Whistle Past the Graveyard [= Give the Girl a Gun]

Chapter Ten

The hall door of my flat was open and through it I could hear the drone of my vacuum cleaner. Cautiously I entered just as the sound died away to a final wheeze.

Fausta, winding up the cord, stopped to look at me accusingly. She blew a strand of blonde hair out of her eyes and I noted there was a smudge of dust on her straight little nose.

“You did it on purpose,” she impeached. “You knew I could not stand to wait here in all this dirt.”

“You’re even prettier when you’re being domestic than you are in a green formal,” I said, walking over and bending to brush the spot of dust off her nose with a light kiss. “You’d make some lucky man a fine housewife.”

“Hah!” she said, grabbing my ears and kissing me full on the mouth. Then she backed off in simulated outrage, as though I had attempted to attack her, gave me a light slap and said, “That is what you call blarney. No girl in her right mind would be a housewife for you. Who wants to stay home and slave while you gad about with other women?”

“The only woman I’ve spoken to since I last saw you was in line of business,” I assured her. “Where’s Madeline?”

“If you are not interested in other women, why do you want Madeline?”

“I didn’t say I wasn’t interested in other women. I love each and every one of them. I just didn’t happen to run into any who appealed to me while I was gone. Where’s Madeline?”

“Where you keep all your women,” Fausta said sulkily. “In the bedroom.”

At that moment Madeline came through the bedroom doorway. She had a dustcloth in her hand and one of my dish towels tied around her head. “That room is done,” she told Fausta. “Are we all finished?” Then she looked at me. “Hello, Mr. Moon. I hope you don’t mind our cleaning things up. Fausta said...”

“I know,” I interrupted. “Fausta said the place was a pigpen. Believe me, I don’t mind at all. Matter of fact, if you girls happen to be in the neighborhood about this time next week...”

“We will go by without even slowing down,” Fausta said. “What did you find out about Madeline’s Thomas?”

“He’s in a jam,” I told them. “Day’s got enough circumstantial evidence to convict him right now. Almost too much evidence. If Henry is the killer, he’s a lot stupider than he looks.”

I outlined everything I had learned, including my visit to Walter Ford’s widow.

“I thought so,” Fausta said. “Out carousing with a drunken widow while we work our fingers to the bone.”

Madeline said, “That’s the first I knew Walter Ford was married. Why he even asked me for a date once.”

“I’m going to have to do some fast moving if I expect to pick up any defense evidence before Henry comes up before the grand jury,” I said. “They sit next Tuesday. Madeline, I suggest you get hold of a lawyer for Tom in the meantime. You might also run over to his flat and pick up a couple of pipes and some tobacco to take him. Can you get in?”

“Yes.”

“Then I think I’ll run you over,” I decided. “I want to take a look at that neighborhood in daylight anyway.”

Fausta, whose workday did not really start until late afternoon, decided to come along too.

While Madeline and Fausta were hunting down Thomas Henry’s landlord, I made a short study of the geography of the neighborhood. The Remley Apartments, where Barney Amhurst lived, was at 14 McKnight Avenue. Henry had a basement flat at 18 McKnight, just two buildings away. The three buildings, the Remley, the apartment next to it and the one in which Henry lived, were surrounded by close-cropped lawn on all sides. As there were no hedges or fences between them, it obviously would have been possible for the killer to cross behind the center building as soon as he shot Ford and arrive at Henry’s door in a matter of seconds.

A check of the basement rear entrance showed the lock was the simple old-fashioned kind which could be opened by a dime-store skeleton key. And when I peered through the window, I saw that this entrance led directly into Henry’s workshop.

It didn’t prove anything except that it would have been possible for the killer to plant the murder weapon as Henry insisted it had been planted.

After completing my geographic study, I decided to drop in on Barney Amhurst while waiting for the girls to finish whatever they were doing in Henry’s apartment, but the visit was a waste of time insofar as finding out anything I didn’t already know about Walter Ford and Thomas Henry. For no particular reason except that I ran out of other questions, I asked him about the accidental shooting of Lloyd Strong.

Amhurst’s statement was substantially the same as Henry’s, except that he admitted to me his belief that Madeline’s bullet rather than his had killed her brother.

“The buck broke cover about two hundred yards from us,” Amhurst said. “Lloyd was about a hundred yards beyond it in a clump of underbrush. There was a slight upgrade from the buck’s position to Lloyd’s, and I’m sure I didn’t shoot high. Just as I squeezed off the shot, I was conscious that I didn’t have enough lead and knew that I had missed. But I’m equally sure I wasn’t high. My slug should have hit the ground about halfway between the buck and Lloyd.”

“Why did you take the blame then?” I asked.

“Well, Madeline was so upset over Lloyd’s death I was afraid learning she herself had killed him might throw her into a complete nervous breakdown. So I lied and told her I’d seen her slug kick up dirt in front of the buck just before I fired. She fired first, you see, but the truth is I didn’t see her bullet strike anything.”

“Would it have been possible that neither of you shot him?” I asked. “That the bullet came from another direction?”

He looked at me strangely. “It’s a funny thing you asked that. I had a feeling that when Madeline fired I heard another rifle crack at the same time, but I wrote it off as an echo. When nobody else mentioned hearing it, I decided it must have been an echo, but it still stuck in my mind. I suppose it’s possible that some other hunter we didn’t know was around accidentally shot Lloyd, but since from the law’s point of view it didn’t make much difference whose bullet killed him, I didn’t see much point in confusing things by bringing it up at the inquest.”

I said, “There wasn’t any if Lloyd’s death was really an accident.”

Amhurst’s eyes grew wide. “What do you mean by that?”

“Nothing in particular. But Walter Ford’s death was definitely murder. And since four of the same people were in the vicinity when both men died, there is at least a possibility that the first death was murder too. I’m not saying Lloyd Strong was murdered, or even that I strongly suspect he was. But since we now know there is a murderer in some way connected with your little group, the possibility has to be at least considered. After all this time I doubt that anything could be proved one way or the other though.”

In an odd voice Amhurst said, “Since Tom Henry was the only person around when Lloyd was shot, aside from Madeline and me, when you start considering the possibility of Lloyd being murdered, you’re actually considering the possibility of Tom having murdered him.”

“Not necessarily. Wasn’t Bubbles Duval in your party too?”

“Not that day. She stayed back at camp.”

“You’re sure? Ever bother to check if she spent all morning there?”

“Now you’re being ridiculous,” Amhurst said. “Why in the devil would Bubbles want to kill Lloyd?”

“Probably she didn’t. Probably she never left camp. But there is still the possibility. There are a lot of possibilities. Maybe Tom Henry shot him by accident and was afraid to admit it.”

Amhurst shook his head. “If Tom did the shooting, it wasn’t an accident. He and Lloyd were on the drive team, and when you’re driving game you don’t shoot. We had a standard rule about that. When the party was separated, only those on a predesignated stand were allowed to shoot, no matter what kind of target showed.”

“There’s another possibility too,” I said. “Maybe either you or Madeline spotted Lloyd through the underbrush, took advantage of the situation and deliberately shot him.”

For a moment the man looked at me. Then he laughed. “Now you’re really reaching out in left field.”

“Probably,” I admitted. “The most likely possibility is that Lloyd’s death was just what the inquest said it was. An accident.”

But in my own mind I didn’t really believe that. Now that we knew there was a murderer around somewhere, it seemed a bit too coincidental for an earlier victim to have died accidentally. If Lloyd Strong’s death had been murder, it bore all the earmarks of as careful planning as the murder of Walter Ford. When I left Amhurst, I still was not absolutely convinced of Thomas Henry’s innocence, but more and more I was inclined to regard it as probable that he had been framed. If he had, my task was to find the framer.

Though I knew of no motive anyone who had been present at Amhurst’s the evening before might have to kill Ford, both Max Furtell and Bubbles Duval had opportunity. Since everyone else had been in the front room when the shots sounded, I could eliminate them as suspects. However, we had only the bodyguard’s unsupported statement that he had not stirred from his car until I went after him, and only Bubbles’s word that she had remained all that time in the bedroom.

The latter I tended to rule out because, while she would have had plenty of time to shoot Ford, step back into the bedroom through the French doors and then unobtrusively join the rest of us, she would not have had time to run across the intervening yards and plant the gun in Henry’s workshop. Nor could she have planted it after she left, since Fausta and I took her home and she wasn’t out of our sight between the time of the murder and the time Hannegan must have started his search of Henry’s workshop.

Ed Friday’s bodyguard easily had time to plant the pistol though, since a good quarter hour elapsed between the time the gun went off and I went outside for him. And for motive all he needed was an order from Ed Friday.

The more I thought about it, the more possible it seemed that Friday had issued such an order. I was certain the ex-racketeer was capable of ordering murder if he thought it necessary to his plans, and equally certain Max Furtell would obey such an order. What Friday’s motive could be, I had no idea, but I kept remembering his nocturnal visit to my flat and his attempt to get me out of town before Madeline could engage me to look into the murder.

I decided my next move would be to check into a possible relationship between Ed Friday and Walter Ford.

Madeline and Fausta had completed their mission of mercy while I was engaged with Amhurst and were seated in the car when I came out. Madeline had in her lap a round, one-pound can of tobacco and a collection of three pipes.

“You know some woman who lives in the Remley?” Fausta inquired.

“Several,” I said. “And they’re all mad about me. But I was visiting Barney Amhurst. You want to take that stuff over to Tom now, Madeline?”

When the girl said she did, I drove her over to headquarters and left her, and then drove Fausta back to El Patio.