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

Chapter Nineteen

I blinked at her. “How was that again?”

“It was all a mistake,” Bubbles said. “I thought he was rich and he thought I was rich. When they found out I was just a working girl, they dropped the blackmail attempt.”

I decided to unscramble this array of personal pronouns one at a time. “Who did you think was rich? Walter Ford?”

She shook her head. “Daniel Cumberland. He’s the man in the picture.”

“And when you say ‘they’ dropped the blackmail attempt, do you mean Ford and this Cumberland?”

“Yes.”

“Let’s start over at the beginning,” I suggested. “Just tell me the whole story.”

So she started at the beginning and told me the whole story.

Daniel Cumberland was an extremely good-looking man of about thirty, Bubbles told me. He was also extremely well-dressed and managed to exude the affluent air of a successful businessman. His front was posing as junior vice-president of one of the local manufacturing plants.

Bubbles met him casually at the bar of one of the more exclusive cocktail lounges, and in a misguided attempt to impress him had colored her own background as fantastically as Cumberland was coloring his. She let him know that she was executive manager of Saxon and Harder’s, where her father was president of the board of directors.

Properly impressed, Cumberland went all out in pursuit of Bubbles. From the cocktail lounge he took her to dinner, then to a show, and afterward suggested they have a drink at his apartment. Bubbles admitted she was as charmed by Cumberland as he seemed to be by her; and not possessing any great degree of maidenly restraint, she welcomed the suggestion with enthusiasm.

This eventually led to the results indicated in the photograph.

It was two nights later that Walter Ford dropped by her apartment, showed her the photograph and offered to sell it to her for a thousand dollars.

At first she was enraged, Bubbles said, and threatened to call the police. Ford, apparently an old hand in such dealings, merely told her to go ahead. He would simply walk out the moment she picked up the phone, he told her, and she could report her head off. Since up to that time he hadn’t told her his name and she hadn’t the faintest idea who he was, Bubbles realized she might have some difficulty making her complaint stick. When Ford also assured her a copy of the photograph would be mailed to every member of the board of directors at Saxon and Harder’s the next day unless she came to terms, she further realized she probably would lose her job unless she talked him out of this action.

So quite calmly she told him she was merely a dress model instead of executive manager of Saxon and Harder’s, had less than a hundred dollars in the bank and couldn’t afford to pay him a nickel.

Once he became convinced she was telling the truth, Ford’s first reaction was anger at having wasted his time. Then the humor of the situation struck him and he suddenly seemed to decide it was outrageously funny.

Why, after such an introduction, Bubbles didn’t kick the man out of her apartment and refuse to have anything more to do with him, I will never understand. But after Ford ceremoniously burned the photograph in an ash tray, she actually forgave him. The only explanation I can think of is that the girl’s moral and ethical standards must have been as flexible as the blackmailers’, because she didn’t even seem to harbor resentment over the use Cumberland and Ford had attempted to make of her. She seemed more resentful over the discovery that Ford had retained another copy of the picture than she did over the attempted blackmail.

“I don’t know,” I said frustratedly. “I guess you and I must have gone to different Sunday schools. Did you also continue to date this Cumberland fellow?”

“Oh, no. Not him.”

I was contemplating that at least she had saved me the mental effort of trying to understand her motives on that score when she burst the bubble by adding, “I phoned him once, but I guess he lost interest in me when Walter told him I didn’t have any money.”

At that point I gave up trying to understand her at all. “Where did this Daniel Cumberland live?”

“He has an apartment at Lincoln and Nebraska. It’s listed in the book.”

Checking her phone book, I discovered that sure enough a Daniel Cumberland was listed at 428 Lincoln Avenue. Dialing the operator, I asked if that phone was still listed under Cumberland’s name.

It was.

Well, well, I thought, the bird hadn’t even flown. And since it was now only a little after seven-thirty, I decided to look up Walter Ford’s blackmail partner before keeping my date with Fausta.

Four-twenty-eight Lincoln Avenue was a three-story apartment house in an upper-middle-class neighborhood. Two walls of the small foyer were lined with mail slots, and by checking the cards beneath them I learned Daniel Cumberland occupied apartment 1-B. The mail boxes had glass fronts and I noted there was quite an accumulation of mail in Cumberland’s.

No one answered the door apartment 1-B.

Returning to the foyer, I discovered 1-A was listed as the manager’s apartment. When I rang that bell, an elderly man with curling snow-white hair and an equally snow-white mustache came to the door. He admitted he was the apartment-house manager and said his name was Stanley Bush.

“I’m Manville Moon,” I said, showing him my license. “I’m working with the police on a case in which one of your tenants is an important witness. He doesn’t seem to be home and I’d like to take a look at his apartment. I haven’t a search warrant, but I can get one if I have to. It would be simpler all around if you’d let me take a quick look now, though. With you present, of course.”

He chewed thoughtfully at his mustache. “Which tenant?”

I indicated the door across the hall from his own. “Cumberland.”

“Hmm. Say you’re working with the police?”

“Under Inspector Warren Day of Homicide. I can give you his home phone number if you’d like to check me.”

He gave me a careful looking over. “Don’t think that will be necessary, young fellow. Look honest enough to me. Besides, I’ll be right next to you to make sure you don’t lift nothing.”

He disappeared for a moment, returning with a ring of keys. Selecting one, he opened the door of apartment 1-B, The odor hit us the moment the door was open, and we both knew what it was at once. It was not strong, but it was unmistakably the odor of decaying flesh.

“Oh, oh,” Stanley Bush said, pushing the door shut again as soon as we were inside. “Thought it funny I hadn’t seen Cumberland around for a couple of days.”

The apartment was expensively furnished, but at the moment it was a mess. Every drawer in the front room had been pulled out and dumped on the floor, books had been pulled from their shelves and even sofa and chair cushions were strewed around the room. Through an open door we could see a similar cyclone had hit the bedroom.

“Somebody’s been looking mighty hard for something,” old Bush remarked.

He sniffed at the penetrating odor, then followed his nose through the apartment into the kitchen. There we found Walter Ford’s partner in blackmail.

Daniel Cumberland may have been as handsome as Bubbles said when he was alive, but he made an exceedingly ugly corpse. Largely this was because of the temperature, for all the windows were closed.

The man lay on his back on the kitchen floor, a bullet hole between his eyes and a pool of dried blood circling his head. He was dressed in pajamas, robe and slippers; and a half-empty cup of coffee sat on the table in front of the chair in which he had apparently been sitting when he was shot. I noted that another cup and saucer, washed clean, rested on the sink drainboard.

From all appearances the man had been drinking coffee with someone he knew well enough to serve in the kitchen when he was killed. And from his attire, his guest must have been a late and unexpected caller. Apparently after murdering his host, the killer had carefully washed out his own coffee cup, then searched the apartment from one end to the other. He had not even missed the kitchen, for it was as much of a shambles as the rest of the rooms.

Cumberland had been dead well over twenty-four hours, I guessed. Possibly even forty-eight, for the body was already bloated.

The elderly apartment manager said, “Let’s leave some of this stink out,” and started toward the kitchen windows.

“Hold it,” I advised. “We don’t touch a thing before the cops get here.”

Stopping, he scratched his head. “What now, then?”

“Now we lock this place up again, go back to your apartment and phone the police.”

“Suits me,” he said. “I’ve seen everything I want to see here.”