The Deadly Dove Read online

  Contents

  COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

  BOOKS BY RUFUS KING

  CHAPTER I

  CHAPTER II

  CHAPTER III

  CHAPTER IV

  CHAPTER V

  CHAPTER VI

  CHAPTER VII

  CHAPTER VIII

  CHAPTER IX

  CHAPTER X

  CHAPTER XI

  CHAPTER XII

  CHAPTER XIII

  CHAPTER XIV

  CHAPTER XV

  CHAPTER XVI

  CHAPTER XVII

  CHAPTER XVIII

  CHAPTER XIX

  CHAPTER XX

  CHAPTER XXI

  CHAPTER XXII

  CHAPTER XXIII

  ABOUT RUFUS KING

  COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

  Copyright © 1945 by Rufus King. Copyright renewed in 1973 by Walter Young.

  All rights reserved.

  *

  Published by Wildside Press LLC

  www.wildsidepress.com

  BOOKS BY RUFUS KING

  The Lieutenant Valcour Series

  Murder by the Clock

  Somewhere in This House

  Murder by Latitude

  Murder in the Willet Family

  Murder on the Yacht

  Valcour Meets Murder

  The Lesser Antilles Case

  Profile of a Murder

  The Case of the Constant God

  Crime of Violence

  Murder Masks Miami

  Other Mysteries

  The Case of the Dowager’s Etchings

  The Case of the Redoubled Cross

  The Deadly Dove

  Design in Evil

  Diagnosis Murder

  Duenna to a Murder

  The Faces of Danger

  The Lethal Lady

  Murder De Luxe

  Museum Piece No 13

  Murder de Luxe

  The Steps to Murder

  A Variety of Weapons

  A Woman is Dead

  Science Fiction

  The Fatal Kiss Mystery

  Dog Stories

  North Star: A Dog Story of the Northwest

  Whelp of the Winds: A Dog Story

  CHAPTER I

  Two events set the stage.

  They occurred in September: the month, appropriately enough, of storms. Their points of origin were one racketeer (emeritus, with honorable discharge from the Volstead era) and one wealthy old museum piece with the stellar-eyed outlook on life of a diligent cobra.

  New York was not at its best. The weather was foul.

  At nine o’clock in the morning Joe Inbrun got up. The windows of his bedroom looked east, high above Central Park, and the sky was as dreary as a sick tomato. This was the same penthouse in which Joe had lived since his racketeer activities during prohibition.

  Although currently a thrifty and substantial citizen of means, with a lucrative penchant for backing night clubs and plays, Joe’s ethics were unchanged: an eye for an eye.

  Joe slipped neat feet into slippers and put on a dressing gown over his pajamas, adding outrage to outrage. He walked into a garish living room and rang for Felix.

  Felix came in with the morning paper. Felix was a furtive, saddened individual who had been Joe’s general servant since the penthouse had been leased. His clothes and manner were strictly de rigueur with the best upper-bracket-mob interpretation of an English butler. Felix would never leave Joe because he knew that if he ever attempted to Joe would see to it that he fried.

  They mutually agreed that the morning stank, and Joe sat down to look at the news while Felix returned to the kitchen and got busy about breakfast. This always was a hearty one, and Felix rarely failed to pale and tremble visibly as the daily urge obsessed him to add a dash of sauce arsenic to the coddled eggs.

  A picture on page three of the newspaper held Joe. Its caption read:

  SOCIALITE AND SECRETARY WED

  The picture was of a handsome, muscular youth with large Irish eyes and dark wavy hair. The woman clinging to the young man’s arm looked definitely maternal, if not downright grandmotherly, in & startlingly smart way.

  Under the picture it said:

  Alan Jefferson Admont and the former Mrs. Christine Belder at Nativity Church, Kingston, N. Y., yesterday.

  Joe said he would be damned.

  He read the item. It was a neat job, a hairline this side of slander. The wedding rated news value, rather than mere space among the social notes, because of Christine Belder.

  Christine was, the item said, the widow of Charles Belder, research engineer and capitalist. Most of her married life had been spent with her husband abroad, where her somewhat eccentric divertissements among the international set had been a caution.

  Following Belder’s death three years ago, Christine had retired to their mountain fastness, Belder Tor, at Dour Notch in the Catskills; an estate which embraced a peak whose elevation almost rivaled that of Roundtop and whose virginal loneliness far surpassed it. Christine’s age (she made no bones about it) was sixty.

  The item then started in on Alan, and the going got rough. Although only twenty-five, the draft had rejected him. Period. It then inferred that a well-kept career had carried Alan through several seasons of being a juvenile lead with summer and lesser stock companies. It lingered on Alan’s having hit Broadway last year for a rubber-curtain run in a play and production of his own: Jupiter Returns. He had managed, it was said, to induce Joe Inbrun to back this turkey to the extent, it was said, of twenty-five thousand dollars.

  The item did not fail to indicate that Joe Inbrun, currently a Broadway angel and an ex-character of a genus less seraphic, must have been suffering some sort of mental aberration ever to have been roped in as such a sucker.

  Joe took time out from reading to bite viciously the end from a cigar.

  The article said the show had been unique in that Variety had given Jupiter Returns, the shortest notice of the season: Jupe Didn’t. But the performance had brought Alan’s facade to Christine’s attention inasmuch as she had attended the opening night. Her quote on this was: “My heart bled at the way both the audience and the critics pilloried that sterling artist.”

  A mutual friend had taken Christine backstage and had introduced her, and she had persuaded Alan to renounce an art whose victories, for him, would at their best be Pyrrhic and to accept the post of her social secretary. That had been a year ago. And now they were wed.

  Christine’s final quote was: “There will be no honeymoon. With transportation at a premium and with every non-essential expense a sabotaging of the war effort, my husband and I will continue our quiet and simple manner of living at Belder Tor for the duration. Afterward, of course, who knows?”

  Joe thoughtfully lighted the savagely bitten cigar.

  Among his attributes was a large sense of pride encased in a very thin skin. He never forgot a debt or a slur. Nor did he ever forgive. Even though a year had passed, his fiasco and monetary loss via Alan still held their full measure of bitter gall.

  He went to a telephone and put in a person-to-person call for Mr. Alan Jefferson Admont, Belder Tor, Dour Notch, the Catskills. He looked acidly at Felix who came in, not with breakfast, but with Belle Crystal.

  Belle was getting on, but as little as she and every expensive aid could help it. Once a week her figure was rolled back to slenderness at a pretty cost. Her furs and style were elegant. She could still do the split.

  She went to Joe and kissed him, through an accompanying cloud of Genet’s Sauve-qui-peut, while her big, hard blue eyes flickered restlessly about the room.

  Joe looked at her stonily.

  “Get hailed out?” he asked.

  “Silly!”

  She could tell that
he was anything but pleased at seeing her and that he was wondering what had made her drop in like this in the morning. Beneath her carefully tended beauty (luscious type) Belle was a thoroughly selfish and conniving woman as well as a conceited one. Her previous-to-Joe-benefactor had hit the nail squarely when he had called her a Baked Alaska flavored with essence of Asp.

  Her flickered survey assured Belle the living room offered no traces other than the purely masculine. For some time she had been increasingly suspicious about the tensile strength of her hold on Joe. She had decided on making this early sortie to give the familiar arena an unexpected once-over.

  Fully aware of the tactical values of demand-and-attack, Belle turned on a modicum of sex and said: “It’s about a little jacket I saw in Saks as I was walking uptown, Joe.”

  “Buy it.”

  She kissed him again. She said that he was sweet. She said that the jacket was chinchilla. The phone rang.

  “Al?” Joe said into it. “Joe.”

  Alan’s voice usually held a warm, hypnotic quality which had served his young and not uneventful life very well. At the moment it was tempered with a faint chill. He was disturbed and considerably puzzled that Joe should call him up, and he detested being called Al.

  He had never been quite happy about Joe. He knew the usual stories: how several of Joe’s friends had suddenly and inexplicably vanished from the passing scene, nor was anyone ever so gauche as to inquire where they went.

  “Hello there, Joe.” Alan did his best to sound cordial. His tones swung into their British register. Nothing pleased Alan better than to have a person say: You talk just like an Englishman. “I suppose you want to congratulate me and all of that, what?”

  “I will tell you what I want when I see you. I will be out.”

  There was a slender pause during which Alan’s British accent did a backslide toward the Middle West.

  “I’ll run in, Joe. I’ll go into town to see you. It will be like old times.”

  “No.”

  “Not that I wouldn’t be tickled to death to have you out here, but you know how it is.” Alan gave his best deprecatory little laugh. It had always gone over like hot cakes with the matinee houses. “Christine isn’t going in much for entertaining right now.”

  Joe repeated flatly: “I am coming out.”

  “Look, then—could you make it this morning? Christine is driving into town. Can you make it about eleven?”

  “I’ll be there at eleven.”

  Joe hung up.

  “Was that Al Admont?” Belle asked.

  “Yes.”

  Belle was deeply interested. She had gone through Joe’s purchase of Alan’s goose egg and had tempered Joe’s steaming morale during the blistering he had been handed by the press. Although an exceedingly cold baby in her own right, Belle had felt colder still at the way Joe had been cold when he had read the early editions’ plastering of Jupiter Returns. She had felt her strongest chill when Joe had given Alan a ring and had said: “It’s all right, Al. I’ll fix it up later.”

  The remark hadn’t made much sense until Belle had thought it over. Joe was bursting with health today because of that principle of his of always letting a lot of time elapse between cause and effect. Joe had once said to her about this: “It bewilders the motive.”

  She had more than a shrewd suspicion that the present telephone call indicated that the time had come for Joe to collect the year-old loss on Jupiter Returns from Alan, via Alan’s just-acquired rich wife. Belle’s greedy, conniving, moderate mind glowed tentatively with dangerous fires. The band wagon, in the sense of the Belder fortune, was a roomy one. Might there not, she asked herself, be a seat aboard it for her too?

  “I read about the wedding,” she said. “Al certainly landed on his feet. On all four of them.”

  “Go get that jacket, Belle,” Joe said.

  CHAPTER II

  Joe headed his convertible toward the Catskills. The car was a stunning job in lemon yellow with white-walled black-market tires, but Joe missed the old bullet-proof bus. He still, even after many years of secure tranquility, felt like a soft-shelled crab without its armor.

  Belder Tor, when Joe reached it, was impressive, in the dolorous and chilling fashion that a Rhineland castle can be impressive. Its mass was granite gray against the large estate’s uninhabited reaches of forested hilltops, while the distant peak of Roundtop offered a grim background against a glimmer and sullen sky. No sound broke the stillness. Not even a bird flashed past on slanting wing. Definitely one hell of a place to live.

  Joe parked the car and sat thoughtfully casing the layout. He supposed some local hunter or fisherman might drift past once in a blue moon, but otherwise what? He got out of the car as he saw Alan open the front door and walk down shallow granite steps.

  Alan, in person, was even handsomer than his picture, and his physique was closer to a light heavyweight’s than to that of an actor. His costume, in several shades of taupe, was carelessly Pinehurst. A large star sapphire in tortured gold accented a smoothly tanned finger. It was a curious ring in that two golden lion paws held the stone in place with delicate claws of platinum. He had admired it greatly, and Christine (with a shudder) had bought it for him.

  He had been drinking steadily since Joe had telephoned, in a nervous effort to bolster his courage against he knew not what. The liquor, and Alan’s ability to dramatize any situation into a mold which struck him as most comfortable, had done the trick. He felt perfectly at ease: a young baronet welcoming a tiresome guest to the family rookery with an appropriate amount of noblesse oblige.

  “Joe, old pal!”

  Alan sought and briefly held Joe’s unresponsive hand, and Joe followed him into an entrance hall murky with tapestries and suits of armor. The armor bemused Joe’s attention while he mentally compared it with bulletproof vests. “Let us,” Alan said in clipped British-baronet tones, “get out of this set for Dracula and go into the morning room. It’s the one spot in the house where you can talk and not spit out vampires.”

  The morning room, because of its sweep of french windows, was somewhat but not much better. Its decor leaned glumly toward further tapestries of the more morbid genre, with an occasional mounted head of the less attractive wild animals. Through the french windows and doors, which opened onto a flagged terrace, lay the view of a small mountain lake and beyond it a terrifying background of the Catskill’s gloomier peaks.

  The atmosphere started to oppress Joe. He was very sensitive to atmospheres, and this one held a predominant emptiness: a deserted quality. He stood at a window and watched the dark forest and the calm, sullen lake. All he could think of was Indians. “How do you run a joint like this?” he said. “Where can you get the help?”

  “We can’t. We do it ourselves.”

  “You and your wife?”

  “No. Christine has three friends staying here. She is a woman who is not unversed in collecting her pound of flesh. They all pitch in. Scotch, Joe?”

  “Yes.”

  Alan went to a cellaret and mixed drinks. He gave a highball to Joe and suggested that they sit down.

  “So that’s the setup. Just you and your wife and three friends.” Joe sat down. He took a drink. It was important that he know who these people were. This data was equally as important as a general knowledge of the house and grounds. He asked casually: “Who are they, Al?”

  Alan was both puzzled and pleased at this interest of Joe’s in the Belder Tor ménage. Of course it was leading up to something, to whatever purpose (unpleasant) which had brought Joe up, but at least it retained the scene on its comforting social plane.

  “They’re a trio of satellites, Joe. My wife’s. Shall we start with Godfrey Lance?”

  Alan tossed the cue to Joe, who left it flat. That was the trouble with these heavy dimwits who were not of the profession. Nothing short of a diseur could hope to cope with them.

  He went on: “Godfrey is a painter. Born somewhere in Brooklyn in one of those outlyin
g regions miles away from the Heights.” Alan pursed handsome lips judiciously. He felt the incipience of a mot. “I suppose you could call him a refugee-expatrie. From Paris.” He indicated a painting on the west wall. The star-sapphire ring flashed handsomely with the gesture. “That’s one of his things.”

  Joe examined the canvas in complete bewilderment. “What is it?”

  “It is a portrait of Christine. Godfrey’s métier lies in doing portraits of his sitters’ psychoses. He had a one-man show at the Lewis Galleries last spring which had the town back on its heels. Christine went to it and picked up one of his little numbers. Portrait of a Toad. It was his only sale. She also picked up Godfrey.”

  “Just what is she, anyhow? A nymph?”

  Alan laughed pleasantly.

  “It’s nothing like that. She isn’t interested in that stuff at all. L’amour, for Christine, is definitely in the sere. Even if it weren’t, Godfrey’s around forty and has the sex appeal of a balloon. He’s a damn good cook.”

  “Does she pay him to stay here and cook?”

  “No, Christine doesn’t work things that way.”

  Alan frowned. Even after a year with her, Christine still bewildered him: the fact that people fell for her like shot ducks, that they couldn’t see through her the way that he did. He still retained a grudging admiration for her wit and for the prestidigitatorial perfection of her Lady Bountiful act. Or was the act more closely akin to a mischievous goddess who both confounded and adjusted the lives of other people from her machine?

  He said: “I suppose what it really amounts to is that Christine dopes out her beloved dependents’ little weaknesses and caters to them. They may struggle to get out of her talons, but the clutch holds firm. Godfrey’s vice is food, so she stuffs him with black-market delicacies. As a result, he fiddles around every morning daubing up a canvas and cooks three meals a day. He loves it.”

  Joe filed Godfrey in his mental notebook. Christine was beginning to make good sense to him: she operated in much the same manner as he did in regard to Felix. “She is not such a dope at that.”

  “Anything but. Take Cordelia—Cordelia Banning. Her great-great-grandfather Blucher, or something, was one of the early mayors of New York.”