Malice in Wonderland Read online

  “I did not know,” she said with difficulty. She managed to stand up, to fight the conflicting waves of nausea and rage that swept through her. “Would—would you be so kind as to leave me, Mr. Duggan? I find it impossible to concentrate.”

  “Perhaps after an hour or two, Mrs. Dean?”

  “Thank you. Surely then, yes.”

  “If you will let me have the marriage certificate, please?”

  “This? Oh yes.” The habit of power, the years of domination which, since her husband’s death, she had enjoyed upon her solid, unassailable pedestal of a woman of social standing and of great wealth—all of those assets were returning in freshening trickles, and she said in her normal manner, “Why do you want it?”

  Duggan placed the certificate in his pocket. “Possible evidence, Mrs. Dean.”

  “Of what?”

  “Motive.”

  “I may seem stupid, but motive for what?”

  “The murder of your son’s wife, Mrs. Dean.”

  * * * *

  The hour was ten-thirty of that Friday morning when Dr. Sibley, fully breakfasted and accompanied by a stenographer, entered the morgue in the new wing of Tropical General. They observed, resting on a broad table equipped with running water and adequate drainage, its surface brilliant under a flood of fluorescent lighting, the unclothed body of Miss Sangford.

  From glassed-in cabinets along the wall Sibley selected, in addition to the usual tools, a couple of Erlenmeyer flasks. He prepared a silver nitrate solution, a potassium iodide solution, and a starch citrate mixture. He took delicate precautions that water should not contaminate the blood, wiping dry the surface of the heart and the knife, and making certain that the pipette and the receiving flasks were dry.

  He did such things as had to be done and then set the solutions to one side. He looked at his watch. Possibly toward tomorrow morning he could let Duggan know the result.

  By noon he had completed such other tests and observations as the regular autopsy procedure made mandatory. Two facts he was prepared to let Duggan definitely know: Miss Sangford had been pregnant and Miss Sangford had been drunk.

  Duggan digested this preliminary report of Sibley’s during a luncheon of broiled snook in the company of Officer Day.

  “It’s wrapped up,” Day said. “The rest is mere routine.”

  Duggan deposited a fish bone on his plate and helped himself to some more coleslaw.

  “You sound like Miss Fernandez,” he said.

  “I do? Well, what do you know!”

  “Until the Gettler test comes through we’re sticking our necks out a mile if we so much as point a finger at him.”

  “I don’t get it. Take the setup. Money-bags Mama ready to cut his allowance if he steps out of line, and for him, in her book, wedding bells spell for whom the bell tolls—boy, am I good.”

  “About as good as last week’s herring.”

  “Nuts, Chief. What happens? He gets potted a couple of months back and wakes up married to Little Egypt and starts paying her off to keep her from telling Mama. And I suggest that Bloodhound Jackson is the go-between.”

  “That much I will grant you.”

  “Chief, a child could figure this with his little hands tied behind his back. Seriously, Mama carts him down here to chill to death for the winter and he runs into the Spang number and he’s gone. Real gone.”

  “Okay. And he’s also a married man.”

  “What’s so funny about that?”

  “I wouldn’t know.”

  “So Sangford trails him. Why? Because she comes into her wits on one fine morning and finds out that she is in a delicate condition.”

  “Brother, are you slicing it nice.”

  “All right, so I was brought up refined. Well, she knows the score and she figures the angles this way and she figures them that. If Mama finds out her apple pie is married he is out on his neck and headed for Skid Row. But. I say but.”

  “Sure, sure, and the ace in the hole is a darling grandchild, who, to ape your refined language, is two months en route on the Storkville trolley, and the fact makes Mama Dean starry-eyed with joy and her flinty heart just melts. Al, you’ve not only read a book, you’ve been glued to TV.”

  “Cut it, Chief. Now what does Sangford find when she lands here? She finds her legally wedded husband overboard about the Spang twist. So she takes second choice and says to Dean, ‘You will pay me off and pay through the nose. I will then quietly divorce you or get an annulment, whichever you like.’ The kid says he’ll pay, and she fixes it for the pay-off to be down at the beach this morning at daybreak.”

  “Why? Why daybreak?”

  “Can I read the minds of a couple of mixed-up kids?”

  “If Sangford was a kid, bud, I’m a baby movie star.”

  “All right, so she’s got a few miles on her. They close the deal and go for a swim to make the meeting look good, and lover boy sees it’s a golden opportunity for yanking her under—with all his troubles, big and little, gone forever. I’m telling you that Oswald Pinker, our slap-happy county prosecutor, will love it. He’ll be delirious.”

  “He’ll be psychotic if we give him the case as it now stands. It’s still as phony as a hustler’s smile.”

  * * * *

  Miss Fernandez drew reflectively toward the end of her luncheon. She was a hearty eater and a deliberate one, with very few epicurean tastes, and the food of the motel’s restaurant did not desolate her appetite. There was an air of peculiar waiting. The room was unusually full, and it occurred to her that death and the police had fused the variegated guests into a group that instinctively herded together and set itself apart as a unit, as being something special.

  The focal point of the diners, naturally, was the table at which Mrs. Dean sat with her son and Bert Jackson. Miss Fernandez cordially approved of Mrs. Deans decision upon this public appearance, terming it in a sense the bravado of position—of Mrs. Dean’s position in the social world—and this carrying of her rarefied environment like a shield of glass around her.

  Of secondary interest were the Spangs. Both mother and daughter offered that setness of expression which renders the otherwise superb waxwork figures of Madame Tussaud’s just short of being lifelike. They accomplished the physical acts of eating and speaking while giving the impossible effect of being in a state of arrested motion.

  Mrs. Spang displayed her mildewing prettiness in full exhibition style, but it was no go. Nor was the virginal loveliness of Jenny any more than a flower-frail veiling for the deathblow to her love caused by the knowledge that Ernest had been married when…

  Miss Fernandez smiled.

  The knowledge that Ernest Dean and Theda Sangford had been man and wife had passed the rumor stage and was an accepted fact. There was a fascination, even a charm, about murder, and a hundredfold more so when the protagonists were right under your eyes.

  Any notion of accidental drowning had been thrown out of the window. And over all (it was like viewing an artist on the high trapeze who at any moment might miss and plummet to death) was the chilling cliché that “murder breeds.” That it breeds if and as necessity dictates. Until the hand of the killer is stilled.

  The seeming inactivity of the police and of the county prosecutor’s office and what appeared to be a dawdling and blasé attitude were considered curious. By Miss Fernandez most of all. She considered it not only curious but dangerous.

  Such were the red wraiths in her mist. They were tentatively identified, but not with enough clear assurance as yet to permit her to issue solemn warnings. For her to say: You must guard yourself by light of heaven and in dark of night when the variety of death is legion. You must even look beneath the mask of love.

  Would she be believed? Miss Fernandez sighed deeply over a forkful of lime pie. She would be heeded no more than people had heeded the warnings of Cassandra or any of the ancient seeresses when their prophecies were not a rosy pink.

  One gesture, however, she did manage to make when,
upon leaving the dining room, she found herself alongside Jenny Spang. Briefly she pressed the girl’s hand and murmured, “Courage, little one! Take heart!”

  * * * *

  By three o’clock the wind had freshened in the south, rolling up moderate combers to fracture in spumy sheets along the beach and driving determined nature boys behind the shelter of canvas windbreaks. Small-craft warnings were up from Palm Beach down through the Keys.

  Duggan, as he approached the Dean patio, noted Ernest and his personal St. Bernard, Bert Jackson, giving a studied impersonation of indolence on a couple of steamer chairs. Both stood as he walked in and both, in their trunks, were like copper-coated specimens of the “after” photographs in a physical culture magazine. Of the two, in the matter of chest mattresses, Bert had the edge on Ernest by a fistful of hair.

  Duggan said he was Chief Duggan, and Ernest said yes, he knew. Then they all shook hands and sat.

  “I guess Mother gave you a pretty good line-up on what happened,” Ernest said.

  “Yes,” Duggan agreed pleasantly, “she did. From her somewhat limited point of view, of course.”

  “He means the marriage angle,” Bert explained patiently to Ernest, somewhat in an Edgar Bergen fashion. “He means her not knowing about it.”

  Ernest looked at Duggan with the glassy eyes of a fighter who has just recently been pulped. “I don’t think I could make you understand.”

  “Try.”

  “You wouldn’t by any chance be an only child?”

  “No, there were eight of us kids,” Duggan said. “Split fifty-fifty, boys and girls.”

  “Then you wouldn’t get it.”

  “Get what?”

  “The responsibility. Being limelighted from the moment when Dad passed on. You-are-now-the-man-of-the-family stuff. Being enveloped.” Ernest felt this wasn’t strong enough and added, “Being eaten, you might call it.”

  “Play that again, will you?”

  Ernest sank into silence and his gloom-drenched thoughts, and Bert took over.

  “It’s this way, Chief. What you see and what the world sees in Mrs. Dean is just the outside coat. A lot of polish and a lot of glitter. Well, that stuff is for the birds. The real woman, the inside woman, is and always has been strictly family. I mean as a wife to her husband and a mother to Ernest, and since the time her husband died of complicated pneumonia, it’s been just Ernest. He is as hooked up to her as a Siamese twin, and you know what happens when you slice them apart.”

  Just who, Duggan wondered, did Jackson think he was kidding? The answer was simple. Duggan. The thought of Mrs. Dean in the calm, wise role of a Whistler’s Mother or in any closed-shop family situation was too much for Duggan to stomach. A vain, jealous, inordinately possessive and tyrannical woman seemed more like it. One with a strangle hold on her son. A death clutch.

  “I’m still off the beam,” Duggan said. “Tell me this, Mr. Dean, if you don’t mind. Naturally you knew of your mother’s thoughts on marriage. Did she expect you to stay single all your life?”

  Flush deepened the bronze of Ernest’s cheeks. Embarrassment? Duggan wondered. Or was it the anger of reluctant hate?

  “Not all of my life, no, Mr. Duggan. Only for all of hers.”

  “Still, you did get married.”

  “When dead drunk.”

  “Mr. Jackson—”

  “Chief?”

  “Isn’t preventing anything of that nature a part of your responsibility?”

  “Yes. But that night, Chief, was the night my sister died.”

  “Bert was called to her bedside,” Ernest said. “In Brooklyn. Me, I picked up Theda in a bar. Got tangled. Got married.”

  Bert said, “After Ernest told me she was throwing the hooks in him, I met her and did what I could to get him out of it—to keep it covered up while we bargained. For over two months now I’ve been sitting on the hatch.”

  “What about this daybreak date, Mr. Dean? Were you reaching an agreement?”

  “Yes. It’s what I had hoped.”

  “Why make the appointment for daybreak?”

  “It does sound sort of cloak-and-dagger, doesn’t it? Theda wanted us to have it out last night, but I was tied up for dinner and dancing. I couldn’t set any time for being back here.”

  “You and Miss Spang? And, of course, Mr. Jackson?”

  “Yes.”

  “The three of you were together continuously?”

  “We were,” Bert said, “until Ernest and I turned in.”

  “When was that?”

  “Around three o’clock.”

  “Do you have separate bedrooms?”

  “Yes.”

  “Mr. Dean, did you set an alarm clock for daybreak?”

  “No. It would have waked up Mother. Bert woke me. He sat up and read.”

  “Did Mr. Dean sleep all of the time, Mr. Jackson?”

  “If you mean did he get up and leave his room, he didn’t. I could see his door from where I was sitting.”

  So the watchdog had sat up and the watchdog had read. Had he, Duggan wondered, also napped? And if he had, during that straining stretch toward the break of day, were his eyes shut solely to the door of Ernest’s bedroom? Were they not unable to observe a possible emergence of Mrs. Dean as well?

  “Mr. Dean, I would like to get this absolutely clear, please. Until you went down to the beach you were to all purposes in somebody’s company. You did go down to the beach alone, didn’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “For ten minutes? Fifteen?”

  “About.”

  “When you came upon your wife, what did you do to determine whether she was still alive? Or that help—resuscitation—would be useless?”

  The question dropped with its hesitant fuse, and the bronze of Ernest’s cheeks underwent a chalky fade.

  “Theda was dead. I just knew it.”

  “The dead are familiar to you?”

  “No. My father—otherwise only Theda. And then I saw that Puerto Rican lady and got rattled. I guess you think I’m a pretty weak sister. I guess I am.”

  “Most of us are at some time or other. Did you touch her?”

  “Theda? God, no.”

  “Well, let’s spend a few minutes on her background. Her relatives, friends—what do you know about them?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Perhaps you do, Mr. Jackson? From your talks with her. While, as you say, you were holding down the hatch.”

  Bert shrugged a pair of broad shoulders. “She never said.”

  “Then how did you contact her? Where did she live?”

  “I didn’t. She contacted me.”

  “At the Deans’?”

  “Yes. She would fix up the time and the place and we’d meet. Mostly it was a pizza joint in the West Forties.”

  Duggan said to Ernest casually, “Did you know that your wife was pregnant?”

  “I didn’t until last night. How did you know?”

  “Medical examiner’s report.”

  “Last night when she stopped at the table for a minute while I was waiting for Jenny. She told me then.”

  “She put the screws on,” Bert said and added, as though it explained everything and nothing further need be said about it, “She was a tramp.”

  * * * *

  Back in his bachelor quarters, which were an efficiency on the edge of town, Duggan tabulated the brief reports that had come through.

  Miss Sangford’s bathing cap had not been found.

  Miss Sangford had a record and her prints were on file.

  She had been booked twice. Once for attempted extortion, once on a badger-game charge.

  For the past two years she had been living in her own small New York apartment in the East Fifties, ostensibly as a model but presumably, from the list of men’s names and numbers in a book beside her telephone, as a call girl.

  He picked up his phone and dialed Operator.

  “It’s Duggan, honey,” he said.

  “Oh,
hello, Bill.”

  “Got a New York telephone directory handy?”

  “Sure have.”

  “Look up a number for me, will you please, honey?”

  “Sure will, Bill. What name?”

  He told her. He waited. She gave him a number. He did not bother to jot it down.

  “Thanks, honey. Now get me Black’s, will you?”

  The connection with the motel made, he asked the clerk to connect him with the bar.

  “Jimmy? Duggan here.”

  “Hi, sleuth.”

  “I need some dope on Sangford.”

  “What kind?”

  “Those two bottles of scotch last night. Did she often pull that?”

  “Maybe two or three times, which is a pretty good record when you think about it. She was only here a week.”

  “Was she a lush?”

  “No more than most. She could hold it.”

  “What about men? Did she play the field?”

  “No. Young Dean exclusive. When any of the other fanged baboons tried to make her they never got off the plate. When are you going to pick him up, Sherlock?”

  “Dean?”

  “Who else?”

  “You’d be amazed. Thanks, Jimmy. Be seeing you.”

  “Why you clam-lipped—”

  Duggan hung up.

  He indulged in a satisfying, jaw-cracking yawn. Then he mused for a while on exactly how stupid a clever criminal could get.

  * * * *

  The afternoon wore on, and gusty winds sent palm fronds streaming like a madwoman’s hair. With sundown the cocktail lounge housed a jam to its last banquette, and Jimmy noted but few absentees from among the regulars. Mrs. Dean wasn’t there, Jenny Spang and her mother weren’t there, and Miss Fernandez was not there.

  Miss Fernandez was in the living room of her apartment and was having a very tough time of it trying to make up her mind. What she wanted to do was to go to Mrs. Dean and warn her of the probability that danger of the most desperate character lay before her.

  On this Miss Fernandez would have staked her reputation in San Juan as a woman with an uncanny gift for predicting the turn of things to come. Actually there was little of the uncanny about it and Miss Fernandez’s forecasts were based on her sound deductive powers and the most elementary guideposts of common sense.