The Second Fletcher Flora Mystery MEGAPACK™: 20 Classic Mystery & Crime Stories!
- Автор: Флора Флетчер
- Год: 2018
- Язык: английский
- Год: Wildside Press
- ISBN: 978-1479436668
- Жанр: Другие детективы
Электронная книга - «The Second Fletcher Flora Mystery MEGAPACK™: 20 Classic Mystery & Crime Stories!». Краткое содержание книги:
“Maybe it was yesterday. I was in here.”
“Oh, sure. I knew I’d seen you somewhere. A guy don’t forget a face like yours. You’re no beauty, Mister. No offense meant.”
“None taken. I guess it’s true you remember the extremes. The uglies and the lovelies. Like that platinum-headed honey a couple of stools down.”
“Where? What lovely? Mister, you’re seeing things.”
“Not now. Yesterday.”
“Oh. That one. A doll. A sexpot. Plenty of class, though. You can always tell the ones with class.”
“That’s right. I could go for a woman like that. If I knew who she was I could work out a strategy.”
“Mister, if you don’t mind my saying so, you ain’t exactly the type.”
“You never know. Lots of lovelies go for uglies. You know her name?”
“Nix. We didn’t introduce ourselves.”
“She come in here often?”
“Never seen her before. Probably a guest in the hotel. Just someone passing through.”
“How about the man she was with?”
“Was she with a man? I never noticed.”
A customer down the bar held up his empty glass, and the bartender went to fill it. I helped myself to a handful of salted peanuts and left. Outside on the sidewalk, I ate the peanuts one by one while I tried to make up my mind if I should quit or give it one more try. One more try, I decided. Asking questions was a harmless diversion, unless I began to get some significant answers, and I had in mind the person to ask who would be most likely to have the answers.
I found her hunched over a typewriter in a blue fog, a cigarette, dripping smoke, hanging from a corner of her mouth. A pair of goggles was clinging to the end of her nose, and her red hair looked like it had recently been combed with an egg beater. She was wearing a sweater that fit her like a sweat shirt, and a skirt that she must have picked up at a rummage sale. I couldn’t see her legs, but it was ten to one that her seams were crooked. It would be a mistake, however, to jump to any rash conclusion.
If you looked behind the goggles, you could see a face worth looking for. Inside the ragbag were a hundred and ten pounds of pleasant surprises. If you wonder how I knew, you are free to speculate. I will only say that she was a lovely, however disguised, who had no aversion to uglies. When she chose to make the effort, after hours, she could knock your eye out. Her name was Henrietta Savage, Hetty for short, and she wrote a column concerning things about town. You know the kind of stuff. Mostly about the fun spots, and who’s doing what, where. It was innocuous enough, the kind of gossip that never goes to court, but in the process of gathering it Hetty had become a veritable morgue of interesting and enlightening items that had never seen print. She peered up at me over her goggles without appreciable enthusiasm, and the limp cigarette assumed a belligerent position.
“Don’t bother to sit down, Percy,” she said. “Go away. I’ll meet you in the bar across the street after five.”
“You’re an avaricious female,” I said. “How did you know I just got paid a fat fee?”
“Thanks for the confession. In that case, we’ll have dinner later and a night on the town.”
“Not unless you renovate yourself. I’ve got my reputation as a playboy to consider. Do you sleep in those clothes?”
“There’s a possibility that you may find out. In the meanwhile, goodbye. Go away. Wait for me in the bar.”
“I’m going, and I’ll wait. Right after you answer a couple of questions for me. Come on, Hetty. Dinner and the town for a couple of answers?”
“Maybe lobster?”
“Pick him out of the tank yourself.”
“What questions?”
“You know Benedict Coon III? That’s just preliminary. It doesn’t count.”
“Your tense is wrong. He’s dead. You’ll find the story on page one. Anyhow, I knew him, and make the next one count.”
“All right. Who was the blond he was playing footsie with?”
“Benny? Playing footsie? Percy, you’re libeling the dead.”
“Not I. I believe in ghosts. I saw them together only yesterday, in the Normandy Lounge. Just barely, of course. You have to strike a match in that place to see your watch.”
“You can buy a girl a drink without playing footsie. Maybe she was a cousin, or an old schoolmate or something.”
“I have other evidence. From the best of sources. Never mind that, though. The thing is, I can’t get any lead on her. I don’t know who she is, or even how to start looking for her.”
“Well, you won’t learn from me. Who asked you to look?”
“No one, I’m just practicing.”
“Go practice somewhere else. Damn it, Percy, I’m busy.”
“Her first name was Myrna. That much I know.”
“You know more than I. If there was another woman, I never saw her or heard of her. Benny must have been pretty cute about it.”
“What sort of fellow was he?”
“Solid citizen. Something of a do-gooder. Bit of a prude, as a matter of fact, which helps to account for my skepticism. I can’t quite imagine Benny among the primroses.”
“Oh, can it. Hasn’t anyone ever told you about the deacon and the soprano?”
“Tell me at dinner. Before you leave, however, here’s something else that makes me scoff. Benny had been taking very good care of himself for the past year or so. Bum heart. Hospitalized after an attack. Strict diet, early to bed — the routine. Benny’s hide was important to him. Gymnastics with a blond just doesn’t fit.”
“You never saw this blond. I did. The earlier to bed, the better.”
“Blonds are deceptive. Anyone can tell you that redheads are superior. Get lost, Percy. Go wait in the bar.”
I thought it would be worth a lobster, so I went and waited, and it was.
Who was Myrna? What was she? A blackmailer, presumably. A spook, apparently.
Whoever and whatever she was, where in the devil had she gone, and where was she now? So far as I could discover, she had simply disappeared like a puff of smoke. No one knew her full name, no one knew her address, no one could remember her in association with Benedict Coon, and no one except me and a bartender could remember her at all. It was frustrating, it was uncanny, and moreover, it was incredible. A woman like that was a woman to remember. The bartender had said so, and I say so.
I was like a kid with a riddle in his head. I couldn’t get it out, and I couldn’t solve it. I worked at it when I didn’t have something else to do, and I took it to bed with me at night, and I got nowhere from nothing.
Was it possible that Benedict Coon had killed her and disposed of her body, later killing himself in despair and fear and hopelessness? I was lying in bed when I had the thought, and it brought me straight up in the darkness. Then, jeering at myself silently, I lay down again. There is no suicide on record, so far as I know, who has shot himself in the back of the head and disposed of the gun afterward.
Perhaps the police had the answers. Perhaps, with all their facilities, they had gone somewhere while I was going nowhere. For the sake of my mental health, I decided to find out. The next day I went to police headquarters and found Brady Baldwin at a desk in a cubbyhole that may have covered a few more square feet than my reception room. If he was not exactly happy to see me, he was at least amiable.
“Sit down, Percy,” he said. “What’s on your mind?”
“Myrna,” I said.
“Mine, too.”
“You mean you haven’t got any leads yet?”
“Not a one.” He rubbed his naked skull and looked at me with an expression that was slightly sour. “As a matter of fact, I’m beginning to suspect that in your mind is the only place she ever was. How many martinis had you drunk, Percy?”