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:
“Where?” she said.
“Where I least expected her.”
“Don’t be evasive, Mr. Hand. Who is she?”
“You. You’re Myrna, Mrs. Coon.”
“And you’re insane.” She laughed harshly, and her voice dripped scorn. “It’s apparent that I made a mistake in coming to you in the first place.”
“You made a mistake, all right, and your mistake was in taking me for more of a fool than I was. Once you had decided just how to kill your husband, you needed a witness to establish the existence of a murderess who didn’t exist. Someone not very clever. Not nearly as clever as you, for example. I don’t know just how you happened to pick on me, but I’m sorry that I couldn’t accommodate you.”
“Are you less of a fool than I thought? Clearly, you are even more of one.”
“Let him talk, Dulce.” The voice was Martin Farmer’s, coming from the door, and it possessed a quality of silken amusement that warned me, suddenly, that I was listening to a dangerous man. “Even a fool can recognize foolishness if he hears enough of it.”
“Thanks,” I said. “I appreciate the opportunity to hang myself. Never mind how I finally tumbled to the fact that you were Myrna, Mrs. Coon. It took me long enough, and I’m not proud of it. Spike heels for added height, being careful at all other times to let me see you only in flats. A blond wig which can, incidentally, be traced, now that we know it was yours. Not only did it have to be bought, it also had to be dressed, and it will be only a matter of time until the police learn who sold it and who dressed it. For the big performance, a calculated emphasis of sex, which for you was easy. More than all this, dark glasses and a dark lounge and every precaution to prevent my getting a good look at you. Your face was always in shadows and turned away. When you left, you left quickly, exposing only your back in the light outside. Unfortunately for you, my ears are better than my eyes.”
“What absurd thing is that supposed to mean?”
“Trade secret. I’ll keep it, if you don’t mind. Anyhow, once I knew it was you in the lounge, I could see that the whole show was phony. For example, you told me that you learned about Myrna by overhearing on an extension a conversation she had with your husband. In this house, there are surely several telephones, most of them without extensions. Why would your husband have received a call from a blackmailer on a phone which offered even the slightest opportunity for eavesdropping to a third person? I don’t think he would have.”
“This is really incredible. If it weren’t so libelous, I might find it amusing.” Her voice was still harsh, however soft, and the blood still burned in her cheeks. She was possessed, I thought, by a kind of unholy excitement. “Now that you have decided that I devised this elaborate hoax, perhaps you will tell me why I wanted to murder my husband.”
“You tell me. Money? That was part of it, I suspect. Money, and the man who helped you murder him.”
“So now there is a man involved. What man, please?”
“The man you met in the Normandy Lounge. Martin Farmer.”
“This is getting more and more absurd. You are insane, aren’t you? I thought all the time that I was presumed to have met my husband there.”
“That’s what I was expected to presume, that the man in the lounge was your husband. But he wasn’t. He was Martin Farmer. Your shirttail cousin. His term, not mine. He had only to exercise the same care that you did to get away with it. Wear the clothes you said your husband would wear. Keep his face obscured in the shadows. He has about the height, the right weight, the right color hair. Everything but the right name and the wife.”
“But my husband was murdered. Remember? Where, exactly does he fit in?”
“He fits in the trunk. The gray sedan’s trunk. He was killed here, in this house, sometime around two o’clock in the afternoon, late enough to satisfy the estimate of time of death, which allowed considerable latitude. After losing me in the traffic, you drove out, put him behind the wheel, and left him where he was later found.”
“You’re ignoring something, aren’t you?” It was Martin Farmer again, and I turned to look at him. There was an air of indolence about him, and he was smiling faintly, but his eyes were cold and wary. “Dulce and I were at the Country Club. We played golf and had drinks and dinner. We were seen by a dozen people who remember.”
“No.” I shook my head and began to wonder, now that I was almost finished, if I could ever get out alive. “Your alibi is the most precarious bit of all. To have a car handy, you drove your car out to the club before noon and left it in the parking area. But you didn’t stay. I imagine that Mrs. Coon followed you and brought you back here, where you had work to do, having arranged in advance for the necessary privacy in which to do it. You know the work I mean. Your golf bags were put into the sedan, along with a change of clothing. After parking Coon’s car on that dead-end road, it was a simple matter to change, and pack into the golf bags that you carried away with you the clothes you removed. It was only a matter of minutes to cross that undeveloped land between the end of the road and the back of the golf course. Risky, of course, but you were ready to take the risk, and you made it. Then you came on into the clubhouse, a pair of innocent golfers with a car to ride home in, and witnesses to testify for you. But I can’t remember anyone’s saying that you were seen before coming off the course. It was simply assumed that you had been playing. Brady Baldwin’s a smart cop, and he’ll be interested in that.”
“This is very interesting speculation,” Dulce Coon said. “Even rather clever. I advise you, however, not to repeat it. It’s actionable, you know, and you would have to account to my lawyer.”
“I predict that you will have to account to a lawyer yourself. The prosecuting attorney, I mean. Don’t forget that the gray sedan is still in custody. The police lab is working over the trunk right now, and you can lay odds that they’ll find something to show that your husband took a ride in it — a thread, a scraping of skin, a hair or two, a smear of blood, something. It’s miraculous, the things that can be done in labs these days. Brady will be along after awhile. You can depend on it. In the meanwhile, since you brought your lawyer into this, I’d recommend calling him early.”
I had started moving toward the door, and I kept on moving, and no one tried to stop me. I slipped past the shirttail cousin and out and away.
At least, I thought, I had finally earned my fee.
At dinner, we were three. I was there, and Hetty was there, and Brady Baldwin was there. Brady was included because he had finished the case and earned a dinner, and because I was feeling expansive. Three assorted fiddles and a piano made music, and it was, altogether, very fancy and satisfying. After dinner, Brady’s ulcer began to bother him a little.
“I’ve got to go home and take something,” he said, “and so I’d better humor you immediately and have it over with. I’ll admit you acted practically like a genius in this business, once you got going, but there’s one thing that must have been pure boneheaded luck, a wild guess, at best. How did you tumble to the fact that it was Martin Farmer that Dulce Coon met in that bar? Maybe it wasn’t even a guess, though. Maybe, when you met Farmer later, you simply recognized him.”
“Nothing of the sort. Brady, don’t try to belittle me. There was a strong resemblance between Farmer and Coon, and I never got a good enough look to see any difference. Farmer saw to it that I didn’t. So far as I knew, it was Benedict Coon at the bar, and Benedict Coon who left with his wife. It was only later that I learned something that convinced me that it was really someone else. Under the circumstances, the shirttail cousin, being suspiciously handy, was indicated.”