The Wrong Murder Read online

  “The trouble with murder is that so often it leads to the commission of more serious crimes.”

  That was too much for Wells Ogletree.

  “That,” he observed icily, “is an attitude that practically condones lawbreaking.”

  “You forget,” Malone said, with no trace of apology in his voice, “I earn my living by defending lawbreakers before a court of justice.”

  Wells Ogletree said coldly, “One cannot but consider it a reprehensible occupation,” and let it go at that.

  “It’s also true,” Malone was saying, “that everyone alive deserves, at some time in his or her life, to be murdered.” He added, “A few people I know deserve to be murdered at regular intervals.”

  Mona McClane said sharply, “And a number of people deserve to be murdered very early in life—but better late than never.”

  Jake thought Helene was a little pale. The atmosphere of the room seemed alive, fairly crackling with cross-currents of hatred. He thought it was almost possible to hear it, like static on a cheap radio. Different people hating each other for different reasons. It gave a strange, electric quality to everything that was said, a quality that threatened at any moment to burst into verbal flames.

  But it was Fleurette Sanders who inadvertently set off the holocaust.

  “Really,” she said, crushing out her cigarette fastidiously, as though there were something faintly objectionable about it. “All this talk about murder seems to me to be in the worst possible taste.”

  There was an instant’s pause. In it, Jake looked up and saw Daphne Sanders framed in the doorway. The shadow in the hall behind her was, he guessed, Little Georgie la Cerra. The girl’s face had suddenly gone dead white.

  “You shouldn’t object to talk about murder, Fleurette.” There was no emotion in her voice. “After all, you murdered my mother.”

  The situation wasn’t relieved by Fleurette Sanders’ laugh.

  Mona McClane swung around in her chair and said, “Really, Daphne!”

  “She shouldn’t mind its being said,” Daphne Sanders said coldly. “Everyone’s been thinking it for years.”

  Jake wondered if anyone else noticed that Willis Sanders’ face had turned a mottled gray-white, and that its expression seemed curiously incongruous with the new beard. He thought too that if anyone ever looked at him the way Daphne Sanders looked at her stepmother, he’d be afraid to go to sleep at night.

  “If your accusations weren’t so utterly absurd, Daphne,” Fleurette Sanders said pleasantly, “I’d insist on your being more specific. But I’m sure that no one takes it seriously.”

  “I do,” the girl said coolly.

  Willis Sanders spoke with sudden sternness. “Daphne, I forbid you to say another word.”

  She flashed him a single, burning, malevolent glance, and was silent.

  Chapter Twenty

  Helene’s big car was barely out of the driveway before she said, “Malone, do you think Fleurette Sanders really killed the first Mrs. Sanders?”

  “I don’t know,” Malone said. “Somebody did.”

  “If you ask me,” Jake muttered, “that girl Daphne is nothing but a murder walking around looking for a place to happen.” Speaking of Daphne reminded him of Little Georgie, and he looked around for the gangster’s car. There was no sign of it anywhere. “Two birds with one stone are worth two in the bush,” he said happily.

  Before Helene had a chance to ask questions, there was a sudden interruption. She had turned off Lake Shore Drive onto a side street, and a long, low-slung roadster came up beside them, all but forcing them to the curb. Ellen Ogletree’s voice called from the roadster.

  “I’m sorry to stop you this way,” she said breathlessly, “but I want to—I have to—talk to you people, and I didn’t want anyone there at Mona’s to know. Except Len. He’s with me.”

  Jake couldn’t see the little lawyer’s face, but he knew Malone’s eyebrows must be raised in two questioning curves.

  “Sounds urgent,” he said quietly.

  “It is,” Ellen Ogletree said. “At least I think it is. It’s about—about that man who was murdered—the one Fleurette saw—” She said, “Is there some place we can talk?”

  Jake held his watch to the light and said, “There’s a little bar on the west side of Rush Street just above Chicago Avenue that’s still open. We’ll meet you in a booth there in five minutes.”

  Helene started the car and murmured, “As you mentioned this afternoon, when people are married—”

  Jake said hastily, “It won’t take ten minutes to talk with her, and the night is still young.”

  “What the devil do you suppose the Ogletree girl wants?” Malone said crossly.

  “Maybe she wants to tell us she saw Mona McClane shooting Mr. Gumbril,” Jake muttered. He was trying hard to remember something. It was something he’d learned at Mona McClane’s. Important, too. He shook his head and sighed heavily.

  “What the hell’s the matter?” the lawyer growled.

  “There was something I wanted to tell you, but it’s gone,” Jake said. He thought a minute longer, finally said, “Oh well, it’ll come to me.”

  Malone grunted. “If I had it to do over again, I’d have been a doctor instead of a lawyer. There wouldn’t have been so many emergency calls keeping me from my sleep.”

  They found Ellen Ogletree and friend waiting in a secluded booth in the little bar.

  “Are you sure this is a good place to talk?” the girl asked.

  “Sure,” Jake said confidently. “The only place to hold a strictly private conversation is in a public bar. It’s the one place where you won’t be overheard.” He gave the bartender a bill, said, “Go on bringing us gin until this gives out, and don’t listen to anything you hear.”

  Helene said, “You mean, don’t hear anything you listen to.”

  Malone ignored them both, turned to Ellen Ogletree, and said, simply, “Well?”

  The girl frowned. “It’s serious. Really serious, I mean.”

  “Sure,” Jake said. “Murder is always serious.”

  Leonard Marchmont laughed heartily, displaying an amazing number of large, horselike teeth. Evidently he had a vague idea that Jake had make a joke. Ellen Ogletree frowned at him, opened her lips to speak, and then thought better of it.

  George Brand decided to help. “I suppose you’re afraid you’ll be mixed up in this murder because Gumbril took part in your kidnaping.”

  Ellen Ogletree looked at him gratefully. “That’s exactly it.” She shuddered. “I don’t know why it should worry me, except that it was such an awful experience and I don’t think I could stand having it all brought up again.” Her little chin wobbled as though she might weep.

  Marchmont laid a hand on her arm. “Frightful thing being kidnaped, you know.”

  Malone nodded sympathetically. “Still, I don’t see why you need to worry about it, Miss Ogletree. After all, who knows Gumbril was part of the kidnap gang? Part of it, or head of it,” he added.

  “Head of it,” Ellen said almost automatically. “I know, and Len knows, and you people. And father.”

  “But not the police,” Malone said in his most reassuring voice. “And as Gumbril’s murder must have been a gang murder—” he ended on a half-questioning note.

  “If it was,” Ellen Ogletree said.

  Malone appeared to inhale his glass of gin. “Was it Gumbril who did the actual—” he cleared his throat delicately, “snatching?”

  Ellen Ogletree paled. “No. There were two men. One of them just drove the car. I don’t know who he was. The other one—the man who seemed to be running things—was an Italian, I think. His pal called him Little Georgie.”

  Jake had a strange notion that all the flesh on his body had moved an inch or so away from his bones. Maybe, he told himself reassuringly, it was just the gin. He rather wished Daphne Sanders had decided to bring her new boy friend into the living room before Ellen had gone. The resulting commotion would have been
worth seeing. He wondered how Little Georgie was making out with her.

  “Do you know who he is?” Ellen Ogletree asked.

  The lawyer shook his head. “Never heard of him. You just forget it and everyone else will. Nothing to worry about.”

  A little color had returned to the girl’s face. Jake noticed that her complexion, under its heavy make-up, was far from perfect.

  “I hope you’re right. The murder did give me a nasty shock, though.”

  “The poor little girl has been through so much,” Leonard Marchmont said sympathetically.

  The poor little girl looked extremely pathetic and said, “It really was frightfully hard on me, really it was.” Jake noticed a faintly English intonation in her speech which could only have come there by association.

  “It couldn’t have been good clean fun for your father, either,” Helene said. “Fifty thousand bucks is fifty thousand bucks.”

  Ellen opened her eyes wide and said, “Oh, but it wasn’t his money.”

  The lawyer spilled only a little of the gin on his tie. “Louder, please.”

  “It was my money. I guess you don’t understand.”

  “No,” Malone said. “I guess I don’t.”

  “My grandfather left it to me,” Ellen said. “The money, I mean. But father is in charge of it until I’m thirty. He can do just as he pleases with it until then. He pays my bills and gives me an allowance,” she laughed a little harshly, “a nickel at a time. So when the kidnaping happened, the money was paid out of my estate. It didn’t cost him anything.” She added the last words in a faintly spiteful tone.

  Jake waited until the bartender had come and gone away before he murmured. “That’s very interesting.” He wondered vaguely why the girl had lied about why she wanted to see them.

  “If he’d had to dig it up himself,” Ellen Ogletree said nastily, “he’d have told the kidnapers they could keep me.” She paused, looked embarrassed, and said, “Please, let’s not talk about it any more. Why on earth do you suppose Mrs. Sanders said that about seeing the murder?”

  “Because she did see it, I suppose,” Jake said. “I’d have mentioned it myself.”

  Leonard Marchmont said lightly, “You’d almost think the woman meant it as a warning.”

  “Oh, people will say anything to make a sensation,” Malone murmured, gazing into his empty glass.

  “Do you suppose she really saw anything?” Ellen Ogletree asked. “I mean, more than just the commotion in the crowd?”

  “Possibly,” the little lawyer said. “In fact, as I remarked at the time, the only way anyone could have actually seen what did happen would have been from a window somewhere above the corner. Looking down on the crowd, one could have seen the murderer move up behind his victim and move away again, seen the murdered man carried along by the crowd until be fell, in fact—” he paused to relight his cigar, “if the murderer had been anyone easily recognized by the person in the window”—he seemed to be having trouble with his cigar—“recognized by some distinctive headgear, for instance, Mrs. Sanders may even know the identity of the murderer.” He expelled a great cloud of smoke like a battleship laying down a smoke screen.

  “But why on earth would she say such a thing?” Ellen Ogletree persisted.

  Jake shrugged his sholders. “Making a sensation. Just as Mona McClane was making a sensation when she made that bet with me day before yesterday.”

  Leonard Marchmont laughed again. Jake decided it was the first time he’d ever heard what could be properly called a guffaw. “I say,” he said. “If Mona McClane was in earnest about that bet, you know, and if this murder yesterday had—” He seemed a little embarrassed. “I mean to say, if she’d done it, you know, Mrs. Sanders might have been warning her she’d seen it.”

  “Quite possibly,” Jake said, as though it didn’t matter. “Nice of her, if that was it.”

  Ellen Ogletree rose. “I’m afraid I’ve bothered you for nothing.”

  “Not at all,” Jake said gallantly. “It’s been a pleasure.”

  He waited until the girl and her escort were out of earshot before he said, “Now why the hell does she hate Mona McClane?”

  “How do you know she does?” Helene asked.

  “She must, or she wouldn’t have gone to all this trouble to make sure I linked up Mona McClane with the murder of Joshua Gumbril. Not too skillfully, either.” He paused. “And to make sure that Fleurette Sanders must have seen the murder.”

  “I’m not sure that’s it,” Helene said thoughtfully. “I bet she’s smelling out the ground to see if the murder could possibly be pinned on her old man. Ellen would love to see someone else handing out her allowance.”

  Jake said incredulously, “Do you think she’d pin a murder on her own old man just for money?”

  “After living with Wells Ogletree all her life,” Helene said tartly, “I bet she’d pin a murder on him for peanuts.”

  “Fleurette Sanders—” Jake began.

  A loud snore interrupted him. George Brand had laid his head on the table and was sleeping peacefully as a child.

  “Get his head out of the ash tray,” Helene said, “and send for Partridge.”

  While they waited, Malone sank into what seemed to be a long spell of almost trancelike thought. At last he lifted his head.

  “The first Mrs. Sanders. It’s a funny coincidence. I remember now.”

  Jake growled, “Whatever it is, it’s a coincidence that picked a helluva time to happen.” He felt for Helene’s hand under the table. “What do you remember?”

  “I told you I knew Gumbril because he sent me a client now and then. I just recalled one of them, that’s all.”

  “Who, damn you?” Helene demanded.

  The lawyer took a long breath. “The man who fired the shot that killed the first Mrs. Sanders,” he said proudly.

  At that moment Partridge arrived, a little pale, more than a little scandalized.

  “I have a taxi waiting for Mr. Brand,” he reported. He seemed to hesitate a minute. “Mr. Justus, the apartment building is full of policemen. Full of them.”

  Jake blinked. “Policemen? Why? What are they doing there?”

  Partridge looked down his nose and said, “They appeared to be waiting for someone, sir. That’s all I know.”

  With the help of a sympathetic bartender he conveyed George Brand to the waiting taxi and was gone.

  “I’m trying to solve a murder, not go to jail for one,” Jake said crossly. “Now I can’t even go home. Damn Mona McClane anyway.”

  Helene said, “Hush. I want to find out something. Malone, go on about the first Mrs. Sanders.”

  “Why?” Jake asked.

  “Because it has something to do with Mona McClane,” Helene told him, “and don’t interrupt. Go on, Malone. Wasn’t she killed in a holdup or some such thing?”

  “That’s right,” the little lawyer said. “It was five or six years ago—something like that. The Sanders were coming home from the theater, as I recall. In front of the apartment building where they lived, they were held up by two armed bandits who took everything they had on them.” He paused for thought and went on, “There has always been some doubt as to just what did happen. The most popular version is that Mrs. Sanders screamed, whereupon one of the holdup men shot and killed her. At least that was Sanders’ story, which was accepted by the police on the face of the available evidence. The holdup man who did the shooting got clean away, with all the swag. The other one was my client.”

  “What happened to him?” Jake asked.

  “I got him off on a technicality. His name was Gus Schenck. He runs a tavern on the South Side now.”

  “That’s all I wanted to know,” Helene said. She rose, picked up her gloves and bag, and said, “I’ve always wanted to meet a man named Gus. And let’s get out of here and into the car before Von Flanagan’s cops begin searching the North Side bars.”

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Out in the car Malone growled, “All
right, I’ll go with you. But why the hell do you want to talk to Gus?”

  “To find out more about how the first Mrs. Sanders was killed,” Helene said serenely. “It’s the first hint of any link between Mona McClane and Joshua Gumbril.”

  “Louder,” Malone said.

  “Mona McClane is a friend of the Sanders. The first Mrs. Sanders was shot by a holdup man whose pal was sent to you as a client by Joshua Gumbril after the shooting.”

  “It’s about as far-flung a connection as the Atlantic cable,” Malone complained. He told Helene to take the outer drive south. “I hope you know what you’re doing.”

  Jake thought of one last objection. “Do you realize it’s past midnight?”

  “All the better,” Helene told him, “there’s a better chance that we can talk to Gus in private.”

  Passing the Field Museum Malone said, “I still don’t think any of this has to do with Mona McClane.”

  They had gone by Soldiers’ Field before Helene answered, “As far as I know, it doesn’t.”

  Going through the Thirty-first Street underpass, Jake complained, “If it doesn’t have anything to do with Mona McClane, then why are we bothering with it at all?”

  “Because,” Helene said crossly, “it’s time to buy a drink, and I always believe in patronizing Malone’s old clients, and I can’t think of another one who keeps his bar open all night. Now sit back and admire my driving, and don’t bother me.”

  Despite Helene’s total disregard for the traffic regulations of the city of Chicago, it was a little past three before she parked the car in front of a lighted window whose painted sign announced, simply, “Gus’s.”

  “Now that we’re here,” Jake began.

  “Wait a minute,” Helene said. “Malone, you know this guy. You ask the questions.”

  The lawyer sighed. “I’ll have to. What do you want me to find out?”