Say Yes to Murder by Todhunter Ballard (pride and prejudice read .TXT) đź“•
This problem was settled for him as a woman crossed the small entrance and pushed open the ground glass door. She was blond, with the enameled finish of Max Factor and the House of Westmore, neatly turned out. She gave Lennox a speculative look, but he was too busy catching the door to give her more than a passing glance.
The entry was small and tiled. An automatic elevator and a stairway which looped like a climbing snake around the cage offered a choice. He chose the elevator and rode upward in the little car with a faint accompanying sense of claustrophobia.
The girl who opened the door was small and very dark. It startled him. He was so used to blondes. She said: "Yes?" impatiently, as if she dared him to give a good excuse for knocking on the door.
She wore a flowered housecoat with a long zipper up the front, and from the way the coat fitted he judged that there could be little underneath.
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Jean Jeffries was standing there. Lennox had no idea when she had come. She could have been there all the time he had spent searching the desk. Her black eyes were on his face, intense, unreadable, yet questioning.
“Hello,” he said, and a thousand things came up to plague his tired mind. What was she doing here? Her apartment was on the second floor. He put it into words, not gentle words, but harsh and irritable.
She said: “The same applies to you also, Bill. You left me to go home or to Spurck. I find you here—and Tina dead.” The inference in her voice was unmistakable, and he laughed shortly.
“So even you are accusing me now.”
“Not accusing,” she told him, her eyes shifting to the rifled desk, “but I don’t understand…”
He was going to explain, then changed his mind. He remembered the warning in Tina Kingstone’s note. “Whatever you do, don’t show this to your granddaughter.”
He lied: “I came to see Tina and found her thus.”
“And searched her desk?”
He was suddenly angry. The girl before him was the cause of all this trouble. Except for her, he would be at home in bed where he belonged. Mary Morris would be O. K.; Heyworth might even be alive. He had an impulse to shake her until the white teeth rattled.
He stepped forward, and his arms went out to grasp her shoulders.
But she misunderstood the gesture. She also came forward, and she was within the circle of his arms, again pressing her face to his. Her body was warm and vibrant beneath the soft folds of the corduroy robe.
She took her lips away and said: “I’m sorry, Bill. I trust you. You know that—after what you did for me today. I’m sorry but it was a shock, walking in here, finding you… and Tina dead. I couldn’t sleep. I had to talk to someone, and she was my friend—about the only friend I had aside from you. I came up…”
A voice said: “Miss Kingstone. Miss Kingstone, is anything the mat—” and Boren was standing in the entry looking at them. “Oh—I didn’t know you had guests. I saw your door open and thought. There he stopped, for his eyes had gone beyond Lennox and the girl to the still figure on the floor. “Why…”
Lennox said: “Hello, Boren.”
“Miss Kingstone? Is she hurt?”
“She’s dead,” said Lennox, and stood aside for the manager to pass.
He came on into the room hesitantly, paused at the dead girl’s side, and stood looking down at her for a long moment. When he turned, the skin above the ragged edge of the beard was yellow and unhealthy looking.
“Bad business, Mr. Lennox. Very, very bad.”
“Lennox said without interest: “This won’t help your house.”
The manager moaned softly as if the thought had not occurred to him before. “Fifty thousand I just spent redecorating and for new furniture. A nice, quiet, respectable house it’s always been.”
“A cesspool,” Lennox corrected him. “If there’s an apartment in town with a lousy reputation it’s this one.”
Boren wisely ignored the remark. “You didn’t kill her?” he asked, as if he hoped for an affirmative answer.
“No,” Lennox told him. “She was this way when we came upstairs to say hello.” He was wondering if there was any way to get Jean out of here before the police arrived, if he could keep her free of the investigation.
It certainly wasn’t the type of medicine Mary Morris needed at the moment. But he couldn’t afford to move a second body, even if it had been possible, and he most certainly couldn’t afford to trust Boren. The best thing to do was call the police and try to bluff his way out. With this in his mind he crossed toward the phone.
Boren read his mind. “Do we have to call the police now?” he said.
“It will be easier now than later.” Lennox was practical. “You don’t expect me to hide a corpse, do you?”
“Of course not,” the man said. “Certainly not.” His beard wiggled up and down earnestly. “That’s the last thing I’d expect you to do—hide a corpse.”
Lennox looked at him suspiciously, but just then he got his connection, asked for homicide and then for Spellman. “Floyd,” he said. “We’ve found that body you were looking for this afternoon. Yes. You’d better come out and have a look for yourself.”
4.
Someone pounded on the door, and Lennox rose to open it. Spellman tramped in trailed by Stobert and a second man. He looked around, his eyes careful under their shielding lids. “What have we here?”
“A murder,” said Boren, and washed his hands in the air. “It’s not the fault of the house, Captain. Miss Kingstone had splendid references.”
“If she did,” Spellman told him, “she wrote them herself. Who finally caught up with her?” His question was directed at the room in general, but his eyes were on Lennox.
Bill shook his head. “I wouldn’t know. Miss Jeffries and I came up to see if she wanted a drink. The door was partly open and we found her… We’ve…” He shrugged. “We called you.”
“Thoughtful,” Spellman said sourly. “I’m surprised. You people have gotten out of the habit of reporting a little thing like murder.” He went over and looked down at the dead girl.
“A lot of guys in this town are going to sleep easier when they hear about this.” He whirled around suddenly and stabbed a finger at Jean Jeffries. “How well did you know this Kingstone doll?”
She stammered, surprised by the directness of his attack. “Why… Not well—not well at all. I only returned from Europe a few months ago. I met her five or six weeks ago outside on the sun porch. We got to talking, and the evenings we didn’t go out we’d get together and gossip.”
Lennox said: “Lay off her, Floyd. She was with me.”
“She could be in far better company,” Spellman said shortly. “It seems mighty queer to me that you two would come up here at three o’clock in the morning.”
Lennox didn’t answer. The less argument they put up the better. Later in the car he said to Nancy Hobbs: “It was lucky you saw the police car coming and got out of the way. Spellman would have thought there was something fishy—one girl bringing me over to see another.”
Nancy’s smile looked a little grim, even in the darkness. “I suppose he figures you and the Jeffries girl are bathed in sin. Up to your eyebrows.”
“Over our heads,” Lennox admitted. “It’s my reputation, you know, although what I ever did to deserve it…”
She said musingly: “I wonder what Kingstone was going to tell Morris…. I wonder who killed her.”
He frowned. “That apartment house certainly seems to be an unhealthy place. If I lived there I’d move quick.”
“Well, you don’t—at least not officially—yet. In the meantime, here’s your place. And Bill,” as he opened the door and started to get out, “if you find any more bodies, give me a ring. I think you owe me that much.”
He promised and was grinning as he watched her drive away, then the grin faded, and he stood for a long time watching the reflected glow of the town on the fog-arched sky.
Lennox did not know how long he had been asleep. He woke with a confused feeling that he had been in bed a long time. But he couldn’t have been, for the sky outside the apartment window was just beginning to show gray. He lay there between sleep and wakefulness, wondering vaguely what it was that had aroused him. And suddenly he knew.
He wasn’t alone in the room. He lay perfectly still, holding his breath, knowing that the slightest indication that he was awake might bring on an attack.
His gun was still in the side pocket of his coat in the wardrobe. He was fairly caught. Suddenly there was a subdued whisper: “Can’t find anything. Let’s wake him and make him talk.” A second voice objected. “And tip our hand.”
“Hell,” said the first. “What difference does it make? He’s got it, hasn’t he? He must have taken it. Who else could?”
“Maybe she didn’t have it in her apartment in the first place.”
“Then what?”
The other man said: “I’m getting out of here,” and the door into the living room opened.
His partner joined him swiftly and they faded through the opening.
The door had hardly closed before Lennox was free of the bed and diving for the closet. He found the .38 undisturbed in his coat pocket, clutched it, and raced across the living room to the hall door. The hall outside was empty.
Looking around he realized that he must have been sleeping very soundly. It was incredible that they had given the apartment such a thorough search without waking him. His wallet was gone, along with a collection of cards, his driver’s license, and the accumulation of memoranda he had gathered through the years. His desk had been emptied and the contents pulled from his bureau drawers. They had carried them into the living room and dumped them in the middle of the floor.
Lennox shaved, dressed, and was in the corner restaurant below the building by seven-thirty. The waitress looked at him in surprise.
“Just getting in, Mr. Lennox?”
He picked up the glass of chilled orange juice and pretended to look hurt. “Why, Helen!”
“You mean you’ve actually been in bed?” she said doubtfully. “And you got up at this hour?”
He told her: “I’m a working man. I’ll have you know the wheels of commerce can’t turn unless I’m around to give them impetus.”
She gave him another disbelieving look and departed for the kitchen.
He picked up the morning paper and stared at the headlines. War news was sharing the spot with Hollywood that morning. Hollywood and Death. He thought that the respective headlines pretty well exemplified the policy of the different papers.
The Times gave Heyworth a two-column drop; the Examiner played up Tina Kingstone’s death, and the News, crowded for space, carried both stories under a single head. He read the three newspaper accounts in full, learning nothing.
Most of the facts on the Heyworth murder had come from the typed statement which he and Spurck had issued the preceding evening. His name figured in the Kingstone murder, but none of the papers connected the two killings.
That was a break—or was it? Perhaps there was no connection, merely the long finger of coincidence. He finished his breakfast and headed for the studio, wondering what he was going to tell Mary Morris.
2.
As soon as he was ushered into her room he knew that the actress was no better. He had been warned by the nurse before going in.
“You’ll have to be careful,” she told him. “I couldn’t let you see her at all but she’s been deviling me to call you ever since she waked up. You aren’t related to her—or something?”
He looked at her sharply. “Of course not. Why do you ask?”
“I don’t know,” she said slowly, “but I got the impression that she was speaking of you almost as a son.”
He smiled. “We’re friends—old friends,” he said, and went on into the sick room.
It was a cheerful room in a nice house on one of the drives curving up from Santa Monica Boulevard, through Beverly Hills toward Sunset. It wasn’t as pretentious as some homes occupied by lesser celebrities, but it was homey and comfortable.
Mary Morris had told Lennox once that it was the home she had always dreamed of—for years, she’d said. “I lived in a trunk and ate in the quick-and-dirties. That’s one thing
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