The Mammoth Book of Roaring Twenties Whodunnits Read online

  Grabbing the man by the collar of his tuxedo jacket, the actor dragged Cal across the lawn.

  The bartender smiled, oblivious to the commotion. His attention had been focused on one of the attractive waitresses. “What’ll it be, gentlemen?” he asked when he saw them.

  “The gentleman here,” Means said pointing to Cal, “claims he found a strand of pearls out here and that you can vouch for his story.”

  “Name’s Howard Pearson, sir, and no, I’m sorry but I never saw any such thing. I’m afraid he’s lying to you.”

  Cal’s shoulders went limp. Novarro released his hold but stood close. “Come on, Howard, tell them how I found those damn pearls right over there.” Cal pointed to a spot near the cliffwalk. “Ya saw me. I showed ya them. Ya acted like you didn’t know where they came from, that ya’d never seen them before.”

  Howard rubbed his chin, the stubble looked like dirt stuck to his face. “Sorry, Cal.”

  Before anyone could stop him, Cal lunged across the bar and grabbed the bartender. “I thought we were friends here, Howard. Ya told me if I covered up for you, I could have the pearls for Irma. Ya told me . . .”

  “Get him off me,” Howard grunted.

  Hearing the commotion, Judith McKeon came running, leaving the rest of the party inside, watching the scene as if it were a moving picture. “Howard,” she said jerking to a stop. “I didn’t know you were here.”

  “Isn’t he one of the bartenders you hired?” Means asked.

  “I called the agency and they sent over some people. I’ve used Howard in the past. There’s never been any trouble before. We have a good working relationship.”

  Howard pushed himself away from the men. “Working relationship? Judith, we both know it was a hell of lot more than that.”

  Before she could speak, Means addressed the man. “Tell us how you would define your relationship with Miss McKeon.”

  “I have connections, know what I mean? I’m very popular with the upper crust, especially in these difficult times. Understand what I’m saying here? I can get alcohol – illegal hooch. High quality and lots of it. I’ve helped her out on more than one occasion.”

  “That’s true,” Judith said. “Mrs Armstrong-Smith is very demanding and when she wants something I either accommodate her or I’m not only out of a job, but as she has threatened many times, never going to find work in this country.”

  “It’s a big world out there, Miss McKeon,” Means said, “and I’m sure an intelligent woman such as yourself . . .”

  “You don’t understand how influential Mrs Armstrong-Smith is . . . I mean was. And excuse me, Mr Means, but you of all people should understand how difficult it is to start over with a questionable reputation. It follows you everywhere. I’ve watched it happen over and over again.”

  Means nodded. “You’re right; I do understand.” Turning to Howard he asked, “So you’ve done some favors for Miss McKeon from time to time, and worked as a bartender at a few parties. That’s all there is to it, then?”

  “Yes,” Judith answered. “That’s all.”

  “And when did you last see the pearls?” he asked her.

  “Days ago. In fact, Mrs Armstrong-Smith was still looking for them earlier this evening.”

  “Cal, do you want to stick to your story or are we calling the police now? I think we can drum up a burglary charge if not murder.”

  “Okay, no police. I swiped them – so what? I didn’t know they were hers. I didn’t know who they belonged to.”

  “Explain,” Novarro said, anxious to hear the man’s story.

  “I got here earlier this afternoon to check things out – set up. I saw the pearls on the floor in the hall. I picked them up, put them in my pocket, and gave them to Irma. Thought maybe I’d get lucky after we were done tonight.”

  “And if Irma got caught wearing them, she’d be the one in trouble, right?”

  “To be honest, I never thought that far ahead. I had other things on my mind.”

  Arbuckle joined the group in the middle of Cal’s story.

  “Let’s go back inside,” Judith suggested. “It’s getting cold out here.”

  Means stood fixed in thought. “You never saw Mrs Armstrong-Smith leave the house?” he asked Judith.

  “No, I told you, the last I heard she was getting dressed in her room.”

  “What side of the house is your room on?”

  “The opposite side.”

  “Why? Wouldn’t she want you close by?”

  “Yeah, you were always telling me what a tyrant she was,” Fatty said.

  “Precisely, that’s why I insisted I be in the other wing. I needed some privacy. I do have a personal life.”

  “I’ll say,” Howard laughed.

  Everyone turned.

  “Shut up, Howard!” Judith snapped.

  “Shut up! Go away! Be quiet! I’m sick of your orders, Judy. You can’t treat me like that anymore.”

  Means saw his opportunity and sympathetically asked the man, “Like what, Howard? Does she treat you badly? Women can be so . . .”

  “She’s a bitch! She lies to me; she treats me like a dog.”

  “But you love her anyway, right?” Means asked.

  “Yes, but she loves someone else.”

  Means turned to Arbuckle. “Did Miss McKeon ever confess her love for you in any of her letters?”

  “Well . . .”

  “Come on, man, no one can hold you responsible for what another person writes.”

  “Occasionally she would say something along those lines.”

  “And you told me you loved me, too,” Judith said. “Tell them. Tell everyone now how much you love me and how we’re going to be together. Forever! That’s what you said . . . forever!”

  “And just how did you expect that to happen, girlie, when you was with me?” Howard shouted. “All the time telling me how that bitch boss of yours was the only thing keepin’ us from being together and now I find out you was writing this fat man, planning to be with him. But I was the one who got rid of . . .”

  Silence.

  “Continue, Mr Pearson,” Means insisted. “You were the one who got rid of who?”

  “No one.”

  “Call the police,” Means told Judith.

  She didn’t move. It took a moment but when she spoke, she erupted. “You, Howard? You killed Mrs Armstrong-Smith?”

  “For you, Judy. For us.”

  Howard jumped over the bar and started for the cliffwalk. Arbuckle and Novarro were on his heels. The smaller man tripped him and Arbuckle pinned him to the ground.

  Judith ran inside for the phone.

  “Gaston Bullock Means,” he told the reporter. “M . . . e . . . a . . . n . . . s.”

  “I’ve heard that name before. Wait a minute. Don’t tell me.” The pretty young thing was anxious to get all her facts straight.

  “I used to work with the President; I was with the FBI.” He beamed.

  “And now you’ve solved a murder!” she said.

  “I guess I was just born to be of service to my fellow man.”

  “Well jeepers, Mr Means, I can’t thank you enough for talking to me. None of the other people at Mrs Armstrong-Smith’s party will give me the time of day.”

  “Don’t mention it, my dear. Don’t mention it.”

  Without Fire

  TOM HOLT

  Tom Holt’s best known for his comic fantasy novels, which began with Expecting Someone Taller (1987), but he’s written much else besides including historical novels, such as Goatsong (1989) and The Walled Orchard (1990) and the continuation of E. F. Benson’s Mapp and Lucia books, Lucia in Wartime (1985) and Lucia Triumphant (1986), which brings us back to the Roaring Twenties.

  I was dragged out of blessed sleep by a ghastly thumping noise outside my cabin.

  At first I assumed it was just the unspeakable Brindesley-White woman again. She had barged in the night before, an exotic but fairly monstrous spectacle in a beaded and fringed
evening dress that for some reason reminded me of a Crusader on a church brass; waved a half-empty champagne bottle under my nose and told me, superfluously and with bad grace, that I wasn’t Bunny Delahey. I’d acknowledged the truth of her accusation and pointed out that Major Delahey’s cabin was number 106, next door. She had peered at me sideways, just to make sure I wasn’t the major trying to be funny, and drifted unsteadily away; that she eventually reached safe harbour, so to speak, I deduced from the wail of a portable gramophone reverberating through the cabin wall ten minutes later.

  On this occasion I was feeling distinctly fragile, on account of broken sleep and sundry other factors, and in no mood to cope with inebriated females. Accordingly, I lay still and waited. A moment or so later, a man’s voice called out my name. “Are you there, sir?” he added, which ruled out Major Delahey as well; I’d only spoken to him once, and he’d addressed me as “old son”.

  I grunted inarticulate permission to enter, and my tormentor took shape before me, a stocky figure in a white jacket with horribly shiny brass buttons.

  “Sorry to disturb you, sir,” the purser said, “but the captain would like to see you right away.”

  For a moment, I thought the poor fellow was talking a foreign language, because he wasn’t making any sense. Why would the captain want to see me, in the middle of the night?

  I fumbled my way into a dressing gown and followed him out down the corridor. “Quickest way’s through the cocktail lounge, sir,” the purser said, “if you’d care to follow me.”

  As it so happened, I knew where the cocktail lounge was; in fact, I’d spent rather more time in it than was good for me since we’d cast off from Liverpool. That in itself was remarkable, since it was a singularly unattractive place; slightly smaller and less ostentatious than St Mark’s in Venice, painted white with pickled wood panelling, littered with those awful chrome bar-stools covered in red leather; whenever I see them, I can’t help thinking of Mr Wells’ Martian war-machines. As I trailed through like a prisoner under escort, a long, bald fellow in a white dinner jacket was crouched, almost hiding, behind the piano, valiantly singing the very latest hit while nobody listened. I winced at his performance but couldn’t help a vestigial salute to the dexterity of the lyrics; one tradesman acknowledging another.

  As we left the room, a man and a girl blocked the doorway, coming in as we were leaving. He was stout, pudding-faced, evening-dressed and gripping a bottle like a ‘keeper dispatching a wounded pheasant; she was shingled and practically skeletal, her jewelled headband slipping down over one eye in the manner favoured by the pirates in the storybooks of my childhood. Neither of them was looking particularly well; he was bright red and she was pale green, so they clashed unforgivably into the bargain.

  “Don’t want to go out there, old man,” the youth told me. As it happened he was quite right – I wanted to be in bed, asleep, back in dear old England where the floor stayed still – but I wondered how he knew; intuition, I supposed. He weaved past me, towing the girl by the wrist like a coal barge, and lunged into the scrum of black mohair backs and bare, fish-belly-white shoulders. It was like watching bees returning to the hive, because a moment later the two of them had been absorbed into the swarm, and I don’t suppose I could’ve told them apart from their peers if my life depended on it. My brother in arms the pianist had finished with “Let’s Do It!” and embarked on “Bye, Bye, Blackbird.” I shuddered from head to toe. There are few sights more revolting to a man with a delicate head than the scenes of joy and youthful exuberance he left four hours ago with a view to sleeping it off.

  We carried on up onto the boat deck (uncharacteristically deserted), through an undersized steel door, down one flight of confoundedly awkward steps and up another. I have precious little sense of direction at the best of times (a failing which, on one notable occasion during the War, both endangered and saved my life) and it wasn’t long before I was hopelessly lost. Fortunately, the purser paused from time to time to allow me to catch up.

  The captain’s office was smaller than I’d anticipated, but rather more magnificent; a pleasant contrast, to my old-fashioned eye, to all the chrome and smoked glass with which the rest of ths ship was festooned. The panelling was a rather splendid dark wood, possibly teak, and the desk wouldn’t have looked out of place in the lair of some American merchant prince. The captain was a short, round man with cropped white hair and bright blue eyes. He was, he told me, frightfully sorry to have troubled me, but he needed my help.

  The mystery again. “That’s perfectly all right,” I lied. “What can I do for you?”

  The captain shuffled, as if painfully aware that everything was somehow his fault. “I regret to say,” he said quietly, “that’s something rather dreadful has happened. A woman’s been murdered.”

  “Good God,” I said. I was still, of course, two thirds asleep. In fact, I was reminded of an unfortunate occasion when I was a boy, and had the misfortune to doze off in the middle of a maths lesson, to be woken by the crisp, harsh voice of the maths master repeating my name and a problem in mental algebra. The helpless, frustrated feeling of panic as I struggled to apply to the problem a mind still furred up with sleep came back to me at that moment with most unwelcome vigour. “I’m terribly sorry to hear it,” I said, “but what possible help can I be to you?”

  The captain frowned, as though I was being deliberately obtuse. “It’s quite simple,” he said. “As I told you, a woman’s been killed. But we have no idea who did it, and clearly it’s of the utmost importance that we find the killer as quickly as possible. For all we know, there could be a homicidal maniac loose on the ship, and obviously we must make sure he doesn’t kill again.”

  I was about to say, “Then why in God’s name don’t you call the police?” but mercifully I managed to stop myself in time. We were at that time three days’ out of Liverpool bound for New York.

  “I take your point,” I said. “But what can I do? I’m not a detective.”

  The captain may have sighed, very faintly. “Of course not,” he said. “But I’ve checked the passenger list, and I have to say, you’re the nearest thing to one that we’ve got.”

  “Nonsense,” I said. “I’m nothing of the sort. You must be confusing me with someone else.”

  “I think not.”

  This was ridiculous, and I fear my manners were beginning to fray. “Does your precious passenger list happen to tell you what I do for a living? I’m a writer. I write song lyrics for musical comedies.”

  The captain frowned. “It says on your passport,” he replied, “that you’re a barrister.”

  That deflated me a little bit. “Used to be,” I corrected him. “Before the War, actually; I was in practice for about six months. If I remember correctly, my entire earnings amounted to a shade under five pounds.”

  I could see myself tumbling a degree or two in his estimation, not that I cared unduly. “Nevertheless,” he said, “a trained legal mind – ”

  “My field was Chancery work, not criminal cases,” I said. “And I was hopeless at it, too.”

  “Even so,” the captain said, sitting up a little straighter. “Your military service; a captain in the Gloucesters, and the DSO – ”

  I sighed. “Let me tell you about that,” I said wearily. “Having been ordered to lead my men back from the front line to prepared positions, I lost my way. It was raining, murky but not dark, and I set off in entirely the wrong direction. I found what I took to be my assigned destination, only to find it was full of Germans. Fortuitously, they were even more surprised than we were. With respect, if you want someone to help you find something, I think you’ve got the wrong man.”

  The captain was starting to look worried, but I could tell that he’d already made up his mind. “There’s nobody else on the ship even remotely qualified to investigate the matter,” he said sadly. “Furthermore, we know for a fact that you couldn’t possibly have done it. You can see the relevance of that for yourself.”


  That aspect of the matter hadn’t even occurred to me. “I’m delighted to hear you say so,” I said.

  The captain smiled thinly. “At the time the murder took place,” he said, “you were – excuse me – in no fit state to harm anyone, except possibly yourself.”

  “Ah, yes,” I said. At least that helped me put things in context. Earlier that evening, a very kind and polite steward had helped me make my way from the bar to my cabin. “Seasickness,” I explained.

  “Quite,” the captain replied. “The point is, you can be eliminated as a suspect straight away. I can also eliminate myself and eight members of the crew, who were with me on the bridge.” He scowled; keeping his patience was plainly costing him a good deal of effort. “Well, will you help me or not?” he said. “If you positively refuse, of course – ”

  “No, of course not,” I replied, sounding perhaps a little more resigned than was polite under the circumstances. “If you believe I can help you, I’ll certainly do my best. I hope you won’t be disappointed.”

  He declined to express an opinion on that score. “Come with me,” he said.

  You’ll have gathered that I earn my living in the theatre. The truth is, I’m what’s known as a play doctor. A musical comedy is put into production, at great expense; at the eleventh hour, it becomes painfully obvious that the music is adequate but the words aren’t, and they send for me. I spend ninety-six hours in a darkened room, poisoning my system with nicotine and coffee, and with luck the show is saved. It’s a pretty grim sort of existence, but I’m good at it. I can rhyme “gadabout” with “lad about” and “yes, sirree” with “Tennessee” as well as any and better than most, and like a bull terrier, I won’t let go until my prey is dead. Nobody has ever heard of me, but I’ve saved the money and reputations of a good many household names. Accordingly, when it finally dawned on Mr Ziegfeld that his latest extravaganza was little short of an affront to human dignity, he cabled me with an offer no sane man could refuse and ordered me to New York by the first available ship.