Midnight Sailing, page 21
“Yeah?” said Cuttle. “And what’s the name? Doe?”
“No,” said Larkin. “The name is George Willowby. And that reminds me, Captain Wyatt. You’d better have Willowby locked up until we land.”
“Hey, wait a minute,” Cuttle protested. “Why would Willowby kill all those birds?”
“Well, let’s start with Arthur Bonner,” Larkin said. “I’m sorry I can’t tell you exactly why he killed Bonner, because I haven’t got an answer to my radio yet. But I’ll lay you ten to one that we’ll know why the minute Willowby is fingerprinted tomorrow morning. My guess is that he was a classmate of Bonner’s at Sing Sing. At any rate, he was certainly a fugitive from American justice. He claimed his passport had been stolen before the Kumo reached San Francisco. Actually it wasn’t stolen. I have it in my pocket now. Willowby hid it under a mattress, and it was going to stay hidden until after Honolulu—so he’d have an excuse for not going ashore in American ports where he might be recognized and arrested. After all, Willowby’s past was behind him, he’d built a new life for himself, and he had a long and lucrative future in store for himself in the Far East. And he didn’t propose to have it wrecked by anyone. That’s why he killed Bonner, when Bonner recognized him and threatened to expose his past.
“Bonner, if you remember, had been doing considerable prowling around the Kumo, looking in portholes, lining up victims to blackmail. It was petty blackmail at first. All he wanted was morphine. I happen to know he looked in Willowby’s porthole, because I was there at the time. I know, too that he asked Frayle and Hood for morphine, and I assume he did the same to Willowby. Willowby obliged—only instead of filling Bonner’s syringe with morphine, he filled it with aconitine. Willowby had told me previously that he was taking aconitine for his neuralgia … Is that a common remedy, Dr. Smith?”
“Quite common,” said the surgeon of the Empress. “If administered in very small doses.”
“A few drops in a glass of water was the way Willowby described it,” Larkin went on. “Only he gave Bonner a syringeful. That explains why Bonner’s body was found on deck, instead of being dropped overboard—as an expert would do it, Gumshoe. It was a long-distance murder. Willowby didn’t know exactly when or where his victim would drop dead, and he wasn’t bothered because he thought it was a perfect murder—the victim himself, being a hop-head, administering his own poison.
“I noticed that the pupils of Bonner’s eyes were dilated, but it didn’t mean anything at the time. It wasn’t until after the funeral that I remembered that morphine contracts the pupils. Dr. Bioki should have noticed it—and his negligence cost him his life. But he wasn’t particularly interested in the death of a man who was apparently a common stowaway.
“You remember when I first intimated to you that I thought Bonner might been been poisoned? We were down looking at the coffin Bonner came aboard in, and the absence of the hypodermic struck me as a possible clue. I suggested we go up and talk to Doc Bioki about it. Well, Willowby must have been worrying about that missing hypo, too, and he followed us below decks. When he heard me suggest calling on Bioki he locked us in while he went up and stabbed the doc. He knew the doc might remember about prescribing aconitine for Willowby’s neuralgia, and he knew that the doc could explain that aconitine dilates the pupils—something I didn’t know till now. Anyhow, that murder was convenient, because Willowby’s cabin was just across from Bioki’s.
“After that, he still had to locate the hypodermic—since he knew I was looking for it, and that a laboratory test could determine what it actually contained. It must have been common knowledge aboard that Hood was the man who went through Bonner’s pockets. At least Millie Greeve saw Hood doing it, and Millie isn’t exactly tongue-tied.”
“Millie could have told him,” Cuttle volunteered. “She knows Willowby. She—say, I wonder if that’s where Willowby got my nosegay? I could of dropped it while I was talking to Millie that morning, and he could of—I’m a such-and-so! What was he doing in my cabin talking to Millie? I’ll hang that bird!”
“The flower, of course, was a dead giveaway,” Larkin said. “I knew you didn’t kill Hood, because the azalea was in Hood’s left hand. Your buttonhole being in your left lapel, as it is in most men’s coats, it should naturally have been in Hood’s right hand if he had grabbed it while being strangled by someone facing him. It was obvious, therefore, that the flower was a frame—but I didn’t suspect it was Willowby who framed you. Not at first, anyway. Not even though I’d seen him in the vicinity of the steering-engine room ’when the murder occurred …”
“And why the hell did he frame me, anyhow?”
“Obviously he was trying to make the crime too perfect,” Larkin said. “By the time Hood was killed, Captain Fujiwara was determined to lock up somebody for the rest of the voyage, and Willowby thought he would, guarantee his own freedom by furnishing a culprit. You were an easy goat, because of your antho-mania.”
“My what?”
‘Your fondness for flowers. Willowby thought the captain would be quick to accept the azalea clue as proof of your guilt. When you removed the flower before the captain saw it, however, and when the captain decided I was the murderer on the basis of Frayle’s story, Willowby decided he’d have to talk fast;. He knew I must have seen the flower in Hood’s hand, because he saw me go down the corridor to meet Hood—who was already dead. He knew damned well I wasn’t going to sit by quietly without saying something, so he got in his story first, thinking that I’d testify to the truth of your removing the flower from the dead man’s hand, and that the weight of our combined testimony would be enough to hang the murder on you—and thus leave him scot free.
“The only thing wrong with Willowby’s picture was this: When he came into the steering-engine room with you, die flower was not in Hood’s hand, it was in mine. I’d removed it and didn’t have time to put it back until after you sent Willowby to get Captain Fujiwara. Unfortunately for Willowby, he didn’t notice that the flower wasn’t there. You may remember, Hood’s body was lying behind the binnacle and was partly hidden by it. Willowby took only a step or two beyond the threshold and apparently didn’t see the hand. At any rate, he couldn’t have seen a flower in it, because it wasn’t, there. And if he knew it was there, as he said, he must have put it there himself!
“I didn’t spring this on him then, because I was waiting for the answer to my radio query on Willowby’s passport number. I wanted to have a complete case, motive and all, before I clamped down. So I meekly let Captain Fujiwara lock me up, figuring I could get a little sleep while waiting for my radiogram. The fire, of course, caused a slight hitch in the program …”
“Too bad you didn’t get the hypodermic before he got rid of it,” said Cuttle. “The evidence is pretty much circumstantial the way it stands And juries don’t like to hang a guy on circumstantial evidence.”
“Even if we don’t make the murder charge stick, he’ll get it for something—whatever it was Arthur Bonner knew,” Larkin said.
“For a newspaperman,” said William Cuttle grudgingly, “you ain’t such a bad detective.”
Chapter Thirty-four: THE CAD
Larkin was working in the sitting room of his suite at the Alexander Young. The window was open and the flower-scented air of the Honolulu morning was sweet in his nostrils. He had just sent of the last installnient of the personal history of Dorothy Bonner and he was glancing through the carbon copies. The telephone rang in the adjoining bedroom.
“I have San Francisco for you,” said the operator.
A second later Larkin’s voice was hurdling two thousand miles of ocean to vibrate shrilly in the receiver pressed to the ear of the San Francisco bureau manager of the Seven Seas Newspaper Alliance.
“Listen, you so-and-so,” it said, “what’s the idea of ignoring my last three wireless queries?”
“I didn’t ignore anything,” said Beasley. “Is it my fault if the ether is jammed up with SOS calls? Anyhow you must have got my message by mental telepathy, or extra-sensory perception. I told you to phone me from Honolulu. I take it you’re there now. Or are you phoning from Kamchatka?”
“I’m in Honolulu, all right,” Larkin said, “with a grass skirt in one hand and a bottle of O-kulihau in the other. Can’t you smell my breath?”
“Cut the comedy,” said Beasley. “This costs plenty.”
“All right. Listen. When I hang up, get our Baltimore office on the wire and have them pick up a man named Hans Schatzman. He’s a photo-printer and a photographer. Have them put him on a transcontinental plane so he can get the Hawaiian Clipper out of Alameda tomorrow. Who’s paying his fare? Why, you are, Beasley. Is Dorothy Bonner still our story or isn’t she? All right, then. This bird Schatzman is the surprise witness, produced by Seven Seas, who’s going to clear up the mystery of the navy’s blueprints. He’ll testify that he made photostats of the missing plans, not for Bonner or his daughter but for a charming scoundrel named Frayle who at this moment is no doubt communing with his selachian brethren. Sharks to you, Beasley.…
“Sure, he’ll testify. Have Baltimore tell Schatzman that unless he plays ball with us, we’ll have him jugged for conspiracy in stealing military secrets …“The photostats? I’ve got ’em. Never mind how, I’ve got them.… No, I don’t think they’ll shoot me, Beasley. I’m going over to Pearl Harbor and put the naval commandant’s mind at rest as soon as I can get the Federal court to impound the photostats as evidence.
“And listen, Beasley. Did you check on British passport No. 98765432 for me?”
“I did,” Beasley said. “And there’s no such passport. Hasn’t been for five years, since the man who had that number was killed near Ossining, New York. Fellow named George W. Allowby. He caught two muggs trying to steal his car on the Albany Post Road, back in 1932, and had the bad luck to protest. They turned out to be a couple of cons who’d just gone over the wall at Sing Sing, and one of them shot him.”
“Who were the muggs?” Larkin asked.
“One of them was a Brooklyn chemist named Henry Binks who was doing a long stretch for embezzling money from his firm—”
“That’s the guy,” Larkin interrupted. “That’s our murderer—George Willowby, the Englishman from Brooklyn, New York. He doctored the dead man’s passport to give himself a new name. And there’s your motive all cleared up, Beasley. He was in the jug at the same time as Arthur Bonner.”
“Where is he now?”
“He’s in the jug here. They’re waiting till they get a report from the F.B.I. in Washington on the fingerprint classification they cabled over. Then they’ll arraign him.”
“And the Bonner gal?”
“She’s in the jug too, I guess. I’m going right down and see what they’ve done with her. But first I’d like to dictate the real story of the fire, Beasley. It’s a pip. It’s about a steward—it has everything. And besides I owe it to the poor guy. He did me plenty favors.”
“All right. Cable a hundred words.”
“A thousand, Beasley—if I have to send if by carrier pigeon.”
Larkin hung up and walked back into the other room. He was halfway in when he stopped and blinked. Dorothy Bonner was sitting in front of his typewriter, her legs crossed, a cigarette in one hand, and the carbon pages of Dorothy Bonner’s Own Story in the other.
“Hello, darling,” she said. “I’m out.”
“So I see. Habeas corpus?”
“No. Bond. Mr. Pendenning’s lawyer arranged bail. I told him he had to—so I could come up and kiss you.”
“That all you came for?”
“That—and to make sure you’d be star witness for the defense.”
“Lot of good I’d do on the stand,” said Larkin, “without those photostats you tore up day before yesterday.”
“There’s the other set,” the girl said. “I heard you telling someone called Beasley that you had them. Where are they?”
“In my briefcase.”
“How’d you get them?”
“Sato the steward must have put them there: He intimated as much. Heaven knows where he got them—except that it must have been from Frayle. Your vanadium papers were with them.”
“Poor General Rodriguez!” the girl exclaimed.
“What’s happened to the general now?”
“He’s in jail,” said Dorothy. “Not having the papers I’d given Charlie Frayle to take care of, I was afraid the general might have another change of heart, now that he’s on dry land again, and run out without signing with the Eagle people. So I had him locked up as a material witness in my case.”
“Bright girl,” said Larkin.
“So I’ve been reading,” said Dorothy, with a wave of Larkin’s manuscript. “I’m quite fascinated with myself—in the Larkin version. Glamorous, and all that. You better send it in, I guess. I’ll make one addition.”
She inserted the last page in the typewriter and pecked away laboriously with two fingers: “When or if she is cleared of charges now pending against her, Dorothy expects to continue her journey to Japan to join—” She paused, looked up at Larkin. “—her fiancé, Mr. Glen Larkin, Toyo correspondent of the Seven Seas Newspaper Alliance. Mr. Larkin once expressed an opinion that Dorothy would marry him when he asked her, and while he has not yet asked her—”
“Gimme that!” said Larkin. He yanked the sheet out of the typewriter, inserted a fresh sheet, sat down in Dorothy’s lap, and began pounding the keys: “Sevsea news sanfrancisco add girl spy—
“Hey, what’s the idea?” Dorothy demanded.
“This has got to go separately,” Larkin explained.
“Meaning that you’ve already sent the other—?”
“Well, yes,” Larkin admitted.
“You cad! said Dorothy. “You shameless, perfidious, unmitigated cad! I love you.”
About the Author
Lawrence G. Blochman (1900–1975) was an Edgar Award–winning author of mystery novels, a prominent translator of international crime fiction, and served as the fourth president of the Mystery Writers of America. He died in New York City.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1938 by Lawrence G. Blochman
Cover design by Ian Koviak
ISBN: 978-1-5040-8577-9
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Lawrence G. Blochman, Midnight Sailing
