The Philadelphia Murder Story Read online

  Captain Malone motioned toward the unsavory mess lying on the morning paper. “This yours?”

  Monk looked at it for an instant. “Not to recognize. Why?”

  “It’s got your initials on it,” Captain Malone said. “And quite a lot of blood. Or I’d guess it’s blood; I wouldn’t want to say for sure till it’s analyzed. The young lady hasn’t told me yet where she found it or why she was trying to burn it up.”

  I thought that when Monk looked at Laurel Frazier, the chief of homicide must have been puzzled. It would have been hard to imagine anything more impersonal and detached than his level gaze.

  “Does the young lady say it belongs to me, whatever it is?” he inquired politely.

  “The young lady hasn’t said anything,” Laurel said hotly. “And she doesn’t intend to say any more.”

  The sudden shower of blue sparks flying around must have been a further blow to what I suppose Captain Malone’s theory was. He looked from one to the other of them and returned to the handkerchief. It was a rather elaborate arrangement, with interlacing letters embroidered in tan on the white linen inside a medallion.

  Monk glanced at it. “I suppose it’s mine if it’s got my initials on it,” he said casually. “Maybe I got it for Christmas. I don’t pay much attention to such items, plain or fancy.”

  “Perhaps the one you’ve got with you is like this,” Captain Malone said gently.

  Monk started to put his hand in his pocket and stopped. “As a matter of fact,” he said calmly, “I just remember. I don’t happen to have one. My valet neglected to lay it out this morning.”

  Captain Malone’s eyes brightened a little. “Maybe you’d just better tell me where you were today—say between twelve o’clock and three—if you don’t mind.”

  “I’d be glad to, captain, but it just happens I can’t.”

  “Why not, son?”

  “Because where I was is my business. I don’t mean to be offensive, captain. It’s just a plain statement of fact. I wasn’t at any time at The Curtis Publishing Company, if that’s what you’re getting at.”

  “I’m mighty glad to hear you say so,” Captain Malone said benevolently. “Somebody was down there, and he’s going to burn for it. I don’t like murderers, and I don’t care whether they live south or north of Market Street, Main Line or water front. I suppose you know Kane was murdered this afternoon?”

  “Yes, I know it. I heard it on the radio.”

  Captain Malone looked at him steadily. He turned back to the table and began making a neat bundle of the burned handkerchief in the two top sheets of the newspaper.

  “It seems to me the judge told me you were in the Army, son. Not out already, are you?”

  “Marine Corps,” Monk said shortly. “I’m on leave. I go back next week.”

  Captain Malone took a piece of string out of his pocket and tied it around his bundle. “You’re out of uniform?”

  “Exercise,” Monk said calmly.

  “You’ve been out exercising,” Captain Malone said. “Not golf—you wouldn’t hear a radio on a golf course, now, would you?”

  Monk said nothing.

  “And you wouldn’t have been out walking. Your shoes would be wet if you had.”

  “I told you I wasn’t going to tell you where I was today, Captain Malone,” Monk said quietly. “And I meant it.”

  Captain Malone looked from him to Laurel, standing by the fireplace, her face expressionless. “You’re making a mistake, both of you,” he said earnestly. “I hope you’ll think it over and come and see me.” He put his little package carefully in his pocket. “Will you tell the judge I’m here?”

  Laurel turned. “Colonel Primrose is in the library with him,” she said. “Do you want to wait or——”

  “I’ll go up now, if it’s all right with the judge,” Captain Malone said. “The colonel’s business and mine are pretty much the same, I guess.”

  Monk Whitney moved out of their way, deliberately avoiding looking at the girl.

  “Will you tell Colonel Primrose, Laurel,” I said, “that Mrs. Whitney says he’s welcome any time he wants to go over?”

  Captain Malone glanced at me sharply. It probably wasn’t the most tactful way of delivering a message, but I didn’t see any other way to do it. We heard their feet going up the stairs, and Monk turned promptly as they got to the top and started along the hall.

  “Come on,” he said. “Let’s shove out of the fire trap and go get a drink. I could use a couple. Just wait till I get hold of that redheaded——”

  “She was trying to get rid of that handkerchief,” I interrupted. I was startled at the sudden resentment in his voice. “She really was.”

  “I’ll bet.”

  He laughed or at least he made a sardonic noise. It could only be called mirthless. He picked up his raincoat.

  “Come on, let’s get out. Unless you don’t want to be seen with——”

  “Don’t be funny,” I said.

  We went out and down the steps. Captain Malone’s car, with a couple of detectives hunched up in the front seat, was parked on the other side of the street. There was a green coupé in front of the pink house next door. Monk took my elbow.

  “Come on, quick,” he said. “That’s Trav’s. He must be up with Abigail. I don’t want to see him.”

  “Why not?” I was surprised at the sudden intensity in his voice.

  “Why not? Good God, I should think you’d know.”

  We cut across in front of the police car to the square. He glanced back.

  “It’s not fair,” he said. “They’re not even watching us.”

  The reason was pretty obvious, I thought. Until Captain Malone caught Laurel red-handed, he’d refused to believe the Whitney clan could have had anything to do with Myron Kane’s murder.

  My bird of evil omen had flitted back. Mr. Toplady was sitting on a bench in the periphery of one of the hooded lights, gazing fixedly up at the second-story windows of the pink house across the street.

  “Stop a minute,” I said. “I want to speak to that man. Or go on. I’ll catch up with you.”

  I stopped at the bench.

  “Mr. Toplady,” I said.

  He started at the sound of his name, and looked around at me. I was appalled at his face. It was ashy-gray and haggard as an old dishrag. He stared at me dumbly, without any sign of recognition.

  “I’m the woman you gave the letter to for Mr. Kane,” I said. And I stopped. I didn’t know quite how to go on.

  He shook his head vaguely without speaking, just looking at me with a kind of helpless agony in his eyes. The light made the whites of them glitter a little, and I edged back a step, wishing I hadn’t sent Monk on. He wasn’t far, at that, just along to where the path intersected the circle, standing by a trash can, lighting a cigarette.

  Mr. Toplady was still looking up at me.

  “Don’t you remember?” I asked.

  “It doesn’t matter,” he said slowly. His voice was cracked and torn as if it hurt him to use it. “He’s . . . dead now.”

  “I know. I’m terribly sorry.”

  He looked back at me, moving his head painfully.

  I would have gone then, but as I moved to go something compelling in the haggard misery in his face held me there.

  “Yes, he’s dead,” he mumbled. “They—they killed him. I know why.” The words began to come faster, all strung together, suddenly articulate, as if a dam inside him had broken, letting them through. “I’m the only one who knows why. I know. I know which, one of them did it. I know.”

  “If you do know,” I said, “you ought to go to the police. Captain Malone is over at Judge Whitney’s now. Why don’t you go and tell him?”

  “Police?” he said at last. He was almost whispering. “They wouldn’t listen—they wouldn’t believe me. My—my own hands aren’t clean.” He looked down at his hands. Then he brought his head up and half rose from the bench.

  “I’ll go,” he said. “I’ll
tell. I’ll pull down the palace he’s built—his—his deceit.”

  He stopped, sinking back down on the bench, the weak flame dying as quickly as it had flared up. His face crumpled, tears ran down his cheeks.

  It seemed shameful just to leave him there, hysterical and in agony, but I didn’t know how to do anything else.

  Monk Whitney looked at me curiously as I came up to him. “What gives?” he. demanded. “Who’s your small friend?”

  I couldn’t speak for an instant. “That’s Mr. Toplady,” I said then. “I’m——”

  He cut me off abruptly, instantly alert. “The man who wrote Kane the letter?”

  I nodded. He took a couple of quick steps past me and stopped.

  “Where is he?”

  I looked back. The bench he’d been sitting on was empty. There was no trace of him anywhere.

  “Who is Mr. Toplady, Monk?” I asked.

  He didn’t answer. He’d thrown away his cigarette, and he stood with his brows drawn together, fumbling absently in his pocket for another. He lighted one deliberately, as if it were a process demanding his entire attention.

  “Come on,” he said. “Let’s go eat.”

  We didn’t stop at the Barclay or the Warwick. “We’d better steer clear of the haunts of the elite,” he said.

  The place we went to was down a narrow side street and up a flight of rickety steps. It obviously had been a speakeasy once, but it was quiet and empty, and the scalopini and green peppers fried in olive oil were very good, and it was pleasantly nostalgic with the iron-grille peephole in the door and the straw-covered bottles on the plate rail that had once held somebody’s best china plates.

  “It’s none of my business,” I said, when the waiter had gone back through the bamboo-and-bead curtain.

  “It’s certainly not,” Monk said. “But what?”

  “It’s just that you aren’t making sense,” I said. “You can’t act the way you did with Captain Malone and expect to get away with it.”

  He didn’t raise his eyes from his plate. “I don’t give a damn about Malone.”

  “Now you’re being childish,” I said. “Why don’t you tell him where you were this afternoon?”

  “Because I can’t, lady,” he said evenly. He looked across at me. “It’s you that’s not making sense. What would you do if you—well, if you were in the spot I’m in? You wouldn’t expect me to shed any tears for Kane, would you? And if he hadn’t got bumped off this afternoon, he’d be with the district attorney right now, and in the morning where’d my father be?”

  “Do you know that?” I asked.

  “That’s what I’ve been doing today,” he said quietly. “And I can’t say to Malone, ‘I wasn’t at the Curtis Building, sir; I was out in the Whitemarsh Valley, trying to find out whether it’s true my father killed his best friend, so count me out.’ Can I?”

  “Why, no,” I said. “I guess you couldn’t.”

  “Well, that’s what I was doing. I don’t know why. I mean, I don’t know what difference it can make now. Except that—— Good God, I’ve got to know! Here that poor guy—that’s what’s so hard to take.” He stopped for a while, thinking intently, and then looked over at me. “You kill somebody,” he said abruptly. “Maybe you lost your head, maybe something happened, maybe it was an accident. Okay, you try to get away with it. Nobody wants to hang. If it can be made to look like a suicide, fine. But what I can’t get away with is my father—Judge Nathaniel Whitney—being a damned hypocrite.” He looked down at his plate again.

  “I haven’t any idea at all what you’re talking about,” I said.

  He nodded silently. “It goes back a long way, Grace,” he said, after a moment. “So long you get to thinking everybody knows. Trav’s father and Laurel’s father and mine were all born around the square there, and they all grew up and went to college together. Then Laurel’s father went to medical school, and Trav’s and mine did law. They were tops, all of them. They were respected, and honored, and honest—or that’s what everybody thought. Doctor Frazier, Laurel’s father, he was a wonderful guy. They don’t come any better. He worked himself to death. When he died, he didn’t leave a terrific lot, but enough for Laurel and her mother, with what his father had left him. They were Quakers and pretty well heeled. You know doctors don’t know much about finance, and the better they are the less they know. Anyway, he left it with Travis’s father, Douglas Elliot, as discretionary trustee. He was a lawyer, and he was supposed to be the soul of honor. You know. Without any of my father’s dramatic flair.”

  He seemed to be coming to the hard part, the way he hesitated before he went on.

  “Everything was fine, then, or seemed to be. Trav went to law school and came back and went in his father’s office and got engaged to Elsie. At least there was a sort of family understanding—childhood sweethearts, that sort of thing. That was September, 1936. Laurel was sixteen and all set for—you know, the usual brilliant social career. Everything was beautiful, and then just overnight everything went to hell.”

  He’d folded his raincoat up on the seat beside him in the booth. He picked it up now and brought a small packet of papers out of the side pocket. They were tied together with a torn strip of white cloth.

  “This is what happened to my handkerchief,” he said. “I tore it up to tie these together. I couldn’t risk losing any of them.” He loosened the knot with his fork. “We’ve got a place out in the Whitemarsh Valley. My father keeps his old papers in a stone barn he fixed up into a library. It’s a storeroom now; he doesn’t go out there much any more. He had it all together—the history of the Affaire Elliot.” He picked one of the clippings out and handed it across to me.

  NOTED PHILADELPHIA LAWYER ENDS LIFE, the headlines said, above a picture of a handsome, black-haired, strong-faced man in his late fifties, I’d imagine.

  Legal circles were shocked today to learn that Douglas Elliot, one of the leading figures in the city’s civic, social and juristic affairs, met death by his own hand in the library of his home in Delancey Place shortly before midnight last night. His body was found by his lifelong friend and associate, Judge Nathaniel Whitney. Judge Whitney, following a practice of many years’ standing, had dropped in to see Mr. Elliot on his way to his home in Rittenhouse Square. A note found beside the body has not been made public. One of the most beloved and highly respected members of the bar, it is believed that the long illness and death of his wife last year must have preyed on Mr. Elliot’s mind. His friends could give no other reason, as it is not believed that a heart condition, though serious, was sufficient to explain his action.

  Nearly a column of Douglas Elliot’s brilliant and active career followed: “He is survived by one son, Travis Elliot, at present starting his own career in his father’s office in Chestnut Street.”

  I put it down and looked at Monk. He was silent for a moment, his face somber and his jaw tight. Then he said:

  “There wasn’t a bean of Laurel’s money left.”

  I looked at him in shocked silence.

  “He’d used it all, every cent of it, speculating. You’d think he’d have learned in 1929. They said he was under such heavy expense for his wife’s illness—— I don’t know. They hushed it up as well as they could. That’s where Travis came in.” He looked down for an instant at the packet of clippings and letters. “He wasn’t legally responsible. His father had the right, under the terms of the trusteeship, to use the money any way he thought best—and nobody could prove he didn’t think what he was doing was the best. I never saw the letter—what was taken as the suicide note—but I understood it said he hoped Travis would do anything he could for Laurel and her mother. What I mean is, he didn’t legally have to.”

  “And did he?” I asked.

  “Did he? He turned over his father’s insurance. It was only about twenty-five thousand. He sold everything they had except the Delancey Place house. He’d have sold that, but nobody lived in town then. It’s only since the war and gas rati
oning that anybody’d be caught dead staying in. Everybody lived out on the Main Line or Chestnut Hill or in the Whitemarsh Valley, except the already dead and buried. The old business of ‘Chestnut, Walnut, Spruce and Pine’ was ancient history. He simply cleaned himself out and turned the money over to Laurel’s mother.”

  It explained a lot, of course, I was thinking.

  “And that’s why she’s supposed to be grateful to him?”

  He looked at me, not understanding. “A lot of people wouldn’t have done it. And that’s not all he did. Every cent he made he turned over to them. His father didn’t have much when it was turned into cash, and Trav wasn’t making much, but he worked like a dog and lived on bread and cheese, practically. And never a peep out of him. That’s what makes it so——”

  He stopped again, trying to cover up how hard hit he was by all of it.

  “You see,” he said, “in Philadelphia, people still have the quaint idea that if you misuse money that’s entrusted to you, you’re no better than a common thief. If your father did it, you’re the son of a common thief. If your father does it and commits suicide, it doesn’t make it any better, it makes it a hell of a lot worse. Trav had damned tough going. Elsie threw him over, crack out of the box, and married Soapy Sam, or Up From Scrapple to Caviar, and all the mothers snatched their beautiful daughters out of his path—and had they been pushing them into it! It wasn’t easy, Grace. It was damned hard.”

  “He seems to be all right now,” I said.

  He nodded. “Yeah. That’s what I’m coming to, slowly. That’s what I can’t stand about my father in all this. Maybe he went over there that night, knowing his old pal had cleaned out the widow and orphan of his other old pal.”

  He stopped, staring down at his plate, recreating in his mind, I supposed, the scene that night eight years ago in the Elliot library when his father was passing final judgment, perhaps, on the man who was his friend.

  “I don’t know, Grace. That’s all right, I guess. I’m not saying maybe he didn’t have provocation enough. But after you kill a guy, whether he had it coming or not, you don’t then take his son in and let him get the idea you’re his great and noble benefactor.”