Carter Dickson
(John Dickson Carr)
A Sir Henry Merrivale Mystery
A Graveyard to Let
ZEBRA BOOKS KENSINGTON PUBLISHING CORP.
ZEBRA BOOKS are published by
Kensington Publishing Corp. 475 Park Avenue South New York, NY 10016
Copyright © 1949 by William Morrow & Co., Inc. Copyright renewed 1977 by John Dickson Canr.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the Publisher, excepting brief quotes used in reviews.
First printing: March, 1988
1
Not without reason did the late and great O. Henry refer to New York as Bagdad-on-the-Subway. Any kind of Arabian Nights' adventure can occur there, and very often does.
Indeed, considering the regrettable behaviour of Sir Henry Merrivale in that same subway...
But let us first indicate the paths of several lives which were converging, towards a point of irony, on that very hot afternoon of Monday, July 6th. Sir Henry Merrivale, himself, wearing a tweed cap and a suit of plus fours which would have inspired aesthetic agony even without his corporation or his countenance, arrived on the Mauretania.
The thermometer stood at ninety-eight. The skyline of lower Manhattan loomed in hard sparkle against a sky like milk on the boil. By the time the liner discharged her passengers, at half-past two in the afternoon, Sir Henry Merrivale had been almost too well photographed and interviewed. He held forth on the international situation with such fluency and lack of discretion that even ships' news reporters felt a qualm.
"Look, sir," interposed one of them. "You'll back this up, will you? If s not off the record?"
"Oh, my son!" said H.M., waving his hand in a disgruntled way. "I called a so-and-so a so-and-so, and he is. That's simple enough, ain't it?"
"Listen!" begged a photographer, who had been dodging back and forth behind his camera like a sniper in ambush. "You say you like this country, don't you?"
H.M. directed towards this man, through his big spectacles, a scowl of such horrible and terrifying malignancy that any such photograph ought to have borne the caption, "$5000 Reward." H.M. also removed his cap, so that the sun could heliograph more evil from his big bald head. The photographer pleaded again.
"Look! I want you to express pleasure!"
"I am expressin' pleasure, dammit!"
"What are your plans, Sir Henry?"
"Well... now," said the great man, "I got to visit a family in Washington."
"But aren't you staying any time in New York?"
"Y' know, I'd like to." Across H.M.'s unmentionable face crept an expression which Chief Inspector Masters, had he been there, would have recognized for wistfulness mixed with pure devilment "I'd like to visit a friend or two of mine. Or go out to the Polo Grounds, maybe."
"Polo Grounds?" yelped another voice. "But you're an Englishman, aren't you?"
‘Uh-huh."
"Do you know anything about baseball?"
H.M.'s mouth fell open, a wide cavern. It was as though you had asked the late Andrew Carnegie whether he ever heard of a free library.
"Do I know anything about baseball?" powerfully echoed H.M. "Do I know anything about baseball?" Hitching up his trousers, he opened and shut both hands to beckon his companions closer. "Looky here!" he said.
At about the same time the great man was being interviewed, one of the friends of whom he had spoken was no great distance away as the crow flies. Mr. Frederick Manning, of the Frederick Manning Foundation, entered the head office of the Token Bank and Trust Company, and went down to the safety-deposit vault
From there Mr. Manning emerged some twenty minutes later, with his brief case looking a good deal thicker than before. In lower Broadway the sun carved a glittering cleft, winking back at him from green and yellow taxies. Under the Corinthian pillars of the bank, Mr. Manning stood for a moment and swore mildly.
He did not like heat He was one of those men who merely turn lobster pink and peel. Frederick Manning, at fifty-one, was spare and lean, a little over middle height with silver grey hair and a pair of vivid blue eyes whose expression he tried to veil rather than to use. His reputation was that of a good businessman, although business he left to his lawyer. Frederick Manning was more man-of-the-world than businessman, and more scholar than either.
"Oh, well!" he said quietly. After this he apostrophized lower Broadway with a quotation from Milton which startled several passers-by. Then, unruffled, he hailed a taxi.
He was driven uptown to his club, where he had lunch alone. In connection with the whirl of ugly events which were to follow, it maybe mentioned that Mr. Gilbert Byles, the District Attorney of New York County, was a fellow member of the club. Mr. Byles, whom the press described as "our beat-dressed D. A.," several times glanced towards Manning across the dining room.
But Manning, evidently so preoccupied that he did not even notice an old acquaintance, hardly touched his food and never glanced up. He was doing sums in arithmetic on the back of an empty envelope. Finally, and with hesitation, he twice wrote the words "Los Angeles."
"Coffee, sir?" inquired the waiter.
"Not good enough!" muttered Manning, and scratched out the words.
"Then can I get you something else, sir?"
"Eh?" said Manning, and clearly wrote "Miami."
"If you don't want coffee..."
Frederick Manning woke up. The blue eyes, against lean pink face and silver grey hair, returned to the vividness of a strong and towering personality. He crumpled up the envelope and threw it aside.
"I beg your pardon," he said, with that engaging smile which had charmed so many. "Coffee, of course."
Shortly afterwards, under the hammering heat, he walked across to the Lubar Building at the corner of Fifty-first Street and Madison Avenue.
His suite of offices, on the twenty-second floor, had only one entrance. Its glass panel bore in small chaste gilt letters, The Frederick Manning Foundation. It brought to mind the Frederick Manning School at Albany, a school philanthropic and non-profit-making, which tried to teach the creative arts. Manning, they said, had only two passions in life, and one of them was this school. At the moment the air conditioning of the building soothed him, calmed him, quietened the emotion which few of his friends ever saw.
And yet trouble exploded as soon as he opened the door.
"Mr. Manning!" softly called the woman at the reception desk. She herself was middle-aged and looked rather like a schoolmistress.
"Yes, Miss Vincent?"
Miss Vincent was perturbed, which no receptionist should ever be. Yet her eyes rather than speech or gesture summoned him to the desk, where he punctiliously removed his loose-fitting Panama hat.
"I thought I'd better tell you," Miss Vincent added in a low voice, "that your daughter is waiting in your office."
"Which daughter?"
"Miss Jean, sir." There was a barely perceptible pause. "And Mr. Davis is with her." Manning, who had been leaning forward with both hands on the desk, straightened up. Miss Vincent felt rather than saw the blaze of anger which surrounded him as she said, "Mr. Davis," and she could guess why. But his eyes remained opaque, his voice steady.
"Is my secretary in?" he asked.
"Yes, Mr. Manning."
"Very well. Thank you."
At his left was a narrow soft-carpeted corridor -which ran past small offices like boxes with frosted-glass sides. It was all very cool, very modern, an incongruous background for Manning, who at the moment could have been called neither. At the end of the corridor was the door to his private office.