We greeted Aunt Agatha, correct in her wisp of black veil and leaning on her nephew. With them were George, M.D., and Emory Kent, and they looked and behaved as expected. I looked for Mr. and Mrs. Franklin Frail and if she seemed possibly a bit too much the mourner, he at least also seemed to be looking and behaving as expected. He had that look of the man who drinks hard, plays hard and works hard. It’s a type we all know, the sort that men like and women tend to adore. Ordinarily, people are so much bemused by the charm of this type that it never occurs to them to look deep into the man’s eyes in search of the killer look. Even there at the funeral, you could see it in Frail’s eyes, that cold, implacable toughness. I honestly hadn’t expected to find it there; but studying the man, I caught myself reassessing the fears the late William Bardon had felt for Sara Frail’s safety. Frail was clearly a man who would have what he wanted and who would without a quiver do what he had to do to make certain he would have it. I had only the one question on that score. Was money the thing this man wanted? He would kill for the thing he wanted, but was money that thing?
All through the preliminary waiting, the man’s behavior couldn’t have been more correct. He was all solicitude for his wife. He was taking off her any burden of affability that might be imposed in contacts with old servants or old friends of the family. None of these people had ever known her, but they had known her father. They pressed their attentions on her.
All these people were meeting her after a fashion, but I don’t think any of them was getting much notion of what she was like. Where her Aunt Agatha was content with just a token wisp of black mourning veil, Sara Frail had gone the full route. She had one of those inkily impenetrable jobs that came all the way down to her shoulders and a little below; and all the kind people got out of her was a murmured politeness, an opportunity to press her black-gloved hand and a close look at the Stygian drapery of that veil.
Her husband, however, was making up for her. He told people how wonderful it was that everyone should be so kind. He told them how deeply their kindness moved his wife. He clapped the men on their backs, hard enough to be sufficiently hearty but never as hard as he easily could have done. With the women, he held their hands firmly and gently in his and there wasn’t a one who didn’t flush with pleasure. As soon as he’d relinquished a woman’s hand, however, the woman would scuttle away. They enjoyed it, but they wanted to be at a safe distance. I wasn’t imagining it. Only a most extraordinary woman would ever consider taking this man on. We went over and greeted the lady. She introduced us to her husband and he gave us the treatment, clapped us on the back, and the force of it had been perfectly measured. People who had known the lady’s father came up behind us. We pulled away.
“I can see what the old man meant,” I muttered.
“Looks just right for his record,” Gibby said.
“Larcenous?” I murmured. “He looks more than larcenous.”
“So does his record,” Gibby told me.
He’d been doing research on it and he filled me in. There was considerably more than the Bardons or their attorneys had seen fit to tell us. In the actual criminal-record department there wasn’t so much. There had been one burglary conviction and he’d served his time on that; and since, except for the deal where Sara had decided she would bring no charges, he had been clean.
There were, however, other records on Franklin Frail and it was those Gibby was chewing over in his mind as he watched the man perform. This Bardon girl was Frail’s second wife. The first had been one Muriel Lodge and a couple of years after they were married, she was picked up on a blackmail charge. She’d hit some Hollywood executive with a packet of love letters he had written her. The executive yelled for the cops and for a while it looked as though he’d made the worst mistake an executive ever made. She did have letters and in his handwriting and bearing his signature and of a content that was more than enough for hanging any man.
The man denied writing them and somehow he got lucky. He managed to prove it. Good as those letters looked, they were forgeries. Muriel Lodge Frail had done them herself. She was enormously talented in the handwriting line and one thing led to another, like some checks she’d been talented with. The State of California jailed her on a forgery rap. It was while she was in the pokey that Frail embarked on his second romance by way of Sara’s wall safe. The man, however, had kept everything neatly legal. He had obtained a Mexican divorce during that gestation period while attempted burglary had been blossoming into love and love into marriage.
Two years later, the first Mrs. Frail had been released. She dropped out of sight for almost a year afterward and then she turned up again; but she turned up dead.
“Killed?” I asked. “Or just plain dead?”
“Dead,” Gibby answered, “and in the company of Frail and the second Mrs.”
If this was smelling bad to Gibby, he wasn’t alone. Nobody else had cared for its fragrance, either. When it had happened, it smelled. Now, three years after the event, it still smelled. The Frails had been spending the summer in a mountain hideaway they had up in the High Sierras. They went there to be alone — no servants, no neighbors, just themselves and the great outdoors. It had been his story that they hadn’t even known his first wife was in the vicinity. Then one day, they’d been off on a camping trip and surprise, surprise — Muriel had come stumbling into camp. This might have been a situation but for the fact that Muriel had been a very sick first wife, so sick that they had to heave her into the car and rush her over the mountains to a doctor. They didn’t make it. They arrived too late for anything but an autopsy and the findings of that, Gibby told me bitterly, had been natural death, ruptured appendix.
“In the opinion of a country coroner who wouldn’t know much even if be wasn’t bribed?” I asked.
“That’s what the L.A. papers thought,” Gibby told me.
Gibby had read those old papers carefully and he had the whole story at his fingertips. The Frails buried Muriel in that mountain town. They never went back to their mountain cabin or to their home in the city. It was then they’d made the move east to Chicago, leaving it to their lawyers to dispose of their California properties and to ship their stuff on to Chicago. Of course, it did look as though they had fixed things up with that country coroner and had then skipped the jurisdiction before anyone would think to ask uncomfortable questions.
Everybody expected that there would be extradition back to California and a trial for the murder of Muriel Lodge Frail. The first step had been a court order for exhumation and a complete post mortem. The thought was that Frail had slipped up in not having had Muriel cremated, but he hadn’t slipped at all. Top men did the second post mortem and the whole case fell on its face. Muriel was dead of a ruptured appendix and everything else came up negative. Also, Frail voluntarily returned to California and volunteered answers to all questions. They hadn’t been fleeing the jurisdiction. They had merely been fleeing the gossip and they’d made no mistake there. It may have been a local scandal, but it had been a loud one.
The services started and Gibby had to break it off. All through the funeral, I was watching Franklin Frail. His behavior could not have been more correct, but that didn’t matter. There was only the one thought in my mind. How had he contrived to murder his first wife and get away with it so neatly? You just couldn’t look at that guy and think anything else of him.
I was still thinking it when we came out to the street after the services. There, alongside the lined-up limousines, Sara Frail and her Aunt Agatha were at it again. Agatha was insisting that all of Papa’s nearest and dearest must be together in the first car. Accordingly, she was consigning Franklin Frail to the second car along with Cousin George, M.D., Emory Kent and Uncle Hep’s blonde for the day.