“I doubt if it bothered you too much when your little game proved too much for Clarissa’s heart, because you weren’t too sure she would even go for your marrying her pet nephew. Even if you promised to help her keep a curb on his side investment tendencies.
“We have a few facts and witnesses, too,” he went on grimly. “You see, somebody paid the switchboard girl downstairs to check on Bina’s calls. And Toto got lazy and put in a couple from the apartment instead of the phone booth downstairs. This girl was a conscientious little cuss, and she came to us.”
A line of white was forming slowly around Marge’s well-cut mouth. Her voice leaped out hoarsely. “The lousy, little sneak!”
The front door banged open. Running steps sounded through the apartment rooms. Then Jerry burst out into the hall.
For one crazy lurch of her heart, Bina watched him unsure of where he fitted into this sudden pattern of horror. Half expecting him to go to Marge Norris...
But his eyes passed Marge and stopped on her. “Bina.”
She was crying when he reached her. She went on crying, burying her cheek deep in the hollow of his shoulder, feeling the jolting of his body with each gasping breath, hearing his hoarse, heavenly whisper, “Are you all right, sweet?”
“Yes,”
“Bina — if anything had happened to you—”
Then suddenly the joy, the peace came to a sudden end as Lefty’s hand clamped down on Jerry’s shoulder.
“No!” Bina lashed out at her father in furious reflex. “You haven’t got anything on him!”
“I’ll get something,” Lefty’s curt voice held a strange note. As Bina stared at him, he added, “A medal, maybe. After we got together on things, he did a first rate job of straight man this evening while we let Marge play out her hand.” Lefty nodded at Ames to take his prisoners away.
Bina’s bewildered eyes turned back to Jerry. “You — knew it was Marge tonight? You left me with her?”
“It was a lousy trick,” Jerry agreed.
“Among a half-dozen other lousy tricks,” Lefty conceded. “But this guy looks out for you, Baby. Before he’d play along on this one, he made me explain just how I knew you weren’t involved in murder when I turned in that second piece of jade.”
“How did you know?” Bina gasped.
“The flash flood.”
“In January?”
“Sure. If you’d dropped that second piece of jade on your way home from Clarissa’s that last night, I couldn’t have found it two days ago. Marge Norris wasn’t hep to our canyon or she’d never have planted that jade where she did. She’d have known that flood took everything but the front porch, and I hauled in dirt to fill around every one of those flagstones.”
“I should have thought of that, too,” Bina moaned. “Lefty, I think I’ll give up my badge.”
“Guess I’m stuck with her,” Jerry said to Lefty.
“Yeah, you might as well keep her. She’s no good to me.”
A bursting warmth spread through Bina as she watched: the slow grin of camaraderie exchanged between the two men. She wiped the last traces of tears away with a shaking hand. “A couple of schmoos,” she jeered blissfully.
A Distinctive Flavor
by Len Guttridge
It happened in England. But it was the kind of murder which would have set people to talking almost anywhere.
That’s a meerschaum you’ve got there, isn’t it? I thought so. I’ve got one just like it at home, but I never use it. It was given to me by a fellow who — well, I suppose you might say he was the cause of my giving up pipe smoking entirely.
Of course, you wouldn’t know about the Mayhew affair, would you? The only English killers who land in our newspapers are people like Heath and Haigh, multiple murderers with a flair for mutilation or acid baths. They are described as monsters and make good copy, I suppose.
There was nothing monstrous about Walter Mayhew in outward aspect. I first met him during the war when I was American liaison officer with a British occupation outfit. He was stocky, mild-mannered, had a slow smile and was never without a pipe. Neither was I in those days and the mutual addiction strengthened our friendship. We lost touch when he left the army but I met him later on in England. He was married by then and living in a seedy Teddington villa. He wasn’t happy.
“My wife is a witch,” he said when we paused outside his favorite pub, the Ace of Spades. “One of those women who can’t love. They have to own you. Know what I mean?”
I nodded, puffing on my briar. His appearance had changed noticeably since I’d last seen him. His face was thinner, paler. Gray streaked his hair. “Maude lost me long ago and doesn’t like it.” He smiled faintly. “She says I think more of my pipe collection than I do of her. She’s right, too. It makes for better company. Or a kind of refuge, maybe.”
I changed the subject and we talked about pipes and tobacco. He told me he was making some experimental attempts to grow his own. This surprised me for I didn’t think the climate or soil suitable. “There are difficulties,” he conceded. “But some chaps are doing it here and there.”
He described his pipe collection. “I’d like you to see it,” he said. Then he added with a scowl. “But Maude would create a scene if I took you home. She drove all my old army pals away.” I wondered why he had ever married her and he seemed to read my thoughts. “If I hadn’t been such a damned lonely fool.”
When I saw him next he was exultant. “She’s gone for the weekend. Up to Liverpool to stay with a bedridden sister. I’m free until Monday.” He was like a small boy given an unexpected holiday. “Now I can show you my pipes.”
We gathered three flagons of ale at the pub and set out for Walter’s home.
You wouldn’t call the neighborhood shabby but an air of genteel decay seemed to hover over it. Drawn, dark brown shades transformed the windows into closed eyes, as if each house was intent on keeping its own secrets. Walter’s was near the end of the block. He fitted his key into the lock with an eager impatience I found myself sharing.
Everything in the Mayhew home was over-sized as if the aim was to smother life. China ornaments cluttered up an excess of tables, the carpet was furrily thick, the wallpaper a colorful horror of formless flowers. Before the window a huge aspidistra blotted out daylight. I’d already decided whose tastes had dictated the choice of furnishings. With a single word and a gesture, Walter confirmed it. “Maude” he said.
Her likeness dominated one wall, in an enlarged enlargement, hideously framed, from which she glared at both of us. Once she might have been handsome. Now the lips were thinly cruel, the eyes contained oppression. Walter gazed at the portrait for several seconds. Then he turned its face to the wall.
He led me to the basement, crossed to an oaken closet and unlocked it. Two built-in blue lamps snapped on at once. He chuckled at my admiration. Walter’s pipes were no mere collector’s items. For one thing, they were friends to solace him when Maude became unendurable. But they also formed, on a quality basis alone, a most unusual treasure, exquisitely set against a black velvet drape, each pipe captioned with date and place of origin.
Two walrus-ivories from Siberia flanked a crimson pottery Ashanti bowl fashioned as a crocodile’s head. An eighteenth-century Dutch clay with a sixteen-inch stem was encircled by delicate French porcelains and rich brown meerschaums. A high-breasted amber nude, bowl flaring from between her shoulder-blades, stared haughtily at a pair of Bali fetish pipes. An assortment of briars, meerschaums, bamboos and clays surrounded a squat, tiny-bowled opium pipe. Walter took it from its bracket.