He stared at her. “You mean you really think he’ll come?”
“Oh yes. Not as an overt murderer, of course. But as soon as the phone is fixed, I’ll have Hank phone all those who got cards and tell them the invitation stands whether they ever killed anyone or not.”
“Why?”
“Why gather them together? Self-defense, Steve. Now that my original plot failed, I want to assure the murderer it was only a trap, and I have no actual knowledge of his identity. I don’t mind being a target for one night, but I don’t want to spend all my time peering around corners.”
The inspector changed the subject again. “Traced the knife to Adrian Thorpe. Bought in a sporting goods store on Seventh about three on Friday afternoon. Just a few hours before the second murder. Clerk can’t remember what the buyer looked like, but knives with six-inch blades have to be registered. Buyer gave his name as Adrian Thorpe.”
I said, “So it was suicide after all!”
Both the inspector and Sedalia looked at me.
“Anybody can give a name,” the inspector said briefly. “Hardly think anyone would have tried to shoot Sedalia if Thorpe was a suicide.”
“We might find out which one of our suspects own guns,” Sedalia said thoughtfully. “The killer wouldn’t have been able to go out and buy one in the middle of the night, so he must have already owned the one he tried out on me.”
I said, “He’s not one of our five then. I don’t know much about guns, but I know an automatic when I see one, and that’s what our killer pointed at me. There is a-shotgun at Alvin Christopher’s house, a revolver at Jerome Straight’s, and no weapons whatever in the hotel rooms of the other three.”
“Could be carrying it with him,” Home commented. For the third time he changed the subject. “You have any luck with your phone calls, Sedalia?”
“Some. I’ll tell you about it at three. I didn’t learn anything very startling.”
“What phone calls were those?” I asked, surprised.
Sedalia said, “Some I made yesterday afternoon while you were looking for a baggage stub. Our local police don’t seem to have a phone.”
The inspector’s face reddened. “We just don’t waste taxpayers’ money.” He turned to me. “We wired for the same information she phoned about. Not in the habit of making private citizens run up their phone bills to gather police information, but the woman’s too impatient to wait for a telegraphed answer. If I made a long-distance call every time Sedalia suggested it, be out of a job in a month.”
“Who have you been phoning long distance?” I asked Sedalia.
“You’ll learn about it at three,” she said laconically.
Under the circumstances, Sedalia’s Sunday afternoon party would have been a strained and uncomfortable affair even if she not had insisted I prepare a bowl of what she calls “Pale Dynamite”. The recipe, in the event you ever wish to throw a drunken orgy, calls for two quarts of grain alcohol, cleverly disguised in two quarts of grapefruit juice, one gallon of sparkling water, a half pint of lemon juice, sugar to taste and the usual lemon rinds and cherries dumped in to dress up the bowl.
The resulting punch has a most innocuous taste, hardly seeming to contain any alcohol at all. But if you are adept at arithmetic, you can figure out from the formula its strength is roughly equivalent to one-hundred proof whiskey cut half-and-half with soda. The above quantity is sufficient to render eight normal drinkers unconscious.
As there were eight persons present, this would have been just the right amount, except that Sedalia and I both knew what was in the punch, and Inspector Stephen Home began to suspect after the second glass. Consequently only our five suspects eventually became thoroughly drunk, and the inspector merely grew gently wobbly.
The insidious thing about Pale Dynamite is that you can drink two or three glasses before you begin to feel any effect at all. After that you do not have to drink any more, for you already have in your stomach enough alcohol to constitute a full day’s supply for an alcoholic. As straight alcohol is absorbed into the blood stream much more rapidly than liquor, you naturally become drunk more rapidly. Before you realize you have underestimated the potency of the punch, it is much too late to do anything except relax and enjoy your stupor.
I served it in our largest punch cups, and by the second round the party noticably lost its sense of strain. Up to then Sedalia played the chattering hostess, keeping the conversation on a small talk level and furnishing most of it herself, which failed to cover the obvious fact that no one else was much interested in small talk. But as I circled the room to pour the third round, she got down to business.
As it happened, this timing was perfect, for though not a person in the room was more than mildly stimulated at the moment, each glass of punch carried the equivalent wallop of three normal highballs, and within thirty minutes all our guests except the inspector were destined to be thoroughly intoxicated. On the third round I got refusals from no one except Inspector Home, who frowned thoughtfully at the punch bowl as he shook his head.
“In a way this is a business meeting as well as a social gathering,” Sedalia said when I had completed replenishing glasses. “As you probably all understand by now, if Hank made himself clear over the phone, the rather unorthodox invitations I sent out were designed to make the murderer of Mrs. Chambers and Mr. Thorpe panic. And as you also know, he did panic, attempting to kill me last night because he thought I knew his identity.”
“He?” Alvin Christopher asked.
She waved one hand impatiently at the assistant district attorney. “Or she. As Hank has so frequently pointed out to me that I’m bored with the subject, the English language should contain some personal pronoun like ‘hiser’ to cover inclusive use of both sexes at the same time.” She paused, then went on with a strange note of emphasis in her voice. “While my trap failed to catch the murderer, it did settle one thing. It-removed all doubt that the killer might be someone other than one of the five of you who received cards.”
A small stir went around the room and the guests glanced at each other with a kind of surreptitious fascination. The assistant district attorney weaved erect angrily.
“Do I understand you include me as a suspect?” he demanded.
Sedalia grinned at him. “You were with the group who discovered the body, and Mrs. Chambers had invited you to the meeting. You must have had some kind of connection with her, or you wouldn’t have been invited.”
“Before she phoned and invited me, I never heard of the woman,” Christopher said hotly. “As a matter of fact I didn’t even know there was to be a meeting. I assumed she wanted legal advice and it would be a private conference between the two of us.”
“Relax,” Sedalia said. “I haven’t accused you of anything.” She looked around at the group. “I really got you together for two reasons. The first is that I don’t care to be a target for a killer, and I want the murderer to know I have no idea which of you five he is.”
Monica Madigan drained her third glass. “Three of us have pretty iron-clad alibis. We could hardly have killed Aunt Agatha if we weren’t even in town.”
Sedalia nodded agreeably. “Alibis can be manufactured. If it was a premeditated murder, it would be strange for the killer not to have an alibi.”
“Just how would I get hold of the stub of a ticket which was used on the four-thirty train from Kansas City if I weren’t on the train?” Monica demanded.
“Any number of ways. You might have arrived much earlier, killed your aunt and then gone to the station to meet the four-thirty train. Perhaps you knew someone coming in on the train, and contrived to get his stub, or perhaps you sized up the male passengers getting off, approached one and asked for his used stub with the explanation it was on a bet of some kind. Or perhaps you simply saw someone throw away the stub and picked it up.”