Going Going Gone Read online

  When an art auction ends in murder, unlikely sleuth Asey Mayo embarks on a search for the perpetrator in a crime that could by linked to the fierce competition between rival art dealers Miss Pitkin and Mr. Harmsworth, the discovery of an unexpected treasure, or the secrets of Quin Sharp, the auctioneer, in a mystery set on Cape Cod.

  GOING,

  GOING,

  GONE

  AN ASEY MAYO MYSTERY

  PHOEBE ATWOOD TAYLOR

  Originally published: 1943

  What the Critics say about

  Asey Mayo, the Cape Cod Detective

  “ASEY MAYO STORIES ARE AMONG THE BEST DETECTIVE YARNS NOW BEING PRODUCED IN AMERICA”

  . . . Baltimore Sun

  “ASEY MAYO TALES ARE ALWAYS FUN. ACCEPT NO SUBSTITUTE”

  . . . N. Y. Herald Tribune

  “A DETECTIVE YOU ARE SURE TO LIKE”

  . . . Albany News

  “FIRST RATE, ASEY MAYO IS BETTER THAN MOST NEW MYSTERIES IN A WHOLE SEASON”

  . . . Washington Star

  “WHEN ASEY’S IN FORM LIFE IS MERRY AS A MARRIAGE BELL”

  . . . San Francisco Chronicle

  “ASEY MAYO AT HIS BEST IS SOMETHING !”

  . . . N. Y. World Telegram

  “ASEY’S DRY WIT IS NO LESS ENJOYABLE THAN HIS SHREWD DETECTING. LONG MAY HE WAVE!”

  . . . Cleveland Plain Dealer

  GOING, GOING, GONE

  CHAPTER ONE

  BIG JOE, the tiger cat, poised for another playful spring at the tangle of cod line Asey Mayo was patiently unwinding in the woodshed of his Cape Cod home, abruptly changed his mind in mid-air. A corkscrew turn left him crouched by the kitchen door with his ears back, his tail twice normal size, and his yellow eyes staring balefully through the screen.

  Asey, looking up curiously to see what new game the cat had devised, found that Joe wasn’t playing any longer. Joe was in deadly earnest now, and from his throat was issuing his general advance warning to all strangers, a sinister half-mew, half-rumble.

  “Stow it,” Asey said as he turned to the cod line. “No dogs or intruders in your own” kitchen, feller! You got your signals mixed!”

  But Joe continued to crouch by the door and snarl, and suddenly Asey heard the unmistakable sounds of the dining-room entry floor boards creaking. Joe turned around and gave him a disdainful “See-I-told-you-there-was-someone!” look, and Asey leaned back against the woodpile and rubbed his chin reflectively.

  The only other person about was his housekeeper cousin Jennie, and she couldn’t possibly be responsible for that weird creaking. Her passage across those entry floor boards was a stolid plank-plank-plank, like someone pushing a laden wheelbarrow over an old wooden bridge. Besides, Joe wouldn’t snarl at Jennie, who had raised him from a kitten, and who gave him the lion’s share of her meat ration. It couldn’t be any visiting friend or neighbour, either. Any one of them would have knocked or called out.

  Gremlins must have descended on his house, Asey decided, and then he sat up straight as he remembered the stranger he’d seen on the shore road some fifteen minutes earlier, a man in a gray suit, with a bulging, baglike brief case under his arm. Because the Nickersons, farther along the lane, were expecting an insurance adjuster to call about their boathouse fire, Asey had mentally dismissed the man as the awaited adjuster. Could lie have been, instead, a salesman or a pedlar who’d sneaked in and made himself free of the place?

  “I wonder!” he said softly as he got up from the overturned pail on which he’d been sitting, stepped over the network of cod line, and joined Joe at the side of the kitchen door.

  The creaking increased, something rustled, and a broad figure loomed on the entry threshold and hesitantly sidled into the kitchen.

  Asey stifled an exclamation of amazed bewilderment.

  Then he blinked.

  But what he was seeing was no mirage. It actually was his cousin Jennie, cautiously creeping on tiptoe across the linoleum as if she were walking on eggs, any one of which might at any instant explode like a land mine.

  She came to a halt by the telephone, warily removed the receiver, and asked for a number in low, conspiratorial tones. While she waited for the connection, she kept darting nervous little looks around. Just, Asey thought, as if she had no business being in the kitchen, and rather suspected a King Cobra to be lurking in a corner, to boot. . .

  Joe relaxed and focused his yellow eyes questioningly on Asey, who shrugged. He didn’t know what the matter was, either, He’d never in all his life seen Jennie act like this before. On the whole, he would have been less surprised had he found the gray-suited stranger making off with his silver, or the best Lowestoft cups. . .

  “Nellie? That you?” Jennie gave the impression of having crawled into the mouthpiece of the phone. “It’s me. I’m all dressed and ready to go!”

  For the first time, Asey noticed that Jennie was decked out in her best flowered-print dress and white pumps, and the broad-brimmed straw hat she’d taken two days to buy in Boston.

  “Everything’s settled!” Jennie went on in the same excited whisper. “Took some plannin’, too – Asey Mayo may be the brainy old Codfish Sherlock they call him in the newspapers, and they can decorate him with medals for improvin’ tanks and all, but I tell you, Nellie, he can be awful stubborn!”

  Asey raised his eyebrows and wondered what bed been stubborn about. To the best of his knowledge, he’d spent the first two days of his current vacation from the Porter Tank Plant amiably acceding to Jennie’s every little whim. The spots on his blue dungarees and denim shirt bore witness to the amount of painting and whitewashing and renovating she’d saved up for him to do. He’d even uncomplainingly helped clean the attic on a fine June day meant for fishing.

  “I didn’t want to rile him,” Jennie continued, and I knew he’d hate the idea. He wouldn’t stand for it. He’d just be stub – good gracious, no! I never told him a word about it, or about the money sittin’ there in that secret drawer! He’d never – Nellie, who told you it wasn’t there? Oh, her?” Jennie sniffed. “Well, I don’t believe that under-the-floor story. Think of the mice!”

  At the mention of mice, Joe got up and hurried away, as if he’d just recalled urgent business elsewhere. Asey, however, continued to stand beside the door and eavesdrop. While he couldn’t imagine what in the world Jennie Mayo was talking about, his curiosity was increasing by leaps and bounds.

  And after her next words, his curiosity swerved into blank incredulity.

  “Wherever that money is,” Jennie said firmly, “we’ve got to take a crack at it – think of laying our hands on all that cash! What? Oh, I don’t know what you’d do about that old safe. Blow it up, or smash it, or something, I s’pose.”

  A paragraph of a letter he’d recently received from Jennie’s husband, Syl – now in the Navy – flashed suddenly into Asey’s mind and stayed there for a moment, like a printed subtitle in an old-fashioned movie. “Jennie says she’s been taking this jujitsu course and some sort of lady commando training,” Syl had written. “Sounds to me like it was giving her a lot of wild ideas, and is probably a bad thing. You can’t tell what it’ll lead to. You know how she always admired Jesse James. Why, she might rob a bank!”

  Jennie nodded so vigorously that her hat almost came off. “Sure, Asey’s taking us,” she said, “only he don’t know what for. He thinks he’s driving me to the dentist to see about that pivot tooth – ‘course I know the dentist’s just next door, silly! So you go stand out in the road, and I’ll make him pick you up and take you with us. Tell Etta and Mary to be out, too, and for goodness’ sakes, do try and make it seem like you wasn’t there on purpose, and hadn’t any idea we’d be drivin’ by. Hurry, now!”

  She replac
ed the receiver, picked up her capacious knitting bag, gave her hat brim a final pat in front of the mirror, and swung the wooden shed door to without noticing Asey standing outside. He heard the back door slam, and peeked out of the shed window in time to see her secrete the key among the petunias in the window box.

  Then she marched over to the black Porter roadster parked in the yard, sat herself on the red leather seat, and stuck her thumb firmly on the horn.

  “A-sey!” she called out serenely after half a dozen blasts. “A-sey May-o! Time to take me to the den-tist’s!”

  Asey found himself grinning at the bland simplicity of it all. Not for one moment, when Jennie had so feelingly discussed her bothersome pivot tooth, had he suspected that it was only a part of a deep-laid plot to induce him to carry her and her friends to some apparently underhanded project which Jennie knew he wouldn’t approve of, and which, for all the intrigue involved, sounded as much like robbing the First National Bank as anything else.

  “For Pete’s sakes!” he said aloud. “That bank is next door to the dentist’s office, now I think of it!” In the next breath he added, “Oh, but those women couldn’t be up to any harm!”

  Still and all, they were up to something. And Jennie occasionally did let herself get carried away by her enthusiasms. People still spoke in awed tones of the havoc caused by her Women’s Defence Committee, a few years back, when they instituted a rifle class. There was her Bond Drive bonfire which had come within an inch of firing the whole town. There had been the affair of the bearded summer visitor whom Jennie had taken for a spy. While no one had ever proved that Jennie’s anti-espionage measures had driven the poor fellow into a sanatorium, no one had ever disproved it, either.

  Asey sighed, looked with regret at his sail-boat waiting at the wharf, and strolled out to the car as the horn began blasting again. To be on the safe side, he’d better string along, find out what was brewing, and generally keep an eye on things.

  “Tooth hurtin’?” he inquired sympathetically as he got into the car.

  “Sometimes it does,” Jennie returned, “and sometimes’ it don’t. It isn’t so much that something feels wrong as it makes me nervous worryin’ about it. Let’s see, now. The shortest way would be along Mill Road, wouldn’t it?’

  Asey nodded. Mill Road was where Nellie and the others lived. You had to hand it to women, he thought as he drove off down the lane. They certainly planned out details. If he’d finished winding the cod line in the barn instead of bringing it to the woodshed, he would have taken the Mill Road in all innocence, and been genuinely surprised to find Jennie’s girl friends in need of a lift to town.

  Having planted in his mind the route she wished him to take, Jennie didn’t spoil her act by displaying any undue satisfaction at his apparent acceptance of her suggestion. Instead, she tentatively touched the side of her face in the vicinity of the pivot tooth, and managed a couple of first-rate winces.

  At the foot of the lane, Asey slowed down before swinging on to the main tarred road, and then he put on the hand brake and got out of the car.

  “Saw a piece of glass I want to pick up,” he said in response to Jennie’s question.

  He went through the motions, too, of picking up something from the sandy rut, and flinging it into the bushes. But his eyes were fixed on the square orange sign, newly tacked on the telephone pole, which had caught his attention.

  “AUCTION!” the sign said. “The Estate of the Late John Alden. Sale to Be Held on the ALDEN PROPERTY, Directly Adjoining the FIRST NATIONAL BANK Building on Main Street, on Tuesday, June 22nd, at 2.30 P.M. USEFUL and VALUABLE Articles of ALL DESCRIPTIONS!! MANY RATIONED ITEMS MAY BE FOUND HERE!!! Also VERY FINE ANTIQUES and COLLECTORS’ PIECES. YOU CANNOT AFFORD to MISS THIS EVENT! Come and BRING THE FAMILY! Quinton Sharp, Cape Cod’s Favourite Auctioneer. You Can ALWAYS TRUST SHARP. Also LIVESTOCK.”

  Asey thought he was beginning to catch on. Jennie’s purpose in inveigling him into taking her to the dentist’s on one side of the bank building was nothing more sinister than to attend the auction being held on the other side of the bank building. Jennie adored auctions, she knew he hated them, and had rightly assumed he would balk at attending one. As for the money she’d been talking so mysteriously about – the flicker of a smile crossed Asey’s face as he returned to the roadster. He thought he understood about that, too.

  “Sliver of milk bottle,” he said conversationally. “Dangerous. You can’t tell whose good tyre might—”

  “Asey, you’re turnin’ wrong! I thought we was goin’ to take the Mill Road!” Jennie interrupted.

  “Thought it’d be a nice change to drive past the fresh ponds,” Asey told her blandly. “Haven’t seen ‘em since I come home. Besides, it’s not more’n half a mile longer.”

  Jennie opened her mouth to say something, thought better of it, and lapsed into a slightly dismal silence.

  “Tooth trouble?” Asey inquired.

  “N-well, yes,” Jennie said. “Yes, sort of. Oh, there’s Miss Spry!” She leaned out and yelled “Yoo-hoo” at a white-haired woman who was backing a beach-wagon out of a garage, and then turned to Asey. “You never met Miss Spry, did you? Miss Solatia Spry? She’s that antique dealer from Orleans who moved over here to the old Hawes house last winter. I guess she’s startin’ out for the au—” Jennie stopped short. “Guess she must be startin’ out for town, too.”

  “Could be,” Asey agreed. Privately, he thought it very probable that Miss Spry was going to the auction of the Alden antiques.

  Fifteen minutes later, be drove past the dentist’s office, past the First National Bank building, and drew up at the front walk of the estate of John Alden.

  “Here you are!” he said. “Have a nice time, an’ don’t let Sharp pull his old bush trick on you – that’s the one where he keeps wavin’ his arms at a bayberry bush out of your sight, an’ takin’ higher bids from it, so you keep raisin’ your own bid skyhigh. I’ll pick you up later – an’ I sure hope Nellie an’ the girls manage to hoof it over here in time. So long!”

  “You – why, you – you—” Jennie was bristling with indignation to such an extent that Asey wouldn’t have been surprised to see her back arching into a ridge like Joe’s, when he’d heard the floor boards creaking. “I never, I never in my life – Asey Mayo, how’d you know?”

  Asey chuckled. “They call me Yogi Mayo,” he said. “Sees some, knows some, hears some, an’ guesses the rest. Get on with your auction. I’m goin’ fishin’ in the fresh pond to kill time till—”

  “Well,” Jennie raised her voice till she drowned him out, “all I have to say is, if I get that money, you won’t be so smart and – and so superior! You and your guessin’, which some people call snoopin’,” she added acidly, “you’d be just the person to guess where John Alden’s money’d been hid!”

  “Jennie,” Asey said patiently, “you haven’t got into one of your buried-treasure streaks again, have you?”

  “No buried treasure about it! It’s money, that’s what! Cash money!”

  “I ought to have known the minute I heard you talkin’ to Nellie,” Asey said with a sigh, “that you’d fallen for buried treasure again. Be yourself, Jennie! They been advertisin’ auctions with buried-treasure rumours since—”

  “I tell you it’s cash money!”

  “Same thing. Since I was a kid in knee pants with copper-toed boots,” Asey said, “one Sharp or another’s been packin’ ‘em in at auctions with talk about hidden money. It’s part of the Sharps’ stock in trade. They’ve auctioned off hundreds of rickety, tumble-down houses at fancy prices because owin’ to a little advance propaganda, someone thought there’d be a tin box stuffed with money an’ jewels buried under the parlour floor, or maybe cached in the chimney—”

  You see that crowd? Jennie interrupted. “See it?” She brandished her knitting bag in its direction. “Practically all Barnstable County’s here. And why? Because they know – we know – that John Alden did have money, cash money, a
nd it’s hid in something!”

  “It always is,” Asey said gently. “That’s just what I been tellin’ you.”

  “John Alden had loose money hid away,” Jennie said doggedly, “and everyone knows he did! Everyone knows he never trusted banks after nineteen-twenty-nine, when he lost so much in banks that blew up. All he trusted was money. Paper money, and coins. He always paid taxes and large bills – like havin’ his house painted – with big, old-fashioned paper money. And when he dropped dead so sudden, he never had any chance to tell anyone where it was hid, see?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “So that money’s inside of something, and everything has to be auctioned off today. Someone,” Jennie said almost dreamily, “is going to take home that old desk of his, or a bureau, or pictures, or a sea chest, and find—”

  “An’ find the insides stuffed with big, old-fashioned bills,” Asey finished the sentence for her. “Uh-huh. I know. I’ve heard it all before. Now run along, an’ have fun buyin’ junk, only please, lay off Currier an’ Ives, will you? Our house has enough of them anemic children an’ sad-faced ladies without any waists!”

  Jennie grabbed his sleeve as he reached out for the starter button. “Listen, Asey, I know sometimes it’s all talk, but this time it’s true! Gordon Sharp, Quinton’s brother, was executor of the estate, and he padlocked the place as soon as Alden died. The money was here, and it still is! The will said everything was to be auctioned off as it stood, and the proceeds to go to the town’s Hospital Fund – the Alden relations are pretty mad about that, too,” she added. “They expected to get left the china and the highhoy and all the really good pieces, and now if they want ‘em, they got to bid ‘em in. Come on and stay, Asey! It’s goin’ to be great fun!”

  “Nothin’ doin’!”

  “Honest, it’ll be excitin’, with the relations biddin’ against the antique dealers for the good things, and all the town tryin’ to grab scarce things – there’s tins and tins of corned beef, you know. And a car with four fine tyres, and yarn in skeins, and – oh, egg-beaters, and an electric iron, and a rubber bathroom plunger – and shellac! You said yesterday you wanted some shellac! And boats and oars and rowlocks—”