A Charm of Powerful Trouble (A Harry Reese Mystery Book 4) Read online

  “And, of course, Ernie Joy was an actor. That’s the essence of Emmie’s theory: Ernie impersonated Twinem and checked into the Cosmopolitan under that name. Then he and the Missus lured Twinem there in order to kill him.”

  “I told you, I tried that one. Even if the clerk made a mistake, it still doesn’t line up with the facts. You’re going to kill a fellow, so you wear a jacket no one could help but remember? And what sort of plan was that for an escape?”

  “Yes, there has to be a lot more to it,” I agreed.

  Emmie arrived home about an hour after I did.

  “I’m afraid I have a confession, Emmie. I inadvertently substantiated your theory.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “I went by the Victoria. I was hoping to verify that it was Twinem who took the manuscript to the Cosmopolitan. But it was his wife. So maybe her story about him meeting a man was just a ruse. And apparently Ernie wouldn’t have had much trouble passing himself off as Twinem.”

  She gave me a smug smile. “I knew it. But I also have a confession to make. I was hoping to prove Carlotta never brought her prop pistol that night, so it wasn’t a matter of someone having to switch them.”

  “How would you prove that?”

  “Well, I thought perhaps that girl she was staying with, Eva, might have borrowed it. Or that it was just misplaced in her apartment. But she and I combed the place—it wasn’t there.”

  “I suppose we could just call it a draw and leave it at that,” I said.

  “Drop the case when we’re so close to solving it?”

  “Are we close to solving it?”

  “Closer than when we started, certainly.”

  “So in much the same way we’re nearer to St. Petersburg whenever we enter the kitchen.”

  “That can’t be right. Surely you mean St. Louis…. But forget the mapmaking, Harry. We need to meet with this Mrs. Twinem.”

  “She’s left town.”

  “To New Brunswick, New Jersey, I know. But that’s just an hour away.”

  “Yes, but in which direction? I’m sorry, Emmie, but until we settle the orientation of the apartment, I don’t think it would be safe to venture out of it.”

  Her reply consisted of a disparaging expletive, lobbed over her shoulder as she went off to bathe.

  16

  The next morning I woke breathing the inebriating atmosphere of Emmie-land. The chief inebriate was back to dripping ice water.

  “We need to get ready, Harry.”

  “Get ready for what?”

  “Visiting Mrs. Twinem.”

  “Why so early?”

  “We’ll need the time to prepare our costumes.”

  It was then that I first suspected the day would prove an eventful one. I began weighing various excuses for absenting myself when my thinking was interrupted by another dose of ice water.

  “What costumes? What are you talking about, Emmie?”

  “I came up with a foolproof way of proving she made up the story about seeing a Chinaman.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Well, say a policeman were to bring by Lou Ling and ask her, ‘Is this the man you saw?’ She would, of course, say yes. But if we’re right that she made up the part about seeing a Chinaman, she has no idea what Lou Ling looks like. In which case she will have to assume whatever Chinaman she’s presented with is Lou Ling.”

  “I suppose that makes some sense. You could suggest it to Tibbitts.”

  “We don’t need Sergeant Tibbitts. It’s simple, really. I dress up as a Chinaman, and you reprise your role as a policeman. You were very convincing back in Washington.”

  “That was a fancy dress ball.”

  “What about your work with the wife-beater?”

  “I was playing to a crowd intoxicated with excitement and cheap beer. I’m unlikely to find Mrs. Twinem so gullible.”

  The telephone rang. Emmie refused to answer it, forcing me out of bed.

  “It’s Tibbitts. Remember asking me to send out a bulletin on Cliff Ainslie?”

  “The one you never sent out?”

  “Turns out I did. They picked him up out on Long Island. A little burg called St. James.”

  “Couldn’t you just tell them to release him?”

  “I tried that, but no go.”

  “What about the woman he was with? Nell Elwell?”

  “What happened to her isn’t exactly clear. I think she might be in some sort of custody.”

  “Some sort of custody? What the hell does that mean?”

  “Not sure. I thought maybe I’d go out and see. You want to come along?”

  “Yes, I’d prefer to rescue her before Emmie finds out what happened.”

  We agreed to meet at the Flatbush depot at nine. Then I went back to our room and told Emmie about Ainslie’s arrest. She seemed surprised.

  “Why was he arrested?”

  “It might have something to do with the kidnapping report I gave Tibbitts.”

  “I thought you called that off?”

  “So did I. I’m afraid I won’t be able to perform an encore of my Officer MacDonald routine.”

  “Why can’t Tibbitts handle it himself?”

  “Complicating factors.”

  “What complicating factors?”

  “Aunt Nell’s current whereabouts.”

  “Where is she?”

  “That’s just it. But don’t worry, chances are good we’ll find her.”

  “Maybe I should go, too?”

  “No, you go on to New Jersey.”

  “Who’ll play the policeman?”

  “Maybe Carlotta can suggest someone.”

  “I have a better idea. Why don’t you go to New Jersey as the policeman? Xiang-Mei could play the Chinaman. Then I’ll go rescue Aunt Nell.”

  “I don’t think that would work, Emmie.”

  “Why not?”

  “Well, for one thing, Xiang-Mei is pretty decidedly feminine. I don’t think she could pull off posing as a man.”

  “But I could?”

  “It was your plan, Emmie, not mine.” Then I played my ace in the hole. “By the way, there’s a canal over there in New Brunswick.”

  “What canal?”

  “The Delaware and Raritan. It’s curious Mrs. Twinem went there, with a canal so nearby….”

  Of course, only a mind like Emmie’s would find it curious. But at the moment, that was the mind I needed to convince.

  “All right, Harry. You go find Aunt Nell. I’ll take care of Mrs. Twinem.”

  To say I was relieved would be a gross understatement. No matter how thorny Nell’s situation would prove to be, I expected it was unlikely to be anywhere near the one Emmie would be creating in New Jersey.

  When we’d boarded the train, I asked Tibbitts about the lapse in his handling of the Ainslie affair.

  “Oh, well, I’ve had some things on my mind lately.”

  “Another case?”

  “Yeah, there’s always that. But my wife has been a problem lately. She wants me to quit my job.”

  “She feels it’s too dangerous?”

  “Too dangerous? No, I think she’s just embarrassed to be married to a cop.”

  “You married into the 400?”

  “No, far from that. Let’s skip it.”

  “All right,” I agreed. “Emmie has a plan to present Mrs. Twinem with a Chinaman in order to trip her up.”

  “You mean show her some fellow she’s never seen before and ask if he’s the one who shot her husband?”

  “Yes, that’s it.”

  “I have the same plan. Jimmy Yuan’s going out there with me tomorrow to play the Chinaman.”

  “It’s a pity you couldn’t have done it earlier.”

  “Why?”

  “Because Emmie intends on executing her version today.”

  “How is she going to pull it off?”

  “She’ll play the Chinaman and get someone else to play the cop.”

  “Why’s she have to mak
e everything so complicated?”

  “My diagnosis is that she generally starts out with something resembling a rational thought—for instance, present Mrs. Twinem with a Chinaman. Then the part of her brain that handles logic mentions the idea to the part where her imagination resides. Since the former is the size of a pea, and the latter reaches down to her ankles, the outcome is never in much doubt.”

  He stared at me for a while, then posed a question. “What do you think happened at the Cosmopolitan that night?”

  “I can’t say for sure. But Emmie can’t be right they were lovers. If Ernie Joy was in on a plot to kill her husband, there was no reason for her to give his description. Unless….”

  “Unless she wanted us to identify Joy as the killer. Then when we didn’t do it fast enough, she links the two shootings by adding the Chinaman. So maybe her lover was someone else, and they just picked Joy to take the fall.”

  “That would explain a lot,” I said.

  “Yeah, but so far, nothing. I had the fellows up in Syracuse look into it, but they couldn’t find anything. Not even a rumor. And the only times she traveled were with her husband or to her mother’s place in New Jersey.”

  “But a lot of people are good at keeping that type of thing a secret.”

  “Sure. But what now? If the whole point was to kill Twinem so she could take up with the new boy full-time, they have to be itching to get together. When they scratch the itch, we’ll have a name and can work backwards.”

  “You have someone watching her?”

  “Not round the clock, but we’re checking up on her. If she hops on a train, we’ll know about it. In the meantime, I have a fellow trying to figure out who Frank Rhodes is.”

  “The inscription on the gun?”

  “Yeah. All we know so far is he was in the G.A.R., and if he was in the war, he’d be at least fifty, probably closer to sixty.”

  “About the right age for her father.”

  “His name was Jacobson,” he said.

  “Had she been to the Cosmopolitan before?”

  “Not according to the staff. But they said the fellow who checked in had.”

  “Under the name Twinem?”

  “No, different names.”

  “That sounds like Ernie Joy. Apparently he toyed with women’s hearts.”

  “So I’ve heard.”

  “But the night of the shooting, the fellow checked in as Twinem?”

  “Yeah. That’s the name on the card.”

  “Did you compare the signature to Twinem’s?”

  “Yeah, I have his card from the Victoria. It looks about right. But I have a handwriting expert looking at them.”

  We arrived in St. James about half past eleven. It was a tiny old-time village surrounded by a lot of newly constructed cottages. Tibbitts led me down a road that seemed to head out of town.

  “Where exactly is the jail?” I asked.

  “Ainslie’s being held by a justice of the peace. Fellow named Pugh. Said he has a big house up the road here.”

  There was no mistaking Pugh’s manse. It was a large, decrepit farmhouse, with a multi-colored sign announcing “Horace Pugh, Justice of the Peace for the Town of Smithtown, Magistrate and Chief Constable for the Hamlet of St. James, Chairman of the Citizens Vigilance Committee, and Plenipotentiary Inspector for the Greater New York Anti-Vice League.”

  “How do we address the fellow?” I asked.

  Tibbitts shrugged.

  Pugh was waiting for us on the veranda. He was an older fellow, over sixty certainly, and not taller than five-two. He had long grey hair and a shaggy grey beard. From his looks, and those of his house, I surmised he was one of the last relics of St. James’s old guard.

  “I suppose you’re the fellow from New York.”

  “Yeah, Sergeant Tibbitts. This is Harry Reese. You still holding that Ainslie fellow?”

  Pugh nodded over to an outbuilding.

  “Didn’t you understand? It was all a mistake,” Tibbitts told him.

  “Well, maybe your reason for wantin’ him ’rested was a mistake. But my reason for ’restin’ him was no mistake. No, sir.”

  “How so?” I asked.

  “Sit down. I’ll tell you.”

  We all sat down, but as soon as we had, he got up.

  “You boys want a drink?”

  “We’re in kind of a hurry,” Tibbitts said.

  This, apparently, was a mistake. Pugh was the type of fellow who relished a captive audience. And once caught, resistance just drove the hook in deeper.

  “That may be, Sergeant. But the wheels of justice turn in their own time.”

  In an effort to smooth the waters, I told him I’d favor a drink. He went off at a snail’s pace, just to make clear whose hand was on the judicial throttle.

  “I hope Nell isn’t locked up in that chicken coop. Or there’ll be hell to pay when I get home.”

  “What made you think Ainslie had kidnapped her?”

  “Bad intelligence. I’d communicated with a couple of excited Celestials via a French mime who was in turn translated by my theatrically inclined cousin. It seems what they interpreted as an abduction was some sort of embrace.”

  “Huh.”

  Pugh came back with a bottle of cheap rye and three glasses. He made a ritual out of pouring it.

  “Your health, gentlemen.” He downed his and we followed suit.

  “Can you tell us what became of the woman who was traveling with Ainslie? Nell Elwell?”

  “Elwell! Ha! I knew it.”

  “Knew what exactly?” I asked.

  “I knew they weren’t married like they claimed. But I’ll get to that in time.”

  He carefully poured us another round and offered another toast. This one to the stamping out of sin. When we’d all polished off our drinks, he leaned back and put up his feet on a stool.

  “You see, yesterday morning I went down to Smithtown to see a fellow about….” There’s no sense in repeating the whole of Pugh’s desultory rambling. Suffice it to say he stopped by the police station and saw Tibbitts’s bulletin about Ainslie and Nell.

  “Well, as soon as I see he’s an actor, I know where to look.”

  “Where?” I asked.

  “Why, right here in St. James! They flock here every summer. It’s Sodom and Gomorrah all over again.”

  He poured another drink and offered a toast to the damnation of actors.

  “So I go by that Shore Inn. Full of those people. I look through the register and there he is! Ainslie! Didn’t even bother to change his name. ‘Mr. and Mrs. Clifton Ainslie’ it says. Well, I round up a couple fellows from the committee and we wait ’til late and creep up to the balcony. They had the window wide open. We could hear everything went on in there. A good hour or more! I can’t say any of us were surprised. Seen it all before up there. Some of them go on all night!”

  His admission merely verified what I’d always suspected, that the chief qualification for membership in an anti-vice league was a prurient obsession with sex.

  “Well, when they finally let up, we took ’em by surprise.”

  “Yes, I imagine so. And you brought them both here?”

  “Tried to. We had him tied up pretty well, but she went a little crazy on us. Foamin’ at the mouth crazy. Even wavin’ a gun. And when I got that away from her, she nearly split the Reverend Simpson’s head open with a ewer.”

  “But what’s her current disposition?”

  “The Misses Fowler were with us. Big women. They managed to subdue her. Then we brought them both here.”

  “You mean….” I nodded toward the coop.

  “No, they have her upstairs. They’re determined to teach her the error of her ways. Through readin’ to her.”

  Nell had always seemed reasonably good humored, but I suspected when she learned it was due to my erroneous report that she’d been ambushed in bed, humiliated by vigilantes, and forced to listen to Bible lectures, her feelings toward me would sour.

&nbs
p; Pugh led us upstairs. Fortunately, Nell and the two elderly Fowler sisters seemed to be getting on amiably.

  “Hello, Harry. I was just telling the ladies about our excursion to Weedsport. Where’s Cliff?”

  “Waiting downstairs,” I said.

  We all went down and Pugh led the whole entourage to the chicken coop, where he removed a large chain securing the door. Ainslie was half dressed and tied to a chair. The stench of his cell was overpowering and he looked to be in a complete daze. We untied him and brought him out in the fresh air and he quickly recovered his wits.

  Not too subtly, Pugh voiced his reluctance to release his prisoners.

  “What will it cost to get the two of them out of here?” I asked.

  “Well, he’ll need to come back. But he can go now for twenty-five dollars bond, I suppose. Or the cost of the ceremony.”

  “What ceremony?”

  “Wedding ceremony. See, if they was married, then there ain’t a case.”

  “And if you perform the ceremony now, you’ll be satisfied?”

  “I reckon so.”

  “How much is that?”

  “Twenty dollars.”

  There was a brief discussion and the decision was made to save the five dollars. For the first time that day, Pugh moved quickly. The whole thing took five minutes.

  “Of course, it only does you good if you was married before last night. Say, yesterday afternoon.”

  Having the certificate backdated to the day before cost another twenty dollars. Nell asked him for the return of the prop gun, but he insisted on keeping it as a souvenir. Then the four of us caught a train back to Brooklyn.

  Tibbitts, thankfully, kept quiet about my having gotten the couple arrested. They attributed it to the enthusiasm of local prudery. Nell even apologized again for having knocked me out in Albany.

  “All’s fair in love and war,” Ainslie said with a smirk.

  “I was just a civilian.”

  “War is hell, isn’t it?”

  I was beginning to dislike the fellow almost as much as he disliked me.

  17

  Simian howls greeted us as we entered the apartment that evening. Carlotta and Thibaut were rehearsing their zoo skit for the benefit of Xiang-Mei. Thibaut went from one make-believe cage to another. In one he was an elephant, and tickled Carlotta with his trunk, in another, he turned his jacket inside out and revealed the telltale stripes of a zebra. Carlotta simply acted amused, giving little squeals of delight. They had hit upon the ideal formula. One that made ample use of Thibaut’s talents, without taxing Carlotta’s. Even Ainslie was impressed.