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  The Pink Umbrella

  A Pat and Jean Abbott Mystery

  Frances Crane

  Cast of Characters

  Patrick Abbott. A tall, lanky private detective from San Francisco, about to become a U.S. Marine.

  Jean Abbott. His brand-new wife, who wants to make the most of what time they have together before Pat reports for duty.

  Ellen Bland. A calm, collected woman whom Pat knew in Paris and who brings out the protective instinct in most men. Jean distrusts her.

  Louis Bland. Her nasty, controlling ex-husband who still exerts a powerful hold over Ellen and their children.

  Dick Bland. Their 16-year-old son, already on the road to being an alcoholic.

  Susan Bland. Their 18-year-old daughter, outspoken and youthfully self-absorbed.

  Anna Forbes. Louis’s former nursemaid, now the family housekeeper, a rude, sour-faced woman who despises Ellen but still adores Louis.

  Hank Rawlings. A chemical engineer who’s deeply in love with Ellen.

  Mary Kent. An expatriate who fled occupied France. Ruthless and overbearing, she’s considered a good match for Louis, who is expected to marry her.

  Daphne Garnett. Another of the Blands’ Parisian friends now living in New York. A seemingly silly woman, she’s more perceptive than people expect.

  Clint Moran. Another refugee, indolent and enigmatic and an inventive pianist. Flat broke, he lives in a flophouse. He and Louis go back a long way.

  Bill Reynolds. Susan’s fiancé, who’s serving in the Merchant Marines.

  Dr. Maxton Seward. The family physician, fat and sleek and opportunistic.

  Patrolman Isaac Goldberg. Conscientious to a fault, he will never believe that Pat and Jean are really married.

  Lieutenant Jeffry Dorn. A deceptively angelic-looking police detective.

  Laura Gilbert. Hank’s beautiful, dedicated secretary, in love with her boss.

  Sarah Howe. The fussy old maid who lives across the hall from Laura.

  Chapter One

  Patrick and I were strolling west on Fifty-fifth just west of Lexington and talking when we did talk about the queer beauty of New York in the artificial twilight called the dim-out. The air was warmish, tender, faintly veiled with thin haze, and full of the somewhat depraved smells which in the cities pass as springlike. There was no wind. The outlines of the old brownstone houses flanking this block and those of the looming apartment buildings ahead on Park Avenue were softened and blended oddly in the strange light. Sounds were distorted and intensified. Some of the most prosaic were furtive, almost menacing. The slow wheeze of a motorcar held mystery. The tread of a faceless pedestrian suggested some dire urgency. Across the street a shadow mounted shadowy steps on peculiarly sonorous feet.

  “New York’s spooky,” I said. I pressed close against Patrick’s overcoat sleeve and moderated my voice to the atmosphere. “That’s the last thing I ever expected, in New York.”

  “It’s only the dim-out,” Patrick said.

  “The dim-out isn’t spooky in San Francisco. It’s grand.”

  “The difference is in the air, dear.”

  “I don’t want to know the difference,” I said. “And I don’t mind. Only it’s not my idea of New York. I thought everything would be bright and scintillating and exciting. I like it better this way, only it’s not what I expected. That’s all. I really love this, Pat. The buildings all around us are so—so anonymous.”

  Patrick sniffed. “Whatever that is.”

  “We don’t know anybody in them. That’s what I mean. Not a soul. Isn’t it wonderful, Pat? Just you and I, all alone, in a whole city full of dimmed-out people. Don’t you love it, dear?”

  Patrick doesn’t like obscurity of any kind. But he made a friendly noise in his throat and pulled my hand so close against his side that I could feel the warmth of his body through his thick man’s clothes.

  Then a sad thought recurred to me as it had been doing all day long. Patrick had joined the Marines. We had, at last, got three days all our own and what had he done, first thing, but join the Marines, simply because it was his first chance to join the Marines. I was glad, proud, sad, and simply furious. Nothing nowadays makes sense.

  We strolled on. Halfway along the long block a taxicab slid by and stopped before a tall narrow white house with white marble steps and black iron railings.

  A long thin boy in a gray flannel suit and a porkpie hat got out. He propped his back against the cab and started feeling through his pockets. As we approached the short thickset driver came around the car, took the boy by one arm, and tried to propel him towards the steps.

  “Be a pal, man!” the boy implored. His young voice was clumsy from drink. “My mother will pay. Only please don’t make a fuss, pal. My father’s in there. See?”

  The driver didn’t want to be a pal. He wanted his dough instead. He pushed the boy forward.

  “It’s a matter of getting to Mother first, pal!” Suddenly the boy stared at us. “Hello, Pat,” he said vaguely.

  Patrick left me near the railing which guarded the areaway and stepped forward. “Hello, Dick,” he said. The boy and the man both gaped. So did I. “Supposed you were still in Paris, Dick,” Patrick said. He took the hand the driver hadn’t got and pumped the arm.

  “What’s the racket?” sneered the driver. “That meter says four dollars and fifteen cents. I’m going—”

  Patrick took out five dollars. “Here!” he snapped. “Scram!” he added when the man fished hastily for change. The fellow went silky and jumped into his car and sped away.

  I stepped forward. The Scot in me is always irked by Patrick’s western carelessness with money.

  The boy, unpropped while Patrick was paying the fare, had slipped into a heap on the bottom step. He stared up at me owlishly from big dark eyes in a good-looking face and then asked with exaggerated politeness, and a wave of the hand, “What is this?”

  “This is my wife, Dick. Jean, Dick.”

  “For heaven’s sake, Pat!” I muttered.

  Dick’s unblinking stare swung between us. “Wife? I thought you were Pat Abbott? He has no wife.” He stood up. He swept his little round hat off and said, “Old Pat always could pick ’em, Wife. Come on in. Mother will love you, Wife. Shush!” He laid a finger on his lips. “Louis is here. It’s not such a hot idea to come home oiled at this time of day, Pat. Louis is always hanging round evenings, same as in Paris. Now, we’ll go easy. I’ve got my key. Shush—we’ll sneak in, see?”

  “Pat?” I said. With meaning.

  Then the white door at the top of the white marble steps swung inward and a very slender woman in black was silhouetted against a gloomily lighted vestibule. I could see the triangular shape of her face and the upward sweep of her hair.

  She slipped the lock’s catch and stepped out and closed the door after her. I caught a whiff of her perfume, something sweet and fresh.

  “Hello, Ellen,” Patrick said quietly. She stopped short and clasped her hands together, then said, as though shocked with surprise, yet hardly lifting her voice even in excitement above its naturally low tone, “Oh, Pat! My dear!”

  Patrick went up the intervening steps. They kissed. I felt a wild stab of jealousy.

  “What a wonderful surprise!” the woman said huskily.

  “Rather! How are you anyway, Ellen? Come and meet my wife. Jean, Ellen Bland.”

  “Wife?” Ellen said. I was standing quite still, at the foot of the steps. I was numb from my jealously. I couldn’t move. She came down, took both my hands, and kissed me. “How wonderful!” she said. “I didn’t know. But, of course, we lost touch.” Her tone changed suddenly, as she spoke to Dick, “Go on in, darling. Go through the house on this floor and up the back stairs. Take a s
hower and change before coming down. Your father’s here.”

  “So I deduced,” Dick said elaborately.

  “Go along quickly, Dick. The door isn’t locked. Hurry!”

  Patrick’s voice held a note of bitterness as he asked, “Still standing guard, Ellen?”

  “Just the same, Pat. Only more so. Won’t you come in? I can’t get over my surprise. Have you seen Hank? How did you know where we lived? But … come in! We’ve got so much to say to each other.”

  I made our excuses. We had yet to have dinner and after that we were seeing The Eve of St. Mark. We accepted an invitation to tea tomorrow afternoon. I said, “If Patrick hasn’t already been snatched by the Marines.”

  We told her we were at the Rexley, which was only a couple of long blocks away, walked up the steps to the door with her, shook hands again and said goodbye.

  We had started down the steps when Ellen Bland opened the door.

  A man’s sarcastic voice accosted her, as from a staircase.

  “Do you often entertain on the street, Ellen?”

  “I’m sorry, Louis,” Ellen said.

  “Who was that!” the voice demanded.

  The door closed.

  “Who was that?” I asked then.

  Patrick growled in his throat, “That was Louis Bland.”

  “He sounds like a dilly,” I said.

  Patrick growled again, and tucked my hand snugly into the crook of his elbow.

  We walked on, arm in arm. The shadows loomed mightier as we neared Park Avenue. But the charming anonymity of the dim-out was gone. Its spell was broken. We knew people.

  Chapter Two

  At the comer of Park Avenue and Fifty-fifth we waited under one of the dimmed-out streetlamps for a green light.

  “Let’s not get involved, dear,” I said.

  “Involved?”

  “With those people, or any people, for that matter. It isn’t as though we’ve got a lot of time, or even know how much we’ve got.”

  Patrick knew I referred to the Marines. He put his arm around me and, just as though we were alone on some lone prair-ee, gave me a long tender kiss.

  That was all right with me till I heard a sort of sly step behind us and to my right, and slanting a glance in that direction I found myself looking into two shiny beetle-brown eyes, which were part of a swarthy heart-shaped face that belonged to a policeman. The eyes were leveled on us suspiciously from a distance of about six feet. I murmured in Patrick’s ear that this wasn’t the Wild West and that you shouldn’t kiss women on street comers in civilized places like New York. Patrick slid a look at the officer and promptly announced in a Wild West accent, for his benefit, “Poison does it the quietest, hon. Then we can get married.”

  The policeman coughed. The cough crawled with suspicion.

  “Behave yourself!” I said to Patrick. The lights changed. We walked on. From the middle of the parkway I looked back and the policeman was staring after us, with one hand rubbing at his cheek. I giggled then and felt quite lighthearted, until Patrick said,

  “It’s a damn shame if Dick’s no good after all Ellen has had to take on his account, Jean.”

  For politeness, I said, “He’s a sweet-looking boy, Pat.”

  “Looks too much like his father for my taste. Though Louis is damn good-looking. Have to concede that. Funny running into them like this. Took it for granted they were stuck in Paris, didn’t think they could even bomb Louis Bland out, frankly. When Paris moved to Biarritz or Cannes or Monte Carlo he went along, but no further. I met them there five years ago. Saw a lot of Ellen and the kids. The kids took a shine to me because I was a real live detective and I was pretty keen about Ellen.” My jealousy started bothering me. Patrick had lived thirty-two years before we’d met and women didn’t leave him exactly numb. I said “Kids?” sort of perfunctorily and Patrick said, “There’s a girl. Susan. She’s a couple of years older than Dick. Dick should be about sixteen. Sue was a nice fat, happy, brown-haired youngster, no trouble for her mother at all, but Dick always was a proposition. Poor Ellen. She’s had punishment enough already, from Louis.”

  I did a little bridling. I’ve no patience with downtrodden women, unless they’ve got some hypersuperduper reason like a broken back or something, but I realized that Ellen was out of Patrick’s romantic past, and indeed from that specially romantic time when he lived for a while in Europe. So I merely asked, “Why does she live with him, then?”

  “She doesn’t. They’re divorced, have been for years. Louis just hangs around.”

  “But really!”

  “You have to know Louis to appreciate it, Jean. He meddles, nags—generally contrives to be a chronic nuisance.”

  “We got laws, darling.”

  “Oh, sure. But Louis has all the money in that family. And they lived in Paris, remember, not here, which may have made some difficulties I wouldn’t know about.”

  “He’s still hanging around, dear. And they’re here now.”

  Patrick let it pass. We had been stopped—a red light—at Madison. He said, “In France a married woman usually has the upper hand in the family because she controls the money. Ellen had no money of her own. That alone might have affected her chances in a French divorce court—but honestly, I don’t know much about it, because they were already divorced when we met. All I heard was gossip. Trials of that kind are held privately in France, but of course people talked. Louis got the legal say-so about the kids. That gave him a whip over Ellen. She always was nuts about those kids.” The light changed and we walked on. “He divorced her on an adultery charge. Ellen’s friends said he had no real case, but that she let him get away with it because she wanted to get rid of him.”

  “It doesn’t seem to have worked.”

  “Not entirely anyhow.”

  “Was there somebody?”

  “There wasn’t really. Not then.” Patrick hesitated. “You heard Ellen ask if I’d seen Hank? He must be in New York. His name is Henry Rawlings. He was a friend of Ellen’s. People said they weren’t in love at all until Louis started prying and accusing. Louis named Hank corespondent, in any case, and neither of them confirmed or denied the charges, just let him get away with it.”

  “What happened then?”

  “Well, then, later, they did fall in love and wanted to marry. Nothing came of it because Ellen wouldn’t leave the kids. Seems that after Louis divorced Ellen and got the custody of the kids he didn’t want the bother of them after all, so he fixed it up for them to live with Ellen. It was a funny setup. Ellen stayed on in a house they’d had for years on the rue de l’Universite. Louis lived at the Ritz. But he and his gang were eternally at Ellen’s. His crowd wasn’t her kind at all.” Patrick paused, then said, “There was a Mrs. Kent. Ellen thought that Louis would marry her. Maybe he did. For a time Ellen and I wrote now and then, but the war ended that. Ellen must be happy to be back. She wanted to have the children educated in America, but Louis was so completely sold on France.”

  “Maybe he’s changed,” I said.

  “Maybe,” Patrick said.

  Fifth Avenue was all in gray, a chasm of pearl-gray wedged between slate-gray spires and skyscrapers. Ruby-red taillights and dimmed amber headlights wove sleek patterns in the grayness.

  We crossed, then crossed Fifty-fifth and after a few more steps were at our hotel.

  There was a telegram in our box. My heart did double-time as Patrick picked it up, imagining it was an urgent summons from the Marines. Naturally, once they knew he was available, I was sure they would grab him at once. I watched him as he opened the yellow envelope, taking his time, performing the small action with graveness and precision. I thought suddenly of the first time I’d seen him, standing with those long blue eyes fastened gravely on a picture in the window of my curio shop in Santa Maria, New Mexico. Tall, lean, sunburned, easy-moving and easy-spoken. White teeth flashing in a brown face. Poker-faced like all good Westerners. A Stetson covering the back of his dark brushed-back hair and his
long legs in corduroys belted low on lean hips.

  He looked quite as well though less romantic now in a gray felt hat, a light overcoat, and a double-breasted navy-blue worsted.

  His face didn’t give a hint at the nature of the telegram. So I quaked till he handed it over.

  It said: “After what you’ve been through here since war started don’t wonder you picked a nice soft berth like the Marines. But remember the Pacific’s your home ocean. Animals happy. Love to you both. Lulu.”

  Lulu was Lulu Murphy, Pat’s secretary in his office in San Francisco. The animals were our black Persian cat Toby and red dachshund Pancho, in Lulu’s care while we were away.

  What Pat had been through since the war started was the spy business which had kept West Coast detectives super-busy since Pearl Harbor.

  The telegram made me feel good because it called to mind our San Francisco, and because it didn’t snatch Patrick right off to the Marine Corps.

  We had dinner at 21, went to the show, arriving late, went to a nightclub called La Vie Parisienne, and got back to the hotel the next time at ten minutes past three. A slip in our box said that Ellen Bland had phoned at ten minutes before ten.

  “I wonder what she wanted?” Patrick asked. He was at once almost gravely concerned.

  I kept silent as a stone. I wouldn’t have voiced it for anything, but I was glad we’d missed her.

  She phoned again next morning as I was leaving the room. Patrick had gone down ahead, for cigarettes.

  “Mrs. Abbott?” Her voice was stunning, really, one of the low authentic-sounding ones. I’m a sucker for voices, so I braced myself against her in advance. “This is Ellen Bland. I tried to reach you last night to ask if you and Pat won’t come to dinner tonight?” Dinner? I felt panicky. Dinner would mean a whole evening. I said I was terribly sorry. It was, luckily, enough. “Oh, I am too,” she said. A little too quickly, as though she had wanted to be refused. “Of course, it’s such short notice. You will come for tea?” I said definitely, and she said, “That much of you is just an hors d’oeuvre but we’ll have to make do, I guess. Dick will be here, I hope, and Sue, and perhaps her friend Bill Reynolds. They’re so excited to be seeing Pat again. You’ve no idea!”