13 White Tulips Read online

  13 White Tulips

  A Pat and Jean Abbott Mystery

  Frances Crane

  To my sister, Mary Bowen

  1

  It was spring. There was a bloom of pink and pale green over the hills across San Francisco Bay. I sat on the front steps of the red-brick terrace of our modern red-wood-and-plate-glass house. Our yards, front and back, were a series of steep planted terraces. Tulips, hyacinths and white and yellow pansies cascaded down the front terraces.

  Our small brown dachshund, Pancho, moved daintily among the spring flowers, savoring their perfume with a blissful expression on his face. At the same time he was watching me. He knew that I felt sad and lonely. He sensed when my sadness grew stronger and, leaving the flowers, he hurried up the steps and settled himself against my knee. The children are away, his big eyes said. But only for three days. They’re happy because they have gone to the beach. You should be happy, too. Lulu Murphy will take good care of them. And, anyway, you still have me.

  I stroked his brown satiny coat, caressed his velvety ears and thought how beautiful is the dachshund to those who can really see.

  Suddenly he stiffened. His body drew away from my caress. His hackles stood up and his muscles tensed as for a sudden leap. Something he considered dangerous was nearby. Perhaps it was only the unusual. Another dog or cat or perhaps only some insect.

  It was a woman. She walked out of one of those spotty fogs which sometimes sit down tight here and there on Russian Hill. This fog lay thick a block or so from our house. The air being windless, it was hugging like a hood a group of houses a short distance to our left.

  The woman was young and as she came closer I saw that she was very pretty. She wore a big, loose dusty pink coat of rough tweed. It was a very fine coat, from a great dressmaker. Her small hat of pink flowers matched the coat. She carried a big honey-colored bag. I noticed as she passed our gate that her smart walking shoes matched the bag. Her gloves matched too. The color was a new one called Benedictine.

  The girl walked past our place without giving me or the house or Pancho so much as a quick glance. But Pancho left me and hurried to the front gate and watched her down the street. He stood with one forepaw lifted and he twisted his neck so that he could watch her slant-eyed through the palings. That ridge of darker hair along his spine to the very tip of his tail stood straight up.

  Well, different incidents affect different observers in different ways. The pretty girl walking out of the fog aroused Pancho’s curiosity and suspicion—it could have been her perfume, which I couldn’t smell from where I sat—but to me she appeared to be only a lovely girl in a very smart coat and a perfect honey of a hat. She did me good. What I needed to cheer me up was obvious. I needed a new hat.

  The idea acted like magic. I perceived instantly that the children would be divinely happy at the beach, that Lulu Murphy—my husband’s priceless secretary—was never happier than when out with the kids and thus away from the office and therefore from crime, that Patrick and I had been looking forward to a couple of days away from these kids, whom we loved devotedly but were quite often weighed down by.

  By this time I realized that it was practically my duty to hurry downtown and buy a new hat.

  I, too, would buy a flowery hat. It would be primrose-yellow because I have yellow eyes and black hair and yellow suits me.

  I stood up and Pancho joined me. Suddenly I felt uneasy. Good hats always cost lots of money. We were pretty broke this spring and that was why I had decided until now not to buy a new hat.

  Not even a new hat.

  We went into the house, Pancho at my heels. Darn it, our trouble was the oil business. Rich one year, broke the next. That was the oil business for you. Damn and blast the oil business. It was wonderful last year with money pouring in. We even had a trip to Europe last year. This year was just the reverse. We had invested in what is called a working interest in our various leases and this year our profits were going into drilling new wells, not coming to us. That is one of the angles of the oil business that I do not like. What I prefer is to have money always coming to us, not going back to drill more wells to bring us more money some time—maybe.

  Time for Pat to get some really big job in the detective line again so that we could pay the butcher and baker and Lulu Murphy.

  Still, you have to have a spring hat. I had the nice clothes I’d bought a year ago in Paris. A new hat, and there you were.

  Besides, I could charge it.

  2

  Twenty-five minutes later, at precisely noon, I was dressed in my best black suit and about to put Pancho in the patio enclosed by the four wings of our house when the telephone rang.

  The dachsie ran ahead of me to the nearest extension with his ears up like little awnings for listening. They went down when he heard the voice of his master.

  “Jeanie? Hi, honey. How about lunch?”

  In my new hat? I thought. How nice!

  “At El Prado?” I asked.

  “Nope. Too many women at El Prado.”

  I was thinking about the hat. Women go for new hats. I tried guile.

  “But I like showing you off, Pat.”

  “My idea exactly. We’ll lunch at the Palace for that very reason. I like showing you off.”

  “Too many men at the Palace, dear.”

  “You don’t mind too many men.”

  “No, I don’t. Okay. You’ll recognize me by a new hat.”

  “Big hat?”

  “Little hat. Very expensive.”

  “That’s the stuff. That’s my girl.”

  “What-t?” I inquired, getting suspicious.

  “You heard me, dear. Meet me at one-thirty by the cigar stand and fetch along a notebook.”

  Pat’s favorable reaction to the hat was now clear.

  “A client?”

  “Don’t know yet. Could be. Isn’t it just my luck to have Lulu Murphy out of town!”

  “I’m every bit as competent as Lulu Murphy.”

  “You’ll do all right with a new hat,” Pat said. “See you, dear.”

  As I changed the usual things a woman carries from a small black bag to a larger one which would also accommodate a notebook, I decided that the prospective client must be a good one. In that case maybe I would also buy a new bag. A honey-colored bag like that big bag the girl in pink carried when she came out of the fog? No, that wouldn’t be practical with kids and a dog. Another black bag, very likely, since it must be practical but still go with my future primrose flowery hat. Antelope? Very expensive, real antelope. Maybe the bag had better wait. Bags cost money, and then there is that tax. A bag isn’t a hat. A bag is not absolutely essential.

  I put the dog in the patio, took a cab to Magnin’s, found a frightfully expensive cap of pale yellow primroses which exactly matched my blouse, charged it, and arrived alongside the cigar stand in the lobby at the Palace at exactly twenty-nine minutes past one. Pat wasn’t there yet. Standing nearby was a good-looking, deeply tanned man about Pat’s age. He had striking black eyes, black hair, broad shoulders, and he was almost as tall as Patrick. Well-dressed in town clothes, he still looked as if he belonged in the country.

  He kept looking at me. I looked at him. If I were single, I thought—and then Patrick arrived and I thought I must be crazy. There is never anybody who even compares in any way to my tall, lean, handsome, blue-eyed, dark-haired, easy-speaking husband. Pat kissed me and then shook hands with the black-eyed young man.

  “My wife, Angus. Jeanie, this is Angus Lyall.”

  We said hello. We shook hands. The black eyes, long and rather narrow under thick black brows, smiled when the good-looking mouth smiled. He’s got a spot of Indian in him somewhere, I thought.

  “I was wondering about my chances of picking this pretty girl up, Pat.”

  “I’m a wife and mother, Mr. Lyall.”

  “You can’t trust your best friends any more,” Patrick said. “Where have you been all this time, Angus?”

  “Mostly on my ranch near Fresno. Also, in the oil business.

  “Oil,” I said, with disgust.

  “Jean doesn’t like oil when it stays in the ground,” Patrick said. “Is Mrs. Strehl meeting us here?”

  “She’s in her room. I’ll phone her that you’ve arrived. I’ve got us a table in the Garden Court, Pat. You two go along and have them hustle us up some drinks. Bourbon on the rocks for me. Martini for Lee. See you.”

  We went along. We came here a lot. All the waiters greeted us as we went to our table. The captain hurried over to take the order for the drinks, asking us how things were, how the kids were, and asking if it would be the usual for us, perhaps, that is Scotch for Pat and for me, now that I am more settled down than I used to be, a martini at lunchtime. I used to try everything new in the cocktail line, in the old days, three or four years ago.

  “Gee, he’s handsome, Pat.”

  “The captain? Sure.”

  “You know I mean Angus. Is he the one from the Marines?”

  “Right. Great guy.” Patrick gave me a cigarette and a light. “Hero, too. DSC. Saved a flock of lives at Iwo Jima and spent a couple of years in a hospital. Never know it now.”

  “He looks as if he’s done all right in the oil business.”

  “So I hear.”

  “Who is Mrs. Strehl?”

  “Her name is Leonora Strehl. Angus calls her Lee.”

  “There’s a surgeon named Strehl.”

  “Her husband.”

  “There’s a Grace Strehl Harrison, who endow
s things.”

  “His sister. That’s the family and they live in that chocolate-colored stucco house on Green Street that you dislike.”

  “You used the wrong word. The house awes me, that’s all. Go on.”

  “Dr. Strehl lives there with Leonora, or Lee, as Angus says we are to call her. Call him Angus, by the way. Lee is a lot younger than her husband. The sister, Mrs. Harrison, has a house in Burlingame, but also a suite in the Strehl house on Green Street. She dominates the family, I think. She offered me thirty thousand dollars …”

  “No?” I cried, joyously.

  “Don’t be like that, Jeanie.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I turned her down. The woman is crawling with malice.”

  “Oh. Well, we do need money just now.”

  “Not that badly. Anyway, we’re here for lunch with Angus and Lee, and it’s all the same case. I mean, it’s the same that Mrs. Harrison came to see me about. A man named Jack Ivers is dead and Mrs. Harrison accuses her sister-in-law, Leonora Strehl, of murdering Ivers. Shush, here they come. By the way, the new hat’s a doll.”

  “Thank you. It cost a mint.”

  “Good!”

  They arrived, and Angus made the introductions and I hung onto my face like crazy to keep from showing surprise. Life is full of coincidences, of course, and it was just one more that Leonora Strehl should be the girl in dusty pink who had walked out of that patch of fog. I glanced at the clock. Two hours and five minutes ago, at half-past eleven, this girl walked past our house. Because of her, I had a new hat. And now I knew why Pancho had watched her like that. It was because she was upset. Dogs observe such things because of their keen sense of smell and their superhuman intuition. To me, when she passed our gate, she was just a pretty woman in a dusty pink coat, with handsome Benedictine accessories and a new flowery hat. But to Pancho she was a worried woman. Worry has its own smell.

  3

  “Tell the Abbotts the story, Lee.”

  We were finishing lunch. Green salads, artichoke hearts with diced white chicken for Lee and me. Steaks tender as butter for the men, Lyonnaise potatoes, new peas, cheese and black coffee.

  Lee still hesitated. I put my hand on my bag to take out my notebook and caught Pat’s glance. He shook his head.

  “I asked for this particular table because no one but ourselves can hear us here, Lee,” Angus said.

  She nodded, said she was just getting up nerve, and then told her story in a low, restrained voice. She had a quiet face with clear turquoise eyes, a small nose, thick brown hair, and full, small, smiling lips. It was a provocative face. It made me feel a bit jealous.

  I felt mean about being jealous when in low, sincere voice and without affectation of any kind she began to talk.

  “I couldn’t sleep at all last night. I was too worried. Finally in a kind of desperation I decided what to do. Thinking back on it I know it was insane. I decided to kill somebody.”

  Her full lower lip pushed out resolutely and the smiling look was gone. She seemed for a moment panicked. Patrick offered a fresh cigarette. She shook her head.

  “Cognac?” Angus asked.

  She nodded and after the drinks were ordered and served all of us and the waiter had gone away, she continued.

  “A man was blackmailing me for ten thousand dollars in cash. I couldn’t possibly raise any such sum without my husband’s help and of course I would not ask that. I had some negotiable bonds my father left me and some old-fashioned jewelry from my mother. These things were in my bank. I thought that the most I could get from them would be five or six thousand dollars. What I decided to do was to get this money together and take it to the man. If he wouldn’t settle for that amount I was going to shoot him dead.”

  She was silent again. Somebody out of sight of our table but not too far away was doused with a musky perfume, a kind I dislike. I specially disliked it now because I could smell it above the bouquet of the cognac.

  “I thought out each detail. I would shoot the man, go home, clean my gun, reload it. But I knew I would not want to go on living if I had done murder. I myself, would take an overdose of sleeping pills. I thought how I could manage that, too. I planned each detail so that no one could possibly connect my death with Jack’s. Jack Ivers. Perhaps you know him?”

  “I know his house,” I said. It was one of those houses which had been hooded with that fog this morning.

  “I know him slightly,” Patrick said.

  “Knew,” Angus said, and his deep, passionate voice was thick with his disgust. “The guy’s stone dead. Ought to have happened long ago. Sorry. Go on, Lee.”

  Lee’s lips had stiffened with a kind of horror at what Angus had said.

  Her expression changed to astonishment when Patrick asked, “Had you taken your husband into your confidence, Lee?”

  “Oh, no. My husband is the most fastidious …”

  “Your husband is a cold boiled oyster,” Angus said.

  “Angus, darling, you don’t know Charles. He is fastidious and amazingly self-contained. He would have dealt with Jack and me, too, had he known what Jack was up to. But in his own civilized way.”

  “A surgeon would know all the ways,” said Angus.

  “You’re wrong in your judgment of Charles, Angus. He is absolutely ethical. Jack was his patient. As a patient, it was Charles’s job to save him, even if he had been a hundred times the heel that we all know he was. Then there was Grace. Jack was like a son to Grace. Grace Harrison, Charles’s sister,” she explained.

  “This does sound complicated,” I said.

  “Ivers wouldn’t care for anything that wasn’t complicated,” said Angus. “He was a lowlived, double-crossing jerk. He lived off women all his life.”

  “How did you come to meet Ivers?” Patrick asked Lee.

  “He was a protégé of Grace’s at one time. She adored him. She sent him to college and started him in business. He’s an artist. That is, he does stage designing, both the clothes and scenes, portraits, and interiors for houses, and even gardens. He was very versatile.”

  “Very,” snarled Angus.

  “Darling?” Lee’s voice made it a reproach.

  “Sorry, Lee.”

  “I’d met Jack first several years ago,” Lee said. “And then, somehow, not more than six weeks ago, I got this silly crush. It wasn’t an affair, but I don’t suppose anyone will believe that. I don’t know just what started me off but suddenly I was in love with him. I thought I couldn’t live without hearing his voice, seeing him, being alone with him.” Angus’ black eyes had narrowed to thin slits. He couldn’t bear it, I thought. “I made a perfect fool of myself. I might as well own up to it. And Jack was sick. There were other women too, and I couldn’t bear to think of them, even if only nurses and such touching him, looking after him. I longed to care for him myself. But I could only see him now and then and even that had to be secretly arranged because my husband was his doctor.”

  “Your husband is a surgeon,” Patrick stated.

  “Yes. Jack had a serious condition, a peptic ulcer.”

  “He would have ulcers,” Angus said with more disgust.

  “Please, Angus. His condition was frightfully serious. There was real concern about risking an operation.”

  “Nuts! Ivers was a rat from the day he cut his baby teeth. He was a coward. I bet he couldn’t face up to an operation. I’ve seen him cry like a baby over a cut finger and run home to mama, or the doctor, or whatnot.” To us, “Ivers was in my class in public school. Managed to be 4-F when the war started, needless to say. Came on to San Francisco where one woman or another looked after him from then on. Quite a boy.”

  “What did he look like?” I asked.

  “Like a rat,” Angus said.

  Patrick spoke up. “I knew him slightly, Jean. He had pointed ears, slanting pale blue eyes with heavy sleepy lids, a widow’s peak and a knowing expression around his mouth. He was tall, slender, blond, and always impeccably dressed. That describe him, Lee?”

  Angus snorted, but Lee said, “Yes. He had a charming voice, too, and he could make himself very attractive to anyone when he wished. Don’t look at me like that, Angus. He could, you know. Anyway, I’d got myself into this thing that was bound to look worse than it really was and I made up my mind to get myself out of it. My husband’s room adjoins mine, through a short vestibule. We close our doors at night because he rises so early, usually before six o’clock. He has to be at the hospital ready to operate shortly after seven. So I got up and packed my small cosmetic bag and a larger week-end bag. I have a friend in Eureka, in the northern part of the state, who had been wanting me to pay a visit. As it happened, I’d had a letter from her a few days ago asking if I couldn’t manage to come soon because she was alone for a while. I locked the bags after packing them, locked the closet, and went back to bed. I heard my husband get up, take a shower, go down to breakfast and leave the house. I got up then myself, bathed, decided what I would wear, and slipped my pistol into my big new travel handbag. Charles keeps an emergency medicine kit in a closet in his bedroom. This closet is kept locked but I knew where a key was. I slipped in, got a small handful of nembutal capsules from his case, and back in my room put them in an envelope and put this in the zipper compartment of that same handbag. My plan was simple. I would go back to bed and have breakfast sent up at the usual time. This was Friday. We have a daily woman in for cleaning and she wouldn’t get to the bedrooms till after noon. Anyway I often locked my clothes closet so there would be no suspicion because of that.