A Friendly Game of Murder (22 page)

Chapter 37

D
orothy stepped into the small pantry and coaxed Woody away from Bibi’s body. Benchley picked up the dog and stroked his fur.

The little room was claustrophobic. There was hardly enough floor space for the wheelchair and Dorothy together. The walls were lined with shelves, which were stocked almost to overflowing with cans, boxes, cartons and bags of food. A big burlap sack of potatoes squatted in the corner, giving the room a musty, earthy smell.

Dorothy found the carton of dog biscuits, opened it and took a treat for Woody. The dog crunched it down quickly. She then turned and moved closer to Bibi’s body to inspect it. Bibi was not wearing the necklace, of course. Otherwise, she appeared exactly as she had when she arrived at the party. Well,
almost
exactly . . .

Doyle stood next to her to examine Bibi as well. “Hmm, what do you observe?”

Dorothy didn’t like being put to the test. Still, this was the father of Sherlock Holmes. So, what the heck—she could try the Dr. Watson role if it meant that Doyle would put on Holmes’ deerstalker hat, figuratively speaking. “She’s fully dressed. Even her makeup has been reapplied.”

“What do you make of that?”

“Someone who cared about her—or at least cared about her appearance—did this for her.”

“And why would a person take such care of her, given that she is now deceased?”

“I can think of two reasons. One, it was someone who loved her and wished for her to not appear quite so . . . dead.”

“And the second reason?”

“Perhaps whoever fixed her up wanted to get her out of the hotel. A nicely dressed woman in a wheelchair is certainly a more acceptable sight on Sixth Avenue than a naked corpse.”

Doyle smiled. “You’re rather good at this. But why take her out of the hotel?” He spoke as though he already knew the answer.

“No habeas corpus,” she said. “If there’s no body, there’s no crime.”

“Not exactly, from a legal point of view,” he said. “But, still, that’s probably the killer’s general idea. So that would lead us to believe it was indeed our killer who spruced her up and put her in here. Correct?”

“Yes, indeedy. He was the one who hid her here, just waiting for an opportunity to wheel her out the front door when no one is looking.”

“He?”
Doyle asked archly. “Weren’t you the one who suggested the killer might just as well be a woman?”

“I know it’s a man.”

Doyle was taken aback. Up to this point he seemed to be leading Dorothy to all the answers. “I agree with you that our culprit likely is a man. But, if one considers all the possibilities, certainly a woman with enough strength and determination could very well have dressed Miss Bibelot and positioned her so, don’t you agree?”

“No,” Dorothy said firmly. “At least, I don’t agree that a woman did this.”

He frowned skeptically. “And what makes you so sure?”

“Her makeup, my dear Doyle. It was applied by a man.”

Doyle raised his eyebrows. Then he adjusted his glasses and looked closely at Bibi’s face. “Good heavens, you’re right!” he exclaimed. “I see it now. The powder is rather heavily caked on her cheeks, but there is hardly any on her nose.”

“A woman abhors a shiny nose,” she said.

“And the lipstick,” he continued. “It is thickly and unevenly applied. There is a certain . . . squareness to the shape of the lip coloring. Not very ladylike, I should say.”

“You said it, all right. A woman always blots her lips after applying lipstick. If a woman had applied this makeup—even if she was in a hurry—she would have given Bibi’s mouth at least some lip service, so to speak.”

Doyle straightened up and looked down admiringly at Dorothy. “So we know that it was a man who dressed her and positioned her here—a man who apparently cared about her, perhaps even admired her. But where does that lead us?”

Benchley sighed. “Almost right back where we started. You can take your pick of men who admired her. There must be two dozen of them in this hotel alone.”

Suddenly Woollcott appeared at the pantry door. “Aha! Here you all are! I’ve been waiting at the Round Table for—” He caught his breath when he spotted Bibi. He turned to Doyle. “You found her! My hat’s off to you, sir. You truly are as great as your famous detect—”

Doyle interrupted as Woollcott was literally tipping his hat. “I cannot take the credit. It was Mrs. Parker’s little ‘bloodhound’ that led us to the body. He’s the one who deserves your praise.”

“Oh.” Woollcott turned to the dog in Benchley’s arms. He gave the dog a perfunctory pat on the head. “Well done,” he muttered. Then he turned back to Dorothy. “Now that we have the body, what do we do about it?”

“I guess we leave her here for now. It won’t be long before the authorities arrive. In the meantime I suggest we continue with our little game as planned,” she said with a scheming glint in her eye. Finding Bibi’s body had boosted her confidence. “I see you’ve brought your top hat, which we’ll soon require. Have the guests arrived in the dining room?”

“Most of them are there—Doug Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, Ruth Hale, Jane Grant, Ben Jordan, Lydia Trumbull, Mrs. Volney, and a few dozen others—with more and more arriving every minute. Come to think of it, I should wake Harpo. . . .”

“Get back in there, then. We’re right behind you.”

Woollcott hurried off. Woody squirmed in Benchley’s arms.

“You can set him down now,” she said. “I’ll put his leash back on.”

Benchley lowered the dog to the floor, and Woody scampered to Dorothy. But then he wiggled between her legs and back into the pantry. He sniffed a moment at Bibi’s bare leg, then turned and smelled the cylindrical cartons of Quaker Oats. Before Dorothy could grab him, he had moved on to a large, empty cardboard box. He scratched at it with his paw, then leaped inside and sniffed it thoroughly while turning in circles.

“That’ll do, my little man,” she said, latching the leash onto his collar. But before she pulled him away, something in the box caught her eye. It was a stained gray piece of paper—a form of some sort. But it was the signature on the paper that had captured her attention. She snatched it up and looked at it more closely.

The paper was a packing slip. Or was it an invoice? She wasn’t quite sure. It was a typewritten list that itemized a shipment of two dozen live lobsters and an assortment of seafood. The signature that had caught her eye was written neatly in bold blue ink. . . .

B. Bibelot.

* * *

In the kitchen, Dorothy grabbed Frank Case by the sleeve of his natty jacket and held the paper in front of his face. “Did Bibi buy these lobsters?”

Case was momentarily taken by surprise. But he quickly recovered and took the paper from her hands. “Certainly not,” he said calmly.

“Then why is Bibi’s signature on this invoice?”

Case scrutinized the sheet. “Ah, now I see. Here are Luigi’s initials at the bottom. That means we took delivery, and the hotel paid for them out of its account with this particular fishmonger. See? It says it’s paid in advance. We paid for this, not Bibi.”

Dorothy looked at the paper, but all she saw was a list of lobsters and fish, and countless inscrutable numbers—and the signature
B. Bibelot
.

“But why does it have Bibi’s name on it?”

“Well,” he said, somewhat confused, “it says she
delivered
the order.”

Dorothy put her hands on her hips. “How could a skinny little girl like Bibi have delivered two dozen lobsters and an assortment of seafood?
Why
would she deliver such a thing? Not to mention when.”

Case pursed his lips. He handed the invoice back to Dorothy. “I can’t explain it. It would indeed take a strong person to carry all that seafood—and some of it packed in dry ice to add to the weight. Or it could have easily been transported on a cart, of course. But, if it’s all the same to you, we have to get breakfast ready for more than a hundred guests all at once, thanks to your suggestion. So if you’ll excuse me, perhaps we can consider this later in the morning?”

He turned away with an apologetic smile and went back to work, directing the waiters and line cooks and handling their questions and problems.

Doyle and Benchley stood by the kitchen doors, ready to enter the Algonquin dining room. She moved to join them. Then she stopped. Something occurred to her. She turned back and hurried again to Case.

“Frank.”

“Yes, Mrs. Parker. Something else?” His calm demeanor was showing signs of strain.

“There’s always something else,” she said. “Did you say that seafood was packed in dry ice?”

He touched a finger to his lips. “Not the lobsters. They were alive upon arrival. But when we get seafood, especially certain fish imported from a great distance, it’s packed in dry ice to keep it fresh.”

“What happened to the dry ice?”

“The dry ice? What happened to it?”

“Have you suddenly become a parrot? Yes, the hotel was without ice of any kind last night, and yet the dry ice from this seafood was not to be found. What happened to it?”

Case finally let his frustration show. “We certainly didn’t serve it, if that’s what you mean. We usually unpack the fish, then throw the ice into the alley. It disappears in no time. On the other hand, perhaps someone left it around and it evaporated. We
were
rather busy last night. And we’re quite busy right now, Mrs. Parker! So if you don’t mind—” He gestured toward the twin doors to the dining room.

“Evaporated?”

“Yes, evaporated. Don’t you know about dry ice?”

“Of course I know about dry ice,” she answered quickly. Then after a moment’s thought—and realizing she actually didn’t know much about dry ice—she asked, “What about it?”

“It’s incredibly cold. Much colder than regular ice. It’s frozen gas. So when it warms up, it turns from a frozen solid directly to a gas, never a liquid, you know.”

Incredibly cold.
So cold that it burns?
she wondered. She remembered that when she had fallen down in the service elevator, her hand had touched a shard of ice—an extremely nasty shard of ice.

“Well, of course it turns into a gas.
Everyone
knows that,” she said, although she admitted to herself that she may have forgotten it.

“There you have it,” Case continued. “Whether someone threw it out into the alley or whether it was left around last night, it’s probably long gone now.”

“Probably?” she asked.

“Yes, probably. That’s the extent of my knowledge on the subject, Mrs. Parker,” he said with finality. “If you have more questions about dry ice, try asking Douglas Fairbanks. But this is a kitchen, not a science laboratory, and we do have breakfast to serve. So, if you’ll please excuse me—”

“Fairbanks? What would
he
know about it?”

Case started backing away. “Dry ice is used for effects in the theater. They drop a large chunk of it into a tub of water, and it makes fog—a swirling mist that rolls across the stage. Surely you’ve seen that?”

“Well, yes, I suppose—”

Then the kitchen doors swung open. The right door bumped into Doyle, and the left pushed Benchley aside. Alexander Woollcott strode in.

“Come, come, my dear Mrs. Parker! The stage is set. We have a packed house, and it’s your cue. All await your grand entrance with bated breath.”

“Aleck, it’s only
your
breath that smells like bait,” she said. “Have a mint or something.”

Benchley chuckled. “That’ll teach you to fish for a compliment, Aleck.”

Woollcott turned to him. “Ah, the Benchley wit,” he said. “As sharp and as cutting as a butter knife.”

“Ahem,” Doyle said, clearing his throat. “That’s quite enough trading insults. Shall we get back to the matter at hand?”

“But,” Benchley said, disappointed, “trading insults is our stock-in-trade.”

“Sorry. Artie’s right,” Dorothy said. “Let’s get this show on the road.”

She grabbed the top hat from Woollcott’s head, tugged on Woody’s leash and pushed open the double doors.

She stopped short. At least a hundred people were crowded into the dining room. Many were packed around the tables, while the rest stood expectantly—and looked slightly annoyed at being summoned at such an early hour after such an uproarious night.

As one, they turned their bloodshot, bleary eyes toward Dorothy.

Oh dear, what did I get myself into?

Chapter 38

D
orothy merely stared at the friends and guests gathered before her in the crowded dining room.

Suddenly Woollcott snatched the top hat from her hands. “I’ll handle this bunch,” he said to her. Then, in an announcer’s voice, he spoke. “Good morning, my good people! We’re here to play a little game of Murder. Only this time it’s no game. One of you gathered here murdered Bibi Bibelot. And I intend to point the finger at the one who ‘done it.’”

Dorothy nearly smacked her forehead. She and Aleck had briefly discussed this plan earlier in Dr. Hurst’s room. But clearly the discussion had been too brief, because this was not what she truly had in mind.

Then again, there was no time to lose. The Health Department would arrive before long. Woollcott might as well get things underway in his own inimitable—and insufferable—style.

“Douglas Fairbanks!” he said, his voice heavy with blame. “You, sir, had both the ability and the motive to attack Miss Bibelot. The young woman effectively took over your party and insulted your hospitality—and that of your wife, Mary. You possess the key to the bathroom, and you had access to the locket. And you, above all, had the acrobatic ability to climb out the window and scamper across the roof—”

“Well, so did I,” Dorothy said before she could think twice about it. “If I could get out the window and get across the snowy roof, just about anybody else could—anyone who could fit through the window, that is. It certainly wasn’t Fairbanks who killed Bibi. That’s preposterous, and you know it, Aleck.”

Woollcott spun around and glared at her. But he quickly ignored her interruption and resumed his accusations.

“Mary Pickford!” he said, literally pointing the finger at her. “Bibi ruined your party. You yourself admitted that you entered the bathroom and took the locket from around the young girl’s neck. If you are so bold to perform such a theft, is murder also out of the question?”

Mary opened her mouth to speak, but Dorothy spoke first.

“Of course it’s out of the question, Aleck,” she said. “We’ve gone over this. Why would Mary kill another woman and leave the body in her own tub? No woman would corrupt her own bathroom like that. She’d never want to use it again.”

Woollcott again faced her with beady, angry eyes. “Whose side are you on? This was all your idea, remember?”

She bit her lip. She couldn’t help interrupting, especially when Woollcott seemed so wrongheaded. But at the same time she didn’t want to be involved in the accusations. “Fine, then. Go right ahead. You’re the detective.”

He turned away with a huff and leveled his irate gaze at Lydia Trumbull. “You!”

She froze. Woollcott continued, “You have a veritable storeroom of sleeping potions and narcotics, or so I have heard. And, as a former army nurse, you know how to use them. Indeed, you poisoned Bibi with a lethal dose of chloroform, which you stole from Dr. Hurst, did you not?”

Lydia’s eyes had widened to the size of half-dollars. Then her pupils rolled upward, and her eyelids fluttered. She swayed sideways, and, to no one’s surprise, she fainted.

“Very well, let’s move on,” Woollcott said matter-of-factly. “Benedict Jordan!”

Jordan folded his muscled arms over his broad chest and returned Woollcott’s stare.

Woollcott, who stood safely across the room, was unperturbed. “You stole the locket from Mary Pickford’s bureau with the aim of returning it to your employer, Dr. Hurst.”

“It was his,” Jordan said gruffly.

“Oh, was it?” Woollcott said archly. “Or was it stolen from a museum in England?”

By this point, Dorothy’s curiosity had gotten the better of her. She picked up Woody and weaved her way through the crowd toward Doug Fairbanks and Mary Pickford. They smiled when they saw her approaching with the little dog.

“Happy New Year’s Day, Dottie,” Fairbanks said warmly. “Say, you don’t have anything to do with this lousy third degree from Woollcott, do you?”

“Certainly not,” she lied. “Now tell me what you know about dry ice.”

“Dry ice?”
Mary asked. “Why do you want to know about that?”

She didn’t answer directly. “You theater folk use it for special effects?”

Fairbanks nodded. “We use it in the movies, too. Makes wonderful fog.”

“Can it be harmful?”

“Yes, if you touch it in its frozen state,” he said. “Its temperature is something like one hundred degrees below zero. It’d freeze your fingers right off your hand.”

Again she thought of the shard of ice in the elevator.

On the other side of the room, Woollcott was now loudly accusing Dr. Hurst in absentia. Jordan and Doyle—God bless them—were standing in to defend Dr. Hurst’s innocence in Bibi’s murder. Dorothy shook her head ruefully. Why did she get Woollcott involved? He only made things more difficult.

She turned back to Fairbanks. “Dry ice melts directly into a gas, right? What do they use the gas for?”

Fairbanks shrugged. “Other than stage effects, nothing that I know of. It’s pure carbon dioxide. You can’t use that for much.”

She frowned. Perhaps her curiosity had led her down a blind alley after all.

Woollcott was now widely accusing many of the partygoers of egging on Bibi. He singled out some of the men who had poured the champagne into the tub.
Oh dear.
She had to stop him soon and get the Murder game underway—otherwise there would soon be another murder on her hands: Woollcott’s.

“Oh, wait,” Mary said to her husband. “Tell Dottie that story about the stagehand!”

“Stagehand?” she asked.

Fairbanks nodded, remembering. “Oh yes, that’s right. This is a funny story—well, not
that
funny, I guess. The young man nearly died. But in the end we all had a good laugh about it.” He smiled.

“What happened?”

“Well, this was a few years ago, before I had really hit it big. It was a small theater, a far cry from Broadway. One of the stagehands got stuck in an old basement broom closet or something with a carton full of dry ice. Of course the stage manager went looking for him. Everyone thought the fellow was out playing hooky, because he was a rambunctious young lad, and it was a lovely, warm day.”

“But of course he wasn’t,” Mary said.

“No, he wasn’t,” Fairbanks agreed. “He nearly asphyxiated in that broom closet. When the stage manager finally found him, his first thought was that the stagehand was falling-over drunk. Then he got a good look at the boy. His lips were blue, and so was the skin under his fingernails. He was nearly dead from lack of oxygen.”

“Lack of oxygen?” Dorothy asked.

He nodded. “On such a warm day and in such a small space, the dry ice had quickly turned to carbon dioxide. The stagehand was overwhelmed in less than an hour. Fortunately that kind of thing doesn’t happen every day, or stagehands would be dying off like . . .”

Then a funny look came into his eyes. At the very same time, a thought popped into Dorothy’s head.

“Dying off . . . like spring flowers?” she asked. “Dying off . . . like
Bibi
?”

“You read my mind!” he said excitedly.

She picked up Woody from the floor. “We’ll be right back,” she said to Mary. Then she grabbed Fairbanks’ hand. “Come with me.”

She pulled him through the crowd. But there were so many people packed so tightly together that she progressed very slowly. Fairbanks halted her.

“Where are we going?” he asked.

“The pantry. It’s through the kitchen.”

“I’ll lead the way.” He stepped in front of her and zipped through the crowd like a speedboat cutting through calm waters. She quickly followed in his wake. Before they reached the kitchen, she had just enough time to consider how easy life must be if you’re a wildly popular masculine movie star—as compared to a petite, little-known female poet.

But she pushed these thoughts aside as they emerged from the crowded dining room to the less congested but more frenetic kitchen.

Suddenly Jacques the chef was yelling, pointing a large carving knife at her. “You stop bringing that filthy dog into my kitchen, or else!”

As Fairbanks pulled her in the direction of the pantry, she called over her shoulder to the chef. “Or else what? You’ll turn him into tonight’s special?”

Jacques’ face went beet red. “Don’t tempt me!”

Looking behind her, she saw that Doyle and Benchley were now coming through the swinging doors.

“What is this, Grand Central Station?” the chef yelled. “Stay out of my kitchen!”

Now she and Fairbanks were in the service corridor and standing in front of the pantry door.

“In here?” he asked.

She nodded. “Afraid so.” She opened the door, and there was Bibi just as they had left her.

“She almost looks alive,” Fairbanks said with a tinge of sorrow in his usually cheery voice.

Woody jumped out of Dorothy’s arms and waddled up to the body. He took a quick sniff of Bibi’s leg, then moved on to the empty seafood carton again.

“Something afoot?” Doyle asked as he and Benchley joined them.

“Do you have a hankie?” she asked him. Doyle quickly produced an ivory-colored silk handkerchief. She took it from him and leaned toward the body. “Remember we noticed her thick lipstick? Watch this.”

She rubbed the lipstick away from Bibi’s mouth—it required quite a few wipes—and stood back so they could see.

“By Jove,” Doyle said. “Her lips are blue!”

“She was suffocated,” Dorothy explained.

“Suffocated? But how? Not strangled, surely! I saw no handprints or ligature marks on her neck.”

“Carbon dioxide,” she said. “Someone filled the bathroom with carbon dioxide while Bibi was knocked out from the chloroform. So she asphyxiated. She ran out of oxygen and died. That’s why the bathroom was closed and locked up. That’s why the towel was placed at the bottom of the bathroom door, to keep the gas from escaping. If we chipped the polish off her fingernails, I bet they’d be blue, too.”

“Well done, Mrs. Parker,” Benchley said admiringly. She smiled in return.

Doyle looked skeptical. “How could anyone fill a hotel bathroom with carbon dioxide? That’s rather far-fetched.”

“Not if it’s in the form of dry ice,” Fairbanks said. “It’d be easy as dropping a bucket of it into the tub. Half an hour or so later, and Bibi is dead.”

As the cold-blooded horror of the murder dawned on him, Doyle understood. “Asphyxiate her with dry ice while she lay there naked and unconscious? But who could have done such a vile, monstrous thing?”

Dorothy stared at Bibi’s porcelain countenance as if the answer could be found there. She studied her delicate, motionless features—her sensuous mouth, her high cheekbones, her slender pixie nose—

Suddenly Dorothy realized who
could
have done such a vile, monstrous thing. “The answer’s as plain as the nose on her face!”