“Evidence,” said Gregory, breathing more strongly now. “Floyd, himself, is all the evidence I’ve got that he killed Mrs. Van Tellen and Mr. Van Tellen and Danborn. I hope he feels like confessing when he comes around.”
“He will,” said Chicory meaningly. “Oh, yes. He will, all right. I’ll see to that.”
Monte Carlo Merry-Go-Round
by Nels Leroy Jorgensen
Black Burton’s .38 blots out a gigolo’s killer.
Most women would have fainted without apologies. Patricia Blaine did not. Afterward she wondered why she hadn’t.
The echo of the backfire from the retreating taxicab that had brought her from the Monte Carlo Casino here to the small villa on the outskirts of town, was dying away. The big clock on the tall mantle shelf opposite the half-closed door ticked on remorselessly, curiously loud of a sudden in that ordinarily quiet room that had so suddenly become a place of violent death.
The door clicked shut unnoticed. Her purse fell. The girl’s hand went to her throat and even then she could feel the wild, ungovernable hammer of her pulse.
She thought she cried out but the cry died in her throat.
The figure was lying sprawled, half propped up on one shoulder against the small table in the foyer. The eyes were open, upturned and glazed. Light from the small night lamp on the table shed a pallid yellow glow down over a lean face that was beardless except for a small, fastidiously pointed mustache, stained now with blood, and narrow shoulders encased in a well fitting coat with tails.
Blood smeared the once glistening shirt front, twinkled redly on the studs. Blood seeped sickeningly from one corner of the man’s mouth, as though some hideously overgrown infant drooled crimson.
Patricia Blaine never knew afterward how long she stood there, her every muscle turned to marble, her voice frozen in her constricted throat, her hands clenched, and feeling the insane, overwhelming impulse to scream and scream and scream.
All the details were to be a blur for some time to come. But somehow she managed to get to the telephone beside her bed. She had to pass the thing on the floor in order to do it, but she managed. She heard her own voice and failed to recognize it.
Vivian Burton answered the call, a little sleepily. The low voice of the gambler’s wife was throaty and reassuring. It held a steadying quality that eased the girl’s nerves. She found herself talking, stammering, halting, choking over some of the words; and then, before she hung up she had taken a new draught of courage from Vivian Burton’s quiet words of comfort:
“We’ll be right out. Please be very quiet, do nothing. My husband arrived at the hotel, the Negresco, a half hour ago. I’ll bring him.”
Patricia Blaine sat back, staring straight ahead of her, fighting down that scream in her white throat. Even then, though she could not have told just why, she felt calmer.
“My husband.” That meant that Stuart Burton had arrived in Monte Carlo! Black Burton! The famous, square-shooting gambler whose deep insight into human nature and whose swift draw and unerring aim had solved many a murder. With Black Burton there this nightmare might dissolve in the end, after all.
She knew the story of Black Burton, Black Burton and Vivian. Vivian, that lovely, glamorous young society girl the gambler had won so many years in the past — cool, competent, fascinating.
For a long time the gambler and his wife had chosen to live apart. Their ways of life, they had discovered early, had diverged too sharply. But that could never interfere with their devotion to one another.
They lived apart, yes, but they were somehow very close. Vivian had arrived in Monte Carlo the week before, and in that week she and the wealthy young debutante, Patricia Blaine, had been together constantly. They had been friends for many years.
Only the day before Vivian had received word that her husband, who had been in London, had left for Paris and would proceed south when his affairs were in order. And now he was in Nice, speeding toward Monte Carlo!
Patricia closed her eyes. She wanted to try not to think. But consciousness beat in on her and about her. She could not avoid what she had to face. This was the first time that tragedy had even remotely brushed the young heiress.
Tall and statuesque, blue-eyed, golden-haired and regal in spite of her youth, Patricia Blaine’s life had been a glittering one from the cradle. A lilting, dancing, capricious existence that had never had in it room for thoughts of any future of responsibilities of any kind. The important thing, from babyhood, had been to escape ennui.
That was why she had come this season to Monte Carlo. That was why she had joined Vivian Burton at the Casino Tabarin — or the Cercle Tabarin, to give it its local name. To gamble. The small Cercle was one of the lesser casinos in the gambling city, and yet it had shown an appeal of its own; possibly that was because it was more exclusive than the great international gambling palace on the waterfront. And even in gambling, Patricia was lucky; the wheels and the cards seemed ever eager to pay her youth and her loveliness additional homage.
Even this — this thing on the floor outside. He had paid homage, too. He had been her cavalier ever since she had first encountered him at the Tabarin. At first she had thought him merely another gigolo. But he had manners and grace, an air of quality — this Rene Descamps who had told her he loved her; and here he was lying dead in his own blood in her house!
The girl closed her eyes once more. Certainly it could not have been suicide. She had heard that these Latins... but, no, he hadn’t killed himself, even for a thwarted love of her. Even though she had laughed gaily at him only three or four hours before and told him that she could never think of marrying him. Told him of her fiancé... somewhere, even now, in France, motoring here.
Suddenly her half-closed eyes started wide open.
But someone had killed him! Her fiancé... Where was Rowland Kitterley right now? And where were those foolish, schoolgirl letters she had written to the dead man, the letters she had begged him to return to her only that night?
Monte Carlo seemed suddenly a long way from home!
She couldn’t look for the letters now. Couldn’t go to that huddled thing in the hall and search the gaping pockets. For it suddenly occurred to her that Rene Descamps had come here to return those letters as he had promised.
But who had killed him? And why? And what would the police have to say? What would they be forced to conclude about a young and wealthy debutante who had accepted the attention of a gigolo — however innocently — and who now had the gigolo’s corpse in her parlor!
Her housemaid lived in the little cottage at the foot of the hill, a small place that went with the villa. She lived there with her husband, who was caretaker of the place Patricia Blaine had rented for the season. She would arouse Celestine now.
Just then a car ground to a stop on the road that ran thirty yards below the villa gates. She could hear steps coming up the winding way to the veranda. But no voices. Surely if it were Vivian and her husband—
The sound of the muted electric buzzer in the depths of the house was a stinging tonic, like a whip. She jerked. She started to her feet, then brought up. No, she could not pass that thing in the hall again.