Эд Макбейн - The April Robin Murders

Bingo glanced around. There weren’t any signs of packing in the room. “Maybe she just felt like cleaning a rug,” he said, a little angrily. “We better get a doctor. Right away.”

“An ambulance, Bingo,” Handsome said. He’d been looking at the label on the bottle. “I read about this stuff in a magazine once. It said if you breathe in enough of it, you die quick.”

Bingo located an extension telephone in the kitchen. For some reason he hated to call the police. Not that he’d ever had any serious trouble with them himself, or ever expected to, but it went against his nature. Still it was the only way to get an ambulance in a hurry. He sighed, and made the call.

Handsome picked up the unconscious woman and carried her into the living room. “It’s all right moving her,” he told Bingo. “She doesn’t have any bones broken and she hasn’t been murdered.”

Bingo shuddered. He opened every door and window he could find, closed the door to the caretaker’s room tightly, and sat down on the other davenport to wait.

It seemed like a very long time before the ambulance arrived, and while they waited, Bingo stared unhappily at the caretaker. Her bony face, ill-tempered even in unconsciousness, was almost as gray as her faded cotton house-dress now, and her hair was limp and stringy around it. One of her shoes had fallen off.

“Handsome,” he said suddenly, “take a look and see if she stuck our note to her in one of her pockets.” He really didn’t mind approaching her himself, it was just that Handsome was closer.

Handsome searched. “Not here,” he reported.

“Probably in her room,” Bingo said. “We’d better look and see—”

But that was the moment when the ambulance got there. Bingo admitted two efficient-looking young men, who paid no attention to him except to ask, “Where’s the patient?”

Bingo pointed. One of the young men examined her and said, “Emergency Hospital.” The other one got her name, Pearl Durzy, and said, “How did it happen?”

Bingo nodded his head in the general direction of her room and said, “She was cleaning a rug.”

The attendant who had asked the questions went with Bingo for a quick look. He examined the spot on the rug, picked up the empty can and looked at it, and said, “Carbon tetrachloride. That stuff’s pure murder!”

Bingo winced at the word. But this had been pure accident. Even though it was an inauspicious beginning for life in the April Robin mansion, it wasn’t murder.

“She sure inhaled enough of it, too,” the young man said. He noticed a glass on the dresser, sniffed of it, too, and said, “Been drinking. Did she drink much?”

“Not that I know of,” Bingo said truthfully. Somehow he didn’t feel that this was the time to reveal that he’d never seen Pearl Durzy before this very afternoon.

The efficient young man asked Bingo a few more questions and then helped hustle the unconscious Pearl Durzy out, remarking that the cops would be by for the accident report, their own job being not to waste time with such chores, but to deliver the victim.

As the ambulance siren receded in the distance, Handsome said in a shocked voice, “I read an article about that stuff. It was part of a series during Home Safety Week. The rest of the column was about bathtubs and electrical appliances.”

“And what did it say?” Bingo asked wearily. It had been a long, full day and he was beginning to think wishfully of sleep. “Besides not trying to do acrobatics in the bathtub, or go sticking your finger onto live wires?”

“It said,” Handsome told him seriously, and just a bit reprovingly, “that if you have to use carbon tetrachloride to dry clean anything, you should do it outdoors. Or you should have a lot of doors and windows wide open.”

Bingo said, with a feeble attempt at flippancy, “Maybe she hadn’t happened to read the same article.” He frowned, thinking of the little caretaker’s room. The door tightly shut. One window, and it had been shut.

“And the whole bottle of it spilled on the floor,” Handsome said, as though he’d been following Bingo’s thought word for word.

Bingo was silent for a moment. Then he said, “We better look for that note, Handsome.” It had just been an unfortunate accident, but still, the note might call for a lot of tiresome and unnecessary explanations.

But before they could start looking, the squad car arrived in front of the April Robin mansion. Two uniformed officers came in; they, too, were efficient-looking young men. They were also friendly, especially so after Bingo had informed them that they were the owners of the property and had handed them a business card of the International Foto, Motion Picture and Television Corporation of America, which seemed to impress them.

The accident investigation was, to Bingo’s relief, short, matter of fact and routine, indeed, almost casual. The shorter of the two remarked that it was an unusual kind of an accident, but anything could happen, he’d seen some funny ones in his day. He wrote down the information that Bingo and Handsome had been out to dinner, that everything had been all right when they left — in fact, the housekeeper hadn’t even been in — that when they returned they’d noticed the odor — noticed, the cop had remarked, how could anyone miss it! — had investigated and immediately phoned for an ambulance. Which, the taller cop said approvingly, had been exactly the right thing to do.

Then Bingo led the way to the caretaker’s room, Handsome trailing along, and opened the door. One of the cops said, “Phew!” and the other said, “Try not to breathe much of this air!” and added, “And you better keep out of this room for a couple days.”

“That’s what the article said,” Handsome said.

The taller cop wheeled on him and said, “What article?”

“My partner happened to read an article about this stuff in a newspaper,” Bingo said. “And he happened to remember it.”

The two cops were willing to let it go at that. They began a very fast job of examining the little room, while Bingo watched anxiously from the door.

There was no sign of his note anywhere in the room.

“Looks like she might’ve got dizzy and tipped the whole bottle over,” the shorter cop theorized. “Then she was too dizzy to get up and get out.” The taller cop agreed that it might have happened that way very easily. Then they gathered up the empty cleaning-fluid can, and the glass from which Pearl Durzy had been drinking, and carried them out into the living room.

“Y’can smell that stuff way in here!” the tall cop said. “You guys better watch out you don’t breathe it in yourselves. Now, identification for this gal—?”

Bingo and Handsome looked at each other helplessly. “Her name’s Pearl Durzy,” Bingo said. “Caretaker here.”

The shorter cop called out, “Look in her purse.”

The tall cop make a quick trip back to the bedroom, returned, and said, “Can’t find one.”

“Hell,” his partner said, “all women got purses.”

The two of them made a quick search of the room, and came back looking frustrated. There had been a coin purse in the pocket of a gray coat in her closet, containing three bus tokens and a dime.

“Let somebody else worry about it,” the short cop said. “They can ask questions at the hospital when she comes to.” He paused. “If she comes to.”

Bingo said uncomfortably, “Can we find out how she is?”

“Sure,” the taller cop said sympathetically. “I mean, maybe.” He called the Emergency Hospital, put down the phone, shook his head and remarked that she was pretty bad. “Say!” he said, suddenly changing the subject and looking around. “Isn’t this the Lattimer place?”