Erle Gardner: Turn on the Heat

“And you never did get back to pick up Miss Dunton’s things?”

“To tell you the truth, I didn’t. I started back, and came to the conclusion someone was watching the apartment. I was afraid he would shadow me and find out where Miss Dunton was staying.”

“And you didn’t push the furniture around?”

“Why, no,” I said. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I do remember I fell over a chair. I was holding a handkerchief to my face, you know.”

Ellis said, “It looked as though there’d been a struggle in that apartment. Miss Dunton’s purse was lying open, and—”

“He told me he’d dropped my purse when he had the nosebleed,” Marian said.

Ellis frowned, but his eyes, meeting Marian’s, couldn’t hold a stern expression. He said, “Let me do it, please, Miss Dunton.”

“Oh, very well,” she said in a hurt voice.

Ellis couldn’t get up any steam after that. He was licked. Five minutes later, he said, “Very well. The circumstances are exceedingly strange. After this, Mr. Lam, if you want to protect any witness who is in communication with our office, simply advise the office and don’t take the responsibility on your own shoulders.”

I said, “I’m sorry, but I did what seemed best at the time.”

I glanced at Bertha Cool, and then decided I might as well get the whole thing straightened out while I was about it. I said to Bertha, “What was this about some charge on a hit-and-run case being made against me?”

She said, “Some officers were trying to pick you up at the agency office.”

Ellis said hastily, “That’s quite all right. That matter has been taken care of. You can simply ignore that. An officer at Santa Carlotta telephoned in a short time ago. The witness who saw the car made a mistake on the licence number.”

I said to Bertha, “Well, I guess we can go.”

Marian said, “I’m coming along, Donald, if you don’t mind.”

Ellis said, “Just a minute, Miss Dunton. I’d like to ask you a few more questions, if you please — after the others leave.”

Bertha Cool said, “It’s all right, Marian. We’ll be waiting for you in a taxi down at the main entrance.”

Walking down the corridor, I said to Bertha Cool, “Do you have that letter Flo wrote with you?”

Bertha said, “Do I look that simple, lover? That letter’s in a safe place. How about notifying our client?”

“Too dangerous,” I said. “A lot of heat has been turned on. Our lines may be tapped. Let him read it in the papers: ‘Amelia Lintig of Oakview Confesses to Murder of Night-Club Entertainer and Commits Suicide.’ ”

Bertha Cool said, “You’ve never going to get away with this aunt business, lover. They’ll nail you on that.”

I said, “They’re going to have a sweet time doing it. She really was my aunt.”

Bertha Cool looked at me in surprise.

“You don’t know anything about my family or antecedents,” I said.

“And what’s more, I don’t want to,” Bertha hastily told me. “This time you’re on your own.”

“That’s swell. Just remember that.”

We waited in the cab for about ten minutes, then Marian came down looking rather flushed and elated. She flung her arms around me and said, “Donald, it’s so good to see you. Gosh, I was afraid you were going to make the wrong play with Mr. Ellis. I’d already squared things for you. I told him we’d formed a very close friendship, and that you were really concerned about me.”

“How did they locate you?” I asked.

“I think it’s that landlady of yours,” she said. “She read the morning papers with a description of the missing witness. I don t think she trusts you entirely, Donald.”

Bertha Cool said, “I think it’ll be a good idea for you to get another rooming-house, lover.”

“Mrs. Eldridge will have already arranged that,” I said. And then to Marian: “Did you have any trouble with Mr. Ellis?”

“Trouble?” Marian laughed. “Good heavens, no! Do you know what he wanted to ask me when he requested me to remain behind?”

Bertha Cool said, “It’s an even money bet he asked you to marry him.”

Marian laughed and said, “No, not that — not yet. He’s a very conservative young man, but he did ask me to go to dinner and a show tonight.”

There was silence for a while. Marian kept looking at me as though waiting for a question.

Bertha Cool asked it. “What did you tell him?” she asked.

Marian said, “That I had a date with Donald.”

Bertha Cool sighed, and then, after a moment, said, in an undertone, “Can me for a sardine.”

It was all more or less routine to the coroner. He had some witnesses who identified the body as that of Flo Danzer, the night-club hostess, but I explained to him that that was a name taken by Aunt Amelia after she’d left John Wilmen. I put the whole history together for him. She’d left Oakview as Mrs. Lintig, had taken her maiden name of Amelia Sellar, had secured a Mexican divorce, had married John Wilmen, had left John Wilmen, taken the name of Flo Danzer, and more recently had gone back to using the name, Amelia Lintig. I told him about her trip to Oakview, and the clerk and the porter at the hotel, whose expenses to the city had been donated by the agency, identified the body absolutely.

After the autopsy, they turned the body over to me. I went with it to Oakview for interment. Quite a few people turned out for the funeral. That wasn’t so good. I explained that I thought the mourners were sincere, but there were a lot of curiosity-seekers and morbid persons who had attended the funeral, so I was going to keep the coffin lid closed. I thought Aunt Amelia would want it that way.

It was a nice funeral. The preacher said what things he could, and stressed the fact that at the last Amelia had repented of the crime and had made the supreme atonement, that justice was divine, and that who was there among us to condemn.

Bertha Cool sent a nice floral wreath, and there was a huge pillow of flowers marked: From an old friend.

I didn’t try to trace the pillow. If I had, I felt quite certain that Marian’s Uncle Stephen would have been found at the paying end of the bill, but Uncle Steve wasn’t at the funeral.

Afterwards, when I dropped in at the office to say good-bye to Marian, I could hear the typewriter laboriously clacking away behind the partition. I wondered who it was.

“A new reporter?” I asked.

She said, “That’s Uncle Steve. He wanted to write the obituary himself. It seems that he used to know her.”

I raised my eyebrows.

Marian looked at me steadily. “Donald,” she said, “was she really your aunt?”

“My favourite aunt,” I said.

She came closer to the counter, so that her uncle couldn’t hear me, and pushed her hands out across the partition. Her eyes were wistful. “When,” she asked, “am I ever going to get to see you?”

“Almost any time,” I said. “Bertha’s landed a job in the city for you.”

“Donald!”

“It’s a fact,” I said.

She came around the counter.

From the back room came the laboured clack-clack-clack of the typewriter as Stephen Dunton wrote out the obituary of the woman with whom gossip had connected his name twenty-one years ago.

In an envelope in my inside coat pocket was a certified copy of the death certificate. The envelope was addressed to Charles Loring Alftmont, Mayor of Santa Carlotta, and, right at present, that envelope was being badly wrinkled by the pressure of Marian Dunton’s body as she hugged me to her, but I thought it would be a touching gesture to hold up mailing the envelope until I could include a clipping from the Oakview Blade .