A Kiss Before Dying (19 page)

From the
New York Times
; Monday, 24 December 1951:

Seated at her desk, Miss Richardson stretched out her right hand in a gesture she considered quite graceful and squinted at the gold bracelet that constricted the plumpness of her wrist. It was definitely too young-looking for her mother, she decided. She would get something else for mother and keep the bracelet for herself.

Beyond her hand the background suddenly turned blue. With white pin-stripes. She looked up, starting to smile, but stopped when she saw that it was the pest again.

‘Hello,’ he said cheerfully.

Miss Richardson opened a drawer and busily ruffled the edges of some blank typing paper. ‘Mr Kingship is still at lunch,’ she said frigidly.

‘Dear lady, he was at lunch at twelve o’clock. It is now three o’clock. What is he, a rhinoceros?’

‘If you wish to make an appointment for later in the week—’

‘I would like an audience with His Eminence this afternoon.’

Miss Richardson closed the drawer grimly. ‘Tomorrow is Christmas,’ she said. ‘Mr Kingship is interrupting a four-day weekend by coming in today. He wouldn’t do that unless he were very busy. He gave me strict orders not to disturb him on any account. On no account whatsoever.’

‘Then he isn’t at lunch.’

‘He gave me strict orders—’

The man sighed. Slinging his folded coat over one shoulder, he drew a slip of paper from the rack next to Miss Richardson’s telephone. ‘May I?’ he asked, already having taken the paper. Placing it on a large blue book which he held in the crook of his arm, he removed Miss Richardson’s pen from its onyx holder and began to write.

‘Well I never!’ said Miss Richardson. ‘Honestly!’ she said.

Finished writing, the man replaced the pen and blew on the paper. He folded it carefully into quarters and handed it to Miss Richardson. ‘Give him this,’ he said. ‘Slip it under the door, if need be.’

Miss Richardson glared at him. Then she calmly unfolded the paper and read it.

Uncomfortably, she looked up. ‘Dorothy and Ellen—?’

His face was expressionless.

She hoisted herself from the chair. ‘He told me not to disturb him on any account,’ she repeated softly, as though seeking guidance in the incantation. ‘What’s your name?’

‘Just give him that, please, like the angel you are.’

‘Now look—’

He was doing just that; looking at her quite seriously, despite the lightness of his voice. Miss Richardson frowned, glanced again at the paper, and refolded it. She moved to a heavily panelled door. ‘All right,’ she said darkly, ‘but you’ll see. He gave me strict orders.’ Gingerly she tapped on the door. Opening it, she slipped in with the paper held appeasingly before her.

She reappeared a minute later with a betrayed expression on her face. ‘Go ahead,’ she said sharply, holding the door open.

The man breezed past her, his coat over his shoulder, the book under his arm. ‘Keep smiling,’ he whispered.

At the faint sound of the door closing, Leo Kingship looked up from the slip of paper in his hand. He was standing behind his desk in his shirt-sleeves, his jacket draped on the back of the chair behind him. His glasses were pushed up on his pink forehead. Sunlight, sliced by a Venetian blind, striped his stocky figure. He squinted anxiously at the man approaching him across the panelled and carpeted room.

‘Oh,’ he said, when the man came close enough to block the sunlight, enabling Kingship to recognize his face. ‘You.’ He looked down at the slip of paper and crumpled it, his expression of anxiety turning to relief and then to annoyance.

‘Hello, Mr Kingship,’ the man said, offering his hand.

Kingship took it half-heartedly. ‘No wonder you wouldn’t give your name to Miss Richardson.’

Smiling, the man dropped into the visitor’s chair. He settled his coat and the book in his lap.

‘But I’m afraid I’ve forgotten it,’ Kingship said. ‘Grant?’ he ventured.

‘Gant.’ The long legs crossed comfortably. ‘Gordon Gant.’

Kingship remained standing. ‘I’m extremely busy, Mr Gant,’ he said firmly, indicating the paper-strewn desk. ‘So if this “information about Dorothy and Ellen”’ – he held up the crumpled slip of paper – ‘consists of the same “theories” you were expounding back in Blue River—’

‘Partially,’ Gant said.

‘Well, I’m sorry. I don’t want to listen.’

‘I gathered that I wasn’t number one on your Hit Parade.’

‘You mean I didn’t like you? That isn’t so. Not at all. I realized your motives were of the best; you had taken a liking to Ellen; you showed a – a youthful enthusiasm. But it was misdirected, misdirected in a way that was extremely painful to me. Barging into my hotel room so soon after Ellen’s death – bringing up the past at such a moment.’ He looked at Gant appealingly. ‘Do you think I wouldn’t have liked to believe that Dorothy didn’t take her own life?’

‘She didn’t.’

‘The note,’ he said wearily, ‘the note—’

‘A couple of ambiguously worded sentences that could have referred to a dozen things beside suicide. Or that she could have been tricked into writing.’ Gant leaned forward. ‘Dorothy went to the Municipal Building to get married. Ellen’s theory was right; the fact that she was killed proves it.’

‘It does no such thing,’ Kingship snapped. ‘There was no connection. You heard the police—’

‘A housebreaker!’

‘Why not? Why not a housebreaker?’

‘Because I
don’t
believe in coincidences. Not that kind.’

‘A sign of immaturity, Mr Gant.’

After a moment Gant said flatly, ‘It was the same person both times.’

Kingship braced his hands tiredly on the desk, looking down at the papers there. ‘Why do you have to revive all this?’ he sighed. ‘Intruding in other people’s business. How do you think I feel—?’ He pushed his glasses down into place and fingered the pages of a ledger. ‘Would you please go now.’

Gant made no move to rise. ‘I’m home on vacation,’ he said.

‘Home is White Plains. I didn’t spend an hour on the New York Central just to rehash what was already said last March.’

‘What then?’ Kingship looked warily at the long-jawed face.

‘There was an article in this morning’s
Times –
the society page.’

‘My daughter?’

Gant nodded. He took a pack of cigarettes from his breast pocket. ‘What do you know about Bud Corliss?’ he asked.

Kingship eyed him in silence. ‘Know about him?’ he said slowly. ‘He’s going to be my son-in-law. What do you mean, know about him?’

‘Do you know that he and Ellen were going together?’

‘Of course,’ Kingship straightened up. ‘What are you driving at?’

‘It’s a long story,’ Gant said. The blue eyes were sharp and steady under the thick blond brows. He gestured towards Kingship’s chair. ‘And my delivery is bound to suffer if you stand towering over me.’

Kingship sat down. He kept his hands on the edge of the desk before him, as though ready to rise again in an instant.

Gant lit his cigarette. He sat silently for a moment, regarding it thoughtfully and working his lower lip with his teeth, as though awaiting a time signal. Then he began to speak in the easy, fluid, announcer’s voice.

‘When she left Caldwell,’ he said, ‘Ellen wrote a letter to Bud Corliss. I happened to read that letter soon after Ellen arrived in Blue River. It made quite an impression on me, since it described a murder suspect whom I resembled much too closely for comfort.’ He smiled. ‘I read the letter twice, and carefully, as you can imagine.

‘On the night Ellen was killed, Eldon Chesser, that lover of
prima facie
evidence, asked me if Ellen were my girlfriend. It was probably the only constructive thing he ever did during his entire detectival career, because it set me thinking of friend Corliss. Partly to take my mind off Ellen, who was God-knows-where with an armed killer, and partly because I liked her and wondered what kind of a man she liked. I thought about that letter which was still fresh in my mind and which was my only source of information about my “rival”, Bud Corliss.’

Gant paused for a second, and then continued. ‘At first it seemed to contain nothing; a name – Dear Bud – and an address on the envelope – Burton Corliss, something-or-other Roosevelt Street, Caldwell, Wisconsin. No other clues. But on further reflection I found several bits of information in Ellen’s letter, and I was able to fit them together into an even bigger piece of information about Bud Corliss; it seemed insignificant at the time; a purely external fact about him rather than an indication of his personality, which was what I was really looking for. But that fact stayed with me, and today it seems significant indeed.’

‘Go ahead,’ Kingship said as Gant drew on his cigarette.

Gant leaned back comfortably. ‘First of all: Ellen wrote Bud that she wouldn’t fall behind in her work while away from Caldwell because she would be able to get all the notes from him. Now, Ellen was a senior, which meant that she was taking advanced courses. In every college senior courses are closed to freshmen and often to sophomores. If Bud shared
all
Ellen’s classes – they probably made out their programmes together – it meant that he was conceivably a sophomore, but in all probability a junior or a senior.

‘Secondly: at one point in the letter Ellen described her behaviour during her first three years at Caldwell, which apparently differed from her behaviour after Dorothy’s death. She described how she had been “the rah-rah girl”, and then she said, and I think I remember the exact words, “You wouldn’t recognize me.” Which meant, as clearly as could possibly be, that Bud had not seen her during those first three years. This would be highly conceivable at a good-sized university like Stoddard, but we come to thirdly.

‘Thirdly: Caldwell is a very small college; one-tenth the size of Stoddard, Ellen wrote, and she was giving it the benefit of the doubt. I checked in the almanac this morning: Stoddard has over twelve thousand students; Caldwell, barely eight hundred. Furthermore, Ellen mentioned in the letter that she hadn’t wanted Dorothy to come to Caldwell precisely because it was the kind of place where everybody knew everybody else and knew what they were doing.

‘So, we add one, two, and three: Bud Corliss, who is at least in his third year of college, was a stranger to Ellen at the beginning of her fourth year, despite the fact that they both attended a very small school where, I understand, the social side of life plays hob with the scholastic. All of which can be explained in only one way and can be condensed to a simple statement of fact; the fact which seemed insignificant last March, but today seems like the most important fact in Ellen’s letter:
Bud
Corliss was a transfer student, and he transferred to Caldwell in September of 1950, at the beginning of Ellen’s fourth year and after Dorothy’s death.
’

Kingship frowned. ‘I don’t see what—’

‘We come now to today, 24 December 1951,’ Gant said, crushing his cigarette in an ashtray, ‘when my mother, bless her, brings the prodigal son breakfast in bed, along with the
New York Times.
And there, on the society page, is the name of Kingship. Miss Marion Kingship to wed Mr Burton Corliss. Imagine my surprise. Now, my mind, in addition to being insatiably curious and highly analytical, is also very dirty. It looks to me, says I, as though the new member of the domestic sales division was determined not to be disqualified from the Kingship Copper sweepstakes.’

‘Now look here, Mr Gant—’

‘I considered,’ Gant went on, ‘how when one sister was killed he proceeded directly to the next one. Beloved of two of the Kingship daughters. Two out of three. Not a bad score.

‘And then the analytical side and the dirty side of my brain blended, and I thought: three out of three would have been an even better score for Mr Burton Corliss who transferred to Caldwell College in September of 1950.’

Kingship stood up, staring at Gant.

‘A random thought,’ Gant said. ‘Wildly improbable. But easily removed from the realm of doubt. A simple matter of sliding out from under the breakfast tray, going to the bookcase, and taking therefrom
The Stoddard Flame
, yearbook for 1950.’ He displayed the large blue leatherette book with its white-lettered cover. ‘In the sophomore section,’ he said, ‘there are several interesting photographs. One of Dorothy Kingship and one of Dwight Powell, both of whom are now dead. None of Gordon Gant; didn’t have five spare bucks to have my face recorded for posterity. But many sophomores did, among them—’ He opened the book to a page marked by a strip of newsprint, turned the volume around and put it down on the desk, his finger stabbing one of the checkerboard photographs. He recited the inscription beside it from memory: ‘Corliss, Burton quote Bud unquote, Menasset, Mass., Liberal Arts.’

Kingship sat down again. He looked at the photograph, hardly larger than a postage stamp. Then he looked at Gant. Gant reached forward, turned a few pages, and pointed to another picture. It was Dorothy. Kingship looked at that, too. Then looked up again.

Gant said, ‘It struck me as awfully odd. I thought you should know.’

‘Why?’ Kingship asked stolidly. ‘What is this supposed to be leading up to?’

‘May I ask you one question, Mr Kingship, before I answer that?’

‘Go ahead.’

‘He never told you he went to Stoddard, did he?’

‘No. But we’ve never discussed things like that,’ he explained quickly. ‘He must have told Marion. Marion must know.’

‘I don’t think she does.’

‘Why not?’ Kingship demanded.

‘The
Times.
Marion gave them the information for that article, didn’t she? The bride-to-be usually does.’

‘Well?’

‘Well there’s no mention of Stoddard. And in the other wedding and engagement articles, it’s mentioned when some-one’s attended more than one school.’

‘Maybe she just didn’t bother to tell them.’

‘Maybe. Or maybe she doesn’t know. Maybe Ellen didn’t know either.’

‘All right, now what are you saying, mister?’

‘Don’t be sore at
me
, Mr Kingship. The facts speak for themselves; I didn’t invent them.’ Gant closed the year-book and put it in his lap. ‘There are two possibilities,’ he said. ‘Either Corliss told Marion that he attended Stoddard, in which case it might conceivably be a coincidence; he went to Stoddard and he transferred to Caldwell; he might not have known Dorothy any more than he knew me.’ He paused. ‘Or else, he
didn’t
tell Marion he went there.’