Dismount and Murder: Double V Mysteries, #3

By Jacqueline T. Lynch

The owner of a wealthy estate is found dead of a heart attack after his morning horseback ride.  But his son suspects murder.  Is it his young stepmother?  His jealous wife?  The ne'er do well stable groom?  The trusted lawyer?  Or did the butler do it?

 

Juliet Van Allen and Elmer Vartanian, casual partners in the business of ferreting out murderers, take us to the cool, green hills of Litchfield, Connecticut, in the summer of 1950.  It is the eve of the annual horse show, and with the mansion full of glittering guests at the opening ball, the estate is full of suspects.

 

Dismount and Murder is the third book in the Double V Mysteries series set in New England in the late 1940s and early 1950s.

 

If you like the romance and charm of a classic film, this "cozy noir" will remind you of an era when character-driven stories were elegant, subtle—and where greed rears its ugly head over a silver tray of hors d'oeuvres in a ballroom of intrigue or under a caterer's tent on the lawn, while sipping a champagne cocktail.

 

It's murder among the horsey set as the pace quickens and there's danger in the paddock for sleuths who don't listen to warnings.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jacqueline T. Lynch
• Release date: Oct 23, 2013
• ISBN: 9781497712508

Jacqueline T. Lynch

Jacqueline T. Lynch has published articles and short fiction in regional and national publications, several plays, some award winners, one of which has been translated into Dutch and produced in the Netherlands.   Her several books, fiction and nonfiction, are available in eBook and print online.  She has recently published the first book on the career of actress Ann Blyth – Ann Blyth: Actress. Singer. Star.  She writes a syndicated newspaper column on classic films: Silver Screen, Golden Years, and also writes three blogs: Another Old Movie Blog (http://anotheroldmovieblog.blogspot.com)  A blog on classic films. New England Travels (http://newenglandtravels.blogspot.com)  A blog on historical and cultural sites in New England. Ann Blyth: Actress. Singer. Star. (http://annblythactresssingerstar.blogspot.com) website: www.JacquelineTLynch.com Etsy shop: LynchTwinsPublishing --  https://www.etsy.com/shop/LynchTwinsPublishing?ref=search_shop_redirect

Book preview

The owner of a wealthy estate is found dead of a heart attack after his morning horseback ride.  But his son suspects murder.  Is it his young stepmother?  His jealous wife?  The ne’er do well stable groom?  The trusted lawyer?  Or did the butler do it?

Juliet Van Allen and Elmer Vartanian, casual partners in the business of ferreting out murderers, take us to the cool, green hills of Litchfield, Connecticut, in the summer of 1950.  It is the eve of the annual horse show, and with the mansion full of glittering guests at the opening ball, the estate is full of suspects.

Dismount and Murder is the third book in the Double V Mysteries series set in New England in the late 1940s and early 1950s.

If you like the romance and charm of a classic film, this cozy noir will remind you of an era when character-driven stories were elegant, subtle—and where greed rears its ugly head over a silver tray of hors d'oeuvres in a ballroom of intrigue or under a caterer’s tent on the lawn, while sipping a champagne cocktail.

It’s murder among the horsey set as the pace quickens and there’s danger in the paddock for sleuths who don’t listen to warnings.

CHAPTER ONE

Elmer Vartanian lightly touched the old fashioned tumbler by his plate.  The ice cubes glistened in the whiskey but he did not lift the glass to drink again.  The sensation of coolness on his fingertips pleased and soothed him more than taking another sip would.  Focusing on the sensation provided a brief respite from the steady soliloquy of his luncheon companion.  Elmer looked up at Hugh Pomfret, who leaned slightly forward as he spoke, his right arm resting on the table, as if to press his point with his body.  Elmer’s glance dropped on Mr. Pomfret’s signet pinkie ring from Yale.

She’s a decent person, Mr. Pomfret said again.  Suggesting to you that she might have murdered my father sounds utterly ridiculous, but it would haunt me if I didn’t make sure.  He lifted his clenched left hand onto the table, as if for further emphasis.  It fell with certainty, like a judge’s gavel on if I didn’t make sure, but as noiselessly as a butterfly.

Pomfret had clean, manicured hands.  He clenched them often as he spoke and gestured once or twice with a slight flick of the wrist as if he were hailing a cab in the middle of lunch.  His tailored, expensive-looking suit tagged him in Elmer’s mind, and Elmer imagined in anybody else’s, with the appearance of importance and taste.  Elmer sensed something else as well: a mantle of unchallenged charm worn by a man on whom fortune always smiled.  Whatever dark clouds Hugh Pomfret might have suffered, there was a suggestion about him of always finding the silver lining.

Elmer shot a look up the man’s face.  Pomfret was in his early forties, handsome and lean.  A bit of gray at the temples, a slightly receding hairline, but the lines on his face looked good, gave character.  He was aging well, like a man coming into the prime of his life, and knew great things were still ahead of him.  Pomfret checked his watch once or twice, and Elmer suspected that it might not be because he was in a rush.  Elmer wondered if Pomfret wanted to impress him as man with a busy schedule, or if he just wanted to show off the gold Rolex that would have cost an entire year’s salary from Elmer’s job as a museum janitor.

Elmer sat back in his chair and took a deep breath.  His knew his feelings of inferiority led to pugnacious resentment that had gotten him into trouble more than once.  He tried to repress them this time.  The tinkle of ice cubes, the clatter of silverware all around him, and the low buzz of voices in the Bond Hotel restaurant, lulled him rather than distracted.  Hugh Pomfret had invited him here to discuss business.  Elmer wore his one good suit; the black one he’d bought over a year ago when he’d taken that temporary job as Juliet Van Allen’s chauffeur.  It was a bit too funereal for this luncheon, but it was the best he had.  Elmer still felt self-conscious about looking like a thug—though he’d been out of prison for well over a year—especially when seated across somebody like Hugh Pomfret Jr.

Elmer asked, now sipping from his glass, You said that Leon Welch recommended me?

Recommended you very highly.

Elmer doubted that.  Welch was one of Juliet’s friends, or rather the husband of Betty Ann, one of Juliet’s friends.  He had been one of the guests last New Year’s Eve when Juliet’s father, Jonas Van Allen, had planned to be married in his mansion just after midnight.  If it hadn’t been for the murder that night, her father and his bride might be lolling in Rio by now instead of Mr. Van Allen sulking up in Bar Harbor. 

Elmer had helped piece together clues that had led to the murderer, and Mr. Van Allen had paid him for it.  Apparently, Leon Welch had passed it among the wealthy set that Elmer Vartanian was an actual private detective for hire.

He wasn’t.  Elmer had no illusions about either his abilities or his qualifications to be a detective.  Nor did he have any plans to pursue that occupation—so he thought.  Now, in the summer of 1950, it was well over a year since he’d been released from prison.  He’d seen his parole officer for the last time a few months ago, and with his parole over now he was completely free of his past mistakes.  He thought the feeling would be as wonderful as it should have been when he was released from prison—but it wasn’t then and it wasn’t now—both his release from prison and the ending of his parole had left him empty and anxious and wondering what to do.

He had asked his parole officer if it was true that a felon could not serve in the military.  That’s what James Cagney said in the movie he saw, White Heat, where Cagney played a psychopathic killer.  They don’t take cons in the Army.  That’s what Cagney said.

Why do you want to go in the Army? the parole officer had asked, scratching his sagging jowl with a look that passed for amusement.

I missed the last war while I was in the jug.  I feel bad about that.

The parole officer’s eyes involuntarily wandered to the newspaper on his small, beat-up wooden desk.  He wove his fingers together behind his head and leaned back in his squeaky chair, his glance meandering around his dim, shabby office.  I was in Africa, then Italy.  Those were some hellish days.  Don’t envy it.

Elmer crossed his arms and looked down at the stained linoleum floor.  He steeled himself to bear the penance of hearing yet another man’s war experience.

The parole officer did not continue, as if mentally pulling himself up out of that tank turret for once and for all.  This thing in Korea started without you and it’ll finish without you, probably in a matter of weeks.  Forget about it.  Everybody else is going to.

Elmer knew he was not very good at forgetting but prided himself at getting a little better about moving on.  Two weeks ago, he had put in his notice to quit his job as a janitor at the Wadsworth Atheneum here in Hartford, Connecticut.  He liked the museum, but he felt now it was time to start a new course.  He wasn’t sure where he stood with Juliet, except that he probably shouldn’t stand anywhere near her.

She was in Bar Harbor now with her father.  That was fine.

I’m not a licensed detective, Mr. Pomfret, Elmer said, bringing himself back to the present and the dessert cart passing by.  I don’t carry a gun.  I don’t have an office.  I have no police training, and what minimal experience I have has been purely in the service of a friend.

Hugh Pomfret neatly lit a cigarette.  I am not looking for a hard-boiled gumshoe with the smell of stogies and gin on him.  I’m not looking for somebody to hide in the bushes and jump out with a camera ... nothing as sordid as that.  I just want someone with intelligence and a quiet manner to watch and listen.  I want you to talk to people naturally, as a guest in my home, and to tell me that my fears are unfounded.  If they’re not unfounded, then I’d like you to give me enough warning so that I can go to the police.  Above all, I want discretion.

Discretion.  These rich types were always concerned about discretion.  They didn’t mind getting involved in murder or adultery or theft or any other crime, they just wanted to get away with it.  That was their idea of discretion.

I’m to get to know your stepmother, Sarah Pomfret, well enough to be able to tell you if she killed your father?

Hugh Pomfret smiled, sat back in his chair and flicked the ash from his cigarette into a crystal ashtray.  It sounds even more ridiculous when you say it. 

Elmer watched a nearby lady puff her cigarette on the end of a long holder.  Where am I to do this?

Pomfret took a drag on his cigarette and blew out the smoke, patiently massaging the tiny furrows in his forehead with his right hand.  Sarah will be getting ready for the Litchfield Horse Show.  I’d like to introduce you to her as an acquaintance who writes for one of these picture magazines.  You’ll be there to write some fluffy article about the event.  That will allow you to stay there in my father’s home for the weekend.  She will be preoccupied, and you’ll have enough time and a logical reason to poke around.

I don’t know anything about horses.

Pomfret smiled again, most charmingly. You don’t have to.  It’s better you don’t.  Then you’ll be able to ask all kinds of questions without seeming nosy.  You’ll just seem out of your element.

I certainly will be.

By the way, the horse show is celebrated with a ball the preceding evening.  The location of the ball rotates to different locations in the county.  This year it’s being held in my father’s home and Sarah is hosting it.  It will also serve as a tribute evening to my late father.  Black tie, you understand.

Elmer had never worn a tuxedo in his life.  Sure.

Because my father was so influential in Litchfield County, the ball will be very well attended.  Feel free to invite someone if you wish.

Who will be escorting your stepmother?

I don’t know.  Pomfret thought a moment.  Sarah is a lovely woman.  But she’s unusual, different.  Perhaps that’s what my father liked in her.  She’s a very quiet person.  Not timid exactly, but there’s something reserved about her.  I wouldn’t really call her sociable.  I don’t think she ever had a line of beaus on a string, and I don’t expect she does now.  But ... still waters run deep.  I don’t know.

Why do you think she killed your father?

She is the only person I can think of who would have a motive.  You see, I was very shocked when my father had his heart attack.  He’d been out riding that morning.  He always enjoyed vigorous health.  Granted, he was sixty-five years old, but he had the strength and the physique of a much younger man.  I may say, as evidenced by his marrying a woman thirty years his junior, he was a strong, virile man.  I spoke to his personal physician at the time of his death and he confirmed that he’d suspected no heart trouble in my father.  There’s a lot you can’t tell with a stethoscope, granted.  But there are drugs used as well, Mr. Vartanian, in the treatment of equine ailments that can simulate a heart attack in human beings.

What’s her motive?

Sarah is passionate about her horses.  She maintains her own family farm apart from my father’s estate.

Motive?

She married my father for his money. 

Elmer nodded when the waiter offered him coffee, and he watched him pour it into the china cup.  He drank it black, took a sip, and thought back to Juliet’s father almost marrying a younger woman with designs on his wealth.  Apparently, it was a more common problem among the well-to-do than he’d thought. 

Elmer shook his head.  She already had his money by marrying him.

Yes, and he was more than generous, helping to finance her farm, which had been failing for a generation.  But she had his money only while he was alive; the estate was left to me.

She has to leave now?

I’ve told her she can remain for the rest of the year, give her time to get her affairs in order.  When she does return to her own farm, which I expect she will, Sarah will be well set up with a thriving horse-breeding business that my father poured money into for the last five years.

So, she doesn’t really need the bulk of your father’s estate.  She’s independent?

Yes.

Then why kill him?

To be rid of a man she did not love.  Even wealth is a bore when you can’t stand sharing a bed with someone.  Besides, one always wants more money.

Does one?

Pomfret blew out a stream of smoke through slightly curled lips, as if relinquishing his seriousness to a half-hearted smile.  To be sure.

Elmer drank his coffee slowly and did not tell Pomfret until it was time for them to part that he would accept this job.

***

Elmer walked out into the heat of Asylum Avenue, marveling again how air conditioning could make anybody forget it was August.  Lots of stores and restaurants were getting it now, this summer of 1950, putting air cooled in their ads. 

Now if they could only do something about the monstrous, Wagnerian Connecticut Valley summer thunderstorms.

Elmer walked along, his hands in his pockets, thinking about renting a tux.  Buying a decent suitcase.  What would a writer of magazine articles need?  A small pad.  A typewriter?  A camera?  He did not know how to take good photos, and he could not type.  A pad, that would do.  He could scribble and call it notes that he’d type up in the office later.  Good enough.

A hostess gift?  Hmm. 

He’d read a lot of etiquette books in the library.  Juliet would have laughed at him if she knew.  She already knew he was sensitive about being an ex-con.  He felt she could not know, could never know, the yearning to not be taken for a thug — wanting to be better than his father had always said he was, which was pretty low.

He paused at the Isle of Safety, a traffic island for pedestrians, just to get under the red tiled roof and out of the sun for a moment, then he made a break across the traffic to a newsstand for a chocolate bar and a glance at the headlines.  The North Koreans had invaded the South a few months ago, and parallels were the new political yardstick.  The commentators were unrelenting about the threat of communism to the democratic world.  Elmer glowered at the paper.  His inability to get into the fight was only another reminder of his unworthiness. 

He bit the chocolate hard and walked down to G. Fox department store to buy some shirts and a suitcase, and possibly restore his self-esteem.

He was at his leisure this Monday afternoon.  His last day at work as a janitor at the Wadsworth Atheneum had been the previous Friday.

He had not told Juliet about his leaving.  She was still out on a month’s vacation.  It was better this way. 

***

Juliet enjoyed the summer heat as long as it was chased by a sea breeze. 

When the breeze did not blow from the east to sweep across her face with a stirring salt taste, but instead came from the west, she almost imagined that she could smell the hint of burning embers, burning grass, burning buildings.  It wasn’t true, or at least should not have been, three years after the summer that Maine burned. 

That had been 1947, when a severe drought, unusual in the New England states, left the rural lands so dry that they practically ignited in a kind of evil spontaneous combustion.  Again, that was illusion.  Towns burned because the grassland and the farms and the forests burned, and looking for a culprit or even an evil spirit was futile.  They burned so far away from the source because it was hot, and there was so much dry material to fuel the massive fires.

Juliet shielded her green eyes from the sun and squinted again down the street where the great Malvern Hotel had once stood.  She did not go closer.  Other tourists walked up to inspect the rubble that been left after the fire, looking and looking at nothing and yet still seeing in their minds’ eye the grand hotel as it once stood there.  So too, from this distance, Juliet could see the grand hotel where generations of well-to-do had summered, just as her family had done.  She did not mourn the place, exactly, for though she liked those summers in Maine, the well-ordered unvarying routine of the well-to-do was too staid and too boring for her.  She had resented what she felt was a combination of being straitjacketed in the role of a rich man’s daughter, and being told to have fun, that these were her carefree days—within limits.  She did not feel carefree, except when she was alone in the dory rolling along the turbulent coast by herself.   

On the tennis courts back when she was a teen, assignations were clumsily arranged by pimply rich boys.  In ballrooms and patios, the privileged young and old, had danced to My Old Flame, while a few older men, some even her father’s age, leered and flirted scandalously with her, which would have driven her father mad if she had told him. 

Juliet never told him.  Bar Harbor was an illusion.  In her own adolescent way, she had wanted to preserve it for him—then, and especially now.

She felt placed in the same position now, innocence by deceit.  She wished she could preserve something of that pre-1947 fire world for her father, especially now that his whole world was crumbling so terribly.  But there was nothing left here to save.

Eight months had passed since her father had been almost married.  The New Year’s Eve party in his grand home in Hartford, Connecticut, was to celebrate his New Year’s Day marriage to a woman who proved to be quite different from what she seemed.  At the time of the murder, a crude and messy fraud played on Jonas Van Allen by one of his oldest friends, Juliet had sought Elmer’s help to ferret out the mystery of a threatening note.  Together, they unraveled the deceptions among the house party guests, and solved the crime.  

She had spoken very little to Elmer since then.  He had kept his distance.  Due to Chauncey, she thought.  Elmer thought that she and Chauncey were romantically involved.  Juliet wanted to convince him otherwise.  She also wanted to convince Chauncey otherwise.

It was good to have a month off from work.  Both literally and figuratively, she wanted to put some distance between her and Chauncey.  He was her superior at the Wadsworth Atheneum, one of the most prestigious art museums in the nation, where she worked as an administrator.  Because Chauncey was such an insecure man, she wanted to find some quiet, professional way of making him take the hint that she was not interested in him.  She admonished herself again for a lack of courage.  It wasn’t just tact that kept her from telling Chauncey that she didn’t love him.  She loved working at the Atheneum, of being desired by a man after her late husband had so blatantly cheated on her, and she realized quite shamefacedly that she wanted her cake and to eat it too.

Her father, Jonas Van Allen, still sat rigidly in the brightly-painted Adirondack chair in the front yard of his small rented cottage here in Bar Harbor, Maine—smaller than the garage behind his mansion back in Hartford—where he stared at the sea, bundled in his sweater, his tie knotted crisply at his throat, his fingers restlessly drumming the wide, flat, paint-peeled armrests.  He had brought only Frederick, the butler, with him to tend the cottage and prepare his meals.  So different from the days of staying at the Malvern along with any number of cronies of the fashionable set with whom he could gossip.  He stayed in his cottage now, not only because the Malvern was reduced to ashes, but because he did not want to run into anyone he knew at the remaining large hotels yet wanting to be alone in a place that was still familiar.

After the New Year’s wedding that had never happened, and after he had finished with the police questioning and the lurid headlines once again in the Hartford Courant and The Hartford Times, having endured other scandalous headlines only the year before when Juliet’s husband had been murdered, Jonas Van Allen left