The Valentine Estate

By Stanley Ellin

Edgar Award Finalist: A former Miami Beach tennis pro discovers the dangerous price of marrying for money in “one of the year’s best chillers” (The New York Times Book Review).

There was a time when Davis Cup winner Chris Monte had it all. Now, down and out in Dade County, restringing racquets at a South Beach tennis shop and hiring himself out for an occasional lesson, he’s dead broke. Then, along comes Elizabeth Jones, a mousy student with an irresistible proposition: fifty thousand dollars in exchange for marrying her. As sole beneficiary of the Valentine estate, Elizabeth is set to inherit a fortune. There’s only one stipulation: She must be married. She’ll collect, they’ll divorce, and Chris will get paid off. Simple.

But there are a few details Elizabeth left out, including the other claimants who are ruthlessly scheming to get their shares; her former boss, a goon with shady connections; her institutionalized mother, the target of whispers and gossip; the syndicate representative behind the execution of the will; and the pressing question of the actual identity of the deceased. Before long, Chris is in over his head. And wondering what his real part is in this twisted game of family secrets, Chris has good reason to fear that in agreeing to marry Elizabeth, he’s set in motion the carefully drawn plans for his own murder.

From a Mystery Writers of America Grand Master, The Valentine Estate is a gripping thriller and was named an Edgar Award finalist for Best Novel.

• Language: English
• Publisher: MysteriousPress.com Open Road
• Release date: Mar 7, 2017
• ISBN: 9781504042697

Stanley Ellin

Stanley Ellin (1916–1986) was an American mystery writer known primarily for his short stories. After working a series of odd jobs including dairy farmer, salesman, steel worker, and teacher, and serving in the US Army, Ellin began writing full time in 1946. Two years later, his story “The Specialty of the House” won the Ellery Queen Award for Best First Story. He went on to win three Edgar Awards—two for short stories and one for his novel The Eighth Circle. In 1981, Ellin was honored with the Mystery Writers of America’s Grand Master Award. He died of a heart attack in Brooklyn in 1986. 

Book preview

Part One

1

At eleven o’clock that sultry April night, Christopher Shaw Monte, age twenty-eight and dead broke as ever, was in the tennis shop of Cobia Isle Spa on Miami Beach restringing a racket and daydreaming of fifty thousand dollars when in walked this girl and apologetically offered him fifty thousand dollars to marry her.

And in so doing, activated the carefully-drawn plans for his murder.

Part Two

1

At midnight, he closed up the shop, put on his crash helmet, and trundled the big Harley-Davidson out to the road, well away from the spa’s cabanas before he made an explosive takeoff. The cabanas were luxurious, six-roomed cottages, and at one hundred dollars daily per occupant, their occupants were entitled to an unbroken sleep.

Heading south by way of Pine Tree Drive and Alton Road, he kept to a sedate rate of speed. Miami Beach cops were bilious about motor cycles anyhow, and in the past few months even more bilious about Chris Monte, motor cycle or not. He couldn’t altogether blame them for that. Here they thought they had finally nailed McClure, the Big Money from Detroit, the evil genius whose buying into the Beach was too much for even them to swallow, really thought they had nailed him on a hit-and-run manslaughter, when along comes this Monte, this local boy turned Benedict Arnold, and swears to it that at the moment of the crime he was playing pat-a-ball with Mr McClure under the floodlights on court number 3 behind the spa. No other witnesses. Just McClure and Monte alone on court number 3 while some anti-McClure mobster named Zucker down from Detroit was being fatally run over on La Gorce Drive ten minutes away.

‘Ah, come on, Monte, what the hell kind of story is that? You and McClure out there playing tennis at one o’clock in the morning?’

‘Yes, sir, Lieutenant, sir. I’m only the instructor there, and Mr McClure is the big boss. Any time he wants his lessons I’m supposed to oblige. Anyhow, why pick on him? The Herald says these Syndicate boys own shares in every fancy hotel up and down the Beach. You want to be fair about it, you ought to work through them alphabetically.’

It had been tactless to say that, to suggest that the police might have their own private preferences as to who could or could not have somebody run over on La Gorce Drive, because between that snide suggestion and the fact that McClure got away with murder Chris Monte was marked Very Lousy by all the law in Dade County.

The sad part was that he had told the truth. It was only after the cops had hauled him in for questioning that he realized the hundred dollars McClure had paid him well in advance to drunkenly scramble after McClure’s drunken volleys on court number 3 – between them they had killed almost a bottle of Hine V.S.O.P. – was simply alibi money. Too late then to fling the hundred dollars, ten crisp tens, into McClure’s smiling face, because the whole hundred had already gone down the drain on what should have been a sure thing quiniella at the jai-alai fronton.

Christopher Monte, the pigeon.

At Fifth Street, Chris turned oceanward and joined the late night traffic of pigeons homing over the causeway from the fronton, the dog track, the trotters. Fifth Street, the hub of the tired old South Beach, was a goner, said the wheelers and dealers. It was a blight, a put-down for tourists entering Miami Beach from this end of town, it had to go. Soon it would. The bulldozers would roar, the shabby frame houses and stores and shanties would be swept away, and there would arise in their place a series of hollow-tile, high rent, Utopian developments. If Papa Victor Monte had only bought the house on Fifth the way he was always going to, it would have meant hitting the jackpot when the real estate interests moved in. No need then to brood about other jackpots.

But Papa Victor was a rent payer until the day he died, the savings for the down payment on the house always blown at the last minute on some long-shot at Hialeah or Gulfstream or Tropical Park. Papa’s trouble might have been vocational. He had been a waiter, a bald, flatfooted, near-sighted, bad tempered, restaurant waiter, and it was Chris’s conviction, bred of close observation, that no restaurant waiter can rest easy at night unless he has bet too much on a loser that day.

The shed attached to the old house fronting Fifth Street was locked. Chris unlocked it, snapped on the light, and trundled the Harley-Davidson in beside the little Honda parked there. On the dirt floor at the Honda’s rear wheel stood a can of gas and on top of the can rested a sheet of paper on which was neatly inscribed in large block letters ‘Use me now!’ It was young Dominic Monte’s way of reminding his big brother that yesterday the H-D had run out of gas halfway up to Cobia and that an ounce of prevention was worth a gallon of cure.

Chris dutifully filled his tank, and then, mindful of Dom’s reproachful look if he did otherwise, replaced the can of gas on its steel rack against the wall. Dom was twenty to his twenty-seven, a skinny, mop-headed, literary-minded, Miami University twenty at that, but he was in charge of the household all right.

Funny thing. Dom had been – how old when mama died? – five years old, but he was mama all over again. Just as concerned about his brother’s affairs, just as fuzzily idealistic about life, as ingenuously blind to its realities as mama. It had to be heredity.

Not in Christopher Monte’s case though. In his case it had to be something else, because while he was so much what Victor had been, Victor hadn’t even been his natural father. But it was all there in the stepson, Victor’s gambling and violent temper and sometimes dangerous pride, the only thing missing being the old man’s peasant endurance, the philosophic endurance of the Calabrian donkey which knows that being regularly kicked in the rump is part of the life process itself.

‘Victor,’ mama would say woefully, ‘you lost again, didn’t you? The rent money this time.’

‘Non è colpa mia, Maria. Goddemma horse died inna stretch.’

Non è colpa mia. It’s not my fault. It’s life. Go blame life.

Still, what more could any bald, flatfooted, middle-aged waiter at the Pink Room have asked from life than to have surprisingly won as his bride the sad-eyed young widow who sang there three shows nightly, the girl he hopelessly mooned over every time she stepped on the bandstand? What difference if Mary Shaw did stand beside him at the altar with a belly full of baby? Since the baby was completely legitimate, wasn’t it an additional blessing to thus guarantee the ageing second husband a ready-made family? That was Victor’s practical way of looking at things. His boss at the restaurant might complain that the rain kept away the tourists, but Victor knew it was good for the skimpy grape arbour in back of the house.

Chris walked into the house. Young Dominic Monte, the second greatest surprise in Victor Monte’s life, was at the kitchen table hard at work on a pile of galley proofs. Dom had dreamed of going to Berkeley where the action was, but, the Monte bankroll not permitting, had settled for a scholarship to Miami University which he was now enlivening as the rabble-rousing editor of its literary magazine.

‘Those grapevines in back of the house,’ Chris said.

‘Grapevines?’

‘Yeah, the ones papa used to sweat over so much. What happened to them? Anything still growing on them?’

‘Jeez,’ said Dom, ‘there hasn’t been anything growing in the back yard for a long time. Only the same old coconut palm and some weeds. What makes you ask about the grapevines?’

‘Just a thought. Any new geniuses writing stuff for the magazine?’

‘None outside of me.’ Dom hastily gathered together the galley proofs. ‘Come on and sit down. I’ll fix you supper.’

‘I can fix it.’ It was sometimes embarrassing to have the kid so eager to wait on him, right now more than ever. Chris peered inside the refrigerator. ‘What’s in this pot?’

‘Stew. Some of everything. But it’s all right if you heat it up good.’

‘It’ll do fine.’ Chris put the pot on the stove and turned on the flame under it. He leaned back against the stove and folded his arms across his chest. ‘Something wild happened up at Cobia tonight,’ he remarked, trying to make it casual. ‘Something real wild. There’s these people from Boston staying there, Prendergast, along with their hot-pants not married daughter and another girl who’s sort of a combination poor relation and secretary. A mousy type. Elizabeth Jones, and she looks like it. I give her and Hilary, the daughter, lessons every day.’

‘So?’

‘So tonight Elizabeth, the mouse, asked me to marry her.’

Dom grinned broadly.

‘She sounds more like a tigress.’

‘It’s not what you think. She was talking serious business. The way she put it, we get married for a couple of months, I’m paid off for it, then we get divorced and forget the whole thing.’

‘Because she’s pregnant, that’s what it is. Some guy gave her the brush-off after he knocked her up, and now she –’

‘She’s not pregnant. There was this old family friend in England who died and left her all his money. But according to the will it’s not hers unless she turns up there pretty soon along with a husband to show them.’

‘You believe that?’

‘I believe it. Some big lawyer from England flew in here just to break the news to her. The deal’s on the level all right, figuring what his round trip costs. Not that it made any dent in the estate. It’s a big one.’

‘How big?’

‘At least five hundred thousand pounds after death duties. Taxes, that is. Better than a million dollars.’

Dom whistled softly. ‘No wonder she’s desperate. How much did she offer you to marry her?’

‘Plenty. Fifty thousand dollars cash.’ Chris let the kid absorb that in awe-stricken silence for a moment before coming out with it. ‘I told her I’d do it.’

The kid stood there staring at him.

‘Well?’ said Chris.

Dom pointed. ‘The stew is burning.’

It was. Chris turned off the flame angrily. ‘Is that all you have to say about it?’

‘What do you want me to say?’

‘I want you to be practical. There’s nothing wrong with the deal. Nobody gets hurt, and everybody winds up happy.’

‘If there’s nothing wrong with it, why are you selling it so hard?’

He was still the kid’s hero, that was the trouble. It was the albatross around his neck, this hero-worship. It had been from the time Dom used to squat on his scrawny little hunkers in the back yard watching him belt a ball against the shed, waiting only for the chance to race after the errant ball and hand it back to him like someone making an offering to Jove.

Victor had taken the kid along to see him in his first National Singles at Forest Hills when he was sixteen, and he had been conscious through every match of Dom’s eyes avidly fixed on him, Dom’s tense little face somehow always vivid among all those other faces in the stands. And when Lew Hoad polished him off in straight sets in the semi-finals – no one in the world could have taken Lew that day, much less a green kid of sixteen – it was the thought of Dominic Monte’s anguish that drove him to push the last set to an agonizing twenty-six games before he went down and out. That was the trouble. A hero just wasn’t allowed to be human.

Not allowed to do things the beach boy way, that was for sure. The look in the kid’s eyes was telling him that now.

And, ironically, he was the one who had given the kid this slant on the beach boy way of life, had forbidden him to take a job at some Gold Coast hotel smearing sun-tan oil on rich, lonely ladies. Better to be a busboy hauling dirty dishes than that, he had said, which was why Dom earned his spending money hauling dirty dishes at Picciolo’s restaurant during the evening rush.

That’s how it went. You wrote the music and sooner or later someone was going to play it back to you.

There was a half bottle of McClure’s expensive brandy on the pantry shelf. Chris took it with him into his bedroom and slammed the door shut behind him.

‘And fifty thousand dollars,’ the kid said, raising his voice to be heard through the door. ‘Funny it just happens to be fifty thousand, isn’t it?’

The fine, honey-coloured brandy tasted like acid going down.

2

But it was funny that the girl had hit on fifty thousand as his price. One of those crazy, unnerving coincidences.

For all she knew – for all he himself knew – he might have settled for a lot less. But through her stammering confusion as she proposed the deal, the one thing that had come out loud and clear was that magic number.

The nemesis number.

He lay there sleepless in the dark unable to get nemesis out of his mind.

The day after he had taken his first Wimbledon, Jack Kramer came to his hotel off New Bond Street with the contract for the pro tour ready to be signed. You made your reputation as an amateur, you cashed in on it as a professional. Now pro tennis wanted him and Jack Kramer was pro tennis.

Frenchy Barbeau was his coach then as he had been from the beginning. Frenchy was dried-out, white-haired, and mean, and what there was to know about tennis, he knew. He dated back from the days of the great Frenchmen, of Cochet, Lacost, and Borotra, and he had taken them all at one time or another. Tilden, too. Now in Chris Monte he had found a great one all his own, and he was worse than father and mother and watchdog about it.

And he loved money. The joke they told on the circuit was that Frenchy Barbeau spent half each year in America making money and the other half in France counting it. He used to groan doling out Chris’s allowance while they were on the road.

‘You break the dollar bill,’ he would warn, ‘you never put him together again.’

He still spoke with the same ripe, Maurice Chevalier accent he had brought with him to America back in the 20s. Queepmen was his pet word, and it had taken Chris Monte, a gangling fourteen-year-old fresh off the public courts at Flamingo Park, quite a while to realize that it meant equipment – the arm, the legs, the heart, and the head – everything that goes into the making of a great one.

‘You ’ave the queepmen you win the big ones, then this Jackie Kramer he comes to us,’ he promised long years before that big Wimbledon.

Now with Kramer coming up to them on the hotel elevator he warned, ‘You say nothing. I talk. You listen.’

‘Fifty thousand,’ said Kramer.

‘No,’ said Frenchy.

‘That’s my offer,’ said Kramer.

‘No,’ said Frenchy.

Chris Monte, Davis Cup star, USLTA singles champion, French singles champion, All-England singles champion, stood there and listened in horror. With fifty thousand dollars he could buy the world, tie a string around it, and dangle it from his little finger. But there was no use saying anything, because his signature alone on the contract wouldn’t count. He wasn’t old enough for that by a couple of months. Frenchy had to sign too, and he knew Frenchy wouldn’t.

When Kramer was gone Frenchy said, ‘You know how much he give Lew Hoad? One hundred ten thousand. You know how much he give you next year? One twenty-five. Also, right now somebody on the pro tour like Pancho Gonzalez kill you every time, wood, clay, or grass. We wait for next year.’

But next year never came. It was at Rome, in the first round of the Italian Invitational, that it happened. He pivoted to make a backhand return, his foot seemed to stick in the ground, and down he went. He tried to stand up, went down again, and was carried from the court. His knee, the doctors said, shaking their heads over the condition of its cartilage, and it was six months and three operations later before they told him to go ahead and try it out.

He did, gingerly and fearfully, against a big, capable kid Frenchy brought in from the University for the purpose. He gathered courage as he ran out the first two sets with no trouble at all. In the third set he felt the pain coming on, getting a little worse with each volley, but still the leg held up. Then suddenly it happened again. Down he went, and this time made no effort to get up. He just lay there writhing, not so much from the agony in the knee as from the agony of knowing it was all over for him, that some brutal joker up there had pulled the chair out from under him for keeps. Finito.

No fifty thousand. No more press clippings for Dom’s scrapbooks. Only the job as Frenchy’s assistant at Cobia, with Frenchy around to remind him now and then, half-pityingly, half-venomously, that for two sets anyhow Chris Monte could still hold his own. It was just too bad, said Frenchy, that tournament tennis wasn’t a two set game.

It was a rotten job but the only one for him, because Frenchy, unlike others who tried him out on their payroll, understood and grudgingly tolerated the need for those occasional boozing sprees or those unpredictable disappearances when he’d head away from home on a motor cycle as fast and far as he could, winding up in New Orleans or New York or even San Francisco, living it up there with the coffee house crowd until he was ready to ride back to reality again.

Fifty thousand dollars.

He hadn’t even understood what Elizabeth Jones was trying to tell him at first. When he finally made some sense of it he had explosively said, ‘Hell, no.’ Then, when she looked stricken – he couldn’t judge whether it was because of his refusal or the contemptuous way he had put it – he had angrily said, ‘Look, we hardly know each other. Why don’t you go buy yourself some other boy?’ because he desperately wanted to say yes and hated himself for it. He wasn’t overly fond of the girl either. She was the shrinking violet type, always breathlessly apologizing for knocking a ball out of bounds, always quick to deprecate her own playing. There was a constant temptation to browbeat her just to see if she’d ever get up enough nerve to snap back.

Then, as apologetically as if she had just knocked a ball out of bounds, she told him what was in the deal for him.

She knew the magic number all right.

And when she spoke it, he knew, no matter how Dom might feel about it – how he himself felt about it, for that matter – that she wouldn’t have to buy herself another boy.

3

He woke at dawn, blear-eyed and heavy-headed, found there was no use trying to get back to sleep, and, after a cup of black coffee, drove up to Cobia. The ground-keepers were not yet at work around the main building of the spa or its cabanas, but beyond the grove of casuarina trees which served as a windbreak between the bayfront and the cabanas there was the usual early morning activity.

This was Frenchy’s territory. The main building and cabanas were the charge of Augie Bloom who fronted for McClure, the money man of the enterprise, but everything beyond them – the outdoor pool, the building housing the indoor pool and sauna and gym, the pitch and putt green, the largely unused handball courts, the marina, and especially the dozen flawlessly surfaced en-tout-cas tennis courts which made Cobia Spa a magnet for the tennis crowd – all this was Frenchy’s private concession.

The tennis shop was as Chris had left it the night before. The freshly strung racket on the work bench – he must have been in a complete daze after the girl left because he couldn’t even remember finishing the stringing job – the litter of bills and equipment orders on the desk, the loaded ashtrays, the empty cognac bottle. That was something else. He had been grateful for McClure’s regular gifts of the Hine V.S.O.P., but from now on he could afford to buy his own.

He looked at his watch. It was a little after six-thirty. At eight, so Elizabeth Jones had assured him, she would meet him as usual for the daily tennis lesson. The thought of the meeting tightened his nerves and added to the queasiness of his hangover.

For one thing, the embarrassing details of when and where and how he’d get his share of the jackpot had to be worked out. All right, he hadn’t gone to the girl looking for the deal, she had come begging to him, but that wouldn’t make getting down to the fine print any less embarrassing.

For another thing, the girl would be Mrs Christopher Monte very soon, even if only on a marriage licence, which raised some delicate questions. What to call her, for instance. Miss Jones, as he had up to now? Elizabeth? Hey, you?

Could he even continue to bill Prendergast, her boss, for the future Mrs Monte’s tennis lessons? That wasn’t as foolish as it sounded. He was at the usual financial low, a fifty per cent cut of each lesson plus any tips coming his way made up most of his income, and he had the house to keep up and Dom to provide for. To take off from the job now and make that trip to London he’d need a large chunk of cash. But his credit was shot with everyone who knew him. Frenchy, Augie Bloom, all of them. They wouldn’t lend him a dime any more, figuring he was odds on to blow it on the horses or jai-alai before it had a chance to cool in his pocket. McClure? No, McClure’s business was lending money, but not in a nice way. I lend you five this week, you pay me back six next week or you get your arms broken. He was a great guy with the handouts, McClure, with the cognac and the hundred dollars alibi money, but he was an unhealthy character to do business with. If the fifty thousand didn’t materialize, and McClure didn’t get his money and interest back –

When the nerves reached a certain tension – Chris always thought of it as sixty-five pound pressure, just a little more than the best racket could bear in the stringing – and when there was no way of releasing the tension by hitting the bottle or taking off on the motor cycle, there was one sure treatment left. He cleaned up the shop in slapdash style, took a pair of rackets and his kit-bag, and hied himself off to the building housing the indoor pool. There, after a quick plunge, he put on shorts, socks, and sneakers, and carefully wound the elastic bandage around the treacherous left knee. Ready now for the familiar, soothing treatment in self-hypnosis, he walked over to the handball courts.

One court, the last in line, was his private preserve. On its concrete wall he had painted a broad white stripe representing the tape of a tennis net. Dead centre in the far backcourt on what would be the