Read Online Date for Murder by Louis Trimble - Free Book Online Page B

then mine right there. That door opens into a storage closet between my room and the Major’s suite. It goes all the way to the far end.”
    “All right, Bayless,” said the Chief, “might as well start waking ‘em.” He went to Link’s door and inserted the key.
    The lock clicked over, and the Chief took his handkerchief and gripped the outer edge of the knob. Fingerprints on a doorknob were usually inside where a man’s fingers would grasp to turn. The door wouldn’t open.
    “Stuck?” Mark asked.
    The Chief shook his head. “It wasn’t locked,” he said, turning the key back. The door opened easily. “I thought it turned backward before.”
    “Are you sure you locked this door?” Mark called to Idell. She was standing in front of Maybelle’s door, and she turned and walked up to them.
    “Quite positive,” she said. “I tried the knob after I turned the key.” She edged into the room behind Mark and the Chief. “Look, Mark!”
    Mark looked. She was pointing to the nightstand beside the head of the bed. The bed itself was to the right of the door, the head butting the hall wall, and the nightstand between it and the door.
    “That package of dates!” she said excitedly. “It wasn’t there before.”

Chapter
VIII
    M ARK stroked his chin and idiotically found himself thinking he needed to shave. The Chief looked at Idell and then back to the nightstand. The excitement in her voice was too obvious to ignore.
    “What dates?” the Chief demanded. “What you mean they wasn’t there before?”
    Idell pointed to the nightstand. A cellophane-wrapped pound package of dates with a little sticker in the center proclaiming them to be Manders’ finest was there with the opened end facing away from the bed. Other than that, the table held only an ashtray containing cigaret butts and a half dozen pits, and an empty whiskey glass. Mark noticed that approximately a half dozen of the dates had been removed from the opened end of the package.
    “As I told you,” Idell said, “after I called Mark I came up here. Everything was just as it is now except there were no dates on the table.”
    “And that was funny, huh?” the Chief deduced wisely.
    “I thought so,” she explained. “Link always ate a package a day at least, and there were only a few pits in the ashtray and no dates at all. It made me feel that—” She stopped and looked at Mark.
    He said to the Chief, “Idell thinks someone poisoned Link’s dates.”
    The Chief grunted and stared at the nightstand. “Yeah,” he said. “Bayless, take this package and hold it. Fingerprints show good on that cellophane. We’ll analyze them dates and see if they got cyanide.” He bobbed his head as if in agreement with himself.
    Mark said, “I don’t think you’ll find any cyanide in those dates, Chief. My guess is that our murderer took the poisoned ones and destroyed them. After Idell went downstairs he came back here and put these here to sidetrack suspicion. Also, they were fixed to make it look like the original package. Notice that six have been taken out and there are six pits in the ashtray.”
    The Chief cocked his head at Mark. “You said ‘he,’ speaking of the murderer. You got any ideas, huh?”
    Mark grinned. “Simply a habit, Chief. A woman could have put the poison there too.” He hesitated and then added, “But a woman couldn’t very well have dragged him out to the pool. He was a big man.”
    “Okay,” the Chief said. “And I suppose you’ll say ‘cause the package is turned away from the bed that’s a clue too, huh?”
    “Possibly,” Mark admitted. “But I’ll bet you a double Scotch at Mickey’s there isn’t any poison in these dates.”
    “And that the autopsy’ll show poisoned dates undigested in Link’s stomach, huh?”
    “I’ll add that too,” Mark said. “He wouldn’t have had time to digest them after that cyanide hit him. My guess is that maybe alternate dates in each row were poisoned, and he ate five