13 White Tulips

Frances Crane

• Publisher: MysteriousPress.com/Open Road
• Year: 2022
• eBook ISBN: 9781504075428
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Crime & Mystery Literature
• Index: Literature

A young couple and their dachshund star in a stylish San Francisco–set Golden Age mystery of "high ingenuity" ( The New York Times).
Jack Ivers, a man-about-town with a taste for rich women, has been found dead in his bed. What's particularly odd is that the chief suspect, a surgeon's fashionable wife, claims that she spotted thirteen red tulips upon entering the victim's home—that were somehow replaced with thirteen white tulips by the time she departed.
 
It's up to sleuthing spouses Jean and Pat Abbott to dig through the dead man's questionable past and determine in whose heart a murderous passion blossomed . . .
 
"Amusing and sophisticated." — Daily Star
 
"Smooth." — Saturday Review
 
"Brightly-told excitement, with good dressing and good food as you go along." — Lady

1

It was spring. There was a bloom of pink and pale green over the hills across San Francisco Bay. I sat on the front steps of the red-brick terrace of our modern red-wood-and-plate-glass house. Our yards, front and back, were a series of steep planted terraces. Tulips, hyacinths and white and yellow pansies cascaded down the front terraces.

Our small brown dachshund, Pancho, moved daintily among the spring flowers, savoring their perfume with a blissful expression on his face. At the same time he was watching me. He knew that I felt sad and lonely. He sensed when my sadness grew stronger and, leaving the flowers, he hurried up the steps and settled himself against my knee. The children are away, his big eyes said. But only for three days. They’re happy because they have gone to the beach. You should be happy, too. Lulu Murphy will take good care of them. And, anyway, you still have me.

I stroked his brown satiny coat, caressed his velvety ears and thought how beautiful is the dachshund to those who can really see.

Suddenly he stiffened. His body drew away from my caress. His hackles stood up and his muscles tensed as for a sudden leap. Something he considered dangerous was nearby. Perhaps it was only the unusual. Another dog or cat or perhaps only some insect.

It was a woman. She walked out of one of those spotty fogs which sometimes sit down tight here and there on Russian Hill. This fog lay thick a block or so from our house. The air being windless, it was hugging like a hood a group of houses a short distance to our left.

The woman was young and as she came closer I saw that she was very pretty. She wore a big, loose dusty pink coat of rough tweed. It was a very fine coat, from a great dressmaker. Her small hat of pink flowers matched the coat. She carried a big honey-colored bag. I noticed as she passed our gate that her smart walking shoes matched the bag. Her gloves matched too. The color was a new one called Benedictine.

The girl walked past our place without giving me or the house or Pancho so much as a quick glance. But Pancho left me and hurried to the front gate and watched her down the street. He stood with one forepaw lifted and he twisted his neck so that he could watch her slant-eyed through the palings. That ridge of darker hair along his spine to the very tip of his tail stood straight up.

Well, different incidents affect different observers in different ways. The pretty girl walking out of the fog aroused Pancho’s curiosity and suspicion—it could have been her perfume, which I couldn’t smell from where I sat—but to me she appeared to be only a lovely girl in a very smart coat and a perfect honey of a hat. She did me good. What I needed to cheer me up was obvious. I needed a new hat.

The idea acted like magic. I perceived instantly that the children would be divinely happy at the beach, that Lulu Murphy—my husband’s priceless secretary—was never happier than when out with the kids and thus away from the office and therefore from crime, that Patrick and I had been looking forward to a couple of days away from these kids, whom we loved devotedly but were quite often weighed down by.

By this time I realized that it was practically my duty to hurry downtown and buy a new hat.

I, too, would buy a flowery hat. It would be primrose-yellow because I have yellow eyes and black hair and yellow suits me.

I stood up and Pancho joined me. Suddenly I felt uneasy. Good hats always cost lots of money. We were pretty broke this spring and that was why I had decided until now not to buy a new hat.

Not even a new hat.

We went into the house, Pancho at my heels. Darn it, our trouble was the oil business. Rich one year, broke the next. That was the oil business for you. Damn and blast the oil business. It was wonderful last year with money pouring in. We even had a trip to Europe last year. This year was just the reverse. We had invested in what is called a working interest in our various leases and this year our profits were going into drilling new wells, not coming to us. That is one of the angles of the oil business that I do not like. What I prefer is to have money always coming to us, not going back to drill more wells to bring us more money some time—maybe.

Time for Pat to get some really big job in the detective line again so that we could pay the butcher and baker and Lulu Murphy.

Still, you have to have a spring hat. I had the nice clothes I’d bought a year ago in Paris. A new hat, and there you were.

Besides, I could charge it.

2

Twenty-five minutes later, at precisely noon, I was dressed in my best black suit and about to put Pancho in the patio enclosed by the four wings of our house when the telephone rang.

The dachsie ran ahead of me to the nearest extension with his ears up like little awnings for listening. They went down when he heard the voice of his master.

“Jeanie? Hi, honey. How about lunch?”

In my new hat? I thought. How nice!

“At El Prado?” I asked.

“Nope. Too many women at El Prado.”

I was thinking about the hat. Women go for new hats. I tried guile.

“But I like showing you off, Pat.”

“My idea exactly. We’ll lunch at the Palace for that very reason. I like showing you off.”

“Too many men at the Palace, dear.”

“You don’t mind too many men.”

“No, I don’t. Okay. You’ll recognize me by a new hat.”

“Big hat?”

“Little hat. Very expensive.”

“That’s the stuff. That’s my girl.”

“What-t?” I inquired, getting suspicious.

“You heard me, dear. Meet me at one-thirty by the cigar stand and fetch along a notebook.”

Pat’s favorable reaction to the hat was now clear.

“A client?”

“Don’t know yet. Could be. Isn’t it just my luck to have Lulu Murphy out of town!”

“I’m every bit as competent as Lulu Murphy.”

“You’ll do all right with a new hat,” Pat said. “See you, dear.”

As I changed the usual things a woman carries from a small black bag to a larger one which would also accommodate a notebook, I decided that the prospective client must be a good one. In that case maybe I would also buy a new bag. A honey-colored bag like that big bag the girl in pink carried when she came out of the fog? No, that wouldn’t be practical with kids and a dog. Another black bag, very likely, since it must be practical but still go with my future primrose flowery hat. Antelope? Very expensive, real antelope. Maybe the bag had better wait. Bags cost money, and then there is that tax. A bag isn’t a hat. A bag is not absolutely essential.

I put the dog in the patio, took a cab to Magnin’s, found a frightfully expensive cap of pale yellow primroses which exactly matched my blouse, charged it, and arrived alongside the cigar stand in the lobby at the Palace at exactly twenty-nine minutes past one. Pat wasn’t there yet. Standing nearby was a good-looking, deeply tanned man about Pat’s age. He had striking black eyes, black hair, broad shoulders, and he was almost as tall as Patrick. Well-dressed in town clothes, he still looked as if he belonged in the country.

He kept looking at me. I looked at him. If I were single, I thought—and then Patrick arrived and I thought I must be crazy. There is never anybody who even compares in any way to my tall, lean, handsome, blue-eyed, dark-haired, easy-speaking husband. Pat kissed me and then shook hands with the black-eyed young man.

“My wife, Angus. Jeanie, this is Angus Lyall.”

We said hello. We shook hands. The black eyes, long and rather narrow under thick black brows, smiled when the good-looking mouth smiled. He’s got a spot of Indian in him somewhere, I thought.

“I was wondering about my chances of picking this pretty girl up, Pat.”

“I’m a wife and mother, Mr. Lyall.”

“You can’t trust your best friends any more,” Patrick said. “Where have you been all this time, Angus?”

“Mostly on my ranch near Fresno. Also, in the oil business.

“Oil,” I said, with disgust.

“Jean doesn’t like oil when it stays in the ground,” Patrick said. “Is Mrs. Strehl meeting us here?”

“She’s in her room. I’ll phone her that you’ve arrived. I’ve got us a table in the Garden Court, Pat. You two go along and have them hustle us up some drinks. Bourbon on the rocks for me. Martini for Lee. See you.”

We went along. We came here a lot. All the waiters greeted us as we went to our table. The captain hurried over to take the order for the drinks, asking us how things were, how the kids were, and asking if it would be the usual for us, perhaps, that is Scotch for Pat and for me, now that I am more settled down than I used to be, a martini at lunchtime. I used to try everything new in the cocktail line, in the old days, three or four years ago.

“Gee, he’s handsome, Pat.”

“The captain? Sure.”

“You know I mean Angus. Is he the one from the Marines?”

“Right. Great guy.” Patrick gave me a cigarette and a light. “Hero, too. DSC. Saved a flock of lives at Iwo Jima and spent a couple of years in a hospital. Never know it now.”

“He looks as if he’s done all right in the oil business.”

“So I hear.”

“Who is Mrs. Strehl?”

“Her name is Leonora Strehl. Angus calls her Lee.”

“There’s a surgeon named Strehl.”

“Her husband.”

“There’s a Grace Strehl Harrison, who endows things.”

“His sister. That’s the family and they live in that chocolate-colored stucco house on Green Street that you dislike.”

“You used the wrong word. The house awes me, that’s all. Go on.”

“Dr. Strehl lives there with Leonora, or Lee, as Angus says we are to call her. Call him Angus, by the way. Lee is a lot younger than her husband. The sister, Mrs. Harrison, has a house in Burlingame, but also a suite in the Strehl house on Green Street. She dominates the family, I think. She offered me thirty thousand dollars …”

“No?” I cried, joyously.

“Don’t be like that, Jeanie.”

“Why not?”

“Because I turned her down. The woman is crawling with malice.”

“Oh. Well, we do need money just now.”

“Not that badly. Anyway, we’re here for lunch with Angus and Lee, and it’s all the same case. I mean, it’s the same that Mrs. Harrison came to see me about. A man named Jack Ivers is dead and Mrs. Harrison accuses her sister-in-law, Leonora Strehl, of murdering Ivers. Shush, here they come. By the way, the new hat’s a doll.”

“Thank you. It cost a mint.”

“Good!”

They arrived, and Angus made the introductions and I hung onto my face like crazy to keep from showing surprise. Life is full of coincidences, of course, and it was just one more that Leonora Strehl should be the girl in dusty pink who had walked out of that patch of fog. I glanced at the clock. Two hours and five minutes ago, at half-past eleven, this girl walked past our house. Because of her, I had a new hat. And now I knew why Pancho had watched her like that. It was because she was upset. Dogs observe such things because of their keen sense of smell and their superhuman intuition. To me, when she passed our gate, she was just a pretty woman in a dusty pink coat, with handsome Benedictine accessories and a new flowery hat. But to Pancho she was a worried woman. Worry has its own smell.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• 1
• 2
• 3
• 4
• 5
• 6
• 7
• 8
• 9
• 10
• 11
• 12
• 13
• 14
• 15
• 16
• 17
• 18
• 19
• 20
• 21
• 22
• About the Author
• Copyright