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Helen Reilly
Name Your Poison
An Inspector McKee Mystery
“The best Inspector McKee mystery yet! Highly emotional, intricately plotted, and tough to guess.”—The New York Herald
“Verdict: Satisfying.”—The Saturday Review of Literature
St. Swithin Press
First published by Random House, 1942
Cover art by Gerald Gregg
Copyright by Helen Reilly
All rights reserved
ISBN: 978-1-927551-26-4
Chapter One
A WEDDING GUEST DOES NOT TARRY
There were no police at the wedding on the afternoon when Julie’s cousin, Mouse Tilden, was married in the tall narrow house on Twenty-second Street. There should have been phalanxes of them, Julie thought later, and more at the Hotel Sandringham. But no one knew then, neither the people involved, nor Inspector McKee, who was to conduct the investigation that ranged over three states, or even the twisted and devious mentality that was so soon to commit the most final of all crimes.
It was a moot point with Julie afterward as to whether murder didn’t cast its shadow before it with a thousand signs and portents, dark signs, terrible portents, in the disguise of small oddities, irrelevancies, deviations from the normal that were so slight and so scattered that one didn’t pay any attention to them at the time.
But they were there. Mouse cried in the night, cried dreadfully in the wretched little room at the end of the second-floor corridor that had been hers for most of her thirty-three years.
“Mouse, Mouse, dear…”
Julie got up, a slim, white-faced figure, her eyes large and dark with sleep, wrapped a robe around herself and went to her cousin’s door. “What is it, Mouse? Let me in.” Mouse didn’t let her in. She said mumblingly that it was nothing, and Julie went back to bed.
The next day the flowers arrived. Before that the clock was smashed and feet raced on the stairs when Julie spoke of her own impending marriage to Brian. Then there was the rain, a cold sleety rain, and, above all, there was the house itself, the old, dim, airless house crammed with furniture and the accumulated possessions of too many lives.
Dressing on the morning of the wedding, doing her lips before the pier glass on a bureau as big as a pocket battleship, Julie reflected that she had been lucky to escape. Mouse hadn’t, but she could now. Julie’s mother and hers had been sisters. They had taken flight from the ancestral tomb when they married, only Mouse’s parents had died when she was little, so Mouse had come back to live here with Aunt Sarah, the third of the Jennings sisters. All that was over now. Sarah was dead. She had died five months earlier, and she had left her entire estate to “My dear niece and companion, Margery Innis Tilden.”
Julie went downstairs at seven to get some coffee. Mouse’s telegram saying that she was going to be married had only reached her the day before, and there were a million things to do. She found Mrs. Racker, the elderly housekeeper, bumbling around in the enormous kitchen-basement. Mrs. Racker sipped her tea out of a saucer and looked gloomily through the small, barred window.
“Happy is the bride that the sun shines on,” she said in a sepulchral voice. “I don’t like it, Miss Julie. Look at that rain. Miss Mouse deserves better than this, she does. Why couldn’t she wait? Why did she have to do things in such a hurry?”
Julie explained, patiently, that Lieutenant Westing, the man Mouse was going to marry, had got his furlough sooner than he had expected. “They couldn’t put it off, Mrs. Racker, they’ve only got two weeks. They’ve waited almost five years; isn’t that long enough?”
Five years, she thought. Would she wait that long to marry Brian? Of course she would, if she had to. But it wasn’t going to be necessary. The impediment between them would be removed in less than two weeks.
“Mr. Joe’s been real steady,” Mrs. Racker conceded. “Every Saturday night as regular as the clock he’d turn up at the front door with his box of candy. It had roses on the lid and a pink ribbon around it. How Miss Mouse’s face would shine when I’d tell her he was here! Up the stairs he’d go to chat with Miss Sarah before they could have a word alone together. She was a great one for news. But what a shame that with Old Miss dead, and his own mother that he had to support dying, too, he had to be took off to the army I don’t like that sister of his, either. She’s a limbful of mischief, and Miss Mouse is going to have trouble with her, you mark my words…Scat!”
This last objurgation was addressed to a small battalion of black beetles exploring the iron sink at which Mrs. Racker was rinsing her cup. Julie shuddered and escaped. But not before the old woman said darkly, “I suppose she’ll be here?”
“She” was Frances Ashe, Julie’s friend and a relation of both Mouse’s and hers by marriage. It was through Frances, who lived there, that she had gone to Hoydens Hill where she met Brian. They had met before, of course; Brian had known the family for years, but only casually and at widely spaced intervals.
Frances arrived as she reached the first floor. She was forty, but didn’t look it. Small and slight, her soft mop of blue-white curls would have made any other woman’s skin bilious, but hers was clear biscuit color and, in contrast with her delicate features, her hair gave her a distinction that made mere beauty seem dull.
She had had a telegram, too. Mouse was a little afraid of Frances, of her sophistication and smartness and of her gay-edged tongue, but she knew she could depend on her.
Frances wasn’t alone. She came in accompanied by a carpenter, a caterer’s assistant, two cleaning women and three handy men. She gave Julie’s scarlet slacks and sweater an approving glance. “The bed at the hotel was frightful,” she said, “but softer than it would have been here, probably. Put a kerchief round your head, darling, or your hair will be a mess.” Stripping off her gloves and divesting herself of her mink coat, she asked about Mouse and began giving swift and competent orders.
Both she and Julie had worked hard the day before. They worked equally hard that day. They were very fond of the big, square, grave girl who had been a slave to Sarah’s whims for so many drab years and who was coming into her own at long last, and they wanted her wedding to be a success. There were various interruptions. The bridegroom’s young sister was one of them.
Rosetta Westing was a plump, pretty girl of twenty who looked sixteen and behaved on occasion as though she were six—a spoiled six. She resented her mother’s death, resented Joe’s marrying, resented Mouse. “Is there any way I can help?” She stifled tears in a doorway and looked at Julie and Frances. In the middle of the morning, Frances said, “You can take that expression off your face, child, and go to work. This isn’t a funeral; it’s a wedding.”
The rain kept on falling and Mrs. Racker sulked. People came and went. The house was at sixes and sevens. At last it was done.
Mouse was married at three o’clock on the dot that afternoon, in green. She had refused to
