Tell Me, Pretty Maiden (Molly Murphy Mysteries, #7)

“I’m a good friend of his aunt,” I answered. “She naturally wants to find out what has happened to him. All we have to go on are ridiculous rumors.”


“I suppose you can come in,” the boy said. “Room’s in a bit of a state, y’know. Rather a rowdy time last night and only got home at four in the morning. Had to climb in along the tiles.” He opened the door wide and ushered us into an unbelievably untidy room. My gaze went from the unmade bed to the items of clothing that littered the floor to the unwashed glasses on the table.

“Sorry,” he said again.

“What’s your name?” Daniel asked. “Mine is Sullivan and this is Miss Murphy.”

“It’s Ronnie,” the boy said. “Ronald Farmington the Fourth if you want the full thing. Of the Boston Farmingtons.”

“Of course.” Daniel smiled. “And you’re one of John Jacob’s best friends, is that right?”

“Yes. Bertie, JJ, and I. We’re thick as thieves. We hit it off instantly when we met as freshmen.”

“Is Bertie the one who has the room across the hall?”

“That’s right.”

“Is he likely to be at home?”

“I should say so. He has a paper due tomorrow and he was up almost as late as me last night, so he’ll probably be working away like a madman.”

“I’ll go and bring him in then,” Daniel said. “That way we won’t have to ask the same questions twice.”

Poor Ronnie was very ill at ease as he cleared the debris of several weeks from an armchair and offered me a place to sit. He was just about finished when Daniel returned with Bertie, who was large and chubby with a round, good-natured face.

“Rum do about Halsted,” he said. “I’m glad somebody’s finally doing something about finding him.”

“So tell us everything you know about the night he disappeared,” Daniel said.

Bertie screwed up his face, thinking. “It was a weeknight,” he said, “but JJ poked his head in the door and said he was going to the theater. He said a new show was opening, a musical review.”

“He was keen on the theater, I take it,” Daniel said.

“Oh rather. Keen on any sort of nightlife—shows and vaudeville and cabarets. He liked pretty girls in skimpy costumes. They were definitely his favorite.”

“Do you remember which theater he was going to?”

Bertie shook his head. “Can’t say that I asked. It was such a regular occurrence that it never occurred to me to find out. Did he tell you, Farmington?”

“All I remember saying is that he’d get himself kicked out if he was caught climbing in late again this semester, and he said, ‘Don’t be such an old fuddy-duddy.’ He said what did he have friends for if it wasn’t to sneak down and unlock the door for him from time to time.”

“So you agreed to do that?”

“Yes, of course. We’d never leave another fellow in the lurch, even though we gave him a ticking off about skipping out when he had a paper to write.”

“He gave us this angelic smile and said that he suspected his little excursion was really going to be worth it,” Bertie added.

“Meaning he was meeting someone there, do you think?” I asked. “A girl?”

They looked at me as if they were surprised I was joining in the conversation.

“Could be,” Ronnie said. “He was always falling in and out of love with some girl or another.”

“But he didn’t tell you anything about the one he was going to meet?”

“No, I was rather busy, late on my own paper, you know. And my father had given me a devil of a talking to about my grades, so I was more concerned with my own problems.”

“Are there many theaters in town?” Daniel asked.

“Only three or four, counting the vaudeville place.”

“So someone might have remembered seeing him that night, if he was a regular.”

“They might,” Ronnie agreed.

“And I presume he didn’t come home after the theater?”

Bertie shook his head. “We waited up to let him in. He’d throw a pebble up at Ronnie’s window and then one of us would creep down and open a downstairs window in the common room for him to climb through.”

“But two o’clock came and he still hadn’t shown up,” Ronnie added, “and we got fed up. We had early classes the next morning so we said ‘to hell with him’ and went to bed. And next morning we found his bed hadn’t been slept in. And Bertie said to me, ‘You don’t suppose he went home with some floosie, do you?’ We heard nothing more until the police came.”

“What was your reaction when the police told you what he was supposed to have done?” Daniel asked.