Invitation to Murder

by Zenith Brown

  Fish grinned at him. “If it’s one you find too painful to bear with your customary equanimity, sir,” he said graciously, “I’ll be glad for you to cease and desist from any further—”

  “The lady’s waiting, Mr. Finlay,” Reeves said. “Go, and keep away from that infernal Rock. Both men and horses have died there. It’s a grave fit only for a monster. Go, and come back. And shut that door . . . I don’t like the sound the wind’s making. There’s a storm rising. My only prayer is we’ll get through this thing without the devil taking another toll. The force of evil is strong at Enniskerry. Jim Maloney’s trying to exorcise it has only strengthened it. God go with you, Fish, and for the love of heaven try to use your head.”

  Fish closed the door, shutting out of the loft room the wail of the wind funneling up from the door under the stairs, left or blown open. So was the door at the end of the passage. The salt tang of the sea was rich with the fragrance of ripening fruit ransomed from the captive branches, their leaves shivering, bound to the iron frame of the cordon. He buttoned his raincoat and stepped into the path and left toward the terraced garden. In the green turf corridor he stopped and looked up at the stable. Caxson Reeves was in the hayloft window at the gable end, watching him. He grinned and turned, looking for Alla Emlyn, the fragrance of wet roses in his nostrils, the pounding roar of the waves, the sucking vacuum of the Chasm and the lost moaning of the wind in his ears.

  CHAPTER : 24

  Jenny Linton came up the steps without looking back at the stable, crossed the verandah and came into the hall at Enniskerry, the raindrops glistening like diamonds in the short tendrils of her curly dark hair. In front of her, coming to the door, was Mrs. Emlyn, carved ivory with the gift to move, a shining black broadtail cape around her shoulders, her bag in her black-gloved hand. Beside her, shorter than she, heavily moving, was the thick misshapen figure of the hunchback whose limousine was waiting outside. Jenny went forward. In the door, half open, half closed, of the small reception room at the left she could see Nikki, hovering, restlessly, just inside it, his eyes darting like blue dragonflies. Behind him her mother was sitting, watching him impatiently, not aware of Jenny in the hall.

  She put her hand out to Alla Emlyn.

  “I’m very sorry. I wish there was something I could do. I liked Peter. I’m sorrier than I can ever say.”

  Alla Emlyn had stopped. She stood rigidly, not seeing the outstretched hand. Purposely, Jenny knew as she turned to the man beside her, his body stunted like a blast-whipped pine or a tree pruned hideously by a hook in a devil’s hand, his head like the egg of some great prehistoric bird set deep into his twisted spine.

  “I’m Jennifer Linton, Mr. Durban,” she said. Her eyes looking into his lighted softly as he put his hand out and took hers. She smiled. “I saw you last night but I didn’t have a chance to meet you.”

  “It’s a pleasure, Miss Linton.” His voice was deep and kind. “Alla tells me you were going to marry Peter.”

  Jenny’s eyes were grave again. “No. That isn’t true,” she said. “I liked Peter. I didn’t love him, and we wanted such different things from life. And I’m already in love with someone else.” She turned to Alla. “It’s Fish Finlay, Mrs. Emlyn.”

  Alla Emlyn stood, carved ivory, the gift of motion taken away. Durban took Jenny’s hand again, smiling at her. “Whatever life you want, I know it’s good. Goodbye for the present. Come, Alla, we must go.”

  “No. I’m staying.”

  She peeled off her glove with a gesture so abrupt that her white hand appeared like a magic hand shining out of a black drawn curtain.

  “You go, Durban. I’ll call you later.”

  He looked at her, his eyes clouding, shaking his enormous head. “Don’t be impulsive, Alla. And don’t stay too long, my dear.” He bowed to Jenny and went out.

  Behind her, Jenny heard her mother’s voice. “Nikki, for heaven’s sake can’t you sit down and be still for half a minute?”

  Jennifer Linton, can’t you stop squirming for half a second? Go to your nurse, you’ll drive me mad! Familiar words, sound the same. Nikki was beginning to irritate her mother too.

  “I’m just waiting, my darling.” De Gradoff opened the door full wide. “Seeing Durban doesn’t come back and bother you. He’s such a repulsive beast.”

  “He’s not!” Jenny flashed around hotly. “He’s not repulsive. He’s beautiful. Look at his face. He’s wise and wonderfully kind. Just look at his eyes!”

  “Oh good Lord.” Nikki’s blue eyes were bright with relief. “Alla darling . . . I thought you were going with your Quasimodo. . . .”

  Alla Emlyn’s lips tightened. “Later. I’m going upstairs a moment first.” She came over to the door and looked at Dodo. “Darling,” she said calmly, “are you quite sure you heard the clock strike four? Are you quite sure it wasn’t three instead of four?”

  “That’s strange, you know.” Dodo was suddenly interested. “I’ve been bothered about it all morning. It seems to me it was three. I—”

  “Nonsense.” De Gradoff cut her off so rudely that angry sparks shot out of her violet-blue eyes fixed on him, seeing his own eyes fixed on Alla Emlyn with an instant’s malevolence so intense that it was as if she’d reached out and touched a high-tension wire naked on the ground. Jenny saw her body contract then, her eyes suddenly pale ash-gray, motionless for a fraction of an instant. She seemed to draw herself slowly inward, the shrinking fabric of her whole being changing texture, color and pattern.

  Nikki smiled at her. “My darling, it was four. Alla’s trying to confuse you. She’s really a witch, you know.”

  He looked around. Mrs. Emlyn was no longer there.

  “It was four o’clock. You were so sleepy, my dearest girl, after your Scotch, you didn’t know I’d kissed you good night. Tomorrow we’ll be away from all this, thank God.”

  “Of course, darling.” Dodo smiled quickly. “We’re going abroad. Jenny, you’ll adore flying. Icebergs, they’re fantastic from the air.” She looked at her watch. “Why don’t you tell Moulton to bring us a cocktail, Nikki? The hall bell, darling, this one’s out of order. Jennifer Linton!” Her voice sharpened petulantly. “Look at the hem of that skirt! Come here, you sloppy Joe.”

  Jenny moved, obedient . . . familiar tone, words the same, her cheeks warming at de Gradoff’s lifted brows as he went smiling from the room.

  “Quick, Jenny!” Dodo whispered the words desperately. “Get out of here. Go to Fish. Tell Alla. It was three o’clock, Jenny . . . not four. Hurry, for God’s sake hurry!”

  Nikki was coming back into the room. Dodo dropped Jenny’s skirt.

  “That’s the trouble with cheap clothes, darling,” she was saying. “Nikki, you’re so right. A year in Paris is certainly what this child needs, to teach her how to dress. Go change to something else, please, Jennifer. Elsa will fix it in the morning. And move, child, for heaven’s sake! You’re slow as well as sloppy, my baby precious rat.”

  “Yes, Mother.” She passed Nikki in the doorway, his smile tinged with mockery before he pushed the door to behind her. She crossed halfway over the thick carpet to the stairs and stopped, her throat tight. Nikki needed her mother now: he was depending on her to prove he was in the house with her until four o’clock. But if he found out she knew . . . Jenny turned back. She couldn’t leave her mother alone with him now. She had her hand out to push the door open when she heard Dodo calmly placing the dagger square in Nikki’s hand.

  “—was three o’clock, Nikki. I set my watch by your bedside clock when you were in your dressing-room putting on those horrible black pajamas. You put it ahead so when you counted the tower bell to four I wouldn’t see it was three by your own clock there beside me. My watch is still an hour fast.”

  “My dearest—”

  “No, Nikki.” Jenny heard her mother’s voice, dispassionate and cool. “Up to now I’ve refused to believe—even last night when I had the whole story in my hands. I wouldn’t read past the letter the Argent
ine woman wrote telling her family you’d called from Dijon to tell her how unbearable a night away from her was and you were taking a sleeping pill, and there was one for her in the silver box beside your bed. Even about the rubies I wouldn’t believe. I thought the person who showed me all that was just trying to destroy my happiness. And the Argentine woman’s maid, Nikki . . . she was killed in a motor accident—like Peter, last night. And Polly Randolph . . . and the detective. I see all of it, now. This one lie shows up all the rest. Even our meeting in the rain. Everything’s a lie, Nikki. It makes me sick . . . really sick.”

  “Dodo, my—”

  “No, Nikki! It’s no use!” Her mother’s voice was sharper. “But I’m like the Argentine family, I don’t want a scandal either. I just want you out of here . . . away from where my child is, at once. Go call the airport. Tell them we want a plane, to run us up to Quebec. I’ll go with you so Art Bestoso doesn’t think you’re running away. We’ll switch and fly to Gander and you can get the first plane to Ireland. I’ve got money in my safe upstairs. I’ll give you ten thousand a year for four years . . . as long as the Trust is mine. Use the library phone. And hurry, Moulton’s coming. . . .”

  Jenny caught her breath, hearing Nikki cross the room and Moulton coming from the pantry. She flashed back to the stairway, slipped off her pumps and ran up the stairs, opening the door of her room carefully so her mother wouldn’t hear it and know she hadn’t left the house. She closed it softly behind her, started breathlessly across the room and stopped.

  “—Peter was my son, Mr. Finlay. I’ll see you in the garden in a few moments. I have a debt of honor that must be paid.”

  Mrs. Emlyn was talking on the outside phone between the beds in the alcove. To Fish Finlay. Her voice was low and terrible. Jenny’s throat went dry, her hands clammy cold. She shrank back against the door, blocking it, as Alla Emlyn came out of the alcove, her face, always white, so white it was marble made of snow, as hard and freezing cold, her eyes, filling it, obsidian black, blacker than pitch running before the flames. She had on sneakers and a misty blue film of a raincoat over her black suit. Her hand was thrust into the pocket and through the plastic transparency Jenny could see the dark outline of the revolver. Mrs. Emlyn stopped and stood there, her hand on the gun, her eyes burning into Jenny’s.

  “What are you doing here?” she demanded, her voice the same deadly monotone.

  “It’s my room.” A sudden flash of anger released the paralyzing fear constricting Jenny’s throat. “Nikki’s leaving. My mother’s helping him get away. She’s paying him ten thousand a year to live on. He’s down there now phoning for a plane. I’m going to call Lieutenant Bestoso.”

  She took a step forward. Alla Emlyn stiffened, her hand tightening on the revolver.

  “No you’re not. Stay where you are.”

  “I’m going to call Mr. Bestoso,” Jenny said evenly. “If Peter was my son—” She broke off, flashing around toward the door. Nikki was coming up the stairs.

  “They can be ready for us as soon as we get there, darling,” he was saying, in the confident familiar voice. And down in the hall Jenny could hear her mother, directing Moulton, hear the casual quality of her voice, not the words.

  Jenny steadied herself. “I’m calling Bestoso, Mrs. Emlyn,” she said again, and started forward. But as she moved, Alla Emlyn moved too, brushing past her with the concentrated swiftness of a stab of lightning burning into the tree it strikes. She was past her to the door, brushing it open with one motion.

  “Ah there, darling.” Jenny heard Nikki’s easy voice. “Dodo and I are just running out for a bite of lunch—”

  “Or just running out? No, you’re not, Nikki. Not this time, love.”

  The crash of the gunshot reverberated. The air was sharp and acrid. Without knowing she had moved, Jenny was gripping the door frame. De Gradoff’s body on the floor twitched horribly once and was motionless. She heard Alla Emlyn’s voice then, the words like writing, tangible, ivory-carved.

  “Now you can call your Mr. Bestoso, Jennifer. And call Mr. Durban at the Colony Hotel too, please.”

  There was a long rigid silence, and out of its total unreality Jenny heard the dreadful dispassionate calm of her mother’s voice, as she’d heard it when her mother was speaking to Nikki, telling him what she knew.

  “I’ll call them, Alla. Jenny, you and Alla come downstairs. Moulton—go to the stable, ask Mr. Finlay to come at once.”

  Fish Finlay waited on the turf stairs well up from the heather shivering purple over the rocks. Alla Emlyn’s few moments seemed to have stretched. He moved back up the terrace out of the wind to light a cigarette and stopped abruptly, his mind refusing to register, his feet to respond to the absurdity, like an old swan walking, of Caxson Reeves hurrying, wind-blown, motioning urgently for him to come. He ran then, hollow-cold inside. Bestoso’s car slowing down at the clock tower picked up speed, passing him halfway to the porte-cochere. He ran across the porch behind Bestoso. Dodo and Caxson Reeves were in the hall. He heard Reeves, aridly composed.

  “Mrs. Emlyn has just shot and killed de Gradoff, Art. He’s on the balcony. She’s here, in this room.”

  Two of the other men in Bestoso’s car passed Fish. One was a uniformed officer, one was B. Meggs.

  “Upstairs, Miller. Call Headquarters, and take over.” Bestoso started into the reception room.

  “I’ve called them, Art,” Dodo said. She stood erect. “I was flying him to Canada. It’s my fault.”

  “Okay, take it easy,” Bestoso said.

  “It is not her fault, Bestoso. I killed him.” Alla Emlyn’s voice came through the reception room door. “The gun is on the table there. I’d like to speak to Finlay before I go.”

  Bestoso picked up the revolver and slipped it into his pocket. He motioned Finlay inside.

  “You’d better clear out of here, Dodo. My people are going to—”

  “I’m staying.” Dodo moved in front of Fish to the door. “Don’t say anything, Alla, till we get a lawyer here. Caxey, will you—”

  “Durban will have done that, Dodo,” Alla Emlyn said.

  Fish stopped in the door. She was standing in front of the hearth, her bag and gloves in her hand, white, rigid as her voice, and cold, so cold he caught his breath as he’d catch it coming around a protected corner into a slashing gale out of an arctic sea. Jenny was beside her, pale with shock, suddenly very far away, her eyes meeting Fish’s and passing over him as if he were someone she’d met long ago in the forgotten country of the blind. Bestoso gave him a shove on into the room and waited for B. Meggs before he closed the door on the men suddenly filling the hall.

  “For God’s sake, why did you do it?” he asked.

  Alla Emlyn’s eyes flickered over him, tiger-bright.

  “Because he killed my son.”

  Dodo, moving to the sofa there beside Jenny, caught her breath sharply. “. . . . Your son . . . not . . . Nikki?”

  “No. His father was a Red Army colonel quartered in my aunt’s house when I was fifteen. I told you, Finlay, everything I’ve done I’ve done for Peter. I’ve even been blind to Nikki, letting him fool me . . . me, who knew him as well as I know myself, and as long. I believed him that night in Dijon when he came from the telephone weeping because the Argentine girl was taking the divorce so hard. Until Polly Randolph and Blum died. Then a horrible fear crawled into my mind. Dodo wasn’t sleeping. The Argentine girl was sleepless too.”

  Dodo’s hand went slowly to her throat. Her peachblow makeup and scarlet lipstick were suddenly a plastic mask with no relation to the flesh behind it.

  “You couldn’t have made her believe it either.” Alla Emlyn spoke to Dodo then without glancing at her. “And your daughter saved you, last night. By chance alone. I thought you were dead when Nikki staggered up from the restaurant table. He thought so too.”

  Her eyes were holding Fish’s, but he could see Jenny beside her, luminously pale, a clear clean loveliness in the periphery of the pool
of black intensity Alla Emlyn created.

  “I wanted a rich American girl for Peter. That’s why I arranged Dodo for Nikki.”

  “You—”

  “From lampost to altar, darling. Because you had a daughter right for Peter. But you, Finlay, you said I was making a bum out of him. I decided then he could marry Jennifer, take your job and eventually Reeves’s and be a man. We were going on a trip today. We’d show Jennifer it wasn’t safe here. She could marry Peter and not have to come back. I was confident. I didn’t see that Nikki had already planned it. None of us coming back, Peter, Jennifer, myself. We were all to end in the blazing hell that Peter—”

  She closed her eyes a bare instant.

  “I thought he was drunk—Nikki. Coming from the dance last night. I thought I was making him talk. ‘Is it all true, how clever you’ve been?’ I asked. He laughed. It was true. He and I would be rich forever. He told me, all of it. The Argentine girl. Polly Randolph and Blum, one blow for each from the Randolphs’ lead-filled flask, at the foot of the stone stairs, and the drunk woman to take the blame . . . because Polly and Blum were in contact with Finlay. Finlay escaping the Rock, Dodo escaping because she was in Jenny’s room, away from the little bottle there by the bed. He was drunk, but not with liquor, with his own brilliance, and he told me because today I would be dead, with Peter and Jennifer, and he’d be abroad with Dodo, and another chance at the Maloney money. We came home. I waited for Peter. I gave him the three hundred dollars he wanted. I sent him to hell . . . alone.”

  “You sent him to the girl at the Azores?” Fish Finlay asked.

  “She was going to give Peter the envelope Ferenc Blum left, till people started searching his room—a tall man with a limp, Finlay, and a workman, and the police. She wanted money then. Blum told her it was his insurance policy, and it was addressed to the Sûreté Générale. I didn’t have much money. But when Nikki told me what he’d done, I knew we’d need an insurance policy of our own. If we had Blum’s story, Nikki would get money for us. I waited for Finlay’s light to go out for him to get Jennifer’s car and go to the girl. But it didn’t, and we took the chance and I went to bed.”