“They did,” said Miss Cole, getting up. “I never could see why. It isn’t as if she ever came alone to see Mrs. Woodworth.”
“If she wandered off, temporarily out of her mind, she might go anywhere she’d ever been before.”
Miss Cole said, looking rather white: “They were all over the place, sir.”
“That’s routine, Miss Cole.” He moved out into the hall. “You’re quite comfortable here? Not nervous at night?”
“Oh no, sir, I have the burglar alarm; and McBride is right out there in his room over the garage—it’s only a step away. And the garage is wired too. Mrs. Woodworth was afraid of getting a car stolen. It’s lonely here, you know.”
“Well, I’ll just wander around the premises, and report all in order to Macloud. And thank you very much.”
“It’s nice of them to send up.”
Gamadge went out into the cool of the porte-cochère, down the steps, and around the house. There were masses of shrubbery, formal flowerbeds and borders, gravelled paths. The old carriage house, gabled and turreted to match the Woodworth residence, was just across the driveway in the rear; now a garage and workshop, gardener’s quarters and toolshed, its upper windows commanded a view of all the cultivated ground, vegetable plots as well as flower plots. They would be within earshot, too, unless McBride happened to be stone deaf.
Behind the garage stretched an orchard, then a stubblefield; beyond that barbed wire cut off the next estate. Alice Dunbar was not here; the police would have been over every foot of orchard and meadow for signs of digging, and nobody could dig unheard, even in the dead of night, nearer the house.
He walked back to his car, and found a little gnarled old man beside it, looking at it with reserved approbation. As Gamadge approached he squinted up at him and put a finger to the brim of his hat.
Gamadge nodded. “Mr. McBride?”
Mr. McBride was far from deaf, and it seemed that he had been in communication with Miss Cole. He said: “I’m McBride. And there’s no news of the young leddy.”
“No, none at all.”
McBride muttered something to the effect that it wasn’t canny.
Gamadge wagged his head. “And I know what you’re thinking, you old image,” he told himself “It isn’t canny because Alice Dunbar wasn’t bonny. If she’d been bonny, or even soncy, whatever happened to her would be canny enough, no matter how horrible.” Looking around him, he said: “You’ve kept this place up wonderfully. I don’t know why the Aaron Means doesn’t keep it on as a convalescent home.”
“I don’t know mysel’.”
“Macloud ought to put it up to Mr. Dunbar.”
The image—he really did look as if he had been hacked out of hardwood—approved of this to the surprising extent of opening the car door, waiting while Gamadge got in, and closing it after him. Finger to hat-brim, he watched the convertible depart.
The August light was mellowing and failing. Gamadge bitterly reflected how much time and trouble it took, this not making a fool of one’s self. If he had been willing to ask a few questions of Macloud, he needn’t have spent all those hours in the library, looking up names and addresses and verifying his data. But nobody could get much farther in this case, or so it seemed, by working in the open; and Macloud wouldn’t be able to back him if he worked out of line.
It was obvious that nobody in authority had connected those two happenings—Alice Dunbar’s disappearance and Mrs. Ames Woodworth’s death. Gamadge hadn’t exactly connected them, he had merely toyed with the idea; and it led to the further idea that Alice Dunbar—who knew so few and such unlikely men—might possibly have known a man through her great-aunt Woodworth. A protégé? Hardly the protégés that Gamadge had already heard of; someone else?
The other one had materialized, and Gamadge felt free to indulge his imagination.
He imagined a sensational little drama: a mysterious stranger arriving, introducing himself, ingratiating himself, making himself familiar with household procedure in the afternoon. He could certainly get an impression of the front-door key, or perhaps he took note of that dining-room window that Gamadge had seen standing open; a french window, masked in shrubbery, across the house from the parlour.
He might have come a little early one Sunday afternoon, when the Russi couple would be out and McBride not working; he would know by this time that Mrs. Woodworth took a nap until teatime. He would go softly up the stairs; wait in the shadows until the old lady came out of her room and began to descend…
“Everything there except his motive,” reflected Gamage, dropped his motive as at present unguessable, and went on to sum up against the landscape gardener, old Mrs. Woodworth’s raffish friend:
He always left his car in the road, an odd thing to do, at least in the winter months. A sensible thing to do, if he didn’t want his licence plate read. An imperative necessity on the day of his last visit to the Woodworth place.
He never looked a servant in the face. Safe enough to look at his hostess, who wouldn’t be on hand to testify against him if he brought the murder off but failed to cover his tracks.
His appearance suggested disguise. Part of the disguise might have been the mannerism that caused Russi to describe him as a gigolo. The all-the-year-round tan, the glasses, the loud clothes and the frightful cravat—not such bad camouflage for a pale young man who normally dressed as neutrally as Gamadge himself did, and whose sight was perfect.
Gamadge, paying his toll on the West Side Highway, was worrying about the young man’s motive again; for without it he couldn’t get anywhere.
CHAPTER FIVE
Comment
WHILE HIS FAMILY was away Gamadge often dined out, to make things easier for his staff of one. Today he had given Theodore the afternoon and evening off, and so when he reached home the house was empty.
Too empty. As soon as he got inside the front door the emptiness hit him in the face. He turned into his office, picked up the telephone, and asked for long distance. When he heard Clara’s breathless voice—she must have been running, could it be possible that in the turmoil of the summer cottage she had felt a solitude too?—he spoke in the flat tone of desolation:
“You’re still alive.”
“And so are you!”
“That’s out of the way, then.” Returning briskly to normal, he said: “I may not be out this week after all.”
“Oh how ghastly.”
“Aren’t you living a full, rich life, my darling?”
“Very. The doggy chases all the bicycles, and the kitty has run away.”
“Get the kitty back,” said Gamadge, sincerely disturbed by this news.
“He’ll be back for supper. He can never catch anything.”
“The cat’s incompetent. He ought to have his affairs taken out of his paws and administered.” Gamadge added: “You say nothing about the boy, Mrs. Squeers; bobbish, I hope?”
“That’s the word.”
“Oh, by the way, Clara; didn’t you say while I was up there, the last week in July it was, that you knew a certain lady who was in the papers at the time and still is? I mean the parent, you know.”
“Why so cryptic?”
“Because we might get in the papers ourselves if I wasn’t; everybody’s so agog about it.”
“I didn’t say I knew her, Henry. I thought I did, but I don’t. I mean I met her five or six times, and I sat next to her at lunch and at a tea; but the last time I saw her she cut me in an elevator.”
“Oh? Why?”
“Well, I bowed first.”
“Clara, I didn’t think you were the sort to push yourself forward like that. What got into you?”
“I just thought she’d forgotten her glasses.”
“What’s she like when she isn’t frightened by ill-bred people like you?”
“Oh, quite pleasant and gossipy; quite an agreeable old b—brute.”
“Watch it,” said Gamadge, who was laughing helplessly. “I think there’s some kind of a law
.”
“We oughtn’t to be laughing at her now.”
“That’s so; I can’t help feeling that they don’t treat their lame ducks very well in that family, though. What would you say?”
“I don’t know. They’d have to behave awfully to have a thing like this happen, wouldn’t they? I mean if she—”
“Careful.” Gamadge changed the conversation. At the end of it he went upstairs and put his light flannels and his Panama away; he would not be wearing them for some time. He changed to dark-brown worsteds, garaged his car, and walked down to a club where he would be sure to see some old classmates.
He found one or two at the bar, and he was not much surprised to find Arthur Jennings among them. Jennings lived with his mother; while she was in the country he patronized the club, looking for companionship to other stranded alumni. He was a long-chinned man, solemn and earnest; even wallflowers at dances shrank when they saw him coming, and said they had twisted their ankles and would rather sit this one out, please.
Everybody was talking about the Dunbar case, which was not surprising either. It was still a mainstay of conversation to rich and poor. Gamadge, who cherished the workings of the human mind when it occupied itself with rumour, listened quietly.
He heard that the police knew exactly where Alice Dunbar was; she was in a sanatorium in French Lick, had taken dope for years.
No, that wasn’t right, the trouble was alcoholism and she was in a hospital in Cheyenne.
Nothing of the kind. The family knew exactly where she was; right here in New York, out of her head; it ran in the family on the mother’s side.
Somebody had had an airmail letter from Paris; this was a fact, a schoolmate had seen her in Paris in a black-and-white dress, talking to a man with a beard and a green hat.
Gamadge couldn’t help asking if there was snow on the hat; but as he seemed to be the only man at the bar who remembered tales of the other war, he got blank looks from his neighbours and nothing more.
Rumour gave way to conjecture. A little rosy-faced man whom Gamadge didn’t know said he didn’t blame her a bit if she skipped out. “I only knew her slightly, years ago, but Abigail walked all over her. It would have been all right if the engagement had stuck, but after that fell through…” He shook his head.
Jennings, bristling a little, said that the Dunbar family was a united family and a happy one. “Old Mrs. Dunbar is charming, a delightful woman.”
“Oh, very,” said the rosy-faced man, “when you’re giving her twenty dollars for a ticket for one of those damned benefits.”
“She is tireless when it comes to her charities, even now. She’s not at all well,” said Jennings stiffly.
“I should think she’d be dead,” said somebody else. “Toughest thing I ever heard of. You know why that engagement was broken, Elkins?”
The rosy man knew, of course. “He fell in love with the other girl, girl from his hometown. Alice had a nervous breakdown and they took her to Hot Springs.”
“You don’t know that,” protested Jennings.
“Everybody knows it.”
Gamadge had now recognized the third man as somebody named Wyn. He nodded, and Wyn turned to him:
“Hello, Gamadge, aren’t you a friend of Macloud’s—the Dunbar partner?”
“I am, yes,” said Gamadge, who had ordered an old-fashioned and was sipping it slowly.
“What does he say? What’s the lowdown? Don’t they really know where she is?”
“He says they don’t.”
“Any ideas on the subject?”
“I’m getting them now,” said Gamadge, and smiled. “From what I hear, she ought to have left years ago.”
“That’s right. After the broken engagement the family never did a thing for her. No dinners, nothing; so of course she more or less dropped out of things.”
Jennings spoke up again with obstinate loyalty: “Mrs. Dunbar has been ill with blood pressure for ages; of course they can’t entertain.” He added gloomily: “And this will finish them forever.”
“It hasn’t finished Gail Tanner,” said somebody at the other end of the bar. “She’s going around to quiet bars of an evening, just like always. Saw her at one the other afternoon with a very handsome guy.”
Jennings said angrily: “She feels all this deeply. Deeply. Trying to get a little diversion now and then—that isn’t going out. She’s living very quietly at the Stanton. I was there the other night.”
“Well, sorry,” said the unknown, and Gamadge leaned forward to placate the Dunbars’ champion:
“They don’t mean anything, Artie; you might be gibbering away like this yourself if you didn’t know the people. They wouldn’t talk in this strain if they thought Alice Dunbar was dead.”
“Dead? Dead?” Little Elkins was shocked. “What do you mean, dead? Nobody ever thought she was dead. She just took it on the lam.”
“With some man the family wouldn’t have let her marry,” added the unknown. “So there wouldn’t be an unholy row.”
“You wouldn’t call this an unholy row?” asked Gamadge.
“I mean, they can’t get after the man and make things hot for him.”
“She’s of age.”
“And then some. But they could make things hot; you don’t know old Dunbar.”
“What could he do?”
“What couldn’t he do, with his money and connections, to some nobody?”
“But there’s no money involved, is there? The nobody can’t swindle them out of anything.”
Jennings finished his drink, said coldly that Mr. Angus Dunbar was a man of the highest principles, professional and moral, signed his cheque, and stalked away. Gamadge, watching him go, asked himself why, in spite of length and boniness, he gave the impression of being not a thin man but a thick one. He decided that it was because Artie walked leaning backward, with his stomach always slightly in advance of him.
Elkins had been watching him also. He said: “Poor old man, he’s having the time of his life, propping up the Dunbars.”
The unknown tossed off his cocktail. “Wonder why Abigail Tanner is letting him hang around. He can’t prop her up.”
“Well, she wouldn’t be going around much now, sitting in a bar now and then doesn’t count,” said Elkins. “And she can’t stand being alone a minute. Jennings is alive, you have to give him that.”
“I hope he doesn’t think he’ll finally make the grade there,” said the unknown. “Boy! You should have seen what she had in tow the other afternoon. Looked like an actor.”
He went off. Gamadge followed him into the dining-room, sat in the corner farthest away from Jennings, and read a newspaper until his lobster came. He wrenched his mind away from the indigestible Dunbar case, or tried to; but it persisted in travelling along routes that were hardly less upsetting. People falling off bicycles to the sound of loud barking; lawsuits and damages; a yellow cat starving in the woods, or marooned up some tall tree; a little boy vainly calling to it along the roads. Clara always minimized her troubles—was she being interviewed by constables, the sheriff, state police?
“If I got up early for once in my life,” he thought, “I could finish my own job tomorrow and drive up to the cottage on Wednesday. And what’s keeping me here?”
Probably nothing more, he reflected with disgust, than an impecunious fellow in a precarious profession, drumming up trade; riding around in such a rattletrap of a car that he didn’t like to park it under porte-cochères. A fellow who owned but one suit, and cultivated that bogus tan under sunlamps to go with the sports clothes he had to wear. If he didn’t look at servants, perhaps they weren’t much to look at. The old lady had played him along for the sake of being entertained and having a man in the house. It wouldn’t be the first time that a wealthy patron had encouraged an artist and then dropped him.
Gamadge had his lobster and his coffee, and walked home. In the library he got out his notes again, and went through them—he assured himself—for the last ti
me. Midway down a scrawled slip he paused, reread it, sat studying it with his elbows on the desk and his hands in his hair.
Theodore appeared silently, arranged the whisky, ice, and tumbler on a little table, brought the table close. Gamadge said: “Thanks. Enjoy yourself?”
“I did, sir.”
He departed. Gamadge sat back in his chair, mixed himself a drink, lighted a cigarette. “Macloud told me all that; but I…” He smoked, his eyes on the cornice. He’d have a shot at it, no harm in that. After all, it was pretty late in the summer; there was a good chance, and here was the telephone book.
CHAPTER SIX
The Private Life
NEXT MORNING GAMADGE dressed himself in his last change of summer wear—an Oxford mixture with an unlined coat, the last relic of his English clothes, and much cherished by him. He walked across to Fifth Avenue, down Fifth, and around into Fifty-seventh Street.
He stopped in front of a narrow old building on the north side of the block, with an art shop on the ground floor and other business premises all the way to the roof. He craned back to see the small gilt sign painted on one of the top windows—Bransome. Paintings.
An open door beside the entrance to the art shop led into a dingy little hallway with torn linoleum underfoot and steam pipes running up to a metal ceiling. The elevator at the end of the passage had a folding gate, and a sign over the push-button said: Bell out of Order.
He rattled the gate, and the elevator creaked into sight from depths below. A bald old man shoved the gate back.
“Miss Bransome.”
They shuddered upwards, stopping at every floor to look for stranded passengers. When Gamadge got out, he asked: “Can you hear the gate rattle from this landing?”
“Sure can.”
“Thanks.”
There were only two doors on the landing, one at the front and one at the rear. The rear door stood open, and he stepped into a narrow hallway; its woodwork was painted green and its walls were papered with a copy of an old-fashioned design—birds on trellises. The south end of the passage led into what looked like a sitting-room; the north end into a studio.
And Dangerous to Know Page 4