The Whistling Legs

by Roman McDougald

  She looked at Cabot. “It all sounds,” she said, “like one of Carlo’s theories coming true. In fact, it was one of Carlo’s theories. I think he talked with Darryl about it, and maybe that was why Darryl became so worried. He always takes people so seriously. Unfortunately, he even takes me seriously.”

  Boynton was studying her face. “Few wives,” he said, “even lovely young wives, find their husbands insoluble mysteries. I dare say you could give us a revealing picture of any change that may have taken place recently in Darryl Rand.”

  Cabot’s hand, extended to crush out his cigarette, suddenly froze for a second over the ash tray.

  My wife will testify that l have been under great nervous strain lately...

  She was sitting there immobile, gazing beyond Cabot with eyes that had become enigmatic.

  Cabot crushed out the cigarette.

  ...that I have acted at times in what seemed to her a peculiar manner...

  She was turning now toward Boynton with an apparent reluctance. “I hardly know how to answer that, Mr. Boynton. I’ve seen so little of Darryl lately. He has been so busy.”

  “But you have noticed something?”

  She inclined her head slowly, as if unwillingly. “Well—yes.”

  “What?”

  She said, “The truth is, he has been acting rather strangely. Not like himself at all. He has been drinking, and he has shown signs of being under some terrific nervous strain.”

  “Of what sort?”

  “I don’t know. I attributed it to overwork.”

  “When, exactly, did it first attract your attention? From, let us say, the time of the accident?”

  “No, a little before that.”

  “Before? Then this strain existed prior to Deb’s appearance?”

  “I think so. I——“ She floundered momentarily. “But the point is that it was progressive. It increased noticeably.”

  “Over how long a period did you observe this change?”

  She thought briefly. “Slightly more than two weeks. It has been two weeks since the accident.”

  Cabot said, “Would you say, Mrs. Rand, that in that time his condition approached a nervous breakdown?”

  She looked at him uncertainly. “I don’t know, Mr. Cabot,” she said. “I don’t really know how people act when they’re having a breakdown.”

  “Did he appear unbalanced at times, out of self-control, completely in the grip of a single emotion or a single thought?”

  She sat there perfectly still; and although her head did not move an inch, the focus of her gaze seemed to be changing, to be shifting almost imperceptibly. She said in a low voice, “Yes.”

  “Likely,” Cabot went on thoughtfully, “to crack at last under that continuous strain, to blow out like a fuse, to run amok——”

  She broke in wildly. “No!—oh, no! You know it couldn’t have happened like that! He was drugged——”

  He said, “Yes, of course,” and got up. He went across the hall into the library, which now was dark. He groped his way to the desk, found the reading lamp which he had put back into place, and switched it on.

  He dialed and smiled faintly, listening to the uninterrupted whirring in the earpiece. He expected every moment to hear the whirring stop and a voice, definitely drowsy now, break in.

  But the odd thing was that the whirring didn’t stop. The drowsy voice didn’t come. And he realized presently that it wasn’t coming.

  He snapped out the light and sat there thoughtfully in the darkness, his elbows resting on the table.

  How soundly did Lib sleep? He wondered, and it seemed to him a little absurd that he should be wondering. She was his own wife, he reflected, and he didn’t even know how soundly she slept. But then, after all, he hadn’t actually...No. But he’d called her up before—late—two or three times! And she always answered.

  She was gone then. But where would she have gone at three o’clock in the morning? What could have induced her to go anywhere at that hour. Still, if she wasn’t asleep...The thought was so disquieting that he did not hear the door opening so quietly behind him. Nor did he at first hear the low voice.

  “Mr. Cabot—Mr. Cabot.”

  He turned. “Yes?”

  There was a little frantic flutter in the dark. “Please! Keep your voice down!”

  He said, “All right, Theresa. But why?”

  The whisper came closer. “I’ve come from Mr. Rand. He wants to see you—without any of the others knowing.”

  He thought for a moment. “So he’s fully conscious now? How did you find out?”

  “I slipped down there from my room after the doctor left. In a little while he became rational and recognized me. He asked me to bring you a message—if I could tell you without telling them. They don’t know yet that he has come out of it.”

  “Did you tell him about Deb?”

  She hesitated briefly. “Yes. I had to tell him. He asked me at once and—well, he asked it in such a strange way.” She paused. “He said, ‘Theresa, which one of them is dead?’”

  Cabot moved around the desk. “Do you think he knows who did it?”

  “He didn’t tell me. But there’s something he wants to tell you. Please go—now! There’s no one in the hall.”

  He went upstairs quietly, and as he turned into the corridor he glanced up instinctively at the stairs leading to the servants’ quarters. He saw at once how easily Theresa Church, standing on the third floor landing, could have observed the little passageway below. From this position she could hardly have failed to see the unknown who had stolen away from Darryl Rand’s doorway with the suicide note.

  He wondered suddenly whether she wouldn’t, almost as inevitably, have recognized that person.

  Chapter Eight

  He halted in the bedroom, staring at Rand with a singular feeling that he was really seeing him now for the first time.

  Rand was looking back at him, and the eyes which had been blank and upturned had become darkly brilliant. He said quietly, “So Theresa found you, Mr. Cabot? You are Cabot, I suppose?”

  Cabot said, “Yes. How do you feel?”

  “Oh, all right. I’m weak as a kitten, but that’s nothing. Come closer, will you? I must talk in a low voice.”

  The voice was low, but it was rapid and incisive. Rand said, “I have to tell you this quickly, and that’s difficult. If I could have told you last night——”

  Cabot sat down. “How did it happen?”

  Rand replied thoughtfully, “It was the whisky, I imagine. It must have been.” He looked at Cabot. “It was simple enough. I came up here before dinner last night, as always, and took a drink. Then I sat down to look over some mail, and presently I began to get drowsy. I struggled against it, as I was expecting you to come...” The voice ebbed momentarily, and Cabot recognized the unmistakable traces of exhaustion in the pale face.

  Rand went on, “I got up and walked around, but it grew worse, much worse. I knew I wasn’t drunk, but I felt unbearably tired. I realized at last that I simply had to rest. By then my legs had begun to wobble, and I weaved around interminably before I could get to the bed. The last thing I remember was that I barely made it and flopped over.”

  Cabot asked, “Who could have drugged that whisky?”

  “Any of them could have. They all know about my habit of taking a drink before dinner, and the apartment wasn’t locked.” Rand made a quick gesture. “But this is incidental. It isn’t the main story. To make you understand that, Cabot, I shall have to make you understand me. I shall have to go far back——”

  Cabot said, “That may not be necessary. There is just one thing I’d like to know as a preliminary.” He pulled out his cigarettes. “Do you have stomach trouble?”

  Rand appeared amazed. “Stomach trouble? No. Why?” Cabot said, “Your vegetarianism, then, is the sentimental rather than the dietetic variety. You’re a type. You have an extremely active imagination and what often goes with it—an abnormally developed sense of pity. Y
ou tend to go to emotional extremes, and you’re a bit ashamed of it.” Darryl Rand was gazing at him incredulously.

  Cabot stuck the cigarette into his mouth. “That being so,” he said, “I can understand exactly how you felt about Martin Kirk. I can understand exactly how you felt about Deb. I can understand exactly why you wrote that suicide note shortly after 2 a.m. on May 12th, why you were going to kill yourself, and why you changed your mind.”

  Rand raised himself on his elbow. His eyes were gleaming feverishly. “You know why I wrote that note—and what was in it?”

  Cabot nodded. “I think so. There is only one way in which the thing makes sense. The essential fact which I have established is that you wrote the note on the night Deb was injured. You wrote it, indeed, soon after that first telephone call, when the hospital gave you the erroneous information that he was dead.” Cabot shrugged. “So it was fairly obvious all along that it was you who had run over Deb.”

  “I can see how you could have figured that out. But who told you what was in the note? Not Theresa——”

  “It was a bit of detective work on Carlo’s part. Theresa’s testimony merely tends to confirm Carlo’s surmise that somebody stole the note from you.” Cabot stopped. “But perhaps you’d better tell me the story, after all—the last part. I’m guessing about some of it.”

  Rand sank back upon the pillow, staring up at the ceiling. After a pause he said slowly, “The beginning and the end of it, in a sense, was Martin Kirk. You’ve said that you understand that, and perhaps you do. But there was always a nightmare quality about it, Cabot. It was always something of a mystery—a murder mystery of the conscience.

  “I could almost convince myself at times that it had been the whisky which had destroyed him, or his own weakness.

  I knew that he was queer. I knew that he was a fanatic. But when I thought sometimes of the poor devil turning on the gas in that attic room—well, I wondered. And I didn’t sleep well.”

  Cabot studied his face, recalling Deb’s words: Mr. Rand is the kind who worries a lot...

  Rand was saying, “But I had other troubles which could ordinarily make me forget about Kirk. You have probably acquired some idea of them by now and you can imagine the rest—the concealed conflicts, the repressed emotions, the constant tension in this house.”

  Cabot said, “Yes. The main thing, I gather, is that you happen to love your wife; your wife’s sister happens to dislike you; and the sister’s influence over Mrs. Rand is almost unlimited. That adds up to plenty of tension.” He stopped. “And all this seems to have come to a head a little over two weeks ago. Is that right?”

  Rand nodded without surprise. “I had trouble with Jan and afterward, as always, with Gail. The quarrel in itself didn’t amount to much. But coming after a prolonged strain at the office and on top of the fact that I had lately found myself thinking a good deal about Kirk, it was pretty unnerving. I started drinking heavily. I was half drunk that night——”

  “The night of the accident?”

  “Yes.” Rand waited a moment as if trying to gather a waning strength. “It was really a drunken impulse that made me decide, just as I got almost here, not to stop after all, but to go on by. I actually speeded up. When I glimpsed him crossing the street in that fog, I was going much too fast to stop. I had to act in a flash.” He looked back at Cabot wearily. “Well—I steered the car away from where I thought he was going. I was wrong——”

  Cabot, watching him, broke in again. “You’re talking too much, tiring yourself.”

  “No, it’s doing me good to talk about it, it’s a relief.” Rand paused. “I jumped out then, of course, and picked him up. And that was when the nightmare seized me—the moment I saw his face. It seized me with the thought: I have killed him again.”

  Suddenly something clicked in Cabot’s mind, and with a vague sense of chagrin he realized that he might have guessed this, too. What was it Terry Crowell had said about Kirk? A wife from whom he had long been separated, and somewhere else a son by a previous marriage.

  The same publicity about Magnamite which had moved Mrs. Martin Kirk to act would most likely have had its effect upon her stepson as well.

  Rand was saying, “That was the way it came to me, in that strange conviction that I had somehow moved backward through time to destroy him once more, not as I had known him, but in his youth!

  “Then, after a long minute, reason began to return to me, and I knew that it wasn’t Martin Kirk who lay there in the glare of the headlights. I knew that it couldn’t be Kirk. It was Kirk’s son.”

  He stopped, and Cabot said thoughtfully, “So Deb was coming here?”

  “Undoubtedly, and the fact that he was coming toward this house seemed to confirm the striking physical resemblance I could see in his face. For I had always expected that some day Kirk’s son would show up. but when I rushed him to the hospital, it developed that there were no marks of identification on him. They couldn’t tell me anything immediately about his condition, but a sleepy-looking girl at the desk promised to phone me later.

  “I reported the accident to the police, giving them the false story which you have already heard. They made an investigation at the scene and took an impression of the car tracks. I had forgotten that they could do that—identify car tracks in the same way as fingerprints—and it frightened me.

  “I thought: Suppose they find out that he was Kirk’s son and that I killed him? They would go back then and dig up the forgotten story of Kirk himself, and the result, for the newspapers, would be a great feature story. For me it would be ruin, absolute ruin.

  “But in a way that didn’t seem to matter. In the larger sense I was already ruined. The horror of the thing, Cabot—the double horror—would have hit any decent man a tremendous blow. The effect upon me was simply indescribable.

  “When I got home, it was early morning. The house was silent, though I noticed a light still burning in Jan’s room and guessed that she was reading late, as she often does. I sat here, drinking and waiting for the telephone to ring.”

  Cabot broke in again upon the tired voice. “And when it did, the hospital informed you that the patient had died. That was, of course, the last straw. You walked back in here and wrote the suicide note on the back of a letter which you had received that day from the War Department.” He paused. “But why, exactly, did you phrase it as you did?”

  Rand gave a restless shrug. “I thought that my meaning would be perfectly clear since the boy was dead. The note, so phrased, was even a kind of defense—the ultimate defense, I thought, that a man could make—to accuse himself and to die.

  “I sat there for a time at the desk, and the whole house was dreadfully still around me, as though it were waiting, listening. I had actually taken the automatic out——”

  “But, fortunately,” interposed Cabot, “the telephone rang again, and this time it was the hospital calling to tell you that the mistake had just been discovered. That changed everything at once. The sheer relief of the thing, after you had been inches from death, must have been stunning. You realized that you had escaped altogether; all you had to do was to keep silent about the accident, tear up the note. But when you walked back in here—“ Cabot glanced at the desk—“the note was gone. You rushed out into the corridor and saw Theresa standing on the stairs. She had seen the thief come out but hadn’t recognized him. You went along the hall, listening at all the doors.”

  Rand nodded. “The house was completely quiet. Jan’s light, by then, was out, and she was asleep. They were all asleep, apparently. At last I gave it up and came back here to try to think things out.

  “I realized suddenly what it was. A suicide note in my own handwriting, containing what was apparently the confession of a murder. A note whose existence I couldn’t admit now, whose meaning I couldn’t explain without bringing upon myself some part of the ruin which I had just escaped!

  “What I thought of then was blackmail. No more than that. I simply considered the frighte
ning possibility that someone would hold the note forever as a potential weapon against me. But that—just that—was terrifying enough.

  “I knew that there was nothing whatever I could do except to wait—to wait until someone made the first little hint to me and I learned with whom I had to deal.”

  “But no one made that hint?”

  Rand shook his head. “No. I waited, and it didn’t happen. And I gradually became convinced that it wasn’t going to happen. What was going to happen was infinitely more horrible.”

  Cabot said reflectively, “That was when you called me. But meanwhile you had gone back to the hospital to see about Deb. From every angle, I suppose, that would have seemed necessary.”

  Rand replied slowly, “I dreaded the meeting in a sense, and yet it fascinated me. Would he, knowing about his father, show an animosity for me when he learned who I was?

  “I was there when he became conscious, and it seemed that luck was with me. He was unable to remember who he was, and the doctors said that this was not uncommon after violent shock. I saw that this would give me an opportunity both to do something for him and to gain his friendship. In more ways than one I felt a queer sort of responsibility for that boy.”

  Cabot said, “I can understand that. But why, precisely, did you bring him here?”

  Rand’s hand twitched on the coverlet. “It seemed a perfect plan, suggested to me by his growing restlessness in the hospital. With him here, I thought, I’d have him close to me; I could possibly determine why he had been coming to the house that night; and, last but not least, I’d have a plausible excuse to bring a detective upon the scene.

  “That was really the main thing. For I was sure by then that something was brewing. But the hell of it was that I couldn’t foresee the form that it would take. I didn’t realize that the person who had that note could make its use utterly convincing only by committing a preliminary murder, and—“ Rand’s eyes had clouded—“and under the circumstances Deb would logically, in fact, almost inevitably, be the victim.”