“But you didn’t go?”
“No.”
Stacey and the men at the head of the stairs exchanged a long look. “And you didn’t come out, either, when the excitement started about Miss Whittemore’s fall?”
“I could hear enough of that to know what it was all about.”
“But you came out into the hall when Mr. P., here, sounded the alarm about the murder?”
“Murder,” said Glee Hazzard evenly, “is so much more wholesome than Miss Whittemore.”
Stacey snorted. He seemed to do a great deal of satisfied thinking, walking about meanwhile. “Well, folks, I’m going to let you rest for a while. We’ve got a few items to check on, fingerprints and such. We want a lock of hair off each of you ladies.” He pointed a finger at Mr. Johns. “You, go get a pair of shears. And—oh yes—Mr. Pennyfeather, I haven’t got your first name.”
He had dug out the silver pencil and was waiting.
Mr. Pennyfeather looked him in the eye. “I don’t intend giving it, sir.”
“What’s that?” Stacey showed a mild surprise.
“I’m not giving my first name,” said Mr. Pennyfeather.
“Not giving it? Why, look here, this is the law speaking.”
“And I’m answering. With silence.”
Stacey scratched his head with the pencil and looked about bewilderedly. One of the men at the top of the stairs was yawning, and the other was looking at Mr. Pennyfeather as though he were an arch criminal.
“I have a very peculiar first name,” Mr. Pennyfeather added. “I just quit using it. You can go on calling me Mr. P.”
“Damned if I will,” Stacey decided. “You got a social security card?”
“No.”
“You teach somewhere, don’t you?”
“I am associate professor of English at Clarendon College.”
“They’ll have your name,” Stacey promised.
Glee Hazzard was smiling faintly; Taffy was staring as though he’d just displayed the symptoms of a strange disease. Mrs. Blight looked bored and Miss Comfort superior. Mr. Jessop seemed submerged in a post-alcoholic woe.
“They do not have my name,” said Mr. Pennyfeather. “And they don’t insist on having it. They’re scholars—and gentlemen.”
Stacey pointed the silver pencil at the tip of Mr. Penny-feather’s defiant nose. “I’ll find your name. Somehow. And I’ll put it in the papers.”
A somewhat pinched expression came over Mr. Penny-feather. He dusted the windproof absently, moving it from one arm to another. His eyes fixed on a spot near the pleat in the center back. With a finger he explored what he had found.
“And now,” boomed Stacey, “we’ll get on to the fingerprinting and haircutting.”
Mr. Pennyfeather remembered all at once the dark hair in Mrs. Andler’s comb.
Mr. Pennyfeather, hesitating at the door of his room, regarded mournfully the ink stains that marked his fingers.
Miss Comfort came up briskly. She had discarded the cape in the face of the increasing heat. The unrelieved white of her uniform brought out the unbecoming blush, the sprinkling of perspiration, the wet look of her scalp.
“Scorching, isn’t it?” she sighed. She saw his confusion about the ink. “Here. I was just going into the bathroom to get rid of mine. Join me, won’t you?” She showed him her bottle of rubbing alcohol. “This takes off anything.”
Mr. Pennyfeather felt a slight bashfulness about joining Miss Comfort in the bath. He supposed, however, that nurses were used to a great many necessary short cuts which might violate ordinary usage. He followed docilely enough, dropping his windproof on the edge of the tub and sticking his hands into the basin. Miss Comfort trickled alcohol over them.
“What do you think?” she whispered loudly into his ear.”
“Think?”
“Could she have done it? All of that business about rushing to get on the same bus—that puzzled me so, even while I followed out her orders. And pretending to be asleep when I peeped in. Do you know, I couldn’t swear the thing in the bed was a human body. She might have rigged something with pillows, mightn’t she?”
An icy prickling stole along Mr. Pennyfeather’s skin. He visioned Miss Comfort peering through the dark, a thing made of pillows leering back. Glee Hazzard’s hair wouldn’t have been showing last night; how easily she might have propped up something white to imitate her head! He stared into Miss Comfort’s intense but rather colorless eyes.
“Oh,” he said lamely, “but she’s so attractive!”
She made fangs at him—indignant fangs. “Nonsense! Don’t be like all the other men, taken in by a pretty face.”
“She isn’t as pretty, really, as Taffy is. I just seem to be impressionable. It’s a look she has—an alive look.”
“Men of your age,” snorted Miss Comfort, “have to beware of ideas like that.”
“Hm-m-m. Yes, I suppose we do.” He meekly let her scrub off the remainder of the ink.
Corking the bottle of alcohol, she nodded toward his windproof on the tub. “You may as well put that away for the day. We won’t have any need for wraps.”
Mr. Pennyfeather also looked at the windproof. He frowned at it. Miss Comfort went out, and he remained, still thoughtful.
Presently he took the windproof and went back into the hall. He draped the coat as he thought it had been when he had run across it in the dark. He recalled coming upstairs on tiptoe with Tick, touching the newel post at the top of the banister, finding the rough texture of the windproof under his fingers.
He stood quiet, thinking. From behind the door of Mrs. Andler’s room came the footsteps and the talk of Stacey and his experts. Mr. Pennyfeather had a vague idea of all that they must be doing: the tedious scientific comparisons, measurements, analyses. He wondered what they would think of his little discovery in the back pleat of his coat. He had a very good idea that they wouldn’t think anything at all.
Two little cactus thorns couldn’t possibly interest all that grim talent Stacey had gathered.
Mr. Pennyfeather decided, with a kind of stubborn excitement, to keep his cactus thorns to himself.
He made up in his mind a little story of his coat’s adventures: of how he had thrown it over Taffy in the lobby—not what Chaucer would have done, of course, but times do change—and of how Taffy had worn it out the back door, holding her candle, and of how it must have arrived on the newel post.
He’d just better check that last point.
He went to the door Taffy had appeared out of last night and rapped. She came at once. She looked warm in the black dress: warm and sticky and afraid. She didn’t speak; she just stared.
He lifted the windproof into her line of sight. “I was wondering about my coat,” he said.
“You got it all right, didn’t you?” she pouted.
He had the impression that Taffy was distinctly not interested in gentlemen of sixty-odd. Nevertheless he tried to win her with a smile. “Did you put it where I found it—on the newel post?”
“I just dropped it at the head of the stairs,” she said. “Yes, it did catch on something. I didn’t see what. You’d taken all the fuses, you know, and old man Johns collected the candles before we came upstairs.”
He saw how this new fact fitted in with his suspicions about the light in Mrs. Andler’s room. There hadn’t been any candles upstairs; Mrs. Andler’s pale blue glow had been something else. His mind shied nervously at the memory.
“Thank you,” he said to Taffy.
“Don’t mention it.” She shut the door.
He went back to his own room and sat on the bed and plucked the cactus thorns out of the thick material.
He was positive that on his trip into the garden this morning he hadn’t backed into any cactus. And last night, when he had been well stuck with thorns, he hadn’t been wearing the coat.
Taffy with her candle hadn’t stepped off the back porch.
The cactus thorns had arrived in the pleat of his windproof by some other mean
s. They were star-shaped, with heavy prongs. He held them in one palm and thought for a while. He was remembering a detail he had forgotten: the prowler in the gloom he had glimpsed from Mrs. Andler’s window.
He folded the windproof and left it on the bed and went down cautiously to the back door and so out into the yard. The giant cactus next the alley cast long distorted shadows like the path of some crawling beast. Toward the street the humped shapes were low and dwarflike. A lizard in his path regarded him with a liquid eye, then vanished with the effortlessness of a puff of smoke.
He projected in his mind’s eye the line his sight had taken last night, trying to find the spot where someone had moved.
He found it finally, the tubby cactus with the wheelshaped thorn, dusty green and gray, squatted in the shade of a Joshua tree like a well-armed legless insect. He touched it gingerly, then brushed it with his sleeve. A prong caught, held, and a thorn came away.
He thought: Someone was here last night while we were in Mrs. Andler’s room. I had my coat with me then. I gave my coat to Taffy; she left it on the newel post. The thorn was brushed off the prowler’s clothes upon my windproof. That means that whoever was prowling outside here in the dark was later upstairs in the hall. Would it have been the murderer?
Was there, perhaps, a connection between the cactus thorn and the glimmering blue light?
He examined the windows of the hotel, and since no one seemed to be looking out of them, he moved back to the spot where he had seen the cigarette butt.
It was gone; the ground under Mrs. Andler’s window was bare.
A sudden conviction seized him that the sheriff and his experts had that cigarette butt now and that it was being put through their weighing and measuring processes. The vivid stain of lipstick would be put under a microscope for an examination of its coloring.
He had a hunch, too, that Glee Hazzard’s lipstick would be beside it.
If Glee Hazzard had been in Mrs. Andler’s room she would have had to be a very careless and foolish girl to leave a sample of her cigarette behind. He recalled her nervous habit of chain smoking. Did people lose track of their discarded cigarettes when they smoked them as rapidly as Glee did?
He went inside, puzzling over the thought.
Mr. Johns was sweeping the lobby in a fog of dust. He paused long enough to give Mr. Pennyfeather a look which implied that the hotel had been getting along fine until Mr. Pennyfeather had arrived.
In his room he sat down on the bed. He had accumulated a lot of ideas which he wished to sort. He heard from somewhere near a dry whisper of sound, scuttling and leggy. It aroused in him the faint beginnings of alarm.
He moved his windproof tentatively. From its inner folds ran forth a huge centipede. It paused on the counterpane near his hand, the shadowy and horrible elongation of a spider. Mr. Pennyfeather’s frame shook with fear and amazement. The scaled thing seemed to look at him curiously.
Even in that moment his thoughts were quite clear.
He wondered if he were marked as the next victim of murder.
Chapter Ten
Mr. Johns, pale and weathery behind the counter, listened while Mr. Pennyfeather poured out his story and a plea for assistance. Then he looked carefully into the depths of a fish bowl which sat on the window ledge of the lobby. In the bottom was a nest of grasses and fuzzy weeds.
“I’ll bet it’s my centipede,” said Mr. Johns. “How the devil did he get’way upstairs?”
Mr. Pennyfeather could have hazarded a guess, but he kept quiet. Mr. Johns came out from behind the counter.
“I was saving him for the county museum,” said Mr. Johns. “Biggest danged centipede I ever saw. Joe Jessop brought him in yesterday.”
Mr. Pennyfeather swallowed. “Does he bite?”
“I don’t know.” Mr. Johns scratched his thin hair. “I never give those things a chance.” He took up the fish bowl and a newspaper.
They went upstairs, and Mr. Johns approached the bed gingerly. Mr. Pennyfeather, with a part of the newspaper, performed flank maneuvers while Mr. Johns frightened the slithering animal into the fish bowl. Scales rattled on glass; there was the thrashing of what sounded like a million legs. Then the thing quieted. Mr. Johns drew a long breath.
“Scared you, I bet, didn’t it?” He tried to laugh.
“You look a bit pale yourself,” snapped Mr. Pennyfeather. “Anyway, I suggest you pickle that thing now and keep it for the county museum in alcohol.”
Mr. Johns went out glowering. He had been badly dealt with for his helpfulness, and he knew it. Mr. Pennyfeather tried belatedly to think of something to say to make up for his ill humor; but he was too busy, really, beating out his windproof. And he was, besides, thoroughly mad.
When he had gone over the garment seam by seam he started on the room. He investigated the bed, the rugs, the dresser, even the iron rack like the one in Mrs. Andler’s room. He turned the rack up and blew fiercely into the pipes. Nothing came out but a hollow noise and a lot of dust. The morning wore away while he labored; heat poured in at the windows; there was a breathless feeling as though a lid had been lowered on the town. Mr. Pennyfeather, covered with dust, sat down on the bed at last to rest.
He thought suddenly of the cool walks of Clarendon College, the absent-minded but pleasant greetings given by passing fellow professors, the respectful attention of his students. He felt a new anger over their loss; and the anger fed on the memory of the blue glimmering light, the centipede, and the mutilated corpse of Mrs. Andler, by now reposing in the morgue.
He felt like going out and shouting into the hall that whoever had tried to have him stung by that insect should quit skulking and fight like a man.
There was a rap at his door.
He waited, his anger dying into a sort of apprehension. The rap came again. Mrs. Blight’s voice trumpeted his name.
He opened the door for her, and she marched in through it.
“I’m worried,” she began without preamble. “Miss Whittemore’s acting rather ill. It came over her suddenly: nausea and a feeling of weakness.”
A drop of perspiration stole down her temple; she blinked behind the lenses and moved the collar of her thick black dress as if to let a little air in under it.
“Sometimes,” she went on quickly, “the effects of a head injury come on a good deal after the accident which caused them.”
Mr. Pennyfeather saw all at once why she had come to him. He was Tick’s representative so far as Mrs. Blight was concerned.
“And you are going to maintain,” Mr. Pennyfeather said, “that Mr. Burrell caused the accident.”
“No.” She shook her head, and the lenses winked in the light. “Mr. Burrell wasn’t directly responsible. My ward is in love with him, and while she was pleading with him not to break their engagement she fell downstairs and was hurt. That’s the story we shall give out, providing that Miss Whittemore’s condition should prove serious.”
“A shakedown,” Mr. Pennyfeather marveled. “And well worked out, too.You can’t accuse Tick of pushing the girl, because the police would take him off as a suspected maniac and lock him up where you couldn’t get at him. So you’re simply going to tell the newspapers that the poor child was pleading her love and lost her footing and fell.”
“I didn’t mention the newspapers,” Mrs. Blight pointed out.
“No, you didn’t.”
“And, of course, there’s no telling just how serious Miss Whittemore’s condition is.”
“I have an idea,” Mr. Pennyfeather said, “that a great deal about Miss Whittemore’s condition depends upon Mr. Burrell.”
“Possibly.”
“And—um-m-m—cash, perhaps?”
She smiled grimly. “Miss Whittemore is above anything so cheap as denying her affection for money.”
“She wants Tick, then,” he decided. “Look. Why didn’t you figure out something like this when you had him? When he was really interested in her?”
A look of shock, of rebuff
, came into her face. She turned quite pale, and the perspiration stood out on the colorless skin. “You’ve misconstrued my purpose in coming here, sir. We had nothing planned. WeMiss Whittemore’s accident was genuine.” She put her hands behind her quickly; not so quickly that Mr. Pennyfeather didn’t see that they were shaking.
He wondered blankly what on earth had come over the woman.
“And you, Mr. Pennyfeather,” she said hoarsely, “aren’t one to criticize others. You have your secrets.”
“I have?” He was genuinely surprised.
“You concealed your name from Stacey,” she said.
“Oh, that.” Disappointment flooded him; he’d thought for a moment she had something interesting. “I’ve a queer first name. That’s all.”
“Criminals conceal their names.”
“I’m not a criminal.” He sounded, to himself, almost regretful.
She was getting back her breath and some of her color. “I must go and keep a watch on Miss Whittemore. You might mention her condition to Mr. Burrell as soon as you see him. In fact, I’d advise you to mention it.”
“I’ll see that he knows,” Mr. Pennyfeather promised.
“Until later, then.” She went out and shut the door.
He rushed for his windproof and dug from its pocket a pencil. The only paper he could find was Tick’s letter. Hastily he wrote on it:
Remark I made to Mrs. B.: Why didn’t you figure out something like this when you had him? When he was really interested in her?
Mr. Pennyfeather read and re-read what he had written. He recalled Mrs. Blight’s trembling agitation. Had it been his words which had so upset her? And if so, why?
He put the letter into the pocket of his suit coat, but the words he had written, the words he’d said to Mrs. Blight, remained in his mind. They were with him while he scouted about in hopes of running into Caroline Pond to find out if she had heard Stacey’s inquiry that morning. They floated through his thoughts during an absent-minded lunch. Picking up his suitcase at the bus depot, he found himself muttering them under his breath.
Shaving in the hotel bathroom, he told himself in the mirror: “The words couldn’t have frightened her. The accusation implied … that she and Taffy had concocted a plot … didn’t worry her when I said it differently, before. She must be subject to spells of indigestion, or something.”
Bring the Bride a Shroud Page 8