Nets to Catch the Wind

by Dolores Hitchens

  Amy turned off the living-room light, stepped to a window, peeped out from behind the blind. The fog was smoky, motionless, between her and the hedge. There was beginning to be a hint of grayness in the air, the first thin tide of dawn, seeping in over the eastern hills to roll down toward the sea. The night—and a lot of other things—had come to an end. Like the life of the girl who had loved Raoul Schneider, who had fought for him as Amy was fighting for a memory.

  She turned away from the window, went to stand out of sight near the kitchen entry, to listen to what Cunninghan was saying.

  “—it seemed advisable to wait until I could be sure that there had been no collusion between Raoul and Tzegeti, that the murder wasn’t an effort to hasten the inheritance——”

  “I’ll put it in, since you say so. What was the real reason you kept the money?”

  “A dying wish isn’t a will, Mr. Fogarty. Not a legal document.”

  “The public might not understand that, of course.”

  “My best loyalty to Schneider seemed to be to make sure that his son had had no hand in his death.”

  “You’re sure, now?”

  “No. I still don’t know. It’s even possible that Raoul Schneider might have been the murderer on the train.”

  At first Amy’s reaction was one of incredulity. Raoul Schneider was in Mexico; he couldn’t have killed this girl. Then she thought, Cunninghan is trying to drag in the idea of an accomplice. He wants an excuse, however weak, for keeping the money the father had instructed be delivered to his son.

  She was roused by Fogarty’s voice. “I won’t put that in your statement.”

  “Naturally not. I can’t accuse Raoul openly of murder.”

  “What else did the old man say in his last moments? Surely he gave you some idea of what had just happened there?”

  “He said something which gave me a strong idea that Tzegeti had had a part in the shooting. He must have been referring to the money, to Tzegeti’s intention to steal it.”

  There was a pause as if Fogarty spent a moment looking at the lawyer. “What were his exact words?”

  “He said, ‘Don’t let Tzegeti take it.’ ”

  “Those were his exact words?”

  Cunninghan cleared his throat. “I’ll be frank with you. Schneider was dying. He gasped out the instructions about the money, shoved the heap of bills toward me. Then his head dropped forward. His lips went flabby and what he said was full of hissing and heavy breathing. He said, ‘Don’t let Tzegeti——’ Then he stopped and started over, and repeated those three words and added, ‘take the——’ ”

  Fogarty pieced it together. “Don’t let Tzegeti take the——”

  “Then he mumbled, and I caught a word I thought was ‘same.’ Meaning the money he’d just handed me.”

  “That’s a kind of funny wording. Stiff, a little legal-sounding?”

  “Yes. Well, he knew I was a lawyer.”

  “Do you want me to tell you what Schneider was trying to say?”

  Cunninghan was inclined to sputter. “Why, I’m sure, Mr. Fogarty, since you weren’t there you could scarcely——”

  Fogarty’s voice bored in, relentless. “Schneider was telling you—‘Don’t let Tzegeti take the blame.’ He still had life in him; he’d probably overheard his murderer telling Tzegeti to keep his mouth shut, then the threats that did seal Tzegeti’s mouth, then the planting of those little blue rubbers to make it seem Tzegeti had been pilfering from the cashbox. The murderer didn’t steal the dough on the desk; that was either too dangerous or the motive wasn’t simple thievery.”

  “Of course this is all conjecture.”

  “And what were you doing at the office tonight? Getting rid of Schneider’s embarrassing money?”

  “No, no. I couldn’t sleep. Often I suffer from insomnia. I was worried about my secretary’s absence. I had learned she was married to Raoul and it occurred to me that she might have been selling me out and that I’d better just check the contents of the files, and the safe.”

  “Okay, go on with the story. You took the money, hid it somewhere——”

  “I simply put it in my brief case.”

  “Then called the cops?”

  “Yes. They arrested Tzegeti at once on suspicion, found the blue rubber bands in his pockets, then checked up and found out they were the sort Schneider snapped around his money.”

  “But you didn’t feel impelled to speak up?”

  “I was in a predicament,” Cunninghan said earnestly. “I knew the real motive behind the crime, since Wyse had obtained the blackmailing confession and Schneider had discovered Tzegeti’s guilt just that day. But I couldn’t speak up. A valuable property was involved, the Picardy Club.”

  “Very careful,” Fogarty said dryly. “By the way, is there a new will giving Raoul a share of the club?”

  “No, there was no will at all, and therefore, under the community property laws of the State of California, Mrs. Schneider inherited fully. I did one rather unwise thing. Under the proddings of conscience, I had Raoul Schneider come to my office and there made him an offer of settlement. I thought he might be in financial straits——”

  “And the dough really was his, anyway, since his father made a gift of it before death.”

  “Yes, in a manner of speaking.”

  “Tell me this. Did Tzegeti leave the club before the cops came?”

  “I don’t know what he did. They found him on the grounds, I believe. But I don’t know where he had gone.”

  Amy had been leaning against the wall. Beyond her was the vigil light, flickering redly, and then the white bulk of the new washing machine. She stepped soundlessly over, touched the clean enamel surface idly. It was a wringer type with a round tub, a flange or skirt extending to within six inches of the floor. At the bottom of the tub, near the base of the wringer-support post, was a row of levers and knobs. Amy knew what these were—they started and stopped the agitator in the tub, they controlled the movement of the wringer to various positions and activated the pump.

  She reached down, touched the smallest knob of all, a black plastic ball, pulled it outward. There was the faint squeak of metal upon metal. At almost the same moment there was a soft thud on the floor as if something had dropped from the inner workings of the machine.

  Amy stood quiet, waiting to see if either of the men in the kitchen had heard anything. Then she bent swiftly, reached under the machine; there was in her mind no doubt of what she would find there. All of her puzzling, her concentration on Mrs. Tzegeti’s cryptic words, had led up to this moment of crystal-clear conviction, of ultimate solution. The little handle—the handle that Elizabeth would touch someday to start the washing-machine pump.

  Amy clutched the book. The pages fell apart; she dragged it out by one cover. Standing erect in the half-light, she turned the book over, let the pages riffle through her fingers. Some of the words were visible, and Amy’s heart sank. It was as Fogarty had surmised—the book was written in Tzegeti’s native tongue.

  She thought of Elizabeth then. The girl could translate this, could reveal the truth hidden here. Amy backed silently toward the front door, opened it, waited to listen in case Fogarty had heard her. Then she slipped outside and hurried to Fogarty’s car.

  What Cunninghan said, what any of the others said, was immaterial now. The truth was waiting to be revealed. She jerked open the car door, slid in behind the wheel, reached for the switch.

  Fogarty had taken his keys with him.

  She stepped out, leaving the door swinging. The wet breath of the morning touched her face, her hands, frosted the collar of her coat. In the thick hedges she could hear water dripping. She thought of Mrs. Arkuto. There was a telephone in that house. There was also the woman, who could talk. Amy beat her forehead with a clenched fist, trying to think. It seemed that she recalled, some five or six blocks away, a service station with an outside phone booth beside it. She hesitated. If Fogarty missed her, he’d suspect at once what she ha
d found, what she meant to do with it. And she’d never shake him.

  There was nothing to do but risk his discovery of her absence. She began to run, light-footed, down the street toward the intersection, the book under her coat, her purse covering the bulge it made.

  A car went by in the mist, slowly, without lights—some worker going to an early job, curious over her behavior. She forced herself to a walk, waited until the car was out of sight before running again. She couldn’t afford to attract attention, to have anyone think, that things were wrong. The gray stillness all about echoed with her running steps; but that couldn’t be helped, and fortunately this outlying part of town was even more deserted, less built up, than the new subdivision where she lived. There was nobody to be curious, no nosy householder to telephone the police, no dogs to be alarmed and to bark. There was just herself, and the thin fog brightened by the approach of dawn . . . and the book.

  Yes, the book. It must contain the name she sought. In it was the power to tear aside the silken mask.

  She thought about the half-reflected face in the dark outside her window. A touch of cold stole down her spine. But there wasn’t time now to remember, to be afraid. There was just this important job to be done, to get the book to Elizabeth, to have her translate its pages.

  The service station loomed up ahead, across the deserted corner. A night light burned in the office. The telephone booth was snuggled at its wall, the door open, the phone gleaming blackly within.

  She called a cab, stood out of sight behind the booth until it came. The driver looked at her incuriously, listened to her address and the directions for getting there, yawned, took off with a roar. Amy lay in the back seat against the cushions, her heart pounding. It wouldn’t be long now. She’d know the truth about Tzegeti, about the murder in the Picardy Club, about the murderer on the train. For though Tzegeti hadn’t been able to write in this book after Schneider’s death, there must be clues in it, the substance of stuff leading up to the crime, the identity of the man Schneider had reason to fear. Perhaps, even, the reason why Tzegeti had had to keep his mouth shut.

  The driver slewed toward the curb. In the thin gray light her house looked dead, deserted; it was comforting to think of the warm bed, the child in it, the pup snuggled in the kitchen, the little core of life that made the place a home. She paid off the cab, hurried in through the front door, turned right to the hall and the door to the room where Elizabeth slept. Then a sound from the direction of the kitchen made her turn.

  The pup came into view, staggering a little as if still half asleep, shaking his head. He whimpered at her.

  “How did you get out of your box?” she cried under her breath, rushing for him, thinking of the floor.

  He took a forepaw, raked at his ear with it. A big crimson blob of blood fell out of the ear and splattered on the clean linoleum. The pup backed away, whined again, ended on a hiccuping noise, stood shrinking and trembling.

  Amy jumped for the hall. The book clattered down. She raked for the doorknob, missed it, tried again. Her hands were shaking. Her purse fell. The door swung open. The bed in the spare room was empty, the covers pulled awry so that only the bottom sheet remained in place.

  On it, in the middle of the bed, something was coiled.

  Amy went in, looked down at it. Here was the rope, grown longer—much longer. Only a half of it had been charred by the fire. Two new lengths had sprouted at either end, fresh, businesslike. You keep on, it seemed to tell her, you’ll have enough to hang yourself.

  Amy ran back through the house, looking for signs of struggle. In the kitchen the pup’s box had been crushed as if someone had fallen into it. Elizabeth, perhaps, struck down when she had tried to protect the little dog. Amy turned her attention to the pup then and took him into the bathroom to doctor the ear. He’d been kicked in the head, she thought. She probed with iodine, and he yelled, then subsided and licked her hands. “Good old boy. Stout boy.” It occurred to her that she hadn’t even given him a name. She found herself looking at him blankly, trying to think up something on the spur of the moment.

  How crazy can you get? I’ve got a job to do——

  With the pup under an arm, she rushed back to the hall, to the fallen purse. She picked it up, jerked it open, half afraid that what she wanted might somehow be gone. But the gun was there, heavy, solid and cold inside her hand, the oiled mechanism smooth as silk, the bullets small and deadly. She straightened the pup’s box as well as possible, got a bone from the refrigerator, put him in the box, waited until he had begun to comfort himself with chewing. Then she telephoned for another cab.

  The lights still burned upstairs in Cunninghan’s office, pale now in the growing dawn. Amy wasted no time there. She took her car and headed for the broad private estates where Schneider had built his house behind a steel-link fence.

  She had wondered how you climbed such things if you had to, but this was not necessary. One of the steel gates hung ajar. Amy walked in warily, looking for the dogs. For a few moments she wondered if they had been shut up or perhaps run away. Then one of the brutes stalked out of the shrubbery beside the porch and stood looking at her. Perhaps he recalled some familiarity from that previous visit. There was no movement at first to bar her way.

  Then the second dog rose growling from a clump of flowers, and the first one began an advance.

  “Down, boy!” She pointed commandingly at the ground.

  He bared his teeth, making no noise. The soundless enmity was more frightening than a growl.

  “Go back!” She walked toward him, the gun in her hand now under the shelter of her folded coat. For an instant she thought of the neighbors, of the chance of rousing someone with a shot—then dismissed the idea. Schneider, the gambling lord, had wanted privacy. He had had it. Enough for a scared child to be brought to his house without anyone knowing. And enough for Amy to take care of his watchdogs.

  The dog leaped; the flash of fire caught him in mid-air, like the studied timing of some acrobatic ballet. He came down on his head, his shoulder, and lay there stunned. The second dog, the growler, whatever his breeding or training had put into him, was definitely gun-shy. At the report of the shot he turned, legs long and body low, and fled.

  Amy went up to the shadowed porch and touched the doorknob. The place was locked. She had no intention of rousing someone within by ringing the bell, of waiting to be admitted. She remembered something Robert Luttrell had said once about a quick way to get a door open. You held a gun in a certain way and the lock shattered. She stood back and took aim. There was a sharp, echoing blast, tearing metal, splinters. Amy walked into the cool, quiet hall. She looked through the doorway to the right, into the big room where Mrs. Schneider had sat with royal composure, telling her she knew nothing about the Tzegeti case.

  The room was empty. The silence held nothing but the echoes of Amy’s footsteps on the polished floor of the hall.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  SHE WENT all through the house, unwilling to believe that it was empty, that Elizabeth wasn’t hidden somewhere in it. She explored the cellar, when she found it, with the most hope; but there was just a gas furnace, some stored logs for the fireplace, and laundering equipment down there. She returned to the kitchen and went to work on all likely cupboards, pantries, closets. The interior walls were all of plaster and stucco. There were no hidden passages, no secret nooks, though she had been sure there must be. Elizabeth wasn’t here. They hadn’t dared that much.

  She wasn’t aware of any dismay at this failure. She was like a machine, put on a job, to go on clicking and turning over until the work comes to an end or the machine is smashed.

  The exploration took some time since Amy was thorough. When she had finished, when there was nothing more to see, even in the depths of Mrs. Schneider’s fur vault or in Mr. Wyse’s private liquor cache, she went out into the rear yard. It was quite light out of doors now, almost sunup. The greenery smelled damp, pungent. She walked down a path between crowding olea
nder bushes. A small oval swimming pool glimmered milk-white in a circle of lawn, ringed in with yellow acacia and red plum, lush summer painting its colors on the eye—provided you had time to look.

  Across the pool, under the trees, a little cabana stood open, its louvered doors folded back, the eastern light filling its interior. Mrs. Schneider was inside, sitting quite straight on a canvas lounge. She didn’t seem alarmed at Amy’s approach, the naked gun in her hand. She seemed to be watching the water, the reflected acacias, the plum like an opal fire. Amy walked up to her. “I’ve come for Elizabeth. I’m going to take her home.”

  There was, a glass sitting on the table beside Mrs. Schneider’s elbow. She turned now to look at it, a strange long look, as if to reassure herself that it was there.

  Amy thrust the gun in her face. “I want Elizabeth.”

  Mrs. Schneider put up a sluggish hand, pushed the gun aside. “You mean the Tzegeti child? Is that who you’re looking for?”

  “You took her out of my house last night. You, or your brother, or some hired help. I don’t mind shooting the lot of you if I have to. I’m going to find Elizabeth.”

  Mrs. Schneider waited, as if the words percolated down to her through a rubble of broken emotions, old ideas. “You think she is here?”

  “No, I know you were too smart for that.”

  Mrs. Schneider brushed at a lock of the silver hair. She was still the duchess, but there were frayed spots on the immaculate dignity. The long black velvet dress had mud along the hem. One shoulder had slipped awry, showing the white skin, the toneless sagging skin of an old woman. Under the fine gray brows the eyes were lusterless, burned out. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  Amy crowded her with fierce persistence. “Yes you do. That day when I was having lunch with Neece and you came into the café—you gave him some double-talk, and what it meant was that Mrs. Tzegeti was dying and you wanted a quick search for the book as soon as she was out of the way. You’d been there. I know that. Somehow you made her drink the stuff that killed her.”