by Rufus King
Estelle reached over and gave Ann’s hand a warm, friendly press.
“Let us leave them to Washburn, dear. Perhaps it would be best to say, Washburn, that a statement will be given out after the proper authorities reach here. It is always a wonder to me that that phrase doesn’t drop apart from habitual senility every time it’s used. I know you won’t antagonize them, Washburn.”
“No, Miss Marlow.”
“For your sake, Ann. They’ll make a Hollywood premiere of you as it is, without this ghastly horror of Justin’s murder being tacked on. You had better say, Washburn, that Miss Ann Marlow will be very glad to give interviews when she recovers from the shock of her grandfather’s death. She is at present resting under the care of Dr. Johnson. Is that all right, Ann?”
“Thank you, Estelle.”
“There is a personal call,” Washburn said to Ann. “Miss Fanny Mistral from New York. Will you take it, Miss Marlow?”
“Yes, of course.”
Ann followed Washburn to a small room just off the lounge. He indicated the telephone. He closed the door.
“Darling!” Fanny’s voice screamed. “The Review had it on the streets two minutes ago. I simply can’t believe it. I feel as if I’ve been using the Hope diamond for a paperweight. Are you all right, darling?”
“Perfectly all right.”
“My dear, you’re a woman of iron!”
“I’m glad you called. It’s like something solid, hearing you, or doesn’t that make sense?”
“It’s the most insulting thing that’s ever been said to me, and I love it. That man who sent the story in from that unheard-of village in the Adirondacks told simply nothing. Just that you were that child and that Justin Marlow had been murdered. I shan’t ask a thing because I know the AP and UP will commit murder themselves to get the story out of you, and I do appreciate the fact that you can’t talk. Especially to me, darling. I know me. Clarence Harlan is the Marlow lawyer, isn’t he? ”
“Yes, Miss Mistral.”
“For heaven’s sakes,” Fanny screamed, “call me Fanny! You’re rich enough to now. Well, every word you say from now on will have to be infra-rayed by Harlan. My dear, you’ll love him. I met him last fall at one of those dogfights that Mariot Whipple calls luncheon, and he’s the nicest old lamb that ever housed a wolf and ate a grandmother. He’ll probably dash in on horseback ahead of the troopers, and don’t think he can’t. Is there anything I can do?”
“Thank you, Fanny, nothing. But it has been ever so good just hearing you.”
“You’ll be staying up there, won’t you? That’s stupid. Of course you will. And don’t, my dear, look demure when the troopers give you the third degree—just be candidly soignée, with a dash of the clinging-vine and the sloe-eyed touch. I know those breeched hot cakes. What?… Wait a minute, dear.”
“I will.”
“Darling, I couldn’t be sorrier. Miss Stevens just dashed in and said that eight vultures from the press have wrecked the joint and gone off with every shot we have of you. They even took those grim things Davis did. You remember when he tried that new lighting and turned you into a reincarnation of Zaza? Oh, my dear!”
“It doesn’t matter, Fanny.”
“You’ll find out whether it matters or not when you get the morning editions. Just sue me as much as you want to. Good-by, darling, and call me any minute of the day or night you feel you need a solid.”
“Thank you, Fanny, and good-by.”
Ann hung up. She returned to the lounge feeling extraordinarily better from her chat with Fanny which had given her, in effect, a momentary release into the outside world. Relief was stripped from her when she saw that Estelle had gone and that Ludwig, instead, was sitting on the sofa by the fire. Flat in her mind was Estelle’s calm statement that Ludwig was a killer. The killer.
She said stupidly, “Estelle?”
“Estelle, my dear Ann, has gone up to Justin’s private office to preside over a joint session of his estate manager and his secretary. The welter of details pursuant upon the death of a man of your grandfather’s prominence is enormous. Sit down and have a drink with me. I’ve just sent for one. You look all right on the surface, but you must be completely ratty inside.”
“I’m not.”
“Well, you should be. After such jolts. Personally, I intend getting slowly and methodically cockeyed.”
“I’m going up to unpack.”
“I told you you reminded me of Aunt Deborah.” Ludwig said with sudden intensity, “Look here, what was it?”
“What was what?”
“What killed Justin? Was it a knife? A gunshot? Was it poison? Weren’t you there?”
“Yes.”
“Well?”
“It was radium poisoning. He had eaten some radioactive substance.”
Ludwig’s expression of intense interest grew blank. He thought this over for a while. Ann thought the beefy redness of his cheeks was paling.
“That’s rot,” he said. “How could Johnson determine a thing like that?”
“The skeleton of his hand was developed on films I had taken of the ocelots. He had held the film pack in his hand. Dr. Johnson will undoubtedly explain it more technically to the troopers.”
Ludwig said nothing to this. He sat shrouded in his thoughts which were, Ann decided, assuredly of the darkest sort. She left him and went toward the door.
Ludwig said as she reached it, “You’re very clever, Ann. Aren’t you?”
CHAPTER XIII
Ann went on up to her rooms. She was fretful, nervous, and completely at sea. Nothing had sunk in. She was still Ann Ledrick with a job at Fanny Mistral’s and a room on Thirty-sixth Street.
She didn’t feel rich. Not even partially rich, much less Marlow rich. This very detachment from her changed status tempered greatly any sense of nervousness about immediate physical dangers. There was no assurance of reality to punch it home.
It was curiously difficult to accept Ludwig in the killer role just on Estelle’s say-so. Even his recent bravura of ignorance as to the method of Marlow’s slaying—although it could have been a spurt of calculated histrionics, it could also have been perfectly genuine. Estelle was herself too apt a subject for the part to take her word alone.
Ann removed her things from the luggage and put them away. She visualized with a certain irritation Ludwig’s Aunt Deborah as she did so. While this normal activity lasted it shoved Marlow’s tragic moment of death and his burning warnings into a general remoteness and dulled their edge from reality.
But he had been murdered.
There was always that. Murdered for having circled ever nearer and nearer to the murderer of Alice. Murdered, of course, by the murderer of Alice. And Marlow had handed her the torch. Whether Ann wanted it or not did not matter. She held it.
She could protest herself blue in the face that Marlow had died before having told her of the spadework already done. His (and Alice’s) murderer would never believe it for a minute and, in any case, would realize that Clarence Harlan, when he reached Black Tor, would shortly give her all the facts.
Her ears, attuned to the intermittent rumblings of thunder, failed to catch the knocking on the door until it was repeated. She opened the door and saw the silhouette of a stranger, dark against the sullen light which dulled the hall through its mullioned windows.
“I am Martin Thurlow,” the man said. “I am the estate manager.”
“Come in, Mr. Thurlow.”
“Thank you.”
Thurlow stepped in. In the living room’s stronger light he offered, with his neat, rimless glasses and thinning sandy-toned hair, a portrait of efficient precision. His movements were all accurately timed and nice, and his smile was as thinly clear-cut as the pressure of the hand which he offered to Ann.
“I came to offer you both my sympathies and my services, Miss Marlow.”
Ann thanked him and suggested that he sit down. She was relieved at having him here, at having anyone on hand to inter
rupt the dark and irritated turgid mess of her thoughts. Thurlow struck her as refreshingly impersonal and solid, very much like the human adding machine which he probably was.
Then thunder ripped tumbling through the sky, and she wondered, while its peals prolonged and then muted off, about Thurlow.
Why shouldn’t an estate manager fit in among a suspect list? The manager of a property the value of Black Tor easily could. The accounts which passed through Thurlow’s hands must be enormous and could present opportunities for peculations which, no matter how modest in themselves, could sum up to a handsome total through the years.
She revolted at this state of mind she was settling into: one of constant suspicion. Thurlow was probably as honest as the day was long. And boy, she pondered in passing, was it long! He looked so certainly an agreeable, businesslike, clever man.
“Miss Marlow suggested that I drop in,” Thurlow said after the last disgruntled rumble of the thunder. “She asked me to say that she herself will come as soon as the most pressing things are gone over with Fleury. There are innumerable wires to send and cables.”
“I thought that Mr. Marlow had cut himself off from people?”
“He had, but his former friends must be notified just the same, and his business holdings reach rather largely throughout the world. Most of them, fortunately, lie in South America.”
“What was his business, Mr. Thurlow?”
Thurlow smiled slightly.
“Everything, I suppose one might say, and none. Your grandfather had an uncanny sense for making both timely and sustaining investments. He exemplified extremely well the man who did not put all of his eggs in one basket. During recent years he entrusted quite a few of his interests to me. They were in addition to my regular job of managing Black Tor.”
Thurlow had been looking with more than usual interest around the room.
“I wonder whether you know that these were your mother’s rooms?” he asked.
“No, I didn’t.”
“It’s the first time they have been used since her death. It was one of Mr. Marlow’s foibles to have them kept locked. I must confess I found it rather interesting when I learned they were to be opened up and put at the disposal of an artist in photography. A stranger.” He stood up and smiled pleasantly. “There was a good deal of speculation about it among the staff, I can tell you.”
“I can see where there would be.”
“Yes, it is understandable. We have had so very little to speculate about during these years of our exile from—yes, I might almost say from life.”
He said good day and went to the door, where he paused for a moment to take a more comprehensive and more leisurely look at the pleasant room.
“A charming setting,” he said, “for the charming woman I understand your mother to have been. How extremely wise Mr. Marlow was to have shielded you from her tragedy. If he had not, you would today be a replica of what he was himself, the shadow of a living person, wasted, embittered, and shrunken from daily brooding on that terrible event. You know, I doubt whether you could ever have brought yourself to stay in these rooms. Yes, I think you might even have been afraid to. Well, good day again, Miss Marlow.”
He closed the door.
CHAPTER XIV
That, Ann decided, was a good swift jab with anybody’s needle. Just what had Thurlow meant to imply by his curtain line? For it was one, and handled in the very best manner of the Clyde Fitch school. All he had needed, she thought irritably, had been a mustache to twist.
Was it a warning, or was it a threat? She shrugged. You pay your nickel. Best let it go at that. She did look the room over with fresh eyes. So it had been her mother’s, her true mother’s: that figure of tragedy who awakened no emotion whatever in her beyond a stranger’s pity.
The dreary monotony of the storm and this standing around and waiting with nothing to do had nourished her nervous irritation to a fine point by the time Estelle came in shortly after three. Fleury was with her.
Fleury didn’t, Ann thought, help much. He fitted in perfectly with the general gloom. With his gauntness and with eyes that were of shallow blue and were shutters rather than windows to his thoughts. His left arm was wasted and distorted.
“I want you to know Mr. Fleury, dear,” Estelle said. “Justin depended on him so much. You and I must depend on him now for so many matters concerning Justin’s affairs of which we are ignorant.”
The shutters lifted for a moment as Fleury accepted Ann’s hand. It effaced the expiring-fish effect and gave her a glimpse of the real man. There was force. A lot of it. There was an undercoat of force even in the reserve with which he greeted her. She knew he was sizing her up, obliquely now, and not regarding her potentialities as a person but rather as an instrument upon which, at some later moment, he purposed to play a tune.
Fleury did not linger. Having paid his respects, he left them, and Estelle said, “You noticed his arm, of course?”
“Yes.”
“Justin did it. Justin always did drive like the devil when he was younger. It wasn’t from recklessness but simply from a conviction that when he bought a car which was built to go a certain speed with safety he saw no reason for not using that speed when he felt like it. To him it was just an understandable business proposition. Well, he hit Fleury.”
“But how terrible!”
“Yes, it was. It wasn’t really Justin’s fault. He was doing one of his wild-West approaches along the driveway when Fleury stepped out into the road from the shrubbery.”
“Couldn’t he have heard the car?”
“Yes, but he wouldn’t. Fleury is usually so up in the clouds that he rarely hears anything.”
“Then how on earth is he a secretary?”
“He wasn’t a good one. He was a very bad one, but a dear friend of Justin’s had asked him to take Fleury on. Justin hated to fire people, but he had just about made up his mind to fire Fleury when the accident happened.”
“I suppose then he felt obliged to keep him.”
“Yes. It wasn’t only the arm at the time. Fleury was pretty badly knocked about. It will be hard for you to realize it after this glimpse of him, but he was quite handsome, in that burning, ascetic way which was so fashionable right then. He adored Alice. From afar. We were completely cruel about this adoration and used to make it the subject of little jokes which were in extremely bad taste. We weren’t an especially nice generation at the time, dear. And I doubt whether we’ve improved.”
“I don’t see why Fleury stayed.”
“Well, people do. Justin loaded him with hospitalization and specialists and money and made his job more or less of a sinecure. You’ll find as you grow older, Ann, that even idealists are not unswayed by good sound cash. They’ll keep right on beating their breasts, but they’ll accept the gold whenever their hands have a free moment. Fleury is an idealist, of course. Almost a rabid one. And I’m a thoroughly beastly cynic. I look for clay feet before I even glance at an idol’s head.”
“What are Fleury’s isms?”
“All of them. Socialism, mostly. I’m interested in seeing how Justin’s legacy will affect him. Justin left him a hundred thousand outright. My bet is that Fleury throws his share-and-sharings straight through the window and becomes an out-and-out capitalist.” Estelle lighted a cigarette. “Ann,” she said suddenly, “there must be a great many things you want to know.”
There were, and foremost among them was some clarification from Estelle about Ludwig being the murderer. She would have started on this, but Estelle said, “Aren’t you honestly curious?”
Then Estelle observed her for a moment and said, “No, I really believe you’re not.”
“About what, Estelle?”
“The estate. Surely it must mean something to you suddenly to know that you are one of the world’s richest young women?”
“This will sound extremely stupid, but I don’t realize it.”
“Then let me bring it home to you.”
Es
telle plunged into a listing of Justin’s far-flung holdings, the scope of the sources from which he had derived his great fortune. She went farther. She spread out before Ann the endless fields for pleasure and for acquisition which her huge income would give her.
Jewels, costumes, great estates, yachts, all of the things which (Ann caught this clearly) Estelle herself held of value in life, a glittering rapacity which, from her own standards, Estelle was transferring to Ann with the assurance that they would be equally acceptable.
“It is odd,” Estelle said after she had finished with the dazzling parade, “what rotten tricks comparisons can accomplish. I’m not a poor woman. Far from it. But in contrast with what your income will be, I’m little short of knocking at the poorhouse.”
“Surely we will share everything, Estelle?”
“No. I know Justin’s will. He spoke to me quite frankly about it. He has left me a trust fund. A very good one, incidentally. He was afraid of this very streak of generosity you are showing now. He also knew as well as I do that I’m a greedy woman, insatiably so. My attacks of insomnia are all brought on by frustration over thinking up new things to buy.”
“You shall buy whatever you like.”
“My dear, to come right down to earth, the trust fund is broken if I accept anything from you at all. Justin knew me far too well. Of course if you were to die before I did and were an old maid, that would be another matter, and both contingencies are as improbable as the chances that this storm will ever stop.”
“It does have an eternal touch.”
“No, Ann. You must believe me. I am perfectly satisfied with what dear Justin has left me. More than satisfied. Grateful. It will enable me, after this terrible war is over and France rises again, to return there.”
“Estelle, I’ve never understood that.”
“Expatríes? I’ve not, myself, been able to satisfactorily. We’re a queer breed. An atavistic throwback to our Old World roots doesn’t explain it. What I really suppose it is just common sense.”
“How can it be? Leaving your country?”