by Rufus King
“You’re young, Ann. I felt a twinge of that, too, at your age. Even recently, while last in Paris, there were moments of nostalgia. Some idiot ordering ham and eggs or a pancake. But there are many single and useless rich people like myself. We’re deadwood, really, in any social scheme. What difference does it make whether we clutter America or Europe? We do neither any good. It would be different if I were married and had children. I’d stay here then.”
“But why don’t you like it better here anyhow?”
“I’ve tried to, dear, but I prefer the Continent. I’m aging and getting mellow, and the tempo of the Mediterranean coast suits me better than Palm Beach. For one thing, they have a greater understanding of single middle-aged women than we have over here, and, for another, the servants fight better, and that keeps my wits sharp. You are different. You belong here.”
“I think I’d hate to live anywhere else.”
“I’m sure you would. You and—his name is Bill, isn’t it? Bill Forrest?”
“Yes.”
“Has he called you since the newspapers started their fanfare?”
“No, he hasn’t.”
Estelle smiled serenely and started for the door.
“I must rest awhile. God knows what the troopers will be like. I need an hour’s sleep or I’ll greet them with all the social graces of a first-class zany.”
Then she said before closing the door, “Don’t worry about Mr. Forrest’s not calling. He will. My dear, I envy you the happiness you have in store.”
Do you? Ann wondered. Do you, Estelle?
CHAPTER XV
Sergeant Hurlstone of the state police reached Black Tor shortly after four o’clock. With him were Clarence Harlan and Medical Examiner Bedmann. The electrical pyrotechnics of the storm had stopped by then, but the rain continued to torrent down in gray cascades and the three men, in spite of their ponchos, were soaked.
At a quarter of five the house phone in Ann’s living room rang. Ann answered it.
“Ann Marlow?” a strange voice said. “I’m Clarence Harlan. I’m coming in to see you, if I may.”
“Certainly, Mr. Harlan.”
“I’ve bailed myself out, but I’m still waterlogged, so don’t expect anything more than a sodden old hulk. How about asking Washburn to send up my usual depth charge of rum, will you? I need it.”
“Of course I will.”
“Thank you. My rooms are just a quarter of a mile down the hall. I’ll be right over.”
Ann phoned Washburn and asked for the rum and also a scotch for herself. The backlash of Estelle’s little visit had put on the bite, and Harlan’s voice had come as a relief.
There was a good deal of mulling to do over the things which Estelle had said, Ann realized after Estelle had gone. Principally that salon handling of their mutual life expectancy with its connotations in Marlow’s will: “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.”
Well, the lightning had stopped and the thunder.
Harlan knocked and came in.
Ann liked him instantly. She doubted whether she had ever seen a man so completely ugly or with such a warming smile. He was not especially tall or large, and yet he lumbered. Comfortably. His clothes were so much expensive sacking. They were also (which Ann did not know) so much expensive tailoring by one of the best men in New York to give him precisely that wholesome look.
No male juror had ever sat watching him without feeling pleasantly satisfied with his own little blue serge number, and no woman juror had ever failed to want to give his coat a motherly twitch. Harlan had also discovered that this worked out admirably in private life, so he had never bothered to be svelte.
He shook hands and said he was going to call her Ann. “And you,” he said, “will call me Clarence. I don’t mind the name a bit. It saved me the bother of looking for chips when I was a kid. Where’s the rum?”
“It hasn’t come yet.”
“Rotten service. Ought to change your hotel. I won’t offer sympathies to you about Justin, because I know he could have meant so little to you. Just the death of a stranger. Same way when we get to that business about Alice and Fred. Your whole mentality and heart are still Ledrick, and that’s how it should be. Both of them were fine.”
“You knew them?”
“Intimately, only you never knew it. Part of the arrangement. Even to wish me a good morning is supposed to cost the wisher a mint. Stupid, the way a legend will grow up about a public figure. You’ll find out. You’re one yourself now. Has Bill called you up since the story broke?”
“Bill? You know Bill Forrest?”
“Ann, there isn’t a thing about you that I haven’t known since you were three months old. You lived as the Ledricks’ daughter, but you were still the Marlow heiress and, thank God, here’s the rum.”
Ann answered the knock and said, “Come in.” Washburn ushered in a manservant with a tray on which, among innumerable other things, was a spirit lamp heating a silver pot of boiling water. The man placed the tray on the coffee table by the fireplace and left. Ann thanked Washburn, who told her that Miss Estelle Marlow had suggested they would have cocktails in the lounge at seven. Miss Marlow had felt that the usual household routine should be adhered to if this was agreeable. Ann assured him that it was, and he went out.
Harlan mixed Ann a highball and then concocted, elaborately, his own hot spiced rum.
“Bill hasn’t telephoned at all today,” Ann said. “Fanny Mistral has.”
“I like Fanny. I admire her. She’s like a smart trick. You know it’s legerdemain, but it’s of the slickest sort. I guess Bill’s busy being a marine. He is not, incidentally, a bad bet.”
“For me?”
“Certainly. If you love him. And if you can get him.”
“Get him! He’s a direct descendant of Og, the caveman.”
“True, but he is also a descendant of a sterling line of self-sufficient Forrests. Most of them had the major characteristics of Army mules. And the scene has changed. Bill isn’t clubbing simple Miss Ledrick on the head. He’s clubbing the Marlow heiress on the head.”
“As if that would make the slightest difference to Bill.”
“Possibly it won’t. It’s all according to how you handle him. You will be seeing Sergeant Hurlstone shortly, Ann. He’s all right. He has brains, brawn, and believes in the decencies. A good character. I have given him a complete synopsis of your life, including the how and why of your being here now. Don’t worry about him. Just help him. And now tell me everything you know about Justin’s death.”
Harlan sat quietly, sipping the hot rum as Ann did so. He made no comments. He did not interrupt. He seemed to weigh and separate and file her words as she spoke. She ended with the short talk which she had had with Estelle after Marlow’s death and with Estelle’s calm statement that both she and Marlow thought that Ludwig Appleby had himself killed Alice.
Harlan, at this, permitted himself a grunt.
“If Justin did think that he never said so to me. And why didn’t he accuse Ludwig directly during his talk with you? From what you’ve told me, Justin’s remarks were entirely general and vague. Either the closeness of death was clouding his mind or Estelle was lying.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know why. But the fact remains that we have always considered Ludwig the one person with a perfect alibi. Ludwig’s clothes were wet.”
CHAPTER XVI
Harlan mixed another hot rum. He suggested a highball, which Ann refused. He returned to his chair and for a while regarded the dark and rain-drenched windows.
He said, “There is the falsest sort of security in being cozy. As we are now. A lazy fire, soft lights, good drinks, and the intimate charm of this friendly room. Ships are like that, right up to the moment of some swift and unpredictable disaster. I am frightening you?”
“Not really.”
“I t
hink a little, I want to. Justin was right, Ann. Hold a constant alert against the unexpected in danger. Let me show you the murderer’s mind. The murderer of Alice and Justin. To him you are an unknown quantity. He has no yardstick as yet with which to gauge you.”
“In what way?”
“Your tenacity. The extent and strength of your purpose to carry on where Justin left off. I am interested in the results of Bedmann’s autopsy. He is a good man, a careful one. I expect that the murderer’s long-range plan involving the radioactive substance lingered too long.”
“You think a swifter, an immediate poison was used too?”
“We shall see. There is nothing in all you have told me to indicate that Justin had come upon some decisive clue, but the murderer could have harbored that illusion. He will continue to harbor it and will believe that Justin passed the clue on to you. I shall get you out of here.”
“I wish you would. I ride. You made it on horseback; why couldn’t I?”
“We found the difficulties almost insurmountable even in daylight. We are centered here in a circumference of chasms, peaks, and streams. The streams were already swollen to torrents. There is no chance by night. We will see what weather the morning brings. I am hoping that the storm will be sufficiently spent for a plane to take off. You will be safer in New York. I will tell you about Ludwig.”
“His wet clothes?”
“Yes. It was a day like this one. Buckets of water since morning, and about the same time of year as now. You have met Justin and Estelle. You know Ludwig, Dr. Johnson, and me. We were all here. Have you met Fleury?”
“Yes, just an hour or so ago.”
“He was here too. He had been Justin’s secretary for just about a year. Hermits are outmoded, I believe. We dub them misanthropes or solitaries. Anyhow, Fleury turned into one after the accident. You know about that, of course?”
“Estelle told me.”
“Well, when he got back on the job Fleury would scuttle out of his own apartment on the floor above only when Justin had some business for him to take care of. As you saw, he is permanently crippled. You can understand how sensitive he is about it.”
“Of course I do.”
“It is depressing to look at him, poor devil, and Fleury knows it. Anyhow, he’s the one who found Fred in the music room. Fred had the knife in his hand and Alice was dead. Jerry Abbott and Frank Lawrence, naturally, you don’t know.”
“They were the hunting accident and ptomaine?”
“I agree with Justin that they were not accidents. Both were here, and that completes the list. You must think of all of us at that time as being twenty years younger, with emotions that were far more fiery and with far less balance than today. Estelle was twenty-five, very rosy-cheeked and plump, very much like any Christmas calendar version of a country lass, only give her a thumping income. And the only corn-fed thing about her was her figure. She was death on chocolate creams. Dr. Johnson, of course, was a far better-looking man at thirty than he is today.”
“Wasn’t that rather young? For him to have been Mr. Marlow’s physician?”
“He was Alice’s doctor, not Justin’s. His father had been the Charing family doctor in Boston. The old gentleman had died of a stroke, and Dick had taken over his practice. Dick Johnson had graduated with about every honor in the book and was the boy marvel of Back Bay. To return to Ludwig. You can see what a bull he is.”
“Indeed one can.”
“Twenty years ago he was a younger one. Still very bull and he-man to the word go. Everybody else stayed indoors that afternoon because of the storm. But not Ludwig. Oh no. Ludwig had to pop outside and breast it. Just himself and the rain and the thunder.”
“I bet he batted the bolts right back.”
“No doubt of it. Well, he did look up at the music-room windows just around the moment when it was settled that Alice was stabbed. That’s when he saw it.”
“Saw what?”
“The thing that Justin paid him money for years to remember. It was a white back.”
“A what?”
“Either somebody in a shirt, or a white coat, or a white dress. Rain blurred the window to an extent, but Ludwig insisted there was something identifiable about the white back if he could only put his finger on it. He is still claiming it and he still hasn’t put his finger on it.”
“Didn’t he testify at the trial?”
“Yes, but it got us no place. We showed that Fred had been wearing a dark suit when Alice was killed and how improbable it was for him to have taken off his coat in order to stab her, especially while blinded in his alleged moment of homicidal rage. We insisted Fred’s story was true: that he had come into the music room and found Alice stabbed and had taken the knife from the wound. We offered the white back as that of the murderer. The prosecuting attorney simply sliced Ludwig’s frail impression into ribbons.”
“Do you believe Ludwig? Estelle told me that she and Mr. Marlow didn’t.”
“I believe nothing, but I am again puzzled at Estelle because I’ve always felt that Justin did put some credence in Ludwig’s story. Naturally we looked into this business of the white back thoroughly. Both Alice and Estelle were in dark dresses, which takes care of the women. The men were in tweeds, so there you are. And there was Ludwig with his lucrative claim. He grew more definite bit by bit as the years passed. It wasn’t a shirt or a coat or a dress. There was something, he said, unique about it. I think it will remain unique as long as he can get a cent out of it.”
“How could he charge for trying to help?”
“Oh, my dear Ann. Nothing so crass as that for Ludwig. He would ask for loans to tide him over momentary straits. Every time he got a loan from Justin he would then oblige by going into his famous concentration act.”
“Estelle was definite about Mr. Marlow paying Ludwig simply because he hoped that Ludwig would make some incriminating slip and give himself away.”
“Estelle would seem to have become peculiarly definite of late. But quite possibly she is right. She herself may have turned Justin to that point of view since her return from Paris. I haven’t been up here at Black Tor in over a year. But I maintain that Ludwig’s alibi was perfect.”
“Doesn’t that in itself—?”
“No, I know the current mode, and it’s nonsense. The man with the perfect alibi is always It. I stick to simplicities, especially so in the case of Alice. There was nothing premeditated about the crime whatever. A flash of terrific passion, a weapon at hand, and she was dead. Have you been in the music room?”
“No.”
“It has a museum flavor. Cases of rare coins, some excellent folios, some weapons. That was true to form, if you wish.”
“The weapon?”
“Yes, a Cellini dagger out of one of the cases. Now Ludwig’s alibi was this: Fleury raised perfect hell the moment he spotted Fred holding the dagger and Alice slumped on the spinet keyboard. I mean really hell. You wouldn’t think Fleur had it in him. The lung power. Well, Ludwig had just come into the house by the front door. He was drenched clear through and left a clear trail of wet footprints right to the coatroom.”
“Did anyone see him come in?”
“Not actually, but Washburn ran into the entrance hall because of Fleury howling murder, and he saw Ludwig just taking off his sodden overcoat.”
“It was a matter of water.”
“You are thinking of shower baths, of some form of trickery. Forget it, Ann. Nothing was planned about Alice’s killing.”
“This is something I didn’t tell you. When Ludwig came here last night Mr. Marlow didn’t act like a man who was glad because someone whom he was trying to trap had arrived. He looked murderous. You know how you can’t mistake certain facial expressions? Mr. Marlow’s was one of hate. Bitter, intense hate.”
Harlan thought this over.
“Interesting,” he said. “And odd about Estelle’s several contradictions. She’s such a clear-thinking woman usually.”
CHAPTER X
VII
Danning, the maid, came in shortly after Harlan had gone. A pale Danning and a thoughtful one.
She said, “I’m glad it’s you. We always felt the child would come back one day. We knew that before Mr. Marlow died he would send for her, and I’m glad it’s you who are Ann Marlow.”
“Have you been here since that time?”
“I was one of the upstairs maids. I used to take care of Mrs. Marlow when her own maid was on vacation. Do you know that these rooms were Mrs. Marlow’s? ”
“Yes, Mr. Thurlow told me so.”
Danning continued to chat at intervals while she drew a bath and laid out Ann’s dark voile dinner dress. It began to occur to Ann as she watched her that there was a touch of the trancelike in her movements. Several of them would have been quite de rigueur at a séance.
“Mrs. Marlow was lovely,” Danning said. “She was a poet as well as a fine musician. Often I’d see her sitting at that desk over there, writing, and she’d look up at me and smile. But she wasn’t seeing me. I suppose you will think this is funny, but there are times when I can feel her in this room.”
Danning lingered on this, tasting it mystically and standing back a bit with her head tilted to one side to consider its full effect.
“No,” Ann said, “that isn’t funny. Anyone you’ve liked—when you’re in a place that is intimately associated with them.”
“It’s more than just that. I’m a seventh daughter.”
This stumped Ann. All she could say was: “Are you!” It satisfied Danning perfectly, and she went on a bit about her extrasensory prowess.
“I saw my niece once.”
“Saw her?”
“Yes. It was about four o’clock in the morning, and she came through the closed door and stood by my bed.”
“You did say closed?”
“Closed and the bolt shot. My niece was at Newburgh at the time, hundreds of miles away. I knew she wasn’t dead, but I did know very strongly that she was in danger from some grave illness. She was. The crisis had just passed.”
“You heard from her?”