by Rufus King
“I got a wire the following day from my sister Mabel. Influenza.” Danning artistically savored Ann’s reactions. “I hope I’m not making you nervous?”
“Not a bit.”
“Some folks don’t care about staying in rooms that have vibrations. I always say it’s according to the vibrations. Your mother was so lovely and so kind, I’m happy when she vibrates. Has anyone shown you that portrait of her?”
“No. Where is it?”
“It’s in the next room, the one your father used to use as a study. Would you care to see it?”
“I’d like to very much.”
Ann went with Danning into the adjoining room, and Danning switched on lights. The portrait hung above a mantel.
“Mr. Marlow sometimes thought of having it brought down to the lounge, but he never did. He left it here because it’s where your father used to enjoy looking at it.”
It was a stunning job, and Ann saw at once that there was a resemblance. Quite a pronounced one, really, and she understood fully Ludwig’s puzzled look on meeting her last night.
Danning sighed happily.
“I can feel her. Yes, I can feel her right now.”
Danning, on this note of triumph, left.
Well, Ann thought as she returned to her living room, there is something to it. You do feel things. Not always with a seventh-daughter virtuosity, but still in a manner highly snorted at by scientists. She tried to shake off this train of thought before it became a mood.
Definitely it was not a moment for moods which impinged on the astral. Tangible murder was wretched enough. And where was Bill’s brash voice? As Estelle had so kindly inferred, the Washington papers would surely be carrying the story by now.
Joining the Marines did not involve a retreat into solitary confinement. Anything but. They were famous for their aptitude with telephones. And telephone numbers. Well?
The mood took root while Ann did a final job on her lips and hair. As she sat before the dressing table it occurred to her that Alice had sat there too. Seeing the portrait of her mother had brought her nearer to reality, but still Ann, in all honesty, could not emotionalize her as such.
She went through the living room, and her eyes rested briefly on the desk where Alice had sat with her verses and loveliness and inward thoughts. How easy, Ann thought, to think a ghost. And how insultingly nonessential all mediumistic paraphernalia of floating cheesecloths and iced rubber hands.
This nervous reflection went with her along the hallway and into the lift, which once more impressed her with its cachet of luxury as Ann went down. It was somewhat before seven, and the lounge was empty except for the brawny figure of Sergeant Hurlstone toasting his rear before the log fire.
Ann found him everything that Ludwig Appleby hoped himself to be and wasn’t. Features of calm granite, muscles of flexible granite, and eyes of hard dark slate. Practically a park monument of the better and more martial sort. He came forward to greet her, extending a hand which pressed her fingers with the courtesy of a restrained stone crusher.
“I regret the incident of your grandfather’s death, Miss Marlow. You are Miss Marlow?”
“I am, Sergeant Hurlstone.”
“I like to have things confirmed.”
“A very sound idea, I should say, in your profession.”
“It is. Mr. Harlan has told me about you. After dinner I would like you to tell me yourself.”
“I’ll be glad to.”
“I will also want you to tell me every word you can remember which has been said to you since you arrived here. As well as everything which you have observed.”
“I will do the best I can.”
“That will be satisfactory. There is no such thing as perfection. Thank you.”
That scene was over. Sergeant Hurlstone withdrew into his granite fastness and once more offered his rear to the co-operating fire. Ann sat on a sofa. Socially the moment presented no routine avenues for advance, and she regretted not having Estelle’s salon touch: an ability to breach all walls.
She wanted to ask about the autopsy results or progress and saw no reason why she shouldn’t. She was about to, when Estelle’s entrance checked her. Estelle was loosely hung with nervous dark chiffons, which were relieved about the throat by a magnificent circlet of what surely were the ocelot-transported emeralds.
Martin Thurlow and Fleury were with Estelle. She introduced them to Sergeant Hurlstone while Washburn supervised the service of canapés and cocktails.
Then Clarence Harlan came in with Ludwig, who gave indications, it seemed to Ann, of having made at least one leg along his course toward becoming potted. Medical Examiner Bedmann did not show up, nor did Dr. Johnson.
Ann found herself with Fleury. He wasted no time but dived abruptly into his favorite ism.
“I suppose all this will go,” he said.
“Black Tor?”
“Yes. The time has gone by when such gestures are any longer tenable. When lands and houses and machinery, when the lifetimes and ingenuity and labor of many women and men should all be expended toward the maintenance of privacy for a single individual. I do not think you will find the thought revolutionary. What will you do with all this, Miss Marlow? With these possessions both living and inanimate which now are yours?”
“I have still to appreciate that they are mine, Mr. Fleury.”
“You are offended. You feel it an impertinence on my part. Do not. I have discussed this quite openly with your grandfather. I did not find him sympathetic.”
“Sympathetic to what, Mr. Fleury? ”
“To my notions, if you care to call them that. He did.” Fleury’s shallow and pale blue eyes took on some warmth of life. The shutters raised and revealed a glow. His notions were, he told Ann, frankly socialistic. There was nothing new about them. The administration in Washington for a good many years had been attempting to apply them, but such an attempt was due to be a long struggle and an ultimate possible failure.
You couldn’t do it that way: from the top down. Using either a schoolmarm’s admonitory finger or a big mouth or a big stick, to say nothing of making people pay through the nose for the experiment whether they liked it or not. No. That bred outright antagonism or a cumulative irritation, which was worse. You had to start at the bottom with a willing guinea pig who would offer himself as a proving ground; say a man like Mr. Marlow and with an outfit like Black Tor.
Fleury clearly was becoming feverish about his obsession (it amounted to one) when Ludwig joined them. He put his empty cocktail glass on a tray being offered by a manservant and took a filled one.
“Something tells me,” he said to Ann, “that Fleury is off again. His face has that transcendental glow.” Then he said directly to Fleury, “You might at least wait until Justin is decently buried before slicing up this elegant estate for a general handout. Seriously, what would you do with it, anyway, if some miracle were to put it in your hands? Do you seriously suppose that your selected little group of underprivileged souls would become so many contented bees, each busy on his own small patch? The harmonious lot of them sweetly stuck together with nectar and honey? You know it’s rubbish. They’d fly at each other’s throats within a week. You’d have a first-class massacre the moment Mrs. Puddlewick’s neighbor stuck a new feather in her hat.”
Fleury said with strange dignity, “We cannot hope to have Philistines understand us, Mr. Appleby,” and walked away.
“Poor wretch,” Ludwig said. “In my heart I’m sorry for him.”
“You have a unique way of showing it.”
“That’s because I’m a little tight. I told you, Ann, I would be. But I was right about Fleury, wasn’t I?”
“Yes, in a sense.”
“For years I used to warn Justin to get rid of him. Pension him off or wrap a fortune around his neck, but anyhow get him out of the house. I don’t like fanatics. I think they’re dangerous. They’re all of them borderline cases. Just the thin breadth of a hair between what shred of sa
nity they possess and in going completely overboard.”
“I do think it queer that Mr. Marlow didn’t in some way arrange to have him go.”
“I’ve a feeling that he may have tried to and that Fleury simply wouldn’t. Just refused to budge. Simply clung here like a limpet—limpets do cling?”
“I think they do. On rocks.”
“Well, we’ll make it a leech. It doesn’t matter. Fleury remained glued simply so that he could fire broadsides of his mad notions at Justin whenever he felt like it. Justin was much too kindhearted to force the point. His sense of obligation because of that accident business seemed to increase rather than diminish.”
Washburn announced dinner.
Ann continued to think of Fleury as she walked into the dining room: Are you the one? Did you kill him? Did you hate him for what he did to your arm, and did you brood yourself toward homicide because he would not underwrite your Utopia? It could be. But where was Alice in all that?
Very much in it, Ann realized as she recalled Estelle’s description of Fleury’s adoration of Alice “from afar.” How deeply the acid could have bitten Fleury to have been changed through an accident from a personable young man into one whom he felt his adored one might have looked on with distaste.
“Yes,” she said to Sergeant Hurlstone, whom she found seated at her left, “I have seen Arsenic and Old Lace and I liked it very much.”
There was this about Sergeant Hurlstone, Ann realized: he kept things in their niches. They were at dinner, and the talk would, therefore, be the talk which he understood was suitable for talk at dinner when served as the meal was and at a place like Black Tor.
She began to like him very much. He was, he admitted, a subscriber to the Book-of-the-Month Club. He believed in a balanced mental ration as firmly as in a diet properly apportioned among the vitamins. He regretted, during the roast, that the opera seemed on its last legs.
It was different after dinner was over and he was alone with Ann, at his request, in her living room.
“Now,” he said, “we can get down to work.”
CHAPTER XVIII
Sergeant Hurlstone listened with his granite calm until Ann was through. She began to feel toward the close like a Scheherazade on the thousand-and-second night.
“What,” he asked, when Ann had run down, “have you left out?”
“Heavens!”
His slate eyes widened in faint reproach.
“You have been here since yesterday afternoon.”
“And I have talked for over an hour.”
“You have told me what you discussed with Mr. Marlow, with Miss Estelle Marlow, with Mr. Appleby, and Dr. Johnson. There were others. Who?”
Ann took a fresh grip and rounded out the canvas with the pilot, the coachman, Washburn, Danning, the young man from the photography laboratory, and the recent fervid cocktail with Fleury, during which he had expounded his socialistic notions with such zest.
Sergeant Hurlstone stood up. He walked over to the desk at which Alice, according to Danning, so frequently had sat.
“Fine Adam,” he said.
“You know furniture, Sergeant?”
“I try to know something about everything. Robert Adam is simple. The wreaths and paterae, the honeysuckle and that fan ornament. You can’t mistake him. What interests me, Miss Marlow, is that this desk must have been built before 1792.”
“Why? I mean why the interest? Do you believe that age gives a thing some psychic value? That Danning ‘feels’ Alice Marlow more than if the desk were modern?”
Ann had the odd impression that her question relieved him. Not the question itself, so much as her interpretation of his interest in the desk.
He said, “Why not? The psychic is a state of mind, and the mind is lulled by old things. The new excites it. You are more receptive when your mind is at rest. Take India or China. There’s where you find your mystics and your true fundamentalists. Not here, with our chromium and plastics and glass.”
Sergeant Hurlstone gave a parting touch to the desk’s velvet patina. He returned to the fire.
He said, “We must go back to the origin of this matter. The murder of Alice Marlow. I agree with Mr. Harlan that it was a crime of impulse, instantly conceived and committed. Then do you find a paradox?”
“I can’t say I do.”
“Murderers are supposed to conform to a set pattern. Once a sash weight, always a sash weight; once poison, always poison. That sort of thing. Largely it’s true, but here we are faced with the exception to the rule. We find increasing premeditation and more care in preparation. The hunting accident to Jerry Abbott—it had to be plotted and the proper moment waited for. The ptomaine of Frank Lawrence. Still more detail and elaboration. The radioactive substance eaten by Mr. Marlow. Great patience there and ingenuity. The murderer has developed a sharp finesse. I accept the viewpoint that all sprang from Alice Marlow’s death.”
“Then you must also accept the fact that Fred Marlow was innocent?”
“It would be stupid not to. The thread runs backward through twenty years. It would be equally stupid to concentrate on an original motive such as jealousy, the one accepted at the trial. Perhaps it was a crime of passion. Perhaps not.”
“What else?”
“Much else. Its obviousness at the time confused the issue. Jealousy, rage, murder. So simple, and all the ingredients were at hand. Also the protagonists. Jerry Abbott, still in love with her. The jealous husband. All too neat. Look here, Miss Marlow.”
“Yes, Sergeant Hurlstone?”
“Your grandfather warned you to trust no one.”
“With the exception of Mr. Harlan.”
“So you said. I suggest you remove the exception.”
“But you can’t say a thing like that without giving me a reason.”
“Mr. Harlan was here at the time of Alice Marlow’s murder. He was here when Jerry Abbott suffered his hunting accident. He has been here frequently during the years and was in Mr. Marlow’s confidence. Such reasons are enough. I do not isolate him. I simply include him and advise you to do likewise. This will be all for tonight, Miss Marlow. Thank you very much.”
Sergeant Hurlstone stood up. He moved to the door. He said before leaving, “These crimes were not conceived by a ninny.”
CHAPTER XIX
The door closed on Sergeant Hurlstone.
It was nonsense, Ann thought, about Clarence Harlan. On the other hand, family lawyers had had their popular run: And so, my dears, the old counselor did it because he had a perfectly poisonous appetite for the stock market and had helped himself to fifty gilt-edged bonds from your late grandpapa’s estate.
Rubbish and nonsense.
Ann looked at the time and thought she would go to bed. It was after eleven. She went through the bedroom and into the dressing room. Danning had laid her things out for the night. She took her dress off and put on a wrapper. She sat at the dressing table and began to take her face apart for the night. A quiet night, now, except for the continual pelt of raindrops against the windows. A dreary sound and a furtive one.
Bill had called up last night around this time.
What was the matter with the dope? A sterling line of Forrest forebears—no, that was absurd. “The Marlow Murder Baby.” That’s what Marlow had said the press had called her. Heaven knew what they were planning to call her now. Change Baby to Heiress and leave the rest? That wouldn’t matter to Bill.
Her money? That might, yes. Ann knew examples—and they weren’t pleasant—of a man with a very rich wife. Look at the Stuttmans. Harriet conscientiously lived down to Peter’s salary, and there was Peter, feeling futile and frustrated. You could tell it. They weren’t happy.
There was no earthly reason why such a setup shouldn’t work out, but it so rarely, if ever, did. Never that Ann knew of. With gigolos, of course, and the handsome frameworks that you bought and paid for. But not with men like Bill. When she looked at it that way it was depressing as hell.
The dressing-room door was slightly open, and clearly in the hush and muted pelting of the rain Ann heard a small sound of something tapping once on metal. It gathered her nerves into a knot of fright.
She called out sharply: “Who’s there?”
Estelle’s voice said: “I am, dear.”
Estelle pushed the dressing-room door wide open and came in. Her face was tired and pale, and her plump, pleasing body seemed to have lost its stiffening.
“I knocked,” Estelle said, “but you didn’t answer, so I came in. I thought you must be getting ready for bed.” I did not hear you knock, Ann thought. You came in and clicked something against metal in the bedroom or the living room. You did not call to me as soon as you came in. You were in there doing something.
“Is there something I can do, Estelle?”
“No, dear. I just wanted to say good night.”
Ann thought: What were you doing? Trust no one, Marlow said. Only Clarence Harlan. Don’t even trust Harlan, Sergeant Hurlstone said.
Estelle sat down on a slipper chair. Her dimpled hands, resting quietly on her lap, were holding something. Ann thought it a small round box.
“It has been a nervous day,” Estelle went on. “It seems trifling to call such a tragic day nervous, but that’s what it amounts to. It’s fretful on the nerves. You look worn out.”
“Just a cold-cream pallor.”
“No, I watched you during dinner, dear. You will need a good sleep in order to face tomorrow. I think I dread the press more than I do the officers of the law. The press can be very wearing. There’s such a gusto about them. Would you like a sedative? I’ve some tablets I used to use in Paris. They’re amazing.”
“I think not, but thank you, Estelle. I never have used any.”
“Amazing,” Ann thought, would probably be right. A delicious coating of sugar to cover that arsenical taste. I’m being brutally unjust. Estelle came here from the kindness of her heart. It’s she who needs comfort and rest. Possibly she was fond of Marlow, truly fond, and his cruel death has left her deeply, miserably shaken. Trust no one, not even Harlan, Sergeant Hurlstone said.