Lay On, Mac Duff!

by Charlotte Armstrong

  It was a quarter after one when I left her.

  I was very tired, but uneasy in a strange room, though not unhappy. My excitement wouldn’t ebb away to sleep. Outside, there was a far roar, mingling of many noises, that I wasn’t used to. I kept thinking about jobs and schools and even careers and how glad I was that Lina hadn’t said, “My dear, we must take you to my dressmaker, my hairdresser, my masseuse, my manicurist, and make you fit to live here.” Yet I wondered and wondered about Lina, who in all that time had told me nearly nothing about herself. And I thought about Uncle Charles, too, and about Mother, a little.

  I was nearly asleep when I heard a bell ring. The sound came from underneath. I started up as it rang again. A telephone bell in the middle of the night in our house had always meant someone was dying and needed Daddy’s comfort. My heart raced, from old habit, and I snapped on the light to look at my watch.

  It was ten minutes of two. I listened but I heard nothing more, so I settled down again, arguing with myself.

  In a little while, I heard the same bell again. I lifted my head to free both ears. All sleepiness had gone out of me. Finally I turned the light on, only long enough to see that it was two o’clock by now, and then I got out of bed and went to my door, intending to look out at the quiet hall and stairwell just to reassure myself. As I opened it by only a crack, I heard footsteps coming up. I say footsteps, but it was rather a soft scuff of feet on the carpet, a sense of someone drawing nearer.

  My uncle appeared in a dressing gown. He went to Lina’s door and knocked, and her voice answered. In a second or two, her face, with her pretty hair all tumbled around it, was turned up to his inquiringly there in the hall.

  “Hugh called,” my uncle said, and the quiet tones of his voice carried every syllable clearly. “Winberry has been killed.”

  “Killed!”

  “Shot,” my uncle said.

  Effans, in a maroon bathrobe, his long neck longer than ever, leaned over the stair rail on the way down from the fourth floor.

  “You rang for me, sir?”

  “Yes. Mr. Winberry was shot and killed tonight. At his home. I want you to know because the police may be here very early in the morning. Wake me at seven.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Effans. “How terrible, sir.”

  “Who shot him?” Lina said.

  “I gather they don’t know,” said my uncle. “Go back to sleep. Good night.” He turned toward me then, making for the stairs going down, so I slipped the door tighter.

  It was 2:04 A.M. My uncle’s feet were still in shoes.

  Chapter Four

  In our house, somebody would have made coffee, and we’d have huddled around comforting each other and speculating, perhaps until dawn. But this house fell silent. I crept coldly back to bed. I got to sleep by saying, “Nonsense!” to myself very sternly every time my fancy wandered off on some horrendous track. I remember because, when I woke up and saw that gorgeous room in the morning light and again when Ellen came through the door with my breakfast on a tray, I said, “Nonsense!” right out loud.

  I wondered whether to let on that I had already heard about Mr. Winberry, but I didn’t have to wonder long because she promptly told me about it. “It’s in the paper,” she explained, “and it’s better to tell you than for you to see it in the paper.”

  “How terrible,” I said, like Effans the night before. “How did it happen?”

  “All it says is he was found shot. Yes, it’s terrible. The master’s gone there to see what must be done. Mr. Winberry was often in this house. Often. Yes.”

  “Did the police come?” I asked.

  “Come here? Now, why ever should they do that, Miss Elizabeth, dear?”

  “I don’t know. But he was here last night.”

  “So he was,” said Ellen. “So Effans says. Think of it.”

  She told me, when I asked, that Lina was sleeping late. Then she left, and I read the piece in the paper, which was very brief. “Hudson Winberry, 58,” it said, “was found dying of a bullet wound shortly after one o’clock last night on the floor of his office, in his first-floor apartment at 609 West 108th St., by Peter Finn, 62, janitor of the building. Mr. Winberry, owner of the remodeled brownstone house, was unmarried.”

  That was all. The Bishop was dead. I would never see his silver hair and his round pink face again. At least, I thought, they won’t play parcheesi any more.

  I dawdled getting dressed. About ten-thirty, Effans rapped on my door. “Mr. Miller is downstairs to see you if it is not inconvenient.”

  “Tell him, please,” I said, feeling rather important, “that I’ll be down in just a minute.”

  “He is in the library, Miss Elizabeth.” Effans went away. I must confess I liked it and that I dawdled some more before I went down.

  “I’m sorry,” Hugh said quickly when he saw me, “I suppose it’s awfully early to come around, but I couldn’t wait to talk to you. I mean … Have you heard?” His face looked more alive than it had the night before, as if the shock had waked him up. But he looked worried, too.

  “I don’t know any more than is in the paper,” I said. “Do they know yet what happened?”

  He shook his head rather impatiently. “I haven’t any business asking you any questions, but I wonder …” He bit his lip.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “I don’t know how to begin. I don’t want you to misunderstand me.”

  “I’ll try not to,” I said, surprised.

  He walked away a few paces and turned back. “What happened after I left?”

  “Why, they only stayed a little while, not more than half an hour, maybe not even that long. Then they just left. Nothing happened.”

  “Have you any reason to suppose,” he said, not looking at me, “that your uncle went out after that?”

  “I wouldn’t know,” I said. “How could I know? Lina and I were talking for quite a long time—”

  “You and Lina?”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh,” he said. Then as if to himself, “So he wasn’t with her.” I pretended not to hear that, but he didn’t give me time to blush. “How long did you talk? How late?”

  “It was one-fifteen. I remember.”

  He made a hopeless little gesture with one hand. “I wish you’d heard him. Are you sure you didn’t? I’ll tell you why in a minute.”

  I felt frightened. “I heard him after the phone rang,” I said. “I happened to be … I was listening at the …”

  “You heard the phone!” He was looking at me intently, and I felt flustered.

  “I couldn’t get to sleep very well. Yes, I heard it. Or at least I thought it was a phone.”

  “In your uncle’s room?”

  “I don’t know where that is.”

  “Why, it’s right there,” he said, and I saw a door at the end of the long library, opposite the windows. “His room and bath are back there.”

  “Are they?” I said. “They must be under my room then. The bell did sound underneath.”

  “Did you hear the phone more than once?” Hugh said as if something hung on my answer.

  “Yes. Once at ten minutes of two and then again at two o’clock.”

  His face changed, fell in some way. It settled into different lines. “Nobody answered at ten of two,” he said. “You see, I made both calls.”

  “Nobody answered?” I said, puzzled.

  “I thought they might not have rung the right number. But from what you say, it seems they did.”

  “Maybe he was asleep.” Then I remembered.

  “What?” Hugh said quickly, reading my face.

  “I guess he couldn’t have been in bed, though, with his shoes still on.”

  “How do you know he had his shoes on?” Hugh said slowly.

  “I listened at my door, and I saw him come up and tell Lina and Effans, too, about Mr. Winberry, after … after you spoke to him. Why do you want to know all this?”

  He put his hand into his trousers
pocket and pulled something out. He hesitated and then he opened his fingers.

  “Why, it’s a Peppinger,” I said, remembering the sweet spicy candy drops of my baby days. “I haven’t seen one since I was little. I thought they didn’t make them any more.”

  “They don’t. This isn’t candy. It’s one of your uncle’s parcheesi men, I’m pretty sure.” I stared stupidly at the red disc. “I don’t know what to do, exactly,” he went on. “I found this on … on Winberry’s body. I haven’t said anything about it. The janitor thought it was a Peppinger, too. He forgot to mention it to the police … so far.”

  “But,” I said, “Uncle Charles threw the red men out of the window.”

  “What!”

  “I saw him do it. He threw three of them out that window, the one in the alcove.”

  “When?”

  “Last night.”

  Hugh walked around in a circle. “This is a funny thing to ask you to do,” he said, “but I think we’ve got to … we’ve got to look into the box.”

  “What box?”

  He was in the alcove by this time, pulling the box out of its shelf, the one in which my uncle kept his parcheesi set. I was right beside him when he opened it, and I helped him count. There were three red men there in the box with the greens and the blues and the golds. Three in the box and one in Hugh’s hand, exactly alike.

  “That’s strange,” Hugh frowned. “Your uncle must have gone out of the house. Don’t you see? Or else how did the others, the ones he threw out of the window, get back in here?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, “I don’t understand this. What if he did go out? Where do you think he went? Nobody,” I said, “kills a man over a game of parcheesi. That’s nonsense!” I said sternly.

  Hugh smiled at me. “Of course it is,” he said. “Of course that’s nonsense.” He put the parcheesi set away. “I don’t suppose it means anything.”

  But I thought to myself that little red composition discs don’t walk.

  I began timidly, “You know so much more about it than I do …”

  “I’ll tell you all I know, right from the beginning. Sit down. I’d like to tell you.” He rested his head against the sofa, our same sofa, for a moment or two. He looked tired. “You tell me I’m crazy,” he said with his eyes closed.

  “I’d be glad to,” I said grimly. “Go on.”

  He opened his eyes, and I saw a gleam of surprise behind his glasses. “What time was it when I left?” he began. “About ten after twelve, wasn’t it? Well, I walked over to Madison Avenue and had a sandwich in a drugstore. Then I walked back to Fifth Avenue and took a bus. You see, there’s a bus that runs up Fifth Avenue and over 110th Street, and if you get off at the corner of 110th and Broadway you are only a couple of very short blocks away from Winberry’s place. I lived there with him, you know. I ought to have been home before him, but the reason I wasn’t is that the bus broke down. It’s lucky it did, for me, in a way. Although if I’d got there first …” He looked dreamy and forgot to talk.

  “Go on,” I said.

  “Well, we waited while the bus driver decided he couldn’t fix whatever was the matter, and then we were all transferred to another bus and went on. It delayed us. I must have got off the bus at the corner at about 1:15. I stopped in at the drugstore on our corner, two blocks down, for cigarettes. I rang the bell of the apartment at 1:22. Or so Peter and I think now. There’s a door from the hall right into Winberry’s office which is across the front, on the street. It was that door Peter opened for me. He’d just found the … the body. Or rather, Winberry had just died. When Peter found him he was still alive. He was lying on the floor, about in the middle of the room. He’d been shot in the breast. Peter says that he heard the door open upstairs … You see, Peter lives in the basement. He takes care of the furnace and all that. And of my lab, which is down there. Well, he says he heard Winberry come in, first the door from the street and then the office door, and he says he called up to ask him a question, but Winberry just put him off with a grunt and went on in. That was a few minutes after one. Winberry evidently took off his hat and coat and hung them up. Just a little while later, Peter says he heard the door again, first the street door, then the office door, and he thought it must be me this time. But, immediately, he heard the shot. He didn’t get upstairs awfully fast. Peter’s old, and he was shocked, you can imagine. But when he got there the office door was open, and Winberry was lying on the floor and so was the gun.”

  “Did he say anything … could he say anything before he died?”

  “Yes. Yes, he said, ‘I never saw him.’ That’s all Peter got out of it.”

  “Then it must have been a stranger,” I said.

  “Why do you say that?”

  “What did he mean? Surely he meant to say, ‘I never saw him before!’”

  “Do you think so? But it’s strange that the gun belonged to Winberry himself. He kept it in the office. I told you he was a pirate. He was mixed up in some rather shady dealings of one kind or another, nothing to do with my work, thank God. Anyhow, he kept a gun there. It was in the top drawer of a filing cabinet right near the door. Not very far from the door, anyhow.”

  “The … the person might have been disguised,” I said.

  Hugh looked at me. “I never thought of that,” he said.

  “Well, Mr. Winberry didn’t recognize him.…”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Because. Because he said he’d never seen him before. But, just the same, the person must have known exactly where the gun was if it happened so quickly. I mean if he was able to find it and shoot … didn’t you say, immediately?”

  “Yes. That’s what occurred to me.”

  “Go on.”

  “Well, of course, I … well, I looked at him, you know, and Peter was babbling on about what he’d heard, and I pushed his coat aside and something seemed to fall. It was the red man. Peter said something about a Peppinger, but I slipped it into my pocket. I thought perhaps Mr. Winberry himself had carried it home for some reason or other.”

  “He didn’t, though,” I said.

  Hugh looked at me thoughtfully for a few seconds. “I called the police,” he went on finally, “of course. And they came about 1:35. I had to wait for them and answer all their questions, and it was ten minutes of two before I got out of there and went down to the corner drugstore and called here. I wanted to tell your uncle what had happened. Nobody answered. So I hung around a little while and called again, and he did answer.”

  “What do the police think?”

  “Well, they questioned me pretty closely, I’ll tell you that. You see, the time was close. They fixed the time of the shot exactly. I don’t know just how. They say it was 1:16. You see, just about then I was on my way from the bus to the drugstore, or else I was actually in the drugstore. But it was close. The druggist wouldn’t remember to the minute. But they were able to check on the bus. And the driver remembered that there was a woman on the stalled bus dressed just as I was able to describe her.”

  “Oh?” I said.

  “As a matter of fact, I never would have noticed her if she hadn’t been so outlandishly rigged up. She was a Negress. She had on a great big wide hat and a long evening dress and a man’s plaid suit jacket. Even I couldn’t help noticing that.”

  “No,” I agreed.

  “The bus driver seemed to think the bus got to the corner of Broadway no earlier than 1:15, and that helped. Anyhow, they seemed satisfied. Of course, you never know.”

  “There must have been people who might have felt like shooting Mr. Winberry,” I said, “if he was shady in his business dealings, as you say.”

  “Yes,” said Hugh in a very odd tone. “Yes, several people may have had motives.” He got up and walked up and down in front of me. “The trouble is,” he said suddenly, “I had no key.”

  “No key?”

  “I had to ring the bell.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “We
ll, I … I lost it. It wasn’t in my pocket. I keep it on a little chain with one other. And it was gone when I got home last night. That’s why I rang the bell.”

  “Yes?” I said, not understanding yet.

  “But don’t you see?” Peter heard Winberry come in and use a key. Then he heard another person come in, at 1:15, and use a key.”

  “Is your key the only other key?”

  “Peter has one. I don’t really know. All I know is, mine’s gone.”

  “Well, then, you lost it,” I said.

  “But what worries me is that I might have lost it here.”

  “Here!”

  “Here in this room. It isn’t in the couch. I looked.”

  “In this room?” I said.

  “I sat over there for a while, remember? But it isn’t there either.”

  “Did you ask Effans about it?”

  “Yes. He hadn’t found it.”

  “But you may have lost it somewhere else. Why do you think …? What makes you …? Oh,” I said.

  “You don’t know your uncle, do you?” he said after a moment. “I mean, you don’t really know him or what he’s like?”

  “You’re saying my uncle might be a murderer. That’s what you mean.” I tried to be indignant. But I was scared.

  “Please … no, I don’t, really. Yet I can’t understand … And you know how Winberry was going on last night. If I’d been your uncle I’d have felt like wringing his neck. I mean that, on top …”

  “He was hateful,” I said. “My uncle must have been angry. But not to kill.…”

  “Oh, not for that …” He walked away again, jingling some coins in his pocket.

  “Then for what?” I asked.

  “I don’t know what I think,” he said in a burst, not really answering me. “It’s queer, that’s all. I just want to know what you think I’d better do … with this.”