Lay On, Mac Duff!

by Charlotte Armstrong

  He had the red man in his hand. “I don’t know,” I said, “oh, I don’t know. Why do you ask me?” I got up myself and walked over to the window. There was a broad sill, and some magazines and a box of cigarettes lay on it. I looked blindly at the lace of the window curtains.

  “You see, you make a difference,” Hugh said. He came over close behind me. “I think if it weren’t for you that as long as I more or less instinctively put it in my pocket as I did, I’d let it go now and keep quiet. The trouble is, I ought to have left it there. They’d never connect it with your uncle as I do.”

  “Unless you told them,” I said.

  “That’s just it. And, of course, if I have to admit I picked it up and concealed it, now I may have to admit why. Yet I wonder if I ought to tell them all about it, on account of you. Because if there is anything wrong in this house, it’s no place for you to be.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “Then again,” he went on, his long thin fingers playing nervously with the cigarette box, “if you happened to be fond of your uncle or have a … well, a family feeling, I wouldn’t do anything that might just make things unpleasant. So that’s why I ask you.”

  “Couldn’t we wait and see what happens?” I said. “For a little while? After all, how do we know the police aren’t on the real track right now? Maybe they’re after some stranger. Anyhow,” I went on rapidly, “I don’t believe it, and my uncle may sleep with his shoes on, for all I know. And maybe Effans found the red men outside this morning and put them back. And maybe Mr. Winberry himself picked that one up outside, for all I know, although I think he’d gone. If you’re really asking me …”

  “Whatever you say.” Hugh seemed relieved. “That’s all I wanted to know.”

  But I was looking down at his hands. I reached down and put his hands aside. I opened the cigarette box wide. Two keys on a little chain lay inside it. I picked them out, and Hugh put his hand quickly over mine and took them. Our eyes met.

  “It doesn’t necessarily mean anything,” he said quickly.

  “I know,” I said and swallowed hard. “Of course not.”

  “You’re not frightened, are you?” he said after a moment, very softly. Something made me turn around. My uncle was standing in the doorway, smiling at us.

  “Good morning,” he said, and his eyebrows made a little mocking comment on our being together. He started swiftly toward the door of his room. “Don’t go until I’ve seen you, Hugh,” he said, “Winberry’s affairs are in a sweet mess.”

  Some people have a way of walking away from you with their consciousness of your still being there somehow apparent in their spines, in the turn of their necks. But when my uncle walked away you felt dropped and forgotten. He went into his room.

  Hugh put his hand on my arm, and I started out of sheer nervousness. I wanted to get away. He whispered. “Do you think he saw you see him throw them out? Did he mean you to see him?”

  “Oh, no,” I said. “No, that’s nonsense. I’ve got to go.”

  “Still, he knew you had seen him,” Hugh insisted.

  “It’s silly. It’s impossible. It’s nonsense!” I said, shaking my head until my hair flew.

  “I’m sorry. Forgive me for worrying you, please, Bessie?”

  “It isn’t your fault, Hugh. Just don’t … we won’t … Just wait.”

  “Of course,” he said. And I fled.

  Chapter Five

  Lina called me as I got upstairs. “Hello. Come and have lunch with me. Ellen, tell Mrs. Atwater … What on earth’s the matter?”

  “I was just talking to Hugh about the murder,” I said. “It m-makes me nervous, I guess.”

  She didn’t say anything more until she got me settled at a little table near her window where she was having breakfast and lunch at the same time. She was all dressed to go out, in a soft yellowish-tan wool suit and a tawny hat no bigger than a piece of toast with a feather in it, and she looked wonderful.

  “Don’t think about it,” she said then, as if she’d considered what to say. “Oh, puzzle over it if you want to, for fun. But Hudson Winberry was nobody you knew and meant nothing to you. Just exactly nothing. You mustn’t even try to feel sympathetic for your Uncle Charles’s sake or for mine. And don’t think,” she added, smiling, “that we have murders every day among our friends, either.”

  “I w-won’t,” I said, ready to bawl because she looked so sweet and was trying to understand me and didn’t know and wouldn’t know from me what was on my mind. Then she launched me into talking about Baker’s Bridge and telling her just what I thought about a lot of people up there until she giggled so much that I began to think I was funny myself.

  After lunch she had to go. It was war work, she said, putting on a long fur coat that cost about as much, I should think, as a small battleship. “I’ll be back for tea. Guy is coming, and Charles will be here, I think. Come down. Will you be all right?”

  “Of course,” I said. “Of course I will.”

  But after she had gone and I was all alone and perfectly free to do anything I liked, and rich, too, for I found an envelope with fifty dollars in it under a powder box on my dressing table, still, I felt lost. I didn’t feel like shopping. I didn’t feel like making plans. It just seemed to me that somebody ought to stay home and worry.

  So I lay elegantly on my chaise and worried, although I tried to be systematic about it. In the first place, I asked myself, why doesn’t anybody think that Winberry might have been a suicide? It was his own gun. No, if he had shot himself, he wouldn’t have said what he did. The phrase “I never saw him” or “I never saw him before” certainly implied that somebody had been there. And the janitor, besides, heard a second person come in. Somebody must have been there, all right. But why not a burglar or just an anonymous criminal? No, because whoever it was had used a key and had known where the gun was. But wait, maybe Winberry himself had taken the gun out of its hiding place for some reason. I couldn’t seem to think of any reason.

  It was my uncle’s parcheesi man that really worried me. How had it got there? I racked my brain to remember whether, at the time my uncle had thrown the red men out of the window, Winberry had already left the house. I realized that I had been assuming all along that, when my uncle came upstairs alone, Winberry and Gaskell had just left. And that Lina had lingered to talk to Guy Maxon a few minutes longer. But I didn’t know that was what had happened. Yet, if that were so, then Winberry was in his cab giving Mr. Gaskell a lift across the park before my uncle opened the window, and he, Winberry, couldn’t have picked up the parcheesi man and carried it home to 108th Street.

  But who had?

  Hugh Miller, for all his apologies, thought my uncle perfectly capable of being mixed up in the death of Hudson Winberry. Why? Hugh knew him better than I did. He knew, I was sure, some reason—some motive, dared I say?—that I didn’t know. After all, I reasoned, there must have been some sore point between my uncle and Winberry to account for their antagonism over the parcheesi game. Hugh knew what it was. I was sure of that.

  Then I wondered why it hadn’t occurred to either of us just to ask my uncle. Show him the red man, say where it had been found, and ask him, what about it. And ask him about the key, too. But then I saw that it wouldn’t do. And the reason it wouldn’t do scared me more than anything I’d thought so far. If we felt it impossible for him to be a murderer, we’d ask him, of course, sure that if he knew anything about it he’d say so, because whatever he knew would be innocent knowledge. But as long as he felt he was possibly guilty, we knew he could lie and leave us worse off than ever. “Do I think my uncle capable of murder?” I asked myself, shocked. And the only answer I could make was that I knew darned well, that, if he chose to lie to me, I’d never know the difference.

  So I came to the conclusion that I had every right to worry. Either (a) my uncle was a murderer, or (b), at the very least, evidence existed that would tend to throw suspicion of murder on him, in which case he was in danger.
But we are all wrong, I thought. Hugh’s wrong. I’m wrong. My uncle isn’t the kind of man it is necessary to protect. What we ought to do is tell everything we know and let him deal with it.

  I felt better for a moment, and then I thought: No, because suppose he is guilty, what then? Then it would be better not to let him know we suspect.

  I was worrying myself into a state. I got up and looked out of my windows, but there was nothing to be seen but the backs of other houses. I decided to go downstairs and explore a little.

  I went down to the second floor, and, rather nervously, past the open doors of the library, where there seemed to be nobody. I started down the next flight, and just as I was halfway down, the doorbell rang. I stopped still. Effans came in a moment through the small door under the curve of the stairs and opened the door. A young man with red hair said, “Is Mr. Cathcart here?” Effans said that Mr. Cathcart was out. “Is Mrs. Cathcart in?” No, Effans said, Mrs. Cathcart was also out. The young man looked up and saw me.

  “Hello!” he said as if he knew me and hadn’t seen me for ages. “Where in the world did you come from?” He came right into the hall, and Effans backed away.

  “Hello,” I said uncertainly, trying to see him better.

  “You’re just the person I wanted to see. I had no idea you’d be here.”

  “I only came last night,” I said, wondering who on earth he was and trying to remember him. I came all the way down.

  “I’ve opened the drawing room, Miss Elizabeth,” murmured Effans respectfully at the white double doors.

  “Elizabeth,” said the red-haired man, “let me talk to you.”

  “Well, of course …” I said, so bewildered that I didn’t realize until we, the stranger and I, were inside the drawing room that I certainly never had seen him before in my life. “But who in the world are you?”

  “Ssh.” The man looked to see if Effans had gone and then turned and grinned at me. He was not very tall and not very good-looking: his eyes were green and full of the devil, he had a wide mouth, and his whole face was smiling at me. “It’s a dirty Irish trick,” he said, “and you’ll throw me out in a minute. Say, who are you?” I blinked. “Never knew Charlie Cathcart had a beautiful daughter.”

  “He hasn’t got a beautiful daughter or any other kind of daughter,” I said furiously, “and … just a minute. I don’t know what you are trying to do or what happened …”

  “I fooled you to get in, and you’re mad at me. Whose beautiful daughter are you?”

  “I am not beautiful!” I said hotly.

  “You are too beautiful!” he said just as hotly. “Who says you’re not?”

  He looked so belligerent and so funny that all of a sudden I began to giggle, and he laughed, too. But he blushed. I never saw a man blush like that. He was red all the way up to his hair.

  “Before you call the guards, let me tell you who it is you’ve got the pleasure of throwing out. My name is John Joseph Jones.”

  “I don’t believe it.”

  “I can’t help it whether you do or don’t. I work for a newspaper, and I’m here to snoop.”

  “Snoop?”

  “Did you ever hear of Hudson Winberry?” I didn’t answer. “I see you have,” he went on smoothly. “He was here last night, wasn’t he?”

  “I don’t think I ought to answer your questions,” I said. “It’s not my place to.”

  “Do you know what I ought to do?” he said suddenly after a second or two. “I ought to threaten you.”

  “Threaten me!”

  “Sure. I ought to make out like I was going to put you in the paper. ‘Mystery girl won’t admit dead man’s presence’ or some dumb thing like that. I could do it. I could scare you into telling me everything you know, but I’m not going to. I’m going to pretend there was nobody home.” He jammed his hat on his head and started for the hall.

  “Wait,” I said. “Why?”

  “I’ll tell you why some night when the moon’s up,” he said. “Elizabeth, eh?”

  “I’m not a mystery girl,” I said. “I’m Elizabeth Gibbon. I’m Mr. Cathcart’s niece. Uh … good-by.”

  I walked down the length of the drawing room. It was a beautiful room, quite as big as the library above it and much more elegantly furnished. I sat down on a French sofa.

  “As long as we’ve met like this”—I looked up, and he was standing beside me, his hat off again, his overcoat dangling, his green eyes smiling—“do you mind if I stay?”

  “I can’t answer questions,” I said. “I don’t think I ought to. But of course Mr. Winberry was here last night. Everybody knows that. He and some other friends of my uncle were … uh … just spending the evening here.”

  “I know,” he said and sat down beside me.

  “He left about twelve-thirty,” I said, nervously when he didn’t speak again.

  “Yeah,” he said, “Mr. Gaskell told me.”

  “Oh, did Mr. Gaskell ride with him through the park?”

  “He did.”

  “And did Mr. Winberry go to his club or wherever it was? He said he had to.”

  “He did.”

  “Where is his club?”

  “Sixtieth Street and Central Park West.”

  “Oh,” I said, “of course, that doesn’t mean anything to me.”

  He shifted around, put one arm over the back of the sofa, and looked at me. “Anything else you’d like to know?”

  “Lots,” I said. “You see, I’ve been trying to puzzle it out.”

  “You’ve got the detective instinct?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “Well, go ahead then, interview me some more.”

  “You don’t mind?” I said.

  “Nope.”

  “Well, what was in the envelope?”

  “What envelope’s that?”

  “He said he had to pick up an envelope at the club.”

  “Oh, there was cash in it. Fifty bucks. Last installment on a debt somebody owed him. Nothing to do with the case.”

  “You wouldn’t kill anybody you’d just paid up, I suppose,” I said.

  “Nope. This guy didn’t. He left for California yesterday afternoon.”

  “I see. Well … uh … what time did Mr. Winberry leave his club for home?”

  “About one o’clock.”

  I cast about for another question. “How far is it from 60th Street to 108th Street?”

  “You subtract,” he said. “Twenty blocks to a mile.”

  “Forty-eight blocks, that’s two miles … and … four tenths.”

  “You not only can subtract, you can divide, and you can reduce a fraction,” he murmured. “Do they call you Betty?”

  “Bessie,” I said. “Isn’t that a long way to go in a few minutes?”

  “Now wait.” He sat up and looked through his pockets for some frayed pieces of paper smudged with pencil marks. “Peter Finn. Here he is. Says Winberry came in at 1:08 (approx.). Two and four-tenths miles in eight minutes. How fast is that? Quick.”

  “Oh, gee, I don’t know,” I said. “I never could do that kind.”

  “Well, I’m glad,” he said solemnly.

  “Why?”

  “Never mind. Male secret. Lemme see.” He got out a stub pencil and chewed on it, making marks once in a while on the paper. “It’s not impossible,” he said finally. “But, I should say, unlikely. Lights, you know. Traffic lights. But everything’s approx. So nothing means anything. Just approx.”

  “But,” I said, “did you find the taxi driver? Wouldn’t he know what time they got there?”

  “Look, what difference does it make what time they got there?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Then why’d you ask?”

  “I was just trying to get it straight … and then that looked too fast.”

  “I see. Nope, as far as I know they haven’t got that taxi driver. Although they’ve got a couple of others.”

  “The one who took Winberry and Gaskell through the par
k?”

  “Yep.”

  “What other?” I said.

  “A cab that took a man from this corner to that about then.”

  “Oh,” I said, “really? Look, there’s another thing I wondered about. How do they fix the time of the shot?”

  I wouldn’t look at him just then, but I felt through my pores somehow that he was smiling. “Well, I’ll tell you, that was a funny one,” he said easily, “I believe it myself, mind you. But Garnett is highly suspicious of the whole thing. It’s too pat for him, he says. Do you read murder stories?”

  “Of course,” I said.

  “I kinda thought so. Well, these two love birds, Mr. and Mrs. Cotes, they read them, too. They live in the second-floor flat—rented it from Winberry. It seems that they were in bed, although not asleep yet, when they heard the shot. ‘My love,’ says he to her, ‘that’s a shot.’ ‘It certainly is,’ says she to him, ‘so turn on the light, darling, and look at the time so we’ll know what to say when the police ask us.’ ‘O.K.’ says he, ‘1:16 on the second.’ ‘That’s fine,’ says she. And they go to sleep. Now, Garnett has to accept that, but he can’t make himself believe it.”

  “But how in the world could they go back to sleep?”

  “They didn’t know but what it was a backfire. They only hoped it was a shot. Playing story book. Don’t you believe it?”

  “I guess I do,” I said slowly.

  “To me it seems the most logical, probable thing in the world. It couldn’t be a lie.”

  “Unless they murdered him.”

  “For God’s sake,” he said.

  “What?”

  “You think of everything. But I don’t think they murdered him. Why should they? Besides, it checks with the janitor, what he says about the time. It also fits in with the story the lab assistant tells.”

  “Who?”

  “Fellow name of Hugh Miller. I see you know him.”

  “Yes,” I said. “Uh … what kind of person is the janitor?”

  “He’s O.K.” He looked at his pieces of paper. “Peter Finn, 62.”

  “Why do they always do that?”

  “Do what?”

  “Put the age after the name in newspapers?”