Lay On, Mac Duff!

by Charlotte Armstrong

  “Did you know she was sick?” J.J. blurted.

  “He said so in his letters. They all say something of the sort, you know.” My uncle’s voice was now soft with discouragement. “You, Mr. Duff, will understand that one cannot believe, just offhand, everything one is told.”

  Maxon said angrily, “People are always getting sick. They often die. That’s no one’s fault. He had no claim on us. He should have invented something else to sell if he needed money.”

  “Maybe he couldn’t,” J.J. said. “A man’s said to be upset when his wife’s dying.”

  “Too bad. But still not our fault.”

  “So you let her die,” Duff said softly. His eyes seemed not to be watching anyone.

  “I made a worse mistake than that,” my uncle said. “Even those who take the profits don’t enjoy the blame, you know, although they always get it. It was unfortunate that during those particular months matters were so confused, the selling and re-selling were going on. I was busy. Nevertheless, when the dust settled, I personally offered to send a doctor of my own choosing to examine the woman. If she really had been ill, I had intended to provide for treatment for her.”

  “Your charity,” Duff said, “came too late. She was dead.”

  “So I understand,” my uncle sighed. “It was a mistake. Charity is so often a mistake unless one knows exactly what one is doing.”

  I was thinking about charity. I was thinking of Daddy, who gave first and asked questions later. I was thinking of the things I’d done without because Daddy’d fed someone our daily bread. Anyone. I thought of Daddy, who’d never had either profits or blame in all his life, and his blood in me denied my Cathcart blood, denied even my mother, who used, sometimes, to click her tongue and say that a saint was well and good but it would try the patience of a saint to live with one.

  “Not your fault,” Maxon said.

  “Graves felt it was, you see,” Duff told him. “All your faults. I found a newspaper account of her death in the small-town paper, where they lived. Very mildly put by the reporter. Yet, how Graves felt was there—was plain. I am accustomed, you know, to feeling for the human emotion behind what gets into print. I felt it there. I am very much afraid that he especially blamed Cathcart because his offer came just three days too late.”

  “Why?” Maxon said, “why especially? At least, Charlie was soft enough—”

  “A mistake,” my uncle murmured. It was clear to me then that Maxon was a stupid man. For all he looked so sharp and clever, he didn’t understand and never would how people feel. It might not be reasonable or even just to blame my uncle because his offer came too late, but how inevitable, that sick helpless boiling bitter rage because he offered to help at last and it was too late.

  My uncle said, “What about Herbert Graves, Mr. Duff? Go on.”

  Duff said, “I know very little about him yet. I have been trying to trace him by wire, but at the moment I’ve come upon a dead end. Yet I think we may assume he exists somewhere. Let us suppose”—Duff spoke quietly, but we were forced to suppose—“he exists, near here, in the city. Suppose he stood below those windows night before last and watched two of his enemies drive off in their cab, a third stroll away, all well pleased with themselves, and then, as if from heaven, three Peppingers fell at his feet.”

  “Three,” my uncle said.

  “Three,” Duff nodded. “But four enemies. Perhaps therefore the fourth man, the arch enemy, must be made to seem guilty of the deaths of the other three.”

  “Other three!” Maxon cried, starting from his chair.

  “You are in great danger, Mr. Maxon,” Duff said, “or else you are guilty of murder. You, Mr. Cathcart, are in great danger, or else you are guilty of murder. I can’t, for the moment, say which of these situations is the true one. You gentlemen will know, of course. And you,” he said, turning to Hugh Miller, “are a chemist, are you not?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then perhaps you are Herbert Graves,” Mac Duff said. “I’ve been wondering.”

  Hugh took his glasses off and rubbed his eyes as if they were tired. “What?” he said weakly.

  “I am frank to say, I don’t know that you are,” Duff went on calmly, “and that it is quite possible that you are not. I shall find out, of course. Now that I have been hired for pay and can hire all the help I need.”

  “I was born in St. Paul,” Hugh said, “on Hudson Street. Went to public school there. Father’s name was Sam. Samuel Miller. Mother was Mary Ann Constable. I went to the University of Wisconsin. Came home when father died at the end of my second year. Went to work for the Great Northern. Left them eight years later to come east when mother died. Spent a year trying to work days and go to school nights. Gave that up to go with Winberry. He had my references filed up there. Look them up.”

  “I am looking them up,” Duff said. “You never married?”

  “No.”

  “How old are you?”

  “Thirty-two.”

  J.J. had taken all this down rapidly on one of his dirty pieces of paper. I reached for his hand again. I looked at Hugh and thought this was a trick of Mac Duff’s.

  But why? What would he gain by such a leaping guess? How was it going to help to assume that Herbert Graves was with us? Was somebody else in this house not himself at all but Herbert Graves instead? Was that the trick? Jones, I told myself, is a real name. There are pages of Joneses in the telephone book, all real Joneses. And what if he did know the cop who knew the cook and could get in at the back? Besides …

  “Herbert Graves would be quite old now, wouldn’t he?” I said.

  “Between thirty-five and forty,” my uncle answered. I saw Duff notice how promptly that answer came.

  Maxon, however, fixed his eyes on something high as people do when they are doing mental arithmetic. “Yes, that’s right.”

  “I assume that, if either of you felt you would recognize Graves after this length of time, you would say so,” purred Mac Duff. My uncle’s crooked eyebrow rose and fell, and Maxon looked a little startled.

  “Let us continue,” Duff said. “Let us go into what evidence exists, and let us see why I say it is possible that any one of you three—yes, three—is guilty of these crimes. We have covered motives—”

  “When you prove I am somebody I’m not,” Hugh said. He looked angry as if he had just begun to realize what had been said.

  “We have no proofs at all,” Duff told him quietly. “You’ll see. We can prove, that is to say demonstrate, without possibility of error … nothing. Let us set up what might have happened and see if we can knock it down. Let us see, first, what there is to make us think Cathcart may be guilty.”

  “First, he threw the three red men out of the window in the presence of a witness. Did you know she was there, Cathcart?”

  “No,” my uncle said. His blue eyes were cold upon me.

  “He was not seen by anyone, as far as we know, between 12:40 and 2 A.M. that night.”

  “Do you want me to tell you where I really was, or do you want to spin your story first?”

  There was some contempt in that silky voice, contempt and indulgence, but Mac Duff didn’t react to it. Just as if somebody had asked him whether he took cream in his coffee, he answered, “Tell me, please.”

  “I was in my room.”

  “Asleep?”

  “No.”

  “Undressed?”

  “Partially.”

  “Do you know of anyone who can prove it?”

  “No.”

  “Very well. Let us tell the story. Mr. Cathcart is angry. He has been irritated especially by Winberry this evening. He also has lost at his game. Let us say that he tosses the parcheesi men out the window in a fit of emotion. Then he finds Miller’s keys, lost here. He leaves his house quietly at about 12:45. He pauses to retrieve the red men. He then walks to the corner and takes a taxicab to Broadway and 108th Street. His crooked finger is observed by the cab driver. He enters Winberry’s house at 1:08. Peter
Finn calls up, assuming he is Winberry. He puts him off with a mumble of some sort and goes into the office. He gets the gun out of the filing cabinet. You know where he kept it, I suppose?”

  “Maybe,” my uncle said.

  “At 1:15, Winberry comes in, using his own key. Cathcart says, ‘Remember the Peppinger business?’ or thrusts the red men under his nose—”

  My uncle let out a laugh, a very Boris Karloff kind of laugh, a “Bru-ha-ha-ha” that rolled and echoed, a burlesque of all the villains you ever heard of, yet it was horrible. Impudent, reckless, angry, scornful, and a ruthless bad taste about it that scared me nearly out of my wits. Lina’s face went white, and she closed her eyes.

  “Thank you,” Duff said gently. And I realized that my uncle’s contempt was defense and Mac Duff’s gentleness was attack, after all. “At 1:16 the shot is fired. Cathcart removes the fallen man’s hat and coat and hangs them up with an idea of confusing the sequence of entrances to the room.”

  My uncle sat a little straighten “Why?”

  “We don’t know why, of course. Perhaps he remembers that the cab driver may have noticed his finger. Or perhaps there is another reason.” My uncle pulled his mouth down, and I thought Duff made a note of it. “At any rate, he then goes out, walks in the direction of the Drive, perhaps hails another cab, perhaps makes his way by subway and on foot, and arrives at his house in time to answer a telephone call at two o’clock. At the news it gives him, he is properly distressed and informs his household immediately. They witness he was here at that hour.”

  “I was here all along,” my uncle said, suddenly more thoughtful than defiant.

  “Why didn’t you answer the first phone call!” Hugh cried. “Why didn’t you? You said you weren’t asleep.”

  My uncle’s eyes seemed to light upon Hugh with faint interest. He seemed to have lost all anger now. “But I did answer the first phone call,” he purred.

  “When did it ring?” Duff asked quietly.

  “Prior to the second phone call.” My uncle put his tongue in his cheek and waited.

  “How long before?” Duff said with very quiet patience.

  “Ten minutes,” my uncle said. “It is only fair to tell you that I have talked to the druggist on 108th Street.”

  Duff’s eyes fell. “Thank you,” he said, “very much.”

  I couldn’t figure out who’d won that round. He knew the exact interval, but he told us how he could have known it and still not have been there in his room. Yet Duff could have found out that he’d talked to the druggist and probably what had been said. Therefore … But it all slipped by too fast for me to get to the bottom of it.

  “You say you answered.”

  “The operator told me there was no one on the line.”

  “I wonder if we could find that operator.”

  “In time,” my uncle said.

  “Yes. Time.” Duff let silence close over the word before he went on. “Now, of course, Winberry said, ‘I never saw him.’ We suppose that it’s possible he meant ‘I couldn’t see him’ and that he couldn’t see because his eyeglasses were befogged. Tell me”—he turned abruptly to Hugh—“were your eyeglasses befogged that same night when you entered that same room?”

  “Yes. Of course.”

  “Could he have found the keyhole of the office door?”

  “Oh, that’s habit. I’ve done it.”

  “Do you mean to say,” my uncle said, his great voice softly complaining, “that Hudson never saw the red man? And all that trouble someone went to—the great revenge motif …?”

  Duff’s eyes flickered. “That couldn’t have been foreseen. Nor could what he said have been foreseen, of course. You must have thought him dead.”

  “If I had been there I daresay I’d have thought him dead,” my uncle said, escaping the trap with easy grace.

  “Mr. Duff,” Lina said, “that’s not evidence. None of it.”

  “You mean it’s not proof. I agree. Some of it is negative evidence, at least. You are anxious for me to examine the possibilities of a frame-up?” She nodded. She was holding her thumbs tight with her fingers, following everything intently.

  “Very well,” Duff said. “Let us suppose Guy Maxon framed him. He, I understand, lingered at the door here that night.”

  Lina gave a quick puzzled nod.

  “Therefore, he might have been on the doorstep when the red men fell.”

  “From heaven,” Hugh said.

  Something happened on Duff’s face, a tiny contraction of muscle around his eyes, a small shift of his jaw.

  Maxon’s head went back, and he looked down along his nose haughtily. “I didn’t see them. I walked down Fifth Avenue and across 59th. I don’t like the Park.”

  Duff conceded a suppose. “Suppose Maxon picked them up. Suppose he takes the cab, the cab we speak of. It is a comparatively easy matter to imitate Mr. Cathcart’s small deformity.” My finger stiffened as he said it. I realized how easy it was.

  “Even then he wanted to implicate me, eh?” my uncle said.

  “Even then. He—”

  “Had no key!” Maxon crowed. “What about that?”

  “Perhaps he had,” Duff said, unperturbed. “How can we be sure?”

  “Perhaps the sky’ll fall tomorrow, too,” said Maxon viciously, his thin mouth snapping. “You can perhaps anything.”

  “As a matter of fact, we are perhapsing everything,” Duff said and smiled. It was the first time he had smiled. Maxon relaxed a little. We all did. It was like seeing a light far ahead when you’re walking in the dark, a light that tells you, anyhow, where you’re going. “Your procedure would be the same,” Duff went on, “entering, finding the gun. You were familiar with Winberry’s flat?”

  “No. I didn’t know he had a gun. I never went there. I don’t think I’ve ever been there, not for years, at least. You never saw me there, Miller?”

  “No,” Hugh said. “As far as I know, you never came.”

  “Cathcart was there more often?”

  “Yes.”

  “More often than never,” my uncle said, “isn’t often.”

  “But never’s never,” Duff murmured.

  “Now wait a minute. There’s something else,” Maxon said eagerly, “if I can get it straight. Look, why did I take off his hat and coat? Not because I didn’t want the cab driver to see that crooked finger. I did want him to see it and report it, too. I mean if it had been me in the cab. Trying to make him think it was Charlie. But, of course, it wasn’t. I mean, it wasn’t me.”

  “One of the things we do not know,” Duff conceded, “is why the murderer took off Winberry’s coat.”

  “There must have been a reason,” Uncle drawled.

  “Yes, there must have been a reason unless the fact is that Winberry came in first and took it off himself.”

  “That’s what the murderer was trying to make us think,” Hugh said.

  “Let us go on with the case of Mr. Maxon.” Duff called us all back to his storytelling. “You reached your hotel at 1:27. Does it take nearly an hour to walk it from here?”

  “I’m afraid I must have rambled rather.” Maxon suddenly lost his eagerness and looked down his nose haughtily and defensively.

  “You were the third man out, were you not, in the parcheesi game? Winberry won and died first, Gaskell was second out.” Maxon blinked. “Did you mind very much being beaten?”

  “Beaten! I wasn’t beaten. I won!”

  Duff nodded and made another note. I saw my uncle’s cold eyes move to Maxon. “Guy’s last one out so often,” he said, leashing his voice in until it was only half a tone above a whisper and still the words rang like bells, “that third place is quite like a victory to him. He killed nobody.”

  “I am inclined to agree with you,” Mac Duff said. “Mr. Maxon, you must be careful.”

  “You drop me very suddenly,” Guy said, “from the villain’s role.”

  “Because I really cannot see how you could have implicated Cathcar
t,” Duff said apologetically, “quite as efficiently as he has been implicated. And don’t you see, if the murderer is not Cathcart himself, it must be someone who—Let me show you by an example. Let me show you how Hugh Miller might have committed this crime and kept his eye on Cathcart all the time.”

  “Pray do,” my uncle murmured.

  Chapter Fifteen

  “May I make a phone call first?” Duff asked.

  “Privately?”

  “Not at all. This phone will do very well, if I may.” Duff went to the telephone, beckoning to J.J. to follow. My uncle rang for Effans, instructed him to serve us with something to drink, whatever we wanted. There was buzz and rustling and shifting of positions, and yet I’ll bet nobody missed one syllable of what Duff was saying on the telephone. If ever I saw a group of people with their ears cocked! He didn’t seem to care whether we heard or not. What he did was to read J.J.’s notes on Hugh’s life, names and places, to someone. “Check on it,” he said. “See if you find a link. The age is off … yes I know. In 1928, he claims to have been only nineteen years old. Too young … I see … Yes … I see.”

  He came back and accepted a drink. It was recess. I saw Lina turn and scrutinize Guy Maxon with a long deep look as if she’d read him inside and out. I saw my uncle pretend not to watch Hugh and Hugh pretend not to watch my uncle. I felt the criss-crossing of tensions weave and tighten while Duff sat in the middle and soaked up his own impressions of all the flying wordless messages. Hugh’s to me, meaning, “I haven’t the right to ask you for faith in me, but have you got it?” Maxon’s to Lina, meaning, “If I knew what you were looking for, I’d be that thing. What is it?”

  Duff sat in the middle, and it struck me that he was a stranger and I was a stranger and J.J. Jones was a stranger, yet Duff belonged where he was. He belonged, paradoxically, because he didn’t belong at all. I mean, he had no link with anybody in this house. Furthermore, his watching and listening was, none of it, for himself. He didn’t care who was guilty. He had no slightest wish that the murderer would turn out to be any one of us rather than any other. All he wanted was to know. That impersonal quality, uncanny, nearly inhuman in its completeness, was what gave him his undeniable right to be there.