Lay On, Mac Duff!

by Charlotte Armstrong

  I studied his face. He had clear color. You couldn’t call him bronzed or even tanned, but the blood moved under his skin. He was healthy, I thought. And surely he was wise and kind and warm-hearted, even though now he was all receptive, giving out nothing. What was he thinking? What was he feeling? He wasn’t. Not for himself. But we were feeling, and that was the point. The room was full of feelings for all we sat so civilized and sipped our drinks. It was our feelings that mattered, I remembered. And I knew what Duff was watching and listening to.

  “The solution of this rather extraordinary situation,” Duff said, almost as if he were answering my thought, “isn’t going to rest on evidence. We haven’t much evidence and no proof. We are dealing entirely with possibilities and probabilities. But let us go on with the possibilities. Yesterday,” he said to J.J. and me, “I had two little thoughts, you remember? They led me to examine the case from the point of view that Hugh Miller is guilty. I didn’t tell you what they were because I wanted to go over the whole story and see whether that point of view broke down anywhere, became impossible. I cannot see that it does break down, but perhaps we can break it down now.” He paused. Hugh looked alert. My uncle looked wary. “The first little thought. Does it not seem an extraordinarily long interval, that ten minutes between phone calls? From Hugh Miller’s end, I mean. Imagine that you are anxious to reach someone. You call, no answer. How long do you wait before you call again? Your impatience distorts time, remember. Lengthens it. So that you do not wait even as long as you think you do. I should like to know,” he said to Hugh, “what you were doing in that ten minutes?”

  “Talking to the druggist. I told him what had happened. He was excited.”

  “For ten minutes. Yes. It still seems odd. The other little thought was about the eyeglasses—that is to say, the hat and coat. Let us come to that in order. You left this house at ten minutes after twelve that night and walked over to Madison Avenue for a sandwich. You took a bus, you say, at 12:30 or so. Let us suppose that you did not take a bus but returned to the street in front of this house and that you were standing in the areaway, in the shadow at 12:30 when the others left. That the red men fell near you, from heaven.”

  Hugh’s face flushed. “You’re assuming now that I am Herbert Graves?”

  “Oh, yes,” Duff said. “Otherwise the red men would have had no significance for you. Nor would you have come back to stand there. Let us just suppose. Do you mind?”

  “I don’t mind,” Hugh said.

  “Thank you. Now we suppose that you picked them up. That you were the man who took the cab, who imitated, as you paid your fare, Cathcart’s crooked finger.”

  Hugh shrugged.

  “Ah, yes, about the bus. Of course. Mr. Jones, at my suggestion, interviewed that cab driver this afternoon.” He seemed to wait for J.J. to speak, so J.J. told us.

  “I asked him, per instruction, what route he followed, getting from here to 108th and Broadway. It seems he didn’t go through the Park. He went up Fifth, over 110th. Going that way, he passed the stalled bus and remembers it.”

  “Ah!” my uncle said. Hugh looked more puzzled than concerned.

  “If Miller had been the man in the cab,” Duff explained, “he could have known all about a bus being stalled, and when and where. Furthermore, he could have known what he claims to know about the very striking costume of one of the passengers.”

  “That’s right,” J.J. said. “Because the cab driver himself knew. He said he was stopped by a red light, that he was interested in the stalled bus—it’s unusual to see one—that the driver and the conductor had the hood open; that he could see inside the lighted bus perfectly well; that this colored woman with the garden-party hat and the plaid jacket and the satin evening dress stood up in the aisle while the cab was waiting there, but she sat down again. He says the second bus pulled alongside the crippled one just as they shot away.”

  “Do you remember,” Duff asked of Hugh, “what she wore on her feet?”

  “I have no idea,” Hugh said carelessly.

  “Neither had the cab driver,” J.J. put in. “Couldn’t see her feet.”

  “But we have discovered,” Duff added, “that what she wore on her feet was sufficiently peculiar, to have been noticed by both the bus driver and the conductor.”

  “Oh, what?” I cried.

  Duff smiled at me. “Canvas sneakers,” he said. “She’s a mystery all by herself.”

  “I should think so.” I looked at J.J., who grinned at me. “Oh! Oh, now I know!”

  “Know what?” my uncle snapped. His voice cut and whipped across at me.

  “He … he was trying to tell me.”

  “I went through a lot of monkey shines,” J.J. said. “Honey, you weren’t dumb.”

  “I certainly wasn’t,” I said indignantly. “How could I be expected.…”

  Lina said, “I wish I knew what Bessie was talking about,” rather plaintively. They were all looking at us, and only Duff was smiling.

  I felt just as if I’d been caught whispering in school. And to a boy, too.

  J.J. said, “It’s nothing. She looked out the window, and I was making motions. I was trying to tell her about the taxi driver and the bus driver.”

  “I thought you were mad,” Hugh said. He looked angry and bewildered, mixed.

  Uncle Charles laughed out loud. “What a lot of spying and counter-spying must have been going on,” he purred. “Where were you that you saw this performance, Miller?”

  “In my room,” Hugh said sullenly. But I wondered, and Duff saw me do it, whether Hugh could have seen past the angle of the wing my room occupied. Then I decided that he might have, and Duff read that decision, too.

  “Let us get back to the business of the stalled bus and the cab that went by it,” he said. “Now a mind, searching for ways and means, might easily snatch at those observed facts, see in a flash how they might create at least the semblance of an alibi. I understand that the conductor of that bus refuses to say, one way or the other, that Miller was or was not on the bus. The police expect nothing more from him, and neither can we. Now please remember that this mind is sorting and discarding ideas swiftly. That it is spur-of-the-moment planning. That it wavers, here and there, on different tacks. He crooks his little finger disembarking. No harm in that. It might never be noticed, but, if so, so much the better. He lets himself in with his own keys, resolving to ‘lose’ them. And where to ‘lose’ them. Peter Finn calls up, and he answers. Now he is Winberry. He sees that must be his line of thought. He must be Winberry, for he cannot be himself. He must not appear yet. He must not have a key. Yet, he cannot, of course, be the murderer, arouse Peter’s suspicions at this, point. Therefore, he enters at 1:08 as Winberry. Now, when Winberry really enters and Miller shoots him, he realizes that he must remove the hat and coat. For Winberry would not remain in his own office from 1:08 to 1:15 without taking his coat off. So Miller, to maintain the fiction that Winberry entered first, takes them off and hangs them up and hurries away. He walks around the block quickly. Enters the drugstore at 1:19. By now in the character of himself, just off the bus, without a key. You see?

  “The time is close. He can’t help that. He is limited by the fact that the bus takes only so much time to reach that corner. Perhaps he hopes the shot will be noted as fired at approximately the time he was in the drugstore. We have the time of the shot exactly only by freak luck.

  “Now, he returns to the flat at 1:22, rings the bell this time, finds Peter and the body, finds that Lo, the body has spoken. That makes no difference unless …” Duff paused.

  “You see that he has not only his own safety to think about. He has to keep Cathcart in danger. What Winberry says makes no difference to his own safety, but it seems to eliminate Cathcart as the killer. It won’t do. He must bring Cathcart back into suspicion. The only way he can think to do that is to destroy his own faking of the sequence of entrances. He can explain that Winberry could not see. But, in doing so, it becomes obvio
us that if Winberry could not see, then Winberry came in last. The fogging of his eyeglasses which prevented him from seeing must have occurred immediately upon his entering the warm room and would have cleared away very soon thereafter.

  “Now, Miller, having changed his plot, must explain the business of the hat and coat. He offers a rather lame explanation. He says the killer, for some reason, wanted it to appear that he came in last. ‘But,’ says Miller, ‘I cannot be that killer because I’d rather he came in first. It helps my alibi.’ Yet I can think of a very good reason why he, if guilty, would have preferred us to think, in spite of the close timing of his appearance in the drugstore, that the first man really was Winberry.

  “Does it occur to you that, if the first man was the killer, and if, when the first man answered Peter’s call he ‘kinda groaned—like the way he used to,’ therefore the first man knew Winberry and the house there well enough to imitate a characteristic sound Winberry was accustomed to make in answering Peter. Remember, Peter hadn’t the least doubt it was Winberry. Now, whether Cathcart or Maxon could have known Winberry’s ways well enough is a question. But there is no doubt whatever that Hugh Miller knew them well enough. He lived there. That,” Duff continued in a moment, “was my second little thought. That turned my attention to him. Then, of course—”

  Hugh said, “That’s clever. It is, really. What do you claim I did with the red man?”

  “Ah, yes,” Duff said, as if he were grateful for being reminded. “In the role of avenger, you left it there. In the role of Hugh Miller, you concealed it from the police. Is that what you mean?”

  Hugh said, with the first humor I had seen in him, “I don’t quite understand myself. Why did I do that?”

  “He did it,” my uncle said, “because the police aren’t as romantic as he is. It looks like a great big beautiful clue, but Garnett’s capable of paying no attention to it at all. Just as he’s paying no attention to the one he’s got now.”

  Duff said, “Peter was a witness, saw him find it, could prove it had been there. In the role of Hugh Miller, it was natural—”

  “Natural!” my uncle said contemptuously. “He hung on to it to stir up trouble.”

  Duff considered silently a moment. I wondered if my uncle really thought Hugh was guilty. Or if Duff found something significant in what my uncle said, and if so how was it significant?

  Duff, however, went on with his story. “Now Miller telephones. He telephones from the drugstore to this house, being sure to leave plenty of time between the murder and his call for Cathcart to have reached home. It won’t do to hand Cathcart an alibi by calling too soon. In the booth, he has a better idea. He hangs up, after only two rings, and attempts to say that Cathcart was not at home yet at ten minutes of two. He lets an interval go by before he calls again, an interval that’s much too long. This is why.

  “He dares not call again, as would be natural, in a few seconds, because Cathcart will answer and there will be a split-second coincidence to make us believe in. That he called at 1:50 and Cathcart was still out, but at 1:50 and a half Cathcart was in. Do you see?”

  “Why, yes,” Hugh said.

  “It’s intricate,” my uncle said. “Do you play chess, Miller?”

  “No.”

  “Too bad. We might have had a game.”

  “You forget the mind he postulates is not necessarily the mind I’ve got,” Hugh said. “Play chess with Duff.”

  They seemed quite friendly. I think I even smiled as if Hugh had said something witty. I certainly at that time took no stock in the idea that Hugh might be guilty. But what Duff said next began to shake me.

  “Now, the next morning, Miller comes here and asks for Bessie Gibbon. He has seen Bessie.” Duff paused as if that were significant, and I felt a cold warning. “The very first thing he does is make sure from her that Cathcart has no alibi. This he finds out before going on.”

  “But he only … but he …” I spluttered.

  “Why does he wish to see Bessie?” Duff said softly. “Of course, you realize that he has plenty of time to place his keys in the cigarette box, ready for her to find, and to place the two unused red men, two remaining out of the three he picked up outside, back in their box for her to see. Why does he do that? To make her believe Cathcart must have been out of the house. Why does he come here and frighten Bessie? He has his chance, you know, to take the red men back again, since she leaves him here in this room alone.” He turned on Hugh and demanded, “Why didn’t you also take the fourth red man?”

  Hugh’s face was livid. A blue vein throbbed in his temple as I’d seen it throb once before. But he spoke with careful control of his voice. “Cathcart had as good a chance to put my keys in that box,” he said with a wonderful mildness. “Cathcart had every chance to do what he liked with the red men before and after I was here. As for Bessie, I had no wish to frighten her. It was on her account. As you say, I’d seen Bessie.” He looked at me, at my hand on J.J.’s sleeve and said, “I’d seen her only once, that’s true.”

  I felt myself blush, and J.J.’s face flamed. My uncle, quick as lightning, said, “How many times have you seen Bessie, Mr. Jones?”

  J.J. said, “The number of times I’m going to see Bessie from now on interests me more.”

  My uncle looked at Duff and said, “She lied about that.” He said it rather thoughtfully, and his eyes came to me, speculating, I knew, on what other lies I might have told him. I dug my nails into J.J.’s coat sleeve. I wanted to tell him that I’d forgotten to pack any suitcase. I couldn’t, of course. I couldn’t do anything.

  I heard Hugh murmur, “Who frightens Bessie?”

  Lina stood up as if she could bear sitting still no longer. “This is a very interesting discussion, but what is the conclusion? Do you say … do I understand you to mean, Mr. Duff, that Hugh is guilty of Winberry’s murder? If so, I’m afraid—”

  “No, no,” Duff protested. “I say it is a possibility. If he is Herbert Graves. If he is not, we know of no motive.”

  “Do you say,” she asked in a colder tone, “that Charles is guilty?”

  “I do not say so. I say possibly.”

  “But you eliminate Guy?”

  “I cannot quite see where Mr. Maxon could have been able to put Miller’s keys in the cigarette box or the red men back with the set,” Duff said, “unless you were his confederate, Mrs. Cathcart.”

  My head swam, my brain buzzed out a plot. Lina’s father in the poorhouse, Lina’s father, who could still go to jail, Lina, who’d been bought, Lina who was young.…

  Lina herself sat down as if the breath were knocked out of her.

  “Mr. Duff,” she said at last, “I had supposed you were a wise and understanding man.” She turned her palms up helplessly. “But where are we now?”

  Chapter Sixteen

  “We have come to the second murder,” Duff said. “An examination of the circumstances of Gaskell’s death may enlighten us. Before I go on, let me say that I do not seriously believe that all of these ‘possibilities’ are really possible. There are facts, facts of character, facts of emotion, that are as solid and more solid than what we call evidence. For instance, I do not for one moment believe, Mrs. Cathcart, that you were Guy Maxon’s confederate.”

  “Thank you,” Lina said coldly.

  Mac Duff smiled. I got the strong feeling again that we were all telling him, as we went along, everything he wanted to know.

  “Let us deal with Mr. Maxon first. You accompanied Gaskell last night?”

  “I did,” Maxon said. “We … happened to leave here together. He had a cab waiting.”

  “You were here in this house. So you knew Cathcart was here?”

  “Yes,” Maxon said. “We had been talking business.”

  “He had been trying to persuade me to take a risk,” my uncle said, “without telling me it was a risk. I don’t mind a risk, but I do mind dealing with a man who doesn’t know one when he sees it.” Maxon said nothing. “Or who tries to
fool me,” my uncle added almost inaudibly.

  “Gaskell went directly to his house?” Duff asked.

  “Yes. He said he’d go home if I’d come and have a drink with him. I went along and went in and had a drink with him. But we hadn’t much to say. I left after one drink.”

  “There is a thermostat clock in this affair,” Duff said, “that has been broken. It leads us to believe that Gaskell was killed later than 2 A.M. Or, alternatively, that the murderer wished us to think so. When you left him at 1:45 he was alive and well?”

  “Certainly.”

  “When you returned a minute later?”

  “I did not return.”

  “Ah, yes, so you have said. From 1:45 to 2:08, you were walking from Gaskell’s house to your hotel?”

  “Yes.”

  “You walk a great deal at night.”

  “I don’t mind walking,” Maxon said. He looked very haughty.

  “Do you know the Eighth Avenue Subway?”

  “Know it? I’ve heard of it if that’s what you mean.”

  “You see,” Duff explained, “if the thermostat clock turned the heat down at 2 A.M. and was, a moment later, broken by the killer as he killed, there would be a margin of six or seven minutes in which you might have reached your hotel, had you come upon a subway train at the exact second necessary and caught it by sheer luck. It would mean, of course, that you had no notion of the significance of the clock. I don’t think you would have relied, on sheer luck for an alibi if you had known that an alibi at two o’clock would clear you.”

  Maxon’s mouth was open. He looked stupid.

  “Have you visited Winberry’s flat since his death?”

  “Winberry’s? No.”

  “No. Negative evidence, no one saw you there. Can you bring anyone to swear that you were walking home between 1:45 and 2:08?”

  “I doubt it. I wasn’t looking at faces.”

  “We have no evidence, then, that positively eliminates you.” Duff sighed. “Because, of course, you may have had the red men in your possession still. If Mrs. Cathcart or someone in this house was helping you.”