by Rufus King
“Then that’s settled. You’ll have a nurse in here all the time, I suppose?”
“Naturally.”
“Then I’m going to ask her to keep this hall door locked on the inside. She can open it if anyone knocks, and my men will keep their eyes on whoever comes in.”
“The precautions seem extraordinary, Lieutenant.”
“And so does the case. I’ll go downstairs now and try to find out something from the servants about his friends. I’ll tell them, if you like, about your staying here, in case there is anything that has to be got ready.”
“Thank you, Lieutenant.”
“Not at all, Doctor.”
Lieutenant Valcour went outside. He found the maid Jane in the hallway, seated on a chair near the stairs, trembling. A tray with an empty glass was on the floor beside her. She saw him, picked up the tray, and stood up.
“I’m that upset, sir,” she said, “that upset.”
“Something has startled you?”
“Startled! Glory be, sir—what with this bringing back of the dead and the missus gone into a comma—if it wasn’t for them three cops at the downstairs doors I’d be out of this house this minute, and so would the rest of us, too.”
“How many of the ‘rest of you’ are there?”
“Sure and including the housekeeper there’s eight of us, sir.”
The Endicott’s, Lieutenant Valcour was now quite certain, must be multimillionaires.
“All women?”
“Except for the houseman and chauffeur.”
“And do they sleep in the house?”
“The chauffeur does not, sir. He has an apartment for himself and his wife and his three-year-old child, named Katie, over the garage in East Sixty-sixth Street, sir.”
“Have all of you been in service here a long time?”
“Indeed and we haven’t, sir—except for Roberts and the housekeeper. I’ve been here a month myself, and the rest of us not more than two or three.”
“And Roberts has been Mrs. Endicott’s maid for the past several years, say?”
“And sure and ever since she landed here from England, sir.”
“Roberts is an Englishwoman?”
“Hold your whisht, sir, and I’ll tell you that she’s of the aristocracy, no less.”
Lieutenant Valcour considered this gravely. It was not improbable. Many English families were utterly wrecked financially by the war, and the children had scattered whither they could, like sparrows, in search of bread. “You’re sure of this?” he said.
“And indeed it is common knowledge, sir. The housekeeper herself, it was, who told me.”
Lieutenant Valcour switched suddenly. “I wonder whether you could tell me who Mr. Endicott’s intimate friends were,” he said.
“Well, sir, there’s quite a few people have called on the madam off and on, and a few on Mr. Endicott, too. I couldn’t say, though, as to just how intimate.”
“But didn’t he ever discuss his friends?”
“Not before me, sir. I’m one of the downstairs girls. Perhaps Roberts would know. She’s often in the room with the madam and Mr. Endicott even when the pair of them is quarrelling that hard that—Glory be to—”
“Tut, tut,” said Lieutenant Valcour gently. “Married couples are always quarrelling together. There’s nothing unusual in that.”
“Indeed and there ain’t.”
“I wonder whether you’d ask Roberts to come out here and see me.”
“I will, sir.”
“Oh—and will you also tell whoever has to know about it that Dr. Worth plans to stay here all night? And then let him know, please, where he is to sleep.”
“Yes, sir.”
Jane went to the door of Mrs. Endicott’s room and knocked. Nurse Vickers opened it and stepped halfway out, blocking the entrance. Their voices were too low for Lieutenant Valcour to hear, but he saw the nurse retreat into the room, caught an affirmative nod from Jane, and presently Roberts came out and toward him.
“You wished to see me, Lieutenant?”
There was still that curious shielding in her eyes—a hinting at definite information kept closely guarded behind twin gates.
“I want you to tell me,” he said quietly, “why you compelled me a while ago in Mrs. Endicott’s room to say ‘Later.’”
“I don’t believe I quite understand.”
“And I believe that you do.”
Roberts became coolly detached. “One is justified in having one’s beliefs.”
“Just why do you hate Mrs. Endicott so?”
She flinched as if he had struck her physically.
“Is that why you sent for me?” she said.
Lieutenant Valcour himself indulged in a veiling of eyes. “I wish,” he said, “that you would sit down.”
CHAPTER IX
11:55 P.M.—Queer Deeps
Roberts went indifferently to the chair that Jane had been using and sat down. Lieutenant Valcour drew another up beside her. He began with the usual distant skirmishing before launching the main body of his attack.
“I will explain why I wanted to see you,” he said. “It’s concerning Mr. Endicott—concerning his condition.” He noted the sudden reflex from tension on the part of her hands as he summed up concisely the statement made to him by Dr. Worth. “I understand,” he concluded, “that Mrs. Endicott is under the influence of a narcotic and will not be available before tomorrow morning at the earliest. Dr. Worth naturally wants to prevent all risk, and so we’ve turned to you.”
He felt her staring through him, as if by some fourth-dimensional process his being had been erased from her vision.
“Mr. Endicott has very few friends,” she said.
“You are taking the word at its literal meaning.”
“Oh, quite. His acquaintances are numerous and transient.” She focused him into an entity again. “They are mostly women. I don’t suppose one of them would do?”
Lieutenant Valcour smiled slightly. “Not if their status is so uncertain—their emotional status, I mean.”
“Exactly.” The masked effect of her attitude remained unchanged as she asked with almost perfunctory detachment, “Would a man do?”
“Why not?”
“Because there is one man of whom Mr. Endicott speaks quite frequently as being his ‘best’ friend.”
“Here in town?”
“In a bachelor apartment on East Fifty-second Street.”
“You have his exact address?”
“It is in the memorandum book beside the telephone in Mrs. Endicott’s room.”
Lieutenant Valcour grew markedly casual. “A mutual friend, then?”
“One couldn’t say.”
“He is your only suggestion?”
“He is the only man to whom I have heard Mr. Endicott refer in terms of friendship and of intimacy.”
“Then there really isn’t any choice.”
Roberts’ smile signified nothing. “No choice.”
“Have you ever seen this man?”
“His name is Mr. Thomas Hollander. I have never seen him.”
“Has anyone in the household ever seen him, to your knowledge?”
“I dare say. I don’t know. One could inquire.” Lieutenant Valcour recognized the rising inflection at each period mark, a habit so much in vogue among certain types of English people when they wish to be mildly disagreeable. He felt a Gallic insistence to retaliate even at the expense of chivalry. At the worst, he thought, he would only be living up to the popular conception of the men in his profession. And there was some link of peculiar intimacy between this woman and Endicott…
“If we cannot get hold of Mr. Hollander,” he said, “would you consider it advisable for the post to be taken by yourself?”
He repented instantly at the sight of her deadly whiteness. It seemed impossible that blood could drain so swiftly from the skin. His own face blazed like fire from the slap of her hand across his cheek. He noticed, as he sat very still, the
strange terror that hid beneath her bitter, staring eyes: it wasn’t any terror of the law, the cheek of which she had symbolically in his person just so vigorously slapped; it wasn’t any terror of what he or the machine he represented could do to her—what anyone or anything could do to her… It was baffling; baffling as the undiscoverable source of any intense emotional reaction is baffling—something that drew its sustenance from roots imbedded not in the immediate present but in the past…
“You will permit me to offer my apologies?” he said.
She returned vividly to the moment, and her color swept back in a succession of bright waves.
“I am not usually so unmannerly,” she said.
“Nor usually subjected to insult. The fault was mine.”
Her laugh was quite harsh. “On the contrary, Lieutenant, I am accustomed to insult.”
“Then why do you stay with Mrs. Endicott?” he said softly.
“Because there are some people, Lieutenant, who can only find their happiness in hell.”
“Martyrs.”
“Not martyrs, precisely.”
“Just what, then, precisely?”
“It’s a sharing, if you wish—sort of a sharing of torture.”
Vague—vague. Lieutenant Valcour felt quite convinced that he would shortly begin to gibber, if the mysteries of hearts, of minds that he had dipped into during the past few hours, did not soon coalesce within the mould of reason. He began to envy his sterner compatriots on the force who confined their processes to the comfortable fields of hard, cold facts—the “did you at five-forty-five this afternoon place the silver teaspoon on the pantry shelf, or did you not?” sort of facts. He conceded that their wholesome, plein-air tactics were quite right, and that his own, in spite of their usually successful results, were hopelessly wrong. They at least were never called liars, or slapped in the face, or found themselves helplessly swirling in a sea of metaphysics with a splendid chance of being thoroughly drowned. He forced himself to concentrate. What was it that slash of pale lips had been saying? A sharing of something…Of course, of torture.
“You mean,” he said, “a sharing that is now going on?”
“Perhaps—but especially in the past. Do you believe, Lieutenant, that the dead remain in emotional touch with the living?”
“And that, my poor fish,” he told himself severely, “is what your interminable probing into people’s souls has got you into.”
“I have never thought about it. But I should like to believe that it is true. I should like to believe in anything that offers corroborative proof of immortality.
“You are convinced of the finality of death?”
“It is a dread, not a conviction.”
Roberts nodded her head swiftly. “And with me—with me—if I could only know.”
“So that you would be quite certain that your sacrifice is not being made in vain.” Lieutenant Valcour spoke very softly. He was approaching, he felt, no matter how grandiloquently, that goal toward which he had been aiming: the answer to the amazing look she had given him in Mrs. Endicott’s room.
The mood broke. She stood up abruptly.
“You wished that address book?” she said.
It was of no great matter. Moods, at least, did not die. They were always there—somewhere—waiting to be recaptured.
“If you will be so kind,” he said.
She went to the door of Mrs. Endicott’s room, opened it, was swallowed up. Lieutenant Valcour waited outside. The case was becoming mired in evasions. That was the trouble with cases whose milieu rose beyond a certain social and mental level. They invariably grew kaleidoscopic with overtones. Crime in the lower strata was noteworthy for its crudenesses rather than its subtleties: an intrigue among animals, with the general patentness of some jackal filching its prey. But breeding and intellect generally presupposed masks: the inbred defensiveness of manner and social combativeness with the world which offered barriers most difficult to pierce. Roberts opened the door and handed him the small leather reference book Mrs. Endicott had used when verifying the telephone number of Dr. Worth.
“Thomas Hollander,” she said. “The names are listed alphabetically.”
The door closed even in that short second which preceded his thanks. It was a gesture of retreat from hinted intimacies. It wasn’t so much the door of the room she had closed as it was the door guarding her secrets. He felt that she wanted to show him she had already repented of having gone so far—not that she had gone any distance, really, but there were beacons, faint pin points of light toward which he would chart a course over the surface of her troubled seas.
He took the reference book and sat down. He began with A and started to go systematically through it. At H he fixed in his memory the street and telephone number of Hollander’s house. He continued without interest to turn the pages.
At the end of the M’s he came, to his marked bewilderment, upon the address and telephone number of Marge Myles.
CHAPTER X
12:06 A.M.—The Stillness of a Grave
Lieutenant Valcour went to the head of the stairs. “O’Brian!” he called down.
O’Brian looked up at him from below.
“Yes, Lieutenant?”
“Send Hansen up here, please.”
“Yes, sir.”
A painting on the wall held Lieutenant Valcour’s attention while he waited. A Gauguin, he thought, and, going closer, confirmed it. His eye drifted over the entire corridor. Everywhere were the details of great wealth, and the young owner of it all not a happy child of kind fortune, but a detested, a passionately hated, and a passionately loved man. There flashed again before him in brief review Mrs. Endicott, a storehouse of mountain storms in summer; Mrs. Siddons, spiritual ash; Roberts, the shortest step this side of some fervor bred in the swamps of lunacy; Hollander—Marge Myles—who knew? And would one ever know? Suppose, as Dr. Worth had more than hinted, Endicott should refuse to speak—if that strange reticence harped upon so insistently both by his wife and his physician should resist…
“Lieutenant, sir, Officer Hansen reporting.”
Lieutenant Valcour dragged his eyes from the Gauguin unwillingly.
“All right, Hansen,” he said. “Come with me.”
They went down the corridor and stopped before the door to Endicott’s room.
“Do you know what’s gone on here tonight, Hansen?”
“From what I’ve heard, sir, the man who was thought dead is now alive.”
“That is correct.”
Lieutenant Valcour opened the door and beckoned to Cassidy. Cassidy came out and joined them.
“When you two men go back into that room,” Lieutenant Valcour said, “I want you to get a couple of chairs and sit down just inside the bathroom doorway. Put the chairs where you can watch the bed and this hall door. If you talk, use a low voice that won’t disturb either the patient or the nurse, and from the moment when she indicates that he’s returning to consciousness, say nothing at all and sit still. The shock of knowing that you were there might disturb his heart again. Is that clear?”
They assured him, in unison, that it was.
“This hall door,” Lieutenant Valcour went on, “is going to be kept locked on the inside by the nurse. Every time she opens it, watch carefully. Keep your eye on anyone who comes into the room, especially if they offer some excuse for wanting to be there—and when I say ‘anyone,’ I mean just that. For instance: the nurse might want some coffee and ring for a servant. Watch that servant every second, until she goes and the door is locked again. While on the subject of coffee, you will drink none that may be offered you while you’re on watch.”
“I never drink coffee, Lieutenant,” said Cassidy. “Now if it was a cup of tea—”
“If you get thirsty,” said Lieutenant Valcour severely, “take some water from the tap. And eat nothing at all. I don’t want to have to come back here and find you both groggy with knock-out drops and with heaven-knows-what happened to Endicott. Min
d you, I’m not suggesting that anything like this will happen—but it might. Clear?”
Again, in unison, they assured him it was all most clear.
“Keep in mind,” Lieutenant Valcour went on, “that primarily you are in a sick-room over which Dr. Worth has absolute charge. You are not to interfere with anything he may do, or with any arrangements he may make during the night. You are only to step in if you see that Endicott’s life is threatened through the action of some person who may approach him. Try to prevent this by physically overpowering the attacker if you can, but if there is no time for that do not hesitate to shoot.”
“Even if it’s a woman, Lieutenant?” said Hansen quietly.
Lieutenant Valcour shrugged. “There are no such things,” he said evenly, “as sex or chivalry in murder.”
“Yes, sir.”
“I am painting, incidentally, the darkest prospect of the picture. In all probability nothing will happen at all. You’ll spend a sleepless and tiresome night, get cricks in your necks, and damn the day you ever joined the force. Now, then, there is one thing more, and that concerns a man by the name of Thomas Hollander. Dr. Worth believes it advisable that an intimate friend of Endicott be near him and be the first person whom Endicott sees when he recovers consciousness. Mr. Hollander is that friend. I am going to try to get in touch with him shortly, explain matters to him, and get him to come up here. Mr. Hollander is naturally the exception to my previous instructions. Let him alone. Don’t interfere with him, but—” Lieutenant Valcour’s pause was significantly impressive “—watch him. Watch him, my good young men, as two harmonious cats might watch a promenading and near-sighted mouse. Shall I repeat?”
“I get you, Lieutenant,” said Cassidy. And Hansen, he was assured, had “got” him, too.
“Then we will go in, and you will establish yourselves for the night at once.”
He opened the door, and they went inside. Dr. Worth’s arrangements were complete, and he was ready to turn in. Nurse Murrow had received her instructions and was to call Dr. Worth should Endicott show any symptoms of returning consciousness.
Dr. Worth joined Lieutenant Valcour at the door.