The velvet hand

by Helen Reilly

  "You mean—those girls who committed suicide in New York?”

  McKee said yes. He pointed out that as long as Pedrick was alive Libby would never be safe. “She had to kill Pedrick. I gave her the opportunity. As you know there’s a phone in each room here. Hers was tapped. She got in touch with Pedrick and he came to Portsmouth. Last night she met Pedrick out in that side garden.”

  So her dream wasn’t all a dream. There had been someone in the garden below the balcony.

  “What did Pedrick intend to do?”

  “He intended to make your cousin sign a statement that she had kidnapped herself. It would have been the basis for unlimited and endless blackmail.”

  Kit sat quietly in her chair. There was only deadness where Libby was concerned. And wonder. No pain yet. “Why didn’t Libby sign Pedrick’s paper down there in the garden?”

  McKee’s smile was thin. “Your cousin had no intention of signing anything. She had other ideas.” He explained at length. Sorting details, Kit could hear Libby’s voice. So plausible. “You’ve got to give me a break, Mr. Pedrick. If you push me too far I’ll confess the whole thing to my uncle, and then where will you be? I can’t stay here now, I’ll be missed. But I’ll think of some way we can meet.” And then the plan. She had built the whole thing cleverly, with the stuff at hand. They had heard it over the phone. Pedrick was to follow the M.G. out of Portsmouth, and Kit was to see the apparent struggle, the second kidnapping. Libby had stressed to Pedrick that no suspicion must attach to her at any time.

  “Wasn’t Pedrick afraid of Libby, Inspector?”

  “No. She had no weapon, he made sure of that, and she was a girl and physically no match for him.” Pedrick had taken the M.G.’s ignition key, ignorant of the fact that there was another in Kit’s bag.

  “But Libby knew, Inspector?”

  “Yes, Miss Haven, that was part of it, a vital part.” McKee described the scene he and the men with him, disposed at strategic points in and around the barn, had witnessed—they had gone on ahead in the milk truck. Inside the bam, Pedrick had produced paper and a pen. He had dictated to Libby. She sat there, on a box, leaning over an old table, writing protestingly. “I won’t ... I can’t . . .” Pedrick had watched her closely, gun in hand as an added inducement. “You’d better.” He didn’t trust her, and he wanted it over and done with.

  About to sign the confession, Libby threw down the pen. “I never unll. Never” Her hand went into her pocket, came out with something in it and went to her mouth. She pretended to try and swallow. Pedrick thought what he was intended to think, that the aspirin tablet she had taken was poison. It got him. If she died he would lose a lot of money and he would also be saddled with a corpse. It wasn’t on his agenda. He dropped the gun to the table and reached for her. “Your cousin was ready—and fast. She snatched up the gun and shot Pedrick point-blank twice, through the heart, before I could make a single move.”

  The lights dimmed some more for Kit as the Inspector continued to talk. Libby then put the second part of her plan into operation. Her tormentor was disposed of, but she was still penniless. McKee said, “You were her main stumbling block. Your uncle’s will leaves his money equally to you and to her, but if she persisted in marrying Tony Wilder, backed up by your dislike of him, your uncle might have changed his mind. With you out of the way she thought she could manage him, and she would be his sole beneficiary quite soon. Mr. Haven is not a well man.” Kit said slowly, “Did she plan to kill me, deliberately?” McKee nodded. “That was what we had to wait for. Without that we would have had nothing. She could have pleaded self-defense where Pedrick was concerned—and gotten away with it. She fired those two shots at you the moment you appeared in the barn doorway, but you were in no danger at any time. I was ready and waiting.”

  Kit unclasped her hands, looked at them, and then linked them together again. “Perhaps—perhaps Libby was just frightened—half out of her wits.”

  “No, Miss Haven. Your death was part of her plan. She knew about your second key, knew you’d follow the black sedan. After Pedrick fell she went out of the barn and moved the sedan back, where you would be sure to see it. Pedrick had driven it farther to the left and out of sight of the road. Then she returned to the barn and watched you from there, moving from peephole to peephole, the gun ready.”

  Kit pushed hair back from her forehead with a vague gesture. “It’s the enormity of it. I can’t seem to. . .”

  McKee shrugged. “Miss Tallis didn’t figure on the developments that cropped up. Minder was no part of her original scheme. As far as the twenty-five thousand dollars extorted from your uncle was concerned, she considered that she wasn’t really harming him, that he would spend as much as that without a thought. She couldn’t foresee William or Pedrick, or the twist events were to take. But once committed, there was no turning back. No, ‘Who rides the tiger can never dismount.’ ”

  Who rides the tiger. . . The shadows came closer.

  "What will happen to Libby?” Kit’s voice was barely audible.

  McKee said, after a quick glance at her, “Your cousin won’t ... I very much doubt that there will be a death sentence.”

  His eyes were cold. He was seeing Libby Tallis as he had seen her a little while ago in a small bare room, with a wardress beside her, white and piteous, denying everything. “I didn’t. No, I didn’t, Inspector. You’re wronging me.” A sweet mouth, soft gold hair, and tears.

  “Your cousin will probably get off with a long sentence; Grant was blackmailing her, which makes for sympathy with the jury. Pedrick’s killing could be manslaughter. And she missed you.” He picked up his hat. “I’ll have to see you tomorrow. There will be statements to sign.” He went.

  Kit sat on, staring at a leather chair, an ornate ash tray. She was thinking vacantly of Hugo Cavanaugh and of how Hugo must feel, when the door opened and he walked into the room.

  He said quietly, “Hello, Kit,” and tossed his hat on a table and sat down opposite her. “How is your uncle?”

  Kit raised drugged eyes. “Sleeping.”

  “It hit him hard?”

  “Very hard.”

  Silence after that. There was nothing to say. Presently Kit removed her gaze from a bronze horse on the marble mantelpiece to Hugo’s face. It was dark with anger. She was faintly surprised. Anger was so futile an emotion now. She said, “Don’t be angry at her, Hugo.”

  “Angry at her?” Hugo got up and started to walk around. “I’m not angry at Libby.” He shrugged. “She is— as she is. It’s you I’m angry at.” McKee had said to him in the corridor, "Miss Haven’s in a state of shock and can’t seem to pull out of it.”

  “Why should you be angry at me?” Kit asked without interest. “I didn’t do anything to you.”

  “Oh, you didn’t? All you did was constitute yourself judge and jury three months ago and give me the gate without a hearing. You thought I’d fallen for Libby. Well, you were wrong, dead wrong. But would you listen? No. That night you saw us in the car I was trying to warn Libby about Wilder, get his address out of her—I didn’t put my arms around her, she put her arms around me. But when I tried to tell you that, you just walked away. Of course I kept after her about Wilder. I wanted those letters, but he kept moving from place to place.” Hugo went on talking. He said a lot of other things.

  Kit settled deeper into her chair. It had been Hugo outside the garden gate here at the hotel the other night. He had been in Portsmouth for days acting under McKee’s orders. He went on admonishing her.

  “Stop it, Kit. Stop mourning for a Libby who never existed outside your imagination. Stop trying to make people over to your own requirements. Take them as they are.” When she didn’t answer he crossed swiftly and put his hands on her limp shoulders and shook her. “You hear me?” Feeling was beginning to penetrate Kit’s numbness. It hurt. She drew a breath and raised her head. “Take your hands off me.”

  “I’ll do nothing of the kind.” Hugo bent and kissed her hard and angrily
, drew off and glared down at her.

  On that Kit laughed. It was a small shaky laugh, but it broke a spell, a spell that had endured for three months that seemed like a section of eternity. Courage and strength began to flow back into her. Whatever was to come, and there were going to be dreadful problems, she could see straight, and knew she could face the future.

  About the author of THE VELVET HAND

  When Helen Reilly was asked for some up-to-the-minute biographical material recently, her novel-writing daughter, Ursula Curtiss, obliged with the following: "For most of the year Helen Reilly lives, deceptively enough, in a peaceful red and white Cape Cod cottage drenched in sun, salt air and rambler roses. This is a cunning front for one of the most lethal combines you could come across because people inside are dying by violence every day of the week.

  "This is not the New England division of Mtuder, Inc. It is the scene of the activities of Mrs. Reilly and her two mystery-writing daughters, Mary McCullen and Ursula Cmiiss, who arrive whenever possible and bring their invisible victims along. With all three at work, the two-hundred-year-old walls tremble to the thunder of typewriters. A third daughter is busy at her easel, while the fourth. Peg, looks over prospective titles for the books currently in progress and announces out of a memory like microfilm what names have been used and what haven't."

  Mrs. Reilly is a native New Yorker but she commutes between her daughters' apartment in Manhattan, her home in Yonkers, and the cottage at Truro, on Cape Cod. She was recently elected president of the Mystery Writers of America for the year 1953.

  Her father, the late Dr. James Michael Kieran, was President of Hunter College. In 1914, before graduating from Hunter College, she married the late Paul Reilly, an artist-cartoonist. John Kieran, former New York Times sports writer, naturalist, and former expert on the Information Please radio program, is her brother.

  Mrs. Reilly gets her plots for her Inspector McKee stories from police files and the pattern of lives about her, but she must often simplify actual cases for they would be too incredible as fictional works.