She addressed Fox: “We can finish that talk now if you want to.”
He regarded her a moment and shook his head. “No, thank you. With that expression of hardihood in your eyes it wouldn’t do any good. Anyhow, I’m starting for that gun from the other end.”
“You were mistaken when—”
“No, I wasn’t. Excuse me. I have a little errand—”
He started off, but turned to her voice behind him:
“You are invited to dinner. We’ll eat at eight o’clock in the dining room. Bellows will show you to a room upstairs if you want to comb your hair.”
“Thank you very much.”
Fox went. Miranda slanted her eyes up at Grant and said, “If he ever gets married I pity his wife. One look at her eyes and he’ll know to a cent how much she’s chiseling on the household allowance. You’re an old friend of his, aren’t you?”
Grant nodded. “Using friend as a euphemism, yes. I lived at his place for several months about three years ago. A sort of charity guest. I was intending to get started on the beginning of a tentative synopsis for a book.”
“Oh. Are you a writer?”
“I am a delitescent writer.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means that I didn’t start the book. I have made a living writing advertising for the past three years, but as some forty million people are now aware, I lost my job.”
“I’m trying to talk about something else for five minutes. At least you aren’t wandering around your own house, seeing district attorneys and policemen and detectives wherever you look. It’s impossible for me to know what it means to lose a job, to have any idea what the feeling is like, because I never had a job. What are you going to do now? When this is over?”
He shrugged. “Look for another one. This time, if I can get it, in a publisher’s office. I ought to be a publisher.”
She stared. “What for? To make a man of yourself?”
“Lord no. Where did you get that idea?”
“From my brother. Why should you be a publisher?”
“To make money. To mount the ladder of success. The best and most successful publishers are writers who are too lazy to write. That’s me.”
“Would you be a good publisher?”
“Marvelous. If I ever got started at it—and if I got out of this beastly mess—I beg your pardon….”
“For what? I would call it worse than beastly. I have done something fairly beastly myself. When I came up just now was your friend Mr. Fox telling you about the gloves?”
“Gloves? No.” Grant frowned down at her. “What gloves?”
“I supposed he was.” Miranda frowned back. “I have a confession to make to you and your niece, but not right now. I played a dirty trick on her, only at the time I didn’t know it was her. I’m hoping for forgiveness and that’s why I’m trying to make a good impression on you, which under the circumstances is darned difficult. I’m not a glamour girl, but I can fry eggs, and once when I was in a bathing suit at Palm Beach a man looked at me twice.”
“I don’t like eggs much.”
“Then I can fry potatoes. If you’d like a room and a shower, come along upstairs.”
As they disappeared through the door to the main hall, Nancy Grant entered at the other end of the room from the front terrace. She looked comparatively cool, but not very fresh, since she was wearing the same skirt and blouse she had had on when escaping from the window of the courthouse Monday morning. She looked around and saw no one, stood undecided, and finally went and stretched herself out on an upholstered bench in front of an open window, with her eyes closed. A few minutes later she opened them, hearing steps, and saw Jeffrey Thorpe approaching. He looked fresh but not cool and certainly not festive.
“I was looking for you,” he said.
She said nothing.
“My sister asked me to find you. We’ll eat in the dining room in a quarter of an hour. Your uncle’s upstairs taking a shower. If you’d like to have one I’ll show you a room.”
Nancy shook her head. “No, thank you. I just had a shower.”
“May I ask where?”
“In a dressing room at the swimming pool.”
“What did you go down there for?”
“To take a shower.”
“And then walked all the way back?”
“I saw no other way of getting back. I came by degrees.”
“You should have—” Jeffrey stopped. “No.
There’s no should about it. You’re here only because you can’t help it.” He was scowling. “Damn it, you’re talking to me.”
“Not with any great enthusiasm.” Nancy sat up, removed her legs from the bench and adjusted her skirt. “Since I’m talking to you, I might as well say something. I’ve heard you say twice that I hate you. That isn’t true. That time at the opera you were arrogant and offensive, you acted like a brainless imbecile, and you helped to place me in a humiliating and embarrassing situation. I don’t hate you at all. I simply have no use for you.”
“I don’t believe it.”
She looked up at him indignantly. “May I ask why you don’t believe it?”
“Because I don’t want to and because I’ve been thinking about it.” His scowl deepened. “The kind of collisions here have been between you and me and aren’t the kind that produce that state of mind. They have thrown out sparks. I have never seen so many sparks in so short a space of time as you produced that night last winter.”
He straddled the bench facing her. “You might suppose that the decent thing to do, with my father killed only six hours ago and me suspected by some people of killing him, would be to keep my mouth shut. But how do I know what’s going to happen? How do I know but what before the night’s out I’ll actually be charged with murder and put in jail? I wish I could tell you what’s been going on in my head this afternoon. I’ve been remembering days when my mother was still here and the way my father treated her, and working up a hatred for him that I never felt when he was alive, and then the realization would come that he’s dead now too, and I would remember the things he did for me. He did do things for me, no doubt of that, and I tried to go over it all and decide whether I was as bum an excuse for a son as he was for a father. I decided that I probably was. But in the middle of thoughts like that would come thoughts about you.”
He put out a hand, but she drew away and he let it fall to the bench. “Another reason why I don’t believe that you simply have no use for me. If that’s the way you really feel, you would have told what’s-his-name about seeing a gun in my pocket this morning. I know you didn’t tell him, because if you had—”
“How did you—” Nancy was looking at him. She looked away again. “How did you know I saw the gun?”
“I heard what your uncle said to you. That’s another thing. He didn’t tell either, so you must have asked him not to.”
“I didn’t! He suggested it himself, that we should mind our own business. And I did tell Mr. Fox. I—I didn’t mean to, but it was out before I knew it.”
“When did you tell him?”
“When we were all sitting out on the terrace. Soon after they called you into the house.”
“That doesn’t matter anyway. Your profile is the most beautiful … absolutely the most beautiful …” His voice began to tremble and he gave it up. “Fox knows that there isn’t a chance in the world that I killed my father.”
“How does he know that?”
“Because he knows people and he knows how much I’m in love with you, and he knows that in the condition I’m in I’m about as murderous as a butterfly, unless it was someone between you and me—Yes, Bellows?”
“Mrs. Pemberton sent me, sir. The gong sounded some minutes ago.”
“I didn’t hear it.” Jeffrey got off the bench and faced Nancy. “If you’d rather not go in with me, follow Bellows. I’ll be in in a minute.”
Before the cold consommé had been finished, Miranda was feeling that it had
been a mistake to tell Bellows that her father’s chair should be left in its accustomed place, vacant. Not that she had any idea that without it the occasion might have been one of merriment, but after all people eating at one’s table are one’s guests, no matter what circumstances collected them, and the ostentatious broad back of that empty chair seemed a calculated reproach to them and a deliberate solicitation of gloom. As the cold meats were being served, she murmured something of that sort to Andrew Grant on her right and to her astonishment he replied that he hadn’t noticed it.
The meal dragged along under the buzz of the electric fans. Certainly no one was endeavoring to prolong it for the sake of conviviality, but then no one was in a hurry to finish in order to do something else. There was nothing to do. The continued presence of the authorities made it probable that another campaign of questioning was in preparation; they all knew that the famous Inspector Damon of the New York police had arrived and was in the library. Dusk deepened in the room and, as the sherbet and raspberries were served, Bellows switched on the lights. The desultory and intermittent mutterings of conversation continued; there was nothing to talk about, since no one tried to talk of the only thing in their minds. The state of their nerves, their readiness to be startled by any incident whatever, was displayed when Tecumseh Fox addressed Miranda across the table, necessarily raising his voice above the fans:
“May I say something, Mrs. Pemberton? I’d like to play a game.”
Eight pairs of eyes jerked to him. Miranda raised her brows: “A game?”
“Yes. Call it that.” Fox signaled to Bellows, and the butler got something from a buffet and approached with it. “I’m going to ask you all to join in, if you don’t mind.” He took the tray from Bellows and nodded thanks and sent a swift glance around the table: Miranda and Grant, Jeffrey and McElroy, Kester and Fuller, Nancy and Henry Jordan. “This may seem frivolous to you, but it won’t hurt you any. I have here eight pads of paper and eight pencils. I’m going to pass them around and ask each of you to write something, all of you the same thing, which I’ll dictate, and sign your names for identification. I hope you’ll have no objection, Mrs. Pemberton, since—”
“Whether I sign my name or not,” put in Fuller dryly, “depends on what you ask me to write.”
“Perfectly harmless.” Fox smiled at him. “Just a pledge of our forefathers, a sentence of the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America. Bellows, if you will please hand the pads and pencils around—”
The butler took them, but instead of distributing them, he suddenly stiffened and stood rigid as the sound of peremptory shouts came in at the windows, apparently at some distance, and then jerked around as the explosion of a gunshot shattered the air. Everybody else jerked with him; and Redmond, crossing with a tray of iced tea, let it drop to the floor without even making a grab, and pierced the already offended air with a bloodcurdling scream.
Chapter 20
When, two seconds later, men came running in from the west hall, Redmond was sitting on the floor in a puddle of iced tea and broken glass, still screaming, every one had got to their feet, Jeffrey overturning his chair, Henry Jordan was white and trembling all over, Miranda was clutching Andrew Grant’s arm, McElroy the multiple director was backing to the wall….
“What—who—” Colonel Brissenden was yelling.
Fox yelled back, to top the screams, “Outdoors! Nobody’s hurt in here! Outdoors!”
Brissenden barked an order and two troopers whirled and disappeared. He barked again and the muscular giant from the hall picked up Redmond, still screaming hysterically, like a bag of cotton, and carried her out. Derwin was gesticulating and trying to say something to a man with a prize-fighter’s jaw and the morose eyes of a pessimistic poet, who, instead of listening, was looking. He strode across:
“Hello, Fox. Shot fired outdoors?”
“Hello, Inspector. Yes.”
“Bullet didn’t come in here?”
“Nobody saw it or felt it.”
Inspector Damon nodded. “We were in the library, the other side of the house, and couldn’t tell.” He turned. “Here’s something coming—”
The something was bellicose voices, upraised, from the darkness outdoors. They became fainter rounding the corner of the house. Brissenden trotted out. The voices, mingling with others, were heard again from the hall and at the sound of one of them Tecumseh Fox started for the door. But before he reached it the influx arrived. Two troopers entered, one on each side of a broad-shouldered square-faced man who was holding his left arm tight against his side and with his right hand grasping it above the elbow. He saw Fox, faced him and announced in a bass rumble that quivered without raged indignation:
“The double-breasted bastard shot me!”
Fox was by him. “Where, Dan? Let’s see. Better sit down. Thanks, Inspector. Take your hand away so I can slit the sleeve—”
“Wouldn’t it be better to—”
“No. Hold still. There. You’re nice and bloody. Hold still, you don’t have to look at it! No, thank you, Mrs. Pemberton. I won’t need a tourniquet. Please stand back, Miss Grant.” Fox glanced sharply at Nancy’s white face. “You’d better sit down—put her in a chair, Andy. It’s only flesh and skin … we ought to move into a bathroom—”
“I want to get you something first.”
“Go ahead. Hold still.”
“I’ve been trying to reach you all afternoon. They wouldn’t let me in. They wouldn’t call you on the phone. I had to get to you because I know who murdered Thorpe.”
“You do?”
“Yes. As soon as it got dark enough, or I thought it was, I climbed the wall and started for the house. Who would have thought one of those apes would actually shoot? And not only that, he hit me.”
“It’s not bad. Thank you, Inspector. Go on and tell us who killed Thorpe.”
“His son did. Jeffrey.”
“Did he?” Fox disregarded movements and ejaculations. “How could you see him from that distance?”
“I didn’t see him. But I know the double-breasted—”
“Save that one till we get to the bathroom. I don’t think I ever saw you this mad before—Don’t push, Colonel, you’ll get it. Two double-breasted’s in three minutes. What is it you know?”
“I know he had my gun, because I gave it to him last night and if it’s the one that shot Thorpe—”
“You mean my gun? One of my Dowseys?”
“All right, your gun. The one I was carrying.”
Fox’s eyes blazed. “You gave that gun to Jeffrey Thorpe?”
“I lent it to him. When he was there last night—when he came downstairs to go home. I was sitting on the porch aiming with it—”
“What were you aiming at?”
“At the bug lamp.”
“Do you mean the insect trap?”
“Yes. I was showing Wallenstein how to pull it down and allow for the jump. The young ape came out and saw me and said he was going to buy a gun and wished he had one, but he couldn’t buy one until morning. I asked him what for and he said for protection. Pokorny overheard it and suggested I should lend him mine—”
“I’ve told you a thousand times to ignore Pokorny’s suggestions.”
“Right. So Thorpe asked to borrow it until he could buy one, and since he had been riding around chinning with you and Miss Grant—”
“And you let him have it.”
“Right. Hey, that hurts!”
“I’m squeezing out the juice. I won’t mention what I’d like to do.” Fox turned to Derwin at his elbow. “Do you want to ask him anything before I take him somewhere and clean him up?”
“I do.” Derwin was grim. “I want him to identify that gun and to sign a statement—”
“You can have that when I get through with him. It’s the gun, all right. I mean any detail as—”
“Yes.” Derwin faced Dan. “Was the gun loaded when you gave it to Thorpe?”
“Certainly it was l
oaded!” The answer came not from Dan, but from Jeffrey Thorpe, who was there confronting Derwin. “I borrowed it from him and it was loaded, and I put it in my pocket and brought it home with me!”
“You admit that?”
“Yes!”
“Come on, let’s get it bandaged,” Fox said to Dan and, as they left the room, no one offered to interfere, or even paid any attention to them, for all eyes were focused on Jeffrey. Miranda had moved and was beside him, her face pale and her jaw set. A trooper had sidled over and was directly behind him.
Brissenden snapped, “Get him out of here. Bring him to the library, Hardy.”
The trooper put a hand on Jeffrey’s arm, but he, ignoring that, spoke to Derwin:
“You want to run me through the wringer and that’s all right, but I want to ask a question. My sister told me that the gun that killed my father has been identified as one belonging to Tecumseh Fox. Is that correct?”
“It is. And therefore it’s the gun—”
“Yes. I can count that far myself. It’s the gun I brought here and that makes it my turn to talk. But you’re not taking me to the library or anywhere else. I’ll talk right here. The people who have heard this much will hear the rest. Tell your stenographer to go get his notebook. When I got home last night—”
“Wait a minute, Jeffrey!” It was Fuller, of the law firm of Buchanan, Fuller, McPartland and Jones, stepping forward. His hard non-committal eyes were aimed at the district attorney. “It is advisable, I think, that I should have a talk with Mr. Thorpe first.”
“Tchah!” snorted Brissenden.
“I think not,” said Derwin curtly.
“I think yes.” Fuller’s tone was acid. “Otherwise it will be my duty to advise him to answer no questions and give no information—”
“You can keep your advice,” Jeffrey blurted. “I’ve been afraid all the time—”
“Jeffrey! I order you, as your attorney, to keep silent! You flouted your father’s authority when he was alive; now—”
Rex Stout_Tecumseh Fox 01 Page 19