by Otto Penzler
John Ranier set his teeth. Anyone should know better than to give a Haitian the wheel of a car. That fellow Marcelline would kill them all, and Mr. Haarman, who wanted gentle handling, must certainly be already dead from that bumping along the beach.
Improved highway was worse. The tires hummed on new macadam, axles screeching with strain at every curve. Cramped in a hoop of rubber, John Ranier could see nothing of the road save the little patch illuminated by the tail light, shiny and wet, a streak of black silk that whistled rearward under his heels and slipped aft into formless vapor.
The road climbed and wound. Now the village window-lights were a cluster of luminous oranges adrift to the left and below in pooling haze; gone. Where the devil was that black Barney Oldfield driving them? Five miles north to the hospital, Hyacinth Lucien had said. But Haitians were as careless with time and distance as they were with the speedometer of a car; five miles on a road in Haiti could be fifty to a white man, especially when the map was obscured in wool-thick mist and you were going sixty miles an hour on a spare tire. John Ranier suffered a certainty the Winton had left the road and was racing off into the sky. Monsieur Marcelline had missed a curve in the night and was steering for the moon. Lucky no celestial pedestrians were afoot on this cloudy highway; their fate would have been the same as that skunk’s back there, no more than a brief acrid whiff in the nostrils. Creeeeee—another hairpin turn like that and the hack would lose a wheel. Presently they should sight the north star, for Ranier saw they’d just passed the Pleiades.
He marked the constellation clearly as it whizzed aft in blank space, a little cluster of twinkles above the road on an invisible hill, like candles burning on some cosmic birthday cake. Ranier wondered what the captain of the cruise ship would say when he explained his absence by claiming he’d whizzed by the Pleiades on a worn-out Firestone tire. “Drunk again!” probably. And, “You’re fired.” That red-jowled navigator would never believe the entrance to the famous constellation was a ghostly roadside arch marked “Cemetery” and the Pleiades were not stars but candles keeping vigil in a lonesome Haitian graveyard.
THE ROAD DIPPED, climbed, swerved. Blackness swept in behind the car, rushed by on both sides. Night mixed with fog and ceiling zero, all landmarks vanished. Ranier could guess the forest without seeing it; could sense the cliffs of timber massed on either side of the road, walls of vine, underbrush, close-packed trunks looming blacker than the darkness. He’d been smart, all right. If this relic didn’t leap an unnoticed precipice he’d end up in mountain wilderness, miles from anywhere in Caribbean jungle with a party of panic-stricken tourists, a dead man and a homicidal expert who made butcher knives disappear in thin air. These Haitian limberlosts would be duck soup for anyone with criminal talent, and that glimpse of the village below with its yawning Gendarmerie had not been any reassurance. In a republic which beat goatskin drums to ward off wandering dead men, the law might be equally phantasmal. Haarman’s assassin had certainly picked his spot.
Or was Haarman’s assassin a her? That peroxide blonde didn’t look capable of anything worse than kissing a Pekingese or gobbling four pounds of bonbons in a lace bed littered with pink ribbons and tabloids. Still, these faded violets were the tantrum type. There’d been that blood-letting in Philadelphia—back in the old ambulance-interne days. Dame looked soft as a bag of marshmallows, and cut her husband’s throat from ear to ear. And Daisy had been seated nearest this case—
Brown next nearest, yet the Ohio real estate man (somewhere on the cruise he’d dropped remarks about Columbus and real estate) looked more overweight than dangerous, too. Golf knickers and dumpling cheeks didn’t go with knives; and murderers, of course, seldom looked the part. But Mr. Brown didn’t seem the sort to stab his fellow-man in the back.
Nor did Professor Schlitz appear capable of any violence greater than sticking a bug on a hatpin. Too jittery for this cool-blooded job. Spent his life classifying butterflies and lecturing on mosquitoes at some obscure college, reciting limericks for relaxation. Those pince-nez spectacled eyes weren’t the eyes of a killer. If they’d reflected the truth—
Carpetsi, on the other hand, fitted the part. Something oily and unsavory about the Broadway boy, and truth wasn’t in his Latin eyeballs. But courage wasn’t, either, and he’d been sitting too far down the table. While Mr. Coolidge of the cauliflowered ears, Mack truck jaw and monkey brow—a specimen who looked willing to choke his grandmother to death if the price was right—had been seated even farther away.
That left Marcelline and Kavanaugh. Inside the café, the dusky Haitian had sat at table’s head, quite beyond knife-reach; he’d gone outside once to fetch the car, park it near the door and stand gazing into the window at Haarman’s chair. Nothing in that. Six feet from the window his tracks had halted, and it was another ten feet inside to that fatal chair. You couldn’t stab a man sitting sixteen feet away. But you might see blood on his chair-back, and you might walk into the room afterwards and talk about something else. The Garde d’Haiti, when and if they came, would do well to cross examine Monsieur Marcelline.
And they might find an Irishman in the woodpile. If anyone in this tourist batch looked competent to engineer someone’s demise, the narrow-lipped Kavanaugh did. He’d admittedly organized the shore party, and Mr. Haarman had joined the ride on Mr. Kavanaugh’s invitation. The man had a cold, direct eye and a cool alibi, and by midnight would probably be in touch with a lawyer. There was a ruthless self-assurance in this sugar company executive which made him appear quite capable of severing another’s spinal cord with nicety and aplomb. Mentally, John Ranier shook his head. Characters under suspicion always turned out to be innocent, didn’t they? At least it was that way in mystery plays. Only this wasn’t any mystery play, and Kavanaugh, two chairs down the table from Haarman, hadn’t left his seat throughout the evening.
Hyacinth Lucien had served a last round of drinks, Ranier remembered, then retired to his bottle-washing behind the bar. He couldn’t possibly have juggled a knife and a tray of rum-glasses at the same time. There it was. No one could have done it. Someone had. When had that blade whisked in and out of the Dutchman’s back? Hard to tell, because he’d begun that paralytic stare in the forepart of the evening, before the others came in. What had been the matter with him then? Why had he thrown Ranier out?
John Ranier decided with an oath as the Winton’s tires screeled on a curve, that he didn’t give a damn who stabbed that Dutchman—that he’d let his imagination get away with him—and that he’d drop out the minute this joy-ride slowed to forty an hour.
HIS DECISION TO drop out, right then, was taken out of his hands. Screeee—am! Jammed brakes gave out a stench of burning grease as the car took a side road on two wheels; thump! A sudden halt flung John Ranier from his perch and left him sitting upright on a roadway that was certainly not paved with clouds. There could be no doubt about it; the car and John Ranier were on solid ground.
Twelve feet beyond him the sedan smoked to a halt; voices broke loose in the night. Too dazed for action other than spitting a dislodged tooth, John Ranier sat on burning posterior while his vision cleared. Black shrubbery hedged the driveway where he’d come to earth; there was the vegetal sultriness, the close-hemmed feeling of jungle around. The sedan had stopped before a screened verandah that fronted a long, two-story frame building, the wings of which stretched off into misting darkness. Headlights of the car streamed through murk to finger through the verandah screen and circle the front door with a wan luminescence.
John Ranier saw the building was painted white, and unlike the average country place in Haiti showed evidence of being in repair. A planter’s villa from the old days, judging by the gingerbread and gargoyles running around the upper gallery. Great sablier trees extended moss-bearded limbs above the gallery rail, and in the drifting scud, opalescent with ghostly rays diffused from the car lights, the dark roof-line seemed to swim along in the night.
He saw a light in an upper window, as if some
one were studying late.
He saw there was a pale lamp burning in the reception hall.
He saw a neat, black-lettered sign on the front door—Ludwig Eberhardt, Docteur en Médecine.
He saw the doors burst open on the Winton; Kavanaugh leaped to the ground, raced to the verandah, and started an urgent pounding on the door. Excitement shrilled from the car; the knocks echoed off into the drugged mountain stillness; it seemed a long three minutes before Ranier saw the door come open.
A girl was standing there. A slim girl, cool in a white linen dressing robe, with a gray tabby cat hugged in her arms. The car lights brushed gleams from tumbled, brown-gold hair, caught the blue of wide eyes in a cool tanned face, the carmine red of lips parted a little in surprise.
John Ranier scarcely heard Kavanaugh’s rapping, authoritative outburst. “Let us in! Quickly! Been an accident! Man out here’s dying—”
John Ranier saw the girl standing there in the door-frame facing Kavanaugh, and aguardiente or not, his heart skipped four beats and left him icy sober. Suddenly he knew that whether he wanted to or no, he wasn’t going to leave that girl facing Mr. Kavanaugh and Daisy, Professor Schlitz and Monsieur Marcelline, Mr. Brown, Mr. Coolidge and Mr. Carpetsi with the remains of Mr. Haarman on this lonely mountainside in Haiti.
CHAPTER V
SOMETHING TERRIBLE —
Canvas shoes made no sound on gravel as they moved John Rainer across the driveway, and melted, unobserved, in the shadowy brush. In a bed of rank tropical fern, he crouched, listening, eyes on the sedan, the house. One thing was plausible. If anyone in that party was secreting a knife, he’d get rid of it before police were summoned; the nooks and crannies of that 1919 Winton would be logical for the hiding of cutlery. Ranier told himself he’d feel better when he located that knife, and his first move would be to search the sedan.
Then he heard Kavanaugh’s shouting. “Hurry it, can’t you? The man’s bleeding to death! For God’s sake, Daisy, get out of the way, and if you’re going to faint again, get into the house where the young lady can look after you! Hold his head, Professor! Brown, you and Carpetsi help carry him. Coolidge, stay out there in the car with Marcelline. The girl says there’s no telephone here, and you may have to drive back to the village for the police—”
Ranier muttered under his breath, parting the ferns before his face for a better view. She was holding open the screen to admit the scramble that charged across the driveway carrying Haarman; but Kavanaugh’s tall shoulders, in front of her, blocked Ranier’s sight.
Emitting a babble of sticky sobs, the Daisy woman was first to reach the verandah where, feminine-fashion, she lost no time in having a nervous breakdown. Ranier could hear the girl’s voice low in quick sympathy as she put an arm around the weeping Broadway belle and led her into the dim hall. A stampede of feet on the verandah as Schlitz, Carpetsi and Brown blundered Haarman’s body to the door, leaving in their track a spotty, winding trail, as if they’d been carrying between them a cake of drippy ice.
From somewhere in a back hall the girl’s voice called: “This room. In here—”
Kavanaugh shouted back at the car: “Do as I told you, you two! We’ll be in the emergency room with Haarman. I’ll talk to this doctor. Ten minutes at the longest—”
“Take your time,” Coolidge called. “We’ll be on the job.”
The door slammed. In the mountain’s stillness only the muffled chugging of the car. Then the engine was cut off, the headlamps switched out; the silence was absolute. Ranier listened. He could hear no sound from the house. He peered in the direction of the car. In swimming blackness, Winton and its two remaining passengers might have been absorbed. A match broke this illusion; a brief blue-red splutter which showed Mr. Coolidge standing on the running board lighting a cigarette, his eyes under jaunty cap brim fixedly regarding the villa’s front. He moved his head casually to speak down to Marcelline whose face was thrust from the driver’s seat. There was a conversational murmur too subdued for Ranier to catch; the match died; there was only the spark of a cigarette some dozen paces away.
Ranier turned his attention to the hazed silhouette of the house. Except for the hall lamp and that yellow upper window, the villa remained in darkness, which meant Haarman had been hustled to some room at the back. No chance to go knife-hunting with those two watchdogs waiting in the sedan, but he might get a look at what was happening in Dr. Eberhardt’s. Carefully he started through the ferns. Fog curled around him; invisible tentacles of moisture fingering his face. His movements whispered in the watery underbrush. A marshy odor, heavy with the scent of jungle plants; the air too torpid for breathing. Like picking your way along the weed-grown bottom of an aquarium. It was dark going with a feeling there might be snakes.
UNREASONABLY, HE FELT a lot better when he skirted the trunk of a sablier, lofted like an apparition in the night, and put the wing of the verandah between himself and the spark of Coolidge’s cigarette. Looking back from the corner of the villa, he could see nothing. The side of the villa sprawled along a slope where the scrub had been cleared and there seemed to be a lawn.
Feeling his way along the dark sidewall, he moved swiftly under a row of black windows that were probably hospital rooms. When he paused to consider a black obstruction that was only a thick-trunked, lily-padded vine, he thought he could detect an odor of formaldehyde. The thick breath of a sick room. Smell of leprosy? What sort of place would this Dr. Eberhardt be running here?
Voices!
John Ranier flattened himself against the wall.
—“Lay him on his back. The pressure stops, sometimes, the bleeding. A knife, you say? How terrible! In a moment this hot water will be on, and the doctor should be here from his laboratory. If one of you would just start removing those bandages—” The girl’s voice. Drifting around . . . the corner of the building from somewhere at the rear. Hurried, yet controlled, with a faint throat-huskiness shading into the least foreign accent. Somehow John Ranier knew her voice would be like that.
Daisy’s voice: “Ohmygod, it’s awful. That terrible road up the mountain. This awful country. I thought we’d never get here alive. I thought we’d go off the road. I want to get out of here. I—I—I—”
Brown’s voice: “Y’see we was all in this café havin’ a few drinks before we started to drive to Port-au-Prince, and poor Haarman just sittin’ there with his back to a window, and—”
Kavanaugh’s voice: “Save it for the police, Brown. And can’t you hurry Dr. Eberhardt, miss? If this man dies—”
The voices came more distinctly as Ranier stole along the sidewall; at the corner of the building he stopped with a gasp. Light washed through the screen of a window at the back, spread out fan-wise in the fog-drift. The window was broad and open; by standing away a little and craning his neck, Ranier, concealed in a clump of Poinsettias, had an unobstructed view of the brightly lighted room. Two hurricane lamps with nickel reflectors shed a glare from white-washed walls that made faces bent over an operating table look greenish and unnatural. Brown, Carpetsi and Schlitz were fumbling with Haarman, who lay face up on the cushioned table, which was in the middle of the room. Kavanaugh, his coat open, belts dangling, stood with a cigarette in a doorway to a corridor. Daisy, her hat on her knees, hair in haystack disarray over cornflower eyes, sniveled make-up and tears into a handkerchief and worked a rocking chair in a corner. The sleeves of her linen robe rolled to the elbow, the slim girl stood at the taps of a washstand at the side, her back to the room, talking over her shoulder above the pour of running water.
To Ranier, familiar with the scrupulous tile of Bellevue and asceptic glass of Johns Hopkins, the room looked hopelessly inadequate and third rate—combination war-time dressing station, country doctor’s office and old-fashioned apothecary shop. A shelf laden with a barbershop assortment of colored bottles. Tin cabinet of surgical instruments. The outmoded operating table a cross between a dentist’s chair and an ironing board. Moths blundered around the lamps and so
me dead insects clung to the window screen. Dr. Eberhardt’s hospital was evidently not up with the Mayo Brothers.
But there was nothing wrong with the way that girl handled herself. Ranier liked the practiced way she scoured her hands; shook back her gold-glinted hair. Nurse’s training. Lining up the case for the doctor. Not her first emergency; and a girl had stuffing to take up nursing in one of these tropic backwaters. Ranier liked that. He liked the firm brown look of sun-tanned arms, and the slim curves revealed by the tight-drawn robe. He didn’t like the way Kavanaugh stood smoking, looking at her.
“Can’t you ring for that doctor again?”
She nodded; reached for a push-button like a doorbell set in the wall. “He always comes at once when I ring it. If he is working hard, though, sometimes he does not hear the first time. He will come.”
Schlitz turned from the table, unclasping his pince-nez. His eyes looked pink in a pinched face. “The bandages are undone. My God,” his voice shook with appeal, “who would have thought this terrible consequence would have resulted from our planned shore excursion. Poor Mr. Haarman! Stabbed! Why,” his voice shrilled as if it had just occurred to him, “with no more compunction than one might impale a Lepidoptera—”
“We’ll all be murdered!” the sobs burst from Daisy. “I just knew something dreadful would happen when—”
Brown’s voice chattered, “Honest to God, Kavanaugh—”
“Miss,” Kavanaugh snapped at the girl, “will you ring for that doctor, again? Are you sure he’s in?”
Her hand was on the call bell. “I was upstairs in my room asleep when you came,” Ranier heard her tell Kavanaugh. “I saw a light under his door as I ran downstairs. I do not think he would go out and leave the laboratory light.”