by Zenith Brown
15
Neither Cass Crane nor Duleep Singh made any attempt to conceal that he knew D. J. Durbin was dead. In fact it was openly the reason they’d come, or that Cass had. Duleep Singh didn’t say why he was there and I can’t recall anybody asking him.
“Mrs. Durbin just phoned,” Cass said. He came down the hall. “Is she . . . all right?”
Of course heat makes anyone seem washed out. When it’s hotter at ten minutes past eleven at night that it is at twelve noon most people look like dishrags. When Cass said he’d been in the Pentagon in the morning, and again part of the evening, that without the heat was enough explanation for why he looked the way he did. The Greeks had a story for it . . . though it’s highly probable that compared with the War Department’s job across the Potomac the Minoan labyrinth was a friendly boxwood maze set between the croquet green and the orangery in an old-fashioned garden. Perhaps too the fact that Duleep Singh was used to hot weather and hadn’t been in the Pentagon, and looked cool and freshly laundered, made Cass Crane look more disheveled and fagged out than he really was. And he was naturally disturbed about Courtney, which Duleep Singh was not.
What I mean is, there were a lot of perfectly simple reasons for the impression Cass made if Inspector Bigges had bothered to find them. It’s one of the troubles of preconceived ideas. Inspector Bigges a few moments before had reversed the French axiom into “cherchez l’homme,” having the femme already, and was more than open to the conviction that he had searched, and found. Courtney’s phoning Cass the minute she got upstairs and his slight hesitation in asking if she was all right, plus the fact that he looked as if he’d been drawn through an emotional as well as physical knothole, made it the most natural assumption in the world when anyone was hellbent on making an assumption.
I could understand it in Inspector Bigges. I was surprised to see Colonel Primrose apparently doing the same thing. He gave me a gentle push forward out of the library doorway and pulled the door shut behind him. It was the most effective gesture he could possibly have made to establish his solidarity with the Law, as opposed to what had seemed to me, anyway, his definite appearance of being on Cass’s side of the invisible fence. He was perfectly affable, however. It was he who said Courtney was all right, that she was holding up very well, that she’d presumably gone to bed. He spoke to Duleep Singh and introduced him to the Inspector.
He nodded toward the drawing room. “If you gentlemen will come in here, there are a few questions we’d like to ask you. Perhaps you and Mr. Blodgett and ourselves can get together on some of this.”
As they started across, Cass glanced up the stair well. Whether his anxiety came from solicitude or misgiving I didn’t know. I’m sure at that angle he couldn’t see the small segment of ivory lace flaring through the mahogany standards that I could see . . . and that I was instantly aware Colonel Primrose had seen. As my eye caught his I realized that he must have been watching Courtney all the time. There was a mirror on the wall at the turn of the stairs, and she’d been standing where she could see us down by the library door, forgetting, if she’d known it, something Colonel Primrose pointed out to me a long time ago; if you can see anyone’s eyes in a mirror, they can also see you in it. I suppose because the light behind her was off she didn’t realize there was enough thrown up from the lower hall to show her shadowy watching figure visible in the glass.
It all flashed through my mind so quickly, and with it a half-formed visual image emerging out of my own unconscious, that I took a step back to verify it. Or I started to, and found myself politely and unobstrusively blocked. Colonel Primrose smiled a little, and I didn’t go back and look again to find out I was quite right. And maybe it was just because she wanted to see Cass. If I could complain because Inspector Bigges and Colonel Primrose weren’t giving him the benefit of the doubt, I shouldn’t myself refuse to give it to Courtney. But it was so unwise of her. It made all the rest of the part she’d played so exquisitely, down in this room, suddenly and patently false. It would have been so much better if she’d just come downstairs.
If Horace Blodgett had so much as nodded to Duleep Singh, I hadn’t noticed it. It was Cass he was looking at.
“—Is it true that Lons Sondauer is in town?”
“I guess it is. I didn’t know it—exactly—until tonight.”
It sounds as if I’m trying to make a fool out of Inspector Bigges, saying that his eyes lighted up instantly. And I’m not, because he was really a superior officer and intent on his job. And after all, having the entire available detective force out hunting for Mr. Lons Sondauer it’s natural he’d be interested.
“How did you find it out, Crane?”
“A friend of mine, Lieutenant Fleming, told me,” Cass said. “He’d met him in Egypt, and ran into him here the other day.”
Inspector Bigges nodded. “All right. I want to know who this guy Sondauer is.”
Cass Crane looked at him deliberately across the point of flame he was holding up to his cigarette. He snapped his lighter shut and took the cigarette out of his mouth.
“It just goes to show you don’t know the best people, Inspector,” he said ironically, shaking his head. “Or . . . maybe not. I’d never heard of him till I got this job. But take the old boy who got bumped off in the Bahamas. The papers said he was worth two hundred million and I’d never heard of him either. They tell me money isn’t everything, after all. Well, Sondauer is that sort of a guy, Inspector. He’s what the papers call a man of mystery. And I guess that’s about all I can tell you.”
“You mean that’s all you know about him?”
“No, Inspector.”
He looked at Bigges thoughtfully for a moment.
“I know a lot about him. I’ve been on his trail for four months. But . . . it’s just not for publication, Inspector.”
It sounded like a definite period to me.
Colonel Primrose spoke very suavely. “I’m afraid you’ll have to open up a little, Cass. Durbin was murdered tonight. Sondauer was in the house.”
Cass moved abruptly. “Sondauer here? Tonight?”
He sounded surprised, and skeptical.
“The man Randy says is Sondauer was here.”
“But I thought——”
Cass stopped short. Whether he was thinking fast or just hard, I wouldn’t know. He turned to Inspector Bigges.
“This is very much off the record, then. Okay?”
He hesitated an instant.
“Mr. Sondauer,” he said slowly, “is one of the birds you never hear about. You’ve never even heard his name. But if you threw out everything you use that he’s got a finger in, from getting rid of a headache to driving your car to Headquarters, you’d be back in a covered wagon and no axle grease. He’s one of the biggest spiders in the web they’re beefing about, Inspector, when they talk about international cartels.”
“What’s he doing here?” Inspector Bigges asked bluntly.
A flicker moved in Cass’s gray eyes for an instant. Then he grinned broadly.
“Don’t be naive, Inspector. Though if you mean what’s he doing in Washington today, I couldn’t tell you. He’s not here officially until next Monday. He’s here then to see if he can shake loose a couple of million dollars’ worth of equipment, and shipping space for it, for a project he’s got in . . . a place called ‘X.’ I might as well tell you he got here on the same plane I did. He just didn’t happen at that time to know I was the guy he wanted to see. When he found it out, did he want to kick himself around.”
He grinned with cheerful amusement.
Inspector Bigges hesitated.
“Would he have business with Durbin?”
Cass’s short laugh was not so amused.
“Brother, he would. If he could get Durbin to loose his stranglehold, he’d be all set—if he could get me to change my report. That’s all Sondauer needed. And that’s one angle, Inspector. The other is maybe he found out he’d already been double-crossed and all D. J. Durbin needed
was to keep my report from going in at all. In either case, plenty of business with Durbin. And not much to lose. When the Japs wiped out Sondauer’s assets in Burma, they left Durbin holding the balance of power . . . in a game of dog eat dog, with Mr. Sondauer’s elongated bicuspids snapped off at the middle. In fact, Inspector, you’re sitting right now in the former drawing room of the real king pin man of mystery in this outfit.”
Inspector Bigges waited with a kind of dogged patience.
“D. J. Durbin’s the real man nobody knows,” Cass said. His irony was a little grimmer. “He’s the nigger in the stockpile. The minute you get your finger on him, he’s gone or he wasn’t there. You know he’s the guy that hamstrings everything you try to do so you can only do half of it, and the simple reason is he’s sitting tight waiting to move in on the post-war setup. He gives out just enough to keep from being blacklisted and running the risk of confiscation when we win. Nobody knows what he’s in, or where. If it hadn’t been for a little matter of an airport, we’d never have got him. And that was a fluke. Nobody even thought he was in the picture.”
He aimed his cigarette butt carefully at a point in the middle of the fireplace and let it go.
“It was an airport eight hundred and fifty miles from Bogotá. He had it all fixed—or he thought he did—for us to build it to get out the stuff we need now. Then we’d abandon it when the war was over and he’d have it. A Berchtesgaden in the middle of a modern El Dorado. It looked fine on paper, and as long as nobody suspected Durbin was in it, nobody said boo. A lot of other interests had their eye on next Armistice Day too, ready to grab. Nobody knew Durbin had it all set and tied up, so when we got in there we’d find we couldn’t get enough stuff out to pay for the gas it took to get a plane in. It was neat as hell. He had the whole thing right in the palm of his hand. If it hadn’t been me they sent down to look it over, nobody would have connected him with it in a thousand years—or until the day peace was signed rather.”
He grinned at us again.
“—It wasn’t because I was smart. It just happened I had a background not many other people would have. He didn’t use the name Durbin down there, but . . .”
He stopped suddenly, as if thinking better of that.
“Anyway, I washed him up,” he said. “He was willing to pay out to fix me up, too. And friend Sondauer, working on his own little scheme, didn’t know his friend Durbin was cutting the ground out from under him. He also doesn’t know that when he turns up in Washington next Monday the black arm band out of respect for his old brother-in-arms isn’t going to get him to first base.”
I could see Inspector Bigges trying to boil all this down to a soft ball forming in water that he could get hold of for his own purposes.
“He’d have plenty of reason for wanting Durbin out of the way?”
Cass’s smile was pleasant, and detached.
“That, Inspector,” he said, “is what is called, tritely, a masterpiece of understatement. I couldn’t tell you how many times he’s tried it already . . . and vice versa. In the places those boys roam a little thing like getting a murder done costs about as much as a good five-cent cigar, and it’s a lot easier to get. Durbin’s accident is supposed to have been one of Sondauer’s playful little jobs. He’s a great wag, Inspector. Always full of practical jokes, like putting breakfast food in your bed on the plane. They say the trouble is you can’t always tell whether it’s just good clean fun.”
He paused, and went on looking at Inspector Bigges deliberately.
“People who know him tell me there are those who’d die of thirst before they’d take a drink he’s had a chance at. That’s the gossip on the foreign Rialto. Sometimes you get the impression he’s just a screwball, other times that a nice cobra would be more fun to have around. I don’t know, myself. I can tell you one thing—he’s shrewd as hell. I talked to him a lot on the plane. All I got was he was just out for the ride, and a devil with women on six continents. I mentioned Durbin once, just for fun, but he’d never heard of him.”
He got to his feet.
“That’s as explicit as I’m allowed to be about him, Inspector. He must have found out after he left the plane who I was. One thing more: I didn’t know Durbin knew he was due here. I sent up a trial balloon on that too, and Durbin wanted to know if he’d said whether he expected to come to Washington. And Julie Ross told my wife the Durbins had arranged, way last week, for him and some guy with him to stay at her house. These people don’t let anybody else’s right hand know what their left one’s doing.—Well, I came over to see if there was anything I could do for Mrs. Durbin.”
“Just a minute,” Inspector Bigges said. “When did you see Durbin last? This bribe he offered you. . . . When——”
“It wasn’t anything as crude as a bribe, Inspector,” Cass said. “It was a golden opportunity, for a young man of parts . . . beginning as of January 1st, this year. That was last night. Mrs. Durbin met me at the plane. We went to the Abbotts’ to find my wife, and dropped in here then to phone around and see if we could locate her. I didn’t expect to see Durbin, because it’s . . . important to my job that I didn’t seem to be tied up with him. I couldn’t refuse to come in, on the other hand, since they’ve been friendly. I’ve been here a lot without his smelling a rat—I think. He knew I’d been down in his bailiwick, all right. I knew he would. But he didn’t know for sure whether I knew it was his. Or I don’t think he did. He did a first-rate job of trying to find out, and he was a hell of a lot smarter than I am, so maybe I gave it away without knowing it.”
He put his cigarette on the silver ashtray this time, and looked up at Colonel Primrose.
“I didn’t know, as I told you, whether Achille’s body in my house meant Durbin had figured out I knew he was it, or whether he just wanted to make sure I didn’t spill the general dope on the business. But when he gets bumped off himself . . .”
He shrugged his shoulders.
“Sondauer was at my house earlier. Maybe it wasn’t Durbin. I guess Sondauer would be just as interested in what I’d brought back with me as Durbin would.”
“—Meaning?” Inspector Bigges demanded.
“Somebody had taken a look through my bags in the back of the Durbin’s car, while I was inside the house. I found that out when I got home and started to unpack.”
“Anything missing?”
“No.”
He turned back to Colonel Primrose. “If that’s all I’ll be getting back. Will you tell Mrs. Durbin, if you see her before you go, that I’ll be around in the morning?”
He started to the door and stopped.
“I wonder if I could speak to you a minute, Colonel?”
The two of them went out into the hall, Colonel Primrose closing the door.
16
Inspector Bigges chewed the corner of his lower lip, and the rest of us just sat there. I don’t know how long it was before Colonel Primrose put his head in the doorway.
“Bigges—look here, will you?” he said.
I had a strange feeling in the pit of my stomach. It was the way he’d spoken, and the total disappearance of the suave urbanity that he usually had even when the going was tough. I glanced at Duleep Singh. Not for any reason that I was aware of, except that I wanted to look somewhere. He was looking at me, which may have been why I felt my eyes drawn to his. There was a sombre almost hypnotic quality about him that held me a moment, so that I had the feeling that his eyes had been fixed on me for some time, quietly dissecting me when I didn’t know it.
He smiled at me. I don’t know whether he was seeing a black wall in front of me, but he must have seen I was disturbed. He didn’t, however, have to be a swami to see that, I’m afraid, because even Horace Blodgett, the newt-souled, saw it.
“What’s the matter, Grace?” he asked. “You haven’t been . . . thwarting justice, have you?”
I didn’t have a chance to answer, because at that instant Colonel Primrose put his head in the door again and said, “Mrs. Latham
.”
If Sergeant Phineas T. Buck could have heard him, all his fears that his colonel had been or ever could be an Odysseus to my Circe would have vanished forever. He’d never spoken to me so sharply in all our association. I can’t think of anybody else who has either. There was something in my throat that made it hard for me to swallow.
“Come here, please,” he said curtly.
I went out into the hall.
Inspector Bigges was angry too. And Cass Crane stood in the middle of the hall looking as flabbergasted as somebody who’d unwittingly pulled a chair out from under the archbishop, That he hadn’t intended what he’d done to have the effect it had was perfectly evident, on the face of both it and him. I had an indescribable sinking feeling that of course it was the business of the records. And I was right. I knew it the instant I saw the door into the room beyond the stairs open and the light go on.
“Go upstairs, please, Mrs. Latham,” Colonel Primrose said quietly, “and tell Courtney I want to see her.”
There was no question about not doing it. I simply went. Moreover, he and Inspector Bigges were about two steps behind me. Cass Crane, when I looked down, was still standing there, with a sort of what-the-hell-have-I-done-now expression on his face, not knowing whether to come or go.
I knocked at Courtney’s door and opened it. Colonel Primrose and the Inspector stood to one side, in the interests of decency, I supposed. They needn’t have bothered. Courtney was sitting at her desk, still in her lace robe.
“Come in,” she said calmly. “Have they——”
I moved the muscles of my face around in what must have been an extraordinary grimace, and said, “Colonel Primrose is here. He wants to see you.”
“Bring him in, by all means.” She turned around in her chair. “What is it, Colonel?”
Perturbed as I was, it still struck me as a little funny seeing Colonel Primrose and Inspector Bigges bringing the strong arm and brazen hooves of constituted authority into the pastel sanctity of a lady’s private sitting room. It looked like the pale inside of a seashell anyway, and they looked definitely as if they belonged somewhere else.