Staircase 4

by Helen Reilly

  He studied Gabrielle thoughtfully. What was worrying her? What was making her hold herself so tightly inside the yellow gown? “Miss Conant, yesterday afternoon at around five o’clock you got off a bus hurriedly at Fourteenth Street and Fifth Avenue. Why?”

  This is it, Gabrielle thought. Don’t rush, take it easy. John had coached her well after their escape the night before. All she had to do was to stick to the story they had arranged, producing bits of it as the need.

  She smiled an enamel smile. “I forgot a pair of gloves I’d bought, Inspector. I met Mrs. Amory and we had a drink at the Fifth Avenue. After I left Alice Amory and got on the bus I missed them. I got out and turned back. Then I remembered that I didn’t have the gloves when I went into the hotel, so”—she shrugged—“I gave it up.”

  Chandler’s report hadn’t mentioned any purchases, any package. The girl appeared to have done nothing but perambulate the streets, except for an occasional stop at the Devon or a neighboring bar—and yet she showed no sign of being an alcoholic. He said dryly, “I see.”

  Gabrielle sat silent, waiting. To lie hurt her pride; it was a confession of guilt where no guilt existed. And yet what else was there to do? She and John had been in Miss Nelson’s apartment within minutes of Glass’s death, they had been hot on the trail of the murderer in Glass’s office later on. It was the murderer lying in wait beyond the door, who, when John incautiously opened it, had knocked John down and escaped. But neither of them had seen him, had the slightest idea of his identity, who he was, what he looked like—so it wasn’t as though they were concealing anything of value to the police. They themselves had escaped, in turn. No one knew they had been there, but she was afraid of the tall man sitting quiet and relaxed in his chair. Did the Inspector believe in her lost gloves? And how did he know she had gotten off the bus at Fourteenth Street? Alice—could Alice have seen her from her taxi? But Alice wouldn’t have gone to the police. Or would she? Alice had changed in the last few months. Her careless volatility had taken on a feverish cast and there was an edge to her ordinarily sweet temper. A woman could have killed Mark, a woman could have struck John and knocked him momentarily senseless in Glass’s office the night before, if she had used a weapon instead of her fist—and John didn’t know what had hit him. Alice was small, but she was strong and wiry.

  Gabrielle stopped thinking, tried to make her mind a blank. She had an almost superstitious fear of the Inspector, of his penetration, insight.

  She was wrong, she did him too much honor. All McKee knew with certainty was that Gabrielle was at high tension and in a state of nerves and that she wasn’t going to give. Force, with such a girl, would get him nowhere. The harder he pressed, the more adamant she would become. And there was a peculiar quality of defenselessness about her brow, the troubled glance of her eyes, that aroused his unwilling sympathy.

  He was on his feet when the phone rang. Gabrielle went to it quickly, yellow skirts swirling. Odd that he hadn’t thought her beautiful at first, he reflected, watching her.

  The call was for him. He took it, listened, and hung up. He turned. He hadn’t taken off his coat. He put down his hat and said quietly, “Better get your things on, Miss Conant. I’ve just had a report from my office. I want you to come with me.”

  Chapter Fifteen: Ex-wedding gift

  SLEET TAPPED AT THE WINDOWS of the Middleton suite in the Waldorf. Joanna Middleton was playing solitaire in the sitting-room when they went in. She obviously didn’t expect them. Her careless “Come” had been directed at a maid, a bus boy. She didn’t leap to her feet, didn’t tip over the table in front of her on which the cards were laid out, at their entrance. She gave the effect of doing so with the rigid posture of her full-bodied figure in arrested motion, the prominent stare of her china-blue eyes.

  There was fear in her, a quick leap of it, instantly suppressed; the fear was followed by recovery, and calculation. She inclined her head stiffly at McKee’s “Good morning, Mrs. Middleton.” No form of greeting was exchanged between her and Gabrielle. When their eyes met, Joanna’s slid away, as though they had touched something obscene.

  Why does she hate me so, Gabrielle thought, marveling, and knew the answer. It was Claire. Joanna Middleton hated her because Mark had been going to make her his wife. Alice Amory had said so more than once. “When he got over Brenda in his middle thirties Joanna thought she was safe, that Mark would never marry. You were a blow, darling. Claire would have got everything from a bachelor uncle if you hadn’t happened along.” Nevertheless, what Joanna had done was… Gabrielle was still dazed by what the Inspector had told her coming up in the cab.

  He didn’t waste any time. “Mrs. Middleton, I believe you hired a private detective named Edward Glass to keep Miss Conant under surveillance?”

  Joanna stacked the cards neatly, put them into their container. “Yes, Inspector, that’s correct.”

  No compunction, no embarrassment; her expression didn’t change. She might have been talking about a dog license, an order to a florist.

  The Inspector was equally detached. “Would you mind telling me your whereabouts last night between six-thirty and nine o’clock, Mrs. Middleton?”

  Joanna drew herself up a little, recognized that she was dealing with the vagaries of a policeman, and indulged him, frigidly. “I was here in the hotel.”

  “You didn’t leave it at all during that time?”

  “I believe I did go out for a brief walk and a breath of air before dinner.” Her tone sarcastically begged him to forgive her for having done so. “We dined at nine, my daughter and myself and Mr. Evans, my daughter’s fiancé.”

  “Then your daughter can corroborate your whereabouts?”

  “Pretty well, I should say. I’ll go and get her.”

  “Don’t bother, Mrs. Middleton. I’ll talk to her myself later. A few more questions.” McKee managed, unobtrusively, to get between Joanna and the door to the adjoining bedroom. “Why were you having Miss Conant watched?”

  Joanna said coolly and without a trace of emotion, “Because I finally decided that Gabrielle Conant might very possibly have shot Mark. I was at her apartment on the afternoon of the day he died. I rang the bell but there was no answer.”

  Gabrielle said, “The bell was out of order; you must have known it was, or you would have heard it ring.”

  Joanna ignored her interruption blandly. “There was a man with Miss Conant. They were talking confidentially together, as lovers talk. I had always suspected her motives in marrying my brother-in-law. Mark was thirteen years older than she was, and he was a sick man. In spite of his illness she kept hurrying the marriage on, wouldn’t hear of its being postponed. I decided to try and find out why. I understand that she has since denied that she was shut up in her apartment with a man that day. The very fact that she did deny it—” Joanna shrugged.

  The chips were down. Gabrielle pleated the suede cuff of her gauntlet. The police knew John Muir had been in New York on the day Mark died. She could speak out. She said, smiling faintly, “I denied it because it was my own business and had nothing to do with Mark’s death. Yes, John Muir came to see me that afternoon.”

  Joanna looked at her for the first time. It was a long look. Her lips were compressed. She removed her glance, focused her cold blue stare on a hand lying on her knee. “Poor Mark,” she said softly, “and poor Brenda Holmes.”

  The amount of insinuation she managed to get into the words was amazing. McKee was watching both women closely. Blood rushed up under Gabrielle Conant’s skin, ebbed, leaving her very white, very still. The reason why he had brought Gabrielle with him was to clear the decks, get the real relationships of these people out in the open. Joanna Middleton hated the girl who had been going to marry her brother-in-law, would go to any lengths to injure her—and two attempts had already been made on Gabrielle Conant’s life.

  “Mrs. Middleton, Mr. Glass was killed last night.”

  A frown, an intake of breath. “Killed! You mean—?”
r />   “Murder,” McKee said smoothly.

  It was Joanna’s turn to change color. She moved sharply in her chair, faced him directly, used anger as a shield. “So that’s why you asked me where I was last night between six and nine o’clock. Have you asked Miss Conant?”

  “As far as motive goes, Mrs. Middleton, Miss Conant is not involved.”

  Gabrielle stared at him, startled. She was filled with gratitude, and remorse. She could have told the Inspector the truth, after all… No. She came back to reality. She couldn’t, on account of John.

  Joanna would have none of it. She was cold, scornful. “Who had a better motive? Mr. Glass was watching her, found out things about her. He found out more than she bargained for, so she took steps—”

  The Inspector shook his head. “I’m afraid not, Mrs. Middleton. I’m afraid your inquiry agent was—ah—unfaithful to his trust. Glass was watching Miss Conant carefully for you until last Tuesday afternoon, it’s true—but after that he transferred his attention to someone else.”

  “Tuesday? I’m afraid I don’t—”

  “Last Tuesday was the day of the fire in Miss Conant’s apartment. Glass didn’t follow Miss Conant when she left home that day. A man answering his description was seen leaving the house in which she has an apartment a minute or two before the alarm was turned in. I think Glass went there that afternoon to examine Miss Conant’s belongings, letters, papers, and so on—and that while he was there someone else arrived.”

  “Someone else? I—”

  “Yes,” McKee said, his voice cold. “Someone else—someone who planted three one-thousand-dollar bills of Mr. Middleton’s missing eighty thousand, and set the fire that brought about their discovery. This visitor wasn’t seen, evidently left hastily by the rear tradesmen’s entrance. Glass then made his own exit through the front door—with valuable knowledge in his possession, knowledge that he hoped could be made to pay off. In some fashion or other, how we don’t know, he tried to collect payment in the apartment belonging to a Miss Nelson on East Twelfth Street last night—tried and failed. Instead, he was killed.”

  Weight rolled away from Gabrielle, and at the same time her compunction deepened. The Inspector didn’t believe her guilty.

  He was speaking again. He didn’t speak to her or to Joanna. He had turned, was facing the flat ivory door in the opposite wall. The door was slightly open, so slightly that you wouldn’t notice unless you looked closely.

  McKee said in an easy voice, “Come in, Miss Middleton.”

  Joanna was suddenly on her feet. The Inspector forestalled her. The door didn’t move of itself. He reached it, sent it wide with a swinging, purposeful motion. Five feet inside the bedroom Claire Middleton stood with a balled fist pressed to her mouth. Above it, her eyes were blazing brown disks with something disordered, sightless, in them.

  “Claire!” Joanna’s voice was sharp, commanding.

  It roused Claire. She had something of her mother’s power of dissimulation, control. Her hand fell to her side, her eyes veiled themselves, and a small grimace intended for a smile quirked her lips briefly.

  “Yes, Mother?” She looked at McKee, at Gabrielle, politely, a poised and restrained young woman with excellent manners about to enter the sitting-room and surprised at the presence of strangers. “I heard voices,” she murmured, “didn’t know—”

  She advanced into the room, crossed it, propped herself gracefully against a broad window sill, tall and slight in green wool, and continued to look gentle and inquiring. But Gabrielle had a sudden new view of her. Claire was shy, yes, but you could attribute too much to her shyness. There was force behind it—rather a terrific force.

  Joanna took over, the calm secure matron with an established background and an orderly way of life that nothing must be allowed to disturb. “The Inspector’s come about that man Glass. Mr. Glass is dead. The Inspector wants to ask some questions about where we were last night at between six and nine o’clock.” A smile held amused communion with Claire. “I told him—”

  “Better let your daughter tell it, Mrs. Middleton, then we’ll have everything straight.” McKee joined them in a display of disinterested courtesy.

  Claire traced arabesques on a green-wool-covered knee, her hair falling forward around her face, partially concealing it. “Last night between six and eight, Mother? What time did we get home from shopping? About five? Yes—and then we had tea and then I went out for a walk. I watched the skaters at Radio City. I…” She filled an hour and a half with chapter and verse, brought herself back to the hotel at around seven-thirty or so and went down to dinner with her mother and Blake Evans at nine o’clock. “Does that answer? Will it do, Inspector?” She was anxious to please, do the right thing, lifted her eyes with a candid look, fluttered her lashes.

  “Very nicely, Miss Middleton, thank you.” McKee put the notebook in which he had scribbled back in a pocket, reflecting that Joanna Middleton might have remained here in the hotel and that Claire Middleton might have been walking around the city. There was no proof either for or against. Check it, or try to, with the hotel staff.

  Mother and daughter quite evidently felt alike about Gabrielle Conant. Their treatment of her was a study in insult, very well done. She might have been a shadow, imponderable, not there. The mother’s dislike was the stronger, the girl’s more burningly violent. The fact that Gabrielle Conant was to have married Mark Middleton, and Mark’s money, scarcely accounted for it. There must be something else. There was.

  According to Joanna, neither she nor her daughter had ever heard of Miss Nelson. Joanna was saying so when there was a tap on the door and Blake Evans, the man Claire was engaged to, walked in. He had a paper under his arm. It was a tabloid. McKee had already seen it. The missing-woman angle in Glass’s death had been heavily played up. It was a tasty piece.

  Evans halted just over the threshold, narrowly straight and easy and debonair. He was blond, in his late twenties, and rather remarkably, and pleasantly, good-looking. He was jarred by the Inspector’s presence and surprised at Gabrielle’s being there. He betrayed very little; his manners were excellent. He greeted the three women, nodded civilly at McKee.

  It was Claire Middleton who gave the show away. A stiffening, a heightened color, a close and instant watchfulness of Evans and Gabrielle Conant; her eyes went from one to the other probingly, assayingly. She was very much in love with Evans, and she was jealous.

  There was no doubt in the Scotsman’s mind that Glass had been eliminated because he knew who the person was who had planted the three thousand-dollar bills in Gabrielle’s apartment. The purpose of that planting was to convict Gabrielle of Mark Middleton’s murder. If proved guilty she would have forfeited her inheritance. Middleton would have been considered to have died intestate and his money would have gone to his next of kin, i.e., young Claire. And Evans was going to marry Claire.

  Joanna Middleton was explaining McKee’s presence. “Mr. Glass, that private detective I hired, was killed last night, Blake.”

  “I know,” Evans said. “I saw it in the paper. That’s why I came.” At the mention of Glass, he looked unhappy, and glanced quickly at Gabrielle, who continued to lean lightly against a chair, her face, her whole manner, polite, indifferent, and unyielding. She smiled at Evans, said in a clear expressionless voice, “Don’t worry, Blake. There was nothing you could do.”

  Evans flushed. He put the paper down carefully, thrust his hands into his pockets, looking like a troubled small boy. He was caught between two fires, his allegiance to the Middletons and his friendship for Gabrielle Conant, who went on: “If Joanna chose to have me watched because she thought I killed Mark, you couldn’t help it. For your information, I didn’t.”

  Evans said firmly, “Of course you didn’t.” He glanced imploringly at Joanna, who refused to meet his eyes, crossed the room, and propped himself on the window sill beside Claire. She drew away from him mutinously, a sulky child staring at the floor.

  “While we’re o
n the subject of Glass, Mr. Evans,” McKee said mildly, “would you mind telling me where you were last night between six and nine o’clock?”

  The question disconcerted Evans. He half rose, sank back. Looking at McKee without friendliness, he said evenly, “I was at my office writing copy for a double page spread in the Leader until almost nine, when I came here and had dinner with Mrs. Middleton and Claire.”

  Once again Claire Middleton was revealing. As Evans spoke, the hands clasped in her lap tightened sharply and she turned a shoulder to him. Absorbing her gesture, her averted face, her whiteness, her downcast eyes, McKee made a guess at a venture.

  “I think not, Mr. Evans. You told Miss Middleton you would be at your office, working late, and she either went there or phoned, and found you weren’t where you said you’d be.”

  It was an arrow into the heart of the target. Claire gave a little gasp. Her mouth opened, and stayed open. Blood swept darkly under Blake Evans’s fair skin. His blue eyes went hard. He was furiously angry. He held his anger in check, ignored the girl beside him, and addressed the Scotsman coolly, with an affectation of amused good humor.

  “I’ll tell you, Inspector—I don’t think it’s any of your damn business where I was or what I was doing—but I was willing to answer and did. You can take it or leave it. I’ve said all I intend to say on the subject.” He turned to Claire and his voice softened. “If you phoned and couldn’t get me, Claire, if you came to the office and couldn’t find me, I was probably over in statistics getting some figures, or in the art department checking on a copy block.”

  He did it very well; he was lying in his teeth, McKee was sure of it. Gabrielle, too, was convinced that he was lying. She was dismayed. She had known Blake for a long time and liked him. She appreciated his predicament as far as she was concerned; Claire’s jealousy put chains around him. She bore him no ill-will for concealing his knowledge that Joanna was having her watched—he had tried to warn her obliquely, had told her she ought to have a lawyer to look out for her interests. But why in the name of Heaven wouldn’t he say where he really was last night? Unless he was with another woman—that was always possible with Blake.