Lemon in the Basket

by Charlotte Armstrong

  “No blood? No knife? No woman hurt?”

  “No, sir. No, I have not heard of this.”

  “Tell me,” he said. “Who are the women of this household?”

  “There is Mrs. Tyler, the elder—”

  “The hostess. Yes. Yes.”

  “And there is Hilde—”

  “Who is she?”

  “Oh, she is the cook and—”

  “Where is she?”

  “She is below,” Zora whimpered. “She has much to do. Chloe is helping her.”

  “Who is Chloe?”

  “Also a servant—of the younger Mrs. Tyler.”

  “What Mrs. Tyler is this?”

  “Mrs. Doctor.”

  “Describe her.”

  “She is very tall and wears the beautiful green.” Zora used her free hand to indicate a slimness at the hips.

  “Hah,” said Gorob. He knew it could not be that woman. Her question had enlightened him in the first place.

  “Now who else? Come. There is a little one, with the long hair.”

  “Mrs. Tamsen, yes, sir.”

  “Who is she?”

  “She is the wife of the young son. She comes every day. She comes to play games with Al Saiph. They are children together.”

  “So I gathered,” said Gorob, sourly. “Who else?”

  “There is a Mrs. Tyler I do not know.”

  “Who is she?”

  “The wife of the other son.”

  “A third son?”

  “Yes, he came to this house one day only. I do not—”

  “Where is he now? Is he here?” Gorob was not really concerned about a male.

  “I have not seen him. I think he does not come here often.”

  “Where is this third—fourth Mrs. Tyler?”

  “I cannot know whether she is here,” Zora said, “I do not know how she looks.”

  “What other women, then?”

  “No others, sir.”

  “That cannot be.”

  “Please, I have so much to do.”

  “Who is in the other rooms, up here?”

  “No one. I think no one. I do not know.”

  “Get on with it,” he said abruptly and let her go.

  Zora was obviously perfectly whole. Not she, then.

  Gorob went on to the end of the west wing, looked into the smaller room, where Zora slept, and into a storage place. No one there. But he felt sure that he was right and he meant to vindicate his intelligence, prove his zeal, and maintain his trustworthiness. He began to open doors along this passage. Mere cupboards. Finally he came back into the stair-hall and stood there a moment, listening to the party sounds wafting upward. He glanced along the center block. Everything was silent. Two doors, both closed. The Colonel began to walk that way. He had always been inclined to be thorough.

  Duncan was already edging toward the hall when Maggie caught him. “Oh, there you are, dear,” she said. “Have you seen Colonel (what’s-his-name?) Gorob?”

  “No, I haven’t, Maggie.” Duncan was able to sound casual. “He is not with the King, is he?”

  “No, he is not,” Maggie joined him in anxiety, without sounding anxious. “Sam, please?”

  “Yes, ma’am, Mrs. Tyler?”

  “Have you seen the colonel with the uniform?”

  “Yes, ma’am. I think he went upstairs a while ago, Mrs. Tyler. Five or ten minutes ago.”

  People were hovering to pounce on Maggie. Duncan said, “Hoo, I bet he’s got himself lost, looking for the conveniences.” He patted his mother’s arm, as the Judge so often did. Then he went upstairs, faster than he seemed to be going.

  “Oh, Maggie,” he heard someone say, “I haven’t had a chance to tell you what a lovely party—”

  “My dear, you are an ornament to it.”

  “The King’s had a phone call? From Alalaf?” The guest sought exciting inside dope.

  “Ah, well,” said Maggie, “there is a time difference. Perhaps it is office hours there. Come, have you met …”

  Duncan huffed and stopped himself at the top of the stairs to listen to the air up here. He heard nothing. He went quickly to his mother’s door and inside. The small door to his father’s room was open and shedding more light than he had left in there. His toes curled within his shoes as he went softly across to look in.

  Colonel Gorob was bending over a sodden-looking Lurlene on the bed. He had stripped her dress lower, to expose both plump shoulders.

  Duncan roared and jumped in.

  The Colonel straightened and gave him an icy glare.

  Duncan said, “Please leave this room and this floor of this house. You have no business here.”

  Gorob smiled nastily. “You don’t understand,” he said in condescending tones.

  “I’m afraid I do. I find you in a bedroom, undressing a sleeping woman—”

  “Oh, come,” said Gorob. (This was, he remembered, an adolescent nation—still as fearful and worshipful of sex as a thirteen-year-old who has just heard of it—but it did seem ridiculous, in the moment.) “I am responsible,” Gorob began, “for the safety of the King. I have reason to believe that something very strange has happened in this house. It is necessary for me to know what has happened. If you will simply enlighten me, then.”

  “I can enlighten you as to what is going to happen if you do not get out of here, right now.”

  “Mr.… Tyler, isn’t it?” The Colonel was patient. “I have realized, for some time past, that you are all concealing an incident of some kind. What is wrong with this woman?”

  Lurlene’s eyes had popped open. They were frightened and puzzled, but in a minute her mouth would open. Duncan might have to wrestle this man out of here, by force. But that would tear it, as quickly as anything. The house was surrounded by police. There must not be a row.

  His mother spoke, behind him. “Will you please,” said Maggie’s coolest voice, “explain this to me? Both of you?”

  “It has become my duty,” said the Colonel stiffly, “to search this house.”

  “My house? Without my permission?”

  “Where the King is,” said Gorob, with pomp and piety, “can no longer be a private dwelling.”

  “Let me deal with him,” Duncan said. “Let me just throw him down the stairs on his—”

  “I must then see that His Majesty is informed—”

  “Out of the house, entirely,” roared Duncan, “and if His Majesty doesn’t like it, let him go back where he came from, too.”

  “Then,” said Gorob, unimpressed by roaring, “I must ask the American—police, are they not?—to inquire what woman has been knifed in this house.”

  Duncan felt as if he were strangling.

  But Lurlene sat up, clutching to her breast the coverlet that Duncan had thrown over her. “What woman!” she said thickly. “What does he mean? Knifed! Who is this man? What’s the big—”

  “Hush,” said Maggie. She went to Lurlene and touched her hair, caressingly. Lurlene’s eyes immediately filled with tears. “Oh, listen, Maggie …”

  “Hush.” Maggie was using magic. Lurlene hushed.

  “Colonel Gorob,” said Maggie cuttingly, “do what you like, anywhere else. But you will not, in my house, disturb a woman who is ill and unhappy.”

  “What,” said the Colonel, “is her illness?” He could not believe that this woman had been knifed. But he was ever thorough.

  Duncan had reached the lamp and turned it low again. “Go on. Get out.”

  “I realize,” the Colonel said, “that you do not recognize my authority. I quite understand. I may seem to have exceeded what is proper for a guest. But my concern must be His Majesty’s security. I believe that this is also the concern of the guards who surround this house? Perhaps they have the authority to conduct the necessary search. I shall speak to them. I shall suggest that they look for bloodstains. I have already seen a trace of blood on Doctor Tyler’s cuff. There must be others.”

  He was backing away. If he told
the guards, it would be disaster. But he was not going the right way. He was backing toward the door to the Judge’s dressing room. Where bloody towels were in the hamper, and a bloody rug in a heap with Tamsen’s bloodied dress. But worse than that, where Rufus Tyler lay bound and drugged in an unconscious knot on the floor. If he looked in—disaster.

  Well, Duncan was going to have to hit the man. He must calculate the quickest way to be sure of knocking him silent, because a noisy row would also be disaster.

  Maggie’s voice struck across the room like a lance of silver. “Nonsense. I don’t believe you. You must be looking for the traitor.”

  The Colonel’s hand did not turn the doorknob. He turned his head.

  “How silly of you,” said Maggie. “He came with the King. We all know he is in the house. He is one of you.”

  “Traitor?” said Gorob, with interest. (For a moment, he did not apply the word to himself.)

  “Of course.” Maggie taught an ignoramus. “Alice Foster telephoned. In fact, she is on the phone with Al Asad himself at this very moment. By this time, she must be sure which one of you this traitor is.”

  “I know nothing of this,” said Gorob stiffly. He began to walk toward Duncan.

  Duncan said, “I believe I have realized for some time past—er—Let me show you down. And out?”

  “I can find my way,” Gorob clicked his heels. “I beg your pardon, madame.”

  “I do not grant it,” said Maggie regally.

  “Thank you,” said Gorob, not having heard her at all. He had other things to think about.

  When he had gone, the room was very quiet. Lurlene was silent from sheer incomprehension. Duncan gripped Maggie’s shoulder. “Wow!”

  “I don’t know,” said Maggie, with anxiety. “I don’t know. Your father is in the midst of the conference. But I had to …”

  “Sure, you did.” Duncan went to open the door that had not been opened by the Colonel. He said over his shoulder, “Gorob will be getting out, without any fussing with guards. He knows what’s good for him. That’s O.K. I’ll stay with this pair, Maggie. You go on down. Hold the fort. It must be almost over.”

  Lurlene said, with belated indignation, “Say, who was that guy? What was he trying to do to me? I’m not sick. Why did you tell him I was sick? What’s the …”

  “There isn’t time,” said Maggie wearily.

  “Time for what? Time to tell me anything? Yah, you never tell me one damn thing. How come you didn’t bother to tell me about my own husband? How come you tied him up and you don’t even—What am I supposed to do?”

  Duncan stared at her. Slowly, he turned his head and looked within the dressing room. The light was sufficient. There were only some cut pieces of the Judge’s neckties, scattered on the floor where Rufus had been lying.

  22

  Gorob went the wrong way in the upper passage, fleeing into the east wing. He passed the room where the boy had been. It was still softly lit. He noted that it was empty and in order. Nothing had happened there. He continued to the back stairway. He came down into the space just off the kitchen. He could hear the servants’ voices, cheerful and busy.

  He listened only a moment. Then he slipped out of the house by its back door. A guard came out of the shadows instantly. “Yes, sir?”

  Gorob said curtly, “I must leave.”

  “Better be checked out, sir. Around front.”

  “Of course.” Gorob turned to go around the sprawling house to the front of it. There the police waited for His Majesty’s departing parade. The TV people had gone, but there were some cameramen still, and there was light. Gorob stood quietly in a shaft of shadow. A bit of commotion, at the moment, made him wonder whether he could possibly slip past it. They seemed to be swarming around a man in a dinner jacket. The Colonel had never seen him before, and could not see him very well, at the moment, either.

  Rufus was blinking in the strong light.

  “No, no,” he was saying. “Not yet. Not now. It isn’t finished.”

  “Party still going on, right?”

  “What about the King?”

  “No, no,” Rufus was mumbling, “not the King. I’ve got to get on down to the hospital. I can get in. My brother … Doctor …”

  “You’re not feeling so good, Mr.—uh?”

  “I’ve got this headache,” Rufus said in a drone. “I took some pills. They haven’t started to work yet.” He wasn’t being fascinating.

  Somebody shouted. Gorob had been spotted.

  “Well, listen, good luck, Mr.—uh,” said one of the inquisitors in a spirit of general goodwill. (Yet who needed symptoms?) He scooted, with the rest, into the new swarming gathering, now, around the Colonel.

  “Is the King coming out now, sir?”

  “How’s the party going?”

  “How is the King feeling about the kid, I mean, the Prince?”

  “Is it true, sir, that the Prince gets to go home tomorrow?”

  “Or is there something wrong? Why did the Doctor …?”

  “What is this last-minute checkup?”

  The Colonel raised his hand and said primly, “It is a checkup. We are confident that Al Saiph will be able to fly home tomorrow. His Majesty is pleased. The party continues. Would you excuse me? I am sent on a small errand.”

  “When is the King coming out?”

  “I believe, soon,” said Gorob.

  A policeman was now solicitous at his elbow.

  “No, no,” said Gorob. “No escort is necessary. I am not royalty,” he added with a thin smile. “But I wonder … A taxicab?”

  “Come with me, sir,” said the cop. “I’ll get you a cab.”

  “You are very kind.”

  “Turn this way, sir?” yelled a cameraman.

  “Don’t waste it,” said another. The Colonel wasn’t being fascinating, either. He didn’t even look like one of them.

  The cop set off at a fast walk down the driveway toward the street and Gorob followed.

  (Someone had made a mistake. Perhaps it was he?)

  Fifty yards away, down under a pepper tree, Rufus Tyler was climbing, unobserved and unpursued, into his own car.

  “You’re hurting me,” Lurlene was whining. “You let go. You quit that. You’re hurting me.”

  Duncan only tightened his hands on her wrists. “All right, never mind your reasons for cutting him loose. Where did he go?”

  Lurlene felt herself to be in the worst mess she’d ever been in, in her life. She hated Duncan. She hated Maggie. She hated all the Tylers, and the whole damn world. “Yah, but you tied him up,” she wept. “You tied up your own brother. What was the big idea? That’s what I …”

  Maggie said, sadly, “She is hopeless.”

  “You don’t know why?” Duncan barked. “You don’t know what Rufus did?”

  “No,” she said, lying defiantly. “What did he do?”

  “What does he intend to do now?”

  “I don’t get the big—”

  “You never will,” said Duncan furiously. “Lots of ideas are too big for you. What is Rufus going to do? Where did he go? Stop squirming and evading.”

  Lurlene began to look sly. Thought he was so smart, Duncan Tyler. They all thought they were so damned smart. But they were liars! Maggie was a liar! She had just told that Colonel-Somebody one big fat lie, and Lurlene had heard her do it. “You’re a bunch of damn liars,” she shouted, furious in confusion. “That’s what you are. And I’m not sick. Or drunk, either.”

  Duncan slapped her, hard.

  “Don’t you …”

  Duncan said, “I need you to talk. I’d a good deal rather strangle you, and be done with it.”

  Maggie said calmly, “He has more sense than to strangle you, Lurlene. Did you let Rufus go and ask him no questions?”

  Lurlene was scared, real scared.

  “I didn’t know,” she whined. “I didn’t know he’d done anything. Only there he was, moaning and all. And tied up. And that’s not right.” She
had found one moral position and she was going to hang on to it.

  When she had awakened and found herself all alone in the Judge’s room, and hearing some moaning going on, she’d been about scared to death. (But what did they care for that?) She had dared, finally, to sneak on her stockinged feet and crack that door.

  Rufus had said, “Cheap. Cheap. Cheap. Lousy bargain.”

  “What, honey? What? What?” (Lurlene could remember now that she had really felt concern.)

  “Or else I put it together wrong. I don’t know too much about guns. It looked all right.”

  “Where is the gun?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Listen, who did this to you?”

  “They did. Where is my gun? Where is the boy?”

  “Who? Who? The Prince?” Lurlene had known who. “I don’t know. Yes, I do. They took him to the hospital.”

  “Then when I shot, I hit him!” Rufus roused. “Is he dead?”

  Lurlene had sat back on her heels and let her rage fly. “Oh, you dope! You stupid idiot!” she had raged. “So you goofed. You couldn’t hit a barn. You missed, as usual. He’s not dead. He’s going home, tomorrow. You can’t do one thing … not one thing.…” She had sobbed. “O.K. We’re getting out of here.” She had turned and hunted and found the Judge’s scissors. “Or else, for once in your stupid life,” she had raged, “you could go and finish what you started.”

  She had cut him loose with much sawing. She had helped him to unsteady feet. She had brushed him down with a rough hand. “The party’s still on,” she had said, “and the King’s down there. So why don’t you go shoot the King? Hah, no gun! You mislaid it. Yah!”

  “I’m going to the hospital?” Rufus had said, weakly questioning.

  “Augh, knock it off,” she had said. “You’re not going anywhere. Not anywhere, in this life. Not you.”

  She had turned her back and walked out into the bedroom, but turning her head, she had seen him fumbling around for his pillbox. And the hell with it, she had thought. Born a dope!

  Then he had come, shambling. “Don’t worry,” he had said. “I told you. You mustn’t worry. I promised.”

  He had stood looking at her and Lurlene had been ready to scream—ready to scream the roof down. Oh, damn! No matter what she said to him, or what she did, this dope, this stupid idiot, this lemon in the basket, he kept right on thinking he had to be in love with her. Didn’t he know? Didn’t he realize? Times change.