The Cases of Susan Dare

by Mignon G. Eberhart

  She must hurry. Mariette could not keep Madame counting money forever.

  She paused to replace the rug and the chair. Who had placed them there? Who had scrubbed in cold water that stain below until it was lighter than all the rest of the floor? Who—she bent over and took in her fingers a small object that lay wedged into the cushions of the chair so that only its blunt end had showed, and she stood there a moment, turning it in her fingers slowly. It was a small wooden bobbin. The kind that is used in making lace.

  She closed her hand upon it. The attic was growing rapidly darker, and the heat was becoming sultry, as it does before an electrical storm. Madame’s hands, strong and broad, making lace assiduously. Madame’s hands carrying that breakfast tray. Madame’s hands scrubbing out the stain on the floor. She was somehow sure that the Frenchwoman had done that.

  Susan decided she’d had enough of the attic and started for the stairway.

  The hall below was empty and rather dark. But as she went quietly along it toward her own room a door away down at the end opened, and Madame’s figure was silhouetted against the light from a window in the room beyond.

  That room was vacant. Why had Susan so strong an impression that there was someone in the room? Was it something about the fleeting glimpse of a turn of Madame’s head—a feeling that words had been quickly hushed?

  At first Susan thought that, in the sudden dusk of the narrow corridor, Madame did not see her. But she opened her own door and a soft shaft of greenish light from the window beyond struck her face and she saw that black-clad figure hesitate.

  There was a small bolt on the door, and Susan fastened it against unexpected interruption before she opened the portfolio and spread the sketches in a wide circle around her on the floor.

  Slowly she arranged them so that all the sketches of one person were in a group, and she studied, fascinated, the results of that arrangement.

  She had known these people always—she had known those varying expressions familiarly and long. Thus Madame looked when she was pleased; purring and complacent because a new lodger was prompt in paying. So Madame looked when intent on her lace-making. So when she was in festive mood. Thus when she was angry,

  Louis Malmin in as many moods; studying them, there was one thing always predominant in the hawk-like, piratical face with its small dark eyes that were just a bit too close set, and that was acquisitiveness. Greed. A subordination of everything else in life to an overmastering need for gain.

  Yes, perhaps André Cavalliere’s only forte lay in a strange flair for character divination—so that, with one stroke of a pencil, he could place driving greed in Louis Malmin’s eyes.

  John Kinder, with time at his disposal, had posed exhaustively. Here he was in a dozen aspects, and Susan lingered over each. Here was Mariette, too: Susan looked at those sketches for a long time, and when she had finished was convinced of one thing at least, and that was that the artist had loved Mariette. He had not of his own volition left her. But then she had known that already. Poor little Mariette.

  It was so dark when Susan pulled herself from a reverie into which she had plunged and turned to the last group of pictures that she had to reach up and turn on the single electric globe that hung from the ceiling in order to see the face of the unknown woman. There were only two poses of her, and as the bright light poured garishly down upon it, Susan remembered where she had seen that face with its almost too perfect regularity of feature.

  It was certainly that of the woman who had emerged so swiftly from the dusk the previous night while Susan was waiting for Mariette; the woman who had slipped quickly up the steps, fleetingly under the light and into the church of Notre Dame.

  Susan frowned and pushed back her soft light hair. Did that entirely account for the familiarity of that perfectly regular face? And if it was a face she had seen somewhere and frequently, whose was it?

  She sighed and wished the storm would blow over, and fell to studying the pictures again. She lingered very long over one sketch.

  Moments passed while the sky slowly darkened and the hot still house awaited the storm. And by the time Mariette knocked timidly at the door, Susan knew things that she had not known before.

  The sound of the knock roused her from a queer, rather terrifying thought that André Cavalliere had left behind him what was, in effect, a record of his death.

  For he had been murdered. Susan was sure of that.

  What should she do?

  To inform the police would be, just then, futile. She could say: I think this man was murdered because there’s a mark on the floor of his studio that has recently been scrubbed and which I think was blood. Because he has disappeared. Because his sketch portfolio holds certain faces in certain poses. They would say and rightly: Where is the body?

  If she knew only a little more—and that little was something that had nothing to do with the blind, fumbling search into currents of thought and feeling around her that was at once Susan’s strength and Susan’s weakness. She smiled a little wryly. If Jim had been there it would have helped. Without him she must herself confirm instinct—if that was what it was—with reason. With clues. With definite evidence.

  “Come in,” she said to Mariette’s knock, and then remembered the door was bolted and scrambled to her feet to open it.

  As Mariette entered, pale as a ghost in her limp white dress, Susan scooped up the sketches, permitting one of the woman of Notre Dame to remain on top.

  “Do you know this woman?” she asked Mariette directly.

  “No,” said Mariette. “But it’s one of André’s sketches.”

  “You’ve never seen her?”

  “N-no. That is, there’s something vaguely familiar about her. But I’m sure I don’t know her. And I never saw this sketch before.”

  “Has there been any time since you knew André when this woman could have been in the house without your knowing it?”

  “Oh, yes. I was on tour for six weeks, last fall. She could have been here then. Louis Malmin was gone at that time, too, on a business trip. And—yes, I remember, that was the time when Mr. Kinder was gone, too. A vacation trip, he said, of about a week. But if she was here then—this woman, I mean—André didn’t tell me. You don’t mean—you don’t think he’s gone with her?” Her dark eyes sought Susan beseechingly.

  “No, said Susan gently. “He has not gone with her. Has Madame Touseau any family? Any children or—any relatives at all? Or even any intimate friends?”

  Mariette shook her head.

  “No. Except that I believe she has a niece somewhere in California. But I’ve never seen her. And Madame keeps very much to herself. She often says her—well, she calls us all guests, you know—are her only family.” Mariette hesitated. “I’m afraid,” she said, “that Madame knows why you are here. She asked me—oh, a great many questions. She—” Mariette shivered a little in that hot, still room—“she watches us so.”

  Susan delved into confused thoughts and went back for something, some word that had been spoken, that must be explored.

  And she must herself this time, without Jim’s help, confirm with hard fact the findings of the queer divining rod of her own consciousness. Of the blind little tentacles of something that was so dangerously like intuition and yet was not quite that either.

  The silence lay as heavy as the leaves outside.

  Then Susan said:

  “Mariette—I want you to go out and get me some things, and I don’t want Madame to see them when you return.”

  She paused, glancing at the open transom. Then she crossed to the window and examined the old-fashioned shade and the light rod that held the hem of it flat and straight.

  “Bring me,” said Susan Dare, “all the movie magazines you can find. And a mirror—a shaving mirror will do, but I’d rather have one of those small make-up mirrors: you’ve seen them. They have a little standard and are about six inches in diameter. And at dinner tonight when everyone is seated at the table I want you to tell Ma
dame that you are going to inform the police of André’s disappearance. Make it emphatic. And again, when I talk of André, follow my lead. Agree with me.”

  “Yes,” said Mariette and was gone.

  Susan hid the sketches and opened her door. Madame’s door was closed. Probably she had taken up her observation post in the drawing room downstairs. Susan looked about her room, discovered a small push-button bell, and rang it.

  Her little plan, however, failed. Either the bell was disconnected or Agnes, the somewhat mysterious servant, was busy in the kitchen. Susan rang several times, but there was still no answer.

  Well, the matter of Agnes could wait.

  But she must know who was in that supposedly vacant room. Or rather who was not in the room.

  But again she failed. For though she managed to approach the closed door to the room at the back of the house without, so far as she knew, having been seen, there was no sound from within. She listened, bending her head to the blank dark panels and holding her breath. But there was no sound at all on the other side of that door. She wanted to knock; she wanted to open the door. But something about the silence and the darkness of the place held her silent, too, and not too certain of herself. After all, a man had been murdered in that house—murdered deliberately and in cold blood. She was as certain of that as she was ever in her whole life certain of anything.

  And the murder had been skillfully, carefully concealed. So skillfully and so carefully that there remained no evidence at all to show that it had been done. No evidence but the thin brown mark around that clean spot under the rug. No evidence but the sketches in André Cavalliere’s portfolio.

  But the murderer had made one mistake.

  And that night, if Susan’s conclusions were right, there would be an attempt to make that mistake right.

  And what could she do then? She would need help—and she must be sure.

  There was still no rustle of motion within that room. Susan went quietly back to her own room, took her hat and, boldly this time, went through the hall toward the front and down the stairs.

  Madame, bent over her lace, looked up. John Kinder let a card fall from his hand and looked up also.

  “I’m going out a bit,” said Susan. “If Mariette asks for me, won’t you tell her I’ve gone for a little walk?”

  Madame’s black eyes plunged across the dusk into Susan’s.

  “The door,” said Madame calmly, “is locked. And I have the key. Mariette has just gone out for a little walk, too. But I shouldn’t advise Miss Dare to go. Because,” said Madame Touseau slowly, “it is about to storm. Mademoiselle would not like to be caught in a storm.”

  Susan gripped the stair railing. Absurd that her heart had leaped so suddenly to pound in her throat.

  She shot a glance at John Kinder. But he had gone placidly back to his card game as if altogether unaware of the threat in Madame’s heavy voice.

  Susan left the stairway, but Madame reached the door first. Her thick body was an indomitable barrier.

  “That gown,” said the Frenchwoman, “is too beautiful—too expensive to permit to be ruined. Me, I know the handsome dressmaking. I am not one to be deceived about that—that,” she repeated slowly, “or other things. I do not believe Miss Dare wishes the walk in the rain. No.”

  It was then an open threat. Yet the woman could not keep her jailed for long in that house. She dared not.

  Dared not? There was that other thing she had dared.

  Susan thought swiftly. It was time for which the woman was playing. She must need time—otherwise her opposition would have taken an entirely different line. Susan restrained a desire to combat the woman openly; for an instant the thought of physical struggle over the key, a mad desire to escape, to be gone from that fetid, silent house with the stain of blood overhead, clutched at Susan as hysteria would clutch.

  But the Frenchwoman was stronger. And there was Kinder. And behind Susan quite suddenly on the steps another voice spoke. The words, however, were altogether commonplace.

  “Madame Touseau,” said Louis Malmin quietly, “may I have dinner a little early tonight?”

  As if a puzzle had given itself a jerk so that pieces which had been distorted and confused fell suddenly into a regular and ordinary pattern, so, all at once the queer little scene changed and became regular and ordinary. Susan’s breath began to come freely. Madame’s dark face was smooth and efficient as she spoke calmly to Louis Malmin.

  She had merely advised Susan not to go out in the rain. That was all.

  “Will you unlock the door, Madame Touseau?” said Susan. “I wish to go out before the rain comes.”

  Would the woman boldly refuse?

  But her dark eyes met Susan’s and glowed. Then she smiled and said:

  “But certainly, if one wishes.” She turned and opened the door. “However—when the storm comes it will be bad.”

  Susan was conscious of Kinder’s face turned inquiringly toward her; of Louis Malmin’s presence there on the stairway behind her. But the door to the street stood open, and Susan walked past Madame and out upon the steps.

  A string of shops ought to be found a street or two beyond, for Susan remembered vaguely a patch of radiance off toward her right as she and Mariette had walked from the church the night before. She turned in that direction.

  Her easy victory was perplexing; it led Susan to doubt her own conclusions. For it was as if Madame had warned her merely to go no further but had scorned, smilingly, any notion that Susan was already in possession of a fact that might be dangerous.

  It became clearer to Susan that the little episode had been merely a warning on Madame Touseau’s part. Madame, then, was very sure of herself. But she did not know that Susan had seen the sketches. She did not know that one of her own wooden bobbins was at that moment in Susan’s white handbag. She did not know that Susan had seen the woman on the church steps.

  Yet perhaps the entire fabric of reasoning that Susan had built up was wrong. Perhaps she had missed some salient and pivotal fact.

  Few corners are without drugstores and the corner upon which Susan emerged was no exception. It was small and crowded at the soda fountain where perspiring and frenzied clerks dealt out tall, iced glasses. Susan supplied herself with nickels and went to the little row of mahogany-stained telephone booths at the back.

  The telephone number of the Record is famous in Chicago. Susan called it and waited. Jim had been out of town yesterday, of course; but that didn’t mean that he was not in town today. If he had not returned, she didn’t know exactly what to do next; it would be best, perhaps, simply to wait. But she wasn’t sure that she dared wait.

  It was terrifically hot in the little booth. A faraway voice said it was the Record and referred her to another voice which hesitated and then to Susan’s immense relief, turned and called distantly: “Hey, Jim!”

  “Hello—hello—”

  It was Jim Byrne.

  “Jim,” said Susan in a small voice, “oh, Jim, I’m so glad you are here.”

  “Oh, hello, Sue. What’s the matter?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know, but I think it’s murder—”

  “My God!” said Jim. “In this heat!”

  “And I think I know who did it.”

  “Where are you? Where’s the body?”

  “I’m at Sibley and Loomis—”

  “What?” shouted Jim.

  “At Sibley and Loomis,” repeated Susan firmly. “In a drugstore in a booth.”

  Then Jim said: “You sound scared. Stay there where you are. I’ll be there in—oh, ten minutes. ’Bye.”

  Susan sat down at a table. “Two tall lemonades,” she said to the white-aproned boy who approached. “With lots of ice.”

  “Two?” he said, eyeing Susan as if measuring her capacity.

  Jim bettered his promise by three minutes.

  “Angel,” he said looking at the frosted glass, “is that for me?”

  “Drink it,” said Susan. “A
nd don’t ask me questions till I’ve finished. Jim, is there anyone who might be in hiding there at Madame Touseau’s? That is a rooming house in the French quarter. Someone a great deal in the public eye; someone who would want to escape attention?”

  He grinned.

  “A lot of people, my Susan. The bird I’ve been trying to locate for one.” He took a long swallow and added: “But everybody says he’s got out of the country. Best for his health. You’ve read about the Anton Burgess disclosures. As long as he can stay out of sight a whole lot of fellows here in Chicago are that much better off. There’s an embezzlement charge.”

  Susan frowned.

  “Yes, I read that. Jim, can you come back there with me? You see, I’ve got some sketches that I want to show you. The main facts of the thing are simple. A man by the name of André Cavalliere, an artist, engaged to marry little Mariette Berne—”

  “Berne,” said Jim. “That little ballet dancer?”

  “Yes. He—well, he just vanished. And I think he’s murdered.”

  “Why?”

  “Because,” said Susan, “there’s blood on the attic floor. And it’s been washed.”

  Jim gave her a long look. Then he beckoned to the boy. “Two more drinks,” he said. “Whose blood, Susan?”

  “I want you to see the sketches,” she said obliquely. “I want to know if you see in them what I see.” She frowned again. “Burgess,” she said thoughtfully. “Yes, that might be right.”

  Jim put down his glass.

  “Look here, Susan,” he said earnestly, “if you’ve stumbled over Anton Burgess, lead me there, Miss Santa Claus. Every paper in the United States has been trying to find him for nearly two years.”