It wasn’t a homeless hunting cat. It was a tame cat, a house cat, with its bell-studded collar. It lived here, since pet cats stay around the places they belong. And I usually get along with cats. They come to rub against me without much urging. Even those in the experimental laboratory which I used to take care of when I was a student, poor things. I have always thought I had a way with cats. I stooped and held out my hand to this one now, with a soothing word. But it only looked at me with its yellow eyes, miaowing, and veered away. It went loping up the drive away from me with its head and tail down, leaping into the tall grass a little farther on, with its hoarse and wailing cry.
There was that mangled gray kitten which Corkscrew had in his arm, and dropped in the ditch beside the highway when Elinor and St. Erme had stopped to see. But there is no way it can be tied up with the wailing of that gray cat of MacComerou’s at sight of me. No way whatever.
No lights had been lit in the house yet. I could hear a woman’s voice talking some place inside, though, through the closed windows, and then another’s voice replying, as I went up the drive; so somebody, anyway, was home.
There was a slow, regular, whacking sound, like someone beating a heavy carpet, out in back. Country houses are usually entered from the kitchen way, and I went back there, following the sound.
Behind the house was the garden I had glimpsed, with swarms of rosebushes heavy with pale full-blown blossoms—cream or yellow, I could not be sure in the silver light, but making a heavy fragrance in the air. Tall delphinium spikes and hollyhocks, and clusters of little pale summer chrysanthemums, grew in beds around, and the air was sweet with all their smells, and the damp smell of grass and good black garden earth.
There were little stone paths between the flowers, and a mirror ball like a clairvoyant’s crystal ball stood on a white wooden pedestal in the middle of a grass plot, to catch and reflect all the colors of the flowers. They were all subdued now, and the ball was as silver as the twilight sky.
A tall, sinewy, bent-shouldered man in a pair of striped shorts and moccasins was packing down the earth with the flat of a spade in the bed across from me, with his back turned to me. He had a bald head rimmed by a thin fringe of clipped whitish hair, big bat ears, and compressed and toothless jaws.
He paused in his whacking as I stepped on the garden path, gripping the spade handle with one brown hand, and waving his other hand around his neck and shoulders, with a long thin white arm like a wavering white snake.
“Get away, you damned bloody little fiend!” he said, in a mushy voice.
He wasn’t talking to me. He hadn’t heard me walking up the broad shallow tire tracks in the driveway gravel, in my prewar crepe-soled sport shoes. He didn’t know that anyone was within three miles of him, perhaps. Just slapping at mosquitoes, and talking to himself, as a man gets to do alone.
“Damn you, you red bloody—”
Whack!
“Excuse me,” I said, pausing by the mirror ball, with a hand on it.
He had squashed a bloated mosquito on top of his bald skull. It made a smear on his palm as he lifted it. He stood there with his face to the flower bed he had been working at, holding his hand motionless two inches above his head.
“Yes?” he said, in a whisper.
“I was wondering—” I said, a little hesitantly.
“Yes?” he repeated.
As if he were concentrating, not quite sure whether he had heard my voice, or had only imagined it. And if he had heard it, and not just imagined it, where in hell it had come from—whether it had come from inside the house, where the subdued voices of those two women were still talking and gabbling, or whether it had come from the general dusk around him, or maybe from the ground.
“Here I am,” I said. “Behind you.”
“Behind me,” he repeated.
He turned around, with his shoulders bent, gripping his spade with both brown hands. There was a gray furze on his pale chest. His face was sunbrowned, like his hands, darker than his arms and body, and he had brown outstanding ears, like a huge bat. He stared at me with compressed and toothless jaws, with pale-blue searching eyes, across the silver dusk.
“Where in hell did you come from?” he said, with his toothless jaws, after a moment. “Who are you?”
I took my hand from the mirror ball. I walked toward him.
“My name’s Riddle,” I said. “Dr. Harry Riddle, of New York. My car is stalled up the road. I wondered if you knew of a garage man around—”
“A garage man?” he mumbled, staring at me.
“I didn’t really expect to find one,” I said. “I think I might be able to take care of the trouble myself, if I had a small wrench. All I need is just to unscrew a nut. I haven’t any tools in my car. Any kind of small adjustable wrench, or a pair of pliers, ought to do the trick, if you have any.”
His mouth spread in a friendly grin, with a twinkle of humor wrinkling about his shrewd old gaze.
“You have a damned light, quiet way of walking, for a redheaded man,” he said toothlessly. “You gave me a small wrench yourself. Turn-about is fair play. You want to unscrew a nut, do you? Well, I imagine that we ought to be able to find something around the place here for that purpose. What is your name again— Riddle? Dr. Riddle. My name is Professor Adam MacComerou, Dr. Riddle. I guess you saw it on the mailbox.”
He shifted his spade to his left hand, extending his right to me. His palm was cool, smooth, and strong.
“Are you the Adam MacComerou?” I asked him.
“The?” he said, looking at me a little warily, as if wondering what problem of screwball murder I was going to spring on him if he admitted that he was. “I am Professor MacCamerou, yes. I don’t suppose there are so many.”
“I had you in Med Psych 12 my senior year,” I said.
‘Harvard?” he asked me. “You took some course—”
I could see from the way he looked at me that he knew he didn’t know me, and yet on the other hand had a feeling that he ought to, for some reason.
“No,” I said. “Southern State. I wasn’t one of your students. You’ve never seen me, Professor. We used your book, I meant. It was almost our Bible.”
“Oh,” he said. “Well, there’s a lot of interesting stuff in it. I suppose a good many have read it.”
He gave a final whack to the ground with the flat of his spade, and tossed it over on the edge of a flower bed, toward the kitchen porch.
“Are you a gardening nut yourself, Doctor?” he asked. “I was just setting in my next spring’s tulips,” he told me, when I shook my head. “A garden takes a lot of time. There’s always something.... Your car’s stalled up the road, you say? I don’t know of any garage mechanic around. But we’ll see what we can do to get you going. Where is your car located? You must be this side of Unistaire’s, or you’d have stopped in at his place. You’re heading up towards Stony Falls?”
“No,” I said. “I’m coming down from Stony Falls. I’m heading towards Whippleville to get over to Route 7. My car’s up in that direction.”
“Oh,” he said. “You came from that direction?”
“Yes,” I said. “From that direction. I’m heading over from 49A. I turned off at Stony Falls.”
“I see,” he said. “You must have had quite a walk. No one living anywhere along the road from here to Stony Falls.”
He seemed to be waiting for me to say something, but I didn’t know what he wanted me to say.
“I suppose you saw that gray car with the two men in it going by you?” he said.
“No,” I said. “I didn’t see anything go by.”
I don’t think he was thinking too much about the car he had asked me about, at the moment. There was something about me that bothered him. Something he found missing, I should say.
“They must have got out at Stony Falls onto 49A before you turned off there,” he said. “It may have been as much as a half-hour ago that they went by.”
“I turned off onto the roa
d here at Stony Falls at sunset,” I said. “An hour or an hour and a half ago. I’ve been on it ever since. There wasn’t anything that went by.”
“At sunset?” he said, with a frown. “You’ve been on the road an hour and a half? Are you sure? And you didn’t see a gray Cadillac phaeton with its top down, with red cushions? A New York license number XL four hundred thousand something? With a little red-eyed hairy-faced man in a blue saw-tooth hat and a checked coat at the wheel, and a black-haired, black-eyed young fellow in a gabardine suit sitting in a rather sprawled, stiff position beside him?”
“No,” I said. “I didn’t see it. It didn’t go by me.”
“It must have turned off the road just before it reached you,” he said. “It worried me a little when I saw it. That fellow at the wheel was such an ugly little devil. He had pointed cat teeth, and a torn ear. What happened to your own car, by the way?”
“My crank flew off while I was cranking—”
But he wasn’t interested. He was revolving some problem in his mind. I followed him to the back porch.
“The black-haired young fellow with him looked like that young fellow what’s-his-name,” MacComerou said, mumbling over his shoulder to me. “Young St. Erme, I think his name is, the young oil millionaire from Oklahoma. A fine, likable type of young business executive. I couldn’t understand what he would have been doing in company with a man like that.”
It was the first time I had ever heard St. Erme’s name. The very first.
“I’ve never heard of him,” I said.
“No, I suppose not,” said MacComerou. “He hasn’t been in New York very long, as I understand it. A. M. Dexter, of the Dexter Day and Night Garage on West Fourteenth Street, introduced him to me one time when I was having my car serviced. St. Erme is a kind of silent partner of Dexter’s, I understand, in developing some highly secret war devices.
“That’s one thing that worried me about it,” he added. “For another, St. Erme is the sort of young fellow who always likes to carry a lot of money. He was sitting beside that tramp with his head on the back of the scat, looking up at the sky. His face was like wax. His lips seemed moving, and I assumed he was saying something to the laughing little fiend at the wheel. But it might have been some prayer he was uttering, when I think it over. Or only the wind on his face.”
“They didn’t pass by me, I’m sure of it,” I said.
“They must have turned off down the Swamp Road before they reached you,” said old MacComerou. “It’s a cul-de-sac. Nobody but John Flail lives on it. But it’s the only way they could have gone.”
He opened the kitchen door. Inside there were those low gabbling women’s voices that I had heard as I came back to the garden.
“The Swamp Road?” I said. “You mean that old wagon road about a mile or a mile and a half back, with the old ruts covered with asters and black-eyed susans, and the old signpost beside it with the old hand-molded lead letters and the lead hands pointing, going off into deep hemlock woods? Why, that’s where my car is stalled, right there at the road junction, where the road begins. And nothing turned off down it, for the last good hour.”
We had entered the darkling kitchen. The murmuring women’s voices which I had been hearing came from the wall beside the stove, I saw, from the receiver of the old golden-oak wall telephone, which had been left hanging. A country party line.
“....Bobbie! He killed Bobbie!....”
“Oh, my poor Mrs. Wiggins!....”
Old Adam had paused in front of me. He caught the receiver and put it on its hook, somewhat impatiently, cutting off the gabbling, weeping voices. In the silence he turned toward me.
“You have been right at the Swamp Road junction?” he said with toothless jaws.
“I have been right at it.”
“You have been at it for an hour?”
“For a good hour.”
“And nothing turned off down it, you are sure of it?”
“Nothing,” I said. “No car, anyway. There was a gust of wind that turned off down it. And there was a man walking away down it when I first got there. I suppose he must have turned off down it. But he had turned down it before I got there. He vanished in tire woods.”
“A man?” he said. “What kind of looking man?”
“He had black hair. He was rather tall, about your own height, I’d say. He was dressed in khaki pants and a blue sweat-soaked shirt, and was carrying his coat or else a sack slung over his left shoulder. He was walking with his head bent forward, at a long flat-footed shuffling Indian stride, without lifting his feet.”
“John Flail,” MacComerou said. “You saw him walking down Swamp Road an hour ago?”
“Yes,” I said. “He was just going into the trees when I saw him. He was about two hundred yards away from me. I didn’t know his name.”
“John was working around my place today,” he said, with a calm effort. “I didn’t notice at just what precise minute he quit. He had left when that car went by is all I know. But I would have said that John Flail left here not more than ten minutes before, not more than three quarters of an hour ago, at most.... Of course, it may have been John Flail you saw. I wouldn’t know.”
Still for the moment in the darkling he stood looking at me with a pale stare, as if he were trying to look right through me. He was completely convinced in his own mind, I could see it, that the man he called John Flail, whoever he was, had not left his place here until definitely later than the time at which I had told him I had seen that figure walking away down Swamp Road.
I don’t think he thought I was lying. Not that I was consciously and deliberately lying, and for a purpose. He looked as if he were just trying to figure out whether it had been a living man or an apparition I had seen. Or maybe if I was a living man or an apparition myself.
He picked up something from a shelf beside the stove—a small nickel-plated monkey wrench that I had asked for. He handed it to me.
“Wait till I’ve put some clothes on. I’ll go along with you and see if I can help you get straightened out,” he said, almost absently.
He was still thinking over a problem that I wasn’t particularly interested in as yet. But I hadn’t seen St. Erme going by with his pale bloodless face. And I hadn’t seen that little red-eyed corkscrewed man named Doc.
But it worried MacComerou now. It worried him already. It was then that he took down his black book from the shelf beside the phone, looking through it for Dexter’s number, his garage man down in New York.
He found the number, thumbing through his book. Standing in his shorts and moccasins, still dirty and sweaty from his garden, he rang the crank with a white arm like a peeled branch, to get in touch with Dexter.
That scene keeps coming back to me. In the darkling kitchen when we had entered from the garden. There had been no word of murder yet. St. Erme was a name that I had only just now heard for the first time—and he was little more than a name to MacComerou, even, I had the feeling. That little corkscrewed man had been only a man passing along the road out in front at the wheel of a big gray car, to MacComerou, as yet. To me, he had not been even that. To us both, Elinor Darrie, St. Erme’s young bride-to-be, was nothing, so far. She did not exist.
There was only something vaguely ominous in the air. A phantasm that I had seen. A car that I had not seen. To MacComerou, the picture wasn’t right.
I’m not sure which of those items worried him the more at the moment. What I had seen, or what I had not. But he could put in an inquiry about the car, at least.
He had laid a big silver watch down on the phone ledge. There were people talking on the line when he picked the receiver up, after ringing. Three or four voices, it sounded like, all gabbling together.
“Toll operator, please,” he broke into their babble.
“Oh, is that you, Mr. Unistaire? This is Mrs. Hinterzee, down the road from you! I have been trying to get you—“
“This is Professor MacComerou,” he said. “Ring 5-5. I’d like
to put in just a brief call to New York, if you don’t mind.”
“Oh, Professor MacComerou! I was going to call you up, but I was afraid you might be busy writing, and would take my head off, as you always do! Did you see a gray touring car go rushing up the road, with a terrible tramp—”
“Yes, it passed my place.”
“He scared Mr. Hinterzee right out of his rocking chair! He had a terrible laugh! He ran down the poor Wigginses’ dog deliberately—Bobbie, their big kind St. Bernard with the brown eyes that the children love to ride on! There was some man in the car with him who looked as if he had been struck on the head! Tell Professor MacComerou how he killed Bobbie, Mrs. Wiggins!”
“Oh, Professor, Bobbie was standing there, and he came rushing in his car! He was crouched down behind the wheel like a monkey, he had a blue hat on with a scalloped brim, he looked terrible! He swung his wheel—”
“Yes,” MacComerou said with mushy quietness. “Yes, I saw him myself. Fortunate it wasn’t one of your children, Mrs. Wiggins. He would have done the same to a child, no doubt of it. I have an idea that I may know who the young fellow with him was. If you will just let me have the phone three minutes, perhaps I can find out....
“Toll operator? This is Whippleville 5-5. I want New York, Mordaunt 2-8385. Station-to-station call....”
Dexter answered the phone himself, when the call had been put through.
It had been his car, all right. St. Erme had borrowed it to go some place with his girl. The girl had been going to drive it. But that was all that Dexter knew....
That was how I happened to have heard St. Erme’s name, anyway, and what the red-eyed little man with him had looked like and the license number of the car, when she flagged me on the road in the darkness down near Dead Bridegroom’s Pond later, saying that her fiancé had been kidnaped and their car stolen. Rosenblatt asked me how I had known, of course.
Old Adam had continued to look through his black book while he spoke to Dexter—looking for other numbers to call up, I could guess, if the car had not been Dexter’s, or the man in it with that nameless little fiend not St. Erme.
The Red Right Hand Page 10