The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps

by Penzler, Otto

  “Y—yes sir—”

  “All right. You stay here with Miss Chase. Hoppy, you find these back stairs and cover them.”

  He raced on up the main stairway.

  As he took the treads three at a time, on his toes, he was trying to find a niche for one fact of remarkable interest. Unless Rosemary Chase was the greatest natural actress that a generation of talent scouts had overlooked, or unless his own judgment had gone completely cockeyed, the interruption had hit her with the same chilling shock as it had given him. It was to learn that that he had stayed to study her face before he moved: he was sure that he would have caught any shadow of deception, and yet if there had really been no shadow there to catch it meant that something had happened for which she was totally unprepared. And that in its turn might mean that all his suspicions of her were without foundation. It gave a jolt to the theories he had begun to put together that threw them into new and fascinating outlines, and he reached the top of the stairs with a glint of purely speculative delight shifting from the grim alertness of his eyes.

  From the head of the staircase the landing opened off in the shape of a squat long-armed T. All the doors that he saw at first were closed; he strode lightly to the junction of the two arms, and heard a faint movement down the left-hand corridor. Simon took a breath and jumped out on a quick slant that would have been highly disconcerting to any marksman who might have been waiting for him round the corner. But there was no marksman.

  The figures of two men were piled together on the floor, in the middle of a sickening mess; and only one of them moved.

  The one who moved was Dr. Quintus, who was groggily trying to scramble up to his feet as the Saint reached him. The one who lay still was Jim Forrest; and Simon did not need to look at him twice to see that his stillness was permanent. The mess was blood—pools and gouts and splashes of blood, in hideous quantity, puddling on the floor, dripping down the walls, soddening the striped blazer and mottling the doctor’s clothes. The gaping slash that split Forrest’s throat from ear to ear had almost decapitated him.

  The Saint’s stomach turned over once. Then he was grasping the doctor’s arm and helping him up. There was so much blood on him that Simon couldn’t tell what his injuries might be.

  “Where are you hurt?” he snapped.

  The other shook his head muzzily. His weight was leaden on Simon’s supporting grip.

  “Not me,” he mumbled hoarsely. “All right. Only hit me—on the head. Forrest—”

  “Who did it?”

  “Dunno. Probably same as—Nora. Heard Forrest … yell….”

  “Where did he go?”

  Quintus seemed to be in a daze through which outside promptings only reached him in the same form as outside noises reach the brain of a sleepwalker. He seemed to be making a tremendous effort to retain some sort of consciousness, but his eyes were half closed and his words were thick and rambling, as if he were dead drunk.

  “Suppose Forrest was—going to his room— for something…. Caught murderer—sneaking about…. Murderer—stabbed him…. I heard him yell…. Rushed out…. Got hit with—something…. Be all right—soon. Catch him—”

  “Well, where did he go?”

  Simon shook him, roughly slapped up the sagging head. The doctor’s chest heaved as though it were taking part in his terrific struggle to achieve coherence. He got his eyes wide open.

  “Don’t worry about me,” he whispered with painful clarity. “Look after—Mr. Chase.”

  His eyelids fluttered again.

  Simon let him go against the wall, and he slid down almost to a sitting position, clasping his head in his hands.

  The Saint balanced his Luger in his hand, and his eyes were narrowed to chips of sapphire hardness. He glanced up and down the corridor. From where he stood he could see the length of both passages which formed the arms of the T-plan of the landing. The arm on his right finished with a glimpse of the banisters of a staircase leading down—obviously the back stairs whose existence the butler had admitted, at the foot of which Hoppy Uniatz must already have taken up his post. But there had been no sound of disturbance from that direction. Nor had there been any sound from the front hall where he had left Rosemary Chase with the butler. And there was no other normal way out for anyone who was upstairs. The left-hand corridor, where he stood, ended in a blank wall; and only one door along it was open.

  Simon stepped past the doctor and over Forrest’s body, and went silently to the open door.

  He came to it without any of the precautions that he had taken before exposing himself a few moments before. He had a presentiment amounting to conviction that they were unnecessary now. He remembered with curious distinctness that the drawing-room curtains had not been drawn since he entered the house. Therefore anyone who wanted to could have shot at him from outside long ago. No one had shot at him. Therefore….

  He was looking into a large white-painted airy bedroom. The big double bed was empty, but the covers were thrown open and rumpled. The table beside it was loaded with medicine bottles. He opened the doors in the two side walls. One belonged to a spacious built-in cupboard filled with clothing; the other was a bathroom. The wall opposite the entrance door was broken by long casement windows, most of them wide open. He crossed over to one of them and looked out. Directly beneath him was the flat roof of a porch.

  The Saint put his gun back in its holster and felt an unearthly cold dry calm sinking through him. Then he climbed out over the sill onto the porch roof below, which almost formed a kind of blind balcony under the window. He stood there recklessly, knowing that he was silhouetted against the light behind, and lighted a cigarette with leisured, tremor-less hands. He sent a cloud of blue vapor drifting toward the stars; and then with the same leisured passivity he sauntered to the edge of the balustrade, sat on it and swung his legs over. From there it was an easy drop onto the parapet which bordered the terrace along the front of the house, and an even easier drop from the top of the parapet to the ground. To an active man the return journey would not present much more difficulty.

  He paused long enough to draw another lungful of night air and tobacco smoke, and then strolled on along the terrace. It was an eerie experience, to know that he was an easy target every time he passed a lighted window, to remember that the killer might be watching him from a few yards away, and still to hold his steps down to the same steady pace; but the Saint’s nerves were hardened to an icy quietness, and all his senses were working together in taut-strung vigilance.

  He walked three quarters of the way round the building and arrived at the back door. It was unlocked when he tried it; and he pushed it open and looked down the barrel of Mr. Uniatz’ Betsy.

  “I bet you’ll shoot somebody one of these days, Hoppy,” he remarked; and Mr. Uniatz lowered the gun with a faint tinge of disappointment.

  “What ya find, boss?”

  “Quite a few jolly and interesting things.” The Saint was only smiling with his lips. “Hold the fort a bit longer, and I’ll tell you.”

  He found his way through the kitchen, where the other servants were clustered together in dumb and terrified silence, back to the front hall where Rosemary Chase and the butler were standing together at the foot of the stairs. They jumped as if a gun had been fired when they heard his footsteps; and then the girl ran toward him and caught him by the lapels of his coat.

  “What is it?” she pleaded frantically. “What happened?”

  “I’m sorry,” he said as gently as he could.

  She stared at him. He meant her to read his face for everything except the fact that he was still watching her like a spectator on the dark side of the footlights.

  “Where’s Jim?”

  He didn’t answer.

  She caught her breath suddenly with a kind of sob, and turned toward the stairs. He grabbed her elbows and turned her back and held her.

  “I wouldn’t go up,” he said evenly. “It wouldn’t do any good.”

  “Tell me, then
. For God’s sake, tell me! Is he"—she choked on the word— ”dead?”

  “Jim, yes.”

  Her face was whiter than chalk, but she kept her feet. Her eyes dragged at his knowledge through a brightness of unheeded tears.

  “Why do you say it like that? What else is there?”

  “Your father seems to have disappeared,” he said, and held her as she went limp in his arms.

  VIII

  Simon carried her into the drawing room and laid her down on a sofa. He stood gazing at her intro-spectively for a moment; then he bent over her again quickly and stabbed her in the solar plexus with a stiff forefinger. She didn’t stir a muscle.

  The monotonous cheep-cheep of a telephone bell ringing somewhere outside reached his ears, and he saw the butler starting to move mechanically toward the door. Simon passed him and saw the instrument half hidden by a curtain on the other side of the hall. He took the receiver off the hook and said: “Hullo.”

  “May I speak to Mr. Templar, please?”

  The Saint put a hand on the wall to save himself from falling over.

  “Who wants him?”

  “Mr. Trapani.”

  “Giulio!” Simon exclaimed. The voice was familiar now, but its complete unexpectedness had prevented him from recognizing it before. “It seems to be about sixteen years since I saw you—and I never came back for dinner.”

  “That’s quite all right, Mr. Templar. I didn’t expect you, when I knew what had happened. I only called up now because it’s getting late and I didn’t know if you would want a room for tonight.”

  The Saint’s brows drew together.

  “What the hell is this?” he demanded slowly. “Have you taken up crystal gazing or something?”

  Giulio Trapani chuckled.

  “No, I am not any good at that. The police sergeant stopped here on his way back, and he told me. He said you had got mixed up with a murder, and Miss Chase had taken you home with her. So of course I knew you would be very busy. Has she asked you to stay?”

  “Let me call you back in a few minutes, Giulio,” said the Saint. “Things have been happening, and I’ve got to get hold of the police again.” He paused, and a thought struck him. “Look, is Sergeant Jesser still there, by any chance?”

  There was no answer.

  Simon barked: “Hullo.”

  Silence. He jiggled the hook. The movements produced no corresponding clicks in his ear. He waited a moment longer, while he realized that the stillness of the receiver was not the stillness of a broken connection, but a complete inanimate muteness that stood for something less easily remedied than that.

  He hung the receiver up and traced the course of the wiring with his eyes. It ran along the edge of the wainscoting to the frame of the front door and disappeared into a hole bored at the edge of the wood. Simon turned right round with another abrupt realization. He was alone in the hall—the butler was no longer in sight.

  He slipped his pencil flashlight out of his breast pocket with his left hand and let himself out of the front door. The telephone wires ran up outside along the margin of the door frame and continued up over the exterior wall. The beam of his torch followed them up, past a lighted window over the porch from which he had climbed down a few minutes ago, to where they were attached to a pair of porcelain insulators under the eaves. Where the wires leading on from the insulators might once have gone was difficult to decide: they dangled slackly downwards now, straddling the balcony and trailing away into the darkness of the drive.

  The Saint switched off his light and stood motionless. Then he flitted across the terrace, crossed the drive and merged himself into the shadow of a big clump of laurels on the edge of the lawn. Again he froze into breathless immobility. The blackness ahead of him was stygian, impenetrable, even to his noctambulant eyes, but hearing would serve his temporary purpose almost as well as sight. The night had fallen so still that he could even hear the rustle of the distant river; and he waited for minutes that seemed like hours to him, and must have seemed like weeks to a guilty prowler who could not have travelled very far after the wires were broken. And while he waited, he was trying to decide at exactly what point in his last speech the break had occurred. It could easily have happened at a place where Trapani would think he had finished and rung off…. But he heard nothing while he stood there—not a snap of a twig or the rustle of a leaf.

  He went back to the drawing room and found the butler standing there, wringing his hands in a helpless sort of way.

  “Where have you been?” he inquired coldly.

  The man’s loose bloodhound jowls wobbled.

  “I went to fetch my wife, sir.” He indicated the stout red-faced woman who was kneeling beside the couch, chafing the girl’s nerveless wrists. “To see if she could help Miss Chase.”

  Simon’s glance flickered over the room like a rapier blade and settled pricklingly on an open french window.

  “Did you have to fetch her in from the garden?” he asked sympathetically.

  “I—I don’t understand, sir.”

  “Don’t you? Neither do I. But that window was closed when I saw it last.”

  “I opened it just now, sir, to give Miss Chase some fresh air.”

  The Saint held his eyes ruthlessly, but the butler did not try to look away.

  “All right,” he said at length. “We’ll check up on that presently. Just for the moment, you can both go back to the kitchen.”

  The stout woman got to her feet with the laboured motions of a rheumatic camel.

  “ ‘Oo do you think you are,” she demanded indignantly, “to be bossing everybody about in his ‘ouse?”

  “I am the Grand Gugnune of Waziristan,” answered the Saint pleasantly. “And I said—get back to the kitchen.”

  He followed them back himself and went on through to find Hoppy Uniatz. The other door of the kitchen conveniently opened into the small rear hall into which the back stairs came down and from which the back door also opened. Simon locked and bolted the back door and drew Hoppy into the kitchen doorway and propped him up against the jamb.

  “If you stand here,” he said, “you’ll be able to cover the back stairs and this gang in the kitchen at the same time. And that’s what I want you to do. None of them is to move out of your sight— not even to get somebody else some fresh air.”

  “Okay, boss,” said Mr. Uniatz dimly. “If I only had a drink—”

  “Tell Jeeves to buy you one.”

  The Saint was on his way out again when the butler stopped him.

  “Please, sir, I’m sure I could be of some use—”

  “You are being useful,” said the Saint and closed the door on him.

  Rosemary Chase was sitting up when he returned to the drawing room.

  “I’m sorry,” she said weakly. “I’m afraid I fainted.”

  “I’m afraid you did,” said the Saint. “I poked you in the tummy to make sure it was real, and it was. It looks as if I’ve been wrong about you all the evening. I’ve got a lot of apologies to make, and you’ll have to imagine most of them. Would you like a drink?”

  She nodded; and he turned to the table and operated with a bottle and siphon. While he was doing it, he said with matter-of-fact naturalness: “How many servants do you keep here?”

  “The butler and his wife, a housemaid and a parlourmaid.”

  “Then they’re all rounded up and accounted for. How long have you known them?”

  “Only about three weeks—since we’ve been here.”

  “So that means nothing. I should have had them corralled before, but I didn’t think fast enough.” He brought the drink over and gave it to her. “Anyway, they’re corralled now, under Hoppy’s thirsty eye, so if anything else happens we’ll know they didn’t have anything to do with it. If that’s any help…. Which leaves only us— and Quintus.”

  “What happened to him?”

  “He said he got whacked on the head by our roving bogeyman.”

  “Hadn’t you bet
ter look after him?”

  “Sure. In a minute.”

  Simon crossed the room and closed the open window and drew the curtains. He came back and stood by the table to light a cigarette. There had been so much essential activity during the past few minutes that he had had no time to do any constructive thinking; but now he had to get every possible blank filled in before the next move was made. He put his lighter away and studied her with cool and friendly encouragement, as if they had a couple of years to spare in which to straighten out misunderstandings.

  She sipped her drink and looked up at him with dark stricken eyes from which, he knew, all pretence and concealment had now been wiped away. They were eyes that he would have liked to see without the grief in them; and the pallor of her face made him remember its loveliness as he had first seen it. Her red lips formed bitter words without flinching.

  “I’m the one who ought to have been killed. If I hadn’t been such a fool this might never have happened. I ought to be thrown in the river with a weight round my neck. Why don’t you say so?”

  “That wouldn’t be any use now,” he said. “I’d rather you made up for it. Give me the story.”

  She brushed the hair off her forehead with a weary gesture.

  “The trouble is—I can’t. There isn’t any story that’s worth telling. Just that I was—trying to be clever. It all began when I read a letter that I hadn’t any right to read. It was in this room. I’d been out. I came in through the french windows, and I sat down at the desk because I’d just remembered something I had to make a note of. The letter was on the blotter in front of me—the letter you got. Nora must have just finished it, and then left the room for a moment, just before I came in, not thinking anyone else would be around. I saw your name on it. I’d heard of you, of course. It startled me so much that I was reading on before I knew what I was doing. And then I couldn’t stop. I read it all. Then I heard Nora coming back. I lost my head and slipped out through the window again without her seeing me.”