The Silver Leopard

by Helen Reilly

  What this Mystery is about—

  … A particularly gruesome KILLING which brings to light a two-year-old, unsuspected murder… A beautiful SILVER LEOPARD which plays an appalling part in both deaths… A strange WILL which curiously disposes of an apparently nonexistent estate… A BLOOD-STAINED ENVELOPE mysteriously reappearing in a most unlikely place… A DOUBLE ELOPEMENT ending in a surprise for four… A simple PROBLEM in multiplication which proves to be a complex problem for a brilliant detective… A green silk scarf which leads to a blood-chilling discovery… A LONE FOOTSTEP in a dark and silent house… A telltale smear of BLUE PAINT on a pair of galoshes… A WOODBOX salted with murder… PANIC, FEAR, and DISTRUST in a close circle of relatives and friends… A progression of HORROR-FILLED MOMENTS in a deathly still cottage.

  Wouldn’t You Like to Know—

  • How it feels to happen in on a murderer and his horribly dead victim—and escape alive?

  • Who took the silver leopard?

  • Why the wealthy painter aged so drastically in a few months’ time?

  • What really happened to Angela’s husband?

  • Why Catherine’s wedding plans do not include the man she loves?

  • What terrible secret the goodhearted Angela has concealed for two years?

  • Why at least one of the prospective brides hopes desperately that the elopement plans will fail to materialize?

  • Whose body is found in the wood box?

  • Why Catherine is stunned to discover the true identity of the murderer?

  YOU will learn the answers in this wholly absorbing triple murder mystery in which a killer, hiding behind an all-too-familiar face, steps in to upset wedding plans and to make life a thing of little joy for a closely knit group of panic-filled relatives and friends.

  Copyright, 1946, by Helen Reilly.

  Reprinted by arrangement with Random House, Inc., New York, N.Y.

  All of the characters and incidents in this novel are entirely imaginary.

  The Silver Leopard

  Chapter One - An Old Love Comes Calling

  IT WAS TEN MINUTES past five on the afternoon of November the thirteenth when Catherine Lister left the doctor’s office on upper Park Avenue.

  The sun had gone and dusk was sifting down over the city. Traffic was heavy on the wide dim street, but the pavements were almost empty. The lights were beginning to come on. In the country, she thought, the leaves would be gone and the tree branches would be black against the sky. But it was a lovely hour in New York. The air was keen, frosty. She drew it into her lungs with a feeling of exhilaration.

  Dr. William Dannaher, and Dannaher was tops in his particular line, had said that Nicky was going to be all right. It might take six months, it might take a year for his fractured skull to knit completely. Meanwhile, he was doing very well—and they could be married any time. Dannaher had said, “Marriage is exactly what the captain needs. It will give him a sense of permanence, of security.”

  The verdict had been an enormous relief. Catherine was deeply content. She thought, surprised, Why, I’m almost happy.

  Nicky, Captain Nicholas Bray, the man to whom she was engaged, was waiting for her, pacing up and down beyond the canopy with his long-legged nervous stride. The doctor had seen him before he talked to her. Nowadays, since he had got out of the hospital, Nicky was always going somewhere in a hurry or planning to, even when he was slumped on the end of his spine in an arm-chair. She tightened the knot of soft fur at her throat. His restlessness disturbed her, but it was natural enough. After four razor-edged years of combat flying, civilian life must be dull to him, and insipid, and very often meaningless.

  Nicky caught sight of her. He tossed his cigarette into the gutter and missed a nurse wheeling a perambulator by inches in his impetuous advance. The nurse merely smiled. People did, with Nicky, looking at his high fair head and at the campaign ribbons on his tunic. He had got his discharge but was still in uniform.

  “At last!” he exclaimed, walking up to her. “I thought you were never coming. That old pot certainly kept you. God, how sick I am of medicos!”

  His eyes were unnaturally bright in the shadow of his cap, and there was more color in his face than usual. Catherine wondered whether anything had happened to upset him. So many things did—a car backfiring, the sudden clamor of an ambulance, the throb of a plane overhead.

  She did what she had been instructed to do, what she would have done in any case—she ignored his mood. “Let’s go and have a cocktail somewhere where we can talk,” she proposed. “I want to tell you what Dannaher said. He’s really sweet.”

  “A cocktail? I’d like one, but—” Nicky looked at his wrist watch. “I’m afraid I can’t. There won’t be time. At least—” He told her about his recent encounter. “While I was waiting for you just now, Blanchard came along—Dick Blanchard. He was our tail gunner in England. He’s quite a lad. I’d like you to meet him some time. He and a couple of the boys from the old Eighth are getting together at Soldi’s at five-thirty, and he wants me to join them.”

  Catherine said, “Oh,” a little blankly. She and Nicky had been going to have dinner at Lenrico’s, in the village, because he was hungry for Italian food.

  He was looking down at her uncertainly. His lighthearted expression faded. “If you don’t want me to meet the boys, I won’t, Catherine. To hell with it.” He reached for her arm.

  She drew back, laughing at him. “Don’t be an idiot, Nicky, of course you must meet them. I wouldn’t dream of your not.”

  She wasn’t going to go and stand in that particular corner, with a dunce cap labeled jealousy crammed down over her head. It had happened once before, out at the hospital—or rather, Nicky thought it had, although he had been mistaken. Gathering her things together, her visit at an end, she had picked up a compact that slipped out of a fold in the covers, to discover that it wasn’t hers.

  The compact was an expensive one, of gold, with onyx corners and a tiny inlaid medallion in the middle. Nick had reclaimed it, stuttering a little, he always did when he was nervous, and saying, “That’s Rosalie Drumm’s—Joe Cotter’s girlfriend. She was here seeing Joe and she stopped in for a minute to say hello and scattered things all over the place.”

  Nicky hadn’t returned the compact. It was in the pocket of his topcoat. She had seen it that morning when she was searching for matches. She wasn’t concerned with Rosalie Drumm or her belongings. What did bother her was that Nicky had felt he had to explain. It was part of his illness. The fractured skull he had brought back with him from a plane crash in the Pacific wasn’t the only trouble. He had been badly mauled psychologically as well as physically during the long months preceding peace, and he flinched from imaginary blows. He must never flinch with her.

  She grimaced up at him with mock rancor, thinking how like a handsome boy he was, with his smooth cheeks and very blue eyes, in spite of all he had been through.

  “Go and meet your old pal Blanchard—and see who cares. But Nicky,” she put a hand on his arm, “you’ve only been dehospitalized a week—promise you won’t stay out late showing anyone the town.”

  Nicky looked at her. He covered her hand with his. “Catherine, you’re an angel,” he said huskily. “I don’t know what I’ve done to rate you—”

  Catherine stood there for a moment in the fading light with Nicky’s hand on hers. She wanted to draw her own hand away. That was it, she thought, with a touch of something almost like despair. Why couldn’t she feel for him now what she had felt, or thought she had, when they first became engaged? His masculinity, his sureness, his gaiety, had drawn her irresistibly then. Had too much time elapsed, had they been separated too long? Nonsense! She retreated from dangerous ground.

&
nbsp; Nicky saw the shadow in her. He said quickly, demandingly, “What is it, darling? You’re worried about something.”

  She was touched and a little frightened by his perceptiveness where she was concerned. He was the one who must not be worried. Emotional stability was the thing they had to strive for. Dannaher, all the doctors, had stressed that. She said lightly, “Don’t flatter yourself, Captain. I’ll be glad to be rid of you for this evening. I’ve got a lot of work to do. I’m going home and get at it.”

  He wanted to put her into a cab, but she said she’d take the bus, and they parted at the corner, Nicky going south to Soldi’s and Catherine west toward Fifth.

  It wasn’t until she had crossed Madison that she noticed she was on Sixty-fourth Street. She was seldom in this neighborhood, but when she was, she instinctively avoided it. Her uncle, John Wardwell, had lived in the wide, handsome house near the corner for years. His death, of heart disease, had been sudden and shocking.

  The house had been closed since. Angela, John’s wife, couldn’t bear it after his death. They had been married twenty years, and she spent her time at one of the Ward-well places in the country, the ranch in Arizona, or the farm in Brookfield.

  As Catherine approached the house, she saw with surprise that it was lighted up. Her aunt had said nothing in her last letter about coming to New York, but she must be home. The dark-blue Bentley that was the family car—there had been a Bentley for as long as she could remember—was parked at the curb.

  Catherine liked her aunt much more than she had ever liked her Uncle John. If Angela wasn’t the most brilliant woman in the world, she was always warm and kind. It would be rude not to stop in and say hello. She started across the street and came to an abrupt halt before she had taken more than three steps.

  Hat’s roadster was drawn up in front of the Bentley.

  Hat, Harriet La Mott, was Angela’s niece. Her father and mother were dead—they had died when she was an infant—and she had lived with the Wardwells practically all her life. From the beginning, there had never been any love lost between the two girls, cousins by marriage. Catherine considered Hat spoiled, vain, shallow, mischievous, and arrogant. What had happened in the distant December shortly before John Wardwell’s death had sharpened Catherine’s dislike into actual hatred, for a while. Hat La Mott had reached out and appropriated Stephen Darrell, the man with whom Catherine was then in love. She had done it calmly, wantonly, and—perhaps that was what had rankled most—with complete success.

  Stephen Darrell no longer mattered; the place he had once occupied was filled with emptiness. Catherine couldn’t easily forgive the girl who was her cousin by courtesy. There was no reason why she should go where Hat was, voluntarily. She could see Angela tomorrow when Hat wasn’t with her, she thought. Swinging around sharply, she stepped up on the pavement and collided with a man standing on the curb and looking where she had been looking a moment before—at the Wardwell house across the street.

  The man was so deeply absorbed in his scrutiny that he hadn’t noticed her. Light from an overhead lamp shone down on him. He was small, elderly, with thinning gray hair and pin-point brown eyes, darkly bright in a pointed fox face. Very clapper. A brilliant blue tie quarreled with a sienna-brown chesterfield pinched at the waist. The collar of the chesterfield was worn and the top button was missing. The man stepped aside, said, “Pardon me, Miss, I’m sure,” ducking his head and touching the brim of a brown soft hat with a forefinger.

  His look at her was intent. His voice had a faintly familiar ring. Catherine couldn’t place him. “Oh, sorry, my fault,” she murmured, and walked quickly away.

  She didn’t look back. The bus going downtown was crowded. The journey, ordinarily pleasant, past the dark park, the great lighted hotels and shops, through the clamor of mid-town Manhattan and on down into the lower reaches of the city, seemed endless. She was glad to get home to the little house on Lorilard Place, one of a row of six beneath trees in a narrow slit bisecting the irregular city block. She had the top floor of the first of these houses, just inside a rusty iron gate that was never closed. The knockered door, crooked in its frame, stood open. There was lumber in the lower hall. The apartment on the second floor was being remodeled. Its door yawned blackly and a smell of paint came out.

  She inserted the key in her own door on the floor above and switched on the lights. The place was old and shabby, but returning to it always gave her a feeling of pleasure. It consisted of a big living-room with a beamed ceiling sloping to windows at the north, an adequate bedroom and bath, and a huge kitchen with all sorts of nooks and cupboards. Best of all, there was a terrace at the back, roofed with a wisteria vine in summer. It would be nice for Nicky when the fine weather came, for they would live here after they were married, for a while anyhow, until he was completely on his feet.

  A small cold wind struck at Catherine. Her bright mood was gone. What was the matter with her tonight? Was it the sight of Hat La Mott’s car and what it conjured up? But all that was over and done with, for good. It had ended on that December morning in Brookfield almost two years ago when she found out about Stephen Darrell and Hat La Mott.

  She had gone into Stephen Darrell’s cottage a mile down the valley from the Wardwell house. She had been staying with her Uncle John and her Aunt Angela over the week-end and had been expecting Stephen the night before. He hadn’t come and she had concluded that he had been kept in New York. Walking into the village on Saturday morning to post some letters, she saw his car in the bumpy driveway.

  The car should have given her at least some warning. It was covered with the mud and rain of Friday night, which meant that Stephen had arrived at the cottage the evening before. She didn’t think of that; she thought only of seeing him. She opened the door without knocking and started to call out. The call stopped on her lips.

  Stephen was there, standing at the foot of the small enclosed staircase that led upward out of the sprawled, irregular book-lined living-room. He had a tray in his hands. On the tray were a coffeepot, cream and sugar, two glasses of tomato juice, and two cups and saucers. A woman’s hat, a green cloche with a peacock feather on it, was lying on a table. There were two used brandy inhalers near it. A pair of small green-leather sling pumps with very high heels stood side by side near the hearth. It was the shoes that told her, not only that a woman had been there with Stephen all night, and was still there, but that the woman was her cousin, Hat La Mott.

  It was the deception that was the worst. She could still recall the overwhelming bitterness of it. While she and Stephen had been walking through the autumn woods with his English setter darting in and out of the underbrush, while they had been on the river with the last of the colored leaves floating down, planning their lives together—what they would do, where they would go, what they would see—it had been Hat all the time. Hat, her little, exquisite cousin—

  With blinding, blazing economy her life was smashed in that second. The room, the shoes, the green cloche, the empty brandy glasses, the tray in Stephen’s hands, his face, the laughter wrinkles at the corners of his hazel eyes gone, the eyes themselves smaller, harder, brighter, his jaw taut, sharply angled—He had tried to talk to her. He had said, “Catherine,” in a low voice, as though he were afraid of being overheard, had put down the tray and started toward her.

  She hadn’t answered. She had simply looked at him and backed away. She knew she had to get out of there before the pain came. It had been an accomplishment.

  She had returned to the city that afternoon. Stephen called her that night and said he wanted to talk to her. She hadn’t even said “No”; she had hung up without a single word. He had written to her and she had torn his letter to pieces, unopened.

  If, later on, doubt had attacked her at times as to the truth of her conclusions, she put it down fiercely. You couldn’t disbelieve the evidence of your own eyes. There was nothing more to be said or done. Wash it out. A clean break was the only thing possible.

  Stephen was
already in the Navy. A week or so after-ward he was sent out to the Pacific. They hadn’t met since. In the late spring of the following year, she had become engaged to Nicky. As far as Stephen Darrell was concerned the only thing left now was a vague wonder as to why he and Hat La Mott hadn’t married. What difference did it make?

  She flattened slender shoulders impatiently, took off her things, changed into a cherry wool housecoat, returned to the living-room, and put a match to the fire her cleaning woman had left laid.

  Flames pulsed unevenly through the room, over the pumpkin-yellow walls, the dark wood, drew gleams from the fat cherry-wood desk that had been her father’s, mirrored themselves brilliantly in the silver leopard on the bookcase.

  The small statuette baa belonged to her Uncle John, It was a beautiful thing, of silver, inlaid with round golden spots. The unknown sculptor had managed to endow it with a peculiar life. The heavy but lithe body was in a crouch, belly sagging, the flattened head slightly turned. The eyes looked out at you, wherever you might be, warily and with an immense indifference. It had stood for years on her uncle’s desk in the house on Sixty-fourth Street, and she had loved it since she was a child.

  She eyed the leopard and turned away. Shortly after they became engaged, Nicky had said to her, “That’s the only thing you got from John Wardwell—and think of all the money he had. After all, you were his niece, and he had no family of his own.”

  She had corrected him. Her uncle had a family. Angela’s niece and nephew, Hat and Tom La Mott, had been brought up in the Wardwell house and he had always treated them as his own children.