by Helen Reilly
“You’re sure, Binks?”
Binks sighed. “Absolutely sure, Inspector.”
“I see.”
It was a dead end. The leopard was a weapon. It was nothing but a weapon. Then why had Michael Nye removed it from Catherine Lister’s apartment? The Scotsman pushed his chair back roughly. He didn’t get up. Out of the flattened head, the sightless silver eyes gazed at him imperturbably. There was a message in the eyes.
He couldn’t read it. He tore his own glance loose, cleared his throat. “Anything on those bonds yet, Binks?” His voice was harsh.
“Ferrell’s working on them, Inspector. He ought to be through. I’ll go and see.”
Binks went out of the hot little room and closed the door. The clock on the wall said five-twenty.
Up in Brookfield, 60 miles to the northeast, the occupants of the big white house at the head of the hill were getting ready to dine. By half-past seven, they were all in the long drawing-room to the left of the hall, drinking cocktails.
Catherine had only taken half of hers but she felt slightly drunk. The lovely spacious room with its fine pictures, its period pieces and shimmering rugs, was swaying faintly. She kept watching for the source of the sway, couldn’t detect it. Nicky was at her elbow. He said something and she answered him absently and fished the olive out of her glass. It was hunger—that was what was the matter with her. She had had nothing to eat for almost 24 hours except those two wretched little sandwiches when she first got here. It was emptiness that was making her feel so peculiar, as though there were a wound-up machine under her ribs and it was spinning faster and faster and the room knew it and was responding to its vibrations.
Stephen Darrell was there, in a distant corner, beside Hat, glancing over the pages of a magazine with her, dark head bent, long legs crossed.
Catherine had shown her surprise openly when she came downstairs and found him in the hall. He said, “Hello, Catherine,” lazily, explaining for general consumption that he had tried to get to New York, couldn’t make it, and had come on to his shack here in Brookfield. Bracheen would have to wait for his Buick. “That’ll teach him to neither a borrower nor a lender be.”
Casual friendliness was the note he had struck with her. It suited Catherine perfectly. The machine under her ribs kept on spinning. There was nothing to warrant it. Angela, still tired and rather remote, but looking better, was sipping an old-fashioned and talking to Fran-cine about household matters. “Now that we’re here, we might as well stay a day or two.” Tom and Nicky were arguing horses and jockeys. Finding her dull, unresponsive, Nicky had sauntered over to the hearth. It was all usual and quiet and unfrightening, down to the step in the hall preparatory to the soft chime of the temple bells that would announce dinner. Her uncle had brought the bells back with him from China. Mrs. Barker’s Anna, subbing as a parlor maid, was familiar with the ritual of the house.
The chimes didn’t ring. The step wasn’t Anna’s.
Instead, a man in a topcoat walked through the looped amber hangings draping the tall rectangle of the doorway. The newcomer was Inspector McKee. Heads were raised, turned. Everyone stopped talking. Catherine looked at the inspector, and the machine under her ribs ran down and stopped.
The wind had died. The room was a vacuum. There was no sound in it anywhere. The inspector had come to a halt just over the threshold. He spoke. His voice wasn’t loud. It reverberated in the perfect stillness.
“Good evening. I’m glad to find you together.”
He was carrying a box. He put the box down on a sandalwood table near the door. He untied a string and opened the box. The thing he lifted from it was the silver leopard.
He put the leopard down on the table beside the box. He took an envelope from an inside pocket, took the bearer bonds out of the envelope. He looked at Angela. His gaze circled the others, too. It returned to Angela. He said, “I’d like you to prepare yourself, Mrs. Ward-well. I’m afraid I have shocking news for you.”
And then he told them.
The leopard was only a weapon but—they all stared at it, a lump of silver transformed into a bludgeon, raised high and brought down crashingly on living flesh and bone not once, but twice. Michael Nye wasn’t the first victim. No.
McKee said, “I’m afraid your husband, John Ward-well, didn’t die of a heart attack, Mrs. Wardwell. His death was murder.”
Chapter Sixteen - Time Turns Back Two Years
PATTERN REPEATED to infinity. It was like looking into a succession of mirrors, Catherine thought, and seeing always the same group of people bound together inescapably. Lamplight, shadow, the gleam of satin upholstery, the shape of a hand, the curve of a cheek, caught and imprisoned and reproduced over and over again.
The room was drowned in seas of incredulous horror. Angela gazed at the inspector sightlessly. She fumbled for the edge of the table, put her glass down, her fingers clasping its crystal rotundity.
“No—Oh, no.” There wasn’t any air behind her voice. Tom and Hat and Francine surrounded her. They stormed at the inspector. “You have no right to—”
“What do you mean!”
Sitting stiffly erect, her breast raised, her hands clasping the arms of her chair, Angela put an end to it. Her face was absolutely colorless. It was like moistened clay, a mask a sculptor hadn’t quite completed. Its definiteness was blurred. She didn’t faint. She showed the same strength she had displayed when she walked into the Fifty-ninth Street apartment after Mike was dead. “Please—I want to hear—”
McKee explained, slowly, carefully, and in detail.
He told them of Mike’s having removed the leopard from Catherine’s apartment on the afternoon of the day he died, of how he himself had thought, mistakenly, that the leopard contained some sort of secret opening. There was no opening. There had to be a reason why Mike had taken the leopard. “Then,” he indicated the bonds, “the stains on those were analyzed.”
Tom, Francine, Hat, and Nicky stared at the bonds. It was Hat who said with a sort of small gasp, “But those are the bonds that were missing—Where—”
McKee slid smoothly over the method of their recovery. “They were found in Clearwater and delivered to me. We know nothing yet of how they got there. We do know certain definite things about them.” He indicated the stains.
The stains were blood. The blood was not Michael Nye’s blood, it was blood that was much older. It had been deposited on the bonds at a far earlier date.
The blood was human blood. He gave them chapter and verse, quoted tests. The leopard next. After Michael Nye’s death, it had been tested and specimens of Nye’s blood had been found in crevices of the carving of the forepaws. The examination had stopped there. A second and more comprehensive examination was made. And under the round golden spots on the body of the animal other bloodstains were found. They were bloodstains that were older in origin and that coincided not only in age but in general characteristics with the stains on the bonds.
There could be only one conclusion. The leopard had been on John Wardwell’s desk on the day he died. Checking earlier on Catherine’s story that her uncle had sent the leopard to her as a gift, they had already established that, through Mrs. Bettinger, the caretaker in the Sixty-fourth Street house. In the course of her duties, Mrs. Bettinger had dusted the silver paperweight while Mr. Wardwell was out in the early afternoon on the last day of his life.
The bonds and the leopard were indissolubly linked by the tying bloodstains, similar in both instances. The bonds must, therefore, McKee said, have been on John Wardwell’s desk too. The rest was ABC. John, seated at his desk at an unknown hour on that distant day, the leopard at hand, a convenient weapon, a succession of swift blows by an assailant; blood had spurted on the bonds as he fell forward and died.
Angela Wardwell said nothing. She looked exhausted. Catherine, Nicholas Bray, Stephen Darrell didn’t speak. Tom La Mott and his wife both spoke at once. “But—” McKee nodded. He had studied the available data on John Wardwell’s de
ath on the way up in the car. “I know. Mr. Wardwell was found lying at the foot of the staircase in the lower hall, with contusions and a fractured skull attributed to his fall down the stairs when his heart failed. He didn’t die there. He died, as Michael Nye died, seated at his desk in the room on the floor above. His body was moved after he was dead.”
They fought that, with revulsion and outrage.
McKee let them go ahead. They could have it any way they pleased. The important fact was that John Wardwell had been killed. He said to Tom, “If your uncle’s death was not murder, this leopard wouldn’t have been wiped off, packed in a box, and sent to Miss Lister. I think time entered into it. To have been thoroughly cleansed, so that no faintest trace of an incriminating stain would be found, would have taken a long time. On the other hand, to remove the leopard which stood on your uncle’s desk for years, without a logical explanation of its whereabouts, might have aroused suspicion. I wasn’t in New York then myself. I was in Europe, but the usual routine investigation was made, as in all cases of sudden death.”
He paused, took a memorandum out of his pocket and scanned it. He said, “An unfinished letter was found on Mr. Wardwell’s desk. He was writing to Miss Lister when he was interrupted. The letter, if I’m correct, said, Dear Catherine, I am sending you this—It broke off there. I believe that letter inspired the disposition of the weapon with which Mr. Wardwell was killed. So—the leopard was wiped off and sent to Miss Lister.”
He waited for the question that any clever defense counsel would have asked, well aware that he was on delicate ground. He was positive that what he said was so. The gap between personal belief and legal proof was disconcertingly wide. The bloodstains on bonds and leopard were too old to group authoritatively. They could not prove, beyond a reasonable doubt, that the traces of blood on leopard and bonds was John Ward-well’s blood. If the family chose to oppose him—
They might have if it hadn’t been for Angela Ward-well. She had listened to him silently, a stone woman, an antique statue with empty eyes. Before Hat or Fran-cine or Tom La Mott could say anything, she said, bringing words out slowly as though the production of each one was difficult, “I don’t know whether John was killed or not. If he was killed, whoever killed him has to be found. Michael was killed too, in the same way—”
The room settled down then. The calm was unnatural, frozen. It served its purpose. McKee already had the surface history of John Ward well’s last day. He extracted a personal report from each of them, as extensive as they were able, or willing, to make it.
The background first. John Wardwell had been a sick man for some time before he died. He had spent October, November, and the early part of December of that year in a sanitarium, in an effort to regain his health.
On the day he died, December the twenty-second, except for Mrs. Bettinger, he was alone in the house most of the day. Hat was visiting in Boston and Angela Ward-well had come up here to Brookfield to prepare for the holidays, bringing the other servants with her. The Wardwells always spent Christmas in the country. No one dreamed of any immediate danger. John had not let even his wife know how bad his heart condition was. Tom and Hat La Mott, who had returned to the city en route to Virginia, had both been with their uncle during the late afternoon. They said that their uncle was alive and well and with no outward sign of anything wrong when they left him at his desk in the study off the living-room. They both remembered events clearly later, because of the tragedy of the evening.
Nothing then, for more than two hours.
At seven-forty-five, Angela Wardwell had arrived at the house according to plan. The arrangements had been made in advance. She was to drive her husband, Catherine Lister, and Michael Nye up to the country that night.
Catherine was walking down the street when her aunt got out of the car, and the two women mounted the steps together. There had been no answer to Angela’s ring. Knowing John was there, she hadn’t brought her key with her.
Angela wasn’t particularly alarmed at first. Mrs. Bettinger was deaf and mightn’t have heard the bell. Deciding that John might be with Michael Nye, whom they were to pick up at his apartment, Angela went round, the corner and telephoned to Michael.
John wasn’t with Michael. Michael came to the house at once. He was there within five minutes. As there was still no response to their ringing, he volunteered to go round to the back and try to get in an unlocked window, if he could find one. He had found one. He opened the front door to them with reluctance—and their worst fears, acute by that time, were more than realized.
Mrs. Bettinger was asleep in her room on the top floor. John Wardwell was lying on the black-and-white marble paving at the foot of the staircase, blood coming from under him. He was dead. The doctor had been sent for, and finally the police.
The verdict of both the police surgeon and John’s own physician was death from a heart attack. He had had a prescription for the medicine he took filled early that day. The box was in the pocket of his overcoat in a closet in the lower hall. The deduction was that he had been seated at his desk in the study on the second floor when he felt an attack coming on. Starting down to get the medicine, lie had been overcome at the top of the staircase. Both doctors said that in all probability he had been dead when his body struck the marble paving in the lower hall.
That was the gist of it, the bare bones. It had been satisfactory then. Everything had changed now. McKee reflected that there were certain constants. Michael Nye had been killed because he knew, or suspected, how John Ward well had died, known or suspected a given individual. As far as Michael Nye’s death went, seven known quantities and one unknown made up the available field: Angela Wardwell, her niece and nephew, her nephew’s wife, her niece’s fiancé, Stephen Darrell, Catherine Lister, and Nicholas Bray, the man Catherine was going to marry. The unknown quantity was the visitor who had arrived after Angela left Michael Nye’s apartment, and who was there when Catherine went in. If any one of this cast could be eliminated where John Wardwell was concerned, it would be a help.
The two men, not members of the family but about to become so, had sat on, shocked, silent, attentive, and untouched by questions. The Scotsman addressed himself first to Stephen Darrell, on a sofa beside Hat La Mott, holding the hand she had slipped into his.
In spite of his excellent control and the fact that he was no relation of John Wardwell’s, Darrell was rather badly shaken up.
“Were you in the Sixty-fourth Street house on the day John Wardwell died, Mr. Darrell?” McKee asked.
Darrell said, “No.”
“You didn’t see him at all on that day?”
“I did not.”
McKee wasn’t satisfied. “Can you tell me where you were, what you did do?”
Darrell remained cool, unhurried. Composure wasn’t achieved without effort, and his jaw was too tight.
“Within reason, Inspector. Two years is a long time. Let’s see—December the twenty-second, nineteen-forty-three—I was already in the Navy and on call from my station. I had a lot of business to wind up, uniforms to be fitted, that sort of thing. I remember now, the call did come through. I got a telegram ordering me to report for duty that night at six o’clock, and I took the eight-forty-five out of Grand Central for Sampson, New York.”
There were, so far, no alibis for anyone. Tom La Mott could have returned to the house after he said he left it at five o’clock. So could his sister at some time before six. Francine La Mott could have gone there; the hotel at which the La Motts lived was only a few blocks away. Angela Wardwell could have arrived, not when she said she did, but earlier, in time to do what had been done, go out to her car and wait there for Catherine Lister to arrive. Darrell had no alibi either. Nicholas Bray remained.
“What about you, Captain?” McKee turned to Bray, seated on the arm of Catherine’s chair.
Bray’s blond head came up arrogantly. His blue eyes were opaque. There was a flush on his thin cheeks. He got to his feet, put his back against a cabi
net. He said, “Yes, I saw John Wardwell that day. As a matter of fact, John sent for me. What’s more, we quarreled.”
There was sudden sharp tension at that, in Catherine Lister, in Tom and Francine La Mott, in Hat La Mott most of all. Her small face had grown smaller. She was frightened. She took her hand out of Darrell’s, leaned forward. “You’re making too much of it, Nicky,” she protested, her husky voice unsteady.
Bray ignored her. He said coldly, looking at McKee. “You see, at that time, Hat and I were engaged to be married. John Wardwell disapproved of our engagement. Fie sent for me and told me so.”
There was a pause. Bray seemed to have finished. McKee looked at him. “You say you and Mr. Wardwell quarreled, Captain?”
Bray shrugged. “I wasn’t exactly pleased to be given the brush-off so cavalierly. But as—well, as Hat was evidently taking orders from her uncle, there wasn’t much I could do about it. So I said okay and walked out.”
McKee got the impression that what Nicholas Bray had said wasn’t what the three La Motts, Hat and Tom and Francine, had expected him to say, or what they had been afraid he would say. The tension eased out of them. Bray had no more and no less of an alibi than the rest. He declared that he left the house well before five o’clock, didn’t know where he went, or what he did afterward; he wasn’t in a mood to recall details.
It struck McKee that as well as answering him, these people were answering each other, and Angela Wardwell. “I wasn’t there. I had nothing to do with it. I left the house at such and such a time—long before anything happened.” Their statements might or might not be susceptible of proof or disproof; two years was a long time. He had to have the statements, had to make the attempt. He noticed in passing that Catherine luster was surprised by the information that the man who was now her fiancé had formerly been her cousin’s.