The Silver Leopard

by Helen Reilly

  She looked at the black triangle dreamily. It was growing larger. All at once it wasn’t a shadow shape. It was real. It was thick solid blackness slamming down over her face, pressing her bandaged head deep into the pillow on which her head rested, crushing her lips against her teeth, stopping her eyes and ears and throat.

  She couldn’t breathe. That roused her. She fought. Her body was curiously leaden. She tried to fling her arms out. Weight pinioned them. She couldn’t breathe, couldn’t breathe—Her eardrums were bursting. Red spots danced on the blackness of her sealed eyelids.

  Then the sounds came, faint and far off at first. They grew in volume. They were footsteps and voices, a scream—The blackness was pulled away from Catherine’s face. She was being lifted. She was being lifted by Stephen Darrell and there was light in the room, a vast flood of it, and troopers and—something else.

  A body in dark-blue chiffon and lace, arms and legs thrusting, gold head at an absurd angle—It was Hat and not Hat—It was a terrible stranger. Hat got loose from the troopers who were holding her. She was running toward the window. She leaped. Glass smashed.

  Stephen pulled Catherine closer. “Don’t look,” he told her, and pressed her head against his shoulder, shielding her eyes with his hand.

  Chapter Twenty-Two - Fitting the Pieces Together

  “THAT, I THINK, does it, Miss Lister.” McKee shuffled papers together, folding them. His glance at the girl in the opposite corner of the big car was uneasy, in spite of the fact that she looked all right, considering. Three weeks had elapsed since that final night in Brookfield. Catherine had been in the hospital in Danbury ever since. He had been in Brookfield checking data, was taking her back to New York. The doctor had said, “Tell her everything. Make her face it. It’s now or never.”

  The Cadillac swung into the Hutchinson River Parkway. The last traces of autumn were gone. Winter had clamped down.

  “I see.” Catherine eyed a stretch of roadbed, drab and gray in the dull afternoon light. “You knew that Hat was guilty all the time?”

  “No, no. Not until I talked to Mr. Zantini at around eight o’clock on the night Dutch Pete died. I had an idea that Angela Wardwell had moved her husband’s body after she found him dead in his study, because she knew or suspected that either Hat or Tom La Mott had killed him. John telephoned to her late that afternoon. She drove at once to New York, arriving at the house, not at a quarter of eight, when you walked along the street and saw her getting out of her car, but much earlier, at shortly after seven. Some of this I surmised, some of it she has since told me. Dutch Pete saw her go in the first time. Cigarette, Miss Lister?”

  “Not now, Inspector.”

  If only she’d show a little more life. Her quietness was disturbing. He said, “You see the irony of the whole business was that it was your aunt and not Hat that Dutch Pete suspected of murder. He didn’t know your cousin was there.

  “Your uncle was killed by Hat with a blow from the silver leopard when your aunt was either in or entering the house. Hat hid. She had already sent her luggage to the Pennsylvania Station. She left a long time later-after she heard your aunt confess to Michael Nye that she herself had killed John in the heat of argument.”

  “Mike found blood on Angela’s coat when he was with her in the hall?”

  “That’s right. Dutch Pete saw your aunt leave the house, reseat herself in the car and go through the pretense of having just arrived when you got there. Then the discovery of the body. The handy man put two and two together and got five.”

  “What made you think of Angela at all?”

  “Michael Nye’s will.”

  “His will?”

  “Yes, his leaving you money he didn’t have. That was the restitution Angela Wardwell was to make. There would have been no point in Michael Nye’s exposing your aunt to the police; it wouldn’t bring your uncle back and Nye was fond of her. But a criminal cannot benefit by the results of his crime—and that was the expiation Michael Nye demanded and to which your aunt agreed. Failing Angela, you were John Wardwell’s natural heir in law. That scrap of paper Nye was figuring on on the night of his death was a straw in the wind. He sold your stock. He was going to tell you he’d made a fortunate deal that had netted you eighty-seven thousand dollars. He would later multiply that by two, after his marriage to Angela and when she had turned the funds belonging to the estate over to him. Afterward there would have been more. It would probably have worked. No one would have thought of asking questions. Nye sent for you that night to tell you you were a rich woman, and to present you with the preliminary eighty-seven thousand.”

  “So Hat killed him for money?”

  “To prevent your getting it, yes. You remember that Tom and Francine La Mott went first, then Hat was supposed to have gone, and finally Angela. Hat didn’t go. After pretending to do so, she remained behind and listened to final arrangements about the money. Your aunt was to have transferred the eighty-seven thousand dollars to Mike Nye’s bank on the following day.

  “Angela left. You were on your way to the apartment. There was time but not too much. The silver leopard was there, in the studio, a handy weapon—Hat used it. She was on her way out of the apartment, she was at the door, when you rang the bell. You had arrived ten minutes too early. She fled back into the bedroom and on into the studio. She watched you through the curtains. Her eye fell on what in her agitation she had missed earlier, the envelope holding the missing bearer bonds. Angela’s fingerprints might be on the bonds. She switched off the light, grabbed the envelope, and made her escape.”

  “Up until then, till Mike came back from the West, Angela had the bonds, Inspector?”

  “Yes. They were bloodstained. She concealed them among her own papers, afraid of the stains being noticed, until she could restore them without any questions being asked.”

  “And—questions were asked?”

  “Exactly. After Nye saw the lawyer, Harris, that day, he called Angela Wardwell. She had been, and still was, nervous about the leopard. She was the one who sent it to you, inspired by that letter on your uncle’s desk. She was the one who tried to get it from your cottage in Brookfield later, afraid that someone, some day, might discover the use to which it had been put. She had an almost superstitious fear of it. Then Stephen Darrell came back and began making inquiries about your uncle’s death.”

  McKee waited for Catherine to ask why. She didn’t. There wasn’t so much as a quiver in her at the mention of Darrell’s name. His earlier optimism began to dwindle. Could the damage done to her by those repeated blows be permanent? He was partly responsible. His uneasiness deepened.

  “About the bonds and the leopard, Inspector.”

  Her low voice was clear, her gray eyes level.

  “Oh—well, Mike Nye told your aunt that as long as she was upset about it, he’d get the leopard—which he did. Mrs. Wardwell brought the bonds with her when she went to the Fifty-ninth Street apartment that night. Nothing was said about the bonds to the others. Nye was simply to discover them among papers of your uncle’s—for Harris and the income-tax people.”

  The car was skimming the edge of Yonkers, going south. “It was Hat who hid the bonds in my room in Clearwater and threw the envelope down into the snow under my window.”

  “That’s right. And had her plan of having them discovered in your possession upset by Stephen Darrell. You’ve seen Mr. Darrell, Miss Lister?”

  Catherine had seen them all at the hospital, except Hat, who was in another hospital, behind bars. She hadn’t died in that plunge through the window. It would have been better if she had. Angela had come, and Tom and Francine and Nicky and Stephen. They were all shadows, insubstantial and without, any longer, any connection with her. Nicky had asked her to forgive him and that was silly, too. She wasn’t going to marry him; she had made that plain. He had been angry about it. That didn’t matter either.

  But politeness did, and the inspector was being kind and she had a certain intellectual curiosity.
He offered her a cigarette again. This time she took one. It was easier to take it than to refuse. “What about Dutch Pete?” she asked, inhaling smoke that had no substance.

  “Oh, that. Dutch Pete finally contacted your aunt when she was on the way home from Nye’s apartment on the night he died. It was the usual thing, ‘I’ve got information the police would like about your late husband’s murder’. Mrs. Wardwell bit. She had to. There was one unusual angle to it. Dutch Pete admitted he was in a spot, that he was just out of jail. He did it to make her feel better, get her to negotiate with him. He proposed Brookfield himself. ‘Later on you could install me as your caretaker and give me a nice little pension’—something like that.”

  McKee shrugged. “He had Angela Wardwell where the wool was short. She said she’d let him know, gave him a little money she had on her. New York wasn’t healthy for him and he took off in the secondhand car he bought. You know what happened up there. He followed the family to Clearwater, then back to Brookfield. The next day he contacted Angela for more money.

  “She hadn’t very much in cash. She told him so, told him she would give him what she had. They arranged that she was to put what money she had into the cottage wood box by four o’clock that afternoon. She actually deposited the twelve hundred and fifty dollars in the wood box at around three-thirty, and returned home.

  “Hat had overheard her telephone call to Dutch Pete—remember Hat was constantly on the qui vive. She had to be. Her safety depended on it. Very little went on that she didn’t make it her business to keep informed about. She followed Angela to the cottage, concealed herself, waited until Dutch Pete arrived and then killed him.”

  “I didn’t see her—”

  “No, and she didn’t see you, or I doubt whether you’d be alive now.”

  “And on that final night—”

  McKee shrugged again. His feeling of guilt was increasing with every moment. And yet, without proof, what else could he have done but try and force the issue? “It was pretty raw, I was afraid they’d see through me. The footprints were a gamble at best. Even if we had found anything good, the defense lawyer would have made mincemeat of it. I had to try and flush the perpetrator into the open. I knew the house would be watching and listening. Pioretti, the borough commander and I talked our throats dry in whispers. Hat, of course, was one of the listeners. As I say, she couldn’t afford not to be aware of what was going on.

  “She argued that I suspected Angela. I admitted I had no proof. You simply had to be killed, for a number of reasons. You would supply the police with a culprit; Pioretti favored you strongly. Most important, if you weren’t removed, even if the police were at fault and the case went unsolved, which it might well have done, Angela would ultimately and in her own time have turned John Wardwell’s money over to you, if you were alive. She felt that she had connived in a crime and that it wasn’t rightfully hers.”

  “That’s impossible. I wouldn’t take a penny. Uncle John’s money has nothing to do with me. I told her so.”

  The river slid by on the right. Some of the big ships were in. “How did you know it was Hat who had killed Uncle John, Inspector? She seemed no more guilty than any of the others. You mentioned a man named Mr. Zantini. What had he to—”

  McKee explained the garage and filling station owner’s connection with the Wardwells. “Zantini had been caught selling black gas. He came to New York to get your uncle to intercede for him with the local prosecutor. One of his pleas was that he had sold gas to Miss Hat La Mott. He said he had sold it to her, a tankful of it, on the evening of December the ninth.”

  The car had come down the ramp and they were protect ling east. The city was all about them, vast, indifferent, enveloping.

  “December the ninth,” Catherine said in a faint voice. It was the night Hat had spent at his shack with Stephen Darrell.

  “Yes. Your uncle said that Hat La Mott was not in Brookfield that night. Zantini gave him proof she was.” The Cadillac rolled along the Avenue of the Americas. Paint dribbled on one of the new signs. Jefferson Market, the clock that was always wrong in the square tower. The car slowed, went around the corner, and stopped before the iron gates of Lorilard Place.

  McKee got out, helped Catherine out, and they went along the small cobbled walk under trees that were leafless now, and into the house and up the stairs.

  Catherine unlocked the door. The November skies were gray, the living-room dim, cheerless. The cleaning woman had left a fire laid. McKee put a match to it. Catherine threw off her coat and sat down in a chair near the hearth.

  The inspector had more to say. She waited. “Miss Lister, I asked you a while ago whether there was any dissension, any cause for disagreement between Michael Nye and Mr. Darrell, and you said no. Isn’t it a fact that on Saturday morning, the morning of Saturday, December the tenth, you gave Mr. Nye reason to think that Mr. Darrell had—misbehaved toward you?”

  That was one way of phrasing it. What did it matter now? Catherine looked at her hands. “That’s true.”

  “Isn’t it also true that a little earlier that morning you stopped in unexpectedly at Mr. Darrell’s house?”

  She nodded stiffly.

  “And you found Miss La Mott with Mr. Darrell and you assumed that Miss La Mott had spent the night there?”

  Another nod.

  “Well, you were right. Miss La Mott did spent the night there because—”

  Then he told her, and the pieces finally fell into place and what Stephen Darrell had done with the missing $1100 was at last explained—and Catherine’s world blew up.

  Hat had spent the night in Stephen’s shack. She had spent the night there because she had killed a man and had sought refuge in the seclusion of Stephen’s shack on the river. Within a mile of the Wardwell house and a quarter of a mile below Stephen’s she had mowed down a laborer named Dykes. She knew she had killed him. Hit and run—she didn’t stop. She didn’t dare go on home. She had broken a headlamp and battered a fender when she struck and killed Dykes. She was known for her reckless driving. Her car would be examined. The police behind, her uncle’s house ahead, no one had seen her on her way over from the Merritt Parkway. She turned into Stephen’s driveway, put her car in Stephen’s garage and locked the doors. It hadn’t yet begun to rain; her tires were smooth and had left no tracks.

  Stephen wasn’t home when she got there. He came in and found her. She was half mad with terror. She made him swear again and again before she told him the truth that no matter what happened, he would never betray her.

  She forgot one thing, that she had had her tank filled at Zantini’s on the other side of town. He didn’t serve her himself, one of his attendants did, but Zantini saw her through the windows of the filling station. He didn’t connect her with the death of the laborer, Dykes; he simply used her as a lever to get John Wardwell to help him with the local court. But—the moment John Ward-well heard Hat had been in Brookfield, he guessed. He sent for Flat that day in New York. He had taken the $100,000 in bearer bonds from his safe. The bonds were on his desk. He told Hat that, instead of going to her eventually, they would go to the Dykes family. Then—she killed him.

  There was no warmth in the fire. Catherine said, “Will Hat—”

  McKee said, “No. Your cousin won’t suffer the usual penalty, Miss Lister. We’re checking on it now, but I don’t think there’s much question of the strain being in her. Her father and mother’s death when she was a child wasn’t accident. Richard La Mott was insane. In a fit of jealousy he deliberately ran the car with his wife in it off the road.”

  At Catherine’s expression of slow horror, he said gently, “Oh, Hat La Mott won’t be so badly off, considering. Money can do a great deal.”

  There was a pause. McKee looked at his watch again. “All clear, Miss Lister?”

  It was very clear. With this revelation about what had happened two years ago between Stephen and Hat, prison gates shut firmly on Catherine. Stephen had been in the right. She had been in th
e wrong. It wasn’t Stephen who had insulted and injured her. It was she who had done that to him.

  There was a step on the stair. The door opened and Stephen came in. McKee had been waiting for him. It was up to Darrell now. He said good-by, that he would see them, later, and went.

  Catherine sat on unstirring. She didn’t even turn her head. Stephen came across the room. He greeted her in a pleasant voice, asked how she was, pulled a chair forward, and sat down close to her. His eyes traveled over her face. “The Inspector told you?” He pulled out a cigarette, lighted it.

  “Yes,” she said dully. “He told me. I’m sorry, Stephen.”

  “You should be.” He said it without rancor, almost cheerfully.

  The walls of stone enclosing Catherine pressed in closer. She had done Stephen an irreparable injury, prejudging him, harshly, without waiting, without trust, or faith. It was done now. It couldn’t be undone. Everything was gone. Nicky into the silences, Angela crushed, Hat in a prison hospital. Nicky loved Hat. He had always loved her. She, Catherine, had never been more than second best, and that only because Nicky had known about Mike’s will and thought she would have money.

  She had had one thing. She had had Stephen Darrell, and she had thrown him away. Well, it was finished. There was no help for; it. Say a word of excuse and ask him to go. When he was gone and she was alone, she would have plenty of time to think things over. She wanted nothing else, couldn’t bear anything else. It was her portion. She had chosen it herself. It must be her portion from now on.

  Stephen pushed his chair back and got up. He stood on the hearth with his back to the fire looking down at her.