by Rufus King
“My grandson is sleeping under the influence of an injection given him by Dr. Hesley.”
“I know that, Mrs. Giles.”
“You have told me that you trust him. I shall ask you to keep that trust, Mr. Stedman, until Kent wakes.”
She was slipping from him again. Like an eel, Stedman thought, no matter how aristocratic a one. Secretly he admired this stubborn streak even as it annoyed him. He had few notes left to play with which to seduce her, to break her down. He was thoroughly frustrated and cold with anger, although this was the last thing which his manner showed. He took a fresh grip. His air of kindliness increased.
“The smashup of the brougham, the reception at City Hall, your grandson’s collapse right after it, all of those things prevented me from questioning him at once upon our conclusions concerning the identification tag. I am still prevented. It will be morning before Lieutenant Giles shakes off the effect of the injection. Dr. Hesley has told me so. There is the night.”
“Night?”
“Certainly. There are hours of it left. Hours during which we remain blindfolded until he talks. Russdorff’s murder was no common crime. Our brief belief that your grandson was his killer, whether from self-defense or whatever, was cancelled by the incident of the brougham when his own life was purposely put in jeopardy.”
“Purposely, Mr. Stedman?”
“Did you think we would ignore that sudden madness of the mare? Fail to have her examined by a veterinarian? We know that American hemp did the trick, had probably been mixed in with her feed. Well, that didn’t work. And do you think this murderous train will stop? Now?”
She was frightened sick.
“Kent is my grandson. I love him, Mr. Stedman, more than anything on earth. But he is a soldier too.”
Stedman drew a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped light sweat from his brow. She had beaten him. Thrown that final stubborn negation straight in his face, wrapped up in a background of the national anthem. When you came right down to it, what sound reason was there for any such grandiloquent implications? Simply because Russdorff was a polyglot fusion of God knew how many nationalities and was listed on the records as an international crook.
And also because if you looked at it otherwise it made so little sense. People went a little mad these days. It took but the smallest pressure to distort the commonplace. He wondered whether he himself might not be suffering from this common complaint. It could have been a meeting of pure chance, and young Giles might have resented some crack which Russdorff made. As elemental as that. No, it couldn’t have. It wasn’t that kind of homicide. There was the knife. That above everything else, in Stedman’s opinion, let out young Giles.
He stood up and replaced the enlargements in the brief case. He zipped it closed.
He said, “The patrol has moved into the grounds itself. The patrolman will hear you, Mrs. Giles, should you find it necessary to call out.”
CHAPTER 30
The house was empty.
It wasn’t, of course, and Mrs. Giles knew it, but that was the impression it gave her. Mr. Smith was out, expending his curious restrained fury on whatever its objective may have been, and Miss Ashley was out so far as Mrs. Giles knew.
But Kent was asleep upstairs in his room under the eye of that disturbingly muscular Nurse Jones, and young Mr. Wade could be in, while Leila and Ella were definitely in the kitchen. Still, she felt alone.
She sat there in this immutable emptiness, summing up the deadly high lights of the past two days in an effort to arrive at some coherence out of their confusions. The high lights were significant but few, and while she brooded on them the minutes, like a long and lethargic fuse, crept ticking toward the powder keg of midnight.
They centered on Kent.
Mrs. Giles abjured coincidence or chance. Purpose had altered Kent’s planned departure from Washington and had sent him on ahead of time by plane. She supposed he would have had small difficulty in getting one, not only from his present prominence in the force but also through his wide acquaintanceship with other fliers in the service.
Then the fate lines of three people met at a common point: Kent, Miss Ashley, and Mr. Russdorff, with the common point being the gravel driveway below her sitting-room window. Had this triple joining been purposed too? Death made Mrs. Giles think it had not. Kent and Miss Ashley, yes: the whole atmosphere of that rendezvous had reeked of the prearranged. Then Mr. Russdorff’s entry upon it had been the unexpected, the unplanned note. And Mr. Russdorff died.
Then, the lie. The acted lie so poorly done by Kent, and so professionally accomplished by Miss Ashley, of never having met prior to that public introduction at the morgue. Or had Miss Ashley’s professional performance been marred by those two touches of the false forwarding address and the contradictory statements as to the plant in which she worked as a gun inspector?
What was the story she had fabricated to send Kent off from the murdered Mr. Russdorff and into furtive flight? Surely it had plucked loudly upon the strings of patriotism in some form. Nothing else would have shackled him to such willing collaboration.
How closely, Mrs. Giles wondered, did the things which she knew combine with those of Mr. Stedman’s theories, theories which had struck Mrs. Giles as very vague ones. As much so in fact as were her own.
What of Mr. Stedman’s feeling that murder had been aimed at Kent? The brougham smashup pointed vividly toward that end. But one thing, and probably the most important thing of all, Mr. Stedman did not know: Miss Ashley’s connection with the situation. The scarlet thread of her ran through it all like thin bright danger.
Yes, Miss Ashley.
It boiled down to that.
Westminster chimes announced the half-hour. That would be half-past ten. Mrs. Giles stood up. She felt she had decided nothing, and still the pressure to grasp some decision had grown into urgent necessity. She would go upstairs and see whether Miss Ashley was in, and if she was Mrs. Giles intended to drag from her the truth.
Miss Ashley was not in her room, and the room held that completely undisturbed look which convinced Mrs. Giles that Miss Ashley had not entered it since Leila had tidied it in the morning. She was satisfied that Miss Ashley had not returned that evening from the plant.
Once more out in the hall and walking through the depressing glow of its dull red lighting, Mrs. Giles was aware, as she passed his door, that young Mr. Wade was home. There were sounds coming from behind the door, almost, she thought for a puzzled moment, as though a heavy piece of furniture were being moved.
She went in to see Kent. Nurse Jones was sitting implacably muscular in a chair near a window. A shaded night light shone on a magazine in her hand. So far as Mrs. Giles could make out, its title was True-something.
“Is he all right?”
“Perfectly, Mrs. Giles. I suggest that you follow Dr. Hesley’s advice and go to bed.”
“You would call me, of course?”
“Certainly. Don’t forget the sedative tablets you are to take. Good night, Mrs. Giles.”
“Good night, Nurse.”
Mrs. Giles went to her rooms. She carried the look of Kent’s face on his pillow with her. The peaceful helplessness of it: so open, through the betrayal of drugged sleep, to undefended attack.
Mr. Stedman’s alarms over Kent’s safety persistently beset her. What could occur? How could the feet of murder step past the patrol on the grounds and, once inside the house, step softly up, then, quelling the gorgon Nurse Jones, step onward into within reach of Kent?
Mrs. Giles frankly did not know. But she was taking no chances. She went to her desk and took a revolver of .44 caliber from a hidden compartment. The gun had been one of Papa’s which he had bought from a sheriff while touring Texas in the old Stanley Steamer. It had a pearl handle, and Papa regretted the fact later. He always felt he should have gotten the sort with notches in it in case he ever had to add one.
Now that the gun was in her hand Mrs. Giles wondered what to do with it. It s
eemed so sizable. She called upon her fund of literary precedents. She tried it in several handbags, but its outline was as noticeable as though it were openly carried in full sight. A muff was of course absurd. She recalled one extremely early opus in which a garter had been employed most effectively, but apart from the fact that garters were no longer in existence Papa’s gun was far too heavy for anything like that.
She rummaged in a bureau drawer of odds and ends, and a large knitting bag which Elsa Marfoot had given her last Christmas seemed the perfect solution. Mrs. Giles, who did not knit, had never used it. As she had no yarns, she stuffed a sweater into the bag and bedded the gun in its folds.
Then she went downstairs to wait.
CHAPTER 31
Fergus added the last pair of serviceable socks to his stuffed suitcase. They were drab affairs in workmanlike gray and diametrically different from the gaudy raiment in which it was his usual pleasure to indulge. They were symbolic to his backward mind of this whole unpleasant venture.
His deepest displeasure lay in the fact that his role had called upon him, at the shop, to work. And there had been the endless delays. His basic nature (a physician had once given him a working-over and had mentioned glands) was all animal and, as such, amoral almost to a complete degree.
He was burning into a slow temper which was laced with fear. Smith’s own rage had touched on panic just before Smith had lunged out into the night, and the panic had communicated itself to Fergus. To his feral brain it had turned River Rest into a jungle with himself deserted, no matter how momentarily, and at bay.
He felt on his own, beset through a thoroughly mysterious quirk of chance with secret dangers. His first thought had embraced nothing but a primal urge to escape from what his simple reasoning could identify as nothing less than a menacing trap.
But escape to what? He was completely penniless, for he spent money as soon as it reached his pocket, and in this disgusting world at war, where men of his age and physique were open at any moment of the day to official questioning, where would he be without Smith?
If he had money he would be all right without Smith. That thought had come while he was throwing his shirts into the bag. Suppose, he wondered, the thing were still in the house? A blaze of hope shot through the jungle. If he could but lay his hands on it and then skip, escape would be assured.
He could sell out to the others.
He wondered feverishly how much he could get. Thousands and thousands of dollars surely. With such a fortune as a stake he could hit Mexico, the coast of which he knew reasonably well from calls at Tampico, Port Lobos, and varying ports while working on a tanker.
The prospect dazzled. He shut the suitcase and snapped its hasps and lock. He went into the bathroom and looked at his face in the mirror. Better cool it off with cold water, he decided. Better do a job on his hair.
Before he looked the old woman up.
CHAPTER 32
At eleven o’clock Mrs. Giles left the drawing room and went back into the kitchen. She sent Ella and Leila up to bed. She told them that she herself would attend to the lights and to locking up. She refused a suggested sandwich and a glass of milk.
As she returned along the hall she caught sight of the flash of a match being struck outside in the vestibule. She saw its gleam through the stained-glass panel of various geometrical figures which Papa had had put into the door.
Mrs. Giles stood still in the hall’s amber light for perhaps a minute. Mr. Stedman was the first thought that came to her, but the bell did not ring. The curiously harried Mr. Smith? He had a key and yet the door did not open.
Queer, she thought.
Looking anything but willowy, Mrs. Giles took a firm and utterly impractical clutch on the knitting bag. Her six-shooter technique, although all right in theory, was almost suicidal in practice. She opened the front door herself.
A startled, burly man in a policeman’s raincoat spun around and faced her. He took the cigarette he had just lighted from his lips.
“Catching a drag or two out of the rain,” he said. “You’re Mrs. Giles?”
“Yes, officer.”
“I’m the patrol. Last night I was mostly out on the main road, but tonight they’ve moved me into the grounds.” He looked glumly out at the depressing downpour. “It’s a rotten night.”
“Would you care to wait inside?”
“Thank you, I couldn’t do that. I shouldn’t even be up here in the vestibule, but I’ve been traipsing in this flood since eight.”
“I wonder whether you noticed one of my guests, a Miss Ashley, either coming in or going out this evening?”
“Would she be the one who went off in a taxi last night with Lieutenant Giles? Her looking all like an angel in white?”
Mrs. Giles repressed an antonym of “angelic.”
“Yes.”
“I recall her well. I recall her from the fact of their dismissing the cab before it was even out of my sight and their walking straight back here and through the gates.”
“They—they returned directly to the house? Right after they had left?”
“Whether the house or not I could not say, but into the grounds they went, and not another sight of them. I thought it a pity. Such a fine pair, the two of them.”
“A pity, officer?”
“What else could it have been but a spat? I am hoping it’s healed by now. That’s me, Mrs. Giles. Beatrice, my wife, says I’m little more than a great big bag of romance.”
Mrs. Giles preferred more concrete information and less of the lovelorn-column ilk. She was fully determined to back that asp-like hussy up against a figurative wall and have it out.
“Then you did see Miss Ashley tonight?”
“No ma’am. Not tonight. The only ones tonight since I’ve been on were the doctor and a stocky gentleman breathing fire and Mr. Stedman. They all came out of the house. Nobody yet has gone in.”
The fire-breathing specimen would naturally have been poor, excited Mr. Smith.
“Thank you, officer.”
“You are welcome, ma’am.”
Mrs. Giles returned to her chair in the drawing room. It was placed near the entrance at a vantage point which gave her a clear view of the front door. This later information bewildered her completely: the fact that Kent and Miss Ashley had dismissed the taxicab and walked back at once into the grounds.
They had gone to no hot spots, an obvious fact both from Miss Davis’ having been unable to locate them and from the policeman’s statement, even though Kent had considered it expedient in the victoria to prevaricate about it. No, they had come back to River Rest.
And then?
Had they entered while she had been upstairs in the studio with Mr. Smith and Mr. Wade? Or sooner even, while they had all been here in the drawing room? Again the irritating veils of deception baffled her. The silence which had marked their presence. The concealment which they must have effected during the nightly tour of Leila turning the lights out and locking up.
Was that woman in the house right now? Brewing her witch’s broth for Kent’s deeper ensnarement? Perverting his mind to her own evil uses under the star-sprinkled banner of patriotism? Invisible and yet here?
Her aptitude for astrology hinted at the occult. How right she had been about the year 1928 and, yes, how equally so in her warning of not to travel. If you could call a ride in a victoria travel. But why not? Surely the essence of strange foresight had been there.
Was Mr. Stedman wrong? Had the victoria attempt at murder been directed not against Kent but against Hopkins, with herself just thrown in as excess ballast? The original plan had been for Kent to ride in the official car with Mayor Saltensburg and not in the victoria. Yes, sense preferably pointed to Hopkins as the target.
To kill Hopkins before he remembered where it was he had seen Mr. Russdorff?
Before he recalled the man whom Russdorff had been talking to: the man of whom Hopkins had viewed nothing but a back? The man (could this be true?) who was to
become Mr. Russdorff’s murderer? Who well could have feared that Hopkins had viewed more than just a back?
A sodden cigarette butt—a torn section of an illegible letter—a fleck of gold-faced paper which once in sunlight and once in partial shadow…Mrs. Giles’s tired old head started to nod.
A sound jerked it upright.
Fergus Wade was standing in the doorway.
The grandfather clock struck twelve.
CHAPTER 33
Fergus had done a good job.
His temper was once more completely under leash and a low, clever cunning smoothly in its place. The house was still a jungle, but he himself was no longer at bay. Rather, he felt supreme, a king of beasts, stalking on sure and softly padded feet his prey.
This weak old woman.
How simple the setup seemed. The servants were all in their roosts in bed. And even if they hadn’t been, what of it? One fragile zany and two wraiths. The grandson was knocked out of the picture with a shot of dope. The nurse was anchored by his bedside. Suppose she did start moving? She was nothing but another woman.
Fergus smiled shyly and walked into the drawing room.
“I didn’t mean to disturb you. The house was so quiet, I thought everyone was asleep. I’m worried about my uncle.”
Relief flooded Mrs. Giles. How clean and fresh and workmanlike he looked: a breath of clear air through the miasma of her nightmarish thoughts.
“I saw your uncle when he left, Mr. Wade. He struck me, too, as being perturbed.”
“It’s gone, you see.”
Mrs. Giles didn’t.
“Something of your uncle’s?”
“Yes. That etching of yours which he bought at the bond sale.” Fergus’ eyes bathed her with candor. “Uncle was very fond of it, Mrs. Giles.”