The Ghosts' High Noon

by John Dickson Carr

  “We’re not far from the bayou now,” she said, when they had been driving for some time. And later: “That was Rouquette Avenue we just passed; keep to the right. The road begins a wide curve; you’ll see (or you’ll just barely see, rather) big houses set back at intervals on both sides. There are the street-lamps you heard about, although—”

  “Street-lamps on both sides, too,” Jim said, “alternately left and right. They seem many hundreds of yards apart, though it can’t actually be that far. I’ll just try a little speed for a change.”

  They roared along under that high emptiness. The wind whipped Jill’s scarf and blew darkish cloud-edges across a yellow moon.

  “It not only seems remote and romantic,” she declared; “it would be remote and romantic if it didn’t give one the creeps at night. What are you thinking?”

  “This seems the time and place for a quotation. In your presence, my dear, it ought to be a quotation from Swinburne; a quotation from Swinburne is almost imperative. But let’s try something else instead.

  “‘When the night wind howls in the chimney cowls,

  and the bat in the moonlight flies,

  And inky clouds, like funeral shrouds, sail over the midnight skies—

  When the footpads quail at the night-bird’s wail,

  and black dogs bay the moon,

  Then is the spectres’ holiday—

  then is the ghosts’ high-noon!’”

  Jill sat up straight.

  “Jim, what is that? I think I’ve heard it somewhere, and I’m not at all sure I like it. But spotting the quotation’s a different thing. What is that verse?”

  “You wouldn’t vote for Gilbert and Sullivan, would you?”

  “It is Gilbert and Sullivan?”

  “Yes. In the second act of Ruddigore it’s sung by the ghost of Sir Roderic Murgatroyd, one of the wicked baronets of Ruddigore Castle. We’re not meant to take it too seriously, you know. After warning his listeners that spectral revelry must end at cockcrow, Sir Roderic concludes:

  “‘And then each ghost with his ladye-toast

  to their churchyard beds takes flight,

  With a kiss, perhaps, on her lantern chaps,

  and a grisly, grim “good night”;

  Till the welcome knell of the midnight bell

  rings forth its jolliest tune…’”

  “Stop!” Jill cried. “That may have been written as comic opera, but the pictures it conjures up are horrible! W. S. Gilbert has a really evil imagination, hasn’t he?”

  “Had a really evil imagination, Jill. He died last year, you may remember, after saving a young lady from drowning in his private lake at Grimsdyke. He’s a ghost himself now, and knows all the answers; I wish we did. What are you signalling me about?”

  “On the left—we just passed it—is Sunnington Hall, old Mrs. Sam Laird’s place. Sunnington Hall and the Villa de Jarnac—on the right—are the only houses for the next quarter-mile. And we shall be at the Villa de Jarnac in two ticks; hadn’t you better slow down?”

  Jim had already done so. He had been counting street-lamps.

  Just beyond the fourteenth lamp-post on the right, as indicated, two stone gate-posts with no gate between them rose up above a low rough-stone wall. At the end of the gravel drive, set well back beyond live-oaks festooned with Spanish moss, stood a massive white house with white columns.

  “Why are we stopping here?” asked Jill.

  “This is where we wait for Leo Shepley. But we’re not stopping here, exactly, and not even stopping for a minute or so. I’m driving a little way in, as you see, and then backing out so we can face the direction we came from. If I can execute the maneuver without stalling this thing…reverse gear, now; mind that tricky clutch…ah, there we are!

  “You see, Jill, Leo should be along at any moment in a Mercer Raceabout. He can’t know I’m waiting, to be introduced to my namesake under properly formal circumstances, and I don’t want him booming past before I’ve had a chance to hail him head on.”

  Jill had not protested, or even asked why they must wait. Though the light of the nearest street-lamp could not have been called bright, it was bright enough to show him her eyes when she removed the goggles and leaned a little towards him.

  “We’re staying here, are we?”

  “For a little while, anyway; I’ll keep the engine running. Down there, in the direction we came from, before the road turns, Jill, you can just distinguish the gate-posts of old Mrs. Laird’s house by the light of another lamp. What is now our right side, I gather, is the side towards the bayou?”

  “Yes, of course!”

  “As for the other house, at present on our left: whatever reputation the Villa de Jarnac may have acquired, at least it can’t be haunted.”

  “Why can’t it be haunted?”

  With his left hand he pointed past her right shoulder.

  “There’s not a light showing at the front of the house. But you see that thing like an open-ended barn with a peaked roof, built directly against the house’s left side with one narrow end towards us? There’s an electric bulb burning in there, maybe two or three. You can’t see much inside the barn-structure; it’s set far back and there are too many trees in between. But there’s a good light on the curve of the drive that leads up to it. Ghosts and electric lights are incongruous; they won’t mix.”

  Jill, who had twisted round to look, turned back again.

  “What you call the open-ended barn-thing with the peaked roof,” she informed him, “was once the way-through to a private racetrack behind the house. A not-so-dignified Creole dignitary named Guy de Jarnac built it years ago. The front’s open, yes. At the back he had them build elaborate double doors which could be dramatically opened when he drove through to his own racetrack in a new car. But I don’t understand why there should be a light there. The way-through’s not used now; those double doors have been locked and barred. The stable’s at the other side of the house, and your notorious Yvonne notoriously keeps a carriage, not a car.”

  “Jill, how do you know so much about the place?”

  “First, because nobody can live in New Orleans without hearing everything there is to hear. Second, because—” She stopped. “Jim, why did you say you’re impelled to quote Swinburne when you’re with me?”

  “Do you really want me to tell you that?”

  Jill raised her eyes and spoke softly.

  “Please do tell me, if you want to! It may seem a little lost and ghostly in this part of the world. But we are alone, you know, and free to please ourselves. There can’t be any interruptions of the sort that kept happening on the train. —What’s that noise?”

  It was the boom of an engine with its exhaust open. They both saw the car approaching from the direction of the town: at a good clip, though not at top speed. Even at a distance and behind headlamps, there could be no mistaking the red Mercer Raceabout with the brass trimmings. Still less, Jim saw, could there be any mistaking the burly, dust-coated, begoggled figure behind the brass shaft of the steering-wheel. As protection from the wind, the Mercer had only a circular pane of glass, hardly much larger than a man’s head, atop a vertical rod on the steering-shaft. But Leo’s attention seemed concentrated with a kind of frozen fixity.

  And then there was another car.

  As the Mercer swept past the home of Mathilde de Jarnac Laird, out from between Sunnington Hall’s gateposts emerged the sleek nose and body of a five-seater Cadillac containing two persons. Its driver, who had no goggles but wore a dust-coat over his uniform, must be Raoul, Peter Laird’s chauffeur. Raoul stood up behind the Cadillac’s windshield.

  “Mr. Shepley, sir!” he bawled, in a voice so loud it carried to Jim and Jill in the Chadwick. “Mr. Shepley!” And then: “Whatever you’re gonna do, don’t do it! Mr. Peter says…”

  The Mercer increased its speed. Raoul turned as though for instructions to the occupant in the back seat, who needed both goggles and coat because the car’s top had not been ra
ised. What those instructions were became instantly clear; the Cadillac with the self-starter leaped in pursuit.

  As the Mercer bore down on the entrance to the Villa de Jarnac, a red Juggernaut with exhaust booming full, Jim slapped dust from his clothes and stood up.

  “What’s the idea, Leo? This is your old pal speaking! Take it easy, can’t you? Take it—!”

  A hand was raised at him as though to silence him. Otherwise the Juggernaut paid no more attention to Jim than it had paid to Raoul. It swung between the gate-posts and up the drive towards the house.

  “What’s the matter with him?” cried Jill. “Has he g-gone mad or something? What’s the matter with him?”

  There was no time to ascertain. The occupants of the gray Cadillac, now clearly as intent as Leo himself must have been, were hard on his track. As the pursuing Cadillac reeled between the gate-posts, Jill spoke again.

  “He’s not even headed for the front door!” She gasped. “He’s making straight for the way-through on the left-hand side! If those big doors are still closed at the back, and he doesn’t slow down…”

  He did not slow down.

  Gravel crunched and spurted under his wheels at the turn. The two-seater Raceabout disappeared inside the shed. And then two noises in quick succession exploded against the night.

  The first noise, not to be confused with any sound made by the car itself, could only have been the report of a fairly heavy revolver fired indoors. The second, overriding all other noises and blotting them out, was a shattering metallic crash.

  Jim looked at his companion, who shrank back in her seat. Fortunately, the Chadwick’s engine had not stalled; he put it into gear and took off up the drive, though not at the murderous pace of the other two; a chilling instinct told him he could do little good now. In any case, Peter Laird’s car had slowed down before following the Mercer inside.

  In a clear space at the pillared portico of the Villa de Jarnac, the driveway divided into two branches. One branch ran closely around the right-hand side of the house, presumably towards a stable. From the corner of his eye, as they approached, Jim noticed another car and chauffeur, the car a Peerless like his own at home, waiting with motor cold and lamps unlighted just beyond that side of the villa, facing outward under the yellow moon.

  But he caught this only at the corner of his eye. His attention never wavered from the other branch of the drive and the wicked barnlike structure to which it led, with a light still shining out on gravel.

  Stopping the car at a point just before Jill could have got a view of the inside, he switched off the engine, climbed down at one side while Jill climbed down at the other, and circled round the front to meet her.

  “Stay where you are!” he said. “Don’t try to go in there; don’t even look! I mightn’t go in myself if it weren’t necessary under the circumstances. I’m afraid…You won’t go in there, will you?”

  “Jim, why did you dry?”

  “Dry?”

  “You said, ‘I’m afraid,’ and then you stopped as though you’d fallen over something. Why, please?”

  “I stopped, Jill, because I’m not sure just what I am afraid of. You won’t go in? You promise?”

  “Of course I won’t go in, if you ask me not to!”

  But Jim did know what he feared. And he found it.

  The barnlike shed was spacious if not particularly high, an oblong some twenty feet wide by a little over thirty feet long. Though there were no windows, its peaked roof had been built almost entirely of heavy glass-squares now dingy and discolored. The inside walls, white stucco like so many outside walls hereabouts, also bore discolorations of time and neglect. The floor was concrete.

  Along the left-hand wall Jim saw half a dozen wooden stalls, rather like stalls for horses and about the same size. A heavy workbench, long bereft of tools or equipment, stretched along the middle of the right-hand wall. Against the white-stucco wall at the rear, massive double doors of carved oak, the remnants of a wooden bar still in its sockets, loomed up over a scene of wreckage. Dark beams crossed what would have been the ceiling if the roof-peak had not risen above them. On an electric cord from the central beam a thousand-candlepower Mazda bulb glowed yellow in its wire cage.

  The gray Cadillac, empty but for the lap-robe in its tonneau, had been driven well inside, almost to what lay beyond. Jim passed it and stopped.

  Leo’s Mercer, badly shattered, had run full-tilt into those double doors, splintering the bar across them and partly splintering the right-hand door without carrying either door off its hinges. One smashed head-lamp lay on the floor; what remained of the other had been squashed drunkenly between crumpled front fenders and twisted hood. At least there had been no fire.

  Leo himself, in goggles and torn dust-coat, his tweed cap turned the wrong way round, lay on the floor below the right-hand driving-seat. His left cheek was against concrete; above his exposed right cheek, just below cap and elastic that held the goggles, the ugly black stain of powder-bums showed where the bullet had been fired into his head.

  Raoul, the chauffeur, a stocky youngish man with a blue jowl, knelt beside Leo. Peter Laird, so shocked and shaken he could barely stand up, had retreated to the work-bench in the middle of the right-hand wall. Hearing Jim’s footsteps, the chauffeur looked up.

  “Better not touch him, sir. He’s gone.”

  “Yes, he’s gone,” said Peter Laird.

  Imbued with a kind of restrained hysteria, Peter suddenly whipped off his goggles (he wore no hat) and flung them on the work-bench.

  “Aren’t many men in the world you can respect, are there? Really respect and look up to; know what I mean? He was one of ’em; he was the real goods; I’d have done anything for him.” Then Peter burst out: “And now he’s gone; he’s gone for good; and is that all you’ve got to say about it, for God’s sake?”

  “Mr. Peter! Your mother—!”

  “She’ll have a fit, won’t she? She’s always having fits. Wait a minute, though!”

  Jim, himself feeling a little sick, had already removed his own hat and goggles. For the first time Peter seemed to see him and to grope for concentration as well as sanity.

  “Look!” he said. “Aren’t you the fellow who was in Alec’s office this morning? The Harper’s Weekly fellow?”

  “Yes. I—”

  “Well, print this! They said he might do it: all right! But I didn’t believe it, I couldn’t believe it; I never for a minute thought he would!”

  “Would what?”

  “What does it look like? It’s what they do, anyway; you hear about it all the time! They’ll take poison or stab ’emselves just before they jump off a bridge into the water. He drove in here hell-bent; he was always hell-bent. Just before he hit the doors, only a second or two before, he took the gun out of his pocket and…”

  Now Peter stood paralyzed.

  “I can’t think straight, can I? We can say that’s what he did; we can swear in court that’s what he did! But, if that’s honest-to-God what he did sho’ nuff, where’s the gun he did it with?”

  “I was just about to ask the same question,” Jim put in quickly. “Where is the weapon?”

  “It’s not here, is it? You don’t see anything, do you? It’s got to be here if he killed himself, hasn’t it? And yet…!”

  Raoul, who had been described as a steadying influence, went over to face the young man.

  “If I were you, sir, I wouldn’t get too excited. Maybe he threw it away from him, and we’ll find it. There’s no way out of this place except through the front, where nobody’s gone. No place to hide, either, and nobody here but Mr. Shepley when we came in. If you don’t mind, gentlemen, we might all pipe down a little. Somebody’s walking on gravel just outside; I think we’re going to have visitors.”

  They all looked towards the front.

  Into the bright light, derby-hatted and wearing a raincoat he didn’t need, sauntered a broad-faced man of middle age, the aggressiveness of whose bristling sandy mous
tache seemed contradicted by an easy-going, ruminating eye. Just behind him came a second newcomer, hatless, very much of Jim’s own height and build except that he was fairer of complexion and had fair hair.

  When the first newcomer’s eye strayed towards that sprawled figure beside the ruined car, perhaps its easygoing expression changed a little.

  “My name is Trowbridge, Lieutenant Trowbridge, and I’m a police officer. What’s going on here?”

  Then the second man spoke.

  “My name is Blake, Clay Blake,” he said in a voice Jim had never heard before. “And I’d like an answer to the same question.”

  10

  JUST OVER AN HOUR LATER, against that same background of dingy white stucco, the two Blakes, Clay and Jim, had their first opportunity to speak in private.

  A telephone call from the Villa de Jarnac had brought the police in force. When measurements were made and flashlight photographs taken from several angles, Leo’s body had been removed to the mortuary. Lieutenant Zack Trowbridge, who proved not too difficult and treated Jim in a curious way the latter could not understand, first questioned his witnesses together in the way-through. Then he decided he had better question them separately.

  “Seeing it’s the cops,” Lieutenant Trowbridge had declared, “I don’t think the lady of the house’ll kick too hard if I sort of commandeer a room for a little while. Wasn’t much fuss when I asked to use the phone. Just walk ahead of me, will you?”

  A massive and dignified mulatto woman, giving her name as Mrs. Emmeline Peabody and announcing herself as Miss Brissard’s housekeeper, met them in the entrance hall of the Villa de Jarnac. The lady of the house, it developed, was not at home. Mrs. Peabody at least partially explained this.

  In Mrs. Peabody’s terminology her employer was always “Miss Brissard,” whereas James Claiborne Blake she called “Mr. Clay.” Lieutenant Trowbridge took notes of the account she gave.