The Ghosts' High Noon

by John Dickson Carr

  On Monday, October 7th, the housekeeper said, Mr. Clay had left New Orleans to deal with some business affairs and attend a political conference in New York over the weekend. On Wednesday Miss Brissard herself had departed to visit friends in Mobile, Alabama. Miss Brissard had been accompanied only by her “social secretary,” not even by a maid, leaving her valuable carriage-horses to be “boarded” at a livery stable on Dumaine Street. Though expected back this evening, just a week after she had left for Alabama, Miss Brissard had not yet returned.

  Such evidence did not square with certain testimony, true or false, Jim had heard that afternoon. But he made no comment.

  Mrs. Peabody then led Lieutenant Trowbridge to a room at the rear of the entrance hall, a room obviously never used or perhaps even entered by Miss Brissard. It was a man’s den, no doubt the den of the late Guy de Jarnac, filled with leather chairs, sporting prints, and photographs of early automobiles.

  Here Lieutenant Trowbridge had separately questioned first Raoul, then Peter Laird, then Jim, and finally Clay. Jill Matthews, so self-effacing that the headquarters detective all but overlooked her when he met her outside in the drive, he said he would question later, since “our distinguished author from New York” could supply the story.

  The interrogation of the four men provoked a kind of minor riot, echoes of which could be heard in the hall outside. At length Lieutenant Trowbridge opened the door of the den and ushered out Clay Blake.

  “It won’t make sense,” he had raved. “The whole damn thing just won’t make any sense at all! Now I’d like to talk a little more to young Peter and that chauffeur; where is he? Ah! You two gentlemen,” the official gaze rested on the Blakes, “I won’t be needing—for the time being, anyway. But stick around, will you? Don’t stray too far away.”

  “And might I,” Clay Blake said to Jim, “have a word apart with you? The shed out there again, I think. Not the place either of us would choose, but you can hear anybody who comes near, and this is rather important. There’s a little something I must attend to here, which shouldn’t take more than a minute. Go along to the way-through, if I can persuade you; I’ll join you almost as soon as you’re there.”

  And so, over an hour following Lieutenant Trowbridge’s rather mysterious arrival, the two Blakes met for a private talk.

  Though Leo’s crumpled Mercer was still there, the gray Cadillac had been backed out into the drive. Apart from the damaged car, no trace remained of Leo himself. But Jim still pictured him lying there, in a linen coat torn but clean, when Clay Blake arrived almost within the promised minute. The tall, fair-haired candidate for Congress seemed to have no difficulty in following Jim’s thoughts. Evidently they were his own.

  “It is a horrible business, isn’t it? When you remember Leo—so vital, so full of bounce, drinking life like a cocktail and enjoying every sip—it’s hard to think of him leaving here as he did leave.”

  “I know.”

  Imaginative, brooding, in a lounge suit casual but of excellent cut, Clay prowled under the bright light and the glass roof. Then he leaned against the work-bench, left hand in his pocket and right hand raised.

  “But can we get one thing straight? I told you when you were telling your own story to Zack Trowbridge here in this shed; I just want to be sure I’ve made myself clear. Will you accept the fact that I didn’t phone you tonight and invite you anywhere, though I’m not sorry to have an ally on hand? Will you accept that?”

  “Yes. The voice on the phone was strong most of the time, but it wasn’t greatly like yours. Yours is heavier, better modulated, the voice of a man who does a good deal of public speaking, as you do.”

  “Well, I wasn’t the voice on the phone; I can prove I made no phone call from here tonight. And yet…and yet…”

  Again he brooded before straightening up.

  “Whoever impersonated me knew a devil of a lot. He knew you and I never met. But he also told you, in part at least, so exactly what I actually was thinking and feeling at the time that he might have been me in somebody else’s body. For instance…”

  “Yes?”

  “For instance, that part about asking you to call me Clay while I called you Jim. After so much talk with Leo, it had already occurred to me; we might do it. And the part about saying I was my own man again, ready to face anything, but faltering when it came to the pinch. Or saying I thought I could trust your discretion and didn’t mind meeting you. Though I’d never have phoned to suggest an interview here, that’s just what I felt or believed I felt. Leo didn’t expect to be on hand tonight; he’s never once turned up when he thought I’d be with Yvonne. When was the last time you talked to him?”

  “About eleven this morning; he reached me at the newspaper office. He said you’d be spending the evening at the Villa de Jarnac, but didn’t tell me Miss Brissard was out of town.”

  “Leo didn’t know. I didn’t know myself, until I came out here without even troubling to telephone in advance, and got the note she left for me with Aunt Emmeline.”

  “May I ask one or two questions about that?”

  Clay made a magnanimous gesture.

  “My dear fellow,” he said, “ask as many questions as you can dream up! This whole affair, which I’ve tried so hard to keep under wraps, is going to be on display in D.H. Holmes’s window. And I don’t mind; I’ve come to a decision. Actually, if it weren’t for the brutal, inescapable fact of what happened to poor Leo, I could throw up my hat and cheer. When I think how shabbily I’ve treated one of God’s most stimulating women, expecting her to be at my beck and call practically twenty-four hours a day, I know I ought to be kicked from here to Baton Rouge!

  “And I’m going to be absolutely frank, Jim. Except for one small matter, which you’ll presently agree is best kept to myself for the moment, I won’t conceal a thing. I’ll even tell you what’s driven me half crazy with worry. I’ll trust your discretion, in short, as Leo did say I could. As regards Yvonne, however, it wouldn’t matter a hill of beans if I couldn’t trust you at all. Wasn’t it the Duke of Wellington who said, ‘publish and be damned’?”

  “In that Harriette Wilson business, you mean?”

  “The notorious Harriette, if memory serves, wrote to him and intimated he might like to make her a substantial payment if she kept his name out of her memoirs. And the conqueror of Napoleon wrote back, ‘Dear Harriette: Publish and be damned.’ Isn’t that true?”

  “Yes, I believe so.”

  Clay Blake took a nervous turn across the shed and then went back to the work-bench, his forefinger still raised for emphasis.

  “But the conqueror of Napoleon, I’m willing to bet,” he continued, “was never accused of having relations with girls hardly into their teens or not yet at that happy state of womanhood. It’s what they’re using against your obedient servant, curse ’em; you’ll soon hear how they got at me. If THAT were published, even talked about, I could say goodbye to a political career or any other kind of career.”

  Again Clay crossed to the other side of the enclosure, glancing along the row of stalls against the left-hand wall before he swung round.

  “Old Guy de Jarnac, I believe,” he added, as though inconsequentially, “used to keep as many as six cars here, lined up for inspection like horses.—But you didn’t want to ask questions about my alleged debauchery among the near-nubile, now, did you? What did you want to ask?”

  “When was the last time you talked to Leo?”

  “He phoned me at something past one o’clock, about two hours after he phoned you. He said he’d been in touch.”

  “At eleven or thereabouts,” Jim explained, “he confessed to being very badly worried over something that concerned himself as well as you, though he didn’t say what it was. Did he strike you as being suicidal two hours later?”

  Clay took out a pack of cigarettes and juggled it for a moment before returning it to his pocket.

  “Not suicidal, exactly. More angry and confused man anything else: the wor
d I should choose would be ‘simmering.’ But it could easily have meant a suicidal mood, I admit. And didn’t you hear what Pete Laird was saying in here, just before the arm of the law hauled us indoors for separate interviews?”

  Jim studied him.

  “Let’s leave that in abeyance for the time being,” he suggested. “Now Mrs. Peabody, the housekeeper, tells us Miss Brissard has been out of town for a week, and you agree. Are you sure the lady really has been out of town since last Wednesday?”

  “Of course I’m sure, Jim! What prompts a question like that?”

  “I asked it, Clay, because another witness testifies she was very much in town. On two occasions—Wednesday afternoon and Friday evening—Miss Brissard is supposed to have called on General and Mrs. Clayton, of Esplanade Avenue, quote, ‘while her carriage waited in the street.’ The witness, of course, may not be the most reliable in the world.”

  Clay looked him in the eyes.

  “Your witness,” he retorted, “is either mistaken or lying, and lying wildly, too! Yvonne left on Wednesday morning; she said so here in the note she left for me.” He ran rapidly through his pockets. “I don’t seem to have it on me now; I must have put it down in the house.

  “But to say she’s associated with that particular couple, Jim, is not only wrong; it’s inherently absurd on the face of it. Yvonne, my Yvonne, has no more use for stuffy people than I have. Not that the general and his wife can be called too stuffy, especially Hellcat Tom. But I think you take my meaning. And I shouldn’t drop in on him to ask questions. Most of us, nowadays, don’t feel about Yankees as he does. Still! Here are two lines of doggerel from the late unpleasantness:

  “‘To cannon or bomb or to strong petard

  We answer the foe with our Beaureguard.’

  “And somebody else, possibly in imitation of that, has given us:

  “‘When Yankees are struttin’ and braggin’ and hatin’

  Who rides ’em down harder than General Clayton?’

  “Since you’re a Yankee, Jim, steer clear of Hellcat Tom. He may be well over eighty, but he can’t forget that as a cavalryman he was outranked only by Jeb Stuart and Wade Hampton.

  “All of which,” added the lawyer-candidate for Congress, smiting his right fist into the palm of his left hand, “is relevant neither to our purpose nor to the evidence. I’m not deliberately straying from the point, you know. Have you any more strictly relevant questions to ask me?”

  “Yes, two more. And the first is very simple. Will you describe Miss Yvonne Brissard, please?”

  “Will I—what?”

  “Just describe what she looks like, as simply as you can.

  “I’m not a very detached or objective witness, remember!”

  “You’re not expected to be. Let’s suppose she’s got lost in a strange city, and you’re trying to find her. How do you describe the lady?”

  “Well! ‘Is this the face that launched—’ No; sorry; no poetic flights! She’s rather tall for a woman; comes up to about the lobe of my ear. Hair so dark a brown it looks black. Eyes clear blue, and a smile that would…but you don’t want that either. Oh, one other thing, for purposes of identification! At the upper outside corner of her left eyebrow she’s got a very tiny mole: not a disfigurement at all, more like one of those beauty-spots women had a craze for wearing a few years back. I don’t know what else I can tell you…”

  “There’s no need to tell anything else. What you’ve said will do admirably for the purpose I have in mind.”

  “If all this is strictly relevant, too, and you seem to be nodding your head at me to swear it is, very well!” Clay drew a deep breath. “What’s your second and last question?”

  “That’s more difficult. It concerns the fact that you yourself were on the train from New York with Leo and Jill and me, only in car seventeen behind us. But it’s like a question in court which has to be approached in so roundabout a way that it sounds like a whole barrage.”

  “I’m still entirely at your disposal, Jim. Approach it in any way that seems best.”

  “Right. Towards midnight on Monday, then, the three of us were in Leo’s drawing-room, drawing-room A of car sixteen. We had been discussing the possibility that some enemy of yours might be plotting against you, and how this could be managed if it were tried. All of a sudden Leo had an inspiration. He said he thought he knew; he threw out various references to a wicked game without giving the slightest hint of what it might be. He never betrayed you in any sense, Clay, and never would have.”

  “Do you think I don’t know that?”

  To Jim the scene had returned in vivid lights and shadows.

  “At the height of the uproar,” he went on, “there was a knock at the door by a mysterious somebody who knocked and instantly made off, either towards the car ahead or the car behind. The porter, standing in the aisle at the rear of the car, said the person in question had ducked into the corridor leading to the car ahead. Whereas the conductor, planted at the end of the corridor, categorically denied that anybody had passed that way.

  “It was the testimony of the porter, whom Leo called Uncle Mose, which I myself doubted. Leo refused to accept this, saying he’d known the man for years and mentioning, incidentally, that Uncle Mose was also well known to Clay Blake.”

  Clay stared at him, head a little on one side.

  “You don’t miss much in the way of evidence, do you? In fact, you haven’t missed a thing so far. Well?”

  “There’s not much more,” Jim said, “but it’s got to have a meaning. When the train reached Terminal Station this morning, I climbed down to the platform. The porter was there, bowing over the luggage as usual. I tipped him and forgot him; Jill was there, too. Leo joined us in a moment, but suddenly remembered something in his drawing-room, and went back for it.”

  “It was a nearly full bottle of Bourbon, Jim, which almost got left behind. Well?”

  “Leo went back for it. Uncle Mose was no longer in sight either. Leo didn’t return for at least five or six minutes. When he did return, startled and upset, it was to tell us you had been on the train all the time, locked up in a drawing-room of the car behind. Everything he said indicated you must be a good deal more upset than he was. And he stayed with you.

  “If Leo went back to his drawing-room, he’d have no occasion even to look into car seventeen. There’s only one explanation which fits the facts as we know them.

  “Leo learned you were there because he’d just been told by Uncle Mose, the mutual friend of you both. Uncle Mose, who at your insistence had kept your presence a secret up to then, felt he had to speak out when you needed help and support at the end of the journey. So Leo went to your drawing-room, where you started to tell him your story.

  “All that part of your conduct, Clay, is entirely reasonable and understandable. And yet one move you made badly needs explaining if we’re all to stay sane. You yourself were the mysterious midnight presence who knocked at the door and ran. The porter, either devoted to you or bribed by you, would never have told us you ran back along the aisle to car seventeen.” Jim looked at him. “But if that’s what you did, what inescapably you must have done, just why did you feel you had to do it?”

  Clay returned the look.

  “Because I was a damn fool!” he burst out. “It was my indecisiveness again, of course. You’d better hear the whole thing now.”

  “If you feel up to telling it.”

  “Oh, I’m all right. Somebody has written that the actions we regret in this life are never our sins, but always our stupidities. My mind seems to run on nothing but quotations tonight; sorry; I’ll try to curb the habit!”

  Taking a key-ring out of his pocket, he twirled it round his forefinger and went on twirling.

  “I haven’t any sins on my conscience: any major ones, at least, that I’ve ever been aware of. But stupidities are all over the place, making noises at me like the sound of one vast, concentrated ‘Yaah!’”

  Still twirling the key-
ring, Clay began to prowl once more. This time it was not the width of the enclosure, between work-bench and stalls. It was the length of that shed, from open front end to ruined car against the double doors, back and forth in both directions, stopping occasionally to glance at his companion. There he paced: hagridden, bedevilled, but immensely likeable. Jim could sympathize with every sentiment he uttered.

  “As you’ve heard,” he said, “I went to New York on Monday, October 7th, taking the night train that got me there Wednesday morning. Though I did have to see a Wall Street broker about some investments, it was mainly to attend that Democratic conference at the Hotel Astor. But I didn’t stay at the Astor. I put up at the Plaza, at 59th Street and the Park, as I always do. And I had no idea Leo himself was in town.

  “The Democratic conference didn’t achieve much or amount to much. All they did in their speeches was make complimentary remarks about Democrats too long dead to carry any weight at the polls, or tell us what a fine and noble bunch of Americans we were. It’s just as well I didn’t have to pay close attention and make any decisions. I got it in the neck as early as Thursday afternoon.”

  “Got it in the neck?”

  “Like this. There was a letter in my mail-box at the hotel. A letter postmarked New Orleans, addressed to me in crude block capitals on the envelope. The message inside had been printed in the same crude block capitals on five-and-ten-cent-store paper.

  “I didn’t keep that message, you can bet; I felt as though I’d been holding a poisonous snake. I tore the thing up and threw away the pieces, but not before I’d read it about fifty times.”

  “You remember the gist of it then?”

  “Remember the gist of it? I can give it to you verbatim; I’m not likely to forget one word. Here it is.”

  For a moment Clay stopped pacing.

  “‘Dear sir,’ it said. ‘You are in bad trouble already; you may be in worse before I’ve finished. What makes you think you can serve a term in Congress, when you ought to be serving a term in the penitentiary? We’ll see to that, my friend. Unless you instantly obey orders you will get as soon as you return to New Orleans, your family and friends will be regaled with the details of your taste for children below the age of consent. You got great pleasure from at least two such creatures, though the girls themselves got no pleasure at all. Just how young do you like them, Mr. Blake? This is only a preliminary warning; you will hear from me again.’