The Ghosts' High Noon

by John Dickson Carr

  Still no comment was made.

  “Yes,” the lieutenant argued, “we’ve accounted for the four witnesses known to have been at the scene of the crime. We know where they were and what they were doing. In fact, we’ve accounted for everybody except…

  “A few minutes ago,” he added suddenly, “I came out from the house to do something or other. No, it wasn’t to question you people or trap anybody into damaging statements! It was to do something or see about something I had to attend to. And yet I can’t seem to…Don’t mind me, gentlemen; I get like this sometimes; in just a second or two I’ll remember what it was. It was…”

  And then his brow cleared, as though at a great light. Even the strawberry-rash had almost faded. He looked at Clay.

  “Excuse me, Mr. Blake, but wasn’t it your car and chauffeur in the drive at the other side of the house? They’re not there now, are they?”

  “Of course they’re not there now,” Clay said with some asperity. “I sent the chauffeur on an errand; he has instructions to come back. But what’s the idea, Zack? You knew that, didn’t you? You were within hearing-distance when I told him?”

  “I was, Mr. Blake, and that’s what reminded me. It’s that nigra housekeeper, the one who looks like a lighter-colored Aunt Jemima; she’s in a state about something, going on fit to bust! Now you’ve got a way with servants, Mr. Blake. Would you just step into the house and quiet her down a little, maybe?”

  “Yes, certainly. What’s the matter with Emmeline?”

  “I can’t tell you that, Mr. Blake. The more I talk to some of ’em, the less sense I get out of ’em. Oh…and before you go, sir, there is one other little thing.”

  “Yes?”

  “I said we’d accounted for everybody’s whereabouts at the time of the shooting. But we haven’t quite accounted for yours. Just for the sake of argument, where were you when it happened?”

  “I was in the library at the back on the other side of the house.”

  “Was anybody with you?”

  “Have I got an alibi, you mean?”

  Lieutenant Trowbridge hooted broadly at this.

  “Alibi?” he scoffed. “That’s the best one I’ve heard tonight, that is! Where would I get off, now, suspecting you of funny business? Be a great day, wouldn’t it, when you had anything against Mr. Shepley? This is strictly to keep the record straight, that’s all.”

  Clay studied him.

  “I have no alibi for the very instant of the crime, it’s true. But then I haven’t got wings or a cloak of invisibility, and I can’t walk through walls.

  “I heard a car come roaring up towards the house. Though it sounded like Leo’s style of driving, I didn’t even think it might be Leo; he never came out here at night. The car roared past and, by the sound of it, must have made a very spectacular turn. Then came the gunshot, or whatever it was, and that appalling crash everybody heard.

  “Another car, which had been tearing after the first, slowed down so much I could hardly hear it. I went out in the hall. Aunt Emmeline, the housekeeper you’re concerned about, asked me what had happened; I asked her, and neither of us knew. I went outside, where—where I met somebody who moved on. I was still standing there, hearing voices from the way-through, when you yourself walked up the drive.”

  “Bet it kind of surprised you, didn’t it, to see me here tonight?” asked Lieutenant Trowbridge. “There’s a story attached to that, too. But it’s getting late, you know; reckon it must be close on midnight; we’ll have to break up soon. So before you do go, Mr. Blake…”

  “Forgive my mentioning it, Zack.” Clay moved his shoulders. “All the same, I’ve been under something of a strain this evening. I’ve lost one of my closest friends, to say nothing of whatever else has been happening. Since you’ve asked me to soothe Aunt Emmeline, do you mind if I just go on and do it?”

  “No, ’course I don’t mind! You run along, now, and forget I said anything at all. No tricks or traps, not a bit of it! Don’t mind me, as I’ve told you; just good old blundering Zack putting in his two cents’ worth!”

  Clay left them. Lieutenant Trowbridge waited until the sound of his footsteps had died away. Then good old blundering Zack addressed Jim:

  “There goes as real a gentleman as I ever met! Be a shame, wouldn’t it, if he didn’t get to Congress after all?” Immense respect had returned to the lieutenant’s tone. “Now, sir, there’s no point in you and me staying here any longer, is there? Just follow me, will you?”

  “Where?”

  “Out the front, of course, like this. But we needn’t walk on gravel all the way, need we? We’ll just cross the drive to the other side, and walk on grass towards the front of the house. This way, please.”

  It was the drugged, drowsy hour of the ghosts’ high noon. A faint white mist rose from dew-wet grass, under spreading oaks with their tracery of autumn. Following his guide, as indicated, Jim passed the dark shapes of the Cadillac and the Chadwick. A few lights burned behind drawn blinds along the facade of the Villa de Jarnac. But Lieutenant Trowbridge was not headed for the portico with the pillars.

  Instead he led his companion along beside the left-hand branch of the drive, across the main drive, and around beside its right-hand branch.

  The Peerless with the chauffeur, Clay’s own car, no longer stood there. Halfway along the right-hand side of the villa, the branch of the drive turned outward at right angles and led to another white structure with a peaked roof, evidently combined stable and coach-house, bowered in more trees.

  That drive, in any case, could not have continued to the back. The private racetrack lay there, indistinct under the yellow moon. It had no banked sides, as they were beginning to build such tracks nowadays. But for the fact that its surface was of asphalt, it might have been a dirt track for horses, surrounded by a neat white railing to keep spectators off the course. And it seemed a fairly large one.

  Jim had no time for a good look, even if he had been interested. Where the drive turned towards stable and coach-house, a porte cochère had been built out over the side door of the villa. At the top of some steps to the side door lurked an indistinct figure.

  “Peters!” Lieutenant Trowbridge called softly.

  “Yes, Lieutenant?” said the indistinct figure in plain clothes.

  “Where are they now?”

  “Mr. Blake’s got that nigra, the one who was carryin’ on, in a room at the front. Where you wanna go, Lieutenant?”

  “Library’ll do as well as any place. Know where it is?”

  “Yessir.”

  “Then show me. But no more noise than you have to make, mind!”

  Less than a minute later they were ushered into a lofty oblong room at the rear. It was the library of one who, like the late Guy de Jarnac, could have done little reading but liked an impressive show. Rows of standard authors in gilded leather or vellum, no doubt bought by the yard like any other merchandise, looked out from shelves amid a profusion of floor lamps and gaunt golden-oak furniture.

  Somebody had recently taken down Whyte-Melville’s The Gladiators, which lay open on a table in the middle of the room. There were several cigarette ends in the adjacent ashtray. Lieutenant Trowbridge struck a big globe-map and set it spinning.

  “This is where Mr. Clay Blake was, or says he was,” the lieutenant continued. “We’re in private now, sir. And when I get a chance to ask the opinion of a famous journalist…”

  “What gives you the idea I’m that?”

  “Well, aren’t you?”

  “No, not particularly. In this country, Lieutenant, we don’t often refer to ourselves as journalists, generally speaking. It’s a fair enough description, but it sounds a little fancy to the average newspaperman.”

  “You’re not the average newspaperman, Mr. Jim Blake, or the average anything else! You are one of these educated people, aren’t you?”

  “It could be called that, I suppose. I never thought much about it.”

  “No, you wouldn’t. Now
nobody could call me educated; didn’t even get to finish high school at the Boys’ High, the only one we had in those days. But I’m no illiterate, and I know a rip-roaring good story when I run across one. Didn’t you write a book called The Count of Monte Carlo?”

  “Yes, Lieutenant.”

  “Yes, I know you did. I’ve read that book three times since it first came out. I may read it again, now I’ve met you, though I practically know the thing by heart as it is.”

  Jim offered no comment. The lieutenant was musing.

  “I dunno, sir. It’s all fiction, I reckon, or mostly fiction. But I dunno. Sometimes I’ve thought of myself—don’t laugh, now!—I’ve thought of myself as a secret agent like that fellow in the book. Commissioned by somebody’s government, with all the kale I need for expenses! Living at swell hotels in Paris and London! Beautiful women all around; some new adventure every time the door opens! ’Course, I never got to France or even to England, though my forebears did come from a little place in Wiltshire, as I’ve heard my old dad say many’s the time. You’re not laughing, are you?”

  Jim was not laughing, and said so. He thought he could discern, under Zack Trowbridge’s bluff exterior, a secret soul essentially as romantic as Clay Blake’s or his own.

  But the lieutenant’s secret soul no longer showed through.

  “I don’t have to tell you what we’ve got on our hands, do I? It’s murder, that’s what it is, and what beats me is not so much who did it as how the hell it could possibly have been done! That busted car’s a two-seater, isn’t it? There couldn’t have been somebody hanging on the back, could there, to lean over and stick a gun against the side of the poor devil’s head when he drove in?”

  “There couldn’t have been, and there wasn’t. I could see the back of the car, too.”

  “Even suppose there had been, what happened to him afterwards? Or suppose there’d been somebody waiting there, to jump on the little running-board between the fenders and give it to him? What kind of a murderer was he, a ghost or something, to vanish like a soap-bubble as soon as he pulled the trigger?”

  Once more Lieutenant Trowbridge did some mind-searching.

  “You see how it is, don’t you? We’re in the middle of one sweet mess; I’m going to need some help before I’ve finished. Now you’ve done some pretty shrewd detective work yourself. I heard Mr. Clay Blake tell you you’d done some pretty shrewd detective work; and, from what he did say, I can well believe it. Why not tag along with me, a man of your experience, and give me help when I need help?”

  “Just a moment, Lieutenant!”

  “All the time you need; what is it?”

  New gulfs were opening; Jim could not shy back from them.

  “If you heard Clay tell me that, you must have been hanging around outside that shed a lot longer and a lot closer than you pretended at the time. You may even have overheard everything we said. If that is the case, Lieutenant, just what kind of crafty game are you playing? Twice you told Clay there were no tricks or traps, and yet all the time you seemed to be lurking in ambush. Does this mean you do suspect Clay after all?”

  Lieutenant Trowbridge wiped the back of his hand across his forehead, and then looked heavily portentous.

  “Whatever I may have heard, sir, whatever I suspect or don’t suspect, I’ll just keep it under my hat until I know where I am and where I’m going.

  “There’s going to be a big rumpus about this business. Too many prominent people are involved; I can’t go treading on toes or getting out of line too soon, and wouldn’t want to even if I could. But I will tell you this much, since I did ask you to work with me and cooperate, and I meant every word of it! What’s the first thing that strikes us about the whole case? What was the very first thing you noticed?”

  “The first thing I noticed,” Jim answered, “was the light.”

  “The light?”

  “A thousand-candlepower bulb was burning, and is still burning, in a way-through which by all accounts is never used now. Who turned on the light? Why?”

  “I thought of that, sir, and asked Emmeline What’s-her-name about it. You weren’t there when I asked her; wasn’t anybody there but Emmeline and me. Up above the front door outside, it seems, there’s another big bulb. According to Emmeline, it was Mr. Clay Blake himself who turned on the light in the shed, but by accident.”

  “By accident?”

  “Yes. Our friend came out here tonight expecting to meet his fancy woman, and didn’t like it at all when he found she hadn’t come back from Alabama. ‘This is a fine howdy-do!’ says he, or words to that effect. ‘Haven’t you even put on the light over the front door, so she won’t fall all over herself when she does get here?’”

  “Well?”

  “In the kitchen there’s a board of switches that control several outside lights, including the one in the shed. Our friend pressed what he thought was the switch for the bulb over the front door. Being a casual sort of gentleman, he never looked to make sure and didn’t realize until later he’d turned on the wrong light. Emmeline didn’t realize it herself, she says, until she heard the car smash and looked out a front window.

  “But that’s not quite the first thing is it? We’ve got to start further back. You’ll get it at once as soon as I make clear what question I’m asking. Somebody phoned you at the St. Charles Hotel, saying he was Clay Blake, and asked you to come out here. Who did the phoning, and what did he really want?”

  “The man who did the phoning,” Jim said, “must surely have been the murderer himself. Allowing that this was no slap-dash spur-of-the-moment crime, but was carefully planned in advance…”

  “It was planned ahead, all right! You can bet your shirt on that!”

  “Then the murderer’s real purpose, Lieutenant, was to have a witness in the right place at the right time.”

  “Got it in one, sir, as I knew you would!” Lieutenant Trowbridge swelled with excitement. “You suggested waiting at the gate, remember? You’re a good-natured fellow; you like to oblige people when you can. If you hadn’t suggested it, he’d have asked you and made you promise. He knew Mr. Shepley was coming out here; he was just getting ready.

  “Now I’m not saying our friend Clay Blake is guilty; I’m not fool enough for that just yet. All the same: what do we get from the supposition he might be guilty? The first thing he insisted, remember, was that he never made that phone call? Also, according to Emmeline, he claims he turned on the shed-light by accident.”

  Jim took a turn away from the table, and came back to it.

  “I see. What you’re saying, Lieutenant, is that he may have been trying a double bluff? That he did in fact make the phone call, in a voice sufficiently disguised so he could deny it later? That he turned on a light to guide him, and…”

  “If you’ve already got some reputation as a detective, Mr. Jim Blake,” Lieutenant Trowbridge said admiringly, “you’ve earned every bit of it! A double bluff for sure, and a pretty good one until it’s called. Going on that assumption…”

  “Easy, Lieutenant! We can’t go on that assumption; I don’t believe one word of it. To begin with, I like Clay.”

  “We all like him; that’s just the trouble. But you only met him tonight, didn’t you? And Leo Shepley, as I understand it, was a very old friend. Don’t you want to see us grab Mr. Shepley’s murderer?”

  “Of course I do! Only…”

  “Only everything, you were about to say, splits and smashes on the same obstacle, just like the car smashed, too.”

  “I wasn’t going to say that at all. I was going to say…”

  “If he did do it, how in God’s name could he have done it? As he said himself, he hasn’t got wings or a cloak of invisibility; he can’t walk through walls. Nobody can, unless this place is really haunted after all.

  “We’d better call it a night, I think. First thing tomorrow morning I’ll start tracing Mr. Shepley’s movements, beginning with what phone calls he made and received. In the meantime, it’
ll do no good just to hammer over and over at the four main witnesses. Whoever killed him, it wasn’t young Pete or the chauffeur; it certainly wasn’t you or the young lady, because…Is anything wrong, Mr. Blake?”

  “Not necessarily wrong, Lieutenant. I was thinking of Jill, that’s all. Where’s Jill?”

  “The fair-haired young lady, sir? You don’t know where she is or where she went?”

  “No; how could I? I haven’t seen her since Clay invited me out to the shed for a private conference which seems to have been about as private as a political speech in Union Square. She must be with the others, but…”

  “She’s your girl, and yet you don’t know where she is or where she went?”

  “She’s not my girl; I only wish she were! I met her in New York, found her again on the train to New Orleans, and then thought I’d lost her until she turned up at the hotel tonight. Even now I don’t know where she lives or how to find her. I ought to have asked her that and insisted on an answer, but…”

  “Half a minute, now, before you start getting alarmed! Mr. Clay Blake, you’ll recall, sent his chauffeur on an errand and told the chauffeur to come back for him?”

  “Yes. Well?”

  “That was it, sir. She left long ago. Our friend sent her home in his car.”

  12

  ON THE FOLLOWING MORNING—Thursday, October 17th—Jim finished breakfast in his room by nine o’clock.

  It was no good, he told himself, endlessly to review last night’s events, and their conclusion in frustration.

  When Lieutenant Trowbridge informed him of Jill’s earlier departure, it had seemed to him that Clay Blake at least must know the address to which she had been driven. But it was not only that Jill had left. Charging into the front drawing-room where “they” were said to be, he found the others had left, too: Peter Laird, Raoul, Clay himself. The only person remaining was that massive woman whom Lieutenant Trowbridge had described as resembling a lighter-skinned version of Aunt Jemima on the pancake-flour box. Since it must be plain at this hour that Miss Brissard would not return tonight, she intimated she was ready to lock up when she could get rid of the police.