The Ghosts' High Noon

by John Dickson Carr

  “I don’t know; I can try. Jump in, before I feel too much reaction from being shot at.”

  “Are you all right, Franz Josef? You’re lookin’ a little bit white.”

  “Yes, that’s what I meant. Jump in!”

  “I think, Lieutenant,” said Horace Kestevan, “you had better do as the gentleman suggests. I am in no hurry to get home tonight, especially under the present circumstances. And this lady and I are finding much to talk about. Meanwhile…”

  Jim gave Lieutenant Trowbridge the spare pair of goggles from the dust-coat’s left-hand pocket. The engine was already so warm that one flip of the crank set it thudding. Saying no word, Jim concentrated on driving until they picked up the Cadillac’s tail-light well ahead. But Honest Zack remained vocal enough.

  “I didn’t see how it could come unstuck,” he raved. “It wouldn’t ’a’ come unstuck, either, if this hadn’t turned into a race. Step on it, Franz Josef; you’ve gained on ’em! But if they want to race AGAIN…”

  They could not seem to make up their minds. The Cadillac suddenly spurted ahead, then hesitated as though uncertain. The mist was clearing; the countryside, like a dead world except for its lush vegetation, stretched emptily ahead; Bayou St. John lay to their left. Jim opened the throttle wide, lessening the distance between himself and the other car as it had previously done to him.

  Over the road arched great live-oaks festooned gray with Spanish moss. A moment or two later, as Jim seemed inexorably to overtake that red tail-light, the car ahead was inspired with new, Satanic life and leaped away.

  “What’s goin’ on up there?” demanded Honest Zack. “He’s off his nut now; he’s as mad as a hatter! Is he using that gun to threaten the driver, maybe? The driver slows down; up comes the gun. You do the same thing, Franz Josef! Give this bus every ounce of speed she’s got; keep your foot on the floor. If his little game’s to threaten ’em, I’ll soon put a stop to that foolishness, you see if I don’t! Step on it, now!”

  Jim’s car met the challenge, its exhaust thundering through the side-ports in the hood. In that seesaw race, advantage first with one and then with the other, the Chadwick began to close in again. Though you could see nothing through the rear window in the Cadillac’s raised top, you sensed activity inside. Lieutenant Trowbridge stood up beside Jim, balancing precariously with the Iver-Johnson in his right hand.

  “Cadillac, stop!” he bellowed. “In the name o’ the law, stop!” He lifted the .45 and fired in the air, with stunning report. “Stop, you hear, or the next one goes through a tire! If you don’t stop…”

  The Cadillac swayed towards the other side of the road, but slowed down. Jim could now hear a voice, as though in response to some threat or protest.

  “Oh, I’ll stop!” the voice yelled. “You want to get us all arrested and wreck the car, too?”

  Once more the Cadillac swayed, but did not go out of control; it came to a halt. The engine was switched off. After a bursting kind of pause, during which you might have counted ten, there was another concussion of a revolver shot.

  Jim stopped the Chadwick ten feet behind the other car. Lieutenant Trowbridge, his face terrifying in goggles, jumped down and strode forward. He looked into the back seat of the Cadillac, then into the front, then into the back again. Returning his own gun to his hip pocket, he faced back towards Jim.

  “There’s two innocent men here,” he said heavily. “One in front, one in back. The other one in back, the one who’s not innocent…”

  “Yes?”

  “He held out just so long. When the time came, he couldn’t bear it. He put the gun to his own head, and he…’Tain’t pretty, this ain’t, but then it never is. And, anyway, it saves us the rumpus of a trial.”

  “Well, Lieutenant, were we right?”

  Lieutenant Trowbridge reached into the tonneau of the Cadillac, as though to haul something forward on display. But he changed his mind in the same instant. Though he walked slowly back to meet Jim’s eye, he spoke in a voice far louder than was necessary.

  “Oh, we were right,” he answered. “The murderer is the man you said it was—Alec Laird. And Flossie Yates is his one and only legal wife.”

  20

  IN THE LIBRARY AT the Villa de Jarnac, under tiers of books which glowed with rich bindings even though they had been bought by the yard, five persons sat over coffee on the night of Sunday, October 20th.

  Jim Blake and Clay Blake had finished dinner with Constance Lambert and Jill. Lieutenant Trowbridge, though invited, had been unable to join them until a few minutes ago. Now Honest Zack, beaming and triumphant, swallowed coffee with a shark-like air of meaning to swallow the small cup as well.

  But Clay Blake showed no triumph. Seated close beside a radiant Constance, he remained moody and abstracted as he glanced across at Jim.

  “Alec Laird!” Clay pronounced the name as though summing up. “He was a consummate hypocrite, then? I can hardly believe it even now!”

  Jim nodded.

  “When the possibility of his guilt first occurred to me,” Jim said, “I could hardly believe it either. I liked the man; for all his seemingly austere ways, I found him sympathetic. I wasn’t alone; he’s been fooling most people for years. But, once you began to think, the weight of evidence was too much.

  “The only one who saw through him was Mathilde de Jarnac Laird. I didn’t like the Duchess of Sunnington Hall; I still don’t like her, having no fondness for fussy and demanding women who tell everybody what to do. But she had him pegged from the start. Remember our lunch at Philippe’s, Clay? When she was telling us about her nephew as a first-class amateur actor, she as good as said straight out he was a posturing hypocrite, and did say straight out he was so fond of power he kept his wife completely under his thumb.

  “Alec Laird’s fondness for power has been commented on by more than one person, including Alec himself. As acting owner of the Sentinel, of course, he had a great deal of open power and authority. His real taste was for secret power, power behind the scenes, power of life or death over those who never saw him but only felt the lash. That’s the key to his character. And don’t forget he completely dominated a neurotic wife, which is an important part of the story.”

  Constance Lambert smoothed her skirt.

  “I can’t (or at least I shouldn’t) enter this discussion at all,” she declared. “I never even met Alec Laird. And yet I’ve heard so much about him, from one person or another, I think I might make an intelligent guess. Speaking of wives, isn’t there some question about who is his wife? What I can’t understand…”

  Lieutenant Trowbridge called for order by rapping on the center of the table.

  “The one I can’t understand…”

  “Yes, Lieutenant?” prompted Jim.

  “It’s you, Franz Josef!” the other boomed with great heartiness. “You call yourself a newspaperman. And you’re a good one; you pieced the whole thing together less’n twenty-four hours after Mr. Shepley was shot.

  “But you haven’t been behaving like any news-hound I ever heard of. Practically all the papers in town, to say nothin’ of some New York papers and one wire service, have offered you all kinds of fancy prices if you’ll write your story of how you did this and how you got on to the truth. And you back away from ’em. You hand me the credit, which is fine for yours truly but not fair dealin’. You won’t write; you won’t even talk. It’s as if you just wanted to sweep the pieces under the rug and forget ’em!”

  “My conduct as a newspaperman, admittedly,” Jim confessed, “should make the ghosts of Horace Greeley and both Gordon Bennetts gibber at me every night. But you’re right, Lieutenant. It’s an ugly business and I do want to forget it, so that—well, so that I can go on to more important things.”

  And he looked at Jill, who said nothing but made a face of happiness.

  “All right, Franz Josef! Now that we’ve got full statements from the two innocent parties, Pete Laird and his chauffeur, we know practically everything that
happened and can supply any bits they didn’t see. What others want to learn is how you put it together. If you won’t tell the world, at least tell these good people here. Tell it as you told it to me in the telegraph office Thursday afternoon. Fair enough?”

  “Yes, fair enough.”

  “While we’re on this subject,” interposed Clay, looking at Constance, “I’ll make a confession, too. I’ve already explained to Yv—sorry; I can’t quite get used to calling her something else—I’ve explained to my Dulcinea what the Voice (and Alec Laird was the Voice), what the Voice accused me of.”

  “Really, Clay!” Constance murmured. “It’s not necessary to…”

  “It is necessary, Dulcinea. Though Jim has been trying hard to conceal this, too, I was accused of spending my nights in orgies with girls of twelve or thirteen years old. Don’t look so shocked, any of you,” he added, though in fact nobody did look shocked; the women merely looked thoughtful, “but there’s the truth. It can be faced now, faced and stared down. So, Jim, you might tell us what made you so sure that damned deacon was the Voice and the murderer, too.”

  Jim spread out his hands.

  “It wasn’t much, but you may as well hear. I first met Alec Laird in his office on Wednesday morning. While we were talking, Peter Laird and Madam Ironface walked in. I knew he was anxious to get rid of ’em, but at that time I couldn’t dream just how anxious he was.

  “In their presence, Leo Shepley telephoned on a private line. Leo, obviously still with no suspicion of Alec Laird, asked for the call to be transferred to another room, the so-called museum adjoining Alec’s office, where he could speak to me in complete privacy. That room has not only a private telephone; it has a private elevator.

  “It was a long conversation, and an important one. Leo told me to get in touch with Florence Yates, and how to approach her. He told me you, Clay, would be coming out to this villa on Wednesday night, and he told me how the Voice had threatened you on the phone. He told me everything, in short, which could have been of use to somebody who afterwards decided to kill Leo.

  “I spoke of these matters to Leo; I spoke about them to nobody else until much later. If anyone could have overheard that conversation…!

  “But, apparently, not a soul could have overheard it. Alec Laird had ordered the receiver hung up in his office, though the line remained open because I was using it in the adjoining room. All the time I spoke to Leo, it seemed, Alec Laird was engaged with his aunt and his cousin. And a heavy door had been closed between the two rooms.

  “When I left the phone and rejoined him, to all intents and purposes he was just saying goodbye to his visitors at the door to the reception room. He even addressed some remark to ‘Aunt Mathilde’ as the door closed. And I accepted all this, at the moment; I was very dense!”

  “For the love of Pete, Franz Josef,” Lieutenant Trowbridge burst out, “will you stop saying how dense you were and just tell ’em what happened?”

  “Realization,” said Jim, “didn’t dawn until the following afternoon, when I was in the telegraph office with our watchdog here. His assistant, Sergeant Peters, left us to cross the street. I looked out of the window, and for some reason was surprised to see Peters had only just crossed the street. It was about the same distance Madam Laird and her son, after leaving Alec’s office, would have had to cover before they reached one of the three elevators out in the corridor.

  “Then I woke up. I remembered what had happened on the top floor of the Sentinel Building Wednesday morning. After (presumably) speeding his parting guests at the door of the private office, Alec Laird spoke only a few words to me before he turned back to that same door and opened it.

  “The door from the reception room to the corridor was open, too. Bart Perkins, the managing editor, stood in the doorway. And the corridor lay completely empty behind him. There was no sign of two guests who were supposed to have left Alec Laird a very few moments before.

  “That wasn’t all. A girl named Ruth Donnelly, as a rule, guards that reception room like a good-natured Cerberus. But Ruth Donnelly hadn’t even been there.

  “Bart Perkins entered the sanctum to confer with his boss and with me. Soon afterwards Alec’s secretary, Miss Edgeworth, appeared with a container of coffee and two cups on a tray. She had taken the coffee from Ruth Donnelly, who had gone downstairs to the drug-store for it. Since the receptionist wouldn’t have left her post unless Alec Laird had sent her, we can see very clearly what must have happened.

  “Madam Laird and Peter couldn’t possibly have left the office when Alec pretended they did. He must have shooed ’em out almost as soon as he planted me at the telephone in his father’s museum. He sent Miss Donnelly for coffee to get her out of the way. He picked up the receiver of the private phone on his desk. He, and he alone, could have heard every word except the beginning of my conversation with Leo. When he heard us both ring off, and knew I would be joining him very shortly, he ingeniously improvised those ‘parting words’ to an Aunt Mathilde who wasn’t there, since there was no receptionist to testify he’d been talking to an empty room. He was very clever, as the same Aunt Mathilde also said.

  “Once we see the truth of that particular incident, everything else falls into place. And it’s almost time to recapitulate.”

  Lieutenant Trowbridge looked from one to the other of the listeners.

  “Got it?” he demanded. “Alec Laird knew my friend Franz Josef would be getting in touch with Flossie Yates, who can find some attractive small girls for men who like ’em at that age. So Alec phoned her first. ‘There’ll be a gent after you soon,’ he probably said. ‘If he wants some of your wares, Flossie, be nice to him!’ Thinking to himself, I’ll bet a nickel, he might just add Franz Josef to his private list of victims.”

  “List of victims?” echoed Jill. “That wasn’t really why you went to see the Flossie woman, was it, Jim? You didn’t want…?”

  “No, of course I didn’t! From further revealing indications in Alec’s office, I believed I knew the nature of the threat being used against Clay. But I had to make sure by questioning the woman herself. I couldn’t know at the time, of course, that Alec Laird was doing a good deal of telephoning the same day.”

  Clay, who had been brooding in a cloud of cigarette-smoke, now raised his head.

  “Alec was the Voice, but was he the only voice? It’s now common knowledge that various persons holding minor positions at the Sentinel were frightened, as I was frightened, by threats never carried out. Are you saying the boss himself sat like a spider and took pleasure in terrorizing the meanest of his employees?”

  “As we’ve been told, Clay, he went to the office early and stayed late. Nobody, not even the managing editor, dared intrude on him without being announced. And he had his father’s retreat, the study adjoining the office.”

  “Granted a poisonously sadistic mind,” Clay admitted, “it’s quite on the cards. But why did it have to end in murder? Why kill Leo?”

  “Because Leo had tumbled to him; he had no choice. Also, since a great part of the game was to destroy you…”

  “To destroy me?”

  “Yes; hadn’t you sensed it?” Jim met his look. “From statements made by Peter Laird and the chauffeur, as Lieutenant Trowbridge has remarked, the police have learned virtually everything. First, however, let’s glance at the evidence, as presented to us both on Wednesday and on Thursday; let’s see if there aren’t indications in it.”

  “Well?”

  “At nine-thirty on Wednesday morning, Clay, the Voice phoned you and said your family should hear all about those under-age playmates if you didn’t retire as a candidate for Congress.

  “At eleven or a little later, when I talked to Leo, he was upset and disturbed. But clearly, as already indicated, he had no suspicion of Alec Laird or of any particular person.

  “Then what? At twelve-thirty, before Alec must have left the Sentinel office for lunch, Leo gets the mysterious call, undoubtedly from the Voice, which sends h
im straight up in the air.

  “When he’d talked to me, an hour and a half earlier, Leo conveyed the impression that he himself, L. Shepley, had been enjoying the favors of pubescent girls. That’s what I understood; and the Voice, listening in, must have understood it, too.

  “The Voice, so to speak, started to lose its head. The latest victim was on the run—you, Clay, seemed to be on the run—and Leo could be put on the run, too. So, with what appeared to be heavy ammunition, the Voice phoned Leo and uttered dire threats about disclosing Leo’s improprieties.

  “But it was the wrong weapon, the Voice’s big mistake.

  “We have now been able to determine what had really been worrying Leo when he talked to me. The whole business of Constance Lambert’s masquerade must soon become public. When it did, the world might think—you, Clay, particularly might think—it had been nothing but a rather cruel practical joke designed to make a fool of you.”

  “But it wasn’t anything of the kind!” cried Constance.

  “Agreed; we now know it wasn’t. Still, that’s what had been on Leo’s mind: up to half-past twelve on Wednesday. After twelve-thirty, when the Voice phoned with threats, the worry had been wiped out. He was in a state of sheer rage.

  “I must now cite a clue (or, rather, two clues) which none of you except Jill will remember. Only Jill and I were present when Leo made either remark.

  “On the train from New York Leo had said, with excessive modesty, that he had one small talent. If ever he heard a person’s voice more than a few times, he insisted, he would never afterwards fail to recognize that voice, no matter how much the speaker tried to disguise himself. Leo said he could do it blindfolded; he said he could do it on the phone.”

  “And so he could!” exclaimed Clay, sitting up straight. “I’ve heard him do it! Then Alec phoned Leo as the gloating Voice? And, for all Alec’s acting ability, Leo knew who he was? That was the way of it?”

  “That, undoubtedly, was the way of it. It fits in with something else Leo had said on the train, even before he mentioned his talent for identifying voices. He was discussing your character, Clay. He said he thought a threat or a crisis would find you indecisive…”