Compartment K

by Helen Reilly

  The mystery of who the dead woman was had been resolved; now that her identity had been revealed, the woman herself and her brutal death posed an even deeper problem. McKee put two of his best men on the late Hazel Bauer. In the long narrow inner office he removed his coat :nid tie, threw himself into the chair behind his desk, and thought about Bimini’s story.

  Ila/el Bauer had caught sight suddenly of someone she knew on East Thirty-second Street late on the afternoon of August the tenth. The Font apartment was on Thirty-second. Seven prospective candidates for murder had been on the same street—or could have been on it—at the time Hazel Bauer happened along. A little later—according to Mrs. Questing's neighbor in the adjoining house —Hazel Bauer had been seen pounding on the Questing front door a few blocks to the north, and then sitting weeping at the top of the steps. It was a fair assumption that the person she recognized and followed had gone into the Questing house and was barricaded behind the locked front door.

  Harry and Gertrude Belding were first on the list of possibilities. They had both been at the Font apartment that afternoon. They had arrived and left separately. According to the statement they gave Todhunter, they had not returned to the Questing house after leaving the Fonts’s, but after doing various errands had gone back to their hotel where they spent the evening together. A key to the house was the crux of that particular angle. It conclusively eliminated no one. Colonel Eden, George Langley, Loretta Pilgrim and the Fonts had all, at one time or another, been directly or indirectly connected with the Questing house. Loretta Pilgrim had lived there before her brother’s marriage and could still have a key. She could have gone there herself for some reason or other, or she could have sent her daughter or her son-in-law.

  The inspector pulled fonvard a time schedule of their various movements. In the first place their statements were unvouched for by a single independent witness, in the second they were, in most cases, extremely vague. Not one of them had produced a satisfactory alibi for the late afternoon or evening.

  Hazel Bauer had been killed roughly between eight-thirty and half-past nine. Was it the person she recognized and followed that afternoon who had killed her after darkness fell? By no means proven.

  Heat swathed the Scotsman, and a feeling of frustration. The room was an oven. The fan simply circulated hot air. Arturo Bimini was the real key . . . Bimini was still in the mouth of the alley across the street when Hazel Bauer took off . . . and the girl out at Amethyst Lake, Rose O’Hara, had been in the Questing house when Hazel Bauer ran up the steps.

  McKee brought the legs of his chair to the floor. His dripping shirt stuck to the wood. He ripped it loose, and spoke into the intercom. He said, “Get Bimini, will you, Joe, and bring him down here,” after that he looked at his watch, and reached for the outside phone.

  EIGHTEEN

  “Nils. Don’t give him a bone. . . oh! . . . you’ve killed him. He’ll choke . . . Augustus!”

  Nils put a hand on Candy’s arm, held her back “Let him alone, Candy. Watch. There . . . he’s going to bury it. Look at those paws fly . . .”

  “I hate you, Nils . . . he’s going to get all dirty.”

  Candy ran across a strip of grass to the banked laurel bushes against the guest house wall under which the pink poodle was industriously digging a hole in the dark earth, the bone in his teeth. It was Daniel, hurrying into view alerted by her outcry who picked Augustus up, took the bone from him and handed him to Candy. She gathered him close, murmuring endearments.

  On the terrace above, Rose turned away. In the middle of the terrace Elizabeth was talking to one of the Canadian police.

  “I have a request to make—Inspector Sheppard, isn’t it?—I want to leave here.”

  “I’m sorry, Mrs. Questing, but no one—”

  “If you’ll permit me, Inspector? I don’t mean leave the lake, I mean leave this lodge, this property. It is not mine. You may have heard? . . . Yes. If Mrs. Pilgrim has to stay on, she will naturally want to come here. I can take a room at the Chalet with my cousin, Miss O’Hara.”

  “Oh. Oh, I see. No, there can be no objection to that.”

  It was 10 o’clock on the morning of that long dreadful day at Amethyst Lake, the last but one. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police, not on horses, had turned up at nine in force. There were two inspectors, four constables besides Duvette and a woman. Inspector Sheppard, a shortish blond stocky man who directed strategy, was the ranking officer. He was extremely civil, thought three times about every remark, and was very thorough.

  Before noon, Rose and Elizabeth were established in a cottage just above the water in the Chalet grounds. Nils and Hugh Eden were in the Chalet itself, Eden wouldn’t permit Elizabeth to go there, the rooms were too small. No one of them stayed, was able to stay, put.

  There was an endless coming and going. Inspector Sheppard had set up headquarters in the guest house Nils and Eden had vacated. First they were all individually searched. It w’as carefully explained that consent was voluntary. Anyone wishing to refuse had the right to do so, in which case other steps would be taken. The other steps were not gone into. The purpose of the search was to make sure, for the protection of the rest, that none of Elizabeth’s guests was carrying Davidson’s stolen gems on his person. Who—me?—naturally they all submitted. After that the lodge and each guest house was taken apart and put neatly together again. Then the questioning began. Examination, cross-examination, recross, with gaps in between.

  “Now Miss O’FIara, please.” Again? And then again and again and again. Throughout the morning Rose kept running into people she didn’t want to see. The Beldings. Gertrude Belding had brightened up considerably, she began dropping things in more normal fashion, moving about busily. Loretta Pilgrim mightn’t be as bad as she seemed at first. ... It was easy to misjudge people—no one should really judge, should they? Harry Belding wore a smooth mask that mightn’t be a mask at all. “I’m sure I don’t know what made Mrs. Pilgrim offer me the job, but it is a job, and I’m interested. Those apartments in New York, for instance. Humphrey Questing bought them in 1918. What ought to be done—”

  Perhaps what Flarry Belding said was true. Just as George Langley might be what he seemed to be, a hunting dog on the scent of money who had found, to a limited and legitimate extent, Loretta w’as going to pay the money he alleged she owed him.

  Loretta was established in the lodge with Candy and Daniel. She had calmed down considerably, the honors she wore were becoming familiar. She was very much the Important Personage, occupied with great affairs, thought before she spoke, judicially and with a touch of languor.

  In spite of Harry Belding’s plausibility, the question that kept repeating itself in Rose’s mind was why Loretta, determined to fire Harry at 11 o’clock the morning before, had decided to rehire him at five the same afternoon.

  Could it be, was it possible, that Harry had something on Loretta? What was there now to have on anyone but murder? . . . There was nothing amusing about those three terrible deaths; Rose smiled involuntarily at the thought of Loretta Pilgrim hustling into Davidson’s compartment, a gun in her small dimpled hand. Daniel was out of it, Loretta would throw him to the lions if the pinch came, she accepted him, perhaps tolerated was a better word, as Candy’s husband. But what about Candy herself? That wouldn’t wash, either. Candy had absolutely no motive for killing Davidson. Unless—Rose was in her room doing her hair at the time, she held the brush suspended. If Davidson had known about Elizabeth’s second marriage and had told Candy, and it seemed certain he had known, and if Candy had seriously compromised herself with him, she might have decided to get rid of an unwanted incubus and keep the bright hoard she coveted. Her passion for jewels amounted to an obsession.

  Too many ifs, too many unestablished conditions—Rose put down the brush, picked up her lipstick, and scowled at a figure going past the window. It was the constable again, summoning her to another going-over by Inspector Sheppard. She had managed to flee the Beldings and Daniel
—two people she wasn’t able to flee were Todhunter and Nils. One or the other of them was at her elbow whenever she poked her nose out of her room. Nils was waiting for her, sprawled in a chair on the long narrow porch. The constable delivered his summons and Rose started down the steps and Nils fell in behind her in silence.

  He must be resenting this guard duty; he had been laughing and amused when he was with Candy that morning and had given the pink poodle the bone. The path was narrow. The three of them walked single file through close-pressing walls of laurel and rhododendron, pine and hemlock, on another of those interminable trips.

  Interminable was the word. The day was interminable. For Rose, it divided itself into isolated incidents between vast stretches of misery and boredom. There were the bears, there was her own flash of memory fading in and out, and there was Augustus. Augustus was amusing at first. So were the bears—but not later.

  On that particular trip, as the constable led the way to the guest house where Inspector Sheppard was holding court, the bears suddenly appeared, two small black cubs about three feet high. They leaped up over the rim of the cliff and right into the middle of the long bed of flowers crowning the lip of the steep drop. The two cubs began to gambol, delighted apparently with the smell and softness of the poppies. They boxed each other with brown paw pads, collapsed into a rolling heap, leapt apart and went at it again.

  Rose stood still, enchanted. “Aren’t they lovely?” she said, and the constable, a staid man, looked at the cubs gloomily. “They can be awful mean, Miss. My brother-in-law had his arm nearly clawed off by one of them, a big black she-devil. People feed them when they shouldn’t, and then when you have no food for them, they get mad—”

  A distant shriek cut him short. It was Candy Font, flying down from the terrace of the lodge in pursuit of her pet. Augustus was ahead of her, making straight for the two chubby black shapes. The bears were up on their hind legs watching the strange beast with small bright eyes. Augustus got to within ten feet of them, pounced down on his paws, and barked shrilly. His stump of a tail wagged. He wanted to play.

  It was Nils who caught him. Nils started back up the path. “Here you are,” he handed Augustus to Candy, running to meet him. “Better put a leash on him. He’s just about bite-size for one of our furry friends.”

  Rose walked on. To her regret, the moment Nils moved the cubs vanished over the edge of the cliff. Inspector Sheppard was on a new tack during that session. Had Rose, on board the Commonwealth, not on the night of Davidson’s murder, but before it, seen anyone entering or leaving Davidson’s compartment at any time?

  Rose said, “I didn’t know it was Davidson’s,” and tried to picture the long corridor in Car No. 7, and got nothing. “Why, Inspector?” Sheppard gave nothing. It was Todhunter who told her on the way back, taking over from Nils who had gone towards the lodge, that the gun with which Davidson had been shot was his own.

  On one occasion early in the game Arturo Bimini, Madame Flavelle’s husband by courtesy, had searched Davidson’s flat while Davidson was out, and he had seen a weapon among Davidson’s belongings that tallied with the description of the gun found under the seat of the dead man’s compartment on the Commonwealth.

  “So it looks, Miss O’Hara, as though someone knew Davidson had a gun and slipped into his compartment in advance and got hold of it.”

  In advance—not hot-blooded murder, cold, cold . . . Rose was cold walking in dappled sunlight between those green walls, past Madame Flavelle’s cottage above on the left. She noted that in broad daylight the little detective was keeping a sharp eye out. When would it be over, done with? When?

  Perhaps it was the talk of Davidson and the gun, and of Davidson’s body and the arrangements that had to be made, that stimulated her memory. Late in the afternoon, at almost 5 o’clock, before her final summons by Inspector Sheppard, she made the connection between something on board the Canadian Pacific train and Elizabeth’s bedroom in the house on Murray Hill in New York.

  George Langley and Nils and Elizabeth and Hugh Eden were on the porch. Not Daniel, and not Candy and not Loretta Pilgrim and not Gertrude Belding. Harry Belding had just gone. The police were releasing Davidson’s body and wanted to verify the name of the next of kin, an aunt in Ohio.

  The cottage consisted of two suites, side by side. Each had its own bedroom, bath and stove with cordwood piled in a basket, the mornings and nights were cold; the long narrow veranda was in common. The others were in chairs near Elizabeth’s door at the far end when Rose came out of her bedroom. She moved to the railing, stood looking down at the brilliance of enameled jade water between pine boughs and almost without volition heard herself speaking aloud.

  “That’s it,” she said. “Yes, that was it. He was there.”

  Flushed with her discovery she turned, to the others, gazing at her in surprise. She explained quickly.

  “When I was in your bedroom in the Murray Hill house that day, Elizabeth, the day before we left New York, after I went to the window—you know, the big bay window at the side—I looked down, and saw him, Davidson. When he came up and spoke to me in the train I knew his face was familiar. That afternoon in New York he was standing on the southeast corner looking along the street towards Third Avenue. Me was in :i—in a sort of attitude of arrested motion. I think that was what made me notice him. Then he started walking downhill in the direction of Third Avenue—” Nils dropped his glass, half full of scotch and water. It hit the floor with a crash and splintered. He swore at himself. “I am a clumsy fool . . . sorry, Elizabeth, did it splash you?”

  The interruption broke the sequence in Rose’s mind. The pictured image of that hot New York street in the thundery light of late afternoon faded. Nils had dropped the glass purposely because he didn’t want her to say any more. Warmth came back into her. But Davidson’s absence or presence outside the house on Murray Hill, he certainly hadn’t entered it, three full days before he was shot on a Canadian Pacific train in northwest Canada thousands of miles away, didn’t seem particularly significant.

  Certainly the others didn’t appear to think it was. Nils was gathering up the broken glass on a magazine. Langley watched him critically. “Be careful, old man. I once knew a guy who cut his hand on a bottle of pop and got lockjaw. I guess it was because it was strawberry soda—poisonous stufl.” Elizabeth and Hugh Eden were engrossed in each other, talking in low voices. Nils disposed of the broken glass by dropping it into the tree tops just beyond the porch railing. George Langley had come about a wardrobe trunk of Elizabeth’s that was at the lodge, he wanted to know where she would like it sent. Hugh Eden said he’d take care of it, and Langley strolled off.

  Twenty minutes later the constable came for Rose again. Walking beside her, along the path, Nils said in a low voice, “That was a damn fool thing to do, Rose, blurting out about Davidson like that. I had to try and stop you. I don’t know whether anyone was deceived. . . . You can’t remember anything more, can you? You can’t remember seeing anyone else on that side street?”

  She shook her head. “I tried to, back there on the porch but—it was just an ordinary street with some people on it, nobody I knew. Anyhow, why is it so important? That woman in New York wasn’t killed until hours later.”

  “That’s right, but where was she in the meantime? Who was she with? She disappeared off the steps; when the woman next door looked out again, she was gone. Maybe the person she followed let her in finally. You didn’t hear anything in the house itself?”

  Rose said no. Nils said, “Well, if you do remember anything else, don’t go blurting it out, come to me, or to Todhunter.” He was short-tempered, spoke curtly. Rose thought, “He’s bored to tears with this patrol duty. I don’t know why he keeps on with it. He’d probably much rather be free—and there’s no danger with all these Canadian police around.”

  This time, it was about the night of Madame Flavelle’s death that Sheppard questioned her. The autopsy fixed Madame Flavelle’s death at between 12:30 an
d 1:30. There was an accurate record of the dinner she had eaten. Rose said she was in bed and asleep before twelve and had heard nothing, no sound whatever.

  She told him about Davidson’s having been on the corner of Thirty-sixth and Lexington late on the afternoon of the tenth and Sheppard nodded. They already had that. According to Bimini, the man tailing him in New York, Davidson had walked up to Thirty-sixth Street and Lexington, then down to Third where he had gone into a bar for a drink before going home. Dismissing her

  Sheppard said, “You look tired, Miss O’Hara, that’s going to be all for you for today.”

  Outside the guest house Rose met Daniel on his way in. Nils was nowhere about. Her constable had gone to get someone else. Daniel looked at her scrutinizingly. “You’re all in,” he said softly. “Poor Rose. I’ve been wanting to have a word with you all day.” He was warm, interested in her, anxious about her. “Stay around for a few minutes. I won’t be long.”

  Rose said, “What’s the use of it, Daniel? It will only cause trouble.”

  His eyes clouded. “Trouble? There’s nothing but trouble . . . I’m tired of pussyfooting, keeping up appearances . . . I’m Candy’s devoted husband, Candy’s my loving wife—and she has about as much use for me as she has for an old shoe. . . . The hell with it. Don’t go, Rose, wait for me,” he said coaxingly. “We can at least have a few minutes. There are things I want to tell you.”