Compartment K

by Helen Reilly

  Rose temporized. “Well, if you’re not too long—”

  Daniel said, “I’ll make it as snappy as I can,” and ran up the steps. Rose walked slowly down the path. The lodge was off on her right, back under wide-boughed pines. The flowers glowed in the late sunlight, delicate and pure against the brilliance of the water. There was no one in sight, yet she had the feeling of eyes watching her. . . . She dawdled as long as she could. Daniel didn’t come. She moved out on the winding road that led away from the lodge and turned left in the direction of the Chalet grounds and the gate. Nils was leaning against one of the gateposts, his arms folded.

  He looked at her as she came.

  "Through so soon?" He was satirically concerned. "I thought you’d be much longer with Font. What’s the matter? The police?’’

  That did it. Rose faced him, fury choking her. Nils could do as he pleased, he could fool around with Candy Font all he felt like—how dared he take this attitude. What business was it of his when she saw Daniel or how long they were together. Fie had put himself out of court on a hundred counts.

  "Look, Nils, get away from me, and keep away."

  Nils said, "With pleasure, once I’ve seen you back to the cottage."

  "You’re not going to do anything of the kind. I don’t want you with me. Try and understand, dear boy, try and get it through your head that I hate the very sight of you."

  She turned and went quickly through the gates and on down the hill. Gradually, when she became convinced that Nils wasn’t following her, she slackened her pace. That last blast had been effective, she thought with satisfaction. It was nice to have told him off—comforting. Nils had wanted an answer. Now she had given him one. Now he knew.

  In under the trees in green gloom she moved springingly, still hot with anger. The narrow path she followed twisted and turned on itself with now and again a glimpse of the last of the sunlight on the polished jade of the water. Then the green would close in once more. Branches reached out for her, leaves brushed her skirt, caught at her jacket. Another curve or two and she would be on the home stretch. Nils was disposed of, finally. This was the end of it, the very end. And Daniel? Once he had been very sure of himself. There was something touching in his new-found humility, his uncertainty. If Candy should decide to divorce him . . . she went away from the thought savagely, excoriating herself. Folic de doute—the French had a term for it. Doubting and questioning was a well known phobia. Always before she had been sure too, uncomplicated, knowing what was right. Now she could never seem to make up her mind, definitely, to anything.

  She was within twenty feet of a turn in the path when she saw Candy’s dog. The pink poodle was trotting along the path in front of her sniffing at the ground. His leash dragged along behind him. He had gotten loose, he oughtn’t to be out in these woods alone. The two tumbling mischievous black shapes of the morning came back vividly to Rose. They were only cubs, but if a mother or father were anywhere around . . .

  “Augustus,” she called imploringly.

  Still trotting on, the dog looked briefly along a curly pink flank with sharp black eyes and ignored her. And then, in full view of her, just at the arc of the bend, he stood still, looking up.

  He was looking at something Rose couldn’t see. He barked. He put out his paws in front of him and went into a semi-crouch, raised his head and barked again, vociferously. His tail was wagging.

  It was exactly what he had done that morning when he got close to the flower bed and the bear cubs. What was he looking at? Was there a bear there, on the other side of the curve, a great black brute getting ready to kill? There was something there. Oh yes, very definitely . . .

  “Augustus,” she called again, and took three running steps and jolted to a halt. The pink poodle had leaped into the underbrush and disappeared from sight. A growl, a single sharp yelp, and then nothing but silence, utter and complete.

  Rose’s heart thundered. What had happened to the poodle? He was so small and useless, just a toy, but he was so little. . . . She listened, sick with fear. There wasn’t the slightest sound. The wind had dropped. It was almost sundown. Then, at the turn of the path, to one side of it, inside the feathery masses of close growing hemlocks, there was a stirring. Something in there among the trees and bushes was moving. The movement was in her direction.

  Terror locked Rose’s muscles, locked her throat. The terror was more extreme than the terror she had felt when Harry Belding advanced on her in the living room of the lodge the afternoon before . . . there was something, someone, in among those trees and bushes . . . Augustus had seen it and had been silenced. Whoever was there was coming closer. She was alone. Nils was far away, so for all practical purposes was the cottage and Elizabeth. So were the police . . .

  Rose began to back up, her eyes 011 the gently stirring boughs. Nearer and nearer . . . her moccasin caught in a root, her foot twisted, and pain was a white-hot flash. She tried to teai her foot free, and couldn't. Her throat did open then. She screamed, again and iigain—and fell heavily, and lay still.

  That was the way they found her not more than a full minute afterwards, when it was too late.

  NINETEEN

  “Good morning, Inspector McKee. Nice to see you. Have a good journey? You certainly made excellent time.”

  The Scotsman shook hands with Inspector Sheppard genially and said that the flight from Toronto to Calgary on Trans-Canada had been quick and comfortable. He had picked up a plane out of New York at 11:30 last night that got him to Toronto with twenty minutes to spare. Getting away from his desk at the end had been nip and tuck, information had started coming in fast.

  “We’ve had a fresh spot of trouble here,” Sheppard said, and McKee nodded. Todhunter had briefed him a little earlier at the airport high on the shoulder of a mountain.

  “So I understand, Inspector. Miss O’Hara?”

  Sheppard said, “She’s going to be all right. What she’s actually suffering from is shock, and a light concussion. Mr. Gantry heard her screams and found her lying on the ground. There was no attack. She got frightened about the little dog, caught her foot in a root, and fell and crashed her forehead on a stone.”

  “And the dog, Inspector?” McKee asked.

  Sheppard shrugged. “There is a wound, but it’s my belief that the dog ran his head into a sharp stick, there were plenty of them lying on the ground, or that he was hit by a falling branch. They often lie up in a tree and come down without warning. There was certainly no sign of an assailant when my men arrived.”

  The Scotsman didn’t agree. Todhunter had had a word or two with Rose O’Hara. He had done what he could to check on whoever had struck down the pink poodle, he was in a fury about it, but no elimination of suspects was possible. Daniel Font had turned up in the wood on Gantry’s heels. He had been with Inspector Sheppard only a couple of minutes, and was searching for Rose O’Hara when she started screaming. As far as the others went they were all within easy reach of the path through the trees and could have gotten to and from that particular spot without being observed.

  The two Inspectors proceeded to the guest house and McKee briefed Sheppard on developments in New York and began to outline his plan, what he would like, with Inspector Sheppard’s permission and agreement, to have done. At the end he said, “It’s a chance. If it doesn’t come off, we won’t be in any worse case than we are now.”

  That was at shortly after 2 p.m.

  It was 4 o’clock that same afternoon when Elizabeth Questing, her guests, and the Beldings found themselves together again for the last time in the great living room of the Questing lodge. Social intercourse was at a bare minimum, was confined to nods. They sat about on couches and in chairs, a thoughtful, silent, but in no instance seriously disturbed collection of people, when the head of the New York Homicide Squad whom Inspector Sheppard introduced, began to talk.

  McKee stood on the hearth with his back to the fire. Loretta Pilgrim, whose permission to use the room he had asked, sat with her hig
hly enameled and extremely pretty daughter, and her son-in-law. Colonel Eden was beside Elizabeth Questing, whom McKee found unexpectedly impressive. Rose O’Hara, her gray eyes enormous under the white turban of a bandage, was on his left, with the Beldings, Nils Gantry, and George Langley completing the loose half-circle.

  McKee spoke quietly. He said the shooting of Gilbert Davidson and the strangling of Madame Flavelle were both, one directly and one indirectly, the result, the outgrowth, of the murder of a Mrs. Hazel Bauer in the courtyard of the Questing house on Murray Hill in New York on the evening of August the tenth.

  He then went on to outline the essentials of that opening scene. The place, a New York street. The time, shortly after five o’clock. A stir, a rustle of surprise, and simulated surprise, one of those present knew all about it. The single element of chance, McKee said, and even there there was direction of a sort behind it, was the appearance on the street, Thirty-second Street, of Mrs. Hazel Hauer, cutting up from Third Avenue to Lexington on her way to Grand Central Station and an express to Maine. Mrs. Hauer was some fifty feet from the corner of Lexington when she recognized someone she knew. It was someone going away from her, cutting across the street on a diagonal from the direction of the building in which the Fonts had an apartment. Mrs. Hauer pulled up, gave a scream, and then took off after the man she recognized, at top speed.

  Again the movement of bodies, the whisper of silk. Rose thought apathetically, her head was pounding, a man . . . McKee went calmly on.

  The man who had emerged from the Font apartment knew he had been recognized and tried to give Mrs. Bauer the slip. She was still behind him when he reached Thirty-sixth Street and the Questing house, to which he had a key. He ran up the steps and into the house and locked the door behind him, hoping he had thrown Mrs. Bauer off the track. He hadn’t. She had seen him enter the house. She mounted the steps, kept pounding on the door and ringing the bell, and when she didn’t get any answer she sat down on the top step and started to cry.

  McKee raised his eyes from the cigarette he paused to light and looked a little to his left.

  “I suggest, Mr. Belding, that you were the man Mrs. Bauer pursued.”

  Heads turning, startled stares—Harry Belding didn’t move a muscle. He sat with his knees crossed below folded arms, but dull color surged into his lean face. He said evenly, “I’m admitting nothing. But go on, Inspector. What happened after that?”

  “I suggest you tell me."

  Harry Belding shrugged. “If, as you say, this woman you’re talking about was later killed, I have nothing to tell that will help you. I did go into the house on Thirty-sixth Street late that afternoon for a folio of papers I’d forgotten. I was there only a minute or two. I left immediately by the side door, and walked down to Third Avenue, where I picked up a cab and drove to my hotel.”

  McKee said nothing. He continued to survey Harry Belding. Under that steady scrutiny Belding’s composure ebbed a little. He said with a show of testiness, indignation, that covered a much more profound reaction, “This is all stuff and nonsense. Why should I run away from a woman named Hazel Bauer? I didn’t know any such woman. I never heard of her.”

  McKee’s smile was thin.

  “Then you must have a remarkably short memory.”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “No? Just this.” McKee took his wallet out, took a slip of paper from the wallet and held it up. “This is a copy of a marriage certificate. Hazel Bauer was Hazel Belding—her mother made her resume her maiden name after you deserted her. You and Hazel Bauer were married on July the second, 1939, in Valley Stream, Massachusetts, by a justice of the peace.”

  A deep hush. The hush broke. The room seemed to fall apart. Now there was movement on every side. No one looked at anyone else, each was under the drive of sharp reaction as the full implications of the certificate McKee had produced and the date on it, began to dawn. It took Rose a full moment to grasp the import of it. If Harry Belding had married a wife in 1939 he wasn’t legally married to Gertrude—and he had never been legally married to Elizabeth.

  . . . Under the law the estate wouldn’t go to Loretta Pilgrim. Under the law it was still Elizabeth’s.

  A gasp from Loretta; she had gone very white. She crumpled into a corner of the couch, grew small, dwindled. Candy’s face was delicate ivory, bleakly carved. Daniel showed no reaction of any kind. Gertrude Belding was crying into a handkerchief.

  Loretta said in a choked voice, “But—surely, all this will have to be proved . . .”

  McKee was not interested in personalities, or in a question of property disposal, he was on the trail of a murderer who had killed brutally three times.

  He continued to address himself to Harry Belding. “You admit your marriage to Hazel Bauer, Mr. Belding, admit you were never divorced? You simply deserted your wife and your son, who is now fourteen years old. Hazel Bauer’s mother, Hazel was her daughter by a first marriage, was an upright, stern, hard woman. You, Mr. Belding, were under suspicion, at the time, of having stolen a fairly large sum of money from the restaurant that employed you as accountant. You got off with a warning. Hazel Bauer searched for you on and off for years. She wanted a father for her son. After her mother’s death she took to drinking more than was good for her and redoubled her efforts to find you. 1 have an idea that on some previous occasion she caught sight of you in New York City, because that was where she did her scouring around. At any rate, she was your wife until the moment of her death in the courtyard of the Questing house on Murray IIill."

  The pounding in Rose’s head picked up speed. Elizabeth sat very still, her eyes cast down. The faintest touch of pink crept into her cheeks. Rose thought, It isn’t pleasure about the money. It’s humiliation, shame. Elizabeth cared less about money than anyone she knew. The knowledge that she had given herself to a man like Harry Belding was a knife thrust. It had been bad before, now it was infinitely worse.

  A change had come over Hugh Eden, too. He moved slightly away from Elizabeth, sat up straighter, holding himself stiffly . . . It was the money again, the terrible money coming between them. Elizabeth wasn’t going to permit it. She put out a hand and slipped it through Hugh Eden’s elbow, let her hand lie there.

  McKee was talking again. This time he was talking to Loretta Pilgrim. He said,

  “Mrs. Pilgrim, you knew this. You knew Harold Belding's marriage to Mrs. Questing was not a marriage at all—you simply didn’t expect it ever to come out. Mr. Belding told you about it yesterday afternoon, and offered to keep quiet about it for certain con siderations.’’

  “It isn’t so. It’s not true. I never ... he didn’t—"

  Harry Belding said, “Of course not.”

  The Scotsman surveyed them. They were both lying. It didn’t affect the real issue, except that it was leading. ... He went on with the grim recital, striking out in another direction. It was to Gertrude Belding he spoke.

  “Mrs. Belding, you were the one who searched Mrs. Font’s and Mrs. Pilgrim’s compartments on board the Commonwealth. You were also the one who went through Miss O’Hara’s suitcase, here in this lodge on the night of your arrival, after Mr. Font removed his jacket and Miss O’Hara’s rain cape and tried to dispose of them in the lake.”

  Gertrude was a white rabbit mesmerized by a python. Her mouth opened. Before she could speak McKee said, “When you were in the Font apartment in New York that afternoon, the afternoon of the tenth, in some fashion or other, you caught a glimpse of the jewels Davidson was carrying with him. You and your husband knew you were going to lose your jobs with Mrs. Questing when Mrs. Questing handed over the estate to her sister-in-law, Mrs. Pilgrim. You were desperate—and those jewels were valuable and would have been a source of revenue.”

  Gertrude moaned feebly and took refuge in her handkerchief again.

  The Scotsman abandoned her. His glance traveled to Candy. “Mr. Davidson showed you those jewels that day, didn’t he, Mrs. Font?— and they tipped the scales.�
�� When Candy didn’t speak, and it was amazing how collected she looked, he told them about the scribbled notation in Davidson’s wallet concerning the expenditure of $350. He described Todhunter’s trip to the Calgary airport the day before, gave the results, devastatingly.

  “Mrs. Font, you were going to fly from Calgary to Mexico in a chartered plane and get a quick divorce. Davidson was coming on here to see things through. He was fairly sure Mrs. Questing was going to speak, he tried to sound out Miss O’Hara on the train as to what she knew—if Mrs. Questing hadn’t spoken he would have forced the issue. After that he would have joined you and as soon as the necessary period had elapsed you would have been married. Davidson would have been getting a prospectively rich wife—and you would have been getting those jewels. In your case they were the deciding factor.”

  Candy stiffened, and sat forward. Her color was high. She was an outraged kitten getting ready to spit and claw. McKee put up a peremptory hand. It stopped her. She was uncertain, and badly frightened. He was getting them pretty much where he wanted them, but no one was more aware than he was that so far there wasn’t a scrap of proof where the murders themselves were concerned.

  He returned briefly to the scene on Thirty-second Street with Hazel Bauer taking off in pursuit of Harry Belding.

  “Gilbert Davidson saw what occurred from the top of the steps as he was about to descend to the street, he left the Font apartment on Belding’s heels. He was interested in Mr. Belding. Everything was grist—possibly paying grist—to his mill, and lie was an inquisitive as well as acquisitive man by nature. He strolled north up Lexington Avenue, after Mr. Belding and Mrs. Bauer. What he saw when he reached the side street leading away from the Questing house was the direct cause of his death, not those stolen jewels. And what he saw was someone going away from there with Hazel Bauer. Someone—”