Uninvited Guest

by George Harmon Coxe

  “There was a plane departure for San Juan and one for Trinidad this morning,” he said, “but both were booked solid days in advance and there were no cancellations. A schooner for St. Vincent and a sloop for St. Lucia. If he’s aboard we can have him taken off on arrival.”

  “Is this anything, sir?”

  The sergeant had unfolded a sheet from a newspaper and now he spread it on the desk as Briggs came close. Scott stepped up beside him, seeing now that the page came from the Sunday magazine section of a New York daily. The three things he noticed first were the picture, the penciled message scrawled across the top, and the heading which read: WHAT HAPPENED TO TIM WELSH? The sub-head continued: Gambler Vanished Without Trace 18 Months Ago.

  The article, date-lined ten days previous, had to do with a much publicized case that Scott remembered as he read on. It had started nearly two years ago with the Grand Jury indictment of a man named Antonelle, his partner, Tim Welsh, and a half dozen lesser lights in connection with a bookmaking syndicate that eventually involved certain politicians and members of the police department. For weeks the papers had been filled with the developments and this article was a recapitulation of that case, pointing up the results of the trials which sent Antonelle and several others to prison but featuring the mystery of Tim Welsh, who had jumped bail and vanished with an estimated $200,000 of partnership cash.

  The photograph of a fleshy-faced man with thinning hair and deep-set eyes seemed familiar but told Scott nothing at first glance; Briggs, with his policeman’s gift of observation, thought otherwise.

  “Thin down that face and tan it up,” he said; “add a mustache and dark-rimmed glasses and I think we’ll have our friend Waldron.” He cocked his head. “Waldron—Welsh. Not very inventive in that respect, would you say. And what do you make of this?”

  His finger underlined the penciled words on top which read: “Didn’t know you were so famous. Will be down soon to collect my share . . . J.

  “J for Julia, do you imagine?” Briggs said. “A comparative analysis of her handwriting should clear that up for us in any event.”

  “She must have recognized him when she saw this article,” Scott said. “Or thought she did and took a chance.”

  “Mailed this down in advance to suggest that she would like some payment for her silence,” Briggs added thoughtfully. “He tucked it in here with his other newspaper clippings and forgot where he put it, if he thought about it at all in his haste to get out.” He folded the sheet and tapped it idly against one palm. “Interesting,” he said. “Could make a first rate motive for murder.”

  CHAPTER 18

  WHEN Alan Scott awoke on his bunk it was nearly dark and he was so drugged with sleep that it took him a while to understand how he happened to be here. He had left Briggs and come to the Aquatic Club for a sandwich and a beer and then gone to Sally’s place at two o’clock only to find her gone. His lack of sleep during the past forty-eight hours was finally getting the best of him and when he came aboard he had flopped down to take a small nap. Now, glancing at his watch, he saw that it was a quarter of six and he sat up, his mouth thick and his body moist from the heat of the little cabin.

  Yawning, he got a cigarette going and sat for a moment scratching his head. It took an effort to peel off his shorts and get into his trunks but when he went on deck the soft breeze began to revive him and he sat down on the cabin house to cool off before his swim.

  As always it was the time of day he most enjoyed and it was enough for the moment to watch the texture of the waning sunlight on the water. There was activity on the club pier now. The sound of music came to him from some distant record player and up by the Need-ham’s Point Lighthouse the color of the sea changed from blue to green before it broke upon the coral shoals. It did him good, just sitting there with his cigarette. Life seemed less complicated. The cruise no longer seemed so important now that Lambert was going to buy the Griselda, and the establishment of Sally’s innocence was like a great weight lifted from his shoulders.

  He flipped the cigarette butt over the side and followed it into the water with a long, flat dive. Leisurely he swam round the Griseldds counter, admiring her lines, happy that for another three weeks she would be his. Just as leisurely he pulled himself aboard and went below to shower and dress. He made himself a small drink, drank it with great enjoyment and, at a quarter of seven, rowed over to the Aquatic Club pier for a second drink. It was here that Freddie Gardner found him.

  Scott greeted him without enthusiasm. For some unknown reason Freddie made him think of murder, a subject he had been trying hard to forget, and somehow he found the other’s somewhat shabby appearance distasteful. His offer of a drink was accepted and Freddie sidled into a chair and smoothed down his sandy hair.

  “I hoped I’d find you here,” he said. “I’d like your advice on something if you have a minute . . . It’s about the other night,” he said when he tasted his drink. “I suppose it’s a moral problem, or an ethical one. What I mean to say is, Julia’s death, tragic as it was, solved some problems for a lot of people.”

  “It didn’t solve any problems for me,” Scott said. “It loused up my cruise charter for God knows how long. I guess Lambert is going to buy the Griselda but—”

  “True enough in your case,” Freddie interrupted. “But for others it is somewhat different and I have a question I would like to ask.” He leaned forward, lowering his voice. “If you knew who might have killed Julia would you say so?”

  For a moment Scott could only stare at him, an odd irritation beginning to work on him. “But I don’t know,” he said. “For all I know, you did . . . All I know for sure is, I didn’t, and neither did Sally Reeves.”

  “Sally went swimming that night.”

  The digression startled Scott. In spite of himself he remembered again the wet spots on the schooner’s deck when he had gone below to find Julia’s body. Then, because the inference was so monstrous, he closed his mind on the subject.

  “Certainly she went in swimming,” he said, infuriated that this little man should bring the matter up. “She said so.”

  “She said there was a man in a dinghy.”

  “She didn’t say it was a man.”

  Freddie shrugged. “You’re quibbling.”

  “So I’m quibbling. She saw someone in a boat. Someone tried to brain her. Maybe it was you—or maybe you know who it was.”

  Gardner removed his glasses and started to polish them on a none too clean handkerchief.

  “Suppose I did.”

  “Suppose hell,” Scott said. “You either did or you didn’t, and if you didn’t why bring the subject up? What is this, another chisel of yours?”

  With his glasses off Freddie’s gaze had a squint-eyed quality and a flush crept into his round face.

  “Not at all,” he said. “I just thought-”

  “You thought,” Scott interrupted, his anger still riding him. He started to amplify the reply and then, suddenly, he stopped. Having it in mind to accuse Freddie of hanging around the beach the night Julia died, he now recalled again the oddly broken headlight he had seen in Freddie’s little car the night before. There had been something familiar about that broken lens but he had not been able to recall where he had seen it earlier. Now, in some mysterious and unaccountable way, his mind supplied the answer and he was sure.

  He had seen it the night he had brought Lambert back from the Club Morgan. He had been turning into the Yacht Club and this car had suddenly appeared before him, coming either from the Yacht Club or some place close by. That had been somewhere around one o’clock and because he realized that Julia might have been dead even then—the medical report had never placed the time of death accurately—he spoke of this to Freddie, his voice curt and incisive, the reaction in the other’s face telling him he was right.

  “You didn’t go home that night like you said you did,” he said, “or if you did you came back later to sneak around in your own peculiar way. I guess you haven’t
told Major Briggs about that, have you?”

  “No,” Freddie said quietly. “I haven’t. That’s why—”

  “Then why bother me? I’m no cop and I’ve got no dough to pay for information. Tell Briggs, Freddie. If you don’t, I will. . . Now if you’ll excuse me I’d like to order dinner.”

  Freddie rose without a word, his face still flushed and his bespectacled gaze evasive. He rearranged his chair and walked swiftly from the pier, a small, stooped figure in a rumpled white suit that had seen better days. Watching him go, remembering the things he had said, Scott felt the anger ooze away and presently there came to replace it the first prodding fingers of shame. He remembered Freddie’s ever-ready laughter and its peculiar giggle-like quality. Freddie wasn’t giggling any more. No one had laughed since Julia came and now, the depression settling upon him, Scott was no longer hungry. When the waiter came he asked if he could get a cup of soup and a sandwich served out here.

  After that he began to think, not wanting to but unable to help himself now that Freddie had brought up again the subject of murder. His angular face was somber and his gaze remote as he began to rearrange the facts he knew and tried to find some pattern that he could accept. In the beginning he had been concerned with his own selfish problems of the cruise, the sale of the schooner; he had been jealous because he was in love, and unfair in that jealousy. He had been worried about Sally, and the things he had done, the lies he had told, had been motivated by that worry.

  Now that worry came back to him, its basis the fact that Sally had probably seen the one who had killed Julia. He believed Sally when she said she did not know who that someone was but suppose there was something else, something she had not spoken of because she felt it unimportant. Was this recent business with Freddie some trick on his part to find out if Sally had told him—Scott—anything she had not told the police?

  “Nuts!” he said, half aloud, annoyed that he should consider such far-fetched possibilities. What kind of thinking was that?

  With an effort he brought his mind back to details he could be sure of, and out of them came one certain conclusion: he had acted foolishly in attacking Gardner instead of playing along and finding out how much he knew. Instead of temper he would have been better off displaying a little finesse.

  By the time he had finished eating the worry was still there and he knew finally that he must find Freddie and do what he could to learn what it was Freddie had wanted to say. But first he wanted to see Sally and reassure himself that she was all right, to make sure once and for all that she had no knowledge that might prove dangerous.

  It was dark when he climbed the outside stairs and went along the railed gallery to Sally’s room. He knocked three times and tried the door before admitting that she was not there, and now, an odd uncertainty working on him, he went to the parking lot and found the attendant.

  Yes, he knew Miss Reeves. He’d seen her leave about ten or fifteen minutes ago. “I don’t rightly know where she went, sir. But you know Mr. Howard Crane? Well, he came to pick her up.”

  “Crane?”

  Scott stood a moment, his face bleak and his gaze fixed and sightless in the darkness as he considered the information. When he could find no sinister implication in the statement he started to turn away; then he thought of something else.

  “Do you know Mr. Gardner?”

  “Mr. Freddie Gardner? Yes, sir.”

  “Could you tell me where he lives?”

  “Could try, sir. You turn right out here,” he said, pointing. “You go along the highway to—you know where the Baldwin Hotel is? Well, you pass that. I think it’s the next gap,” he said, using the local synonym for a secondary street. “Turn left. It should be marked; should say Dodd.”

  “Dodd Street?”

  “Dodd’s Gap. Mr. Gardner, he live in the last house.”

  Scott thanked him and gave him a coin. Then, leaving the dinghy tied up at the pier, he went along to the Yacht Club and his car.

  Dodd’s Gap was paved but narrow and the small houses which flanked it—some stone and some frame-stood on narrow plots and were separated from each other by walls or vine-covered fences. A half dozen cars were parked on one side, all facing the highway, and as Scott drove past he knew why: the street ended in a field with a turn-around and the residents apparently made the turn and headed properly before parking. Scott did the same, taking the first vacant space and then walking back to this frame house, standing well off the ground and having an unpainted, rundown look even in the darkness.

  Yellow light rimmed the shades in the front room and Scott crossed a sandy yard. In a neighboring plot a dog was yapping and somewhere a radio was playing softly as he climbed the steps and moved across the veranda to the wooden door. He knocked, knocked again. When there was no answer he tried to peer round the shades. Finally he came back and tried the knob which turned easily enough.

  At first he only opened the door about a foot, calling ahead of him. “Freddie! . . . Is anyone home?”

  He widened the opening to take a forward step. Then he stopped, hand still on the knob, his stare suddenly wide and fixed, only vaguely aware of the sparsely furnished room with its washed-board floors but knowing now why Freddie Gardner had not answered his knock. Freddie lay crumpled on the floor, face down and one arm outflung.

  Scott did not remember closing the door. He was conscious only of the still figure in the wrinkled white trousers and the short-sleeved shirt. Somehow he was on one knee beside it, his nerves stretched tight and his throat dry.

  “Freddie!” he said again and put his hand on a shoulder that was limp and inert in his grasp. He shook it. He pulled at it, not meaning to, and the torso tipped over on its back and then he saw the ugly dark stain on the shirt front and the tiny little hole just to the left of the breastbone.

  Until then Scott reacted without conscious thought. Now he lifted a limp wrist and sought a pulse-beat that never came. When he replaced the hand the sickness came and he forced his glance upward and away from the round face, pale now but composed, the eyelids closed in death.

  CHAPTER 19

  IT WAS not the fact of death as such that held Scott there on one knee as reaction began its work; it was the thought of what he had said earlier, the fancied picture he had of Freddie shuffling off alone across the Aquatic Club pier to his death, because he, Scott, had been abusive and had refused to listen when Freddie asked for advice. There was no trick on Freddie’s part. He had wanted help, needed help. He had known then who had killed Julia; he must have known. He had held back the information for some personal reason of his own, knowing this was wrong and bothered by the knowledge. Now—

  With tremendous mental effort Scott forced the picture from his mind and tried to think. Still on one knee he let his harried glance move on, taking in the canvas chair, the cot with its bleached-blue covering, the table with the radio, the smaller one with the telephone. To his left was a darkened hall leading to other rooms, the door on one side of which stood ajar.

  As remembered things came flooding back the pattern he had been seeking seemed to fall in place. He seemed to understand what had happened, and why. That it was nothing he could prove seemed unimportant now. He would tell what he knew and the rest would be up to Major Briggs.

  When his glance came back to the telephone he knew what he had to do. He rose wearily. He took a breath but he did not touch the telephone or even make a move in that direction, then or ever.

  It was luck rather than any great alertness or instinctive pressure on his part that warned him in time. One moment he was concerned only with the problem of murder and its ramifications; the next he stiffened as he stood, scalp tightening as a curious fear that was akin to panic took hold of him.

  He had heard nothing at all but the distant radio. What he had seen was but a shadow of movement, caught briefly in the corner of his eye.

  The door in the hallway which stood ajar had moved.

  Not much. No more than an inch. Except for
the acuteness of his vision he would not have noticed it at all.

  He did not try to tell himself this was nothing but pressure of ragged nerves on imagination. The door had moved. Someone was waiting in the darkness of the other room and his mounting fear came not from this but from the sudden realization that there was no gun in sight.

  Freddie had been shot, but there was no gun! The killer still had it, and he, or someone else, was waiting.

  An instant later Scott had his nerves in hand and the panic had gone as swiftly as it came. He knew what he had to do, and he did it slowly and with deliberation, turning towards the front door, his face expressionless and a grim smile working at his eyes.

  No telephone. Not now. Major Briggs would have to wait.

  He opened the door and went out on the veranda. He closed the door behind him without looking back. When he started his car he raced the motor in case anyone was listening. He drove to a space just short of the highway corner, pulled in and cut his lights. The hand that presently lit his cigarette was steady.

  He did not have long to wait. He heard the car coming up behind him, saw it pull on past and hesitate at the intersection before turning left and accelerating.

  Scott did not get a good look at the driver but he thought he recognized the car, and its license number was firmly fixed in his mind as he stepped on the throttle. He had to wait at the intersection for a speeding car to pass but it was the bus that licked him. It was rolling fast, the ticket-taker clinging to the side rail, and he might have been able to cut in front of it had it not been for the car coming from the opposite direction. As it was he was held up. He had to sit there and watch the bus flash past and then he had to follow it. Because of oncoming traffic he had to wait behind it when it stopped to discharge passengers. When, a quarter of a mile farther on, he was able to get by, he knew his chance was gone and he slowed down, thinking hard, wondering what he should do first.