Corpses at Indian Stone

by Philip Wylie

  The things you've done!"

  "Nonsense. Sifting dust in ruined cities. Measuring the heads of native rug weavers."

  "Nonsense, yourself! I had Dad borrow a couple of your books from Sarah.

  You've got more nerve than Tarzan--and a vocabulary that makes a sap out of Webster's dictionary. Come on. Take me to dinner. It'll make people talk. Whoever I dine with--it makes people talk. You'll blush--and that's ridiculous--for a man that attacked a gorilla with a--garden fork."

  Aggie blushed as they started into the club.

  Danielle took his arm. "I wish things weren't like this," she said. "I wish I'd met you long ago--and some other way."' She laughed. "Or married you when I was six. Like those natives in India you wrote about. You'd make such an interesting husband. So nice to go on trips with. There's Beth! Are you as keen about her as the rumors say? She's extremely beautiful--and I suppose--having spent so much time in the tropics--you prefer brunettes."

  She looked at him wickedly and his blush deepened. But the glimmer in her eyes faded back to anxiety. "I'm incorrigible," she said.

  Aggie walked back to Rainbow Lodge in the early part of the evening. He had left Danielle at the club--with Ralph Patton and Beth and Bill Calder. Left her sitting with them, talking, killing time, listening to the radio. It seemed to Aggie that, having told all she knew, she had completely relaxed. The burden was now on his shoulders. He had no idea what to do about it. If Sarah were only a little less silent and truculent--more confiding--he would tell her. He decided, as he walked, that he would tell Sarah part of it, anyway. He needed help.

  She was in bed. Around her were unopened books, unplayed games, unread.

  magazines. She looked at her nephew with disturbed eyes and said, "If you want to learn patience and humility, try the mumps! What's afoot?"

  "Well--for one thing--they haven't found Bogarty's body."

  "I know it! Wes was here--making a sick call--and prying harder than a burglar's jimmy on the subject of Hank."

  "I was wondering," Aggie said, "if you happen to have any old fox traps lying about?" Sarah squinted at him. "Thousands. Help yourself. Wes told me about the fox.

  What good will it do you to catch it?"

  He shrugged. "I just have a hunch I'd like to--that's all. Like to see that collar.

  Like to check the teeth with pictures of the bite on Calder's hand. I'm not kidding."

  "Well--if you really want to--I'll have Windle get you some, in the morning. I doubt if it will help you find out who killed Jim--"

  "Oh, I know that. What I want to find out is--where's Hank?" Sarah was staring as glassily as he had expected. "you know--?"

  He was almost supercilious. "Oh, yes. George Davis."

  "Don't be an idiot!"

  "He had reasons for doing it of which we are all aware.

  He's strong enough and decisive enough. His alibi for that night is rotten.

  Circumstantial evidence shows he was probably on the scene of the crime shortly after diagnosing you--removing traces of his original presence. A brilliant analytical mind--

  broken down after years of morbid and vengeful brooding. Oh, yes. George is our man.

  Question is--shall I turn him in? Danielle put it up to me."

  "Danielle! What's she got to do with it?"

  "Oh--she did the redhanded catching."

  "You're not serious, Aggie!"

  "Perfectly."

  His aunt was silent for an unconscionably long time. "George didn't do it," she said finally. "I've known him like the palm of my hand--ever since he cracked his first speller. At least--if he did do it--he's gone crazy."

  "People do," said Aggie.

  "I'd suspect Danielle herself-before I'd dream of George! I'd suspect Byron Waite.

  Or that strong, silent young Patton boy. Greed, there. Beth-who hated her father. Old John, here. Bill--or Martha--or Jack Browne even. Or myself. George is as rentless as rock! His sense of values wouldn't permit him to waste time thinking about murder. As a surgeon, he's seen too much of life and death to be interested in it in any but an intellectual way. Rubbish, Aggie! George never did it!"

  "I wanted your reaction," he grinned. "And--boy!--did I get it."

  Sarah grunted.

  "Nevertheless, I'm going to phone Wes and tell him to come over right away. And you're going to hear a set of circumstances that will probably result in the immediate arrest of your physician."

  Sarah sagged. She seemeo, suddenly, old and scared and uncertain. "I--" She shook her head. "Never mind. Go ahead. Maybe you're right. Maybe I'm an old fool.

  Maybe the confidence I have in my knowledge of people is wholly misplaced! Wholly.

  All my life, I've been a Miss Foot. I haven't hesitated to use any stratagem I could think of to make people do what I believed was good for them. Usually--I've been right. But I could be wrong--fundamentally."

  ' There's something," Aggie said, "about not being your brother's keeper, in the Bible. A good program. I'm going to phone."

  He did so. Wes Wickman, however, was not at Headquarters. He was not expected until morning. The sergeant offered to send up another man. Aggie decided to wait until morning. It was a terrible decision-not from Aggie's viewpoint, but from the viewpoint of chance. He went to bed awhile later and fell into a troubled sleep. A creaking of the stairs woke him up.

  CHAPTER 9

  Sarah pushed open his door as the lights clicked on. She was wearing a heavy wrapper--a velvet one. Upon her form it looked like a fur coat. A towel, under which an ice bag audibly squdged, encircled her neck. There was red on her cheeks-high and spotty--like bad make-up.

  "You're worse!" Aggie exclaimed. "I'll get Davis--!"

  She shook her head and sat down in the largest chair his room contained. She thrust out her feet, which were encased in lambskin boots. "Get me a stool. I want to talk."

  Aggie shoved his arms into the sleeves of his dressing gown. There was no stool in his room. He made one, of a box and a pillow. He arranged his aunt's feet, and stripped a blanket from his bed to tuck around her. Then he switched on a bridge lamp and sat down, facing her. He smiled, and she smiled back at him.

  "Shoot," he said.

  Her first words were an apology to herself rather than a prelude to a definite subject. "I can't ask you not to repeat what I'm going to tell you, Aggie, because it isn't that kind of information-and this is not a time when innocent people can be required to keep secrets. I must not say what I'm going to--and yet I've got to. I decided, only now.

  I'm old and I'm ill and I'm not as astute as I used to be. I determined that you would have to judge about things just as Danielle evidently has done." She smiled again. "It's funny.

  Nobody has done my thinking or my judging--ever."

  Aggie reflected her expression and waited.

  "It's about Hank Bogarty. Since he hasn't turned up, I'm going to tell you. Davis threatened me, if I talked. I had a long note from Waite yesterday in the same vein-and another today. I--personally--haven't anything much to lose. They have. Which is the reason I've kept my mouth shut.

  "Aggie, this is going to sound a shade dramatic, and quite silly! To you, I mean.

  To businessmen--it would seem more commonplace. Their lives are bound up in money.

  Money means security to them. It also means power. Without power, such men lose their reason for living. Without security, they get panicky."

  "A fact," he said, "that applies too universally, these days! Because security and power, as represented by money, always were, and always will be, illusions."

  "If you have any moralizing to do," Sarah responded tartly, "do it some other time. I feel rotten and I have something to say."

  "Sorry!"

  "And don't, for heaven's sake, keep going through life saying, 'Sorry.' Who gives a damn if you're sorry! Listen. Thirty-odd years ago, Byron Waite was rich by inheritance, and a very promising Wall Street youngster. Jim Calder had shown enough of the ruthlessness that has made h
im unbearable to impress a lot of important people. His father, too, was rich, and Jim was coming up. George Davis had his inheritance--we all did, at Indian Stones--and Marilyn's money--that was his wife--and his skill. We were a clique within this Indian Stones clique. There were a couple of others in our crowd who have long since petered into their graves and I won't bother you with them.

  "Jim and Byron Waite, naturally, did business for George and for me. George and I only put up capital--they ran things. We made money. And then the panic of 1907 came along. You don't recall that--but you do remember 1929."

  "I was in Sumatra--mostly--"

  Sarah scowled. "I mean--you've read newspapers. You're more or less cognizant of the fact that there was a depression after the crash. You can possibly recall the bank closings, the bonus marchers, the bread lines, the riots, the strikes and shutouts, the chimneys that were not smoking--all that."

  "Vividly."

  "Well, the 1907 panic wasn't exactly like that--but similar enough. It raised sin with Indian Stones. Calder was cleaned out. Davis lost most of Marilyn's money. The Pattonssold their Fifth Avenue mansion. I dropped a handsome chunk of the ancestral Plum fortune. Waite lost less, perhaps, than the rest of us. But he was the worst scared and the most bitter. He was older-by five years or more-than most of us. He's nearly seventy now. Anyway--we were very thick in those days. Entertained for each other in New York all winter. Had a whist club up here that met two nights every week--without fail. I mean to say--we'd grown up together--like this present generation here. We were in grooves together; we established habits--ruts. We knew each other as well as if we were in one family. Do you see?"

  Aggie nodded.

  "All right. Think of us. Then think of the people you knew who acted batty after the 1929 crash. People hoarded so much gold, for example, that the government had to call it in. Plenty of people, in 1932, were actually stocking their country places with supplies--as if for a siege. It was like that in 1907--exactly. And the worst feature--in 1907--for all of us was a scarcity of cash and liquid assets. A lack of cash wrecked Jim. A lack of cash cost Waite a whole railroad."

  Sarah drew a deep breath. "That was where Hank Bogarty came in. He'd been up here in 1905. Distant relative of the Scotts--who have died out. They called him a wild kid and a black sheep--because he'd slammed out of Harvard his first year and gone to the Far West and done as he pleased. I never thought of him as wild. In fact--" she cocked an eyebrow at her nephew--"if Hank had made a proposal to me--instead of Waite and a few of his ilk—I daresay there would be other Plum heirs and assigns, besides you!" She grinned reminiscently. "I had too much tongue for Hank, I presume.

  "Hank played whist with us and Hank talked mines. Gold and silver and lead. All summer long. He talked about canoes and portages, maps and lodes, white water, and living off the country. If he had a small capital to fit out an expedition, he said-Oh, you see the point! He was romantic as Satan--and plausible-and we were all flush. Putting up twenty thousand from four of us was a cinch. We dangled Hank all summer because we liked his company--and we sent him west with his 'grubstake' in the fall--and practically forgot about it. He didn't write much. In the 1907 panic, when we were scratching every private till to the bottom, we did try to get in touch with him. But he was out in the back country somewhere--and we dismissed any hope of collecting the twenty thousand dollars."

  "And then--" Aggie said-"Hank came through."

  Sarah nodded several times. "He came through like an Oklahoma gusher. He showed up here in 1909. It was gold and plenty of it, and he wouldn't hear of taking more than the fifth allowed him by his original deal. Nobody--" Sarah snorted--"nobody but me suggested it, in any case! The mine was in Canada. We'd felt the terrible penalty of a lack of cash. We were ambitious--that is, the men were--and imaginative. Rugged individualists. All that. Legality was not ever a chief concern of Waite or Calder--or Davis. We decided to use the proceeds from the mine to establish a joint cash reserve. We arranged to have the gold refined and molded and shipped--but not marked as gold. I don't know when we decided to keep it here--"

  Aggie literally jumped. "Keep it here!"

  She went on impassively. "Here. Calder didn't trust any bank. Waite didn't.

  You've got to see us as we were--or them, rather. Scary, suspicious, determined--and possessed of a source of liquid funds that couldn't be checked exactly, ever. Half the proceeds of the mine went into regular channels. The other half came here."

  "But why here?"

  Sarah smiled. "When we decided not to use a bank--we talked and talked about what place to use. We'd formed, by then, one of those secret societies. Done everything but signed in blood. Sworn never to speak about our hoard. It was a lot of fun--at the time." She paused. "Aggie, you know that the club was built on the foundations of the old Sachem House."

  "My God," he said softly. "The cellar!"

  Sarah's voice sank. "You used to play in it. Part of it. Under that old hotel was the cellar for the heating plant and for wine. The one for tools. There was an exit, too: for those mauve decade beaux--the married ones--who wanted to hurry away when their wives appeared suddenly in fine carriages accompanied by furious mothers. Life then wasn't quite as dull--as this jitterbug generation likes to think. The Sachem House was a gay dog's paradise. Yes, Aggie, the cellar. When the hotel burned down, and your grandfather's generation built the club, only part of the cellar was known. I discovered another section. I found the architect's original drawings in the library--and when we were thinking of a proper hiding place--I got the drawings out. The men secretly broke through a wall one autumn. That's where we started depositing the gold."

  Aggie thought for a long time in silence. "Well?"

  "Hank wouldn't join in the scheme. He handled his fifth through his bankers. The mine paid off--handsomely--for almost twenty years. Waite and Calder dipped into our gold during the war. Again, in 1929, it was handy. What we took--we replaced. Then--a little later--gold was called in. We four held a meeting.

  "I was for turning over the gold. Calder and Waite refused. They said we'd be branded as economic royalists. Said the mere fact would hurt their businesses. There wasn't any record of it. They said that if an inflation came--our gold was our only cushion. I argued. I like to be more or less lawful. Finally, it occurred to me to trade my quarter for platinum. That was legal. I made some indirect inquiries from people I knew, and, in the end, I bought platinum and I had it put in our joint cache, by George, and Jim, and Byron, too. They thought, as usual, that I was an old fool. Platinum wasn't stable.

  They expected that gold would be remonetized soon. It hasn't been, yet--as you know.

  Now, of course, they're scared to budge.

  "Legally, if they turned in all that treasure, they could be sent to prison. Actually, I don't believe it would happen. But you can see how they might almost rather die than surrender that gold--if you stop to think what sort of men they are and how long they've depended on it. You can see why they're afraid to exchange it--these days. Let it sit.

  That's their idea. You can also see why the wire about Hank's approach, his mention of a

  'new grubstake', and the sudden, violent death of Jim Calder got all three of us in a tizzie.

  It looked as if our sins would find us out. That's what Jim was razzled about when he barged in here!"

  Aggie felt a need for his pipe. "I can 'see' everything you've said," he replied, after lighting it. "Except that I can't yet understand why none of you came out with it--under the present circumstances."

  "I am coming out with it," Sarah said. "In doing so, I'm spilling private matters that have been in the dark for thirty-odd years. I'm betraying George Davis and Byron Waite. At least, they'd consider it betrayal. They haven't told this story to Wes Wickman--

  or to the coroner--or anybody. I'm risking their hatred. I'm risking revenge, even. I've said to myself ten thousand times in the last three days that if I tell, and if it proves that Hank is still somewhere in the la
ke, and Jim did stumble into some youngster's deadfall, I'll never be able to hold my head up around here again. We felt mighty serious about that cache. Even Jim would never have dared to violate it, I--I--think."

  "Are you sure?"

  "Pretty sure," she answered after a moment. "Yes. Certain, almost."

  "Couldn't you check?"

  "I've got the mumps! I'm sick! I can't poke in cellars--"

  "I mean--have George Davis check. Or Waite."

  "It's difficult now; the club is constantly milling with people. Guests all day.

  Employees at night. We made our deposits in the winter, when it was empty. Our own manager was in charge. We'd bring up what he thought was wine. We all had our own wine stock, and bins, in the cellars."

  "Couldn't your 'other' cellar have been found by somebody else?"

  Sarah shrugged. "Nobody living knows where it is--except the four of us. Three--

  now. We made sure of that. It's cut in bedrock--and we're using an old safe which belonged to the Sachem House. It's beautifully hidden; it was meant to be. The smoothies in the seventies and eighties used that safe. In all these years-nobody has ever tampered with the place--or found the entrance--"

  "What about somebody like Jack--who's up here alone all winter?" Sarah smiled.

  "Jack? If he found the cellar--he'd tell the world! It would be a game for him. Fun. We'd get telegrams: 'Come up! Great mystery uncovered!' You know. He might love discovering such a place, but he'd never crack it open without permission. He's such a lamb! The truth is--he'd never find it. You'd have to blast. It isn't something you can stumble on. You've got to know it's there, and know how to get to it."

  Old John's feet sounded on the stairs. He brought in a tray on which were coffee cups and a steaming glass container. He looked reproachfully at Sarah. "You should be in bed, Miss Sarah. Since you're not, I thought you might like some coffee. I heard you talking--"

  "Yes, John. I'm going back, soon. I wanted to have a talk with my nephew. It's done me a world of good! And this is very thoughtful!"

  Aggie nodded. "Genius, John."