by Medora Sale
“Everything quiet tonight?” asked Franklin, who, after a brief and heartfelt struggle between revenge for the scare and desire for a peaceful shift, elected peace.
“Very quiet,” said the gardener. “I came out to say— I don’t know if you’re permitted to do this, but Bettl, the housekeeper, she always leaves me a big thermos of coffee. If you want to come in, you’re welcome to some. I can’t drink it all—never do. She makes good coffee.” He sounded diffident, embarrassed, as if never in his life could he have imagined offering an invitation to someone in authority.
“Thanks,” said Franklin stiffly, although with some deeply hidden reluctance. He could taste hot, strong coffee. “Couldn’t possibly come inside. I’m on duty. But I’m fine out here.”
“I’ll bring the thermos out to you, then,” said Esteban. “Just leave it on the step before you go.”
“Well . . .” said Franklin, uneasy but not quite sure what was wrong with the suggestion. “I guess—” The gardener was gone before the constable could frame his next sentence.
In less than a minute Esteban was back, holding a large thermos. “I’m going to bed,” he said lightly. “How many security people do you need around the place in one night? I’ve left the dogs locked up.” The gardener laughed and headed around the house.
Franklin waited until Esteban’s footsteps disappeared in the distance before opening the thermos and trying the coffee with a certain amount of caution. It was strong and bitter, just what he needed on a night like this; he blew on it to cool it down and drank most of it.
The police officer stared up at the windows of the house, passing the time by counting how many there were. It was a strangely taxing occupation. The windows kept shifting sideways, not really wanting to be counted, and he had to open his eyes very wide to enable them to concentrate on each one long enough to number it off. Still, life seemed very pleasant and slow and relaxed, with nothing to worry about . . . nothing at all to worry about . . . worry . . .
The noises filtered through to him at an enormous distance. People talking. A metallic screech. A door? A door . . . He struggled to raise his head and open his eyes. There shouldn’t be doors opening. His eyelids were fastened shut, and he fought to force them open. Footsteps and more voices. He tried to lurch to his feet and was stopped by something smooth and round. A steering wheel, his fingers told him at last. Have to get out of the car, said one small part of his brain. Have to look. The car door was swinging open beside him, and he fell out onto the gravel. He blinked. Once, then twice. It was dark. He pushed his hands against the gravel and somehow was on his feet again, moving toward the house, his legs folding and buckling and growing fantastically long and unwieldy under him. He looked up at the front door and blinked. Locked, said his brain. Back door. He fell against the side of the house and let it carry him around. He wasn’t surprised to find the back door swinging open. He grabbed the doorframe; it swayed and swelled in his grasp, bringing him dangerously close to the floor. A stove floated over to his right. A kitchen. If only he could lie down on the nice soft floor for just a moment. . . . Footsteps echoed in front of him, and he pushed himself forward again, leaning on the walls with his long, rubbery arms. He threw himself in the direction of the door to the central hall.
Just then the door next to it opened up. He blinked again and turned his head with painful slowness in the direction of the sudden light. Someone made a noise. He raised an arm in a gesture of menace or self-defense, but too late to protect him from the slashing blow to the side of his head. He crumpled onto the floor and lay still.
By nine o’clock that evening Veronika von Hohenkammer had been dazed. She felt exhausted, ill, achy, utterly wretched. Sanders had abandoned her in the study after ten hostile minutes of questions, during which he went over the same material one more time, rarely pausing long enough for answers. Left alone with Harriet at last, she had poured out her tale and the background to her tale and finally her life history. Harriet had listened silent and stony faced, the least sympathetic looking confidante that Nikki had ever run into. At nine o’clock, over the remains of dinner, Harriet had finally poured herself a cup of coffee and decided she was too tired to listen anymore. She told Nikki brusquely that it was time for bed. Nikki had sworn that she wouldn’t sleep—she hadn’t slept the night before at all—and Harriet had stood up abruptly and walked into the kitchen.
When Veronika followed her in, she found her engaged in heating up a small saucepan of milk. “If that’s for me,” she said, “I hate milk, and warm milk is disgusting.”
“Shut up,” said Harriet, her last dregs of amiability gone long since. She stalked back into the dining room and began to open doors: to the sideboard, to the linen press, to the small teak cabinet. “Bingo,” she said. “Scotch. I knew there’d be some in the house.”
“What are you doing?” asked Nikki, following her back into the kitchen. By now the milk was boiling over onto the stove, and Harriet moved the saucepan off the burner.
“Preparing an ancient native remedy, known only to a few million North Americans,” she said curtly, grabbing a glass. She poured in a dollop of Scotch, added the scalded milk, found some nutmeg, and grated it in. “There, take that upstairs, get ready for bed, open up a really boring book, and drink it. You will find staying awake impossible. I’m going home. I’m so tired I can’t keep my eyes open.”
Only now Veronika was wide awake. Her mouth felt thick and woolly; her eyes throbbed, her stomach fluttered unhappily, but she was thoroughly awake. Her ears rang with the memory of some alarming sound. Something must have awakened her, then. She sat up in bed and reached for her watch: one-fifteen. She was never going to get back to sleep. A door slammed. A car engine started up, very close. She heard voices, voices she could not quite understand, say something brief and then be quiet again. The car must be in the driveway that ran up beside the west side of the house, right under her window. Doors slammed shut. The car moved away in a burst of engine noise and squeal of tires. The police, thought Nikki. Checking up on her. Prowling through the house as if they owned it, hoping to rattle her and trick her into running away. She pulled the sheet over her head; tears oozed into her freshly laundered pillowcase.
The ringing telephone caught Sanders just as he was about to go home. Dubinsky had left hours ago, grumbling that he wasn’t crazy enough to spend the night there, and Sanders had no choice but to pick up the receiver. It was the sergeant on night duty, with worry in his voice. “Inspector? Franklin hasn’t reported,” he said. “He’s fifteen minutes late, and they can’t raise him. They want to send in a team—”
“For chrissake, that’s all we need,” grumbled Sanders. “Six cars charging up there, lights flashing, all the neighbours screaming bloody murder. No. He’s probably in the kitchen, cozying up to the housekeeper, eating bacon and eggs. I’ll drop by on my way home. If there’s anything wrong, I’ll call in.” He picked up his jacket and left.
Sanders parked the car in front of the house, behind Franklin’s cruiser, grabbed a flashlight, and jumped impatiently out. The night was cool and still, the neighbourhood silent except for the frantic call of a cricket and the faraway hum of traffic. He shone his light into the cruiser, half-expecting to find a tired constable deep in slumber. Nothing— just Franklin’s private thermos of coffee on the passenger seat. He listened for the muted crashing of someone doing a tour of the property. Not a sound. Unless he was barefoot and very agile, Franklin wasn’t walking around out there. The silence of the night seemed to grow in intensity as he strained to listen. He turned off his flashlight. The house was still and dark, and he was beginning to like the situation less and less. It occurred to him that he had been crazy to come out here alone. Tell me, Inspector Sanders, he muttered to himself, exactly how much does lack of sleep impair your judgment. A little? Somewhat? A lot?
As he started a slow circuit of the house, the spot between his shoulder blades twitched. He w
as brave enough when occasion demanded it, he supposed. But tonight we’re talking about stupidity, not bravery, he thought. And stupidity got people killed. He thought of Underhill, the cheerful kid from the Thirty-third Division, who ended up with a bullet in his back on a night like this, and stopped to listen hard behind him. He rounded the back corner of the house onto the patio and walked over to the French doors that led into the conservatory. Suddenly the leg of a chair materialized under him, and he stumbled, smashed his shin, almost fell, and cursed. He turned on his flashlight, picked his way through the garden furniture over to the door, and shone the light through the glass.
The little conservatory was tranquil in its emptiness. He raised his arm to break through the panel of glass in front of him and then stopped. There was a red light glowing from beside the door inside. A burglar alarm. “My God, Sanders,” he muttered. He had been about to break into a substantial house on the insubstantial evidence of an empty car. He shook his head. Time to raise the inhabitants and get let in legally. In the meantime, he could use a little backup in case something had gone wrong.
Moments later, he was standing on the front doorstep, leaning on the bell, having already called in a bad-tempered demand that they get the security system turned off and send help. He could hear the expensive gongs reverberate, to no effect. No lights going on, no noises of irritable sleepers. He rang again. And again. He stood back and looked up at the windows for some sign of movement. Nothing. He moved back around the house as fast as he could and peered once more through the glass. To hell with the alarm, he thought, picking up a metal chair and using it to smash a hole through the glass in the door. He reached in carefully and turned the knob. No sirens, no bells, no red lights. Nothing disturbed the silence of the night. He flicked on the overhead light. The room was empty. As he reached the door into the hall, he heard the faint, irregular gasps of someone struggling for breath. One sweep of his light answered his questions. Franklin was lying on his stomach in the open doorway to the basement. Blood was pouring down the constable’s face and onto the floor from an indefinable mess on the side of his head.
Sanders looked at the wound helplessly. None of his emergency training had covered hemorrhaging through a mass of shattered bone. And even if he knew what to do, he didn’t think he could bring himself to touch that battered head. In the distance he heard the approaching ruckus from the emergency call and ran toward the front door, bumping against furniture, cursing and moving his light around until he found the round knob of a rheostat. With an impatient twist he turned it up to full power; the entire central portion of the house blazed with light from the enormous chandelier hanging above him.
The first uniformed man was already running up to the house as he opened the door. He charged up the steps, his pistol in his hand, ready to shoot anything that moved. “Put that goddamn thing away before you hurt somebody. Where in hell’s the ambulance?” snapped Sanders.
“What ambulance? You hurt?”
“Christ almighty!” he snarled. “No, you idiot, he is—the one lying on the floor.”
“My God, who’s that?”
“Franklin. He was supposed to be watching this place.” Mumbling incoherently, the constable shoved his weapon away and turned to go back and radio for further aid when the next carload of help pulled up and disgorged two officers. Within moments there were five men in the front hall looking expectantly at Sanders. “Could one of you clowns go back there and see to Franklin?” he asked, his voice heavy with sarcasm. A figure hastily detached itself from the group. “And upstairs there should be three more people. God knows how they slept through all this, so maybe someone had better just tiptoe up there and see what’s up.” The two men closest to the stairs looked at each other and, taking him at his word, began to move gingerly up the stairs.
That left two men. Sanders turned to them and pointed in the direction of the open basement door. “I want to know what’s down there, or rather, who. Move carefully. Then check this floor. There’s supposed to be a gardener responsible for security. He lives on top of the garage. When you’re through with the house, see if you can raise anyone over there. His name is Esteban—Paul Esteban. And look out for the dogs.”
“What dogs?” said one of them suspiciously.
“Guard dogs,” he said. “The house is protected by guard dogs. Why aren’t they barking? Or don’t you think they’ve noticed us yet?” He suppressed the further remarks that sprang to his lips. “Don’t worry. They didn’t take a piece out of me, so they must be chained up.”
Not much more than thirty minutes later, five police officers, three cruisers, an ambulance, and the injured man had all left the premises, leaving Sanders sitting in the kitchen with one healthy replacement for Franklin, Veronika von Hohenkammer, Klaus Leitner, and Bettl Kotzmeier. It would be hard to say which of the people in the room looked the worst, with the exception of Franklin’s replacement, who was in fine shape. Out in back, two more men were still dealing with the problem of the gardener. The five of them were sitting around the kitchen table; Klaus had his head cradled in his arms and was apparently unconscious. Bettl sat bolt upright, but her eyelids drooped, and her eyes kept unfocusing, while her head sank down from time to time, then jerked rapidly back up again. Nikki sat very still, her dark eyes enormous in her white face.
“Listen,” said Klaus, opening an eye and cautiously raising his head an inch or two, “I have one hell of a headache, and I feel like death. Do you think you could tell me why we were dragged out of bed in the middle of the night like this?”
“Gestapo!” Bettl muttered.
Sanders looked at her with interest, did a few mental calculations, and then figured that she would have been prepubescent at the time the Gestapo had been disbanded. He turned back to Klaus. “Just a few questions . . . We’d like to know exactly what happened here tonight, if you don’t mind. You must have heard something going on.”
“I didn’t hear a thing until I woke up and this gorilla in uniform was shaking me, with another one leaning over his shoulder, watching. They dragged me out of bed.” He had raised his head a little higher to speak and then let it drop cautiously down again to where it had been.
“When did you go to bed?”
“Oh,” he said, raising his head once more, “that. You want to know when I went to bed. I can’t remember.” His eyes fogged over. “It’s so damned hard to think.” He grasped his head in both hands. “I remember. It was early, very early. I finished dinner, and suddenly I was so tired I couldn’t stand it, and I went to bed. That’s all I can remember.”
“And what about you, Miss von Hohenkammer? What did you hear?”
She jumped, startled, glanced at him, and then turned her head away. “Nothing much, I guess. I heard your men in the house. Downstairs.”
“My men?” asked Sanders, puzzled.
“Yes,” she replied coldly.
“Did you hear me ring the doorbell?”
She nodded.
“Then why didn’t you answer?” he asked.
“I assumed one of you would answer it.”
“I see,” said Sanders. “You assumed one of us would . . .”
She nodded again.
He shook his head and filed this away for future consideration. “And you, Miss Kotzmeier?”
“No.”
“No, what?”
“No, I know nothing, I hear nothing, I clear the table and go to bed, and that’s all I know.”
“What time was that?”
“I don’t know. I don’t watch the hour every minute that I work.” She managed to invest this remark with moral force, as though even asking her the time betrayed a slack attitude toward one’s employment.
“Was anyone else in the house?”
“That photographer person was talking to Miss Veronika,” said Bettl. She made the word “photographer” sound like a species of vermin
. “And she stayed for dinner.” She obviously felt that photographers had no business eating at the same table as honest folk.
“No one else? What about Mr. Whitelaw?”
“Yes, of course. When did he ever miss a meal here?” At that moment there was a mild commotion at the door that led outside from the kitchen. After a certain amount of stamping about, three men came in from the utility room behind the kitchen: two neatly uniformed police officers and one bedraggled gardener. His clothing was rumpled and twisted, as if he had been sleeping in it, and his hair was wet and tousled. His eyes were red, and he yawned enormously as he staggered into the room.
“Esteban, the gardener,” said one of them. “Sorry we took so long, but he was kind a hard to wake up.” He looked up above their heads as he spoke. “While we were knocking, we noticed that the door was unlocked, and we entered in order to ascertain if Mr. Esteban was in any difficulties. On account of him not answering,” he added. “We thought something might have happened to him. From the difficulty we had in arousing him, we thought he might have been drugged, or something.” Sanders looked at the red face and wet hair and wondered what methods they had tried.
“Thanks,” he muttered, and turned his attention to Esteban. One thing was clear: He hadn’t been in a drunken stupor. If he had consumed enough alcohol to do that to him, the whole room would have reeked of it. He smelled as if he had gone to bed cold sober. “Okay, Esteban, what happened tonight?” His voice was crisp and unsympathetic. “And you two, keep him on his feet. We don’t want him passing out again.”
“Nothing happened tonight.” His consonants were thick and indistinct. “Nothing. I did what I always do. Nothing different.”
“What do you always do, then?”
“I had my supper over here with Bettl. She always keeps me something from their dinner.”
“Did you eat together?”