That made sense. He thought Fleur had done it and Fleur thought he had done it—which should cancel them both neatly out. For one cynical moment it occurred to me that between them they might be putting on a colossal piece of double bluff, but it was hard to believe such a thing as I looked at Wyckoff’s gaunt face.
So the Wyckoff saga was complete—a tragic little tale of a man and wife still in love with each other, one too proud, the other too humble to admit it.
I moved away from him to one of the windows, trying to think. I stared down idly. The old station wagon was parked in front of the pillared entrance to the house. It hadn’t been there when I last looked out.
I said over my shoulder, “If I went to the police and demanded an autopsy on Dorothy, you’d be through as a doctor, wouldn’t you? You’d even be arrested as an accessory after the fact?”
He joined me at the window. Huskily he said, “Of course. I realize that. But there’s nothing I can do to stop you.”
“Maybe there is.” I turned to him and held out the letter he had written to Dorothy Flanders. “I’m ready to make a bargain.”
He stared at the letter as if he couldn’t believe his eyes.
“This letter’s the only thing that incriminates you and your wife. I’ll let you have it if you’ll promise to go with me to the police tomorrow morning and ask for an autopsy on Dorothy yourself.”
He still stared blankly. “Myself?”
“That’s the only way to save you and the easiest way to get an investigation started. If I went to the police, they might think I was a crackpot. But you’re the doctor who signed the certificate. If you handle yourself right, you can sound perfectly innocent. Tell them Dorothy had a weak heart and that you’d never have become suspicious if I hadn’t come to you with a tale about a stolen dart tipped with curare. I’ll tell you about the dart later. Say there’s a possibility she might have been poisoned and that you’re no longer satisfied with your own diagnosis. The postmortem will show the curare, the police will get on the job, and we’ll have done all we have to do.” I still held out the letter. “You’ll run the risk of having them dig up your affair with Dorothy, anyway. But at least you’ll be able to destroy this.”
He took the letter. I could tell what he was thinking from his face. I’d not only been able to show him that his wife still loved him. I was even giving him a chance to pull himself out of one of the messiest situations in which a doctor had ever floundered. It was just too much of a good thing.
“Of course I’ll go to the police with you.” He added, “But I’m afraid an autopsy will not clear things up as easily as you think. I doubt whether there’s a pathologist in the country who could prove that curare had been administered.”
I hadn’t banked on that. I said, “You mean the police would have to show definitely how the curare had been administered before they had a case?”
“I rather imagine so. They would probably have to produce the murder weapon—the needle or whatever it was. And also prove the suspect had access to curare. It’s not an easy drug to come by.”
“It is in this house. Lorraine’s got that trophy cabinet full of it. That won’t bother us. But the murder weapon—”
I told him then my half-formed theory that someone had set some sort of death trap in Dorothy’s pocketbook. I asked his opinion.
He said, “It’s the popular belief about curare that even the smallest dose injected into the blood stream by a prick will prove fatal. That’s not strictly true. In academic circles you’d be told that no dose less than twenty-five milligrams could be depended upon to be lethal, and that the dose would have to be injected deeply, intramuscularly. The truth lies somewhere in between. There are so many incalculables to consider—the general health of the victim, idiosyncrasies, etcetera. If you asked me if anyone could be killed by the prick of a needle tipped with curare, I’d say yes, particularly in a case like that of Dorothy where a heart condition already existed. But it couldn’t be relied upon. Someone might easily be stuck once or twice and not die.”
“Then the person who murdered Dorothy took a big risk?”
“Not necessarily. It’s much more likely that, as a layman, he assumed that one prick would be deadly, and he was lucky. Most people know next to nothing about curare except what they read in sensational fiction.”
“And that includes me.” I grinned. “Well, if I want to impress the police, I guess it’s up to me to find that murder weapon. Or at least figure out more definitely how Dorothy could have been killed with curare. Thanks, Wyckoff. You’ve been a big help.”
He stared at me incredulously. “You’re thanking me. It’s I who should thank you. How can I ever begin to—”
I felt self-conscious. “If I were you, I’d go find your wife and start getting your stories together.” I smiled. “Maybe Lorraine isn’t such a giddy girl, after all. The Lagunos and the Flanders didn’t respond to treatment. But it looks as if the Wyckoffs are in for a slap-up reconciliation with trumpets blowing.”
His face lit up. “Yes, I must find Fleur. I—”
He stopped. He was staring out of the window. I turned just in time to see the small figure of Fleur Wyckoff run down the steps of the house and jump into the station wagon.
“Where’s she going?” said Wyckoff sharply.
“I don’t know.”
He tried to tug the plate-glass window down so that he could shout to her. It wouldn’t move. He tried again feverishly. Fleur was in the station wagon now. It lurched forward and started down the drive. She reached a sharp bend, swung around it, and disappeared from sight.
There had been a recklessness about the way she was driving that somehow infected both of us. We ran to the other window which showed the lower part of the drive careening dangerously down the flank of the mountain toward the foothills of Mount Rose. It was a strange sensation staring out through the plate-glass window of that upstairs room. It was like watching something on a movie screen, something that was not quite real.
Two figures were strolling up the drive. I could just make them out as Mimi and Lover. Fleur’s car hadn’t appeared yet. Wyckoff was close against the window, watching with white anxiety.
“What’s the matter, Lieutenant? She was driving like a crazy woman. She—”
The station wagon came into view. And it was a horrible sight because it wasn’t acting like a car. It was hurtling and staggering down the precipitous drive like a rudderless ship in a high sea. Although it was utterly impossible for his wife to hear him, Wyckoff shouted, “Fleur! Fleur!”
I was watching in horrified fascination. Completely out of control, the car was heading straight for Mimi and Lover. I saw Mimi scuttle up the stony bank to safety. Lover made a move to follow her and then turned back, waving wildly at the oncoming car. It almost reached him. With a disregard for danger that made me wince, he made a futile attempt to leap onto the running board. The car flashed past him and he fell forward onto the rocky gravel of the drive.
There was a sharp bend ahead with a naked drop down into the canyon. There was no fence, no anything to guard it. Lover scrambled to his feet, waving again. The car roared on.
Wyckoff had gripped my shoulder. His fingers were digging into my skin.
“Fleur …” he cried, and the word faded into a whimper.
Because the car reached the bend and did not turn. It went right on into nothingness.
It plunged out of sight—over the edge of the canyon.
PART FOUR
MIMI
XII
David Wyckoff gave a single cry. It was a horrible sound to hear from a man—as thin and shrill as a dog’s yelp. He spun from the window and ran out of the room, disappearing headlong into the corridor. I ran after him. The sight we had just seen through the window sent questions racing through my mind. Fleur Wyckoff had dashed out of the house and jumped into the old station wagon. Why? The car had careened down the drive, completely out of control. Why? In spite of Lover’s efforts,
the car had plunged over into the canyon, carrying Fleur to almost certain death. How had it happened? I knew no hows or whys.
I just knew, with a sinking sensation, that for the third time in as many days an “accident” had brought disaster to another of Lorraine’s guests.
Dorothy… Janet… Fleur…
This wasn’t just a murder case any more. It was a mass slaughter. The thing in Lorraine’s house was running amok as insanely as the car that had just toppled over into the canyon.
David Wyckoff had already reached the stairs. As I started after him, the door of our room opened and Iris ran out. My wife stared down the corridor at Wyckoff and then came to me, her lovely face pale with foreboding.
“Peter, what’s the matter with David Wyckoff?”
“Quick,” I said. “Come on. Quick. It’s Fleur.”
“Fleur?” Iris ran at my side. “What’s happened to her?”
We reached the great staircase. “The car,” I said. “Something went wrong. It plunged off the drive. Wyckoff and I saw it from his window.”
“Peter! But what was Fleur doing in a car? Where was she going?”
“I don’t know. Mimi and Lover were coming up the drive. Lover tried to stop it. At least they’ll be there if anything can be done.”
The broad wooden stairs swept to the right. I could see the enormous hall stretching below, opulent and without personality, like the very latest thing in picture galleries. Wyckoff was running toward the front door. Bill Flanders was down there, too, sitting with his crutch propped against him, on a low settee. He was reading a magazine and glanced up idly as Wyckoff dashed past.
It seemed impossible that anybody could be sitting stolidly and reading a magazine at a moment like this.
Wyckoff was through the door. As Iris and I came panting into the hall, the Count Laguno appeared from the trophy room, his lizard face bright with curiosity.
“What’s all the fuss about?”
“Fleur.” I said.
“Fleur? She asked me to get a car for her from the garage. About fifteen minutes later she came rushing downstairs and leaped into the car without so much as a civil thank you. What’s the matter with her?”
I stared at him. “Was the car all right when you brought it round?”
“All right? The brakes seemed a trifle weak. What is this, anyway?”
There was a clattering of high heels behind us. I turned to see Lorraine hurrying from the living-room, all fancied up for the evening in a trailing black raspberry creation.
“My angels, what goings-on! What is this? Some divine new game or—”
Iris said, “Fleur’s gone off the drive in the station wagon.”
Our hostess’ eyes popped with horror. “Off the drive! But it’s a drop—almost a sheer drop into the canyon!”
I had started towards the open door. The others clattered after me, all except Bill Flanders. It would have been foolish for him to come, anyway. He couldn’t make any time on his crutch.
The light was fading as we sprinted out into the wide, walled-in approach to the house. Iris and I were ahead. There was a desolate grandeur to the mountain peaks. Here and there in the huge view stretches of evergreens stood out black and smudgy as trees in a woodcut.
I said grimly, “There we were muddling along trying to catch up with yesterday’s murder, and all the time today’s murder—”
“Murder!” echoed my wife.
“Of course it was murder. That car had been tampered with. No one could have kept it on the drive. Someone fixed it so Fleur would plunge over the side.”
I had said it now. It was out.
Lorraine, for all her high heels and her swirling evening dress, was running with the best of us. She caught up with Iris and me, her curls flying, her elegance absurdly out of place.
“Peter, darling,” she panted. “Why on earth did Fleur want to go to Reno anyway?”
“To Reno?” I said. “So that’s where she was going.”
“Yes. I mean, it seemed so weird. She positively hurtled into my room when I was changing for dinner. She said she had to go to Reno to get something. Could she take the station wagon? Was there enough gas? I told her Chuck was in Reno, she could call him and get him to bring whatever it was she wanted. But she insisted on going herself. I couldn’t understand. I—”
Her monologue rambled on. I gave up listening. With a crawling sense of guilt, I was beginning to realize just what had happened to Fleur. When we got home from Reno, she must have discovered the loss of her husband’s damning letter to Dorothy. She didn’t know I had stolen it but she did know that her pocketbook had fallen and burst open on the church floor. Naturally she assumed the letter was still there in the church, and naturally she would have had only one idea—to rush and retrieve it.
If it hadn’t been for my attempts at so-called investigation, she would never had dashed off on that wild-goose chase. In a sense I was responsible for whatever it was we were going to find.
I was half sick with anxiety. We came to a sharp bend. A fresh segment of the drive came into view, clinging like a huge, winding serpent to the precipitous flank of the mountain. The spot where the car had plunged over into the canyon was about two hundred yards ahead.
We could see Mimi Burnett running from it along the drive. Ahead of us, David Wyckoff was hurrying towards her. The sight of his lonely figure brought the pitiful irony of the situation into focus. A few minutes after he had learned from me that Fleur still loved him, Wyckoff had had to see his wife and the station wagon reel off the drive before his very eyes.
Wyckoff was paying a bitter penalty for his past indiscretions.
He reached Mimi. The two of them stood together for a moment Then Mimi turned and they started back to the point where the car had disappeared. They came to it. Mimi pointed. Recklessly Wyckoff swung himself down from the bare edge of the drive and disappeared, leaving Mimi fluttering on the brink.
I was the first to join her. She was wearing a pseudo-medieval evening gown with long trailing sleeves. It was creased and strewn with scraps of dead sage. She was wringing her hands like a demented Lady of Shallot. She threw herself into my arms, hiding her head against my shoulder.
“Lover shouted to her to open the door and jump,” she sobbed. “The car toppled over. She opened the door. It threw her free. She’s lying down there. Lover’s with her. And the car, it went on and on, rolling, rolling, rolling—”
I was still panting, trying to get my breath back. The others crowded up. I stared over Mimi’s quivering head, down into the canyon. The slope at this point was not sheer, but it was steep and bare except for a few jutting rocks and an occasional tangle of straggly sage bushes.
Hundreds of feet below us stretched a dry, boulder-strewn river bed. Sprawled in it, looking scarcely larger than a toy and blazing like a beacon, lay the ruins of the station wagon.
Some thirty feet down the slope from the drive, Lover was clinging plumply and precariously to a sage bush. Wyckoff was scrambling and sliding down the treacherous mountainside towards him. Lover was stooping over something, invisible to me, which lay in an outcropping of sage above a flat slab of rock.
Relief poured through me as I realized that Fleur was not in the flaming wreckage of the car. She had been sufficiently in control of her wits to obey Lover’s desperate yell to open the door. She had been thrown free. She might still be alive.
Mimi was almost hysterical. Lorraine and Iris hovered at my side with Laguno behind us. I manoeuvred Mimi over to my wife.
“Take care of her, darling. Laguno, see whether you can find a rope in the house. They’ll need one to get her up. I’m going down to see if I can help.”
Lorraine said, “There’s a rope in the garage, Count.”
Laguno ran off. Iris put her arm around Mimi. Her eyes were frightened.
“Peter, do be careful.”
“It’s okay. I’ve got rubber soles.”
I eased myself over the edge and started slit
hering down the slope, catching at sage to support myself. Wyckoff had already reached Lover. He had dropped to his knees at his side and was stooping over the thing I couldn’t see. Soon I came down to them. My heart was thumping from the exertion. I grabbed a sage bush next to Lover and stared down over his shoulder.
I saw Fleur then. Wyckoff, his own face white as a corpse’s, was running his hands over her little body. She lay on her back, her dress dripped half off her, her arms tossed limply over her head. Her hair was tangled around her flower face. Her eyes were closed and there was blood, gaudy as paint, staining the ivory skin of her cheeks.
I couldn’t tell from looking at her whether she was alive or dead.
Lover, swinging round on his sage bush anchor like a clumsy, bespectacled sloth, stared at me. There was nothing hearty about him now. He looked shot to pieces.
“The car,” he said hoarsely. “We saw it coming, Mimi and I. There was something wrong with the car, Lieutenant.”
Behind the shock, you could see his dazed mind stumblingly putting two and two together.
“I don’t understand. I drove the station wagon back from Reno this afternoon. It was all right when I put it away in the garage. And then—then it came careening down the drive as if it had no brakes at all. How d’you figure that?”
I was pretty sure I knew what had happened to that car, but I didn’t want to say it then in front of Wyckoff.
I muttered, “At least you had the sense to shout to her to jump. If she’s alive, I guess she has you to thank for it.”
A smile flickered dimly over his face. “I—I tried to stop it. But what could I do?”
Wyckoff was still bending over his wife. His eyes were the eyes of a man in a nightmare. Slowly his hands slipped from her body. He squatted a moment, staring at nothing. Then in a strangled whisper, he said, “The sage—the sage must have broken her fall.”
Puzzle for Wantons Page 11