Odor of Violets

by Baynard Kendrick

  There was another chance, which Duncan Maclain disliked exceedingly—a chance that Babs had killed Paul; a chance that Arnold Cameron had known Thaddeus Tredwill’s daughter, and was taking a murder charge to save the girl. Babs had keys to The Crags—knew every inch of the great house—

  The Captain’s knuckles rapped sharply on the table and he irritably shoved back his chair. He crossed the room and opened the door to the hall. The trooper’s footsteps approached quickly, and the officer said in a low tone, “Captain Maclain. Is there anything I can do? Sergeant King said I was to co-operate with you.”

  “I’m going downstairs to use the phone,” said Maclain. “You might make sure that no one listens in the hall.”

  “I’ll go with you.”

  “You’d better post yourself on the stairs. You can watch both upstairs and down.”

  “Okay,” said the trooper.

  Schnucke came up beside her master, but Maclain ordered her back into the room and closed the door. He was already familiar with the layout of the Tredwill home. Under the anxious eyes of the trooper he strode off confidently, stopped at the top of the stairs, found the banister, and unhesitatingly went down.

  A few minutes later he had New York Police Headquarters on the phone. He got the Missing Persons Bureau and asked for Sergeant Kyle.

  “Duncan Maclain calling from Hartford,” he said. “A confidential report of a girl named Barbara Tredwill was turned in to you this morning by G-2. Have you turned up anything yet? It’s important that I know.”

  “Hold it,” said Kyle. Maclain could hear the rustling of papers. The Sergeant spoke again. “A cab picked her up on Twelfth Street and dropped her at Sixty-third and Park Avenue. She went in an apartment house there, and came out twenty minutes later, according to the doorman. She was staying there with friends. She had a traveling bag with her when she left. No trace from there.”

  “Did she take another cab?” asked Maclain.

  “No. She walked off uptown toward Sixty-fourth Street. Beyond that the doorman doesn’t know. Have you got anything?”

  “A hunch,” said Maclain, “that she’s been kidnaped, but I wouldn’t want to put it on the air!”

  He left the booth and went back upstairs accompanied by the trooper. In his room again, he fitted a record onto his portable Ediphone which Cappo had set up in a corner. Twice he played the record through, marking the voice of the unknown man who had impersonated Paul Gerente; searching for unusual accents or pronunciations; listening intently for cadences and tones as a handwriting expert might take note of loops and whorls.

  The man’s diction was faultless, but the Captain’s face was set in lines of satisfaction when he took the record from the Ediphone. The speaker had an unconscious trick of pronunciation, a quirk of speech so slight that it had almost escaped the analytical ears of Duncan Maclain.

  Once or twice he had injected an extra syllable on the vowel i—“cap-i-tan” instead of “cap-tain”; “con-dish-i-uns” instead of “con-dish-uns.” To Maclain’s impressionable hearing it marked the speaker with an ineradicable scar.

  The Captain got into bed and lay sleepless for a long time listening to the crackle of frost against the windowpane. Russia and Finland were battling desperately. England, France, and Germany were choked in the constricting coils of war. The smaller nations of Europe stood armed, in constant danger of invasion. Those nations were thousands of miles away, yet, in the brooding quiet of The Crags, Duncan Maclain felt them disturbingly near.

  From somewhere in the direction of Boston he heard the drone of a late-flying plane. Lying rigid, he followed the swell of the sound, traced it overhead, and relaxed with its passing.

  For one terrible moment memory had carried him away, tricked him into thinking that the roar of the motor would be blotted out by the whine and crash of a life-destroying bomb.

  “We are at war!” he whispered into the darkness. “Every combatant in the world is against us—fighting our peace with every weapon they know.” He sat up suddenly and shook his fist into the darkness. “I’ll beat you,” he exclaimed so loudly that Schnucke stood up and came to the bedside. “You think you’ve wrecked me with blindness—but I still have a brain. Your weapons of death and terror are helpless against it.” He lay back on the pillow, then reached down and petted the dog beside him. “Go lie down, Schnucke, you need your sleep—you and a blind man versus a world full of fools!”

  2

  It was shortly after seven when Sergeant King rapped at the Captain’s door. Cappo, bearing a tray of breakfast, was with the officer.

  “I’m going upstairs to look over that girl’s room again,” the Sergeant said laconically. “After you eat I’d like you to join me.”

  “I’ll come,” said Maclain.

  “Good.” The Sergeant went out and Maclain addressed his giant Negro servant: “Did they make you comfortable last night, Cappo?”

  “Yessah, Captain.” Cappo’s big hands moved with extraordinary delicacy as he arranged the breakfast tray. “I slept over the garage. This breakfast ain’t exactly like Sarah would fix it, Captain.”

  Maclain laughed as he sat down and located the dishes on the tray. “There are other cooks besides that wife of yours, Cappo.”

  “Yessah,” Cappo agreed doubtfully, “but seems like Sarah knows exactly what to do. That’s hot cereal in the bowl, Captain, cream in the silver pitcher, and milk in the china one. You say the word and I’ll open the eggs for you.”

  The Captain ate silently while Cappo laid out a suit, drew water in the tub, and found clean underwear.

  “Where’s Dreist?” Maclain asked when breakfast was nearly finished.

  “He’s chained up in my room, Captain.”

  “I want you to stay close by him,” said Maclain. “I don’t want anyone to get near him—nor anyone to see him if you can help it. What’s the number of the house telephone in your room?”

  “Number nine, Captain.”

  “If I give four short rings I want you and Dreist,” Maclain said impressively. “Understand?”

  “Yessah.” Cappo spoke from the bathroom. “How’ll I know where you’re ringing from?”

  “There are twelve phones in the house,” Maclain told him after a little consideration. “I want you to locate each one and its number. I’ve done so already. I’ll give four short rings—and follow with the number of the phone I’m ringing from. For eleven, I’ll follow with two long rings—and for twelve, one long and then two more. Is that clear?”

  “Yessah, Captain. If you gives four short and two short I come running with Dreist to phone number two.”

  “Right.”

  Cappo busied himself about the room for a moment, then he asked, “Are you going to need the car?”

  “Badly, perhaps.” The Captain stirred the last of his coffee and drank it down. “But I’m not going to use it for that very reason. I want you to let it out around here that something’s wrong with the car. Ask about the nearest garage. If necessary, put some small thing out of adjustment—but keep yourself ready. You may have to drive to New York in a hurry.”

  “I’ll be ready, Captain. You can trust me.”

  “That fact, in the chaos of a schizophrenic civilization,” said Maclain, “is one of the very few things I know.”

  “You sure know a lot of words, Captain.” Cappo’s massive head shook admiringly. “Yessah. You suttinly do.”

  3

  Duncan Maclain bathed and dressed hurriedly. When he was ready to leave the room, he sent Schnucke off to be fed and walked by Cappo. He didn’t need Schnucke’s help to find his way to that room on the upper floor.

  In the top hall he paused outside of the door.

  Sergeant King turned from his occupation of staring moodily out of the single window and said, “Come in.”

  The Captain took three steps and stopped just across the threshold. He stood palms out, his little fingers lightly touching the seams of his trousers. The position threw his powerful sh
oulders slightly back, giving him a most military air.

  “Tell me, Sergeant King, when you searched this room last night did you find any violet perfume?”

  The Sergeant opened his mouth and closed it again. Seconds of silence ticked away, and with each one the Sergeant found it more difficult to reply. He was bogged down in the noisome muck of a crime too sanguinary to be real. It belonged in a hovel, somewhere in the backwoods or the slums, to be listed in the category of crimes of lust and passion. It was decidedly out of place in a wealthy producer’s home.

  His watchful eyes trickled down over Maclain. Everything was out of place. The murdered girl was beautiful—yet through hours of intensive search the police had failed to locate a lover; failed to locate any motive, any family, anyone who knew anything about her. Now, added to his sack of assorted incongruities was a blind man—not an ordinary blind man, but one armed with highest authority from the Commissioner himself; blanket authority to pry, interfere, and ask questions—questions which the farthest reaching of the Sergeant’s quick mind could only type as irrelevant, questions about violet perfume.

  King drew a deep breath and managed to keep it from ending in an audible sigh. “There’s a bottle of violet perfume on her bureau,” he said with a trace of compassion. “Why?”

  “I thought it might be a clue.” Maclain shook his head. “I smelled it last night in the hall. If the girl used it herself it probably means nothing at all.”

  “It probably doesn’t,” King agreed with a shade more cordiality. “You made a remark about this method of murder last night. I asked you up here to talk to you. The murderer picked about the bloodiest method I’ve ever heard of—so bloody that he stood behind a screen and swung the ax around one end. I thought you might tell me why.”

  The Captain left his place just inside the door and took two steps toward the bureau at the left of the room. His fingers moved about the surface until he located the bottle of perfume. He sniffed it without removing the stopper, then put it down again. Slowly he swung about and with his left hand touched the fabric of the plain cloth three-panel screen beside the bed.

  “Did you ever hear the story of the horseshoe nail that lost Napoleon the Battle of Waterloo?”

  “Yes,” said Sergeant King.

  “This reminds me of it, somewhat,” Maclain continued, as though the Sergeant had failed to answer. “The screen was here and the murderer saw it. The sight of it reminded the murderer that it might be used effectively as a shield against spattering blood. That pleasant thought reminded the murderer of the weapon in the armory hall. The weapon reminded the murderer of what happens to traitors in Germany today. Bella met her Waterloo.”

  “You’re talking in riddles,” said Sergeant King.

  “And you’re dealing in them, Sergeant,” replied Maclain. “You can investigate this murdered girl from now until Hitler goes into a synagogue to pray. You’ll unearth nothing but a carefully prepared labyrinth of blind alleys. Two nations stand in your way.”

  “Two nations?”

  “She was working for both of them and both paid her, but she loved only one. You’ll get no help from either this country or the country that killed her—Nazi Germany. She died on active service, and no human will ever prove that she was a counterespionage agent working for G-2. My problem is who killed her, not why. Yet you have to know the why to find the who.” The Captain turned his back on the Sergeant and felt his way to the end of the bureau, where he found a chair. He sat down, crossed his legs, and seemed to be looking at his toes.

  “This is a private home,” said Sergeant King. “Do you expect the State Police to swallow a story that a maid was murdered in a private home by a spy?”

  “No,” said Duncan Maclain, “and neither does the spy. That’s what makes it difficult, Sergeant, both for me and for you.”

  He raised his head with a sudden gesture which brought his chin out firm and strong. “The New York Homicide Squad is faced with the same problem, Sergeant King. Night before last, a man named Paul Gerente was murdered in a Twelfth Street apartment in New York. That was spy murder number one. Last night this girl was killed here—spy murder number two. If Barbara Tredwill fails to get back home alive, you can put her murder in the same class, as number three.”

  “And what am I supposed to do—arrest the whole Tredwill family because they were in New York and here too?” King’s emotion was evident in the tightness of his fingers about the holstered gun at his hip, but his voice was ominously calm.

  “It might prove efficacious in bringing matters to a head, but I’d hardly recommend it,” said Maclain. “You’d be faced with the necessity of breaking several airtight alibis which keep this family in the clear in Gerente’s murder. Gilbert Tredwill attended a banquet. His wife and his father had dinner together and went to a show. Stacy attended a picture with another boy.”

  “And what about Barbara?” the Sergeant snapped out. “She was in New York, too.”

  “So was Mrs. Tredwill.” Maclain uncrossed his legs and placed his hands on his knees. “Would you be inclined to arrest either of them as a spy?”

  The Sergeant turned to look at the bed where Bella had been murdered and suddenly said, “Hell, no!”

  “Well,” Maclain went on, “that brings us back to scratch.”

  He stood up. “I suppose you’ve searched this entire house for bloodstained clothes?”

  “And found none,” said King abruptly.

  “It’s a feature of these two murders that you find nothing.” The Captain closed thumb and forefinger about the lower part of his jaw. “If you were going to hack someone up, Sergeant King, and didn’t want to get bloodstains on your clothes, would you prefer to stand behind the inadequate protection of a screen or to remove your clothes entirely?”

  “I’d remove them entirely.”

  “Check!” said Duncan Maclain. “So would I.”

  “So you’ve narrowed it down to someone in The Crags?” said Sergeant King.

  The Captain stood up. “When I narrow things down that far, Sergeant, I make arrests. The fact that a murderer wishes to avoid bloodstained clothing is hardly adequate proof that that murderer is living in the Tredwill home.”

  4

  Norma Tredwill was opening her morning mail when Pierce announced Duncan Maclain. Overwrought from an almost sleepless night, Norma pulled herself up into a straighter position on the chaise longue as the Captain came in.

  His appearance was heartening. The terror of murder striking at The Crags the night before seemed to have passed him by. Impeccable in a salt-and-pepper suit of heavy weave, he greeted her with a smile which helped her put aside a burning desire to cry.

  “Mr. Carter is calling for me at ten,” Maclain told her. “He’s driving me over to East Hartford. I don’t want you to worry about anything you’ve told me. I can clear everything up with Mr. Carter. I really dropped in to see how you were feeling today.”

  “My arm’s better, thank you. But, Captain, that poor girl—”

  “Please!” Maclain raised a hand. “I’m going to ask you to try and forget that anything happened here last night, Mrs. Tredwill. You can help yourself and Barbara most by keeping your mind as far from worry as possible.”

  “Barbara?” asked Norma in a tight small voice. “You’ve heard something?”

  “No,” said Maclain. “Actually I hoped that you might have—in the morning mail. The officer on duty downstairs said that a letter addressed to you was scented slightly with perfume.”

  “It’s an ad,” Norma informed him with marked disappointment. “There was nothing but that and Christmas cards. I’ve already thrown it away.”

  She had a fleeting impression that Maclain had stiffened as she spoke, that under his urbanity her casual words had revealed for an instant hidden flecks of diamond-cutting steel. When he said, “That’s too bad,” she felt she must have been mistaken.

  “Don’t hesitate to call on me, Mrs. Tredwill, if there’s anything you f
eel I can do.” The Captain started toward the door. Halfway there he turned. “I wonder if you’d gratify a whim—let me smell that circular you received. Due to my blindness I’m extremely interested in various types of perfume.”

  “Certainly.” Norma found it difficult to keep wonderment out of her tone. Pushing aside several Christmas-card envelopes in the wastebasket beside her, she located the letter and envelope. “I’ve had a couple of these before.”

  Maclain came closer and took the letter from her hand. For an instant he held it close to his nose. “It’s very delicate,” he said. “Were the letters always the same?”

  “Really,” said Norma, “I don’t believe I read them. I throw most advertisements away. This is a recent pest—called the House of Bonnée.”

  “Some day, if I live,” said Maclain, slipping the letter into his pocket, “I may buy some of their violet perfume.”

  CHAPTER XVIII

  1

  THERE WAS an air of somnolence about Duncan Maclain as Bunny Carter’s Lincoln crunched down the driveway to Tredwill Village and turned its glistening radiator toward town. Watching him intently, Bunny thought that he could detect lines and indentations on the Captain’s face which had not been there the night before. He started a line of inconsequential chatter in a friendly effort to smooth away the Captain’s apparent worry.

  “The Crags looks like some sort of medieval castle shining under the morning sun. Sometimes I wonder why I built my own home on the next hill. It’s big enough, I guess, but The Crags sort of dwarfs it. Whenever I see the two of them together I feel as though I’m coming home to a caretaker’s shack.”

  “There is something medieval about The Crags,” said Maclain. “You have very vivid powers of description; something most people lack entirely.” He closed his eyes as though he had felt the bright flash of sunlight which struck suddenly into the Lincoln from the windshield of an approaching car.

  Bunny said, “Thanks. There’s nothing much to describe right where we’re passing now. Just bare trees, a few hills and snow.”

  The Captain’s right hand moved exploringly along the side of the car. He located a cigarette case in the fittings, and took one out without opening his eyes. Bunny started to light it for him, but found himself fascinated at the Captain’s adroitness and sank back into his corner again. Obviously, in spite of his commendation of Bunny’s descriptive powers, Maclain was intent on something deeper than the scenic beauties of the Connecticut hills. He lighted his cigarette with the ease of long practice, restored the lighter to his pocket, and for the space of half a mile let his strong hands rest tranquilly on his knees.