Odor of Violets

by Baynard Kendrick

  He began to count the vowels, taking the letter word by word and tearing off a match each time a vowel appeared. The e’s predominated, as they should have, with sixty-three. Then came forty-seven i’s, forty-seven o’s, thirty-nine a’s, and sixteen u’s. He included the salutation “Dear Madam” in his count because he considered it an integral part of the letter, for the salutation might be easily changed if it had anything to do with a code. The sender could use “Dear Mrs. Tredwill,” or “Dear Mrs. Thaddeus Tredwill,” or any particular combination that might fit his purpose. For the same reason, Maclain eliminated counting the vowels in the signature, “By The House of Bonnée.” He considered that the signature was unlikely to be changed even for the purpose of a code.

  He played around with the idea of the vowels for two hours or more before he rejected it as not making sense. Disgustedly he left the bed, found his jigsaw puzzle, and dumped the pieces on the floor. He sat down beside them and carefully began to put them together while Schnucke watched uncomprehendingly. The afternoon light was fading fast when he rumpled the almost completed puzzle into fragments again and returned it to the drawer.

  He took his small noiseless typewriter from its case, set it on the writing table, and inserted the stencil into the roller, carefully counting the lines as he began to wind it into the machine.

  THE HOUSE OF BONNÉE

  TANNER BUILDING

  EAST 57TH STREET

  NEW YORK CITY

  Dear Madam,

  The problem of the well-groomed woman is to obtain, in the city’s turmoil and grime, a complexion superior to, and more vital than, that of her country cousin.

  Unfortunately most modern cosmetics have failed on many points. Nothing is more detrimental than force when cleansing and purifying the delicate skin. Once use caustics and the entire defensive membrane is injured. The sight of rough pitted skin more often than not indicates some balm of injurious content. It’s important to demand far more than economy when purchasing. Don’t forget this pertinent fact—the integrity of the makers is an essential ingredient. In purchasing face cream look for these assuring words—

  By THE HOUSE OF BONNÉE

  The salutation “Dear Madam” came up into writing position at thirty-nine.

  Maclain’s lithe body was seized with a strange rigidity. There were thirty-nine a’s in the letter, a coincidence perhaps, but he doubted if that were so. It must have something to do with the setup—must be some indication of where the letter began.

  The room was dark when he went to the brief case and took out the envelope with the original letter enclosed. As he did so, his highly trained sense of smell was caught once again by the lingering violet perfume.

  He propped himself up on the bed with two pillows, closed his sightless eyes, and held the letter out before him as though his wonderful brain, shrouded in darkness, might give him what his eyes forever lacked—the power to see.

  Violets.

  How in the name of the ancient gods could a code be buried in violets—a code which was hidden even from the searing penetration of the ultraviolet ray. Someone intended to get that letter, to decipher its contents. The only way they could know that its contents was important was by its smell. Yet how could a smell be applied to a code? How could an odor become something that a reader with eyes could see?

  In the back of his mind, a picture began to form; a picture, not of flowers, but of letters wavering and burning with vivid intensity. One by one he shut them off and turned them on. They flickered and danced, then suddenly the first two of them stood out flashingly, like the only two letters left burning in a faulty neon sign. You could apply those letters to a piece of paper.

  He jumped from the bed, startling Schnucke into a muffled bark, and snatched the stencil from his typewriter. Coldly and without a quiver to betray his agitation, he ran a finger down over the perforated words and up again. Only once he paused to give a chuckle which was cold as a falling icicle snapping against a pane.

  He selected a fresh record from the stock in his Gladstone bag, slid it onto the Ediphone, and began to dictate. The usual, pleasant cadence of his voice was gone, replaced by words sharp and metallic as the clip of a gardener’s shears: —

  “Spud: The game has changed. Go immediately to the Tanner Building, East Fifty-seventh Street. Be cautious, because it’s dangerous as hell. Get everything you can on a perfume place called the House of Bonnée. Remember, they mustn’t suspect you, because the fate of New York City and this nation may be in their files. The Tredwill bombing sight has become passé, and I’ve become the quarry now. If you find anything suspicious, get in touch with Colonel Gray. Tell him that I’m more important than anything for the moment, and to keep an eye on me. I’ve stumbled on a foreman named Madoc at International. I think he’s the man who impersonated Paul Gerente and brought the Braille instructions to me.”

  He reached out in the darkness, found the button to Cappo’s phone, and gave it a single ring.

  When Cappo answered he said, “Come here, but leave the dog.”

  Twice more he ran his finger over the stencil. When Cappo knocked at the door Maclain admitted him instantly.

  “Listen carefully,” he told his chauffeur. “Do you know where they dispose of the trash here at The Crags?”

  “Yessah,” said Cappo. “It’s down in the basement in a bin.”

  “Have they emptied the wastebaskets today?”

  “I don’t know, Captain. I can look.”

  “That won’t do any good,” said Maclain hurriedly. “I’ll have to take a chance.”

  He handed Cappo the advertising envelope and letter. “I want you to take these downstairs without anyone seeing you and throw them away in that bin. As soon as you’ve done that, I want you to take this Ediphone record to New York in the car and deliver it to Mr. Savage. You can drive it in three hours, can’t you?”

  “Yessah,” said Cappo. “In nearer two.”

  “Don’t get arrested,” Maclain cautioned him. “Keep this record beside you on the floor. If anyone stops you for any reason at all, smash it instantly.”

  “Yessah,” said Cappo. He paused a moment and added, “Did you want someone to watch, Captain, to see who gets that letter out of the bin?”

  “No,” said Maclain. “I’ll find out soon enough. Whoever gets that letter out of the bin is going to kidnap me.”

  3

  Dinner at The Crags was marred by an overwhelming mantle of nervous expectancy. At the head of the long table alight with the flicker of candles against cut glass and silver, Thaddeus Tredwill carved the roast. Each slice was cut with fine precision, laid upon a plate with studied care, and handed to Pierce to be served. Gil, Helena, Cheli Scott, and Stacy mutely watched. Sitting quietly at the right of his host, Duncan Maclain listened to the butler’s self-effacing steps passing behind his chair. It seemed as though the entire drama of murder and disappearance had distilled itself into one torturing hour, filling those at the table to satiety.

  Maclain felt the urgent need of introducing conversation to break the terrible spell. “I’d like to drive into Hartford after dinner to register a letter, Mr. Tredwill. Would it inconvenience you if Dominick drove me in your car?”

  “Certainly not.”

  The Captain sensed the instant relief engendered in those present by his simple question. Down the table, Helena giggled at nothing. It sounded slightly out of place, like the laugh of an overwrought woman at a deathbed scene in a picture show.

  Cheli Scott said quickly, “I’ll take you, Captain, if you don’t mind women drivers. I’m going in anyway.”

  “Dominick can take you both.” Thaddeus put down the carving set and hitched his chair closer to the table.

  “I wouldn’t be so impolite.” The Captain smiled. “To assure you of my faith in women in all professions, Miss Scott, I’ll be glad to have you take me in your car.”

  “You have more nerve than I have,” Thaddeus told him. “Automobiles scare me to death,
even when they’re driven by a chauffeur.”

  “Cappo’s one of the best drivers I know,” Maclain remarked, “but that hasn’t saved me from having trouble with my car. He had to take it to town to have some work done late today.”

  Pierce put a plate down in front of him and said, “I took the liberty, Captain, of cutting your meat for you.”

  “You’re very kind.” The Captain picked up his fork and added, “I wish you’d take any message for me if Cappo happens to call.”

  “Certainly, sir.” Pierce moved away.

  Stacy asked without warning, “Which dog are you going to take in town?”

  For the space of a breath the dining room was still. Then Helena spoke up with, “What do you mean? I didn’t know the Captain had two.”

  “Dominick says there’s another one out in the garage,” the boy told her importantly. “Isn’t that so, Captain Maclain?”

  The Captain moistened his lips with a sip of water, wiped them carefully with his napkin, and said, “Yes, that’s true, but Schnucke always goes with me. The other dog, Dreist, is somewhat in the nature of a spare. He’s not much good to guide me around, but he’s dangerous as a loaded gun.”

  “Dangerous!” exclaimed the boy. “He looks just like Schnucke to me, and she’d never bite anyone.”

  “Dreist’s trained for police work,” the Captain told him. “He can jump, run, and trail; and without any command on my part he’ll tear anyone to pieces the instant he sees me threatened with a gun. For that matter, I don’t need to be threatened. He attacks at the sight of a gun in anyone’s hand.”

  “How about other weapons?” Stacy asked.

  The Captain smiled. “He’ll attack anybody who hasn’t a weapon if I give him the command. He jumps up sideways behind their legs and knocks them over if they try to run. Football players call it clipping.”

  “Gosh!” said Stacy admiringly. “I’d like to have a dog like that for my own.”

  “I’m afraid you wouldn’t have many friends left,” said Duncan Maclain.

  Immediately after dinner, he went upstairs to his room. There he took an almost flat automatic in a shoulder-holster rig from his Gladstone bag and started to put it on. With his arm through a loop he changed his mind, took the gun off, and put it in a bureau drawer.

  As he left the bedroom, Thaddeus stopped him in the hall. “If I don’t hear something about my daughter by tomorrow, Captain, I’m going to report her kidnaping officially to the police and the F. B. I.”

  “If I don’t know where she is by tomorrow, I advise you to do so,” the Captain told him, speaking very softly, “but whether you know it or not, you’re already in touch with the F. B. I.”

  CHAPTER XXI

  1

  CAPPO PUSHED the swift Packard to the limit of safety on the trip to New York, utilizing every trick of a splendid driver’s skill. Once he thought that a sedan with New Hampshire plates was clinging too close to him on the Merritt Parkway. Losing inquisitive sedans was a joyous game to Cappo. The Packard flashed right on an exit to New Canaan, twisted around two more turns at nauseating speed, and stopped on a bridge above the highway.

  Cappo’s dark face was wrinkled with lines of amusement as he watched the New Hampshire car pass below him, hesitate, and finally take the New Canaan turn. The Packard streaked off the bridge, made two more turns, and was doing better than eighty when it rolled back onto the Parkway. Cappo ran five miles passing everything until a glimpse of a State Police car slowed him down to a legal fifty. At seven-thirty, two hours and forty-five minutes from Hartford, he placed Maclain’s recorded message safely in Spud’s hands.

  It was characteristic of Duncan Maclain’s partner, Spud Savage, to think that an hour’s delay in carrying out the Captain’s suggestions was an hour’s wasted time. He took the wax cylinder into the Captain’s office, put it on the transmitter, and flicked the switch connecting the Capehart with the Ediphone.

  Maclain’s short, clear-cut message filled the room.

  There was a battling light, almost feline, in Spud’s unusual yellow eyes when he called Cappo in from the hall.

  “When the Captain gave you this, Cappo, did he say why he didn’t phone?”

  “Nossah, Mr. Savage. He’s acting mighty careful like.” Cappo related what had happened at The Crags. His eyes widened to show the whites in a frightening expanse as he told of the murdered girl.

  “Hell’s fire!” Spud snapped out when the Negro concluded. “He probably suspects that someone’s tapped the phone. I’m going to take a look at the Tanner Building right now. Come on, Cappo.”

  He slid his arms into a heavy overcoat and said a trifle morosely, “I wish now that Rena was here. She might handle a cosmetic job better than I can. Is there a gun in the car?”

  “A twenty-five automatic, but ’tain’t much bigger than so.” Cappo measured the size by extending thumb and forefinger.

  “That’s big enough. I probably won’t need it.”

  “Ain’t no telling, Mr. Savage,” said Cappo.

  Spud located the venomous little Colt once he was in the car. He slid out the clip, tested the loading, and replaced the clip again. Duncan Maclain was a man given to expressive understatement. Spud didn’t even want to look at a building unarmed if the Captain termed that building “dangerous as hell!”

  Yet the atmosphere of New York City was deceptively lulling. As the Packard crossed the junction of Broadway and Amsterdam Avenue at Seventy-second Street, Spud looked out of the window at the orderly crowd of people and indulged in a sheepish grin. The traffic officer, an old-timer on Seventy-second Street, recognized Maclain’s car and waved them through the converging traffic stream. Reflecting on his mission, Spud was hard put to waive a feeling of participating in an opéra bouffe where he had the part of a clown to play.

  New York City was part of the United States; the United States, its institutions, traditions, and all they stood for formed a deity to Spud. The deity was mounted on a concrete base of integrity, set apart from other countries of the world and their futile bickerings. To him, as to most Americans, its ramparts were unassailable, its defenses ineluctable, tried and true. He could understand the internal seething and boiling of politics and crime, but the belief that outsiders might strike against his country was a shade beyond his comprehension. That he willingly, without thought or question, would start on a quest which he considered a trifle childish was a high tribute to his confidence in Duncan Maclain.

  East Fifty-seventh Street was comparatively deserted when Spud rapped on the window and Cappo pulled into the curb. The Tanner Building was across the street, less than half a block away. The neighborhood was devoted largely to art and antique dealers. Most of the shops showed darkened windows on the street-level floor. Farther east, beyond the elevated, the lighted canopy of the Sutton Theater cut a yellow box of white, making the block where the Packard was parked seemingly dark.

  “You wait here, and keep your motor running,” Spud told Cappo. “The building’s probably closed, but I may be able to get in the lobby and see what names are on the directory. You say the Captain mentioned something about being kidnaped, Cappo, when he asked you to throw that letter away?”

  “It sounded that way to me, Mr. Savage, but he jokes an almighty lot.”

  “I don’t think he was joking then,” Spud remarked a bit irritably. “The darn fool’s up to something which he knows I wouldn’t approve of. Otherwise he’d have sent me more information. As it is, he’s keeping things to himself and telling me nothing except what he wants me to know.”

  “Yessah, that’s certainly a way with the Captain,” agreed Cappo.

  Spud took a cigarette from his pocket and put it back again. A man in the uniform of a Protective Agency was coming down the street trying the shops from door to door. Spud sat back in the limousine until the watchman went by with no more than a cursory glance at the car. He got out when the man was several doors beyond, turned up his coat collar, and lowered his head again
st the sharp wind sweeping down Fifty-seventh Street from the East River. The traffic light turned red, and Spud cut diagonally across the street.

  Closer to the Tanner Building, he saw that a light was burning behind wide curtained windows on the second floor. Outlined against the curtains, gold letters indicated the House of Bonnée. Spud went into the small office-building lobby through an entrance next to a decorator’s shop. There was an elevator a few steps to the rear, but the bronze door was closed and no attendant was in sight. At the right was a staircase. A sign on the wall said

  HOUSE OF BONNÉE

  Second Floor

  Spud walked up, going over in his mind a hastily concocted story about selling cosmetics which he hoped might get him an interview with the head of the House of Bonnée.

  He stopped before stained-glass panels in a double door. It opened readily. He went into a reception room done in colored mirrors in the most modernistic style. To the left, arranged on steps of crystal shelves, were bottles and jars. Close by the shelves was a cashier’s booth with a window of chromium bars. Straight ahead he glimpsed a line of curtained booths through an open door. The curtain of the third booth was drawn back far enough to disclose the back view of a woman with a waving machine spread out octopus-like above her head.

  On the other side of the waiting room, a girl with slender legs revealingly crossed looked up from a magazine. She was dressed entirely in white except for a small apron of violet hue embroidered in one corner with “The House of Bonnée.” The girl’s blonde hair was clustered thickly to her head in a mass of becoming curls. She stared at Spud questioningly for a few seconds out of ingenuous blue eyes before she wrinkled her saucy nose with a smile and asked: —

  “Was there someone you wanted to see?”

  Spud switched his story, deciding it was too late for a credible salesman’s tale. He took a chance and said, “I suppose I want to talk to Monsieur Bonnée.”