Odor of Violets

by Baynard Kendrick

  It was after midnight when the center of the city dropped behind. The streets grew darker, broken only now and then by the light of some late-closing store. A watery moon battled ineffectively against smoky clouds and finally sank down behind them defeated. As Sergeant King sighted the single yellow square marking The Crags and turned up the hill, it began to snow. They waited some time before Maclain heard footsteps answer the Sergeant’s peremptory ringing and Pierce opened the door.

  “Captain Maclain!” the butler exclaimed, taking in the Captain’s disheveled appearance with a trained servant’s eye. “You’ve been hurt, sir—and Miss Scott, is she with you?”

  “Yes, Pierce.” Maclain stepped inside. “You might give the Sergeant a hand and help her in out of the car.”

  He leaned wearily against the wall, concentrating on the abnormally loud tick of a grandfather’s clock.

  Pierce came back in and Cheli’s voice said, “I’m quite all right now, Captain. Pierce has just been saying that the Tredwills are all away.”

  “You’ve had a terrible shock,” Maclain told her commandingly. “I’m going to call Dr. Trotter. Get to bed immediately.”

  Pierce said, “Mr. Tredwill had a call from Boston. They found Miss Barbara.”

  “I thought they might,” put in Arnold Cameron. “That means they’ve washed up the show. I have to get to a telephone right away.”

  “There’s one here,” said Pierce.

  Maclain heard Cameron go into the closet booth and close the door. He took two steps, opened it, and said, “I wish you’d get Dr. Trotter for Miss Scott before you make another call.”

  Cameron’s gray eyes flashed with a quick admiring glint as he said, “Okay.”

  “Dominick was to drive Mr. Tredwill and Mr. Gilbert to Boston in the car,” Pierce went on when Maclain had shut Cameron in behind the door. “The ladies insisted they be allowed to go so they took Mr. Stacy along. The cook and parlormaid have gone into Hartford for the night with their people, but they’ll return in the morning. For the moment I’m the only one here.”

  “It’s quite all right, Pierce.” Maclain pulled himself together with an effort. He heard Cheli go upstairs and added, “I wonder if you’d see me to my room, Sergeant,” and followed her up, leaning on Sergeant King’s arm.

  Pierce came close behind them. “Your dog’s waiting for you in your room, Captain. The police found her when they located Miss Scott’s car. Apparently it was left exactly where you were stopped last night and never moved at all.”

  The Captain said nothing. He needed no one to tell him that Schnucke was waiting on the other side of the bedroom door. She had already acknowledged his arrival with a welcoming scratch and a whine. When she broke her rigorous training long enough to put both feet on his chest and caress his nose with a warm soft tongue, it was a moment before he could find the voice to order her down.

  Pierce clicked on the lights. “You’ll find everything just where you left it, sir. Your other dog’s in the basement. I brought him over here because Dominick’s away and the heat’s turned off in the garage. I was afraid he might be cold. Is there anything more I can do?”

  “Nothing, but accept my thanks,” said Maclain.

  “I’ll turn down the bed before I leave,” the butler told him, “and lay out your things. If you need me for anything more, my telephone button is Number Seven, the top one in the left-hand row.” He went off with a quick “Good night.”

  Sergeant King said, “He’s a damned efficient man.”

  As the Captain started to undress, King told him, “Lie down on the bed. I know you’re butt-headed and independent, but you’ve been through hell-and-gone, and tonight, for once in your life, a policeman’s playing nurse to you.”

  “I’m afraid it’ll be a pleasure.” The Captain stretched out on the bed with a smile and added, “How in the name of heaven did you locate me?”

  “I didn’t,” said Sergeant King, tugging at a shoe. “You’ll have to thank that madman in the camel-hair coat. He picked up a fellow named Louis Madoc, shut him up in a closet, and turned rats loose on him. I’m afraid when the Commissioner hears what I’ve been mixed up in tonight I’ll have some real explaining to do.”

  Maclain started to sit up, but the Sergeant pushed him back again.

  “Then he must have been in touch with Spud, my partner in New York.” The Captain paused and added, “Did you know Cameron was a member of the F. B. I.?”

  “I learned it tonight,” said King, “but how did you?”

  “It was fairly obvious, if you had all the details as I had,” said Maclain. “He confessed to a murder he hadn’t committed and pointedly dragged in an innocent girl. She was promptly thrown into jail and held there under a prohibitive bond. I tested her with a trick, a friendly suggestion written in violet ink. She reacted to it and proved herself a member of the sabotage gang by jumping at the idea that she back up Mr. Cameron’s fake confession and make a stab at sending him to the chair. While everyone in this very smart spy organization thinks Mr. Cameron is in jail too, he’s most annoyingly running around free.”

  “You said it,” Sergeant King remarked, breathing heavily. “He’s certainly been plenty of annoyance to me.”

  Schnucke stood up beside the bed as Cameron came in the door. The F. B. I. man closed it swiftly behind him, walked over, and sat down on the bed beside Maclain. “Captain,” he said, “I have bad news for you.”

  Two thin lines appeared at the sides of the Captain’s nose and smoothed themselves out again.

  “They found your partner, Spud Savage, in a room in the Tanner Building when they raided it tonight. He was shot in the back. He’s in New York Hospital and the doctors say his chances are good, but it was touch and go. Your chauffeur was there too, knocked out with a hypo of scopolamine. He isn’t seriously hurt.”

  Cameron slid an arm under the Captain’s shoulders and raised him up while the Sergeant slipped his pajama jacket on.

  Maclain asked, “When did Spud talk to you?”

  “I didn’t see him,” said Cameron. “I’m afraid I burgled your apartment last night and played the record containing your message. The F. B. I. has in its possession twenty-three names of ringleaders in an organization which planned wholesale sabotage in the United States tomorrow. Eleven of them they knew. Twelve more they found, thanks to you, in the House of Bonnée. The President of the United States has sent you a word of thanks, Captain Maclain, conveyed by Colonel Gray.”

  The Sergeant said, “Gentlemen, if you’ll excuse me, I’d better be traveling. I have a report to make. Are you coming, Mr. Cameron?”

  “No,” said Cameron. “I have some things to talk over with the Captain. I think I’d better stay.”

  The Sergeant paused at the door. “If you turn up anything that will throw a light on the murder in this house, for God’s sake let me know.”

  “I will,” said Duncan Maclain.

  Pierce’s footsteps sounded in the hall. When the butler rapped, Sergeant King opened the door and said, “I’m just leaving, Pierce. Mr. Cameron’s staying. If you don’t mind, you can go down and lock up after me.”

  “Yes,” said Pierce. He hesitated a moment, looking about the room. “I’m afraid I’m getting a bit nervous, gentlemen, but something peculiar happened after the Tredwills left. I thought I’d better report it, although I imagine it’s nothing more than a petty theft.”

  “What’s that?” Maclain asked quickly.

  “It’s so silly that I almost hate to bring it up at such a time,” Pierce went on. “I heard a noise downstairs about an hour before you arrived. I went out on the side porch to investigate and found that somebody had stolen the untrimmed Christmas tree.”

  “A Christmas tree!” Cameron exclaimed. “Now what the hell—”

  The Sergeant’s face was a study. He adjusted his uniform jacket to a closer fit and looked at Maclain. The Captain lay motionless, staring unblinkingly with hypnotic intensity at a bright bulb in the table lamp.
It made the Sergeant’s eyes water. He shifted his gaze to Cameron, then back to Pierce again.

  “It wasn’t exactly stolen,” Pierce corrected in the steady manner he had of getting everything right to a T. “Somebody took it from the porch and dragged it down the hill at the end of the house to the edge of the driveway. I found it there and brought it back again.”

  “Probably some kid who lost his nerve,” said Sergeant King. “I really must go.”

  The butler told Cameron, “There’s an empty room across the hall. I can supply you with everything you need if you decide to stay.”

  “Thanks,” said Cameron. He stood in the doorway watching Sergeant King and the butler until they disappeared downstairs. When they were out of sight he closed the door.

  “There’s whiskey in my bag,” said the Captain. “Will you join me?”

  Cameron lifted the lid of the suitcase and said, “Will the angels sing?” He poured two stiff drinks, handed one to Maclain, and tossed his own down.

  “There’s something queer going on, Captain Maclain,” he remarked as he took the empty glass from the Captain’s hand. “I phoned the Boston police as well as Colonel Gray. They have no record of Thad’s daughter being found at all.”

  “I was afraid of that,” said Maclain. “I thought that something important had made you decide to stay.”

  2

  Dr. Trotter came, left sedatives for Cheli and Maclain, and went away.

  Cameron sat on the foot of Maclain’s bed and said, “It’s heartless not to let you sleep, but the lives and property of a lot of people are in terrible danger, and time is slipping away. We’ve broken the back of a spy organization which has wormed itself even into the army and navy. It was through you that we turned up their headquarters.”

  The Captain heard a match strike and smelled tobacco.

  “The F. B. I. wants to know, Captain Maclain, how you got wind of this House of Bonnée.”

  “There’s a stencil and a copy of a letter in a false compartment in the top of my Gladstone bag, Mr. Cameron. You’ll find a brass stud in each corner of the bag in the inside. If you pull them, the lining will come free.”

  He lay quiet while Cameron secured the stencil and the copy of the letter made by Bunny’s secretary. He pressed his fingers to his eyebrows and listened as the F. B. I. man read the letter aloud.

  “It sounds like an ad,” said Cameron.

  “It’s intended to sound like an ad.” The Captain was thinking of Spud and fighting an apprehension which threatened to dull his every faculty. “Actually, Mr. Cameron, that’s a code hiding a message which says that I have information much more important than Gilbert Tredwill’s plans, and telling the agents here in Hartford to concentrate on me.”

  “You found the code?”

  The Captain felt the movement of the bed as Cameron leaned forward. His snapped-out question indicated his tenseness. He went on speaking, holding himself still: —

  “Let me tell you what that means, Captain Maclain. We don’t know how many tons of high explosives set with time bombs have been planted throughout this country today. We’ve found some, it’s true, but enough others exist to cause a holocaust tomorrow if they’re not uncovered. The prisoners we’ve taken either don’t know where these bombs have been planted or they refuse to say. If you’ve found a code, Captain Maclain, for God’s sake give it to me. Colonel Gray believes that the information we’re seeking is buried somewhere in a lot of dummy contracts taken from the files of the House of Bonnée.”

  “The code is based on the odor of violets,” said Duncan Maclain, and swung his feet to the floor. “The key to it is the abbreviation for the name Violet, the word Vi. Lay the letter you’re holding down on the writing table, and make a perpendicular fold down the middle. See that the edges meet all the way around.”

  The Captain heard the rustle of paper, and Cameron said, “Okay.”

  “Now take a ruler—you’ll find one in the drawer. From the upper left-hand corner of the letter draw a line to the middle of the page at the bottom. It must be exact. From the bottom draw another line upward to the right-hand corner. You should have a V covering the entire page bisected by an I. Now read down on the left only those words touched by the left-hand line of the V, and up on the right, the same.”

  Cameron read down, “City’s vital points and defensive more important,” and up on the right-hand side, “than balm sight use force to obtain.”

  Almost unbelievingly, he grouped them together and read it aloud once more. “City’s vital points and defensive more important than balm sight. Use force to obtain.”

  “You see,” said Maclain, “it’s right before you in plain English. I possessed, locked in my head, the knowledge of the city’s vital points and defensive. This was the tip-off to get that information by force. If it hadn’t been for your swift, clever work, I’m afraid—”

  “Skip it,” Cameron hastened to say. He wrinkled his forehead and muttered, “Balm sight!”

  “For bomb sight,” said Duncan Maclain.

  “I’ll let you sleep in peace,” Cameron told him. “I have to get to the phone.”

  3

  The Captain turned over and grimly resettled himself, trying to rid his mind of the fiendishly obsessing rhyme: —

  ’Twas the night before Christmas

  And all through the house,

  Not a creature was stirring,

  Not even a mouse.

  The jingle proved just as bad on his left side as on his right. Persistently it dug rabbit warrens in his brain and circulated through it, turning his night into day. Mixed in with it to form a disturbing phantasmagoria worthy of a hashish smoker was Pierce’s story about the Christmas tree.

  At ten minutes to two, somnolence was put to flight by a pair of facts that struck into his consciousness, carrying with them an internal clarity of vision bright as the light of a magnesium flare. Duncan Maclain was even more sensitive to silence than he was to sound. Like Nature, his well-trained ears abhorred a vacuum. Unlike most people who found themselves wakeful, his insomnia was not being caused by chafing noises, but by lack of a subconsciously expected sound. That was fact number one. He had not heard Arnold Cameron return from his downstairs trip to the telephone.

  Fact number two had come more laboriously, built up piecemeal by selection and rejection of various reasons why anyone should want to make off with such a prosaic object as an untrimmed Christmas tree.

  Pierce had said the tree was dragged down to the highway at the end of the house. At the end of the house was Thad’s intimate theater, and at the back of the stage in the theater was a door. Maclain’s methodical mind had tabulated that information and weighed it with care. The result was a logical conclusion that dragging the Christmas tree around the house to take it down to the road formed a clumsy piece of work unworthy of a sneak thief. Straight down in front of the side porch where the tree had stood was another hill, a much smaller one, and certainly a much easier one on which to drag a tree down to the state highway.

  Not a creature was stirring,

  Not even a mouse.

  And he knew what they’d done with Thaddeus Tredwill’s girl.

  As though he had fitted two pieces of some great puzzle together, the Captain visualized a new niche of irregular design. Its edges were drawn with wavering lines of blood in the darkness. Into it, far too late for his own personal safety, he thought morosely, he fitted fact number three: Gerente’s assassin and Bella’s killer were the same, and should have been apparent from the time he entered the Tredwill home. Yet not until this moment had he known. No careless person could ever have built the House of Bonnée, no one with any loophole in life’s record which could be unearthed by Maclain or the F. B. I.

  He clenched his hands despairingly, blaming himself entirely for the dangerous delay, refusing to condone his own remissness with the fact that the State Police had also been off trail.

  Norma Tredwill was attacked and nearly killed when she r
eturned to Hartford after discovering the body of Paul Gerente. There was no way anyone could have gotten in or out of The Crags—he had checked that himself, and the State Police agreed. Therein lay the vital flaw. He and the police had concentrated on the Tredwills and their servants; the Tredwills because they were in New York when Gerente was killed, the servants because he and the police were hunting for a spy. Colonel Gray had checked everyone in the Tredwill home; he was getting information from Bella, his operator, who lost her life posing as a servant—murdered because she was the only one who knew that Paul Gerente’s killer had been driven into New York in Bunny Carter’s car with the tracings of Gilbert’s plans.

  The puzzle line changed again and driving himself malevolently, Duncan Maclain fitted in piece number four: the reason the police had found no other tire tracks leading up to The Crags. Bunny’s car had brought Mrs. Tredwill home from the station. It had brought Barbara home from New York just a short time before, accompanied by the cleverest slayer it had ever been Maclain’s misfortune to know. The police and Maclain had overlooked one vital fact. Bunny’s car made two trips to The Crags that night, not one.

  Coldly and carefully, staking everything on the assumption that he was right, Maclain began to forge a chain of events which would satisfy him as true. Gilbert’s plans had been traced by a master spy. The tracings were bulky, and risky to entrust to the mail. One thing that spy did not know: that Bella was a counterespionage agent who had wormed her way into the Bonnée crowd while working for G-2. It was unfortunate for the spy, because Bella had brought a man into the House of Bonnée ring—an actor named Paul Gerente. Not until the spy arrived in New York did it come to light that Paul Gerente was working for the F. B. I. A column seen in the morning paper had aroused the spy’s suspicion of Gerente. Gerente, posing as a member of the House of Bonnée, had unquestionably expected to receive the tracings and make an arrest. Instead, he had been tricked and murdered by the master spy.

  The Captain lay awhile, listening for Cameron’s footsteps in the hall.

  Babs must have encountered the killer in Paul Gerente’s room. The killer must have persuaded her to drive back to Hartford in Bunny’s car.