The Project Gutenberg eBook ofMurder at Large

The Project Gutenberg eBook ofMurder at LargeThis ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.Title: Murder at LargeAuthor: Lesley FrostRelease date: October 13, 2016 [eBook #53268]Most recently updated: October 23, 2024Language: EnglishCredits: Produced by Stephen Hutcheson, MFR and the OnlineDistributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MURDER AT LARGE ***

This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.

Title: Murder at LargeAuthor: Lesley FrostRelease date: October 13, 2016 [eBook #53268]Most recently updated: October 23, 2024Language: EnglishCredits: Produced by Stephen Hutcheson, MFR and the OnlineDistributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net

Title: Murder at Large

Author: Lesley Frost

Release date: October 13, 2016 [eBook #53268]Most recently updated: October 23, 2024

Language: English

Credits: Produced by Stephen Hutcheson, MFR and the OnlineDistributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MURDER AT LARGE ***

BYLESLEY FROSTEditor of“COME CHRISTMAS”Decorative borderMURDERATLARGEDecorative borderPUBLISHED IN NEW YORK BYCOWARD-McCANN, INC.

BYLESLEY FROST

Editor of“COME CHRISTMAS”

Decorative border

PUBLISHED IN NEW YORK BYCOWARD-McCANN, INC.

PRINTED IN THE U. S. A. BY THE VAN REES PRESS

Ordway Belknap, ex-Judge of the Magistrate’s Courts, and for the present a detective of amateur standing, and a semi-professional criminologist, on call at the Homicide Department, leaned comfortably back in an arm-chair in the den of his spacious penthouse apartment on the East River—in Gracie Square to be exact. James, the perfect ‘man’ that confirmed bachelors dream of one day possessing, entered soundlessly on the deep-napped carpet, and, in a cotton-wool voice, announced Judge Whittaker on the wire.

“Thank you, James,” murmured Belknap in a tone modulated to the atmosphere of the room; while James, with the smooth precision of the Roxy Orchestra being lowered, sank from view, the den being a floor to itself.

Belknap slowly ground out a freshly lit cigaretteand meditatively examined the telephone at his elbow. His face gathered seriousness as a window gathers steam. He recalled Whittaker’s remark of a week ago, made as they passed at the Club: “I will give you a ring soon on a matter of life and death. No, I can’t go into it now—I’m running.” And though in the meanwhile the matter had slipped his mind he now unaccountably, even to himself, hesitated to remove the receiver.

Belknap was a man of fifty-odd, but didn’t look it; tall, handsome, with a firm mouth, burning brown eyes, and thick, lustrous black hair. His muscles were steel-hard; and his skin always deeply bronzed, winter and summer alike, for he was one of those elusive and self-styled members of the Long Beach nature club. He enjoyed motoring down on brilliant days even in January to nurse a driftwood fire in the shelter of a shallow dune, basking himself in fire heat and violet ray.

Sun-bathing is the habit of a solitary; but then, Belknapwasa solitary in more ways than one. He loved the slow, indolent afternoons, apparently wasted, and with no words spoken. He relished the mingled smell of olive oil, wood smoke and salt; and the sight, through more thanhalf-shut eyes, of gulls, and a ship moving up the horizon like the large hand of a clock, invisibly moving yet seen to have moved. Rodney Drake would periodically rise like an elongated Pict out of the waste of sand and gesticulate against the sky. On the open beach the hardy little Egyptian, name unknown, would squat motionless on his heels over a tin firebox.

So it may well have been these lonely watches that fostered the thing in Belknap that his acquaintances, even friends, called ‘queer.’ The world in general certainly considered him puzzling, enigmatic. It found him definitely uncommunicative, or, when communicative, ironic, which is a turn of speech that leaves the hearer not much the wiser. His friends claimed for him a sensitive, reserved nature that shed humankind with reluctant cynicism for lack of a better method, a cynicism sharpened and brought to a point through years of close association with the evils and corruption, hypocrisy and injustice of the courts. He had a way of never overlooking an opportunity to be bitter at the expense of law and order as practiced in this enlightened twentieth century.

And it was the hopelessness of the struggle to keep a modicum of honesty in the legal system that, Belknap said, had driven him out to play a lone wolf game tracking the criminal. Too frequently, he claimed, the innocent paid, or no one paid, while the guilty sat in full view of the Bench. He was at least determined to give the eager public a few real captures, if not convictions. In his two most famous cases he had managed the convictions as well.

His first, that of Maria Monroe, strangled in her closed Riverside Drive apartment when it was supposed she herself was in Honolulu, followed immediately on his resignation from office. In fact what he considered the bungling of this case had been the last straw that made him yield to a temptation of long standing. And he was miraculously successful. With every investigating agency in the City against him, and with an apparently impregnable alibi to break down, he saw his man through to the chair.

But it was the Stanton-Mowbray affair the next winter that saw Belknap’s amazing and unreasonable technique developed to its greatest power. Stanton was shot at the Villa Bella NightClub in Forty-eighth Street, West, toward the daybreak closing of an exceptionally wild night. No gun was found, although the few remaining guests were searched within a few moments by the police; and even the general direction from which the shot was fired could not be determined. Some said it had come through a window, others from close range. The case had lain dormant for months when Belknap took an interest in it. The chief suspect had been a certain Colonel Blake, a man of great personal magnetism, strong political associations and influential friends. The feeling had become current that he was guilty and that it was being ‘hushed up,’ that the law was once more proving inadequate. But in this instance Belknap was able to give the law a clean slate. Jumping to insane conclusions in the intuitive manner that was his strongest claim to distinction, he put his finger on little Violet Mowbray, a musical comedy dancer, who had had a last-minute invitation as an ‘extra’ for Stanton’s party. Although it was believed that she and Stanton had thereby met for the first time, Belknap discovered a weird series of events that put Stanton in the most blasting light and gave poor Violet a dozen motives for murder. Violet took her sentence offrom ten to twenty years with a quiet protestation of innocence that moved the courtroom to tears and hysteria. No one seeing her frail figure led away that dull December day would have said she could live to see a year of it served.

Since the weeks when he had kept his name and face headlined, together with Stanton’s and Violet Mowbray’s, Belknap had had several months of comparative quiet. He had given the police some assistance in a few minor matters, but had really fastened his teeth into nothing worth the candle. And at the moment he felt particularly in need of violent distraction. He was surfeited with a week of burning sun; weary of women; stale with an overdose of detective fiction; and disturbed by a tendency on the part of his thoughts to take a gloomier turn than usual.

Yet for some odd reason Whittaker’s ring, following the words of their last meeting, gave him pause. He knew Whittaker as a dangerous person,friendor enemy, often even more dangerous as the former. Their relationship had of late been strained. Belknap had all but come to the conclusion that any intercourse between them, kindly or unkindly, had been dropped. Then why this matterof life and death? Oh well, curiosity had killed more than cats. He reached for the receiver.

“Yes? Oh, Whittaker? Good to hear your voice.” (a little overdone that. Rang false) “Of course, old boy.” (Now why was he calling him ‘old boy’?) “I’d be delighted, more than delighted.” (Good God, I don’t even mean delighted) “Something thrilling for me to do? You’re going to put me wise? Oh, I see: give me an opportunity togetwise. Of course. Any old thing for a change.... No, I don’t exactly catch your meaning. You’re pleasantly mysterious as usual.” (Diabolically so, is what I want to say, and I will say it one of these days.) “A house full of criminals? Since when have you been on week-end terms with Sing Sing? They’ve never been in Sing Sing? You want me to help you put them there, is that it? You bet your sweet life. Anything to do with what you let fall to my ear last week? It has? When do you want me? Dinner tonight. Thanks most awfully. I’ll be there.”

He hung up; but failed to return to the Audubon which lay open on his knees, an originalFolio, given him with relief and gratitude by Colonel Blake. Instead he relapsed into a brown study and considered a rather sinister possibility from several angles and in varied lights.

Belknap made the distance to Whittaker’s Long Island mansion at Blue Acres in something under an hour. His Dusenberg, long and low-slung, colored to please his own eye, and fitted with special gadgets for defence and utility, was also a demon for speed, and even in traffic had broken many records, largely its own to be sure. He had always driven himself, and he had often reflected that if he had not been a lawyer or a sleuth he would have been ticking off mileage at Daytona. Such was his love of the power and beauty of line of a splendid machine. And he admired as much as he admired any work of art his brown, thin, muscular hand on the wheel, one mahogany, the other coffee.

As he turned into the wide, sweeping drive of Thorngate, he slowed the car to a crawl, and savoredfor a moment the view of the Sound, the lemon and orange sunset beyond it, the peace of the trees and shrubs and flowers on either side. He listened with one ear to the swish of the tires in the traprock gravel roadbed, and with the other to the cicadas making the mad sound of a semi-anæsthetized brain among the oaks.

Black John, alert and loquacious, opened the door to him, and showed him immediately to a large, luxurious room on the second floor. Belknap stood at the long windows, looking down, and shedding, with the deafness characteristic of his general indifference, John’s flow of well-intentioned chatter as he unpacked and laid out Belknap’s week-end wardrobe. Belknap was so far removed from it as to be unaware of John’s withdrawal. Unaware also of Bertrand Whittaker’s entrance.

“You made the trip in short order, I imagine. How are you, Belknap?”

“Splendid, thanks. Yes, I came down fast enough. There is nothing to warrant a leisurely drive on Long Island—until after Shinnecock Hills perhaps. Before that the sooner it’s over the better. You know I am still forever beingsurprised that there can be such charming and secluded spots as this within a stone’s throw of these atrocious main highways. And yours is one of the best, Bertrand.”

“Isn’tit, Belknap!” Whittaker’s face lighted with pleased vanity. But it died on the instant. “I shall hate to leave it. More than I shall hate to leave anything else, I assure you.”

Belknap paused with their lighted cigarette match arrested between them, and quickly met the eyes he had been studiously avoiding.

“Leave? Why, when, and where for? Going abroad?”

Whittaker’s immediate answer was a cold smile. He accepted his light and crossed to a chair. Belknap regarded him intently through puffs of his own smoke, and being a keen student of men when he cared to be, or found it necessary, he remarked a new hardness in the hard grey face. Whittaker was a grey man: iron-grey hair, granite skin, grey-blue eyes, gun-metal suits, and plenty of grey matter. He was a man too able, too willfully brilliant, for the cramped position in which he had to work. So he put the extra energy into deviltry. “That’s just what he is doing now,”thought Belknap, “and God help somebody. Somehow I think it’s God help him for a change.” But he wasn’t prepared for being quite as right as he proved to be.

“Not exactly abroad. Though perhaps yes, in a very broad sense. Sit down, Belknap, and we’ll talk, if you don’t mind being serious on an empty stomach. The drinks will be up shortly.”

“Fire away, man, by all means. You are now making things sound, not only mysterious, but rather important. What’s ittoyou?”

“It’s a great deal to me, I’m afraid. It seems I have short shrift, Belknap. I’m sentenced to death. The doctors have given me six months—or ‘with luck,’ as they put it, an extra one or two.”

“Good Lord! Why I’ve always thought you one of the fittest. Whatiswrong? Whittaker, I’m sorry—too terribly sorry. Is there a thing I can do?”

“Yes, there is.” A flare of wicked humor came and went in Whittaker’s eyes. “But we’ll come to that in a moment. I’m dying of cancer. In a bad spot. I’m in for pain and a great deal of it; more than I can quite bear to put up with, I guess. ‘Six months to live.’ It may sound shortenough to you, but to me it sounds an eternity. Sixweeks, yes; I might have kept a stiff upper lip for six weeks. But that’s about my limit.”

“You mean—it’s suicide?” Belknap asked, and did his level best, in respect to the situation, not to show a fierce impatience that he should have been asked in at the death.

“No-o, not strictly speaking. Though I’ve always contended suicide is justifiable in such circumstances. And I purchased a very pretty little Colt last week for the purpose. But I reconsidered. I’ve been a man who made himself felt going and coming; you can testify to that, Belknap. Then why make this particular exit dull and unromantic, with nothing more said of it than, ‘Mr. Bertrand Whittaker had been suffering from ill health, and it is thought—etc., etc.’ You know the line. So, as I’ve said, I didn’t shoot. For here was the perfect opportunity to go the limit with life and death, nothing to lose that wouldn’t be gain. In other words I could leave a bit of a pother behind me—in commemoration. And, my dear fellow, I’ve hit on an idea that I doubt even you could match.”

Belknap’s face was a mosaic of varying expression:sympathy of a kind, eager curiosity, distrust and threatening disapprobation. A man of Whittaker’s evil propensities could do considerable damage if he was driven, as now, to turn at bay.

“Think twice, Whittaker,” Belknap warned him quietly, “before you mention your idea even to me. We can drop it here and now. I promise to ask no questions. Remember a doctor’s judgement has been as often reversed as a judge’s! Don’t be rash under the first shock.”

“I’m not being rash. This is a certainty, born witness to by my flesh and bones. The doctors didn’t surprise me, to tell you the truth. But I had rather banked on being tabled, so to speak, and dying under the knife. No such luck. So it’s my six months or my week-end, and I’m going to make it the week-end. If that fails me I can always fall back on the pistol. Putting two and two together, do you begin to get my drift?”

“I can’t say I do in the least. I suppose I’m stupid.”

“For a detective I think you are. Well, to call a spade a spade, I intend to be murdered—with you in attendance to get the murderer. Is that clear enough?”Belknap, without the flicker of an eye-lash, darkly concentrated on a point somewhere between himself and the ceiling. Whittaker examined him secretly and furtively from under overhanging brows. The atmosphere had a tendency to thicken before Belknap drew himself back to the necessities of speech.

“Thanks most awfully,” he said with a hard, ironic twist of the lips, “for this amazing opportunity. It quite takes my breath away. Undoubtedly I should make a drastic effort to turn your intention, as one is expected to withhold a man about to leap from the Brooklyn Bridge. But I admit I’m frankly curious as to details. So before I seize you around the neck, metaphorically speaking, let’s hear more.”

Whittaker’s body, from a slight stiffening, yielded to the shape of his chair.

“I’m delighted that your first reactioniscuriosity, Belknap; for in that case I feel sure I can eventually enlist your interest in the bizarre and dramatic elements of the situation. I feared you’d mount the pulpit, or the bench, or the stand of mere friendship, deliver me a moral lecture, and ring up your pet specialist for an appointment.In which event,” he added with faint mockery, “I should have resorted to your rival, Silas Berry. So you see Iamdetermined. And so far so good. I swear it’s been good fun making arrangements.”

“Such as?”

“Well, for one thing, putting in what I call my supply of ammunition. Although I have a fair handful of erstwhile, and therefore potential, murderers on my visiting list, it was another matter to bring enough of the right sort together to insure a pleasant week-end, and a week-end that, as you can see for yourself, may be indefinitely prolonged—forthem! Several of my favorite respectable killers are in foreign parts. But I’ve managed at least eight. Do you want a brief synopsis? Of course certain of them are familiar to you.”

Belknap tried matching casualness with casualness. He leaned over and lit a table lamp.

“May I enquire how many of them are in the house? And how soon we may expect action? There may easily be a brace of us, Whittaker, before we’re through. A more or less famous detective left floating around on the scene of the crime might be considered rather a serious handicap.”

And at that moment John, entering with a tray,was responsible for the startled movement of both men. Whittaker remarked on it as he poured them each a highball.

“Apparently certain death hasn’t yet quenched my instinct of self-preservation. Naturally one can’t destroy in a week fifty years of vital energy and will to live.”

“Listen, old timer, are you sure even now that this is the best way out for you? What about repentance and the Church? Go in for it thoroughly, I mean, and try for the Heavenly Choir. You’re too good a tenor to waste.”

Whittaker laughed.

“Too good a devil to waste, Belknap. Better devil than tenor I think. No, I’m going out in a sputter of fire and brimstone—no candles for me.... Aha! I hear someone arriving. Possibly Blake. He was motoring in from Southampton.”

Standing at the windows, Belknap looking over Whittaker’s shoulder, they saw Blake spring lightly from the seat of his Ford convertible, throw out his bags from the rumble, spring back, and “zoom” around the corner to the garage.

Putting a hand on Whittaker’s arm, Belknap brought him roughly about.

“Why ring Blake in on this?” he asked, and his voice took a deadly level. His lips also leveled to a straight line, and his teeth showed white in the slit between. “After all he’stoogood a friend, isn’t he, of yours,andmine? What’s the big idea?”

“Heisa friend, old man, true enough.” Whittaker quietly brushed Belknap’s hand from his sleeve, and turned away. “But what are friends, true or false, to me now? ‘Less than the dust.’Besides, Blake is a crack shot—and a sportsman to boot. Even though you proved so brilliantly that he didn’t shoot Stanton, it was just the kind of shooting he might have done, you know that. He gives no quarter to men who run out on debts, or dishonor women. Sort of a knight errant—goes about saving situations in the nick of time. That he finds it convenient to use a gun in most cases is nothisfault. I can even see him doing me what he would call ‘a good turn,’ taking me out after a whiskey and soda, and putting a hole through me against the garden wall with a Sorrell-and-Son generosity, ‘We mustn’t let the poor devil suffer.’ Yes, Belknap, you must admit he’s a splendid prospect from my point of view. I can’t help it that you have scruples against sleuthing him.”

“By all that’s holy, you are beyond me, Whittaker.”

“If you mean by that that I am beyond the pale, I am. And beyond caring. There may or may not be a life in death, but that there is death in life I’m finding out. So what the Hell!”

“Enough said, Whittaker. We’ll leave it at that. I begin to see that itis‘what the Hell’ and thensome.” Belknap was pacing the floor, his hands thrust deep in his pockets. He stopped before Whittaker to ask, “I have a question before we go further. What’s the match, that lights the fuse, that blows up the house that Bertrand built?”

“A good match, Ordway, soaked in tar, pitch, and turpentine. I publish my Diary. It’s a substantial, well-filled, truthful Diary, packed with sensations. In a period when confessions and revelations are in such demand, it seemed a pity not to keep abreast of the times. Hearst gives me a small fortune for mine, sight unseen, and it goes, in my will, with whatever else I possess, to my niece Joel—unless, of course, this week-end makes it useless to her; in which case—”

“Joel Lacey! See here, Whittaker, you’re insane! I’ve cared for Joel, and you know it, since she was too young to know the meaning of the word love. She is incapable of murder. But if shehadcommitted a crime, and you were letting her down, you would have me to reckon with.”

“Hear, hear! The first threat, and that from my bodyguard. Check it for Berry’s benefit. It happens, my dear fellow, that your estimate of Joel’s character, like that of all true lovers, is mistaken.Joel is a murderess. Her husband wasn’t a suicide. Oh, she had incentive enough, I guess. And it was hardly a murder in one sense: she challenged him to a duel but he scoffed at the very idea. So she fired anyway, and came to me to give herself up. I silenced her. As for letting her in for all this—well, I needed her. I was short of women for the dinner table. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have bothered with her, for my hopes don’t lean very heavily on her, I can assure you.”

“I should have thought youmightbe short of women. Who are the others, by the way?”

“Romany Monte Video for one. The accident inThe Renegade Lover, in which she killed her husband (who was not her husband in private) with a folding dagger which didn’t collapse was not an accident. The dagger that night was not intended to fold.”

“Bertrand, you’re a cad. When did you desert Romany?”

“Years ago. I didn’t desert her. She left me for— Oh, I can’t even remember, there have been so many.”

“That’s no excuse for such betrayal as this. Who else?”

“Nadia Mdevani. You’ve met her here once or twice, I think; and of course know of her in a professional way. Not that there has ever been anything proved against her, quite the contrary, and yet where there has been a political murder, here or abroad, during the past ten years, she has almost invariably been questioned. I should say offhand that she is probably the tool of a powerful international ring of Governmental murderers. But her social distinction is unquestioned, her culture and wit are superlative, and her beauty is a thing to be dreamed of. I can say to you now, what I would not have said under any other circumstances, that she and I have been—call it friends, yet I have not breathed a word to her of what I instinctively know to be true: that she is a murderer twenty times over.”

Belknap shrugged to cover a strong, irrepressible shudder.

“You are a braver man than I am, Gunga Din. But then, in a pinch, I’ve always known you were. Is that the toll of women?”

“There’s one other. She is not a murderess, but she is a potential one, for I think she knows thather husband killed a man years ago. Until lately, when, I am sorry to say, Romany has been having her innings with him, Neil and Sydney Crawford were hand and glove in a marriage that I liked to call a marriage. He is a banker;—lives out here at Blue Acres; respected, indeed loved, by everyone who knows him; and the same can be said of Sydney. He got inadvertently mixed up with a gang of boys on the streets of New York, when he was a youngster, and they later proved to be a gang in good earnest. So when Crawford was sowing his wild oats, and had run up a card debt far beyond anything he knew his father could pay, he accepted an honorarium for cutting short the career of a drug smuggler. It was his wildest oat. He turned over to a very clean leaf; but I think he would go to any lengths now to save his name for Sydney and the children. And she would do the same by him.”

“Splendid! Go on. This is too good to be true. It is really such a sweet reversal of form—expecting the bad eggs to hatch. Isn’t that Julian Prentice out there with Joel? Who didhekill—his crippled grandmother or something?”

“Not so bad as that—or I wouldn’t have let him engage himself to Joel. No, he merely drowned a boy who was all but drowning him during the hazing of freshmen at the University. He pretended cramp to do it. Everything appeared accidental, and of course sympathy was with Julian anyway. There is one other, who makes the fourth man—irrespective of ourselves, and we don’t count. Milton Dorn I doubt whether you know. He is an able surgeon; but he also has a secret laboratory, or operating room, where he experiments on the conscious flesh to the point, but not beyond the point, where life still lingers. I should imagine that would be all you need know about him.”

“Absolutely! My only wonder is that you didn’t apply directly to him for release.”

“I thought of that. But then, as I’ve said, it’s a long row he hoes and I’m looking for a short one. There, Belknap, I guess that tells the tale in brief, doesn’t it?”

“No, not altogether, Judge. There is a point on which I need to be enlightened, with a bright, bright light. Where do I come in?”

“I thought I had made that clear. You are here to find good sport, but to be a spoil-sport.”

“I don’t mean that, Whittaker.”

“You mean the Diary—why, man alive, it makes something like a hero of you. My admiration is written all over it. Perhaps it shouldn’t be.Haveyou committed murder?”

Belknap laughed. “It’s not the time to admit it exactly, is it?”

A silence fell between them. Belknap broke it with another question.

“When do you spring it?”

“I thought I might bring it up at dinner. Unobtrusively. Casualness will at first bewilder them. The horror of the situation will dawn on them gradually.”

“Has anyone an inkling?”

“No one. Except perhaps Nadia. I mentioned to her the other day that it would be fun to publish my Diary verbatim seeing what a number of things it contains. Her answer was, that if I proposed doing so I would probably never live to see it in print. That sounds hopeful. Oh, of course nothing at all may happen. They may decide to take their medicine for the old rather than be on withthe new. I think that would be my solution provided I was in their shoes. And then again anything may happen. Psychologically it’s a pretty how-de-do. To throw half a dozen killers together, even civilized ones (in fact the more civilized the more interesting), makes for a strange medley.”

“Stranger than you know, I’m afraid. There is an interrelation of secret currents between your protagonists that is likely to be devastating. You may not even be the only casualty. What about the police?”

“Call them in at the drop of the hat of course. The Homicide Department would be delighted to send Berry along to help you if you suggested it, I’m sure. Well—what about dressing for dinner?”

“Suits me.” Belknap put a hand on Whittaker’s shoulder as they parted at the door.

“Whittaker,” he said gently, “I don’t know what to say exactly. I’ll have to reserve my judgement until later. But again let me say I sincerely regret the circumstances that have brought us to the present precarious position. For even I can’t see my way to withdrawing now. I can’t foregothe chance of so much excitement, if nothing else,” he added, with the flicker of a smile.

“Thoughtye couldn’t, boy.” Whittaker stressed the shrewd, cunning accents of his Yankee ancestors.

The luxurious ease, and quiet, well-oiled machinery of service at Thorngate gave no slightest indication of the worm at its heart. Up the long, winding, carpeted stairs the servants glided on their errands, and, in turn, the guests themselves came softly down by ones and twos, with a gleam of jewels, of colored silk, of white shirt-fronts in the halls dimly lit with candles.

Belknap had hastened his dressing in order to be first in the drawing-room. He felt that at any moment he might be needed in the front line, and that no time should be wasted under a shower or before a mirror. His trust in Whittaker was not so perfect as to assure him that he had been honest in saying no one was in the least aware of impending trouble. And there was just the chance that someone, being forehanded, would get away with murder!

Although he had been in the receiving room, which was also library and den, fifty times over, Belknap looked it over with awakened interest. Whittaker, it was apparent, had a leaning toward panelings and oil portraits, medieval tapestries and deep-napped carpets. Here tapestries formed the wall covering from floor to ceiling: none of exceptional value except the Gobelin over the mantel, but all equally lovely in colors and texture. An impulse, not so odd perhaps under the circumstances, prompted Belknap to test what lay immediately behind the surface of woven cloth and, as far as its stretching would yield to his hand, he found space. He tried it at various points and discovered it everywhere the same; and he recalled having heard that it was the safest way to hang tapestries against the rear attack of insects and dampness. Convenient to know, he thought. He was engaged in trying to locate the servants’ entrance to this interstitial passage when he became gradually aware that someone else had come into the room.

He turned about with elaborate sang-froid and met the gaze of a tall, strikingly handsome woman, who stood quizzically regarding him. She wore ablack sheath gown with crimson accessories that included the oval nails of tapering fingers and the clear-cut lips of a willful mouth. The crimson handkerchief tied to her garnet bracelets floated lightly up and back at every slightest movement of her arm. The cigarette case of scarlet enamel which she opened with a deft flick of one hand to help herself with the other, gleamed like smoldering coal.

He had met Nadia Mdevani several times with Whittaker; and he had vaguely realized the relationship between them, but had given it little consideration; except that once he had instinctively withdrawn from a case in which her name had figured more or less conspicuously. The sense of her guilt had been conveyed to him on the wings of one of what he called his wild guesses, and he paid Whittaker the courtesy of letting well enough alone. As it happened, she had cleared herself easily.

Looking at her now he realized that she was inwardly disturbed at sight of him. Perhaps she saw in his mere presence a confirmation of the faint doubts she might be entertaining with respect to the week-end. But her poise held perfectly—infact it was by a shade of its over-emphasis that he caught the inner tremor at all.

“Ah, Mr. Belknap!” she exclaimed, in her slow, husky contralto. “How ni-ice to see you here. Or should I call you Judge Belknap—or Detective Ordway Belknap? I am never sure of the term to your face. Behind your back I call you Belknap for short.”

“Let’s discard them, all four, and make it simply Ordway, to my face, as you put it,andbehind my back. And may I make it Nadia? Remember Bertrand is an equally dear friend to us both. You are looking divinely, Miss Nadia. Black is your color. Although I have seen you when I should have said the same of red, or white for the matter of that. Red and white are your contrasts. Tonight you are fused into a single vivid figure of black. Whistler would have liked you. You have a way, which most women have not, of lending distinction to a color instead of letting it create you. You have a like faculty with situations I am told.”

“I am not quite certain what you may mean by that, or whether it should entirely please me. But I have sufficient vanity to be flattered by yourrecollection of my gowns in view of how little attention you seemed to give them. Will you have one?”

She proffered her exquisite box and on his “Thank you, no,” crossed to the hearth where she lifted a crimson-slippered foot to the side bar of the fender, and for graceful balance (pose, Belknap thought it) laid a hand against the tapestried wall. It yielded enough to mar her picture.

“I had forgotten these tapestries are but the semblance of walls,” she murmured. “What a cosy place for rats. Although I suppose it was for the very purpose of perpetrating the Hamlet act against rats that the space was originally reserved.”

Belknap was pouring himself a thimbleful of Scotch at the tray standing in readiness on the divan table. He tossed it off, and turned over the after flavor on his tongue, as his mind turned over the possible subtleties of Nadia’s remark. She had made it piquant by a twist of inflection. A Polonius as well as a rat—or so the tone implied.

“We were speaking of Bertrand,” she continued abruptly. “Do you not consider him a little secretive about the week-end, conveying that there is areasonwhy we are here? Why should there need be a reason?”

“Thereshouldbe none, Nadia, except our enjoyment of his unbounded hospitality. But I feel myself, now that you mention it,” Belknap pursued, willing to test where her guards were raised, “that Bertrand has something up his sleeve. Possibly an announcement; he likes to make any news impressive. He may have lost his shirt in the Market, or been left a fortune by his great-aunt Emma in Vermont. You know Bertrand well enough to know he’d celebrate either with equal pomp.”

He heard the little whispering sigh that Nadia suddenly drew.

“I hope it’s nothing serious,” she said, more to herself than Belknap. Then, quickly: “Is it the Diary?” she asked.

Belknap hesitated by the fraction of a second. By all accounts Nadia Mdevani was dangerous. Her intelligence, fearlessness and beauty were things that might throw dust in any man’s eyes. Her ability to ‘clinch,’ as she was doing now, with a power greater than her own, and cut her way free from within, had won her many a hand-to-hand encounter that if taken blow for blow would haveseen her downed long ago. However, Belknap could see no better way at the moment than to close with her.

“Yes, it is the Diary,” he said quietly; and stood spellbound by the extreme beauty of her face as the color mounted under the ivory skin, accentuating the high, molded contours of the bones beneath it. He could not have said whether she were more angered or hurt.

“When?” Her low voice held its ground; not by a shade did it show disquiet. “How much time is granted us to deal with it?”

He was smitten with admiration at the serenity and ease of her apparent candor. With veteran coolness she took him on. He could do no less than to match her play for play.

“He intends letting the cat out of the bag tonight. But there will be nothing published for several days.”

“Thank you. I don’t know why, Mr. Detective, you are being so kind and telling me tales out of school.” She turned fully toward him and gave him one of her rare smiles, lifting her drooped eyelids enough to show two burning high-lights, like two stars under an edge of cloud. “I had to knowhow swift the sands were running away. Even you can’t speed them or retard them. And you wouldn’t if you could—for you have really seen me tonight for the first time,” she said, with the faint irony he was beginning to adore because in a more subtle and whimsical way, it counterbalanced his own. “May I?” She took a flower from a bowl on the table and broke it short for his buttonhole. At that moment he had regretfully to turn from her. Whittaker, at his elbow, was presenting the Crawfords.

was the way they sat at dinner.

Belknap regretted Miss Video on his left. He was one of the few who had never been properly infatuated with the Romany patteran, as he privately named her for her continuous flow of inconsequential chatter, and had therefore never liked her. It was one thing or the other with Romany. She was a sylph-like creature with enormous eyes, an auburn Viennese bob, and a disingenuous manner. She ‘needed’ them, was the way men put it,first their friendship, then their protection, finally their passion. You couldn’t somehow let her down by disappointing her. They said she was weak and easily swayed, and each in turn flattered himself he could strengthen her philosophy against a bitter world (a world he helped to embitter, if he could but see it that way), and help her get on her feet. Yet somehow she had never mastered this art of walking alone!

Belknap, always irritated by willowy natures, now wished her in Kingdom Come. He wanted to renew the dangerous but charming intimacies that had swiftly and strangely sprung up between himself and Nadia Mdevani; and here would have been his opportunity, with Nadia beside him sending odd disturbing currents up the arm that almost brushed hers. He felt her mind being restive and wild, puzzled and angry, and above all keenly intent on a loophole of escape. If anyone else should succeed in silencing Whittaker forever it would not be because Nadia had yielded her designs but because she had delayed long enough to be cunning and intricate in their workmanship. She even seemed, now that the die was cast, rather to relish the added risk of having Belknap in the arena withher. Whittaker, asked for a description of Nadia, would have said the obvious things about raven locks and snowdrift skin, with eyes too revealing to go revealed. Belknap, after this evening, would have spoken of her in terms of a banked fire with a scent of brimstone. With less than half his exasperated attention given to Romany’s innumerable reasons, centering in jealousy, why she had not been assigned to lead inAfter Midnight, he glanced surreptitiously at Nadia. Her face, ivory white and immobile, signified nothing. He wondered whether he might be mistaken in thinking the atmosphere so heavily charged between them. His appraising eye passed down the table, appreciating beauty and distinction where he found it, and paused at Joel—dear Joel, not beautiful perhaps, but dear looking. Belknap, in his fashion, had loved her; but for his own bachelor’s sake (he was not an unselfish man), as well as for her youth’s sake, he had never spoken of it to her. Looking unwaveringly ahead into a night that might well be terrible for them all, he felt a particular pang for her. She was talkingsotto vocewith Julian:

“Hush, dear, people are listening.”

“Then darling, more darling, most darling.”

“Don’t,please!”

“I want to see your amber eyes, not the back of a leaf-brown head.”

“Don’t say things like that at the table. Speak when you are spoken to.”

“Can’t you say something nice to me?”

She looked around at him, half tearful, half laughing, under her lashes.

“Oh, my dearest one, is it as bad as all that?”

“Worse, Joel, much worse.”

Of course it must be a dream, and a very bad one, that Whittaker had been saying things about cancer and murder and murderers. The more so when one looked at Whittaker himself, sitting genially, though perhaps with an extra dash of grey pallor, at the head of his board, lifting his champagne to touch glasses with Sydney Crawford: “To the lips, to the eyes.” The Stein song again! Would its revival never die? Yet it quite applied at Whittaker’s table tonight. Every woman in her way was as fair, as vital, as more than willing to play up, as any man could ask. Even Sydney, with a flash of challenging laughter at her husband, was returning Hartley Blake’s sallies in kind. Sydney was obviously fey tonight, with a heightenedcolor, brighter eyes, and a recklessness of sentiment that might mean trouble. Had Neil and Romany failed in discretion?

Blake was in his usual excellent form; and it was plain to see thought his wit of too good a flavor to be entirely spent on a woman, even the excited Sydney. So he was tossing it by means of a slightly lifted voice up over his right shoulder at Dorn. Dorn however looked darkly unresponsive, and, being a man of few words, it seemed probable Blake would never know whether his delightful flippancies and exaggerations were being appreciated. Then, suddenly, he knew:

“As for myself,” Dorn remarked to his side-partners in particular, and to the table tangentially, “I have recently resolved to remain silent unless I feel that I can definitely contribute something worth while to the conversation. Time and energy are indiscriminately wasted in the futile, the repetitive, and the platitudinous. If we could hold our tongues until they were loosed by the real idea, the absolute necessity of speech, there would at least be a deal less noise, and quite possibly a return to the art of thinking which at present is a lost one.”

It was an insulting and uncalled for remarkunder the circumstances. Romany, who looked positively crestfallen for a change, perhaps needed a blunt rebuke (she wasn’t suppressed in a day), but Blake, though an inveterate talker, was a brilliant one. His high color showed such anger that the control of his first words was surprising.

“I should not only hold it, Dorn, I should bite it if I were you.”

The silence that fell in the room was deep and ominous. But in it was Whittaker’s opportunity, not only to distract Dorn and Blake, but to call attention to himself. Here, like Jason, he could cast his stone among the dragon’s teeth.

“I believe Ihavea contribution to make to the conversation, to the evening’s pastime, and I hope to posterity.”

Belknap, without looking her way, knew that Nadia stiffened and straightened at the words. As for the others, their eyes turned to Whittaker expectantly, but with no premonitory awakening.

“I had planned letting you learn of what I intend when it had ceased to be an intention and become an actuality. In other words, you were only to know of the publication of my memoirs when you saw them in print. But I really can’t resist alittle boasting in advance, and I thought I might read scraps of them after dinner to the assembled gathering, before we get down to bridge.”

“Oh, how wonderful of you, Uncle Bertrand,” Joel exclaimed, eager to help him, as she thought, tide over the embarrassing moment. “I didn’t know you were writing. You have so many irons in the fire, howdidyou find time to do a book? But it must have been pretty good fun, so much has happened to you.”

“It isn’t recent, Joel; it’s been written at odd moments over a period of twenty years. In other words, it’s my Diary. But itispacked full of material, and all sorts of things. Everybody’s in it. Oh yes, you are all there, my dears.”

“You talk like Red Riding Hood’s wolf, Bertrand,” Nadia said with cold acidity, and at her tone the first chill, like the first autumn frost, fell on them all. “Just what do you mean when you say we are in it?”

“Exactly that, Nadia darling. I hope you are in it to the life, as I’m sure I am.”

“You mean it is a character portrayal of your friends and foes as well as a revelation of your ownnature—you sinner,” she added with bitter lightness.

“You express it in a nutshell.”

Blake spoke.

“By what right does one betray one’s friends—even in the cause of literature; and you will excuse me, Whittaker, if I doubt the literary merits of your pen.”

“By the modern right of giving the public what it craves and pays for: the revelation of evil, the worse the merrier. It used to be how I found the true light; now it is how I went plumb to Hell.”

“How you did perhaps, but not how I did.”

“In most instances one touches close upon the other, I’m afraid. It is a platitude of course (I ask your pardon, Dorn) to remark that we none of us can sin alone, but it is true nevertheless. Even the person that hears the tale of a crime is somehow affected. I feel the need of clearing my decks, of things heard and committed.”

“I doubt it would earn you a free pass through the pearly gates, supposing your proposed act comes off. Mark I say proposed.”

“Is that your glove, Blake? You must be able to get gloves at a discount.”

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