But severe as the tone was, a quick glance at Berry’s face revealed a twinkle behind it, and Julian was thrilled down to his bootstraps at the intimate badinage.
“I promise not to flatter myself too much, Mr. Berry,” Julian smiled shyly. “Now about those shots, sir,—and then I have a clue or two I’ve been hoarding just for you. I heard two shots, unless my hearing had gone double. Iwastired, but I hadn’t been drinking. However, I’m wrong by the facts; the Colt had been fired but once. So my testimony doesn’t signify.”
“Amateur reasoning, Prentice. Try to figure out why after you go to bed tonight—I hope you aregoingto bed—and the effort will put you to sleep better than sheep-counting. Or come and tell me if youdofind the nigger in your wood pile. All right, give us your clues. I’m all excited.”
Julian produced his slip of thin white paper with its cryptic message.
“You see Colonel Blake was tagged and numbered,” he said.
“I’m surprised you knew the code. Very keen of you. Where did you find this?”
“On the stairs, after Mrs. Crawford screamed.”
“Is that the sum total of your knowledge of its antecedents, birthplace, and purpose in life. Then we’re about as well off as we were a month ago.”
Julian looked quenched.
“Can’t it be traced?” he murmured.
“What with—a stencil? Never mind. Don’t let it worry you. Oh, I’llkeepit,” he added, as Julian extended a hand. “Our friend Stebbins will enjoy it.IfI show it to him. He hasn’t a flare for motives, but he eats up clues. Have you others?”
“No, not exactly. But I thought I’d better mention that Miss Lacey just remembered the name she was trying to recall.Youknow, the name mentioned by Romany. It’s Violet Mowbray. Does it mean a blessed thing to you? It doesn’t to me.”
Berry’s eyes were intent on the pattern in the rug. Again Julian could make nothing of his face. Then Berry clicked his tongue, with a sound like a miniature gunshot, and for the startled Julian it registered the click of an idea.
“Uhmmm?!” Berry prolonged the interrogatory exclamation with exaggerated softness.“Very strange. In fact,verystrange. Thank you, Prentice. Youarecontributing your bit at last. It fits. It jolly well fits. Which is what I’m looking for, you know—things to fitmypreconceived idea. There are two ways of working this detective racket, son—theory first and theory last. Mine’s first. I make my facts fit the crime.— Hello, Belknap. Come in. Prentice and I are having a truth party. Or rather he’s come across with a little truth after keeping it back all afternoon. But I’m being lenient with him because he claims it’s all due to my charms. He saved up just to give me a few pointers. Aren’t you jealous?”
“Rraather.” Belknap always went his English ancestors one better in accent whenever his dignity was endangered. “Shall I retire?”
“By no means. I’m sure even the untutored Prentice will agree that in matters of codes and Violet Mowbrays three heads are better than two. There’s no such thing as too many detectives, is there?”
“Violet Mowbray!” Belknap showed sudden and marked interest and for a man who rarely showed any itwasremarkable. He closed thedoor. “What about Violet Mowbray? I thought I had her under lock and key. Is she abroad?”
“We don’t know. It was the name Miss Lacey couldn’t remember and has remembered.”
“Let’s see. How was it Miss Video mentioned her. ‘Revelation for revelation, with Violet Mowbray thrown in?’ Was that it? It might mean anything. After all, Violet Mowbray did have a past. However, we’d better look into it.”
“Yes, Miss Lacey wasn’t the only prowler last night.” Berry squinted at Julian, who stood looking bewildered but pleased at the response to at least one of his hopeful suggestions. “The remark may have meant more to another than it did to her. And it can do no harm to look up Violet, poor girl. One of your cruel cases, Belknap. Brilliantly executed, of course, and justified in consequence I suppose, but sinfully cruel. I’m surprised she’s living. Though this doesn’t prove she is.”
“Itwasa sad affair. I regretted it myself. But Blake was a close friend, and I saw my way to be able to clear his name. Shall I give the prison a ring? One of us could see her tomorrow—or we could send a man out.”
“Do. But cast your mind’s eye over this before you go.”
Belknap took the coded message, scarcely glancing at it.
“Oh yes. I wondered when I’d see this again. Where did you find it?”
“Prentice recovered it on the stairs.”
“I must have dropped it there. I really hadn’t wanted to enter it as evidence unless it was necessary. Particularly since I am convinced it has no bearing. I received it from Miss Mdevani. She was in a trap, as you can see. She brought me this to show me in how desperate a trap. It was to her advantage under the circumstances, to prevent murder here last night. Though if it had been just between the two of them with the world well lost I’m sure she would have blown Whittaker’s brains out and considered he escaped lightly for his damned treachery. Mind, I’m holding no brief for her character. This would rise up to deny me.” He smiled ironically, lifting the paper at them. “She is no angel. But I shall have to be shown about the present case. If you think, on this account, I shall be less help than hindrance toyou and Stebbins I shall gladly withdraw, with no hard feeling, I promise you.”
“Not for a minute, old man. Don’t dream of deserting me and the ship. In fact I wouldn’t, Icouldn’t, get on without you. I’m not as cold-blooded as you; and I don’t in the least relish being left alone by night, in a fog, with the rats either dead or deserted. No, I guess I could bear up as far as that’s concerned. But Idolook to you to provide the missing link to what seems to me a pretty bad tangle. Which reminds me I have an important question to put to you. Run along, Prentice, will you, like a good fellow? The powers that be want to confer.”
Julian, having just congratulated himself on the fact that they seemed to have completely forgotten him, was sadly disappointed. He left them with their heads together.
Yes, Belknap and Berry at last had their heads together in peace and quiet—if being cheek by jowl with a tongue in each could be said to be having their heads together. Greek was meeting Greek, and, with reservations (decidedly with reservations!), they put their cards on the table.
It was akindof peace and quiet in which the two men conversed. Nothing, thought Berry, had ever seemed to him more hollow-still than Thorngate that Saturday evening: fog outside, and illness, depression, and possibly guilt inside. Like the central vacuum of a cyclone it seemed to augur as much trouble ahead as behind. He wished for a moment that he and Belknap had let Sergeant Stebbins carry out his obstinate desire, which had been to run the whole lot down to the Blue Acres lockup for the night. It had really been becausehe relished the thought of catching somebody red-handed that he had joined in Belknap’s quiet but determined resistance to the idea. Belknap’s claim was that the scandal in society was bad enough as it was without herding several prominent and supposedly honorable ladies and gentlemen into prison as if they were one and all guilty of murder. It was hardly likely theywereall guilty, and the danger of injured innocence was not fair to risk.
But Stebbins would undoubtedly have had his way about the arrested Crawford, whom he had proved backwards and forwards to his own satisfaction guilty of Whittaker’s murder, if Crawford had not chosen an opportune moment to collapse and be put to bed. Even the hardened Belknap had shown a gleam of sympathy for the prostrated Crawford and asked if someone hadn’t a sleeping drug. It was Nadia Mdevani who produced the little red bottle from her vanity bag, poured a few half-inch capsules into her cupped hand, and re-poured them into Belknap’s, who transferred them to Sydney Crawford’s.
“I couldn’t survive without these,” she had said. “They’re harmless enough—allanol or luminol, or one of those things.”
So every living soul that had been dining at Thorngate the night before, always with the exception of Dorn, was still there. It was this fact of his absence that brought Dorn uppermost in the Belknap-Berry discussion.
“No report on Milton Dorn?” Berry asked.
“None of any exact value to us. But one of your men has unearthed a hidden room at the back of his Eighty-fifth Street office, and in it several human specimens in varying degrees of dissection. None of these can hope to endure, but none have been dealt the finishing stroke of the knife. The press is hot onthatscent, as you can well imagine. And of course nothing will satisfy it but that Dorn is guilty of our three murders and a few besides. I wish I felt as sure of the three as of the few besides.”
Berry shivered.
“You say that’s all of no value to us? I should think as a mark of character it might shed light on the situation. However, it’s useless to jump to conclusions.Ourwhole case against Dorn is summed up in his disappearance, added to your possible glimpse of him.”
“Perfectly true. My answer referred merely tothe fact that he himself has not been traced, much less located.”
“I see.” Berry stroked his chin and glanced up at Belknap with one eye shut. “You’re not in too good a humor, old man. Stuck for an answer? Don’t tell me!”
“I guess I am, Berry. I’m mired.” Belknap smiled slowly, but failed to quite meet Berry’s open eye. “The trouble being I haven’t a flare about this business. And unless my instincts are at work I flounder. I’m not good with a magnifying glass, I must admit.” And Belknap made a thrust of his head at the glass on the table.
Berry laughed.
“Neither am I, really,” he said. “I bow to convention. I know you don’t. But neither are my instincts particularly violent. A little luck, some thinking, and an enormous amount of hard work have got the poor boy where he is today. Don’t disparage him. A glass like this is a pretty little tool of the trade. Boys like Prentice like to see a detective without one as little as they like to see a naturalist without a butterfly net. I’m a detective, you see; you’re a genius. That’s the difference—andoh, the difference to me! Gee, that rhymes, Belknap—internally.”
It was true that on the face of it Belknap’s reputation exceeded Berry’s because of the ‘hunches’ that made him spectacular. Yet Berry, for just the reason that he lacked them, perhaps averaged a greater percentage of successes than the older man. Whereas Belknap’s failures, according to the fortune of heroes, passed unrecorded or were forgotten overnight, Berry’s went down in history.
Berry had recently written finis at the end of a slow, grueling, painstaking case, begun five years before—having of course had his hand in numberless affairs, successful and unsuccessful, in the meantime. The Star Diamond robbery round-up, seen in a bird’s eye view from beginning to end, was a masterpiece of intricate workmanship and cunning design, with Berry the spider. But it had been too much to expect a fickle public attention to remain riveted to a five-year hunt that led around the world and back again. And what newspaper would take the time to review it at sufficient length to bring out its pattern in bas-relief.
Belknap, on the other hand, seldom was interested in crimes at their birth. They had to pullthemselves together, assume character, even become aged and ripened in the detective cellars, before he woke up to them. Then suddenly with the warp and the woof before him he saw the flaw, the weak thread, and unraveled the whole in a breath. Belknap had a certain contempt for Berry’s methods, though a sincere respect for his achievements.
“I’m not so sure about the luck in your case, Berry,” he said generously. “I’m afraid there’s always been far too much of it with me. I’mnota hard worker. And as for thinking, it happens in wedges of intuition driven in between sleeping and waking. I have damn little to do with it. That’s why I’m up a tree now. I haven’t had a good sleep since the returns on these murders of ours began to come in.”
“You don’t look it. And unless I miss my guess we’ve got a bad night ahead of us. So let’s run over our lists to date and not leave the household too long on its wild lone. Who are there to be considered? Mr. and Mrs. Crawford; Prentice and his girl-friend; Miss Mdevani; and this missing Dorn. Andthatleaves out of account the quite possible possibility that Blake killed MissVideo, orvice versa, or that Whittaker killed both. Violet Mowbray’s name may be a stepping-stone and it may prove just another stumbling-block. What really interested me in Miss Video’s remark was the ‘revelation for revelation’ bit. Did she mean that because Whittaker was exposing her lover Crawford she was going to pay him off? For what shecouldhave meant was that if you are exposingmeI’ll get even with a story about you and Violet Mowbray. In which case it would bear out a little suspicion of mine about that Diary you people seem so anxious to forget. Perhaps the Diary had ’emallin it—not merely Crawford. Whittaker may have been letting fifty-nine cats out of the bag instead of one. He was an old scoundrel, Whittaker, by accounts. If that was so, with most of those here having interrelated parts, what more likely than the only way for any one of them to come clean was to wipe out every other one, and the Diary with ’em.”
Belknap carefully regarded a thumb-nail, pausing before he spoke.
“Astute reasoning, Berry. You’re uncannily warm, you’ll be pleased to know. I haven’t had a good opportunity to explain to you the method inthis madness, if there is any. Such as it is, it’s Whittaker’s. The poor devil, though I swear I can’t be as sympathetic as I should be, was dying of cancer, and witness his bright idea of a way to shorten the sentence. He called me in at the last minute to watch it done—too late to more than expostulate and then resign myself to what I thought was going to be rather a gruesome lark, and has proved far too much of a good thing. I assure you I didn’t anticipate a shambles! I’ve kept this item for your ear alone because—well,youknow the police. Can’t you picture that damned sergeant hot and bothered on the trail of a lot of stale crimes when the time is too short for the new? What do you say about it?”
Berry walked across and threw up a window. “Bad night,” he said, and spit. He knocked the ashes from his pipe on the stone outer sill, closed the window deliberately, and came a few steps back, refilling his pipe as he came, and keeping his eyes on that.
“You’ve let me do quite a bit of feeling around in the dark, haven’t you, boy? Oh, I don’t exactly blame you. After all, it was your case, not mine. There’s a catch-as-catch-can element betweenus I guess we can’t avoid. And aside from that I agree with you that it would be rather low-down to allow your friend the Judge to blight the careers of his criminal friends because of certain age-old professional secrets between them. For I take it that’s what you’re trying to tell me.”
“I am, exactly. But now that youareenlightened what good is it to you? It’s been of little help to me to know that the Miss Laceys and Mr. Prentices have their pasts. Can you see either one of them with any of last night’s blood on their hands?”
“Not particularly. But we’ve both had our tragic experiences with gentle creatures who have spread the veil of innocence over a positive welter of sin. No, given your tale of what Whittaker had set out to do, and has done to a T, the matter boils itself down to a neat psychological one. We’re unable to budge with the circumstantial evidence; unless the fact that all the circumstantial points directly at your foreign lady, Miss Mdevani. But I, for one, feel it’s planted on her. I gather it strikes you the same way? However, we can’t afford to eliminate her. As far as everyone is concerned we only have their sworn word asto how they spent last night: Miss Lacey in Mr. Prentice’s room, for the most part; Mr. Prentice in the Judge’s, except when he wasn’t; the Judge in Miss Video’s, you think; Mrs. Crawford in her own; Miss Mdevani very much out and about—and yet not seen until her visit to you; Mr. Crawford further out and about but not seen because of the assignation with his wops. The few instances in which we can check their stories we find them quite uncommonly truthful. You saw Miss Lacey when she says she came to the library for a drink. Mrs. Crawford saw Mr. Prentice as he came from the Judge’s room, when she was on her way down to find her husband and found Blake instead. No one saw Blake. You kept moving and saw damn little—unless youdidsee Dorn. I wasn’t in the picture until after two of the important episodes, and too far afield to get much out of the third. You were actually present at the third, and a lot of good it did you. Which reminds me. I just want to check that shooting with you again. It bothers me. One shot, you say, from the direction of the library wall, in other words from the holes therein. Prenticedoesinsist on two.”
“There was one shot,” Belknap said with controlledquietness. “I should think it would be unnecessary for me to repeat myself. But therehavebeen cases of simultaneous, or all but simultaneous, shots that might deceive one, more particularly the person nearest the scene of action. Do you suggest it might have been something of that sort? Miss Mdevani in the wall, and Crawford or his hired man in the pantry, shall we say?”
“My idea in a nutshell. You see this is what I found to make me such a nuisance on the subject.”
Berry produced the bullet of a 22 calibre Colt automatic from his vest pocket—a bullet apparently identical to the one found in the table that morning.
“May I inquire?” Belknap asked gravely, taking the pellet on the palm of his hand and crossing it from one to the other.
“In my meticulous, persnickety way,” Berry said with his little twisted smile, “I made a cleaner sweep of the dining-room tonight than you and I and the Sergeant did this morning when working in unison.” Berry had been known to strip a freshly papered wall in his thoroughness! “And this article is the net result. Foundinthe sideboard—you noticed that Chippendale thing betweenthe windows—inside, deep in the back board, with the doors closed and no hole in the doors. Meaning the doors were standing open when the shot was fired, which, incidentally, means nothing.”
“Exactly; nothing at all. And of course it may have been in hiding there for years, the relic of some earlier shooting picnic at the Whittaker mansion! But I congratulate you on the find, for itisa find. We must get it to the ballistician, who has Exhibit A, and let him determine which, if either, came from our captured weapon. We know only one shot could have come from it.”
“Certainly. I’ll take charge of it. You get in touch with Miss Mowbray. I’ll continue with Miss Video’s room while I’m about it, and you go mix with the gang. The more I hear about them the less I like them unchaperoned. See you later.”
On either side the door each drew a long breath that being translated meant “I guess I gave him myfactsfair enough. Conclusions?No.”
Sydney had been wandering the house like one possessed. From her room where she stood inanimate motionless beside Neil’s bed, to the East Room where she mechanically extended her hands to the fire Nadia had herself built on the enormous hearth, to the kitchens where she blindly prepared things for Neil’s comfort, she made the rounds with frozen face and rigid body. The spirit was stricken—only the form of Sydney went on living and doing. Meeting far too many emotional crises within far too short a space of time had destroyed her receptivities; whether temporarily or permanently remained to be seen.
Nadia was in the East Room, smoking furiously, picking up and laying down bric-a-brac, books, pictures, a glass of water, with indiscriminate and hasty distraction. Seeing the ghost of Sydney passthrough for the sixth time her nerves were stung to remonstrance.
“For Christ’s sake, what’s the matter, Mrs. Crawford? One would think you were the only one in trouble around here. Is it as bad as all that with your husband? Can’t he buck up?”
Sydney halted in her tracks and stood gazing straight through Nadia, through the walls, through the outer fog, for several seconds.
“He’s worse,” she said in a dragging voice. “I don’t understand it.”
“I’ll come up with you.” Nadia’s bomb of angry impatience burst in air and came softly down. “There may be something I can do.”
Again there was an appreciable interval before Sydney answered, her eyes distantly intent, as though, a creature of another world, she listened for echoes of this.
“You may come,” she murmured.
They went up together to the Crawfords’ room, passing in the lower hall a policeman sitting bolt upright in a straight-backed chair against the wall near the door. A high-low light was turned low above the mirror-table beside him. It was all the light for the hall and stairway. At the head of thestairs another policeman, equally immobile and disinterested, sat in a straight-backed chair against the wall.
“It feels like a hotel after 2A.M., or a funeral parlor at midday,” Nadia cried at Sydney. “Let’s turn up the lights and dance on the graves—throw a celebration with horns and cymbals.”
But Sydney was deaf to her. And even Nadia’s bitter laughter died away when she had taken one look at Crawford, felt his pulse, and listened to his breathing. There was a horrid whitish edge of something, like dried foam at a tide-mark, along his upper lip. The lids of his eyes were neither up nor down, but remained fixed half across the pupils. His Adam’s apple shifted a little, spasmodically. Nadia swung on Sydney.
“You little damn fool,” she hissed. “What do you think you’re doing—playing with death? As if we hadn’t had enough of it about. Did that frightful idiot of a Dr. Giles go off duty?”
“What’s the matter?” Sydney asked stonily.
“Did you give him the sedative I gave you?”
“What?”
“I said,did you give him the sedative I gave you?”
“I did.”
“What else?”
“I don’t know. Some tea, I think. And bicarbonate. And—and water of course.”
“Is that all?”
“I don’t know. I tell you I don’t know. What are you driving at? Answer me! What do you mean?”
“Keep quiet.”
“Are you trying to make out I’ve—?”
“Shutup, or I’ll make you.”
Sydney Crawford’s eyes seemed to return at last from the cosmic universe. They contracted and shivered to points of horror. Everything about her, from her clinched hands to her vivid chalk-white face, put itself headlong into one word:
“Murderer!”
And Nadia Mdevani was looking all too ready to be one when Julian, standing in the door, interrupted them.
“Don’t tell me anything’s wrong,” he said with a thin sarcasm.
Poised against each other as the two women were, it took them both several breaths to withholdtheir momentum and divert it to new channels. Nadia was the first to recover.
“We need a doctor, Mr. Prentice,” she said quietly. “And we need him soon.” She threw a glance in Crawford’s direction and, in a low voice, risked more: “I’ve seen a few poisons in my day, and thisisa poison! Arsenic. You know how rapid that is.”
Sydney sprang toward Julian.
“Don’t go, Mr. Prentice! I tell you if you go—”
But Julian had fled; down the corridor, down the dim stairs, and out into the fog. They heard the door close loudly behind him. Sydney dropped her hands loosely, resignedly, at her sides. “That’s that,” she said quietly. “Not that it really matters. I am completely at your mercy, Miss Mdevani. You may think it makes a difference. It doesn’t. There are others now who care as little as Bertrand Whittaker cared.”
Nadia looked her up and down with cold contempt and a colder pity.
“Don’t worry, Mrs. Crawford. Your time is not yet. Notquiteyet.” She pushed back her shining ebony hair with her two hands. “It appearsI must be the one to do it at that—the chosen of the Lord. For the mortification of the flesh.” She was speaking to herself, not to Sydney.
Crawford shifted a little, and moaned.
“I am in pain,” he said. “Sydney.”
“Yes?” Sydney neither stirred, nor looked toward him.
“I am in pain.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Is something wrong?” he asked.
“Yes, something is wrong.”
Neil seemed to be considering that. Beads of perspiration stood out on his forehead, and on the backs of his hands lying weakly on the coverlid. His dry lips thinned perceptibly. Then, on a breath, he only said again:
“Sydney.”
“Yes?”
“Sydney.”
“I said, what is it?”
“It’s up to you, Mrs. Crawford,” Nadia cried softly.
“What do you mean?”
“Sydney.” Crawford’s monotonous, sad repetitionof her name was the tragic undertone in the room.
“Be quick about it,” Nadia screamed in a whisper.
“I tell you I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Sydney.”
“You know as well as I do what I mean.”
“Sydney.” His voice was weaker.
The effort by which Sydney moved her limbs and went to Neil’s side was painful to watch, like the first steps of a Frankenstein conception. She bent over him a little and laid her hand across his eyes.
“It’s all right, Neil. There is nothing wrong. I didn’t mean there was. It has been so hard for you. So bad I can’t remember how bad. If I remembered I’d die. Perhaps you are remembering. Don’t let it kill you, dear. For you and I have so much to do. We are going to go on from where we laid our story down—was it a year ago? I’m sure we can find the very page, paragraph and sentence where we left off.”
Neil smiled. It was the smile of a blind person, sweet and helpless. He moved a little nearer Sydney,and lay perfectly still. How long the three in the room remained speechless and motionless it would have been hard to say. It was Belknap who disturbed two of them; the third was beyond all further disturbance.
“What have we here—a séance?” Belknap asked from the door.
Nadia quivered and shrank back against the wall as she turned to face Belknap. Her hands, with spread fingers, formed a spidery white pattern against the room’s daring modernistic wall-paper of black shot with gold. Her eyes wavered, and Belknap saw them consider the open window leading to the roof of the porte-cochère.
“Mr. Belknap!” she breathed.
“Your humble servant.” Belknap closed the door, turned its key and pocketed the key, and crossed to the bed.
“What’s ailing our friend Crawford?”
He thrust Sydney Crawford aside with an arm that would have brooked no interference had there been any. He looked down at Crawford; thenbent over him; and then, quickly, felt for the heart. His face darkened.
“This man is dead,” he said, straightening and turning toward Nadia Mdevani.
“Thank God!” Sydney cried, and Belknap swung to her.
“Another Strange Death of President Harding, is that it?”
“That’s for you to say, Mr. Detective,” Sydney answered with unexpected fire. “But this is the second time today you have accused me of murder; and I should have thought, unless you can make your point better than you made it this morning, you might exercise a greater professional restraint.”
By a blazing light in Sydney’s transparent face it was clear things no longer mattered a tinker’s dam: life, death, love, hatred were all one to her, which was nothing. Belknap regarded her with merciless, puckered eyes, and turned again to her husband. He touched a light forefinger to the powder on Crawford’s corroded lips.
“Poison is my guess,” he said. “We’ll find out where it came from soon enough. You’ve run it too close, Miss Mdevani. I shall have to examinethe remainder of that sleeping drug you so kindly offered.Ifit’s still in your possession. Hmmm! No you don’t, lady—stand where you are.”
“I’m sorry to have frightened you,” Nadia drew back and spoke with slow venom. “I merely thought to assist you. You’ll find it in the middle compartment of my handbag.” With her eyes she indicated the bag on the dresser. “Are you—alone?” she added.
“Quite alone, Miss Mdevani. But not for long I assure you.” Belknap went to the telephone: (“Operator, give me 40. Thanks. Police Headquarters? Give me Sergeant Stebbins. Oh, that you, Stebbins? You’d better come up. Your catch has gone the way of all flesh—which, in this house, means he has been murdered. But I have a good substitute. So come along and help me. Right.”) He hung up.
“Where is Mr. Berry?” Nadia asked.
“Doing research work.”
“I should like to see him, if I may.”
“You should? Why? My opinion is that I make a better father confessor.”
“I’m sure of it. I prefer a layman that’s all—as safer in the long run.”
How he admired her Custer stand. He knew, if she didn’t, that she was literally at the end of her rope. He hadn’t a doubt in his mind that her bag contained the poison. This poisoning business was always such a risky affair. He felt convinced that in the excitement she had neglected to exchange the contents of the bottle. Yet she was boldly facing it out to the last ditch. It was proving a gallant fight, if a criminal’s fight can be called gallant. And, admiring her, he wanted her more than ever. His eyes absorbed her as she stood there slim and taut, outlined in the light that, being shielded from Crawford, fell directly upon her. She wore a clinging dress of bitter-sweet red. It shaped her narrow hips, her lovely forward drooping shoulders. There were slippers to match the dress; coral in her ears; a half dozen barbaric coral bracelets high on her arm; a large bloodstone ring on her index finger. She seemed not so much savage as heathen, a descendant of Attila. It was a thousand pities, Belknap thought, to have her broken in this sordid fashion: law courts, disgrace, and, short of death, a prison. How much more fun to break her himself, in a man’s way. But it was too late now. The cards were stacked against her, and hedidn’t need her enough to follow her lead to Hell. He drew a breath and relinquished her.
“That’s quite possible. Safety is not a term you and I have conjured with.”
“Hardly. We have never pretended to be anything but dangerous to each other. And this was scarcely the moment to have drawn in our horns. But that shouldn’t destroy our relationship, should it? For I believe it was you who first made a claim to courage. You put it rather neatly, I remember, calling it the coin of our realm.”
Again her irony, and he flushed.
“I was flattered, my dear, when you challenged me to catch you at one murder.” (God, he thought to himself, what kind of a grip has this woman got on me that I should stand here arguing, with a corpse on the bed between us!) “I have ceased to be flattered. Four is far too simple a problem; particularly when you let yourself be tripped up in the fourth act.” Belknap was opening her bag. He held up the little red bottle for reflections. “Your stop-light,” he said with his cruel, side-wise smile.
“Your play on words, sir, is one of the most delightful things about you. I see it doesn’t fail youunder trying circumstances.” Nadia’s color was up. She was positively enjoying this linguistic sword play. Belknap hated himself for having let himself be snared into it. She was playing for time. Exactly what good it would do her he failed to see. But the furtive half-eye she gave to the door, the furtive half-ear she gave to what might be happening outside, meant she was biding an opportunity. And something was at last happening outside. Suddenly the door of the lower hall was opened and closed repeatedly and vehemently. There were loud voices, and someone in a querulous rage was insistently keeping the upper hand. There was a scuffle on the stairs. Belknap went to the door, and paused with the key in his hand. He looked quickly at Sydney’s quiescent figure lying curled up at Crawford’s feet—she had fallen into a deep sleep, or perhaps a faint, at some moment of the conversation; how little attention had been paid her!—and then back at Nadia.
“Quick, dearest,” he whispered, “go by the window! Forgive me, it’s the best I can do.” He was surprised at his own words. But her shuddering tremor at the approach of the others hadbeen the last straw. He couldn’t go with her but he could let her off.
“Thank you,” she answered gently. “I am not running away. I have never run even when guilty. Is it likely I should try it now?”
Without replying, and with an angry twist of his arm, he turned the key in the lock and flung the door wide.
“Come in, Stebbins. You too, Berry. I want one of you. And Miss Mdevani, I understand, wants the other.”
“I do, Mr. Berry.” Nadia stepped forward and stood near him. “I hereby place myself wholly in your charge. Whether I am guilty or innocent of all of which I am accused has yet to be determined. Until it is determined I am confident you will extend me fair play. Mr. Belknap, I regret to say, is now as assured of my guilt as he recently claimed to be of my innocence. Such variable winds cannot fail but be ill winds for one in my delicate position.”
“Cool and tricky!” thought Berry, putting the room to a quizzical scrutiny. “What a perfectly worded appeal. No male could resist it.” Aloud he said, “I promise you will receive every considerationjustified by the circumstances.” And, to Belknap, “I see wedidleave them too long alone. The tally mounts! But I take it we have reached the end of the trail. My congratulations. Ithoughtyou would come across, and I’m sincerely glad—”
The disturbance on the stairs had moved up and now suddenly intruded itself. Julian Prentice proved to be at its center—pale, disheveled, his tie twisted, his hair up-ended, Julian struggled feverishly with a veritable regiment of cops. His captors were so intent on their prize and on his retention that it would have taken a dozen murders to have shaken their concentration; such is the Force’s strength of character! In spite of everything, even his own nature, Belknap had to smile.
“Who’s this you’ve got? I figured the least you could be doing was bringing in Milton Dorn. What’s Prentice been at to so rouse your righteous wrath?”
“Tryin’ to escape, sir. Ran his car right off’n the premises. We did have a chase, sir! He was doin’ seventy in the fog. It was as good as suicide, sir.”
“A verdict of suicide would be a relief. Come, come, boys, hands off. Can’t you see you’re bothering him? Where were you heading, Prentice, for Times Square?”
Julian, standing free at last, shifted his gaze distractedly from the vibrant, defiant figure of Nadia Mdevani, to Silas Berry standing like an off-stage critic, to Ordway Belknap who looked a general with the puppets at his disposal, to Sydney Crawford lying crumpled and desperately pathetic across the feet of the still form on the bed, and suddenly he trembled uncontrollably from head to foot.
“Where is Joel?” he cried in a high, piercing voice that froze the room.
From this moment Thorngate, house and grounds, was pandemonium let loose.
It was clear that the first thing to be done, when it became certain that Joel Lacey was really among the missing, and had last been seen sleeping on the library couch, was to institute a searching party. Because of the numberless recruits, three groups were formed—two taking the great outdoors and one the sliding panels and the secret attics. The way the police, Belknap groaned, came scurrying out of corners, like the Hamlin rats to the piper’s pipe, at news of a safe and sane hunt, when there was never one of them underfoot when he was needed to block a murder, made one positively ill. Not that the hunt wasn’t important. But the bare chances offindingJoel Lacey, much less finding her alive, seemed so slight in view of the thoroughness of the earlier crimes.
In the midst of it all, behind and before, to right and to left, came Julian. Julian joined first one searching party, then another, urging, beseeching, cursing, cajoling, diving into a closet or under a bush as the case might be. Julian was every which way. Julian was at sixes and sevens. Julian had gone berserk. Losing Joel, Julian seemed to have lost whatever of value he had recently possessed: his boyish philosophy, such as it was; his sense of humor, which hadn’t been bad; his kindly, inconsequential wit which had served rather to balance the household during the late unpleasantness. These had vanished in thin air. Instead here was a frantic, unreasonable, hysterical, bothersome young man who dogged everyone’s footsteps like a spoilt child, stubbornly refused to remain even passably steady, and flung wild and outrageous accusations about like so much confetti. No one escaped his fury or his suspicions. Even his idol Berry took a raking over the coals that under normal conditions would have been unpardonable. But when Julian burst into tears at the end of his peroration Berry let that be the end of it.
Julian said no one wastryingto find Joel; he said Nadia Mdevani had cremated Joel in the furnacesand they must sift the ashes for her bones; he said Milton Dorn was murdering her by unspeakable degrees in some god-forsaken hole-in-the-wall where her screams would never be heard; that Belknap, Berry, and Stebbins had whisked her off to some Inquisitorial chamber where their minions were torturing a statement from her. He said the whole investigation from A to Z had been stupidly handled (he said it very loud and clear, and embellished it with bad words); that a lot of helpless and innocent people had been kept in a house which had a chronic disposition to murder, where they had been nipped off one by one like sheep by wolves; that Thorngate was proving no better than an Island of Dr. Moreau, only worse, because it was human beings instead of rabbits being experimented with; he said—
But this was going one further than the harassed Belknap could quite tolerate. He thrust Julian gently but firmly from the East Room into the hall, saying, as he closed the door on him:
“Go along, Prentice. I’m sorry. We’re doing all we can, and the best possible. I have even got in touch with Headquarters again and have asked them to send an extra man or two. I admit thingsare pretty damn thick, but you aren’t thinning them out. So beat it.”
And Belknap turned back to continue, with Berry and Stebbins, the heated interrogation of Nadia Mdevani by which they hoped to run her to earth by her own admission, and so, clearing the decks of legal red-tape, hasten and simplify her path that led but to the grave as best you looked at it. For, admitted or not admitted, denial could no longer stand against a sealed order to kill Blake, a gun left lying on the scene of Whittaker’s murder, and a poisoned sleeping drug administered to Crawford. This last, in a brief preliminary test, Belknap had proved to be arsenous oxide; anyway arsenic in one of its forms.
They had of necessity quickly abandoned all attempts on Sydney Crawford. Not that she stood above suspicion, hardly that (Stebbins had even taken it upon himself to arrest her willy-nilly), but Sydney, passing from one phase of excessive shock to another, was now wandering the house like a modern Ophelia, modern in that nothing she said bore the least resemblance to her predecessor’s soliloquy. She said cruel, bitter, terrible things to the walls and the ceilings in a hard, glintingvoice: “I’ll call up Victor and tell him his Daddy’s dead. He’ll remember it for life if he’s fetched out of bed to be told.” “The place to stab a man with a paper knife is between the fourth and fifth vertebræ, I mean ribs. I’ve foundthatout.” “Well, Romany, if it’s true that the first two of a triangle to die make the couple in Heaven,youshould worry now. You’ve got him.” Until she changed her tune a little there was no use bothering with her, for questioning or pressure brought to bear might push her beyond this ragged edge of insanity.
No danger of insanity in Nadia Mdevani’s case! But apparently no danger either of obtaining any satisfaction from her. Wanting a confession from her was one thing—obtaining even a modicum of it was another. Nadia sat limply, almost unconcernedly, in a deep chair before the East Room fire, and, never lifting her eyes from a bemused contemplation of the flames, refused to yield a hair’s breadth of vantage to her tormentors. The ground they covered with her was the old ground covered in the morning, but, though her three examiners bore the same names that they had then born, they were three men of different attitudeand temper. Each blaming himself secretly for an earlier male to female softness, that had perhaps been responsible for the extra hot water they were now in, was now out for blood in earnest, beauty or no beauty. It angered them that she seemed not to notice a difference. Quite as collected, equally as cool, as during the morning’s session on the stand, she shed their individual and concerted attacks.
Yes, she had received the order regarding Colonel Blake. No, she could not say when, or from whom. That was for them to find out—ifthey could. Yes, she had taken it to Mr. Belknap. Why? She didn’t exactly know; an impulse. Perhaps a wily way to further the intimacy between them! Here she threw a little whimsical smile in Belknap’s direction. If he saw it he gave no sign. She said she intended telling him she had not obeyed orders—even though Blake lay dead at that moment on the library floor. She had intended asking his protection, such protection as a man of law and justice, power and respect, can give a woman of doubtful antecedents. The sarcasm, if there was any, was ever so slight.
Whathadshe been doing during the hours beforeconsulting with Mr. Belknap? Oh-my-God, her weary tone of telling and retelling implied, what a twice and thrice told tale to repeat. She had gone to her room and been restless. Naturally; no one else had claimed to be anythingbutrestless last night, and she wouldn’t profess to be any exception to the rule. She had read a little, and then done a bit of reconnoitering— Oh well,callit prowling. What difference did it make? She had been made aware, putting the two of his absence from his own room and the two of his voice in Romany’s together, that Bertrand Whittaker was paying a visit. And that couldn’t be said to have made her any the less upset. Not that she would have called him one of your story-book lovers; but this evening she needed him to be his own best friend with her in his own behalf. Her new distrust of him, a blend of anger, disrespect and fear, rising from his cat-and-mouse play with his Diary, was running her blood up close to killing heat. Romany was rather a last straw. She had returned to her room for her Colt, to find it had disappeared from the dresser; and had gone on down for a drink to restore her equilibrium. Again her smile. It was then she had remarked the gnawing of a ratin the wainscoting—a persistent rat, Mr. Belknap; a purposeful rat; one intent on going places. She had left him working his way through, and had gone for a long cooling-off stroll, down to the water and back. What a night! What a moon!
Stepping back over the low sills into the library, and crossing the dark room to the door dimly blocked in by the hall light, her foot had encountered something soft and humpy. By that seventh sense that comes to one’s aid at such moments she knew it for a body. She had her own pocket flash. Turning it up she discovered Blake. The message she had received was illumined in red letters. She was on the point of destroying it when Belknap occurred to her mischievous mind! It was Mrs. Crawford who had interrupted their exciting tête-à-tête.
Romany? The first she had seen of Romany last night was this morning when, with the others, she had seen her dead. No, it wasn’t Romany she would have killed under the spur of jealousy—if they wanted to name it jealousy—but Whittaker.Anotherreason for killing Whittaker, whom she hadn’t killed. Not even in his case was she guilty, much as she had intended being. Someone hadbeen ahead of her. Someone who had planted her gun with one shot fired from it—and in using another gun had had the misfortune to have to fire twice in order to get the victim cold.
The three men exchanged glances of unmistakable surprise and shock. This was new testimony on Nadia’s part, though not altogether fresh, and an entirely new explanation of it. But Nadia never showed by as much as a shifted finger that she realized the importance of what she had just let fall.
“Two shots!” Berry said.
“I said two shots.”
“You agree with Prentice?”
“I do.”
“Why haven’t you said so before?”
“I had my reasons.”
“You knew something?”
“If you care to put it that way.”
“You suspected and were afraid?”
“I suspected. I was not afraid.”
“Your explanation of the two shots—whether true or false—is amazingly clever.” Belknap was deeply respectful.
“Thank you.”
Stebbins interrupted angrily.