The Opening Door

by Helen Reilly

  At first, following Eve’s slender hurrying figure into the subway at 14th and out of it at 8th, McKee thought she was going to the house on Henderson Park, but at 4th Street she swung east, then south, then east again into Eldon Place. Midway along the short block she mounted the steps of the first of a row of three brownstone houses and entered the vestibule.

  McKee was in time to hear the click of the latch, the soft closing of the inner door. He entered the vestibule in the girl’s wake, scanned the names on the letter boxes. Gram, Visniski, Tennerfly, Graham, Violet; none of them had so far been connected with the case under investigation. He pushed the top floor bell labeled Violet, hoping the girl hadn’t gone there, got an answering click and entered the dim lower hall. Footsteps mounted in the obscurity above. McKee followed them without noise. Half way up the stairs leading to the third floor he looked through banister rails in gloom at Eve’s pretty legs in nylons and red calf sandals, motionless in front of a door. The door opened and a man’s voice said; “Oh—hello, Miss Flavell,” with enthusiasm.

  “Is Mr. Cunningham in, Mr. Graham?” Eve asked, and the man she called Graham answered, “No, he’s not, right now. He went out about three-quarters of an hour ago. I don’t think he’ll be long. Won’t you come in and wait?”

  “I think I will, if you don’t mind.” Eve’s feet and ankles moved forward and the door closed.

  Outside of it, pressed close to the fine old paneling, McKee listened as well as he could, to what went on inside. It wasn’t much. “Don’t stay with me, Mr. Graham. I’ll be quite all right in here.” Graham murmured something indistinguishable and Eve said, she had a very definite voice, low and a little husky and with a soft ring to it, “No, nothing, thanks...Yes, I have cigarettes.”

  Inside the apartment a door closed and typewriter keys rattled. A woman on the floor above was playing the piano; a cat meowed plaintively somewhere; the Scotsman tried the door of the apartment absently. To his surprise and pleasure it wasn’t locked. He eased it out of its frame. A corridor stretched right and left in dimness in the light of a single lamp with a heavy shade. There was no one in sight, but someone was coming up the stairs from the street.

  McKee stepped into the hall, shut the front door behind him, opened another at random on darkness, and found himself in a windowless bath. He left the door there a little ajar. He was only just in time. A man in a trench coat was entering the apartment. It was Bruce Cunningham. McKee recognized him at once; there was a large framed picture of him on the dressing table in Natalie’s gold-and-white bedroom in the house on Henderson Square.

  Cunningham went in the direction of the living room. He opened the door, and paused. Eve Flavell said, “Bruce,” on a breathless note.

  “Eve—What are you doing here?” Cunningham answered blankly as though he couldn’t believe his ears, harshly, peremptorily, as though he didn’t want to believe his eyes.

  McKee abandoned his position between what felt like a wash basin and a metal clothes hamper and moved unostentatiously out into the corridor. He had a fair view. The living room was straight ahead and the door was open.

  Cunningham stood just inside of it, tall and wide-shouldered, his lean dark face in profile, his peaked cap pushed to the back of his head. He took the cap off and went on staring at his visitor. Eve was on her feet in front of the chair from which she had risen. Her raspberry tweed coat made a bright spot of color against a window. One hand was at her throat. Above its round white column her head was a little bent. Her white triangular face was cold, expressionless.

  She was saying in an icy little tone, “You heard about—Charlotte, Bruce? You know what—happened to her.”

  She looked ill. The hand hanging at her other side was clenched.

  “Yes,” Cunningham said quietly, “I heard. Natalie called me...that was when I gave you a ring at the shop.”

  “I couldn’t talk to you,” Eve said. “There was a Police Inspector with me.”

  “I gathered as much,” Cunningham said dryly. “That’s why I think...Wasn’t it rather stupid of you to come straight here?”

  His cool question appeared to infuriate his fiancée’s sister. She said, her eyes blazing, “I didn’t come here because I wanted to. Disabuse your mind of that idea. I came because I had to. There are certain things I’ve got to know...

  Bruce Cunningham balled the gloves he had drawn off, tossed them into the air, caught them. “Exactly, my angel—and there are things I want to know. You were in the shop all last evening with the estimable Mr. Holland, I presume?

  At least Natalie told me you were. You’re sure about it? I’d like to hear you say so yourself.”

  There was more than the width of the room between them. They were antagonists, eyeing each other warily. Eve thrust her hands into the pockets of her coat and faced Cunningham more directly. “No,” she said, “I wasn’t in the shop all evening. I went down to the Square. I wanted to find out what happened. When I saw nothing of you, I went into the house to talk to Charlotte. Charlotte wasn’t there.” Her hand was at her throat again, a fold of soft flesh between tight fingers.

  “So you think I killed her?” Cunningham said softly. He was smiling. It wasn’t a pleasant smile.

  “I don’t think anything,” Eve cried out at him. “I don’t want to think. Except about Natalie. She’s my sister. She loves you. You’re going to be married. I didn’t tell the Inspector about last night. You mustn’t either, for Natalie’s sake...”

  “For Natalie’s sake,” Cunningham reflected musingly. He was still smiling, his eyes narrowly bright.

  “Yes,” Eve told him on a full breath. “For Natalie’s sake—and for hers alone. I don’t care about anyone else in the world. But she mustn’t be hurt. Nobody knows about last night but us....I didn’t say a word to the Inspector. You mustn’t either. If the police were to find out...”

  A dog whined somewhere and claws scratched wood. A door at the other end of the apartment opened and an English setter bounded along the hall. He caught sight of the Scotsman and let out a howl.

  McKee sighed. He didn’t do much field work these days; as a general rule his place was at the center of a battery of phones directing an investigation rather than taking an active part in it. So far his luck had been good. The string had run out. It was no part of his plan to antagonize these people at this stage. He did a lightning shift. He was at the outside door, had it open and was standing in the opening when Bruce Cunningham appeared.

  The Lieutenant was something less than pleased to see 2 visitor who had walked in unannounced. He controlled anger at the interruption with difficulty. “Yes? Who are you, what do you want?” he demanded curtly.

  “The door was unlocked,” McKee said. “I’m sorry. I knocked but no one answered.” He introduced himself.

  Cunningham’s manner changed. The savagery went out of him, he became brisk, civil. He said, “Come in, please, Inspector.” He was a quick thinker. “It’s about Miss Foy, I suppose? Miss Flavell, Miss Eve Flavell, is here now. We were just on the point of starting for the Square. This way.”

  They went into the living room. Eve Flavell was sitting in a chair near one of the two tall windows. Her back was to the light. Her position was comfortable. The face she raised to McKee was white, tight, the scarlet of her mouth the only color in it. She smiled at him.

  “Hello, Inspector. We meet again.”

  “Yes, Miss Flavell.” Cunningham was as taut as his prospective sister-in-law, but his powers of dissimulation were better. He had an interesting face, not handsome but definite and well-planed. Women would take to him instinctively. There was humor and gentleness in his firm mouth with indentations at the corners, and his light eyes under dark strongly marked brows, were intelligent. So was the shape of his head.

  Play it straight, the Scotsman decided, and see what he got. “You understand the questions I’m going to ask you are purely routine, Lieutenant? We’re interviewing all Miss Foy’s relatives and friends. Now—do you
know anything that will shed any light on her death?”

  Cunningham took off his trench coat, folded it and threw it over the back of a sofa. His uniform molded a lithe hard figure. “Nothing whatever, Inspector. It’s a complete mystery to me. I was dumbfounded when I heard about it. It just doesn’t seem possible.

  The Scotsman nodded, showed regret.

  “I see....I had hoped...Well, we go on trying. From present indications Miss Foy appears to have been shot and killed between ten minutes of seven and, say, eight o’clock. Would you mind telling me what you were doing, where you were, during that time?”

  Bruce Cunningham struck a match, held it to a cigarette. In the small flare his face was bleak. He didn’t look toward Eve. He dropped the match into a tray, inhaled smoke, and said musingly, “Ten minutes of seven....I was here at ten minutes of seven, changing. I had an engagement with Natalie—Miss Flavell—for dinner. I got to the house at half-past exactly; I remember, because on account of the fog I was afraid I might be late, but I looked at my watch when I got there and I wasn’t.”

  McKee watched smoke rising in spirals. Cunningham and Natalie had been together from seven-thirty on, according to separate and independent statements. What had Eve Flavell been referring to when she said, “I didn’t tell the police about last night?” Whatever it was it must have taken place before seven-thirty. These rooms weren’t more than three or four minutes’ walk from the Square...“What time did you leave here, Lieutenant?”

  The setter licked a paw and rolled over on his side. Cunningham sat down on the arm of a chair. He stretched his long legs out in front of him, thrust his hands into his pockets, and threw a bombshell in the most casual of tones. “I left here early. I think it was at about ten after seven. I had an appointment to meet Charlotte Foy at the north gate of the park in Henderson Square at seven-fifteen.”

  A gasp from Eve as he began to speak Was instantly suppressed. Her face was a little death’s head, with blackness for the eyes, in the hollows of the slender cheeks, and beautiful temples. McKee stared fixedly at the imperturbable lieutenant. He himself had already predicated a meeting between Charlotte Foy and someone else in the darkness and the fog the night before. It was this man she had gone to see. She had never emerged from the tryst. Cunningham was alive, she was dead, with a bullet hole in her...

  McKee made no attempt to hide the gravity of the lieutenant’s disclosure. Eve Flavell, at least, was fully cognizant of it. Question and answer after that, clipped, cold, impersonal. Gradually the full story emerged. On the previous day Bruce Cunningham got back from Washington earlier than he expected and went directly from the station to the house on the Square. He arrived there at around five, left in about half an hour, after making arrangements to spend the evening with Natalie. He had had no private conversation with Charlotte; she had been called to the telephone shortly after he got there and he was under the impression that she wasn’t in the room when he left.

  He hadn’t come straight here from the Flavell house; he had an appointment with a fellow officer, Hilary Fenn, for five-thirtyish at the Harvard Club, where they had a couple of drinks together. He got home at about half-past six, maybe a little later. Meanwhile Charlotte Foy had telephoned.

  Bruce Cunningham explained that he had lived in the apartment before he went into the Army, sharing it with a writer, Philip Graham. An artist friend of Graham’s, Jim Buchanan, had taken his place when he joined up, but the two men had insisted on his staying with them while he was on leave. Philip Graham had answered Miss Foy’s call.

  Graham was summoned. He was a plump man in his forties with thinning auburn hair and thick-lensed glasses over weak eyes. He looked his bewilderment at McKee’s questions, didn’t get any explanation of them. He said that Miss Foy rang up at ten minutes of six the previous evening.

  He remembered the time because he had been expecting another call and was watching the clock. Miss Foy asked for Bruce. When Graham told her he wasn’t in and wanted to know whether there was any message she said yes. Would he ask Lieutenant Cunningham to meet her at the north gate of Henderson Park at seven-fifteen. She repeated the location twice. “The north gate. Tell him I want to speak to him, but that I won’t keep him long.”

  Years of experience at interrogation convinced the Scotsman that Graham was speaking the truth. He had no axe to grind, no connection with the Flavell family. Back to Cunningham again, “You kept the appointment with Miss Foy, Lieutenant?”

  Cunningham lit a fresh cigarette.

  “Yes, Inspector, I did—but Charlotte didn’t. When I got to the north gate she wasn’t there. The mist was heavy and it was very dark; I’ve never been out on a night that was any darker. I looked through the gate. I even called. There was no sign of her. I walked up and down the pavement in front of the gate for a while. Then it began to rain and I decided that the weather had kept her indoors. It was getting late by that time, so I went round to the house, collected Natalie and we went out to dinner.”

  “Did you mention your appointment with Miss Foy to Miss Flavell, ask her where her aunt was?”

  Cunningham shook his head. “No. Charlotte was ill and Natalie was worried about her, anyhow I didn’t want to bother her. If Charlotte had changed her mind, I figured she’d see me later.”

  McKee took a turn up and down the big comfortable living room, a man’s room, bare of ornament, cluttered with books, pipes, golf clubs, a skiing kit on end in one corner, a collection of fishing rods in another; the three men who occupied the rooms had sporting tendencies in their hours of ease. Charlotte Foy’s telephone call to Cunningham was, to say the least, peculiar. He had been in the Flavell house that afternoon, was going to be there again in a matter of minutes. Charlotte Foy wasn’t content to wait. She wanted to see him alone, out of doors, in the darkness and fog of the wooded Square where they couldn’t be seen or overheard. The flavor of secrecy about the proposed meeting was arresting. Cunningham was, or professed to be, in complete ignorance of what Charlotte wanted to see him about.

  “You have no idea, Lieutenant?”

  “Not the slightest.”

  “Did Miss Foy approve of your engagement to Miss Flavell?”

  “I don’t think she did, at first. But later, yes.”

  “What was her objection, in the beginning?”

  Cunningham shrugged. “I wasn’t a favorite of hers, and Charlotte was a woman who played favorites. She was very good, you understand, but she was narrow and stubborn and liked her own way. Cross her in anything and you were at once a villain of the deepest dye.”

  Was this a reference to Charlotte Foy’s relationship with her niece, Eve? The girl had scarcely moved since Cunningham made his disclosure. She was locked up inside of herself, tension in every slender line. If Cunningham hadn’t mentioned his appointment with Charlotte to Natalie, he had to her. She had said to him when he first came in, “No one knows about last night but us.” Leave it, the Scotsman thought. Neither of them was giving freely. Get at it another way.

  Eve stirred, she came out of her long winter’s nap to say, “It wasn’t that Aunt had anything against Lieutenant Cunningham personally, Inspector. But she had another man picked out for Natalie. She wanted her to marry Everett, a cousin of the Corey’s. She was disappointed about it, but I’m sure she got over her feeling.”

  What Eve Flavell was sure of, even if she was telling the truth, wasn’t necessarily so. If Cunningham hadn’t pulled the trigger of the gun that had blown a hole in Charlotte Foy—and while the testimony was damaging it was by no means conclusive—the perpetrator would have had to know that Charlotte would be in the park, at the north gate, at seven-fifteen. The people in the house when she made the call included Hugh Flavell, Natalie, Gerald, his wife, Alicia, Jim Holland and the servants. The afternoon that had preceded the slaying in the misty darkness of the Square was becoming more and more important.

  Cunningham declared he had neither a pistol nor a revolver, offered to let himself, the apartment, be
searched then and there. McKee waved the offer aside. It would be done later as a matter of course. Cunningham’s uniform was too trimly fitted to conceal the bulge of an iron he would scarcely have been stupid enough to carry about with him, and it could have been more than adequately disposed of in—a clock in a near-by tower struck one—the eighteen hours that had elapsed since Charlotte Foy was killed.

  Get men here to search the apartment, not only for a gun but for other things, blood-stained footgear, letters, papers, evidence of any sort that would lay bare the real picture with which they had certainly not, so far, been presented. Meanwhile keep an eye on the Lieutenant and Eve Flavell; he said pleasantly, “You were on your way to the Flavell house when I arrived. I’m going there now. We may as well go together.”

  Eve stood automatically, a robot in raspberry tweed operated by a hidden mechanism. Cunningham put on his trench coat, tightened the belt, picked up his cap. In spite of these preparations for departure they didn’t immediately leave.

  The front doorbell rang. Before anyone could answer it the door opened, a voice called “Bruce” softly and a woman came along the hall and paused on the threshold of the living room. She was a tall woman in her middle forties with a quantity of fair hair under a small gray hat with a red wing in it. Sables were slung across the shoulders of her gray cloth suit. She exuded an air of vigor, of richness and of shock. There was strain, grief, in her generous red-lipped mouth.

  She didn’t see either Eve or the Scotsman; they were partially concealed by the door that swung inward and she was looking at Cunningham. She said with a little rush, “Bruce, I want you to do something for me, get me something...”

  Eve Flavell said “Sue,” sharply. Cunningham said quietly, “Hello, Susan. You heard about Charlotte, I suppose? He waved toward McKee, in shadow to the left of the door. “Inspector McKee of the Homicide Squad. Inspector, Mrs. De Sange.

  Susan De Sange had been in the Flavell house the afternoon before. Her name was not down on the list of guests. She told the Scotsman so, herself. With her appearance on the scene the roster of people intimately connected with the life, and with the death, by violence, of the late Charlotte Foy, became complete—with one notable, and tragic, exception. The Scotsman couldn’t know that then. He felt it instinctively in his bones.