by Helen Reilly
CHAPTER SIX
You’ve been a friend of the Flavells for a long time, Mrs. De Sange?”
“For more than twenty years, Inspector. I knew this infant when she was a young woman of four.” Susan De Sange laid a hand on Eve’s, linked tightly together in her lap.
The two women were on the back seat of the cab they had picked up outside Cunningham’s rooms. The lieutenant was with the driver in the front seat. McKee occupied one of the stools. The light outside the windows was cold, gray. The sun had vanished and clouds pressed down threateningly. It looked like snow.
When she had heard that they were on their way to the Flavell house, Susan De Sange had said she’d go with them, she wanted to tell Hugh and Natalie how sorry she was, find out whether there wasn’t something she could do.
She went on explaining her link with the Flavells. She had lived next to them, in a little cottage close to their big house in Eastport, where the three children had been born and where both Hugh’s wives had died. They had been difficult days for her, too. She had lost first her husband and then her only child in the fall and winter of ‘21-22. The Flavells—and Charlotte—had been extremely kind. The intimacy that grew up between them then had lapsed when the Flavells moved to New York and she herself left Connecticut. It had been revived after almost two decades when she ran into Eve at a party early that spring. She had entertained and been entertained by both Hugh and Natalie; Charlotte was in Vermont. She met her for the first time after her return to New York in late November.
Listening, the Scotsman made various mental notes. Like Hugh Flavell and Natalie, Alicia and Bruce Cunningham and Eve, Susan De Sange was deeply stirred by Charlotte Foy’s death.
She lived in the Trianon, an apartment hotel on Henderson Square less than a hundred yards from the spot where Charlotte had been shot down.
Eve Flavell was surprised to hear that she had been in the house the afternoon before. She opened her long gray eyes. “I didn’t see you, Sue. Were you there when I...”
Mrs. De Sange said tranquilly, “I didn’t go into the living room. I wanted to talk to Charlotte alone, about a wedding present for Natalie. I’m going away in a week or two and I hadn’t much time.”
She said it too casually, not looking at McKee but into the darkening streets, abstractedly. Charlotte Foy’s appointment with Bruce Cunningham for seven-fifteen at the north gate of the park had been made at ten minutes of six. “What time were you in the Flavell house, Mrs. De Sange?”
“What time? I’m afraid I can’t remember exactly, Inspector. It was quite late. I’d been to a bridge at the Pierre and I was going on for cocktails at the Jacobys’.”
“You did see Miss Foy?”
“Oh, yes. She came to me in the little writing room. We were only together for a few minutes. I didn’t want to keep her.”
Had she told him, the Scotsman wondered, because she thought the servants would? Kent had talked to them, talked to them himself. He put a smile around his request for an alibi. “We’re trying to establish the whereabouts of Miss Foy’s relatives and friends and acquaintances for the hour from ten minutes of seven until approximately eight, Mrs. De Sange. During that time you were—where?”
“Dining in my room in the Trianon. I went out later for a short walk, but as far as I can recall it was after eight.” The apartment people would probably know. The cab swung into the Square, turned right and pulled up before the mellow red brick house with the blue shutters. It was after they went in that McKee got a fresh slant on affairs in general. Hugh Flavell was in love with Susan De Sange, and his daughter-in-law, Alicia, didn’t approve of his very obvious devotion. His cold, high-nosed face lit up when the older woman entered the room. “Susan. My dear, this is very kind of you.” He got up impetuously from the chair in which he had been sitting moodily before the fire.
“Hugh, I’m so sorry....” She took his hand. He patted hers and shook his head. “I’m still dazed...
Alicia watched them thoughtfully from behind the smoke of a cigarette in a jeweled holder. Her nod to Susan was cool. Natalie had put on a long-sleeved black dress. Her face was drawn and colorless between the wings of her soft fair hair. “Bruce,” she went swiftly to Cunningham. McKee joined Kent in the hall.
Spencer Gorham, the Boston lawyer Charlotte was going to see and to whom she had talked over the phone a few hours before she died, was coming to New York some time that evening. There was no report yet from the Medical Examiner’s office, nor had the lethal bullet been recovered. Men were busy searching the Park for it inch by inch.
Gerald Flavell had been at the house but had gone; he was expected back later.
As far as Mrs. De Sange went, she had arrived at the house the previous afternoon at around five-thirty. She had said to the maid who admitted her that she wanted to see Miss Foy alone and was ushered into the writing room. Charlotte was then talking to Boston. The little writing room was next to the booth that housed the phone and a comfortable chair. Mrs. De Sange could have overheard both the conversation with Boston and Charlotte Foy’s call later to Bruce Cunningham. The maid didn’t know what time she left. McKee mounted the stairs thoughtfully, with Kent.
The dead woman’s room was on the same floor as Natalie’s, at the back of the house. It was a big bare room austerely furnished with a bed, dresser, a bureau, a desk, several tables and two chairs. A small bathroom led out of it. There was a luggage rack at the foot of the bed. A pigskin suitcase on it was open. The suitcase held a change of underlinen, a flannel nightdress, two pairs of rolled stockings, a brown bathrobe and a small wooden box with a brass handle in the lid. The things were tumbled this way and that. The box was old and empty.
Kent said, waving at it and at the desk, also open and with the papers in it in considerable disorder, “When the maid came in here early yesterday evening everything was O.K. She says Miss Foy was a very tidy woman and that she’d never have left her stuff like that. Someone went through the desk and the suitcase after she went out.”
“Yes, I think so.” McKee told the secretary of the stirrings Eve Flavell had heard when she was standing outside the locked room, of the silence that followed her knock and her call to her aunt. Whoever had been in the room knew that Eve was there...He didn’t like it. “Fingerprints, Kent?”
“Belloni and Knox just left. They got a mess of them.
Nothing doing on the shoes.” He had examined every shoe in the house. There was no blood on any of them and no indications of a hasty cleaning. “Of course they could have been thrown out.”
McKee’s nod was somber. “What’s in the desk, Kent?”
“Oh, a lot of junk. Letters, canceled checks, postcards, receipts—some stuff I haven’t sorted.”
McKee ordered the lot sent to the office for a detailed examination, looked into the room’s two closets—and stared.
The first closet was full of expensive clothes in cellophane bags and protective wrappings, with shoes in racks and a variety of hats in boxes on the shelves. There was a smell of camphor and a faint almost impalpable dust over the entire collection. Voluminous folds and deep pleats stamped most of the gowns as pre-war. The second closet held a black skirt and a black jersey blouse with a Bennington label in the collar. These were apparently the only clothes, besides the dress she had on when she was killed, that the dead woman had brought with her from Vermont.
Charlotte Foy’s life had suffered a sharp sea change within the year, he reflected. It was natural enough that a woman who discovered that she was mortally ill should become indifferent to what she ate and drank and what she put on. Yet—was there more to it than that? McKee had an unpleasant sensation of missing something significant, of depths he couldn’t plumb, dark recesses in whose subterranean windings the truth about the dead woman lay concealed.
He had felt it all along. He felt it more keenly standing there with a doorknob in his hand, looking from the full closet of abandoned luxuries into the almost empty one. He tore himself loose from
conjecture without a focus, stared into the old-fashioned wooden box in the suitcase that might have held jewels, old letters, keepsakes, wondered whether the intruder of the night before had removed the contents of the little chest, or whether it had some other significance, and presently left Kent sorting through the desk and descended the stairs. He was half way down the top flight when he pulled to a halt.
Mrs. De Sange was crossing the lower hall. She didn’t see him. She paused near the foot of the staircase, looked over her shoulder at the living-room archway, and then moved on out of sight.
McKee reached the main floor in time to see the door of the writing room close. He opened it without noise. Susan De Sange was so absorbed in what she was doing that she didn’t hear him. Her back was to the door. She was down on one knee at the trash basket beside the empire desk.
McKee said, “Looking for something, Mrs. De Sange? Can I be of any assistance?” and Susan De Sange turned. She smiled up at him and rose with a single twist of her strong supple body. Her color was high and her eyes were bright, otherwise she was perfectly at ease. “Thanks, no, Inspector. I was looking for something—but it doesn’t seem to be here. Yesterday afternoon Charlotte gave me the name and address of a mutual friend of ours that we used to know up in Eastport. I left it behind me when I went. It must have been thrown away.”
She pulled out a chair, sat down at the desk, opened a gray snakeskin purse with a silver monogram and silver corners, and extracted a sheet of paper with a list of names on it, explaining that she was going to let people, friends and distant connections of Hugh’s, know about Charlotte’s death.
McKee left her to her task and sought out the maids. The trash-basket had been emptied that morning. The papers were in a receptacle at the foot of the cellar stairs. Kent joined him and they sorted through empty cigarette packages, advertisements and letters of no importance. Almost at the bottom of the small stack Kent found the only object Mrs. De Sange could possibly have been looking for. It was a three-cornered fragment of double-weight paper jaggedly tom from a photograph. The outline of what might be an arm, in what might be a dark coat, was bordered for two inches one way and three the other by a small white margin.
The Scotsman turned it over curiously. A photograph had cropped up during the little talk between Charlotte Foy and Susan De Sange at between half-past five and six the night before; somehow or other it had gotten tom. Try and find out whose photograph it was and which woman it belonged to—but not by asking. Certainly not. Meanwhile have the paper tested for prints.
Kent returned to Charlotte’s room to begin a photographic survey, and McKee talked to Hugh Flavell first in the dining room and then in his study. To his surprise Flavell was remarkably pleasant. “Come upstairs, Inspector, where we can be comfortable,” Mrs. De Sange—something—had made him a different man. He could be attractive, likable, when he wanted to. A weight seemed to have fallen from his shoulders and he had completely recovered from his attack of the morning. He offered McKee a drink from a tantalus in the handsome book-lined room on the third floor. “Not so early? It is a good rule, I think. Prohibition ruined this generation, most of us oldsters, I mean.” Yes, he said, it was a habit of his to walk in the Park morning and evening, but he hadn’t left the house last night; the weather was too bad. He couldn’t imagine what had taken poor Charlotte out into the fog on such an evening.
McKee told him about her appointment with Bruce Cunningham, and Flavell showed surprise and bewilderment. “Now what—“ he threw himself back in his chair behind the streamlined mahogany desk. He sat erect, drummed fingers on the polished wood. “To tell you the truth, Inspector, I’m beginning to wonder if Charlotte wasn’t getting the least little bit—queer.”
The woman lying in among bushes in the Park, across the street hadn’t looked it. The Scotsman waited patiently for enlightenment. But Hugh Flavell didn’t pursue the subject except to say, “Perhaps I’m wrong, but she, well, during the last year she took fancies. I never approved of her going up to Vermont alone—and then there was her anxiety to hurry on Natalie’s marriage, when at first she opposed the engagement. I suppose it was simply that she was ill.”
McKee asked whether a date had been set for the wedding and Hugh Flavell said no. “Natalie’s too young.” As she was in her twenty-second year this didn’t seem a very valid objection. Flavell added, “Bruce feels, and I agree with him, emphatically, that it’s better for them to wait until the war’s over.”
His own whereabouts between six-fifty and eight the night before? He had been in his study, working. No one had disturbed him. From the study he had gone directly to bed in the bedroom beyond at, perhaps, eleven o’clock.
McKee thanked him and went downstairs. He was in the lower hall, wondering if Charlotte Foy had approved of Mrs. De Sange and her brother-in-law’s third drift toward matrimony, when Kent poked a head over the banister railing. The blond birdlike secretary was excited. The Scotsman joined him, and Kent said, “Something I want you to take a look at,” and led the way through the dead woman’s bedroom and into the bath.
The upstairs girl, Gloria Fox, was standing beside the sunken tub looking scared. The door of the medicine cabinet was open. Kent pointed to an empty space between a bottle of mouth wash and the cabinet wall. “There’s a box of medicine gone from there, Inspector.”
“What was in it?”
Gloria Fox answered. She said, “It was pills Miss Foy brought down with her from the country. She took them whenever she got a pain. She sent me for one yesterday afternoon.”
The box was small, of blue pasteboard and had been more than half full of little capsules. It wasn’t in the dead woman’s purse. Someone else must have removed it. It could have been taken at any time between late the previous afternoon and less than ten minutes ago, when Kent had been with McKee in the cellar. McKee looked grimly at shining chromium, at a green shower curtain. Question the people here now? It would be useless. There had been no check on their movements during that quarter of an hour’s search in the basement, and no one was going to step forward as the thief. The best thing to do was to get in touch with Charlotte Foy’s doctor in Vermont and find out what the capsules were. They might be harmless. And then again—Doctor Hendricks had said that Charlotte was probably suffering from a serious internal condition—they might not. A sedative to quiet pain, to quiet...The discovery had the opposite effect on the Scotsman.
He swung on his heel, descended the stairs, got the name of Charlotte’s Vermont doctor from Natalie, and went to the telephone. He called Headquarters. He used the word “urgent” gently, as a curb on his own nerves. After Headquarters, the Medical Examiner’s office; the post mortem on Charlotte Foy was in progress. “Look for a drug, a sedative of some sort, will you?” he asked. “And let me know as fast as possible.”
He hung up. Men from the Ballistics Squad and two homicide detectives, Davidson and Peak, were still searching the park for the bullet that had crashed through Charlotte Foy’s body to bury itself in the ground, in among thickets, under piles of leaves or in the branches or trunk of some tree. They had to have the weapon that had killed her. To search for it adequately they had first to get hold of the lethal slug.
McKee left the telephone booth and the house. It was ten minutes of three when he entered the park across the street. It was five minutes of five when the bullet was finally found. It was embedded in a small hillock crowned with a statue of Niobe weeping for her children that was at least eighty feet from the thicket into which the dead woman had crashed. Sergeant Wennikoe of the Ballistics Squad unearthed it.
Big men in a ring stared at the battered bullet on Wennikoe’s palm under a darkening sky. There was something new, or comparatively new, under the sun. In all the Scotsman’s experience it had happened only once before within the precincts of Greater New York.
Charlotte Foy had been shot and killed not with a pistol or a revolver but with a high-powered bullet from a hunting rifle.
CHAPTER
SEVEN
The murderer, and the murderer alone, knew the weapon with which Charlotte Foy had been eliminated. He or she knew, too, that the police would eventually uncover the make and caliber of the death-dealing gun. Until a thorough search had been accomplished, the longer they withheld their knowledge the better chance they had of discovering the rifle’s ownership and whereabouts. It was Sergeant Jabowski of the 4th Detective Division who unwittingly made the premature revelation.
Jabowski was in the hall of the Flavell house on the Square when the call came through. Kent took it. He told the news to a small group of officers near the front door. “A rifle,” Jabowski exclaimed. “My God, the dame shot down like a sick dog...What do you know?”
Eve was standing just inside the living-room archway. The sergeant had a carrying voice. She heard him. The blood drained away from her heart and the walls and floor shook. “No,” she whispered soundlessly to herself, frozen into a terrible immobility. “No...Oh, no.”
She stared blindly at a blue horse in watercolor treading yellow sand in front of a blue sea. It had been a long and dreadful day; the night before had been almost as bad. She hadn’t expected Charlotte’s death—no, never—she had expected—something. When Natalie told her that Charlotte was dead her first sensation had been one of release, and for a moment she had been able to breathe. When she heard what had actually happened she had been flung back into darkness. The inner darkness had never quite left her since.
After Bruce had called her the night before at around seven, telling her that Charlotte wanted to see him, and where, she had tried to reassure herself. He had said, “I don’t know what she wants. It may be nothing, but I thought you’d better be prepared. If it’s unimportant, I won’t call you back.”
