by Helen Reilly
The Scotsman didn’t look at the rifle. He bent over Eve. He said harshly, “Coma,” and gathered her up in his arms. The door at the front of the shop opened. The Chief Medical Examiner, Fernandez, hurried in. He was a slim, dark, elegant man with bright hazel eyes. He strode the shop’s length. He took a look at the unconscious girl McKee was holding. He lifted an eyelid. Eve’s pupils were pin points. He touched her cheek. It was cold, clammy. Her breathing had slowed. Respiratory paralysis had set in. He said, “Morphine, yes...She’s dying, McKee. I don’t know...We can only try...Give me that bag.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
“Good night, darling.”
“Good night, Nat, dear.”
At the foot of the steps in front of the house on Henderson Square Natalie looked up at the tall man in uniform beside her, the gold insignia on his cap flashing in the faint light coming through the fan above the door. She raised her face and Cunningham bent and kissed her, lightly. At a step on the pavement they drew apart.
It was Hugh Flavell, on his way home from seeing Susan De Sange into the lobby of the Trianon around the corner.
The four of them had driven down in one cab after that terrible and distressing scene at the Cedars; Jim Holland had taken another with Gerald Flavell and Alicia. It was twenty minutes of ten. The night was nasty. Sleet was beginning to fall and wind wailed through the black trees across the street.
Natalie laid a gloved hand on Bruce’s sleeve. “You’re sure you won’t come in?”
“No, dear,” he said firmly. “You’re desperately tired. What you need is a good sleep. I’m going straight home to bed and I want you to do the same.” He touched her shoulder, said good night to Hugh Flavell and walked away into the icy darkness.
Hugh Flavell stood where he was for a moment looking after the flier’s retreating figure. There was a peculiar expression on his handsome high-nosed face. It wasn’t exactly friendly, the watching detective noted from the shadows a few yards farther along. Natalie was at the open door above, her tall slenderness framed in a narrow oblong of apricot. She said, “Coming, papa?” and her father joined her and the door closed behind them.
Across town, in the shop on 19th Street, the Chief Medical Examiner was busy with the stricken girl. Fernandez said afterwards that he never worked harder over anyone in his life than he did over Eve Flavell on that stormy December night.
In the beginning he held out very little hope. The unconscious girl was carried to the bed in the long narrow bedroom on the floor above and nurses and an oxygen tank were sent for. Hypodermics of strychnine in small doses were given, and a heart stimulant was administered.
Eve had been discovered by the Scotsman in a dying condition at a little after 9 p.m. At ten o’clock there was no change, but at any rate she wasn’t any worse. By eleven, her heartbeat had picked up slightly, her breathing had eased and her body temperature was beginning to rise. But Fernandez said warningly that she was by no means out of the woods. It was still touch and go.
Meanwhile the rifle that had been lying on the rug in front of the hearth at Eve’s feet had been sent to Headquarters. Before it was removed, McKee examined it. The model was familiar to him. It was a .351 self-loader, manufactured by the Winchester Repeating Arms Company and was used extensively by the FBI as well as for deer and other four-legged game. McKee ran his eye over the plate attached to the oddly shaped stock. The patent marks were there, August 27, December 10, ‘01; Feb. 25, ‘02; Feb. 17, Dec. 22, ‘03; Aug. 21, Oct. 30, ‘06; July 5, ‘10. It had been purchased subsequent to 1910. There was no difficulty in establishing the .351’s ownership.
The rifle belonged to Bruce Cunningham. It was registered in his name in the Permit Bureau at Headquarters.
McKee talked over the phone to the detectives who had been sent to search the rooms on Eldon Place where Cunningham was staying while he was on leave; he also talked to Philip Graham. The golf bag in which Eve had carried the rifle was unearthed. The manner of her exit from the third floor apartment via the fire escape while Graham, with mistaken chivalry, had pretended to fumble with the key in the hall outside the locked door didn’t detain the Scotsman. Why she had gone to so much trouble, did. He shoved conjecture impatiently aside. Charlotte Foy had been killed with a bullet from a rifle—but there were plenty of them in existence and there was no proof, yet, that the lethal bullet had come from Bruce Cunningham’s gun. They would know in a short time. Until then there were certainties closer to hand.
Eve had been put out of the running by the man or woman who had dropped or thrown the box of morphine capsules under the table in the restaurant on 52nd Street. Whoever had poisoned her in all probability had eliminated Charlotte Foy. So the killer had to be someone who (1) had been at the shop earlier that evening and (2) at the Cedars when McKee reached there.
The list wasn’t extensive. Seven people, and seven only, fitted the requirements. They were Hugh Flavell, Natalie, Gerald and Alicia, Susan De Sange, Jim Holland and Bruce Cunningham.
Empty cocktail glasses stood about in the room at the back of the shop, on the desk, on a table under the window to the right of the fireplace, on the mantel, the top of the bookcase. In no other place in the building was there a sign of Eve Flavell’s having eaten or drunk anything else. McKee used the telephone and Daligan, and Grant, a fingerprint man, came up from Centre Street. The unconscious girl’s prints were taken and her glass was isolated. It was one of two on the table under the window. Dried sediment in the bottom would have to wait for a qualitative and quantitative analysis, but during a pause for rest and a quick drag at a cigarette Fernandez put the tip of a scooping finger to his tongue and said, “No doubt about it, Christopher. She got the stuff in this. Someone dumped the contents of a couple of those capsules of Charlotte Foy’s into the girl’s cocktail and gave it a whirl with the cherry on the end of a toothpick. Who fixed the drinks?”
McKee didn’t know. He found out a few minutes later.
Jim Holland had called the shop around nine-thirty, during those first anxious minutes when both Fernandez and McKee were afraid Eve was going out. Acting on the Inspector’s directions, a detective told Holland, “I’m sorry but Miss Flavell can’t come to the phone just now.” The engineer muttered something indistinguishable in reply and hung up. But he didn’t accept the dictum. He drove from his rooms on Kossuth Street to the Henderson Square house, where he picked up Natalie. They arrived at the shop together in a state of thorough alarm at 11:15.
Natalie’s narrow white face was distracted between wings of soft pale hair. She hadn’t stopped to dress carefully. She was hatless and under the mink coat she had thrown on, the silver buttons of her lime green suit were fastened crookedly.
“What have you done to Eve?” she demanded imperiously, walking up to the Scotsman and pausing squarely in front of him. The nostrils of her delicate nose flared, freckles stood out on her white skin. Her pretty mouth was a red line.
Holland was equally upset. “Yes” he said, anger thick in him, “what has Eve done that the police—why couldn’t she come to the phone?”
It would have served no useful purpose to conceal the girl’s condition from her half-sister and the man Eve Flavell was going to marry. McKee told them what had happened. He said, “Miss Flavell was poisoned with morphine taken from the cabinet in Miss Foy’s bathroom in the house on Henderson Square.”
Natalie stared at him blindly, her eyes round black stones. “Poison!” she whispered, “Eve!” and fumbled for the nearest chair unsteadily and dropped into it, her self-possession stripped away. She wasn’t a smart streamlined young woman with a fortune tied to her apron strings and a habit of command; all at once she was a bewildered child, knocked topsy-turvy and fighting ghosts in the dark.
Jim Holland gripped the back of the chair in which she sat huddled. He glared redly at McKee. He seemed to have difficulty with his breathing. “Where is she—Eve?” his stick rapped the floor sharply. “Where is she now?”
Holland starte
d walking around aimlessly. “Is she going to get better?...She has to.” His big face, ordinarily ruddy, was putty-colored.
McKee shrugged. “She has an even chance. If she recovers she’ll recover fast. We’ll know within an hour.”
Natalie gave a cry and hid her face in the crook of her arm.
McKee said quietly, “If you want to help Eve Flavell, you’ll pull yourselves together,” and began asking them questions. They answered dully, lethargically, ears tuned to footsteps and voices on the floor above. They had seen nothing suspicious here in the shop earlier that evening nor in the restaurant on 52nd Street, so they declared. It was Gerald Flavell who had mixed the cocktails before they went to dinner. Natalie raised her fair head and looked pallidly at McKee. There was terror in her eyes. “Oh! But Gerald wouldn’t...” she faltered. “No, never...Why, he loves Eve...Holland swore steadily, his eyes heavy-lidded, half closed.
Certainly if either of these two had given Eve a dose that had so nearly proved fatal, they were remarkable thespians, the Scotsman reflected—but it meant nothing. One of the seven people, and only seven, could have dumped the morphine into Eve Flavell’s glass...
Outside, wind blew and sleet slapped thinly down. The whisper of starched skirts intruded. One of the nurses was coming down the stairs. At what she said weight took itself away from McKee and Natalie sat up, her face illuminated with a light that made her look slightly mad and Holland said hoarsely, his voice a croak, “Thank God—Oh, thank God.”
Eve wasn’t out of danger but she had taken a turn for the better and Fernandez was more sanguine. After a word with him, McKee let Holland and Natalie see her for a moment.
Eve’s sleeping quarters were in striking contrast to Natalie’s gold-and-white bedroom in the house on the Square. The shop’s upper floor was one long narrow room with a diminutive bath opening out of it. A maple bed, a bookcase, a highboy, a small vanity case and two chairs were adequate but not luxurious. A reproduction of Sarnoff’s Winter Wood was sharply black and white against one wall, where Eve could look at it when she woke in the morning.
It was then just short of twelve o’clock, and while Fernandez was beginning to hope, he was by no means fully satisfied. Eve might or might not look at the Winter Wood again. Her eyes were closed. Thick dark lashes were half moons of shadow on her lovely worn face. Its contours had been accentuated by the near approach of death. One lax hand protruded from under the blankets. A nurse held a finger on the wrist and eyed a watch.
Fernandez stood close by with a hypodermic in readiness. He gazed with interest at the stricken girl’s half-sister, at the man she was engaged to. Natalie approached the bed slowly, as though she were afraid of what she was going to find. She looked down and gave a sudden hard, dry sob that was like a cough and dropped to her knees. Holland stood just behind her, big and solid, transfixed. His lips opened but no sound came through. He looked as if he were being torn apart.
Eve was stirring. Fernandez nodded and the Scotsman touched Natalie’s shoulder and motioned to Holland and all three of them walked toward the stairs. McKee went down first, Natalie following slowly on Hollands arm. The Scotsman stepped out into the long narrow shop. It was empty and still as it had been when they left it a minute or so earlier. The door and the windows were all closed. The curtain across the alcove under the stairs moved a little. He glanced at it and then away as Natalie went past him and sank into a chair and began to cry. Sobs shook her long slender frame, doubled forward over fingers that wrenched at each other in her lap. “I can’t stand it,” she said in a broken voice. “First Aunt Charlotte, and now Eve. She looks so dreadful...What does it mean? Why should anyone want to hurt Eve?”
Holland leaned heavily against the mantel and stared down into the replenished fire. The clock on the shelf, a ridiculous little clock with a loud tick, struck twelve. He raised his eyes and looked at the clock. The whites rolled. They were threaded with tiny red veins. He said in a low voice, “We were to have been married tomorrow...
McKee told them that the worst was over. Fernandez corroborated him a couple of minutes later coming down for a puff of a cigarette. When he crushed it out and returned to the second floor, McKee said, “There’s nothing more either of you can do here. Miss Flavell will probably sleep for hours. What she needs most now is rest and quiet. And so,” he smiled at Natalie, “do you. Will you take this young woman home, Mr. Holland?”
Natalie rose obediently and drew her mink coat around her and wiped her eyes. She opened her purse. “Money?” she said. “What about money? Those nurses—Eve will need care. Suppose I leave a check. I haven’t more than a hundred dollars in bills with me—”
But McKee waved the check aside. “It’s on the police, Miss Flavell.”
Holland took her arm. “We can see Eve tomorrow, Inspector?”
“The first thing in the morning,” McKee promised, and on that they said good night.
McKee watched them through the door. It closed behind them. The untenanted little room at the back of the shop was warm and quiet. The curtain across the deep closet at the foot of the stairs hung in straight unstirring folds. McKee looked at it. He said, not moving, “You can come out now, Lieutenant Cunningham.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
“Thanks, inspector.”
The curtain was lifted and Bruce Cunningham, First Lieutenant in the Army Air Corps, uncoiled his length from the wall against which he had been propped, dipped his head for the lintel and walked out into the shop. The flier’s tanned face was tightly planed and his eyes and mouth were narrow, grim, but he wasn’t abashed or nervous or in the slightest degree discomposed. He shrugged his Army overcoat into place, went past the desk to the hearth, took off his cap, knocked wetness from it, laid it on the mantel and turned.
McKee moved an ash tray an inch on top of the bookcase beside which he stood. “You came here to get your rifle, didn’t you, Lieutenant?” He studied the flier thoughtfully.
Cunningham nodded without haste. “That’s right.”
“You knew Eve Flavell took it from the rooms on Eldon Place and brought it back here with her early this evening.”
“Yes,” Cunningham said, “she told me so over the phone late this afternoon, while I was in the Henderson Square house.” He looked around. “Where is it?”
“It’s down at Headquarters being tested,” McKee answered pleasantly. “Charlotte Foy was killed with a bullet from a rifle.”
Cunningham smiled. One eyebrow went up crookedly. “Not with a bullet from my rifle, Inspector. I didn’t kill Charlotte. When I went to meet her on Wednesday night, the rifle was in the Eldon Place living room, leaning against the wall beside the bookcase. It was some other gun that put Charlotte out of the way.”
The Scotsman let the assertion pass. There were plenty of rifles in the world and there was no proof that Cunningham’s .351 was the lethal weapon. The Lieutenant moved to a chair, hitched it closer to the fire, sat down and leaned toward McKee.
He said in a steady voice, “I was stunned when I overheard in there,” he waved at the curtained closet, “what happened to Eve. I didn’t know she was in any danger...” He looked into the fire. “When the doctor came downstairs and said she was going to be all right...He gave his dark head a shake, squared his shoulders and drew a long breath. “This is the point,” he turned more directly toward McKee, “Eve did a very foolish thing when she went to my place this afternoon and took the rifle and brought it back with her. But there wasn’t anything I could do to stop her. When I was here with the others earlier this evening, I had no chance to talk to her alone or to get the rifle from her then. That’s why I came back a little while ago.”
McKee said, “Yes. I see. But, would you mind telling me why you didn’t come out in the open, Lieutenant? Why you hid in there in that closet under the stairs?”
Cunningham examined the toe of a polished brown shoe. “When I walked in here the shop was empty. Then I heard Natalie upstairs, heard her coming down....I didn�
��t know what happened. Natalie had nothing to do with this gun episode. I didn’t want to pull her into it anyway. She’s had enough to bear as it is. My intention was to get my rifle and take it to the police myself. The simplest and easiest thing to do when I found that Natalie was here was to get out of sight until she and Jim Holland went. Then, while I was in there, I heard about Eve...”
The Lieutenant turned away. “I was in a spot. I didn’t know quite what to do. While I was thinking it over, Natalie left.” He got up, propped an elbow on the mantel, faced McKee squarely. “That rifle of mine didn’t kill Charlotte, Inspector. You can count on it. I repeat, it was in the living room on Eldon Place when I left to go and meet Charlotte at the north gate of Henderson Park on Wednesday night.” ‘
The Scotsman started to answer and stopped. Instead, he asked Cunningham a number of questions. The flier’s answers were straightforward and jibed with what he already knew. In spite of himself, the head of the Manhattan Homicide Squad was impressed. Here, he thought, was a man who had risked his life, day after day, for months, battling Zeros over the Pacific. He had carried out dangerous missions with daring and skill. He wore the Order of the Purple Heart on his breast. Was such a man likely to have shot down an elderly and defenseless woman out of the dark? It didn’t ring true; it was neither logical nor convincing. On the other hand, this was a crime in which murder was wearing a mask, and an extremely clever one. Someone in that group of people around the table at the Cedars had discarded the box of morphine capsules when its usefulness was at an end...
The wind kept on blowing and the sleet kept on coming down. Without warning one of the little mirrored windows, the one to the right of the fire, flew open and let darkness and a slam of icy particles in. McKee raised his eyes. He stared at the black oblong open on the night. He got up and went to the window and looked out. Less than two feet away the walls of the building in the rear rose sheerly. But there was a narrow alley behind the shop that on investigation angled crookedly to the street farther along the block. The catch of the window was released from the inside. The only thing that held the little casement in place was the tightness with which it fitted into its frame.
