The Opening Door

by Helen Reilly

  McKee didn’t answer at once. He was seeing Susan De Sange looking at him with her brilliant eyes curiously dulled, her creamy skin blue white, her mouth compressed, and saying, “Edgar knows nothing, nothing. It was just bluff. He was trying to put pressure on...He lives by his wits and he thought there might be money to be made out of this. Oh, he’s shrewd and clever....I didn’t touch him. I didn’t leave the cottage. I was waiting for him there when I heard Eve scream. I meant to tell Edgar that he would have to stop it, stop spying on me and on the Flavells...”

  Perhaps; McKee sat down in a slipper chair. He picked up a fold of the satin quilt and drew it absently through his fingers. “Do you get the apparent contradiction, Miss Flavell? Edgar Bently was apparently struck down because he was a danger to someone and that danger would appear to lie in his presence outside the house on the Square the night your aunt was killed or in his presence in the Cedars on the following night when the box of morphine capsules was disposed of. But—and here’s the point—if what Mrs. De Sange says is true and Mr. Bently was after profit, why was he watching Mrs. De Sange and the house on the Square before Charlotte Foy died? There’s a good deal we don’t know. There’s one important thing we do, and that is that your Aunt Charlotte had important knowledge in her possession that threatened your half-sister, Natalie. She said so to Natalie’s lawyer, Spencer Gorham, over the phone. She said to him that afternoon, ‘I’ve got to see you, got to tell you something...It’s very terrible,’ and when the lawyer asked her whether it affected Natalie she answered. ‘Yes,’ and added that she was frightened.”

  He settled back in the chair and lit a cigarette. Well, her fear was justified, he reflected. The proof of whatever Charlotte knew, or had learned, was in the small wooden chest that was in the suitcase she had intended to take to Boston with her. The contents of the chest had been removed after her death. If they could find out what it had contained...He explained to Eve that Charlotte had taken the little wooden chest out of her bank the day before she died. “Did you ever see it, Miss Flavell?”

  Eve nodded, her eyes suddenly bright. “Yes. I remember it very well. It was on account of the little box that Charlotte slapped me for the first and only time in her life. It was long ago,” she said in a thoughtful voice. “I couldn’t have been more than five or six at the time. The box had always fascinated me. It was in Charlotte’s desk here in this house. One day I tried to open it and Charlotte found me with it in my hands and boxed my ears roundly. I can still recall her face, how furious she was...” She looked anxiously at McKee. “Does that help any, Inspector?”

  McKee said slowly, “It means that even then the contents of the box were important to her.” Then, eighteen or nineteen years ago, Hugh Flavell was a newly made widower and Susan De Sange a widow. Natalie’s mother and Susan’s husband had died within two months of each other in the same year. Their ghosts stirred faintly. The Scotsman contemplated them and fingered possibilities. Suppose, and it was the purest supposition, that there was something wrong about the death of Virginia, Hugh’s second wife, for instance. Suppose, for the sake of argument, that she had been—removed? Well, what then? So then the assumption might have been that Flavell would inherit his wife’s money, in which case he would have been a rich man and free to marry again. It hadn’t turned out that way, but Flavell, or Susan, needn’t have known that in advance. If Charlotte had found out that there was something wrong she might have held her tongue for the sake of the children, contenting herself with a warning to Susan de Sange to keep off. Certainly Susan had left Eastport immediately following her husband’s death and also certainly nothing had happened to the Flavell clan for more than twenty years and then Susan De Sange had reappeared. Shortly thereafter Charlotte had ceased to exist.

  Try and find out more about those two deaths, McKee decided, and returned his attention to Eve. He took her back to the bank above the brook in darkness, and to the footsteps that had rushed at her, but she couldn’t help him. They had been just footsteps, and then she was struck.

  McKee nodded somberly. “Somebody was trying to cross the plate before the ball could be fielded and an alarm raised. You got in the way.” He went to a table on which Eve’s hat and coat lay. He picked up her little tricorne, spun it around on a forefinger. Blades of grass stuck to the soft black felt and it was out of shape. “This saved you from a serious, perhaps a fatal, head wound. But...” He put the hat down gently and went back to the chaise lounge and held Eve’s lovely eyes, wide and dark with strain, with his own intent gaze. “You might not be so lucky again. No. Look, my dear, if you discover anything, and it’s quite possible you will—you’re on the inside where you can see and hear—let me know, let me handle it. Is it a promise?”

  Eve stared at her clasped hands. On the inside, with her father and Gerald and Jim. But Bruce was in danger. His innocence had to be established, no matter what happened...Her breath failing at the thought of what might lie ahead, she pressed shaking lips together and nodded.

  Pierson knocked at the door then, and McKee left Eve.

  There was news.

  Standing in the wide graceful hall at the foot of the stairs the Scotsman looked at a pair of men’s hand-sewn brown cordovan oxfords. They were practically new. The leather was water soaked. They had been found in the channel of the brook a hundred feet from the bridge. They hadn’t been there long. They belonged to Gerald Flavell.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  “I didn’t kill her, Inspector. I didn’t. I tell you you’re wrong.” Gerald Flavell wiped his face with a handkerchief and did another fast turn up and down the rug. He ran a finger inside his collar, shook his head as though he were shaking off a weight. His eyes were cold—and wary.

  “But you admit the shoes are yours,” McKee said. “All right, suppose you tell me why you got rid of them and exactly what happened.”

  The two men were in a breakfast room at the back of the hall. Hugh Flavell and Alicia, Susan De Sange, Natalie and Jim Holland were still in the living room with Pierson stolidly at the door. Alicia had given a little gasp when Gerald was summoned, but that was all.

  “I’ll tell you,” Gerald said, throwing himself into a fragile chair that creaked protestingly at his impact. “God knows I’ll be glad to get it off my chest. It was a terrible thing to do. I don’t believe I’ll ever forget it. I haven’t been able to sleep thinking of her lying there, untended, in the dark and the cold...” He shuddered violently and swallowed a groan. “But I had other people to worry about—I had Alicia and the boy...He drew a long breath, got a cigarette lighted with a third match and began to talk more or less coherently.

  The trouble started, he said, when Charlotte came back from Vermont in November. He wasn’t altogether surprised, not as surprised as he would have been if he hadn’t seen her on the farm outside Bennington in the middle of October. He, Alicia, Natalie and Hugh were on their way down from Quebec and Natalie wanted to see Charlotte, so they stopped off. Charlotte hadn’t seemed a bit glad to see them; she had hardly a word to say and she had looked frightful. He had laid it to illness; she hadn’t been well for almost a year—but the change in her was mental as well as physical. She had a ten-thousand-dollar mortgage on his place in Long Island. It was a good investment. The interest was paid regularly and he had never expected her to call it in. Yet that was exactly what she did. She wasn’t back in New York two days before she sent for him and told him that she wanted her ten thousand in cash, at once.

  Gerald said bitterly, “She had no head for business. I tried to explain to her that it was impossible for me to raise the money, that to go chasing around for it would hurt my credit, and that at the best it would take time to arrange another mortgage. But she wouldn’t listen. She said she’d give me to the first of December and that if I didn’t produce by then she’d have old Gorham, that damn lawyer of the precious Coreys, start foreclosure proceedings. I didn’t really believe she meant it, not until that afternoon we were all there in the house and she
came back from the telephone and said she was going to Boston the next day. I don’t mind telling you that it knocked me for a loop. I went home. I’d had plenty to drink and I fell asleep on the sofa.

  When I woke up Holland was gone and Alicia was out with the pup. I decided then to have a last try at Aunt Charlotte. I thought if I appealed to her for the boy’s sake, that if I told her that a public foreclosure would just about ruin me, she might change her mind. So I started across to the house on the other side of the Square.”

  “What time...?” Gerald wrenched at his tie. “I think it was around half-past seven, but I’m not sure. There was a fog out and my head wasn’t any too clear, so I went through the park where I wouldn’t be knocked down by a car. The east gate is across from the apartment. I unlocked it with my key and walked along. I had a torch. I was past the fountain and rounding the bulge near the north gate when I saw a woman’s purse lying on the ground. I picked it up. It was Aunt Charlotte’s. I looked around—and saw her.”

  He paused and covered his face with his hands.

  “Go on, please.”

  Gerald said in a muffled voice, his eyes covered, “She was lying there, down in among bushes. I didn’t know at first that she was dead. Then I found out and I...” He broke down completely.

  McKee filled the gap. “You wiped your shoes on the grass, left the park, went across to the Flavell house and let yourself in. In the hall, at the foot of the stairs, you slipped and deposited a smear of the blood you hadn’t quite removed from your shoes, on the carpet. What made you slip, Mr. Flavell?”

  “I was startled. There was someone moving around in the corridor on the floor above.”

  “Who was it?” Gerald didn’t know. The Scotsman did. The cook and Hugh Flavell were the only two other people in the house and it wasn’t the cook...Leave that for the moment; he extracted the rest of the story bit by bit. Charlotte Foy had loaned the nephew she had indulged and spoiled various sums over a period of years, nothing big, a hundred now, two hundred again, and Gerald had given her receipts for these loans. He wanted the receipts back. Her keys were where she always kept them, in her top bureau drawer under a pile of handkerchiefs. The receipts weren’t in the desk. He unlocked the suitcase. They were there, with a rubber band around them. He took them away with him and destroyed them.

  “You also,” McKee said pleasantly, “removed nine thousand dollars in war bonds that you intended to cash in on later, when the furor over your aunt’s death had died down. You were the beneficiary. You knew that your sister Eve wasn’t likely to ask embarrassing questions...”

  Gerald turned sullen. “Charlotte wasn’t fond of Eve. She meant me to have them.”

  “Where were the bonds?”

  “In a brown envelope with the receipts.”

  “Not in the box?”

  “In—Oh, that wooden thing of Charlotte’s. No.”

  “What did you do with the contents of that?”

  “Nothing. I didn’t touch it.”

  McKee looked steadily at Gerald from under frowning brows. He could be speaking the truth; he could be lying. Whatever the little wooden chest had held was of tremendous importance. In every case when you blew’ the froth away there was a small nucleus of important fact, a few drops of the real McCoy, the vital principle, the essence at the heart of murder, from which it derived. In this case it was the missing contents of the little wooden chest. Hugh Flavell’s fingerprints and Hugh’s alone, were on the box. McKee had already taxed him with it. Flavell was a clever man. He didn’t deny touching the box. He did deny opening it. He had said, “That little wooden chest of Charlotte’s—it was a nice piece of craftsmanship. I believe I commented on it when I was talking to her in her room Tuesday night. I may even have picked it up—but it was locked and I certainly didn’t open it.” If what Gerald said was true, Hugh Flavell certainly had lied. According to his first statement, on the night Charlotte was killed, Flavell had gone upstairs to his study on the third floor at around six o’clock and had remained there until he went to bed in the adjoining bedroom at half-past ten, yet Gerald had heard his father in the second-floor corridor at around twenty minutes of eight, as soon as Natalie was safely out of the house.

  There had been fear in Hugh Flavell, rigidly controlled, at the mention of the wooden chest; there was fear in Gerald Flavell now. The catharsis of open confession, which Gerald had declared would be a relief, didn’t appear to have done him much good. It wasn’t open confession. There were, definitely, things he wasn’t telling. He had been in the bedroom when Eve tapped at Charlotte’s door; he had mixed the cocktail into which the morphine had been inserted; he could have gotten rid of the capsules in the restaurant on 52nd Street; he could have bashed Bently over the head earlier that night. He was guarded, watchful and afraid. He was also letter-perfect in his story. McKee took him back and forth over it a half dozen times, and let him go, with a warning.

  “Stick around, Mr. Flavell. In case Joe Buchanan springs Bruce Cunningham for good, we may want to talk to you in more detail.”

  Gerald wheeled on him sharply. “How could Buchanan do anything for Bruce?”

  McKee said quietly, “He could do a lot for him, negatively by saying that he himself went out last Wednesday night—in which case, with the apartment empty, someone could have replaced the murder rifle by using the key your sister Natalie—lost. He could do the same thing positively, by naming a visitor to the apartment who could have put the rifle back without using a key.”

  Something had happened to Gerald Flavell’s handsome gray eyes—and they were too ingenuously open, too steady after the first quick flash. But he had himself well in hand. “I hope Buchanan does clear Bruce. I didn’t kill Charlotte. I’m sure Bruce didn’t either.” McKee had nothing to say to that. He indicated that the interview was over, momentarily.

  At the door Gerald hesitated and then made his request. He had already declared that Alicia knew nothing about his coming on Charlotte’s body in the park, about his visit to the house or the war bonds. “Do you have to tell her, Inspector? Will the others, my father and Natalie, have to know? Tonight, I mean? If I could sort of break it to them gently they mightn’t feel so bad...”

  Flavell’s relations with his wife or his family were no concern of McKee’s except insofar as they affected the investigation. He said indifferently, “Your statement will have to be checked—but not necessarily tonight,” and watched the young investment broker take heart of grace and register a gratitude and satisfaction out of all proportion to the boon of temporary silence that had been granted to him. Gerald was mounting the stairs, his vigor almost completely restored. His resilience was amazing. The Scotsman turned away.

  There was a call from the office for him. He went to the telephone at the end of the long hall and dialed operator. Before he left New York, as soon as he received word that Hugh Flavell’s fingerprints were on the little wooden chest, he had sent Detective Rumboldt to the house on Henderson Square to talk to the servants. Rumboldt came on. His quest had been partially successful. Gloria Fox, the upstairs girl, had caught a glimpse, no more, of the things the chest contained. Charlotte’s secrecy, the care with which she handled the box, had aroused the girl’s curiosity. On Tuesday evening, while the family was at dinner, she had gone up to

  Charlotte’s bedroom, had taken her keys from under the handkerchiefs in the bureau drawer, and had unlocked the suitcase and the chest. She had expected jewels, or money at the very least, gold pieces maybe, she said. Not that she meant to steal; she just wanted to look. She had looked and had been disappointed. All that was in the box was a flat package wrapped in white tissue paper. It wasn’t very big. She had peeked through the folds as well as she could without leaving traces. There was some sort of yellow cloth in it and a string of pink stones.

  Yellow...cloth and a string of pink stones, coral...tourmalines? McKee dropped the instrument into its cradle and stared blankly at wide polished floorboards. Bend an ear as he would the news
he had so eagerly awaited said nothing to him...yet it was there, behind that enigmatic and unreadable presentation, the crux, the core, of the dark riddle of crime and violence that had erupted into murder. Charlotte certainly wasn’t taking the chest and contents to Boston for the ride. They were getting closer and closer; they weren’t close enough. He roused himself from motionless brooding. Gerald Flavell was coming down the stairs. McKee spoke briefly to Pierson, joined Gerald and they entered the living room together.

  Jim Holland was reading a book in a big chair in a corner under a lamp; Natalie was beside Alicia on a love seat near the fire, her eyes big in a face that had thinned and sharpened. Susan De Sange and Hugh Flavell were at opposite ends of a sofa in front of the second fireplace.

  They all looked up quickly, apprehensively as the door opened. Alicia jumped to her feet. She stared from McKee to her husband. Gerald’s bearing reassured her. She touched her lips delicately with her handkerchief and a diamond flashed on one of her well-cared-for hands with the greedy fingers. Perhaps the jewel was one of the reasons. why Gerald’s creditors were hounding him “like wolves.” Alicia said brightly, “Well, darling, you’re alive, I see—which of us is for the torture chamber next?”

  No one echoed her lightness, her smile. Hugh Flavell was rising from the couch. His movements were stiff. Instead of a young fifty he looked sixty and arthritic. He walked toward McKee, pulled up a few feet from him. “Inspector?” His voice was curt.

  “Yes, Mr. Flavell?”

  “I want an explanation.”

  The boot, McKee thought ironically, was on the other foot. Hugh Flavell had lied round the clock, about remaining in his study on the third floor of the house on Henderson Park on the night Charlotte was killed, and about the little wooden chest and his casual handling of it. “An explanation of what, Mr. Flavell?”