The Opening Door

by Helen Reilly

  “Of what my daughter, Eve, was doing down there by the brook when Bently fell from the bridge, instead of being on her way to New York on the train.”

  Susan De Sange who had had time to pull herself together, broke in. “I think,” she said calmly, “that the poor child suspected me. She was right in a way. I’m not proud of Edgar. He came up to me in the cemetery when I was going to look at my own graves. Eve heard us talking. I didn’t realize it or I’d have explained to her then who Edgar was. If I had she would have told me about his being the man with whom she collided outside the house on the Square on Wednesday night, and we could have gone to the police together.”

  It was very smooth. It was altogether untrue. Susan De Sange’s earlier agitation denied it.

  She had addressed the room as a whole. It was Hugh Flavell who answered. He turned toward her. He said, “Eve suspected you, Susan? Oh, she’s a fool, a fool...” He was very angry. He was in love with Susan De Sange. Alicia, Flavell and Gerald were emphatically not in love with her. Alicia’s prominent eyes resting on Susan were icily hostile and she said in an insinuating tone, “If Mr. Bently recovers it will be nice to hear the explanation of his—attentions to us, shall we call them?”

  The remark could be a feeler as to Edgar Bently’s condition. As far as these people knew he was dying when he was put into the ambulance. McKee had already arranged a little experiment with Pierson. He laughed lightly and the Captain tapped and opened the door.

  “Telephone call from the Norwalk Hospital for you, Inspector,” he said, and looked around uncertainly. “Do you want me to...?”

  “Yes, go on.”

  “Mr. Bently’s conscious and able to talk.”

  Susan De Sange was staring at Pierson. Something went inside for her, some stay, some support, so that although she didn’t move it was there, in her still face, her tightly clasped hands, the impression of a side-slip, a cave-in...McKee’s attention was abruptly diverted.

  Hugh Flavell did a retake. He too was staring at Pierson. Without the slightest preliminary warning he was falling forward in a slow-motion curve, his face cyanotic, swollen, his eyes half-closed.

  “Papa,” Natalie screamed, and jumped up and ran toward him. Gerald and Jim Holland both leaped. They caught the stricken man before he reached the floor.

  “You’re sure Bruce Cunningham was in his room here in the village when Bently was slugged?” New York’s District Attorney went on pacing the floor of the big old-fashioned bedroom in the Eastport inn with a slow step.

  It was ten o’clock on the morning following the scene in the dark gardens of the Flavell house on Red Fox Road and McKee had just finished telling Dwyer, who at his insistence had come up from the city on an early train, of the events of the previous night.

  The Scotsman said patiently, “Hold it for a minute, Counselor. You’re not figuring on two killers in this case, are you? No? Good. Then, we’re agreed that the person who killed Charlotte Foy and tried to poison Eve Flavell was the person who struck Bently and sent him down on those rocks under that foot bridge.”

  Dwyer’s nod was reluctant and gloomy. “I’m afraid you’re right, Inspector.”

  “I know I’m right,” McKee answered. “I can assure you on my word as an officer and not as a gentleman that Cunningham was a mile and a half from that bridge when Bently was laid low. We had a man watching him and he was here in his room down the corridor. No, Cunningham didn’t attack Bently. Cunningham didn’t poison Eve; ergo, Cunningham did not kill Charlotte Foy.”

  Dwyer ruffled butter-colored hair with a moody and irritable hand. His case had been cut from under his feet and he was all abroad. He turned on McKee sharply. He said in a sour tone, “Couldn’t you have told me this in New York? Did you have to bring me all the way up here?”

  McKee exhaled smoke in a long stream. “I brought you up here because Buchanan has been located, and I thought you’d want to talk to him yourself.”

  Dwyer came to an abrupt halt. “Oh. He has? I see...His china-blue eyes were bright again. “That’ll do it, McKee,” he said with rising vigor. “That’ll do it. This case is going to crack now. If Cunningham isn’t guilty, someone took that gun of his, shot the Foy woman with it and put it back in the Eldon Place apartment last Wednesday night after Charlotte Foy was dead. Buchanan was there all evening. He’ll know who it was...When will he be here?”

  “He’s on his way over now in a car from his aunt’s farm in Dutchess County,” McKee told Dwyer. “He ought to have arrived a good half hour ago, but the roads are bad.” The District Attorney was all eagerness again. The Scotsman wanted to ask Eve a few more questions for the record, so in order to save time he left Dwyer to wait for Buchanan and drove across town to the house on Red Fox Road.

  The big living room with the two fireplaces was bright with crisp winter sunlight and fragrant with sheaves of flowers Natalie had ordered from a neighboring greenhouse. Eve and Natalie and Bruce Cunningham were there, Bruce and Natalie talking before one of the fires, Eve, in a monks-cloth robe of soft yellow with a blanket over her knees, was on a sofa some distance away, reading a paper. All three greeted the Inspector cheerfully.

  Eve said, smiling up at him, that she felt much better, and Natalie and Cunningham came toward the sofa. Natalie looked happy. She had regained her smartly groomed air. Her coat and skirt were beautifully cut and her hair and eyes and skin glowed. She gave Cunningham’s sleeve a small pat and said eagerly, “Bruce won’t have to go back to jail now, ever, will he, Inspector? As soon as that Mr. Bently can talk, he’ll tell who hit him and then...” She pushed at a spray of orange chrysanthemums in a big blue vase. A shadow crossed her bright face but she continued steadily, “We’ll know who killed Charlotte.”

  Cunningham said dryly, “It can’t be too soon for me. I hope Bently won’t pass out on us.”

  McKee took out his little red-leather notebook and began clearing up minor details. His ink gave out. “May I...?”

  “Over there,” Natalie said, and he crossed to a desk at the far end of the long room and filled his fountain pen. A nurse poked a head in the door. Hugh Flavell wanted to see Natalie. She left the room and went upstairs.

  McKee was putting the cover back on the inkwell when the door at the south end of the room opened again. Alicia Flavell stood in the opening. She didn’t see him. She appeared to have had an uncomfortable night. Her oval face was swollen. Her eyes were fastened on Eve and on Cunningham standing beside the couch, his hands in his pockets. They both turned. There was a curious air of tension about all three. The room was still for a clock tick. Then Alicia began to talk.

  “You’re at it again, aren’t you?” she said in a low voice, with venom in it. “The moment Natalie’s back is turned, you begin. You’ve succeeded in fooling her, but you haven’t fooled me—and you didn’t fool Charlotte, either. Charlotte saw you that afternoon—the afternoon of the day she died. She was in the dining room and she opened the door and looked in and saw you two whispering together in front of the hearth...”

  Eve sat up suddenly on the couch. The blanket fell to the floor. She swayed a little as she got to her feet. She faced Alicia, her eyes dark pools of shock and horror. Alicia had to be stopped, she thought; she couldn’t wreck Natalie’s life like this, couldn’t smash everything with one blow.

  Bruce began to speak. He said in a slow level voice, eyeing Alicia steadily, “Are you out of your mind?”

  Alicia took a step toward him. Her eyes were blazing. “No, I’m not out of my mind,” she said furiously. “Gerald’s been questioned by the police. I think that what you people have been up to has been the cause of all that has happened. I think Charlotte intended to tell you, Lieutenant Bruce Cunningham, what she thought of you and that after that she meant to go to Spencer Gorham in Boston and lay the whole thing before him, so that your marriage to Natalie could be stopped.”

  In the background, unseen and unnoticed in the whirlpool of clashing interests and emotions, the Scotsman turned
to a window and looked out across maize-colored fields. He didn’t want to believe Alicia, but he knew she was right, knew also that he should have been aware of the truth, from the beginning. It had been there in Eve last night, in the face she lifted to his when she spoke of Bruce Cunningham, her lovely eyes wide with renewed hope.

  It had been in Bruce Cunningham, too, that day in his rooms on Eldon Place. McKee looked, without seeing it, at an old summer house with a cap like a mushroom above gray water. The whole thing added up damningly. Natalie had made a will leaving the bulk of her fortune to Bruce Cunningham in the event of her death. Suppose the Lieutenant had been planning to have his cake and eat it. He could have intended to marry Natalie and then, later on...

  McKee stood erect. His eyes began to shine between narrow lids. All at once he knew his reasoning was completely and absolutely false. Granting that Bruce Cunningham loved Eve Flavell, he would never have given her that lethal dose of morphine. It was a contradiction in terms. The conclusion was inevitable. Cunningham had been shopped by someone who had wanted the .351 Winchester to be found because, if anything happened to Natalie, Cunningham would inherit—but a man accused of a crime couldn’t benefit by it, particularly if he was on his way to the electric chair. All of which meant that the rifle with which murder had been done had been removed from the Eldon Place rooms before Charlotte was killed and returned there after her death on Wednesday night by someone else.

  The Scotsman wheeled. The door was closed and Alicia was gone. She had become aware of him, too late. Flight was her only recourse. A coward had killed Charlotte Foy and Alicia was a coward. Bruce Cunningham and Eve were both staring at him mutely. McKee started to speak, and stopped. There were footsteps and voices in the hall outside. The door was flung open and District Attorney Dwyer came stamping in.

  He pulled up just over the threshold. He had been cast down at the inn, a half hour earlier. He was triumphant now, his face a pink moon, his round eyes blue. He glanced at McKee and then away from him at Cunningham.

  “Lieutenant,” he said, “you agreed you would come back to New York whenever we wanted you?”

  Cunningham’s brows rose. “Of course.”

  “All right,” Dwyer snapped with a flourish. “You’re coming now.” He swung on the Scotsman. “Buchanan’s over there at the inn. He talked, plenty. This is what he told me. He says that Cunningham’s rifle, the .351, that killed Charlotte Foy, was in the Eldon Place living room at a little after seven-thirty on the night she was shot to death, that he saw the gun and handled it, and that there were no visitors whatever to the apartment that night and that he was in the living room continuously all evening long. Cunningham is the only person in the world who could have put that gun back after it blew Charlotte Foy to Kingdom Come.”

  He rounded on the flier. “I’m taking you back to New York with me on the first train, Lieutenant. This time you’re not going to get out on bail. You’re under arrest, Cunningham, not as a material witness, but for the deliberate, cold-blooded, premeditated murder on last Wednesday night of the late Charlotte Foy.”

  At the door, beyond Dwyer’s burly figure, there was a flash of pale gold. It was Natalie’s head. She had come downstairs in the middle of Dwyer’s peroration. Her head went up and up. It sagged; she gave a strangled cry and crumpled.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  “Commissioner Carey lost his temper, “McKee, if you can show me how anyone but Bruce Cunningham could ,have fired the shot that killed the Foy woman, I’ll give you all the help you want. Bruce Cunningham, and nobody but Cunningham, could have had possession of that .351 between seven and eight o’clock on Wednesday night when Charlotte Foy was shot—Right?”

  “Yes.”

  It was nine o’clock on Sunday night. At noon that day Dwyer had returned to New York with Lieutenant Cunningham and had lodged him in jail to await formal indictment within forty-eight hours. The Scotsman took a turn up and down the carpet in the Commissioner’s big office on the second floor of the long gray building on Centre Street.

  “How can Cunningham be innocent?” Carey demanded.

  “I don’t know,” the Scotsman murmured abstractedly. He was thinking of other things. “I want to know what the little wooden chest contained, the chest Charlotte Foy was taking with her to Boston to show to Natalie’s lawyer.”

  “Pshaw! A bit of yellow cloth and in ornament of pink stones. Some old keepsakes.”

  “Then why were they removed? Why have they disappeared? Why can’t we find a trace of them anywhere? And what about Bently?”

  The Commissioner swept Bently aside. “Dwyer thinks now that the fellow may have fallen off that bridge by accident, or that Eve Flavell may have been up to some hocus-pocus in an attempt to clear Cunningham. No, for once you’re off the track. Cunningham’s as guilty as hell.”

  He told McKee plainly that only his long and brilliant record kept the case open and kept him on it. The scope he was permitted was meager. He could have two men and a couple of days.

  McKee picked up his hat, said, “Thanks,” dryly, and walked out of the office and went in search of Sergeant Cutts. But the head of the Ballistics Bureau was in Detroit. “We don’t know when he’ll be back, Inspector, maybe in a week...”

  It was a blow. McKee had been relying on the Sergeant. He spoke to the telegraph bureau and said he was anxious to get in touch with Cutts, that it was urgent, and then went to see Bruce Cunningham, partly to retest his own faith and partly to find out more about the history of the .351.

  The interview between the two men was short and inconclusive. It uncovered no new evidence of consequence. It was to have a far-reaching effect at which neither of them could guess.

  Outside stars sparkled in a frosty sky; inside those walls the gloom of night was not dissipated by the glare of an unshaded electric bulb at the far end of a long narrow cubicle in front of the cell block. A key grated and the door of Cunningham’s cell opened clankingly and the flier came walking out of the shadows, tall and erect and with a stride, as though he was glad to stretch his long legs. McKee waited for him beside a deal table below a barred window.

  The Lieutenant’s lean definitely planed face was tired but his glance was steady and direct. The turn of events hadn’t broken his morale, or even put a dent in it. He knew that McKee had overheard Alicia’s charge. He didn’t discuss the situation except to damn her out. “Nice little hell cat, isn’t she?” He struck the table with the palm of a muscular brown hand and the identification tag on his wrist tinkled thinly in the stillness.

  McKee made no comment. It wasn’t basically his affair. That Bruce Cunningham should have engaged himself to one sister and then fallen in love with the other was regrettable, for all their sakes, but it had happened before and it was a private problem that they would have to work out for themselves. Its only interest for him lay in the effect it had had on the murder of Charlotte Foy.

  He asked Cunningham questions. The flier said he had overheard part of the conversation between Susan De Sange and Bently in the cemetery in Eastport, and that he had followed Bently to the village and had lost him.

  Of the rifle he said that it had been given to him more than a year ago by a friend in Eastport who was joining the Canadian Air Force. The Flavells were familiar with it. Gerald had tried it out on the rifle range in the meadow across the brook and had been enthusiastic about its performance. All the time he himself had been away the .351 had been in the Eldon Place apartment, as far as he knew.

  So much for the gun. As to the gathering in the Flavell house on the afternoon of Charlotte’s death, his recollection was poor. If he loved Eve Flavell, he was extremely fond of the girl he had mistakenly engaged himself to. The thought of her made him miserable. He said curtly, “I went to the Henderson Square house last Wednesday determined to tell

  Natalie the truth. She has a right to know, for her own sake. She wouldn’t want what I have to give her. It isn’t enough...” His voice shook a little. It hardened. “Eve st
opped me from telling her that day. Eve was wrong. She’s doing exactly what she accused Charlotte of doing, interfering with Natalie, babying her, not letting her alone. Natalie’s got what it takes. There are plenty of men in the world—and God knows I’m no bargain. Six months from now she’ll be engaged to someone else and as happy as a lark. I tried to tell Eve that but she wouldn’t listen...perhaps she didn’t want to. Well, what I didn’t do then I’m doing now. I’ve written to Nat.” He took a sealed envelope from his pocket.

  McKee looked at it thoughtfully. If Cunningham was determined to break off the engagement, he agreed that Natalie ought to know as soon as possible. It would be a shock at first, but she was young and volatile and she would get over it. The only question was one of timing. He was anxious above all things to keep the Flavell household on an even keel, and the slightest disturbance might upset the emotional balance and provoke the disaster they had so far managed to avoid. Eve had been poisoned and Edgar Bently had been sent hurtling from the footbridge down onto those rocks, but so far Charlotte’s was the only life that had been taken. He said slowly, “I’m not sure that it would be wise to send that letter at this point, lieutenant.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because Natalie isn’t the only one involved,’” McKee answered. “Because...” He picked his way through tortuous ice that was beginning to form a faint pattern on the surface of a black stream flowing sluggishly but inexorably toward an unknown goal. “You’re here where someone wanted you, out of the running. With the situation stabilized no further attempt of any kind will be made until...”

  “I’ve been permanently disposed of, by the state?” Cunningham’s smile was wry. “But I don’t understand what you’re getting at, Inspector. Say I am eliminated, wiped off the slate...Good God—“ he sat up sharply, his jaw a white ridge, “you don’t mean that those girls—that Eve—that there’s any real danger?”

  “I’m afraid there is, Lieutenant, as far as Eve Flavell is concerned. She’s been in on a good many angles of this case, has interfered more than once...”