The Opening Door

by Helen Reilly

  If there had been the shadow of a doubt in McKee’s mind as to the genuineness, the depth or the permanence of Cunningham’s feeling for Eve Flavell, it would have been dissipated by the flier’s reaction. No one could have simulated the emotion that turned his sun-browned skin livid, made blazing disks of his light eyes and sent him stumbling to his feet, his head twisting from side to side, his composure smashed. His chair went to the floor with a thump that woke the echoes, and the warder appeared running. McKee motioned him back. Cunningham was oblivious. He was saying in a loud voice, “Not Eve—no. I can stand anything but that...anything.”

  “Sit down, Lieutenant. Miss Flavell is all right at the moment. I’ve got men up there watching the house. She’s in no immediate danger.”

  McKee spoke with a confidence he was far from feeling. He did manage to reassure Bruce Cunningham, and the flier pulled himself together and asked questions in his turn.

  “Why was Charlotte killed, Inspector? That’s what I want to know.”

  The Scotsman’s brown gaze was opaque, hooded. “She was killed to prevent her from going to see Natalie’s lawyer in Boston. That’s all that’s certain. We’ve established that whatever Charlotte had to communicate to Gorham was a threat to Natalie. The proof of that threat boils down to a handful of yellow cloth and a string of pink stones wrapped in tissue paper and enclosed in the little wooden chest she took from the bank the day before she died. Hugh Fla veil’s fingerprints, and only Hugh Flavell’s, are on the wood of the chest. He denies having removed the contents. His denial isn’t worth the paper it’s written on.”

  “Yellow cloth...and a string of pink stones...” Like the Commissioner, Bruce Cunningham was completely at sea.

  McKee couldn’t enlighten him. “Yes,” he said, “and until we know the meaning of those things we’ll go on drifting...” His cigarette tasted foul. He threw it on the cement floor. The simile was too close to fact for comfort. That was exactly what they were doing—drifting, drifting around in fog and blackness, rudderless and without oars, while far off, the distant crash of surf sounded the warning of impending shipwreck. It hadn’t yet come but how long would this state of affairs last? The answer was simple. It would last as long as the situation remained static and Bruce Cunningham was the goat.

  Cunningham understood. He said, “The police have to have a culprit. I’ve been selected. As long as I’m it, whoever killed Charlotte won’t make another move?”

  “That’s the general idea,” McKee said dryly. He pushed back his chair and rose. “It’s not going to happen like that.”

  “How are you going to prevent it?”

  “By finding out which one of those people disposed of the box of morphine tablets under the table in the restaurant on 52nd Street. Whoever eliminated Charlotte Foy poisoned Eve.”

  “It has to be one of them?”

  “It has to be.”

  “A bullet from my .351 did kill Charlotte?”

  “Yes.”

  “But—“ Bruce Cunningham ran bemused fingers through his short dark hair. “The rifle was in the Eldon Place apartment on Wednesday night from seven-thirty on—unless Buchanan is lying?”

  “Buchanan isn’t lying.”

  “Then how...”

  McKee gave the lieutenant the same answer he had given the Commissioner. “I don’t know, now. But if you didn’t put that bullet in Charlotte Foy...”

  “I most certainly did not.”

  “Then one of those people did.”

  That was all the Scotsman could be prevailed on to say. It was getting late and he had work to do. He summoned the warder, saw Cunningham returned to his cell and drove back to the office and to a desk piled high with reports. There was nothing yet from Cutts.

  In Eastport Hugh Flavell was better. So was Eve. The others were all in the house on Red Fox Road, kept there, ostensibly at least, by their solicitude for Hugh. In the Norwalk Hospital Edgar Bently’s physical condition had improved, but his mind was still clouded, so that there was no immediate prospect of his being able to talk.

  The photograph that had been torn during Susan De Sange’s interview with Charlotte Foy less than two hours before the latter’s death had almost certainly been destroyed; the relationship between the two women and the bitter quarrel they had had twenty-one years earlier, continued to engage McKee’s attention. On one day all had been sweetness and light between the big house on the hill and the little one at the foot of the lawn; on the next all intercourse between them had come to a sharp end. This had been verified by Gerald, who, although he was only eight at the time, remembered it quite clearly and by Jim Holland, who was seventeen. The quarrel between the Flavell house and the cottage had further been corroborated by neighbors and acquaintances—but not its cause.

  When Charlotte Foy first returned to the house of her brother-in-law, Hugh Flavell, after his second wife’s death, Susan had been with her constantly, helping with the children and with Hugh. When Susan had been going through her own trouble, when she lost her baby and, shortly afterward, her husband, Charlotte had been more than kind. McKee lingered over the history of that husband, Lucien De Sange. Not much was known of him in the country town except that he was considerably older than his young wife and that he drank heavily. He was an absentee husband for the most part. Then, on one of his infrequent trips to the cottage, he had come down with an attack of delirium tremens, which appeared to have been a habit with him. Susan was ill herself at the time and Charlotte had nursed De Sange during the final bout from which he fortunately failed to recover.

  The interesting point, for the Scotsman, was that it was directly after Lucien De Sange joined Hugh Flavell’s second wife in the cemetery on the other side of the river that the chasm between Charlotte and Susan opened. Within the month the younger woman closed the cottage abruptly and left Eastport. Twenty years passed before she and the Flavell’s reencountered each other, through Eve, in New York. With Susan’s reappearance death had come to the Flavells again, suddenly and violently...

  Was this coincidence, or was it something more sinister? McKee looked at shadowy pictures of Charlotte Foy alone with Lucien De Sange during his last hours, listened to the stricken man’s babbling tongue—and told himself that he was being a fool. Both De Sange and Virginia Flavell, née Corey, had been dust for a long while—and there was nothing to go on now.

  He was mistaken. Pierson called him from the police station in Eastport at twelve-five. Less than a half hour earlier, when everyone else was in bed in the house on Red Fox Road, Susan De Sange had gone down to the library and had removed a photograph of her defunct husband from an old album in a closet there.

  Todhunter had watched her through a window. Before he could intervene she had torn the photograph up and had put a match to the pieces. She hadn’t been able to complete her work. Pierson’s entrance had evidently scared her off. But the record of her activity was contained in the caption on the mutilated page, in Charlotte Foy’s handwriting. It said, “Lucien and Gerald, with Gerald’s first trout, March, nineteen twenty-one.”

  Pierson added that Mrs. De Sange didn’t actually know she had been overseen. McKee said, “I don’t want her to know,” and put the instrument gently into its cradle. March of nineteen twenty-one was the month Virginia died...Lucien De Sange had been there...Undoubtedly it was another and larger photograph of him that had been destroyed by Susan De Sange, except for the one corner, during her visit to Charlotte on the previous Wednesday afternoon. Both women’s fingerprints were on the scrap that had escaped unnoticed during what must have been a struggle between them.

  Where a good deal was still unclear, one thing was obvious. The attractive widow of whom Hugh Flavell was enamored didn’t want her dead husband to walk again—as far as the police were concerned. There was a story there. Talk to her about it tomorrow, he decided grimly. Meanwhile the door to the case was opening little by little. The phone rang again while he was testing theories. It was Sergeant Cutts in Detroit, and
Cutts gave the door another push.

  McKee put the problem of the Winchester repeating rifle that had to be in two places at once squarely in the ballistics expert’s lap.

  At the other end of the wire Cutts said musingly, “You’re sure Cunningham didn’t kill her, are you? Well, now, Inspector, that’s a pretty tough nut to crack. Let me see...” He went on talking in a phone booth in Detroit and in the narrow room bright with light and empty with silence in New York McKee went on listening and jotting down instructions he didn’t understand.

  It was twenty minutes of one when he put the receiver back on the hook. It was twenty-five minutes past two when Fernandez, who had heard that he was in town, came in and found him crouched over his desk staring at nothing, his eyes bright in an exhausted face.

  On the desk in front of him there was an array of weapons that had been brought up from Centre Street. Jim Holland’s Army Colt was there, and Eve’s little revolver, and the revolutionary blunderbuss belonging to the Gerald Flavells and the walking-stick shotgun of European manufacture that was Hugh Flavells, all of which had been collected and sent to Headquarters on the morning after Charlotte Foy died.

  Fernandez read the tags. He stared. He said, “What the devil are you up to?”

  “Oh, looking for something Cutts told me to look for.”

  “But, good God, Chris, why?” Fernandez demanded. “Charlotte Foy wasn’t killed with a revolver or a flintlock or a shotgun, she was killed with a bullet from Bruce Cunningham’s .351—or was she?”

  “Yes, she was killed with a bullet from Cunningham’s Winchester.”

  The Chief Medical examiner was exasperated. “Then what in hell are you doing with those things?”

  McKee didn’t answer. He went on sweeping a magnifying glass right and left up and down over weapon after weapon. It was just short of three o’clock on the morning of Monday, December the ninth when he found what he had been instructed to search for, a tiny brownish-green shred of some

  Fragile substance barely visible to the naked eye. It was in the firing mechanism of the walking-stick shotgun.

  The Scotsman transferred it to an envelope with a tweezers and the most exquisite care. Every atom of it was precious. Five minutes later he was on his way to the C.P. Laboratory with the envelope in his pocket.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  “Well, I mean, McKee—after all, twenty years is a long time, and if there was any hocus-pocus, anything wrong with the details of the deaths of either Lucien De Sange or Virginia Corey, and it would have to have been poison from the circumstances, you wouldn’t have a hope. Even arsenic in the soil would be hard to be sure about, after twenty years.”

  “I realize it.” McKee stared moodily at wet cement sliding away in front of them. Rain slanted down grayly. The two men were in a cab leaving the Norwalk station. It was a little after one o’clock on Tuesday afternoon.

  Fernandez had come up from New York to have a look at Edgar Bently, to see whether anything could be done to put him into shape so that he could be made to talk. The Medical Examiner looked with approval at a woman with pretty legs struggling with a bundle in front of a supermarket. “All right,” he conceded, “say for the sake of argument that there was something wrong and that Susan De Sange or Hugh Flavell or both are involved. Are you centering on them exclusively?”

  “By no means. Jim Holland was seventeen at the time. If there was anything going on he could easily have known about it.”

  “Holland? Oh, the big fellow who’s going to marry Eve. By George, I envy him. She’s lovely. Those eyes...but what about Gerald, and Alicia?”

  “Skeletons have an annoying way of not staying in the cupboards where they belong and whatever Charlotte Foy knew someone else could have found out.”

  “Hold up a minute, McKee, I want to get this straight. Charlotte Foy was killed because she was taking proof of some sort of dirty work at the crossroads to Natalie’s lawyer in Boston—but she didn’t meet Susan De Sange until she came down from Vermont in late November—and as early as the middle of October she was trying to contact Spencer Gorham, who was West.”

  “True,” McKee said, “but she could have heard from Natalie, by letter, that Susan De Sange had turned up and was back within the citadel or she could have heard it from one of the others, Hugh or Alicia or Gerald, when they stopped in at the farm on the way down from Canada, at the beginning of October.”

  “Whatever Charlotte knew or found out, threatened Natalie—but how, McKee?”

  “I seem to recall that Hamlet had rather a bad time of it with his father’s ghost,” McKee said dryly. “If Charlotte had been permitted to talk, in Natalie’s case it might have been her mother’s. A woman with red hands could scarcely be a desirable stepmother...but that’s all water over the dam. Charlotte didn’t talk.”

  “That being so,” Fernandez remarked dispassionately, “I don’t see how you’re going to get at the truth.”

  “The little wooden chest,” McKee said with a snap to his voice. “When I know who, besides Gerald Flavell and Hugh, could have been in the Henderson Square house on Wednesday night after Natalie left it with Bruce Cunningham, I’ll know who killed Charlotte. We won’t know why until we establish what the contents of the chest meant.”

  “Yellow cloth...” Fernandez murmured ruminatively, “perhaps a scarf—remember how Isadora Duncan was killed?”

  McKee’s nod was curt. “And lots of others, and not by accident but by seizing the two ends firmly and drawing them tight around a throat...

  “Your idea is that Edgar Bently knows something?”

  “Oh, yes,—decidedly yes. Susan De Sange returned from Europe early in the spring. She didn’t come up here into Connecticut until last Tuesday, the day before Charlotte died. On that day Bently, who is often in Eastport, ran into his dead cousin Lucien’s attractive widow near the entrance to Red Fox Road. It appears to have been a chance meeting and they were only together a few minutes—but I think Bently followed Susan De Sange to the cottage at the foot of the Flavell grounds and then to New York. He didn’t do that without a reason. It must have been a pretty good reason from the lengths to which he went. In New York he not only took a room in a hotel on the south side of Henderson Square that was handy to the Flavells and Susan De Sange, he was actually watching the Flavell house, with Susan in it, before, keep that in mind, and very shortly before, the bullet that killed Charlotte Foy was fired.”

  “That’s the one thing I don’t get,” Fernandez shook his head discontentedly, “how Charlotte Foy could have been killed with a bullet from Cunningham’s .351, if Cunningham didn’t do it.”

  “Well, he didn’t, and she was,” McKee said. “The bullet’s in Dwyer’s possession, and you can have a look at it any time you want to.”

  “Then if the .351 killed her, why were you so damned interested in that walking-stick shotgun last night and this morning?”

  “Cutts,” McKee answered, “and he’s by no means sure. All he has is a theory. He didn’t explain it to me in detail; he simply told me what to look for. What’s more, even if he does succeed in solving a riddle that seems insoluble, it will simply throw the whole mess on the table. How Charlotte could have been killed by someone other than Bruce Cunningham won’t tell us who killed her, or why. That’s what I want more than anything else, motive. That’s why Mr. Edgar Bently has got to talk.”

  “Well, I’ll do the best I can for you,” Fernandez promised, “I’ll give you a ring at the Eastport police station as soon as I’ve examined him.”

  He got out at the foot of the hospital hill a few blocks along, saying that he wanted a walk, and McKee drove the remaining ten miles alone.

  A half hour later he was walking with Pierson in the lea of a hill crowned with a tall stand of oaks, through whose black leafless branches the roofs and gables and chimneys of the Flavell house made a somber pattern against the wet, gray sky. Rain fell steadily, and although it wasn’t two o’clock, the light was narrow, down drawn,
and distances were blurred. Below them the sullen water was rising steadily whipped into whitecaps by the wind. Ducks, heads low, were swimming in a formation of five on the push of the incoming tide near the rickety footbridge from which Bently had been thrust.

  McKee walked with his eyes on the ground and listened to Pierson report nothing new. Occasionally he stooped to examine a low-growing shrub, then straightened and moved on.

  Pierson kept staring at him curiously. “Looking for something, Inspector?”

  The Scotsman reached back into the thirteenth century. “‘That no man myghte se hym for muche mos and leues. Mos, also musch, moss, moul...’ Pyxidanthera barbulatam, Captain, a prostrate and creeping evergreen plant having small leaves and numerous white or colored flowers, and generally found in the pine barrens of New Jersey.”

  Pierson restrained his irritation with difficulty. The Inspector was in one of his moods. He was often like this toward the end of a case, irrational, a little nuts. “If it grows in New Jersey, what would it be doing here?”

  “Transplanted perhaps,” McKee said “or carried on the wind. It needs sheltered places...Ah.” He paused at the edge of a semicircular grouping of white birches shivering in the wind. The ground in among them was carpeted with a great shawl of the moss for which he was searching.

  The C.P. lab. had identified the tiny shred he had delivered to them at on toward four o’clock that morning as a stem of Pyxidanthera barbulatam. He looked down at the soft gray-green rug. That this particular type of moss should be here didn’t prove anything decisive, but it was suggestive and interesting. He knelt and gathered a few tufts of the soft fronds for form’s sake and for Cutts. After that, leaving Pierson at the footbridge, he went to see Mrs. De Sange in the rain-drenched cottage she had entered alone, an hour earlier.

  She opened the door to him in a well-cut black dress that displayed her excellent figure to advantage. “Oh—come in, Inspector.” She hadn’t expected to see him and there was terror in her, under surface composure. Dust smeared her fine hands; the nail of her left forefinger was broken and there were wide runs in the expensive stockings covering her handsome legs; she had been giving them rough treatment.