by Helen Reilly
The runs began at the knees and laddered down.
“A vile day, isn’t it?”
“Very nasty, indeed. If it freezes, the roads will be in bad shape.”
A door on the left was partially open on a room that wasn’t a woman’s. There were only two bedrooms in the cottage. It was probably the one Lucien De Sange had died in. Furniture had been moved about in it, recently. There were tracks of castors on the grimy floor and the footboard of a bed was pushed out from a wall.
McKee had entered the house with the intention of confronting Susan De Sange with her destruction of her late husband’s picture the night before, and of asking her a number of questions. He had been depending on the element of surprise as a weapon with which to make a break through and establish a bridgehead within the almost impregnable fortifications of this woman’s aplomb, her deviousness and her impenetrable savoir faire. He threw the intention away. Susan De Sange was in the middle of a campaign of some sort; let her go on with it, by all means, and then move in on her.
He said pleasantly that his visit was routine, that there were statements to be signed in triplicate. “It’s just a formality, Mrs. De Sange. You’ll be here tomorrow? Good. It can be done then. I’m starting in on another case and I want to get everything in order.”
She stood facing him, at the end of the wide hearth, scrubbing at her fingers with a scrap of rose-colored linen. Her hands stopped moving.
“This one is—finished, Inspector? There’s—no hope for—Bruce?”
Logs flamed in the stone fireplace, in which things could be burned. The room was warm. Susan De Sange looked as though she were bitterly cold. The edges of her lips were blue.
“Unless new evidence turns up, I’m afraid not...
She was staring beyond him at shadows. She gave a low cry and buried her face in her hands. McKee waited a moment and when she neither moved nor spoke he left the forlorn little cottage whose meritorious prettiness was so inappropriate to the woman who owned it and who before he interrupted her, had been searching it inch b] inch for something she hadn’t yet found...
Pierson was waiting for him outside with a message There was a long-distance telephone call for him at the police station. Five minutes later, in a dark little room at the back of a hideous red brick building on Main Street, McKee was talking to the man he had been trying to gel hold of for almost twenty-four hours, the stout middle aged Doctor Hendricks, who had attended the Flavells in New York for more than fifteen years.
McKee hadn’t seen Hendricks since Thursday morning, when Hugh Flavell had fainted on being informed of his sister-in-law’s death; he had been convinced then that the Flavell physician had more on his mind than he was giving forth. Going over the case himself from the beginning the night before, he had been struck by (1), Natalie’s indisposition when the maid had summoned Charlotte to the girl’s bedroom early on Wednesday evening and (2), by Charlotte’s remark that she wasn’t satisfied with Hendricks’s treatment of Natalie and wanted Natalie to see her own doctor in Boston.
A terrible suspicion had begun to form itself in the Scotsman’s mind. It was only a suspicion. He didn’t lead Hendricks; he simply asked questions.
Hendricks said that, yes, Natalie hadn’t been up to snuff for a month or six weeks preceding her aunt’s death, but that he hadn’t been able to find anything organically wrong. He said it defensively, in his best pontifical manner.
“What were her symptoms, Doctor?”
“Oh, headache, some abdominal distress, a general lack of tone—nervous indigestion I should say, brought on by fatigue and too much work on committees and flying here told there at all hours. Natalie had never been very robust...
The Scotsman moved an ash tray an inch on the battered desk, in the hot little room, moved it back again. “What about her pupils, the salivary glands, the heart rate?”
“The heart? The salivary...” McKee couldn’t see Hendricks start and stare and wipe his forehead and fall back in his chair, his lips sagging, his face green. He felt these things over the phone.
In his office on the first floor in an apartment off Henderson Square Hendricks put his finger on the buzzer. He knew what the Inspector was driving at, and what was worse, knew that he had been uneasy at the time—but the thing had seemed utterly impossible...The nurse came.
“Miss Natalie Flavell’s folder.”
It was brought. Hendricks looked at it. He spoke into the ‘receiver, woodenly. He said, “Digitalis?” and McKee said, “I think so, yes,” and Hendricks went sedately mad.
“My God, Inspector, the stuff was there, in the house, I prescribed it for Hugh Flavell...what are we going to do?”
McKee didn’t know. He got rid of Hendricks. He said, “Natalie isn’t getting any digitalis now, and I’ll call you tomorrow,” and hung up. Although the necessity for action clamored at him he sat on, staring through a cracked window at rain falling, his thoughts as dark as the landscape outside, the black trees, the gray river, buildings huddled along its bank veiled in the approach of dusk. Poison for two and a bludgeon for one. The poison had varied as opportunity provided. First Hugh Flavell’s digitalis was used, and then Charlotte’s morphine pills, when they offered themselves.
An extremely agile mind was behind this clever murder and one of the greatest police departments in the world had been outgunned, outflown and outmaneuvered, at every turn. A slow anger built itself up in him. He reviewed the! testimony, holding it in restraint. Natalie’s money, the money that had increased so enormously with the war, was at the bottom of the whole black business. Charlotte had been afraid of it all along. When she returned to the Henderson Square house her fear had crystallized. She might not have known that Natalie was getting the digitalis; she did know that there was something wrong with her and that the threat, the danger, was real. It was significant that she hadn’t confided in the people closest to Natalie, in Hugh Flavell or Gerald or Alicia. Instead she had redoubled her efforts to get to Spencer Gorham, who was Natalie’s lawyer. She hadn’t succeeded. She was dead, and the household that would have been disrupted and blown apart by her disclosures was still a united whole. All those people were together, here in Eastport, under one roof, the collapsing Hugh, Gerald and Alicia, Susan De Sange, Jim Holland and Natalie and Eve...
Digitalis; he put out a nervous hand and called the local man who was attending Hugh Flavell.
There was digitalis in the house on Red Fox Road.
McKee put the receiver back on the hook and metaphorically felt his way across a mine field in darkness. Bruce Cunningham was in custody for the murder of Charlotte Fay. Until he had been offered up as the human sacrifice the law demanded, it was probable that nothing more would be attempted. Probability wasn’t enough. Yet—what could they, the police, do to hold the line? Nothing—
The Scotsman sat up sharply. There was a way, he thought....It might not come off, but if it did—he went on exploring and fingering and arranging; if it did—then they would have the proof they needed. He got up like a man walking a tight rope, got into his raincoat, pulled on his hat and walked out into the bitter rain-swept dusk.
CHAPTER TWENTY
“And I do wish you’d make that slatternly girl wear an apron, Stella. I know that help is hard to get and that it’s only for a few days...Oh—you startled me. Inspector.” Alicia whirled round in the middle of the big hall in the house at the end of Red Fox Road. “Come in.”
McKee was already in. He had opened one of the double front doors without knocking. Alicia dismissed the elderly housekeeper she had been berating and extended a gracious hand. She had on black satin slacks and a mandarin coat. Jade earrings swung from her ears and her hair was brushed back from a smooth olive-skinned face expertly made up, but she was badly worried inside her handsome decorative shell; her movements were sharp and her artificial voice was half an octave too high.
She showed him her worry openly with a conspiratorial glance around the big hall and up the stairs. “I have
n’t said a word, Inspector, not a word, although sometimes it’s been rather hard...Poor Nat. You’ve come to talk to her, to tell her?”
The eager brightness in Alicia Flavells full brown eyes didn’t match the compassionate shake of her head or the compression of her thin-lipped red mouth. After the scene with the District Attorney on Sunday morning she had evidently expected the police and a show-down. The delay, the inaction, were getting on her nerves.
She went on confidentially, moving closer to him, “It isn’t only Nat; it’s Jim Holland, too...Poor fellow, he’s been begging Eve to marry him this week, to go with him and see some houses in Lordship. It’s frightfully trying to watch, when all the time you know he and poor darling Nat are living in a fools’ paradise....”
McKee looked at her thoughtfully. If anything happened to Natalie, Hugh Flavell would be a very rich man. But he had a heart condition and his life wasn’t a good risk; a shock, for instance, might polish him off. Gerald and Eve were his natural heirs. Should Eve be disqualified in advance, put out of the running, Gerald would be the sole beneficiary of Natalie’s entire estate.
He said aloud, patting Alicia’s hand, “Don’t worry, Mrs. Flavell, something will be done, as soon as we get the necessary evidence. I’d like to talk to Miss Eve Flavell now, about another matter. If you wouldn’t mind getting her for me?”
“Of course not, Inspector.” Alicia turned. But Eve was coming down the stairs; she had seen the Scotsman arrive from her bedroom window. There was white at the throat of the dark dress that followed the lines of her slender erect figure and her head was high but her lovely black-fringed eyes under the dark delicately marked brows were luminous in pools of shadow and the curve of her red mouth was tight with strain.
She went with McKee into the big empty living room and the door closed. Five minutes later he was gone and Eve was alone. She sat on where he had left her, huddled in a wing chair beside the leaping fire, the words he had said repeating themselves over and over in her brain: “When you and your sister go to bed tonight lock your doors and see that they’re locked...”
Fear was one thing, she thought dully, certainty was another; there was no appeal from it. She and Natalie were to lock their doors against—someone in the house. She began to shake. Stop, her mind warned her, don’t think, just obey orders she had been given. “Don’t leave your rooms, either of you, no matter what happens. There will be a detective under your windows all night. If anything alarms you, you have only to open the window and call Captain Pierson.” He had told her more. Edgar Bently had been struck with a length of iron pipe—there were specks of rust in the wound in his head—and there was a lot of iron piping in the stables, left there by plumbers...
Outside rain beat drummingly against the windows; inside, the room was warm, bright. The wide dark floorboards, the shimmer of the rug, the pattern of the gray-blue chintz chair on the other side of the hearth, the fat yellow sofa against the wall, the dull glow of a cherry-wood desk taking gleams from the fire and doing things to them were a shifting kaleidoscope that wouldn’t stay in place.
Someone spoke in the hall; someone answered. Eve drew a long breath, took a compact from her pocket and did her lips shakily. They smeared and she wiped redness away and did them again. Danger to Natalie, she thought, to her young sister whose shoulder blades were too sharp, whose chin was too pointed, who was painfully wasted under clothes that were growing too big for her. It wasn’t fair. Natalie had suffered too much already, and for all her courage and fortitude she was in such a state that the slightest added blow might tip the scales...
“Hello there, build a new plane today, my bucco?” That was Gerald. The front door was closing. A stick clattered. Jim was back from Bridgeport. “Where’s Eve?”
The room took one mad swirl and settled into place before the determined push of her will. Jim was coming toward her, big and solid and giving a little to his bad leg, his face ruddy from the wind and the rain. “What a night!” He stooped and kissed her lips lightly and straightened, and gave her a long look.
He knew there was something wrong. She had an almost overwhelming impulse to confide in him, to lay down her burden, let him help her with it toward the impossible goal of tomorrow. The Inspector had said, “Bently was operated on in the Norwalk Hospital at five o’clock. When he comes out of the ether he’ll be able to talk. It may take time, but I can promise you that by tomorrow it will be all over.” Leaning against the mantel Jim said quietly, “What’s the matter, Eve? Anything happen while I was away?”
Eve shook her head. Then, to her horror, she began to cry. It was an involuntary reaction she couldn’t control. It was her last break in technique. Jim knelt in front of her and wiped her eyes with his handkerchief. “There, now I’ve ruined your powder. Come on, give me your compact and I’ll fix your face...” He took her chin in his palm. “What is it, Eve? Tell me.”
She smiled unsteadily and drew on the lighted cigarette he put between her lips. “Nothing happened, nothing whatever—that’s the point, Jim. I’m just tired, and the day has been so long...”
He nodded his understanding. “Let’s get out of this and get married, darling. We would have been married almost a week ago if Charlotte hadn’t been killed. What do you say? We can go to New York tomorrow. I can get the day off...” His fingers smoothed hair back from her hot forehead.
“Not tomorrow, Jim. I can’t leave Natalie now...
“Oh, but Eve, look here...”
Alicia and Gerald, and then Natalie, came in and saved her from another argument for which she hadn’t the strength. Natalie’s face was pale and tired in the frame of her long, soft, fair bob. She looked at Eve hopefully. “I got down as soon as I could. What did the Inspector want? Did he say anything about Bruce?”
Eve said cheerfully, “Yes, he saw him and Bruce told him to tell you that he’s getting the first decent sleep he’s had in a year and that you’re to pay him a visit on Thursday. It’s all arranged.”
Alicia toed a log into place with her slipper and looked sideways at Eve. “Dear me, you seem to be a favorite. You’d think the Inspector would have told that to Natalie. Was that all he wanted?”
“No,” Eve said, her dislike for Alicia accelerating sharply, “he asked me more questions about Edgar Bently, whether he was alone that night, whether there mightn’t have been someone with him.”
It did as well as anything else. Alicia was watching her. Gerald said with an utter lack of logic, “You mark my words, that fellow’s at the bottom of the whole business. Wait and see if I’m not right.”
“Wait and see,” that added itself to the dreadful inner sing-song that never stopped ringing in Eve’s ears. “Lock your doors tonight and wait and see.”
“Edgar? What about Edgar?” a cool contralto voice asked. It was Susan. She came up to the hearth and looked at Eve inquiringly. There were no runs in her stockings, no dust was on her hands. She was her usual calm self, so sure of the road she was traveling that she didn’t have to bother much about other people.
Eve said as she had been instructed to say, “They don’t know whether he’s going to get better or not, Sue. He never recovered enough to be able to talk,” and could have sworn that the flash in Susan’s brilliant eyes was relief in spite of her slow, “Poor Edgar, he was always as crooked as a dog’s hind leg, but I feel sorry about him...”
Then Hugh was there, downstairs for the first time since his attack, pallidly handsome in a smoking jacket that gave him a cavalierish air, and Alicia was hovering around him solicitously. Gerald mixed cocktails and shortly after they went in to dinner.
Natalie was beside Eve. She was very quiet but she ate her soup obediently when Gerald got after her. “Come on, young one, how about a little of the old life, the old pep?” Mrs. Eddey changed plates, and the candles mirrored themselves in the rubbed-pine paneling. Everything was perfectly normal and agreeable to the outward eye, but not to Eve. Her father regarded her with animosity and suspicion every time
she spoke, although she had long since made her peace with the others for the deception she had practiced the night Edgar Bently was hurt. Alicia continued to jab at Susan and Susan continued to disregard her, although she was a very proud and independent person. Gerald was too determinedly light-hearted and devil-may-care, and Jim stared too long at nothing, his face heavy in repose. But there wasn’t anything which pointed at any one person.
It was the same in the living room afterwards. Eve sipped her coffee and listened to talk of war and peace and to Jim and Gerald argue helicopters, and inside of her the ceaseless mental combat between what was and what seemed to be, produced a permanent twilight with shadows converging from every direction. Only the person she looked at was clear, and the others, offside, were slipping and sliding and changing shape monstrously, until she looked again with quick frightened glances and they were themselves...
Her father played cribbage with Susan before the fire. Later she and Natalie and Gerald and Alicia played bridge and Jim read a book on turning lathes and smoked his pipe and the evening went on and on. The only thing that sustained Eve was the thought of Bruce, of his release, of his vindication. Even that was stained and darkened by the perpetual question mark that danced before her eyes.
Just before they broke up at ten o’clock there was a telephone call for Natalie. She went out listlessly; she came back, after quite awhile, a different person. Her narrow sensitive face was irradiated, as though a light had been turned on behind it. A stir went through the room.
The call was from Anthony Burchall, Bruce’s lawyer. Natalie didn’t say very much there, in answer to questions from Hugh and Gerald and Alicia, except that Burchall was encouraging and hopeful, but as soon as Eve and she were upstairs alone, she threw her arms around Eve impetuously and hugged her, words pouring out of her joyfully.
