And Dangerous to Know

by Elizabeth Daly

  Dunbar exchanged mock-formal salutes with Bishop and the orchestra, Bishop tapped his baton against a music stand, and the band plunged into a lively dance tune. Dunbar, still standing, drank off the rest of his whisky.

  “That was terrible of me,” he said, “but I couldn’t help it. I’d better go before anybody happens to find out who I am.”

  “Brucey,” said Mrs. Lynch, who had tears in her eyes, “it was wonderful.”

  “Oh Lord, I’ve heard my mother sing it a thousand times. But I oughtn’t—”

  Gamadge smiled up at him: “Why should the innocent fear? I’m deeply obliged to you, Mr, Dunbar. And I really can’t understand why Osterbridge, for instance, didn’t know one song.”

  “They might know the songs, but not the composer,” said Dunbar. “Just like them.”

  “Bishop, too. I can’t understand it. Well, you saved me from making a complete ass of myself, anyhow.” Gamadge stood up. “Must you go?”

  “Don’t dare stay; and I ought to get back to the house. I’m staying with the Dunbars.” His face clouded again. “I have a key, but it wouldn’t do to disturb anybody. We’re quite a family.” He smiled at Gamadge. “Gail passed out upstairs, and me down here entertaining customers. Nice for the Press.”

  He shook hands with Gamadge, patted Mrs. Lynch on the shoulder, and was gone.

  Mrs. Lynch rose. “I’m overdue upstairs. Goodness, it’s nearly eleven o’clock; they’ll be having the intermission. I don’t want the house detective pinching poor Jack Osterbridge.”

  Gamadge asked: “Did he know Alice Dunbar?”

  She was startled. “Not that I know of. He might have. Why?”

  “Mrs. Tanner said Alice didn’t know any of her friends.”

  “Oh—did she?”

  “Yes, it was in the papers after she disappeared.”

  “I don’t know a thing about it,” said Mrs. Lynch, and hurried away.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  End of Evening

  GAMADGE STOOD LOOKING after the departing figure of Mrs. Tanner’s friend. “Repeat that if you like,” he thought. “It certainly won’t come as a surprise.”

  He was beginning to feel that he had had a long day; the music, good of its kind, was no more than a din in his ears; the motions of the dance, when he turned back to the room, looked to him like the aimless gyrations of dolls on wires. But his thoughts were still churning, if sluggishly, and he was as hungry as Miss Bean. Should he go home and investigate the icebox? He might find it uninteresting; Theodore’s housekeeping, when Gamadge made these short trips home in the summer, was careful.

  The intermission was coming; why not sit quietly down and eat something in peace while he regularized his ideas? He subsided again into his small but comfortable chair, consulted the menu, and ordered an egg-and-watercress sandwich, a ham sandwich, and coffee.

  The band stopped playing and the musicians filed out. Bishop cast a look of inquiry towards the corner which had supplied the request number, and followed them from the platform. Some of the audience settled down to supper, many of them came past Gamadge into the lobby. His coffee and sandwiches were put in front of him.

  Eating and drinking, he went over the events of the evening and back from them to the disappearance of Alice Dunbar; back from that, to Alice Dunbar’s life with her family.

  From the first, he had realized that her principal opportunity to meet men outside her own small circle would have been at the Stanton, among her sister’s friends. She might easily have met Bishop or Osterbridge in Mrs. Tanner’s suite, and followed up the acquaintanceship afterwards; the hours of her visits to the Scale house would be free time for these men.

  After her disappearance, Mrs. Tanner had denied that her sister knew them; but after her disappearance Mrs. Tanner realized only too clearly what happened to men who had known Alice Dunbar. She had seen it happen to Bruce Dunbar. Because he lived alone, had a car and a private garage, didn’t keep house, had no regular occupation to tie him down to regular hours, his life had been made a burden to him. It would be more of a burden now that the body had been found, and they’d be trying to connect him with the Scale house and Mrs. Woodworth; they wouldn’t connect him with either, but they’d keep at it for a long time.

  All this would be annoying and socially awkward, to put it very mildly, for a Bruce Dunbar; what would it have meant to a Bishop or an Osterbridge? Would their records, for instance, stand up well to it? Even if they did, would the management of the Stanton react favourably to it? Would the family custom? Now, of course—but even then, it would have been tough for the piano artiste and the band leader. Mrs. Tanner’s large heart might have melted for them. Neither, of course, she would tell herself, could possibly have been interested in poor Alice, even if they had thought she expected money from her great-aunt Woodworth; she’d keep both or either out of it.

  But now! She might still intend to keep them out of it, but she was certainly in a very hysterical, queer state, and she was drinking. She had made foolish suggestions about the murder to Jennings, the suggestions of a frightened woman who wouldn’t face what had really happened. She had seemed frightened tonight—to Gamadge’s thinking she had not shown remorse, but anxiety.

  And there had been no sign of affection between her and Osterbridge; nothing even resembling love. Her tone when she ordered him to stop playing was enough to convince any moderately intelligent person of that, and Osterbridge himself had shown nothing of the sort either. He was frightened too.

  If Gamadge was right, and he had met Alice Dunbar, and Mrs. Tanner knew that he had, he would certainly be wanting that private word with Mrs. Tanner tonight. She had been inaccessible before—with her family from the time of the discovery until the Stanton dinner hour, when the band would be playing. Osterbridge had counted on a few words afterwards; Bishop and Miss Bean wouldn’t get in his way. But Mrs. Lynch was there, Jennings came and Gamadge came. The intermission, then.

  And Mrs. Tanner had collapsed, and she would be inaccessible again until the next morning, when the police would probably be nagging at her once more. No wonder he had suggested black coffee.

  If Gamadge was right, and that had been his trouble, he couldn’t be checked up on any more than Dunbar could. The Scale house wasn’t more than half a mile from the Stanton.

  Gamadge finished his coffee, put his cup down, lighted a cigarette, and indulged himself in one last and fascinating conjecture: “The family wouldn’t like it if Alice Dunbar complained of him. She’d complain to some purpose if he decided to transfer his attentions to her sister. After the Woodworth fiasco, Mrs. Tanner would be the better match, but she wouldn’t get the Dunbar money if she married a singer who’d tried for the Woodworth money first.”

  Osterbridge looked like a man who thought himself invincible with the women. Would he believe that Mrs. Tanner could resist him if he decided to turn on the charm? A little later, naturally, not while the family was in the middle of a celebrated case like this one.

  Gamadge sat smoking, looking across the half-empty room at the open concert piano on the stage; at the bass viol, the horn and cornet lying on chairs, the drums, the curving saxophone, the steel guitar. He thought of brown wigs over bald heads or light hair, of horn-rimmed glasses, layers of brown powder, plumpers and adhesive tape. He thought of dim rooms in town or country, of identifications and what they were worth.

  And he thought of other things, things everybody knew or could know, and sadly shook his head.

  As for the Stephen Foster business, what did it prove, what could it prove to anybody but him? That detail didn’t seem to have been passed along by Miss Cole to others; she might have forgotten it, and so might the singer have forgotten it. If the singer remembered it, would Gamadge’s naïve demand frighten him? If it did, he might react either way: boldly like Dunbar—“why should the innocent fear”—or with a pretence of ignorance, if that had been pretence on Bishop’s or Osterbridge’s part.

  Nobody would be co
nvinced either way. Bishop could say he’d forgotten the ballads and wouldn’t give out with “Swanee River”; Osterbridge could say he’d forgotten the words. “No good to a soul on earth,” thought Gamadge, “except me. And I’m prejudiced.”

  A voice at his shoulder whispered: “Mr. Gamadge.”

  He turned and rose. “Miss Bean?”

  “Mr. Gamadge, Wayne Bishop sent me.” She looked flurried. “He wants to know if you’d mind coming behind and speaking to him before the end of the intermission.”

  People were coming back into the room. A waiter slipped behind one of the silver screens and pushed open the leaves of the french windows; it must have stopped raining.

  “Be there as soon as I’ve paid my check, Miss Bean.”

  “Oh, thank you. Wayne says you know the turning in the lobby, and then there’s another passage on your right.”

  “I’ll find it.”

  She gave him a look that had doubt and anxiety in it, and fluttered off. Gamadge looked at the check on the table, put money down on it, and strolled into the lobby. Past the elevators, he turned the corner into the plain druggeted corridor that seemed to lead all the way through the hotel to the rear. Halfway down it was the cross passage, which must run back of the stage.

  There were three doors in the wall opposite the partition behind the stage, and another door at the end of the passage. Against this Bishop leaned, hands in the pockets of a raincoat that was hanging open over his uniform. The khaki colour of the raincoat and the bleakness of the light here may have been what gave him his sallow, almost pallid look. He said without moving: “This is very kind of you, Mr. Gamadge.”

  Gamadge walked towards him and stopped a yard away. He said: “I hope you didn’t get me here to scold me, Mr. Bishop?”

  “Scold you?”

  “For requesting the wrong thing.”

  “Oh.” They exchanged a smile. “That happens,” said Bishop. “Makes us look silly, doesn’t it? Osterbridge doesn’t sing that kind of thing, and just for the moment I couldn’t remember anything you’d want. I didn’t suppose you’d want ‘Susannah.’ Who was the fellow that obliged?”

  “Some friend of Mrs. Lynch’s.”

  “Nice voice. Osterbridge said it reminded him of glee club days on the dear old campus.”

  “You all ended up nobly.”

  “Simple harmony; I liked it myself. Why did you ask for Foster, Mr. Gamadge?”

  “Why do you ask me?”

  Bishop’s dark eyes left Gamadge’s face and contemplated vacancy. “You had some reason—or I thought so.”

  “Don’t you ever have an impulse?”

  Bishop pulled himself upright. His voice changed and sounded businesslike. “I wanted a big favour of you. We go on in five minutes, and I can’t find Osterbridge.”

  “Can’t find him?”

  “I’m just back myself. Went out for a drink—that way.” He half-turned and indicated the door behind him. “It goes to the garden, short cut to the next street. There’s a gate, you can’t open it from the outside. It had stopped raining, so Osterbridge was out there, just beyond the door, having a smoke; I went on out to my usual tavern around the corner, and when I came back I couldn’t seem to find him.” He added: “I leave the gate ajar.”

  “He’ll be back in time, won’t he?”

  “He was supposed to be back long ago, to talk to Beanie about his songs.” Bishop turned and glanced at the middle door of the three in the wall. “That’s our sort of greenroom. The men’s dressing-room is next to the garden door there, and the women’s is the one at the end. Beanie was in the middle room, talking to the band; he hasn’t been there or in the dressing-room at all, not since the intermission started.” Bishop looked at Gamadge again: “I thought he might have gone upstairs.”

  “Oh. I see.”

  “He was worried about Mrs. Tanner. He’s a kind of character that if he wants a thing he makes every effort to get it, and he certainly seemed to want to talk to her. I don’t want to go up there again, and I don’t want to send Beanie. Mrs. Lynch might complain of us, and we get nowhere antagonizing the management of the hotel.”

  “Wouldn’t Mrs. Lynch get rid of him?”

  “He’s quite persuasive. He never did anything like this before, but it’s a sort of an upset evening. Beanie could play the piano for him, but she can’t sing for him. He has quite a following.”

  “I saw that he had.”

  “Would it be too much to ask you to go up there and see where the bonehead is? I mean if he’s in that suite?”

  “No, not at all.”

  “It’s a good deal to ask, but you could do it and no questions asked.”

  The band was coming out of the middle doorway. One by one they crossed the passage and mounted a short flight of steps to a masked door at the back of the stage. All of them had an inquiring look at Gamadge, and the horn player whistled a bar of “Oh Susannah” under his breath and grinned. Gamadge grinned back at him.

  “Thanks,” said Bishop. “I have to go.”

  He peeled off his raincoat, threw it into the middle room without looking to see where it fell, and followed the last of the orchestra up the steps.

  Gamadge stood looking after him. The music started up, and Miss Bean could be heard pounding the piano in a serious manner. She must have gone up into the wings before Gamadge arrived in the passageway.

  Did Bishop really think that Osterbridge would have been allowed into the Tanner suite again that evening? Gamadge thought that Bishop was incapable of thinking anything of the kind. He thought that he himself had received a pressing invitation to go out and investigate the garden.

  “And he knew I’d go.” Gamadge went up to the end door and pulled it; it was a heavy steel door, fitting into its frame like a glove. He stepped out into the dark of the garden; a rain-soaked and desolate confusion of piled-up tables and chairs, thick shrubbery, trees. On his right, behind the high palings of a fence, was the parking lot; the narrow walk on which Gamadge stood, a raised causeway, extended through a gate in the paling right through to the street, behind rows of parked cars whose metal bumpers glinted in the shadows beyond the range of the spotlight.

  Activity there; figures on the walk, people waiting for their cars, getting out their checks. But on the left, along towards the hedge and fence that cut the garden off from the next block, nothing. The fence was high, a palisade of bars topped with spearheads; the hedge was thick. No light but what came vaguely from the street and from the distant parking lot.

  Gamadge walked down towards the gate that Bishop had so carefully described to him; yes, it opened easily from within, but you couldn’t get your hand through from the other side to turn the knob. Gamadge swung around and began to slowly walk back the way he had come, his eyes on the darkness at his right. Wet grass, wet flagstones, slim tree trunks, bushes, tables, and chairs. At the side door through which he had come into the garden he turned and walked back again to the gate.

  This time, just within the gate, he struck a match and lighted a cigarette, his head lowered and his eyes on the shrubbery near the fence. Now he got it; just a suggestion of whiteness under that bush, beside that tree.

  He threw away the cigarette and picked it up again; put it and the burned match in his pocket, and moved over the wet flags and the grass. Osterbridge lay under the bush, not far from the gate; or Gamadge supposed it was Osterbridge; he seemed to have shot himself through the right jaw, upwards. He had fallen after the rain stopped—his coat, sodden where it touched grass, was dry above.

  The automatic lay near his right hand; it had bounced on the turf, and was glistening wet. His left arm was under him. The body had fallen forward, and lay in the peculiarly flat, final attitude that meant death; but Gamadge bent and touched the hand. Long-fingered, broad, powerful; dead.

  Gamadge straightened, and cast a look of irony at the garden door. Quite an errand, he thought, Bishop sent me on. Damned if I’ll oblige him.

  He turned a
nd went back through the door and into the deserted passage, along the passage to the corridor, back to the lobby. Plenty of people moving about there; he joined a small crowd at the counter and got his hat and raincoat. Out in the street he waited for some time before they brought him his car; waited on the raised walk, from which nothing could be seen of the garden, through the narrow gap in the paling, but darkness. The fence jutted out too far for him to have been seen on that promenade of his to and from the gate; and when he crossed the flags, in his black clothes, he would hardly have been even a shadow to a man looking up at that moment, a man actually looking for him.

  He got his car, drove west to the next avenue, turned the block, and drove east. On Lexington Avenue he found an open drugstore. He parked around the corner and went in. He shut the door of the telephone booth tightly behind him, and called the Stanton.

  The switchboard girl said: “Hotel Stanton, good evening.”

  It was good morning, but Gamadge didn’t correct her. He said as fussily as he could: “I should like to speak to the manager.”

  “Who is speaking, please?”

  “That does not matter in the least. The matter is urgent, and I wish to speak to the manager.”

  He was switched on to a man, probably the night clerk. The night clerk asked: “Who is speaking, please?”

  “I am—I was a temporary guest of the hotel. The matter is urgent, and the manager will be glad to keep it private.”

  He could almost hear the clerk’s patient sigh. “I will give your message to the manager of the hotel.”

  “It’s your responsibility. I am merely performing my duty as a citizen,” said Gamadge. “I ought to be on the manager’s private wire. It would have been simpler for me to inform the police, but I was anxious to get home to bed.”

  Truth carries conviction—sometimes. The clerk asked rather anxiously: “What’s the trouble, sir?”

  “I was in your hotel this evening, listening to the music; I might say that as I only intended to stay for a few minutes (I had missed an appointment in the lobby) I kept my coat and hat.”