She said, “I’m sure I wouldn’t hear them. After I get to sleep—really get to sleep—it takes a loud bell, inches from my ear.”
He could tell as soon as he walked in that Kroll had smoothed the way for him. Or perhaps, he speculated, the astute Captain was merely giving him, as well as Rand, a sufficiency of hemp.
Fant, standing at the door, gave him a broad wink and said, “It’s all yours, Cabot.”
Cabot looked down the deserted hall for a moment before he answered dryly, “Apparently. Where is everyone?”
“They all got sleepy and went to bed early,” explained Fant. “Maybe they caught it from Rand.” He shrugged and went out of the room.
Cabot wondered how much of an innuendo lurked in that last, chaffing sentence. Could Fant be subtle?
Theresa came out of the dining-room and started up the stairs. He hailed her, and she froze into an immediate stillness, her gaze darting apprehensively to both sides before it centered upon him with a warning fixity.
He knew then that she had seen him as he came in and had ignored him.
He said calmly and distinctly, “Theresa, if Mr. Rand becomes fully conscious and rings for you before you go to bed, will you notify me promptly? I shall be in the drawing-room.”
She said flatly, “Yes, sir. But I’m going to bed directly.”
He thought: The indifferent maid. She does it fairly well. The large eyes were telegraphing, I won’t go to bed. I’ll sit there all night, waiting.
He turned back and glimpsed Cotton standing in the dining-room doorway, simultaneously surveying the hall and licking his milk-moistened lips. Cabot stooped over, calling him, and after giving the overture due consideration the great cat came to him, smoothed both sides of his mustache delicately against the extended fingers, and followed him up the hall complacently, his enormous tail raised like a pennant in the air.
Cabot went into the drawing-room with Cotton at his heels and sat down on the sofa. He lit a cigarette and watched the smoke curl up and become tiny drifting clouds against the mirrored walls. The cat stretched out in front of the sofa and began to purr.
There was no sound at all beyond the open door. He thought: Kroll is doing this cleverly. There is no sign of anything except the most perfunctory watch. But I shall have to go up after a time and look in on Rand, just to make it appear convincing.
Nothing would be done, probably, until he had been up at least that one time and had returned. They would expect that, more than likely. They would wait for it.
It would happen upstairs just as he walked back into this room.
He thought: Suppose we make it midnight? That’s a good time.
The silence of the house appeared to have deepened, to have taken on a quality of permanence. Sitting there, utterly relaxed, he wondered whether it was the house or his own senses over which sleep was stealing so insidiously.
Even the little throaty sound at his feet had ceased.
He bent over drowsily and looked down. The cat’s eyes were closed, but in a moment the lids fluttered up, and Cotton’s watchful gaze was fixed upon the door once more.
Cabot leaned back wearily, closing his eyes. Cotton had the right idea, he reflected—rest in very small doses.
But he couldn’t do it. He realized that the moment he came to himself with a start—he was slipping farther down on the sofa, his shoulders sagging. He jerked erect with a swift impression that he had been asleep for hours. But when he glanced at his watch he saw that it had been only forty minutes.
It was a quarter to twelve.
His gaze roved across the still, shining room, searching for Cotton; and at the sight of the cat his muscles stiffened.
The Persian was in the doorway, staring out with a queer, upward slant of his luminous eyes. His back was arched; his lip was drawn back slightly from his teeth; and even as Cabot watched, the big white cat gave a sharp hiss and bounded backward into the room.
Cabot sprinted out into the hall, but it was empty. He raised his eyes instinctively, as Cotton had done; and after a moment he realized that if the line of his vision could penetrate the ceiling, it would be fixed upon the corridor leading to Rand’s rooms.
He walked deliberately down the hall and mounted the stairs. He moved on quietly to the top. Suddenly a furry white ball shot by him, and Cotton was standing beside him on the landing.
They went down the dim hall together, the man moving almost as silently as the cat. They crossed the dark study, and Cabot lifted his hand to knock reassuringly on the bedroom door. Then he abruptly reconsidered, thinking: I’ll make a test of this. If he hasn’t heard the study door click, the whole thing’s off.
He squatted and peered through the keyhole. He got up after only a moment, but he knew that he would carry with him forever the memory of that stricken face, distorted by dread, turned in an agony of waiting toward the closed door.
He hadn’t realized until then how horribly afraid Rand was.
He tapped upon the door and went in. He walked toward the bed, and Rand watched him coming with eyes that mirrored fading shock and disbelief and finally a vague, desperate anger.
He whispered, “Why are you coming here? I thought you agreed——”
Cabot murmured, “I’ll explain later. This is part of a plan. I think it’ll come within minutes after I walk out. Understand?”
Rand nodded wordlessly, his gaze moving toward Cotton, who was standing there, sniffing uneasily. Rand put out his hand and rubbed the cat’s head; and then, as on a sudden impulse, he patted the coverlet suggestively.
Cabot turned. “That’s all. I’m going now. Be ready.”
Again Rand nodded, his gaze still fixed upon Cotton. The cat looked up in momentary temptation at the inviting softness; then his inscrutable eyes seemed to change ever so slightly, as with some curious interplay of reflected light and shadow, and he turned and streaked after Cabot.
As Cabot closed the door, he glanced back and saw that Rand’s lonely and haunted eyes were fixed blankly upon the exact spot on the floor where Cotton had stood.
Cabot walked back through the corridor into the hall. He walked slowly, but he did not pause at any point or look around. To do that, he knew, would be a tell-tale gesture to the sly eyes that were watching his going. He would have to play it out to the last detail, to the last moment. And then....
He glimpsed Cotton crouching on the dim landing, a shape with gleaming eyes. The big cat turned abruptly, without waiting for him, and streaked down the stairs.
Cabot walked after him, and with every step he could feel his own muscles taking on something of the instinctive nervous tautness that had gripped the Persian.
As he reached the last step, the great clock in the hall began to strike. On its second stroke another clock in the library started chiming, and from somewhere upstairs, like a haunting echo, came the sound of a third, joining in the brief, dark melody of midnight.
He walked on from the staircase, and just as he reached the drawing-room door the clocks ceased striking. He stood there for a moment, listening in the returning stillness, and then he turned swiftly and began racing for the stairs.
He was on the bottom step when he heard the shot, and the other sound come almost in the same instant. They were so close together that they might indeed have been simultaneous, but he knew which one of them had come first.
It was the man’s scream.
Chapter Twelve
Cabot reached the landing, and now it was a woman who was shrieking—shrilly, persistently, somehow unnaturally—from the same direction where the man had cried out so briefly.
Fleming was running down the hall with his service revolver in his hand. A door burst open behind him, and somewhere along the passageway there was a muffled crash.
Cabot rushed into the corridor and glimpsed Theresa Church on the third floor staircase. She sank down suddenly, clutching at the railing with both hands. The shrieking ceased.
The study door was closed.
Rand lay face downward across the side of the bed with his feet sticking over the edge. His position, no less than the blood which was smeared beneath him and beyond him, indicated that he had struggled there for a few seconds before unconsciousness came. His outflung left arm lay inertly across a twisted pillow which still bore the imprint of the fingers which had clutched it convulsively before the hand loosened and grew still. His automatic lay on the bed a few inches from his right hand.
Cabot tugged at the prone body, turning it to the side.
“Hold on!” said Fleming. “Don’t touch it. They’ll want pictures. Can’t you see he has shot himself through the heart?”
Cabot ripped back the blood-soaked pajama coat. “Call a doctor!” he snapped. “The phone’s in the study.”
Fant came lumbering in. Fleming, after a second’s hesitation, dodged out with the pistol still in his hand.
Fant took in the scene with one sharp glance. “I thought that guy was putting on an act!” he said. “He wasn’t unconscious. Somebody was giving him a play-by-play description.”
Cabot was trying to examine the wound through the profuse bleeding. He straightened up at last, taking a long breath.
“Apparently,” he said, “he twisted aside just as the automatic went off. The bullet went through the fleshy part of his chest and grazed the under side of his left arm.”
Fant was stooping over the desk, staring down at something lying there. He turned after a moment and said brusquely, “He didn’t twist aside. It was a case of a shaky hand. You’d be surprised how many people develop shaky hands when they try it.”
Cabot walked around the bed. He could hear Fleming’s raised voice resounding through the study.
“Get back! All of you. Nobody goes in.”
He went to the desk and read the note which was lying there.
It was word for word as Carlo had described it. There was even a tiny hole midway in the message where the pencil had broken through.
He took a knife from his pocket and turned the corner of the sheet without touching it with his finger. On the opposite side he saw the letterhead of the War Department, the typed date, and the opening words of a letter:
Dear Sir: Major-Gen. Ascott will call upon you to discuss...
He let the sheet down and turned to find Fant watching him.
Fant said, “If that’s Rand’s handwriting, this murder case will have the kind of perfect ending I’ve always dreamed would happen.”
Cabot’s face tightened. “Perfect endings don’t happen, Fant,” he said. “They’re achieved.”
Fleming appeared at the door. “I’ve notified everybody,” he disclosed. “The doctor, headquarters, Mr. Boynton—”
Cabot looked at him. “Where were you, Fleming?” he asked. “In Deb’s room?”
Fleming nodded. “Peeping out of that hole you made when you broke it down,” he said. “It was a swell place for a lookout.”
“Did you see anybody?”
“Nobody after you went downstairs. The shot came in about two minutes—maybe three.”
“Did you hear a man scream a second before the shot?”
Fleming hesitated. “I don’t know whether it was a second before or a second after,” he said. “They were almost together.”
Fant was looking at the bed. “It was a second after,” he commented. “While this fellow was squirming around, feeling it.”
Cabot shook his head. “No,” he said. “It was before.”
He went out through the study into the corridor as the doctor hurried in. The group to whom Fleming had spoken had now moved back into the hall, from which came a fluctuating murmur of voices. Cabot turned up the third floor staircase, pausing halfway to pick up a handkerchief lying on the step.
He tapped lightly on Theresa’s door and then went in.
She was sitting beside a small round table with her back to the door. She was arched forward in the chair, almost unnaturally erect. On the table there was nothing except a pile of knitting.
Cabot spoke, and she gave a slight start, her large eyes swerving around at him. “Oh!” she gasped. “I didn’t hear you.”
Cabot said, “I wouldn’t become quite so preoccupied—with my back to the door.” He moved around the table. “Well, Theresa?”
She said nothing.
“Did the buzzer ring?”
She shook her head, her eyes going blank for a moment. “Are you sure? You were here all the time?”
“Why, yes. Didn’t he tell you——”
He said, “Theresa, weren’t you on the stairs when the shot came?”
She returned his gaze steadily, her thin face uplifted toward his, her body still rigidly erect in the chair.
“No,” she said after a second. “I was here.”
“Your scream came within moments after Rand’s. It came in the space of time that it takes a man to run upstairs.”
“I was here,” she insisted evenly. “I expected every instant that something would happen. When he screamed, I ran out at once—I flew—to the stairs. It’s only a few feet.”
“Was it your impression that the scream came first?” She nodded. “It did. Before the shot.”
“When you reached the staircase, what did you see?”
“Nothing. I knew then that it was over. I caught at the railing, and all at once I found myself screaming. I hadn’t intended to.”
He put the handkerchief down on the table and turned away. “I hope,” he said, “that you are telling the truth.” Jan Utley was standing at the foot of the staircase, smoking a cigarette. She did not glance up as he came down, but spoke abruptly when he reached the bottom step.
“Well, Mr. Cabot, what did Theresa see?”
He said, “You surprise me. Did you take your psychology at Duke?”
She made an impatient gesture. “Telepathy is bunk. It was a natural assumption that Theresa might have seen something. It’s her business to see something.”
“What do you mean?”
“She is a detective, isn’t she?”
Cabot turned his startled eyes from her as the study door swung back. Kroll came out, grim-faced, and strode into the hall without looking across the corridor.
Jan Utley was watching Cabot. She said thoughtfully, “Did Darryl try to kill himself?”
“When a man is found shot, with his own automatic lying by him, that is understandably the first impression.”
“Was there anything besides the automatic?”
He turned back to her. “Wasn’t that enough?”
The eyes behind the horn-rimmed glasses bored searchingly into his for a long moment, but Cabot out-stared her. She gave a little shrug and looked off.
“I presume,” she said, “that the wound could have been self-inflicted?”
“Oh, yes.” He paused and then described it.
“Then,” she said, “either of two things could have happened. Darryl’s hand could have become unnerved at the last moment, as is so often the case in attempted suicide, or——“ She stopped. “He could have twisted aside just as someone else fired.”
“That’s right.”
She waited a moment. “Cabot, were you the first to enter the bedroom after the shot sounded?”
“Fleming was a few feet behind me.”
“Nobody was there ahead of you?”
“That would hardly have been possible, unless somebody ran down from the third floor stairway.”
She said, “Or somebody could have run out of the apartment up those stairs before you and Fleming appeared?”
“Yes.”
“But in that case, Theresa Church was running toward the stairs. She would have seen him?”
“If she ran immediately.” He thought of the woman sitting there so rigidly above them. “But it’s p
ossible that Theresa, exhausted as she was, had dropped off to sleep when the shot awakened her. In that case there would have been a short delay.”
Or, he reflected suddenly, if Theresa was already on the stairs, she had deliberately waited that short interval before she had started screaming.
Jan said, “So there’s a loophole?”
“At least one.”
She shook her head abstractedly and moved away a step.
“I don’t understand it,” she said. “It doesn’t make sense as either attempted suicide or attempted murder.”
“Why not?”
She gave him a final glance. “There should,” she said, “have been something besides the automatic.”
He stood there pondering the fact that she had not once used the word note. Yet their conversation had essentially been about little else.
He went downstairs and found Boynton and Kroll in the drawing-room. Boynton’s face was solemn. Kroll was doing the talking.
“And that’s it,” he concluded. “If anybody had approached Rand’s apartment about midnight, Fleming would have seen him, as he saw Cabot. If anybody had left, they would both have seen him.”
Cabot said, “Unless he used the fire-escape.”
Kroll’s voice was dry. “The second story entrance to the fire-escape was locked. If anyone had tried to get to Rand that way, he would have had to go downstairs first—and Fleming would have seen that, too—mount the fire-escape to the third floor, and come down into the corridor. It’s true he could have left by this method without being seen by Fleming, but it’s ten to one that Theresa would have caught a glimpse of him going or coming.”
Cabot replied thoughtfully, “Theresa is your only real argument. As for the rest of it, there’s an alternative. Someone could simply have remained downstairs until nearly midnight and then have gone up the fire-escape with Theresa as his sole danger.”
Kroll looked skeptical. “Possible,” he granted, “but unlikely.” He scowled faintly. “Your only real argument is that wound.”
Boynton said, “You mentioned that before.”
“Well, it seems to me,” Kroll went on, “that if the fellow was holding an automatic to his heart and his hand became unnerved at the last moment, the hand would have dropped, relaxing with gravity so to speak, and that would have pulled the muzzle up.”
The Whistling Legs Page 12
