The Whistling Legs

by Roman McDougald

  “Instead of which,” Cabot added, “the deflection of the bullet was sidewise, indicating that the whole arm would have had to be jerked outward and backward, with the elbow bending and the shoulder moving. That suggests either that somebody else pulled Rand’s arm away as he fired or that somebody else was holding the automatic, and Rand twisted aside in time.”

  Boynton got up abruptly and strode across the room. “It’s a minor point,” he rapped, “so long as Rand could have shot himself.” He swung around before the mirrored wall, confronting Cabot. “That maid was seen sneaking into Rand’s apartment on two occasions. It’s perfectly evident now, not only that Rand was feigning unconsciousness throughout, but that Theresa was keeping him informed of what was going on.”

  Cabot asked, “How did Theresa keep herself informed?”

  “We shall dig that out of her, together with the admission that she was helping him.”

  “And why?”

  Boynton said impatiently, “It was love. It was an emotional fixation. It was what Hollywood would call the blooming of something in a starved soul.” He shrugged. “We might have guessed when we were questioning her last night that she had fallen for Rand and that she was the sort of woman who wouldn’t have given a damn whether he was a millionaire murderer or an impoverished saint.” He strode back. “But that, too, is incidental. The essential fact is that Rand learned somehow that we had developed a strong case against him. He realized that the game was up and he tried to throw in the towel, but the result, ironically enough, merely clinched his conviction.”

  Kroll said with a hint of reserve, “If the experts determine that he wrote that note.”

  Cabot looked at him. “You won’t have to wait on their report,” he said. “I can tell you that now. Rand did write it.”

  Boynton’s eyes narrowed. “How do you know?” he demanded. “Was Rand writing that note when you walked into his apartment last night?”

  Cabot said, “No. He had written the note two weeks ago.”

  Boynton stared at him for an interminable moment with his mouth open and his hand raised in an arrested gesture. Then he spun on his heels and the hand moved on to complete a sweeping arc. “Preposterous!” he thundered. “Do you expect us to swallow anything so manifestly absurd? Do we look like a couple of gullible and wide-eyed Alices who would step nimbly through the looking-glass of your imagination and pirouette delightedly among transparent impossibilities——”

  Cabot sighed. “Sit down, Jeff—for God’s sake—and stop being so melodramatically logical. It’s bad enough without that.” He pulled out his cigarettes. “The truth is so amazing, in fact, that it will have to be understated to be understood.”

  Boynton sat down and began listening with the restive and outraged reluctance of a physicist hearing a lecture on poltergeist phenomena. From time to time, as Cabot talked, the District Attorney clenched his jaw and gripped the arms of the chair, as though he were struggling mightily to keep himself from bursting into a flow of sonorous skepticism.

  On the sofa Kroll sat motionless, his lean face curiously pensive, watchful, unsurprised.

  The hands of the clock crawled on toward four o’clock.

  When Cabot finally stopped, there were a few moments of complete silence; then Boynton’s hand twitched upward from the chair arm in a rather weak movement that did not quite become a gesture. His voice also, when it sounded at last, seemed to have lost its ringing strength. “This,” he said, “is the most utterly amazing—“ and stopped.

  Kroll cleared his throat.

  Cabot looked from one to the other of them. “I know,” he said, “when I am being called a liar by thought transference. Maybe you’d better get Carlo to show you those slides and enlargements——”

  Kroll interrupted. “We don’t doubt that it can be verified. That’s the part that has knocked me for a loop—the thing can’t be doubted.”

  Boynton was stirring like a dazed but determined heavyweight at the count of nine. Cabot glanced at him and said, “No? I can see objections coming up at this moment.”

  Kroll replied, “I’ll be darned if I can guess what they’ll be. Unless we theorize that Carlo and Theresa, as well as Rand, were all telling the same whopping lie—and why should they? I don’t think it can be questioned that that note was written two weeks ago.”

  Boynton waved his hand with reviving emphasis. “We won’t question it,” he said. “We’ll concede that it was written on the night of Deb’s accident. We’ll concede that it was an accident. We’ll concede that Rand—understandably enough under the circumstances—decided to kill himself when he heard that his victim was dead and that he just as naturally changed his mind when the hospital soon afterward informed him of its error. Oh, yes, Captain, we’ll concede all that.”

  Kroll was frowning. “Well, I don’t see how we can go that far without going the rest of the way. It all hangs together from that point. If there’s a weak spot in it, I can’t find it.”

  “You can’t? There is one!” Boynton’s manner was as vigorous as ever as he swung toward Cabot, but Cabot thought that he detected in it a slight strain of uncertainty. “Darryl Rand wrote the note that night, to be sure, but—there is no real proof at all that it was ever stolen from him!”

  Kroll appeared more startled than Cabot. He said, “But Theresa and Carlo——”

  “You must remember,” Boynton swept on, “that Theresa merely had a glimpse of someone going through the corridor. She is obviously not prepared to state that this person had stolen anything from Rand’s bedroom or even that he had been into the bedroom at all. And that, moreover, is the fact which Carlo deduced, basing it upon the fact that he ad heard someone going toward Rand’s apartment and upon his own interpretation of Rand’s later actions. From this point Carlo made three arbitrary assumptions. He assumed that the unknown actually entered the bedroom, which is by no means certain; that he saw the note after he had entered, which doesn’t necessarily follow; and that he took it away with him, which is even more clearly a non sequitur. For Rand’s own subsequent conduct can be much more plausibly explained than by this theory of the missing note. It is far more likely that he had simply heard the visitor pass the study door and had suspected that someone was spying upon him.”

  Cabot said, “All right. Assume that the note wasn’t stolen. What’s the first thing Rand would have done when he walked back into the bedroom after hearing that Deb wasn’t dead?”

  Boynton frowned slightly. “A normal man would have destroyed it at once,” he admitted. “But you must bear in mind that Rand wasn’t normal. He was not only in the grip of powerful emotions but he had been drinking heavily. And, finally, there was this momentary distraction of trying to discover who had been lurking outside his apartment. It’s entirely conceivable that Rand stuck the note into his pocket, intending to bum it later.”

  Kroll muttered, “I think I see where this is leading us.” Cabot’s face was thoughtful. “It’s leading us—by a new route—back to where we started, back to what Jeff considers the fundamental situation.” He crushed out his cigarette. “As you see it, that situation developed after Deb came to the house. It reached its climax in the scene which Greg described, when Rand apparently learned that Deb was infatuated with Gail. Rand decided then to kill Deb, using me as an alibi. When he learned four hours ago that he couldn’t get away with it, he set out for the second time to commit suicide, using the original note which he had providently saved for such an emergency.”

  Boynton’s frown deepened. “I admit that it sounds crazy——”

  Kroll broke in. “It wouldn’t be half as crazy if Carlo Pugh had let on to Rand what he knew. Rand would then have seen that it would give him an out if we supposed, as

  Pugh did, that someone had stolen the note. It’s the subtle and complicated kind of alibi that high-brow murderers think up. The more complicated it is, the safer they feel.” Boynton shook his head. “But Pugh denied to Cabot that he had mentioned any of this ex
cept for a casual comment to Jan,” he said. “And it seems humanly improbable that he would have mentioned it to Rand.” He stopped, still scowling. “The primary question is whether someone did steal that note from Darryl Rand. If it could be established that it was stolen, the aspect of the whole case would be altered. The motive would lie in Rand’s death, not Deb’s.”

  Fant came in hurriedly and reported, “Rand is conscious now, Captain. He wants to make a statement.”

  Cabot sprang to his feet. “Rand did scream before the shot,” he said. “And that means that he must have seen the person who shot him!”

  Kroll snapped, “Go back, Fant—at once! Stay in that room and don’t let anybody in until we get there!”

  Fant dashed out.

  Boynton surged up with an exclamation. “Let’s go!” Cabot was already hurrying toward the door. He had almost reached it when it opened unexpectedly and Jan Utley stepped across the threshold.

  Her eyes brushed past him and fixed themselves upon Boynton and Kroll, who were advancing toward her.

  She said, “I beg your pardon. This is urgent.”

  Cabot noticed that the familiar evenness of her voice had a strained note. She seemed to be trying doggedly to swallow shock, just as she had done last night when she had looked at Deb.

  She said, “There was a note in that room, wasn’t there?” Kroll broke in sharply, “How did you find that out?”

  “One moment, please.” She was looking at Cabot. “Did the note read: I have killed a fellow human being...”

  With stunned disbelief he heard her repeat the note word for word. The same reaction showed in the faces of Boynton and Kroll.

  She asked, “Did it read like that, Mr. Cabot?”

  He replied gravely, “It did, Miss Utley. And you’ve had no opportunity whatever to see that note since it was found.

  Kroll moved unobtrusively into arm’s length behind her.

  She went on. “Was it written on the back of a letter from the War Department which read: Major-Gen. Ascott...”

  She recited the complete text of the typed letter at which Cabot himself had barely glanced.

  He said, “I didn’t memorize it, but I’m sure that’s it.”

  She moved a step farther into the room, and suddenly everything was deathly still around her. She looked around at last into the frozen faces of the three men, and in her eyes now there was a trace of indecision and of fear.

  “In that case,” she said with the same forced evenness, “I have reason to believe that somebody has tried to kill Darryl Rand.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  They sat down, and Boynton looked at her across the table.

  “When,” he asked, “did you first see this note?”

  She said, “I saw it about two weeks ago. To be exact, on the night when Deb was injured.”

  “Where did you see it?”

  “Lying on the desk in Darryl Rand’s bedroom.”

  “Where was Rand himself?”

  “He had gone into the study to answer the telephone.”

  “Who was with you at the time?”

  “No one.” Jan made a quick gesture. “You don’t have to approach this by legal bypaths, Mr. Boynton. It won’t be necessary to trap me into admitting that I took the note.”

  “You do admit it?”

  “Yes. That’s what I came to tell you.”

  Boynton glanced at Kroll. “Captain, will you take down her statement?” He turned back to Jan. “Go on, in your own words.”

  Kroll got out his notebook.

  Cabot’s gaze remained fixed upon the door, where Fant had appeared with his electrifying disclosure that Rand was conscious and wanted to make a statement.

  But it was Jan, he reflected, who was making it. He felt a strange uneasiness.

  She began deliberately, “On that night I was reading late in my room, as I often do. I thought that everyone else in the house was asleep, but shortly before 2 a.m. I heard somebody going through the hall. I opened my door and glanced out. The hall lights were off, but I heard the footsteps turn into the corridor and I was sure that it was Darryl. I left the door open for a few minutes, and presently I heard the telephone ringing in his study.”

  She paused, and Boynton said, “What did you do?”

  “I didn’t do anything immediately, but I changed my mind about undressing and going to bed. Darryl’s late return and the ringing of the telephone in the middle of the night seemed to add up to something highly unusual. The more I thought about it, the more curious I became about what was happening. At last I decided to investigate—quietly.”

  “You had turned out your light?”

  She nodded. “I didn’t want to advertise the fact that I was awake. If Darryl hadn’t already noticed the light burning, I didn’t want him to learn that I was up. Feeling toward me as he does, he would be sure to suspect that I was prying into his affairs.” Jan paused and then added, “Which, of course, is exactly what I was doing.”

  Boynton swept impatiently over her ironic candor. “What did you do?”

  “Well, I went down the corridor to the bedroom door, where I noticed a glimmer of light. I decided to knock, after all, and ask him bluntly what was going on. But just then the telephone rang again and I heard someone’ cross the floor. I opened the door and glanced in, and the first thing I saw was Darryl’s automatic lying by a sheet of paper on the desk. That convinced me that something was wrong.”

  “You went on into the room?”

  She said, “Of course. I could hear Darryl speaking on the telephone in the study and I knew that I had time to slip across the bedroom and read that note. All the wild horses in the world couldn’t have held me back.”

  “You did so—and what was your reaction?”

  Jan straightened up in the chair, adjusting her glasses. “Well, frankly, for about two seconds I was scared out of my wits.”

  “You were afraid, that is,” pursued Boynton, “that Rand would kill himself?”

  She gave him a startled glance and then said dryly,

  “Heavens, no! The idea of his suicide wasn’t alarming at all. I could have been very brave about that.” She paused. “But the point was that I didn’t have any idea then what the note meant. I thought, naturally enough, that he had killed somebody—murdered somebody. And since I knew how he was about Gail, my first, wild thought was that he might have gone Othello. But I realized almost instantly that that couldn’t have happened. He had been in the house only about thirty-five minutes, and he hadn’t been in Gail’s room. And I had seen her shortly before twelve, when she went to bed——”

  Boynton broke in. “What did you do?”

  She put her hand to her glasses again, and Cabot wondered suddenly whether she wasn’t purposely prolonging it.

  Rand wants to make a statement.

  He found himself listening instinctively for a sound from upstairs.

  Jan went on. “I heard Darryl speak one or two more words—in a hoarse, unnatural voice—and then I heard the receiver click. It occurred to me that he might walk back into the bedroom at any moment. I grabbed the note and ran out——”

  “One moment, Miss Utley,” Boynton interrupted. “Why did you take that note?”

  She was looking at Cabot. “In the light of what I told you,” she said, “my action probably seems understandable.”

  He replied equivocally, “Well—yes,” and stopped.

  She looked back at Boynton. “I could give you a number of legitimate reasons,” she said. “I could tell you, for instance, that the note seemed to be evidence in a murder case and that I considered it my duty as a citizen to take it in charge and hold it for the authorities. But I won’t give you any of those rationalizations. I’ll give you the real reason.” She leaned back again. “The truth, as I’ve told Mr. Cabot, is that because of a peculiar psychological situation Darryl Rand and I instinctively dislike, distrust, and fear each other. The moment I saw the note I realized that it represented a measure of
control over that situation. It represented a measure of control over Darryl Rand himself. With it in my possession—regardless of what the explanation might prove to be—I had a potential weapon against him in case he ever tried anything funny against me.”

  Boynton’s face was a study in reluctant admiration. “You are being frank, Miss Utley—almost appallingly so. But go on.”

  “I returned to my room, hid the note, and got into bed without taking time to undress—I simply pulled the covers over myself. The house was very still, and presently I could hear Darryl coming up the hall, stopping at every door. When he opened mine, I merely lay still, breathing deeply, and it must have convinced him that I was asleep, for he went on after a moment.”

  She paused, looking across the room. “It was several days before I could fit the puzzle together. But when I finally learned all the circumstances of the accident, I worked out a plausible theory about what had occurred. Knowing Darryl as I did, I understood how the supposed death of the victim of his drunken driving could have brought him to suicide. He couldn’t have faced the prospect of ruin or a manslaughter charge. He is too imaginative, too egoistic——”

  Boynton said, “Did you know, by the way, that you were observed leaving Rand’s bedroom?”

  She looked at him quickly. “Do you mean that I was identified?”

  “No. Only that someone, unidentified until now, was seen.”

  Her face relaxed a trifle. “Well, from a chance remark of Carlo’s about hearing voices in the corridor soon after I had left, I inferred that someone might have been on the third floor stairs, and it was evidently this person whom Carlo had heard Darryl questioning. But judging from Darryl’s own actions immediately after that, it seemed obvious that he hadn’t learned who had come out of his bedroom. The person he had questioned, then, in all probability hadn’t recognized me—or, at least, certainly hadn’t told Darryl.”