She stopped, her gaze swerving toward Cabot as he abruptly got up. “I am just now coming to the important part—a few days later——”
Cabot said, “I can guess that, Miss Utley. You discovered suddenly that the note had disappeared from the place where you had hidden it.”
“Yes, but—“ she turned in the chair—“well, I want to explain this.”
He said, “There isn’t time for it now, and perhaps it isn’t necessary. Your actions throughout have been natural enough—at least as natural as your taking the note in the first place. You simply didn’t want to stick your neck out until you had become quite certain what was going on.”
She nodded. “I thought at first, of course, that the thief was planning to use it against Darryl in the same way that I had intended doing. I suspected, too, that that was the real reason Darryl was bringing you here—to try to recover the note. Even after Deb was killed, I couldn’t quite convince myself that anything so—unspeakable was happening.”
“But when you learned definitely that the note had been found beside its writer, you knew not only how it was being used against Rand but also why Deb was killed.”
“Yes.” Her narrowed eyes were still fixed upon him, as intently as though they were trying to hold him. “I knew then that Darryl had another enemy—one who hated him far more than I could ever do. I knew...”
He went out, closing the door softly behind him.
As he climbed the stairs, he reflected that it would probably amount to only a question and an answer. He would ask Fant whether anyone had tried to get into Rand’s room. And Fant would say, “Yes, a few minutes ago...
Then the noise started above him.
It was, at first, only a raised voice, muffled by closed doors and the distances of corridors. But as he reached the landing, the voice swelled into a sustained shout and a vague tumult grew up around it.
He rushed on toward Rand’s apartment with a growing conviction that somebody was trying to break a door down.
The doctor ran out into the corridor, shouting, “Quick, man! Is there another way into that bedroom? He can’t make it.”
Fant was smashing at the bedroom door with a chair. The legs had already broken off, and he was swinging the edge of the seat at the stout panels like a giant wooden hammer.
Cabot seized the chair behind the desk and ran across the room. But Fant struck a final mighty blow at the door, and simultaneously the frame of the chair came apart in his hands and a panel cracked, sagging inward.
Boynton and Kroll came plunging into the study. The Captain took one glance at the scene and whipped out his revolver.
Boynton thundered, “Who is in there?”
Fant, his hand thrust through the hole, found the key, and he and Cabot leaped across the threshold.
Gail Rand was kneeling beside the bed, staring at them with widened eyes. Her hands were clutching Rand’s arm.
Above her head his own eyes watched them pouring into the room. Gail’s fingers appeared to tighten upon his arm, and she looked at him quickly as if in covert appeal before she got up.
He said quietly, “It’s all right. She wanted to talk to me.”
Fant was breathing unsteadily. “You asked me to keep them out,” he said. “All of them. You were afraid——”
“I know, but——“ Rand stopped, and in his drawn face there was a brief flicker of conflicting emotions before he spoke again, wearily. “It’s all right.”
Gail Rand went out slowly without glancing back.
Fant was explaining to the Captain. “We were there in the study,” he said, “when she came in and put on an act about having to see him. I told her nothing doing, and she seemed to give up. That got us off guard, and all at once she whirled around and darted in here and had the door locked before I could say Jack Robinson——”
Kroll snapped, “Why the hell did you want to say Jack Robinson? I told you——”
Cabot said, “What did she want, Rand?”
Rand did not immediately reply, and Cabot’s face tensed as he recalled a phrase: The truth is that I’m pretty crazy about her...
Rand said finally, “She wanted to ask me about—all this.”
“No, she didn’t. What did she want?” Cabot stood there, his narrowed eyes like hard, bright pebbles as he looked down.
At last Rand lifted his gaze. “She was asking me not to say that it was Jan who shot me.”
There was a moment of silence. Then Cabot said, “Was it Jan?”
“I don’t know.”
Boynton exclaimed, “You must know!”
Rand glanced at the towering figure behind Cabot. “You’re Mr. Boynton, aren’t you? Sit down, all of you, and I’ll tell you.”
Cabot said, “How did it happen?”
Rand looked back at him. “It didn’t happen as we expected,” he replied. “I kept watching that door, and it almost got me killed. The door didn’t open. Nobody came in——”
“Wait!” interrupted Cabot. “Somebody had to come in!”
Rand shook his head. “Not then,” he said. “You see—the killer was already here.”
“You mean—while I was talking with you?”
“Yes, though none of us knew it except Cotton.”
“Cotton?”
Rand nodded. “Do you remember,” he asked, “how strangely he acted while he was standing here beside the bed?”
“Yes. Why, by the way, did you want him to stay?”
Rand looked off. “To be perfectly candid,” he said, “I felt panicky for a moment, and I had an overpowering desire to have something here with me—something alive. I knew that the presence of a cat wouldn’t hold a murderer back, so——“ He stopped. “But when Cotton suddenly backed away and flew after you, it hit me squarely between the eyes. It was the first time he had ever backed away from me. I asked myself: Could he have seen me as a corpse? That was utterly insane, for I knew that cats didn’t see into the future. They merely see into the present and react nervously to anything unusual or strange.”
“What do you mean?”
Rand looked back. “As Cotton stood there,” he said, “he saw something like that—something very strange indeed.” Cabot raised his eyes and gazed across the room at a mahogany highboy and, to the right of it, the bathroom door. He frowned. “That door,” he said, “was closed. Tightly.” Rand was watching him. “Oh, it was done cleverly, Cabot,” he commented. “It was done in the one way on earth that would have worked.”
Kroll said suddenly, “I think I get the idea.”
Rand went on. “I lay here watching that door after you closed it. My hand was under the pillow, next to the automatic; and my eyes were fixed upon the knob, which I knew would be the first thing to move. I listened as I had never listened before in my life for some small, warning sound from the study beyond.
“That was the trouble; my attention was concentrated too intensely upon the door. For when the sound came at last—and came within the bedroom—it seemed unreal. I thought at first that it was something else, something wholly extraneous—perhaps Cotton, after all, hadn’t gone out.
“The sound was merely a little soft thud somewhere over in the direction of the bathroom door. I was lying, of course, with my face turned the other way; and to look I had to roll over quickly in bed, taking my hand from under the pillow. Then I could see what had made the thud.
“It was simply an empty cigarette package, wadded up into a tight ball, lying there on the floor.”
In the background Fant muttered to Kroll, “I found it. There may be a pretty fair fingerprint on it.”
Rand continued. “The first thought that flashed through my mind was that someone had opened the bathroom door and had thrown it out. But I had been in the bathroom only a short time before you came in, Cabot, and I knew that no one was there. From what other direction, then, could it have come?
“The only answer was that it had been tossed from within the bedroom against that door for the very pur
pose that it had achieved—to attract my attention and to make me turn. I knew then that I had been tricked. Death was behind me.
“I tried to twist over, to grab at the automatic, but I was too late. The person at my back was now in position to act, and the action came in one swift, scrambling movement. The pillow was jerked up and thrust down over my face, temporarily gagging me, and then the automatic was pressed against my chest.
“I instinctively threw myself to the side, as the one chance of knocking the muzzle from over my heart. My mouth got free of the pillow, and I screamed a moment before the weapon went off.
“The impact of the shot threw me back, and I fell face downward across the bed. I dimly remember that the automatic was thrust hurriedly into my hand and that someone ran across the room. He evidently thought that I was mortally wounded——”
Boynton’s gaze searched his face. “Surely you had a glimpse?”
“Not for one second. Don’t you see how it was worked? He crept in here while I was in the bathroom and concealed himself in the one place where he would have been in position to do it. That was why Cotton saw him.”
Boynton said, “It seems fantastic, somehow.”
Captain Kroll came to the bed and got down on his knees. “I hope,” he said, “that your servants are not too death on dust.” He peered under the bed and muttered, “They’re not.” He took out his little pocket flashlight and squirmed halfway out of sight.
Rand said, “I am guessing, naturally. But I don’t see how else it could have been done. If he was there, it would have been simply a matter of making me turn over, as he did, and of seizing the automatic. He would have been close enough.”
“He?”
“In the general sense. I don’t know that it was a man.”
“Do you have any reason to believe that it was?”
Rand hesitated. “Not exactly,” he replied. “But I have a confused recollection that the person running out of here was wearing trousers.”
“You glimpsed them?”
“No, it seems to me to have been more of a sound—like the swishing of trouser legs. But——“ He stopped, frowning. “I shouldn’t have heard that, should I? I mean—they don’t usually make a sound.” He shook his head. “It may have been delusion.”
Kroll got to his feet and said, “Somebody was under that bed.”
Boynton asked swiftly, “Did you find something?”
“Just some marks in the dust. But they tell the same story that Mr. Rand did.” Kroll paused. “There are traces under there of a floor sweep compound that can probably be matched on a certain pair of pants.”
The District Attorney got up. “Let’s leave it at that for tonight,” he said. “You obviously need rest, Mr. Rand.” Cabot waited until the door had closed behind the others. “I suspect,” he said quietly, “that you’re holding something back.”
Rand replied calmly, “Why should I do that?”
“Because you love your wife—God pity you.”
Rand’s smile was faintly bitter. “Not that much, Cabot.”
“You realize, then, that if you are holding something back, you’re not worth two cents as a life insurance risk?”
“Yes.”
Cabot went out into the corridor and turned up the stairs. The third floor lights were off, and there was only the dim reflection of street lamps through a window. He halted on the landing, looking down the hazy length of the passageway.
The faint, cloying scent which clung to the quiet space was like a presence without a name. It was so indefinable that he was not even certain at first that it was a perfume, and as he walked on into the obscurity he might have been trying to overtake a memory.
He turned into the alcove cautiously, not thrusting his neck out as Carlo Pugh had done. He could see the very faint outlines of the French windows opening upon the balcony of the fire-escape and, beyond them, the dimness of distant lights. He looked out steadily for a few moments and began to suspect that he had been mistaken.
He stepped out into the dimness, and instantly something seized him.
Chapter Fourteen
He swerved aside in a flash, breaking the hold, and then lunged back with his arm closing around it in a half nelson. It went over immediately in his grasp.
He realized then that the form which he had pinned down was soft and fragrant and gasping. Its muffled voice sounded from the crook of his arm.
“Philip Cabot, I’m—surprised!”
He turned her loose as though she had become white-hot. “So am I,” he said.
He helped her up, and she stood there breathless for a moment.
“It was my fault,” she said. “But I thought you had recognized me. I thought you were following me.”
“I never even saw you.”
“I was just reaching the top of the stairs when you opened Darryl’s door. I saw you glance up toward the landing and cross the corridor, so I walked on. I didn’t want to talk with you until we had reached a place where we couldn’t be heard.”
He said, “Well, here we are.”
Gail Rand moved slowly out of the shadow of the house to the iron railing of the balcony. Her face in the faint light was elfin-lovely when she turned to look at him.
She said, “I know you’ve been wondering about me. About why I pulled that trick a while ago, why I was in Deb’s room—all that.”
“All that,” he agreed, “and the heavenly, too. What makes your eyes so blue, for instance.” He looked down at her. “But the chief thing that I can’t figure out is whether you’re slightly guilty or very innocent.”
She said rather plaintively, “I am very innocent, Mr. Cabot. I’m so innocent that it’s dangerous. I know that——”
“Dangerous—to whom?”
“Why—to me.” Her head was turned toward him in the dim light, and he knew instinctively that her eyes had widened. “I mean—well, in a murder case like this you have to be so careful, so—calculating. You have to provide yourself with an alibi, account for every minute, show them that you couldn’t have done it. And I can’t for the life of me even remember where I was during the period when they say Deb was being murdered. I keep telling them that, but Captain Kroll said the most perfectly horrid thing to me about it. He said, ‘Maybe you were killing him at the time, Mrs. Rand, and it has just slipped your mind.’”
“Pay no attention to Kroll. He has dyspepsia.”
“Oh!” She put her hands upon the railing and looked down into what appeared a great drop through obscurity. She was silent for a moment. “Did Darryl tell you what I wanted?”
“He said you begged him not to say that it was Jan who shot him.” Cabot paused and then asked bluntly, “What would have been the point in doing that if it wasn’t Jan?” She seemed to freeze to the railing for a few seconds before she turned with an effort to look at him. “Well—it’s difficult to explain,” she said, “and I’m not good at explaining things. But there has always been this strange enmity, you see, between Darryl and Jan——”
“I know. But I can’t see why.” He stopped with an abrupt feeling that he could see, after all. He was beginning to understand the problem in all the implications which it would have had for these people, even for the girl who had begun so haltingly to try to sum it up in words. An emotional dilemma of that sort could not have been a mere detail, an occasional unpleasantness, in their lives. It would by now have colored everything, distorted everything. It would have given a false depth even to the trivial and a false perspective even to the real. It would have run like a black thread through the labyrinth of a violence which might have seemed as inevitable as the emotions themselves.
Gail was saying, “As soon as it became clear that it was a plot against Darryl, we realized that she would be the first one he would suspect. He would suspect her simply because—to him—she is the enemy. Do you understand?”
He said, “I think so,” and reflected that anyone else in the house would have understood that, too. Anyone cou
ld have counted upon it.
“So,” she went on, “unless Darryl did see the person who shot him or unless he had strong reason to believe that it was somebody other than Jan, I thought that he would be sure to accuse her the moment he became conscious.”
Cabot said, “But that was where you were wrong. He had not accused her.”
She turned quickly. “What——”
He said deliberately, “I had talked with Darryl Rand three times before he was shot, and he had not expressed any opinion whatever as to who had that note.”
“Oh!” She was clinging to the railing again. “Then it wasn’t——”
“Necessary for you to appeal to him? No. He has leaned backward, apparently, to keep from directing suspicion upon Jan.” Cabot paused. “Which was sensible, of course, as well as fair. For, as Rand said, he couldn’t afford to make any wrong guesses.”
She was silent for a few moments. “But that was only part of it,” she said presently. “The simply horrible feature was that Jan did take the note. We couldn’t get away from that.”
He replied dryly, “So it seems. When did she tell you about it, by the way?”
“Only an hour ago. She had just learned that it had been found in Darryl’s room after the shooting. She was certain then what had happened, and she was going to Mr. Boynton.”
“And she asked you to try to get into your husband’s room while she was telling us about the note?”
She did not answer directly. “I was terrified. I pleaded with her not to admit that she had stolen it. For, after all, she couldn’t prove that someone else later stole it from her.”
She kept her face turned outward. She was motionless, leaning forward upon the railing. He watched her, with his back to the iron grille-work, half bracing himself against it. It felt a little unsteady.
He said, “I think, nevertheless, that she did the smart thing.”
Her gaze swung back to him. “She wouldn’t have done that, would she, if she had been guilty?”
He replied evenly, “That depends entirely on the circumstances.”
She caught her breath. “I don’t understand. I——“ She stopped helplessly. “It’s too complicated for me.”
The Whistling Legs Page 14
