by Helen Reilly
A silvery laugh, high, fluting, mannered, a laugh that it was impossible to mistake, came over the wire. It was the laugh of a woman whose lips were closed in death, a woman who was or should be lying in a satin-lined casket inside a bronze metal box under six feet of earth in a country cemetery. At the other end of the line the voice of Sara Hazard paused. There was a faint sound as though someone had opened a door. She said sharply in a whisper, “Steven. I can’t talk freely from here. Listen and listen carefully .. She began to give him detailed instructions.
XIII
Cristie Lansing was never able afterward to recall with any clarity the last hour of waiting at the rendezvous that had been so carefully planned in advance, and at which Steven failed to arrive. She didn’t leave the corner opposite the little church until almost eight o’clock. She called Steven’s club from a grocery store on Hudson Street. He wasn’t there. She got, somehow or other, back to Margot’s penthouse, called him again three times during that interminable evening. Still no word. The people of the club didn’t know where Steven was and couldn’t tell her anything.
She went to bed at last, worn out with the travail of ceaseless questions, of crowding fear and bitter disappointment. No news was good news. She fell asleep to the aphorism of her childhood, woke to quiet sunshine and Sunday morning church bells. The trite old saying wasn’t much, but it was all she had.
The penthouse without Margot or Euen or Johnny or Margot’s constant train of visitors was huge, lonely. Its elegant spaces had a fictitious air, like an empty stage with the lights off and the actors missing.
Cristie made herself wait until half past eleven before ringing Steven’s club again. The man there said that Mr. Hazard had gone out early that morning. No, he was sorry, he didn’t know where Mr. Hazard could be located, didn’t know when he would be back. Mr. Hazard hadn’t said.
Stinging tears burned Cristie’s eyelids as she fumbled her way into the living room and sat down, a small shivering figure in the corner of a huge geranium red-leather couch. Not a word from Steven. Surely, no matter what had happened, he might have let her know. She had waited so long and she had done her part. Why hadn’t he done his? There must have been some way in which he could have gotten in touch with her.
She dashed tears from her lashes angrily. The anger was directed at herself. Steven wasn’t to blame. He couldn’t be. Steven loved her, he wouldn’t let her suffer needlessly. There was, there must be, some reason for his silence, his absence. All she had to do was wait. There couldn’t be anything really wrong or she would have heard. Her impatience was stupid. It was foolish. She was behaving like a child. But when luncheon was behind her and after she had played twelve games of solitaire and walked at least ten miles up and down the terrace and there was still no word of or from Steven, her anxiety and mounting fear got the better of her.
Another call to the club. Nothing. She called Pat Somers. Pat Somers denied all knowledge of Steven. Where else? Mary Dodd, or her niece, Kit Blaketon, might know. She rang the Dodd number and Miss Dodd offered her a measure of comfort.
“Steven? No, Miss Lansing,” she said, “Steven isn’t here now. But he often drops in on Sunday afternoon. Why don’t you come over here and wait for him? I’m practically sure he’ll be in some time before tea.”
Cristie’s growing panic began to recede. She flew into a dark-blue sport suit, creamy silk blouse, pulled a small blue hat down over her hair, disregarded a run in her stocking, put on lipstick crookedly, and snatched up the wrong gloves. It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered, if she could only see Steven, if Steven was all right.
Her eyes searched the long softly lighted living room on the second floor of the Dodd house when the maid opened the door. It was empty except for Miss Dodd. The older woman came toward Cristie, took both Cristie’s cold hands in hers and smiled down at her reassuringly.
“You look half frozen. Come and sit by the fire. There’s a nasty wind out. Steven’s not here yet. He’ll probably arrive with the crumpets. He generally does. He has a passion for them.”
Her matter-of-fact cheerfulness reassured Cristie as nothing else would have done. She was a friend of Steven’s, would .have known if he was in a jam. Cristie’s tension relaxed. They discussed indifferent topics, the autumn, the beauty of the foliage. Mary asked about the foliage in Texas. Cristie said it was nothing to the Eastern Seaboard. Mary said the coloring was just about at its height. They ought, all of them, to get a weekend in the country, perhaps at Steven’s farm, at Kokino in Dutchess County. It was a particularly lovely spot. And a little change wouldn’t do Steven any harm. He wasn’t looking particularly well.
“Nor,” said Mary, with a penetrating glance at Cristie’s pallor, “do you look well yourself, Miss Lansing, if you don’t mind my saying so. New York air is all there is in New York but it isn’t refreshing as a constant diet. This worry about Sara hasn’t helped anybody either.”
Cristie answered mechanically, her thoughts elsewhere. Why didn’t Steven come? Would he never get there? Why didn’t he hurry? Perhaps he wasn’t coming at all. And then she heard him, speaking to the maid in the hall below, heard his footsteps on the stairs, and he was in the room.
Mary Dodd was in a low slipper chair facing the fireplace and the door. She looked up and Steven came in, stared, and frowned. The lightness of her greeting was cut off in mid-air. She said, “Steve, here’s...” and stopped.
Cristie turned her head. Her worst forebodings were confirmed. Something terrible had happened to Steven. The blood drained away from her heart. He was different, utterly different. This was not the Steven she knew, the Steven to whom she had said goodbye with such high hopes less than two days ago. Two days? It might have been two years, the change in him was so awful. No, much more than two years, much more.
The essential bone structure, the height, the thick dark hair, were still there. But his bones had taken a twist, were tight in their sockets, had lost their elasticity. There was no light in Steven’s eyes, they were deep in his head. His lean cheeks had fallen in, there were lines in them, they were hollow. His carriage, his whole bearing, intensified the impression of sudden aging, as though he had been cleverly made-up to look as he would be with a decade added to his real age.
Cristie’s cry, Mary Dodd’s shocked, “Steven! What on earth is the matter? Where have you been?” produced no immediate response. Steven took off his hat and coat, folded the coat deliberately. His brown brogues were encrusted with mud and bits of briars, beggar lice and fragments of leaf were embedded in the tweed of his trouser legs.
His voice matched his appearance as he said shortly, “Nothing’s the matter and I’ve been for a walk.” Then, and not till then, he looked at Cristie. He didn’t look her full in the face. His eyes rested on her chin. He said, “Hello there,” dully, without a spark.
Cristie was dazed, too dazed to think. Why had Steven looked at her like that, as though he were surprised to see her, as though the sight of her was unwelcome, almost as though he actively resented her being there? She mumbled a reply and turned back to the fire to hide her face, the trembling of her lips.
Again, as she had done that morning, she took herself to task, trying frantically for equilibrium, for strength. She was being a fool. Steven couldn’t talk in front of Mary Dodd, of course he couldn’t no matter how well he knew her. They had agreed, hadn’t they, that his love and Cristie’s must be kept a secret from everyone. Steven was doing his part, she would have to do hers. Sit up straight, light a cigarette, join in the conversation, behave naturally until they were alone.
Steven had thrown himself into a chair some distance from the hearth. The entrance of the maid with the tea wagon created a diversion.
“Here, Eliza, in front of me,” Mary Dodd said.
The maid went out. Cristie started when Mary spoke to her. She said brightly, “One lump. And cream, please,” took the cup and sent her spoon round and round in it. The tea made a little swirl, there was a depression in the m
iddle of it. Talk between the other two, in which she joined, talk about the coming election and Cliff Somers’ chances, about Halloween and what they used to do when they were kids, about the war.
Mary knew that there was something wrong, couldn’t help knowing. She kept the conversation going, kept it away from rocks. Cristie appreciated her tact, her consideration. But if she would only go, the girl thought wearily, if she would only leave Steven and herself alone together, just for a minute.
Presently Mary did. Attempting to replenish the pot, she found the hot water jug empty. “One of Eliza’s favorite tricks,” she said. “I’ll go and fill it myself. That will be quicker.”
The door closed behind her. Cristie sat on motionless waiting for Steven to come to her, to speak.
Neither of these things happened. Steven sat where he was. He didn’t open his lips. A clock on the mantel ticked loudly, flatly. The silence in the room was unstirring except for that tick, tock. Cristie turned. She looked at Steven.
He wasn’t looking at her. His gaze was fastened on the white Adams mantel. His face with its haunted, brown-patched eyes, was harsh, set.
“Steven,” she cried, and got up out of her chair.
At her first movement, Steven rose. He walked quickly to a window and stood there looking out. Cristie stared at his back unbelievingly. Before she could speak again, his words came, level, monotonous, hammer strokes with decision behind them. He said without turning, “I’m sorry, Cristie. It’s all off. It’s no use. It’s over and done with. I’m not going to see you any more.”
That was all. The floor came up to meet Cristie. The ceiling came down. There was firelight on Steven’s dark bent head, reflected in a little tongue in the leather of his heel. Walls pressing close, crushing her, one of them fell open and Mary Dodd came in, water jug in hand. There were flowers on the water jug. Mary Dodd said something in a startled tone. Cristie didn’t hear what it was. She only knew she had to get away through that hole in the wall that was a door.
She wasn’t conscious of much after that. Between the rushes of pain and the blazing anger that consumed her she was out in the hall and was going down the stairs. At some spot before she reached the air and temporary escape, she did encounter something, something malign, the stare of a pair of green eyes from a cloud of red hair under a small hat. She thought vacantly, “That’s Mary Dodd’s niece, Kit Blaketon. Why does she hate me? She couldn’t hate me. I didn’t do anything to her.” And then the coldness of the knob was in her hand and the front door was open and she was running down the steps into the October dusk.
The dusk was a cloak under which she could hide her agony, her humiliation, her trampled pride. She had wanted to help Steven and he would have none of her help. He had cast her off as though she were an impediment, a hindrance, as though he disliked, despised her. Why had he pretended all along? That was cruel, terribly, callously cruel.
When she reached it, the lights burning all over the penthouse hurt her eyes, made her feel stripped, naked. She lifted her head. No one must know, or see, or guess. She entered the living room.
Margot was there, tall, strong, ugly and clever and very, very smart in a severe coat and skirt that had cost an enormous sum. She seemed tired. Her abstracted gaze sharpened when she looked at Cristie. She gave her a shrewd glance, but said nothing. She had just come back from Chicago. She held square, capable hands to the fire, remarked that it was bitterly cold there. “I forgot my fur coat and thought I’d freeze. How did you get along while I was away, Cristie? Did Fame take those two full-page drawings?”
Cristie said that she hadn’t finished them. Then she told Margot—there was so very much she couldn’t tell, but she could tell about the visitor with the key who had mysteriously entered and left the penthouse late the previous Friday night when both she and the maid were in bed and asleep.
In the middle of the recital Margot got up and began to wander around, puffing a cigarette. She asked Cristie a half dozen sharp questions. Cristie described exactly what had happened. Margot went to a tall chromium cabinet in a corner at the far end of the room. She pulled open the top drawer. It held song records and sheet music. There was something else in it, something small that Margot took out and examined with her back turned.
She swung around toward the fire. Her face was intent, a little haggard. The freckles sprinkled over her nose and angular cheeks stood out. A pin prick of dreary wonder pierced Cristie’s self absorption.
Margot was badly worried about something. Had it—the fear that was always with her, beyond and above and below everything else, stirred—had it anything to do with Sara’s death? No one seemed exempt, no one.
How Sara seemed to persist, a malignant entity casting an active aura of threat into the lives she had left behind. At the hearth Margot paused. She threw the thing she was holding in her hand into the fire. There was a brief flare. Cristie was so preoccupied with the queer scene that she jumped when she heard the voice.
“Good evening, Miss Lansing. Good evening, Miss St. Vrain.”
It was the Inspector. The maid had admitted McKee. He had traversed half the length of the room without either woman seeing him. He was standing directly behind Margot. His lightning glance over her shoulder was fixed on the fire and on the object she had just thrown into it. Part of it was consumed. It was a clipping from a newspaper of the announcement of Margot’s engagement to Euen Firth. The headline vanished in smoke. The whole clipping blackened. Something stood up on the blackness of the margin.
In the single fraction of a second during which it stood out boldly on the carbonized paper, McKee got it. A name was scribbled in handwriting in the margin. The handwriting, he had examined endless specimens of it, was the handwriting of Sara Hazard.
It was Margot St. Vrain’s act when she became aware of his presence that pointed up and gave significance to the scrap of paper, linking her to the dead woman. Before Margot turned, she stooped, picked up a log, and tossed it on the fire. At the impact the newspaper clipping crumpled into unrecoverable ash.
McKee made no reference to it whatever. As Margot faced him, he said pleasantly, “Sorry to intrude, Miss St. Vrain, but I’ve been wanting to see you for some days. If you wouldn’t mind answering a few questions...”
XIV
The Scotsman stood at one of the windows of the fourth floor of his apartment in a narrow red-brick house near the corner of Forty-seventh and Lexington. The city beyond and below was black ice spattered with tiny lights that were millions of electric bulbs.
It was after eight o’clock. He was expecting Fernandez, the Chief Medical Examiner, for supper. Fernandez had arrived from his vacation that afternoon.
McKee looked northward through the darkness in the direction of Margot St. Vrain’s invisible penthouse. An astute, even a bold woman. She knew her Shakespeare or its essence, had emphatically not protested too much. She hadn’t pretended to like Sara Hazard, explained Sara’s presence at the party from which the other woman had gone to her death, with a shrug, a gesture of her clever hands. Sara Hazard was an old schoolmate. They had known each other when they were young.
Margot had given him no fresh information as to anything germane to the crime that might have occurred at the party. Her own whereabouts? Her declaration that she was in bed and asleep when Sara Hazard’s accident took place was balanced by a certain rigidity in her lean, square-shouldered, greyhound body and the important fact that the elevator to and from the penthouse was self-serviced and therefore not checkable.
When he mentioned casually that he wanted to talk to her fiancé, Euen Firth, because Euen Firth had driven Sara home that night, adroitly concealed surprise and something remarkably like shock had flashed into Margot’s cool eyes. She had been in Chicago on business, didn’t know exactly where Euen was. He had spoken of a hunting trip with a friend.
The clipping that she had thrown into the fire with Sara Hazard’s handwriting on it had been very effectually destroyed. There were certain infer
ences that could be drawn from it. John St. Vrain had taken space in the Plymouth Warehouse on the day after the investigation into Sara Hazard’s death began. St. Vrain could have been the fugitive who had searched the Hazard cubicle. He could have gone there to obtain the clipping. McKee turned from the window and began to walk up and down the floor restlessly, fingering an unlighted cigarette. His brooding glance traveled over the book shelves that lined the walls, shelves filled with scientific treasures on every known subject.
He was aware of Hazard’s abortive attempt at a getaway, had just been in touch with the office by phone. A car parked in front of the old church in Hudson Street had been hired by Steven Hazard and left there at his direction. A bag in the tonneau was packed for a trip. Hazard wasn’t going away alone. Cristie Lansing had eluded her tail at the football game. A uniformed officer patrolling the Hudson Street beat had noticed a woman lingering in the neighborhood of the car, a woman who answered Cristie Lansing’s description. The dead woman’s husband and the girl with whom he was in love had planned a fadeout. Why had Hazard changed his mind at the last moment? Why had he remained in his club? Echo answered firmly that it was because something new had cropped up, some startling development that had halted Steven Hazard dead in his tracks. The Scotsman shook himself moodily.
Cristie Lansing, he was sure it was Cristie Lansing, wasn’t the only one who had been left waiting at the church in the last few days. Pat Somers had also been given the runaround. In response to a mysterious phone call, a call they had been unable to trace and which had been delivered while he was breakfasting at the Hotel Biltmore with a national committeeman from a Rocky Mountain state, Pat Somers had taken a hasty departure—to stand at the corner opposite the Cathedral for more than an hour and a half. Nobody met him, he encountered nobody. Pat was a busy man. He hadn’t gone to that spot for nothing. He had been summoned there by someone who had something of vital importance to say to him, something that couldn’t be said in any of Pat’s ordinary haunts. Odd, that second frustrated meeting. Perhaps the prevalence of the watching detectives had something to do with its non-result. And then again, perhaps not.
