Bring the Bride a Shroud
Page 13
“I did not,” corrected Jessop without turning around.
“And you might just ask about the hand ax. Whether Mr. Johns had bought a new one, for instance.”
Stacey opened his mouth to deliver something really monumental about the interference of Mr. Pennyfeather; but Mr. Johns beat him to the punch.
“I didn’t have to buy one.” He sounded squeaky and futile after Stacey’s roar. “I had one—a new one—to trim the cactus. Now I suppose you’ll tell me it was my ax somebody used to murder with. Again.”
“And you’d put it into the closet off the bath?” Mr. Pennyfeather said eagerly.
“Why not? I need one up there for the roof.”
“You’re looking for rain soon?”
The sunlight was turning yellow, and its heat was beginning to penetrate the panes. Someone laughed; a ripple of amusement, rather hysterical amusement, ran through the group. Mr. Johns hopped from one spidery leg to the other.
“Now you quit making it seem as though I’d done something wrong. When it rains here, it rains quick and it rains bucketfuls. I want an ax up there near the scuttle where I can get it in a hurry.”
Mr. Pennyfeather looked at him incredulously. “You mean that you repair the roof during a storm?”
“If I didn’t,” said Mr. Johns, “they’d drown like rats.” His gaze on the nervous guests was speculative; Mr. Pennyfeather gathered that a spot of drowning would help Mr. Johns’s temper considerably.
“But this creeping and dragging noise,” Stacey got in finally, turning back with determination to Miss Comfort. “Was it like walking? Human walking?”
“I don’t know.” She grinned nervously, an unfunny grin. “Would there be animals about?”
Stacey snorted; and Mr. Pennyfeather was seized with the conviction that she was lying, that she had made up the whole story for a cover to something else.
Taffy put up a pale, tear-stung face. “I—I thought that I heard it. I’ve just remembered.”
“What time was this, now?” Stacey tried to impress them by bringing out a notebook to scribble in.
“Well—really, I haven’t the least idea.” Her gaze fluttered around the room and fastened on Tick as on a recognized friend, and she smiled tremblingly. “I woke, and heard this sound, and wondered what the thing was. I didn’t go to look. I was afraid.”
Mr. Pennyfeather was, for a vacillating moment, almost convinced. Then he decided that Taffy was being pitiful, reminding Tick of her aloneness and fear, using Miss Comfort’s absurd ghost to bolster her act.
Glee Hazzard dug her cigarette to death in an ash tray; she looked pale and bitter and scornful. “I heard it, also. I looked out into the hall. I saw a two-headed werewolf dragging a chain and chewing an unmentionable something as he went. He had green eyes and fangs. I thought nothing of this, of course, so didn’t mention it till now.”
There was complete silence; then a mutter of anger from Stacey and hissing outrage from Miss Comfort.
“Really, Miss Hazzard, you’ve quite missed the point. We couldn’t be blamed for forgetting temporarily, for not investigating the sort of sound we heard. My life had been attempted earlier. Miss Whittemore is still suffering from the effects of a fall.”
“Miss Whittemore,” said Glee clearly, “is a liar.”
Tick winced. He half turned about, angrily; to Mr. Pennyfeather’s amazement he heard him mutter: “Glee, don’t. She’s just a kid.”
Glee hadn’t heard, nor had Taffy. Taffy had begun to weep on Miss Comfort’s white bosom.
The thing that happened next almost brought Mr. Pennyfeather to the state of thinking he’d gone crazy. Tick walked to where Taffy sat, crouching, thin inside the gray satin robe. He pulled her off Miss Comfort and looked into her face. “Don’t cry any more.”
“I’m afraid!” she wailed.
“You don’t have to be, ever again.”
Miss Comfort slid gracefully out of her chair, and Tick took it; took over, too, the job of drying Taffy’s tears.
“Now,” said Stacey, though with an air of confusion, “we’ve got to quit arguing. I’m asking for information about the murder of Mrs. Blight. I don’t want this thing cluttered up with werewolves. Nor with noises you couldn’t identify, either.”
“Good for you,” murmured Mr. Pennyfeather. He was comforted, too, by the twin ideas that either Tick’s troubles had temporarily unbalanced him or else he was simply following out Mr. Pennyfeather’s suggestion of seeing what Taffy was after. He hoped Glee remembered the last. She had turned from Tick; there was a fighting-mad look in her eye.
“I can’t worry about any more amateur reconstructions of the crime,” Stacey continued. “Don’t know for sure, now, whether Mrs. Blight had really been chloroformed. There was a strong smell of chloroform in the room, and Mr. P. here must have smelled that. Maybe it didn’t mean what he thought it did. Doc’s the only one will know that.”
The group had grown very quiet. Jessop had twisted about and was watching Tick. Miss Comfort’s grin had turned smug.
Mr. Pennyfeather offered meekly: “You might ask if anyone saw the hand ax before the crime. Mrs. Blight did before, you know.”
Stacey swatted at a fly. “O.K. Did anybody see the ax?”
There was a great variety of reflections in the eyes turned on him; Mr. Pennyfeather caught Tick’s suddenly blank stare, Miss Comfort’s indifference, Taffy’s wide-eyed glimmer. No one said anything. A bus roared in the street outside, shattering the morning, and there was a shout from some soldier fearful of being left behind. Mr. Johns sighed and shut his parchment-lidded eyes for a moment as if he wanted to sleep. Glee turned about without seeming to see Tick; she lit a new cigarette quickly.
Stacey fumbled about with the notebook, squinted at the ceiling, took a deep breath and seemed to make up his mind. “I guess I’m not getting much of anything out of you people. You either don’t know anything or won’t tell it. I guess if I did what a detective is supposed to do, I’d sneak around and find out what I wanted to know. Well, I’m not cut out that way. I’m going to ask you one more thing, open and above-board.” His tone turned flat, and he looked at them grimly, not having much hope of a result. “I’d like to know why Mrs. Blight was killed. It seems kind of reasonable that she should have said something to one of you about what she was in danger from, or who she was afraid of, or if she was involved in some way with the person who did the other killing.”
The silence began again when his words ceased. Mr. Pennyfeather was conscious of the increasing warmth, the buzzing of the flies, the glitter of a spider web against the pane outside.
Glee said tightly: “You’d have been so much more sensible to have asked for that sort of information in private.”
Stacey pounced. “Have you got something to tell me?”
“No.” She was abrupt, decisive. “It just seems to me that anyone who spoke up in front of a group like this would be sticking his neck out.”
“Yeah.” Stacey seemed to chew an invisible cud. “Guess you’ve got something there, Miss H. Tell you what, I’ll be in this downstairs office over there behind the counter for an hour or so. Any of you who want to see me can duck in when nobody’s looking. How’s that?” He tried to conceal his bafflement, his reluctance to accept the suggestion of a girl who was herself a suspect. Mr. Pennyfeather had the impression that the return of the experts would be welcome. Stacey was the law in Superstition, a fair law for the rowdy boys from Camp Frey, a stern law for the vultures who might prey upon them. He made a picturesque figure of an old-time sheriff, a survival of the roaring past. But he didn’t know what to do about Mrs. Blight and Mrs. Andler. He was neither psychologically nor scientifically equipped for the day of the microscope and the X ray, or for any motive beyond the simple ones of drunken obstreperousness or robbery.
“I guess that’s all for now,” Stacey concluded.
The group broke up at once.
Joe Jessop headed for the rear door and the alley; he
had purpose and a touch of apprehension in his face, and Mr. Pennyfeather surmised that Caroline would hear about the new trick of Taffy’s—and Tick’s reaction to it.
Miss Comfort assisted Taffy back to her room. Tick remained in the lobby; he glanced once or twice at Glee, and there seemed something he would have said. Glee didn’t give him the chance. When she had killed her last cigarette she went out into the street.
Mr. Pennyfeather hurried after her. She was on the sidewalk, standing just beyond the range of the hotel windows. She was wiping her eyes fiercely on a red sleeve. These weren’t the easy tears of Taffy; they were hot, wrung out, full of fury.
Mr. Pennyfeather touched her arm, and she flung around, and for an instant he thought she meant to hit him. Then she said, “Oh. Hello. You surprised me. I thought for a moment that stupid fool might have followed me.”
“Tick?”
He saw that she was trembling, that her clenched hands dug the pockets of the slacks, and that her mouth was tight with pain.
“Please,” he said gently. “We musn’t be upset until we hear his side.”
“I don’t have to hear his side. I know what’s happened.”
“No,” said Mr. Pennyfeather. “No, that couldn’t be.”
She nodded bleakly. “Taffy’s won. I don’t know how, but she’s put it over. He’s gone.”
Chapter Sixteen
“There are some things I shall never believe, and one of them—along with Professor Peck’s hopeful conviction about goat glands—is that Tick has fallen again for Taffy Whittemore,” said Mr. Pennyfeather firmly. More firmly, he prayed, than the chaotic uncertainty of his thoughts would indicate. “She just isn’t real enough for him.”
“Tick has one funny weakness,” Glee said after a moment. “His sense of sympathy. He’s a pushover for beggars and cripples. I’ll wager you that in some way Taffy managed to make him think she’d been terribly abused. By him.”
This was precisely what Mr. Pennyfeather had been thinking, and he hoped the fact didn’t show in his face.
“If she gets her hooks into him again—” Glee broke off, dug out a pack of cigarettes, jerked open a miniature box of matches. “I can’t think straight. I keep seeing Taffy all chopped up like Tick’s aunt and the Blight woman. Do you suppose there’s any chance of our murderer working around her way?”
“You’re going to stop saying that sort of thing now,” Mr. Pennyfeather told her. “If you don’t, I shall wash out your mouth with soap the way my aunt Elizabeth did when I came home from my ride with a mule skinner. You might start a new tack, too, by giving me that list I asked you to make.”
She looked at him blankly, then ran narrow fingers into a pocket. “Oh. I’d forgotten it.” A tattered piece of paper showed bright in the sunlight. “There they are, all my little chores. I even put in my bubble bath.”
Mr. Pennyfeather studied the sheet, reading aloud in a mutter: “Washed Iast pair of nylons…. Dusted suitcase…. Called Joe at the garage and asked him to check the car…. Made a swiss cheese sandwich and some tea, ate same…. Shampoo….” He glanced up at her. “This hair washing. Anything in the way of preparation for it?”
“Just—well, soaking my head. But that was the night before.”
“Soaking it with what?”
“A kind of oil. You know. Some of that miracle stuff that practically drags the men along the street after you—if you believe in ads.”
Mr. Pennyfeather drew a long breath; he wasn’t looking at Glee, though, but at the front of the hotel. He wore an expression of worry and surmise. “You soaked your head with this glamour stuff and then—”
“Rubbed it in, combed like mad. The way you’re supposed to do.”
“And the hair combings?”
She had grown a little paler and was looking at him oddly. “I don’t really remember. I suppose I must have put them into the wastebasket in the bathroom. I think I do know, though, what you’re getting at. You’re trying to run down that hair that Stacey found in Mrs. Andler’s comb.”
He nodded: “I was sure some sort of rigmarole with an oil treatment had gone on before you wrapped up in those bandages. You’d want to be quite pretty for Tick when the wrappings came off.”
She winced, turned her face away.
“I could have asked you outright and not been sure but that I’d put the idea into your head myself. I had to be sure, this way.”
“There is only one person who could have wound my hair into Mrs. Andler’s comb.”
“It would seem so.” He nodded, still with the touch of worry.
“This is a nightmare, isn’t it?” He saw the signs of strain in her face, the gradual narrowing and washing away of the alive look that had been so attractive. “Why should she want to implicate me in the murder of Tick’s aunt? Could she herself be guilty? Or just wanting me to be taken in?”
He didn’t answer at once. His shadow on the sidewalk was grasshopper-thin, sharp with an air of caution. “Look. I do hate to ask you to sit locked in your room all day.”
“It’s going to be another sizzler,” she agreed, looking into the coppery sky.
“I know. But it’s you, not Taffy, I keep seeing chopped up like Mrs. Andler. And I’m worried.”
She didn’t react much. He had the feeling that her emotions had gradually become wrung out, like an overworked mop, and that there were just rag ends to apply to her own possible danger. She drew the neck of the red jacket a little closer. There was a trace of perspiration on her temple, against the shining line of dark hair. That could be the heat, of course.
“I’ll stay in if you say I should.”
“Stacey’ll be around,” Mr. Pennyfeather told her. “You might step out for a breath of fresh air when you hear him up there.”
“Stacey’s waiting in Mr. Johns’s office for someone to tell him something.” She smiled briefly. “For me, I think. He’s sure I want to tell him a deep, deep secret.”
“Someone else—an unpleasant someone—might have thought the same thing,” Mr. Pennyfeather pointed out.
“I’ll be careful.”
She walked away quickly, leaving Mr. Pennyfeather in the sun. He watched until her figure vanished into the hotel lobby; then, having observed no one observing him, he walked off in the direction of Mrs. Jessop’s.
Mrs. Jessop was in her kitchen mixing biscuit dough. She rubbed flour off her hands, unhooked the screen for him, smiled with what might have been a touch of weariness. “I hear you’ve had more trouble,” she said. There was a dark smudge under each eye, a look of close control about her mouth. “Another woman, too. Can’t Stacey stop things like that?”
She spoke as though Stacey were a schoolmaster faced with a few problem pupils.
“He’s doing pretty well,” Mr. Pennyfeather said, deciding to give Stacey the benefit of the doubt so far as Mrs. Jessop was concerned. “He’s being hampered. The case is very involved, and the people in it haven’t co-operated with him.”
She began again with the spoon, rubbing it around inside the bowl with the dough bulging before it. “This second woman was no relative of Mr. Burrell’s, was she?”
“None at all.” He was eyeing sausage, laid out on a waxed sheet in generous patties, green-apple slices dusted with brown sugar and cinnamon ready to fry beside it.
“What was she doing here?”
He dragged his thoughts from the food, wondering if Mrs. Jessop didn’t already know these answers from Mr. Jessop. But he explained: “She was sort of rooting for one of Tick’s ex-fiancées. A combination spiritual adviser and ringmaster.”
She gave him a quick glance. “How did she do at it?”
Mr. Pennyfeather had the intuitive idea that she was checking on her husband’s report. Had Jessop told her of Tick’s action that morning in the lobby? “She was very active,” he evaded. “Active and vocal.”
There was a sudden sharp scrape of the spoon. “Someone should be rooting for Caroline a bit, don’t you think?”
He was saved from having to answer Mrs. Jessop’s broad hint by Caroline’s sudden appearance from the front room.
She made the sort of picture they put up for WAC recruiting posters: scrubbed and shining and full of businesslike energy. She smiled at Mr. Pennyfeather, walked across the kitchen and picked up a sugared apple slice and turned, nibbling at it. “My leave’s almost up. You might tell Tick that, when you see him.”
“I’ll do that,” said Mr. Pennyfeather, waggling an eyebrow to let her know he wanted to see her in private.
She walked casually back toward the front of the house. “If you’ll come and sit down, I’ll scratch a note for him.”
He sensed Mrs. Jessop’s gaze probing him as he went out.
“Perhaps, too,” Caroline went on, “Aunt Lou will give you some apples after she has them fried.”
“Of course,” said Mrs. Jessop—not so warmly as before.
In the big front room, on the other side of the oilcloth-covered tables set for breakfast, Caroline led him to two chairs, one of them before a desk. It was a small, work-worn desk, and Mr. Pennyfeather had the sudden hunch that Caroline had studied here when she went to high school.
She sat down at the desk, looked significantly toward the kitchen. “It’s all right,” she said.
On the battered desk top, up under the edge of a cubbyhole, was a little heart gouged with an uneven line. There were initials inside the heart: one, he thought, was clearly a C. The other might be an F.
He was looking at the dark mark on the wood when he asked: “I was hoping you might help me find your friend Freddy.”
Her eyes followed his instantly, guiltily. She took a sheet of scrap paper out of the cubbyhole and let it settle below. “Freddy? I don’t see why you’d want to meet him.”
“I did once. Did you know?”