The Smiling Tiger

by Lenore Glen Offord

  “You know who. The woman who rents David Shere’s property in the City.”

  “Oh, that woman. Mrs.—oh, yes, of course. But what would she have to do with us, now?”

  “She had something to do with you a while back. You got her that place, you recommended her to Shere—someone in this family did, at any rate. I shouldn’t be surprised if one of you put up the money for her deposit.”

  This was another shot in the dark, but he saw it register in the flutter of Ryn’s eyelashes. She said, composedly enough, “Well, what did she do to you?”

  “She told us a number of unpleasant lies,” said Todd. His voice was twanging now, like a deliberately plucked wire. “And the basis for those lies came from somewhere in this family. On the day that you and Cass had lunch with us, our daughter Barby took you to her room to freshen up, didn’t she? She talked to you for some time. There’s a picture of her father in that room. She told you his story, didn’t she?”

  “I—I don’t remember.” Ryn’s face was enclosed and wary.

  “Mrs. Trumbull used that story today, but not on her own. She had someone in that place directing her, telling her how to change plans on the spur of the moment when I turned up unexpectedly. She changed them, not very skilfully, and then—she disappeared, clean off the map, and I’d guess she did her disappearing out the back door with the person who was directing things. Now, where do you suppose she went? I’d like to renew my acquaintance with Mrs. Trumbull. I’d like it very much.”

  “I scarcely know the woman,” said Ryn coolly, “and I wouldn’t have the faintest idea where she went. What were the plans?”

  “That’s another thing I don’t know.” Todd had not taken his eyes from hers. “I only know that it felt bad, like the concentrated solution of evil, and that one of you had a part in it. That was a blunder, you see. The police can’t do anything, because the plan failed, but I can do something. That’s what I wanted you to realize.”

  He got up. He told himself that he wished to heaven he knew what it was that he could do, but no hint of this uncertainty had sounded in his voice. There was a good chance that he’d stirred something up, and that someone would really be frightened.

  Ryn rose with him. “I suppose,” she said, “you wouldn’t believe me if I said there was no—what did you call it, conspiracy? That you are just suffering from an obsession?”

  “No, I wouldn’t believe you.” Todd picked up his hat from the bookcase near the door, where he had laid it beside the alligator purse. “You’ll see that Miss Godfrey gets her handbag?”

  Ryn looked away from him. “Yes,” she said tonelessly. “I—I’ll care of it.”

  “And, if you really don’t know what’s going on, how about taking care of yourself?”

  The gray-green eyes flashed up to his. “Will you go home?” she said, wrenching the door open.

  Todd drove home thoughtfully, and still thoughtfully mounted the steps to his own front door. The wife-sitter was at the telephone in the lower hall, giving a strong impression that he had gone to it immediately after Todd left and hadn’t moved since. This, however, was not quite the case; the youth reported that everything had been quiet except for once when the back door had blown open. “I went out to look,” he said responsibly. “I kind of figured you wanted a man in the house just for that sort of thing. Nobody was there, though, I guess it was the wind.”

  When the sitter had been paid and dismissed, Todd also went out to look. The yard was serene and domestic under a flood of moonlight that artistically touched up the whirligig and the big empty clothes-basket propped at the corner. The next-door windows were dark, but on the hill above, houses were close-set along the irregular streets, against the contour, and their white stucco and wood caught the moonlight almost dazzlingly among the black shapes of trees. Though it was not very late, even as he watched some of the gold squares of their windows blinked out.

  Todd went upstairs. His wife was still asleep and safe, and he went to bed himself, wearier with bafflement than with exertion.

  It was much later when he awoke to find Georgine standing with chattering teeth beside his bed, and urging him to move over. “I’m scared again, Todd,” she said apologetically, sliding under the covers and pressing her head against his shoulder.

  “Bad dream?” he said.

  “No. I hate to be so traditional, but I’m sure I heard noises downstairs.”

  “Want me to go down?”

  “Yes—no—I don’t know. I have visions of you getting shot…”

  “I won’t get shot. I’ll leave my own gun up here, that’s safest.”

  “I’d go with you,” said Georgine faintly, “so we could die together, only my knees won’t hold up.”

  Todd went down, soundlessly. There was no one in the house, and nothing but deep shadow in the yard; only the kitchen door had once more slipped its latch and was banging in the fitful wind. He put a chair against it; if he couldn’t fix it himself tomorrow, they’d have to call a locksmith.

  Georgine was still in his bed, with her head frankly buried under the covers; she emerged with relief when he reported. He said, “Stay here for a while, till you get calmed down,” and laid his arm lightly over her. The heartbeats that had shaken her whole body gradually diminished, and one by one her tense muscles softened.

  “Funny, the little extra things you love people for,” she murmured after a time.

  “I’m waiting,” Todd mentioned.

  “You always know when not to laugh.”

  “Well, that’s good as far as it goes.”

  There was another, longer silence. Presently she said in a drowsy monotone, “I guess I’d better go back to my own bed so we can get some sleep.”

  “You don’t mind if I laugh at that one?” Todd inquired.

  CHAPTER NINE

  LOCKSMITHS, IT APPEARED on investigation the next morning, were so far participating in the current prosperity that they could be high-handed about employment. The kindest of them was willing to rearrange his schedule so that he could repair the McKinnons’ back door a week from the next Monday. When advised of their needs he merely said, “Whyn’tcha put a chair under the knob and go out the front?” and hung up.

  “And the chair,” Todd observed, “I’d already thought of.” He bent once more to fiddle with the lock, whose repair was beyond his powers. When he straightened up, it was to glance around the kitchen as if trying to capture an elusive memory. “I keep thinking that there was something different here when I came down the second time last night,” he said slowly. “The first time, just after young Al left, I didn’t look around inside as carefully as I might; but there was some li’le thing that photographed itself on my mind, and I can’t get it now.”

  “Well, nothing’s missing,” Georgine said, hanging up the last cup and flinging her dishtowel over a rack. “All the pots and pans are here, and the remains of the cake, and the knives—now, if our steak knife had gone, we could really get worried.”

  “No, it was something on a wall. As you say, though, there’s nothing missing now.” He sat down beside the table and began absently to run a scale or two on his mouth-organ.

  Georgine waited. In a minute or two he would work up to the Running Jump Symphony, and when—yes, there it came. “Look, chum,” she said ominously, “you can’t do that there ’ere. I’m going mad hearing that theme. Can’t we talk it out?”

  “What? Oh. Yes, I suppose so. Georgine, if you wanted to lose a horse, where would you take it?”

  “Haven’t you got that wrong?” Georgine said. “I thought it was, ‘I thought where I’d go if I was a horse and I went there’—”

  “No, I meant what I said.”

  “I see.” She thought for a moment. “Well, I suppose in a field with a lot of other horses.”

  “Yes.” He tapped the mouth-organ on his palm, his agate eyes narrowed and hard. “I wonder if there are any landladies’ conventions, or clubs, or hideouts.”

  “Are you
still thinking about that woman?”

  “Still thinking. Does it bother you?”

  “No, I’ve recovered pretty well.” Georgine polished the drainboard. “It—the thing that bothers me most is the uncertainty, not knowing what would have happened to me; it would be easier somehow if I knew they’d meant to kill me.”

  Todd looked at her soberly for an appreciable time. Then he said, “You’ve never been to the Colony. Want to drive out there with me?”

  Georgine’s heart seemed to leap sideways like a skittish colt. Mentally she spoke soothing words to it, telling herself that Todd had been safe on that other occasion, that she’d be with him, that she needn’t even get out of the car unless she chose…

  “All right,” she said finally. “I suppose there’s some definite reason?”

  “Not definite. Just a long chance.” He got up and went into the hall. “While you’re getting dressed I want to make a telephone call.”

  From upstairs she could hear him, not all the words, but enough to make out that he was talking to Mrs. Majendie. One sentence rose clearly. “Not yet? You haven’t looked for her?” Then the softer murmur again.

  He explained, as they got into the car. “I wondered if Miss Godfrey might have gone back to the Colony the other night. Mrs. Majendie says no, that it would be unlikely, and that she hasn’t seen her since the big scene on Tuesday, but that she’d evidently been home—which we knew already— and had cleaned up the house in a frenzy of leave-taking and done a few things about the garden that she’d been putting off.”

  “Why do you want Miss Godfrey?” Georgine said. “No, you drive, I don’t want to be entertained with mouth-organ solos all the way out there.”

  Todd started the car. “I don’t want her. I most particularly don’t want her at the Colony. She’s probably got some other place she goes to when the Cosmos won’t vibrate right.”

  They were through the tunnel and running smoothly along through the milder air of the Orinda section before Georgine said, “Todd, do you think this whole thing began at the Colony?”

  “It depends,” he said thoughtfully, “on which theory and which motive I’m on at the moment. If Chloe Majendie’s been directing the Hand of God, it started when Nikko Majendie was caught getting out of that warm bed, but if she didn’t take revenge on his partner in sin, that theory falls through. I sure hate to give it up—I’ve never bagged a Ritual Repeater.”

  Georgine gave a spurt of unsympathetic laughter. “I doubt if anyone ever has. But what about it if Nikko died naturally?”

  “Then it might still have started out here, with the one who had the forbidden baby—and was probably nursed by Joan, too. The old girl has her uses; you could forgive quite a lot of oddities if you had a good chauffeur and gardener and nurse rolled into one. —Joan was around, no doubt, when Bell Johnson started off on her wedding trip,” said Todd meditatively, “and she was certainly there when Hartlein paid his evening call and laid the inhaler on the table, and had to be reminded of it.”

  They drove for a mile or so in silence. Then Georgine said, “Todd, I don’t see how a person could follow two or three patterns at once.”

  “How’s that again?”

  “Look; you’ve got Joan being a Ritual Repeater, and a Maniac, and a Perfect Murderer—trying to implicate someone else—and even, partly, the Policeman’s Little Helper. It’s too much.”

  He thought it over, slowing the car to watch the road signs. “You’ve got a point there. Of course, I don’t confine myself to that one theory. What if the murders didn’t start at the Colony, but with the death of Bell and her husband? They might be caused by simple greed. We’ve got Cass and Ryn both inheriting from Bell; we’ve got Cass collecting some of Hartlein’s insurance, and technically both of those murders are of the Perfect type… Or suppose that old debbil Sex is at the bottom of all this, you could see David Shere bumping off his lost love and the successful rival, all in one, and then going on to the just impediment in the person of Hartlein, and removing that, and even taking a few swipes at a sister who might be some other kind of impediment.”

  “No, I couldn’t. The methods are too indirect.”

  Todd slowed for a turn, and glanced sideways at her. “Ah, my dear stooge, but have you considered that that furious manner Shere affects may be put on just so that we’ll consider him a big straightforward bumbling schoolboy? ‘Not in character,’ we say, and dismiss him. If you could really work a personality disguise, it’d beat all the false beards and plastic surgery that ever turned up in the history of crime.”

  “Okay, but I’ll stick to my own character reading. And not one of these patterns takes in that business with the Trumbull, yesterday.”

  “No,” Todd said, “but if we could get to the bottom of that, maybe we could work it in. You know what it fits? The pattern of the Nervous Murderer, and we haven’t got one of those yet.”

  “Well, dear, by all means have one. Let’s get in the whole collection, even if we have to kill me off to make it plausible.”

  Todd laughed callously and swung the car into the gateway of the Beyond-Truth Colony.

  The grass circle was as smooth and verdant as ever, the walks and shrubbery as neat, but today the Sabbath hush was absent. There were sounds of activity, of lawn-mowers and clippers and voices calling; in fact, the first person the McKinnons met was Mr. Alvah Burke, clad in overalls, standing on a ladder and clipping away at the top of a hedge near the circle. He turned and saw them and descended with a look of ingenuous pleasure on his sprightly old face. “Well, well,” he said. “Back again, eh? And with a lady, too. There’s lots of our visitors that get interested and come back.”

  Todd introduced him to Georgine, and added, “I’m afraid we’re still in no state to be converted, Mr. Burke. We came to call on one of your other visitors.”

  “Yes? Who would it be?”

  “She calls herself Mrs. Trumbull, but that may not be the name she’d give you. She would have come here last night, and I think that one of Mrs. Majendie’s nieces would have brought her out and arranged for her stay.”

  “A stranger, you mean? There’s not a soul here that we don’t know,” said Mr. Burke, and shook his head for added emphasis, his candid old eyes on Todd’s. “I guess you made a mistake, Mr. McKinnon. Nobody’s here but our own members.”

  Todd grinned at him. “Honest, Mr. Burke? We just want to talk to the guest, that’s all. You mean nobody came here last night?”

  “No one but members.” The old gentleman smiled back at him. “That’s World Truth, sir.”

  “Nobody could have come without your knowing?”

  “Well, now, that’s possible. You might ask the ladies, I reckon. There’s a lot of them over there turning out the guest cottage.”

  Todd thanked Mr. Burke, and directed Georgine across the circle toward the guest cottage. “Hell,” he said in a low voice as they walked, “I think he is telling World Truth, too. Most transparent old codger I ever met. We might as well look around, though.”

  As they neared the guest cottage, it was evident that the ladies who “took pride,” in Mr. Burke’s earlier phrase, were doing it today in the most strenuous fashion. Cheerful elderly voices were exchanging directions and comment from every point in the cottage’s vicinity; a corps of four were washing windows, several more were attacking wicker furniture with a paint-spray gun, and a plump gentleman was pruning vines under the instruction, given in no uncertain terms, of another. The ladies had all protected their hair with bandannas, and their wash dresses and aprons might have been photographed on the spot for a soap advertisement.

  “Oh, dear,” Georgine murmured. “I ought to wash our upstairs windows this week.”

  “Easy,” Todd said. “I didn’t bring you out here to get those ideas in your head.” He tipped his hat back to look up at a window whence one of the ladies had just hailed him by name.

  “Good morning,” she was saying briskly. “We were sorry you and your friend cou
ldn’t stay for the meeting on Tuesday.” He had to gaze at her for an appreciable moment before he recognized the Miss Cortelyou who had guided him, today wearing her nice old face completely unadorned.

  He repeated his request, while Georgine stood mutely trying to look as if she had left her own house in irreproachable order: a difficult feat at any time.

  “Why, no,” said Miss Cortelyou after a minute’s pause, “I haven’t seen anyone who isn’t a member. All the ladies are here this morning, anyway. You can look around and see for yourself.”

  “When I made that remark about the field of horses,” said Georgine, sotto voce, “I should have added that the horses ought to be all alike.” A shapeless gray-faced woman working with a spray gun, who might have been near enough to hear a word or two, glanced up at her and looked faintly surprised; and then wiped her forehead with a short sleeve and returned to work.

  “Well, Holmes,” Georgine added, “it was a wonderful idea, only it didn’t work.”

  Todd shook his head. He had completed a survey of all the visible ladies, and now was leading his wife slowly around to the back of the cottage where one or two other workers were hanging blankets on a line. Georgine could sense the rising of those invisible antennae of his; he let go her arm and walked quickly around to confront a woman whose face had been hidden.

  “Oh, how do you do,” the woman’s voice said pleasantly. “I hope Mr. Burke told you all you wanted to know, the other day?” Todd’s voice, politely answering, sounded deflated.

  “ ‘A blank, my lord,’ ” said Georgine softly as they retraced their steps.

  “You’re right, damn it. I expect we’d better go back to the City and look for that landladies’ convention.” He took off his hat in farewell to Miss Cortelyou and started back across the lawns. “And I can tell you that, from the landladies I’ve known, I’d just as soon jump into a den of lions.”

  “How do they keep their grass like this?” Georgine inquired inattentively. “It’s almost like a putting green.”