The Smiling Tiger

by Lenore Glen Offord

  They reached the car. Todd held open the door for her, and she got in, smiling. “I’ve just reacted to the landladies’ convention. It’s one of those pictures that kind of builds up in your mind, all of the brass-haired and high-busted ones in a solid phalanx, with those distrustful eyes on you and their eyebrows… Todd!”

  “What’s the matter?”

  “We’re a pair of perfect fools! Didn’t you rather expect to find Mrs. Trumbull with all her make-up on?”

  Todd paused in the act of inserting his ignition key. “You think one of those women was the Trumbull after all?”

  “You don’t know what a difference it makes if you take off everything.”

  “That I would have noticed, like the witches’ sabbath.”

  “Lunkhead,” said Georgine without rancor. “I mean the eyebrows, the mascara, the corsets—and the henna. Yes, I looked too, for an edge of red hair to show under one of those kerchiefs, and they were all gray except for the one with the spray gun. Hers was still pinkish, Todd. She couldn’t wash out all the henna overnight.”

  “Nobody but members,” he said slowly, thoughtfully. “I believed that story. I still believe it. But if those old innocents were telling the truth both ways—Georgine; wait here for a minute.”

  It was not much more than the actual sixty seconds before he came back through the screen of trees that masked the guest cottage. Ahead of him walked the woman who had been using the spray gun. She walked hurriedly, unsteadily, with her head bent, like the pictures of an accused person coming out of court and ducking the photographers.

  Todd herded her almost to the car; he sat her down on a stone bench on the edge of the grass circle, and beckoned Georgine to join him. The woman looked up defiantly, and it was easy enough now to paint, in imagination, the black eyebrows and the dark lipstick on her colorless face, and to recognize her.

  “Georgine,” said Todd softly, “this is Mrs. Trumbull, of course, but it’s also Frances Sagers.”

  Georgine’s eyes began to spark a vivid and ominous blue. They met Todd’s, hard as a whetstone, and the woman’s, sullen and fearful. Slowly she got out of the car, closed the door and leaned against it.

  “So they were telling the truth,” she said. “Once a member, always a member; and the old people took you in because they thought you’d returned to the fold. It might have worked except that my husband spotted the connection between you and the Beyond-Truth.” She waited a minute, remembering the cruelty of the lies that had been told her yesterday. “Todd, do the people out here know what kind of member she was—what she did to Dr. Majendie?”

  “Not yet,” said Todd. He glanced at Mrs. Trumbull, who had shut her mouth in an ugly stubborn line. Georgine guessed what kind of pressure he had exerted to get the woman to come with him.

  “They couldn’t do anything,” said Mrs. Trumbull roughly. “They wouldn’t—the old softies. Wouldn’t even believe you.”

  “They’d believe Mrs. Majendie,” Todd pointed out. “She’d be interested personally, too. You got off too easily that other time. She was sorry for you—and she went farther yet, she recommended you for the job at the lodging-house.”

  “I didn’t do anything.”

  “Perhaps not, but what was done couldn’t have been fixed up without your connivance.” Todd looked at her implacably, and his eyes narrowed. “Where were you, all those years between the early Thirties and the middle Forties?”

  “None of your business.”

  “We can find out from Mrs. Majendie. She’ll tell us when she knows it’s important. But in the meantime, I can make a guess. Shere said you’d come ‘from the South,’ but I’d bet that it wasn’t any farther south than the Tehachapi Mountains. You were in the women’s prison, weren’t you?”

  The woman said nothing, but a muscle twitched in her face.

  “What you pulled on Dr. Majendie,” Todd added, “was the old hotel-room con game. You probably tried it again, and one of the times you got caught.”

  Georgine watched the colorless face. Trumbull wasn’t the smartest deceiver in the world; her eyes jerked nervously sideways and her lips tightened. Georgine nodded as she met Todd’s look.

  “And after you got out, you came crawling back to Mrs. Majendie, and said you were sorry, you meant to go straight now, she’d been kind to you before and maybe she’d help you again. That was the set-up, wasn’t it? But,” said Todd softly, “You weren’t going straight yesterday. She’ll have to know that, and so will the police. You know about terms for multiple offenses.”

  “I didn’t do anything,” Mrs. Trumbull burst out again, a frightened tremor in her voice. “She came over there and made me do it—threatened me, same as you’re doing now, only she was going to tell Mr. Shere all about me, he didn’t know before.”

  “Who came over there?”

  “That girl, that girl! And it didn’t sound like any great harm, she knew a woman in Berkeley who’d been telling lies about her, and she wanted to give her a scare. That’s what she said.”

  “What girl?” Todd repeated patiently.

  The Trumbull’s voice was sullen. “The Johnson girl.”

  “Which one?” said Georgine with emphasis.

  “I don’t know. I can’t hardly tell ’em apart, I never saw much of either of ’em, only that time they took me to see Mr. Shere. She just said she was Miss Johnson.”

  “What did she look like?”

  “Well, kind of middle-sized, pretty, with dark hair. She had on one of those camel-hair coats that cost a mint.”

  “They both have them. How about her eyes, and her hair, and the shape of her face?”

  “I don’t know, I tell you. She had on dark glasses, those slantwise ones, kind of like a mask—and her eyes looking through—” She paused, swallowed and added, “But you couldn’t see the color.”

  “Mrs. Trumbull,” said Todd with quiet concentration, “that sounds as if you’d felt something wrong about her too. She frightened you, didn’t she? Aside from the threats, I mean?”

  “Yes, she did. I don’t know why. I didn’t want to—so help me, I did go straight after I got out, and I got a man friend that’s—well, she did scare me into it. And she said there wasn’t any harm in what was going to happen.”

  “But what was planned?”

  “I don’t know.” The rough voice was desperate. “I was just to do the telephoning, and meeting at the door, and then show you—” she looked at Georgine, with a sort of miserable appeal in her eyes—“to the stairs. I don’t know what else.”

  “And then the plan was changed, because my wife didn’t, after all, come alone. The Johnson girl rushed you out the back door, isn’t that so?”

  “That’s right. Said there was going to be trouble, and I better get out. And she drove me to the bus station and left me. I was to stay out here until she ’phoned me to come back.”

  “There was going to be trouble,” said Todd thoughtfully. “There still could be, you know, unless we find out which of the Johnson girls worked out that plan.”

  “What was her hair like?” Georgine said.

  The woman shrugged. “I told you. Black. Done up in a kind of thick roll at the back of her neck, coming up to cover her ears.”

  “Could have been either of them,” Todd said. His eyelids contracted, and he met Georgine’s look. She shook her head. She said, “That hair-do would disguise the shape of her cheeks, and so would the glasses. She didn’t mean Mrs. Trumbull to know which one she was.”

  Todd stood up. “Perhaps we’d better take you in to talk to the police—and Mrs. Majendie.”

  “No, for God’s sake,” the woman said with sudden desperation. “I couldn’t tell you any more, I swear it. And you know nothin’ happened, you can’t pin that business on me! Just lemme stay here, I won’t move from the place. You tell the old people I’ve got to.”

  “That might do,” said Todd deliberately. He looked at Georgine again and gave an infinitesimal shrug. She knew what he meant;
there was, after all, nothing of which to accuse Mrs. Trumbull, and there was also the strong impression that she had told all—or nearly all—she knew. She would be safe here.

  And yet—there was the uncertainty, still unresolved, and the added fact that this woman also had felt the sense of something wrong. Eyes, looking at her through dark tilted glasses: that had been enough.

  “Let’s drop it,” said Georgine abruptly. “For now, anyway.”

  Todd nodded. In silence he gestured to Mrs. Trumbull, so that she rose and started back, walking behind him, across the green circle. Georgine sat waiting for him, feeling that if she moved too suddenly her nerves would give out an audible twang. Something wrong was abroad, something evil, but nothing that you could grasp; an evil so nebulous that for the police and the law it would not exist; a crime as yet invisible, related to life only as the Beyond-Truth was to ordinary fact, a kind of vibration of wrong-doing which only the initiate could see.

  Todd came back. Watching his approach, she thought, —We’ll drive home, we’ll be in time for a late lunch, and afterward I am really going to wash the upstairs windows; I might even—yes, I will, I’ll put the bedroom rugs through the washer.—

  ***

  The lunch part of this program went off as planned, but the rest of it fell far short of Georgine’s ideal. She had seen herself being the conscientious housewife while Todd was at home, scrubbing away to the accompaniment of cheerful sounds from the typewriter. It developed, however, that Todd meant to drive up to Cuckoo Canyon and gently sound out Mrs. Majendie on the subject of Frances Sagers’ relations with her nieces.

  “Oh, Todd, no!” she said violently. “You’re just sticking your neck out!”

  “Dear Georgine, I’ve got to stick it out. I’ve got to get those damned stories of mine into workable shape. Do you know how many I’ve managed to finish so far? Two; and not masterpieces, either. It’s not enough.”

  She answered his inquiring look. “Of course I’m scared. Nobody seems to have a sense of danger except me. Hugh Hartlein did, of course; and look what happened to him!”

  “As a matter of fact,” said Todd rather sheepishly, “the police say that he was a suicide.”

  Georgine looked at him. “Now he tells me! How did they finally decide on that?”

  “Three days before he died he’d sent an old suit up to his mother’s home. They found aluminum filings embedded in the material, and traces of crystalline cyanide in a pocket. He made that inhaler himself. They think he stole the cyanide from the Majendie greenhouse, and of course he planted the experimental inhalers in the compost heap.”

  “You sound,” Georgine said, “as if that doesn’t satisfy you.”

  “It’s hard to go against that kind of evidence,” said Todd slowly. “Maybe I’d be like Nelse and say that the case is closed, except for those goings-on yesterday. They might have fitted into a murder pattern, but they certainly don’t into a suicide. And maybe the police can afford to ignore the Trumbull business; I can’t.”

  “Oh, dear me. I see. If there’s no mystery about Hartlein, that other thing is just—the result of dislike.”

  “Yes, and who hates you that much?”

  “I thought nobody did,” said Georgine plaintively. “I’ve done nothing but ply them with creamed shrimps and coffee and Coca-Cola, and I wish to heaven they’d feed me some time! The only one—”

  “Yes?”

  “I can’t make anything of this either, but every time David Shere and I have met we’ve ended up fighting—or at least, he’s been mad at me.”

  “And that doesn’t fit any of the patterns either,” said Todd, unhappily running a palm across his hair, “unless he got the idea that you’d done him out of the money. I admit I wouldn’t mind finding out that it was Shere. I want very much to poke somebody in the nose over that business yesterday. You’re sure you won’t put the Curse of Rome on me if I go now?”

  “No, I think you have to be at least a Cardinal to do that. But I will assert myself somehow; wear a sweater under your coat!”

  “I’ll wear five sweaters if you like,” said Todd, springing up. “Batten down the hatches, Georgine, and don’t speak to any strange men. I shouldn’t be gone more than an hour.”

  He drove slowly up to Cuckoo Canyon under a sky which today was veiled by a thin, mean-looking haze behind which the sun and all warmth had retired. The wind had blown itself nearly out. Gardeners who would not have dared to light a trash fire in the dry northern gale of the past few days were now busily raking up leaves and cramming them into incinerators, or watching over smoldering piles in the gutters, hurrying to get their yards cleaned up before the winter rains began in earnest. Todd sniffed the pleasant smoke soberly. His mind was busy with the proper opening for the afternoon’s business: —Mrs. Majendie, we’ve found Frances Sagers, but I assure you it was quite by accident; —Mrs. Majendie, just how much do your nieces know about Frances Sagers’ past history? —Mrs. Majendie…

  He hadn’t yet found the really tactful approach when the low redwood house came in sight over the top of the cliff. He parked his car beside the Majendie driveway and strolled into the garden, where a shapeless felt hat was moving deliberately along behind a tall row of chrysanthemum bushes.

  Chloe Majendie reached the end of the row and saw him. She said, “Good afternoon, Mr. McKinnon,” in her beautiful deep voice, and came into the open with her eyes fixed on his. “How may I help you this time?”

  “By letting bygones be bygones, for one thing,” Todd replied. “When this is all over, Georgine and I would very much like to call on you as friends.”

  “And I should like to have you. But surely ‘this’ is all over now?”

  “Not quite, I think. I was a li’le worried over Miss Godfrey, Mrs. Majendie.”

  “I doubt that you need to be,” said the old lady kindly.

  “Has she come home, may I ask?”

  “No, not yet. I never have known where she’s gone on her other—let us call them, leaves of absence.” Mrs. Majendie’s eyes twinkled faintly. “Nor have I known when to expect her, but I think she’ll be home soon.” She looked at him curiously. “Was it she who inspired this call?”

  “As it happens, no,” said Todd, smiling. “I was just leading up to my other subject in what I hoped was a graceful way. Easing into it, you know. Start with Joan, ask if her handbag had been returned safely, work round to your nieces—seemed less abrupt, I thought.”

  Mrs. Majendie’s attention had been caught earlier in his remarks. “Her handbag?” she said. “Joan’s?”

  “Yes. It was left at our place, and I returned it to Ryn last night.”

  “Was her money in it, Mr. McKinnon?”

  “Yes. Rather a large amount, I believe.” He debated a moment and added, “Georgine said that Miss Godfrey was a bit upset, still, and indicated she didn’t want to take along anything you’d given her.”

  “That would scarcely include money. She earned her salary.” Chloe’s lips pressed together briefly. “Will you come in, Mr. McKinnon?”

  Todd followed her into the house, and sat down on the chair she indicated. From another room her voice sounded intermittently, the words inaudible. It was evident that she was telephoning. —So much for tact, he told himself resignedly. — The old lady’s got off on another subject and I’ll never get her back to Frances Sagers until she’s exhausted it.—

  It was perhaps ten minutes before Mrs. Majendie reappeared, and when she did her craggy old face looked flushed and anxious. “I called Ryn,” she said. “The child’s been asleep all morning after a bad night, and hadn’t had a chance to bring the bag up. And I called the bank. Joan hasn’t cashed any checks, Mr. McKinnon. She would need money; she’s not as unworldly as that.” She paused a moment, and her keen eyes seemed to glaze over. “I believe I will sit down. —This is Thursday afternoon, and I haven’t seen Joan since she left us at the Colony on Tuesday. She was gone when I got home that night.”

  “We
saw her here at about six o’clock. She was sweeping the porch,” said Todd.

  “Yes, I noticed. Coals of fire on my head, was how I interpreted it. She did a number of odd jobs that we usually finished together: swept every ash out of the fireplace, tied up the old newspapers, fumigated the—”

  Her voice broke off as if something had clutched her windpipe. She had been gazing past Todd; now she looked at him squarely, and her weathered face turned ashen gray. “She fumigated the greenhouse,” she said on the merest thread of sound. “I saw the sign on the door, ‘Danger, cyanide fumes, do not open for forty-eight hours.’—That last is to make sure that the fumigation is thorough. But—I didn’t go in.”

  Todd said nothing. The little core of concentration was drawing together in his mind.

  Old Chloe’s voice and vigor had returned. “There’s only one thing to do, of course,” she said, rising. “That’s to go and investigate. Will you be so kind as to come with me?”

  “Of course,” Todd murmured. After the comfortable warmth of the house, the cold November air hit him with a physical shock as he followed her across the porch, but it did not dissipate his almost hypnotized attention. —Mrs. Majendie had not thought of the greenhouse until now—until she had an impartial witness.—

  The dowdy, impressive old figure moved deliberately across the garden to the edge of the cliff, the first point at which both the greenhouse and the Johnsons’ cottage, far below, were visible. The greenhouse stood on a natural shelf at the second turn of the path. Mrs. Majendie looked down at it, paused only briefly, and began to round the hairpin curve.

  At the same moment something moved in the Johnsons’ garden. Someone had come quickly out of the house and was running through the gate, up the road to the place where the cliff path began. A long, full, gray-green coat swung out behind the figure as in desperate-seeming haste it began to climb…

  Mrs. Majendie had reached the door of the greenhouse. Her big hand reached out and unhooked the hand-lettered sign from the doorknob, opened the door and motioned Todd back.

  “We’ll wait for just a minute,” she said quietly. “Let the place air before we go in.”