“Eh?” I answered, startled by his sudden change of subject. “What?”
“Regard her, if you please. La porte de la maison, she is open.”
Following the direction of his nod I saw the door of a big house across the street swing idly on its hinges, displaying a vista of dimly lighted hall.
In almost any other section of the city opened front doors on a night like this would have been natural as hatless men or girls without their stockings; but not in Tuscarora Avenue. That street is the last outpost of the pre-Depression era. Housegirls in black bombazine and stiff white lawn may still be seen at work with mop and pail upon its low white-marble stoops at daybreak, lace curtains hang in primly white defiance of a changing world at its immaculately polished windows, housemen in uniform come silent-footed as trained cats to take the visitor’s hat and gloves and walking-stick; no matter what the temperature may be, Tuscarora Avenue’s street doors are never left open. “Perhaps”—I began; then—“good heavens!”
Sharp and poignant as an acid-burn, wordless, but hair-raising in intensity, the hail came to us from the open door.
“Allons!” de Grandin cried. “Au secours!”
We dashed across the street, but at the mansion’s small square porch we paused involuntarily. The place seemed so substantially complacent, so smugly assured. . . . “We shall feel like two poissons d’avril if what we heard was someone crying out in a bad dream,” he murmured as he tapped his stick on the sidewalk. “No matter, better to be laughed at for our pains than emulate the priests and Levites when someone stands in need of help.”
He tiptoed up the steps and pushed the pearl button by the open door.
Somewhere inside the house a bell shrilled stridently, called again as he pressed on the button, and repeated its demand once more as he gave a last impatient jab. But no footsteps on the polished floor told us that our summons had been heard.
“Humph, looks as if we were mistaken, after all,” I murmured. “Maybe the cry came from another house—”
“Sang du diable! Look well, my friend, and tell me if you see what I see!” Low and imperative, his whispered command came. Through the open door he pointed toward the end of the wide hall where an elaborately carved balustrade marked the ascent of a flight of winding stairs.
Just below the stair-bend stood a Florentine gilt chair and in it, hunched forward as though the victim of a sudden case of cramps, sat a man in house-servant’s livery, green trousers and swallowtail coat corded with red braid, yellow-and-black waistcoat striped horizontally, and stiff-bosomed shirt.
I took the major details of the costume in subconsciously, for though his shirtfront was one of the least conspicuous items of his regalia, it seized and held my gaze. Across its left side, widening slowly to the waistcoat’s V, was a dull reddish stain which profaned the linen’s whiteness as a sudden shriek might violate a quiet night. And like a shriek the stain screamed out one single scarlet word—Murder!
De Grandin let his breath out in a suppressed “ha!” as he stepped across the threshold and advanced upon the seated man.
“Is he—he’s—” I began, knowing all the time the answer which his nod confirmed.
“Mais oui, like a herring,” he replied as he felt the fellow’s pulse a moment, then let the lifeless hand fall back. “Unless I err more greatly than I think, he died comme ça”—he snapped his fingers softly; then:
“Come, let us see what else there is to see, but have the caution, mon vieux, it may be we are not alone.”
I reached the door which let off from the rear of the hall first and laid my hand upon the knob, but before I had a chance to turn it he had jerked me back. “Mais non,” he cautioned “not that way, my friend; do this.”
Touching the handle lightly he sprang the latch, then drew back his foot and drove a vicious kick against the polished panels, sending the door crashing back against the wall.
Poised on his toes he waited for an instant, then grasped the handle of his cane as if it were a sword-hilt and the lower part as though it were a scabbard and pressed soundlessly through the doorway. “Bien,” he whispered as he looked back with a nod, “the way seems clear.” As I joined him at the threshold:
“Never open doors that way, my friend, when you are in a house whose shadows may conceal a murderer. Not long ago, to judge by the condition of that poor one yonder, someone did a bloody killing; for all we know he is still here and not at all averse to sending us to join his other victim. Had he lurked behind this door he could have shot you like a dog, or slit your gizzard with a knife as you came through, for you were coming from a lighted room into the dark, and would have made the perfect mark. Hé, but the naughty one who would assassinate de Grandin needs to rise before the sun. I am not to be caught napping. By no means. Had a wicked one been standing in concealment by that door, his head would surely have been soundly knocked against the wall when I kicked it, much of the fight would have been banged from him, and the advantage would be mine. You apprehend?”
I nodded appreciation of his wisdom as we stepped from the dim light of the hall into the faint gloom of the room beyond.
It was a dining-room, a long, high-ceilinged dining-room appointed with the equipment of gracious living. A long oval mahogany table of pure Sheraton design occupied the center of the floor, its polished surface giving back dim mirrorings of the pieces with which it had been set. In the center a silver girandole held a flat bouquet of early summer roses, a silver bowl of fruit—grapes, pomegranates and apricots—stood near the farther end, while a Sheffield coffee service graced the end near us. A demi-tasse of eggshell lusterware stood near the table edge; another lay upon its side, its spilled contents disfiguring the polished wood. A pair of diminutive liqueur glasses, not entirely drained, stood near the coffee cups, their facets reflecting the flickering light of two tall candles burning in high silver standards at each end of the table. A chair had been pushed back as though its occupant had risen hastily; another lay upon its side on the floor. To me it seemed as if the well-bred silence of the room was holding its breath in shocked surprise at some scene of violence lately witnessed.
“Nobody’s here,” I whispered, unconsciously and instinctively lowering my voice as one does in church or at a funeral. “Maybe they ran out when—”
“You say so?” he broke in. “Regardez, s’il vous plaît.”
He had seized one of the candles from the table and lifted it above his head, driving the shadows farther back into the corners of the room. As the light strengthened he pointed toward a high three-paneled Japanese screen which marked the entrance to the service-pantry.
Something hot and hard seemed forming in my throat as my eyes came to rest at the point toward which his pointing stick was aimed. Protruding from behind the screen an inch or so into the beam of candlelight was something which picked up the rays and threw them back in dichromatic reflections, a woman’s silver-kid evening sandal and the ox-blood lacquer of her carefully kept toenails.
He strode across the room and folded back the screen.
She lay upon her side, a rather small, plump woman with a mass of tawny hair. One delicately tinted cheek was cradled in the curve of her bent elbow, and her mane of bronze-brown hair was swirling unconfined about her face like a cascade of molten copper. Her white-crêpe evening gown, cut in the severe lines which proclaimed the art of a master dressmaker, displayed a rent where the high heel of her sandal had caught in its hem, her corded girdle had come unfastened and trailed beside her on the floor, and on the low-cut bodice of her frock was a hand-wide soil of red—such a stain as marked the shirtfront of the dead servant in the hall.
One glance at her face, the startled, suffering expression, the half-closed eyes, the partly opened lips, told us it was needless to inquire further. She too was dead.
“Eh bien,” de Grandin tweaked the needle-points of his mustache, “he was no retailer, this one. When he went in for murder he did it in the grand manner, n’est-ce-pas? Put
the screen back, if you please, exactly as we found it. We must leave things intact for the police and the coroner.”
He led the way into the wide, bay-windowed drawing-room at the front of the house, raised his candle a moment; then: “Nom d’un nom d’un nom d’un nom, another!” he exclaimed.
He had not exaggerated. Lying on the low ottoman beside the door communicating with the hill was a man in dinner clothes, dark-skinned, sleek, well groomed, hands folded peacefully upon his breast, silk-stockinged ankles crossed, and on the white surface of his dress shirt was the same ghastly stain which we had found upon the servant in the hall and the murdered woman in the dining-room.
De Grandin eyed the oddly composed corpse in baffled speculation, as if he added up a column of figures and was puzzled at the unexpected answer. “Que extraordinaire!” he murmured, then, amazingly, gave vent to a low chuckle. “Comme le temps de la prohibition, n’est-ce-pas?”
His Gallic humor failed to register with me. “I don’t see anything so droll about it,” I scowled, “and what had Prohibition to do with—”
“Tenez, ever literal as a sausage, are you not, my old one? Cannot you see the connection? Observe him closely, if you please. No one ever died like that, not even in his bed. No, certainly. He was carried here and arranged thus, much in the way the gangsters of the Prohibition era laid their victims out when they had placed them on the spot.
“But yes, this business is clear as water from a spring. It fairly leaps to meet the eye. This was no robbery, no casual crime. It was carefully premeditated, planned and executed in accordance with a previously-agreed-upon program, as pitilessly as the heartlessness of Hell. The servant might have been, and doubtless was, killed to stop his mouth, the woman looks as if she might have died in flight, but this one? Non. He was killed, then dragged or carried here, then carefully arranged as if to fit into his casket.”
Something evil and soft-footed seemed to stalk into that quiet room. There was no seeing it or hearing it, only the feeling, sudden and oppressive, as if the mid-June heat evaporated and in its place had come a leering, clammy coldness. Small red ants seemed crawling on my scalp; there was an oddly eery prickling in the hollows of my legs behind the knees. “Let’s get out of here,” I pleaded. “The police—”
He seemed to waken from a revery. “But yes, of course,” he assented, “the police must be notified. Will not you call them, mon vieux? Ask for the good Costello; we need his wisdom and experience in such a case.”
I scurried back into the entranceway, picked up the receiver, and dialed police headquarters. No buzzing answered as I spun the dial. The rubber instrument might have been a spool of wood for all the life it showed. Again and again I snapped the hook down, but without result.
“You have them—he is coming, the good sergeant?” de Grandin asked, emerging from the dining-room with the candle in one hand, his sword-stick in the other.
“No, I can’t seem to get any response,” I answered.
“U’m?” He pressed the instrument against his ear a moment. “One is not surprised. The wires have been cut.”
He put the phone back on its tabouret and his small, keen face, flushed with heat and excitement, was more like that of an eager tomcat than ever.
“My friend,” he told me earnestly, “I damn think we have put our feet into a case which will bear scrutinizing.”
“But I thought you’d given up criminal investigation—”
“En vérité, I have so; but this is something more. Tell me, what does ritualistic murder suggest to your mind?”
“One of two things, a malevolent secret society or a cult of some sort.”
He nodded. “You have right, my friend. Murder as such is criminal, though sometimes I think it fully justified; but the killing of a man with ritual and deliberation is an affront not only to the law, but to the Lord. It is the devil’s business, and as such it interests me. Come, let us go.”
We hurried to the cross street, walked a block down Myrtle Avenue and found an all-night pharmacy.
“Holà, mon vieux,” I heard him call as his connection with headquarters was established, “I have a case for you. Non, great stupid one, not a case of beer, a case of murder. Three of them, par la barbe d’un corbeau rouge!”
Then he closed the phone booth door to shut the traffic noises out, and his animated conversation came to me only as an unintelligible hum.
“The sergeant tells me that the owners of the house have been living on the Riviera since last year,” he told me as we started toward the murder mansion. “They rented it furnished to a family of Spaniards some eight months ago. That is all he knows at present, but he is having an investigation made. As soon as he has viewed the scene he’ll take us to headquarters, where we may find—”
“Look out!” I warned, seizing his elbow and dragging him back to the curb as he stepped down into the street. A long, black, shiny, low-slung car had swung around the corner, driven at a furious pace and missing him by inches.
“Bête, miserable!” he glared at the retreating vehicle. “Must you rush him to his grave so quickly?”
I stared at him, astonished. “What—”
“It was a hearse,” he explained. “One of those new vehicles designed to simulate a limousine. Eh bien, one wonders if it fools the dead man as he rides in it and makes him think he is alive and going for a pleasure trip?” He set a cigarette alight, then muttered angrily: “I saw his number. I shall report him to the good Costello.”
The big police car, driven like the wind and turning out for no one, drew alongside the curb just as we reached the house, and Costello ran across the sidewalk to shake hands.
“There musta been some doin’s here, from what you tell me, sor,” he greeted.
“There were, indeed, my friend. Three of them there were, one in the entranceway, one in the dining-room, one in the—mon Dieu, Friend Trowbridge, look!”
I glanced past him into the hall, steeling my nerves against the sight of the dead houseman keeping silent vigil over his dead employers, then gasped in sheer astonishment. Everything was as we’d left it; the hall lamp still glowed warmly in its shade of bronze fretwork, the big gilt chair still stood below the curve of the stairway, but—the murdered man had disappeared.
Costello mopped his streaming forehead with a sopping handkerchief. “Where’s this here now dead guy, sor?” he asked.
De Grandin muttered something unintelligible as he led us through the hall, across the darkened dining-room, and pushed back the carved screen. Nothing but the smudge of shadow where our bodies blocked the candlelight was there.
“Parbleu!” de Grandin muttered, tugged the tip of his mustache, and turned upon his heel to lead us to the drawing-room. The low ottoman, upholstered in brocaded satin, stood in the same position against the damask-draped wall, but on it was no sign or trace of the dead man we’d seen ten minutes earlier.
Costello drew a stogie from his pocket and bit its end off carefully, blowing wisps of tobacco from his mouth as he struck a match against his trousers. “There doesn’t seem to be much doin’ in th’ line o’ murder here right now, sor,” he announced, keeping eyes resolutely fixed upon the match-flame as he drew a few quick puffs on his cigar. “Ye’re sure ye seen them dead folk here—in this house? These buildin’s look enough alike to be all five o’ th’ Dionne quints. Besides, it’s a hot night. We’re apt to see things that ain’t there. Maybe—”
“‘Maybe’ be double-broiled upon the grates of blazing hell!” de Grandin almost shrieked. “Am I a fool, a simpleton, a zany? Have I been a physician for thirty years, yet not be able to know when I see a dead corpse? Ah bah, I tell you—”
Upstairs, apparently from the room immediately above us, there came a sudden wail, deep, long-drawn, rising with swift-tightening tension till it vanished in the thinness of an overstrained crescendo.
“Howly Mither!” cried Costello.
“Good heavens!” I ejaculated. “What the—”
“Avec moi, mes enfants!” de Grandin shouted. “Come with me. Corpses come and corpses go, but there is one who needs our help!”
With cat-like swiftness he rushed up the steps, paused a moment at the stairhead, then turned sharply to the left.
I was close behind him as he scuttled down the hall and kicked against the door that led into the chamber just above the drawing-room. Panting with the labor of the hurried climb, Costello stood at my elbow as the door flew back with a bang and we almost fell into the room.
Sitting in the middle of the floor, stockinged feet straight out before her, like a little girl at play, was a young woman—twenty-one or -two, I judged—dressed in a charming dinner frock of pastel blue georgette, a satin sandal in each hand. As we entered she shook back the strands of her almost iridescent black hair from before her face and beat against the floor with her slippers, like the trap-drummer of a band striking his instruments, then fell to laughing—a high-pitched, eery laugh; the laugh of utter, irresponsible idiocy.
“Sí, sí, sí, sí!” she cried, then fell into a sort of lilting, rhythmic song. “Escolopendra! La escolopendra! La escolopendra muy inhumana.” She drummed a sort of syncopated accompaniment to the words against the floor with her sandals, then raised the tempo of her blows until the spool-heels beat a sustained rat-tat on the boards as though she were attempting to crush some vile crawling thing that crept invisible around her on the floor.
“Escolopendra, escolopendra!” The words rose to a shriek that thinned out to a squeaking wail as she leaped unsteadily to her silk-cased feet and her wisp of frock swirled round her slender graceful legs when she bounded to the center of the bed and gathered her skirts round her, for all the world like a woman in deadly terror of a mouse.
“Esto que es?—what is this?” Costello asked as he stepped forward. “What talk is this of una escolopendra—a centipede—chiquita?”
Black Moon Page 27
