Zachariah Burden turned to the slender young man with owlish granny glasses who had risen at their entrance. He said, “Everything in order, Johanssen?”
“Everything shipshape so far, Colonel,” said Johanssen. “I have Henderson and Yashimuru checking the cliffside passages just in case of leaks.”
“Fat chance of that,” said Zachariah. He introduced Chan, adding, “Johanssen graduated from both Cal Tech and M.I.T. He helped install the machinery and stayed on to keep it running.”
Pleasantries concluded, Zachariah pushed on out of the control room via another door with Charlie Chan following. The detective said, “When you speak of leaks, you make the house sound like a ship.”
“It is,” said the former Marine. “The ventilation is entirely artificial. Naturally, there is a back-up system if it should break down - two of them, in fact. But in the unlikely event of this Maginot Line fortress springing a leak, a lot of circuits might short. Nothing serious, understand, but a damned nuisance to fix.”
Chan forced himself to breathe deeply. He had once taken a trial trip on an atomic submarine and had been sensitive to sealed air ever since. Until then, he had not been aware of it but now he felt vaguely uncomfortable.
Zachariah, regarding him out of the corner of one eye, said sardonically, “Don’t go claustrophobic on us, Charlie. It’s out of character for you.”
The detective became aware that there was sweat on his forehead and in the curves of his nostrils. He did not enjoy having his companion discover this rupture of his poise. Ignoring it, Chan said, “Do you really think Harriet is down here?”
“I doubt it very much,” said Zachariah. “Harriet’s a fresh-air fiend. If she hadn’t opened the windows to air out the guest rooms we wouldn’t have been flooded upstairs.” A pause, then, “Unless somebody hung her up on a hook in the meat locker.”
“Better look,” said Chan.
Zachariah’s right eyebrow rose. Then he shrugged and led the way along another corridor. Following him, the detective’s thoughts were upstairs. If Harriet’s presence in the basement were so unlikely, why had Lenore Burdon Wilmot been so insistent upon the search? Nerves and worry? Possibly, he decided. Chan recalled that the seemingly unflappable Lenore was an adult version of the unstable and neurotic teenager who had connived with a declasse lover to exact ransom from her own family.
Further speculation on these lines was cut off when Zachariah Burden opened a massive, perfectly balanced grey painted steel door whose thick glass window was frosted inside. Again, the detective followed him through. He found himself in a deep freezer large enough to serve a big hotel.
“We’d better go through this quickly, Charlie,” said the colonel. “It doesn’t take long to turn a man into an icicle without a cold suit.”
Sides of beef dangled in ghostly array from ceiling hooks of gleaming metal - as did the carcasses of whole sheep, hogs and a long battery of immense turkeys. Lesser fowl and fish were stored in orthodox freeze lockers along the walls.
Zachariah said, “You take the left aisle, I’ll take the right.”
It was sensible advice, but Chan began to feel oddly uneasy as Zachariah passed out of sight behind the double rows of flayed and frozen animal corpses. After all, he was alone with a man of violent action, a man he did not really know, in a room that could quickly become a deathtrap once the door was closed. The recent attack in his room was also in Chan’s mind. By the time he reached the room’s far end, he could feel the chill to the very marrow of his bones.
During the return trip, Chan forced himself to walk slowly, even to inspect the smaller wall lockers through their glass lids. Each was easily large enough to hold a human body. But they contained only small fowl and fish of a vast variety of shapes and sizes. By the time he reached the entrance, he was fighting to keep his teeth from chattering.
Chan felt a moment of real panic when he discovered the door was shut - panic hardly abated by the fact that it was designed, like most such freezer doors, to be opened only from the outside.
The door was opened at that moment and Zachariah stood aside to permit Chan to pass. He said, “Sorry, Charlie, but you took your time. Me, I can’t stand that kind of cold very long. I guess my blood’s too thin after my years in the tropics.”
The detective felt himself warm to the man about whom he had so recently been entertaining the most sinister suspicions. Thanks to his frankness, they were now all even - Zachariah one up on the air conditioning bit, Chan one up on his greater tolerance for cold.
What fools we mortals be, he thought…
“Harriet on your side?” Zachariah asked, and, at Chan’s headshake, “Not on mine, either.” He turned right into a passage they had not explored, adding, “Let’s cut through the back way. It will save us about fifty yards.”
“Okay,” said Chan, warming to his companion even more. Like him, the detective had no desire to retrace the seeming miles of dreary passageways they had already traversed. He wanted to learn what the others had found.
Another left turn, and their corridor dead-ended at the inevitable steel door, this one without an inset window and with an orthodox knob. Zachariah paused there briefly, said, “This should bring us back to the others.” A pause, then, “Charlie, you’ve had a good look at the kids. What do you think of Armand?”
“Jury still out, judge on long weekend,” said Chan, lapsing into the pidgin he used when he preferred to avoid giving an answer.
Zachariah Burden sighed and shook his head, then grinned and said, “I guess I deserved that. But a father these days needs all the reassurance he can get.”
“It’s all right,” said Chan. “The apologies should be mine. Now, if I may, I have a question that’s been bothering me ever since I heard Lionel Burdon committed suicide.”
“Charlie -” Zachariah spoke before the detective could ask it “- if you want to know if I know why he did it, the answer is negative. I’m as much in the dark about it as everybody else. And to do it at this time…”
“Why ‘this time’ - is that significant?”
“Maybe, Charlie, it should have been. Today, he was supposed to invest Dave Wilmot with full voting powers on the family board of directors.” Another hesitation, then, “You ought to see the ceremony. It’s rather like the investiture of a bishop or a coronation on a very private scale.”
With that, again he pushed opened a door and led the way inside with the detective following - into a chamber so brightly lit that it temporarily blinded Chan. There a smell of long-cooled hot metal in the atmosphere, the sharper smell of gunpowder.
From beyond the blur of light, the detective heard somebody cry. “Don’t!”
Zachariah let out a cry of alarm and, spinning about, gripped Charlie Chan tightly and flung both of them to a floor that was unexpectedly soft beneath their bodies.
With a shattering series of thunderlike reports, the ten shot clip of a semiautomatic rifle was discharged earsplittingly close and the bullet whined over their heads by less than a foot to thud into a spongy wall.
IV
IN THE CONFUSION, Charlie Chan was quickly aware of only one thing - Zachariah Burdon had led the two of them into the target end of a private shooting gallery at the precise moment that Armand Kent emptied the clip of a semiautomatic rifle at an already well perforated silhouette simulating the upper half of a man’s body.
Zachariah sprang to his feet, cursing like the proverbial camel driver of the Sahara caravan routes. What, he wanted to know, was the blankety-blank idea of firing when the rear door through which he and Chan had entered was unlocked? It was, Chan decided, a sound and relevant question under the circumstances.
Armand stood in his firing post, still holding the rifle, looking stunned. It was the vivid dark-haired Carol Burdon, Zachariah’s daughter, who volunteered the explanation.
“Zach,” she said, “he wasn’t shooting at you. We came through the rear door a few minutes ago and somebody must have forgotten to set the
lock.”
Three of the less conspicuous members of the family search party, all Burdons or Burdon in-laws, stood there and embarrassed. Zachariah, like Chan still dusting himself off, regarded them mordantly.
“This is a helluva time for target practice,” Zachariah barked. “We just buried a Burdon, and we’re searching for a missing Burdon. Who was the last one inside?” he cried.
A plump, middle-aged man in conventional mourning attire, shuffled his feet and said, “I guess I’m the guilty party, Zach. My God! It never occurred to me that…”
The former Marine colonel spoke to him gently. “Elwood,” he said, “in this household, where there’s a rule, there’s a damned good reason.” Then, to Chan, “You all right, Charlie?” His look was anxious.
“Thanks to you,” said the detective. He wondered for a moment how his guide had been able to see the bombardment was imminent in the blinding glare of the battery of spotlights beamed from the firing end on the targets. Then he recalled hearing a faint click, just before Zachariah Burdon dumped him, recalled his Marine Corps combat experience and decided his guide had recognized the sound as prelude to the firing of a gun.
Armand handed the weapon sheepishly over to Zachariah, who examined it quickly, then passed it to the detective for inspection, saying, “If that thing had killed us, Charlie, at least we’d have been done in by a Rolls Royce of weapons.”
It was a fantastic gun, not new but by no means an antique. It was gas operated, beautiful burnished and balanced, with a telescopic sight by Zeiss. The stock, of magnificently grained walnut wood, was chased with silver. In an oval plaque midway along its right elevation was inscribed in Gothic script the name Reich Marshal Hermann Goering.
Chan said, “It looks like a Mannlicher. But I never saw a gun exactly like this.”
“It’s unlikely you ever will again,” said Zachariah. “Mannlicher made a half dozen for top Nazis in nineteen forty. As far as is known, this is the only one that survived the end of the war.”
Chan returned it, remarking, “Bullet kill same dead no matter lineage of gun that fires it.”
“Touche,” said Zachariah. Then, to Armand, “Just what was the idea of taking target practice now? You were supposed to be looking for Harriet.”
The youth’s bright brow eyes fell under the former Marine colonel’s direct gaze. He shrugged elegantly clad shoulders, replied, “We covered everything except the zone you took with Mr. Chan. When we got here, it seemed like a good idea to let off some steam.”
Kent turned to Chan and said in flawless Mandarin Chinese, “Most humble apologies from misdirected self to great detective from Honolulu. No harm intended.”
Chan, whose knowledge of the supreme Chinese tongue was slight, was barely able to understand and to reply in far from flawless accents, “Honorable apology most gratefully received and accepted.”
Did he detect mockery in the too bright eyes of the elegant young man? Charlie Chan wondered!
When they resumed upstairs, the others had already learned of the near disaster. Lowell Burdon, grave and dignified, expressed formal apology to the detective, who brushed it off politely despite the continuing fluid weakness in the backs of his knees. Chan took advantage of the moment to ask the successor to the chieftainship of the Clan Burdon for a look at the site of Lionel’s suicide.
He had expected hesitation, if only on personal grounds, but Lowell Burdon quickly agreed, adding, “You know, Charlie, I still find it hard to believe.”
Grave and dignified, he ushered the detective from the living room across a hall into another wing of the huge house, into a large, quietly luxurious library whose walls were lined with books from floor to ceiling and whose center was occupied by a huge desk, a brass and mahogany replica of the George Washington desk in New York’s city hall.
Lowell indicated an area of the rich grey carpeting that still bore the faint chalk outlines of the position in which a human figure had lain, markings inevitable to the early investigation of any violent death. “That was where Willis found him.”
“Willis?” said Chan. Then, recalling, “Oh, yes, the butler.” He was unable entirely to repress an inevitable “the-butler-dunnit” thought but managed not to utter it, mildly cursing his sense of humor.
“It still seems incredible,” said Lowell Burton, leaning against the desk. “My first thought was of some incurable illness concealed from the rest of us. But Dr. Smith assured me my brother was probably healthier than I, and I am remarkably healthy for a man of fifty-nine.”
Chan could think of nothing to add along those lines, except, “Who heard the shot?”
“No one,” Lowell Burdon replied. “But that is not too surprising. This is a huge house and the walls are thick. For instance, nobody up here heard Armand’s discharge in the gallery downstairs.”
“May I ask what’s in there?” Chan nodded toward a door midway in the far wall.
“Of course.” Lowell Burdon led them there, opened it to reveal a rectangular chamber with a long ebony table occupying much of its area surrounded by ebony armchairs with red morocco seats and arm covers.
“If this looks like a board of directors’ meeting room, that’s exactly what it is,” Lowell Burdon said. “This is where the formal family conferences are held. And this room is soundproof. It’s immediately over the shooting gallery where you and Zachariah had your close call.”
“Why the juxtaposition?” asked Chan. “Accident of design?”
“Hardly. My brother did little by accident. It was a matter of practical economics.” A thin smile lit his face and he added in an aside, “I know that word sounds odd in connection with this family. But Lionel wanted these two rooms completely proofed for obvious reasons and it made sense to put one on top of another.
“Then, too, when the weather or time did not permit him to play golf, my brother liked to let off steam at the end of a working day by going downstairs and firing a few rounds at target practice.” A pause, then, “Running a family empire like ours is not an easy job, a fact that I am increasingly beginning to realize since Lionel - well, since Lionel is gone and left it on my shoulders. At any rate, he found target shooting a release.”
“Understandable,” said Chan as they moved back toward the living room. “I’ve done it myself more than once. It steadies taut nerves.”
When they returned to the others, Lenore Burdon Wilmot took Charlie Chan in charge again, offering him a highball which was gladly accepted. When they were seated, away from the others, she said, “Well, dear Charles, what do you think?”
“Too early for think,” he replied. “Still seeking cause of uncle’s suicide.”
Lenore wrinkled her charming nose, shrugged equally charming shoulders. Her grey green eyes flashed fire and she said, “Who knows why he did it? Who knows why anyone does away with himself? I’m worried about Harriet. Disappearing this way simply isn’t like her.”
Chan agreed but had no desire to get off on that angle again just then. For the moment, his attention and interest were focused on Armand Kent.
“Passing curiosity, Lenore” he said, “but where did young Armand pick up Mandarin Chinese?”
Lenore spread her hands and her eyes lit up with a glow of pride. She said, “Armand picks up languages the way other boys his age pick up girls - not that he doesn’t get his share of those, too. You must have noticed that Carol is - what do they call it? - simply bananas over him.”
“I’m not quite sure who he is,” said Chan, “or how he fits into the family pattern.”
Lenore’s lovely brow furrowed as she thought it over, sighed, then said, “Oh, dear! It’s all so complicated.”
“Try to unravel, please,” said the detective.
“Well… You see, Charlie, in a family like this, sometimes things get awfully complex. Thanks to all the money, every Burdon is a target. And sometimes - no, that makes it sound worse than it is - or was.”
She paused. Chan waited. Then she said, “When Ellen
Burdon, that’s Lowell’s wife, was a girl, she went to school in Versailles, a very select boarding school for wealthy American girls and a few English. There, she met a handsome young Air Force major and eloped with him. There was hell to pay. He was half-French and wild as a hawk, nobody is really sure whether they were married or not. The result was Armand. Major Kent died in a crash just before he was born.
“So, when Lowell married Ellen, Armand sort of came with her. Not right away, of course. He visited here as a boy, and everyone liked him, even if he inherited his father’s wild streak. Then, about five years ago, he seemed to get serious. Charlie, he’s an absolute genius. He excels everybody else at everything he tackles - languages, finances, mathematics, sports. He has a tremendous drive to succeed.”
Chan nodded. This was entirely in line with his own observations and deductions where Armand Kent was concerned. He said, “But he’s not really a Burdon then, except in a second hand way.”
“But he will be one.” Lenore spoke with absolute conviction. “He won’t be the first the clan has adopted. Like all big families, to survive there must be a constant inflow of fresh blood and talent. After he marries Carol…”
She shrugged, let it hang. Chan decided to change the subject. “Is there some sort of guide to this house available?” he asked. “If I’m to remain here a day or two, I’d very much like to avoid repeating the shooting gallery duck experience.”
“Poor Charlie!” Lenore put down her empty highball glass on the coffee table between them, rose, said, “Uncle Lionel had an album made up when he rebuilt the Point. I’ll see if I can find it.”
While she was away, Chan considered what Lenore had told him. Most curious of all was Lenore’s attitude toward her mother. She referred to Ellen Burdon amiably enough, but he sensed no normal filial attachmeet. Then, the chronology was cockeyed. If Ellen had had a schoolgirl romance in Versailles, of which Armand was the result, it would mean the boy had to be older than Lenore - which he obviously was not by quite a few years.
Charlie Chan The Silent Corpse Page 3
