by Rufus King
Sergeant Hurlstone came directly to the point.
“You were standing by the elevator door, Mr. Thurlow, when Danning came into the hallway from Miss Marlow’s room. This was just a short while ago. She said good night to you.”
“Yes, that is correct.”
“Where had you been, please?”
“Mr. Fleury and I were in conference with Miss Estelle Marlow in her living room. Mr. Fleury remained with her to take notes on arrangements concerning the funeral. I left. The lift was in operation when Danning wished me good night. It stopped at the third floor, and Mr. Appleby came out.”
“Did he mention where he was going?”
“No, and I did not inquire. I presume he was going to his rooms to retire for the night. I took the lift down and went to my house.”
“You have been here for about fifteen years, Mr. Thurlow?”
“That is correct.”
“Had Mr. Marlow known you before you came? How did he happen to get in touch with you?”
“I had been the manager of Mrs. Walter McFraney’s estate at Mount Desert. After her death I was without a post. Mr. Clarence Harlan knew of this. He knew about me. He recommended me to Mr. Marlow.”
“You were here at the time when two men were drowned in Crystal Lake. Lattigan and Turfmann, both employees. Do you remember the details?”
“I remember very well. Both of them were old hands. They had been in service here for years and were good men. They took care of the greenhouses. Lattigan had just bought a canoe rigged for sailing. He took Turfmann out with him that Sunday. There was a squall and the canoe overturned. They could swim, but not well enough. Panic and the icy water, I suppose. That was the end of them.”
“While they were under you did either of them ever refer to Mrs. Marlow’s death?”
“No.”
Sergeant Hurlstone then said with no change of pace: “At whose suggestion was luminous paint used to band the trees as a black-out precaution?”
“I wondered when that would occur to you.” Thurlow thawed visibly and smiled. “It was my suggestion. I ordered the paint somewhat over a year ago, when it was first indicated that black-outs would be required. The paint is composed of eight parts zinc pyrosulphide and one part of a radioactive substance called radiothorium. I presume you have settled on the paint as the medium for Mr. Marlow’s radium poisoning? I have.”
“I have settled on nothing.”
“Then you are a uniquely clever man. I accept the paint as the obvious, as having been handy. The storehouse for the estate’s supplies is reasonably accessible during the daytime to anyone. In an isolated and socially insular community such as Black Tor there is no incentive for petty thievery. I should think that one drop of the luminous paint would have been enough. You have a hard row to hoe, Sergeant Hurlstone.”
“I know it.”
“You like cats, I see.”
Sergeant Hurlstone regarded Thurlow steadily. His strong fingers were gentle on the cat’s dark fur.
“Yes,” he said. “I do.”
“That is interesting. I should have laid odds on the reverse.” Thurlow stood up and started to say good night. He hesitated. “Would you mind telling me why this questioning about my standing before the lift and Danning having seen me there?”
“She had just left a carafe of water in Miss Marlow’s room. The water was poisoned.”
Thurlow displayed no particular sense of shock. He thought it over for a moment.
“Yes,” he said to Ann, “that is understandable. Naturally you must expect things like that.”
CHAPTER XXII
“The man,” Ann said, “is a machine.”
“Mr. Thurlow?”
“Yes. He has probably projected my graph, or whatever that thing is that jerks up and down and shows the rise and fall of stocks. Each peak a nice fresh brush with violent death.”
Hurlstone smiled fractionally.
“He struck me as smart.”
“That is both soothing, Sergeant Hurlstone, and a big help. It’s a wonder to me the administration hasn’t snatched you up to be the czar of public morale. Did Mr. Thurlow also strike you as a fit subject for the suspect list?”
“No. Why should he have? He wasn’t here when Alice Marlow was killed.”
“Need he have been? He might have known her in Boston.”
“He might. What of it? There are no secret passages or trap doors in this house that I know of. He would have had to be here in order to stab her. If he had been here he would have been seen.”
“I was stupid. My mind is turning into an octopus. Tentacles reaching all over the place. Hundreds of them.”
“Eight,” Hurlstone said dispassionately. “An octopus is an eight-armed cephalopod.”
Ann honestly thought she would have slapped him if Ludwig hadn’t come in. A lounging jacket of wine-colored faille with rather startling lapels and that this-ought-to-get-them look had replaced Ludwig’s dinner coat. And, Ann decided, it wasn’t a Christmas present.
The contrast between Ludwig and Sergeant Hurlstone caught her. If Ludwig could strip off twenty years it possibly would not have been so acute. There was little more fatal to he-men than beginning, like Ludwig, to be lightly larded by the forties.
She watched him consciously holding in a crescent middle and his manner of going Sergeant Hurlstone one better as he, too, took a sitting stance in a straight-backed chair. A good wave of scotch whisky radiated out from him, and he was, Ann decided, well away on his second leg toward oblivion.
“I suppose,” Ludwig said graciously to both of them, “you’ve cooked me up between you. I could hear the bracelets rattling in your voice when you phoned, Sergeant.”
Sergeant Hurlstone’s facade reflected none of Ludwig’s affability.
“They’re still in my pocket, Mr. Appleby.”
“Forgive me if I insist that the impression still remains. Your voice is at bailiff pitch.” Ludwig was studying Ann curiously. “What has happened to you, Ann? You’ve lost that dewy and, if I may say so, blankish look. Your face is vitally grim.”
“I feel grim, Ludwig. And also vital.”
“Excellent. The Marlow mantle is being donned. Why did you send for me, Sergeant Hurlstone? Is this a where-were-you-when? ”
“Yes, you can call it so. Mr. Thurlow was waiting to take the lift when you stepped out of it. This was on the third floor and just a short while ago. Do you confirm that?”
“Confirm? I do. You seem rather serious for such a casual event. Has something happened recently? Something deadly, of course?” Ludwig’s dark, bold eyes settled on Ann. “To you?”
“The water in Miss Marlow’s carafe was poisoned,” Sergeant Hurlstone said.
Ludwig did a splendid job at blanching. His lush lips parted slightly in astounded shock. His hairy fingers clutched his knees. A Rodin figure registering Aghast.
“When,” he said mellowly, “will this end? Has Dr. Johnson treated you? I’ve always understood that poisoned people twisted up into knots. You look perfectly all right, Ann.”
“I am all right. I didn’t drink any.”
Ludwig evidently decided he had blanched enough. He said with the sharpest sort of curiosity, “Then how did you know the water was poisoned?”
“That,” Sergeant Hurlstone said, “is a story which can be deferred. Tell me this, Mr. Appleby. Did you see Mr. Thurlow go into the lift and close the door?”
“No, but I heard it close. It makes that unique, soft clashing effect. Like the aftermath of a banana peel. I was walking toward my room.” Ludwig’s lively air of speculation increased. “Surely not Thurlow? He’s only been here about fifteen years. Simply vats of money to dig his fingers in. Stop me if my eyes begin to glitter.”
“Did you go directly to your rooms and stay in them?”
“I went to them, yes. I did not stay in them. And I did not collect a dose of poison from my cache under a bathroom tile and skulk with it to Ann’s carafe.” Sergeant Hur
lstone permitted the dark cat lazily to shift its position.
“What was it you did do, Mr. Appleby?”
Ludwig’s sudden air of sober candor was admirable. “You know, this may mean something. I was on my way to see Estelle. Fleury was standing in front of your door, Ann. He had either knocked or was just about to. Fleury. Now there’s a thought. I never considered Fleury. I’ve always expected him to blow his top at any minute, but I never considered him seriously with murder.”
“Did Fleury see you?” Sergeant Hurlstone asked.
“I don’t imagine he did. His back was toward me, and he was at the end of that long hall. Why on earth don’t you ask him? I’ll phone him to come down. Shall I?”
“Thank you.”
Ludwig said, after he came back from the house phone, “This fits in with the things I told you during cocktails, Ann.”
Sergeant Hurlstone looked at Ann reproachfully.
He said, “What were they, Mr. Appleby?”
“Oh, just about Fleury being a fanatic. About my having advised Justin again and again to get rid of him. You know, the more I think of it, the better I like it. He was crazy about Alice. We used to kid her a little about it.”
“Just how crazy would you say?”
“Well, in a Byronic, terribly high-plane sort of way. Would that fit Byron? I don’t know.”
“Sergeant Hurlstone,” Ann said bitterly, “will.” Hurlstone did. He quoted with precision the young Byron’s remark that his school friendships were, with him, passions. He touched with disfavor on the young man’s habit of lying down and dreaming on his favorite tombstone in the churchyard and his love for his distant relative, Alary Ann Chatworth, who made him shortly realize the hopelessness of his passion and threw him out alone on a wide, wide sea. Yes, Hurlstone said, you might call Fleury’s attitude toward Alice Marlow as Byronic.
“Well, I,” Ludwig said, “will be damned. And it will be a long, long day before I start anything like that again. Look here, here’s another point. Fleury’s the one who walked in and saw Fred standing there with the knife. Why couldn’t that have been a return walk? Like that thing they used to do on the stage when the army marched by? I mean he could have stabbed Alice and gone away and then have been drawn back by remorse, only to see Fred with the knife. Naturally he grabbed it as an out and yelled murder.”
“Aren’t you forgetting the famous ‘white back,’ Mr. Appleby? The one you yourself saw in the music-room window?”
Ludwig did not deflate. He looked smug and a little bit cunning.
“You couldn’t, of course, know how Fleury looked back then. Or how he acted, as a matter of fact. Not one of us would have been surprised if he had turned up, some morning for breakfast, in a sheet.”
CHAPTER XXIII
Fleury was no help at all. He admitted candidly that he had stood for a while before Ann’s door and had been of two minds about knocking. The second mind (the not-to-knock one) had conquered. His Utopian urges had continued to obsess him, and they had lingered even through the conference with Thurlow and Estelle.
Obviously he considered Ann as offering more fallow ground for socialistic seedlings than her grandfather had offered, but the lateness of the hour had eventually deterred him. Also, the more practical fact that she was probably in bed.
So there, Ann thought, they were. Not one of them who could not have slipped inside her bedroom and concocted the deadly dose. She wondered what the poison had been. Odorless, because she had sniffed. Probably tasteless too. Although one swallow might have been managed before being repelled by a flavor. She would ask Sergeant Hurlstone after this relay of suspects abated.
Truly a relay in that each had put the finger on his successor. A lot of trick timing there, unless one were a liar.
It wasn’t very tricky at that, though. Thurlow and Fleury had been with Estelle, and Fleury had lingered to pothook funeral arrangements in his notebook. Ludwig’s having stepped out of the lift just as Thurlow was desirous of stepping into it was the only coincidental thing. Although his stepping out into the hallway just when Fleury had finished with Estelle and was hovering before Ann’s door had been coincidental too.
There was a lot coincidental about Ludwig.
Twenty years ago he had happened to glance up at the music-room windows just as Alice was being murdered and had glimpsed the almost identifiable white back. Possibly a coincidence carrier, like Typhoid Mary. Possibly, quite possibly, the murderer.
Piqued passion would be the motive if he were. If Alice (who had been so devastating and so coveted) had failed to fall for Ludwig’s Tarzanish caperings and turned him down. Ann held the thoroughly feministic viewpoint that a man could be fully as deadly as a woman scorned.
What about Ludwig’s wet-clothes alibi? The house was a hotel in the sense of having any number of entrances and exits. Practically a furtive character’s dream home. And no one as yet had made the least mention of how long Alice had been dead when Fleury started his yells. It could have been ten or fifteen minutes or conceivably longer.
Plenty of time for Ludwig to have killed her and then hustle down a back stairway and run outside to freshen or acquire his storm-soaked condition. She retained “acquire” because there was nothing to prove that she knew of that Ludwig, after his publicized exit to breast the storm, could not have come right back indoors, changed his wet clothes, killed Alice, and then have gone out and got thoroughly soaked again.
Let it still remain a crime of impulse instantly conceived. Ludwig’s rain-streaming entrance could have been cooked up after the knife had struck home. That was just as good a possibility as Sergeant Hurlstone’s contention that Alice’s desk drawer could have been searched and left half open after, rather than before, the murder.
No, Ann decided, you are far from being off the list, Ludwig, despite your wet-clothes entrance and your gainful vision of an odd white back. That would be something. Not only to get away with a murder for scorned passion but to cash in on it as well for years afterward. And on the outrageous presumption that Ludwig, himself the murderer, knew a clue which would indicate who the murderer was.
Ann looked at Ludwig with a moment’s respect.
Ludwig’s face was pleated in gourmet and bibulous lines while he listened to Fleury conclude a tirade from the saddle of his pet hobbyhorse, that everyone except invalids and the very old should attend to his own menial tasks himself.
They, Fleury was saying with a conviction so hot that his words became fused, were the true leveler. Turn a tycoon or a duchess loose with a dishpan, and class consciousness would shortly melt. Ludwig amiably pointed out that so would the stock of dishes.
Ann had the feeling that Fleury would keep this up all night. Sergeant Hurlstone seemed not to mind. His eyes were open, but he was as somnolent as the dark-haired cat on his lap. But it did stop. Ludwig’s amiable crack evidently upset Fleury dreadfully, because the eager light died from his eyes, and he said that if he could be of no further service he would retire to his chambers.
Ann liked the chambers touch and felt sorry for him. Sorry for his twisted arm and his good but twisted dreams. They weren’t for this world of greed and slaughter. Just a dreamland for Fleury and the handful of thwarted visionaries like him to think it would be nice to live in. Meanwhile, they either washed other people’s dishes or starved.
She said, when she said good night to Fleury, that they must talk again soon. He accepted the implied promise gratefully and went away looking a little less unhappy. The change was growing more complete, Ann thought. The Marlow wealth, her wealth, was now an entity in her possession. Its amount the staggering Golconda which Estelle had so rapaciously spread out before her. She was getting the feel of it.
Estelle had been right, even if the slant were not the same. All of the things in this world that she might want to possess or to do were surely possible to her, and something could be done for Fleury and his small, unhappy band of fellow travelers whose only true chance lay in a second mir
acle from the Mount. Something beyond the legacy which Marlow had left him. Even a token miracle, if this wealth which now was hers could so arrange it, would take the harsh edge off their lifetimes.
“You’ll be a fool to fall for him,” Ludwig said, having admirably followed her train of thought. “In fact, every crackpot in the country will be after you now. Justin learned how to deal with them, and you will in time.”
Possibly that, also, was true. There was a law to the management of wealth, a natural law inherent in the money itself. Otherwise its power turned into defeat. “The gods, to avenge themselves, grant us our desires.”
They might even grant her Bill.
And how would that turn out? A dimming Bill, ever going about his job each day after the war was over, with his earning capacity a drop in the Marlow bucket of gold. For Bill would never stop working. Work that would be a daily farce in its pretentious sense of supporting his wife.
Bill would find difficulty in looking at her, and when they no longer could look at each other equally and frankly that would be the end of it. If it wasn’t already over even before it had begun. It was one o’clock in the morning, and still Bill hadn’t called.
“Well,” Ludwig was saying to Sergeant Hurlstone, “what about it? Does Fleury split a bracelet with me? Just take a good look at the angles.”
“I looked,” Sergeant Hurlstone said.
CHAPTER XXIV
Dr. Johnson came toward them from the distant doorway. A man was with him, and Ann supposed he would be Medical Examiner Bedmann. They both looked tired. The man was Dr. Bedmann, and Dr. Johnson introduced him.
Dr. Bedmann was young, and Ann thought he must be of the age that Dr. Johnson was when Alice had been killed. Under his tired look there was an eager one which searched beyond any present moment and into the future. She found herself slipping naturally into the role of hostess and suggested drinks. Ludwig was enthusiastically enchanted with this. He went over and pressed a button for Washburn.
