Lay On, Mac Duff!

by Charlotte Armstrong

  “I’m what you might call an amateur,” he said.

  “J.J. told me you can see through a stone wall.”

  “No, but sometimes I seem to be able to see through people.”

  “That’s what I meant,” J.J. said. “A lot of stone walls are made out of folks. You should hear him see through the founding fathers.”

  “Bessie doesn’t get the connection,” Duff said, “between history and detection.”

  “I guess I don’t.”

  Duff swayed on his long legs. “You read history,” he said rather dreamily, “and what do you get? A series of things that happened. What fascinates me is figuring out why. You can’t change what happened: no matter how fantastically improbable it was, it did happen. So you’ve got to imagine, and solidly, too, because they were real, the kind of people who would do what was done. That’s the fun of it.”

  J.J. grinned. “It’s fun, all right. Never a dull moment in History 2B.”

  “And,” Duff went on, “when you’ve practiced a long time, figuring out what kind of people do the silly and terrible things they do, why, you get the knack of it.”

  “Oh,” I said. “But I always thought American history was the dullest of all.”

  “Little do you reck,” J.J. told me, “what went on in them good old days.”

  “I used to tell them the juicy bits,” Duff confessed a little ruefully. “I used to talk about the folks instead of the forces of economic expansion. How they felt, you know. And I always thought it was more fun to know how a hero got along with his wife and what effect it had on his military strategy than to remember the dates on his tombstone.”

  “’Twas,” J.J. insisted. “More educational, too, in the long run.”

  Mac Duff’s eyes could twinkle. “Be that as it may, I educated myself to be a pretty good amateur detective.”

  “That’s very interesting,” Hugh said. “Isn’t it, Bessie? And if there’s anything we need, it’s someone who can see through people. I think you can help us, Mr. Duff.”

  “Indeed, I hope so,” Duff said rather quaintly. “Good night, Miller. Good night, Bessie.”

  J.J. squeezed a groove into my fingers where my high-school ring was and whispered, “Stiff upper lip, chin up. Call Plaza 7-9203 if you need me.”

  “Plaza 7-9203,” I said over and over to myself as they went away.

  Chapter Ten

  “MacDougal Duff,” Hugh said in a soft voice as if he were pleased.

  “Who is he, Hugh?”

  “He’s a detective. I don’t know what the difference is between an amateur and a professional, but what else can you call a man who investigates crimes and takes fees for doing it?”

  “I mean, is he famous?”

  “He’s done a couple of spectacular things. There was a feature article about him in one of the papers a while ago. People know his name right now. You know, there’s a point you get to, in this town”—Hugh sounded cynical—“when your name is known, and it doesn’t matter much for what. They’ll listen.”

  “Who’ll listen?”

  “Everybody. They’ll listen for a while. Just because they’ve heard of you. MacDougal Duff’s right at the point.”

  “You mean he’s in the public eye … or ear?” I said.

  “Yes, that’s it, and it’s a good thing for us. Because they’ll listen to him. Don’t you see? Whatever he says.”

  “Who’ll listen?” I demanded again.

  “Why, the police!”

  “Oh.”

  “The police,” Hugh said, “are probably turning on the routine, looking for a … oh, a gangster or a regular criminal. You know how they work. The stool pigeons or whatever you call them will be out. That won’t do us any good.”

  “Unless it was a regular criminal who did it.”

  “There’s something a little too subtle about this thing …” Hugh said and broke off.

  I knew he was thinking about Uncle Charles.

  “Is Mac Duff supposed to be subtle?” I asked. “I wish I’d read that article. What did it say?”

  “Oh, it built him up. Told how he lives in an old frame house up along Riverside Drive, squeezed in between big stone apartments. And how his rooms are built around the view he gets of the spot where Washington crossed the Hudson River in a rowboat fifteen minutes ahead of the British or something like that.”

  “He was always crossing rivers, wasn’t he?” I murmured.

  “Who?”

  “Washington.”

  “I guess so. They said Duff’s got death masks of Revolutionary heroes sitting all around and that he’s always feeling out things about what went on in those days. Oh, it was a big buildup. A new master mind. Those articles are always hoping for the best.”

  “You mean people hope he is a new master mind? They’d like it if he were?”

  “Of course they would. It told about how he just walked out of the History Department and solved the Kinzer case. It sounded simple and impulsive and well … spectacular.”

  “I know. They leave out all the human doubts and jitters,” I said. “Biographers do that. All great men sound as if they just up and did things when maybe it really took them years to get around to it. Well, I guess hard work isn’t any more fun to read about than it is to do. People like to think that great things get done quickly and easily.”

  “Yes,” Hugh said, “but the real world is awfully suspicious of a great thing done too fast. The real world sees to it that you suffer enough. It sees to that.”

  “You sound awfully bitter about it,” I said.

  “I’m getting older, and I haven’t got very far.” Hugh looked at me, unsmiling. “At this moment I haven’t even got a job. I haven’t got enough money to marry, for instance.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Well, I guess we’d better have some dinner.”

  We went in to dinner, the two of us, alone in that big room, close around the corner of one end of the table, with tall candles making our end bright. I felt shivery, as if the room were drafty, although it was merely too big for us.

  Hugh wasn’t much company. It was funny how he’d gone off again into that same disinterested mood, disinterested in me, I mean. Not that I cared about that. But right after what he’d said about marrying, I guessed it meant he hadn’t been thinking of me in that connection.

  It’s rather interesting to eat with people for the first time. The way they eat tells so much about them. It’s like getting a letter from them, the first letter. Hugh ate rather primly and not as if he were hungry. His table manners were all right. But I could have used some bright chatter with my meal, and he didn’t have any. He was there to be a companion to me—after all, we had a date—but he didn’t seem to know how to be a companion. He was quite amiable. He answered when I spoke. He seemed to put himself, outwardly, altogether at my disposal. But there was something both limp and remote about his amiability. He wasn’t really there.

  Of course, the only thing of burning interest to us both that we had ever had to talk about was the murder, and I guess we both felt talked out on that subject. Hugh said once, “I wonder what he meant … two little thoughts?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, and I didn’t know and couldn’t guess either.

  Effans served us, and he seemed disinterested, too, without his usual air of pride in his work. His face looked lumpy and out of drawing in the candlelight, he balanced his head tenderly on his long neck, and once in a while the muscles around his eyes winced with pain. As he was removing our fruit cups, I realized that his mind was on a pretty bad toothache. I didn’t know the etiquette of the situation of what a perfect lady is supposed to do when the butler has a pain, but finally I just asked him if he didn’t want to be excused to go and do something about it.

  “Oh, no, Miss Elizabeth, thank you very kindly. I have applied some drops that will no doubt have an effect soon.”

  “You’d better see a dentist,” I said, and he winced but answered bravely that he would and thanked me.
Why do butlers have to be so grateful?

  The drops evidently took hold, though, because he served us a pudding and coffee with more style. After that, moving inertly, according to plan, Hugh and I went to the movies.

  We walked around the corner and up a way to what Hugh said was a neighborhood theater. All I can remember about the picture we saw is that some man kept standing around smirking in the most conceited kind of way at two or three girls and they were all charmed, and I thought to myself I’d have smacked him one. A devil’s one thing and very attractive, too, but a plain smart aleck I cannot stand.

  J.J. Jones had a devil in his eye, but it was cute. Reckless and exciting, you know, as if he might take it into his head to do almost anything, any time. It wasn’t the kind of look that says, “Look at me, baby! I’m a regular rascal, I am!” It wasn’t a self-conscious devil. That was it.

  I poked Hugh with my elbow. “Don’t you think Lina’s beautiful?” I whispered.

  “What? Oh, yes, very.”

  “Really beautiful?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “I should think any man would be crazy about her.”

  “She’s lovely to look at,” Hugh said in a matter-of-fact way.

  “All my uncle’s friends seem to think so,” I meowed.

  Hugh turned his head. His glasses caught light from the screen. “What do you mean?”

  “Oh, nothing. I just … She’s so young and all, and my uncle’s not a young man.” Hugh kept looking at me. “Don’t you think,” I whispered, “Mr. Gaskell had a lot of nerve tonight? I mean, taking her out … oh, you know.…”

  “She often goes out,” he said blankly as if he didn’t understand at all.

  “My goodness, isn’t Uncle Charles jealous, ever?”

  The woman in front turned around and gave me a dirty look. The hero on the screen was leering one of his insults at the heroine, while the villain, who throughout treated her with old-fashioned courtesy, looked indignant in defense of her innocence. I stuck my tongue out at the woman’s back hair.

  We had a dutiful dish of ice cream after the show. It seemed to “go with the dinner,” like Jell-o on the menu. But I was glad to have been out of my uncle’s house for a few hours, and I shrank a little from going back. We walked silently along the street. It always seemed strange to me how that short block could be so quiet of itself while the whole vast city seemed to send up roars of distant excitement all around. The tall stone faces of the house gave me the shivers again.

  “I hate to go in,” I said.

  “There’s a fire escape going past my window.” Hugh startled me so that I stopped walking. “Doesn’t it go past your uncle’s bathroom, too?”

  “I guess it must,” I said. “Why?”

  “Is there a way out of the yard at the back?”

  “I don’t think so. What do you mean?”

  “I wondered … There’s a law he mustn’t be disturbed, isn’t there?”

  “Yes,” I said grimly, “there certainly is.”

  “But if there’s only the front door …”

  “There are two doors, one from the basement, under the steps. Do you think,” I said, “he gets out?” I had a vision of somebody wicked, escaped, prowling, free to prowl, while everybody thought him safe inside. “But, if he wanted to go out, surely,” I said, trying to be sane, “surely he’d just go out the front door. It’s his own house.”

  “A man’s conspicuous coming down those high steps,” Hugh said. I drew closer to him, seeing the pits of shadow in areaways all along beside us.

  A taxi passed and stopped a little way ahead. It was Mr. Gaskell bringing Lina home. The hour was twelve, midnight.

  Hugh and I walked more slowly so as to let them get into the house before us, but we couldn’t help knowing that Gaskell didn’t want to let her go, he wanted to go on to another place, he wanted another little drink, the night was young and she was beautiful, and he was all for making the most of it. Lina, however, paid no attention, and he had to follow her.

  We hesitated on the steps ourselves, but we had to go in. The taxi driver was peering at us with a great deal of curiosity. So it happened that we came upon a little scene in the hall.

  Lina stood at the foot of the staircase, looking up. Gaskell was whining at her back. Guy Maxon, his hand on the newel post, stared down at her, and he was angry. Up above, against the curved wall, my Uncle Charles loomed, gigantic and still, and Lina’s gaze went past Maxon to his face.

  Maxon said, “Why so early?” with a sneer in his voice.

  Gaskell said, “Damn it, Lina, I don’t want to go home.”

  Maxon said, “He doesn’t want to go home.”

  Uncle Charles said quietly, but I jumped as if he’d slapped somebody, “Lina, go to bed.”

  She pulled her red cloak close about her knees and went past Maxon as if she didn’t wish even her cloak to touch him. She went steadily and quite obediently up the stairs, and the two men below turned their faces, watching. As she drew level with my uncle he said, “Good night, my dear.” She stopped and I saw her tremble. Then she did what she’d done the night before, bent her head, so much too meekly, and my uncle kissed her forehead.

  Maxon laughed on a high note, sounding like a woman. “Going my way, Bert? Let’s you and me go.”

  He snatched his coat from Effans’s arm—Effans was there like magic, of course, when needed—and went out the door without even putting it on.

  Gaskell said, “Well … uh … g’night, Charlie.”

  “Good night,” my uncle said very placidly.

  Gaskell didn’t even see Hugh and me. His pop eyes were blind as he went out past us.

  My uncle said, “Was it a good picture?” and smiled.

  I realized with a start that Hugh wasn’t going to answer him, so I said, “It was all right. It was very nice. I am going to bed. I’m tired.”

  Hugh said “Good night.” But I put my head down and went past my uncle on the stairs as if I were running a gauntlet. I was halfway up the second flight when I saw him go into the library below me and turn right toward his own quarters, dismissing us all with the turn of his broad back in the way he had.

  Lina was nowhere to be seen.

  The pretty little clock on my night table agreed with my watch that it was only a few minutes after twelve. I drew a long shaky breath and began to get undressed. This terrible day was over, I thought. Nothing now but to go to bed and get some sleep and forget and rest and be steadier in the morning.

  But it wasn’t over.

  It was Hugh who wouldn’t let it be over. I had slipped out to the bathroom and back and was brushing my hair a few last licks when I heard a soft tapping at my door. Bundling my old blue bathrobe closer, I leaned against the panels and said, “Who is it?”

  “Hugh. Please …”

  I didn’t let him in, of course. We talked with our faces close in the gap of the door. “Everyone’s quiet. Come and help me do something.”

  “What, for heaven’s sake?”

  “A kind of trap,” he said. He wasn’t undressed yet. I was glad of that anyhow.

  “I don’t know what you mean. Hugh, I’m tired.”

  “I want somebody besides myself,” he whispered, looking rather reproachful. “It won’t take a minute.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “See if anyone uses the doors.”

  “How can you? Where’s Effans?”

  “Gone up. Everyone’s quiet. Please. Then we’ll know. Don’t you see?”

  “Know what?”

  “We’ll know if he … if anyone goes out.”

  “But …”

  “Please.”

  “All right,” I said.

  He started very softly down the padded stairs, and I went after, with my heart in my throat so I could have bitten it, past the second floor. The great stairwell was lit, as it had been the night before, but the library doors yawned darkly at us. We got down to the street floor without any sound, and I be
gan to feel excited and brave and adventurous. Hugh took a piece of thread and stood it up so that it lay against the bottom of the door and out across the floor.

  “See?”

  “Won’t it blow?” It would have in our house, where we used to have to stuff newspapers around the window frames in winter. But my uncle’s house was better built. Anyhow, this was the inner one of two doors.

  “I don’t think so,” Hugh whispered. He held his hand against the crack at the bottom. There was no draft. The door was rough enough so that the thread seemed to stay where it was. “Now, if it’s opened, we can tell,” Hugh said.

  “Effans will open it early to take in the milk or something.” I felt like giggling all of a sudden.

  “I mean to get up early and see.”

  “That means me, too?” He nodded, looking at me anxiously. I thought it would be something to tell J.J. Jones, so I didn’t object.

  “Where’s the other door?” Hugh said.

  “Oh, I don’t see how we can … it’s in the basement.”

  “Where’s the basement?”

  I turned silently the way I knew and hoped the cook would know me again if I encountered her on the same level. We went through the little door under the stair’s curve. A weak bulb burned over the coat rack in the corner. Three coats hung there. Hugh’s, the one he had worn to the movies, and a camel’s hair, a beautiful coat that must have been my uncle’s because it looked like him, and a third, a long, dark heavy wool coat that looked like him, too. I showed Hugh the door to the basement. “Or we could ride down on the dumbwaiter,” I whispered hilariously.

  Hugh frowned at my funny streak and snapped on a tiny flashlight, one of those little ones that can be carried in a pocket. It wasn’t much light, and there was none below us, but we went down. The basement stairs had a carpet, too, but it was thin, not padded, and our feet made a crushing sound on it. At the bottom, Hugh let the tiny light swing around, and we could see that we were in a narrow passage running back of the way we came to where the kitchen must be and ahead of us to the door we were seeking. Two other doors pierced the wall at our right.