Lay On, Mac Duff!

by Charlotte Armstrong

  Then he took both hands, one flat on the other, and pushed his chin up.

  I pushed my chin up, too.

  There was a noise at my door. I turned, listening. It was Ellen trying to get in. I turned back, but J.J. was already melting into the darker shadows.

  Ellen had come to help me dress, so I let her, keeping into the deep half of the room while not decent because I knew J.J. was there, yet I couldn’t bear to pull the shade all the way down and hide my light. I suspected Lina had sent Ellen to help me, because I never would have gotten myself into my graduation gown if I’d been let alone. It was a sweet dress. Mrs. Cox, up home, made it from a Vogue pattern, and I’d always loved the long swish of the skirt, sixteen gores and Mrs. Cox complaining up and down every seam. It had been white, but we’d dipped it, after the exercises, and now it was a pale rose color. The cold cream and the nap had done my face no harm, either. I almost felt equal to dining with my uncle. After I got the dress on and the little bunch of pink satin roses in my hair, I felt pretty grand.

  Ellen said, “You look lovely, Miss Bessie, dear. Was your mother pretty?”

  “Yes,” I said lonesomely. “She was awfully pretty, Mother was.”

  “You look good enough to eat,” Ellen said vigorously. “Try a little lipstick, dearie.” I didn’t have any, so she smuggled me hers.

  Being dressed up certainly helps. I wondered if even I, who’d always thought of myself as being—oh, you know—high-minded and all that, would like to be married to a very rich man and look pretty all the time. But when I swished out and found Lina in the hall, looking down over the stairwell with a wistful face, I thought, no. And I was glad J.J. was out there in the back, even if he only had $29.93 until Friday. Lina wore black chiffon. It was cut high and Quakerish with no tricks. She looked sweet and lovely and sad. As we went down together I wished, for a minute, I’d left the roses out of my hair.

  It was funny to think we weren’t going to a party but just downstairs to eat. Hugh was nowhere to be seen. I guess he wasn’t invited. But Uncle Charles met us at the foot of the stairs and took us into the dining room where we sat around one end of the table, Lina on one side, I on the other. I’d dreaded this meal, but it turned out to be fun. In the first place, I knew J.J. was just outside, and that made me feel as if I weren’t facing all this elegance quite alone. Then, our being all dressed up, and something else, a kind of feeling that it was right for an aunt and an uncle to be dining with their niece, that this peculiar house, for once, was nearer normal, made it very festive. Effans was serving in style this time, and you could tell he was happy to do it, to have the master and the mistress there and show them his mettle.

  Besides, my uncle was being nice. He was being charming. He talked to me as if I were grown up and about me as if I mattered and about a lot of fascinating things he knew I’d enjoy. He told me a lot of inside dope about theaters, and of course I loved that. He had me hanging on his words. Before I knew it, I was chatting away, not self-conscious or anything. I nearly forgot that he was probably a murderer. I had the strangest feeling of thawing out, of wanting to like him, and at the same time being afraid I might because that’s what he wanted me to do.

  Lina was sweet and gracious, and she chimed in once in a while, in her pretty way, but she was different. She wasn’t the same Lina she had been with me alone. Not quite.

  We were talking about actresses, beautiful ones, and I said, “But Lina’s so beautiful. She’d be lovelier than all of them.”

  My uncle cocked his crooked brow a little. “Yes,” he said carelessly, “Lina is very beautiful.”

  I saw Lina swallow, although she sat serenely still with her eyes down. “I don’t know,” he went on, “that Lina would care to be on the stage. Or would you, my dear?” His voice seemed full of live curiosity as if he really had never thought of such a thing before.

  “I’m afraid I’m not a very good actress, Charles,” Lina said humbly, still looking down.

  My uncle smiled, just a little fleeting smile as if he knew a secret, and he said, “Well, perhaps Bessie …? She’s very pretty.”

  “It takes more than just being pretty,” I said. “My goodness! And I’m not, so very …” I saw Lina’s eyes just then, looking at his half-turned face with … well, I’ll have to say anguish … with anguish in them. So I looked away quickly.

  Lina said, suddenly very gay, “She is pretty, isn’t she, Charles?” And I knew what was different about Lina. Of course, she was acting. That’s what happened to her when Uncle Charles came around. She began to act. Whatever she appeared to be, she wasn’t quite, when he was near.

  “What’s more,” Lina said, “I think she’s got a beau!” And, of all things, she began to tease me about J.J. Jones, when he might have been listening for all I knew, and I got so flustered I forgot to wonder about anything but that.

  Uncle Charles didn’t join her. He stopped talking. Effans was serving our coffee by then, and when he was finished my uncle said to him sharply, “Pull the blinds, Effans, please.”

  I felt my heart lurch as Effans snapped the blinds shut and pulled the draperies across each window. My coffee cup was at my lips, and I couldn’t get it down. But I had to look at Uncle Charles. He was watching me. I’d known that.

  “Do you think you ought to drink coffee at night?” he said to me softly. “You don’t sleep well, do you?”

  Then his cold eyes left me. “That sleuth of yours will be here in a minute,” he said coldly to Lina. “Let’s go upstairs.” And he walked out of the dining room ahead of us, leaving the bright bubble of friendliness we’d dined in shattered like a Christmas ornament that had been stepped on.

  Lina and I didn’t say anything to each other. We just followed him upstairs. Guy Maxon and Hugh were there in the library, Hugh chewing his fingers by the fire and Guy glancing scornfully through a magazine. Like clouds gathering before a storm, the atmosphere was frightening again. My uncle walked in, and the two men stood up, all three of them tall, uneasy, antagonistic. Lina stood like somebody lost, just at the door. The three tall men looked at us. My uncle was angry. Downstairs, we heard the bell.

  I wished to see any encounter between Mac Duff and my uncle. It would be, I thought, like an irresistible force meeting an immovable body, and nobody was quite decided as far as I knew, what the result would be when that happened. But when they came in, it was the twinkle in J.J.’s green eye and the quick touch of his hand I needed.

  “Something about a car,” I whispered to him. “I knew that, but I’m not very bright.”

  “Taxi driver. Didn’t you see me spit?”

  “Yes, but I—”

  “Never mind.”

  “Was it important?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Oh, I’m glad you got out.”

  “You mean here.”

  “She means out,” my uncle said. “Was it by your orders, Duff, that the back of my house was being watched tonight?”

  “No,” Duff said. He was impregnable, entrenched in his deepest calm, that limp powerful collapse of all urgency, all nerves, all effort. Nobody can do anything to a man who, for himself, just doesn’t care. I seemed to feel all my uncle’s force surge up, on impulse, to break that calm, and then retreat with a quick intelligent acceptance of defeat.

  “You knew about it,” he said, not accusingly.

  “Yes,” Duff said.

  “How,” my uncle said, almost amiably now, to J.J., “did you get in?”

  “I know the cop on the beat, the cop knows Duff, Mrs. Atwater knows the cop. It’s a grapevine,” J.J. said cheerfully. “Looked like a darned good dinner.”

  My uncle laughed. “Did you see any murderers?”

  “I don’t know,” J.J. said. “Maybe.”

  Lina said quickly, “Mr. Duff my husband has been implicated in these crimes, hasn’t he? I want you your help before it comes to … I wish to retain your seer-vices.”

  Mac Duff did his almost invisible bow.

>   “Ah, yes, that’s what we’re here for,” my uncle said. “She wants you to discover the murderer of Winberry and Gaskell. You may send the bill to me.”

  A gasp hung in the air. Nobody made the sound, but so many of us wanted to that it hung there.

  Duff said, “I wonder if you realize the situation.”

  “I do.” His mouth was tight around the words, and yet my uncle seemed to grin.

  “Very well,” Duff said mildly. “I think we are all here.”

  He sat down. He sat in a chair at an angle to the fire, my uncle at the same angle on the other side. J.J. and I went to the sofa at Duff’s right. Lina and Maxon were together on my uncle’s left. Hugh closed the circle, between Maxon and me. We settled ourselves.

  Guy Maxon said in his nervous voice, “Lay on Mac Duff, and damned be he who first cries hold, enough!”

  J.J.’s hand closed over mine convulsively. I saw Duff’s long face lengthen. It drew down so drolly, with such patient disgust, such comical and weary bearing of his cross that I nearly giggled out loud.

  He said, “Thank you, Mr. Maxon, But it’s ‘him that,’ you know.”

  A log fell in the fire, making a sound just as if someone had said, “Ssh.” We were all quiet.

  Chapter Fourteen

  “I want to talk to you,” Duff said, “about Peppingers.”

  He was the speaker, we were the listeners. Yet he listened. We were at school, he was the schoolmaster. Yet we taught him. He was the well of truth, we were the rills that fed it. We were to tell him, but he knew. I can’t explain how it was. But Mac Duff took over.

  “I have been told,” he began, “that four men bought the formula for that candy product from its inventor, built it up into a large business, and made a great deal of money from its manufacture and sale.”

  “Winberry, Gaskell, Maxon here, and me,” my uncle said.

  “Some years ago, Winberry and Gaskell sold out to you two here in rather an underhanded fashion.” Mac Duff threw the sentence out as if he were throwing a stone into a pond, and settled back to listen to the ripples.

  My uncle’s voice sounded perfectly casual to me. “They did. A matter of advance information they happened to have.”

  “Which you later acquired and turned to your own account, selling out to an ignorant Maxon.” Mac Duff turned his listening face to Maxon.

  Maxon’s face turned darker. “He did. That’s right.”

  “I further understand that you”—back to my uncle—“have or had in your possession a parcheesi set which includes red men resembling the old Peppingers so much that they might be mistaken for that candy.”

  “I had,” my uncle said.

  “They were specially made?”

  “Specially. There are no others like them as far as I know.”

  “Thank you,” Duff said. “Now, after a game at which you were the loser, you threw three parcheesi men out of a window. Why?”

  My uncle was silent for the space of a few seconds.

  “A whim.” His voice shrugged its shoulders. “I intended to use them no more.”

  “The red men?”

  “The set.”

  “But you threw only the red men away.”

  “Yes.”

  “Have you seen them since?”

  “One of them. Miller gave it to me here, that is, downstairs. The one he found on Winberry. I threw it into the fire. Destroyed it.”

  “One of them is in the possession of the police, having been found on Gaskell’s body. Where are the others?”

  “The fourth man I burned in this fireplace later yesterday.”

  “Why?”

  My uncle shrugged. “A whim,” he said as if he were merely suggesting a possible explanation which Duff could take or leave.

  “It has been suggested that they are symbols,” Mac Duff said.

  My uncle nodded. “It was as a symbol that I destroyed the fourth man.” It seemed to me that suddenly Mac Duff and my uncle were together in understanding. They knew what they were talking about. They really did. But I didn’t, and neither did J.J. I could feel his bewilderment in the very limpness of his fingers.

  “As for the last of the three,” my uncle said, “I have not seen it since.”

  “But they were in the box!” I cried. “They were here the next morning. Hugh and I both saw them. Three. Not the one from Winberry’s. Hugh had that in his pocket.”

  My uncle’s face was blank of expression.

  “You took the one you call the fourth man from the box, I suppose?” Duff asked him.

  “Yes. About six o’clock last evening. It was the only red man there in the box.”

  “That’s impossible!” I whispered to J.J.

  “Ssh.”

  “Since,” Duff went on, seeming to drop the point, “the red men were found as they were found, we are led to suppose that they are a clue to a motive as well as to a person. If, indeed, they are a symbol, what can they symbolize? They look like Peppingers. So we conclude tentatively that they are meant to represent Peppingers and the murders were done because of something to do with Peppingers. I have done some research on the subject. Not, I fear, enough. But let me outline to you the possible motives that lie in that old story. First, to be sure, in all cases, the motive is revenge. Now, revenge is a plausible motive. It can be a motive for murder. It is an explanation of the red men as nothing else can be. The man who was about to die was shown one, perhaps heard the word Peppinger, knew what sin of his it was that had come to someone’s judgment. Or there is a second explanation of the use of the red men. Perhaps the killer wished to frighten certain other sinners. To extend his revenge. Perhaps he meant his future victims to be worried by the fate of his first victims.”

  “Future victims!” Maxon exploded.

  “There is at least one more red man unaccounted for,” Duff reminded him. “Perhaps two.” My uncle’s eyebrow wavered. He didn’t miss Duff’s calling him a liar. After all, I thought, he could have burned a blue one to create that smell. I wondered if anyone had counted the other colors.

  “There is a third reason for the red men, or may be,” Duff went on, “and that is that it was left there in each case partly because it belonged to Cathcart.”

  Lina said, “Yes.”

  “But let’s consider the motives. We can see in the story a motive for Cathcart. He may have wished to revenge himself on Winberry and Gaskell for their treachery toward him. That revenge has been taken. He may or may not have a different but equally driving motive for wishing Maxon’s death.”

  Maxon started, and his nostrils quivered. Lina didn’t move. My uncle drew on his cigar. “The Peppinger deal was business,” he said, “strictly business. Besides, I had the best break in the end. I usually do. Why kill?” Mac Duff listened with that intense patience of his. He was receiving all the overtones of that voice. “Revenge in business must be taken in the same terms,” my uncle said silkily. “Not in bloodshed. To see them bankrupt would be infinitely more satisfying, and appropriate, than to see them die.” Duff waited. “It’s rather like a game,” my uncle said.

  “Ah.” Mac Duff seemed to pounce. “Yes. They tell me you lost at parcheesi.”

  “That was very unusual,” my uncle said and laughed. Laughed in the teeth of danger because he liked it.

  “Now,” Duff said in the same tone as before, “we also see in the story a motive for Maxon. He may have wished to revenge himself on Winberry and Gaskell and also on Cathcart. Perhaps especially on Cathcart. I shall come to that in a moment.”

  “The frame-up,” Lina said and bit her knuckles. Maxon’s face settled into cold lines as he seemed to gather himself together against all of us as his enemies.

  “The story gives, as far as we can see, no motive for Gaskell against Winberry,” Duff said, “and, besides, we suppose he was himself a victim of the same killer. I think we may take that for granted. He knew it himself, did he not?” He looked around, and all of us nodded. “Very well. Four men were the
original owners of the Peppinger business, but there is more to the story.” He paused, and the faces tightened. “There exists, as a matter of fact, a strong revenge motive for a fifth man. It seems that the inventor of the rather special formula for those candies was a young man by the name of Graves.” He paused. “Herbert Graves.” Nobody spoke.

  “He was happy at first to sell his formula to the firm of promoters for a lump sum. Or so we imagine, since he did so sell it and married, settling down, as the fairy tales say, to live happily ever after. But things went wrong. He seems to have become very poor. He then wrote, I discover, many letters, demanding, sometimes begging, for a share of the enormous profits he saw rolling up for someone else out of his own work. I have even seen one or two of the letters in Winberry’s files. They are full of bitterness and fury. I believe his demands were not answered?”

  “Certainly not,” my uncle said. “He’d sold the formula. Been paid for it.”

  “He had no claim,” Maxon said. “I remember.”

  “Do you remember that his young wife died?”

  “Ah, yes,” my uncle sighed. “I had thought of that.”

  “Graves wanted money, not for himself, but to save her. She had a rare illness. An expensive illness.”

  “It is extremely probable she’d have died in any case,” my uncle said lightly. “When medical science learns definitely how to cure a disease, the price of the cure goes down.”

  “Do you realize how he felt at all?” Duff said with an insulting curiosity.

  “How he felt? Oh, certainly.” My uncle’s eyes met mine. He must have seen the shock and revulsion I was feeling. “People like Graves,” he explained to me, “don’t know how the wheels go around. They only feel. He saw our success and leaped to the conclusion that it was due to some miraculous quality in his work. He took no account of our work. Nor of the fact that almost any other formula, given the same expert push … ah, well.… The misunderstood genius who thinks one has only to make his produce available, that the public’s tongue hangs out for his wares.…” His voice died in utter contempt.