"In a question of reading individual character, I’m just suggesting what he might do if he were driven far enough.
When I say he's tricky or slippery, I don't mean tricky in the way we usually mean it. There's a whole lot of things he wouldn't and couldn't do. Pa Maynard wouldn't cheat you: he wouldn't sell you a worthless stock or a used car you couldn't depend on. But if he thought he had cause he might just possibly slip poison into your bourbon when he was sure you weren't looking. I'll go further than that; I'll say—"
"Yes, young man?" demanded a harsh voice. It was as though the room had been struck with physical chill.
On the little platform inside the library door stood Valerie Huret. with her red hair and her white skin. But they hardly noticed Mrs. Huret now. They all looked at Henry Maynard, who stood just in front of her.
His wide-open eyes had acquired such fixity that a ring of white showed entirely around the iris. He hardly seemed to breathe. Shoulders back, elbows at his sides, he stood rigid, drawn up, the picture of a perfect gentleman holding in check the flaming temper of a fiend.
"Yes, young man?" he repeated. "Let's both go further, shall we? Since you insist on theorizing about my many shortcomings and my basically murderous impulses, hadn't you better share the theory with me?"
8
Early evening light, with a broad red glow in the west, was settling over James Island as Alan drove back the way he had come. Again Dr. Fell occupied the rear of the car; there was nobody else. The trees of Fort Johnson Road sped past overhead; the clock on the dashboard pointed to ten minutes past six.
And a certain feverishness was still on Alan.
"Do you see the time, Dr. Fell? Actually, it hasn't been a full ten minutes since the old boy turned up at that door like an avenging ghost. I thought there was going to be the great-grandmother of all rows!"
"The same thought occurred to me," confessed Dr. Fell. "But young Hillboro, it would seem, is not quite the indomitable figure he tries to be. Faced with a direct challenge, you remember, he covered confusion by laughing and apologizing, and a reminder of his careful preface that he had been joking all the time."
"Which Mr. Maynard accepted, to everybody's surprise, without protest and with only one comment." Here Alan mimicked Henry Maynard. " It will decrease friction, Rip, if you and Yancey see less of each other from now on; and if I see still less of you too.' They both said, 'Yes, sir,' like obedient schoolboys. Back upstairs he went, with some remark about a book he'd forgotten.
"And that was all. But was it all? Valerie Huret stalked over like Juno to capture the attention of Bob Crandall; you instantly made excuses to get us out of there . . ."
"Promising," supplied Dr. Fell, "that the old duffer would be on tap if they needed him. In candor, I was concerned to avoid more rows. What did you write on that card you gave Miss Bruce?"
"The name of the restaurant where we're going now, one I particularly want you to visit. I asked Camilla to go with us; she wouldn't. It's not quite six-fifteen at the moment, but it will be nearer seven when we get there. Do you mind an early dinner?"
"Sir, I enjoy dining at any time; even, malcontents have hinted, at breakfast time. What is the restaurant?"
"A place called Davy's, adjoining the Dock Street Theatre in Church Street."
"No Englishman," said Dr. Fell, "can be stunned to find the Dock Street Theatre in Church Street. At the same time . . . !"
"It's not as confused as it sounds. Queen Street, formerly Dock Street, is just around the corner. By the way, speaking of Camilla—"
"Do you still think she can't bear the sight of you? Archons of Athens! 'Somebody asked the Sergeant's wife.'"
"Asked the Sergeant's wife what? How did the Sergeant get into this anyway? Are you beginning on cryptic remarks again?"
"No remark of mine, properly considered, is ever cryptic," Dr. Fell informed him with a certain stateliness. "It may be misinterpreted; it is not cryptic. Is there anything you especially want to know?"
"I want to know everything. But I'll be content with such hints as you feel you can drop. Can't we talk about this business at Maynard Hall? Is there any reason why we shouldn't discuss it freely?"
"On the contrary, there is every reason why we must and should discuss it as freely as circumstances permit. What others may think is anybody's guess; but by thunder, sir, it frightens me!"
"What frightens you?"
"Emotional pressures," said Dr. Fell. "Certain remarks and attitudes of several persons, notably of Henry Maynard himself."
"Do you think Rip Hillboro's right? That the old man might just possibly have some kind of murderous design?"
"Come!" the big voice boomed. "Tut, tut, and out upon it! Are there no emotional pressures but those that lead to murdering somebody? More often, surely, they may be directed to the happier course of not murdering somebody? For the most part, I concede, our information has come from atmospheres, suggestions, innuendoes. But the atmospheres, suggestions, and innuendoes have been extraordinarily revealing!
"As for Henry Maynard, something haunts and hag-rides the man. I told him this in your presence. The twenty-five minutes or so I spent alone with him, after you had gone downstairs and before I myself descended to watch the baseball challenge, I devoted mostly to hammering him with questions about what could be doing the haunting or hag-riding."
"And—?"
"It has something to do with the conduct of his daughter," replied Dr. Fell. "But that, on the surface at least, would seem the most pulling point of all. She is a well-behaved girl, is she not?"
"Madge is all of that. Even in Goliath (and there's no whispering gallery like a college town) the worst of the damned prying minds had nothing against her. She hasn't liked being kept so much in cotton-wool, like a fair-haired princess in a fairy tale. But thaf s not strange; it's only human!"
"Then what can she have been up to that worries or frightens him so much? Does nothing suggest itself?" "No; nothing."
"Perhaps it will help," wheezed Dr. Fell, "if I recount what he told me in reply to my questions. Later this afternoon, I seem to remember, Yancey Beale mentioned an occurrence that took place on the night of Sunday, May 2nd. This is what Henry Maynard had already told me:
"On the night of May 2nd, he says, he was in his study with the air-conditioner turned off and one of the windows raised. Madge and some young man—whom her father supposed to be Yancey Beale because Yancey lives close by in Charleston, and Rip Hillboro had not yet arrived—were under the magnolias out in front.
"He could hear only a distant murmur of talk, and not always that. The situation appeared to be growing a little impassioned, though not at all dangerous, when suddenly the visitor lost his head and cried out something to the effect that it would be disastrous if Madge's father discovered them there.
"It took Henry Maynard off balance, or so he says. If his daughter becomes anybody's wife, he would prefer her to be Yancey Beale's. The notion that the boy should suppose himself unwelcome really shocked our listener on the top floor. Down he went in a hurry. Yancey was there. When asked why he had made so strange a remark, Yancey—perhaps carrying chivalry too far, as he is inclined to do—did not deny using the words. He merely said he could not remember saying them.
"But . . .
"Henry Maynard is no fool. He wondered at the time, and afterwards felt certain. Yancey Beale, a highly cultivated young man, affects broad Southern speech; it is the only affectation I myself have discerned in him. There had been, as our friend Maynard put it, 'something different about the voice.' It was not Yancey who had been with his daughter at the time. Who was it?"
"He accused me, damn him!" Alan burst out. "He thought / was the one, even though—"
"Tut!" protested Dr. Fell. "He did not really think so. It occurred to him, or so he says, merely because you, once admittedly an admirer of Madge, were a mere two hundred miles away instead of a thousand miles or more.
"And yet this disturbance, surely, is
all cry and no wool? The girl was being 'embraced,' his own word; nobody suggests it went further. Truth must be told, as I indicated to Maynard. Queen Victoria is dead; President McKinley has long since departed the White House. Is he afraid she will make an unsuitable marriage? Even so, why the disturbance? What is there about the bearing of this girl, Madge Maynard, to hint at devils howling down the wind or direful voices in the wilderness? So far as we know, nothing whatever. And yet, unless the man has been a complete liar in everything, which I refuse to believe, there is an explanation somewhere. That is our problem, or the greater part of it."
"What else did he tell you, Dr. Fell?"
"Nothing germane to the purpose. Stop! It seems almost an irrelevance," bumbled Dr. Fell, fishing out of his capacious side pocket a battered old exercise-book bound in cardboard, "if briefly I execute a flip-flop back over nearly a hundred years, and to Commodore Maynard battered to death on the beach."
He held up the exercise-book. The wind caught and riffled yellowed pages of spidery script in ink that had turned brown.
"I have here—as Maynard promised, remember?—the diary kept for the year 1867 by one India Keate, then eighteen years old, who for a part of April was a guest at Maynard Hall. She was very much there on the night of April 16th, when somebody so mysteriously struck down the victim.
"I glanced through these pages on my way downstairs from the study. India Keate noted several significant points, though she did not realize she was noting them and never thought of the matter; well-brought-up young ladies were not encouraged to interest themselves in brutal murder. Most significant, it seems to me, are the names and activities of those staying at the Hall on April 16th-17th.
"The head of the family was our own Maynard's great-grandfather Henry. Great-grandfather Henry, our host told me this afternoon, was born in 1810. He had three sons and three daughters. Two of the sons had been killed in the late conflict; the third—our Maynard's grandfather, incidentally—was a mere boy of fourteen. The two elder daughters had married and left home. The youngest daughter, Ariadne, was that friend of India Keate who entertained India at the time.
"Present at the Hall on the night of April 16th, in addition to Miss Keate herself, were Great-grandfather Henry, his wife, his son, his daughter, and his younger brother Luke, the stern and moody ex-commander of C.S.S. Palmetto. Finally there was Jack Maynard, a cousin from Mobile, Alabama. Jack Maynard seems to have been something of a ne'er-do-well. He followed the sea in less formal fashion than the commodore, and had been a blockade-runner during the war. But similar pursuits had not endeared him to his cousin Luke; there was bad blood between the two, as India Keate's gentlest references seem to indicate. Jack Maynard twitted the commodore about a real or supposed weakness in the latter's right eye, saying he wondered that a gallant Confederate captain had been able to see the enemy, still less engage the enemy; and once, after Luke had refused to lend Jack money, there was a quarrel that came very near a fight."
Dr. Fell, puffing out his cheeks, made a hollow noise like wind along a tunnel.
"Now mark what follows; use your wits on it!
"On the afternoon of the 16th they had an early meal, all of them, at half-past five. At about high-tide—say between six-thirty and seven o'clock—Luke Maynard went for his customary walk along the beach. Nobody worried when he did not return; his solitary habits were known and accepted.
"Nobody worried, that is, until a laborer found his body next morning. The line of his footprints showed that he had gone as far as Fort Johnson and returned, walking rather high up the beach. At some point below the terrace of crushed oyster-shell he had veered towards the water, as men on an idle walk will do, apparently without reaching what at that hour would have been the edge of the surf. Commodore Maynard lay on the beach with the right side of his head crushed: not as though by repeated blows, but as though by one massive blow from a blunt weapon."
"Yes!" Alan agreed, when Dr. Fell hesitated like a man whistling for attention. "All that was in the newspaper account!"
"Then hear what India Keate says. Before Commodore Luke left for the walk the previous evening, Jack Maynard, on the plea of exercise, had taken a small rowboat and left the then-existing jetty with the intention (he said) of rowing around James Island. At the crucial times, we observe, Luke Maynard was near the water and Jack Maynard was on the water in a boat. Note that well: in a boat."
Alan, in a rush of whirling thoughts, almost drove the car off the road before he recovered. "Dr. Fell, it won't do!" "What won't do?"
"Your theory won't do. Luke Maynard was walking west, it's true. He had his right side towards the harbor: agreed. But if you're suggesting that ne'er-do-well Jack, with a small boat in very shallow water, approached on Luke's blind side and struck before his victim apprehended danger, it's out of the question. I told you this morning that the body lay above the highest reach of the tide; no boat could have come so close. It's more than out of the question; it's fantastic!"
"Did I say how the murderer approached?" demanded Dr. Fell. "I asked only that you use your wits and remember the facts."
"But it leaves us worse off than before; there's no way!"
"When water is near, keep your eye on water. But perhaps," grunted Dr. Fell, closing the exercise-book and slipping it back into his pocket, "perhaps I shall not have brought the matter up. What have we to do with these old shades? Out upon them! Our problems lie at Maynard Hall in 1965. Think of the people you have just seen there, of the Hall or associated with it!"
"I'm trying to think."
"There are several—this I do suggest—who might be called enigmatic. But by far the most enigmatic is Henry Maynard himself. Henry Maynard, to whom all roads lead! Have you any notion about him?"
"I was wondering . . ."
"Yes?"
"Dr. Fell, two of my lectures at King's College dealt with the Victorian novel. I maintain, in spite of Camilla's derision, that the Victorians wrote novels better than anybody before or since. One of their stock figures was the heir to an estate who isn't really the heir; if some curious personality turns up in the story after long absence from home, you can bet your shirt he's an impostor. Our own Henry Maynard seems almost too good to be true. What if Henry Maynard isn't the real Henry Maynard at all? Or is that, as Camilla would say, too wild even for me?"
"As a matter of fact," Dr. Fell sounded guilty, "it was the first thought which occurred to me. And the notion is not wild; it is merely mistaken. I had a word aside with Captain Ashcroft at the hotel. Henry Maynard really is Henry Maynard and nobody else; kindly accept that or we shall be nowhere! But it does lead directly to another thought, if you follow me. And, speaking of the hotel," pursued Dr. Fell, waving a hand ahead as they emerged into fast traffic on Folly Road, "surely that is the bridge and the approach to Charleston? Do we return by way of Calhoun Street and our hotel?"
"No. In getting to the restaurant, we'll swing all the way downtown and come up again. The tricky thing is to remember the one-way streets; where you may turn and where you mayn't. In about twenty minutes, now . . ."
Twilight was thickening above old roofs and pastel-colored house fronts as Alan, having parked his car a little distance away, led Dr. Fell into Church Street.
There is always a hush at this hour. On the west side of Church Street, which stretches seven blocks from St. Philip's to the Battery, thin pillars of brownish sandstone supported a wrought-iron balcony across the face of the Dock Street Theatre. No lights showed there tonight; apart from fragile street-lamps, the whole thoroughfare seemed dark.
Alan pointed.
"The first Dock Street Theatre, Dr. Fell, was opened in 1736. It burned down; so did a succeeding one. On that site, in 1809, they built the once-celebrated Planter's Hotel, a place of luxury where so many bets, love-affairs, and duels originated in the old South. Thirty years ago its shell was restored into still another playhouse, with a Georgian auditorium and as many relics as possible, including those pillars and the
balcony above them, from the Planter's Hotel. That pink-fronted building to the left of it is Davy's." "Davy who?"
"That's the surname: Parsifal Davy, a restaurant-keeper of the early nineteenth century. If the head-waiter I'm acquainted with is on duty tonight . . ."
The head-waiter was. With some ceremony they were ushered from the foyer into a spacious restaurant, gratefully air-conditioned, with walls panelled in native black cypress and ante-bellum decor not overdone. Electric table-lamps, fashioned to resemble oil-lamps in gray silk shades with gilt fringes, shed soft light on napery and silver. At a table against the right-hand wall, where a window looked into the courtyard of the Dock Street Theatre, Alan ordered food and drink any host could depend on.
She-crab soup, a Charleston specialty, was followed by succulent lobster a la Davy and strawberry shortcake for dessert. The wine, a medium Anjou, padded mind and heart. Over the coffee, with a mist of tobacco smoke arising. Dr. Fell jerked his thumb towards the window beside them.
"Those premises adjoining," he said. "They've had a romantic history, then?"
"Romantic and sensational too. In 1838, when the place was a hotel, Junius Brutus Booth, the actor, got roaring drunk as usual and tried to murder his manager by beating the man's head in with an iron firedog. He—" Alan stopped abruptly.
"I see. You don't suggest," asked Dr. Fell, "that beating somebody's head in is a common practice hereabouts? At the same time, when we remember Maynard Hall . . ."
"When we remember Maynard Hall," Alan insisted, "we mainly remember that accursed jumpy atmosphere.
Dr. Mark Sheldon, whom I met on his way to deliver a message he decided against delivering after all, said everybody there needed a tranquillizer. I wish Camilla had come with us; I wish she were out of the atmosphere. You and I are out of it, at least."
But they were not out of it At that moment none other than Mark Sheldon himself, minus black bag but with a distressed forehead, hurried into the restaurant and wormed among tables towards them.
Dark of the moon - Dr. Gideon Fell 22 Page 10
