Murder On the Way!

by Theodore Roscoe

  “I saw him, myself,” cut in Narcisse with a glare.

  “You bet,” assented the En-sign with a cheerful grin, “cos’ that’s just where he was, this arty guy. And why was he there? Because he come outa th’ office with th’ gat he’s took from the safe he’s opened, and he went hikin’ up them stairs over there. Standin’ on them stairs he can draw a bead smack down through this transom over here. A pipe for a gunman like him!”

  I untied cords in my throat and gnashed out: “I’d have to be a pretty good gunman to take a shot like that in the dark, particularly when I didn’t have any gun — ”

  “You musta had a gun, bright boy, an’ maybe it wasn’t dark.” The man’s salty face fissured in a thousand merry wrinkles, his coppery nose screwed up between happy cheeks. “I got that answer, too. It was lightning outside, wasn’t it? Down in the hall we couldn’t see it, becos’ there’s no windows in th’ hall. But up them stairs over there, lookin’ across through th’ transom into Ti Pedro’s room here, you could see it. Lightnin’ plays behind that winda in there an’ brightens up th’ room. You see Ti Pedro’s head, an’ you pop a bullet down through th’ transom an’ hit him atop his nob!”

  Pete stood forward with fists clenched at her sides. “And since you’ve taken over the case,” she accosted the En-sign scornfully, “perhaps you’ll explain why a gun in total darkness on those stairs wouldn’t be seen down in the hall?”

  “Maybe Bright Boy muzzled the flame with a nose-blower or something. You tell us how he did it.”

  “And how was it,” Pete cried, “the sound of the shot, when heard by the police lieutenant and the rest of us, seemed come from Ti Pedro’s room?”

  En-sign hitched a sweat-stained belt on his tattooed (and blistered) stomach muscles. “You said ‘seemed to come’ didn’t you, girlie? That’s a give-away. It was thundering outside. Them Voodoo drums is still goin.’ The whole dam’ house is fulla noise as a ship in a storm. How do you know where a sound comes from? You can’t never tell in the dark. Manfred,” he twisted about to blink at the German, “where’d it seem to you th’ shot was?”

  “On the stairs, Herr En-sign.”

  “Narcisse,” I bawled, “they’re trying to frame me, if you believe — ”

  I must have made a move at the officer, for Corporal Louis put a bayonet-point into the knot of my necktie and held me suddenly at attention. Tears of quicksilver were sliding down Pete’s marble cheek. I saw Narcisse snatch a lantern from one of the men; go sputtering across the hall to the staircase. The bull’s-eye sent a yellow path mounting the steps ahead of him, and he was halfway to the landing when he stopped, grabbed up something with a shout, came leaping down the steps and at us. Curses of astonishment rose in the windy gloom, my own curse leading the chorus in key and profanity. Narcisse carried a gun in his hand.

  “It was dropped — or thrown — on those stairs. You were right, m’sieu the En-sign. Here is the pistol!”

  Well, it was a pistol, right enough. Not an automatic or a baby twenty-two, but an old-fashioned dueling pistol with a barrel as long as a piece of lead pipe and a long, curved, chaste-silver handle, single-ball, vintage of colonial days.

  Everybody looked at the pistol.

  Lifting the muzzle to a splayed nostril, the officer sniffed audibly. “So! It has just been fired!”

  Everybody looked at me.

  I looked at everybody. Amazed satisfaction leered from the En-sign’s mottled countenance; I saw his glance slew sidewise at his German partner; saw Manfred’s eyebrows go up.

  The Haitian lieutenant’s teeth glittered as he barked, “Have any of you seen this weapon before?”

  “I have.”

  Everybody looked at Pete. Pale, she was pointing a white finger at the gun in the officer’s fist. “I saw that gun when I was a little girl. Uncle Eli’s house in Florida. He kept it with a lot of others in a trophy case — he — that was Uncle Eli’s gun!”

  “But I — I have seen it, also,” came the unexpected admission from Maître Tousellines. “It is one of a collection of which M’sieu Proudfoot was most choice. Always it was locked in the office safe.”

  Narcisse glowered, “I did not see it when I locked up the other weapons in the safe.”

  “It was in a little strong box,” the lawyer gurgled.

  “Who could open the strong box? Who has that key?” Narcisse shouted at Tousellines. “Who?”

  “Not I!” the old Negro crowed. “Non, I have not the strong box key. Nor do I know where it is. I could not open the box.”

  “Ah but ma’mselle knew of this loaded pistol and its whereabouts.” The officer’s eyes flashed black lightning at Pete. “And her American friend could open the safe and the strong box, eh? I begin to believe m’sieu the En-sign speaks more truth than poetry when he accuses the so-called artist of this murder.”

  “I told you I had it figgered,” put in the En-sign with a gloating glance.

  As for me, I could only stand there in that ghost-gray hall, my brain in complete coma, everything going flibbertigibbet around me, and listen to those rats railroad me to beat the New York Central. Away off in the gloom, drums were trains in the rain; the hall of Morne Noir was a dim cavern of Inquisitionists; dead men stiffened behind doors; I could stare with my tongue out at the weapon in Narcisse’s hand. If it hadn’t been for Pete they might have got me, right then. My head had stopped.

  But Pete’s warm-haired head hadn’t stopped. In the space of five minutes the lights could go out, the mute from Santo Domingo could be trapped and shot, murder, in every shadow, storm and Witch’s Sabbath — and when it comes to nerve I’ll put my wager on the frailest woman, any time. She laughed. Her eyes narrowed green at those devils around her, and she laughed a cold laugh that shocked the color out of the darkest of those visages.

  “Don’t be a fool!” she spoke to the officer in the way women can speak to men. “The En-sign’s story is all right, except it isn’t true. Assuming Mr. Cartershall could open the safe in that dirty office — and heaven knows he can’t open a Gladstone bag without pinching his fingers — why should he go to the trouble of breaking into a strong box to get that ancient pistol when the safe was full of all kinds of guns?”

  “Because the other guns, ma’mselle, were not loaded.”

  “Very nice,” she said tight-lipped (in my defense, and me standing beside her like a gawk), “but who set fire to the grass rug behind this door?”

  Gulps from the audience.

  “A shot from that stairway might go through the transom of this door,” Pete went on scathingly, “but it wouldn’t hit a man directly through the top of his head. More likely it would hit hint above the ear. Besides, just before we heard the shot we heard a scream. Somebody screamed, ‘Stop!’”

  “True!” Narcisse was staggered.

  “And Ti Pedro never gave that scream.” Pete’s voice broke on a sob. “The voice screamed, ‘Stop!’ and that Dominican in there didn’t — didn’t have any tongue to — to scream out a word like that.” She turned on the En-sign, on Manfred. “There goes your murderous little plot to frame Mr. Cartershall. Who set fire to that grass rug? Who gave that scream?”

  Under the girl’s verbal attack German and sailor retreated against the bayonets. Head high, chin up, foot stamping, Pete lashed at the rattled police lieutenant.

  “Keep us out of this! It was dark and the hall was full of — of other murderers! Listen, you! The inside door, nailed shut in there. What room is connected with that fastened door?”

  The Haitian lieutenant scowled. “The billiard room — ”

  “Tell me! Tell me, you! Who was in the billiard room?”

  The door to the billiard room, down the hall, stood shut. Narcisse glared at the door. “Ambrose was in there, and — ”

  “Who would benefit most by Ti Pedro’s murder?” Pete lashed out. “Who was named third in the will?”

  “Ambrose!” The hall echoed to the yell.

  “And where,” Pete fin
ished, “is Ambrose?” She turned about, hugged my arm, put her face in my shoulder and began to cry. God knows what I did. In the cathedral-like gloom of that shade-infested hall, we stood as two lost souls while hullabaloo broke out like the Tower of Babel at quitting time around us.

  Ambrose! Ambrose! Where was that pink-eyed, tubercular Munchausen? He wasn’t behind the chintz-and-chocolate bulk of the Widow Gladys, or behind the fuzz-grown black shoulders of the Toadstool, or the lawyer’s redingote, or the portières or anything else in the hall. Like a blow on the brain it came to me that I hadn’t seen him in the “accident crowd” gathered to spy at Ti Pedro’s finale; hadn’t seen him since lanterns relighted the dark. Only Pete had owned enough mind to mark him absent.

  “Ambrose! Good God! Third in the will — ”

  Someone else had remembered that numerical progression, too. Someone else had Ambrose’s number!

  Narcisse went by. I watched him snatch a lantern from a gendarme’s paw; make a rush at the billiard room door. The rest of us mobbed after him. He opened the door with a kick; then stood. The rest of us bunched and bayed on the threshold. Light sped bull’s-eye into the room before us and explored a shadowy pool table, its mahogany legs and sagging pouches, its flat green cloth worn bald here and there and scarred with old cigarette burns, its little cluster of colored balls huddled together at one end of the field as if in fear.

  Thunder boomed above the plaster ceiling, shaking the inverted-dishpan shades of darkened overhead lamps. Rain tattooed on the shuttered side windows; and the weak rays of light strayed beyond the table and grew weaker. So did the watchers in the doorway.

  “Ambrose!”

  The youth on the floor beside the table was spreadeagled. Arms and legs stretched X to mark the spot. Our combined lungs chorusing his name could not get a rise out of that lad; he was down to stay. Pinned like a bug by a hatpin. Impaled by a wooden lance that was speared through his skinny chest to nail him flat on the carpet.

  Only it wasn’t a lance. Ambrose had been speared by a billiard cue — a billiard cue that had been sharpened like a pencil, its polished shaft sticking straight up at the ceiling, allowing Ambrose to study the handle with white-lidded, horrified eyes, and his mouth wide open to yell. But that yell had been smothered by a gag; and let me live to a millennium, I’ll never see the like of that gag again. I thought at first he had choked on a crimson crabapple. Jaws fastened apart by that unswallowable sphere in his mouth, he looked for all the world like a magician stuck in the middle of a trick.

  What a trick that was! The deadly cueist had made his score. The shot had been called and played. Jammed in Ambrose’s mouth was a billiard ball. We could see the little white circle with the number. Number Three!

  Picture that decayed billiard room reasty in shadows and enfeebled light; that odious white-haired boy on the floor with a sharpened cue sticking up out of his wishbone and that billiard ball popping from his mouth; the thunderstruck huddle in the door to the hall, and that other door nailed shut on the other room, and the other dead man.

  Nobody laughed. Nobody budged. Then Narcisse pulled himself together with an effort that made the fat sizzle on his forehead, backed out of the billiard room, slapped shut the door with a crash. The crash brought pandemonium. It started with a sob and swept into slaughter-house oratorio of yowls, squeals, yelps, cries. God was importuned to save us all. Tousellines wrung his hands and spoke to his patron saint. The others took up the wail of calamity. Toadstool and his mother gesturing, gibbering. Manfred scrubbing water from his forehead with a sleeve. The En-sign’s eyes spidery in a rumpled face.

  Nobody had wanted to linger in that billiard room. Nobody wanted to remain there in the hall. There was a subway rush for the staircase, a hubbub free-for-all ringing with the voices of bravado, consternation and terror (such a stampede of gargoyles and faces as Cocteau might have sketched during an opium fit), and I slapped right and left to shield Pete from the crush of panic. I stepped on a gendarme’s foot, and the Haitian screeched as if he’d been tagged by Frankenstein’s monster.

  Narcisse outflanked the stampede, and it was thrown back from the stairs. The Widow Gladys, followed by her Toadstool, wheeled and sped in a tangent for the dining room. A gendarme blocked that escape, and the Widow came romping back, for all the world like a black Guernsey trailed bleating by her malformed calf. Anything to get away from the doors on that black side of the hall. The library portals that were closed on the bodies of the doctor and Sir Duffin. The storeroom door shut on Ti Pedro’s ruins. The billiard room door, entombing what had happened to Ambrose.

  The hall was a catacomb, its entry open to a verandah clouded by sooty rain, two Haitian Guards fixed in symbolic pose, their rifles crossed, in the doorway. There was no way out of this thing. Narcisse was front and center once more, armed with that gangsterish Tommy gun. “Back! Stand back!”

  We were lined up at the staircase. I clutched Pete’s shoulder and spoke down to her hair. “Stick with it.”

  “I’m all right.”

  “They can’t get away with any more. They can’t!”

  “I’m all right,” she whispered faintly.

  Sure. She was all right. Perfect. The whole thing was all in fun, anybody could see that. What was a dead albino, a dead Dominican, a dead Englishman and a dead doctor to this Haitian house party? It was a game. Twelve hours had passed since the kick-off, and the first half was over. Twelve hours to go. Your turn came, you were tagged, and you were “out.” When you were “out” you had to lie behind a door with a white cloth over your face. Then the Haitian police played Twenty Questions, closed their eyes and tried to guess the killer.

  We were playing Questions and Answers now. Lieutenant Narcisse confronted us with his sub-machine gun and flung scowls. Pomade was melting in his watch-spring curls, sliding down the sides of his face to lubricate his jaws. His nostrils fluttered, and he kept looking over his shoulder at the billiard room door as if doubting its reality behind him.

  “Five minutes! Five minutes while the lights are out, and two men are slain. That Ambrose visited the office, drew a knife on this artist, was returned to the billiard room — pouf! A cat’s jump later and he is killed — stuck like a pig. You, Corporal Louis. You shut him in that room.”

  “Oui!” the corporal honked.

  “There is no lock on the door of that accursed billiard room?”

  “Non!” the corporal honked.

  “You saw no one in the room when you shut the albino in?”

  Louis shuffled his boots and stammered that he had seen no one. Before God, the room had been empty when he had kicked the pink-eyed one inside. Louis had closed the door. Louis had mounted guard before the door. Louis had heard the sound of billiard balls clicking as Ambrose resumed his game. Then the lights had blown out, and Louis had fled to find lanterns.

  “Mort de Dieu!” Lieutenant Narcisse gnashed out. “In that time the killer breaks into the billiard room and sticks Ambrose. Throttles him with a billiard ball! So! Ambrose it was who gave that scream. He must have seen the assassin.” The machine-gun pistol shook a little in the officer’s grip. He scraped water from his upper lip with a grassy tongue; screwed his eyes at Manfred.

  “Captain Manfred von Murda, your room is opposite that billiard room. By your own confession you rushed out into the hall the moment the lights departed.”

  The German’s neck swelled and reddened in his collar. His blemished cheek was purple velvet. “Aber, I did not spear the little white head. Where would I have on my person a billiard cue? Or the knife with which it was pointed?”

  The lieutenant’s teeth gleamed behind drawn lips. “German dog, tell me why, if the assassin possessed a knife did he bother to fashion himself a lance?”

  “Ha ha! Because the lance strikes deeper than the blade, ja.”

  “The answer comes readily from m’sieu the captain. Doubtless,” Narcisse suggested, “you speak from experience. Is it not you were once an officer of the Potsdam
Guard? I think you know too much about this lance — ”

  “Dinderhead! Have I any knife to sharpen such a spear? Herr Proudfoot would not allow those who worked for him to carry blades. Machetes were taken from the field hands. There is not a knife in the place.”

  “Is this true?” Narcisse asked Tousellines.

  Maître Tousellines nodded drearily.

  “Ambrose had a knife!” It was my own voice putting a finger in the pie. I reminded Narcisse, “He tried to stab me there in the office and I damned well kicked it out of his hand.” I laughed fiercely, shaking a fist. I was acquiring some of the Morne Noir mannerisms, suddenly determined to play these savages at their own game and throw mud on my own hook.

  “Give me a break, Lieutenant,” I begged. “You wanted to know what this German butcher and the En-sign were whispering at breakfast? All right, that navy deserter and his Boche friend told me they had ways to finish the others. Said they were going to get Ti Pedro and Ambrose. That’s what they told me this morning!”

  The En-sign had been leaning at ease against the balustrade, stuffing his pipe, eyes subdued on the doors across the hall. Now my outburst dropped him in a quarter crouch, shoulders bunched, tobacco can spilling, pipe crushed in his fist. His face, close to mine, heated like a stove lid.

  “Who pulled your chain?”

  “You did,” I said. “You and your Teuton acolyte. I’ll put a stop to this Greek chorus of yours once and for all. If you think you’re going to railroad the girl and me — ”

  Smoke-blue, incendiary as the heads of Swedish matches, his eyes bathed me with a hate that lifted the short hairs on my neck, and I was glad when Lieutenant Narcisse’s yell allowed me to shift my attention.

  “You! Why did you not tell me this when first I asked you?”

  “I was going to,” I sputtered, “but I thought they were pulling a bluff, and I didn’t want to scare Miss Dale. Then when Ti Pedro was killed I — I didn’t have the chance. Now I’m telling you. This pair, Manfred and the En-sign, said they had ways to get the lot of us.”