Murder On the Way!

by Theodore Roscoe

  I was suddenly aware of a poiceman’s whistle shrilling down below. Someone was drubbing the front door. Boots clacked down the hail, and the front doors slammed open admitting excited yells.

  Narcisse scrubbed scenery from his forehead, legging it out to the balcony. Voices came up the stairs on the run, and in the bedchamber we stood in tableau, listen-big to news. Glad tidings? The messenger, returned from Cap Haitien? Undoubtedly the American consul was with him, diplomats, the Marines. We were saved!

  My wish was father to that thought, and the thought was stillborn, as I wasn’t long in discovering. I saw a muddied, brown figure come drunkenly up the staircase, tracking the steps with dark puddles. On the landing the figure swayed and saluted Narcisse who had stalked across the balcony with what dignity he could muster to meet the man at the stair-head. The dispatch bearer wanted breath and had to lean on the bannister. The mouth in his upturned face broke open to release a torrent of creole. He shouted at Lieutenant Narcisse and Lieutenant Narcisse shouted back.

  A lump of nausea hit the pit of my stomach as I saw that this darkey messenger was wounded, a livid blood-splash just under his temple trickling crimson down his jaw as he yelled. Slowly he gained the stair-head, where he balanced, panting and tipsy as a juggler holding himself against a fall. Blood wormed in bright threads along his chin as the wounded envoy handed the lieutenant a yellow envelope. Narcisse tore it open and clapped a hand to his forehead. He teetered forward as he read. He teetered backward. Paper crackled in his hand, and Lieutenant Narcisse gave a dramatic stagger, as if he’d been hit.

  “Sacré Dieu!”

  Pete could not restrain a cry. “What is it?”

  “Did he see the American consul?” I yelled.

  Walking stiff-legged, smeared like a witch doctor, eyes baleful as a cat’s in a cave, Narcisse came at us.

  “Into that room with you! Every villain in this house will remain here until my return! Maître Tousellines! You will come with me to the office where I will arm you and give you orders. I am leaving you in entire charge of Morne Noir!”

  “Tousellines? In charge of Morne Noir — ”

  “Exactly!” Narcisse whipped at me. “Do not think this means I am through with this little affair, m’sieu. Do not imagine my departure gives you leave to escape. I deputize M’sieu the Count of Lemonade to shoot and kill any member of this household who does not remain in his room!”

  The little black lawyer made a gasp of protest.

  There was a stoppage in my windpipe.

  Pete cried, “What does it mean?”

  And Narcisse chewed through his teeth, “It means I am ordered away with my men most immediately, ma’mselle. All available police must go, and at once. Word has just come of a Caco uprising. At three of this morning Cap Haitien was attacked by bandits, the Banque Nationale blown up, the terror loose through the hills! It is said,” his voice crescendoed tenor, “it is said the Cacos are led by a zombie, do you comprehend that? Headquarters sends for every man and my command. But I give you both warning — ”

  He paused to let his glance glitter into mine, backing out on to the balcony with uplifted gun. “I give you both warning, it will be a whole lot the more dangerous for whites to leave this house than to remain hidden inside. Under no circumstances would I attempt to flee Morne Noir, m’sieu! I leave Tousellines with orders to shoot if you so much as step the foot from this room. If you value yourself or ma’mselle — stay where you are!”

  We stood hand in hand like children and stared at the slammed door. I could hear the rasp of the key, boots racketing down the staircase, confusion below. Maître Tousellines’ scared falsetto punctuated by commands from Narcisse. More doors slammed. Boots ran, lading on the verandah. Outside there were shouts, rain-muffled calls.

  Pete released her fingers from mine, pressed them to an expressionless forehead, wandered to the bed and slipped down. I found my legs and forced them to a window where I could peer through shutters at an afternoon dank as a waterfall. Beyond the verandah vines the landscape blurred off into colorless fog. Leftward the bald hill swooped up above a wedge of rain-thrashed jungle, the summit smoky-dark and misty where soggy clouds tumbled along the crest. Straining, I could just make out the silk cotton tree as a tiny hand of gray bones reaching up through tatters of vapor, and the speck-sized guardian angel, a white sentinel over its grave.

  Down the rain-swept compound, blotted as if by night, the sullen tumpy-bum-bum of the drum family continued its lament, the echo loudening and fading like the pulse of a sickened heart. Like the pulse of my own heart, I had to admit when I watched that dim squadron of mounted gendarmes go clattering down the gravel drive past the iron coach dog, bunch together with Narcisse in the lead, and gallop off in the water clouds. Like horsemen from Sleepy Hollow, the riders misted away at the foot of the compound. The rain drank them up. There was only the terrace and the falling flood, and what was left of the Law had gone.

  I closed the shutters and stared a minute at the hole Narcisse’s machine-gun pistol had shot through the cane. Another inch in the wrong direction and that blast would have taken my arm off. I could feel the blood running down out of my face and throat, and I waited a moment to warm up before I turned to face Pete, while my head churned.

  A Caco uprising! Cap Haitien sacked and a bank blown up. Black guerillas raiding through the storm, bandits led by a zombie! Pete and I, marooned in this black château with its downstairs stiff with murder, its lower quarters alive with brigandry, the murderer in the house and a pigmy, colored lawyer who titled himself Count of Lemonade left in charge. It had been poor enough sport as refereed by those Haitian gendarmes, but Narcisse at least had meant well, and now that the pudgy man with his big gun was gone I found myself missing him.

  It looked as if the lid was off and I was sitting on it. I muttered aloud, “Tousellines alone down there in that hall!” and about-faced from the window.

  Pete sat on the edge of the bed. The bed was tall with four posts that sent shadows like trees up the wall behind her. In her organdie frock, seated there in candlelight under the high ceiling, she was small, unnaturally white. She didn’t look scared. Not Pete! Her chin had Irish in its line. She just looked lost and small.

  1 began to swear and pace. I measured the room four times, swearing under my breath, then stoppered that nonsense with a long swallow from the bottle out of the Gladstone. Pete sat with her eyes on her portrait tacked on the clothes-closet door, and two bright tears grew and strolled down her cheeks. She shook her head at the offered bottle.

  “I’m not crying. I’m just done up. No sleep and no lunch or anything.”

  “It’s been hell, all right.”

  “And then I was thinking — I got you into this — ”

  I stood over her angrily. “That’s bunk. This expedition was my idea,” I blustered, “and what’s more, I’m going to see you out of it!” I swallowed another for color, tried the locked door, then sat on the bed-edge beside her and glared, trying to pretend amusement and snaking a vinegarish mouth-pucker of the job. “Great Christmas, what a mess. Anybody’d told me this would happen two days ago, I’d of called him a liar. This is too good. Somebody tells a ghost story on this island and the whole police force goes on the run.”

  “Cart, it’s a nightmare.”

  “None of it’s happening,” I said hopefully.

  “I can’t believe it, myself. Any of it. Somehow that frightens me more than anything.”

  “What?” I asked.

  “The feeling it’s all an illusion. Candles. Rain. Those drums. What’s happened since last night. It’s been like a dream, the kind of dream where you want to run and can’t because you don’t know what exactly to run from. And it scares me because it doesn’t seem to affect me.”

  I swallowed another inch of courage.

  “It’s queer,” Pete went on, her white hands tight in her lap. “I can’t seem to weep over — over those dead men. You’d think I’d have hysterics and
I — I’m only tired and pretty hungry. They’re like reading about the Chinese. Two million Chinese can die in a plague or a flood and we turn the page and laugh at the comic strips. It’s all been so dreadful, it’s impersonal. I feel as if I wanted to laugh.”

  “It’s like a book,” I snarled. “This sort of thing happens in detective novels. Alice in Wonderland as Poe might have written it if he were drunk; if he’d been drunk one night and didn’t care about form.”

  “No, it isn’t. In books the characters direct the situations. This is like life, I suppose.”

  I supposed it was more like death, but I didn’t say so. Half of my mind was engaged with Pete, and the other half sorting wildly for a way out of this madhouse. “How do you mean, Pete, like life?”

  “We aren’t running this show, Cart. We haven’t controlled a single moment of destiny since we, purely by chance, arrived in Haiti.”

  I said, “It wasn’t chance. I urged you to come.”

  “It was only by chance that you urged me to come, assuming you did. Don’t you see? In books people make brave decisions and direct their own destinies, making smart epigrams and good dialogue all the time. Something happens and they do so-and-so and everything comes out all right. You and I — things happen and we haven’t a thing to say or any place to go.”

  I glared miserably at the door.

  “We can’t stop what’s happening in this place,” Pete said wearily. “It goes on like — like a steamroller. All we can do is try to jump out of the way. We don’t steer the steamroller, it’s being steered at us. We’re being run. That’s life, really. If we only could find out who’s behind all this — ”

  “You,” I remembered all at once, “said you knew how Ti Pedro was killed. You told Lieutenant Narcisse — ”

  “I think I do,” she said quietly, “but the important thing isn’t how. Cart, it’s who?”

  I shook the bottle in the direction of the hall door. “One of that bunch is trying to knock off all the others to get the estate, that’s certain.”

  “It would seem like that from the will.”

  “That will may have been cooked up, for that matter,” I said. “Any one of this gang could be behind it.”

  Wet woodwork creaked across the room, jumping me off the bed with uplifted bottle. It was only a warping floorboard. I sat down.

  “Suppose one of this gang killed your Uncle Eli,” I speculated, “and monkied up the will to clean up the rest of the household, bring them all together and pick them off one at a time.”

  “Why did they kill Dr. Sevestre?”

  “That’s hard to figure, unless he was going to testify about the bullet he removed from Uncle Eli’s head. You know what the Negress told about Manfred and the doctor fighting.”

  “I don’t think Manfred killed him,” Pete dissented.

  “That German Bluebeard would crucify his mother.”

  “The En-sign would put him up to it, though. Besides, Manfred was soaked to the eyes last night. A marksman shot the doctor. A steady hand.”

  “Whoever’s behind this hell,” I said, pointing the Scotch bottle earnestly, “one thing’s evident. This bunch of killers has been running rum.”

  Pete sat up, tense. “Since Repeal?”

  “I’ve an idea Repeal came along and busted the smuggling business, and this mob went broke. Say they’d been working under cover from Haiti, shipping the stuff to the States. Operating in secret from this plantation, where they’re pretending employment with Uncle Eli.”

  “Rum runners,” she gasped, “I never thought of it.”

  I said sternly, “Repeal washed them out, and sometime last year they killed an American Coast Guard captain.”

  “Named Browninshields!”

  “Right. The En-sign gave that much away this morning at breakfast. They murdered this coast-guardsman, and maybe your Uncle Eli knew about it, a witness, something like that. So they put him out of the way and frame his will in an attempt to snatch his estate.”

  Pete watched me with widening eyes.

  Liquor was lubricating my head but hadn’t reached the point where the wheels would jump the track. “Sure,” I pursued. “The gang put your uncle away, but now I think one of them’s double-crossing the rest. And they’ve maneuvered you down here to pin guilt on you. With your name last in the will it would give you a motive to erase those on top.”

  “It might be the reason,” she whispered.

  “I hope to God it is,” I told her with vehemence, “because that means they aren’t going to touch you, but want to leave you as a set-up to take the blame. Me, too, now I’m in on it. They’ll attempt to frame us and leave us to take the rap. And no court on earth could prove us guilty.”

  Her face, pale in candle-shine, was strained. “Cart, who?”

  “Well, they’ve narrowed it to four, and if it goes any farther it’ll only be a simple process of elimination.”

  She counted in a low voice, “Toadstool. His mother. The sailor. The German.”

  I growled, “Down the line so far, one, two, three.”

  Pete looked at me. “Cart, listen. I’ve a feeling — this isn’t just murder to grab an estate. It’s something deeper, more terrible than any of us know. Who” — her lips tried to smile—”who is it in stories, in mystery plays who always turns out the guilty one? That’s the way I’ve been trying to work this out, to solve this. I mean, isn’t it always the one you don’t suspect, the one who seems least guilty, who looks impossible?”

  I followed the thought around in my head. I couldn’t get it out of the rough. “Don’t I wish this was a mystery play!”

  “Cart, who looks the least guilty to you? Who in this awful place — which one of this dreadful household couldn’t be the murderer with any apparent rhyme or reason?”

  She was staring at the door to the balcony, her eyes sunk deep, strangely shadowed in her face. A cold breath stirred the little hairs on my neck-nape, as if somewhere an invisible curtain were blowing.

  I thought, “My God, the trouble is none of them look the least guilty, even me. And if I were writing a mystery play I’d know the idiots who attend them would be looking for the villain among the least suspect, so for once I’d make the killer look guiltiest and nobody would guess him. Besides this isn’t fiction and it’s all happening and real life, so what?”

  This mental acrostic left me a little ill, and when I looked at Pete she, too, had gone white as chalk. Here I sat like a fathead trying to comfort myself with Scotch and conversation, the police goose-chasing phantoms a hundred miles away and anything getting ready to happen. Whisky growled in my stomach and I made up what was left of my mind.

  “How do we know this zombie scare isn’t a trick to get the police out of here?” I swung away from the bed. “Look here, Pete, the devil with this. Real life or not, you and I aren’t going to sit around and be steamrollered. We’re going to take a hand in this show from now on. You hear me? I’m not going to stay locked in here waiting for the next move. I’m going to make it, myself. That midget of a lawyer wouldn’t dare take a shot at me, and if he thinks I’m going to twiddle my thumbs meekly up here with that den of tigers downstairs — ”

  “Wait.” Pete caught at my sleeve. “What are you going to do?”

  “I’m going down into that hall and take that little African shyster by the nose and make him open office safe, that’s what. From now on we’re going to hold all the guns in this game, and I’m going down there and get them.”

  No philosophizing, no amount of optimism could make me believe that Maître Pierre Valentin Bonjean Tousellines was going to keep Numbers Four, Five, Six and Seven caged politely in their rooms until the ghost-hunting police decided to return. I’d better haul the other side of my lap out of this bedroom and down into the office for the heavy artillery before the others of the house party drank enough to have the same idea.

  It was a good idea, at that, but it was born too late.

  I’d no more than tightened
a notch in my belt and moved for the door when a furious burst of gunfire started Fourth of July in the hall outside and knocked the stuffing out of my good intentions.

  IX.

  Death in the Afternoon!

  I waited, stupefied, for the shooting to quit. I couldn’t count the shots. For three-quarters of a minute they came so fast that the noise streamed together in one elongated, continuous din, like a team of riveting hammers running an armament race.

  Pete stood with a hand to her throat, appalled, while the château boomed and banged with the loud enthusiasm of a Black Tom erupting on Sunday. Echoes were gnomes firing cap pistols along upper corridors, and the place roared with battle. Somebody was going over the top, but Bunker Hill never rivaled that outburst. Then it stopped. Dead. I could hear my watch ticking.

  I shoved Pete roughly away from the door — “Don’t move!” — and smashed the quart bottle on the doorknob and drove a shoulder against the wood. The lock was so much cheese. The door bulged, gave, stuck, then opened farther than I’d have dared, and I was spilled headlong out on the balcony. My arms hugged the balcony rail to keep me from sprawling; then tight muscles fastened me there in a crouch, and I couldn’t get away. I rooted. Anybody on the hunt could have sniped me for a stunned tapir, just then, but the gunmen in the hall below weren’t looking at me.

  Under the balcony Maître Tousellines, no longer on guard, wasn’t looking at anybody. Back against the wall, he sat on the floor under the gagged telephone, his globed head askew, knees splayed, arms limp and palms open beggar-fashion at his sides, not unlike a discarded umbrella thrown there because of a broken handle. I thought he was dead. His eyes were squeezed shut and a little red soap bubble glistened on his loose underlip. There was just enough candle-light flickering from sconces down the hall to see him by.