Murder On the Way!

by Theodore Roscoe

  The staircase was brighter, laved in that mellow colonial light. Toadstool, at the foot of the stairs, did not see me. The apish creature was mounting the stairs and bending every faculty to the task. Something was the matter with Heir Number Four. His great, door-matted shoulders were at last too much for him; he was grunting like a piano mover, legs bowed, absurd, wobbling as if under the oppression of Atlas. His feet struggled to grip the wood, his rubbery knees strove to hold, and the dark beef of his shoulders glittered with thousands of inky sweat-beads.

  “Huff! Puff!”

  On the bottom step, it seemed an hour before he chugged the next one up. Left hand gripping the bannisters, he had to haul himself upward with an effort that threatened to burst the muscles through his skin.

  Looking down on those incredible shoulders, I was unable to see the moosy face, but the black boy’s head was lifted in an upward fixity as if he were Jacob, or whoever it was, ascending the golden ladder and spending his life’s blood to get there. Only Jacob, bound for Paradise, wasn’t armed. And in his right hand, the butt clamped in his armpit, Toadstool clutched a shiny new repeating rifle.

  The Widow Gladys faced my way, but she didn’t see me, either. Planted on the stairway landing, she was interested in the doings of her son. His slow-motion struggle to ascend amused her, and she was looking down on him with a hugely maternal smile, affably nodding her chins in the way of Mamma urging Baby to his first adventurous climb. The swaddled bulk of the Negress was shaking with a suppressed inner mirth, a silent Mammy giggle that jiggled her like a great chocolate pudding; one might have supposed she had skipped upstairs ahead of her infant, turned, beckoned; and another minute and she would peal a bushel of laughs.

  But a crimson current was flowing down her side, welling from a red gutter scooped out of her dimpled and armless left shoulder. And her pugilistic right arm was akimbo, wrist resting on the shelf of her hip, and in that boxing-glove hand gleamed a squat black revolver.

  It was a charade. Mother and son playing a game. The house and its hall were silent while the walls listened. I’d imagined hearing those shots — it was only the stair clock ticking. That burnt-powder smell, those smoke-wisps lingering as strips of bluish gauze above the stairs were part of the fancy.

  In the candle-lit quiet, Toadstool gained another step. Save for her subterranean merriment, the seismic heaving of her mountainous bosom, the Widow Gladys made no move.

  A tightening in the air had to snap.

  It did.

  I heard Toadstool’s voice. “Morne Noir b’long Toadstool, all mine.”

  The Widow Gladys whispered, “No!”

  “All mine,” Toadstool panted.

  The Widow Gladys smiled, “No, Toadstool, no!”

  Toadstool’s right hand slid along the polished barrel of the repeater and fastened into the trigger. Holding left-handed to the bannister rail, he pointed the repeating rifle as a lame man might point a crutch. Flash! Flash! Flash! Flash! Silence smashed into a succession of shocking explosions as the black boy triggered the repeater, and I could almost hear those bullets hitting, like blows on a soft pillow.

  At each successive and deliberate blow, the Widow Gladys shrugged violently and squeezed the revolver on her hip. Noise flamed from the revolver, slam-bang! slam-bang! above the shooting-gallery crackle of the repeating rifle, and at each slam-bang Toadstool would jolt and scream.

  Battle smoke hazed the stairway. I wanted to shriek and stop it, but my voice was gone. They were riddled in a trice. They kept on firing. They swayed and tottered and teetered and rocked and continued upright and shooting like a pair of black Rasputins too evil to die. I don’t know whether death or the sheer weight of the lead in them finally overbalanced and brought them down.

  Together they dropped — the Widow slopping down on the landing like a bag of thrown laundry; Toadstool plunging forward and sliding down the stair-steps, his chin going tubbedy-bub-bub-bump until his bare feet touched the floor and held him stiff. His mother’s revolver capered down the steps to look at its handiwork, and the noise disappeared down a rear corridor. Smoke cleared. Pose!

  “Cart!” Pete screamed from my room, “are you all right?

  “Stay right where you are!” I broke inertia and raced around the balcony to the stair-head. “Don’t come out, Pete! That black woman and her son just killed each other — ”

  I sneezed through powder-smoke and banged down to the landing, broad jumped the Widow and on down the staircase two at a time. I picked up her black revolver and stowed it into a pocket, then stooped to wrench the rifle from Toadstool’s grip. His dead fingers hung on, and I had to tug. Even in death he was as strong as Hercules. I was shaky and seasick, but I felt a lot better when I had those two weapons in my possession. Typical of a pacifist, I never thought to wonder if they’d been emptied.

  My mind was on the rest of the household, the guests quartered down the hall. I was wondering what to do about it when a snore rippled out behind my back and jumped me around in new alarm. Maître Tousellines! I’d forgotten the little black man under the telephone. He was not dead. His snore woke him up. He gave a mulish snort and wrinkled his ace-of-spades nose as if to dislodge a fly, then his eyelids were open, his white eyes popping in terror at the carnage around him.

  “Mort de Dieu!”

  His eyes absorbed the bodies decorating the staircase; then he saw me standing over him with the rifle and jack-knifed to his feet with a howl. I had him covered.

  “Stand right there!”

  Rumpled and moaning, he sagged against the wall. He put a hand to his undershot chin and worked the jaw around in its hinges.

  Keeping one eye out for trouble at the back of the hall, the other on Tousellines, I demanded, “How’d that black woman and Toadstool get out here? Let’s hear what happened, and make it quick.”

  He gulped like a trained seal, eyelids batting terror at the staircase. “Before God, m’sieu — that woman, Toadstool, they were shut in a chamber beyond the billiard room. I was standing here, oui, where I could watch all the rooms. Standing by this newel post as Lieutenant Narcisse had instructed me. He gave me the rifle you now hold and told me to guard — ”

  “What? Narcisse gave you this rifle?”

  “Believe me.”

  “So you turned around and passed it to Toadstool, there?”

  “Never on the life!” Tousellines cried. “The ruffian took it from me, m’sieu.” Trembling, he nursed his jaw. “I was standing here, you comprehend, when suddenly, Faith of God! I looked up and saw that fiend and his sorceress mother walking up the hall from their room. How? It must be they had pried the lock. I cried at them to halt or I would shoot. But the Widow was aiming at me a gun. A black pistol!”

  I patted the bulge on my hip, “Where did she get the pistol?”

  “I give you my word it was in her hand as she walked from the room!”

  “Narcisse locked up all the guns,” I snarled. “Where did she get the pistol?”

  He eyed the laundry bundle on the landing and crossed himself.

  “Where did she get the pistol?” I stormed.

  Tousellines stammered, “The woman was a wizardess! She said it, the pistol, had flown through a window in her room. Straight to her hand. The shutters opened. Dieu! It flew to her fingers like a bird!”

  “That’s a hell of a story. What happened was, you opened up that office safe and passed around some of these guns.”

  He fairly jigged in fear. “Does m’sieu believe me mad?”

  “You gave ’em these guns!”

  “Non, non, non! Would I hand them the very weapons with which to slay me?” His face shone like a patent-leather dancing shoe. His eyes rolled to the landing where the laundry bundle was turning red, to the foot of the stairs where Toadstool was worse. His face despaired. “Oath of heaven, non! She was grinning as she marched forward, aiming the gun. She made me hold up the hands, and the Caco boy snatched from me the rifle. Ah, Dieu! and the Garde not half an hou
r gone.”

  “Then?”

  “The witchwoman warned me if I so much as opened the mouth to call she would blow my heart out and eat it. Her very words! That she should possess a pistol with which to carry out this threat! I was frozen, m’sieu! Frozen! Whereupon she started up the staircase saying Morne Noir now belonged to her and she would take care of you and ma’mselle.”

  I sped a glance of horror at the red laundry bundle.

  Tousellines shook out, “I believe she would have killed you but for that Toadstool. He jumped. He jumped to the foot of the stairs, lifting my rifle, and he called softly to his mother to halt her on the landing. Attend! He ordered her to wait. He said Morne Noir did not belong to her. She had made a little mistake. By the will it belonged to him. Then without warning he turned and struck me across the jaws with the rifle barrel. After that — I saw nothing.” He waved toward the staircase. “This — I do not know how this happened — ”

  He wasn’t the only one who didn’t know how it happened. A pistol flying through shutters to arm that ogress and her offspring! This feud messing the staircase. I could believe the pair shooting out an inheritance between them, but I wanted the truth on where the Negress snaffled her pistol and how many more errant guns were flying around that château. I grilled that little lawyer until his forehead gushed, but nothing in my vocabulary could alter his story.

  “Every gun in the house was locked up. Then she appears with a revolver with which to punish her son. Possessed of the devil, that one! There are those who assert she was not his real mother, non, but summoned him from regions of darkness. Consider! Perhaps that is how she came by a weapon.”

  Apparently Master Tousellines had lost some of his agnosticism in regard to the supernatural. For that matter, the things transpiring in that Morne Noir château had roused a few of my own atavistic fears. If anyone ever looked capable of summoning demons, the Widow Gladys did.

  Revolvers were another matter. “Now I’ve got the guns,” I went on, my voice rising, “and I want them all. Tousellines, you’re going to open that safe in the office. I’ll do the rest of the gunning around here.”

  “M’sieu is not going to kill me?”

  “I’ll kill the next damned one,” I shouted to the world, “who makes a move without my saying so. I’m running this racket, see?” I drew a bead on the little black man and his skin shaded the color of liverwurst. “What’s more I want everyone out here in the open where I can watch. Where’s Manfred?” As long as I shouted and stamped I could bluff that scene on the stairs.

  “The German is in the room beyond the office. That door across from the billiard room.”

  “And the En-sign?”

  “Next to that room, m’sieu.”

  I shoved Tousellines against the telephone, stepped over the Toadstool’s ankles and scouted shadows for something to shoot at. Tombstone silence in the hall. Doors opposite the staircase were portals to grave vaults. Doors on the staircase side — Manfred’s and the Ensign’s — gave no sign. I’d announced my dictatorship to a couple of dead Negroes and a third who was dying of fright. Apprehension twitched muscles under my belt.

  “Let’s go.” I shoved Tousellines. “Go down there and call that German out here into the hall.”

  His funny legs ran him to the first door. He called in a quavery voice, “Manfred! Manfred! M’sieu the American would speak with you.”

  No answer.

  “Manfred!”

  No answer.

  “M’sieu the captain! Captain von Murda!”

  As well have tried to hail Ambrose out of the billiard room, Ti Pedro from the storeroom, the doctor and Sir Duffin from their couches in the library.

  Hands sweating on the repeater, I walked up the hall, thumbed Tousellines aside and crashed the sulking door with a kick. I walked in behind the rifle and Tousellines walked in behind me. Vacant room. No Manfred. Nothing of note except a window that had been smashed, a blind ripped away, a shutter hanging lame on a broken hinge. Rain foamed on the sill and the verandah outside was darkly adrift in the weather.

  “Out the window! I’ll bet he broke that glass when the guns were going.”

  Tousellines protested at my coat-tails, “But m’sieu! The lieutenant did not think they would dare. Consider the Cacos!”

  I didn’t wait to consider the Cacos. Nor did I do any polite teasing at the En-sign’s door, but walked at it with leveled rifle and drove it in first crack, certain of what I’d discover in the mariner’s room and by no means disillusioned. Another broken window and wrecked shutter, curtains of rain blowing in the frame and a glimpse of wet verandah and foundering day. Vacant room. No En-sign.

  Tousellines stammered, “Gone!” and I stood in the middle of the vacated room, throat ticking, ears alert as a bird dog’s, nervous system running what used to be called the entire gamut of emotions. It was like that first minute of silence which poured over France in November, that minute when you wondered if everyone were dead, and then you began to glow with security and happiness, forgetting the lad who was killed by the last shot.

  The war was over. The war that had started with the doctor’s Serajevo and gone on to the detriment o Sir Duffin Wilburforce, the post-prandial murders of Ti Pedro and Ambrose, the battle of attrition on the staircase and my final ultimatum to the world. It was done. The En-sign and Manfred had capitulated. Withdrawn through windows. Folded up like Arabs. Gone home.

  I said, “By God, they are gone!”

  And then it was just too true to be good. My relief at their being out of the house ebbed to anxiety as to their whereabouts. I’d cheered too soon; there was once a False Armistice.

  I backed into the hall.

  The old darkey lawyer’s eyeballs were traveling. “If the Cacos catch them,” he whispered, “they will most assuredly be sorry. Our mountain bandits can be most cruel to the whites. In the days of the Marine occupation there was much bitterness. The mountain people were enraged.”

  A lot I was concerned with the safety of that couple! I took the old black man by the collar. “Tousellines, we’re getting out.”

  “You? You would quit the château?”

  “Miss Dale and I. Believe it or not, you’ve got to help us get out of here!”

  “You are forgetting, m’sieu. The Cacos!”

  Cacos weren’t the only terrors riding that rainstorm outside. I visualized Manfred in his uniform, pickled and skulking, venomous as an escaped lion, with his blunted head and stove-burned cheek. The En-sign with his Alice-blue eyes and rattlesnake mouth, his coffee-burned stomach and tattooed, sadistic hands.

  “You know the road,” I cried, shaking the lawyer. “Any road. We’ve got to chance it, understand? Where are these Cacos?”

  He described with an arm-sweep. “Thick as snakes in the forest and three times as dangerous. Only of late have they been banding. Who knows where? I dare not advise you in this leaving, m’sieu.”

  I shook him again. “There must be some horses around.”

  “If m’sieu insists — ”

  “I want horses.”

  He gulped, “A stable at the foot of the compound.”

  “Good. You fetch the guns out of the office,” I directed sternly, “and we’ll ride. Where, I’ll leave up to you. There must be some place in the country that’s safe, and you’ll see we get there if you know what’s good for you.”

  The little man shrank under my eye; rattled out, “Anything you wish, on my word of honor. I must warn you the roads will be almost impassable. And I am a lawyer, not a guide, but I will try.” He hesitated, then went on breathlessly. “Perhaps Port de Paix would be our most opportune attempt. But, m’sieu — ”

  I had his arm and was running him for the office. “Hurry it!”

  “But if ma’mselle departs she forfeits her right to the estate.”

  I saw the bodies on the staircase and snapped, “We’re clearing out. Bring me those guns!” I pushed Tousellines at the office door and started an obstacle race
up the stairs. Those steps were becoming slippery, and I didn’t stop for star-gazing on the way. We were leaving. Pete should have an automatic; I’d carry the rifles; if we kept our fingers crossed we’d soon be out of this hecatomb.

  “Pete!”

  I hailed her as I skirted the body on the landing. The door to that front bedroom where I’d left her was closed. Thunder bounded around on the château roofs as I yelled, and my call was overwhelmed. I sprinted along the gallery and shouted her name as I yanked the doorknob. The draught of my entry flittered the candles, wall-shadows cavorted as I rushed in.

  Pete was there, standing in the door of the clothes closet across the room, smiling composure and ready to go, her hat in hand.

  “Pete, we’re — ”

  Only for an eye-wink that portrait, shadowed in with dusk and candle-glow, was natural as life. For the tenth of a second I thought she was there. Then ice formed around my heart.

  Pete was not in the room!

  “Pete!”

  I broke through window-shutters to the outside gallery. Water swooshed green through the vines, and that upper verandah was wet as a derelict schooner’s deck and as deserted. Pete was not to be seen.

  I drove my face through vines into stinging downpour, hunting the landscape with frantic eyes. A brown river purled across the terrace where Dr. Sevestre had been shot; shrubs, bushes, hedgerows blew flat in their beds; hemmed by walls of rain, the compound was a lake in a swamp. Nobody in sight.

  Drenched as a turtle, I sprang back into the bedroom, expecting, naturally, that Pete would be there. She wasn’t.

  I knew. She’d gone to her own room for something; perhaps fallen asleep. I raced out to the balcony shouting her name, and slammed without knocking through her door. “Come on, Pete, we’re leaving — we — ” Empty. Her suitcase careless on the bed, something pink fluffing on the back of a chair.

  I backed out choking and pawing my hair with scared fingers. My God, I hadn’t left her for more than five minutes! “She’s frightened,” I tried to comfort myself futilely. “Those devils on the staircase must have frightened her. She’s hiding somewhere.”