by Rufus King
Madame Velasquez’s laugh was an art; unfortunately not a lost one. “The millionaire marriage,” she gasped. “My dear”—her hand found a resting place on one of Lieutenant Valcour’s knees—“he didn’t have a cent.”
“She felt disappointed, I suppose?”
“Disappointed!” Madame Velasquez fairly screamed the word at him, like an angry parrot. Her manner changed and became darkly mysterious. “I know my little know,” she said. “You can believe me, Lieutenant, little Miramar’s not the boob some parties I could mention, but won’t, think she is.”
Her voice grew harsh with the gritty quality of a file. “I’ll learn her to leave me in the ditch like this.”
“Then you think Marge purposely isn’t here to greet you?”
It was a sweet little bunch of filth, taken all in all, thought Lieutenant Valcour. It was perfectly plain: Madame Velasquez either held definite knowledge that Marge had killed Harry Myles, or else had convinced Marge that she knew. And then Madame Velasquez had simply bled Marge of all the money she could get.
“Is Marge frightened easily, Madame Velasquez?”
“About some things.”
The reddish, dusty-looking curls nodded vigorously. Lieutenant Valcour looked at his watch. It was one-thirty. He stood up.
“Thank you for receiving me, Madame Velasquez. If I leave you a telephone number would you care to call me up when Marge comes in? Or will you be in bed?”
“Leave your number, Lieutenant.” The seamy enameled face became more nutlike than ever. “I got a thing or two to talk over with that female Brigham Young.” She raised a be-ringed hand and held it unescapably close to Lieutenant Valcour’s lips.
He brushed them gently against a hardened coat of whiting, smiled his pleasantest, and left, assisted doorward by what might at one time have been called a sigh.
He paused for a moment in the small foyer, after putting on his hat and coat, and penciled the Endicott’s’ telephone number on one of his cards. He started back to give it to Madame Velasquez.
She wasn’t in the room where he had left her, and the room’s other door stood ajar. He crossed to it softly and looked in. Madame Velasquez—yes, he convinced himself, it was Madame Velasquez—was sitting before a dresser. Her wig was off, and her heavily enameled face peered into a mirror beneath thin knots of corn-gray hair. As the lonely, weak old voice rose and fell, Lieutenant Valcour caught a word or two of what Madame Velasquez was saying: “He didn’t know—if I went and told her once, I told her a thousand times—he didn’t know.” There followed a short, dreadful noise that passed as laughter. “But I know—Miramar knows, darling—you little lousy…”
Lieutenant Valcour retreated softly. He left the card lying on a table. He went outside and closed the door. He rang for the elevator and shut his eyes while waiting for it to come up. There were times when they grew a little weary from looking too intimately upon life.
Down in the lobby he used the house telephone and called up the Endicott’s’.
“Lieutenant Valcour talking,” he said.
“O’Brian, sir.”
“Everything quiet?”
“Indeed and it is, sir.”
“Mr. Hollander get there yet?”
“He’s just this minute after arriving, sir. He’s upstairs with Dr. Worth now.”
“Did he identify himself all right?”
“He did that, Lieutenant, with cards and a driver’s license.”
“Good. I’ll be along in about an hour now. Goodbye.”
He was helped by the bitter wind as he walked east to Broadway. He found a taxi and gave the driver Hollander’s address on East Fifty-second Street. He settled back and closed his eyes. He went to sleep.
CHAPTER XIII
2:01 A.M.—Glittering Eyes
Nurse Morrow didn’t slumber, exactly; it was much too slender a lapse from consciousness for that. But it was not until the second gentle rapping that she stood up.
Someone was rapping on the hall door.
She glanced at her wrist watch as she crossed the room, and was glad to note that it was just after two o’clock. Three or four hours, now, and it would be dawn. She’d get some coffee, then, and her work for the night would be almost over.
As she turned the key in the lock she noticed with a sharp thrill of interest that the two policemen, very quiet, very alert, but still sitting on their chairs in the bathroom doorway, had each drawn a gun from its holster and was holding it by his side. She opened the door.
Dr. Worth, his dignity considerably muffled in camel’s hair, stood in the corridor with a stranger.
“Miss Murrow,” he said, “this is Mr. Thomas Hollander, the friend who is going to sit up with Mr. Endicott. He understands everything about the situation, and I have advised him just what to do.”
“Yes, Doctor.”
Dr. Worth failed futilely in suppressing a yawn. “Are there any reports?”
“No, Doctor.”
“Then I’ll return to my room. Call me at the slightest indication.”
“Yes, Doctor.”
Hollander came inside. Miss Murrow closed the door and locked it again. She stood watching Hollander as he went an uncertain step or two toward the bed, with that natural hesitation with which one approaches the very ill. He was a personable young man in his thirties. He was more than personable, she decided. Not handsome, exactly—heavens, no—she corrected herself rapidly. The features weren’t molded in the tiresome regularity of handsomeness. Engaging? Perhaps. A body perfectly proportioned, with the broad shoulders and slim hips of a fighter—of, yes, a prize fighter—an amateur sportsman.
Hollander had finished with staring down at Endicott. His walk, as he came over to where she was standing, caused Miss Murrow to change her opinion as to his vocation. She put him down as a sailor, a yachtsman. There was a buoyancy, a certain fluidity, in his movements, as if his feet were accustomed to maintaining him with poise across the surfaces of moving things. His eyes, except for one flashing glance, did not meet her own directly.
“Is it all right to smoke?” he said.
Miss Murrow smiled apologetically. “I’m afraid not, Mr. Hollander. Mr. Endicott’s lungs require as clear air as possible. I’ve even opened that window a little to keep the atmosphere in the room quite fresh.” She nodded toward the window above the large mahogany chest. The sash was up about six or seven inches from the bottom.
“Oh.” Hollander continued to stand before her, giving her still that peculiar effect of movement. There was nothing perceptible about it. His body was like a stolid field, motionless, beneath drifting shadows of the clouds. “Will Dr. Worth be here when Herb comes to?”
Nurse Murrow felt a professional stiffening. “I will inform Dr. Worth at the first sign of returning consciousness.”
“How?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“How’ll you inform him?”
“By going up to his room, of course.”
“Oh.” Hollander’s gaze wavered about at the line of her chin. “Then I’ll just baby Herb along until you get back down here with the doctor.”
“The doctor and I will undoubtedly be back before Mr. Endicott actually does come to.”
“Uh-huh. Good kid, Herb.”
She threw out a tentative feeler.
“You and he are great friends, Mr. Hollander?”
“Buddies. War buddies.”
Miss Murrow’s thoughts fled back along old trails. “How splendid! So few war friendships have really lasted, Mr. Hollander. I know it’s been so in my case, and with so many, many others.” A faint flush crept over her palish cheeks and made her look rather young again. “There was a girl with me in hospital at Chaumont, and we just knew we were going to be friends for life, but she lives out in Akron, Ohio.”
“Uh-huh.”
“We wrote quite regularly for a while after we got back from France—we both sailed from Brest on the Amerika—but then it sort of dwindled. Postal cards—
picture postal cards at Christmas. Last year we didn’t even send any. I wonder what she’d be like if I saw her again. Have you ever wondered about people whom you’ve once been very fond of, that way—about whether they change in time, I mean?”
“Everything changes.”
“Doesn’t it, though? Just like the seasons. Oh, I do think you can draw so many happy comparisons between life and nature. They’re interlinked, if you get what I mean. That’s why the weather is so affecting. I just can’t help feeling gloomy on a gloomy day, and when it’s bright and cheerful and all sunshiny outside, why then I’m that way, too.”
“Cripes!” muttered Hollander softly.
“What did you say, Mr. Hollander?”
“I said that was nice.”
“Now I suppose with you and Mr. Endicott you see each other quite regularly.”
“Now and then.”
“I suppose whenever your business permits?”
His look flicked her like a whip.
“Where’ll I sit?” he said.
Nurse Murrow vanished within her professional sphere.
“Near the patient, please.”
She wondered whether he had meant to snub her. It wasn’t a snub exactly. Yes, it was, too. Well, what of it? He was attractive enough to get away with it, and it probably was nothing but brusqueness, after all. Many strong men were brusque—purposely so to hide a tender interior. There was a man, and a millionaire at that… Hollander was back again beside her. She wondered whether it was so—whether people who didn’t look into your eyes were people whom it was unsafe to trust.
“Just what do you know about all this?” he said softly.
“About all what, Mr. Hollander?”
“About the police being in the house.”
“Isn’t it just too thrilling?”
“Uh-huh. Whom do they suspect?”
Miss Murrow began to feel friendly again. He was so good-looking. She wished she had a whole lot of exciting and important information to give him that would keep him standing there listening, so that she could just stare at him and try to put her finger on the source of that amazing effect of fluidity.
“They haven’t said whom they suspect, really.” She lowered her voice to an appropriate pitch. “But I know they think it’s somebody who is in the house.”
Hollander’s voice was a whisper. “You wouldn’t say it was Mrs. Endicott whom they suspect, would you?”
Miss Murrow appeared a trifle shocked. “Oh, it would be too dreadful to think a wife would harm a husband. But it does happen.” Her mind tabulated the news offered daily by the papers. “Why, it happens almost every day. Oh, you don’t think—”
“Certainly I don’t think she did it,” Hollander said fiercely. “It’s what the police think that I’m trying to get at. What makes you so sure they’re going to hang it onto somebody who’s in the house?”
Miss Murrow nodded toward the bathroom door. “From the way they’re guarding Mr. Endicott from being attacked again. From being attacked,” she added, “before he can make a statement.”
“Then they’re still just guessing?”
“Just guessing.”
It seemed to satisfy Hollander, and he managed to convey the impression that the conversation, so far as he was concerned, had come to an end. Miss Murrow went over to her chair in a corner of the room and sat down. He was deep, she decided. Yes, a deep creature, with deep impulses…
Cassidy and Hansen tilted back their chairs a bit and, with loosened collars, settled for the last tiring watches of the night. They had nodded briefly to Hollander, and he had nodded just as briefly in return. He looked to them like a good scout. Like one of the boys. Regular. Cassidy tried to remember what that last line of hooey was that the lieutenant had shot at them about Hollander. Something about cats.
About two cats, that was it, watching a promenading and near-sighted mouse. Nuts.
Hollander took an armchair and pushed it close to the head of the bed. It was an upholstered armchair, heavy, and with a tall solid back. He placed it so that its back was to the bathroom door. The back also obliquely obscured him from a full view on the part of Nurse Murrow. He vanished into its over-stuffed depths and settled down. His eyes travelled slowly along the spread until they came to rest with a curious fixity on the smooth, masklike face of his friend Endicott.
Then the pupils of Hollander’s eyes contracted until they glittered like the heads of two bright pins.
CHAPTER XIV
2:01 A.M.—An Empty Sheath
It was just after two o’clock when Lieutenant Valcour stepped to the pavement and paid his fare to the driver. The cab snorted away and left silence hanging heavy on the street. The bachelor apartment house where Hollander lived had an English basement entrance. He found Hollander’s name among a row of five others and pressed the proper button. After he had pressed it four times, a voice answered him through the earpiece of the announcer.
“Who and what is it?” said the voice.
It was the Southern voice.
“This is Lieutenant Valcour of the police department talking.”
“Oh. Mr. Hollander has already left, Lieutenant.”
“Thank you, I know that. I want to come upstairs.”
“Fourth floor, Lieutenant—automatic lift.”
“Thank you.”
The release mechanism on the door was already clicking. Lieutenant Valcour entered a smart little lobby and then an electric lift. He pressed the button for the fourth floor.
“Sorry to bother you like this,” he said, as he stepped out into a private foyer, and stared curiously at the young man facing him.
“No trouble at all, Lieutenant.”
“That’s very kind of you, Mr.—”
“Smith, Lieutenant—Jerry Smith.”
“Since when?” asked Lieutenant Valcour gently, as he started to follow Mr. Smith into an adjoining room.
“Why, what do you mean, Lieutenant?”
The man stopped, and his soft dark eyes stared earnestly at Lieutenant Valcour from a ruddy, slightly dissipated-looking young face.
Lieutenant Valcour removed his hat and placed it on a settee. “Nothing much, Mr. Smith,” he said. “Certainly nothing beyond the fact that I saw you one morning last month in the line-up down at headquarters. In connection with some night-club business, I believe. The charge fell through, I also believe, because the woman involved preferred the loss of her emerald necklace to the loss of prestige she certainly would have suffered during the publicity of a trial had she pressed the case. That’s all I mean, Mr. Smith.”
“I don’t suppose, sir, I could convince you of my innocence?”
“No, I don’t suppose you could.”
“It was my misfortune that the case never did come to trial, Lieutenant. I could have cleared myself then.”
“Nonsense. You could have brought counter charges—sued for damage for false arrest.”
Mr. Smith looked inexpressibly shocked. “We of the South, sir, do not bring charges against a lady.”
“Well, the ethical distinction between swiping a woman’s necklace and bringing charges against her is a shade too delicate for my Northern nerves to grasp.” Lieutenant Valcour crossed casually to a chair placed before a secretary and sat down. “Sit down, Mr. Smith,” he said, “and tell me something about your friend Thomas.”
“The straightest, squarest gentleman who ever lived, sir. Why…” Mr. Smith plunged into a panegyric that would have brought a blush even to the toughened cheek of a Caligula.
Lieutenant Valcour permitted him to plunge. While the flood poured into his ears, his eyes were inconspicuously busied with such papers as were on view in the secretary.
TOM, DARLING [he read on the folded half of a sheet of notepaper]: Let’s tea on Thursday at the Ritz. 4:30, as Herbert…
Lieutenant Valcour did not consider it essential to reach out and turn the page. His fingers absently busied themselves with the leather sheath for, presumably,
a metal paper cutter or, perhaps, a stiletto.
“Yes, he is an honorable and an upright gentleman, sir, and if you think there is anything wrong with him in the Endicott business”—Mr. Smith temporarily moved north of the Mason and Dixon Line—“you’re all wet.”
Mr. Smith was through.
“For how long has he known Endicott, Mr. Smith?”
“As I’ve been telling you, Lieutenant, ever since that night he saved Endicott’s life.”
Lieutenant Valcour became almost embarrassing in the sudden focusing of his attention. “Would it bother you very much, Mr. Smith, to tell me of that occurrence again?”
“Why, it’s just as I’ve been saying, Lieutenant, in the war—the war.”
“Oh, of course. Endicott and Hollander were in the same outfit, and Hollander saved Endicott’s life.”
“You can prove it, sir, if you wish. Just call up the Bronx armory and ask for the adjutant—in the morning, of course, as he wouldn’t be there now. He’ll make it official.”
“Oh, I believe it all right, Mr. Smith. It’s a very reasonable explanation of why Endicott should be so intimate with one of your friends.”
“I swear you have me wrong, Lieutenant. I had no more to do with that gilt-knuckles job than—” Mr. Smith sought desperately for a convincing simile—“than a babe unborn.”
“It isn’t any of my business anyway, Mr. Smith, even if you had,” said Lieutenant Valcour soothingly. He tapped the leather sheath he was holding against his fingers. “I suppose Hollander was even quite prominent at the wedding, when Endicott was married?”
“Prominent? He was the best man.”
“Really. Well, well. Mrs. Endicott is indeed a very beautiful woman, and from all that she has told me, a much misunderstood one.”
Mr. Smith poised himself delicately upon the fence and remained watchful.
“It must have been rather a problem for Hollander,” Lieutenant Valcour went on reflectively, “when she told him this afternoon during their tea at the Ritz that she was faced with one of two things.”
“What do you mean, Lieutenant?”
“Didn’t he tell you?”
