“Suppose he’s the murderer?” I asked sourly.
“Oh, but Arnold couldn’t be!”
“Could Mrs. Lawson?”
“Of course not!”
“Or Doctor Lawson?” I asked wearily.
“Of course not,” she said less convincingly, and her eyes moved from one to the other of the rest of them.
Suddenly both palms flew to her face, and she began to cry.
Arnold Tate jumped to his feet. “Dammit, Grace,” he shouted at her. “We both know how to end this thing, and I’m going to do it right now!”
Grace’s tears stopped as suddenly as if a valve had been closed. The look she threw at Arnold was so frightened it was almost cowering.
“Don’t, Arnold! Please don’t. I’ll go away with Mr. Moon, and everything will be all right.” She smiled tremulously at the rest of us. “It hasn’t anything to do with all this. Nothing at all.”
Arnold strode into the house, slamming the screen door behind him. I made a mental resolution to speak to Arnold privately at the earliest opportunity.
After dinner we called a taxi instead of taking one of the other cars, because I had no intention of returning that night. Deliberately I left the impression I would not be back because our trip involved considerable distance, but actually I wanted some free time to do a little research at the state university.
To get to El Patio by the shortest route, we should have turned right when we left the Lawson grounds. But on the principle that overcaution is smarter than carelessness, I told the taxi driver to turn left. We had not gone more than three blocks in the wrong direction when I spotted a black sedan attempting to be inconspicuous a half block behind us.
“Union Station,” I told the cabbie.
When we reached the railroad station, I carried Grace’s suitcase and my own grip through the Market Street entrance. I had lost sight of the sedan after we entered downtown traffic, and in the mob at Union Station it was impossible to tell if anyone was following us.
A check of the train schedule board showed a train due to pull out north in ten minutes. I bought a one-way and a round-trip coach to a town a hundred miles north.
Our gate was number ten. Five minutes before train time we passed through it, but instead of going on to the train immediately, I led Grace to one side and peered through the iron railings at the bank of ticket windows in the main lobby. A squat, bowlegged man in a white suit stood at the window I had just left. Possibly it was coincidence, I thought, but from a distance and from the back he looked remarkably like the smaller of the two gunmen who had jumped me at my flat.
Six cars up I flashed our tickets at a conductor, and we climbed on the train. But instead of going into the coach, I left Grace standing in the vestibule with our luggage while I remained on the steps looking back at the gate. Just before the conductor shouted, “Bo-ard!” the short man in the white suit hurried through the gate and climbed into the last car. Even at that distance, there was no mistaking him. It was the short pal of the English lord.
Picking up our bags, I urged Grace on ahead of me through the car and on into the far vestibule. There I set down the bags, pulled open the door on the opposite side from which we had entered and tossed out our luggage. Without raising the floor platform over the steps, I dropped after the bags, then turned and held up my arms to catch Grace. The train gave a jolt and started to move just as I set her down.
“What are we doing, if you don’t mind?” Grace asked.
“Taking to water,” I said.
I scanned the windows of each car as it passed. Our shadow was in the last car, seated next to the window, and looked straight at us as the car rolled by. He wore one of the most startled expressions I have ever seen.
I gave him a friendly wave.
Crossing a set of empty tracks to the next loading-platform, which was for a train apparently just arrived, we mingled with the few stragglers still getting off and headed for the exit to the street. Seven empty taxis were lined up at the curb, there apparently being a momentary slump in the transportation business. I threw our bags into the first one.
“El Patio,” I told the driver.
El Patio, billed as “The Dining-Place of Kings” ever since a deposed monarch stopped there for a sandwich while passing through town, consisted of three huge rooms insofar as the public portion of it was concerned. The center one, originally a casino when the place was a gambling-house, was about the size of a first-class hotel lobby, and somewhat resembled one in that instead of the usual chrome and Bakelite furnishings stressed by cocktail lounges, comfortable sofas in front of which stood low coffee tables were spread through the room with planned haphazardness. The sofas, being the soft type you sink so far into you have to be a contortionist to get out again, were economic traps. They were so comfortable, and the effort involved in getting up again so tremendous, it was always less trouble to order another drink than to leave. And the lowest-priced cocktail El Patio served was a dollar and a quarter.
On one side of this room was the ballroom and on the other the dining-room where the ex-monarch munched his sandwich. Both were nearly as large as the cocktail lounge. Later in the evening all three would be jammed and standees would be three-deep at the bar, but at 2:30 on a Sunday afternoon the place was practically deserted.
As we passed through the cathedral-like bronze doors into the lounge, a thick-shouldered man with a skull nearly as flat as his face and a mild case of acne detached himself from the bar and approached with teeth showing in a grin.
“Hi, Sarge!” he greeted me, slamming a palm the size of a pancake griddle between my shoulder blades.
During the war Mouldy Greene, whose real name was Marmaduke, but derived the nickname “Mouldy” from his acne, had been the sad sack of my outfit, one of those soldiers whose well-meaning uselessness exasperated you to the point of wanting to boot him every time he stooped over while policing the area, but for whom you developed the same sort of protective fondness a mother feels for an idiot child. With an amazing lack of judgment El Patio’s former owner had hired him as a bodyguard, and Mouldy proved about as efficient a civilian as he had a soldier, managing to be out at the bar when his boss was murdered in his own office. Fausta Moreni inherited Mouldy along with the place, and having no use for a bodyguard, converted him to official customer greeter, a job which involved grinning at people as they walked in, after which he turned them over to the head-waiter. It was a perfect job for him, for in spite of his flat nose and mild acne, he had the same sort of appeal an ugly mongrel dog possesses, and people instinctively liked him. Fausta had almost broken him of the habit of pounding those he particularly liked on the back, but as an old army buddy he regarded me as above mere customers.
When I got back my breath, I said, “Hello, Mouldy. Fausta around?”
“In the office. Come on back.” His tone made it an offer of the whole building.
We followed him through the deserted dining-room and down a hall to an office, where we found Fausta working over the books.
As always the sight of her dark-eyed blondness put a lump in my throat. As usual I had resolved no lump would develop this time, but as we stopped in the open door she was laboriously entering figures with a desk pen too long for her, the pink tip of her tongue was pressed against her upper lip to help her concentrate, and she had a smudge of ink on her nose. The lump came up in spite of me.
“Manny!” her husky voice said.
She came around the desk, grabbed my lapels, and greeted me with a short but solid kiss.
“Cut it out,” I growled. “I got a date with me.”
Fausta’s eyes narrowed at Grace, then she screwed up her nose at me, turned, and went back to her chair.
“Pooh! If Grace were really your date, you would tell me some lie about business. I do not care anyway. I am through with you. I give you back to the Pirates.”
“You mean the Indians,” I said. “I need a favor.”
Her eyes narrowed ag
ain. “All right. We will make a trade.”
I shook my head. “No trade this time. It’s a favor for Grace, not me. I want you to hide her out a few days.”
“Surely,” she said agreeably. “She can stay in my apartment upstairs. No rent, except each day she stays, you will take me out one night.”
“I said no trade,” I said, exasperated. “This is for Grace, not me.”
“Pooh! Then she can sleep in the street.” She looked calmly from me to Grace, who only grinned at her.
“All right,” I said. “I won’t argue about it. But I’ll pick the nights.”
“No you will not, my smart one. You would pick them all next year.”
“Okay,” I said, giving up. “You pick them.”
My resistance to Fausta’s bargaining was always weak, but in a sense it was sincere. There was nothing I liked more than piloting Fausta around town, but it worked like a drug, and the hang-over was not worth the momentary pleasure. It made me start wondering if it really mattered whether you or your wife had the money, and by the time I decided it really did, as I inevitably decided each time, the break had the same effect on my nerves as suddenly taking dope from an addict.
Mouldy Green said brightly, “You got ink on your nose, Fausta.”
I turned on him and snapped, “It looks good there.” Then more mildly I said, “This is Grace Lawson, Mouldy. Nobody gets up to see her while she’s here. Got that?”
“Sure, Sarge. Nobody.” Then he asked, “How about Fausta?”
“Except Fausta and me!” I yelled at him. “I can hear you,” he said in a hurt voice.
X
IN SPITE OF WHAT I HAD TOLD THE FAMILY, I had not entirely eliminated the servants as suspects, which still left me eleven people to choose from as Grace’s assailant. Tentatively I was working on the assumption that the same person had killed Don Lawson, and of the eleven suspects presumably only Arnold Tate could not be Don’s killer, since he had returned to school the Sunday night Don disappeared.
I do not possess the type of mind capable of making brilliant deductions from bits of cigarette ash, and any results I get generally come from good old-fashioned leg work. I don’t know where Bertillon would have started in this case, but it was my simple intention to check Arnold’s alibi as a first move, so that I would either have one less suspect or an exceptionally good one.
Of course it was possible that Don’s death was just what it seemed, a suicide, and had no connection with the attempts on Grace. But to my mind this was stretching coincidence a bit far.
From El Patio I had the taxi driver take me to my flat, where I left my overnight bag and returned to the taxi again.
“Bus depot,” I told the driver.
As he started up, he glanced in the rearview mirror and kept glancing at it again every few seconds for the next two blocks.
“Listen, mister,” he said finally. “We got a tail.”
Without turning I asked, “What is it?”
“Yellow convertible with red upholstery. Hell of a thing to tail anyone in. Sticks out like a circus wagon in a funeral parade.”
“Just pick us up?” I asked.
“Naw. Just after we left El Patio, I guess. I remember seeing him in the rearview, but I didn’t think nothing of it till I pulled away just now and he pulled out right after us from a quarter block back. Want I should lose him?”
I said, “No. Find a dead-end street and turn down it.”
“You ain’t aiming to get in a fight or nothing, are you?” he asked uneasily.
“Not if it’s who I think it is,” I assured him.
The cabbie shrugged, bore down on the gas, and sped straight ahead for three blocks. With a squeal of tires, he suddenly swung right into a narrow street that ended fifty yards on at a board fence.
I had him turn into the first driveway, jumped out, and made the corner just as the convertible careened around it as though afraid it might lose sight of us. When the driver saw the board fence ending the street, he slammed on his brakes and sat there looking foolish while I went over to him.
I said, “Hello, Mouldy.”
“Why, hello, Sarge,” Mouldy Green said in a surprised voice.
I said coldly, “Let me guess before you make up a story. Fausta is afraid I’ll fall down and hurt myself, and you’re supposed to tail along and pick me up.”
“Aw, I was just riding around. How you like my new car?”
“Just the thing for trailing people,” I told him, “though you might have the wheels painted red.”
“Yeah, I was gonna,” he said seriously. “But Fausta said I’d be conspicuous.”
“Look, Mouldy,” I said. “You ride back to El Patio and tell Fausta I’m a big boy now and don’t need a nursemaid.”
Mouldy scratched his flat head. “Jeepers, Sarge. Fausta’ll be mad. How about ditching the cab and I’ll take you where you want to go.”
“No,” I said shortly. “I got enough troubles without you. You go back to El Patio and protect Grace Lawson from murderers.”
He looked at me sadly, then shrugged his shoulders and backed the car. I stood at the corner and watched until he disappeared down a side street two blocks away.
At the bus depot I learned the next bus for the state university left in ten minutes, and purchased a round-trip ticket. Taking a seat at the rear, I idly surveyed the street while waiting for the bus to start.
Just as our driver began to cut from the curb, a yellow convertible crept alongside, and Mouldy Green peered up at the windows. Almost too late he slammed on his brakes, which prevented his radiator from mashing into our side, but apparently was too sudden for the car behind him. There was a mild crash, the bus stopped and the driver and passengers all peered out at the convertible.
Mouldy climbed out and walked back to stare ruefully at his rear bumper, which was locked with the bumper of a black sedan.
Seeing that the damage, if any, was minor, and that the bus was not involved, the driver shifted and completed his pull into the street. But not before I caught an unnerving glimpse of the black sedan’s two occupants, who had stepped out either side of the car. Both were clad in white Palm Beach and wore sailor straw hats. The driver I had last seen less than two hours before on a train headed north, and his tall companion was staring down his nose at Mouldy in the condescending manner of an English lord.
If we were going to have a parade, I thought, it was just as well Marmaduke Greene was in it, for while it was unlikely he would be of any help, he was almost certain to confuse the enemy as much as he did me.
During the thirty-minute ride I could detect neither the black sedan nor the convertible trailing us, nor did I see either after we arrived. I walked the three blocks from the depot to the men’s dormitory.
Arnold Tate’s room, a student clerk at the desk informed me, was 210. I made my way up the stairs, knocked on the door, and a voice called, “Spit on the floor and slide under.”
Opening the door, I found a young man of about twenty lying on one of the beds in his undershirt. He jumped to his feet embarrassedly when he saw me.
“Gee, I thought you were one of the guys, or I wouldn’t have hollered that.”
I grinned at him. “This Tate’s room?” I asked.
“Yes, sir, but he’s not in. I’m his roommate.”
“Manville Moon,” I said, holding out my hand.
He shook it solemnly and informed me he was Willie Gillis and a junior.
“Arnold usually gets back about eight,” he said. “He always spends the week-end in town, you know.”
“I was afraid of that,” I said ruefully. “I missed him last Sunday, too, and I can’t wait for two more hours.”
“Last Sunday?” he said, surprised. “I was here all evening.”
“I just phoned from the depot and the clerk said he was still in town. About nine o’clock, I think it was.”
“That was a late night for Arnold,” Willie said. “He just barely caught the last bus, th
e one at two a.m., and got in about a quarter of three. Hardly could make classes the next day.” Suddenly he laughed. “Unless you know Arnold pretty well, you don’t know how funny that is. Old Early-to-bed-and-early-to-rise, I call him. He says sleep is just as important as study, and won’t stay up beyond eleven even during exam week. But take your coat off and sit down, Mr. Moon. Why you wearing a coat around in this weather?”
The real reason, of course, was that a suit coat when the temperature was near one hundred was less conspicuous than a shoulder holster hanging out where everyone could see it.
“My business requires it,” I told him truthfully. “Thanks for the invitation, but I can’t stay. Give Arnold my regards, will you?”
“Glad to,” he said agreeably.
As I reached the stairs, a bell suddenly set up an infernal clangor. Instantly the halls filled with students, who moved quickly, but without running, down the stairs. My initial thought was that it was a fire alarm, and I began to move more quickly myself. Then from the unexcited babble of conversation around me, I realized it had only been the dinner signal, and I suddenly became hungry.
Next to the bus depot was a hamburger stand. As my bus was not due to leave for twenty minutes, I employed the time in getting rid of my hunger.
As I stepped outside again, the first thing I saw was a car at the curb which had not been there when I entered the hamburger stand. It was a black sedan with a squat, white-suited man in the driver’s seat. The rear door hung open, and in the back sat an English lord, a wide, horsy grin on his face and his hammerless revolver in his hand.
Normally I stay at least half awake when not in bed, and the only way I can explain being taken so easily, particularly when I knew the pair was on my trail, is that I must have been semidazed from the heat. Of course the two gunmen were suffering the same heat, and seemed none the less alert for it, but I have no other alibi.
“Get in,” invited the man in the back seat in such a polite tone I could hardly refuse.
I glanced quickly both ways along the street, hoping the yellow convertible was still in the parade, but as usual Greene was missing at the only time he was needed. Not only that, but no other living soul was on the street at the moment.
Gallows in My Garden Page 8
