She looked at me beseechingly, turned her eyes to Ann, and her face flamed red. “Crying,” she said simply.
I studied her face for a moment, started to ask, “About what?” then changed my mind because I thought I knew.
“Get Jason and Karl,” I told Edmund.
He disappeared in the direction of the kitchen. Hardly had he gone through the door when footsteps sounded on the veranda and the door chime rang. Kate started toward the door, but I waved her back and answered it myself.
“Well?” Inspector Warren Day growled, jutting his unlighted cigar in my face.
I stepped aside and he entered, trailed by two others. Behind him came granite-faced Jonathan Mannering, looking more like Mussolini than ever, and behind him, the inspector’s satellite, Hannegan.
Day swept his eyes around the room, glowered at Abigail Stoltz, simpered at Ann Lawson, then jerked off his hat and barked, “Afternoon!”
“Good afternoon, Inspector,” they all chorused back like a classroom greeting its teacher.
I said to Hannegan, “Know Marmaduke Greene at El Patio? The guy they call Mouldy?”
Hannegan nodded, never being one to employ one word where none would do.
“You’ll find him third door to the right upstairs. He’s guarding two unconscious women, two empty glasses, and four bottles of Coke. The glasses and Cokes are for analysis, with chloral hydrate suspected.”
The lieutenant nodded again and raised an inquiring eyebrow at Day.
“All right,” the inspector said irritably.
As Hannegan started toward the stairs, Day said to me, “What’s going on here? Something new happen?”
I told him about the attempted drowning.
“Phone in about it yet?”
“Mrs. Lawson did,” I said, surprised. “Aren’t you here in response to the phone call?”
“No. Was on my way out anyway, because of what happened yesterday. Suppose half the division will show up now.”
He glowered around the room and suddenly boomed, “All right! I want everyone together here who was present when this last incident took place.” He turned to Kate. “Round up the servants.”
“Just get Maggie,” I told her, then explained to the inspector, “I sent Edmund after the other two just before you and Hannegan arrived.”
Day grunted. “Were you here then?” he shot at Mannering.
“Why—no—I mean, I don’t know,” the lawyer said. “Not when Doctor Lawson called out, certainly. But I must have been gone only a few minutes.” To Ann he explained, “I met the inspector on the road about a mile from here, and he waved me down.”
“Took you a long time to drive a mile, didn’t it?” I asked.
Mannering turned toward me stiffly. “It’s a hot day,” he said frigidly. “I stopped for an ice-cream soda.”
Maggie and Kate came in, followed by Jason Henry, Karl Thomas, and Edmund.
“This everyone in the house?” Day asked Ann Lawson.
She nodded. “Except that man with Mr. Moon and Miss Moreni.”
“If you don’t mind, Inspector,” Arnold Tate put in, “I’d like to make an announcement before you begin asking questions.”
The inspector examined him sourly. “Go ahead,” he said finally.
“I don’t know who is trying to kill Grace,” Arnold began slowly, “nor why, but I can visualize a number of possible reasons. Ann, as Grace’s heir, may be doing these things—“
“See here!” Dr. Lawson interrupted angrily.
“Or Miss Stoltz, as Ann’s heir,” the young man went on imperturbably, “may plan to kill both Grace and Ann. Mr. Mannering, as executor of the estate, may have some motive less obvious than these. Or Mr. Cushing may have mismanaged the corporation’s funds in some manner.” He glanced at the inspector. “We don’t have to stick only to those here now, you know. The Coke could have been doped yesterday, and perhaps Cushing was hiding near the pool awaiting an opportunity.” Arnold turned from the inspector to Dr. Lawson. “Even you, Uncle Doug, might appear to have the motive of making Ann rich and then marrying her, except we both know you could accomplish that without murder if you really wanted to—make Ann rich, I mean; not marry her. And besides, you saved Grace’s life.”
“Is this supposed to be an announcement?” the inspector asked impatiently.
“No, Inspector. Just give me a minute, please.” Speculatively Arnold ran his eyes over the five servants. “What motive any of you could have, I don’t know. But it is at least conceivable one of you believes you can somehow gain by Grace’s death. My own opinion is that somehow or other the will is tied up in all this, so I want to straighten out a misapprehension in the murderer’s mind.”
Deliberately Arnold rested his eyes on the face of each person present, one after another. His face was pale, but his expression was half mocking. “Whoever you are, murderer, Grace’s life means more to me than twenty million dollars. You may stop trying to kill her now, because she isn’t heir to the Lawson estate.” He paused, then said distinctly, “Grace and I have been secretly married for nearly six months.”
“Arnold!” Ann Lawson cried.
“You shouldn’t have done that, Arnold,” Dr. Lawson said quietly. “Ann knew it, because I told her, and I don’t see how it could possibly mean anything to anyone else.”
“See here, Ann!” Jonathan Mannering put in. “Do I understand both you and Doctor Lawson knew this all along?”
“Yes,” Ann said simply.
“But this changes everything!” the lawyer exploded. “With young Don dead, and Grace married, you automatically become heir. Why on earth did you keep it silent?”
“Just a minute!” Inspector Day roared. “Let me ask the questions here.” He peered over his glasses at Ann. “All right, Mrs. Lawson. Mind telling me what you’re talking about?”
Ann looked as though she were ready to cry at any minute. “You see, Inspector, I never approved of the marriage clause in my husband’s will. Of course, with Grace being so young, had I known she planned to marry, I would have done everything in my power to dissuade her.” She glanced quickly at Arnold. “Not that I disapprove of you, Arnold. I just feel you should both have finished school first.”
Her eyes turned back to the inspector, then shifted to Jonathan Mannering. “But once the deed was accomplished, I felt it unfair for Grace to lose her heritage simply because she married the man she loved. And of course up to Saturday it would merely have meant Don got everything if the secret got out. But even though it now makes me the heir, I still feel it unfair to Grace.” She paused and looked defiantly at the lawyer. “The money’s going to Grace anyway. I won’t take it from her.”
Mannering stroked his chin and said ponderously, “I’m afraid you have no choice, my dear. What you do with your money afterward is your own business, but there is no way I know of you can avoid inheriting.”
“Do I understand,” Warren Day asked in a pinched voice, “you don’t want twenty million dollars?”
“It’s not that exactly,” Dr. Lawson explained for her. “Maybe you’ll understand better if I tell you the whole story.”
“Do,” Day told him.
The doctor carefully smoothed his trouser crease and lit a cigarette before starting. “You see, Grace has always been a favorite of mine, and since Don died—my older brother, that is, Don Senior—I’ve sort of taken the place of her father insofar as advice and confidences are concerned. It was for this reason more than any other, I suppose, she told me about planning to marry Arnold. I tried to talk both of them into waiting, for, after all, Grace is still little more than a child. But when it seemed obvious they were going ahead with or without my blessing, I gave up arguing and decided to help them.” He turned faintly red. “Matter of fact, I gave the bride away. Naturally I felt honor-bound to keep the secret—”
“Then how’d you happen to tell Mrs. Lawson?” the inspector interrupted.
The doctor’s color deepened even more. “Why—
I’m in the habit of—I mean, we generally confide family affairs to each other—” He paused, smiled crookedly, and blurted out, “Maybe I’m just henpecked. We’re planning to be married one of these days.”
“Douglas!” Ann’s face had turned crimson, but the light dancing in her eyes was certainly not from embarrassment.
I glanced at Jonathan Mannering in time to see his face slowly contract. The pompousness fell away from him, and suddenly he looked like an old man.
Lieutenant Hannegan strode into the room and delivered the longest speech I ever heard him make.
“That trained ape up there won’t let me in the room,” he said loudly.
XV
WARREN DAY’S NOSE began to whiten at the tip. He asked softly, “Would you like reinforcements, Lieutenant? Say a couple of squads with tear gas?”
Hannegan’s face slowly turned red. Without a word he about-faced and started upstairs again.
“Excuse me,” I said to Day, and ran after Hannegan.
I caught the lieutenant at the top of the stairs, grabbed his coattail, and said, “Whoa!”
He turned a beet-red face in my direction and slapped my hand away from his coat. But it slowed him enough for me to get past him and reach the bedroom door first.
Mouldy Greene sat in the chair where I had left him, a twin of the automatic he had loaned me in his hand. It was at full cock, and the safety was off.
“Hi, Sarge,” he greeted me. “What d’ya think? That plain-clothes cop who’s always with Warren Day tried to bust in here.”
Behind me Hannegan made a growling noise deep in his throat.
“Put up your gun, Mouldy,” I said.
“Sure,” he said obligingly, snapping on the safety and tucking it under his arm.
Crossing to the dresser, I picked up the four bottles by their necks with one hand and picked up the glasses with the other. I delivered them to Hannegan in the doorway.
“Got a permit for that gun?” Hannegan growled at Mouldy.
“Sure. Wanta see it?”
The lieutenant expelled air through his nose, made a sharp right turn, and disappeared.
“He acts mad about something,” Mouldy commented.
I examined the two women, found them still breathing deeply, and returned to the drawing-room.
As I entered the room, Jason, the gardener, was saying, “I can’t help what I oughta seen or heard. I didn’t see or hear nothing.”
Hannegan had set the empty glasses and Coke bottles on the bar. Just after I came into the room, Kate appeared through the dining-room arch with a paper bag in her hand. She crossed and gave it to Hannegan.
“This big enough?” she asked.
The lieutenant grunted and began transferring the Coke and glasses to the bag.
Warren Day said to me, “The gardener here says he was rolling and lining the badminton court about the time Miss Lawson was tossed in the pool. The badminton court isn’t fifty yards from the pool, but he’s blind and deaf.”
“They’s a hedge between the badminton and tennis courts,” Jason said sullenly.
“I know,” I said. “One about shoulder-high. Were you working on your hands and knees?”
“Part of the time,” Jason said. “While I was laying the chalk-line.”
“I passed there on the way in not a half hour before Doctor Lawson yelled,” I told Day. “Nobody was on the badminton court then.”
Jason’s expression turned belligerent. “Maybe I hadn’t started yet. Didn’t say I spent all afternoon there. All I know is when I pushed the roller past the pool after getting it out of the garage, Miss Grace and that other woman was sitting there. After that I never left the court till Edmund came after me.”
I asked, “Did the two women have glasses in their hands when you saw them?”
His tone indicated bored indifference. “Never noticed. Miss Grace called hello to me and I said hello back, then went about my business. You can ask questions all day, and I won’t know no more when you stop.”
I turned to Day. “How about Karl here?”
“In the stable at the time,” Day said gloomily. “Claims he’d been currying the three riding-horses for over an hour when Edmund found him.”
He ran his eyes over the five servants. “All right,” he snapped suddenly. “You can go back to work.”
The servants quietly began to fade from the room. Day turned his attention to Ann Lawson, tried to keep his tone gruff, but could not prevent a querulous note from creeping into it.
“I’d advise you to get your stepdaughter out of the house and keep her away somewhere until this is cleared up.”
“We tried to,” Ann said in her soft voice. “Mr. Moon took her away, but she refused to stay.”
Day peered over his glasses at me. “Better try again, Moon. Another incident like this and your bodyguarding reputation won’t be worth a hoot in Hades, because I’ll run you out of here and assign a department man to protect Miss Lawson.”
He turned and strode out of the house without even saying good-by, followed by his shadow, Hannegan. I caught them at the bottom of the veranda steps.
“Wait a minute, Inspector,” I said, catching his arm only to have him jerk it free impatiently. “What’s the score?”
“Nothing to nothing!” he snapped. “What’s the point of going around in circles asking everybody the same old questions again? No suspects, no leads, no anything in this case.” He lowered his head to glower at me over his glasses. “I,” he said distinctly, “am going home and get drunk.”
Turning his back on me, he started to walk away.
“Hold it a minute,” I told him. “I got an idea.”
He stopped and regarded me suspiciously.
I said, “I agree with Arnold Tate that somehow the will must be behind this mess. So let’s try an oblique approach. In the first place, all we know about the will is what Mannering told us, and maybe he was lying. How about subpoenaing a copy and looking it over? In the second place, maybe one of our suspects is in financial straits. How about having their financial statuses investigated?”
“You mean secretly?”
“Of course secretly. Do you need written permission from all eleven suspects?”
“As a matter of fact, we do,” he said in a ponderous tone. “You can’t pry into a private citizen’s personal affairs—“
“Look, Inspector,” I interrupted. “It’s me, Moon, you’re talking to—not the commissioner. Don’t tell me the banks and investment companies in this town won’t cooperate if the cops ask for a little off-the-record information. I could get it by myself from some of the banks, if I promised not to use it in evidence. Take a few of those college cops you’re always complaining the chief assigns you, have them contact the credit bureau, the various banks—”
He said coldly, “I know how to conduct an investigation, Moon.”
“All right. Conduct one, then,” I said. “I don’t know what you’re so discouraged about. At least we can now eliminate three suspects, which is progress of a sort, even if it is negative.”
“What three suspects?” he asked.
“Arnold Tate, Maggie, and Doctor Lawson. Tate was with me when Grace underwent this last attack, Maggie was with Mouldy Greene, and the doctor pulled Grace out of the pool, so he could hardly be the one who threw her in.” I paused, then added, “If you assume Don’s killer is the same person who is passing at Grace, those three can be dropped as suspects there, too.”
“Suppose it isn’t the same person?” Day growled.
“It’s almost bound to be. But even if it isn’t, I think we may be able to eliminate Doctor Lawson and Arnold Tate. If you want to do some checking, we may be able to narrow the time of Don’s death down to sometime between two-thirty a.m. and seven, when the servants got up.”
“How?”
“First,” I said, “you’ll need a good recent picture of young Don.”
After staring at me a moment, Day turned to Lieutenant Hannegan. �
��Go inside and get a picture,” he ordered.
As Hannegan silently re-entered the house, I went on. “A local bus going downtown passes the house at eleven-ten at night. Find the driver who was on that night and see if Don Lawson wasn’t a passenger. There is a tavern at Fourth and Market—I don’t know its name, but it has a neon sign reading, ‘Bar and Grill.’ Check the bartender to see if Don wasn’t there in a back booth from midnight till one-thirty, when the bar closed. Then question all the bus drivers who came this way from downtown from two a.m. on, and I think you’ll be able to establish the time he got home.”
“Where’d you get this lead?” the inspector asked.
“From Arnold Tate, but it was more or less in confidence, so I’d prefer you to hold off questioning him for the moment. If the story checks, Doctor Lawson is clear because he would have been at the hospital when Don went over the bluff. If it doesn’t check, better pull Arnold in for a going over. While you’re at it, check the two a.m. university bus to see if Tate was on it. If he was, and we can prove Don Lawson was on a bus coming home about the same time, Tate will be clear on that angle, too.”
“Why would Tate be on a two a.m. bus?” Day asked querulously. “Grace Lawson dropped him off for the seven-fifteen p.m.”
“It’s a long story,” I said. “And not important to the case unless it’s a lie. Believe me, I’m not holding out on you, but I’m kind of morally bound to keep Tate’s confidence.”
“You’d better not hold out,” Day grumbled. “You’ll need the department’s recommendation for a license renewal one of these days, you know.”
“I know,” I told him.
Hannegan came out of the house carrying a cardboard-framed picture in the hand not occupied by the bag of bottles and glasses. He handed the picture to Warren Day.
“Now go back and get a picture of Arnold Tate,” the inspector snapped.
The lieutenant raised his eyebrows.
“Try Grace Lawson’s room,” Day said impatiently. “Mrs. Tate, I mean. Nuts as she is about the guy, she’s bound to have a picture.”
“I’ll get it,” I said quickly, remembering Grace’s room now contained Mouldy Greene, and not being up to another clash between him and Hannegan.
Gallows in My Garden Page 12
