“He, too,” said the Chief, grinning at me, “is under observation. But so far it has been equally fruitless. As I said before, we are in black darkness. Yet a woman—one little, rich, and not too youthful woman—might assist.”
“How?” Kyra spoke.
“She might take dancing lessons, Mademoiselle.”
“Then you suspect this gigolo?”
“Not of murder. But of knowing more than he will tell us. He is frightened, I think. And when a rabbit is frightened——”
“One strokes it,” suggested Kyra, looking very intently at her own exquisite hands.
III
To the average mind, of which I hope I am the possessor, there is something inordinately comic about disguises. Also, I feel that it counts for many Platonic points in my favour that the Kyra whom I escorted in to dinner that evening stirred only one desire in me—and that, to laugh.
Had I been, however, as the gossips proclaim me, her lover, I think that I should have cried to see so much loveliness disappear. All Kyra’s loveliness—or nearly all of it—had disappeared. Before me sat a middle-aged woman—over-rouged and over-powdered, and with slightly discoloured teeth. A blonde wig—so obviously a wig!—covered her sleek, dark head; a high frock, the young bosom and the smooth throat. What she wore under that frock I know not. But her boyish figure had acquired a gruesome plumpness. And most of that plumpness was decked, as a velvet cushion in a jeweller’s window, with gems.
“And the young lady?” asked the waiter who had served our luncheon. “Does she not dine with you?”
“Alas!” I answered. “Mademoiselle had the bad news. She left this afternoon—hurriedly.” Which last—Kyra having departed with the same ostentation that “her friend, Madame Gardiano,” had arrived to occupy her vacant apartment—was more or less true.
We dined well, though conversation, even in Rumanian, proved a little difficult. And some while after dinner, with the band playing a fox-trot, our rabbit appeared.
“Madame would like to dance?” he suggested.
“But I dance so badly,” said Kyra.
Auguste Roux, however, would brook no denial.
I was well into my second cigar when “Madame Gardiano” took the floor with him; but soon, in sheer pity, I let the weed out. It seemed heartless, you see, to enjoy fine tobacco while a fellow-creature was being tortured. And torture is the only word applicable to Auguste Roux’s ordeal.
On the whole he bore the ordeal manfully. But when he brought “Madame Gardiano” back to me, his mouth was twitching; and in sheer pity I offered him drink.
“Une fine,” he gasped; and Kyra smiled on him, fatly, as it is possible that the Frau Direktorin may have smiled on him, saying:
“A little later, if you are not too busy, we might have another one. A tango, perhaps. In Rumania we dance much tango; but little fox-trot.”
“Madame Gardiano’s” tango, however, proved even more devastating than her fox-trot; and little as I admire gigolos, I would not have grudged Auguste a mention in despatches for his courage in suggesting: “A little course of lessons, Madame. Just to acquire the French manner. The nuances, if you understand.”
“Private lessons?” smirked “Madame Gardiano.”
“Of course, Madame. All my lessons are given in private.” And on parting—inspired by yet another brandy and another of my hundred-franc notes, which he clutched from me under the table—he kissed her hand.
“The poor little rabbit,” said Kyra, alone with me some hour and a half later. “I begin to feel sorry for him. And he is all of a dancer. Once or twice it was almost impossible for me not to let myself go with him. He has sympathy, too. What I told him about my dear husband——”
“Your what, Kyra?”
“My dear husband. General Gardiano of the Imperial Cavalry. It was he, you remember, who led the first charge against von Mackensen. An ardent soul, Gilbert. One of those who, doubtless, survive after they pass over. Indeed, only six weeks ago, when I was dining with our dear Queen in Bucaresti, he appeared to me, in his white uniform with his silver helmet, and wearing all his medals——”
“Kyra,” began I severely.
But Kyra only laughed till the blonde wig toppled sideways; and continued laughterful, whenever we were alone together, which was not often, for three whole days. But on the fourth day, when she came upstairs from her dancing lesson, there was no laughter in her—and it seemed to me that, for the first time in our acquaintance, she must be afraid.
“You are ill?” I said, going to her.
“I am not ill.”
“You have discovered something?”
“No. No.”
“You have. Tell me!”
“No. Not——” her hands shook—“not till I’m certain. I—I shall need your car tonight. And a pistol. And—and I must see the Chief. Be a dear, and telephone for him. Now. At once.”
IV
It was six o’clock before I could get the Chief on the telephone; but he came in ten minutes; and Kyra, who seemed to have recovered from the worst of her fright, received him with her wig off, and a cigarette between “Madame Gardiano’s” over-rouged lips.
“Eh bien!” said the Chief. “You have found out the truth? You have news for us?”
“I have no news—yet,” answered Kyra. “And the truth seems impossible. There is no motive, either. No human motive, anyway. But the murderer—if murder it be—lives in Mougins, at number thirteen, Rue de la République. And there I visit him, by appointment, at ten o’clock tonight.”
“Who made this appointment?” asked the Chief.
“Our gigolo. But he is only an innocent go-between. All he gets is his little bénéfice——”
“Yet the home of our gigolo’s mother”—the Chief referred to his notebook—“is also in Mougins. At the same number in the same Rue de la République. His mother——”
“She is innocent, too, my friend. Nobody could suspect——”
“But what do you suspect, Mademoiselle?”
“Something that is beyond even the powers of the French Sûreté to deal with,” said Kyra; and for the second time in our acquaintance it seemed to me that she was afraid.
She kept her own counsel, however; though the Chief did his best to probe her suspicions. All she asked of him was his spare pistol, one of those deadly Brownings which a woman can conceal in her handbag; and that he should watch the house.
“If you hear a shot,” she said, “break your way in.”
“Rely on me,” answered the Chief; and at about seven o’clock he left us—me in a panic, Kyra again calm.
We dined in her apartment, lightly. I took a couple of brandies with little soda. She drank only Evian water. At a quarter to nine I fetched my run-about from the garage. Ten minutes later we were sweeping down the Promenade des Anglais, lights blazing from the big hotels to the right of us; on our left the sea.
“Are they following?” I asked.
“At about fifty metres.” Kyra, shrouded to the eyes in a cloak that could only have belonged to “Madame Gardiano,” had glanced over her shoulder. “Hurry a little. I must be on time.”
I put my foot down; and our pace quickened. Soon the sea lay behind us, and the racecourse, and the Octroi Station on the National Road. We swung into Cagnes at a fair seventy-five kilometres; were blocked there, and again at Antibes. But nine-forty to the second found us in Cannes.
Through Cannes the police-car still followed. But once across the railway-bridge, it hooted; and I drew to the right for it, catching a glimpse of the Chief’s face. There were three men with the Chief; but none in uniform.
“Good,” said Kyra. “I shall feel safer—if I know they have surrounded the house.”
So I slackened speed; and when we came into Mougins the police-car
was not to be seen. Nothing was to be seen, in that up-and-down street of shuttered houses, except a man drawing water from a pavement-tap, and a lone pussy scaling a garden wall.
Just beyond that wall, acting on Kyra’s orders, I braked the run-about; and, dismounting, knocked on a barred door, to which a woman in servant’s dress came quickly, asking: “Is it Madame Gardiano? If so, will she be pleased to enter?” And because that woman’s mouth was narrow, with the projecting teeth of the bunny-rabbit, my heart misgave me as I helped “Madame Gardiano” to the pavement and she passed within.
I knew nothing, beyond what I have related here, of Kyra’s motives for this nocturnal visit. But I smelt a trap, with the gigolo to bait it. And smelling that trap, I felt glad only of two circumstances—of the bulge in my own hip-pocket and the lowness of the garden wall. It is open to doubt, however—for I am by nature a disciplined animal—whether anything would have made me scale that wall, or remove the bulge from my hip-pocket, except the Chief’s careful whistle, his signalling hand.
“It is all watched,” whispered the Chief, once I stood in the shrubbery beside him, “except that window. Take it—while I go round.” Then he disappeared, a shadow among shadows; while I crept to the shutters of the long French window he had indicated, and crouched there, waiting for the bark of Kyra’s pistol, fingering my own.
I must have been crouching, I imagine, a good five minutes—and all that time (let it be imputed to me for virtue!) telling myself to thank my stars for not being in love with Kyra Sokratesco—before I heard the unmistakable click of an electric-light switch, the unmistakable opening and closing of a badly-fitted door. And even then—so that it really is quite obvious I am not in love with her—I had no sensation of Kyra’s presence within two feet of me, till I heard a man’s voice say in tolerable French, “Please to sit there, Madame Gardiano. Yes. Just there, with your back to the long window. And please do not think of me. Think only of your dear one. Yes. Of your dear one: of the General who has passed over so gallantly, fighting for his country and his king.”
And after that, for the window-frames of the house fitted as badly as the door-frames, I heard the chair creak as Kyra sat on it. But because the shutters were of the cheap Provençal type, plain board and not slatted, I could see nothing. And neither could the Chief.
The Chief came back before the man spoke again: and I managed to indicate to him that Kyra was just inside. He, too, had his pistol out. And I had the impression, as we crouched together, that he was in a state of the intensest excitement. Twice the held breath made a little whistle through his nostrils. Once he muttered to himself; and though the mutter was almost inaudible, it sounded to me like the echo of what I myself was thinking: “It is too much. C’est trop.” Then all thought left me; as it will do when all a man’s senses concentrate in his ears.
For the man beyond the shutters had turned off the light; and was speaking again, very slowly, and with a peculiar enunciation that brought back memories of certain experiments of which I, then an insomniac, had once been the subject, though to no good end.
“All is prepared,” said the voice. “Let your eyes close. You are sleepy. You are very, very sleepy. When you sleep, you are well. Do you wish to be well? Answer me?”
“Yes,” answered Kyra, “I wish to be well.”
“And happy?”
“And happy.”
“Then sleep. While my eyes watch for you. Sleep. Sleep. Sleep.”
Silence followed; and in my imagination I could see the man’s hands making their hypnotic passes, while Kyra feigned sleep. And presently it seemed to me that her feigning must have accomplished its purpose; for the man’s voice went on again: “You sleep. But I bid your eyes to open. I bid your ears to hear.”
Kyra did not answer; but a faint moan came from her. And in that moment I had the impulse, almost uncontrollable, to break in. I looked at the Chief; and saw, even in the semi-darkness, that his eyes had hardened. His free hand was feeling cautiously at the shutter. Then the man spoke and Kyra moaned again; and I knew suddenly that the hypnotic slumber was not feigned, but real.
“Your eyes are open,” went on the voice. “And your ears hear me. Listen, you—you useless one. You, who are middle-aged, and wealthy, and—and without a husband. The earth is full of women such as you are. But women such as you cumber it. You serve no purpose here. Do you hear me? You serve no purpose.”
“I serve no purpose,” answered Kyra—and her voice was strange.
Her voice terrified me. But for a long while I heard no more of it, only the voice of the hypnotist, working on the defenceless soul. And into that soul he poured a horror of itself, and a poison; as one pours poison into a well. On earth—he said—that soul could have no abiding-place. Because earth, and the people thereof, hated it. Yes. Even the humble people——
“Those who bring you food! Those who bring you drink! The boy who dances with you! Why do they do these things for you? For love? Surely not? Only for money. And even taking your money, they despise you. You are loathsome to them. When they see you at your high balcony, they wonder why you do not throw yourself from it. Yet to one, you were never loathsome. And that One is waiting. Waiting for the moment when you—even as he—shall be no longer earth-bound; when you shall come to him at sunrise, not in the vile flesh, but in the free spirit. And always he is very close to you, that Waiting One. Yet closest when you stand on that high balcony of yours at sunrise. For look! I—even I, whose eyes are your eyes—will lift the curtain which is between you. Look! For the sun is rising. Look down on your beloved, earth-bound one. Look down on him. And see!”
And on that there began that work which was first done in Endor, and which still goes on today.
How it was done, we—beyond the window—knew not. Because, though sounds reached us, the sounds were no longer human; being more beast-like—the pant of hot breathing, the scratch of claws on woodwork, the beat of wings. And when those sounds ceased, no sound reached us—until the man’s voice commanded, very loudly: “Awake! Awake! It is finished. Madame Gardiano, I order you: awake!”
And then—then the pistol-shot. Within two feet of us! And the Chief’s whistle. And the two of us tearing—tearing at the shutter-boards with crazy hands.
V
The Chief and I had those shutter-boards away in thirty seconds. But there was no need to smash the windows, for Kyra herself opened them; and even through the rouge of Madame Gardiano I saw that her face was gray.
“A—a monster,” she stammered. “Somebody had to. So I did. Don’t—don’t step on him, Chief. He may not be dead yet. The—the light’s by the door.”
Then she staggered past us, into the garden; and I saw the rest through a haze which was some of it her own dark hair, and some of it the blonde wig she had worn, and some of it the smoke which still curled, as pistol-smoke will curl, like wisps from pipe tobacco about the room.
A body lay in that room; and a great ball of glass, overturned from a black velvet stand, beside the body. Over these knelt the Chef de la Sûreté. While beyond, a door was opening, to show a rabbit-mouthed woman, already handcuffed, and the face of one of the Chief’s men. But the Chief signalled to shut the door; and instantly the rabbit-mouthed woman vanished; and in a moment or so he ran out to us in the garden, saying: “My pistol, Mademoiselle. My pistol.” And once he had got the pistol he ran back again, very quickly into the room.
Nor could I, despite all the emotions of the past hours, and all the emotions of that bundle of queer femininity which kept muttering, half in and half out of arms, “He put me under. He put me under—though I fought against him,” restrain my admiration as I watched the man whose business is to reveal truth arrange that which the Eclaireur de Nice reported two days later as “A Fortune-Teller’s Suicide,” with confirmatory details from “the deceased’s servant la nommée Constance Roux,” and an agent de la Sû
reté who “happened to be passing when the shot was fired.”
And again I admired the Chief when, some hours later—after telling us the whole story from Auguste Roux’s first tentative: “If Madame is interested in spiritism, I know of a real medium,” to that final moment of horror which had seemed “like—like drowning among jelly-fish”—a rejuvenated Kyra walked out on to her balcony, and stood staring at the sunrise and the sea.
* * *
—
For it was his quick brain which grasped the situation; he and not I who sprang after her; who pulled her backwards—even while her left foot was feeling blindly upwards for a niche in that three-foot-nine balustrade.
DETECTIVE: SUSAN DARE
INTRODUCING SUSAN DARE
Mignon G. Eberhart
ONCE ONE OF AMERICA’S most successful and beloved mystery writers, Mignon Good Eberhart (1899–1996) enjoyed a career that spanned six decades and produced sixty books, beginning with The Patient in Room 18 (1929) and concluding with Three Days for Emeralds (1988). Her first five books featured Sarah Keate, a middle-aged spinster, nurse, and amateur detective who works closely with Lance O’Leary, a promising young police detective in an unnamed midwestern city. This unlikely duo functions effectively, despite Keate’s penchant for stumbling into dangerous situations from which she must be rescued. She is inquisitive and supplies O’Leary with valuable information.
Equally unlikely is the fact that six films featuring Nurse Keate and O’Leary were filmed over a three-year period in the 1930s. While the Patient Slept (1935) featured Aline MacMahon as Nurse Keate and Guy Kibbee as O’Leary. The Murder of Dr. Harrigan (1936) starred Kay Linaker in the lead role, renamed Nurse Sally Keating and now much younger. Murder by an Aristocrat (1936) has Marguerite Churchill as Keating, and The Great Hospital Mystery (1937) features a much older Jane Darwell, before Warner Brothers–First National decided to go younger again with a lovely Ann Sheridan starring in both The Patient in Room 18 (1938) and Mystery House (1938).
The Big Book of Female Detectives Page 104
