The velvet hand

by Helen Reilly

  THE VELVET HAND

  by HELEN REILLY

  “Darlings—Don’t worry about me. You’ll be hearing from us in a few days.”

  The unsigned note clearly written in a state of emotional upset and left on the dresser in Libby’s disordered room, indicated an elopement. That was shocking enough to Kit Haven and her well-to-do uncle Philip, with whom the girls lived. Then a whispering voice spoke over the phone and the terror descended. In spite of a state trooper patroling the house, the murderer struck.

  The subsequent investigation tossed up strange things, and people: an unemployed Adonis, Tony Wilder, who claimed to be Libby’s fiance; Samuel Pedrick, a cafe society “press agent”; and his mistress, Eleanor Oaks, an ex-actress who once figured in a murder case. There is no apparent link between these people whose habitat is New York and Philip Haven who lives in Connecticut.

  Inspector McKee of the New York Homicide Squad succeeds in making the connection and finds it amazingly close. Not close enough, though, to account for Kit’s feeling that a velvet hand seems to be nudging them along, a hand belonging to someone who knows the house, and their habits, their very way of thinking; a hand that has killed once and threatens to kill again. Kit, Philip and Libby flee, in vain. The hand follows them unerringly to their hideaway. The startling denouement will astound even those of Mrs. Reilly’s fans who know her talent for terror and surprise.

  THE VELVET HAND

  BY HELEN REILLY

  RANDOM HOUSE • NEW YORK

  All the characters and incidents in this novel are entirely imaginary.

  Copyright, 1952,1953, by Helen Reilly All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions Published in New York by Random House, Inc., and simultaneously in Toronto, Canada, by Random House of Canada, Limited Manufactured in the United States of America

  THE VELVET HAND

  I

  Libby Tallis wasn’t missed until the evening of June the third.

  Her uncle, Philip Haven, arrived home from Mexico at around five o’clock that afternoon in a thoroughly bad humor. Although he had telegraphed that he was coming, his niece Libby didn’t meet him at the station and he had to take a cab. When he reached the house three miles out in the country it drowsed tranquilly in the late sunlight. There was no one under the apple trees, no one on the tennis court or on the tree-shadowed lawns. The cab driver got out and lifted the bags out.

  "Just put them down anywhere, someone will take them.” Haven reached absently for his wallet and gave the man an extravagant tip.

  “Yes, Mr. Haven. Thank you, Mr. Haven.”

  The writer was highly regarded in the little town, particularly since he’d come into all that money six months ago.

  The taxi drove off. Carrying his typewriter, Philip Haven mounted steps and crossed the broad stone terrace that was a recent addition, deciding critically that it looked very well. The price had been high—he couldn’t quite remember what—but on the whole it was worth it. What, after all, was ready cash for but to spend? It didn’t do any good locked up in a bank.

  Tall and lean, with an energetic forward stoop, at fifty-two Haven was as vigorous as he had been at thirty. He hated his advancing age, resented it as a personal affront imposed on him from the outside. The girls were the trouble. He had regarded his two nieces as children, until, a year or so ago, they weren’t children, they were women, and they were behaving like women, in an inconsiderate and irrational manner. Libby particularly.

  The hall inside, broad and long, was dimly cool. Tulips on the drum table under the window looked like Libby’s arrangement. The tulips were fresh, so she must be here.

  “Libby,” he shouted, and dropped the typewriter with a thump.

  His voice echoed back at him emptily from the living room, the dining room, the sun porch. The house appeared to be deserted. In the stillness a door upstairs opened and a voice called, “Is that you, Philip? I’ll be right down.” It wasn’t Libby, it was his sister-in-law, Miriam VanKreef.

  Miriam descended the stairs with a stately tread. She was a large statuesque woman whose age was a mystery; she could have been forty, she could have been in her late fifties. There was no gray in her fair hair, and her face, on which she spent hours daily, was smooth and masklike, with that slightly beaten-up look that skins get from creams and massage and beauty oils. She had married again after Philip’s brother died and had succeeded in burying a second husband. She had been with the Havens since the death of Philip’s own wife, ten years earlier. “I wouldn’t think of leaving you alone to cope with those two motherless girls. I’ll stay for a month or so and straighten things out.” It had been quite a visit. She had been there ever since. Periodically she announced her intention of moving on, but nothing came of it.

  “My dear boy!” Miriam advanced on Haven smilingly. Her smile was like butter brushed over pastry—it left the essential structure unchanged. They touched cheeks, or rather Miriam did. She looked past Haven. “Where’s Libby? ... I want her to do some errands in the village. I’ve been laid low again—one of my attacks.” She indicated the elaborate white organdy negligee she wore, waved the ice bag she held in a large shapely hand.

  “Where’s Libby!” Haven exclaimed crossly. “I’m sure I don’t know where she is—and I’d very much like to know. Why didn’t she meet me? Didn’t she get my telegram?” “Yes. I took it over the phone myself. We didn’t expect you for at least another week or two and Libby was overjoyed. I’ve been in bed all day and I haven’t seen her, but she must be somewhere around.”

  “Tom might know,” Haven suggested.

  Tom was the colored houseman, also one of their recent acquisitions, whom Miriam was in process of making over into an old family retainer. She shook her head. Tom, it appeared, was in New York having his teeth attended to. “Perhaps Libby’s out in the garage, Philip, perhaps the Lincoln had a flat.”

  Libby wasn’t in the garage. She wasn’t anywhere in the big rambling house, she wasn’t in the garden or the paddock, ponylcss now since the matched pair of Shetlands Haven had insisted on buying had run away with her. Haven came back, puzzled and disgruntled.

  “Catherine,” Miriam suggested brightly, running a finger over a table in search of dust. “That’s probably it. Yes, that must be it. Libby went into New York to meet you, missed you at Grand Central, and went on to Catherine’s.” Catherine was Philip Haven’s other niece and a cousin of Libby’s. Like Libby, she had been with the Havens since she was a child, but, college done with, she had insisted on taking a job and an apartment in New York, much against Haven’s wishes. It was one of the bones of contention between them.

  Haven made for the phone.

  Answering his ring in the little inner hall of her three rooms on Ninetieth Street, Kit Haven was surprised to hear her uncle’s voice. “Philip!” He had taught them to call him that—it was part of his innocent determination to remain young. “I thought you were still in Mexico. Nice trip?”

  “Yes,” he said impatiently, “although I hate the sun, always have. Is Libby there?”

  Kit said no, and felt the familiar little stab because her uncle hadn’t asked her how she was. Well, she thought with tolerant wryness, what did she expect?

  “I don’t understand it,” Philip said violently. “I don’t understand it at all. I got in ten minutes ago expecting her to meet me at the station, and she wasn’t there.”

  He spoke as though the skies had fallen. Kit smiled. Libby was her uncle’s right hand; she did his typing for him, and listened to his plots, and was a combination secretary and companion, had been since she was seventeen.

  “A nice how-do-you-do,” he declared. “I’ve been flying all day and I was about ready for the undertaker anyhow— and no
w this. Where the devil can she be?”

  Libby could be any number of places. Kit started to say so, and stopped. A sudden thought struck her. It gathered strength. It was, after all, what she had been expecting for the last couple of months . . . She stared at a triangle of late sun on a board fence from which the paint was peeling, at a section of cement, a rusty garbage can. Her knees were shaky. She steadied herself. Yes, it could very well be. If she was right it would be a blow to Philip, a staggering blow—unless Libby had done some sort of spadework, and it didn’t look as though she had.

  "Kit,” her uncle barked, "are you on the phone or are you not and am I talking to the empty air?”

  Kit stood straight, her dark head lifting. It was a beautiful head. She pulled air into her lungs and flattened her shoulders. “Sit down and have a drink or something, Philip, or you’ll send your blood pressure flying.” Prepare her uncle a little? He evidently had no idea. She glanced at her watch. “I think I know where Libby might be. I’ll tell you when I see you. If I leave now, this minute, I can just catch the 7:10.” She hung up on the first of a furious barrage of questions and dashed for the bedroom.

  Half an hour later she was on the train. She caught it by the skin of her teeth and the help of a mad taxi driver. George Corey’s call at the last minute had held her up.

  She was to have dined with George. There had been a lot of dinners with him lately, and movies and the theater. Settling herself in a vacant seat as the train pulled out she tried to cling to the thought of George, looking through the window into the darkness of the tunnel.

  Her own reflection gazed stonily at her, gray eyes under delicate dark brows, hollows below the cheek bones, hair lifting from her forehead in a widow’s peak. A widow?—no, it wasn’t quite that bad. She loosened taut muscles and sank back against the chair cushions and let the pain come.

  Might as well get it over with. Anyhow, it was only pain’s ghost and not the real thing. She had wrestled with that earlier and had won the decision—only the fight had gone on for a good deal more than fifteen rounds. Hugo and Libby, Libby and Hugo, her cousin and the man she had thought, erroneously, loved her. But that was before he met Libby. . . . The train shot out into Harlem and the fading light. Pushcarts in the streets, a new housing development, the river, the bridge; Hugo and Libby—their names kept time to the clicking of the wheels.

  What was she to say to her uncle? The truth. That Libby and Hugo had gone away to be married quietly like this because they thought it would be kinder. “I was in love with Hugo. He fell in love with Libby and Libby with him, and they’re both civilized people and neither one would have wanted me haunting them at the altar, maid of honor at Libby’s left hand.”

  That wasn’t quite right. Libby hadn’t known about Hugo and her, Kit thought. Libby was a square shooter, as square as they came. She couldn’t help it if everybody was drawn to her, women as well as men. Libby rose before her in the speeding train. Her hair was curly too, only it was the purest palest gold. Her eyes were dark blue. They crinkled at the corners when she laughed, and she had the loveliest mouth. It wasn’t only her looks. It was her sweetness and her stability. She wasn’t moody or contentious or changeable, she was always the same. A man would like that. No, it wasn’t Libby’s fault, it wasn’t anybody’s fault. It was just one of the things that happened. Kit picked up a magazine and began to go through the pages.

  It was almost dark when she got out at Denfield. The platform was deserted, the commuters home and dining. New leaves overhead brushed together in the soft wind. Philip had sent a taxi. Charlie Brown came up to her. “Hello, Miss Haven. Over here.”

  Kit knew every foot of the way from the station, the wall of lilacs on the far side of the river, the towered monstrosity on the cliffs, the development called Salt Hill filled with glistening new Old New England salt-box houses sprouting television aerials and bony young trees, and after that the country. Kit got out under the maples, went through the gate and up the path.

  Philip had the door open before she reached it, waited there silhouetted against the light. Everything about him came at you belligerently, the jut of dark hair sprinkled with white above the domed forehead, the deep-set eyes, the unequivocally Roman nose, the kind mouth and fiercely opinionated jaw.

  “Well,” he said, “well, Kit—I presume you didn’t bicycle up, although it’s almost two hours since I called you.” He kissed her cheek absent-mindedly and angrily. “What did you mean by saying you had an idea of where Libby might be and then hanging up on me?”

  Kit put her bag on the drum table. She stripped off her gloves and ran her fingers through her hair. Under the overhead chandelier that deepened her eyes and the hollows in her cheeks, she said, “Don’t get excited, darling, it’s not good for you.”

  “Thanks, Doctor Haven.” Philip was irritable and on edge. "Do you or don’t you know what’s happened to Libby—where she is?”

  He was genuinely worried. He would be worse than worried when he found out. Libby was twenty-four, but if it had ever occurred to Philip that she would marry and leave him, that he would cease to be the star-dogged moon, he had never given the slightest indication of it. Poor Philip, she thought compassionately. He was like a nut, sweet if you could get through the shell to the meat. She let her hands fall and faced him.

  “You remember Hugo Cavanaugh?”

  In the preceding October a distant cousin Philip had never particularly liked had left him a large sum of money he didn’t particularly need. Keogh, Campbell, Strait and Frobisher had handled the legal proceedings in reverent murmurs. Hugo was a junior member of the firm. Hugo didn’t murmur. On their first date he had asked Kit how it felt to be an heiress. That had made her laugh. Not a chance, she had told him. “Philip will go through that money like a knife through cheese. He will consider it a duty to spend it. He makes enough from his books to live on comfortably. Besides, on the rare occasions when he worries, it’s Libby he worries about. He says I can take care of myself.” She had wondered later with bitterness whether that last remark had had anything to do with what had taken place.

  “Cavanaugh?” Philip stared at her. "Of course I remember Cavanaugh. I’m not yet in my dotage. What’s Cavanaugh got to do with it? If you have something to tell me, come to the point.”

  “I’m trying to, Philip, dear. That is the point. I think Libby and Hugo Cavanaugh. . ”

  Philip laughed on a short high note. “Are you mad?”

  Kit studied her uncle helplessly, trying to find the right words that would get past his wall of unbelief, put him out of his misery.

  He was no longer looking at her. A car had driven up outside. Footsteps crossed the terrace. The front door was still open. Someone came though it. Kit turned.

  It was Hugo.

  Kit hadn’t seen Hugo in a long while. He looked exactly as usual, with that rakish carriage to his brown head, at once careless and cocky. There was no one behind him, no one with him. He spoke and she caught her breath. He said easily, “Hello, Kit. How are you? Well, have you solved the mystery? Do you know where Libby is?”

  II

  For a sick, spinning moment Kit stood staring blankly at Hugo. She couldn’t believe her ears. She had been so sure that he and Libby had slipped off to be quietly married, that he had persuaded Libby that that was the best way for all concerned.

  Her uncle was speaking to her in a scathing tone. "I told you you were out of your mind, Kit. Cavanaugh doesn’t know a thing. I rang him right after I called you.”

  Hugo was studying her thoughtfully with his bright hazel eyes, eyes that had been black with rage when they last met. It was not a friendly glance. Sauntering over to the little yellow love seat sideways to the fireplace he sat down and lit a cigarette. Kit watched the match flame.

  If Libby wasn’t with Hugo, where was she?

  Miriam VanKreef was coming along the hall from the pantry swallowing something and patting her lips delicately with a handkerchief. Miriam prided herself on th
e smallness of her appetite and she was always eating, but then Miriam’s capacity for self-deception was infinite. She nodded to Hugo, tucked the handkerchief into her sleeve.

  “Oh, Catherine, you're here.”

  She managed to put surprise into it, as though it was odd that Kit had come. "As you see, Aunt,” Kit said pleasantly. She and Miriam had disliked each other from the moment they met, when Kit was a gangling sixteen. “Catherine, how can you slouch like that?—Catherine, your hair!— Catherine, I must insist . . They still crossed swords when they encountered each other, which wasn’t often; it was a sort of game.

  Hugo was asking questions. Miriam said that the last time she had seen Libby was at around seven o’clock the night before. “The child came in to see whether I wanted anything. I had one of my attacks—my heart.”

  How she played that heart of hers! In Kit’s opinion it was as sound as a bell. If every so often she succumbed to anything beyond a desire to he at ease and be waited on hand and foot, it was indigestion. She said she had been in bed all that day and had drowsed most of the time, she had only gotten up a few minutes before Philip arrived home. “I simply thought Libby was out some place.”

  “What about the maid, what’s her name—Agnes?” Hugo wanted to know.

  Philip stopped pacing gray broadloom energetically, as if he were going somewhere in a hurry. It was Agnes’ day off, but he had talked to her over the phone. Agnes hadn’t seen Libby at all that morning, and she had been in the house from seven-thirty until after she had given Miriam lunch at one.

  Stillness. Lamplight and pictures and books and flowers and the solidity of wood, and the familiar shape of the staircase, rising to a broad landing and doubling on itself. Miriam said, “Just because Agnes didn’t see Libby this morning doesn’t mean Libby wasn’t here. You know how enormous this place is, she might have been upstairs in the other wing.” Miriam spoke shortly. Under the solid ice of her ordinary manner she seemed ill at ease.