Boston caught up the table leg he had torn off and leaped forward. He struck the door a mighty blow and it fell completely off its melted hinges, dropping out into the corridor.
“Let’s go!” cried Quade. He covered his face and leaped straight through the inferno of fire. Scorching heat seared through to his body. For a fraction of a second Quade thought he had lost, but then he stumbled on a stair and began scrambling up it. Behind him he heard Charlie Boston, scuffling and swearing. They fled up the stairs, the fire crackling behind them. Quade beat out sparks on his clothes and he knew that his hair and eyebrows were singed.
A door at the head of the stairs was closed but not locked. They tore it open and burst into the saloon where they had been defeated earlier in the day.
The bartender and one of the two men who had come to Demetros’ aid were the only occupants of the saloon. The fight this time was all in Quade’s favor, Charlie using the table leg to knock both of the utterly surprised men out of the way. He and Quade left the saloon inside of two minutes.
“The building’ll probably burn down,” he exclaimed outside. “But damned if I care.”
Their battered flivver was still around the corner. Demetros hadn’t had it removed. Quade and Boston climbed into it and in a few minutes were bowling north along Seventh Avenue.
It was almost six o’clock when they reached the Westfield Hotel. Dirty, their clothing scorched and torn and their hair singed, they caused the hotel room clerk to exclaim in horror when they entered. But they breezed past him to the elevator.
Quade was putting on a clean shirt when someone in the corridor began a sledge hammer tattoo on their door.
“Christopher Buck, the world’s greatest detective,” Quade remarked. “I recognize his gentle knocking.”
He let Buck into the room. “Where’ve you been?” Buck cried.
“Talking to Bill Demetros.”
“You got him?” Buck cried eagerly. “Where is he, in jail?”
“Not that I know of,” replied Quade. “Matter of fact we lost an argument with him.”
Buck saw the remnants of Quade’s blue suit on the floor. “You were in a fight!”
“No, I got the black eye from a canary. It kicked me.”
Boston came out of the bathroom, several strips of adhesive tape on his face. “You shoulda been along, Mr. Buck,” he grinned largely. “You would have enjoyed it.”
Buck shuddered. “I abhor physical violence. A man with brains doesn’t have to resort to it.”
“Brains?” exclaimed Boston. “Man, where we were your brains would have got you a concrete block.”
Christopher Buck wrapped himself into knots and dropped into a chair. “What’re you going to do next, Quade?” he asked.
“Gather in the murderer,” Quade replied bluntly. “Before there is another killing.”
The telephone tingled. Quade picked it up.
“This is Felix Renfrew,” said an excited voice. “I’m over here at the bus station. I just got in. I’ve got something very important to tell you.”
“Come right over,” Quade told him. He hung up the receiver and turned to Buck. “Sorry, but I’m having a visitor. You’ll excuse me, won’t you?”
Buck scowled. “Holding out again, huh?”
“Look,” said Quade, exasperated. “You’ve fooled around on this case long enough. Your client is dead, so why the hell don’t you take a powder?”
Buck blustered but Quade shoved him through the door. Quade turned to Boston, his eyes gleaming. “This thing is breaking fast, Charlie. Felix Renfrew is coming up here. I think he’s going to give me the proof I’ve been trying to get.”
“That Demetros knocked off young Lanyard? Hell, I knew that long ago.”
Five minutes passed, but Felix Renfrew did not show up. Quade fidgeted. “Wonder if Buck ran into him and bought him off to spill it to him. That man would do almost anything to get credit for breaking a case.” He held up a hand suddenly. “Listen, isn’t that a police siren? Lord, I wonder…”
Quade bounded off the bed and out of the room. He took the stairs to the first floor, three at a time, and burst through the lobby. People were rushing by on the street, heading for a spot in the next block where a large crowd had gathered. Quade caught hold of a man’s arm. “What’s happened?”
“Man’s been shot!”
It was Renfrew, of course. Quade found Chief of Police Costello and his entire force herding the curious back from the huddled body.
Costello was very unhappy. “More killings!” he snapped. “It’s getting to be an epidemic around here.”
“How’d it happen?”
“No one seems to know exactly. He was crossing the street and someone took a shot at him from an automobile. Only one or two people around and they thought at first the noise was just a backfire. Only natural. Up to now, people haven’t been in the habit of firing off guns on our Main Street. What happened to you?”
Quade touched the mouse under his eye. “I got tough to the wrong man. Well, you still satisfied that Bob Lanyard committed suicide?”
The chief cursed roundly. “I been out to the Lanyard house. The old man and his daughter claim it was murder. This Renfrew killing makes me wonder now.”
Quade saw the lank figure of Christopher Buck forcing through the crowd and slipped away. He walked to the hotel and climbed into his disreputable flivver.
Ten minutes later he rang the bell at the Lanyard home.
“Miss Lois Lanyard,” he said to the butler.
“I’m sorry, she’s not at home.”
Quade frowned. “Mr. Lanyard then.”
The butler led Quade into the living-room where Guy Lanyard was sitting by the rear window, moodily looking out toward the dog kennels.
“Where’d Lo—Miss Lanyard go?”
“To the dog show. I thought it best for them to get out for a while.”
“Them?”
“She and Jessie both went. Poor girls.”
Quade left abruptly and drove to the dog show—fast. It was around dinnertime and attendance was slight. Quade went swiftly from aisle to aisle but saw neither Lois nor Jessie Lanyard. He did, however, run into Freddie Bartlett. The wealthy playboy gritted his teeth at sight of Quade. “Here you are, I’ve been looking for you all day.” Freddie spoke as he would to a servant.
“The hell you have,” snapped Quade. “Where’s Miss Lanyard and her sister-in-law?”
“What business is it of yours?” sneered Bartlett. “You’ve been around them just about enough. I was looking for you today to see that you didn’t annoy any of us any longer.”
“Oh, hell!” snorted Quade. “Are you going to try to lick me?”
“Someone seems to have started the job,” Bartlett said ominously, “but I’m going to finish it. You didn’t know I was light-heavyweight champion of my university, did you?”
Quade sighed, stepped forward and smashed Bartlett a terrific blow on the point of the jaw. Bartlett staggered back against a dog partition. His eyes rolled wildly as he struggled to keep his feet.
“So you want to fight?” Quade asked. He lashed out with a left hook, and Freddie Bartlett hit the wooden partition and slid down it to a sitting position. He wasn’t out, but he sat there goggle-eyed. “And now,” Quade said, “where’s Lois?”
Bartlett looked up stupidly. “I—I don’t know,” he mumbled. “They were here, then they said they were going for a drive up River Road. Jessie said something about going where it was quiet. Woods down there—”
Quade left Bartlett sitting there. He dashed to the exit of the building, then on sudden impulse ran back. He found the Old English sheep dog aisle and stepped into one of the stalls, the one occupied by Oscar, Lois’ first-prize winner.
The dog was a bit skittish, but Quade spoke soothingly to it and unchaine
d it. Leading it by the chain, he started again for the exit.
The show secretary was coming in just then. “Here, here, you!” he cried. “You can’t do that.”
Quade did not even answer. He brushed the man aside and rushed out to his car. He put the dog in the front seat and climbed in beside it. In a moment he was scooting out of the fair grounds.
Quade didn’t know the section of the country around Westfield, but during the last few days he’d seen the river several times and instinctively headed toward it. The road beside it was a winding one. There were a few houses and farms on both sides of the road, near town, but when he got out a mile or two, the farms gave way to thick woods. Quade cursed furiously. There was no fencing along the side of the road and every now and then there was a winding wooded lane or road, cutting off from the main drive. Jessie and Lois could have turned down any of these roads and he would miss them.
Quade stopped the flivver beside a small road and listened. There were fresh tire tracks leading into the road, but it did not necessarily mean anything. This was a populated country and someone used these roads every day. He stepped on the starter, but suddenly switched it off again. He strained his ears, but heard nothing. The dog beside him growled deep in his throat. Quade looked at it and his eyes flashed.
“Bark!” he cried, in a sudden command. The dog was startled and barked warningly. “Louder!” Quade cried, making a pass at the dog. The dog barked and bared his teeth threateningly.
And then Quade heard it—a wolf-like howl rising to a mournful note and dying out. It came from the woods ahead and not so far away. Quickly Quade stepped on the starter of the flivver and slipped the gears into second. He stepped on the throttle and the car leaped into the narrow winding road.
As he drove he bore down on the horn. The noise excited the dog beside him even more and it barked. And from ahead, came the answering howl of a dog. The flivver burst into a clearing and Quade brought it to a stop in a cloud of dust. Ahead was a bright yellow roadster, Lois’ own car. Oscar, the sheep dog, began barking excitedly and tried to get out of the car. Quade sighed in relief, kicked the door open beside the dog.
He saw the girls then. They were in the back of the clearing, near an old stone house. Jessie had the big Eskimo dog with her. It was bristling at the approach of the sheep dog and Jessie had to speak to it to keep it from attacking the woolly as the latter bounded across the clearing to his mistress.
“Hello, there!” Lois called as Quade approached. “How’d you happen to find us?”
Quade jerked his head toward the husky. “The dog. He howled.”
Lois looked at him in surprise. “You mean you recognized his howl? But you’ve only seen him once or twice.”
“I know, but this happens to be the only dog in this neighborhood that doesn’t bark. You’re a dog raiser; you ought to know that an Eskimo dog, being descended from the wolf, does not bark—he howls.”
“The Human Encyclopedia himself,” said Jessie.
Quade looked at her. Jessie was unsmiling. “Yes,” he said. “I got that information out of the encyclopedia. It was a good thing to know.”
“We were just about to start home,” said Lois. “Jessie wanted to explore this old house first. It’s deserted.”
“Some other time,” said Quade. “Let’s go back to Westfield now.”
“Why, has something happened?” Lois’ eyes clouded.
“I’ll tell you later,” Quade held out his hand to Jessie. “Let me have your bag.”
Her eyes widened, but he took the handbag firmly from her grasp. It was heavy and he could feel the outline of something hard in it.
Lois’ forehead was creased as they walked to the cars. Something seemed to be annoying her. Quade’s rudeness, no doubt. At the car he maneuvered to hand Jessie into the seat first, then took hold of Lois’ elbow.
“I’ll drive,” he said firmly.
He handed her into the car, then stowed the two dogs into the rumble seat, chaining each to a side, so they would not be forced together too much.
Quade walked around and slipped in under the wheel. He could feel Jessie beside him, her body tensed. She knew that he knew.
No one said a word until they reached the Lanyard house.
“Your father’s in the living-room,” he suggested, guessing that the old man would still be by the window overlooking the dog kennels. He was. By the look on Guy Lanyard’s face Quade knew that he had guessed the truth during his absence.
“Renfrew, Wesley Peters’ pal, is dead,” Quade said.
Lois gasped. “Dead!”
“The police captured this Demetros,” said Guy Lanyard. “Costello phoned just a few minutes ago. He resisted and is in a bad way. Probably won’t live. He’d come to Westfield to—”
Lois suddenly looked sharply at her sister-in-law. “Jessie,” she said slowly, “who was that dark man you talked to at the dog show this morning? I asked you about him before and you didn’t answer.”
“I’m going to my room,” Jessie said.
Guy Lanyard looked at Quade. The latter held his gaze for a moment, then looked at Jessie’s handbag in his right hand. He extended it to her. “Here’s your bag.”
Jessie’s teeth were sunk into her lower lip. She took the bag, turned and walked out of the room. Quade heard her heels as they clicked on the stairs going up.
“Thank God you got to Lois in time,” Guy Lanyard said.
Lois turned to Quade. “What does he mean? What’s the matter with her? Why wouldn’t she answer me about that man? Was he … ?”
There was a sharp explosion upstairs. Quade relaxed. Guy Lanyard slumped into his chair.
“It’s best this way,” Quade said.
“That was a shot!” cried Lois. Her eyes were wide. “Jessie! Jessie!”
An hour later Quade dropped wearily onto the bed in his room at the Westfield Hotel. Charlie sat on the other bed, biting his fingernails. “The dame!” he swore. “You knew it was her all the time!”
“Not all the time, Charlie. She fooled me there at the start. That confession of hers. It was on the level and that’s what threw me off the track.
“If she’d stopped with Peters’ death she’d probably have got away with it.”
“What mistakes did she make?” asked Boston. “I didn’t get any. Hell, I never even suspected her.”
“But I knew she killed her husband the minute I read the suicide note he was supposed to have left. Remember what it said? ‘Forgive me for making this exit.’ Making an exit is an actor’s expression. Bob might conceivably have picked up such a phrase from his wife, but his speech ordinarily was scholastic and precise. In his most tragic moment he would not have used slang.
“But aside from the note, Jessie gave herself away by killing Bob in the dog kennels. Remember the layout?”
Boston considered that for a moment, then shook his head. “What’s wrong with that layout? She didn’t want to kill him in the house maybe on account of the noise.”
“It would have been far safer for her to have done so. Don’t you see, Charlie? The dogs are loose in their kennels. She could have forced Bob past the pointers, but after shooting him she could never have gone back that way. The pointer, Duke, would have torn her to pieces. Dogs smell blood quickly and sense death. And Bob probably cried out when she shot him. No, after shooting him she left by way of the husky kennels, her own dogs.
“Get it now. No one could have killed Bob and left by the pointer kennels. And only Jessie could leave by the Eskimo kennels. Those dogs are half wild and in the middle of the night would have attacked anyone but their mistress. So it had to be Jessie.”
“I’ll be damned!” exclaimed Boston. “But did she have to kill Bob?”
“Perhaps, perhaps not. But one murder leads to another and after she killed Peters she had to kill her husband. You see, J
essie made her big mistake years ago when she tried to throw over Bill Demetros. Demetros wasn’t the sort of man who liked his women to leave him, at least not until he was through with them. And he wasn’t through with Jessie. She changed her name, but Bill would have caught up with her probably, except the Government caught up with him about then and sent him on that five-year visit to Atlanta.
“Then Jessie got into that show with Wes Peters. That was a bad break for her, because he turned out to be Bill Demetros’ brother. When Jessie found out she threw him over. Or maybe she met Bob Lanyard about that time. Lanyard meant real dough to her. And safety.
“She married Bob. And then it turned out that Peters, even though he was supposedly not like his gangster brother, was even worse. He blackmailed Jessie about her former association with a gangster and threatened always to tell Bill where she was unless she paid plenty.”
“You mean she paid heavy sugar just to keep that rat Peters from writing his brother that Jessie had married a rich guy?” demanded Charlie.
“That’s about the size of it. Jessie knew Bill pretty well. She knew that he would get word to some of his pals on the outside and it would be too bad for her. So she paid off … and then Bill got out. Inasmuch as Wes had played around with his brother’s girl he figured he’d better skip. He needed money for that. So he went to his mint, Jessie, and demanded one last big roll.
“She couldn’t get enough money. So she gave Peters that thousand that was on him when he was found dead and stalled him. She got an opportunity and gave him a lead slug instead of more money. She might even have taken to carrying the gun figuring to kill herself with it. But when she got such a swell chance in the dog show she up and let him have it.
“It was her first murder and she was pretty shaky about it, so when we went after her hot and heavy there at the start, she broke down, admitted it. Then when her husband tried to take the blame and she saw that no one really wanted to believe she had done it, she began covering up.
“But Bill Demetros must’ve got to her, because all of a sudden I found Demetros on her side. Which wasn’t at all according to Hoyle. Took me a little time to figure out. Demetros had been away for five years and I imagine his lawyers and fixers had come pretty high, so the old safety deposit box was probably pretty empty. He knew Jessie was scared stiff of him. So he showed her how she could come into a big chunk of dough and by splitting with him, live to spend it.
Oliver Quade, the Human Encyclopedia Page 17
