“What’s biting you, Neil?”
Pollard blinked at the phone. “Nothing! Nothing! I’ve just had an idea that—Look, Philip, I’ll have to call you back.”
He broke the connection with one finger and sat scowling at the telephone, breathing hard. Then he got the receptionist.
“Sally, get me Dan Abel.” He sat there flushed and scowling until the call went through. His voice sounded a little thick with the tensity of his throat muscles when he said, “Abel? Neil Pollard. Look, tell me one thing, quick. Is there a psychological test that involves looking at a lot of faces and picking out one from the others?”
Abel was silent for a surprisingly long moment. Then he said hesitatingly, “Well, I’m not sure I—there are so many tests, you see. All kinds. I’d have to check up for you. Can I call you back in about half an hour?”
Pollard gripped the phone hard. “Can’t you give me a yes or no?”
“Not without checking.” Abel sounded firm this time.
“All right,” Pollard said slowly. “Call me back, will you?”
He broke the connection and sat thinking and scowling. Then he clicked the switch and said, “Sally, get me the State University, Psychology Department.”
This time the response was more illuminating.
Yes, said the voice from the university, there are several tests that involve looking at pictures and giving personal reactions to them. The one based on a series of actual photographed faces would probably be the Szondi. The voice gave him a brief resume of how it worked.
Pollard’s hand holding the telephone was shaking noticeably by now. “Tell me one more thing,” he said. “Is it a well-known test? I mean, would a practicing clinical psychologist know about it without having to take time to look it up?”
“Why, yes, he should know about it,” the voice said, surprised.
Pollard said, “Thanks,” in an abrupt tone, and hung up.
Then he rose and stood for a few minutes smacking his fist into his palm indecisively, making little grimaces that showed his teeth. When the phone rang again, the sound seemed to galvanize him. He got his coat off the rack and strode out of the office, his face set and unseeing.
The receptionist said as he passed her, “Mr. Herrick’s on the line again, Mr. Pollard. Will you—”
He didn’t even look up. Her plaintive call, “Mr. Pollard? Mr. Pollard!” died behind him as he slammed the door.
Abel phoned Quine at about the same time Pollard was slamming his door.
“I’m trying to reach Mike Gray,” he said. “Know where he is?”
“He left here about an hour ago. On his way to see the McCreery brothers, I think.” Quine looked at the telephone doubtfully, struck by Abel’s tone. “Anything wrong?” he asked.
Abel told him.
Quine was silent for a moment. “Do you think Pollard’s figured it out, then?” he asked, alarm in his voice.
“Why else would he be asking? Maybe he took my word and maybe he didn’t. What am I supposed to tell him when I call back?”
“Let’s keep stalling as long as we can,” Quine said. “Don’t call back. I’ll try to reach Gray. Do you think Pollard may check up on this somewhere else?”
“He might. It’d be easy to do.”
“Well, hold the line a minute,” Quine said.
The interval stretched out to nearer two minutes. Then Quine came back on the phone, chewing his cigar, and said, “The McCreerys don’t seem to have a telephone. Gray’s probably on his way back to his office now.” He gave the cigar a final gnash and laid it down in the ashtray. “I’d better tell you what happened here,” he said. “This is the picture—See what you think.”
In quick sentences he summarized what Gray had told him.
When he had finished, Abel said, “I think we’d better reach Gray as fast as we can. I may be exaggerating. Even if Pollard’s a killer, he’d hardly start gunning for Gray on the strength of this thing alone. But—”
“Not if he’s normal, he wouldn’t,” Quine said. “But if he’s a killer, is he normal? I wouldn’t want to take a chance on it myself. Would you?”
“I wouldn’t. I think we’d better talk to the police.”
21
Gray went up the walk to the McCreery house through a dazzling, windy morning that made the house look shabbier and more dispirited than ever. A pale blur of a face swam briefly behind the dirty panes of an upstairs window, and Gray knew his presence had been noted.
He went around the side of the house to the basement entrance, under foliage still damp from yesterday’s rain. His feet slipped on the thick green mold that carpeted the ground. When he tried the door, he found it locked. He knocked, hearing the sound reverberate inside. Nothing happened.
Gray knocked again, longer and louder. Still nothing. Gray lit a cigarette and leaned against the doorframe, knocking at intervals about thirty seconds apart, firmly and relentlessly.
His cigarette was about half smoked, and his knuckles had begun to feel a little sore, when the sound of shuffling feet inside could finally be heard approaching the door. Bolts slid back with a little clicking sound and the door creaked on its hinges.
Martin McCreery’s pinched, sallow face looked out at Gray, the red-rimmed eyes hot and angry.
“Well?” he said.
Under the circumstances, Gray admired his restraint.
“I’d like to have a short talk with you, Mr. McCreery,” he said.
“I’m busy,” McCreery told him, and started to shut the door.
Gray put his foot in the crack.
“If you’re too busy to give me time now,” he said, “I can get a warrant.” He watched McCreery blink. Then he took his foot out of the door and said, “It’s up to you, McCreery.”
The reddish eyes measured him piercingly. It came to Gray again that this is not the way a real recluse meets the eye of a stranger. If McCreery didn’t want Gray inside, if the threat of the police disturbed him, it wasn’t for a recluse’s reasons.
“All right,” McCreery said grudgingly after a long moment. “Come in. But I can’t spare much time.”
“Neither can I,” Gray said, and smiled slightly to himself.
“My office is upstairs,” McCreery said. “This way.”
And Gray followed him down the corridor of baled newspapers in the faint light of a bulb burning unseen overhead somewhere beyond the papers. They came to the fork in the passage. Down the left-hand way Gray had a glimpse of the jutting bundles that triggered the man trap overhead. He thought he wouldn’t have been able to see it if he hadn’t known where to look, and he wondered if it had ever been sprung on a human being.
Martin turned right and climbed the stairs, unlocked the door at the top. Following him, Gray wondered how he was going to handle this interview. The things he wanted to know weren’t things he could ask outright. The subject foremost in his mind was the fraud case and the McCreerys’ dead cousin. But if they had the vanished money, or even knew where it was, questions about it would get him nowhere. He would have to play this as the cards fell.
After the bright, windy day outside, Martin McCreery’s little room-within-a-room seemed dark and airless. The small oilstove cast its heat outward in heavy waves. The high Victorian furniture shut the air in around it.
Martin sat down at his roll-top desk, quickly pulling down the lid, though not before Gray glimpsed a businesslike ledger spread out. There was only one other chair in the room. Gray sat down where Chris Bond had sat yesterday, and leaned back on the carved teakwood desk where Bond had leaned.
“Well?” McCreery said.
Gray looked at him consideringly. It came to him suddenly How often the McCreery name had cropped up in the case of Beverly Bond. Deviously, all trails seemed to lead back into this dark, crammed house. It seemed strange that even Neil Pollard’s reactions had somehow guided Gray here, though it was unlikely that Pollard would ever even have heard the name of McCreery. Beverly and Melissa had mysteriou
s ties, somehow, with this house. Only the dead Ferguson seemed unconnected. Ferguson and Chris Bond—
No, Gray thought suddenly. Even Chris Bond had reacted to the mention of McCreery’s name, when Gray brought it up in the bar. It was after that mention that Bond abruptly went blank and impatient to get away. Had he come here?
Gray asked without any preliminary, “Did Chris Bond come here yesterday?”
McCreery looked startled. “No,” he said. “Of course not Why should he come here?”
“Then you do know him,” Gray said.
McCreery’s Ups compressed. “I knew Beverly. Naturally I knew Chris, too. After the divorce I had no occasion to see him. Why?”
“I talked to him yesterday,” Gray said. “I mentioned your name. Right after that he got very preoccupied and went away…” Gray thought it over briefly. “And the next thing I heard,” he said, “was how Bond all of a sudden had some blackmail photographs for sale. When I saw him, he was trying to raise money on a lot less evidence than photographs. Where did he get them? Was it here?”
“Certainly not,” McCreery said, looking uneasy.
“But you know about them?” Gray took a shot in the dark. “Was it blackmail pictures you got out of Beverly’s apartment Saturday night?”
“I took nothing from Beverly’s apartment!” McCreery sounded less nervous this time. Gray thought he might be telling the truth.
They sat there exchanging measuring looks. In the silence, a clock ticked somewhere, and from behind the heavy furniture that walled them in, a sliding, rustling sound came clearly. McCreery’s eyes wavered toward it and swung back at once.
“Just what do you know about Chris Bond?” he demanded suddenly of Gray. “What did you come to find out?”
Gray sensed that he was being asked a question with a double meaning. He didn’t know what the inner meaning was. He fumbled a little.
“I want to know about the photographs—” he began.
McCreery laughed shortly. It had been the wrong answer, and Gray knew it But he didn’t know why.
“Just what’s your business here?” McCreery asked. “Do you represent the police?”
“Unofficially,” Gray said, stretching the truth somewhat
“I think we’re wasting time,” McCreery interrupted. “Maybe you’d better go and get that warrant. I don’t know anything about photographs and I took nothing whatever from Beverly’s place. Now if there’s no other subject you’re interested in—” Here he paused, eying Gray alertly. “—then I’ll ask you to go,” he finished, his voice quite confident.
“There’s one more thing,” Gray said. The mastery of the situation had slipped away from him, and he wasn’t sure just where he had gone wrong. “I’d like to ask you about your cousin, David McCreery.”
Martin’s stubbled, sallow face flushed. He stood up with some dignity.
“We have nothing more to say to each other, Mr. Gray,” he said. “Good-by.”
Gray didn’t rise. “Not yet,” he said. “I’m not finished.”
“I am, Mr. Gray.” Martin McCreery leaned over to turn the key in the lock of his roll-top desk. “I can’t put you out myself,” he said, “but I’m under no obligation to stay here. You know the way out.” He shuffled across the little room, a ragged man with an incongruous air of confidence now. And sufficient dignity to make Gray wish he could play this some other way. But Eileen’s life was at stake, and he couldn’t surrender without one further try. “McCreery—” he said.
Martin turned at the door that led back into the cellar.
“Good-by, Mr. Gray,” he said. “I’ll leave the doors unlocked for you.” He went out calmly, closing the door.
Gray sat there for a long moment. He looked at the strange little room walled with wardrobes and bookcases. He looked at the teakwood desk heavily adorned with carving. He heard the clock tick.
Somewhere behind these cluttered walls, hidden in the trash-crammed house, a key part of the secret might be lying. But how could he make McCreery speak?
A rustle sounded beyond the wall of furniture. A soft chuckle rose and then fell. Bulwer, Gray thought. I wonder what he looks like. I’ll probably never know.
He got up reluctantly and turned toward the door.
Bulwer chuckled again.
Bulwer? Gray thought. Is there any way Bulwer can be coaxed to talk? A faint idea stirred in Gray’s mind. He opened the door and looked down the empty stairs. Slowly he went down. The cellar seemed very quiet. Where Martin had vanished Gray had no idea. The whole house, crammed with secrets and sickness and the accumulations of decades, pressed down around him overpoweringly.
They know something, he thought. Something that may mean the difference between life and death for Eileen Herrick. If there’s any way to find it out, I’ve got to do what I can.
He came to the branching corridors. One way led to the open door, the bright morning light falling through it The other way led into darkness and the poised trap.
“Mr. Gray…”
Gray heard the whisper up the dark corridor as he turned toward the light. He paused, not quite sure he had heard it. Then it came again, the softest possible sound in a mellow voice.
“Mr. Gray? May I talk to you, Mr. Gray?”
“Come up the corridor, Mr. Gray,” the pleasant, soft voice invited. “I’ll tell you what you want to know…Come along, come up the corridor. It’s just a little way. Mr. Gray, can you hear me?”
He doesn’t know, Gray thought He doesn’t realize I know where the trap is.
“Come along, Mr. Gray,” the mellow voice persisted. “I’ll tell you everything. We won’t let Martin know…”
Gray thought with a cold shiver, “Has he ever really killed anyone with this trap? Or has he only tried?” He looked up the passage. He could dimly see the two jutting bales that would release the load of iron overhead. Bulwer he couldn’t see at all.
It was then, quite suddenly, that he knew what he was going to do.
“McCreery?” he called, quite loudly in the paper-walled passage. “Bulwer McCreery—is that you?”
“Hush!” the gentle voice urged him anxiously. “We won’t let Martin know. Come this way—hurry—”
Gray went cautiously up the dark corridor, glancing overhead for new dangers that might have been set since he was here last. There was nothing, only the two jutting bales past which a man would have to squeeze. And when the bales were dislodged—crash!
He came to the bales. In the darkness he heard an eager, wheezing breath now. The mellow voice said, “Just a little farther—that’s right, come along…”
Gray put both hands out and shoved the two bales hard.
He felt them begin to move. He heard a creaking and settling from overhead, and then a sharp twang as some overburdened wire gave way. He jumped back almost convulsively, every muscle and nerve galvanized with tension.
The crash, when it came, was thunderous, deafening. In the enclosed space Gray felt displaced air rush by him like a solid thing, and then the enormous thud of impact struck, making the wooden floor jump underfoot. After the thud came a sliding and clattering crash. Dust billowed up in a choking cloud.
Gray pressed his handkerchief over his face and backed along the corridor toward the outer door. A little way off, he stopped and waited.
There had been one sound above even the crash of the falling trap—Bulwer’s shout of triumph.
Now the echoes rolled, deadened against the paper walls, and ceased. Out of the dusty billows Bulwer’s voice came again, this time louder, triumph sounding in it.
“Mr. Gray?” he said. “Still there, Mr. Gray?”
Gray waited.
Then, from outside in the overgrown back yard, another voice sounded.
“Bulwer?” Martin McCreery shouted. “Bulwer, for God’s sake! What did you do, Bulwer?”
The daylight darkened as Martin’s slight shape blocked the doorway. “Gray?” he called with terrified anxiety. “Gray, are you all
right? Bulwer! Bulwer!”
“It’s all right,” Gray said. “You can relax, McCreery. There’s no harm done. But I think we’d better have another talk. And this time you answer all my questions…”
Martin sat by his locked roll-top desk and wrung his hands together.
“What was it you took out of Beverly’s apartment?” Gray asked.
“Nothing, nothing, I swear to God!” Martin beat his interlocked fingers on his knee. “Chris Bond came with the same question, and I don’t know if he believes me yet, but it’s the truth, the gospel truth. Mr. Gray, I swear to you Bulwer never did a thing like this before! If you can just forget about it, he’ll never—”
“If you didn’t take anything from Beverly’s place, what was it you were looking for?” Gray said relentlessly.
“I don’t know what I was looking for. All I do know is Beverly had something. Mr. Gray, Bulwer’s perfectly harmless if you only—”
“How did you know Beverly had something?”
Martin looked at Gray’s face, swallowed hard, and said meekly enough, “All right, I’ll tell you…”
When he had finished, there was a little silence around them again, this time unbroken by the slightest sound from beyond the walls. If Bulwer was listening, he made no motion at all.
“Small enough to carry in a handbag,” Gray said, frowning.
Martin nodded nervously. “She sat right where you’re sitting now, telling my fortune with tea leaves and laughing at me. Saying the joke was on me. I never knew what she meant by that”
Gray shook his head.
“Well have to try something else,” he said. “Now I have to ask about your cousin, David McCreery. I know the police must have questioned you about him. You know the money he was convicted of stealing never was recovered—”
“David didn’t steal it,” Martin McCreery said firmly. “I knew David. He never had any money.”
Michael Gray Novels Page 49
