IT WAS A SERIOUS face he showed at breakfast the next day. “You have perhaps a half hour’s liberty this morning?” he asked as he drained his fourth cup of coffee.
“H’m, I suppose so. Anything special you’d like to do?”
“There is, indeed. I should like to go again to Shadow Lawn Cemetery. I would examine it by daylight, if you please.”
“Shadow Lawn?” I echoed in amazement. “What in this world—”
“Only partially,” he interrupted. “Unless I am much more mistaken than I think our business has as much to do with the next world as this. Come; you have your patients to attend, I have my duties to perform. Let us go.”
The rain had vanished with the night and a bright November sun was shining when we reached the graveyard. Making straight for the tomb where we had found young Rochester the night before, de Grandin halted and inspected it carefully. On the lintel of the massive doorway he invited my attention to the single incised word:
HEATHERTON
“U’m?” he nursed his narrow pointed chin between a thoughtful thumb and forefinger. “That name I must remember, Friend Trowbridge.”
Inside the tomb, arranged in two superimposed rows, were the crypts containing the remains of deceased Heathertons, each sealed by a white marble slab set with cement in a bronze frame, a two-lined legend telling the name and vital data of the occupant. The withering remains of a wreath clung by a knot of ribbon to the bronze ring-bolt ornamenting the marble panel of the farthest crypt, and behind the desiccating circle of roses and ruscus leaves I made out:
ALICE HEATHERTON
Sept. 28, 1926—Oct. 2, 1948
“You see?” he asked.
“I see a girl named Alice Heatherton died a month ago at the age of twenty-two,” I admitted, “but what that has to do with last night is more than I can—”
“Of course,” he broke in with a chuckle somehow lacking merriment. “But certainly. There are many things you do not see, my old one, and there are many more at which you blink your eyes, like a child passing over the unpleasant pages of a picture book. Now, if you will be so kind as to leave me, I shall interview Monsieur l’Intendant of this so lovely park, and several other people as well. If possible I shall return in time for dinner, but”—he raised his shoulders in a fatalistic shrug—“at times we must forego a meal in deference to duty. Yes, it is unfortunately so.”
THE CONSOMMÉ HAD GROWN cold and the roast lamb kiln-dried in the oven when the stutter of my study telephone called me. “Trowbridge, my friend,” de Grandin’s voice, shrill with excitement, came across the wire, “meet me at Adelphi Mansions quickly as you can. I would have you for witness!”
“Witness?” I echoed. “What—” A sharp click notified me he had hung up and I was left bewildered at the unresponsive instrument.
He was waiting for me at the entrance of the fashionable apartment house when I arrived, and refused to answer my impatient questions as he dragged me through the ornate entrance and down the rug-strewn foyer to the elevators. As the car shot upward he reached in his pocket and produced a shiny thumb-smudged photograph. “This I begged from Le Journal,” he explained. “They had no further use for it.”
“Good heavens!” I exclaimed as I looked at the picture. “Wh—why, it’s—”
“Assuredly it is,” he answered in a level tone. “It is the girl we saw last night beyond a doubt; the girl whose tomb we visited this morning; the girl who gave the kiss of death to the young Rochester.”
“But that’s impossible! She—”
His short laugh interrupted. “I was convinced you would say just that, Friend Trowbridge. Come, let us hear what Madame Heatherton can tell us.”
A trim Negro maid in black-and-white uniform answered our summons and took our cards to her mistress. As she left the rather sumptuous reception room I glanced covertly about, noting rugs from China and the Near East, early American mahogany and an elaborately wrought medieval tapestry depicting a scene from the Nibelungenlied with its legend in formal Gothic text: “Hic Siegfriedum Aureum Occidunt—Here They Slay Siegfried the Golden.”
“Dr. Trowbridge? Dr. de Grandin?” the soft, cultured voice recalled me from my study of the fabric as an imposing white-haired lady entered.
“Madame, a thousand pardons for this intrusion!” de Grandin clicked his heels together and bowed stiffly from the hips. “Believe me, we have no desire to trespass on your privacy, but a matter of the utmost importance brings us. You will forgive me if I inquire of the circumstances of your daughter’s death, for I am of the Sûreté of Paris, and make investigation as a scientific research.”
Mrs. Heatherton was, to use an overworked expression, a “perfect lady.” Nine women out of ten would have frozen at de Grandin’s announcement, but she was the tenth. The direct glance the little Frenchman gave her and his evident sincerity, combined with perfect manners and immaculate dress, carried conviction. “Please be seated, gentlemen,” she invited. “I cannot see where my poor child’s tragedy can interest an officer of the Paris secret police, but I’ve no objection to telling all I can; you could get a garbled version from the newspapers anyway.
“Alice was my youngest child. She and my son Ralph were two years apart, almost to the day. Ralph graduated from Cornell year before last, majoring in civil engineering, and went to Florida to take charge of some construction work. Alice died while visiting him.”
“But—forgive my seeming rudeness, Madame—your son, is not he also deceased?”
“Yes,” our hostess assented. “He is dead, also. They died almost together. There was a man down there, a fellow townsman of ours, Joachim Palenzeke—not the sort of person one knows, but Ralph’s superior in the work. He had something to do with promoting the land development, I believe. When Alice went to visit Ralph this person presumed on his position and the fact that we were all from Harrisonville, and attempted to force his attentions on her.”
“One sees. And then?” de Grandin prompted softly.
“Ralph resented his overtures. Palenzeke made some insulting remarks—some scurrilous allusions to Alice and me, I’ve been told, and they fought. Ralph was a small man, but a thoroughbred. Palenzeke was almost a giant, but a thoroughgoing coward. When Ralph began to get the better of him he drew a pistol and fired five shots into my poor son’s body. Ralph died the next day after hours of terrible suffering.
“His murderer fled to the swamps where it would be difficult to track him with hounds, and according to some Negro squatters he committed suicide, but there must have been some mistake, for—” she broke off, pressing her crumpled handkerchief to her mouth, as if to force back the sobs.
De Grandin reached from his chair and patted her hand gently, as if consoling a child. “Dear lady,” he murmured, “I am distressed, believe me, but also please believe me when I say I do not ask these so heart-breaking questions idly. Tell me, if you will, why you believe the story of this vile miscreant’s suicide an error.”
“Because—because he was seen again! He killed Alice!”
“Nom d’un nom! Do you say so?” His comment was a suppressed shout. “Tell me, tell me, Madame, how came this vileness about? This is of the great importance; this explains much which was inexplicable. Say on, chère Madame, I implore you!”
“Alice was prostrated at the tragedy of Ralph’s murder—somehow, she seemed to think she was responsible for it—but in a few days she recovered enough to make preparations to return home with his body.
“There was no railway nearer than fifteen miles, and she wanted to catch an early train, so she set out by motor the night before her train was due. As she drove through a length of lonely, unlighted road between two stretches of undrained swampland someone emerged from the tall reeds—we have the chauffeur’s statement for this—and leaped upon the running-board. He struck the driver senseless with a single blow, but not before he had been recognized. It was Joachim Palenzeke. The car ran into the swamp when the driver lost consciousness, but
fortunately for him the mud was deep enough to stall the machine, though not deep enough to engulf it. He recovered in a short time and raised the alarm.
“A sheriff’s posse found them both next morning. Palenzeke had apparently slipped in the bog while trying to escape and been drowned. Alice was dead—from shock, the doctors said. Her lips were terribly bruised, and there was a wound on her throat, though not serious enough to have caused death; and she had been—”
“Enough! No more, Madame, I entreat you! Sang de Saint Denis, is Jules de Grandin a monster that he should roll a stone upon a mother’s breaking heart? Dieu de Dieu, non! But tell me, if you can, and then I shall ask you no more—what became of this ten-thousand-times-damned—your pardon, Madame!—this so execrable cochon of a Palenzeke?”
“They brought him home for burial,” Mrs. Heatherton replied softly. “His family is very wealthy. Some of them were bootleggers during prohibition, some are real estate speculators, some are politicians. He had the most elaborate funeral ever seen in the local Greek Orthodox Church—they say the flowers alone cost more than five thousand dollars—but Father Apostolakos refused to say Mass over him, merely recited a short prayer, and denied him burial in the consecrated part of the church cemetery.”
“Ah!” de Grandin looked meaningfully at me, as if to say, “I told you as much!”
“This may interest you, too, though I don’t know,” Mrs. Heatherton added: “A friend of mine who knows a reporter on the Journal—newspapermen know everything,” she added with simple naïveté, “ told me that the coward really must have tried suicide and failed, for there was a bullet-mark on his temple, though of course it couldn’t have been fatal, since they found him drowned in the swamp. Do you suppose he could have wounded himself purposely where those Negro swamp-dwellers could see, so that the story of his suicide would get about and the officers stop looking for him?”
“Quite possibly,” de Grandin agreed as he rose. “Madame, we are your debtors more than you suspect, and though you cannot know it, we have saved you at least one pang this night. Adieu, chère Madame, and may the good God watch over you—and yours.” He laid his lips to her fingers and bowed himself from the room.
As we passed through the outer door we caught the echo of a sob and Mrs. Heatherton’s despairing cry: “Me and mine—there are no ‘mine.’ All, all are gone!”
“La Pauvre!” de Grandin murmured as he closed the door softly. “All the more reason for le bon Dieu’s watchfulness, though she knows it not!”
“Now what?” I demanded, dabbing furtively at my eyes with my handkerchief.
The Frenchman made no effort to conceal his tears. They trickled down his face as if he had been a half-grown schoolboy. “Go home, my friend,” he ordered. “Me, I shall consult the priest of that Greek Church. From what I hear of him he must be a capital fellow. I think he will give credence to my story. If not, parbleu, we must take matters into our own hands. Meantime, crave humble pardon from the excellent Nora for having neglected her dinner and ask that she prepare some slight refreshment, then be ready to accompany me again when we shall have regaled ourselves. Nom d’un canard vert, we have a busy night before us, my old and rare!”
IT WAS NEARLY MIDNIGHT when he returned, but from the sparkle in his eyes I knew he had successfully attended to some of his “offices.”
“Barbe d’une chèvre,” he exclaimed as he disposed of his sixth cold lamb sandwich and emptied his eighth glass of Ponte Canet, “that Father Apostolakos is no man’s fool, my friend. He is no empty-headed modern who knows so much that he knows nothing; a man versed in the occult may talk freely with him and be understood. Yes. He will help us.”
“U’m?” I commented noncommittally, my mouth half-filled with lamb sandwich.
“Precisely,” he agreed, refilling his glass and lifting another sandwich from the tray. “Exactly, my friend. The good papa is supreme in matters ecclesiastical, and tomorrow he will give the necessary orders without so much as ‘by your leave’ from the estimable ex-bootleggers, real estate dealers and politicians who compose the illustrious Palenzeke clan. The sandwiches are all gone, and the bottle empty? Good, then let us be upon our way.”
“Where?” I demanded.
“To the young Monsieur Rochester’s. Me, I would have further talk with that one.”
As we left the house I saw him transfer a small oblong packet from his jacket to his overcoat. “What’s that?” I asked.
“A thing the good father lent me. I hope we shall have no occasion to use it, but it will prove convenient if we do.”
A LIGHT MIST, DAPPLED HERE and there with chilling rain, was settling in the streets as we set off for Rochester’s. Half an hour’s cautious driving brought us to the place, and as we drew up at the curb the Frenchman pointed to a lighted window on the seventh floor. “That burns in his suite,” he informed me. “Can it be he entertains at this hour?”
The night elevator operator snored in a chair in the lobby, and, guided by de Grandin’s cautious gesture, I followed his lead up the stairs. “We need not announce our coming,” he whispered as we rounded the landing of the sixth floor. “It is better that we come as a surprise, I think.”
Another flight we climbed silently, and paused before the door of Rochester’s apartment. De Grandin rapped once softly, repeated the summons more authoritatively, and was about to try the knob when we heard footsteps beyond the panels.
Young Rochester wore a silk robe over his pyjamas, his hair was somewhat disarranged, but he looked neither sleepy nor particularly pleased to see us.
“We are unexpected, it seems,” de Grandin announced, “but we are here, nevertheless, Be kind enough to stand aside and let us enter, if you please.”
“Not now,” the young man refused. “I can’t see you now. If you’ll come back tomorrow morning—”
“This is tomorrow morning, mon vieux,” the little Frenchman interrupted. “Midnight struck an hour ago.” He brushed past our reluctant host and hurried down the long hall to the living room.
The room was tastefully furnished in typically masculine style, heavy chairs of hickory and maple, Turkish carpets, a table with a shaded lamp, a long couch piled with pillows before the fireplace in which a bed of cannel coal glowed in a brass grate. An after-tang of cigarette smoke hung in the air, but mingled with it was the faint, provocative scent of heliotrope.
De Grandin paused upon the threshold, threw his head back and sniffed like a hound at fault. Directly opposite the entrance was a wide arch closed by two Paisley shawls hung lambrequinwise from a brass rod, and toward this he marched, his right hand in his topcoat pocket, the ebony cane which I knew concealed a sword blade held lightly in his left.
“De Grandin!” I cried in shocked protest, aghast at his air of proprietorship.
“Don’t!” Rochester called warningly. “You mustn’t—”
The hangings at the archway parted and a girl stepped from between them. The long, close-clinging gown of purple tissue she wore was almost as diaphanous as smoke, and through it we could see the white outlines of her body. Her copper-colored hair flowed in a cloven tide about her face and over smooth bare shoulders. Halted in the act of stepping, one small bare foot showed its blue-veined whiteness in sharp silhouette against the rust-red of the Borkhara rug.
As her eyes met de Grandin she paused with a sibilant intake of breath, and her eyes widened with a look of fright. It was no shamefaced glance she gave him; no expression of confusion at detected guilt or brazen attempt at facing out a hopelessly embarrassing situation. Rather, it was the look of one in dire peril, such a look as she might have given a rattlesnake writhing toward her.
“So!” she breathed, and I could see the thin stuff of her gown grow tight across her breasts. “So you know! I was afraid you would, but—” She broke off as he took another step toward her and swerved until his right-hand coat pocket was within arm’s length of her.
“Mais oui, mais oui, Mademoiselle la Morte,” he retur
ned, bowing ceremoniously, but not removing his hand from his pocket. “I know, as you say. The question now arises, ‘What shall we do about it?’”
“See here,” Rochester flung himself between them, “what’s the meaning of this unpardonable intrusion—”
The little Frenchman turned to him, a look of mild inquiry on his face. “You demand an explanation? If explanations are in order—”
“See here, damn you, I’m my own man, and not accountable to anyone. Alice and I love each other. She came to me tonight of her own free will—”
“En vérité?” the Frenchman interrupted. “How did she come, Monsieur?”
The young man seemed to catch his breath like a runner struggling to regain his wind at the end of a hard course. “I—I went out for a little while,” he faltered, “and when I came back—”
“My poor one!” de Grandin broke in sympathetically. “You do lie like a gentleman, but also you lie very poorly. You are in need of practice. Attend me, I will tell you how she came: This night, I do not know exactly when, but well after sundown, you heard a knock-rap at your window or door, and when you looked out, voilà, there was the so lovely demoiselle. You thought you dreamed, but once again the pretty fingers tap-tapped at the windowpane, and the soft, lovely eyes looked love at you, and you opened your door or window and bade her enter, content to entertain the dream of her, since there was no chance of her coming in the flesh. Tell me, young Monsieur, and you, too, lovely Mademoiselle, do I not recite the facts?”
Rochester and the girl stared at him in amazement. Only the quivering of the young man’s eyelids and the trembling of the girl’s sensitive lips gave testimony he had spoken accurately.
For a moment there was a tense, vibrant silence; then with a little gasping cry the girl lurched forward on soft, soundless feet and dropped to her knees before de Grandin. “Have pity—be merciful!” she begged. “Be merciful to me as you may one day hope for mercy. It’s such a little thing I ask. You know what I am; do you also know who I am, and why I am now—now the accursed thing you see?” She buried her face in her hands. “Oh, it’s cruel—too cruel!” she sobbed. “I was so young; my whole life lay before me. I’d never known real love until it was too late. You can’t be so unkind as to drive me back now; you can’t!”
The Best of Jules de Grandin Page 12
