Rex Stout_Tecumseh Fox 01

by Double for Death

  “Where is Mr…. Mr. Byron?” she demanded.

  “Mr. Thorpe’s all right,” Fox said. “You told me on the phone you’re alone here?”

  “I am.”

  “Good. I’d destroy that note if I were you. I’d like to know, when did Mr. Thorpe arrive at the cottage at Triangle Beach for the weekend?”

  “Friday evening. So did I.”

  “When did he leave?”

  “I don’t know. I came—he sent me away yesterday morning. He was still there when I left.”

  “Were Luke Wheer and Vaughn Kester there?”

  “Yes. They came late Sunday night, to tell him—” Her hand fluttered in appeal. “But where is he? What’s going to happen? For God’s sake—”

  “He’s all right. Don’t worry, Miss Duke. We’ll handle it. Was Thorpe with you at the cottage continuously from Friday evening until Sunday midnight?”

  “Yes, he—” She stopped and her eyes narrowed.

  “Why do you ask a question like that if—”

  “If I’m working for him? Because no matter who I’m working for I have to be sure of the facts. Don’t waste valuable time suspecting me. Was he?”

  “Yes.”

  “He didn’t go away at all?”

  “We went for a ride and to the movies at the village. He didn’t go away from me, not for five minutes.”

  “Thank you. Now what I really came for, do you know where your father is?”

  “My father?” She gawked at him. “My father?”

  Fox nodded. “Mr. Henry Jordan. Now take it easy, you’re jumpy. Thorpe says in that note that you are to answer my questions. We want to find your father because we need his help. Thorpe will explain when he sees you—or you’ll read it in the papers—I haven’t time now. Do you know where he is?”

  “But, good Lord—”

  “Do you?”

  “No.”

  “Do you know whether he spent the weekend on his boat?”

  “No. I know he’s on it most of the time. Weekends are the same as week-middles to him since he retired. I expect he was—”

  “Where does he go on the boat?”

  “Lord, I don’t know. Around on the water.”

  “Where does he keep it?”

  “I don’t know that either, but I suppose somewhere near his house. He lives in a little house at City Island. I suppose somewhere on the ocean—”

  “City Island isn’t on the ocean, it’s on the sound.”

  “Well, then, on the sound. That’s all I know—but I can give you the address of his house. Wait a minute, I’ll get it.”

  She disappeared within, and in a few moments came back and handed Fox a slip of paper. “That’s the address. He hasn’t any phone.”

  “Thank you very much. No, Miss Duke, I can’t tell you a thing. But don’t worry. Go to bed. I interrupted your sleep. I apologize.”

  He left her, left the building, walked around the corner to the truck, got a key from his pocket and unlocked the rear door, poked his head in and spoke to the dark interior:

  “I saw her. She doesn’t know where he is or where he was over the weekend. He lives at City Island and we’re bound for there.”

  “This is insuf—”

  “I told you not to talk,” Fox snapped and banged the door.

  North on Third Avenue, on the car tracks under the elevated, the truck bumpety-bumped along, back through the city; darted deviously through the vastness of the Bronx and finally straightened its course on Central Avenue. The sun was beginning to assert itself and obviously it meant to make a day of it. On a stretch where no sidewalk offered a risk of curious pedestrians and the bedlam of passing traffic smothered lesser sounds, Fox steered off the through lanes, stopped the truck, got out and unlocked the rear door again, and inquired:

  “All right?”

  “No!” Thorpe yapped. “It’s unbearable! It’s an oven in here! We can’t—”

  “Sorry, you’ll have to take it. Quit banging on that partition, or I’ll park this thing and take a taxi home and you can play the hand out. You even banged after I stopped. How did you know where I was stopping?”

  He swung the door to and trotted back to the front. As they eased back into the swift current, he observed to Dan, with his eyes on the road and his face straight: “Good gracious, it’s hot in there.”

  “It’s even hotter where his stand-in is,” Dan rumbled. “Anyhow, people pay three or four dollars for a Turkish bath. The same thing.”

  Ten minutes later they turned off of Central Avenue at a busy intersection, rounded another corner and parked at the curb. Fox opened the rear door enough to poke his head in, stated that he was leaving Dan on the seat and there was no telling whether he would be gone forty minutes or four hours, walked back to the intersection and found a taxi, and gave the driver the address he had got from Miss Duke. As the taxi headed east towards the causeway to City Island, Fox was on the edge of the seat, gripping the strap, frowning and not singing. If he found Henry Jordan at home, his boat at its mooring, the operation was defeated, done, and he might as well drive the truck straight to the courthouse at White Plains.

  But the little house at 914 Island Street, perched, like its companions in the row winding with the shore of the sound, with its rear on stilts to lift it above the tide, had no occupant. Fox, having found both front and back doors locked, and having got no response to his knocking, stood on the little elevated porch and looked out across the water. Boats of all sizes and descriptions tugged at their moorings; and bobbing dots here and there—one a hundred yards straight out from where he stood—were moorings without boats. He was saved the trouble of deciding on the next step by the sound of a voice.

  “He’s not there!”

  Fox turned and saw the head of a woman with frowsy hair protruding from the window of the house next door, thirty paces off.

  “Good morning!” he called. “I’m looking for Henry Jordan!”

  “Yeah, I see you are. He’s out on his boat.”

  “Thanks. When did he go?”

  “Oh, I think … yeah, I think Thursday.”

  “Hasn’t been back?”

  “No, he often stays out a week or more.”

  “Where does he go, anywhere in particular?”

  “No, nowhere particular. He likes flounder. There’s more of them down the Long Island side. Once my husband and I caught—”

  “Excuse me. What’s the name of his boat?”

  “Armada. Funny name, don’t you think?”

  “Very. What’s it like a cruiser?”

  “Yeah, it’s thirty foot, nine-foot beam, high out of the water and an awful roller, white all over with the cabin trimmed in brown, though he was telling my husband not long ago—”

  “Thank you very much.”

  “Who shall I tell him—”

  “Don’t bother.” Fox was on his way. “Thanks!”

  That, of course, was the best of luck. The bad luck was waiting for him when he got back to the truck—a flat tire; and there was no spare. Fox glared at it; this would not only cause delay, but would call attention to a conspicuous vehicle far from its haunt; but there was no help for it. He drove back to the intersection and found a garage, and told the mechanic:

  “Fix it as quick as you can, will you, brother? I’ve got meat in there that’s going to spoil on a day like this.”

  That cost a dollar and thirty-five minutes. Then he headed north again and at a favorable spot halted to report progress to his inside passengers. Again north.

  His wristwatch said half-past ten and the heavy oppressive air said ninety in the shade, when he parked the truck once more, this time on the main street of South Norwalk. Before he left the seat and left the truck for good, he told Dan:

  “Remember, my part’s easy. I’m taking it because I can find it from the water and you can’t. You’ve got the job and it’s up to you. Don’t let them out until I’m beached and don’t let them out if there’s any one in sight c
lose enough to see faces. They’re not to run or do anything but act natural—walk across the beach to me—and they’re not to do that if there’s any one within three hundred yards, even if it means waiting all day. As soon as they’re on board and the boat’s under way, take the truck home, get the convertible, drive to South Norwalk, park outside Carter’s place and wait. You may wait an hour and you may wait twenty. Stay with the car.”

  “Wouldn’t it be better if I parked—”

  “No.”

  Dan’s “Right again” reached Tecumseh Fox, if at all, through the back of his head, for he was off. A block away, at the railroad station, he entered a taxi and left it again five minutes later at the entrance to an enormous barnlike wooden building at the waterside with an inscription painted across the front: DON CARTER BOATS & EQUIPMENT. He went in and traversed its length, dodging construction scaffoldings and jumping blocks and timbers, emerged on to a platform from which piers jutted over the water, went up to a man who was watching two others scrape the side of a cabin cruiser and accosted him:

  “Hello, Don. Is the tide still with you?”

  “Hello there!” The man extended a hand. “Well, well! Where did you come from?”

  “Oh, places. I’m in a hurry this time, I have to make a little trip. Can I have the Express Forty?”

  “Sure! Sure you can. She’s all tuned up.” The man’s crinkled eyes laughed at him. “I don’t suppose you’re bound for foreign shores? After that on the radio last night and then the papers this morning—”

  “I haven’t had time to look at a paper. No, I’ll bring her back all right, but I can’t say when. While you’re warming her up I’ll step across the street and get a sandwich.”

  In a quarter of an hour he was back, with a large package under his arm and a bundle of newspapers. At the end of one of the piers a long narrow powerboat, with seats for six in a glassed-in cockpit, was purring smoothly. Fox hopped in and got behind the wheel, the engine swelled to a roar and then purred again, a man holding her to the pier gently eased her off and she glided away, with Don Carter watching her with pride in his eyes. Fox took her out beyond the last marker, turned her north and opened up the throttle. She reared, lifted up her long narrow aristocratic nose and scooted.

  In twenty minutes he went ten miles. He throttled down the engine, aimed for a desolate-looking stretch of beach strewn with rocks and old seaweed; a hundred yards offshore he reversed to stop her, left the seat and catfooted it to the bow, and dropped an anchor. Peering inshore, he caught through scraggly trees a glimpse of a white object with a splotch of red on its side. A survey of the beach showed him no sign of life. He hopped to the stern, unlashed a dinghy that lay athwart, lowered it into the water, got the oars and rowed to the beach. Jumping out, he stood and surveyed the scene again, and in a moment saw activity around the white object, and soon three men emerged from among the trees and stumbled towards him over the stones. They looked unmistakably like men running away from something and Fox scowled fiercely as they approached, but when they reached him he said only:

  “Get in. Thorpe and Luke in the stern, Kester in the bow. Get in!”

  With that weight in the little dinghy, he had to wade in to his knees to get her free; then he hopped over the gunwale and took the oars. Back alongside the boat, he got them transhipped, pulled the dinghy to the stern and lashed it, and issued instructions:

  “You are all to lie low. No faces showing. It would be a shame to spoil it now. There are sandwiches and beer in that package, and help yourselves to the newspapers. We’ve taken a trick. Jordan left Thursday on his boat and hasn’t returned. I won’t describe it or tell you the name of it, or you’d be sticking your faces up to help me look for it.”

  Ridley Thorpe growled faintly: “My stomach hurts and I think I’m going to vom——”

  “Lie down and take it easy. Open that window, Luke, and he’ll soon get enough air. Now remember, keep down.”

  He went to the bow and upped the anchor, climbed into the seat and started the engine, reversed and nosed her around for open water, and the search for the Armada was on.

  By four o’clock that afternoon Tecumseh Fox would have given ten to one that there were fifty million boats on Long Island Sound and that a high percentage of them were white cruisers with brown cabin trim. The Carter Express Forty had poked its nose in at a hundred coves, inlets and harbours, all the way from Norwalk to Niantic on the Connecticut shore, and back from Plum Island as far as Wading River on the Long Island side. It was at four o’clock that an act of God came perilously close to terminating the operation by the conclusive process of sinking the entire outfit. Fox saw it coming around three-thirty and he knew that prudence dictated a flight for shelter, but he decided the boat could take it with proper handling. It came swooping and swirling from the west, a savage wind lashing with a thousand staggering blows, the recently placid water swelling, rushing, breaking, careening like a maniac, the summer day darkened into night. Fox throttled down, took it three-quarters on and prayed that the gear was good. The boat quivered, lunged and plunged, turned on its side, righted and tried the other side for a change, fought desperately to keep its nose into the danger. The act ended almost as abruptly as it had begun; and when he could, Fox turned for a look at his passengers. Vaughn Kester was trembling and as white as a sheet; Luke Wheer was not white but he was trembling; Ridley Thorpe nodded at Fox and declared, “You did that very well! Gracious, that was a blow! You handled it just right!”

  Fox nodded back at him and returned to his steering, muttering to himself, “One more proof that no man is a total loss. Never forget that.”

  Ten minutes later, not far beyond Shoreham, a tiny cove no bigger than a hollow tooth came into view and planted in the middle of it was a white cruiser with brown cabin trim. Apparently it was well anchored, for there was no sign that the storm had torn it loose. Fox circled inshore and in a minute made out the name on the stern: Armada. He throttled down and floated up to it, alongside, reversed, grabbed the cruiser’s gunwale to hold off and killed his engine. In the cockpit, mopping water which the storm had blown in, was a man around sixty, brown as leather, small but not puny, with jutting cheekbones guarding deep-set grey eyes.

  Fox asked him, “Are you Henry Jordan?”

  “I am,” said the man. “Who are you?”

  Chapter 7

  That was at 4:40 p.m.

  Across Long Island Sound and some miles west, Dan Pavey slouched in the front seat of the convertible, parked in front of Don Carter’s place at South Norwalk. He was motionless and his eyes were closed. Suddenly his right leg twitched, then his left arm; his eyes opened; he jerked himself upright, stared around, blinked at his wristwatch and saw that it said 4:40.

  “Well!” he told himself, in a rolling rumble of shocked incredulity.

  He stared fixedly at space for three minutes.

  “Well!” he repeated, still incredulous. “Mrs. Pavey’s boy Dan dreaming about a girl. Don’t deny it. Wake up. Is your boy running a fever, Mrs. Pavey? Perhaps he has acute cerebral flimmuxosis. What a pity. Flush out his skull and let it dry in the sun. How far can he spit? Phut!”

  He got out, walked along the sidewalk to a door with a sign, BAR & GRILL, entered and ordered a double Scotch.

  He downed it in a gulp, frowned around the place and ordered another. It went the way of the first. He ordered a third, sent it after its predecessors and ordered another one. The man behind the bar demurred.

  “Right,” Dan growled. “It’s a waste of money. You might as well try to fill a gas tank with a teaspoon.”

  He picked up his change from the bar, returned to the street, walked a block and a half to a drugstore, climbed on to a stool at the fountain and told the boy:

  “Westchester Delight with nuts.”

  He muttered to himself, as the boy started the complex operation.

  “Yes, sir, nuts.”

  In the late afternoon, a little after six o’clock, District Attorn
ey P. L. Derwin sat at his desk in his office at White Plains, wearily mopping his face with a damp handkerchief. Not only was he harassed by the impacts and exigencies of the most spectacular murder case Westchester County had enjoyed during his term of office, but also the weather was getting him; the thunderstorm that had raged across the city on its way to the sound in midafternoon had brought only ephemeral relief; it was now hotter and more humid than ever. Derwin looked at the man and girl in chairs facing him, let his handkerchief drop to the desk and spoke irritably:

  “I may need to question you further at any time. I can’t say when or how long or how often. Mr. Collins is of course correct when he says that it is your right to refuse to answer questions, but if you do so, the law has a right to make inferences from that refusal. You have both been released under bond as material witnesses.” Perspiration showed on his forehead again. “You are bound, under severe penalty, to be available when needed. That publicity stunt of Tecumseh Fox’s—that radio broadcast—has no bearing whatever on your status. As you know, Fox disappeared from his home during the night, has not returned and cannot be found.”

  He shifted to a man standing between two chairs —a large healthy-looking man in a white linen suit, with an amused mouth and sharply watchful dark eyes. “I resent your last remark, Mr. Collins. I’m not man infant. I’m well aware that you are acquainted with the law. I merely ask that you keep me informed of the whereabouts of Grant and his niece, so that in case—”

  “Refused.” Nat Collins was brusque. “I’m under no obligation to keep you informed. If you want to see them at any reasonable hour I’ll produce them and I’ll be with them.” He put his hand on Andrew Grant’s shoulder. “Come on, my boy.” He must have been at least four years older than Uncle Andy. “Come, Miss Grant.”

  They left Derwin wearily mopping his face again. As they traversed the anteroom, the faces of four or five men sitting there, one a trooper in uniform, were turned to escort them across. Nearing the exit, Grant, who was in the lead, halted abruptly to avoid head-on collision with the door, which was being opened from without. The trio stepped aside to make gangway and were face to face with the pair who were entering.