Doan went down the steps, feeling his way cautiously as he got beyond the path of the light from the kitchen door. The cellar was a warm, dark cavern thick with the smell of coal dust. Feeling overhead, Doan located the warmth of a fat asbestos-wrapped pipe and judged from the direction it ran that the furnace was over in the far corner.
He started that way, sliding his feet cautiously along the cement floor. He was somewhere in the middle of it, out of reach of either wall, when something made a quick silent breath going past in front of his face.
He stopped with a jerk, reaching for his revolver. The thing that had gone past his face hit the wall behind him with a dull ominous thud and dropped to the floor. Doan stayed rigidly still, his revolver poised. He was afraid to move for fear of stumbling over something. He listened tensely, his head tilted.
A voice whispered out of the darkness ahead of him. "Don't--don't you dare come any closer. I've got a shovel here. I'll--hit you with it."
Doan was a hard man to surprise, but he was as startled now as he ever had been in his life. He stared in the direction of the voice, his mouth open.
The voice said shakily: "You get out."
"Whoa," Doan said. "Wait a minute. I'm not coming any closer. Just listen to me before you heave any more of that coal."
"Who--who are you?"
"Name's Doan."
"The detective! Oh!"
"That's what I say. And who're you?"
"Sheila Alden."
"Ah," said Doan blankly. He drew a deep breath. "Well, I know I'm not drunk, so this must be happening. If you're Sheila Alden down here in the cellar, who's the Sheila Alden up in the bedroom?"
"That's my secretary, Leila Adams. She's been impersonating me."
"Oh. Sort of a game, huh?"
"No!"
"Well, I was just asking. What's the matter with the light down here?"
"I screwed the bulb out of the socket."
"Well, where is it? I'll screw it back in again. I need some light on the subject."
"Oh, no! No! Don't!"
"Why not?"
"I--I haven't any clothes on."
"You haven't any clothes on," Doan repeated. He shook his head violently. "Maybe I'm a little sleepy or something. I don't seem to be getting this. Suppose you just start and tell me all about it."
"Well, Leila and I came up here alone. Kokomo had come ahead to open up the place. Kokomo and Leila are in this together. When we got here they held me up and locked me in the cellar--in the back room beyond this one. Leila told me she was going to pretend she was me."
"Is Brill crazy? Didn't he know Leila Adams wasn't you?"
"No. Mr. Dibben in the law firm always handled all my business. I don't know Mr. Brill. He's never seen me."
"Well, well," said Doan. "Then what?"
"They just locked me in that cellar room. There's one window, and they didn't want to put bars over it, so they took all my clothes away from me. They knew I wouldn't get out the window then. If I did I'd freeze.
"It's two miles to the station and I didn't know which way. And Kokomo said if I screamed he'd..." Her voice trailed off into a little gasping sob. "He told me what he'd do."
"Yeah," said Doan. "I can imagine."
"Where is he now?"
"Kokomo? He's slightly indisposed at the moment. Go on. Tell me the rest."
"I broke a little piece of metal off the window, and I picked the lock on the door and got out here. I know how the heating system works. The valves are down here. I turned off the ones that controlled the downstairs radiators and opened the ones that control the upstairs radiators wide.
"Then I kept putting coal in the furnace with the drafts wide open. I thought if I made it hot enough in the upstairs bedrooms someone besides Kokomo would come down and look."
"Sure," said Doan. "Smart stuff. If I'd had any brains I'd have been down here hours ago. You stay right here and I'll bring you something to wear. Don't be afraid any more."
"I haven't been afraid--not very much. Only--only of Kokomo coming down here and--"
"He won't be coming down. Stay right here. I'll be right back." Doan ran back up the steps. All his cheerful casual air was gone now. His lips were thinned across his teeth, and he moved with a cat-like, lithe efficiency.
Kokomo was still lying flat on his face in the center of the kitchen floor. Doan, moving with the same quiet quickness, opened the cupboard door and located an aluminum kettle.
He filled it with water at the sink. Carrying it carefully, he walked over to Kokomo and, using the toe of one shoe, expertly flipped the big man over on his back.
He dumped the kettle of water in Kokomo's blankly upturned face. For a second there was no reaction, then Kokomo's pulpy lips moved, and he sputtered wetly. His eyes opened and he saw Doan looking thoughtfully down at him.
"Hi, Kokomo," Doan said softly. "Hi, baby."
Kokomo made noises in his throat and heaved himself up on his elbows. Doan took one short step forward and kicked him under the jaw so hard that Kokomo's whole lolling body lifted clear of the floor and rolled half under the stove. He didn't move any more.
"I'll have another present for you later," Doan said.
CHAPTER IX.
BLACK SNOW
HE WENT IN through the living room to the front hall. He had opened the door of the closet and located his snow-damp topcoat when he heard a little shuffling noise at the top of the stairs. He turned around to look.
It was Brill. The light behind him made him look grotesquely thin, sagging in the middle like a broken pencil.
"Doan!" he gasped.
He got hold of the railing with both hands, and then he came down the stairs in a crazily shuffling dance, his skinny legs wavering and twisting weirdly. He tripped and fell headlong down the last ten steps before Doan could catch him.
The skin on his face was yellowish, the cheekbones bulging out in ugly lumps. Blood was streaked in a long smear across his forehead. Doan straightened him out on the steps.
"Doan!" he said desperately. "That damned scoundrel, Crowley. Tricked me. Hit me--hit me--chair." He heaved himself up on his elbows, eyes glaring. "Doan! I'll hold you responsible! Got away! Your fault!"
"They didn't hit me with a chair," Doan pointed out.
"You!" Brill gasped. "Leaving me with them. While you wander off... They'll get away! They'll get to the station! Jannen will help them! Flat-car there--go down the grade..."
"We'll telephone ahead and stop them."
Brill rolled his head back and forth helplessly. "No telephone. Tried it upstairs. Line cut. You've got to go after them! They've got only a few minutes start! You can catch them! That girl--she can't go fast."
Doan said: "You mean you want me to go out in that storm again?"
"Oh, damn you!" Brill swore. "Don't you understand that my whole career is at stake? I hired your agency, and you failed me! I'll have you black-listed. I'll sue!"
"All right, all right," Doan said. "I'll go bring them back. Take another coat and give it to the girl you find down cellar."
He went to the front door and opened it. The wind whooped in triumphantly, driving a fine mist of snow ahead of it.
"Light," said Brill weakly. "They've got an electric lantern. You can see--"
Doan slammed the door shut. The wind came whipping down out of the black mouth of the ravine with a fierce howling intensity. Doan was struggling to get into his topcoat, and the wind billowed the coat out like a clumsy sail and blew Doan with it down the steps and across the black, rock-strewn ground.
He stumbled into a drift waist-deep before he caught himself. He stood still for a moment, one arm crooked up to shield his eyes from the cutting whip of the snow. The wind blasted at him, and then he caught the flicker of a light on the path that led up out of the flat.
Doan began to run. He was half-blinded with the snow, and the wind pulled and tugged at him, pushed him in staggering crazy spurts. He stumbled and half-fell, and then the gravel on the
steep path grated under his shoes.
The light was high above him, much closer now, and as he watched, it flicked over the edge of the ravine and disappeared.
Doan fumbled under his coat and found the revolver. He went up the path at a lurching run. His breath burned icily in his throat. The air was thin and fine, with no weight to it, and his heart began to drum in a sickening cadence.
He was breathing in sobbing gasps when he hit the top of the ravine, sweat crawling in cold rivulets under his clothes. He paused there swaying, looking for the light, and found it off to his left.
He turned and plowed stubbornly in that direction, and there was no path here, nothing but thick drifts of snow piled against stunted brush that tore at his clothes with myriad clutching fingers.
The light tossed up high ahead of him, very close now, and showed stunted trees lined up in a ghostly gallery, leaning forward in the push of the wind as they watched.
Doan tripped over a snow-hidden log and went down flat on his face in powdery whiteness. He heaved himself stubbornly up on hands and knees, dabbed at his smeared face with his coatsleeve--and he stayed that way, half kneeling, rigid, staring into savagely cruel greenish yellow eyes on a level with his own and not a yard away.
"Hah!" Doan said, grunting with the exhalation of his breath.
The eyes came for him with the sudden slashing gleam of teeth under them. Doan poked the revolver straight out and fired, wondering as he pulled the trigger whether his fall had packed snow in the barrel and whether the gun would blow back at him.
The shot made a bright orange flare, and the eyes were gone. A heavy body kicked and squirmed in the snow. Doan struggled up to his feet, and another dark low form slipped sideways in the whirling darkness, circling him.
Doan leveled the revolver and fired instantly. A shrill ki-yi-ing yip echoed the smash of the shot, and the second dark form went tumbling over and over in the snow, contorting itself into desperate struggling knots.
The third one came in a black streak out of the darkness, up out of the snow in a long lunge, straight at Doan's throat. He fired going over backward. The flat-nosed .38 hit the animal in the chest and turned it clear over in the air. It fell back rigid and still beside the first.
Doan struggled in the snow, heaving himself up, and then Jannen loomed above him, yelling something the wind garbled into an unintelligible, frenzied scream. He had an ax in his hand, and he swung it back up over his shoulder and down at Doan in a full sweep that made its head glitter in a bright, deadly line.
Doan whirled himself sideways, rolling.
"Jannen!" he yelled frantically. "Don't! Don't! I'll shoot--"
The ax-head hissed past is ear, and Jannen caught it on the upswing and chopped back down again with it.
Doan couldn't dodge this time. He didn't try. He shot Jannen just above the grassy gleam of the buckle on the wide web belt around his coat.
Jannen made a queer, choked sound. The ax stopped in midair. Jannen took one step back and then another, trying to get the ax up over his shoulder again.
"Drop it," said Doan.
The ax was going up inch by desperate inch. Jannen's breath made a high whistling sound. He made a clumsy step forward.
"All right, baby," said Doan.
He pulled the trigger of the revolver again. There was a dull, small click--nothing else. Before Doan even had time to grasp what that meant, Jannen reeled queerly sideways and went down full length on his face, as rigid as a log.
"Good God," said Doan in a whisper.
He got up slowly. The thing had happened in split-seconds, and the echos of the gunfire were still rolling lustily ahead of the wind.
Doan stared at his gun. It was bright and deadly in his hand, with the snow moisture gleaming on its thick cylinder, and he remembered now that he hadn't reloaded it. He had fired once at the metal case and once in the snow-shed. There had been four cartridges left in the gun. He had used them all. If he had missed just one of those four shots...
The wind whistled shrilly through bare branches, chuckling in its high, cruel glee.
Doan stumbled forward, leaned down over Jannen. The man was dead, and the snow already was laying a white cold blanket thinly across his distorted face.
Doan plowed back through the drifts and brush, found the hard surface of the path. He felt weak and numb with cold that was more than cold. His legs were stiff, unwieldy sticks under him as he went back down the steep path, across the flat toward the warmly welcoming glow of the windows that watched for him through the whirl of snow.
CHAPTER X.
TOO MANY GUNS
DOAN WENT BLUNDERING across the porch with his head down and ran into the front door. He found the knob, fumbled it with numb fingers, finally turned it. The wind swept the door out of his grasp, banged it back thunderously against the wall.
Doan stamped through into the soft luxurious warmth of the hall, fought the door shut again behind him. Sighing in relief, he wiped snow moisture off his face with the palm of his left hand.
"Drop your gun on the floor."
Doan jerked to attention. Brill was standing in the doorway of the living room. He was wearing a blue dressing gown now over his pajamas. He lounged there, quite at ease, with the big .45 automatic bulking huge and black in his right hand.
"Drop your gun on the floor," he repeated in the same confident, quiet voice.
He looked very theatrical, with the white blaze showing up in his smoothly brushed hair, with his eyes narrowed. He was smiling in a dramatically sinister way.
Doan loosened the stiff fingers of his right hand and the .38 thudded on the carpet.
"It wasn't loaded anyway," he observed.
"Come in here," said Brill.
He backed out of the door, and Doan followed him into the living room. Someone had thrown kindling on the fire, and red flames crackled greedily in it.
"You know Miss Alden, I think," Brill said.
She was sitting on the divan. She was wearing a man's overcoat so big that it almost wrapped around her twice. She had brown hair cut in a long bob, mussed a little now, and the fire found warm glints in it. Her brown eyes were wide and scared, and her soft lower lip trembled. There was a smear of coal dust on the end of her short straight nose.
"Hello, again," said Doan.
She didn't answer, and Brill said:
"You're becoming a nuisance, Doan. What happened to Jannen? I heard you shooting."
"I was just target practicing," Doan said, "but Jannen, that dope, stepped right in front of my gun just when I happened to be pulling the trigger. I expect he's sort of dead."
Kokomo came in from the kitchen. There was a lopsided swollen lump on one side of his jaw, and his eyes glittered malevolently at Doan.
"You tricky little devil! When I get my hands on you--"
"I can hardly wait," Doan told him.
"Later, Kokomo," Brill said. He was watching Doan with gravely speculative eyes. "I suppose you are beginning to understand this now, aren't you?"
"Oh, sure," said Doan. "I figured it out quite a while ago."
"Did you, now?" said Brill sarcastically.
Doan nodded. "Yes. You were next in line for the management of Sheila Alden's trust fund after this gent Dibben. You had all the time in the world to figure things out and get ready for this little play. You saw that an accident happened to Dibben at the right time. You knew Sheila Alden was coming up here--probably suggested the idea yourself--and you made all your arrangements beforehand.
"First you got Leila Adams, Sheila's secretary, to throw in with you by promising to split part of what you got from Sheila with her. Then you got Kokomo to do the muscle-work, promising him a split too. When you were prowling around up here beforehand you found out that Jannen was a crackpot with a grudge against the Aldens.
"Now, there was an ideal fall-guy for you all ready-made. Anything that happened you could always blame on him. But Jannen talks too much, and this poor guy, Boley, the r
egular station master, got suspicious of what you were cooking up with him, and either you or Kokomo or Jannen--or all three of you--got Boley drunk and probably doped him and left him out in the storm to freeze.
"Leila Adams wasn't going to impersonate Sheila Alden unless it was necessary on account of someone like me coming around. You definitely didn't want anyone around--not with the real Sheila Alden locked in the cellar.
"And so--" Doan paused, ran a hand over his cheek.
"Jannen knew a lot about explosives, and so you got him to fix up that little cigar case present for me. You knew I was going to be on the job because the trust company hired the agency, and Toggery told you he was going to send me up. So you dressed up in a fancy costume and laid for me with your cigar case bomb."
"How did you know I was the one who gave you that case?"
Doan grinned. "I couldn't miss. You spent so much time trying to cover yourself up that you stuck out like a sore thumb. You wanted to be sure that if anything went wrong no one could prove that you had anything to do with the whole business.
"That was the reason for your little fairy tale about the janitor and the cigar case and why you put on that elaborate, nervous and worried act and why you wanted to make sure that I knew you'd just been assigned to handle Sheila Alden's business. You wanted me to think that you were a jittery sort of a dope who couldn't possibly know the score. As a matter of fact, you are a dope."
Brill's lip lifted. "So? And I suppose you can tell me what happened tonight, too?"
"Easy," Doan agreed. "When you found out you hadn't put me away and that I was coming up here, you had to get a girl to act as secretary to the phoney Sheila Alden because you knew I'd expect to find a secretary.
"You hired the first girl you could find--Joan Greg. She wasn't in on the impersonation business. She thought Leila Adams was actually Sheila Alden--and, more important, so did her boy friend, Crowley.
"Crowley just messed the whole works up for you. He started impressing his personality on Leila Adams. He's a slick worker. She fell for him. She was a scrawny, homely dame, and she'd never had anybody like Crowley tell her how beautiful, breath-taking, marvelous and generally all-around wonderful she was before.
The Doan and Carstairs Mysteries Page 5
