“They hire various name bands here,” observed Penny, pointing.
A placard on a gilt easel informed Jeff, supremely uninterested in bands, that Cinderella’s Slipper now featured Tommy Somebody and his Boys. This immediately became evident. From the direction of an open archway at the rear of the hall, sound smote with a kind of religious fury, soon afterwards picked up by the Boys’ tenor vocalist in revival-meeting exaltation.
“When cares pur-sue ya, sing hal-le-lu-jah.
And it will shoo tha blues a-way!
When cares pur-sue ya, hal-le-lu-jah
Gets ya through tha dar-kest day!
Again Penny indicated.
“Back there,” she explained, “there are two rooms opening into each other, set in a line from right to left. The band’s in the far room at the extreme left; that’s why this entry is so wide. They haven’t got a bar; I mean they haven’t got a bar counter. You sit at tables to be served. That’s it, Jeff; straight through.”
With the solicitous Marcel hovering attendance, they made their inspection.
Both rooms, little more than one room separated by another open archway, were dark except for a meandering blue spotlight and a little glow from the throne dais which held the band. Each room contained a small dance floor surrounded by tables for two or for four. On the white cloth of each table stood a siphon of soda, cups, saucers and spoons as well as a small silvered bucket of ice cubes. In air thick with tobacco smoke and the damp aniseed breath of absinthe, both rooms seemed pretty well patronized without being crowded or even full. Nobody except the waiters or attendants wore formal dress. Most couples were dancing; some merely sat and listened with rapture.
After she had glanced at each table in the first room, Penny led her escort into the second. At a ringside table Jeff noticed one couple: the woman a well-shaped redhead with her back turned, the man heavy-shouldered and balding in his early forties. He should have looked of the utmost good nature, and didn’t. But he raised his hand in salutation to Penny, who returned the salutation absently.
Still no Serena. Penny even opened a distant door adorned with a pastel sketch of Cinderella herself, disappeared for a few moments, and returned shaking her head.
“Et alors, madame, monsieur?” prompted Marcel.
“It’s rather loud,” said Penny, with which Jeff could heartily agree. “If you don’t mind, Marcel, perhaps a table in the first room …?”
When they had been installed at another ringside table, Marcel’s place was taken by a waiter. Asked in French whether madame or monsieur wished to order something, Penny replied in the same language that both would have the specialty of the house. Removing two cups and saucers, the waiter soon returned with both cups half full of the greenish liquid Jeff had been expecting. He filled the cups with soda-water already so chilled that the beverage needed no further ice.
“Hadn’t we better drink a toast to absent Serena,” Penny suggested, “since we can’t drink it to her in person? She’s not here, Jeff; she’s not anywhere; I ought to have known she wouldn’t be.”
“To Serena, then! But afterwards,” said Jeff, when both had sipped and set down the cup without making a face, “why not a toast to ourselves? Or would you prefer to dance?”
“No; let’s just sit here for a minute or two, shall we? Serena’s not here and hasn’t been here; Marcel wouldn’t lie about a thing like that. Then, too, you don’t meet your secret lover at a speakeasy; or, if you do, you don’t stay there afterwards. Yes, to ourselves!” breathed Penny, giving him a glance of some intimacy. “But I could drink with more enthusiasm if this stuff were distilled from honest alcohol instead of wormwood! And … and …”
“What is it, Penny? What’s the matter?”
“Ever since we’ve been here, Jeff, have you had a feeling somebody’s been keeping an eye on us and watching us?”
“Yes, I know what you mean.” Jeff had experienced the sensation without being able to define it, still less account for it. “At first I thought it must be good old Marcel himself, but I’m not sure. He’d have no particular reason for keeping an eye on either of us, surely? If not, who would?”
“I can’t think; that’s just what makes me nervous!”
“Whoever may be doing it, Penny, it’s not that fellow in the other room.”
“What fellow in the other room?”
“Big fellow, built like a football player a little run to fat. He’s with the redhead in green, who always keeps her back turned as though to concentrate on him; you can see ’em both from here. He waved to you, and you waved back.”
“Oh, him?” Penny said with relief. “It’s all right, Jeff; that’s only Billy Vauban. He’s the managing director of Danforth & Co., a manufacturing firm of some kind. The woman is Pauline, his wife.”
“Danforth & Co., did you say? I’ve heard that name recently, in some way related to the Hobarts. What’s the connection, Penny?”
“I never heard there was one. Billy’s very popular, and deserves to be; everybody likes him. Normally he’s the best-tempered man on earth, but … is he drinking?”
“He’s gulped down at least two since we’ve been here. One eye looked glazed when we passed; he didn’t seem very pleased about something. And you can’t polish off the green scourge as though you were swilling grape juice or soda pop.”
“When Billy’s been drinking, it’s more than rumored, he can be quite impossible. Pauline Vauban is no patient Griselda herself. She keeps her attention on him so she can tell him off when they have one of their frequent spats. If Pauline cuts loose, apparently, she’s got no inhibitions at all.” Penny faltered. “That’s in private, of course. They’d keep it to themselves; the Vaubans are an old Creole family. I—I don’t think they’d have a row in public.”
But they would.
The band finished its number on a soaring note, individual musicians settling back with the deflated air that betokened an interval. When loud applause drew no further music, the dancers returned to their tables. Soft lights glowed through both rooms.
Hitherto, under the buzz of talk in that damp, smoky atmosphere, both Pauline Vauban and her husband had been speaking in voices so lowered that they could scarcely have been overheard at the adjoining table.
Now it changed. Mrs. Vauban was leaning forward intently. Though she remained inaudible, she must have administered one more stab or goad. Even here Jeff could feel the shock as her husband’s temper blew to pieces. He lurched to his feet and stood swaying, a red-faced tower of menace. His hoarse voice tore through smoke and fumes.
“Now don’t you start on my mother’s people, either! Thad Peters was my uncle, the best offensive halfback Tulane ever had!”
The woman, still with her back turned, also sprang up.
“Offensive?” she shrilled. “You just bet you’re offensive, every last one of you! Beginning with your drunken grandfather and ending with your drunken self, the double-dyed offensive worst!”
Guests at nearby tables, trying hard to pretend they saw and heard nothing, sat as though paralyzed. Billy Vauban paid no attention.
“I’ve had about enough of this!” he roared. “Shut your damn mouth, you hear me? How’d you like to be turned over papa’s knee and get your tail smacked as you deserve?”
“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” shrieked his wife. “Every time you’re crazy with booze, which is practically all the time, you’d like to hit me or get your filthy paws on me. But would you do it? Oh, no! Not with anybody else present! You wouldn’t dare, not you, or they might lock you up in the asylum where you belong!”
Her husband did not reply; he seemed incapable of reply. Left hand a little extended, right hand back, he began to edge round the table towards her. Several waiters, black vests and white shirt-fronts, were converging on them without haste.
“I wouldn’t, sir,” the leading waiter advised quietly. “If it was me, honest, I wouldn’t try to touch the lady. Because if you did, you know, we’d just
have to stop you.”
Drunk or not, overweight or not, Billy Vauban moved as fast as a striking leopard. Snatching up the chair behind him, holding the chair by its back, he whirled it aloft and brandished it in the air, defying everybody.
Shocking as the outburst had been, its aftermath was no less so. For, at the very peak and paroxysm of rage, another change occurred. A wheel seemed to go round behind his eyes. Wrath drained out of him. Lowering the chair, he sat down in it. With a waiter on either side of him, each with a hand near his elbow, he put both elbows on the table and his head in his hands.
Then, after a pause during which you might have counted six, Billy Vauban sat up as though partly waking from his daze.
“There, now!” he said in a different voice. “Did it again, didn’t I? Made a damn fool o’ m’self, or almost.” Remorse, contrition shook him as he rose to his feet. “Poll m’dear, I ap—I ’pologize for everything! I ’pologize, too, to all these good pol—all these good ladies and gentlemen I ’ffended by my lout’s goin’ on! Poll m’dear, time we went home.”
The woman, it was clear, had instantly become mollified. Producing a thick roll of banknotes, Vauban dropped several on the table. He extended his arm to his wife, who took it. Unsteadily, if not without a certain curious dignity, he led her through the other room and out.
The waiters, who had followed the offender as far as the lobby but had not tried to escort him, went their several ways. A brief buzz of comment swelled and died.
“Jeff,” Penny said soon afterwards, “it’s not late; it’s not much past eleven o’clock. But do you really want to stay here with the specialty of the house?”
“Am I still forbidden to approach what I want to approach?”
“You’re not forbidden anything. And possibly I’m thinking about it as much as you say you are. But this isn’t the time or the place. Having dragged you here on such an utter fool’s errand!”
“We haven’t learned much about Serena’s alleged boy friend, it’s true. If you’d like to go—?”
“Please!”
Jeff called for the bill, and was surprised to find it reasonable. The band had begun to prepare for another number when they left the table. Marcel ushered them to the front door, volubly regretting their early departure and insisting, after the habit of the South, that they must soon return.
The door shut them into that brick-floored passage. Wind still piped across rooftops, though it did not penetrate down here. Penny lingered at the front door. Despite near darkness, she had opened her handbag to make sure of the car keys.
“Jeff, don’t you still feel somebody’s watching us?”
“No, that’s gone now.” Having moved a few steps to one side, he was inspired towards the oracular. “Let me repeat, Penny, that we haven’t done well as detectives. We have learned only that one William Vauban of Danforth & Co., a nephew of the late Thad Peters, can go berserk and then recover before much damage has been done. What might have been an ugly incident blew over very quickly. The essence of the whole evening is that nothing has happened. It’s peaceful, after all; it’s so utterly peaceful that—”
He never finished the pronouncement. Some heavy, fairly large object, whushing down out of the air between them, landed with a smash on the brick paving. Both had instinctly recoiled; he heard Penny gasp.
Finding a box of matches in his pocket, he struck one and lowered its flame.
The large flower-pot of spring daffodils, which now lay in a ruin of reddish shards, brown earth, and ragged yellow flower fragments, would have crushed the skull of any person underneath. Jeff straightened up. He saw Penny’s frightened face a moment before the match went out.
“Was it meant for you or was it meant for me?” she cried. “And why, oh, why should it have been meant for either of us?”
9
WHEN JEFF FINISHED breakfast on the following morning, an overcast Saturday, he was not expecting more trouble within the next hour.
He had decided, or virtually decided, that the incident of the flower-pot at Cinderella’s Slipper must have been the accident everybody said it was. Almost as soon as that weight fell, he had jabbed at the doorbell in a way that brought Marcel in some haste. But Marcel, though sympathetic, seemed to have deeper woes. Somebody, said the maître d’hôtel, was always leaving flower-pots too precariously balanced on the ledge around the little low roof. And they’d noticed the high wind, hadn’t they?
A waiter, sent upstairs to investigate without being told what sort of horticultural item had almost done the damage, reported the absence of a flower-pot containing daffodils, adding that he himself had removed other flower-pots to a safer place.
With some intimation that it had better not happen again, since even one brained patron would be no very good advertisement, Jeff led Penny away.
He calmed her down, he thought. But she drove slowly and somewhat erratically on the return journey; she would not be drawn from her preoccupation. At past midnight, when she let him out at Delys Hall, the whole house seemed dark except for a gleam behind stained-glass windows above the front door.
Waiting until Penny had gone, Jeff found his way around the east side of the place to a modern brick garage at the back. Pushing back its folding doors, he discovered the light switch and kindled a hanging bulb in the middle. The garage, which would hold four cars, at the moment held two: the dark-blue Packard limousine and a gray Marmon touring-car. The Stutz was still missing. He had no real curiosity; it was only by accident he touched the hood of the Marmon and found it faintly warm.
Jeff returned to the house, where a sleepy-looking Cato admitted him.
“Hadn’t you better turn in, Cato?”
“Think I go now, suh. Mist’ Dave, he gone a’ready; Miss Reen got her own key. Good night, Mist’ Jeff; glad you back home!”
The returned wanderer slept heavily that night. Whatever shadows may have been in the house, they did not trouble his rest. It was past ten in the morning when he awoke, and almost ten-thirty before he finished dressing and went downstairs, to find Dave sitting over the remnants of breakfast in the great black-beamed refectory, with several of its window-lights set open on the warm, dampish day.
“How’d it go, old son? Didn’t sleep very well myself,” said Dave, who looked as though he hadn’t. “Heard Cato let you in round about half-past twelve. Serena didn’t get back until half-past one.”
“She’s not up yet this morning, I gather?”
“Oh, she’s up. Up, and full of beans! Finishing her toast and coffee when I got down a little while ago. She’s out in the garden now, but said she’d join me for more coffee when I finished. Well, old son, how’d it go? She volunteered no information; I asked no questions. Did you find her last night?”
“No, not a sign of her. Penny thought she might be at a night club called Cinderella’s Slipper. But she wasn’t there and evidently hadn’t been there.”
“For the sort of meeting I think it was, she wouldn’t have been. Well …”
Jeff helped himself at the sideboard, which had been set out with some variety of dishes. While Dave kept glancing towards the open windows that faced south, his companion returned to the table and pitched into breakfast. He did not mention the incident of the flower-pot, seeing no point in bringing it up.
“Did you yourself go out last night, Dave?”
“Yes, for a short time. Remember the drugstore at Rupert’s Corners up the road? I was running low on cigarettes, so I took the touring-car and went to get ’em before the place closed.”
“Anything so very interesting out on the lawn?”
“I’m not interested in the lawn, old son; only in the driveway. It’s Malcolm Townsend: the authority on old houses and architectural tricks, if you remember?”
“He’s in New Orleans?”
“Very much so. Got in by the early train this morning. He’s at the St. Charles now, and phoned me as I was coming downstairs. Of course I invited him to stay with us. But I think h
e prefers the freedom of a hotel, as you did yourself until somebody persuaded you. I should have said he was at the St. Charles when he phoned. I offered to drive in and get him, but he had a taxi waiting. He ought to be here very soon.”
Jeff, eating steadily, had pushed aside his plate and gone to the sideboard for coffee when Serena, all in white for the tennis she may or may not have intended to play, strolled in from the drawing-room.
Dave had described her as full of beans, by which presumably he meant happy or even radiant. Jeff would have used no such description. But she did look determined, with a certain fixity in her blue eyes and perhaps a more stubborn line to the fragile jaw.
“May I have some of that coffee, Jeff? You might pour for me, please? Cream, but only one lump of sugar. —Thanks!”
Together they carried their cups to the table, where Dave had risen as though with some sort of protest on his lips.
“Look, Serena, you’re not—?” He stopped.
“Not what? If it’s in your own mind to ask a lot of questions about last night, Dave, I’d much rather you didn’t!”
“Oh, we know that. And I don’t intend to ask a lot of questions, which would only give you the chance to ask me twice as many. One query, though, that ought to be harmless. Was he very entertaining?”
“Was who very entertaining?”
“The man you went to meet.”
“How do you know it was a man I went to meet?”
“Because I can be pretty damn certain it was nobody else! Whatever your tastes may be, little sister, we all know they’re not Sapphic.”
“Really, Dave—!”
“Any pretense of shock and outrage, Serena, becomes you still less. Since you object even to that question: as Ira Rutledge might say, I’ll rephrase it. Did you spend an entertaining evening?”
Serena lifted one shoulder.
“Whether or not I found it entertaining,” she replied, “I must say I found it both enlightening and profitable.”
“Profitable?”
“That was the word. Can you and Jeff say the same?”
Deadly Hall Page 11
