Deadly Hall

by John Dickson Carr

  As though on a wire of nerves, the District Attorney went to the very deep cupboard which had been built out along the side of the bathroom against the southwestern wall. He opened the cupboard door.

  Once more, as light penetrated the cupboard, Jeff could see the array of dresses, gowns, and coats depending from hangers at either side. Nearest at hand, on the left, he could see the dressing-gown of dark-blue quilted silk, which, when Uncle Gil had held it out to them, was smudged with dust along the right sleeve and the back. Nearest at hand, on the right, he could see the black silk house-coat with gold embroidery, smudged in much the same way. From the floor on the right rose a bank of closed drawers. On the floor to the left stretched a row of shoes and slippers.

  “But—!” Jeff began, but checked himself.

  “There was disagreement among witnesses, remember,” Uncle Gil pointed out, “about what Serena had been wearing over her pajamas. Dave Hobart and Isaac, the chauffeur, said it was that dressing-gown, so dark a blue as to seem almost black. Cato, on the other hand, said it was the house-coat. I remarked to you that it might have been either. ‘Or else—’ I added, stifling the suggestion that had come to me. What I meant was that, for obvious reasons, it was probably neither one.”

  “Obvious reasons?” Lieutenant Minnoch echoed blankly.

  “Yes, very obvious. Now see what she actually wore.”

  Gilbert Bethune, hunching his shoulders, moved into the cupboard, bent down, and pulled open the lowest drawer of the bank on the right. From this drawer he drew out, and held up for his companions’ inspection, a woman’s sweater of knitted wool, black in color, rumpled and heavily dust-stained. From the sweater’s left-hand pocket, where they had been hastily stuffed away, he produced a pair of dark-brown cotton gloves, also dust-stained.

  “Well?” prompted Uncle Gil.

  The approaching storm had taken several strides nearer. Though all window-lights were now closed, they could hear the wind become a roar and hear the peal of thunder that followed a vivid lightning-flash.

  Lieutenant Minnoch, as though half out of his wits, could only point at the sweater Uncle Gil was still holding up.

  “That’s what she did wear, is it?”

  “Yes, Harry. Dave Hobart now admits she did. For he began to get a glimmering of what Serena had been up to on Saturday night. And, though he couldn’t guess the details, it frightened him so badly that to conceal everything he hid the sweater in that drawer and told a lie about what she had worn.”

  Replacing the gloves in the sweater’s pocket, Uncle Gil put it back in the drawer, closed the drawer, and stepped out of the cupboard to join them.

  “Look, sir!” Minnoch said in desperation. “You mean she was wearing the gloves as well as the sweater? And, when Dave took the sweater off her, he took off her gloves and shoved ’em in the pocket?”

  “No, not at all,” Uncle Gil replied with great clarity. “Serena herself had removed the gloves at an earlier time. Kindly don’t ask me how I know that; the reason should be apparent.”

  His Mephistophelian face now looking as pleased as it seemed wicked, Gilbert Bethune drew himself up.

  “Well!” he added. “You have both seen the sweater and the gloves; you have marked their condition. Does either of you, like Dave, begin to have some notion of what Serena must have been up to? If you haven’t any answers for me, have you some queries of your own? Harry?”

  “Reckon I pass, sir.”

  “Jeff?”

  “I have two questions, Uncle Gil,” Jeff told him. “One of them is so very pertinent that you’ll probably fob me off with more cryptic hints. The other question, which deals with the only aspect of this business I think I do understand, at first glance seems so irrelevant and inconsequential that I hesitate to ask at all.”

  “By all the saints and sinners,” thundered Uncle Gil, “don’t be daunted or put off by any seeming irrelevancy! Let’s have both questions, if you will. And begin with the apparently inconsequential, which is an approach after my own heart.”

  “Yes; nobody could deny that. But, since I’ve been out of local circulation for eight years, I’m compelled to ask. Is old John Everard, the philosophical tobacconist of 701b Royal Street, a well-known character in New Orleans?”

  Uncle Gil made a flourishing gesture.

  “Yes, Jeff. To those who pride themselves on their literacy, at least, he has become a very well-known character indeed. John Everard is an asker of questions, a dabbler at curious problems, forever active with tongue or pen. If I had remembered that from the start, instead of being distracted by extraneous matters, I should have been spared much unnecessary wonder. Now, then! What’s your very pertinent question?”

  “You keep suggesting,” Jeff flung at him, “that there’s evidence for everything on every side. You do definitely say Serena’s secret lover is also her murderer. It’s the identity of this secret lover which has been driving me round the bend!” Now it was Jeff who shook his fist. “If there’s evidence of the secret lover’s identity, who provided that evidence?”

  “Serena herself.”

  “Serena?”

  “Oh, indubitably. Jeff, how do you take your tea?”

  “What?”

  “When someone offers you tea, how do you drink it? With milk and sugar, or with lemon?”

  “With a little milk but no sugar, and never lemon. Didn’t I tell you, Uncle Gil? We’re back at cryptic hints again!”

  Gilbert Bethune looked stern.

  “It is no hint, cryptic or otherwise; it is the clue that should tell you. If you will just stop vilifying your saintly uncle and think back for a moment, you are sure to see the connection.”

  “Well, I don’t see it. Who is this unknown lover?” Jeff yelled. “Who in Satan’s name is it? The self-assured Serena lost her heart and her head, did she? She lost ’em to some bastard who’s been lurking behind the scenes all the time?”

  “A bastard in the vulgar sense of the term, no doubt. But not unknown, Jeff, and certainly not lurking behind the scenes. The person in question …”

  Jeff experienced a kind of psychic fit.

  “I’ve got a feeling, rightly or wrongly,” he said, “that we haven’t yet finished with unpleasantness. There’s an ambush ahead; some damned thing or other lurks in it. Maybe you’re waiting to spring on your quarry, Uncle Gil, but so is the enemy. When he does show his hand …”

  Every window went white with lightning; thunder smote hard and close; still the storm would not break. Since the broken door still hung drunkenly open, they heard the clear ringing of the doorbell.

  Footsteps, too light and quick to be Cato’s, hurried over stone towards the front door. There was a rush of wind as the door opened.

  “Penny!” exclaimed the voice of Dave Hobart, instinctively raised.

  A low-pitched female voice said something indistinguishable. Dave’s reply was equally indistinguishable until Dave raised his voice again.

  “Yes, he’s here. —Cato!”

  “Suh?”

  “They’re all up in Serena’s room, probably. Will you ask Mr. Jeff if he’ll come down here and see a friend of his?”

  Jeff waited no longer.

  Hastening out into the upper hall, he made for the head of the stairs. Cato, on the way up, saw him descending and turned back. Dave’s voice continued.

  “What do you mean, you can’t stay? Come on in, Penny! Come on in and take off that slicker!”

  Penny, in a hooded yellow waterproof, was edging round the left-hand side of the doorway, whose door stood wide open. Dave, his left hand extended, had turned in that direction and stood almost in profile against the tumultuous night outside.

  A small flame-spit from that tumultuous night was followed by what could only have been the report of a firearm. Two more flame-spits, two more blurred reports, whacked out of nowhere as Jeff neared the foot of the stairs.

  Dave had not retreated; he did not even try to close the door. Lightning-dazzle briefl
y illuminated terrace and drive. An enormous crash of thunder, exploding above Delys Hall, split in tumbling echoes down the sky. As the skies opened and the rain tore down, Lieutenant Harry Minnoch plunged past Jeff and raced out into the deluge, shouting orders at somebody.

  Penny Lynn cringed away. Dave Hobart closed the front door. Jeff Caldwell stood staring at the gouge made by three bullets which, missing Dave by inches, had lodged in the newel post on Jeff’s right.

  “Well, well!” he said to nobody in particular. “I seem to have made an accurate prophecy for once.”

  18

  “YOU MADE AN accurate prophecy, all right!” Saylor declared on the following afternoon. “How did it turn out, though? This joker who fired the shots, I gather, was in a car of some kind. The whole place was lousy with cops, and they chased him. But they lost him in traffic out on the main road, and didn’t even pipe the car’s number. Is that a fair summary?”

  “It’s an accurate summary,” conceded Jeff, “without being strictly fair. The attack took ’em off balance; it took everybody off balance. Though they anticipated some move against Dave, they didn’t expect him to be treated like a duck in a shooting gallery. Now that we’ve told you our side of it …”

  Four persons—Saylor himself, Jeff, Dave, and Penny—sat over the remains of lunch at Henri’s Restaurant, Toulouse Street just off Bourbon Street, towards three P.M., on Tuesday, April 26th. In the sedate central room at Henri’s, with its dark-red wallpaper and its unhurrying waiters, Jeff found his mind toiling back over the events of last night.

  Three bullets had been dug out of the newel post. Only Gilbert Bethune seemed untouched by the attendant confusion or chaos. At the height of the confusion Saylor, having evidently arrived back in town, had phoned with urgency.

  Would Dave and Jeff, he had begged, have lunch with him tomorrow at Henri’s? He knew Dave was in mourning; but, since Saylor might have something very important to communicate, would both of them accept? When Dave conveyed this message to Jeff, the latter at first had replied that he couldn’t make it because he had invited Penny to lunch on the same day.

  Though he had issued no such invitation, Penny’s look showed her willingness. Whereupon Saylor had urged that they all join him, stressing the importance of what he might have to communicate.

  And so it had been arranged. The question of Dave’s mourning was settled that same evening, when Uncle Gil haled away the same three guests for dinner at La Louisiane, prolonging the meal until a fairly late hour.

  “Do what you like tomorrow,” he had said on parting, “but be sure you are all at Delys Hall by four o’clock in the afternoon. I am inviting a little party of interested persons. And we are preparing a surprise.”

  “What kind of surprise, Uncle Gil?”

  “On the wall of some famous scientific rooms in London, honoring the achievements of Sir William Crookes, there used to be and perhaps still is a motto that reads, ‘Ubi Crookes, ibi lux.’ When Sir William so earnestly espoused spiritualism, one would-be humorist suggested changing the motto to ‘Ubi Crookes, ibi spooks.’ I also have hopes of shedding a little light.”

  “What’s more, when we meet Saylor tomorrow,” Dave had warned, “not a word about that gold being recovered! I’ve told Penny, but it mustn’t go any further until I’ve made up my mind what to do. Agreed, Jeff?”

  “Agreed. Do we also hide the fact that somebody shot at you from the drive?”

  “We may not be able to hide it. So far they’ve pretty well kept the newspapers at bay; nothing’s been published about this joker walloping me on the bean Sunday afternoon. Shots fired in public may belong to a different category.”

  They did belong to a different category. Mention of the shots, without factual elaboration but with every possible sensational hint, appeared in the press Tuesday morning. Saylor, meeting his guests at Henri’s Restaurant, wore an air of great mystery and portentousness, like some Balkan diplomat at secret negotiations.

  Their host ordered lavishly, but did not refer to the present until they sat over coffee. Then he called for some explanation of the shots, and Jeff told as much as seemed discreet.

  “What about the gun?” Saylor instantly demanded.

  “No gun turned up,” answered Jeff, “but the three slugs they dug out of the newel post were .38 pistol bullets. —Now that we’ve told you our side of it,” he repeated, “why not tell us yours?”

  “My side?”

  “Look!” said Dave, fiddling with silverware. “Mr. Bethune wanted to see you this morning, and there can’t be much doubt you went. Well, what did he want to see you about?”

  “Ah! That’s part of the problem, isn’t it?”

  “One of these days, sooner or later,” Jeff observed broadly, “some straight question is going to get a straight answer. Even my esteemed uncle has begun to loosen up. Why can’t our esteemed magazine writer loosen up too?”

  “Oh?”

  Jeff caught and held Saylor’s eye.

  “As you yourself remarked at the front door yesterday evening,” he continued, “Detective Lieutenant Minnoch has been on your trail since Sunday. At the Jung Hotel he found that on Saturday night you’d asked your way to the pier of the Grand Bayou Line. Uncle Gil said you were probably in search of Captain Josh Galway, and that something in the evidence indicated you must have been in search of him.

  “Well, that’s just what you’d done. Saturday night, at first not finding Captain Josh aboard the Bayou Queen, you sat down and talked with the purser. Then Captain Josh turned up, so you went into very hush-hush conference with him. Later both you and the captain said you hadn’t talked about anything important. But Harry Minnoch wouldn’t buy that explanation, and neither will my uncle. What did you and the captain talk about?”

  Impressively Saylor rose to his feet.

  “Since District Attorney Bethune has been playing detective,” he commented, “it might have occurred to him that I was playing detective too.”

  “It has occurred to him, as I’ve just explained. Now don’t confine your answers to sibylline comments like, ‘Oh!’ and ‘Ah!’ On what subject were you questioning Captain Josh Galway?”

  Still on his feet, Saylor regarded them with an air of persuasive frankness.

  “All right!” he said. “All right! I never intended to fool you or confuse you or sound like the Delphic oracle; I meant to speak my piece when the time came. I’ve been leading up to it gradually, that’s all.

  “First, though, forget that hot air I talked aboard the steamboat: killer staircases, bodies in a secret hiding place, guff like that. It was only a little play of the imagination, and didn’t mean a thing. I never really expected there’d be a crime, still less any danger to Serena Hobart.

  “But I wasn’t very bright, it must be confessed. There were several little things I ought to have noticed last week. And yet we’d reached New Orleans before I suddenly realized what they meant, what they had to mean. Didn’t it ever strike you that somebody in our party on the Bayou Queen was behaving rather strangely?”

  Penny Lynn spoke for the first time in many minutes.

  “Oh, now—!” she began in a voice of protest.

  Facing Jeff across the table, Penny wore the same costume—orange-colored sweater, skirt of light-brown tweed—she had worn after their strange reunion on Tuesday just a week ago. There was another similarity too. In the turn of her eyes, in every shade of expression, Jeff could sense a return of that eagerly receptive mood which on him acted like strong drink. Through the skylight in the roof a stray beam of sunlight caught glints in yellow-brown hair.

  “Do you object to something. Penny?” he asked. “If so, you’ve got every right to object. From one person after another we’ve heard little but vague talk about somebody behaving guiltily …”

  Up went Saylor’s forefinger, admonishing him.

  “I didn’t say ‘guiltily,’ remember!” Saylor corrected. “I didn’t say ‘guiltily’ at all; I said ‘strangely,’
and I stick to it. The things I saw, and you saw too but didn’t seem to notice, have nothing to do with anybody’s guilt. They’re not vague either; they fit together. I don’t claim to be Old Sleuth himself, but they do fit together and they do start the explanation. They even explain why Captain Josh, as that boat docked, stamped past Serena groaning, ‘How many of ’em? Dear God in heaven, how many of ’em?’”

  “Mr. Saylor,” Jeff queried, “how do you know Captain Josh said that? You weren’t there when Serena heard him say it.”

  “Somebody told me afterwards, I guess. Anyway …”

  “Anyway,” interposed Dave, hammering on the table with the handle of a fork, “what difference does it make and why are we arguing? Somebody’s behind this; somebody’s guilty; that’s the one we’re after. You got us here because you said you had something very important to tell us, but we haven’t heard it yet. What’s the good of fancy talk if it proves innocence rather than guilt?”

  Saylor teetered back and forth on his heels.

  “Ah,” he said wisely, “but relatively innocent behavior on the part of one person may lead straight to someone else who’s actually guilty. Now I must correct you, Dave. I said I might have something very important to communicate. At that time I couldn’t be more definite; I hadn’t yet tested my ideas on District Attorney Bethune. But I’ve tested ’em and I’m sure. As a matter of fact, friends and guests, it was an innocent suggestion, innocently made, that showed me the direction in which we’ve got to look. Shall I tell you about it?”

  “Well, at least,” Dave almost yelled, “you might tell us something.”

  Few still lingered over lunch at Henri’s; they had the big room almost to themselves. In leisurely fashion Saylor lighted a cigarette, blew out smoke, and stared into the middle distance.

  “If I remember correctly,” he addressed them all, “it was a week ago today, in the Old South Lounge of the Bayou Queen, that Dave told us he’d made a special trip north to see Malcolm Townsend, the investigator of old houses, and that Townsend had promised to be in New Orleans for the week-end.”