by Zenith Brown
“When did you finish dinner, Courtney?” Colonel Primrose asked.
“We didn’t have dinner,” she answered calmly. “After the kitten episode Mr. Durbin was extremely upset. He called Flowers and cancelled dinner, and told him to bring sandwiches and Scotch and soda to the library. He told me to go upstairs and soak my hands in hot water. I was afraid they were broken, but he didn’t want a doctor called. One of the men—Mr. Skagerlund—tried to insist.”
She shrugged her shoulders.
“Mr. Durbin wasn’t in a state of mind anyone could . . . disregard. They went to the library and I went upstairs. The maid helped me undress, and taped my hands. That’s all I can tell you. I didn’t hear any disturbance down here, not until you people came. I was packing a bag then to leave. The reason—one reason—I was glad to see you was I thought Mr. Durbin would probably make it difficult if he knew I was leaving.”
“What about your guests——”
“Mr. Skagerlund and Mr. Austin?”
She shook her head.
“I never met them till this evening. They were friends—or associates—of Mr. Durbin. I don’t know anything about them. Mr. Skagerlund was very kind to me this evening . . . or tried to be. He didn’t seem as afraid of Mr. Durbin as the other one.”
Colonel Primrose was looking at her very intently.
“When did they leave, Courtney?”
Her voice was as calm and casual as his.
“I didn’t know they had. I thought they were still there when Mr. Blodgett went in.”
If I hadn’t known she wasn’t telling the truth just then I would never have suspected it. And I knew she wasn’t because of the four black discs on the phonograph open over by the window . . . for she would never have been in the agony of despair she’d been in, suddenly remembering the recording machine, if the only people whose voices might be heard on it were two men she’d never seen until seven o’clock that evening. There are few things you can say with certainty in times like these, but that was definitely one of them. What she said sounded so true, however, that it made me wonder how much of anything else she’d said had been so.
“Then you saw him last——?”
“About twenty minutes to eight, when I went upstairs.”
“And you didn’t hear anyone come in or go, or any disturbance in the library?”
She shook her head. “That doesn’t mean anything, however, as far as the library’s concerned. It’s insulated and practically soundproof. I didn’t hear anyone at the door at all, before you came. Flowers may have.”
“Is there a bell?”
She pointed to it at the side of the mantel. Colonel Primrose pressed it.
“When did it . . . happen?” she asked quietly. “Do you know?”
There was a moment’s silence.
“That . . . is one of the questions,” Inspector Bigges said.
Flowers must have been hovering very close to the back stairs, or come very fast. He was in the doorway, and he was not looking himself at all. His face had lost its high ebony gloss as if someone had dusted it with putty-colored flour. And a second dependable truth was clearly established, I thought, as he came in—or a second and a third truth. One was that he had not known when we came that D. J. Durbin was dead. The other was that he did now. That knowledge had shattered his dignified elegance like a bombshell on the fancy front of a jerry-built palace of fun. Flowers was reduced to original stem and bud. The bloom was gone, and with it, oddly enough, all the polysyllabic vocabulary.
14
“Tell Colonel Primrose anything you can, Flowers,” Courtney said. “And don’t be alarmed.”
“I ain’t alarmed, miss, I’m just plain scared,” he said. “All them police downstairs . . .”
“They won’t hurt you,” Colonel Primrose said quietly. “When did you take the sandwiches to the library?”
“Eight o’clock on the dot, Colonel, sir. And that was the last time I saw Mr. Durbin, the very last time. He told me to get the hell out and downstairs and stay till he rung, and he ain’t never rung. I didn’t come out of the cellar till you kep’ on ringin’ the doorbell, and I thought he’d be out and raisin’ cain, which is why I come up then.”
“No one else came?”
“No, sir.”
“When did the two gentlemen leave?”
“I don’t know is they left,” Flowers said emphatically. “I didn’t hear nobody come, or nobody go. And that’s the truth, Colonel, sir.”
“What about the other servants——”
“There ain’t no other servants, sir. They left, and they’re not coming back. The cook put the dinner in the icebox and went home. The maid and Mis’ Durbin’s maid left right afterwards. They say they don’ use to work for crazy people.”
Courtney shrugged her shoulders.
“You can’t blame them.”
She got up slowly and stood there for a moment.
“If you don’t mind, I’d like to go to bed,” she said. “I’m very tired. In the morning I’ll talk to you again, but now I’m tired.—Mr. Durbin’s life was something I knew almost nothing about. He never discussed his business, or his family. . . . May I go now?”
I don’t mean to sound as feline as I know I must, and it isn’t feline, actually, as much as it’s just a sound crimino-sociological observation, in view of the next few minutes. But Courtney Durbin all but had Colonel Primrose and Inspector Bigges making a rose-garlanded litter to bear her up the stairs. There was something so fragile and intangibly wistful in her appeal. It was so without artifice. She was tired, which was no doubt true, but the impression was she’d stay there till she dropped if they really wanted her to, which I’d have bet practically everything wasn’t true. Only a brute could have said, “Hold everything, lady. You wait till we’re through with you.” She looked so ingenuous and so entirely in their hands, without laying on one thousandth of an inch more than the traffic would bear.
The men had got to their feet.
“Sure, you ought to try to get some rest,” Inspector Bigges said hastily, because it was he she was looking at. He looked as if he felt like a dirty dog, keeping her there that long.
She took a step or two toward the door, and then, as if it had just occurred to her, she turned back, glancing at Colonel Primrose.
“It wouldn’t disturb anyone if I turned on the victrola upstairs, would it?” she asked.
She went over to the open phonograph, picked up the records on the turntable as if she’d been playing them before all this, and started back to the door. There wasn’t the slightest change in the delicate drooping line of her body or in the tempo of her movements. I sat there in a plain dither of suspense, feeling like a dirty dog myself, and with reason. It was a filthy trick I was playing on Colonel Primrose, who’s a much better friend of mine than Courtney is. I had a definite idea, however, that he’d stop her and take the records away. I’ve got so used to his absolute omniscience. And when he moved a few steps in front of her to the door, I knew it was functioning. I was sorry in a way, because I knew the agony that was going on inside her.
She had about ten feet to go. It seemed a hundred to me, and I knew it seemed a hundred times that to her. I tried hard to breathe normally. And finally she was there. She held out her hand, then remembered and let it fall to her side.
“Good night, Colonel,” she said. “Thank you for being here.”
She turned to us.
“Good night, Grace. If you wouldn’t mind staying all night, the blue room’s ready, and I have anything you need Good night, Mr. Blodgett . . . Inspector.”
I thought for a moment that Colonel Primrose was looking at the black discs under her arm, and that he was going to stop her. But he didn’t; he just held the door open for her to go out. I could hear her steps on the stairs. The impulse to break and run like mad must have been intolerable, but she kept going more slowly, as if the physical effort of the long pull up was a little more than she finally had strength for. I
t was as perfect as it could possibly have been.
I didn’t realize that I’d been holding my breath until I had to let it out again. It sounded to me like steam escaping from a pressure valve in an overheated laundry. But that was because the rest of them were so silent.
Colonel Primrose came back to us.
“She ought to have a doctor look at those hands,” Inspector Bigges said practically. “It’s a damned shame. I don’t wonder she’s getting out. I wouldn’t blame her much if she’d . . .”
He came to a full stop, looking at Colonel Primrose with the most extraordinary expression on his face.
I’ve heard a lot of detectives say they didn’t know what it was, but just something seemed to tell them. They never call it intuition, it’s just something.
Surprise, doubt and deadly suspicion were dawning on Inspector Bigges’s face like a tropical sunrise bang up over the eastern horizon. He shook his head as if coming out from under the influence of a spell, which I imagine is in fact just what he was doing, and got slowly to his feet.
“Say, Colonel . . .”
Colonel Primrose was looking at him gravely.
“I know,” he said. He shot a disturbed and mistrusting glance at me. “I don’t like it either. I think it’s time we had a look around this place. We should have done it before, I expect.”
He looked at me again, and raised his head, listening. From upstairs came the moving strains of Tschaikowsky’s Sixth Symphony, barely audible, as if her door were closed.
He glanced across the hall, went to the library door and opened it. Then he turned back.
“I’d like you to have a look here, Mrs. Latham.”
I thought at first he was being kind because he knew I was like the Spartan lad with the fox, my vitals being devoured by curiosity. But I made a mistake. That wasn’t it, or anywhere near it.
I knew before I went in that D. J. Durbin would be gone, but I wasn’t prepared for the rest of it. The room was as large as the drawing room, mahogany panelled, with a thick Persian rug on the floor, heavy dark green curtains pulled over the long windows at the front, and not a breath of air stirring anywhere, not even through the open windows onto the terrace. I knew all that, and knew the two inside walls were lined with books—sets, mostly, quite new—and that his broad-topped mahogany desk was in the middle of the floor, facing the Grinling Gibbons reproduction fireplace and carved overmantel. What I didn’t expect to see were the panels on either side of the fireplace open and revealing filing cabinets I didn’t know were there, and the two leather chairs that had been drawn up between the fireplace and the desk and pushed back again, one of them so violently it had knocked over the Jacobean chair behind it.
By each chair was a small table, on it a plate, a linen napkin and a highball glass. The highball glasses were still full, the napkins untouched. Each plate had a sandwich on it, and only one sandwich had a bite out of it. The bread was curled up, the lettuce drooping unattractively around the edges. On the desk was a large silver plate with more sandwiches, and a decanter and syphon.
Also on the desk, in front of D. J. Durbin’s chair, was a plate with another untouched sandwich, and a highball glass lying on its side on a large completely soggy dark green blotting pad. Mr. Durbin’s stick was there too. It lay broken in half on the desk, the ink from the crystal stand there dried, bronze-edged, where it had slopped over onto it.
Even without D. J. Durbin sitting in that chair, strangled, they’d said, so that his tongue must have protruded horribly, and his eyes too, I still found myself stopping short in the door, the way Horace Blodgett and Colonel Primrose had done. It was a mute but living picture of three men who had started out with at least an appearance of amicability, and had ended with murderous violence. I saw at once why neither Inspector Bigges nor Colonel Primrose had been as on guard with Courtney as they might under other circumstances have been.
I think the three men standing just behind me all started, as I did, when the phone on the desk buzzed sharply, like something hidden and alive speaking out in a place of the dead.
Inspector Bigges pushed past me and picked it up before it had time to ring again.
“Hello,” he said. “Speaking.”
He nodded to Colonel Primrose as if it were a tall they’d been expecting.
“You’ve checked everywhere?”
After that it was a series of monosyllables, mostly yeses, the frown on his face etching itself deeper with each one.
“The hell you say,” he said at last. “Give it everything you’ve got.”
He put the phone down and turned around. I had the unpleasant feeling that my presence was a definite repressive, because usually when there’s that light in a man’s eye there are words on his tongue to match it.
“Blown,” he said. “Both of ’em. The boys got there in five minutes, and hung around both entrances for half an hour before they went inside. The lady says they left at a quarter to seven and haven’t been back.”
I knew of course he must mean the two men who’d been in this room, and when I looked at Colonel Primrose he nodded without saying anything.
“—They’ve checked the airport and they’re working on the station.”
Colonel Primrose looked at his watch. “It’s not late. They may show up.”
Inspector Bigges shook his head. “The lady said one of them called up the maid and asked her to bring their briefcases down to the Garfield Hotel. That was around quarter past nine. The maid hasn’t come back and she’s not at her cousin’s house. They haven’t been able to get hold of the doorman who was on duty at the Garfield. It’s my guess they’ve cleared out, Colonel.”
His gaze moved past us to Horace Blodgett.
“If Mr. Blodgett would loosen up a little about who those men are . . .” he began deliberately.
I thought Colonel Primrose hesitated for a moment before he spoke, but Horace said nothing.
“Cass Crane, I expect, is the man who can tell us more about them. In fact——”
Inspector Bigges nodded grimly as he interrupted.
“—In fact, Cass Crane can tell us more about lots of things. He can tell us a better story about what happened to that little driver. Cass Crane or somebody else. That story won’t wash any longer, Colonel.”
I caught my breath. It may not sound very bright, but for some reason I can’t fully explain I hadn’t until that very moment connected the murder of Achille, in the slightest degree, with the violent death that had taken place in the room we were standing in, not two hours before. It may be that when Colonel Primrose said they were going to arrest D. J. Durbin for the little man’s murder, that had finished that for me. I’d never known him to be wrong, and never known him to take a final action unless his case was proved.
“—Throws the whole stinking business right back where it began,” Inspector Bigges said morosely.
What the implications were, and how staggering they were, I realized as they took form slowly out of the complete fog my mind seemed to be in. It wasn’t so much that it was all back where it had begun as that where it had begun was the little white house in Beall Street.
“And I’d like to know who sent that kitten,” Inspector Bigges added. “That’s a screwball trick, if we were looking for one.”
Randy Fleming had called Mr. Sondauer a screwball . . . that flashed into my mind, bringing a momentary small ray of what looked like light. I glanced quickly at Colonel Primrose, but he shook his head, so I kept still. I couldn’t understand him. I’d never seen him so silent, and so willing, apparently, to let somebody else take the full burden of an investigation.
Inspector Bigges stood there chewing one corner of his lower lip, intent on something going on in his own mind. He came back to the door, looked over toward the staircase for a moment and turned back to Colonel Primrose.
“There’s one thing I’ve always found it didn’t pay to overlook, Colonel,” he said speculatively. “I don’t know as it comes in here. But . . .
she’s a damned attractive woman.”
He nodded toward the upper stairs. Then he turned and glanced at D. J. Durbin’s desk.
“Because of what’s happened here, she’s free to marry somebody else . . . if she happens to want to marry somebody else. Free as air, Colonel . . . and with a wad of dough. And I mean a wad.”
Colonel Primrose was looking intently at me, a curious ghost of a smile in his black eyes. I knew at once that he’d thought of that already, and that he knew I hadn’t. And I knew that without saying it he was putting a choice of loyalties up to me. Molly Crane, or Courtney Durbin.
“Yes,” he said quietly. “You’re quite right. It doesn’t pay to overlook it. She’s a very attractive woman, and she’ll probably be a very wealthy one. It’s . . . apt to be a winning combination.”
I thought of Molly playing checkers on the floor at the Abbotts’, and Randy Fleming picking the hair from her paint brush out of the uneven blob of paint on the living room mantelpiece . . .
Inspector Bigges nodded.
“She’s got everything it takes. It looks to me as if somebody sure did her a favor.”
His eyes met Colonel Primrose’s.
“This fellow Crane, now. I’d like to know what he was doing tonight . . .”
He stopped short as the front door opened and shut. A uniformed policeman came down the hall.
“A couple of guys out here want to know if they can come in, Inspector. They say they’re friends of the Colonel’s.”
“Who are they?”
“One’s named Crane and the other’s some kind of a foreigner. Sounds like ‘Sing,’ or something.”
“Sure, let ’em in,” Inspector Bigges said genially. “Glad to see ’em.”
His glance as he turned and looked at Colonel Primrose was what Flowers before his bloom was gone would have called full of signification.
