“Of course you do!” Patrick said, for all the world as though everybody adored Uncle George.
Ava smiled. Her fair hair was pulled up high at the back and in front it shaped a loose puff on her forehead. Even when smiling her beautiful dark eyes looked troubled.
She talked her usual patter.
“If I speak up to help Uncle George, my fair name will be sullied, kids. Now, what ought I to do?”
“Nothing, unless you can really help Uncle George, Ava.”
Patrick sounded like somebody’s uncle himself.
Ava thought it over.
“I wonder if I should consult you?” she mused out loud. “Frankly, the aunts don’t trust you two. I guess you know it already. You pal around too much with that police detective.”
Patrick said, “Strictly between ourselves, Ava, the detective picked us to pal with. I don’t think it’s because he likes us. He thinks that Jean knows more than she’s telling and—well, that’s the secret of our fatal attraction for Jonas, I think.”
Ava was listening.
“I shouldn’t wonder if the reason he let you come here so readily just now was because he hoped you’d pick up a few clues, Ava. And he’d then lure them from you.”
Ava frowned, and Patrick said, “Don’t misunderstand me, Ava. He doesn’t suspect us of the worst, only that we’re holding out on him. Evidence, you know.”
I looked hard into my glass, wondering what Patrick was up to.
But was he up to anything?
Jonas was artful. Decidedly. He had nothing on Pat, however.
Maybe Patrick simply hadn’t wanted me to know how tight a spot I’d tumbled into?
He certainly had kept me right under his wing!
Anyway, what he said engendered enough confidence in Ava for her to start opening up. She did like Uncle George.
“I happen to know something that might be a help to Uncle George,” she said again.
Now Patrick tried to stop her. “Better think twice,” he said. “I mean, I wouldn’t want you to think that we had told—if it gets out from some other source....”
“That’s all right, Pat. If I tell you it’s because I mean to tell the police. I just want your opinion as to whether it’s worth it. I’m worried for Uncle George. They’ve been pretty tough on him over there just now, and he’s got a bad heart. Aunt Dollie’s fairly out of her mind.”
“Is that why she didn’t speak to us awhile ago, Ava?”
“Yes. But she’ll get over it. She never stays mad long. I love Aunt Dollie. I know she looks like hell, and twitters, but she’s stayed young, in her ways, I mean. She’s sweet. She adores Uncle George. They’re both tops. It’s a shame they’re poor because they do have such fun with money—which some people in this family don’t! But to get back to Uncle George. He told the truth when he said Victorine left the house last night.”
Patrick said, “Yes?”
“Of course he did. I myself saw her!”
“From your room?” Patrick asked.
“No, darling. I—I happened to be outside. My dears, it’s too unbelievable, but I was outside the house, and I saw her go. And I saw her come back.”
There was a short silence.
Ava laughed mirthlessly. “It’s one of those darn silly coincidences, or something. It happened thus. I was to meet the crowd last night at Toby’s place, and I had got there a little early for some reason and was sitting at a corner table when who should walk in but my kid sister Carol, and right away she started to lay down the law about my behavior, none of her damn business, needless to say. Well, I couldn’t sit and listen to that, so I picked up my drink and ambled over to the bar or rather around to the bar at the far side where Carol couldn’t see me for the crowd. There was a bunch of French sailors over there and they started being galant and Toby eased over and told me to go back to the table with Carol or else go home. He’s awfully particular about my reputation, you know.” Ava said this proudly, girlishly. “Of course, we’re engaged....”
“You are?” I cried out.
“Shush! There I go, telling all. And I don’t dare tell Aunt Dollie, even, for fear she’ll spill it to Aunt Rita, who doesn’t care for Toby so much as she ought, considering...You won’t tell?”
“Of course not.”
Ava went on, “Well, anyway, I was kind of mad, to put it mildly, at Toby for being so respectable, and being already generally mad at Carol, I came home. There wasn’t any place else to go at that hour on Saturday night without asking for trouble....You know, Saturday nights in the Quarter, since the war...”
“Did you come past Jackson Square?” I asked.
Patrick secretly kicked me under the table, too late.
“No. Why should I? It’s out of the way. Anyway, I came home. And I actually went to bed. Later on I decided I was an idiot and I got up, fixed my bed to look as if I were in it, and left the house. Then, well, I was not far from the house when Victorine went out.”
“What time was that, Ava?”
“A little after two.”
“You’re sure it was after?”
“But definitely, Pat.”
“Did you hear Helen Clary fall into the garden? Or the talking afterward?”
“No-o. Maybe it was a little before two. Yes, it was. I remember now. I heard the Cathedral clock strike after I was out on the sidewalk.”
“You went straight to Toby’s place?”
“Well, not exactly. I started walking toward Royal. Then I got cold feet. I knew Toby would be cross all over again if I walked through the Quarter at that hour all alone. When I got to Royal I changed my mind and turned around and started back home. I did that two or three times.”
“Did you see Uncle George at the window?”
“No. He wasn’t there so far as I know when I left the house and of course I didn’t come back as far as the house because I didn’t want the family to spot me hanging around trying to make up my mind. Aunt Rita wouldn’t think I was being ladylike. Anyway, I saw Victorine leave. She crossed the street a few steps along from our house, and she turned right on Royal Street.”
“It’s as short that way as any to where she roomed,” Patrick said.
Ava looked at him as if to ask what possible difference could that make? Then she said, slowly, “Why did she come back?”
No one spoke for a moment.
“Isn’t it odd! It was so peculiar. She evidently walked around the block and came back from the direction of Chartres Street. She kept very close against the wall of the house, acting very peculiar, sort of furtive. She let herself in with her key.”
“Could she have seen Uncle George watching her when she went out?”
“Don’t ask me. I didn’t notice him when I went out. But why would she come back, and in that way? Sort of sly, and peculiar? Well, that’s my story, and I’m telling it to you because I think Victorine killed Helen and then hurt her own head some way and so crawled somewhere and died.”
Patrick was very silent for a moment, and then he said, “But where did she crawl away to?”
Long, pantherish steps sounded outside and Patrick got up to admit Toby Wick from the gallery.
“Ava, Aunt Rita wants you in the dining room,” he said, without so much as a nod to either of us. “Apparently they’re going to take this relic to pieces,” he said, speaking directly to Ava, giving her a long look. To us, “To find out where the nurse hid out these twelve or more hours.”
Ava squirmed, looked at Patrick, said she’d be back and started out. She stopped abruptly. “Why don’t you wait here, Toby? I’ve got to talk to you. If you stay up here I can come back and it won’t look funny, the way it might otherwise. What do you think?”
“Do stick around, Toby,” Patrick said. “I’ll mix you a drink.”
Toby declined the drink, but he agreed to wait and sat down in the chair Ava had vacated.
He seemed nervous. He refused our cigarettes and took out one of his own, his fingers rather fumbli
ng, and the cigarette trembling when he held his lighter to it.
Patrick put out his own cigarette and leaned back in his chair.
“I’m glad to have this chance to talk to you about that crypt,” he said casually. I was puzzled. Toby sat perfectly still. His big soft body was slumped in his chair, his knees crossed. He held the cigarette a little away from his lips. Its smoke went straight up in the hot, still room. His oblique green eyes were glued on Patrick. “Perhaps you call it a vault?” Patrick said.
“You’re talking double-talk,” Toby said.
“I suppose it was originally a vault,” Patrick went on, in the same easy voice. “Your living room was originally an office, Aunt Rita said. No doubt the first Roger Clary had the place built into the walls as a sort of safe for money, papers and such. The device for concealing it was clever—between those mirrors, one in our downstairs hall, the other in the room now your living room.” Toby said nothing, but he resumed smoking. “I’ve been wondering if the mirrors in this house are so numerous because the man who built it had a French passion for mirrors, or because, by having so many, those two which guard the vault would pass without notice.”
Toby waved a hand, letting an ash fall onto the linoleum.
“Excuse me for laughing,” he said.
Patrick put up an eyebrow. “Laughing?”
Toby said, “Aunt Rita thinks that nobody in the whole world knows about that vault except herself. She doesn’t even know I know it’s there. How did you come to find it?”
Patrick said, “That mirror downstairs in our hall is in the wrong place. I was curious—and there you are.”
“When was this?”
That’s what I wondered. Why hadn’t Pat told me?
“Oh, a week or so ago, maybe.”
“You’re smarter than I was,” Toby conceded. “I discovered the vault entirely by accident. I was pulling stuff around getting my place ready for the decorators, and I found out that that big mirror operated on hinges. I had to pick a lock to find that out, though. The place intrigued me, so I let the mirror stay—told Aunt Rita I was crazy about the damned thing. She was too delighted for words when I didn’t ask her to move the mirror. Well, well—so you knew all about it all the time?”
Looking as dead pan as I could, I wondered how much Patrick had been holding out on me, and why.
“It made a perfect place to hide the body, Wick,” Patrick said, softly.
Toby crouched like a cat ready to spring. “Jesus Christ!” he murmured. Then he said, “No?”
Patrick touched his shirt pocket. “As it happened, a chip was cracked off one of the nurse’s blue beads. Maybe there’s something in voodoo, after all.”
I was now staring at Patrick. Was there another blue-bead chip? One left in the vault? Why hadn’t he told me? When had he found out all this?
“No kidding?” Toby’s voice was satiny. “Well, whadda you know?”
Patrick said, “Did you move the body, Wick?”
I was so fascinated by the knifelike green look in Patrick’s eyes that I didn’t notice Toby until a swift, sly movement drew my eyes as to a snake.
He was sitting exactly as he had been, but in his right hand was an automatic pistol. “Get your hands up, Abbott!” he said. He wagged the gun.
Patrick put up his hands. So did I.
“What made you ask me that?” Toby said.
“I wanted to know.”
“Well, it’s not so, see. And don’t you run round giving the police ideas. They’re against me to start with.”
“I see.”
“I don’t like the way you say that,” Toby said. He moved the gun so that it pointed at me instead of Patrick. But he watched Patrick. I began to shake.
Then, so fast that it was like a flash, Patrick ducked, pushed the table hard with his left shoulder so that it tilted up between me and Toby Wick, leaped, and one fist caught Toby under the chin with an upward jab as the other hand clenched on the wrist holding the gun.
The gun plopped on the linoleum. I bent down and picked it up, scared to death that the thing might go off as I held it in my hand, only long enough though for Patrick to take it.
Toby sat up on the floor and rubbed at his face.
“Give me a break, pal,” he whined. “I can explain. For Christ’s sake, don’t squawk to that wolf of a Jonas. I can explain everything. Give me a chance, pal, I wasn’t going to shoot....”
He stopped talking, because ear-rending screams rang out from the other wing, their shrillness and volume increasing in an appalling crescendo as the woman who screamed ran out into the courtyard.
XV
HIS GREAT face livid, his huge body in a fresh pongee suit, his feet limp in their polished handmade shoes, with a Charvet tie under his double chins and a Paris-monogrammed handkerchief peeping from one sleeve—thus lay Uncle George on one of the two antique beds in the big front room on the main floor under the drawing room.
This room had once been the day nursery for Clary children and, while its furnishings were in no sense inferior to those in other parts of the house—except the drawing room—it nevertheless had a haphazard, poorly cared for look. But this was because the Sears’ bags and trunks and belongings were about, as though they had just arrived or were about to depart. They had always been like that—Carol told us later on. Aunt Dollie and Uncle George were really visitors in their hearts, always half unpacked, always halfway ready to return to Paris.
Now Uncle George would never see Paris again. His heart had failed him.
“It’s my fault,” Aunt Dollie was weeping, when we arrived in the room. She was leaning on Carol’s shoulder. “I shouldn’t’ve told him.” Her voice wasn’t stylish just then. It sounded suddenly soft and small, like Aunt Rita’s, though not so polished and clear.
It had been Aunt Dollie who did the screaming which brought us here.
We had run down by way of the winding stairs, risking our own lives probably, moving too fast to bother with the railing. The air was cooling, but we didn’t notice. The sky hung black and glowering. On the vines the leaves stirred and lifted. But we didn’t notice this as we ran across the flagstones. We didn’t even notice that Toby, slowing his pace to a walk, went out the front door—at least, I didn’t notice it—when we followed Aunt Dollie, Carol Graham, Roger Clary and three policemen into that front room.
It was the room flanking the sidewalk, across the carriageway from Toby’s living room. At one of those tall windows Uncle George had sat peeping out in the street. There the curtains had moved and flowed back together last night when Patrick and I came in. There those little blue eyes had seen the nurse leave the house—and had not seen her come back!
Had he really not seen her come back? Or was he concealing this bit of evidence for his own personal use? Five hundred’s nothing to you now, Roger, he had said, or words to that effect. Now he was dead.
And Roger was beside him, closing his jaw, snatching a mirror from the bureau to hold over Uncle George’s lips, sending Carol for his medicine case. “Bring them both,” he ordered, in a clear, professional tone.
Carol came back at once with the surgical and medicine bags.
“Is he really dead?” Jonas asked, as Roger bent with his stethoscope over Uncle George’s motionless chest.
“Be quiet, please!” Roger snapped, his nerves still on edge. The Captain of Detectives obeyed him.
We waited, clustered inside one of the two doors from the hall, half the length of the big room from the bed, silent, while Roger explored and listened for some evidence of life lingering in poor Uncle George.
The two beds were the same sort as ours, wide mahogany beds with footboards that came up only as high as the deep mattress, with soaring testers supported at the heads by massive posts. A door between the beds led into a modern bath, installed—we learned later—specially for Uncle George because he could not climb stairs.
Uncle George had been tidy, I imagined, seeing none of his clothes lying about
, and many of Aunt Dollie’s. Her bright frocks and housecoats draped chairs and trunk tops. Her powder and rouge stood looking naked with the lids off on top of the marble-topped bureau. Her comb and brush sprawled where last dropped. The bathroom, I knew, would be disfigured by hot-water bags and such.
Aunt Dollie herself stood with her hands and face working spasmodically while Roger listened for some sign of Uncle George’s heart. Carol stood guarding her, her face twisted with sympathy. Ava did not come down until later. Aunt Rita was not present either, which was odd, because of her habit of sailing in and taking charge in time of trouble. The colored people waited just outside in the hall. Captain Jonas and Sergeant Callahan remained in the room and managed to keep between us and the bed.
Roger injected a heart stimulant in one of Uncle George’s arms and said, “Get Dr. Lamont, will you, Carol?”
“Who’s Dr. Lamont?” Jonas asked.
“The family doctor,” Roger said, resuming his listening to Uncle George’s heart.
“Find out his number and call him yourself, Callahan,” Jonas said. That was because he didn’t trust Carol.
Carol whispered the number, and the sergeant left the room.
“It’s my fault!” Aunt Dollie burst out. “I shouldn’t have told him right out like that about the five thousand dollars.”
“What’s that?” Jonas cut in.
“Shush!” Roger said, from the bedside. “I’ve got to have quiet. Get them out of this room, Jonas!”
Callahan returned just then and said to Jonas that Dr. Lamont was not at home. “Get Postgate, if he’ll come,” Roger said. “He’s in the next block. You’ll want another opinion than mine,” he added, satirically, to Captain Jonas. “And now, get out!”
Oh, dear, why couldn’t Roger be nice? Always, ever since this happened, he’d kept irritating people.
The Indigo Necklace Page 14
