Staircase 4

by Helen Reilly

  Alone in her apartment after the Inspector had gone, Gabrielle set about the task of putting the wrecked living-room straight. This attack was the worst. She felt soiled, unclean, after the tussle with the District Attorney. Bad luck that he had found out about the seven thousand dollars of her own she had given Tony Van Ness six months ago. If she hadn’t given it to Tony, he would have gone to jail. It was a miserable, sordid business. He had raised a check, clumsily, in an attempt to cover his losses. The forgery had been discovered. Only Gabrielle’s intercession and her seven thousand had let him escape with a whole skin. To tell the truth about it would be to crush Susan.

  Gabrielle had cleared away the worst of the disorder when John Muir arrived. He stood still in the living-room doorway and looked around. “Good God! What—?” Gabrielle told him. She had never seen him so angry. His anger was almost frightening. “Someone is going to pay for this, plenty. Oh, yes. Framing you! A short circuit—what’s easier to arrange than a short circuit? Bait the trap and then spring it.” He walked the floor like a tiger hungry for food. He questioned her exhaustively, grew livid and very quiet at the revelation of the water running in the bathroom, the radio turned on, the teacup upside-down last week.

  It was a comfort to have him there. His glance was gentle when it touched her, his concern was warming. Gabrielle said she had seen no one loitering around the building and nothing suspicious, except the strange cab man who she thought had followed her to Greenfield.

  She wiped smudges from her hands with a crumpled handkerchief. “I’m inclined to think now he was a detective, John. The police have a lot of information about my movements, seem to know where I’ve been, and what I’ve been doing.”

  He was bleakly furious. “And the pills were removed from under their noses up there in your room at Susan’s. The police! Damn the police.”

  They discussed the anonymous letter to the District Attorney and who could have sent it. John said, “It is whoever’s at the bottom of this whole business.”

  “Yes.” Gabrielle hesitated, but he’d better know. “The District Attorney asked me again about the man mentioned in the letter as having been here on the afternoon of the day Mark died.”

  “And you said—?” John looked at her over the flame of his lighter.

  Gabrielle shrugged. “I repeated what I told his bright young assistant, Simpson, this morning. I said there was no one here.”

  John thought that over frowningly. “I don’t see what my visit could have to do with Mark’s murder.”

  Gabrielle didn’t either, except… “It’s just that they think I was in love with another man, and that Mark found out.”

  John wheeled on her.

  “Were you? Are you?”

  The demand was abrupt. Gabrielle was already bruised and sore. His roughness startled her, and his lack of faith was a shock. Once, in another life, she had loved him. That was over and done with, but there had never been anyone else. If John chose to believe there was, and he seemed very ready to, let him.

  He crossed the floor, towered over her. His hands, were on her shoulders. They had been there before on one occasion, but not like this.

  “Please.” She tried to twist away from him.

  His grip tightened. “Answer me, Gabrielle.”

  “Of course there was no other man.” To say it was a humiliation. She thought, I’ll never forgive him for this.

  “Then why did the police think there was another man? They don’t dream these things up.”

  She wrenched out from under his grasp. “It wasn’t the police, it was the District Attorney.” Her words were icicles.

  “Same thing.”

  If she told him about Tony Van Ness and the seven thousand he would go to Dwyer and Susan would find out about the forged check. Pictures of Susan, doing her housework, the tip of a pink tongue between her parted lips, going to the Yale prom with Blake Evans in a white tulle dress… No, she couldn’t do it

  “The District Attorney decided there was another man because of that anonymous letter. Someone must have come here that day while you were here. The bell was out of order. Whoever rang and didn’t get any answer heard us talking in here—heard a man’s voice.”

  She was exhausted, drained, and deeply angry at his insistence, didn’t know whether he believed her or not, scarcely cared.

  “Could be.” He nodded thoughtfully. “It must have been someone you knew, who came with a gift, or to talk about the wedding.”

  Someone she knew. She had been fighting that for days. “Yes. I suppose so… I’m tired, John.”

  “What…? Oh, no wonder.” He roused himself from inner brooding, left in a few minutes after vainly trying to get her to go to a hotel to sleep. “You’re not safe here, with these locks.” She said, “I’ll bolt the kitchen door and put the chain on the front door.”

  He wanted to hear the chain going on. She went with him into the foyer. At the door he stood still and looked down at her. Gabrielle looked up at him. Her heart began to race, and there was a hollow under her midriff. His face, his eyes and mouth, were different. The hardness was gone out of him, the detachment, aloofness. Gabrielle’s anger died. They were close, there was no separation between them. This was the John Muir she had once known, had once loved. Had loved?

  He took her hands. “Gabrielle…” His voice was gentle.

  The ice began to fall away from Gabrielle’s heart, the tensions that had built up since Mark’s death to release their hold. She kept on looking at him, and waiting.

  There wasn’t any more.

  John dropped her hands and turned. He opened the door and went out. The door closed. From the other side of it he said, “Put the chain on,” and when she did: “Good night, Gabrielle.”

  “Good night, John.”

  Gabrielle remained where she was in the little hall, listening to his footsteps recede down the stairs. John loved her, and she loved him. She had seen it in his eyes, in the way he looked at her. He didn’t need to put it into words, nor did she. The time for that hadn’t yet come. When all this was over, when the round man had been found and the truth about Mark’s death revealed, then… She went to bed and slept profoundly, woke rested and with a sense of well-being that even an avalanche of telephone calls couldn’t disturb.

  The news of the finding of the three thousand-dollar bills in her apartment was out. As one of the executors, Phil Bond had it first. Phil was portentous, grave, thought she ought to have someone to look after her interests. Tyrell called, and Alice, and later Susan called from Greenfield and after that, surprisingly, Blake Evans. They were all outraged, took her innocence for granted I without question. Blake Evans agreed with Phil Bond.

  He said awkwardly, “I was with Claire last night when the District Attorney came to talk to Joanna. I’d—if I were you I’d get a lawyer to see I wasn’t pushed around, Gabrielle. That Dwyer’s a damn fool.”

  Joanna Middleton, who disliked her; was it Joanna who had been outside her door on that August afternoon, Joanna who had sent the anonymous letter to the District Attorney?

  Gabrielle thanked Blake, refused to go to Alice’s to stay, wouldn’t let Susan come down to New York. Then the superintendent of Mark’s apartment called. The lease of the apartment had been terminated by mutual agreement between the executors and the landlord. Mr. Middleton’s effects were to go into storage the following day. What did Miss Conant want done with the things that belonged to her, the pictures and books and ornaments in the upstairs room?

  Gabrielle didn’t want anything done with them. She couldn’t leave them there. Ticket them and have them brought back to her own place and pack them away out of sight; she went to the apartment on Central Park West that afternoon. To walk into the building was difficult. Upstairs in the softly lighted corridor it was still more difficult to unlock the front door with the key Mark had given her. She opened the door. The hinge creaked when she closed it behind her, recreating the smell of cordite, the echo of a shot, Mark lying on
the study floor with blood welling.

  Grayness filtering through the living-room windows, darkness was beginning to come down outside, silence, dead air, a faint film of dust on everything. Mark’s housekeeper, Mrs. Pendleton, had long since gotten another job and only the executors had come here since Mark had been lifted to the stretcher and carried away. Gabrielle swallowed in a stiff throat, turned her back on the study, started for the stairs, and stood still. The door of the closet under the stairs was wide open.

  She walked over to it. Clothes of Mark’s, three or four coats, were lying in a heap on the floor as though they had been hastily flung down. The pockets of a chesterfield were inside out. Gabrielle was standing there, her back to the foyer, staring down at the inside-out pockets when it happened. A hand between her shoulder blades thrust her sharply forward and she went to her knees in blackness on top of the piled coats. Behind her the closet door slammed and a key turned, locking her in.

  Chapter Ten: Shadows of doubt

  POUND. Call out. Rest a minute, and think. What good did thinking do, or pounding, either? Someone in the apartment when she got there and who didn’t want to be seen or identified, had locked her in the closet. Whoever it was was far away by now. The prospect of immediate release was dim. No one knew where she was. The moving men would arrive tomorrow morning. But until then—

  The blackness was the worst. It made her dizzy. There was no limit to it. The door fitted tightly into the frame. If only there was one thin line of light. How much air was there in the cubicle? She had always hated confining spaces. Claustrophobic terror got its claws into her. Without her intending it her fists were battering again on the panels, fiercely, insistently.

  So suddenly that she almost fell forward on her face, the key turned and the door was jerked wide. Light. Escape. Gabrielle opened her mouth, drew a gulp of air into her lungs, and stared whitely at Tyrell Amory, knob in hand, staring whitely at her.

  “Gabrielle!—Good Lord!”

  Gabrielle told him about it, in a chair in the living-room, with all the lights on.

  Tyrell was stunned. “Thank God I came when I did. I almost didn’t come.” He wiped his forehead with his handkerchief. “I heard the pounding when I opened the front door, but not when I was outside. Who was it, Gabrielle?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You didn’t hear anyone—see anything?”

  “No.” There was a smudge of dust on Tyrell’s right cuff. There was dust all over the apartment. If Tyrell had come straight from the front door to the closet, how had dust gotten on his cuff? Oh, silly. He could have gotten it anywhere. She was losing her sense of values. Tyrell was her friend, he had been a friend of Mark’s, he was a man of probity, a scientist with an established position, happily married and with everything in the world he wanted, his laboratory, and Alice. To imagine him in connection with chicanery and deceit and subterfuge and lies and—she was mad.

  Return to the problem. Who had been searching the apartment, and why? For it had been searched, pretty thoroughly; she and Tyrell went over it together. Mark’s bedroom had been ransacked. Drawers had been pulled out, pushed in crookedly. Books and periodicals were in scattered heaps and the closet and the clothes in it were in wild disorder.

  “But why?” Gabrielle said helplessly. “There couldn’t be anything undiscovered here—anything important. The police practically took this place to pieces after Mark died, and since then Phil Bond has been through Mark’s records, papers.” Tyrell agreed. He had come to get some books he had lent Mark, first editions, and they discussed the search while he helped her ticket her own things in the room upstairs, without getting anywhere. But Tyrell wasn’t being frank with her. He was concealing something. Gabrielle taxed him with it. “Tyrell, what is it? What are you thinking—and not saying?”

  He stared at her, reddening, turned away. Hands in his pockets, jaw set, gazing at nothing, he said explosively, “Damn it all, Gabrielle—I still don’t think Mark’s death was murder.”

  Gabrielle was astonished. “No? Then what about those three thousand-dollar bills that were found in the base of my lamp?”

  He gave his cockatoo flaxen crest a shake, as though he were trying to get rid of a hornet. “I know. They were put there, but—” He hesitated and went on doggedly: “Did it ever occur to you that—there might have been another woman?”

  Gabrielle’s eyes widened. Her astonishment grew. “You mean Mark—that he was mixed up with some woman and gave her eighty thousand dollars? And that, to remove suspicion from herself and throw it on me, those bills were planted in my living-room?”

  For a man schooled to clear thought and exactness Tyrell was being peculiarly muddle-headed.

  “I don’t know… Maybe I’m wrong, maybe you’re right, but I still—”

  “You still think Mark killed himself?”

  Tyrell was wretched but firm.

  “I—yes.”

  According to Alice, once he got hold of an idea he was immovably obstinate. Gabrielle said coldly, “Well, it’s a free country and you’re entitled to your own opinion.”

  He was honestly disturbed, loathed hurting her. “I hate to be like this, but…”

  Gabrielle stopped listening. They were standing near the open door. The whine of the front door drifted up. Someone had just come in. She went to the rail of the gallery, looked down. It was Joanna Middleton.

  A figure in black caracul that managed to have about it something of majesty, and mourning, Joanna moved diagonally across the floor to a heavy pseudo medieval table-desk at the far end of the living-room. Back turned, she started to pull out the drawer. Gabrielle said, “Hello,” and at the sound of her voice Joanna gave the drawer a quick shove with her hip, put down her gloves and purse as though that was what she had gone to the table to do, and turned.

  She looked up. Her pale face was blank. Had there been fear in it, and a flicker of hatred? She said, “Oh—Gabrielle. I understand that the apartment’s been rented. I came to get a gold toilet set I left here. I hope you don’t mind my removing my own property?” Her tone was falsely civil, almost arch. There was venom under it.

  Gabrielle said curtly, “Don’t be silly.” Was Joanna trying to be deliberately insulting? There was more to it than that. The gold toilet set was in the spare bedroom that Joanna Middleton used to occupy occasionally when she stayed in town overnight while Mark was alive. It wasn’t in the table drawer.

  Downstairs, when Joanna had gone, Gabrielle looked in the drawer. The little key was in the keyhole but the drawer wasn’t locked. The riding-crop Mark had valued was there, and silver trophies and his war medals, not things Joanna could reasonably have wanted, without asking for them, anyhow. “Here, let me,” Tyrell said. He lifted the heavy drawer out. There was nothing in the aperture behind it.

  “You think Joanna was looking for something, Gabrielle?”

  “That was the impression I had.”

  When they left the apartment a few minutes later Tyrell asked Gabrielle to go home with him. “Alice has been moping a bit lately, she’ll be glad to see you. I think all this, coming up again, has gotten on her nerves. I wish I could take her away, but I’m in the middle of an important experiment.”

  Gabrielle wanted to call John, tell him about the closet and about Joanna; she could do it just as well at the Amorys’ as anywhere else.

  Alice didn’t seem particularly glad to see her, not at first, anyhow. When Tyrell unlocked the door of the sumptuous apartment in the East Sixties Alice was in the foyer. Warmth, light, a stretch of violet broadloom. She was at the telephone, had evidently just come in herself, had on her mink coat and mink tricorne. As they came in she turned her head and Gabrielle had a fleeting impression that she was displeased. She said into the mouthpiece, “Well—thanks very much,” dropped the instrument into its cradle, and stood up.

  “Gabrielle, this is nice!… I thought you were going to Mark’s place, Tyrell?”

  “Did. We just came from there.” Ty
rell kissed her. She moved away from him, impatiently pulling off her hat and running thin jeweled fingers through her dark hair. “Come on into my room, Gabrielle. I just got in myself. Bridge—I’m broke and broken-hearted—I lost a fortune… That dreadful Betty Lawrence, her face-two currants in a stale bun. Mix a drink, will you, Tyrell? I need support.”

  Tyrell was right, Gabrielle thought, listening to her restless flow of chatter. Alice had a drawn expression and there were now lines in her small vivid face. Gabrielle left her in her beautifully appointed bedroom, changing into a hostess gown. Tyrell was in the serving-pantry. There was a phone in his study; call John there. She went through the living-room, across the corridor, opened the study door—and saw him.

  John was on the sofa at the far side of the big dim room. Firelight danced over the walls, the books and pictures, over John’s head and shoulders above the back of the sofa. He wasn’t facing the door, and he wasn’t alone. There was someone on the couch with him. Before Gabrielle could speak or move, white hands reached up and cupped his face and a voice said chidingly, “Stop looking at me like that and stop asking questions. Kiss me, darling, I’m blue today.”

  The woman with John was Brenda Holmes. Neither of them had seen her. Gabrielle stepped soundlessly back into the corridor and pulled the door closed with the most minute care.

  She was saying good-by to Alice and Tyrell in the living-room when John and Brenda sauntered in. They had arrived separately half an hour earlier and the maid had admitted them. There was no sign whatever of the intimacy of the little interlude Gabrielle had witnessed in the study. Friends dropping in on friends; they were all friends together. Before Tyrell could tell them about what had happened in Mark’s apartment, Gabrielle made her escape.