Twice already, that day (when I was out of the room) he’d tried to walk-once getting as far as the linen room again and the second time halfway down the stairs where he was found sitting, dizzily clinging to the bannisters, by one of the troopers and brought back.
The third time, late in the afternoon, with still no news, he sent me on a pretext to the kitchen, and this time he got as far as trousers and a sweater, and the fireplace bench of the lower hall. I found him there myself grimly upright, clinging to the bench with his eyes shut as if the room was going around him.
Peter helped me get him back to his room. And it was then that we had our long and curiously illuminating, and at the same time curiously baffling talk. It was long, that is, in content, not in time. All of us, I know, were strongly aware of the passage of time. It was growing dusk in the room, I remember, although it was still light outside with the clear, cold light of a late winter’s afternoon. And Drue’s disappearance was still unexplained.
Peter eased Craig down into a chair and then stood there looking rather ruefully down at him.
“You’d better go back to bed,” I said, but Craig shook his head obstinately.
“Well, then,” said Peter, “let me be your leg man. Just tell me whatever you want me to do and I’ll do it. If I can.”
“Find Drue, of course,” said Craig, his head back against the cushion and his face white. I got some spirits of ammonia and in my agitation held the bottle too close to his nose. He sat up abruptly, gasping, and Peter said soberly, “I wish I could. I’ve helped look, you know. She’s not in the house. She’s not in the barns or the greenhouse. I looked myself and the police looked, too, of course. My opinion is, Craig, that she went away of her own will. Voluntarily. She must have gone like that because otherwise she would have been heard in the house. Even if the guard was drugged he would have roused, I should think, if she’d screamed or made some kind of struggle. I would have heard it. All of us would have heard it. She went of her own will. I feel sure of that.”
“But what happened afterward?” said Craig. “Why did she go like that? Why is Anna with her?”
“Are you sure that Anna went with her?” asked Peter. “Or do we just feel that they must be together because they are both gone?”
“I’m not sure of anything,” said Craig, and pushed away the bottle of ammonia. “For God’s sake, get that thing out of the way! If Chivery was murdered because he knew too much of my father’s death, then maybe Drue knew the same thing. Maybe she…” He stopped as if unable to say it. And Peter said quickly, “Craig, if anything had happened to her, they’d have found-well, found her by now.”
“Then why doesn’t she telephone? Why doesn’t she let me know where she is? Why doesn’t she…” Craig stopped again and put his hand over his face.
I said, “Why didn’t you tell her how you felt about her? Then she wouldn’t have gone away without telling you.”
“She doesn’t love me,” said Craig from behind the hand that shaded his eyes. “It’s Nicky she was in love with. She feels sorry for me now; and she feels it her duty to take care of me.”
I started to expostulate and then stopped. What was the use! The more desperately I worked to get the two blind young idiots together the farther they swung apart. Everything, it seemed to me, combined to separate them. Even though they were actually in the same house, Drue had been made to stay in her room, and Craig couldn’t move ten feet under his own steam, so to speak, without collapsing. And now they were in truth separated and there was no way of telling where Drue was, nor why (if Peter was right and she had gone of her own volition) she had gone. I felt as Craig did, however; if she could have telephoned to me I was sure she would have done so.
It didn’t lift my spirits to reflect on that. I said waspishly to Craig, “You ought to have told her you wanted her to stay. Instead, you asked Alexia to marry you.”
Peter lifted his eyebrows. “I thought it was Drue you liked,” he said.
“Alexia said no,” said Craig after a pause.
“Oh,” said Peter.
“Do you want Alexia to marry you?” I asked directly, and Craig said after another pause, “No.”
“Good God,” said Peter. “What’s the idea?”
“I wanted to see if she would,” said Craig simply.
Which got me nowhere. I was staring at Craig in furious exasperation, and Peter was staring rather blankly at him, too, and Craig just sat there with his hand over his eyes when someone knocked and came in and it was Nugent.
“I got a report on the Frederic Miller checks,” he said abruptly. “Do you want to hear?”
Did we want to hear! Peter’s rather large ears stretched another fraction of an inch and Craig snapped, “Go on. What’d you find out?”
“Frederic Miller,” said Nugent, “was a member of the New Jersey Bund. He lived in Newark at least for a time. He appears to have lived in New York, too. Sometime during the fall of 1938 he disappeared. Probably got wind of the fact that the activities of the Bund members were being watched pretty closely by the F.B.I. At any rate he disappeared and covered his tracks pretty thoroughly. The checks however were credited to his account at the Newark bank-the bank whose stamp appears on the back of one of the checks. The account was closed before he left the country, which is what they believe he did. That’s as far as they could tell me at a moment’s notice. They will investigate further.”
Craig said quickly, “Were there any pictures of Miller?”
“I asked that, too,” said Nugent. “No. But they said they’d be able to find somebody who could identify him.”
“Then Mr. Brent was helping the Bund,” said Peter.
“Presumably. Unless Miller used the money himself. However, that end of it comes under the jurisdiction of the F.B.I. They’ll run the thing down if anybody can. As a matter of fact, this angle interests them in the whole case and I don’t mind telling you it’ll be a help. The trouble is it’ll take time.”
“But don’t they know anything else about Frederic Miller?” asked Craig.
“No,” said Nugent. “He was just one of the Bund; all of the ringleaders were kept under pretty close scrutiny. They knew of him mainly through the records. They didn’t know whether he was young or old; born in Germany or in America; anything in fact about him except what I’ve told you. The point is that it could have been an assumed name.”
“Frederic Miller,” said Craig thoughtfully. “The trouble is too that there’s nobody around here who could be Frederic Miller.”
“And if there were,” said Peter, “why should he murder Mr. Brent? And Dr. Chivery?”
“The checks bring him into it,” said Nugent. “If I knew how, the case might be ended here and now. And again,” he added, “it might not be. But if it was an assumed name it could be anyone. You, Brent. Or you, Huber. Or Nicky. Or even a woman.
“It’s not me,” said Craig, and Peter said, “Gosh,” in a heartfelt manner. And Nugent said, “It might even be you, Miss Keate.”
“Well, it isn’t,” I snapped. “You can check back over my whole history if you want to.”
“Thank you,” said Nugent coolly. “I have.”
“But it couldn’t be a woman,” cried Peter, looking a little stunned.
“Remember,” said Nugent, “there’s only the name and the checks to go on. Women have managed to assume a man’s name before now. As to that, it has often struck me that Mrs. Brent and her brother could easily exchange identities. Especially considering the way she wears her hair.”
There was another silence and then Peter said again in a rather stunned way, “Gosh,” and stared at Nugent as if he’d pulled a rattlesnake out of his hat. And Craig said wearily, “But what of Drue, Lieutenant? All the rest of this will take time. You may be on the right track and you may be on the wrong track. Certainly there’s nobody around here whose whole past isn’t known.”
“I’ve checked on everybody,” said Nugent. “Insofar as I could. But Frederic
Miller could have had a quiet and infrequent existence in name only, so to speak, for some time. However, there’s another thing that has just come out; nothing to do with the checks. The gloves that were found, one beside Chivery and the other in Anna’s room, were sold to your father. He bought them at the little shop in the village the day of the attack upon you, Brent.”
“Oh,” said Craig. And looked at Nugent. And said suddenly, “I suppose you want me to tell you why he shot me.”
20
PETER WHIRLED AND CRIED, “He shot you!”
I said, “You knew. All the time, you knew who it was.” And Nugent said quietly, “Yes. Why did he shoot you?” Craig took a long breath. “It’s not very pleasant, you know. But I know that he didn’t mean to do it. I saw his hand, you know, with the glove on it. I suppose he-he got the gloves so his fingerprints wouldn’t appear on the gun. But I don’t think he meant to kill me; in fact, I think he believed me to be somebody else.”
“Who?” said Nugent.
“I don’t know,” said Craig slowly. “I’ve thought and thought and I don’t know who. It was dusk, you see; my father’s eyesight was failing somewhat, although he’d never admit it. I was talking to Alexia, as I told you; then she went back up to the house and I walked up and down there for a little. And I saw the gloved hand showing behind the hedge, and I was pretty sure it was my father. There was something about him-you know how it is-a familiar line even when you can’t see a person’s face. And just then the shot came. Naturally-the next day-I wasn’t going to explain it; I had sense enough even under the drugs Claud gave me, to know that. There was no reason for my father to shoot me; I knew that. So I knew there must be a mistake somewhere. That day I was too fuzzy and drugged to think clearly. But I did think I would tell Claud enough to put him on guard; he was devoted to my father and if my father told anyone, he would have told Claud. I think he did tell him; and I think he told him why he shot at me; and I think that is why Claud managed to lose the bullet that he extracted. It may have been why Claud himself was killed; he knew too much; I’ve always thought that.”
“Why do you think your father shot you?” asked Nugent.
“I tell you, it was a mistake. He thought I was somebody else.”
“Who?” said Nugent again.
And Craig said again, “But I don’t know. I had on a lightish raincoat I had taken out of the hall closet. I think it belonged to my father; but anybody might have a light raincoat; there was nothing about that that would make my father think I was somebody else. And we’re all about the same height-I mean you, Peter, and Nicky, and even Claud Chivery. We were all about the same height and in the dusk my father might have easily mistaken one of us for the other.”
“But my God,” said Peter. “Why would he shoot me? I scarcely knew him.”
“Why would he shoot anybody?” said Nugent. “Unless it was a question of shooting or being shot.”
“Yes,” said Craig. “That’s what I thought later when it was my father who was killed.”
“You mean,” said Peter, “that whoever he thought he was shooting when he shot at you was actually after your father?”
“Yes. In other words, I think it was a question of self-protection on my father’s part. Somebody was after him and he knew it and he thought he’d get him first. And he got me and-and couldn’t tell anybody but Claud what had happened and why. And then the other person, whoever it was, saw that action had to be taken at once. I mean it was-well, it was the same thing: kill or be killed.”
Nugent said nothing. Peter said, “But, my gosh, why didn’t they go to the police? I mean all your father had to do was ask for police protection. And whoever he meant to shoot…”
“That’s the point,” said Craig. “Whatever the disagreement, quarrel, whatever it was, was about something that neither the murderer nor my father wanted to tell the police about. That’s why I keep thinking the Miller checks come into the thing. I mean-well, I don’t think Miller himself is lurking around the countryside somewhere, although of course he might be-but I do think that the checks might have been used to blackmail my father. To keep him, perhaps from going to the police. My father would have hated the fact that he had given money to the Bund to come out. He’d have done anything to prevent it; he was that kind of man.”
“Murder,” said Nugent softly, “is usually done either in blind rage or from some very strong and personal motive.”
And I said suddenly, “Alexia had the checks. Alexia was in the garden just before your father shot you.”
“And Alexia,” said Nugent, “is very like Nicky and Nicky very like Alexia. How was she dressed that night, Brent? I mean she didn’t happen to be wearing, say, slacks? Women do.”
“You mean he might have seen her going to the garden, happened not to see her leave the garden and go back to the house, and thus that he mistook me for Alexia?” said Craig frowning.
“M’mm, roughly,” said Nugent. “You are sure it was Alexia you talked to?”
“Yes,” said Craig. “And she wasn’t wearing slacks. She had on a dinner dress, I’m sure; a black dress she wore at dinner, and a long coat.”
There was another silence during which I thought back somewhat confusedly to the times I’d seen Nicky and the times I’d seen Alexia and wondered whom I’d really seen-Alexia in a checked coat and slacks, or Nicky. I could fancy Alexia in Nicky’s clothes and, at a distance, even a short distance, so like him that one would think it was Nicky. But I couldn’t somehow see Nicky in Alexia’s trailing feminine clothes. And then I saw what I suppose Nugent had seen from the beginning and that was that the whole question of alibis was threatened, at least, so far as the twins’ alibis went. Was it Nicky Beevens had seen coming from the meadow the previous afternoon or Alexia? “Why, that means,” I burst out suddenly, “that it may have been Alexia in the meadow last night. It may have been…”
“Exactly,” said Nugent. “And of course there might have been another reason for your father thinking you were someone else, Brent. That’s pretty obvious. If he was jealous of her and had reason to believe that she liked some other man and had gone to the garden that evening to meet him…”
Peter had been swelling a little around the cheeks and getting very pink. He cried, “Look here, Nugent, if you mean me, she doesn’t. I mean I didn’t. I mean-oh, look here. I may as well make a clean breast. I-well, I think she’s terribly attractive; who wouldn’t? But I-I-” he faltered, and Nugent said, “You what?”
“Well, I-oh, gosh. I didn’t murder Mr. Brent. And I-there’s something I did get into that I tried to stop and couldn’t and I didn’t want to tell…” he faltered again, scarlet to his blond hair.
“If you mean Alexia,” began Craig, “say so…”
“I don’t mean Alexia,” said Peter. “I mean Mrs. Chivery.”
“Maud!” cried Craig sitting up. “My God, you’ve not fallen in love with her, have you?”
“Maud-oh, shut up! That’s not it. Mrs. Chivery-oh, for God’s sake…”
“What do you mean?” asked Nugent. “If you’ve got anything to say, get it out.”
“All right,” said Peter swallowing hard. “But it' not easy. It-I didn’t mean to. You see, well, it’s the Spanish jewels.”
The Spanish jewels again. And Maud’s talk of investment. Peter had got stuck again, and I said crisply, “You wanted her to invest in Spanish jewels.”
“Spanish…” began Craig incredulously, and Peter interrupted.
“Yes,” he said defiantly, but rather miserably, too, “Spanish jewels. It was this way. I was talking-too much; you know the way one gets carried away. Anyway, I was telling about a chap I know who was in the Spanish war, and he told me about taking a truck-oh, I know it sounds utterly ridiculous, but that’s what he said and what I told Mrs. Chivery about-he said he was taking a truck full of jewelry and silver that had been donated by various Loyalists from one place to another when the war was over. He was caught en route, so to speak. So he di
dn’t know what to do with his truck load of stuff and he hid it somewhere behind an old church. He knew the exact location, and he said it would take some money for-oh, greasing palms and that kind of thing, but he insisted that sometime he was going to get the money and go back and bring out the jewelry. I don’t think he really meant it; anyway the chances were all against his being able to do it, even if the stuff hasn’t been found months ago. But Mrs. Chivery-well, she kept talking to me about it; said she had some money and wouldn’t I get in touch with the fellow who told me about it and all that. She said her husband would be against her putting up the money and that Mr. Brent would be against it, so I wasn’t to tell them. I couldn’t believe that she was in earnest about it; then, when I began to think she was I-my God, I did everything I could think of to discourage it. Told her how absurd it was, the whole story. But she didn’t think it was absurd at all; and I suppose things like that did happen. I mean, I remember reading stories of how the Loyalists gave up everything in the way of jewelry that they could get their hands on. I suppose some things were caught like that, in the process of delivery, so to speak, when the Spanish war ended. But as an investment it was the bunk,” said Peter simply. “And I told her so. But the more I said against it the keener she was.”
“Yes,” said Craig, “Maud would be. But all you had to do was to refuse to take the money.”
“Well, naturally I did,” said Peter. “But she kept insisting. I was sorry I had ever mentioned the thing to her. And it was so-well, gosh, so completely absurd I sort of was embarrassed about it. Wished I hadn’t made such a good story.”
“Is that all?” said Nugent.
“Yes,” said Peter. “Except I think she’s still got it in her head.”
“Well, all you have to do is to keep on refusing,” said Craig wearily, and looked at the clock and then at Nugent. There was a wordless and rather desperate appeal in his eyes. Nugent got up. “We ought to hear from Miss Cable soon,” he said. “I’m convinced that she left voluntarily. Try to be patient, Brent.” His voice was kind-too kind. I thought of all the things that could have happened and then tried not to think of them as I had tried not to think so many times that day.
Wolf in Man’s Clothing Page 23
