by Rufus King
Sheffield knocked and came in, and said that District Attorney Heffernan would be pleased if Mrs. Elser would consent to join him downstairs in the living room.
“I’ll be back shortly, Nan dear. We’ll lunch up here. Something simple, Sheffield. Tell Delilah that sandwiches will do and tea.”
“Yes ma’am.”
“You might ask her to have some ready for the gentlemen of the police. If they are still here.”
“Yes ma’am.”
Lily had met District Attorney Heffernan casually at various affairs at the country club, occasionally at the houses of mutual friends. She thought him a pleasant man, one normally tinged with a preoccupation in his work, and knew that officially his terms in office (he had served two) had been highly satisfactory to the town.
He turned from a contemplation of the still-curtaining snowfall and came over to greet her, taking her hand and smiling with, it seemed to Lily, an unusual air of formality. She thought: I’m sensitive to shadings right now. I must keep things in their true proportions.
“I must thank you, Mr. Heffernan, you and Doctor Starr, for arranging about Mr. Hangaway.”
“I suppose the doctor told you how lucky you were. What an escape!”
“Yes. Won’t you sit down?”
“Thank you.” Heffernan smiled briefly, almost boyishly, in fleeting concession to his hearty liking of Lily Elser and of everything he’d ever heard about her. “I’m sorry you find me in the second of my personalities. My official one.”
“Naturally, Mr. Heffernan. In fact, you find me in mine. A dispenser of lodgings. It turned out a rather disastrous one. I’m doing it no longer.”
“I should hope not. I can’t understand how Lorrimer Keith ever let you.”
“He did try to dissuade me. I put my foot down.”
Here was the trouble, Heffernan reflected, with dual personalities: You had to goad into action the one which you knew became you least.
“I don’t suppose you noticed the gun, Mrs. Elser? The one that was in Parne’s hand?”
“No, not really. I did see a gun there, and then Mr. Hangaway had spoken about it when he told us that he had found Mr. Parne.”
“Well, the gun was one of Mr. Elser’s. The case for it was in that secretary over there.”
“Milton’s? He had one, of course—but, of course, Mr. Heffernan. I remember it now.”
“Yes, Mrs. Elser?”
“Mr. Parne had scarcely been here more than five or ten minutes when he noticed that secretary, because it’s a Sheraton. I remember he went over to it and examined it quite carefully. In fact,” (yes, thank God, Sheffield had been here) “Sheffield came into the room while he was doing so and asked Mr. Parne about putting away his car.”
“Good. That does help a little. You’ve no idea how hard it is to get things clear. Did Parne strike you as a man who would be especially interested in antiques?”
“Frankly he didn’t. But he did recognize that the secretary was good.”
“We’ll naturally know more about that angle when we know more about Parne.” Heffernan’s gray, solid eyes turned toward the windows. “Our blizzard is a quiet one, Mrs. Elser. No howling winds. It has a muffling quality about it. Did you hear anything, any unusual sound whatever in the house during the night?”
“No, none at all.”
“It’s a curious situation. We know that somebody must have come into the house, but we don’t know how. They have a good man on the force for this forcible-entry business, and he’s decided that there’s nothing doing. Whoever killed Parne must have been let in through one of the doors. Let in by someone already here.”
“But that’s impossible.”
“No, we think that possibly Parne let the man in himself.” He could not look directly at her. “We’ve got to think that, Mrs. Elser.”
Lily said equably—she hoped so fervently that her voice did sound equable—“But why would he?”
“We don’t know. It would presuppose a rendezvous, wouldn’t you think? I can’t see Parne coming downstairs and letting in a stranger. Possibly Parne went outside the house and met him at some appointed spot in town, but I can’t figure him then bringing the man back here. No, we’ve got to presuppose that Parne came to this house not through any chance, not as a passing tourist, but intentionally, and that his killer knew Parne was going to do so.”
“I can think of no reason on earth why Mr. Parne should have come here.”
“No more can we. And still, any other supposition seems to make less sense if we want to connect the two men, Parne and Hangaway. Then there must be a motive. Every murder has a motive, Mrs. Elser, even for a dope fiend like Hangaway. Our chief difficulty is that the motive probably lies in the past, and we don’t know Parne’s past. We don’t, so far, know a thing about him. You’ve not remembered anything further that he said last night, Mrs. Elser?”
“No, he spoke of the west coast, that he was driving East. That’s all, beyond the most general sort of conversation.”
“Well”—Heffernan looked at Lily for one penetrating instant and then stood up, smiling his smile and holding out his hand—“thanks for helping us about the gun. We can think of Parne as finding it himself in the secretary. That will do for a starter. Perhaps of his coming downstairs after you and Miss Elser had gone to bed and looking at the secretary again. This time looking through it and finding the gun. Then either meeting his killer outside and bringing him back here or just letting him in. Then the killer took the gun away from Parne and shot him and fixed things up to look like a suicide. I’m afraid that it couldn’t be thinner, but any picture does for a beginning. Doctor Starr tells me that you and Miss Elser are dining with him tonight?”
“Yes. He thought the change of scene—”
“And a very sound thought. Incidentally we feel that you may be nervous for a night or two. It wouldn’t be natural if you weren’t. I’ve persuaded the chief to have a man stay here nights. You and your daughter will feel more secure. He won’t be a bother but will just sit out in the hallway—if that will be agreeable to you, Mrs. Elser?”
“Quite.” Lily forced the smile on again, thinking that by now it must be pretty threadbare. “It’s good of you, very kind of you to think of it, Mr. Heffernan.”
* * * *
Mr. Parne, in a basket, left at three.
Lily’s eyes were leaden. It seemed to her that she had never slept. The brief hour and a half that she had caught last night in her exhaustion were nothing. Wave after wave of wanting to sleep flowed through her, dragging down her eyelids and drugging any coherence in her thoughts. If she could rest some, really rest for several hours, then she felt that she could handle things as they came along.
She took the red velvet negligee from its hanger and went with it over to a window. Blood, she instructed her drugged intelligence, did not stay red. It dried out something darker: a brown. She saw nothing on the short soft pile, but after her tired, hot eyes had begun to glaze with red her fingers found a patch of stiffness. Naturally blood would harden and get stiff. Stupid not to have thought of that. It was there all right: quite a patch of it, under the right sleeve, which was cut very full and flowing, where her arm had encircled Mr. Parne’s deadweight looseness while she had been pressing his willing hand upon the doorknobs. Well, water got out blood.
Lily filled the washbasin in the bathroom with the lukewarm water (hot either set blood or didn’t; cold, ditto) and let the right sleeve of the negligee sink in it and soak. Casually the water grew pink and then pinker, a pink that meant but one thing to Lily: Mr. Parne. He was materializing before her vague eyes like a print in a tray of developer. Neatly, just as he had been neat.
She would have to put her fingers into the water and stir Mr. Parne up to get rid of the last drop of him. Then rinse and rinse and rinse. Well, she couldn’t.
Lily stoo
d for a while just pressing her hands down flat on the cold white marble and wanting to go to sleep. It would be so sensible to go to sleep and just permit the sleeve to float there and soak, then to wake up and find the last trace of the man gone. Joining himself in his basket.
She had no idea for how long Nan had been standing behind her in the bathroom doorway. Time was an element of such inconsequential relativity that Lily for once, and never again, enjoyed a thorough comprehension of the theories of Einstein. Then the red in the water and Nan made sharp sudden sense, and almost with a reflex action Lily’s fingers reached swiftly and opened the drain, while her whole being jumped wide-awake. Her fingers, regardless of repulsion, sank into the tepid water, lifted velvet folds, freeing the drain, and hastened the exit of pink, which sank and gurgled and at long last vanished in a minor wail. Lily turned quietly, said quietly, “Darling, I thought you were going to rest.”
“I couldn’t, Mother.”
The child’s lips were positively stiff. She couldn’t help but have seen the pink water from the doorway, not being blind.
“I’m always being disillusioned, Nan, dear.”
“What, Mother?”
“This wretched stuff is supposed to be fast. It appears to run.”
“I think it’s supposed to be dry-cleaned only.”
“I realize that now, and I hope to live long enough to learn that there’s nothing so expensive as a petty economy.”
“There was—something on the sleeve, Mother?”
“Tea.”
Lilly squeezed the soft velvet in her hands, squeezing tighter and tighter because it was easier to do so than to treat the blood of Mr. Parne with any repellent delicacy.
“Mother.”
“Nan, dear?”
“Do you know something?”
“Honestly, darling, the older I grow the more I believe I don’t. This notion that wisdom comes with age is nothing but a solace for wrinkles and double chins.”
“Oh, this is just it. Just as it’s always been.”
“What is, dear?”
“We’re never close. We’ve never been close. Can’t parents and children ever be close, Mother?”
The negligee dropped in moist folds to the bathroom floor. No, Lily reflected, they couldn’t be. She hadn’t been with her parents, and she hadn’t been with her own child. Not truly so. Not in the sense of being vibrantly inside of one another in the way that it happened at rare times within two people of a similar generation, in rare marriages, with rare friends.
Love and respect, even a fine companionability, all of the sane, decent, nicer bonds could be there, but Nan was right: never could there be any honest closeness; just two loving images which strove throughout life to live up to the best of what each thought the other saw in each. Well, here was a moment for breaking a rule like that. Letting everything tumble and taking Nan in her arms and opening every bit of herself to that cry from Nan’s heart.
Lily held out her hands.
She had a feeling that death was striking her right on the spot when she saw the tightness of Nan’s lips draw tighter and Nan’s eyes glance swiftly at and away from the hands which were wet and still dripping a little from their rinse in pink.
“I guess I will rest, Mother.”
Lily watched Nan back a step or two (not turn), then walk (not run) across the living room and out into the hall. It was extraordinary what swiftness could exist in a complete about-face. Of one’s mental attitude toward a thing, and one’s interpretation of it. That was the bother with being so dead tired. Clearly now Lily saw Nan running outside there in the hall to her rooms. Saw Nan grabbing up whatever it was Nan had been wearing last night on her terrible mission. Letting water into her washroom basin and (again) draining out some more of Mr. Parne.
Lily picked up the negligee and went to a boxed-in radiator, spreading out the wet right sleeve, smoothing it to dry evenly over the heat. That was when she noticed the piece that had been clipped out of it, about the size of a quarter, from about the center of about where the center of the blood patch had been.
That will be (Lily thought) the state’s Exhibit “A.”
* * * *
Lorrimer Keith left his house at twenty past seven. Normally it was only a ten-minute drive to Lily’s, but the drifts and the ruts and the falling snow would slow him up tremendously. His car was a coupe, conservative, expensive and black.
Lorrimer closed a beaver collar more warmly about his throat, tightened fur-lined gloves and reflected dreamily on all the worth of a comfortable solidity. Surely, in face of this horrible business of last night, the wretched, cruel shock of it, Lily would defy the conventions (just as he was prepared to defy them) and let him take care of herself and Nan. Let him bring them both within his shelter, no matter how few the months were that Elser had been in his grave.
They could marry quietly and go away. Rio de Janeiro was enchanting at this season of the year. Quietly (but not too quietly) in its warm, Latin gaiety Lily could bloom and Nan could have a good time. Then, after several months of colorful lassitude (parrots, maxixes, jalousies, exotic flowers, the Belasco harbor) they would come back to Laurel Falls and settle down to a vista spread with fallow fields of a peaceful domesticity. It never occurred to him for an instant but that Lily would agree to all this, because that was the way you felt about Lily.
The good-looking, uniformed young cop in the hall was something of a shock. You couldn’t escape the youngster’s presence, his personality, and still he seemed to flatten into a backdrop of the scene: there and yet not of it. A bright red bulb of danger, bare and unshaded, in the toned glows of this lovely house.
Lily and Nan were ready, waiting, cloaked and with galoshes on, in the living room. They came out and joined Keith immediately.
“You were an angel, Lorrimer, to have thought of coming for us.”
“Of course I’m an angel, Lily. Hello, Nan.”
“Hello, Mr. Keith.”
(That would all stop pretty soon. He’d be “Lorrimer” to her in practically no time at all. Nice to have such a fine daughter all fully grown.)
“Still storming?”
“Lily, this snowfall is going down in history. Like that midget affair they’re still boasting about in New York.”
They heard, as they chatted in the warm richness of the coupe, the staccato explosions of a motorcycle behind them. It became impossible to ignore them.
“Glad the boys are taking such good care of you, Lily.”
“Mr. Heffernan was sweet about it. Have you heard about our dope-fiend lodger?”
“Ladies, I have heard everything. Our local sheets are plastered with hot details to the point of indigestion. I’ve read every one of them. If Heffernan hadn’t posted guards at your house I’d have got out Betsy and camped there myself.”
“I thought it was Roscoe.”
“And they say guns are sexless!”
“Crowding you, Nan, dear?”
“No, Mother.”
“I suppose Doctor Starr won’t mind if we leave early. After all, after last night.”
“I imagine he’ll force you to, Lily.”
Lily looked young in beige chiffon and Nan very young in white organdy. Mrs. Forrest, Gene’s mother, was not so successful in plum velvet, and Alice Tomlinson (Harry’s twin) needed nothing but a wire hook and a Christmas tree for her candy-striped taffeta. It was all very gay.
It was (Lily thought) determinedly so: murder, addicts, the patient, watchful eyes of the law, were deliberately suffocated beneath a wealth of social pleasantries in this handsome, turn-of-the-century drawing room of Dr. Starr’s.
Starr said to Lily over martinis, “I know you must be interested, so I’m bringing it up. It’s about that man Hangaway.”
A Capehart was softly full with a bright thing of Cole Porter’s, and Lily smiled
, and said, “Yes, Doctor?”
“He got back to normal during the afternoon. He’s still in the hospital and under observation, of course. Heffernan has tried his best to get something out of him, but he’s turned sullen. He just refuses to talk. That is, about anything that counts.”
“About a possible connection with Mr. Parne?”
“Yes. His story is one of those simple tales which seem infernally impossible to check up on from a police point of view. Nobody can be pinned down to an hour-by-hour accounting of what he was doing while driving through a blizzard. Hangaway says that he started out around seven o’clock last night from Detroit.”
“Detroit!” (Nan—the same vague finger of murk, of unnamable dread, its tip in Detroit, as the picture of Nan among Mr. Parne’s belongings had been taken in Detroit—what was it?—what was it that linked her child with a Parne, with [now] an addict—the vicious center lying in Detroit?) “But I thought Mr. Hangaway came from Kansas City, which—as Delilah insists—is in Kansas?”
“He docs. But he stayed over yesterday in Detroit and didn’t start out until evening. That would have made the driving time to here all right with the road conditions what they were. He says he’s a free-lance writer and eventually expect to put Sinclair Lewis out of business.”
“Mr. Hangaway certainly is a dope fiend.”
“Oh, that part is real enough, and he does have his amusing points. Addicts can. It’s one of their main dangers. They lull you with their pleasantries into a false security before, well, the other side of them comes out.”
“He says he only stayed in Detroit just yesterday?”
“Yes. He told Heffernan he was on his way East to look up a literary agent in New York—when he went into the bathroom and found Parne. He stops right there. Nobody’s been able to get another word out of him. Now that looks like dinner.” Starr eyed a maid in the drawing-room doorway. “Let’s go in.”
