The Silver Leopard

by Helen Reilly

  Her anger at white heat, she started home in another cab. Nicky had a key and might be at her apartment. He didn’t know she had gone to see Angela. Halfway downtown she changed her mind. She had to talk to him, had to find out why he had deliberately deceived her the night before, but not now, she thought, not like this, not until she was calmer, more rational.

  Her watch had stopped. She set it with shaking fingers by a clock on a stanchion and got out at Union Square. The afternoon had turned soft, golden, and the benches in the little park were crowded. What she craved was space, and the sky, and room in which to think. On Fourteenth Street she swung east toward the river and the drive.

  Two hours of fast walking followed by a sandwich and a cup of coffee in a cafeteria did her an enormous amount of good and reduced things to their proper proportions. When she fitted the key into the lock of her door at around half-past six her anger had long since faded. She knew that there was, there had to be, a reason for Nicky’s evasion of the night before. Simply because she couldn’t imagine what it was didn’t mean that it didn’t exist.

  She had hoped to find Nicky waiting for her. The darkness when she opened the door was a disappointment. Nicky wasn’t there. But he had been there. The little prayer rug in the hall was scuffled and the small maple rocker at the foot of the couch that people were continually bumping into, faced the kitchen instead of the windows.

  But there was no note on the table beside her chair. It was seven o’clock. Troubled, Catherine called the War-field. She called again at eight, without result. By that time, she was beginning to be seriously worried. Had something happened to Nicky? Had he blacked out somewhere? Was he ill, in a hospital? With his fracture, a blackout was always a possibility. When the phone finally rang at shortly after nine, she sprang for it. It wasn’t Nicky; it was Mike Nye, and Mike wanted to see her.

  “Can you come up here to my place, Catherine?” Mike asked. “I’d come to you only that I’m waiting for a long-distance call.”

  “Now?” she said. “Oh, Mike, I can’t. I’m expecting Nicky.”

  “Nicky—?” There was a pause at the other end of the wire. Then Mike said, “I’ve got to see you tonight, Catherine. Don’t ask me why, I’ll tell you when you get here.” There was a note of urgency in his voice and it was sharper than usual. Catherine was mystified. She couldn’t refuse. Leave word for Nicky at the Warfield, leave a note for him here. “All right, Mike, I’ll be along at,” she glanced at her watch, “around ten.”

  Mike thanked her and rang off. Catherine dressed quickly, walked to the corner and was lucky enough to get a cab at once. Driving north between ribbons of light on the pleasantly empty width of Sixth Avenue, she wondered frowningly what Mike wanted to see her about in such a hurry. Something to do with business, probably. He was the executor of her mother’s tiny estate as well as of her Uncle John’s big one.

  Twenty-third Street, the theater district, Columbus Circle, a blazing crescent off the park. Her thoughts returned unhappily to Nicky, and what he was doing, and where he could be. Was it her fault that he had had to resort to subterfuge to get away from her yesterday? Perhaps. Obsessed by the doctors, she might be trying to hold him on too tight a rein. You didn’t always like what was best for you. Quite the contrary. This applied particularly to men. They were used to the driver’s seat, resented a woman at the wheel. Yet in an emergency you had to take it. With convalescence, Nicky had become increasingly restless and unsettled. He had to have someone to lean on until he was completely well. The support might be irksome to him but without it he would fall to the ground.

  The cab slowed, swung into Central Park South. Catherine looked at her watch when she got out a few doors west of the Plaza. She was on time. She would get hold of Nicky somehow when she was finished here. She mounted steps and entered the lobby. Mike’s studio apartment was on the top floor. She got into a small red-and-gold self-service elevator, pushed the button labeled 10, stepped out in a small square vestibule, and rang Mike’s bell.

  He didn’t answer at once. She could hear voices inside. After a moment, she tried the door impatiently. It wasn’t locked. She opened it and went in. The long hall was empty. The voices had receded, but she could still hear them faintly, a man’s and a woman’s.

  Walking slowly toward the living-room, which like Mike’s studio, overlooked the Park, she was hesitant and a little uneasy. Who was the woman with Mike? She shouldn’t really have barged in like this. She paused in the living-room archway. The voices had stopped and what she could see of the room was empty. Mike and his guest must have gone out on the terrace. French windows opposite her framed the magnificent picture of the city to the north.

  She would wait for him, she thought, and went through the archway. There she stood still, her stomach crashing into her throat.

  Mike wasn’t out on the terrace. He was there, less than twenty feet away, behind the kneehole desk that faced her, slumped forward across the desk, one elbow propped on it, his other arm hanging limply. His eyes were open. The top of his head—

  The life within Catherine ceased to exist. Even her breathing stopped. Not Mike, she thought. No. Not like this. It wasn’t possible. She had been talking to him only a little while ago. There was a whimpering sound somewhere in the room. It was coming from her own throat. “He’s just—hurt,” she told herself frantically, and whispered his name. “Mike—Mike—”

  Mike kept on staring into illimitable distance. He didn’t move. But something else did. A few feet behind him, long blue curtains of Chinese brocade masked the entrance to the studio. The curtains had been hanging straight, motionless, were part of the stillness, the utter cessation. All at once they stirred lazily, with a soft, almost imperceptible rustle.

  Catherine stood with her eyes nailed to the long graceful folds. There was someone behind them, someone who had done—that—to Mike. In a moment the curtains were going to part and whoever was standing there was going to come out—

  Shock, the mortal sickness of horror, had locked her muscles. Terror gave the use of them back to her. She began to retreat, step by step, never taking her eyes from those blue folds. Without warning, her foot encountered something, some object, and she slipped, lost her balance, and started to fall. As she did so, there was a click and the room went soundless into blackness, and stayed that way.

  Catherine didn’t lose consciousness. But the fall jarred her and she remained as she was, down on one knee, arms out, shoulder crowded against a bench, her mind wiped clean of everything but fear. The fear was terrible and overwhelming. It was elemental. She couldn’t fight against it. She was alone here, at the top of the house, shut in with Mike and with whoever had killed him. The killer knew she was here, knew exactly where she was, must have been observing her from behind the curtain. She waited, crouched deep inside herself for attack, for a bullet to plunge into her flesh, for hands to touch her, close around her throat.

  Nothing happened. No one moved, spoke. There was no sound. After a timeless interval, the instinct of self-preservation asserted itself laboringly. Her ears unsealed themselves. She tried to swallow, made it, and listened, frantically, to a clock ticking very softly, to wind, to the steady hum of traffic in the incredibly distant streets. Cautiously, with slowness, every nerve taut, she managed to get to her feet.

  There is a point at which terror doubles on itself and becomes desperation. She had to get out of here and get help for Mike. He might be still alive—she didn’t know, couldn’t be sure that he was dead. The blackness was’ the obstacle. In the blackness, she might run into the murderer—and both she and Mike would be beyond help.

  Fighting herself and blindness, hands outstretched, she forced herself toward what she hoped was the living-room archway. It was. She was through it and out in the hall. The hall was also in darkness. There the temptation to run was overwhelming. She resisted it until she was fairly close to the front door and then could resist no longer. She made a dash for the door, bumped into a table, felt
it teeter. Wood, china, and glassware hit the floor with a resounding crash. It didn’t matter. She was at the door, wrenched it open, ran on into the outer vestibule—and full tilt into a short stout man with a bald head, in pajamas and a bathrobe.

  It was Mr. Findlater from the adjoining apartment. She was telling him, stumblingly, incoherently, about Mike. A woman appeared behind Mr. Findlater, in a negligee, her hair in bobby pins, under a net.

  “Well, you poor child. Well—Come in here. Horace—” Horace didn’t answer. He was already at the tele phone, calling the police.

  Chapter Three - Christopher McKee Takes Over

  “I DIDN’T,” CATHERINE SAID. “I don’t know who did, but I didn’t. He was like that when I went in—”

  Her voice was too high and tight. She caught at fraying nerves, fought bitter, flooding anger at ineptitude, delay. Mike was dead—but then she had known that from the first moment she looked at him. Seated at his desk in an attitude of ease, he had been struck down by someone standing behind him. He had died at or about the time she was in the apartment, in which he was alone, or appeared to have been alone, when she arrived—and the police suspected her of killing him.

  She had been shut up with them in the Findlater’s living-room for more than an hour. At least five sets of officials had questioned her separately and in pairs, taking down what she said, consulting together, and returning to the attack. While they fooled around with her, Mike’s murderer was getting farther and farther away. She had tried to tell them so. It wasn’t any use. They wouldn’t listen.

  Her latest inquisitor was from the Homicide Squad. He was a captain. His name was Pierson. He was a big, ruddy solid man with a broad benevolent face. He wore white socks. Catherine didn’t like him. She thought him sly.

  “Now, Miss, I’m advising you for your own sake—there’s no use your getting excited.”

  Excited—was the man an imbecile? Her mind was a battleground of dark images that came and went. Mike was there, with that terrible wound at the back of his head, and the unseen watcher behind the blue curtains, and Angela who had been going to marry Mike, and who had been so quietly content, and Tom and Hat and Francine who hadn’t wanted her to, and Nicky, so strangely missing—She hadn’t heard from him in more than 24 hours. She pushed tendrils of hair from a hot and aching forehead.

  Captain Pierson regarded her with satisfaction. She was about all in. As far as he and the rest of the boys were concerned, it was open and shut. The trumped-up story Miss Catherine Lister had handed them was full of holes. For one thing, she couldn’t have opened the murdered man’s door from outside. Although the door itself stood open, the night latch was on when they got there. If they could get her to break, if she’d come clean now, it would save time and trouble for everybody.

  “Look, Miss,” he bored in impatiently. “You killed Mr. Nye. You went behind him while he was at his desk—”

  “No.”

  Catherine sat up. She straightened her jacket, pulling the sleeves into place. The direct accusation cleared irrelevant images out of her brain, made her able to think coherently. She leaned forward on the huge purple and white striped couch, looked at Pierson steadily, and asked a question.

  “It was the noise of that table’s going down in there, and the lamp falling to the floor and smashing that brought Mr. Findlater to Mr. Nye’s door, wasn’t it?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Then do you think I’d deliberately turn off the lights and run the risk of colliding with something in the dark and so of attracting attention to myself?”

  Pierson returned her look stolidly. He was not impressed. There was no figuring what dames would do when they got excited. Help came from an unexpected quarter.

  “It is an idea, Captain.”

  It was a new voice. Pierson swiveled around as though he had been shot. Catherine glanced up.

  A man in well-cut, well-worn tweeds was standing in the doorway fingering an unlighted cigarette. He was very tall, in his forties, with a long, clever, lined face, deep-set brown eyes under dark brows and thick dark hair white at the temples. He was the head of the Manhattan Homicide Squad, Christopher McKee.

  Pierson’s eyes and mouth were circles of astonishment. When he had last heard, McKee, a commander in Navy Intelligence, was somewhere in the Far East settling up odds and ends left over from the war. The captain jumped up from the chair he had been using as a judgment seat. “My God, Commander—Where did you spring from?”

  “Inspector,” McKee said briefly. “I’m back with you again. I was with the commissioner when this call came through.” He brushed Pierson off.

  The Scotsman had been in the building only long enough to examine what was left of Michael Nye, and to scan preliminary reports on the young woman found fleeing from an apartment with a dead man in it, and with no present indication of any other visitor. Fie Studied the girl caught red-handed. She was very lovely. She was more than that. Other women had broad childlike foreheads, slender springing brows, short straight noses, and beautiful eyes. That they had been put together in Catherine Lister in a combination that was singularly compelling wasn’t the point. She had a quick, leaping intelligence. She was lying stupidly. There was something wrong.

  She had said that she reached Michael Nye’s door at ten p.m. or a minute or two after, that she heard voices in Nye’s apartment and that in her impatience, she opened the door and walked in, But according to his neighbors, the Findlaters, Nye was alone from a little before half-past nine on that evening. The entire floor at the top of the house had once been a single apartment. The reconstruction of it into two was a flimsy job, the dividing walls were thin and anything but soundproof, and the Findlaters were at all times adequately informed as to their neighbor’s movements.

  McKee crossed to the couch, ignored the physical recoil that crowded Catherine back against the cushions, and stooped. Taking her wrist in delicately blunted fingers, he exposed the dial of her wrist watch. And at once the ambiguity of her statement vanished.

  Her watch was just over a quarter of an hour fast. She had arrived at Nye’s door, not at ten but at sixteen minutes of ten, and the voices she had heard weren’t in Nye’s apartment; they came front the Findlaters’ radio, which Horace Findlater had turned on at nine-thirty and off at nine-forty-five.

  He explained it, watching Catherine thoughtfully. It didn’t make her innocent. It did prove that as far as timing was concerned, she was telling the truth. And it opened new possibilities. They were tentative. He sat down in the corner of the couch opposite to her and began outlining them.

  The night latch, on when the police got there, although the door itself was standing wide, could have been slipped after the crime, by someone leaving the apartment in advance of Catherine. Fie said, “If so, if the door was unlocked when you arrived, the killer was then, at that moment, the moment when you rang the bell, standing on the other side of the door and about to emerge. He, she—whoever it was—beat a soundless retreat into the bedroom. The bedroom opens into the studio. A switch there controls the living-room and hall lights. The lights were turned out so that the killer could escape unseen. As he went through the front door, he probably shoved on the night latch. If that was done, it rather looks as though you were selected as a victim—”

  He didn’t say aloud, “By someone who knew you could be made to fit the part because of that document in there on Michael Nye’s desk.” Voices spoke in the Findlater hall. One of them was a woman’s.

  Pain quickened in Catherine. “Angela,” she said with a small gasp, linked fingers twisting.

  McKee nodded. “We telephoned for Mrs. Wardwell.”

  A patrolman brought Angela to the door. She walked into the room. She came in slowly. A black dinner gown heightened her length of limb under a short black Persian lamb coat with mandarin sleeves. Her shoulders were erect, her head with its gleaming coronet of chestnut braids was high, but her face—Catherine’s heart ached.

  Angela simply was
n’t there. Her face was molded papier-maché with nothing behind it. Watching her was like watching a ship cream through blue water with no one at the helm, no life on board. She had been stricken when John died, but she hadn’t been like this. John’s death was natural, inevitable. Mike’s was different. It needn’t have happened. Mike had been slaughtered—

  Angela stood still a few feet over the threshold as though the mechanism that impelled her had run down. She looked through lamplight at Catherine. “There’s—no hope? He’s—gone?”

  Her voice was as empty as her face. Tears stung Catherine’s eyelids. She didn’t need to answer. Her expression was enough.

  Angela dropped into an armchair, bent sharply forward, and buried her face in her hands.

  Catherine started to get up and go to her, sank back. Sympathy would be the last straw. Angela didn’t collapse. After a moment, she regained her control. She straightened and looked at the inspector.

  “Will you tell me, please, what happened?”

  Ashes in her month, she no longer doubted. Her acceptance of tragedy, of an end to so much, was complete—and rather terrible. She must, Catherine reflected, have loved Mike very deeply. The inspector was considerate with her. The facts weren’t. They were brutal. There was no shielding her from them.

  He put questions to her and she answered them quietly, describing Mike’s day, his arrival in New York that morning, his taking them all out to lunch. The party broke up around three. Mike had some business to attend to and she had gone shopping. At a little after half past five, he had called her at home asking them, her niece Harriet La Mott, her nephew Tom La Mott, Tom’s wife, Francine and her, to his apartment for drinks and sandwiches. No one felt hungry after a huge lunch.