The Silver Leopard

by Helen Reilly

  Street lamps reflected themselves in the pavements, signs flashed, sleet flailed down. The brilliantly lighted lobbies were filled with throngs of pleasure seekers, with umbrellas and without, milling and shoving and trying for place; the watching detectives pressed nervously closer. That was at approximately nine-thirty-five that evening.

  It was nine-fifty-two that the first disastrous report, on Stephen Darrell, reached McKee in his rooms at the top of a tall red brick house on East Thirty-seventh Street. The other reports arrived in rapid succession. By ten, the last was in. One would have been bad enough, but four—Spurlos versenkt. Darrell, Bray, Hat La Mott, and Catherine Lister had disappeared without trace.

  McKee stared, narrow-eyed, at the wall. This was the thing he had been afraid of. Nothing he could do could have prevented it. Without warrants for arrest and detention—and that was out of the question at this stage—he was powerless. Surveillance was the only resort. It had failed. Four people—one of them might well be a killer, and one, certainly, Catherine Lister, a victim—were on the loose. Sooner or later they would be caught. Sooner or—The Scotsman stopped stroking his black cat, Cinders, as though her silky coat burned him, walked on eggs to his desk, lifted the phone, and called the telegraph bureau at headquarters.

  “Warm enough, Catherine?”

  “Yes, I’m fine.”

  “Here, let me—” Nicky bent over and tucked the rug more firmly under her feet. The dark interior of the car was cold. Sleet drummed on the roof, slashed against the windows. The panes were coated with ice so that you couldn’t see very much. Catherine and Nicky were in the back seat, Hat was in front with Stephen Darrell, who drove.

  The going was treacherous. Catherine had no idea where they were, except that it was in the country. New York lay behind, almost two hours behind. It was a few minutes after eleven. She felt as though she were in a dream, a bad impossible dream, and knew she wasn’t. Weight constricted her lungs, unhappiness pressed in heavily on her. She resettled herself against the cushions, huddled deeper into her coat, and went on staring at slanting lines of whiteness through the black fan on the windshield.

  In the beginning she had hoped that the project would fall to the ground of itself, not that there was anything particularly startling about it. All over the country, hundreds of thousands of ex-servicemen and the girls of whom they had been defrauded for months and years were doing the same thing, cutting the corners and marrying in haste to make up for lost time. But not in the same circumstances.

  She moved restlessly, flexing numb fingers. She had pinned her hopes of frustration on Stephen Darrell and on the police. Both had failed her. Bitter draught, bitter as gall. From the first, Stephen had quite evidently regarded Nicky and her simply as excess baggage, to be borne for the sake of friendship, and because Hat was insistent. “Judge, whatever his name is, darling—Fountain? Judge Fountain won’t mind. You can get around him.”

  Stephen’s assent was curt, grudging. “I suppose so, if you’ve really made up your minds.” He looked at Catherine. Her “We’re going to be married anyhow, later on this week,” backed up by Nicky’s violent assertion that he didn’t want her to be alone, had clinched the matter. So that was that and in a matter of hours now, she would be Nicky’s wife and Hat would be Stephen’s. She twisted in her corner, caught folds of the blanket lightly in her gloved hands, couldn’t feel anything.

  As for the police, Stephen’s careful planning, done in advance, had disposed of them. He had had it all figured out. They were to separate and lose themselves separately in crowds. For her and for Hat, scarves had entered into it. “If that inspector has detectives on our trail,” Stephen said, “and I’m inclined to think he has, they’ll be on the lookout for what they saw when they lost you,” Consequently, Catherine had gathered her entire collection of kerchiefs. There were three for Hat and three for her. When she entered the lobby of the theater, bought her ticket, and went on into the dim interior, one of a jam of 50 or 60 people waiting for seats, she had retreated to an unobtrusive niche where she hastily replaced her red scarf with a yellow-and-black-striped one.

  Out of the theater then, not too soon, by another exit, and down into the subway, still companioned by people, and a forest of umbrellas. She bought a newspaper and held it in front of her during the ride uptown. The car which Stephen had borrowed from another friend was parked on Newtown Road a block west and half a block south of the 231st Street station.

  When she arrived, it was there, in front of the white house beyond the church, that she had been told to look out for, and the others were already in it. They had started off immediately and hadn’t once been stopped.

  Half a dozen times during her journey uptown the temptation to drop out and go quietly home had been almost irresistible. To have done so would have been to turn Nicky and Hat and Stephen Darrell over to the police; she would never have been able to withstand McKee’s questioning. She couldn’t quite bring herself to that. Anyhow, what difference did it make, tomorrow or Thursday was all one. Everything was gray and dreary—and flat and stale and unprofitable.

  The place for which they were bound was Clearwater, a small town in the middle of New York State that was the county seat. There was a courthouse there, and a church and a hotel of sorts. They had all had blood tests and could produce their reports later. In the morning they were to go to the town hall and get their licenses, after which Judge Fountain would sign the necessary waivers and marry them in his chambers.

  Ordinarily the journey would have taken under three hours. The car was a good one, but with the roads in the condition in which they were, and with the necessity of keeping off main highways, their progress was slow.

  They had talked back and forth at first, with the exception of Stephen Darrell, who gave his entire attention to the road, but after a while conversation ceased. Catherine said she was going to sleep and didn’t. Nicky did. Hat slept too, curled up on the front seat, her head on Stephen’s shoulder.

  In the hills back of Tarrytown, the sleet gave place to snow. Time and time again they skidded nastily and threatened to bog down, but Stephen kept the car going. There was never a straightaway for more than a few hundred feet. They went round cities and towns instead of through them. There were very few other cars abroad; the night was too bad. Mile after mile unrolled behind them and still they traveled on unmolested.

  Tired and cross and filled with a profound depression whose depths she neither defined nor investigated, Catherine would have been glad to sleep and forget, if only for a short space. Once she closed her eyes, to open them and find Stephen Darrell’s eyes fastened on hers in the rear-view mirror. Blood rushed into her cold cheeks, drained away; there was something formidable in his steady gaze.

  It had the same fixed probing quality to it that there had been in him when he came to see her on the night before Mike died. The narrow hazel gleam between compressed lids, steady and immovable in a world where everything else moved, darkness, whirling flakes, trees, fences, had a hypnotic compulsion to it. What was Stephen Darrell saying? What did he want of her?

  She was drawn irresistibly forward. In another second she would have spoken. The compulsion was withdrawn and she sank back. A hairpin turn loomed and Stephen looked away. He missed a bank by inches, gave the wheel a spin, and went round the bend safely. Hat stirred then and spoke drowsily.

  Catherine didn’t look at Stephen Darrell again. She felt spent, drained, lay back gazing at the white-flecked windshield, at glimpses of the white road, a thin ribbon in surrounding blackness. More blackness, storm torn, more miles, more snow. There were weights on her eyelids. They fell. She was roused by Nicky’s hand on her shoulder. “Catherine—Wake up, Catherine, we’re almost there.”

  She sat erect, disoriented and confused. Her shoulders ached and her right foot was asleep. She asked what time it was, and Nicky said, “Twenty minutes of three,” and she straightened her coat and retied her kerchief.

  Hat was awake. She was replenish
ing her make-up and talking to Stephen Darrell, who sat on behind the wheel as he had been sitting for almost five hours, body relaxed, hands steady on the spokes, driving the car forward.

  “Cigarette, Nicky?” Nicky gave her one and Catherine wiped mist from the little window with a gloved palm and peered out. It was still snowing. They were climbing a rise on a rough road hemmed in by big trees. The going was heavier. A shift into second, they continued to mount, swung round a half turn. Snow-covered mounds on a level plain were big stones marking a driveway. They ran into it. The headlights brought the bulk of a house, an enormous place, there seemed no end to it, into being. Lights glimmered from a bay window behind curtains a little farther along.

  Stephen Darrell braked, slid into neutral. The car slowed and stopped and they all got out, yawning and stretching. The lights in the window, the circle of brilliance around the car, the cessation of motion, didn’t bring Catherine any relief. There was something curiously final about this journey’s end.

  Her knees were stiff. Nicky took her arm and they followed Hat and Stephen up steps onto a veranda to a side door with a lighted upper panel.

  Nicky said, “Well, we made it.” Stephen said, “Yes, my boy,” and knocked.

  Only they hadn’t. The first person they saw, beyond and across the shoulder of the landlady who admitted them to a small, overfurnished, and intensely hot parlor, was Tom La Mott. Behind Tom was Francine. And in a chair near the stove, wrapped in a long fur coat, was Angela.

  Chapter Eleven - Too Much Police Vigilance

  EXCLAMATIONS, AN OUTCRY, raised voices, questions and recriminations; Stephen Darrell was furious but not less so than Tom. Angela was merely unutterably tired; Fran-cine tried to throw oil on the troubled waters; Hat wept with rage.

  The landlady, Stephen’s buddy, shrugged responsibility aside. They had come, Mrs. Wardwell and the La Motts, half an hour earlier. She kept a house of public entertainment, couldn’t refuse them lodging. Their car was in the garage.

  “Why did you do it like this, Hat? Why didn’t you tell me?” Angela’s plaint was quiet. “When the inspector called me—”

  “The inspector?” Hat’s voice was a small screech.

  “Certainly, the inspector,” Tom said heavily. “You idiot! Did you really think you could pull the wool over the eyes of the police?”

  “Mind your own affairs, will you? What’s it your business?”

  They were upstairs by that time, in a great barn of a bedroom on the second floor.

  Nicky said, “You mean that we were followed? But—”

  “No,” Francine answered with a grin. “You weren’t followed, you were forestalled. It seems, Steve,” she turned to him where he lounged grimly against a wall, balanced on his heels, his hands in his pockets, his hazel eyes blankly bright and inscrutable, “it seems that earlier today, yesterday—goodness, where are we?—you put through a telephone call, a couple of them, to a Judge Fountain here in Clearwater, and to the woman who owns this place. Mrs. Muir, is it? Yes. Well, the police got onto what you were up to when you gave them the slip.”

  “Damn fool trick,” Tom said roughly. His gloss was gone and with it his amiability. He was thoroughly aroused. His bloodshot eyes rolled and his hands Were shaking. Francine retained her savoir-faire. Nothing could apparently put a dent in it. She went on with her story.

  “The police called Angela. She was asleep. Luckily, Tom and I were there. The car was in the garage. Tom got it. The midnight ride of Paul Revere—we drove up the Merritt Parkway as far as Fairfield, then we cut across. We stopped at the house in Brookfield first, to see whether you might be there. You weren’t, and we came on here.”

  Listening, Catherine felt like a fool and an ingrate, on Angela’s account. All the more so because her aunt didn’t reproach her directly for what had been, whatever euphonious appellations you might give it, an act of treachery. Like Tom, Angela had a great respect for the conventions, and she had been under a terrific strain. She herself had not only shielded Hat, she had joined actively in an escapade that to say the least was juvenile, stupid, underhanded, silly, and, in fact, thoroughly objectionable.

  Her remorse was deepened by the fact that Angela said very little, just, “I think you were all very foolish. I can see how you were pushed into it—the police, and questioning, and being tied down, but—I wish you had waited. Or that you, Hat, had come to me and told me what you wanted to do. It could have been arranged in another fashion. Now, I think, if we all go to bed and try to get some sleep, we’ll be better able to discuss matters in the morning.”

  So agreed and so acted upon. They scattered. Nicky went with Catherine to the door of the room assigned to her. “No matter what happens,” he said, holding her hands tightly in his in the big dim corridor, “you and I are going to be married. Angela can stop Hat if she wants to—but that needn’t affect us. If this friend of Stephen Darrell’s, Judge Fountain, is still willing to go through with it—and I don’t see why he shouldn’t be—then tomorrow’s our day.”

  Tomorrow was already there when Catherine got into bed wrapped in one of Mrs. Muir’s blankets. Stephen Darrell had prohibited luggage, had made Hat leave her bag behind. In spite of more blankets and a comforter, she couldn’t seem to get warm. Through the tall windows opening on the veranda, light was growing vaguely in the east, a storm-ridden band over the tops of dark pines. She didn’t want to look at the coming day. She turned her face to the wall.

  In spite of the fact that it was almost five before she fell asleep, Catherine woke very early. What sort of box is this I’ve got myself into? she thought with shrinking apprehension when she opened her eyes. Memory returned dismayingly. She got up, took a tepid bath in an immense painted tub in a carved wooden frame in a bathroom the size of her New York living-room, and dressed in the clothes she had worn the night before, pleated brown-and-white-checked skirt, cream-colored blouse, and brown cardigan.

  She threw her heavy tweed coat over her shoulders and left her room. Silence, dimness, the halls and stair well, like the rest of the rambling old place that had once been a private house, were vast and draughty. She went past halt a dozen closed doors. Were there voices behind them? Hat’s, Angela’s, Tom’s, or Francine’s? She didn’t want to meet anyone. She wanted solitude, out in the open and away from walls, where she could face and settle things in and for herself.

  It was her wedding day. She and Nicky were going to be married. It seemed as if it had been settled months ago. She thought she had become accustomed to the idea, found she hadn’t. The imminency of change pressed in on her heavily. In a matter of hours she would no longer be herself, she would be Nicky’s wife. She twisted away from that, brought herself back to it with firmness. She had to meet, to become accustomed to, and to prepare for it. From now on his interest must be hers, his good her first consideration.

  She went quickly down the stairs, grateful for solid floors that didn’t creak and give notice of her passing. Mrs. Muir, the owner and proprietor of the boardinghouse, was feeding a canary in the little parlor, apparently the only small room in the entire building.

  The elderly woman was kind. She had quick eyes. Breakfast was ready. Would Miss—?

  “Lister.”

  Would Miss Lister—?

  Miss Lister didn’t want anything to eat. She drank a cup of coffee in the big old-fashioned kitchen and went outside.

  The skies were low and gray, but nothing was coming down. It was very cold. Snow covered-the lawns and fields, lay in solid patches on hedges and shrubbery, outlined the black branches of tall trees with long lines of whiteness. Beyond and below were the roofs of the town. It was scattered, rambling. A church spire rose from the middle, near the ugly dome of what was probably the courthouse.

  That was where she and Nicky would be going presently, to take out a marriage license. Catherine turned in the other direction, went round the house, and started up a long hill sloping to the east. The snow wasn’t deep and her brogues were sturdy. />
  After New York, the stillness was profound. There were scarcely even any bird calls. Halfway up the hill she paused for breath; propped herself against the trunk of a gnarled apple tree, lighted a cigarette, and looked down.

  The house she had left was a dark bulk in encircling trees. Some of the trees were evergreens. No wonder the place was gloomy. The trees grew too close, obscuring the light on the lower floor. Above were the veranda and windows of the rooms that housed Angela and Hat, Tom and Francine, Nicky—and Stephen Darrell.

  She closed an inner door sharply, not permitting herself to think of Stephen Darrell. He had returned the leopard to her apartment. Well and good. She understood that better now. He was going to marry Hat, and it was the sort of thing you would do for your prospective wife’s cousin. No one wanted a convicted murderess in the family. There would be so much apologizing to be done. It would be awkward, embarrassing.

  A crow cawed hoarsely and flew high in the air with a flapping of black wings. There were two cars near the entrance to the driveway of the boardinghouse below. One was a milk truck. Bottles rattled distantly, and men’s voices spoke, and there was a hammering sound. A motorist was stuck in the drifted snow close to the gates.

  Smoke was beginning to rise from the town chimneys. It was getting later. Catherine’s unreliable watch said twenty minutes of eight. It was the watch that had landed her at Mike’s door, fifteen minutes too soon, almost soon enough to confront a murderer in the lighted outer hall. Whose face would she have seen? Would it have been one she knew?

  What was the use of thinking about it? She began to retrace her steps ploddingly. Being alone wasn’t any better than having people around. It was worse. There was no check on imagination when you were by yourself.

  The motorist and the milkman were walking along the side driveway together. The milkman carried a wire basket with bottles in it, the motorist a spanner. He was a shortish thickset countryman with the stuffing coming out of the right armhole of a sheepskin-lined wind-breaker. He had a car. Catherine’s gaze lingered on his squat figure. How would it be, she thought, if she asked him to drive her away from here, anywhere, as long as it was away?