by Rufus King
“Nothing but shacks there, lady. Shacks and mud.”
“So I understand.”
He shrugged and clashed into high. He hustled through the modest traffic and stopped, after a ten-minute run, where the pavement came to an end. He gave her one more chance.
“This right, lady?”
“It is, thank you.”
He opened the door and helped her out.
“Wait, please, driver.”
“Don’t worry. Can I help you across that mud?”
“No, thank you.”
He stood beside the car and watched her. She seemed to know what she was doing. But nuts always did seem to. Nuts and some drunks. He’d never forget that one old turkey whom he’d driven to a house on the embankment, the way the dignified old twerp had said. “Well, good night, my man,” and had stepped up to his neck straight into the river.
She was spotting that makeshift street light now. Looking down at the mud at the bottom of it. A case, all right. He watched her, fascinated, as she picked something up out of the mud. Looked like a cigarette butt. Well, for God’s sake, she was putting it into her clean white kid bag. What was this?
Something else, now. Some torn paper which evidently had struck her mad fancy. One of these, maybe, scavenger-treasure hunts? Hadn’t heard of any, not for more than a year anyhow, but with all of-these bond drives going on it was hard to keep up with the stunts.
There she dipped again. Looked like a very small bit of paper this time. Gold color, like a speck of gold confetti. Pop it went, into the bag. An apple-sized drop of rain hit him on the back of the neck.
“Hey, lady,” he shouted, “she’s coming down.”
She nodded and was walking toward him. Unhurried. Reminded him of a lithograph his wife had of a castle in Ireland and an old dame like this one out for a breather on the lawn. Also a couple of swans.
He helped her back into the cab. She told him how to drive her home.
Mrs. Giles sat straight against the cushion and, opening the bag, examined her treasure-trove. It consisted of (the driver’s eyesight had been acute) a sodden cigarette butt, the fragment of a letter, the writing of which the rain and mud had rendered completely unintelligible, and a small rectangle of paper, one side of which was glossy gold. It was very small, this last bit, scarcely wider than an eighth of an inch and not quite a quarter of an inch long. It fanned out slightly toward a torn end, something like a trellis for climbing roses.
It reminded her of something. It seemed to belong to something which, fairly recently, had caught her eye in strong sunlight. Well, it would come. She shut the bag with a snap of satisfaction.
Her clues.
The storm had increased considerably by the time they reached River Rest.
A package, Leila said as she opened the door for Mrs. Giles, had been left by a man while Mrs. Giles was out.
Mrs. Giles saw a cardboard carton over on the console table. It was untied and she lifted a flap of it. Odd—but of course: the inks. Mr. Smith had said he would attend to them. Just the suggestion of their pungent smell made her feel a brief creative urge. She took a pot out and thought it very strange. The ink wasn’t black; it was green. There were other pots of course; black, brown, red, blue, yellow, and some composition that shone with the metallic glint of gold.
How very interesting.
Mrs. Giles had always confined herself to pulling prints done in the conventional sepias or black. It had never occurred to her to use color. Nor, as she recalled it, had it ever occurred to her etching instructor to do so: that kind, dyspeptic Mr. Rollo Vanderwick. It might be quite exciting. A new school.
“Take these up and leave them in the studio, please, Leila.”
Leila said she would, and that there was an omelet for dinner and a good strong chicken broth for Mr. Kent when he should wake up.
Mrs. Giles went on up to Kent’s room. He still slept soundly, and Ella told her that he hadn’t stirred. She gave Ella the love which Hopkins had sent and asked Ella to go downstairs and send her up a tray. She would dine in Kent’s room and wait there until Dr. Hesley arrived with a nurse.
It was then a quarter to six.
By half-past seven the tray which Ella had brought her was still untouched. Her eyes rarely left Kent’s closed ones, and her thoughts would drift through the memories of earlier and happier moments of their lives.
Dr. Hesley came at eight. He brought with him a most competent-looking woman whom he introduced to Mrs. Giles as Nurse Jones. Mrs. Giles found herself somewhat confused and disturbed. Nurse Jones was—well, almost muscular, and offered so very little of the Florence Nightingale touch. In fact, she didn’t strike Mrs. Giles as being typical of a nurse at all. A product, she supposed, of today, when nurses were as rare as almost everything else.
Dr. Hesley was satisfied with Kent’s condition. He was not as satisfied, he said, with Mrs. Giles’s. He thought she needed rest. A good deal of it, and certainly a sound night’s sleep with breakfast in bed. He gave her some tablets and instructed her to take two of them upon retiring. She was to chase all worries from her mind, especially any regarding Kent’s condition, as Nurse Jones would take care of Kent most capably.
Mrs. Giles saw that Nurse Jones was comfortably installed after Dr. Hesley had gone, then she left Kent’s room and went out into the hall.
The lighting was, as it had always been, bad. Its source was a ceiling fixture made from a tortured wrought-iron pendant enclosing a globe of red glass which Papa had bought in Turkey. He had thought it very impressive. It was, all right, but it was also very sinister and ineffectual to see things by. As a little girl Mrs. Giles had always run like mad through its somber glow (it had been even worse in those days because of the gas jet which had preceded electricity) on her way to the nice bright nursery.
Perhaps it was this lighting and a subconscious reflection from her childhood fears which made Mrs. Giles think Mr. Smith’s expression so strange.
Mr. Smith had been hurrying toward the stairs just as she left Kent’s room and had all but knocked into her in his haste. He had his hat on and a raincoat, and possibly the shadow dropped by the hat’s brim and the reddish tone which the lighting threw on his skin gave his expression that satanic cast. But there was his manner too: a distracted, almost distraught brusqueness which effaced his fine, rugged kindliness and changed it into something almost brutal. She thought he seemed possessed, if you could think of anything so demonic in a man of his stolid, forthright character.
“Watch it!” he said. “Got to go out.”
And that was all, just that Mephistophelean look and the brutal rasp in his voice and he was gone: running down the stairs. The front door slammed.
The encounter increased her general nervous condition, and Mrs. Giles went on into her rooms in a state. She put the envelope which Dr. Hesley had given her on the bed table. She had no intention of taking them, although the temptation to do so was very strong. What heaven it would be: a good night’s rest.
But the gloom of rain on the windowpanes and the seeds of fear which Mr. Stedman had so pointedly sown were filling her with the most uncomfortable premonitions about the night. A voice within her warned her strongly against drugged sleep. Be up, the voice told her, and be on guard. She had learned during the many years of her life to pay attention to such voices.
Nurse Jones disturbed her. It was not the time when doctors could be given a choice, could send for a nurse who they knew from experience would be reliable. Was Nurse Jones a nurse at all?
Where was it she had seen something similar to that fleck of gold-faced paper which she had retrieved from the mud near that shack? In full sunlight she had seen its counterpart and then, yes, she had seen it once again in partial shadow.
And what had happened to kind and sturdy Mr. Smith? What news, what shock could have come to him to have produced that menacing tornado effect out in the hall? Had his handsome young nephew been affected too?
Then Leila came in and said
that Mr. Stedman would be happy if Mrs. Giles would be kind enough to join him for a moment down in the drawing room.
CHAPTER 29
Mrs. Giles took a moment to refresh her toilet. This coming encounter with Mr. Stedman would be, she felt, the moment for the drawing of the net. She wanted the buttress of looking her best. Her cheeks were terribly gray, and she decided that a slight rouging would do them no harm. She also touched up the bloodless look of her lips.
A grandfather clock struck nine as she walked slowly down the stairs. The chimes were Westminster and some of the notes were off key, but they floated with dignity up past her ears and spread through the cloud of brooding which seemed clamped upon the house. She wondered whether Miss Ashley were back from the plant. There had been no sound of Miss Ashley about, or any feel of her.
Mr. Stedman was standing squarely before the drawing room’s hearth, now graced with its summer decor of a fan-shaped arrangement of decorative grasses. Mrs. Giles took a good look at his rooted imperturbability as she advanced into the room and decided that he was there to stay. Certainly his stance said he had no intention of budging until he got what he had come for. She drew together the tattered remnants of her bodily strength and asked him to sit down.
He declined. He remained standing. He waited until she was seated in an armchair and then he said: “Mrs. Giles, I am going to ask you to be frank.”
She looked for a longer moment at him, and he seemed filled with knowledge, stuffed with a full awareness of all of the things which she had tried so miserably to withhold from him. It would be difficult to fence.
“I am completely at your disposal, Mr. Stedman.”
“No, it is evasions such as that one which I hope we can avoid. We both know you are not. You are bound by a quixotic and stupid desire to protect your grandson. Will it help you if I assure you he needs no protection of the nature you are offering him? Neither the police nor I are such stereotyped fools as to believe that Lieutenant Giles, after a year of battle service in the South Pacific, flew to Washington and then on to Bridgehaven and spent the first hour of his arrival in cold-bloodedly murdering an international crook.”
It was very tempting.
“Naturally,” Mrs. Giles said quietly, “anything of that nature would be impossible for a man of Kent’s character. You will permit me to correct you? He reached here yesterday morning—that is, the morning pursuant to Mr. Russdorff’s murder—by train.”
Stedman walked over to a side table and opened a brief case. He took out two photographic enlargements. He handed one to Mrs. Giles and said: “Take a look at that, please. It is a very small segment of the news picture which was taken of you by the cameraman of the Bridgehaven Gazette while you were standing on the station platform. This was shortly after Lieutenant Giles had left the train. It is greatly enlarged.”
Mrs. Giles remembered only too well. Slowly from her feet and from her finger tips ice crept inward through her veins and approached her heart. She could even recall the cameraman’s brash remark as the flash bulb flicked and he shouted at her: “That’s the stuff we want, sister.”
Well, there she was, at least that small segment of her which the enlargement had encompassed: her eyes, her hand with the handkerchief crumpled in its fingers, and escaping from the handkerchief which was busied with wiping away her tears hung Kent’s identification tag and a section of the bracelet’s chain.
It was no use.
“Well, Mr. Stedman?”
“My secretary noticed this and brought it to my attention. In common with every other young woman in town, she is romantically flat on her face about your grandson. She had not been able to take in the reception at the station, so her interest in the newspaper account, especially those press shots of Lieutenant Giles, were gone over with a magnifying glass. The pictures, literally so. The touch about his having had his identification tag torn from his wrist and about it later having been found on the platform and restored to him was included in the general report. Well, she thought it odd—that recognizable metal tag dangling from the handkerchief in your hand.”
“Yes, Mr. Stedman.”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake, Mrs. Giles, don’t take this so tragically. The story was perfectly simple to reconstruct. Here, look at this other enlargement. You will see it shows the imprint of a woman’s bedroom slipper in the moist earth close to Russdorff’s body. Even sheer dolts would have examined the various slippers in this house. The police went through every room while all of you were down at the morgue.”
(At least, Mrs. Giles thought swiftly, the search had taken place after she had basted the blue silk wrapper inside the dinner dress. But if the slippers had been found was the wrapper of any consequence? Better attack.)
“You found that a pair of mine were damp,” she said.
The admission pleased Stedman. Evidently she was softening up.
“Yes. Naturally at that moment it was too soon to know just where we stood. We knew that during the night or early morning you had observed the body and, for some reason which must have been an urgent one, had decided not to inform the police. We were considerably puzzled as to why a woman of your character and standing would do a thing like that.”
Stedman took a turn, as though debating how far to go. He said, “We had no knowledge then that Lieutenant Giles had reached Bridgehaven hours before he was expected. We still thought of him as being on a train en route here from Washington. Is it any wonder that we were forced to consider that you had murdered the man yourself?”
“None. I can easily understand it.”
“Take that bit of blue silk from your wrapper.”
(So this too. All of her cleverness a futile waste.)
“You knew that the wrapper was mine?”
“We knew, Mrs. Giles, that you owned a blue silk wrapper. That astonishing maid of yours told the police so before they searched for the damp slippers. Naturally they were unable to locate it. Where did you hide it up to the time when you buried it beneath the delphiniums this morning?”
“Did the man on patrol duty see me, Mr. Stedman?”
“The light being turned on in your bedroom at four in the morning of course interested him. The flashlight flickering in the tool shed. His instructions were simply to observe. Where did you keep the wrapper hidden, Mrs. Giles?”
“I basted it inside a dinner dress and left it hanging in the wardrobe.”
He observed her with the respect he usually reserved for an accomplished crook. How pitiful the rouge looked against the white of her cheeks.
She said quietly, “Is this a prelude to my arrest, Mr. Stedman?”
“I have already asked you not to consider this so tragically, Mrs. Giles. I am not a wolf who is here to eat you. It is true that we more than ever considered you as our best bet after we had learned Russdorff’s identity. Because of his record, which, as I told you, largely included blackmail.”
Mrs. Giles was sincerely bewildered.
“How on earth could he blackmail me?”
Stedman smiled.
“We did not know. We did know that you were a very rich woman and that your life has in recent years been a fairly lonely one. Certainly so far as publicity is concerned you have been anything but an open book.”
“I am naturally retiring, Mr. Stedman.”
“Yes, we knew we were wrong and crossed you off as a suspect right after the identification-tag business. Lieutenant Giles hadn’t had it torn from him by the welcoming mob. You yourself had dropped it onto the platform. Why? So it would be found there. Why? So that it wouldn’t be found where it had originally fallen. The inference was elemental. You had found the tag by Russdorff’s body and you had not called the police because of your desire to shield Lieutenant Giles.”
“As you say, Mr. Stedman, those things are entirely inferential.”
“Not really. We checked back then, you see. We established your grandson’s arrival from Washington by plane at ten o’clock that night. We established
his backtracking along the line after the crime had been committed and his waiting in a station until morning so that he could reach Bridgehaven on the proper train. Those things are very simple.”
“I see now that they are.”
“The crime itself is not simple. Neither the motive for it nor the killer. We continue puzzled. Badly so. The knife that killed Russdorff has proven valueless as a clue to its owner. There are no fingerprints on its hilt. With the exception of the one made by your bedroom slipper, all footprints in the vicinity are useless. There seemed a thousand of them, left by the rush of people who came here that morning to rent rooms.”
Had he lulled her now enough? Had he convinced her sufficiently of the high altruism of his intent? He hesitated a briefest instant and then said, “Mrs. Giles, that night was a very silent one. The storm had stopped. What time was it when you heard Russdorff cry out as he was struck?”
“There was no cry. Just that scuffling sound down on the gravel.”
Stedman expelled a deep breath of relief. He grimaced.
“I hate to trick things out of you like that. There seemed no other way.”
He sat down. He looked at her with kindness. He held no doubt whatever but that she was in her grandson’s confidence and could inform him of the essential lead. Surely the bulk of these generous loaves which he had cast upon the waters would come back home.
It had been worth it. Both the effort and all of his patience during the past two days. At last she would talk. Swiftly, then, they could reach within the murk of this mess and catch their man.
“Tell me now,” he said. “Start with the scuffle. Tell me everything from there.”
The ice had reached her heart by now, and her whole body lacked comfort and warmth, and she thought that if she once started to tremble an ague would grip her and she would never be able to stop. It was so difficult to think when you felt sick like this, sick all through with doubts and worry and indecision.
How greatly if at all did this assurance of knowledge on Mr. Stedman’s part release her from Kent’s injunction that she keep still? Kent’s voice, so earnest, so saturated with the imminence of a threat which was imperiling this nation which he loved so much, which both of them loved so much: how could she betray him further than (because of Mr. Stedman’s trickery) she already had?
