The Ghosts' High Noon

by John Dickson Carr

  “Ah, Mrs. Laird! How are you, Pete? Sit down and join us for coffee, won’t you?”

  “Hello, Clay. And the other Mr. Blake. We’ve just had coffee, thank you, but I will sit down for a moment, if I may.”

  A waiter had darted forward to hold a chair for her. Indicating with her gesture that Peter required no such luxury, she seated herself and contemplated them.

  “When you have been as close to any person as I have always been to Leo Shepley (he called me Aunt Mathilde, you know), it seems the height of the unfeeling to take luncheon at a public restaurant the day after his death. But there’s always shopping to do, and one must eat somewhere. What a dreadful business, Clay! About Leo, I mean. Are the police holding anyone? Do they even suspect anyone?”

  “No, they’re not holding anyone. And, so far, the only person they seem to suspect is myself.”

  “You? How utterly absurd! Why should they suspect you?”

  “Mainly, I think, because I was there conveniently on hand before anybody else arrived, and can’t supply an alibi for some crucial moments. There’s no other possible reason, God knows!”

  “Tell me something, Clay,” interjected Peter, looking up from under his eyebrows. “Why did you go out to Yvonne’s in the first place? Your joy and delight wasn’t there, was she?”

  “No, Pete, she wasn’t there. How do you know she wasn’t there?”

  “You’re forgetting, aren’t you? I was there myself, wasn’t I, being questioned by that cop along with the rest of you?”

  “Yes; sorry; I was forgetting!”

  “To tell you the truth”—Peter made a face—“I knew she wasn’t there before Raoul and I chased in.”

  “How did you learn that?”

  “Backstairs gossip. Every maid at our place is as fascinated by Y.B. and her doings as though she had all Y.B.’s talents for her own.”

  “Be quiet, Peter!” his mother said sharply. “Such talk does no credit either to you or to your upbringing. I’ll hear no more of it; be quiet!”

  Then she looked at Jim, and a smile softened her features.

  “When we met you in Alec’s office yesterday morning, Mr. Blake, I was not very gracious, I’m afraid. But I had no idea who you were. You’re a successful author, among other things, as Alec soon informed us in your absence. May I ask whether you’re investigating Leo’s death with a view to publication?”

  “Certainly not with a view to publication, Mrs. Laird!”

  “But you are investigating?” Her eyes would not let go. “What have you learned about us, Mr. Blake? In particular, what have you learned about me?”

  “Only that you enjoy reading plays, as so many of us do.”

  “Only enjoy reading them? Your researches, Mr. Blake, must surely have unearthed the sinister revelation that I was once an amateur actress of no inconsiderable talent? It does seem to run in the family.”

  “Yes, madam?”

  “Indeed it does. Alec, my severe and formal nephew, has some slight gift along that line, though he has employed it only for charitable entertainments in aid of the Presbyterian Church. He once gave a capital performance as a comic clergyman whose parishioners are scandalized when someone finds a pack of cards in the tail pocket of their pastor’s coat.” An edge of malice glittered behind her smile. “‘How well you play a hypocrite!’ I said to him; ‘the part just suits you.’ And he said—well, he made some ingenious retort. He’s clever, I give him that, even if he’s so fond of power he keeps poor Sylvia completely under his thumb!

  “Strangely, Mr. Blake, even Peter is not without talent. I say ‘strangely’ because of his obvious natural clumsiness and the fact that he lacks the glib tongue of the de Jarnacs or the Lairds. But he did quite well as Tony Lumpkin in She Stoops to Conquer; the part suited him.”

  “Now look, Mother…!”

  “Be quiet, I said. You are sure, Mr. Blake—and you, Clay—you can tell me nothing more about Leo’s death?”

  “I don’t know one other thing, I swear!” said Clay.

  “Then we won’t keep you from your coffee. But perhaps, my dear Clay, I can help you a little.”

  “Help me?”

  “Oh, not in the matter of poor Leo, which is so completely senseless I sometimes think it can’t have happened, and Peter agrees with me: No; this concerns you and your private affairs; it’s more personal. One of these days, Clay,” she looked hard at him, “you are going to get a most staggering surprise. It won’t displease you, though it may throw you off balance for a moment. In fact, it should lift you into a higher heaven than any you have yet dreamed of!

  “About Leo, however, one thing does surprise me. If he had something terrible on his mind, as by general report he must have had, I should have expected him to come to me with it, rather than pelt so hard for the home of a woman who must remain nameless. ‘Cherish Aunt Mathilde!’ he used to say. ‘If you have a problem, take it to Aunt Mathilde.’ What went wrong with him in the darkest hour?”

  She rose up, adjusting the fur-piece round her neck.

  “And now, gentlemen, we must bid you goodbye. Remember me, Mr. Blake, if you remember me at all, as an old witch who used white magic in prophesying only for people’s good. Come along, Peter. Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye.”

  And away they went. Clay stared after them, crushing out his cigarette in the ashtray.

  “Now what was that all about? What did she mean, exactly? And, come to think of it, what was I saying when Madam Ir—when she interrupted?”

  “Something about the Voice’s latest trick.”

  “Yes, of course!” An odd look flashed into Clay’s eyes. “Some while ago, you remember, I was called inside to the telephone? Philippe escorted me to it. The phone’s in a little booth under the stairs. I picked up the receiver, and…”

  “The Wicked Voice? Threatening again?”

  “Not threatening, exactly. Still gloating, but more challenging than threatening, and even a little conciliatory.”

  “What did you say, Clay?”

  “I didn’t have a chance to say anything except the noise like ‘Ug?’ we all make when we pick up a receiver without being sure who’s at the other end.”

  “Well?”

  “My unknown friend said: ‘Listen to me, and don’t interrupt. How’s your courage? If you want to prove you’ve got any, go to number 114-b Conti Street. It’s a perfectly respectable place in a perfectly respectable neighborhood, run by a respectable man. Pay a quarter; go inside; try your skill. You’ve got physical guts, maybe; how’s your mental fibre? At least you’re in no danger from the baseballs. If you accept this dare, good fool, then I may not do what I ought to do. Don’t forget the address: 114-b Conti Street.’ And then he hung up on me.”

  “Where’s 114-b Conti Street? And what’s all this about being in no danger from baseballs?”

  “The address is just around the corner; we could walk there in five minutes. I don’t understand the part about baseballs, but I used to be a pretty fair pitcher.”

  “Are you going?”

  “You bet I’m going, old son! Since I was a boy, Jim, I’ve never been able to pass up a dare. And I want to see what the Voice does when I spit in his eye. Care to come along?”

  “With pleasure!” Jim said heartily. “If I can catch somebody’s attention, I’ll just call for the bill…”

  “You’ll do nothing of the kind; I invited you. —Philippe!”

  A few minutes later, with the bill paid, they went out through the body of the restaurant into the street.

  Though the sky remained overcast, still no rain had fallen. With a subdued kind of relish Clay led his companion south to Royal Street and then turned to the right. Another right-hand turn brought them into Conti Street, which ran parallel with St. Louis on the side towards Canal.

  More pastel-colored houses, some shop-fronts and some private dwellings, stretched away to the north. Perhaps a little more than five minutes’ walk, keeping to the right-hand pavement, brought the
m abreast of 114-b.

  “Is this all right, Clay? Your secretary said you had a political meeting this afternoon.”

  “Yes, but that’s at three o’clock. It’s not quite two-thirty now. Look!”

  Their destination occupied premises between an old-fashioned drug-store on the far side and, on the near side, a confectioner’s conspicuously advertising pralines behind the dummy figure of a colored Mammy with a red bandana round her head.

  Housed in a good-sized if temporary-looking structure, rather higher and broader than most buildings thereabouts, appeared what a sign across the façade described as Test Your Eye: A Trial of Skill above the representation of crossed baseball bats and a fielder’s glove.

  In the glass-enclosed pay-box, rather like the pay-box at a theatre, sat a fat elderly man with a goatee beard.

  “It’s Major Magruder!” exclaimed Clay, striding up to the wicket of the glass cage. “I didn’t know…hello, Major! What game are you operating these days?”

  “Afternoon, Mr. Blake,” said Major Magruder, “and hope you’re interested. It’s just what the sign says: a machine that pitches to you. Self-loading, self-operating, and automatic.”

  “How does it work?”

  “Six pitches for a quarter; you stand and lam at ’em with one of the bats inside. The distance it pitches, mind, ain’t quite as long as the distance between the mound and home plate, but it’s a pretty fair piece. They’d all be strikes if you let ’em go by: a little above waist-high, dead over the plate, and not thrown too fast.”

  Jim moved past Clay and slid half a dollar through the grill.

  “Mr. Blake and I,” he said, “would both like a whirl at it. How do we set the machine in motion?”

  “I set it in motion. As soon as you’re both inside, I’ll count to twenty and then press this button here. I can calc’late just how long the pitches’ll take, and I can hear the bat, too. When the first of you’s taken his swats, I’ll count another twenty and press the button again. Just imagine the metal arm is Walter Johnson, though you won’t be meetin’ anything like the Big Train’s speed. Thank’ee kindly, gentlemen; go on in.”

  Clay led the way through a cramped little entry into the blaze of light beyond.

  It was a lofty shed which would carry many echoes, illuminated by concealed electric bulbs. At the far end, in what appeared to be a padded rear wall, they could see a dark aperture like an open doorway. In the middle of the aperture loomed some box-like metal contrivance which grotesquely suggested an altar.

  On the wooden floor, some thirty-odd feet back from the metal contrivance at the end, a pentagon for home plate had been drawn in white paint. To one side lay several medium-weight bats.

  “I don’t like this place,” Clay said suddenly. “It’s got a funny damn feel about it, if you ask me. Major Magruder’s all right; I know him; but…”

  “You go first, will you? Pick up one of those bats and face Walter Johnson. The major’s almost had time to count twenty, even if he’s counting very slowly. I’ll stand to the left of you and a little way back.”

  Clay took a bat at random and squared himself beside the painted plate.

  “I can’t even hit the thing, probably; haven’t touched a bat since I was in college. Never mind; here we go!”

  A shiny white baseball appeared up over the back of the altar, where metal glinted faintly. After seeming to hang there for an instant, it flew towards the plate: some few inches above waist-high, not particularly fast, and straight in the groove.

  Clay swung hard at it, but there was no clean crack; he swung only into a murderous foul-tip. The ball whacked hard against the wall behind them, which was not padded; it clattered to the floor and bounced amid a fusillade of echoes.

  “I still don’t like this,” Clay declared. “It’s too dark in that space behind the. machine-thing. But I’ll get your money’s worth whatever happens. How long between the pitches?”

  About twelve seconds, Jim estimated. Another baseball appeared out of nowhere and bore down. This time Clay met it squarely, for what on any field would have been a clean two-base hit to left center. Padded wall or no, the ball smote hard and rebounded in more echoing din.

  The third pitch Clay missed completely. But it had to land somewhere; noise never ceased.

  “I’ll get the next one,” he promised. “Trying too hard, that’s all. It’s only a damn machine, you know. Anyway, the World Series is over.”

  And then a commonplace play-scene suddenly altered its tempo.

  Jim, standing to the batter’s left, was keeping alert for hits that might rebound from the side wall and fly at his head. After the first two pitches he had scarcely glanced at the aperture with the machine.

  But he glanced now, and could hardly believe his eyes. There was something besides the machine in that aperture.

  A man, face grotesquely daubed to darkness with dirt or soot, stood in semi-darkness a little to the right of the pitching apparatus and behind it. He held a light rifle, which he was raising to his shoulder. And he was turning the rifle not towards Clay Blake, but towards Jim.

  Several things ran fast to their end at once. A fourth baseball appeared from nowhere. There was a thud and rattle as Clay dropped his bat. The baseball flew from the machine; Clay caught it with a flat smack against his left palm. As the man with the daubed face fitted rifle to shoulder, drawing his sights on Jim’s forehead, Clay sighted, too. Then, with a powerful sidearm delivery, he threw.

  The ball, a blinding white streak, took Daubed-face full in the middle of the stomach. Daubed-face pitched backwards, doubled up as though kicked by a mule. His rifle struck the floor before he did, its hair-trigger jarring and exploding the cartridge. At the lash of the shot among all other sounds, stout Major Magruder ran in from the entry, his chin-beard waggling, and stopped, appalled.

  “What you doin’?” he shouted. “What you doin’, fergossake?”

  Almost instantly he jumped aside to avoid a fifth baseball, which flashed out of the machine and whizzed past both Clay and the major before it struck the front wall. As Daubed-face lay inertly beyond the machine, a second and burlier figure with a mud-daubed mask appeared above the recumbent rifleman, and started to drag him out by some back way.

  In from the front entrance, enraged, charged none other than Lieutenant Zack Trowbridge, his face all strawberry-rash.

  “Stop!” he bellowed to Daubed-face Two, who was still dragging at Daubed-face One. “In the name o’ the law, stop!”

  He raced for the aperture, dragging an Iver-Johnson .45 out of his hip-pocket holster, and swerving just in time to avoid a sixth baseball, which Clay caught. Daubed-face One, Daubed-face Two, and Lieutenant Trowbridge all disappeared.

  “It can’t work again,” sputtered Major Magruder, almost in tears, “’less I press the button. But I don’t reckon you want it pressed again, do you? You can claim a quarter back, if you want it.”

  “As a matter of fact, Major,” Jim assured him, “it won’t be necessary either to reactivate the machine or to refund the quarter. Thanks, Clay! That was quick thinking; you quite literally saved my life.”

  “But why?” demanded Clay, dropping the baseball and pressing both hands to the sides of his head. “Couple of cheap hoodlums somebody hired. One of ’em’s knocked silly; Zack’ll grab him even if he misses the other. But why’d the Voice put ’em up to it? Since I was the one they wanted, why go for you?”

  “Are you sure you were the one they wanted, Clay? Don’t you see what must have happened this time?”

  “No, damned if I do!”

  Major Magruder had discreetly withdrawn. Jim looked his companion up and down.

  “Well, we can easily prove it by questioning Philippe,” he went on, “but I should risk a small bet before we do. You were called to the telephone. Though everybody knows you as Clay, which is short for your middle name, your actual first name is James, the same as mine. And that’s well known, too. When the Voice asked to speak to Mr. Jame
s Blake…”

  “Are you saying…?”

  “Yes. Several persons have told us there can’t be any confusion between our names. But there can be. There has been. I didn’t have to give my name to Philippe or anybody else. I asked for Mr. Blake’s table, as your secretary told me, and was escorted there without further parley. So far as Philippe knew, my name might have been Jones or Brown or Robinson or Woodrow Wilson.”

  Clay picked up the fallen bat, lashing it viciously at the air as though to lash at his troubles, before lowering it and facing Jim with the look of a man half out of his wits.

  “But this just gets crazier as it goes along! You think the Voice, the one who’s been doing all the phoning, is also the murderer?”

  “I’m convinced of it. This time, by your own report, you didn’t say anything except a sound like ‘Ug.’ He had no chance to realize he was speaking to the wrong man.”

  “But why you? Why should the Voice want to kill you?”

  “He must think I know who he is.”

  “And do you?”

  “That, Clay, is what a friend of yours would call tragic irony. Just after lunch, for instance, I suddenly thought I saw how the murder could have been done, the thing that’s been driving Zack Trowbridge up the wall. It’s simple; it’s so damnably and essentially simple it should have occurred to us long ago.”

  “It hasn’t occurred to me. Are you going to enlighten the feebleminded?”

  “Not just yet, since at the moment there doesn’t seem to be any conceivable way of proving it.”

  Jim turned towards the entry, then hesitated and turned back again.

  “You asked me whether I know the murderer’s identity. Well, I don’t. Unless I’ve missed some fact of glaring importance, which is possible and even probable, the evidence doesn’t seem to indicate any particular person; or, rather, the evidence seems to point in three or four directions at once. It might be X, it might be Y, it might be Z; but where’s the clear clue to show which?

  “The irony, mentioned a moment ago, is that I can’t be sure who our quarry is. And yet for some mysterious reason he thinks I do know. He’s had one go at trying to kill me, and he may try again. Yes, Clay, he may try again.”