by Rufus King
Contents
COPYRIGHT INFORMATION
THE LIEUTENANT VALCOUR SERIES
CHAPTER I
CHAPTER II
CHAPTER III
CHAPTER IV
CHAPTER V
CHAPTER VI
CHAPTER VII
CHAPTER VIII
CHAPTER IX
CHAPTER X
CHAPTER XI
CHAPTER XII
CHAPTER XIII
CHAPTER XIV
CHAPTER XV
CHAPTER XVI
CHAPTER XVII
CHAPTER XVIII
CHAPTER XIX
CHAPTER XXI
CHAPTER XXII
CHAPTER XXIII
CHAPTER XXVI
CHAPTER XXVII
CHAPTER XXVIII
CHAPTER XXIX
CHAPTER XXX
CHAPTER XXXI
CHAPTER XXXII
CHAPTER XXXIII
COPYRIGHT INFORMATION
Copyright © 1929 by the Consolidated Magazine Corporation, copyright © 1930 by Doubleday, Doran & Company, Inc. Copyright © renewed 1957 (renewal # R188477) by Rufus King.
* * * *
The copyrights to all works by Rufus King are owned by Wildside Press, LLC. All rights reserved. For information on this and other Wildside Press properties, contact us at www.wildsidepress.com.
THE LIEUTENANT VALCOUR SERIES
Murder by the Clock
Somewhere In the House
Murder by Latitude
Murder in the Willet Family
Murder on the Yacht
Valcour Meets Murder
The Lesser Antilles Case
Profile of a Murder
The Case of the Constant God
Crime of Violence
Murder Masks Miami
CHAPTER I
There was, on the shore of Lake Champlain and close to the Canadian border, a certain house. In this house, forgotten from disuse, in the drawer of a maple smoking stand, was a gun. Its make and type were a Colt automatic, caliber .25.
There was, in the City of New York, a certain man. He was influential both politically and financially. He was, as well, a man of family. One winter morning he said to the commissioner of police at the conclusion of a detailed and confidential statement, “I need the best man you’ve got.”
The commissioner said, “I agree with you. You do.”
They sat and looked at each other for a while.
“It will be difficult,” the man said. “I can’t advise—my natural, my normal inclination, frankly, is to kill—but we can’t do that.”
Their smiles were wintry.
“No,” the commissioner said, “we can’t do that.”
“Delicacy—the thinnest ice—there must be no arrest, of course. I’d be involved. What a pity we haven’t retained the attitude as well as the lore of the Borgias.”
“You appreciate the basic obstacle, of course?”
“Of course: getting him into the community.”
“And into the house.”
“Can it be done?”
The commissioner smiled again. “Valcour?” The man stirred heavily in his chair. “A lieutenant, isn’t he?”
“Yes. Handled that Endicott business, you know.”
“I know.”
The man considered this for a while. “He won’t have any official standing up there.”
“He could have.”
“How?”
“Several ways. Why bother? I’ll attend to it. Get the district attorney at the county seat to deputize him—the sheriff’s office—oh, any number of ways.”
The man frowned and emphasized his words carefully. “No one must know what he’s up there for. There must be no publicity.”
“There won’t be any.”
“How will he fit?” the man said.
“Up there?”
“Yes.”
“He was born in Canada.”
“Returning-tothe-scenes-of-his-childhood thing?”
“Well, near them if not to them. It had better be for his health. The hunting season’s over, I imagine, except for rabbits. Roger’s Landing, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“What’s the nearest village to it?”
“How should I know?”
“It doesn’t matter.” The commissioner waved a manicured finger in a circle. “He’ll circle about, you see, and then work in. Valcour works in circles. They’re walls, really, that he builds around the thing he’s out to do.”
The man’s fingers were inclined to pudginess. Their hold on the cigar he was smoking was unsteady. “It ought to be quick,” he said.
“It’ll be quick.”
CHAPTER II
Vera wondered, as she lifted the receiver from the hook, whether the line had gone dead. It usually did after a storm, and the snow had been falling steadily through the day and evening up to about a half hour ago. She accepted the normal stillness of the night as a direct insult to her nerves. They were gathering into a hard solid lump in her chest. She jingled the telephone hook again. That was the trouble with living in a forsaken hole like this: the lake a sheet of ice, the roads impassable for cars because of the drifts, everyone holed in for the winter, and even when they weren’t they were dumb. She wouldn’t stand it; she wasn’t going to stand it if the answer she expected…
“Oh, hello! Get me Mason’s Forks, Central.”
Mason’s Forks was the next village to Roger’s Landing, on the outer fringes of which she lived.
It was four miles to the west over a road that wasn’t very good even in good weather.
“You betcha.”
“And hurry, Central. There’s been an accident.”
“Mason’s Forks,” said another voice shortly.
“Dr. Harlan’s—quickly, please,” said Vera.
“Hello?”
“Hello—oh, Dr. Harlan?”
“Yes?”
“This is Vera.”
“Oh—Vera.”
“Say, listen, Fred, you got to come over here right away.”
“You crazy, Vera? Say, on a night like this…”
“You can make it, can’t you?”
“Sure, if I have to. What’s up?”
“There’s been an accident.”
“What happened?”
“Well, I don’t want to say too much on the telephone.”
“Sure, but I’ve got to know what to bring.”
“It’s our maid.”
“Who?”
“It’s Alice.”
“What’s the matter with her?”
“She—I think she’s been shot, Fred.”
“Well, why didn’t you say so? Every minute may count.”
“I don’t think you need break your neck. I think she’s dead.”
“But don’t you know? Wasn’t anyone there?”
“No, and there isn’t any gun around. But there’s a little hole in her back.”
“Say, that’s an attack, Vera. What?… Wait a minute, Vera.” She could hear him talking to someone near his end of the phone. The words were unintelligible. His voice came back to her directly: “Listen, Vera, Valcour’s offered to come, too.”
“Who’s Valcour, Fred?”
“He’s a lieutenant from the city. He’s stopping up here for his health.”
“Lieutenant of what?”
“Police—detective—so
mething.”
“Detective? Why bring a detective, Fred?”
Fred had hung up.
Vera replaced the receiver upon its hook. The telephone stood on a shelf that ran beneath four small-paned windows in the kitchen. The night sky was clouding over and it would snow again probably before morning. A windbreak of spruce cut a sharp silhouette against a slope blanketed deeply in blue snow. Vera ignored the familiar picture. Fred’s voice—there was that same touch of irritableness that had been in it for the past few weeks. It was a recognizable signpost; one that she had come to know well from habit. Her eyes, which dominated her slightly coarse face, contracted. All right, let him get irritable. It wouldn’t do him any good. It never had the others, until she herself was ready.
Who was this Valcour? She had heard of him. The name grew. Somebody’s had him for an evening at bridge—that was it. He was stopping at Mason’s Forks for his health. He played for points. There was something about his having been born near by. The lump in her chest received scant attention for a moment. She stopped before a large mirror that hung over a porcelain sink. She compared her own face with that of a famous opera star. Yes, she did look like her. Younger, of course—decades younger. Who was it who had told her so? Some officer down at the post at the county seat—the one who had passed out cold at Matt’s a couple of weeks ago and said nasty things about her, and Will had punched him.
Will was her husband.
She left the kitchen, went through the darkened dining room and into a small living room the walls of which were hung in silk and the furniture of which she knew to be authentically Chippendale and uncomfortable. She snapped on the radio and hummed to herself for a minute while the tubes warmed up. She looked at her wrist watch. It was almost eleven. WEAF would be broadcasting jazz from some grill in a few minutes. Were there still such things as grills—such a city as New York? Her fingers, which were very strong, twisted an empty cigarette package until it broke.
“…first number by Ben Levy and his Hotel…”
“Vera.”
“Will! Turn that switch on again, please.”
“Haven’t you any sense of fitness?”
Will didn’t look so uninteresting, Vera decided, when he got mad. That old look which had settled on him during the year they’d been married looked purposeful rather than just old. She’d even feel sorry for him, if he hadn’t lied to her about his money—not lied, exactly, but she’d misunderstood, and he hadn’t contradicted her. Of course she should have come right out and asked him, but…
“I said turn that switch on again, Will.”
“I heard you, Vera.”
“Just because a hired girl’s dead—”
“She isn’t dead, Vera.”
Vera stood quite still.
“No? Then who shot her?”
Will looked at her steadily for a moment.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Do you?”
Vera didn’t answer right away.
“Just what are you trying to get at, big boy?”
“I’ve asked you not to use that expression.”
“You listened to it once.”
“We were both of us fools once.”
“And will be, big boy—until death do us part.”
Not his death, Will knew, or hers, but the death of his father lying sick in bed upstairs. He’d be rich then and could pay alimony. Well, at least he’d flushed her out into the open. “That’s a rotten thing to say, Vera.”
Vera shrugged. “Where’s Alice?”
“On the bed in her room. We ought to stay with her until Fred comes.”
“What can we do?”
“We can just stay with her.”
“Don’t be impatient.”
“I’ve been trying awfully hard not to be, Vera.”
He followed her up curving stairs that were the important note, architecturally, in a combined living hall and library. He was like a tense dark shadow lengthening behind her, stepping when she stepped, her shingled hair mounting before him like ashed coals waiting to break into flames. It was that curious quality about her that had magnetized him. It still magnetized him; that ever-present quality, which was like a vital force, of sluggish fires that flamed so easily beneath any draft. He followed her down a hallway, the walls of which were hung with large and valuable canvases that rested oppressively in shadow, that brooded in heavy sullenness for want of proper light.
The maid’s room was an oblong box. Alice lay on a bed just beyond the circle of light from a single electric lamp. Even in shadow her cheeks seemed feverishly flushed.
“She’s got a fever,” Will said.
“It’s mostly rouge—my rouge.”
“Why do you let her use your things, Vera?” They were speaking in whispers.
“She can use anything I’ve got.”
“It isn’t right to be so intimate with a servant, Vera.”
Vera muttered something unintelligible about this eternal moralizing. “You’ve said yourself her family was as good as any around here,” she said.
“There’s a difference between decent respect and intimacy.”
“A difference which it’s too subtle for your wife to understand, I suppose.”
“Don’t raise your voice, Vera.”
“I will raise my voice. I—”
She stopped abruptly, facing the hall doorway. Her father-in-law, Mr. Sturm, was coming slowly through its patch of darkness. There was no expression whatsoever upon his virile, finely modeled face; no expression in the careful, steady look of his black, deep-set eyes. A dark silk dressing gown added an effect of further tallness to his natural height. His face and carefully brushed white hair seemed, for a startling moment, disembodied against the dark of the hall. “Vera, my dear.”
“Yes, Mr. Sturm.”
It was her constant form of address.
“We must not disturb Alice in her present condition. Further shock to her nervous system would be—” he stopped to permit the escape of a dry hacking cough, to take a lozenge from a tin box in the pocket of his dressing gown and place it in his mouth, before adding—“unfortunate.” Mr. Sturm’s voice was, from prolonged sickness, an echo of itself. It carried even in its thinness certain assurances of culture, dominance, habitual gentility—many things.
“You ought to be in bed, Father. You shouldn’t have got up.”
“I know, Will.”
The inscrutability of Mr. Sturm’s stare relaxed for a moment as he looked at his son.
“You ought never to have gotten out of bed, Mr. Sturm.”
“There is a moment in every man’s life, my dear Vera, when his physical actions are no longer of importance, one way or the other, to his well-being.” Mr. Sturm, beyond a faint rustle of silk, made no sound as he came farther into the room. “I am living,” he added, “through such a moment.”
“But the doctor said, Mr. Sturm—”
“It is precisely because of what the doctor said, my dear Vera.”
“He said you were well enough to get out of bed, Mr. Sturm? To move around?”
It was impossible for Vera to control completely the anxious disappointment in her voice. Mr. Sturm’s smile was effortless and unreadable.
“He said that I could move around, Vera. What have you done for Alice, my dear?”
“I put a compress on her back,” Will said, “over that little hole where the bullet went in.” A stillness as if blood had been drained from the three of them settled on the room. Vera alone, because of her rouge, didn’t look quite so deadly pale. Mr. Sturm’s “of course” hung thinly for an instant on their over-sensitive hearing.
“I don’t know what else to do,” said Will.
“It is all we can do until Dr. Harlan comes.”
“He ought to be here in a few minutes now, Mr. Sturm.”
“Oh, yes, Mr. Sturm.”
“That’s right, Vera.” Mr. Sturm’s singularly expressionless eyes lingered for a speculative moment on her sharp face. “Yes, there is every need for haste.”
He turned and was gone into the shadows, into the great stillness of the hall. His felt slippers made no sound. There was no sound of any closing door. He might, for all they knew, still be outside there, standing still and listening. Vera felt sure that he was; standing quite still out there in the hall, with heaven knew what sort of an expression breaking through the polite mask which he wore on his face. He was like the hard, well-kept stone wall to an estate; but most walls had gates, and he had no gate at all.
“We might as well sit down, Vera.”
She answered him abstractedly. “We might as well, Will.”
Vera took a rocker quite far from the bed. Will looked ungainly in the slipper chair he had sunk into. The ground outside, through a window near her, was like blue velvet ice, dimming to polished black where the snow-laden roadway ran north to the village, and across the roadway stretched ice-covered lake to the distant Vermont shore and a fringe of village with its careless handful of pin-point lights.
A thermometer fastened on the outer casement showed that the mercury had dropped to ten below. The broad, flat branches of the evergreens were weighted with thick slabs of snow, and the telephone and light wires running to the house were heavy with it. Somewhere along the power line leading to the village power house there was bound to be trouble; there always was when it stormed. Will must have been thinking about it, too.
“Did you order candles, Vera?” he said. “You were going to yesterday.”
Vera lied from habit. “I did; but they didn’t send them. There must be some around the house.”
“I think there are a few half-burned ones downstairs. We’ll need them if the lights go out.”
“They never stay out more than a few minutes.”
“With a storm like this they may be hours in locating the trouble.”
“I can’t think of everything.”
Deep beneath the surface in the mind of each of them was the constant knowledge that in Alice’s back was a little hole that had been made by a bullet, and that the bullet had come from a gun.
