by Rufus King
And, near her, there had been no gun.
CHAPTER III
Lieutenant Valcour was interested in the fact that no gun had been found, too. It definitely elevated the shooting of Alice Tribeau from the realm of the accidental. It made it attempted murder. What was of greater importance to him still was that the crime established him in the house on the strongest sort of a footing.
And it was the proper house.
Lieutenant Valcour refused to believe the affair to be blatantly coincidental. Something should have happened in that house. And now it had. Even before he removed his heavy fur coat, his muffler, and his wool-lined galoshes he sensed that in the Sturm house there was crime. The atmosphere was heavy with it—as definitely so as the warm, moist air which could tell a blindfolded man that he was in a greenhouse. It wasn’t simply that a servant had been shot. It wasn’t as simple as that. It couldn’t be as simple as…
“Take Mr. Valcour’s things, Will, and put them on that lounge in the library. Give me yours, Fred.”
Lieutenant Valcour permitted his eyes to be held by Vera’s. His own were friendly and intelligent eyes, well set in a friendly and intelligent elderly face. He thought of Vera’s as theatrical eyes, even as her dress verged on the theatrical: a woman who physically rather than mentally dramatized her emotions.
“It’s a shame to drag you out on a night like this, Mr. Valcour.”
He bowed almost apologetically. “In a way it’s my duty, Mrs. Sturm, and perhaps I can be of some help in untangling this unpleasant affair.”
“Isn’t it?—unpleasant, I mean. Of course I’m terribly sorry Alice got shot, but why should she get shot in our house?”
“That is what we must find out, Mrs. Sturm.”
“You better run right upstairs, Fred. Alice is in the maid’s room. Will will show you. You won’t need me, will you? I’ll stay here with Mr. Valcour. I’m sure he’ll want the facts at once.” Dr. Harlan picked up a small handbag. When he spoke he almost consciously avoided Vera’s eyes. “I guess Will can do all that’s necessary, Vera. I need some boiling water.”
“There’s a kettle on the stove, Will.”
“Yes, Vera.”
“You won’t come up with us, Mr. Valcour?”
“Thank you, Dr. Harlan; it will not be necessary for me to see Miss Tribeau for a while. Later, when she is more comfortable and can talk… As Mrs. Sturm suggests, I will first want the facts in the case.”
The embers of a log fire remained on the hearth of the living hall fireplace. The woodwork of the fireplace itself was a beautiful example, in the restraint and simplicity of its moldings, of Early American. A portrait hung above it and on either side were mahogany candlesticks with cut-crystal drops.
“Your husband’s family, Mrs. Sturm, has lived in this house for a long, long time.”
The statement was half interrogation, half assertion. Valcour cast it upon the conversational waters for whatever it might bring forth. Mrs. Sturm, as soon as Will and Dr. Harlan had gone upstairs, had settled in a sleepy-hollow chair that was covered with faded blue velvet. Her hair was an impudent jewel against a tired container. Her attitude was patently meant to convey a sense of calmness, of ease, but it failed to do so.
“I guess we’re the best people around here,” she said.
“Certainly—if I understood Dr. Harlan correctly—one of the oldest families in the county.”
“Will says so.”
“Ah, yes, your husband.”
She looked obliquely at him. He presented a certain impressive dignity, but there was nothing definite about him. She couldn’t label him, any more than she had ever been able to label her father-in-law, Mr. Sturm.
“You’re stopping up here, Mr. Valcour?”
“I’m up here for a rest.” Lieutenant Valcour smiled genially. “Every so often people tell me that I need a rest. It’s getting to a point where their insistence ceases to be polite. I had an introduction to the district attorney over at the county seat and he deputized me. I suppose it’s his way of presenting the keys of the county to fellow criminals. He suggested that Dr. Harlan, being a deputy coroner, might put me up. Dr. Harlan has very kindly done so. You know, about birds of a feather…”
“And you came up here from choice?” Valcour laughed pleasantly at her obvious incredulity.
“Oh, quite from choice, Mrs. Sturm. I’m sure you feel like saying that there’s no accounting for tastes, and that in your opinion I’m unsafe outside of an asylum.”
Vera thawed perceptibly.
“I guess you’ve got some reason, all right.”
“Simply a sentimental one. I was born, you see, in Canada. I went through McGill University for no good reason at all, and then became naturalized in the States and took up police work.” Vera thought this over for a moment.
“If you’re up here for a rest,” she said, “why are you monkeying around with this?”
Lieutenant Valcour smiled. “You know as well as I do that a sailor on leave hires a boat and goes rowing.”
“Fred says you are a detective.”
“That’s right; a lieutenant.”
“I suppose you’ll have to turn in a report about Alice being shot.”
“Yes.” Valcour continued to smile at Vera with impersonal friendliness. “And about who shot her.”
Vera snapped open a jeweled lighter and touched its flame to a cigarette. She inhaled deeply and then let the smoke curl in lazy drifts toward the ceiling.
“Harry Beaudrez shot her,” she said.
“That,” said Lieutenant Valcour after a moment’s pause during which he had forgotten to smile, “is most convenient.”
Vera inspected the word from every angle before repeating it.
“Convenient?”
“Why, yes, Mrs. Sturm. It obviates the unpleasantness, the very great local publicity, there would be were it one of the family. Who is the man?”
“Harry Beaudrez? He’s the milk man.” She added, almost angrily, “It’s a dairy farm, really. He owns it. It’s a lot of nonsense. He’s got enough money to live like a gentleman, but he messes around with a lot of cows, and—” She stopped suddenly. “He and Alice are doing that idiotic thing they call up here ‘going together.’”
“Then it was a lovers’ quarrel?”
“Yes.”
“He was calling on her this evening, perhaps?”
“They’d been out together, to a dance.”
“Not a distant one, surely, on a night like this. Dr. Harlan was forced to leave his car in a drift on the Mason’s Forks road. We came the rest of the way on foot.”
“The dance was just down at the Corners.”
“And Mr. Beaudrez walked back here with her? Mrs. Sturm, do you know when?”
“When?”
“When it was they got here?”
“About half-past ten.”
“Rather early for a dance to break up, wasn’t it?”
“They’d had a quarrel. She told me so.”
“Oh, then you saw her when she came in.”
“Yes; in the kitchen. I always eat something before going to bed.”
Lieutenant Valcour had no objection to a good liar, but he hated a silly one. A silly lie was always such an insult to its receiver’s intelligence. It wasn’t half an hour ago since Mrs. Sturm had called up Dr. Harlan and at that time there had been, according to her telephoned statement, no gun. Now, it seemed, there was not only a gun but a definite motive for the murderer’s having pulled the trigger. Valcour decided to follow his usual policy and make no immediate comment. Mrs. Sturm could lie as much and for as long as she pleased.
There were, inversely, any number of important things one could learn from lies: one simply inverted the statement and occasionally arrived at the truth. In the present instance Mrs. Sturm had patently de
cided that some person who was not a member of the family must be believed to have fired the shot, whereas she either felt, or had definite knowledge, that the reverse was true. There was also the convenient and not impossible theory that she had fired it herself. A whole thousand avenues for conjecture radiated pleasantly for Valcour from that single focal point of the shot.
“Was Mr. Beaudrez in the kitchen, too?” he said.
“No, Alice came in alone.”
“Then Mr. Beaudrez wasn’t inside the house at all?”
“No.”
Lieutenant Valcour refused to appear quite so stupid.
“But isn’t your premise a bit contradictory, Mrs. Sturm?”
“No. He shot her, you see, from outside—through the open front door.”
It was thoroughly bewildering.
“Tell me of this strange occurrence, step by step,” he said.
“From the time Alice got back?”
“From the first moment you saw her after she got back.”
“Well, she let herself in by the front door and came back into the kitchen. She had to bank the stove before going to bed. She told me she and Harry had quarreled, which is why she left the dance so early.”
“Even at the expense of appearing like a fishmonger’s wife, Mrs. Sturm, I am curious to know what they quarreled about—if she told you.”
“She certainly did. We talked it over. It wasn’t as if I could help it—”
Vera stopped abruptly Valcour was interested in the sudden flush that crept up her face.
“Yes?” he suggested gently.
“Well—she didn’t say anything definite, really. All she told me was that she’d slapped him. Does it matter?”
“Not right away, Mrs. Sturm. We must admit, of course, that a slap is a rather mild incentive for an attempt at murder, unless it’s the culminating point, the physical period mark to a whole series of disturbing things. By the way, how does it happen that Mr. Beaudrez would have a gun? We’re so many miles to eastward of the country where they’re supposed to carry them to dances and check them at the door.”
“Why, he must have had a gun.” Vera looked at him for the first time directly. Her eyes were consciously possessive. “Otherwise,” she added, “he couldn’t have shot her.”
It was divinely simple. Valcour had the uncomfortable feeling that, had he been thirty years younger, beneath the practiced battery of Vera’s look it would have seemed the most natural thing in the world for black to be white.
“Just so,” he said. “And after banking the fire?”
“We talked for a minute or two. She was warming herself by the stove.”
“Had she taken off her coat and things?”
“Yes. She keeps them on a hanger in the kitchen. She showed me a small tear in her dress where the chiffon was ripped at the shoulder. I’d only worn it a couple of times, too.”
“I beg your pardon, Mrs. Sturm?”
Vera stirred a little beneath the momentary sharpness in his tone.
“It’s a dress I gave her yesterday afternoon,” she said.
Lieutenant Valcour darted along a conjectural avenue that was rather shocking.
“What was its color, Mrs. Sturm?”
“Green—jade green. I thought it would go well with my hair, but it didn’t. It’s supposed to,” she added petulantly.
“Did she have to alter it much to make it fit?”
Vera was frankly bored. She liked her men to talk like men, not dressmakers.
“We wear the same size,” she said. “Have a drink?”
“Thank you.”
Vera, with the ease of a young animal, got up from the sleepy-hollow chair.
“Was it in this room you found her, Mrs. Sturm?”
“Yes, lying at the foot of the stairs.”
That would be, Valcour noted, directly in line with the front door. He stood for an instant on the spot Vera had indicated and then looked up. The curving stairway left a large well. Its handrail along the upper hall was plainly visible. The shot could have been fired as easily from up there as from the direction of the front door.
“Why would the front door be open, Mrs. Sturm?”
“We air the house out every night before locking up. It gets stuffy if you don’t, and sometimes there’s the smell of coal gas if the wind’s in the west.”
“I wonder why Miss Tribeau wasn’t found right by the door. Was the door open when you did find her?”
“No, it was closed.”
“Then you think that after she was shot she closed the door, took a few steps toward the stairs, and fell?”
“Yes. Help me get some ice.”
“Did she cry out?”
“I didn’t hear her. Look out for this step going down into the kitchen.”
They went to an electric refrigerator and Vera opened its door. She tried to lift out one of the trays of ice cubes.
“These trays always stick,” she said. “See if you can pry it.”
She leaned quite close against him as he pried at the ice tray. There was nothing subtle about the perfume she used, nor was there, Valcour reflected, anything subtle about her methods. Her proper habitat was the jungle. Where, he wondered as the tray continued to stick, could he find a jungle? It came loose with that startling suddenness which comprises the sense of humor of ice trays. Vera took it to the sink, turned on the hot water, and loosed the cubes. Her fingers were over-supple and their end joints bent backward unpleasantly.
“I like my whisky straight,” she said, “but I suppose you want water. Most people do.”
Lieutenant Valcour expressed a preference for water.
“Were you very long here in the kitchen after Miss Tribeau went into the other part of the house?” he said.
“I finished a sandwich and a piece of cake. Here’s how!”
“How!”
Vera swallowed her pony of whisky and rinsed the glass out. Valcour took a precautionary sniff and then a sip. It was very good.
“Some of Eddie’s stuff?” he said.
“Yes.”
“I get mine from him, too.”
“He’s dearer, but you get what you order.”
“That’s my main reason for liking him. It’s always such a refreshing surprise. The first day or two I was up here they used to bring me heavens knows what. How did you happen to find Miss Tribeau?”
“I stumbled against her.”
“Then it was dark?”
“Yes.”
“No light at all?”
“Just from upstairs.”
“You had turned them out down below, I suppose.”
“There was only one—the one in the corner by the radio. Say, Chicago ought to be coming through pretty—” Vera stopped suddenly and then said, “Have another, Mr. Valcour?”
“Not just now, thank you, Mrs. Sturm. I wonder whether we could arrange the lights inside just as they were when you left the kitchen.”
Vera looked at him steadily for a moment. “Aren’t you going to an awful lot of trouble, Mr. Valcour?”
“You have no idea,” he said pleasantly, “the amount of trouble I am going to, Mrs. Sturm.” She blocked the dining-room doorway for a while, leaning almost indolently back against its frame. But it wasn’t indolence. Valcour felt that it was a very conscious pose. Then she said, “Why?”
“Well,” he said, “it’s my job.”
“But I’ve told you what happened. Why don’t you go and arrest Harry Beaudrez?”
He sensed it again: an enigmatic undercurrent in the very casualness of the question. It was, he thought, a curious combination of vindictiveness and fear.
“Because, Mrs. Sturm, it happened to stop snowing tonight at a quarter to ten.”
CHAPTER IV
Lieutenant Valcour,
as Vera looked directly at him, felt the play of a sultry sort of fear in her eyes.
“What’s the snow got to do with it?” she said.
“Shall I show you?”
“Why—yes.”
“You’ll need a wrap.”
“We’re going outside?”
“Just on the porch for a moment.”
“Then I won’t need any.”
There was nothing further said until they stood on the front porch facing the somber below-zero night. There were no stars or moon; nothing showed but black outlines of leafless locust trees, vague against the curious effulgent quality of the earth deep-carpeted in snow. Valcour held a powerful flashlight in his hand. He directed its beam along the path that stretched from the porch to the road.
“You can see, Mrs. Sturm, that there are three sets of tracks. When Dr. Harlan and I arrived here there was only one.”
“Yes? It is cold, isn’t it? Must we stand outside here?”
“Why are you trying to fight off an unavoidable conclusion, Mrs. Sturm?”
“I’m sure I don’t know what you are talking about, Mr. Valcour.”
“And I am quite certain that you do. The set of tracks which we found were undoubtedly made by Alice Tribeau. At my suggestion, when we reached here, Dr. Harlan and I made a careful study of the ground, and on all the surface of the snow—that which covered the roadway, the walk, the lawns, the path which leads to the house—there was nothing but smoothness, except for the single trail where Miss Tribeau had walked. From a quarter to ten, when the snow stopped falling, until a good half hour after the shooting occurred no person approached, passed, or was near this house with the exception of the woman who was shot. What is it you want me to believe, Mrs. Sturm?”
“Why, it’s simple, isn’t it, Mr. Valcour?”
“Quite simple, Mrs. Sturm.”
“I was sure you’d see it. It’s just that Alice must have lied.”
Valcour shrugged his shoulders. Vera preceded him inside. She closed and locked the door.
“So you see, Mrs. Sturm,” he said as he crossed to the fireplace, “the shot was fired from inside the house.”
Vera went to a humidor and took a cigarette. She lighted it and again chose the sleepy-hollow chair. Even its lines could not make her appear quite thoroughly at ease.
