by Rufus King
“Suppose it was,” she said.
“It is a fact, not a supposition.”
“For heaven’s sake,” she blazed, “don’t you start being smug.”
Valcour was genuinely startled.
“I’m sorry, I’m sure—did I say something that offended you?”
“It’s nothing you said. It was your manner. I’ve lived,” Vera concluded fiercely, “with smugness for one solid year.”
Valcour felt that his skates were gliding out upon the thinnest possible sort of ice.
“Your temperament would naturally revolt at smugness.”
“Mr. Valcour, you don’t know what I’ve been through.”
His voice was very sympathetic—very quiet. “Tell me,” he said.
“It’s stupid—stupid—stupid!”
“What is stupid, Mrs. Sturm?”
“This life up here—this lousy get-up-in-the-morning-at-eight, eat-three-times, and go-tobed-at ten life up here.”
Vera cried easily. She started to cry now. She wasn’t noisy about it; even her breathing continued to be regular; it was just that tears filled her eyes and started trickling down her cheeks. They left little parchment-colored paths in her make-up. Valcour had seen many women cry and it had little effect upon him; it was only when men cried that he felt seriously disturbed. As for tears of self-pity, they were never affecting and rarely beautiful; certainly they were neither in the case of Mrs. Sturm.
“Do cry,” he said gently. “You will feel so much better for it.”
It had, as he expected, the instant effect of drying her tears.
“I’m not going to stand it much longer,” she said.
“Perhaps you are going away?”
“You bet I’m going away.”
Lieutenant Valcour carefully lighted a cigarette.
“Alone, Mrs. Sturm?”
“Quite alone, Mr. Valcour.”
“I see.”
Vera became irritably petulant. “You don’t see at all. You can’t. No one can understand how I feel about things except me.” She grew intimately confidential, leaning toward him across the arm of her chair, her eyes curiously alive even though they were shaded from the lamplight. “This house is a prison.”
“A prison, Mrs. Sturm?”
Her voice, even in a whisper, held certain harsh qualities of tone.
“And there’s a jailer,” she went on. “That old man upstairs—Will’s father—he’s the jailer.” Of course she was being absurdly melodramatic, but Valcour felt that she wasn’t being so deliberately; there was a genuine naturalness apparent.
“Your nerves are a little on edge,” he said.
“They’re not. I know exactly what I’m saying. I mean exactly what I say. I wish he was dead.”
“Mrs. Sturm.”
Her face became almost mottled under the intensity of her emotion.
“I wish,” she said again, “that he was dead.”
Dr. Harlan called down to them from the head of the stairs. “Oh, Mr. Valcour.”
Both of them started abruptly. Valcour felt with a guilty sensation that Dr. Harlan’s voice had dragged him back from the brink of some inescapable conspiracy; the moment had held the enervatingly hypnotic qualities of nightmare.
“Yes, Dr. Harlan?” he said.
Dr. Harlan remained standing well up on the stairs.
“If you care to come up and see Miss Tribeau… She is not conscious, but there are certain things that may be of help to you.”
“You will pardon me for a moment, Mrs. Sturm?”
“Of course, Mr. Valcour.” She caught his arm as he passed and deliberately drew his face down to hers. “You’ll say nothing of what I just said?”
He felt a wave of repugnance from her physical nearness. Beneath the heady scent of her perfume were strata, forces; very definite for all their invisibility, quite patent even in their obscurity.
“Nothing, Mrs. Sturm.”
She squeezed his arm. He imagined that her finger tips were hot.
“I knew you were a gentleman,” she said.
It was so sickeningly common; so at variance with every quality which one had a right to expect in the mistress of this gentle, charming house. Her fingers still lingered on his arm as he moved away from her, slid along it until they could no longer touch him. It was several steps before he felt himself freed from the physical field that was set up about her. He turned and faced her again as he reached the stairs.
“I would prefer it if you would come up with us, Mrs. Sturm. I do not like the thought of your being down here alone.”
Vera basked for a moment luxuriantly in the pleasure of having hooked a new fish.
“Why?” she said.
“Because,” said Valcour, “there is some person in this house whose purpose it was, and perhaps still is, to kill a woman.”
CHAPTER V
Dr. Harland was profoundly shocked.
“What on earth do you mean?” he said. “And why should it affect Vera?”
“My mind,” said Lieutenant Valcour, not a little pedantically, “is like a curious animal. It leaps of its own strange volition upon conclusions. I only hope that in the present instance it has taken a bad jump.”
“But you must have reasons.”
“That is just what I tell my mind all the time, but it rarely has. Let us go and see Miss Tribeau.” He stood aside to permit Vera to precede him up the stairs. She passed him, vibrant. Life was again vitalized for her. Two men—Fred, Mr. Valcour—one to be shoved into the discard, the other to be brought into play to her advantage; strange undercurrents of danger—not really danger, for life raced too strongly within her. Nobody would ever kill Vera. Even death itself, she felt exultantly, would never kill Vera. Her passage down the hallway was like an indolent comet with fresh fires added to its tail.
The maid’s room was empty except for Alice. “Will must have gone,” Dr. Harlan said. “Probably to his father. Mr. Sturm is very anxious about Alice’s condition. I’m glad we could tell him she’ll get over it all right.”
“Will I undress her?” Vera said.
“No, it’s best not to disturb her. Later, when she wakes up, maybe you’ll help her, Vera?”
“All right, Fred.”
“Did you find the bullet, Dr. Harlan?” Valcour said.
Dr. Harlan took a little lead pellet from his pocket and handed it over. Valcour glanced at it, then dropped it into a pocket of his own.
“A Colt automatic, caliber. 25, I should say,” he said. “Could you determine its course?”
“Yes. Something funny happened. Have you ever noticed that lots of funny things happen sometimes when people get shot?”
Valcour smiled. “One is always reading about a watch or a metal cigarette case fortuitously saving a person’s life,” he said.
“How did you guess? In this case it was a cut-steel buckle. You can see where it’s dented and chipped, where the bullet glanced off. It hit the buckle and glanced off into the flesh just below the left shoulder blade. I found it imbedded right under the surface. The buckle took almost the whole force of the blow. Can you beat that?”
“Not immediately,” said Valcour pleasantly. “Where would you say the shot had been fired from—above, below, on a level?”
“It’s hard to tell, the buckle deflected it so, but it looks as if it was fired from somewhere above her, and that’s nonsense.”
“Not necessarily.”
“Of course it’s nonsense. There wasn’t anybody upstairs at the time but Mr. Sturm and Will.”
Valcour did not press the point. “When will Alice Tribeau be able to talk?” he said.
“Not for an hour or two. I’ve given her a mild opiate as her nerves were all shot.”
“Didn’t she recover consciousness at all?”
“Oh, yes. She started talking wildly, so I gave her an opiate.”
“I am sorry that I wasn’t here.”
“Well, I couldn’t leave her to call you, and Will was busy getting some water.”
“Do you remember anything she said?”
“Not much. I didn’t pay much attention. She kept repeating, mostly, ‘That terrible sound—that terrible sound,’ and then she started weeping hysterically. Nothing made sense.”
Dr. Harlan turned about to face Vera, who had been standing apart from them near the door. She wasn’t there. “Vera’s gone,” he said.
“To her own room, do you think?” Valcour’s tone was quite sharp.
“I don’t know. She could have.”
“Where is it?”
“You go down the hall and it’s the farthest room on the right. Shall I show you?”
“No. Stay here, please, until things are more straightened out. Have you a gun?”
“Good Lord, no! Why?”
“Because there are types of killers who like to finish their jobs.”
Dr. Harlan adjusted his voice to a lower key; his words were barely audible.
“Tell me, Valcour, just what you are driving at. You’ve been hinting about things—about Vera. How does Vera figure in this?”
“Your knowledge of the household is more intimate than mine, Doctor. My hints, as you call them, have been warnings. I am sorry if they have been distasteful to you. We must pull together, you and I. We cannot afford to have spats.” Valcour, in a singularly negative way, became very impressive. “We have found four people in this house—two men and two women. I am being childishly explicit in the picture I am attempting to draw because it must, in just such simplicity, be kept clearly and constantly before us. One of the two women has been shot. She wore a dress belonging to the other woman and was, when fired at, in an uncertain light. She is not unlike the other woman in build. That, Doctor, is all we know. I’ll go into more detail with you later. Just now I want to locate Mrs. Sturm and search the house.”
Lieutenant Valcour left the room. He walked thoughtfully along the shadowed hall. He paused by the well railing and looked down the curving stairs. It could have been from about here, he thought, that the shot had been fired. Along the wall at his left were four doors. Farther on to the right, beyond the head of the stairs, was another. They were all closed, and he felt alone among well-guarded and unpleasant secrets. He wanted to meet Mr. Sturm, and yet was consciously delaying from doing so. He knew that he was going to admire Mr. Sturm, and that Mr. Sturm wouldn’t care in the slightest whether he was admired or not; any more than the assured and indifferent ocean cared for the admiration of the pygmies who visited its negligible fringes of sand.
The door beyond him to the right opened and Vera came into the hall. The traces of tears were removed from her make-up. She held between her fingers a half-eaten piece of nougat. She finished it, licked her fingers, and wiped them on a handkerchief.
“Sleuthing?” she said.
Valcour smiled pleasantly. “I foolishly left my magnifying glass in the car.”
“Do you really want one?”
“Heavens, no! I think a crystal globe would be more appropriate.”
“I’m glad you’re not taking all this too seriously.”
“Do not misunderstand me, Mrs. Sturm. I am taking it seriously.”
“Well, if Harry Beaudrez didn’t do it, who do you think did?”
Her tone was flip, but nervously so. It was a flipness that functioned automatically, like a machine whose momentum carries it forward after the power has been shut off. She was a woman, Valcour decided, curiously devoid of brakes. She came to him, drifting through the uncertain light of the hall. She had changed her dress to a loose tea gown that just escaped being a negligee.
“Who do you think did it?” she said again.
“Someone who is still in the house, Mrs. Sturm.”
Her eyes remained shaded beneath blackened lashes. Her voice was barely audible.
“You don’t think it was Will, do you?” she said.
“Do you?”
“Well—he’s been very nice to Alice.”
“In that case, why should he shoot her?”
He wanted to go away from her. It was unpleasant to be near her; but it was necessary to be near her.
“Well, she might have refused to be nice to him.”
“I prefer to think,” said Valcour carefully, “that there is an intruder in the house. I am going to look. I hope very sincerely, Mrs. Sturm, that I shall find one.”
“I’ll come with you.”
Valcour shrugged. After all, he felt convinced that there would be little danger while he was with her. And he wanted to be with her for a while, to catch as they emerged the little schemes that were mulled about in artfulness behind the sharp mask of her face.
“Let us start in with the attic,” he said.
They went back down the hall and through a doorway that opened at the foot of a steep flight of stairs. It was pitch dark. Valcour snapped on his flashlight and shot the beam upward. The circle of its light came to rest on rafters dripping with cobwebs. It was very quiet. Each step, as he mounted, the hush became more absolute. The stair well was on a level with the attic floor. As his head came above it he flashed the beam of his torch around. It tore the darkness into protesting shapes—discarded furniture, some trunks, many boxes—an age-old litter that had settled to permanent rest and seemed curiously inimical at intrusion. Vera had reached the step beside him.
“There’s no one here,” she said.
Her voice was muffled in the deadness of the attic air.
“We shall see.”
Valcour, stepping softly, moved his flashlight about among dark bulked shapes. He neglected nothing, not even the trunks, the lids of which he raised.
“No,” he said, “there is no one here.”
She was seated on the top step, and motioned him to join her.
“You didn’t fool me when you looked in those trunks. You weren’t looking for a man.”
“No, Mrs. Sturm?”
“No.” Vera drew a little closer to him. “You were looking for the gun.”
CHAPTER VI
He snapped off his flashlight and darkness rushed past them from the attic. Below them, at the foot of the stairs, the hall doorway was an oblong box of dull light. Valcour had a curious feeling as he looked directly at Vera that her eyes caught and held whatever glow there was. He did not answer her immediately. He wanted the impressionable quality of the silence, the still, dead air, and the black enigmatic spaces about them to become a mood. A mood, he hoped, of fear. For different personalities there were different solvents: intangible fluids that would dissolve the outer husk and leave the real person exposed. And for the cold, shallow woman beside him he felt that the proper solvent was fear.
She was similar and yet different from that other woman with whom, once, he had conversed in an attic—Mrs. Endicott. She was as different, so far as surfaces go, as velvet is from cotton, but linking them was that same underlying (he disliked the word, but there was none other so apt) animalism. He wondered, fleetingly, whether his life were to hold a succession of moments passed with animalistic women in attics. He tuned his voice so that it was just a shade above the stillness itself.
“Let us forget the gun for a moment,” he said. “The concrete substances of any crime are available to diligent search. It is the motivating impulse that must be groped for, as a man in the darkness of an unfamiliar chamber will grope for some door that will lead him to the light. Let us take this opportunity, Mrs. Sturm, while we are utterly alone. Shortly I must join the others—interview your husband and his father—and I feel that you can help me.”
The glow down in the hall doorway held a certain fascination for Vera; it was gent
ly hypnotic.
“In what way?” she said. “I’ve told you all I know.”
Valcour took six mental steps to the left and approached his objective at a tangent.
“You and I, Mrs. Sturm, are in a strangely similar position. In a measure we are both of us outsiders. We are of the city, cast in its mold, and time or absence will never quite efface that form. We look upon things differently, and just where that difference lies is a difficult thing to determine. We cannot take any single state, such as sophistication, and hold it up as an example, for the country has its sophisticates, too. They possess the same machinery for human behavior that we possess. It is rather in the reactions and in the viewpoints that the differences lie. In other words, what might seem morally shocking to a native might appear inconsequential to us, and yet we have our morals and when they are outraged we are genuinely shocked. The reverse, too, is true. They will do things up here that astonish us, and yet they will think little about it. We are and always shall be of a different world.”
Vera was only vaguely conscious of what Valcour was driving at, but it sounded flattering. She began to feel that here was someone who would understand her, and one to whom she could really talk.
“I’ll say we are,” she said. “You’ve no idea all I’ve had to put up with. The simplest thing…”
“Such as?”
“Well, take the case of Higgy—Higgy’s an army officer down at the post. He didn’t mean a thing to me, really. He was just an outlet. Will punched him in the jaw. I’ve got to have outlets. If I didn’t have outlets I’d die.”
“Purely Platonic,” murmured Valcour.
“That’s it—I was about to say it. Higgy and I were Platonic; nothing else.”
Valcour searched frantically in his memory and went the whole hog. “A jug of wine, a book of verse—something about beneath the bough and thou. Was that it, Mrs. Sturm?”
Vera wanted to be quite frank and meticulous. The conversation was so very elevating. “Well,” she said, “if you accept the book-of-verse part as symbolical.”
