State Department Murders

by Edward S. Aarons

  Jason Stone was a name to conjure with in industry, and it was no secret that he had come up the hard way in the Pittsburgh steel mills, from mill hand in the blast furnaces to a fabulous figure whose interests reached into the very core of America’s economic life. Industry and politics went hand in glove for Jason Stone. He had never sought public office for himself, but it was common knowledge that he held a crucial handful of public men under his thumb, and through them his power permeated the whole structure of government, riddling every bureau and department.

  Cornell had first clashed with the man over a year ago when he turned in a report to Paul Evarts on the security operations of Project Cirrus. Stone had been meddling there, pressing for information, and getting it. The man’s string of newspapers daily sang and bellowed a hymn of imperial jingoism that would have been augmented by wild threats to use the new weapon Cornell had been assigned to guard. Stone had been surprised at the stubbornness of what he had considered an insignificant stumbling block to his will.

  Cornell grinned wryly as he turned into the side road that led to Overlook. There had been subtle attempts at bribery. There had been enormous pressures brought to bear on Paul Evarts to overrule Cornell. Evarts had done the best he could. Even now, Paul was testifying in his behalf before the investigating committee, at the risk of seeing his own career discredited and smashed. Security measures were vitally necessary in a divided world, Evarts argued, but they could be turned into a menace when the tools to achieve security fell into irresponsible, destructive hands.

  It was during this first clash that Cornell met Kari Stone. She wasn’t yet separated from the man then. Much later, when Kari walked out on Stone, she admitted that their original meeting had been arranged by him as an effort to undermine Cornell’s stand. That first clash between Cornell and Jason Stone was long over by then, but not forgotten. The present attack on Cornell, he knew, was a direct if delayed result of his opposition to Stone’s will. Jason Stone was not the sort of man to brook opposition of any kind. It all boiled down to what the man was really after, Cornell decided. He was gathering power bit by bit and building toward something as yet unsuspected.

  Cornell had his own ideas on the subject, that were unvoiced to anyone, but if he was right, he knew that he himself didn’t matter, that he was only one small cog in an intricate machine that ground on toward some dim but dangerous objective. He had got out of line, and was scheduled to be purged. If he was right, then nothing that happened to him would matter very much. The thing was bigger than himself and any other single individual.

  The frogs down by the shore kept up their querulous chorus. Cornell turned right, where the moonlight opened up the private road that led to Overlook. The night was warm and quiet. The village was long behind him when he reached the moss-grown stone wall and the iron grille gate that led to an avenue of live oaks reaching to the house. Some windows were alight on the lower floor of the plantation manor. The moon touched the old house with silver, turning her red brick chimneys to black, and made a geometrical pattern of light and shadow around the high classical columns that dominated the main entrance.

  He heard a motor start somewhere ahead, rising to an impatient roar. Headlights glared over the high boxwood hedge that cut off his view in that direction. Cornell walked on up the graveled driveway. He hoped Jason Stone wasn’t leaving at this moment, just when he had arrived. The lights still shone in the house, however, and he quickened his stride.

  The car came from around the bend, hidden by the high hedge, at unsuspected speed. Cornell had only a moment’s warning. The headlights bathed him in dazzling brilliance, pinning him to the spot. For a split second he thought he would be impaled as surely as an insect on a pin. And then he jumped sidewise, his muscles convulsed into sudden effort. The car, big and heavy, was doing all of fifty when it reached the spot where he had been. He felt a sudden tearing rip along his right leg and then he was picked up and spun off the driveway to the dark lawn at the side. For just an instant he caught a glimpse of the driver’s face behind the wheel of the big sedan—and then he landed heavily, sprawling on hands and knees and rolling over into the dark, moist loam at the roots of the boxwood. Something tore a long, stinging scratch across his face, and then he scrambled up, anger in him.

  The taillights of the car were already swinging out through the gate, heading back to the village. It was gone before he could make out the license plate. He staggered and almost sat down again, and then turned as he heard the sound of someone’s feet running across the lawn toward him.

  “Are you all right?” a voice called.

  The voice was familiar. Cornell looked down at the rip in his trouser leg and felt the skin of his thigh. The bumper of the heavy sedan had just snagged his clothing, whipping him off balance and spinning him off the road. The skin wasn’t broken. He straightened, shaking inwardly, as the big man who had hailed him came nearer.

  It was Paul Evarts.

  “Why, Barney!” the man said. “What happened?”

  “I wish I knew,” Cornell said grimly. “Do you know who that was?”

  Paul Evarts stared at him. “Are you all right?”

  “I’ll live,” Cornell said. “No thanks to the Congressman, though.”

  “Was it Keach?”

  Cornell said, “I had a look at his face. I couldn’t miss it. He looked like a maniac.”

  Paul Evarts didn’t look too composed himself, Cornell decided. The man was pale, a thin film of perspiration shining on his moonlit face. Evarts dabbed at his mouth with a handkerchief and breathed heavily. Cornell caught the faint scent of cologne.

  “Well, it was a close one. I was too far away to warn you.”

  Cornell wondered just how close the accident was meant to be. He said, “You didn’t tell me you were coming here, too.”

  “Kari insisted upon it.”

  “Is Kari here, too?”

  “She made me drive her down. She wanted to see Jason. It wasn’t an easy thing for her to do, Barney. She’s proud. But when you persisted in your plan for a private interview with Stone, she thought she might be able to make it easier for you.”

  Cornell said angrily, “I don’t want Kari pleading for me. Not with him.”

  “Now, Barney. She’s a stubborn girl. But she was determined to pocket her pride, for your sake.”

  “What about Keach? What was he doing here?”

  “Blessed if I know,” Evarts said. “I’ve just been hanging around waiting for the row to end. Kari insisted on seeing Jason alone. They’ve had an awful quarrel in there.” The big man turned and looked at the white house. “It seems quiet enough now.”

  Cornell said tightly, “You shouldn’t have let her come.”

  Evarts shrugged. “She was upset about the way you talked to her in the café. You shouldn’t have mentioned it, Barney.”

  “Mentioned what?”

  “You know. How she is.”

  Cornell said grimly, “Just how is she?”

  “You know,” Evarts said again, and looked embarrassed. “Skip it.” He was wearing the same dark-blue conservative suit he had worn to dinner, but he looked somewhat less natty, and his smooth blond hair was rumpled. He took the handkerchief from his breast pocket and patted his broad face again. The man’s hands were long and white and graceful, moving in the gloom. The question about Evarts and the question about Kari brushed Cornell’s mind again, mingling to become one and the same. He had heard rumors of trouble in the State Department with abnormal personnel who were open to morality charges. He didn’t want to believe it. He looked at Evarts again, and the man muttered:

  “I’d almost given you up, you were so long getting here.”

  “Didn’t you know Keach was here too?” Cornell asked.

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “I’d better go in.”

  “Barney, I don’t think that’s wise.”

  “I’ve got to get Kari out of there,” Cornell said.

  He started acro
ss the lawn, and a twinge of pain in his leg made him limp slightly. Paul Evarts didn’t follow. He looked back and saw the man with his head ducked down, lighting a cigarette under one of the live oaks. Cornell went up the broad, flat steps of the veranda and into the fan of light from the doorway behind the Ionic columns. The double-leafed door was open. His footsteps echoed on the marble floor of the high, vast center hallway. He paused, but no one came to greet him.

  It was all fouled up now, he thought. Jason Stone would take one look at him, note his battered appearance, and call for the servants to throw him out. Everything had gone wrong. He had wanted a private interview. Now it seemed as if everyone else connected with the case had decided to visit Overlook, too. The thought of Kari actually humbling herself to face the man she loathed made him squirm inside.

  An odd silence pervaded the cool, ornate formality of the house. There was no sign of life anywhere, which was strange, because Jason Stone invariably surrounded himself with a host of servants, secretaries, and bodyguards. Yet the house seemed empty,

  He turned to the left of the wide hallway, where light shone from behind high library doors. His heels made sharp rapping sounds that echoed from the high, vaulted ceiling. The room he entered was unoccupied. There was a large fireplace opposite the door, and tall, richly draped windows to one side. The richly polished antique furniture gleamed and glistened in the light of several subdued lamps. He wondered where Kari could be, and crossed the room toward another doorway, which was dark.

  Something scuttled in the shadows beyond as he approached. He said, “Hello!” and felt a queer chill on the nape of his neck. There was no answer. Light seeped through the doorway into the room ahead. He could make out its shape, long and narrow, with a wide runner carpet leading across its mathematical center to a huge, shadowy desk. The odd scuttling sound was not repeated for the moment. Then he heard it again—quick, hard footsteps crossing the bare floor to the right. The light from behind him made a narrow aisle ahead, outlining his long shadow, but on either side of the room there was darkness, and he could see nothing.

  “Hello!” he called again.

  A door clicked somewhere, and for the briefest moment he caught the dim outline of a figure slipping out of the room, and he had the queer impression that it was a man dressed as a woman, in an odd sort of dress that came just below the figure’s knees. Then the door shut and the figure was gone, and Cornell hadn’t moved from the spot where he stood.

  He felt along the wall for the light switch, and the room leaped into existence. His mouth thinned as he surveyed the place. His impression of a royal audience chamber, with the desk at the far end of the runner, was fully carried out, except that its design didn’t belong in the stately colonial architecture of a Maryland plantation house. It didn’t fit. And with the thought his uneasiness deepened, and his first conviction that something was wrong became a certainty.

  He approached the desk slowly, aware of the brooding emptiness all around him. He didn’t intend to snoop or spy. That was not his purpose in coming here. But the condition of the desk attracted his attention, with its litter of discarded papers, its overturned inkwell of ornately etched brass, the open drawers and snowstorm of files scattered on the floor behind it. A telegram caught his eye, and he picked it up and knew the reason why Overlook was deserted.

  The telegram was addressed to the butler or caretaker, obviously, and advised the staff that a full week-end holiday was ordered and the house was to be closed.

  Cornell frowned in puzzlement. It didn’t make sense, since Kari had told him plainly that Jason Stone intended to be here tonight. Then why had the man dismissed all his servants before his arrival? His uneasiness sharpened to acute worry.

  He glanced up at the huge portrait on the paneled wall behind the desk. It was impossible to escape. It should have seemed ridiculous, that imperial, pompous pose, but it wasn’t ridiculous at all. The artist had been clever, even satirical, and perhaps Jason Stone, who was never obtuse, had been amused by the artist’s representation of himself. Everything in the man was captured by brush and pigment—the cruel, commanding mouth, the hawk’s beak of a nose, the brooding, intelligent eyes of the man. But the essence of the portrait was power. Power for its own sake. Omnipotence that brooked no challenge, strength without morality. Cornell looked up into the eyes of the portrait and knew that he had been right all along. His fight was not for himself alone.

  The disheveled condition of the desk was puzzling, in view of the quiet order that brooded everywhere else. Someone had been looking for something, and he was reminded of the person he had frightened away by his approach. It couldn’t have been Stone. Nor had it been Kari.

  Tall windows flanked one side of the room and opened onto a terrace. One of the windows stood open, its heavy drape moving faintly in the breeze that came from the bay. Cornell turned that way and stepped outside, into the moon-drenched perfection of a formal garden. A flag-stoned walk led down between the boxwood to a lesser building on the estate. He could see the roof of it jutting above a flight of stairs that led down to the water’s edge. A faint gleam of light came from that direction.

  He wondered how Paul Evarts was spending his time, patiently waiting on the front lawn, and then he stepped off the terrace and walked quickly through the garden and down the flight of stairs to the boathouse. The moonlight made a path of yellow across the Patchacoulee River, where Jason Stone’s motor cruiser was tied to the dock. The vessel rode quietly, her portholes dark, the sleek white hull lighted only by reflection from an upper window of the boathouse. Cornell glanced up from the wooden platform where he stood, but he could see nothing inside except a section of the beamed ceiling. The frogs kept up their chorus all around him. Except for the moonlight on the water, the overhanging willows kept everything else in deep and breathless shadow.

  The boathouse had a Dutch door, the upper leaf already opened inward, the lower fastened by an antiqued thumb latch of black iron. When he tried to push the lower panel open, he felt the weight of something beyond it, resisting him. He looked over the edge and saw Kari.

  She lay in a crumpled heap in the deep shadow just inside the door, her face upturned, her eyes closed. For a twisting instant, Cornell thought she was dead. Then a shuddering sigh came from her, and she moved vaguely. He pushed the door open enough to squeeze through and dropped to his knees beside her.

  “Kari?”

  She stirred again. He looked back into the gloomy cavern of the boathouse. Water lapped quietly under the planked floor. Light shone down from a stairway beyond the canvas-covered launch that rested on trailer wheels nearby. A large moth winged purposefully toward the light. There was no sound from above.

  “Kari, darling,” he whispered.

  He saw that her eyes were open now, watching him with curious detachment. Then her hand groped for his. Her fingers were cold.

  “What happened?” he whispered.

  “I—I was silly. I was leaving, and I—I fainted.”

  “But why? Are you all right?”

  “I think so. Help me up, Barney. You got here at last, didn’t you?”

  Something in her voice warned him. “What do you mean?”

  Her eyes moved with an odd, lost expression, seeking the shaft of light that poured down the silent stairway nearby. It was very quiet for the moment. Too quiet. He could feel the soft shudders that racked her when she leaned against him.

  “Have you seen Jay yet?” she asked.

  “Not yet.”

  She said, “Then you better had.”

  Her long, uptilted eyes kept watching the light at the other end of the room. He saw that part of her pale lemon frock was torn, and her red hair, usually so carefully coiffed, was disheveled. She looked frightened. Her breathing was ragged.

  “What made you faint?” he asked sharply. “What’s up there?”

  “Go see for yourself,” she whispered.

  He hesitated. “Are you all right now?”

  “I�
��ll wait here.”

  He was reluctant to leave her, but the need to walk up that quiet, brooding staircase was greater than his fears for her. He turned without another word and skirted the cradled launch and went toward the steps. They creaked softly under his weight. The light moved and danced in flickering shadows, and as he cleared the top of the staircase, he saw that the big moth was dancing and gyrating around an overturned table lamp on the floor. The naked bulb shot glaring light into his eyes, blinding him for a moment. He paused, then stepped into the room.

  He took it in with one swift glance, seeing its rich comfort, the quiet atmosphere of a working den disarrayed by what must have been a grim and desperate struggle. And then he saw the big silver-haired man sprawled on the floor, and he knew he would never get the interview he had sought tonight.

  The man on the floor was Jason Stone, and he was dead.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  HE HAD been stabbed again and again, as if the killer could find no outlet for his fury except in repeated murder. Cornell paused, the shock of it like a blow inside him. The knife, still wet and bloody, lay on the carpeted floor about five feet from the dead man. Even in death, Jason Stone looked dominating and dangerous, somehow. His smooth silvery hair caught the light from the overturned lamp and shone with a liquidity of its own. The man’s face, convulsed and frozen into an expression of surprise and fear, was the same that had dominated the national scene for the past decade.

  There will be hell to pay, Cornell thought. There was danger in the room, and it touched not only him, but Kari as well. A dozen ideas tumbled through his mind as he remembered the queer events of the afternoon and night that led him here. He didn’t touch the dead man. He dropped to one knee beside the body, noting that the pockets had been turned inside out. There were seven knife wounds that he could see. The room was in the same state of upheaval as the desk back in the main house. Somebody had searched it with wild desperation. Cornell had no idea what the object of the search could be, and now was not the time to find out. There was nothing he could do here. Remembering Kari, down below, he straightened and turned away from the dead man, aware of his tightened nerves. The moth still danced its ritual over the shining lamp. He went downstairs.