State Department Murders

by Edward S. Aarons

  Kari was not at the door where he had left her. The room was empty. Cornell strode around the launch, leaning against the wooden rail of the platform that overhung the dock and cruiser below. But she was not alone. Paul Evarts was with her. The big man turned quickly at the sound of his approach, and Kari moved a little apart from him, her face pale and anxious.

  Evarts’ voice grated with harsh shock. “Barney, this is fantastic. Kari just told me about Jay.”

  Cornell looked at the girl and said, “Kari?”

  Kari said, “No, Barney.”

  “All right,” he said. “Then who?”

  “I don’t know, Barney. He was dead when I came here. I didn’t see who killed him. We’d quarreled in the house, and then he stalked out and I saw him heading here. I followed about five minutes later. It took me that long to collect myself after the—the things he said to me.”

  “What sort of things?” Cornell asked bluntly.

  Her face was stiff and white. “I’ll never repeat them. He was dead when I got here, that’s all. And the place had been ransacked, just as you saw it. It was foolish of me to faint afterward, but I did. That’s when you found me.”

  Cornell swung to Paul Evarts, who moved uneasily near the edge of the platform. “Paul?”

  “Not I, Barney. I won’t say I’m sorry the man is dead, but I didn’t kill him. I’ve been out in front, waiting for Kari, all this time.”

  “There’s only your word for that,” Cornell said.

  “Only my word,” Evarts nodded. “That’s all any of us have for tonight. I could turn the tables, Barney, and ask about you, too.”

  “I didn’t kill him,” Cornell said. “I just got here.”

  “You’ll have a hard time convincing the police.”

  The man’s voice was withdrawn, oddly unfamiliar. Cornell glanced quickly at Kari. She was watching him in wide-eyed silence, as if he were a stranger to her, too. He shook his head, as if to dispel the unreality between them. They didn’t believe what he said. At the very best, they were waiting watchfully, not decided, uncertain of what he had done and why. No, he thought, there’s no doubt about why. If it were pinned on him, no one would think twice about his motive. Not after everything about him came out. No one would believe he had come down here in an effort to talk Jason Stone into seeing reason about his charges. The enormity of what had happened began to grow in him, like veils withdrawing to reveal a dark and bottomless pit.

  He drew a deep breath. “What was Reach doing here?”

  Evarts spoke impatiently. “I told you before, I don’t know.”

  “Did you see him, Kari?”

  She shook her head. “I knew his car was parked in the driveway, but I didn’t actually see him. Jay mentioned that the Congressman had driven over from Washington, and he was amused by it. He thought there was something funny in the fact that Keach was so upset about you.”

  “Funny?”

  “It would strike Jay as funny,” Kari said. “Barney, Jay was determined to ruin you. Everybody knows that. Let’s not just stand here and talk about it. We’ve got to do something. We must get you away from here.”

  “What about yourself?” Evarts asked. “If the newspapers ever get wind—”

  She looked at them in helplessness. “It’s a dreadful thing. We can’t all just run away, can we? No matter what Jay was or what he did, we can’t just leave him there, the way he is.”

  Cornell said, “We must.”

  Evarts hesitated. “It’s risky, but for Karl’s sake, we ought to try it.”

  “What about the servants?” Cornell asked.

  “The place was deserted when we got here.”

  Kari said, “Jay was in a terrible temper about it. Some one sent a telegram telling them all to take the week end off. He carried on fearfully about his enemies and petty persecutions—though heaven knows, Jay had everything he wanted and was more apt to persecute others.”

  Again there was that queer pause and hesitation between them. They think I did it, Cornell thought. Even Kari thinks so. He put a hand on the platform rail and felt oily wetness against his palm. He looked at the stain curiously. It seemed like yellow pigment in the light of the moon, and he took a handkerchief and wiped it from the heel of his hand.

  Evarts said, “I think we had better go now.”

  “The sooner the better, for both of you,” Cornell nodded.

  Kari said, “You’re coming with us, Barney.”

  Cornell thought of Sally Smith and her little coupé. “No, I can’t. It will be best if you two go back to Washington together, the way you came. I’ll get back alone. There’s something—someone I want to see in Calvert Beach.”

  “Barney, you’re crazy,” Evarts protested. “You can’t—”

  “We’ve wasted enough time,” he said shortly. “Either we stay around until someone stumbles over us, or we pull out. Which will it be?”

  Evarts said reluctantly, “All right. I’ll take Kari.”

  She went with him.

  Cornell waited until Evarts’ car vanished down the road toward the village. He stood alone on the columned veranda of Overlook, listening to the diminishing sound of the motor. The silence, except for the eternal frogs, seemed deeper than before. At his back, the empty house reached out to him. He had never felt so alone before.

  After a moment he turned and walked quietly into the echoing hallway and retraced his steps to the long, narrow room where the dead man’s portrait watched him. The telegram addressed to the servants still lay where he had dropped it, on the desk. He took a scrap of paper and copied the time, date, and code number of the message and carefully folded the note into his pocket. He didn’t think anything would come of it.

  There was a question of fingerprints, but he had touched nothing dangerous. There was no telling where Kari had been or what she had touched, but he wiped the arms of the chairs anyway. He hoped the police investigation would somehow overlook her, although from his own experience he knew that the hope was vain. He felt weighed down by the conviction that everything that had happened tonight was carefully planned and executed for a purpose too obscure to divine as yet. He would know the worst soon enough, he decided.

  He could learn nothing from the desk. There was no way of knowing what the other searcher had been looking for. Out on the terrace again, he looked down toward the roof of the boathouse beside the creek. He thought he saw movement there, and at the same time he became aware of another sound over the din of the frogs. The sound of sirens.

  He turned and leaned back against the windows behind him. The sirens were far off, lost beyond the tangle of marshland and twisting creeks to the north, from the direction of Calvert Beach. It could be a coincidence. It had to be. But it was not. The sirens came nearer, and after a moment he saw the glow of headlights swinging through the trees, dimming the light of the moon on the broad lawn. The first of several cars came into the driveway on screaming tires, and swept between the oaks and boxwood toward the house. A red light winked vengefully on the roof of the first car.

  Cornell drew back a little. A spotlight stabbed through the boxwood and bathed the front of the stately old house in garish radiance before covering the formal garden and the roof of the boathouse. A man’s voice shouted something unintelligible. Cornell hesitated. Two weeks of surveillance and accusations had changed his attitude toward the inevitability of justice. And as always, there was Kari. The police here could mean a number of things, among the worst of which was that Kari and Paul Evarts had somehow been picked up before leaving Calvert Beach. It didn’t seem reasonable that the police had plucked their alarm from thin air. But here they were, and they were obviously hunting for trouble.

  Behind the house there was nothing but an untamed wilderness of brush and woodland. Ahead, beyond the formal garden, was the boathouse again. Time ran out swiftly as he still paused. The police were fanning out over the lawn, and in another moment they would come around the side of the house and find him here. He mo
ved away from the dim light coming from the windows behind him. A flashlight winked on the other side of the farthest row of boxwood. A man shouted, and got an answer. All three cars of the cavalcade had stopped now, and the night that had been so silent was alive with the sound of more than a dozen excited men. Cornell went down the broad flat steps quickly and halted in the shadows of the garden.

  He was none too soon. Shadows moved and voices sounded from the room behind him. He turned a corner of the graveled path and reached the opposite end of the garden with a fast sprint. He paused, but no one had heard his footsteps. He went down the stairs to the boat-house landing two at a time and hesitated before crossing the bar of light that came from the upper window. Beyond the light were more steps going down to the float where the cruiser was moored. And beyond the float was a footpath that presumably followed the meandering creek to the beach and the shore of the bay. If he could reach the outlet and cut north, he might still get back to Sally Smith in a reasonable time—assuming that Sally Smith still waited for him.

  He started for the second flight of stairs going down—and a uniformed trooper seemed to appear from nowhere. Without warning, a flashlight glared in his face, blinding him. The man blurted, “Hey, you!” and beyond the dazzle of light Cornell saw the man’s hand claw for his holstered gun.

  Afterward, Cornell wondered if that was the beginning of everything wrong that he did that night. If he hadn’t moved without thinking, if his fist hadn’t caught the trooper flush on the jaw, everything might have been different—and everything might still have gone wrong.

  The trooper was as surprised as Cornell. A strangled yell came from him as Cornell swung, and then the man staggered backward, smashing through the platform rail as if it were kindling. His flashlight soared in an arc and followed him as he fell into the water fifteen feet below. Cornell rubbed his knuckles and whirled to face the garden stairs. Shouts of alarm and inquiry came from up there. Turning, he raced down the steps to the float, passed the moored cruiser, and leaped to the path on the shore beyond. From behind him came a thrashing and yelling from the trooper in the water.

  A shot cracked, and the bullet snapped through the air over his head. Cornell dug his toes into the yielding sand of the path and raced on. The shot was followed by a bellowed warning and a command. He paid no attention. He had started something that couldn’t be finished by meek surrender now.

  The path looped around a bend in the creek and brought a screen of willows between himself and the boathouse. Footsteps pounded hollowly across the float, and then another shot cracked, but the bullet went far wide. There was a shouted conference behind him. He sprinted, trusting to the moonlight for footing, cursing it whenever he had to duck across an exposed area. The Chesapeake glimmered through the foliage ahead. A root suddenly snagged him and flung him headlong. He scrambled up and felt a sharp, knifelike pain in his knee, but he ran on. The path gave way to deeper sand and he burst out onto the beach, turned north, and dived into the woods again. A moment behind him, half a dozen men debouched on the beach, following his trail.

  The shrubbery served as a screen while he caught his breath. His right leg trembled and threatened to yield under his weight. Flashlights winked on the beach. Somewhere farther back, he knew, they were discovering the body of Jason Stone. Then, unless they already knew the murderer, they would hunt him down without quarter, intent on destroying him as a killer. Cornell shivered and eased deeper into the brush. There was no longer a path for him to follow. The undergrowth plucked and tore at him, and then he slid down the muddy bank of a saltwater stream and splashed across to the other side.

  His leg bothered him more with each struggling step. His pace grew slower, and he knew that the distance between him and his pursuers was being steadily cut down. They were fanning out now in an arc behind him, their lights revealing the way they were reaching around him on the landward side, trying to pass him and cut him off by making a noose that would crowd him back to the beach again. He stumbled on, not as silent as he had been before. Sweat drenched him, and his breath felt sharp and hot between his teeth.

  He was down before he knew what had happened, and when he tried to rise again, the pain in his leg was beyond endurance. He crawled, humping along on elbows and one knee, and slid down a second embankment. Quiet water lapped at his face. Through a curtain of reeds he saw the flare of a flashlight, growing brighter. He couldn’t get up. He couldn’t go on. He raised his head and saw the dark outline of a boat nosing through the reeds, moving soundlessly. Far away, a trooper called out to another. Cornell kept staring at the boat, as if it were something in his imagination. Someone was in it. More than one person. The sound of the tide washing through the pungent marsh grass covered the purl of water around the bow. It was a small, open craft, and there were two people in it. And someone whispered his name.

  “Barney? Barney?”

  From about fifty yards beyond the inlet, a shot was fired. A man called out angrily, and was answered by a sharp command. The boat was very near now. Cornell raised himself painfully from the soft wet turf. Something leaped and splashed into the water a few feet away.

  “Barney?”

  He had heard the whisper right the first time. He could see the small figure in the bow of the boat. He parted the reeds in front of him.

  “Here,” he called softly. “Over here.”

  The boat moved closer toward the shore, a dark shadow among all the moving, whispering shadows around him.

  Someone said, “Damn it. Where?”

  “Here,” Cornell repeated.

  Someone said: “Gootsie, give him a hand, will you? Are you all right, Barney?”

  The impatient voice mixed anger with relief. Cornell tried to stand up, wavered, and took a few staggering steps forward. His legs made a loud splashing sound in the shallow water.

  “Do be quiet! The cops are all around us!”

  Cornell gave up wondering about it. He let the man pull him into the open boat without question. It didn’t seem at all surprising that little Sally Smith had somehow popped out of nowhere and was getting him out of this.

  CHAPTER SIX

  CORNELL looked at the man who handled the boat. He stood in the stern, propelling them forward by using an oar as a scull, and he used it skillfully and in complete silence except for the occasional chuckle of the cross tide or the dry rasp and rattle of the swamp grass as they pushed along the bank of the inlet.

  He had never seen the man before. He was short and squat, with a broad face and darkly tanned skin and a mat of curly black hair on his chest that showed between the loops of his dark shirt. He looked at Cornell and grinned, but he said nothing, intent on guiding the boat out of danger.

  Cornell felt his leg tentatively, exploring for a fracture. Nothing was broken. He had pulled a ligament, already weakened by the brush with Keach’s car. The leg would be stiff and painful for a day or so, and then he could forget it. He saw Sally Smith’s eyes watching him, and said, “It’s all right.”

  “We’re not in the clear yet,” she reminded him.

  “You have a lot of questions to answer, Sally.”

  “Later,” she said.

  She looked back at the man sculling the boat, and he nodded. There seemed to be a close understanding between the slim girl and the squat, hairy man. Cornell did not try to penetrate it for the moment. He was content that the moon had vanished between thick clouds, sheltering them—as if to prove that all was well, now that Sally Smith had arrived with the U. S. Cavalry. He had the feeling that he was safe now, that the police thrashing about on the low-lying shore had lost the scent. He could see their flashlights like fireflies among the tall trees and reeds, dancing in frustration because they couldn’t find him. He wondered if the trooper he’d knocked into the creek could identify him. Perhaps they had known about him before they arrived. Nothing would have surprised him.

  The motion of the boat changed as they reached the open bay. The lights of Calvert Beach winked on the
shore to the north. Cornell was content for the moment just to sit quietly in the boat, easing his leg and watching Sally Smith. The girl crouched beside him, watching the shore. She was a riddle that he meant to solve, no matter what happened. For a lonely little government clerk, she certainly got around. The man—Gootsie, she had called him—had apparently come from nowhere.

  Sally became conscious of his stare and looked up at him. Her face was difficult to distinguish in the deep shadows. She looked different, younger, somehow, even innocent. He knew the last was an illusion, but he liked the impression he had. He liked the scent of her hair as she squirmed closer beside him.

  “You walked into something tonight,” she said.

  “You ought to know,” Cornell said.

  “Do you think I had anything to do with it?”

  “Didn’t you?”

  She didn’t answer his question. Instead, she asked, “Is Jason Stone really dead?”

  “How did you know?”

  “We heard it in the village—Gootsie and I. The local cop told us about it, just as the squad cars pulled out. They had your name and said you’d killed him. The boat was Gootsie’s idea. We knew we couldn’t get you out by land.”

  Cornell said dryly, “I didn’t kill Stone, you know.”

  She looked at him. “Is that true?”

  “It’s true.”

  Gootsie spoke up with annoyance. “Knock it off, Sally. Voices carry over the water.”

  “Sorry,” she said.

  “Better to be safe,” Gootsie said.

  Cornell could no longer see the lights of the search party along the shore. A low headland presently cut them off from all possible detection from Overlook Plantation. Gootsie stopped sculling and reached under the transom seat to ship a lightweight outboard motor. The boat drifted inshore with the tide, rocking slightly. Sally said, “That will make an awful racket, chum.”