Dead of Night

by Stewart Sterling

  “Stick around ten minutes. If I’m not back by then, I’ll be staying awhile.” I gave him a buck over the fare.

  He said okay, I’d get soaked, he’d lend me his slicker only if I didn’t come back he’d have no way to get it.

  I thought the rain was letting up, much obliged.

  There was a small lodge about a hundred yards inside the gate; no light showing there. If there was any illumination on at the big house I couldn’t distinguish it, though its four tall white columns and its two broad wings showed up clearly enough through the avenue of oaks, every time the lightning flashed.

  No one could have heard me coming, with all that grumbling from the thunderheads, the hrrush of the downpour. But it would have been easy enough to see me, if anyone were watching for intruders.

  When I got up to the crescent drive around in front of the house I couldn’t see a spark of light in any of the rooms. The brass knocker I used made a ludicrously tiny noise against the artillery overhead. After a minute I circled around the side, past a long screened porch, toward the garage. No sign of life. Except something that jumped my pulse beat in a rush!

  In a lucky flash of lightning, two huge black dogs showed up like those single frames that are frozen on a screen when the projector is stopped. They were bounding in midair, racing toward me. Only fifty feet away. Pinschers. Doberman pinschers. The only kind of canine that’s absolutely forbidden in the hotel, because they’re so ferocious.

  I’ve read all that mahooly about dogs never harming you, if you stand still and aren’t afraid of them. It did me no good whatsoever. If those galloping hellions could tell by a sense of smell whether a person was scared, I was a gone goose.

  I made a leap for that screened porch. The door wasn’t hooked or locked. I made it inside by the thickness of my pants seat. The dogs leaped against the door. Their weight sagged the screen so I thought they’d come right through at me.

  They were ugly animals. They weren’t playing at being ferocious. Their snarly growling was ample warning to stay where they couldn’t get at me.

  If there was anyone in the Millet house, it seemed impossible for them not to hear the uproar those pinschers were making. True, it was coming down in buckets, water spouting off the roof like hydrants. Also, it was dark as a cave; the lightning had pretty well quit; it settled down to rain in a serious way.

  I know—every well-equipped Private I is able to whip out a flashlight at a moment like that. I regretted my lack of foresight. I had two packs of paper matches and my lighter.

  I knocked on the doors opening off the porch. Not the slightest stir.

  I tapped on the glass with my lighter. Still nothing. Those damned dogs were ripping the screen door with their claws.

  I tried the French doors. Locked. One of the dogs got his head and forepaws through the wire, set up a demoniac racket at not being able to get at me. But it wouldn’t be long.

  Those French doors have two latch handles. I remembered an old trick from my schooldays; sometimes if I pulled both handles together, the doors would give enough to open, even when locked. I gave a good healthy tug. Bingo!

  Then I pulled the door wide, snapped on my lighter to get a glimpse of the room inside. What I got a glimpse of was the moving muzzle of a shotgun swiveling toward me about five feet away!

  No champion base stealer ever did a fancier fadeaway dive. I hadn’t hit the floor when the room blew up with a blast that made thunder sound like a bowling alley a block away.

  When I hit the floor I went over in a shoulder roll, sure I was hit. The side of my face felt as if somebody’d patted it with a red-hot waffle iron.

  The muzzle flare blinded me, but I swung a leg to kick up at the shotgun. I had to gamble it wasn’t a pump gun with half a dozen more shells ready to blow me apart.

  A sliver of light showed at the bottom of the chair. I’d forgotten the lighter, in my dive. Somehow the flame was still burning, more than it usually did when I needed it. It had the slipcover of a chair on fire. That was nokay. I f the shotgunner got light enough to aim, I was finished.

  I made an ungraceful belly-down lunge, caught an ankle. A bare, slim ankle I could get a grip on. Yair. A girl.

  It may have showed a deplorable lack of savoir-faire for me to wrestle around with a girl in a nightgown, but my small stock of savoir-faire was at an all time low. She clawed. I butted. She kneed me. I got a body scissors on her, pinned her beneath me.

  Click! The lights went on.

  Across the room a small boy, about seven, in blue pajamas, held a hatchet in one hand and kept his other on the light switch.

  “You let Nikky alone, you! Or I’ll kill you!”

  Chapter Thirty-One: CORPSES CAN’T TESTIFY

  MISPLACED HUMOR’S a common reaction to sudden danger. Stick-up victims often get plugged for wisecracking at gunmen. Something like that must have hit me. I had to snigger at the tousle-haired kid with the tomahawk and the terrified, determined eyes.

  “All you need’s a fire helmet, Chief. You got your ax with you, I see. How ’bout puttin’ out that blaze? Huh?”

  “You get off Nikky.” He lifted the hatchet threateningly.

  “Might have a point there, son.” I did shift my position; with bright lights on it was downright embarrassing, the way Nikky’s nightgown’d been torn. Especially since another woman, a few years older than Nikky, clomped hurriedly downstairs in dressing-gown and mules to seize the boy, gasp at the burning chair, and cry out to Nikky;

  “Hold him, while I phone the police!”

  Nikky said calmly, “Please don’t, Miss Ellen. Just open the door.”

  Miss Ellen ran.

  I let go of the tornado beneath me, made a grab for the gun. It was a pump gun. I broke it, fast, to make sure there were more shells in it.

  The dogs raced into the hall.

  “Call ’em off,” I stepped behind a wingback chair, “or I’ll kill ’em off.”

  They bounded into the room.

  “Don’t you shoot my dogs,” the boy shouted in a frenzy. “Down, Castor! Down! Pollux!”

  Miss Ellen hollered, too, when she saw I was ready to use the gun. “Stop it, Pollux! Pollux!”

  It was Nikky who sprang up, flung an arm around the neck of the biggest animal, flailed at the other one with her fist.

  It took a couple of minutes to get them quieted enough to lie down in front of the Dutch-tiled mantel. Another five to slap out the sparks in the smoldering slipcover, exchange guarded apologies all around.

  Nikky wouldn’t have shot at me except she thought I was someone else. They’d been afraid of a visit from Al Gowriss ever since Nikky’d arrived at noon.

  “They” were Miss Ellen—Mrs. Ellen Marino, actually, she was Tildy’s widowed sister, Tony’s mother—Tousle Hair was Tony, of course. He was sorry he’d offered to chop my head off, but he’d thought I was hurting Nikky. Since he was the only man in the family he’d tried to protect her.

  There were only the three of them in the big house. And the pinschers, of course. Tildy wasn’t home yet, though she was expected any time. The gardener and groom were down at the lodge. The cook lived at the other end of the farm.

  I said I wouldn’t have entered the house if the pinschers hadn’t driven me to it. I hoped I hadn’t injured Miss Narian. No? Good. Fortunate none of her shots drilled me, though the powder grains in my face did sting.

  My errand? The same as that which had taken me to Little Syria; to help a tired old waiter who’d been arrested for something he hadn’t done.

  Nikky slipped out, whistled to the pinschers. They eyed me balefully as they slunk to the kitchen. There was a sound of spoon scraping a pan. She placated them for not having had a morsel of house officer.

  I admired the cherry drop-leafs, the antique break-front, the white woodwork, the old-fashioned wallpaper, while Mrs. Marino chivvied Tony upstairs.

  “But I don’t want to go to bed, Mamma.” The dimple in his chin deepened as he pouted. “If Aunt Tildy
’s coming, I want to stay up.”

  I told him, “She won’t be here until morning, son, I promise you.” Might be quite a bit later than that, I told myself.

  He stamped upstairs finally, hollering questions at me every third step. “When’d Aunt Tildy leave New York?” “Was that bad man still bothering her?” “Had I seen the Stack O’ Jack show last night?”

  Last night? It seemed more than thirty hours since that pair of hands had played We Won’t Go Home Until Morning.

  Mrs. Marino brought a decanter and glasses by way of rapprochement.

  “Perhaps you’d prefer a highball, Mister Vine?”

  “Thanks. No. Straight across the board.” I was ready for a stimulant. “Your sister’s in a pretty desperate fix, Mrs. Marino.”

  “I know. I wanted to go to New York to be with her, but she didn’t think the authorities would permit it. And now this awful news on the radio about Dow Lanerd; Tildy must be absolutely stricken.”

  “Broke her up, all right.”

  “Such a sweet man. So considerate. Not at all the sort you’d expect to do a frightful—”

  Nikky reappeared, skirted and sweatered. She seemed annoyed with her mistress’s sister but waited respectfully while Mrs. Marino urged me to stay in one of the spare bedrooms, no trouble at all, really; they’d feel badly if I didn’t—after the peculiar reception I’d been given.

  When Mrs. Marino had gone, I put it up to Nikky in words of one syllable.

  “You were in the room when the guard was knifed. You saw it all.”

  “No. I was in the bathroom. Washing a pair of gloves.”

  “What’s the diff? Why all the guff about what the man wore?”

  She rubbed her cheek, where I’d butted her. “It’s so absurd. We were doing all we could to hide it; then he had to end it himself. What’s the use?”

  “Lanerd?”

  “Of course.” She switched on a big console radio, tuned it in to some platter parade, low enough so we could talk but loud enough to keep anyone upstairs from hearing what we said. “After dinner, we both went into her bedroom. Mister Lanerd had a key to her room; he let himself in. They began to argue—she’d written him a note calling off plans to go to South America with him, and he began to maul her. I can’t stand anyone being mean to my baby, so we had a tussle. He swore at me, slapped me. Tildy ran into the other room to ask the guard to help with him.”

  “Neither Lanerd nor Roffis will dispute any of it.”

  “Tildy will tell you it’s true. Roffis came in; he tried to put Mr. Lanerd out, even had the hall door open. He struck Mister Lanerd in the face; it made him furious. He seized a knife from the serving-table the waiter’d just put out in the hall, stabbed the guard in the back. We couldn’t believe he was dead for a little, then we dragged him to the closet, dumped him in there, and held a council to decide what to do.”

  I really was impressed. What she’d said checked perfectly with Auguste’s story, so far.

  “We decided Mr. Lanerd would have to get cleaned up; there was blood on his coat and shirt. Right after the stabbing, we thought the waiter would be able to see us dragging the body to the closet, so I ran over and pushed the bedroom door to. There was blood on my gloves, I still had them on, some of it got on the door. That’s what made us think of the stain on Mr. Lanerd’s coat. So he went across the hall to change.”

  “Auguste said someone came out of the bedroom. But he didn’t recognize the man. He recognized Lanerd quickly enough a little later when I was in the room.”

  “That old goof. He’s half blind. He couldn’t recognize his own mother unless he heard her talking. Mr. Lanerd bumped right into him, but didn’t say a word. Auguste grunted but never knew who it was. Tildy telephoned the other man, Hacklin, told him that Roffis had run some intruder out of the room and hadn’t come back, would he come over and take us to the studio. So he did. Of course I had to go down in the service elevator.”

  “Ridiculous rule.” I quoted, “‘Only nurses with infants allowed in guest elevators.’ Yair. Go on.”

  “That’s all. Except at the studio, Tildy kept reassuring herself that she’d had to do it, she couldn’t let him go to jail.”

  I remembered what MacGregory had said. It checked.

  “Why’d you skip out on Hacklin?”

  The music faded. There was a station break. A signature. Five minutes of the latest news from the wire room of WLEX.

  She said, “Tildy was afraid we’d say the wrong thing, or do something to give Mr. Lanerd away. So I took her to my uncle’s until we found out how the wind was blowing.”

  It checked with Auguste, with the producer. But not with Dow Lanerd’s waiting in 21MM with his automatic ready for business. Why was that?

  “Oh, we’d all been under such a strain, expecting that cochon Gowriss to sneak in and murder us both in our beds. We pulled the bureau up against the bedroom door every time we snatched a ten-minute nap. Mr. Lanerd was as scared of Gowriss as we were. He thought, several times, he’d been followed by a man in a taxi—” she paused to listen.

  The zombi voice from the console said:

  “… after a hair-raising chase for seven miles through crowded traffic on the Boston Post Road at speeds in excess of eighty miles an hour, Connecticut State Police tonight shot it out with Albert Gowriss, notorious criminal. Gowriss and a woman companion were critically wounded by gunfire and subsequent smashup…”

  “One thing about you, Miss Narian. There are fewer and fewer people who can contradict your story.”

  Chapter Thirty-Two: AMNESIA?

  IN THE PLAZA ROYALE, we’ve one old girl who’s been living in a tower suite for nine years. She hasn’t been out of the hotel more’n a dozen times annually. Says she considers our metropolitan palacio the positive peak of luxury living. Point is, she can afford to live anywhere she wants to—and the place she left to come to New York was Fayette County, Kentucky! Man!

  If I could afford one of those Bluegrass country homes, I’d never envy anyone who lived in New York. Not to mention Carmel, Cal., the Isle of Capri, anywhere you like on the Riviera. Or what have you.

  When I woke up in Lovelawn’s west guest room next morning, my vista was a golden green sea of rippling corn, an emerald knoll where jet-black cattle browsed, a bronze mare and her nuzzling colt silhouetted against the sun on the crest. Prettier than Central Park. Much.

  There was more to it than My Old Kentucky Home atmosphere, too. A shaving-kit the Syrian had set out in my private shower room. Tasty old ham with eggs goldenrod, corn cakes and country butter, clotted cream and coffee our breakfast chef should have taken a cue from—served in solitary splendor off Limoges china, by a Negress who had as much aplomb as any of our Gallic waiters.

  I couldn’t understand how Tildy Millett would have been willing to give up all that. She’d have had to, of course; Dow Lanerd wouldn’t have been the type to move into any wife’s home.

  The females of the household had petit déjeuner upstairs. The youngster’d been up for hours, was ky-hootin’ around the yard on a palomino pony, buckarooing all over the place.

  I had seconds on old ham, made a note to ask Emile why we couldn’t get flavor like that on our menu, went over Nikky’s story, step by step.

  It dovetailed neatly with the official version. Maybe too neatly. I’d stayed up half the night with her, trying to discover discrepancies. She’d had answers for everything.

  Why’d she described the murderer’s suit as dark instead of cream-colored? To divert suspicion from “her baby’s” fiancé.

  What reason could Tildy have had for claiming the man who killed Roffis looked like Roy Yaker, an acquaintance of Lanerd’s? Must have been because Yaker was the first person who’d come to Tildy’s mind, when I’d insisted on some description. The pollster’d been loitering around 21CC and the corridor with what Nikky diagnosed as lecherous intent. Once he’d been in the elevator with Tildy and managed to let his hand come into contact with her—Nikky illust
rated with scornful distaste—her behind! Tildy’d ignored him. But she’d have remembered him, unkindly.

  Nikky got peeved at my persistence.

  She did add a few details. Which dropped into place snugly, too. For one, Tildy’d left Lanerd’s table at the Blue Blazer to phone Nikky, who was with her cousin Golub in Brooklyn. That’s why Nikky hadn’t been near her mistress at the time Gowriss shot the Grocer-boy. For another, Nikky was convinced Gowriss, or someone working for him, had tracked her down at the Narian house, sometime Sunday, in the belief Tildy’d confided in her maid even if she hadn’t told the D.A.’s men about Gowriss.

  That would have been important, if true. It could have accounted for the blitz on Atlantic Avenue. But in that event, why did Tildy claim the guy who’d shattered my windshield had been the one who’d stabbed Roffis? The gent who could have been Yaker’s twin? I didn’t ask Nikky that.

  I did ask her to plane to Manhattan with me in the morning. She refused. I had to bear down.

  I told her Tildy was in the greatest possible danger; wasn’t going to be able to get to the Bluegrass right away; would need her friend and companion as never before. That didn’t work.

  So I hollered cop. If she wasn’t going to come back to New York willingly to testify, I’d have no recourse except to have her held for extradition. Of course I couldn’t have done it. But she didn’t know that. She agreed sullenly.

  Whether she thought she’d put over her yarn about Lanerd, or suspected I’d uncovered the truth, I couldn’t tell. She was a cool one. The Prosecutor’d have little luck trying to fluster her, if he got her on the stand.

  While I finished that sumptuous breakfast, I wondered what she would admit, when it came right down to the courtroom.

  I wandered out to the porch with the torn screen door. Castor and Pollux were agreeably noticeable by their absence.

  “Whoopee-ti-yo,” I called as Tony hightailed ’round the corner. “Practicing to give Roy Rogers a run for his box office?”

  “Uh, uh.” He brought the pony to a prancing stop. “I wouldn’t give a candy bar to be th’ best doggone cowboy there is. I wanna be a champion skater like Aunt Tildy. Ever see her do the sword dance? On ice?”