by Unknown
• • •
Charleroy went along the hall and knocked at Julia’s door.
“I want to see you, Julia. At once,” he said.
“I’ll be down in a few moments, Daddy.”
“No, now. Put on a wrapper and open the door.”
“All right!” she said angrily, and turned the key.
She was wearing a blue shirt and a dark skirt; her dark hair was smooth and neat. Yet she looked wretched, woebegone, dreadful, to him, with her discolored eye, the sullen thrust of her underlip.
“There’s a man here from the police,” he said. “He wants to see you.”
“All right,” she said.
There had been no greeting between them, no pretense of their being glad to see each other.
“There’s no use going into details just now,” Charleroy went on, “but a man was found last night, just outside the drive here. He’d been shot. Killed.”
“Really?” said Julia indifferently.
“Julia—” Charleroy began, in the very low tone he had used from the first.
“Mr. Charleroy?” said a voice behind him, and, turning, he saw Lieutenant Levy halfway up the stairs, polite, smiling, but very alert. “Miss Ewing tells me your daughter isn’t feeling very well. If she’d prefer, I can come upstairs and talk to her.”
“I’ll come down,” said Julia clearly.
There was nothing for Charleroy to do but stand aside and let her go; he followed her down the stairs and into the sitting-room, where Miss Ewing stood before the empty fireplace. In the past, this room had seemed to him particularly colorful, with the chintz curtains, the flowered wallpaper, the bits of shining brass here and there. But on this rainy morning it was bleak and deadly cold.
“Sit down, Miss Charleroy,” said Levy. “Have you heard anything about what happened yesterday, just outside here?”
“Yes. My father just told me.”
“This man’s name was apparently Winter, Leonard Winter. Were you acquainted with him, Miss Charleroy?”
“No,” said Julia.
“Her manner,” thought Charleroy, “couldn’t be worse, sullen and brusque; she must be making the worst possible impression on this policeman: Better,” he thought, “if Levy would speak sharply to her.” His patience was somehow sinister.
“You see,” Levy said, with an air of explaining everything, “the first thing we want to do is identify the body. The car has a Buffalo license and it’s registered in the name of Leonard Winter, who was recently living in a hotel in Buffalo. We got in touch with the Buffalo police and they say he left there some days ago. We could get someone from Buffalo to come down and identify, but that takes time. If we could get any information locally—”
Julia said nothing.
“You see,” Levy went on, “we think he must have stopped in somewhere in this neighborhood. No coat or hat, and it was a cold day.”
Still Julia said nothing.
“There aren’t many houses just around here,” Levy went on. “And there’s very little traffic, this time of the year. But, just the same, in the course of time we’ll find someone who saw him, before he got where we found him.”
In the course of time—Charleroy repeated it to himself. It was an ominous phrase. There would be someone—a boy on a bicycle, a busy doctor driving by, a trouble shooter up a pole—someone, surely, must have seen this man.
“You see,” Levy said, “he wasn’t killed in the car.”
“Mercy!” cried Miss Ewing, with eager interest. “How can you possibly know that?”
“For one thing,” Levy answered, “there was no blood in the car, and no sign of any having been cleaned up. And, for another thing, the Medical Officer says that, sitting the way we found him, the man couldn’t have been shot through the heart. The bullet came from below him.”
• • •
In the course of time—Charleroy said it to himself. There was a car coming up the drive now, and suppose it were to bring the boy, the doctor, the trouble shooter, the inevitable witness?
The car stopped, but there was no sound of footsteps on the veranda; the doorbell did not ring. Somebody standing outside, cautiously peering in at a window?
Then the back door closed, there were footsteps in the kitchen.
“The Bradys!” he said, with a sigh of relief.
“I’d like to see them,” said Levy, and went out of the room. He was back in a moment, followed by the Bradys, still in traveling costume, and after them came Leon, very neat, his black hair sleek.
“Good morning!” Charleroy said to the Bradys, and they answered together, “Good morning, sir!”
“A fine couple,” Charleroy thought; “fine people.”
Tim Brady was a man of fifty-five or so, tall and gangling, with a long, rueful upper lip and a low forehead habitually wrinkled in a puzzled frown. Loretta, his wife, was a little thing, quick and lively, white-haired, still pretty. They had been at Meadowsweet for some twelve years now; they had their own bedroom, sitting-room, and bath; it was their home for the rest of their days.
• • •
“Sit down, Mrs. Brady,” said Levy. “Have you heard anything about what happened here yesterday?”
“Yes, sir,” answered Mrs. Brady. “The taxi driver that we took from the station told us.” She brought something out of her pocket. “We told the taxi driver to let us out at the entrance to the drive; that way we’d look around and maybe pick up something, and sure enough didn’t I find these in the bushes there!” She was holding out a pair of white-rimmed sunglasses, and she was proud and pleased.
“There you are, Leon!” said Charleroy. “That’s where you must have dropped them.”
“Yes, Mr. Charleroy,” said Leon. “They’re always falling out of my pocket.”
It was as quick as that, as easy as that, to cross the bridge from a passive resistance to the law to an active conspiracy.
“Always losing them,” said Leon, and held out his hand for the glasses.
But Levy appeared not to notice this; he put them into his own pocket.
“Well, I won’t bother you any more now,” said Levy. He stood up, looking at the little herd he had rounded up there. “If you come across anything that seems to have any connection with the case, you’ll let me know?”
“Yes, sir,” said Mrs. Brady, alone.
“Any prowlers, for instance,” said Levy. “You see, Winter wasn’t killed in his car.”
“Ah! And where was the poor man killed, then, sir?” asked Mrs. Brady.
“We don’t know—yet,” said Levy. “Well, thank you all.”
Charleroy went to open the door for him; when it was closed, he stood beside it. “I’ve got to go in to New York today,” he thought. “There are things in the office—appointment with Carlsen at three— And I’ve got to see Helen; there’s no getting out of that. And I’ve got to be normal. She’s a very observant woman.”
He opened the door and stepped out on the veranda. But the cold, fine rain drove into his face and he retreated into the house. Leon was just about to mount the stairs.
“Leon!” said Charleroy.
“I ought to thank him,” he thought; “ought to say a word of appreciation.” Leon had been asked to lie, and he had lied, readily; he must understand why this had been asked of him; he must understand the whole situation, more or less. Yet in his thin, dark face there was no hint of knowingness; he stood waiting, attentive and obliging, nothing more. “No,” Charleroy thought. “Let it go.”
“When will your taxi be ready?” he asked.
“Tomorrow,” Leon answered, and explained what was amiss with it.
“Then you might as well stay here overnight,” said Charleroy.
“I’ll do that, Mr. Charleroy,” said Leon.
Charleroy went on to the kitchen, where he
found the Bradys sitting at the table, drinking coffee.
“Don’t get up! Don’t get up!” he said. “Station wagon in order, Tim? . . . Good! If you’ll bring it around, I’d like to make the nine-forty.”
He left the kitchen, closing the door behind him; in the little hall he paused for a moment. “No!” he said to himself. “I won’t want to talk to Julia now. Not now.”
As he started up the stairs he was saying to himself, over and over, “The less I know, the better.” But he checked that. “No reason to think there is anything to ‘know,’ ” he thought. “The only thing is, to act for the best, as things come up.”
He finished packing his bag and carried it downstairs. Mrs. Brady had breakfast ready for him in the dining-room, and he sat down there alone. “Julia’s got Miss Ewing to look after her,” he thought. “Couldn’t find anyone better, more devoted. The Bradys are here; Leon’s here.” He tried to take comfort from the thought of all these devoted people about her, but in his mind he saw her as forlorn, wretched, stubbornly hostile. “She’s not herself,” he thought.
There was no one he knew on the train, and he was glad of that; he sat in the smoker, looking out of the window at the flat country in the rain, and he made his plans.
The first thing was, to get rid of Winter’s clothes. “Two angles to that,” he thought. “I want to put them where they won’t be found, but I don’t want to destroy them. I might want to bring them out, later on. After Levy’s caught the killer.”
He concentrated his thoughts upon the clothes in his bag, and in a few minutes a good solution came to him, as he had expected it would. “I’ll take them to the club,” he thought, “leave them in my locker. No one’s going to look there.”
With this settled in his mind he began to think of Helen. Not of Julia. He knew already what he wanted to do about Julia; the great difficulty was, how to present it to Helen. “She must not be worried,” he thought. “She’s ill. She must be spared.”
• • •
At the Grand Central he got a taxi and drove to the Pendleton Club; he went directly to the locker-room, which he had seldom visited before; he wrapped Winter’s coat and hat in his old bathrobe, brought along for the purpose, and locked up the bundle. Nobody here would ever dream of opening his locker, and, he thought, it was improbable, almost impossible, that a Horton County policeman would enter a place like this.
Then he got into another taxi and drove off to the hospital.
He knocked on Helen’s door, and she called, “Come in!” He entered, and he was not pleased to find her sitting in a chair, a blanket over her knees.
“You’re up?” he said. “It’s too soon.”
“No,” she said. “I didn’t have any temperature last night, or this morning.”
But she was pale, her clear features were a little sharpened; it seemed to him that she looked remote and a little strange. He went to her side, and as he bent to kiss her she put one arm around his neck; she drew his face against hers and held him fast for a moment, with that queer little fierceness which underlay her great composure. He had, in the past, seen her speak sternly to one of the children, and then suddenly catch the little culprit in her arms. “Don’t do that again!” she would say.
He stood for a moment with his heavy head bent; then she released him and he stood upright. He began to ask her questions: What medicine were they giving her? How was she eating? How was she sleeping?
“I’m much better, Carrol,” she answered, with impatience. “I wish I’d never let Dr. Marcher rush me off here. I wish I’d stayed home.”
“You’re better off here.”
“No,” she said briefly, and was silent for a moment. “Are you going back to Meadowsweet tonight, Carrol?”
• • •
He brought up a chair and sat down beside her. “Yes,” he said. “And there’s another thing, Helen. I may have to go to Chicago on Monday.”
He was watching her covertly, and he saw no change, no look of surprise in her face. “I thought of taking Julia along,” he said.
“That’s a nice idea,” she said. “Perhaps she could look up Anne Barrow there.”
So it was done, and with surprising ease. He had dreaded telling her of this trip; he had expected questions, objections. But she did not seem to think the plan at all odd, or even particularly interesting. He left her a few moments later, relieved, seeing the road clear before him.
“I’ll have to go to Chicago on Monday,” he told Masterman, his partner, when he got to the office. “Family business.”
That, too, was surprisingly easy. He talked to Masterman about matters that would, or might, come up during his absence; he told his secretary to get plane reservations and hotel rooms for himself and his daughter. On his way out to lunch he stopped in a telephone booth in the lobby and called up a fellow club member.
“Macarren?” he said. “This is Charleroy. You’re from Chicago; can you give me the name of a doctor there, a first-class man?”
“Certainly!” Macarren answered, with severity. “I’ll give you the name of the best all-around man there. If he can’t help you, I don’t think anybody could.”
Charleroy wrote down the name and address in his little blue, leather-covered book, and went on to his lunch. “I’ll see this doctor alone, first,” he thought. “I’ll get some information about drugs; how long the effects can last, and so on. Julia doesn’t remember anything about that Wednesday evening. There may be—other blackouts. It’s possible, I suppose, that she’ll never remember . . .
“That would be the best. If I’m satisfied with this doctor,” he thought, “I’ll leave her there for a while. Get her a suite in some comfortable little hotel, send Miss Ewing out to keep her company. What will I tell Helen about that? I don’t know,” he thought. “I’ll think of something. But I’m going to get Julia away.”
For a little change, he told himself, still denying, still refusing to look at the shadow that waited in the background of his mind. . . .
He was determined upon this course, impatient to embark upon it. “But we’ll have to wait until Monday,” he thought. “That police fellow isn’t likely to object, but we don’t want to seem hurried. Just two days,” he thought. He would spend those two days at Meadowsweet, and he hoped, he believed, that he could keep her shut away and safe.
“I don’t imagine Levy will be back,” he told himself. “There’s nothing to connect anyone in the house with Winter. And he seems a decent sort of fellow, Levy does. Not the type who’d want to bother respectable people.”
He got out of the train at the little station that was so deserted and bleak in the March twilight. In another three months, he thought, it would be summer, alive, cheerful. Margaret and her new husband would come to visit; the house would be full again, Helen there; friends of Julia’s would be there. And Julia, herself, would be recovered, calm, proud, confident.
• • •
As the taxi turned into the drive, he noticed, with surprise and uneasiness, that another car, a taxi, had turned in after him. Who could this be? he wondered. No visitor could be welcome now. His cab stopped before the house and Charleroy paid the driver and got out, just as the door of the other cab opened and that passenger descended. He was a slim, even a thin, young man, in a dark overcoat and a soft, black hat pulled down too low over his forehead. Looks queer, Charleroy thought.
“Yes?” he asked, standing at the foot of the steps.
“I came to see Miss Charleroy,” said the stranger. “Miss Julia.”
“I’m her father,” said Charleroy, and the young man took off his hat. He had neat blond hair, a sharp and rather long nose, a look of fatigued cheerfulness about his gray eyes and his thin, wide mouth.
“My name’s Winter, sir, Leonard Winter. I heard from Irene Bascom that I’d be likely to find Miss Julia out here, so I came along.”
�
��Leonard Winter,” Charleroy was repeating to himself, in blank astonishment. “Leonard Winter, eh? But Leonard Winter is dead.”
He glanced again at the newcomer; there he stood, still hat in hand, in the chill wind, patient, amiable, but, Charleroy thought, with something unbearably flippant about him. “An impostor,” Charleroy thought. “I’d like to order him off the place. Tell him to get out. But better not. If he actually is the fellow Julia was out with, he’ll need handling.”
“Is my daughter expecting you?” he asked, with an effort.
“No, sir; I just took a chance.”
“You came all the way out from New York?”
“Well, yes, sir.”
“In business there?” He had to know all he could about this fellow.
“Oh, yes, sir,” said Leonard Winter. “I give dancing lessons.”
“Good heavens!” thought Charleroy. Then he said, “I don’t know whether my daughter’s seeing anyone or not. I’ll find out.”
He mounted the steps and rang the bell; when Mrs. Brady opened the door he stepped in, closing the door behind him. “I don’t want that fellow in the house,” he thought. “Miss Julia?” he asked.
“Up in her room, sir,” said Mrs. Brady, and he went up the stairs and knocked at her door.
“Come in!” she answered indifferently.
In a dark sweater and skirt, she was sitting at her desk, under a rose-shaded lamp.
“Oh, Father,” she said. “Hello!”
“There’s someone here to see you, Julia.”
“Who is it, Father?”
“No use beating about the bush,” he thought. “She’s got to know this, sooner or later.”
“He says his name is Leonard Winter,” he replied.
She rose, looking at him in dismay. “But, Father! The other one—? The one in the car—?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know anything about it. Simply, this fellow says his name is Leonard Winter. He says he’s come out here to see you. But if you don’t want to see him, I’ll send him away.”
“I don’t want to see him,” she said.
Charleroy went down the stairs again and out of the house. Leonard Winter was still standing in the drive, which was empty now, the two cabs gone; he had his hands in his pockets and he was looking up at the upper story of the house. “I don’t like this fellow; I don’t trust him,” Charleroy thought.
