Compartment K

by Helen Reilly

  McKee paused.

  Rose pressed cold hands together in her lap. The tension in the still room was unbearable.

  The Scotsman let it ease a little, playing the big fish. He took a turn up and down the hearth, lit a fresh cigarette and spoke of Madame Flavelle’s death. She had seen the murderer leave Davidson’s compartment on board the Canadian Pacific Commonwealth. She didn’t know it at the time. When she opened Davidson’s door, pretending to fall against it, and discovered his body, she knew. Her main interest was the jewels. They were gone. He quoted her letter to Bimini, 'If they are not in this place, they are in that.’ She had two choices. She drew blank when she attacked Mr. Font in the act of throwing the bloodstained jacket and Miss O’Hara’s rain cape into the lake. The jewels weren’t on him, and she looked elsewhere. The second attempt to get possession of the jewels cost her her life.”

  McKee paused again. He took out a handkerchief, wiped his forehead, put the handkerchief away. It was the agreed on signal.

  “Just as Miss O’Hara very nearly met the same fate yesterday afternoon out there in the woods. She was in the Questing house on the afternoon of the tenth while the perpetrator was leading Hazel Bauer down that side street. There was always the danger that Miss O’Hara, too, had seen what she shouldn't have seen.”

  He paused again. Rose looked up. Someone had come into the hall from the terrace. It was the little New York detective. Todhunter was carrying what looked like a pair of gloves. He put them down on a distant table.

  At the same moment another man appeared in the doorway in the extreme opposite corner, the doorway leading to the little terrace at the side. The man was shortish and stocky with a heavy handsome face and black hair and eyes.

  The man was Arturo Bimini and he had his instructions. He didn’t come in, he remained standing in the doorway. McKee had already plotted the footage. From where Bimini stood to the table in the hall was a good sixty feet. The background was different, the clothes not too much so, it was still high summer, the main characteristics would be there, height and gait and silhouette. McKee said, “I am going to ask each one of you to go out into the hall and examine what is lying on the table there and then come back to your places. Not you, Mrs. Questing, and not you, Miss O’Hara.”

  The others got up one after the other, automatons moving mechanically. Hugh Eden was the first on his feet. He crossed the living room at a diagonal, went to the table in the hall, and returned to his seat beside Elizabeth. Loretta Pilgrim, gray-faced, her eyes dead, went next. Candy, Daniel, Nils, George Langley and the Beldings repeated the performance. They all studied the gloves for a second.

  No one had ever seen the gloves before, which wasn’t surprising as they belonged to Inspector Sheppard.

  When they were seated McKee beckoned and Arturo Bimini entered the room. McKee told them who Bimini was, and that he had been in the mouth of the alley beyond the Font apartment building on the afternoon of the tenth when Harry Belding left, pursued by Hazel Bauer.

  Bimini had come to a halt on the edge of the hearth beyond Rose. McKee said, “Bimini, do you see anyone here in this room who was on that street outside the Font apartment on the late afternoon of the tenth?”

  Bimini nodded.

  “Yes, sir, I see him.”

  He raised an arm and pointed. He was pointing at Hugh Eden.

  No. Oh, no, Rose thought wildly. And yet it made a sort of terrible sense. Hugh Eden knew that Elizabeth would never marry him while she was in possession of the Questing millions. If she could be deprived of them temporarily, and during that interval Hugh Eden could prove his disinterestedness and get her to promise to marry him, the millions could then be restored. He had to have the interval. A premature disclosure of Belding’s previous marriage, making Elizabeth’s to him null and void, would have utterly defeated Eden. And once Hazel Bauer had tracked Belding down she wouldn’t have remained silent for an instant. She would have had to be killed. . . .

  McKee said, "You saw the Colonel, Bimini?”

  “Yes, I did.”

  Hugh Eden was smiling. He said gently, “Of course I was there that afternoon, Inspector. I made no secret of it. I told Mr. Todhunter so the other night, told him what I was doing there.”

  “And when you left, Colonel?”

  “I went straight to my hotel.”

  “You didn’t go to Thirty-sixth Street, to the Questing house?” “I did not.”

  McKee shifted to Rose. “Miss O’Hara, I want you to think hard. You w’ere at the window of the bedroom in your cousin’s house. You could see the whole side street—”

  It began then for Rose, the dreadful culmination of that whole grim symphony of death and destruction. I can’t, she thought, and I won’t. Elizabeth has suffered too much. Even if I could, I wouldn’t. She closed her eyes. And it was there against her lids, a picture of the side street with cars going past and Davidson on the corner to the right, and people moving down the street singly and in pairs. Then it came to her. A moment ago she had seen, as they moved across the room, the same head, the same shoulders . . .

  Her breathing stopped. It had been there all the time, buried behind the block she had erected in her mind deliberately, because it had happened again and again to her during those eight months, on the street, at the theatre, in a restaurant. And it had finally happened, actually happened, on board the Commonwealth when she entered the dining car with Nils behind her. Anguish squeezed her heart. But there were those three deaths . . .

  She opened her eyes, to see Bimini pointing in a different direction.

  Bimini said, “And him I see. He comes round the corner into Thirty-second Street, he stares across the street at the woman screaming and follows her.”

  McKee turned slowly towards Rose. If she could make the necessary identification at the necessary spot—

  “Miss O’Hara—”

  Rose looked up. She could see the tall inspector only dimly. His outlines were blurred. She nodded.

  “Yes,” she said in a voice just above a whisper, “yes. Daniel was with the woman in the green dress, walking beside her down Thirty-sixth Street towards Third Avenue—”

  It was Loretta who screamed. Daniel had been in the room and then he wasn’t. He had leapt past Loretta and was streaking for the front door, was through it. The Canadian police came running in from the dining room where they had been listening, McKee and Todhunter were moving fast; George Langley was the nearest to the front door. He was on Daniel’s heels. Just outside the door, he collided with a long chair. The chair spun around and Langley fell, and a tangle of bodies and arms and legs blocked the doorway.

  The halt was brief and effective. Daniel never stopped. He was beyond the flower bed, speeding to the right up the slope to the huge flat-topped rock that hung over the water.

  He was there for a fraction of a second silhouetted against the sky, and then he was gone.

  TWENTY

  The September night was roasting. In the living room of her apartment above the bookshop on Ninth Street in lower New York, Rose looked at a thermometer on the table at her elbow and put it down carefully.

  “What is it,” Nils asked, and she said, “Eighty-four.”

  George Langley groaned. “Phew—eighty-four at nine o’clock.” He was on the bench in front of the spinet, lolling against the keyboard drinking a highball. Rose smiled at him. He had brought her flowers to celebrate her recovery. She liked him. So did Nils. Inspector McKee was slightly less enthusiastic, at the moment, anyhow. The tall Scotsman was stretched out at ease in the biggest armchair in the room.

  The case had been finally closed that day. He said to George Langley,

  “You’re sure that your falling over that chair on the terrace out there at Amethyst Lake that last day was an accident?” And when Langley said indignantly, “Of course I’m sure,” he nodded pacifically, said, "Well, that’s all I wanted to know/' and went on talking.

  Some of what he said Rose already knew, a detail here a
nd there had broken through during her almost three week sojourn in another dimension. After she got back to New York she had collapsed completely. Now she was better and stronger, and she wanted to know it all, and have done with it.

  Daniel was dead when they got to him that day. His neck was broken. She couldn’t help being glad that it was over so quickly. They found the jewels where he had buried them under one of the bushes against the guest house wall. McKee said that when Daniel entered Compartment K on his wife’s heels, and shot Davidson, the jewels were there in plain view on the seat. They were a surprise to him, but for all he knew any number of people could be aware of their existence and, if so, theft would be established as the motive for Davidson’s murder—but not if the jewels were still there. He had to remove them.

  The jewels were in his pocket when he entered Rose’s compartment. When she left to get him another coat he took them out, and after she returned and washed the bloodstains off the sleeve and was rinsing the basin, her back to him, he replaced the jewels in the pocket of the jacket and rolled it in the rain cape. From then on, until after Amethyst Lake was reached they remained in Rose's suitcase. As soon as Daniel recovered the jacket that first night at the lake, he buried the jewels hastily, before going on through the woods to dispose of the jacket and the rain cape. He didn’t know the history of the stones then, and, either he figured that they were too valuable to be permanently disposed of, or that they could be used later to incriminate someone else.

  How agile he had been, Rose thought, how resourceful and clever, and how he had fooled her . . .

  McKee said that Madame Flavelle, who had followed Daniel down from the shuffleboard court, had been thrown off the scent momentarily by the blackness in under the trees. When the jewels weren’t on Daniel she suspected the truth. On board the Commonwealth she had been watching Davidson’s compartment from the other end of Car No. 7 that evening, she kept Davidson under almost continuous observation, and the only two people who either entered or left Compartment K were Candy Font and then Daniel.

  Very late on the night of their arrival at Amethyst Lake, after the attack on Daniel and after Todhunter and Duvette had left her, the Frenchwoman had gone over to the guest house. Candy and Loretta Pilgrim were in bed. For all her shrewdness, Madame Flavelle was a fool. She had put her proposition to Daniel—silence for the jewels. Daniel pretended to agree. Outside in the darkness he struck her down so suddenly she couldn’t cry out. He had carried her limp body into the Chalet grounds, lifting it through the fence, which was when the silk threads from her kimono caught on a lower rail. Close to her own cottage the woman had revived, for a moment. Daniel Font had used his necktie.

  A shiver went through Rose. Nils took her hand, held it. McKee said that Daniel had played into hard luck, and when Rose looked puzzled he said, “All right, we’ll take it from the beginning.”

  At that time, months earlier, Daniel Font had an expensive and discontented wife with whom he was deeply enamored and needed money desperately, he was heavily in debt. Where to get money? Chance threw it in his way.

  McKee looked at Nils.

  “Do you remember telling Todhunter that Elizabeth Questing and her sister-in-law had met at a first showing of some paintings at the Metropolitan in the early spring? After we found out that Mrs. Questing had married Harry Belding at East Haven, Connecticut, in 1945, we began to dig. Three other couples were married that same morning. One couple, a Mr. and Mrs. Hurst, were at the Metropolitan on that opening day. Standing at the top of the long flight of steps leading to the second-floor gallery, Mrs. Hurst saw Elizabeth mounting with Colonel Eden beside her and the Beldings behind. Mrs. Hurst exclaimed to her husband, ‘Look, Dan, look— There she is, the woman who was married the same day we were, up in East Haven. And that’s her husband in back of her, that tall dark man. I’ve a good mind to go over and speak.’ ”

  Mr. Hurst had restrained his wife’s enthusiasm. McKee said, “Davidson and Font were both there in the throng at the Metropolitan, a sizeable segment of smart New York turned out. There’s no proof of it, but I’d be willing to bet my bottom dollar that that was where the whole thing started. Both Davidson and Font, independently, grasped the import of Mrs. Hurst’s statement, and verified it. They were both working the same side of the street, they both wanted Candy Font, and the money.” McKee swirled the ice in his glass.

  It was Daniel who had sent those letters to Elizabeth. lie didn't want to appear openly. If there had been no reaction from Elizabeth he would have tried something else.

  McKee said that things had come to a boil on the afternoon of the tenth of August here in New York. Daniel Font had a reasonable idea of Elizabeth’s character and he knew she was going to speak, that that was why she had asked them out to the lake. On the afternoon of the tenth, when he came round the corner on his way home and heard the woman in the green dress on the other side of the street scream and take off after Harry Belding up Lexington Avenue, he was instantly alerted. He followed them. The first part of it went all right. He found a Mrs. Hazel Bauer w'eeping at the top of the Questing steps. Harry Belding had vanished. Hazel Bauer’s declaration that Belding wras the husband she had married fifteen years earlier was a smashing blow. He took her away from there and around to a series of bars, and then finally back to the courtyard of the Questing house, w'here he killed her. He had probably told her that Belding was inside the house.

  George Langley said, “What did he kill her with, Inspector?” McKee threwr out his hands. “With something he picked up during his wanderings with the poor woman and dropped dow’n a sewer opening later, maybe. We’ll probably never know.”

  Unfortunately for Daniel Font, Davidson saw him walking down Thirty-sixth Street with Hazel Bauer. According to Candy Font, Davidson had said later to Daniel on board the Commonwealth, “Who was the dame you were slumming with the other afternoon?” —or something of that nature.

  Nils asked, “Did Font know that Candy w’as going to divorce him and marry Davidson?”

  McKee finished his drink. “That’s what I mean about his playing into hard luck. He didn’t find out until he was on board the Com-inonwealth when he overheard them talking. Candy denied it but he didn't believe her. It was during their quarrel, part of which Gertrude Belding listened in on, that Candy said to Daniel Font, ‘You’d better be careful threatening people, Gil Davidson has a gun.’ ” McKee shrugged. “The fact that Candy was going to leave him if she wasn’t stopped provided Font with a double motive.

  Davidson had to be removed before the train reached Calgary, where Candy would have taken a permanent departure. But why go on? That’s about it, in essence—”

  Rose stopped listening and thought about Candy, who had gone apparently unscathed; Elizabeth had settled money on Loretta, as she had on Hazel Bauer’s son. Why think of Candy at all? Leave her to heaven.

  Rose settled back, her shoulder against Nils. All the doubt, the uncertainty in her where he was concerned had been swept away in a great cleansing flood. But she was still jittery when he wasn’t close to her. He got up and filled the Scotsman’s glass, and she followed him with her eyes. The ringing of the doorbell made her jump. Nils opened the door.

  It was Todhunter who came in, modestly. He was not alone. A large stout brown dog on a rope was with him. The little detective walked over and shook hands beamingly with Rose and waved at the brown animal.

  “This is my dog, George, that I was telling you about.” George looked up at Rose with sad eyes. She stooped and petted his unresponsive head. She said, “Oh, he’s lovely

  At the spinet, George Langley looked at the animal with a grin and began, very softly, to play Strike Up the Band.

  THE END

 

 

 
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