by Rufus King
Alan lighted a cigarette while permitting Joe to sit there and take Cordelia.
“Cordelia,” he said, “is a dear, vague old thing and an incurable shoplifter. Naturally her breeding and good taste prevent her from lifting any but the best things. Say some exquisite little brooch or similar bijouterie.”
Joe’s opinion of Christine’s good sense evaporated. “What does your wife do? Fence the stuff?”
“Scarcely.” Alan gave Joe his profile and smile. “Cordelia takes care of the few rooms we use. She also does the catering, a job peculiarly fitted to her shoplifting proclivities. Primarily, of course, she amuses Christine beyond words. Every time Cordelia brings home the unbilled caviar Christine is in stitches. She caught on to Cordelia at a jeweler’s and whisked her away in her car just as the clerk was beginning to wonder about a pair of teardrop earrings.”
Joe was not entirely happy about Cordelia. He checked her off with mental reservations.
“Who is your third nut?” he asked.
“He is a doctor. Dr. Hugo Wintersweet. Hugo diddled with some unorthodox antics and they drummed him out of the Medical Association. There was a splash in the papers over some fatal case, and Christine hooked him. She set up a laboratory for his use in the game room, where he kids himself he can finish his experiments and be re-established.”
“What does Christine get out of it?”
“Hugo is an excellent chauffeur and general mechanic, as well as having a strong sardonic streak which pleases her. I suppose she feels like a lion tamer every time Hugo brings around the car. Another scotch, Joe?”
“Yes.” Joe thought the list over. “She should have run into a mess before now, picking up characters like that.”
“She did. There was some trouble a couple of years ago, before this present bunch was installed.”
Joe said with careful interest: “Just what happened, Al?”
“Some woman. Christine doesn’t speak about it much, but we all know it worries her. This woman blew her top when Christine eased her out. Said she’d get Christine for discarding her like an old glove, or some such wretched cliché.”
“What had Christine done to her?”
“Nothing, according to Christine. I suppose the woman felt she was set for life in the lap-of-luxury sort of thing and got steamed up over being thrown out. Just one of those messes, Joe.”
“What was this woman’s name? Where is she now?”
“God knows. Christine simply speaks of her as Laura. She dusts off the menacing Laura whenever she needs an example of Ingratitude to shake in our faces. Why?”
“Laura,” said Joe thoughtfully, “might fit in with what I am out here for. We’ll see.”
“Just what does bring you out here, Joe?”
“Twenty-five thousand dollars.”
So here it was. Alan drank deeply. It gave him a breathing spell to curtain his mind against the number of shocking avenues along which Joe’s statement might lead. His smile emerged pleasant and fresh.
“You took a chance on Jupiter Returns,” he said. “It was a gamble, and you lost.”
“I never lose. Not even when I do.”
“I don’t get it, Joe.”
“How much did she kick in to get you to the altar?”
“Christine? Nothing. Not a cent.”
Joe studied Alan for a quiet moment.
“Better wipe that sweat off your forehead. Don’t be nervous.”
“I’m not.”
“How much was it, Al?”
“Nothing. I told you so.” Alan added sullenly: “She made a will.”
“I suppose she left you the works?”
“Yes.”
“Sap!”
“Why? What have I got to lose?”
Joe said patiently: “You will get what she decides to give you until she changes the will and boots you out. She will get tired of you in the same way she got tired of that Laura woman.”
“Not a chance. She’s hooked, Joe.”
Joe went on speculatively sizing Alan up, the way he had sized up a good many people in his career to their ultimate disadvantage or worse. He wondered briefly what slip of judgment had caused him to put his chips on Alan in the first place. Subconsciously he knew it had been the youngster’s very convincing line of talk and a certain charm that, even with Joe’s, was all but hypnotic.
“Would your wife fix you up with a personal bank account, Al? Would she let you manage her securities?”
“No, her lawyer does that. Stuyvesant Swain. The-old buzzard handles some of the biggest estates in the country. Christine’s income isn’t anywhere near what it was when her husband was alive, Joe. When they built this place.”
“What do you think she’d cut up for?”
“Maybe not more than half a million.”
“What do you get for cigarettes, Al?”
“She gives me the same as I got as her secretary.”
“Scratch feed.”
Alan thought this over. The alcohol and his acute powers for self-dramatization gave emphasis to the truth of Joe’s gibe. He discarded the role of worldly young baronet.
“Don’t I know it?” he said bitterly. “Honestly, Joe,” he added, the ham in him breaking out, “do you know what I feel like sometimes? It’s—well, it’s like being a golden falcon caged into lifelong servitude through the machinations of a rich old witch.”
Joe let this pass.
“About this will—have you seen it, or did she just tell you about it?”
“She showed it to me. It’s why she decided to marry me. She wanted to leave me her money but was afraid that a porcupine grandniece who’s her ward would contest the will unless I was her husband.”
Joe thought the grandniece over. It never paid, he had discovered, to overlook the smallest detail of a picture. “Does this grandniece hang around?”
“No. Her name’s Lida Belder, and Christine keeps her in the best girls’ schools and ships her off for vacations with her school friends. I’ve never seen her. Christine has an allergy to the callow young. In skirts.”
“Orphan?”
“Yes. Her parents blew up on a yacht or something.”
“Where is she now?”
“Visiting some people called Vanbuskirk up at Bar Harbor, I believe.”
Joe finished his drink and put the glass down.
“Did I ever tell you about the Dove?” he asked.
“No.”
“He was one of my guns back in the old days.”
A strange excitement raced through Alan. Being fundamentally amoral about everything, he certainly was so about this tentative implication concerning Christine’s welfare.
“What about him, Joe?”
“The Dove is still one of my guns.”
Alcohol fumed further, and Christine was crystal sharp in Alan’s mind. Heaven knew that often enough he had speculated as to how long a stretch it would be before she kicked off and left him holding the golden bag.
He found himself blurting out tensely: “Murder isn’t safe, Joe.”
“It’s all according.”
Alan looked at him in fascination. He took in Joe’s calm, well-massaged face, the noncommittal eyes.
“I suppose you could even get used to it?”
“I will tell you more,” Joe said, “about the Dove. He is a gentlemanly, mild-mannered old guy, and for looks you would think that a sneeze would blow him away. With him you never have to worry. Just give him a job and you can forget about it. He dopes out all the angles and always works on his own.”
Alan’s voice shook.
“What does he use, Joe? A gun? A knife? Poison?”
“He uses whatever he thinks best for the job on hand. He likes accidents. Sometimes he likes illnesses. He knows more about drugs and poisons than most of the pill-pushers in the country. He knows everything about electricity. Some of the traps he’s rigged up with ordinary house currents would honestly make you laugh.”
Joe stood and walke
d over to a handsome jardiniere where, with well-bred aplomb, he spat.
“How is your wife’s health, Al?” he said.
“Fine.”
“Is her ticker okay?”
“She is strong as an ox.”
“Well, the Dove will know best.”
“I—I wouldn’t have to know a thing about this, Joe?”
“You could put it right out of your head until it was time to be surprised and shocked. You wouldn’t have to turn a finger beyond ordering the blanket of roses and a wreath. That is the nice part about the Dove—once you turn him loose on a job, you never see him again until it’s over. The whole Missing Persons Bureau couldn’t contact him if they wanted to. Even I couldn’t. He works like a ghost.”
Alan’s superb tan was a mottled, sickly gray. It would be a break in a million to have the old crock safely shuffled off and a good-sized fortune in his hands. But was it worth it? The risk? Basically he was a coward, certainly a physical one. At Christine’s sudden death he would instantly become Suspect Number One, unless the Dove were to do a superhuman job of camouflaging. “Would he do it here? Right in the house, Joe?”
“He might. Plenty of old women slip in their bathtubs or fall downstairs. At times they fall out of windows. Maybe there’s a short circuit in some electrical gadget in their bathrooms. Accidents happen inside of houses. All with results.”
“If it were poison—they’re awfully clever with their autopsies, Joe.”
“With the Dove there is no autopsies. And whatever it is, he will do it soon. I am worried about her maybe changing her will.” He gave Alan a comprehensive look. “I want the job settled before Christine gets time to think you over.”
Although teetering on the brink, it was no go. The ham in Alan dramatized too vividly the denouement. “No, Joe—I can see it too plainly—”
“You can see what?”
“The final scene—every grisly bromide of it—the last long mile, the little green door, the chaplain, the audience of reporters and special guests, the shaven head, the slit in the pants—No, Joe. I say no.”
Joe said with amiable logic: “You have nothing to say about it. Which would you rather be? A widower or a corpse?”
The last vestige of color fled Alan’s smooth cheek. “Would there be anything more than the twenty-five thousand, Joe?”
Joe brushed this jejune naïveté negligently aside. “There will be an added expense or two. We can talk that over afterward.”
Joe walked over to a spinet desk. Several silver frames stood on it containing portraits, one of which was of Christine. Joe took this from the frame and replaced the empty frame on the desk among the others.
“This is a better picture of your wife than the one in the papers.”
Alan, now that the die was cast, had started to re-bound. A hint of his dazzling, golden future began to thrill him.
“It’s the rig she slew them with one year at the Beaux Arts Ball. She went as Hecate—replete with torch and hound. But only one head.”
Joe folded the picture once and put it in a coat pocket. “I’ll take it along with me,” he said. “It will simplify matters for the Dove.”
“I’m beginning to get the feel of this, Joe. For the past year I’ve been stifled. Just a bonded slave being stifled. It’s like ozone. A great big breath of fresh ozone.”
“There are one or two more things the Dove had better know. How about neighbors? Any patrols of any kind?”
“We could be in the middle of the Sahara.”
“How much of the house is closed up?”
“All of it except for this wing, and most of this is too. We use this room generally as a gathering place.”
“Where does your wife sleep?”
Alan indicated a door in the south wall.
“In there. There’s a foyer that used to be a powder room, and a larger room beyond which she turned into a bedroom. A bathroom is connected with it.”
“How many ways are there of getting into it?”
“Only by that door. The others were blocked up when she had the rooms done over.”
Joe went to the foot of a small turret stairway in one corner.
“Is this the only stairway?”
“Joe, this rococo dump has at least twelve staircases.”
“How about the top floor of this wing?”
“Just a residence for rats.”
Joe indicated a small door set in a jog by the turret stairs.
“Coat cupboard?”
“It was. Christine had it made into a quick-freezer locker room. She uses it to store her furs.”
“This is important, Al.”
“What is?”
“Does your wife have any habits?”
“She is filled with them.”
“I mean special ones—things that nobody else does in the house but herself.”
“She plays that damned clavichord whenever she feels like it. Nobody else can play a note, if that’s any good to you.”
Joe thoughtfully looked at the clavichord, which had its keyboard facing and close to a wall. He looked at the chair-backed stool on which the player would sit. His eye briefly traveled up to the stuffed head of a tusked wild boar, set on a heavy oval plaque, which hung on the wall directly above this chair.
“You never can tell,” he said. “One of the Dove’s specialties is vibrations. How about liquor?”
“Well, she drinks, of course.”
“Anything special? Just used by her?”
“Yes, Joe, there is. It’s a cordial—Prunelle. There’s a bottle of it in the cellaret. It’s the only one left, and she’d cut the hand off anyone who touched it.”
Joe went to the french door and opened it.
“So long, Al. Don’t bother to see me around front.” Alan seized one of Joe’s hands and gripped it.
“Joe, I can’t begin to tell you what this means to me.”
“Glad to oblige, Al.”
“Free! No more servitude to the whims of age! Joe, Edmond Dantes must have felt like this.”
“What was his racket?”
“He was the Count of Monte Cristo. From chains to riches!” Alan dipped into the practical: “You will see the Dove right away, Joe?”
“He will be on his way here before dark. Don’t worry, Al. Christine is as good as cooked.”
Alan stepped out onto the terrace after Joe had gone. Now that there was no retreat, he simply dropped the asbestos curtain on the whole unsavory venture. His ability to do this in any situation, no matter how upsetting, never failed. Hugo had noticed this power in him and had been interested. Hugo had said something about glands.
A mountain breeze gently cleared Alan’s head and brought him a sense of exhilaration and power. He idly decided that the breeze would die at nightfall and that a fog in all probability would set in. Most suitable indeed.
He left the flagged terrace and walked over a carpet of pine needles to the shore of the little lake. An intoxication of release filled him, for his mind accepted the job as being already as good as done. Fate, in the sleekly sinister person of Joe, had opened a dizzying vista of golden freedom.
He considered it fantastic that his station in life should have altered so in a minute, and through no volition of his own, but it was no more than just. What was that odd remark which Joe had made about the Dove?
He works like a ghost.
Alan savored the phrase with intense pleasure. It cast the horrendous plan into the regions of the unreal, made of murder an unseen wraith which in its own thoughtful time would separate from the shadows of some dust-sheeted portion of the house and silently, cleverly envelop Christine.
He was, by now, a combination of Tarzan, Superman, and John D. Rockefeller. He took a deep lungful of the cool, crisp mountain air. He pounded his magnificent chest. The ham in him reached its full flavor.
“The world,” he cried triumphantly to the indifferent mountains, “is mine!”
CHAPTER III
Christine’s hair, this year, was red.
She had tried several shades and had settled on titian. The effect was a frank and startling one. She wore this lambent hair in the latest mode, and in certain lights it tinged her face with the macabre, an effect which did little to relieve her features from the traces left by the years.
The features in themselves were well shaped and leaned toward what is generally considered as the aristocratic. Her figure was excellent, being slender and erect, and her clothes were designed by one of New York’s best houses to give her great individuality and style. They invariably caused most women who came in contact with her to feel dowdy and to dislike her on sight.
As Christine’s car moved along with the traffic of lower Broadway her intelligently wicked violet eyes were speculative on the back of Hugo’s neck. It was a stocky neck, in keeping with his general compact build, and its skin would turn the shade of a ripe watermelon whenever Hugo was more than normally annoyed. It was that color now.
Hugo stopped the car at the entrance to a towering building in which Stuyvesant Swain, Christine’s lawyer, had his-offices. Hugo helped Christine out. His lips were compressed into a thin, vitriolic line. He had been telling himself all the way in from Dour Notch the precise phrases in which he would ask Christine to go to hell and take her beneficences along with her.
Hugo’s sole passion lay in experimentation with roentgenotherapy. He was a callous, thoroughly cynical man who would cheerfully have used his own grandmother as a guinea pig if he had required her to further his work. Life and death meant literally nothing more to him than phenomena arranged through the offices of some natural force for the benefit of his scientific inspection.
Christine’s decision to have him drive her into New York (“You won’t mind doing this little thing for me, will you, Hugo?”) just as he was involved in a compelling problem had forced Hugo into a fury.
Christine smiled at him appealingly and looked her most helpless.
“Before you pick the car up and hurl it at me, Hugo, why not run uptown and order that machine, or whatever it is, you spoke about the other day? I shall be hours with Stuyvesant. You could meet me at the Ambassador at five.”
The watermelon color drained from Hugo’s skin, leaving it pale. He thought: What a devil she is! Truly one.
