Corpses at Indian Stone

by Philip Wylie

  "I dunno," Aggie answered. "I dunno. But if he didn't kill Calder--then someone else did. That's my point!" She asked a perfectly natural question--but one that dumbfounded Aggie. "How much gold did they have?"

  "Good God! I didn't think to ask!" He came as close to grinning as was possible in the little darkroom.

  "Where's it hidden?"

  He was on the point of rebuffing that, also, when he saw her eyes dilate with horror. They were looking at the floor; they had kept moving back toward it since she had entered the room; what she was seeing there made him whirl from the cupboard. It was a ghastly thing. Under the blanket was movement. She pointed and shrank into a corner.

  Her mouth sprang open.

  "Don't yell again," he said fiercely. He bent, and whipped back the covering. Dr.

  Davis's hand had relaxed its hold on the knife and was slipping across his chest in a movement started, possibly, by the weight of a fold of the robe. That was all. Under the robe, such motion had been hideous. Revealed, it was shocking enough, but not devastating. The arm slid away from the knife, down across the chest, and flopped limply on the concrete floor.

  Danielle had covered her face.

  Aggie knelt by the corpse. He touched the skin of its face. It was not cold. Cool, but not cold in the way of yesterday's death, or death hours old. Rigor mortis had not set in. Not yet.

  "We'll get out of here in a minute," he said to the girl. He reached again for the blanket and his eye fixed on the protruding knife hilt. A good knife-engraved. And initialed, he perceived, as he bent close. The initials were in fancy script: "H. H. B."

  Hank--Henry--H. Bogarty. He cursed passionately. This was--in all likelihood--the knife that had pinned the calling card to Sarah's door. The knife he believed Calder had found and taken.

  Aggie gazed at the door that had been locked, and the high, small window. Then he pulled up the car robe again. He rose and took Danielle's arm. "This has been rotten for you," he said. He led her out into the warm night. "Your father killed himself with Hank Bogarty's knife. He must have seen Calder that night! It begins to look as if--after all--!"

  "Yes," she said. "I don't know what you're talking about--but I know what you mean. Father did it."

  "Unless--" He was walking toward her house. "I better see how Sarah's coming along by now--if your phone's working again."

  "It isn't out of order."

  "It was. Old John tried to get your father before I came over." They went into the Davis house hurriedly. Aggie tried the phone. "Dead," he said.

  "That's funny. It was all right when I went to bed. I called a couple of people just before." She switched on more lights and half smiled at the figure he made: pajama tops stuffed in his tuxedo trousers, pajama bottoms flaring below. "We've got to get the police," she went on. "And you ought to send for Dr. Smith. He's the best one--in Parkawan. Sarah may still need attention. We can go over and raise old man Waite. It's nearest. Golly! I feel sick and feeble."

  Aggie's eyes had been preoccupied. Now they fixed on her.

  "Do you know how the phone line comes in here?"

  "From the barn to the house. The garage."

  "Have you got a flashlight?"

  "I'll get one."

  With the flashlight, they went out again--by the back way. Aggie pointed the flashlight and found the place where two black wires were fixed to the house on glass insulators. He followed them in a long span to more insulators on the front of the converted barn and from there, around the side of the building, to a rear corner. At that point, the wires had been snapped from the glass. He turned the light to the ground and found the shiny end of one wire dangling from the maple tree.

  "Somebody yanked 'em down," he said. "Must have had a long pole to do it with.

  Or a ladder. Or shinnied the tree."

  "Why? What does that mean?"

  "I couldn't say. Everything I find out gets crazier and crazier. Was there a phone in the darkroom?"

  "No."

  "The garage?"

  "No."

  "But--somebody--took the trouble to pull the wires down. Who? Why? Danielle, I think that somebody--killed your father."

  "Behind a locked-bolted door? Or by climbing through a window hardly big enough for chickens?" She had spoken quickly, but she went on sadly, "Why not quit all this? Dad did kill Jim--and himself. We--" She broke off.

  Aggie gasped convulsively. "Come on! We're going to Waite's--and fast! Suppose somebody got him--too--and even Sarah--!"

  He ran and Danielle ran behind him--through the yard and out into the road.

  Their feet pounded dully on the dirt and softly on pine needles. Old leaves in the Waite driveway made their running noisy again. They stomped up on the porch. But Mr.

  Waite was not dead. Aggie's clamor eventually raised him; he appeared at a window, thrusting out a head in a tasseled nightcap and bawling, "Who is it? Stop that noise!

  What's going on?"

  "It's me! Aggie Plum! Sarah's sicker! I came to get Dr. Davis, but--he can't go. I want to use your phone!"

  The old man was slow to comprehension and, even then, unwilling. "Why didn't you go to the club and wake up that Browne puppy? Why bother me in the middle of the night?"

  "Come down here, you cranky old idiot, and open the door!" Aggie said.

  There was a long delay. When the old man descended he was dressed in trousers and a smoking jacket and he had taken the trouble to comb his white hair. Aggie asked the location of a phone and brushed him aside. Danielle hurried in Aggie's wake, giving him the number of Parkawan's "best" physician. Aggie rattled for the operator and barked another number. The girl was startled. Byron Waite, behind her, was still complaining.

  They watched Aggie while the number was rung. "Hello!" he said. "John! Thank heaven! How's Sarah?" He nodded his head, as if old John could see him. "Why--if she feels like it." He swung around toward Danielle and Waite. "Sarah's coming to the phone." He did not turn all the way back, but kept the comer of his eye on his involuntary host. "Sarah! I want you to wake all the servants! Get them in the house! Lock every door and window!" He paused to listen. "I'll be home--yes--but I don't know when. . . . Why?

  Because George Davis is lying on his garage floor with a knife through his heart! There's some kind of hell loose around here--and I want you to be careful. Yeah. 'Bye." He turned. "That goes for you too; Mr. Waite."

  The white-haired man had reacted with a look of slight shock--and no more. Now he was standing in front of Aggie calmly enough. His marble-blue eyes--faded from a once more penetrating color-seemed to lack focus. He took a black case out of his jacket and set a pair of gold-rimmed pince-nez on his large nose. "Davis is dead," he said.

  "Murdered?"

  "Suicide," Aggie replied. "That is--I think so."

  "You found him?" Waite asked.

  "I did."

  "How, may I ask? Aren't you rather presumptuous, young man, to be poking into affairs that are no concerns of yours? On numerous occasions you have appeared in a--a suspicious light--and I think the spectacle of you and Miss Davis rushing about in the small hours--is outrageous!"

  Aggie's left eyebrow cocked and he touched his Vandyke. These were the words of a querulous old man--an angry and alarmed old man. They might be, also, the words of a shrewd man, who relied on attack for his defense. Aggie tried a counterattack.

  "Speaking of snooping, Mr. Waite, where were you the night Calder was killed?"

  The other man stared glacially. "You do not hesitate to assume any prerogatives, I see! I haven't the remotest intention of answering. But I do have every intention of finding out how you learned of my absence. This is my home. You've invaded my privacy sufficiently!"

  "Were you--by chance--in the cellar of the club?"

  Aggie had counted upon the statement to have some effect. Waite's reaction was, however, an enlargement of that expectancy: The old man began to tremble. His face contracted into an expression of fury, of hate, of miserliness and fear. His pin
ce-nez flickeringly mirrored the electric lights. "Curse Sarah!" he finally croaked. "Curse the blabbing old fool! Get out of here!"

  Aggie turned to Danielle. "Come on." But the girl stood still. "Haven't you forgotten to call the police?"

  Aggie looked at her, smiling faintly. "Damn! So I have!"

  "Get out!" Waite repeated. In a hobbling frenzy, he rushed across his living room and snatched a vase from the mantel. He raised it. "Get out of here, I say!"

  Aggie nodded toward the door. "We'll phone from Sarah's."

  CHAPTER 11

  The voice at state police headquarters was toneless. "Dr. Davis found dead.

  Medicine. Lodge on the Upper Lake Road. We'll send somebody at once."

  "The servants are waiting there for you," Aggie said. "I'll be at my aunt's house."

  He hung up.

  The room was flooded with light. Danielle was busy tucking Sarah into the inglenook. Chillie apprehensively took their order for more coffee. "They're coming,"

  Aggie said unnecessarily.

  Sarah instructed old John in the method of setting a match to the fire laid on the grate, although John had ignited a thousand in the same place. They wanted a fire for psychic comfort--not warmth. "Now, Aggie," she said, when she was satisfied, "tell me."

  Aggie glanced at Danielle. She dropped into a chair, stretched out her legs, and nodded. "Shoot, Aggie. I'm all right now."

  For fifteen minutes, Aggie talked. At the end of that time, he had given his aunt a complete description of the scene in the Davis garage. During the recital, Sarah kept touching her swollen neck with a tentative finger--and jerking it away. She seemed, nevertheless, to have taken a new lease on life; unburdened of her secret, she was very much her usual self. When her nephew finished, she said, "Hunh! George wouldn't kill himself in a million years! Too conceited!"

  "But he did--apparently."

  "With Hank's knife? Nonsense!"

  "You think Henry Bogarty is alive--and around here--and killed him?"

  Sarah grunted again. "Did I say so! I just said--Danielle's father hadn't a suicidal streak in his bones!"

  ' Then,'' Aggie tugged his beard, "maybe you can explain how the thing was accomplished."

  "I don't attempt to explain! That's your business. Or Wes Wickman's. You're a scientist. He's a cop. You're supposed to be able to think! I'm merely a woman--who knows people. I say, somebody killed Danielle's father! What do you say?" She turned to the girl.

  Danielle shook her head. "I don't know. He must have done it. There's no other way. There must be something--something else--besides the cache--"

  Sarah glanced from the girl to her nephew, with a strange, luminous expression.

  "You told Danielle?" His eyes were abstracted. "On the way back here. The salient points. I was thinking--"

  Sarah made a scoffing sound. "Thinking out loud, practically! I saw you look over your shoulder toward the hill! You were thinking about that gold!"

  "I was deciding I'd go up and check on it. If you'll tell me how to get to it--"

  Both women were startled by that suggestion. Danielle looked at him with incredulity. Sarah was frightened. She spoke: "That, too, is Wes's affair! It's dark--three o'clock--and you can't go poking around in cellars! Suppose-- somebody else was there!"

  "An additional reason for going! Besides, cellars are dark--even in daytime."

  "I won't tell you how to get in!"

  "Then I'll run up just to see if anybody is fumbling around there. If Dr. Davis was murdered--somebody might be. In a few more minutes, this place is going to be waked up by sirens and headlights. Attention will be on Danielle's house." He had risen. "I think this is an excellent time to be in that cellar. Besides--I used to play games in the wine cellar. It was fun."

  Sarah glanced at the girl opposite her. Firelight emphasized the concentration with which Danielle was looking back at Aggie. The girl's head finally shook and she said,

  "Don't go there, Aggie. It might be-dangerous. And this isn't the kind of business for a--a-

  -person like you to--get into."

  "Danger?" he repeated. "You mean--I should stay out of it because it's dangerous?"

  Danielle nodded. "That's exactly what I mean! After all, you're a professor--not a cop. You can't go barging into a cellar at night."

  He seemed perplexed. "But--I'm keen to! I'd enjoy beating Wes to it! I don't mind danger." He noticed the way in which his aunt was regarding the girl. "Right, Sarah. Send her out of the room--and give me the dope. And--Danielle. Remind me to tell you about the time I was lost on the ice floe for a week--and a night in Cambodia--and one thing or another. Danger! Good Lord!"

  Sarah grinned. Danielle went reluctantly into the kitchen. Sarah pulled her nephew close. "You might shift from that pajama top," she said, "to a sweater. You look absurd." Aggie started, glanced at his clothes, and blushed. In a whisper, she told him.

  Five minutes later, he left the house. The moon had vanished. Clouds covered most of the sky. In the east, a few stars still shone. Through the trees, in the distance, lights twinkled at the Davis house, where the servants were queasily waiting for the police. Aggie cut up the hill toward the club on a footpath. The building would be locked.

  Jack Browne and the servants would be asleep on the upper floors. He did not wish to waken them.

  He came to the edge of the trees, moved from.one lilac to another, and finally onto the side porch. There was not a light in the clubhouse. He swung out a screen. The first window was locked; the third was not. Aggie raised it and went in. He smelled moth flakes when he passed the stuffed moose head. He used a flashlight once, for less than a second, to find a way through the tables and divans in the main lounge. In the same manner, he passed through the dining room to the pantry and from the pantry into the steamy, institutional smell of the club kitchen. He found the door to the main cellar, carefully opened it, entered, closed it, and started down the steps.

  When he was midway on them, he listened. An automatic pump was going somewhere below. It made a muffled, rhythmic noise, but, between its beats, there were minute silences. Aggie heard nothing in them. This cellar had windows--opaque squares that let in little light by day and none at night. He risked another flicker of light. Anyone who happened to be outside would have seen it-but he had to get a bearing through the place. He moved again in the dark--past the furnace and the bins of coal. Ashes gritted under his feet. A door at the end of the furnace room opened into a corridor. He found its handle. Beyond that door were no more windows, so he turned on his light and locked the switch. There was dust enough and cobwebbing enough to suggest that the passage had not been used for years. But the concrete floor was blurred with the evidences of feet going to, and coming from, the wine cellar.

  Each inhabitant of Indian Stones who kept a private stock in that cellar had a key for it. Most of those keys were in the possession of servants, who made occasional trips for their employers. Old John had turned over Sarah's key to Aggie. He fitted it, now, into a heavy door at the end of a passage and turned a lock that was stiff with rust. The hinges of the door creaked awesomely. The flashlight showed a narrow flight of steps, carved in stone, winding down out of sight.

  With a thought that an unarmed man was pretty helpless in that cool, dry spiral of carved, purplish rock, Aggie listened again and went ahead. The stairs made a complete revolution before debouching on a vast room that was crowded with bins. Two of its walls were raggedly cut from rock; the other two, from hard earth. The low ceiling was shored up by venerable timbers. Names were burned over sections of bins: Waite, Peters, Calder, Drayman, Sommerfield, Plum, and so on. Faded labels above the gleaming bottles denoted types of wine, vintages, and chateaux. Aggie read a few, and reflected in a hasty aside upon the luxuries of the rich. His childhood recollections of this place were not reassuring--now.

  He moved past the long racks of almost-level-lying bottles to the far end of the room. There, the bins were built against the wall. A portion of that
space--a large portion-

  -was devoted to Davis. There was not a bottle in it. The timbers supporting the Calder shelves were massive, for they also served to hold up that part of the ceiling. He played his light full on them; they seemed too ageless and too immovable to permit even the thought of disturbance. They had been there from the beginnings of Sachem House--a century ago and more. A man, Aggie thought, might spend a week--or a month--in the wine cellar--even in search of something--without ever considering the possibility of getting behind those mighty beams.

  That was why Sarah had said nobody would find the hiding place. It simply was not suspectible. And yet--the shelves themselves were bolts, and the paneling behind them was a door, hinged on the back of one of the beams, where it appeared to be buried in hard earth. Aggie inspected each shelf with his light. The dust had been agitated. But whether that had been done by somebody getting wine, or by somebody using the passage, he could not tell. One by one, he then slid each shelf to the right an inch or so; they moved along rusty iron brackets in which were the heads of corroded screws. Then he pushed hard against the whole thing, and it swung inward.

  He stepped through and closed it. Ahead was another passage, another door. This door also was locked, and the keys for it belonged to four persons, only. He put in Sarah's key. The edges of the keyhole glittered slightly. Was that because it has been scratched by another key? The lock turned. The door opened--in, again.

  Aggie stood in the secret vault of the old hotel. It was not a large room. It had been cut from the underlying, ferrous rock. An old, battered mahogany table and two chairs stood in the center of it--furniture condemned to that use, manifestly, after it had served its time upstairs in the Sachem House. The safe had been set into one wall. Its iron façade was taller than Aggie. He shut the door behind him again--and the lock snapped.

  He was not afraid--intimidating though his surroundings were--but the darkness and subterranean aspect of his adventure gave him a feeling of urgency. Sarah had written down the combination of the huge old safe. He fished out the paper and went to work on the dials. It took him five minutes to get the ponderous thing open. He could hear nothing of the world above him--nothing from the club--nothing from the roads, where sirens ululated, and the ambulance had come with a winking red light.