Hangman's Whip

by Mignon G. Eberhart

  “What have you missed?”

  “Oh, that.” As readily as a child Ludmilla was led back to her original subject. “Why, you see, I’ve only just missed it. It may have been gone for a long time. Not too long, though, for it seems to me—yes.” She frowned. “I’m sure I had it out sometime this summer, for I showed it to Eve. I remember her asking me if I had anything else—any jewelry or keepsakes like that. And of course I hadn’t. There was only this little gold case—a handbag, you know, for evening. I’d always admired it—they were on their way to a party, you know, the night it happened. Up at Farrington—a long drive; that’s why they were speeding. At least I’ve always been sure they were speeding; John drove so fast. She remembered I had liked it, and I was very touched because she sent it to me. But, anyway, it’s gone. And yet it—it was nothing important. Just a little rectangular case—gold with initials on it and a place inside for powder and lipstick and cigarettes—”

  “Darling, who gave it to you?”

  “Why, Isabel, of course! That is, she didn’t give it to me. She gave it to somebody passing and said to send it to me. Almost with her dying breath, you might say. That’s why I was so touched by her thinking of it. Poor little Isabel.”

  “Isabel Abbott!”

  “Naturally. What other Isabel?”

  “But—I don’t see why anyone would want it.”

  “Well, I don’t either. There was nothing in it. Absolutely nothing but a cigarette or two that I threw away. I put the case away; I’ve never used it.”

  It made no sense; her mind touched the possibility of something of value to someone (what or to whom, it was impossible to guess) and rejected it. If Ludmilla said there was nothing in the case, then there was nothing there. Ludmilla was exact about small things.

  “Do you think that whoever searched your room took that case?” she asked directly.

  Ludmilla blinked.

  “Why, my dear, how can I possibly say? It’s been weeks since I’ve even opened the drawer where I kept the case. But it’s the only thing, so far, I’ve missed. I—I just thought I’d tell you.” She looked a little hurt. Search said quickly: “When I come back we’ll talk about it again. I won’t be long.” She would telephone, she thought rapidly, from Chicago. “I’ll go on now, dear. Anything I can get for you?”

  “No,” said Ludmilla. “The house is full of papers; I can’t bear to read them. It’s a relief to get rid of the reporters though. Calvin says they won’t turn up again until the grand jury convenes. That man up there with Richard won’t let me see him. He says the sheriff had to go out of town and he’s under strict orders to let no one see Richard.”

  Search said something intended to be comforting and gave Ludmilla’s fat, agile little body a small hug. She saw Ludmilla enter the house and then crossed the lawn behind the house toward the driveway.

  Five minutes later she met Jonas, driving Diana’s coupé; he stopped, swung the door open for her, and she climbed in.

  He said almost nothing on the way to town.

  She caught the four thirty-five easily, with a few moments to spare. Jonas waited but spoke only when the train came around the curve below the little red station and puffed toward them.

  It stopped, and Jonas said: “Howie Stacy went somewhere this afternoon too. Took his car out a little while ago. … Parlor car’s up ahead. You’ll have to hurry.”

  The train paused only a moment or two at Kentigern. She reached the step of the parlor car almost as it started. She waved at Jonas and entered the cool car.

  Four thirty-five.

  The sun was lower but still hot and golden. She pulled the blind beside her and leaned back wearily.

  At eight she would meet Richard. All clear, his wire had said.

  Yet all the way to Chicago she kept thinking in endless circles, trying to fit in—or discard—things she knew. They would arrive at seven-thirty.

  At about seven she went back to the diner and, sitting before an open window, watching the farmlands slide gradually into towns, thought of her trip up to Kentigern—at about that time of day—so short a time before. She remembered Howland and the interview with him and the odd second (of something that now seemed like premonition) when she had locked the door of her small apartment.

  She ordered a cold dinner. She must still have her key; to be sure she looked in her handbag, but the key was not there.

  She searched the handbag—coin purse, cigarette and lipstick compartments, all the little zippered recesses for bills or checkbooks. And sought back perplexedly into her memory for the moment of her hurried departure with Howland. She hadn’t given the key to Howland, she was sure; she had locked the door herself and would naturally have put the key in her handbag. Unless she had left it at the desk in the quiet gloomy foyer.

  Eventually she came to the conclusion that it didn’t really matter, for the desk clerk would let her into her own apartment. And the sight of the green silk cord and little celluloid ball gave her an idea which, if the train was on time, she could carry out.

  She finished her iced coffee quickly, aware that they were passing through Evanston with its wide and shady streets, and went back to the Pullman and when the train drew in was ready, nose powdered and hat at the right angle, waiting for the porter to put down the step.

  It was hot in the big station; breathlessly still, with people hurrying this way and that and redcaps panting under loads of baggage. She walked quickly to the taxicab stand and hailed a yellow cab. The train was on time; she compared her watch with the big clock on the station. And ordered the driver to take her first, slowly, along the 300 block on South Pearley.

  Chicago lay sluggish under a blanket of heat. At that time and on Sunday the Loop streets were like caverns, not quite deserted yet curiously still, so footballs seemed to have echoes. The elevated clattered overhead; they turned from the comparative gloom beneath the elevated into South Pearley and slowed up, and Search leaned forward, peering at shops and numbers. A cigar store, a restaurant and a whiff of cooking; a pastry shop.

  “Wait,” said Search sharply. “Stop here, please. Wait for me. …

  She got out of the taxi; the sidewalk was hot under her feet.

  It was a small store: a petshop. The little window was full of wicker baskets, feeding dishes, leashes, toys—catnip mice and rubber rats and red silk snakes. And several green silk cords ending in celluloid balls and tassels. There was a printed label above the latter: Perfect Plaything for Your Kitten.

  Kitten. Calvin. …Nobody but Calvin would have brought the thing she had found to the house.

  Calvin—

  At last she turned and went back to the taxicab. She must have given her own address to the driver, for he turned left at the next corner, found his way to Michigan and turned left again. She was conscious of the stream of traffic, of the gray horizon at her right, of the lights of Tribune Square and the tall white Wrigley Building.

  They crossed the bridge. After a while they stopped, and she fumbled in her handbag and paid the driver and hurried into the big apartment building.

  The clerk didn’t think, he told her, shaking his head, that she had left her key with him. But he gave her the duplicate key.

  And he had a telephone message for her. It was written hurriedly on a slip in the mailbox, and he gave it to her.

  “Mr Bohan telephoned. Wants you to meet him cocktail lounge Drake not apartment.”

  She hesitated, then turned toward the elevator. She would freshen up a bit first and get Ludmilla’s letter.

  She entered the waiting elevator. The elevator boy said: “How do you do, Miss Abbott. Didn’t expect you back so soon. Hot today. You ought’ve stayed up at the lake.” He chatted all the way up to the tenth floor. It hadn’t been hot, though, in Chicago, he said, until that day. “Turned cold the very night you left, Miss Abbott; wind turned off the lake about seven o’clock, and the temperature went down twenty degrees. Here you are.” He opened the door.

  The corridor
, the cream-colored walls, the beige and brown carpet, were poignantly familiar. As if she hadn’t been gone.

  She unlocked the door to her apartment and entered and closed the door behind her. It was dusk in the room, the windows still light. She put down her handbag and took off her hat and put it down, too, on the pearwood table. She turned on the light in the desk lamp. At the desk a scrap of white paper caught her eyes, and she remembered suddenly and with a feeling of strangeness the note she’d begun to write to the milkman and then had forgotten. Howland had waited while she wrote it. Then she hadn’t finished it. How many little bottles of cream had accumulated in the cupboard in the wall, she wondered and glanced at the written words. “Today is too much; can’t take it. This is The End. Address Miss Ludmilla Abbott—”

  It puzzled her for a second, then she remembered the mild little joke about the heat the milkman had shouted untiringly through the door every morning. He would tell her the temperature, gloatingly, and wait for her comment. Whatever the comment was he would then laugh uproariously, tell her she couldn’t take it and go on about his rounds. “Address Miss Ludmilla Abbott—” She had meant to tell him to send the bill to her in care of Ludmilla.

  The room was airless and hot and had that closed-up look a room so soon takes on. There was still the ash from Howland’s cigarette in the tray.

  She went to the wide windows and opened them and stood for a moment looking down—far down—to the street below. There were lights there, only barely beginning to be needed, for it was still dusk.

  Howland had said the low ledge was not safe. How small the figures on the sidewalk looked! She went on to the bedroom and absently closed the door.

  She opened the window first and then turned on the dressing-table lights. Ludmilla’s letter still lay there, face downward among the perfume bottles. She took it and removed the letter from the envelope, intending to glance at it then and there, before taking it on to Richard.

  And just at that instant there was a faint click of a key in the door of the apartment. And it opened and closed again, and someone walked across the living room. She heard it all distinctly through the closed bedroom door.

  She heard that.

  And then nothing for a long time.

  She was rising. She was rising cautiously, scarcely breathing. She was no longer Search Abbott; something else had taken possession of her. She was an automaton, moving without mind or volition. Standing there before the mirror, with her hand pressed against her mouth, her eyes wide, staring at the blank white panel of the bedroom door. The door between her and whoever had entered her apartment, walked across the little living room and then stopped.

  She thought she couldn’t bear another instant of silence.

  That telegram needn’t, actually, have been from Richard!

  She had taken it over the telephone, eagerly, without a question. And anybody, during that week, could have taken the key from her bag. She thought that—and then stopped thinking.

  For she heard quite clearly a kind of short satisfied laugh in the next room. She remembered her hat and handbag, there on the low table, in plain sight. She remembered the light she had turned on. The low wide window she had opened.

  There was the click of the telephone dial. Then a voice spoke; she could hear it faintly, only a few words out of a jumble. Puzzling words.

  “—police, police—suicide—woman about to—window—note—eleven twenty Branch Street—”

  There was a little more, then silence. Suicide? Window? Note? Woman—what woman? And then she knew.

  “But that,” she thought blindingly, “that must be me!”

  Chapter 22

  SEARCH THOUGHT, THIS CANNOT be happening to me. Woman about to commit suicide.

  And remembered, in a sequence that was horribly convincing, the low window ledge, the plunge downward from it, the note she’d left for the milkman with its mild joke. A suicide note, they would say. And when the police arrived—

  But they wouldn’t arrive. She’d heard that much distinctly. The number given the police was eleven twenty Branch Street; the number of the apartment building was ten twenty-one. There were ranks of apartment buildings along the street; the police wouldn’t come, yet (later) the wrong number would be put down to confusion and fright on the part of the man who had telephoned.

  For it was a man. That much she was sure of but no more. If there was a familiar cadence in that muffled voice she missed it; perhaps it was purposely disguised—but that made no sense. Perhaps she was stupid and numb with terror. And she must escape.

  She was on her feet. The room was a perfect cul-de-sac. The bathroom and tiny kitchen occupied parallel spaces on the other side of the living room—an inconvenient but a space-saving arrangement. The closet was a shallow rank of cupboards with doors. The only way of escape was through the living room.

  But there must be a key to the door.

  She ought to have thought of that before; stupid; she was thinking badly, fumbling, frightened.

  Somehow she moved (in a nightmare—against tremendous odds) and reached the door, and there was no bolt and no key.

  Key—where was it? When had she last seen it? Had there ever been a key? And time was passing.

  She had no idea how long it had been; five minutes, longer.

  Well, then, there was only one thing to do and that was to face whoever was there. Face him and use all her wits to maneuver herself toward the door or the telephone. Face him at once—by surprise, boldly.

  Yet perhaps she couldn’t have done it had she not had again a wave of incredulity: this can’t happen to me, Search Abbott. To somebody else, perhaps, but not to me.

  If there had been another sound in the living room, she was not aware of it. When she put her hand on the knob she thought that if she did it quietly she might gain a second or two of time; she might even reach the door to the corridor in the first instant or two of surprise on the part of the man in that room waiting.

  So she opened the door very quietly but quickly.

  Howland Stacy stood there. He stood between her and the door to the corridor. His tall figure, blocky and strong, was a complete barrier.

  “Search,” he said.

  He was very pale; she noticed that. His eyes were opaque, as always, but a white rim showed around them. Howland, then. Howland who had pretended he loved her; who had, perhaps, loved her after his own fashion. But who now (why?) had to save himself. She glanced swiftly, involuntarily, toward the window. It was wide open as she had left it; the low ledge gave directly upon space. The note was gone from the little desk. She met Howland’s eyes, and he was panting a little, watching her, a queerly calculating look on his face.

  “Howland, you can’t do this. I heard you at the telephone. You don’t dare—they’ll see through it. You won’t have a chance “

  He stared levelly back at her. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. You—you’re alone, aren’t you, Search? Yes, of course, I know you are. I’m at the end of things. I can’t help any of this. I didn’t know it would turn out this way. I never meant, in the beginning—” He took out his handkerchief, still watching her, and wiped his forehead slowly, with an effect of calm except that his hand shook. “I never meant—” he said again. “Search, I tell you I’m at the end of it. It’s got beyond me—”

  She thought suddenly, sharply, he wants to talk. He’s frightened; he’s afraid and a little uncertain; he wants to talk. If I can ask questions, if I can get a little nearer the door, if I can play for time, I may have a chance. She said: “How did you happen to come, Howland? Just now …” and measured her distance to the door.

  “I”—his eyes shifted toward the window and back again—“I had an appointment. Search, I—you see, I was the man watching the cottage. You knew that all the time, didn’t you? I thought you knew at first; then when Richard was arrested I knew you’d have told if you really did recognize me. But—but something’s gone wrong. They’ve taken Richard away; he’s not at
the house. Calvin told me that. So—you’re going to tell them, aren’t you?”

  She must keep him talking. She said: “Did you see me?”

  “I saw you come. I didn’t see you leave. I saw everything. I—Search, I tell you I’m half crazy. It’s all been a horrible mistake. I never meant it to be like this. I followed Richard, you see, that night. He went along the lake path and I missed him, so I thought of the cottage. I went there and hid in the edge of the woods. It was dark but not too dark to recognize you in your white dress. And Richard and—and I saw everything. I saw Eve come.”

  Search scarcely listened. Every nerve and every drop of blood in her body had one purpose and that was escape. Very cautiously she moved an inch—two inches nearer the door. But it was also nearer Howland. He did not seem to note that cautious movement. He was wiping his glistening forehead again, staring at her with eyes that had a look of remembered horror—as if he was seeing Eve again, golden-haired, smiling, sure of herself, entering the little cottage to keep her last appointment.

  “But I didn’t do it!” he cried. “I didn’t do it. I saw her come and I saw who came with her. They went into the cottage and turned on the light. I waited; I heard her scream—only a little—choked off. How was I to know it was murder! I waited and I saw, after a while—” He broke off. A look of craft came into his face. “I’m telling you all this to—to save you, Search. To help you; that’s what I want. To help you. You won’t forget that, will you? You’ll—”

  He edged nearer her; his tall shambling body looked strong, huge, in the little room. The motion toward her brought her heart pounding in her throat. She mustn’t show fear. She must listen, since he wanted to talk. She must question. Time

  “Of course, Howland. I won’t forget. I’ll—I’ll tell the sheriff you came to help—” If he came a step nearer, one sweep of his arms could reach her. She moved, only a little, to one side. But Howland moved too, so he stood almost squarely before the door.