She was sitting upright again; she had drawn away from him or his arms had neatly withdrawn and left her, now that she seemed no longer to need support. He searched her face and said tersely:
“It’s only five minutes or so to the house and God knows what we’ll find when we get there. And there’s no telling when I’ll get a chance to talk to you alone again. I want you to pay attention to me.”
But there was something she must know. Everybody must know. Everybody in the world.
“Jevan, I didn’t kill him. I know nothing about it. You must listen to me.” Her voice, horrifyingly, was thin and frightened and unconvincing. It sounded to her own ears far away; as if somebody else was talking, protesting futilely.
His eyes went quickly away from her own. He glanced out the window; they were already at the lake and dark waves broke tumultuously against the white breakwaters.
“We are almost there. There’ll be guests, hordes of people. You must act as if nothing had happened. Understand me? Go through with that reception and—and whatever comes afterward as if you knew nothing at all of the murder. Don’t try to think now. But do as I say. You——” He turned then and looked at her briefly and said coolly: “Your very life depends upon it, you know.”
“Jevan——”
“When they question you, simply deny having been at his apartment.”
“But I——”
“Listen to me, Dorcas. I married you just now. You’re my wife. You must do this.”
His wife. Dorcas Locke. But Ronald …
“But I didn’t murder him. I know nothing of it.”
A hard, taut little mask came over Jevan’s brown face.
“All right,” he said abruptly. “You know nothing of the murder. But nevertheless, do as I say. Deny having been in his apartment last night. Deny having seen him at all. And—if you have a grain of courage, take your part this day as gallantly as you can. If they give us time to prepare we may think up some sort of plan—but they may not give us time.”
They? Police? Oh, impossible!
“Deny everything,” repeated Jevan. “If you don’t know what to say refuse to reply. If they know too much, if they question you too much, refuse to answer and say you must have your lawyer’s advice. Understand me?”
Her lips moved numbly.
“Yes.”
Again he shot a quick, dark look at her.
“I don’t think you do,” he said, shaking his head. “Good God, rouse yourself. You look and act as if you were half asleep. Don’t you see the danger——”
The car stopped. Grayson was out, holding open the car door. Immediately the house door was flung open and lights poured out, only to lose themselves in the gray, diffuse light. Wind and rain again on her face.
Jevan helped her out. At the door his grip on her arm tightened and she felt him take a quick, short breath that was like an exclamation. He leaned over her, shielding her from the rain, and they ran up the steps and at the top he said urgently: “Remember, Dorcas …”
There were lights in the hall and people. Bench, looking pale and upset. Mamie, very red faced and crying. No guests yet. Cary and Sophie and Marcus hadn’t, of course, had time to arrive. But somebody was there already—several men who must be guests, yet they were not dressed for a wedding reception. Dorcas saw that and stopped. One of the men stepped forward and said: “Miss Whipple?”
She had an instant’s clear glimpse of him—a slender, dark little man with a bored, sallow face and morose, heavy dark eyes. Two other men stepped forward, too, one at each side of the speaker, as if they were supporting him.
“Miss Whipple?” he said again. Mamie gave a sob in the background and cried: “Oh, Miss Dorcas, they’ve been everywhere. All over the house and in your room and——”
The little dark man glanced once at Mamie and said: “Shut up.” Bench automatically closed the outside door. Jevan’s arm went around Dorcas. The slender, dark man said: “You are Miss Whipple, aren’t you?” as if some identification was necessary.
“Why—y-yes.”
Jevan’s arm pulled her backward a little so he seemed to interpose his own body between her and the advancing men.
“This is Mrs Locke,” he said. “My wife. What is your business with her?”
There was an instant of complete and utter silence, an instant that hung suspended and static, capable of sharp, clear analysis. These men were intruders and they were dangerous. Their presence in that hall was a threat. Their observant, waiting eyes a menace. Even the hall—wide and silent, with its polished floors and its thin rugs, its bronze boy and its marble woman, its glimpses into other rooms of gilt chairs and flowers and a flower-banked mantel off in the drawing room at the right where the bride and wedding party were to receive—even the hall rejected the intruders. The whole silent house, waiting and empty as yet except of its own being, rejected them.
A man, uniformed and from the caterer’s, scurried across the back of the hall, away back under the stair, casting a curious, sharp glance at them above the tray laden with silver. Off somewhere in the distance a violin wailed softly and was tuned. Another violin, and then a piano was struck in four clear little notes.
Over everything was the floating odor of coffee and of flowers. Dorcas’ own flowers, held rigidly before her, sent up a soft warm fragrance of gardenias and lily of the valley.
It was an instant that engraved itself in clear, small lines upon her perceptions and, afterward, upon her memory so that the scent of gardenia was always to recall, not a visual memory of the lighted hall, the somber background of polished dark wood, the faces of three men all staring at her, but instead a sense of danger.
The dark little man was fumbling in a pocket of his brown tweed coat. He pulled out a paper, glanced at it and shoved it back into the pocket as if it didn’t matter. He looked at Jevan and addressed him briefly:
“My name’s Jacob Wait. I’m from headquarters.”
“Well?”
“I’ve come here to investigate the murder of Ronald Drew.”
“Investigate? What do you mean?”
“I mean I came to see Miss Dorcas Whipple.” Jevan started to speak and the man Wait made a small, gentle gesture with one extraordinarily mobile and expressive hand. “All right,” he said. “Mrs Locke. It doesn’t matter. I have the proper authority if you want to see it.”
“Why? Mrs Locke knows nothing of the murder.”
“Mrs Locke,” said Jacob Wait, “talked to Ronald Drew last night. I’m in a hurry. Do you want to answer my questions here, Mrs Locke, or would you prefer going to headquarters?”
“She’ll talk to you here,” said Jevan. “Here and now. Bench——”
“Yes sir.”
“Where can we go——”
“Mr Whipple’s study, sir. Wedding guests will be arriving shortly.”
“Will you …?” Jevan gestured briefly toward the narrow little passage that led off the main hall toward Penn Whipple’s study.
In the distance the violins, joined now by a harp and a cello, began to play softly a Strauss waltz and the delicate melody floated along the passage around them.
The study was chilly and dark. Jevan turned on the lights. Wait and the two men with him, still supporting him like the wings of an army, followed them into the room. Jevan himself closed the door and shut out the light-footed, incongruously gay little melody.
“Now then,” he said. “What do you want to ask my wife?”
CHAPTER 7
HIS WIFE. WELL, SHE was that now. And she felt no different at all. But then the new dimension that had overtaken them pushed out normal feeling and thought; there was room only for horror, for catastrophe. He pulled a chair up for her—her father’s great armchair. She sank down into it; her veil floated eerily around her and she put it back from her face and realized she was still carrying her bouquet and put that down on the shining mahogany table before her. Automatically, too, she stripped long white gloves from fingers that wer
e heavy and lifeless. The man who had introduced himself as Jacob Wait, a name that for an instant seemed to have a slightly familiar ring, as if she’d heard it somewhere before, simply stood there at the other side of the table looking at her. The black leather of the great chair was cold and seemed damp to her touch. She leaned back in it, a slender figure in sheath-like white satin with silver slippers that barely touched the old Turkey-red rug. On the opposite wall a steel-engraved “Stag at Bay” stared blankly down and covered a clumsy, old-fashioned safe. All around the room bookshelves covered with glass reflected their figures weirdly in disjointed, shadowy sections. The room had been used very little since Pennyforth Whipple’s death; was, in fact, rather avoided, and it had the indescribable air of desuetude such rooms take on with years.
Jacob Wait thrust his hands in his pockets and said: “You knew Ronald Drew?”
“Certainly she knew him. So did I. So did hundreds of other people.” It was Jevan answering for her. Wait said abruptly:
“I’m talking to Mrs Locke. Let her answer for herself. Did you know Ronald Drew, Mrs Locke?”
Mrs Locke? She moistened her lips and said: “Yes,” almost inaudibly.
“How well did you know him?”
Jevan took a quick step forward and said: “See here, you can’t——”
“I’ll ask what I need to ask. Do you want to stay in the room?”
“Certainly.”
“Then keep quiet. How well did you know Drew? Answer me, Mrs Locke.”
How well had she known Ronald? The three faces—Wait’s in the center—all three like searchlights, pinioning her with inquiry, waiting inexorably for her reply. Jevan moved over to stand beside her. And all at once she saw her danger.
Jevan had foreseen it. He had known it was to come and had warned her. She sought back frantically in her mind for the things he had told her to do. She was trapped; she had to fight for herself; no one else, now, could do it for her.
What had he said? Oh yes, deny. Deny everything. Deny …
“I knew Ronald Drew,” she said in a small but fairly steady voice. “I don’t know anything about his death.”
Wait blinked and one of the men beside him lifted thin sparse eyebrows as if in surprise. Jevan did not move. Wait said:
“You knew he was murdered?”
“Yes.”
“Who told you?”
“It was in the paper. I saw the headlines.”
“Do you know anything of the circumstances of the murder?”
“No.”
Wait looked impatient. “Mrs Locke, you talked to Drew last night. We have the record of his telephone call to you at seven o’clock last night. It’s the last telephone call he made. Why did he call you?”
Then they didn’t know she had actually been in the apartment! Or did they know and were they merely trying to trap her into acknowledgment of it? Jevan had said deny; deny everything.
Instinctively, more frightened than she knew, she clung to it. Later there would be time to think, to reason, to seek a way out of the thing. Just now he had said to deny. But she’d have to admit to that telephone call if they had the record of it.
“Yes, he called me. He wanted to talk to me. He knew my wedding was today.”
“What did he say?”
Jevan was so rigidly motionless that it was as if he had spoken a warning.
“He—he spoke of my approaching wedding. He wanted to say good-by to me.”
“What else?”
“That’s—that’s all.”
“How long did you talk?”
“Only a moment or two.”
Again Wait made a little gesture of impatience.
“See here, Mrs Locke, we’ve been told that until your recent engagement Ronald Drew was your constant escort and that people were under the impression that you were to marry him. We’ve been told, too, that he was very much—ah—affected by your coming marriage to Mr Locke and that, in fact, when the news of his suicide came out the general impression was that he did it because of your marriage. Now there’s no use in your evading the issue. Was he in love with you?”
“He—he said so. Yes.”
“Did he ask you to marry him at any time?”
She couldn’t look away from him; she tried to and failed.
“Y-yes. Yes, he did.”
“And you refused?”
“Yes.”
“How did he take your refusal? I mean, did he insist or did he——”
“Mrs Locke will answer all your questions, Wait, after she has seen her lawyer. She has a right——”
“Answer me, please, Mrs Locke.”
“He—I—Jevan, what can I say?”
“Tell the truth, Mrs Locke. And I have a right to question her alone, Locke, if you want to leave.”
“You need not answer, Dorcas——”
“She must answer.” There was an ugly flash in the little man’s eyes. He spoke to the man nearest him without turning his head. “If he says any more, put him out…Now then, were you surprised when you heard, as the servants here tell me you did hear early this morning, that Drew had suicided?”
Dorcas’ hands were clutching themselves together in her white satin lap. “I was horrified.”
“But you thought he did it because of your marriage? Did you?”
“I—yes. Yes, I was afraid of it.”
“Why?”
“Because I—because he had threatened——”
“Oh, he’d threatened to commit suicide if you married Locke?”
“Y-yes. That is, I didn’t think he meant it.”
“And when you heard of his death you refused at first to go through with the wedding? Don’t lie to me, I’ve questioned your servants. They’ve told me of his visits here—yes, and of the pressure brought to bear upon you to bring about your wedding to Locke here——”
“That’s enough. Get out. All of you. You can’t——” Jevan was standing over Wait, his eyes blazing from his white face, his hands doubled into hard fists.
Wait didn’t move, although the two men with him moved up closer quickly. Wait said amicably: “All right, all right, Locke. Keep your shirt on. But tell your wife to answer my questions. We know too much for you to try to dodge them. Drew was murdered and somebody killed him.”
“My wife knows nothing at all about it. You have no right——”
“I have every right,” snapped Wait, his suave affability vanishing. “I have every right. Ronald Drew was murdered last night. About eight or a little after a woman was in his apartment. I want to know who the woman was. About nine-thirty a man was in his apartment I want to know who that man was. I’ve already inquired about Mrs Locke—the servants say she went to bed about eight. I’ve not inquired about you, Locke. What about it? What did you do last night and where were you?”
“I was at my club. Any number of men saw me. You can easily establish that.”
“What time did you leave?”
“I’m not sure. Between nine-thirty and ten, I think. I was with Willy Devany.”
“Where did you go?”
“Home, of course.”
“What time did you arrive there?”
“I don’t know exactly. Devany brought me in his car; we sat out in front and talked a little. He might know what time it was.”
“You mean young Willy Devany, of the Devany Packing Company?”
“Yes. He was my best man today.”
“And you were in his company from the time you left the club till you got home?”
“Certainly. What is this? Do you think I shot Drew?”
Something became fixed in Wait’s morose eyes. “Oh, so you knew he was shot?”
“Certainly. It was in the papers. But how do you know he was murdered? Why did the papers first say suicide and later murder? Are you sure it wasn’t suicide——”
“I’m sure,” said Wait and spoke to one of the men with him. “Take the name of Locke’s club and names of the men he claims s
aw him there.”
“Check them?”
“No. I’ll do it myself.”
“Okay.” A notebook was in the plain-clothes man’s hands and he moved to Jevan’s side and began to question in a lowered, husky voice, and to write.
Wait turned back to Dorcas. “Now then, Mrs Locke, when Drew talked to you last night did he say anything of his immediate plans?”
“No.”
“Did he make any kind of threat?”
“Threat——”
Jevan interrupted.
“Dorcas, this has gone far enough! Refuse to answer——”
“Did he threaten to do anything to stop the wedding? Had he,” said Wait in a matter-of-fact way, “any kind of hold over you?”
“Don’t answer, Dorcas.” Jevan was at her side again, bending close over her, making her meet his eyes. “Don’t answer.”
“I must answer.” She looked at the detective. “No! He made no threats! He had no hold whatever over me. There was nothing—nothing he could have done. He had wanted to marry me, yes. He urged me, even, to marry him. But that was all. There was nothing he could have used as a—a threat.”
Jevan dropped her hands and stood straight again and looked, too, at the detective. There was something triumphant in that look, as if he’d scored a victory. He said, almost smiling, except it was a queer, tight smile: “Well, there you are, Mr Detective. Satisfied now, are you?”
“No. Except that you’ve coached your wife. However …” He paused thoughtfully. Away off in the distance doors were opening and closing; there was a murmur and hum of motion and voices from the main part of the house. The guests were arriving, turning out in full numbers in order to show their support. Behave as if nothing at all had happened. It was like a motto. But tomorrow, that night even, Chicago would rock with it.
Jevan said suddenly: “The guests are arriving. If you could postpone your inquiry…”
Unexpectedly Wait seemed to agree. “Why not?” he said. “I’ll see you later.”
“We are going on a wedding trip,” said Jevan. “We leave immediately after the reception.”
Hasty Wedding Page 6
