CHAPTER 12
SHE WENT, AT LAST, to answer it.
Slipping quietly out of bed, thrusting bare, small feet into flat slippers, fur lined and heelless, wrapping a long, warm negligee around her. She opened the door, and because that sharp summons was so singularly imperative, because, perhaps, she was not fully awake and did not think of her own telephone that was nearer—or perhaps because fate stepped in and demanded the making of that one small, tremendously important link in the darkly patterned chain—because of all this or because of nothing she went downstairs, thinking urgently and only of the main telephone off the hall below.
Her feet made no sound on the carpeted steps, her hand slid quietly along the polished railing. As she reached the area of light cast by the torch in the bronze boy’s hand she stopped, momentarily daunted by the blackness of the cavernous openings of other rooms from the hall below her.
The telephone rang again and she ran down the remaining stairs and into the darkness leading off at her right.
It was the narrow side passageway which led past the telephone closet, an entrance to the laundry chute and thence to Penn Whipple’s study. At the end of the passage, lost completely now in darkness, was the side entrance which emerged to the porte-cochere.
She groped for the handle of the telephone door, found and opened it. Or thought she opened it. Instead a cold, dampish current of air struck her face and with it the unmistakable, musty odor of cellars. She pulled back abruptly. It was the laundry chute of course; she closed the door and it clicked sharply into place. The telephone pealed again and she groped along the wall. She found the door to the telephone closet, went in and automatically closed it behind her.
But when she grasped the telephone and answered no one replied. She spoke again and again and finally, fumblingly in the darkness, replaced the telephone. It was some mistake of course. She opened the door. And opened it upon a completely dark hall with no light leading from the bronze boy. No light anywhere. She caught her breath sharply with surprise and stopped.
And it was just then that the thing occurred that, then, had no meaning and no explanation but always to Dorcas had the very essence of reality.
For she heard it clearly, altogether unmistakable in the stillness, and that was the small, neat click of the door of the laundry chute.
Just that.
That and the fact that the bronze boy’s small light no longer burned and nothing more.
She was all at once, chokingly, every pulse leaping, frightened. She ran. Through the darkness and up the stairs.
A faint stream of light came from the guest-room wing and she ran stumblingly into it and into Jevan’s arms.
The light was coming from the door to his room which was open. He grasped her tightly in his arms, so her heart thudded frantically against him.
“Dorcas, what is it? Where have you been? What——”
“Downstairs.” Her voice was muffled against his heart so he had to bend his head to hear her. “There’s something—somebody——”
“I can’t understand, Dorcas. Tell me——” He drew her into his room and closed the door and sat down, holding her cradled in his arms. “Now tell me. Don’t be frightened.”
There was so little to tell. Yet when he heard he rose and put her down in the chair and went to a table. Light flashed on a revolver and Dorcas cried: “No—no—don’t——”
“I won’t be long. If there’s nobody there it’s all right. If there’s somebody down there I want to know.”
“Don’t——”
But he had gone.
It seemed a long time before he returned, gave her a quick look, closed the door and thoughtfully put the revolver down on the table.
“What did you find? Who——”
“Nobody,” he said. “And nothing—except the light in the bronze boy was turned out. Not burned out. And the door, the little grade door at the back of the house that was opened last night, was standing open again.”
“But you had locked it.”
“Yes. I locked it myself. But somebody could have entered the basement somehow and got into the house by way of the laundry chute. He could easily have escaped, then, by the grade door. Unless he had some way of burgling the lock he must have opened the grade door from the inside; it certainly isn’t very likely that anyone would have the key to that door. Although its having been opened twice seems to indicate tonight’s prowler and last night’s are the same. At any rate the grade door certainly could provide an exit. The light in the hall had been turned out while you were at the telephone.”
“Then someone was in the hall——”
“He could have been. Or he could have heard your voice and taken refuge in the chute and escaped by the grade door as soon as you were gone. The laundry chute is plenty big enough for anybody to get into. And thus have access to the whole house.”
Her skin prickled.
“Oh no, Jevan. It isn’t possible.”
“It’s quite possible. There’s a kind of rough ladder—pieces of board nailed to studding—I looked. Must have been there forever. But whoever used it would have to know something of the house.”
“No one was there. I feel sure. A draft from somewhere forced the door shut and I happened to hear it.”
“And the bronze boy got down from the newel post and walked over and turned himself out at the switch and went back to the newel post.”
She didn’t answer. He said, watching her: “We can’t do anything tonight. I closed and locked the grade door. It has no bolt but I’ll have one put on it tomorrow. It’ll be a Houdini,” said Jevan, looking very grim, “that gets in this house tomorrow night. Come, Dorcas. You’re going back to bed.”
He led her back through the little dressing room to her own room. Saw that she got into bed and pulled the eiderdown to her chin.
“You’re still scared,” he said, looking down at her. “It’s no wonder. Do you …” He hesitated and said: “Shall I leave the door open so you can call to me if anything—if you want me?”
“Yes,” she said in a small voice. His look deepened, and he smiled.
“You look like a scared little kid. Your eyes are so big and bright.” He put out one hand abruptly and pushed her hair back from her face and unexpectedly sat down beside her. The amused, half-tender little smile vanished and he took her in his arms closely, brusquely, his mouth all at once upon her own.
“Dorcas,” he said, whispering, and kissed her again.
Then quietly, with queerly gentle abruptness, he put her back and rose. Still quietly and rather deliberately he crossed the room.
For a few moments she could hear him moving about in his own room, then the light went off. After a long time she turned off the light upon the little table beside her.
CHAPTER 13
IN THE MORNING THEY talked it over, Dorcas and Jevan, distantly, politely, with no faint recognition, unless it was in that very politeness, of a moment the night had also brought.
He had, he told her, discovered nothing more of their nocturnal visitor.
“But I don’t like these entrances and escapes by night and I’m going to stop them,” he said. Again by common consent they did not tell Cary.
Sophie came upon Bench and Jevan in the back entry, driving nails into the casing of the small grade door and building an impromptu but solid wooden bolt across it. And even Sophie, whose poise was not readily shaken, looked upset when they told her the house had been entered again.
“Why?”
“I don’t know.” Jevan took some nails out of his mouth and stood up, regarding his work with a critical eye.
“But—but there’s nothing in the house,” said Sophie. “Cary’s jewels are kept in safe deposit; there’s simply nothing to warrant a burglary. Unless they are after the flat silver! Or perhaps it’s the Rembrandt Penn bought just before he died and they don’t know it’s not a Rembrandt.”
“Perhaps. Give me the hammer, Bench.”
Sophie
was staring at the nails, her hazel eyes dark and somber.
“It’s not very pleasant, is it?” she said suddenly. “Somebody entering and wandering about this old place at night. After Ronald’s murder…After all, there is such a thing as a homicidal maniac.”
“Sophie!” cried Dorcas sharply. “Don’t!”
Bench sighed and drove another nail morosely and the doorbell rang.
It was a detective. He was shown into the drawing room and he asked for Jevan and for Dorcas and told them briefly that he wasn’t satisfied with Jevan’s story of his own activities on the night of the murder.
Jevan did not seem perturbed.
“Did you inquire about what you call my activities at the club?”
“Certainly,” said Wait, allowing his attention to be caught and immediately relinquished by the spurious Rembrandt on the opposite wall.
“And didn’t you find several men who saw and spoke to me?”
“By all means. None of whom knew exactly what time he had seen you. And all of whom were very much more interested in knowing why I was making the inquiry than in anything else. Oh, I’ll grant you,” acknowledged Wait with a small wave of his hand, “there were several efforts in your behalf. Did you have a scotch and soda at the club bar with one Tom Wilkins at ten o’clock?”
“Good old Tom.”
“Exactly. Devany says you were with him in his car at ten.”
“That’s right.”
“Did you and Devany make any stops between the club and your house?”
“You mean, I suppose, did we go to Drew’s apartment and kill him?”
“Drew was murdered,” said Wait incontrovertibly. He added simply and with the weight that plain, direct truth always carries: “Where there is murder there is motive. In a man’s life there are not many people who stand in so close and strong a relationship to him that a motive for murder exists between them…The night Drew was murdered a woman came to his apartment. A man, probably, came later. I must find that woman and that man.”
There was a small silence. Jevan and the detective looked steadily at each other. Dorcas sat perfectly still. Away off somewhere in the house a door closed and someone—Sophie or Cary or one of the maids—passed quietly along the hall. Jevan said at last, gravely:
“Look here, Wait. Neither my wife nor I want to go through life under suspicion of having done murder. We are quite willing for you to question us as fully as you wish. Question, I said, however,” he added with a quick glance at Dorcas. “Not accuse.”
There was again a silence as Wait did not immediately reply. Dorcas could not tell whether Jevan’s words had impressed Wait as being sincere or the contrary. Probably the contrary, for finally Wait said: “Thank you very much, Mr Locke. There will be a number of questions at the inquest. That is to take place on Monday. You and Mrs Locke will be expected to attend, naturally, as witnesses.”
“Witnesses!” cried Dorcas. Jevan flashed her a warning look and the detective said:
“Yes, certainly. You were one of the last persons to talk to Drew. Over the telephone, of course. And a sales record was found at Jacques’s dated a year ago and covering the purchase of a green tweed suit which exactly answers the doorman’s description of the green suit worn by the woman with Drew that night; this sales record was made out to you——”
“I——” An almost imperceptible stiffening of Jevan’s shoulders warned her again and she checked herself.
“Yes,” said Wait. “That will need explanation. Also at the inquest there will be a taxi driver who picked up a woman on the Drive at Schumanze Court on the night of the murder and brought her to this address. He can identify the woman. Wouldn’t it be better to tell me the truth?”
Jevan said quickly: “Mrs Locke has told you the truth.”
Wait’s slender black eyebrows lifted slightly.
“Very well. At the inquest you will be obliged to swear to your statements. There is something, however, I’d like to ask you about before the inquest.” He walked as gently as a cat toward Dorcas and stood just above her so his eyes could plunge straight down into her own. She shrank back a little in her chair; he must not see the things in her mind. She must make her eyes blank and uncommunicative. He said unexpectedly: “How much money have you—loaned Ronald Drew?”
“Money!”
“No hysterics, please. Listen. Drew made for years a precarious and somewhat questionable livelihood. But all at once last fall he began to have money. Sums of cash deposited to his account at the Stock Bank. Where did he get it?”
Her head was pressing against the back of the chair. She shot a frantic glance at Jevan, who had not moved, and cried: “I don’t know! I know nothing of his affairs! I gave him no money. Not a penny.”
“When did you first begin to go about with Drew?”
His face now came between her and Jevan; she moistened her lips. “Recently—last November——”
“You began to be seen together,” said Wait definitely, “at exactly the time his bank deposits began——”
“Get out!” said Jevan in a voice of seething rage. His face was white and his eyes blazing. “Get out. In thirty seconds I’m going to kick you out.”
Wait turned deliberately and looked at Jevan.
“No,” he said. “You aren’t going to do that. I have a search warrant, and I’m going to be here for some time while I search the house.”
Dorcas, her head still pressed rigidly against the back of the chair, watched the two men face each other for a long ten seconds. Then Jevan, white and furious, thrust his hands violently into his pockets. “All right,” he said with suppressed savagery. “That’s legal and I can’t stop you. But I swear, Wait, if one word of what you’ve just said reaches the newspapers I’ll——”
Wait put up one small hand in a deprecating way: “No threats, Locke. No threats.”
He turned and went away. Bench anxiously put his head in the door. “He says he has——”
“A search warrant,” cut in Jevan shortly. “Let him go through the house.”
Feet went through the hall and up the stairs. Dorcas let out a tremulous, half-sobbing breath. Jevan said grimly, his eyes fastened on the door and a tight white line around his mouth: “I’d like to break his neck. The little——”
“Jevan,” she cried unsteadily. “The taxi driver will identify me.”
He still didn’t look at her. “The only thing you can do is stick to denial. Wait still has no proof——”
“He said I gave Ronald——”
“Forget it,” said Jevan crisply. And added thoughtfully: “I wonder, though, who was paying Drew for what. Something crooked, you can depend upon that. He never did an honest day’s work in his life.” He paused again thoughtfully and then added: “But cheer up, Dorcas. Wait’s only playing his hunch. I’m sure of that.”
Was he? Jevan still looked white and avoided her eyes. And later, when the detective and two plain-clothes men had gone (as they did very soon), went to question Bench as to what rooms they had searched and what they had looked for. But Bench didn’t know.
After that the day went on quietly. The incidents that filled it were important only in retrospect. There were Wait’s early morning visit, Marcus’ telephone call and the newspapers in which the Drew case was suddenly augmented, gaining, indeed, a sudden weight and momentum which were mysterious and obscurely threatening. Where the day before there had been at the most half a front-page column, there were now two full columns and they were continued onto following pages. Why? said the newspapers.
WHIPPLE HEIRESS OBJECT OF MURDERED MAN’S LAST TELEPHONE CALL, said the Call. And went on to demand: “Who Was Mysterious Woman at Drew Apartment?” That night, for the six o’clock edition, were other headlines: WHIPPLE HEIRESS TO TESTIFY—BRIDE TO BE ON STAND.
That day suddenly there were almost no telephone calls from friends. Cary didn’t notice it, nor Dorcas, but Sophie did and spoke of it.
“They are beginning to
wonder,” she said. “And why not?”
It was that day, too, that the woman in the checked coat came to see Dorcas.
Came so mysteriously and as mysteriously disappeared.
That was in the afternoon, sometime after Marcus’ telephone call, which came during lunch. It was for Dorcas.
“Dorcas, have you seen the papers?” Marcus began worriedly. “Has Jevan seen them?”
“Yes.”
“Yes; well, don’t you think—that is, it seems to me—it seems to me something ought to be done about it.”
“What?” said Dorcas wearily.
Marcus didn’t know.
“But they’re going too far,” he said helplessly. “However, aside from the papers, is—is everything all right?”
“Y-yes.”
“No, no, something’s happened. I can tell it by your voice.”
“The house was entered last night but again nothing was taken.”
“Good God,” said Marcus. “Tell me all about it.”
When she told him the little she knew, however, he had no comment to make but instead asked her if she had looked at his reports.
“No. There’s not been time.”
“Oh. Well—give Cary my regards,” he said and hung up.
That afternoon (as much as anything, Dorcas told herself, to escape the haunted anxiety in Cary’s lovely troubled eyes) Dorcas went for a solitary, wind-swept walk.
But she could not leave her thoughts behind. The lake when she reached it was as gray as Jevan’s eyes and as incalculable.
She was curiously in need of the solitude the wind and stormy lake gave her. Yet the crowding questions that surged so tumultuously and so urgently in her mind were no more capable of analysis and reply than when she was at home, shut inside the four thick walls of the Whipple house. Instead of clarity there was confusion. Had Jevan killed Ronald? She marshaled arguments for and against it—and suddenly in the middle of it was thinking only of a moment in the night. A moment when the man who was her husband had held her in his arms and had gone away.
Spray touched her face and lips and felt cool and lovely upon their sudden warmth.
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