Hasty Wedding

by Mignon G. Eberhart

  “We shall know very soon,” said Wait at once and Cary’s lovely eyes swept back to him. “Mrs Whipple, did you leave the house on any errand at all last Wednesday night?”

  “Wednesday night,” repeated Cary thoughtfully as if considering it. “Wednesday night! But that was the night before Dorcas’ wedding!”

  “Yes.”

  “And the night—the night Ronald was—why are you asking me such a question? What has that to do with Marcus?”

  “So you did leave the house that night when everyone thought you were in bed?”

  “Of course not. Certainly not! Ask anyone. What a question! Do you think I shot Ronald?”

  The little phrases were as quick and soft as the beat of a bird’s wings and had the same tremulous quality. Dorcas could see the feverish beating of a pulse in her mother’s soft white throat. She turned rather desperately to the detective.

  “Isn’t that enough?” she cried.

  He did not even look at her. He did, however, rise and stand looking at Cary for a moment before he said quietly: “I wish I could persuade you to tell me whatever it is that you—don’t want to tell. Don’t make the mistake of trying to shield someone.”

  For a moment Cary did not reply. Instead she shrank into her soft pillows, shrank into her lacy bed jacket, shrank into the heretofore protected haven of the great bed. Shrank like a terrified child with her great blue eyes fastened on Wait and unexpectedly, with her eyes wide open, began to cry.

  “I’ve done nothing,” she sobbed in tremulous little gusts. “Dorcas has done nothing——”

  “You’ve made her ill,” said Dorcas furiously, finding a lacy handkerchief on the table and thrusting it into Cary’s little fingers, unloosed at last.

  “I’ve done nothing of the kind,” said Wait. “Will you come with me now, Mrs Locke? Ring for her maid if you don’t wish to leave her alone.”

  “Go, Dorcas,” said Cary, crying. “Go, dear.”

  At the door Wait looked at the uniformed policeman who stood, tablet in hand, in the shadow of the french screen.

  “Did you get all that?”

  “Oh yes, Mr Wait. Every word.”

  At the stairway Wait stood aside politely, allowing Dorcas to precede him.

  CHAPTER 17

  IT WAS THEN NEARLY midnight.

  It was after two o’clock when he left the house.

  Almost immediately the next morning it became apparent that with the murder of Marcus Pett the Drew-Pett murder case leaped to the status of a cause celebre. It was a natural, indeed an inevitable, development. For three days now the Drew murder had been simmering with constantly increasing ebullience and the murder of Marcus Pett had the effect of removing an already trembling lid.

  There was an all too obvious connection between the two murders. Marcus Pett’s only orbit and one of Ronald Drew’s several orbits touched at one tangential point and that tangential point was Dorcas. Mrs Jevan Locke. The former Dorcas Whipple. Or, more frequently, the “Whipple Heiress.”

  That was the view of the newspapers. The view, reluctant, stunned but inevitable, of the people she knew; the view, apparently, of thousands of people she would never know, who clamored for news and more news, who snatched extras as soon as they came on the street, who planned to attend the trial and made bets as to the outcome.

  That night a siege of reporters began which did not for an instant relax. It was like a barrage around the house and grounds. If anyone came, if anyone went, if anyone so much as approached a window to raise or lower a shade there were reporters to see it; reporters to take pictures, reporters to pounce upon and make a news story of whatever material they could ferret out and to fill columns and columns of fine black print with it. It was their duty and they were acting under orders; they were never malicious and there was a detached, impersonal technique of strategy.

  Yet the very next morning, Sunday morning, the Call said: WHIPPLE HEIRESS CHARGED WITH MURDER.

  “There’ll be grounds for enough libel suits to last the rest of your life,” said Jevan grimly. “Don’t read them, Dorcas. Here, Bench, take these papers and burn them.”

  He took the paper out of her hand but not before she had seen the headline. And a picture of herself, an old picture in her debut gown of white silk. She’d carried scarlet camellias, she remembered, and her mother had been lovely and gracious in soft green lace and Marcus, beaming, had supplied the camellias.

  That was the next morning, late, over breakfast in her own room, with Jevan striding up and down, smoking and saying very little. And church bells from the Midway, the carillon, tolling distantly.

  They had said what there was to say the night before. Wait and his immediate cohorts had left about two. They had, in the end, made no arrest. There remained, however—exactly why Dorcas didn’t know, except that it seemed to be customary—a police guard in and around the house. It ought to have given them a feeling of security. Yet long after Dorcas had finally gone to sleep she roused again; dawn must have been at hand, for there was a grayish tinge at the windows and in the cold dawn Jevan was sleeping, stretched out in a bathrobe and an eiderdown on a chair near her with his long legs on another chair. He was sound asleep; she could tell it by his regular breathing. Yet he was solidly and firmly placed between her and the door. It gave her, in the stillness of that chill and desolate hour, the most extraordinary sense of comfort and she went straight back to sleep again. But later in the morning, much later, when she waked to find Mamie at her bedside with hot coffee, there were no signs of Jevan’s presence. The chairs had resumed their customary places, and the eiderdown and Jevan were gone. And when he came into the room, freshly shaven and dressed, he did not mention it. And she could not. As she could not say: “Jevan, did you kill Ronald? Jevan, did you—could you have killed Marcus?” But he couldn’t have done it; no matter what reasons he might have had, he couldn’t have done it. Not Jevan. She clung to that.

  And she couldn’t say either: “Jevan, why did you marry me?”

  He had already, early that morning, talked over the telephone to a friend who was a member of a firm of certified accountants and had given, sealed, into the hands of a Western Union messenger the whole bulk of Marcus’ reports. It would be, he supposed, another day before they could expect definite news of that.

  Mamie knocked and came in. Mr Devany was downstairs, wanting to see Mr Locke.

  Jevan went away. And Dorcas, her very muscles aching with fatigue, dragged herself through the motions of dressing and went to see her mother. Mamie was darning stockings in a chair just outside her mother’s door.

  “I wouldn’t go in if I was you, Miss Dorcas. Your mother is asleep.” She stabbed a stocking heel viciously with her needle. Mamie looked old that morning. Her usually neat, grayish hair had wisps down the back of her neck and her round, Irish face seemed to have sagged. She sat with her chair against the wall and commanded a long view of the corridor.

  “All right, Mamie,” said Dorcas and wandered back to her own room.

  It was then late in the morning, nearly noon. A dark morning again and very cold, as if there were no such thing as spring and never would be.

  Her face in the heavy mirror over the dressing table was pale as a ghost. Absently, automatically she reached for lipstick, selecting a shade at random. The stick of paste felt strange to her lips and she looked at it abruptly. It—and every other lipstick in the tray—had been neatly cut off. The used ends, instead of being smooth and tapering, were straight and blunt with fine edges, as if the cutting instrument, whatever it was, had been extremely thin and sharp.

  Mamie hadn’t done it. Who then? Why?

  After a moment she thrust the small tubes of varied colors and shapes back into the drawer and closed it hurriedly and left the room. She would find Jevan, Sophie, anyone. It wasn’t good, that day, to be alone. Sophie was in the lower hall, speaking to Bench.

  “I don’t care if she has given notice, she can’t go.” They were talking of Ethel, it
seemed, who had decided to leave. Sophie, seeing her, dismissed Bench.

  “Have you seen your mother?”

  “She is asleep.”

  Sophie nodded with satisfaction. “Your mother is showing unexpected reserves of strength. The doctor was quite satisfied; said he would drop in today if we called him but not otherwise. Your mother is stronger than you realize.”

  The hall was quite empty. Dorcas leaned forward. “Sophie, what about that towel? You know. Last night. You knew something about it, didn’t you?”

  “Certainly. I washed it out.”

  “But why?”

  “Sh-h-h. Because there were bloodstains on it, of course. I suppose that damned knife was wiped off on the towel.”

  “Why, then——”

  “Do you think I wanted Wait to have another link between the murder and us? You. Me. Your mother. Jevan.”

  Bench came through the dining room and into the hall. Dorcas started back at sight of him, as if she and Sophie had been conspiring. He went on to the front door; the bell had evidently been rung. Sophie said: “Jevan’s in the conservatory,” and went toward the kitchen. Funny, thought Dorcas; meals went on, and a semblance of a domestic routine. Thanks to Sophie, however, who never quite lost her head.

  Bench, at the door, was saying no one was at home. Probably a reporter.

  She went to the conservatory. Still called the conservatory, though the plants in which Pennyforth Whipple had taken great pride (or had pretended to take pride, according to the fashion at that time) had dwindled to some scraggly-looking banana trees and sparse foliage plants much veined in red. There lingered, however, about the little room with its glassed roof and concrete floor covered with matting the dampish, earthy smell of all greenhouses. Jevan was there, sitting in a wicker chair, and Willy Devany was pacing around and around the small green bronze fountain in which water hadn’t run for years. As she opened the french door from the library Willy said cheerlessly:

  “Hello, Dorcas,” and Jevan said: “You’re in good time; I want you to tell me—and Willy, too, of course—everything you remember about that night Ronald was killed. Tell it carefully and put in everything. Willy is all right; don’t mind him. It seems to me that there was something in what you told me that made a sort of discrepancy with what I knew. I can’t remember exactly what but—well, go ahead, Dorcas. If you don’t mind.”

  She did mind. Telling Willy wasn’t, queerly, the same as telling Jevan. She hated it but she told it. Willy kept on pacing and managing to look disheveled in spite of his always perfect grooming. “She oughtn’t to have gone,” he kept saying in worried, blue-eyed asides to Jevan. “She oughtn’t to have gone.”

  “Well, she did go,” said Jevan finally in an annoyed way. “Do shut up, Willy, and listen. Stop pacing.”

  “I can’t,” said Willy distractedly.

  “Go on, Dorcas. So you put down your cigarette——”

  “I can’t remember what I did with my cigarette. I can’t remember anything about it. I just remember Ronald answering the telephone”—Jevan looked at Willy just then and Willy looked back at Jevan—“and I went away. I hurried. I don’t think anyone saw me leave and I hailed a taxi over on Lake Shore Drive and came home. It’s that taxi driver that Wait says he’s found and will identify me——”

  “The whispering in the kitchen and the door opening must have been——” began Willy and Jevan cut him short.

  “She doesn’t know any more about it than that. She decided the whispering must have been just ice being crushed, although I must say, Dorcas, I can’t see much similarity——”

  “You would if you had been there. The kitchen is some distance from the living room, along a little hall. And the door that closed—I mean that I thought I heard close—must have been just the—the refrigerator door. And the white door that Ronald closed between the hall and the living room—well, I’m not certain about its moving either. Perhaps I only imagined it; all those mirrors give a queer feeling of motion about you.”

  “Yes,” agreed Willy, adding quickly, “Mirrors have that trick. Didn’t you see anyone? Wasn’t there anything more—more definite?”

  “Nothing. Except there was a car that drew up just behind us as we arrived and it—well, a car had passed slowly as Ronald and I left this house. And then again, later, when I got home and got out of the taxi a car was just leaving—or at any rate it looked like it, although so far as I know no one had called.” She looked at Willy, whose face was a blank.

  Jevan snapped his fingers impatiently. “I can’t find it. There was something and I didn’t see it at the time and now I can’t—can’t get it. What time was it when you reached home, Dorcas?”

  “I don’t know exactly. I met Ronald at eight. It couldn’t have been more than nine-thirty when I got home again.”

  “I was at the club about that time. I reached Ronald’s flat about fifteen minutes later.”

  Willy made another turn and said to Jevan: “What exactly did you do in Ronald’s place? You wiped off the revolver and put it by his hand. You told me that.”

  “Yes. And I put his fingerprints on it,” said Jevan. “It wasn’t as easy as it sounds and I expect I smudged them or got the—the fingers in the wrong position somehow and Wait, curse him, spotted it. Then I looked around and wiped off the doorknobs and the telephone and the glass with the lipstick on it and took the three cigarettes that had lipstick on them and——”

  “My lipstick!” cried Dorcas. “Every lipstick I have is cut sharply off and the ends are gone.”

  They received it in a kind of deep silence and she became a little frightened, perceiving that silence.

  Then Jevan said sharply: “It means that I overlooked a cigarette somewhere and they found it and are trying to match lipstick on it with one of your lipsticks. But there were only three in the room. Think, Dorcas; are you sure you weren’t in any other room? You didn’t go to the kitchen and drop the cigarette you were smoking?”

  “No. I’m sure of that.”

  Willy said quickly: “Jevan, isn’t it possible that Wait found somewhere else in the apartment a cigarette that somebody else had smoked and left with—with lipstick on it?”

  “Somebody,” said Jevan and looked at Willy and instantly agreed: “That’s it of course. The—whoever it was in the kitchen. If anybody—a woman …” Jevan paused thoughtfully.

  “A woman,” said Willy significantly and Jevan said:

  “Heaven send it’s not the same lipstick Dorcas uses.”

  “It couldn’t be,” observed Willy cheerfully. “There must be hundreds of lipsticks.”

  “Here’s Bench,” said Jevan shortly, and Bench rattled the french doors and opened them.

  “Mr Wait is here,” he said, unpleasantly apropos. “He wants to see——”

  “I’ll come out there,” said Wait behind him and did so. Jevan said quickly: “You’d better go, Dorcas.”

  “No, Mrs Locke, stay right here. You, too, Devany. I think you ought to know that Marcus Pett’s accounts are nearly a hundred thousand dollars short.”

  “Short!” cried Jevan incredulously. “You can’t know! I only sent off the reports this morning.”

  “Telephone your friend if you don’t believe it. I’ve just left him. You chose a very good man, Locke, one who knew how to spot a shortage. He said it was as plain as the nose on my face,” observed Wait a trifle grimly.

  “But there hasn’t been time for him to check those reports!”

  “Pett had made no attempt to falsify. He had, in fact, almost pointed it out to you if you had looked in the right place.”

  “A hundred thousand!” repeated Jevan in a stunned way. “That’s an awful lot of money. What on earth did Marcus do with it?”

  Wait knew. “Stock market,” he said succinctly. “He seems to have tried—by the use of your money, Mrs Locke—to build up a fortune for himself. It’s been going on for some time and instead of retrieving losses he got in deeper and deeper. You must
have guessed.”

  He paused but only for an instant, as if to arrange the things he intended to tell them; it gave them no time for exclamations or denials or inquiry but only for acceptance. He went on, making of each sentence a neat, detached fact like links in a chain.

  “Two days before Drew was shot he wrote a note to Pett saying he was afraid of someone; the note was found among Pett’s papers this morning.”

  “Who—” began Jevan but Wait went on as if he had not heard it.

  “The inquest which was to have taken place tomorrow has been postponed; consequently I have asked the taxi driver, who took a woman to this address the night of Drew’s murder to come here and identify”—he paused there and looked at Dorcas and said simply—“her. He will be here shortly.”

  Again Jevan tried to interrupt and Willy, who had disappeared behind a banana plant, uttered a protesting, small sound. Wait went on.

  “You, Locke, and you, Devany, have not the alibi for the time last night when Pett was murdered that you claimed to have. You were observed by the clerk in the drugstore, who says you arrived at the store separately, Locke first, Devany a little later. That was a little before seven o’clock. You had Coca-Colas, talked for about ten minutes and left the store together. Locke, you said you left the house (and Bench corroborates it) a little before six o’clock. That’s an hour, during which you have no alibi.”

  “I was walking,” began Jevan. “Believe it or not——”

  “You had plenty of time, then, to return to the house unobserved by way of the side door, murder Pett, escape again by the side door and reach the drugstore in time to meet Devany; the store is not more than five minutes walk from here.”

  “You would have to prove——”

  “The drugstore clerk also heard part of your conversation. Who is the woman in the checked coat and where is she?”

  CHAPTER 18

  “I,” SAID JEVAN, “I don’t know.”