The Crooked Lane

by Frances Noyes Hart

  “Very surely. Thanks more than I can say for your kindness in putting me straight on some of these points, Mallory. Later, I am sure, you will help me even more. Till this evening, then—and to many others.”

  He sat watching the tall figure take the curve of the staircase three steps at a time, before it swallowed him up. A door banged in the distance almost simultaneously, and before its echo had died on the air the young man taking his ease so luxuriously in the great bed had whipped out of it and was halfway across the room, the telephone book in his hands, and a glitter of almost murderous impatience in his eyes. A quick flicker of leaves, and the long, competent fingers were snapping the numbers out of the dial as though they were so many pistol shots. The voice, however, which he shortly directed into the mouthpiece was as agreeably pitched and imperturbable as ever.

  “Automobile Association of America? This is Karl Sheridan, of the Viennese Criminalistic Institute.… I have recently become one of your members through my Austrian affiliations, and I believe that you are being good enough to take charge of my roadster, which should be on your hands any day now.… But it is not concerning that of which I wish to speak to you at present. Could you, I wonder, give me any idea as to exactly how long it would take to go from Washington to Baltimore at night—if, say, your need was desperate and you were not very particular as to the legal requirements that might retard you?”

  Sheridan smiled a little, grimly, at the note of austere protest in the light baritone voice at the other end of the wire—a voice that suggested youth not untinged with pomposity. For a moment he saw rising in prophetic vision before him a high blond pompadour, a cleft chin, a neat blue four-in-hand with even neater red stripes. “No, no—I understand naturally that you discourage that sort of thing, and I assure you that I haven’t the faintest idea of trying it out myself. My interest is—well, possibly you might say academic. Could you, then, be so good as to give me the distance? … Thirty-seven and one third miles from the zero milestone—just one moment, please.” His impatient fingers tugged at the drawer, extracted the yellow slip folded like a fan that Tess had given him the night before, fumbled for a pencil, found it, and wrote down the figures with the swift precision of a chartered accountant. “That is to the heart of Baltimore, I suppose? … And the traffic conditions—how would one find them? … Well, say something after midnight.… No lights after twelve? … I see.… Now I wonder whether I would be once more unethical if I asked whether it would be possible to look over some of your maps a little later in the day? … That is extremely good of you—whom shall I ask for, then? … Mr. Gustaven? … Thanks so very much.”

  He sat quiescent for a moment, smoothing out the little fan with the remotest of frowns, faint and abstracted until, with a sudden sharp movement, he pulled the phone towards him once more, setting the dial spinning.… But though his eyes rested on the neat white disk, they never saw it at all.… They saw only a row of bottles.… Old Rarity Scotch, bonded rye, House of Lords gin, half a bottle of curacao—the label on that half-empty bottle was clearer even than the telephone number on the folded yellow paper, half an inch from his hand.

  “Long distance? Torytown 7362, if you please.… No, no; it is the private number of a small—er—nursing home, near Baltimore.… This is Greene 4023 calling.… Yes, I prefer to hold the phone.” … But just exactly what had he been doing last night, that too curly-headed and amiable Dr. Byrd, with all those bottles that had belonged to the small, dead Fay Stuart—all those bottles that had been standing so decorously on the rows of concealed shelves in the one-time night nursery of the Stuart babies, safe in charge of the tall girl whose deep young voice grew deeper still with disdain when she spoke of the gentleman known as Byrd? How in the name of heaven had Jack Byrd become the possessor of those rows of bottles? … Sheridan’s fingers tightened perceptibly about the slim waist of the telephone, but his voice was not raised a fraction. “Tory-town 7362? … Might I speak with Dr. Byrd? … Impossible? But surely not actually impossible, if he is there? It is, I assure you, of the utmost importance.… Yes. I quite understand—but it is not probable, is it, that he will stay continuously on even the most important case? What if I call up again within an hour, shall we say? … No? … Oh, but my dear lady, you must forgive me if I find that a little arbitrary! … Very well, then, may I speak to Mr. Hardy? … Exactly—Mr. Jerry Hardy. He is with you at present, is he not?”

  The small, brittle chatter at the other end of the line was swallowed up in a faint gasp, followed by a silence so abrupt and dismaying that Sheridan, waiting blankly, felt himself, too, becoming dismayed and abrupt—a curious, distraught, lonely feeling, as though he had been left dangling in midair, and that Atropos might reach towards him with her shears at any moment.

  “Stillhaven Hospital?” he inquired in a voice that he trusted was sufficiently severe to cover the panic that he felt hovering over him like a dark hand. “I say, are you still there, Stillhaven? … I was asking whether it would be possible to speak to Mr. Jerry—”

  The small gasp came again, this time accompanied by a rush of fluttering, slightly incoherent words; and at the few that were coherent, Karl Sheridan bit down hard on his lip and felt the heavy lines carving themselves sharply between his brows. He said, “I see” three times, each time a little more distinctly; he said, “Oh, quite naturally.” He said, “Thank you very much indeed,” and replaced the telephone on the hook with meticulous exactitude. For quite a long time he sat motionless, smooth black head in brown hands, staring down unseeingly at the contents of the half-open drawer.… So that was that.…

  Pneumonia—and double pneumonia—and, what was more, double pneumonia complicated by a bad set of lungs, a crocked-up heart, and a wrecked nervous system. It seemed quite likely that no one in this world would ever again speak to Jerry Hardy.… Which, any way that you looked at it, was not at all a pleasant prospect.

  That laughing kid with the deep-carved dimples, and the blond, ruffled hair—what in the name of the good Lord had he been doing at close onto two in the morning, drenched and insensible, a good mile away from the ominous little sanitarium? Who knew how long he had been lying there? Was there a chance—even an off chance, strained and remote—that by some fantastic hook or crook he’d got to Washington and up to the Stuarts’ night nursery where Fay lay waiting curled at the end of the love seat, like some little Persian page in her silver and green? He scowled down at the figures; thirty-seven miles.… Well, allow him twenty minutes to get to the Washington highway and pick up a bus or a lift—if anyone in his sane senses would consider giving a lift to that desperate, half-clothed young lunatic.… An hour more to get to Washington; that might be shaded a trifle one way or another, but was fair enough, certainly, as an estimate for thirty-seven miles. That would make it twelve or later before he could possibly have arrived at the Stuart house—and he would hardly have appeared in the light of an appropriate opponent for a backgammon game, even if there were the remotest possibility of his carrying out an elaborately contrived murder, staging the scene for the appearance of an even more elaborately contrived suicide, returning to Baltimore, and collapsing completely a mile or so from the sanitarium at Stillhaven within something less than two hours.

  Of course, someone else might have been that invisible backgammon player—someone who had gone from the night nursery before Hardy so much as set foot on the scene—someone, perhaps, who had played another and more dreadful game, for higher stakes than backgammon.… It was entirely within the realms of possibility that Jerry Hardy had found Fay Stuart in precisely the same position that Tess had found her, hours later on that unspeakable night.… Kippy Todd might have been the backgammon player for instance; as far as that went, Kippy Todd might have been— He pulled up short, frowning irritably at the uncompleted speculation. Just exactly why had young Mr. Todd never entered all these elaborate calculations and speculations? Because of the half-affectionate, half-contemptuous tone in which Tess had alluded to him, becaus
e of Dion’s easy reference to the likelihood of his having gone up to the study that night with Fay? Because, buried deeper than these, of that subconscious sense of outrage at the bare thought of any human mortal called Kippy Todd committing a murder? Kippy Todd—no, even when he tried it over now, grimly and soberly, it evoked only the image of an easy-going, lanky, amiable youth with a comfortable tweed shoulder for any lovely, errant lady to cry on.

  Still, Mr. Todd should be checked up, promptly and adequately. Tess could undoubtedly help there. And Jerry Hardy should be checked, too, reluctantly, but more thoroughly still. And, most thoroughly of all, and far more enthusiastically, the elusive Dr. Byrd, so conscientiously occupied with his patients that it was utterly impossible to get even the thinnest wedge of a question through to him. Here, at least, was one case that it would be a definite and distinct pleasure to investigate with all the back-breaking, soul-satisfying energy and skill for which five years of exhaustive training had amply equipped him.… If the too curly-headed Dr. Byrd had not gone on to that backgammon party with the unhappy infant, Vicki Wilde—if, as was certainly plausible, they had once more quarreled—then there was no doubt whatever that he would have had ample time between eleven and two to have gone to the Stuarts’, committed the murder, and returned to Baltimore before two o’clock, in order to devote his more formal activities to the resuscitation of Hardy’s drenched and dying body.… If … That was undeniably the catch—one word, two letters, fragile, treacherous, and precarious, that Sheridan had learned long ago to lean on lightly.… Well, if Byrd continued to be inaccessible, it was entirely possible that the girl Vicki would do as well. At the Lindsays’ party tonight, perhaps? If he could definitely ascertain that she would be there.… He pulled the creased bit of paper that held Dion Mallory’s telegram towards him irritably, and scribbled across its back, beneath the number of the sanitarium at Stillhaven and the number of miles between Washington and Baltimore, four names, very black and straight:

  Check Kippy Todd

  Check Jack Byrd

  Check Vicki Wilde

  Check Jerry—

  The pencil paused, hovered a second uncertainly, and then slashed ruthlessly through the uncompleted name. Of what use, in the name of heaven, to hunt down that poor, dying devil when there was no earthly or unearthly method by which he could have gone to Washington and back to Baltimore that night unless he had flown through the air or—He paused, riveted, the pencil still poised above the paper.

  Through the air.… Exactly.… Unless he had flown through the air.… As clearly as though it stood there on the long table in front of him instead of on Mallory’s desk in the sitting room below, the laughing face with the jaunty cap rose before him, and the air about him was filled with the sound of wings.…

  He wrote once more carefully and painfully, at the end of the brief list:

  Check Jerry Hardy

  and rose stiffly to his feet, crossing slowly to the bell by the door and keeping his fingers on it for a full half-minute, as he strove to steady the incredulous thoughts that swung upward in the wake of that flight of wings.

  The shuffling scurry of Timothy’s feet on the stairs, and the sight of the small, dark face, gnomelike and reproachful in the doorway, brought them abruptly back to earth.

  “Timothy, I swear that I’d forgotten both the bell and the finger. You would have been quite justified in thinking that the entire room was on fire, and all that I wanted to know was one very simple question. You have an airport here in Washington, naturally—do you by any chance know whether it is far from the city itself?”

  Timothy, thus unexpectedly and gratifyingly endowed with a flying field in Washington, relinquished his reproachful expression for one of modest gratification.

  “As you say, sah—natchully, sah. It is just a short way across the Arlington Bridge.… Were you considering flying to anywhere, Mr. Sheridan?”

  Sheridan, already headed purposefully towards a suitcase neatly stacked with garments, flung a hasty and emphatic denial over his shoulder.

  “Oh, but ten times never! Washington, for these many years, I trust, will be my local abode and habitation.… No, it is the flying activities of others that I am interested in at present. It is too far for a walk, this field, Timothy?”

  “It would surely be a right smart walk, sah, unless you figure to arrive there around tea time.… Should you care for me to call you a taxicab, Mr. Sheridan, sah?”

  “I should like it more than you can possibly imagine, Timothy! If you knew the hatred that I have conceived for that little black horn lying so innocently asleep in its cradle—” Sheridan, bending to knot shoes that hundreds of skillful polishings had deepened to the exact shade of a perfect Malacca cane, paused abruptly, his incredulous eyes on the hook rug that spread like a small flower garden before the low chair in which he was seated. “Timothy, wait one moment. This little square of green glass—what is, now, this little square of glass?”

  Timothy, bending politely over the small, black-taped inch of dark emerald glass that Sheridan had scooped into the palm of his hand, gave a small cluck of scandalized surprise.

  “Now who forevermore let that little bitty thing drop? Must have been Mr. Dion when he was moving all those doodads of Mr. Jerry’s out of his drawers into that closet out yonder—but I’m surely mighty pleased and thankful that he isn’t here now to see that Susan and I didn’t clean it right up after. Likely we missed it because it’s the very match and color of those vine leaves on that there rug.… Mr. Jerry, he’s got a whole flock of them little bits of colored glass that he uses in that sort of photography work that he’s so busy fussing around with all night and day. I don’t recollect exactly how he does call them by name—something right down unlikely like colored sieves, or words like that—”

  “Sieves?” Sheridan dismissed it with an impatient shake of his head. “No, no—not sieves! In photography, you say? No, but this minute—this very minute—I have it on the tip of the tongue.… Ah, at last!” He was on his feet so suddenly that Timothy executed a small, startled scuffle backwards. “Filters! Is that not it, Timothy? Color filters, surely? Idiot that I am, not to have thought of it before!”

  Color filters were the very words, Timothy agreed with dignified alacrity, and proceeded to order a taxi to be at the door of Mr. Dion Mallory’s residence in Georgetown in precisely ten minutes in a tone of such soothing competence that even Sheridan’s troubled spirit felt its healing balm.

  He stood tilting the mirror on the mahogany chest of drawers to an angle that would do justice to the subdued luxury of the copper-colored tie, reflecting that one agreeable feature of shaving at night was that it left you a running jump ahead in the morning, and that anyone who could not dress in five minutes flat had no business doddering about the face of the earth. Now, then—still five minutes before the taxi stood a chance to arrive.… He moved purposefully towards the long table with the microscope, pulled open the drawer, tossed the piece of green glass in to join the other exhibits with a disregard of consequences that was unscientific in the extreme, and pulled the telephone towards him as he swung himself easily onto the end of the table.

  “This one time, Timothy, I shall almost forget, I promise you, how I hate this small black monster!”

  He started to twirl the dial rapidly, lifting his most engaging smile in the direction of Timothy’s exquisitely discreet voice, already withdrawn to the hall outside.

  “Will you be returning for your luncheon, sah? Susan can fix you some—”

  “Lunch? Great heavens, Timothy, after such a breakfast in this country does one eat lunch? It would be sheer insult—and suicide into the bargain I No, I will not be back until quite late in the afternoon; if Mr. Mallory should return before me, will you tell him that I have several errands to attend to, but that I will be back surely in time to dress for the dinner at the Lindsays’ tonight? And will you see that the evening clothes in that second bag are in order? And again, Timothy, one thousand thanks.
”

  He focused his attention once more on the interrupted telephone call, twirling the dial again as he listened to Timothy’s footfalls, shod in the velvet of perfect consideration, dying away down the staircase.… A most excellent fellow, Timothy! Tonight he must remember to give him something more substantial than thanks.… A voice with an exaggerated and highly unconvincing British accent boomed ponderously out of the black horn, and with a slight tightening of the jaw, he lifted it closer to his ear.

  “Mr. Stuart’s residence? … Might I speak with Miss Stuart? … Yes, I quite realize that, but I believe that if you will tell Miss Stuart that it is Mr. Sheridan, she will speak with me.… No, not a member of the press—a personal friend.… Thanks.”

  He sat waiting, his eyes fixed reluctantly on the contents of the still half-opened drawer.… A square of red glass—a square of green.… Something young and obstinately unconvinced lifted a protesting clamor just below the level of consciousness. Light filters they might well be—light filters, as a matter of fact, they undoubtedly were—but it was not of photography that they reminded him for one solitary moment. Even at a glimpse of that red one, the air was fresh with fir and balsam, there was a glitter of snow and candles and tinsel—no, gone again! He gave the telephone an impatient jerk.… What, in heaven’s name, was keeping Tess all this time? … Beside the tooled-leather cylinder that held the lapis and malachite backgammon markers, the stray one that he had picked up at the edge of Fay’s love seat still lay in solitary state, small and lonely and faintly ominous still, as though it did not realize that now that Tess had found its snugly housed mates, it had lost all its sinister importance. He twisted the cover off the box, starting half mechanically to wedge it in where it belonged.… And curiously, incredibly, it would not wedge. The little box was completely filled; if he pushed the exiled marker harder, he ran a definite risk of snapping it in two. He gave a delicate, experimental thrust, his eyes so concentrated that once more they had that strange look of blindness.… A voice, young, deep, and lovely, sounded distantly through the forgotten telephone, and box and marker slipped through his fingers as he turned to answer it.