The Crooked Lane

by Frances Noyes Hart

  “For what are you thanking me, Tess?” He did not want to raise his eyes; they, too, were cowards when it came to meeting the inexplicable elation of the eyes still drowned in tears. “For lending you my handkerchief, or for proving beyond any possibility of doubt that Dion Mallory is a murderer?”

  Tess put down the drenched handkerchief with a smile that was not for him.

  “Is that one of those trick questions where either ‘yes’ or ‘no’ will lay you by the heels? Never mind—I’ll answer it. I was thanking you because you’d proved twice over that something that was making me sick with terror—too sick to move or breathe or dare to ask you the answer to it—wasn’t true at all. You see, all the way up those stairs—all the way across the room to this sofa—oh, I didn’t ever, ever think that I’d get to this sofa—I’ve been wondering if by some hideous chance I’d made the most horrible mistake that anyone ever made.… And now you’ve told me that I haven’t. It’s idiotic to cry just because—just because that ghastly weight’s off my mind, I know—but wouldn’t it be even more idiotic not to be thankful to you for lifting it? Here’s your handkerchief; I won’t be such a little fool again, I promise.”

  “And what was this mistake that you thought that you had made?”

  His eyes were still on his hands, staring with as fierce a concentration as though he could by sheer will power force them to show him the path that the swift, smooth fingers had brushed across them, burnt as deeply and irrevocably into his flesh as a scar.

  “K, would you mind if I didn’t talk about it just now? When I try to put it into words—even just inside my head—it makes me feel that same deathly sickness all over again. I can’t possibly put it into words to tell you.”

  “I see.… Does it make you sick if I, myself, put it into words? If I suggest that after you had persuaded Mallory that I was distinctly more ruthless than he anticipated, and that he must burn his boats and prepare for flight while you devoted your ingenuity to keeping me well in hand, that only after the boats were burning did it occur to you that I might not have managed to put the two and two together of the glass and the stamp and make the final four that spelt damnation to every plan you had; and that even if I had done so, Mallory might not have committed himself too fatally as to the time and the place in the writing on the stamp? After all, that was the only actual proof that you were sure that I had—’proof so definite that a prosecutor could actually hold it under a jury’s collective nose and have them accept it without the flicker of an eyelash or a split second of debate. Was it not of that possibly fatal error that you were thinking when you came up those stairs to me, Tess?”

  “You mean that you believe that I’ve been urging Dion to escape, K? I?” Something in her voice brought his head up this time, and after a moment he forced himself to confront once more the brilliant amazement of her eyes. “You know that does knock all of the wind straight out of my sails! Of course I keep explaining to myself that you don’t really know us—that you can’t really know us, after just a few days—but it isn’t till you say something like that that I can even pretend to believe it.… No, no, you’re wrong there. Dion—Dion simply wasn’t built for flight.”

  “You know that, Tess?”

  “Oh, K, how could anyone help knowing it? Anyone who had known him even three days? Dion was meant for happiness, for delight, for victory, for gallantry—all those pretty story-book words—never, never for slinking down back alleys—never for looking up sidewise too quickly or too slowly over little dirty glasses of little dirty drinks in dirty, hateful little places. You know the kind of things—you’ve been on the track of that kind before, haven’t you? Port Said, and Port Limon, and the back streets of Shanghai and Liverpool and Cairo and Budapest—we used to drag around through some of those with Dad when we were just scraps of things, and since we were bigger there have been trips and cruises.… But even now I can’t bear to look at them, all bent up over their glasses—”

  “Yes,” he said, “I have been on that track before. It is not, as you foresee, a pretty one.… How, Tess, were you so sure of that?”

  “Probably because I have too much imagination. Probably because, even before I knew him, I was afraid that one of them might look like Dion,” she replied, in that clear, grave voice more ominous by far than anything stressed or harried. “You remember telling me so that first night at the Temples’, K? That I had too much imagination to be either a good criminal or a good detective? You know, I think that you are right. But I have enough imagination to see what it would be like to be a bad criminal—a criminal like Dion, for instance, who would sit in dark, shadowy corners over a soiled tin table, and forget every day or so to get a shave, but never, never forget to take one of those dirty little drinks even before he took his morning coffee in the tall thick glass—nor to jump rather badly if someone came up too quickly or too loudly, and most especially if someone laid a hand on his shoulder.… You know the kind of people who jump if you put a hand on their shoulder, don’t you, K?”

  “Too well,” he told her. “A great deal too well.”

  “Yes. Well, Dion’s one of them. You know that, too, I suppose. He’s one of the kind whose bones would turn into dust and whose blood would turn into water while he was waiting for that hand to bear down. At least, that’s how I figured it out, quite a long time ago.”

  “And that, Tess, was what you told him tonight?”

  “That was one of the things that I told him tonight,” she corrected gently.

  “He agreed to it?”

  She considered that carefully for a moment, and when she spoke again her voice was a little deeper than usual:

  “Not just at first. It isn’t a particularly easy thing to agree to, do you think? To admit that in disaster and danger you’d deteriorate—that you’d shrivel up and be inadequate and pitiful—I’d hate to admit that, wouldn’t you, K?”

  “Very greatly. Still, you forced him to admit it?”

  She murmured, in the voice so far away from him that it almost seemed that she was talking to someone else:

  “I think I did.… I’m almost sure that I did.… The part that makes it hardest is that I won’t ever be quite sure, I suppose.”

  “I have no doubt that he will find means to strengthen your assurance,” Sheridan commented grimly. “Even in jail he will not be held entirely incommunicado, you know! And with the remarkably liberal point of view that your great and generous country has towards murder in its various manifestations, there is surely a fair chance that after not too long an interval he will be able to convey them in person, is there not?”

  She sat staring at him blankly, the pupils of the silver-gray eyes so dilated that they were suddenly as jet black as her lashes.

  “You mean that you think that they wouldn’t have—that they wouldn’t convict him? Oh, no—oh, no, you’re wrong there, K! You’re either overrating or underrating the liberality of this great and generous country. Gangsters, maybe, or beautiful ladies if they can manage the right amount of tears on the right length of eyelashes—but a Britisher who poisoned in cold blood the most ravishing-looking creature in North America, just because she thought that he ought to marry her? A heavenly, soft little scrap of a thing that didn’t weigh a hundred pounds, and was nineteen on her last birthday, and the daughter of one of the most eminent public figures in the United States? Oh, you know as well as I do that they’d hang him—that was the one thing that Dion and I agreed on from the first.… Though it—though it wouldn’t be here that they’d do it, as a matter of fact. We don’t hang people in the District of Columbia. The twelve good men and true who would undoubtedly have taken great pleasure in hanging him if they ever got the chance are probably drawing nice long foggy breaths of British air while we’re sitting here talking about it.”

  “British?”

  “Yes. Don’t they teach you anything about international law in that wonderful Criminalistic Institute of yours, K? And you with an ambassador for a grandfather, t
oo!”

  “You are referring, perhaps, to diplomatic immunity?” he inquired austerely. “I have heard of that. But I may also remind you that it is entirely a question of the discretion of the sovereign whom the suspect represents in however minor a degree as to whether he is turned over to the local authorities or dealt with ultimately by those of his own country. In the end, it would make singularly little difference, I imagine.”

  “That’s what I thought, too,” Tess agreed, the black eyes not wavering a fraction of a hair’s breadth from his. “And even if there was a temporary slip up here, in Liverpool, or Buenos Aires—one way or another I’m sure that you and your good friends the police would get your man.… You’d get him just as surely, even though not quite as satisfactorily, if you never even managed to slip handcuffs over his wrists. You’d get him from the very first time that he was afraid to turn his head to see who it was that was touching him on the shoulder.”

  “A highly gratifying tribute to our prowess,” commented the representative of the police force grimly. “Still we would hardly consider a case closed in our dossiers because somewhere in the byways of Central America a young man was developing a bad attack of nerves if someone came up behind him.”

  “No.… No, I said that you probably wouldn’t consider it satisfactory—but, one way or another, it would still check up to your credit, wouldn’t it? The police always get their man. I was paying you a compliment.”

  “Were you, indeed? And their woman—do the police always get their woman, Tess?”

  “Their woman? Just exactly what do you mean by that?”

  “Just exactly what I say. What did you think that I meant?”

  She made no answer to the slightly sardonic tone, apparently contenting herself in maintaining the unswerving vigilance of the eyes riveted on the dark face of the young man from Vienna.

  “Were you so sure, Tess, that any twelve good men and true would send you back scatheless and vindicated to this lovely spring world that is all yours—or were you even surer that I would never have turned you over to them?”

  For a brief moment the eyes went wandering, seeking for the focal point in this new attack.

  “Turn me over? Oh, you mean all that about suspecting me before I was sure that you hadn’t deciphered the writing on the postage stamp? I was really just sounding you out. I had to know—I had to know how strong your case was against Dion.”

  “And you were brave enough to be willing to risk your neck to find out—by calling my attention to the fact of the strength of the case against you? You cared enough for Mallory to do that?”

  “My neck?” She lifted one of the long white hands to it, the fingers touching its smooth roundness delicately, and the lovely sweep of her mouth suddenly tilted in rueful mirth. “Oh, I wasn’t doing that exactly, was I? I think that you’re giving me more credit than I deserve—in more ways than you realize. It didn’t seem to me that you had any real case against me at any time. If I had thought so, I probably shouldn’t have even hinted at the possibility. I’m not precisely a coward—but, K, no one ever wanted to live more than I do—no one ever. It’s not that I’m afraid to die, but I’m terribly, terribly afraid not to live. I know how to do it awfully well, you see; most people don’t—they get it all tangled up with regrets and worries and irresolutions—when all that’s really important is life waiting for them to live. How can anyone get tired of just breathing, and feeling, and—oh, knowing that no matter how cruelly and senselessly and wickedly it can hurt you, it can’t ever, ever beat you. I know that now, K. I’ve beaten it—it can’t beat me.”

  The eyes holding his were no longer black enemies playing sentry in the cool, exquisite face; they were as clear as the lost War Baby’s—that small scrap, gallant in her flying scarlet scarf and stubby mittens, who had faced him undaunted across long-melted snows, victorious even in woeful defeat, because she had not learned in six brave years one single concession yielded by the vanquished; in spite of all his superior taunts and strategies and extra measure of years and brain and brawn, he had still been unable to wring from those small pale lips one sound that admitted defeat—one step backward to grant that she was standing on conquered territory.… Well, whatever the sixteen years that lay between the snow and crystals of that winter, and the crystal snows of the lilacs and peonies, scenting the breeze that blew spring silently into every corner of the small, hushed green room, Charity de Tessaincourt Stuart had not yet learned to know when she was beaten.… He felt suddenly something salt and bitter stinging in the little empty place where his heart should be at the thought of all that valiant grace, too serene even for defiance, beaten down finally into the dust of irretrievable defeat.… After a moment he said, gently:

  “Give me your hand, Tess.”

  She stretched it out to him, unhesitatingly, with a grave smile of amused wonder—it was steadier than his own, and for a moment he felt only the cool freshness of her palm pressed against his.

  “No, turn it over—that way—yes, now I can see.… What is it that you have been doing to your fingers?”

  She sat staring in silence for a moment at the pale upturned hand cupped in the dark shadows of his—at the little balls of the fingertips with the faint, rosy gloss almost like varnish over the curiously wrinkled skin, and then, with a small shrug, that held in it as much amusement as resignation, let it be completely relaxed in his.

  “It’s nail polish; didn’t you know? I thought that you’d guessed when I touched your hand. The kind that they call Dawn Flush. I don’t ever wear gloves; I told you that the first night—remember? But you didn’t tell me whether anyone had ever tried liquid nail polish as a substitute, did you?”

  “You were very anxious not to leave any fingerprints here tonight, I gather. Was there, perhaps, some especial reason for that?”

  “You couldn’t write it off to my simply being an old-fashioned girl, who’d been brought up to believe that ladies didn’t call on gentlemen at midnight?”

  “I had not been led to believe,” he said, “that the question of leaving fingerprints behind her was involved in a lady’s visit, however close to midnight.… There were other reasons, surely?”

  “Surely,” she said. “Though, curiously enough, they don’t seem particularly important to me. London Bridge won’t fall down if anyone discovers that I was here tonight; but I’ll admit quite honestly that I’d rather that no one but you, and Dion, and I knew about it.… I think I was rather clever about the polish. I had to use two coats because after twenty minutes or so the first one just shrivels up your fingers—but the second one makes them as smooth and non-committal as any rubber gloves you ever saw.… Might I have my hand back now, if you’re quite through with it?”

  Sheridan, releasing it without even the lightest pressure, acquiesced pleasantly:

  “Quite, thanks. I am to gather, then, that there was some special reason why you did not wish anyone to know that you were here tonight, but that for the time being at least I am not to know what that reason was. So then, Tess, shall we forget all about it for the present? And move back ten or twenty minutes to the time that you were explaining to me that Mallory was so blind and crazed with rage when he sent Fay the pleasant little note about the races Saturday morning that he could not even remember what he had written on the red stamp. He had already, then, made up his mind to kill Fay when he wrote it?”

  “Saturday morning? Oh, good heavens, K, even you ought to know that Dion couldn’t possibly have planned out all the details of a highly complicated murder in cold blood hours and hours before he was actually going to try to bring it off. People like Dion simply aren’t made that way. It’s perfectly true that he was furious when he sent her the note Saturday morning agreeing to see her that night—the whole thing was beginning to sound like blackmail to him, and I imagine that most generous, chivalrous people have quite a definite prejudice against blackmail. But he still kept thinking that he could make her see that what she was trying to force him
to do was plain madness. That was why he agreed to try once more.”

  “And just what was she trying to force him to do, Tess? Or is that a secret, too?”

  “No, that’s not a secret—not now—not from you. That’s part of what I have to explain to you. She wanted him to marry her. I told you that a little while ago when we were talking about the jury, didn’t I?”

  “Yes. Now I remember. And why, if she was as ravishing as you say, did he not want to marry her?”

  Tess said, steadily:

  “Because he wanted to marry someone else. He wanted to marry her rather badly.”

  “And she—this other girl—did she want to marry him?”

  “I don’t think that I should answer that, K. Let’s just say that lately she’d found out some things that made it—that made it impossible. At least she thought it was impossible. Maybe she was wrong. Dion was quite sure that she was.”

  “I need not ask if that other girl was you, Tess?”

  “No,” she said. “You needn’t ask that.”

  “Very well. Curious as it may seem to you, it is the very last question that I care to ask you. Let us return, then, to’ this final act that drove Mallory back against the wall, so trapped and desperate that murder seemed to him the only possible solution.… Or perhaps I should not permit you to return even that far. As we who are watchdogs on the trail of crime honorably but somewhat disingenuously put it, anything that you say may be used against you, you see.… Or against him, which is probably more important to you.… Because I am right in thinking that you were not actually involved in Fay’s murder, am I not?”