Chapter Sixteen

  The Rope in the Attic

  Bill Gabriel dropped in to see if Fred Oaks needed a dash of picro-toxin. As soon as he entered the room, he had a feeling that someone else had been there in his absence. His eyes took a slow, panoramic inventory, seeking some detail that did not correspond with his memory of the room as he had left it. Had the chairs been moved? Or his suitcases on the floor? Or the bowland-pitcher on the marble-topped wash stand? Or was it the corner of the mosquito bar which hung down at the foot of the bed? He thought he had tucked it in all around, but he was not sure.

  He went over to the bed and looked at Oaks. The man’s face showed no signs of discoloration. His nostrils stirred slightly with his even breathing. The detective lifted the netting and pinched Fred’s arm. No reaction. Fred was sleeping soundly all right. Gabriel would like to put in a little sleeping himself. He looked at his watch. Two o’clock. There was really not a great deal more he could do tonight. It could all wait until morning. Why not crawl in beside Fred Oaks and catch a few winks until the drugged man woke up?

  There was Rhoda Curring’s story of her husband on a still-hunt for dynamite at Seaside House that needed checking, of course. Probably it was just a story. The lady with the copper hair had a great talent for fiction. She was just as screwy as Gwendolyn Small, in a different way, of course. What the hell got into women here in Shakkarpur?

  Maybe he’d better have a look around the second floor after all. There was an off chance that Rhoda was telling the truth, or part of the truth. It wouldn’t take long just to look around. What if he did feel like a boiled dish cloth? A drink would give him a jolt of energy for just one more chore.

  He took the whisky bottle from his suitcase, tilted it up for a healthy swig—and instantly spouted whisky against the wall. Coughing violently, he lurched into the bathroom, rinsed his mouth out with water, gargled his smarting throat. Then he wiped the tears from his eyes and looked at the label on the bottle. It was his whisky bottle, all right, but it wasn’t his whisky. In fact, it didn’t taste like whisky at all.

  Gabriel’s hunch was correct about someone having come into the room while he was away—someone who thought that American detectives gulped their liquor without tasting it—someone who was annoyed by Gabriel’s presence on earth, or at least in Shakkarpur. This certainty was all the stimulant the detective needed. He no longer thought about sleep. He would get on with his job.

  He took another look at the sleeping Oaks, went out and locked the door. He struck a match, worked the flame around the doorknob until the porcelain was dark with smoke. He should have done this before, he told himself. Then he wouldn’t have made the mistake of the whisky. Lucky he didn’t swallow any.

  Gabriel walked quietly down the corridor. Outside Gwendolyn Small’s room, he paused. Gwendolyn had not yet gone to bed, apparently. He could hear her moving about inside. For a moment he considered going in, then decided-against it. Gwendolyn already had her inquisitive nose in too many corners of this case. Gabriel would conduct his examination of the upper story without her.

  The marble steps and the gilded railing of the rusty iron balustrade, mute testimony to the departed glory of Seaside House, had been freshly dusted, but in the upper corridor the powdery white grit of Shakkarpur crunched beneath Gabriel’s shoes. He whipped out a tiny flashlight, no larger than a fountain pen, flung a thin lance of radiance through the hot darkness. The beam of light slid along the mildew-streaked walls, picked out ghostly tongues of fungus that hung from the ceiling, exuding a warm, damp odor of decay. Rhoda Curring was right about the complete abandon of the upper half of Seaside House, whatever the truth of her story about hidden dynamite and a dead husband. Spiders had woven their spectral shrouds over every lifeless door in the hall. No, not every door. Gabriel stopped in front of one that was free of its cobweb barrier. Shreds of dusty gossamer still sagged from the frame, but the webs had been torn by someone who had entered the room—recently, very likely, for the spider was already at work repairing the damage.

  Gabriel turned his light downward. Yes, someone had been in the room. The thick dust had been disturbed. There were no distinct prints, but it was evident that feet had passed this way. Moreover, there was—

  Quickly the detective dropped to one knee. There was a dark splotch near the threshold, where something had been splashed, something liquid and dark red. It was dry now. Blood, probably. Gabriel arose, thrust his pass key into the lock, pushed the door open. The hinges groaned.

  The flashlight beam swept in a slow, exploratory semicircle. Shadows wheeled upright, crawled along the wall, expired in gloom. Gabriel heard a dry, whispering sound at his feet. He depressed the light, sprang backward. A snake slithered out from under the bed, squirmed across the crazy-china floor toward the bathroom. Gabriel watched it with round, uneasy eyes. When it had disappeared into the drain, he advanced farther into the room.

  The detective contemplated the desolate picture of tropical nature reclaiming its own from the intrusion of Man. A bougainvillea vine had thrust a slender, thorny branch through a broken window to bloom wanly inside the room. A clump of pale weeds had sprung up from a heap of dirt and refuse in one corner. A lizard scampered up the tattered, rotting window curtains. The chest of drawers leaned forward at a crooked, tired angle, and a pile of wood dust surrounding the broken foot told a story: white ants.

  There was nothing in the whole dreary scene to indicate to Gabriel that the room had any significance in his investigation—yet someone had broken through the cobwebs across the door. He looked under the bed. Nothing. He walked toward the window—and a flash of red caught his eye. An instant later he had picked up Lucy Steel’s red patent-leather handbag from the floor back of a moldy chair.

  Gabriel straightway began taking the room to pieces. He didn’t have to go far, however. He found Lucy Steel’s clothing wadded into a compact bundle at the bottom of the tall walnut clothes-press. Carefully he unfolded the bundle. The black lace lingerie and the white dress. The dress wasn’t very white any more. A large, dark, reddish-brown stain covered part of the back. The discolored material was stiff beneath Gabriel’s fingers. Later, perhaps, he could get Dr. Forsythe to make a test for blood—if necessary. In the meantime, he examined the underthings carefully, going over every inch of the lace with the flashlight. He frowned.

  He directed the light downward again, systematically sweeping the floor with the beam. There must be some clue to the murderer’s identity on the floor. After all, the man did not walk on the ceiling.

  This time he saw something that had escaped him before. In the corner beyond the clothespress gleamed a dozen tiny points of light like the hard, faint sparkle of morning frost. He moved closer, bent down. The sparkle came from a hundred tiny fragments of shattered glass, scattered on the mosaic floor like microscopic diamonds. Something metallic, too, gleamed among the broken glass—small, shining globules that lay in the dust like bird shot. Gabriel reached out his hand to touch them, then, suddenly, he snapped out the light. He stood up. He had heard a disturbing noise.

  He held his breath, listening in the darkness. It was a faint sound, repeated at slow regular intervals, a distant, timid thumping—or a stealthy footstep.

  Gropingly, Gabriel put Lucy’s clothes back in the bottom of the clothespress, listened again. The sound had ceased.

  He tiptoed toward the door, was in the corridor before he again heard the faint, measured rapping. This time he thought he could localize the sound. It seemed to come from above, as though someone were walking cautiously, so cautiously, that four or five seconds elapsed between each footfall. He squeezed the flashlight contact. At the far end of the corridor, the light outlined the rusty steps of a ladder-like iron staircase. There was evidently a garret above him. And someone was up there.

  Gabriel climbed the rusty stairs. He looked at the overhead trapdoor, then put out the flashlight, exchanged it for his automatic. He found he could lift the trap with one hand, raised it a few inches. A cloud of dust blew into his face There was a garret window open—or, more likely, with its glass panes knocked out. When he was sure he was not going to sneeze, he raised the trap another few inches. Nothing happened. He opened it all the way, crawled up on the attic floor, remained crouched for a moment, waiting. He no longer heard the sound of ghostly footsteps.

  His thumb found the safety of his automatic, slipped it off. Still crouching, he moved a few cautious steps away from the open trap. He could see a dim gray oblong—the window through which the wind was blowing from the sea. The faint gleam of starlight did little to dispel the thickness of the blind gloom. Gabriel could barely make out vague masses about him—trunks, probably, and discarded furniture. He could feel the warm, damp wind on his face, and the moisture beading his eyelashes. And inside him he felt a cold, tightening sensation, an instinctive warning that he was not alone in the darkness.

  He was about to stand up when he heard the ghostly footfall again. At the same moment he saw something move, directly in front of him. He ducked behind a dusty box.

  “Hold that pose!” he ordered. “You’re covered.”

  There was no answer.

  The slow, muted tapping continued.

  Puzzled, Gabriel raised his head until his eyes were above the edge of the box. He peered hard into the gloom. Again he saw something move. He thought he saw, in fact, what was causing the sound that had intrigued him. His scalp crawled.

  He stood erect. His left hand sought his pocket lamp. A pencil of light bored through the blackness, sketching a flare of scarlet, a gleam of new hemp rope. The rope was fastened to a rafter overhead. Hanging from the end, her feet eighteen inches off the floor, was Gwendolyn Small in her red dressing gown. She was swinging gently in the breeze from the open window, and her bare heels kicked an overturned chair at regular intervals. There were cobwebs in her white hair, and her face was dark with the purple of strangulation. She stared at Gabriel with horrid, bulging eyes.

  Gabriel slashed the rope with a pocket knife, lowered Gwendolyn Small gently to the floor. There was still warmth in the body, but no life. The old-time actress had played her last role.

  The detective reached for the overturned chair, to set it upright. One of the front legs came off in his hands. It did not break. The wood merely disintegrated between his fingers, and he was grasping a handful of sawdust. White ants, again.

  Gabriel’s lips pursed in a silent whistle.

  Chapter Seventeen

  The Prodigal Who Didn’t Return

  The detective’s soundless whistle continued for a full minute as he tried to fit his jumbled thoughts around this new and unexpected piece which had been abruptly added to the puzzle. What was his next move? He would have to notify Hatton, of course, that Gwendolyn Small was dead. On the other hand, there was the problem of what to do with the sleeping Fred Oaks while the District Officer was prowling through Seaside House. Awkward. Gabriel didn’t want to turn the ex-husband of Lucy Steel over to Hatton until he himself had a chance to talk to him—at length. Besides, he was sure that the D.O. would consider the case closed once Oaks was locked up; and it wouldn’t be closed—not by a mile.

  Gabriel took off his jacket, preparatory to spreading it over the dark, swollen face of Gwendolyn Small, as a gesture of common decency. With one arm still in a sleeve, he suddenly paused. A flashback had intruded itself into his mental kaleidoscope. Twenty minutes ago, he had heard someone moving about in Gwendolyn Small’s apartment—yet twenty minutes ago Gwendolyn was dead; she had probably been dead for nearly an hour. Who, then, had been in Gwendolyn’s room, while Gwendolyn was hanging in the attic, not yet cold? In a trice the second arm had slid out of the jacket, and Gabriel was on his way down the iron stairway.

  Gwendolyn’s apartment was unlocked. Gabriel went in quietly. Light was shining through the half open door from the next room. The first thing that struck his eye was a picture of disorder. Gwendolyn’s fortune-telling cards were scattered over the desk and floor, as though a gust of wind had caught them. Drawers of the desk were pulled out and ransacked. Keys had been pulled off the rack and dropped at random. Even the theatrical photographs on the walls were askew. The place looked as though a cyclone had struck it—a human cyclone, Gabriel decided suddenly, as he heard a sound in the next room. He flattened himself against the wall. The light fanned out into a wider beam, as the connecting door opened all the way. A shadow slid across the floor in front of the detective. He gripped his automatic—waiting.

  “Hello,” said Virginia Hatton casually.

  Gabriel grinned sheepishly. He put up his gun.

  “Hello,” he said. “Find that you were looking for?”

  “I wasn’t looking for anything. You mean all this topsyturvy disorder? I didn’t do that: I’ve just this moment got here. Where’s Miss Small?”

  Gabriel thought he had better not say anything about Miss Small’s whereabouts for the present. “What do you call ‘just this moment’?” he countered.

  “Two, perhaps three minutes before you arrived. Have you seen Miss Small?”

  “Do you usually call on Gwendolyn at three in the morning, Miss Hatton?” Gabriel challenged.

  “Not usually. Not at all, in fact. I came to see you, Mr. Gabriel. Don’t you remember saying to me that if I had anything to tell you, you were at Seaside House, Room 3? I couldn’t sleep, so I came—but your door was locked.”

  Gabriel seized the girl’s wrists, turned them. The palm of her right hand was smudged with soot. She was telling the truth about trying his door.

  “What did you want to tell me?” he asked.

  “Nothing, really. I wanted to ask you—”

  She paused. A look of genuine embarrassment came into her face.

  “You wanted to ask me about Fred Oaks?”

  “Yes.”

  Another one, Gabriel thought. First Lucy, and then Rhoda Curring. Even Gwendolyn Small had said she liked Fred Oaks. Yes, it must be the climate in Shakkarpur. Not a healthy climate, either, for women curious about this Oaks: fatal for Lucy and Gwendolyn, and certainly not much of a tonic for the nervous, guileful Curring woman. Virginia Hatton’s interest, however, was not quite the same. There was something fresh and wholesome about it, even if she knew it wasn’t what the doctor ordered. Gabriel thought he might be able to use it—for his own purposes.

  “You don’t want to see Mr. Oaks, by any chance?” he asked.

  “Yes—oh, yes.” The girl’s tone was eager. That decided Gabriel. He gave a final look around the upset room, decided he could return to that later.

  “Come with me, sister,” the detective said.

  Outside his room, he hesitate was he put his key into the lock, he added, “Just a minute, later, before we go in. Can you take it?”

  “I’m not sure what you mean.”

  “I mean that you’re not going to any Sunday school picnic. If you don’t like things to happen that aren’t nice and ladylike, you’d better not come in. If you can’t stand strong meat, you’d better go right home now.”

  “I’m not going home. I came here for a purpose.”

  “O.K., then.” Gabriel opened the door. He watched the girl’s face as her eyes found the sleeping form behind the haze of mosquito netting. The look of agony that came over her was real, involuntary, heartfelt. She took a faltering step toward the bed, stopped, turned an appealing glance upon Gabriel.

  The detective took his time about answering her unasked question. He was savoring the correctness of his own judgment. There was nothing phony about this girl’s concern over Oaks. She was genuine. She could be useful.

  “He’s all right, I think,” Gabriel said. “He’s been needled with some barbiturate—evipal or pentathal, probably. He’s due to sleep for another three or four hours. Will you stay with him?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “You’ll have to stay in the dark, and I’m going to lock you in. You won’t be afraid?”

  “Why should I be?”

  “Well, this Seaside House has turned out to be more of a charnel house.”

  “I don’t think Lucy Steel’s ghost will haunt me.”

  “There’s two ghosts now, Miss Hatton.”

  “Oh, no! Who?”

  “I just found Gwendolyn Small hanging in the attic.”

  “How awful! Did she destroy herself after all?”

  “That’s what your brother is going to say,” Gabriel said. “But she didn’t. She was murdered.” He paused. “Want to change your mind?”

  “No, I—it doesn’t make any difference. I must speak to Fred when he wakes up. I can’t have him believing that I let him down—over that business with the chokidar.”

  “I wouldn’t let that would you, sister. Just figure that Fred Oaks has been let down by nty of women before this. He must be used to it. It’s not important.”

  “It is important—to me. I’ve found out a good many things about myself tonight, Mr. Gabriel—confusing things. I must get straightened out.”

  “I see.” The detective shoved a cigarette into his mouth but didn’t light it. With the tip of his tongue he rolled it against his upper lip from one corner of his mouth to the other. “All right, listen,” he said at last. “Did anybody see you come to Seaside House tonight?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “Did you see anybody—in Miss Small’s rooms, or any place else?”

  “No.”

  “Good. Now, I’ve got a little work to do in Miss Small’s apartment After that I’ve got to rout your brother out, and tell him what I found in the attic. He’ll come right back here with his crew, naturally. I’ll do my best to keep him away from this room. Don’t open the door for anybody. When I come myself, I’ll use my key. I’ll probably be here before dawn. Will you hold the fort till then?”

  “I’ll do my best.”

  “That’s plenty for anybody,” Gabriel said. “Good luck, then.”

  He turned out the lamp and left.

  Virginia stood perfectly still when he had gone, listening to the sullen murmur of the sea, waiting for her eyes to become accustomed to the darkness. When she could see the tent-like outlines of the mosquito bar, she walked to the bed, lifted the edge of the netting, ducked under, sat down on the side of the mattress. Almost instantly her fingers were seized by a large, warm hand.

 

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