Rather Cool for Mayhem, page 3
Captain McKay collected the ignition keys of all the cars parked outside the cabin. Then he had all of the cocktail guests fingerprinted.
“Merely a precaution,” said the captain, when Eddie Westerford objected to being treated as a common criminal, “to help our identification men eliminate innocent prints. You don’t have to worry. They’ll be thrown away afterwards—unless your prints are already on file somewhere, or if you happened to have killed Dr. Norman.”
Eddie held out his hands to be inked without further objection.
Captain McKay was polite but tough in a casual, quiet way. He was surprisingly informal in his preliminary in-vestigation, and almost offhand in his first questioning. He readily agreed to my suggestion that I make good on the cocktail invitations and whip up a round of dry martinis for the assembled guests and suspects. And I think he was almost as annoyed as I was when Henry Pennington practically snatched the gin and vermouth out of my hands and began performing as self-appointed Ganymede. The captain didn’t know anything about my talents as a barman, but I could tell from his expression that he, too, thought Pennington was too generous with the vermouth.
Pennington was being very much the master of the house, spreading his benign protective presence over Grace as though to shield her from the vulgarities of police procedure. Knowing his present and potential relationship with Grace, this all seemed natural enough to me, but I could see that McKay didn’t like it. He singled out Pennington whenever he felt that a police captain was neglecting his duty if he didn’t make somebody squirm now and then.
“You’ve got a fine, well-developed set of muscles there,” said McKay as Pennington lifted another log to put on the fire. “Where did you get them? Army?”
“No,” said Pennington.
“Navy?”
“I didn’t serve with the armed forces,” said Pennington.
“Well, well. What story did you tell your draft board? Or did you remember to register?”
Pennington put the log on the fire and came over to tower above the police captain. There was a band of pink at the top of his forehead, just where his hair was beginning to thin. Otherwise he showed no sign of emotion. He said: “I think you show extremely bad taste, Captain, in addition to wandering frivolously from your investigation. Would you like to see my Selective Service Registration card?”
“Yes,” said McKay. He took the card from Pennington’s fingers, glanced at it, and grunted. “You look pretty healthy for a 4-F,” he said.
“The Army didn’t think so,” said Pennington coolly. “Neither did the Marine Corps. For your information, Captain, I tried to enlist in the Marines in September, 1943. You might make a note of the date: September 15. The Marines may still have my electro-cardiogram on file, in case you’re seriously interested in my health.”
“Bad heart, eh?” Captain McKay was not at all apologetic. “Been under medical treatment?”
“Yes.”
“Who’s your doctor?”
“I haven’t one at the moment,” Pennington replied. “It was Dr. Norman. Do you think a cardiac condition is motive for murder?”
Captain McKay didn’t seem to be interested in motives at this point. Once he had learned that all the nine people present, with the exception of me, had known Dr. Norman more or less well, he concentrated on the roads they had traveled to reach Blindman’s Lake, and on their detailed itineraries for the forty-five minutes during which Grace and I had been absent from the cabin. He seemed particularly interested in Eddie Westerford when he learned that Eddie had parked his wife and Betty Hurley in a bar just outside of Blue Falls for half an hour while he made a phone call to New York.
“Did you talk on the phone all that time?” Captain McKay wanted to know.
“Most definitely not,” said Eddie. “I was calling the producer of my Sunday night radio show. He hadn’t reached the studio yet but they expected him in five or ten minutes. They said he’d call me back. Since I knew that Grace had no phone here, I gave the number of the pay station in the bar and waited. I had to wait for nearly twenty minutes.”
“Gracious!” said Captain McKay. “And you waited all that time in the phone booth?”
“Yes, in the booth.”
“Why?”
“Well, I was afraid I wouldn’t hear the phone ring if I went back to join the girls. The phone booth was just outside the men’s room and I wasn’t sure I could hear the bell from the table where we were all sitting.”
“You mean your wife couldn’t see the booth from where she was drinking?”
“No, she couldn’t.”
“Then when she says you were in the phone booth all the time, she was just guessing?”
“Not precisely. I told her I was in the booth, and my wife happens to believe I’m a rather truthful person.”
That seemed to satisfy Captain McKay. He was not satisfied, however, by the universal denial that anyone had sent the telegrams in Grace Boyd’s name inviting people to cocktails at Blindman’s Lake.
“I’m warning you,” he said, “that the telegrams are being traced. I know already that the text and addresses were telephoned to the Blue Falls office of Western Union last night. By morning, I’ll know who did the telephoning. One of you—somebody who knew just what kind of sensational entertainment was scheduled for five o’clock—is lying. Anybody want to change his story?”
Nobody did.
“Okay,” said McKay. “Then I’m holding you all as material witnesses, at least until after the autopsy. If you play ball with me, I won’t be formal about it and make you put up bond. You can stay at the inn tonight.”
He let the Stewarts go home, because he knew they lived just down the road. Grace insisted on sleeping at the cabin, somewhat to my surprise, and the captain didn’t object. So of course Henry Pennington had to sleep there too, to protect Grace. Since I was the original weekend guest, I insisted on staying there to keep things decent. Only Pennington, with his consummate proprietary manner, moved my bag out of the extra bedroom and installed himself in the only comfortable extra bed.
I didn’t mind too much, and bedded down on a sofa in the living room near the fire; it was uncomfortably near the spot where I had first come upon the late Dr. Norman, but I’d had enough martinis not to care.
A State trooper hung around for a while, dozing in front of the fire, but a little before midnight he went out and I heard his motorcycle popping down the road. Then I fell asleep.
I was awakened by something that scared the sleep right out of me. I didn’t know what it was at first, except that it sounded like a shot. Then I heard it again, and knew it wasn’t a shot—just acorns dropping on the roof. I lay awhile, laughing at myself, when I heard another sound, one that made me sit upright. I listened, then slipped into my shoes and went to the front door of the cabin.
I stood for a long moment, listening, straining my ears for the repetition of a sound I half hoped had been the product of my imagination. A few tireless katydids were still sawing out their stupid litany, and a small, cold wind nuzzled the sleeping trees. But the other sound did not come again—the sound I thought I had heard that afternoon while building the fire, the measured rustle of dead leaves, the repeated dry whisper that warned of feet moving across the leaf-carpeted flat, the feet of someone seeking in the darkness, perhaps seeking what he had not found in Grace’s cabin after Dr. Norman had been killed. I heard nothing, yet I could not get rid of the sense of impending catastrophe that had been haunting me all evening, the feeling that one of these charming uninvited guests who had come to Blindman’s Lake for cocktails had not yet completed the evil cycle begun with the death of Dr. Norman.
I peered hard into the night, but a scud of cloud had snuffed out the stars and the blackness was opaque. I thought I could make out forms in the darkness, but they were motionless forms—shrubs, perhaps, or the parked automobiles. I took a step away from the doorway, then another, and, after an interminable ten seconds, a third. The complaint of the dead leaves beneath each step, a faint rustle by day, was like the crackling of a forest fire in the silence of the night. Again I waited, listening.
This time I was sure I heard a sound. It was a new sound, a faint, hollow metallic note, the sound of something solid briefly drawn across thin metal.
A drop of cold formed at the base of my tingling scalp and seemed to trickle down my spine.
I listened again—and heard the racing beat of the blood in my ears, the loud thumping of my own heart. Then a sudden gust of wind rattled through the dead leaves and the restless murmur of the trees rose in response like a tattoo of alarm.
Quickly I struck out across the flat while the noise of the wind covered my footfall. I had completed two-thirds of the distance to the nearest car when the wind dropped abruptly to a chill gasp, then died.
I took two more steps. I stopped again, imagining that the crash of dead leaves echoed in the darkness.
I was quite near Grace’s car now. I could make out its outlines. I could almost touch it. I took another step.
There was a great flash of light, a blinding light that flared behind my eyes, a painful, whirling light inside my head that sparked and flamed and expanded until it filled my skull, then exploded into empty darkness.
When the light came back, it was a steady ruddy glow through my eyelids. I opened my eyes. Grace Boyd was standing over me with a flashlight.
“You sure pack a wallop,” I said. “You didn’t have to hit me quite so hard.”
Grace said: “You’re hurt, Jim.”
I was hurt, superficially at least. There was a little man with a hammer banging on my skull just behind one ear, but I was determined to ignore him. “Hell no, I’m not hurt,” I said. “I was just resting.” I tried my legs. I could stand. “How long was I out?”
“Twenty, maybe thirty seconds,” Grace said. “I heard you get up and leave the cabin. When you didn’t come back, I went to the door. I heard something bang against a fender so I came out to investigate. And here you were … resting.”
“Alone?”
“Alone.”
I took the flashlight from Grace’s fingers. As I swung the beam inside the car, the light made a cameo of Grace’s silhouette against the darkness. She was wearing woolly light blue pajamas which fitted her very well indeed.
I moved the disc of light across the dashboard. There were marks on the enameled metal. Someone had been trying to force the glove compartment with a screwdriver or something similar.
“The police took your keys, didn’t they?” I asked.
“Yes, but I have dupes.” She reached into her pocket.
“I could have sworn the police took your dupes, too. Didn’t I see you fish them out of your bag and turn them over like a good girl?”
“I keep an extra set behind the clock on the mantel,” Grace said, “just in case I lock the car some day with the originals in the ignition lock and my bag on the front seat.”
“Do you always go to bed with duplicate car keys in your pajamas?”
“Always, on the night of a murder.” Her voice had a hard edge. Her face, too, was hard in the glow of the flashlight—all but her eyes. Even in the half-darkness her eyes were warm and sensitive.
I took the keys and opened the glove compartment. My pipe and tobacco pouch were still there. I took them out. The Leica, too, was still there.
The automatic was gone.?
“Where’s the gun?” I asked.
“What gun?”
“The .32 Colt automatic that was here this afternoon.”
“Oh that. Isn’t it there?”
“Look for yourself. Where is it?”
“I don’t know. Maybe the police took it.”
“Do you have a permit to carry it?”
“No, it’s not mine.”
“Whose is it?”
Grace did not answer. She turned her head. Another cone of light cut through the darkness and was coming toward us. The State trooper who had been drowsing by the hearth earlier in the evening was coming back. I closed the glove compartment and pocketed the keys before he came up.
“Going for a little drive maybe?” said the trooper.
“We’d love to. Are you giving back the keys?”
“What are you folks doing out here?”
“We couldn’t sleep. I came out to get my tobacco that I left in the car.”
“You shouldn’t ought to be walking around,” said the trooper. The beam of his flashlight caressed Grace’s pajama-clad figure, then shone hard at me. “Better go to bed.”
“Anything you say, officer.”
I took Grace’s arm and started to walk her back to the cabin. The trooper remained behind. I could see his light probing the parked cars.
When we were out of earshot, I asked again: “Whose gun was it?”
Grace hesitated, then said: “Bob Stewart’s.”
“Why did you borrow it?”
“I didn’t. Bob Stewart telephoned me last night in New York and asked me to pick up the gun at his office and bring it out when I came. I stopped by his office on my way to get you, and his secretary gave me the gun.”
“Why does Stewart own a gun?”
“He’s treasurer of an aircraft firm. Payrolls or something. He never carried it. It was always in his office.”
“Why did he want it today, at Blindman’s Lake?”
“I don’t know. Bob didn’t say. Did you take the gun, Jim?”
“Of course not. It was still there when we arrived this afternoon. I saw it when I took out the Leica.”
“Do you think somebody used it to kill Norman?”
“Maybe. The autopsy and the ballistics experts will tell us soon enough—if they find the gun.”
I didn’t tell Grace that I felt, deep inside, that they would find the gun all right, and that it would have my fingerprints all over it, and that it would prove to have fired the shot that killed Norman. Instead, I kissed Grace goodnight. It was meant to be a friendly, reassuring, paternal kiss, but I’m not sure I succeeded.
Then, on a hunch, I looked in on Henry Pennington in the extra bedroom. Pennington was snoring gently, with the measured, dignified restraint becoming a successful business man and a potential senator. I went back to my sofa in front of the dying fire.
It wasn’t until hours later, while I was trying desperately to go back to sleep, that I understood the meaning of the marks on the dashboard. When I realized what it was that the murderer was after in the glove compartment—for it was certainly the murderer who had conked me when I interrupted his work—I broke out in a cold sweat. I had a moment of relief at having got off without becoming corpse No. 2, but it was followed by a feeling akin to terror. After all the murderer was still at large and he had still not got what he wanted.
I wished then that I had taken the Leica with me when I took the tobacco from the car. But it was too late.
Chapter Four
The moment I realized the significance of the Leica, the whole mechanics of the murder became clear to me.
The footsteps in the dead leaves which I thought I had heard while building the fire in the afternoon were not the product of my imagination. They were real footsteps, the footsteps of the murderer walking to Grace’s car to take the gun from the glove compartment. The murderer had been waiting at the cabin when we arrived—waiting for Dr. Norman. He—or she—had been hidden in the shrubbery near the door. How well he was hidden he was not sure. Since he could see me examining the gun while Grace was opening the back door of the cabin, he was afraid that some part of him might have been visible in the photographs I took of Grace in the doorway and standing against the evergreen shrubbery. He saw me carry the camera into the house but apparently did not see Grace carry it back to the car later. Having determined on murder, he jumped at the chance of being handed, practically on a silver platter, a gun which belonged to somebody else. He took the gun from the car while I was building the fire and Grace was changing her clothes. While we were shopping in the village, Dr. Norman arrived and was shot. The murderer then ransacked the cabin, looking for the Leica so that he could destroy the film that might have—he wasn’t sure—given him away. He could not find the camera.
The murderer therefore must have returned with the uninvited cocktail guests. The throbbing lump on the side of my head made me sure he was one of the guests. Either he was one of the Hurleys or the Westerfords who could have walked up the hill from the inn in three or four minutes, only to be interrupted by me while trying to get the Leica out of Grace’s car. Or one of the Stewarts, who were only a ten-minute walk away in the other direction. Or even Pennington, who could have sneaked out of the cabin while I was dozing and sneaked back again while Grace and I were talking to the State trooper. Despite Grace’s assurance that Pennington was too practical a man to kill for jealousy, I wasn’t ready to write him off so easily. Maybe I was prejudiced.
When the place of the Leica in the pattern of events finally came to me, I had for several hours been alternately dozing and trying to find a painless position for the bump on my head. My legs were stiff with cold as I rolled off the sofa. The fire was out. My shoes were damp as I stepped into them. I went to the door.
It was already getting light outside, a cheerless gray light that cast no shadows. Tatters of mist clung to the trees and Blindman’s Lake lay beneath a white shroud. The cold sweat of dawn beaded the windshields of the parked automobiles. I had an empty feeling inside me as I walked out to Grace’s car. I knew what I would find even before I looked into the glove compartment.
The Leica was gone.
The murderer had evidently not gone very far after he slugged me. He had retreated into the woods until the excitement had blown over, then returned to take the camera. Even if I had taken time to lock the glove compartment when the State trooper was bearing down on us, the murderer would have taken it. He would have forced the lock, as he was trying to do before I surprised him.
