Call After Midnight, page 6
Sometime or other, though, Jenny went to the window. A pallid light was streaking over the lawn and sea wall and the gray Sound.
Blanche sat and stared at nothing with eyes from which all the color seemed to have faded. At last a knock on the door brought Jenny’s pulses leaping in her ears. She said, “Come in.”
A young policeman entered, cleared his throat and said that the Captain would want to see them soon. He then stood in a soldierly posture in front of the door until Jenny told him, absently, to sit down. He hesitated and sat down. He looked wistfully at a package of cigarettes on the table. “Cigarette?” Jenny said.
But he was staunch. “No, thank you, miss.”
After another age someone knocked again; the young policeman sprang to the door, there was a murmured word or two, then he turned back, “Miss Fair, first, please.”
Blanche pulled herself up like an old woman and went out. The young policeman closed the door after her and with a polite murmur sat down again. It was like waiting in a dentist’s reception room, only worse. It was so much worse that Jenny didn’t think she could bear it and had to.
It wasn’t so bad when it actually happened, at least not at first. The pallid light was filling the room, dulling a lamp which Jenny had no recollection of having turned on, when a knock came at the door again. This time a man came in. He was swarthy, short and authoritative, with black eyebrows and heavy eyelids. He gave the young policeman some kind of signal, for the young policeman whipped out a notebook and pencil. “For the record,” said the swarthy policeman. “If you don’t mind.” He introduced himself. “I’m Captain Parenti. Now don’t be upset. Just take your time.” But he glanced at the watch on his thick brown wrist.
“The—she—” Jenny moistened her dry lips. “Where shall I begin?”
“At the beginning. When your former husband phoned to you and asked you to come here.”
That was the part of it which was not so bad. It was merely a recital of facts. When she reached the point where there had been some discussion over calling a doctor she paused and Captain Parenti said, “Go on,” and moved to a more comfortable position in one of the deep, velvet-covered chairs.
She went on, but carefully now, making it very clear that Fiora had not been seriously hurt that first time.
Captain Parenti said shortly, “So nobody called a doctor until after you and Calendar arrived. I know that. It was then reported to the police. A little late. Go on.”
Yes, they had reported it and the police came. Then Fiora had asked her to sit with her that night.
“Why?”
“Because—” It began to grow more and more difficult. The fact was that Fiora was not entirely sure in her mind that Peter hadn’t shot at her. Jenny had a notion that Captain Parenti noted her hesitation. “Because she wanted me,” she said, “so I did.”
She went on and now she was choosing her words with great caution. When it came to Peter entering the kitchen, telling her he had needed her and then abruptly taking her in his arms, it was as if a red light, far away but warning of danger, flashed. There must not be anything to suggest a quarrel between Fiora and Peter. Peter was safe; he could not have shot Fiora. Yet when a woman was murdered didn’t the police automatically suspect the husband? She skipped that part of it entirely. “Peter came in while I was heating the milk. Then Cal and Blanche, I mean—”
“Miss Fair, yes.”
“They came in, Blanche thought she’d, heard someone. Then they went back upstairs and Peter—”
“Picked up a stocking.” He had of course questioned Peter minutely. He had questioned Blanche and Cal. She was instinctively thankful that Peter had had the wisdom, and Cal and Blanche the friendliness, to omit describing the incident in the kitchen, of Jenny and Peter in each other’s arms.
She said, “Yes. Then we talked a moment and heard Fiora scream. We ran and there were two shots—”
“Where were you then?”
“In the dining room. Peter ran out into the hall, I could see him, the hall light was on—”
“After the shots?”
“Yes. I ran out, too. Cal must have reached Fiora’s room first. Peter ran down the hall and Blanche fainted, that is she sort of collapsed, and—I sat down on the stairs. Then Cal phoned—”
“Yes. Let’s go over it again, please. The whole thing. Try to remember every detail you can.”
This took longer. Again she skipped the moment in Peter’s arms. But this time she remembered the fact that she had found the back door with the bolt off and had put it on.
“You didn’t tell me that.”
“I didn’t think of it.”
He glanced at his watch. “Let’s go over it all again.”
I can’t, Jenny thought, but she did, carefully.
Her voice died away at last; Captain Parenti looked at his watch, rose and said in an offhand way, “You’ll be willing to swear to being with your former husband, in the dining room, when the shots were fired.”
Jenny instantly saw the purport of his statement; the red light of danger flashed near. “Yes! It’s the truth.”
“Thank you,” he said, gave another imperceptible signal to the young policeman and both of them walked out of the room.
It was then broad daylight, a chilly gray day. Jenny felt as if she had run a long and exhausting race. She went to the window and saw two policemen walking slowly, scrutinizing the lawn, the rocks beyond the sea wall, everything. Clearly they were looking for a gun or for any evidence of a murderer’s escape.
She went back and sat down on the bed; there was a great deal to think about. But the next thing she was really conscious of was that someone was leaning over her, very gently pulling a blanket over her. She half opened her eyes and saw Cal walking softly out and shutting the door.
She couldn’t shake off the paralyzing hold of sleep. But she knew vaguely that hours had passed when she awoke because someone was knocking at the door. She said, “Come in.”
It was a young woman, a girl really, with curly dark hair and dark eyes; she wore a blue uniform and a black sweater and carried a tray.
“Oh!” Jenny sat up.
“I’m Rosa.”
“Oh,” Jenny said again blankly.
“We work for Mr. Vleedam. Victor and me. He gave us the gardener’s cottage to live in.”
“Oh, yes, I remember. What’s happened? Have the police found the—the murderer?”
Rosa shook her head. “They’re still questioning everybody. They questioned me and they questioned Victor. We didn’t know a thing about it till all the police cars got here. It’s dreadful. Poor Mrs. Vleedam! Oh, Mr. Vleedam said to wake you. Captain Parenti wants to talk to you again.”
Sleep was only a temporary escape. “What time is it?”
“After two. Is there anything else, Miss—Mrs. Vleedam?”
“No, thank you.” The hot coffee smelled delicious.
Rosa pushed back a thick curl, waited a moment and then went away.
By two-thirty Jenny had eaten, dressed and felt better for her heavy sleep. But she went down the stairs very soberly. Art Furby sat in the hall, staring thoughtfully at the floor.
Art Furby was almost as truly an inheritance of Peter’s as the railroad or his house. Not only had his father been Peter’s father’s closest friend but there had been a time, when exactly Jenny didn’t know, during which the railroad had been in a state bordering upon bankruptcy. At that time Art’s father had stepped in, put every cent of money he could rake and scrape into the road and, Peter always said, had saved it. The money had never quite been paid back as money, but Art Furby still held a sizeable block of stock. He also held, and probably always would hold, a vice-presidency in the Sheraton Valley Railroad; he was head of the legal department, general counsel for the road. He would indeed, Jenny thought briefly, have had hurt feelings when Cal was moved up ahead of him to the presidency.
He was older than Peter but not much, in his middle forties. He said little and what he said was conventional and predictable. He wasn’t brilliant but he had to know his job and it seemed to Jenny that as some of the hardness and responsibility of railroad management had rubbed off on Peter, so had the requirements of Art’s profession rubbed off on him. Even his gray tweed jacket and gray slacks and sleek graying hair looked discreet and composed.
If he felt that he had never quite been granted the honor and authority which he deserved, he never showed it. If there were ever something slightly grudging, slightly critical in Art’s relation to Peter, it was so slight that Jenny was never sure it actually existed.
He was always correct; he had no need to explain his presence to Jenny but of course he did. He rose and put out his hand. “I came as soon as I heard. How do you do, Jenny?”
She took his hand.
“I’m glad to see you again,” he said politely. “Not of course in these circumstances.”
She glanced down toward the library from which came the rumble of voices.
Art said, “Peter is in the library. The police are talking to him. I believe they want to see you again. Yes, as soon as I heard of this dreadful thing, I came of course, in the event Peter needs me. Not that I can be of much help as a lawyer. I’ve never had anything to do with criminal law. But then Peter isn’t at all likely to need a lawyer. I haven’t seen Peter yet. I came out last night to my house. Blanche phoned to me about eleven-thirty last night. She rang off rather abruptly but I didn’t dream of anything serious. Cal told me that it was just then that the first attempt to kill Fiora was made.”
“You’ve seen Cal?”
“Oh yes. And Blanche briefly. That’s all. However, I understand that they’ve not got the murderer yet. Terrible.”
“Yes.”
“Shocking.”
“Yes.” She wondered when he would run out of adjectives.
“Dreadful.”
“Dreadful for Fiora,” Jenny said with something cold and pitiful in her heart. Poor Fiora, with her rich husband and her three fur coats.
Art was getting out a snowy handkerchief; he paused to look at her with extremely acute—and discreet—gray eyes. “Oh yes, yes. That’s the frightful thing. Somehow I never felt that you—well, I wouldn’t have expected you to feel any particular affection for Fiora.”
There it was, the tiny barb which seemed to come out of Art even when he didn’t intend it. He said, “But of course disliking Fiora, as naturally you would, and wanting her to die are two different things.”
“I didn’t want her to die!”
“I was a little surprised to learn that Peter had asked you to come out here.”
“So was I,” Jenny said.
“Why was that?”
It was not the only time that Jenny was to be asked that question but there was only one answer. “Peter was shocked, upset. He wanted Cal to come and he wanted me.”
“Forgive me, Jenny, but that—well, as I said, it surprised me.”
“I don’t see why,” she said boldly. “People can be friends even after a divorce.”
“But I shouldn’t have thought—well, there it’s none of my business. Peter should have called me.”
“There wasn’t anything anybody could do. Fiora wasn’t seriously hurt.”
“That first time,” he said. “It would have been better to have taken that first attempt on her life more seriously.”
Hindsight is easy. Jenny didn’t say that. She said, “Yes.”
The library door opened and Blanche came out. Her blue-black hair swept in a full curve around her face, not a hair was out of place; she was chic and elegant in a tweed suit; she wore her bangle bracelet and small string of pearls and she looked like a hag.
Her brilliant coloring had faded to nothing; her face was sallow as a candle; even her green eyes seemed to have faded and her lipstick stood out in queer disharmony. Her chin seemed to have tucked itself inward; there were small pouches under her eyes; her nose was pinched. She said, “Oh, are you still here, Art?”
Art eyed Blanche rather narrowly and a faint impression of Jenny’s was suddenly erased. Somehow, sometime she had got a notion that Art Furby and Blanche were very good friends indeed; also she knew that Art had had a wife somewhere, an invalid in some sanitarium; she was never mentioned but Jenny had rather felt that her existence accounted for the fact that Blanche and Art remained only very good friends. Not, she thought oddly, that she could possibly conceive of Blanche flinging herself into a reckless and hot-blooded love affair with anybody! But that formless impression must have been wrong, for there was now a definite sense of something guarded, polite but coldly reserved, between Art and Blanche. Art said, “I want to see Peter, of course.”
Blanche turned to Jenny. “They want you now. In the library. Jenny, I’m afraid I did a very troublesome kind of thing. But I really couldn’t help myself.”
The tiny red light of danger flickered. “What did you do?”
Blanche rubbed one hand across her eyes. “I’m not myself. I couldn’t think. They kept after me—Captain Parenti and—he kept asking about everything, details, everything.” She took her hand away and said, “I’m afraid—that is, I know I told him how Cal and I found you and Peter in each other’s arms a few minutes before Fiora was shot.”
It was like having a bucket of cold water dashed in her face. Jenny caught her breath.
“I didn’t mean to.” Blanche rubbed her puffy eyes again. “He said he had questioned Peter and you and Cal. He said I must try to remember everything, every smallest thing. Then he kept on and on about your going to get hot milk for Fiora and why had Cal and I gone to the kitchen at all. I said I’d heard somebody on the stairs—it must have been you or Peter. Whoever shot Fiora must have used the back stairs and I couldn’t have heard that. I was uneasy so I called Cal. But then—oh well,” Blanche said wearily, “Captain Parenti wouldn’t give up. He seemed to know so much. I thought Cal or Peter—or even you must have told him—”
Art Furby said, “Told him what?”
“Peter and Jenny—that is—”
“We were hugging each other,” Jenny said bluntly.
“But really it helped you both more than it could hurt. I mean it’s almost like an alibi for you both, you see, only a few minutes before she was shot—”
“Yes. But there was nothing—” Jenny stopped, for of course in the eyes of the police there might be a great deal. First wife in the arms of the husband; second wife murdered a few moments later. “All right,” she said and walked back to the library feeling as if she were about to mount the scaffold.
But she had been with Peter when they heard the shots. Peter knew that she was only a few feet from him. Blanche and Cal must have seen them running up the stairs after the shots.
But she had something to explain and didn’t know exactly what the explanation was. In a hurry to get the ordeal over with she didn’t knock but opened the library door. Cal was standing in the middle of the room, looking white and very angry. Peter was standing at the window, his back turned to the room, his fists jammed into his pockets. Captain Parenti sat, his thick figure slumped, in a deep chair. “Come in,” he said to her. “You can go now, Mr. Vleedam—Mr. Calendar.”
Peter didn’t move. Cal said, “I’ll stay, if you please—”
“Are you Mrs. Vleedam’s lawyer?” Captain Parenti said with an edge in his voice.
Clearly he expected no answer and got none. Cal’s hand doubled up as if he wanted to hit Parenti, to hit anything, and he had to yield. “I’m sorry, Jenny,” he said tersely, went to Peter and touched his arm. Peter turned, gave her a blank look and followed Cal out of the room.
“Sit down, Mrs. Vleedam,” Captain Parenti said. “Now then, what about this love scene with your former husband, a few moments before his wife was killed?” He eyed her for a moment. “You might as well tell me the truth. Your former husband admits it. Miss Fair saw you.”
“It was nothing. We hadn’t seen each other for a long time. He was fond of me—”
“So he got a divorce.”
“We were still friends.”
“So you fell into each other’s arms.”
“It was only—impulse. Nothing—”
“Did your former husband tell you to say that?”
So that must have been Peter’s reply. “No.”
Captain Parenti rubbed his fleshy nose. “Why then does John Calendar deny it?”
“Deny—”
“He says there wasn’t any love scene at all. He walked out in the kitchen; Miss Fair had thought she heard someone on the front stairs and aroused him. He says he didn’t see anything of the kind.”
But he had seen. He was trying to protect Peter. She said nothing.
Captain Parenti said, “Is he protecting your former husband, or protecting you?”
“It meant nothing.”
“Then why did you come here when Mr. Vleedam asked you to come?”
“Because he was upset, shocked. Frightened about Fiora.”
Captain Parenti’s eyelids lifted a little. “It seems very clear that that was a first attempt at murder which wasn’t successful.”
“Peter didn’t know that. Nobody thought of that. Peter only wanted Cal and me to come. Naturally.”
Captain Parenti was silent for a moment. Then he said thoughtfully, “I don’t think that’s so natural.”
“Well, it was.”
“No, it doesn’t seem so natural to me,” he said as if communing with himself. “There’s a divorce. He marries another woman. Then the instant he sends for you, you come back. Only one reason I can see for that. You and he wanted to get together again. The easiest way could be to get rid of the second wife.”
She shot up from her chair. “No! It wasn’t that way at all. No!”
“Sit down. Well, then, if that’s not so, does your conduct seem sensible to you?”
“No,” she said shortly, “I wish I hadn’t come.”
She, the discarded wife, in the house at Peter’s request when the new, the victorious wife was killed. The danger lights were flickering now, bright and dead ahead.
She sat down; she summoned all the composure of which she was capable and looked straight at Captain Parenti who was looking at the crystal rabbit lighter. He picked it up, turned it around, seemed to satisfy himself that it was a lighter and said, “Were you on the back stairs last night at all?”
