Black Cat Weekly #10

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 2CANTRELL’S house was at the extreme edge of the city limits, practically in the country. But the city police were the ones to answer a notification that murder had been committed, and they arrived in a hurry. Terry Cantrell had phoned for them; it had been done before they found me bending over that chair in the library, and I had barely turned away from the door of the study when there was a trampling of feet and two uniformed men, and a man with a doctor’s bag, and then Nolan came in.

He was rather short, and not at all impressive, and he had the disillusioned look that one expects on the face of police reporters. It isn’t usual on a cop, though they have as much to do with crime as anybody else. The difference may be that police reporters don’t believe in anything, while cops still believe in politics.

“This way,” said Terry, politely. “I’m Terry Cantrell. It’s my uncle who’s been murdered.” Then he added bitterly, “I’m his heir, I believe, and your logical suspect.”

Sally Morris said quickly, “Nonsense, Terry! I can testify—”

Nolan waved his hands. “Let it go, let it go!” he interrupted fretfully. “This is business with us; it ain’t a movie. We ain’t suspecting anybody until we got some idea about what’s happened. This way, you say?”

Terry led the way into the study, closed the door. After two or three minutes—while the rest of us simply sat or stood around—he came out again. Adele wet her lips. “What— what did they say?”

Terry glanced at her. “They say it’s murder,” he said ironically; “they’ll ask all of us questions in a little while, and please stick around. I think—” He looked at Sally— “I think we could all do with a drink. I know I could.”

He rang for Jermyn. The butler came in, still ghastly to look at. “We need a drink, Jermyn,” said Terry. Then he added, “I think you’d better take one yourself. You look like you need it. —That’s an order, Jermyn.”

“Yes, sir. Thank you, sir,” said Jermyn.

Purcell leaned back in his chair and said meditatively, “Queer that such things can happen and one has no warning of them. I was up in my room packing that film for the mail. And I was whistling a tune. I’d no idea ...”

“I,” said Terry sardonically, “was out on the lawn. By myself, by the way, and I’m chronically broke and expectant.”

“I saw you, Terry,” said Sally Morris quickly. “I—I watched you the whole time.”

Then she flushed, horribly embarrassed.

“I think it unlikely,” said Terry, with elaborate politeness.

Purcell looked at me. I said shortly, “If the conversation has turned to alibis, I haven’t any. You saw where I was and what I was doing.”

* * * *

Jermyn came back with glasses and soda and bottles of Scotch and one of sherry. Mrs. Winthrop asked for sherry in a weak voice. Adele shook her head. She looked at me oddly. I took a drink; I needed it.

Then we sat around and sat around. I remember that Adele sat staring at nothing for a long time. She shivered a little. I’d liked her a lot, during dinner. I’d felt protecting and indignant and ferociously resolved to get justice for her, when I went into Cantrell’s study—and was the first person to see him dead. But not Adele or anybody else was very good company for me right now. Because I knew of a motive for Cantrell’s murder—one hell of a good motive—that would not only fit me, but practically anybody else in the house including the servants. It made me feel pretty sick.

It was those platters. They were a fortune. As far as I was aware, only Cantrell and myself knew of their value. But anybody else who learned of it—

Adele came over and sat down beside me. She said rather embarrassedly; “It appears that none of us has an alibi. Were you—were you in the library the whole time? Didn’t you see anyone at all?”

“I was there the whole time,” I said untruthfully.

“Oh ...” said Adele.

Her voice was queer. After an instant she got up and went back to the fireplace, shivered as if she were chillier than before. Then Purcell burst out suddenly, enormously pleased with himself; “By George, this is a chance!”

He looked around eagerly. “I’ll see if I can wangle permission to make a picture-story of this! We’ll have to pose the discovery of the body, of course, but I can make a complete, actual, picture-record of the whole thing as it happens, up to the actual end of it all!” His enthusiasm increased. “Any picture-magazine in the country would jump at it! You wouldn’t mind, would you? ... Nothing like it’s ever been done before!”

He grinned excitedly, like a man who has just had the bright idea of the century. But just then Nolan appeared in the study door. “Okay,” he said. “I’m sorry, but I got to ask you people some questions, one at a time. Who’ll come in first?”

Terry Cantrell stood up, went in. He was inside for probably fifteen minutes. A cop came out and went off on some errand. Terry emerged. As he came out the door, Sally Morris—very pale—got up to go in. He stopped her and said harshly, “Look here! You tell the exact and literal truth! That’s what I’ve done!”

She went in without making a reply. She was very white, indeed. Terry gnawed at his fingernails while she was inside. She came out, paler still. Adele looked at her somehow appealingly.

“It’s not bad,” said Sally unsteadily. “But of course—with Uncle Tom’s body still in there ...”

Adele went in. Mrs. Winthrop was next. She took her son Joe with her. I think he’d have preferred to go in alone, as more dignified. When they came out he looked crestfallen and his mother was weeping copiously.

The cop came back from his errand, whatever it had been, and went in before Nolan could call Purcell or me. Nolan came out and told us he’d be back in a minute. He hurried off somewhere and was gone for half an hour. Adele sat rather stiffly, staring at nothing.

But something had occurred to me and I wanted to get back into that room to find out if I was right.

I heard cars roll up to the wall outside the house; they stopped there. It was so deadly quiet that I even heard voices. More police, of course. Maybe reporters.

Then Nolan came back. Very quiet and businesslike. He jerked his thumb at Purcell. Purcell went in the study. He was in there for a long time. He came out beaming, Nolan beckoned to me. “Let’s get it over with. It shouldn’t take long.”

I followed him inside. I was shaky as the devil. I’d had the better part of an hour and a half in which to think, and I was in one ungodly mess inside. When I went in to row with Cantrell—and found him murdered—the shock had knocked everything else out of my head. But now I wanted to know if those platters were gone.

They were.

Nolan waited for me inside the study. I took one step in the door, and a sinking feeling went all over me. Cantrell had kept the platters in his study, displayed in a hutch cabinet. They were safe there because as far as I knew only he and I knew of their value. Now the cabinet had been moved to make room for the rococo desk—and its shelves were empty.

The rococo desk would normally have taken my eye immediately. It was something on the order of that rather over-famous Bureau du Roi in the Louvre, by Oeben and Reisener. But there were the empty hutch cabinet-shelves, and there was a sheet over the chair at Cantrell’s ordinary desk, and there was something under the sheet. Cantrell.

“Okay,” said Nolan. “I know your name an’ all that. You got anything to say that might help?”

I shook my head numbly.

“Sit down,” said Nolan. “Look here!” He pointed at the sheet-covered figure. “He was gonna put on some kind of show. What was it?”

“I’ve no ideas,” I said.

It was true. I didn’t know what Cantrell intended to do. Only what I’d intended to make him. But I stumbled, found I’d blundered into Purcell’s camera-tripod with the camera on top, all set up to take pictures when Cantrell’s now-never-to-take-place show was staged. I pulled up a chair and sat in it.

“He specially invited you to come out here,” said Nolan. “You were one guy he was bound to have on hand. That so?”

I nodded. Cantrell had telephoned me and had insisted feverishly that I put aside everything else to come out to dinner. He mentioned some remarkable event then.

“This guy Terry Cantrell,” said Nolan, “says the only show he knows of is that his an’ Sally Morris’ engagement was gonna be announced. How do you rate in on that?”

“I don’t,” I said. “I didn’t know it, but—”

I shrugged.

“Mmmmm. This guy Terry Cantrell don’t talk like a guy who’s crazy about the girl. What’s the matter with him?”

“Nothing,” I said. “But he’s lived with his uncle; that would make almost anybody a little bit queer.”

“Huh? How’s that?”

I tried, but it wasn’t an easy task to explain Cantrell to anybody who hadn’t known about him. He simply smothered everybody by sheer insistence and exuberance. Terry had never been allowed to accomplish anything in his whole life. If, as a small boy, he’d started to make an aero-plane model, his uncle grandly ordered a dozen of the finest power-driven toy planes for him. And Terry naturally got no pleasure from them and was deterred by their perfection from trying to make his own. Even Sally was quite possibly the result of Cantrell’s ebullient showing off. It was quite likely that he’d seen Terry showing signs of romantic interest in Sally, and had promptly spoiled everything by shoving him forcibly toward a marriage he’d have wanted if he’d been left alone.

Nolan listened, seeming to be thinking of something else. “Uh-huh,” he said when I stopped. “But this show, now. You must have some kinda idea what it was gonna be about!”

“The only guess I can make,” I said, “is this desk. I heard about it and its association, and heard it had been shipped to him on approval. Maybe it’s remarkable in some way, though I can’t see it at the moment. From this camera, set up as it is, it looks like Purcell was going to make some pictures as part of the exhibition, showing-off, or whatever it was that Cantrell planned. If the desk is something really outstanding, Cantrell might have intended to gloat over me for not having sold it to him. He loved to boast of a bargain. Shall I look it over?”

“Go ahead!” said Nolan.

Again he seemed to be thinking of something else. I went over the piece. In spite of my private worries, it was absorbing. After five minutes or so I heard Nolan grunt. He was regarding me speculatively.

“It’s late Louis XV,” I said. “The extremest of rococo style, with everything from marquetry to espagnolettes—they’re the little bronze busts at the corners there—but with Asymmetrical shells, which dates it late. It’s a fine piece. A very fine piece. But it isn’t unparalleled, and I can’t see why anything connected with it should make me—well—want to cut my throat.”

By the way Nolan grunted, I knew he’d heard that phrase quoted as Cantrell’s statement of what he expected of me.

“Mmmm,” said Nolan. He asked suddenly. “Say, what was Cantrell killed with?”

“I wouldn’t know,” I said. “In fact, I looked in and saw him dead—the others probably told you—but I saw no wounds or anything like that.”

Nolan pointed to the hearth of the study fire-place. The brass firetongs of a set from Benedict Arnold’s English home—the home he’d occupied after he was an exile from America forever—the brass fire-tongs lay on the hearth. They were discolored and scorched and oxidized as if they’d been pulled out of the fire itself.

“Somebody threw the tongs in the fire,” said Nolan. “Like they wanted to get ridda their fingerprints after beatin’ Cantrell in the head with it. They got ridda the fingerprints, all right. Only it ain’t what Cantrell was killed with. Want to see?”

I didn’t.

“A funny kinda wound,” said Nolan detachedly. “I don’t know what made it. Something shaped like a cone or a small pear, prob’ly, only with a fancy lump stickin’ out where the point would be. About half an inch across. Like this.”

He showed me a sketch in his note-book. To me it only suggested a small funnel with a cutoff spout.

“You sold him a room-full of furniture once,” said Nolan meditatively, “an’ promise to buy it back on demand.”

“Yes,” I said. “I needed money badly at the moment. He found it out, and drove a hard bargain, then gleefully put in that proviso just for the hell of it. If you knew him, you’d know he’d do that sort of thing just so he could dangle it over you. It would amuse him enormously, though he probably never intended to make use of it.”

“But he did,” said Nolan. He sat on the opened, elaborate desk which had replaced the hutch cabinet, the one where the platters had been. “He told Purcell he was gonna turn it back an’ refurnish that room around this piece. Does that make sense?”

“In a way,” I admitted. “If he thought this piece important enough it would be reasonable to collect around it. He hadn’t told me he expected to turn back that Jacobean stuff, though.”

Nolan nodded. “You’d be a fool to admit he had,” he observed.

I opened my mouth, and then shut it.

“The point is,” said Nolan flatly.

“You had a dam’ good reason to kill him. You’ in a bad fix financially, huh? If he pulled this trick you’d go bankrupt?”

I said evenly, “No. It would be embarassing; no more.”

“You were in the library all the time between when Cantrell came in here an’ the time the folks found him dead, huh?”

“I was,” I said shortly. I was confident there was no proof to the contrary.

“But two people looked in there for you an’ didn’t see you,” said Nolan. “Got any explanation for that?”

“I was there the whole time,” I said doggedly.

“It looks kinda bad,” said Nolan. He waited.

It did look bad. He didn’t know half how bad it could look if he found out some other things. “You mean,” I said grimly, “that you think I murdered him. All right. I didn’t. What motive could I possibly have, anyhow?”

“Just think, guy!” said Nolan ironically. “Just think!”

The platters were enough for almost anybody to commit a murder for. But Nolan didn’t know about them!

“I’m thinking,” I said sardonically, “and still I can’t remember either killing Cantrell or having any reason to.”

“Okay!” said Nolan. “If you wanna have it that way, that is the way it goes. But remember this!” He bent forward and tapped impressively with his finger for emphasis. “He was gonna put on a show, Morden. You were gonna be it; you were gonna want to cut your throat. Maybe it was the furniture he was gonna turn back, an’ maybe it was something’ else. But you were gonna be the star of the show he was gonna put on! An’ you wanted to stop it! An’ you did!” Then he straightened up. “Okay! Stick around. Don’t try to go home. Stay right here. If you wanna talk, I’ll listen. You’ll be better off if you do.”

As I went toward the door he added significantly, “Hangin’ is kinda messy, Morden. Even life’s better. You got a chance to get pardoned, then. Think it over, Morden; it might mean a lot to you!”