Black Cat Weekly #10

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 3TERRY CANTRELL came up to the room Jermyn had assigned me, later; he came in and put a bottle on the bed-table. “I thought you might like a drink,” he told me sombrely. “I would.”

He’d brought a glass for himself.

He went into the bathroom and brought one back for me. “If this is hospitality, Terry,” I told him.

“Maybe you don’t know that Nolan has practically accused me of murdering your uncle.”

Terry looked at me, and then grunted. “The hell with that,” he said.

“I’m in a fix, too. He doesn’t think I did it, as far as I know, but he acts like he thinks I’m trying to shield the one who did. Maybe he’ll think my coming here is proof.”

“In that case,” I agreed, “a drink won’t do any harm.”

Terry had a queer, angry expression on his face. “Sally told him she sat at her window and watched me strolling about on the lawn,” he said seething, “all the time the murderer was busy! And he believed her!”

“Didn’t you?”

“As a matter of fact, I went out and sat by that ghastly faun that Uncle Tom bought because it once belonged to Cagliostro. I was right there, swearing to myself, when Uncle Tom was murdered. But she could not see me from her window; there’s a thick screen of shrubbery in between! She might have seen me walk there, but once I was hidden I could have gone anywhere! She lied, to shield me from suspicion!”

It came into my head that for Sally to claim to have been watching Terry was not only an alibi for him, but for herself also.

“Nolan tells me your engagement was to have been announced tonight.”

He swore. “Uncle Tom was practically knocking our heads together. I told him I hated her guts and he beamed at me; he simply didn’t believe it. I was to marry her. My income kept up as long as we were engaged and would increase when we were married. It stopped if we weren’t engaged tonight, and stayed stopped until we were. And, dammit, he was sort of guardian of hers, and the same thing happened to her! I could take it for myself, but—”

“Ah!” I said. “Chivalry!”

“Nothing of the kind! Have you ever seen a damned fool making an ass of himself, and all the time thinking he was being wise and kindly and doing something benevolent and really rather beautiful? That was the old duffer! He was an awful fool, Sam. He was just about as irritating as a person could be; he messed up all my childhood and was working on the rest of my life. But he meant well, and no matter how mad I got with him I couldn’t hate him or really want to hurt him!”

He paused a moment and said wrily, “That’s the devil of an epitaph for anybody! He meant well!”

* * * *

Terry sat on the edge of my bed with a cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth. He looked all broken up and bitter.

“You think the announcement of your engagement was the show he was going to put on?” I demanded.

“What else?”

“Something,” I said drily, “was to make me want to cut my throat; something was to be done to see how much I could take. I was to be part of the show. How do I fit into the announcement of your engagement? Nolan figures I was to be the show, and that I killed your uncle to prevent it. You wouldn’t have murdered him to keep from marrying Sally?”

“Of course not! Sally’s all right if you happen to like her,” he protested. “I don’t — though once I thought I did. But when somebody’s rammed down your throat—”

I cut in. “There were two of us connected with the proposed show Nolan thinks your uncle was killed to stop. But your reason is inadequate, so I must have done it. It’s infernally plausible, only I didn’t.”

“It isn’t plausible! It’s silly,” he protested again. “You—”

“How about the others? Did any of them have reason to kill him? Mrs. Winthrop? Joe? Purcell? Sally? Adele?”

I carefully didn’t emphasize Adele’s name, but if he picked it up it would mean he knew about his uncle’s having gotten the platters from her and what they were ... had quite legally done her out of a fortune.

“No-o-o,” said Terry. “None of them could have any motive...”

He poured himself another drink then stopped and looked at his glass for a good ten seconds. Then he went and poured it down the sink. After a moment he said, “It’s all silly! I’ll talk to Nolan in the morning. Let you know what he says.”

Terry went out abruptly, and I looked after him and figured that quite possibly I’d convinced him that I was the person who’d killed his uncle, after all.

I poured myself a drink, then put a cigarette in my mouth and fumbled for my lighter, couldn’t find it. And of course I had no matches.

I sat there with an unlighted cigarette in my mouth and grouched all by myself. My motives throughout had been of the best, and I regretted nothing I’d intended to do. It was my purpose, when I slipped unseen into Cantrell’s study, to blackmail him. I didn’t know what sort of spectacle he planned, but I was going to make him change it to the sort I wanted.

I had plenty to blackmail him with. All I needed was the one fact Adele had told me with no idea of its importance—that those fabulous platinum platters had been bought from her for a hundred and twenty-five dollars. When Cantrell bought them he knew their real worth, all right! I’d told it to him!

Cantrell’s consuming vanity would shrivel at the idea of being exposed as such a particularly shabby sneak; he couldn’t take that! So it had been my intention to present him with the ironic choice of having the whole story told—or of making his dramatic scene one in which he revealed, himself, the actual value of the platters, and presented Adele with a check for their real price.

That had been my plan. But when I went quietly into his study by the back doorway he was dead. Murdered. Those platters were an adequate reason for me or almost anybody else to kill Cantrell. And now they were seemingly gone.

Thinking of all this got me thoroughly wrought up, and made me want a soothing smoke more than ever. So presently I went downstairs to try to find some matches.

I felt a strange sensation when I got down; there ought to be a detective or two around. I moved with a defiant absence of any attempt to be silent, expecting at any instant to be challenged.

I wasn’t. A dim light burning in a hallway shone into the living-room. The furniture cast long shadows across the floor. There was darkness in the corners of the room and the light was cold and dead; I found myself looking behind me much more often than was necessary.

I didn’t find any matches. I went into the dining-room. There shouldn’t be any matches there, but I looked. Then I came back to the big and now creepy larger room. There was the library and the study and the big music-room where Cantrell really-spread himself in displaying his collection-items. I glanced in the door of the library; it was like looking into a cave where anything unpleasant might be hiding.

It was nerves. I had an unlighted cigarette in my mouth and I wanted a smoke and dammit, I was going to have one! I turned on the study light. Quickly. There were matches on Cantrell’s desk—not the new, rococo one, but the one he’d used all along. I struck one and lighted the cigarette I’d carried in my mouth all this while. It was amazingly satisfying.

The study was fully lighted, and it was a relatively small room. No dark corners. But, the platters were positively gone.

That wasn’t news. I stayed in the study, smoking. I told myself that now I was here I might as well take a really good look at that rococo desk. Maybe Cantrell had meant only to show it off. The idea didn’t make sense, but neither did anything else—And I was naggingly aware that Adele had mentioned the platters...

I opened the desk to have something else to think about. The piece was, in its way, really magnificent, and professional interest came to the fore in my mind. The work “rococo” has come to mean all that is shoddy and in bad taste, nowadays. Perhaps that usage is justified. But the workmanship of pieces that are actually of the original rococo period is marvelous. It was a time when craftsmanship had overtaken and passed the artistry which should have directed it. The ornamentation of a rococo lock or a panel may be overdone. It may be shoddy and meretricious in conception. But it is masterly in execution. There has never been marquetry or ormolu to compare in sheer perfection of workmanship with the pieces that were made in the years when French taste was at its worst. The little espagnolettes—the small bronze female busts or figures like misplaced caryatids which are placed at the corners of late Regency and rococo tables and commodes and such—were marvelous. They are merely finish-pieces for the legs, but those on his desk were the most perfectly executed bits of bronze-work I have ever seen.

Oh, the desk was possibly appalling. Maybe it was an atrocity; a lot of rococo stuff is. But even the tragedy of such good work put into such messy design has its charm— and good workmanship isn’t to be despised anywhere you come upon it.

I went over the desk thoroughly. Meticulously. If it had a suitably sanguinary association, it might have been something Cantrell would have unveiled with enormous enthusiasm and boasting. But I knew who it had belonged to, and though Poisson was a dirty scoundrel, he wasn’t unparalleled. The desk, as such, wouldn’t have explained the show idea.

Then something else occured to me. Cantrell owned a fourteenth-century seal ring that had belonged to a disreputable member of the Orsini family. It had been offered as the possession of a Borgia but he knew better. It was possible, by twisting the bezel, to make a tiny fang stick out in such a fashion as to wound anybody you shook hands with while wearing it. And there was a dried-up, gummy mass upon that little fang which Cantrell wouldn’t have had cleaned off for anything.

That would explain everything. Cantrell’s intention to furnish a room around it, scrapping the furniture I’d sold him, which had only an ordinarily disreputable history. His having Purcell’s camera set up in the study to take pictures. His calling me to the house to watch his triumph. But the proof would have to be good and the villainy spectacular.

It was the most plausible guess yet. I began to hunt for secret hiding-places in the desk; such things aren’t hard to find if you know how. The naïveté of our ancestors in some lines is only less remarkable than their bloodthirstiness. I knew how to look. I found one tiny secret drawer. It was empty. But any ordinary hiding place would have been found long ago. I began to search away from the regular, normal locations for hiding-places... And I found it.

One of the little espagnolettes— the bronze figurines I mentioned— yielded the barest suspicion of a hair. I got to work. I found a bit of relief decoration that shifted. The two together...

The espagnolette swung down upon a beautifully contrived hinge. It revealed the bare unstained wood beneath, just as the rougher-in had left it before the ebeniste took over. And in that naked wood there was a neatly chiseled opening perhaps two inches by two by four. It was cut into the massive wood of the desk’s framework. It was empty, yet clinging to the wood-fibres there were threads of unspun wool. Where we would pack something in cotton-wool, nowadays, there was a time when wool itself would have been used. Something had been hidden here...

Then it hit me. It added up perfectly! Why Cantrell had said it would hit me harder than the South American stuff—the platters. Why he’d chosen this night to insist upon announcing the engagement of Terry and Sally. Why he’d had Purcell on hand to take photographs, with his camera ready, and why it would make newspaper headlines, and why he was going to refurnish a whole room around this piece...

The platters had nothing to do with the show he’d have put on, and probably nothing to do with his murder, either. The show itself was something nobody but Cantrell would have thought of. This discovery changed everything. Everything! And Adele was left out. My head fairly swam with relief.

I carefully pushed the little espagnolette back into place. Then, for no reason at all, I jumped as if I’d been shot, and wheeled to gasp at the open door of the study. I hadn’t seen anything. I’d been faced three-quarters away from the door. But I felt as if a shadow had crossed behind me . . .

Then I clenched my hands and stalked into the living-room; it was empty, of course, but somehow I wasn’t satisfied. I poked in the still-dark corners; I had an insistent feeling that there was someone else downstairs.

Somehow I couldn’t go into the library, but I did push open the door that led into the music-room. I saw a man, almost snarled at him. Then I recognized him.

He was a uniformed policeman— one of the two who had come with Nolan. He was seated in the most comfortable chair he could find, his head leaned back, peacefully sleeping with his mouth open.

I looked at him for seconds. Then a grim satisfaction filled me. Tomorrow morning I’d tell Nolan all this, and show him what I’d found.

* * * *

When I waked next morning, though, I did not have a headache, but I think I’d have felt better if I had. It occured to me that the policeman would deny vehemently that he had been asleep. If he had been awake I could not possibly have made my discovery; the rococo desk had arrived since my last previous visit to this house. Nolan had watched me examine it once. If I described the hiding-place, Nolan would be able to believe in only one possible time for me to find it—the time when Cantrell had been murdered.

I went downstairs, and Nolan greeted me with an ironic politeness. “Mornin’, Mr. Morden,” he said. “Big doin’s during the night.”

I imagine I went pale.

He said flatly: “I had a cop on duty downstairs, name of Houlihan. He was on guard so nobody’d mess with the stuff in the study or anywhere. But somebody did; somebody ransacked all downstairs last night, lookin’ for somethin’. Of course, to get a chance to do all that, they hadda get rid of Houlihan. They did; they smashed his skull in. Don’t know yet whether he’ll live or not.”

I wanted to swear.

Then Nolan said sourly; “Now, if I could prove you were downstairs last night, as I’m pretty sure you were...”