Black Cat Weekly #10

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 5I GOT RID of Adele by walking her to the house and firmly walking away again. She smiled at me almost mournfully. But she was irritatingly good to look at, and I had a very savage suspicion that she’d be able to wrap me around her little finger if I wasn’t firm with her. So I was firm.

“You’re going to stay out of this mess!” I told her.

“The truth is mighty and will prevail,” she said pleasantly, and very persuasively. “And if you really want to kiss me—”

“That’s true enough.”

“And if,” said Adele, “you also told the truth about not having murdered anybody even partially, why—that truth is going to prevail too. And I’d like to help it.”

And she smiled at me; it almost worked.

But I growled and turned and left her. I didn’t want to, and she knew it. And somehow she knew that I knew she knew it. Our minds seemed to fit together, somehow.

The platters. The desk. That hiding-place in it, with threads of sheep-wool clinging to the rough wood-fibres. Cantrell, murdered and with that pathetic blank expression on his face. Houlihan, too—but I’d seen Houlihan only twice, and one of those times he was asleep in a chair, and an unbeautiful sight.

I stalked about the grounds, trying to piece things together in my mind, but feeling uncomfortably aware that Adele was probably watching me from the house and wanting to go back to her.

Nothing made sense! If Cantrell had been planning to show off the desk—as my discovery seemed to hint at—then undoubtedly one could account for everything up to a certain point. It would explain Terry’s and Sally’s engagement announcement; Cantrell’s gloating prophecy of how I’d feel, and a very plausible guess at the murderer. But that murderer would have had a motive which didn’t imaginably lead to cracking a cop on the head and ransacking Cantrell’s collection in search of something! That second crime was most plausibly explained with the platters as the motive. But the platters wouldn’t have urged anybody necessarily to murder Cantrell as things looked now, and certainly they couldn’t have had anything to do with Cantrell’s planned dramatic moment.

The combined items simply didn’t make one sum; they might make two.

A plainclothes man came and told me Nolan wanted me. I went in the house and found him sitting by a telephone, smoking a disreputable, leprous cigar.

“I’m waitin’ to eavesdrop on a phone-call for you, Morden,” he told me.

“What’s that?”

“A phone-call,” repeated Nolan. “I’m waitin’ to listen in. A guy’s called tip for you three times this mornin’. Only he won’t give his name an’ he won’t hold the wire. He keeps askin’ for you to come wait by the phone for him to call back.”

“The devil!” I said. “I came out here for dinner last night; I didn’t expect to stay. Nobody knows I’m here!”

“Oh!” said Nolan. “He don’t know you’re here! It’s just an accident, then, that he’s so cagey he won’t give us a chance to trace where he’s callin’ from!” He said ominously. “Listen, Morden! Since Houlihan got hit last night, I’m gettin’ ideas! Maybe you didn’t kill Cantrell just to get outa a jam! Maybe you’re still after somethin’! Maybe this guy could tell me a lot I’d like to know!”

“To hell with you!” I said savagely. “The calls aren’t for me; I don’t want ’em and won’t take ’em!”

I swung about and went furiously away from there. I wanted to get by myself and swear. This made less sense than anything that had gone before. But it had to fit in somewhere!

* * * *

I found a place in the rock garden where nobody was likely to come, and I fumed to myself. Presently Joe Winthrop came shambling loutishly out and picked a soft spot on the grass not far away. He sprawled out to read a book he’d brought with him.

I scowled at him. He didn’t see me; he had a book from the library and read absorbedly. From time to time he pulled something from his pocket and chewed on it. He’d made some contact with the kitchen for food between meals. I sat and smoked and scowled, going over and over everything that had happened and getting nowhere. Those phone-calls, now . . .

A long time later I heard Adele’s voice. She didn’t know I was around and I hadn’t seen her come. She was standing beside Joe where he sprawled on the ground. “How are you doing, Joe?” she asked.

He looked up and grinned, then said zestfully; “There’re some swell books in the library. There’s a history of English highwaymen that’s a pip. Read it yesterday. I’ve got another honey, now.”

From my vantage-point among rocks and shrubbery I could look out over miles of grass and woodland. This part of the lawn sloped away from town. But I looked down as Adele sat on the grass beside Joe. Not many girls can be friendly with a boy half a dozen years their junior without patronizing him.

“It’s a book on jewel-thieves,” said Joe, with relish. “History of the Koh-I-Noor. The Korloff. The Regent, and so on. There’s not a big stone in the world that hasn’t been stolen and murdered for, except the ones that’ve been found lately.” He took a bite, and said with his mouth full, “More fun! More people killed …. They all turn up, though. There’s only one big enough to have a name that’s still missing.”

His voice changed suddenly. “What’s the matter, Adele?”

“Nothing,” said Adele. She asked restlessly, “Have you seen Mr. Morden?”

“Nuh-huh,” said Joe. It was a negative.

A moment’s silence. Then Adele; “I don’t think Mr. Morden killed your unc—Mr. Cantrell. Do you?” Then she said suddenly. “How about doing some detective work, Joe?”

He looked up alertly, raised himself on one elbow. “Mother’d raise the devil,” he said cheerfully. “Have you got an idea, Adele?”

“I’ve been talking to Mr. Nolan,” she told him. “He says he knows who killed your Uncle Tom. He says he needs just two things. One is proof that the person he suspects was in the study at the time of the murder. The other is the weapon the murder was done with. So ... What would be shaped like a small onion, Joe? The thing that killed Mr. Cantrell was something round, about half an inch across, and it tapered almost to a point, only the point stuck out a little. It must have been already in the study, because Mr. Nolan doesn’t think the murderer intended to do his killing with it, but counted on a sandbag to do the trick and grabbed it up when Mr. Cantrell didn’t die from sandbag blows. It must have had some weight behind it, because it pierced the skull. But it was at hand when he got desperate because the sandbag wouldn’t kill ... What could it be, Joe?”

Silence. Then their voices began again, lower-pitched. Adele sketched an outline on the grass. The outline of the deadly part of the weapon that had been used on Cantrell. It wasn’t part of the fire-tongs; it wasn’t anything anybody normally carried in his pocket. It could conceivably have been a finial on a baroque chair-back, but in wood it wouldn’t have had strength enough to puncture a braincase. It must have been metal. And Adele had described its shape more accurately than Nolan. He’d showed me a diagram and called it cone or pear-shaped; Adele said a small onion, and that was much closer to the diagram, even to the blunt extension of what could have been a dullish point. Nolan had said it was half an inch across.

People don’t carry pieces of metal like that. They don’t even use pieces of metal like that. Nolan would have been better off with an ordinary blunt instrument to look for. At least he’d know what that could be!

A maid came out of the house, looking around. She saw Adele and picked her way toward her. “Luncheon is served, ma’m.”

Then she saw me. I was in plain view, if you looked. The maid spoke to me. “Luncheon is served, sir.”

It was the pretty young maid. She turned and went back to the house. Joe looked after her with self-consciously sophisticated admiration. But Adele looked at me with her head on one side. “Haven’t we met somewhere before?”

“I was eavesdropping,” I said stiffly. “Eavesdroppers rarely hear good of themselves, but I did. Thanks.”

Joe said “Hello” and looked after the little maid.

“We have been deducing and deducting and so on,” said Adele. “About the murders; we are still baffled.”

I said sourly, “Has the phone still been ringing for me?”

Adele nodded, looked at me earnestly; I scowled.

We walked toward the house. Joe Winthrop came along, his nose in the book again since we didn’t include him in our talk. There was a heading at the top of the page he was reading. “The Regent.” The Regent was a blue diamond on the order of the Hope, which disappeared during the French revolution. It had never been recovered. It fitted everything neatly together. The name of Poisson, who had been Secretary of Police Affairs for the Directory. A rococo desk, and Cantrell’s boast that he was going to make me feel worse than that affair when he’d bought a set of pewter platters from Adele, after I’d told him they were counterfeits, made of platinum in the days when platinum had no value. Cantrell had felt that I envied him his luck—that I resented the fact that it hadn’t been mine. He didn’t know how savagely I resented the whole business now!

It all added up, beautifully. The announcement of Terry’s and Sally’s engagement fitted in. There was even an overwhelmingly plausible guess at who must be the murderer. But there was no evidence. Nolan couldn’t even be told of my theory, because I’d found the cubbyhole which started it at a time and under circumstances which—if I admitted them—would fix Houlihan’s injury or death irrevocably upon me.

We went into the house. I went upstairs to wash my hands. I went into the room Jermyn had assigned me, and then I stiffened. There was something wrong, somehow. I’d had no luggage when I came, because I’d only come for dinner. I was wearing one of Terry’s shirts now. But there was something wrong about the room.

I felt it so insistently that I looked, and even then it was almost pure chance that I found it. The room was large and the furniture was naturally a part of Cantrell’s collection. It was XIV century stuff, massive and heavily carved and almost incredibly stuffy. It had belonged to that Marguerite de Crillon who married six times, poisoned five husbands, and lived to a ripe old age with the last. There was her cassone—a sort of hope chest of the Middle Ages—with very fine primitive decoration. There was an armoire, or press, to hold linen.

On top of the armoire, high up near the ceiling, I caught a faint dull gleam of metal. It didn’t belong there. I climbed up to see.

The twelve pewter platters that were worth so many times their weight in gold were piled up behind the armoire’s decorative top. Adele’s platters. The fortune I’d helped cheat her of. Somebody had cached them in the room I occupied. Found there, they would at the very least provide a motive for me to have murdered Houlihan the cop, after my supposed murder of Cantrell failed to yield them. If they weren’t discovered, ultimately the murderer and thief would get a chance to take them away . . .

I got down to the floor and reflected grimly. After a bit I took a towel from the bathroom and climbed up again.

A little later I washed my hands and went down to lunch.

It was not a pleasant meal. Terry sat still, not scowling but not uttering a word. Sally Morris didn’t appear. Mrs. Winthrop ate with a mournful appetite and in a quasi-melancholy silence. Joe Winthrop ate with normal sixteen-year-old voracity. And nobody but Adele spoke to me. Purcell regarded me with a cheerful wariness and said nothing whatever.

Two separate telephone-calls came for me during lunch. The first time whoever called simply asked for me and hung up immediately when the cop Nolan had on the job said he’d call me. The second time he said; “You tell that guy he’d better be waitin’ for my next call!” Nolan, of course, had an extension ready to listen in on; he’d told me so, blandly.

I grinned at him angrily when he suggested that I spend some time waiting by the phone. “No thanks,” I said. “I have what is sometimes known as a hunch. There is dirty work at the crossroads, Nolan. I don’t know the gentleman who’s calling for me; I don’t want to know him. He doesn’t want to talk to me, anyhow. He wants to talk to a couple of other guys.”

Nolan looked at me almost respectfully.

“I assure you,” I told him, “that he doesn’t know me. If you’ll have somebody answer the phone and pretend to be me, my unknown chum will take the bait and speak as my companion in crime. But you, Nolan, will know that he isn’t my companion in crime if he doesn’t recognize my voice. He’ll be—to put it vulgarly—a phoney.”

Nolan said, “You’re smart, Mordent.”

“I’m smart enough,” I told him, “to have arrived at the thought that I want you to have somebody watching me every minute, but not to let you get anything on me. Come to think of it, I wouldn’t mind being pinched. Now. Right away. At your earliest convenience. Can it be arranged?”

Not pleasant conversation for the luncheon-table. Nolan shook his head. “I couldn’t make it stick,” he said without resentment. “I ain’t got the two pieces of evidence I need. I can’t prove you were in the study at the time I wanna prove it, an’ I ain’t got a smell of a idea what the killin’ was done with.”

Mrs. Winthrop pressed a handkerchief to her eyes. Terry scowled. Adele looked from one to the other of us, her eyes somehow anxious. Purcell listened with an air of cheerful interest.

I got up from the table and said politely, “I’ve decided that I want to stay in the public eye for a while. I shall talk to one of your cops until somebody else turns up to talk to me. When you get a chance, I would like to have a conference with you.”

I went out of the dining-room. I rather expected the telephone-calls to stop. As it turned out, they did.

* * * *

I had a sort of program in mind, but didn’t have a chance to carry it out. Nolan didn’t confer with me; he was conspicuously busy all afternoon. But Adele came out-of-doors and sauntered over to where by that time I sat in dourly visible solitude. She stopped by me and said politely, “Are you still grumpy?”

“I wasn’t grumpy,” I said angrily. “I was sensible!”

“Are you still in a mood of stern intelligence?” she asked with the same air of polite inquiry. “If not, I might sacrifice myself to sit down by you for a while.”

I grinned reluctantly.

But Adele was good for me. She didn’t argue; she began to talk, casually, and presently we were getting along famously, and suddenly she stopped short and said in mild inquiry, “Did I understand you correctly this morning? Did you say you wanted to kiss me? And did I say—”

“You did,” I told her grimly. “I did. And you did say it could be arranged if I’d tell you the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. But I refused to meet the conditions.”

She shook her head at me. “Sooner or later,” she told me, “you will rue the day.”

* * * *

When we went in to dinner, it was just about as bad as lunch-time. Sally invisible; Terry scowling and wordless, not speaking to anyone at all, and only Adele really speaking to me. But when Purcell asked her to pose in some pictures he was making of part of the furniture collection—to give them life, he said—she agreed cheerfully. Nolan disappeared. I was left alone. It was absurd for me to be irritated, but I went up to my room and sat there with the lights on, smoking savagely.

About eight o’clock, I heard an excited uproar out on the lawn; I stayed grimly where I was. The tumult spread to the house. Then I heard a car start up beyond the outer stone wall, and when I looked out I saw its tail-lights and the glow of its headlight racing toward town at top speed.

There weren’t so many people in the house, but there was an atmosphere of jitters; of excitement; of something close to horror. Just the sound of voices conveyed it. And I got curious. Curiosity wouldn’t be too healthy for me, but it wouldn’t be wise to be too incurious, either. I went out of my room and down the stairs.

* * * *

When I appeared, with a cigarette in my mouth, Jermyn looked at me in stupefaction; Joe Winthrop gaped at me; Adele was deathly white. She stared at me with stark incredulity in her eyes. Somebody ran and told Nolan. He came into the big living-room just as I was asking curtly; “Well, what’s happened? I heard excitement and came to find out what’s up. What is the excitement, and what’s happened to make you look at me as if I were a walking case of halitosis?”

Nolan stared at me hard. Then he beckoned behind him. “He’s here,” he said flatly. “The guy’s got nerve, anyhow. Take him, boys; we got enough to tuck him away on now!”

Two cops appeared. They approached me warily. I said sardonically, “I hate to trouble you, Nolan, but would you mind telling me what all this is about?”

Nolan nodded as if to himself. “You got nerve, Morden. You’re smart. But I think it’s all over but the shoutin’ now. We’re gonna have a showdown.”

There was a cop at each of my elbows.

“But would you mind,” I repeated in ironic politeness, “just satisfying my innocent curiosity? What’s happened to make me demonstrably a scoundrel rather than just a suspicious person?”

Nolan scowled at me.

“Still pullin’ the innocent gag, huh? All right! Terry Cantrell’s headin’ for a hospital! an’ a blood-bank now, with one chance in three of bein’ alive when he gets there! We found ’im on the lawn. He hadda get to a hospital, an’ fast, but he could talk. He said you did it. Said he’d caught you with some platters that are worth plenty of cash. He accused you of killin’ his uncle for a chance to grab ’em off—an’ you hadda knife an’ you used it!”