The Silver Leopard Page 16

  Catherine was surprised. She was also wryly and bitterly amused. So that was the way it had been, she thought. She had turned to Nicky getting over Stephen Darrell and Nicky had turned to her, trying to recover from Hat. Well, there was nothing particularly startling about it. It happened all the time among intimates, sometimes between husbands and wives—a new deal, change partners, moisten the lips and start afresh. The pattern was set now. She would marry Nicky and Hat would marry Stephen Darrell—that is, they would, if one of them wasn’t a murderer.

  “Miss Lister—”

  “Yes, Inspector?” Reality closed in around Catherine again, stark, dreadful.

  “I’ve been thinking,” McKee said. “If your uncle expected to see you that evening, expected you to spend Christmas with him up here, why was he writing to you?”

  Catherine looked at her hands. “I had only made up my mind to accept my Aunt Angela’s invitation that morning,” she said. It was true. Not until she had heard that Hat was going to a house party in Virginia and wouldn’t be in Brookfield, had she agreed to come. I hate her, she thought, with a flash of something like pure venom. It ebbed, leaving exhaustion in its wake. But the inspector didn’t go and didn’t go.

  A new idea had occurred to the Scotsman. The idea that John Wardwell had changed his plans, that something had happened that day in the house in New York to make him change them, that he hadn’t intended to spend Christmas in the country, a quietly convivial Christmas, with his family. I am sending you this—What was the “this” he alluded to in his unfinished note to Catherine Lister? Not the leopard, they knew that now. He asked questions, about what had been done after the discovery of John’s body, about the condition of his study, asked who had sent the leopard, packed in a carton and addressed to Catherine at her cottage in Brookfield.

  Angela thought, but wasn’t sure, that one of the servants had sent it. The servants had returned to town the following day and there were letters and other packages. She hadn’t gone into the study that night. Mike had at-tended to everything. She had lain down in her own room and Catherine had remained with her, then Tom and Francine had been sent for and had come. It was too late to catch Hat. Her train had already started. She got back the next afternoon.

  Michael Nye had attended to everything. And Michael Nye had been killed. He had been alone in the house before the two women entered it. It was, it must have been, while he was alone that he saw something, heard something, that ultimately led to his own extinction.

  It was while the inspector was asking how long Mike had been in the house before he opened the front door that memory stirred in Catherine. The stir was very faint. It was persistent. She tried to isolate, to define it. She said, a little breathlessly, “He—I—You never found the man, the small man in the brown chesterfield who was watching the Sixty-fourth Street house from across the street the day before Mike died, Inspector. If whoever killed Mike killed Uncle John, couldn’t that man—”

  McKee agreed that the small man in brown might be important. So far, their efforts to trace hint had been in vain. They hadn’t enough to go on. “You say, Miss Lister, that when you collided with him on Sixty-fourth Street that afternoon, you were under the impression that you had seen the fellow before? Can you connect him with anyone, anything?”

  “A—shovel,” Catherine said suddenly.

  “A shovel? Go on, Miss Lister.”

  How could she go on when she didn’t know where she was going? Catherine pursued the shovel, abandoned it, grasped for it again—and all at once, without conscious thought, the memory was there, whole and complete.

  The room was very still. They were all attending on her efforts. She said sharply, “I know,” and paused. Because she felt it again, as she had felt it once before, in the living-room of the house on Sixty-fourth Street when she was on this identical subject. That time it had been vague. Now it was sharp. And definite. From somewhere in this room, in which the same group of people was assembled, a cold finger, a beam of frozen lightning, reached out and touched her.

  She couldn’t have stopped if she would. The inspector said, “Yes?” and she said, “I know who the little man in brown watching the Wardwell house that day was. It was Dutch Pete.”

  Dutch Pete, handy man and general factotum, had tended the Wardwell furnace. The month was December and the furnace was lighted. Unseen, unnoticed, Dutch Pete had been in the Wardwell house on the night John Wardwell died.

  Chapter Seventeen - Two Murders to Solve

  DUTCH PETE, A HANDY MAN, a servitor, small, inconspicuous, a tiny wheel within the other wheels in the Wardwell ménage. On the surface, Catherine’s revelation didn’t seem particularly important. There were other considerations.

  After John Wardwell’s death, murder successfully accomplished, there had been a long lull. The Wardwell house on Sixty-fourth Street had been closed and for almost two years it knew the family no more. Following the funeral, Angela had remained on here in Brookfield for a few months and had then gone out to the ranch in Arizona. Hat spent part of the time with her aunt, part with friends, part with her brother and his wife. Mrs. Hettinger, the present caretaker, had gone to live with a cousin. It wasn’t until a little over a month ago, in October of the present year, that Mrs. Bettinger had been reinstated in the Sixty-fourth Street house, and the boards taken from the windows, the water turned on and the furnace relighted, by another man this time, in preparation for Angela’s eventual homecoming following her engagement to Michael Nye.

  Dutch Pete had vanished with the rest of the servants employed by the Wardwells at the time John died. They had not come back. Dutch Pete had. It was as though he were tied to the family and the house on Sixty-fourth Street, with an invisible string. Was it the red thread of murder? Had Dutch Pete killed John Wardwell? Had he been drawn back to Sixty-fourth Street by fear? He was thoroughly familiar with the workings of the household. It wasn’t difficult to see him there, eyeing the securities on John Wardwell’s desk when Wardwell was out of the room for a moment. Bearer bonds—$20,000 of what was practically cash, a fortune. Suppose John Ward-well had surprised Dutch Pete fingering the bonds? “All right, stay right where you are. I’m going to turn you over to the police.” A quick blow with the silver leopard snatched up from the desk? It could be.

  Then what? Terror. Make the death look like accident. Carry the body to the stairs, let it fall. Clean up the desk and remove the bloodstained bonds. Pack the leopard in a box—As McKee had already pointed out, the unfinished note to his niece, Catherine, would have provided even an elementary intelligence with that expedient.

  The little man might very well have been afraid to cash the bloodstained bonds, clip the coupons. He had killed in vain. Vengeance waited on him in the shape of Michael Nye. Nye had been in the house the night John Wardwell died. He could have seen something, heard something, meaningless at the time but that, when added to the disappearance of the bonds, gave him Dutch Pete.

  Dutch Pete could have been the visitor to Nye’s apartment; it could have been Dutch Pete who had been standing behind the blue brocaded curtains in the dark studio when Catherine entered Nye’s living-room, Dutch Pete who had turned off the light, snatching up the bloodstained envelope and making off.

  There was one Haw here. It was a bad one. There was no slightest evidence that Dutch Pete had been anywhere near the boardinghouse in Clearwater where the bearer bonds were planted in Catherine Lister’s room and the bloodstained envelope thrown beneath her window as a guide, a finger post, pointing to her as the murderer.

  Slow and steady wins the race, mused McKee. Dutch Pete had either to be eliminated or placed firmly within the circle of possible perpetrators. McKee asked more questions. Angela Wardwell could tell him very little about the former furnace man. Still suffering from shock, her mental processes were slowed down. “I don’t know. I can’t recall Dutch Pete very well. Stupid name.” She wasn’t aware of his real one. “I knew there was such a person, that’s about all.” It was J
ohn Wardwell who had hired and fired the servants.

  “Mrs. Bettinger might know, Mrs. Wardwell?”

  “She might, yes.”

  A shouting duet with the caretaker was indicated. In any case, she would have had to be questioned exhaustively. John Wardwell’s last day was going to have to be plotted minute by minute. Any number of things might have happened. McKee was convinced that something important, something of which there was no inkling as yet, had.

  He had entered the house at seven-thirty-five. It was ten before he left it, a sadder because not a wiser man. He had unearthed the story behind the story, uncovering a fresh surface. That, in turn, would have to be excavated and explored. If they had made little headway with the solution of the murder of Michael Nye, their chances with John Wardwell’s slaying were definitely less. Wardwell’s end and the circumstances that surrounded it were written on water that had long since drained away. His records had been destroyed, the background against which he had lived and died had completely changed. Servants, friends, business associates, had scattered. Even when and if found their recollections might be worth nothing. Nevertheless, murder had been committed, not once but twice, by the same person, and somewhere within the frame of John Wardwell’s death lay the proof of who had killed him and then Michael Nye. The attempt to dig it out had to be made.

  Wardwell and Nye had both died in New York. The Scotsman had to return there. Six of seven possible perpetrators were here in Brookfield. He had no jurisdiction whatever over them. With them was a girl upon whom a deliberate attempt to throw suspicion had been made. It had misfired. There might be another attempt, of an even more serious nature. Dead men, and dead women, could tell no tales. Here’s your perpetrator—Catherine Lister could neither deny nor refute the charge if her lips were permanently sealed. A close watch would have to be kept on the Wardwell house and its occupants.

  McKee said good night and took his departure. He went to the barracks. The state police were co-operative. Men were posted in the grounds. McKee told himself that an attack on Catherine here in Brookfield was highly improbable. It would pin murder irrevocably to one of that small tight group of stunned people he had left behind him. Nevertheless, it was with considerable misgiving that at twenty minutes past eleven he gave the order to the driver at the wheel of the Cadillac outside the police barracks and started back to the city to begin his quest for Dutch Pete, and to gather in the haul he hoped might be waiting at the ends of other lines he had already set out.

  Chapter Eighteen - A Nocturnal Footstep

  IF MCKEE HAD DISLIKED leaving Catherine behind him in the house in Brookfield, she hated being left there. The feeling she had had of a malign glance directed on her when she brought forth Dutch Pete’s name, as though someone were willing her not to remember, not to speak, had been very strong.

  Try as she would, she had been unable to locate its source. Nor could she understand why anybody should want to suppress all mention of the little ex-furnace man. Then there was the fact that Hat and Nicky had actually been engaged to each other two years ago. She felt curiously alone, curiously alien.

  The revelation in itself wasn’t too disturbing—if Nicky hadn’t told her about Hat, she hadn’t told him about Stephen Darrell. What did disturb her was the realization, for the first time, of how little she really knew about her aunt and her cousins, and for the matter of that about Nicky. Odd how you could become engaged to a man, be planning to marry him, and not know, really know, the essential person at all. Nicky had been different since the afternoon, moody and withdrawn, and then unaccountably gay—before the inspector came.

  There were certain things she did know about Hat. While Hat and Nicky’s engagement was still on, before John had voiced his objections, Hat had already abandoned Nicky for Stephen Darrell. That interlude in the cottage in Brookfield had taken place ten days before her uncle’s death.

  She knew other things that she hadn’t mentioned to the inspector. In the last year of her Uncle John’s life, his disappointment in both Tom and Hat had been evident. He had wanted them both to be beautiful proud swans and had been made impatient by their gooselike behavior. His idea of himself, and of them as his appendages, had been larger than life-size. Angela had had to be the moderator. She must, Catherine thought, have had rather a hard time of it on occasion. If so, she had borne it as she was bearing the grief and shock at the terrible news the inspector had brought, without taking the world into her confidence.

  No one was making any confidences. After McKee went, there was surprisingly little talk. Mrs. Barker’s Anna’s dinner had long since been ruined. Sandwiches were produced and drinks were mixed. “Scotch or rye?” “Here you are.”

  “Thanks.” Conversation was more or less monosyllabic. The room was inert, dead, each person in it engaged with his own thoughts.

  Before twelve o’clock they were all in their rooms, except for Stephen Darrell, who went along to his shack down the valley. He did say one startling thing to Catherine, catching her alone for a moment in the hall. Hat and Francine had gone up with Angela, and Tom and Nicky were still in the drawing-room. Coming out to get his coat from the hall closet, Stephen passed Catherine at the foot of the stairs.

  “Lock your door when you go to bed.”

  That was what he said. Just that, nothing more. He didn’t even pause. He kept his voice low and went on to the closet without breaking his stride, as though he were afraid of being seen or overheard.

  Catherine looked at his retreating back and went on upstairs, exasperated and undeniably frightened. In spite of her feeling in the drawing-room earlier that evening, in spite of the bonds and the envelope turning up in the boardinghouse in Clearwater, it was hard for her to believe that anyone in the house now would do her any bodily harm. Nevertheless, she did lock her door and once in bed, fell deeply and dreamlessly asleep.

  It was when she woke in the night that she heard the footstep. It began with the creak of a loose board. First, perfect stillness, the stillness of the country, with, at that time of year, neither insects nor frogs. Catherine had been awake for about five minutes and was just beginning to doze off when the stillness was shattered by the creak.

  Her room was on the right side of the hall near the head of the stairs. The creak was followed, after an interval, by an undeniable footstep, a single footstep, and, after that, no sound at all. She didn’t attribute any particular importance to it. And then, in the morning, the discovery was made that the garage had been entered during the night.

  It was Mrs. Barker’s Anna who produced the information while Catherine was at the breakfast table with Hat, Nicky, Tom, and Francine, all in robes and slippers. Angela was breakfasting in bed. Coming in with a platter of fresh pancakes, Anna said, “There was someone in the garage last night. The whole place is tore up.”

  Coffee cups were put clown, cigarettes extinguished. They threw on their coats and went outside in a body. The garage, an extensive building of gray fieldstone, was perhaps 50 feet away, beyond the drive that circled the house. Boards had been laid from the edge of the drive to a pair of the garage doors. They walked along the boards and into the garage.

  The troopers were upstairs, three big men in dark-blue uniforms and black boots. There was a single huge comfortably furnished room there, with a piano in it and ping-pong and billiard tables. An easel, one of Mike’s, mantled with dust, stood near the big window at the northern end. He had painted here on occasion.

  There were cupboards under the eaves, lire doors of these cupboards were open and stuff had been pulled out, suitcases and piles of old English Christmas magazines and Punches. Mike’s big box of paints had been knocked over, and tubes littered the floor around the easel and the table near it. Paint oozed out in fat brilliant ribbons of orange and ultramarine and emerald, vermilion and burnt sienna.

  The blackout curtains, in use during the war, had been pulled across the windows, which was why the troopers had seen no light. They hadn’t been that way the day b
efore. One of the troopers had noticed the drawn curtains half an hour earlier. During the night, someone had ransacked the room, little used nowadays, very thoroughly.

  Who and why? That was the question. There was no answer, as far as evidence was concerned. The garage wasn’t locked, Brookfield wasn’t a place where you locked things up. As for marks in the snow, there were plenty of them beside and underneath the boards, but the temperature had risen, the snow was soft. Nicky and Tom had been in and out of the garage on the previous afternoon, and if there were prints that were not theirs, the troopers were doubtful as to whether they could be isolated.

  Raised brows, shrugs, random remarks, “Well, I’ll be damned.”

  “Now who do you suppose—”

  “Oh, some tramp perhaps, looking for loot.” Catherine was the only one who was fully clothed. Her tweed coat was soft and warm; she felt chilled to the bone. She thought drearily, Shall I mention that footstep I heard in the night? But what would be the use of it? No one would admit having been out here—and she could be mistaken. The sound could have been an innocent one.

  Someone could, legitimately, have been in the hall. Francine or Tom or Hat might have gone to see how Angela was, or someone might have gone downstairs for a book, for matches or cigarettes.

  She didn’t ask. A week ago, two days ago, before Clearwater and the episode of the envelope stained with Mike’s blood, she would have. Since then, she had learned wisdom—and doubt and distress and fear. She thought of Stephen Darrell’s low-toned order to her the night before—and could make nothing of it. If he suspected anyone of being implicated in John’s death, in Mike’s, if he had genuine knowledge of any sort, surely he would have gone to the police.