The Silver Leopard Page 17

  They went back into the house and found Stephen there, in a chair before the fire, in boots and breeches and a battered leather jacket, his long legs stretched out in front of him. He looked as though he hadn’t had much sleep. His eyes were tired. Hat offered her cheek and he kissed her and she propped herself on his knee, swung a slippered foot, and told him about the garage, with interjections from the others.

  Stephen had no comment to make beyond raised brows and a shrug or two. They weren’t going back to New York until tomorrow. Tom said that Angela needed rest. And the day wasn’t promising. It was bleak with a threat of rain and patches of fog in the hollows.

  The thought of another day shut up in the house with nothing to do was almost intolerable to Catherine. They were cut off from ordinary pursuits. You couldn’t, with a death in the family that had been pronounced murder, go out and seek entertainment, or play bridge or sit around and gossip lightheartedly.

  The attempt was made to keep things normal. It failed miserably. Tom was heavily distrait, Francine too crisp, Hat openly jittery. Nicky and Stephen were the only ones who were even approximately themselves. Catherine told herself that there was nothing actually to keep her there. She could go back on an afternoon train. She knew that if she attempted it, there would be an outcry. They showed a strong tendency to cling together.

  The truth was that they didn’t trust each other. The atmosphere of mutual watchfulness, noticeable in Clearwater after the discovery of the envelope that had contained the missing bearer bonds, was ten times worse since the inspector’s pronunciamento last night.

  Presently the others went up to dress and Catherine was left alone in the hall with Stephen Darrell. She would have liked to walk away. She didn’t know how to do it without being too obvious.

  Silence, the soft hiss of the fire, a shower of sparks. “Sleep all right, Catherine?” Stephen asked.

  “Oh—Oh, yes, thanks.”

  She glanced at him briefly. He was looking over his shoulder up the stairs. He turned to her. His eyes, steady and unreadable, with dark specks between the dark rim and the iris, were traveling over her face exploringly.

  “Why did you tell me to lock my door last night, Stephen?”

  “I didn’t want anything to happen to you. Did anything happen, here in the house?”

  Catherine looked at the brightly colored backs of books in a row in a bookcase against the opposite wall. How could a man chop and change like this? How could he be so gentle at one moment, and at the next so indifferent, so remote? If only Hat hadn’t come between them two years ago! Pain tore at her rackingly. She thought desperately, So you don’t know when you’re licked. You’ll take anything. Stephen Darrell can trample over you and you’ll still be moved by the tone of his voice, the shape of his head, his hands, his eyes, his mouth.

  She gave her own head a small, impatient shake. It wasn’t any of these things. They were only the envelope for—What was it that made up the irresistible attraction of one person for another? Was it that you could be free and yet companioned and never alone, that loneliness was banished and you could be two separate entities functioning with perfect harmony in a complete whole?

  Such wholeness with Stephen Darrell was not for her. He had broken the tie between them himself. Her allegiance now was to Nicky. But couldn’t they, she thought—weary of sensation, of conflict, of all feeling—couldn’t she and Stephen Darrell be friends? She could, at least, try. She told him, speaking softly, of the step she had heard in the upper hall in the night. “Someone might have been out—”

  “Uh—huh.” He mused on that intently, his glance narrow, withdrawn, smoke dribbling up unheeded from his cigarette.

  “Wet shoes,” Catherine said, “anyone who went out of the house to the garage last night would have—”

  Stephen threw his cigarette into the fire with a hurling movement. He sat up. His eyes were as hard and edged as disks of flint. “Don’t try anything. I told you that over in Clearwater. Leave detecting to the men who are paid to do it. It’s not your job, or mine. Why don’t you go back to New York? Go back to your apartment, your job. It looks,” his smile, if you could call it a smile, had the same edge to it his eyes had, “as though you’re going to need a job. If you’re going to marry Nicky—”

  Here we go again, boys, Catherine thought wearily. “I am.”

  “Well, then, Mike’s legacy seems to have vanished, and Nicky has no money. You’ll have to work hard and save your pennies.”

  It was as though he were deliberately baiting her. Before she could answer in kind, the others trooped down the stairs. They had dressed with remarkable quickness. Catherine looked at their feet—and didn’t get anywhere. They all wore boots and slacks and jackets. Nicky had an outfit of Tom’s on. He made fun of his appearance.

  Catherine had never been more conscious of his quick warmth, his sunniness, his consideration for her. He saw that she was upset. He gave her a quick glance and took her hands in his. “Up, wench. You and I are going to walk into the village. I need cigarettes. A walk will do us good, warm up the old blood.”

  The others were going out too, and the house would be empty. This was her chance, Catherine thought. She had been rebuffed by Stephen Darrell. She didn’t need his assistance. When they were gone, she could look in their rooms.

  She put Nicky off. She said, “I’ve got letters to write. I’ll take a walk with you this afternoon,” and went upstairs.

  But she had counted her chickens much too soon. It was more than an hour before she could begin her search. Mrs. Barker’s other daughter was busy with the vacuum and dust cloths and a mop. It was almost half-past twelve by the time the upper floor was quiet.

  Catherine began with Nicky’s room, beyond her own, near the head of the stairs. Nicky had on brown oxfords when he went to bed the night before. The oxfords were standing side by side in one of the capacious closets below his uniform blouse, and they were bone dry. He had no other footgear of any sort. It wasn’t Nicky who had left the house last night. Thankfulness filled her. She was on her way out into the hall when she came to an abrupt standstill.

  There was someone in the next room. There were two people there. A door opened and she heard voices. One was Tom’s. The other was Hat’s.

  Catherine heart thumped erratically. Tom’s room was separated from Nicky’s by an intervening bath. The door of the bathroom was evidently open. Suppose Tom should take a notion to walk in here—She glanced speculatively at the door into the hall, but Tom’s bedroom door might also be open, and she didn’t want to be seen either in or coming out of Nicky’s room. She remained where she was.

  Hat and Tom were quarreling. Tom’s voice was angry. “I saw you yesterday afternoon,” he said. “I was in front of the Y when I saw you two going into McKendrick’s.” Hat laughed. “Dear, dear, isn’t that just too terrible! So you saw us having a drink together.”

  Tom was exasperated. “Look,” he said with heavily patient sarcasm. “You’ve got Steve Darrell. Why don’t you let Nicky alone? He’s going to marry Catherine. If Angela finds out that you’re fooling around with him again, she’ll be plenty hot under the collar.”

  A foot stamped. “I’m not fooling around with him, you idiot.”

  “Okay. Then why didn’t you say you drove back with him from town? I saw you. What did you do? Get out of the car before you got here? Sooner or later you’re going to get caught playing your games. What’s in it for you? You’d better cut it out. If you don’t, I’m warning you—”

  “What’ll you do? Go tittle-tattling?” Hat’s voice had a soft, silken quality to it. “You know, Tom, I wouldn’t do much talking if I were you, I really wouldn’t.” Grayness swirled around Catherine’s stiff shoulders, her rigidly held head. Threats and counter threats—her exploration was giving her more than she bargained for.

  Brother and sister moved off. She could no longer hear them. She roused herself. Back in her own room, which she entered without encountering anyone, she though
t over what she had heard. Nicky and Hat meeting surreptitiously. What did it mean? A drink in the village together? Well, that was innocent enough. Why hadn’t they come out in the open with it? Why conceal that, and their drive back in the station wagon?

  Standing at the window, looking out over the gardens and orchards, the rolling fields, the dark woods, veiled here and there with fog, Catherine swung the shade cord to and fro. Were she and Nicky in the same boat? Thrown together by the forces of murder in an artificial intimacy, seeing each other, being with each other constantly, day after day, had Hat’s old supremacy over Nicky, like Stephen Darrell’s over her, reasserted itself? What a sorry mess! She felt sad and unutterably depressed, not angry with anyone, for once not even with Hat. You couldn’t help your feelings. You could your actions. She and Nicky would have to have a talk.

  The chimes in the hall roused her from motionless brooding. She went slowly downstairs. Hat and Tom, Nicky and Francine were there. There wasn’t the slightest trace of the interchange between Tom and Hat, no suggestion of anything significant between Hat and Nicky. Catherine had a sensation of battling images in mist that dissolved when she advanced among them.

  After lunch Angela sent for her. By that time, she had given up the idea of searching for wet shoes; it no longer seemed to her very good—and her initial attempt hadn’t been very successful. It was later on, when she left Angela, that without searching for it at all, the information she had been seeking tumbled unsolicited into her lap.

  She found her aunt up and dressed in beautiful silvery tweeds. Angela was sitting erect in a chair near the fire, mending a glove in lamplight. The afternoon was gray. Her chestnut hair in the familiar coronet of braids was as carefully arranged as ever, but her creamy skin had bluish undertones to it, and her eyes were empty.

  They were fine eyes, large and a little heavy-lidded, accustomed to resting on pleasant things, comfortable things. There was no natural fret in Angela, no stir or ferment, no press of bothersome questions. If she was abnormal in anything, it was that she was the almost perfect norm, a happily married woman for two decades, kind, charitable, openhanded and good. She had never, in Catherine’s knowledge, done an unkind act. Yet it was to her that tragedy and heartbreak had come twice in less than two years.

  The facade was still there. Was the structure behind it crumbling? There was no immediate indication of it, except for the empty look in her eyes, as though she weren’t there. Her surface tranquility was, if anything, more pronounced.

  She spoke of money again, drawing the fine needle in and out of black suede with small neat stitches. She wanted to give Catherine money until Mike’s money was located.

  Catherine refused as gently as she could. “I don’t need any, really, Angela. If I do, I’ll ask you for some.”

  There were pictures on the walls, of John, of Hat and Tom when they were little, of their mother, Angela’s sister, Laura, and their father, Richard La Mott. Tom was like his mother, Hat like her father. Laura and Richard La Mott had been killed in a car crash when Hat was a baby. Richard La Mott had died instantly, Laura had lived long enough to put the two children in Angela’s hands. She had had them ever since. It would kill her if they were mixed up, in any way, with John’s murder. And Hat had threatened Tom.

  Her aunt didn’t speak of the dreadful revelation that had broken over the, house last night at all. She addressed herself to practical matters, There was a leak in the roof of the east wing. Tom was going to see Mr. James about it. The drawing-room and hall needed painting badly; Francine had promised to look in on Mapsen, who did good work. Would Catherine post some letters for her in the village? She’d like them to catch the three-o’clock mail. And Susan Blair had called. Susan was head of the Town Improvement Association. “While you’re in town, will you stop in and give her this check—and sort of smooth her ruffled feathers? She wanted to come over but I—I didn’t feel up to seeing her.”

  Tom and Francine might have the cars. “I’ll call a cab for you.” She put out a hand toward the phone but Catherine said she’d rather walk.

  Taking letters and check, she went downstairs. There was no one around. It would be good to get out into the open air alone, the clean untainted air where the fog was at least real. She went to the hall closet, tied a scarf over her head, got into her coat, and looked around aimlessly. The snow was melting and the roads would be wet. There were galoshes at the back of the closet, in a distant corner. Would they fit her? She reached in and started to pull them out—and her fingers stood still. The galoshes were damp. She drew them slowly from the closet.

  They were huge. Much too big to walk in with comfort. But someone had walked in them, recently. Not that day; Tom and Hat and Nicky had boots on. Someone had walked in these galoshes last night, slipping silently down the stairs in the small hours of the morning, pulling the galoshes on, going out to the garage and searching, coming back in and moving silently up the stairs, except for that single incautious footstep she had heard.

  The proof was there. Turning one of the galoshes over, she saw it, dulled by wetness, partially removed by snow, but nevertheless there, a smear of paint from Mike’s crushed tube of cerulean blue that the searcher had stepped on in his or her haste. The blue stain ran from the sole onto the cloth of the cravenette upper.

  Down on one knee, Catherine looked at the blue smear. The search of the garage was a direct result of the news that her uncle’s death was murder. It was someone in the house, or someone who had access to it, who had made that secret journey. Someone in the house—

  It stretched away from her on every side, quiet and ordered in the gray light. She came to sharp awareness of her extreme vulnerability. There was no one in sight but she could be seen from a dozen different vantage points.

  Was someone, in the upper hall, in the drawing-room, beyond the sweep of the staircase, standing watching her? Coldness ran down her arms and there was a prickling sensation at the back of her neck. She didn’t look anywhere. She got carefully to her feet. Thrusting the galoshes back into the depths of the closet, she walked in a straight line to the front door, opened it, her shoulders stiff, closed it behind her, and started down the driveway into the welcome advance of a wall of mist.

  Chapter Nineteen - Dutch Pete Appears Again

  MEANWHILE, IN NEW YORK, the police mill was grinding steadily on. Feed it fact, tangibles, and you got results. By noon that day, McKee knew of the search of the room over the Wardwell garage in Brookfield. Before that, he had discovered other things. Dutch Pete had been provided with a local habitation and a name.

  Mrs. Bettinger, the caretaker in the Wardwell house on Sixty-fourth Street, had seen and talked to the ex-handy man recently. On the day before Angela Wardwell returned to New York from the West, Dutch Pete had come boldly to the house asking for Mrs. Wardwell.

  Dutch Pete’s name was Peter Heinson. He had worked for the Ward wells on and off for two years prior to John Wardwell’s death. He had been in the house on the night John Wardwell died, occupied with his usual furnace chores. He came night and morning and, in cold weather, in the middle of the day. As usual, Mrs. Bettinger let him in; he let himself out through the basement door when he was finished. She didn’t know what time he left. She had had a touch of neuralgia that day, and after giving Mr. Wardwell a glass of milk and some graham crackers at around six o’clock, she had gone up to bed on the top floor.

  “That one,” Mrs. Bettinger said of the ex-handy man with angry contempt. Pete had asked her to call him when Mrs. Wardwell got home. Call him where? “At Pete’s Tavern.” The old caretaker was withering. “Tavern it is—and me that never touched a drop nor ever will and him a thief.”

  Why did she call him a thief? Because, in her opinion, it wasn’t the parlor maid Anna Beckwett, or the upstairs girl, Pearl Starr, who had made off with cash lying around the house in those days; it was Dutch Pete.

  Dutch Pete—Pete’s Tavern. Did Dutch Pete own a tavern? That Mrs. Bettinger couldn’t say, nor d
id she know the address of the tavern. She had stopped him right there, shutting the door in his face.

  A telephone book, and various precincts, were consulted. There were no less than 21 Pete’s Taverns in all parts of the city. By eleven o’clock, they had run down the right Pete’s Tavern. It was on Forty-eighth Street near the river.

  The bartender was no relation of the ex-handy man’s. He declined the honor with thanks. The police had a word with various patrons. Dutch Pete when last seen was staying at the Saybrook Hotel but he hadn’t been in for quite a while, maybe a week. The Saybrook, a seedy, dollar lodging house on Avenue A near Thirty-sixth Street was a bust. But—Dutch Pete had checked out on the morning following Michael Nye’s death.

  McKee fed the information to Centre Street and turned his attention to recreating the background against which John Wardwell had lived, and the full history of the day on which he had died. He talked over the phone and in person to half a dozen of Ward well’s former business associates. They could tell him little he didn’t already know. Some of them unconsciously enlarged upon the portrait of the dead financier.

  Hard, cold, upright, and just, John Wardwell had had few personal friends. He had craved eminence in other things. His charities were large and public, he had given lavishly to hospitals and churches and civic improvements. McKee thought of Chesterton’s On the day of the millennium, the gutters will run with the blood of philanthropists. John Wardwell’s blood had run before the millennium.

  A Simon P. Florian put him onto the man who had been Wardwell’s private secretary during the last year of his life. McKee interviewed this man, Gilean Peters, in Peters’s office in the Wall Street district. Thin, blond, and in his forties, Peters was mystified and cautious. He had been in the Wardwell house on the day Wardwell died.