The Silver Leopard Page 18

  Asked about John Wardwell’s relationship with his family, Peters said that he had been devoted to his wife. His children, or rather his wife’s niece and nephew? Well, there might have been some slight friction. In spite of his wealth, Wardwell was a careful man, and the younger people were spenders. On the morning of the twenty-second, Wardwell had given Peters orders to close out all the Wardwell charge accounts—at Tiffany’s, Black Starr and Gorham’s, Sloan’s, specialty shops. Brooks Brothers, Fifth Avenue department stores. As Peters understood it, after the first of the year, John Wardwell was going West with his wife in search of renewed health and vigor, and he expected to be gone a long while.

  Also, on that morning, Wardwell had sent Peters around to the Federal Trust, a near-by bank where he kept a small running account for the payment of household bills and personal items. That is, the account was small for him; there was never more than $10,000 in it. His statement wasn’t due, but he wanted what there was of it. Something in the statement and the accompanying checks had made him extremely angry. That was all Peters knew.

  Dutch Pete aroused no echo in the secretary’s mind. Nicholas Bray was a friend of the young La Motts and had done some work for one of John Wardwell’s companies before he went into the service. He had seen Darrell about the house once or twice, but the social side of the Wardwell ménage was out of his province. The secretary did, however, add a name to the list of visitors at the house on that last day.

  Coming back at around, oh, late, at perhaps half-past five, with some papers Wardwell wanted, he found a Mr. Zantini in the hall asking Mrs. Bettinger whether he could see Mr. Wardwell. Zantini was the owner of a garage and filling station in Brookfield and serviced the Wardwell cars. Peters had sent him checks from time to time. He couldn’t say whether or not Zantini’s request for an interview had been granted. He handed the portfolio Wardwell wanted to Mrs. Bettinger and left the house.

  That was all Peters had to contribute. McKee thanked him and returned to the office. There was no trace yet of any money belonging to Michael Nye. There was nothing on any quarrel or cause for ill will in the past between Nye and Stephen Darrell. The information concerning the marauded garage was in. It wasn’t particularly difficult to figure that. As one of the executors of Wardwell’s estate, Michael Nye had had papers and records of Wardwell’s in his possession, and he had spent some weeks in Brookfield after the funeral. If there had been anything informative in the room over the garage, it was gone now.

  The Scotsman gathered his finds, summing them up. They didn’t amount to a great deal, in the shape they were in. He sent a man to John Wardwell’s neighborhood bank, the Federal Trust, although with very little hope of getting anything after almost two years. He called Headquarters. There was nothing new on Dutch Pete. The ex-handy man had to be found. He had been in the Wardwell house at some time during that crucial period, six o’clock until a quarter of eight. John Ward-well was alive at six; he was dead when his wife and Michael Nye and Catherine Lister went in and found him at seven-forty-five.

  Dutch Pete could have killed John Wardwell himself, or he could know who did. He could have killed Michael Nye, or he could know who did. The search for him might take time, and there was none to spare. With a vision of the house in Brookfield and its cargo of dynamite pressing against his eyeballs, he rang the Brookfield barracks. He heard with satisfaction that on last reports everything was quiet. The family were lunching together in apparent peace and amity. He asked that Zantini be talked to, the garage proprietor might have seen or heard something during his brief visit to the Wardwell house on the day John died.

  Going into the long narrow inner room that was his private office, he plunged into reports on everyone closely or distantly connected with the two crimes that so persistently paralleled each other and that so far, in spite of all the work that had been done, were wrapped in polar darkness.

  That was at shortly after two. At ten minutes of three, the darkness was split a little and with extreme unpleasantness. Inspector Brown of the Safe and Loft Squad called him. Brown had a good deal to say. The gist of it was that Peter Heinson, the man known to the Ward-wells as Dutch Pete, had been implicated in a silk robbery that occurred in the summer of 1943. He was arrested on December the twenty-fourth of that year, tried, convicted, and sent up for three years and three months. With time off for good behavior, he got out of jail one week before Angela Wardwell’s return to New York and the reopening of the Sixty-fourth Street house.

  An ex-convict, implicated in a robbery during which a man had been killed. Not a pleasant gentleman to have roaming around loose. The Scotsman sat on and thought about it for a long time before he moved.

  While McKee struggled with the problem of Dutch Pete in New York, up in Brookfield, Catherine occupied herself with carrying out her aunt’s errands, companioned at a distance by a state trooper. She arrived in the village at twenty minutes of three. It was after she had posted Angela’s letters and was on her way out of the post office that she saw Stephen Darrell.

  He had just emerged from the bank and was standing outside the revolving door, a few yards from her. He had money in his hands, quite, a lot of it. He put the sheaf of bills in his wallet, put the wallet in an inside pocket and started to turn in her direction.

  Catherine didn’t want to meet him, to talk to him. Her movement was instinctive and swift. There was a cotton shop between post office and bank, a long, low, old-fashioned wooden building running through to the other street. Stepping quickly in front of two women, she cut into the shop, went down one of the Jong aisles at a pace just short of a run, and out through the door at the rear.

  The maneuver was successful in removing her from Stephen Darrell’s path. It also separated her from her guardian in blue. The trooper had taken his eyes off her for no more than a few seconds to glance at Darrell. When he looked back, he was flabbergasted to find the slim figure he had been trailing nowhere in sight. The cotton shop was the only place into which she could have gone. Feeling like a fool, he entered the shop and looked around, but by that time Catherine was well away.

  Susan Blair, to whom she had to give Angela’s check, lived on High Rocks Road, a mile or so from town, to the north. Once Catherine left the end of Main Street, her pace slackened. She was in no hurry to return to the big beautiful house she had left an hour earlier. The nervous apprehension that had driven her out of it headlong had subsided. She was no longer occupied with who had searched the garage the night before. She had come face to face with another dilemma.

  Suppose she suspected, or even knew, who had killed her uncle and then Mike—could she go to the police with her knowledge? Could she, herself, with her own hands, turn Nicky or Francine, or either of her cousins, or Stephen Darrell over to the law? Murder was vile. It was horrible. Its consequences were equally horrible. The culprit was isolated and stripped naked. His innermost secrets were torn from him and thrown down before the public gaze. The eyes of the crowd, gloating eyes, were fastened on his wounds, his ignominy and despair. Then there was the black cap and the verdict, and then Sing Sing and the last morning and that final walk to that other room at the end of a corridor, and the hood, and the straps being fastened—

  Catherine wrenched away from image after revolting image. If it was a stranger with whom she would have to concern herself, it would be different—but no stranger had gone out to the garage last night, and, even more important, no stranger had carried the bonds and the bloodstained envelope up to the boardinghouse in Clearwater. Before she had wanted to know. Now she didn’t. Anything but that, anything. Forget about the galoshes and the bonds. She walked on faster, as though, with distance, she could put these things behind her.

  Small houses were widely spaced, with meadows in between and glimpses of the river. There was a man ahead of her on the path paralleling the road. She didn’t really look at this man until they were both approaching a small general store on a corner, at the extreme limit of the village. Then she did look at h
im, and pulled up short.

  The man going into the store was short, thickset, and wore a sheepskin-lined windbreaker with the stuffing coming out of the right sleeve.

  She stared at his retreating back, her eyes round. There was no doubt about it. He was the stalled motorist she had seen in the grounds of the boardinghouse in Clearwater two days earlier. Was it coincidence? Had his being there, in a town some 20 or 30 miles away been accident, chance? Her pulses drumming with excitement, she remained where she was, in shadow near the southern end of the low ramshackle building. She decided to wait until he came out and get a better look at him for future reference.

  The door opened with a jangling sound. The man in the windbreaker appeared. He paused in the doorway and looked back over his shoulder. Then he pulled the door shut and walked off rapidly, not toward Catherine, but north, away from her.

  Catherine didn’t immediately move, except, to put a hand against a porch pillar for support. The man in the sheepskin-lined windbreaker with the stuffing coming out of the right sleeve was Dutch Pete.

  She stood spellbound, gazing after his retreating figure until the full implication of this began to break on her in waves. Dutch Pete over in Clearwater and now here in Brookfield. She began to run. She ran up and across the porch and into the wretched little store. It smelled of kerosene and damp. The grocer, an elderly man in glasses, a foreigner of some sort, looked up from weighing potatoes behind the cluttered counter.

  “Telephone?” Catherine said.

  “Telephone?” The grocer mouthed, shook his head.

  “Telephone, telephone ” Catherine repeated. “I want to telephone.”

  He had no telephone. Catherine left the store precipitately. Out in the narrow road the light was beginning to fade a little; it was almost four o’clock. Except for the store, there was no other building, no house, in sight. Dutch Pete was just disappearing around a bend in the road. She had no wish to encounter him, but if site could get a hint of where he was going, it would be a help. Walk on a short distance and see what she could see. She did. Fifty feet beyond the turn, Dutch Pete was getting into the ancient and dilapidated Ford he had had over in Clearwater. The car moved off, gathered speed, and disappeared from view.

  Ten minutes later, Catherine hurried up Susan Blair’s driveway between rows of barberry bushes. She had debated whether or not to return to town and telephone the police from there, then decided against it. Susan’s was nearer. To her dismay, there was no response to her vigorous use of the knocker. She went around to the back of the pretty little house. The garage doors were open and Susan’s car was gone. She might not be home for hours. Back on the road, Catherine hesitated. What to do, fastest? The Wardwell house was now fairly near. She straightened her shoulders with satisfaction. There was something else nearer—her own cottage.

  The phone was still connected. She had kept it on all year, during the war, for fear of having it removed if she didn’t. She started on, walking rapidly through the gray November afternoon along the narrow twisting road, uphill to Four Corners, left at the fallen-in red barn, uphill some more between stretches of young timber. The woods dripped and were still, dripped again. The road, high in the middle, grass grew on it in summer, was rutted deeply on either side. It was very little used. The ruts, patches of snow and melting slush, slowed her maddeningly. It was important that the police should know all about Dutch Pete as soon as possible.

  There was a stitch in her side and her lungs were laboring, but in spite of her physical discomfort, an enormous weight had lifted from her. Dutch Pete had been in the Sixty-fourth Street house on the night her uncle was killed, he had been in the city when Mike died, he had been in Clearwater when the bloodstained envelope was discarded beneath her window. He easily could have slipped upstairs in the boardinghouse and crammed the bonds behind the bureau drawer in her room.

  In spite of her haste, Catherine was wary. She was in lonely country and Dutch Pete had driven out in this general direction. There were dozens of different roads and the township was extensive. Nevertheless, as she went, she kept looking around, kept a careful eye on the surface of the lane. No car had driven over it recently. She was perfectly safe. She jumped when a rabbit ran across her path.

  Another hill, a twist, a level stretch, the cedar hedge of the cottage swung into view with, above its green spears, the peak on her roof and the weather vane pointing east. Catherine turned in at the little white gate, went up the path paved with stones and lined with more cedars so that you walked in a soft green tunnel with no roof but bare apple branches and the fling of a maple bough.

  She mounted two immense slabs of stone to the white front door with a fanlight over it. The key was on the key ring in her purse. She got it out and opened the door on dimness. There was no hall. You went straight into the little living-room with its three windows, one in the west wall at the foot of the enclosed staircase, two in the same wall as the door, the north.

  On her left was her own bedroom. At the back of the living-room, to the right, was the tiny guest bedroom. Beyond the immense fireplace with its Dutch oven, a really old one—the house was pre-revolutionary—a narrow passage led to the infinitesimal dining-room with the bath opposite. The sizable kitchen was at the back.

  Catherine threw down her purse and pulled off her heavy gloves. Waning daylight seeped thinly through the small panes of the windows. She touched the switch just inside the door and lamplight sprang up. Somehow she needed it. It fell reassuringly on familiar things, on sofa and chairs, her old cherry table, the bookcases, the ivory walls hung with pictures. Another half mile along the same road, after it broadened out at Hyatt’s Mill, would have brought her to the Wardwell house. She was glad she had stopped in here. She could get in touch with the police that much sooner, and speed was important.

  The telephone was in the middle of the passage leading to the kitchen, just outside the dining-room door. She crossed the living-room and turned into the passage, with its sloping floor and uneven walls. It was almost dark here. She switched on the overhead light cupped ridiculously in ceremonious crystal pendants in the middle of the ceiling. What should she say to the police? Simply, “Dutch Pete, the man Inspector McKee is looking for, is here in Brookfield?” It was too bad she hadn’t been able to see the license plate of his car.

  Lemon-colored light washed warmly over ivory paint, the lovely door lintels, penetrated into the kitchen in a long narrow stream. Within a few feet of the telephone Catherine stood still.

  Inside the kitchen, on the right, there was an old mahogany table below a window in an embrasure between icebox and stove. A Windsor rocker was pushed in to the table. She had breakfasts there when she was up here, where she could look out over her book into the garden enclosed, beyond spaciousness, in its live cedar hedges. The isolation, the peace, the silence and seclusion had been marvelous, once. Now they smashed in around her like the steel plates of a sprung trap.

  Who’s been sitting in my chair? Panic knocked against her ribs, rose chokingly in her throat. Thrown over the back of the Windsor rocker was a sheepskin-lined jacket with stuffing coming out of the right sleeve. She had blundered into the jackal’s den. Dutch Pete was here, in her house. She was shut up alone with him here, miles from anywhere.

  Chapter Twenty - Murder at the Cottage

  CATHERINE DIDN’T KNOW how long she stood there, absolutely motionless, halfway along the little brightly lighted passage, with the telephone, almost, but not quite, within reach, staring at that unmistakable coat. Behind her was the lighted living-room, to right and left the dark bath and dining-room, in front the kitchen. Nothing moved. The stillness was intense. There wasn’t a single sound.

  Then there was. Somewhere above her head something stirred. Was Dutch Pete upstairs? The single long room there, running the entire length of the house, except for the kitchen, had fanlights at either end, and twin beds and an overflow of books and unwanted furniture. She listened. Her flicker of hope died. The sound was the scrat
ching of tree branches against the roof.

  The stillness came back. Dutch Pete wasn’t upstairs. He was much nearer than that. Was he around the corner in the living-room? Or in the bathroom, waiting to throw open the door? Was he in the dining-room beside the buffet, armed with a bludgeon? He might be in the kitchen, hidden by either projecting wall, with a knife in his hands.

  How was she to know? What was she to do? Which way was she to run? Dared she try to get to the telephone? No, that would be insanity. Dutch Pete knew she was here. She had turned the lights on. Before she could take a step he would spring. There was no escape that way. There was no escape at all.

  It was the waiting that was the worst. Her tense throat ached with the desire to scream, “Where are you? Show yourself.” Her skin was covered with cold wetness. Her breathing, low, shallow, sounded like thunder in her ears. She became fretful. Tears stung her eyes. Why didn’t Dutch Pete attack? Why was he keeping her waiting like this?

  Her nails dug deeper into her clenched palms. There was another sound now. It wasn’t the creaking of branches. It was a sort of hoarse cry or exclamation, almost a grunt. It came from outside the house. It was followed by a thump, as though someone had thrown down a burden, perhaps an armload of logs. Was Dutch Pete outside? Had he seen the lights? Was he coming in? If so, by which door—the front or the kitchen?

  She couldn’t see either of them. They might already have opened, the man might be stealing up on her while she stood there helpless. There was another way in and out of the house. French windows in the dining-room occupied almost all of one wall. They opened on the big stone terrace at what was really the back of the house. If the slatted windows were fastened from the inside, Dutch Pete couldn’t get in that way, but she might be able to get out.

  Suppose the man was already in the dining-room. It was dark there. The slats were closed. She turned her head the fraction of an inch. She couldn’t see anything but a small segment of black floor boards. A sob, unuttered, tore at her rigid throat. She would have to chance it. Anything was better than this crouched waiting. If she were very fast, it was only a few feet—