The Silver Leopard Read online

  There was an automatic perfection to the movements of her body that inspired admiration in a distant part of her brain. Before she had thought out what she was going to do, she was doing it.

  A thrust backward, a dash across the dining-room, fingers on the hasp of the French windows, the window pulled inward, she was through it, still alive, and out on the terrace.

  Gray light, gray cement, two old chairs, an old table, trees to the left of the terrace, a clump of lilac bushes to the right, straight ahead beyond the terrace the hillside, clothed in tall maize-colored grass, fell steeply to the well, and then to the woods at the bottom. There was no one in sight.

  Catherine drew a great mouthful of air into her lungs. Careful now. She retreated, put herself flat against the house wall. Which way? Right or left? Try right. The garden was in that direction, and there were more areas of concealment—the hedges, the silver spruces near the pool, the maple in the middle of the lawn, the bulk of the wood box outside the kitchen door.

  Muscles tight, she edged along the clapboarding, on the balls of her feet, ready to break into instant flight. She was almost at the corner, then down off the terrace and onto the grass. A stone path led round the corner to the kitchen door. She advanced foot by cautious foot, watching and listening.

  She was at the corner, hugging it, could look along the south side of the house. A five-foot white pine just outside the kitchen door obscured her immediate view, but as far beyond it as she could see, past the kitchen window, and over to the pool and the spruces, there was still no one visible in the fading light.

  If she could get in among the spruces it would be only a short dash through the cedar hedge to the road. She tensed herself, started around the pine, leaped forward, stumbled over an obstruction, and started to fall, full length. A man’s outstretched legs were mixed up in her fall. She couldn’t save herself. Her head struck a flagstone crashingly—and that was all.

  A voice was talking somewhere. It said, “My God!” Catherine knew the voice. It was Stephen Darrell’s. She was in a moving vehicle. Her head was a ball of iron packed with dynamite that kept going off in spurts. The spurts were red-hot flame.

  Something warm ran into her mouth. She licked it away and forced her eyes open. There was sky above her head, and a tree branch. She was in Stephen Darrell’s arms. He was carrying her. The road was in sight, the road in front of the cottage that she had tried for so furiously and hadn’t made. Recollection came back sickeningly, in bits.

  Stephen wasn’t going toward the road. He was hugging the cottage wall. He turned into the path leading to the front door. He opened the door, carried her into the living-room, and put her on the sofa, lowering her carefully. He sat down beside her, supporting her with an arm around her shoulders. His disengaged hand had a handkerchief in it. He was wiping her cheek, her forehead. She flinched, cried out.

  He said, “There, I won’t touch it.” He felt her pulse and nodded. “Catherine, can you talk?”

  She didn’t want to. She simply wanted to brace herself against the pain banging away inside her skull, rocking it.

  “Try,” Stephen urged. “Try and tell me what happened.”

  She got it out, stumblingly, her swollen lips shaping words thickly. She had recognized Dutch Pete, had come here to phone. “Where is he?” She shrank back.

  “Dutch Pete won’t trouble you again.”

  Stephen spoke shortly. His voice was grim. He went on talking. Catherine listened. It was Dutch Pete’s outstretched legs she had stumbled over. He couldn’t move them out of her way. Dutch Pete was dead.

  Catherine looked vacantly in front of her. Dead, dead, dead—Her Uncle John had died and Mike had died—and now Dutch Pete was dead. She didn’t care a snap of her fingers for Dutch Pete, but in her mind he had been release, horizon, the end of terror, of night. She was wrong.

  Stephen told her that he had found her lying unconscious beyond Dutch Pete’s body on the flagstones outside the kitchen door. “I called the police. I had to. You’ve got to have a doctor. Tell me before the police come—did you hear anyone, see anyone through the windows, or when you first went outside?”

  Catherine started to shake her head and the ceiling came down and hit her.

  “Never mind,” Stephen’s voice said hastily from a distance. He got up, got her a glass of water she couldn’t drink. He went away, came back with wood and paper and kindling and lighted a fire. Flames roared up the chimney. Catherine had been cold, now she was burning hot. Stephen took off her coat, resettled her on pillows he brought from her bedroom. He threw off his own leather jacket. Catherine closed her eyes.

  When she opened them again after some little time, it was almost dark out and the room was empty. There were a lot of men somewhere near by, in another room. She could hear their voices. They must be in the kitchen. It was the police. Listening, a rough picture began to take shape.

  When they got there, Dutch Pete, dead, was sprawled half in and half out of the wood box beyond the kitchen door and directly behind the small white pine. It was the pine tree that had effectually concealed him from her when she started to run past the kitchen door. Dutch Pete had opened the wood box, the lid was up. He had been in the act of bending over the box when he was struck across the head from behind with a stout piece of locust, two or three inches thick. The improvised bludgeon was lying on the stones near the box. It had blood and hair on it. In the wood box, and in his clenched fingers, there was money, $1,250 in ten- and twenty-dollar bills.

  Someone had salted the wood box and the ex-handy man had tumbled into the prepared trap.

  The fire on the living-room hearth still burned brightly. Catherine was bitterly cold again. Dutch Pete had been killed by someone lying in wait for him, in concealment, close to the house. He was alive a short time before she ran out through the dining-room windows. The grunt she had heard, the thump, were his death struggles as he was struck and sagged forward.

  Stephen Darrell had appeared with startling swiftness very soon afterward; the light painting the windows, all but gone now, had still been fairly full when he carried her in here, Catherine thought.

  She thought of something else. According to the police, there were bills in the wood box, and when Stephen Darrell was in the village earlier that afternoon, he had just cashed a check. She could still see him, standing outside the bank doors, putting money, a lot of it, in a wallet, and putting the wallet into an inside pocket of his leather jacket. He had no coat under it, just a dark-blue flannel shirt.

  The jacket was lying across the green chair beside the pine table. Catherine looked at folds of worn brown leather. She got up, swayed, and almost fell. She had to get across the floor, had to set her dreadful suspicion at rest.

  It wasn’t Dutch Pete who mattered so much, but whoever had killed her Uncle John and then Mike.

  It took incredible effort and what seemed like a quarter of an hour to negotiate twelve feet of space. She went from sofa-end to staircase to wall, to table, was at the green chair. She sagged down into the chair’s embrace, dragged the leather jacket across her knees.

  A pause for rest. She found the inside pocket, man-aged to get the wallet out. Another pause—she opened the wallet.

  The sheaf of currency she had seen Stephen stuffing into the wallet earlier wasn’t there. It was gone. The only money in the pigskin envelope, with Stephen’s initials on it in gold, was a single ten-dollar bill.

  She was still sitting there, with the wallet clasped loosely in nerveless fingers, when footsteps sounded along the passage and Inspector McKee walked into the room.

  Chapter Twenty-One - Fourth Attempt at Murder

  THE AGONY WAS FRIGHTFUL. She had done it. She was the one who had delivered Stephen into the inspector’s hands. That was what Catherine thought at first. McKee undeceived her. He knew all about the check Stephen had cashed in town.

  Summoned, Stephen readily admitted cashing an $1100 check just before the bank closed. He absolutely refused to say what
he had done with the money. He did deny, emphatically, that the bills in the wood box were his.

  Standing on the hearth, tall and lounging, in his familiar indolent attitude, his dark head a little on one side, Stephen said, “I’m sorry, Inspector, but it’s a private matter, nobody’s business but my own.” And stuck to it.

  Hours later, the clash between the two men kept repeating itself in Catherine’s aching brain. “You’re in a bad spot, Mr. Darrell.”

  “I can’t help that.”

  “There’s such a thing as tracing bills—” A shrug. “Go ahead.”

  “If you didn’t put that cash in the wood box why not say what you did do with the eleven hundred dollars you had when you left the bank?”

  “My money’s my own to do with as I please. That money you found is not mine.”

  Then and there nothing very much actually had happened. Stephen’s story was taken down in shorthand by a man in plain-clothes the inspector had brought up with him from New York. Fie said he had been walking toward the Wardwell house from town, when, from a distance, he saw the lights on here. He had come to investigate, idly. “I thought the others might have walked over,” When he reached the cottage, Catherine was lying unconscious, face down, on the stones outside the kitchen door with the Wardwell ex-handy man sprawled near her. “The fellow was dead. I didn’t even know who he was.”

  Asked whether he had seen anyone in the vicinity of the little house, in the fields, along the road, as he approached the cottage, he said, “No.” He said it sharply, shortly.

  His tone put new hope into Catherine. She knew how he felt. He had already declared, to her, that he wasn’t going to do the police’s work for them. If he had seen someone, she thought, recalling her own earlier emotion, he probably couldn’t bring himself to turn whoever it was over to the police.

  That brought her back on the Gordian knot. Someone he knew. Someone she knew. One of them.

  McKee’s conclusions were much the same as Catherine’s. Either Stephen Darrell had killed Dutch Pete, or he knew, or had a keen suspicion of who had. If the latter, wild horses weren’t going to drag it from him. To establish the truth or falsity of the statement he had made oughtn’t to be too difficult. If the bills in the wood-box were not his, he had disposed of his own cash between the time he left the bank at a few minutes of three and four-ten when he said he arrived here.

  Brookfield wasn’t a large place. Troopers were dispatched to backtrack on Darrell. Other men were sent to the Wardwell house to keep the occupants there. They would all have to be questioned as to their whereabouts at between a quarter of four and a quarter past. Catherine hadn’t seen murder committed—but she had heard it.

  She herself had missed death by a hair. The only thing that had saved her was that the killer didn’t know she was in the cottage. From the back of the house, the lights weren’t visible. Dutch Pete dead, the bludgeon dropped, and a quick fadeaway; one thing was evident. If Catherine hadn’t been there, the ex-handy man’s body would have lain undiscovered for weeks, perhaps months. The road past the cottage was very little traveled and the grounds were secluded.

  The immediacies claimed McKee’s attention. Catherine’s head needed attention. Stephen Darrell showed a curious tendency to linger in the vicinity of the stricken girl. Under no condition must he be left alone with her. McKee was relieved when a Doctor Robson, the local physician who had been called, arrived. He was still more relieved when Doctor Robson said he would have to take Miss Lister over to the hospital in Danbury to have some X rays made; that it was impossible, from an exterior examination, to determine the extent of her injury.

  Catherine was helped to the car and wrapped in blankets. Her gray eyes large and dark in a face as white as the bandage around her head, she said to McKee, “You’ll let my aunt and—Nicky know, Inspector?”

  “Yes, Miss Lister.”

  The car started off. Darrell and the Scotsman stood side by side in the narrow lane watching the red taillight dwindle. It was almost completely dark in the small clearing in the woods. Dutch Pete’s Ford was parked in the sunken driveway farther along, which was why Catherine hadn’t seen it.

  The red tail light vanished. There was scarcely a stir of air. The stillness was deep. Out of it, without preface or warning, McKee said, “Before all this happened, before you went into the service—when did you last see Michael Nye up here in Brookfield, Mr. Darrell?”

  “On the morning of December the tenth.”

  The response was automatic. It came out in a drugged tone. Darrell had been thinking of other things. He came back to awareness sharply, broke off, turned his dark head, and looked at the Scotsman through the gloom, his sharply angled face wary. “What’s that got to, do with—anything in particular, Inspector?”

  “Oh, I don’t think you and Michael Nye were friends.”

  “You’re wrong. Mike was a good guy.”

  “You wouldn’t like to tell me what you really went to see Nye about on the night he was killed?”

  “I did tell you.”

  “Yes, yes, of course. Now you say you last saw Nye here in Brookfield on the morning of December the tenth—what December? Forty-three? The year John Wardwell died?”

  Darrell retreated. “That year, yes. It might have been the tenth or any other day at around that time, I don’t really recall.”

  He recalled, all right. The nucleus of the dissension between the two men, a curious little incident, was now pinned to a definite date and gave them something to go on.

  Darrell was restless. “Am I to consider myself under arrest, Inspector?”

  “Not yet, Mr. Darrell. Don’t leave Brookfield. I shall probably, and Lieutenant Carstairs of the state police will certainly, want to question you later on this evening.”

  “Okay. See you then.” Darrell walked off along the road at a rapid pace and McKee turned and went slowly back toward the cottage. He was disgruntled, out of sorts, and altogether thoroughly dissatisfied with himself. In an investigation into homicide, a second killing to conceal the commission of the original crime was a commonplace. Up until now, they had managed to prevent that. He hadn’t prevented it this time. Even his presence in Brookfield was fortuitous. He had come up here to see Mr. Zantini, the Brookfield garage and filling station owner who had been in the Wardwell house late on the day Wardwell died. He had made the journey in the hope that Zantini might be able to shed more light on what was close to John Wardwell’s last hour of life. He hadn’t yet seen Zantini; he had only just arrived at the barracks when Stephen Darrell’s call came through.

  The cottage could tell him very little, simply that Dutch Pete had used it as a hideout. The wretched little man was as dead as a doornail. He had died because he had tried to cash in on knowledge incriminating to John Wardwell’s and Michael Nye’s murderer. Safety for sale—it wasn’t a seller’s market. The little ex-handy man had brought about his own death. He couldn’t talk, but there was one thing that might be made to do so. That was the ground around the cottage, the stretches of meadow and woodland between it and the Wardwell house. The snow had gone for the most part, but soft spots, damp places, might hold some trace of a definite footprint.

  It wasn’t too good a chance, and it would be a long business. He had no sooner entered the cottage than what small chance there was of tracking down Dutch Pete’s killer by a revealing footprint was three-fifths wiped away. Nicholas Bray and Hat and Francine La Mott came tramping in.

  Like Darrell, they had seen the lights from a distance—they said. Informed of what had occurred, the appropriate emotions were appropriately displayed, shock, surprise, bewilderment, curiosity—and innocence, always that.

  McKee didn’t even ask them any questions. He had certain things to do first. They had already messed up the ground coming this way from the Wardwell house. There might be others going the other way, in reverse. He requested them, gravely, to return home by the road, dispatched a trooper with them to see that they did so, and after a scruti
ny of the rooms and an uninformative search of the dead ex-handy man’s clothes and Ford, he returned to the barracks for a conference with Lieutenant Carstairs and a talk over long distance, first with his own office, and then with the District Attorney’s.

  It was six when he reached the barracks.

  The next few hours were given to a minute scrutiny of the whereabouts, between half-past three and half-past four, of all the people concerned in the two previous murders, of which Dutch Pete’s was the third. To walk through the woods to Catherine Lister’s cottage, salt the wood box with cash, wait, kill, and return to the Ward-well house, could have been done in as little as 20 to 25 minutes.

  The trouble was that no one’s uncorroborated word could be accepted—and there was no independent check. The single trooper left in the house, after Catherine Lister walked into town in the middle of the afternoon, didn’t, and couldn’t, make an adequate report. The grounds were extensive, there were half a dozen ways of getting in and out of the house and he didn’t have eyes in the back of his head. The net result, as far as alibis went, was zero.

  Neither, when the phone rang for McKee at nine o’clock, had he discovered what Stephen Darrell had done with $1100 in cash between the time he left the bank at three and a few minutes after four, when he turned up at the cottage in the woods.

  The doctor who had taken Catherine Lister to Danbury was on the wire. Doctor Robson said, “I don’t know what to do. There’s no private room vacant in the hospital, and Miss Lister wants to return to her aunt’s, and a Captain Bray is here and clamoring to see the girl.”

  McKee thought for a while. There was danger for Catherine Lister in the big white house among trees on a hill a mile and a half away. On the other hand—he came to a sudden decision. He said, “All right, Doctor, let Captain Bray bring Miss Lister back to her aunt’s. I want to talk to her, anyhow.” He hung up.