The Silver Leopard Page 5

  They got there at around seven-thirty. They didn’t stay long. Tom and Francine left first, then Hat. She herself had gone after Mike telephoned to Catherine. “He was to have called me later. When the police phoned, I thought—” Her voice stopped and she crushed a scrap of white chiffon hard against her mouth.

  “What did Mr. Nye want to see Miss Lister about, Mrs. Wardwell?” McKee asked.

  The deadness in Angela shifted a little, lightened faintly. “About money. Mike was going to give her some. I tried to, earlier today, but she wouldn’t listen. Mike was going to make her listen. She’s going to be married and he, I—we both felt she oughtn’t to have to go on working.”

  Catherine thought, I wish Angela wouldn’t talk of my marriage. I don’t want Nicky brought into this. She was recalling, with a small inward shiver, the way Mike had spoken of him over the phone, saying, “Nicky?” sharply, and then “I’ve got to see you.” But Nicky hadn’t been here; that was one thing she didn’t have to worry about.

  He didn’t even know Mike was back from the West.

  McKee thought, The aunt’s statement is favorable to the niece. You didn’t kill your prospective benefactor when there was no necessity of doing so. On the other hand—He turned to Catherine.

  “You’re aware that you’re the chief beneficiary of Mr. Nye’s estate, Miss Lister? His will, or a copy of it, is in there in a drawer in his desk.”

  “What?” Catherine’s exclamation was almost a cry. She stared at the Scotsman incredulously, eyes wide under flattened brows. She was astounded, and moved. Why had Mike done it? They were friends, and always had been, in spite of the difference in their ages, but Mike had no obligation toward her—and he had relatives of his own, a sister and some cousins. She said aloud, slowly, “No, I didn’t know. I never dreamed of such a thing. Mike never said anything. He never gave me the slightest inkling—”

  Then she understood why the police were going after her so hard. His will had provided her with a motive for murder.

  Angela wasn’t a particularly brilliant or quick-thinking woman. And she was sunk in her own grief. But even she made the connection. The last vestiges of color left her cheeks and lips. “Oh, how horrible!” she said. “Surely you don’t think, Inspector—Why, that’s ridiculous and wrong! I’ve told you what Michael meant to do. He didn’t intend that Catherine should wait until his death, he wanted her to have money now, when she needed it.”

  The Scotsman took a turn up and down the floor. Catherine Lister’s astonishment appeared to be genuine and her aunt’s testimony was effective. Nevertheless, the fact remained that the slim frozen girl in the corner of the couch would have benefited largely by Michael Nye’s death. A whole loaf instead of a half, for herself and the man she was about to marry. He would look the gentle-man up, McKee decided. But first—

  He rose. “I’m going to ask you ladies to do something you won’t like. But I’m afraid it has to be done. I want you to look at that room of Mr. Nye’s and see if there’s anything out of order, anything that shouldn’t be there, that is unusual, and might give us a lead.”

  There was a ring of greenish pallor around Angela Wardwell’s mouth. He added hastily, “There’s nothing—Mr. Nye’s body has been removed.”

  They went with him perforce. Catherine could feel Angela shudder as they entered the familiar apartment next door in which Mike had lived for so many years, to which he had returned from so many journeys. He would never come back again. She tightened her fingers on the other woman’s elbow, whispered, “Don’t. It will be over soon,” and they went through the living-room archway and paused.

  Walls, floor, furniture, window frames, the desk at which Mike had been sitting, had been photographed and fingerprinted. The only traces of the furious activity on the part of the police were dustings of powder here and there, black on white, white on black. Everything else was as it had been. Both women looked around. There was nothing to indicate the presence of anyone but the people who had been there that evening, Tom and Francine, Hat and Angela. Their glasses stood where they had put them down, with, no doubt, their fingerprints on them. No, nothing. And then—something.

  It was Captain Pierson who found it, all but concealed where it had slipped behind the green-brocade cushion of a chair near the desk. He picked it up, held it out.

  Catherine stared at it, coldness, a deadly coldness, spreading through her. Nicky hadn’t been here at Mike’s, she told herself numbly. And yet the object lying on the captain’s extended palm was the compact that had fallen out of Nicky’s bed covers a month ago over in Halloran Hospital—and it had been in Nicky’s pocket late the afternoon before.

  “Yours, Mrs. Wardwell?” McKee asked.

  Angela shook her head. The front door opened and closed. Voices murmured. Someone had come in. Quick light footsteps sounded in the hall. They all turned. Hat La Mott appeared in the archway. Ermine wrapped her slender fairness above the froth of a floor-length gown of swirling green chiffon. Her gleaming head was bare. Her eyes, narrowly shining, were on the compact Pierson held.

  She spoke, and a galvanic shock went through Catherine and a number of things became clear—including the enigmatic and appraising glance Hat had given her in the Sixty-fourth Street house at shortly after noon that day.

  Chapter Four - A Missing Bloodstained Envelope

  THE COMPACT WAS HAT’S. She said so. She said, “That? Oh, that’s mine. I must have dropped it. It must have fallen out of my purse when I was here earlier this evening.”

  Catherine sat motionless, gazing absorbedly at whirling ballet dancers in a Degas on the opposite wall, without seeing a single thing. Hat’s compact—That meant, Nicky had had the compact when they separated outside the doctor’s office late the afternoon before, that it was Hat Nicky had met last night, Hat for whom he had substituted a dead man’s name.

  She was stunned. First Hat La Mott had appropriated Stephen Darrell and now she was reaching out for Nicky. Was it deliberate? Did her cousin hate and want to wound her—or was it that nothing had value in Hat’s eyes unless she could take it from someone else?

  What had happened as far as the compact was concerned was clear enough. Hat had gone out to Halloran, one of a party of fashionable young ministering angels, and had come on her own and her brother’s friend, and had dropped the compact during her visit. Why, Catherine thought passionately, hadn’t Nicky told her about their meeting? That he hadn’t, then or yesterday, increased its significance a thousand-fold. Was Nicky in love with Hat? If so, why had he pretended to love her?

  Anger was a cold bright flame in Catherine as she listened to the other girl express grief at Mike’s death, show solicitude and sympathy for Angela. Tears clinging to her lashes gave her an appealing look as she talked. Captain Pierson was quite plainly dazzled. She said that she had walked home after leaving Mike’s at around nine. She and Stephen Darrell and some friends had intended to go to the Stork for supper and to dance, at eleven. She finished dressing, and went down to Angela’s room, to find her gone. The caretaker, Mrs. Bettinger, told her about Mike.

  “I came as soon as I could—” Her mouth shook. She took Angela’s hand, pressed it to her cheek.

  McKee hadn’t failed to notice the antagonism between the cousins. He filed it for reference. As early as that a certain formlessness about the crime troubled him. It was simple in essence. Michael Nye, a wealthy man and a painter of distinction, had been struck down while seated at his desk in an attitude of ease. He either knew his killer well or thought he was alone in the apartment. The weapon with which the blow or blows had been delivered had not yet been located. It could be any one of dozens of objects on the premises, wiped clean of fingerprints and restored to its accustomed position.

  Fie wanted more background information, a lot more, about the dead painter and all these people. It had already occurred to him—as it had occurred to Catherine, fleetingly—that there was a slightly odd flavor to the family gathering in Nye’s rooms that evening.
Michael Nye had met them all, the woman he was going to marry, her niece and nephew and her nephew’s wife, earlier in the day. That he should want to be with Angela Wardwell again was understandable—but why the others, so soon? There was a suggestion of conference about it, of business afoot, something that had to be settled, then and there.

  Where so much was usual, the slightest hint of the unusual was of vital importance. “This visit of yours earlier tonight, Mrs. Wardwell, was it for a specific purpose, to discuss anything in particular?”

  They had seated themselves by that time, at the inspector’s request. Catherine was facing Angela, Hat was at the edge of her field of vision. Did Angela’s white immobility deepen? Did Hat’s small hands cupped around a cigarette jerk ever so lightly? She couldn’t be sure, but there was certainly something.

  Angela wasn’t a woman to take refuge in words as a disguise or to gain time. She did now. She said, as though the question were important and she was turning it over in her mind, “Why, no, we didn’t come for any particular purpose, except to see Michael. As to what we talked about—-I was to have gone to South America immediately after my marriage, and we would have been away for at least a year. So naturally we had to discuss details; whether my niece,” she indicated the girl at her side, “would join us, whether my nephew and his wife wanted to take over the Sixty-fourth Street house—”

  McKee nodded. A marriage had been arranged and would not take place. This woman’s niece and nephew, to both of whom she was evidently devoted, would be the gainers by the bridegroom’s elimination. That worked both ways. So would Catherine Lister and Nicholas Bray, the man to whom she was engaged.

  He was standing beside the desk. He opened a drawer and took out a checkbook he had already examined. The last check, dated as of that day, was drawn to Nicholas Bray for the sum of $500. There had been no mention of a meeting between the two men.

  He read the notation on the stub aloud. “Can you give me any information as to when Captain Bray and Mr. Nye met, Miss Lister?”

  Nicky here at Mike’s—the checkbook was a large one and Mike wouldn’t have carried it around with him. Catherine’s heart hammered. She told herself she was being absurd. So Nicky had been here? So what? Other people had been here too, Angela and Hat, Tom and Francine—

  “No, Inspector, I can’t tell you. I haven’t seen Nicky today.” She felt Hat’s gaze on her, ignored it, and gave McKee Nicky’s address.

  It was then that the Scotsman produced the key. He sent it straight down the alley for them, a strike over the heart of the plate. He did it idly, in a ruminative voice. He said, “What we have to consider—and it’s why I’m asking your help—is how Mr. Nye’s murderer gained admittance to this apartment.”

  It startled them. They didn’t know what he was getting at until he elaborated. He said that according to the superintendent and the Findlaters, not to speak of the dictates of common sense, Michael Nye kept his front door locked. So that he had either admitted the person who killed him—or the killer had a key. But he didn’t appear to have admitted anyone. The Findlaters asserted positively that his doorbell hadn’t rung from the time Angela left at twenty-five minutes past nine until Catherine rang it at a quarter of ten.

  “The bell,” the Scotsman explained, “has a particularly shrill clamor. We tested it for ourselves, and the people next door are very positive.” He went on to say that Mike couldn’t have known by prescience that there was a visitor standing outside his distant and locked front door and that therefore, as the evidence now stood, the visitor had to have a key.

  Angela roused at that. “No,” she said positively. “Michael wouldn’t have given a key to anyone. He was—he hated having his things touched.”

  “That,” said the inspector, “is not what I have in mind. Mr. Nye needn’t have given anyone a key. But there was another way one could have been obtained. Mr. Nye’s own key was in the pocket of his topcoat. When he came in at shortly after half-past five this afternoon, he threw the coat over a chair out there in the hall. Someone who was in the apartment earlier tonight could have taken the key from his pocket, used it to regain admittance unheard, returning the key to its proper place after the crime was commit ted.”

  Someone who had been there earlier that night—someone who had been there and who, after an apparent departure, had returned to do—what had been done. The coldness in Catherine spread. She and Hat both started to talk at once, pointing out that Mike could have had any number of visitors.

  It was the first sign of unanimity of thought between the two cousins. McKee agreed. The day elevator man who went off duty at seven, the other tenants, would have to be questioned. McKee dismissed the subject. “Miss Lister, I want you to do something for me.”

  “Yes, Inspector?”

  “I want you to re-enact what you did when you first entered this room tonight and found Mr. Nye.”

  When she first entered the room—Sickness rose in Catherine like a wave. She made no protest. She got up, went to the archway, faced about, took two steps, turned her head toward the desk. A horror of the lofty room and what it had held was thick in her. Mike was gone; he would always be there in memory, sprawled across the desk, his silver head laced with red ribbons—

  “I was here. I thought Mike was in the studio or out on the terrace. Then I saw him.”

  “Uh-huh.” McKee came to where she was standing, stooped until he was eye level with her, straightened.

  “I see. Now, look at the desk, please, at the objects on it. Is everything the same as it was then?”

  Catherine looked, her mouth dry. The lamp, the blotter, the terrible tonguelike stain zigzagging crookedly across it, the pen set, a calendar, a small scratch-pad to the left; to the right—there was something missing.

  She said, uncertainly, “There was an envelope, I think, a long, rather bulky one, there, beside the phone. Yes—I remember now. There was blood on it.” She had to try hard to keep her voice steady.

  “An envelope? You’re sure, Miss Lister?”

  “Yes.”

  Catherine had seen neither stamp nor address on it, was under the impression that it was lying with the flap unfastened, face down.

  The hush in the room was intense. She was the one who broke it, quickly, impetuously, her racing mind backtracking.

  “That man,” she cried, and produced the small man in the shabby brown chesterfield who had been hanging around the Wardwell house on Sixty-fourth Street late the afternoon before, and again at shortly after noon that day.

  Something added and something taken away—a suspicious stranger, and a missing envelope. Catherine’s very eagerness held the Scotsman’s attention. She was afraid of something—and her fear wasn’t for herself. Nevertheless, her information might be important.

  He took down details of the loiterer’s appearance, clothing, probable age, etc., noting that neither Mrs. Wardwell nor Hat La Mott made the same mistake as Catherine Lister, consciously or unconsciously. They expressed simply weariness and a desire to go home.

  They had told him all they knew—or all they intended to tell him. McKee let them go after another few minutes. Catherine’s purse had already been searched for a possible weapon. She retrieved it and did her lips and hair and adjusted her hat in the dead man’s bedroom before she went. It was a mistake. McKee had no way of knowing that then. He saw the three women into the elevator, Angela Wardwell grief-stricken and exhausted, with her two extremely pretty and remarkably different nieces in close attendance.

  The self-servicing car started to descend. He stood looking at the closed door musingly for a long moment, turned, re-entered Michael Nye’s apartment and joined the men waiting for him. One of the first items that engaged his attention was a scribbled problem in elementary arithmetic on the scratch-pad on the dead painter’s desk. Shortly before he died, Nye had been doing some figuring. He had multiplied eighty-seven thousand dollars by two. The answer was correct. One hundred and seventy-four thousand dollars and no cents
.

  It meant nothing in that shape. He would get his lawyer in the morning, McKee thought, and settled down to business.

  Chapter Five - A Perfect Fit

  MEANWHILE, IN THE DARK NIGHT STREET ten stories below, with a cold wind blowing, the stars invisible, and a threat of snow in the biting air, Catherine got a shock. It wasn’t administered by the small crowd of the curious drawn to Mike’s doorstep by the wail of sirens and the presence of the police, or by the newsmen who surged forward out of the crowd and who were promptly disposed of by a stalwart plain-clothes man. Nor was it the shadow who followed in their wake. She wasn’t even aware of him. It was what Angela said to Hat in the cab a detective whistled up.

  The cab was to drop her aunt and Hat at the house on Sixty-fourth Street and then take her on down to the Village. The door had no sooner closed and they were barely in motion when Angela leaned forward and directed the driver to go across to Madison instead of up Fifth, and stop at the first drugstore he came to. Leaning back against the cushions, she said, “Tom and Francine ought to know at once, Hat. Call them and tell them what happened, and what we said to the police—so that they’ll be prepared.”

  It was a quiet order, given calmly and with no expression. Hat didn’t question it. She simply obeyed, without comment. Catherine was astounded. Three minutes would have brought Angela and Hat home, where what phoning there was to be done could have been done in peace. Evidently the call couldn’t wait five minutes. In less than two, the cab pulled to the curb and Hat got out and disappeared into a brightly lighted pharmacy in the middle of the block.

  “Tell them what we said—” Beside the older woman, lighting a cigarette and not looking at her in the small sharp flare of the match, fear was a formless shape prowling the fringes of Catherine’s mind.

  Angela didn’t talk. She sat on, erect under the folds of soft black fur that enveloped her to the waist, gloved hands folded in her lap. Always, from the time she was little, her Uncle John’s wife had been a figure of stability, gracious, serene and untroubled, not brilliant, but knowing her own limitations, and content within their frame. There was no subterfuge in her, no fret, no deviousness. Yet now—what had Angela and Hat said to the police that was so important that Tom and Francine had to be instantly informed of it in order to be able to follow a lead when they, in turn, were questioned? Something that wasn’t the truth? Of course, that stood out like a sore thumb.