The Silver Leopard Read online

  She told herself that there might be perfectly legitimate things Angela didn’t want the police to know, private personal matters that had nothing to do with Mike, and no bearing on his death—and, wretchedly, wasn’t convinced. She gave it up presently for problems of her own. Nicky was the first and foremost of them. She had to see Nicky if it took all night.

  Hat came back, and Angela said, “You got them?” and Hat said “Yes,” and that was all. The cab swung north on Madison, turned into Sixty-third, went round the block and stopped. In the light hanging from an overhead stanchion, her aunt’s eyes were marble, dead.

  Catherine kissed her, choked with sudden pity. “Try and sleep. You need rest.”

  “You too,” Angela murmured, getting out.

  The two cousins hadn’t exchanged a single word with each other since leaving Mike’s apartment. The other girl seemed to have forgotten she was there. Catherine called, “Good night, Hat.”

  Starting across the pavement, an arm through Angela’s, Hat turned her head carelessly. “Oh—good night.” The door closed and the cab proceeded on its way.

  Nicky wasn’t at his hotel. His room didn’t answer and there was still no message for her. It was almost one o’clock. Catherine drove on downtown through the cold night streets, consumed with an anxiety that washed her mind clear of everything else.

  And then, when she got home, as she was dismounting in front of the iron gates, Nicky stepped out of another cab drawn up a little farther on. He came striding toward her. They met in the middle of the pavement.

  “Catherine!” His hands gripped her shoulders hard, and he stared down into her face. “Thank God! I was afraid I wouldn’t find you.”

  He knew Mike was dead. When she started to tell him, he said, “I heard about it. I was in the Plaza having a drink when the police sirens started—”

  Fear invaded Catherine again, and uncertainty. Caution—the same sort of caution that had inspired Angela?—made her look around through the obscurity pocketed with blackness and say quickly and softly, “Not here. Come upstairs, we can talk there.”

  She went ahead, used her key, switched on the lights, walked on into the living-room—and was aware, the moment she stepped over the threshold, of something vaguely out of place, different, not as it should be. It was a random impression, not important. What she had to say to Nicky was about Mike and when he had been with him—and about Hat.

  He forestalled her on both counts. She threw her gloves and purse down on a table and was starting for the bedroom to take off her coat when Nicky said, “Wait.” Catherine turned. He was standing still near the door, stiffly erect, his handsome boyish face flushed, his cap crushed nervously in gripping fingers.

  Catherine said, “Yes?” steadying herself for what she was going to hear, and Nicky said, speaking quickly, as though he had rehearsed what he was going to say and was anxious to get it out and over and done with. “I saw Mike early this evening. He was damned decent. Angela’d been talking to him and he was worried about you. He needn’t have been—”

  Nicky paused and brushed a bent wrist across his damp forehead. “Catherine, I double-crossed you last night.” His blue eyes were miserable. He hurtled on. “Blanchard’s dead. I found that out today. Served me right. Oh, yes. It was Hat La Mott I met outside Dannaher’s office up there on Park Avenue while I was waiting for you yesterday afternoon. Why didn’t I tell you? I don’t know, except that I was in a rotten mood and she”—he was white, shaken and bitterly self-accusing—“well, she suited it. I was crazy about her once. I don’t give a hoot in hell for her now. And yet I turned you down, and went out and drank with her. I can’t understand it, when you’re the one—when you’re—” He put out a hand and touched her sleeve fumblingly.

  Catherine looked past him. She could understand it very well. There were moments when wild oats had far more flavor than the best brand of domestic flour. But her hurt began to ease; Nicky did love her. It was there, in his voice, his eyes, his wretchedness. His little-boy contrition was oddly touching. He was as simple and direct as a child blurting out the truth. He wasn’t a child; he was an attractive man. Something of the feeling he had roused in her when they were first engaged came back.

  He was watching her anxiously. “You do believe me? I swear that’s all there was to it. I swear—”

  Catherine was deeply moved. He needed her, and she needed him, and he was sweet. She crossed the floor with a little rush. “Don’t, Nicky—It’s all right.” She reached up, cupped his face in her palms, and kissed the tip of his chin. “There. You’re forgiven.”

  “Catherine.” His relief was enormous. He gathered her into his arms—and it was there again like a wall dividing them, her inability to respond—

  She was tired, that was what was the matter. After a moment she withdrew herself. Mike’s death, and the manner of it, had exhausted her capacity for emotion-hut not for fear or conjecture.

  The room was cold, the heat had been turned off at twelve. Nicky lighted a fire and Catherine made coffee and they sat down in chairs drawn up to the hearth and talked.

  Nicky had seen Mike at around six o’clock. “After I found out about Blanchard being dead and what a fool I’d made of myself, I rushed over here. You weren’t in. I finally called the Wardwell house. I thought you might be there, and old Mrs. Bettinger shouted that you were out to lunch with Mike. It was a little after half-past five before I got hold of him. He said he wanted to see me, so I went up to his apartment and he whaled into me, about how lucky I was to have you, and that I had no business to be running around with Hat. I said I wasn’t running around with her, that since Halloran, I hadn’t seen her or planned to, and that yesterday afternoon was just a chance encounter. Anyhow, Mike gave me a check with orders to buy you something nice. What happened to him, Catherine?”

  She told Nicky, briefly. He was appalled. “Good God, the killer beat you to the gun through the door of the apartment. But you were there with him, shut in alone. If he hadn’t managed to get clear—”

  “Yes.” She held cold hands to the blaze. Had whoever was standing behind the blue brocade curtains when she went into Mike’s living-room turned back for the envelope on Mike’s desk? Its removal was significant. Yet, if Mike had been killed in order that the murderer could get possession of the envelope and its contents, why had it been forgotten, and left behind, in the first place?

  She shifted wearily in her chair. The small man in the shabby brown chesterfield moved across her mental field of vision. The more she thought of him, the more a figure of evil he became, standing there on the other side of the street and staring absorbedly at the Wardwell house, on two occasions, just standing there and doing nothing.

  She thought of other things. Stephen Darrell had told her aunt of the meeting between Hat and Nicky, that was why Angela had been upset, and Angela had told Mike. Stephen must have been up there on Park Avenue late yesterday afternoon when Hat and Nicky met, must have seen them. If so, why had he come down here to see her, professing ignorance of Nicky’s whereabouts? It didn’t make sense.

  She got up restlessly, poured herself another cup of coffee, stood on the hearth sipping it, and frowned. What was it about the room that had struck her as different when she first came in? Something about the air, something—Her lips parted and she gave a cry of astonishment.

  The silver leopard had been moved. It no longer stood on the right of the low green bowl filled with chrysanthemum buds, but far to the left.

  It had been in its proper place that morning, and her cleaning woman didn’t come on Saturday. She crossed the floor, picked the statuette up. Nicky had been here that afternoon. She was about to turn and ask him whether he had touched the leopard, when the sound of footsteps on the outer staircase stopped her.

  There was a brisk knock. Startled—it was very late—Catherine called “Come,” and the door opened and the inspector, with Captain Pierson behind him, walked into the room.

  McKee looked at the slende
r, dark-haired girl, vivid in firelight, cradling the silver toy in her hands, looked again, considering its weight, its shape, flashingly. It couldn’t be—It might.

  “Miss Lister, we came to ask you a few additional questions. May I see that, please?”

  Catherine handed the leopard to him wonderingly. He studied it, turning it this way and that. The right front paw had come loose from the heavy base.

  McKee put the leopard down on a table. In perfect silence, he reached into his pocket and took out an envelope. From the envelope, with a pair of tweezers, he drew a metal ring. It was very small, not silver, and partially covered with rust. Using a handkerchief, he levered up the loose paw, slipped the ring into the tiny indentation in the base. It fitted perfectly.

  He looked at Catherine, began to speak.

  Catherine’s hand went to her throat. The tiny metal ring was part of the statuette. The rust on it was blood. It had been found embedded in the stained carpet under Mike’s chair in the living-room of his apartment on Fifty-ninth Street.

  Chapter Six - Who Took the Leopard?

  “MISS LISTER! NOW, Miss Lister! Miss Lister, please!”

  The voices, harsh, commanding, persuasive, and unceasing, came out of the darkness that hemmed Catherine in with the crouching body of the silver leopard, gleaming terribly in the circle of brilliant light where she was pinioned helpless and alone. Big men, little men, fat men, lean men, from the District Attorney’s office, from Headquarters, from the Fourth Detective Division, all tried their hands in turn.

  Michael Nye, distinguished American painter was an important personage, with important friends. The whole department had rolled on that homicide alert from the golden bowl at the top of the long gray building on Centre Street. Assistant District Attorney Jim Sneider and Pioretti, borough commander, were there. Finding McKee gone when they reached the murdered man’s rooms, they had followed him down to the Village.

  Their arrival was most unwelcome. If the Scotsman could have concealed his discovery for the moment, he would have. It had astounded him. He hadn’t expected it.

  When the little metal ring was found under Nye’s chair, Pierson had said excitedly, “There was a broken silver chain in the Lister dame’s purse. Dollars to doughnuts this come off of it. It must have broken when she gave him the chop—” McKee had been skeptical. His visit here was more a matter of routine than anything else. No weapon that was at all appropriate had been found in Nye’s rooms and every possibility had to be exhausted.

  There was no doubt now in his mind that the object that had bludgeoned Michael Nye to death was the small heavy silver toy belonging to Catherine Lister. There was considerable doubt in him, and it remained there, obstinately, as to whether Catherine was the perpetrator.

  The statuette had been wiped off. Probably water had been used. It didn’t matter, there would still be traces of blood in the interstices of the carving and metal overlays that no hastily attempted cleansing could remove. The result was a foregone conclusion. The metal ring was an integral part of the statuette. It had been jarred loose with the force of the blows that had crashed in Michael Nye’s skull.

  His doubt as to Catherine’s guilt was shared by no other official. Some killers used guns, some a neat length of iron pipe, some their hands, etc. The unanimous opinion of the rest of the department was that Catherine Lister had gone to the dead man’s apartment armed with the handy little silver bludgeon tucked into her purse. Before she had given the alarm, she had hidden the leopard somewhere. After her bag had been searched and she was given a green light, she retrieved the silver leopard from its hiding place and walked out of the place as innocent as you please, confident that her tale of a mysterious visitor who had turned off the lights had gone down whole.

  It was entirely owing to McKee that Catherine wasn’t arrested then and there, that night. Only his reputation, and the prestige and privileges he enjoyed as a man who on occasion had pulled off brilliant coups in the teeth of the evidence, kept the Black Maria from backing up to the alley immediately and carting Catherine off to the nearest precinct, where she would have been charged with murder and put behind bars. He had a hard time pulling it off.

  In the background, not interfering, he had listened to the accused girl’s toneless reiteration of the story she had first told him. “I didn’t take the leopard to Michael’s apartment. I didn’t kill him with it. I didn’t hide the leopard. I didn’t put it in my bag when I left.”

  Soft dark hair in disarray, her eyes shadowed, faint color was coming back into her lips and cheeks. She was gathering strength instead of losing it. Pioretti, and Sneider, the latter a man the Scotsman disliked, were antagonizing a witness. It was a tactical error. He drew them aside while their henchmen took over.

  To Pioretti, he said, “Have a heart and give me a little time. I’m not ready to go to bat now. I haven’t got half enough stuff—” To Sneider, he said, “You want a case that will stand up. We haven’t got one yet. District Attorney Dwyer won’t thank you for a premature arrest when he gets back to town.” To them both, he said, “What’s the hurry? If she’s the one, we’ve got her. I have men on the house back and front. She can’t get away. Call off your bloodhounds, gentlemen.”

  Finally, after much grumbling and argument, they agreed, and McKee and Catherine were alone. The handsome young army captain, white and incoherent with rage and dismay, had been ejected from the room and was keeping vigil, companioned by Pierson, out on the stairs.

  “Miss Lister—” The Scotsman was only another voice to Catherine. But he was a different voice. He gave her a cigarette, lighted it for her, and prowled the big room with the peaked ceiling, beamed and firelit, pausing to glance at this or that, to read the title of a book, and talking to himself as much as to her.

  He didn’t make a great deal of headway. Catherine answered his questions willingly enough, up to a point. She told him about the leopard, that it had been a Christmas gift from her uncle, John Wardwell, two years old and had been in her possession ever since.

  “So that everyone who knew you would know where to find it.”

  Shoulders huddled forlornly, clasped hands hot and tight on knees pressed stiffly together, Catherine looked into the dying fire. Everyone she knew—The person who had removed the leopard in order to get hold of a weapon with which to kill Mike—otherwise why should it have been taken?—had to know Mike too. There weren’t many of her friends or acquaintances that condition fitted. They hammered themselves at her, that small close group, Nicky and Tom and Francine, Hat and Angela and Stephen Darrell. She searched for another name, couldn’t find one, wrenched away from the conclusion. She spoke her thoughts aloud.

  “Why,” she said with slow violence, “was the leopard taken to kill Michael with, Inspector? To throw suspicion on me? If so, why was it returned here?”

  McKee couldn’t answer her. According to Mr. Find-later, the tenant in the apartment adjoining Nye’s, no one had entered the dead painter’s rooms from the moment the alarm was given until the arrival of the police. Check on that more closely, he thought. Meanwhile, one figure remained. It was that of the perpetrator. As things stood, it could only have been the man or woman who killed Nye who had replaced the leopard in this girl’s apartment. It was a senseless procedure—unless the intention had been to shield her. In that case, why had the leopard been used as a club with which to batter out Michael Nye’s brains in the first place?

  Until they knew more about that, he decided, Catherine’s violence echoing itself in him, they wouldn’t know anything.

  He eyed the silver toy where it stood on a table to the left of the hearth, the body crouched, belly sagging, head turned, blind gaze warily intent—and uninformative. “When did you last see the leopard in its accustomed place, Miss Lister?”

  Catherine smoothed the sleeve of a creamy silk blouse with more color to it than her skin. “I—it’s hard to say. You know how you take things in a room for granted without really looking at them? It was th
ere this morning at a little before twelve, when I left here to go up to my aunt’s.”

  “Five or ten minutes of twelve, that’s the last time you can be positive about? You were here after that, weren’t you? You were here this evening when Mr. Nye telephoned to you asking you to go up to his apartment?”

  The only move Catherine made was to lower her lashes. McKee mustn’t see the fear in her eyes. The little rocker out of place, the rug scuffed up—Someone had been in this room during the afternoon. The door was locked and Nicky, was the only one who had a key. Of course he hadn’t taken the leopard. Before she said anything about a visitor while she was out, she wanted to hear him say so with her own ears.

  “Yes, I was here later,” she said, “I went for a long walk after lunch and didn’t get back until nearly seven, I stopped for a cup of coffee and a sandwich on the way in, I don’t—I can’t possibly say whether the leopard was gone then or not.”

  In spite of her effort at steadiness, McKee saw the fear in her. She wasn’t to know until afterward what a beacon the readability of her face was to the Scotsman, or how often he consulted it. She’s afraid for that very good-looking young airmail she’s engaged to, lie thought grimly. Nicholas Bray had made anything but a favorable impression on him. The released bomber pilot was a rattled gentleman. Under his smooth blond and attractive exterior, something was worrying him badly. It might not be murder. Then again—He went to the door and opened it, and Nicky came bounding up the stairs and into the room.