Chiffon Scarf (26 page)

Jim spoke first. He looked very white and, somehow, angry. But he said smoothly enough: “I’ve been thinking, Eden, that I ought to apologize. About last night. I’m afraid I interrupted—May I be the first to offer you and Noel good wishes?”

T
HE CURIOUS THING WAS
that it seemed so unimportant. So trivial really that she brushed it away with a feeling of impatience; it was as if Jim himself couldn’t possibly credit his own words.

Instead of replying, she said quickly: “I’ve been talking to Sloane. Jim, has he told you about the baggage check? Surely he must have done—”

“You didn’t,” said Jim, “let much time go by.”

“Time?”

“Between affairs of the heart,” said Jim promptly. “Or perhaps it wasn’t of the heart. The stage lost a good actress in you, Eden.”

She caught her breath sharply as if a dash of cold water had been flung against her face.

“That’s unfair, Jim!”

“I suppose it is. Somehow I wouldn’t have expected you to forget so promptly and so easily. So you and Noel are to be married?”

She put up her head.

“In any case my marriage doesn’t concern you.”

“How right you are,” said Jim. “Do forgive me—” And stopped and said in a different, graver voice: “And I mean that. I know as things—are—between us I’ve no right to say a word; I only want to know—do you love him?”

She couldn’t answer for a moment: it was silent in the hall, silent in the lounge. Out on the porch someone spoke to someone else and they could hear a murmur of voices without distinguishing words. Then she put back her head so as to look squarely into his eyes and said: “You have no right to ask that, Jim.”

His face did not change. There was no way of knowing what the look in his eyes really meant.

And there was a rustle above and steps coming slowly down the stairway. It was Dorothy Woolen; she came gradually into sight, her white sports shoes and sturdy legs, the hem of her bright blue dress; she stopped for an instant as she saw them and looked down over the banister with utterly blank, expressionless eyes. Then she put one hand to the pale yellow braid above her broad white forehead and said to Jim:

“May I speak to you, Mr. Cady?”

Jim looked surprised and then, quite distinctly so Eden perceived it, a flicker of something like understanding crossed his face. He said: “Excuse me, Eden. Yes, of course, Dorothy,” and went quickly to meet her as she came down the remaining steps. His voice was warm and oddly sympathetic.

Eden said quickly: “Jim, you must talk to Sloane. There’s something—he’s got a baggage check. He telephoned to St. Louis” She glanced over her shoulder to the closed door of Sloane’s study, at the end of the hall, and lowered her voice. “They say—the police, I mean, that you checked—Jim, I know how mad it is—but they say you checked the plans. The plans for the engine—”

She stopped as if her voice had died in her throat. For Jim was looking straight into her eyes and he knew about the baggage check; knew about the plans; knew what the St. Louis police had said. She was sure of that; there was sharp, instant comprehension in his face. Yet Sloane had talked to the police only a moment or two ago, when she was in the room with him. It was true then, what Sloane had said; and it couldn’t be true. She went to Jim and said almost pleadingly: “It isn’t true, Jim.”

“And suppose I say it is true.”

“I still,” said Eden slowly, “don’t believe—”

Something eager and swift flared in” Jim’s eyes.

“Eden,” he began. And Dorothy said, moving colorless lips:

“Miss Shore, I couldn’t help overhearing as I came along the hall above—is it true that you are to be married to Mr. Carreaux?”

The eager look left Jim’s face. He turned to Dorothy and said:

“Yes, Dorothy. I was wishing her happiness.”

Dorothy came down the remaining steps, paused a moment, looked full at Eden with completely blank, flat gray eyes, and said: “I understand you were engaged to him long ago.”

“Why, yes. Once long ago. Not—you don’t understand. Not now” She didn’t know what she had been about to say; denial, expostulation, anything. There was no time. For Noel came swinging in from the porch, followed by Strevsky. He was excited, blue eyes blazing. He cried: “Strevsky did it. He cut the fuel line. He’s going now to tell Sloane.”

“Lud, for God’s sake, did you do that?” demanded Jim, seizing Strevsky by the arm.

He looked sullenly back at Jim.

“Sure, I did it. The first afternoon we were here. Do you think I wanted anybody to get away before your detective found out who killed my brother!”

“But—”

“Oh, it’s all right now, boss. I fixed it this morning. So we could go after Wilson. If he did it, the little sneaking—”

“You fixed the break?”

“Sure. It’s okay now. And I’m going to tell Sloane.”

He detached his arm from Jim’s grasp with an effortless little twitch and went on gracefully and swiftly as a leopard to Sloane’s study door, where, without knocking, he disappeared.

“It was a mistake to bring Strevsky,” said Jim slowly. “I thought I could control him.”

“He’s a primitive bird. If he got it into his thick head that Creda was in any way responsible for the plane crash and his brother’s death—” Noel stopped abruptly, thought and said: “Do you suppose Strevsky’s the fellow? The murderer, I mean?”

There was an instant’s silence. Behind them and beyond the closed door of Sloane’s study they could hear a murmur of voices. Noel said: “After all if Pace is out—I’d rather it’d be Strevsky.”

Jim smiled without much mirth.

“I oughtn’t to have brought him,” he said. “But I had to have someone who felt as I felt about the crash and who would go along with me.”

“You oughtn’t to have brought any of us here, Jim,” said Noel rather wearily. “That was the mistake. Coming here. Not telling any of us what you thought and planned. Bringing us all out to this Godforsaken and God-forgotten place. Rimmed in with mountains as if it was another world—” He checked himself sharply.

They had moved, talking, onto the porch. Sun poured down. Pace sat at one end, smoking and staring with enigmatic eyes at the blue mountain wall in the distance. Averill sat at the other end, her neat black head with the even white part showing bent over a letter she was writing. She looked up, too. Attracted as Noel had been attracted by that flying figure in the distance.

Then they all saw it—and watched, suddenly arrested and rigid, as if in that first instant of perception they knew the truth.

Eden was never to forget the sight of the horse and rider rising into the sky from a distant slope; hurling toward them through sunlight and heat; swerving to avoid prairie-dog holes; stirring up small clouds of sand. The thud of hoofbeats became louder; the horse stopped with a swirl and stood there heaving and sweating, and the man was out of the saddle, running along the path, spurs jangling as he reached the porch and flung across it, shouting: “P. H.! We’ve found him! P. H.!”

It was the cowboy they called Charlie.

And Roy Wilson had been found. An hour before noon with the sun beating down hard and hot upon the sand and the sagebrush and two tall spikes of flowering soapweed rearing at his feet as if to mark the spot.

He was in the dip of an arroyo a mile or so distant from the house, and there was a fringe of sagebrush and cactus above him. He was on his back with sightless blue eyes staring at the brilliant blue sky and his childish mouth open and drawn.

He had been dead for some time.

One of the boys, ranging through the brush, found the thing that killed him and it was Chango’s hatchet, stained, with a notch cut in the handle of it.

And he had been dead certainly for twenty-four hours.

That was the next fact that emerged.

“Blood’s dried, P. H.”

“And the condition of the body?”

The man, panting, shrugged and mopped his arm across his wet forehead.

“If it was a calf I’d say twenty-four hours at least. It’s probably been more—”

“I’ll come along.”

Sloane paused and his eyes swept the circle of faces. All of them were there, drawn by the news of Wilson’s murder. Even the pilot, Strevsky, had horror in his eyes and Pace, at Eden’s elbow, lifted his cigar with a trembling hand and lowered it again as the detective’s eyes met his own, lingered and then went on. And stopped at Jim who stood near, with Averill’s hand linked in his arm.

“You’ll come, too,” said Sloane, addressing Jim. “Have them bring a horse for Mr. Cady, too,” he told Charlie, and said to Jim: “You can ride?”

“You ought to remember,” said Jim evenly. “We’ve had many rides together.”

The detective accepted the challenge as evenly.

“Perhaps I’ve remembered too much.”

Jim’s eyes narrowed. He dropped Averill’s hand from his arm and stepped forward to face the detective. For a sharp instant they stood, curiously alike in their tall, lean bodies, both sun-bronzed, both taut, both tensed against encounter. Both shrinking from and yet demanding a clearing of the slate between them, a balancing of old memories and old ties with the immediate, unlabeled but terribly urgent demands. Jim was the first to speak.

“Look here, P. H., you’d better explain. Let’s have things clear between us.”

“You’re the one to explain. I’ve given you a chance and you refused.”

“I didn’t refuse. I told you only the truth.”

“Not the whole truth. What about these plans? You said they were gone. You—” He stopped, looked at Jim and said more quietly: “All right. Since you ask it.” He glanced at Charlie and said parenthetically: “There’s somebody with Wilson?”

Charlie looked worried. “Ed.”

“Ed? Well, he’ll stay there awhile.” He turned back to Jim. “The fact is, I like my cases to be complete before I make an arrest—”

“Arrest!”

“Arrest. In this case, naturally, humanly, I would like to have a case so complete that there would never, anywhere, be a question of it. It would be better for us to have this thing out alone—”

“Why? There’s nothing these others can’t hear. I’ve known since yesterday when that letter of Creda’s was found what you thought.”

“What I feared,” said Sloane rather heavily. “What I would have avoided if I could have done so.”

“Go ahead,” said Jim. “State your case.”

“You know what it is. It doesn’t need stating. You refused to sell the engine. You admitted that. It would have been (in an odd, inverted way) to your admitted advantage if the plane failed. Well, it did fail. You brought all these people here and told me there was something phony about the crash and begged me to investigate it. On the surface it was the act of an innocent man; it looked like that to me and to these others. But there was also evidence that the plane had crashed, which was not held by you alone; it was shared by a man who had been with you when you discovered it; a man of certain mechanical knowledge and a man who was not likely to forget; that man is Strevsky—and he instantly demanded revenge for the death of his brother. Was your action in coming to me, then, a result of your own wishes? Or was it an expediency calculated to shut Strevsky up forever and to convince him that you yourself had no part in the plane crash—”

Strevsky looked startled, opened his mouth and closed it again.

Jim, gray below his tan, said: “That’s not true.”

“Wait, you’ll have to admit there are those two ways of looking at what you did. Now, then; your engine was worth a lot of money—Pace proved that. Suppose you decided that inasmuch as you yourself had built that engine, you alone ought to have the money for it. If the thing is once sold to Pace you lose out forever. Well, then, what could be simpler than to fix the engine to crash as it was fixed? Thus destroying the only model and preventing its being offered for sale to anyone, particularly the government you expected to sell it to, for months to come. It would take months to rebuild from the copies of the plans possessed by the factory. In the meantime you would have those months in which to sell your own plans—with no competition from anyone—the Blaine Company or Pace because the engine itself had crashed.”

Pace wriggled and said suddenly: “But they would have copies of those plans, too. They could sell without a model as easily as Cady could sell.”

“I see you’ve thought it all out,” said Sloane. “The point is time. The first one to sell and to convince the buyer that his offer was in good faith stood to make a lot of money. And the inventor, the man who actually built the engine, would certainly have an advantage over anyone else when it came to finding a market. Always provided the model was destroyed.”

“Go on,” said Jim with tight lips.

“All right. Then this letter—”

“That was not written to me. I don’t care what it says, there was nothing between Creda and me to justify the thing she wrote. Besides—”

“Besides, Miss Shore came to your defense and insisted that letter was not as Creda Blaine wrote it. Well—that’s something for someone else to settle; I’ve sent it to be analyzed by handwriting experts. In the meantime I have to go on the only theory that explains it; there is no other course open to me. But even so, I was anxious to give you the benefit of the doubt; in spite of the years during which we’ve seen almost nothing of each other, I found myself—” The detective paused and said: “Reluctant to believe you had be come a murderer.”

“P. H.”

“I’m not finished. Why did you tell me the plans were lost? Why did you tell me the plans had been stolen from the drawer in the library table? When you yourself, without troubling even to conceal your identity from the checkroom attendant, deposited those very plans in the checkroom of the airport the night you left St. Louis?”

“Jim!” cried Averill sharply. “Jim—you took the plans! You—it was you who were in the house that night—that’s why you were late at the airport. You went back to the house while we waited for you; you took the plans and—”

She stopped as sharply as she had begun to speak. Slowly, as wax hardens so the hardening can almost be seen, her small face set itself in rigid and implacable lines. She said almost querulously: “You did it. You killed Bill. You killed the mechanic. You wrecked the engine. Because you wouldn’t sell it. You—” Her thin voice was increasingly angry and unsteady: “And you killed Creda because she knew. She knew and wrote to you; and you watched while I gave her my coat. You didn’t come into the house. You stood there in the shadow and heard our talk and watched through the window of my cabin and I gave her my coat. And after I’d gone you killed her and—” There was a small yellow flame in her eyes. She whirled to Eden and cried shrilly: “And you helped! You saw him and you helped—”