Escape the Night (18 page)

“Why, only that I was in Johnny’s office almost all afternoon. At least I went there almost as soon as we—my husband and I—left the village station after we talked to you, you know, about our aunt.”

“Yes.” Quayle inclined his white head gravely and waited. Sutton moved quietly, pushing up chairs and passing cigarettes. Obviously he knew Quayle and the others as they knew him and Amanda, and Dave and, even, Jem. It became a curiously matter-of-fact, quietly businesslike occasion—and it was the beginning of an inquiry into murder. Serena thought that, and then noted that Slader had unobtrusively pulled out a shorthand tablet and a pencil. Amanda saw that too, with a nervous flicker of her eyes. She bit her lip and said to Quayle: “My husband and I drove directly from your office into Monterey. Suttoņ had some things to do—he’ll tell you, if you want to know about it—and I went to Johnny Blagden’s office. That must have been about three o’clock. Johnny was busy, and I had to wait some time. The office girl was there—she’ll tell you. Eventually, whoever was with Johnny went away—out the door that goes from his office directly into the hall. At any rate, whoever it was didn’t go through the waiting room, for I didn’t see anybody. But the girl finally said I could go in. It must have been nearly four, then. I was with Johnny for a long time. I’d gone in to see him about Aunt Luisa’s will. You see, if the body isn’t found, there’s a question about when the will can be probated and I …”

Sutton interrupted: “They don’t want to know all this, Amanda.”

“Well, I only …”

“That’s all right, Mrs. Condit,” said the Captain. “It’s just as well in a case like this to get the fullest possible statements from everybody concerned. And then …”

“Oh, that’s all, really,” said Amanda. “I left Johnny’s office at about five, I imagine. The office girl would know.…”

“Well, no, she doesn’t,” said the Captain. “She left at four-thirty. But she thought Mr. Blagden and you were still in his office when she left. She said there were voices; she could hear that.”

“But then you …” Amanda flushed slowly. “Then you’ve already questioned her?”

“Briefly,” replied the Captain in that pleasant and impersonal tone. “We had to get a statement, of course, from Mr. Blagden. He said, too, that he was probably with you when the murder occurred.”

“You see,” said Amanda, with a glance at Sutton, “he does have an alibi.”

“And so have you, Mrs. Condit,” said the captain of police, in a completely flat and inflectionless voice. “We might as well get your statement, too, Mr. Condit.”

“Does this mean—what exactly does it mean, Captain?” asked Sutton. “Do you believe that Mrs. Blagden’s murder was premeditated? Is that it?”

Anderson shifted his position rather uneasily, putting one long leg over the other. His face was inscrutable. The Captain said: “There were no marks of violence on the body, if that’s what you mean, Mr. Condit. We don’t have the full report from the medical examiner yet. We didn’t touch the body, of course, until he’d arrived to see it; then it was taken away for a post-mortem. So far as we know now it isn’t a question of any maniac or of robbery. Her bag was under the body; there was some money in it, not much; apparently it was untouched. Whoever strangled her did so with some instrument.”

“Not my scarf!” cried Amanda.

“It could have been that,” said Quayle. “Or it could have been something else. We …”

“But can’t you tell? Wouldn’t there be—oh, wrinkles in it? Leda’s perfume? Can’t you prove it was not my scarf? Powder marks? What are laboratories for?”

“I assure you, Mrs. Condit, we are giving the matter of the scarf every consideration—the scarf and any other possible lethal instrument.”

“Oh.” Sutton gave a little start. “Yes, of course. Well, it’s as my wife said. We drove from your office into Monterey. She went to ask Johnny Blagden what he thought of the chances for probating my aunt’s will in case the body isn’t found for some time. I did a little shopping; stopped in a couple of electric stores to try to get some batteries and couldn’t, of course; stopped at a drugstore; spent most of the time down at the railway station talking to the freight man about shipping some cattle. He’ll remember it, if you want to ask him. But if it’s an alibi, I don’t know that it’s a very good one. But I didn’t kill her.”

“I don’t know that we are at the place where we have to ask for anybody’s alibis,” said the Captain equably, “but thank you very much, Mr. Condit. You weren’t in Gregory’s by any chance, were you?”

A hardware store in Monterey. Serena’s nerves tightened. Jem’s face was completely without expression; but he had told them, then, of Leda’s telephone call and something at least of what she’d said. Obscurely Serena was glad he had done so. Amanda’s gaze had sharpened. “Gregory’s!” she exclaimed. “Why Gregory’s? That’s a hardware store, isn’t it?”

“Yes. You weren’t there, were you, Mr. Condit?”

“No,” said Sutton, looking puzzled. “Why?”

“Any of you there?” asked the police Captain in a perfectly pleasant and quiet way as if it didn’t really matter very much.

There was a general denial. Sutton said “No” again. Dave shook his head. Jem said nothing but watched the Captain rather closely, Serena suddenly perceived. Then she realized that the Captain was looking at her and she hadn’t replied. “No,” she said, “I wasn’t there.”

“You the young lady that found her?” The Captain’s blue eyes were direct and very patient. It was not, however, the kind of patience that merely, passively waits. It was the deadly kind of patience that never gives up. She seemed to feel that, even then. She said, her heart in her throat all at once: “Yes. Yes, I found her.”

“You and Mr. Daly, that is. You were with Miss Condit yesterday, too.”

“Y—yes,” said Serena again.

“Wonder if I could talk to Miss March alone,” said the Captain very pleasantly.

“But—why …” began Sutton. Jem got up and walked across to stare at the fire—listening, Serena felt, with every nerve in his tall body.

“Won’t take long,” said the Captain. “We can just stay right here if you others don’t mind.…” he glanced at the door.

Amanda said abruptly: “But what about my scarf, Captain? I didn’t leave it there. I wasn’t near the place …”

“We’ll come to that, Mrs. Condit. A lot of it isn’t clear at all just now. In fact, almost none of it is clear except”—the pleasantness gave way to an underlying sternness—“except,” he said, with a bleak and cold look in his face, “that it was murder. Now then …”

Slader remained with his notebook. Anderson took up his position in the rim of shadow at the end of the long table. Amanda went rather quickly; Sutton, it seemed to Serena, reluctantly. Jem followed Dave and, as he passed her, put his hand for a moment on her shoulder. At the door, however, he turned. “I’d like to stay,” he said directly to the Captain. “I was with her, you see, and …”

“Sorry,” said Captain Quayle. It was quiet and pleasant but final. Jem looked at Serena. He said: “I’ll be waiting …” then the door closed behind him. And Quayle said:

“Now then, Miss March, just tell us what happened. What did she say over the telephone? When did she telephone to you? Why do you think she was murdered? But first—we’d better begin at the beginning, you see—how did it happen that you came home day before yesterday?”

I
T WAS WHAT JEM
had asked.

And there were things that she couldn’t tell them; things that concerned Amanda and Jem—and thus herself. She tried to think, quickly, what those things were. The best course was to talk quite slowly and deliberately, making sure where a sentence was going to end before she began it. The dark, thin man with the shorthand tablet had moved out of sight as the others left the room but he was still there, in a small straight chair behind the long sofa with his tablet on his knee. So every word she said was to go down in black and white.

The Captain was waiting, his honest, intelligent—terribly patient—eyes upon her. She linked her hands around her knee. “I had a vacation,” she began. “I came home. I hadn’t been here for several years.”

“Four,” said the Captain. It was a small and definite word which gave Serena her first glimpse of the minuteness of detail which a police inquiry eventually extracts, assorts, weighs—discards or retains. He said: “You saw Mrs. Blagden in New York before you came?”

He knew that, too. Jem must have told him. Still it hadn’t been a secret—her visit with Leda. Johnny could have told him. Or anyone to whom Leda had mentioned it.

“Yes.”

“Tell me about that, Miss March, will you, please? Don’t try to select anything that you think might be important. Just tell me all about it.”

His look, his voice, his words were all disarming, too disarming. She must watch out for that. It would be fatally easy to do exactly as he told her to do; tell him everything, in the greatest detail. And thereby plunge Amanda and Jem—and, always, herself—into a very equivocal position, to say the least. Amanda hadn’t murdered Leda. Or Luisa.

“We talked. Just chat, mainly.”

He waited and then said: “Anything in particular?”

“Well, I—don’t know exactly what you mean.”

“Anything that might have a bearing upon her murder, Miss March?”

That was safe. “No,” she said firmly.

There was a slight pause. Then he said: “But you came home right away.”

“Yes. I got to thinking about home and the people here and that I hadn’t been at home for a long time. So I asked for my vacation and came. I don’t know who killed her. I …”

“Well, well, now, Miss March. Don’t get upset. Tell me about her phone call to you. She was in Monterey, Mr. Daly says, and indicated to you that she’d seen something in Gregory’s—or I guess it could have been somebody—that made her think Miss Condit was murdered, and she wanted to tell you about it. That right?”

“Yes.”

“She was sure Miss Condit was murdered?”

“Yes.”

“What exactly did she say?”

“She said that the body wouldn’t be recovered and that she knew why. She said—well, that she’d been in at Gregory’s. She wouldn’t tell me what she’d seen. She seemed upset about it and …”

“Afraid of anybody?”

“No—no. That is, she was excited and she said she might have been followed …”

“So it was a person she saw, and she thought the person had seen her and had followed her.”

“Yes. I suppose so. I thought she was talking—well, low, so she wouldn’t be overheard by anybody in the drugstore.”

“Did she say which drugstore she was in?”

“No.”

“What time was this?”

“I don’t know exactly. Between three-thirty and four, I think.”

“Go on. What else did she say?”

“She asked me to meet her at Casa Madrone. She didn’t want to go to the police. She said she wouldn’t. I thought I’d better see her. So I did and …”

“Wait a minute, Miss March. Try to tell that conversation over the phone word for word, will you?”

Serena took a long breath. And began.

She told that—except for what Leda had said of Amanda; that, Serena was convinced, had nothing to do with the murder. She told everything—every word she could remember that Leda had uttered, except for what she’d said of Amanda, of her own suspicions of Amanda, of the quarrel she’d said had occurred between Amanda and Luisa and the subject of it. Yet whatever evidence Leda believed she had happened upon in the hardware store had obviously gone to prove, in Leda’s mind, that Amanda had had nothing to do with Luisa’s death. It occurred to Serena swiftly that there was a chance that the part of the story that she was withholding might serve to clear Amanda rather than to incriminate her; yet the chance the other way was too strong. If she’d only had time to think, she thought desperately, to talk to Jem or a lawyer at length. But of course there wasn’t time. She went on, hoping that her voice hadn’t faltered or shown the indecision she felt. She told of getting the station wagon, and Amanda’s red coat; of driving down to the house. She told of entering it, of finding Leda.

And of someone on the stairs.

Her voice did falter there; she found it extraordinarily difficult to continue. Anderson went to the side table and got her a drink of water. The Captain said, “Take your time, Miss March.”

“I don’t know who it was on the stairway, but someone was there. I heard the footsteps and then they seemed to stop, or else came on down so quietly that I couldn’t hear them. I didn’t move. I—couldn’t. And then all at once Jem came in from the back. He spoke to me … He thought at first that I was my sister because of the red raincoat I was wearing. Just as he spoke someone knocked over the lamp in the hall. You saw that …”

“Go on.”

She did. There wasn’t much more, then, to tell.

But when she sat back against the cushions of the sofa and thought, relieved that now she’d finished, at least for the time being; that now she’d told it all and not in any way incriminated Amanda, not in any way brought Jem into the thing, she found that she had only begun.

She had to go over it all again; and then she was asked to go over the whole story a third time.

They questioned her then, on points of her story. They questioned her about her own views of the thing. What did she think about it? Was there any reason she knew of that might conceivably lead to the murder of Leda Blagden? Well, then what about Luisa Condit? Would she please tell the Captain everything she knew of that?

She did so. Once, twice—again a third time. Conscious all the time of Slader’s fingers, in the shadow of the sofa, but so near that he heard every syllable she uttered and made a deathless record of it.

They questioned her about that, too—both Anderson and the Captain this time. Had she seen anyone during the course of their walk? Only a car passing along the highway. Had she recognized anybody in the car? Were there men or women or only one person? Oh, she hadn’t noticed. Well, was she sure that there was no one on the ledge of rocks above the spot from which Luisa had fallen? She’d seen no one? Had she looked up? Why had she looked up? Had she thought someone was there? Oh, she wanted to get help.

It seemed to go on endlessly, yet it really wasn’t long that they kept her there, questioning, and it was in no sense a third degree or anything remotely resembling it. They merely questioned, quietly and in a disarmingly friendly and sensible way—and kept on questioning.