Hasty Wedding (12 page)

“Yes. Yes, perfectly. Will you, Marcus?”

“Why, of course. Certainly. By all means. My poor dear child, I know exactly how you feel.” He looked at the reports and apparently was aware of the faint trembling of his hands, like a beginning palsy, for he put them down tight upon the bundles of papers. “Certainly,” he repeated briskly. “But don’t thank me. Don’t thank me. I’m only too glad to do anything I can for you. And as a matter of fact it’s a very good arrangement. You can’t take things over in ten minutes time and the markets just now are very jumpy. Very jumpy,” said Marcus, thoughtful for an instant, with gray cobwebs over his face again. But he rose energetically. “Shall I take the reports with me, Jevan? Yes, I think I’d better just take them along.”

“It doesn’t matter,” said Jevan rather quickly. “There’s a safe here somewhere, I expect.”

“Back of the picture,” said Dorcas and told them how to slide the stag aside and, when the safe was disclosed, how to open it.

“Somewhat antiquated,” said Marcus doubtfully. “Are you sure you don’t want me to take them to my office safe?”

Jevan frowned. “There’s nothing here a burglar might want, is there, Marcus?”

“No. No, certainly not.”

“They’ll be all right here then,” said Jevan and put the reports and the brief case in the safe. Marcus watched him a little dubiously but went away briskly enough, bowing gallantly over Dorcas’ hand and striding down the corridor with the step and carriage of a younger man. And he must have met the detective on the step, for he had barely gone, and Jevan had turned to Dorcas briskly and begun to say something about the trusteeship and Marcus, when Bench came to the study door. He looked pale and very distressed and said the man was there again.

“Who?”

“The police, sir. That is, the—the detective. The one that was here yesterday.”

He didn’t mention the two detectives who had accompanied Jacob Wait and neither Dorcas nor Jevan thought of them either, but thought instead and immediately of Wait.

“Oh,” said Jevan. “Wait.” He glanced at Dorcas. “Send him in.”

Dorcas was standing, her heart pounding furiously, her breath jerky. She clutched at the back of the chair near her with stiff, frightened fingers.

Jevan was standing, too, lighting another cigarette. Bench hesitated and said: “There’s a man with him. Not a police man. Shall I permit him——”

“Certainly. All of them.”

“Yes sir.”

“Jevan—I didn’t expect them so soon. What shall I——”

“I didn’t either. I thought there’d be time to talk. But there’d be nothing more to say. I mean, you’re to deny having been there. Deny everything. Believe me, it’s the only way to do; trust me, Dorcas.”

He said it suddenly, pleadingly. He took a long step nearer her and looked down into her eyes and said again: “Trust me—my wife.”

Dorcas did not speak. She was suddenly very much afraid of a little, sallow-faced man who walked like a cat and had somber dark eyes, and what Jevan said scarcely reached her. But he turned abruptly away and added in his usual, pleasantly impersonal way: “Take it easy, Dorcas. Try not to look so guilty.”

Bench came to the door and stood aside and Jacob Wait appeared in the doorway. His black, glossy hair made his features pale by contrast, looming out of the dimly lighted hall. He wore a heavy brown burberry; perhaps Bench had made no offer to take it from him. He looked at Dorcas and at Jevan and turned to someone following him.

“In here,” he said in an unexpectedly full, rich voice and entered the room. The man following him entered too. He was tall and extremely well built and did not wear a uniform but, instead, rather shabby dark clothing. He glanced at Jevan and very quickly away, as if he did not want to meet Jevan’s eyes. He looked fully and boldly at Dorcas, however, and Wait amazingly took a hundred-dollar bill from his pocket and laid it on the table. Jevan started to say something and stopped. Wait’s small, graceful hand lingered upon the bill and he said: “Well, how about it?”

The man replied at once. “That’s the woman,” he said. “That’s the woman who was with Drew the night he was killed. I’d know her anywhere.”

I
T WAS, IT MUST
be, the doorman.

Dorcas sought for something memorable about him, something recognizable, but there was nothing. Jevan said: “Who is this? What do you mean by bringing this man here?”

“His name is McFee. He is the doorman for the apartment house where Ronald Drew lived. He saw Miss Whipple arrive with Drew and enter the apartment house a short time before Drew was murdered.”

“The man is mistaken,” said Jevan shortly. “He saw someone else. You can ask anyone in the house, Wait; they’ll tell you Mrs Locke was here. She has a perfect alibi.”

“Oh,
has
she,” said Wait. “Well, that’s fine. But she couldn’t be in two places at once. Therefore I am obliged to arrest——”

“What’s that hundred-dollar bill for?”

Wait smiled. “Doormen don’t customarily go about trying to change hundred-dollar bills. It’s routine; he was being watched and he tried to get change for it; in five minutes he admitted that he’d had a typewritten note enclosing the bill and telling him not to identify a woman he would be asked to identify.”

“So you think I gave it to him. You are wrong, Wait. Look at me, McFee.” McFee looked once in deep embarrassment and quickly away. “No, look at
me.
Now then, did you ever see me before?”

“No,” said McFee, not looking. “No sir.”

“Sure about that?” said Wait. “Remember the man who went up to Drew’s apartment later on. Are you sure this wasn’t the man?”

McFee’s Adam’s apple went up and down and he stared at the stag, who returned his gaze remotely.

“No, Mr Wait.”

“What’s that! Did you see this man? Can you identify him? Look at him.”

McFee wouldn’t. He gave one scared look at Wait and sought the stag again swiftly. “I meant, no sir, Mr Wait. I meant, I don’t know. I only saw the man enter the elevator. Just his back—a dark overcoat, a felt hat. I wouldn’t know him again. I didn’t see him leave. I’m new in the building and don’t know all the regulars yet. He might have been anybody.”

Wait stopped him. Jevan was smiling. Wait said quickly: “That’ll do, McFee.”

“There goes your witness,” said Jevan.

“He identified Mrs Locke,” said Wait. “Now then, Mrs Locke, when you went to Drew’s apartment with——”

Sophie opened the door and entered. Sophie, dressed for the street in a green tweed suit with the long coat fastened over a skirt which was undoubtedly much too tight.

“Dorcas,” she said, saw the two men and stopped too abruptly. McFee, clutched by the little silence, tore his eyes from the stag, saw Sophie, saw the green suit, let his jaw fall in a look of consternation and said: “Oh——”

“What is it, McFee?” cried Jevan quickly. “Is that the woman you saw?”

“Yes,” said McFee. “No. I don’t know. I——”

“Stop that,” snapped Wait. “Shut up, you fool, you. You’ve already identified the woman——”

“Not much of an identification, Wait,” said Jevan. “No. You’re wrong. He’s admitted before three people that he doesn’t know. That identification is no good All he remembers is a green suit. Any woman in a green suit would look like that woman you saw. Isn’t that right, McFee?”

The doorman was angry. He had flushed a deep crimson and was fumbling for his hat.

“I’m going,” he said. “You can’t keep me here, making a fool of me. I’m going and I won’t say another word.”

“But you don’t know which woman it was that you saw? Isn’t that right, McFee? Look at them both. Look at them. Now can you swear that it was one or the other?” Dorcas was as still as a doll; she felt as if her very face were wax and had the truth written over it. Sophie, collectedly, swayed a little so McFee saw her profile with the little hat pulled low and the big fur collar pulled high. McFee, angry, looked at her and then at Dorcas and back to Sophie.

“See, you don’t know! You can’t tell! It might be either of them. It might be a hundred other women. You can’t go into a court and swear a woman’s life away on an identification like that. You——”

McFee muttered something, gave a bitter glance at the hundred-dollar bill and started for the door.

“I’m going,” he said. “You’re making a fool of me. I’m going——”

“Nobody can make a fool of you,” said Jacob Wait neatly.

“Keep your hundred dollars, Locke.”

He pushed the bill toward Jevan, who made no move to take it, and Wait, having no use apparently for the small amenity of leave-taking, vanished instantly in the wake of an already sullenly vanished McFee.

Sophie reached under her coat and unfastened her tight skirt and sighed.

“How much do you weigh, Dorcas?” she said. “I can’t take a deep breath with this skirt fastened!”

“Sophie, you shouldn’t have done it.”

“Why not? It worked, didn’t it? And I wasn’t in any danger, for I wasn’t at the apartment house and nobody could possibly prove that I was.”

“You did it in the very nick of time, Sophie.” Jevan picked up the hundred-dollar bill, smoothed it in his fingers and laughed shortly. “Like Willy, wasn’t it, to give it to him in a hundred-dollar bill. Why couldn’t he have made it tens?”

“Willy——”

He gave Dorcas an impatient look. “I phoned Willy last night after you told me the doorman actually saw you. Told him to fix the doorman. Told him to write a note on some public typewriter, enclose the money and get it to the fellow. So he did. Except that I didn’t tell him to make it small bills and he just simply put in a hundred-dollar bill.”

“Then Willy knows too,” said Sophie.

“Yes,” said Jevan. “Well, there’s nothing we can do. If I only knew why he is concentrating on you, Dorcas. Is there anything that you haven’t told me? Any scrap of evidence, no matter how small?”

There wasn’t. In the end they were obliged to leave the thing unsolved. And there was nothing they could do.

The day wore on. There were more telephone calls. Servants finished clearing the house, and restored the spacious rooms to their usual shining, somber order.

Late in the afternoon Dorcas went to Cary’s room and found her pale and worried with her lovely blue eyes rimmed in pink.

“If the police would only let you go on your wedding trip,” she said. “I know that everybody’s talking about it.”

Cary, of course, didn’t know and mustn’t know why the police would not let her leave. Dorcas answered evasively and presently went away.

Late in the afternoon, too, Willy Devany came. Came with elaborate circumspection so there was actually something like stealth in the way he slid in the front door, startling Bench.

“The police,” he said breathlessly. “I’m followed. I’ve been grilled, Bench. Grilled.”

“Your hat, sir.”

“Grilled,” repeated Willy a trifle wildly and asked for Jevan.

Their conversation, however, was lengthy and private, with the study door closed.

Dorcas wandered about the house, listening for their emerging, going from one gray window to another, thinking in circles that had no beginning and no end.

Yesterday at about this time the wedding guests were beginning to leave. Her wedding seemed as unreal as everything else in that suddenly topsy-turvy world. Unreal and at the same time paradoxically and poignantly real.

For Jevan was there in the house, in the study which seemed to become his own. How immediately the household had adopted him; how immediately and automatically he had become the head of the house! “It’s good,” Mamie had said, “to have a man in the house.” Her husband. And what did she know of him? What did she know of this marriage she had made except that already she knew that it was not the thing she had expected it to be! For it was different; the calm, smooth, untroubled sea she had expected her marriage to Jevan to float quietly upon was full of hidden, unplumbed depths and sweeping currents. And Jevan himself, mysteriously, was different.

What had Jevan found when he came to Ronald’s apartment? Why had he come? What could have happened between the time of her own hurried departure from that mirror-lined apartment, with its dead white and dull blue shadows, and Jevan’s arrival? Or had it happened after Jevan’s arrival? Had Jevan killed Ronald?

It was not the first or the last time the thing forced its way into her conscious mind: could Jevan have done this thing? Jevan, who had, besides basic common sense, so strong a strain of ruthlessness. Jevan, who hated Ronald and made no bones of it. Jevan, who had had opportunity.

But if Jevan had killed Ronald he must have had a motive and his motive could not be jealousy.

And he had said with an effect of truth that he had not killed Ronald. He had said it impatiently, as if, if he had murdered Ronald, he would not have hesitated to admit it. To her at least. His wife. His wife—and yet, in this strangely perplexing, suddenly important thing called marriage, not his wife.

Willy was leaving. She heard his voice and Jevan’s in the hall and growing nearer; then Jevan said: “All right, Willy.” And Willy said: “See you later,” and came along the hall toward the outside door. As he passed the drawing-room door he looked in and saw her, hesitated and came in.

“Hello, Dorcas.”

He was a little pale and excited and breathless. His thin blond hair was ruffled and his blue eyes sought her own anxiously.

He came closer to her and peered at her worriedly.

“Now look here, Dorcas. You mustn’t be so—so upset about all this. Brooding around in the dark. Why don’t you turn on some lights?” He peered closer, took one of her hands in his own and patted it.

“You’re not—not grieving over Ronald, are you?” he said as if struck by the thought suddenly. “He’s not worth grieving over. You—why, Dorcas, I never dreamed you really—cared about him.”

“I didn’t—that is, I don’t.”

For a moment he looked deeply into her eyes as if to be sure she had told him the truth. Then he sighed as if with relief.

“Thank God you weren’t in love with Ronald. He—oh, there’s no use going into the reasons. But—gosh, Dorcas, if you had been in love with him and——”

“And?”

“Nothing,” said Willy. “That is, I was only thinking how tough it would be for you. Of course it’s bad enough as it is, but if you’d been in love with him——” He stopped again and looked at her and said unexpectedly: “Listen, dear, if there’s anything troubling you that—I mean if there’s anything I can do for you, you’ll tell me, won’t you? You see,” said Willy simply, “I love you. Too.”