Hasty Wedding (18 page)

Mamie hadn’t done it. Who then? Why?

After a moment she thrust the small tubes of varied colors and shapes back into the drawer and closed it hurriedly and left the room. She would find Jevan, Sophie, anyone. It wasn’t good, that day, to be alone. Sophie was in the lower hall, speaking to Bench.

“I don’t care if she has given notice, she can’t go.” They were talking of Ethel, it seemed, who had decided to leave. Sophie, seeing her, dismissed Bench.

“Have you seen your mother?”

“She is asleep.”

Sophie nodded with satisfaction. “Your mother is showing unexpected reserves of strength. The doctor was quite satisfied; said he would drop in today if we called him but not otherwise. Your mother is stronger than you realize.”

The hall was quite empty. Dorcas leaned forward. “Sophie, what about that towel? You know. Last night. You knew something about it, didn’t you?”

“Certainly. I washed it out.”

“But why?”

“Sh-h-h. Because there were bloodstains on it, of course. I suppose that damned knife was wiped off on the towel.”

“Why, then——”

“Do you think I wanted Wait to have another link between the murder and us? You. Me. Your mother. Jevan.”

Bench came through the dining room and into the hall. Dorcas started back at sight of him, as if she and Sophie had been conspiring. He went on to the front door; the bell had evidently been rung. Sophie said: “Jevan’s in the conservatory,” and went toward the kitchen. Funny, thought Dorcas; meals went on, and a semblance of a domestic routine. Thanks to Sophie, however, who never quite lost her head.

Bench, at the door, was saying no one was at home. Probably a reporter.

She went to the conservatory. Still called the conservatory, though the plants in which Pennyforth Whipple had taken great pride (or had pretended to take pride, according to the fashion at that time) had dwindled to some scraggly-looking banana trees and sparse foliage plants much veined in red. There lingered, however, about the little room with its glassed roof and concrete floor covered with matting the dampish, earthy smell of all greenhouses. Jevan was there, sitting in a wicker chair, and Willy Devany was pacing around and around the small green bronze fountain in which water hadn’t run for years. As she opened the french door from the library Willy said cheerlessly:

“Hello, Dorcas,” and Jevan said: “You’re in good time; I want you to tell me—and Willy, too, of course—everything you remember about that night Ronald was killed. Tell it carefully and put in everything. Willy is all right; don’t mind him. It seems to me that there was something in what you told me that made a sort of discrepancy with what I knew. I can’t remember exactly what but—well, go ahead, Dorcas. If you don’t mind.”

She did mind. Telling Willy wasn’t, queerly, the same as telling Jevan. She hated it but she told it. Willy kept on pacing and managing to look disheveled in spite of his always perfect grooming. “She oughtn’t to have gone,” he kept saying in worried, blue-eyed asides to Jevan. “She oughtn’t to have gone.”

“Well, she did go,” said Jevan finally in an annoyed way. “Do shut up, Willy, and listen. Stop pacing.”

“I can’t,” said Willy distractedly.

“Go on, Dorcas. So you put down your cigarette——”

“I can’t remember what I did with my cigarette. I can’t remember anything about it. I just remember Ronald answering the telephone”—Jevan looked at Willy just then and Willy looked back at Jevan—“and I went away. I hurried. I don’t think anyone saw me leave and I hailed a taxi over on Lake Shore Drive and came home. It’s that taxi driver that Wait says he’s found and will identify me——”

“The whispering in the kitchen and the door opening must have been——” began Willy and Jevan cut him short.

“She doesn’t know any more about it than that. She decided the whispering must have been just ice being crushed, although I must say, Dorcas, I can’t see much similarity——”

“You would if you had been there. The kitchen is some distance from the living room, along a little hall. And the door that closed—I mean that I thought I heard close—must have been just the—the refrigerator door. And the white door that Ronald closed between the hall and the living room—well, I’m not certain about its moving either. Perhaps I only imagined it; all those mirrors give a queer feeling of motion about you.”

“Yes,” agreed Willy, adding quickly, “Mirrors have that trick. Didn’t you see anyone? Wasn’t there anything more—more definite?”

“Nothing. Except there was a car that drew up just behind us as we arrived and it—well, a car had passed slowly as Ronald and I left this house. And then again, later, when I got home and got out of the taxi a car was just leaving—or at any rate it looked like it, although so far as I know no one had called.” She looked at Willy, whose face was a blank.

Jevan snapped his fingers impatiently. “I can’t find it. There was something and I didn’t see it at the time and now I can’t—can’t get it. What time was it when you reached home, Dorcas?”

“I don’t know exactly. I met Ronald at eight. It couldn’t have been more than nine-thirty when I got home again.”

“I was at the club about that time. I reached Ronald’s flat about fifteen minutes later.”

Willy made another turn and said to Jevan: “What exactly did you do in Ronald’s place? You wiped off the revolver and put it by his hand. You told me that.”

“Yes. And I put his fingerprints on it,” said Jevan. “It wasn’t as easy as it sounds and I expect I smudged them or got the—the fingers in the wrong position somehow and Wait, curse him, spotted it. Then I looked around and wiped off the doorknobs and the telephone and the glass with the lipstick on it and took the three cigarettes that had lipstick on them and——”

“My lipstick!” cried Dorcas. “Every lipstick I have is cut sharply off and the ends are gone.”

They received it in a kind of deep silence and she became a little frightened, perceiving that silence.

Then Jevan said sharply: “It means that I overlooked a cigarette somewhere and they found it and are trying to match lipstick on it with one of your lipsticks. But there were only three in the room. Think, Dorcas; are you sure you weren’t in any other room? You didn’t go to the kitchen and drop the cigarette you were smoking?”

“No. I’m sure of that.”

Willy said quickly: “Jevan, isn’t it possible that Wait found somewhere else in the apartment a cigarette that somebody else had smoked and left with—with lipstick on it?”

“Somebody,” said Jevan and looked at Willy and instantly agreed: “That’s it of course. The—whoever it was in the kitchen. If anybody—a woman …” Jevan paused thoughtfully.

“A woman,” said Willy significantly and Jevan said:

“Heaven send it’s not the same lipstick Dorcas uses.”

“It couldn’t be,” observed Willy cheerfully. “There must be hundreds of lipsticks.”

“Here’s Bench,” said Jevan shortly, and Bench rattled the french doors and opened them.

“Mr Wait is here,” he said, unpleasantly apropos. “He wants to see——”

“I’ll come out there,” said Wait behind him and did so. Jevan said quickly: “You’d better go, Dorcas.”

“No, Mrs Locke, stay right here. You, too, Devany. I think you ought to know that Marcus Pett’s accounts are nearly a hundred thousand dollars short.”

“Short!” cried Jevan incredulously. “You can’t know! I only sent off the reports this morning.”

“Telephone your friend if you don’t believe it. I’ve just left him. You chose a very good man, Locke, one who knew how to spot a shortage. He said it was as plain as the nose on my face,” observed Wait a trifle grimly.

“But there hasn’t been time for him to check those reports!”

“Pett had made no attempt to falsify. He had, in fact, almost pointed it out to you if you had looked in the right place.”

“A hundred thousand!” repeated Jevan in a stunned way. “That’s an awful lot of money. What on earth did Marcus do with it?”

Wait knew. “Stock market,” he said succinctly. “He seems to have tried—by the use of your money, Mrs Locke—to build up a fortune for himself. It’s been going on for some time and instead of retrieving losses he got in deeper and deeper. You must have guessed.”

He paused but only for an instant, as if to arrange the things he intended to tell them; it gave them no time for exclamations or denials or inquiry but only for acceptance. He went on, making of each sentence a neat, detached fact like links in a chain.

“Two days before Drew was shot he wrote a note to Pett saying he was afraid of someone; the note was found among Pett’s papers this morning.”

“Who—” began Jevan but Wait went on as if he had not heard it.

“The inquest which was to have taken place tomorrow has been postponed; consequently I have asked the taxi driver, who took a woman to this address the night of Drew’s murder to come here and identify”—he paused there and looked at Dorcas and said simply—“her. He will be here shortly.”

Again Jevan tried to interrupt and Willy, who had disappeared behind a banana plant, uttered a protesting, small sound. Wait went on.

“You, Locke, and you, Devany, have not the alibi for the time last night when Pett was murdered that you claimed to have. You were observed by the clerk in the drugstore, who says you arrived at the store separately, Locke first, Devany a little later. That was a little before seven o’clock. You had Coca-Colas, talked for about ten minutes and left the store together. Locke, you said you left the house (and Bench corroborates it) a little before six o’clock. That’s an hour, during which you have no alibi.”

“I was walking,” began Jevan. “Believe it or not——”

“You had plenty of time, then, to return to the house unobserved by way of the side door, murder Pett, escape again by the side door and reach the drugstore in time to meet Devany; the store is not more than five minutes walk from here.”

“You would have to prove——”

“The drugstore clerk also heard part of your conversation. Who is the woman in the checked coat and where is she?”

“I,” SAID JEVAN, “I
don’t know.”

“You talked of her; you said she had been here at the house; you and Devany agreed she must be found. Now then, who——”

Jevan’s jaw and eyes looked savagely stubborn. “I don’t know, I tell you.”

Wait whirled to the banana plant and Willy’s anxious blue eyes blinked frantically. “I don’t know her,” he cried. “She’s nothing to me. It was only because we thought it was queer—her coming like that and then disappearing. We thought we ought to investigate it.”

“What did you do after you left the drugstore? It was at least eight-thirty when you turned up here.”

Willy shot a worried look at Jevan, bit his lips and said jerkily that they had sat in his car and talked.

“For an hour and a half?”

“Yes,” said Willy. “And I can swear to it and so can Jevan. Then we came back to the house and saw lights everywhere and police and naturally said we’d been together. Self-preservation,” said Willy breathlessly. “That’s all. I don’t know who in hell that woman is——”

The detective turned back to Jevan.

“I wonder,” he said simply and directly, “if you quite realize the motives which we feel might have led to the murder of Ronald Drew and subsequently to Pett’s death. Listen to me. Suppose your wife (who was not then your wife) was threatened by Drew. Wait, let me finish! Suppose he intended to throw a monkey wrench into the wedding plans and told her so; suppose she went to his apartment in the hope of inducing him to give up his plan—perhaps she meant to pay him off. Suppose you learned of it and followed her. Suppose you realized that he would go on demanding money and there was only one way to stop it. Certainly someone had already been paying him regularly for no apparent value received and there is only one person close to Drew who had the money to make such payments and conceivably the motive——”

Dorcas’ heart was throbbing painfully in her throat. Jevan shot her a lightning look and said, evenly enough except for a deep undertone of fury: “It doesn’t happen to be true, Wait. It’s only a theory.”

“But it does fit,” said Wait. “Especially if we suppose that Marcus Pett, in charge of your wife’s money, knew of these payments, knew of a motive for Drew’s murder and in fact knew so much that he, too, had to be murdered.”

Jevan was white to the lips; he said, however, still evenly: “It’s still theory only.”

“Theory? More than that, Locke.” He looked at his watch. “More than theory. The taxi driver ought to be here any moment now.”

Dorcas felt queerly cold. How could she have gone so blindly with Ronald; how could she have done the thing that, now, was to tell so fatally against Jevan and against herself! She wished with the cruel futility with which people have so wished since time began that she could undo the thing she had done. That she could have that last instant of decision over again. But how could she have known how important that short ride with Ronald was to be!

Jevan’s face was like a mask except for its tenseness; behind it, she knew, he was seeking desperately for a way out, conscious as she was of the danger of the taxi driver’s identification. Willy, still shrinking behind the banana plant, stared blankly at the detective. And Bench just then appeared in the doorway, and with him a man in uniform who could be no other than the taxi driver.

He held his cap in his hand; that night she hadn’t seen his face; it had been shaded by his cap. She sought for and could find no familiar line. But he had seen her fully; there had been a light on her face from the street lights, and he had leaned toward her and stared a little, noting, she had been sure, her breathlessness and agitation.

She realized that her fingers were digging into the wicker arms of the chair she sat in and that Wait saw it; she tried to look unconcerned, certain of herself, but her face felt stiff and marked with guilt. Jevan had not moved, nor Willy.

Wait looked at the taxi driver and said: “Well?”

He saluted Wait cheerfully: “Here I am, Mr Wait. On the dot. And this is the address all right.” He looked at Dorcas. Jevan started and stopped. Dorcas forced herself to meet the taxi driver’s eyes. He stared, tipped his head first on one side and then the other, gave Wait, Jevan and Willy a sweeping look, stared again at Dorcas and said cheerfully: “But that’s not the girl.”