Murders in, Volume 2 (7 page)

“I can't look at it as a pious anything; it's the meanest, ugliest thing I ever heard of. Uncle wouldn't have cut us out completely. Of course we need all the money we can get—he's sinking so much, as it is, in the endowment for the house. The poor children—Clara has nothing. Angela won't do much for us, she thinks first of Tom Duncannon. But if we can't get extra money without cheating Uncle in this shameful way, and employing a girl like that, I don't want extra money at all.”

“How is he leaving it?”

“A hundred thousand to each of the children, and the residue to Angela and me. He's supposed to have a couple of millions. Oh, I can't believe any of us would stoop to such a miserable thing! You must be wrong!”

“Well—an outsider wouldn't have known how your uncle was likely to react to the arbor scene, and an outsider couldn't be sure that the family wouldn't drag the thing into the open. And—what's most important, and what bothered me from the start—nobody but a member of the family, or an affiliated member, could count on a big enough slice of Mr. Vauregard's fortune to repay them for all the trouble and risk. Not without fighting for it!” He added, with another commiserating glance: “Do try to look at it calmly. The idea was to save your uncle's money from swindlers.”

“I can't look at it calmly; if we do a thing like this, we're swindlers ourselves. Would you look at it calmly?”

“No, because that kind of thing is dangerous. People who embark on a fraud—even a pious fraud—never know where they're heading for. They never know how the situation may develop, especially when they get in outside help. We don't know what the Miss Smiths are capable of, or what they'd do at a pinch. We don't know what we'd do, ourselves. I think you ought to get to the bottom of it. But you can fire me, if you like. I'll retire gracefully and ask no questions.”

Miss Vauregard stopped dead. “What shall I do?”

“You'll have to decide before I see the family; because, as you no doubt realize, we shan't be able to take them fully into our confidence. Not a word about that other set of Byron!”

Miss Vauregard walked on again. “It's too horrible! As if we were a lot of gangsters! Mr. Gamadge, if we're right, I shouldn't have been allowed to engage you!”

“Well, nobody could very well protest. Besides, a private investigator can sometimes be more or less controlled by his employers, and I suppose your family knows enough about me to be pretty sure that I shouldn't blackmail them.”

“When you meet them, you'll know how impossible—”

“I can't meet them, unless you decide to keep the real investigation between us two.”

“But that Smith woman will tell—whoever she's in with; she'll tell all about what happened this afternoon, and everything that was said.”

“I suppose she must often slip out at night and meet her friends; she wouldn't telephone. The point is, she doesn't know whether the Dykinck story impressed us, or how we mean to act on it.”

“I only wish I knew how we meant to act on it! Mr. Gamadge, how can I conspire against the rest of the family? And poor Angie—she's paying you! Suppose you found out something about somebody she—Oh, dear.”

“She needn't pay me if she doesn't care for my findings. You can pay me—when you get your money from the Vauregard estate,” said Gamadge, smiling at her. “And don't forget that we may be wrong, after all; these people may be professional swindlers; but if they are, they're the most remarkable gang I ever heard of.”

“If you could only prove that they were professional swindlers!”

“And there's another possibility, too; you won't care for it, but as an alternative it isn't too bad.”

“Any alternative!…”

“How about this, then; your uncle engineered the hoax himself.”

“What!” Miss Vauregard stopped dead again. Gamadge urged her on, with a hand beneath her elbow. She gazed up at him, aghast.

“Suppose he met her somewhere,” continued Gamadge, “and was completely bowled over; such things do happen, you know! He wouldn't like to take the family into his confidence about a divagation of that sort! So, being unable to admit to any of you that he's about to make a perfect fool of himself, and knowing that the refugee business—his first inspiration—wouldn't hold water if you all got after it seriously, he makes up the arbor story. You can't interfere, for financial reasons; and he knows you won't put him into a madhouse. He hopes that he may gradually get up enough courage to marry her.”

“Mr. Gamadge, please don't go on. It's too grotesque.”

“Lots of things in life are grotesque.”

“Uncle Imbrie! You don't know him. I suppose he met her at a burlesque show,” said Miss Vauregard, with intense sarcasm.

“No, indeed I don't; but she's an actress, Miss Vauregard,and a trained one, that's certain.”

“Uncle Imbrie! Ridiculous.”

“In a way, I'm glad that it is, because if it's the truth, you're all sunk. Trying to prove undue influence is not a safe bet.”

“Uncle Imbrie making up that story!” Miss Vauregard gave a short laugh.

“He made up the refugee story, and enjoyed it. Well, I've made you laugh, anyhow, and that's something.”

They had reached the Fourteenth Street subway station. Neither of them spoke again until they had descended, caught an express, and reached Forty-second Street. When they were in their local, Miss Vauregard shouted in his ear:

“I must get to the bottom of it. It's all too hideous!”

The colored man sitting beside Miss Vauregard caught that, and moved slightly away from her. He was not reassured by Gamadge's answering shout: “Everything is, when you get involved in fraud and conspiracy.”

They got out at Sixty-eighth Street, and took a cab. As they turned west from Lexington, Gamadge said dreamily: “I have a personal interest in all this, you know.”

“Your—er—fee?” Miss Vauregard cast a quizzical glance at him.

“No, that's business. Your niece.”

“Do drop that nonsense, Mr. Gamadge!”

“Miss Dawson is not for me?”

“You can't be serious.”

“I don't know how I could behave more seriously than by addressing myself to the young person's guardian.”

“Angela is her guardian. Clara engaged herself years ago.”

“Infant betrothal? Sounds rather Hindu.”

“You'll see how Hindu it is when you meet Cameron Payne.”

The cab stopped in front of an ornate stone house, bay windowed, and highly decorated with flowers, fruit and foliage in gray stone. Miss Vauregard got out of the cab before Gamadge could open the door of it for her.

“Wait a minute,” he said. “Do I continue my journey, or are you employing me?”

“I'm employing you. I must.” She mounted a short flight of stone steps, looking pale and grim. Gamadge paid the driver, and followed her through plate-glass swing doors, impressively grilled, into a vestibule with a floor of black and red mosaic. Inner doors confronted them, with stretches of Renaissance lace behind their plate glass, which prepared Gamadge for the interior revealed when a swarthy, harassed-looking houseman answered the bell.

“Tell my sister that Mr. Gamadge is here, Luigi,” said Miss Vauregard.

The houseman's white coat disappeared through an arch-way, curtained with red brocade, which divided the front from the back hall. Gamadge deposited his hat on a tremendous carved oak bench, over which hung an equally tremendous gilt-framed Florentine mirror. Miss Vauregard waited for him between the red brocade curtains at the entrance to the drawing room. He looked about him.

In spite of the late season, red carpet covered the floor and the staircase—a hot, bright cherry red which matched the portieres. Small pictures—oils, watercolors, etchings, even photographs—covered every inch of available wall space, and followed the staircase to the second floor. All the pictures were originals, and many of them were affectionately inscribed. A big Italian sconce, carved and gilt, and provided with a red-glass globe, hung on either side of the mirror.

“Pretty awful, isn't it?” Miss Vauregard followed his glance about the hall, and up the stairs. “My sister won't have the curtains down, or the carpets up, until she goes to the country; and she won't have anything changed. This is as it was in the nineties.”

“Very handsome,” said Gamadge.

She led the way into the drawing room. Here the Napoleon craze which swept the western world in the last decade of the nineteenth century was strongly in evidence. The walls were white, decorated with gold wreaths. Wreaths, crowns and bees, all in gold, sprinkled the marble mantelpiece, the Empire furniture, and the green-satin window draperies. A white marble bust on a pedestal between the windows did not, however, represent Napoleon, or even Josephine—it was Angela Morton in her prime, with wide, blank eyes, hair blown back from her forehead, and smiling lips half-parted.

“Angie bought the house furnished,” said Miss Vauregard. “The furniture isn't real Empire, you know.”

“A very good reproduction of it.”

“She doesn't care a bit about such things; all she likes is a background.”

Gamadge raised his eyes to a full-length portrait of Angela Morton in velvet and tights—no doubt the costume of Viola, one of her favorite parts. He said: “It must be fun to live surrounded by the proofs of one's glory.”

“One can't blame them for hating to give it all up, can one?”

“No, indeed.”

“But they lose their sense of proportion.”

“Your sister supports the two young people, you say?”

“Dickie is earning something—he's a lawyer. Clara wanted to go on the stage, but Angela wouldn't hear of it. She said the child had no talent, and was only stage-struck. The truth is, poor Clara hasn't been trained to do anything—just like me—and she thought she might be able to earn her own living that way. All the young people seem to want to do something nowadays.”

“Mrs. Morton doesn't sympathize with her efforts to leave home? Too bad.”

“She thinks Clara hasn't the reasons for breaking away that she had. Life was a little stuffy for some of us in those days; Angela doesn't think Clara's life is stuffy.”

Gamadge looked about the hot, crowded room, dominated by the effigies of its owner. He said: “Overwhelming personality, I should imagine.”

“But she's so good to us all, Mr. Gamadge! We're perfectly free and happy.”

“No latchkeys.”

“What? Oh. No, I haven't one, and Clara hasn't. Angie hates them getting lost. Dick finally revolted; he got one when he left college and went into law school.”

“No animals allowed on the premises.”

“They ruined the furniture. Angie has her macaw.”

“Good God.”

“Now, please, Mr. Gamadge! She supports us all.”

“Including Mr. Duncannon?”

“Of course not. He's been unlucky in his last plays, but he usually makes an excellent income. He adores her—it was a marriage for love.”

“Everybody adored Mrs. Morton. She permitted Miss Dawson to get engaged to this Mr. Payne, and at an early age?”

“Angela doesn't care for the match—now; but that she could not interfere with.”

Two men came almost simultaneously into the room: a young one, from the hall; and an older one, through the doorway that led from a room in the rear. Miss Vauregard said: “Mr. Gamadge, this is Mr. Duncannon; and this is my nephew Richard.”

Duncannon came forward with the attractive, calculated awkwardness which Gamadge remembered as being an asset to him on the stage; the gait and manner of one who knows how to hold himself, but doesn't have to bother about that any more. His voice lagged, too—a cultivated drawl. He had been very handsome, but he now looked his forty-odd years; his figure was thickening, and so were the Roman features of his bronzed, discontented face.

“Awfully glad you're on the job,” he said, shaking hands.

“High time, too.” Richard Vauregard, a big, lumbering, worried-looking young man, nearly shook Gamadge's arm off. “Now, let's hope, we'll get some action. To the deuce with all the pussyfooting. Mr. Gamadge, have you met the zombi?”

 

“I
F YOU ARE GOING TO BE VULGAR,
dear,” said Miss Vauregard, who had seated herself on the settee to the right of the screened fireplace, and was glancing uneasily at Gamadge, “you may go away.”

“Vulgar, Aunt Rob? Zombies aren't vulgar.”

“Miss Smith didn't say she had been dead.”

“Just in abeyance. Well, I don't propose to mince words about Miss Smith, I can tell you. I saw her once, and she struck me as well able to take care of herself. What do you say, Mr. Gamadge?”

“Quite well poised, in every way.”

“Poised! Of all the brazen-faced assurance—but Tom's fallen for her.” He grimaced rudely at his uncle-in-law. “I forgot that. He won't hear a word against her.”

Duncannon walked with his long, balanced actor's step to the left-hand window. He said coldly, over his shoulder: “Go chase yourself. I don't care for your type of humor, that's all.”

“‘Spare her, boys; she's a woman. More to be pitied than blamed. Well, of course, she has no designs on your money; that makes a difference. We're afraid of her, and they say fear leads to brutality.”

“I've noticed that it does.”

“Now, please,” said Miss Vauregard.

“That girl is not a common swindler,” continued Duncannon, parting the lace undercurtains to look out at the wide, empty street. “There's something funny about this thing, somewhere. Don't you agree with me, Gamadge?”