Rex Stout_Tecumseh Fox 01 (16 page)

She flopped on to the divan, buried her face in cushions and wept.

Fox looked down at her with the helpless exasperation that is a man’s first reaction to a woman’s tears from Singapore to Seattle, going either direction. From behind him came Jordan’s quiet voice:

“Now listen to that, will you? Without the slightest justification, the slightest reason—Mr. Fox, this must be embarrassing for you. It is for me too. I would like you to know that I have not plagued my daughter about her way of living. Five years ago, when I first learned of her relations with Mr. Thorpe, I disapproved and told her so. She was too old to bow to my authority and too independent to be influenced
by my counsel. I regretted it certainly, but I haven’t plagued her. It wouldn’t have done any good. I admit I threatened her once, a long time ago. I insisted on knowing who the man was and on meeting him, and threatened to take steps to find out unless I was given that much satisfaction. I wanted at least to know that she had not become a gangster’s moll. I was to some extent reconciled when I learned that the man was Ridley Thorpe, as I suppose many eighteenth-century fathers were when they discovered that it was a duke or an earl. I also acknowledge the fact that it is her life she is living. I have never tried to coerce her and she has no right to accuse me of coming here to threaten her. It is a relief to me to speak of this to another person. I agreed to do what I was asked yesterday, by you and Mr. Thorpe, because I don’t care to have my friends read in a newspaper that Thorpe was weekending with his mistress, Dorothy Duke, and that her real name is May Jordan and she is my daughter.”

Miss Duke sat up. “You didn’t intend to threaten—”

“I did not. Did I say anything that would give you any reason to suppose I did?”

“No, but I thought—”

“You didn’t think at all. You never do.”

“Well,” said Fox, “I don’t blame you a bit for coming here to make sure you weren’t shielding a murderer. I did the same thing myself yesterday. But your daughter’s right that it was dangerous. If some bright newspaper reporter was hanging around my place and followed you here and learns that you got out at five o’clock in the morning to come and call on your beautiful young daughter who lives alone on Park Avenue—we’ll hope he didn’t. Are you convinced
now that you weren’t persuaded to furnish an alibi for a murderer?”

“Yes. My daughter wouldn’t lie to me.”

“Good. I’m due at Thorpe’s office at nine o’clock and I want you to go along. You’ve got too much initiative to be left alone. I would have driven you here to see your daughter if you had asked me to. Stick with me for the day and we’ll see if we can’t develop a little mutual trust.”

Jordan made the objection that he wanted to go and see about his boat. Fox spent minutes cajoling him out of that and finally succeeded. They were in the hall on their way out, with Miss Duke bestowing a filial kiss on her father’s cheek, and then she looked at Fox and provided the day’s third surprise.

“I’d like to give you a message to an old friend,” she said, “but I don’t suppose it would be wise to let him know you’ve been to see me, because he’d wonder why?”

Fox smiled at her. “Let me have the message and I’ll furnish the wisdom. Who’s it for, Mr. Thorpe?”

“Oh, no.” She returned the smile. “If you think it’s safe, give Andy Grant my love and tell him if he wants a character witness he can call on me.”

Fox hoped that in the dim light of the hall the flicker of astonishment in his eyes was not too visible. “Oh,” he said casually, “is Andy an old friend of yours?”

She nodded. “A long ways back. I haven’t seen him for ages. I was his illusion once.”

“I didn’t know Andy had any illusions.”

“Neither have I now. I said a long ways back. Will you give him my message?”

“I’ll think it over. Good-bye and be a good girl.”

He left the building with a frown on his forehead
and Henry Jordan at his elbow, went to where he had parked the car and headed downtown. But that part of the trip was fruitless, though at the end of it he did receive the fourth surprise. After fighting traffic, searching for space to park and walking four blocks with Jordan beside him, he entered the towering edifice on Wall Street and took an elevator to the 40th floor; and after consulting a smart young woman with red hair, arguing with a smart young man with bleary eyes, walking a carpeted corridor a hundred feet long and establishing his identity beyond question to a man with spectacles who, queried, would have reserved his opinion on the globosity of the earth, Fox was told by the last:

“Mr. Thorpe has decided to remain for the day at his country residence, Maple Hill. I am instructed to tell you that he telephoned your home at half-past seven this morning, to tell you to go there instead of here, but you had already left. He would like you to go to Maple Hill at once. The directions for reaching there——”

“Thanks,” said Fox, turning, “I know where it is.”

On his way out, with Jordan, he told the smart young woman with red hair that there would be a phone call for him from a Mr. Pavey and asked that Mr. Pavey be requested to proceed at once to Maple Hill.

M
aple Hill was on a height a little north of Tarrytown. There was nothing much to the mansion and grounds except wealth; it had not the twilight charm of antiquity, nor the bold beauty of a creative imagination disciplining nature, nor the dazzle of an impudent modernist playing with new planes and angles. But it was spacious and rich and everything was there that should be: curving drives bordered with twenty-foot rhododendrons, majestic elms and enormous rotund maples, rose and iris gardens, tennis courts, pools, manicured evergreens, luxuriant shrubbery, undulating lawns and a forty-room house.

At the entrance to the estate Fox stopped the car, for though the massive iron gates stood open, a heavy chain barred the way and a uniformed guard strolled towards him, scowling inhospitably. Again Fox established his identity, but that was not enough, in spite of the fact that he was expected; the guard entered the stone lodge to telephone up the hill that the caller was accompanied by a man named Henry Jordan, and only after he received satisfaction on that did he unfasten the chain and drag it aside. Near the top of the hill
Fox caught sight of another guard standing at the edge of a filbert thicket, this one in shirt sleeves with a gun in a belt holster. He muttered to Jordan, “Locking the door after the horse is stolen,” and Jordan grunted, “That wasn’t the horse, it was only one of the donkeys.”

The drive leveled with the ground immediately surrounding the house. Fox stopped the car under the roof of the porte-cochere, at the lifted hand of a bald well-fed man in a butler’s costume who stood there, and was told that Mr. Thorpe was at present engaged but would see him shortly. He drove on through, arrived at a large gravelled space and maneuvered the car into the shade of a maple tree. Five or six other cars were already parked there and among them he observed the Wethersill Special which Jeffrey Thorpe had been driving on Monday. He got out and invited Jordan to come on and find a cool spot, but the little man shook his head.

“I’d rather wait here.”

Fox insisted. “You’re an old friend of Thorpe’s, you know. He was weekending on your boat. It would look better to the company. See that state police car?”

“You understand, Mr. Fox, that I’m not entirely comfortable at this place.”

Fox said he appreciated that, but that he had accepted a rôle and ought to play it, and Jordan, looking neither happy nor amiable, climbed out and went with him.

Crossing the gravel to a path and following it around a corner of the house, they were led to a flagged terrace with an awning and on it Fox was faced with the fifth surprise of the day. At the outside edge of the terrace, Jeffrey Thorpe stood erect as a sentry with his back towards the house and five paces
behind him, her face flushed and her jaw set, Nancy Grant sat in one of the summer chairs.

Jeffrey turned his head enough to see who was coming. “Hello,” he said grumpily. “Hello, Mr. Jordan.”

“Good morning.” Fox included Nancy in it. “Stop in on your way to Westport, Miss Grant?”

“This is not on the way to Westport and you know it,” said Nancy. “Mr. Thorpe’s secretary phoned that he wanted to see Uncle Andy and we came here first.”

“How did he know Andy was at my place?”

“I told him,” said Jeffrey, with his back still turned. “I told Vaughn I was there last evening, and I arranged with him to tell my father that I am in love with Miss Grant and I’m going to marry her if I can, and for the first time in my life I’ve got something to work for and I’m going to work for it. And at it. I don’t care if it takes me twenty years—”

“Will you please tell him,” Nancy demanded, “how comical he is?”

“Tell him yourself.” Fox dropped into a chair and motioned Jordan to one. “Have you stopped speaking to him again? That will get tiresome eventually.”

Jeffrey wheeled to face them. “There’s no use appealing to her,” he declared. “She’s as stubborn as a mule. That’s all right, I knew she had a temper—it was when she flared up that time at the opera that I saw how beautiful she was. I understand what she’s doing—she’s going to keep me on ice until she figures she’s evened up for that. I stopped talking to her just before you came. I was standing that way with my back to her because she said if I spoke to her or looked at her she’d howl for help, and since I had already followed her from the music room to the front
terrace and from there here, I was afraid she might. What is it, Bellows?”

The butler had emerged from the house. “May I ask, sir, if any refreshment is desired?”

“Oh, sure. I was preoccupied. What will you have, Miss Grant?”

Nancy violated etiquette by looking directly at the butler to tell him she would like orange juice, Jordan admitted he could use a glass of water, and Fox and Jeffrey asked for highballs. As Jeffrey, with a wary glance at Nancy, moved to a chair not more than two yards from her, Fox asked him:

“Is Grant in the house with Kester now?”

Jeffrey nodded. “I think Vaughn took him into the library to see Father. Or, I don’t know, there’s quite a collection scattered around. Five or six directors and vice-presidents and that kind of muck have shown up, and they’re in there some place, and that rooster what’s-his-name is pacing up and down the front terrace muttering to himself—”

“Derwin?”

“No, the colonel with the chest. Briss something—”

“Oh, Colonel Brissenden.”

“Yeah, that’s him. They’ve kept him waiting nearly an hour and he’s as sore as a boil. I beg your pardon. Miss Grant, I see by the face you made that that expression is disgusting to you and I humbly apologize. I
humbly
apologize.” He gazed at her face a moment and burst out indignantly, “I tell you, when you look like that, it’s inhuman not to let me look at you! Can I help it how I react? I’ll tell you something, my sister has an account at Hartlespoon’s, and she’s going there to look at clothes and I’m going with her, and you’ll model the clothes, and by God I’m going to sit there
for hours and look at you and what are you going to do about that? Now, damn it, please—please don’t! I’ll control it!! You haven’t had your orange juice! I’ll talk to Fox.” He turned. “I’ve got a request to make of you anyway. That photograph you took home with you yesterday. You don’t need it any more, do you? I’d a lot rather have her give me one, but that will take time….”

Fox raised the obvious objections, but Jeffrey persisted. It appeared that he really did want the photograph. The refreshments arrived and were distributed, and Jeffrey took a gulp of his highball and pursued his argument to a point where it became probable that he was merely trying to force a contribution to the discussion from Nancy. She sipped her orange juice with an air of aloof indifference that might have been thought slightly unnatural for a girl who was hearing a personable and eligible young man intimate that a picture of her was the most beautiful and desirable inanimate object on the face of the earth. She was doing a good job of it when her ordeal was mercifully ended by a voice from the doorway pronouncing Fox’s name.

Vaughn Kester stood there. “Through this way, Mr. Fox?”

Fox excused himself and entered the house. He was conducted down a side hall, that not being the main entrance, through a room which contained among other things a grand piano elaborately carved and across another hall into a room somewhat larger but less formal. Two of its walls were completely lined with books; a third had French windows, standing open to invite emergence on to a shady lawn made private by a nearby screen of shrubbery; and on its fourth side an enormous fireplace was flanked to the
right and left by more books. Cool-looking summer rugs were on the floor, the chairs were cool too with linen covers, and the familiar staccato click came from under the glass dome of a stock ticker, which was at one end of a large flat-topped desk. Standing, fingering the tape, frowning at it, was Ridley Thorpe, shaven, groomed, refreshed, himself. Fox told him good morning. “Good morning.” Thorpe let the tape drop. “I’m sorry you had the trip to town and back. You had already left when Kester phoned your place. May I have that letter from that lunatic?”

Fox took it from his pocket and handed it over. “I doubt if it was written by a lunatic, Mr. Thorpe. I thought perhaps its style and contents had suggested someone to you.”

Thorpe grunted. “Nothing very definite. We’ll go into this later. I have—by the way, I said I’d pay you when your job was successfully completed. Did you make out that check, Vaughn?”

Kester got it from a drawer of a smaller desk and handed it to his employer with a fountain pen. Thorpe glanced at it, signed it, and gave it to Fox. Fox too glanced at it and said, “Thank you very much,” as he put it in his pocket.

“You didn’t earn it,” Thorpe declared. “I should have offered you five thousand, that would have been ample, but I was close to desperate and my head wasn’t working. Not that you didn’t handle it well; you did. It was a perfect job. If you had taken me to White Plains, saying you had found Jordan’s boat and me on it, there would have been a certain amount of suspicion and investigation. The way you did it, leaving me there and letting Luke and Kester be discovered on your boat with you, was good work. I admire it. I want to hire you to find out who killed Arnold.
I’m not making any more foolish offers, but I’ll pay you all it’s worth. Unless he is found and taken care of I’ll get killed myself and I doubt very much if the police—”