Rex Stout_Tecumseh Fox 01 (26 page)

“I’ll show him, Bellows.”

It was Nancy Grant, somehow there. Bellows thanked her and made off. Nancy led the way, with Dan following, up the broad winding stair, down half the length of the wide carpeted corridor, and indicated a door.

“In there,” she said.

“Thanks.”

Nancy stood. He stood. Her mouth opened and closed again.

Dan asked, “What is it?”

“Your arm.”

“What about it?”

Her finger nearly touched it. “Does it hurt?”

“Nothing to brag about.”

They stood. Dan’s mouth opened and closed again.

Nancy asked, “What is it?”

“Something I might as well say,” Dan rumbled, his bass pitched lower even than usual. “I’ll get it out. That playboy of yours. I really did think he had shot his father. Since I understand you have alibied him, I was wrong. Congrat—”

“He is not my playboy.”

“Well, your whatever you want to call him. Anyhow, what I want to say, on account of my accusing him in public of being a murderer, I owe you a laugh. I dreamed about you yesterday. I dreamed I was picking flowers for you. Red flowers. With these hands—ouch. Draw any conclusion you want to and you’ll probably be right.”

“But I—” Nancy stopped, then went on, “Whatever conclusion did you draw?”

“I didn’t draw any. I didn’t have to. You wouldn’t either, if you had a dream like that. Picking red flowers and arranging them to look nice. Kindly postpone the laugh until you are out of hearing.”

He strode to the door she had indicated, opened it without knocking, passed through and closed it.

Tecumseh Fox, there alone, faced him and inquired:

“Well?”

The vice-president nodded. “Okay,” he declared. “They wanted me to sign a statement and identify the gun, that’s all. It’s my gun all right. You know, it kind
of gives you the creeps to realize that your own gun was used to shoot—”

“It’s not your gun, it’s mine.” Fox compressed his lips. “You know, Dan, this is past the limit. We won’t discuss it now—”

“We might as well. That is, if we’ve got to discuss it at all. It won’t do any good. We’ve been over it all before and what good does it do? You have your ideas and I have mine.”

“It might do some good if I made it impossible for you to put your ideas in practice in my business and with my property.”

Dan shook his head. “You mean kick me out?” He extended an enormous paw in an appeal to reason. “What do you say things like that for? To begin with, you couldn’t kick anybody out. Particularly not me. Six years ago last May, you saved my life. If you hadn’t butted in, that Arizona jury would have hung me higher than a kite, as sure as a duck quacks. If it wasn’t for you I wouldn’t be here. Then in the last analysis, who’s responsible for my actions? You are—All right, I’ve admitted before that I got that argument from Pokorny, but that doesn’t keep it from being a good argument. You saved my life and here I am. Whatever I do, brilliant or the contrary as you seem to think, it’s up to you. As far as that gun is concerned, common sense ought to tell you that if that one hadn’t been handy—”

“I said we won’t discuss it now!”

“We might as well if we’re going to.”

“No. I’m busy.”

“I know you are. You’ve found out who murdered Thorpe. I can tell that by the way your eyes look. But if we’ve got to discuss my lending that gun—I don’t want to be worrying about it all night—”

“You never worried about anything for five minutes in your life. Please go downstairs and ask Vaughn Kester to come up here, and to bring Luke Wheer and Henry Jordan with him.”

Dan stared a second, grunted, rumbled, “I thought it was him all along,” and started for the door; and paused not for Fox’s challenge:

“Wait a minute, I’ll call that! Ten to one you can’t name him—”

The vice-president was gone. Fox made a face at the door, then crossed to an open window and leaned out for a breath of the cooler night air. Apparently Dan was having trouble finding Kester, or Kester was having difficulty locating the other pair, for ten minutes passed before footsteps were heard, muffled on the carpet of the corridor.

Fox faced the door as it opened. Luke Wheer was in the van, his face sullen, his eyes bloodshot. Vaughn Kester’s backbone was stiff and he walked with nervous jerky steps. Henry Jordan looked completely miserable, with the corners of his mouth drooping, his shoulders sagging, his feet dragging. There were only three chairs in the room. Fox invited the others to take them and, for himself, brought over the bench from the dressing table, then spoke to Dan.

“Stay out in the hall, will you, please? By the door. Sit on the floor and don’t go to sleep. If any one comes, give us a tap.”

Dan rumbled, not resentfully, “That’s one thing I’ve never done, I’ve never gone to sleep,” on his way out.

Fox turned to Kester: “Can we be heard in an adjoining room if we keep our voices down?”

The secretary shook his head. “The house is soundproofed. What’s this all about?”

“Murder,” said Fox curtly. “That’s what we’re going to discuss. But the precautions for secrecy are for the purpose of preserving the reputation of Ridley Thorpe. It’s his secret we’re trying to keep. You and Luke want to, I know. Jordan has his own reason for wanting the same thing and so have I. I’d hate to have to return this check to the Thorpe estate. I earned it and I want to keep it.”

“In any event,” Kester observed dryly, “you couldn’t be compelled to return it.”

“Oh, yes, I could, by my scruples—or my vanity. No matter what you call it, it’s the most effective compulsion there is.”

Kester didn’t look impressed. “What is it you want to discuss about the murder?”

Luke Wheer broke in, in a hoarse squeak, “I do not want to discuss any more about murder. I tell you, gentlemen, with all respect, I don’t want to!”

“I don’t blame you, Luke,” Fox sympathized. “But we four share the secret we want to keep and that’s why I asked all of you to come up here.” He turned and said abruptly, “The discussion will be mostly between you and me, Mr. Jordan.”

The wiry little man looked wearily surprised. “I don’t know what you think I can discuss about it,” he declared.

“Well,” Fox conceded, “I expect I’ll do most of the discussing myself. The fact is, I want to apply a test to you. I did it with Kester this afternoon; I built up an inference that he had killed both Arnold and Thorpe, and I did a pretty good job of it. Now I’m going to do the same thing with you.”

Jordan frowned at him. “I don’t understand. What is it you’re going to do?”

“I’m going to build up an inference that you killed
Arnold, Sunday night, and Thorpe here today, and see what you think of it.”

The sag left Jordan’s shoulders, his chin stiffened and a flash came from his deep-set grey eyes. His voice was an angry growl: “I can tell you right now what I think of it.”

“Sure you can,” Fox agreed quietly, “but you’d just have to tell me all over again when I get through. To save time and avoid misunderstanding, I’ll put it this way: you’re going to sit there and listen right through to the end. If you start any motions I don’t like I’ll be on you and don’t think I can’t handle you. If you bust up the discussion, I’ll leave you in charge of Luke and Kester, and I’ll go downstairs and give the district attorney all the information I have, including the detail of Ridley Thorpe’s real weekend.”

“Not that,” Kester snapped.

“Yes, that,” Fox snapped back. “What about it, Jordan?”

“It’s ridiculous.” Jordan wet his lips. “It’s illegal. You can’t force me to sit and listen to this scurrilous—”

“I’m not forcing you. I’m merely telling you what will happen if you don’t.”

Jordan’s deep-set eyes were barely visible behind their ramparts. The palms of his hands slid down his legs and cupped over his knees and gripped there, as though he would hold himself down. “It’s blackmail,” he said. “I’ve suspected you from the beginning. Go ahead. Let me hear it.”

Fox nodded. “That’s sensible. I’ll make it as brief as I can, but there’s a lot to it.”

Luke, his bloodshot eyes wide at Jordan, squeaked, “He was on the boat!”

“Sure he was on the boat. Don’t start butting in,
Luke, let’s get it over.” Fox’s eyes had not left Jordan. “Here are the bald details of the inference. Ten days ago, your plans being perfected, you sent an anonymous letter to Thorpe, threatening his life. You worded it so as to make it appear that it had been sent by a man who had been financially ruined by Thorpe, a man who lunched at the club he did. You did that to guide suspicion in that direction and also to establish the supposition that the man who killed Arnold thought he was killing Thorpe. You mailed the letter on Monday. The following Thursday you went for a trip on your boat. You knew of course that Thorpe would spend the weekend at the cottage in New Jersey with your daughter. Sunday night you anchored your boat at some deserted strip of beach on the Connecticut shore—I wouldn’t be surprised if it was the same spot where I embarked Luke and Kester and Thorpe yesterday—rowed ashore, stole a car somewhere and drove to the bungalow—probably on the road along the woods back of it, since Grant and his niece saw no car—sneaked through the woods, shot Arnold through the window, drove back to where your boat was, or near there, went back on board, crossed the sound to the Long Island shore, anchored, got into your bunk and slept. Maybe you slept; sometimes they do and sometimes they don’t. Any comment?”

“No,” said Jordan contemptuously. “I wouldn’t know where to begin.”

“I think myself,” Fox agreed, “it would be better to wait till I’ve finished. Before proceeding to more bald details, I’ll turn some light on a few of those. You had no desire or intention of harming Thorpe; it was Arnold you were after. You had no expectation of ever being remotely associated with the affair in the
mind of any one. There were only four people in the world who knew that there was any connection whatever between you and Ridley Thorpe; Luke Wheer, Vaughn Kester, your daughter and Thorpe himself; and they were all people who would not divulge that connection. So your natural expectation was that all you would ever hear about the murder of Corey Arnold would be what you would read in the papers whenever you saw fit to go ashore and get some. It must have been the nastiest shock of your life, yesterday afternoon, when I floated alongside and you saw who was sitting in my boat. Wasn’t it?”

Fox shook his head. “Excuse me. Don’t try to answer yet. You handled that situation marvelously. To be sure, I wasn’t expecting anything suspicious, but I always have my eyes open and you didn’t betray yourself by the slightest flicker. The negotiations were completed, and Luke and Kester and I left. Then, at some moment prior to the time when it had been agreed you and Thorpe would go ashore, you had a second shock. Probably, I imagine, while you were steering the boat to Port Jefferson. Thorpe emerged from the cabin with a revolver in his hand. ‘Look here, Jordan,’ he said—I can hear him saying it—‘I was poking around in there and found this in a drawer. I hate guns and I never carry one, but good gracious, somebody’s trying to kill me and I’m going to protect myself. I’ll just borrow this until I get one of my own.’ And he stuck it in his pocket. Wasn’t that the way it happened?”

Fox shook his head again. “Excuse me. That shock must have been almost as bad as the first one. It was the gun you had killed Arnold with. You had seen no necessity for disposing of it, since there hadn’t been one chance in a million that you would ever be connected
with the crime and after our arrival with Thorpe you had had no opportunity to ditch the gun. Of course you tried to talk him out of taking it, but what Thorpe wanted he took and you couldn’t make your objections too strong for fear of arousing suspicion.

“But you were certainly on a spot. If any faint suspicion should arise, Thorpe had in his possession evidence that would convict you like that”—Fox snapped his fingers—“of murder. You must have been very uncomfortable at my house last night. With the fears of a guilty conscience aroused, some remark I made may even have led you to think that I already suspected you, though I certainly didn’t. I’m not very proud of the fact that I didn’t really suspect you at all until I looked at the writing on those pads downstairs. Your best defense against the threat of disaster was to get the gun back from Thorpe, but you didn’t know how to go about it. But your fear forced you to do something, to erect some barrier against suspicion and you had devised a pretty good one. I admit you fooled me completely with that early morning trip to your daughter’s apartment. I should have suspected you then, hearing you tell about her giving you a biscuit and tea, but your calculations were sound. You figured that by running away from my place before sunrise, ostensibly for the purpose of talking with your daughter in order to make sure that Thorpe hadn’t committed the murder himself—to make sure that you weren’t furnishing an alibi for a murderer—you would render yourself immune to suspicion; and it worked. I underestimated you. After that trick, I even passed over your remark about a biscuit and tea—What is it, Kester?”

“Nothing,” said the secretary shortly. “Only the
inference you’re building against Jordan seems to be more elaborate than the one you tried on me and a good deal more mystifying. What the devil have a biscuit and tea got to do with it?”

“Everything,” Fox declared. “No American would ever speak of a biscuit and tea, but an Englishman would. Before that even, I should have known that Jordan’s an Englishman, since I heard him say he had been purser on the
Cedric
, which is a British ship, but he had himself insulated.”

Fox’s eyes were not leaving Jordan. Jordan apparently was meeting them, but his own were so deep under the jutting brows, so narrow behind the crinkled leathery lids, that they left their expression to be guessed at.

“Then,” Fox told him, “I brought you here to Maple Hill myself. I suppose you were on the edge of panic. You had expected to be quietly on your boat, untroubled and utterly unsuspected, during the hullabaloo over Arnold’s murder and here you were right in the thick of it. You had begun to be afraid of me. My sudden appearance at your daughter’s apartment, so soon after your own arrival there, had alarmed you—quite needlessly, for I hadn’t expected to see you there. Worst of all, Thorpe still had the gun and he knew it was yours. That was your most acute danger, Thorpe’s knowledge that that gun belonged to you, and circumstances conspired to tempt you with an opportunity of removing that danger. You were sitting on the side terrace and men came and disturbed you. You wanted to be alone, to decide whether to take any action and if so, what. You went to the back of the house where the cars were parked and the gun lying on the seat of Jeffrey Thorpe’s car caught your eye.