The Cases of Susan Dare (16 page)

If it hadn’t been for that past, if the girl’s voice hadn’t been so soft and appealing, if she hadn’t—Come, now, Susan admonished Susan, admit the truth! It’s not sentiment that’s brought you here. And it’s not because a probably fourth-rate artist has taken it into his head to disappear and that he was engaged to marry little Mariette Berne. It’s because of the soap on the shaving brush.

A woman came swiftly from the dusk and approached the door of the church. She was tall and slender and, as there was a light above the door, Susan caught an instant’s glimpse of a singularly regular face and carefully arranged dark hair. There was something about her—her hat, perhaps, or the sleek lines of her thin light gown—that was not what Susan would have expected to see just there. But at the moment she was only concerned with the fact that the woman could not be Mariette Berne, for she did not hesitate at sight of Susan but went rather hurriedly into the church, and the door closed behind her.

It was terrifically hot. Susan shifted the thin white coat on her arm and was thankful she had worn the thinnest, coolest tailored white silk her summer wardrobe included.

She wished that Mariette would come. And just then she came, emerging from the twilight.

Susan recognized her at once. Her great, soft dark eyes had changed only to hold sorrow. Her hair made a dark cloud for her heart-shaped face, which with maturity had grown beautiful. Her hand met and clung to Susan’s.

“Oh, Miss Dare—you will do it, then? You will find André?”

“I’ll try,” said Susan, wishing the girl’s eyes were not so terribly beseeching. “I’ll try. But I may not succeed.”

“Oh, but you will,” cried the girl with soft earnestness. “I know about you. I’ve read your books—you can solve
any
mystery.”

“Look here, my dear,” said Susan gently. “Are you sure that you want to know? Can you face it if—”

“If—he’s dead, you mean?” breathed the girl. Her hands clasped and unclasped, but there was suddenly a clear, firm strength about her mouth. “I must know,” she said in a whisper. “Whatever it is—
I must know.
”

It wasn’t what Susan had meant. A voluntary disappearance on the part of the artist had been in her mind.

“You see,” added Mariette quite simply, “he would let me know—if he could. If he were alive he would let me know.”

After a moment Susan leaned over toward the small dressing case she had brought. “You’ve told Madame Touseau that you were bringing me?” she asked.

“Yes,” said Mariette. “There is a room next to mine. I told her you were a friend of mine. Out of a job.” They walked down the steps and off into the mysterious dusk. “But Madame,” said Mariette doubtfully, “is very keen.”

“Let me see if I have things straight. Madame Touseau owns the house where you live?”

“Yes. There are several roomers. She calls us guests. We have meals there, too, and it is very good cooking. Everything is very clean, and doesn’t cost much.”

“How many people live there?”

“There’s me. And André had a studio in the top floor—the attic. Then there are now, only Mr. Kinder, and Louis Malmin. The maid-of-all-work, Agnes, sleeps out.”

“Tell me again,” said Susan, “just what happened.”

“Well—first you must understand that Madame is very sharp. Nothing at all happens in the house that she does not discover one way or another. I mean, when she says the doors were bolted for the night
after
the guests were all inside the house, and that André did not go out again before the doors were bolted, then that is right. Of course, now, she says that she is not sure. But the doors were bolted on the inside the next morning. I know that.”

“Windows?” suggested Susan.

“I don’t think so,” said Mariette. “His windows are very high, you know, with a straight drop to the street. And in these streets it is well to keep houses locked. That night—that was Wednesday night, two nights ago—André said good-night to me there in the corridor. I watched him walk up the stairs to his studio in the attic. At the door he turned and waved at me, as he always does. And—that was the last time he was seen. He closed the door and—vanished. Simply dropped out of sight.”

They walked on for a few steps in silence. Around them, lining the narrow streets, were tall houses, their shabbiness and their smoke-stained walls hidden by the night.

When Susan spoke, her voice had lowered.

“Madame did not want you to call the police?”

“She would not permit it,” said the girl slowly. “Madame—is very determined. As you will see.”

Madame’s changing story bothered Susan. Still, perhaps the woman had honestly not heard André’s departure, and then, when it became evident that he had gone, had been obliged to admit her mistake. Yet the door had been bolted on the inside: was that a mistake—or had he gone out some other way? After all, there were windows on the first floor.

“Madame,” said Mariette softly, “would be in a rage if she knew that I had told you. She says that André grew tired—of me.”

“I expect he could have got out of the house some way if he had wanted to,” said Susan, lost in thought.

“Perhaps,” said Mariette, in a way that rejected it completely. “But there is the shaving brush, Miss Dare. A man does not put soap on a wet shaving brush and then make up his mind to disappear. And do so taking nothing at all with him. Not even his money.”

“Money?”

“Not very much,” said Mariette with a sigh. “It was hidden under a brick of the fireplace. I took it,” she added with simplicity. “No need to let Madame find it. I will take care of it for him. There’s only a little.”

“Have you watched the papers?” asked Susan.

“Oh, yes. There’s been nothing. No accident—no—” the girl choked and said—“no suicide. Nothing that I could think would be André.”

Well, of course, a man would scarcely start to shave, be overcome with a desire to commit suicide in the middle of it, and dash away to hurl himself—where? In the river, perhaps.

And there was something strange, something indecipherable about Mariette’s bald little story that caught and held Susan. It might prove to be merely a voluntary disappearance of a man who was important only to himself and to Mariette. Yet its very unimportance was perplexing. Why had he disappeared so suddenly and so completely?

“Had he any enemies?” she asked abruptly. “Did he ever seem to have sums of money?”

“No, no. You are thinking of racketeers. It was nothing like that. André wanted only to paint.”

If he had not left of his own free will, then he had been kidnapped. Or murdered. Murder was probably not unknown along that street. But what was the motive?

Quite suddenly Susan thought of Jim Byrne. But he had been out of town for a week following a difficult assignment that had to do with an extradition case then usurping newspaper space. And besides, Jim had not seen the appeal in the girl’s soft dark eyes.

“But André has been gone only two nights,” Susan said. “Surely you need not—” She never knew what she had intended to say, for the girl whirled suddenly toward her. Her white face and dark eyes looked tragic in the dusk.

“I am afraid,” said the girl tensely. “There is something wrong about the house. Something terribly wrong. Something—Here is the house, Miss Dare.”

She turned, and Susan looked up at the darkly looming house above them and was conscious of a wish that Jim had returned. Well, she could leave if she wanted to. There was nothing at all to keep her there.

A heavy door, stained with many years of Chicago’s smoke, closed behind them, and Susan blinked in the mellow light of a spacious and somewhat elegant entrance hall. The house had been evidently one of the half circle about Chicago of one-time beautiful residences that gave way gradually to the encroachments of warehouses and factories and the steady wave of foreign breadwinners.

Then Mariette was leading her to the wide doorway and into a long crowded living room—crowded with furniture, crowded with plants in pots, crowded with embroidered and laced cushions and footstools and table covers.

There were two people in the room. A woman of perhaps fifty sat under a light, with her sleek, dark hair bent over something like a cushion on her lap. Not far from her a man at a table played some kind of card game.

“Madame,” said Mariette, “it is my friend, Miss Dare.”

Madame turned, and the light fell strongly upon her. She was dark and heavy and scrupulously neat. Her features were coarse and strong and swarthy. Her eyes were very black, she had a faint mustache across her upper lip, and there were two black marks like warts on one lower eyelid which gave her an extremely sinister look.

She looked Susan up and down. Clearly Madame Touseau’s roomers had to pass some test and standard hidden away back in Madame Touseau’s Gallic mind. Clearly, too, there was something about Susan which did not altogether please Madame Touseau.

She said something in quick French to Mariette, and Susan caught only Mariette’s reply, which was something about a department store and seemed to reassure Madame.

She smiled, disclosing strong yellow teeth.

“You may have one of my rooms,” she said. “I’ll show you at once. A friend of Mariette’s—” She did not finish, and Susan felt that Mariette had vouched for her respectability. The man at the table flipped the cards together with a sigh.

Madame was rolling up intricate white threads. She was an expert lace-maker, for her strong broad hands were inconceivably quick and delicate in their touch. The tiny wooden bobbins clicked faintly against each other as she put down the cushion upon which she worked and which held, firmly pinned, the lace she was making.

“Is it as hot outdoors as it is inside?” said the man at the table, turning to watch and rippling the cards idly.

“Worse,” said Mariette. “Miss Dare, this is Mr. Kinder.”

Kinder rose and bowed. He was a man of somewhat uncertain age, with a thin face and shoulders and a surprising thickness of body upon long thin legs. His hair was black and he wore a straggly beard, black also. His eyes looked tired and wearily sharp. A small muscle near his mouth twitched as he said something polite to Susan.

Madame said abruptly: “Will you come with me, Miss Dare? I must ask you to sign my guest register. This is not the hotel nor the rooming house, but one is obliged to follow the letter of the law, nevertheless.”

She snapped on the light above a long blotter-covered table in the hall, and pulled forward a small ledger.

“Your name, please, and former address. And your occupation. Here is a pen.”

Susan sat down slowly in the chair Madame pulled forward and took the pen. Madame was taking no chances—yet perhaps the register was demanded by law and not, as it looked, a ruse to protect herself against unwelcome guests.

Susan looked at the names written on the page Madame placed before her. Looked, and her eyes became thoughtful.

Mariette had not been mistaken then. There was something wrong about the house.

Aware of Madame’s brooding regard, Susan slowly wrote her name and address in the space below Louis Malmin. Taking advantage of Mariette’s statement that she was out of a job, she left the occupation unnamed.

Madame read it and led the way upstairs.

The room to which she showed Susan was terrifically hot and airless but scrupulously clean. Susan opened the windows as soon as Madame had gone.

The night was hot and still, too, with not a breath of air moving. Away off somewhere she could hear the faint rush and clangor of an elevated train, muffled by heat and distance. Above her was the third-floor studio from which André Cavalliere had so curiously vanished. Tomorrow she would examine it at her leisure.

Mariette, coming quietly to the door, told her definitely of the arrangement of the rooms which Madame had let to her guests. Mariette’s own room was beside Susan’s, with a vacant room beyond that. Across the back of the house was another vacant room.

“Madame, herself,” said Mariette, “has the large room at the front of the house, at the head of the stairs. Across the hall is Mr. Kinder’s room: it is the largest and best room, and he pays more than the rest of us. Then beside his room is that of Louis.”

“Louis Malmin, is it?”

“Yes. Louis Malmin. An importer of oriental things: he is here for the Century of Progress.”

“How long has he been here?”

“Nearly two years. He knows André. André did some silhouettes for him. But they are on good terms.”

“Who is Kinder?”

“He was here when I came two years ago. He is a retired salesman. He is not in good health.”

“Does he know André?”

“Oh, yes. We are all well acquainted. Madame calls us her family.”

Susan had not been strongly impressed with a sense of the sincerity of Madame’s sentiment. Still, a tiger could purr for its food and hide the unsheathing of its claws. “It’s late,” said Susan. “We’ll talk in the morning.”

But after Mariette had gone, she sat at the window for a long time. Madame, Mariette, Kinder, and Louis Malmin. André Cavalliere who had vanished in that hot, silent house.

Two nights ago, when André Cavalliere had gone to his attic studio and vanished, there had been only four others in the house. Had one of them had something to do with that disappearance?

In the silence of the night it seemed possible.

Down the hall Madame was waiting like a sleeping tiger behind her closed door. Susan felt altogether sure that Madame would know of any sound or movement on the stairway or along the hall. If André Cavalliere had gone out that night, Madame would have known of it. But if he had not gone out, what had happened to him?

It was not a pleasant thought, and it haunted Susan through a long and stifling night.

Morning dawned; the air was still hot and misty, and it was an effort to breathe.

While the others were at breakfast in the dining room downstairs Mariette took Susan up to the third floor.

“I took the key,” she said, unlocking the low door that led directly from the stairway into the wide, long room which extended, except where it had been walled up under the eaves, over the entire space of the house. The walls and low ceiling, which followed in outline the peaked roof, had been plastered and were hung with a variety of paintings.