The Devil's Cook (19 page)

“What makes you think I'm looking for Mrs. Miles?”

“She's missing, ain't she? Dr. Miles was here Friday night with Mr. Moran looking for her, and she ain't come back. Leastwise, I ain't seen her.”

“I'm trying to find out where she's gone.”

“Not knowing, I couldn't say.”

“She left here, I understand, about the same time as Ben Green. I'm wondering if they could have gone away together.”

“I wouldn't put it past either one of them. But it so happens that they didn't.”

“Oh? You're sure about that?”

“I saw Mr. Green leave—carrying a bag, he was—and there wasn't nobody with him. I was working in the vestibule upstairs, and he walked right past me. He's a snooty bastard. Talks when he takes a notion, which ain't often.”

“What time was that, do you remember?”

“I couldn't say. Some time in the afternoon. I'm no clock-watcher when I'm about my work.”

“Well, that seems to settle it.” Bartholdi sniffed, wishing he could somehow eliminate the olfactory evidence of Orville. “You had something good for dinner, eh? I love the smell of onions cooking.”

“I had liver. Onions go good with liver.”

“I thought for a minute you'd been making a Student's Ragout.”

“Student's what? Never heard of it. I don't go for them fancy dishes. Plain eats is what I like.”

“I'm with you. You can't go wrong on plain eats.”

On the apron behind the building, Bartholdi breathed gratefully
pi
the good cold November air. Remembering his thoughts after leaving Otis Bowers, he felt a stirring at the roots of his hair, an electric tingling in his flesh that had nothing to do with the cold.

Yes, Terry Miles was still dangerous. She was deadly dangerous to a frightened and desperate murderer; and in spite of irrelevancies and diversions and unconfirmed assumptions, Bartholdi was sure—as he had been sure for some time—who her murderer was.

23

The lane was a tunnel in darkness; the hedges hemmed in the road; the wind whispered in the hedges. Once the road had been graveled, but the gravel was gone, pressed into the clay bed or thrown aside by wheels. The clay had been softened by rains and rutted while soft; now it was frozen hard, and the ruts writhed treacherously underfoot.

Farley had approached the lane alone, after parting from Bartholdi some distance from where it began. He walked along at a measured pace, counting his steps. He had not been told to do this, but he did it for such comfort as it provided, having anticipated that what could be a five-mile walk along a lonely road on a dark night was nothing to bring home to one's dreams.

“Take your time, Mr. Moran,” Bartholdi had said. “There's no telling when you'll be contacted—if you're contacted at all—but I have a hunch it will be on your return trip. This kidnapper will want to wait as long as he can before he makes his move, just to be sure there's no trap. Remember, you won't be alone. My men have got to stay back some distance, of course, but one of them will always be close enough to protect you. Here, take this police whistle. After you've been contacted by the kidnapper and he's left, give two blasts on it. The alarm will be passed along from station to station, and in a matter of seconds we'll close in.

“The chances are at least even that the kidnapper will slip through, considering the terrain. That can't be helped. So you've got to get a good look at him, if it's at all possible. And don't go being a hero, Mr. Moran.”

“Don't worry,” Farley had said, “I
won't.”

“Be sure you're safely away from him before you use the whistle, then hide yourself in a bush and stay put till one of my officers shows up. Here's your package. It's got nothing but paper in it, of course.”

The night was cold. The sky was remote, it's blackness pricked by pinpoint stars. Farley heard the wind in the hedges; he heard from somewhere, dying, the fluty boom of an owl.

His foot struck something that rolled away in the darkness, and he sprang aside, heart in his mouth. His other foot jammed into a deep rut and he staggered, almost falling Pain shot up his leg; he had twisted his ankle.

The road felt like cement as he knelt on it. He rubbed the turned ankle, trying to massage the pain away. Finally, the pain dwindled to a throb … He could see, nearby, faintly on the dark clayey road, the object he had tripped over. He crawled ahead and picked it up. It was an orange from an Osage hedge. He cursed and hurled it away. It struck the frozen ground with a crash, like a rock, and bounded away.

Farley got up on his feet, testing his ankle cautiously. Limping, he walked on. His hands, ungloved, were cold, and he shoved them into the big patch pockets of his thick wool jacket. In one pocket bulged the dummy package. The whistle lay in the other.

He came suddenly on a concrete culvert spanning the dry bed of a shallow ravine that ran with water when the rains fell and the snows melted. The culvert was no more than a flat slab without railings. He sat down on the slab, dangling his legs into the ravine. All at once, it seemed, the entire earth had dropped into a profound silence, in which all living things crouched mute, listening for—what? He, too, was listening, leaning forward on the slab; then, becoming aware of what he was doing, the tension left him, and he laughed:

Farley
, he mocked himself,
you are about to fall under the spell of the witches and the goblins and that old black magic. Get with it, man!

The spell was instantly broken; the night was filled at once with a thousand small, comforting sounds. Rising, Farley went on. He had developed a blister, and the ankle prevented his going too briskly; but he came soon enough to the intersection—the end of the lane.

He had met no one on the way, he had seen no one, and now nothing remained but the tiresome ordeal of walking back. He waited for a few minutes, thinking that an officer might approach him, but nothing happened. He started back the way he had come.

Walking aggravated the pain in his ankle. He stopped every two or three hundred yards to massage the ankle, trying to determine by touch if it was swelling or not He cursed the fatuity of his mission as he limped from one stop to the next.

It was now his urgent desire to be done with it as soon as possible. But his progress was so slow because of his ankle that he had to fight a rapidly growing irritation.

Out of this mood, having paused once more to rub his ankle, he was suddenly jolted. Ahead of him somewhere, along the dark road, he heard the throb of an idling engine. A car had entered the lane and was parked, lights off, in the most dense shadow of the hedge.

He followed the sound, limping and silent, and soon came upon the car. It was so nearly absorbed by the shadows that he might have passed without seeing it. It was pulled off the road in the rough opening of a hedge that led to a field beyond, no doubt broken through by some fanner to give access to his machines. Farley leaned forward to peer into the interior of the car. Canted against the door on the right side of the front seat he made out what appeared to be the shadow of an enormous and grotesque head.

He felt about on the hard road until his fingers came in contact with some gravel. This he tossed at the car. The head, at the ping of stones on metal, flew apart as if riven by the sound. There was a frantic flurry of movement. Farley had barely time to jump aside. The headlights flashed on, the car backed with a rush from the opening in the hedge, and tore off in a shower of gravel.

Farley resumed his trek. His feet on the frozen clay bed of the road were numb with the cold. He began counting cadence again, limping along to the count; and after what seemed infinity, he reached the terminus of the road where he had started. He began trudging down the crossroad as he had been directed. He had gone perhaps fifty yards when Bartholdi materialized from the night.

“Nothing?” said Bartholdi.

“Not a damn thing.”

“A car entered the road a while ago. Did you see it?”

“Yes. A couple. They parked. I scared them off.”

“They were stopped at the other end.”

“What do suppose went wrong?”

“Who knows? Maybe the whole thing was a rehearsal. For whatever reason, we've been stood up.”

“Well, I'm tired, and I'm freezing, and I twisted an ankle. Do you need me any longer?”

“No, Mr. Moran, you did fine. There's a police car over there. The driver will take you home.”

Bartholdi continued to stand there, thinking. An officer stepped out of the darkness.

“Dry run?” the officer said.

“Dry run.”

“What about the car that went in?”

“A couple making out.”

“In my day, we called it necking.”

“In your day, that's all it was. Today …” Bartholdi sighed.

24

Bartholdi knew that he would not sleep. Instead of going home, he went to headquarters and sat alone in his office in a darkness that was compromised by a finger of light prying through a crack in his door from the hall outside.

His brain was as jumpy as if it had been injected with a cerebral aphrodisiac. It had happened before, and he always preferred on such occasions to sit in the dark. He indulged himself at these times in a harmless fantasy. His thoughts, he would imagine, were irrepressible imps that wriggled out at his head and scampered around with an abandon that was often embarrassing. Consequently, in order to secure a decent privacy for their performance, it was only proper to release them after dark, and when he was alone.

Now his liberated imps were uneasy and angry. He was convinced that a murderer was at that moment having a grim laugh at his expense. He was certain, indeed, of a number of things. He was certain that his quarry knew the police knew Terry Miles was dead; he knew, in spite of this, why they had been put through the antics of this dreary night.

His imps figured it out this way:

The kidnapper allegedly knew that Jay Miles had gone to the police. If so, why didn't he also know that the body of Terry Miles had been found? Having Jay under such close observation, apparently following him from home to headquarters, would he have abandoned the tail just in time to remain in ignorance of their subsequent visit to the old Skully place? Is was conceivable, granting an egomaniac with delusions of grandeur and immunity, but it was not probable. No, it was not.

In the second place, the kidnapper himself was merely a theory. Evidence of his existence was hearsay. Bartholdi had only Jay Miles's word that a kidnapper had made himself known. There had been no witnesses to the telephone contact.

It had been necessary to take the whole thing on blind faith, and Bartholdi did not count himself among the faithful blind. Yet he believed in a kidnapping of a sort.

He knew who the murderer was. He would have bet his pension and his sacred soul that he knew. But he could not, knowing, prove what he knew. He needed confirmation on a critical point.

From among his antic imps he culled the three that had directed his mind to its present state. Sternly, like a drill sergeant, he brought them to attention in rank and inspected them:

One newspaper too many.

A girl who slept too soundly.

Most important of all, a ragout with too many onions.

25

Later that day, which was a Wednesday, the story of Terry Miles was issued by Captain Bartholdi to the press. Too late for the morning edition of the
Journal
, it was lavishly treated in the evening edition—illustrated with garish photographs of the old Skully house and the bleak little room where the body was found, and of Terry and Jay, which were dug up from somewhere. And it was annotated with comment from the authorities in high places, and from young Vernon and Charles, who gave free rein to imaginations loosened at last from the threat of police displeasure. Vernon in particular revealed a talent for narrative embroidery.

Bartholdi, peppered by snipers from all sides, remained committed to his task. Early in the day he telephoned Jay to warn him of coming events; Jay, on the captain's advice, arranged for the removal of Terry's remains to a private mortuary from which, as soon as arrangements could be completed, they would be transferred to the west coast. Thereafter, still following Bartholdi's advice, he locked his door and took his telephone out of its cradle. Even Fanny, who made two attempts, was unable to rouse him.

After dark, when he was at last on his way home, Bartholdi—having greater authority—was admitted. He remained with Jay behind a locked door for half an hour.

It was the following afternoon when Jay, expecting Bartholdi again, opened to find Brian O'Hara on his threshold. The gambler was meticulously dressed, from burnished black shoes to gray homburg, which he held at his side in a black-gloved hand. His face gave the impression of having been as carefully selected and donned for the occasion as his attire. Jay had the feeling that O'Hara, in rage and grief, had deliberately applied himself to the minutiae of his appearance as a sort of emotional camouflage.

“Oh,” said Jay. “I was expecting someone else.”

O'Hara voice had come out of the closet with his face and tie. “I tried your phone, but it was dead. May I come in?”

“If you must.”

Jay stepped aside, and O'Hara walked three steps into the room and stopped. He stripped off his gloves and held them with his homburg in his right hand.

“What I have to say will only take a minute,” he said. “It won't be an expression of sympathy, I assure you.”

“Good. I'm relieved that you're so sensitive to the situation.”

“There's nothing to be gained by our being cute with each other. We know what the situation was last week. But now it's changed, and what it is is something to be settled between us. Terry's dead. I've been telling myself that—it's hard to accept, but it's true. She's dead, and someone knocked her off. If it was you, I'll find out.
And if I find out before the police do, I'll settle with you. I'm not making a threat. It's a promise.”