The Wrong Way Down (14 page)

Harold went upstairs. Gamadge waited until the house was quiet, and empty of strangers; then he put on his hat, coat and gloves, reconnoitred at the front door, and let himself out of the house.

G
AMADGE WALKED DOWN
to Fifty-ninth Street, and took the subway to Eighteenth. He emerged, and walked south and east to the Vance apartment house. A plain-clothes man—the one Gamadge had met earlier that evening—sat in the office reading a magazine. He looked up and nodded. “You back again? Nordhall left long ago.”

“I had to come back. Something I forgot.”

“Up there? Want me to go along?”

“No thanks.”

“All quiet, I guess. All sewed up. Man in back, and there's going to be three on the day shift.”

“One for each?”

“That's right. The subjects can go out, but we'll be right after them in case they try to make any contacts—Bowles or Spiker.”

“I'd like to see the back premises.”

“Go ahead. Tell the guy there that I sent you—Lugan. He's Weinberg.”

Gamadge went out to the street again and around the corner to Third Avenue. Between the apartment house and a grocery store he found the alley, a flagged path dark as night itself. Gamadge went along it, bumped into ashcans, and circled them to emerge on a square of garden. He came back and pounded on a door.

A face looked out. Gamadge said: “Weinberg? Lugan sent me around here. I was with Lieutenant Nordhall.”

“Gamadge,” said Weinberg. “I saw you.”

“I was interested in the layout back here.”

“It's nothing.” Weinberg let Gamadge in and closed and bolted the door. They stood on a landing; cement steps went up and down, and behind the plain-clothes man there was another door, in the wall.

“Footprints?” asked Gamadge.

“They don't seem to take. We didn't find any. Or else this Bowles floats.”

Gamadge laughed politely and went through the door into the lobby. He climbed from landing to dim landing, arrived at the top floor, and turned to Apartment 5A. He stood up against the door and very gently turned the knob. The door opened.

All was silent, but every light seemed to be on in the living room. He walked softly forward. The left-hand wall of the living room came into sight. On a studio couch there Iris Vance now lay asleep. She was fully dressed, and the light Indian blanket which had covered her was flung back and sliding to the floor. The flat was very cold.

Gamadge tiptoed across the room and down the inner passage. Nobody. He came back, retreated into the outer hall, closed the door, and rang.

In a few moments he heard her voice: “What is it?”

“Gamadge. Nothing wrong, Miss Vance. I wanted to speak to you.”

She opened the door a little way and stood looking up at him and shivering.

“You're frozen,” said Gamadge. “Why didn't you go to bed?”

She opened the door wider, and he came past her into the living room and stood looking at the studio couch and frowning. “Been spending the night there? What for? Never mind now; I'll just thaw you out a little first.”

He went over to the fireplace, kindled a fire, piled on wood, and then picked up the whiskey bottle which still stood on the table, half full. He went down the inner passage to the kitchen, Iris Vance following him with uncertain steps.

Gamadge lighted a gas burner on the stove, found a saucepan, poured whiskey into it, put the pan on the flame, and began to hunt along shelves and in cupboards.

“Sugar? Right in front of my eyes. Knife in the drawer. Two glasses. Lemon in the icebox? Fine. We'll have a toddy. I need one myself.”

“Why did you come?” Her teeth were chattering. Gamadge had thrown his hat on a kitchen chair. Now he shed his coat and put it over her shoulders. “Later,” he said. “I can't talk to people while they're having a chill.” He put the two steaming glasses on a tray, spoon-handles rising from them. “Especially not at four in the morning. I don't know about you, but at four in the morning, if I'm unfortunate enough to be up and about, I require artificial stimulus. The inner man doesn't supply a thing but mental and physical protest. Now some people, they tell me—bright as a button. Oh well.”

He carried the tray back into the living room, set it down, took his coat off her shoulders, and pushed up a chair to the fire. When she was sitting in it, slowly sipping grog from her spoon, he pulled up another chair and sat beside her.

“In a few minutes,” he said, “we'll be strong rugged characters again. Keep at it—never mind if it burns your tongue…Feeling better? So am I. Now where shall we begin? Will you tell me why you kept on all the lights and didn't dare go to bed, or shall I start the ball rolling?”

“I was frightened.”

“But when people leave the lights on and can't go down dark passages to bed it means only one thing—ghost stories. Like that ghost story you told us tonight.”

“Every now and then it frightens me still. And that picture—the words coming out on that picture that looks like old Mrs. Ashbury…And then people thinking I'd stolen it.”

Gamadge looked at her, his glass halfway to his lips. He took a swallow, put the glass down on the flat arm of his chair, and got out his cigarettes. He lighted one for her and one for himself.

“It's an awful moment,” he said, “the moment when one's early sins seem to be coming home to roost. Pain in the side—My God, my liver; how many highballs
do
I drink in a week? Seems to me I used to fairly swash them down. And so on. But you? That tap on the shoulder.”

“I can feel it now.”

“And I see that I'll have to find you a proof before letter of Lady Audley. Meanwhile, the thing to do in such circumstances is to keep the mind on Hotspur.”

“Hotspur?”

“Surely you remember Hotspur and Glendower. Glendower says he can call spirits from the vasty deep. And what does Hotspur say, Hotspur the realist?”

“But will they come…”

“Right. And you get an unmistakable conviction that Shakespeare's talking then. He means that Glendower's the ninny, Hotspur's the sensible man.”

“It doesn't mean they won't come.”

Gamadge turned his head to look at her severely. “Of all the feeble interpretations I ever heard, that's the feeblest. It does mean they won't come.”

“It only asks.”

“Miss Vance, I beg of you, don't make me despair of your intelligence. Don't force me to tell you what you know already—the rhetorical device used there. That question expects a negative answer.”

“Hotspur is only casting a doubt…”

“Miss Vance, do you seriously think that Shakespeare thought Glendower could call spirits from the vasty deep?”

“He leaves it in doubt.”

Miss Vance's teeth had stopped chattering, color had come into her face, her eyes no longer looked dazed. Gamadge drained his glass and set it down. He said: “All right. He leaves it in doubt. Therefore you couldn't go to bed. That's settled, and we can go on to my reasons for coming down here tonight. In the first place, I came back to latch your front door.”

“My—”

“Because I left it unlatched when Nordhall and I came here at one o'clock. The door was ajar, and we looked around your place. When I left I pushed the button that releases the latch.”

She was gazing at him white-faced again.

“Because,” said Gamadge, “I was afraid you might decide—or be constrained—to harbor a murderer.”

She said, her lips barely moving: “There are men downstairs. Nobody could get in.”

“Nobody could get in after the men were posted. But suppose our friend had never left the building? Those fire exits have doors on every landing, and the men were posted downstairs. What safer place to hide in than a place that has been searched already by the police?”

She said soundlessly: “Ridiculous.”

“Is it? You're backing these people, Miss Vance, and I suppose you know what you're letting yourself in for. But are you so sure they're backing you? Miss Ashbury wanted to hang the theft of the picture on you; what if the whole family hung the murders on you?” He added: “Murder and attempted murder—mine.”

“I can't imagine why you should even dream—”

“Miss Ashbury let you down once. Why not again? And why isn't Ashbury here, sitting up with you and mixing your grog?”

Tears had begun to roll down her cheeks. Gamadge felt for his handkerchief, but she produced one and dried her eyes with it.

“Is Miss Ashbury nervous too?” he asked. “Is she the one he has to sit up with?”

“With all the worry,” sobbed Miss Vance, “of course they have to be together.”

“Well, it's a funny thing.”

“We don't understand about your being shot at, and Miss Paxton's death was an accident—even the police thought so until you—until you—”

“Miss Paxton's death was murder—cold-blooded murder, premeditated, and cruel as the grave. I came down here, secretly and in the dead of night, to beg you to tell me what you know about it. Nobody will know that you told me; it's a dangerous thing, I realize it, to inform on a murderer like this one, but you're quite safe; nobody will know.”

“I don't know anything.”

“And that's that.” Gamadge rose. “You're locked in now, anyway; and I don't think you're going to catch cold. Would you like me to wait until you get yourself to bed?”

“If you would…”

“Sing out when you want me to put out the lights and go.”

She got up and stood looking at him in confusion. “I ought to thank you.”

“‘Thank you, damn you.' That the way you feel?”

“It's awfully good of you to wait.”

“Remember,” he called after her as she went down the passage, “they will not come.”

“They will not come.”

Gamadge put on his coat. Miss Vance came back, holding his hat in both hands. “You left it in the kitchen.”

“Thank you,” said Gamadge. “I'd be tickled to death if Ashbury found it there in the morning.”

She couldn't smile. She didn't even look at him again. After she had been gone a few minutes she called: “I'm all right now. Thank you.”

“Good night.”

He switched off the lamps and groped his way to the front door. Down in the lobby the plain-clothes man intercepted him: “Get anything?”

“No.”

“They telephoned me about Spiker.”

“Did they?”

“One less contact to worry about. Wonder if it'll make the morning papers.”

“I shouldn't think so. She wasn't important enough.”

“That's what
they
think. Funny they didn't tie you up with it.”

“None of the pressmen on that job knew me from Adam—except one, and I'm afraid he'll get a wigging.”

“Well, we know one thing—these three birds didn't do it. I guess they hire out that kind of work, anyway.”

A
T NOON NEXT
day Gamadge was finishing his breakfast in the library. Harold, stretched out on the chesterfield, read aloud from the morning paper:

AGED WOMAN KILLED BY FALL

Miss Julia Paxton, a resident of Tarrytown, was the victim of an unusual accident last night when…

“Mrs. Spiker didn't make it?” asked Gamadge.

“She didn't make it.” Harold looked up at Lady Audley, whom he had propped behind silver candlesticks on the chimney piece. “You'll be in the news some day,” he told her. “‘Titled Englishwoman abducted, impersonated by illegitimate twin.'”

Theodore, still put out by the events of the night before, appeared in the doorway. He was closely followed by Lieutenant Nordhall.

“Lieutenant Nordhall to see you,” he said.

“Tell him I'm not at home.”

“You tell him it ain't the law for him to come bustin' up like this. Police wait to be announced like anybody.”

“I'd like a cup of coffee.” Nordhall sat down in front of the fire, leaned back, and immediately sat up again to gaze at a scene displayed on the hearthrug: Martin the yellow cat lay on his side, lazily batting a paw at an all-yellow kitten. Nordhall turned to look at Gamadge in wild surmise.

“Don't ask me anything about it,” said Gamadge, “I don't know. They tell me Martin got out into the yard one day and came back with the creature.”

“Who says so?”

Theodore was filling another breakfast cup. He said: “Harold say so.”