Call After Midnight (27 page)

The chill touch of the little bottle was repulsive. Jenny dropped it. She went out into the hall. There was not a sound anywhere. The lower hall was lighted dimly and a streak of light came up the stairs. She went to Cal’s room and the door was open, showing a darker rectangle. She called “Cal” softly; she turned on the light. Cal was not there; the bed was smooth and unrumpled.

She was struck with a notion that he might be downstairs, talking to Parenti perhaps again, over the telephone in the library. She went downstairs; the door to the library was closed so she could not have heard voices but when she opened the door, the room was lighted and empty except for smoke still curling up from a cigarette which lay in an ashtray. So someone, Cal or Peter, had been there within the past few moments.

She waited, listened, heard nothing, sat on the arm of a chair, debating. The cigarette burned slowly out. Nobody came, nobody spoke. She might have been in a deserted house.

Deserted—and haunted, she thought, and started up to do something, she didn’t know what, search the house perhaps, find somebody, anybody, and at that instant the telephone rang. She snatched it up, feeling illogically that here might be some answer to that odd silence and desertion.

“Hello,” she said and waited and since there was utter silence at the other end of the wire, she said, “Hello—hello” sharply again.

She had an answer but it wasn’t the answer she expected. “Jenny,” someone whispered. “I hoped you would answer. Jenny, danger—”

But this time suddenly the whisper broke into a voice which she recognized. “Art!” she cried. “Art!”

He spoke in a half-whisper, a half-mutter, but distinctly. “Don’t ask me how I know. Danger. There’s danger. Save yourself—”

There was a click and the dial tone came on.

Jenny didn’t move for a moment or two. Then she thought, Cal, Peter, Mrs. Brown, somebody’s got to be here.

Art had been telephoning from his own house. Yes, he must have been telephoning from there. Art was trying to warn her, that was clear, too clear, horribly clear. Cal, Peter, Mrs. Brown, the house was full of people. Only it wasn’t. Nobody in the living room, nobody in the dining room; she fled upstairs again, turning on lights. Peter was not in his room. Cal was nowhere. It seemed to put the last touch of cruel fantasy upon the emptiness of the house when she knocked first and then flung open the door to Mrs. Brown’s room and even Mrs. Brown had disappeared. She looked incredulously around the room; she went to the dressing room and at last, as Fiora had once invited her to do, glanced inside, seeing as in a nightmare the mirrors and the pink painted cupboards.

Art had tried to warn her; Art had warned her. So what should she do? Get a taxi, leave? Run away, down the driveway, along the highway, leave? That could be a trap. She didn’t believe that it was a trap; there had been a passionate honesty and terror in Art’s voice. He knew she was in danger and he hoped to save her from that danger.

The emptiness and silence of the house had its own peculiar terror. She was suddenly afraid to leave and afraid to stay there alone. She stood at the top of the stairs, trying to reason with herself, failing, listening, and presently she was sure she heard a sound; she did hear a sound. The pantry door squealed. Mrs. Brown came rustling through the dining room and emerged into the light of the hall, below Jenny, and she carried a tray with a sandwich and another highball. Jenny could have cried with relief. Mrs. Brown waddled down toward the library, out of sight.

So Jenny wasn’t alone in the house. The smoking cigarette was Mrs. Brown’s. Her first impulse was to join Mrs. Brown. Instead she went into Cal’s room, turned out the light again and settled herself to wait for him. She was safe there; nobody would look for her in Cal’s room. Perfectly safe. Art had warned her. How had he known? Don’t ask me how I know, he’d said.

Mrs. Brown had turned on a radio downstairs; an eerie echo of dance music came softly through the house. It went on and on and Jenny suddenly realized that it had been a long time, while she sat there and waited for Cal—too long a time.

She decided, after all, to go down and join Mrs. Brown. She went into the hall again and down the stairs and then, feeling that surely Cal and Peter must be somewhere in the house, she tiptoed into the dining room and thus saw a blur of light outside the windows, at the foot of the steps. She went to look and the inside of Cal’s car was lighted, as if a door had been left open.

If Cal was going any place then she was going with him. She didn’t want to encounter Mrs. Brown with explanations; she went back into the hall. Dance music was still coming from the library; she opened the front door softly and ran down steps, across the terrace, down more steps and before she approached Cal’s car she saw Cal. He was running lightly along the path that led toward the copper beeches and the little door in the wall.

It was a dark night but the scudding clouds parted just long enough for starlight to streak down upon his running figure as it rounded a vast clump of laurels and disappeared. She ran after him, softly over the grass, and had reached the clump of laurels before she thought, that was not Cal.

She came to a sliding stop. She shrank back into the shadow of the laurels. It wasn’t Cal; she had had only a glimpse; the clouds were over the stars again but by one of the thousand ways which make up recognition she knew that it wasn’t Cal.

Back to the house then. Hurry. She didn’t move because off in the darkness a dog gave a long howl. It was horrible enough, loud enough to wake the haunted house, to wake the dead. She was frozen for a moment before she remembered Skipper, fenced in, down by the gardener’s cottage. He howled again, terribly, as if he knew something that nobody else could know. There was a hushed silence when he finally stopped. Then a door banged and somebody shouted: it was Victor, she thought, in the cottage. Somebody else shouted. There was the rush and crash of running feet, shouts, and then the wild clamor of Skipper’s barking as if someone had let him out. The sound of barks shot off into the darkness toward the copper beeches and the road.

Cal’s lighted car stood safe and sound, there at the foot of the steps. Run to it, she thought; get in, put your hand on the horn, give the alarm, hurry. She reached the car; she was hurling herself into the front seat when she saw that someone was already in the car. Blanche Fair lay, crumpled in her green suit, her face down on the floor, wedged between the front and back seat.

“No,” Jenny heard herself say, “no.” Her own voice was like the voice of a stranger. Someone was running down the steps. Peter was beside her. There was a shout in the blackness of the copper beeches. Skipper barked distantly. Peter leaned over the back seat. Jenny couldn’t see beyond him. He stood as if frozen, humped over, and then sagged back against her. “It’s a bullet—right in her temple—Jenny, she’s dead.” He clutched Jenny’s shoulders. “Jenny, I didn’t kill her!”

Cal came running out of the darkness. He saw them but ran past them, up the steps and into the house.

“Cal,” Peter shouted. Jenny started up the steps.

Peter caught at her. “Jenny, don’t go! I didn’t kill her!” He clutched at her skirt. She jerked away and ran on, into the house, past Mrs. Brown with her sandwich in her hand and into the library because she heard Cal at the telephone. “No,” he said, “I didn’t. Victor, the man who works here, and the dog are the heroes …Okay—” He hung up with a clatter. Jenny was beside him, pressed against him; she wasn’t going to leave him but he didn’t even look at her. “Stay here,” he said and was gone.

Mrs. Brown came wobbling in, gave Jenny a glassy-eyed look, wavered over to the sofa and sank down, still holding her sandwich. “Those two girls,” she said presently in a mumble, “those two girls. Always jealous of each other. And now both of them—” Her voice died away.

There was a clatter of feet and voices and Victor came in, holding Skipper’s collar. Victor was in a T-shirt and sagging slacks and looked nonchalant but rather satisfied. Skipper was all agog, eyes still blazing, tugging at his collar. “Hold him, miss,” Victor said. “He’s got his fighting blood up.” He thrust Skipper at Jenny and she took a hard grip on his collar, while Skipper cast threatening looks at the door and tugged. She thought queerly that if, as Cal had said, Victor and Skipper were the heroes, then Victor bore his honors better than Skipper who was flagrantly triumphant.

Abruptly then Art Furby and Waldo Dodson, Cal and Peter seemed to surge into the room, with Victor taking up a stance in the doorway. Art was tenderly clasping one arm; Dodson had a red blotch on his jaw. Victor eyed them and sucked his knuckles absently and Jenny associated painful knuckles with the red blotch on Dodson’s face.

Skipper barked and lunged and Jenny held him with both hands. Peter shouted at Cal, “I’ll put him out,” and Cal shouted above Skipper’s barks, “No, leave him here. Let him go, Jenny, if we have any trouble.”

Art Furby waggled his arm. “That dog of yours is a killer!”

Skipper lunged again. Cal said, “No, he’s not the killer. All right, Dodson, what was it you were afraid to tell us tonight?”

Dodson shook his head and wouldn’t answer. Cal said, “Shall we let the dog loose?”

“No!” Dodson edged toward the door but Victor stood there, blocking it.

“Hurry up,” Cal said. “You’ve got more to tell. Let’s hear it.”

Suddenly they were speaking into a silent room for Skipper heard something outside and was listening, head cocked, his stovepipe legs braced for any new threat. Jenny then heard it too, the very distant, thin wail of a police car.

Dodson heard it. His sullen face went white. “All right,” he said, suddenly. “Remember I’m doing you a favor, Mr. Vleedam. The night Fiora was murdered, Blanche said she was talking to Art Furby at the time when Fiora was in the pantry and somebody shot her. Well, she wasn’t, because Art Furby wasn’t at home. I said he was; I gave him an alibi but he wasn’t. And the phone didn’t ring then at all. They made up an alibi for Blanche and for him, too, but it was a lie and I knew it. And I thought you’d pay me something if I told you. But then tonight Art as good as told me that if I gave him an alibi I’d be set for the rest of my life, so—but never mind that now. I didn’t kill anybody!”

The siren shrieked closer. Cal said, “I wasn’t really sure until tonight when Jenny said Blanche was so different after Fiora’s death. It didn’t strike me until then.”

“Huh!” Peter said. “What didn’t strike you?”

“Blanche’s guilt, her conscience, the effect of murder upon her. She hadn’t planned on guilt. She turned against Art and he turned against her, because they were partners in murder. They hadn’t expected to fear and hate each other—after their murder was done.”

“Art?” Peter cried.

Cal went on. “Blanche could plan murder. But when it was done she went to pieces. She nearly fainted. She was different. She and Art were both different. I think conscience got in its inevitable work, so they almost hated each other simply because they shared in murder. I don’t believe they were putting on an act of being cold and indifferent to each other simply to deceive us as to their real understanding. I think it was a true reaction to their common guilt. She—oh, look at the facts, Peter. Somebody had to open that back door for a murderer to come in and it was a murderer who was so scared that once before that night he had fumbled his job. So scared that as he took out the stockings to use one of them over his face, he dropped the other one and never knew it. Somebody had to hunt around and get those bottles of sleeping pills.” He turned to Art Furby, “What hold did Blanche have over you?”

“She didn’t. I didn’t kill Fiora.”

“You bought so many shares of the road you want us to merge with, that if we don’t merge you’ll go broke. Blanche tried to influence Peter in favor of the merger. But that wouldn’t make a murderer of you. How did she do it, Art? Why did you kill Blanche?”

“I didn’t—”

Jenny cried, “Art warned me. He phoned. Tonight. Only an hour or so ago. He told me there was danger! He warned me.”

Cal said, “So things got out of hand, Art? Is that the reason you killed Blanche—”

“I didn’t.”

“I saw you open the door of my car,” Cal said slowly. “I saw you put her in my car. I was standing behind some shrubbery, watching. Peter was waiting on the terrace at the opposite side of the house. We both felt that whoever had been prowling around the house might return. And she did,” Cal said somberly. “Blanche came back but you brought her. I heard your car stop down at the gate. I saw you carry her along the drive and put her in my car. I didn’t have a gun. I ran down to the cottage and told Victor and he let the dog out and came to help us. What’s the use of denying it?” Cal turned to Dodson. “Did you help him?”

“No!” Dodson’s pudding face caved in. “No, no, I had nothing to do with it. He killed her.”

“You’re lying,” Art said and hugged his arm against him like a barrier. “Besides, I warned Jenny, didn’t I? I warned Jenny!”

Dodson’s eyes glittered with ugly pleasure. “Blanche came to see him tonight. He sent me away, he always did when she came. This time I didn’t leave, I hung around and they quarreled. I couldn’t hear what they said. After a while though I did hear a shot. Then I saw his car come out and turn this way. I didn’t have a car. I followed though and came through the door in the wall and—” He looked at Victor. “That guy and the dog nabbed me. I didn’t kill her but Furby did and I’ll turn state’s witness. He’s never treated me right,” said Dodson, pleased at his revenge.

He was too obviously pleased; it cast doubt on his story.

“Art phoned,” Jenny said again. “He said I was in danger. He told me to save myself.”

Her voice died away; even the police car fell suddenly silent. Finally Victor shrugged, said, “No use in being so polite,” and came to Jenny. “Excuse me, miss,” he said and took Skipper’s collar in his own hand. “After him, boy—”

Art screamed. “
No
—”

Captain Parenti plowed in from the hall and up to Art, his turtle head looking as if he were about to snap. “All right, Furby. We’re taking you in.”