Death Before Bedtime (21 page)

I didn’t pursue this point.

“I blame that dreadful little man, the secretary, the one who killed himself, for everything. I’m sure he did it deliberately … made up all sorts of documents just to implicate Johnson. He was a nasty creature, I always thought, killing Lee like that and then purposely framing poor Johnson.” This was a novel twist.

“Did you know him at all?”

“Who? The secretary? Hardly, but I never liked his looks those few times I saw him. Johnson is building his case on the little man’s dishonesty, however. He swears to me that
it’s a deliberate plot and I believe him. He quarreled with him the night he died.”

“Who quarreled with whom?”

“Johnson and that little man, you know, Hollister.”

“How do you know?”

“Johnson told me. He tells me everything, not that it’s any particular secret; soon everyone will know it.”

“But where did this take place?” Veils were trembling before my eyes; the figure at the puzzle’s center grew more distinct.

“Johnson spent the evening at the Rhodes’, with Mrs. Rhodes, the evening Hollister killed himself. Didn’t you see him? But of course not, you were at my party and Johnson should have been there, too, except he rightly decided that his first evening in Washington as a Senator should be spent with his predecessor’s widow, a very, very nice thing to do, but then Johnson is a nice man.”

“You mean he was in the house when Hollister died?”

“But of course and he had, he tells me, a private conversation with Hollister of the most unpleasant kind.”

“Without witnesses?”

“There would hardly be witnesses if the conversation was private.”

“I wonder why the papers didn’t mention that he was in the house when the murder took place.”

“Perhaps no one thought to tell them … they never know anything.”

For a while I entertained the mad fantasy that Verbena Pruitt, Mrs. Rhodes and the Senator-Designate (the only
three in the house at the time, other than servants) might have got together and killed Rufus on their own. Each had a motive, except perhaps Verbena. The vision, however, of these three elderly political figures tiptoeing upstairs to shoot Rufus Hollister was much too ludicrous.

I arrived at the house shortly before dinner. It was already dark outside and the curtains were drawn against the night. The plain-clothes man who usually stood guard was nowhere in sight.

In the drawing room I found Mrs. Rhodes, quite alone, playing solitaire at a tiny Queen Anne desk. She greeted me with her usual neutrality.

“I suppose,” I said, “you’ll be glad to see the last of us.”

“The last of you under these circumstances,” she replied courteously, motioning me to sit beside her.

“What do you plan to do when all this is over, when the estate is settled and everything is taken care of?”

“Do?” she looked at me blankly for a moment, as though she had not, until now, conceived there would be a future.

“I mean do you intend to go back to Talisman City, or live here?”

She gave me a long look, as though I had asked her a nearly impossible question. Finally she said, “I shall stay here of course. All my friends are here,” she added mechanically.

“Like Mrs. Goldmountain?”

She smiled suddenly, for the first time since I met her, like sun on the snow. “No, not like Mrs. Goldmountain. Others … my old friends from the early days. We had no very close friends back home, the old ones died off and we made no new ones, except politically. I haven’t lived there since we came to Washington.”

“I saw Mrs. Goldmountain today.”

“Yes?” She was clearly not interested.

“I understand she’s a great friend of Governor Ledbetter’s.”

“I believe so.”

“She is certainly taking his side in this business.”

“As she should. I’m sure that Johnson did nothing dishonest, nor did Lee.” But this came out automatically; she seemed to be making a series of prepared responses, her mind on something else.

“I didn’t know the Governor was here the night Rufus died.”

“Oh yes, we had a nice chat. He is a good friend, you know, as well as our lawyer.”

“He told Mrs. Goldmountain that he and Rufus quarreled that night, about the business of those companies.”

Mrs. Rhodes frowned, “Ida Goldmountain should show better sense,” she said sharply. “Yes, they had a disagreement. Over what I don’t know; it took place upstairs, in Rufus’s room.”

“Did the police know this?”

“That Johnson was here? Oh yes, both Verbena and I told them when we were questioned as to who was in the house.”

“Did they know that the Governor went upstairs to talk to Rufus, alone? That they quarreled?”

She looked at me coldly, with sudden dislike. “Why, I don’t know,” she said. “The police didn’t ask me and I don’t remember having volunteered any information. I am so used to having things misunderstood,” she said and her voice was hard.

“I’m sure they must know,” I said thoughtfully, trying to
figure out Winters: why had he kept this piece of information secret? Not only from me but from the official report given to the newspapers.

“Besides,” she said, “the case ended when Rufus killed himself. There was no need to involve one’s friends any more than was necessary. I appreciated Johnson’s kindness in coming to see me his first night in Washington, before he was to take his seat. If I were you,” and she looked at me with her clear onyx eyes, unmarked by age or disaster, “I would say nothing about Johnson’s exchange with Rufus.”

“I’ll have no occasion to, yet,” I said, quite as cool as the old lady. “In any case, I’m not the person to silence. Mrs. Goldmountain is. She’s the informer.”

“That fool!” Mrs. Rhodes exploded.

“Fool or not, she’s given us a new angle on the case.”

“Case? what case?”

“On who killed your husband, Mrs. Rhodes, and who killed Rufus Hollister.”

She sat back in her chair, “You’re mad,” she said in a low voice. “It’s all over. The police are satisfied.
Leave it alone
,” her voice was harshly urgent.

“But the police aren’t satisfied,” I said, and this was a big and dangerous guess. “They know as well as you and I that Rufus was killed; they are waiting for the real murderer to make some move. So am I.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“But it’s true.”

“Even if all you say is true why do you involve yourself in it? Why not go back to New York? Why involve yourself in a world which has nothing to do with yours?”

“Because, Mrs. Rhodes, I’m already involved, because I’m in danger no matter where I go.”

“Danger? Why?”

“Because I know who the murderer is and the murderer knows that I know.” This was a crashing lie but there was no help for it.

She pushed her chair back and stood up, as though prepared to run from the room; her face was ash-gray. “You’re lying,” she said at last.

I stood up, too. From the hall I could hear a door shut and the sound of someone running upstairs. We stood looking at one another like two graven images, like gargoyles on a mediaeval tower.

Then she recovered her composure and gave a strange little laugh. “You are trying to confuse me,” she said, attempting lightness. “We all know that Rufus was the murderer and that he killed himself. Whatever argument Johnson had with him was perfectly innocent … as far as the main thing goes. Certainly the thought that Johnson killed Rufus is a ridiculous one, quite unimaginable.”

“Then why did
you
imagine it, Mrs. Rhodes? It never occurred to me that he did.”

She flushed, confused. “I … I was mistaken then. I was under the impression you thought Johnson was in some way involved.”

I was conscious that she had betrayed something of enormous value to me, but what I could not tell. “No,” I said. “I never thought the Governor killed Rufus but I am curious about their conversation.”

“I suspect that it is none of your business, in any case, Mr. Sargeant,” Mrs. Rhodes was herself again.

“As I pointed out, it
is
my business if it concerns the murder.” I could be quite as cold as she.

“And you think there is some connection?”

“Certainly. The collapse of this company has a great deal to do with the case … not only with your husband’s death but with the career of Governor Ledbetter.”

She gathered up her purse, a handkerchief, prepared to go. “I assume then you will be staying with us for quite some time, after the others leave tomorrow?” This was insulting.

“No, Mrs. Rhodes,” I said looking her straight in the eye, “I will deliver the murderer tomorrow.”

She looked at me for one long moment, quite expressionless; then in a low voice, intensely, she said, “You meddlesome fool!” and she swept out of the room.

Feeling somewhat shaken, and a little silly, I went out into the hall. A familiar perfume was in the air as I walked slowly up the stairs, wondering what to do next. There was very little chance that I would be able to unmask the murderer, much less be able to collect sufficient evidence to assure conviction.

I was tempted to forget about the whole thing.

I was surprised, when I opened the door to my room, to find Walter Langdon leaning over my desk in a most incriminating fashion. He gave a jump when he saw me.

“Oh! I … I’m awfully sorry. I came in here just a minute ago, looking for you. I wanted to borrow some typewriter paper.”

At least it could have been a match, or wanting to know the time. “There’s some in the top drawer,” I said.

He opened it and, with shaking hands, took out a few sheets. “Thanks a lot.”

“Perfectly all right.”

“Hope I can do the same for you one day.”

“Never can tell.” The sort of dialogue which insures, or used to insure, any number of Hollywood scriptwriters a secure and large income.

“Sit down,” I said.

“I really better get ready for dinner.”

“You look just fine.” He sat down in the chair at the desk; I sat on the foot of the bed, legs crossed in a most nonchalant fashion. “Are you satisfied with the way things turned out?”

He looked puzzled. “You mean the murders?”

I caught that. “So you think Rufus was murdered too?”

“No, he killed himself, didn’t he? That’s what the police seem to think.”

“Why did you say ‘murders’?”

“A slip of the tongue. Two deaths is what I meant.” He was perfectly calm.

“But I take it you think Rufus was murdered?”

“You take it wrong, Sargeant,” said Langdon. “I see no reason to think Rufus might have been killed. It makes perfect sense the way it is. I think you should leave it alone.” The second time I had been advised, in exactly those words, to keep my nose clean. I was beginning to feel that a monstrous cabal had been formed to misguide me.

“You don’t have much of the newspaperman in you, Langdon,” I said in the hearty tone of a stock company actor in
The Front Page.

“I’m not really one,” said Langdon with a touch of frost in his voice. “I just do occasional articles. I’m mainly interested in the novel.”

I have all the pseudo-intellectual’s loathing of those who have dedicated themselves, no matter how sincerely and competently, to art … a form of envy, I suppose, which becomes contempt if they fail. Langdon had all the earmarks of a potential disaster.

“Even so you should be more interested in this sort of thing. Have you decided what you’re going to write about for your magazine?”

He nodded. “I’m working on it now, that’s why I needed the paper. I want to have a first draft ready by the time I get back to the office, tomorrow afternoon.”

“What line are you taking?”

“Oh, the implications of a political murder … I use the Rhodes thing as a point of departure, if you know what I mean.”

I knew only too well: the Diachotomy of Murder or The Theology of Crisis in Reaction. It would be great fun to read, I decided grimly. “Then you’ll be taking the noon train with Ellen?” This was a guess, but perfectly logical.

“Yes, as a matter of fact, we
are
going back together.”

“She’s quite something isn’t she?”

Langdon nodded seriously. “She certainly is.”

“Are you still engaged to her?”

“Oh, it wasn’t a formal engagement.”

“I’m sure of that; they never are.”

Langdon blushed. “She … she’s very promiscuous, isn’t she?”

“Yes, Walter, she is,” I said in the tone of a Scoutmaster explaining to a new tenderfoot the parts of the body and their uses.

“I didn’t think it was so bad until we went out to Chevy Chase and she ducked off with a Marine …”

“She’s been known to complete a seduction in ten minutes.”

“Well, this took a lot longer. I was mad as hell at her but she told me it was none of my business, that she thought the Marine much too nice-looking to let go; it was then I caught on.”

“You didn’t really care about her that much, did you?” I was curious; both Ellen and I had thought him a fool.

He scratched his sandy hair in a bumpkin manner. “Not really. I never ran into anything quite like her before and I guess I was taken in for a little bit.”

“The fact she now has a million dollars, as well as an uninhibited technique, might make her irresistible to an American boy.”

“Not this boy.” But I detected a wistful note; she had used him up, as it were. I wondered what would become of her now that she was rich; there were bound to be operators cleverer than she in the world, and what a ride they could take her for. Well, it was no business of mine.

“Let me see what you write for the
Advanceguard
, if you don’t mind.”

“Not at all. I’d like your advice.” Then he left the room.

I puttered about the room, getting ready for dinner, the last dinner in this house. I packed my bag, slowly, reluctantly, aware that the puzzle was incomplete and would doubtless remain so now, forever. I cursed my ill luck, my slow brain, the craft of my opponent: for some time now I had regarded the killer as a malicious personal opponent whose delight it was to torment me.

I opened my desk to see if there were any letters or old socks in the drawers. There was nothing. Only a few sheets of typewriter paper. On one of them I had made some elaborate doodles; at the center of the largest decoration I had written “paper chase” in old English type.