Murders in, Volume 2 (17 page)

“Mrs. Morton,” whispered Gamadge. She did not move; her hand, beside the telephone on which she seemed just to have replaced the receiver, did not move. Gamadge reached her side in a second, lifted the hand, let it drop, looked at the face—one that he would not have recognized—seized the telephone by the tips of his fingers, and dialed.

“Police. This is Henry Gamadge. Can I get hold of Detective Lieutenant Durfee? The Vauregard case.”

After a pause he spoke again.

“Lieutenant Durfee? I'm Gamadge. Mrs. Morton telephoned me to come up, fifteen minutes ago—less. I found her dead, in her library…Strangled with one of her curtain cords… They're all upstairs, gone to bed…Of course. Certainly I'll wait.”

He replaced the receiver, and leaned for a moment against the edge of the desk. Presently he got out his handkerchief, dried his forehead and the palms of his hands, and slowly replaced it in his pocket. He then crossed to the curtained doorway on his left, stood for a moment looking up at a raw and dangling end of silk cord, and went through into the back hall. He followed it, passed between other portieres, and found himself at the foot of the front stairs; these he negotiated two at a time.

The upper hall was dimly lighted. He turned to the right, reached the open door of Miss Vauregard's sitting room in half a dozen strides, and entered. It was dark, and the communicating door was closed. He knocked on it, gently.

Miss Vauregard spoke immediately: “Who is it?”

“Gamadge.”

“Mr. Gamadge!”

“Your sister sent for me. Where is your nephew's room, please?”

“Upstairs, in the front. Why did Angela—where is she?”

“She isn't here. I'll come right back and explain. Will you wait for me?”

“Yes, but…”

Gamadge fled up the stairs to the third floor, and banged on the door of the front room. A drowsy voice said something. He banged again, and Clara Dawson came out of the door at the other end of the hall. At the same moment Dick Vauregard opened his; he was in his pajamas, and looked half awake.

“Gamadge? What is this?”

“Your aunt—Mrs. Morton. She's dead…in the library.”

“What? What's that?”

“Try to get it. She's dead—been killed. The police will be here any minute. Get hold of Duncannon, break it to him, and if possible keep him upstairs. I haven't a second—I must get back to Miss Vauregard.”

After a wild, blank look at him, Dick Vauregard leaped down the stairs. Gamadge went along the hall, and stood looking at Clara; her neat, soft hair was unruffled, and she wore a white-dotted, dark-blue foulard dressing gown over pajamas that matched it. She stared at him, frozen.

“Clara,” he said, “it's up to you. Go down there and tell Miss Vauregard, and get her in shape to talk to the police, if you can. Where's some whisky?”

“In the dining room.”

“I'll get it. Can you put this through?”

“Yes.”

He ran down ahead of her, gained the first floor, and dashed to the big dining room at the back of the house. He rummaged in the sideboard, and came upstairs breathing hard, a bottle in his hand. Miss Vauregard sat on the couch in her sitting room, a Japanese kimono over her nightgown. Clara, beside her, was saying: “I don't know, Aunt Rob; I don't know.”

“Glasses,” said Gamadge. “Three of 'em. We all need some of this.”

Clara went into the bathroom and returned with a tumbler, a medicine glass, and an eyecup. Gamadge filled them all. He put a hand behind Miss Vauregard's head, and held the little beaker to her lips.

“That's right,” he said. “You'll be better in a minute.”

He watched her for a moment, frowning anxiously at the sight of her pinched face and circled eyes, and let her head drop back against a cushion. “Had yours, Clara? No? Down with it; and here's to better days.”

Clara, agate-gray eyes on him, drained her thimbleful.

“There's the bell. Just tell the police everything, Miss Vauregard, every single thing—except Dykincks. No Dykincks.”

Gamadge ran down, opened the front door, and allowed a blue wave more or less to meet over his head.

At one thirty
A.M.
, he found himself, not quite asleep and by no means awake, in the hot little back room which was called by courtesy the library. Mrs. Morton's body had been removed, but drawn curtains shut off the drawing room and the back hall. The family were upstairs, a policeman dozed in the vestibule, and most of the press had departed. Gamadge felt like a stranded jellyfish, floating gently about on an ebb tide.

Durfee came in and sat down opposite him on a hard, high-backed Florentine chair. “Do you ever call at a house,” he asked, “without finding a corpse in it?”

There was an expression on his face which Gamadge had seen before on the faces of policemen. He said: “Only happened twice.”

“I should have decided that twice was too much; only, from what Miss Vauregard and the rest of them tell me, I understand I'm dealing with a pro.”

“Nonsense. I'm not a detective at all. I only took this case because there was a book in it.” He closed his eyes wearily, and added: “Poems of Lord Byron, Volume II.”

“I know; and now that it's gone, you have no evidence. If you were a detective, I could have your license for holding out on me last night.”

“Consider that I have one, and take it, with my love,” replied Gamadge. “I hate these cases.”

“So they tell me. Miss Vauregard tells me you wanted the police called in, right from the start. She says you've been at them since the other murder, trying to get them to call us.”

“I like working with the police. Much easier.”

“If you had been, we might have saved these people's lives.”

“I doubt it.”

“This party knew that you were nosing around, and got scared, and cleaned up just ahead of you, both times. First, you thought you had something on that Smith woman, connected with that book; and I may as well say that I never heard such a story in my life before.”

“Very odd story indeed.”

“Then Mrs. Morton made up her mind to tell us all about Smith, called you up to confer with you, and was overheard and strangled with a piece of curtain cord.”

“Mrs. Morton didn't call me up to say that she was going to tell you about Miss Smith.”

“No?”

“Certainly not. Why should she get me up here to go over that, again? I'll tell you why she called me, and you can go on from there, with my best wishes.”

“Thanks.”

“Mrs. Morton got me up here to tell me that she knew who her uncle's murderer was, and how she knew it.”

Durfee looked at him in silence.

“She knew who he was,” continued Gamadge, “because she was a member of the conspiracy. This case reeked of theater from beginning to end. Miss Smith was certainly an actress; Mrs. Morton got hold of her somehow—she would have been likely to know plenty of young actresses, out of a job and perhaps desperate—and put her there in Traders Row to keep Mr. Vauregard's money in the family; she had a big stake—something like five hundred thousand dollars, perhaps more.

“I realized quite early in the game that a member of the family was in the plot; no outsider could have known enough inside detail to put the thing through, and no outsider could have been sure of big enough money to risk such a thing.”

“They talk about these Chandors,” said Durfee. “I've heard of them.”

“Mrs. Morton learned—probably from her uncle, while they were both interested in New Soul—that he was thinking of doing something for them. From what they said to me, I think he was going to transfer the old house and its endowment to them.”

“You saw these Chandors?”

“Yesterday. It was my duty, and I did. Mrs. Morton couldn't stand it, broke with New Soul, and worked up another interest for the old gentleman. She probably meant to send Miss Smith out of the picture, as soon as she thought he was sunk in the arbor thing for keeps.”

“How about her keeping the Chandors in on it?”

“Possible.”

“Who was it got nervous, and killed Mr. Vauregard?”

“It wasn't just a case of nervousness, Durfee; he was killed to preserve the family fortune no matter what happened.”

“Mrs. Morton would stand for a thing like that?”

“Certainly not; she was almost knocked out by it. Could hardly believe her senses. If ever I saw a frightened woman, I saw one this morning. Tonight, she wanted my advice on how to wriggle out of the mess without giving away her own part in the conspiracy. I could only have advised her to throw herself on the mercy of the court. She wouldn't have done it.”

“But this accomplice didn't know she wouldn't.”

“Just so.”

“He heard her telephoning, and killed her as soon as she hung up.”

“That's it.”

“We think he hid out there in the hall; that's where he cut off the piece of curtain cord.”

“I saw it.”

“Three steps across this carpet—she wouldn't hear a thing, and probably didn't even turn her head.” Durfee looked at Gamadge, hesitated, and continued: “Nobody could hide there until the servants went up to bed by the back stairs. The three women went up about ten thirty. The house-man left earlier—he lives out. There were two guests for dinner—Bridge, the theater manager, and young Payne, the Dawson girl's fiance. She's a nice girl, Miss Dawson; sat beside her aunt, tears rolling down her face, answered all my questions without any fuss, didn't ask any of her own. But she sticks to it that she left young Payne at his apartment Thursday afternoon around five. Drove herself here and there and around and about until six twenty, when she garaged her car. The dog was with her.”

“You sound as if you didn't put much faith in her statement.”

“The boy at The Humbert, Payne's apartment house, says Payne didn't come in till six fifteen. He doesn't use the stairs; takes the elevator.”

“What does Payne say?”

“Says he meant to do some photograph developing, but it was such a nice day he got on a bus.”

“People do.”

“I can't see Payne on a bus. Miss Dawson garaged her car at six twenty, all right, and took her dog over to that place she keeps him at, and got home at six forty-five, or thereabouts. Last night Payne and Bridge let themselves out of this house, the man having gone home. Bridge went first, about ten to eleven; Payne a trifle later. One of them could have pretended to go, of course, and hidden behind those curtains that shut off the back hall.”

“Payne's a cripple.”

“And rides on a bus. You can stand on one foot and operate that curtain cord—or anyway, I can.”

“As for Mr. Bridge, I am not in love with his personality, but Mrs. Morton was not only going to star in his new piece, she was going to help finance it. And if he stood on one foot, I bet he'd fall over.”

“Miss Vauregard, Miss Dawson, Mr. Duncannon, and young Vauregard—all right on the spot,” said Durfee.

“And me,” said Gamadge, with a glance of mild surprise.

“Talk sense. The old gentleman was dead, according to the M.E., before you ever left your own house, much less reached Traders Row. We don't want too many murderers in this—got enough as it is. These murders are connected.”

“But if the Vauregard mob pulled these killings off,” said Gamadge, in a reasonable tone of voice, “they probably employed a paid assassin or two. Me, for instance: Gamadge the Strangler.”

“You think it's funny to suspect any of 'em, do you?”

“Certainly not. There's always Miss Smith, though, isn't there? Or some other outsider. Let's see: Mrs. Morton, as you know, put the door on the latch for me. She then retired to the library, where we now are. Well, you know what happens when you put a door on the latch. You open the door part way, and you feel around the edge of it and press the button. Anybody who was standing in the vestibule, or on the steps, or at the foot of them, would see your hand, and what it was doing; but you wouldn't see them.”

“If somebody just happened to be standing there, they could see it,” said Durfee, looking at him with some amusement.

“No ‘happen' about it. Suppose Mrs. Morton intended to tell me the whole thing, including the name of the murderer. She might have telephoned to that person beforehand, and advised departure for climes unknown.”

“So the party comes around, just in time—”

“Comes around the minute she telephones, and waits around for me to go in.”

“Intending to finish you off, as well as her?” Durfee's smile broadened.

“Why not? The party doesn't wish to disappear, and evidently has no objection to taking human life.”

“It's the darndest complicated rigmarole I ever listened to.”

“Rather involved, I admit.”

“But of course,” said Durfee, with a sharp look at him, “it takes the thing out of the family.”

“I only met them day before yesterday,” said Gamadge. “And they stand to gain not only what they get from old Mr. Vauregard's estate, but what Mrs. Morton got from it, and her own property besides.”

“Had she much?”

“Young Vauregard drew up her will for her. He says this house goes to Miss Vauregard; it has two mortgages on it. Five thousand apiece to the nephew and niece, and the rest to Duncannon.”

“When did she perpetrate this atrocity?”

“When she married. Of course Duncannon now gets her share of old Mr. Vauregard's property.” Durfee coughed. “Never saw any man so upset as he was over his wife's death. He's dazed. We had to get the M.E. to give him a sedative, and then call his own doctor. We put a man up with him for the night—feller's half out of his head.”

“He seemed much attached to his wife.”

“Of course, he's an actor,” said Durfee reflectively. “Young Vauregard—well, I suppose you can't expect him to jump out of a window because he's lost his aunt and his great-uncle. He seems more mad than anything. Boiling about this Smith woman. Now, Duncannon thinks she was a refugee, and a mighty nice one.”