Rex Stout (14 page)

“I’m just asking.”

“Well, I suppose he was around. They feed at 5:30. I didn’t see him.”

Dol kept her eyes obliquely down at Martin’s face, and
stood, silent. Finally she spoke: “Thanks, Martin, for indulging me. I hope it turns out to be Ranth. It was hardly you. Len—I can’t see Len. If it was Steve Zimmerman or de Roode, that would hit you, and if I can find generosity to wish any man on earth peace and happiness it will be you, for Sylvia to share it.” She compressed her lips and took a slow breath, and looked down at the junior partner of Bonner & Raffray. “It wouldn’t hurt you, Sylvia dear, to indulge me too, even if you do think I’m a prima donna. I want to know about yesterday morning: did Steve Zimmerman or Storrs, either one, tell you what their talk had been about?”

Sylvia gazed up into the caramel-colored eyes, biting her lip. She extended a hand and let it fall again. “Dol … tell me. Are you just doing this? What are you doing? You can’t make a game … asking these questions about all of us.…”

“I’m not making a game. I’m working.” Dol suddenly stepped forward, leaned down to put her hands on Sylvia’s knees, and looked into Sylvia’s face. “You poor kid. Damn it, I know. Everything hurts you worse because you’ve never been hurt before. And me—I’m me, that’s all. If I’m adding to your hurt by making a job of it, I’ll go and sit on the terrace and read about the Roman Empire. I’ll let it alone—if you want me to.” She straightened up, made her back straight.

“No.” Sylvia shook her head. “It isn’t what I want—I want you to do whatever you think you ought to do.”

“Okay. That’s the girl. I think I ought to ask you to answer that question—whether Steve or Storrs told you—”

“They didn’t.”

“But you said Steve spoke about a mortal injury.”

“He did, but I thought he was just maundering. He didn’t say anything specific.”

“And Storrs didn’t either?”

“No.” Sylvia frowned. “It all seems cloudy now. It seems a year ago.…”

Dol nodded. “All right. I hope it’s Ranth.” She pressed her palms to her temples. “I’m going to the house and find some aspirin. I’m going to find a hat too, or stay out of the sun.” She turned to Martin: “I’ll phone Pratt and tell him
not to come tonight. Maybe we can try again later, if you still have the pheasants.”

Martin agreed that that would probably be best, and Sylvia expressed concern about the headache, then, as Dol moved off, leaned her head against the back of the chair again and shut her eyes. Martin sat and looked at her.…

Crossing the main terrace to enter the house again, Dol saw that the door was being opened for her by a trooper in uniform. So they were even usurping the domestic functions. Inside, in the reception hall, stood another trooper, apparently for adornment. She supposed that the movements of everybody were being kept more or less under observation, and that exasperated her until she realized, with a little shock, that she would like to do the same thing herself.

She moved around the obstruction of the broad staircase and stood looking at the closed door to the card room, from behind which came an indistinct murmur of voices. She frowned at hearing no words, and she was frowning, too, from irritation at something that was eluding her memory. It was like a face which she could remember without being able to fit a name to it; a fact that she wanted, and knew was in her mind, but could not get hold of. She felt that it was trivial and yet might be important; something she had that morning seen or heard or felt which had struck her, below the surface of consciousness, as a contradiction or incongruity which needed to be explained; and she had at the moment failed to call it up for examination, and now could not find where it was hid, in some secluded recess of her mind. It was something someone had said … or a gesture not apropos … or some object she had seen.…

She gave it up, knowing it would return to plague her, and heard, behind her, her name pronounced.

It was Belden, bowing, with slips of paper in his hand. There had been telephone messages for her. Mr. Tavister, having learned of the predicament at Birchhaven through the newspapers, wished to know if he could be of any service to her. She could get him at his apartment until noon, after that at the Biscuit Club. Miss Eldora Oliver … a similar message. Mr. Malcolm Brown wanted Miss Bonner to know that he was at his place near Westport for the weekend, and that he could drive to Birchhaven in twenty minutes. Dol thanked Belden and asked him if there was a phone available—since the only one she knew of was in the card room—and was conducted by him to the pantry. She consulted a memo book from her handbag for Silky Pratt’s number, got him, and told him to forget about the pheasants for the present and to join Gil Delk in the search for Anita Gifford’s dress.

She returned to the reception hall frowning again. What the dickens was it she was trying to remember? What measly little fact was eluding her? She tossed her head in exasperation—recollecting too late that her head was in no condition to be tossed—and mounted the stairs.

The wide upstairs corridor was intersected at its middle by a narrower one. Around the corner, at the first door on the right, Dol stopped and tapped softly on the panel. After a little wait she tapped again; then it opened and Janet Storrs was confronting her. Janet, as Dol had observed previously, either felt no grief at her father’s death, or grief was not with her a matter for tears and lamentations; rather, she had withdrawn from it, or with it, there was no telling which; her surface had frozen into a pale mask, and the blood flowed beneath with its secrets. Her gray eyes slept or smouldered as they had before.

Dol said, “I wanted to see Mrs. Storrs. Just for a minute.”

Before the other could reply a voice sounded from within: “Who is it?”

“It’s Dol Bonner, Mother.”

“Let her in.”

Janet stepped aside and Dol entered. But in three paces, she stopped in amazement. The sight that met her eyes was
not really extraordinary … or was it? Mrs. Storrs, bare-armed and bare-legged, dressed only in an athletic jersey and shorts, stood on the platform of a complicated exercising machine, grasping the rubber handles. She was not young nor slender, but neither was she unwieldy or misshapen. Disregarding, or not seeing, Dol’s open-mouthed surprise, she spoke in her normal voice, which always in its first sentence startled by its intensity:

“I have not missed doing this in three years, but this morning I didn’t feel like it. After that … downstairs … I came up and lay down, but I couldn’t lie still. Do you want something, my dear?”

Dol was impelled to leave the room without a word. The woman was manifestly crazy; at the very least, simple-minded. She abandoned as useless the questions she had intended to ask, but there was nevertheless something to say. She approached the machine.

“There’s nothing I want, thank you, Mrs. Storrs, but there are two things I thought I should tell you. First, I am not here as Sylvia’s guest. Mr. Storrs asked me to come. He engaged me, hired me, to discredit Mr. Ranth. To get rid of him. I have told the men downstairs about it, so I thought I should tell you.”

Janet stood there motionless, looking on, no change on her frozen surface. Mrs. Storrs said, as calmly as the compression of her vocal chamber would permit: “Thank you, my dear. My husband would do that. I understood my husband. It is of no consequence. He acted in his sphere, and by his death I am confined to it.”

Dol hastily agreed. “Yes. It’s too bad you couldn’t—” She checked herself. “The other thing I wanted to say: I am staying in your house, of course, because I have to, but I still am not a guest. Nor a friend. I am investigating the murder of your husband.”

Janet faintly stirred, then was motionless again. Mrs. Storrs released the rubber handles and declared, “That sounds foolish. What is there to investigate about it?”

“Several things. For one—who killed him?”

“Nonsense.” Mrs. Storrs stepped from the platform. “Who are you? What can you know? I have told that man … he says he looks for proof. Do you mean you help
him? Do so, my dear, but do you know what Siva says?
The camel leaves a track, the sun does not
. I could show him the truth, but I could not imprison it for him.”

Dol only half heard her. She was thinking that anyone who could stand there in linen shorts with a Saks label showing, and talk like that, was either a mahatma or plain dotty; and that, at the moment, was not the dilemma that engaged her. And there was, after all, one question which might be favored with an intelligible answer.

She asked it: “If you don’t mind, Mrs. Storrs, there’s one thing I would like to know. Ranth came back to the house at 4:20 and told you Mr. Storrs had kept that paper. Was he with you from then on? All the rest of the afternoon?”

“No.”

“How long did he stay with you?”

“Ten minutes. Perhaps fifteen.”

“Do you know where he went?”

“Yes. If Leonard Chisholm, as he says, saw my husband alive. He went back to my husband.”

“Did he say he was going there?”

“No.”

“Did you see him go?”

“No. He said he was going to the card room, to write a letter.”

“Was Janet here with you?”

“No. She left long before that, when my husband did.”

Janet put in, with her soprano that was at times toned and musical, at others almost a squeak: “I gathered some flowers and put them in vases. Then I went to the rose garden and read there in the pergola. Because my mother is strong, do you have to torment her like this? Or me? When you have forfeited your right to courtesy …”

“I know I have. Courtesy is no good anyway, just at present.” Dol sounded firm, but not unpleasant. “Would you mind telling me—while you were outdoors, and in the rose garden, did you see anyone going toward the fish pool or away from it? Len Chisholm, for instance?”

“I saw no one anywhere.”

“Okay.—And Mrs. Storrs. Please. You came with Mr. Ranth to the tennis court a little after six o’clock. Had he rejoined you?”

“No. When I went downstairs at six he was on the terrace, the side terrace. We went together to the tennis court.”

“Were you upstairs all afternoon?”

“No. I was with my husband.”

Dol gasped. “You were what? When?”

“I was with my husband when he left the house. I was with him as he slept, and after he was destroyed. I am with him now.”

“Yes. Of course.” Dol felt uncomfortably that crazy or not, the wretched woman was pitiable. Standing there in her linen shorts, her bare arms and legs … what had Storrs said … sticking her nose in the cosmos. Dol said abruptly, “Thank you both, very much. I hope I will be able to show that I am not merely a nuisance.” She turned and left the room.

Descending the stairs, she reproached herself for not having made one small demand of courtesy and asked Janet for some kind of a hat. Her own turban was useless in the bright sun, and she did want one. She asked the trooper in the reception hall where the butler was, found him, put the problem, and was directed to a closet in the side hall beyond the dining-room. There she found a shelf of floppy straws and cotton helmets, picked a decent fit, and proceeded to the side terrace. She had learned from the trooper that Ranth was in the card room, and that Zimmerman had emerged from it a few minutes ago and had left the house. She had decided to tackle Zimmerman.

It proved to be her most dismal failure of the morning. The assistant professor of psychology was indeed to be found, but he might as well not have been. After wandering in the grounds on two sides of the house and thinking it as well not to make inquiry of a trooper on the main driveway and another who looked down on her from the roof of the summer kitchen, heaven knew why, she finally ran across Zimmerman out at the kennels. He was seated on an upturned box, staring through the wire netting at a Doberman lying with his head on his paws and blinking in the sun. He offered no greeting, made no movement, though Dol went up and stopped within a yard of him. She stood, also silent, and gazed through the netting at the dog.

Finally she said, “His name is on that plate there. Gulken Prince Birch.”

No response. Continued silence. Dol swallowed exasperation and turned on him: “Steve Zimmerman. You’re a darned fool. Either what you and Storrs talked about yesterday morning is connected with his murder, or it isn’t. If it isn’t, you ought to tell it. If it is, and you won’t tell it, you should have made up something to tell that man Sherwood. You don’t seem to realize that Sherwood can do really unpleasant things. He can lock you up as a material witness, and keep you locked up. He can make you notorious. He knows that just after you left Storrs you said something to Sylvia Raffray about a mortal injury. Now I want to tell you, I’m in on this. I am investigating Storrs’ murder. If what you and Storrs said to each other is something that you can’t disclose, but had nothing to do with his death, and if you won’t tell Sherwood because you think you can’t trust him to keep it confidential, you can trust me. That would do until the inquest Tuesday. At the inquest is when you’ll really get it. You’ll testify or you’ll get it.—But maybe I’m talking too fast. You’ve just been in there with Sherwood. Maybe you told him about it. Did you?”

Slowly Zimmerman’s head turned, tilted, and he looked up to meet her gaze. His thin stringy hair was lifeless in the sun, his wide nostrils looked permanently distended, and his pale eyes, no longer inquisitive, gave the impression that they saw nothing whatever and did not expect to. They remained fixed on Dol a moment, then abandoned her and went back to the dog.

He said, in a tone devoid of any concern in the matter, “I don’t see that it’s any of your business. However … I told Sherwood nothing about my talk with Mr. Storrs. Nor will I tell you. Or anyone else.”

“Sooner or later you will. You’ll have to.”

Zimmerman shook his head. “No, I won’t.” He spoke without animation, with dead finality. “The human mind has given countless proofs of its capacity for resolution. I shall betray nothing that I choose to conceal, unless I change my resolution. It is my own affair whether I act for my own defense, or as a shield either for innocence or for
guilt, or merely from caprice. It is psychologically fascinating, but I am not enjoying it. I told Sherwood that.”