Rex Stout (15 page)

“Good lord.” Dol stared at his profile. “You
are
a fool.”

“No, I’m not a fool.” Zimmerman picked up a crumb of biscuit which lay on the gravel and tossed it through the netting. The dog eyed it, and decided it wasn’t worth the trouble. “You suggest that I invent something to appease Sherwood. Something fanciful? You forget my scientific devotion to the truth. But I suppose I might manage it with the play instinct—the simplest and most effective incitement to the imagination. Should I perhaps tell him that I called on Storrs in my capacity as an alienist, to inquire into his sanity? And as a result of my inquiry, condemned him to annihilation? Should I describe to him how yesterday I got to that place unobserved, and fastened the wire around Storrs’ neck, and pulled on it, held him up when he jumped—is that what you would like? Only I don’t know where the gloves are; I couldn’t tell them that; and I understand the law won’t take a man’s word for it when he confesses murder, it suspects him of bragging; he has to furnish corroboration. I’m sorry, I must have mislaid the gloves.…”

Dol said, “You’re as goofy as Mrs. Storrs. You babble. Or are you—” She stopped, and regarded him through narrowed eyes, under the brim of the floppy straw. “I’m not apt to imagine I can guess anything from your silly camouflage, so don’t bother about it. But you deserve to hear my opinion. I don’t believe you killed Storrs and are acting for your own defense. I doubt if your talk with him yesterday had anything to do with his murder, and I doubt if you have any reason to think it had. I suspect you hit it when you said caprice. You would call it that. You are constantly digging around in other people’s brains, even common decency doesn’t restrain you, and I actually believe you are mean enough to regard this as an opportuntiy … to practise …”

“When you finish with my mote,” Zimmerman put in, “I’ll help you with your beam. It seems that you also seize opportunities for practising your profession.”

He picked up another crumb and tossed it to the dog.
Dol, speechless, watched him do that; then, disdaining a reply, she turned and left him. Dismal failure indeed.

Striking off across the lawn, she was hotly denying the justice of Zimmerman’s thrust. She thought of arguments: hadn’t she herself discovered the body? Hadn’t she come here to work for the man who had been killed? Hadn’t she deduced the significance of the wire spiraled around the tree? Hadn’t she prevented Ranth from getting away with the piece of paper? Hadn’t she been told by Sylvia to go ahead? Hadn’t she …

But veering away from a perennial border where two men were scratching in the peat moss, she admitted to herself that all those arguments, if not exactly dishonest, were at best specious. She didn’t need them anyway. For whose approbation were they required? No one in the world, except possibly Sylvia. For herself … She stood looking down at a flaming patch of phlox and muttered aloud, “I’m a detective or I’m not.” She dismissed it at that, and a recurring trivial annoyance assailed her, like a persistent buzzing gnat: what the dickens was it that had happened this morning, that she wanted to remember and couldn’t? She concentrated on it futilely, then tried to dismiss that too.…

She wanted to see Len Chisholm.

After going to the house and learning that he had been dismissed from the sun room by Colonel Brissenden some time ago, and looking for him in vain on the western and southern slopes, she finally found him in the rose garden, in the pergola with his legs stretched out on a bench, reading a Sunday newspaper. As she approached he greeted her and moved to make room, but she sat on another bench across the path from him. Her head felt better, but her muscles were weary.

“Where did you get the Gazette?”

“One of the troopers went to Ogowoc.”

“Anything in it?”

“Yeah, half the front page.” Len held it up. “Picture of him. Picture of the house too, I wonder where they dug that up. Want it?”

Dol shook her head. “I’ll read it later maybe. What did the uniformed colonel do to you? Was he tough?”

Len grimaced. “Honest to God, Dol, I don’t know how it happens those babies don’t get smacked in the puss oftener.”

“Good heavens, did you smack him?”

“No, I only wanted to. I reprimanded him. I let him have it straight. I even told him I was an American citizen. Don’t you worry, I acted like a gentleman.”

“I’m not worrying.” Dol frowned at him. The whites of his blue eyes looked bloodshot, he had obviously not shaved, his shirt collar was wrinkled and his tie askew, and his hair was more than ordinarily chaotic. “Yes, I am too. Of course I’m worrying. I am taking advantage of this opportunity to practise my profession. I am investigating this murder.”

“Fine.” Len leaned back and clasped his hands behind his head. “You’ll do better at it than that tin soldier. That damn fool pretended he thought
I
did it.”

“Maybe he does think so.”

Len grunted. “Don’t frighten me out of my wits.”

“I won’t. I want you to use your wits. For instance, tell me what happened yesterday at Martin’s place. I understand you got there around three o’clock. Then what?”

“Aha!” Len sat up. “So that’s it. You pretend you’re investigating a crime, and what you are really doing is prying into my conduct with other women. Thank heaven you have betrayed yourself at last! Jealousy like yours reaches a point where it is uncontrollable, and then it explodes. I refuse to defend—”

“Please, Len, postpone it. I want to know what happened.”

He spread out both hands. “You insist? All right, we got there at three o’clock, Martin driving like a demon. We found Steve Zimmerman there on the porch, looking as if somebody had fed him ipecac. Martin excused himself and went in with Steve, and Sylvia found shoes and things, and rackets and balls, and that what’s-his-name put up the net for us—”

“You mean de Roode.”

“Right. Sylvia and I volleyed a little, and then she wanted to sit and talk, she said about my job. What she really wanted was to put her sign on me. She was waving
the wand when Martin came out, and kept it up on account of momentum. I was like stone, I wouldn’t give an inch, I was thinking of you all the time. Martin got nervous and butted in, I made one or two appropriate comments, Sylvia got frustrated and bitter, and finally I saw it might end in bloodshed, so I merely bowed to them and came over here. No man was ever more faithful—do I go on?”

“No, not that way. Talk sense. Then—as you told Sherwood—you came here and looked for Storrs, and found him there on the bench asleep, and came away without waking him up, and walked around the front of the house and met Sylvia near the tennis court. Is that right?”

“You heard me say it.” Len put up his brows. “Sylvia again, huh? But we didn’t sit and talk then. We played—”

“Don’t do that! Please. As you came up the slope and around the front of the house, did you see anyone? Janet or Ranth or anybody at all?”

“Dol, my love.” Len twisted his body around and put his feet on the ground. “What do you think you’re doing?”

“I told you, I’m investigating Storrs’ murder.”

“But not … my dear lady … not like this. I mean you’re not serious. Asking me about the little events at Martin’s place? What the devil has that got to do with it?”

“I don’t know.” Dol kept her eyes level at him. “I’m asking about everything I can think of. I would especially like to know what Steve went to see Storrs about yesterday morning … yes, I still would. And I’m still wondering why you told all of us yesterday that you looked for Storrs and couldn’t find him.”

Len waved a hand. “You’re cuckoo. The sun’s got you. You actually sound as if you meant it.”

“I do mean it. Oh, I know your explanation of that lie was perfectly simple and natural, but I wonder anyhow. I am a detective, Mr. Chisholm. And I happen to be aware that you know how to conceal your feelings quite effectively and that you are a practised and accomplished liar. After explaining to Sherwood why you had said that you hadn’t found Storrs yesterday, you went ahead and told him another lie this morning. In front of all of us.”

“Me? You’re crazy. I was the soul of candor.”

Dol shook her head. “You told him a lie.”

“Name it.”

“You said that you are in love with me and that I am the only woman you have ever cared for.”

“Well by God!” Len jumped up. “That’s gratitude for you! Just because I don’t turn on Hearts and Flowers and whine around like a sick calf? Do you think you can crush my passion like that? Do you think you can blow it away with a puff? Do you think—”

“Cut it out.” Dol looked unimpressed. “Stop it, Len. The horse play was all right as long as it merely helped you to hide what you didn’t want to show—I didn’t mind—some times I really enjoyed it—but not now. It may have nothing at all to do with this business, but I thought I ought to tell you I know all about it. You are no more in love with me than you are with the Empress of China.”

“There is no Empress of China. You play with my heart as a cat plays with a mouse. China became a republic—”

“Len, will you stop? Do you think I’m an imbecile? Do you imagine I don’t know that you are completely bewitched by Sylvia?”

It hit him, quite unprepared as he was for it, and, with her eyes on his face, she saw that it did. But he made a good and almost instantaneous recovery. He stared, and got incredulity into his voice: “Say that again? I wouldn’t have believed it. You
are
jealous! I’ve got demons, you’ve got demons …”

Dol shook her head. “No good, Len. I saw it months ago. I suppose you fell for Sylvia the first time you met her, that day last spring at the Giffords’. I don’t know why you didn’t try to trip Martin up and make a play for her—or maybe you did and it didn’t work. You have a fine equipment of words and postures to cover up with, but I’ve been educated and I’m hard to fool. She put her sign on you all right, so much so that you couldn’t resist the desire to see her, just to look at her and listen to her, but you weren’t going to make an exhibition of yourself, so you got the idea of pretending I was the attraction. I suppose you figured you couldn’t hurt me any, in spite of your charm because you knew I had been inoculated and was immune. I credit you with that consideration—”

“Dol, you darned fool—”

“You’re another. If I hadn’t been immune I wouldn’t have seen through you so easily. Why do you think I’ve tolerated all your clowning? Why else would I, except from compassion? I do feel sorry for you. Maybe I wouldn’t bother to, if it were anyone but Sylvia, but she is so lovely and desirable and honest and sweet, that if I were a man and as madly in love with her as you are,—if I wanted her as much as you do and couldn’t get her,—but that’s the point I’m coming to. Why all the abnegation? You don’t owe Martin anything. You don’t regard the ties of betrothal as sacred, do you? Since you’ve used me for four months as a peg to hang your hat on, and I haven’t kicked, I think I have a right to ask that. Why haven’t you had the spunk to make a try for it?”

Len growled, “It’s not a question of spunk.”

“What is it then?”

He shook his head. Abruptly he got to his feet, shoved his hands deep in his pockets, and scowled down at her. He shook his head again, turned and strode six paces down the path, picked a rose from the vine on the trellis—a yellow everblooming climber—crushed it in his hand, and tossed it to the gravel. He came back to her:

“Look here. Have you noticed that I’m going off my nut? What am I going to do about it?”

“Well, Len, what have you tried?”

“Nothing. I thought for a while it might go away. Along in the early stages I kidded with her—I thought I was kidding—and she beat me at it because she is full of devils. Once I asked her why she wasted herself on a guy like Foltz when material like me was available, I said surely she didn’t love him, and she looked at me—you know how she can look—and she said oh no, she didn’t love Mr. Foltz, she was going to marry him only because her guardian wanted her to and she always obeyed her guardian, and she began making suggestions how I might displace Foltz in her guardian’s affections, she said first I should learn to play the piano because Storrs was fond of music. That was how far I got kidding with her.”

“You might have tried just telling her how you felt. That might have interested her.”

“Yeah, sure.” Len sounded bitter. “I did try that once,
and she was clever enough to pretend she thought I was kidding again, and began making plans how I could write to her after I got into a monastery. And anyway you’re wrong. I’m not in love with her, it’s only some kind of delirium. Infatuation maybe. I wouldn’t marry her if she mounted an altar on wheels and followed me around with it for ten years. She’s worth what? Three or four million? What would be my title, Equerry of the Steering Wheel? I wish to God she would go ahead and put the loop on Foltz and lead him away; with her guardian gone she might forget why she picked him.”

He gazed down at her. He demanded abruptly, “Why did you stampede me with this now?”

“To show you that I know what an accomplished liar you are.”

“Does anyone else know about it?”

“You mean about your delirium?”

“Yes.”

“I imagine not.”

“Does Sylvia?”

“I don’t think so. Slyvia’s conceit is quite superficial; she is really very modest about herself.”

“Does Foltz?”

“I doubt it.”

“You haven’t discussed it—with her?”

“Certainly not.”

“You’d better not. Forget it. Don’t bother about the compassion; I wouldn’t know what to do with it. You haven’t time anyway; you’re investigating a murder.” He turned and strode away, down the path; at ten yards he wheeled to call to her: “And I won’t annoy you with any more clowning!” Then he went.

Dol sat and watched him go. The back of his coat was badly wrinkled. He swung to the right, into a crosspath; then, above the intervening bushes, she could see only his head and broad shoulders as he passed through the arch at the far end.

She had thought for weeks that it would some day be amusing to inform Len Chisholm how transparent his antics had been—and now it had happened this way. Nothing very amusing about it, and nothing revelatory either, as far
as she could see. Detective? Piffle. She was nothing but a darned female quidnunc.