Rex Stout (16 page)

A breeze stirred gently, and the air around her was fragrant from the roses. She looked at the Gazette with its sections scattered on the opposite bench, and was momentarily minded to reach for it, but didn’t. She looked at the ravished rose Len had plucked and crushed and tossed away; and by some obscure communication in her brain it was the sight of those discarded petals, abandoned there on the path, which brought into consciousness the trivial little fact which had been eluding her for two hours. There on the compost heap …

Relieved but not elated, she smiled commiseratingly at herself. So that was it! Certainly not worth all her cerebral searching. Probably worth nothing whatever; all the same, she would go and take another look. She got up and shook down her skirt; and discovered how jumpy her nerves were by the sudden start she gave when the loud sound of a gong came from the east terrace; Belden announcing lunch.

Luncheon, naturally, was a complete failure socially, and not a marked success biologically; plates went back with rejected contents far in excess of the politeness percentage. Meals are the times above all others for household solidarity, not only as a preservative of civilization, but also for digestion’s sake; and they can be horrible and dismal affairs when hostility or apprehension or any acute disruptive emotion has invaded the breasts of the partakers. They were all present, even Mrs. Storrs, and including Martin Foltz, who had apparently not taken advantage of the permission given him to go home. The hostess informed them that Mr. Sherwood and Colonel Brissenden had
declined her invitation and gone to Ogowoc, but would return shortly.

They were eating in the shadow of death, but not with the reliquiae under the roof with them; the body of P. L. Storrs had been taken to Bridgeport for an autopsy.

The ordeal over, Dol got away and outdoors again, alone. Forlornly, without any expectation of the event, she intended nevertheless to satisfy herself regarding the phenomenon which she had finally dragged into memory. Once more she took the path to the kennels, turned aside at the gap in the hedge, entered the vegetable garden and followed the central path to the other end where the compost heaps were. Glances both ways had assured her that for the moment no one else was exercising any curiosity regarding this part of the grounds; nobody was in sight.

She stood and looked at the compost heap in recent use. It did not appear to have been disturbed since she had seen it three hours previously; there were the corn husks, the spoiled tomatoes, cabbage leaves and roots, celery and carrot tops, the little pile of pink and unripe watermelon meat.…

She didn’t want to walk into the mess, nor did she wish to disturb it. Lifting her skirt, she stepped on top of the low brick wall enclosing the heap, and edged around it. Bending over, peering. She went clear around, inspecting every inch, arriving at the other side and jumping back to the ground. She stood frowning, thinking, “Of course I’m a fool. Probably they forked this thing over before I was here this morning and covered up the rind. But the fact remains that that’s not more than a fourth of a watermelon, and it’s not ripe, and there’s not a speck of rind or the white part in sight. If somebody tried one and threw it away … anyhow, what the dickens, what else have I got to do?”

She returned along the central path, near its middle turned left, and stood surveying the patch of watermelon vines. It was a mat of luxuriant foliage perhaps sixty feet square, with here and there, for a sharp eye, a glimpse of the rounded, rich green top of a melon. She saw that she could expect no hint from displaced vines or trampled leaves or stems, because those signs of recent disturbance
were all over the patch; men that morning, she presumed, stepping, stooping, brushing the foliage aside … and possibly also conceiving the same idea that had occurred to her, and testing it … only with her it was not merely a wild conjecture, she had arrived at it logically.… She looked around again, in all directions, saw no one, stepped off the path into the foliage, pushed leaves aside to disclose a melon, and getting her fingers under it, turned it over to look at its bottom.

She shook her head and went on to find another, and another. It became apparent that she would have to look sharp at every step, bending to thrust the foliage aside in a wide circumference, not to miss any. After ten minutes of it she began to feel silly, but she also felt stubborn, and she kept doggedly at it. She straightened up to take a kink out of her back, then muttered to herself, “Leave no melon unturned,” and squatted again as she found another one.…

She was at the right edge of the patch, near the strawberry bed, when, rolling a large fine melon partly over and squinting at its bleached bottom, she gasped in astounded disbelief. It was as though, opening oysters with an idle pretense of looking for pearls, she had, incredibly, actually found one. She sat back flat, crushing foliage and stems regardless, trembling all over. She saw that she was trembling, and couldn’t stop it; then suddenly she was stiffened by a dreadful thought: “What if they’ve been here and found it? But no … surely … they would have taken the melon.…” She scrambled to her feet and looked around. No one to be seen. She needed some kind of a tool, a nail file perhaps, and had left her handbag lying on the path. She reached to her hair and pulled out a bobbie pin, stepped close to the melon, squatted, carefully turned it over on its side, and looked again at the irregular rectangle, as big as the palm of her hand, which a knife had made cutting through the rind. She pushed tentatively at the rectangle of rind; it was loose; she stuck the bobbie pin into it diagonally and pulled, and the piece of rind plopped out. Her hand was trembling again as she inserted it into the cavity; was it empty? Was it just a melon plugged to see
if it was ripe? The answer was in her hand as she pulled it out: a pair of heavy tan leather gloves.

She thought: “I must stop this damned trembling; I’m a swell detective, I am.” She replaced the rectangle of rind in the hole, pushed it in too far and let it go, and rolled the melon back to its rightful position. She sat down on the foliage where she had already ruined it, extended her legs straight out, pulled up her skirt, and stuck one of the gloves under the top of her left stocking, and the other under the right. On her feet again, with her skirt smoothed down, a glance around still disclosed no eye observing her, and she made her steps unhurried as she went to the path and got her handbag, sought the central alley, and followed it to the gap in the hedge. There she stopped, indecisive. Which way to turn? To the house, of course, to see Sherwood, or to await him if he had not returned. But no—she compressed her lips—not of course. Those gloves were, at least for the moment, her own private loot, her private and personal discovery, and she would at least examine them. Not outdoors; she wanted walls, opaque to curious eyes. Not in the house, with troopers and detectives all over the place. The stable? That would do. She emerged from the gap in the hedge and turned right.

There was no one there. She stood on the concrete floor and called, and there was no answer. But one of the men might come through the door unexpectedly, so she moved to the other end, beyond the stalls, beside a dusty window, and got the gloves from their intimate concealment, damp with watermelon moisture. They were brown, looked new, heavy for driving or country, and stamped on the inside of the cuff, “Genuine Horsehide.” She did not recognize them as any she had ever seen. She looked at the palms and, if proof was needed, found it. Deep marks cut into the new leather, diagonally across from the little finger to the crotch of the thumb, on both of them. Circumstantial but conclusive evidence that P. L. Storrs had not killed himself, for she held there in her hands the gloves that had been worn by the man who had murdered him.

Who?

A thought struck her. She rejected it as capricious; it came back. She admitted it to consideration, and it possessed
her. She could do it, or at least she could try, and there was no reason why she shouldn’t. Hadn’t she found the gloves? It would mean at most an hour’s delay, if it came to nothing.

But where to leave the gloves meanwhile? They were certainly too precious to take any chances with. Hide them … where? There was no place good enough. She lifted her skirt again and carefully and thoroughly tucked the plunder back beneath her stockings, and felt no delicate discomfort at the touch of the moist leather against her skin. Then she went back past the stalls, left the stable, and headed for the house.

Instead of entering, she veered to the right and approached, from the rear, the graveled space where her coupe was parked. Other cars were there too, three or four of them; a trooper and a man in a brown suit sat on a running-board talking; and as Dol arrived another car, a large sedan, drove up and rolled to a stop, and its door opened and Sherwood and Colonel Brissenden got out. Dol was right there; Sherwood lifted his hat; Brissenden ostentatiously did not see her. For a split second Dol weakened; she could feel against her legs the two objects which those men would give a night’s sleep for; then her resolution returned and she let them briskly cross the terrace. Paying no attention to the two on the running-board, she went to the coupe and got the key from the dashboard compartment, opened the panel at the rear, took out the pigskin case, relocked the panel and returned the key. With the case in her hand, she entered the house.

She knew she was taking the long way around; she should have started at the other end, the melon, but that was not practical. She knew too that this was an undertaking for an expert, and she was not an expert, but that was beside the point—
her
point. So she asked Belden where Ranth was, thinking he would be a good one to begin with, and found him downstairs in the billiard room, alone, with no cue, rolling the balls around with his hands.

He bowed as she approached: “Miss Bonner! Am I to be spoken to?”

She felt pressed for time. She rested the pigskin case on the edge of the billiard table and took his eye: “Why not,
Mr. Ranth? Especially since I want to ask you a favor. No reason and no recompense; just a plain unadulterated favor. I am doing an experiment and I want samples of the fingerprints of everyone here, and I’m starting with you. Will you let me take them?”

He looked surprised. “Well!” He rubbed his cheek. “My fingerprints? It … it seems one of those requests where one can say, why should I? or why shouldn’t I? with equal propriety.” He looked at her keenly a moment, then lifted his shoulders and dropped them. “
Sans peur et sans reproche
. So why shouldn’t I? You have paraphernalia there? Go ahead.”

Dol opened the case, again disclosing to a rude gaze the Holcomb pistol and box of cartridges strapped to the lid, and fished for what she wanted: the ink-pad, the tablet of paper with tissues between, the bottle of ink-remover, the gold pencil with indelible leads. While not an expert, she was not utterly a greenhorn, for she had read a good treatise and had spent quite a little time practising. She uncovered the pad and said, “Right hand first, please.” She showed him how: the thumb, then the fingers consecutively; and without comment he followed her instructions. She marked on the slip of paper, “Ranth RH.” When the left hand too was finished she took the stopper from the bottle of ink-remover, with its swab on a wire, and dabbed the tips of his fingers. As he got out his handkerchief he murmured, “Thank you very much. Your equipment is quite complete, really professional.”

Dol, repacking the case, lifted her black lashes to permit her caramel-colored eyes a curious glance at his dark-skinned face. She protested, “I should thank you. You were very nice about it, to humor me. Gallantry does have its advantages.” She snapped the case shut. “I have told everyone else that I am investigating Storrs’ murder. They think I am fiddling at a funeral, but I’m not. I have not told you because you could not reasonably suppose that I was asserting a privilege of friendship, since we are not friends.”

He bowed. “I was unforgivably stupid about that piece of paper. It was better for me that it should be found there. You did me no harm, and I am sure you are not trying to
make opportunities.” He gestured at the case in her hand. “You are welcome to that small civility.” He bowed again as she turned to leave him.

Upstairs, she sought Belden, and learned that Mr. Foltz was in the study with the members of the family—presumably a consultation. She sent the butler off with a request to Mrs. Storrs, and shortly he returned with the response that she was to go right in.

The study at Birchhaven, as is the case in so many well-to-do American homes, was the room permitted to the master of the house for such petty privacies as his repertory might afford, and was called that, by unintended paradox, because he would never have dreamed of doing any studying in it. Dol had never been in it, but knew where it was. Entering it under the present circumstances, she had no time to inspect its treasures: the mounted rainbow trout, the hunting prints, the radio cabinet, the framed college diploma, the Rocky Mountain sheep head.…

Mrs. Storrs was seated across by a window; near her on a stool, erect and still frozen, was Janet. Martin and Sylvia were on a built-in leather divan alongside the radio, and in the big chair at the desk, with a legal-looking paper in his hands, sat a man with a clipped gray moustache, darting gray eyes, and an air of sad but unavoidable importance.

Mrs. Storrs said, “Yes, my dear? This is Mr. Cabot. He is … he was my husband’s lawyer. Miss Bonner, Nicholas. You want to see me?”

Dol was gripping the handle of the pigskin case. She nodded. “All of you. I’m sorry to interrupt, but it won’t take long. I’m doing an experiment.” She moved to the desk and lifted the case to it. “Please don’t ask me to explain, and don’t think I’m a Pulcinella.” The case was open. “I’ve just taken Mr. Ranth’s fingerprints, and I’d like to take yours—all of yours. You first, Martin?”

There were sounds—a little exclamation from Sylvia. Mr. Cabot demanded in irritation, “Who, may I ask, who is this young woman?”

Dol had an exaggerated dislike of lawyers, on account of her dealings with them as an aftermath of her father’s ruin and suicide. She put out her chin at him: “I am a detective whom Mr. Storrs hired to come out here yesterday afternoon.
I am attending to my business and would suggest that you stick to yours.” She turned her back on him: “I’m not playing tricks or making mud pies, I really do want your fingerprints. There’s no reason you shouldn’t give them to me, is there?”