Rex Stout (23 page)

It was midnight when the trooper went upstairs to knock at the door of Martin Foltz’s room to see if he was there. It might have been much earlier than that but for the erratic behavior of Wolfram de Roode; if he had, for instance, on leaving the Birchhaven house at 10:40, seen fit to communicate his anxiety to the trooper. But it appeared from his actions that he was already convinced that the trooper was not in a position to be of any help to him; at any rate, he said nothing whatever when he came downstairs, made a detour to the study to speak to Mrs. Storrs, passed through the reception hall, and went out by the main door. The trooper was momentarily minded to halt him, but, knowing the circumstances, saw no point in it, and let him go. The time consumed by de Roode in trotting back to Foltz’s place by the path through the woods was of course a necessary delay, since he had to get his car.

The first that the men at Station H heard of him was at 11:20, when there was a call for Maguire of Bridgeport on the telephone. The conference was still in progress, and
Maguire went to the front office to take the call. It was the deputy warden on the night shift at the county jail.

“Chief? This is Cummings. There’s a gorilla turned up here that wants to see a guy named Martin Foltz, and by God I’ll say he wants to see him. He says Foltz is here in my hotel, and I say he ain’t. I was getting ready to throw him out on his ear, when it occurred to me that that’s one of the names I saw in the paper about that Birchhaven murder, so I thought I’d better call you. This bird just stands here and says he knows Foltz is here and he wants to see him. That’s all he says.”

“What’s his name?”

“Deerudy or something like that.”

“Hold the wire.”

Maguire left the receiver dangling and went to the inner room. In a few minutes he came back to the telephone.

“Cummings! Listen. We want that man here at Station H. Right away. Can you send him?”

“He’s got his own car. He wants to know if you’ve got Foltz there.”

“To hell with what he wants. His own car is all right, but you’d better send a man with him to make sure that he gets here.”

At 11:50 they arrived. The inside office was much denser with smoke than it had been before, and everyone looked weary and irritated and their eyes were bloodshot. They had been about ready to call it off for the night when the call had come from the deputy warden. De Roode walked in with the jail keeper trailing him, swept the room with a swift glance, and stopped at the table.

Sherwood demanded, “Well? What did you go to the jail and ask for Foltz for?”

De Roode’s mouth worked. He controlled it.

Brissenden barked, “You got a tongue?”

De Roode said, “I want to see him. Where is he?”

“In bed asleep. I suppose he is. Where did you get the notion he was in jail? What’s the idea?”

De Roode said, “You have him here. I want to see him.”

Brissenden stood up. “Damn you, will you answer a question?”

Apparently he wouldn’t. Not, at least, until his own had
been answered to his satisfaction. He wanted to know where Foltz was, and Brissenden’s snarls seemed to have no effect on his desire. Finally Sherwood told him in dreary exasperation: “Look here. If you can understand plain English, Foltz is in bed at Birchhaven, as far as we know. We left him there. Maybe we should have locked him up, but we didn’t. Where did you get the idea we did? Who told you?”

“No one told me.” De Roode’s massive chest expanded like a heavyweight prizefighter’s as he took a deep breath. “I went to Birchhaven at six o’clock to take him some things, and he told me about the gloves. I understood then why you had asked me what you did this afternoon, about his jacket and gloves in it. But you are wrong.” He looked around slowly at the faces. “I say you are all wrong! Mr. Martin didn’t do it!”

“Didn’t do what?”

“He didn’t kill Mr. Storrs.”

“Who the hell said he did? What did he tell you about the gloves?”

“He said you had found them, and they were his gloves, and they had been used to kill Mr. Storrs.”

“Right. What about it?”

“That was all. But I could see that he was worried, I could see that he expected something. I went home. But at ten o’clock I couldn’t go to bed without seeing him again. You understand, I have cared for him for many years. I went back to Birchhaven. The trooper in the hall told me that everyone had gone up, except Mrs. Storrs and Mr. Ranth in the study. I went up to his room and knocked, and there was no answer. I went in, and he was not there. I went to Mr. Zimmerman’s room, and he was not there. I went down to the study and asked Mrs. Storrs, and she did not know. So I knew you must have taken him, on account of the gloves. I thought you would take him to the jail, and I went there.”

De Roode straightened his slumping shoulders. “Where is he?”

“For the love of Mike.” Sherwood was disgusted. “He’s human, he was probably in the bathroom.”

“No. I looked.”

“Well, he was somewhere. You’re a fathead. I thought maybe … what does it matter what I thought?” Sherwood turned to the trooper on a chair by the door. “You might as well call Birchhaven and tell the man there to see about Foltz. See if he’s in his room. Tell him to call back right away.”

The trooper went. Sherwood got up and stretched thoroughly, with a cavernous yawn. “You’re coming with me, Inspector? That’s better than going back to New York; you wouldn’t get more than three hours’ sleep if you’re going to be out here at eight o’clock.” The others moved and looked for hats. Maguire was muttering to the man from the jail. The attorney-general spoke darkly to Brissenden, who nodded a scowling agreement. Inspector Cramer crossed to the table and helped Sherwood get his papers gathered up and deposited in his brief case. No one paid any attention to de Roode. They talked desultorily, then straggled towards the outer room.

The phone rang, and the trooper answered it. He talked a brief minute, then hung up and turned to his superiors.

“Hurley says Foltz is in his room, in bed.”

“Did he go in? Did he see him?”

“Yes, sir. He went in, and Foltz was sore because he had waked him up.”

“Hunh. Where is that damn fool?” Sherwood turned and saw de Roode. “Did you hear that? He’s in bed asleep, where we all ought to be. Except you, you ought to be in jail yourself, anyone as bright as you are. Come on, Inspector.”

Sylvia slept. She had not expected to; she had not slept Saturday night. And now, at ten o’clock Sunday evening, the turmoil in her head and breast was surely in worse confusion than it had been twenty-four hours before; there had been the discovery of the gloves, which she had herself bought; the grotesque proposal of Steve Zimmerman—she could not forget his eyes; the detached imperturbability of Martin when she told him about Steve, not like Martin at all; and Dol’s antics which she would not explain. So, though Sylvia went upstairs early because the others did, she dreaded the long dark hours of futile resentment at the
net of grief and apprehension and suspense that she was tangled in. In fact, it scarcely amounted to long dark minutes after she had changed to pajamas, performed a minimum of toilet ceremonies, got into bed, and turned out the light. Tired young nerves, which in twenty years had had little occasion for the development of detours and blockades in their canals, demanded respite and got it. By 10:30 she was sound asleep.

The trooper named Hurley, in the reception hall, did not have as tiresome a night of it as might have been expected by a man who had been assigned to watch over a sleeping household. There was the interruption by de Roode, coming and going, by Mrs. Storrs and Ranth leaving the study and going upstairs some time after eleven, and, at midnight, the phone call from Station H and his resulting expedition to Foltz’s room. It was half an hour after that that another little diversion offered itself. He had just returned to the hall after a trip to the terrace for a cigarette, when there came faintly from the floor above the sound of knocking. He listened, and after a moment the sound came again. He debated with himself a little whether it was any of his business, finally decided that it might be, since Sergeant Quill had given him a pencil diagram showing which rooms the various guests were occupying, and mounted the stairs.

He had turned off the hall light after his visit to Foltz’s room, and now switched it on again. No one was visible in the corridor to the right, and he turned the corner to the other hall. Halfway down its length a man stood, and Hurley saw it was the big guy who the sergeant had told him had been drinking all afternoon, by name Chisholm. Hurley walked down the hall to him, quiet on tiptoe but assured. He had been feeling a little out of his element on night post in a house like this, but a drunk was a drunk anywhere.

He spoke in a rough undertone. “Who you looking for?”

Len Chisholm leaned against the jamb of the door he had presumably been knocking on, raised his brows superciliously and kept them there. He disdained to reply.

“Come on, what do you want?”

Len left the jamb in order to get his lips within ten inches of the trooper’s ear, and whispered as one conspirator to another, “Sit down and I’ll tell you. Let’s both sit down.”

Hurley grunted, “You’re pie-eyed. What do you want with Zimmerman at this time of night?”

Len attempted a frown, but it wouldn’t stay in place. He leaned to the jamb again and abandoned the whisper for a rumble. “Zimmerman?” He was scornful. “I wouldn’t speak to that runt if you offered it to me on a silver platter.”

“What are you knocking on his door for?”

“I’m not knocking on his door. I intend to visit Miss Bonner. The only job I have ever cared for.”

“This is Zimmerman’s room.”

“What!” Len turned and peered intently at the door’s upper left panel, his nose almost against it. He touched it with his finger. “By God, it is.” He wheeled unsteadily. “I am not in the habit of going into rooms occupied by men in the dead of night. You can take my word for
that
. My mistake.” He propelled himself forward by placing his back against the door jamb and using it for purchase, abruptly brushed past the trooper, and was off down the hall, tacking some but by no means staggering.

Hurley followed him, muttering, “Thank God he can navigate. I’d hate to lug that lump of meat.” There proved to be no occasion even for steering it. Len turned the corner into the main corridor without mishap, proceeded to the door of his own room, opened it, passed through, and shut it with a bang.

The trooper grimaced as the door banged, gazed at it a second, and then turned and went back downstairs.

The banging of Len’s door a little after 12:30 may or may not have been heard by various others—except Sylvia, who was sleeping too soundly,—but it was heard quite distinctly by Dol Bonner, because her room was not far away from Len’s, across the main corridor, and she was not asleep at all. She had not even undressed. She sat at the little table between two windows and put things down on paper, or on the window-seat with her knees up and her chin resting on them, or paced the floor in her stocking feet, frowning at a chaos which she could not shape. She did harder thinking
between ten and two o’clock that night than she had ever done in her life—most of it abortive, some of it painful, and none of it conclusive.

Most of the first hour was spent at the table with pencil and paper, setting down individual schedules for Saturday afternoon, theories with pros and cons, probabilities balanced against implausibles. At length she saw that she would never get anywhere that way; there were too many hypotheses and permutations. She went and sat on the window-seat and considered Janet and the lie she had told. Should she go now to Janet’s room and have it out with her?

She had been tempted, as soon as she learned that Janet had lied, to confront her with it and demand the truth. She still was. But still she held back. She wanted first to have the possibilities well enough arranged in her head so that, if Janet sought refuge in another lie, it would not be gulped down so easily as the first one had been. Also there was the likelihood that Janet would simply stand pat and refuse to elucidate at all, in which case it was better that she should not know that her lie had been detected. And in addition, the Janet business was extremely ticklish anyway and already perhaps bungled beyond repair. The only pressure that could have been applied to her no longer existed, and Dol could have kicked herself for her quixotic impulsiveness in wiping the fingerprints from the watermelon. Granted the humanity of her desire to keep Janet out of it, surely a little reflection and ingenuity could have provided a better method; for instance, she could have hid that melon somewhere, and cut a hole in another one and substituted it. Sherwood and Brissenden had been indignant that she had wiped off the melon because it contained no fingerprints; if they knew that what she had done was to remove the prints of the person who had actually cached the gloves …

All of which was particularly pertinent and vital because the certainty that Janet had lied, and the most obvious inference to be drawn from it, put a new face on the whole matter and made it seem extremely likely that the destruction of those fingerprints might prove to have been a major mistake. And even if that inference was wrong, any other
possible inference from Janet’s lie was equally pregnant with perplexity.

Dol felt incompetent, bewildered, exasperated, and determined. She could not go to bed and go to sleep. In the morning those men would be back here. They didn’t even know about Janet and her lie, nor about Zimmerman’s strange and curiously timed betrayal of friendship—nor even Len Chisholm’s camouflaged infatuation. But they would be here; and, for one thing, they might lose patience with Zimmerman’s obduracy and take him away and lock him up. They might do anything.…

During those four hours from ten till two, sitting at the table, or on the window-seat, or pacing back and forth in her stockings, various noises came to Dol in the night-still house. Steps in the upstairs hall, the voice of Ranth saying goodnight, presumably to Mrs. Storrs, faintly the ring of the telephone bell in the card room which was beneath her; then, later, more footsteps, and after an interval again more, and the loud banging of Len’s door. It was still later by an hour, around 1:30, that she again heard footsteps, this time on the gravel outdoors, and she went to the open window and leaned out. After a moment she made out a form below on the path, then a round blotch that could only have been a face upturned to her lighted window.