Rex Stout_Tecumseh Fox 01 (27 page)

“The sight of that gun made your blood pump. You
knew Thorpe was in the library on the opposite side of the house from the side terrace, for I had told you so. The windows would certainly be open and the notion of shooting through an open window wasn’t a new one for you. You knew there were plenty of available suspects around—the son and daughter, Luke and Kester, Grant and his niece, a group of business associates. But you were not in enough of a panic to abandon caution. You thought it over before touching the gun. A man firing a gun seldom leaves recognizable fingerprints, but particles of burnt powder lodge in his skin and can invariably be detected. It wouldn’t do to use your own handkerchief. You looked around and on the seat of my sedan you found the blue scarf which Miss Grant had left there. Making sure that you were not observed, you took it, and then you took the gun. You were clever enough to wipe the metal parts of the gun, for if any fingerprints were found on it suspicion would be directed against one person and it might be that that one person would have an unshakable alibi; besides, suspicion should be dispersed. Equipped, you strolled to the other side——”

Fox stopped at the sound of a tapping at the door, the pecking of a fingernail. Barely audible footsteps were heard without, on the carpet of the hall. After a moment the door opened wide enough for the insertion of Dan Pavey’s head, and his hoarse whisper came:

“A woman with a big nose and a squint! Went into a room!”

“Knudsen, Mrs. Pemberton’s maid,” Kester said.

“All right, shut the door,” said Fox, with his eyes steady at Jordan. He went on, “You strolled to the other side of the house and from behind a ring of shrubbery you heard voices—those of Colonel Brissenden
and Ridley Thorpe. You wriggled into the shrubbery and saw them in the library through the open French windows. Your cover was perfect. You maneuvered into position and waited, with the scarf around your hand holding the gun. Kester was there too, or he was summoned by Thorpe, and then he went out with Brissenden. Thorpe was alone. When his back was turned you darted from your cover, shot him in the back, tossed the gun and scarf into the room, ran back through the shrubbery to a spot under a tree at the back of the house, and adopted the role of a man who had been sitting on the grass and had been suddenly startled by hearing the sound of a shot. A gardener appeared from somewhere and you followed him as he was guided by Kester’s yells in the direction of the library. You showed good presence of mind following the gardener through the shrubbery you had just used for your cover; that was the natural thing to do, but it took nerve, since it placed you on that side of the house.”

Fox stopped. Still gazing steadily at Jordan, he pulled at the lobe of his ear. No one spoke.

“Well,” Fox said, “those are the bald details.”

Jordan’s lips twisted. His palms were still cupped over his knees, gripping them, holding them down. “Come on, out with it,” he demanded.

“With what, Mr. Jordan? What more do you want?”

“I want you to put it in words. In front of these chaps. You must take me for a bloody idiot, if you think I won’t defend myself against a false charge of murder to keep it from coming out about Thorpe and my daughter. That dirty game won’t work.”

Fox shook his head. “It’s not a game. If I’ve given you the impression that it’s only a game, I apologize.
I’m accusing you of the premeditated murder of Corey Arnold and the more briefly premeditated murder of Ridley Thorpe.”

“Bah. I thought you had better sense. Why would I want to kill Arnold? I had never seen him. I knew Thorpe had a man at that bungalow impersonating him, but I didn’t even know the man’s name.”

“Sure,” Fox agreed. “That was part of your immunity to suspicion. Absence of motive. I’ll take that last. First I’ll mention a couple of other points, both to my own discredit. When Derwin told me today that the gun that shot Arnold was found in Thorpe’s safe, I should have suspected you immediately. Where could it have come from? I won’t go through the process by which all other possibilities could have been demonstrated as highly improbable; it’s enough to say that the one place Thorpe had been where it was plausible to suppose he had got hold of that gun was on your boat. At least I should have suspected it and I was dumb not to. By the way, I doubt if you’re right in supposing that by killing Thorpe you destroyed the evidence of the gun. There must be someone who can recognize it as yours—for instance, that woman who is your next door neighbor—I’ll bet she can.”

Jordan wet his lips. “No,” he said huskily. He wet his lips again. “No, she can’t. Not the gun that killed Arnold. I had no motive.”

“I’ll take that last.” Fox’s gaze was relentless. “You see, you’re springing leaks. Another one is that letter you wrote. It was obvious it had been written by a Briton or someone with a British education and background. It said, ‘You will meet me on the pavement.’ An American would say, ‘You will meet me on the sidewalk,’ or ‘You will meet me on the street.’ But in England they never say sidewalk, they say pavement.
No American ever does, in that sense. Also you mentioned your word of honor and you spelled honor with a u. No American does that; all Britons do. That was all there was to that sentence downstairs; it had the word honor in it. You were the only one who spelled it with a u.”

Luke Wheer was whispering to himself, “H, O, N, O …”

Kester, his colorless eyes leaving Jordan for Fox, muttered, “I’ll be damned.”

Fox nodded. “That’s all there was to that. It ought to be a pretty fair piece of evidence.”

Apparently Jordan’s lips were dry; he kept wetting them. The muscles of his hands, still cupped over his knees, were slowly and rhythmically tensing and relaxing; he said nothing.

“But I have an idea,” Fox resumed, “that the evidence that will clinch it is your motive for murdering Arnold. That’s another thing I’m not very proud of. Since traditional morality left its cradle thousands of years ago, so many outraged fathers have killed the men who were weekending with their daughters without benefit of clergy! That was the outstanding ostentatious fact of your connection with Thorpe: you were the father of his weekend companion. Such fathers have immemorially fallen into one of two categories: one is the enraged defender of the family honor who kills the man if he can; the other is the complacent sharer in the proceeds of his daughter’s degradation. Obviously you were not in the second category, since you refused even to accept any gift either from Thorpe or your daughter. Apparently you were not in the first category either, since your expressed attitude was that it was her life she was living; and even if you had been, that would have
supplied no motive for your killing the man in the bungalow, since you knew it wasn’t Thorpe. Those considerations seemed to put you out of the running, but they shouldn’t have, since there was one other point to consider. Particularly I should have considered it, but like a fool I didn’t. Thorpe himself had told me that you were a comparatively poor man, that you lived on a little income from your savings and that the one thing in the world you wanted was a new boat of a certain design that would cost twenty thousand dollars.”

Jordan blurted, as if involuntarily, “He wanted to give me the money himself and I wouldn’t take it!”

Fox nodded. “I know. He told me about that. Your pride wouldn’t let you. You wouldn’t have been able to look yourself in the face if you had accepted money from Thorpe, but you wanted that boat and there wasn’t the remotest chance that you would ever be able to acquire it. So you made a plan and you carried it out. It’s a dismal commentary on the limitations of the human mind, at least of my mind, that I considered the likelihood that Arnold had been murdered by someone who wanted to buy Thorpe Control at 40 and sell it at 80—I considered that possibility in connection with Kester and Thorpe himself and any number of unknown financiers, but not in connection with you. I was too grandiose. I thought of someone doing it to clean up a couple of million profit, but not of you doing it to get a boat. Of course I have no evidence of that, but it will be easy to get if it exists. If it is found that you recently turned your savings into cash, and that Thorpe Control was bought for you Monday on the drop, that will be conclusive.”

“I didn’t—” Jordan’s tongue was struggling heroically against the dizzy and horrible panic of his
brain. His hands, still on his knees, no longer had a firm grip; they were flaccid, quivering, useless to hold anything down. His eyes, withdrawn under the jutting brows, were dark little slits of terror.

“Pull yourself together,” Fox told him in a hard, metallic voice. “You had a boat, didn’t you? If you were tough enough to kill a man to get a new boat, you can be tough enough to take what’s coming to you. You haven’t even got the excuse—”

Fox stopped because the door of the room was opening. As he frowned at it, it swung wide enough to admit the breadth of Dan Pavey; then it was closed again, softly. Dan approached, glanced at the little man in the chair, no longer wiry, and announced to Fox:

“Not just a boat.”

“Why not?” Fox demanded. “I’ll handle this, Dan, if you’ll——”

“You can’t handle what I’ve got in my pocket unless you get it out. With this bum arm I can’t get at it—here in my jacket—no, the other side—”

Fox’s fingers, inserted into the inner pocket of Dan’s jacket, came out again clutching a folded sheaf of papers. He unfolded them, fingered through them with a glance at each, screwed up his lips and looked at Dan.

“Where the devil did you get these?”

“On Jordan’s boat.”

“This morning?”

“Sure.” Dan ignored an inarticulate cry of rage from Jordan, behind him. “I thought I might as well look around. They were in a metal box I had to pry open. There’s a box of cartridges there too, a kind I never saw before, in a drawer in the galley. I left them there—”

“It might interest you to know,” Fox said dryly, “that if you had given these to me this morning it would have saved a life.”

“You mean Ridley Thorpe.”

“Yes.”

“You mean there in the rose trellis.”

“Yes.”

“Right. I should have. After you finished laughing. You sent me home before I had a chance—”

“It can’t be helped now.” Fox glanced at the papers again, then returned his gaze to Henry Jordan. “So,” he observed quietly, “it wasn’t just a boat. Thorpe told me he doubted if you profited by the market tips he gave you, but you must have, to get enough capital to swing fifteen thousand shares of Thorpe Control. What in the name of God were you going to do with a million dollars when you got it, at your age? But that’s none of my business. My only purpose in bringing you up here to talk it over was to let you know that Luke and Kester and I will say nothing about Thorpe and your daughter if you don’t. It’s up to you. Your motive for murder is valid without that. Stand up!”

Jordan came up from his chair. Technically, he was standing, but he could scarcely have been called erect. He was shaking all over and his mouth was hanging open. “I d-d-didn’t—” he stammered. “I—I didn’t—you c-c-can’t—”

“He’s going to have hysterics,” Vaughn Kester said icily.

Fox moved until he was directly in front of Jordan, facing him, and stood there frowning down intently at the suddenly grey and flabby face. Abruptly and swiftly his hand swooped up and its palm flattened against Jordan’s cheek-bone with a sharp and staggering
smack. Jordan nearly fell, but recovered his balance; and then, slowly and painfully, he straightened. He was erect. A last quiver ran over his body and it was composed. He looked up at Tecumseh Fox and said clearly and firmly:

“Thank you. I’m all right now. What do you want me to do?”

“Go on.” Fox inclined his head to the door. “I’ll follow. To the library to see Derwin.”

As they went out, Jordan with a steady unfaltering step and Fox close behind him, Kester’s pale cold eyes followed them. Luke’s did not. His head was bent and his eyes closed, like a preacher leading his congregation in prayer.

A
man, with brown cheeks almost smoothly shaven and wearing a blue denim shirt still fairly clean because it was milking time Monday afternoon, was chaperoning his herd of Jerseys across the paved road from the pasture side to the barn side. He saw a car coming and cussed. With any driver whatever the car would make his cows nervous; and if bad luck made it a certain kind of weekend driver from New York there was no telling what might happen. He stood in the middle of the road and glared at the approaching demon, then felt easier as he saw it slowing down and still easier when it crept, circling for a six-foot clearance past Jennifer’s indifferent rump. But two other cows rendered the démarche futile, and the car surrendered and came to a full stop directly alongside the man; and, glancing at the two occupants, he recognized the pretty girl who, a week previously, had momentarily taken his mind off of cows. The driver, beside her, was a citified male at least ten years her senior.

She smiled at him through the open window. “Hello! Nice cows.”

He squinted at her; she certainly was a promising
heifer. “You don’t look as mad as you did last time,” he observed.

“I wasn’t mad, I was worried.”

“You don’t look worried.”

“I’m not any more.”

The road was clear and the car moved forward. In two minutes, having covered another mile of highway, it turned in at the entrance to the Fox place, known locally as The Zoo, and was guided by the curving lane over the little brook and on to the sweeping circle around the house, ending at the broad graveled space which was bounded in the rear by the enormous old barn which had been converted into a garage. From the right came the sound of voices. As the man and girl climbed out three dogs converged upon them for inspection. A man appeared at a small door at the far corner of the barn, decided in one brief glance that he wasn’t interested and vanished.

Andrew Grant said to his niece, “They’re pitching horseshoes. I didn’t know Thorpe and his sister were to be here.”

“Neither did I,” said Nancy with spots on her cheeks.