The Wrong Way Down (6 page)

“Mr. Bowles,” said Miss Vance.

Mr. Bowles was a little startling. He stood at the right-end side of the mantel, just behind Miss Higgs, and there was a glass on the shelf at his elbow. He was of medium height, dark, with heavy shoulders. He kept his heavy face lowered, and looked up at Gamadge from cold observant eyes. The eyes were a little sunken—Mr. Bowles might be needing sleep. He wore a blue pin-stripe suit that had not been pressed recently.

He muttered something that was meant to be affable.

The bouncer after all? thought Gamadge.

“And,” said Miss Vance, “Mr. Simpson.”

Mr. Simpson's suit had not been handed to him off a rack; nor did it need pressing. It was dark, well-cut and expensive. He was dark, well-made and expensive-looking himself. A young fellow, not more than twenty-five; brown-eyed, brown-haired, slim, self-confident. And if he's psychic, thought Gamadge, then so am I.

There was a big crystal globe on the mantel. Gamadge asked with naïve interest: “Do you use a globe, Miss Vance?”

“No, that's something I used to use. I don't use anything now. Won't you have a drink first, Mr. Gamadge? Before you tell us what you want to know?”

Mr. Simpson took a step towards a side table on which was a whiskey tray, but Gamadge shook his head. “No thanks, nothing for me. I won't keep you waiting. I'll get right down to business.”

There was a long cherry-wood table below the windows, clear except for some big magazines. Gamadge went over to the table, heaped the magazines at one end of it, laid his parcel down, and unrolled it. Miss Vance came to stand beside him.

“Something has been lost,” he said. “I thought this might help you to find it.”

“By clairvoyance?”

“By clairvoyance of course.”

“Sometimes a related object does help.”

“This is a related object.” Gamadge stripped off the inside wrapping of brown paper, and laid the aquatint face upwards on the table. He kept it flat with both hands, and looked at Iris Vance. She stood absolutely still. Wonderful control of the muscles, Gamadge thought.

The group by the fire watched her. Moments passed.

“I see that you remember Lady Audley,” said Gamadge. “You would, naturally.”

She slowly raised her eyes and looked at Gamadge with polite inquiry. “Know it? To my knowledge I've never seen it before.”

“I'm sorry to hear that; I thought you'd remember it, since it comes from the Ashbury house on Park Avenue.”

“I haven't been there, except for a short call on Miss Paxton last Sunday afternoon, for many years. Not since I was a child.”

“So she told me.”

“What has been lost, Mr. Gamadge?”

“The other Lady Audley, a much better one; what is called a proof before letter. You know what that is?”

“No, I really don't.”

“An engraving with no inscription on it. It hung in the hall until—let me see—Sunday evening. Then it developed letters—all this…” Gamadge ran his finger along the lettering. “Miss Paxton noticed that it had done so, and mentioned the queer fact to me today.”

She looked down at the picture, and then up at him again. “I really don't understand at all.”

“You've never met another such case of this kind of spirit writing?”

“I never even heard of such a thing.”

“I'm so ignorant about the occult. I hoped you could explain it. A proof before letter is so much more valuable, you know.”

Mr. Bowles asked loudly: “How much more valuable?”

“Fifty to seventy dollars difference. Rather a mischievous kind of trick for a spirit to play,” said Gamadge. “Malicious, I call it.”

Miss Higgs spoke in a low, rather husky voice: “Let's see the thing.”

Gamadge held it up by its top and bottom edges. “Nice thing,” he said. “Supposed to resemble Miss Vance's great-uncle's mother. Miss Paxton knew it well; that's why she noticed that lettering had sprouted out on it. She's worried—feels responsible.”

Mr. Simpson said after a silence: “I thought something was supposed to be lost.”

“Well, that's of course the alternative,” Gamadge told him. “That the pictures were changed. This one was in the house in a kind of book-room—I mean it may have been. At any rate, the other is gone—either really gone, or supernaturally changed into what you see. If Miss Vance could tell us by clairvoyance what has happened to it, well, I needn't say what a relief that would be to poor Miss Paxton.” He laid the portrait down again and turned to face Miss Vance. “Or if you can't help her in that way, she thought it was just possible that you might be able to suggest some dealer who would be able to replace the other portrait. She tells me that your father was an artist, perhaps you have some knowledge of this sort. The thing wouldn't be so easy to find. Miss Paxton wondered if you could possibly be persuaded to hunt one up among the galleries. Anything to get it back, you know, without a fuss and complications.”

Simpson had stepped a little forward, but nobody spoke. Then Miss Vance laughed gaily, threw out her arms so that the sleeves floated like wings, and let her hands fall. She said: “This is stupid. He's laughing at us.”

Miss Higgs was scowling. Bowles was shaking his head at Mr. Simpson, but the young man walked up to Gamadge and spoke furiously: “What do you mean by all this? What's the idea?”

Iris Vance replied, still gaily, “He thinks I'm an underworld character. He thinks I stole the thing. No, really, when you come to think of it, what a joke on me!”

Bowles came forward, a man who seemed to lumber but was light on his feet. He said: “Wait a minute, wait a minute,” and went up to the table. He leaned over the engraving, frowned at it, bent to read the lettering. Then he swung on Gamadge. “Let's hear some more about this. Where was the other one hanging in that house?”

“Towards the rear of the first-floor hall.”

“Framed?”

“Framed.”

“And we're to take your word for it that the frame could have been tampered with?”

“And Miss Paxton's word for it. My opinion is that it had been tampered with, and recently.”

“Then all this stuff about spirit writing was phony? You didn't mean it? You didn't even expect Miss Vance to fall for it?”

“It was an approach. It wasn't I, you know, who let in anybody else on our sitting. Miss Vance was free to respond as she chose.”

“Well, of all the—”

Mrs. Spiker now spoke, roughly but with a kind of careless good humor: “Don't waste any of that on this guy, he's too slick. Iris, go ahead and tell him you don't have to go around picking up fifty dollars that way.” Simpson was about to speak, but she cut in on him: “No, it's her business.”

“Yes,” said Miss Higgs shortly. “It certainly is.”

“And I could have told you he didn't believe in spirits,” added Mrs. Spiker, “one minute after he came into this room. Look at him.”

“I'm looking at him.” Bowles lowered at Gamadge. “He's out to get some picture back, he thinks he has proof Miss Vance has it, and he'll hang on to his idea whatever she says.”

Mr. Simpson's face was a study in frustration. He walked over to the side table and poured himself a drink.

“That's right,” said Miss Vance, her eyes following him. “That's what we all need.” She looked at Gamadge, and he thought there was an anxious expression in her round eyes. “It's all a mistake, you know, Mr. Gamadge. Some mistake of Miss Paxton's. I thought when I was there that she was a very old lady to be doing all that work and sorting out all those things. Of course she forgets, and mixes things up. There are dozens of pictures in that hall—I remember that much about it.”

Miss Higgs was now supplied with a highball; she thanked Mr. Simpson, crossed one leg over the other, drank, and then spoke coolly:

“My advice is to go and find a picture. Tell Miss Paxton you're going to find a picture, and go out and find one. I don't think it would do any good to offer her the fifty or seventy dollars, or whatever it is; just go and get a picture for her and take it up there.”

Simpson stood glaring at her. “And how does Iris find the picture?” he asked.

Miss Higgs shrugged her shoulders.

Simpson clenched his hands. “J—j—just keep out of this,” he said between his teeth.

Miss Vance walked up to him and put her hand on his arm. “It's all my fault, Jim. Let me just explain to Mr. Gamadge, and it will be all right. Pull up a chair for him, and we'll all sit down and have highballs and talk it over. He'll understand.”

“He'll understand about you,” said Bowles, whose lower lip was protruding as he again studied the calm face of Lady Audley. “But what about this?”

“Miss Paxton made a mistake. The picture always had that lettering on it, that's all.”

“And that's enough.” Mrs. Spiker put out one of her silk-clad legs and touched the rung of the chair next to her with a silk-clad toe. “Sit down, Mr. Who. Have a drink and listen to the kid. You look to me like a sensible man. You had your fun, you can't prove a thing, now you'll find out that she wouldn't any more take somebody else's stuff than she'd jump out of the window. She don't have to. She'd be crazy to.”

Simpson had pushed up another chair. Iris Vance sat down, Gamadge sat down. He again refused whiskey, but accepted a light for his cigarette from the obliging Mrs. Spiker.

“That's right,” she said, “don't drink with strangers. You'll change your mind later. I hope so, anyway, because you're the kind of feller I like. Go right after what you want. What's this Miss Paxton to you, by the way?”

“Old friend of my wife's, and a nice old lady. I don't care to see her victimized.”

“She hasn't been.”

Bowles had gone back to his position at the end of the chimney piece, Simpson sat down behind Iris Vance. She turned to Gamadge:

“It was just my idiotic idea of a joke, Mr. Gamadge—to tell Miss Paxton that I was a medium, and to keep it up afterwards when you telephoned. I'm not a medium. I never was one professionally—for money—and I haven't even pretended to be one since I was fifteen years old. I'm a commercial artist.”

“This is a surprise,” said Gamadge.

“I used to pretend to be a medium when I was a child,” said Miss Vance, “but I never believed in it, and I had no powers at all.”

“And whatever you do,” said Mrs. Spiker, looking truculently at Gamadge, “don't act shocked about it. The kid wasn't to blame.”

“I'm not acting shocked,” said Gamadge mildly.

M
ISS VANCE SAID:
“You will be shocked, of course. And I don't know who was to blame if I wasn't.”

Simpson muttered: “You won't let anybody blame your father and mother.”

“They believed in something and brought me up to believe in it. That's all they did. The rest was entirely my own idea.” She turned her head to look at Gamadge. “They were wonderful people, Mr. Gamadge. Utterly unworldly. But thanks to my father I can make a living at so-called art.”

“Are those yours?” Gamadge raised his eyes to a flower piece over the mantel, and looked at others to the right and left of it. “They're charming.”

“But you can see how I've missed the real thing. My excuse is that I had my living to earn, and now I do more than that; but—the dyer's hand, you know. Everything I do looks like something that ought to have a slogan under it. ‘The perfume of these roses has not the
effect
of Lancelot's Rose Witchery.'”

Mrs. Spiker burst out laughing. “You ought to do the copy too.”

Miss Vance gave her an elvish smile. “And who says I don't? But Mr. Gamadge isn't interested in all this. He can check up on me and find out that I'm not likely to risk my reputation and my income for the sake of fifty dollars. Even a kleptomaniac wouldn't, and I don't think kleptomania comes into it. They don't take things like pictures, do they? They like bright things.”

Bowles said: “Take anything, but if you ask me there isn't much kleptomania in the world. That's a fancy name for good old plain thieving.”

Simpson said angrily: “It's nothing a kleptomaniac would take—a framed engraving off a wall. Don't waste time on it. Just make this Mr. Gamadge understand that you don't need small sums of money.”

“I understand,” said Gamadge.

“But you don't understand why I let you think I was a medium,” said Iris Vance.

“Or why you let Miss Paxton think so. For the matter of that, I don't know why you let Mr. Lawson Ashbury go on thinking so.”

“And let myself be cut out of his will? Oh, but he would never have put me in his will, not if I'd gone down on my knees to him. I'll have to tell you the whole story. It's a funny story, Mr. Gamadge; it's one of the funniest stories you ever heard in your life.”