Hasty Wedding (13 page)

He meant it. There was no possible doubt of that. He put her hand a little awkwardly to his cheek and looked at her with lighted, purposeful blue eyes and repeated it: “I love you, Dorcas. I’ve always loved you. Since we were kids. Oh, I’ve never had the nerve to tell you; you never needed me before …” He faltered there and then said: “Before this. I knew you didn’t love me.”

“I’m—sorry…”

“Oh, it’s all right, Dorcas. You’re in love with Jevan and you’ll be happy.”

“But——” She checked the denial on her lips and Willy went on: “Jevan knows I love you. He’s always known it. That’s why,” said Willy rather wistfully, “he’s so good to me.”

“Oh, my dear,” cried Dorcas. “Don’t! Jevan is your friend. As I am, Willy.”

“I know you’re fond of me. I only told you all this because I wanted you to know that I would do anything in the world for you. Anything,” repeated Willy with the deep, fervent flame of a zealot burning in his blue eyes.

“Willy, I—I can’t tell you what——”

“Don’t try,” said Willy cheerfully. “I only want you to know you can depend upon me. With my life,” said Willy calmly. “Hello—what’s that?”

Dorcas heard it too. Someone being let into the hall and speaking to Bench and the door being closed. “Is Mr Devany here?”

“Yes sir.” That was Bench.

“It’s Wait,” said Willy. “Again. He’s been after me twice; you’d think I shot Ronald…All right, Bench,” he said in a louder voice, going to the door. “I’m in here. Hello, Wait.”

Dorcas turned on lights as Wait entered the room. He blinked.

“Don’t go, Mrs Locke,” he said quickly as Dorcas moved toward the door. “I only want to talk to Devany a moment or two.”

Dorcas sank into a chair and Willy looked at Wait and said irritably: “All right. Shoot. What is it?”

“What car were you driving Wednesday night when you say you picked up Locke at the club and took him home?”

“What car?” Willy’s light eyebrows lifted. “Why, I think the Cadillac sedan. Why?”

“Tell me again exactly what you did, say, from seven o’clock on.”

“Oh, all right,” said Willy. “At seven o’clock I was home. At seven-thirty—no, perhaps a little earlier, I had dinner. Ask my servants and——”

“I have. Go on. You had finished dinner by a quarter to eight.”

“Yes. Then I had the car brought round and dismissed the chauffeur.”

“Right. At ten minutes to eight, your chauffeur says: he got to the eight o’clock movie over on Sixty-third.”

“Did he? Well—well, then I just drove around a little.”

“Where?”

“I don’t know—oh yes, I went through the Midway, I think, and then I went to see Jevan.”

“What time exactly did you reach the Locke place?”

Willy said, blue eyes rather narrow, that he didn’t know. “Jevan wasn’t there. He is closing the old place, intending to sell it; nobody was there but the cook and a maid. They didn’t know where he was——”

“The maid who answered the door said it was about a quarter to nine when you came.”

“Did she? Well, perhaps it was. Naturally I didn’t notice particularly.”

“Then you had no appointment with Locke?”

“No. That is, I just—wanted to see him. Had nothing else to do. Was to be his best man, you know, next day, so I——”

Willy’s eyes brightened and he said quickly: “I wanted to be sure everything was set. That’s all.”

“So you went to the Locke house. You reached the house at a quarter to nine, having left your own house at ten minutes to eight. That’s quite a gap in time. Were you here at this house in the interval?”

“You mean
here?
At this house? Why, no. Certainly not,” said Willy sweepingly.

“How about that, Mrs Locke?” Wait turned quickly to Dorcas.

“No, Willy wasn’t here,” she said hurriedly. And remembered the long car which had passed so slowly during the moment she had met Ronald, spoken to him, permitted him—so foolishly and mistakenly—to lead her to the taxi he had waiting. Could it have been Willy driving the car? But if it had been it meant nothing. Only that he might have seen them together.

“A Cadillac sedan,” said Wait thoughtfully. “Did you drive to Drew’s apartment, Devany?”

“Why would I go there? Certainly not.”

“That’s interesting,” said Wait. “You see, a Cadillac sedan drew up and stopped just behind the taxi in which Drew and his woman companion arrived at the apartment house Wednesday night. The doorman went from Drew’s taxi to open the door for the driver of the sedan, who, however, did not get out of the car just then. The doorman waited and then heard the telephone ring and had to go inside. The car had gone when he returned.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Wait. I can’t be held responsible for every Cadillac sedan in the city.”

“I think,” said Wait, “that this was your car. And I think it was your Cadillac sedan that later on, according to the doorman, was parked across the street from the apartment building for at least half an hour—between nine-thirty and ten. Was it?”

“Ah,” said Willy” pleasantly. “That’s the time for which I have an alibi. I picked up Locke at the club at nine-thirty and was with him from then on till about eleven.”

“Drew,” said Wait, “could have been murdered any time after eight-fifteen when the doorman saw him alive…Why were you following Drew?”

“I was not,” said Willy flatly, with his pointed, delicate chin up.

“Who was the woman with him?”

“I don’t—I tell you I wasn’t there.”

“You’re lying,” said Wait and, as appeared to be his customary manner of departure, went away without another word.

“Gosh,” said Willy and touched his forehead with a handkerchief. “Gosh…Well, there’s no talk of license numbers. Good night, Dorcas.” He went away as abruptly as Wait had done.

And Dorcas sat in the twilight, staring at the glow of light from the lamp upon an old rug, and not seeing it. Willy—but Willy wouldn’t kill a mouse. And Jevan, who had force that Willy lacked, had actually been in Ronald’s apartment and coolly admitted it.

Dinner that night was served, without orders to that effect, in the big dining room. It was another note of recognition to Jevan’s presence. A man in the house, occupying a high-backed armchair at the head of the table.

Dorcas wore one of her trousseau gowns, a misty gray chiffon, as lovely as a foggy sea. She wore an emerald at her throat and her hair shone gold in the mellow glow from candles. But if Jevan had eyes for the gown—or for her—she did not perceive it. He talked coolly and abstractedly to Sophie about European travel and war in Spain.

Later over coffee in the long library she looked at him and thought of dancing around that library only twenty-four hours ago, dancing over bare and polished floors in her white satin with his arm tight around her, holding her to him.

Now Jevan was remote, impersonal, looking at magazines, getting a foreign news bulletin on the radio and commenting upon it. About eleven Bench came into the room, spoke to Jevan quietly and he rose, said something vague and followed Bench out of the room.

Sophie, hazel eyes curious, got up presently and went away, her suavely fitted, flesh-colored lace trailing gracefully behind her. She came back almost at once with a newspaper under her arm.

“He’s seeing to the locks—windows, doors, everywhere. The paper was in the butler’s pantry.” She opened it across a table and Dorcas came to stand beside her.

There were several columns. The headlines shouted murder and Ronald Drew. At the end of the second column Dorcas’ name appeared.

“It’s his telephone call to you,” said Sophie and pointed with her unexpectedly blunt forefinger.

Perhaps after a while I shall get hardened to it, thought Dorcas, aware again of that sickening wince inside her as she saw her own name.

The murdered man had put in a telephone call to Mrs Locke a short time before his murder. Up to the time of the announcement of Mrs Locke’s engagement to Jevan Locke (young broker and son of the late Jevan A. Locke, of the Stock Exchange) she had been seen frequently in the company of Ronald Drew and there was an apparently well-authenticated rumor that she and Drew were to marry.

Cringing and hating herself for cringing, Dorcas read on.

The Whipple family; the Lockes; Drew’s death at first supposed a suicide due to despondency; inquiry in the hands of Jacob Wait, new to the city staff (here followed a brief but pungent account of Wait’s activities in Wrexe County); and Mr and Mrs Locke had not yet gone on their wedding trip but were being detained for questioning.

“It could be worse,” said Sophie. “But we’d better not let your mother see the papers…I’m going to bed.”

Dorcas followed, thinking in spite of herself of the white divan in Ronald’s apartment, the look on his face as he had flung the telephone to the floor, the way the taxi driver had scrutinized her when she hailed him.
The taxi driver!

She’d forgotten him.

Her hands, busy with the fastenings of the gray chiffon, were suddenly cold and clumsy. She was becoming acquainted, she thought fantastically, with fear. But the taxi driver wouldn’t remember her. How could he? So many fares, so many faces, so many addresses.

It was close to midnight when Jevan knocked at the door leading into his room and, as she replied, came in. He wore a brown dressing gown over his pajamas and went to the door which led into the hall.

“Does this lock?”

She put aside the book she had been trying to read and sat up. “I don’t know. Why?”

“No reason,” said Jevan and found an old-fashioned bolt let into the casing and turned it. “You all right, Dorcas?” he said then, glancing at her.

“Quite.”

“That’s good,” said Jevan coolly. “Good night.” The door closed again behind him and after a long time Dorcas picked up her book. But she couldn’t read and presently she put out the lamp beside her. She wished he hadn’t thought it was necessary to lock the door. And she wondered what he was thinking of in the silence and darkness of the room adjoining her own.

Outside the night darkened. Shrubbery huddled closer in the corners of the gaunt fence. Gradually the few remaining lights in the house vanished. In the hall the bronze boy still held a faint, amber light which left the corners and the open doors leading to other rooms crowded and suffused with deep, cavernous shadows.

It must have been about three o’clock when Dorcas roused to hear the telephone ringing, faint and distant and imperious in the silent black depths of the house.

S
HE WENT, AT LAST,
to answer it.

Slipping quietly out of bed, thrusting bare, small feet into flat slippers, fur lined and heelless, wrapping a long, warm negligee around her. She opened the door, and because that sharp summons was so singularly imperative, because, perhaps, she was not fully awake and did not think of her own telephone that was nearer—or perhaps because fate stepped in and demanded the making of that one small, tremendously important link in the darkly patterned chain—because of all this or because of nothing she went downstairs, thinking urgently and only of the main telephone off the hall below.

Her feet made no sound on the carpeted steps, her hand slid quietly along the polished railing. As she reached the area of light cast by the torch in the bronze boy’s hand she stopped, momentarily daunted by the blackness of the cavernous openings of other rooms from the hall below her.

The telephone rang again and she ran down the remaining stairs and into the darkness leading off at her right.

It was the narrow side passageway which led past the telephone closet, an entrance to the laundry chute and thence to Penn Whipple’s study. At the end of the passage, lost completely now in darkness, was the side entrance which emerged to the porte-cochere.

She groped for the handle of the telephone door, found and opened it. Or thought she opened it. Instead a cold, dampish current of air struck her face and with it the unmistakable, musty odor of cellars. She pulled back abruptly. It was the laundry chute of course; she closed the door and it clicked sharply into place. The telephone pealed again and she groped along the wall. She found the door to the telephone closet, went in and automatically closed it behind her.

But when she grasped the telephone and answered no one replied. She spoke again and again and finally, fumblingly in the darkness, replaced the telephone. It was some mistake of course. She opened the door. And opened it upon a completely dark hall with no light leading from the bronze boy. No light anywhere. She caught her breath sharply with surprise and stopped.

And it was just then that the thing occurred that, then, had no meaning and no explanation but always to Dorcas had the very essence of reality.

For she heard it clearly, altogether unmistakable in the stillness, and that was the small, neat click of the door of the laundry chute.

Just that.

That and the fact that the bronze boy’s small light no longer burned and nothing more.

She was all at once, chokingly, every pulse leaping, frightened. She ran. Through the darkness and up the stairs.

A faint stream of light came from the guest-room wing and she ran stumblingly into it and into Jevan’s arms.

The light was coming from the door to his room which was open. He grasped her tightly in his arms, so her heart thudded frantically against him.

“Dorcas, what is it? Where have you been? What——”

“Downstairs.” Her voice was muffled against his heart so he had to bend his head to hear her. “There’s something—somebody——”

“I can’t understand, Dorcas. Tell me——” He drew her into his room and closed the door and sat down, holding her cradled in his arms. “Now tell me. Don’t be frightened.”

There was so little to tell. Yet when he heard he rose and put her down in the chair and went to a table. Light flashed on a revolver and Dorcas cried: “No—no—don’t——”

“I won’t be long. If there’s nobody there it’s all right. If there’s somebody down there I want to know.”

“Don’t——”

But he had gone.

It seemed a long time before he returned, gave her a quick look, closed the door and thoughtfully put the revolver down on the table.