Long Live the Dead (32 page)

I had it doped out this way. He—or she—would arrive sometime before daylight, gather up my substitute letter and read it. Unless it lacked some secret identifying line or phrase, the handwriting was sufficiently like Grace Marvin’s to pass inspection.

Tomorrow night at midnight, then, this person would journey to the foot of the cliff, as requested, and from what I’d seen of the bottom of the cliff, it was a mighty difficult place from which to exit in a hurry.

When I pounced out of hiding at midnight tomorrow night, I’d catch my mouse. If I tried it tonight, I might miss and scare the mouse into permanent hiding.

Moreover, the intervening hours would give me a chance to work on Miss Marvin’s letter.

So I sat by the window and waited.

And waited.

And nothing came but the dawn.

It was a miserable dawn, in more ways than one. A sticky fog rolled in off the Atlantic. The fog turned to a slow, dreary, drizzling rain. Thoroughly disgusted, I shed my pajamas, got dressed and went down to breakfast in a black mood.

T
hat was not a very cheerful breakfast. Mrs. Meade, the housekeeper, had a long face and wore an expression you could have used in the making of quince jam. This sort of weather, she explained, brought on her rheumatism.

Caroline Standish was put out because she had planned on a trip to the city but couldn’t go. “With Mrs. Meade feeling so miserable,” she said, “somehow I don’t like to leave her in charge of Junior.”

Edgar Standish offered no explanation of his misery, but his eyes told a story. His eyes said he’d been drinking and was deep in the toils of a hangover. I wondered about that. He hadn’t done any drinking before going to bed last night—so when?

The object of my professional attentions, Miss Marvin, didn’t show up for breakfast at all. I was told that she frequently didn’t. “Doctor Truett told us,” Caroline said, “to let her sleep as long as she wished. She often sleeps until noon.”

I thought it might be a good idea to go out and remove my letter from the bird-house. No one, in broad daylight, was going to hop the wall to collect it, and Miss Marvin might just take a notion to go exploring.

“While she’s asleep,” I announced, “I believe I’ll go for a walk. I need a bit of exercise.”

Edgar lent me his raincoat, and off I went.

The envelope was still in the birdhouse. I slipped it into my pocket, feeling somewhat ashamed of myself, and then I saw the footprints. That is to say, shoe-prints.

The grass was worn pretty thin in the immediate neighborhood of the birdhouse, and in patches of dark bare ground the prints were plainly visible. My own, some of them. My own where I’d jumped the wall, prowled over to the home of our feathered friends and prowled back again. The others were hers.

They were sneaker-prints, and I distinctly recalled that she had worn sneakers.

Here was proof, anyway, that she had put that goofy missive in the bird-house, and that I, Jefferson Cardin, had not merely dreamed it up out of a nightmare.

I went for a walk.

It was a nice place Mr. Edgar Standish had. Being an architect, he had probably designed it himself, and while I have no particular fondness for so much ocean, with its clammy rains and fogs, I had to admit the joint was no dump.

What stopped me, and stumped me, was a sudden discovery of more of those sneaker prints.

They were on the sheltered side of the house, where the sweep of the rain had not yet been able to blur them.They ran from a very cute little doorway under what I suppose you’d call a sun-deck, to a gate about sixty feet distant—and back again. I don’t mean in a straight, unbroken line, mind you, like footprints in snow—but they were there for the finding.

I snooped around the gate. The road ran past it. There was no sidewalk other than a strip of bare ground, now soggy, between the road and Edgar Standish’s stone wall.

She had leaned on that gate for some time. No deerslayer instincts were needed for the observance of that little fact, since the marks of her sneakers were deep and definite. Furthermore, she’d been conversing with someone of the opposite sex.
His
shoe-prints were now half-filled with rain.

I wondered about that goofy letter. I wondered about me, and did some mumbling.

The cute little door under the sun-deck was unlocked. I opened it and went snooping. The snooping took me through Standish’s study, which he democratically called a workshop, into the main entrance hall.

The door-chimes were ringing. Caroline Standish came down the stairs without seeing me, opened the front door and said, “Why, how do you do, Doctor Truett!”

Just for something else to do, I’d been wondering about him, too.

He was a short, stubby male with a paunch. He had a round, red face with a bristle of mustache, and you guessed, looking at him, that when he removed his hat he would have more hair than a man his age ought to have.

He removed his hat and had it.

“Nasty weather, Mrs. Standish,” he said. His voice was a bedside caress, and the smile that accompanied it was as mechanical as Charlie McCarthy’s. “Miss Marvin is expecting me, I hope.”

“She’s in her room, Doctor. I’ll call her.”

“Excellent. And—er—Mrs. Standish.”

“Yes, Doctor?”

“I think it might be better if I saw her privately.”

“Certainly, Doctor.”

Mrs. Standish went upstairs. The good doctor shed his raincoat, draped it carefully over the hand-rail and sighed prodigiously, as though that, in itself, were a day’s work accomplished. He adjusted his sleeves, his lapels and his tie with grave deliberation, as though about to wade into a major operation.

I wondered how far off the floor he would jump if I coughed to advertise my presence.

I didn’t cough.

Dr. Truett walked into the living-room and passed out of my line of vision.

I
stepped out of hiding and edged closer, hoping for better luck. At that moment Mrs. Standish came down the stairs with Junior. “Hi, there!” Junior yipped.

“We’re going to have our morning study period,” Caroline informed me with a smile.

“Mr. Cardin,” the youngster shrilled, “was listening at the keyhole. That isn’t polite, is it, mother?”

“Hush, Junior!”

“But it
isn’t
, is it?”

The S. P. C. C. could have prosecuted me for my thoughts, at that instant, and won a unanimous verdict of guilty. I tried to laugh it off. “Matter of fact,” I said lamely, with a grin equally lame, “I was pulling up my socks. When you grow up, Junior, always wear garters and keep out of trouble.” Something told me that Dr. Truett and Miss Grace Marvin were listening to every word.

With a feeble grin at Caroline, I went up the stairs and slunk into my room. Maybe, with an ear to the floor, I’d be able to accomplish my purpose.

It didn’t work. Either Grace or Dr. Truett was smart enough to turn on the radio down there. All I got for my backache was the hundred-and-eighth installment of
Dolly Dawson’s Diary
and a lecture on the unsurpassed qualities of Snappy Soap Suds, after which Mrs. Meade burst into the room with some clean bed-linen draped over her arm.

She evidently thought it somewhat strange for a grown man to be down on his hands and knees, smelling the floor. I told her I’d lost a quarter. She said that was too bad. I said it didn’t matter, and slunk out.

For a sleuth with ten years of experience, I was doing fine. Still, with Grace Marvin out of her room, Caroline busy with Junior downstairs and Mrs. Meade in the throes of bed-making, here was an opportunity not to be sneered at.

I slipped into Grace Marvin’s room, shut the door behind me and went exploring.

There should have been something of importance in that room. By all rights and logic, after all I’d been through, there should have been something to clear up at least one of the mysteries that were crawling around this place.

If there was, I overlooked it. Or did I? For after snooping in vain through a closet full of clothes, opening in vain a couple of suitcases that proved to be empty, and poking in vain through an assortment of junk in and on the vanity—if that’s what you call those ultrafeminine bureaus—I found a scarf.

It was a soft, silky thing with more colors than the map of Europe. It smelled, but the perfume of which it smelled was not a perfume heretofore encountered by the Cardin nostrils—at least, not in this household.

I worried about that scarf. It plagued me. I would have wagered my hundred-dollar retainer that I’d seen it before, or seen one exactly like it. But my brain, if any, was cluttered up with so many other things.

I slipped out of the room and went quietly down the hall. Mrs. Meade was pushing a broom in my room, in a manner that indicated she hoped to find my mythical quarter. The radio was still churning in the living-room. With no other place to go, I eased into Edgar Standish’s study and sat to do some thinking.

The good doctor departed half an hour later, shutting the door with what appeared to be more noise than was necessary. Grace Marvin went upstairs. About an hour later the rain stopped, and about an hour after that, Edgar arrived home.

We sat and talked. I didn’t show him the goofy letter. I didn’t tell him what a remarkable athlete Miss Marvin had turned out to be. He said: “I’m afraid, Lieutenant, for a man of your experience this is a rather boring job.”

And I said: “Well, it has possibilities.”

He said: “Selfishly speaking, I hope it hasn’t.”

“How long have you known Miss Marvin?” I asked.

“Years.”

“And Doctor Truett?”

“Went to school with him.”

“I’d like to make a little experiment this evening,” I said. “Are you game?”

“I don’t understand.”

“Miss Marvin is up to something. I saw signs of it last night, heard her prowling around. She saw me and gave it up, whatever it was, but if we could find out what’s on her mind, it might save us some headaches. An ounce of prevention, you know.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“I’ll tell you. Miss Marvin seems to think—”

The phone rang. We were both sitting within arm’s reach of it, there in the study. Standish picked it up. I walked to a window,

“Why—hello,” he said. “Evidently I just missed—”

I couldn’t hear the voice in the receiver. I did, however, sneak a look at Standish, and saw that his face wore a scowl as he listened. Presently he said: “It was an absolute necessity. I’m perfectly willing to do all I can for her—I’ve told you that—but good Lord, man, it’s been damned awkward around here for both Caroline and myself, and there’s the youngster to consider. I felt that we needed some sort of protection … What’s that? … I know you did… .”

His fingers beat out a nervous rhythm on the desk as he listened. He was breathing hard, and I had an idea that he was not entirely happy about this particular phone call.

Finally he said with some force: “I’m sorry, Frank, but he stays. I’ve got to consider Caroline and the boy and—well, he stays. That’s final.”

He hung up, stared sullenly at his fingernails for a moment and said under his breath: “No matter how decent you try to be—” Then he exhaled noisily, looked up and said with a mechanical smile: “Well, Cardin? This scheme of yours?”

I explained it, being extremely careful in explaining my reasons for suggesting it.

“It sounds fantastic,” he said.

I shrugged and said: “Maybe it is.” But I didn’t think it was fantastic. I thought it would work.

T
hat was a beautiful night—damn it! The rain and the fog had disappeared entirely, and the sky was so full of moon and stars that it looked like the ceiling of a planetarium. About nine o’clock I snared a symphony concert out of the maze of junk on the radio, and Miss Marvin rewarded me by yawning, rising, and saying: “Well, if we must have our culture, I’d much rather take mine in bed.”

She went upstairs. I glanced at Standish and he said with a dubious shake of his head: “Well, all right, Cardin, but I think it’s fantastic.”

He really looked a lot like me when he put my coat and hat on. My clothes always look a lot like me, which is no compliment to my tailor. Standish turned the coat collar up and the hat brim down, shoved his hands into his pockets and hunched his shoulders to give them the Cardin slouch, and I nodded my approval.

“I give you fair warning,” he said, “a little of this sort of thing goes a long way with me. If nothing happens in an hour or so, to the devil with it!”

That was a chance I’d have to take—that it might not happen before he grew disgusted. The rub was, it might not happen at all. It might have happened last night.

He went out, and I watched him from the living-room window. Caroline, reading a book, frowned at me and said: “What in the world are you two up to?”

“An experiment, Mrs. Standish.”

Good girl—she let it go at that and went back to her reading.

Standish played his part well. He left by the front door, circled wide to the other side of the street and walked along in a lane of shadow provided by a row of poplars. He let himself be seen, but furtively, and when he stationed himself at the far end of the wall, near the bird-house, he was visible but you’d have sworn he meant to be otherwise.

Satisfied, I went quietly down the hall, out the cute little door under the sun-deck, and stationed
myself
on my stomach, near a stone bench close to the gate, where I couldn’t be seen from the house or the road.

Then I waited.

It just might work, I hopefully told myself. Unless all my deductions were faulty, Miss Marvin had duped me with a set-up very similar to this, last night. That goofy letter in the bird-house had glued me to the window of my room, enabling her to slip out for a meeting with her boy-friend, here at the gate.

He had come once—he might come again.

He did.

I heard him before I saw him. That is, I heard the car. The air was so still, the night so quiet, that the sound of the motor was plainly audible. The car climbed the hill and stopped, before the glow of its headlights turned the corner.