Rex Stout_Tecumseh Fox 01 (9 page)

“Very. What’s it like a cruiser?”

“Yeah, it’s thirty foot, nine-foot beam, high out of the water and an awful roller, white all over with the cabin trimmed in brown, though he was telling my husband not long ago—”

“Thank you very much.”

“Who shall I tell him—”

“Don’t bother.” Fox was on his way. “Thanks!”

That, of course, was the best of luck. The bad luck was waiting for him when he got back to the truck—a flat tire; and there was no spare. Fox glared at it; this would not only cause delay, but would call attention to a conspicuous vehicle far from its haunt; but there was no help for it. He drove back to the intersection and found a garage, and told the mechanic:

“Fix it as quick as you can, will you, brother? I’ve got meat in there that’s going to spoil on a day like this.”

That cost a dollar and thirty-five minutes. Then he headed north again and at a favorable spot halted to report progress to his inside passengers. Again north.

His wristwatch said half-past ten and the heavy oppressive air said ninety in the shade, when he parked the truck once more, this time on the main street of South Norwalk. Before he left the seat and left the truck for good, he told Dan:

“Remember, my part’s easy. I’m taking it because I can find it from the water and you can’t. You’ve got the job and it’s up to you. Don’t let them out until I’m beached and don’t let them out if there’s any one in sight close enough to see faces. They’re not to run or do anything but act natural—walk across the beach to me—and they’re not to do that if there’s any one within three hundred yards, even if it means waiting all day. As soon as they’re on board and the boat’s under way, take the truck home, get the convertible, drive to South Norwalk, park outside Carter’s place and wait. You may wait an hour and you may wait twenty. Stay with the car.”

“Wouldn’t it be better if I parked—”

“No.”

Dan’s “Right again” reached Tecumseh Fox, if at all, through the back of his head, for he was off. A
block away, at the railroad station, he entered a taxi and left it again five minutes later at the entrance to an enormous barnlike wooden building at the waterside with an inscription painted across the front:
DON CARTER BOATS & EQUIPMENT
. He went in and traversed its length, dodging construction scaffoldings and jumping blocks and timbers, emerged on to a platform from which piers jutted over the water, went up to a man who was watching two others scrape the side of a cabin cruiser and accosted him:

“Hello, Don. Is the tide still with you?”

“Hello there!” The man extended a hand. “Well, well! Where did you come from?”

“Oh, places. I’m in a hurry this time, I have to make a little trip. Can I have the Express Forty?”

“Sure! Sure you can. She’s all tuned up.” The man’s crinkled eyes laughed at him. “I don’t suppose you’re bound for foreign shores? After that on the radio last night and then the papers this morning—”

“I haven’t had time to look at a paper. No, I’ll bring her back all right, but I can’t say when. While you’re warming her up I’ll step across the street and get a sandwich.”

In a quarter of an hour he was back, with a large package under his arm and a bundle of newspapers. At the end of one of the piers a long narrow powerboat, with seats for six in a glassed-in cockpit, was purring smoothly. Fox hopped in and got behind the wheel, the engine swelled to a roar and then purred again, a man holding her to the pier gently eased her off and she glided away, with Don Carter watching her with pride in his eyes. Fox took her out beyond the last marker, turned her north and opened up the
throttle. She reared, lifted up her long narrow aristocratic nose and scooted.

In twenty minutes he went ten miles. He throttled down the engine, aimed for a desolate-looking stretch of beach strewn with rocks and old seaweed; a hundred yards offshore he reversed to stop her, left the seat and catfooted it to the bow, and dropped an anchor. Peering inshore, he caught through scraggly trees a glimpse of a white object with a splotch of red on its side. A survey of the beach showed him no sign of life. He hopped to the stern, unlashed a dinghy that lay athwart, lowered it into the water, got the oars and rowed to the beach. Jumping out, he stood and surveyed the scene again, and in a moment saw activity around the white object, and soon three men emerged from among the trees and stumbled towards him over the stones. They looked unmistakably like men running away from something and Fox scowled fiercely as they approached, but when they reached him he said only:

“Get in. Thorpe and Luke in the stern, Kester in the bow. Get in!”

With that weight in the little dinghy, he had to wade in to his knees to get her free; then he hopped over the gunwale and took the oars. Back alongside the boat, he got them transhipped, pulled the dinghy to the stern and lashed it, and issued instructions:

“You are all to lie low. No faces showing. It would be a shame to spoil it now. There are sandwiches and beer in that package, and help yourselves to the newspapers. We’ve taken a trick. Jordan left Thursday on his boat and hasn’t returned. I won’t describe it or tell you the name of it, or you’d be sticking your faces up to help me look for it.”

Ridley Thorpe growled faintly: “My stomach hurts and I think I’m going to vom——”

“Lie down and take it easy. Open that window, Luke, and he’ll soon get enough air. Now remember, keep down.”

He went to the bow and upped the anchor, climbed into the seat and started the engine, reversed and nosed her around for open water, and the search for the
Armada
was on.

By four o’clock that afternoon Tecumseh Fox would have given ten to one that there were fifty million boats on Long Island Sound and that a high percentage of them were white cruisers with brown cabin trim. The Carter Express Forty had poked its nose in at a hundred coves, inlets and harbours, all the way from Norwalk to Niantic on the Connecticut shore, and back from Plum Island as far as Wading River on the Long Island side. It was at four o’clock that an act of God came perilously close to terminating the operation by the conclusive process of sinking the entire outfit. Fox saw it coming around three-thirty and he knew that prudence dictated a flight for shelter, but he decided the boat could take it with proper handling. It came swooping and swirling from the west, a savage wind lashing with a thousand staggering blows, the recently placid water swelling, rushing, breaking, careening like a maniac, the summer day darkened into night. Fox throttled down, took it three-quarters on and prayed that the gear was good. The boat quivered, lunged and plunged, turned on its side, righted and tried the other side for a change, fought desperately to keep its nose into the danger. The act ended almost as abruptly as it had begun; and when he could, Fox turned for a look at his passengers. Vaughn Kester was trembling and as
white as a sheet; Luke Wheer was not white but he was trembling; Ridley Thorpe nodded at Fox and declared, “You did that very well! Gracious, that was a blow! You handled it just right!”

Fox nodded back at him and returned to his steering, muttering to himself, “One more proof that no man is a total loss. Never forget that.”

Ten minutes later, not far beyond Shoreham, a tiny cove no bigger than a hollow tooth came into view and planted in the middle of it was a white cruiser with brown cabin trim. Apparently it was well anchored, for there was no sign that the storm had torn it loose. Fox circled inshore and in a minute made out the name on the stern:
Armada.
He throttled down and floated up to it, alongside, reversed, grabbed the cruiser’s gunwale to hold off and killed his engine. In the cockpit, mopping water which the storm had blown in, was a man around sixty, brown as leather, small but not puny, with jutting cheekbones guarding deep-set grey eyes.

Fox asked him, “Are you Henry Jordan?”

“I am,” said the man. “Who are you?”

T
hat was at 4:40 p.m.

Across Long Island Sound and some miles west, Dan Pavey slouched in the front seat of the convertible, parked in front of Don Carter’s place at South Norwalk. He was motionless and his eyes were closed. Suddenly his right leg twitched, then his left arm; his eyes opened; he jerked himself upright, stared around, blinked at his wristwatch and saw that it said 4:40.

“Well!” he told himself, in a rolling rumble of shocked incredulity.

He stared fixedly at space for three minutes.

“Well!” he repeated, still incredulous. “Mrs. Pavey’s boy Dan dreaming about a girl. Don’t deny it. Wake up. Is your boy running a fever, Mrs. Pavey? Perhaps he has acute cerebral flimmuxosis. What a pity. Flush out his skull and let it dry in the sun. How far can he spit? Phut!”

He got out, walked along the sidewalk to a door with a sign, BAR & GRILL, entered and ordered a double Scotch.

He downed it in a gulp, frowned around the place and ordered another. It went the way of the first. He
ordered a third, sent it after its predecessors and ordered another one. The man behind the bar demurred.

“Right,” Dan growled. “It’s a waste of money. You might as well try to fill a gas tank with a teaspoon.”

He picked up his change from the bar, returned to the street, walked a block and a half to a drugstore, climbed on to a stool at the fountain and told the boy:

“Westchester Delight with nuts.”

He muttered to himself, as the boy started the complex operation.

“Yes, sir, nuts.”

In the late afternoon, a little after six o’clock, District Attorney P. L. Derwin sat at his desk in his office at White Plains, wearily mopping his face with a damp handkerchief. Not only was he harassed by the impacts and exigencies of the most spectacular murder case Westchester County had enjoyed during his term of office, but also the weather was getting him; the thunderstorm that had raged across the city on its way to the sound in midafternoon had brought only ephemeral relief; it was now hotter and more humid than ever. Derwin looked at the man and girl in chairs facing him, let his handkerchief drop to the desk and spoke irritably:

“I may need to question you further at any time. I can’t say when or how long or how often. Mr. Collins is of course correct when he says that it is your right to refuse to answer questions, but if you do so, the law has a right to make inferences from that refusal. You have both been released under bond as material witnesses.” Perspiration showed on his forehead again. “You are bound, under severe penalty, to be available when needed. That publicity stunt of Tecumseh Fox’s—that radio broadcast—has no bearing whatever on
your status. As you know, Fox disappeared from his home during the night, has not returned and cannot be found.”

He shifted to a man standing between two chairs —a large healthy-looking man in a white linen suit, with an amused mouth and sharply watchful dark eyes. “I resent your last remark, Mr. Collins. I’m not man infant. I’m well aware that you are acquainted with the law. I merely ask that you keep me informed of the whereabouts of Grant and his niece, so that in case—”

“Refused.” Nat Collins was brusque. “I’m under no obligation to keep you informed. If you want to see them at any reasonable hour I’ll produce them and I’ll be with them.” He put his hand on Andrew Grant’s shoulder. “Come on, my boy.” He must have been at least four years older than Uncle Andy. “Come, Miss Grant.”

They left Derwin wearily mopping his face again. As they traversed the anteroom, the faces of four or five men sitting there, one a trooper in uniform, were turned to escort them across. Nearing the exit, Grant, who was in the lead, halted abruptly to avoid head-on collision with the door, which was being opened from without. The trio stepped aside to make gangway and were face to face with the pair who were entering.

Jeffrey Thorpe, red-faced from the heat, but no longer sartorially incongruous, confronted Nancy, blocked her off and demanded:

“Why wouldn’t you see me?”

Nancy’s look should have been cooling. “I don’t know you. Let me—”

“The name is Jeff Thorpe. Not only do you know me, I am in your thoughts. You hate me. That’s why you looked out of the upstairs window both times
when I was leaving the Fox place today after you refused to see me. You couldn’t help looking out of the window because I fascinate you like a snake. You fascinate me too, damn it! Did you get my letter? What did you—Randa, let go of me!”

His sister pulled him around. “Behave yourself, Jeff. It’s picturesque to be headstrong, but it’s an open season on Thorpes—oh, I didn’t mean that, that was brutal—well, maybe I am brutal—” She tilted her face for her handsome eyes to slant up at Andrew Grant. “You’re picturesque too, Mr. Grant, much more subtly than my brother, but I doubt if you’re headstrong. That was quite effective—what you said to me yesterday in there—and the way you said it.”

Andrew’s eyes, gloomily withdrawn, met hers. “Was it?”

She nodded. “Very. Impressive. I told Mr. Derwin immediately that I believed you. I’m sorry—I speak as the daughter of Ridley Thorpe, surely with as much right to speak as an outsider, even a district attorney—I am sorry that you are innocently involved in the tragedy of my father’s death. Shall we shake hands?”

“Why …” Grant’s lips twisted a little. “I think not. I don’t want to be doggish, but in such a situation as this a handshake would be so extremely … personal …”

“I suppose it would.” She shrugged. “Will you introduce me to your niece?”

He did so. Each of the two women, one beginning her twenties and the other ending them, extended a hand and there was a clasp as Nancy said:

“Of course he’s innocent! We’re both under bond as material witnesses, but you can’t help that.”

“No, I’m afraid I can’t, Miss Grant. You’re very
lovely. Exactly the type that makes me look like a frump. I hope you’ll go on hating my brother; it will do him good. If you’re under bond …” She glanced at Nat Collins. “So this man isn’t a policeman?”

“No, this is Mr. Collins, our lawyer. Mrs. Pemberton. Mr. —” Nancy stopped short and bit her lip.

“Thorpe,” said Jeffrey, giving Collins a hand. “She doesn’t know me. If anybody wants to make a study of headstrength or headstrongness, whichever it is—”