The Devil To Pay (22 page)

A hiss brought his head up. Across the rock garden the head of Valerie Jardin protruded from the doorway of the empty Jardin study. She motioned angrily, but he shook his head, smiling. After a moment she slipped down the Jardin terrace steps and ran across to the Spaeth house. “She’ll see you!” she whispered, darting up under the protection of the terrace awning. “Are you mad?”

“Never saner,” said Ellery. “Winni the Moocher is out stuffing her gullet. It seems she’s sick of preparing her own meals. At least that’s what the detective on duty says.”

“Did you come in through the
gate?
” asked Val, horrified.

“Why not?” said Ellery innocently. “Didn’t you?”

Val gazed ruefully at her ripped riding-habit. “Over the fence again. At that, Mr. King, you took an awful chance. If Ruhig should be watching—”

“He isn’t.”

“How do you know that?” asked Val suspiciously.

“Silence. I’m trying to concentrate.”

Val looked at him in a dubious way but he merely lay back in the chair, resting his neck against the back. He folded his hands across his chest. Val experienced a twinge of bafflement. He certainly was the queerest man. Concentrate? He was just snoozing! “Better come away from here,” she said, taking a tentative step towards the stairs. “If you want to sleep, you can join Pink. He’s taking a nap back there. At least Winni won’t come back and find you.”

“Leave this comfortable chair?” murmured Ellery. “Not on your life.” He opened one eye.

“You are by all odds the most—” Val stopped, watching him in bewilderment. The single eye, naturally invisible to her behind the tinted glasses, nevertheless contrived to communicate a certain fixity, a surface tension, to his figure. He sat up abruptly, his shoes thumping on the flagged floor. “What’s the
matter
with you?” said Val, puzzled.

It was noon, and the sun poised high. Ellery rose, looking up at the awning overhead, his Adam’s apple quivering delicately. His gaze was directed toward a sliver of blinding light in the awning. He stepped on the chair and raised the blue glasses to his forehead, examining the rupture closely. “What’s wonderful about that?” demanded Val. “You’re the oddest creature! It’s only a rip in the awning.”

He slipped the glasses back over his eyes and stepped down, smiling. “I’m sensitive to sudden flashes of light. Go away, will you, darling?”

He settled back in the chair again. Val threw up her hands and descended to the garden. He watched her from under the glasses. She darted off on a tangent bound for the far boundary of
Sans Souci
, where the bushes and trees were thick and the fence could be climbed without benefit of witness. After a moment her slender figure, boyish in the jodhpurs, disappeared beneath the palms. Ellery lay quiet for some time, watching the palms, the terrace of the Jardin house. Cicadas sawed away somewhere; the garden before him crawled and hummed with bees. There was no sign of human life anywhere. So he got out of the chair again and stepped up on it and once more examined the slit in the awning overhead. The colored stripes ran from top to bottom of the awning, the slit lying neatly parallel between a yellow stripe and a green one. “Tear roughly a half-inch long,” he mumbled to himself. “Well, well,” and he took a penknife out of his pocket and was about to employ surgery on the awning when he caught sight of something else, and he stopped. On the stone wall of the house proper, not three feet to the side of the glassed area which served as the fourth and outer wall of the study, there was a sharp, clean, fresh-looking nick. Something with a keen point had chipped away a fragment of stone. He looked at the nick in the stone, and he looked at the tear in the canvas. The nick was high on the wall, and the tear was high on the awning. Tall as he was, and standing on the chair, he still had to crane directly upwards to see them closely. Yes, the tear was a little higher than the nick, and directly in front of it, judging it by the eye with the flagged floor as a base. And tear and nick were a mere four inches apart. Four inches! Muttering excitedly to himself, he proceeded to mutilate the unoffending awning. He slashed ruthlessly away in a rough rectangle with the penknife until he was able to pull a piece about five inches square out of the awning. He dropped to the flags, holding the canvas scrap gingerly. In the stronger light near the edge of the terrace he thought he detected a faint brown stain on the upper edges of the slit. Golden-brown. Molasses-brown. Molasses. Molasses and potassium cyanide? And what would an Italian rapier be doing sticking its smeared nose through a nice, clean, summery awning? That, said Mr. Hilary-Ellery King-Queen to himself as he rolled up the canvas square with cautious fingers, was the Question.

He wrapped the roll in a handkerchief and, holding the tubular result like a twist of diamonds under his coat, he made his way from the terrace along the row of palms to the gate, trying to look unconcerned but not succeeding.

“Well, Bronson?” said Ellery, leaning over the laboratory table.

The Chemist nodded. “Molasses and cyanide, all right. Say, I’ve heard about you, King, around headquarters here. Where did you get hold of this piece of canvas?”

“If you’re thinking of ’phoning Glücke,” said Ellery hastily, rewrapping the scrap of awning with fingers that trembled a little, “don’t bother. I’ll be seeing him soon myself.”

“But look here—” began Bronson.

“Goodbye. Oh, isn’t it a lovely day?” said Ellery, hurrying out.

V
ALERIE
crossed the
La Salle
lobby, vaguely noticing that the manager of the hotel, a small dark man, was seated before the switchboard with Mibs Austin’s earphones clamped about his head. She supposed the telephone girl was upstairs and made her way to the elevator, sighing. The poor thing had been so terrified. If she only knew what really hung over her! She unlocked the door of 3-C. “Mibs, are you here?” The door swung to and the slam echoed. There was no other sound. “Mibs?” Val stepped into the living-room. It was empty. “Mibs!” The color drained out of her cheeks. She ran into her bedroom, into Rhys’s room, the bathrooms, the kitchen. … Mibs was not there. She clawed at the front door and flew down the emergency stairway to the lobby. “Where’s Miss Austin?” she cried shrilly.

The manager removed the earphones. “Why, I thought—”

“Where is she!”

“Don’t you know?” asked the manager, surprised.

Val was furious in her panic. “You fool, if I knew would I ask you? Where is she!”

The man looked annoyed. “Didn’t you call her up an hour or so ago? I’ll have to give her a talking to. She can’t make excuses like that to take time off.”

“Say that again,” said Val, speaking with distinctness. “She told you I telephoned her?”

“That’s what the snip said. She said you called her and asked her to meet you right away at the corner of Cahuenga and Sunset on an important matter. So naturally—”

Val groped for the support of the desk. “Oh, yes,” she said faintly. “Thank you.” And she went over to a divan and sat down under the dwarf palm, her thighs quivery with weakness. Call. … She hadn’t made any call. Some one had telephoned Mibs, using her name. An appointment!

The manager went back to the switchboard, looking angry. Val felt like laughing. Angry! Oh, Mibs, you fool. … Val managed to get out of the divan and go to the telephone booth. It took her a long time to fish out the coins from her purse; her fingers seemed incapable of holding on to anything. “Walter Spaeth,” she said, when she was connected with the
Independent
. It was supposed to be a calm, unconcerned alto; but somehow it came out a dry croak.

“Spaeth talking,” said Walter’s blessed voice.

“Walter. Something terrible’s happened.”

“Darling! What’s the matter? Has Winni—Ruhig—”

“It’s—it’s Mibs. Mibs Austin.” Val clung to the telephone. “Walter… she’s
gone
.”

Walter made a funny little sound at the other end of the wire. “Gone? I thought you said she’d agreed not to—I mean, that she wasn’t to leave—”

“You don’t understand, Walter,” said Val stiffly. “Somebody… somebody telephoned her an hour ago using my name and telling her to meet me at Cahuenga and Sunset. But—I—didn’t—’phone her!”

“Oh,” said Walter. Then he said: “Hold tight, funny-face. I’ll be right down.” Val hung up and stood in the hot booth for a moment. Then she went out and toiled upstairs to wait for Walter. She felt like an old, old woman.

Walter was there in thirty minutes, and she let him in and bolted the door behind him. They went into the living-room and Walter sat down. Val went to the window mechanically and let down the Venetian blinds. That done, she moved the Chinese vase a half-inch to the left on the refectory table. Then she moved it back again. Walter sat silently, the flesh over his eyes bunched into little knots. His fist was pounding up and down on his knee. “Do you think,” said Val in a tight voice, “do you think she’s—”

Walter got up and tramped around the room, red in the face. “What I can’t understand is how the little fool ever let a trick like that take her in,” he muttered. “Good lord, doesn’t she know your voice?”

“I haven’t had much to do with her, Walter,” replied Val listlessly.

“The damned fool!”

“Walter.” Val twisted her fingers. “She may be—she might be…” It was hard to say. It was impossible to say.

Walter sat down again and buried his face in his hands. “We’re up against it, Val. For fair, this time.” Val nodded wordlessly. How well she knew! “Now we’ve got blood on our hands.”

“Walter,” she moaned.

But it was true. Their scheming, their crazy impetuous scheming, their frantic effort to stave off the inevitable—Walter, Walter’s predicament, Walter in the shadow of a tall gaunt thing made of wood. … It had cost the life of an innocent person. Val said with a faint nausea: “Do you think she’s—” But she could not get the word out.

Walter rubbed his palms together in a meaningless sort of way. “Whoever’s behind this, hon, won’t stop at anything. Somehow he found out about your father’s alibi, and he’s put the Austin kid out of the way to destroy it.” His voice rose. “I can’t. I simply can’t understand such damned brutality, such savagery! How could any one hate another man so much?”

“It’s our fault, Walter,” whispered Val.

His face softened and he went over to her and pulled her to him. “Look, Val.” He cupped her chin and made her look up at him. “Let’s finish this mess here and now. We’re miserable failures at this thing—we’re wriggling like worms trying to get away from something that’s bound to get us in the end.”

“Not us,” cried Val. “You!”

“You’ve done too much for me already, you and Rhys. And meanwhile we’ve done something to an innocent person we’ll never be able to undo.”

Val, thinking of the blonde girl, began to cry. “How could we have let her take such chances—”

“Stop crying, Val,” he said gently. “The first thing we’ve got to do is report her disappearance to the police.” Val nodded, sobbing. “Maybe it isn’t too late,” he said encouragingly. “Maybe she’s still alive. If she is, we can’t waste a second.”

“But we’ll have to tell them all about—all about you—”

“High time, too!” And he grinned a little.

“No, Walter.” She pressed her face against his coat.

“If I don’t—what about your father?” he said in the same gentle voice. “Remember, with Mibs’s disappearance he has no alibi. No alibi, Val.”

“Oh, Walter, what an awful, awful mess!”

“Now let’s go downtown and tell Glücke the truth.”

She raised her head, agonized. “But if you do, Walter, they’ll arrest you! They’ll say you murdered your father!”

His kissed the tip of her nose. “Did I ever tell you you’re beautiful?”

“I can’t let you do it!”

“And that I’ve dreamed about you every night for a year?”

Walter or Rhys. Rhys or Walter. It went round and round in her head like a phonograph record. It might slide off to some other place, but it always came back to the same place. … She dropped her arms helplessly.

W
ALTER
went to the telephone and called police headquarters. He waited patiently, his back to Valerie. His tall figure shimmered; and Val sat down, rubbing her eyes. She wished she could go to bed and sleep and sleep for months, years. He spoke to Inspector Glücke in a rather listless tone, telling him about the disappearance of Mibs Austin and the false telephone call, the appointment for the corner of Cahuenga and Sunset. … Everything had drained out, Valerie felt. What was the use of fighting?

“Let’s go, Val.”

“All right, Walter.”

Neither spoke on the journey downtown. There didn’t seem to be anything to say. The saucy child-face of Mibs Austin with its dip and crown of blondness danced before Val, obscuring the streets. She closed her eyes, but Mibs remained there like a face on a bobbing balloon. Glücke received them in state, with two police stenographers occupying chairs beside his desk and District Attorney Van Every enthroned to one side, all silence and alertness.

“Did you find out anything?” asked Walter abruptly.

“We’re working on it now,” said the Inspector. “What makes you think the girl was snatched?”

“Because she had certain information which the murderer of my father didn’t want known.”

Glücke laughed. “Sit down, Miss Jardin. Is this another of your fairy stories, Spaeth? If you’ve got anything to tell me, say it now. And make it stick this time.”

“I see,” said Walter, “you’re all ready for me.” Val looked down at her hands, and they stopped twisting. “All right. I’m glad to get this off my chest. What I said—”

A scuffling sound from an adjoining room stopped him. One of the doors burst open and Rhys Jardin appeared, struggling in the arms of a detective. “Walter!” he cried. “It’s a trick! The girl wasn’t abducted at all! Glücke had her—”

“Stubborn to the end,” remarked the District Attorney wryly. “Too bad, Glücke.”

“Pop!” Val flew to him. The detective released Jardin, puffing.

“Do you mean to say,” growled Walter, “that you cooked this up, damn you?”