The Dragon’s Teeth (21 page)

“Find out if De Carlos has ever been married? Of all the cock-eyed assignments! What's the point?”

“It may
be
the point.”

“You're too much for me. Say! Cole's will actually stated that De Carlos was a bachelor, so there's your answer.”

“I'd rather have it from a more objective authority,” murmured Mr. Queen. “Check it.”

“I wish, you'd taken that pen away from him!”

“Yes, the pen.” Mr. Queen's tone was damp. Something about the pen seemed to trouble him. Then he shrugged. “Let's forget remote considerations and discuss things nearer home. What happened tonight after I left you at the hotel?”

Beau told him.

Ellery began to walk about. “I don't like one thing. I don't like the spot we've put dad in with your use of my name. He's done too much already in the way of suppressing facts. Beau, we've got to spill the truth before the newspapers get hold of it by themselves and ride dad out of the Department.”

“Damn the mess!” roared Beau, jumping up. Then he sat down again, looking foolish. “It's getting too involved for me. You're right. I'll have to face the music. Kerrie—”

“You've got to tell her, Beau. And about the other thing—”

“No!” Beau glared. “That's the one thing I won't tell. And you keep your mouth shut, too. Don't you realize what it would mean if we told about that? We'd be handing her over to the chair on a platter!”

Ellery gnawed his lower lip. “Dad's convinced, you say, that her story is a fabrication?”

“Yeah. You've got to admit, from his angle, it's a pretty tall yarn.”

They were silent.

Finally Ellery said: “Well, clean up this business of the name, anyway. I'm going home to catch up on some sleep, and I'd advise you to do the same, because you're in for a busy day.”

“Yeah,” mumbled Beau. He stared at the floor as if he saw something of unique interest there.

BEAU faced the new day with a scowl. Times Square at dawn is not a gay place.

The place matched his mood; and yet, as he watched Ellery's nighthawk cab drum off uptown, he felt a certain elation, too. Beau had spawned an idea in the office upstairs, and it was growing with abnormal rapidity. It was such an amazing idea that he had decided to keep it to himself. If Ellery could be mysterious, why couldn't he?

He weighed the idea, turning it over, and the more he weighed it in the cool of early morning, on the deserted sidewalk in Times Square, a cigaret drooping from his lips, the more it staggered him.

If it was so … yes, it could wait. He could always pull it out of his hat. Meanwhile, there was a mess to be cleaned. That name business. Kerrie. How could he tell her?

He walked east towards the
Villanoy,
his heels raising echoes on the empty pavement.

The first thing to do was dodge the reporters. They had camped in the
Villanoy
lobby all night. If he knew reporters, they were there still, stretched out on the divans among a litter of cigaret ends and the butts of sandwiches.

He entered the hotel by way of the Service Entrance, roused a night-man, a bill exchanged hands, and the man took him up, surreptitiously, to the seventeenth floor.

One of Inspector Queen's men, a detective named Piggott, who had known Beau when he used to visit his father at Headquarters in knee-pants and with barked knees showing, was perched on a chair which leaned against the wall next to the door of 1724. Piggott opened one eye and said, without smiling: “Hello, Mr.
Queen.”

Beau grinned and jammed a cigar into the detective's mouth. He entered 1724 without knocking.

Sergeant Velie was napping in the armchair by the window. He came awake instantly, like a cat.

“Oh, it's you.” The Sergeant settled back and closed his eyes again.

Beau opened the bedroom door. The shades were drawn and Kerrie was curled up in a ball on one of the twin beds, under blankets. He could hear her deep, regular breathing. Vi, fully dressed as she lay on the other bed, raised her head with a start. When she saw Beau she slipped off the bed and tiptoed out to join Beau in the sitting room. She closed the door softly behind her.

Her eyes were red-rimmed and her white skin looked pasty, flabby. She said to him: “Calling on your wife for a change?”

“How is she?”

“All right, no thanks to you. The doc gave her a shot of something and after a while she fell asleep.”

“That's good. That's good.” Beau was nervous; he began walking about.

Vi looked at him. “If you want to go in there, I can't stop you. You're her husband.”

“No, no, let her sleep. Good for her. You're aces, Vi. We've got a lot to thank you for.”

“Never mind the baloney,” said Vi. “You're a first-class rat, do you know that?”

“Hey.” Beau turned round slowly. “What is this?”

“You know damn' well.” Vi sat down on the edge of a chair and looked him over with a. deliberate insolence. “You let that poor kid take the rap for you, and you didn't have the gumption to stay with her while she was taking it!”

“What goes on here?” Beau flushed deeply.

Vi glanced at the huge figure of Sergeant Velie lying still in the armchair.

“Never mind him! What was that last crack supposed to mean?”

“I don't think you'd want the big boy hearing what I had in mind.”

“Don't worry—he's listening! Come on, Velie, can the act.” The Sergeant opened his eyes. “Now out with it! What's on your virgin mind now?”

“You asked for it,” said Vi calmly, but she went pale. “I say
you
were in that room across the court. I say
you
fired those shots through the window at the Cole woman. I say
you
threw Kerrie's .22 into this room. That's what I say!”

She sat very still suddenly. Beau was glaring down at her with such ferocity that her lower lip began to tremble. She glanced swiftly towards the Sergeant, in a panic.

The Sergeant rose. “Listen, boy—”

“Keep out of this, Velie. You think I bumped off Margo and then framed Kerrie for the job, do you?” Beau spoke very quietly, standing over Vi with his arms dangling.

“Yes!” The cry burst from Vi's lips, defiant through her fear.

“And I suppose you planted that idea in Kerrie's head, too? You did, didn't you?”

“I didn't have to. The idea was already there.”

“You—doublecrossing—liar!”

“Ask her,” said Vi with a glance of hate; but she shrank. “It was all so pat, your leaving her the way you did. Kerrie had to realize that. She does! She fights against it, but she does. She loves you—God only knows why. She ought to curse the day she ever set eyes on you!”

“Go on,” said Beau hoarsely.

“You were in with this Margo. That's the way I figure it … Sergeant!” Vi slipped out of the chair and ran from Beau to grab the Sergeant's beefy arm. From behind him she continued defiantly: “You were Margo's sidekick. You'd get Kerrie out of the way, the two of you. You and Margo. When your clever attacks didn't work, you schemed to marry Kerrie and do her out of the money. Then you'd split—”

“I don't want to hear your poisonous version of it,” growled Beau. “I want to know what Kerrie thinks!”

“And then Margo lost her head and came here last night and was going to squawk that you and she were partners. You were afraid of that, so you followed her and, just before she could blab, you shot her.”

“I said I want to know what Kerrie thinks.”

“She thinks what I think! Only she won't admit it to me or to herself. There's one part of her that still believes you're a right guy. And all the time she's taking your rap! Don't you feel proud of yourself?”

Beau drew a deep breath. “Get out of here.”

Vi glared back at him.

Beau began to stalk towards her, and she screeched and retreated completely behind the rampart of the Sergeant's body.

“Take it easy, son,” rumbled Velie.

“I said scram.”

“You can't make me!”

“I said scrambo, you forked-tongued copperhead!”

“Kerrie needs me!”

“The way she needs a hole in the head. Are you going to get out of here, or do I have to throw you out?”

He was addressing her over the Sergeant's shoulder now, in a low and clear voice, completely blind to the mountain of flesh between them.

“Leave
you
with her?” shrilled Vi hysterically. “So that you can murder her, too?”

“If you were a man,” grunted Beau, “I'd just about break your neck for that.”

“Lay off, I said,” said Velie, and he grabbed Beau's arm.

They all turned at a clicking sound.

Kerrie was in the bedroom doorway—in her thin nightgown, her hair tumbled about her face, her face as white as the wall.

Beau's neck turned red. He started to say something. But Kerrie stepped back and slammed the bedroom door. Vi cried out and ran after her. The door slammed again.

Beau started after them.

Sergeant Velie was quicker. He set his broad shoulders against the door. “You'd better take a powder yourself, Beau,” he said mildly.

“I've
got
to talk to Kerrie! I can't let her think—”

“Isn't she in a tough enough spot without you making it tougher? Go on home and get some shut-eye. You'll feel better in the afternoon.”

“But I have to tell her—who I
am,
Velie! I've got to come clean about this name business—I've got to clear that crazy idea of hers up—that I'm trying to frame her for a murder she thinks I pulled off—”

“It's certainly going to convince her,” said Sergeant Velie dryly, “when she hears you've been hidin' under an alias ever since she knows you. That under a phony handle you upped and married her—”

At the word “married” Beau swallowed and stepped back, as if the Sergeant had tried to take a poke at him.

He turned and shambled out without another word.

XVII.
Mr. Rummell Becomes Himself Again

When Beau plodded into his apartment he pulled off all his clothes, set the alarm of his ninety-eight cent clock, and threw himself onto the bed.

The alarm went off before noon. He opened his eyes with a groan.

“Sure feels like a hangover,” he muttered. “Only worse.”

He crawled out of bed, danced under a cold shower, shaved, dressed, and went out.

On the corner he stopped in at a cigar store for two packs of cigarets and a nutted chocolate bar. Munching he chocolate, he headed for the subway.

KERRIE awoke from an exhausted sleep just before nine. Vi was tossing and snoring on the other bed.

Kerrie crept out of bed and peeped into the sitting room. Sergeant Velie was gone, but another detective was reading the morning paper in the armchair. When he saw her he quickly hid the headlines. She shivered and closed the door.

When Vi awoke it was noon and Kerrie was fully dressed, seated at one of the bedroom windows staring out into the court, her hands in her lap.

Vi said something, but Kerrie did not reply. The blonde girl yawned, and then made a face, and then joined Kerrie at the window.

“Kerrie!”

Kerrie looked up, surprised. “Oh, you're up. What?”

“Don't you see those rubbernecks?”

“What?”

The windows facing their side of the court were densely peopled. Women, men, at least two staring children; and in one window an enterprising reporter was shouting questions across the court as he leaned perilously out.

“I didn't see them,” said Kerrie indifferently.

Vi yanked down the shade; and after a moment, as if she were just conscious of the reporter's shouts, Kerrie closed the window, too.

It was a curiously peaceful day. Occasionally the door from the sitting room to the corridor opened and slammed as a detective came in. Men were coming in and out all day. There was some activity in 1726, too; Vi peeped from the window and could see men bustling about in there.

But no one entered the bedroom except a detective; and he came in only because Vi, after trying vainly to rouse the telephone operator, complained that they were starving.

“Okay,” said the detective. “Why didn't you ask before?”

“Ask!”

“No tickee, no washee.” He went out.

“They've cut the line,” said Vi in a scared voice.

Kerrie said nothing.

Fifteen minutes later the detective wheeled a table in which was laden with food. He went out immediately.

“Come on, hon. We may as well stoke up.”

“Yes,” said Kerrie.

She sat down at the table and toyed with a slice of toast. She looked calm enough; only a certain air of abstraction, a deepening of the two lines from her nostrils to the corners of her mouth, pointed to anything unusual inside her.

Vi saw it and said in a small voice: “Kerrie dear, you've simply got to eat. You haven't eaten—”

“I'm not hungry, Vi.”

Kerrie went back to the window.

Vi sighed. She finished her breakfast and, after hesitating, Kerrie's, too. She took a bath, borrowed fresh underwear and stockings from Kerrie, dressed, and then the two of them sat still, without conversation, all the long afternoon.

BY nine o'clock in the evening Vi was ready to scream. Any noise—a cough, a cry, sobbing—would have been relief. But Kerrie just sat with her hands folded in her lap like some female Buddha carved from stone.

And then there was a commotion outside, the noise of many voices, at least one scuffle. Vi jumped up. Even Kerrie turned her head.

The bedroom door opened and Sergeant Velie, accompanied by several strange men, stood there. The Sergeant was carrying a folded paper.

Kerrie rose, pale.

“I've got a warrant here,” said the Sergeant in a flat voice, “for the arrest of Kerrie Shawn. Miss Shawn, will you get ready?”