The Glass Slipper (14 page)

“Oh yes. The poison found in Crystal’s body and in Julie’s. None of those drugs is harmful except in excess. As you know. But I had access to them too; and Andy. And you yourself, Rue.”

She leaned forward again, anxiously.

“Brule, there’s something that’s worried me. I’m afraid the police have found it. Yet if they have I don’t see what’s keeping them from arresting me at once. I —”

“Arresting you!” He got quickly to his feet and came to stand beside her. “What on earth do you mean?”

“My — I had a lot of medicines. In a little bag. Left over from nursing — you know how a nurse gradually acquires a lot of medicine.”

“Where is it?”

“I don’t know. I brought it here — in a trunk, I think, along with my other things. It may be in my room; I can’t think where else it would be. There are shelves and drawers in the dressing room; it must have been placed there. Rachel might remember; she helped me unpack. But I’ve been — I haven’t wanted to ask her. And the police have closed the room. I’ve had to ask permission just to go in and get — clothes and things; a policeman watching me all the time. I couldn’t search for the bag.”

“What was in it?”

“I don’t remember exactly: a pretty complete supply, I suppose.”

“Nurses,” said Brule with a groan. “Good God, Rue, you never need medicine! You’re as healthy as a kitten.”

“I didn’t keep them for myself. You know how it is when you’re on private duty. How often something like that is needed and the doctor tells you to give it, and it’s a help not to have to send out —”

He interrupted her: “Oh, I know, I know. They all do it! The whole point is, was there morphine in your drug supply?”

“Yes, of course. I don’t know how much. I’d never had occasion to draw on my own supply; it had accumulated gradually. There couldn’t have been much.”

“But enough,” said Brule, “enough…” The look on his face frightened her. He saw that, too, and said quickly: “Well, when the room is opened we’ll have a look. If the police had found it they would have arrested you. Instantly. So almost certainly they didn’t. If someone else did — we’d find it… Look here, Rue.” He put his hand suddenly under her chin, lifting her face so he could look directly, deeply into it.

“Rue — it’s asking a lot, perhaps. It’s asking a — a little blindness and a lot of faith on your part. But will you — trust me? And do the things I’ve asked you to do?”

His hand cradled her chin softly. She had all at once, with breath-taking sharpness, a desire to turn her face, moving it softly against that hand. So her lips touched it.

The unexpectedness, the sheer craziness of the impulse gave her a queer kind of shock.

Trust him, he’d said. Do what he asked. But that meant accept Alicia’s presence and all that presence implied.

P
ride is a luxury of price.

She moved her face from the caressing cradle of his hand. She stood up and turned toward the door.

“I can’t do anything else,” she said clearly but, despite herself, not quite naturally, and went away.

But that night all the things he’d said haunted her. There were at least two things he had not mentioned, neither had the newspapers, in all their long and repetitious accounts, mentioned either of them. One was the matter of the telephone call which had taken Brule and the policeman out of the house that first night after Julie’s murder. It had been a false errand. Who did it, and what had been its purpose? Brule had said nothing of it. The police must know of it, since one of them had actually accompanied Brule. This provided, too, an alibi for Brule at the time she herself knew that that intruder had crept, so silently and so knowingly, into her room. If Brule had needed an alibi.

The other omission was, again, the matter of the stain on Julie’s hands.

Brule had talked of it once briefly and dismissed it. The police had apparently kept that detail (and how many others, she wondered, of which she knew nothing?) from the newspapers. There was never a word of it in any account she read. And it would have been the kind of thing that lent itself to headlines.

Had it been a stain? A dye? Some curious effect brought about, say, by a change of temperature or a result of the poison that had been given Julie? Yet in all Rue’s professional experience she had encountered no one drug and no combination of drugs that would have brought about just that curious and somewhat grisly effect.

Yet Brule did not seem to feel it of importance enough to consider at length. Or was it that he thought it was of so much importance that he wouldn’t talk of it? To them, at any rate?

If Alicia, Rue thought once in the silent, dark hours of the night, if Alicia had crept into her room and put the powder in the glass as a threat, then it wasn’t Alicia who had put in that telephone call whose only purpose, so far as they knew, was to call Brule away from the house. For Alicia was in the house at the time and couldn’t have made the telephone call. Or wait — could she? There was an outside telephone in the kitchen, on a different line than the house telephone, a convenience for household ordering and for the servants. She pursued that thought for a moment and then rejected it; for Alicia to go to the kitchen, downstairs and through halls, escape the policeman on guard and make the telephone call would have been far more difficult than simply to enter Rue’s room without going to the elaborate precautions of getting Brule and the policeman (and Kendal, but that was unimportant) out of the house. And she thought, too (and tried not to think), of what Alicia had said of Rue’s marriage to Brule — and what Brule had not said.

It was the next day that Rue went to the hospital.

Another brooding, sullen day, with lights on in the narrow long house, and Madge as sullen as the day. Alicia had breakfast in her room — rather Madge’s room. Steven looked ill and scarcely spoke. Brule left early.

It was that morning, too, after Rue (without telling anyone what she planned to do) had ordered the car, that her own bedroom was at last opened. Police arrived early as usual; they had grown more accustomed, by that time, to the ubiquity of police. Even to the bouts of constant questioning which, so far, had taken no new turn.

Rue went immediately to the opened room. She stood for a moment at the threshold, thinking of Crystal and thinking of Julie. The room was in slight disorder; and it had evidently been searched minutely.

The stale odor of smoke struggled with the faint scent of roses. The soft pastel colors looked weary, somehow; in fact the whole room had an air of dreariness in spite of its luxury.

She went to the large cupboard-lined dressing room.

She was still searching when Rachel, neat and efficient in her crisp morning uniform, appeared in the doorway and asked if she could help.

Rue, standing on a footstool in order to search a shelf, sighed and got down.

“I’m looking for a small brown leather bag,” she said. “I think it was somewhere here — on a shelf perhaps. Have you seen it?”

Rachel hadn’t. Together they looked again, but the little bag, shabby from years of constant use, was not there.

Rachel vaguely remembered it.

“A small bag,” she said. “Yes, I remember. I unpacked it myself when I unpacked Madam’s trunks. I believe I placed it in a drawer. There were little boxes of medicines and some things that — looked like the doctor’s instruments in it.”

“Rachel,” said Rue on an impulse, “there’s something else that’s been lost. Perhaps someone has already questioned you.”

Rachel’s rather broad, dark face was blank.

“Yes, madam?” she said inquiringly. Rue took the plunge.

“When Mrs Hatterick — I mean —”

“The first Mrs Hatterick —”

“Yes. When she was ill we kept what we called charts — sheets of paper, printed forms, on which we wrote the progress of her illness — things like her temperature and the medicine that was given and —”

“Yes, madam.”

“You remember?”

“Yes, madam. They were kept on a little table by the door.”

“Exactly. Rachel, after she died and when the room was cleaned, do you know what happened to those charts?”

The blankness on Rachel’s face had intensified itself.

“No, madam,” she said instantly.

It was too prompt.

“You’ve — already been questioned about it?” said Rue slowly, watching the maid.

“Yes, madam. The police and Doctor Hatterick and also Doctor Crittenden questioned me. I know nothing of the chart.”

“But you — it was you who cleaned the room afterward.”

“Yes, madam. But I know nothing at all of the chart.”

She’s lying, thought Rue and attempted persuasion.

“No one would blame you, Rachel, if you had put them away someplace and forgotten them. Or — even if you know what happened to the charts but didn’t want to tell the police for fear of getting yourself in any way involved in this — this horrible thing. No one would blame you; you could still tell me.”

The very slight hesitation, the swift weighing of what Rue had said and the instant of choice, convinced Rue. For the maid’s eyes wavered, then fixed boldly and with determination upon Rue’s. She said:

“I know nothing of them, madam… Shall I clean the room now and prepare it for Madam?”

In the car Rue pondered over it.

Kendal had been waiting at the curb. Madge had been in the hall when Rue left, had noted her coat and hat and that the car was waiting, dark eyes observant.

Rue said to Gross: “I’ll be home shortly after noon. Not for lunch.”

“Yes, madam. If the police ask for you shall I tell them —”

Always the police! “Yes, certainly.”

A small car pulled away from the curb a few doors down the street and unobtrusively followed them.

She had taken one of the morning papers from the table in the hall. Kendal’s square shoulders were like a black wall in front. The streets were cold, the sky gray and heavy. A cold wind came off the lake.

She unrolled and glanced at the paper. Headlines, of course. A complete résumé of the inquest. Long columns of print, of necessity repetitious. Halfway down one column she found again her own story of the day of Julie’s death. And following it she read, for the first time, Gross’s and Andy’s and the maids’ stories of their own activities the day Julie was murdered. There was nothing significant: Gross and the maids had followed their usual routine. She read Andy’s statement; he had been at the office all morning except for a brief sick call at the hospital; he had lunched at a little restaurant on Michigan Boulevard, had made three sick calls at homes, had been in the hospital until four-thirty and had just returned to the office when he had Gross’s telephone call. He’d arrived at the Hatterick house just as Dr Hatterick had arrived; they had entered together. He had noticed nothing unusual about the body. (It was an oblique allusion to Julie’s hands, the first one Rue had seen.) There followed a statement about Crystal’s illness; a repetition of the statement Andy had already made to Miller and the rabbity little Funk that first night.

The night they’d gone to the opera together.

The night Andy had told her he loved her and had loved her for a long time. “I used to watch for you in the hospital,” he’d said. “Among all the white uniforms and white caps I always knew the little square set of your shoulders; the smooth knot of gold hair under your perky little cap.” It was as if he repeated it, word for word. He’d said other things too; and Andy was young and he loved her and she needed — oh, desperately needed that refuge and assurance.

She thought of him all the way to the hospital; through the crowded Loop, almost brutal in its suggestion of power, along the strip of narrow, unknown back streets. Andy was loyal; Andy loved her; with him at least there would be no more heartache, no more Alicia.

The hospital when they reached it looked enormous, dotted with lights, looming stark and huge against the lowering gray sky. Great bluish windows on the fourth floor told her they were operating that morning. Who, she wondered automatically, was working there?

She had told no one that she was going to the hospital.

It had been an overnight decision. Somewhere in the record of Julie’s last day of life lay the secret of her death.

Rue’s mind touched again that curious story told by the bartender; curious because
if someone had been with Julie
it would not have been curious.

Well, she would see the girls — nurses who knew them both so well. Tight-lipped from training and habit, reserving their cool, pregnant opinions, they would not, any of them, have been inclined to talk much to the police. Even if they had known anything.

Something about Elizabeth Donney had perhaps suggested that trip — some intangible girding of herself against the questions hurled at her; that and the friendliness in the nod she’d given Rue.

But when she reached the hospital it was a little grim and forbidding.

The doorman didn’t remember her. The girl at the desk was new. The smell of ether and antiseptics struck her now-unaccustomed senses like a blow; once she’d loved it. As she had loved the subdued hustle and bustle; the sense of important things being done; the dim long halls; the lights, the flutter of the nurses’ white uniforms. She made her way at last to the nurses’ dormitory. Elizabeth Donney was on duty. But three nurses of her own graduating class were not on duty; they would tell Elizabeth that Rue had asked for her; they were anxious to talk; they exclaimed, too, over Rue, hailing her back to the fold. There was (which was a tribute to Rue) a kind of extra flippancy and matter-of-fact acceptance of her, as if they wanted to show her that her marriage to the supreme emperor of their world would raise no barrier that their mutual respect and affection could not pass.

And they talked of Julie; soberly, trying not to show the sorrow they felt. The trouble was they knew nothing; Julie by some miracle of secrecy had even kept the fact of the police inquiry from them; they hadn’t known Julie had intended to see Rue, much less why.

Rue went away at last; pausing to look through the open door of a room she’d once lived in, the small, clean room with its two white beds, its small dressing table scrupulously divided in halves; even the little row of stockings washed and drying above the radiator was all poignantly familiar to her. The singular thing was, it aroused no nostalgia and it no longer seemed like home.

It was as she went away that she met Andy.

He stopped short.

“Rue! What on earth are you doing here? Is Brule with you?”

And when she said no, he insisted on her going to lunch with him.

“I’m ready to go back to the office,” he said. “Did Kendal bring you? Dismiss him and I’ll take you home in my car after lunch. I’ve got to talk to you, Rue.”

Why not? thought Rue, and went.

His car was parked in the doctors’ parking lot near the hospital; they walked along the street, Rue conscious of the red brick wall of the hospital beside her as if it had been a living thing. How many years had she lived under its influence!

Andy placed her in the seat beside him. He smiled at her as he took the wheel.

“How I’ve wanted to have you just there,” he said and put his hand on her own, “all wrapped in your furs with your little hat on one side so I can see your lovely hair and your eyes — Rue, did anybody ever tell you that your eyes really are exactly like stars? Except they’re blue.”

“No one,” said Rue. “You’ve an Irish tongue, Andy.”

But it warmed her, nevertheless. Except… She glanced at Andy’s profile as he turned into the traffic. Handsome, regular, boyish; queer, thought Rue, how much better she liked Andy when she was away from him.

If the police car followed them, as it must have done, Rue did not know, for she didn’t look for it.

They lunched at the Blackstone, in the old, mellowed room overlooking the lake with the flow of traffic directly below their window and the lake stretching away in cold gray to meet an equally cold gray sky.

Crimson-shaded lamps were on the tables, and flowers. Andy was anxious about the lunch, ordering with care, everything was to be just so, he explained to the waiter. And, as it always is, his anxiety for perfection was a subtle compliment to Rue.

In the balcony the Blackstone Ensemble, muted, all strings and piano, played softly. Andy pushed aside silver and plate and leaned across the table and smiled.

“Nice,” he said, “isn’t it? When have I had you alone! Oh, darling, I’ve been starving for you.”

Rue looked at him with a little dismay; she was inexpressibly grateful for him, but she was unused to speaking in fervencies.

“Starving for lunch, you mean.”

He looked wounded and covered it. And melon came, chilled exactly to suit Andy.

It was a safe, a comfortable world. Soft chatter from other tables, women in furs and smart hats with single, discreet rows of pearls at their throats; flowers and the exciting throb of traffic outside the window, and above it all, weaving it into a harmonious, colorful tapestry, the music of violins and piano.