The Wrong Way Down (19 page)

Gamadge dumped what he carried on the bare mattress of the four-post bed. The cleaning woman came out of the space behind it and saw him. She said: “I'm going to clean up the bathroom now, and then I'll be ready to pack. Those going in?”

“If you can get them in.” Gamadge was wandering about, hands in pockets. He opened the closet door. “Not much here; she was wearing her coat when she fell.”

“Nice-dressed old lady.”

“I thought so too.” He took the laundry bundle out into the hall and rolled it down the stairs, following it when he heard the telephone.

He picked up the receiver. “Oh, hello, Limpeck.”

“Thought you might like the end of the story.”

“I would. Very nice of you to call up.”

“He came back home. Been kindly requested to stay there. Miss Vance has gone for a walk, she's got a very nice well-dressed cop trailing her. He's keeping up close, but she's just strolling along. I left your car in front of your house like you said.”

“Thanks very much.”

“They want me at the theatre when Miss Ashbury comes out.”

“Do they?”

“She might pay some calls too. I got them to send someone down to talk to the Smileys.”

“That's right.”

“How you coming, up there?”

“All right. Nobody's been here since last night, so far as I can make out.”

“What would they go there for?”

“I don't know.”

“Well, hope to meet you again.”

“Thanks.”

Gamadge went up to the top floor. Servants' rooms, a trunk room with empty trunks in it. He came down to the third floor, where he found a back and a front bedroom, nicely furnished, a bathroom and some linen cupboards. Nothing like a portable flat surface in any of them.

When he returned to the second story the cleaning woman was at work in the bathroom, which was between the two bedrooms on that floor, and windowless. He went into the front bedroom, a kind of bed-sitting-room with a broad, sofalike couch in it. He put on the light, and then stood staring down at something that stood against the baseboard behind the door.

There it was, with its slender handle, its weighted shell-shaped base; he bent and picked it up by the fixed ring at the end of the twelve-inch stem, and swung it up and down in a murderous arc. He examined it closely; a fine old brass doorstop, eighteenth-century work, with an iron foot, and a smooth piece of iron clamped into the ornamental shell. The whole thing looked clean. The iron behind the brass was no rougher and no smoother than the pavement two stories below.

Why should it be in this room, which looked like a guest room? Gamadge opened and closed the door, and found that it had a loose latch. Easier to keep it shut with a doorstop than to have the latch replaced.

He put the portable flat surface back where he had found it, locked the windows, put out the light, and went back to look in on the cleaning woman. She was putting things into the drawers of the trunk; Miss Paxton's modest wardrobe was heaped on the bed. He went downstairs, picked up the laundry bundle, and turned. Iris Vance was standing in the doorway of the drawing room, looking at him.

Against the dusk behind her she had her ghostliest look; but presently she became less startling to Gamadge's eyes, a conventional figure enough in her dark-green suit and her neckpiece of reddish fur; a moderately pretty girl, as astonished by the sight of him as he was by the sight of her.

He asked: “How did you get in?”

“Jim lent me a key.”

“He had a key, had he?”

“His father gave him an old key to the house, in case…”

As she did not go on, Gamadge finished the sentence for her: “In case the young people had business here?”

“Well, they were in town. They might…” Again she stopped.

“Might decide to come and see Miss Paxton after all? Why did
you
come, Miss Vance?”

She glanced about her vaguely. “I didn't hear anybody. I thought the house was empty.”

“There's a cleaning woman upstairs. We're closing up, she and I. That's what I'm here for. What about you?”

“I came to look for that picture.”

“Picture?”

“The one you thought was stolen.”

Gamadge dropped the laundry bundle and straightened to gaze at her. “You think it's here after all?”

“I always thought Miss Paxton must have been mistaken about it. Mistaken this time, I mean—since she came.”

Gamadge turned this over in his mind. “You mean the proof impression had been taken out of the frame for some reason, taken out of the frame by Mr. Lawson Ashbury, and the letter proof substituted? Why?”

“I don't know why. Perhaps he might even have meant to have it framed properly; to give away.”

“Give away? To his son? To Mr. James Ashbury?”

“Anything makes more sense that the idea that it was stolen.”

Gamadge, his eyes fixed on her, was biting the side of his thumb. At last he said: “That future sister-in-law of yours has persuaded your young man that you did steal it? Is the engagement still on, Miss Vance?”

“Of course it is.”

“Why didn't they take you along and introduce you to Miss Ashbury's young man and his family, then?”

She turned away from him into the dark of the drawing room. “We weren't telling anybody about the engagement. You know that. We were waiting for Mr. Ashbury.”

“And Ashbury couldn't spend the afternoon with you because he had to pursue Mr. Bowles.”

She said, as if she hadn't heard him: “I did see the picture in one of those drawer things in the book closet; when I was a child.”

“Great heavens, a little candor at last!”

“I wondered if the other could be there now.”

“And what an idea that is.” Gamadge came past her into the room and switched on lights. “Will you credit me when I confess that I haven't looked myself? But miracles do occur.”

She came into the book-room after him. He put on the light, and tipped out cupboards. At the second one he paused and smiled. “Here we are.”

“You haven't looked.”

“I didn't look before. I'm looking now. You don't see it?”

“No. How can I?”

Gamadge gently drew the proof impression out by one corner. He held it up admiringly. “Beautiful. So clear and bright, so superior to the other one—that's the thing to say, you know, whether we see any difference or not.” He slid it back into place among the others, and turned to look at her. “Did you really dare hope that if you found it here they'd believe you?”

“Believe me?”

“Believe you didn't bring it back just now and put it there. It
could
have been rolled under your coat and you thought the house was empty. Don't you really know how I found it before I saw it properly?”

“You couldn't see it at all. There are too many others packed in.”

“Not packed in. Look again. Don't you see the edge—that it's been rolled?”

She bent to look, stared up at him.

“This copy's been rolled, as I rolled the other to bring it to your apartment last night. It's been out of the house.”

She stood with her back on the woodwork, her hands on the shelf below the books; her eyes on his.

“And I can tell you something else about it,” continued Gamadge. “It's been replaced since I glanced into these cupboards yesterday. Today I wasn't noticing—I shouldn't have seen it; but yesterday I should. Do you think Mr. Lawson Ashbury ever rolled this picture?”

She said nothing.

“But exactly when was it replaced? Between the time I went home yesterday and the time the murderer left here last night? After that the police were here until late. And after that—”

“After that,” she said, “we were watched.”

“Yes. From six to nine yesterday, or this afternoon; that's the choice of times.” Gamadge turned out the book-room light and came into the drawing room. “Evidence—it's dangerous sometimes, a two-edged sword. Be careful with it.”

Standing in the doorway of the book-room she looked at him desolately.

“You ought to have brought a witness along with you, you know,” said Gamadge. “Then you'd at least be clear for this afternoon. That well-dressed cop I hear you've trailing along with you—you might have brought him. But no, the last thing you'd do would be to use the police. What a mistake you're making.”

“You don't know anything about it.” She spoke almost angrily.

“But I'm allowed to guess. That's what I'm really here for—to guess, Miss Vance. I was even glad to help out with the closing up, but I was even better pleased to have a chance at reconstructing Miss Paxton's murder. Would it interest you—to listen to the reconstruction of a crime?”

S
HE CAME SLOWLY FORWARD
. Gamadge pushed a yellow satin chair up to the hearth.

“I suppose,” he said, “that this is your old friend.”

“Yes.” She touched its rounded back. “I remember it very well.”

She sat down in the yellow chair. Gamadge brought a little table across the room, placed it beside her, and looked about him. He got a hideous little Worcester dish from the top of a cabinet and laid it on the table.

“Never meant for ashes,” he said, “but we'll desecrate it. Smoke? No?” He got out matches and knelt at one end of the fireplace. “We'll see how much of an optimist I am. Miss Paxton didn't use the gas range in the kitchen, and she would never have asked them to turn the gas on for the sake of open fires; but Mr. James Ashbury may have sent instructions. He seems an openhanded kind of man; showed her consideration after her death—why not before?”

He turned a little wheel, and then applied a lighted match to the asbestos logs. Blue flames popped up and spread.

“Horrible things.” Gamadge stood up. “But useful in an emergency. The furnace is off, and we should soon have felt a chill.” He moved to her right, leaned his shoulders against the high mantel shelf, and looked down at her. “Not good manners to stand over you,” he said, “but this is going to be a kind of lecture. There's a moral in it; but need I state it?”

She sat back looking at the blue flames, her feet crossed and her hands on the arms of the yellow chair. “I suppose,” she said, “you mean I know who the murderer is. You mean I ought to have told.”

“And that if you had told, Mrs. Spiker might be a live woman at this moment, instead of a labeled corpse in the morgue, with half her face shot away?”

She said, her face expressionless, “I don't know anything.”

“You've got me quite wrong, Miss Vance; I'm not going to insult your intelligence with platitudes. My moral applies only to murderers.”

She glanced up at him and away.

“There are two ways down to murder,” continued Gamadge, lighting a cigarette. He dropped the match in the Worcester dish, and went on: “And one way is the safe way. Miss Paxton's murder was so well-planned and so brilliantly executed that it couldn't go really wrong; the murderer had a straight path down to victory. Safety down there, satisfaction and peace of mind—for somebody who could breathe the air and didn't mind the dark.

“But this murderer couldn't resist what looked like an amusing little detour, a tempting excursion into another and pettier sort of crime. But it wasn't a detour after all, it was a road through hazardous country to a very different place. And even now the murderer doesn't know it; thinks it was as safe as the other, and will end in that dark, peaceful cave.

“A chance in a million that Miss Paxton had ever noticed that pale old aquatint among all the other pictures on the wall; the murderer took the chance. It's the kind of thing,” said Gamadge reflectively, “that makes your flesh creep. It's as if Macbeth turned out Duncan's pockets first. No great tragedy here, of course, but a great intelligence at work, stooping to small larceny. Murder for profit, and a little extra on the side. Perhaps no more than a gesture of arrogance or contempt? Murderers can't afford them.

“What was the result of this one? Miss Paxton had to be killed that very night, so that she wouldn't talk to others about my theory of a substituted engraving; I had to be killed—I'm sure you know why—and when my murder didn't come off, Mrs. Spiker had to be killed before she could talk to me.

“But still the murderer thinks there's a straight safe road down to that infernal, quiet cave.”

Gamadge dropped ashes into the Worcester dish, and went on:

“Much has happened since I saw you last night, and you will already have gathered that I'd had enlightenment. But I could do with more, and you can supply it. Would you supply it if you could see these events, not from the personal angle, but from that of the humane being who has the build-up? People read something or they hear something, and it doesn't make a sharp impression; they say: ‘I don't want the gory details.' But it's the gory details that count; it's the gory details that drive peace-loving persons like me into action, against instinct; even against the instinct of—er—self-preservation.