Wolf in Man's Clothing (19 page)

The flaw was his wound; nobody in his right mind would have come so near killing himself, when he could (with exactly the same effect) wound himself less dangerously and less painfully. And I still didn't believe Craig had killed his father—
but Drue was afraid he had, because she believed Craig had a motive.
I saw that, then; she believed that Conrad had shot Craig, so Craig's motive might be self-defense, or it might be a long-standing jealousy between the two men over Alexia!

When I reached that point, I got up and put on my cape. I had to get outdoors. I had to reach some sensible conclusion about that box and Drue and Craig.

In the hall, as I was starting for a walk, I met Anna. She had an enormous black eye, a perfect mass of black and green and purple bruises. I stared and she said quickly, “I ran into a door, Miss.”

“Really, Anna. Dear me.”

“Yes, Miss.”

Of course one does encounter a door sometimes. It doesn't make a round mark, however; and there is almost always a sharp red line on the eyebrow made by the edge of the door. I said, “You're sure you didn't see anyone in the meadow last night?”

“Yes, Miss. That is, no. I didn't see anyone but you.”

Certainly I hadn't given her a black eye. But I couldn't think of anyone who might have done it, either. With the possible exception of Delphine who was of a jaundiced enough nature but much more likely to scratch. However, I persisted. “I thought you might have seen someone in the meadow. Someone you were afraid to tell the police about.”

But she didn't blush or show any change of expression; she just stood there neat and respectable in her long black uniform and white apron and cap. “No, Miss,” she said stolidly.

But Nugent had been sufficiently impressed by my story of the shooting to question Anna. For she added unexpectedly, “The Lieutenant says it must have been someone hunting—last night, you know. Someone from the town, perhaps. He searched the house and he says the only guns in the house that anyone knows about belonged to Mr. Brent. A revolver,” she said flatly, “which the police took from Miss Drue's room yesterday. And a shotgun which hasn't been fired for a long time. They said they could tell. So you see, Miss, I—I was right.”

“I see, Anna.” Her eye looked terribly painful. “Try alternate hot and cold packs for your eye,” I told her and went for a walk.

I had walked along the driveway down to the public road, meeting no one, deep in thought of Drue and the little medicine box, before it occurred to me that if I had been the possible if extremely unwilling target for gunshots the previous evening, I might well be again. This time perhaps more successfully from the hunter's point of view. It was getting on toward dusk again and the February landscape was very quiet and deserted, but there were plenty of little thickets of brush and evergreens, to say nothing of the opportunities for concealment offered by the walls and hedges. So I turned back, but before I had gone more than a dozen steps, Peter Huber came along in a long and very handsome gray coupe and stopped. He'd been to the inquest, he said, leaning bareheaded from the car. “Is everything all right at the house?”

I told him yes, and that Alexia was staying with Craig while I took a rest.

“Good,” he said cheerfully. “How about a little ride? I'll tell you, we'll drive back to the village and get a drink. Hop in.”

It suited me perfectly, for I wanted to hear about the inquest. So I got in beside him, looking with rather stunned admiration at the inconceivably luxurious car. It didn't have platinum handles and diamonds set in the wheel, but it had everything else. He saw me looking at it.

“A beauty, isn't it?” he said, backing expertly and swiftly so as to head the long gray hood toward the village. “My means don't run to cars like this, though. It's Alexia's.”

His voice didn't caress her name in loverly fashion, certainly; but then there was no reason why it should, even if, as Craig had hinted, he was actually rather infatuated with her. Craig hadn't said how he knew, but then one can usually tell these things about people one knows very well, without words and without definite proof; it's something in the eyes, something in the air. But it occurred to me that if Peter intended to wait, discreetly, until he could press his suit with propriety, then he was reckoning without Alexia's singular directness.

In any case, whether or not there was anything in what Craig had told me, certainly both Peter Huber and myself, chance wayfarers, really, in the Brent house, were yet inexorably and inextricably bound up with the things that had happened there.

I sighed a little at that thought and he glanced at me.

“Tired? They've kept you going. I don't suppose you've really rested since Conrad died. Well, since before that really. What with Craig sick and all the goings on before Conrad died.”

“There weren't … Oh, you mean the bump on the door and seeing Nicky?”

“
Seeing …
” The car swerved toward the stone wall at the edge of the road, jerked back to the middle, and Peter said, “What do you mean? Was it Nicky you saw in the hall when you opened the door?”

“No, no. I didn't see anybody. I opened the door after there was that—well, bump against it. But not right away. So whoever went past the door, carrying Heaven knows what, was out of sight by that time. It was earlier when I saw Nicky. And he wasn't doing anything, really. Just coming out of some room along the hall.”

“Oh,” said Peter. “I thought the way you spoke you had seen Nicky in the hall.”

“No, no! Not then.” Nicky! If he'd hurried, the night before, taking a short cut through the meadow to the house, he might possibly have arrived before me. In any case I made it clear. “I didn't see Nicky then. It was earlier.” Suddenly I remembered Conrad's white starched shirt front and black tie. “Nicky must have changed after dinner again. Unless he didn't change for dinner. Do you remember?”

“Do I—oh, I see what you mean.” He frowned, seemed to think back and said, “Why, yes! He wore a dinner jacket at dinner that night. So did Conrad; he always did. I changed, too. But I believe—yes, you're right. It must have been my room you saw Nicky come from; he'd been in to get a book I was reading. And I remember now, he had changed back to, I think, tweeds; a brown checked coat, anyway. But I …” He drove in silence for a moment, watching the road ahead. “I thought nothing of it then. And I don't see now that it makes any difference.”

“Well,” I said, “I don't either.”

We had already topped the ridge where I stood the previous night; now we turned into the main traveled road. We could see the village ahead, very snug and peaceful and rather distant in the gentle dusk. And then all at once, neither of us speaking, we were there. The little main street lengthened, the white houses attained sudden height, and we turned and parked along a street of small, low-roofed shops, in front of a small haberdashery, in fact, and a clerk lounging in the doorway recognized Peter and spoke to him. “Evening, Mr. Huber.”

“Hello.”

“Hear there was an inquest this afternoon.” The man's eyes were curious.

“Yes,” said Peter shortly and helped me out.

“H'm,” said the clerk and, as Peter offered no comment but steered me along the sidewalk in the direction of the inn (a long, sprawled, white building with the sign Coach Inn, 1782, hanging above its door), the clerk called after us, “You look fine, Mr. Huber. Glad the things fit.”

“Oh, thanks,” said Peter. “Yes, they were all right.”

“I'll never forget what you looked like when you came to the store that morning,” added the clerk with a chuckle that carried clearly through the winter twilight and silence of the little street.

Peter grinned back at the chatty (and curious) clerk and we crossed the narrow white porch of the inn.

It was a hospitable and warm old tavern. We went along a dark passage so narrow that my cape brushed the walls and entered the tap room, all smoke-stained rafters and age. Aside from nearly braining myself on a low rafter, I reached a table without misadventure and looked around me. Except for the bartender, no one else was there—or at least I could see no one, although the high-backed settles along the side walls cut off my view of one corner of the room.

Beside the bar was the kind of machine where one drops in nickels (or dimes or quarters, if one is really just a gambler at heart) and takes what comes, if anything. With this machine it had to be nickels. It was very quiet; I had had a kind of expectation of some kind of repercussion from the inquest, but if the police or Soper were still in town, I saw and heard nothing of them then.

The bartender knew Peter, too. He came forward, wiping his hands.

“Hello, Mr. Huber.”

“Hello, John. I guess we'll have a—what do you want, Miss Keate?”

I took ginger ale. Peter ordered whisky and soda. And suddenly the bartender chuckled much as the haberdashery clerk had chuckled. “You certainly look different, Mr. Huber,” he said. “Ever find your baggage?”

“No,” said Peter. “Guess it's gone forever.”

“Too bad. You looked as if you'd been shipwrecked,” the bartender laughed.

“Felt like it, too,” said Peter. He unbuttoned his short leather jacket, untied the white scarf around his throat and said, “Anybody been in here from the inquest, John?”

The bartender's face sobered instantly. “That's a bad business, Mr. Huber,” he said. “First murder in Balifold since—well, I can't remember another and I've been here a long time. Ginger ale for you, Miss? And whisky and soda.” He ambled away.

Peter leaned his chin gloomily in his hands. “I lost my baggage,” he said ruefully. “I arrived here in what amounted to fancy dress. The natives can't forget it. They all but burst into hysterics whenever they see me.”

If he was trying to divert me, he didn't succeed.

“You were at the inquest, then,” I said. “What happened?”

“Nothing, really,” he said, staring at the bare table and biting his knuckles. “They didn't intend anything to happen, I suppose. It was a formality. Dr. Chivery was there; he and the police doctor both testified as to what they had found. The police testified, too—that is, Nugent and one of the troopers. Then they had the lawyer that had drawn up Brent's will tell something of its contents. I suppose that was only to show that Brent was a rich man and that there might have been a motive for his murder.”

“Was that all?”

“That was all. Or about all. They adjourned then.”

“Then they said nothing of—of Drue?”

He shook his head, rubbed his hands across his thick, curly blond hair and then put them flat on the table. “Not a word. And Soper can't ask for a Grand Jury indictment until after the inquest reconvenes and delivers a verdict. Or so they tell me. So Drue is safe till then. They had to hold an inquest in order to give the police a kind of ticket to go ahead. Soper can go back now to the county seat or wherever his office is. And Nugent stays here and goes on with the investigation, calling on Soper whenever he needs him. The inquest can't be concluded, I understood, until they have more evidence. There couldn't be a verdict, but they made no bones of calling it murder.”

The bartender ambled toward us and set our glasses on the table. Peter cupped his hand around his own with a welcoming sigh. “Alexia wanted me to go and hear what was said, so I went. She didn't want to go herself.” He took a long drink, put down his glass and said unexpectedly, “He had really a lot of money. Conrad, I mean. And it won't come to Drue, so that ought to help out your little friend. I mean, she hadn't money for a motive.”

He looked very gloomy. I said, a little gloomily myself, “Unless they think she hoped to remarry Craig and thus get money. That is, if Craig does inherit.”

“Oh, yes, he inherits. Conrad wouldn't have cut him off; Conrad was strong on family, you know. A little cracked really on the subject. Had all kinds of grandiose ideas.”

“Yes, I know,” I said dryly, remembering what Conrad had said of Drue. “Anybody's wife, yes,” said Conrad, “but not
my
son's.” I added, “He seems to have felt that Alexia fitted into his family particularly well.”

Peter glanced quickly at me, and I felt the way you do when you've said something that sounds more disagreeable than you meant it, and a man gives you that look of “So-it's-true-about-women-and-cats.” He said slowly, “Perhaps he married her because Craig had as good as jilted her. The honor of the family—all that.”

“Nonsense,” I said. “He was in love with her; he …” I hesitated and then went rashly on, “Perhaps he'd been in love with her, really, without knowing it, for a long time. But that doesn't matter, anyway, and it's nothing to me.”

“Nor to me,” said Peter, and added thoughtfully, “But there's Mrs. Chivery. An extremely handsome and brilliant woman. I should have thought somebody like—well, like Mrs. Chivery, would have attracted Conrad.”

“Mrs. Chivery!”

“Oh, I didn't mean anything,” he said hurriedly. “It's only that she's very—well, attractive, you know.”

I stared at him. He had a pleasant face; his calm blue eyes were well spaced above high, rather sharp cheekbones; his blunt chin and his wide mouth and thick blond eyebrows suggested a certain uncompromising strength. He was no Adonis, certainly, but he was not bad-looking, either. And I was visited by a more or less fantastic idea. Perhaps it was Maud he'd fallen in love with and not Alexia, so Craig was right in guessing his emotional temperature, so to speak, but wrong in his diagnosis of its cause. True, Maud was at least twenty to twenty-five years older than he, but what with all the liberties playwrights and scientists are taking with time these days, that might not make so much difference. Time might be actually a sheer question of relativity; and I might be skipping rope again at any moment. Which was a fairly blood-curdling thought and shocked me back into a semblance of common sense.