Wolf in Man's Clothing (23 page)

Craig made a quick motion forward as if to expostulate, and I said hurriedly, “I can't let you question my patient very long, Lieutenant.” And put my hand on Craig's wrist. Not, again, to defend Craig but merely because it was my obvious duty. His pulse seemed steady enough, however. And Nugent said,

“All right. Just a few more questions. The night your father died, Brent, you were found in the linen room. How did you get there?”

“I told you everything I knew about that.”

“You said someone struck you. Who?”

“I don't know. I've told you. I didn't know anyone was near me.”

“You say you were in the hall, starting downstairs, your back to the corridor. How did you get into the linen room where your wife—I mean Miss Cable—found you?”

“I don't know. That's the truth. You've no case against me.”

Nugent looked at him slowly. “I'm not saying I have,” he said. “But where there's murder, there's motive. And everybody knows that you and Mrs. Brent …”

“Can't we leave Mrs. Brent out of this?”

“Not very well,” said Nugent. But after a moment's thoughtful silence he said no more of Alexia and went on instead to Conrad Brent's will, asking Craig if he knew its main provisions. Craig said he did. “My father told me.

“How did he make his money?”

Craig glanced at the Lieutenant with a little surprise. “It's no secret. He inherited from his father, quite a lot; I don't know how much. He invested it—oh, a long time ago. Before I was born. Anyway, everything he touched prospered. In the summer of 1929 he sold; everything was almost at its peak. Since then he's done very little buying or selling of stocks.”

“He was a very rich man.”

“Yes,” said Craig, “he was. That is, it wasn't anything fantastic. But more than enough.”

Nugent, hard and sinuous as a whip in his trim uniform, leaned over the railing at the foot of the bed. Lights touched his narrow high cheekbones and reflected in small points in his gray green eyes. “Brent, there was a queer codicil to your father's will. I mean, he'd lived in America all his life …”

“Oh, that,” said Craig abruptly. “You mean he wanted to be buried in Germany. At Stuttgart. Yes, I know. It was an odd notion of his. When it struck him years ago, he had it written into his will; then, after his recent marriage, when his new will was written I suppose that was just carried over. I am sure that he'd changed his mind about it.”

“Why did he want it, in the first place?”

“You'd have to understand and know my father to understand that,” said Craig slowly. “I'll try to explain. He once had a kind of hobby for family; he dug into his genealogy, oh, away back when. Unearthed a single direct line, and clung to it. Got hold of the coat of arms, all possible records and history, everything. He was of German descent; although I think his father came to America and made his fortune sometime before the Civil War. My father had time on his hands; the study of genealogy interested him.”

“A hobby,” said Nugent. “I see. He didn't take it too seriously, did he?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, did he consider going back to Germany to live, for instance?” said Nugent.

“Good God, no,” said Craig. “He was a little hipped about family, that was all. He thought a lot about pure Nordic blood …”

“Approved of some of Hitler's ideas, in other words?”

“
No
! It was only at the beginning of the Hitler regime that he was rather taken with some of the ideology it claimed—resurrecting the old Teutonic family life, improving the race, keeping family blood pure, that kind of thing. But he got over that right away. There was nobody more loyal to America than my father. I'm sure of that. He much regretted that he'd been even briefly taken in by anything Hitler claimed.”

“I see,” said Nugent. “Forgive me, Brent, but he did disapprove of your marriage, didn't he?”

“He thought we hadn't known each other long enough. That was all.”

“Oh,” said Nugent. “I had an idea that you had rather quarreled with him about your marriage. I mean when you married a girl he didn't think was good enough to marry into his family.”

“That,” said Craig dangerously, “is enough of that. As a matter of fact, Miss Cable was too good for me and the Brent family. If that is all, Lieutenant …”

“No, it isn't,” said Nugent. “It's this way, Brent. Soper thinks the girl—your former wife—did it. I'm not sure. Until something clinching and material turns up I'd like to hold off an arrest. And I've tried to give her a fair break. But she's not telling everything she knows.”

“Well?” said Craig, still with a dangerous look in his face.

“For one thing, she disclaims having taken the missing box of medicine. Yet her fingerprints were on the drawer of the desk where the medicine was kept; they were on the wooden handle and the panel across the front. She wouldn't explain how they got there.”

My heart sunk, quite literally and heavily down toward my white oxfords; yet I'd been afraid of it. Craig said evenly, “That doesn't prove anything.”

“And she got past my man late this afternoon and went outdoors. He …” Nugent stopped there and left us to conjecture what had happened to the trooper on guard in consequence. “It won't happen again,” he said briefly. “But she was out of the house at the time Chivery was killed.”

“A woman couldn't have killed him! Like that,” said Craig.

“Mrs. Brent told us Drue Cable had been out of the house,” said Nugent slowly, and looked at the ugly things that still lay there on the towel—the bright, sharp paring knife, the yellow glove.

And abruptly then, after a few more questions about Claud Chivery, they went away. As they left, Craig asked a question.

“Oh, by the way, Nugent …”

The Lieutenant turned. “Yes …?”

“Did you find only one glove?”

For an instant something very deep and intent stirred again away back in Lieutenant Nugent's green gray eyes. “Only one. See you in the morning, Brent. The District Attorney may be here then, too. I'm leaving a man in the house tonight.”

They went away then, rolling up the towel and taking it and the things inside it along with them.

Craig lay in silence, his eyes closed, after their departure. And I can't say that I felt exactly chipper and talkative myself.

And presently Beevens came; he'd stay with Mr. Brent he said, while I got some rest. “And the Lieutenant spoke to the trooper on guard in the hall. I heard him, Miss. He's to let you enter and leave your room whenever you wish to.”

“They're still holding Miss Cable, then,” said Craig.

“Yes, sir. I'm afraid they are. Is there anything about medicine, Miss?”

I told him there wasn't and went away quickly; there were things I had to do, for somehow, now, everything was different.

It was an ugly difference too, something in the air, in the stillness of the house, in the shadows in the corners and around the stairwell. In our meeting eyes.

There was no possibility of evasion this time; no way to deceive ourselves, no glossing of the grim and terrifying truth. Murder had been in that house, murder on the black and silent meadow. A thing that struck swiftly, out of nowhere and might strike again as swiftly, as silently.

An opened door, with the room unlighted beyond it, was a threat.

Well, I hurried along the corridor. The trooper, the same one who had stopped me earlier in the evening, let me enter my room, this time without a word. But I didn't go straight on to Drue's room, for the first thing I had to do was write a letter to the police.

I didn't really think I had done any harm or obstructed their inquiry in the least by hiding the hypodermic syringe. But I also felt a responsibility about it, to say nothing of the empty medicine box. So light in my hand when I weighed it and looked at it, so heavy on my heart. Perhaps now that Claud Chivery was dead Drue would tell me what she knew of it.

But just now I had to write my letter.

Since the shooting episode, not unnaturally perhaps, I had felt a remarkably unpleasant sense of personal danger. This was now very much stronger. I had seen Claud Chivery with his throat cut, huddled like an empty sack. The only motive for murder so far attributable was that he'd known something that was a danger to the murderer of Conrad Brent, or to whoever it was that shot Craig. And I, accursed with the Keate nose and a mentality that would have startled and delighted any psychiatrist, was simply reeking with clues. I had been led astray by my affections and softening of the brain; it was impossible to avoid the conclusion that if I didn't end as Claud Chivery had ended I'd be lucky.

True, I was none the wiser for any of my clues, if clues they were, for I didn't know who had murdered Conrad or Claud. But still there they were, and suppose something happened to me. Not that I intended to let anything happen to me; but I did want a clear—or fairly clear conscience. Just in case.

And it was equally conceivable that the little I knew might later, in some way, clear Drue or another innocent person, rather than convict anyone.

So I wrote it quickly, a bare statement of facts about the hypodermic—
not the medicine box,
for that was still Drue's secret—put it in an envelope, and, as I didn't know what else to do with it, I pinned that too to the under side of my uniform, just below a pocket so it didn't show, and patted it down flat. Although, as to that, mine is not exactly the kind of figure which reveals an extra bulge or two.

Even then, however, I didn't go to Drue. I had nothing to tell her, nothing at all to offer that would give her support, except my affection for her and she knew she had that.

Besides, I'd have had to ask her again about the medicine box.

But I was beginning to be thankful for the trooper on guard at her door. Whatever the intention was, the result must be a degree of safety for Drue. After that twilight moment or two down in the meadow, a queer and horrible
unsafeness
was everywhere in that house, among the shadows of driveway and garden, across the stretch of lawns, around every corner. Even the encircling, shadowy hills seemed to know it and wait and watch.

I went first in search of Anna's room. The narrow hall that crossed the main corridor near the stairway led to the back of the house and I turned into it, passed the entrance to some rather steep back stairs, turned again and brought up in a wing that was obviously the servants' wing. I walked along, passing one or two open doors beyond which Anna obviously was not, and came to a closed one.

And just as I knocked someone inside the room spoke. It was a murmur, further muffled by my knock, but it sounded masculine. And it stopped abruptly at the sound of my knuckles on the door.

But it was Anna's room; for, after a longish pause, I knocked again and then Anna said quaveringly, “Is that you, Gertrude? I—I'm asleep.”

“It's Miss Keate. I want to see you.”

There was another sudden silence on the other side of the door. This time however there was a quality of consternation about it. Anna was not the type for tender dalliance; I didn't even think of that. But I didn't imagine the consternation either for it was plain in Anna's voice when she said suddenly, almost at the keyhole, breathlessly, “I—I'm all right now. I'm not upset any more.”

And when I insisted, she just kept repeating it, “I'm all right. Thank you, Nurse. There's nothing wrong—nothing wrong …” with her voice growing thinner and more frightened at every word. It was exactly as if whoever was there with her, and had stopped talking when I knocked, was standing beside her holding a club over her head.

But it wasn't really till sometime the next morning that they found the other yellow glove, bloodstained and stiff, hidden under the mattress in Anna's room. And by that time it was impossible to question her.

W
ELL, LUCKILY IN A
way, I didn't yet know about that. And I couldn't break down the door to Anna's room and I couldn't see through hard pine.

I said, “Open the door, Anna. Beevens said you were ill. I'd like to get some medicine for you.”

“Thank you, Miss Keate. No, I'm all right now.” There was another slight pause, and she added, “I don't need medicine, thank you. I don't need anything.”

So in the end I was obliged to retire to the end of the hall, loudly, and return on tiptoe to the open door of a room opposite Anna's. But after five minutes no one had emerged and there was no further sound of a (possibly) masculine voice from behind the closed door on which my eyes were glued. I was eyeing the keyhole thoughtfully and, indeed, had tiptoed nearer and was bending over (merely to see if a key was in it; as there was) when I heard footsteps behind me and straightened and whirled around and it was Beevens.

Who said “Ah” and coughed, giving me a chance to pull myself together. Not that I needed it; I said “Yes, Beevens?” as calmly as if keyhole investigation were my everyday and normal activity.

“Dear, dear, dear,” observed Beevens, and again coughed and choked and choked and coughed so wildly that I saw that he was agitatedly concerned with something else and possibly had scarcely noted my posture and pursuit. His eyes were bulging and his throat palpitated like a fish's gills, quite noticeably, above the little white wings of his collar.

Craig wanted me—at once, quickly, he said.

Not even by a look did he question my presence just where I was and where I had no business to be. There was silence in Anna's room. So I followed Beevens back to Craig's room and Craig was waiting impatiently, watching the door, harassing the folds of blanket and coverlet across him with nervous fingers.

“There you are,” he said. “Come in. That's all, Beevens. Shut the door.”