Yellow Room (21 page)

“About the C.M.O.H., Tim,” he said. “Find out if the holder was registered there in New York at a hotel between these dates. It’s important. Probably one of the big places, but I’m not sure. And get a move on. We’ve had more trouble here.”

He gave the dates and Tim took them down. He had some trouble with the Congressional Medal of Honor, but finally understood. He had not finished, however.

“I located that suitcase here,” he said. “Initials M.D.B. Sounds all right, doesn’t it?”

“Sounds fine.”

“Railroad company won’t let it go. But they can get it opened, or a friend of mine there can. What are they to look for?”

“How the hell do I know?” Dane said irritably. “Papers, documents, photographs—you know as well as I do.”

“No panties?”

“No panties,” said Dane grimly. “And you’d better come back here as soon as you can. I need you.”

Dane rang off, confident that Bessie at least would be puzzled. He was not so sure about Floyd, nor indeed about the whole business. After all, Greg was not only a nation-wide hero, with his picture in all the papers. He was Carol’s brother, and Dane was not fooling himself any longer about Carol. Not that it was any use, he knew. This was a long war, in spite of the idiots who were betting it would soon be over. And Carol had waited for Don Richardson. He was not going to ask her to wait for him.

As for Greg he was puzzled. He could have come here by plane, killed the girl and got away. Nevertheless, there was the fact that he had come back, rather cheerfully than otherwise. Murderers did not return to the scene of their crimes, unless they were psychopathic. They got as far away as they could, and stayed there.

He was thoughtful when he called Alex, who came from his kitchen without removing the apron tied around his broad body.

“What about this grandson of the Wards?” he asked. “You say he hasn’t come home lately.”

“No, sir. They were expecting him a while ago, but he couldn’t get away. They’d planned some sort of party for him, but he had to go back to the Pacific. Old lady went to bed over it. Kinda hard on her.”

“That the one they call Terry?”

“Yeah. Not short for Terence. Mother’s name was Terry. He’s a flier in the Pacific. Good guy, by all accounts. Father and mother both dead. Lived with the old folks.”

As usual Dane ate his lunch outside. The weather had cleared, and a plane had ventured out, flying low. He ate at the corner of the porch, so that by turning his head he could see either the bay or the ridge of hills above him. He could see the skeleton of the burned house, a chimney of the gardener’s house at Rockhill, and above and beyond them all two or three abandoned summer properties.

He had driven or walked around most of them, with their neglected gardens and their blank closed windows. Now, returning to the X of his earlier equation, it occurred to him that someone could hide almost indefinitely in any of them. He did not admit even to himself that he preferred an unidentified criminal to Greg Spencer. It was merely a part of his system to explore all possibilities. He said nothing to Alex when he took his car that afternoon and drove around over the hill. Owing to the gasoline shortage, the roads back there were completely deserted, and the first two empty houses were closed so entirely that he gave them up after a brief examination. The third was different.

It was also closed, of course. It was almost buried in vegetation, and no tire marks showed on the ragged drive. But a winter shutter was loose, and underneath it in the soft ground he found a footprint or two. He took his automatic from a compartment in the car, and going back to the building managed to raise the window.

It creaked badly. He waited for a while; then, nothing happening, he put a leg over the sill and crawled inside.

The building, shut in as it was, was almost entirely dark. It smelled moldy and dank. But it also smelled faintly of tobacco smoke. It was not fresh. It might have been there for a week or more. Nevertheless, someone had been in the house recently, and might still be there.

The darkness bothered him. He had forgotten to bring a flashlight, and after he left the room by which he had entered only the hall showed a faint illumination from the window he had opened. Using matches he more or less felt his way along, until a blank space indicated a door.

He stepped inside and almost fell over a pile of blankets. They were lying there, abandoned in a heap, as if they had been dropped casually. Otherwise the room was undisturbed. It had been a dining room and some of the old-fashioned furniture still remained. Outside of the two blankets, however, he found nothing. The kitchen, too, was neat and empty. Apparently no one had cooked there for years. But the few dishes in the closet he found remarkably clean, and he was whistling softly to himself as he lit a cigarette and went up the stairs. Here were the usual bedrooms, the beds with ancient mattresses on them and everything else of value gone.

On one bed, however, was a pillow, somewhat indented as though it had been slept on. That the house had been occupied by someone, and that recently, he did not doubt. But he did not doubt either the care with which all evidence of each occupation had been eliminated. The blankets were a curious oversight. He puzzled over them, leaving the house as he had found it and drove slowly home.

C
AROL SPENCER WAS NOT
the same girl who only ten days or so before had kicked Greg’s golf clubs out of her way in the train and worried about opening Crestview. That sheltered, carefully set-up young woman had vanished. She was as neatly dressed as ever, her eyes as frank, her smile—when it came—as spontaneous. But there were lines of strain in her face, and she looked very tired. Maggie, coming in after Dane had gone that morning, surveyed her with disfavor.

“Are you planning to stay up all day?” she inquired truculently. “What good will you be to anybody if you get sick?”

“I don’t suppose I can sleep. What about the girls, Maggie?”

“Scared of their shadows. That man who was going to help hasn’t showed up again, and I’m having to fix the furnace myself.”

“That’s ridiculous. I’ll tell Greg to do it.” Carol got up, but Maggie caught her arm.

“There’s that newspaper fellow snooping around,” she hissed. “Up with you, Miss Carol. I’ll tell him you’re sick. And sick you look,” she added. “I’ll bring you some coffee right off.”

She whisked Carol up the stairs and stood by until she got into bed. For a second or so she paused indecisively by Don Richardson’s picture. Then she faced Carol, her honest Irish face troubled.

“I’ve got something to tell you, Carol,” she said, reverting to years ago when Carol was a child, running in from play to ransack the refrigerator or to find sanctuary from her governess. “I don’t like to say it, especially just now, but you’ll have to know it sooner or later.”

Carol smiled. Maggie’s troubles usually referred to her department of the house. This proved to be different, however.

She had been out the night before, Maggie said. At the Daltons’ with the maids there playing hearts. She was surprised when she found how late it was. It was around one o’clock when she put on her galoshes and got her umbrella and started home, and before she reached the main road she heard a shot.

“It could have been a backfire,” she said, “but I didn’t think it was. I didn’t hear any car. I just stood still, kinda scared. I guess I was there five minutes or so. It was raining cats and dogs. And then I heard somebody running. He was splashing down the lane, and—now mind, I don’t say he shot Miss Elinor; why would he?—but it was Colonel Richardson.”

Carol sat upright in her bed, her face a mask of astonishment.

“It couldn’t have been, Maggie. Not the colonel! He never—”

“I seen him plain enough,” Maggie said stubbornly. “White hair and all. He looked as though he was wearing a bathrobe or something, and he went into his house and slammed the door as though the devil was after him. Believe me, I got up to the house fast by the short cut from the road. I was plenty scared.”

Carol dismissed all this with a gesture.

“He’s been queer lately,” she said. “And don’t tell me he’d leave the Wards’ in that storm and in what he was wearing. I been going over it in my mind ever since. Seems to me he’d had just time to come from the hill where they found Miss Elinor, but I didn’t see any gun. Why else was he running like that, with the heart he’s got?”

“I’m sure there’s some perfectly ordinary explanation, Maggie.”

“Well, it’s off my mind anyhow, miss.” Maggie returned with dignity to her role of cook to a respected family. “I’d rather you didn’t mention it to the police, if you please. I don’t want that Floyd poking around. The way he went up to the attic where he had no business to be, and carried away your grandmother’s washstand set…”

This grievance being an old and safe one, Carol let her go on. After Maggie had gone, however, she lay back and thought with some anxiety over the story. Had the shot alarmed the colonel, so that he had run back to his house? Had he already told the police the story? And why had he been in the lane at all, unprotected from the rain? She came back to Maggie’s statement that he had been what she called queer. Outside of his obsession about Don, which was largely wishful thinking, he had seemed much as usual to her, courtly and kind.

Greg came in to interrupt her thoughts. He had had breakfast and some sleep at the hospital, and although his handsome face looked weary the news he brought was good.

“She’ll be all right,” he told her. “Lost a lot of blood, but it missed the big artery. She hasn’t any idea who did it. They won’t let her talk much, of course, but it’s a puzzler, isn’t it?”

He wandered about the room, said he needed a bath and shave, and wondered if they could have lunch up there.

“Think the staff will run to a couple of trays?” he asked boyishly.

She thought it would, and they had cocktails and ate the usual Sunday dinner of chicken and ice cream together in her room. It was characteristic of Greg that he threw off Maggie’s story about the colonel as easily as he threw off everything which did not immediately concern him. She marveled at that ability of his. He was the old Greg, for all his war record, saying life was fun, even when he had a headache the morning after.

“The Irish are an imaginative lot,” he said, amused. “The old boy runs to get out of the rain, so he’s mixed up in this mess. Or maybe Maggie shot Elinor herself and makes this up! She isn’t fond of Elinor, you know. Never was.”

He clung to the theory that the shooting was the result of an accident. Carol found herself accepting it, as the simplest way out. But after he had gone, to bathe and shave and take a nap, she made a decision. She took off Don’s engagement ring for the first time since he had put it on her finger, and put it away in her jewel case. She felt freer without it, as though she had finally laid a ghost.

In the meantime Dane took his car and drove down to Floyd’s office. He had decided to tell the chief about the empty house. It would at least keep him busy, he thought derisively, and off his own neck. But Floyd was not alone when he got there; he was in angry consultation with Campbell. The district attorney was cold and unsmiling, chewing on an unlighted cigar, his hat on the floor beside him and his expression one of annoyance mixed with contempt.

“What did you expect me to do?” Floyd was demanding savagely. “I’m here alone except for Mason and a traffic man. I can’t put guards around the whole town. I haven’t got them. If I ask for more help it raises the taxes, and watch the people howl.”

“You knew Lucy Norton didn’t tell all she knew at the inquest,” Campbell said, scowling.

“So what? So I’m to put an intern at the hospital outside her door as a guard? They’ve got more than they can manage there now. Look at this town, only one doctor left, no men available, no nothing. As for the Hilliard woman, if she wants to wander around at night in the rain and get shot that’s her business. I can’t keep her in her bed, can I?”

Neither of them paid any attention at first to Dane. He walked to the desk and stood waiting until the argument ceased. Then:

“I was driving around the back roads today,” he said to Floyd. “Know a place called Pine Hill?”

“Been empty for years,” Floyd said sulkily. “What about it?”

“I have an idea someone’s been sleeping there lately. Maybe a tramp, maybe not. Couple of blankets on the floor. Bed upstairs may have been used.”

Floyd blew up.

“That’s all I need,” he roared. “It’s an unknown now, is it? That saves your friends at Crestview, I suppose. I may be only a hick policeman, but I haven’t lost my senses.”

“You might go up and look.” Dane’s voice was mild.

“You bet I’ll go up and look, and if this is a plant, Dane—”

“It’s not a plant.”

Campbell spoke then.

“What’s your idea, major? How did you happen on this house?”

Dane sat down and got out a cigarette.

“I don’t exactly know,” he admitted. “There are a good many imponderables in the case. You can’t leave out X, you know.”

“Who’s
X
?” Floyd snorted.

“It’s just a symbol I use for myself. Meaning the unknown factor, of course. Has Mrs. Hilliard talked yet?”

“If you can call it talking! Says she doesn’t know who shot her. Says she wasn’t on the hill at all. Couldn’t sleep and went out as far as the dirt lane there. Knows she was shot and remembers falling. That’s all.”

Dane was thoughtful. Elinor’s story did not hold water, of course, except that she had not been on the hill. That was true enough. He looked at Floyd.

“Was the girl who was murdered wearing a wedding ring when you found her?”

“What’s that got to do with it?” Floyd was still surly.

“Well, was she?”

Reluctantly Floyd opened the drawer of his desk and took out the box Carol had seen earlier. He shook its contents out onto the desk blotter. “The jury saw these,” he said resentfully. “I don’t know what right you have to look at them.”

Dane surveyed them, the scorched imitation pearl earrings and a narrow gold band. He picked up the latter and weighted it in his hand, then he carried it to the window and examined it. There was a poorly engraved inscription inside it.