The Bizarre Murders, page 64
She whispered: “I tell you, Walter, I never really loved him. It was just—you know what I mean. As soon as I’d done it I could have killed myself, even though he—he’d got me drunk. I was sorrier than you’ll ever know. But I was trapped and he—oh, he was horrible.”
“So that’s how you came to invite him here,” muttered Godfrey. “I did wonder, in my dumb-animal way. You’ve asked crumby people in your time, but he was unique. And your lover!”
“No. Walter, I didn’t want him! It was all over for me long before then. But he—he forced himself on me, made me accept him as my guest…”
The crunching on the gravel stopped. “You mean to sit there and say he invited himself?”
“Yes. Oh, Walter…”
“Lovely.” His voice was bitter. “He invited himself, he ate my food, he rode my horses, he picked my flowers, drank my liquor, made love to my wife. Pretty soft for him!…And those others? That Munn couple, that blowsy old Constable frump—where do they come in? The usual scenery, or what? You may as well tell me, Stella. Maybe you don’t realize it, but you’ve got us into one hell of a jam. If the police find out that you and he—”
There was a swish of feminine clothing, sharp and precipitate, and Ellery knew that she had flung herself into her husband’s arms.
He winced. It was decidedly unpleasant. It was like sitting in at the dissection of a cadaver. But he set his lips and listened even more intently.
“Walter,” she whispered, “hold me tight. I’m afraid.”
“All right, Stella, all right, all right,” said Godfrey, over and over, softly and mechanically. “I’ll see you through. But you’ve got to tell me the whole truth. How about the others? Where do they come in?”
She was silent for a long time. A cricket chirped maddeningly in the bushes. Then she said, so huskily that the words were deep breaths: “Walter, I never saw any of them in my life before they came here.”
Ellery could feel Godfrey’s astonishment. It filled the sweet air in impalpable gusts. Godfrey was choking; it took him some time to utter coherent words. “Stella!” he spluttered at last. “How can that be? Does Rosa know them? Or did David?”
“No,” she moaned. “No.”
“But how did they—”
“I invited them.”
“Stella, talk sense! Get your chin up, now. This is damned serious. How could you invite them if you didn’t—” Even then he did not see the truth.
“Marco told me to invite them,” she said drearily.
“He told you—! He gave you their names, their addresses out of a clear sky?”
“Yes, Walter.”
“No explanations?”
“No.”
“What happened when they came? After all, they couldn’t have taken it for granted that an invitation—”
“I don’t know,” she said slowly. “I really don’t. It’s been so strange—such an awful, awful nightmare. Mrs. Constable’s been the strangest of all. From the very beginning she pretended. Just as if I’d known her all my life…”
The old crackle came into Godfrey’s voice. “From the very beginning? She saw Marco here at once?”
“Yes. I thought she’d—she’d faint when she first saw him. And yet it wasn’t as if she hadn’t known. I got the definite feeling that she had known—that she’d been steeling herself against the meeting—but that with all that she couldn’t help being shocked. Marco was cool and—and mocking. He accepted the introduction as if he’d never met her…But she fell into the deception instantly. Afraid—she’s been deathly afraid.”
Afraid, thought Ellery grimly, of the same thing that has frightened you, Stella Godfrey. And you’re keeping something back even now. At this moment there is something else which so frightens you, Stella Godfrey, that you daren’t tell—
“That fat old hag,” said the millionaire thoughtfully. “Of course, it’s possible that…And the Munns?”
There was appalling weariness in her reply. “They’re queer, too. Mrs. Munn especially. She’s—funny. She’s just a cheap, pushing creature, Walter, the kind you read about in the tabloids, the grasping chorus-girl type. You wouldn’t think a woman like that would be afraid of anything. And yet from the first moment she saw him she was scared to death, too. We—we’ve been three women walking on the edge of an abyss, blindfolded. Each of us has been afraid, afraid to talk, afraid to breathe, afraid to confide in the others—”
“And Munn?” asked Godfrey curtly.
“I—I don’t understand him at all. You can’t make him out, Walter. He’s so crude and coarse, and yet he has strength. And he never shows what he’s thinking about. He’s really acted very nicely up here for a man of his sort. He’s been trying hard to be ‘society.’ Society!”
“How did he treat Marco?”
She laughed a little hysterically. “Oh, Walter, this is almost humorous. I have to tell you how a man living in the same house with you…With contempt. He didn’t like him at all. Never paid any attention to him. Only when the other night Marco took Mrs. Munn for a stroll in the gardens I—I saw something in Mr. Munn’s eyes. It made me shiver.”
There was another interval of silence. Then Godfrey said quietly: “Well, it seems open and shut to me. You’re three women he’s made love to at various times. He had a hold on you, saw a chance to combine a sponging summer with some good, clean, honest fun. The filthy rat! He made you ask the others here…If I’d known. If I’d only known. When I think of what Rosa has escaped. He was making love to Rosa, too, damn his soul! How could a daughter of mine—”
“Walter, no!” Stella Godfrey cried in anguish. “He may have flirted with her…I’m sure the other thing—Not Rosa. Not Rosa, Walter. I was so tied up in knots myself I was blind to what was going on. Earle’s attitude should have told me. The poor boy’s been frantic—”
Ellery heard her sudden sharp intake of breath. He parted the bushes cautiously. A twig snapped, but they did not hear. In the light of the moon they were standing close together in the path, the woman taller than the man. But the man was grasping her wrists, and on his ugly masterful face there was the oddest expression.
“I said I’d help you,” he said clearly. “But you still haven’t told me everything. Was it just fear that I’d find out that made you such a willing tool of that damned gigolo? Just fear—or something else? The same thing that’s petrified the other two?”
But there is a higher power that protects the rights of violated hosts. And eavesdropping is an uncertain business at best.
Some one was coming up the path. Coming slowly, with heavy feet whose drag expressed the most profound and deadly weariness.
Ellery was in the thick of the bushes in a flash. He was destined never to hear Stella Godfrey’s reply that night. He crouched under cover, holding his breath, his eyes fixed on the path he had left so hastily.
The Godfreys heard, too. They became incredibly still.
It was Mrs. Constable. She loomed into view, a pale large ghost dressed in grotesquely jutting organdie, her bare arms fat and marbly in the moonlight. Her feet were still dragging, scuffing the noisy gravel, and her huge face was blank with the blankness of somnambulism. She was alone.
Her vast haunches passed within inches of Ellery’s head as she rounded the curve in the path.
There was a simultaneous outburst of exclamations, as false in its twitterings as the mechanical song of toy birds.
“Mrs. Constable! Where have you been?”
“Good evening, Mrs. Constable.”
“Hello. I—I was just taking a walk…What a horrible day…”
“Yes. We all feel—”
Ellery snarled to himself with bitterness at the vengeful spirit of the fates, crawled out to the path, and very quietly stole away.
Chapter Nine
NIGHT, THE DARK-BLUE HUNTER
JUDGE MACKLIN CAME AWAKE. One moment he had been struggling upward through a black turgid fog; but now he was vitally awake, awake in every sense, listening before he was conscious that he was listening, straining to see through the darkness before even his eyes were open. His old heart, he was startled to feel, was pounding away like a piston. He lay very still, aware of danger.
Some one, he knew, was in his room.
Out of the corner of his eye he glanced at the floor-windows which gave upon the Spanish balcony. The curtains were only half-drawn, and he could make out a star-pricked sky. It must be late, then. How late? He shivered involuntarily, causing the bed-clothes to rustle. He did not care for nocturnal visitors, much less for nocturnal visitors in a house in which murder had been committed.
But gradually his pulse slowed down to normal as nothing happened and common-sense repelled the invader. Whoever it is, he thought grimly, is due for the surprise of his life. He gathered his aged muscles for a leap out of bed. He was not so decrepit that he couldn’t still give a rousing good account of himself in a tussle…
His door clicked suddenly and—his eyes now accustomed to the darkness—he was positive he had seen something white flick out the door. His visitor, then, had left.
“Whew,” he said aloud, swinging his bare feet to the floor.
A cool dry voice said from somewhere nearby: “Oh, so you’re up at last, are you?”
The Judge jumped. “For heaven’s sake! Ellery?”
“In the flesh. I take it you heard our perambulating friend, too? No, no, don’t turn on the lights.”
“Then you were the one,” gasped the Judge, “who just—?”
“Left? By no means. Isn’t it Bode’s Law that two material bodies cannot occupy the same position in space at the same time? Well, no matter; I was always weak on science. No, that was the prowler I’ve been expecting.”
“Expecting!”
“I’ll confess I didn’t anticipate that she’d try this room, but I think that can be easily explained—”
“She?”
“Oh, yes, that was a female. Didn’t you smell the powder? Sorry I can’t give you the maker’s name and odeur; I’ve never been Vance-ish in that direction. As a matter of fact, she was dressed in something long, flowing, and white. I’ve been watching here and there for an hour or more.”
The old gentleman choked. “From here?”
“No. From my room chiefly. But when I saw her try this door I thought I’d slip in through the communicating door in case of—er—emergency. You’re such a sublime old angel. She might have bopped you before you stopped dreaming of that languorous houri.”
“Don’t be ribald!” snapped the Judge, but he kept his voice down. “Why should any one try to assault me? I don’t know any of these people and I certainly haven’t done anything to any of ’em. It must have been a mistake. She got into the wrong room, that’s all.”
“Oh, undoubtedly. I was just ribbing you.” The Judge, still on the bed, heard nothing at all, and yet when Ellery’s voice came again it proceeded from a different part of the chamber—from the door. “Hmm. She’s beaten a strategic retreat temporarily. I’m afraid we’ll have to wait. Your noisy preparations for getting out of bed scared her off. What were you going to do,” chuckled Ellery, “leap at her throat like Tarzan?”
“Didn’t know it was a woman,” said the Judge sheepishly. “But I wasn’t going to lie here and be made mincemeat of. Who the devil was the creature?”
“Blessed if I know. Might have been any of ’em.”
Judge Macklin lay back, propped on one elbow. He kept his eyes fixed on the spot where he knew the door to be; he could just make out Ellery’s motionless figure. “Well,” he snapped at last, “aren’t you going to talk? What’s been happening here? Why were you waiting? How’d you come to suspect? How long have I slept? You’re the most exasperating young—”
“Whoa. One at a time. By my wrist-watch it’s almost two-thirty. You must have a singularly easy conscience.”
“I’d be sleeping yet if not for that confounded woman. Just beginning to feel the ache in my bones again. Well, well?”
“It’s a long story.” Ellery opened the door to pop his head out; it was back and the door closed in an instant. “Nothing doing yet. I didn’t wake up until ten myself. You must be hungry, eh? Tiller fetched the most delicious—”
“Bother Tiller! And I’m not hungry. Answer me, you idiot! What made you suspect some one would go prowling tonight, and what are you watching for?”
“I’m watching,” said Ellery, “for some one to go into the room next door.”
“The room next—! That’s yours, isn’t it?”
“On the other side. The end-room.”
“Marco’s,” said the old gentleman, and he was silent for a moment. “But isn’t it under guard? I thought that Roush boy—”
“Oddly enough, that Roush boy is stretched out on a cot in Tiller’s bedroom taking a well-earned nap.”
“But Moley will be furious!”
“I think not. At least, not with Roush. You see, Roush left the room unguarded on orders. Er—mine.”
The Judge stared into the darkness with open mouth. “Yours! It’s beyond me. Or is it a trap?”
Ellery peered out into the corridor again. “She must have been properly scared. I suppose she thought you were a ghost…Quite so; a trap. Most of them turned in before midnight. Poor souls! They were very tired. Nevertheless, I carelessly let them know—en masse—that there wasn’t any sense in keeping watch by a dead man’s door, especially since we’d already looked the place over; and I informed them that Roush was off in slumberland.”
“I see,” muttered the Judge. “And what made you think some one would fall into your trap?”
“That,” said Ellery softly, “is another story…Quiet!”
The Judge held his breath, his scalp prickling. Then Ellery’s mouth was at his ear. “She’s back. Don’t make a sound. I’m off on a little spying expedition. For God’s sake, Solon, don’t crab this act!” And he was gone. The curtains of the floor-window fluttered a little, soundlessly, and a shadow drifted out and vanished. The Judge saw the stars again, cold and remote.
He shivered.
When fifteen minutes had passed and his ears had told him nothing except that waves were breaking against rock below and that a frosty wind blew in from the sea through his windows, Judge Macklin crept noiselessly out of bed, wrapped his gaunt pajama-clad body in a silk quilt from the bed, dug his toes into carpet-slippers, and stole to the window. With his hair standing on end at the top of his head, forming a tuft resembling a scalplock, and the quilt draped about his shoulders, he was grotesquely like an ancient Indian scout on the warpath. Nevertheless, his humorous appearance did not prevent him from stealing out onto the long shallow iron-grilled balcony in the best Indian tradition and gaining Ellery’s side at a window several yards away…one of the windows of the late John Marco’s bed-chamber.
Ellery was sprawled on his side in an uncomfortable position, his eyes glued to a plinth of light. The Venetian blind had not been completely drawn—a careless oversight on the marauder’s part, since the space left unguarded at the bottom afforded a complete view of the room. Ellery saw the Judge coming, shook his head in warning, moved a little.
The old gentleman calmly spread his quilt, squatted on his lean hams, and peered into the room by Ellery’s side, almost doubled over.
The huge Spanish bedroom was in violent disorder. The door of the closet stood open and every one of the dead man’s garments lay on the floor outside, tumbled and in some cases torn. A trunk had been lugged into the center of the room; its drawers sagged, empty. Several valises and suitcases had been hurled away by a disappointed hand. The bed had been attacked in ruthless fashion; a knife had slashed at the mattress, which lay exposed and half of the box-spring. The spring itself had been assailed. The drapes had been jerked off the tester. All the drawers in the room had been pulled out and their contents strewed the floor in a tangle of confusion. Even the paintings on the wall had been examined, for they hung awry.
The Judge felt his cheeks grow hot. “Where’s the damned ghoul,” he growled sotto voce, “responsible for this desecration? I’d cheerfully throttle her!”
“No irreparable harm done,” murmured Ellery, without removing his eyes from the plinth of light. “Looks worse than it is. She’s in the bathroom now, no doubt making kindred whoopee. Has a knife with her. You should have seen her fly at the walls! Just as if she thought there was one of those secret passageways here you read about in Oppenheim and Wallace…Silence. The lady enters. Beauty, isn’t she?”
The Judge glared. It was Cecilia Munn.
It was Cecilia Munn standing in the doorway from the lavatory, her mask peeled off. Apparently the countenance she presented to the everyday world was only as deep as her cosmetics. Beneath it lay something appallingly different, now shamelessly revealed. Something raw and naked and nasty, a thing of writhing lips, taut blue skin, and tigrish eyes. One of her hands was clawing empty air, the other brandished a common breadknife which she had probably filched from the kitchens. Her robe lay open, half-revealing small panting breasts.
She made the most sharply etched picture of human rage, bafflement, despair and terror that either man had ever seen. Even her blonde hair was infected by it, standing hideously on end like a dried mop. The bristling, vivid un-loveliness of her made them both feel sick.
“Good lord,” breathed the old gentleman. “She’s—she’s animal. I’ve never seen…”
“She’s afraid,” muttered Ellery. “Afraid. They’re all afraid. In his own way that man must have been Machiavelli and Beelzebub rolled into one. He hammered the fear of—”
The blonde woman soared like a cat—straight for the light-switch. Then there was only blackest darkness.
They lay frozen. Only one thing could have caused such an instantaneous muscular reflex. She had heard some one coming.
It seemed an age. In reality it was only a few ticks of Ellery’s wrist-watch. Then light flooded on again. The door was closed once more and Mrs. Constable stood with her back to it, one hand still on the switch near the jamb. Mrs. Munn had vanished.
