The Amethyst Spectacles, page 25
When she got to the twisting stairs she went down their middle instead of keeping near the railing. I always kept within reach of the balusters because of the uneven width of the segment-shaped treads.
I hurried into the apartment. I fastened the latches of the shutters carefully and went to the bathroom to undress. I knew now who it was that had walked through our apartment. That nurse couldn’t be very vigilant. Mrs. Clary must have got hold of a key. All keys were rather silly here because the courtyard was really an extension of the whole house. Anybody who wished could get into any room in the place, except Toby Wick’s duplex. We could, of course, rig up tighter fasteners for the shutters.
I would have to tell Patrick.
What a tragedy! I didn’t feel so hard toward Roger now. Poor Carol! The whole family, even Uncle George, and even that would-be wolf of a Toby Wick, if he knew, had been pretty gallant in not telling us what ailed Roger’s wife.
Still, we should have been told. Patrick would look grim and would jump on Roger Clary. Maybe, I thought, brushing my teeth, I wouldn’t tell him, after all. Yes, yes, I would … No, I wouldn’t—would.
I brushed my hair and twisted it for coolness on top of my head, put on white-silk pajamas and, after checking the bedroom shutters, got into bed. The telephone gave its anticipatory clink.
Patrick spoke first. “Hello?” he asked.
“Hello, darling.”
“Nothing wrong, is there, Jeanie?”
“Nope. Why?”
“You sound different from usual, and you answered before the phone rang.”
“Darling, I’m clairvoyant.”
“Heaven help us! Listen, I’ll be home….”
“When?”
“Pronto. Pretty pronto, soon as a long-distance call comes in. Thought I’d let you know.”
“That’s nice. Be careful, darling. Be careful in the fog.”
“Fog? There’s no fog now. There’s a wind.”
“Be careful in the wind, then. And hurry.”
Patrick laughed softly. We said good-bye. I cradled the receiver. I felt very happy. I looked at the luminous dial of the clock. It was ten minutes to one. If that long-distance call came through at once Patrick could be home a little after one o’clock. I would stay awake, of course.
He was right about the wind, which had picked up a lot while I was getting ready for bed. I could hear the leaves of a clump of banana trees brushing drily together in the garden.
Some of the slats were a little loose on the shutters. They rustled from the wind. It was a different sort of rustle from fingers fiddling with a latch. Oh, that! I certainly would wait until tomorrow to tell Patrick about Mrs. Clary. Sadness, like a cloud, crossed my happiness.
To forget Mrs. Clary I kept my mind on Patrick, walking with long steps through the old, balconied streets of the French Quarter in a gay wind.
All at once, something seemed wrong.
I sat up in bed and glanced at the clock. It was three minutes before two. More than an hour had passed since Patrick had phoned. I had been asleep. I had been wakened, apparently by one of the shutters on the garden side. The shutter had come open and was swinging in the wind.
I got up quickly and crossed the room to close it.
As I put my hand on the shutter I heard a dragging noise down below and then a sort of thumping and a final thud.
The thud sounded near the grass plot below this end of our gallery. I opened the shutter and tiptoed over to the railing.
The moon was well up. It shone clearly on something white sprawled on a black square of turf. I thought it was Mrs. Clary.
As I ran back to the bedroom to get a robe and slippers the Cathedral chimes began striking two o’clock.
Mrs. Clary lay on her side two yards or so from the foot of the short flight of steps. I spoke to her softly. I bent over her. She did not move. Her neck was twisted so that her face was upright. Her eyes were wide open and staring.
I had the presence of mind to reach for a wrist and feel for the pulse. Something sticky and black-looking covered her arm and coated my fingers. It had made a black splotch on the side of her white-satin nightgown.
There was no pulse! I stooped over her and laid my hand on her chest. She didn’t seem to be breathing.
I stood up and for seconds did nothing at all.
Then I turned and ran back up the steps to look for the nurse. A French window stood open in the room below our bedroom. I hesitated before entering, but not wanting to make a noise and rouse the house by calling out, I stepped silently across the sill.
The room was literally a pit of blackness. I could see nothing at all. It smelled stuffy and close.
“Nurse?” I whispered.
My whisper echoed in the black, stuffy room. No one answered.
All at once I smelled another smell, something spicy and fresh.
“Roger?” I whispered now. “Roger?” I pitched my whisper as high as I could.
There was no answer. The spicy smell was strong and fresh.
Suddenly, for no particular reason I could later account for, I felt afraid. I had to get out of that room. In a panic I tried to step backward, to go out the way I had come in.
Chapter III
I kept smelling iodoform.
I opened my eyes. There was a lamp glowing on a table nearby and Roger Clary was kneeling beside me. He was in his uniform, but without the cap. “Hello,” I said. His lips crooked. “Hello,” he said. “What happened?”
“I think something fell on my head.” It was aching. I felt stuffy and tired.
“The curtains fell down,” Roger said. His fingers were now on my wrist. “I suppose the pole got you. It looks as if it weighs a ton. Did something happen to fetch you downstairs?”
I remembered Mrs. Clary. I tried to sit up.
Roger grasped my shoulder and forced me down. “Stay lying down if you don’t want to get sick,” he said, pretty brusquely.
“It’s your wife,” I said. “She’s—she’s out there in the garden.”
Roger looked at me without speaking. After again telling me to keep lying down he jumped up and hurried out the door.
He was very handsome. I thought so even with my head aching. Roger Clary looked like a portrait painted long ago in the middle of the last century. His face was dark and slender, his tilted black eyes rather brooding. His hair was smooth and very black. He didn’t smile a great deal, and when he did it was like a warming light on his dark face.
The room I found myself lying in was something like our own bedroom. There was a towering bed with a lofty tester—the satin tufting on its underside rose-pink, however, instead of blue—a huge mahogany wardrobe, a marble-topped bureau, many tables and chairs. A straw matting covered the floor. Long stiff brocade drapes outlined the four tall French windows. The bed had not been slept in.
Now that Roger had gone, it was dust that I smelled rather than iodoform. That would come from the draperies which had fallen with the curtain pole. They had been picked up and tossed over a chair. The thick brass pole glinted among the curtains in the lamplight.
Roger did not return immediately, so I sat up again and after a moment took hold of one of the open windows and pulled myself to my feet.
The window felt sticky. No, it was my hand. There was blood on my hand, on both hands, and there was a smear of it on my white bathrobe. I felt a wave of nausea and held tightly to the French window. Then I stepped out on the gallery.
Roger was coming up from the garden.
“I told you to stay where you were!” His voice was low but angry.
“I’ve got to wash.”
“You can wash when the time comes.” He thrust me into a chair on the gallery. “Now, you sit there! I don’t like head injuries, hear?”
“Well, you needn’t be so cross.”
“Sorry!” He went in and came out with two blankets and two medicine cases and ran down the steps to the grass plot. He got out a torch. In its light I could see the woman lying just as motionless as ever on the grass. Roger took out his stethoscope and bent close to her as he applied the main tube to her chest. I was puzzled and felt another wave of nausea. I was positive that the woman was dead. It made me feel sick to see Roger listening for a heart that was no longer beating.
The clock in the St. Louis Cathedral a couple of blocks away struck a quarter hour. A quarter past what? How long had I lain in that room? What had caused the curtains to fall down? Where was the nurse? Where was my husband?
Roger covered the woman with the blankets.
I got up and started for our stairs. Roger Clary apparently had eyes in the back of his head, for he shouted for me to stay sitting down. “God dammit—can’t you wait?” he yelped. It was the first real noise that either of us had made and immediately—too immediately, I thought later—Uncle George Sears piped up from the lower gallery of the other wing.
Uncle George had a rather high reedy voice and sometimes stuttered.
“I s-say? What goes on?” he called out.
Roger left his wife long enough to take a few steps in the direction of Uncle George. “Shush. No sense in waking everybody. Helen fell down the steps.”
“W-what steps?”
“Never mind that now. Call Carol and tell her to phone Dr. Postgate and ask him to come at once. Oh, by the way, don’t you go upstairs. Remember your heart. Call Aunt Dollie and have her wake Carol. Then tell Carol to come here. Tell her to fetch hot-water bottles.”
“I’ll t-take care of it, Roger!” Uncle George’s high voice was positively rippling with delighted excitement.
“Mind that heart!” Roger said, again.
He hurried back to his wife and applied the stethoscope and again picked up her wrist. What was all this? I had felt her wrist. I wasn’t any expert, but I had taken the time to feel it carefully and there hadn’t been any pulse. That woman was dead. The sight of Roger hovering about her blanketed form in the blend of torch and moonlight made me sick all over again.
I concentrated for a moment on keeping a level stomach and sat very still.
Miss Marguerite Clary now came out on the upper gallery of the other wing. She came to the railing outside her bedroom, which was situated, like ours, at the back end of the second floor in that wing. She spoke in French. The precise elegance of her enunciation and the clarity of her voice was striking at such a time.
“Roger, dear, what can I do?”
“Nothing, Aunt Rita. Sorry you were waked.”
“Carol woke when you spoke to George, Roger. She is phoning the doctor.”
“Good.” Roger was speaking from a position close above the dead woman. “Was Postgate here tonight, Aunt Rita?”
“I didn’t see him. Where’s Victorine?”
Roger’s answer was low and angry.
“I don’t know.”
The old lady’s voice tightened. “Roger—did that girl go away and leave Helen? Alone?”
“Apparently. Never mind it now.”
“E-everything is f-fine!” Uncle George puffed from the other end of the forbidden upper gallery. “C-Carol got the doctor. He’s coming right over. I’ll be right down, Roger. C-carry on, old man.”
“My God!” Roger growled, under his breath.
Whether Roger wanted it or not the house was now alive. Lights were coming out all over, including the picturesque but somewhat ineffectual old lamps about the garden. Old black Hugo hustled out of the servants’ house in the rear and after a moment Paulette sauntered out rubbing her eyes and muttering with annoyance. Doors opened and closed. I heard Aunt Dollie’s loud, stylish voice asking what on earth was the matter. Nobody answered, but that was usual with Aunt Dollie. She talked all the time and, like the music at a movie, you got so you noticed her only when she wasn’t talking. I heard Uncle George telling Hugo to go to a room rented for Victorine—she must have used it very little—on Dauphine Street and fetch her at once if she was there. Hugo said, “Yassir,” and had just got to the front door when it opened and Patrick stepped into the carriageway. He stopped short on noting all the commotion.
“You’re in the very nick of time, Lieutenant Abbott!” Uncle George called. He went skimming to meet Patrick. “She will have to be carried in, no d-doubt, so we can use you, L-Lieutenant.”
“What’s happened?” Patrick asked.
“Come back here, will you, Pat?” Roger called out. “Uncle George, you stay where you are.” He spoke authoritatively. For the moment Uncle George obeyed.
Carol Graham ran down the outside stairs of the other gallery carrying two hot-water bottles. She was dressed in a shirt and denim slacks.
Ava Graham didn’t appear.
Patrick dashed past where I sat, but on the lower level of the courtyard. I thought he did not see me. Uncle George skimmed in his wake. Roger spied Uncle George and ordered him to stay away. The fat man took a stand behind an oleander on my right and stayed there, listening hard.
Patrick stooped beside Roger Clary and the prostrate woman and picked up one wrist. “She’s bleeding, Roger.”
“She was. It’s not important. A scratch when she fell, I think.”
“Fell?”
“Down those steps. I don’t exactly understand her condition. It’s shock, I think, but that doesn’t seem to explain it entirely. You can’t feel any pulse in the wrist, but her heart is beating faintly and her breathing is so faint I don’t dare move her even enough to slip a blanket under her.”
Patrick laid the wrist back under the blanket.
Uncle George tiptoed past me to a handier oleander. I didn’t notice Toby Wick till he was so close against the railing that he spoke literally up into my ear.
“What’s all the excitement?” he asked, with his lazy insolence.
“It’s H-Helen,” Uncle George whispered, from up ahead. “She fell, apparently.”
Toby’s laugh was a rattle deep in his throat.
“She didn’t get pushed?”
Uncle George emitted a nervous giggle.
“Not that I know of,” he said.
Toby took out his cigarettes and fumbled at the package. “It would be opportune. Very opportune.”
Uncle George again giggled.
There was a perceptible silence. Then Uncle George asked, with a touch of concern in his voice, “Toby, where is A-Ava?”
Unexpectedly Aunt Rita made answer. She was now standing with Aunt Dollie in the middle of the flagged court, and her voice was crisp against Aunt Dollie’s low but excited monologue.
“Ava is in her room, George,” she said, in English.
“She w-wasn’t when I looked just n-now.”
“Of course she was!” said Aunt Rita.
“Possibly you were too excited to notice, dear,” Aunt Dollie said. She had put on the housecoat with huge poppies on a pinkish ground. You couldn’t distinguish colors in the light in the courtyard, but I had often seen the garment swishing about Aunt Dollie’s long legs and keglike middle as she went about the place.
“I think Ava shows good judgment in staying in her room,” Aunt Rita said. “I think the rest of us might follow her example.”
“I agree,” Roger spoke up.
At that moment, the loud sound of the front doorbell shattered the hushed-up atmosphere. Since Hugo was not here, and Paulette had again apparently vanished, Uncle George was not stopped as he skimmed along to the door. A very whiskery doctor was admitted.
Dr. Postgate walked as fast as his dignity would permit to the side of the patient. Meanwhile Toby Wick had edged up closer to the railing near my chair. I could smell liquor on his breath.
He began talking softly into my ear. “They wouldn’t be sorry to be rid of her, maybe. She’s got one of the biggest fortunes in Louisiana. All the money in the world and nothing upstairs.” He paused, and added, “Must be a constant temptation, specially for a doctor.”
I had the feeling that this was the prologue for much more of the same. My head suddenly ached unbearably. My stomach hurt, too. I felt sure I’d be sick. I jumped up and hurried upstairs. If Roger Clary saw me he did not try to stop me.
It was two-thirty-five when I walked into our apartment by way of the window whose banging shutter had waked me just before two o’clock. Then the quarter-hour which the chimes had sounded after I came out of what might be called my curtain-pole blackout had been a quarter past two. A lot can happen in thirty-five minutes.
I threw my blood-stained robe and my pajamas in a hamper, scrubbed my hands clean, took a shower, took two aspirin tablets, combed my hair and, gently feeling at the bump on top of my head, thought it was lucky I’d had my hair up. I pinned it up again, got into fresh pajamas, and was sitting in bed wondering what next when Patrick came up. He threw his cap and tunic on a chair and turned to go out again. “Just wanted to see if you were all right,” he said.
“Did you know I was downstairs, darling?”
“I saw you.”
“Oh. How is she?”
“She’s gone, they think. We carried her into her bed. They’ve sent for a pulmotor and meanwhile they’re going to try artificial respiration and I’ve got to get back to help.” He gave me a puzzled glance. “I wonder what was wrong with her?” he asked.
“She’s mental.”
He gave me a sudden angry look. “Why didn’t somebody say so?”
“I didn’t know it till tonight, dear. Did you?”
“Certainly I didn’t.” He was very angry. “Roger says you’re the one that found her, after she fell.”
“I heard a sort of thud and looked over the railing and saw her lying on the grass. I ran down and thought she was dead. You see, I couldn’t find any pulse. I—I—oh, well, Roger came right away and after that I just sort of hung around till Toby Wick started chumming up, then I came upstairs.”
“Was Wick in the garden when you went downstairs?”
“Why, I don’t know. I didn’t see anybody except Mrs. Clary. It was pretty dark, except for the moon. Why do you ask?”
Patrick’s face was very grave.
“When we moved Mrs. Clary to her bed, Wick helped carry her. There is a chandelier in that room and it was turned full on, making a lot of light. I happened to notice that Wick’s shoes were damp and had a few blades of grass sticking to the leather. There aren’t many places in the Quarter outside of the private gardens where you can get grass on your shoes.”
