Dead of Night

Chapter thirty: Shotgun and hatchet

It was a rough jaunt. Night flights are usually smoother than day flying but that thunderstorm was chasing us all the way to the Bluegrass. The bumpy trip may have contributed to my gloom. When they pulled the ramp over to us at Lexington, the mercury was pole-vaulting up over the ninety mark. And I had cold feet.

If I didn’t hurt anyone but myself it wouldn’t be so bad to canter around investigating a couple of grisly homicides in an entirely different direction from that taken by the duly constituted authorities. But if I was putting another person’s life in danger, and there seemed to be better than an even chance I was doing just that, then I had to consider the consequences. I did so, hence my gloom.

It was all so lucid, way they figured it. Roffis stabbed in a scuffle because he tried to prevent Tildy and Dow from taking her belongings with her, en route to Rio and a divorce cum marriage. Auguste’s being given the compact to say he knew nothing about the guard’s death. Tildy’s subsequent turndown of her Casanova. His resulting suicide.

If I hadn’t known about the wax spots and the finger marks — which weren’t fingerprints — on Tildy’s bedroom door, if it wasn’t for being trailed and shot at by someone who couldn’t have been Dow L., I might have accepted Hacklin’s view. As it was, I couldn’t shake off a conviction that the killer was still up and about, that there’d be another murder if I didn’t find the answer, but sudden.

“One for sorrow, two for mirth.” It clattered around in my cranium like one of those idiotic singing commercials, while I coffeed and crullered. “One for sorrow, two for mirth.” What the hell? The tie-in with “Seven for a secret” and “Never forget four” seemed obvious. But the meaning was as murky as the skies when I went out to hire a hack.

Thunder grumbled. Lightning flashes made the white fences stand out as if floodlighted, against the vivid green of thoroughbred pastures. The heat was oppressive.

The cabdriver knew where Tildy Millett’s place was, sure. A show farm, Lovelawn was. Not many horses out there now, but he’d heard she planned to breed trotters next spring. Maybe she’d be breeding something else, too; there was talking about her latching up with some big advertising man.

I chuckled at his feeble jest. Would he know whether she’d come home by plane, today?

He wouldn’t know. He’d just come on at midnight. But it was only another mile down the pike; there were relatives living with her, if I wanted him to wait while I found out if she was there.

It began to rain. We passed a famous racing stud whose colors I’d bet on often at the tracks. The whitewashed stables and paddocks, the parklike grounds, the long white fences loping over gently rolling hills — very picturesque. The Land of Gracious Living. As advertised. I was in no mood to appreciate it.

Why had Lanerd said Tildy was on her way to Lexington when she hadn’t been? Why had Walch’s club thought he might be in Lexington, when he was on Long Island Sound? Most important, what followed “One for sorrow, two for mirth”?

The cabdriver said, “Here’s Lovelawn. Hey, they got the chain on.” He stopped.

Between fieldstone pillars a massive chain was padlocked.

“I better wait for you, huh? It’s quite a piece up to the house. Maybe there’s nobody home, after all.”

“Stick around ten minutes. If I’m not back by then, I’ll be staying awhile.” I gave him a buck over the fare.

He said okay, I’d get soaked, he’d lend me his slicker only if I didn’t come back he’d have no way to get it.

I thought the rain was letting up, much obliged.

There was a small lodge about a hundred yards inside the gate; no light showing there. If there was any illumination on at the big house I couldn’t distinguish it, though its four tall white columns and its two broad wings showed up clearly enough through the avenue of oaks, every time the lightning flashed.

No one could have heard me coming, with all that grumbling from the thunderheads, the hrrush of the downpour. But it would have been easy enough to see me, if anyone were watching for intruders.

When I got up to the crescent drive around in front of the house I couldn’t see a spark of light in any of the rooms. The brass knocker I used made a ludicrously tiny noise against the artillery overhead. After a minute I circled around the side, past a long screened porch, toward the garage. No sign of life. Except something that jumped my pulse beat in a rush!

In a lucky flash of lightning, two huge black dogs showed up like those single frames that are frozen on a screen when the projector is stopped. They were bounding in midair, racing toward me. Only fifty feet away. Pinschers. Doberman pinschers. The only kind of canine that’s absolutely forbidden in the hotel, because they’re so ferocious.

I’ve read all that mahooly about dogs never harming you, if you stand still and aren’t afraid of them. It did me no good whatsoever. If those galloping hellions could tell by a sense of smell whether a person was scared, I was a gone goose.

I made a leap for that screened porch. The door wasn’t hooked or locked. I made it inside by the thickness of my pants seat. The dogs leaped against the door. Their weight sagged the screen so I thought they’d come right through at me.

They were ugly animals. They weren’t playing at being ferocious. Their snarly growling was ample warning to stay where they couldn’t get at me.

If there was anyone in the Millet house, it seemed impossible for them not to hear the uproar those pinschers were making. True, it was coming down in buckets, water spouting off the roof like hydrants. Also, it was dark as a cave; the lightning had pretty well quit; it settled down to rain in a serious way.

I know — every well-equipped Private I is able to whip out a flashlight at a moment like that. I regretted my lack of foresight. I had two packs of paper matches and my lighter.

I knocked on the doors opening off the porch. Not the slightest stir.

I tapped on the glass with my lighter. Still nothing. Those damned dogs were ripping the screen door with their claws.

I tried the French doors. Locked. One of the dogs got his head and forepaws through the wire, set up a demoniac racket at not being able to get at me. But it wouldn’t be long.

Those French doors have two latch handles. I remembered an old trick from my schooldays; sometimes if I pulled both handles together, the doors would give enough to open, even when locked. I gave a good healthy tug. Bingo!

Then I pulled the door wide, snapped on my lighter to get a glimpse of the room inside. What I got a glimpse of was the moving muzzle of a shotgun swiveling toward me about five feet away!

No champion base stealer ever did a fancier fadeaway dive. I hadn’t hit the floor when the room blew up with a blast that made thunder sound like a bowling alley a block away.

When I hit the floor I went over in a shoulder roll, sure I was hit. The side of my face felt as if somebody’d patted it with a red-hot waffle iron.

The muzzle flare blinded me, but I swung a leg to kick up at the shotgun. I had to gamble it wasn’t a pump gun with half a dozen more shells ready to blow me apart.

A sliver of light showed at the bottom of the chair. I’d forgotten the lighter, in my dive. Somehow the flame was still burning, more than it usually did when I needed it. It had the slipcover of a chair on fire. That was nokay. I f the shotgunner got light enough to aim, I was finished.

I made an ungraceful belly-down lunge, caught an ankle. A bare, slim ankle I could get a grip on. Yair. A girl.

It may have showed a deplorable lack of savoir-faire for me to wrestle around with a girl in a nightgown, but my small stock of savoir-faire was at an all time low. She clawed. I butted. She kneed me. I got a body scissors on her, pinned her beneath me.

Click! The lights went on.

Across the room a small boy, about seven, in blue pajamas, held a hatchet in one hand and kept his other on the light switch.

“You let Nikky alone, you! Or I’ll kill you!”