Double for Death

Chapter 13

Maple Hill was on a height a little north of Tarrytown. There was nothing much to the mansion and grounds except wealth; it had not the twilight charm of antiquity, nor the bold beauty of a creative imagination disciplining nature, nor the dazzle of an impudent modernist playing with new planes and angles. But it was spacious and rich and everything was there that should be: curving drives bordered with twenty-foot rhododendrons, majestic elms and enormous rotund maples, rose and iris gardens, tennis courts, pools, manicured evergreens, luxuriant shrubbery, undulating lawns and a forty-room house.

At the entrance to the estate Fox stopped the car, for though the massive iron gates stood open, a heavy chain barred the way and a uniformed guard strolled towards him, scowling inhospitably. Again Fox established his identity, but that was not enough, in spite of the fact that he was expected; the guard entered the stone lodge to telephone up the hill that the caller was accompanied by a man named Henry Jordan, and only after he received satisfaction on that did he unfasten the chain and drag it aside. Near the top of the hill Fox caught sight of another guard standing at the edge of a filbert thicket, this one in shirt sleeves with a gun in a belt holster. He muttered to Jordan, “Locking the door after the horse is stolen,” and Jordan grunted, “That wasn’t the horse, it was only one of the donkeys.”

The drive leveled with the ground immediately surrounding the house. Fox stopped the car under the roof of the porte-cochere, at the lifted hand of a bald well-fed man in a butler’s costume who stood there, and was told that Mr. Thorpe was at present engaged but would see him shortly. He drove on through, arrived at a large gravelled space and maneuvered the car into the shade of a maple tree. Five or six other cars were already parked there and among them he observed the Wethersill Special which Jeffrey Thorpe had been driving on Monday. He got out and invited Jordan to come on and find a cool spot, but the little man shook his head.

“I’d rather wait here.”

Fox insisted. “You’re an old friend of Thorpe’s, you know. He was weekending on your boat. It would look better to the company. See that state police car?”

“You understand, Mr. Fox, that I’m not entirely comfortable at this place.”

Fox said he appreciated that, but that he had accepted a rôle and ought to play it, and Jordan, looking neither happy nor amiable, climbed out and went with him.

Crossing the gravel to a path and following it around a corner of the house, they were led to a flagged terrace with an awning and on it Fox was faced with the fifth surprise of the day. At the outside edge of the terrace, Jeffrey Thorpe stood erect as a sentry with his back towards the house and five paces behind him, her face flushed and her jaw set, Nancy Grant sat in one of the summer chairs.

Jeffrey turned his head enough to see who was coming. “Hello,” he said grumpily. “Hello, Mr. Jordan.”

“Good morning.” Fox included Nancy in it. “Stop in on your way to Westport, Miss Grant?”

“This is not on the way to Westport and you know it,” said Nancy. “Mr. Thorpe’s secretary phoned that he wanted to see Uncle Andy and we came here first.”

“How did he know Andy was at my place?”

“I told him,” said Jeffrey, with his back still turned. “I told Vaughn I was there last evening, and I arranged with him to tell my father that I am in love with Miss Grant and I’m going to marry her if I can, and for the first time in my life I’ve got something to work for and I’m going to work for it. And at it. I don’t care if it takes me twenty years—”

“Will you please tell him,” Nancy demanded, “how comical he is?”

“Tell him yourself.” Fox dropped into a chair and motioned Jordan to one. “Have you stopped speaking to him again? That will get tiresome eventually.”

Jeffrey wheeled to face them. “There’s no use appealing to her,” he declared. “She’s as stubborn as a mule. That’s all right, I knew she had a temper — it was when she flared up that time at the opera that I saw how beautiful she was. I understand what she’s doing — she’s going to keep me on ice until she figures she’s evened up for that. I stopped talking to her just before you came. I was standing that way with my back to her because she said if I spoke to her or looked at her she’d howl for help, and since I had already followed her from the music room to the front terrace and from there here, I was afraid she might. What is it, Bellows?”

The butler had emerged from the house. “May I ask, sir, if any refreshment is desired?”

“Oh, sure. I was preoccupied. What will you have, Miss Grant?”

Nancy violated etiquette by looking directly at the butler to tell him she would like orange juice, Jordan admitted he could use a glass of water, and Fox and Jeffrey asked for highballs. As Jeffrey, with a wary glance at Nancy, moved to a chair not more than two yards from her, Fox asked him:

“Is Grant in the house with Kester now?”

Jeffrey nodded. “I think Vaughn took him into the library to see Father. Or, I don’t know, there’s quite a collection scattered around. Five or six directors and vice-presidents and that kind of muck have shown up, and they’re in there some place, and that rooster what’s-his-name is pacing up and down the front terrace muttering to himself—”

“Derwin?”

“No, the colonel with the chest. Briss something—”

“Oh, Colonel Brissenden.”

“Yeah, that’s him. They’ve kept him waiting nearly an hour and he’s as sore as a boil. I beg your pardon. Miss Grant, I see by the face you made that that expression is disgusting to you and I humbly apologize. I humbly apologize.” He gazed at her face a moment and burst out indignantly, “I tell you, when you look like that, it’s inhuman not to let me look at you! Can I help it how I react? I’ll tell you something, my sister has an account at Hartlespoon’s, and she’s going there to look at clothes and I’m going with her, and you’ll model the clothes, and by God I’m going to sit there for hours and look at you and what are you going to do about that? Now, damn it, please... please don’t! I’ll control it!! You haven’t had your orange juice! I’ll talk to Fox.” He turned. “I’ve got a request to make of you anyway. That photograph you took home with you yesterday. You don’t need it any more, do you? I’d a lot rather have her give me one, but that will take time...”

Fox raised the obvious objections, but Jeffrey persisted. It appeared that he really did want the photograph. The refreshments arrived and were distributed, and Jeffrey took a gulp of his highball and pursued his argument to a point where it became probable that he was merely trying to force a contribution to the discussion from Nancy. She sipped her orange juice with an air of aloof indifference that might have been thought slightly unnatural for a girl who was hearing a personable and eligible young man intimate that a picture of her was the most beautiful and desirable inanimate object on the face of the earth. She was doing a good job of it when her ordeal was mercifully ended by a voice from the doorway pronouncing Fox’s name.

Vaughn Kester stood there. “Through this way, Mr. Fox?”

Fox excused himself and entered the house. He was conducted down a side hall, that not being the main entrance, through a room which contained among other things a grand piano elaborately carved and across another hall into a room somewhat larger but less formal. Two of its walls were completely lined with books; a third had French windows, standing open to invite emergence on to a shady lawn made private by a nearby screen of shrubbery; and on its fourth side an enormous fireplace was flanked to the right and left by more books. Cool-looking summer rugs were on the floor, the chairs were cool too with linen covers, and the familiar staccato click came from under the glass dome of a stock ticker, which was at one end of a large flat-topped desk. Standing, fingering the tape, frowning at it, was Ridley Thorpe, shaven, groomed, refreshed, himself. Fox told him good morning. “Good morning.” Thorpe let the tape drop. “I’m sorry you had the trip to town and back. You had already left when Kester phoned your place. May I have that letter from that lunatic?”

Fox took it from his pocket and handed it over. “I doubt if it was written by a lunatic, Mr. Thorpe. I thought perhaps its style and contents had suggested someone to you.”

Thorpe grunted. “Nothing very definite. We’ll go into this later. I have — by the way, I said I’d pay you when your job was successfully completed. Did you make out that check, Vaughn?”

Kester got it from a drawer of a smaller desk and handed it to his employer with a fountain pen. Thorpe glanced at it, signed it, and gave it to Fox. Fox too glanced at it and said, “Thank you very much,” as he put it in his pocket.

“You didn’t earn it,” Thorpe declared. “I should have offered you five thousand, that would have been ample, but I was close to desperate and my head wasn’t working. Not that you didn’t handle it well; you did. It was a perfect job. If you had taken me to White Plains, saying you had found Jordan’s boat and me on it, there would have been a certain amount of suspicion and investigation. The way you did it, leaving me there and letting Luke and Kester be discovered on your boat with you, was good work. I admire it. I want to hire you to find out who killed Arnold. I’m not making any more foolish offers, but I’ll pay you all it’s worth. Unless he is found and taken care of I’ll get killed myself and I doubt very much if the police—”

Fox interrupted. “I’m not sure I can take the job. I understand you sent for Andrew Grant. I’m working for Grant and I can’t undertake—”

“There’ll be no conflict unless Grant killed Arnold and I don’t think he did.”

“What did you send for him for?”

“Because my daughter asked me to. Also because he was there at the bungalow and I wanted to question him myself.”

“All right,” Fox conceded, “I’ll talk it over, anyhow. I already have an idea about that letter you got—”

“It’ll have to wait,” said Thorpe brusquely. He glanced at his wristwatch. “Good gracious, it’s eleven o’clock. I only called you in now to get that letter. Colonel Brissenden of the state police is here and he’ll want to see it. I’ll get rid of him as soon as possible, but then I must have to talk with some of my business associates who have come up from New York. This thing is making a lot of trouble and causing a lot of foolish rumors. You’ll have to wait till I’m through. If you get hungry, find my daughter and tell her to give you some lunch.”

“It’s only a thirty-minute drive to my place. I’ll go there and you can phone—”

“I’d rather you’d wait here. I may be through sooner than I expect. Take a dip in the pool or something. Vaughn, bring Colonel Brissenden.”

Fox returned to the outdoors by the way he had come. Two men were standing talking in the living room as he passed through, one large and fat and florid, the other angular and hollow-cheeked, with a nose whose bridge took all the space between his eyes. They looked worried and ill-humored and stopped talking when Fox appeared. He continued on to the flagged terrace at the side of the house and found that its only remaining occupant was Henry Jordan, still in his chair. He got his glass from the table where he had left it and finished the drink before inquiring:

“Did they go off and leave you?”

Jordan nodded. “The young lady jumped up and went, and young Thorpe followed her.”

“Which way did they go?”

“Down that path.”

A glance showed that the path was deserted up to a bend where it disappeared around a rose trellis. Fox shrugged and informed Jordan, “I’m sorry, but we’re held up here. Thorpe has to see a policeman and then have a business talk first. It may be a couple of hours or more. Did you have any breakfast?”

Jordan looked morose. “I’m all right. My daughter gave me a biscuit and tea. I wouldn’t eat anything at this place. I’d just as soon not see Thorpe. Is there any chance of him coming out here?”

“No, I don’t think so. He’s in the library on the other side of the house, busy dominating. I don’t like him much either. Want to walk around a little?”

Jordan said he was all right where he was, and Fox left him and strolled on to the lawn. Some scale on a limb of dogwood caught his eye and he stopped to examine it with a frown. It was a shame, he reflected, that with millions of dollars a man couldn’t keep scale off his dogwood. Going on, he found himself skirting the border of an elaborate series of trellises covered with climbing roses. As he neared its farther end there was a halt in his step, as of a momentary inclination to turn towards a gap in the trellis; then he resumed his course. Another vast expanse of lawn, punctuated with trees and shrubbery, opened to his view; and there were two moving figures at a distance. Nancy Grant was strolling along the straggling edge of a planting of junipers and fifty paces behind her, now sidling forward, now pausing as if for a reinforcement of resolution, was Jeffrey Thorpe. Fox stood there watching them, then suddenly burst into laughter, turned and entered the central path between the trellises, marched down it for ten yards, stopped abruptly and said aloud:

“Hello, when did you get here?” Then he started laughing again.

The bulk of a broad-shouldered man emerged from the luxuriant thorniness of a golden climber and Dan Pavey’s rumble announced aggressively, “Something is funny.”

“Yes,” Fox agreed.

“You saw me as you went by.”

“Yes. I wondered what you were watching from ambush. I went on and saw them. It struck me as funny. It also struck me as funny when I saw you were blushing. I never saw you blush before. So that’s why you volunteered that advice to Miss Grant last night; you were covering up. I didn’t get it at the time.”

Dan, scowling, uttered a sound that was half growl and half grunt. “What do you mean, covering up?” he demanded. “Covering what up?”

“Nothing.” Fox waved a hand. “I apologize. None of my business. How long have you been here?”

“I got here at 10:47,” said Dan stiffly. “Jordan wasn’t around his boat. Nobody was. I phoned Thorpe’s office and got your message to come here, and I came. They told me you were in with Thorpe. The first thing I see is Jordan sitting on a terrace. I didn’t know whether you knew he was here, so I—”

“You’re going to tell me it was him you were watching?”

“I am.”

“Don’t do it. I’d have to laugh again. The first time I ever saw you blush. I have to stick around here for a talk with Thorpe. You might as well go on home.”

“You mean now?”

“Yes. There are enough complications as it is. Go home and look at yourself in a mirror. If I need you I’ll let you know.”

Dan, with his jaw set square, with no protest or comment, without even any attempt to propose a superior alternative, tramped off down the trellis path. Fox, watching the broad back receding through the bower of roses, waited till it had disappeared at the far end before muttering to himself, “I shouldn’t have laughed, I handled that wrong.”

Leaving the trellis by a transverse path, he wandered across the lawn, back past the scale-infested dogwood in the direction of the east side terrace. Jordan was still there, with his chin gloomily on his chest, and Fox veered to the left. Continuing, he heard voices and, proceeding around a corner of the house, he came to a much larger and more elaborate terrace and saw two people standing at the edge of it, talking. He approached.

“Good morning, Mrs. Pemberton. Hello, Andy.”

They returned his greeting. Miranda looked slim, cool and informally impeccable in a white blouse and yellow slacks. Grant asked Fox, “Have you seen my niece around anywhere?”

Fox waved a hand. “Off in that direction being stalked by young Mr. Thorpe. Mrs. Pemberton, I may have to ask you to change that dinner invitation to a lunch. I’m waiting around for a talk with your father and it may be a long wait.”

“I’ll be glad to feed you,” she declared, “but it won’t cancel the dinner. I’m trying to persuade Mr. Grant to stay.”

“And I interrupted. I apologize. May I wander around a little and look at things?”

She said yes but didn’t offer to accompany him, so he strolled off. Around on the third side of the home he chatted a little with a man who was removing the unsightly tops of oriental poppies and learned, among other things, that they did not use miscible oil as a dormant spray on dogwoods. Stopping to inspect various objects on the way, such as a mole trap of a construction he had not seen and a new kind of border sprinkler, he came to a drive which headed in the direction of a group of outbuildings and followed it. In front of a stone garage which would have held at least six cars, with living quarters above, a man was jacking up a wheel of a limousine. Fox passed the time of day and wandered on. On the other side of an extensive plot of grass was a large greenhouse and he gave that thirty minutes or more. He always found a greenhouse fascinating, but of course there were very few things that he did not find fascinating. There seemed to be no one around, but as he emerged at the far end he heard a voice and, circling a bed of asparagus, he saw whose it was. A little girl sat on the steps of the porch of a little stone cottage, talking to Mrs. Simmons. He saw her affected gestures with her hands and heard her affected mincing tones:

“You know, Mrs. Simmons, it’s really frightful! Would you believe it, they go to the movies every day! Oh, Mrs. Simmons, I don’t know what to do! My children say to me and my husband, they say if they can go to the movies every day, why can’t they go too and my nerves just get all out of my control— Ooh! Who are you?”

“Excuse me,” said Fox, smiling down at her. “I apologize.” He bowed politely to empty space at the left. “How do you do, Mrs. Simmons? I guess I frightened you too. I apologize.” He turned to the other lady. “I’m just a man who came to see Mr. Thorpe and he told me I could walk around. My name is Fox. Do you live here?”

“Yes. You scared me.”

“I’m sorry. I said excuse me. I suppose you know who Mr. Thorpe is?”

“Of course I do.” She was scornful. “He owns my daddy. Anyway my mommie says he does. I heard her. Does he own you too?”

“No, he doesn’t own me, he just rents me.”

She shrieked in derision. “Aw, go on! You can’t rent a man!”

“Well you can’t own one either, or at least you shouldn’t. Is your daddy the gardener?”

“No, he isn’t. He’s the head gardener. My name is Helen Gustava Flanders.”

“Thank you very much. I’ll call you Helen. You can call me Mr. Fox. Those are very beautiful gloves you have on, but they look as if they’re too big for you.”

She looked complacently at the yellow cotton gloves baggy on her little hands, with the fingers flopping. “They’re streemly nice,” she declared.

“Sure,” Fox admitted, “they’re nice enough, but they’re a little too big. Besides, they’re not mates. They’re both for the left hand. See how that thumb’s in the wrong place? Would you mind telling me where you got them?”

“Why, of course, Mr. Fox.” She giggled. “I went shopping in the stores and I bought them. I paid sixty dollars.”

“No, Helen, I mean really. No faking.”

“Oh.” Her eyes looked at his. “If you mean no faking, Miss Knudsen gave them to me.”

“When did she give them to you?”

“Oh, about a year ago.”

He abandoned that detail. “Do you mean Miss Knudsen the cook?”

“She’s not a cook.” She was scornfully derisive again. “She’s Mrs. Pemberton’s maid. Mrs. Pemberton is Miss Miranda. She swims naked. I saw her.”

“Did Miss Knudsen give you the gloves yesterday? Or Monday?”

“Yes,” said Helen firmly.

“Well,” said Fox, “I think she was nice to give them to you, but I tell you what. Those are both for the left hand. You give them to me and I’ll bring you another pair that will—”

“No,” said Helen firmly.

“I’ll bring you two pairs, one yellow and one red—”

“No.”

It took time, tact, patience and guile; so much time, in fact, that Fox’s wristwatch told him it was 12:35 when, having circled back around the greenhouse, he stepped behind a shrub for a strictly private inspection of his loot and satisfied himself on these details; the gloves were yellow cotton of good quality, soiled now but little worn, were exactly alike, both for the left hand, and bore the Hartlespoon label. He put them in his pocket, left the shelter of the shrub and cut across towards the garage, thinking to follow the drive back to the house as he had come. The limousine was still there in front of the garage, but not the man. He went back up the drive frowning, paying no attention to objects that had been worthy of keen interest an hour before. Suddenly he stopped dead still, jerked his chin up and stood motionless. From somewhere ahead of him a car had backfired. Or someone had shot a gun.

A car had backfired.

No, it sounded more like a shot.

He moved again, walked faster and went into a jog, leaving the drive to make a bee-line for the house, still at a distance beyond intervening trees. He heard excited voices, shouts, and broke into a run. To his right, he saw a man running, headed also for the house, one of the guards loping like a camel with a revolver in his hand. The guard was aiming for the front entrance, but Fox, judging by the direction of the voices, swerved to the left, crossed an expanse of open lawn, crashed through some shrubbery, saw French windows standing open and kept going right on through them.

He was in the library. So were a dozen other people, including Ridley Thorpe, who was sprawled on his face on the floor, and also including Colonel Brissenden, on his knee besides Thorpe, barking as Fox entered, “He’s dead!”

Helen Gustava Flanders’ gloves had been the sixth surprise of the day. This was the seventh.