Ellery Queen’s Anthology. Volume 1, 1960

Helen McCloy Murder is Everybody’s Business

The second of our three distinguished short detective novels... Helen McCloy, wife of Brett Halliday of Michael Shayne fame, is enormously talented and will some day be — if she hasn’t already achieved that stature — one of the “big” names of detectivedom...

She stood at the foot of the broad stairs, one hand on the newel post, looking up into the shadows on the floor above. “Mother? Peter? Here I am — Amy!”

A sense of inertia came through the silence. The house was empty. Amy was hardly surprised. She realized she had been foolish to imagine they would stay in because she was coming home. That wasn’t like them at all. Peter might be anywhere, but her mother was probably having tea with Esther Gregory.

Amy crossed the hall to the telephone table and found the Gregory’s number in the book. Time enough to call Allan after she had talked to her mother.

While the open line buzzed and clicked against her ear, she looked down at her cigarette, harsh white against the golden-brown of her skin. She could almost hear her mother’s voice: “Such a deep tan isn’t fashionable any more. Really, it’s almost darker than your hair. And your nails! Just like a boy’s — short, blunt, unpolished. Yet you have nicely shaped hands. One of your few good points. They’d be all right if you took care of them. Oh, if only you had been the boy, and Peter the girl! He has all the charm and you have all the brains. It isn’t fair to me...”

“Operator, I’m still waiting for that number. Will you try it again?”

“Oh, didn’t you get them? I’m sorry. Just a minute, please.”

More buzzing... What proportion of their lives did people waste nowadays waiting for someone else to answer the telephone?

There was a click, and a man’s voice spoke, musical, a gentle, Negro voice: “Hello.”

“Is Mrs. Corbett there? This is her daughter.”

“Just a minute, please, I’ll see if she’s down at the stables.”

Since when had the Gregorys acquired a Negro butler and stables? Over the light humming of the wire she heard footfalls ring on a hard surface and die away. A cat was wailing at the other end of the line, sharp, nasal wailing. A Siamese? Here in the hall where Amy sat there was no sound but the surf and one shrill cry from a gull. This summer home was built on a dune, overlooking the sea. Double doors at either end stood open to the sunny, windy emptiness of sand hills.

Over the telephone line footfalls rang again on a hard surface. Another voice spoke — a white man’s voice: “This is dangerous. I don’t...”

A woman’s voice answered, high, rapid, clear, and rather cool: “We’ve got to... Where’s the Nembutal?”

“In my pocket.” The man’s voice was deep and hoarse.

Amy tried to interrupt: “Hello? Hello? Is this a crossed wire?”

The voices went on. These two could not hear Amy. Only some words were distinct, not complete sentences; as though the pair stood at some distance from the telephone. Not a crossed wire. Just two people talking in the same room as the telephone, unaware that someone else had left it off the hook. Amy was reaching for the telephone cradle to break the connection when the woman said, “I’ve been wondering... better a lethal dose...?”

“No! That... suggests murder... or suicide... We’ll... enough... befuddle senses and... they’ll call it accident. I wish... over!”

“Do you suppose I’m enjoying...?”

“Sometimes... think you do.”

“I’m not that tough, but...”

“You’re the toughest woman I know... Why I love...”

“I’m not... even talking... frightens me.”

“Why? No one can overhear... big room like this... 30 feet to door. You can... terrace from the picture window... no one outside.”

“Things... more real... put them into words. Murder... What a word for people like you and me to...”

“Somehow... doesn’t seem like murder when... you and I.”

“I know... Didn’t seem like adultery when it was you and I... Have you thought... when? What about... tonight...? Sooner the better. If...” The woman’s voice faltered now, a little breathless. “If anything should go... wrong, I hope... adjoining cells before... the end.”

The man’s answer came harshly: “Some prisons... men; others, for women. If... goes wrong, we’ll never meet again.”

“...meet in hell.” Her laugh was cold and bitter.

“Paolo and Francesca? Then hell will be heaven!”

He had matched her mood, yet her response was acid: “None, I think, do there embrace...”

Suddenly the voices ceased. There was only a faint humming. The line was dead.

Frantically, Amy jiggled the lever. “Operator, I was cut off. Give me that number again. Oldport nine seven four.”

A woman’s voice answered this time, a voice spiced with Irish brogue: “Mr. Gregory’s residence.”

“I... I called a moment ago. I was cut off. May I speak to the man who answered the telephone then? He was a Negro, a butler, I suppose.”

“There’s some mistake, ma’am,” the voice answered her cheerfully. “There are no butlers here and no Negroes.”

“Then the operator must have given me a wrong number that first time. May I speak to Mrs. Corbett? This is Miss Corbett.”

“Mrs. Corbett isn’t here now, ma’am, and she’s not expected.”

“Oh, thank you.” Amy jiggled the lever. “Operator, that first call was a wrong number.”

“I’m sorry, madam. Excuse it, please.”

“You don’t understand. I’m not blaming you. I just wanted to know what that wrong number was. It’s important.”

“But, madam!” The operator was bewildered. “If it was a wrong number, it was a mistake. I did it without knowing it. I can’t tell you something I don’t know myself, can I?”

“Oh! Then give me six five three.” But no one answered that number.

Twenty minutes later Amy tried again.

“Dr. Galt is not here now,” said a woman’s voice with a tart Yankee, twang. “But— Oh, wait a minute! I think I hear his car just coming into the drive.”

“Amy!” Allan Galt’s welcome was cordial. “I had no idea you were coming back today. When can I see you?”

“Right away. Unless you’re busy.”

“Something wrong? You sound upset.”

“I am. Something queer just happened. I need advice.”

“I’ll be there as soon as I can. I have a few more house visits to make.”

Amy put down the telephone. Through the open doorway she could see dune shadows turning blue in the sand hollows, while the sunlight that lingered at the level of each crest was taking on its late afternoon luster, bright, still, golden. The day was dying, as summer itself was dying at this time of year. She shivered, suddenly aware of the threat of winter and night.

Have you thought... when? What about... tonight?

Amy frowned. Why was she so sure she had heard that woman’s voice before, somewhere, some time?

Upstairs, slipping into a white pique dress, she heard footfalls below. Allan already? It was little more than half an hour since she had telephoned him. She ran to the head of the stairs. A single lamp was lit in the dark hall below. Within its circle of light a flash of sapphires drew her gaze to her mother’s hands, arranging flowers in a vase on the table. Pale, slender hands, tipped with rose-petal nails.

“Why, Amy! I had totally forgotten you were coming today. You might have reminded me!”

“I did try to reach you by telephone when I got here.”

“Dear child, that was thoughtful!” Natalie Corbett beamed at her daughter as if she meant every word. In a way, she did. That was the funny part. It wasn’t quite the special compassion a mother feels for a child who is crippled or defective. It was rather the deprecating tolerance a breeder of dogs feels for the one puppy in a thoroughbred litter that hasn’t enough points to make the bench show. Poor little brute, no form at all! But he is faithful and affectionate, so I do make rather a pet of him... A girl who dressed carelessly as well as simply, a girl who would rather go to a play than a debutante dance, a girl who treated ineligible men as if they were eligible... Well, it was trying, all Natalie’s friends agreed.

“I wish you’d worn a prettier dress, dear,” Natalie was saying. “And as for that lipstick! The wrong color for your eyes. And crooked. There’s a new shade upstairs on my dressing table that Esther Gregory gave me. Vin Rose. Do run upstairs and try it. I don’t suppose there’s any use suggesting you try the nail polish that goes with it?”

“No, there isn’t.” Amy smiled. “I told you why I stopped wearing nail polish, Mother. At college I developed an allergy to it quite suddenly.”

“You never mentioned such a thing,” exclaimed Natalie.

“Yes, I did, Mother,” Amy said. “You’ve forgotten. I didn’t talk too much about it. I believe people don’t talk about their allergies until they’re cured. It’s humiliating to know that you’re so vulnerable to things normal people use without any trouble.”

“Thank goodness, nothing like that ever happened to me!” Natalie regarded her pearly pink nails with satisfaction. “That Allan Galt is here. He seems most anxious to see you. If I were you I wouldn’t hurry out to the terrace. I’d keep him waiting. A little finesse on your part wouldn’t be out of place at all!”

Amy sighed. “Mother, you know I can’t finesse with anybody and I don’t want to!”

“As you please!” Natalie shrugged as she moved toward the terrace door.

Amy hesitated on the threshold. The terrace seemed crowded, though actually there were only eight people. Natalie had gone over to the cocktail table. No one noticed Amy in the darkness. She recognized her sister-in-law’s fair, fluffy hair and kitten eyes, wide apart, round and wisely wondering. Peter’s wife was sitting apart from the others, and that seemed odd. Amy slipped into a vacant chair beside her. “Hello. Kate!”

“Why, Amy! I didn’t know you were back. How nice!”

“Only for a week. Where’s Peter?”

“Over there at the table with your mother, mixing cocktails.”

Now she had been told where to look, Amy picked out her brother’s figure in the shadows. Peter was like his mother, slim, neat, almost dapper. In the darkness, beyond the lamplight that spilled through the hall doorway, another woman sat on a wicker settee with two men. Amy could see only a whiteness of face and throat and arms against a drift of black dress. The hair must be dark indeed, for it blended with the night. The black lace of a mantilla would have been invisible without a crescent of diamonds that glittered through its mesh.

Kate’s glance followed Amy’s. “That’s Esther Gregory.”

“I’ve known Curtis Gregory for years,” said Amy. “But I think the only time I met Esther was at their wedding in town two years ago. She was a widow, wasn’t she?”

“Yes. A Mrs. Maitland from San Francisco. She’s become a great friend of your mother’s down here.”

“I’ve heard about that.”

Just then the woman’s laugh rippled, light but thin and chill, as the ring of a crystal goblet tapped by a fingernail.

Kate spoke quietly: “I don’t like her, because Peter likes her so much, I suppose. But she’s got a husband. Why does she want all the other men to dance attendance on her as well? Even Allan.”

“That doesn’t sound like Allan.”

“He’s changed, Amy. You’ve stayed away so long you don’t know. He’s over there in the dark sitting with Esther and her house guest, Mr. Payne.”

Amy was startled. Couldn’t Allan have made some excuse to leave Esther Gregory by this time?

“Kate, do you know anyone who has a living-room 30 feet wide?”

“If anyone has, I wouldn’t know it. I’m no good at guessing distances.”

“Well, just a big living-room, then, with a hard floor, stone or tile, and a picture window?”

“Lots of people have big living-rooms with hard floors and picture windows.”

“Are here many who have stables?”

“Probably. You remember there’s fox hunting here in the fall.”

“How many people have Negro butlers?”

“I don’t know any, but several have Negro chauffeurs.”

“Do many people keep Siamese cats?”

“The Pettys have one. What are you driving at, Amy?”

“Think, Kate. Do you know anybody at all who has all these things? A big living-room with a picture window and a bare, hard floor, stables, a Negro chauffeur, and a Siamese cat?”

“I can’t think of anyone. Maybe Allan would know. A doctor visits so many h#uses.”

“I thought of that, but...” Amy sighed. Had her voice sounded a little too upset over the telephone? A doctor who cares about his practice might not like to be mixed up in “something queer.”

“Kate, do you know any man at all who has an unusually hoarse, rough voice?”

“No. What is all this about, Amy?”

“I’m sorry, Kate, but I don’t want to tell you. I’m still hoping it was all a mistake of some kind. Somebody rehearsing a play or something like that. But there was something in their voices that made it seem — real. Two lost souls talking in Limbo. I suppose that’s the way people do talk when they’re in love and the love is furtive and criminal.”

A man’s voice interrupted: “Am I late?” It was Curtis Gregory standing in the hall doorway. “Amy, I didn’t know you would be here today.” His pleasant, usually grave face relaxed in a warm smile. “We never seem to see you in town. When you were twelve you didn’t avoid me like that!”

Amy returned the smile with affection. “When I was twelve I wasn’t running an art gallery in Manhattan!”

“You’re not drinking?” said Curtis. “May I get you some sherry?”

Peter had come over to welcome Curtis. “For heaven’s sake, Amy!” He spoke to his sister with a touch of patronage he had learned from their mother. “Sherry is such an affectation. Why can’t you drink Martinis like everybody else?”

“I’ll get you sherry.” On his way to the cocktail table, Curtis paused in front of the settee: “Esther, where have you been all afternoon? I thought you were going to meet me at the club for a swim.”

Amy didn’t hear the reply. She turned to her brother: “Is that all you have to say to me, Peter?”

“State Department tact,” put in Kate tartly.

“Oh, you know I’m glad to see you, Sis!” Peter’s grin was a little ashamed. “And I’m not in the State Department yet, Kate. I haven’t even decided.”

Peter had flirted with many possible careers — bonds, publishing, real estate. But somehow when it came to the point there was always some good reason for not leaving the pleasant homes his mother maintained in New York and Oldport. Obviously, Kate was beginning to worry about Peter’s emotional and economic dependence on his mother.

“You’ll have to do something,” she said wearily. “I’d rather have the simplest household of our own than go on living with your mother forever!”

Natalie could not have caught the words, but her quick ear picked up the tone and she acted swiftly to break up the trio: “Children, we really must go in to dinner!” She raised her voice slightly to include the whole company: “Allan, you’ll stay, won’t you?... Mr. Payne, Esther, please bring your glasses to the table. We can’t be late for the dance.”

Amy was scarcely conscious of Payne, the only stranger, as Esther stepped into the light from the lamp in the hall. She was a woman who drew and held the eye irresistibly. Under hair like polished onyx, her face had all the perfection of a marble image, Greek of the classical period. But there was something strange about her beauty, a disturbing touch of mystery that was emphasized by the slight, weary smile.

“Amy, dear, don’t you remember me? I remember you at my wedding two years ago. You were such an attractive child, so artless and serious.”

“I’m still rather artless.” Amy couldn’t trust herself to say more at that moment. Esther’s voice was high, rapid, clear, and rather cool. Unmistakably the voice of the woman Amy had heard on the telephone this afternoon. The voice that grew a little breathless and faltered when it said: “If anything should go... wrong I hope... adjoining cells before... the end.” But who was the man?

In the dining-room four long windows stood open to the terrace. The night was so still that the candle flames were as motionless as the candles. Mahogany brought out the fine detail of doily lace and doubled the flames in its dark red mirror. Natalie had spoken of dinner, but it was actually a buffet supper. Guests gathered around the sideboard, plates in hand, serving themselves, while the maid confined herself to pouring coffee. When Amy turned back to the table she found a place next to the Gregorys’ house guest, Payne.

Her first glimpse of him on the terrace had suggested a young man, tall, lean, muscular. The face he turned toward her now placed him somehere between 30 and 40. Lines had begun to form about the eyes and mouth. The skin was swarthy and weatherbeaten. A plain face, yet when he smiled it was transfigured by a flash of gaiety and daring. The smile of a bom adventurer, as different from other smiles as the warm, dancing light of a wood fire is different from the steady, impersonal glow of an electric bulb. “You’re the toughest woman I know... Why I love...” Yes, Amy could imagine Payne saying that. She felt her own smile waver as she realized that now she would hear his voice.

“You’re Miss Corbett, aren’t you? Nobody bothered to introduce us. I’m Matthew Payne.”

Amy’s breath escaped in a long sigh. This voice was deep and masculine, but it was mellow, almost soft, with a hint of Southwestern drawl.

And yet it had all fitted so neatly. A house guest of the Gregorys’, a mature man who looked reckless, a stranger whose voice Amy had never heard before. Was it conceivable that he was the man, that he knew someone had overheard him and that he was deliberately disguising his voice? Could anyone but an actor do that?

“Haven’t I seen you on the stage, Mr. Payne? Or in the movies?”

“Who, me?” His laugh was as uninhibited as his smile. “Do I look it?”

“It’s not your looks. It’s your voice.” She gazed at him directly. “I think I’ve heard it before.”

“I doubt that.” He frowned, apparently puzzled. “I’ve never been on stage or screen and I’ve been on the air only once. During the war when I was with the OSS.” He was smiling again. “Could it be that one radio speech?”

“No.” She managed to smile back at him. “What is your job now that OSS is disbanded?”

“Insurance. That was my last job before the war, too.”

“Your last job?”

“Before that I had all sorts of odd jobs — cowpunching in Texas, engineering in Mexico. Jack-of-all-trades and master of none.”

“Matt, you should take yourself more seriously!” The cool voice startled Amy. She had not realized that Esther, across the table, was listening. “You sound like an adventurer. Are you playing Othello to Amy’s Desdemona? She may look young and inexperienced, but she isn’t naive. Not at all.” Esther’s eyes dwelt on Amy for the moment enigmatically.

“So I’ve discovered!” Payne was amused.

“Matt has had a most interesting life,” Esther went on to Amy. “He has lived the sort of thing most people today merely read about. Especially when he was in the OSS.”

“I’m sorry if I seemed rude.” Amy turned to Payne impulsively. “It was the voice, really. I was so sure that I’d heard it before.”

“The voice?” Esther’s eyes glittered in the candlelight. “Where did you think you had heard Matt’s voice before, Amy?”

“I... didn’t know.” The tone of that question was disturbing.

After supper, in the hall, Allan said, “Will you drive with me to the dance, Amy? Then we can have that talk we planned on the way.”

There were two cars on the sweep of gravel outside. Amy recognized Allan’s little coupe. The big sedan must be the Gregorys’. Natalie was already arranging her skirts on the back seat of the big car, when Peter said:

“I don’t like jump seats! Esther, will you drive with me if I get my convertible? I can’t ask Kate or Mother, because they don’t like to get their hair blown.”

It was said lightly, easily, but Amy was conscious of effort under the ease, heaviness in the moment that followed the lightness.

Esther smiled. “I’d love to, Peter. Night is so much more lovely than day. It’s the one time I really enjoy an open car.”

Without a word, Kate got into the big car beside Natalie.

“That leaves you to sit with the ladies, Matt, while I drive.” Curtis Gregory spoke as if he were unaware of tension, and the big car moved away.

“Why is night more lovely than day?” inquired Allan.

“Can you ask?” Esther threw back her head to look up at the stars. Her mantilla fell softly away from her face, a part of the shadows like the filmy black of her dress. “Day is commonplace. Night has mystery. And awe.”

Peter’s convertible swung around the corner from the garage and came to a stop. Light from the house fell on the sleeve of his old topcoat as he reached out an arm to open the door of the car.

“Just a minute, Peter.” Amy was glad of the chance to shatter Esther’s romantic mood. “Something on your sleeve.” She was all sister, as she plucked at a tuft of tawny hair.

“Golden tress of a beautiful blonde?” suggested Allan.

“No.” Amy’s voice was colorless. “It looks more like the hairs of a cat. A Siamese cat.”

Allan’s car left the tree-lined lanes of Oldport for the State Highway that ran through farm and wasteland to the Yacht Club. The starlit road unwound before them swiftly as a white ribbon unreeling from a runaway spool. Allan’s dark, good-looking face was in shadow, but Amy saw the gleam of his teeth as he grinned. “You sounded very upset on the telephone,” he said. “What gives?”

Amy was silent. Then: “Allan, tell me something? What do you think of Esther Gregory?”

“She’s the most amazing woman I’ve ever seen. The word ‘beautiful’ is too shopworn for her. Every screen star and advertising model is called beautiful today. Usually a matter of clever camera angles and trick makeup. Esther’s beauty isn’t a trick. It’s Esther. It’s the way she steps and smiles and breathes and speaks. It’s the faint shadow in the hollows at her temples and the way her hair grows on the nape of her neck.”

Amy sighed. “Do you like her?”

“Of course. Don’t you?”

“I think she’s fascinating, but I’m not sure I like her.”

“You’ve only met her once or twice before this evening, haven’t you?”

“Once. At her wedding.”

“You’ll like her when you get to know her better. Has Esther got anything to do with this thing you want my advice about?”

They were passing a farm that stood in a clearing. The farmhouse was bright with lamplight, snug, warm, and safe. Why “safe”? Amy asked herself. Didn’t she feel safe on this familiar road with one of her oldest friends?

“Yes, Allan. She has, and it’s not a... a nice thing. Perhaps I’d better not tell you, if you’re such a good friend of Esther’s.”

“We’re not exactly friends.” Allan’s voice was calm, reassuring. “Not the way you and I are. Go ahead.”

He listened stolidly as she repeated the telephone conversation, slowing the pace of the car so they would have more time. “You’re sure you couldn’t identify the man’s voice?”

Amy could not see Allan’s face. His voice was expressionless. “No, I couldn’t. But I’m sure of the woman. Perhaps the telephone distorted the man’s voice. Anyway, we know he’s a man of cultivated tastes.”

“Do we? Everybody’s heard of Paola and Francesca.”

“But not everybody has heard of Andrew Marvell.” Amy quoted pensively:

“You said it was the woman who quoted that,” objected Allan.

“But she wouldn’t have quoted it if he hadn’t been the sort of man who would recognize it,” insisted Amy. “Allan, should I go to the police?”

He sighed. “Would that be wise? Your only evidence is subjective: your own identification of a woman’s voice heard briefly on an open telephone line. There are no other witnesses and you admit the telephone distorts a voice. You may be mistaken about the voice; you may have misunderstood some of the words as well. These people may not have used the word ‘murder’ at all. Even if you did hear and remember every word correctly, there may have been nothing more sinister at the other end of that telephone than a radio playing a snatch of dialogue from some crime play. Even if you don’t care for Esther herself, think how Curtis will feel if you go to the police!”

“But, Allan, that’s the whole point! If this murderous woman is Esther Gregory, there can be only one victim — Curtis himself!”

“Curtis? Wait a minute. Let’s stop and get this straight.” Allan swung his car onto the grass beside the road and then turned in his seat to look at her. “Did either of them mention Curtis by name?”

“No.” A throb in Amy’s voice betrayed her anxiety. “But, Allan! They were lovers, quite obviously. ‘You’re the toughest woman I know... Why I love...’ And they were illicit lovers. ‘Paolo and Francesca... didn’t seem like adultery when it was you and I.’ Who is always the victim of a wife who talks murder with a lover? The husband, of course?”

“Ever hear of divorce?”

“Curtis has money, hasn’t he? He used to run some sort of importing business before he was in the Army. Silk, I think. If Esther has no money of her own and if the lover himself is poor...”

Allan looked down at his own hands, clasping the rim of the steering wheel. “I didn’t realize at first how serious you were about this. Now, there’s something I have to tell you. I recognized that room the moment you described it — the hard, bare floor, the width — 30 feet, the picture window overlooking a terrace, even the Siamese cat and the stables.”

“And the Negro?”

“He happens to be a white man from Alabama. Hearing him without seeing the color of his skin, anyone would take him for a Negro.” Allan smiled crookedly. “You didn’t know that I’d had my place done over this spring, did you? That room happens to be my own waiting-room.”

“Allan...” The word died in her throat for lack of breath.

“And now...” There was a new, hard note in his voice as he leaned forward to turn the ignition key. “We’re not going to the Yacht Club. We’re going to my place to find out just who was there late this afternoon.”

The car left the highway and turned down a lamplit, a most suburban road.

“Allan, it’s such a coincidence.”

“What is?”

“That I got your number when I got a wrong number.”

Allan laughed. “Don’t you see what must have happened? You planned to call me after you called your mother at the Gregorys’. My number was in the foreground of your mind, so, in a moment of abstraction, you gave my number instead of the Gregorys’. Perhaps you really wanted to call me more than you wanted to call your mother.”

“Don’t go Freudian on me!” protested Amy.

“If the woman you overheard really was Esther Gregory and if it was the operator who gave you a wrong number, the whole thing would be a mathematical impossibility. Out of all the numbers in Oldport, the operator selects one for you by pure chance that tunes you in on a room where a woman you already know is talking. I couldn’t believe that. But if the wrong number wasn’t chosen by chance, if you actually chose it unconsciously, it’s not surprising you overheard someone you knew.”

“Was Esther at your place today?”

“Not to my knowledge, but we’ll find out.”

Amy remembered Allan’s home as a long, low, white-painted house, standing in an open meadow that gave the place its name, The Paddock. Now, by the car’s headlight, she could see that the meadow had become a cultivated lawn enclosed in a neat hedge, and a new wing had been added to the house itself. A light shone from one of several outbuildings.

“Stables?” murmured Amy as the car halted.

“I keep a cow and a saddle horse. Curtis sold me the idea I should have a horse for exercise. Sold me the horse, too, for that matter. I ride on the beach mornings before I go to the hospital.”

“What sort of staff do you have here?”

“One of the local nurses comes during office hours to keep records straight and help with patients. Then I have a housekeeper, Mrs. Adams. Nice old soul. It’s she who’s responsible for the Siamese cat. Got him a week ago.”

“And the man from Alabama who talks like a Negro?”

“Sharpe. He comes in twice a day to look after the grounds and the stables. He’s a gardener, really, employed by a landscaping company to mow lawns and trim hedges on the big places around here. But he likes to make extra money, so he comes to me when he’s off duty.”

“And that’s the terrace and the picture window.” Amy was looking at the new wing.

Allan opened the front door without a key.

“Don’t you ever lock it?”

“In Oldport? Of course not!”

Allan led the way through a door on the left and pressed a light switch. The waiting-room was big, at least 30 feet wide, obviously new, aseptically impersonal. There were no rugs. The floor was some synthetic composite, a mottled gray that looked like marble and rang like stone under Amy’s heels.

“Allan! This must be the place.” Her glance came to rest on a desk with a telephone.

“That’s where the nurse sits. There are two other extensions, in my office and in my bedroom.”

“Wouldn’t the nurse be here at 5 o’clock? That’s the time I telephoned.”

“She leaves a few minutes earlier if there are no patients in the waiting-room and I am out on house visits, as I was today.”

“Then it’s no use asking your housekeeper whether Esther was here today or not. This room could have been empty when the telephone rang about 5 o’clock. The stableman, Sharpe, might have heard it, passing a window. He might have stepped inside to answer it, knowing you and the nurse had gone, not knowing whether the housekeeper heard it or not. Only, when I asked for Mrs. Corbett, why did he say she might be down at the stables?”

“Because she might.” Allan’s voice was sober, plainly worried. He looked heavier, more settled and weary than Amy remembered him. “Your mother and Peter have been here a lot this summer.”

“So Sharpe puts the telephone down on the desk, leaving the line connected, and walks out to the stables,” mused Amy. “That walk would take several minutes. While he’s gone, two other people come into the waiting-room — a man and a woman. They walk in unannounced because the front door is unlocked. If they are discovered they can always claim they came as patients.”

“But why come here at all?” demanded Allan.

Amy smiled. “Remember what the woman said: ‘Where’s the Nembutal?’ ”

“Holy Moses! I’ll check that at once.” Allan hurried through the door to his office. Amy followed, and found him standing before a wall cupboard.

“Do you always leave the key in the lock like that?”

“No. I carry one key and keep a spare in the desk drawer.”

“Where any patient might have seen it?”

He nodded. “That’s the spare.” He took a bottle of capsules out of the cupboard. The face he turned to Amy now was haggard. “There seem to be about a dozen capsules missing. I swear I can’t remember whether I took them out myself to put in my bag or not.”

“Now, do you believe my story?”

“I suppose I must.” He locked the cupboard. “Even so, I’m not sure you have enough evidence to go to the police. I can report the missing Nembutal, but that conversation you overheard is still a flimsy basis for accusing a woman like Esther Gregory. And you have no idea who the man was.”

“Perhaps we can find out now.” Amy’s eyes shone. “Allan, haven’t you wondered about afterward?”

“After what?”

“After that telephone connection was cut. The man, Sharpe, must have come back from the stables to tell me that Mrs. Corbett wasn’t there. Did he find Esther and the man still here or see them leave the house?”

Allan frowned. “Are you sure it was your sudden start that cut the telephone conversation? Isn’t it possible that the people you overheard discovered the open telephone line at that moment? In that case, one of them would cut the connection and they’d both get away as fast as they could, before anyone saw them. They couldn’t know that the listener at the other end of the line thought she had a wrong number. They would think she knew she was listening to a conversation in my house. So they couldn’t afford to be seen here at that particular time.”

“Even then they may not have got away fast enough. Sharpe may have seen them.” Amy turned toward the door. “Is he down at the stable now? There was a light there when we came in.”

After the aseptic, fluorescent glitter of office and waiting-room, it was hard to see, outside. Amy stumbled as they crossed the uneven turf.

Allan opened the stable door. “Sharpe?”

There was a thud of iron-shod hoofs on wood. Allan opened a door on the right and pressed a wall switch. The light of a naked bulb showed a concrete floor and a box stall of unfinished wood. A horse’s head lifted across the barrier — dark chestnut with a black mane. Amy saw the white rim that circled rolling eyeballs.

“Quiet there, old girl. What’s the matter?” Surprise edged Allan’s voice. “Usually Stormbird... Great heavens!”

Allan was looking intently into the mare’s box. She moved, and her shadow shifted with her, so that light fell on the farther wall. Now Amy could see the crumpled body of a man in overalls and the horseshoe curve of the wound that had crushed his skull, dark with blood against a bloodless face.

“Sharpe!” Allan whispered incredulously. “But Stormbird wouldn’t... I’ve been in that stall with her often.”

Amy turned away, fighting nausea. “It wasn’t Stormbird.” She closed her eyes, leaning her head against the wall. “Now we know what happened... afterward. And we can’t prove a thing.”

Never again would Amy enjoy the pungent smell of horse and hay and leather. She opened her eyes and walked numbly into the yard outside.

“Allan!”

“Yes?” He was at her elbow.

“I have to tell the police about that conversation now.”

“You’re not suggesting that Esther killed Sharpe?”

“Of course not. But the man who was with her did. Sharpe was the only person who knew that a Miss Corbett had called your number and been left listening to an open line that led to your waiting-room. Sharpe was the only person who could have seen the couple who came into that room while the line was still open without noticing it. Don’t you see? They were still there when he got back and he told them who had called. They realized instantly that, once I talked to Sharpe, he would identify them for me. And I was certain to talk to Sharpe as soon as I identified your waiting-room as the place where they had talked. Together, Sharpe and I were a menace. I could testify to the couple’s conversation. Sharpe could identify the couple. So the man killed Sharpe to save Esther and himself.”

“Would any man murder to escape a charge of attempted murder? That is the only accusation you and Sharpe could make!”

“Suppose they want to carry out their original plan of murdering Curtis and making it look like an accident? There must be some overwhelming motive for that or they would never have planned it in the first place! If I charge Esther now, or later, and she denies the whole thing, it’s just my word against hers. Without Sharpe’s corroboration, I have nothing but my belief that I identified the woman’s voice as Esther’s. Allan, what should I do?”

“Tell your story without identifying Esther. Then you have told the police everything that you actually know. You can’t name Esther when you’re not sure it was she.”

“Esther — always Esther! Are you so fond of her?”

“Don’t you understand? If you accuse Esther without proof they can’t arrest her. But they’ll have to question her. If she’s guilty she’ll know from their questions that you identified her voice and not the man’s. She will tell the man and—”

“And I’ll be in danger, too?” Amy broke off short. “Lights! See? A car coming into the drive.”

“Quick!” Allan started to run toward the house. “Keep them in the living-room, whoever they are, while I call the police from my office.”

The car had halted. A slender figure in drifting black stepped into the light. Fine brows arched. Dark eyes turned in Amy’s direction. Esther was smiling. “Amy! Your mother was getting worried, so we came to look for you. I thought we might find you here.”

Another figure stepped out of the shadows. “I was ordered to look for you. Esther came along for the ride. Where’s Allan?”

Amy looked from the mockery in Esther’s eyes to the blandly impudent face of her brother. She took a certain satisfaction in her calm rejoinder: “Allan? Oh, he’s gone to call the police.”

“Police?” Peter’s eyes widened, but Esther’s narrowed. A clear indication of temperament, thought Amy — the one, impetuous; the other, calculating. Or could it be that Peter was surprised and that Esther was not?

“A man has been killed. Allan’s stableman. Allan wants us to wait for the police in the living-room.”

“But it has nothing to do with us!” cried Peter.

“It has to do with me,” retorted Amy. “I was with Allan when he found the body.”

The living-room was cheerful and commonplace — gray chintzes splashed with cherry-red against gray walls and carpet. The only exotic note was the cat that sprang forward to welcome them, biscuit-colored with the seal-brown face and paws of a Siamese.

“Oh, Houri!” Esther put out her hand. But Houri spat at the hand and fled to the top of a bookcase.

Allan walked into the room. “They’ll be here in a few minutes.”

“Can’t they see Amy tomorrow?” demanded Peter.

“There’s something only I can tell them.” Amy turned to Allan. “You’ll let them know that my story is vital evidence, won’t you?”

Allan nodded. “Of course. I’m going outside to wait for them.”

“Vital evidence?” Peter looked at Amy with irritation. “You’re dramatizing yourself. What vital evidence?”

“I’d rather not tell anyone but the police.”

Peter lit one cigarette after another. Amy, herself, was restless. Only Esther was outwardly serene.

Allan came in again and shut the door behind him. “The man in charge is Murchison. Assistant District Attorney. Rather like a German police dog. If he were defending your rights, you’d think he was a faithful, well-trained animal. But if you were the man whom he was defending someone’s rights against, you’d certainly think he was a vicious brute that ought to be shot.”

“And which are you?” Esther’s voice was cool.

Allan shrugged. “He hasn’t decided — yet. The body was found on my premises, but it looks like an accident and I can account for most of my time. I was making house visits between 5 and 7, when Sharpe must have died, but of course there are some time-gaps between each visit.”

“Isn’t that less suspicious than a watertight alibi?” suggested Peter.

“Perhaps. Especially as I had no motive for killing poor Lem Sharpe.”

“Lem Sharpe!” Peter was startled. “The man who cuts our lawn?” He turned to Amy: “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I didn’t know that you knew the man at all,” returned Amy.

“Everybody knows Sharpe,” exclaimed Esther. “He’s employed by Neilson and Eddington, the landscape gardeners. They take care of all the lawns and hedges around here on a weekly basis.”

Peter was smiling for the first time since he had entered the room. “The D.A. was just looking for excitement,” he said comfortably. “No one would kill an inoffensive chap like Sharpe.”

Amy spoke quietly: “I think he was murdered.”

“Why?” Peter’s smile vanished.

The door opened. The man who came into the room did have the long-legged lope of a police dog. The eyes, too — a light hazel that looked shallow and flat, with a small, hard core of black pupil. “Miss Corbett? Dr. Galt says there is something you want to tell me. Let’s have it.”

Amy looked at him in astonishment. Witnesses with vital information were always interviewed alone so others could not adjust their testimony to suit. “Mr. Murchison, I would rather talk to you privately.”

She saw a trace of amusement under the hard surface of his eyes. She had been wrong to trust Allan as go-between. Unintentionally or not, he had given Murchison an idea that her evidence was not vital at all.

Esther’s high, cool voice cut the silence: “Miss Corbett is young and inexperienced, Mr. Murchison. The shock of discovering this body has brought her to the edge of hysteria. Don’t you agree that at least one of us, I or her brother, should be present while you question her?”

“Well, Miss Corbett?” Murchison was indifferent.

Amy felt the color hot in her cheeks. Esther’s gentle patronage spurred her to recklessness. “All right. What I have to say concerns Mrs. Gregory.”

Once or twice Amy, herself, had doubted her identification of Esther as the woman whose voice she had overheard. Now all doubt died. In the first instant of shock a look flashed across Esther’s face that startled even Amy. A sudden, taut thinning of the lips, a sudden, wide blazing of the eyes, and that beautiful face became a tortured mask, a specter from the nightmare side of the human soul, glancing to the surface for the moment, then, as swiftly, submerged.

The men did not see it. They were all looking at Amy, herself.

Esther’s voice was as calmly modulated as ever: “I have no idea what you are talking about, Amy.”

“Sis!” Peter’s voice was harsh. “If you’re dramatizing yourself again—!”

“Trust a brother to give you a good send-off!” Amy turned to Allan: “Tell Mr. Murchison: Do I dramatize myself? And do I stick to facts?”

Allan looked at Peter, then at Amy, with embarrassment. “You try to be truthful. You are imaginative, but — you never distort facts knowingly.”

Amy had expected more from Allan. She began to feel as if she were struggling in an invisible net, fine, clinging, steely as a spider’s web. She told her tale badly, her very voice faltering, a witness against her.

Murchison was skeptical. “You understand that this is a very serious thing, if it is true? In effect, you are accusing Mrs. Gregory of plotting with a lover to kill her husband. But you have no evidence and no other witness to corroborate your statement.”

“There was a witness — Sharpe. Now he is dead. It can’t be coincidence!”

Peter broke in angrily: “See here, Murchison. My sister has always been erratic. Ask my mother if you don’t believe me! Amy is what they used to call a tomboy, and she has always neglected our mother, who is a very feminine person, herself. Today Amy comes down here and finds Esther Gregory taking her place with Mother, more like a daughter than Amy, herself, ever was. It’s easy to see how her sense of guilt would sharpen her jealousy of Esther. So when she overhears this conversation, probably a radio play, she imagines that she recognizes the woman’s voice as Esther’s.”

All this time Esther had had the wisdom to sit perfectly still, with only a slight expression of dismay. Subtly she was suggesting that Amy’s accusations were too wild to merit her denial.

“There’s another point worth considering,” said Allan. “There has never been the slightest breath of scandal about Mrs. Gregory. She and her husband are the most devoted couple I know.”

“Of course.” Peter was simmering. “Everybody knows that.”

Murchison pursed his lips and looked thoughtfully at Allan. “There’s one point you haven’t mentioned: the Nembutal. Some capsules may be missing, according to your statement. Perhaps your housekeeper saw some of the patients who called here between 5 and 7 this afternoon after you and the nurse had left.”

“She saw me,” said Peter defiantly. “I wasn’t going to mention it, because it didn’t seem to be relevant, but now I’ll have to. I came here this afternoon around 6 o’clock to get some emperin for my mother’s neuralgia. The housekeeper let me in, but there didn’t seem to be anyone else around except the cat. That’s how I got that bit of cat fur on my sleeve, Amy — playing with Houri.”

“And you just helped yourself to Nembutal?” suggested Murchison.

“Of course not! Why should I do an idiotic thing like that?”

Allan intervened: “You do understand that I’m not sure whether any Nembutal is missing or not?”

Murchison turned to Amy with a smile that was not unfriendly. “There goes the one bit of corroboration you ad. Better forget the whole thing and get a good night’s rest.” He became gravely polite as he addressed Esther: “Are you and your husband patients of Dr. Galt?”

“My husband has been his patient. I haven’t been ill since I came here.”

“And I suppose you can account for most of your time this afternoon tween 5 and 7?”

“Of course.” Esther smiled through her distress, sunshine piercing a storm cloud. “I was at home all afternoon until I went to the Corbetts’ for dinner. My husband was out, but our house guest, Mr. Payne, can probably assure you I didn’t leave the house. He was in his own room writing letters. The window beside the desk in that room overlooks the front drive. I am sure he would have seen me go out.”

“And the servants?”

“They were in the kitchen. Two maids, Bridget and Anna. So I couldn’t have gone out the back way, either. And there are no French windows.” Esther’s smile seemed to say, “Is all this necessary?”

Murchison’s answering smile agreed that it was not. “Thank you, Mrs. Gregory. That clears up everything.”

Amy felt physically ill. “Aren’t you going to — do anything?”

Murchison looked at her, no longer friendly. “What do you expect me to do? The District Attorney’s office has to decline prosecution if there isn’t enough evidence to win a case in court. In this case there’s no evidence at all. I really think you owe Mrs. Gregory an apology. Good night.”

Through a haze across her eyes and a drumming in her ears, Amy heard Allan and Peter saying “Good night” to Murchison in voices loud with relief as they escorted him out.

Amy looked at Esther. “Well?” Amy’s voice was hard.

But Esther answered softly, “Well?”

“It’s between you and me, isn’t it?”

If Amy hoped that the sting of her words would bring that revealing look of frenzy to Esther’s face again, she was mistaken. Esther’s smile was so gentle, so tired, that Amy began to wonder. Had she been deceived by a trick of the lamplight? Had she really surprised that look on Esther’s face at all?

“My dear child” — there was a slight vibrancy in Esther’s voice — “I am distressed to think you could believe me capable of such things.”

Amy looked at her steadily. “It’s witchcraft. Both Peter and Allan defended you, though it meant discrediting me. You could charm a dead man out of his shroud. You almost charmed me. Almost. Not quite. If only I knew who he was, the man you talked to this afternoon, the man who killed Sharpe. Peter can be a fool. Allan admires you. And Payne was at your home with you this afternoon while poor Curtis was out. Why couldn’t you and Payne have left the house together and come over here? Your maids were in the kitchen. They might not have seen you leave.”

Esther dropped her eyelids. Her face was still. “Can you really believe that I don’t love Curtis?”

“I’m sorry. You sound as if you meant it, but I heard you talking to the other man. If anything happens to Curtis now, I... I’ll spend the rest of my life bringing it home to you. I’m warning you.”

Amy could not understand Esther’s sudden smile. Honest anger or hypocritical scorn would have been normal responses. But why that look of sly, almost mischievous irony? As if Amy had done or said something utterly stupid that played directly into Esther’s hands...

Amy woke late the next morning. In a wan voice, she answered the tap on her door: “Come in!” A maid entered with a breakfast tray. Natalie followed, trailing an exquisitely fragile lavender peignoir. She lit a cigarette and waited until the maid had gone. “Amy, you know I love you, but why did you have to cause Peter such embarrassment last night? He tells me you practically accused his friend, Esther Gregory, of murder without any evidence at all.”

“His friend?” Amy put down her coffee cup. “I thought Esther was your friend. And there was evidence.”

As Natalie listened, a shrewdness came into her eyes Amy had never remarked before. “I suppose the man was Payne.”

Amy was amazed. “You believe me? You think Esther capable of such a thing?”

Natalie smiled. “My dear child, I’ve always suspected that Esther was capable of anything. That’s one reason she fascinated me.”

“But I thought she was your friend!”

“A woman my age doesn’t make friends, Amy. I don’t like Esther. I like being with her. She’s decorative and if I’m giving a party I know the men will have a good time if Esther’s there. But I’ve always thought she would be a dangerous woman if she were thwarted.”

“Then you don’t think I did wrong last night?”

“On the contrary, I think you did very wrong. Not because I care about Esther, but because I care about you. What business is it of yours if Esther has a lover?”

“No business of mine at all,” agreed Amy. “But murder is everybody’s business.”

“Murder?” It was Natalie’s turn to be amazed. “Esther is not a fool!”

“But I heard her say—”

“Oh, talk!” Natalie brushed the idea aside. “People who talk about murder don’t commit one. Just as people who talk about suicide never kill themselves. You happened to catch Esther and her lover at a morbid moment, daydreaming about something they would never have the nerve — or the stupidity — to carry out in cold blood. I’m not afraid of Esther’s murdering Curtis. I am afraid of his divorcing her and washing a great deal of dirty linen in public.”

Amy sighed. As usual she and her mother had been talking at cross-purposes. When Natalie said, “I’ve always suspected that Esther was capable of anything,” she meant anything scandalous, not anything criminal. Violence was something outside all Natalie’s traditions and experience.

“I don’t care what happens to Esther,” Natalie was saying. “But I don’t want my daughter mixed up in a nasty thing like this. Or my son.”

“But... Peter isn’t involved!” protested Amy.

“Are you sure?” Natalie frowned. “Esther is at the age when women make fools of themselves over younger men.”

“Then it was more hope than faith that made you say, ‘I suppose the man was Payne’?”

“He’s a likely candidate, but — Peter never did have the brains you have. The only thing now is to pick up the pieces.” Natalie cast an appraising look at Amy, the look of any mother whose daughter is ‘unpredictable.’ “Curtis Gregory is downstairs now. He wants to see you. That’s why I woke you. I have an impression that he’s as anxious to protect Esther as I am to protect Peter, and Curtis thinks you can help. I hope you’ll do whatever he suggests.”

Amy pushed aside her unfinished breakfast and began to dress. Natalie would never understand a woman like Esther. Natalie knew nothing of the height of passion or the depth of despair. She enjoyed playing the game according to the rules, but Esther was potentially lawless...

Curtis waited at the foot of the stairs. The face he lifted to Amy was drawn and sallow in the morning light. “Let’s go outdoors,” he suggested. “Where we can talk undisturbed.”

Amy led the way around the front of the house to a carefully cultivated patch of lawn, an oasis amidst the wind-blown poverty-grass of the dunes. There were iron chairs that Natalie had had painted dusty pink instead of the usual white. Curtis leaned forward in his chair, hands tense, eyes haunted, the eyes of a stranger.

“Amy, I want you to think carefully before you answer the question I’m going to ask you. Could you go on the witness stand and swear that the woman’s voice you overheard on the telephone was Esther’s?”

Amy shook her head. “I couldn’t swear. But I believe it. Don’t you?”

Curtis sat back in his chair, his face relaxed in the smile that was so familiar. “Of course not.” The glance he bent on Amy now was the old, quizzically affectionate glance she knew so well. “I’m not quite a fool, Amy,” he said comfortably. “And I’m a good many years older than you. If Esther cared about another man, I should know it. Do you believe me?”

There was unmistakable sincerity in his voice. Amy looked into the friendly eyes and felt a great compassion for him. If Esther was abusing such unquestioning faith, she was doing something more coldly evil than murder itself.

“You understand that I wasn’t just — gossiping?” said Amy. “I would not have said anything if there had been no talk of murder.”

“I understand that.” Curtis’s voice was quickly sympathetic. “You thought you were protecting me and you couldn’t warn me without accusing Esther. I just wish you hadn’t done it so publicly. There’s going to be talk now. Unpleasant talk. But we can fight that, if you’ll help. Will you?”

“What do you want me to do?”

“First of all, Esther wants to talk to you. Will you go to see her today?”

“What good will that do?”

“Amy—” There was surprise in his voice. “Don’t you like my wife?”

“I must answer honestly: We’re not congenial.”

“That’s too bad.” Curtis frowned. “Because she likes you so much. She feels that if she could just have a talk with you she could clear up any misunderstanding. Will you try, Amy?”

Amy was surprised at the almost physical revulsion she felt. “All right, I’ll try. To please you. Anything else?”

“Yes. Your mother thinks we should all appear in public together as soon as possible, behave just as if nothing had happened. It’s a matter of saving face.”

“That sounds like Mother,” murmured Amy.

“Your mother knows her world,” returned Curtis. “She has the nerve and the presence and influence to carry off a thing like this. The rest of us will have to play up to her.”

“Mother has no influence with the police.”

“She has social influence, which is more important now,” explained Curtis. “The police may be satisfied, but what about public opinion? If your mother appears in public with you and Esther, everyone will know that she never believed your charges against Esther and that you have withdrawn them.”

“Then it’s really Esther whose face we are to save?”

For a moment Curtis was silent. Then he spoke earnestly: “You don’t seem to realize, Amy, how much I love my wife. If your fantastic idea were true, if she actually did love another man, I would do everything to make divorce easy for her, once I was convinced she really wanted it. That’s why this idea of her planning my death is so ridiculous. She has no conceivable motive for wishing me out of the way.” His voice shook.

Amy wondered at his emotion. Under this brave front was he, too, beginning to doubt Esther? Moved, she said quickly, “When is this to be?”

“Tomorrow. We’ll dine at the club and stay for the dance afterward. We can meet at my place for cocktails — you and your mother, Kate and Peter and Allan, Esther and Payne and myself.”

“The same party we had last night.” Amy spoke with a sense of foreboding.

“It has to be,” insisted Curtis. “And you will go to see Esther today? Around teatime?”

“Yes.”

“Thank you, Amy.”

She watched his tall figure move toward the car he had left in the drive. He turned to smile at her. “Don’t worry, Amy!”

She went into the house. In the living-room, Natalie was pretending to read the morning Times. Amy knew it was pretense, for the paper was open at the financial page, and Natalie never read anything but book reviews and fashions. Peter wasn’t pretending anything. He openly waited for Amy.

“Well?” he said as Amy came in.

She spoke a little tartly: “Curtis doesn’t believe Esther is capable of violence. If she’s been indiscreet, he would much rather not know anything about it, so I made him happy by admitting I couldn’t swear the woman whose voice I heard was Esther. I’m to see her this afternoon and we’re all dining together publicly tomorrow.”

“Well, I’m glad it’s all settled!” Natalie spoke as if a minor domestic problem had been happily resolved. Her heels tapped briskly, almost gaily, as she trotted upstairs.

Amy crossed the room to Peter. “Tell me something, Pete.” It was a long time since she had used his schoolboy nickname. “You weren’t ever really serious about Esther?”

“What ever gave you that idea?”

“Something Kate said last night.”

“Oh, Kate!” He laughed uneasily. “She’s become quite possessive lately.”

“Did Esther ever encourage you?”

“Well—” Peter had the grace to color. “But it wasn’t serious.”

“Then perhaps you were only a smoke screen,” suggested Amy with sisterly realism.

“Smoke screen for what?” There was a touch of pique in Peter’s demand.

“For some other man, of course, who was serious about Esther. Kate’s jealousy would make you an effective screen.”

Peter looked at his sister with malice. “The only other man Esther sees much of is your pal, Allan Galt.”

“What about Matthew Payne?”

“Could be,” admitted Peter. “But I can’t think of anyone else. Why are you so dead set against Esther?”

“Look what she’s done to Curtis. He used to have character, but now — I wouldn’t like her to do the same thing to you, Pete.”

“She won’t. Don’t worry.”

“That’s what Curtis said,” Amy sighed. “But somebody’s got to worry.”

“Why?”

“Because I’m morally certain that it was Esther’s voice I heard on the telephone. And I have no idea what her next move will be.”...

By teatime long feelers of sea mist were creeping into every highway and byway like an invading army of ghosts. Even the Gregory house and stable, two solid blocks of ivy-covered brick, seemed to float and shiver like something seen under water. But Esther herself, standing before a glazing driftwood fire in the long, oak-paneled living-room, had laid aside her air of mystery as if it were a cast-off garment. In a dark crimson sweater and a skirt of black-and-white tweed, she was the proper young matron — wholesome, competent, discreet, with just a dash of sophisticated charm used as sparingly as bitters in a cocktail or garlic in a salad. Amy felt shabby in her old trench coat, glad she had worn her good tweeds underneath.

“Tea?” said Esther brightly. “Or something stronger?”

“Tea, please.” Esther rang, and a maid brought in a tea tray, heels loud on the marble floor, bare for summer. An old-fashioned silver kettle swung from brackets above a flattened column of blue flame. The ample teapot was gay with the dark blue and red, white, and gold of old Worcester. But Esther was not pleased. “No toast?”

“Sure, an’ there’s mice in the bread-box again, ma’am.” The maid’s answer came in a West Irish brogue pungent as peat smoke. “If only you had let me keep the sweet little kitten that wandered in there yesterday.”

“That will do, Bridget. You know I don’t like cats.” Esther turned to Amy: “My first husband bred Persians and I had a surfeit of them then... Cream?”

“No, thank you. Just lemon.”

When Bridget had gone Amy said, “Esther, there’s one thing I must make clear to you: I really did overhear that conversation, every word about as I repeated it. But, as Curtis pointed out this morning, I cannot swear the woman’s voice was yours. So it’s only fair for me to give you the benefit of the doubt.” She paused to underline her next words: “As long as nothing else happens.”

Esther frowned. “What else could happen?”

“All sorts of things.” Amy looked at the fire. “Curtis really loves you, Esther. It would he horrible if he were disillusioned. Or if he were to — die.”

The frown had gone. Esther dropped her lids. Eyeless, her face was a mask chiseled from stone — pale and hard.

“I’ve made her angry. She doesn’t trust herself to speak,” Amy thought.

On a stand near the hall door a telephone pealed stridently. “Excuse me.” Esther walked down the room rapidly as if she were glad of the pretext to get away. “Hello?” She added, “It’s all right, Bridget,” to the maid who appeared in the doorway. Then, to the telephone: “I’ll call you back in a few minutes. Good-bye.”

From the hall door Esther looked back at Amy with guarded eyes. “I must get some information for the Horse Show Committee, but do wait. I’ll be back in a moment.”

Amy lit a cigarette. “If she hasn’t come back by the time I’ve finished this, I’ll go.”

“Miss Corbett!”

She started, and dropped her cigarette. Matthew Payne was standing in the music-room doorway. He offered her another cigarette from his own case.

“No, thank you.”

He lit one for himself. “You don’t like me, do you?”

“No.”

“That’s better than indifference.”

Amy began to draw on her gloves.

“Don’t go. Why do you dislike me so much?”

“You were in the next room listening deliberately just now. You’re the kind who does listen.”

“So do you — on telephones. And you don’t speak the truth.”

Anger flashed through Amy. “What do you mean?”

“You disliked me before you knew that I had been listening to your little talk with Esther just now. Why not admit the truth? You think I was the man you overheard on an open telephone line talking to Esther.”

“Weren’t you?” Amy looked at him directly and found his intent gaze disturbing.

But he was not disturbed. “Does my voice sound like it?” His tone was casual, almost impudent.

“Of course not. If it did I should have accused you last night. But that’s the only reason for thinking you’re not the man — your voice. If I could find some explanation for that, everything else would fit you. The only other men who have been with Esther frequently this summer are Allan and my brother Peter. I don’t believe my brother capable of violence. I’ve know Allan all my life. He hasn’t a romantic temperament like the man I overheard. Besides, I don’t think voices I’ve known so long could be distorted enough to fool me. That leaves you, a stranger. The telephone may have an especially distorting effect on your voice. I don’t know anything about your temperament, but you look like a romantic daredevil, quite capable of violence. You came here as Esther’s friend, somebody out of her past. You may have been her lover for years, before she married Curtis.”

“Then why did she marry Curtis?”

“Perhaps he could offer her some things you couldn’t.” Amy’s glance took in the dark luxury of the oak-paneled room, at its handsomest by firelight. “Now she’s got all this, she wants to keep it and have you, too. The only way is to get rid of Curtis. Even if he loves her enough to make divorce easy for her, he couldn’t give her every penny he has, so he would have to be eliminated some other way.”

“If you really believed all that you would be a fool to tell me so. I might get ideas about eliminating you. Look.” He went on hurriedly, “You’ve got the whole thing dead wrong. I wasn’t a friend of Esther’s. I was a friend of Charley Maitland, her first husband.”

“Isn’t that the same thing? You knew them both, I suppose.”

“Yes. But I liked Charley. I don’t like Esther. I’ve always suspected she killed him for his insurance.”

The silence seemed to sing in Amy’s ears. “You said your job was selling insurance,” Amy said finally.

“No, I said my job was insurance, not selling. Actually, I’m an insurance investigator. I investigated Charley Maitland’s death before the company paid his policy to his widow.”

“If they paid there can’t have been any evidence of murder!”

“No real evidence — just my hunch, and one discrepancy in Esther’s story. He was a cripple. He was killed by a fall downstairs when the brake of his wheel chair failed to work. Esther said he and she were alone in the house all that evening. But I happened to telephone about half an hour before the time Charley died and a stranger’s voice answered the telephone, a man’s voice that wasn’t Charley. That man was never traced. Esther denied, of course, that a man had been there. Since I came here I’ve been trying to decide whether he was Allan or Peter. Weren’t they both on the West Coast during the war?”

Amy nodded, speechless.

“Wasn’t Allan a poor man just out of medical school when he went into the Army? Isn’t Peter entirely dependent on his mother?”

Again Amy nodded.

“So, either one might have been a lover who could not offer Esther all the things that Curtis Gregory has given her.” Payne smiled wryly. “That shocks you, doesn’t it? You thought you had fitted us all so neatly into our little slots! Allan and Peter must be innocent — men you’ve always known and liked. But a stranger — he might do anything.”

“Not Peter!”

“That leaves Allan. Funny, I thought you liked him.”

“I do.”

“But your first cry was, ‘Not Peter.’ When a girl likes a man less than her broth—”

“Allan. I don’t believe it! If you dislike Esther why did you come here at all?”

“Because another insurance man told me that Curtis has just applied for $50,000 worth of life insurance, with Esther as beneficiary. Some criminals are psychopathic enough to repeat the pattern of a crime once it has succeeded. I wrote Esther from the West Coast and proposed myself as a guest. She couldn’t refuse an old friend of her first husband’s who had to come East anyway, and now you come up with this story of yours about a conversation heard over an open telephone line. Murchison gave me the gist of it when he came here this morning asking for confirmation of Esther’s alibi, but he didn’t go into details. Can you repeat the actual words?”

“I can try.”

Payne listened, his gaze on the fire. “There’s one odd thing. The sex of the potential victim is never mentioned. There isn’t a single ‘he’ or ‘she’.”

“What of it?”

“Obviously, two lovers were plotting to kill someone. But why assume it was the woman’s husband?”

“But who else—?”

“Isn’t it equally possible that these lovers were plotting to kill the man’s wife? Curtis may be willing to make divorce easy for Esther if she wants it, but would Kate be willing to make divorce easy for Peter? Or would she make the whole thing very unpleasant? Particularly unpleasant for a young man who is dependent on his mother?”

“Oh, no!” Amy was on her feet. Blindly she stumbled toward the picture window. Mist was swirling through the trees, across the hedges... Not Peter. Not Kate. Amy pressed her hot forehead to the cool glass. “Don’t let it be Peter!”

The picture window.

Then she knew.

Payne was startled by the look in her eyes as she turned. “Everything you’ve said was a lie. It was you all along. You are Esther’s lover. You killed Charley Maitland. You killed Sharpe. And you are going to kill Curtis Gregory. I see it all now. And I’m going to prove it.”

“You can’t, because it isn’t true!”

Amy ran into the hall. Footsteps behind her spurred her flight.

“What in heaven’s name—?” It was Esther’s voice.

Amy looked back. Esther was coming down the wide stairs. She had paused in the grace of arrested motion, one hand on the balustrade.

Payne, in the doorway of the living-room, was looking up at her. Their eyes met and held, unsmiling, intent.

To Amy the tableau was like an illustration of the snatch of drama she had overheard yesterday. The fire that smoldered so darkly in the woman’s eyes, brilliant against the dull pallor of her face. The buoyant posture of the man’s lean, supple body; the brooding look on his swarthy face, harder and more virile than a merely handsome face. A born gambler, a buccaneer to his fingertips. And the woman an outlaw, too, at heart. Both drawn irresistibly together when they met in an orderly, ponderous world like Curtis Gregory’s or Charley Maitland’s, where there was a place for every emotion and every emotion was kept in its place. These two seemed the star-crossed lovers of all time, desperate, doomed.

“Amy!” called Esther. “Where are you going?”

“To Allan’s!”

Amy turned and ran out to her car...

Allan’s car was standing in his driveway when Amy drove between the gateposts.

“Can’t it wait?” Allan stood in the driveway, bag in hand.

“Let your patients wait a few minutes. This is vital, Allan. The man was Payne, and I can prove it.”

“Payne?” Never before had Allan seemed so slow. “It can’t be Payne!”

“Why not? It is, and we must do something about it. Let me tell you.”

“All right.” Allan seemed dazed as he followed her into the house.

In the waiting-room he sat sidesaddle on the edge of the table and lit a cigarette. “I’m a busy man Amy. Please make it brief.”

“Allan! Aren’t you interested in saving Curtis Gregory’s life?”

“Not particularly.” His eyelids dropped as he shook ash into a tray. “Curtis is a grown man. Let him take care of himself. He’s been warned. I’ll do anything the police require, but I’m not going out of my way to stir up mud.”

“I’m not going out of my way, either!” Red flags were flying in Amy’s cheeks. “This was thrust upon me... Allan, you were wrong. It wasn’t here, in this room of yours, that those two — Esther and Payne — were talking when I overheard them on the telephone.”

“What?” She had really startled Allan this time.

“As Kate said last night, there are lots of living-rooms in Oldport that are 30 feet wide, with hard, uncarpeted floors and picture windows.”

“I know that,” retorted Allen. “But we have to explain the apparent coincidence; out of several thousand possible wrong numbers, you got one where you overheard someone you knew — Esther. There’s only one explanation — the one I gave you last night. My number was in your mind because you were going to ask for it next. Your tongue slipped and you asked for it the first time without realizing you had done so. We have the same friends, so it wasn’t surprising that here you overheard someone you knew, if you did. All quite simple.”

“Allan, it was simpler than that. Don’t you see it? I didn’t get a wrong number. My tongue didn’t slip.”

“You didn’t—?” He looked at her.

“Do you remember what number I intended to call first?”

“The Gregorys’.”

“Exactly. I did ask for the Gregorys’ number, just as I thought I did, and I got the Gregorys’ number. It was that simple. There was no coincidence at all. What threw me off at the time was the voice that seemed to belong to a Negro butler. For when I called the number a second time, the Irish voice of their maid told me there were no butlers and no Negroes there. That and the word ‘stables’ confused me. Curtis used to call that building the barn before he married Esther.”

“You mean Sharpe answered the Gregorys’ telephone that first time?”

“Why not? Sharpe worked for a landscape gardening company. That afternoon he must have been trimming the Gregorys’ hedges. He heard the telephone and no one answered, so he stepped inside and answered it himself, just as we thought he did here. Even my asking for ‘Mrs. Corbett’ made no difference. Mother was just as likely to be there as here. And what place safer for Esther to hold that conversation than their own home while Curtis was out and the maids in their own quarters? Once she discovered that I thought the conversation had taken place here, she said she’d been at home all afternoon. That’s why she looked so slyly pleased — I’d given her a sort of alibi.”

“But what makes you think Payne is the man?”

“Who else can it be? You were making house visits when Sharpe died. Peter was here getting empirin for Mother. That leaves only Payne. Last night Esther thought it safe to admit that he was home with her all that afternoon when Curtis was out, because the conversation I overheard was supposed to have taken place here. Of course, she said Payne was upstairs, while she was downstairs, but that could be a lie.”

“And the Siamese cat?”

“This afternoon the Gregorys’ maid said something about a stray kitten being there yesterday. I was never sure that the cat I heard was a Siamese; I merely thought it might be.”

Allan rose and began to pace the floor. “Why was Sharpe killed here? You think Payne followed him?”

“Of course. Payne and Esther couldn’t afford to have his body found there. Allan, don’t you see what must have happened in the middle of that conversation? Payne or Esther noticed the unhooked telephone and broke the connection. Sharpe came back from the Gregorys’ stable to the Gregorys’ living-room, expecting to find the line still open. They said they had broken the connection accidentally and asked him who had called. He answered, ‘Miss Corbett.’

“Esther and Payne realized I must have overheard something. They knew I couldn’t recognize the voices of Payne, a stranger, and Esther, a woman I scarcely knew. They hoped I wouldn’t identify those voices when I heard them again. But whether I did or not, I would never have any corroborating evidence as long as I never met Sharpe. He was the only witness who knew I had been listening to an open telephone line there while he went to the stable to look for my mother. He was the only witness who knew that Payne and Esther were the pair he found talking there when he came back from the stable.”

“And Sharpe wasn’t kicked by my mare at all?”

“Why assume that? Because he was found dead in the stable? Because the wound was shaped like a horseshoe? Couldn’t Payne strike Sharpe’s head with a horseshoe? And wouldn’t he do it in a stable, so it would look as if a horse had done it?”

Allan paused in his pacing. “The voice! I knew there was a flaw somewhere in your reasoning! What about Payne’s voice? It isn’t harsh and rasping.”

“That’s why I came here tonight, Allan. There must be some explanation. You’re a doctor. Think. Isn’t there something physical a man can take to change his voice? Some drug or irritant?”

“Wait!” said Allan sharply. “Payne had no reason to disguise his voice when you first heard him over the telephone because he didn’t know then that he was going to be overheard. And you can’t believe he’s been disguising his voice since then without Curtis noticing the difference. Curtis has known Payne ever since Curtis married Esther. He told me so himself.”

“Then it must have been a piece of pure gambler’s luck that Payne’s voice was different when I first heard it over the telephone. Is there any disease that makes a voice harsh for only an hour or so?”

“And then restores it to normal a few hours later?” There was relief in Allan’s smile, as well as amusement. “It’s no use, Amy. That voice is one thing you just can’t get around.”

Amy was reaching for the cigarette box, when she halted suddenly, looking down at one of the medical magazines on the table. “Allan, I have it! This word on the cover!”

“What word?”

“Allergy! That’s something that comes and goes suddenly, capriciously. I once had a skin allergy to nail polish, and I know. Suppose Payne has a throat allergy. Suppose he was exposed to the stimulus, whatever it may be, just before I heard him talking to Esther that first time. He would know that if he could get his voice back to normal before he met me at dinner, I would never identify it. Aren’t there new ways of controlling allergic symptoms? Antihistamine drugs? Bacteriophage? Sedatives? Even throat lozenges and inhalants can clear up hoarseness in a couple of hours.”

“It usually takes longer,” insisted Allan.

“But not always. Allan, don’t be so skeptical! If we look up the case histories—”

Allan grinned. “Have you forgotten I have patients waiting for me now?”

“Then let me look through these medical books while you see your patients. When you get back I may have found something.”

He looked at her dubiously, brows bunched together, mouth a thin line. “All right, but it happens to be Mrs. Adams’ night off.”

“The housekeeper? Then you can come home with me when you get back, and we’ll have dinner there.”

“Hasn’t this affected your appetite?”

“What do you mean?”

“The bloodhound act. It’s a job for the police. I want no part of it.”

“But—”

“You think I’m thinking of Esther. I’m not. I’m thinking of that poor devil, Payne. Suppose he did fall for Esther and all the rest of it. Do you think you’ll be very happy if he and Esther are arrested for murder because of you?”

“Do you think you’ll be very happy if you pick up your paper some morning and find they have killed Curtis because we did nothing to stop them?”

“All right, Amy. You win.”

After he had gone Amy drew a Venetian blind across the picture window, switched on a table lamp, and began to read. When she shut the book and looked up, night had closed in upon her. She was alone. There were not even any traffic noises now from the side road at the foot of the drive. She looked at the clock. Quarter of 8. What was keeping Allan?

She went out into the hall and turned on the lamp there. Houri, the Siamese cat, came toward her, pausing to dig claws into the rug, daintily and precisely. “You’re company, anyway.” Amy spoke largely to hear the sound of her own voice, and — the lights went out.

One moment she had been contemplating the sinuous ripple of the cat’s tail in the lamplight. Then there was no cat, no lamp, no light, nothing but impenetrable darkness, as if she were suddenly struck blind. That meant the light in the waiting-room had gone out, too, for she had left the door open behind her. A short circuit? A fuse blown? She had no idea where the fuse box was.

She would talk to Allan tomorrow. At the moment she wanted nothing so much as the reassuring brightness of her car’s headlights.

She opened the front door. Something brushed her ankles. Houri slipping out for a late prowl. Had she left her car on the right or the left? Night and mist together made it impossible to see. She groped her way toward the car.

Something hard caught her neck. Under a rough cloth sleeve she felt the pressure of an arm constricting her throat. A leather-gloved palm clasped nose and mouth, choking off breath. She struggled, but her feet slipped. She could not turn, for there was a knee against her spine. Blood began to beat and sing in her temples. Her head seemed to swell as her throat contracted. Somewhere a hard heel scraped gravel and a blow thudded close to her ear. She was thrown to the ground.

Her palms burned as they grazed the stones but she was scarcely conscious of the sting. She crouched, drawing cool sea air into her lungs in snatches, hardly aware of sore throat or pounding pulses. Somewhere in the distance someone was running.

“All right?” A pale beam of light crossed the gravel beside her hands. Someone was lifting her. She pushed tangled hair from her eyes with the back of her hand, and felt something cool and wet her hand left there — blood or mud, or both. She tried to stop panting, and looked up at the face in the dim glow of a flashlight.

“You!”

Matthew Payne sat back on one heel, the other knee upright, like a cowboy crouching before a campfire. A smile touched one corner of his mouth. “Whom did you expect?”

“But— Who ran away?”

“Someone who just tried to kill you. I would have followed him if I had known you were not injured.”

“Did you see who it was?”

“No. Did you think it was I?”

She tried to study his face in the faint light. “I... I’m afraid I did.”

The smile widened. “So much pleasanter to believe a murderer isn’t someone you’ve known all your life, isn’t it?”

“But why would anyone try to kill me?”

“Perhaps you’ve been asking too many questions. Or perhaps—”

“What?”

“Perhaps you were mistaken for someone else. It was very dark. You’re tall for a girl, and one trench coat is much like another... Let me help you to your car. I’ll drive you home.”

“You came here on foot?”

“There’s a short cut by foot. And I like walking.”

“In the mist?”

“Good cover if you’re watching somebody else.”

“Whom were you watching?”

“You. How else do you suppose I turned up in the nick of time? I heard you tell Esther where you were going when you bolted so unceremoniously. I saw the look on Esther’s face and I thought there might be trouble, so I trailed along. Just before the lights went out I thought I heard footsteps at the back of the house. I went around there to investigate, and came front again when I heard the noise of a scuffle here. That’s how I missed seeing whoever it was monkeying with the electric wires.”

Amy sank into the front seat of the car, with a shudder.

“Tell me,” said Payne. “Why are you so sure I’m a murderer? Aside from my being a stranger?”

“It wasn’t here at Allan’s that they were talking when I overheard them — Esther and the man. It was at the Gregorys’.” She told him how she knew. “You were alone with Esther at the Gregorys’ house that afternoon.”

“I was at the Gregorys’. But I wasn’t with Esther. I was upstairs, in my own room. She could have talked to anyone in her living-room.”

“Then why did you look at Esther so intensely this afternoon? I was sure you were the lover then!”

Payne chuckled. “Hate is intense as well as love. I told you I don’t like Esther.”

Amy groaned. “Then, if it wasn’t you, after all, we’re right back where we started — except that I like you better.”

“Because I came to your rescue?”

“You seem like another person.” What she had thought sardonic was now simply quizzical; what she had thought rash was now attractively daring.

“We’ve made some progress, in more ways than one.” He was smiling. “For one, I think that conversation did take place at the Gregorys’, just because it’s more likely you got a telephone number you thought you gave than a wrong number. Is there any detail that doesn’t fit?”

Amy leaned her aching head in her hands. “One phrase: ‘Where is the Nembutal?’ That sounds to me as if Esther were here in the waiting-room keeping watch, while the man was in Allan’s office getting the drug.”

“Not to me. No criminals would linger to discuss plans in a place where they’ve just stolen something. More likely, the man came here alone to get the Nembutal and took it back to Esther in her own home, where they could talk more freely. Anything else?”

“The man’s voice. Why was it so hoarse? No friend of Esther’s that I know has such a voice. Was it the man’s normal voice? Or had some physical cause affected it temporarily? An allergy?”

“Allergy!” Payne struck the steering wheel with one fist. “That does it, Amy!” It was the first time he had called her ‘Amy’. “Tomorrow I must talk with Murchison.”

“The police won’t be interested. They think Sharpe was killed by Allan’s mare.”

“They did at first,” retorted Payne. “But Murchison told me this morning that their lab man said the blow couldn’t have been inflicted by the kicking or trampling of a horse — not enough weight back of it. There was a human fist holding that horseshoe. And a human brain that didn’t know how nicely the weight behind a blow can be calculated from a wound.”

As Payne started the car and turned it, a swath of light swept over the gravel. Amy was jolted forward as he stopped suddenly. “Look!” Spotlighted on the gravel lay a small, still heap of fur.

“Houri! She belonged to Allan’s housekeeper! She was alive a moment ago. Oh, Matt! Why? And how?”

Payne shut off the engine and left the car. “Knife.”

“Could anyone stab a Siamese without being clawed?”

“Perhaps. If the knife were thrown. Certain branches of the Army taught a lot of men all about knife-throwing. And strangling.” Payne turned the cat’s body over with his foot. “The knife isn’t here.”

There was a wicked spark of anger in his eyes as he came back to the car. Somewhere in the depths of Amy’s mind a small voice whispered: Certain branches of the Army... or the OSS... She pushed the thought out of her mind.

“Amy,” Payne was saying, “tomorrow night you shall hear that hoarse voice again. The one you overheard on the telephone.”

“You mean at the Gregorys’ dinner?”

“It’s the only way. And there is time to get things ready — a whole day tomorrow. I shan’t tell you more now. You might lose your nerve. And you must find the nerve to identify that voice tomorrow... Why the tears?”

“Only three people knew where I was this evening: Esther and you and — Allan.”

“Esther might have told someone else.”

“Then Allan isn’t involved in this?”

“Of course Allan is involved.” Payne’s glance strayed toward the sprawling house, glittering white in the glare from the headlights. “Building is expensive these days. Even in a fashionable summer resort a doctor doesn’t make enough in a year’s practice to pay for that new wing, plus a stable and a thoroughbred saddle horse.”...

Amy was the first to arrive at the Gregorys’ that evening. Esther was in the living-room alone. A collar of amethysts clasped her white throat. Her dress, glossy as her dark hair, was a Parma-violet color, falling in stiff folds and deep dimples that the rosy firelight flushed with orchid. Amy looked at the amethysts, suddenly conscious of the tulle that hid bruises on her own neck.

“A sore throat? My dear, I’m so sorry!” Esther’s apparent concern gave Amy a giddy sense of unreality.

Curtis came into the room, his face still and unsmiling. “Payne told me you were attacked, Amy.”

“Attacked?” Esther’s thin brows climbed.

“A strangler. What they call a ‘mugger’ in New York. But you don’t expect that in Oldport. She was leaving Allan’s house.” Curtis sat by the picture window, his profile silhouetted against a wide view of the evening sky. “You’re not very gay,” he said to Esther.

“Should I be?”

“This party’s for you.” His voice was toneless. Heavy brows shadowed his eyes. Something disturbed him. Could it be that his first, faint doubt of Esther was growing to intolerable proportions?

She spoke bitterly: “The party was your idea, not mine, and—” She broke off with a start that was almost guilty. Payne stood in the doorway.

“Come in, Matt!” Uneasiness made Esther curt.

Payne crossed the room with a loping, loose-hipped walk as Southwestern as his slight drawl. “A charming dress, Esther,” he said, halting beside her.

“Thank you.” She was in no mood for compliments.

Amy heard the purr of tires on gravel. A car door slammed. Allan’s voice was loud and cheerful as he came into the room: “Hello, Esther — Amy.” He nodded to Curtis and Payne. “Why are you all so solemn?”

“Amy doesn’t feel well.” Malice flashed into Esther’s eyes. “She claims some maniac tried to strangle her last night when she was leaving your house!”

“I didn’t say it was a maniac,” murmured Amy.

“You’re serious?” Allan was shocked.

“Yes.” Involuntarily Amy put a hand to her throat. “And he was sane enough to lure me outside by blowing a fuse or causing a short circuit, so the house was plunged in darkness.”

“There was a short circuit when I got back.” Allan stood under the light from the chandelier. For the first time, his gray eyes looked bleak and calculating to Amy. “Did you report this?”

“What’s the use?”

“But you should! He must be the same fellow who knifed poor Houri last night. That does look like mania.”

A second car purred into the driveway. Through portieres, Amy saw her mother and Kate going upstairs in outdoor wraps. Peter waited at the foot of the stairs until they came down again.

“Esther, dear!” Natalie came in briskly. “I think you’re splendid to go through with this. Of course, it’s perfectly clear to me that the man who attacked Amy is either a psychotic or a hoodlum from New York, but—”

“Why is it perfectly clear?” asked Payne quietly.

Natalie fluttered a little. “Well, the hoodlum technique. Mugging, you know. Who else had anything to gain by it?”

Curtis intervened: “Here come the cocktails. Let’s talk about something more pleasant, shall we?”

Kate had not uttered a word. Her eyes seemed larger than ever in her small, immature face. As the maid served cocktails, Amy made her way to Kate’s side. “Anything wrong?”

“Just Peter. And Esther. How is it going to end?”

Peter approached. “Not drinking, Kate?”

Her smile was sickly. “I’m not in the mood.”

“Oh?” He looked at her oddly. Just then someone choked.

It was Curtis Gregory. He set down his glass. Esther flashed him a lightning glance. Anguish? Despair? The choking became a cough, hacking, uncontrollable. He held a handkerchief to his lips. His eyes were red and watering.

“Swallow the wrong way?” Allan moved swiftly to his side.

Curtis shook his head, the handkerchief still masking his face.

“Aspirin, then. Hold the tablet in your mouth until it dissolves. It will check this at once.” Allan’s grip on the shaking shoulder was firm. “Don’t try to talk, old man. Come upstairs.”

They moved toward the door. It was Allan who stopped suddenly. His voice shook with anger: “What the devil is that beast doing here?”

Through the music-room doorway a small Maltese cat padded noiselessly into the room, sniffing at the unfamiliar odors of strange feet, letting an incurious green gaze slide over strange faces.

“Get out!” Esther backed away, withdrawing the hem of her skirt. A paw darted. A ripping sound left a scar on the violet satin.

“Upstairs! Quick!” Allan drew Curtis away.

But Payne barred their path. “Why are you taking charge, Allan?”

“Because I am Curtis’s physician!”

“Of course.” Payne’s smile twisted. “A doctor has so many opportunities for blackmail.”

“What do you mean?”

“There had to be a doctor who supplied the Nembutal two days ago. And there had to be a doctor who helped Curtis suppress the symptoms of that allergy yesterday, and for the last three years. Who else but a doctor trying to establish himself in practice after the war? A doctor’s fees vary according to the income of each patient. Even the income-tax people wouldn’t suspect a doctor who suddenly became rich. When the going got tough, you naturally did everything you could to protect such a source of income. That’s why you suggested to Amy that your waiting room was the scene of the conversation she overheard. You hoped that would diffuse suspicion. Anyone might walk into a doctor’s waiting-room. But only a few people had easy access to the Gregorys’ living-room.”

Allan dropped Curtis’s arm. “Blackmail! Preposterous! I—”

“Not only blackmail.” Payne’s voice was hard. “Accessory after the fact of murder. Unless you are going to talk.”

“Murder! You don’t think I had anything to do with Sharpe’s death or with—” Allan stopped abruptly and then said, “I must have a lawyer before I say anything.”

“Curtis, let me get you upstairs.” Esther’s voice was low and rich with feeling as she moved forward to take the place Allan had deserted.

But Payne still blocked the way. “One question, Curtis: Why is that cat in this house tonight?”

Curtis shrugged.

“Does it matter now?” Esther was contemptuous.

“I can tell you how the cat got here,” said Payne. “I brought him in myself, secretly, this morning, so he would be in the house all day, before we met this evening. But why did I do that?”

Again Curtis shrugged.

“Aren’t you going to answer me in words, Curtis? Are you afraid to speak, with that cat and Amy Corbett both in the same room?”

“Don’t say a word!” It was more like a sob than a cry from Esther.

Curtis touched her arm. “My dear, what’s the use? They know. They’re going to prove it. Let’s get this over with.” He turned toward Amy, his eyes so sad and shamed she could scarcely meet them. “Well, Amy? Is this the voice of the man you overheard talking over an open telephone line?”

The deep, hoarse tones, so unlike Curtis’s normal voice, died away. Amy nodded. “Yes.” She couldn’t say more. There were tears in her own eyes.

“Oh, my dear... my dear—” Esther pushed her cocktail glass into Curtis’s hand, then she put her arms around him, her head against his shoulder.

Curtis gently disengaged himself. He drained the cocktail before he turned to Payne: “Why did you do this to us?”

“Because you and Esther killed my best friend, Charley Maitland, in order to marry each other, and you were planning to kill me, when you saw I suspected it.

“The cat, whose cry Amy heard over the open telephone line two days ago, was a stray kitten that wandered in here and that Esther forced her maid to give away afterward. That cat was what made your voice unrecognizably hoarse when Amy heard it over the telephone. For you have a respiratory allergy to the dander of cats. It must have developed when you were on the West Coast during the war, for no one here knew about it.

“When I telephoned Charley Maitland’s house the night he died, yours was the strange voice that answered the telephone. Your voice was rasping then, so that I couldn’t identify it afterward — a rasping caused temporarily by the Persian cats Charley Maitland bred. You didn’t want anyone to know you were in Maitland’s house the night he died. So you did everything you could to conceal your allergy and its symptoms.

“When you came East again, your doctor, Allan, discovered the cause of your allergy. He helped you conceal it by avoiding the cause and suppressing the symptoms as quickly as he could when avoidance wasn’t possible. But your anxiety about it made him suspicious, and he discovered enough of the truth to be able to blackmail you.

“You were late when you reached Mrs. Corbett’s house that first evening because you had already killed Sharpe in Allan’s stable. When you came out on the terrace you were careful to say to Esther in Amy’s hearing, ‘Where have you been all afternoon? I thought you were going to meet me at the club for a swim.’ You wanted Amy to think you and Esther had not been together since lunchtime. When, later, you pleaded with Amy to forget the whole thing and make peace with Esther, you were pleading for yourself as well as for Esther.

“The fact that you really liked Amy and didn’t want to injure her made it all the worse for you. It was not Amy you were trying to kill when she left Allan’s house last night. It was I, Matt Payne, the one person from Esther’s past whose very existence was a perpetual threat to Esther and yourself. Maitland’s friend, who, once he heard your hoarse, allergic voice again, would know that you were with Esther and Maitland when Maitland died.

“Esther had told you I was following Amy to Allan’s. When you saw Allan leave the house you assumed Amy had gone already. But there was still a light in the waiting-room. You thought it was I, prying into Allan’s records for evidence of blackmail. You caused a short circuit with outside wires to bring me outdoors. When you saw the tall figure in a mannish trench coat through the misty darkness, you were sure it was I, not Amy, so you attacked.”

Payne looked at his watch. “I didn’t expect the allergic symptoms to develop quite so soon. Murchison was to have been on hand. As it is, we can expect him here at any moment.”

“You’re too late!” Esther’s brilliant eyes defied him mockingly, then softened as she turned back to Curtis. “Forgive me, dear.”

Curtis smiled. “Did you think I didn’t know what you had put in that cocktail? Thank you, Esther!” He cherished her face against his cheek and, at last, Amy saw Curtis as he really was — a star-crossed lover, doomed and desperate, Paolo to Esther’s Francesca...

Afterward Payne came to see Amy at her apartment in New York.

“Charley Maitland wouldn’t divorce Esther,” said Payne. “Hence that misleading phrase: ‘Didn’t seem like adultery when it was you and I.’ They talked of running away together without divorce, but that takes money. Esther had no money of her own. The war had brought Curtis near bankruptcy, since he was a silk importer. When they realized that Maitland’s life insurance would pull Curtis out of his financial hole, while Maitland’s death would make it possible for them to marry, the situation became intolerable to them, and three years ago, while Curtis was still in the Army, they killed Maitland.”

“And did Curtis kill that Siamese cat?” prompted Amy.

“He had to keep the cat at a good distance or his voice would become hoarse again. He couldn’t risk that, for he didn’t know how soon he might meet you afterward. It was too dark and foggy to see shape, but he could see movement. He threw his old army knife at a movement so close to the ground it had to be animal rather than human. Luckily for you.”

“Why luckily for me?”

“He thought you were I. Why do you suppose he had the knife?”

Amy shuddered. “Not Allan. Not Peter. But Curtis. The one I trusted.”

“You first met Curtis when you were twelve years old and he was about thirty. How could a girl that age realize what a mature man is really like under the civilized shell?”

“And now?”

Payne shrugged. “There won’t be any trial. Allan is pleading guilty to an accessory charge. Curtis and Esther died in each other’s arms after Murchison reached the house.”

Amy’s voice quavered: “ ‘And none, I think, do there embrace...’ ”

Payne laid a hand on hers. “What about having dinner with me tonight?”

To her own amazement, she said, “Yes.”