The Black Ball Of Death

CHAPTER II

TWENTY-FIVE miles north of Lake Candle, a late session of bridge was winding up at Tall Tree, the home of Clayton Marsh, a retired railroad executive whose aim in life, Richard Curtis Van Loan had come to believe, was the snaring of week-end guests for the sole purpose of playing cards with them.

Marsh, an inveterate bridge fiend, had written several pamphlets on the subject. He fancied himself an authority on the game. The stakes meant nothing just so long as he could put some of his theories into practice and, between hands, deliver post mortems on how the cards should have been played or how expertly they had been played – by him.

Van, a New York socialite, wealthy in his own right, had never been a guest at Tall Tree before. As he glanced at his watch he decided he would see that it never happened again. Bridge was all right in small quantities. But to be forced down at a table and made to play for more than four solid hours was a chore that had little appeal.

Marsh, with a gold pencil, began to total the score. Van Loan, helping himself to a surreptitious stretch while he smothered a yawn, glanced at the others around the table to see how they were taking it. His recent partner, the elderly Matthew Arden, seemed numb. The former US. Attorney General, who played a shrewd, mathematical game, rubbed his eyes as if to get the fog out of them, while a horse-faced Englishman who had been Marsh’s last partner, poured himself a stiff brandy and soda.

Through the quiet of the pine-paneled card room, Van heard the far off tinkle of a telephone. Then the sleepy voice of a servant answering it.

Clayton Marsh completed his addition. He stared at the score pad, frowning. As if in disbelief, he checked back over the figures. Finally he looked across at his partner.

“What do you make it, Hackett?”

“Van Loan’s top man. Wins everything.” Hackett took a long drink and rattled the ice in his glass. To Van, he said, “I don’t mind telling you, old chap, you’re a bit of a wizard at the game. I’ve played plenty of bridge, but I’ve never seen anyone get top score out of a lot of bad hands. Marvelous!”

Marsh’s frown deepened. He was a man in his middle fifties, slightly heavy from lack of exercise. He had pale, shrewd eyes. They focused on the handsome profile of Dick Van Loan, speculatively.

“I had no idea you were such a worthy opponent, Dick. I don’t recall ever having played with you before.”

“I play occasionally.” Van moved his wide shoulders. “I don’t profess to be an expert. I was just lucky tonight.”

“Yes, of course. Luck. I’ve often said that luck is at least sixty percent of every played hand. The technique of bidding, as well as of a stubborn and scientific defense -”

About to launch into another lecture, Marsh stopped when his butler entered the room and coughed apologetically.

“Begging your pardon, Mr. Arden is wanted on the telephone.”

Arden got up. He was about six feet, a partially bald, loosely built man with an aristocratic face and a certain amount of dynamic impact despite his years.

“Who would be calling me at this hour? It’s almost one o’clock.”

“In the lounge, sir,” the butler said.

Arden left the room, and Van Loan shot some seltzer into a convenient glass. He added a pair of ice cubes as Clayton Marsh began talking again, and Hackett hastily replenished his own glass.

Marsh was still droning away when Van saw Matthew Arden return to the room. A glance was enough to straighten Van Loan in his chair. The former Attorney General’s face was ashen. His big hands seemed to tremble as he came in quickly.

Marsh broke of! as he caught a glimpse of Arden’s expression.

“Matt! What’s happened? Are you ill?”

“That call -” The big man seemed to have difficulty getting it out “It was from my place at Lake Candle. The – Sheriff McCabe – he wants me to come down immediately. My son’s there – dead!”

He reached for a chair for support. Marsh and Hackett, as if stupefied by the news, peered at him speechlessly. Van, on his feet instantly, said:

“Let me drive you down, Mr. Arden. My car’s outside.”

“Would you? I’d be grateful.” Arden drew a deep, gasping breath.

In less than ten minutes Van had his sleek black sedan on the main cement highway that ran south through the New Jersey hills. On the front seat beside him, Matthew Arden sat in an apathetic huddle. There was no conversation as the fleet car sped along through the night.

None was necessary. Van knew the thoughts of the man beside him. He didn’t want to intrude upon them. Conversation, he decided, was superfluous at a time like this.

While he drove, Van Loan pieced together all that he knew about Arthur Arden. He had had a brief acquaintance with the young man. He knew that Arthur, inheriting his mother’s estate upon her death, was well known around the hot spots of New York. Arden’s son had the reputation of being a spender and a playboy.

Van remembered him as a good-looking youth, slenderly built, with a rakish, carefree personality of the kind that appealed to women. And he was dead? Van’s brows drew thoughtfully together.

In a short time the north end of Lake Candle was visible from the highway. Matthew Arden stirred himself and gave directions where to turn. But they were hardly necessary. As Van Loan headed into the private road leading to the lodge, he saw the bright shine of floodlights, local police cars, figures moving through the gloom.

They were stopped halfway down the road. Arden identified himself and, with Van beside him, hurried into the lodge.

More of the constabulary were on the terrace and in the house. But Van hardly saw them. Through the lamplight in the long, beautifully furnished living room his gaze fell on the stockily built, gray-headed Frank Havens.

Van Loan stared, puzzled. Havens was one of his closest friends. The publisher had been a friend of his father, too. It was the Clarion’s owner who had made a protege of Richard Curtis Van Loan, advising him in financial matters growing out of the vast estate Van’s father had left him. Now, to find the newspaperman at Lake Candle, well after midnight, was a surprise that made Van hurry over to him.

“Mr. Havens! Don’t tell me the Clarion is featuring a split-second coverage of what happens when it happens?”

The publisher swung around, equally surprised at seeing the tall, trim Dick Van Loan confronting him.

“What are you doing down here?” He asked the question, his eyes narrowing queerly, an enigmatic expression crossing his square, dignified face.

Anyone observing that expression and hearing what he said might have had the idea that there was something behind the publisher’s query known only to him and Van.

Van Loan explained rapidly. Matthew Arden, with the sheriff and a couple of deputies, had left the room. From the corner of his eye Van had a glimpse of a small, red-headed young man who was busy scribbling shorthand notes. It wasn’t hard to recognize him as Steve Huston, one of the top reporters on Havens’s metropolitan sheet.

Steve came over, nodding to Van Loan. He knew the wealthy socialite was one of his boss’s friends. Secretly, Huston had always wished that he could wear clothes the way Van did. He wished he were tall and as attractive as the blasé young man who often came to the Clarion Building.

Steve nodded to Van and said to Havens, “The sheriff won’t let me in the billiard room until he’s finished with Mr. Arden. I want to get an open wire on that telephone. I can break the story in the first edition if I can get through to the city desk. Can’t you do something about it, Mr. Havens?”

“In a few minutes.” Havens led Van Loan aside. “A horrible thing,” he muttered, and went on to explain what he and Huston had stumbled in upon.

Van Loan listened without comment. His friends in town might have thought it odd that Havens took the trouble to give Van a complete word picture of Arthur Arden’s murder. And Van’s friends would have considered it entirely out of character for him to listen to such macabre details with so much apparent interest.

Finished, the publisher, with Van Loan and Huston in tow, went down the long hall to the lighted room at its end. Sheriff McCabe, rugged, carroty-haired and pot-bellied, was surrounded by several of his deputies. An anemic little man in a black suit, whose spectacles had slipped half-way down the bridge of his nose, was putting instruments into a well-worn leather bag. Van decided he was the County medical examiner.

The sheriff verified it the next minute. “You’re sure about the time, Doc? Ten o’clock.”

“Or thereabouts.” The little man pushed his glasses back in place. “Two shots, large caliber bullets. One went in and up. I think we’ll find it in one of the cardiac chambers. The other entered straight, several inches lower. Probably find it near the spine.”

He snapped his bag shut and went out. Matthew Arden, chalk white and shaken, sat in a straight-backed chair across the room. On one of the two pool tables, where the cold shine of lights fell, Van Loan noticed a sheet-draped figure.

NOBODY paid any attention to Van as he took up a position in the background. McCabe went across to Arden. The sheriff gave his belt a hitch and rubbed the beard stubble on his chin.

“Just a few questions, Mr. Arden. I wouldn’t ask them if they weren’t necessary.” He tried to make his voice sympathetic and understanding. Arden nodded, and the sheriff went on, “When did you see your son last?”

“A few days ago, at our home in New York.” Matthew Arden spoke slowly, in a flat, dead voice.

“You knew he was down here?”

“Yes.”

“Did Arthur Arden have any enemies?” McCabe hooked his thumbs in his belt. His questions were almost casual, but the watching Van Loan saw the gleam in the man’s eyes.

“None that I know of.” Matthew Arden’s mouth tightened. “To the contrary, Arthur was everybody’s friend.”

McCabe rocked on his heels. “That’s all for now. We’ll want to talk to you again – tomorrow.”

Arden got up. With Havens he left the billiard room. Van, feeling out of place, watched McCabe’s fingerprint experts powder the wooden edges of the pool tables and give their attention to the sills of the casement windows.

Huston had put his telephone call through and was reading from his shorthand notes on the other side of the room. Idly, his narrowed glance moving to the sheet-draped body on the pool table, Van Loan got out of the chair he had played wallflower in.

A camera flash bulb flared. He saw one of the deputies holding up a black pool ball for a picture. Van in his usual unhurried way slipped out of the room and went down the hall.

A few minutes later he encountered Frank Havens. The publisher, consulting his watch, dropped a hand to Van’s arm.

“I have to get back to New York, Dick. Are you leaving?”

“Mr. Arden won’t be going back to Bear Hill.” Van frowned. “My car’s outside. Suppose I drive you in.” He hesitated for an instant. “What about Huston?”

“He’s staying. Naturally, young Arden’s murder is of tremendous importance. Steve wants to cover all angles.

Why?”

But Van didn’t answer. Back in his big car, after the Clarion’s owner had talked to Huston, he waited for Havens to arrange himself comfortably before starting the purring motor.

On the main road, Van Loan headed north. But he drove slowly, still without speaking, Half a mile further on he ran the car off the shoulder of the road in behind a protecting fringe of trees. Quickly he snapped off the headlights; transferred himself from the front seat to the rear of the car; and, turning on a pair of small lights there, got busy.

The big, black car was deceptive. The rear compartment looked like that of any other expensive sedan. But there was a difference. Van Loan’s car, designed for his peculiar and secret needs, had built-in features that few other cars possessed.

One was the folding mirror-flanked table that came into view when he pushed down a spring button on the top of the front seat. This contrivance, fit to grace the dressing room of any theatrical star, was complete in its cosmetic and make-up supplies.

Frank Havens, as silent as Van Loan, sat motionless while, behind him, the good-looking young man began swiftly to change his attractive face with the use of skin crayons and color creams.

Some hint of the odd way Havens had spoken to Van at the lodge was expressed in the publisher’s manner. There was no surprise in his face, no amazed questions voiced when, a few minutes later, Van walked around to the door beside him and looked in through the open window.

In the moonlight a totally different character had replaced the suave, well-groomed socialite. The face that Havens stared at was that of a man several years older than Van. It was an unrecognizable countenance, so cleverly and skillfully devised that, even when subjected to the closest scrutiny, it gave no hint of its falseness.

From under the rear seat Van had taken a plain gray suit. He wore it with none of his usual grace. He let it hang on him a trifle disconsolately, so it gave him a slightly stoop-shouldered appearance. And the felt hat he had produced, had been worn just enough to be in complete harmony with his outfit.

For a quick minute Havens studied the stranger who had replaced Richard Curtis Van Loan in the moonlight.

Then his hand closed over Van’s before he transferred himself to the wheel of the big car.

“You’re going back to the lodge -” Havens said quietly – “as the Phantom Detective!