Wolf in Man’s Clothing

7

NO ONE SPOKE. EVEN Beevens goggled in the doorway like a stricken fish. Nicky’s small head and graceful body seemed to freeze into wariness like a young animal, sensing a trap.

Then Maud said, “Tell them, Claud. There’s a mistake.” And Dr. Chivery blinked rapidly, looked at his wife’s dark hair and the Lieutenant’s left shoulder and said that they were mistaken. “Mr. Brent was my patient. He died of a heart attack. No one called you and he was not murdered.”

The Lieutenant came into the room slowly; he was tall and spare as a whip and not unlike one, in suggesting a kind of coiled and wiry strength. A couple of policemen (troopers, by their uniform, so I reasoned that the Brent place was well outside any borough limits and thus in the jurisdiction of the state) followed him. He said, “I see. But who telephoned to us?”

Which was what developed the trouble. For no one had telephoned, or at least no one would admit it. Chivery looked uneasy but blank, Maud angry but equally blank-Nicky, Alexia, Peter and even Anna, when questioned directly denied it with various degrees of indignation, but with a kind of concerted and astonished ignorance of such a telephone call which sounded sincere. Beevens from the door was fervent in his denial. Perhaps I was, too. I remember saying I hadn’t thought of the police, in a voice that rang out positively in clarion tones against the book-lined walls.

Alexia drew herself up to her full height and assumed a wonderful lady-of-the-manor command. “You see, Lieutenant,” she said, “you must be mistaken. My husband died of a heart attack. The nurse”-the Lieutenant’s eyes flicked toward me and back to Alexia-“the nurse found him like this. She called us, and we telephoned for his doctor. My husband was not murdered.”

Nicky said eagerly, “You’ve got the name wrong. You’d better hurry along, too, hadn’t you, Lieutenant? I mean if someone in the neighborhood has been murdered or-or anything like that-and they want you…” The officer looked at Nicky, and Nicky stopped rather suddenly. The Lieutenant had narrow, gray-green eyes, narrow high cheekbones and an expression of complete taciturnity. He said, “I took the message myself. It was a woman’s voice. There’s no mistake.”

“A woman!” cried Nicky. “But…” He stopped and flapped his small hands helplessly. “But he wasn’t murdered!”

Claud Chivery stepped forward. “I agree to that, Lieutenant. I’m going to give the death certificate, and I have no question at all in my mind. Remember, he was my patient.” There was a sharp silence except, from the hall, Beevens could be heard evicting the servants clustered there from their observation post. “You’ll be called if necessary,” he said. “Now get along…” Beevens himself remained, however, hovering in the hall and in all probability straining his ears out of all nature.

The Lieutenant said quietly, “If you’ll permit…” stepped to the sofa, and looked down at Conrad Brent.

I don’t mind saying I was nervous. In the course of a not uncheckered career (far, now, in the past) I have chanced to see a little of the scope and persistence of a police investigation.

They had been summoned by telephone, so whoever had summoned them must have had reason to believe it was murder.

Everybody was watching the Lieutenant when he turned at last to Alexia and said, “I’m sorry, Madam. We shall spare your feelings in every possible way; we’ll do our best to protect you from public comment or annoyance. If Mr. Brent wasn’t murdered, we can soon satisfy ourselves and you in that respect. If he was…”

“But he couldn’t have been!” cried Alexia angrily. Then all at once her rigid, masklike face softened. She went quickly and gracefully to the Lieutenant and put her white hands on his arm; leaning very close to him and lifting her beautiful face beseechingly, she said softly and musically, “Lieutenant, no one would have murdered my husband. It is impossible…”

The officer detached himself without effort and without compunction. “Will you please leave the room to us now?” he said politely. “It will be better that way. All of you, please, except Dr. Chivery.”

“But I…” Alexia’s voice was no longer musical. Her small face was set and the gleam in her eyes was not a pleasant one. Maud was watching every move and every look and had said nothing. The Lieutenant interrupted Alexia coolly. “We’ll have to have an autopsy, Dr. Chivery,” he said. “I’ll send to Nettleton for the appointed medical examiner; he should be here in an hour. He’ll assist you in making the autopsy.”

Dr. Chivery looked at the buttons on the police officer’s coat. “Conrad had a bad heart. He’d had it for years. He had digitalis which he took for these attacks, and we’ll probably find some. But not a fatal amount and…”

Maud interrupted, “But that was the point! What about the medicine? Where is it? If it was removed-if he removed it himself, that is-he died from the lack of it. It’s as I-as I was saying when the police arrived.”

Well, it wasn’t quite what she was saying. She was saying that if it had been intentionally removed, that was tantamount to murder.

“What’s this about digitalis?” demanded the Lieutenant, falling upon it like a dog upon a bone and Claud Chivery, helplessly, explained. The medicine had been kept in the top drawer of the desk; it wasn’t about the body of Conrad Brent, and he might have died for lack of it.

But that didn’t prove that anyone had removed it with that result in mind. The Lieutenant didn’t say that, he only asked if anyone had removed it or knew of Conrad Brent himself removing it.

“It was in the drawer just after dinner tonight,” said Alexia suddenly. “I saw it.”

“Did you give it to Mr. Brent?” asked the Lieutenant.

“No. He was not ill then; he didn’t want it. We were having coffee here. He wanted a clipping, something about the war that he’d cut from the papers. It was in that drawer and I got it for him; and I saw the medicine, then.”

“I remember,” said Peter Huber. “He read it to us.”

Maud’s black eyebrows were pinched together. “I remember, too,” she said. “It was about the arrest of some enemy aliens, some former Bund members.”

“It doesn’t matter,” said Alexia. “But I saw the medicine then. It was in that drawer.”

No one had seen it since, however, or if so did not admit it. I got to thinking of the autopsy and wondering if whatever Drue had given him (some kind of stimulant certainly) by way of the hypodermic would show up in the blood stream.

While I knew something of autopsies, I didn’t know enough, and I stopped thinking along that line when the Lieutenant abruptly and very definitely told us we could go. “Get some rest if you can,” he said. “The things we have to do will take time. I’ll have to question you later.”

I started quickly toward the door. I had to see Drue as soon as I possibly could. But Nicky got there first and then turned back toward Alexia. “Come, darling,” he said in a voice of sudden sympathy, which reminded everyone that Alexia was a recently-indeed, a very recently-bereaved widow. Even Alexia looked a little startled and then instantly drooped against the arm he put around her. “If they insist upon this investigation, we’ll have to make the best of it.”

Alexia looked at the still figure on the couch. I thought she was going to approach it, to say a kind of farewell perhaps, but she didn’t. Her shadowing lashes fell softly over her eyes and she turned toward the door, leaning on Nicky’s arm. She said softly, musically, “I am stunned, I think-the shock. Yes, I’ll go now. Nicky…” She leaned on his arm as far as the stairway, for I watched them go. I would have followed instantly, quickly, eager to get to Drue, but the Lieutenant stopped me.

“You were here when he died, Nurse?”

“He was dead when I reached him.” Maud was leaving too, and Peter Huber, looking uncertain of his status in that house of death and tragedy-a stranger plunged into a dreadful intimacy-followed her. Anna had disappeared, I didn’t know when. There were left only the police, the Lieutenant, Dr. Chivery and me in that room. And Conrad Brent.

“Wait a minute, please, Nurse,” said the Lieutenant sharply as I made another move toward the door. “I want to talk to you. Did you telephone for the police?”

He had asked that before; presumably he was asking it again because, the family being now out of earshot, I might be willing to admit suspicion and the reason for it.

“Certainly not,” I said. “If I had, I’d have told you so. This is nothing to me, any of it. I’m a nurse here. I arrived today-that is, yesterday afternoon. I…”

“Yes, I know,” he said. “You and Miss Drue Cable, who was formerly married to Craig Brent.”

I caught my breath so hard that I nearly choked myself trying to conceal it. “Yes. Some time ago. That has naturally nothing to do with…”

“They were divorced last year. You were the first to find Mr. Brent, is that right?”

Dr. Chivery passed his hand over his forehead and thin hair and I said cautiously, “It’s as I told you. He was dead when I reached him.”

“Yes, I know,” said the Lieutenant. “But how did you happen to find him? You were upstairs in your patient’s room, weren’t you?”

I had seen it coming but was still unprepared and it put me on what I believe is called the spot. If Peter Huber hadn’t seen Drue with me, leaning over Conrad Brent-but he had. I said very carefully, “I thought I heard a kind of call of help. Miss Cable must have heard something, too. But we could do nothing for him. Then-then Peter Huber came running down the stairs, too. He had heard the same thing, I imagine. I sent him to telephone for the doctor…”

“Why?”

“For the death certificate, naturally. Miss Cable went back upstairs to our patient” (I was rather pleased with the implication of that) “and I stayed here. But there was nothing I could do. And then all at once there was a loud noise.” Suddenly, I remembered that no one had inquired about that, yet almost certainly it was the thing that had roused Maud and Nicky and Alexia.

“Noise? What was it?”

“I don’t know. It sounded as if the house was coming down.” I was anxiously making a clean breast of everything I could and hoping desperately to divert his inquiry from Drue. “Peter Huber ran upstairs to see what it was. I ran after him, but when I got upstairs he had disappeared and I was afraid that-that something had happened to my patient…”

“Something had happened to him? What do you mean?”

“N-nothing. Naturally he was on my mind. And I was right, because when I got to his room he wasn’t there. Miss Cable had found him, though; he had apparently got up and put on a dressing gown and started downstairs and fallen. We got him back to bed.”

“Where was he when you found him?”

I told him briefly.

“But I thought he was drugged.”

“He was,” said Dr. Chivery suddenly. “He is. But nothing is so variable as a drug plus a bit of temperature with a man like Craig. He probably got some fuzzy notion of something going on and fainted on the way downstairs.”

The Lieutenant (Nugent his name was, I learned later; just Nugent; if he had a Christian name he kept it a secret) looked at Claud Chivery. “He had had a quarrel with his father, hadn’t he, Doctor?”

Dr. Chivery looked up quickly and uneasily; he looked terribly tired, his eyes swollen and the nervous lines deep and gray in his troubled face with its receding chin. “Why-why, no,” he said. “That is, in the past perhaps, yes. But not…”

“You’d better know, Dr. Chivery, just where we stand,” said Nugent, suddenly. “You-and everyone here told me a story about that shooting business the other night that frankly, Doctor, was phony.”

“Lieutenant Nugent…” began Claud Chivery, rising indignantly.

“Well, it seemed so to me. But, as things were, my hands were tied. If Craig Brent died I intended to start an investigation into murder…”

“Murder…” said Dr. Chivery in a high protesting voice, his little hands tremulous.

“… if he didn’t die I intended to insist upon his preferring charges. But yesterday, while he was so heavily drugged as to be entirely unconscious, there was nothing I could do. I couldn’t even question him. Now, you see, I’m going to.”

“But-but it wasn’t Craig that died. It’s Conrad…”

“Exactly,” said Lieutenant Nugent, cutting off Chivery’s fluttering expostulation. “Could Craig Brent have walked down here to the library, poisoned his father and walked back upstairs and collapsed there in the storeroom…”

“Linen room,” I said.

“… where he was found?”

“Poisoned!” cried Chivery shrilly, his uneasy face turning gray. “That’s horrible! I tell you Conrad died a perfectly natural death. I’ll do an autopsy. And your medical examiner can help me. But mark my words we’ll find he died of a heart attack-and anyway…” his nervous eyes darted about the library, toward the desk, toward the sofa, anywhere but at the Lieutenant. “Anyway, Craig shot himself! Accidentally. Why-even you cannot believe that there are two murderers here in this house…”

“Unless Craig shot himself for that very reason,” said Lieutenant Nugent watching Chivery’s frightened, uneasy face.

“Shot himself-oh, I see! To make it look as if somebody else tried to kill him and then succeeded in killing his father? To establish a kind of alibi before the deed? Why, that’s preposterous, Lieutenant! That’s absurd! Ha, ha, ha,” again it was meant to be a laugh and sounded like anything else in the world.

And I said, “But he does have an alibi. Craig, I mean. I am it.” Both men looked at me. “I was in the room. I would have known if he had moved. He didn’t.”

There was a moment of silence. Chivery hadn’t looked quite at me, just at my left ear. Nugent jerked his head toward one of the two waiting-and intently listening-policemen. “Telephone Dr. Marrow,” he said. “Get him over here at once.” One of the troopers vanished.

Claud Chivery said slowly, “Conrad must have just got back from his walk. He went for a walk every night. About eleven. Said it made him sleep. Walked very slowly…”

Nugent said abruptly, “That’s all now, Nurse.” He was bending over Conrad again when I left-trying not to run.

No one was in the hall. Claud Chivery, I think, closed the door behind me. At the stair landing I stopped, looked quickly around, saw no one and plunged my hand under the ferns. The syringe was not there.

I looked and looked and still it wasn’t there. The only possible conclusion was that someone had seen me hide it and had taken it away.

There’s no use in trying to describe my feelings. Naturally, it wasn’t myself I cared about; it was Drue, whom I had delivered into the hands of her enemies-if, that is, Alexia or Nicky had taken the syringe. Or even Maud; there was a look in her dark eyes that suggested depths and no way to tell what kind of depths-true or false, as the radio programs put it.

All three of them-Alexia, Nicky and Maud-had passed that fern on their way upstairs; Peter Huber also could have taken it. Or Beevens, presupposing eyes in the back of his head, for he certainly had not turned while I hid it.

The library door was visible from the landing, and it had been open when I came downstairs; but I had seen no one, for I had looked.

Eventually, hearing steps coming from the end of the hall beyond the stairs (where there proved to be a tiny telephone room, and a hall going to the back stairs and kitchen regions) and guessing correctly that it was a trooper, I had to give up. I trudged up the remaining stairs with a heavy and a troubled heart. Murder is no pleasant thing, and I kept seeing Drue’s face-so young and so lovely, with the childish, honest curve of her young mouth, and the look in her eyes when she’d lifted them to mine and said, “I’ve only tonight.”

And I had to tell her what I had done.

She was sitting by the bed when I entered Craig’s room; her eyes leaped to mine. Craig was unconscious, asleep, I thought; his pulse was all right; the wound hadn’t opened and she had sterilized and dressed the bloody bruise on his temple so a neat patch of surgical dressing and adhesive adorned it. I beckoned Drue into the dressing room and told her everything, except that the syringe was gone-quickly whispering, hating to see the color drain out of her lips when I told her the police were there.

Her hands went out to grip mine, hard.

“Sarah, do they know I…”

“No. I hid the hypodermic. I didn’t tell them that you were there before me. I-oh, my dear child, don’t look like that. You didn’t mean it…”

“I gave him digitalis. Sarah, I had to. He was sick. His medicine was gone. I thought he was dying. I hurried to my room and I had some digitalis. I had it left over from old Mrs. Jamieson-remember, we nursed her together…”

I nodded. A nurse either destroys or hoards for an emergency drugs that are left over from a case and I had nursed old Mrs. Jamieson with her. Every nurse, I imagine (at least I always had done so) accumulates slowly a kind of first-aid, emergency kit of her own. I had then in my bag enough sedatives to bring upon me the highly unfavorable attention of any policeman who happened to discover it.

“So you gave it to him?”

“Yes.” There was horror in her eyes. “You see, I’d been talking to him. Then he… I saw he was really sick. He said to get his medicine; he gasped horribly. He told me where it was, but I remembered. He’s always kept it there in the right-hand drawer of his desk. But I looked and it wasn’t there so I…”

“You opened the drawer?”

“Yes, of course.” (I thought, then, of fingerprints; yet Drue’s fingerprints on the drawer couldn’t be made to prove anything. Or could they?) She went on quickly: “But there was no box of pills. Then he begged me for something; said even if I hated him I’d have to help him, and I-I got my syringe from the bag in my room. I sterilized it quickly with alcohol and prepared the hypodermic and hurried back to the library. He rolled up his sleeve himself and told me to hurry. So I did. I gave him what I thought was the right amount…”

“How much?”

She told me. I nodded. Conrad hadn’t taken any of the pills he had ready for emergency during the few moments that he was alone while Drue was preparing the hypodermic. That was obvious, for if he had done so he wouldn’t have permitted her to give him the additional medicine. “Go on,” I said.

“That’s all, Sarah. He…” She took her hands from my wrists and put them to her throat. “He died. Then. Just-just died and I couldn’t stop it.”

She was shivering; I took her hands again and held them tightly. And thought hard.

“You’re not to tell about the hypodermic. Not tell anyone. Lie if you have to.”

Her hands clung to mine. Her eyes, dark with horror, searched my face. “They’ll say I murdered him,” she whispered. “Is that what you’re afraid of?”

I had to tell her, then. “Listen, Drue. I lost the syringe. That is, I didn’t lose it. I hid it and someone found it and took it away.”

There was a little sharp silence. In the next room Craig slept heavily. Outside, rain and sleet whispered against the windows. Drue whispered stiffly, “Who…?”

“I don’t know. I hid it in the fern; I guessed what you had done; I didn’t want them to know. It’s gone now, so someone must have seen me hide it. I don’t know who. But it’s gone, and your fingerprints are on it. They can easily prove it was yours; there will be traces of digitalis in it.”