Wolf in Man’s Clothing

15

SHE TURNED SO SWIFTLY toward the door that I had to run to follow her.

No one was in the corridor. Drue swept along it like a queen with the folds of blue cape swirling around her, so the red lining was like her insignia of royalty. I didn’t speak to her; I took only one look at her blazing white face, her small lifted chin, the poise of her head upon her slender shoulders. At the stairway I hurried ahead to look down to the landing with some vague idea of stopping Drue so the trooper wouldn’t see her-although I could as easily, I fancy, have stopped a whirlwind. But he was gone, luckily; for Drue swept past without looking and on down the corridor and into her room. I followed her and said then, “Drue-Drue…”

“Sarah, don’t!”

The little dog was there and came quickly, his tail wagging furiously; I saw her take him into her arms as I turned away and press her white face down upon the wriggling, little brown thing.

I closed the door behind me. Funny how seldom you can really face anything with anybody you love, no matter how hard you try. It’s the everlasting loneliness of life; you are born alone, the alone, go up and down the winding road alone. Only in love you do ever really share, and I suppose that’s why it’s so important.

Well. I went back to Craig’s room. Alexia was sitting in a kind of sulky silence beside the bed, and Craig was lying there looking straight ahead; neither of them spoke when I came in, although Alexia’s eyes shifted toward me, measuring me again, I thought. Wondering, planning perhaps. And after a while she got up and walked out of the room. As she went Beevens came to the door; he still looked sick and his color was a pale blue-gray, but he said punctiliously enough: “The police are in the north meadow, sir; I thought you had better be informed of their arrival.”

Police in the north meadow.

But it was at least two hours before they came to Craig’s room and brought the things they brought.

It was a queer two hours which I remember in patches. Mostly we waited. Craig said nothing to me of Drue or of Alexia. Naturally, I said nothing of it to him and indeed made the few remarks I had to make as short and crisp as I could make them. He noticed it, for once I caught his eyes upon me in the oddest look; it had a kind of understanding, yes, and liking, and I don’t think I imagined it. If it was liking, however, I did not reciprocate; on the contrary, for I thought he had treated Drue abominably. Indeed, I thought a lot of things, none of them pleasant, and looked coldly back at him and asked him what he wanted for his dinner tray. My suggestion would have been, at that moment, a sprinkling of cyanide, but it isn’t really considered ethical for a nurse to poison her patient even though he richly deserves it. Which somewhat vigorous but merely fanciful line of thought brought me quickly back to unpleasant reality. Murder had actually happened in that house.

And on a dark and silent meadow.

It must have been about then, or earlier, that Peter Huber brought Maud back to the house. Alexia helped Maud to bed and later I gave her a sedative. Pills; nothing could have induced me to give her anything by way of a hypodermic. Maud said almost nothing; yet she seemed in a queer way to know everything we did, her eyes were so bright and knowing in her little sallow face. It may have been shock or brandy or sedative or all three-whatever it was, she went to bed docilely enough and then all at once to sleep. Alexia stayed with her for a while and, when she left, I think Nicky took her place.

We all had that curious feeling of haste that goes along with tragedy as if there’s a great deal to do (hurry, see to things!) and yet there’s really nothing you can find to do.

Every so often someone would bring a bulletin from the police in the north meadow and once Peter and Nicky and Beevens went to the back door and down into the meadow until they encountered a policeman who sent them back. There were by that time quite a number of police and cars; we could see lights (the long steady streams from the cars and searchlights, and the glancing, busy gleams from small flashlights going everywhere) like the lights of ushers in some darkened, dreadful theatre. Someone knew and told us when Chivery’s body was at last removed.

A trooper again was outside Drue’s door, and this time when I attempted to enter my own room and then go to Drue, he stopped me. “Orders, Miss,” he said. And when I said, “Orders nothing; it’s my room,” he removed my hand from the doorknob in a very muscular way and then put his hand on his revolver holster. So I had to give up; not that I thought he was going to shoot me, I just thought I’d wait a better chance.

Beevens gave us a kind of dinner, served from the buffet in the big elaborate dining room, with its crystal chandeliers and stiff, green and silver brocade draperies. It was an elegant room, too big and too cold. Anna didn’t help him serve; she was having hysterics in her room and I sent her some spirits of ammonia.

But before dinner Peter came to Craig’s room; I was there and remained so I heard everything they said. Peter told him of the inquest and of our visit to Balifold where we found Maud, and when and where he had left me.

“I’m horribly sorry, Miss Keate,” he said. “It must have been a terrible shock finding him like that. I ought to have taken you to the house. Craig, what’s your idea of this? Why do you think he was murdered? If it was because he knew something that was a danger to whoever it was that killed your father, then what was it?”

It was the only motive for his murder that had as yet occurred to any of us; I suppose because it was so obvious. But I thought Craig hesitated. If so, however, it was barely perceptible. He said, “It’s hard to say; Claud was very secretive. Pete, what about these checks to Nicky? It does look like blackmail, but there was nothing anybody could blackmail my father about. Nothing!”

Peter shrugged. “The police found the canceled checks. That’s all I know.”

Craig said suddenly, “I knew about the will, of course; Maud inherits now from Claud.”

And she would inherit fifty thousand dollars; I’d forgotten that. I remembered Maud sitting quietly in the bar while we talked, drinking steadily. And an ugly picture presented itself in my mind: Maud in her dark cloak waiting for Claud in the meadow-and then afterward walking in to Balifold, trying to establish a kind of fumbling alibi, and drinking because she had to, to steady herself for the discovery. She had told me to take the short cut which was the path through the meadow and led inevitably to the discovery of the murder; was that, again, to give herself a semblance of an alibi? Or had it merely happened; everyone knew of and used the path.

And what of the time? Claud had left the inquest fifteen minutes before it adjourned, which would have given him just about enough time to reach the meadow. So what of Maud? How long actually had she been in the bar? And how long had Chivery been dead? Everything would depend upon that, and I didn’t believe that anyone could fix the time of his death with real exactness.

Craig and Peter were probably thinking very much the same thoughts for, after a longish silence Peter said suddenly, “I don’t think she did it, Craig. A woman…”

Nicky came in just then to say there was a dinner of sorts in the dining room. A little to my surprise, Craig tackled him then and there about the checks.

“What were those checks for, Nicky?” he said. “It couldn’t have been an allowance. My father wouldn’t have given you or me or anybody an allowance.”

Nicky answered instantly, promptly, smilingly. “He would have, if Alexia asked him to. As she did for me.”

A slow flush came up into Craig’s face, but his voice was quite level and steady. “Do you know Frederic Miller?” he asked.

This time Nicky didn’t answer promptly; he seemed to stop and think, cautiously. Then he said, “No. What about him? Are there canceled checks to him, too?” There was an eager light in his eyes that baffled me; it was as if he really wanted an answer. But Craig shook his head and made us all go to dinner. Gertrude, the little waitress, popeyed with excitement, stayed with Craig while I ate hurriedly with the others.

I was alone with Craig when the police finally came. Lieutenant Nugent and two other officers. And asked me to bring a towel from the bathroom.

When I spread it out on the foot of the bed so Craig could see, they put down upon it two objects. Neither was exactly pleasant to look at. Quite the reverse, in fact, for one was a small knife, a kitchen paring knife, quite ordinary except its blade was sharpened razor-thin and bright, and it was spotted, especially about the wooden handle, with a dark, dried substance, now turning brown.

The other was a yellow string glove and it, too, was stained in thick reddish brown patches, dry now and stiff.

Both had been found near Claud Chivery’s body, but not near enough for him to have used and dropped, so it did not indicate suicide.

And there were no other clues, except my own white cap and some nickels, which they returned a little ceremoniously to me, Peter already having explained them.

They let me stay; in fact, they requested me to stay, for they wanted to question me, and thus I heard the whole thing. And beyond the fact that they had found no one yet who had seen Claud Chivery after he left the inquest, I knew no more than I had already known.

Except, of course, about the matter of alibis. For it was developing even then that there was a troublesome lack of alibis for that hour or so during which the murder had taken place. They couldn’t, or at least they hadn’t yet been able to fix the time very definitely. They asked me about rigor mortis, I remember, and the temperature of the body when I found it and I could tell them simply nothing. I’d had a kind of impression that he’d been dead for a time when I’d found him; but had no way of giving them a really accurate answer.

They asked me too, for I told them of it, about the rustle I had heard in the brush. I’m not sure, however, that they believed the little I could tell them; it was too tenuous, too unsubstantial a thing.

Nugent told Craig again, briefly, of the inquest, except he didn’t mention the checks Conrad Brent had given Nicky. Mainly they asked Craig about Dr. Chivery: when had he seen him last, what had Chivery said, could he suggest a motive for the murder?

“Did he know anything-any clue or any evidence, about your father’s death?”

“Claud didn’t tell everything he knew,” said Craig obliquely.

Nugent’s green eyes sharpened. “Why do you think he was killed, Brent?”

“I don’t know. But I’d stick to the knife if I were you-for a clue, I mean. The glove…”

“What about the glove?”

“Oh, nothing. It doesn’t seem to mean anything.”

“You’re not being very frank, Brent.”

“I can’t do anything to help you like this. In bed.”

Nugent said slowly, “I’d better tell you that it would help if you had an alibi for this afternoon.”

“I!” Craig lifted himself abruptly on his elbow, winced and lay cautiously back again.

“An alibi always helps,” said Nugent. “But the fact is people are saying-that is-well, it’s like this, Brent. Everyone knows now that you and Mrs. Brent inherit practically all of your father’s money. And everyone knows that you and Mrs. Brent…”

A slow flush was creeping up over Craig’s face; his eyes narrowed. “Well? Say it.”

“You know as well as I do what I mean,” said Nugent. “Everyone thought you and Mrs. Brent were to be married over a year ago; then you married the little nurse and Alexia Senour married your father. Now they’re saying…”

“Listen! I didn’t kill my father! Get that into your head! I didn’t kill Claud, either,” said Craig bleakly. “I’ve no alibi for this afternoon, unless you consider it an alibi not to be able to walk without getting dizzy.”

Nugent leaned forward. “Are you sure of that, Brent?” he said quietly.

An angry flush came over Craig’s face. “My God, do you think I’d stay here if I could help it?” he cried angrily. “Don’t you think I’d get out and do something! Don’t you…”

“What would you do?” broke in Nugent softly.

Craig stopped abruptly. “I don’t know,” he said wearily, after a moment. “I don’t know.”

I said, merely in the line of duty and not to defend Craig, “He couldn’t have murdered Dr. Chivery. He couldn’t have walked that far and back again. I’m sure of that, Lieutenant.”

Nugent’s gray-green gaze plunged at me. “Are you, Miss Keate?”

“Yes. And as to that, Mr. Brent had an alibi the night Mr. Brent-that is, his father-died. I was with him.

“I know,” said Nugent without any expression at all in his face. “Still, sick people have been known to walk incredible distances. And there really is no alibi in the case of murder by poison.”

Craig made a quick motion forward as if to expostulate, and I said hurriedly, “I can’t let you question my patient very long, Lieutenant.” And put my hand on Craig’s wrist. Not, again, to defend Craig but merely because it was my obvious duty. His pulse seemed steady enough, however. And Nugent said,

“All right. Just a few more questions. The night your father died, Brent, you were found in the linen room. How did you get there?”

“I told you everything I knew about that.”

“You said someone struck you. Who?”

“I don’t know. I’ve told you. I didn’t know anyone was near me.”

“You say you were in the hall, starting downstairs, your back to the corridor. How did you get into the linen room where your wife-I mean Miss Cable-found you?”

“I don’t know. That’s the truth. You’ve no case against me.”

Nugent looked at him slowly. “I’m not saying I have,” he said. “But where there’s murder, there’s motive. And everybody knows that you and Mrs. Brent…”

“Can’t we leave Mrs. Brent out of this?”

“Not very well,” said Nugent. But after a moment’s thoughtful silence he said no more of Alexia and went on instead to Conrad Brent’s will, asking Craig if he knew its main provisions. Craig said he did. “My father told me.

“How did he make his money?”

Craig glanced at the Lieutenant with a little surprise. “It’s no secret. He inherited from his father, quite a lot; I don’t know how much. He invested it-oh, a long time ago. Before I was born. Anyway, everything he touched prospered. In the summer of 1929 he sold; everything was almost at its peak. Since then he’s done very little buying or selling of stocks.”

“He was a very rich man.”

“Yes,” said Craig, “he was. That is, it wasn’t anything fantastic. But more than enough.”

Nugent, hard and sinuous as a whip in his trim uniform, leaned over the railing at the foot of the bed. Lights touched his narrow high cheekbones and reflected in small points in his gray green eyes. “Brent, there was a queer codicil to your father’s will. I mean, he’d lived in America all his life…”

“Oh, that,” said Craig abruptly. “You mean he wanted to be buried in Germany. At Stuttgart. Yes, I know. It was an odd notion of his. When it struck him years ago, he had it written into his will; then, after his recent marriage, when his new will was written I suppose that was just carried over. I am sure that he’d changed his mind about it.”

“Why did he want it, in the first place?”

“You’d have to understand and know my father to understand that,” said Craig slowly. “I’ll try to explain. He once had a kind of hobby for family; he dug into his genealogy, oh, away back when. Unearthed a single direct line, and clung to it. Got hold of the coat of arms, all possible records and history, everything. He was of German descent; although I think his father came to America and made his fortune sometime before the Civil War. My father had time on his hands; the study of genealogy interested him.”

“A hobby,” said Nugent. “I see. He didn’t take it too seriously, did he?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, did he consider going back to Germany to live, for instance?” said Nugent.

“Good God, no,” said Craig. “He was a little hipped about family, that was all. He thought a lot about pure Nordic blood…”

“Approved of some of Hitler’s ideas, in other words?”

“No! It was only at the beginning of the Hitler regime that he was rather taken with some of the ideology it claimed-resurrecting the old Teutonic family life, improving the race, keeping family blood pure, that kind of thing. But he got over that right away. There was nobody more loyal to America than my father. I’m sure of that. He much regretted that he’d been even briefly taken in by anything Hitler claimed.”

“I see,” said Nugent. “Forgive me, Brent, but he did disapprove of your marriage, didn’t he?”

“He thought we hadn’t known each other long enough. That was all.”

“Oh,” said Nugent. “I had an idea that you had rather quarreled with him about your marriage. I mean when you married a girl he didn’t think was good enough to marry into his family.”

“That,” said Craig dangerously, “is enough of that. As a matter of fact, Miss Cable was too good for me and the Brent family. If that is all, Lieutenant…”

“No, it isn’t,” said Nugent. “It’s this way, Brent. Soper thinks the girl-your former wife-did it. I’m not sure. Until something clinching and material turns up I’d like to hold off an arrest. And I’ve tried to give her a fair break. But she’s not telling everything she knows.”

“Well?” said Craig, still with a dangerous look in his face.

“For one thing, she disclaims having taken the missing box of medicine. Yet her fingerprints were on the drawer of the desk where the medicine was kept; they were on the wooden handle and the panel across the front. She wouldn’t explain how they got there.”

My heart sunk, quite literally and heavily down toward my white oxfords; yet I’d been afraid of it. Craig said evenly, “That doesn’t prove anything.”

“And she got past my man late this afternoon and went outdoors. He…” Nugent stopped there and left us to conjecture what had happened to the trooper on guard in consequence. “It won’t happen again,” he said briefly. “But she was out of the house at the time Chivery was killed.”

“A woman couldn’t have killed him! Like that,” said Craig.

“Mrs. Brent told us Drue Cable had been out of the house,” said Nugent slowly, and looked at the ugly things that still lay there on the towel-the bright, sharp paring knife, the yellow glove.

And abruptly then, after a few more questions about Claud Chivery, they went away. As they left, Craig asked a question.

“Oh, by the way, Nugent…”

The Lieutenant turned. “Yes…?”

“Did you find only one glove?”

For an instant something very deep and intent stirred again away back in Lieutenant Nugent’s green gray eyes. “Only one. See you in the morning, Brent. The District Attorney may be here then, too. I’m leaving a man in the house tonight.”

They went away then, rolling up the towel and taking it and the things inside it along with them.

Craig lay in silence, his eyes closed, after their departure. And I can’t say that I felt exactly chipper and talkative myself.

And presently Beevens came; he’d stay with Mr. Brent he said, while I got some rest. “And the Lieutenant spoke to the trooper on guard in the hall. I heard him, Miss. He’s to let you enter and leave your room whenever you wish to.”

“They’re still holding Miss Cable, then,” said Craig.

“Yes, sir. I’m afraid they are. Is there anything about medicine, Miss?”

I told him there wasn’t and went away quickly; there were things I had to do, for somehow, now, everything was different.

It was an ugly difference too, something in the air, in the stillness of the house, in the shadows in the corners and around the stairwell. In our meeting eyes.

There was no possibility of evasion this time; no way to deceive ourselves, no glossing of the grim and terrifying truth. Murder had been in that house, murder on the black and silent meadow. A thing that struck swiftly, out of nowhere and might strike again as swiftly, as silently.

An opened door, with the room unlighted beyond it, was a threat.

Well, I hurried along the corridor. The trooper, the same one who had stopped me earlier in the evening, let me enter my room, this time without a word. But I didn’t go straight on to Drue’s room, for the first thing I had to do was write a letter to the police.

I didn’t really think I had done any harm or obstructed their inquiry in the least by hiding the hypodermic syringe. But I also felt a responsibility about it, to say nothing of the empty medicine box. So light in my hand when I weighed it and looked at it, so heavy on my heart. Perhaps now that Claud Chivery was dead Drue would tell me what she knew of it.

But just now I had to write my letter.

Since the shooting episode, not unnaturally perhaps, I had felt a remarkably unpleasant sense of personal danger. This was now very much stronger. I had seen Claud Chivery with his throat cut, huddled like an empty sack. The only motive for murder so far attributable was that he’d known something that was a danger to the murderer of Conrad Brent, or to whoever it was that shot Craig. And I, accursed with the Keate nose and a mentality that would have startled and delighted any psychiatrist, was simply reeking with clues. I had been led astray by my affections and softening of the brain; it was impossible to avoid the conclusion that if I didn’t end as Claud Chivery had ended I’d be lucky.

True, I was none the wiser for any of my clues, if clues they were, for I didn’t know who had murdered Conrad or Claud. But still there they were, and suppose something happened to me. Not that I intended to let anything happen to me; but I did want a clear-or fairly clear conscience. Just in case.

And it was equally conceivable that the little I knew might later, in some way, clear Drue or another innocent person, rather than convict anyone.

So I wrote it quickly, a bare statement of facts about the hypodermic-not the medicine box, for that was still Drue’s secret-put it in an envelope, and, as I didn’t know what else to do with it, I pinned that too to the under side of my uniform, just below a pocket so it didn’t show, and patted it down flat. Although, as to that, mine is not exactly the kind of figure which reveals an extra bulge or two.

Even then, however, I didn’t go to Drue. I had nothing to tell her, nothing at all to offer that would give her support, except my affection for her and she knew she had that.

Besides, I’d have had to ask her again about the medicine box.

But I was beginning to be thankful for the trooper on guard at her door. Whatever the intention was, the result must be a degree of safety for Drue. After that twilight moment or two down in the meadow, a queer and horrible unsafeness was everywhere in that house, among the shadows of driveway and garden, across the stretch of lawns, around every corner. Even the encircling, shadowy hills seemed to know it and wait and watch.

I went first in search of Anna’s room. The narrow hall that crossed the main corridor near the stairway led to the back of the house and I turned into it, passed the entrance to some rather steep back stairs, turned again and brought up in a wing that was obviously the servants’ wing. I walked along, passing one or two open doors beyond which Anna obviously was not, and came to a closed one.

And just as I knocked someone inside the room spoke. It was a murmur, further muffled by my knock, but it sounded masculine. And it stopped abruptly at the sound of my knuckles on the door.

But it was Anna’s room; for, after a longish pause, I knocked again and then Anna said quaveringly, “Is that you, Gertrude? I-I’m asleep.”

“It’s Miss Keate. I want to see you.”

There was another sudden silence on the other side of the door. This time however there was a quality of consternation about it. Anna was not the type for tender dalliance; I didn’t even think of that. But I didn’t imagine the consternation either for it was plain in Anna’s voice when she said suddenly, almost at the keyhole, breathlessly, “I-I’m all right now. I’m not upset any more.”

And when I insisted, she just kept repeating it, “I’m all right. Thank you, Nurse. There’s nothing wrong-nothing wrong…” with her voice growing thinner and more frightened at every word. It was exactly as if whoever was there with her, and had stopped talking when I knocked, was standing beside her holding a club over her head.

But it wasn’t really till sometime the next morning that they found the other yellow glove, bloodstained and stiff, hidden under the mattress in Anna’s room. And by that time it was impossible to question her.