Drury Lane’s Last Case (34 page)

“Hamnet being the second visitor, was therefore murdered by the first, since there were only two involved according to Maxwell's bell-testimony. Who was the first, the masked man?” Patience's lips parted eagerly. “We proved long ago that the first man was the wielder of the axe, the hacker. Then Hamnet was killed by the hacker. Could William have been the hacker, as you've just maintained, father? I say no, because William knew better than anyone else in the world where the secret compartment was; he wouldn't have had to hack the place to splinters under any circumstances! So I say William Sedlar was
not
the hacker, wasn't in the house at all that night, didn't kill his brother, and there
is
a third man in this case—the wielder of the axe, the man who did not know where the document was, the man who killed Hamnet after Hamnet had taken it from the hollow panel, the man who put Hamnet's body into the cellar and escaped with the document!”

“Swell,” said young Rowe quickly. “But who is he?”

“We'll have to start all over again, I'm afraid,” said Patience, shrugging. She fell silent, frowning deeply. Suddenly she uttered a choked cry and her face became white as death. “Oh!” she said, and got uncertainly to her feet. She swayed a little, and Rowe with an expression of alarm leaped to her side.

“Pat, for God's sake. What's the matter? What's happened?”

The Inspector brushed him roughly aside. “Patty. Don't you feel well, darling?”

Patience moaned faintly: “I—I … It was the strangest feeling. I—I really think I'm ill.…” Her voice trailed off; she staggered and fell against her father's arm.

Lane and the Englishman sprang forward. “Inspector!” said Lane sharply. “She's going to … Look out!”

Rowe darted forward and caught her knees as she began to slip to the floor.

When Thumm and Rowe had departed with Patience, bound in a cab for the Thumm apartment, Patience weeping queerly in a quiet hysteria, Mr. Drury Lane and William Sedlar found themselves alone in the curator's office.

“It must have been the heat,” muttered Sedlar. “Poor girl.”

“No doubt,” said Lane. He was on his feet, tall as a pine topped with snow; and his eyes were two bottomless pits, dark and deep.

Sedlar shivered suddenly. “I suppose it's all up, eh? The end of the quest,” he said bitterly. “I shouldn't care half so much if——”

“I quite understand your feelings, Mr. Sedlar.”

“Yes. I suppose you'll turn me over to the authorities——”

Lane regarded him inscrutably. “Why should you suppose that? I'm not a policeman, nor is Inspector Thumm connected with the police any longer. Our little group are the only ones who know. There is really no charge against you; your thefts have been paid for; you are not a murderer.” The Englishman stared at him with a flaring hope in his haggard eyes. “I can't very well speak for the Inspector, but as one of the directors of the Britannic Museum I suggest you submit your resignation to James Wyeth at once and …”

The man's thin shoulders drooped. “I quite understand. It seems hard.… I know what I must do, Mr. Lane.” He sighed. “I never thought when we conducted that erudite battle in the columns of
The Stratford Quarterly——
”

“That it would come to this very dramatic end?” Lane eyed him for a moment and then grunted noncommittally. “Well, good day,” he said and, picking up his hat and stick, walked out of the room.

Dromio waited patiently at the kerb with the car. The old man got into the tonneau very stiffly, as if his joints ached, and was driven away. He closed his eyes at once, so sunken in thought that he seemed to have fallen fast asleep.

30

Mr. Drury Lane's Solution

The Inspector was not a subtle man; his emotions were raw and spontaneous, like the leaping juice of a squeezed lemon. He had accepted fatherhood with a mixture of bewilderment, delight, and trepidation. The more he saw of his daughter the more he adored her and the less he understood her. Consequently she kept him in a stew of excitement; the poor man never succeeded, no matter how desperately he tried, either in anticipating her next mood or grasping the mystery of her last one.

In the turbulent depths of his misery he was suddenly glad to turn over to Mr. Gordon Rowe the task of calming the young woman so inexplicably stricken with hysteria. And Mr. Gordon Rowe, who until now had loved only books, realized with a despairing groan what it meant to love a woman.

For Patience remained a puzzle, neither to be grasped nor solved. When her weeping had run its course, she dried her eyes on the young man's handkerchief, smiled at him, and retired to her room. Neither threats nor pleas moved her. She advised Mr. Gordon Rowe to go away. No, she would not see a physician. Yes, she was perfectly well; just a headache. And not another word out of her in response to the Inspector's frantic bellowings. Mr. Gordon Rowe and his prospective father-in-law looked gloomily at each other, and then Mr. Rowe went away, already obeying orders.

Patience did not emerge for dinner. She uttered a choked “good night” without opening her door. During the night the Inspector, finding his old heart strangely pounding, rose from his bed and went to her room. He heard a wild sobbing. He raised his hand to knock on her door and then dropped it helplessly. He returned to bed and stared bitterly at the black wall for half the night.

In the morning he peered into her room; she was asleep, traces of tears still on her cheeks, her honey-coloured hair tumbled about the pillow. She stirred restlessly, sighing in her sleep; and he retreated in haste to a lonely breakfast and his office.

He moved listlessly through the routine work of the day. Patience failed to make her appearance in the office. At 4.30 he uttered a loud curse, grabbed his hat, dismissed Miss Brodie for the day, and returned to the apartment.

“Pat!” he called anxiously from the foyer.

He heard a movement from her room, and he quickly crossed the living-room. She was standing, pale and strange, before the closed door of her bedroom dressed in a severe suit, a dark little turban over her curls.

“You goin' out?” he rumbled, kissing her.

“Yes, father.”

“Why've you got the door closed that way?”

“I'm——” She bit her lip. “Father, I'm
packing
.”

His huge jaw dropped. “Pat! Darlin'! What's up? Where you going?”

She opened her door slowly. The Inspector saw through a sudden mist a full suit-case lying on her bed. “I'm going away for a few days,” she said in a quivering voice. “I—it's very important.”

“But what——”

“No, father.” She snapped the case shut and buckled the straps. “Please don't ask me where or why. Or anything. Please. Just for a few days. I—I want to …”

The Inspector sank into a living-room chair and stared at her. She snatched up the suit-case and ran across the room. Then she dropped the bag with a little choked cry, ran back to him, and flung her arms about his neck and kissed him. Before he could collect his stupified wits she was gone.

He sat there limply, in the empty apartment, a dead cigar in his mouth and his hat still on his head. The slam of the apartment-door kept thundering in his ears. In his slow deliberate way, as he calmed down, he thought things over. And the longer he thought the more uneasy he became. His lifetime of dealing with criminals and policemen had given him a certain shrewd insight into human nature. When he forgot that Patience was flesh of his flesh he began to appreciate the especial oddity of her conduct. His daughter was a level-headed, grown woman. She was not given to the customary feminine tantrums or emotional storms. The strangeness of her actions … He sat in the darkening room for hours, without moving. At midnight he rose, switched on the light, and made himself a cup of strong coffee. Then he went heavily to bed.

Two days passed with agonizing slowness. Gordon Rowe made his life miserable. The young man telephoned, he dropped into the office at odd hours, he clung to the Inspector with the grim tenacity of a leech. He did not seem even remotely satisfied with Thumm's grunted explanation that Patience had gone away for a few days “for a rest.”

“Then why didn't she call me up, or drop me a note, or something?”

The Inspector shrugged. “I don't want to hurt your feelings, younker, but who the hell are you?”

Rowe flushed. “She loves me, damn it all!”

“Looks like it, doesn't it?”

But when six days had passed and there was no word, no smallest sign, from Patience, the Inspector caved in. He dropped his tightly casual air and for the first time in his life experienced real terror. He forgot his elaborate pretences at working; he paced his office floor with slow wavering steps; and finally on the sixth day he could bear the agony no longer. He took his hat and left the building. Patience had not taken her roadster; it stood as she had left it in the public garage near the Thumm apartment. The Inspector climbed in wearily and headed its nose toward Westchester.

He found Drury Lane sunning himself in one of the crisp little gardens of The Hamlet; and for an instant the Inspector was shocked out of his own misery at the old gentleman's appearance. Lane had aged incredibly in less than a week. His skin was waxy yellow and exhibited the appalling texture of crumbling chalk; he sat wrapped in an Indian blanket, despite the hot sun, as if he were cold. His body seemed to have shrunken; and Thumm, recalling the astonishing vigour and youthful vitality of this man only a few years before, himself shivered and sat down with averted eyes.

“Well, well, Inspector,” said Lane in a feeble, almost croaking voice. “It's good of you to come here.… I suppose you're sickened by my appearance?”

“Uh—no, no,” said the Inspector hastily. “You look fine.”

Lane smiled. “You're a poor liar, old friend. I look ninety and feel a hundred. It comes over you suddenly. Do you remember Cyrano in that fifth act seated beneath the tree? How many times I've played that part, a withered old buckaroo, while underneath my doublet my heart beat with the surging strength of youth! Now …” He closed his eyes for an instant. “Martini is openly worried. These medical men! They won't recognize the fact that old age is, in Seneca's phrase, an incurable disease.” He opened his eyes. Then he said sharply: “Thumm, old man! What's happened? What's the matter?”

The Inspector buried his face in his hands. When he took them away his eyes were like wet marbles. “It's—it's Patty,” he muttered. “She's gone—Lane, for the love of God, you've got to help me find her!”

The old gentleman's pallor deepened. He said slowly: “She's—disappeared?”

“Yes. I mean no. She went off by herself.” The story tumbled out. A score of wrinkles appeared about Lane's unwavering eyes as they watched the Inspector's lips. “I don't know what to do. It's my fault. I see now what must have happened,” cried Thumm. “She got a clue, some damn notion that sent her off on a wild chase. It might be dangerous, Lane. It's about a week now. Maybe …” He faltered and stopped, unable to phrase the horrible uncertainty in his mind.

“You think, then,” murmured Lane, “that she was perilously close to the truth, somehow. That she's gone off on the trail of the third man, the murderer. That he has possibly turned on her.…”

The Inspector nodded dumbly; his big gnarled fist was pounding the seat of the rustic bench in a steady tattoo.

Both men were silent for a long time. A robin perched on a nearby bough burst into song; from somewhere behind them Thumm heard Quacey's querulous old voice raised in argument with a gardener. But Lane's dead ears head nothing; he sat studying the grass at his feet. Finally he sighed and laid his veined hand on Thumm's, and Thumm looked at him with tortured hope.

“Poor old friend. I can't tell you how sorry I feel. Patience … Shakespeare once said a remarkable thing. He said:

‘O most delicate fiend
!

Who is't can read a woman?'

You're much too honest and primitively masculine, my friend, to understand what has happened to Patience. Women have an inexhaustible capacity for concocting exquisite tortures for their menfolk, many times in all innocence.” Thumm's haggard eyes devoured his face. “Have you a pencil and paper about you?”

“Penc——Sure, sure!” The Inspector fumbled in an agony of eagerness in his pockets and produced the requested articles. He watched his friend fiercely. Lane wrote steadily. When he had finished he looked up.

“Insert this in the personal columns of all the New York newspapers, Inspector,” he said quietly. “Perhaps—who knows?—it may do good.”

Thumm dazedly took the paper.

“And let me know the moment anything happens.”

“Sure, sure.” His voice broke. “Thanks a lot, Lane.”

The queerest spasm of pain twisted the old gentleman's pale face for an instant. Then his lips curled in a smile that was just as queer. “It's little enough.” He gave Thumm his hand. “Good-bye.”

“'Bye,” muttered Thumm. Their hands clasped. The Inspector strode abruptly off toward his car. Before he started the motor he read the message Lane had scribbled:

“
Pat. I know everything. Come back. D.L
.”

He sighed with relief, grinned, sent the engine roaring, waved his hand, and disappeared in a cloud of gravel and dust. Lane had risen and smiled very peculiarly until the car was gone. Then he shivered a little and sat down again, wrapping the blanket more closely about him.

The next afternoon found two men seated opposite each other, an old man and a young; and both were haggard and biting their nails. The apartment was cool and quiet. An ashtray at each man's elbow was filled with dead butts. Between them, on the floor, lay a tumbled heap of morning newspapers.