Gun in Cheek (27 page)

One of these men, of course, is the Bat.

And why is the Bat flying around this particular old country house? Because he knows that somewhere inside it is hidden a fortune in cash—the very money Jack Bailey was accused of stealing from Courtleigh Fleming's failed bank, but which Fleming himself stole and hid in the house. How the Bat knows this is uncertain; how we know it is because Mrs. Rinehart has revealed that Brooks isn't really a gardener, or named Brooks, but instead is Jack Bailey, who happens to be the man Dale Ogden fell in love with and who has been brought to the house by Dale in order to protect him from the police and also so he can search for the missing money, which he is convinced is hidden inside a hidden room.

Clear?

"'Listen, honey,' " Bailey says to Dale at one point, "'it's like this. Here's the house that Courtleigh Fleming built—here, somewhere, is the Hidden Room in the house that Courtleigh Fleming built—and here—somewhere—pray Heaven—is the money—in the Hidden Room—in the house that Courtleigh Fleming built. When you're low in your mind, just say that over!'"

"'I've forgotten it already,'" Dale says, drooping.

More strange and exciting things happen. A second warning note is thrown through one of the French windows, tied around a rock. The lights go out unexpectedly, and a sinister figure slips inside the house and up the rear staircase. Lizzie spies the figure and gives vent to "a piercing shriek that would have shamed the siren of a fire-engine." When Miss Cornelia rushes in, accompanied by Detective Anderson, she accidentally spills hot coffee on Lizzie's foot, causing the maid to dance up and down and squeal hysterically, "Oh, my foot—my foot!"

Miss Cornelia tried to shake her back to her senses.

"My patience! Did you yell like that because you stubbed your toe?"

"You scalded it!" cried Lizzie, wildly. "It went up the staircase!"

"Your toe went up the staircase?"

"No, no! An eye—an eye as big as a saucer! It ran right up the staircase—"

The action at this point becomes frenetic. Richard Fleming, unaware of the hidden room until Dale blurts out Jack Bailey's suspicion that there is one, locates the blueprints of the house, struggles over them with Dale, tosses into the fire all but a portion that reveals the location of the hidden room, and is then mysteriously shot to death for his trouble. Dale hides the blueprint portion inside a dinner roll to keep Detective Anderson from finding it. The image of a bat appears inside a flashlight beam that somebody shines through one of the windows. A dead bat turns up on one of the doorknobs. The telephone line goes dead, yet someone seems to make a call on it a little while later. The Japanese butler uses some jujitsu on Beresford, who has been lurking around outside. And, unobserved by anyone,

a Hand stole through the broken pane of the shattered French window behind their backs and fumbled for the knob which unlocked the window-door. It found the catch—unlocked it—the window-door swung open, noiselessly—just enough to admit a crouching figure, that cramped itself uncomfortably behind the settee which Dale and the Doctor had placed to barricade those very doors. When it had settled itself, unperceived, in its lurking place—the Hand stole out again—closed the window-door, re-locked it.

Hand or claw? Hand of man or woman or paw of beast? In the name of God—whose hand?

Well, it turns Out to be the hand of the bloody Unknown, who makes his first up-front appearance a short while later . . - after the hidden room has been found, the lights have gone out again, Miss Cornelia and some of the others have been locked in the living room, the Bat (complete with mask and cape) has climbed up a ladder from outside and stolen the money that was hidden inside the hidden room, and there has been a fight between Anderson and Dr. Wells. The bloody Unknown knocks on the front door, and when Billy opens it, he falls wounded inside. He had been hit on the head earlier in the garage, that much he remembers; but he hasn't regained all his faculties yet and doesn't know who he is or what he's doing there. This is why he has been stumbling and lurking about the place, hiding behind furniture and flashing his hand.

Detective Anderson says the bloody Unknown must be the murderer of Richard Fleming and that he must have hidden the stolen money somewhere on the grounds; a few minutes alone with the man, he says grimly, and he'll have the truth. At this point Miss Cornelia cries out that somebody just went through the skylight and out onto the roof, which creates a good deal of excitement and a lengthy offstage chase. Meanwhile, the Unknown remains near Miss Cornelia and regains enough of his senses to filch her revolver when she isn't looking.

Jack Bailey returns from the chase first, and Miss Cornelia confesses that she didn't really see anyone go through the skylight onto the roof. She believes the stolen money is still inside the house and wanted Detective Anderson outside so she'd have freedom to search. She and Jack and Dale and Lizzie begin to prowl the upstairs, where they find a second body in one of the closets.
 
This corpse is that of Courtleigh Fleming, who did not die after all in Colorado; that was just a ruse concocted by Fleming and his cohort, Dr. Wells, so Fleming could return to the house on the QT, retrieve the stolen money—he stole it in the first place, you see—and exit for South America or some other exotic port of call. (Wells, we are told, somehow hauled another body up to Colorado to substitute it for Fleming and thereby complete the death ruse. Ingenuity, thy name is Wells.)

But who killed the Flemings,
père et fils
? Jack Bailey theorizes that Courtleigh shot his son and was in turn murdered by Dr. Wells, who wanted the money all for himself. Miss Cornelia has other ideas. Before she tells what they are, however, she wants to search for the missing money.

In a clothes hamper, they find some books (Little Rosebud's Lover, or the Cruel Revenge is one) and unsoiled clothing that belong to Lizzie. These things were in Lizzie's satchel, meaning that somebody dumped them in order to put something else in the satchel. "Isn't that your satchel, Lizzie?" Miss Cornelia asks, indicating a battered bag she happens to notice "in a dark corner of shadows above the window." And indeed it is. Inside it, of course, is the missing money.

Lizzie then looks out the window and notes that the barn is on fire. "Fire!" she screams. But before they can all rush out, the bloody Unknown blocks their way and throws down on them with Miss Cornelia's revolver. "Not a sound if you value your lives!" he says. "In a moment or two, a man will come into this room, either through the door or by that window—the man who started the fire to draw you out of the house."

The suspense, lest it become too great for the reader's heart, is not allowed to linger. The ladder, up which the Bat climbed earlier, is still propped outside the window, and a black bulk appears atop it and stands outlined against the glow of the fire. "The Bat, masked and sinister on his last foray!" As soon as the Bat enters the room, the Unknown and Jack Bailey jump him and take his gun away. Then Bailey rips off the black silk handkerchief that hides the master crook's face—

A simultaneous gasp went up from Dale and Miss Cornelia.

It was Anderson, the detective! And he was—the Bat!

"It's Mr. Anderson!" stuttered Dale, aghast at the discovery.

The Unknown gloated over his captive.

"I'm Anderson," he said. "This man has been impersonating me. You're a good actor, Bat, for a fellow that's such a bad actor!" he taunted.

There is one more brief flurry of action when the Bat, in spite of handcuffs, jerks the revolver away from the real Anderson and throws down on everybody. But Miss Cornelia heroically disobeys his order to put up her hands and tells him that she took the bullets out of the gun two hours ago. Whereupon the Bat flings the revolver at her and tries to flee, but Anderson gets the drop on him with the Bat's own weapon. Miss Cornelia then reveals that the gun really is loaded after all: she breaks it open and lets five shells fall to the floor. "You see," she says, "I too have a little imagination."

In the final wrap-up, we learn that the Bat "had probably trailed the real detective all the way from town," knocked him unconscious, and stole his identity papers. How did the Bat find out about the money hidden inside the house by Courtleigh Fleming? We are never told, although there is an inference that he somehow managed to tap the telephone wires to police headquarters. Who is the Bat? Where did he come from? Why did he keep running around with his Bat costume on, when he could have accomplished more with less trouble in his guise as a detective? Mrs. Rinehart chose neither to divulge nor infer the answers to these and several other questions. And perhaps she knew best.

Why clutter a perfectly bad melodrama with logic and plausibility?

L
ogic and plausibility—of a sort—are present in another perfectly bad melodrama of the same period,
The Invisible Host
(1930), by Gwen Bristow and Bruce Manning. So is a different kind of supercriminal: the brilliantly cunning madman.
The Invisible Host
was also produced as a play, under the title
The Ninth Guest
(which was what Popular Library called its paperback reprint of the novel in 1975), though in this case the book came first. It was the maiden effort, in fact, of the Bristow and Manning team—they having been husband and wife at the time, despite the different surnames; they perpetrated three additional mysteries in 1931 and 1932, all published by the redoubtable Mystery League, none of the same tour-de-force proportions of
The Invisible Host
. Bristow went on to write a successful string of historical novels bearing such titles as
Calico Palace
and
Jubilee Trail
. It is not generally known what Manning went on to do.

Just one of the many remarkable things about
The Invisible Host
is the fact that its plot is quite similar to Agatha Christie's
Ten Little Niggers
(also published as
Ten Little Indians
and
And Then There Were None
). This is made even more remarkable by the added fact that the Bristow/Manning opus was published nine years before the Christie. Dame Agatha is certainly above reproach and doubtless was unaware of the existence of, much less had read,
The Invisible Host
when she conceived her masterpiece; writers of her stature do not look elsewhere for inspiration. The truly fascinating point is that a team of young American writers and the British grand dame should have come up with essentially the same plot nine years apart and have made of it a pair of classic novels, one at each end of the mystery spectrum.

The Invisible Host
is set in New Orleans, among the café society of the French Quarter fifty years ago. Eight telegrams are sent to eight individuals, men and women, all of whom are acquainted with each other; each telegram reads as follows:

CONGRATULATIONS STOP PLANS AFOOT FOR SMALL SURPRISE PARTY IN YOUR HONOR BIENVILLE PENTHOUSE NEXT SATURDAY EIGHT OCLOCK STOP ALL SUB ROSA BIG SURPRISE STOP MAINTAIN SECRECY STOP PROMISE YOU MOST ORIGINAL PARTY EVER STAGED IN NEW ORLEANS. And each one is signed YOUR HOST.

The eight recipients each think a different person sent the telegram, for a different reason. Thus, a clever ploy to introduce each character in turn. The eight are: Margaret Chisholm, a snooty dowager; Dr. Murray Chambers Reid, a hard-hearted university dean; Peter Daly, playwright and nominal hero; Sylvia Inglesby, "an admirable lawyer, logical and coldly inspired"; Henry Abbott, also known "in the lopsided familiarity of the Quarter" as Hank, an intellectual who has been tossed off the university faculty for preaching subversive social theories; Jean Trent, a "beautiful, misty, diaphanous" movie star who has come home to New Orleans on a holiday; Jason Osgood, a pompous philanthropist; and Tim Slamon, a local politician whose main characteristic is that he never chews his cigars in public.

When the principals gather in the Bienville penthouse on Saturday night, none of them admits to being the host. The consensus is that the host hasn't yet arrived. While they wait for him or her, the guests engage in much gay party talk as well as some barbed exchanges and not a little philosophizing about death.

"But—" Jean hesitated. "Maybe it's a trick party. Maybe he'll come in costume, or drop through the ceiling, or come up the dumbwaiter—"

"Jean's been to Hollywood, Hollywood, Hollywood," sang Out Jason Osgood, waving his cigar in the air to mark time.

"Be still," ordered Margaret, spanking his cheeks with her fan.

"Age is heartbreaking to contemplate," agreed Tim. "I dread growing old."

Peter almost shuddered. "Who wants to grow old—sitting huddled in an armchair clutching at the withered dry cord that he feels slowly being drawn away from him—"

"Exactly," said Hank, "until at last Death, the great housewife, sweeps one's puzzled moldiness into the dustbin."