Rex Stout (17 page)

Martin stood up. “You can have mine if you want them. You say you took Ranth’s?” He moved to the desk.

“Yes, he was very obliging. Here, this way.” She showed him how, took all ten fingers, removed the ink for him. His hands were nervous but strong, long-fingered, sensitive. He looked at the prints with interest. Dol asked, “You next, Sylvia?”

Sylvia came over. The lawyer interposed, “Just a minute, Miss Raffray. This seems to me—”

“It’s all right.” Sylvia had done it often before and was going about it almost professionally. “This is Dol Bonner, my partner. I don’t know what the dickens she’s up to, but I can see she means it, and that’s enough for me.… That all right, Dol? You’ll explain when you get around to it … to me. Won’t you?”

Dol patted her shoulder. “You’re okay. I’ll explain when the time comes. If it comes.—May I, please, Mrs. Storrs?”

Cabot merely sat back and frowned as his new client, the widow of his client, got up and approached. She acquiesced with her normal intensity: “I have no reason to refuse. You know, Nicholas, Peter always said I had no respect for facts.—This way, my dear?—He was wrong. He was wrong about many things.—Oh, I see, I pressed too hard.—I merely would not let them interfere with acroamata which went far below the depth of facts, and soared far above their horizon.” She lifted the print of her left hand. “See that? That poor meager fact? Do you suppose I could admit it as a witness to contradict my soul?” She put it down.

Dol said, “Janet? If you don’t mind?”

Janet offered no discussion of facts and souls; she said nothing. She walked to the desk in stately indifference and followed instructions, and did it more neatly than any of the others, even Sylvia. When Dol cleaned her finger-tips she extended the right hand again for an infinitesimal smudge on the thumb.

Dol put the things back in the case and closed it, thanked
them collectively and apologized for intruding, let the lawyer have a curt nod as a minimum of courtesy, and left them. Before she returned to the reception hall she lifted her skirt for a brief glance to make sure that the gloves were secure.

She still had to get Len Chisholm and Steve Zimmerman. They proved to be equally amenable and almost equally unpleasant. She found Len in the rose garden pergola again, where he appeared to have assumed squatter’s rights, and he was, in a word, grouty. She ignored his rudeness and sarcasm; what she was after was fingerprints, and she got them. Zimmerman was finally discovered in the peach orchard back of the garage, sitting on the bottom rung of a stepladder, moodily splitting a fruit. When Dol explained what she wanted he sat and stared at her for a full half a minute without any effort to conceal his contempt; then, without a word, he put down the peach, wiped the juice from his fingers on the grass, extended a hand to her and held it there. She was, in fact, surprised; she had rather expected a refusal from him. He was last on the list.

She stood again in the vegetable garden, debating on her procedure, and decided not to complicate matters by trying to lug the melon off somewhere. If someone came up she would have to call on her wits. She went to the compost heap and put the pigskin case down there, then went to the patch and found the melon. The stem was tough and hard to break, and she had trouble lifting it, because she had to be careful to touch as little of its surface as possible. It was big and heavy, and carrying it with her hands at the ends, and held away from her dress, was not easy. At the compost heap she put it gently down on the brick wall, opened the case, and got out the white powder, the spray gun, and a magnifying glass. She was not trembling at all now, quite cool and efficient.

She tried a couple of shots with the spray on a cabbage leaf, then turned it on the melon. Delicately and evenly she spread the film; nothing showed; then there was a large blur extending along the side; then she got two good impressions. She looked at them through the magnifying glass, and saw that they were her own; she knew her whorls; but later she could make sure. She became precipitate
and got the film too thick and swore under her breath. Then, after turning the melon a little, she got several good prints, and then some more. She covered all the exposed surface before she took the glass again; and, after an examination, she got from the case the envelope holding the samples she had collected, and began comparisons. Some of the prints on the melon were definitely not her own.

Nor any of her samples either? That was quite possible, she thought, indeed, more than possible, but she went on comparing. One paper of specimens after another she laid aside with a shake of her head; then, after one look through the glass at the next one, she smothered a cry of incredulity and peered at it again: the left hand, index, middle, ring. She placed the paper close to the prints on the melon and bent over, close, for a detailed comparison—back and forth with the glass, this one, that one, this one, that one.…

There was no room for doubt. She stood up and muttered in an incredulous whisper, “I will be damned.”

The total surprise of it bewildered her and made her knees weak. She sat down on the edge of the brick wall. Well, she thought, there she was. The gloves that had been used to murder Storrs were there under her skirt under her stocking-tops, and that was all right, she could go to the house and turn them over to Sherwood. But the devil of it was that she knew who had hid them in that melon, and she devoutly wished she didn’t. Whether she really hated men or only thought she did, assuredly she did not hate women; and especially, under the circumstances, to know that that particular woman …

It was bad, it was very bad. To turn her over to Sherwood, to the inquisition, to that military creature Brissenden …

It was not Dol’s custom to dally long over decisions. She knew that this was a serious one, even possibly perilous, but when she had made it she didn’t hesitate. She arose energetically, her knees no longer weak, took a piece of gauze from the pigskin case, and began methodically to wipe the melon clean. She knew that no matter how thoroughly she wiped, a microscopic examination would betray traces of the powder she had used, but she hoped it
wouldn’t come to that, and anyway she couldn’t help it. When she was sure that no spot of the melon’s surface had been missed, she picked it up and carried it back to the patch and replaced it in the spot which nature had selected for it, and rolled it back and forth, handling it so that it would show as many of her own prints as might reasonably be expected. She left it there and, returning to the compost heap, collected her accessories—the powder gun, magnifying glass, specimen prints, gauze—and packed them in the case and closed it. There was a detectable film of powder all around—on the bricks, the edge of the compost heap, the ground at the other side—but she decided that nothing satisfactory could be done about it.

Gripping the handle of the case, she left the scene of her questionable triumph, passed again through the gap in the hedge of yew, and pointed her steps for the house. Trying not to look too determined, she entered by the east terrace, passed down the side corridor to the study door, and rapped sharply on the panel.

She opened the door and went in. The same five were there. Three pairs of eyes were on her inquiringly; one pair, Janet’s, indifferently; another, the lawyer’s, with irritation. He snapped, “Really, this is a private family—”

“I’m sorry.” Dol spoke not to him. “I know I’m a nuisance, but I must ask Janet about something important. Will you come with me, Janet?”

Janet’s mask relaxed enough to express mild surprise. “Come with you where? Can’t you ask me here?”

“No, I can’t. It may take too long. And I want to show you something. I wish you would come. I think you ought—”

“This is preposterous!” Judging by his voice, Mr. Cabot’s
irritation was preparing to blaze. “Miss Storrs is engaged with us—”

No one paid any attention to him. Martin was frowning at Dol, and Sylvia, who knew Dol’s ways and tones, was gazing at her with eyes narrowed in puzzled solicitude. Mrs. Storrs, apparently by now resigned to any fact and unimpressed by any, told her daughter, “Go with her, child. See what she wants.”

Janet, without comment, got up and crossed to the door. Dol had got there and opened it, with a nod declining Martin’s polite approach; they passed through into the hall and Dol pulled the door to.

“What is it?” Janet demanded. “What do you want to show me?” Then she looked startled as she felt her arm being pinched, and puzzled as she heard Dol saying: “I never do have enough powder along. If you wouldn’t mind … you use Valery’s Trente-trois, don’t you? That will be close enough.…”

The trooper, whose approach down the hall had caused this warning and camouflage, stopped near them and nodded at the study door.

“Is Miss Raffray in there?”

Dol told him yes; and as he thanked her and knocked she took Janet’s arm and started her down the hall. “We’ll go to your room and I’ll take my pick. You’re sure you don’t mind? I hate to bother you.…”

The reception hall was empty, and the door to the card room stood open. They mounted the stairs together and went down the upper corridor to its end, the last door on the right. Dol, whose trips to Birchhaven had been as Sylvia’s guest, formerly when she had lived there, and latterly when she had come out from her town apartment for weekends, had never seen Janet’s room before. It was old-fashioned, feminine but not frilly, comfortable but not cluttered.

Janet said, “You don’t really want powder, do you?”

Dol shook her head. “Let’s sit down.”

Janet shrugged, moved, and lowered herself to the end of a blue silk chaise longue. Dol put the pigskin case on the floor and pulled a chair around. She sat and looked straight at Janet and said, “I’ve found the gloves.”

Janet indubitably had control, but it was not perfect. Her jaw moved perceptibly as her teeth clamped, and her fingers tightened on the silk of the chaise longue. Her eyes betrayed nothing, and her voice didn’t because she didn’t use it. She sat and met directly the gaze of the senior partner of Bonner & Raffray.

Dol repeated, in the same low imperturbable tone, “I say, I’ve found the gloves.”

Janet said, her soprano more musical than Dol had ever heard it, “I heard you. What gloves?”

“You don’t know what gloves?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Dol sighed, carefully, for strength. She was not liking this. “Listen, Janet. I suppose you figured that no one would think of the watermelon. Anyway, you left your fingerprints all over it. At least two dozen, and every one of them yours. There’s no use in our talking unless we take, as a basis of discussion, the fact that you took the gloves which had been used for murdering your father, and hid them in that watermelon. I’m not going to ask you about that; I already know it.”

Janet’s eyes smouldered, inscrutably. Her fingers had pressed deep into the cushion and her jaw twitched again, twice, before she spoke: “What if we don’t take that as a basis of discussion? What you said. What happens then?”

“Then I deliver the gloves to Sherwood, with the proof that you hid them, and you can deal with him.”

“And if we do take it as a basis, then what?”

“Then, first, I want to ask you some questions.”

“Did you take the gloves? Have you got them?”

“I took them.”

“Have you got them here? Show them to me.”

Dol, without taking her eyes from Janet’s face, sat and considered warily. She saw, from the swifter rise and fall of Janet’s breast, that there had been an internal demand for more oxygen, and that looked suspicious. There was no telling what that girl could be capable of; she might, if she saw the gloves or knew they were within reach, actually try to start a roughhouse. Dol, having seen her smash a tennis ball and vault into a saddle, knew that she was far from puny.

Dol said, “Don’t get any silly ideas. If the gloves were here before you, in my hand, and you tried to grab them, one yell out of me would bring an army, and then where would you be? I’m even keeping my voice low, not for my sake, but yours. The gloves are in a safe place. When I get through talking with you I’m going to turn them over to Sherwood. What I tell him, or don’t tell him, depends on what you tell me.”

The heave of Janet’s breast was subsiding. She sat with no change of expression, and no movement save a slow gradual slumping of her shoulders; then suddenly she jerked herself back to straightness, so abruptly that Dol felt her own muscles tighten involuntarily all over her body in a reflex readiness for combat.

Janet said, “I hid them in the watermelon. What do you want to know?”

“I want to know …” Dol hesitated. “Look here, Janet Storrs. I’m not as tough as I thought I was. I know that people can do unspeakable things. I know that daughters have killed their fathers. I thought I was as hard as my knowledge should have made me, but I’m not. If what you tell me … if it appears from what you say … that this is as ugly as that, I don’t know what I’ll do. I’ll probably leave the gloves on the card tray in the reception hall and let them find them there, and keep my mouth shut. I don’t owe it to anybody, not even myself, to mix in anything as horrible as that.”

Janet spoke into Dol’s eyes. “I didn’t kill my father.”

“I hope to God you didn’t. Who did kill him?”

“I don’t know.”

“Where did you get the gloves? Who gave them to you to hide?”

“Nobody.”

“Where did you get them?”

“I found them.”

“Where?”

“In the rose garden.”

“Where in the rose garden?”

“Under a bush. Under the mulch. Peat moss. I saw the mulch had been recently disturbed, and wondered if it was a mole, and poked at it to see. The gloves were under it.”

“When was that?”

“Yesterday afternoon, late. I think about half-past five. I had been reading there in the pergola, and I left because a bird was singing in the filbert thicket, and I went to try to see what it was. Then I went back to the rose garden to get my book, and that was when I found the gloves.”

Dol was frowning. “What time did you first go there to read?”