Rex Stout (6 page)

Dol let that thought flit by. She was more interested in George Leo Ranth, since she had engaged to ruin him. He was not actually slimy; in fact, seeing him in a theater seat or on the sidewalk, you might have taken him for nothing more sinister than an importer of almonds and olive oil, or a Fifth Avenue shoe salesman. He was a little above medium in size, somewhere between forty and fifty in age, dark-skinned, well-dressed, deferential with women, and dignified and aloof with men. Dol had once seen him maintain that dignity at the Birchhaven dinner table, with P. L. Storrs present and not trying for a record in politeness, and had thought it an extremely smooth performance. Now, observing him unobtrusively as he ignored Len Chisholm (that alone quite a feat), prepared a drink for Mrs. Storrs, and conversed with Sylvia and Janet and Zimmerman, she realized that her boast to the picture of Scotland Yard had been merely a statement of necessity: this operation would have to be good.

A notion struck her. Her enterprise would be rendered doubly difficult, even perhaps impossible, if George Leo Ranth was given any reason to suspect that she was engaged on it; and, while her presence at Birchhaven was by no
means unprecedented, the circumstances of her coming today were such that some chance remark might give Ranth a hint. She, and Storrs too, had already been careless. Possibly her explanation to Sylvia of the telephoned invitation from Storrs had already been contradicted by something he had said to his wife or daughter. Also, he had said that he would like to see her when she arrived. He might appear to join the gathering at any moment. She must see him first, for a word or two, alone. Considering the matter, she let her head go back for the last drops of the drink to trickle into her throat. Then she put the glass on the table and turned casually to Sylvia:

“I’ll be back in a minute. The simple pleasures of the poor.”

Sylvia nodded and Dol trotted off. Past Martin Foltz, back along the sloping path, past her coupe still standing on the graveled space, across the terrace and into the house. In the reception hall a maid carrying a huge vase of gladioli halted to give her gangway. She found the butler in the dining-room, surveying the table with a frown which meant that he was completely in the dark as to how many places would be required, and knew not when light would come.

Dol asked him, “Do you know where I might find Mr. Storrs, Belden?”

“No, Miss Bonner.” Belden faced her. “I think not in the house. He went out over two hours ago.”

“Away? In the car?”

“Oh, no. I saw him walking—he isn’t at the tennis court?”

“No.”

The butler shook his head. “I really couldn’t say. Perhaps at the kennels … or the garden.”

Dol thanked him, and went through another door and along a hall, emerging onto a narrower terrace at the other side of the house. She looked vaguely around at shrubs and trees and the green alley to the swimming pool. This was a nuisance, but she ought to find him. If he had gone for a long walk he would surely be returning soon, since it was going on for seven o’clock. From this side she could get to the kennels and stables without being observed from the tennis court. She started off that way.

At the kennels there was no one at all except the dogs. At the stables milking was going on and a man was telling the horses goodnight, but it was not Storrs, and he was not around. Dol left on a trot. She couldn’t comb the estate, and she decided to let it go and wait for him to show up, but on her way back to the house she could try a couple of spots. She knew Storrs took especial pride in the vegetable garden, and she turned aside and went through a gap in a yew hedge to give it a look, but saw only tomatoes and pole beans and tiled celery and late corn and fat pumpkins impatient for the frost. Back through the yew hedge again, she remembered a corner that was peculiarly Storrs’ private and personal spot, a nook beyond the fish pool beneath some dogwood trees, near by other trees which concealed a toolhouse and a shed for mulch. She left her course again and took off down the slope. She skirted the pool, dodged a planting of rhododendron, and there, in his personal nook, she found P. L. Storrs. When she saw him she stopped short, stood perfectly rigid, and, wanting to scream, set her teeth down hard on her lip. It looked at first as if he were doing a grotesque dance in the air, three inches above the ground, with his toes pointing downward; it was not easy to see the slender wire which looped around his neck and stretched taut up to a limb of a dogwood tree.

Dol moved, took one step, and stopped again. She was telling herself with desperate ferocity:
You have simply got to control yourself, you have simply got to
. She stood and shut her eyes, tight, thinking she would not open them again until she stopped feeling numb. She had an overpowering desire to sit down, to quit trying to hold herself up, but was determined not merely to collapse, and there was nothing within reach to sit on … or maybe there was … she opened her eyes. She ventured a movement and found that her legs would work and did not even appear to be trembling. She took five good steps toward P. L. Storrs, where he danced, and stood looking straight at him.

He was unquestionably dead. If he was not dead the thing to do was to get him down and get help to make him breathe, but surely he was dead. His mouth was partly open and the end of his tongue, dark purple, showed between his teeth. His eyes were pushed halfway out. His
face looked swollen and was the color of an eggplant. He was surely dead. She took three more steps, stopped, and stretched out her hand arm’s length—a silly and purposeless gesture, since she was still five feet from him. She muttered to herself aloud, “I am too damned fastidious. I always have been. Nurses handle dead people all the time.” She was surprised that her voice sounded firm and controlled, and got courage from it. She moved forward and grasped the hand hanging alongside Storrs’ body, held it and felt it. He was dead all right. She backed up a little and again spoke aloud: “Here it is. I’m alone with it. I’m not going to run, not for a minute anyhow.”

Her blood was calming down, leaving a tingle all over her. She looked around. First at the wire; it went from its loop around Storrs’ neck up to a limb of the dogwood tree some eight feet above the ground, passed over the top of the limb, stretched diagonally to a crotch of another limb with the trunk at a lower level, was wound several times around the trunk itself, in a spiral, and had its end twisted in one of those windings. Dol Bonner frowned at the spiral; it was not a way to fasten a wire. She looked at the ground. Beginning at the edge of the concrete walk which led to the toolhouse was grass which carpeted the nook; and to her eye, which was keen enough but not really practised, it was merely grass. There were, though, two noticeable items: some distance back of Storrs’ dangling feet, a bench, long and wide and heavy, lay overturned; and near one end of it there was a white object on the grass. Dol circled to get to it—yes, it was a crumpled piece of paper. She stooped to pick it up, but her fingers stopped short of it; she looked at it, but it was too crumpled to make anything of without touching it. She stood up, frowning. Veteran detectives would soon be coming to this place, perhaps famous ones; but she too was a detective; she realized with a shock that that was what she was thinking. She glanced at the paper again but left it untouched. She surveyed the nook again, but not to any purpose, knowing that she had seen all she could see, then turned her back on it and left its gloom, passed again around the curve of the fish pool, and headed up the slope toward the house.

Before she reached the house she had determined on
something. She went around instead of entering it, and at the far end, screened by a clump of evergreens, opened her bag and took out her mirror and examined her face. In spite of the swift walk uphill it was not flushed, but she thought it not too pale. She went on, and down the path to the tennis court, trying to collect as she went the loose ends of her agitation, wishing she could know how her face was acting and was going to act.

Apparently her face was all right, and it seemed that no one had fretted at her absence, not even Len Chisholm. He was standing at the edge of the court with Janet Storrs, demonstrating something. Sylvia was perched on the arm of Martin Foltz’s chair; evidently, as she had predicted, they were indeed speaking again, or at least she was. Zimmerman remained as before. Mrs. Storrs turned from her conversation with George Leo Ranth as Dol approached:

“My dear, Mr. Ranth and I were speaking of you! Mr. Ranth has taught me that the essence cannot be invited, it seeks its own residence, it alights upon the crooked twig as well as the straight young shoot! If you should be chosen, as I have been! Mr. Ranth thinks not! They are trying to decide where to eat, and of course Sylvia in particular because she has Martin to manage. Siva destroys husbands with wives, and wives with husbands, even before the rites. Mr. Ranth says you have no insight, you are too lonely for the communion.”

Dol protested, “But if I can’t invite I can only wait. Perhaps, Mr. Ranth, you don’t know how hopefully some people do wait.”

“Never in vain, Miss Bonner.” Ranth was positive but polite. “Not in vain if they are destined. Drops of water unite always, if they touch, but their strongest reluctance just precedes the union.” He raised a deprecating hand. “The enthusiasm of Mrs. Storrs races ahead of me at times. I would hesitate to disturb your bliss in ignorance.”

“When better bliss is made, ignorance will make it.” Dol was aware that her remark was silly and her voice pitched too high. She moved. “I think I can use a drink—no, thanks—please don’t—rather do it myself—”

She poured Irish, conscious that Steve Zimmerman, from his chair nearby, was observing her without turning his head. She looked directly at him, then turned her back for another glance at Ranth and Mrs. Storrs and the others farther off. She perceived the futility of the little project she had determined upon after she had left the nook. If P. L. Storrs had been murdered by someone present there in that group, he was not likely, however unsuspected and on whatever edge of horrible expectancy, to exhibit any stigmata of guilt which she could recognize with any assurance. “Someone present there” meant chiefly, of course, George Leo Ranth. He was apparently completely himself. So was Len Chisholm, loudly ragging Janet Storrs, who was looking bewildered. So was Steve Zimmerman, who was commonly either glum and silent or inquisitive and loquacious. Likewise Martin Foltz, who was suffering Sylvia to berate him and cozen him, in turn, out of a fit of jealousy. Dol swallowed the Irish straight, shivered, and surveyed them all again, beginning and ending with Ranth. Detect? Detect nothing.

She put the glass down. Now, then … but not any of them. Certainly not dear Sylvia. Not Len Chisholm.… Dol set her lips. She was apart from them all, really. She had no strength but her own, and she didn’t want any, neither for trivialities nor for this shocking emergency. She left them. Abruptly she started back toward the house. Mrs. Storrs said something, and Sylvia called after her, but she went on without answering, into a trot along the slope, running by the time she reached the terrace.

The butler was not in the reception hall nor in the dining-room. She found the button and pressed it, and in a moment he entered by the swinging door. She faced him:

“Belden, something terrible has happened. I speak to you because you are the only man this house has got left, and jobs like this are supposed to be for men. Telephone the police—I suppose the state troopers, that will do—and tell them Mr. Storrs has been murdered.”

Belden stiffened and stared. “Good God, Miss Bonner—”

“Yes. Be a man—you know how, don’t you? When the
police come send them to the nook below the fish pool. That’s where he was murdered. You know that nook?”

“But good God, when—”

“Don’t tremble like that, Belden! Be a man. Phone them at once and send them to that nook. Then you can tell Mrs. Storrs and the others … you won’t faint. Will you?”

“I—I won’t faint. No.”

“Good. I’m going to the nook. I’ll be there.”

She left him, and again sought the exit by way of the side hall. The sun was finishing his day, and, racing down the rolling slope of lawn, her fantastic elongated shadow leaped and staggered before her. As she ran she thought that it had been idiotic of her not to look at that paper on the grass.

The nook was more somber now. Night was earlier there than on the open slope under the unimpeded sky. Dol, shivering as she entered the shadow, deliberately did not look at P. L. Storrs, and yet saw and felt the presence as she stuck to the concrete walk until nearest to the overturned bench, where she stepped onto the grass. She stood for a moment, considering the technical problem of fingerprints on paper, then moved to where the crumpled sheet lay and bent over to pick it up. Gingerly she straightened it out and frowned at it. It was a promissory note, a printed form filled out in ink. The writing was precise and eminently legible. It was dated Ogowoc, Connecticut, August 11, 1936, and it went on:

Dol read it several times, turned it over and looked at the reverse side, which was blank, crumpled it up again as it had been, and returned it to its original position on the grass. She jerked up, startled at a sound, and grimaced at herself as she realized it had been a fish jumping in the pool. She moved to the concrete walk, and after some hesitation went along it to the toolhouse some fifteen yards away. The door was ajar and she pushed at it and entered. The place was neat and orderly, but a hodgepodge: wheelbarrows, lawn mowers, garden tools of all varieties and sizes, bags of fertilizer, raffia and twine, bulb racks, baskets, a shelf with hammers and pliers and heavy shears … and Dol crossed to the other side to look closer at something. It was a large reel of wire fastened to the wall, strands of fine wire twisted into a miniature cable, and as she peered up at it Dol nodded. Somenting stirred inside of her, a tiny glow of excitement and satisfaction; she had not come to the toolhouse for anything at all, and yet she had almost at once uncovered a palpable and important fact; the wire was the same, no doubt of it. The murderer had entered the toolhouse, knowing of the wire, reeled off a desirable length of it, snipped it off with pliers, returned … yes … returned the pliers to the shelf, proceeded to the nook and—Dol’s train of thought jumped the track. How had the wire got around Storr’s neck? Had he put it there himself? With a shock Dol realized that the idea of suicide had not entered her mind … why not? Because P. L. Storrs was so pre-eminently not the sort of man who would do that. The notion had not occurred to her. She saw now that it should have; possibly she had made an utter fool of herself, telling Belden …