Rex Stout (22 page)

Sherwood was saying, “That’s the picture the way it stands now. The only two for whom we can demonstrate any motive at all are Chisholm and Ranth. Chisholm certainly had opportunity, by his own admission—he went there and saw Storrs asleep on the bench, and he could have got the gloves before he left Foltz’s place. But that’s not enough even for a coroner’s charge, let alone a jury. And his motive—just because he got kicked out of a job? And he was sore? Whoever went to the garden house and got that wire and went there and rigged it up and poked it under Storrs’ neck was as cool as a cucumber and as malignant as a snake. And he had an awful good reason for it, of some kind or other.”

Linnekin declared, “I say there’s a woman in it.”

“Hell, there’s four women in it. One of them is batty, one thinks she’s too hot to handle, one’s rich and sweet and innocent, and one pretends she’s floating around somewhere over your head when you ask her anything. I’ve told you. You try it in the morning.”

“I shall.”

“That suits me, with no reservations. As to motive, the only thing we’ve got that’s satisfactory is Ranth. It looks like he did it. But even if we are all convinced he did it, we’re in a hole. With the evidence that we have from three people, Mrs. Storrs and the daughter and the butler, that after seeing Storrs Ranth returned to the house before 4:30, and Chisholm’s testimony that Storrs was alive at 4:40, we’ve got to show that Ranth went there again
after
4:40, or at least make it extremely plausible. In fact, we have to show that he went there after 5:20 or 5:25, because that was when Foltz put his jacket on the chair in the reception hall, and Ranth couldn’t have got hold of the gloves before that. The butler says that at five o’clock Ranth was in the card room writing letters. He could have left the house by the sun room, after getting the gloves from the hall, and returned the same way, but no one saw him go or come. Another difficulty is that note on the grass. Is it likely he would have left it there after he strung Storrs up? He might, if something put him in a panic, but he doesn’t look addicted to panics. Understand, I’m not trying to read Ranth out of it, I’m just showing what we’re up against. It looks to me very probable that Ranth did it. What does it look like to you, Inspector?”

Cramer grunted, without removing his cigar. “Nothing looks like anything. Whoever did it certainly got all the breaks. It’s a bad one. You’ve either got to put it on Ranth or uncover some motives somewhere. If it was him, and you try it on a jury with no more than you’ve got now, they won’t bother to leave the courtroom. Did I tell you? One of my men found Storrs’ secretary down at Long Beach, and she says she didn’t hear any of the talk with Zimmerman yesterday morning, and no one else could have.”

Sherwood nodded. “I got it on the phone from your office.” He shot a sidewise glance at Brissenden. “The colonel brought Zimmerman to the barracks late this
afternoon and tried to pry him open. Nothing rough, just tactics. It only closed him up tighter. He’s an educated mule, the worst kind.”

Brissenden growled, “We should have locked him up, the damn insolent little squirt.”

“I disagree. Tomorrow will do for that. If he won’t talk at the inquest, we’ll throw him in. That right, Ed?”

“Certainly, we’ll have to.” The attorney-general looked somberly judicious. “I think you’ve acted with proper discretion, Dan. These people, except possibly Ranth, aren’t the kind you can put the screws on. But it’s murder, and they’ll have to talk. I say there’s a woman in it.” He licked his lips.

Cramer nodded at the table. “Those gloves.” They were lying there. “You say you tried them on everybody?”

“Yes. They were loose on Zimmerman, and pretty tight on Chisholm, but they went on all right.” Sherwood sighed. “I tell you, Inspector, as you say, it’s a bad one. I would appreciate it if you would go over the ground thoroughly in the morning. Now here, once more, look at this diagram.…”

Maguire of Bridgeport closed his eyes.

On the grounds of Birchhaven were the peace and stillness of night, but it was a peace under surveillance. At the entrance to the estate a motorcycle leaned against one of the enormous granite pillars, and a trooper stood at the edge of the driveway, moving now and then to keep himself awake. Down by the fish pool, thirty paces from the entrance to the nook under the dogwoods, stood another trooper. He was not stationed there; he, and a colleague who was at the moment seated on a chair by the tennis court, removing a piece of gravel from his shoe, were on patrol. At the house, Belden had locked the outside doors at ten o’clock as usual, but had left the door to the main terrace on the latch because there was a trooper there also, now tussling with boredom on a straight-backed chair in the reception hall, then going to the terrace for a cigarette, an easement of his muscles, and a look at the night. When in the reception hall he could hear, very
faintly if he strained his ear, a murmur of voices from the study.

Or more properly, a voice, for chiefly it was George Leo Ranth speaking. After dinner, which had been socially a replica of lunch, he had, with most admirable and exquisite finesse, maneuvered Mrs. Storrs from the room, around to the side hall where she had had no intention of going, and into the study. It was a stroke both bold and adroit for him to pick the study as the field of the skirmish; it was the room most privately and exclusively her husband’s of all in the house, where his spirit might be expected to linger if it tarried there at all; it was as if Ranth told her, “Let us be where your husband can challenge me; I surmounted him in life; I shall not evade him in death.”

Now, at ten o’clock, he had won the first trench; she was listening to him without either acquiescence or response, but without protest. The light was dim, from the reading lamp in the corner. Mrs. Storrs was seated on the divan by the radio, her hands clasped in her lap, her shoulders sagging, her eyes veiled by drooping lids. Ranth was ten feet away, easily and gracefully erect on a Turidan rug which P. L. Storrs had once brought back from Persia with his personal luggage; he talked better standing.

“… but that is beyond the interest of all who fail in comprehension, and to fail in comprehension is the most trivial failure of all. There is no demand from Siva that he be understood; no rite in ancient or modern Sakti that can be explained grossly to intelligence alone. Three steps: contemplation, acceptance, introgression. We cannot understand what we adore. Three fulfillments: dispersion, infiltration, homoousia. The second can be reached only through the first; the third is inaccessible until the first and second have been perfected. Three sacrifices: I, self, I myself. Shreds of identity are the tatters of incompletion. To be whole presupposes and requires infinity. There is no other way to glory. There is no method by which the eternal cycle may be entered save by dissemination of the personality into an infinitude of
disjecta membra
, to follow the unnumbered radii from the quivering center of all flesh …”

The apostate stirred on the divan, unclasped her hands and clasped them again, and became again immobile.

“… into the movement that can never cease. The rites of Occidental Sakti command spiritual destruction only as the prelude to humility and the sublime restoration; they are superior to the grossness of physical destruction and no longer demand the sacrifices of the ancient temples. I, George Leo Ranth, am the priest, the hierophant, and the talapoin, and it is I who beckon from the eternal cycle which I have entered.…”

The trooper in the reception hall could hear the murmur only if he stood perfectly still and held his breath.

Upstairs, in her room at the end of the hall, Janet Storrs sat at her flat-topped desk of Brazilian cedar, with a pad of paper before her and a fountain pen in her hand. She had formerly used a lead pencil when composing, on account of the convenience of erasing, but two years ago had changed to a pen, because in the event that the manuscripts ever became valuable, it would be much better to have them in ink. She had not yet dressed for bed, but had kicked off her shoes and got into mules. She sat with her eyes focused on the swaying window curtain, but seeing nothing; her vision was inward. At length she sighed deeply and looked at the pad of paper:

A shiver of despair ran over her. She thought, “It’s no use; I can’t finish it. It was said that poetry is an emotion remembered in tranquillity … but God help me, I am not tranquil … no … no, I am not tranquil.…”

She buried her head on her arms, on the desk, and her shoulders shook violently, though there was no sound.

Three doors down the hall from Janet’s apartment, on the opposite side, was the room assigned to Steve Zimmerman.
It was not the finest that Birchhaven had to offer guests; it had only a lavatory in a niche instead of a bathroom; still, it was far more luxurious than the accommodations Steve permitted himself to pay for on 122nd Street in New York. Belden, or the maid, or both, had apparently been demoralized by the event of Saturday afternoon, since there were no towels on the rack, the ashtray on the bedstand still held cigarette butts and match ends from the night before, and when Steve went to the closet for a coat hanger he found that the door would not open and had to drape his coat on a chair.

These annoyances manifestly glanced off of the shell of Zimmerman’s consciousness, he was obviously preoccupied. Having found the closet door locked or stuck, and hung his coat on the back of a chair, he crossed to a window and opened it wider and poked his head out into the night; from below and to the left he heard the scrape of a footstep and saw that it was a trooper on the terrace. He pulled himself in, went and sat on the edge of the bed and scratched his elbow, and stared at a row of books, between bookends, back of the light on the bed table.

Ten minutes later, still sitting there, the edge of his consciousness noted the sound of voices entering at the open window, apparently from the terrace; he distinguished no words. Finally he muttered half aloud, “I’ll go on with it. I have to. I’ve started it and I’ll see it through. It is not credible that I can be shattered by events. Irony does not go that far. It would be like Einstein getting run over by a truck.”

Arising to go on with his undressing, he heard footsteps muffled on the carpet of the hall passing his door. He got stripped, put on his pajamas which had been brought over from his bag at Foltz’s the evening before, sat on the edge of the bed and scratched his elbow again, and finally twisted around and stuck his legs between the sheets—at least the maid had not neglected to turn the bed down. There was one blessing he could count on, no matter how events exploded around him: he could sleep. He always did. He had, even that night in June when he had first admitted romantic terms into the austerity of his personal vocabulary, with regard to Sylvia Raffray. But first, before
he put out the light, he would lie there and tidy up a little more in his mind. He lay on his back, his eyes closed, his lips compressed, his wide nostrils expanded.…

There was a knock at the door, a low discreet trio of taps. Steve opened his eyes, twisted and raised on his elbow, and muttered to himself, “Damn it, not tonight. It must be him.” The taps sounded again, and Steve sat up and said, “Come in.”

The knob turned, the door silently swung open and, after the intruder was in, as silently closed again.

Steve’s pale eyes betrayed surprise and his voice irritation. “What the devil do you want?”

The impression Wolfram de Roode produced, more by structure than by size, of brute physical power, was even more striking in this bedroom than it was out of doors. And his intelligent face, as he stepped smoothly and quietly across to the bedside, showed the strain of some emotion which he was obviously controlling with difficulty. He spoke low, in a tone of husky menace:

“Where is he? What have you done with him?”

Steve was sitting, his knees drawn up, looking up at the face above him. “What do you mean, done with him? I suppose he’s in bed.”

“He is not. I’ve looked in his room. Where is he?”

“I don’t know. Maybe downstairs. How do I know?”

“He is not.” De Roode’s hands, at his sides, clenched into fists. “Damn you. You murderer! Where is he?”

Steve said, with a good imitation of composure, “You’re a fool, de Roode. Say it louder, why don’t you? Someone else might like to hear it. You call
me
a murderer? I tell you, I don’t know where he is. And for God’s sake, do you think I’m afraid of you? We’re not in a jungle.—Well, maybe we are. Anyway, he’s around somewhere. Possibly under his bed. I haven’t seen him since dinner. Don’t stand there looking as if you ought to have snakes in your hair … you look silly.…”

He would have to talk this neurotic ape out of the room.… He went on talking to that end.…

Thirty yards away, in a room in the other wing, Len Chisholm sat in a chintz-covered chair in the cushion of
which a cinder from one of his cigarettes had burned a hole as big as a dime without his taking any interest in the phenomenon. He had not undressed for bed, and betrayed no inclination for that enterprise. Sections of the Sunday Gazette were scattered around the floor: also on the floor was a tray with a bottle, pitcher and glass. It had originally been deposited on the bureau by Belden, but Len had changed it to its present location to save mileage.

He kicked feebly at a newspaper section which appeared to be in the way, though he had no present intention of moving, picked up the glass and swallowed a couple of gulps, grimaced indignantly at the tastelessness of it, and muttered hoarsely because his windpipe was constricted by his posture: “I’m nuts. Nuts, very nuts. That sounds like Gertrude Stein. You can’t fight it, you can’t give in to it, you can’t strangle it, you can’t even get drunk. I’m only a pathetic imitation of a drunk. I’m no more drunk than you are. Drown it in liquor. You can’t drown anything that won’t sink. I don’t mean that. I mean I’m already sunk. I’m already drowned. So any liquor I swallow is merely tautology.…”