The Cases of Susan Dare (19 page)

Mariette repeated: “I’m going to call the police.” And Louis Malmin rose suddenly, spoke briefly to Madame, and left the dining room.

After that, nothing more was said of police, though John Kinder kept up a mild barrage of conversation which covered Madame’s glooming silence and the general air of discomfiture that silence induced.

Under cover of the little confusion of pushing back chairs Mariette whispered to Susan: “I found the woman that André sketched in one of the movie magazines,” she said. “She is Sally Gowdy.”

Sally Gowdy. One of the near-stars in the movie firmament. That was why the face was so familiar.

“Go with the others,” whispered Susan, and as Mariette disappeared, Agnes came to the table.

“Agnes,” said Susan directly, “for how many days have you been arranging extra trays?”

Agnes blinked, hesitated, and was lost.

“Since Monday,” she said. “And I don’t see where Mr. Malmin puts it all. Six meals a day that makes for him! Besides the extra work!”

Thoughtfully Susan returned to the living room. Madame had taken up her lace-making again.

Mariette had waited for her, and she and Susan walked quietly toward the stairs. Over the banisters Susan saw that John Kinder was again mildly intent upon his card game. And as she paused at her own room, she caught a gleam of light from the transom above Louis Malmin’s door.

“Go on to your room, Mariette,” she said in a whisper. “Lock the door, and don’t let anyone—anyone, mind you—in the room. Not on any pretext.”

Mariette, her small face white and ghostly in the dusk, nodded and vanished.

Jim switched off a flashlight as Susan entered. She turned on the light. The sketches were again spread, but fanwise on the floor. And the movie magazines had been rummaged and tossed aside. He knew, then. And beside the door was an odd little contraption which consisted of a mirror fastened stoutly to the end of a light wood rod, obviously taken from the head of the window shade.

His eyes were black with excitement and jubilance.

“Susan,” he said in a low voice, “you’ve got him. It’s Burgess beyond all doubt. But it took an artist to penetrate the disguise. This fellow André Cavalliere was clever—too clever for his own good. Now then, what’s the program? Your periscope is ready. Are the sketches the bait?”

“That,” said Susan, calmly accepting Jim’s immediate comprehension, “that and a threat of police in the morning. They’ll do something tonight.”

“They’ll do something,” said Jim, “right now. Better turn out your light.”

Susan did so. Afterward she remembered that as they started their queer vigil, there was a sudden roll of thunder, close at hand and reverberating threateningly in the hushed, hot room.

Jim held the improvised periscope, which worked remarkably well, and Susan stood beside him, her eyes glued to the small reflection of the head of the stairs and a patch of intervening corridor.

“I think,” said Jim in a whisper, “that I’ve got the main points. But there are some completely mysterious gaps. For instance, Sally Gowdy—”

“Sh-h—” breathed Susan. “You’ll see, soon. There’s Madame—”

It was queer to stand there in the darkness and watch Madame, a quickly moving figure with a white face, pause at the head of the stairs, look swiftly about her, and then glide directly toward them. Jim turned the mirror carefully so they could catch a glimpse of the back of the hall in time to see Madame disappear into the supposedly vacant room at its end.

There was another short wait. Very short. For the storm in all its pent-up fury swooped furiously upon the house with wind and rain and wild lightning that lit the small room eerily and then was gone.

And probably the tumult and frenzy of sound outside induced the murderer of André Cavalliere to do what must be done under cover of all that turmoil. A door along the hall opened. And a figure slipped quietly toward the attic stairway.

The mirror jerked to follow it, and Susan put her hand on Jim’s arm. “Wait,” she whispered. “Not yet. Wait—”

Jim would have remonstrated but she clutched his arm tighter, and he waited.

But, of course, Jim didn’t know that she had no proof. That the figure that had slipped up those attic stairs must be trapped in another way.

Susan never knew how much longer they waited. The figure that had gone to the studio did not return. But finally the door at the end of the hall must have opened, for all at once there was a woman in the mirror—a woman who now crept silently along the corridor.

Susan’s fingers were tight on the hard muscle of Jim’s forearm.

“Now!” she said and the little mirrored picture vanished as Jim flung open the door.

The woman stopped and screamed and put her hands over her face. Then Madame Touseau was there, too.

Susan saw the glint of a revolver suddenly in Jim’s hand, and the sight was inexpressibly comforting.

Madame cried: “What is the meaning of this? Who is the man? What—” She had grasped the meaning of it at once and was glaring at Susan. “You did this?” she panted.

And Jim’s hand wavered suddenly on the revolver as the woman in the corridor lifted her head. “My God,” he said, “it’s Sally Gowdy herself!” He whirled toward Susan. “Where’s Burgess?”

“Burgess,” said Susan rapidly, “is upstairs in the attic, looking for the sketches. But I’m sure Madame Touseau would rather confess what she knows of the murder of André Cavalliere than have Miss Gowdy involved in a murder investigation. If you confess, Madame, merely to what you know, Miss Gowdy will be permitted to leave before the police come. You see,” she said to Jim, “Miss Gowdy is Madame’s niece. But, probably for publicity’s sake, she does not want it known that this is her home. She arrived for a secret visit two days before the murder occurred. Madame tried to conceal the murder in order to keep Miss Gowdy out of it. It was most unfortunate that she was secretly in the house at the time. It would be still more unfortunate if the police investigation discovered her. So Madame undertook to keep them away. I am sure,” said Susan, meaning the opposite, “that Madame would not have taken money from Anton Burgess for her silence.”

“I don’t know what you are talking about,” said Madame. Her face and lips were ashen. Sally Gowdy looked up. Her beautifully regular face was stricken and terrified. Her voice that had thrilled thousands was trembling and harsh.

“Oh, tell them, tell them,” she moaned. “You didn’t help kill him. They can’t do anything to you. And I’ve got to get away before the police come.”

Madame’s fixed dark eyes did not flicker. She said grimly: “Isn’t there a thing called being an accessory after the fact?”

“There is,” said Jim. “But we already know that you concealed the murder. You may as well tell it all.”

“Murder—” Mariette was among them suddenly and stood swaying, her eyes wide and piteous. “He’s—dead, then—”

Madame’s lips were tight.

“He’s dead, you little fool,” she said. “But I know only that there was blood spilled. I didn’t see him dead. And I didn’t help remove the body—”

“The body,” whispered Mariette.

“It’s in the Chicago River, I suppose,” said Madame. “Burgess got rid of it that night. Does it matter?”

A crash of thunder held them silent and transfixed for a queer moment or two. Mariette’s white face was blurred, and Sally Gowdy’s beauty was an empty mask, and the little black spots on Madame’s eyelid worked and twitched, while thunder submerged them, shaking the house, and slowly rolled away. And on its heels came a violent, sharper sound from over their heads.

Jim sprang toward the stairway, and Louis Malmin’s door opened, and quite suddenly they were all surging up those narrow steps and into the attic. John Kinder was slumped over a chair. There was a table beside him, and on the table a scrap of paper. He had died instantly.

The note was confused, yet clear enough.

“You’ve got me,” he had scrawled. “I can’t find the sketches. I’ve known it was coming. The artist fellow recognized me and told me. But I didn’t know that he had made a sketch of me as I really looked. That is what the girl meant. After he told me, there was nothing else for me to do. I used the same revolver that is here beside me. I forced the Touseau woman to conceal the fact. She was ready to do it for many reasons. But she had nothing to do with the murder. I’m ready to go. I’ve been hunted. I’m tired. The notes on the embezzlement case are in my trunk.”

It was signed Anton Burgess, with a broken line below Burgess.

“Look,” Susan said, “at the line below. It’s broken for the downward stroke of the ‘g.’ That’s how I knew, you see, that Kinder wasn’t his real name. That a man in the house was using a name not his own. He had the same kind of line under it, but that was no reason for it to be broken, for the ‘d’ below which the break appears has no downward stroke. And the line extended beyond the following two letters to about the space of another letter. Thus I supposed that his real name had had seven letters with a consonant in the middle of it that went downward. The flourish of a line below his name was too strong a habit for him to break—especially when there was nothing that seemed betraying about two short lines. It told me where to look.” That was later, when she was showing Jim the register and comparing the mark below the signature of John Kinder with the mark below that of Anton Burgess.

It was still later, and the storm had died, when they left the Touseau house and walked slowly toward Notre Dame.

“The sketches were the betraying evidence,” said Jim thoughtfully. “Without the beard, with light hair instead of dark hair, and a youthful figure—Burgess was very much younger than he appeared as John Kinder—he was immediately recognizable as Burgess. It must have been on the artist’s part an idle bit of amusement. He couldn’t have dreamed what it would cost him—unless, of course, he wanted money from Burgess to keep his secret. And Burgess knew where that would lead. How did you know about Sally Gowdy?”

“I didn’t,” said Susan, “until I realized that the woman of Notre Dame and the woman in the sketches were the same. Therefore, that she must be here now and must have been sometime connected with the place. Then Mariette said she thought Madame had a niece in California and, of course, I thought of the movies. She was so beautiful. And it was luck that her picture was in one of the magazines. And since Agnes had been taking trays upstairs for two days
before
the murder, I knew it couldn’t be André who was concealed in that supposedly vacant room. Then I realized that the movie actress and Madame would do everything possible to escape becoming involved in a murder case. I don’t know why she didn’t leave at once—Sally Gowdy, I mean. But, of course, I knew she would leave at once after Mariette had said she would call the police.”

Notre Dame loomed darkly above them into the clear, rain-washed night. The violence of the storm had left peace and clear, wet quiet in its wake.

“Do you realize,” said Jim in a hushed voice, “what a furor this news is going to make? Anton Burgess found at last—I’ve got to hustle, Susan! This is one time when I’ve got a real scoop.”

“I know.” She looked up at the dim outline of a cross against the sky. “Poor little Mariette,” she said. ‘She was such a harmless little thing to be caught in such a big wheel.—All right, Jim. I’m coming.”

I
T WAS NOTHING SHORT
of an invitation to murder.

“You don’t mean to say,” Susan Dare said in a small voice, “that both of them—
both
of them are living here?”

Idabelle Lasher—Mrs. Jeremiah Lasher, that is, widow of the patent medicine emperor who died last year (resisting, it is said, his own medicine to the end with the strangest vehemence)—Idabelle Lasher turned large pale blue eyes upon Susan and sighed and said:

“Why, yes. There was nothing else to do. I can’t turn my own boy out into the world.”

Susan took a long breath. “Always assuming,” she said, “that one of them is your own boy.”

“Oh, there’s no doubt about that, Miss Dare,” said Idabelle Lasher simply.

“Let me see,” Susan said, “if I have this straight. Your son Derek was lost twenty years ago. Recently he has returned. Rather, two of him has returned.”

Mrs. Lasher was leaning forward, tears in her large pale eyes. “Miss Dare,” she said, “one of them must be my son. I need him so much.”

Her large blandness, her artificiality, the padded ease and softness of her life dropped away before the earnestness and honesty of that brief statement. She was all at once pathetic—no, it was on a larger scale; she was tragic in her need for her child.

“And besides,” she said suddenly and with an odd naïveté, “besides, there’s all that money. Thirty millions.”

“
Thirty
—” began Susan and stopped. It was simply not comprehensible. Half a million, yes; even a million. But thirty millions!

“But if you can’t tell yourself which of the two young men is your son, how can I? And with so much money involved—”

“That’s just it,” said Mrs. Lasher, leaning forward earnestly again. “I’m sure that Papa would have wanted me to be perfectly sure. The last thing he said to me was to warn me. ‘Watch out for yourself, Idabelle,’ he said. ‘People will be after your money. Impostors.’ ”