The Wrong Way Down (5 page)

“And she simply must find out whether we do. If she refuses to see me, worse may befall than a private visit from someone who knows a member of the family. And she realizes that it may all be true—that I'm really a credulous ass who wants a clairvoyant. Have you any idea, Miss Paxton, how many otherwise hardheaded people in this city
do
want a clairvoyant? How many people more or less like us consult them all the time? Remember the Vances. You said they were cultivated and charming.”

“But she may lose her temper and get you turned out.”

“No violence,” said Gamadge, following Miss Paxton back into her sitting room. “She wouldn't tackle the problem with violence. I'll take Lady Audley home with me, if you don't mind, frame and all. Those splinters under the nails are valuable evidence, and I want to look at them under a glass. I don't think they've had time to catch any dust at all, and the fresh wood under them is as clean as when it was new.”

Miss Paxton fluttered about collecting paper and string. Gamadge wrote down his doctor's name and telephone number for her, picked up his hat and coat from the chair on which he had laid them when he came in, put the coat on, and took the wrapped picture under his arm. “Don't
you
see Miss Vance, you know,” he instructed her. “And if she telephones, just repeat what I told her. You don't know a thing. You're in the hands of your agent now. Don't let her in. But how would you know who it was if the doorbell rang?”

“Look out first,” said Miss Paxton, “or—I'll show you.”

She caught up a golf cape—the last golf cape, Gamadge supposed, now existing in the Western world—and threw it over her shoulder. As he stood in the hall at the head of the stairs, she went along to the old front doors and opened one of them. She smiled at him over her shoulder. He laughed, nodded, went down and let himself out. Emerging from the portico, he looked up; she was standing on the little balcony, nodding and waving farewell.

A cab drove up, and Gamadge got into it. As they moved off downtown the driver commented on the pleasant scene they had left: “Cute old lady.”

“Cute indeed.”

As soon as he reached home—which was in the east Sixties—Gamadge went to his office. This was on the first floor, with a laboratory and darkroom behind it—a suite which had once been the Gamadge family's drawing room, dining room and pantry. The office retained its original molded ceiling and its fireplace, but was now lined with reference books and filing cabinets.

Gamadge unwrapped the aquatint, laid it on the broad desk between the windows, turned on a reading lamp, and hung his hat and coat on a chair. Harold Bantz, his former assistant, came out of the laboratory. He was staying with Gamadge while Mrs. Bantz and the little Bantz boy lodged with relatives in Connecticut. Harold was looking for an apartment.

Short, stocky, dark and morose of countenance, with a white blouse buttoned to his chin, he looked very much as he had looked ten years before when Gamadge took him, a destitute youth, off the street. But he was now a man of science.

He said: “I got those photographs of the Ranier forgeries developed.”

“Thanks very much. Get the big reading glass, will you, and take a look at this?”

They examined the back of the picture, and signed a statement to the effect that the nails had been removed from the frame very recently. Then Gamadge turned the picture face up, and told Harold the story.

Harold said: “Funniest darn thing I ever heard of.”

“Funny, yes.” Gamadge looked at him inquiringly.

“Bad luck your dropping in on the old lady. I don't think she'd have done anything about it if you hadn't doped it out for her.”

“No, I don't think so either. She didn't understand that there was any question of money involved, of course, and she's sensitive, as she naturally would be, to ridicule.”

“Elderly people don't like it said they can't see straight.”

“Or remember straight. She might have written to ask James Ashbury if he remembered lettering on the portrait, but she seemed to think he wouldn't know. I dare say he wouldn't. Now she's more than ever reluctant to mention it to him, because she wants to let the Vance girl off if she can.”

“Let her off with a warning?”

“A scare.”

“You think you can get a scare out of a professional medium?”

“If I spring the picture on her she might give herself away.” Gamadge added: “What bothers you about it?”

“Mighty small profit for all that risk and trouble.”

Gamadge was taking the portrait out of the frame. He said: “I know; but think of all the trouble some people take over a practical joke. Perhaps Miss Vance has a debased sense of humor.”

“Couldn't be something bigger behind it?”

“Bigger?”

“Some racket. The house is made to order for it, the whole setup is. Plenty of things Miss Paxton wouldn't miss, plenty of stuff this James Ashbury doesn't know about at all. If Vance is mixed up in that kind of thing she could make a killing there. And if she's a medium and knows her business she already has a wax impression of Miss Paxton's latchkey.”

Gamadge considered this doubtfully. “She could take the picture because she knew there was a duplicate in the house. What else could she take that Miss Paxton wouldn't miss?”

“I haven't seen what's there. But you could replace old glass and china—paperweights, ash trays, jade stuff—with plastics and junk from the five-and-ten. There's a market for everything now that was bought even fifty years ago, inflated values for gimcracks. And as for sales and the dealers, you hear a lot about people getting pleasant surprises when they dig out the old things in an old house; but they get unpleasant surprises a good deal oftener. You ought to know.”

Gamadge was rolling the engraving up and wrapping it. He said: “Yes, I know. Everything's a museum piece to the heirs until they offer it to a museum.”

“Here's something else: the old gentleman that owned the house—Lawson Ashbury. He lived alone there after his wife died?”

“So I gathered.”

“If anybody got hold of his latchkey, they've had since last spring to do the looting; the house was standing empty.”

“We can settle that.”

“How?”

“There's burglary insurance.” Gamadge sat down at the desk and pulled the telephone towards him. He dialed the Ashbury number. Miss Paxton answered. After a short and cheerful conversation with her he put the receiver down and turned to Harold. “There you are. The house was fully protected after Mr. Ashbury's death; wired with an alarm that rang at insurance headquarters. The agent had to cut off the alarm before he let Miss Paxton in. Nobody could open the door or any window without setting it off.”

“O.K.,” said Harold.

“And the small things James Ashbury picked out of the inventory—good stuff like Chinese curios and Battersea enamel—it was all there, and Miss Paxton says she remembered every piece of it.”

“O.K., I'm licked.”

G
AMADGE DID NOT
know what was worn at séances, but he had an idea that upper spiritualistic circles were dressy. He therefore put on dinner clothes, and stood contemplating himself in a long mirror in the library when Harold came in for cocktails.

Harold said: “Don't break Vance's heart.”

“Vance,” replied Gamadge complacently, “will have to look after herself.”

“I was just thinking: That picture's going to be a considerable shock for her. Don't mediums have bouncers to attend to scoffers that jolt them?”

“Miss Vance will placate me.”

“Some day you're the one that's going to get the jolt.”

“Let it come.”

After dinner Gamadge wrote to his wife to tell her that he had deputized for her that afternoon. He wrote of the three thousand dollar income, and went on discreetly:

Miss Paxton had a nice little mystery waiting for me. I hope to solve it tonight. Harold takes it a little more seriously than I do, but as you know, he is always romantic. I think he misses that code he made up for us to use long ago before the war. Do you remember ‘potto'? But of course he and I have used too many codes since then to find amusement in them now.

At twenty minutes to ten he stamped the letter and sallied forth into a crisp clear night, with a half moon riding high. He mailed the letter at the corner, and then came back and got into his car. He drove down Lexington, around Gramercy Park, and down Third almost to Fourteenth Street. He turned right, and stopped at a corner building on the south side of the street.

On the north side there were little brick houses, little dark shops; but Miss Vance's apartment house was the only residential structure on her block. Beyond it rose the blank walls of a storage warehouse, beyond that a factory. The street was deserted, and very dark.

The apartment house looked very old. Gamadge went up a short flight of steps into a vestibule, and through swing-doors into a high, dim, spacious lobby with a broad stairway at either end of it. The lobby was tiled and wainscoted, and had plaster walls of a sickly blue. There was no elevator.

The cubbyhole of an office on the left of the front door was empty, and contained no switchboard; but a list of names hanging just within the half-glass door told Gamadge that Miss Vance's flat was 5A.

With a groan, he began to climb the nearest stair. Under his arm he carried what looked like a roll of newspaper; it was in fact the evening paper, loosely wrapped about the rolled aquatint of Lady Audley.

In this generous old house there seemed to be only two apartments to a landing, with a door at either end of the wide hallways, and a door in the outer wall between that probably led to a fire exit. Gamadge, climbing on, reflected that when the place was built, elevators were only just coming in; people expected stairs. They also expected breathing space, elbow room, open fires, and plenty of people to carry coal scuttles and logs of wood. Balancing in his mind the pros and cons of the good old days, he reached the top story.

5A was just beyond the head of the stairway, with the fire door opposite the stair head. He traversed creaking floor boards and pushed the bell.

The door opened on a long, dark, narrow passage, beyond which there was a lighted room. Half hidden by the door, a young woman stood looking up at him; for the space of a few seconds they eyed each other silently. She saw a personable man with a stoop, carrying his evening paper in a rather slovenly roll under his arm; he saw a girl with a white skin, round hazel eyes, a mouth subtly curved. Her face was a rounded oval, framed in red hair that she wore to her shoulders. She looked faintly amused—more like a sprite, Gamadge thought, than a spirit.

She was wearing a long, brightly flowered green-and-yellow dress of some airy material, with floating sleeves. There were green sandals on her feet. She came out from behind the door and smiled. “Mr. Gamadge?”

“Miss Vance?”

“Yes, I'm Iris Vance. Will you leave your things on that chair, please? I'm sorry to say that my maid doesn't sleep in.”

Gamadge laid his coat and hat on a chair. He retained the roll of newspapers, but Miss Vance had gone on to the lighted doorway beyond and did not seem to notice that he was bringing his bundle with him. He followed her into a large, bright, shabby room, with high studio windows, flowered rugs, wicker furniture, and vividly colored unframed pictures on the walls. Nothing, Gamadge thought, could be more unlike the popular idea of a witch's consulting room. Nothing could have surprised him much more than to see, when he looked towards the log fire, that four other persons were grouped about it. They were all looking at him.

“These clients had appointments for tonight too,” said Miss Vance lightly, “and I didn't like to put them off—or to put you off. Do you really prefer a private sitting? A circle is always more effective.”

“I don't in the least object to a circle,” said Gamadge, “if you don't.”

“Then may I introduce you?”

Gamadge stood looking urbanely at the other clients. They struck him as a very queer assortment, but perhaps in the circumstances a queer assortment was just what might be expected. Only…He had a sensitive perception to atmospheres, and he thought the group had at least one thing in common: a joke. The joke was on him. No—they had something else in common: a tenseness.

“Mrs. Spiker, Mr. Gamadge,” said Miss Vance, standing beside him. Mrs. Spiker, who sat on the left of the fireplace with a half-filled glass in her hand, gave him a short nod. She was a large but shapely woman of perhaps forty, with lavishly applied coloring and bright blond hair. She wore big bright jewelry, a fashionable black dress, and a fantastic little spangled hat. Her shoes were hardly more than a crisscross of thin straps and a pair of very high heels.

“Miss Higgs,” said Miss Vance.

Miss Higgs barely inclined her head. A very good-looking girl in her twenties, with an expression of languid disdain. She wore no hat, and her long velvet dress was rather informal. She might have been the product of a conventional bringing up and a fashionable school.