Wolf in Man's Clothing: A Sarah Keate Mystery (22 page)

Nicky answered instantly, promptly, smilingly. “He would have, if Alexia asked him to. As she did for me.”

A slow flush came up into Craig’s face, but his voice was quite level and steady. “Do you know Frederic Miller?” he asked.

This time Nicky didn’t answer promptly; he seemed to stop and think, cautiously. Then he said, “No. What about him? Are there canceled checks to him, too?” There was an eager light in his eyes that baffled me; it was as if he really wanted an answer. But Craig shook his head and made us all go to dinner. Gertrude, the little waitress, popeyed with excitement, stayed with Craig while I ate hurriedly with the others.

I was alone with Craig when the police finally came. Lieutenant Nugent and two other officers. And asked me to bring a towel from the bathroom.

When I spread it out on the foot of the bed so Craig could see, they put down upon it two objects. Neither was exactly pleasant to look at. Quite the reverse, in fact, for one was a small knife, a kitchen paring knife, quite ordinary except its blade was sharpened razor-thin and bright, and it was spotted, especially about the wooden handle, with a dark, dried substance, now turning brown.

The other was a yellow string glove and it, too, was stained in thick reddish brown patches, dry now and stiff.

Both had been found near Claud Chivery’s body, but not near enough for him to have used and dropped, so it did not indicate suicide.

And there were no other clues, except my own white cap and some nickels, which they returned a little ceremoniously to me, Peter already having explained them.

They let me stay; in fact, they requested me to stay, for they wanted to question me, and thus I heard the whole thing. And beyond the fact that they had found no one yet who had seen Claud Chivery after he left the inquest, I knew no more than I had already known.

Except, of course, about the matter of alibis. For it was developing even then that there was a troublesome lack of alibis for that hour or so during which the murder had taken place. They couldn’t, or at least they hadn’t yet been able to fix the time very definitely. They asked me about rigor mortis, I remember, and the temperature of the body when I found it and I could tell them simply nothing. I’d had a kind of impression that he’d been dead for a time when I’d found him; but had no way of giving them a really accurate answer.

They asked me too, for I told them of it, about the rustle I had heard in the brush. I’m not sure, however, that they believed the little I could tell them; it was too tenuous, too unsubstantial a thing.

Nugent told Craig again, briefly, of the inquest, except he didn’t mention the checks Conrad Brent had given Nicky. Mainly they asked Craig about Dr. Chivery: when had he seen him last, what had Chivery said, could he suggest a motive for the murder?

“Did he know anything—any clue or any evidence, about your father’s death?”

“Claud didn’t tell everything he knew,” said Craig obliquely.

Nugent’s green eyes sharpened. “Why do you think he was killed, Brent?”

“I don’t know. But I’d stick to the knife if I were you—for a clue, I mean. The glove …”

“What about the glove?”

“Oh, nothing. It doesn’t seem to mean anything.”

“You’re not being very frank, Brent.”

“I can’t do anything to help you like this. In bed.”

Nugent said slowly, “I’d better tell you that it would help if you had an alibi for this afternoon.”

“
I
!” Craig lifted himself abruptly on his elbow, winced and lay cautiously back again.

“An alibi always helps,” said Nugent. “But the fact is people are saying—that is—well, it’s like this, Brent. Everyone knows now that you and Mrs. Brent inherit practically all of your father’s money. And everyone knows that you and Mrs. Brent …”

A slow flush was creeping up over Craig’s face; his eyes narrowed. “Well? Say it.”

“You know as well as I do what I mean,” said Nugent. “Everyone thought you and Mrs. Brent were to be married over a year ago; then you married the little nurse and Alexia Senour married your father. Now they’re saying …”

“Listen! I didn’t kill my father! Get that into your head! I didn’t kill Claud, either,” said Craig bleakly. “I’ve no alibi for this afternoon, unless you consider it an alibi not to be able to walk without getting dizzy.”

Nugent leaned forward. “Are you sure of that, Brent?” he said quietly.

An angry flush came over Craig’s face. “My God, do you think I’d stay here if I could help it?” he cried angrily. “Don’t you think I’d get out and do something! Don’t you …”

“What would you do?” broke in Nugent softly.

Craig stopped abruptly. “I don’t know,” he said wearily, after a moment. “I don’t know.”

I said, merely in the line of duty and not to defend Craig, “He couldn’t have murdered Dr. Chivery. He couldn’t have walked that far and back again. I’m sure of that, Lieutenant.”

Nugent’s gray-green gaze plunged at me. “Are you, Miss Keate?”

“Yes. And as to that, Mr. Brent had an alibi the night Mr. Brent—that is, his father—died. I was with him.

“I know,” said Nugent without any expression at all in his face. “Still, sick people have been known to walk incredible distances. And there really is no alibi in the case of murder by poison.”

Craig made a quick motion forward as if to expostulate, and I said hurriedly, “I can’t let you question my patient very long, Lieutenant.” And put my hand on Craig’s wrist. Not, again, to defend Craig but merely because it was my obvious duty. His pulse seemed steady enough, however. And Nugent said,

“All right. Just a few more questions. The night your father died, Brent, you were found in the linen room. How did you get there?”

“I told you everything I knew about that.”

“You said someone struck you. Who?”

“I don’t know. I’ve told you. I didn’t know anyone was near me.”

“You say you were in the hall, starting downstairs, your back to the corridor. How did you get into the linen room where your wife—I mean Miss Cable—found you?”

“I don’t know. That’s the truth. You’ve no case against me.”

Nugent looked at him slowly. “I’m not saying I have,” he said. “But where there’s murder, there’s motive. And everybody knows that you and Mrs. Brent …”

“Can’t we leave Mrs. Brent out of this?”

“Not very well,” said Nugent. But after a moment’s thoughtful silence he said no more of Alexia and went on instead to Conrad Brent’s will, asking Craig if he knew its main provisions. Craig said he did. “My father told me.

“How did he make his money?”

Craig glanced at the Lieutenant with a little surprise. “It’s no secret. He inherited from his father, quite a lot; I don’t know how much. He invested it—oh, a long time ago. Before I was born. Anyway, everything he touched prospered. In the summer of 1929 he sold; everything was almost at its peak. Since then he’s done very little buying or selling of stocks.”

“He was a very rich man.”

“Yes,” said Craig, “he was. That is, it wasn’t anything fantastic. But more than enough.”

Nugent, hard and sinuous as a whip in his trim uniform, leaned over the railing at the foot of the bed. Lights touched his narrow high cheekbones and reflected in small points in his gray green eyes. “Brent, there was a queer codicil to your father’s will. I mean, he’d lived in America all his life …”

“Oh, that,” said Craig abruptly. “You mean he wanted to be buried in Germany. At Stuttgart. Yes, I know. It was an odd notion of his. When it struck him years ago, he had it written into his will; then, after his recent marriage, when his new will was written I suppose that was just carried over. I am sure that he’d changed his mind about it.”

“Why did he want it, in the first place?”

“You’d have to understand and know my father to understand that,” said Craig slowly. “I’ll try to explain. He once had a kind of hobby for family; he dug into his genealogy, oh, away back when. Unearthed a single direct line, and clung to it. Got hold of the coat of arms, all possible records and history, everything. He was of German descent; although I think his father came to America and made his fortune sometime before the Civil War. My father had time on his hands; the study of genealogy interested him.”

“A hobby,” said Nugent. “I see. He didn’t take it too seriously, did he?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, did he consider going back to Germany to live, for instance?” said Nugent.

“Good God, no,” said Craig. “He was a little hipped about family, that was all. He thought a lot about pure Nordic blood …”

“Approved of some of Hitler’s ideas, in other words?”

“
No
! It was only at the beginning of the Hitler regime that he was rather taken with some of the ideology it claimed—resurrecting the old Teutonic family life, improving the race, keeping family blood pure, that kind of thing. But he got over that right away. There was nobody more loyal to America than my father. I’m sure of that. He much regretted that he’d been even briefly taken in by anything Hitler claimed.”

“I see,” said Nugent. “Forgive me, Brent, but he did disapprove of your marriage, didn’t he?”

“He thought we hadn’t known each other long enough. That was all.”

“Oh,” said Nugent. “I had an idea that you had rather quarreled with him about your marriage. I mean when you married a girl he didn’t think was good enough to marry into his family.”

“That,” said Craig dangerously, “is enough of that. As a matter of fact, Miss Cable was too good for me and the Brent family. If that is all, Lieutenant …”

“No, it isn’t,” said Nugent. “It’s this way, Brent. Soper thinks the girl—your former wife—did it. I’m not sure. Until something clinching and material turns up I’d like to hold off an arrest. And I’ve tried to give her a fair break. But she’s not telling everything she knows.”

“Well?” said Craig, still with a dangerous look in his face.

“For one thing, she disclaims having taken the missing box of medicine. Yet her fingerprints were on the drawer of the desk where the medicine was kept; they were on the wooden handle and the panel across the front. She wouldn’t explain how they got there.”

My heart sunk, quite literally and heavily down toward my white oxfords; yet I’d been afraid of it. Craig said evenly, “That doesn’t prove anything.”

“And she got past my man late this afternoon and went outdoors. He …” Nugent stopped there and left us to conjecture what had happened to the trooper on guard in consequence. “It won’t happen again,” he said briefly. “But she was out of the house at the time Chivery was killed.”

“A woman couldn’t have killed him! Like that,” said Craig.

“Mrs. Brent told us Drue Cable had been out of the house,” said Nugent slowly, and looked at the ugly things that still lay there on the towel—the bright, sharp paring knife, the yellow glove.

And abruptly then, after a few more questions about Claud Chivery, they went away. As they left, Craig asked a question.

“Oh, by the way, Nugent …”

The Lieutenant turned. “Yes …?”

“Did you find only one glove?”

For an instant something very deep and intent stirred again away back in Lieutenant Nugent’s green gray eyes. “Only one. See you in the morning, Brent. The District Attorney may be here then, too. I’m leaving a man in the house tonight.”

They went away then, rolling up the towel and taking it and the things inside it along with them.

Craig lay in silence, his eyes closed, after their departure. And I can’t say that I felt exactly chipper and talkative myself.

And presently Beevens came; he’d stay with Mr. Brent he said, while I got some rest. “And the Lieutenant spoke to the trooper on guard in the hall. I heard him, Miss. He’s to let you enter and leave your room whenever you wish to.”

“They’re still holding Miss Cable, then,” said Craig.

“Yes, sir. I’m afraid they are. Is there anything about medicine, Miss?”

I told him there wasn’t and went away quickly; there were things I had to do, for somehow, now, everything was different.

It was an ugly difference too, something in the air, in the stillness of the house, in the shadows in the corners and around the stairwell. In our meeting eyes.

There was no possibility of evasion this time; no way to deceive ourselves, no glossing of the grim and terrifying truth. Murder had been in that house, murder on the black and silent meadow. A thing that struck swiftly, out of nowhere and might strike again as swiftly, as silently.

An opened door, with the room unlighted beyond it, was a threat.

Well, I hurried along the corridor. The trooper, the same one who had stopped me earlier in the evening, let me enter my room, this time without a word. But I didn’t go straight on to Drue’s room, for the first thing I had to do was write a letter to the police.

I didn’t really think I had done any harm or obstructed their inquiry in the least by hiding the hypodermic syringe. But I also felt a responsibility about it, to say nothing of the empty medicine box. So light in my hand when I weighed it and looked at it, so heavy on my heart. Perhaps now that Claud Chivery was dead Drue would tell me what she knew of it.

But just now I had to write my letter.

Since the shooting episode, not unnaturally perhaps, I had felt a remarkably unpleasant sense of personal danger. This was now very much stronger. I had seen Claud Chivery with his throat cut, huddled like an empty sack. The only motive for murder so far attributable was that he’d known something that was a danger to the murderer of Conrad Brent, or to whoever it was that shot Craig. And I, accursed with the Keate nose and a mentality that would have startled and delighted any psychiatrist, was simply reeking with clues. I had been led astray by my affections and softening of the brain; it was impossible to avoid the conclusion that if I didn’t end as Claud Chivery had ended I’d be lucky.

True, I was none the wiser for any of my clues, if clues they were, for I didn’t know who had murdered Conrad or Claud. But still there they were, and suppose something happened to me. Not that I intended to let anything happen to me; but I did want a clear—or fairly clear conscience. Just in case.