Wolf in Man's Clothing: A Sarah Keate Mystery (9 page)

The library door was open; Alexia was pacing up and down at the other side of the great desk, taking a few steps, whirling, returning. Anna stood beside the door; she was huddled into a blue, faded bathrobe and her blue eyes were staring from a colorless face.

The others were grouped around Conrad Brent’s body on the couch and Dr. Chivery had arrived. He knelt beside the body, his back toward me. Maud was on the other side of the sofa, her face a rigid, yellowish mask with two bright eyes that watched Chivery. Peter was there too, looking thoughtfully downward and, as I entered, Nicky turned away from the sofa abruptly, walked around the long desk and flung himself into Conrad’s armchair.

Alexia saw me first. She paused as she turned to kick her short crimson train out of the way, looked at me and said, “Here’s the nurse. Did you find Craig? Where was he? What happened?”

“He’s all right. He’s in bed again. Miss Cable is with him.”

Maud glanced at me swiftly. Dr. Chivery got up a little awkwardly, dusted his knees absently and looked around in a bewildered way. “I—I wasn’t expecting Conrad’s death just now,” he said. “Well, I’m afraid it’s all over.” He glanced irresolutely at Maud. Nicky said, “It must have been quick. None of us knew he was having an attack.”

Claud Chivery passed an unsteady hand across his small chin. “He had some medicine,” he said. “He always took it for these attacks. I suppose this time …” He leaned over the body and seemed to be searching about it and the sofa. “Well, it isn’t here. The box of pills, I mean. It must have taken him so quickly he didn’t have time to get the medicine. He’s had this heart condition, you know, for years.”

“We knew,” said Alexia.

Dr. Chivery glanced at me. “You found him?”

“Yes. He was dead. I could do nothing for him.”

He looked at my wrist watch and seemed to wait a little tentatively for me to elaborate on my statement. As I didn’t on the principle of least said soonest mended, he nodded. “Ah—yes. I was afraid he would go like this.”

Maud said stiffly, “His medicine was digitalis, wasn’t it, Claud?”

Again Claud Chivery glanced uncertainly at his wife. “Why, yes, of course. Everyone knew it. He kept it in the drawer of his desk, over there.”

It was natural for all of us to glance at the desk. It was natural too, I suppose, for Alexia to reach out and pull open a drawer—the top right-hand drawer—as she did.

“It isn’t here,” she said. “He must have it somewhere about him.”

“But I …” Dr. Chivery shrugged. “Perhaps I overlooked it.”

He turned back to Conrad Brent’s body. There was a silence that had a quality of question that was still, unspoken and undefined. We all watched while he searched swiftly and with a kind of gentleness, so I remembered that Conrad Brent and his physician had been friends and neighbors for many years.

“No, it isn’t here.” He straightened up at last. Perplexity struggled with a queer kind of new uneasiness on his ever uneasy face. Maud said, “That was digitalis. Everyone knew where he kept it. Claud—Alexia—if anyone removed that box of pills it would have been murder. Murder …”

So there it was again, I thought almost angrily to myself—murder. Doggedly persistent.

But that’s all I thought just then, for Beevens uttered a kind of stifled exclamation and vanished from the door with an effect of consternation. We all heard his footsteps cross the hall and the heavy sound of the front door opening. We heard the voices, too, loud and authoritative.

“We got here as soon as we could. Where’s the murdered man?”

“
Murdered—
but we—but he …” Beevens seemed to master himself by a great effort. “You are mistaken, sir. There’s no murder here. No one sent for the police.”

There was a kind of jumble of several voices and the sound of motion; then quick, hard footsteps crossed the hall toward the open library door and the state trooper of the previous day stopped in the doorway.

He took one quick look around the room. Then he addressed Dr. Chivery. “There was a telephone call to headquarters about fifteen minutes ago from this house. Whoever it was said Conrad Brent had been murdered and asked us to come at once. Who killed him?”

N
O ONE SPOKE. EVEN
Beevens goggled in the doorway like a stricken fish. Nicky’s small head and graceful body seemed to freeze into wariness like a young animal, sensing a trap.

Then Maud said, “Tell them, Claud. There’s a mistake.” And Dr. Chivery blinked rapidly, looked at his wife’s dark hair and the Lieutenant’s left shoulder and said that they were mistaken. “Mr. Brent was my patient. He died of a heart attack. No one called you and he was not murdered.”

The Lieutenant came into the room slowly; he was tall and spare as a whip and not unlike one, in suggesting a kind of coiled and wiry strength. A couple of policemen (troopers, by their uniform, so I reasoned that the Brent place was well outside any borough limits and thus in the jurisdiction of the state) followed him. He said, “I see. But who telephoned to us?”

Which was what developed the trouble. For no one had telephoned, or at least no one would admit it. Chivery looked uneasy but blank, Maud angry but equally blank—Nicky, Alexia, Peter and even Anna, when questioned directly denied it with various degrees of indignation, but with a kind of concerted and astonished ignorance of such a telephone call which sounded sincere. Beevens from the door was fervent in his denial. Perhaps I was, too. I remember saying I hadn’t thought of the police, in a voice that rang out positively in clarion tones against the book-lined walls.

Alexia drew herself up to her full height and assumed a wonderful lady-of-the-manor command. “You see, Lieutenant,” she said, “you must be mistaken. My husband died of a heart attack. The nurse”—the Lieutenant’s eyes flicked toward me and back to Alexia—“the nurse found him like this. She called us, and we telephoned for his doctor. My husband was not murdered.”

Nicky said eagerly, “You’ve got the name wrong. You’d better hurry along, too, hadn’t you, Lieutenant? I mean if someone in the neighborhood has been murdered or—or anything like that—and they want you …” The officer looked at Nicky, and Nicky stopped rather suddenly. The Lieutenant had narrow, gray-green eyes, narrow high cheekbones and an expression of complete taciturnity. He said, “I took the message myself. It was a woman’s voice. There’s no mistake.”

“A woman!” cried Nicky. “But …” He stopped and flapped his small hands helplessly. “
But he wasn’t murdered
!”

Claud Chivery stepped forward. “I agree to that, Lieutenant. I’m going to give the death certificate, and I have no question at all in my mind. Remember, he was my patient.” There was a sharp silence except, from the hall, Beevens could be heard evicting the servants clustered there from their observation post. “You’ll be called if necessary,” he said. “Now get along. …” Beevens himself remained, however, hovering in the hall and in all probability straining his ears out of all nature.

The Lieutenant said quietly, “If you’ll permit …” stepped to the sofa, and looked down at Conrad Brent.

I don’t mind saying I was nervous. In the course of a not uncheckered career (far, now, in the past) I have chanced to see a little of the scope and persistence of a police investigation.

They had been summoned by telephone, so whoever had summoned them must have had reason to believe it was murder.

Everybody was watching the Lieutenant when he turned at last to Alexia and said, “I’m sorry, Madam. We shall spare your feelings in every possible way; we’ll do our best to protect you from public comment or annoyance. If Mr. Brent wasn’t murdered, we can soon satisfy ourselves and you in that respect. If he was …”

“But he couldn’t have been!” cried Alexia angrily. Then all at once her rigid, masklike face softened. She went quickly and gracefully to the Lieutenant and put her white hands on his arm; leaning very close to him and lifting her beautiful face beseechingly, she said softly and musically, “Lieutenant, no one would have murdered my husband. It is impossible. …”

The officer detached himself without effort and without compunction. “Will you please leave the room to us now?” he said politely. “It will be better that way. All of you, please, except Dr. Chivery.”

“But I …” Alexia’s voice was no longer musical. Her small face was set and the gleam in her eyes was not a pleasant one. Maud was watching every move and every look and had said nothing. The Lieutenant interrupted Alexia coolly. “We’ll have to have an autopsy, Dr. Chivery,” he said. “I’ll send to Nettleton for the appointed medical examiner; he should be here in an hour. He’ll assist you in making the autopsy.”

Dr. Chivery looked at the buttons on the police officer’s coat. “Conrad had a bad heart. He’d had it for years. He had digitalis which he took for these attacks, and we’ll probably find some. But not a fatal amount and …”

Maud interrupted, “But that was the point! What about the medicine? Where is it? If it was removed—if he removed it himself, that is—he died from the lack of it. It’s as I—as I was saying when the police arrived.”

Well, it wasn’t quite what she was saying. She was saying that if it had been intentionally removed, that was tantamount to murder.

“What’s this about digitalis?” demanded the Lieutenant, falling upon it like a dog upon a bone and Claud Chivery, helplessly, explained. The medicine had been kept in the top drawer of the desk; it wasn’t about the body of Conrad Brent, and he might have died for lack of it.

But that didn’t prove that anyone had removed it with that result in mind. The Lieutenant didn’t say that, he only asked if anyone had removed it or knew of Conrad Brent himself removing it.

“It was in the drawer just after dinner tonight,” said Alexia suddenly. “I saw it.”

“Did you give it to Mr. Brent?” asked the Lieutenant.

“No. He was not ill then; he didn’t want it. We were having coffee here. He wanted a clipping, something about the war that he’d cut from the papers. It was in that drawer and I got it for him; and I saw the medicine, then.”

“I remember,” said Peter Huber. “He read it to us.”

Maud’s black eyebrows were pinched together. “I remember, too,” she said. “It was about the arrest of some enemy aliens, some former Bund members.”

“It doesn’t matter,” said Alexia. “But I saw the medicine then. It was in that drawer.”

No one had seen it since, however, or if so did not admit it. I got to thinking of the autopsy and wondering if whatever Drue had given him (some kind of stimulant certainly) by way of the hypodermic would show up in the blood stream.

While I knew something of autopsies, I didn’t know enough, and I stopped thinking along that line when the Lieutenant abruptly and very definitely told us we could go. “Get some rest if you can,” he said. “The things we have to do will take time. I’ll have to question you later.”

I started quickly toward the door. I had to see Drue as soon as I possibly could. But Nicky got there first and then turned back toward Alexia. “Come, darling,” he said in a voice of sudden sympathy, which reminded everyone that Alexia was a recently—indeed, a very recently—bereaved widow. Even Alexia looked a little startled and then instantly drooped against the arm he put around her. “If they insist upon this investigation, we’ll have to make the best of it.”

Alexia looked at the still figure on the couch. I thought she was going to approach it, to say a kind of farewell perhaps, but she didn’t. Her shadowing lashes fell softly over her eyes and she turned toward the door, leaning on Nicky’s arm. She said softly, musically, “I am stunned, I think—the shock. Yes, I’ll go now. Nicky …” She leaned on his arm as far as the stairway, for I watched them go. I would have followed instantly, quickly, eager to get to Drue, but the Lieutenant stopped me.

“You were here when he died, Nurse?”

“He was dead when I reached him.” Maud was leaving too, and Peter Huber, looking uncertain of his status in that house of death and tragedy—a stranger plunged into a dreadful intimacy—followed her. Anna had disappeared, I didn’t know when. There were left only the police, the Lieutenant, Dr. Chivery and me in that room. And Conrad Brent.

“Wait a minute, please, Nurse,” said the Lieutenant sharply as I made another move toward the door. “I want to talk to you. Did you telephone for the police?”

He had asked that before; presumably he was asking it again because, the family being now out of earshot, I might be willing to admit suspicion and the reason for it.

“Certainly not,” I said. “If I had, I’d have told you so. This is nothing to me, any of it. I’m a nurse here. I arrived today—that is, yesterday afternoon. I …”

“Yes, I know,” he said. “You and Miss Drue Cable, who was formerly married to Craig Brent.”

I caught my breath so hard that I nearly choked myself trying to conceal it. “Yes. Some time ago. That has naturally nothing to do with …”

“They were divorced last year. You were the first to find Mr. Brent, is that right?”

Dr. Chivery passed his hand over his forehead and thin hair and I said cautiously, “It’s as I told you. He was dead when I reached him.”

“Yes, I know,” said the Lieutenant. “But how did you happen to find him? You were upstairs in your patient’s room, weren’t you?”

I had seen it coming but was still unprepared and it put me on what I believe is called the spot. If Peter Huber hadn’t seen Drue with me, leaning over Conrad Brent—but he had. I said very carefully, “I thought I heard a kind of call of help. Miss Cable must have heard something, too. But we could do nothing for him. Then—then Peter Huber came running down the stairs, too. He had heard the same thing, I imagine. I sent him to telephone for the doctor …”

“Why?”

“For the death certificate, naturally. Miss Cable went back upstairs to our patient” (I was rather pleased with the implication of that) “and I stayed here. But there was nothing I could do. And then all at once there was a loud noise.” Suddenly, I remembered that no one had inquired about that, yet almost certainly it was the thing that had roused Maud and Nicky and Alexia.

“Noise? What was it?”

“I don’t know. It sounded as if the house was coming down.” I was anxiously making a clean breast of everything I could and hoping desperately to divert his inquiry from Drue. “Peter Huber ran upstairs to see what it was. I ran after him, but when I got upstairs he had disappeared and I was afraid that—that something had happened to my patient …”