The House without the Door (11 page)

"We'll go into the writing-room."

"But dear, he's settled here with his drink."

"I've quite finished." Gamadge had been seizing these few moments to study the girl who, according to Benton Locke, had lost her humanity. She was tall and very slim, with densely black hair arranged high on her head, and sharp-cut features in a narrow face. Her eyes seemed to be a very dark grey; her eyebrows, he thought, had once been straight and thick. Now they curved upward, two thin lines. He thought that her natural complexion was pale, but her make-up was vivid. She wore big, multi-coloured earrings, and a costume, apple-green and spangled, which looked—except for the spangles and the length of skirt—like a tailored suit.

"Well, go along then." Mrs. Smiles patted the spangled coat sleeve with a proprietary air. "Of course I like it, Celia," she declared, "I knew I should. And that hairdresser knows how to get the right effect. Just like the girl in the shop."

"I'm glad it's a success." Miss Warren laughed down at her employer.

Mrs. Smiles took her in, from the curls of her topknot to the lacquer on her fingernails that matched the paint on her lips. She said: "It's just right. Did the slippers come?"

Miss Warren put out a foot in what looked like a fragment of green-and-gold net.

"The girl's her hobby," thought Gamadge.

Miss Warren led the way for him across the room, and through an archway in the northwest corner of it. As they entered a little oblong space which communicated with the hall by an arched door, she turned and looked him full in the face. "I never heard Vina speak of you," she said.

"Mr. Colby introduced me this afternoon."

The writing-room was pretty yet sombre, with dark-gold Japanese paper on its walls, and three pieces of black-and-gold furniture: a desk and two chairs. Miss Warren lighted a lamp on the desk and sat down on one of the chairs. She sat very straight. Gamadge, facing her, was glad that he had brought his cigarette along with him; he was sure that Miss Warren would never invite him to smoke, or to make himself in any other way at home.

She looked at him, the bluish light of the desk lamp bringing out her masklike decoration of eye shadow, mascara, and rouge. Gamadge attacked brusquely:

"Your cousin, Mrs. Curtis Gregson, told me this afternoon that in the last few months there have been four attempts on her life."

Miss Warren continued to look silently at him, but Gamadge thought she had ceased to see him; she was engaged in fierce inner consultation. He waited until she spoke.

"Are you a detective?" she asked.

"Me? No."

"Are you connected with the police?"

"Certainly not. I sometimes investigate cases when I'm asked to do so by people I like. Colby asked me to investigate this one."

"Vina has never mentioned these attempts to me."

"But Mrs. Stoner has done so. Did she call you up this afternoon? You knew who I was, I could see that."

"Of course Minnie called me up."

"Did she tell you about the anonymous letters, too?"

"Yes."

"I advised Mrs. Gregson to consult the police, you know. She refused to do so."

"I don't blame her."

"But practically all that
I
can do for her is to ask questions. I have seen Mr. Locke, and tomorrow I shall drive up to Burford and talk to Mrs. Stoner."

She asked quickly: "Are they going back there?"

"Mrs. Stoner didn't call you up and tell you that she's going? Mrs. Gregson is going to disappear for a while—by my advice."

After a moment Miss Warren said: "I suppose that's wise."

"Yes, the matter seems urgent; too urgent for a delicate approach. Can you illuminate the darkness in any way, Miss Warren? As I explained to Mr. Locke, I have a free hand; I shall treat what you say as confidential, unless I am forced to use it to prevent a crime."

"I have no information to give you, and I can assure you that Minnie Stoner has none. We are both completely bewildered by the story."

"You can recall nothing significant, which may have escaped you at the time, about that mackerel with the poison in it?"

"I never thought of poison. It's perfectly horrible and perfectly incredible—all of it." She turned her head away from him.

"Yet there was arsenic in that fruit cake. Tell me, Miss Warren: is there any possibility of Mrs. Stoner's not being in her right mind? She seemed a trifle vague and wild to me."

"Of course she's in her right mind. If she's vague and wild, she has every reason to be." Cecilia Warren turned her head back to stare at him. "Don't put this on her. It's ridiculous. She has no motive."

"In a case like this, the field widens to include friends of the parties directly interested."

Cecilia Warren suddenly looked as though she had run into something in the dark. Gamadge went on: "The same can be said for the Gregson case three years ago; but evidence was not forthcoming to justify other arrests, and murder trials are a great expense to the State."

There was a long pause. Then she said, again looking beyond him: "I always believed that it was suicide."

"Well, I grant you that motive for suicide is often obscure, too obscure to be understood in a court of justice. Motives shade off into one another until they're hardly what the average person recognizes as a motive at all."

"Yes, and men disappear and nobody ever knows why they ran away."

"They do indeed. Now Mr. Locke favours the accident theory."

"Accident?" Miss Warren looked as if she would have liked to develop the theory herself, if she had ever considered it.

"You must get him to tell you about it; it sounds quite plausible, as plausible as suicide."

She gazed at him in silence.

"What I must do first," said Gamadge, looking about him, and then disposing of his cigarette end in a black glass ashtray, "is to get this business last August as straight as I can. It's not easy to get things straight after three months, but I must do my best. You went up there on a train that arrives at Burford at seven twenty-two?"

Miss Warren seemed to seek information from the gold walls. She said at last: "Oh, yes. I remember that I couldn't take a train before six. Mrs. Smiles had come in from a trip to the country, just for overnight. She was going to Long Island. I had to see her off before I went up to Burford."

"When did she go?"

"About half-past three, I think."

"Noody saw
you
off?"

"No."

"The servants here knew when you left the apartment?"

"There were no servants here; it was closed for the summer. I got Mrs. Smiles' room ready for her the night before, and we went out to dinner at a restaurant. I got her breakfast for her in the morning."

"Did you come back here after you had put Mrs. Smiles on her train?"

"She never takes trains. I put her into her car, and saw that she had her luggage. Then I took my own bag down to the station."

"Nearly three hours to kill on an August afternoon in New York. How did you manage the process, Miss Warren?"

"I don't remember."

"Surely you must. Did you shop, or call up a friend?"

"I think I called a friend up, but he was out of town."

"Mr. Belden, perhaps?"

She looked at him, coldly. "Yes."

"Really, I should think you would have gone up to the country on an earlier train."

"You're trying to—" there was sudden horror in her glance. "You think I went up there earlier, and put that stuff on the step."

"Say that I'm trying to help you prove you didn't. Why
didn't
you take an earlier train? I'm only asking."

"I had errands. I remember now."

"Mr. Belden: was he away on holiday, or only for that afternoon?"

"Just for the day. His work takes him out of town a great deal."

"Did they tell you where he had gone?"

Miss Warren said with dry composure: "There was nobody in the office but the girl at the telephone, and she didn't know. It was a Friday."

"I thought that Mr. Belden might have gone off for the weekend."

"Perhaps he had. I don't really remember. I thought it was only for the afternoon, but
1
may have forgotten."

"He didn't tell you at some later time where he had been?"

"I never asked him. I am up at Mrs. Smiles' place in the Adirondacks most of the summer, myself."

"When you reach Burford, Miss Warren, and get out at the station, are the cabs in full view?"

"Nothing's in full view from that side; nothing but trees. The ticket office is across the track, and the cabs park behind it."

"You climb stairs to cross?"

"Yes." Miss Warren's mouth curved down at the corners in an expression of contempt. "And I don't think the conductor is acquainted with me; I don't go up there often. Nobody knows what train I went up on."

"You don't get up there often, nor does Mr. Locke. He says that he goes because Mrs. Gregson has remembered him in her will."

"I hope you won't tell Cousin Vina that."

"I may not need to tell her that. On Saturday morning, when Mrs. Gregson was made so ill by eating mackerel, you were all 'in and out of the kitchen' before she came down; so Locke tells me."

"I don't remember; we usually do go in and out of the kitchen. I don't know how whatever it was got into the mackerel. I know Vina came down last."

"Do you have time off in the afternoons, Miss Warren?"

"I go out whenever Mrs. Smiles can spare me—except on Tuesdays."

"Where do you go on Tuesdays?"

"To a concert; to hear chamber music."

"On Tuesday last, at about five o'clock, you were at this concert?"

"Yes. It's a series."

"Mrs. Smiles doesn't go?"

"No, she doesn't care for that kind of music," said Miss Warren gravely.

"How about your evenings? You are going out tonight; did you go out a week ago Wednesday night, do you remember?"

Miss Warren turned to the desk, and looked at an engagement pad bound in black-and-gold leather. She said: "I seem to have been dancing."

"With Mr. Belden?"

"With Mr. Belden."

"At a private house?"

"No, a night club."

"Thank you very much." Gamadge uncrossed his knees, but she gave no sign of meaning to rise. She asked: "Did Benton Locke answer all these questions as meekly as I have answered them?"

"You've been very patient. I didn't ask him the questions I've asked you. Mr. Locke has no elevator man and no doorman, and there is no way of checking up on his incomings and his outgoings." He rose, and so did she. "You don't look like your cousin Mrs. Gregson," he said.

"I look like the other side of the family."

"You were born in Omega?"

"I left it when I was quite young, to go to school."

"And never went back?"

"I went back, of course."

"When were you there last, Miss Warren? When your father died?"

She looked at him with that cold contempt. "No; he died suddenly, and I was working hard."

"Might I ask you what he died of?"

"Heart disease."

"One moment more: I have advised Mrs. Gregson to clarify the situation so far as she herself is concerned by making a new will."

There was a whiteness around the bright red of her lips. "A new will?"

"She is reluctant, but I advise it strongly. It's a step that should protect others besides herself, Miss Warren."

Cecilia Warren walked quietly out of the little room, Gamadge in her wake. A caller had arrived in their absence; a tall, loose-limbed young man with red hair and a broad smile. His dinner coat was so ancient that it had shrunk, through many cleanings, away from his wrists; there was a limpness about his black tie, and his tremendous shoes had a cracked look. He rose from his seat beside Mrs. Smiles and strode across the rug to put his hands on the girl's shoulders. They looked huge there.

"Gorgeous," he said. "And what have you done to your hair?"
His
speech had not undergone cultivation; the
r'
s rolled out richly.

"Mrs. Smiles wanted me to try something new. This is Mr. Gamadge," she said stiffly.

Gamadge and Belden shook hands. Mrs. Smiles inquired tremulously: "Doesn't she look lovely, Paul?"

"But I don't know her. The way these girls get themselves up, Mr. Gamadge!"

"I told you he'd hate it." Cecilia Warren had a look, as she watched her fiancé, that Gamadge had not seen on her face before. "I'll go up and take it all off, Paul; the dress too, if you like."

"This one is fine, but I always like the red one best."

"All right, if Mrs. Smiles doesn't mind." She bent over the squat figure in the big chair. "Do you, Mrs. Smiles?"

"You do just what he says; but you look so smart like this!"

"I'll wear it the next time
we
go out together."

Mrs. Smiles cackled gently. "Don't you like girls to look smart, Mr. Gamadge?"

"The smarter the better. My wife can't look too smart to suit me," said Gamadge, who would have suffered tortures if Clara had lacquered her nails.

"I should have loved to be smart when I was her age."

Miss Warren went off smiling, but she was still walking stiffly. Gamadge said: "I'm just going. Delighted to have met you, Mr. Belden."

"Oh, you mustn't!" implored Mrs. Smiles. "Do wait and visit with us until Celia comes back."

"Nothing I'd like better, but it must only be for a few minutes." Gamadge and Belden sat down, and Belden, officiating at the silver tray, poured a stiff drink. "This how you like it, Mr. Gamadge?" he asked.

Gamadge said that that was how he liked it. Belden poured one for himself. Mrs. Smiles, already accommodated with a stiff one of her own, nodded gaily at them both.

"I hope your business with Cecilia wasn't too difficult and troublesome," she said. "I hope Mrs. Gregson is all right."

"Perhaps she'll be all right now." Gamadge swallowed whisky. Belden remarked that he wished Celia didn't have to have anything to do with the Gregson woman.

"Now, Paul dear! Don't wish to interfere with the pattern," begged Mrs. Smiles. "That's so bad for the spirit."