The Wrong Way Down (12 page)

“Part of the joke.”

“It ended up by not being such a joke for Mr. Gamadge. We'll talk about the joke with the ladies present. Now listen, Mr. Ashbury”—as the young man seemed about to protest—“you knew very well that we were coming down here to talk to you all. So let's get ahead with it.”

Ashbury's sister had appeared at the end of the passage; Iris Vance was behind her, just visible as a white and disembodied face under a halo of red.

Miss Ashbury said: “Then what we heard must have been a shot, Jim.” She addressed Nordhall with cold reserve: “We didn't know.”

“Tell me all about it.” Nordhall walked forward, past Ashbury; Gamadge followed him. The two women stood aside, and then they and Ashbury came into the big living room too. The sergeant remained beside the outer door.

Nordhall stopped abruptly and looked about him. It was a formal room, well-furnished and rather sombre, with a framed oil landscape over the mantel, mahogany furniture, a big oriental rug. The original owners had left it a little bare, and the Ashburys had not disordered it with personal belongings. It had in fact no signs of tenancy except for some newspapers and magazines on a side table.

Nordhall had not been looking at the room. He asked: “Well, where's the man going under the name of Bowles? Where's the woman called Spiker?”

Ashbury said after a moment: “I don't know why you should think those were false names.”

“You don't?” Nordhall swung to stare at him.

“No. We didn't use our names—I mean our family name—because Mr. Gamadge said he knew Miss Paxton, and we hadn't been up to see her. We were afraid she'd think it was funny.”

“
I
think it's funny. Where's Bowles?”

“They left long ago.”

The Ashbury girl stepped forward. Her brother said: “Don't mix in this, Janet.”

“I want to know whether we really did hear a shot.”

“Yes,” said Nordhall, looking at her with a sardonic smile. “You really did.”

“Because Mr. Bowles went out after we heard it, and we haven't seen him since.”

“Went out because he heard a shot?”

“I suppose so. This is exactly what happened.” She stood in front of Nordhall, looking quietly at him, with a kind of steely calm that might hide anything: “We left Iris Vance's flat as soon as this Mr. Gamadge had gone, and we came here—all of us but Iris. My brother and Mrs. Spiker and I came straight through to the kitchen for drinks. We left Mr. Bowles in the front hall, just inside the door. He was putting his coat on; he said he had to go as soon as he'd had a highball.”

“A straight rye,” her brother corrected her.

“Oh yes. A straight rye. The kitchen is down that passage, you can't hear what goes on in the outside hall when you're there; but we heard something, some kind of crash. We wondered what it was, and my brother thought it almost sounded like a shot. We came back here, and Mr. Bowles had gone.”

“And the funny thing about it,” said Nordhall, still ferociously genial, “is that he left by the fire stairs. Because Mr. Gamadge and his friend were on the stairs, a flight and a half down.”

Ashbury came up to her and put a hand on her arm. “Why doesn't Mr. Gamadge tell you what happened out there?” he asked Nordhall.

“He doesn't know. If his friend hadn't been downstairs—with
his
gun—Mr. Gamadge would have been shot in the back. Shot dead.”

Iris Vance murmured in a spectral voice: “This isn't a good neighborhood.”

“Evidently not. I'll say it's a bad one. So Mr. Bowles ran after some thug, did he? That the way you all want it?”

Janet Ashbury turned away. “That's all we know.” She went across the room and sat down on a bench under the windows.

Ashbury said: “Sit down, Iris.” He moved one of the chairs that stood in front of the fire; she sank into it, and he stood behind it with his hands on the chair back.

“Well, I'm glad that mystery's cleared up,” said Nordhall. “I mean the mystery of why none of you bothered to find out why there'd been a crash in the hall. Miss Vance was listening to the elevated train. Bowles hasn't called up to say he caught the party that fired at Mr. Gamadge—or was going to fire at him.”

“I don't understand what did happen,” said Ashbury.

“We won't waste time over it. How can I get in touch with your friend Bowles and Mrs. Spiker?”

Ashbury said: “I don't know where Bowles is staying.”

“You don't?”

“I hardly know him. I met him in a bar.”

“You met him at a bar, and brought him home with you to play a joke on Mr. Gamadge?”

“I brought him home with me. We heard about Mr. Gamadge afterwards from Miss Vance.”

Nordhall stood looking at him.

“He's all right,” said Ashbury. “He's an oil salesman, I think he lives in Dallas. I'm interested in oil myself, I'm going into that business. I knew Janet was having a buffet supper, and I brought him along. I bring friends, she brings friends. Nothing formal about the way we live.”

“And Mrs. Spiker—who brought
her
home with them?”

Iris Vance said: “She came to see me. She's an agent for a cosmetics firm; I met her through some advertising people once. She had some idea she wanted to work out with me for her firm. I should have divided the money with her, of course, if they'd taken up her idea and I'd drawn a picture.”

“And she had supper here too?”

“Yes.”

“You told Mr. Gamadge when he called you up this afternoon that you were going out to dinner.”

“I meant supper here.”

“Well, that places all five of you, does it, safe and sound in this apartment here until say nine o'clock?”

“Until nearly ten,” said Ashbury, “when we moved down the hall.”

“Fine. Now I'll just try and get hold of Mrs. Spiker. Unless Miss Vance doesn't know where she is? Or unless she's left town?”

“She's staying at the Hambledon on Seventh Avenue.”

“Well, that's a nice quiet commercial hotel. What's her full name?”

“Miriam Spiker. She's a widow. I don't know her by her married name.”

Nordhall, with a glance that included them all, a glance of savage amusement, went to a telephone which stood on the table with the magazines. He picked up the directory from its shelf below, found his number and dialed. Gamadge, who stood leaning against the wall near the entrance archway, thought he had never seen people wait more quietly than those three waited while Nordhall got the Hambledon.

“Mrs. Miriam Spiker, please,” said Nordhall. “Oh. When? About one?… That's too bad. Thanks.”

He put down the receiver and turned. “Isn't that too bad?” he said. “Mrs. Spiker left the Hambledon at about one o'clock—checked out. Now let's just make a guess about that. We've got a timetable to work from.” He stood propped against the edge of the table, looking from one to the other of the Ashburys, and from them to Iris Vance.

“Let's see. Mr. Gamadge left here around eleven, and Mrs. Spiker left soon afterwards. She started packing up right away. I finished talking to your father, long distance, at about twenty-two minutes to one. He called you up here, of course, soon as we finished talking. Say he got you in ten minutes; that's quick work, but it can happen. The minute he gave you the news about Miss Paxton's adjourned inquest and all that, you called Mrs. Spiker at the Hambledon. She was all ready to go, and she made it—checked right out. Perhaps you called Bowles too. Shame there's no switchboard here, but we can check the long distance call.”

Ashbury cleared his throat. He said: “My father did call us up, of course.”

“We can check your call to the Hambledon.”

“You might check on
a
call to the Hambledon,” said Ashbury. “I suppose Mrs. Spiker has her own affairs to attend to.”

“And they get her out of her hotel, unexpectedly, in the middle of the night. Mr. Ashbury, your father tells me he didn't know you knew Miss Vance.”

“He didn't know.”

“How was that?”

“There was some absurd old family feud. I looked Iris up when I was East at college, and Janet met her then too. We saw no reason why we shouldn't know our only relation—the only one in New York, the only one in fact except Miss Paxton in Tarrytown. I was going to tell Dad when we got home.”

“Why tell him now?”

“Because Iris and I are engaged to be married.”

Nordhall's eyes went to her. “That makes her practically one of the family, the immediate family, not merely a cousin.”

Ashbury said: “That's really why we gave false names tonight. I mean it's the principal reason. We didn't want it getting around to Miss Paxton—that we knew Iris. Not until we had a chance to tell my father ourselves.”

“He didn't seem any too pleased when I told him.”

“Because he thought Iris was a medium. I couldn't explain about her being an artist, because I wasn't supposed to know her or anything about her.” Ashbury shifted his hands on the chair back. “These ideas older people have—you can't change them in a minute.” He went on after a pause: “We don't know anything about that picture—that engraving Mr. Gamadge brought in. It didn't mean a thing to us; it doesn't yet.”

“And it doesn't matter now,” said Nordhall. “Does it? Because the only person that knew it was a substitution can't talk now. She's dead.”

Ashbury, bent forward a little, stared at him vacantly. Iris Vance spoke in that dying, far-off voice: “When Mr. Ashbury told us so over the telephone we could hardly believe him.”

“No, it's a funny kind of coincidence,” said Nordhall. “Funny series of events. Miss Paxton gets Mr. Gamadge to come here about a picture; she's dead before he arrives, and an hour later he's all but murdered himself as he's leaving your place. Nobody here knows about that, nobody here knows where Bowles and Mrs. Spiker got to, Mrs. Spiker checked out of her hotel as soon as she heard about Miss Paxton's inquest being adjourned.

“You know what's going to look even funnier when it gets to the newspapers? Your father didn't tell us, when we first called him up, that you were in New York. We got that another way. If Mr. Gamadge hadn't made up his mind that those two pictures had been switched, your names and Miss Vance's name and Bowles and Mrs. Spiker would never have been heard of in connection with Miss Paxton's death.

“Now I'll be frank with you. We're not going to give any of it to the newspapers till your father gets here and we have a talk with him; unless he's too long getting here, and I don't think he will be. But until he arrives we'll have to check up on you—that's routine—and see that you don't disappear too.

“For tonight, all I suggest is a search. Just routine, and more or less of a joke in the circumstances, but we have the bullet that didn't hit Mr. Gamadge, and we wouldn't be acting sensibly if we didn't at least look for the gun it came out of. I asked them to send a policewoman down—she ought to be here now. Any objection? I have no warrant, but you might like it better this way, instead of all going downtown and waiting around there till I get one. More privacy this way—you'll like that.”

Janet Ashbury was looking at her brother, her dark eyes fiery. He said: “Better take it, Jane. What do you and Iris care?”

“That's right,” said Nordhall. “What do you care?” He went out into the passage, spoke to the sergeant, and came back. The sergeant let himself out of the flat, closing the door quietly after him.

“Just a question or two more,” said Nordhall. “What business is your father in, Mr. Ashbury?”

“None just at present.”

“What business was he in?”

“Importer.”

“Where from?”

“China, Japan, East Indies, and so forth.”

“War retired him?”

“Temporarily.”

“What do you do? You said something about oil.”

“I'm looking around. Just out of the army.”

“Branch?”

“Air. I didn't get overseas.”

Silence fell. Ashbury went and sat down beside his sister. Nobody said anything more until the doorbell rang. Nordhall let the sergeant and a stocky woman into the flat; Gamadge passed them, murmured that he was going home, and went into the hall.

He descended the stairs in a crablike manner, one hand clasping Harold's Colt and his head turned back over his shoulder. But all the flat doors and the fire doors remained shut, and he reached the lobby without accident. He said good night to the plain-clothes man, and got into his car.

G
AMADGE'S FAVORITE CLUB,
a small but rather famous one, had its quarters in a remodeled private house behind Gamadge's own, on the next street South. The clubhouse had been planned and finished inside and out by a master, long since dead. As Gamadge's grandfather had been a charter member, and as he and Gamadge's father had done an immense amount of thankless work for it on committees and boards, a privilege had been granted them and extended to Gamadge himself—the privilege of a connecting gate between the club's rear premises and the Gamadge back yard.