Wall (32 page)

Lying upstairs I remembered the parties of my childhood: the florist augmenting the garden flowers with his own, the candles and centerpieces on the long table, the gilt chairs with their rose cushions, and the caterer’s men in their shirt sleeves, making canapés in the pantry. Mother rustling down the stairs, holding up her train, with her pearls around her neck, her diamond solitaires in her ears, and her hair built high in the braids and curls she wore until after the war.

She would move around, her train over her arm, inspecting everything. Then she would join Father in the drawing room, and I would be sent up to bed; to see from my window the first pair of lights turning in at the drive, and to hear the sound of horses trotting.

“Now, come away from there and get to bed,” Maggie would say.

I was thinking of that as I went downstairs the night of the dinner. How far we had gone since those days! Especially Arthur. Arthur and the war. Arthur and Juliette. Arthur and Mary Lou. Arthur and our murders. And now Arthur free at last, busy and working.

I drew a long breath of sheer relief, and after glancing into the dining room, stepped onto the veranda and looked out over the bay, still faintly opalescent after the sunset.

Then suddenly I knew I was not alone. I turned with a jerk, to see a man with his back against the wall of the house in order to escape observation from the windows, and to hear a familiar low laugh.

“Allen!” I said incredulously.

“Be careful, darling,” he said. “One shout and I’m out! Are you all right?”

“Yes. But you, Allen. Are you well again?”

“Well enough. Come over here, won’t you, where they can’t see us. I want to hold you, just for a minute. I’m so frightfully in love with you, Marcia. You know that, don’t you?”

I did know it. It seemed to me that I had always known it. And nothing else mattered that night except that he was there, alive and warm and strong. I simply put my head on his shoulder and sniffed.

“You know too much,” he said, almost roughly. “Worse than that, you know me. That may be dangerous. I’m earnest. Deadly earnest, my dear.”

All sentiment had gone out of his voice. He dropped my hand.

“You’re not safe. Nobody’s safe,” he said somberly.

He would not explain that. He knew about Fred Martin, and he said flatly that Fred would never go to the chair. Then he glanced out over the water to where a small cruiser was anchored offshore. It showed only its riding lights, and he nodded toward it.

“That’s how I came,” he said. “I’ll have to get away pretty soon. But I hate like hell to leave you here alone. You will go, darling, won’t you? Soon?”

“I’ve got to see Fred Martin through this, Allen. I’ve promised his wife.”

He gave a sort of groan.

“Don’t you ever think of yourself?” he said. “Or of me?”

“Always of you,” I told him, and for the first time he leaned down and kissed me.

“I’ll have to go,” he said huskily. “I’ll watch you as well as I can. But I’m dodging the police, my darling, and that’s not as easy as it sounds.”

As it happened that was his good-bye to me, for I heard Mrs. Pendexter’s high-pitched voice in the hall, and when I looked back for him he had gone.

I suppose the dinner that night was all right. I never have known. I must have talked. I dare say I smiled. Women are good actresses, all of them. But I sat facing a window, and we had not finished the soup when I saw the lights on the cruiser moving out toward the open sea.

I felt deserted and lonely.

It was after the meal, while the men were having cigars and brandy in the library, and the women coffee and liqueurs in the drawing room, that Marjorie Pendexter called me into a corner and said she wanted to talk to me.

She looked feverish that night. Her face was flushed, her eyes almost glittering. But she was steady enough, as though she had made a decision, and meant to stand by it.

“I’m going to tell you something, Marcia,” she said. “Fred Martin never killed Juliette. I know it.”

“So does anybody with any sense.”

She did not hear me. She was busy with her own unhappy thoughts.

“I think I know who did,” she said, and shivered. “But if Fred’s innocent—Marcia, this Allen Pell who’s been missing; I knew him. So did Howard. Why did you call me up that night? Did you know who he was?”

I put a hand on a chair to steady myself.

“Only that Pell was probably not his name.”

She pulled herself together at that. She even lit a cigarette, and inhaled deeply and exhaled before she spoke.

“I imagine you’re right,” she said. “I think he was Langdon Page, and that he is on parole from the penitentiary.”

I must have shown the shock, for she looked at me quickly and asked if I wanted a glass of water. I shook my head.

“From the penitentiary?” I managed to ask. “For what?”

“For manslaughter.”

For a minute the room faded away, all the lights, the women’s bright dresses, the flowers. I heard Marjorie telling me to sit down, and I did so. But just then the men came trooping in, and she had to leave me. I did not see her again until she and Howard were leaving. Then she said merely that she had had a lovely time, only she had lost fifteen dollars at bridge. She evaded my eyes, and when at last I was alone I did not dare to telephone her. Our night operator has a pretty dull time of it, and I did not want her listening in.

When I did call the next morning I found that she and Howard, with one or two others, had started on a short motor trip to Canada, and I was left with that one word of hers to ring in my ears, day and night. Manslaughter!

Much of the puzzle was clear to me now; the reason why Allen’s prints had been erased from the trailer, the absence of identifying marks on the clothing there, even that absurd pretense at painting. Allen Pell was Langdon Page, he had killed some person or persons with his car while he was drunk, and he had been drunk because of Juliette.

There was only one question I could not answer. Had he hated her enough to kill her?

L
ACKING MARJORIE, I HAD
to know the story somehow. I could not sit still that day. When I tried to walk my knees shook. When I sat out on the upper porch I found myself searching for the small cruiser I had seen the night before. When my lunch came I drank some coffee and sent the rest away untouched.

It had always been Mother’s custom to thank the servants when a dinner had gone well, and I have done it ever since her death. That day, however, I forgot the dinner entirely, and it was only a reproachful William who reminded me, as he took away the tray.

“Were things to your liking last night, miss?” he inquired.

I roused myself.

“I’m sorry, William. I’ll see Lizzie later. Yes, it went beautifully. I’m afraid I’m tired today. I forgot to speak about it.”

He cheered visibly.

“The lobster was especially fine, I believe, miss.”

“It was indeed. Will you tell Lizzie that?”

Having been thus tactfully reminded of my duty, I went the rounds later myself. But early that afternoon I found myself at the public library in town, asking if there were any back files of New York newspapers.

There were none; nor, I was assured, were there any at Clinton. At four o’clock I went back to the house and announced to Maggie that I was going to the Park Avenue house that night for a day or two, and she could come along to make my bed and cook my breakfasts. Perhaps my manner was strange, for she looked at me queerly. She was willing enough, however. Like the others, she looks forward to summers on the island, as an escape from the drab monotony of all service, no matter how loyal. Like the others also, the end of the season finds her fed up with the country, and anxious for the city again: its pace, its noise, its general feeling of active living everywhere.

More than that, she had completely lost confidence in Sunset. It developed as she packed that day that the bells had started ringing during the party, with nobody upstairs at all; and that William, pouring champagne into Mansfield Dean’s glass, had heard them and spilled it.

“It didn’t hurt the table,” she said. “But it upset him. I’ll be glad to get away from whatever rings them, miss.”

I paid no attention. I went out onto the porch and stood looking down at the beach. Those wretched crows were there again, strutting impudently about.

There was no sleep for me in the train that night, and the city was hot when we got there the next morning. Early as it was when we arrived, small heat waves were rising from the streets, and our taxi driver was in his shirt sleeves. The house looked dirty and dreary, its windows shuttered, the pavement unswept and dusty. It had been wired as usual for the summer, and I had telegraphed ahead to have it opened. We descended from the taxi, however, to find a wretched-looking young man on the doorstep, turning a worried face to me.

“Miss Lloyd, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” I said. “Is anything the matter?”

He looked even more uncomfortable.

“I’m sorry. It looks as though somebody had been in the house. The service is okay. I’ve tested it. But I’ve had a look around, and”—he smiled faintly—“I don’t suppose you leave your bureau drawers on the floor!”

Maggie gave him a ferocious look.

“Are you telling me—” she began.

“He is telling
me
something, Maggie,” I said, effectually shutting her up. “Do you mean,” I inquired incredulously, “that someone has broken into the house?”

“I’m afraid so. Although how they did it—It’s not all over the place,” he added. “Just some rooms on one of the upper floors.”

And that, as it turned out, was the fact. There had been a cursory inspection of the lower floors. Here and there drawers had been opened and not entirely closed. But the real search had been made in the rooms Arthur and Juliette had occupied after their marriage. They consisted of a double bedroom, a large sitting room and a bath, and when Arthur and Juliette took an apartment the rooms had been left as they were.

Juliette had done them over, after her own flamboyant fashion, and that morning they bore a sort of family resemblance to her apartment the day the sheriff and I had seen it. I could only stare around me helplessly, with Maggie muttering and the young man—still nameless—practically wringing his hands.

“I’m sure I don’t see how it happened,” he said. “The wires are all right, and the basement windows are barred. I’ve been down there. It’s—it’s most mysterious.”

He was completely unnerved when I finally got rid of him and sent Maggie downstairs to make some coffee and open the windows. But left alone I had no solution of the mystery.

The whole suite was filled with memories for me. Coming home from boarding school to hear Arthur and Juliette quarreling there. Arthur coming back there, after the break, and bringing such few personal possessions as a man salvages under such conditions; a few books, some papers, his pipes, his clothing. Juliette, looking into the place one day for some purpose or other, long after their separation, and laughing unpleasantly.

“There’s the old wall safe,” she had said. “And I had nothing to put in it!”

It was there now, open but empty.

I examined the rooms as best I could. So far as I could tell, nothing had been taken. The safe—there was one in every bedroom—had been empty for years. A photograph of Juliette still hung on the wall, but Arthur’s books were gone long ago. The closets were empty, and the bathroom showed only the extra guest toothbrush in a cellophane holder, although someone had recently washed there. As for the rest, the dust sheets were off the furniture, the carpet had been lifted, the mattresses were off the beds and all the drawers stood open, with some left on the floor.

I did not attempt to straighten the place. I went down to my own room and bathed and dressed again. Maggie had brought up coffee and toast by that time, as well as considerable indignation. But I left her as soon as I had eaten, her head tied up in a duster and her face still flushed with fury.

Looking back, I think I had gone through the previous thirty-six hours in a sort of automatism. Now, however, my head was clear. I was thinking as coldly and clearly as a machine. All emotion seemed to have died in me.

The next few hours I spent at the public library. The building was comparatively cool, but the search was a long and tiring one. I forgot lunch entirely. It seemed to me that for endless hours I had been going through newspaper files, filled with endless tragedies. But by four o’clock that afternoon I knew what I had gone there to learn.

It was all there: the identity of Allen as Langdon Page—his full name was Allen Langdon Page—supported by many pictures, his antecedents, his college, his inherited wealth, and his ultimate catastrophe. But I still knew nothing whatever that would explain the murder of Juliette Ransom, or that of Helen Jordan, her companion and maid.

The story was not an unusual one. I had lived the life of my day and generation, and no part of it was strange to me. But it was both sordid and tragic. Allen had been at a weekend party on Long Island, drinking heavily. On Sunday the party had moved to a country club, and the drinking had gone on. Then, at eight o’clock of a late spring night three years before, he had suddenly left in his car, heading toward New York.

The result was horrifying. He had either gone to sleep at the wheel—he did not remember—or he had suddenly passed out. What was certain was that he had run through a traffic light, killed a woman and her grown daughter, and critically injured her husband. Not only that. He had not stopped his car! Two or three blocks farther along he had turned sharply into a side street, hit a lamppost, and was found unconscious lying on the cement roadway. He claimed to have no recollection of what had happened, in the hospital and later at the trial. But he had put up no defense.

“If I did it I’ll take what’s coming to me,” he had said.

His lawyers had fought for him. He had an excellent record. He was not normally a drinking man. He had inherited his father’s business and was a hard worker. They challenged the jury panel until the court’s patience ran out and the jurymen already selected were betting quarters on whether or not the next would be chosen. There was a vast array of counsel.