The Almost Perfect Murder Part 9

We stared at her. Mephisto instantly became panicky. "I have no other gun on me," he stammered.

"I didn't say you had," she said.

"How do you know it's not the same gun?" cried Mr. Punch.

"Because I marked it when I unloaded it," she answered. "I scratched the barrel with my ring."

"Another gun?" said Abdullah huskily. "What has become of the first one?"

"That's what we'd all like to know," she said blandly. "Please stand where you are, and I'll try to dope it out."

She did not have to speak twice, for all were arrested by the new and peremptory tone in her voice. Stepping to the left of the head of the table--that is to say, almost on the spot from whence the shot had been fired--she went on thoughtfully: "The murderer had to make a quick subst.i.tution of the loaded gun for the empty. He or she had to hide the empty gun instantly--too dangerous to keep it on the person. He would have to take the handiest place, trusting to retrieve it later. Well, in any room there are only a limited number of hiding-places..."

The bright eyes through the slits in the mask travelled slowly around the room and finally came to rest on a wine bucket standing on the floor alongside the mantelpiece almost directly behind Abdullah's chair. The empty bottle was now sticking upside down in the ice and water. She pushed up her sleeve a little way, and thrust her hand into the water alongside the bottle. She drew it out, grasping a second gun identical with the other.

Glancing at the barrel, she said casually: "There's the scratch I made behind the sight if any of you are interested in checking it up."

III.

The silence in the room was broken by Zuleika, who said with a sneer: "Easy enough to find something when you know where you put it."

The effect of this remark was only to focus suspicion on Zuleika herself.

Abdullah muttered in a dazed way: "Two guns? Two guns? That lets me out, don't it?"

"Why should it?" demanded Zuleika. "You could hide a gross of guns in that costume. I knocked against one of them when I sat down at the table!"

Zuleika, it appeared, was ready to charge anybody with the murder.

"It's a lie!" whined Abdullah.

Mme. Storey meanwhile was comparing her gun with the one Mephisto held.

"Same style and make," she remarked. "No doubt they were carried by the same person."

We now heard a sound that threw everybody except Anne Boleyn into another wild panic. It was the distant clanging of a gong in the street. Instantly it was clear to us all that the people outside had sent for the police. With a moan of terror, Jackie ran to the window and threw it up. Mr. Punch made no move to stop her now. Out she went, followed by Zuleika and Abdullah. When it came to the point, Abdullah was not so anxious to face the police after all.

Myself, I was wild to follow. The dead man on the floor, the clanging of that horrible gong, the thought of a fight with the police--it was too much. My nerve failed me completely; but I waited for some sign from my employer. Mr. Punch seemed to have lost his head, too. He stood there biting his fingers in a horrible state of indecision. Mephisto at the window shouted to him: "Come on! Come on! You can't face this out alone, you fool!"

Mr. Punch flung up his arms.

"All right," he cried. "You are all witness that I didn't want to go. If you must go, I've got a car in the street. I'll get you away." He turned to us and shouted: "Come on! They're already in the building."

Mme. Storey gave me a sign, and I hustled after Mephisto. I left her and Mr. Punch contending which should go last. She got her way.

Out on the fire escape my head reeled. The pattering of those descending feet on the iron steps below me made me shudder. It is a sound which suggests fire and catastrophe.

The fire escape was on the rear of the building. Late as it was, lights went up in the windows of the surrounding tenements, and bodies hung half out.

"What's the matter?" they cried back and forth to each other. "There they go! Look at them!"

Mr. Punch stood by my side, stamping with impatience, while Anne Boleyn was still only two-thirds down. "Come on! Come on!" he whispered frantically.

"Coming!" she answered serenely.

She reached the ground just as the police started issuing from the window above. Scrambling over the fence any way we could, we found ourselves in a narrow pa.s.sage which communicated with the next street. The others were hovering in the mouth of the pa.s.sage, uncertain where to turn.

"This way!" whispered Mr. Punch, taking the lead.

We ran around the first corner into an alley. It was evident from the sounds that a crowd was gathering in front of Webster Hall, but by the grace of Providence the dark streets behind were empty. Mr. Punch flung open the doors of a big limousine standing in the alley. He took the wheel, and all the rest of us piled in pell-mell behind. When he started the engine the sound brought men running from the front of the hall to the other end of the alley, and the cry went up: "There they go!"

The gong began to clang again.

As we crossed the street in the rear of the hall, the police were coming out of the pa.s.sageway by which we had escaped a minute earlier. One of them shot at us. I saw the sparks where the bullets ricochetted from the paving stones. But we were only in sight for a moment before plunging into the second block of the alley, and they were all on foot. There was no car at hand for them to seize.

The awful strain relaxed a little. What a strange crew we were in the back of that limousine! All masked and watching each other out of the corners of the eye-slits. The two women had resumed their masks, though what they expected to gain by it now, it would have been hard to say. And what a load we carried beside the seven people! Love, hatred, guilt, suspicion, and fear, all squeezed up together as in an affectionate embrace.

Something, I don't know what, the suggestion of a new sound behind us perhaps, prompted me to peep under the curtain over the rear window. To my dismay I discovered that a light car filled with policemen had crept up almost upon us, and was gaining rapidly. There was no particular reason why I should have feared the police, but I was terrified sick at the thought of more shooting.

"Oh, they're coming!" I gasped.

Scarcely slackening speed at all, Mr. Punch turned the first corner to the left. The heavy limousine reeled, teetered, slid, while we held our breath and clutched at one another. But the four wheels came down to earth again and we rushed through the side street in safety. Not so the policemen. The light car skidded half across the street, leaped to the sidewalk and crashed to a standstill against the house-fronts. I only hope the poor fellows in it were not seriously hurt.

That was the end of pursuit. Mr. Punch turned a few more corners and then, slackening speed, put on his mask and spoke to us through the front window. He was less suave now.

"I can take you folks to a place where you'll be absolutely safe until you can get some proper clothes. But, naturally, I don't want you to know where it is. Pull down the blind over the front window. If I catch anybody peeping I'll put you out in the street just as you are."

"That's fair enough, Punch," said Mephisto. "I won't let anybody look out."

"I want to go home!" wailed Jackie like a child.

"Nothing doing, sister," said Mephisto. "We're all in this thing together, and we got to stick together."

So the front curtain was pulled down. It made little difference to me, because I had no idea where we were anyhow. But I didn't like Mr. Punch's proposition a little bit. It was too smooth to come from an honest man, and Mephisto had fallen in with it a little too quickly. I began to feel as if they were all crooks together. My anxiety was chiefly on Mme. Storey's account. A woman as famous as she is has to be wary. She has many enemies. However, as she seemed to accede to it, there was nothing I could do.

The whole business of trying to escape from the police seemed senseless to me, and I could not imagine how Mme. Storey had come to fall for it. You can't trifle with murder. But presumably she knew what she was doing. She always does.

The red-clad devil produced a packet of cigarettes and offered them around. Only Anne Boleyn helped herself with a cry of thankfulness. "That's what I wanted!" She and Mephisto lighted up.

"Well, the worst appears to be over," said Anne.

Over? Our troubles are just starting, I thought. But I saw that her object was to recommend herself to these people as a good pal, and I kept my mouth shut.

"Yes," said Mephisto. "Mr. Punch seems to be a man of resource."

"Have you any idea who he is?" she asked offhand.

"Not the slightest. But he must work for very fine people, judging by the car."

Mr. Punch drove for a considerable distance, but from the number of turns we made, I judged he was merely trying to confuse our sense of direction.

Finally we came to a standstill. Opening the front window a crack, Mr. Punch said: "Sit still until I give the word."

I was greatly tempted to peep around one of the blinds, but I noticed that Mephisto was watching us narrowly. As it was, Jackie happened to push one aside for a moment with a movement of her shoulder, and I got a glimpse through the gla.s.s of the door. But all I saw was a dark and deserted street with lamp-posts at intervals. It was a fashionable quarter of the town, that was all I could tell.

I heard the squeaking of hinges, and afterward the car moved forward for a few yards and stopped again. A gate closed behind us, and Mr. Punch opened the car door. He had on his mask.

"Here we are," he said.

We were in a private garage that had once been a stable. Another handsome car lay alongside us, and through an open door we could see the disused stalls beyond. Opening a small door, Mr. Punch led us all out into a narrow courtyard with the stars overhead and the dark bulk of a great mansion looming before us.

"You will be safe here," he said. "My employers have gone south for the winter."

"How about your licence plates?" asked Abdullah anxiously. "The police in the small car certainly got the number."

"That won't do them any good," answered Mr. Punch with a laugh. "I always fasten on false plates when I go out in the evening--just to be on the safe side, you know."

He unlocked a door into the rear of the house, and switched on lights in the pa.s.sage. I noticed that after we had all pa.s.sed in, he locked the door with a key, and dropped it into his pocket. This did not make me feel any easier in my mind. In fact this so-called place of safety scared me more than the supper room at the hall, where there had been at least a crowd outside within call. The big house was as silent as the grave.

We crossed a s.p.a.cious old-fashioned kitchen, and mounted a flight of stairs to the main floor. It was a really palatial mansion in the older fashion, with an immense central hall running through it, and a suite of three superb drawing-rooms on one side.

Everything had been dismantled in the absence of the family; hangings and rugs removed and all furniture and pictures swathed in white dustcloths. I noticed that all the windows on the first floor were closely boarded up outside, and I suspected that there was no way out except by the bas.e.m.e.nt door to which Mr. Punch held the key.

He led us into the middle drawing-room and turned on a single bulb in a wall bracket, which created just a little island of light amid the crowding shadows. Queer-shaped objects peeped out of the corners; a shrouded harp, a statue on a pedestal with a sheet thrown over it and tied around its middle.

On either side opened a wide archway revealing a yawning pit of blackness beyond. To my disordered imagination the ceiling looked a hundred feet high. Our motley crew of masqueraders were like a little company of ghosts stealing through some long-deserted hall.

Jackie glanced around her, and fell to shivering. "What did you bring me here for?" she whimpered. "I want to go home."

"I reckon you're all wondering why I brought you here," said Mr. Punch suavely, "and you're certainly ent.i.tled to know. This is it. It's up to us to discover amongst ourselves who shot George Danforth, so that we all won't have to suffer for the crime of one."

George Danforth! The name rang familiarly in my mind. Then suddenly I recollected that George Danforth was butler at the Creighton Woodleys' when the big jewel robbery took place. So Mme. Storey's caprice in attending the butlers' ball was something more than a caprice.

IV.

We four women were shown into a dressing-room on the first floor of the mansion to tidy up after our strenuous escape from Webster Hall. Naturally Mme. Storey and I did not unmask in the presence of the others. Those two, masked also, would not approach within a yard of each other. Suspicion divided us all. My employer and I lingered in the room until they had gone out, so that we could have a word or two together. What a relief it was to raise our masks!

"Are you scared, Bella?" she asked, smiling.

"You know I am," I answered tartly. "So there's not much use in denying it."

There was a telephone in the room. She took down the receiver and listened. "Dead," she told me, hanging up again.

"Where do you suppose Crider is?" I asked nervously.

"Heaven knows!" she said. "I couldn't foresee any such outcome as this, and he has no instructions to cover it. The poor fellow will be wild with anxiety.... We may solve our case through this accident," she went on thoughtfully, "but it's risky--it's risky!"

"Oh, what does a jewel robbery matter beside a murder?" I said, shuddering.

"It's all part of the same thing," she said gravely.

I stared. "Do you know where we are?" I asked. She shook her head. "I thought I knew most of the great houses in New York, but I've never been in this one. There can't be many of the type left. It's on Fifth Avenue, I should say, and probably it's somewhere in the Sixties. We'll dope it out before we leave. Ha!" she cried, suddenly pointing to the telephone instrument; "there's our clue! The telephone number is Buckingham 4-3773."

"But you can't go through the telephone book looking for that number!" I objected.

"I won't have to," she said, tapping the directory. It had been slipped inside an elaborately tooled leather cover which bore a big V on the front. "Undoubtedly the family initial," she said.

The Social Register lay beside the telephone book, and Mme. Storey picked up the blue volume as affording a narrower field for her search. Almost immediately she said: "I have it! A. A. Vandegrift. I was nearly right. This house is on Madison instead of Fifth, and behind St. Patrick's Cathedral. We have often pa.s.sed it!"

"What does Vandegrift do?" I asked.

"Do?" she said, smiling. "He's a rich man of the third generation. He sits in a window of the Union Club during the rare periods when he favours New York with his visits and complains that times are not what they were."

"It's too bad the Social Register doesn't give the butlers' names, too," I suggested.

"I know it now, without that!" she said. "Crider told me that the president of the Butlers' a.s.sociation was the Vandegrifts' butler. His name is Alfred Denby. That identifies Mr. Punch. We are making headway, my dear."

"We'd better go out or they'll be getting suspicious," I said, nervously.

"Just one moment! Mr. Punch, I take it, is preparing to hold a sort of hearing. I want you to testify against Abdullah."

"But I don't know anything against him."

"Then make something up. You'll see why later. And don't mind if I get you all tangled up on cross-examination. I don't want them to suspect we're working together."

We adjusted our masks and left the room.

Mr. Punch had placed a little table for himself under the single light in the middle drawing-room. He sat behind it on a sofa with six chairs in linen covers ranged in a semi-circle before him. It was certainly the most grotesque court ever held--if you could call it a court: Mr. Punch and six mummers. But all the fun had gone out of this mummery. The partic.i.p.ants were distracted with grief, fear and suspicion.

He began in his suave and reasonable voice: "Abdullah--or whatever your name may be--all the evidence seems to point to you as the one who shot George Danforth. But we want to give you every chance. Have you got anything to say for yourself?"

"I didn't do it!" cried Abdullah. "I had no gun!"