Читать книгу One of us is a Murderer - Alan Le May - Страница 4

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“Old Immunity,” mumbled Buck Loftus. “Just as he gets back to so-called civilization again—he gets his.... Old Immunity!”

Buckner Loftus was the only one who called Harry Blackburn Old Immunity. It was true that Blackburn had been uncommonly immune to fever, and those other tropic ailments that have always been the chief weapons of the South American jungle in holding back the white frontier. But he was not old; a young man of twenty-three, quiet to the point of being dull company, and very serious-minded and wrapped up in his work.

A certain irritation, perhaps, was behind that mocking nickname Buck had applied to him. Harry Blackburn had been immune to a lot of things besides disease. He had been immune to any comprehension of danger, or any awareness of the exotic atmosphere of the tropics, which has always made such an impression on the other exiled young men. If he reacted to anything but geology, I don’t know what it was.

I can see him yet, an inoffensive, middle-sized young man whose steel-rimmed glasses made a red mark across his perpetually peeling nose, and whose plump cheeks the tropics could not gaunt. He walked through the heart of tropic jungles in a weathered Panama hat, set too high on his head, and cloth puttees which wrapped baggy trouser legs in clumsy bunches about his ankles. And he held the irritating theory that no one who took proper care of himself ever became diseased.

And now—all those out-of-place effects of his were over with, finished.

“Old Immunity,” said Loftus again; “just back to so-called civilization.”

Jane bit her lips, half suppressing a long quivering sigh. I pressed her hand for a second, and found it cold and trembly.

Loftus and I carried Harry Blackburn into the house, clumping heavily over the sounding floors, and laid him on Buck’s bed. Then Buck’s voice roared, reverberating through the house:

“All right, you birds! Come out of it! Something’s happened here!”

Heneshaw came floundering out of his net again, full of sleepy questions, and very sketchily clothed. Suddenly he noticed that Jane Corliss was in the room; and he modestly dived back under his mosquito cloth, from whose foggy concealment he did not again emerge until he was full dressed.

When I had lit two more lamps I had a moment in which to run an eye around the main room, a worn-out looking place, not overly large. The walls, like the whole construction of the house, were of the cheapest wood obtainable there—which happened to be excellent mahogany, poorly finished, and now warped and discolored with the damp.

Half a dozen sad-looking reed chairs, a roll-top desk at which Heneshaw transacted his mostly imaginary business, a table, a phonograph stand, a water cooler, Heneshaw’s net-draped cot, a shelf with a few moldy books and a wooden figure carved by the Choco—every detail seemed to be just as I had last seen it the evening before. Only—something on the book shelf did not look just as I had expected. At first, however, I could not decide what this was.

What had moved through the bedroom, between Buck’s cot and mine, its feet silent on that creaky floor? Where had it gone? At front and rear of that main room were the doors opening onto the broad galleries. In the left wall of the room, as you entered from the front, were two doors: one opening into the room where slept Lucretia Heneshaw, Phil’s wife; the other into the room where Doc Harmon and Charley Walker were now sleepily blundering about, trying to get dressed.

On the right were the doors of three rooms. First, the corner room which Jane occupied; then a small windowless storeroom; and finally, at the rear, the room I shared with Buckner Loftus.

I had seen a crouching figure enter this main room. By one of these doors it had evidently made its exit. Presumably it had not used the gallery doors; rushing into the house then directly out again—what would have been the sense to that? I went to Lucretia Heneshaw’s door, and called to her through the panels.

“Mrs. Heneshaw—are you all right?”

“Ye-es!” A tone of ill-natured irritation.

Crossing the room, I thrust open the door of the store room. The lamplight pushed reluctantly into the black windowless closet, showing crates, boxes, a floor covered with dust. Nothing had entered here.

Buck Loftus now walked out of our room, where he had laid Blackburn, and stood close in front of me. His big shoulders stooped a little: he was accustomed to talking down to people in that overbearing way he liked. Some of the antagonism between Buck and me may have arisen from the fact that I was too tall for him to talk down to. He was much the more powerful man, but he had to straighten up to look me in the eye, just the same.

“Did you notice the color of Blackburn’s skin?” he asked in his heavy undertone.

I nodded.

“Black as your hat,” he muttered.

“Poison—or strangulation,” I said.

“Poison,” he said dogmatically. “There’s a blowgun dart under his right ear.”

“I saw it.”

As I studied the room again, still thinking of little except that crouching form that had passed so near me in the dark, Flatfoot Charley Walker appeared at the door of the room he shared with Doc Harmon. He stood buttoning his shirt in the shadow; and I had a swift impression that he had been watching me for several moments as my eyes traveled the room. He came out now.

He had said he was a rubber buyer, this Walker. This was peculiar, for at that time there was no rubber production, to amount to anything, in the Choco. Still, I knew he might have been telling the truth. There aren’t many places that harbor as many useless comings and goings, in proportion to almost no population, as the Caribbean coast.

Walker looked like nothing so much as a New York harness bull very recently shifted over into the plain-clothes division. When he wore a Panama hat he contrived to give it a chunky look, so that it had the effect of an iron derby. His shirts were loudly striped, his clothes dark and weighty-looking. He had big, hard-looking pads of cheeks, which deprived him of all expression; insolent, unreadable black eyes, with the whites showing beneath, and a small, thick-lipped mouth which in its typical state clamped a cigar butt in one drawn-down corner.

“Blackburn’s got a blowgun dart under the ear,” I told him.

“All up?”

“Yes.”

Doc Harmon, the fat driller, now appeared behind him. Harmon’s presence here was better accounted for: he was here to meet Blackburn, having been sent by the Laguna Oil Company which employed them both. For two weeks he had been waiting for Blackburn to return from the jungle. He was a blowsy, paunchy man, red-eyed and puffy, with purple jowls.

“You don’t mean he’s——” Harmon wheezed.

“Dead as a flounder,” said Loftus.

Walker took a lamp into the bedroom where Blackburn lay. Heneshaw and Harmon followed him, but these two were not in there very long.

“He can’t have been dead more than fifteen minutes; less maybe,” Harmon said. He always tried to live up to the “Doc”—or perhaps he had earned the nickname that way.

Flatfoot Charley Walker was the last out. Afterward I wished that I had been with him; or at least noticed exactly how long he had been in that room with Harry Blackburn, alone. When he came out he had the dart in his fingers, and stood testing the point with his thumb. The little weapon looked innocent enough: a polished sliver three inches long, with a tuft of downy feathers at the blunt end, was all it was.

Now I took the time to make an examination of my own. Three minutes convinced me that there was nothing further I could learn in this way. When I returned to the main room Heneshaw was speaking in a dry, unsteady voice.

“He paid off his canoe boys yesterday. Up river Indians, every one of them. A treacherous breed. Evidently one of them crept back, and shot from the cover of the bamboo; a finger hole would have let the dart into the net. And a stalking Choco buck could touch the net, where Blackburn had it, without leaving the cover of——”

“He shot from the clearing side,” I said.

“Why?” said Walker.

“Because,” I said, “Blackburn always slept on his back; he thought it was a more healthful position. His head was to the east.”

“How do you know?” Walker snapped so abruptly that I looked him over before I answered.

“I looked into the net; his canvas coat was rolled up and laid in the east end of the hammock. I don’t suppose he put it there as a pillow for his feet. The wound is on the right side, which would have been toward the clearing.”

“The body was found in the hammock?” asked Heneshaw.

“Twenty or thirty feet away,” said Loftus.

“Then—he must have been shot outside his hammock!”

“Then who ripped the net?” I asked. “It’s ripped wide open—with a knife—on the clearing side. The dart could have been put in through a finger hole, as you say.”

“You can’t account for what one of those Chocos will do,” said Heneshaw vaguely.

At this point Mrs. Heneshaw joined us. She, for one, showed no trace of sleep. There were dark smudges under her eyes, but these were always there, giving her eyes a tragic look contradicted by the sharp petulance of her features. She must have been in her thirties—much younger than her husband certainly. But she looked much older than she was, with her skin roughened and darkened by the punishing tropic heat, which she and Phil had now endured together for some years.

“It seems, dear,” said Phil Heneshaw gropingly, “that Harry Blackburn has met with a——”

“I’ve heard everything that’s been said,” said Lucretia irritably. “You don’t have to repeat it all.”

Walker was staring at me again with those blank black eyes. The cigar butt had reappeared in the corner of his small crooked mouth.

“You notice quite a lot, don’t you?” he said to me.

I took a chance. “What were you doing in my room at two-ten?” I asked him.

“What’s this now?” Walker demanded.

Everyone was looking at me now, and there was a silence; but Walker stood fast, without sign of any kind, and my eyes could not bear his down. I repeated my story about the silent figure that had gone through my room.

“It was just before that——” said Jane suddenly; then caught herself.

“What is it, kid?” Loftus prompted her.

Jane Corliss was silent.

Walker put on a great air of frankness. “Folks—” he might have been a politician, a ward heeler smoothing out recalcitrant votes—“folks, I think we need to lay our cards on the table here. I think we each one of us has got to tell what he knows about what’s going on here to-night. All right, Janey—what was it, now?”

“Who told you to call Miss Corliss ‘Janey’?” I exploded.

He let me have a long stare. “Miss Corliss, then. This isn’t no time to get snooty, is it?”

Heneshaw broke in. Now that he seemed fully awake he was himself once more—just a shabby, gentlemanly old chap, tired and discouraged, but hospitable still, as we were accustomed to know him.

“Why are we all on edge?” he remonstrated. “Mr. Macgregor possibly imagined a shadow. Don’t you think you might have, Joe? This tragedy has unnerved us all. We are all greatly shocked that this terrible thing has happened to a friend who was very dear to some of us. But after all, what hope is there of learning anything about an unseen native——”

“Harry Blackburn,” Walker interrupted heavily, “wasn’t bumped by no native.”

He dropped his voice. His flat expanse of cheek, his small arrogantly pouched mouth, were unchanged. But though his eyes were expressionless too, I have never seen a more baleful stare than Walker’s as he let his eyes go slowly from one to another. “Blackburn was killed by somebody in this house to-night.”

From Lucretia Heneshaw there broke a sharp, breathy little cry. Then she clapped the back of her hand to her mouth, so that all we could see was her horrified eyes, with those tragic black smudges under them.

“You think——” boomed Loftus.

“I know.”

“Oh, you know something yourself, do you?” Doc Harmon, the fat driller, broke out irascibly.

“I’ll say I do.”

I almost grinned at the rubber buyer, there was such a slow theatrical menace in his voice. I wished, though, that I could better read those slow black eyes.

“I know,” he repeated.