Читать книгу One of us is a Murderer - Alan Le May - Страница 7

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We did not pan Walker, as he had suggested, when he was gone. After a moment or two there was a general stir of restlessness, and when Jane offered to make coffee I was glad to accompany her.

There was no kitchen. Instead there were cupboards, a cooler, and a wood stove on the screened rear gallery. These arrangements were partly shut off from the rest of the gallery by a chin-high partition, the other side of the gallery serving as a dining room. No one followed us as I picked up one of the lamps and lighted Jane’s way. I learned later why it was they chose to remain where they were.

The lamplight on the screen wire cut off all view of what was outside, and beyond in the dark; but I knew that thirty or forty yards away, to the rear, were the decaying grass huts toward which Walker had gone. I peered out, trying to glimpse his light among the huts, but could not.

When I had got a fire going in the little stove I leaned close to Jane, speaking in whispers.

“One thing’s certain,” I told her. “At the first daylight, you and I are going to hop off.”

She tossed me a little fearful glance. “What do you mean?”

“I mean to get you out of here. I’m shy of gas, but I can get to Laguna, and refuel there. We’ll be in Panama, or Cartagena, whichever you choose, by this afternoon. I recommend Panama; you’ll be more comfortable there than in Cartagena, until your father gets back. As for money, I can cable for it.”

Slowly she shook her head. “I—I can’t go.”

“In heaven’s name, why not?”

She was silent for so long that I thought she was not going to answer me; but at last she said, “I can’t tell you why.”

You can imagine, this rocked me back on my heels. “But do you realize——”

“Realize what?”

I hesitated. After all, what exactly was there to realize? We still knew so little about what was happening here.

“That there has been a murder to-night,” was all I could supply.

“Will you be leaving to-morrow?” she asked mechanically.

“Without you? You know better than that!”

Jane turned to the coffee pot.

“What is it you’re not telling me?” I asked again.

She gave me a tormented glance.

“Don’t you know that I——” I began.

“If the time comes,” she whispered, “when it will do any good, I’ll tell you what it is. But not now, Joe. Please don’t ask me again.”

I shifted ground, concealing my bitterness.

“What do you make of Walker?”

“Well—I was glad to see him stop harassing poor old Heneshaw. Anybody could see that Mr. Heneshaw couldn’t possibly—do anything like that!”

“That’s just the trouble,” I answered. “He could have done it.”

“You think——”

“I think there is nobody here to-night whose real character we know. Of course, you’ve lived with the Heneshaws nearly a month. But—well, what kind of a man is Heneshaw?”

“Quiet—very quiet; just a disheartened old——”

“Does anyone ever know a quiet man? For that matter, these free-running talkers, like Walker and Harmon, are just as bad. Their run of words acts as a smoke screen, and hides the truth. On top of that, there’s the effect the tropics have on a man. I tell you, this is a mad country, Jane, for North-bred men. I’ve been here three years, and I’ve seen enough of it to know that half the men down here are not their normal selves in this heat.”

Again I saw the startled spark show for a moment in Jane’s eyes. Suddenly I wondered exactly where Dan Corliss was. None of us definitely knew. Instantly I thrust the thought out of my head.

“There’s no one here that we can believe,” I went on. “None of them in there, for that matter, is ready to believe me.”

“Joe, are you certain of what you saw?” Jane asked slowly.

“Someone coming through my room, you mean?”

She nodded.

“Perfectly—there’s absolutely no question about it. What I saw would, under normal conditions, have been impossible. But to-night is not normal, in any way!”

“Very far from it.”

She carried cups and saucers into the house, and I followed her with the coffee pot and lamp. All during the simmering of the coffee there had been a dim flutter and cross-fire of talk going on in there. As I appeared, this ceased, and its place was taken by a silence which the small clatter of the china could not conceal. I set down the equipment.

“Well, come out with it!” I suggested.

Harmon, Loftus, and Heneshaw exchanged glances. Only Lucretia met my eye with an ironic gleam.

“Where,” said Heneshaw at last, “are Harry Blackburn’s notes? His field book, I mean?”

“In my back pocket, right now,” I answered.

“That was Harmon’s impression,” said Heneshaw; and Doc puffed his cigarette nervously.

“Impression hell,” I snapped. “You all knew he gave me his field book, to take to Laguna by plane so O’Hare could start the plot-out. You can look at it if you want to.” I tossed it onto the table.

“Much good to look at it,” said Harmon. “That boy was smart. He carried his base lines in his head. Maybe he reversed his compass card too, for all I know. But the upshot is, his notes are jargon. I know, because he tried them out on me, to see if I could read them. And I’ll say the man don’t live that can plot them out.”

Heneshaw picked up the field book—just a notebook bound in stiff, worn leather—and leafed it through incuriously. Its pages, I suppose, contained a score of maps, geologic and topographic; but those maps were in the form of cryptic notations only—“N20′—552 (paces),” and so on—long compact columns of compass points and distances. It was true that you could not convert those notes without the correct azimuths.

“There’s a chap back in the office that can plot Blackburn’s notes,” said Heneshaw. “O’Hare, isn’t it?”

“Naturally,” I said. “Why should he want me to fly his notes back ahead of him, unless there was somebody at Laguna who could plot them?”

At this point Walker came stumping in across the rear gallery; but, curiously, for the moment no one regarded him.

“I can’t see what this has to do with our problem,” said Heneshaw. “These notes could not possibly constitute a motive—at least not for murder—because they’re undecipherable, and we all know it.”

“Unless,” said Walker’s flat voice, “someone wished to intercept those notes before they were plotted out in Laguna. Lose them, huh? Or jim them up. No point to that with Blackburn alive. See it?”

“No,” I said. “If someone wanted to squelch the dope Harry was bringing out of the jungle he would have to eliminate both Harry and the book. And the book is still safe, and is doggone likely to remain so, I’ll tell the cockeyed river!”

What he was getting at was plain enough. I waited for it, and it came.

“Blackburn is dead; and his notes are safe—in whose hands?”

I looked from one to another of them, and none of them met my eye, not even Walker, now. I waited.

“Folks,” Walker went on, “you see, we now have something worth looking at: an honest-to-God motive. We don’t know what discovery Blackburn made, nor why anyone wants to head it off. We only know one thing: Joe Macgregor is the boy who has come up with the field book in his teeth.”

“And no one has tried to get it from him,” Harmon summed up.

“And no one had better,” I added, “if that’s what you’re getting around to!”

“It doesn’t happen to be,” Walker said, studying his cigar. The rubber buyer did not seem to be baiting me as he had the others, though whether this was complimentary, or ominous, I could not tell. “Macgregor, what did you do after you saw this—this spook go through your room?”

“I got up—as you perfectly well know,” said I.

“What then?” Walker’s eye ran around the circle of faces, but avoided mine.

“Buck came back from the water cooler.”

“Yeah,” said Walker slowly. “I heard that, too. Here’s two more members for your owl club, Professor. So many, many people taking little walks in the dark!”

“Well, and what of it?” demanded Buck belligerently.

“And you,” Walker turned on him, “you’re another that’s afraid of getting the issue confused, huh? So it was you I heard tramping around here—to the water cooler, of course. At about two o’clock,” he added. “Such coincidences!”

“What you’re losing sight of is this,” I objected: “this is an extremely hot night, even for the equator. I see nothing surprising if everyone here made a shift of some sort at an average of once an hour during the night. What surprises me is that anyone slept at all.”

“If anyone did, but me,” said Walker. “By the way, Buck, you didn’t see this here sinister figure rush in here from your room about then, did you?”

“Well—a board let out a squawk in here,” Buck grouched.

“Yeah. Well, that accounts for everybody but you, Mrs. Heneshaw.”

“I was asleep,” Lucretia snapped at him. “I’ve been in the tropics long enough not to be bothered by a little heat.”

“That’s rocking ’em, Sister.”

“Mr. Walker,” said Phil Heneshaw, with more menace in his voice than I would have thought he could achieve, “I advise you not to go too far.”

“Somebody around here has already gone too far, seems to me,” said the rubber buyer’s slow, flat voice.

“One other isn’t accounted for,” growled Buckner Loftus. “Who knows where you were, Flatfoot?”

“Nobody,” said Walker bluntly. “You haven’t got the least thing to tell you where I was. You don’t know if I heard what I said I heard, or seen what I said I seen. One after the other of you, I’ve pried admissions out of you all, and made you like it, yeah? Yeah!”

That was a thick-skinned man. He now chuckled explosively within himself, and picked up the coffee I had poured him, apparently unaware of the hostile stares that were centering upon him. I was the only one who grinned, tickled by the man’s rash impudence.

“Who made this coffee?” he demanded, shaking the pot. When Jane said, “I did,” he set his cup aside untouched, and poured himself a fresh saucerful from the pot. Then he sprawled in his chair again, sipping his coffee noisily, and ogling us all across the brim of the saucer with more self-satisfaction than I had ever seen in one man before.

With Walker silent a curiously static pause fell upon the group. He had at least furnished a certain driving investigative force. And though no one had appreciated his officiousness, no one seemed eager to take the lead in his place. After a minute or two of general silence I turned away.

“Walker wins round one,” I remarked; and went into my room to get shirt and shoes. I had not before wanted to take time for that, and was still wearing only the canvas trousers I had put on when I first got up. Loftus followed my example, and we rummaged in the dark for our clothes.

“We’ve got to squash this bird,” Loftus grumbled in my ear.

“Why?”

“He’s trying to hang this on you, you chump,” Buck growled. “And me too, for that matter.”

“Let him.”

When we returned to the main room I tried a new tack.

“You were gone some little time, Flatfoot, rounding up your peace-abiding sneak thieves,” I reminded him. “Where are they?”

“I don’t know where they are,” Walker answered.

“Master Mind turns in a blank,” grunted Loftus.

“I’m pretty near ready to believe your ghost story, Macgregor,” said Walker. “Every last one of those smokes has taken a powder.”

“A what?” demanded Heneshaw.

“A run-out powder, Professor,” explained Walker. “Your peace-abiding Christians have all lammed, to the last abider.”

It took a few moments for this to soak in. Loftus, still jabbing away at Walker, was first to comment.

“So right away you figure out that checks up with Joe’s story about somebody going through our room. Oh, my lord! I suppose you have it now that what he saw was the house boy and family, fleeing for their native jungle by the shortest route—in one window and out a couple of others!”

“That may be your theory,” Walker retorted. “But all I say is, one of those smokes must of saw something, and they all sloped for the tall while the sloping was fresh.”

“Can it be,” said Heneshaw, “that I was wrong about those servants? Why, I would have trusted any one of them with——”

“With his own hide. This was no bunch of iron-nerved redskin scouts, Professor. Many a one of these jungle boys has seen trouble start, and been twenty miles into the cover when it ended.”

“But what can we conclude?” went on Heneshaw, disregarding him. “Harry Blackburn is shot with a poisoned dart from a blowgun; and coincidentally the Choco servants and their families fade into the bush. We can only assume——”

“Assume that before they faded out they yanked this dart right out from under our noses by means of magical magnetisms known only to Choco voodoo doctors. Oh, gosh, Professor!”

“We’re getting no place,” objected Heneshaw irritably.

“We’re getting on toward morning, at any rate,” Doc Harmon wheezed. “Boys, I was never so glad to see daylight come on in my life!”

You could hardly say when the dawn began, so slowly did the first dim grayness seep into that black jungle clearing by the river; but the feel of dawn was in the air, and from the edge of the jungle sounded a clear metallic piping, the odd, harshly sweet call of a bird whose name I never heard.