Читать книгу Dead Man's Hat - Footner Hulbert - Страница 6

Table of Contents

They got into a taxi at the door. Paula said to the driver:

“Put us down at the corner of Second Avenue and Forty-ninth Street.”

Little was said during the short drive. Dave tucked Paula’s arm under his own, and murmured, happily:

“Isn’t it nice to be driving in the dark?”

“If that was all!” she answered, sadly.

When they got out, Dave looked around him, surprised at the character of the neighborhood—the rusty elevated railroad running overhead; the ancient, sordid tenement houses on every side. Paula read his thoughts.

“I live on the corner of First Avenue,” she said. “It’s better over there. But I didn’t want to drive up to the door.”

They walked through Forty-ninth Street, which was like a canyon between the tall, dark tenement houses on either side. Late as it was, some of the little stores were still dimly lighted, and a few hoodlums stood about on the sidewalk, eyeing them curiously as they passed.

Halfway through, Dave looked back. Down near Second Avenue he thought he could distinguish the flirt of the dark girl’s red skirt.

As they approached First Avenue the neighborhood improved. Tall, modern apartments were being built on both sides of the wide street, and it was rapidly becoming one of the best sections of the city. It was a main automobile thoroughfare, and taxis were still running up and down.

A hundred feet short of the corner, Paula stopped. “Can you ... can you walk up fourteen flights of stairs?” she stammered.

Dave laughed in surprise. “Sure!” he said. “My heart action’s good.”

“Ah, don’t laugh at me!” she murmured. He discovered that her hands were icy cold.

“Listen,” she went on. “It will be all right with mother to have you come in, but the doorman would think it strange. That’s why I didn’t want to drive up to the door.” She pressed a key in Dave’s hand. “There’s only one man on duty after midnight. When he leaves the door he locks it. Let me go in first, and while he is taking me up in the elevator, you let yourself in and come up the stairs. Our apartment is Fourteen C.”

“Okay,” said Dave.

All was carried out according to her plan. Dave gave her a half-minute’s start of him, and then crossing the empty foyer of the apartment house, opened a door to the stairs at the back. In these modern houses the stairs are built in a fireproof well from cellar to roof, with steel doors on every floor. They are intended as a fire escape, and are rarely used otherwise. Dave plodded up the entire fourteen flights, hearing, seeing nothing.

On the fourteenth floor the door marked C was almost opposite the stair door. Paula had left it a little ajar behind her, and Dave walked in. She was waiting for him, looking pale and drawn under the lights. Helping him off with his overcoat, she led him across a little foyer into a long living-room, warm and inviting with its deep cushioned seats and shaded lamps.

“After Mrs. Bradley’s boarding-house this is like heaven,” said Dave.

To his surprise, he saw her shiver slightly. She said between stiff lips, “Wait here for a moment until I get mother ready to receive you.”

Left alone, he looked around him with a smile. Everything seemed exactly right—rugs, pictures, the way the lamps were arranged beside the easy-chairs. Not too much of anything. He saw Paula’s hand in all. In fact, the room was Paula. It started a daydream in his mind.

The physical plan of the room was simple. In the end wall farthest from the door were two windows looking down on Forty-ninth Street, flanked on either side by doors in the side walls. There was a third door near the back corner of the room. In the middle of the right hand wall was a wood-burning fireplace with a deep sofa in front of it.

Paula returned to the foyer and beckoned him. As they went through a short passage she whispered:

“Don’t let her see that we have any troubles.”

She opened a door admitting Dave into a rosy-colored bedroom that had no suggestion of a sick-chamber. A middle-aged lady was sitting up in bed, wearing a pink negligée, and smiling delightfully. Her hair was gray, her thin face marked with the lines of laughter, her eyes, blue like Paula’s, full of life.

“Hello, Mr. Westover!” she said, holding out her hand. “It was nice of you to come and see an old woman like me.”

“I’m afraid it’s pretty late to pay a call,” said Dave.

“Oh, time was made for slaves,” said Mrs. Wrenn, with a wave of her hand. “It’s all right with me because I can sleep all day, but I expect it will be hard for you to get up in the morning and go to the bank.”

“It’s worth it!” said Dave.

“Nice man! ... He’s a big fellow, isn’t he?” she added to Paula.

They all laughed. “What do you expect?” asked Paula. “I don’t care for pygmies.”

In that room Paula could smile, too. There was no hint of pain or foreboding in her eyes now. In the interim she had rubbed a little rouge in her cheeks to help her get away with it.

“And very good-looking,” said Mrs. Wrenn, with sly humor.

“Oh, spare his blushes!” said Paula. “He’s a modest man.”

“Why should I? The blush is becoming. And I reckon he likes it, anyhow.”

“Of course I do,” said Dave.

“That’s right. I always speak my mind, and I expect everybody else to. Sit down on the edge of the bed and tell me all your hopes and fears.”

“My hopes are that I’ll be allowed to come often,” said Dave, “and my fears are that I’m going to be chucked out immediately.”

“Not by me,” said Mrs. Wrenn, laughing. “Paula is the dragon here. I love company by night or by day. I tell Paula I’d be much better off in the public ward of a hospital where I’d have all kinds of comical patients around me, and people coming and going at all hours; but she won’t hear of it.”

“I couldn’t see you there but once a week,” said Paula. “They don’t allow visitors at night.”

“As it is, she’s a slave to her invalid,” Mrs. Wrenn went on. “She has to run home every day at noon to feed me, and at night I can’t drive her out.”

“Well, you’re pretty good company,” said Paula.

“Of course I am, but you need a change occasionally.”

“Well, here’s Dave Westover for a change.”

“Dave’s all right,” said Mrs. Wrenn. “You know,” she added to him, “Paula tells me about everything down at the bank. I feel as if you were all my friends. There’s the fellow whose desk is next to yours, the long-legged one who lopes like a kangaroo.”

“Bill Fielder,” said Dave, laughing.

“Where’s Bill tonight?”

“Listening to the feathers.”

“You must bring him with you sometime.”

“I will.... What did Paula say about me?”

“Now, mother,” said Paula, warningly.

“I must tell him,” said Mrs. Wrenn. “I want to see his face when he hears it.”

“Good God! What’s coming!” said Dave.

“Paula said you reminded her of a wild horse among the adding-machines. She was always looking for you to tromple them.”

They laughed together.

When Paula led him out a little while later, Dave said, “She doesn’t seem like a sick woman.”

“She doesn’t suffer,” said Paula. “It’s her heart. She can’t get out of bed. Any exertion would be fatal. Or a shock.”

“What a swell mother-in-law she would make!” murmured Dave.

Paula appeared not to hear him.

The heat had been turned off for the night, and a chill was spreading through the rooms. The ever-present hum of the city streets was dying down at last. New Yorkers are not conscious of it until it stops. An unnatural silence filled the air.

There were two doors between bedroom and living-room, and Paula closed them carefully as they passed through. When they got into the big room Dave was shocked by the change in her face. Her eyes had a frantic expression; the spots of rouge looked as if they had been plastered on her pale cheeks.

“Paula, are you ill?” he cried.

Neither of them noticed that he had used her first name.

She shook her head. “It’s just the strain ... of trying to hide things from her,” she murmured. “I can’t keep it up!”

“You don’t have to now,” he urged. “Tell me what the trouble is. She can’t hear.”

Paula dropped on the sofa and covered her face. “It’s too terrible, too terrible! I don’t know what to do!”

“Tell me!”

“Can’t you feel it?” she murmured, wildly. “It fills the place!”

He glanced around him, half infected with her terrors. The room looked as before. A little clock over the fireplace struck once, half past two, and both started.

“I see nothing wrong,” he said.

Her tormented eyes searched his face. “Tell me that you think I’m on the square,” she said, imploringly.

“I do!”

“I wouldn’t lie to you to save myself!”

“I know you wouldn’t!”

In the effort to get a grip on herself, she clenched her hands until the knuckles turned white. Looking straight ahead of her, she said, huskily: “When I came home at noon today ... I found ... I found ...” She pointed to a chair near the windows. Her voice scaled up hysterically. “In that chair. It was turned around the other way then. I found ...” Her face worked painfully. She was unable to speak further.

Dave covered one of her trembling hands with his. “It’s all right,” he said. “Tell me.”

“I can’t say the words,” she whispered.... “Look behind the door in the corner.”

When he stood up she gasped: “Oh, keep a tight hold on yourself! Don’t cry out!”

Dave, as pale as she was now, crossed to the back corner of the room. He laid a hand on the knob and, drawing a breath to steady himself, opened the door. When it was opened a light came on inside. He saw a deep closet with the usual household impedimenta neatly stowed away. But on the floor at his feet a grotesque kind of doll was huddled with waxen flesh and open, sightless eyes. A middle-aged man doll with sparse faded hair all awry on his skull, and his arms and legs sticking out awkwardly.

Dave closed the door softly and leaned against it, trying to get his breath. There was a long silence in the room.

From the sofa came Paula’s pitiful husky whisper.

“Oh, say something! Say something!”

Dave opened his mouth, but no sound came out.

“I didn’t do it!” she wailed. “I didn’t do it!”

“I didn’t think you did,” he muttered.

He returned to the sofa, moving like a sleep-walker with blank eyes. Paula was stretched at full length, face down, shaking all over in violent hysteria, but making no sound. A frightful effort must have been required to hold in her cries.

“Oh, let it come out,” he said, pityingly.

“I can’t!” she gasped. “She would hear!”

Sitting on the end of the sofa, he laid the flat of his hand between her shoulders to steady her. Gradually she quieted a little.

“He was all slumped down, half in the chair, half on the floor,” she said, in a toneless, hurrying voice. “There’s a dagger sticking in his back. The handle’s broken off. Blood all over the seat of the chair, and the rug. I had to get some material and recover the chair in a hurry. Does it look all right? ... Does it look all right?”

“Like a professional job,” said Dave, glancing at the chair.

“I scrubbed the rug and put a little rug over the place to hide the wet spot.”

“That was wrong. It won’t dry that way. You should put something under the big rug to hold the wet place clear of the floor.”

Another silence.

“How could he have got in here when you were out?” asked Dave.

“I always leave the latch off, so that if mother needed help somebody could get in to her. The telephone’s beside her bed.”

“Could he have known that the door would be open?”

“I suppose he tried it. He’s been here before.”

“Then you know him!”

Silence from Paula.

“Who is he?”

Her reply was scarcely audible. “My father.”

“O my God!” breathed Dave. His face sickened with horror.

“He means nothing to me,” said Paula. “He deserted us when I was a baby, and I haven’t seen him since, until just lately.”

“Does your mother know he came back?”

“She hasn’t seen him. She knows nothing about it.”

“What did he come back for?”

“To try to get money out of me.”

Dave’s face softened in pity. “What a swine!” he murmured. He leaned over the recumbent Paula and stroked her hair.

After a moment he asked, “Have you any idea who killed him?”

“No.”

“What was the nature of his business?”

“I suppose he wasn’t doing anything, because he had no money.”

“What did he used to do?”

“He was an actor.”

“Had he any enemies?”

“I know nothing about his life.... When I found him here, what was I to do?” she burst out, passionately. “If I had called in the police, the shock, the excitement would certainly have killed my mother. After all, he was her husband. She must have been fond of him years ago.”

“No, you couldn’t call in the police,” said Dave.

“What am I to do, then?”

“We’ll have to get him out of here somehow.”