Читать книгу Name Your Poison - Helen Inc. Reilly - Страница 4

A STRANGE CROP OF FUNERALS

When Julie got to the Biltmore at half-past six that evening Brian was waiting for her. She had never been so glad to see him before. He would have been at Mouse’s wedding, only that he had to fly to Washington and his plane back to New York wasn’t due until five forty-five. He had called her from the airport before leaving. She had been afraid he would be late on account of the weather, but he wasn’t. He was standing near the head of the main staircase when she crossed the pavement where the rain was freezing as it fell, and pushed her way through the revolving doors.

The very sight of him was warming. Tall and loosely built, his lean, tanned face bore the intangible marks of intellect and humor. The introspective quality of his gray-green eyes set widely under a thoughtful forehead was balanced by the decision of his lightly squared jaw and his firm-lipped mouth.

More than one pair of eyes turned interestedly on the meeting of the tall man with a briefcase under his arm and the slender dark girl in furs, her small vivid face glowing beneath a tiny silver fox tricorn.

“Hello, honey,” Brian said, taking her arm. “Well, how did it go off?”

When he smiled at her like that, it made Julie feel safe and happy. She needed to feel safe; she had been more badly shaken than she had realized. “Wait,” she said rather breathlessly, “wait until I tell you.”

Ensconced in a niche in the lounge strewn with little tables and sofas and chairs and low lamps, with birds in cages swinging between the archways and filling the air with their soft soprano twittering, a vermouth in front of her and Brian sipping a Martini, Julie did tell him. Brian laughed at her—at first, anyhow.

“Bill Conroy went to the house, saw Mouse, gave her flowers and Mouse was upset—so what?”

“The little box that had the flowers in it was gone, darling. Why should anyone take it?”

“A servant—”

Julie shook her head. “I asked. Besides, if one of the caterer’s men or Mrs. Racker removed the box, why leave the flowers messing up the floor?”

“Was there anything in the box besides flowers?”

“Nothing that we could see, except the torn card.”

“Did you ask Frances about it?”

Julie said she hadn’t had a chance as Frances had had to go on to a cocktail party.

Brian said, “Well, if you’d like my opinion I think you’re making a mountain out of a molehill.”

Julie tried to tell herself that he was right, and presently they forgot about Mouse and Joe Westing and began to talk about the most engrossing topic in the world, themselves.

Brian was married, but he and his wife had been separated for years. Julie knew nothing concerning the first Mrs. Moore, except that he had been unhappy with her and that she had left home. He had never bothered about getting a divorce until he and Julie met, when he had started. proceedings in Connecticut, on the grounds of desertion. As soon as the decree was granted they were going to be married, quietly and without fanfare. He had a house in New York, a tiny house in a backwater off Morton Street that had belonged to his father, but he spent most of his time at his place at Hoydens Hill near that of Frances and Sam Ashe, so there had been no difficulty about establishing residence. Julie had a cottage on the Hill too. She had taken it the previous summer and had kept it on because she loved the place. Free-lance fashion illustration plus a small income let her live anywhere she wanted to. Brian’s divorce would become final in nine days, and on the morning of the tenth day they were going to be married.

Until his departure for Washington they had kept the news strictly to themselves. It was Brian’s idea. He had said, “It’s nobody’s business but our own, sweet—let’s not tell anyone until it’s an accomplished fact. You know what people are. They’d be all over us, and we’ve both got work to do.” Julie hadn’t minded. In a way it had been rather fun. She had let the cat out of the bag inadvertently to Frances that morning. She told Brian about it and he said resignedly, “Well, I suppose they’d have to know soon, anyhow.”

If Julie hadn’t been occupied with another train of thought she might have weighed his answer more carefully. But recollections of Mouse had erupted again—Mouse and Rosetta. She said, frowning at the white cap of a chef bent over a neighboring table, “That was funny, Brian.”

The chef reached them and Brian took two sausages, handing Julie one. “What was funny?”

Julie ate the sausage absently as she felt her way through imponderables, trying for exactness. “Frances,” she said slowly, “was doing the, mantelpiece in the living-room when I told her about us. She turned, and her elbow hit the clock and it fell and the glass broke. I was beside the door. There was a broom and a dustpan in the hall. I opened the door. Mouse was standing outside. She looked—queer. Not as if she’d just come downstairs but as if—I know it sounds peculiar—she’d been there for some time. The worst of it was that Rosetta was watching her. She was halfway up the stairs and she ran up the rest of the way and out of sight the moment I opened the door.”

Brian frowned. “You mean that Mouse was listening to you and Frances—deliberately?”

“That was the impression I got but, oh, it’s impossible.”

“Well, let’s hope she didn’t suffer the common fate of eavesdroppers.”

“I don’t know,” Julie said unhappily. “Frances and I were talking about Mouse and Joe Westing earlier, and you know how Frances talks. It doesn’t mean anything, but Mouse isn’t used to it. Frances thought that Mouse and Joe both knew about Sarah’s will and that was why they didn’t marry sooner.”

“Frances is crazy,” Brian said with decision. “Mouse didn’t know. Or Joe Westing either. I was there when the will was read. Mouse expected Sarah to leave her something; she never expected to get the entire estate. She was knocked into a cocked hat.”

Julie gave a little sigh of relief. It had hurt her to think of Mouse as an eavesdropper. She wasn’t small or underhanded or curious. If anything, she was too direct and open and simple. Brian ought to know. He had been in Sarah’s confidence. The son of the man she would have married if she hadn’t sacrificed herself for her father, he was one of her executors. She was very fond of him and if anything had happened to Mouse, if she had died or run off with Bill Conroy, for instance, Brian would have inherited her estate.

“It was that house down there,” she said. “It—there’s something horrible about it—I can’t describe the effect it had on me.”

“You don’t need to, darling, I can see for myself. It seems to cast a spell over you. Forget about it. Don’t you want to hear the news?”

He had a flying license, and now that it was over he told Julie that while he was in Washington he had asked to be allowed to volunteer for active service and that his request had been summarily refused. “They say my carburetor’s more important than my carcass—want me to go on working on it. The devil of it is that I signed a contract last week with the Hamden Syndicate for ten engineering articles to be delivered within a month. I’d try to get out of it, tell them to go fish, only that we need the money, you and I.”

His tone was rueful and Julie’s fingers tightened on the stem of her glass. Was it Frances who had said, “Well, if you’re getting married, Brian will have to buckle down to work.” It was years since his wife had left him, and he had been a bachelor to all intents and purposes for a long while. If marriage was going to be a burden to him…

Brian looked at her with a smile in his eyes. “Go on, say it, get it out of your system. You don’t want an unwilling bridegroom; you won’t marry a man who doesn’t want to marry you.”

They both laughed. But Julie wasn’t altogether reassured. Brian had a disconcerting habit of reading her mind, and he disposed of her reactions rather too cavalierly, perhaps because they weren’t very important to him. If there was anything she hated it was being treated like a child.

He saw the cloud on her brow, dropped his idle tone and said in another voice, “Listen, my darling, with the world in the shape it’s in things are going to be tough, damn tough, for a long while. I don’t care about money for myself. I don’t need it, but I do care about it for you. I want to know that no matter what happens you’ll be all right, safe, provided for.”

Her hand was lying on the cloth. He put his over it. At what Julie read in his face, a lump came in her throat and she wanted to cry with pure happiness.

Afterward it seemed to her that that moment was the last outpost in contentment before the shadow fell. The dark blight of its full eclipse didn’t mature all at once, but the cold wind that preceded its slow remorseless advance began to blow.

They were talking about what they meant to do that evening when Brian was paged.

“Mr. Moore…Mr. Brian Moore…Mr. Moore…”

The singsong call was muted against the hum of a hundred voices and the faint twittering of the caged birds. Julie looked up, surprised. No one but Sam and Frances knew where they were, at least, she thought so, and Brian hadn’t been sure until he called her what time he was going to get back.

Brian was equally surprised at being paged. He said, “Who on earth…?” and signaled. He was wanted on the telephone. He got up with a frown and left the lounge.

He had been gone for some five minutes and Julie was beginning to be restless when Frances arrived. She had said she might stop in. She asked where Brian was and Julie told her. Frances dropped into a chair and threw back her mink coat. “I’m dead,” she declared.

She didn’t look it. She had been tired earlier in the day, and now she was almost brilliantly alive. Her narrow face was tinged with color and the unaccustomed flush on her thin cheeks under her soft gleaming hair gave her an unusual vivacity. She said, “Tea with lemon, waiter,” and lit a cigarette. “Some day I’m going to forget about my figure and eat and drink all I want,” she announced with a sigh. “If it weren’t that Sam hates fat so, I’d break down and do it this minute.”

Julie smiled. She had a shrewd idea that if Frances decided to get fat Sam would take it and like it. Before she had a chance to speak of the missing box that had contained Bill Conroy’s flowers, Sam unexpectedly hove into view. Julie wouldn’t have minded Sam, he was fond of Mouse and would understand her anxiety, but to her astonishment he had Rosetta Westing in tow. He said with a suffering side glance at Frances, “I lost the six-thirty and thought I’d have a drink. Rosetta and I bumped into each other in front of the coffee shop.”

Rosetta laughed her shrill girlish laugh. There was an explosive quality to it and she seemed excited. “I was going to meet a friend, but she didn’t come,” she explained. “I hope—hope you people don’t mind?” Her round pretty face was flushed and her black eyes were very bright.

Mouse had made Rosetta a present of the ensemble she was wearing. Frances had chosen it. Frances raised the jeweled lorgnette that was one of her latest toys and looked at Joe’s young sister critically through lenses of plain glass. There was nothing wrong with her sight. “You shouldn’t have that diamond clip on,” she said judiciously. “It spoils the neckline.” Rosetta wriggled and shifted in her chair. A deeper color dyed her peachy skin as she mumbled something about the clip being Joe’s present.

Julie felt sorry for her. Frances’s passion for excellence was all very well, but she shouldn’t demand too much. There was something else. It might have been the light, it might have been her own humming nerves, but there seemed to be something wrong with all three of them. It wasn’t only Rosetta; both Frances and Sam looked different, not as they usually did, Sam solid and genial, Frances poised and sure of herself in a world that provided her with unlimited amusement and diversion. The word “shaken” slid into Julie’s mind. Were they feeling the effects of Bill Conroy’s invasion of the narrow dark house on Twenty-second Street that afternoon? Did Rosetta know about it?

Brian was coming back. Julie glanced up at him when he reached the table, and a start went through her. His gray-green eyes were dark between compressed lids and his mouth was a hard tight line. She said on a quick breath, “Brian, what’s the matter? Who was it?”

He said carelessly, “Just Andrews, my old flying instructor. He wants to get in touch with some of the boys,” He said hello to the others and sat down.

Julie’s heart contracted. He wasn’t telling her the truth. Something had happened, something that had upset him badly. She suppressed a swift stab of alarm. When they were alone he would explain. She was going back to Hoydens Hill that night, and he was going to stay in the Morton Street house for a few days, but they would be together until he put her on the ten o’clock train.

“Weddings and rumors of weddings,” Sam said. “What’s this I hear about you two?” He and Frances congratulated Julie and Brian and reproached them with their secretiveness. “You shouldn’t have kept it from us, not that it’s any great surprise.” Rosetta was thrilled. She kept looking at Brian with her big black eyes. Julie was amused. Rosetta had evidently conceived a schoolgirl passion for Brian and he, quite as evidently, didn’t like it. Julie’s desire to get away from all of them gathered strength. She was correspondingly annoyed at the suggestion that was put forth.

Frances had been abstracted, sipping her sugarless tea and, looking around the room for acquaintances, she became suddenly gay. “Let’s not go home, Sam. Let’s make a night of it,” she proposed. “Let’s give these two a party—go to the theater and then have supper somewhere and dance. I feel like dancing.”

Julie looked at her. Frances hadn’t been cold exactly, but she hadn’t been particularly pleased when Julie first told her the news about Brian and herself. It was understandable enough. Brian was one of Sam’s and Frances’s oldest friends, and Frances had had a lien on his free time for years. When he was married it would be different. She was evidently trying to make up for her initial lack of enthusiasm.

“Say yes,” she urged. “We’ll go on the tiles. Care killed a cat—and that horrible house of Sarah’s and Mouse’s wedding almost killed me.”

Julie didn’t say anything. She waited for Brian to speak, confidently and with a little smile. Her smile froze. She and Brian weren’t going to have dinner alone together. Brian wasn’t going to the house in Morton Street. He said, “You can have your party, Frances, but not in New York. I meant to stay in town, but I find I’ve got to get back to the country. We’ll stop at the inn in Easton after we get off the train and have dinner. How’s that? All right with you, Julie?”

Adding it up afterward Julie knew that she should have been warned then. The discrepancies were glaring. Sam oughtn’t to have been in the Biltmore. He had intended to go straight home. Rosetta oughtn’t to have been there, either. As for Frances, she wasn’t a mercurial person and her changes of mood had been more than marked. Julie noticed none of these things consciously at the time. All she could think of was Brian, and the upset in their plans and his calm decision made without the slightest pretense of consulting her in advance, and of her own anger and resentment and hurt.

It came fast after that. Sam was looking at his watch. He pushed back his chair. “Come on, girls. Sorry to leave you, Rosetta, my pet, but we can make the seven-fifteen if we step on it.” Brian signaled to the waiter, took out a bill. “Yes, sir, thank you, sir.” He waved the man away, Julie rose without demur. It was then, as she turned to pick up her gloves and purse, that she saw the man and woman.

They were standing side by side in the mouth of the aisle that opened on the corridor to the right. Julie didn’t know the woman, noted nothing about her, except that she was tall and darkly handsome and wore a leopard-skin coat. The man was Bill Conroy. He looked much as he had looked that afternoon when he left Mouse tearing his flowers to pieces in Sarah’s study, handsome and sulky and in a bad temper. His attention had been focused on Mouse earlier. It was on her now. Thirty feet of space filled with seated figures intervened between them, but there could be no mistaking that deliberate, intent and prolonged scrutiny. Bill Conroy and his companion were staring, not at Rosetta or Brian or Frances or Sam, but at her.

Julie’s heart was beating thickly. Her anger had vanished. Another emotion took its place. The emotion was fear. None of the others appeared to have noticed Conroy. Rosetta was pouting over her half-finished cocktail and Frances was getting leisurely to her feet. Julie said on a breathless note, “Hurry, or we’ll be late,” put her back to the distant archway where Bill Conroy stood with the woman, and started precipitately for the exit under the clock, in flight, without knowing why or from what, for the second time that day.

There had been no police at the wedding, there were none at the funerals, at any of the funerals in point of fact. Before the second crop of those strange and dreadful removals matured, attention had shifted elsewhere. The first death took place two days after Margaret Tilden or Mouse, as she was called, married Lieutenant Joseph Westing in the Jennings house on Twenty-second Street. Alice Camber, a maid in the Hotel Sandringham, died suddenly while on duty. The hotel physician, a Dr. Mull, said heart, and let it go at that. Alice Camber was a married woman. She and her husband didn’t get along too well. Her sister put up a howl, mentioning insurance, and an investigation was ordered.

The facts that developed, however, were simple and clear and pointed at death from natural causes. Alice was a chambermaid and her wages were regular. Will Camber was an upholsterer’s assistant and his were not. On Saturday night, which was Alice’s night off, she was in the habit of taking home a bottle with which to smooth out the wrinkles in domesticity and create a temporary, if alcoholic, accord. She had done so on the Saturday preceding her collapse and death, which took place on the Sunday following. Unfortunately, on that particular Saturday night, Will Camber had also brought home a bottle out of the proceeds of a bill unexpectedly paid by a longstanding debtor. The union of two pints of rye followed the familiar pattern of headache, nausea and general debility on the inevitable morrow. Alice Camber reported for duty at the Sandringham at 9 a.m. on Sunday morning feeling, as she said, like “nothing on earth.” It was a grisly prophecy. At five in the afternoon she was dead.

Unfortunately, her body had been cremated. Except for that the inquiry was thorough. There were no attendant circumstances to arouse suspicion, and, at the end of twenty-four hours, “case closed” was written across the voluminous and careful report.

Alice Camber’s death didn’t go entirely unrecorded. Christopher McKee, the head of the Manhattan Homicide Squad, was an extremely busy man. World War I had graduated him from Army Intelligence into the New York Police Department via the appeal of the then commissioner for a trained criminologist. World War II had enormously increased the Scotsman’s responsibility—which was the continued safety of one of the few great cities left lighted in a darkening world.

Alice Camber picked herself from the day sheet dated November thirtieth and slid into a niche of McKee’s memory.

It was on December the second that the second casualty occurred. On that day a Mrs. Sally Fenway dropped dead at the feet of her hostess at a cocktail party in a Park Avenue apartment. Again heart was diagnosed. A friend who had been seated with Mrs. Fenway said that she had become ill after drinking a Martini. She had hoped that the illness would pass, but she had steadily got worse. When she went to ask her hostess, a Moira Jackson, to let her lie down some place and call a doctor, she had succumbed.

Mrs. Fenway was a wealthy widow with a home in Greenwich. She had come into the city to do some shopping on the two o’clock train and had then gone on to the party. She wasn’t strong anyhow. She had had stomach ulcers for years and wasn’t supposed to touch alcohol. Her death might have been written off as due to natural causes if Mr. Jackson, the husband of the woman giving the party, hadn’t died on the succeeding night in much the same fashion as his wife’s deceased guest.

That did raise a furor. Mr. Jackson, a cotton broker of fifty, was in blooming health when he sat down at the dinner table on his return from his office. Three quarters of an hour later he was dead. Christopher McKee went and saw. He acknowledged to himself ruefully that he didn’t conquer. He talked to Mrs. Jackson, he talked to Mrs. Fenway’s relatives, he talked to the guests who had been at the cocktail party and to the servants. At the end of twelve hours of intensive work he ended up where he had started, which was no place—except for the autopsies. Mrs. Fenway and the cotton broker had died of poison. The poison was hydrocyanic acid. There was no cyanide either in Mrs. Fenway’s Greenwich house or on her person; there was none in the Jackson apartment. There was no reason why either of them should have been killed. Yet they were both dead. Suicide was out of the question. Had they bumped into the chain lightning of practically instant annihilation by accident or was there design behind it?

Alice Camber marched out of McKee’s memory onto the stage. He went into the chambermaid’s death more closely and in person. Her symptoms, described in detail by two of her fellow workers, paralleled the symptoms that cyanide would have produced. He decided that there was a lethal link between the chambermaid, the wealthy social widow from Greenwich and the cotton broker of Park Avenue, a link that sprayed death from its hidden coils. The conclusion was obvious and terrible. There was a poisoner loose in New York, an unidentified and anonymous poisoner who struck right and left without ostensible discrimination, unchecked and at will.

The difficulties of isolating this killer were enormous. Neither Mrs. Fenway nor Mr. Jackson had ever been at the Hotel Sandringham nor had they known Alice Camber in any other setting. The Sandringham was a large and busy hotel with a transient trade, and Alice’s duties had brought her into contact with a number of guests. Except for a hangover, she was all right when she left home. It was from one or through one of the guests that she must have obtained the poison that killed her. A check on the Sandringham’s patrons was begun. Meanwhile, warnings were sent out to every precinct in the city to be on the alert for the first traces of a sudden illness. For one whole day nothing happened. Late on the afternoon of December the fourth the call for which McKee had been waiting and which he had been fearing came in. The poisoner had claimed a fourth victim. A woman had been stricken in the ladies’ room on the upper level in Grand Central Station.

She wasn’t dead—yet. The Scotsman was out from behind his desk and shoveling into his coat almost before the receiver settled into its cradle. Everything was in readiness. He said, “Pierson, Kent, Fellowes,” quietly, and the three men in the outer room jumped to their feet and followed the Inspector’s swift flight down the stairs and out into the bitter winter dusk of the dingy side street. The Cadillac was parked at the curb between the wan green lights. The detectives piled in. McKee said “Grand Central” to the man at the wheel and the long black car leaped forward.

“You think it’s safe, Doctor?”

“As safe as it will ever be, Inspector.”

“You’re not going to be able to save her?”

“There’s a chance. It’s a very slight one.”

It was eight o’clock on the morning of December the sixth and more than forty hours had passed since the woman stricken in Grand Central had been hurried to the room in Bellevue that had been prepared in advance. The latest victim was a Mrs. Carpenter of Bridgeport, Connecticut, a comely, childless, well-to-do matron in her fifties. Her husband had been communicated with. He was confined to bed with a broken hip and hadn’t been able to get to his wife’s side, but McKee had talked to him by telephone.

The facts concerning Mrs. Carpenter were as meager and uninformative as those embracing the three previous victims. Mrs. Carpenter had come to New York on the morning of the day she was stricken to do some Christmas shopping. Her course had been easy to trace, from the packages she carried and those sent to her home: a succession of stores, luncheon at Schraftt’s, more shopping and resultant fatigue. She hadn’t been feeling well when she entered the women’s room. One of the attendants did remember that.

Alice Camber hadn’t been well, either, nor had Mrs. Fenway. Mr. Jackson, according to his wife, had also confessed to a slight headache on returning from the office. The Scotsman had already formulated a theory. It was only that. There wasn’t an iota of testimony with which to back it up. The other victims, Alice Camber, Mrs. Fenway and Mr. Jackson, had been dead when the police arrived on the scene and could tell no tales. It was a tale that had to be told; the necessity was commanding. Through the long night, pacing up and down the hospital corridor, McKee had waited for word that Mrs. Carpenter could be interviewed. His stenographer, Kent, was with him. McKee said, “I’ll be as brief as I can, Doctor,” and the doctor opened the door and the two officials entered the white-walled room.

The Scotsman was shocked at what he saw. Cyanide isn’t kind to its takers. He stood on one side of the high white bed, Kent on the other. The doctor was beside Kent, a nurse flanked McKee.

“Mrs. Carpenter,” the Inspector spoke softly to the woman lying on pillows, her wasted face a sharp skeleton mask. “Will you tell us what happened to you?” He repeated the question half a dozen times. It was a horrible thing to have to do; it had to be done.

At first there was no response. Then a change came over the suffering mask. It was very slight. The blue lips moved. No sound came through but the hand on the coverlet, cyanosis tinging it, was lifted. Mrs. Carpenter tried to touch her forehead with fumbling blue fingers.

He had been right. McKee said to Kent, “Headache,” and, as Kent wrote, he said more loudly to Mrs. Carpenter, “You were in the waiting-room at Grand Central and you were tired from shopping. You had a headache, and someone gave you something for your head.”

The slightest sketch of a nod rewarded that.

“The person who gave you the medicine was a friend, someone you knew?”

No response.

“It was a stranger who gave you the medicine. The stranger was a woman. You met this woman in the ladies’ room while you were waiting for your train.”

Nod again.

“Mrs. Carpenter…” McKee paused. To ask a dying patient to describe a perfect stranger with the wealth of detail that would be necessary, if a successful search and identification were to be made, was an almost hopeless task. The Scotsman took it in sections, relying on trial and error and on Mrs. Carpenter’s constantly weaker response or lack of it to keep him on the right track. At the end of three quarters of an hour he had established that the medicine given to the woman in the bed wasn’t a liquid and that the poisoner was neither young nor old, had black hair and was tall. Just before coma set in Mrs. Carpenter unexpectedly spoke. The blue lips parted. The eyes fastened on the ceiling were almost sightless but the sick woman struggled. A single syllable finally issued from her wrenching throat. It was “pod” or “perd.”

They had done all they could there in that room. McKee returned to the office. He studied Kent’s notes. He forgot the others, Alice Camber and Mrs. Fenway and Mr. Jackson, and concentrated on Mrs. Carpenter, fiercely. Pod…Perd…Pardon? She wasn’t a woman who would have had to ask forgiveness; she had neither the make-up nor the temperament for it. He put prefixes in front of the broken syllable she had uttered. He put suffixes after it. Late, very late that night, it came to him, sailing into memory like a kite out of the blue. He had been questioning Mrs. Carpenter about the poisoner’s clothing, and Mrs. Carpenter hadn’t answered at all. And then from the depths of her immobility she had brought up that single syllable. That was what it was, a syllable, part of a word, he was sure of it.

Busy transcribing his notes at the far end of the long, narrow room Kent started and jumped when the Scotsman sent a line of Keats drifting though the smoke-laden air. What McKee said was, “Striped like the leopard, spotted like the pard…‘Lamia,’ I think.” He reached for the phone.

Long before the latest victim had joined the others who had traveled the same path, McKee and the entire police department of New York City had begun looking for a tall dark woman in her thirties who had been in Grand Central between a quarter of five and a quarter past on the afternoon of December the fourth and who had worn a leopard coat.