Читать книгу The Narrow Cell - Ronal Kayser - Страница 11

. . . washed my mouth with soap and to this day that word makes me think of Pine Bros, tar soap.—THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF CATHERINE HOPE.

John Kenmore came to a stop; listening.

“Skunk-kitty,” the voice in the darkness said. “Dirty, nasty little skunk-kitty. That’s what you are, you drunken bitch.”

The words made up a meaning of violence and anger and reproach. Only the voice (a man’s) was not that kind of a voice. I-told-you-so, its tone said, and the only passion in the saying was a small lip-smacking note of triumph. That’s what you are, it said with a taste of relish on the tongue.

Kenmore was shocked. The lieutenant was used to the casually indecent vituperation of the lock-up and bullpen; but this struck the ear differently, it was genuinely and studiedly impure.

Unfortunately, he couldn’t see the speaker. The sound came from the rear, around the house corner, so that even by broad daylight he couldn’t have seen anything from where he now stood.

Kenmore, who had been heading toward the front door, veered his direction swiftly.

“Come on,” the voice said, quietly and almost soothingly. “Don’t stumble, don’t break your damned neck. Upsi-daisy, watch the step, you sow.”

Kenmore could subsequently testify to these words. What his testimony could not reproduce was the quality of the voice: its blend of pleasure and contempt, mockery and self-satisfaction. And of something else he could not define at all, but was surely evil.

He had overheard a blasphemy, the lieutenant thought. But he could not imagine the district attorney making anything out of that ancient and Biblical impiety. The incident was not to be that easily pinned down . . . “At 9:03 p.m., while proceeding across the tennis court in the direction of the house, the officer heard a sacrilege committed upon the back step—” no.

All the same, Kenmore knew something more than the skunk-kitty was being mocked.

Another figure, likewise arrested by the sound of the voice, loomed unexpectedly before the swiftly advancing lieutenant.

He heard a startled gasp.

And a flashlight blazed full upon him.

“John Kenmore!” Darwina Roydan’s voice exclaimed.

After that, of course, when Lieutenant Kenmore got around the house corner to the rear, the service porch back step was clear of everything except a trio of milk bottles.

Miss Roydan, not for the first time in her career, had outspokenly upset the beans. And Kenmore, not for the first time in his, proved himself a patient man.

After all, it was hardly her fault. Darwina, emerging by way of the front door, had been on her way to the guesthouse. She had simply not recognized him as he bore down toward her out of the night.

“Darwina,” said he, “will you come along, please. There’s something I want to ask you.”

Darwina Roydan, Sc.D., Ph.D., was Fellow of the American Zoophytical Society and the author of the renowned two-volume monograph on leucetta losange-lensis. Among marine biologists, Kenmore understood, her name was almost exactly synonymous with the leucet-tidae for the same reason that the name Einstein is popularly and practically synonymous with relativity.

“This carbon monoxide?” he asked. “How much is enough? A fatal concentration?”

“You mean in here?” Darwina’s hat (it resembled a Spanish galleon more than anything else) tacked sidewise and back again as she glanced around the guesthouse. “But concentration isn’t the point. It’s a question of saturation. So it doesn’t require any particular concentration. The process is absorption, the inhaled gas combining with the victim’s red blood cells, which it does about 250 times as readily as oxygen will.”

“Yes,” said Kenmore, “but how much—?”

“I’m trying to tell you,” interrupted Darwina, somewhat pedagogically. This was an impression furthered by her physical proportions. Darwina was almost Amazonian; she chanced to be one of the sturdiest distance swimmers on the Pacific Coast. Her eyes flashed with a vitality she was accustomed to harness for conversational purposes.

“I am trying to tell you,” said she, “it isn’t the concentration in the atmosphere, it’s the amount in the bloodstream. Death results from an eighty per cent saturation, but you could get that much eventually from the merest trace of the gas in the air—one part in 5000—if you breathed it long enough.”

“But how long?” said the lieutenant. “What’s certain here is that Bowling was alive as late as 7:20, and dead—at any rate unconscious—when I tried to reach him by phone at 7:31.”

Kenmore’s grey eyes wore a gleam of intense thought. The whole face had a wiry look of energetic cerebration.

“Now! It would take a pretty powerful concentration to account for your eighty per cent saturation—in ten minutes, or less, wouldn’t it?”

“Yes,” said Darwina, “one part in 100. Only it doesn’t necessarily follow he was killed in ten minutes, or even half an hour.”

“Why not?”

“Because carbon monoxide is insidious. It can sneak up on one. Suppose,” suggested Darwina, “he lighted the heater before seven o’clock. He might have absorbed up to perhaps a thirty per cent saturation and not have noticed any definite symptoms—and then just suddenly collapsed.”

This was not what Kenmore had hoped to hear. His expression changed; his face did not exactly fall, but it became profoundly contemplative.

He confronted a difficult decision.

How far should he trust Darwina Roydan?

Kenmore didn’t question her personal integrity. It was just the opposite . . . He knew where the young woman stood in La Jolla’s estimation; she was candidly radical. Only her radicalism had nothing to do with anything so remote as Communism, for instance. She believed ardently in reform, and concretely, in reforming the village.

And she believed in direct action. Thus she had been known to patrol the beaches, snatching up discarded ice cream paper cups and fragments of sandwiches. “Here,” she would say, thrusting the offensive article under a picnicker’s nose, “do you realize you’ve left a rat a day’s rations?”

It was in this forthright manner that she undertook to renovate and enlighten La Jolla. Undoubtedly, Darwina was something of a busybody; but at least she was busy in the public interest . . . Only as so often happens, the public needed to be shown where its best interest lay.

Kenmore knew she was an optimist, as every sincere crusader must be. To believe in Causes, she had first to believe in human nature; she could never permit herself a moment’s disillusion about the essential goodness in people. Or what would have been the use of trying to change mere conditions?

Darwina Roydan, who was a scientist in respect to leucetta losangelensis, was an idealist in respect to the human race.

And that, thought Kenmore, was just the trouble. Her honesty was too transparent. She was too candidly transparent.

You could pledge her tongue to silence, and her eyes would nevertheless speak eloquently.

But the lieutenant had reached a point where he needed help; and Darwina was assuredly his best bet.

“That’s no good, then,” said he, and took the plunge. “I’m trying to get around it—the heater part. I’m not satisfied about it a bit.”

Darwina’s eyes opened widely in the shadow of the galleon’s prow. “But then you must mean—!”

“Yes,” said Kenmore, “if it wasn’t accidental, it was on purpose.”

Murder . . . That chasm yawned too wide.

Darwina shook her head.

“If it wasn’t the heater, you would have to get the carbon monoxide in by some other means. And then it probably wouldn’t have worked at all. It might be possible to kill a sleeping man or a drunken one that way. And while the poison is insidious, still in a majority of cases your victim would be warned by headache and dizziness and nausea. He’d simply step out for some fresh air. It would be a stupid and improbable way of trying to kill anyone, really.”

Lieutenant Kenmore smiled at the corners of his mouth, an unconvinced smile. He wasn’t going to rule out the possibility of homicide merely because the apparent method seemed stupid and improbable to Darwina Roydan.

“Would this mean anything to you?” said he.

She peered at the face of the envelope.

“No.”

“This, then.”

He turned it over.

“Good heavens!” said Darwina thinly. She moistened her lips. “You mean he was killed after he phoned you about her? Because he had this?”

“Was he, though?” Lieutenant Kenmore looked perplexed. “Maybe. If that’s it, he must have read the letter inside. But the letter itself is gone. And that’s only one difficulty. Bowling seems to have run onto this thing in the last few minutes of his life. Or why didn’t he act on it sooner?

“From that point,” he shook his head, “it gets worse than confusing. The thing contradicts itself. For if Bowling only stumbled onto this in the last few minutes of his life, apparently his death was a last-minute necessity, too. But to kill a man and make the murder look like accidental death caused by a defective heater needs preparation and planning. Such a crime is not thought-out and executed in ten or eleven minutes. If it was the kind of murder the set-up indicates, of course it was plotted hours in advance. But why plot to kill a man because of this envelope he hadn’t yet seen?”

He stepped to the filing case, opened its upper section, ran his thumb along the index cards to the one headed Henry R. Bowling, 222 Laguna Terrace.

“Darwina,” said he, “I suppose it has occurred to you this envelope may be a plant?”

“A—?”

“A plant, a decoy, a red herring.”

She looked momentarily enlightened. And the next moment, distrustful. “Why? This was supposed to be accidental death. Not murder. And people don’t leave false clues scattered around a scene of accidental death.”

“Unless it was desired to have two strings to the bow. I had a case once in which a man pushed his wife off a cliff. He hoped it would pass for suicide. When he saw we wouldn’t swallow that, he got busy and helped us find some footprints along the top of the cliff. He had gone to a second-hand store and bought a pair of oversized boots, figuring if the suicide theory wouldn’t wash, the crime might be pinned on some unknown tramp or hitchhiker.

“Well, then, Darwina. It might have been hoped Henry Bowling’s death would pass as accidental, but if not, the envelope would point away from the murderer.”

And the detective got down to brass tacks:

“That brings the family into it. They may be innocent. I hope so. If they are, they’ll probably be glad to cooperate with the police. But I can’t rely on it. Because if they are guilty, after all, I don’t dare put them on guard, point out the little discrepancies in the thing, in fact show them the little lies they must tell . . . It’s a delicate job. And you can help with it. You know them, you can tell me what I’m going into here.

“First—” his grey glance dropped to the card “—Mrs. Axiter. Who and what is she?”

“Bowling’s sister. She managed the house for him.” Darwina pursed her lips. “I think if you told her Henry was murdered—well, perhaps murdered—I suppose her first reaction would be to faint. Then she would burst into tears. Finally, she would be insulted.”

“Insulted?”

“Because murders don’t happen in nice families,” said Darwina, “and Jessie is wonderfully adept at closing her eyes to unpleasant truths.”

“Yes,” said the lieutenant. “What truths?”

“I don’t suppose it has anything to do with Henry Bowling,” said Darwina hurriedly. “I mean Lally. Lalitha is Jessie’s youngest. Younger. There are two daughters. Lally married a man named Al Dearborn, and the marriage turned out badly. They’ve separated. Lally’s staying with her mother. The gossip is—I don’t like to repeat gossip, but you should know—she’s consoling herself with alcoholic beverages and pick-ups at the local bars.

“I suppose,” said Darwina thoughtfully, “she’s in psychiatric difficulties, as almost all dipsomaniacs are, and perhaps the same difficulty was what upset her marriage. Though I’m told Al Dearborn is no bargain, either. At any rate, if you broke your suspicions to Lally, the chances are she’d react by needing another drink. I don’t suppose it would go deeper than that with her.”

“Corinne Axiter,” said Kenmore, from the card. “She would be the other daughter.”

“The elder one. The dark one. She’s a glacial, bitter brat. I wouldn’t predict how she’ll respond.”

And for the first time, Darwina’s tone sounded perturbed.

“Corinne has intelligence! It takes brains to be that sarcastic. She could do something, she could be useful. I don’t understand people who have intelligence and simply won’t use it.”

There were three more names on the card. Mary Yellick, said Darwina, was the cook. Ella Marion, the maid. And Fred Crush, the gardener. “But I don’t suppose the servants count, do they? Or Lally, either. It’s what Jessie and Corinne will think, and I don’t imagine you’ll find them very cooperative.”

“No,” said Lieutenant Kenmore. “Well. I had better let on I think it was accidental death, for a while at least.”