Turret Room Page 14

  And Myra had to marry him! Well, Myra had been, her brother supposed, ready to settle for this. Myra had run around … and in circles … for quite some time. She’d had it, on romance, Tyler supposed. If that was what it could be called.

  She was dead, now. Murdered. His case.

  He focused on this Edith Thompson. He’d like to be rid of her nuisance quality right now. “You tell me why,” he snapped. “Why would you hide this man in your room? You in love with him?” A somewhat kookie reason, but existent.

  Her face was pale and she started to get to her feet. “It was because I didn’t believe—”

  “Sit down,” he snapped and it was as if he had shoved her.

  She didn’t believe! Oh, deliver me from kooks. And fools. And bleeding hearts.

  Wendy Whitman popped up from her spot on the sofa, like a jack-in-the-box with its spring released. “She let him in! She hid him! He could have killed somebody!” the girl wailed.

  Tyler glanced at the boy and the boy’s face was as bare as bone, and pure pain.

  Ted was trotting after his daughter, who circled the floor behind the sofa like a distressed animal. “Criminal! Absolutely criminal! Now, sweetheart …”

  The old lady was leaning forward. “You, guard!” She spoke to Conrad, who stood back of Harold’s chair. “You are paid to keep your eye on him. On the madman, remember!”

  The guard said, “Yes, ma’am.”

  And Charles Tyler felt like sweeping the whole pack of Whitmans out of his way with one brush of his arm.

  Deliver me, not only from kooks and fools, but spoiled brats, useless idiots, and rich old women.

  The guard, Conrad, spoke up. “Excuse me, Chief Tyler, but I guess you remember?—I was in here, going through every room, yesterday afternoon? Before we put the guards on?”

  And Tyler turned to him with some relief. This was his language.

  “You weren’t in my room,” spoke up Edie Thompson, speaking the language, too, and with spirit.

  Edie was feeling better, now that Harold Page was in the open. It was not her nature to hide in corners. She was more or less the happy warrior, now—fighting openly, although she could think of nothing else to do but dispute every word that was, to her knowledge, not true. Her truth wasn’t going to sound true. Her reasons hadn’t sounded very reasonable. Nobody wanted to believe that she had done what she had done, and she couldn’t blame them.

  The guard gave her a nod that agreed, and went on: “I was going to say, I searched that room, up there (That’s your room, miss?) around midnight, and he wasn’t in it then. She knows and Mr. Whitman, he can tell you, too. We …”

  Edie opened her mouth to answer the look on Charles Tyler’s face, to “explain” the truth about where Harold Page had been, around midnight, but before she could phrase a sentence that would have the slightest chance of sounding true or reasonable at all, Cousin Ted cut in.

  “Of course he wasn’t there. Now, this is what really happened, Charles.” He was up and balanced on his tiny feet, his face flushed with victorious understanding. Cousin Ted had it all figured out.

  Tyler listened in moody silence; he was more or less just waiting. But things could come out.

  “He got in here,” said Cousin Ted, “on Wednesday night, by way of the tree. We know that. After he fought with my poor Myra, he ran away. We know that, because Wendy saw him. Very well.” Ted was in ecstasy of logic. “Now, the house was searched on Thursday, yesterday, and he was not here. So it is obvious that Edie for some reasons of her own (which I, for one, simply cannot imagine) is only trying to give him an alibi. But the point”—Ted let out what was almost a crow—”the point is, Charles—the madman was not getting out just now. He was getting in. Again! That, alone, is against the law. Arrest him!”

  Cousin Ted was really a ridiculous man. There he stood with his arm thrown out dramatically, in his own eyes the hero who had solved everything.

  Tyler said, wearily, “I have arrested him. Waiting on the ambulance.”

  But Harold’s eyes were slowly widening. So was Edie’s mouth. “Wait a minute. What did he say?” There was a thing that Cousin Ted had said, that played back with a surprise in it.

  Tyler seemed to suffer a playback of an idea.

  He strode to Harold, took hold of the white coat, gathering it close to Harold’s throat. “This coat you’re wearing,” said Tyler. “That’s how you could sneak into the hospital last night? Where my sister was lying in a coma, helpless, and you put the thing over her head? Where did you get this coat?”

  Harold said, “My own.”

  “Absurd! Absurd!” Cousin Ted was almost dancing, behind them.

  “Neck—look—neck—” choked Harold.

  Tyler let go and seemed to fling the boy backward. Mistake to touch. He knew that. Better not. He said, bitterly, “I suppose there’s no getting any sense out of him.”

  But Edie was up and in battle array. She cried out sharply to the big angry man, “Why don’t you look inside his neckband?”

  “What’s that?”

  “How do you know he doesn’t make sense?” she howled.

  His anger and hers met head-on. With a dark look on his face, Tyler turned again, and yanked Harold’s torso forward, then the white coat backward. He read from the inside of the neckband—HAROLD PAGE. He tossed the boy against the chair.

  “Nobody told me she was killed in the hospital,” cried Edie.

  (“In the hospital!” someone echoed. Ronnie?)

  “If that’s so,” Edie went on triumphantly, “then he happens to have an alibi. And what are you going to do about that?”

  “Happens to wear a white coat?” Tyler said.

  “Happens to have worked as an orderly in a hospital. Which happens to use white coats, too. What a coincidence!” She threw this in his teeth.

  The clash was strange, this time, because it melted into a kind of joining. He and she were, at least, clashing in the same terms.

  Charles Tyler believed in coincidences, all right. He was the one who knew all about them. He kept a little working scale in his mind. One coincidence? Par for the course. A mere maybe Two coincidences? Suspect. Watch it. Three coincidences? No. Almost always, significantly connected. A real freak, if not. So, putting the white coat on this scale, it was a mild “maybe.”

  “Maybe,” he said sourly. He thought, But he’s in town, and there’s the second one.

  Then Wendy Whitman, who had been shifting, moving, not quite pacing but flitting, as it were, back and forth, burst in. “I don’t know what you people are talking about! Didn’t you hear her say she let him in? And hid him! She didn’t care if he murdered us or not. She doesn’t even belong in this house.”

  “Thank God!” flashed Edie.

  And Tyler was startled by the antagonism between the two of them, the blond girl and the dark one, the poor girl and the rich one (whichever was which). It burned like a naked flame. Tyler’s mind said, Ah! What’s all this? His mind was also tucking away something about this social worker. In his experience, they were not fire-spitting types. They were trained out of it. They were trained, he often thought, out of every emotion known to man but one—which they called “compassion” and which consisted of having no human feelings of their very ego-own.

  Maybe he had this social worker wrong. She was a young one. He looked at the kook, this Harold Page. These females wouldn’t be fighting over him, surely. What the devil was that skinned look on the kook’s face?

  Harold could feel his ears grow, so hard was he listening. Wendy was behind his field of vision, somewhere in this big room. He couldn’t see her. He heard the antagonism, yes. But more. He could hear the fear. But Wendy was not afraid of him, as he alone could know. What was she afraid of, then? Phantoms, maybe? Or punishment? He wished he could know. He wished he could look at her and talk to her. He felt so funny—as if his thumbs were pricking.

  Scared? thought Tyler. What scared him, just now?

  He sent a p
iercing gaze to Edie. “What is your relationship with this man, Edith?” he said coldly. “Why are you so bound and determined to get him out of this?”

  “Because he doesn’t belong in it. He is not that nice convenient figure, the ‘berserk ex-husband.’”

  Insult me, thought Tyler. Good. Get worked up, and tell me something. “You intended,” he went on, “to smuggle him out and never mention a wanted man to the authorities?”

  “You were the authority, yesterday,” she said. “That’s why I stopped and thought better of mentioning it.” Then, her face broke and she smiled at him. “I made a mistake, I think.”

  Tyler said nothing. Flattery would get her nowhere.

  At least, thought Edie, she had his attention and that was good. She was standing up, now, and he hadn’t told her to sit down. She went on as vehemently as she could. “But I’ll tell you and swear to this. Harold Page certainly did not get into Myra’s hospital room last night because he was here, with guards all around, and I myself was with him, nearly all night long.”

  Granny said, “All night long! Disgraceful!”

  Edie flashed around to look at her. “Then you believe me, Granny?”

  “I do not,” said Granny, loftily, “care to believe you, Edith.”

  Edith chewed on her lip and faced Tyler. Did something stir behind his cold gray look? “My word should be as good as that, at least,” she said.

  “Back it up,” he said coldly.

  “Well, Dr. Wesley knows.” Edie thought, How strange to have to prove it!

  “Who is he and how does he know what?”

  “He is Harold’s doctor.” She saw the flaw. “Well, I told him on the telephone—but earlier this morning. And Ronnie Mungo knows.”

  Ronnie Mungo, long ago, had retreated to the outer fringes where he remained an interested spectator. As soon as the draperies had opened, in fact, Ronnie had abandoned the cause as if he had never joined it. He had been sitting beside Wendy, when Wendy had been sitting, but merely beside her. Now he sat alone on the sofa, with his pleasant smile, his air of having better mariners than to interfere in any way, masking him completely.

  Tyler challenged, “You go along with that? Mungo? You knew Harold Page was hidden in this house?”

  “Let me put it this way,” said Ron, with an easy air, yet as if he wished to be scrupulously truthful. “I believed that he was here, when the lady said so.” He was neatly and pleasantly being on both sides at once. Then he added, “I believe it now, don’t you?”

  Before Tyler could speak, Wendy, hanging over the back of the sofa, with her hair down over her face, said as if she were cursing, “He was here. He was here. How long are you going to talk about it? How long are you going to talk?” She seemed to be cracking with something.

  Scared? Tyler wondered.

  Down in the round cellar at the base of the tower, it was almost dark. The tiny slits of windows, at ground level, were filthy and shrubs grew close. It was chilly, down there within the circling stone. Sound did not penetrate that stone or down so deep. Nor could a small whimper, near the floor, escape as far as an ear, upstairs.

  In the big room, Ronnie Mungo hushed Wendy, with a touch of annoyance. “Be a little quiet, toots.”

  “Can’t we get out?” She sounded as if she must get out or die.

  “No, no. Not now.”

  “Never?” said Wendy, like a child who had learned a new word recently, but did not like the taste of it. She pushed herself away from the sofa and went to the stairs, where she dragged up two steps. She sat down on the fourth step and put both her hands on the iron balusters. She peered through, between two of them, as if she were in a prison cell, looking out.

  Tyler watched her, thinking, Well, this one’s a kook, for sure. He knew Wendy by reputation. He had daughters. Wendy was willful and wild, unsatisfactory as a friend. None of the young people who swam in the currents, down in the town, busy with their lives, could be bothered to put up with her.

  What a bunch! he thought, looking around the room. The old lady was glaring at her granddaughter with a curled lip. Ted had frozen between flutters. There was neither repose nor purpose in him. And Myra took this every day? What a crew!

  He turned his mind sternly to Ronnie Mungo. Sticking in Tyler’s craw was the query: Why in hell did Mungo go for that rescue bit with this Edith-social-worker-person?

  Oh, he would find out, once he got his witnesses where he could go to work on them, one by one, with all the skill and patience that he possessed. Where the devil was that ambulance and the others?

  Tyler told Conrad to watch it and went up into the foyer and outside. Air was good. He breathed deep and tried to track the notion about Mungo that was stirring somewhere in his head. What if Mungo would rather the Page kid didn’t have an alibi? Pretty vague. Pretty fancy. But—something like that.

  Chapter Thirteen

  A POLICE car raced up the drive and pulled up at his very feet, with a flourish. Ah! Another one, down at the gates. Ah, more like it!

  “Where’s the ambulance?” he demanded.

  “Dunno, sir.”

  “Check on it. Must be some foul-up.”

  “You got the kook in there, Chief? We’ll take him in.”

  “Nope,” said Tyler. “Trouble enough, without ‘police brutality.’”

  His men grinned, showing appreciation.

  “Roust up that ambulance and you … sit here. Just sit on it.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “It’s a snake pit,” he told them. “One of those.”

  They were using the com. Tyler stepped back toward the house. Stood, gazing over the town. His town.

  He had a snake pit up here, all right. One of those damn cases with plenty of meat for columnists and commentators. He foresaw the chewing-over, the speculation, the theories and the counter-theories, spun out, like Ted Whitman’s, on shaky premises. The shakier the more fun. All the “logical” trappings of the whodunit, a gamboling of brains. And the hearts bleeding for Harold Page. They always bled for the accused. Not for Myra, who was dead. No fun in that. The accused might turn out innocent. Myra would not turn up alive.

  He had to apprehend her murderer.

  And what if the kook’s alibi stood up? Guaranteed, by the very guards appointed to frustrate him? Then, somebody else was the murderer.

  Tyler already had an alternate in mind, although it was, as yet, pure speculation. Mungo. Once upon a time, as Charles Tyler had known, Mungo and Myra had been pretty cozy. What if she had made some kind of threat, trying to stop Mungo from getting married to the kid with the money? Mungo was trapped, all right. Tyler had heard it on the grapevine. He’d gone through money like he had his own mint, and he had paid off two very expensive wives in his day. Never earned a nickel, either. A sporting type, this Mungo. Traveler, sailor, tennis player. Tyler thought that one could begin to feel a little less spry on a tennis court as one grew older.

  Suppose rich boy is against the wall and here is little rich girl, spoiling to get her hands on her mama’s money and Mungo wants, in the worst way, to help her do just that? In the worst way? Bad enough to kill?

  Would Myra risk the threat, though, when to make it good she would expose herself, too, and what would Ted Whitman do then, poor schmoe? Tyler didn’t know, but guessed, that Ted would put his head back in the sand as fast as he could. The old lady was a different proposition. She might boot out Mungo, and Myra, too. Myra would have been taking a risk. Had she been torchy enough for Mungo, still? Jealous? Women had their motives and Tyler was the first to admit that he didn’t always understand them. He knew some that seemed to exist. He had a glimpse, now, and his mind said, Ah! Myra wouldn’t be crazy about finding herself Ronnie Mungo’s stepmother. It rang authentically female.

  But in spite of the ring of this, he was really reaching and he knew it. Wishful, even? Maybe so. He resented this Mungo, but he knew that he did. So Tyler’s mind came heavily over to the other side. Not likely Mungo, prowling the
hospital, when eight out of ten pairs of female eyes would have noticed him. Why was that? Tyler didn’t know. But he knew it was so.

  Well, he thought, get back in and maybe stir up a little more and keep listening. He’d get down statements later on. But before a story crystallizes, you can often catch on to a whole lot of loose ends, handy for pulling when you need them. The crystallizing process, as he well knew, was a smoothing-out process.

  What didn’t fit got cast aside. Truth got tailored. Maybe he could get hold of a little more of the raw stuff.

  The cop came to tell him that the ambulance had gone to the hospital! And, oh, the cop knew that Tyler wasn’t going to see anything funny about it, and the whole department, in fact, quivered in anticipation of his blast. For such a foul-up!

  But Tyler, with his cold look, said, “Get on to the ambulance. Tell them, no noise. And when they get here, if they ever do, hold them. Just let me know.’’

  He turned to go in—a man who recognized pressure when he had it, and who now thought he might as well use what pressure had come into his hand.

  Let them squirm.

  The big room was silent, now that Granny was off the phone. The moment Tyler had left them, she’d been on it, ordering her doctor to her side, immediately, and if he was with another patient, then let another doctor tend to that patient. She was Lila Whitman. Now she was at the far end of the sofa, in another chair, and Ronnie Mungo was hovering in attendance.

  Edith was trying to seize on silence to organize herself and think how to be more effective. But the silence was a distraction. She wished Wendy wouldn’t sit on the stairs and stare, like an animal in a cage. Granny hadn’t gone near her. Her own father hadn’t gone near her. Where the dickens is Mrs. Beck, all this time? she thought.

  Harold could barely sense where Wendy was—his mate, his love, his hate, his enemy—and he none of these to her. There was nothing he could do anymore, with her, to her, for her, or against her. All lines between them had been cut long ago. He put his heavy head back, to wait on fate. When had they been divorced? he wondered. What and who had put them asunder when they were young? Something had worked on Wendy while he’d had to be away. He could swear to that, now. Where was Mrs. Beck, by the way?