Lay On, Mac Duff! Read online

  “Catch me,” Maxon said bitterly, “moving an inch without a witness from now on.”

  “Stick to that,” Duff said, and Maxon looked startled.

  “Now we must examine the chances that Cathcart or Miller could have managed to kill Gaskell with Winberry’s knife last night.” Hugh started to say something, but Duff stopped him. “Let me develop this in my own way. First, either of them could have had the red man. We cannot decide which of them was left in possession of the remaining red men after the first death. Second, either of them could have taken the knife from Winberry’s flat. That is so?”

  “True enough,” my uncle said. “Go on.”

  “No fingerprints, of course. I daresay both of you own gloves. Third, the man who was seen to enter Gaskell’s house at 1:46 or thereabouts cannot be identified beyond the fact that he was tall. All three of you are tall. It helps us not.

  “Assuming for the moment your innocence, Mr. Maxon, you did not see anyone, as you left Gaskell’s house, who reminded you of either of these men?”

  “No.”

  “Both of them knew you’d gone there,” Duff sighed. “Either of them would have been watching for you to leave, of course, keeping out of your way. Now, it happens that both Miller and Cathcart were in this house last night. In order to be the man who got to Gaskell’s at 1:46, one of them must have left this house some time before that and after about 12:30, when this household retired for the night. At 12:35, Hugh Miller and Bessie together placed a thread across the doorsill of each of the two doors of this house. At a few minutes after 2 A.M., Bessie and Hugh discovered that the thread across the basement doorsill had been disturbed.”

  My uncle laughed out loud.

  “Of course,” Duff said rather plaintively, “either of them, Cathcart or Miller, could have opened that door, broken that seal.”

  “Hugh couldn’t,” I said.

  “Why not? You were not with him between 12:35 and 2?”

  “Cer-certainly not!” I said.

  “Was anyone with you between 12:35 and 2?” Duff asked Hugh Miller.

  “No,” Hugh crossed his legs the other way. “But where was Cathcart between 12:35 and 2:30, when we heard him come in?”

  My uncle got up and kicked the fire.

  “Look here,” Hugh said, suddenly cheerful. “All this is very fascinating. And it does seem to me that I have an alibi this time.”

  “After 2 A.M., up until 4 or later, your alibi is solid,” Duff admitted. “If we accept the evidence of the thermostat clock.”

  “And if not?” my uncle asked.

  “If the killer was keen enough to notice the clock’s setting, and was quick enough to see that he could turn the furnace down by hand and leave the impression that the killing was done after two, then, of course, it may actually have been done before two. But in that case, it is difficult to understand why Miller took the risk of depending upon Bessie. That is to say, he gambled that she’d wake near enough to 2 A.M. to be of use as his alibi. Yet she might not have awakened. Surely he would not have dared make too much noise, for he would have known that Cathcart was in the house. Could he have entered your room?”

  “I had the door sort of blocked,” I said. “I mean, he couldn’t have got in without being noisy. I didn’t open the window to the fire escape.” Hugh had suggested that, I remembered. “It was closed and locked, too, so he couldn’t have got in that way. He’d have been able to see that from his own room, too.”

  “No way, then, he could have been sure to wake you at any certain time?” I shook my head. “In fact he would have known he couldn’t be sure.”

  The room fell quiet. The disturbed fire purred. A mantel clock ting-ed, a small clear sound. It was midnight.

  Maxon said abruptly, “I think I’m out of this. One thing and another. This time, my alibi’s good enough, if only a miracle of luck accounts for it. There’s no case against me.” He looked down his nose at Duff.

  Silence closed over his words like water over a stone. Then Lina looked up and said, “That’s so?” Duff nodded. His eyes looked sleepy.

  Hugh said, “Since I am who I am and nobody else, I still have no motive. Also, I think my alibi is good enough, this time.”

  Duff said, “It seems to be.”

  The silence came down. My uncle moved. “Since I did not leave the house—” he began.

  Lina said quickly, “Let me explain, Charles.” She leaned back, her head resting against the chair, her eyes closed. My uncle was motionless. We all watched her lovely face. “You see,” she said, her voice a little weary, a little bitter, a little cold, “Charles has an alibi, too. Between a quarter after one, perhaps, and a quarter after two, I should say, last night … Charles was in my room, with me. Were you not, Charles?” She did not open her eyes.

  I saw fury on Maxon’s face and something like dismay on Hugh’s. Mac Duff was very still.

  “My dear Lina,” said Uncle Charles in his gentlest voice, and that was all.

  Maxon said, “Oh, my God, Lina, why do you lie?”

  “Where are we now, Mr. Duff?” she said.

  Chapter Seventeen

  “We are not finished yet, I’m afraid,” Duff said, “although perhaps we are through talking. Someone has lied, of course.”

  Yes, someone had lied. Lina, for one. I knew that, knew it in my bones. But I didn’t know why. Was she afraid? Had Uncle thrown her some signal there from the fireside? I hadn’t seen any, but I felt all lost and bewildered, and I knew there were lots of things I didn’t know about these people. Maxon could lie. Maxon could have nipped speedily home by the subway even though he wouldn’t admit that he ever had anything to do with so plebeian a mode of transportation. But Maxon wasn’t clever enough. Maybe he didn’t have to be clever. Maybe he was just lucky. And Hugh could have lied. But if he’d gone out that basement door and come in again he knew about the thread. He could have put it back again. Unless he wanted me to think … But there was the overcoat, my uncle’s overcoat.

  “But the coat!” I said out loud. “It was gone, and then it was back. And we heard him come in. I’m sorry, Lina.”

  “Perhaps someone else came in,” she said steadily.

  “But who?” I cried. “Effans couldn’t wear Uncle Charles’ coat. Why, he’d drown in it. And there’s nobody else.”

  “My dear,” Duff said, “the situation is impossible, quite impossible, if you believe everything you’ve been told. Therefore, of course, you must be sure that someone has lied.”

  “I—I know,” I said.

  Uncle Charles sat down and stretched out his legs. “My coat,” he said. “Well, well …”

  “It was cold last night,” J.J. said fiercely. “You needed your coat, didn’t you?”

  Duff stopped him by lifting his long hand. “The point is,” he said quietly, “that another night has fallen. And a dangerous night. We’ve proved nothing yet except that there’s danger.”

  “Danger?” Lina said.

  “You must see what I’ve done. Surely you see that if Hugh Miller is Herbert Graves, I have precipitated danger for Maxon and for Cathcart. My man is working to check his background. If he is Graves, he must know he has only tonight left, perhaps tomorrow, not long.

  “If Maxon is the killer, Cathcart must be wary tonight, also. For the guilty knows there’s evidence somewhere we may stumble upon too soon. And if Cathcart is guilty.…”

  “I’m in danger,” Maxon said. “Oh, I’m in danger, all right. Well, shall we sit the night out right here? I’m willing.”

  Lina moaned.

  J.J. said, “For God’s sake, can’t we do better than that? Which of them is it? You know, don’t you?”

  “I guess,” Duff said.

  “Tell us, then, and we can—we can—”

  “We can try to protect and prevent, in any case,” Duff said. “It will do no good to say what I guess. We are sufficiently suspicious of each other, don’t you think? May I spend the night here?”

 
“Please,” Lina said.

  “Me, too,” said J.J. “Or let me take Bessie away.”

  “Whatever harm or good Bessie ever did is done,” my uncle said impatiently. “Bessie’s safe. And Hugh’s safe. No matter whom he may be after, no one is after him. No, it’s Guy or me. That’s right, isn’t it?” Duff nodded. Uncle’s cold eyes narrowed. “Not me, I think. Unless he finds a way to frame me.”

  “But that’s it,” Maxon said. “I won’t leave. I won’t be alone.”

  Hugh said sulkily, “I can’t see I’m so safe.”

  Lina said, “What shall we do, Mr. Duff, please?”

  Maxon said, “I won’t leave. I won’t be alone.”

  Duff spoke thoughtfully. “We can sit the night out here. That would be stalemate.”

  “I’m for it,” Maxon said.

  “Why don’t you go home,” Duff began, “where you’ll be well out—”

  “No, I won’t leave. The moment I leave one of them will kill the other and fix it on me.” He sounded frantic. “I won’t leave. I won’t be alone.”

  Then my uncle stood up again. “The rest of you may do as you like. The house is yours.” His voice was lazy music. “But Lina and I are going to bed, together.”

  Lina’s face turned white, then pink. She seemed immeasurably distressed. She turned her head from side to side like something helpless in a trap. Her eyes were full of hurt before she hid them.

  Maxon said, “Put the women together!” loud and harsh.

  My Uncle Charles looked down along his whole length insolently. “My house,” he said briefly. “My wife.”

  “We shall all go to bed,” Duff said rather gaily. Lina looked up, and he smiled just for her, his sweet winning smile. It surprised her and seemed to steady her, too. “What rooms are there, Mrs. Cathcart, please? Bessie’s?”

  “Two beds,” I said. “I don’t want to be alone, either. Please, could Ellen …? She looks like home.”

  “Ellen, by all means.” My uncle rang for Effans.

  “Then there’s the second guest room, on the fourth floor,” Lina went on. “That’s a double room. Then there’s the small room Hugh has. He is alone there.”

  “Not tonight,” Hugh said. “Not I. I want to be watched, please.”

  “You move to the fourth floor and take a roommate with you. J.J.?”

  “No,” J.J. said, “I’m on Bessie’s doorstep, wherever she is.”

  “The small bedroom formerly Miller’s then for you.”

  “Do I have to go to bed?”

  Maxon cut in. “I’ll take the other half of the fourth-floor room.”

  “I had elected myself,” Duff said.

  “Leaving me alone? I tell you I won’t be alone.”

  “I won’t either,” Hugh said.

  “I’ll alibi you, Miller. You alibi me. If you murder me in the night you’ll risk your own neck to do it. I don’t think you will. I’m not afraid of you.” Maxon’s eyes slid to my uncle. “And if Duff and Jones watch the halls.…”

  Duff said, “Very well.”

  Hugh said, “I’m not afraid of you, either.” He said it to Maxon, but I wondered if that was who he meant.

  I thought to myself, who can sleep? Who can possibly sleep? What nonsense to go to bed! Yet when I thought of the alternative, all of us sitting here in this room just to wear the night away, I thought we’d be screaming idiots by morning. But we had to wear time out, somehow, because Duff wanted time.

  Duff also wanted to search the house. He said so. Uncle told Effans to take him through, and Effans, looking scrawny and frightened, said, “Yes, Mr. Cathcart. Thank you. This way, sir.”

  The rest of us stayed together. As long as we stayed, all awake, all in the same room, all watching, we were safe. But we couldn’t know in which man’s mind, even now, plans might be forming. Yet how could he plan anything to happen before morning? Surely, no one could kill another tonight and get away with it. But suppose the one who had already killed two men didn’t care any more? Didn’t care to escape, but just that his victim died? Against pure recklessness, there’s no protection. Yet Duff would watch. I knew he would.

  Which of us, I wondered, would lie tonight beside a murderer? A murderer whose mind, at least, would twist and turn and toss on the pillow.

  No one spoke while Duff was gone. J.J. had put his arm around me, and he rubbed his chin in my hair from time to time. Hugh hunched in his chair and stared at the carpet. Maxon picked dust out of his trouser cuff. Lina had her eyes closed, but her breath was short. My uncle weighed a match book in his hand, the hand with the crooked finger, and every so often he would toss it up suddenly and catch it again with a sharp smacking sound in his palm.

  We heard Duff coming back at last. He stood in the door with his hands in his pockets, slouching, yet balanced and alert, and his eyes skipped from face to face, making his warning sharp and personal for each of us. “I’m afraid someone believes in being prepared,” he said. “You had better know what things seem to be missing. Your revolver, Cathcart, is not in your dresser. Do you know where it is?”

  “No.”

  Duff shrugged. “There’s little use in asking,” he said. “There are too many deep hiding places in a house like this, and you know this house. Mrs. Cathcart, some sleep-inducing pills have disappeared from your bathroom. According to Ellen, the box was a full one. Was it?”

  “Yes,” Lina said. “I saw it yesterday. It was there yesterday.”

  “It isn’t there now. The paper knife from the best guest room desk is not there now, either. You haven’t seen it, have you, Bessie?”

  “Oh, no.”

  “I didn’t suppose so, child. A small hatchet is gone from the basement. The cord from Effans’s bathrobe cannot be found either.”

  Effans’s teeth clicked together, his jaw shook. “Cook doesn’t know … I don’t know …”

  “Rather a significant collection, isn’t it?” my uncle drawled. “I wouldn’t worry about that paper knife. It’s pretty dull.” He yawned.

  “I ought to advise you,” Duff said gently, “that it would be safest not to separate at all.”

  No one said anything. The double doors to the stairwell were wide, and I could feel the wind of death blowing out there from hidden places. But I knew that was silly because the death-wish was in here, locked in one of these heads, hidden in Maxon’s narrow skull, under Hugh’s smooth light hair, behind the bones of my uncle’s wide forehead.

  My uncle took the tongs and began to turn the fire logs up on end, separating them so that the fire would go out. “If we sit up we’ll bore each other to death,” he said, “a horrible fate. Come, Lina. There’s a nightcap there, whoever wants one.”

  Lina got to her feet smiling, but her eyes were still nearly closed. “Do you know the way, all of you?” she said and started for the doors in that funny blind fashion.

  We went up two by two. Duff stood and watched us go. No one cared to drink a nightcap.

  J.J. handed me over to Ellen at my door.

  There was a thermos bottle filled with warm milk beside my bed. I didn’t drink any.

  Chapter Eighteen

  I wasn’t afraid that anything would happen to me, not that. I was afraid of horror. I was afraid that at any moment the scream would come, the cry of someone hurt to death.

  Or a tiny sound. A stealthy sound. That would be even worse. To hear something moving in the dark. Creeping across the floor. To see a shadow. To see blackness blacker. Air thicken into a shadow, then into substance.

  Or that someone would see nothing, hear nothing, but never wake.

  Ellen was a lump in the other bed. But not asleep. I heard her sigh. Hugh and Guy, I thought. Did they lie, playing possum, staring across at the silent lump each must make, wearing the night out, silent and stiff in the dark? Was lovely Lina wakeful in her big bed beside her husband? Could Uncle Charles sleep? Lie humanly warm and unaware and helpless? Did he ever sleep?

  Would she, at last? And would he
stir? Then?

  Did Mac Duff’s tired face still watch, still listen outside our doors? Was J.J. Jones awake or sleeping? Thinking of me? My rose-colored dress, my pretty dress. I was glad …

  When I woke up daylight came wanly in, and Ellen was out of bed and dressing. It was seven o’clock.

  “I didn’t mean to wake you, Miss Bessie, dear. You sleep on, now do.”

  “It’s morning? Everything’s all right?”

  “Effans has just gone down. Yes, it’s morning. You’d like your coffee?”

  “I’d love my coffee and everything,” I said. “I’m so glad it’s morning.”

  “As soon as ever it’s ready,” she promised, beaming, and went away in her neat uniform. I got up, thinking I’d push the furniture back against the door. I looked out. The stairwell was artificially lighted, as it always was, but the feel of morning came up from below, a “Cook’s in her kitchen, all’s right with the world” kind of feeling.

  The first thing I knew J.J.’s head popped out of his door, and the next thing I knew he was in my room and I was being kissed.

  “Oh, my goodness,” I said. “It isn’t proper!”

  “I’m protecting you. Ellen’s gone, isn’t she? You can’t be alone, can you?”

  “Comes the dawn then.” He kissed me again.

  “You’d better ask me to marry you so I can say yes,” I said. “Otherwise, it’s not proper.”

  “I won’t do it. Do you realize that by the end of the week you’ll be Mrs. Jones? This is your last chance.”

  “But I haven’t brushed my t-teeth.…”

  He put his hand under my chin. “Never mind your teeth. Do you love me, baby?” And then he tucked me under his arm, sort of, and said, “Gee, I love you, too.”

  It was morning, and J.J. was there, and I thought nothing could frighten me.

  There was a bumping sound, a muffled clatter, then a kind of squish, then silence, with movement in it.

  We stood, perhaps thirty seconds. Then J.J. put me aside with hands that hurt. He opened my door.