Lay On, Mac Duff! Read online

  Mac Duff was running up from the floor below. He passed us, said nothing, went down the hall to the door of Lina’s bathroom, pounded on it. I could hear the shower running in there. Someone opened the door. Duff didn’t speak. He turned and ran up the stairs to the fourth floor.

  J.J. ran lightly on his toes up the hall and stood, looking up. My uncle appeared in the door of Lina’s bathroom. His hair was wet. He was pulling a robe around his naked body. The door to Lina’s room opened, and she was there, lovely and rumpled in her nightgown.

  Somebody shouted below. J.J. looked down and recoiled from the railing. Lina sagged against the wall. My uncle supported her. All this was wordless.

  On the stairs above I saw first Hugh’s feet in those sheepskin slippers. Then his white face, without his glasses, peering down. A door slammed on the fourth floor, Mac Duff came down fast, passing Hugh. He leaned on the rail.

  J.J. said, “That’s Maxon down there? Dead? Did he fall?”

  Effans’s voice came up, thin and weird. “There’s a cord around his throat, sir.”

  “Strangled,” Duff said. “From that niche.” He pointed up to where the curve of the stair wall was indented on this level, just as it was on the two levels below, by a shallow though man-sized ornamental niche. “With a bathrobe cord. And dumped over the rail. What’s that?” he called to Effans.

  “It seems to be one of the master’s parcheesi men,” Effans’ voice said weirdly from the depths. “It’s a red one, sir.”

  Lina fainted. My uncle picked her up and held her limp body as if it weighed nothing.

  Hugh said, “How was it done?”

  Duff said, “These bathrooms. Two bathrooms, each with two doors. Two bathrooms, and three men awake at once. Maxon was coming down to the one off the hall here.” He pointed to mine. “But one of two men was not in any bathroom, although he seemed to be. He was in that niche at the curve of the stairs. It’s dark. It’s dark because the bulb’s gone up there. As Maxon passed, he slipped the cord around his throat. It took no time at all. Damned clever devil! The one chance! The one moment! The first possible moment!”

  Lina moaned.

  “Lina can say my shower was running,” my uncle said and stopped and grinned. “Not again?” he said.

  “Again,” Duff said. “Miller was in the bath upstairs. It has no shower. He was scrambling out of the tub when I got there.”

  “A man can leave a shower running,” Hugh said, “and be somewhere else.”

  Duff said, “Take care of Mrs. Cathcart. Get dressed, all of you. Come down to the library. I’ll call Garnett.”

  Ellen came up, weeping and praying to herself, and followed my uncle into Lina’s room. I got dressed numbly.

  We met in a very little while in the library where Effans had brought coffee. He looked ill and shaken. There were police downstairs, men’s voices, and flashlights going off. Duff closed the library doors, shutting us in. He faced us a moment. He looked resolute and formidable. He went to the telephone and called a number.

  “MacGuire? Well? I see. Yes, I understand. Keep at it.” He hung up. I saw a flash of contempt in Hugh’s haunted eyes.

  I sat down beside Lina, who was pale and, for her, disheveled. J.J. stood by me looking very grim. My uncle and Hugh faced each other, and Duff went to stand between them.

  “Either of you two,” he said, “as usual, could have had that third red man, the last of the three. We’ve been over that. Either of you two could have had that cord, hidden it earlier. Either of you could have been in that niche. It’s almost exactly as far from one bathroom door below it as it is from the other above it. Either of you two could have twisted the bulb out upstairs in the hall. It is true, a man can leave a shower running and go away, and leap back into it very quickly. It is also true that a man can leave a bathtub running if the stopper of the tub is out.”

  He bent his gaze on Hugh. “Maxon saw you go into the bath from the room you and he occupied, didn’t he, Miller? He heard you lock that door. He heard the tub running. He assumed you were there and would be there for some time. He decided that he had better make his way to the bath down here.

  “But perhaps you were not there. I say you could have heard Cathcart’s shower start. Could have realized the very good chance that he was alone, not watched. Could have got out of bed and established yourself in the bath, or seemed to. Could have gone out the hall door and waited for just what did happen. It might not have happened, but it did happen, and you were ready.”

  “I was ready!” Hugh said. “I think you’re mad. I tell you I am not Herbert Graves and never have been and I have no conceivable motive for these crimes. You are obsessed by your own cleverness. You want me to be Herbert Graves. Tell me, does your henchman on the telephone say I am Herbert Graves?”

  “No. He does not. Not yet.”

  Hugh laughed. “Yet here is a man with the same opportunity, as good or better. A ruthless man. A wicked man. And, besides that, a man with a perfect motive to kill Guy Maxon.” He looked at Lina. “I’m sorry,” he said, “but I have to protect myself, Mrs. Cathcart.”

  Lina lifted her tired face. “I don’t know what you mean.”

  Mac Duff said, “I assure you, every one, that Charles Cathcart has and knows that he has no motive whatsoever for Maxon’s death.”

  Hugh looked startled. Then my uncle laughed in his face. He pulled his big body up and swaggered—it’s the only word—across to the mantel where, apart from all of us, he leaned with arrogant ease.

  “That’s wise, Duff. Cathcart always gets out of everything.” His voice mocked and taunted. His eyes were lit with amusement and contempt. “This, too.”

  Hugh’s jaw tightened. “You’ll be sorry if you try to pin this thing on me,” he said, trying to speak quietly and doing very well, “because you can’t make it stick. How can you? I am not Herbert Graves. I had no motive. I never did any of these fantastic things.”

  Duff said, “Heat and cold. It’s a very strange thing, the clues we have that deal with heat and cold. The temperature of this case is against you, Miller. Take the eyeglasses. They fogged up from the effect of heat on cold. That started my wondering. That confused you, didn’t it? That was why Winberry said what he said before he died and why you had to drag Cathcart back into it. Then the thermostat clock. Do you suppose it escaped me, how you rigged that innocent-looking alibi? You had to bend the hands of the clock, didn’t you? A most unlikely accident. What shows it was broken on Friday night? The clock gives no hour. What’s to prevent you from coming home here and waking Bessie as soon as you could and smashing the clock in the morning, when you know exactly where your alibi begins. You set the alarm part, the furnace-tending part of that clock for 2 A.M., the time when your alibi begins. But you had to bend the hands. You found the body. You were there. But you had to bend the hands, or the clock itself would have shown us the hour of nine!”

  “Ah, well, Cathcart always gets off, you see,” my uncle crowed. “This time, too?” Lina was on the edge of the sofa. Her eyes were fastened on my uncle with terror. His lips curled a little. “You ought to have known that,” he said, reproachfully.

  Hugh shook his head as if to shake a fog out of it.

  “Wait,” he said. “You’re wrong! You’re terribly wrong. Cathcart was out of the house last night. She lied. You know she lied!”

  “Cathcart’s overcoat,” Duff said, “was gone from the rack either because he wore it when he was out, or because you hid it.”

  “Hid it!”

  “But he couldn’t!” I cried.

  “Why not?”

  “But he didn’t. Because it came back.”

  “Ah! Yet he left you at the foot of the basement stairs, long enough, my dear, to put the coat back on its rack if he had had that in mind.”

  Things whirled in my head. My eyes seemed to go out of focus.

  “But we heard Uncle come in!”

  “Did you?”

  “Yes, I … I don’t know. I thou
ght … You mean he just fooled me?”

  “I mean that’s what you were there for,” Duff said, “to be fooled, Bessie.”

  My uncle’s voice was coiled like a snake in his throat and it came forth softly, softly. “Childish,” he said, “wasn’t it?” Lina braced her neck with her fingers as if to hold her head on, but Hugh stood still.

  “Also,” Duff went on, “when a man runs a warm bath, you know, the bathtub itself gets warm. And stays warm a while even after the water is gone. I felt your tub this morning. Warm water never stood in it. It should have been warm, but it was cold.”

  “And that’s the clincher,” my uncle said. “That’s it, Duff. Good work. You’re clever, Graves, but I’m lucky, and it’s better to be lucky.”

  Lina said, “Don’t, Charles!”

  Hugh’s tongue slipped out and moistened his lips. He looked at my uncle.

  My uncle laughed.

  “The tub was cold when it should have been warm. How was that, Graves? How did that happen?”

  Hugh put his hands in his pockets. He swayed a little. “Did you ever take a cold bath?” he said, “you filthy—” His lips were white.

  “Oh!” I cried. “Warm and cold. What was warm when it should have been cold? The coat! The overcoat!” J.J.’s hands came down on my shoulders. “But I touched it! In the pantry. It hadn’t been outdoors, Mr. Duff. It was warm! And yours was cold that day,” I said to J.J., “when you came in, so I remember.”

  “All right,” Duff said sharply. And there was silence.

  “I usually win,” my uncle drawled in the silence. “Cathcart gets out of everything. Hadn’t you known?” I heard the tiny sound of a scream die in Lina’s throat.

  Hugh stood like a stone. Then his face broke and snarled.

  “Get out of this then,” he said. And he had a gun in his hand.

  J.J. pushed me down and sat on me, but I heard the shot. When I could look, Duff had Hugh’s arms twisted behind him, and J.J. was calling downstairs for help.

  My uncle held Lina in his arms. Her shoulder and breast were running blood.

  “All right, Graves,” Duff said.

  My uncle, all arrogance dead, said quietly to Hugh’s altered face, “I tried very hard to be nasty. I’m sorry. But you had to be broken.”

  “You …!” Hugh spat a name at him.

  “Perhaps,” my uncle said, agreeing. “Phone the doctor, Effans. She’s not dead, you know.”

  He walked out of the library doors, carrying his wife, past the gaping faces of policemen. Her blood was on him. He carried her as if she weighed nothing at all. He turned his broad back on us and took her up the stairs, holding her gently, dismissing us, forgetting us, leaving us all behind.

  Chapter Nineteen

  J.J. Jones, Duff, and I were having dinner at Max’s on West 48th Street. It was good food, too. J.J. was sulking a little because Lina had said we must wait until fall to be married and let her stage a big fancy wedding. I didn’t mind. I said I’d like to be courted some more. Three days hadn’t been enough, such a dreadful, mixed-up three days, too. Duff was on my side. “She hardly knows you,” he said.

  J.J. said gloomily that’s what he was afraid of.

  Hugh Miller was in jail. Herbert Graves, I should say. Duff said they might not have traced the identification, even yet, but he’d given them the link, and now they had it. He was thirty-seven really. And his nose had been broken since Uncle and the others had seen him, which was only once or twice, anyhow.

  “I hounded him,” Duff said, ‘although he looked no sadder than usual, “and so did Cathcart, and we broke him at last between us. He’s broken now. That haste motif. He was the only one in a hurry. But he didn’t see that. He was working against the time we’d get his identity proved. Cathcart could have waited weeks, months.”

  “You harped on that, all right.”

  “I did. And killed Maxon in the process. I ought to have prevented his death. But I knew Miller was obsessed by the need to incriminate Cathcart, and I simply did not know how he could manage it.”

  “You guessed Hugh?” I asked.

  “Yes,” Duff said, “Yes. Though. I couldn’t possibly have proved it. So Maxon’s dead.”

  J.J. said, “If I’d been on the job that morning instead of where I was, canoodling with Bessie.… Let’s not weep for him. But tell us all, O master mind. Why do you think we’ve cornered you like this? How did you know? Or guess? I changed my mind on those two sixty times.”

  “What can I tell you?” Duff smiled, and all at once was transformed into somebody boyish and pleased with himself. “You knew every bit of evidence I knew except that you didn’t get to feel the temperature of the bathtub. Still, he might have been a cold-water addict as he tried to say. That was the clincher. You knew one bit I didn’t know.”

  “About the overcoat that wasn’t cold?”

  Duff nodded.

  “How I ever thought of it when I did!” I said. “And I never would have been able to think of it if I hadn’t run my face into your coat that day, J.J., and noticed how it felt. You just don’t say to yourself, now this coat is supposed to have just come indoors, therefore it ought to be cold to the touch. Where did he hide it?”

  “In the dumb-waiter, I think.”

  “I don’t believe he wanted me to touch it.”

  “I doubt if he thought of its temperature,” J.J. disagreed. “Fellow wasn’t temperature conscious. Who ever heard of taking a cold bath in a tub! It’s preposterous! He must have just forgotten about the temperature of his bathtub. I’ll never believe different.”

  “The temperature of a tub isn’t the sort of idea that comes readily to mind, either,” Duff said. “But, you see, I didn’t believe he’d been taking a bath.”

  “What did he do? Jump into an empty tub?”

  “The water was still running, of course, when he got back there. So he managed to get wet enough. When I got in, after he’d unlocked the door for me, the last bit of water was gurgling away and sounded all right. I daresay he put his foot over the drain and only turned the water off when he heard me close.”

  “Why didn’t he fill the tub and then go out and wait over the stairs?”

  “Who’d splash?” Duff asked. “Remember, Maxon was still alive and had to be fooled. Running water covers human sounds. And covers the fact that they aren’t there, too.”

  “He didn’t dare leave the stopper in, eh?”

  “Because he couldn’t know how long he might be out there. Tubs can’t be trusted not to overflow. He hadn’t time to test the capacity of the overflow valve and all that. In an old house, the tub might not even have one.”

  “I see. I see,” J.J. said. “All is made clear. Go on.”

  “To what? You know that only two rings on the phone that first time was odd. That the interval between calls was too long. You know the business about Peter Finn’s being grunted at. By the way, did you wonder, as I did, how well Miller could see without his glasses? Suppose we found he’d been the second man to enter Winberry’s office, after all? He couldn’t have shot blind. I tested him here. With the menu.”

  “So you did. Sauce au diable,” I said.

  “It was crude, but his romantic mind leaped on that phrase.”

  “One thing,” J.J. said, “puzzles me. You say he didn’t smash that thermostat clock by accident. He smashed it the next morning. Why didn’t the heat go on, then, the next morning. If the clock was still O. K.”

  “I didn’t know why myself,” Duff admitted, “till I talked to the housekeeper later. That was Gaskell’s doing. It seems the clock was set to turn the heat up at 9:15.”

  “Pretty darned late.”

  “We don’t know how late a sitter he was, but we know how that he was a late riser. He didn’t care if his housekeeper froze. That’s also why she always stayed in the kitchen, near the gas stove, in the early morning and let her cleaning wait. It was a flaw in Gaskell’s character. Or we’d have seen that point quicker. Or she’d h
ave found his body quicker. Of course, Miller could easily have turned it down to sixty again by hand. But as it was, he didn’t have to.”

  “Well, well, the old skinflint. Speaking of character …”

  “Oh, yes,” I said, “you said yourself it wasn’t solved by evidence.”

  “Let me try,” Duff said, “to tell you how various impressions got into my mind and what they meant. Hugh Miller, first. The kind of man he was and how he felt about things. Bessie was a fairly good interpreter of the way Hugh felt. Better than she knew. She herself, you see, had no feeling about him. She didn’t love him, she didn’t hate him, she didn’t fear him.”

  “You didn’t even like him, did you, honey?”

  “Ssh,” I said, “of course not.”

  “Bessie said about Hugh, ‘Tight, cramped, holding hard.’ That meant a tense person. A person with an active will. Controlling himself. He may just have been a nervous type, of course. But she felt that inner tension, and I saw no reason to believe she was wrong. Now she also felt, very definitely, as she told us, that he wasn’t interested in her. I’m inclined to trust a female on that score. She’d know.”

  “He puzzled me, though.”

  “Because he tried to pretend he was interested. It was his excuse, of course, for coming around and fussing about his suspicions of Cathcart. However, I wondered why he claimed to be interested in Bessie, yet she felt he was not. But the uses of Bessie’s face were obvious, once you had the germ of the idea that he was up to something.”

  “My face?”

  “J.J. told you. Your window face. Hugh wanted suspicion of Cathcart to get about. And yet to pretend that he didn’t. It’s like a man who wants to spread a rumor slyly. He tells it secretly to the worst gossip he knows. Your face is a gossip, Bessie.”

  J.J. chortled. “I’ll tell you exactly what you’re thinking now, my little pet. You’re thinking, ‘Gee whiz, I’ll never be able to get away with anything.’” He was right, of course.

  “Teach her not to deceive,” Duff warned. “If she ever learns, God help us all. And she’s terribly suggestible. That’s how she heard a man come in while he was safe upstairs all the while. Though Miller held her by the ears—”