Lay On, Mac Duff! Read online

  Chapter Seven

  I roamed around the big drawing room as if I were inspecting it, but I didn’t see a thing. I was talking to myself. “Don’t be naive, don’t be a little hick, now, Bessie. He’s probably a city slicker, don’t forget. Don’t you believe everything he said or everything he didn’t say, either. Don’t be a hick, Bessie, don’t be a hayseed.”

  A clock on the mantel said 4:15. I thought I’d better get on with my exploring, since what I was saying to myself was going in one ear and out the other anyhow. There were sliding doors at the end of the drawing room, but I thought I’d try the little door in the hall. I got there and opened it and came upon Effans in a strange little room, part pantry and part cloak room, with one window looking on a narrow brick-paved yard.

  “I was just exploring,” I said. “Is it all right?”

  He beamed on me. “I’ll be happy to show you the house, Miss Elizabeth. Very happy indeed.” He whipped off a kind of apron and smoothed himself down. “Let me explain the basement.” He opened a door and showed me steps. “Below, here,” he said, “is the kitchen and small kitchen annex, where the dumbwaiter leads to. The kitchen runs under the dining room, a large old-fashioned kitchen, you understand.” I nodded.

  He opened a little door in the wall, cleared his throat, leaned in, said loudly, “Oh, Mrs. Atwater,” listened a moment, then stepped away. “Miss Elizabeth,” said Effans proudly, “may I present the cook?”

  I leaned in then and looked down the dumb-waiter shaft. A woman’s red face looked up from the bottom. “Very happy, I’m sure,” she shouted.

  “How do you do?” I called. We stared, she up, I down, until I felt like saying, “Mutton, Alice, Alice, Mutton.”

  “If there’s anything you like special,” she cried, “you let me know, Miss.”

  “I will, thank you,” I said. She nodded, and I smiled and nodded, and she smiled, and we withdrew simultaneously, having established diplomatic relations.

  Effans looked pleased. “Cook’s room is at the front, below,” he said, “and in between lies the furnace room. Service and help, of course, use the door to the areaway underneath the front steps.”

  “Oh, yes,” I said, “I remember seeing that door.”

  “Now here is our dining room.” He led me into a handsome and rather austere room with three windows placed as those in my bedroom were placed, looking out upon the brick-paved, high walled yard. A few evergreens grew in tubs out there. A row of ivy tried to climb the rearmost wall out of a wooden trough. “The court serves to cool the rooms in summer,” he said. “It is not used otherwise. This is an old house, Miss.”

  “It’s very tall,” I said.

  “Four stories and basement. Yes.”

  “What’s on the fourth floor?”

  “Ellen’s room. And mine, Miss. And a guest room across the front.”

  “It seems a queer kind of house to me.”

  “Typical,” he said, “typical.”

  “Has my uncle any other houses?”

  “No, Miss Elizabeth. When he goes away, which is not very often, Miss, we engage rooms at a hotel. Nor does the master keep a car. He finds it quite satisfactory, you know, just to take taxicabs.”

  “Oh, he must,” I murmured. I thought of the fare with the crooked finger. I wished I knew how to ask Effans some questions without telling him everything I knew. “Have you been with my uncle long?” I asked.

  “Years. Ten years. Before the master married at all.” His eyes flickered and dropped. “It’s a good place. We manage very smoothly. Cook in the basement. Ellen upstairs. I attend to this floor myself, and the library. Very smoothly,” he said and sighed. “Yes. When we entertain, Miss Lina has help come in, of course.” He cleared his throat and looked at me rather anxiously. “I hope it was permissible to introduce the … er … police gentleman.”

  I was startled, but I saw my chance. “They have to ask questions,” I said. “Did he ask you any questions?”

  “Not … not to say questions, Miss.”

  “You mean not about Mr. Winberry?”

  “No, Miss.”

  “They ought to have asked you. You know much more about this house than I do. You saw Mr. Winberry leave, I suppose?”

  “Indeed, yes, Miss Elizabeth.”

  “Oh, dear, I hope I was right. I told him they all left together.”

  “Mr. Winberry and Mr. Gaskell left together. Mr. Maxon left almost immediately after.”

  “Oh. But what I told them was close enough, don’t you think so?”

  “I do,” he said gravely. “After all, Mr. Winberry and Mr. Gaskell were taking a cab, and Mr. Maxon was not.”

  “Was there a cab?”

  “I had seen to it that one was waiting,” he told me.

  “They ought to have asked you all these things,” I said. “I don’t know. They asked me what the people of this household did after that. I said we went to bed.”

  “I think you need not worry about your answers, Miss Elizabeth,” Effans said kindly. “That is quite so.”

  “Oh, I remember. You went up to the fourth floor.”

  “Yes, Miss.”

  “And Ellen was already there.”

  “Oh, yes, Miss.”

  “Cook wouldn’t be wandering around, would she?”

  “Oh, never! Cook has not been upstairs for … for a very long time.” He looked shocked and puzzled. “They wished to know all this?”

  “Why … it was only …” I let my voice trail off. “Did you hear the phone ring? You couldn’t have, could you?”

  “No, Miss, not in the master’s room, and that is the only phone left open at night. I switched all other bells off, as usual, when I bolted the doors.”

  “Well, I don’t know what it’s all about,” I murmured, trying to think how I could ask him about the red men now and not tell him anything. Then I thought of a way. “People worry about such little things … you can’t remember. There’s Mr. Hugh’s keys, too. You didn’t find them anywhere?”

  “No, indeed. Mr. Hugh inquired this morning.”

  “He inquired of me, too. I don’t know. Were you out on the front steps this morning? He may have dropped them there.”

  “When I have occasion to leave the house,” Effans reminded me patiently, “I use the lower door, Miss.”

  “Oh, but they might have fallen into the areaway.”

  “I saw nothing in the areaway.”

  “And you were out there this morning?”

  “Oh, yes, Miss.”

  “Then he can’t just have lost them here.”

  “I believe not, Miss, because, on opening the upper door for those who ring, I do have occasion to see the steps.”

  “Of course.”

  “And I saw nothing there this morning. Nor in the library, as I told him. No. If the keys had been here I should have found them.” His head rode high on his long red neck. He looked offended.

  “Oh, I’m sure you would,” I said. “That’s what I told him. It’s silly to insist you know where you lost something because if you did it wouldn’t be lost, would it?” He beamed again. “Thank you, Effans. These doors …?”

  “Communicate with the drawing room,” he said, bowing. “If you’ll excuse me, I believe the bell.…”

  I stayed where I was. I wished I had one of J.J. Jones’s pieces of paper and a stub pencil to chew on. If Effans had lied he’d told a real whopper, not just left off a piece of truth. He’d said, “I saw nothing in the areaway, nothing on the steps.” Somebody had picked up the red men before morning. But we already knew that. We still didn’t know who. Except that it wasn’t Effans.

  When finally I opened one of the sliding doors, the drawing room was full of people. The fire was lit. Lina was pouring tea.

  My uncle was saying, “No need to worry about his will, Maxon. There’s nothing to divide. Unless you propose to pay his debts.”

  “Not I,” said Guy Maxon. He was dressed exactly as he had been the night before. I
suddenly knew he was a great deal less prosperous than he looked.

  “Not I,” said Mr. Gaskell, who was sitting on the edge of a chair so that his short legs could reach the floor. His feet were planted wide apart. He had a teacup in his hand.

  “Oh, Bessie,” Lina said, “come and have tea.”

  Hugh Miller was there. I was surprised to see him, as he stood up lankily until I found a chair.

  “Hudson was always an optimist,” my uncle said. “Always had a fortune around the corner. It’s still there.” He drank his tea standing. His large head was placed slightly forward of his big shoulders.

  “Leaves you high and dry, don’t it, Miller?” Gaskell said, rolling his froggy eyes around to Hugh.

  “Yes,” Hugh said shortly.

  “What will you do?” Lina asked him with pretty concern.

  “He’ll stay here,” my uncle said, making his big voice gentle, for what purpose I couldn’t tell, “until this business is wound up.”

  Hugh began as if he thought Lina ought to be consulted. “Mr. Cathcart has very kindly asked me—”

  “I’ve told Effans,” my uncle said, settling the matter. “The late Winberry’s flat is an unpleasant place, with half of it sealed by the police.”

  “Oh,” I said, “oh, I’ve got to tell you.”

  They all looked at me.

  “The police were here,” I said.

  “Here!” The Frog was, of all of them, the startled one. He put his teacup down and picked up his cigar. “What’d they want, eh?” He was asking my uncle, not me. It was my uncle to whom I told my story.

  I told him that J.J. Jones had called, party as a reporter, partly as a friend. I believed, myself, that he was an old friend of mine. It never entered my head until long after I’d said so that I was telling a lie about that. For the rest, I told the truth, starting with Garnett’s first question and ending with his last. I told it fast because my uncle’s attention was like the beam of a searchlight. It made me feel far too conspicuous to be comfortable.

  “What’s on their minds?” Gaskell said when I had finished. “Eh, Charlie?”

  But my uncle said, “Thanks very much, my dear,” softly to me, and I was suddenly terrified.

  “Was it all right?” I said, “I d-didn’t know …” Hugh put his hand over mine, and I was startled. The teacup rattled in my saucer.

  “Of course it was all right,” Lina said.

  My uncle smiled. “You mustn’t be frightened,” he said in his great, soft leashed-in voice. “You did exactly as you should have done, of course.” But his eyes, which held mine, were cold and not as amused as usual.

  I was so scared that I said aloud the phrase I was saying over to myself. “I c-come from the country.…” My voice quavered ridiculously. But it was just the thing because everybody laughed—my uncle, too, a beautiful laugh—and I blushed like fury but I felt eased.

  “What’s going on?” Gaskell demanded when their laughter died. “You oughta know, Charlie. You been there. You see this dick?”

  “I saw him.”

  “Fella was around to my place this morning,” Gaskell went on. “I couldn’t get anything out of him.”

  “However,” my uncle said, “I also had a little talk with Peter Finn.” I felt Hugh stiffen in his chair. He took his hand away. “Odd thing,” my uncle said in his soft and somehow therefore significant tone. “He seems to think he saw a Peppinger.”

  Everybody was motionless except Lina whose hands still moved among the tea things. I put my cup down so it couldn’t rattle. Gaskell’s eyes were popping. “Where?” he said explosively. “There ain’t any more Peppingers. You oughta know.”

  “On Winberry’s body. There are no more Peppingers. I do know,” my uncle said calmly.

  “What the hell …?” Gaskell slid even farther forward. “Winberry and I were together on that deal.”

  “Ah, yes,” my uncle said, “so you were.”

  “We were all in it,” Maxon said wryly. “What of it?”

  My uncle shrugged his shoulders and looked at Hugh. I felt the searchlight shift to him. I almost saw it picking him out.

  “It wasn’t a Peppinger,” Hugh said. “It was this.”

  He picked the red man out of his pocket and dropped it, with an air of carelessness, on a little drum table that stood near him. The red chip made a sound as it fell on the wood. They recognized it.

  Then, again, as on the night before, upstairs, I felt that wave of angry ill-will rise in the room. What was it? These men, these few men, somehow, among them, generated that evil thing like pressure in the air. Winberry was dead, but the evil was not dead yet.

  My uncle picked up the parcheesi chip. “I guessed as much,” he said lightly. Then he flipped it into the fire.

  Maxon looked startled. Gaskell opened and closed his mouth rapidly several times. Hugh’s jaw was clenched. A vein throbbed blue on his temple. Maxon said in a minute, “That was a mistake, Charlie.” I looked at him and saw his sensitive nostrils quivering.

  I thought two things. I thought: Maybe there were fingerprints on it. Then I thought: Maxon. Maxon lingered. Don’t forget. Think of it later.

  “Phew!” Lina jumped up. “Heavens, what a smell!”

  “Sorry,” said my uncle, with satisfaction, not regret. “Shall we go up to the library?” We trooped upstairs to get away from the odor of the red man burning. A nasty, indescribable stench, not like any other burning thing I’d ever smelled. It was worse than celluloid, worse than rubber. It was worse than anything.

  Lina was first on the stairs. Guy Maxon and I were even, behind her. Halfway up, he said, “Dinner?”

  She said, not turning her head, “Maybe.”

  He said, “Nice.”

  She said, “I can’t tell.”

  He said, “Well?”

  That was all. We disposed ourselves in the library. My uncle lit the fire himself. He liked fire. I could see that. He liked to look at it, perhaps he liked to play with it. He watched the flames get started.

  Gaskell said, “Damn it all. What’s it mean, eh?”

  Maxon said, “Do the police know about that … thing you found, Miller?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?” My uncle seemed merely curious.

  “Because I forgot about it,” Hugh said sullenly. My uncle looked sidewise at him but said nothing.

  “Just as well,” Guy Maxon suggested. My uncle shrugged his shoulders. He said nothing about having thrown any red men out of any window.

  Gaskell chewed his cigar. It had gone out, but he didn’t seem to notice. “Worry,” he said rather defiantly, “never got anybody any place. I’m going to a show tonight. Forget it. Come along, Lina?”

  “What are your plans, Charles?” she said. My uncle didn’t seem to hear, but she didn’t repeat her question, and presently he answered it, having heard after all.

  “I shall be working late tonight.”

  “Let’s catch ourselves a dinner at a nice noisy place,” Gaskell said. “Eh, Lina? Eat, drink, and be merry, eh?”

  I wished she wouldn’t go. I could just see him, showing her off, watching her with his popeyes, acting as if he owned her, touching her shoulders when he could, soiling her perfection just by the way he looked at her, in front of people, too.

  But she said, “You’ll dine upstairs, Charles?” He nodded. She smiled at the Frog. “What shall we see, Bertram?”

  The Frog blinked. “Get me tickets to the opening, Charlie, can you?”

  My uncle said a few words into the library telephone, did it quietly, obediently. I saw Lina glance at Guy Maxon, a message sent, received, and answered. I couldn’t read it. I felt sad.

  As Gaskell left, he stood in the door and said queerly, “I ain’t afraid, y’ know.” He said it to no one in particular. Nobody answered.

  As the tea party began to break up, I heard Maxon speak to my uncle, something about a “deal.” “I’ll be here. Give you half an hour,” my uncle said, “if that’s enou
gh.”

  “It’ll do,” Maxon said. Then he left, saying no special good-by to Lina.

  Hugh asked me, on our way upstairs, to go to the movies, and, surprised, I said I would. Then he went to get himself settled in the little bedroom next to mine.

  Lina came presently to my door. “Are you all right?”

  “I’m … Sure. Come in.”

  She wandered in, still in her pale wool suit, which looked as if it had just come from the tailor’s. Her lovely face was thoughtful. “I haven’t explained to you the way this house is run,” she said. “And I think I’d better. I don’t suppose we live as other people do. You see Charles has the rather quaint idea that our servants are here to serve us. So you must feel free … I mean to say, because dinner has been prepared here is never a reason to decline another invitation.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “I’m afraid we dine out rather often,” she said. “I honestly forgot this is your first dinner here.”

  “Oh,” I said, thinking I saw the light. “Oh, you mustn’t consider me. I don’t want you to. That would make me a nuisance. You tell me the way the house is run, and I’ll learn.”

  “All right,” she said. “The house is run to suit those who live in it. Whatever we wish to do, we feel free to do. It’s only polite, of course, to tell the servants—just mention it to Effans—when you will not be here for a meal if you know about it in advance. We more or less dine together by appointment, do you see?”

  I didn’t see. “You mean I must ask you or Uncle Charles …?”

  “There will always be dinner served here if you are here and want it. But if you especially wished to see us at dinner, why, you might ask what our plans are.” She seemed a little embarrassed. “Now, I’ve asked Charles to dine with me tomorrow night, and you must, too.”

  “I’d love to,” I murmured.

  “Also, we dine all over the house. If you want dinner served to you here, for instance, just tell Effans. Or lunch, of course. You never need come to a family table. There isn’t any. Do you see?”