Murder at Large

III

Standing at the windows, Belknap looking over Whittaker’s shoulder, they saw Blake spring lightly from the seat of his Ford convertible, throw out his bags from the rumble, spring back, and “zoom” around the corner to the garage.

Putting a hand on Whittaker’s arm, Belknap brought him roughly about.

“Why ring Blake in on this?” he asked, and his voice took a deadly level. His lips also leveled to a straight line, and his teeth showed white in the slit between. “After all he’s too good a friend, isn’t he, of yours, and mine? What’s the big idea?”

“He is a friend, old man, true enough.” Whittaker quietly brushed Belknap’s hand from his sleeve, and turned away. “But what are friends, true or false, to me now? ‘Less than the dust.’ Besides, Blake is a crack shot—and a sportsman to boot. Even though you proved so brilliantly that he didn’t shoot Stanton, it was just the kind of shooting he might have done, you know that. He gives no quarter to men who run out on debts, or dishonor women. Sort of a knight errant—goes about saving situations in the nick of time. That he finds it convenient to use a gun in most cases is not his fault. I can even see him doing me what he would call ‘a good turn,’ taking me out after a whiskey and soda, and putting a hole through me against the garden wall with a Sorrell-and-Son generosity, ‘We mustn’t let the poor devil suffer.’ Yes, Belknap, you must admit he’s a splendid prospect from my point of view. I can’t help it that you have scruples against sleuthing him.”

“By all that’s holy, you are beyond me, Whittaker.”

“If you mean by that that I am beyond the pale, I am. And beyond caring. There may or may not be a life in death, but that there is death in life I’m finding out. So what the Hell!”

“Enough said, Whittaker. We’ll leave it at that. I begin to see that it is ‘what the Hell’ and then some.” Belknap was pacing the floor, his hands thrust deep in his pockets. He stopped before Whittaker to ask, “I have a question before we go further. What’s the match, that lights the fuse, that blows up the house that Bertrand built?”

“A good match, Ordway, soaked in tar, pitch, and turpentine. I publish my Diary. It’s a substantial, well-filled, truthful Diary, packed with sensations. In a period when confessions and revelations are in such demand, it seemed a pity not to keep abreast of the times. Hearst gives me a small fortune for mine, sight unseen, and it goes, in my will, with whatever else I possess, to my niece Joel—unless, of course, this week-end makes it useless to her; in which case—”

“Joel Lacey! See here, Whittaker, you’re insane! I’ve cared for Joel, and you know it, since she was too young to know the meaning of the word love. She is incapable of murder. But if she had committed a crime, and you were letting her down, you would have me to reckon with.”

“Hear, hear! The first threat, and that from my bodyguard. Check it for Berry’s benefit. It happens, my dear fellow, that your estimate of Joel’s character, like that of all true lovers, is mistaken. Joel is a murderess. Her husband wasn’t a suicide. Oh, she had incentive enough, I guess. And it was hardly a murder in one sense: she challenged him to a duel but he scoffed at the very idea. So she fired anyway, and came to me to give herself up. I silenced her. As for letting her in for all this—well, I needed her. I was short of women for the dinner table. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have bothered with her, for my hopes don’t lean very heavily on her, I can assure you.”

“I should have thought you might be short of women. Who are the others, by the way?”

“Romany Monte Video for one. The accident in The Renegade Lover, in which she killed her husband (who was not her husband in private) with a folding dagger which didn’t collapse was not an accident. The dagger that night was not intended to fold.”

“Bertrand, you’re a cad. When did you desert Romany?”

“Years ago. I didn’t desert her. She left me for— Oh, I can’t even remember, there have been so many.”

“That’s no excuse for such betrayal as this. Who else?”

“Nadia Mdevani. You’ve met her here once or twice, I think; and of course know of her in a professional way. Not that there has ever been anything proved against her, quite the contrary, and yet where there has been a political murder, here or abroad, during the past ten years, she has almost invariably been questioned. I should say offhand that she is probably the tool of a powerful international ring of Governmental murderers. But her social distinction is unquestioned, her culture and wit are superlative, and her beauty is a thing to be dreamed of. I can say to you now, what I would not have said under any other circumstances, that she and I have been—call it friends, yet I have not breathed a word to her of what I instinctively know to be true: that she is a murderer twenty times over.”

Belknap shrugged to cover a strong, irrepressible shudder.

“You are a braver man than I am, Gunga Din. But then, in a pinch, I’ve always known you were. Is that the toll of women?”

“There’s one other. She is not a murderess, but she is a potential one, for I think she knows that her husband killed a man years ago. Until lately, when, I am sorry to say, Romany has been having her innings with him, Neil and Sydney Crawford were hand and glove in a marriage that I liked to call a marriage. He is a banker;—lives out here at Blue Acres; respected, indeed loved, by everyone who knows him; and the same can be said of Sydney. He got inadvertently mixed up with a gang of boys on the streets of New York, when he was a youngster, and they later proved to be a gang in good earnest. So when Crawford was sowing his wild oats, and had run up a card debt far beyond anything he knew his father could pay, he accepted an honorarium for cutting short the career of a drug smuggler. It was his wildest oat. He turned over to a very clean leaf; but I think he would go to any lengths now to save his name for Sydney and the children. And she would do the same by him.”

“Splendid! Go on. This is too good to be true. It is really such a sweet reversal of form—expecting the bad eggs to hatch. Isn’t that Julian Prentice out there with Joel? Who did he kill—his crippled grandmother or something?”

“Not so bad as that—or I wouldn’t have let him engage himself to Joel. No, he merely drowned a boy who was all but drowning him during the hazing of freshmen at the University. He pretended cramp to do it. Everything appeared accidental, and of course sympathy was with Julian anyway. There is one other, who makes the fourth man—irrespective of ourselves, and we don’t count. Milton Dorn I doubt whether you know. He is an able surgeon; but he also has a secret laboratory, or operating room, where he experiments on the conscious flesh to the point, but not beyond the point, where life still lingers. I should imagine that would be all you need know about him.”

“Absolutely! My only wonder is that you didn’t apply directly to him for release.”

“I thought of that. But then, as I’ve said, it’s a long row he hoes and I’m looking for a short one. There, Belknap, I guess that tells the tale in brief, doesn’t it?”

“No, not altogether, Judge. There is a point on which I need to be enlightened, with a bright, bright light. Where do I come in?”

“I thought I had made that clear. You are here to find good sport, but to be a spoil-sport.”

“I don’t mean that, Whittaker.”

“You mean the Diary—why, man alive, it makes something like a hero of you. My admiration is written all over it. Perhaps it shouldn’t be. Have you committed murder?”

Belknap laughed. “It’s not the time to admit it exactly, is it?”

A silence fell between them. Belknap broke it with another question.

“When do you spring it?”

“I thought I might bring it up at dinner. Unobtrusively. Casualness will at first bewilder them. The horror of the situation will dawn on them gradually.”

“Has anyone an inkling?”

“No one. Except perhaps Nadia. I mentioned to her the other day that it would be fun to publish my Diary verbatim seeing what a number of things it contains. Her answer was, that if I proposed doing so I would probably never live to see it in print. That sounds hopeful. Oh, of course nothing at all may happen. They may decide to take their medicine for the old rather than be on with the new. I think that would be my solution provided I was in their shoes. And then again anything may happen. Psychologically it’s a pretty how-de-do. To throw half a dozen killers together, even civilized ones (in fact the more civilized the more interesting), makes for a strange medley.”

“Stranger than you know, I’m afraid. There is an interrelation of secret currents between your protagonists that is likely to be devastating. You may not even be the only casualty. What about the police?”

“Call them in at the drop of the hat of course. The Homicide Department would be delighted to send Berry along to help you if you suggested it, I’m sure. Well—what about dressing for dinner?”

“Suits me.” Belknap put a hand on Whittaker’s shoulder as they parted at the door.

“Whittaker,” he said gently, “I don’t know what to say exactly. I’ll have to reserve my judgement until later. But again let me say I sincerely regret the circumstances that have brought us to the present precarious position. For even I can’t see my way to withdrawing now. I can’t forego the chance of so much excitement, if nothing else,” he added, with the flicker of a smile.

“Thought ye couldn’t, boy.” Whittaker stressed the shrewd, cunning accents of his Yankee ancestors.

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