“Well, it was lying on the stairs,” she said. “After all, people do fire them.”
“How true that is,” I said. “But Mr. Lavery probably had a hole in his pocket. He isn’t home, is he?”
“Oh no.” She shook her head and looked disappointed. “And I don’t think it’s very nice of him. He promised me the check and I walked over—”
“When was it you phoned him?” I asked. “Why, yesterday evening.” She frowned, not liking so many questions.
“He must have been called away,” I said.
She stared at a spot between my big brown eyes.
“Look, Mrs. Fallbrook,” I said. “Let’s not kid around any longer, Mrs. Fallbrook. Not that I don’t love it. And not that I like to say this. But you didn’t shoot him, did you—on account of he owed you three months’ rent?”
She sat down very slowly on the edge of a chair and worked the tip of her tongue along the scarlet slash of her mouth.
“Why, what a perfectly horrid suggestion,” she said angrily. “I don’t think you are nice at all. Didn’t you say the gun had not been fired?”
“All guns have been fired sometime. All guns have been loaded sometime. This one is not loaded now.”
“Well, then—” she made an impatient gesture and sniffed at her oily glove.
“Okay, my idea was wrong. Just a gag anyway. Mr. Lavery was out and you went through the house. Being the owner, you have a key. Is that correct?”
“I didn’t mean to be interfering,” she said, biting a finger. “Perhaps I ought not to have done it. But I have a right to see how things are kept.”
“Well, you looked. And you’re sure he’s not here?”
“I didn’t look under the beds or in the icebox,” she said coldly. “I called out from the top of the stairs when he didn’t answer my ring. Then I went down to the lower hall and called out again. I even peeped into the bedroom.” She lowered her eyes as if bashfully and twisted a hand on her knee.
“Well, that’s that,” I said.
She nodded brightly. “Yes, that’s that. And what did you say your name was?”
“Vance,” I said. “Philo Vance.”
“And what company are you employed with, Mr. Vance?”
“I’m out of work right now,” I said. “Until the police commissioner gets into a jam again.”
She looked startled. “But you said you came about a car payment.”
“That’s just part-time work,” I said. “A fill-in job.”
She rose to her feet and looked at me steadily. Her voice was cold saying: “Then in that case I think you had better leave now.”
I said: “I thought I might take a look around first, if you don’t mind. There might be something you missed.”
“I don’t think that is necessary,” she said. “This is my house. I’ll thank you to leave now, Mr. Vance.”
I said: “And if I don’t leave, you’ll get somebody who will. Take a chair again, Mrs. Fallbrook. I’ll just glance through. This gun, you know, is kind of queer.”
“But I told you I found it lying on the stairs,” she said angrily. “I don’t know anything else about it. I don’t know anything about guns at all. I—I never shot one in my life.” She opened a large blue bag and pulled a handkerchief out of it and sniffled.
“That’s your story,” I said. “I don’t have to get stuck with it.”
She put her left hand out to me with a pathetic gesture, like the erring wife in East Lynne.
“Oh, I shouldn’t have come in!” she cried. “It was horrid of me. I know it was. Mr. Lavery will be furious.”
“What you shouldn’t have done,” I said, “was let me find out the gun was empty. Up to then you were holding everything in the deck.”
She stamped her foot. That was all the scene lacked. That made it perfect.
“Why, you perfectly loathsome man,” she squawked. “Don’t you dare touch me! Don’t you take a single step towards me! I won’t stay in this house another minute with you. How dare you be so insulting—”
She caught her voice and snapped it in mid-air like a rubber band. Then she put her head down, purple hat and all, and ran for the door. As she passed me she put a hand out as if to stiff-arm me, but she wasn’t near enough and I didn’t move. She jerked the door wide and charged out through it and up the walk to the street. The door came slowly shut and I heard her rapid steps above the sound of its closing.
I ran a fingernail along my teeth and punched the point of my jaw with a knuckle, listening. I didn’t hear anything anywhere to listen to. A six-shot automatic, fired empty.
“Something,” I said out loud, “is all wrong with this scene.
The house seemed now to be abnormally still. I went along the apricot rug and through the archway to the head of the stairs. I stood there for another moment and listened again.
I shrugged and went quietly down the stairs.
SIXTEEN
The lower hall had a door at each end and two in the middle side by side. One of these was a linen closet and the other was locked. I went along to the end and looked in at a spare bedroom with drawn blinds and no sign of being used. I went back to the other end of the hall and stepped into a second bedroom with a wide bed, a caféau-lait rug, angular furniture in light wood, a box mirror over the dressing table and a long fluorescent lamp over the mirror. In the corner a crystal greyhound stood on a mirror-top table and beside him a crystal box with cigarettes in it.
Face powder was spilled around on the dressing table. There was a smear of dark lipstick on a towel hanging over the waste basket. On the bed were pillows side by side, with depressions in them that could have been made by heads. A woman’s handkerchief peeped from under one pillow. A pair of sheer black pajamas lay across the foot of the bed. A rather too emphatic trace of chypre hung in the air.
I wondered what Mrs. Fallbrook had thought of all this.
I turned around and looked at myself in the long mirror of a closet door. The door was painted white and had a crystal knob. I turned the knob in my handkerchief and looked inside. The cedar-lined closet was fairly full of man’s clothes. There was a nice friendly smell of tweed. The closet was not entirely full of man’s clothes.
There was also a woman’s black and white tailored suit, mostly white, black and white shoes under it, a Panama with a black and white rolled band on a shelf above it. There were other woman’s clothes, but I didn’t examine them.
I shut the closet door and went out of the bedroom, holding my handkerchief ready for more doorknobs.
The door next to the linen closet, the locked door, had to be the bathroom. I shook it, but it went on being locked. I bent down and saw there was a short, slit-shaped opening in the middle of the knob. I knew then that the door was fastened by pushing a button in the middle of the knob inside, and that the slit-like opening was for a metal key without wards that would spring the lock open in case somebody fainted in the bathroom, or the kids locked themselves in and got sassy.
The key for this ought to be kept on the top shelf of the linen closet, but it wasn’t. I tried my knife blade, but that was too thin. I went back to the bedroom and got a flat nail file off the dresser. That worked. I opened the bathroom door.
A man’s sand-colored pajamas were tossed over a painted hamper. A pair of heelless green slippers lay on the floor. There was a safety razor on the edge of the washbowl and a tube of cream with the cap off. The bathroom window was shut, and there was a pungent smell in the air that was not quite like any other smell.
Three empty shells lay bright and coppery on the Nile green tiles of the bathroom floor, and there was a nice clean hole in the frosted pane of the window. To the left and a little above the window were two scarred places in the plaster where the white showed behind the paint and where something, such as a bullet, had gone in.
The shower curtain was green and white oiled silk and it hung on shiny chromium rings and it was drawn across the shower opening. I slid it aside, the ring
s making a thin scraping noise, which for some reason sounded indecently loud.
I felt my neck creak a little as I bent down. He was there all right-there wasn’t anywhere else for him to be. He was huddled in the corner under the two shining faucets, and water dripped slowly on his chest, from the chromium showerhead.
His knees were drawn up but slack. The two holes in his naked chest were dark blue and both of them were close enough to his heart to have killed him. The blood seemed to have been washed away.
His eyes had a curiously bright and expectant look, as if he smelled the morning coffee and would be coming right out.
Nice efficient work. You have just finished shaving and stripped for the shower and you are leaning in against the shower curtain and adjusting the temperature of the water. The door opens behind you and somebody comes in. The somebody appears to have been a woman. She has a gun. You look at the gun and she shoots it.
She misses with three shots. It seems impossible, at such short range, but there it is. Maybe it happens all the time. I’ve been around so little.
You haven’t anywhere to go. You could lunge at her and take a chance, if you were that kind of fellow, and if you were braced for it. But leaning in over the shower faucets, holding the curtain closed, you are off balance. Also you are apt to be somewhat petrified with panic, if you are at all like other people. So there isn’t anywhere to go, except into the shower.
That is where you go. You go into it as far as you can, but a shower stall is a small place and the tiled wall stops you. You are backed up against the last wall there is now. You are all out of space, and you are all out of living. And then there are two more shots, possibly three, and you slide down the wall, and your eyes are not even frightened any more now. They are just the empty eyes of the dead.
She reaches in and turns the shower off. She sets the lock of the bathroom door. On her way out of the house she throws the empty gun on the stair carpet. She should worry. It is probably your gun.
Is that right? It had better be right.
I bent and pulled at his arm. Ice couldn’t have been any colder or any stiffer. I went out of the bathroom, leaving it unlocked. No need to lock it now. It only makes work for the cops.
I went into the bedroom and pulled the handkerchief out from under the pillow. It was a minute piece of linen rag with a scalloped edge embroidered in red. Two small initials were stitched in the corner, in red. A.F.
“Adrienne Fromsett,” I said. I laughed. It was a rather ghoulish laugh.
I shook the handkerchief to get some of the chypre out of it and folded it up in a tissue and put it in a pocket. I went back upstairs to the living room and poked around in the desk against the wall. The desk contained no interesting letters, phone numbers or provocative match folders. Or if it did, I didn’t find them.
I looked at the phone. It was on a small table against the wall beside the fireplace. It had a long cord so that Mr. Lavery could be lying on his back on the davenport, a cigarette between his smooth brown lips, a tall cool one at the table at his side, and plenty of time for a nice long cosy conversation with a lady friend. An easy, languid, flirtatious, kidding, not too subtle and not too blunt conversation, of the sort he would be apt to enjoy.
All that wasted too. I went away from the telephone to the door and set the lock so I could come in again and shut the door tight, pulling it hard over the sill until the lock clicked. I went up the walk and stood in the sunlight looking across the street at Dr. Almore’s house.
Nobody yelled or ran out of the door. Nobody blew a police whistle. Everything was quiet and sunny and calm. No cause for excitement whatever. It’s only Marlowe, finding another body. He does it rather well by now. Murder-a-day Marlowe, they call him. They have the meat wagon following him around to follow up on the business he finds.
A nice enough fellow, in an ingenuous sort of way.
I walked back to the intersection and got into my car and started it and backed it and drove away from there.
SEVENTEEN
The bellhop at the Athletic Club was back in three minutes with a nod for me to come with him. We rode up to the fourth floor and went around a corner and he showed me a half-open door.
“Around to the left, sir. As quietly as you can. A few of the members are sleeping.”
I went into the club library. It contained books behind glass doors and magazines on a long central table and a lighted portrait of the club’s founder. But its real business seemed to be sleeping. Outward-jutting bookcases cut the room into a number of small alcoves and in the alcoves were high-backed leather chairs of an incredible size and softness. In a number of the chairs old boys were snoozing peacefully, their faces violet with high blood pressure, thin racking snores coming out of their pinched noses.
I climbed over a few feet and stole around to the left. Derace Kingsley was in the very last alcove in the far end of the room. He had two chairs arranged side by side, facing into the corner. His big dark head just showed over the top of one of them. I slipped into the empty one and gave him a quick nod.
“Keep your voice down,” he said. “This room is for after-luncheon naps. Now what is it? When I employed you it was to save me trouble, not to add trouble to what I already had. You made me break an important engagement.”
“I know,” I said, and put my face close to his. He smelled of highballs, in a nice way. “She shot him.”
His eyebrows jumped and his face got that stony look. His teeth clamped tight. He breathed softly and twisted a large hand on his kneecap.
“Go on,” he said, in a voice the size of a marble.
I looked back over the top of my chair. The nearest old geezer was sound asleep and blowing the dusty fuzz in his nostrils back and forth as he breathed.
“No answer at Lavery’s place,” I said. “Door slightly open. But I noticed yesterday it sticks on the sill. Pushed it open. Room dark, two glasses with drinks having been in them. House very still. In a moment a slim dark woman calling herself Mrs. Fallbrook, landlady, came up the stairs with her glove wrapped around a gun. Said she found it on the stairs. Said she came to collect her three months’ back rent. Used her key to get in. Inference is she took the chance to snoop around and look the house over. Took the gun from her and found it had been fired recently, but didn’t tell her so. She said Lavery was not home. Got rid of her by making her mad and she departed in high dudgeon. She may call the police, but it’s much more likely she will just go out and hunt butterflies and forget the whole thing—except the rent.”
I paused. Kingsley’s head was turned towards me and his jaw muscles bulged with the way his teeth were clamped. His eyes looked sick.
“I went downstairs. Signs of a woman having spent the night. Pajamas, face powder, perfume, and so on. Bathroom locked, but got it open. Three empty shells on the floor, two shots in the wall, one in the window. Lavery in the shower stall, naked and dead.”
“My God!” Kingsley whispered. “Do you mean to say he had a woman with him last night and she shot him this morning in the bathroom?”
“Just what did you think I was trying to say?” I asked.
“Keep your voice down,” he groaned. “It’s a shock, naturally. Why in the bathroom?”
“Keep your own voice down,” I said. “Why not in the bathroom? Could you think of a place where a man would be more completely off guard?”
He said: “You don’t know that a woman shot him. I mean, you’re not sure, are you?”
“No,” I said. “That’s true. It might have been somebody who used a small gun and emptied it carelessly to look like a woman’s work. The bathroom is downhill, facing outwards on space and I don’t think shots down there would be easily heard by anyone not in the house. The woman who spent the night might have left-or there need not have been any woman at all. The appearances could have been faked. You might have shot him.”
“What would I want to shoot him for?” he almost bleated, squeezing both kneecaps hard. “I’m a civil
ized man.”
That didn’t seem to be worth an argument either. I said: “Does your wife own a gun?”
He turned a drawn miserable face to me and said hollowly: “Good God, man, you can’t really think that!”
“Well does she?”
He got the words out in small pieces. “Yes—she does. A small automatic.”
“You buy it locally?”
“I—I didn’t buy it at all. I took it away from a drunk at a party in San Francisco a couple of years ago. He was waving it around, with an idea that that was very funny. I never gave it back to him.” He pinched his jaw hard until his knuckles whitened. “He probably doesn’t even remember how or when he lost it. He was that kind of a drunk.”
“This is working out almost too neatly,” I said. “Could you recognize this gun?”
He thought hard, pushing his jaw out and half closing his eyes. I looked back over the chairs again. One of the elderly snoozers had waked himself up with a snort that almost blew him out of his chair. He coughed, scratched his nose with a thin dried-up hand, and fumbled a gold watch out of his vest. He peered at it bleakly, put it away, and went to sleep again.
I reached in my pocket and put the gun on Kingsley’s hand. He stared down at it miserably.
“I don’t know,” he said slowly. “It’s like it, but I can’t tell.”
“There’s a serial number on the side,” I said.
“Nobody remembers the serial numbers of guns.”
“I was hoping you wouldn’t,” I said. “It would have worried me very much.”
His hand closed around the gun and he put it down beside him on the chair.
“The dirty rat,” he said softly. “I suppose he ditched her.”
“I don’t get it,” I said.
“The motive was inadequate for you, on account of you’re a civilized man. But it was adequate for her.”
“It’s not the same motive,” he snapped. “And women are more impetuous than men.”
“Like cats are more impetuous than dogs.”
“How?”