If Karl Sheridan had thought the night too long even before the Stirlings’ party was half over, by the time that Timothy’s low, obsequious knock sounded on the door the following morning, he knew all too well just exactly how eternity might taste on a reluctant tongue. It tasted bitter.
He lay flat on his back for a moment, watching the breeze stir the crisp folds of the organdy curtains, and the pale gold of the sunlight deepening until it warmed and brightened every inch of the dark, satiny gleam of the fine old furniture. He had been watching it for a long time.… It made him think of Sunday mornings in Surrey when he’d awakened late to realize that it was holiday time and that he was in his English cousin’s nursery. Well, this was holiday time, too, and he wished, with a violence that jerked him up on one elbow and half out of bed, that he were safe back in the nursery.
The knock sounded again, a little more insistently, and he pulled himself up against the pillows, calling in a voice that he hoped did not sound as irritated and embittered as he felt:
“Very well, very well, come in, then!”
Timothy was very small, and very black, and very, very old. He came in as cautiously and delicately as Agag walking before Samuel and placed the tray with its glittering load of silver across Sheridan’s knees with the same exquisite caution.
“Good-morning, sah. Mr. Mallory’s ordahs was to bring the breakfas’ to you at nine o’clock. Ah hope that you found your night comfortable in every way?”
“Thanks, Timothy,” replied the young man in the large four-poster bed noncommittally. “Mr. Mallory told me last night what excellent care you and Susan take of him, and if this breakfast is a sample of it, he has clearly understated the case!”
He surveyed the frosty glass of orange juice and the crisp brown balloons of the rolls with undisguised approval, as Timothy whisked the cover off the miniature silver chafing dish with all the pride of a master prestidigitator, and a truly ineffable odor, bland and intoxicating, flooded the room.
“Timothy, what in the name of all the good little gods of the kitchen is this ambrosial concoction?”
“That, sah,” elucidated Timothy, beaming like a small ebony Cheshire cat as he poured a stream of black amber from the slender Georgian coffee pot and laced it generously with cream, so proudly clotted that he was obliged to spoon it from the round little jug, “that, sah, is kidney stew, treated like we treats terrapin in this vicinity. Are you acquainted with terrapin, sah?”
“Unfortunately, no. I am beginning to believe that my past life has been an entire loss. And this brown pot that smells of fruit and nuts and flowers, what does it contain, Timothy?”
“That there little pot, sah, holds some of Susan’s spiced peach preserve with white almonds that she put up last August. She is right sinfully proud of that preserve, sah.”
“It would be sinful if she were not proud of it,” said Sheridan judicially. Propped against the glazed white of the linen pillows, his dark young face looked once more gay and relaxed. “As well as singularly stupid—and even without seeing her I am profoundly convinced that Susan is not only virtuous but possessed of the most penetrating intelligence. No one less endowed could have made these really remarkable rolls.… Does Mr. Mallory feast in this royal state every morning?”
Timothy’s cat whiskers quivered with delight at this obviously sincere tribute.
“He does pretty fairly well at breakfast, yes, sah. He runs a little more to crumpets and that bacon that’s more like ham that he gets from Ireland, but he came to have a right good appetite for spoon bread and waffles with chicken gravy a good while back. Shall I open those curtains a little bitty further, sah? It’s a right pretty morning out.”
The sun, thus encouraged, poured itself even more recklessly into the pleasant, spacious room, lavishing its golden generosity on everything from the chintz that looked like a garden in full bloom to the black lacquer and glittering chromium accessories of Sheridan’s cherished microscope, now as comfortably installed on the long table opposite them as though it had been an integral part of the original scheme of decoration. It lingered, too, on the row of small objects marshaled before it, formal as museum exhibits. A three-inch cylinder of tooled brown leather. Three yellow pencils. A scant square inch of red glass, its edges taped in black. A little stack of papers securely anchored under his thin gold watch, but not so securely that the breeze did not catch and flutter the straying yellow edge of a telegram, revealing the corner of a gray envelope and a slip of creamy paper.
There was another object standing at the end of the row, quite invisible to anyone save the luckless occupant of the bed—and to him more relentlessly and hatefully real than all the other detestable exhibits put together: a bottle of curaçao, half filled, the pale amber of the liquid cutting sharply across its label. Karl Sheridan bestowed a scowl of unqualified disapproval on the entire row and concentrated on his breakfast.
They had been the last thing that his tired eyes had rested on as he had finally called it a day and a night, turning his face with a grimly weary determination to the wall, thoroughly fed up on the story that those small, stubborn objects were still trying to tell him. The sunlight on them then had been the youngest and shyest gilding, instead of this flooding opulence, but he cared for their cryptic confidences as little by one light as the other. Any one of a dozen people might quite possibly have sent to the hell that she feared that small shining creature known as Fay Stuart, they whispered insinuatingly; any one of four very probably had—and out of those four there was only one that it did not sicken him to the bone to think of sending after her.… Well, when he got this tray off him, he’d show them the proper place for inanimate objects, and put them in it, too.
“And Mr. Hardy, whose room I have been so fortunate as to temporarily inherit,” he inquired casually, “did he also fare so sumptuously? If so, Susan must have passed busy mornings indeed!”
Timothy’s wizened black countenance instantly assumed the uncanny, inscrutable glitter of a very small, aged, and intelligent monkey.
“Mr. Jerry, sah? Mr. Jerry did not care much for his breakfast. Mos’ generally he did not have what you could rightly call a breakfast. He was—he was right poorly in his health.”
“So I had heard. Rotten luck, poor fellow! He was by way of being an artist, was he not, Timothy? I wish that he had left some traces behind to remind me of it! Artists are a distinct hobby of mine—but the ones that I know are not so shockingly tidy as Mr. Hardy seems to have been.”
His eyes wandered regretfully over the bare, palely tinted walls, over the shining, noncommittal spaces of the swept and garnished room.
“Mistah Jerry is not what anybody in this world could call tidy—no, sah!” relied Timothy, softly emphatic. “Mistah Mallory, he come up hisself yestiddy afternoon, after he got back from that trip to New York, an’ clean up everything with Susan an’ me to give him a hand with the movin’ and the polishin’ and sweepin’. He was right anxious that everything should be spick-an’-span for you, so he pile everything out in that there hall closet where Mistah Jerry keeps a lot of the li’l’ doodads he fusses roun’ with.… Shall I come back for this heah tray, Mistah Sheridan, or do you like that I should wait for it?”
“Just wait, will you? I have only this one small bit of roll to finish, and I do not think it possible to move without bringing this whole glorious structure down with a crash.… There! That is farewell to the best breakfast that I or any other lucky fellow ever ate.… Mr. Mallory has not yet left for the embassy?”
Timothy, halfway between door and bed, paused to shake a reassuring head.
“No, sah. He have just finished his own breakfas’ when I brought you youah tray, and he ask me to tell you that he will step up an’ see you round half-past nine—befoah he goes along to the embassy.” He managed his exit through the door to the hall with the same catlike dexterity that he had employed on entering, and stood balancing delicately on his toes, one hand still on the doorknob, his head cocked appreciatively in the direction of the stairs, up which came floating the sound of a young, strong voice, thoroughly intoxicated by spring and its own easy, radiant swing. “That theah is Mistah Dion now. He has what I should call a mighty pretty singing voice, and he most surely does use it.… Shall I close the door, sah?”
“On the contrary! He has what I, too, should call a mighty pretty singing voice. Leave it open, by all means, and a thousand thanks to you and Susan!”
He leaned back, hands linked loosely about his hunched knees, watching Timothy’s minute figure vanish around the curve of the stairs—listening to the careless magic of the distant voice. The tune was changing, and for a moment he was standing again in the Stirlings’ crowded, smoky little room.…
“When the felon’s not engaged in his employment,”
caroled Dion Mallory with considerable abandon:
“Or maturing his felonious little plans,
His capacity for innocent enjoyment
Is just as great as any honest man’s.”
Sheridan, the lines deepening between his eyes, and the gray-green eyes themselves darkening to the curious black gray of rain-wet slate, reached absently for the cigarette case beside the bed.
“Our feelings we with difficulty smother
When constabulary duty’s to be done …
Oh, take one consideration with another,
A policeman’s lot is not a happy one!”
No, thought Sheridan grimly, his eyes, watchful through the curling gray wreaths, fixed on the neat row of objects before the microscope—not a happy one.… Not, something clear and ominous as a bell tolled deep within him, in any possible case a happy one … no matter what that relentless row of small, ambiguous traitors eventually confided in him. That was about the only thing in the world on which score he was entirely clear.
“When constabulary duty’s to be done, to be done,
The policeman’s lot is—not—a—happy—one!”
Still listening to the full-throated mockery of the mournful plaint swell to a truly magnificent crescendo, the young man from Vienna ground out the tip of the half-finished cigarette with a valedictory gesture, and slipped, tightlipped, from the insidious shelter of the stacked pillows. For a moment he stood motionless, staring at the microscope and its attendant satellites, and, girding the cords of the darkly brocaded dressing gown twice about the lean, hard waist with a vicious tug, he crossed to the long table.
“When the enterprising burglar’s not a-burgling,
When the cut-throat isn’t occupied in crime—”
He wrenched the center drawer open, sweeping his prize exhibits into it with a reckless dexterity that his alma mater in Vienna would have both admired and deplored, and slamming it to with a vigor that rocked him back on his heels.
“He loves to hear the little brook a-gurgling
And listen to the merry village chime.”
… In the bathroom just beyond, he turned the coldwater faucet on full tilt, plunging his head into the icy downpour, as though the crystal-green rush held blindness and deafness and oblivion in its healing torrent. But clear above the rush of the waters, another sound rose clearer still:
“When the coster’s finished jumping on his mother,
He loves to lie a-basking in the sun—”
The sun.… Yes.… The sun was good, too. Had Fay Stuart loved the sun? Incredible, to be done with sun and moon and stars forever.… He lifted his head, swept the hair back from his brow in two curt strokes of the brush that left it dark and sleek as a seal’s flank, and stood scowling at the mirrored reflection.… What of that other face that the mirror had held prisoner a thousand times—that young, suffering face, at once gay and stricken—Jerry Hardy’s face, that Tess had said looked like a little boy’s, punished for something that he had never done? From the frame that stood on Mallory’s admirable Chippendale desk downstairs, it had already smiled a brilliant welcome to them when they had crossed the threshold of the sitting room in the extremely small hours of the morning. Sheridan had known without asking who he was, this blond and gallant boy, with the dimple barely flickering in the young curve of the cheek, and the Royal Flying Corps cap cocked recklessly on one side of his head.… But would the mirror have recognized even dimly the blithe lieutenant in the haunted face that of late had shadowed it, day after day, night after night? It was, decidedly, a highly dubious and not particularly pleasant speculation.
There was a light clatter of feet on the stairs, and Sheridan, setting his teeth, retraced his steps swiftly and noiselessly across the bedroom floor. He had known for a long time that if you wanted someone to be entirely relaxed and at ease, the surest and simplest way to accomplish it was to be entirely relaxed and at ease yourself.… He particularly wanted Dion Mallory to be at ease.… There were several things that he needed to find out rather badly, and he could hardly fire questions like bullets if his quarry were on the wing.
When Jerry Hardy’s friend crossed Jerry Hardy’s threshold, the policeman from Vienna was solidly and serenely installed in the four-poster bed, a book open on his knees, and the smoke wreaths mounting to the high ceiling.
“Taking it easy, you lazy young devil?” Mallory’s voice was as warm and friendly as though the stranger from across the seas were a lifelong comrade. “How did Timothy do you at breakfast? Oh, God, Sheridan, I wish that you were in my boots, and I were in your bed! I never in my whole blighted life felt less like knitting official red tape into afghans for the blooming Empire. It’s the truth before heaven that if I don’t get my nine hours of sleep under my belt every night of my life, I’m no better than dead and buried the next morning! I’m no better than that this minute, and still and all in no less than that well-known split second I’ll have to be on my way like the prize carrier pigeon of the universe. Anything that I can do for you before I go, young fellow?”
“Oh, many things!” replied Sheridan promptly. “The breakfast was incredibly admirable, of course, but there are still a good half-dozen things that I long to know about this mènage. Am I to take that bit about instant flight literally?”
“Well, as one honest fellow to another, not if you can give me a fairly good excuse for staying! It’s a light day at the embassy, and if I check in anywhere around ten it will be quite all right. May I borrow one of those cigarettes? I’ve eaten the hearts out of my Gulaks these last few days, and there’s not a solitary crumb of one left in the house. Now then, if you don’t mind my cocking my feet up on our mutual furniture, I’m your humble and happy servant. What’s the first thing on your mind?”
“As a starter, suppose you assume that, quite literally, all that I know about this more than delightful house is that I am fortunate enough to be in it. There is a sitting room next to this, I understand? Is that my private property? And what arrangement do we have as to lunching and dining?”
“Good Lord, you must think that I’m the worst host this side of Tasmania! I clean forgot how little you knew about your own local habitation—as a matter of fact, I was so blind, deaf, and dumb with fatigue last night from my run to New York that the best that I could do was to point to your bed and fall into mine. The room next door is your private property, naturally. If we’re ever in luck enough to both be here together instead of reveling about town in our best purple and fine linen, we’ll dine in my diggings below—if you’ll be affable enough to put up with me. Breakfast you already know about, and Susan will see that you get lunch here any time that you feel like it. Next, sir?”
“Next, tell me something of this party that we are to attend tonight. At what hour is it, and do we wear black or white tie?”
“Oh, I rather fancy that it’s dinner jackets with carnations on the lapels, and that it’s somewhere around eight, with the people dropping in somewhere around nine. You know the kind of thing—buffet supper on the terrace, quantities of very fairish champagne, and a swimming pool lit with blue moonlight, trick bars, elegant backgammon sets, and fiddles to dance to if you feel like dancing—and a little fellow with a little rolling-around piano who sings songs by Cole Porter and Noel Coward as though he were having an intrigue with the piano. All very romantic and festive and informal—gray caviar and pink chiffon and home at six in the morning if you’re lucky.”
Sheridan selected another cigarette and eyed it pensively for a moment before he drew a leisurely match across the sandpaper of the packet.
“It sounds a truly admirable party. Do the Lindsays always do you so well?”
“As well or better. When it comes to parties, no one in these parts even touches them, and it’s a poor week that they don’t find a good excuse for giving one. This week it’s Jerry’s kid sister—she’s by way of being a first-rate actress, and she’s opening here in a try-out of Lonsdale’s new comedy at the National tonight, and dashing out to Green Gardens as soon as it’s over. Joan Lindsay and she went to Foxcroft together.”
“Ah, yes—Jerry Hardy,” murmured the young man from Vienna, his eyes on the curling gray wreaths. “Tess told me yesterday that he was in a really bad state, poor fellow. I was more sorry than I can say. It is a form of shell shock, as well as the actual war injuries?”
“That, and a few other trifles,” remarked Dion, his charming Celtic face, with the color high on the cheekbones and the deep blue eyes that flickered so unexpectedly from mirth to melancholy, suddenly grim. “Didn’t Tess wax expansive on the subject?”
“Hardly. I should imagine that expansiveness is not one of her besetting sins.”
“You’d be right there,” commented Mallory, the mirth briefly replacing the melancholy. “Lord bless her lovely heart, she’s about as expansive as a locked steel trap! But I can’t for the life of me see any particular point in going in for mystery as far as Jerry’s concerned, poor lad.… He’s been taking drugs these three years past, and they’ve finally got him down—and out, too, if you’re asking me. I’m not the one that’s blaming him, mind you! If I’d had half the pains that were ripping him in two every hour that he breathed, I’d be putting hashish in my tea in the morning and opium in my coffee at night. And I’ll take my oath to heaven that he’s half killed himself trying to break off with the rotten stuff—like as not he’s killed himself entirely.”
Mallory’s voice was so somber and bitter that Sheridan did not have to look to ascertain that the face was dark and bitter, too.
“And it is at Dr. Byrd’s sanitarium at Stillhaven that he is trying to fight it out?” he asked, in a carefully expressionless voice.
“Ah, Byrd!” The cold violence of the tone caused Sheridan to abandon his inspection of smoke wreaths abruptly. “There’s one that the devil will make short shrift of one of these fine nights! I’m making you a wager now that he and that cursed assistant of his would feed those poor souls poppies sooner than fast them. A sanitarium, is it? Well, then, I’ve seen joss houses that were decent hospitals.”
“You mean that he actually peddles drugs to the poor devils under the cloak of curing them?”
“Oh, well, I wouldn’t be putting it just that way in the public prints,” remarked Mallory with a brief glint of a smile. “Not so long as about the only law left that’s fashionable is the one on slander. I’ve not got a feather of proof on him, mind you. But my guess is as good as the next fellow’s, and mine is that he’s got his stool pigeons out among all the fine expensive snow-birds and hop-heads in these parts—and once he gets his claws into them, they never draw an easy breath again, the pitiful, luckless fools.”
“You think that he simply gets them under his roof and then doles out their daily ration at his own price?”
“Ah, now go a bit lighter and easier on what I think, will you?” remonstrated Mallory, with more irony than apprehension in his warmly colored voice. “Was it that that I said? You’re as good as building four damp stone walls around me this minute! No, he’s not as simple as that about it, worse luck. I think he goes about it by diminishing one of the dirty drugs and doing what he calls building up their threshold of resistance with another. I’d call it no better than putting two halters around the lost soul’s neck instead of one—but he has plenty of good fat books with little fine print in them to tell him and the rest of the world that he’s on the right track. I’m the lad that knows; didn’t he have Jerry reading them day and night before he got him where I couldn’t yank them out of his hands and throw him into his own bed? … Well, he’s in another bed now!”
“All very neat and tidy,” commented Karl Sheridan in a voice that was far from congratulatory. “I gather, then, that corpses rather than cures are usually disgorged from the portals of the nursing home of the enterprising Dr. Byrd?”
“I’d feel a dashed sight more comfortable if you weren’t so active when it comes to gathering things,” murmured his host, with a somewhat rueful twist to his smile. “He’s careful enough when it comes to corpses that lie down and stiffen out instead of trotting around and sniffing powders, let me tell you I When it begins to look too dangerous, he makes a dash for the scopolamine bottle.”
“Hyoscine hydrobromide, if you like it better. They’re identical, aren’t they?”
“Quite.… And in the case of your friend Hardy, do you think that Byrd had reached the hyoscine stage?”
“I think so, but I’m not taking any oath on it. There were two things that Jerry didn’t give me more than six words on a year, and one was drugs, and the other was Fay Stuart. But he surely had some of that hyoscine stuff about here for a while. I ran across two bottles of it out there in the closet where he keeps all those poisonous chemicals that he works with, when he’s experimenting on his new processes in etching, while I was getting some things together to send after him to Jack Byrd’s.”
“They are still there?”
Mallory narrowed blue eyes in intense concentration.
“No, I’ll be hanged if they are! I was in there only yesterday piling up a lot of things that I didn’t want to have in your way, and I’m positive as Punch that they weren’t on that shelf. I have rather an extraordinary visual memory, and I can see the little empty space that they left between a bottle of silver nitrate and a tin can of cyanide that he kept there. He probably took them along with him when he left.”
“How long ago was that?”
“A week or so—no, two weeks. I wasn’t here—down at Hot Springs on a house party, or he’d never have got off, let me tell you!”
“Can you, by any chance, remember whether those bottles were of the same size, and whether their labels were identical?”
Mallory lifted amused brows.
“Good Lord, you have got faith in my powers of visualization, haven’t you? As a matter of fact, I don’t have to draw on it very heavily this time. One of the bottles was a little larger than the other, and Tess called my attention to the fact that the fiftieth-of-a-grain one was practically full to the cork, and the one with hundreths was half empty.”
“Tess? Tess called your attention to it?”
“Yes; she was helping me get his things off—he’d had a bad collapse at some party, and Byrd, devil take his soul, simply swept him off his feet and out to Baltimore. Tess was worried about him; she was awfully fond of him, you know, and he’d taken little more with him than slippers for his feet and a shirt for his back.”
“And the hyoscine,” Karl Sheridan reminded him gently.
“Right you are—and the hyoscine. I suppose he’d have hung onto that if he’d had the death rattle itself in his throat.”
“Yes. That is entirely possible.… One fiftieth of a grain.… That is a very stiff dose, even if a man did not have a weak heart. For a man with one, it sounds close to suicidal.”
“Does it? Well, evidently he thought so, too, as he’d decided to stick to the hundredth grains. Not that the fact that it was dangerous would have stopped him, poor lad I He’d been friend with danger for many a long day.… But doses and strengths are up your alley, not mine, my dear fellow I I’d never have so much as noticed the little brutes if it hadn’t been for Tess.”
“Quite candidly, that memory of yours intrigues me!” murmured Sheridan pensively. “Something, now, surely made you identify scopolamine with hyoscine, and you tell me that it was not in your line? To the average layman, that identification would be black magic and Arabic.”
“Still and all, it’s as simple as Christopher and his egg,” Dion Mallory assured him. “I had a sister that decided that the thing they called twilight sleep was the first good idea that anyone had had about producing a baby since Eve had Cain. She raced off to Germany to try it out, and while Sheila was blue in the face for the first week or so, she’s as pretty a creature today as you’d find between Dublin and San Francisco. There wasn’t anything that my sister didn’t ferret out about the stuff—from the fact that that poor little fright of a Crippen used it to kill his great, strapping, caterwauling wife, down to the news that the flowers that it came from look as pretty as pictures against garden walls. It was she who told me how it and hyoscine were blood brothers.”
“Exactly. It is incredible how these small far-away things tie in so close together, is it not?” inquired the young man from Vienna philosophically. “You will have another cigarette? I am joining you, as you see.… Three thousand miles away and many years ago your sister has a so small baby called Sheila—and poor little Harvey Crippen, of all the men in all the world, decides that hyoscine hydrobromide would be a very neat way to put someone out of it.… And now ten days ago you find that Jerry Hardy takes hyoscine. And two nights ago we find that Fay Stuart took far too much.… Which all goes to prove, I suppose, that this is a very small world indeed—and not a very pleasant one.”
“Jerry?” Mallory, the cigarette poised between fingers suddenly tense, removed his feet from their cushioned ease with startling abruptness. “See here, my dear old fellow, exactly what are you driving at? Tess told me that you thought that Fay hadn’t precisely committed suicide; to use a few short, ugly words, you thought that someone had done her in—and quite frankly, I’m inclined to agree with you. I knew her very well indeed at one time—quite well enough to know the unholy horror that she had of death. But she also told me that you were extremely intelligent, and, quite without prejudice, your last two or three remarks lead me to doubt it! If you’re trying to put me in the box to prove that Jerry Hardy had anything in God’s world to do with Fay’s death, you’ll be finding me a far better witness for the defense than for the prosecution, and what’s more I’ll match wits with any insanity expert that you walk up to prove that you’re madder than any poor loon with straws stuck in his hair. Jerry was the only mortal in all Washington who couldn’t so much as say Fay’s name without drawing a halo behind her empty little yellow head.”
“It was kind of Tess to think me a little intelligent,” said Karl Sheridan, in his most courteous and noncommittal voice. “And, if you will forgive me for saying so, it is also kind of you to think me a little stupid. I do not remember having so much as suggested that your good friend Jerry harmed even a hair of that poor child’s yellow head—though I confess that I would like very much to know whether he ever gave to her that large bottle with the fiftieth grains of hyoscine in it. I am not entirely satisfied, you see, that the contents of the bottle, marked one-hundredth grains found at her side would have killed her so quickly.”
Mallory snapped the ash so violently off the tip of his cigarette that it flicked half across the room.
“I can tell you now that he didn’t. What’s more, he’d have murdered anyone that did. He knew all about the properties of hyoscine, and the fact that she had a bad heart was common property.”
“Was it, indeed? Well, then, that opens other vistas, does it not? … Mallory, have you any idea, I wonder, where the ineffable Dr. Byrd was around one Saturday night?”
“Baltimore, probably,” said Dion Mallory briefly. “And he was there again at two o’clock yesterday afternoon. I’m afraid that we’ll have to count him out, agreeable as the prospect of hanging him higher than Haman would be.”
“When I last saw him at the Temples’ somewhere around eleven,” remarked Sheridan thoughtfully, “he was heading straight for some kind of backgammon festivities with the child called Vicki. Nothing whatever was said about Baltimore.”
“Well, something was done about it,” Mallory stated uncompromisingly. “He got back there Saturday night all right, unless half the staff of Stillhaven are out-and-out liars.… I thought it was all off with Vicki.”
“He thought so, too, I believe,” said Sheridan more thoughtfully still. “Something occurred to alter his mind, possibly. Have you any idea what hour Dr. Byrd arrived at the sanitarium?”
“Not the foggiest—except that it couldn’t have been as late as two, because it was around that time that they found poor old Hardy.”
“Found him?”
“Yes. Oh, God, I keep forgetting that you don’t know all this!” Mallory ran both fine, strong hands through the shining hair that clung as close to his skull as black water. “It’s your own fault for sounding so damnably omniscient.… I stopped by Stillhaven on the way back from New York Sunday to find out how the kid was getting on—I’ve been so infernally worried about him—and Byrd himself was there to inform me that I’d had excellent reason to be. It seems that Saturday night some time after dinner he went completely to pieces—literally off his nut—and kept yelling at them that he had to get to Washington. Of course they’d as soon have let him go to the moon, and they as good as told him so; he’s been in bed with fever and nausea and sinking spells for a good week, and even when he said he’d keep quiet if they’d let him telephone, no one was any too keen about it. Byrd had taken the phone out three or four days ago, because he used it all the time talking to Fay, and it simply wore him down—but it was one of those plug in and out things, and the attendant brought it back for him.”
“And at what time was that?”
“Around ten, I think they said.”
“Was the attendant in the room when he telephoned?”
“No. Jerry swore he wouldn’t telephone if anyone was there, but they were scared out of their shoes to leave him alone in the state he was in, so the attendant waited just outside the door.… He got the general drift of the telephone calls, if that’s what you want. He was trying to reach Washington and couldn’t get the number he was after. And then he tried someone in Valley Hunt.”
“That,” Karl Sheridan assured him, “is precisely what I want.”
“Well, they were both long-distance. The first one was for Washington, but Jerry lowered his voice, so the fellow outside didn’t get the number—not even the exchange. But it was obvious that he couldn’t get the number he was trying for, because in a minute or so he began to go straight cuckoo and yelled at the operator that it must answer—that it couldn’t be out of order—all that kind of lunacy. Then he piped down and gave another number—Valley Hunt something or other, and the attendant heard all that part quite clearly.”
“And exactly what did he hear?”
“Jerry was asking if Fay were still there, and then he said, ‘Gone over an hour? Then she must be home. Oh, God, why didn’t you stop her?’—and hung up before anyone could have possibly told him.”
“The unfortunate Tappans, I gather,” murmured Karl Sheridan thoughtfully. “They must have had a busy evening at the telephone. Tess Stuart tried them, too, when she found that the Stuart telephone did not answer. It seems that Fay left some time before nine with a young person known as Kippy Todd.”
“With Kippy, did she? Well, then, he probably came in with her for a nightcap, and she disconnected her phone. She has a way of doing that when she doesn’t want to be interrupted.”
“Didn’t,” corrected Sheridan gently, as he reached for another cigarette. “She is no longer in danger of being interrupted.… But the possibility of young Mr. Todd going up with her certainly should give us pause for thought.… And after he discovered that she had left the Tappans’, what did Hardy do?”
“Well, then, he started in all over again with the Washington business, and he was going it strong with the operator when the attendant outside got one of the assistant doctors to back him up, and they went in and yanked out the telephone by main force. The minute they did it, Jerry quieted down as suddenly as he’d started up; he let’em tuck him in and turn out the lights and give him his last shot for the day. It wasn’t till after ten-thirty that he called out to the attendant next to him that he still felt stark wide awake, but that he thought that if he could have some hot malted milk with sherry in it, it might do the trick.”
“And the affable but misguided youth coöperated with him to the extent of going in search of it? Mallory, you both shatter and restore my faith in human nature!”
“He went all right,” Mallory said grimly. “And you’ve obviously guessed the rest of it. When he came back ten minutes later, Jerry was clean gone—and so were a pair of trousers, an overcoat, some shoes, and about seventy dollars.”
“Apparently they do not equip the sanitarium of Still-haven to cope with any whims that its patients may have as to leaving it.”
“Apparently they don’t. It’s not a jail or an asylum, after all, and Jerry had been perfectly reasonable up to Saturday. He must have piled into his clothes like a flash and gone out of the window in another—at any rate, by the time they sent out the alarm, he’d got clear away. It was raining in Baltimore that night, and black as a hat, so they didn’t stand much chance of finding him unless they hit on just the direction that he was headed for. And they guessed wrong—twice.”
“Just what, then, did they guess?”
“Oh, just that they thought he might be heading for the nearest house with a telephone—and that was a quarter of a mile away; and then someone got the bright idea that he might be trying for a hitch hike or a bus into Washington, but that was off, too. They didn’t actually find him till close onto two in the morning, about a mile down a side road to the west of the sanitarium. God knows how long he’d been lying there.… He was soaked through and dead to the world.”
“It was he who told you all this?”
“Jerry? Well, hardly! I was only there for about twenty minutes, and all of the time he wasn’t in a rotten sort of stupor, he was yelling at anyone who came near him to get out of his sight—not to come near him—to keep clear of him if he didn’t want his neck broken.” Dion Mallory dropped his black head in his hands and said in a thick, bitter voice, “He yelled it at me.”
“He was out of his head, of course.”
“Yes. He was out of his head. That didn’t seem to make it much more tolerable, however.” He lifted his head, fixed his eyes on the stately little pendulum clock on the mantel, and rose to his feet with a motion of startling swiftness. “Good Lord—quarter-past ten! They’ll think I’m dead and buried.… I’ll be seeing you late this afternoon, then, shan’t I? And if you don’t mind my old rattle-trap, we’ll head out for Green Gardens together. Just ring for Timothy if you want anything, won’t you?”
“Very surely. Thanks more than I can say for your kindness in putting me straight on some of these points, Mallory. Later, I am sure, you will help me even more. Till this evening, then—and to many others.”
He sat watching the tall figure take the curve of the staircase three steps at a time, before it swallowed him up. A door banged in the distance almost simultaneously, and before its echo had died on the air the young man taking his ease so luxuriously in the great bed had whipped out of it and was halfway across the room, the telephone book in his hands, and a glitter of almost murderous impatience in his eyes. A quick flicker of leaves, and the long, competent fingers were snapping the numbers out of the dial as though they were so many pistol shots. The voice, however, which he shortly directed into the mouthpiece was as agreeably pitched and imperturbable as ever.
“Automobile Association of America? This is Karl Sheridan, of the Viennese Criminalistic Institute.… I have recently become one of your members through my Austrian affiliations, and I believe that you are being good enough to take charge of my roadster, which should be on your hands any day now.… But it is not concerning that of which I wish to speak to you at present. Could you, I wonder, give me any idea as to exactly how long it would take to go from Washington to Baltimore at night—if, say, your need was desperate and you were not very particular as to the legal requirements that might retard you?”
Sheridan smiled a little, grimly, at the note of austere protest in the light baritone voice at the other end of the wire—a voice that suggested youth not untinged with pomposity. For a moment he saw rising in prophetic vision before him a high blond pompadour, a cleft chin, a neat blue four-in-hand with even neater red stripes. “No, no—I understand naturally that you discourage that sort of thing, and I assure you that I haven’t the faintest idea of trying it out myself. My interest is—well, possibly you might say academic. Could you, then, be so good as to give me the distance? … Thirty-seven and one third miles from the zero milestone—just one moment, please.” His impatient fingers tugged at the drawer, extracted the yellow slip folded like a fan that Tess had given him the night before, fumbled for a pencil, found it, and wrote down the figures with the swift precision of a chartered accountant. “That is to the heart of Baltimore, I suppose? … And the traffic conditions—how would one find them? … Well, say something after midnight.… No lights after twelve? … I see.… Now I wonder whether I would be once more unethical if I asked whether it would be possible to look over some of your maps a little later in the day? … That is extremely good of you—whom shall I ask for, then? … Mr. Gustaven? … Thanks so very much.”
He sat quiescent for a moment, smoothing out the little fan with the remotest of frowns, faint and abstracted until, with a sudden sharp movement, he pulled the phone towards him once more, setting the dial spinning.… But though his eyes rested on the neat white disk, they never saw it at all.… They saw only a row of bottles.… Old Rarity Scotch, bonded rye, House of Lords gin, half a bottle of curacao—the label on that half-empty bottle was clearer even than the telephone number on the folded yellow paper, half an inch from his hand.
“Long distance? Torytown 7362, if you please.… No, no; it is the private number of a small—er—nursing home, near Baltimore.… This is Greene 4023 calling.… Yes, I prefer to hold the phone.” … But just exactly what had he been doing last night, that too curly-headed and amiable Dr. Byrd, with all those bottles that had belonged to the small, dead Fay Stuart—all those bottles that had been standing so decorously on the rows of concealed shelves in the one-time night nursery of the Stuart babies, safe in charge of the tall girl whose deep young voice grew deeper still with disdain when she spoke of the gentleman known as Byrd? How in the name of heaven had Jack Byrd become the possessor of those rows of bottles? … Sheridan’s fingers tightened perceptibly about the slim waist of the telephone, but his voice was not raised a fraction. “Tory-town 7362? … Might I speak with Dr. Byrd? … Impossible? But surely not actually impossible, if he is there? It is, I assure you, of the utmost importance.… Yes. I quite understand—but it is not probable, is it, that he will stay continuously on even the most important case? What if I call up again within an hour, shall we say? … No? … Oh, but my dear lady, you must forgive me if I find that a little arbitrary! … Very well, then, may I speak to Mr. Hardy? … Exactly—Mr. Jerry Hardy. He is with you at present, is he not?”
The small, brittle chatter at the other end of the line was swallowed up in a faint gasp, followed by a silence so abrupt and dismaying that Sheridan, waiting blankly, felt himself, too, becoming dismayed and abrupt—a curious, distraught, lonely feeling, as though he had been left dangling in midair, and that Atropos might reach towards him with her shears at any moment.
“Stillhaven Hospital?” he inquired in a voice that he trusted was sufficiently severe to cover the panic that he felt hovering over him like a dark hand. “I say, are you still there, Stillhaven? … I was asking whether it would be possible to speak to Mr. Jerry—”
The small gasp came again, this time accompanied by a rush of fluttering, slightly incoherent words; and at the few that were coherent, Karl Sheridan bit down hard on his lip and felt the heavy lines carving themselves sharply between his brows. He said, “I see” three times, each time a little more distinctly; he said, “Oh, quite naturally.” He said, “Thank you very much indeed,” and replaced the telephone on the hook with meticulous exactitude. For quite a long time he sat motionless, smooth black head in brown hands, staring down unseeingly at the contents of the half-open drawer.… So that was that.…
Pneumonia—and double pneumonia—and, what was more, double pneumonia complicated by a bad set of lungs, a crocked-up heart, and a wrecked nervous system. It seemed quite likely that no one in this world would ever again speak to Jerry Hardy.… Which, any way that you looked at it, was not at all a pleasant prospect.
That laughing kid with the deep-carved dimples, and the blond, ruffled hair—what in the name of the good Lord had he been doing at close onto two in the morning, drenched and insensible, a good mile away from the ominous little sanitarium? Who knew how long he had been lying there? Was there a chance—even an off chance, strained and remote—that by some fantastic hook or crook he’d got to Washington and up to the Stuarts’ night nursery where Fay lay waiting curled at the end of the love seat, like some little Persian page in her silver and green? He scowled down at the figures; thirty-seven miles.… Well, allow him twenty minutes to get to the Washington highway and pick up a bus or a lift—if anyone in his sane senses would consider giving a lift to that desperate, half-clothed young lunatic.… An hour more to get to Washington; that might be shaded a trifle one way or another, but was fair enough, certainly, as an estimate for thirty-seven miles. That would make it twelve or later before he could possibly have arrived at the Stuart house—and he would hardly have appeared in the light of an appropriate opponent for a backgammon game, even if there were the remotest possibility of his carrying out an elaborately contrived murder, staging the scene for the appearance of an even more elaborately contrived suicide, returning to Baltimore, and collapsing completely a mile or so from the sanitarium at Stillhaven within something less than two hours.
Of course, someone else might have been that invisible backgammon player—someone who had gone from the night nursery before Hardy so much as set foot on the scene—someone, perhaps, who had played another and more dreadful game, for higher stakes than backgammon.… It was entirely within the realms of possibility that Jerry Hardy had found Fay Stuart in precisely the same position that Tess had found her, hours later on that unspeakable night.… Kippy Todd might have been the backgammon player for instance; as far as that went, Kippy Todd might have been— He pulled up short, frowning irritably at the uncompleted speculation. Just exactly why had young Mr. Todd never entered all these elaborate calculations and speculations? Because of the half-affectionate, half-contemptuous tone in which Tess had alluded to him, because of Dion’s easy reference to the likelihood of his having gone up to the study that night with Fay? Because, buried deeper than these, of that subconscious sense of outrage at the bare thought of any human mortal called Kippy Todd committing a murder? Kippy Todd—no, even when he tried it over now, grimly and soberly, it evoked only the image of an easy-going, lanky, amiable youth with a comfortable tweed shoulder for any lovely, errant lady to cry on.
Still, Mr. Todd should be checked up, promptly and adequately. Tess could undoubtedly help there. And Jerry Hardy should be checked, too, reluctantly, but more thoroughly still. And, most thoroughly of all, and far more enthusiastically, the elusive Dr. Byrd, so conscientiously occupied with his patients that it was utterly impossible to get even the thinnest wedge of a question through to him. Here, at least, was one case that it would be a definite and distinct pleasure to investigate with all the back-breaking, soul-satisfying energy and skill for which five years of exhaustive training had amply equipped him.… If the too curly-headed Dr. Byrd had not gone on to that backgammon party with the unhappy infant, Vicki Wilde—if, as was certainly plausible, they had once more quarreled—then there was no doubt whatever that he would have had ample time between eleven and two to have gone to the Stuarts’, committed the murder, and returned to Baltimore before two o’clock, in order to devote his more formal activities to the resuscitation of Hardy’s drenched and dying body.… If … That was undeniably the catch—one word, two letters, fragile, treacherous, and precarious, that Sheridan had learned long ago to lean on lightly.… Well, if Byrd continued to be inaccessible, it was entirely possible that the girl Vicki would do as well. At the Lindsays’ party tonight, perhaps? If he could definitely ascertain that she would be there.… He pulled the creased bit of paper that held Dion Mallory’s telegram towards him irritably, and scribbled across its back, beneath the number of the sanitarium at Stillhaven and the number of miles between Washington and Baltimore, four names, very black and straight:
Check Kippy Todd
Check Jack Byrd
Check Vicki Wilde
Check Jerry—
The pencil paused, hovered a second uncertainly, and then slashed ruthlessly through the uncompleted name. Of what use, in the name of heaven, to hunt down that poor, dying devil when there was no earthly or unearthly method by which he could have gone to Washington and back to Baltimore that night unless he had flown through the air or—He paused, riveted, the pencil still poised above the paper.
Through the air.… Exactly.… Unless he had flown through the air.… As clearly as though it stood there on the long table in front of him instead of on Mallory’s desk in the sitting room below, the laughing face with the jaunty cap rose before him, and the air about him was filled with the sound of wings.…
He wrote once more carefully and painfully, at the end of the brief list:
Check Jerry Hardy
and rose stiffly to his feet, crossing slowly to the bell by the door and keeping his fingers on it for a full half-minute, as he strove to steady the incredulous thoughts that swung upward in the wake of that flight of wings.
The shuffling scurry of Timothy’s feet on the stairs, and the sight of the small, dark face, gnomelike and reproachful in the doorway, brought them abruptly back to earth.
“Timothy, I swear that I’d forgotten both the bell and the finger. You would have been quite justified in thinking that the entire room was on fire, and all that I wanted to know was one very simple question. You have an airport here in Washington, naturally—do you by any chance know whether it is far from the city itself?”
Timothy, thus unexpectedly and gratifyingly endowed with a flying field in Washington, relinquished his reproachful expression for one of modest gratification.
“As you say, sah—natchully, sah. It is just a short way across the Arlington Bridge.… Were you considering flying to anywhere, Mr. Sheridan?”
Sheridan, already headed purposefully towards a suitcase neatly stacked with garments, flung a hasty and emphatic denial over his shoulder.
“Oh, but ten times never! Washington, for these many years, I trust, will be my local abode and habitation.… No, it is the flying activities of others that I am interested in at present. It is too far for a walk, this field, Timothy?”
“It would surely be a right smart walk, sah, unless you figure to arrive there around tea time.… Should you care for me to call you a taxicab, Mr. Sheridan, sah?”
“I should like it more than you can possibly imagine, Timothy! If you knew the hatred that I have conceived for that little black horn lying so innocently asleep in its cradle—” Sheridan, bending to knot shoes that hundreds of skillful polishings had deepened to the exact shade of a perfect Malacca cane, paused abruptly, his incredulous eyes on the hook rug that spread like a small flower garden before the low chair in which he was seated. “Timothy, wait one moment. This little square of green glass—what is, now, this little square of glass?”
Timothy, bending politely over the small, black-taped inch of dark emerald glass that Sheridan had scooped into the palm of his hand, gave a small cluck of scandalized surprise.
“Now who forevermore let that little bitty thing drop? Must have been Mr. Dion when he was moving all those doodads of Mr. Jerry’s out of his drawers into that closet out yonder—but I’m surely mighty pleased and thankful that he isn’t here now to see that Susan and I didn’t clean it right up after. Likely we missed it because it’s the very match and color of those vine leaves on that there rug.… Mr. Jerry, he’s got a whole flock of them little bits of colored glass that he uses in that sort of photography work that he’s so busy fussing around with all night and day. I don’t recollect exactly how he does call them by name—something right down unlikely like colored sieves, or words like that—”
“Sieves?” Sheridan dismissed it with an impatient shake of his head. “No, no—not sieves! In photography, you say? No, but this minute—this very minute—I have it on the tip of the tongue.… Ah, at last!” He was on his feet so suddenly that Timothy executed a small, startled scuffle backwards. “Filters! Is that not it, Timothy? Color filters, surely? Idiot that I am, not to have thought of it before!”
Color filters were the very words, Timothy agreed with dignified alacrity, and proceeded to order a taxi to be at the door of Mr. Dion Mallory’s residence in Georgetown in precisely ten minutes in a tone of such soothing competence that even Sheridan’s troubled spirit felt its healing balm.
He stood tilting the mirror on the mahogany chest of drawers to an angle that would do justice to the subdued luxury of the copper-colored tie, reflecting that one agreeable feature of shaving at night was that it left you a running jump ahead in the morning, and that anyone who could not dress in five minutes flat had no business doddering about the face of the earth. Now, then—still five minutes before the taxi stood a chance to arrive.… He moved purposefully towards the long table with the microscope, pulled open the drawer, tossed the piece of green glass in to join the other exhibits with a disregard of consequences that was unscientific in the extreme, and pulled the telephone towards him as he swung himself easily onto the end of the table.
“This one time, Timothy, I shall almost forget, I promise you, how I hate this small black monster!”
He started to twirl the dial rapidly, lifting his most engaging smile in the direction of Timothy’s exquisitely discreet voice, already withdrawn to the hall outside.
“Will you be returning for your luncheon, sah? Susan can fix you some—”
“Lunch? Great heavens, Timothy, after such a breakfast in this country does one eat lunch? It would be sheer insult—and suicide into the bargain I No, I will not be back until quite late in the afternoon; if Mr. Mallory should return before me, will you tell him that I have several errands to attend to, but that I will be back surely in time to dress for the dinner at the Lindsays’ tonight? And will you see that the evening clothes in that second bag are in order? And again, Timothy, one thousand thanks.”
He focused his attention once more on the interrupted telephone call, twirling the dial again as he listened to Timothy’s footfalls, shod in the velvet of perfect consideration, dying away down the staircase.… A most excellent fellow, Timothy! Tonight he must remember to give him something more substantial than thanks.… A voice with an exaggerated and highly unconvincing British accent boomed ponderously out of the black horn, and with a slight tightening of the jaw, he lifted it closer to his ear.
“Mr. Stuart’s residence? … Might I speak with Miss Stuart? … Yes, I quite realize that, but I believe that if you will tell Miss Stuart that it is Mr. Sheridan, she will speak with me.… No, not a member of the press—a personal friend.… Thanks.”
He sat waiting, his eyes fixed reluctantly on the contents of the still half-opened drawer.… A square of red glass—a square of green.… Something young and obstinately unconvinced lifted a protesting clamor just below the level of consciousness. Light filters they might well be—light filters, as a matter of fact, they undoubtedly were—but it was not of photography that they reminded him for one solitary moment. Even at a glimpse of that red one, the air was fresh with fir and balsam, there was a glitter of snow and candles and tinsel—no, gone again! He gave the telephone an impatient jerk.… What, in heaven’s name, was keeping Tess all this time? … Beside the tooled-leather cylinder that held the lapis and malachite backgammon markers, the stray one that he had picked up at the edge of Fay’s love seat still lay in solitary state, small and lonely and faintly ominous still, as though it did not realize that now that Tess had found its snugly housed mates, it had lost all its sinister importance. He twisted the cover off the box, starting half mechanically to wedge it in where it belonged.… And curiously, incredibly, it would not wedge. The little box was completely filled; if he pushed the exiled marker harder, he ran a definite risk of snapping it in two. He gave a delicate, experimental thrust, his eyes so concentrated that once more they had that strange look of blindness.… A voice, young, deep, and lovely, sounded distantly through the forgotten telephone, and box and marker slipped through his fingers as he turned to answer it.
“Miss Stuart? Tess, this is K—K Sheridan.… Would it be possible for me to see you this afternoon sometime? Tonight will not do, I am afraid, because there are some things that it is vitally important for me to know before the Lindsays’ party.… Four would do admirably—yes.… No—no, I am still very greatly in the dark, but I think that you can hold a candle for me if you will answer two—no, three—questions.… On the contrary, it is I who am in your debt—forever, I am afraid.… Till four, then, and thank you.”
The click that the telephone made as he hung it back was echoed by a lusty peal on the doorbell below, and Sheridan, slamming the door to, catching up hat, gloves, the yellow paper with its names and figures, and the recalcitrant marker and its inhospitable home, took the steps between the second floor and the presumptive taxi at a swinging gallop that landed him well through the front door before the scandalized Timothy was halfway to it.… If things turned out at the airport as he hoped they might, the young man from Vienna was in for a busy day.
He gave the address of the airport without so much as a glance at the freckle-faced youth who was to guide him there, placed the malachite marker and Mallory’s telegram with its hoarded names and numbers carefully in his wallet, and more carefully still shook the contents of the leather box onto the seat of the taxi. The markers divided neatly into two little piles, one considerably larger than the other; Sheridan bent over them, counting them as slowly, as carefully, as though a man’s life hung on the sum that he reached.… Thirty lapis lazuli; twenty malachite; fifty markers. He checked them again—rechecked—and returned them carefully to the leather case lined with velvet.… Fifty-one backgammon markers, counting the exile in the wallet.… Well, any way that you looked at it, fifty-one was a curious number for a set of counters—and if you looked at it one way—
Sheridan, apparently, did not care to look at it at all. He slipped the case into his pocket, leaned back in the taxi, and closed his eyes with something approaching determination. For the remaining minutes that lay between him and the bridge to Arlington he looked a good ten years older than the twenty-eight that were his rightful heritage.
Halfway over the bridge that swung its gracious arches across the Potomac, linking the white columns that soared where Lincoln sat now in triumph, simple and weary for all his majesty, to those other white columns, soaring where once Lee had sat, weary, simple, and majestic in defeat, Sheridan opened his eyes and noted without marked enthusiasm that the Washington that he had returned to was incomparably more beautiful than the one he had left. The noble sweep of trees, the noble curves of spacious roadways … there was a sudden clutter of low buildings somewhat less than noble, a sharp grinding of brakes, and the amiable drawl of the freckle-faced youth at the wheel, assuring him of the somewhat obvious fact that he had reached his destination.
“Will you wait, perhaps, for five minutes—ten?” Sheridan’s voice was once more eager and persuasive. “Not longer, I am sure, and after that there are several other places that I must go.”
Accepting the smiling nod of his driver with a flashing smile of his own, he pushed the nearest door open and stepped quickly across the threshold.
The room was a private office, obviously; it was quite empty, save for some scattered chairs and filing cabinets, and two enormous desks at one of which sat a sandy-haired young man with a face as alert and engaging as a thoroughbred terrier. He glanced up swiftly as the door clicked to behind Sheridan.
“Anything I can do for you, sir?”
Karl Sheridan, taking in the room at a glance, advanced, a few steps, doubtfully.
“Nothing save accept my apologies, I fear! I am looking for some information about planes in and out of Baltimore—but this, apparently, is not the place that I should have come to?”
The youngster at the desk pushed back the pile of maps that he was consulting and rose helpfully to his feet.
“Tickets or time-tables? The main office is right through—”
“No—no, neither tickets nor time-tables. Maps—and a little highly unofficial information.” His eyes rested hopefully on the impressive stack on the desk. “Perhaps I have not come to the wrong place, after all?”
“Well, if you’re looking for something highly unofficial, you couldn’t have done better if you’d used a divining rod,” remarked the office’s sole occupant with engaging candor. “The boss is out for lunch, and I’m about as official as a drummer boy or a powder monkey. We’re trying out some new stuff—rerouting two of the plane services entirely—so I’m fairly up on maps. What’s the trouble?”
“A good deal of trouble, that I am afraid that I shall have to ask you to take on faith. You see,” said Sheridan, his dark young face suddenly darker and graver, “it is not mine. All the more reason why I shall be eternally grateful to you if you can help me.”
“My name’s Trent—Bob Trent,” said the sandy-haired young man. “It begins to look as though I were invented for your particular benefit.… All right—let’s get going. Baltimore, you say?”
He pulled one of the stray chairs invitingly close to the desk, seated himself in his own, and extracted one of the maps from the pile before him.
“Some day,” said Karl Sheridan, appropriating both the chair and the map, “I trust that fortune will permit me to show you a very small part of how grateful I am. My name is Sheridan—Karl Sheridan, of the Criminalistic Institute of Vienna, shortly to be attached to the Division of Investigation here. It would be impossible, however, to be more completely detached from either of them than I am in my present capacity. Do I make myself quite clear?”
“Quite clear enough to gather that I’m to keep my mouth shut,” grinned young Trent amiably. “All right—where do we go from here?”
“To Baltimore,” replied Sheridan, his finger marking it hopefully on the map. “Trent, how long would it take to reach Baltimore from here by plane?”
“Depends on the plane. Roughly, anywhere between fifteen and twenty-five minutes. Next?”
“And is there a regular night service between these two cities?”
“There is not,” replied Bob Trent promptly. “Neither regular nor irregular. Give me something harder.”
“With all the pleasure in the world. It is possible, of course, to charter a plane?”
“Possible, if the depression didn’t hit you too hard. It’s liable to cost you plenty.”
“Yes, I can quite believe that I Now, then, is there more than one field in Baltimore?”
“Oh, sure! The regular airport is Logan Field, but there are several smaller ones. They’re marked in circles on the map—see?”
“Yes. Yes, I see. What I am looking for is one that would be quite near a small place called Torytown, that I have been told is just northwest of Baltimore. Could you be very clever and find me a field like that, Trent?”
“I wouldn’t have to be in the genius class to help you out on that,” commented his collaborator mildly. “You’ve got your thumb on it. Crawford Field—and there’s Torytown, about a mile and a half away, judging from the scale.… When are we going to start perpetrating all these horrible indiscretions that are going to be our ruin?”
“That is the way that it looked in my very brightest dream,” murmured Sheridan, gloating luxuriously over the red circle on the map. “Torytown—Crawford Field. Trent, I am very, very sorry that I do not have the Kohinoor diamond. If I had, I should most assuredly present it to you.… Fifteen minutes, you say?”
“Fifteen minutes in a good fast plane. A Lockheed or a Northrup can make Newark from here with a favoring wind in around an hour. I’m still waiting for the indiscretions.”
“The first—the last—the only indiscretion that I shall suggest is such a small one that by now I am ashamed of it. Trent, is there any way possible of discovering whether a passenger flying from Baltimore landed here Saturday night between the hours of eleven and twelve—or whether a passenger landed at any field in Baltimore—preferably the admirably situated Crawford Field—between, say, the hours of twelve and two? And would it be possible to find out what that passenger was wearing and what he looked like?”
“He, is it?” commented young Trent pensively. “And I was just beginning to get all worked up for a romance. Well, Lord knows I’m not the lad to say that anything’s impossible. But I will say that it’s going to have to be done in rather snatchy bits, as the boss is due back in about ten minutes, and I don’t exactly see myself getting really into my stride while he’s in the room. You might give me a ring around four, if you’re in a tearing hurry to know, and if I’ve collected any valuable information and he isn’t about, I’ll pass it on.”
“And if he is about?”
“Well, then, I’ll just say ‘Sorry, sir—what you want is the ticket office’ and give you a ring myself around six. He’s sure to be gone by then. You can write your number on the corner of the calendar here, if that suits you.”
“That suits me admirably. And, Trent, if it isn’t too much trouble, would you see that that passenger has curly hair, and does not look too ill and exhausted? Good-bye. I’m not forgetting what you are doing for me, believe me.”
Back in the taxicab, he consulted his watch, settled himself comfortably in the corner, and remarked to the expectant driver:
“I have been told that Washington is a city remarkable for its beauty. Be so good as to show it to me.”
“Show it to you?” demanded that amiable youth, startled out of his drawl.
“Exactly. Show it to me—drive up and down and around it until half-past three o’clock. Do not tell me about it, however; it is my eyes that I desire to use, not my ears.”
“O.K., General! What goes on at three-thirty?”
“At three-thirty you will be so kind as to stop at a reputable florist’s, wait ten minutes, and then conduct me to an address on Massachusetts Avenue that I will give you.… You might start by driving me several times around the Capitol, quite slowly.”
It is to be doubted whether Sheridan properly appreciated the beauties of Washington, though they were conscientiously and thoroughly laid before his eyes, and his eyes were kept conscientiously and unwaveringly on them. He neither stirred nor spoke save once, and that was on his second trip around the cool, green-and-white loveliness of the White House. At that stage he shifted the little leather box from his right-hand pocket to his left-hand pocket, and remarked under his breath in a voice so bitter and despairing that it was just as well that his obliging guide did not hear him:
“None so blind as those that won’t see …”
Quite possibly he was speaking of the fountain, performing its exquisite and eternal pantomime of tossing showers of diamonds against a background of emeralds before an audience that did not even know that it was there. And quite possibly he wasn’t.
At three-thirty exactly he emerged from the taxicab and entered the somewhat rococo portals of the Ann Hathaway Flower Shoppe. He looked singularly unrefreshed, but at the first glimpse of the minute creature perched on a tall stool behind the counter his countenance relaxed.
“I would like,” he said in a voice too low for the energetic young man at the other end of the counter to catch it, “a few flowers for a lady. Some rather unusual flowers for a rather unusual lady. What would you suggest?”
“Well, we’ve got some nice, fresh sweet peas,” suggested the small person eagerly. “We could fix them up with some asparagus—the fern, you know—and a little baby’s-breath, and make a big pompon bow of that petal-pink and Nilegreen gauze—”
“We could not,” said Sheridan with great distinctness. “Not, at any rate, while I have a breath left in my body.… What are those frosty blue berries with the glossy leaves next to that jar of white lilacs, Miss—”
“Kitchen, Peggy Kitchen, from Manchester, England, if there’s anything else you’d like to know.” The creamy softness of the little round voice and the little round face turned the sauciness to something singularly endearing. “I’m sure I don’t know what you call them, though I call them star berries myself, because of the color. Like star sapphires, as you might say. Shall I use this green ribbon?”
“You shall not, Miss Kitten—you astound me! Here, what is in this basket?”
Miss Kitchen inspected the somewhat dingy gilt basket disdainfully.
“That? Oh, that’s just a lot of tags and bobtails left over from a wedding we did last month. You won’t be finding anything in there, I’m afraid.”
“Are you? Now I, you see, am quite sure that I will find precisely what I am looking for. Aha!”
He produced a snowy length of velvet ribbon and two short pins topped with the small, round balls of frosted filigree with a flourish of pure triumph.
“There—you see that the spirit of prophecy was strong on me. Now if you will just tuck away those appalling swathes of what you call Nile-green and petal-pink silk gauze in the camphor which they have so richly earned—in all truth, I wonder that the excellent Nile has not risen and drowned every rose in Egypt at the mere rumor of such atrocities!—we will wrap the stem of that one admirable spray of lilac and those two sprays of star berries in the dullest bit of silver tinfoil that you possess and knot the ribbon about it, so—and stick pins through it—so—and tuck it away in that agreeable little silver box, and I will promise to do every other single thing myself—except one.”
The small person behind the counter who so pleasantly resembled a tawny kitten wrinkled her round scrap of a nose and gurgled helpfully.
“You wouldn’t like me to just pop around to the house with it and poke it under the door?”
“Thanks, no—any popping that is done with this nosegay, I will do myself. What I most earnestly desire you to do, Miss Kitten—I beg your pardon, but I fear that I did not quite catch that name?—what I implore you to do is for one moment only to slip around that corner of the counter and call this number that I have written here at the top of this bit of paper. The young man with the jaw strong enough for two man-eating tigers is surely capable of holding off the old lady who wants a centerpiece of asparagus fern until you get back, is he not?”
“Oh, I’m sure he is. And what am I to do when I get the number?”
“When you get the number you are to ask for a young lady called Miss Wilde, or for her personal maid, and inquire as ingratiatingly as possible what color gown Miss Wilde is going to wear to Mrs. Lindsay’s dinner dance this evening, as a young gentleman had come into the Ann Hathaway Flower Shoppe who was extremely anxious to send some flowers to Miss Wilde, and even more anxious to see that the flowers that he sent harmonized with the frock. You see how simple and plausible the truth sounds, even over the telephone.”
Miss Kitten, slipping neatly about the end of the long counter, dimpled engagingly.
“Well, I will say one thing for you! You take a good deal more trouble for your lady friends than most of the young gentlemen do that drop in here. It’s two purple orchids for the shoulder, or three nice gardenias for a corsage, and they’re out of the place as pleased as peacocks.”
Her fingers were at work on the dial with almost professional ease, and Sheridan turned to a critical and absorbed inspection of the plate-glass cages that stood ranged about the room, proudly exploiting their lovely captives. It was not till the florist’s young lady slipped neatly back, around the end of the long counter that he glanced up. “Well—and did the maid tell you what she was to wear?”
“She hasn’t got any maid, and her voice sounded as surprised as Punch giving it to Judy, but she’s going to wear a smoke-gray mousseline, with a geranium velvet girdle and scarf, and she says that if we know of any flowers that will go with that, we’re better florists than she’s ever run across.”
“Well, perhaps we are!” agreed Sheridan amiably. “Those small white orchids hanging there on that spray with their wings flecked with scarlet—what would you say if we twisted their stems with that bit of bronze tinfoil, and sent them on to Miss Wilde?”
“I’d say you ought to run a florist shop on your own. Shouldn’t you like to put a card in with them?”
“No; no card, just the name and address that I gave you.” He picked up the silver box and tossed a banknote to the now deeply interested young man. “Does this cover it? No, don’t bother about change. That’s for a nosegay for Miss Kitten—without a card, too! Thanks awfully, both of you.”
It was exactly four when the freckle-faced young man deposited him at the entrance of the Stuart house and departed, beaming.
He could hear a clock striking somewhere, far away, as he followed the portly butler docilely to the small, silvered elevator.
“Miss Stuart is expecting you, sir,” he was informed. “Tea is in the upstairs sitting room.”
She was sitting on the sofa in front of the old tiled fireplace, the smooth pale amber head bent deep over a book, so intent on its contents that she did not hear his step, and even when he spoke she lifted her head and looked at him strangely for a moment with the wide gray eyes as though his voice came to her from a different world. But in a moment the swift smile reached him, and she held out her hands.
“K! I’m most awfully glad that you decided to come, family retainers or no family retainers! I never knew how lonely this house was before. It’s amazing how quarrels and bickerings and good violent bitterness brighten up a place, isn’t it? You don’t realize it until they’ve stopped. Dad and Fay and I—” She paused, bit her lip until the faint rose deepened to blood red, and after a long breath said tranquilly, “I have tea all ready for you, iced with lots of fresh green mint, and little cress-and-cucumber sandwiches. It’s frightfully hot, isn’t it? I tried to think of the coolest things in the world.”
But she, thought K, sitting there so serenely in the lovely ordered room bathed like an aquarium in the pale green light that filtered through the Venetian blinds, looked as cool as the ice tinkling in the tall amber glasses on the tray before her—as cool as an Irish trout pool at dawn. He held out the silver box, his tired eyes sweeping approvingly down the flowing length of snowy muslin girdled just below her breast with an old silver clasp set in moonstones that matched her eyes.
“You make it difficult to believe that it is not everywhere in the world as cool and pleasant as here,” he said, taking the glass from her with the grave, courteous smile that was so peculiarly his own. “But I have not yet been long enough away from the infernos of those streets of yours to quite forget them!”
“For me? Oh K, the lovely things!” In her hands the starry berries looked as though they had come home. She brushed them slowly along the velvet sweep of her cheek before she thrust them through the silver clasp. “And you’ve been working hard, poor darling?”
“Quite hard—yes. And with you to help me a little, and this oasis of peace where I can stop a few minutes to catch my breath, I will work harder yet, I promise. Do you know, the last time that I held anything one half so cool and green and frosty in my hands was the last spring that I was at Harvard—how long ago was that? Six years? Six thousand? Well, at any rate, I motored down to North Carolina with a classmate for Easter, and his father brought out some truly imperial bourbon, that he had kept buried in a little keg in the cellar, and made me a drink that looked almost precisely like this, and that had about it a fragrance that made all the perfumes of Arabia seem a trifle musty.”
“Now you’re making me feel that I’m a very delinquent hostess,” murmured the lady of snow and amber, tranquilly helping herself to one of the minute sandwiches. “But this will make you cooler than the mint julep, truly—and even if I wanted to give you one that would make the gentleman’s from North Carolina seem like a bad dream, I’m afraid that I couldn’t do it. To the best of my knowledge, there isn’t a drop of anything stronger than orange-pekoe tea in the house.”
“You amaze me,” replied Sheridan agreeably. “All that impressive array of last night is gone, then? Is it permitted to inquire to what destination?”
“Oh, it’s permitted to inquire!” Tess Stuart assured him. “But it’s rather a waste of time, isn’t it? Because you know just as well as I, don’t you, K? And while I’m susceptible enough to regard this devious conversation as a highly agreeable way of spending a spring afternoon, I still have to frown on it a little as one of the most hideous wastes of time known to man, woman, or child.… You know perfectly well that I gave them to Byrd, and that he took them straight over to Bill and Abby Stirling’s. And the first question that you wanted to ask me was as to what in Hades Jack Byrd was doing here to get it, when I’d just told you that I detested him—or wasn’t it?”
“Oh, it was—it was, indeed. Since when have you added mind-reading to your accomplishments, Tess? It simplifies matters enormously, of course, but also it complicates them just a little. How, for example, can I ask you questions, if you already anticipate them? But since you have already asked this one, suppose that you tell me just exactly what it was this too curly-headed doctor was doing here, since you so heartily detested him?”
“Since I’ve asked you to help me, I can’t very well indulge in resentment at your being a little bit impertinent about it, can I?” inquired Tess Stuart levelly, her eyes mitigating the asperity of her remark with a small, fleeting smile. “Byrd was here because I asked him to come, of course. I’d been trying to get hold of him several times the afternoon after—after Fay was killed—I told you that, didn’t I?”
“You told me that you tried to reach Jerry Hardy at Dr. Byrd’s sanitarium,” amended Sheridan, quite as levelly, but without the mitigation of even a fleeting smile.
“Oh, well, naturally, when I couldn’t reach Jerry, I tried to get Jack Byrd.” The ice clicked a trifle impatiently in Tess’s glass. “I was frightfully anxious that Fay’s death shouldn’t reach Jerry as more of a shock than was absolutely necessary. I still am. I thought that I made all that perfectly clear last night.”
“Oh, all that,” he assured her, the slate-gray eyes by no means properly penitent. “Perfectly, entirely clear. But I did not know that it was that of which we were speaking.”
“Well, whether you know it or not, it is.… K, you do make me feel so revoltingly rude, and I don’t think it’s all my fault, honestly. I’m generally the most polite lady under the sun or stars. But I start out with you feeling grateful and affectionate and comrade-at-arms, and in about five minutes you reduce me to mentally crouching about like the smallest and worst of the conspirators in the clutch of the Inquisition. Generally it’s Dion Mallory that starts you off, but now apparently anyone will do as a whipping boy. Do you want me to stand in the corner with my face to the wall while I tell you about why, how, and when Jack Byrd was here last night, or can I sit here and finish my tea if I cross my heart and swear to tell you every last mortal thing about the whole hateful performance?”
This time the smile flickered, candidly amused, for all the faint, controlled bitterness beyond its edge.
“My poor Tess, believe me, I am on my knees in contrition. You see, you are so unfortunate as to be dealing with a luckless devil who every now and then loses what wits he has and forgets that he is a detective and remembers that he is a man—and a few minutes later forgets that he is a man and remembers that he is a detective. I cannot imagine which manifestation is the more detestable! I can only bow my head in shame and implore you to continue to sit exactly where you are and tell me about our mutual enemy, Dr. Byrd. If there is a corner going begging, God knows that it is I who should inhabit it!”
Tess, the long white hands light and sure as usual about their friendly task, replenished his glass forgivingly, adorned it with another tuft of mint, and leaned back against the cushions, relaxed and gracious.
“I must say that I like you best in the rôle of a culprit—it’s extremely becoming! What happened exactly is that Jack Byrd called up a few minutes after you left for the Stirlings’, and said that he’d just arrived from Stillhaven and found a note from me waiting at his apartment. They’d all been having a terrible time with poor Jerry, and there were several things that he wanted to tell me that he couldn’t explain over the telephone, but that if he could only see me for ten minutes he could make everything perfectly clear. So of course I told him that he could come over then; especially as there was something that I wanted particularly to ask him.”
“Of course,” he repeated mechanically. “And am I supposed to know what it was that you so particularly wished to ask him?”
“Naturally. It was because of you that I asked it. I’d given him my word, you see, not to tell where I got the hyoscine for Fay. I think that he was afraid that it might stir up an investigation of his hospital, if the information fell into the wrong hands. But I promised that I’d explain that it was only because I begged him for it that he ever let us have it at all, and that I had to clear up the way it had come into our—into my possession. He really was awfully nice about it, K. He said to go straight ahead—not to mind him.”
“So you rewarded him by turning over the wine cellar.”
“Oh,” she cried, the soft violence of her voice shaking her for a moment from head to foot, “those hateful, loathsome bottles—I never wanted to see them again as long as I lived! He had an empty suitcase with him, and he told me that he was going over to the club to get some stuff—that Bill Stirling had called him at the apartment, just as he was leaving, to say that they only had three or four bottles of whiskey and that about a hundred extra people had turned up, and he needed some more. And so of course I told Byrd that I’d bless him forever if he’d get all that vile stuff that Fay had been collecting out of the house—and he packed it into his suitcase, and telephoned Abby that he was on his way, and bowed himself out of the house, bag and baggage.… And that was that, K.”
“As you say,” assented Sheridan evenly. “That was that. You must find me extremely amusing, Tess. Dr. Byrd would find me amusing, too, I am sure.… What was it that he told you about Hardy?”
“Just what Dion said he told you this morning—about his being lost out on the road somewhere, and that he was mortally ill. But, K, do you know what it was that he kept raving about all that time before he got away out of the window—all the time after they found him and brought him back?”
“No, Tess.”
“He kept calling out, ‘Fay, don’t touch it—Fay, put it down, darling. Some of you fools stop her, can’t you? Stop her—stop her—stop her! For God’s sake, don’t let her take it!” The lovely voice, shaken with some of the despairing horror of that cry, was abruptly silent; but when she spoke again, though it was quite steady, the horror still echoed behind it. “K, do you believe in mental telepathy and—and that kind of thing?”
“I? I no longer have the faintest idea as to what I believe, I assure you. But is it not quite possible that young Hardy was simply thinking of the drugs that she had been taking, and of the harm that they had done her—that it was only that of which he was raving?”
Tess said, in a voice that was suddenly colorless:
“That’s quite possible, of course.… What were the other questions that you wanted to ask me?”
“Oh, yes, those questions.… It was for them that I came, was it not? Is there any way of finding out whether Kippy Todd came up with her that night?”
“Any number, I should think. I tried one by simply asking him. He didn’t come up.”
“But you have only his word for it?”
“I must convey the impression of being even more ingenuous than I feel,” murmured Tess gently. “No, the butler let Fay in and saw them say good-night. It wasn’t until half an hour later—sometime well after ten—that she rang for him and told him that she wouldn’t need him any longer. Kippy went straight on to the Metropolitan Club, and from ten until quarter-past one was playing bridge.”
“Did he volunteer all this information?”
“Not exactly. It more or less came out because I called him up to find out what—what frame of mind Fay was in when she came back that night. He said that she’d been drinking quite a bit, but not half as much as she did sometimes, and that all the way home she seemed quite gay—he simply couldn’t understand what could have happened to make her do it.” She put down the tall, frosty glass and sat staring into it, motionless as a crystal gazer. “I told him that I couldn’t understand it, either.”
“No. That, Tess, is hard for more than one of us to understand.… Now for my third question. How was it that you learned that Fay was one of X’s—what was the word that you used?—scavengers? Did she tell you herself?”
“No,” said Tess, “she didn’t tell me. I didn’t know anything about it until Wednesday night. That’s why we had that dreadful fight that I told you about.”
“Who was it that told you, then, Tess?”
She sat silent for a moment, wringing her hands together, hard. After a moment she lifted her eyes to him—those strange, clear eyes, candid and fearless, that belonged to the lost War Baby.
“I suppose that you have the right to know that,” she said slowly. “I suppose that you have the right to know everything—now.… It was Raoul Chevalier.”
“Raoul Chevalier?” His voice was the blankest of echoes. “The young attaché who sat next to Freddy Parrish at the Temples’? But what in the name of heaven had Fay done to him?”
“Oh, what she’d done to everyone, K! She and Raoul had managed to get lost for several hours at a moonlight riding picnic that the Lindsays were giving—and Raoul, like the sentimental Latin lunatic he is, wrote her an extremely indiscreet note about it—and the next thing he knew she was holding it over his head, and X’s column was blossoming from one end to the other with perfectly recognizable allusions. Raoul was raging, because he’s really devoted to Andrée, and he came straight to me and told me that he’d sue Fay for blackmail if another word about it appeared in X’s column. It was—it was just about the last straw for me. Knowing that Fay did that, I mean.”
“Yes. That I can understand. Tess, for the first time since I have seen you, there are little shadows under your eyes. You are tired?”
“I’m very tired,” she said gravely. “I was going to ask you if you thought that you would need to see me again tonight, K, or if this would do instead? The doctor wants to give me something to make me sleep; I haven’t slept for a long, long time, and he says that he won’t let me go to the funeral tomorrow unless I’ll take a sedative and get some rest. He’s afraid that I might break down—he doesn’t know me very well, you see, even though he’s wise and old and kind, and saw me first when I wasn’t even a minute old. I don’t want to hurt him. I don’t want to hurt anyone, ever again.”
Sheridan said:
“I am glad that you will sleep. Tomorrow, when you are rested and all the hard things are behind you, we will take counsel again together. Should I come, perhaps, to the funeral?”
“Please, no. It’s to be in the morning. After lunch I’ll telephone you, and we can arrange some time in the afternoon or evening. K, do you feel that you’re making any progress? That you’re any closer to knowing who it is?”
He asked, his voice suddenly strange, “What do you think, Tess?” and raised a quick hand before she could answer. “Shall we say, perhaps, that I am closer to knowing who it isn’t? Tonight I will be better able to answer that question—tomorrow, almost surely, better still. Till tomorrow, then, Tess—all sweet dreams.”
At the corner he glanced at his watch and hailed a passing taxi, giving him the number of the house in Georgetown, with instructions to stop at a news stand on the way. At the stand, he briefly demanded the morning papers—all the morning papers—and the thick sheaf was still under his arm when Timothy opened the small, stately green door with the worn brass knocker.
“Mr. Dion was in earlier in the afternoon, and he left this latchkey for you in case it might come in handy,” Timothy informed him sedately, eying the collection of papers with an expression of marked disapproval at the size of the headlines. “He said he would see you hisself when he come back between six and seven.… Would you like for me to dispose of those papers for you, sah?”
“Thanks, no. Is it all right for me to use the upstairs sitting room, Timothy? Then will you be good enough to tell Mr. Mallory that he’ll find me there?”
In the upstairs sitting room, all cool green chintz and deep bowls of lilacs, Mr. Sheridan subjected the tall secretary desk to a surprisingly thorough examination. The Chippendale one in Mallory’s room below had already passed through an apparently casual and actually exhaustive inspection, as had the long table in his own room, but none of them had yielded the particular quarry that he was after. Sheridan was looking for a pencil—a pencil with a fat, soft black lead sheathed in its trim yellow body, a pencil preferably marked 6B, such as artists use for certain work. He hoped fervently that he would not find it, but when he failed to a somewhat professional scowl briefly adorned his countenance.
After a moment of digesting this last bit of frustration, he retired to the winged chair in the bow window, and with hardly a glance at the relentless headlines clamoring over and over their tale of Tragic Death of Society Beauty, he plowed steadily ahead through the awkward, flimsy pages with their endless reiteration of the fact that life and death, war and peace, capital and labor are still news. It was halfway through the third paper that he found what he was looking for—no longer even a column—simply the curtest of statements in heavily leaded type that, owing to a severe nervous breakdown on the part of X, that column would be at least temporarily suspended.… He was reading it through for the third time when he heard Mallory’s gay voice on the stairs.
“Can I come in, old boy? One of the embassy plutocrats just presented me with a bottle of amontillado that he swears has been seventy years in the cask, and I brought it up to see whether you agreed with him. Shall I bring it in?”
He stood framed in the doorway, looking far more Irish and engaging than any British secretary had a right to look, the thick little cut-glass tumblers in one hand, the dusty brown bottle carefully cradled in the other.
Sheridan shoved back the papers and came quickly forward to greet him.
“Mallory, I had forgotten that any sherry lived so long! What abstemiousness on some admirable character’s part—and what excellent luck for us! See, is this the right table? And shall I hold the glasses while you pour?”
Far off down some corridor he could hear a telephone ringing and a voice answering, subdued and distant, and then the soft steps hurrying towards them that must be Timothy’s. But the glass into which Mallory was pouring the fine, steady stream of topaz and amber was half filled before the gently hesitant voice reached them from the doorway.
“For you, Mr. Sheridan, sah. Some gennelman calling from down at the airport; he said you would know who it was.”
The smooth brown flow of the liquid halted for a moment, and then Mallory put down the bottle very carefully indeed, stretching out his hand for the glass.
“Here, I’ll manage it. The telephone’s behind that little screen on the table—or would you rather take it in the next room?”
“Hardly! This will do admirably.… This is Sheridan speaking, Trent. Well, how do we stand?”
Mallory, having filled the second glass with scrupulous exactitude, stood motionless, watching the dark, eager young face bent over the phone turn to bitter exasperation.
“Nothing at all from Washington? … Well, but what about the Baltimore end? … Oh, but my dear fellow, that simply knocks everything to pieces.… Can’t you find another field anywhere around those parts? … Well, then, I’ll drop around in the morning and help you explore.… Good-bye; I’m still trying to think up some adequate way to reward you, you know.… This isn’t the end by any means.”
Mallory pushed the glass towards him with the faintest suggestion of a smile.
“If you’re still trying to track down my poor old Jerry, you’re never the one I should be sharing this with. Or is it perhaps for Byrd that you’re spreading nets clean up to Baltimore?”
“I’m meeting with singularly little success, in any event,” said Sheridan, with a rueful twist to his smile. “The only mortal soul that set foot on a Baltimore or Washington field Saturday night except the pilots and mechanics was an elderly gentleman with a limp and a German accent, and a black band on his overcoat, headed for Hasbrouck Heights, near Hackensack, with a consignment of a new serum for an infantile paralysis case.… Well, that seems to dispose of any tenants of Stillhaven as suspects very neatly! … What do you say when you drink good health and good fortune to a fellow in your Ireland, Mallory?”
“You say ‘Slanta,’” said Dion Mallory, clicking the little tumbler until it rang like a bell against the edge of Sheridan’s glass, “as I say it to you. Slanta, Sheridan, slanta—and may we be saying it many’s the time again!”