Odor of Violets, Baynard Kendrick [best short novels .txt] 📗

murderer was discovered by Babs, why had Babs been allowed to leave unmolested?

The Captain straightened up suddenly, found the piece, and fitted it into the puzzle.

Murdered in Gerente’s apartment, Babs would have bathed The Crags in a searchlight of publicity. Publicity was bad for a place which had become an outlet of information which might affect the outcome of a war. Gerente was killed because he became too interested in The Crags. Then if Barbara had seen Gerente’s killer, Barbara was allowed to leave the Twelfth Street apartment for one reason only—because a neater plan had been conceived to get her out of somebody’s way, a plan which would allow a few days’ leeway for work to be completed.

To get her out of whose way?

The Captain stood up and ran supple fingers through his hair. He felt that his reasoning was sound, but it presupposed one thing he had failed to consider. If Barbara had encountered anyone in Paul’s apartment, it must have been someone she knew. No stranger could have argued her into leaving quietly. There was a chance, of course, that she had left in terror, as Norma had done, without seeing anyone at all.

There was another chance, which Duncan Maclain disliked exceedingly—a chance that Babs had killed Paul; a chance that Arnold Cameron had known Thaddeus Tredwill’s daughter, and was taking a murder charge to save the girl. Babs had keys to The Crags—knew every inch of the great house—

The Captain’s knuckles rapped sharply on the table and he irritably shoved back his chair. He crossed the room and opened the door to the hall. The trooper’s footsteps approached quickly, and the officer said in a low tone, “Captain Maclain. Is there anything I can do? Sergeant King said I was to co-operate with you.”

“I’m going downstairs to use the phone,” said Maclain. “You might make sure that no one listens in the hall.”

“I’ll go with you.”

“You’d better post yourself on the stairs. You can watch both upstairs and down.”

“Okay,” said the trooper.

Schnucke came up beside her master, but Maclain ordered her back into the room and closed the door. He was already familiar with the layout of the Tredwill home. Under the anxious eyes of the trooper he strode off confidently, stopped at the top of the stairs, found the banister, and unhesitatingly went down.

A few minutes later he had New York Police Headquarters on the phone. He got the Missing Persons Bureau and asked for Sergeant Kyle.

“Duncan Maclain calling from Hartford,” he said. “A confidential report of a girl named Barbara Tredwill was turned in to you this morning by G-2. Have you turned up anything yet? It’s important that I know.”

“Hold it,” said Kyle. Maclain could hear the rustling of papers. The Sergeant spoke again. “A cab picked her up on Twelfth Street and dropped her at Sixty-third and Park Avenue. She went in an apartment house there, and came out twenty minutes later, according to the doorman. She was staying there with friends. She had a traveling bag with her when she left. No trace from there.”

“Did she take another cab?” asked Maclain.

“No. She walked off uptown toward Sixty-fourth Street. Beyond that the doorman doesn’t know. Have you got anything?”

“A hunch,” said Maclain, “that she’s been kidnaped, but I wouldn’t want to put it on the air!”

He left the booth and went back upstairs accompanied by the trooper. In his room again, he fitted a record onto his portable Ediphone which Cappo had set up in a corner. Twice he played the record through, marking the voice of the unknown man who had impersonated Paul Gerente; searching for unusual accents or pronunciations; listening intently for cadences and tones as a handwriting expert might take note of loops and whorls.

The man’s diction was faultless, but the Captain’s face was set in lines of satisfaction when he took the record from the Ediphone. The speaker had an unconscious trick of pronunciation, a quirk of speech so slight that it had almost escaped the analytical ears of Duncan Maclain.

Once or twice he had injected an extra syllable on the vowel i—“cap-i-tan” instead of “cap-tain”; “con-dish-i-uns” instead of “con-dish-uns.” To Maclain’s impressionable hearing it marked the speaker with an ineradicable scar.

The Captain got into bed and lay sleepless for a long time listening to the crackle of frost against the windowpane. Russia and Finland were battling desperately. England, France, and Germany were choked in the constricting coils of war. The smaller nations of Europe stood armed, in constant danger of invasion. Those nations were thousands of miles away, yet, in the brooding quiet of The Crags, Duncan Maclain felt them disturbingly near.

From somewhere in the direction of Boston he heard the drone of a late-flying plane. Lying rigid, he followed the swell of the sound, traced it overhead, and relaxed with its passing.

For one terrible moment memory had carried him away, tricked him into thinking that the roar of the motor would be blotted out by the whine and crash of a life-destroying bomb.

“We are at war!” he whispered into the darkness. “Every combatant in the world is against us—fighting our peace with every weapon they know.” He sat up suddenly and shook his fist into the darkness. “I’ll beat you,” he exclaimed so loudly that Schnucke stood up and came to the bedside. “You think you’ve wrecked me with blindness—but I still have a brain. Your weapons of death and terror are helpless against it.” He lay back on the pillow, then reached down and petted the dog beside him. “Go lie down, Schnucke, you need your sleep—you and a blind man versus a world full of fools!”

2

It was shortly after seven when Sergeant King rapped at the Captain’s door. Cappo, bearing a tray of breakfast, was with the officer.

“I’m going upstairs to look over that girl’s room again,” the Sergeant said laconically. “After you eat I’d like you to join me.”

“I’ll come,” said Maclain.

“Good.” The Sergeant went out and Maclain addressed his giant Negro