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

take it down to the road formed a clumsy piece of work unworthy of a sneak thief. Straight down in front of the side porch where the tree had stood was another hill, a much smaller one, and certainly a much easier one on which to drag a tree down to the state highway.

Not a creature was stirring,

Not even a mouse.

And he knew what they’d done with Thaddeus Tredwill’s girl.

As though he had fitted two pieces of some great puzzle together, the Captain visualized a new niche of irregular design. Its edges were drawn with wavering lines of blood in the darkness. Into it, far too late for his own personal safety, he thought morosely, he fitted fact number three: Gerente’s assassin and Bella’s killer were the same, and should have been apparent from the time he entered the Tredwill home. Yet not until this moment had he known. No careless person could ever have built the House of Bonnée, no one with any loophole in life’s record which could be unearthed by Maclain or the F. B. I.

He clenched his hands despairingly, blaming himself entirely for the dangerous delay, refusing to condone his own remissness with the fact that the State Police had also been off trail.

Norma Tredwill was attacked and nearly killed when she returned to Hartford after discovering the body of Paul Gerente. There was no way anyone could have gotten in or out of The Crags—he had checked that himself, and the State Police agreed. Therein lay the vital flaw. He and the police had concentrated on the Tredwills and their servants; the Tredwills because they were in New York when Gerente was killed, the servants because he and the police were hunting for a spy. Colonel Gray had checked everyone in the Tredwill home; he was getting information from Bella, his operator, who lost her life posing as a servant—murdered because she was the only one who knew that Paul Gerente’s killer had been driven into New York in Bunny Carter’s car with the tracings of Gilbert’s plans.

The puzzle line changed again and driving himself malevolently, Duncan Maclain fitted in piece number four: the reason the police had found no other tire tracks leading up to The Crags. Bunny’s car had brought Mrs. Tredwill home from the station. It had brought Barbara home from New York just a short time before, accompanied by the cleverest slayer it had ever been Maclain’s misfortune to know. The police and Maclain had overlooked one vital fact. Bunny’s car made two trips to The Crags that night, not one.

Coldly and carefully, staking everything on the assumption that he was right, Maclain began to forge a chain of events which would satisfy him as true. Gilbert’s plans had been traced by a master spy. The tracings were bulky, and risky to entrust to the mail. One thing that spy did not know: that Bella was a counterespionage agent who had wormed her way into the Bonnée crowd while working for G-2. It was unfortunate for the spy, because Bella had brought a man into the House of Bonnée ring—an actor named Paul Gerente. Not until the spy arrived in New York did it come to light that Paul Gerente was working for the F. B. I. A column seen in the morning paper had aroused the spy’s suspicion of Gerente. Gerente, posing as a member of the House of Bonnée, had unquestionably expected to receive the tracings and make an arrest. Instead, he had been tricked and murdered by the master spy.

The Captain lay awhile, listening for Cameron’s footsteps in the hall.

Babs must have encountered the killer in Paul Gerente’s room. The killer must have persuaded her to drive back to Hartford in Bunny’s car.

Maclain tensed suddenly.

If arrangements had been made to intercept Bunny’s car and abduct Babs Tredwill, the fake kidnaping might leave the killer in the clear in the event anything went wrong.

The Captain sat up in bed more than satisfied. It fitted all the way through. Babs would be left alive. Gil was working on the final steps of his bombing sight, and, alive, his sister might be used in extorting information from him.

Maclain left his bed with the smoothness of a materializing apparition, found trousers, heavy shirt, and soft-soled shoes, and put them on. Schnucke came up beside him to receive her brace and harness, which the Captain took from a chair. His flat automatic in the shoulder rig was still in the drawer. He strapped it on, covered it with a dark overcoat, and with a slowness which would have been impossible for an ordinary man opened the bedroom door.

Something which had puzzled him badly was finally clear: how his own abductors had known exactly the time and place to stop Cheli’s car.

4

The granite of resolution and the marble of anger had driven out every lovable quality in Duncan Maclain. As he stepped into the hall he was as impersonal as a piece of metal come under a powerful magnet’s sway, and forced by the immutable laws of physics to answer its imperious command. He had no eyes, but he could shoot with the devastating accuracy of lightning at the most infinitesimal sound. He was blind, but it was the implacable blindness of Justice. Duncan Maclain and his dog, pitted against a world full of fools; no more a man, but a killer out to destroy the God of War’s machine.

He found the stair top and went on down. Not a tick of the grandfather’s clock was lost in the sound of any movement he made. As though the keen mind of the dog beside him felt his need, Schnucke became part of his stealthiness.

At the bottom of the stairs, his thumb found the light switch, felt the smoothness of the pearl knob sticking out and the roughness of the black knob, in. He knew from that that the lights were out in the downstairs hall. He crossed it with counted steps, opened the phone-booth door, and