She set down the valise close against the baseboard of the wall, where she could find it again readily. They toiled forward in a sort of swimming darkness that was almost liquid, it was so dense. “Step,” he whispered.
She raised her foot, pawed, found the foremost step with it. The rest of the stairs, followed in automatic succession, were no trouble at all. The stairs creaked once or twice under them in the stealthy silence. She wondered if anyone else was in the house, anyone still alive. For all they knew, someone might be. Many a nocturnal murder isn’t discovered until the following day.
“Turn,” he whispered.
His arm swung away, to the left. She kept contact, wheeled her body after it. The stairs had flattened out into a landing. She felt his sleeve go up again, after the brief level space. She found the new flight of steps. Finally they, too, had leveled off. They were in the upstairs hall now.
“Turn,” he breathed.
She felt herself go over a wooden door sill, slightly raised. His sleeve stopped. She stopped beside it. He reached behind her and did something, and she felt a slight current of air as a door closed in back of them.
“Get your eyes ready, here go the lights,” he warned.
She squinted protectively. They flashed on with unbearable brilliance after the long pilgrimage in the dark.
The dead man was the most conspicuous thing in the room.
It was a sort of library or den, by the looks of it. One doorway led into a bedroom, the other, at a spaced distance from it, into a bath. Frank left her to go into the former and draw the heavy, sheltering drapes together over the windows, to keep the light from showing through at the rear of the house.
He didn’t bother with the bath, so it evidently had no outside window. She stood there staring down in grim fascination until he’d rejoined her. She’d never seen anyone dead before.
The man was about thirty-five or so, lying face upward. Even in death he was still immaculately attired in evening clothes, the starched shirt bosom scarcely rumpled at all, the flower in his buttonhole still in place. Only the jacket had sprung open with his backward fall, and a small reddish-black swirl was revealed, marring the expanse of white pique vest.
She had drawn slowly near, crouched down by him, as if drawn by an irresistible compulsion. “Can you tell what — it was done by?” she asked with bated breath.
He saw her arch her hand timidly above the wound, fingers spread as if trying to undo the vest buttons without coming into contact with it.
“Here, I’ll do that for you,” he said quickly. “It looks partly burnt. It must have been a gun.” He undid the buttons, then an inner layer, and peered through without letting her see. He nodded. “Yeah, bullet wound.”
“Then we can be sure there’s no one else in the house right now, or they would have heard it happen.”
He was scanning the room. “Must have taken the gun out with them; there’s no sign of one around.”
“What’s their name — the people who live in this house?”
“Gadsby.”
“This is the son, you said?”
“The older one; there’s another, still a student, away at college somewhere. Then there’s the mother, well-known society woman, and a couple of debutante sisters. Gadsby senior’s dead.”
“If we could get at the motive — was anything taken out of the safe, when you went back to it the second time?”
“I don’t know. After I’d stumbled over him, I tossed the money back in without stopping to look.”
“You said there was some jewelry in it. Let’s make sure, shall we?”
They went into the bathroom. He had hacked a square opening through the plaster, behind where the safe was, large enough to pass the cash box through. The lining of the safe was not steel but only wood paneling. He had removed the rear section of this first, then brought out the box. He did this now a second time and they examined its contents.
“Everything’s still there,” he murmured. “Nothing’s been taken out since I—”
He was ashamed now, she could see. As dangerous a situation as they were in, his face still had time to color at the recollection of his theft. That was all to the good; that was the way the boy next door should feel about a thing like that.
They put it back, turned away. Just as he was about to poke the light out, she glanced behind them into the expensive built-in tub. There was a little piece of paper lying in the bottom of it, a little piece of light-blue paper that looked strangely out of place there.
“What’s that?” She went back, leaned over and picked it up. It was a check. Some one’s personal check. It was made out to Stephen Gadsby for twelve thousand five hundred dollars. It was endorsed by Stephen Gadsby. It was signed by Arthur Holmes. It was stamped, in damning letters diagonally across the face of it: Returned — No Funds.
They exchanged a look. “How’d a thing like that get down in there?” she puzzled.
“It must have been in the cash box, and when I pulled the box out through here, it slipped out into the tub without my noticing it.”
“Then maybe this Holmes came around here tonight to see Gadsby, either to make good on it, or to ask him to delay prosecution until he’d raised the money. Gadsby couldn’t find it when he went to look for it. Holmes thought he was trying to put something over on him. They got into an argument about it, and he shot him.”
“Then, in a way, I’m still responsible for his death.”
“Forget that. He didn’t have to kill him, even if he did think he was holding out the check on him. Have you — looked him over yet?” she asked in a hesitant voice.
He knew what she meant; had he searched him. “No. I didn’t even see him until my foot caught against something. I got out fast.”
She conquered her repulsion, knelt down by the motionless form. “Come on, help me go through his pockets.”
He dropped down on the opposite side. They resembled, grotesquely, two overgrown kids playing with their pails in the sand. He didn’t say anything, but she could tell by his face he was thinking they didn’t have a chance — not in the time left to them.
She reached out across what lay between them, gripped his arm, shook it imploringly. “We can figure this out, Frank, we can! If we think we can’t, if we start saying we can’t, then we never will!”
A clock on the book shelf behind them went tick-tock, tick-tock mockingly. So fast, so remorselessly. They both kept from turning to look at it by sheer willpower alone.
“Take out everything,” she breathed, “no matter what it is.”
They made a sort of audible inventory as they went along. “Cigarette case, given to him by somebody with the initial B. Two, ticket stubs from the show at the Winter Garden. I wonder who went with him?”
“Business cards. Wait a minute. Holmes was his broker; one of these is his.”
“That’s funny. Clients usually give checks to their brokers, not the other way around. And a bad one at that.”
“Maybe Holmes misappropriated some securities that Gadsby had entrusted to him, and then Gadsby demanded an accounting sooner than he’d expected, so he tried to gain time by foisting a worthless check on him. When that bounced back and Gadsby threatened to have him arrested—”
“There’s motive enough there for Holmes to have shot him,” she agreed. “But we don’t even know for sure that Holmes was here tonight.”
“Somebody was.” He pitched his thumb toward the opposite side of the room, where a low occasional table was placed in a position accessible to two chairs. “See the two glasses, with tan rings around the bottom? See the two cigar butts in a tray, pointed toward each other?” He went over, took a closer look. “They were having an argument, too. One smoker in particular was laboring under some strong emotion; one of the butts is chewed to ribbons.”