A moon was rising over the Westchester hills, but it was still too near the horizon and too yellow to cast much radiance on the car.
Once, taking care to keep out of range of the rear vision mirror, Mark Telfair raised his head to glance slantingly inside. Smythe had turned on the domelight to find something; Mark saw that it was a silver flask, and the lawyer tilted it to his lips even as he snapped off the light.
The car purred on, climbing and working its way in a zigzag course back from the river. Suddenly it swerved sharply to the right and swept smoothly up a driveway. Gravel crunched under the whirling tires; then momentum thrust Mark against the polished body as the brakes soundlessly slowed the car. A house, dimly lighted, showed suddenly in his limited vision. He had barely time to drop off and scramble into some bushes beside the drive before the opening front door sent a flood of light over the car.
A man-servant hurried down the steps. Mitchell slid hastily out of his seat to release his master. Martin H. P. Smythe alighted with dignity, his flask well concealed. He paused before the front door, waved the man-servant into the house, and spoke to his chauffeur in a low voice.
Mark Telfair moved deeper into the bushes, traveling in a circuitous course among the elaborate shrubberies of the estate. Well behind the car, which still stood before the door, with headlights glaring, he crossed the driveway. Then, rapidly, he turned the corner of the house and in a wide swing worked around the building. He had no difficulty in finding his way. The moon was already beginning to dispel the darkest shadows of the night.
He came at last to the driveway that led from the house to a low garage set a good hundred yards behind it. The driveway passed several greenhouses and skirted a pond perhaps fifty feet wide which was almost covered with the broad flat leaves of water lilies. Around it paths of stone were inlaid in moss, and a high thick privet hedge offered good cover.
The garage was dark and silent. Telfair approached the square building with great caution, keeping in the shadow of a hedge. His ears were alert for the crunch of gravel and the hum of a motor behind him.
Where the hedge ended he paused. The garage had a double set of doors. These were closed, as was a smaller door beside them.
Telfair scrutinized the windows on the low second floor of the building. Apparently the chauffeur’s quarters were up there. The windows were unlighted.
He crossed the apron in front of the garage and laid hold of the knob of the small door. It was locked. In quick succession, ears strained for any sound from the direction of the house, he tried the larger doors. Locked, too.
“Chink Mitchell doesn’t trust anybody,” Telfair muttered. “Well, where he came from they specialize on locks. He may be right.”
He retreated to the hedge and waited, taking note of the lay of the land by the waxing light of the moon. The driveway did not end at the garage; it vanished in the direction of the road. Apparently Mr. Smythe’s estate sported a service entrance.
Soon he heard the limousine approaching from the house. It halted directly in front of one of the double doors. Chink Mitchell climbed quietly down from behind the wheel. He came around to the rear of the car and stood there a moment, looking across the lily pond toward the house and the greenhouses. It was no idle glance; there was intense effort in that scrutiny. Then his head turned as his gaze swept over lawns and bushes, and down the driveway.
At last the ex-convict swung around to the garage doors, fumbling in his pocket. Keys tinkled; he opened the doors and pushed them back. Hastily he climbed to the driver’s seat.
Mark Telfair was back in his place on the gas tank before Mitchell slid the car into gear. And he was off the tank inside the garage before the flat-faced chauffeur ratched up his emergency brake.
Chapter VI
Murder!
The headlights revealed to Mark the interior of the building before Mitchell snapped them off. It had a floor space broad and deep enough to accommodate four cars comfortably. There were within only two cars beside the limousine. One of these, in the corner, in front of the limousine, was swathed in a linen dust cover.
The other, behind which Mark Telfair took refuge in two noiseless bounds, was a heavy, powerful roadster. Crouching low, Mark Telfair kept still, awaiting the blazing radiance of the garage lights.
But Chink Mitchell did not snap on the lights. Instead he remained in his seat for an instant. The slight noise of his fumbling hands reached Mark’s ears. He seemed to be trying to find something.
Mark Telfair reached out in the darkness. He groped for the left forward fender of the roadster behind which he was hiding. His fingers encountered the smooth, curving sheet of steel. It seemed as solid to his fingers as the plates of a battleship. This expensive, low-slung car had been designed with a view to safeguarding its occupants from hazards of the highway. Those fenders would stand the gaff.
His fingers moved on inquiringly to the top of the sweeping curve. Here, if anywhere, a fender guide would be attached. He felt painstakingly for the thin rod or the stump of such a rod. Suddenly he touched something quite different — a small patch of wet, sticky paint.
Mark’s lips tightened in a brief, grim smile. This tiny area of new paint was at the extreme outer edge of the fender — exactly where a guide rod would be bolted to the sheet of steel. But now there was no rod — no marks of the bolts — nothing but a square of fresh paint. And the evidence it mutely gave would be gone in an hour or two, as the paint dried.
“Not quite smart enough,” he muttered.
His fingers confirmed what he already suspected — that these heavy steel fenders had swept his light car off the road with no great damage to themselves. All he found was another drying area of paint — this time covering a long scratch on the forward surface of the fender.
Suddenly he stiffened at the sound of a closing door. Chink Mitchell was out of the driver’s seat of the limousine. A flashlight, partly screened by one hand, moved toward the open doors. Mitchell shut them and shot the bolt, locking himself inside. Then, with his flashlight even more carefully screened, he turned toward the car with the linen dust cover.
Telfair shifted cautiously to watch.
Chink Mitchell lifted up the dust cover. Underneath was a sedan. He opened the rear door. The beam of his light played directly upon something on the floor of the car.
Mark Telfair stood up on the running board of the roadster to see what it was. The flashlight disclosed it plainly to him. His face stiffened.
Chink Mitchell was bending over the body of Keeper Naylor. Every feature of Naylor’s white, gaunt face was vividly revealed. But the back of the prison guard’s head had been crushed in by a terrible blow. Murdered!
Here was reason enough why Warden Crawford had never received his aspirin. And here was reason, too, why the ex-convict who drove Martin H. P. Smythe was careful about locking the garage doors. But why had Naylor been killed — Naylor, the inoffensive death house guard — the only man for whom Herrington had shown a liking.
Chink Mitchell fastened back the dust sheet and crept into the sedan. What followed was a grotesquqe, moving chiaroscuro to Mark Telfair, for the beam of Mitchell’s flashlight was never still; and at close range never revealed more than a part of the keeper’s relaxed corpse.
But what Mitchell was doing was plain enough. He was searching Naylor — searching him with painstaking thoroughness. Once the flashlight’s beam, misdirected for the instant, revealed the chauffeur’s flat face. It was drawn up into a mask of apprehensive tensity; his yellow teeth showing in an involuntary snarl; his eyes deep sunken and small under the contraction of his brows.