“I’ll get him. But the new sedan would be better—”
“No. Miss Grant wants to drive over to Westport to get the luggage she left where she was weekending. If Jordan isn’t there when you arrive, phone me at Thorpe’s office— Thank you, darling. No, that’s all.” Fox buckled his belt with one hand and ate a peach with the other. Mrs. Trimble bustled out.
Dan had questions to ask and Fox answered them as he drank his coffee, finished dressing, brushed his hair and got the envelope from the pigeonhole in the safe, more or less simultaneously. He gulped down the last of the coffee, grimacing at the heat, and left Dan at the door of his room. Outdoors, back at the garage, he found that Trimble had run the convertible out and turned it around and was wiping the windshield. He climbed in.
“Thanks, Bill. Private property, no trespassing.”
“Yes, sir, I’ll keep an eye out.”
“Make it both eyes. Miss Grant is going to drive to Westport and I suppose her uncle will go along. They can take the new sedan. Dan will be using the old one. Ask Crocker to take Brunhilde to the veterinary in the station wagon. You’d better stick around. If a man phones from Pittsburgh about a bridge, tell him I can’t come. Are you doing the cover spray on the apples?”
“Yes, sir, today. That storm yesterday—”
“Good. Look out, dogs!”
The dashboard clock said 7:22 as he swung from the drive on to the highway. That appeared to be rushing it, since his allowance for reaching Wall Street from his home was an hour and ten minutes; but he was calculating on two stopovers, a telephone call and a brief visit to the apartment of Dorothy Duke. While neither his life nor his liberty was at stake on account of the alibi he had manufactured for Ridley Thorpe — since Thorpe was not suspected of murder or any other crime — still, as a minimum consideration, he liked to have things that he arranged stay arranged, not to mention the fee involved and his aversion for apologies, except polite ones, to district attorneys. He had gone to the trouble of hauling Jordan home with him purely as a safeguard for that alibi and now that Jordan had gone on hitchhiking God knew where, he wanted the assurance of another look and a word with the only other person who could shatter it.
At a filling station on the Sawmill River Parkway he pulled up and told the attendant to fill the tank and went inside to use the phone. He knew neither the number nor the name, only the street address, so it took a few minutes to get the call through. But finally he heard the voice and recognized it from the hello.
“Hello! Is this 916 Island Avenue? No, this is the man you talked to through your window yesterday morning when I called to see Henry Jordan and he wasn’t home. Remember? Thank you very much. Yes, indeed he has. Yes, I’m Tecumseh Fox. Thank you very much. I just called Mr. Jordan’s number and there was no answer. Has he returned home? Oh, no, I just have a message for him. Will you do me a favor? You see, he’s quite annoyed at all the publicity and he may not answer the phone. If he comes home will you give me a ring? Croton Falls 8000. That’s right, easy to remember. Thank you very much. Sure, I’d love to meet your husband. We’ll do that some day.”
He went out and paid for the gas and was off again. At that hour the traffic was thin and he made good time — on over the Henry Hudson Bridge and down the West Side Highway. He left it at 79th Street and headed east, crawled crosstown and across the park, and parked the car on 67th Street at the identical spot where he had parked the truck the previous morning.
The day’s second surprise was awaiting him in apartment 12H of the palace on the avenue. The same functionary as before greeted him, this time with no astonishment, phoned his message and waved him to the elevator. Also as before, Dorothy Duke herself opened the door of the apartment to him, and though she looked more rested and less pinched by apprehension, her voice was squeaky with an irritation so pronounced that he was startled.
“Come on in here,” she said, turning for the rear.
“No, thank you, Miss Duke, this will do—”
“Come in here a minute,” she squeaked peevishly and kept going. He followed her because there was nothing else to do, entered, at her heels, a large, cushioned, perfumed room with the shades drawn and the lights turned on, and saw Henry Jordan sitting there in a chair.
Fox stood and took a breath.
Miss Duke confronted her father. “Ask him,” she demanded, “whether it was dumb or not.”
“Good morning,” Jordan said. “How did you know I was here?”
“Good morning.” Fox took another breath. “I didn’t. I was on my way downtown and stopped for a word with Miss Duke. Nothing important. May I ask how you got here?”
Dorothy Duke furnished the information. “He hitched a ride to Brewster and took a train. I used to invite him to come to see me and he never would. Now he comes just when—”
“I didn’t come to see you,” Jordan protested. “I came because it was absolutely necessary. I had let myself be bullied into joining in a deception—”
“It isn’t costing you anything, is it?”
Fox shook his head at her. “Please, Miss Duke. It isn’t costing him anything, but he isn’t making anything either. Mr. Thorpe offered him a lot of money to help us out and he wouldn’t take it. You understand how we handled it, I suppose.”
“Certainly I do. It was obvious as soon as I heard it on the radio last night.”
“Of course. Well, as I understand it, your father consented to help us only for the purpose of protecting you from undesirable publicity. Don’t you appreciate that?”
“Sure I do.” The squeak was gone. “I told him I did, I think it was swell of him. But he shouldn’t have come here! What if somebody followed him, or saw him downstairs and recognized him from his picture in the paper? It’s mighty damn dangerous!”
“I agree with you there. Will you tell me why you came, Mr. Jordan?”
“I will.” The little man’s tone was uncompromising. “I came because there had been a murder done and I had been browbeaten into furnishing an alibi for a man, and I wanted to make sure that man had been where he said he was at the time the murder was committed. The only way I could do that was come and ask my daughter.”
“Do you mean you suspected that Thorpe had committed the murder himself?”
“I didn’t suspect anything. But wouldn’t I be a fool if I let myself in for a thing like that without making sure? A man had been killed at that bungalow that Thorpe owned. You and he came and told me that he didn’t want it known that he was down at that cottage, and asked me to furnish a false alibi for him. I agreed to do it, but I made up my mind last night that I’d find out for sure whether he could have been at that bungalow himself. I’m not in the business of furnishing an alibi for a murderer, not even for the sake of — not for anything.”
“Neither am I,” Fox declared. “But I thought you already knew that Thorpe spent his weekends with — at the cottage.”
“He did,” Miss Duke put in. “He knew all about it.”
“What if I did?” Jordan demanded testily. “Did I know for certain he was there that weekend? I didn’t know anything for certain. I hadn’t even heard about the murder until you chaps came alongside and boarded me. I had every right to come and see my daughter and satisfy myself—”
Dorothy Duke, who had sunk into cushions on a divan, sprang up again. “That’s not why you came!” she squeaked. “You didn’t doubt for one second that he was at the cottage with me! You came for the pleasure of reminding me that you had warned me that my way of living would bring trouble! And to tell me that the only thing that was preventing trouble now was your coming to the rescue! And I wouldn’t be surprised — I was expecting it any minute — you were going to threaten that if I didn’t agree — that you would — that if I didn’t...”