She flopped on to the divan, buried her face in cushions and wept.
Fox looked down at her with the helpless exasperation that is a man’s first reaction to a woman’s tears from Singapore to Seattle, going either direction. From behind him came Jordan’s quiet voice:
“Now listen to that, will you? Without the slightest justification, the slightest reason — Mr. Fox, this must be embarrassing for you. It is for me too. I would like you to know that I have not plagued my daughter about her way of living. Five years ago, when I first learned of her relations with Mr. Thorpe, I disapproved and told her so. She was too old to bow to my authority and too independent to be influenced by my counsel. I regretted it certainly, but I haven’t plagued her. It wouldn’t have done any good. I admit I threatened her once, a long time ago. I insisted on knowing who the man was and on meeting him, and threatened to take steps to find out unless I was given that much satisfaction. I wanted at least to know that she had not become a gangster’s moll. I was to some extent reconciled when I learned that the man was Ridley Thorpe, as I suppose many eighteenth-century fathers were when they discovered that it was a duke or an earl. I also acknowledge the fact that it is her life she is living. I have never tried to coerce her and she has no right to accuse me of coming here to threaten her. It is a relief to me to speak of this to another person. I agreed to do what I was asked yesterday, by you and Mr. Thorpe, because I don’t care to have my friends read in a newspaper that Thorpe was weekending with his mistress, Dorothy Duke, and that her real name is May Jordan and she is my daughter.”
Miss Duke sat up. “You didn’t intend to threaten—”
“I did not. Did I say anything that would give you any reason to suppose I did?”
“No, but I thought—”
“You didn’t think at all. You never do.”
“Well,” said Fox, “I don’t blame you a bit for coming here to make sure you weren’t shielding a murderer. I did the same thing myself yesterday. But your daughter’s right that it was dangerous. If some bright newspaper reporter was hanging around my place and followed you here and learns that you got out at five o’clock in the morning to come and call on your beautiful young daughter who lives alone on Park Avenue — we’ll hope he didn’t. Are you convinced now that you weren’t persuaded to furnish an alibi for a murderer?”
“Yes. My daughter wouldn’t lie to me.”
“Good. I’m due at Thorpe’s office at nine o’clock and I want you to go along. You’ve got too much initiative to be left alone. I would have driven you here to see your daughter if you had asked me to. Stick with me for the day and we’ll see if we can’t develop a little mutual trust.”
Jordan made the objection that he wanted to go and see about his boat. Fox spent minutes cajoling him out of that and finally succeeded. They were in the hall on their way out, with Miss Duke bestowing a filial kiss on her father’s cheek, and then she looked at Fox and provided the day’s third surprise.
“I’d like to give you a message to an old friend,” she said, “but I don’t suppose it would be wise to let him know you’ve been to see me, because he’d wonder why?”
Fox smiled at her. “Let me have the message and I’ll furnish the wisdom. Who’s it for, Mr. Thorpe?”
“Oh, no.” She returned the smile. “If you think it’s safe, give Andy Grant my love and tell him if he wants a character witness he can call on me.”
Fox hoped that in the dim light of the hall the flicker of astonishment in his eyes was not too visible. “Oh,” he said casually, “is Andy an old friend of yours?”
She nodded. “A long ways back. I haven’t seen him for ages. I was his illusion once.”
“I didn’t know Andy had any illusions.”
“Neither have I now. I said a long ways back. Will you give him my message?”
“I’ll think it over. Good-bye and be a good girl.”
He left the building with a frown on his forehead and Henry Jordan at his elbow, went to where he had parked the car and headed downtown. But that part of the trip was fruitless, though at the end of it he did receive the fourth surprise. After fighting traffic, searching for space to park and walking four blocks with Jordan beside him, he entered the towering edifice on Wall Street and took an elevator to the 40th floor; and after consulting a smart young woman with red hair, arguing with a smart young man with bleary eyes, walking a carpeted corridor a hundred feet long and establishing his identity beyond question to a man with spectacles who, queried, would have reserved his opinion on the globosity of the earth, Fox was told by the last:
“Mr. Thorpe has decided to remain for the day at his country residence, Maple Hill. I am instructed to tell you that he telephoned your home at half-past seven this morning, to tell you to go there instead of here, but you had already left. He would like you to go to Maple Hill at once. The directions for reaching there—”
“Thanks,” said Fox, turning, “I know where it is.”
On his way out, with Jordan, he told the smart young woman with red hair that there would be a phone call for him from a Mr. Pavey and asked that Mr. Pavey be requested to proceed at once to Maple Hill.
Chapter 13
Maple Hill was on a height a little north of Tarrytown. There was nothing much to the mansion and grounds except wealth; it had not the twilight charm of antiquity, nor the bold beauty of a creative imagination disciplining nature, nor the dazzle of an impudent modernist playing with new planes and angles. But it was spacious and rich and everything was there that should be: curving drives bordered with twenty-foot rhododendrons, majestic elms and enormous rotund maples, rose and iris gardens, tennis courts, pools, manicured evergreens, luxuriant shrubbery, undulating lawns and a forty-room house.
At the entrance to the estate Fox stopped the car, for though the massive iron gates stood open, a heavy chain barred the way and a uniformed guard strolled towards him, scowling inhospitably. Again Fox established his identity, but that was not enough, in spite of the fact that he was expected; the guard entered the stone lodge to telephone up the hill that the caller was accompanied by a man named Henry Jordan, and only after he received satisfaction on that did he unfasten the chain and drag it aside. Near the top of the hill Fox caught sight of another guard standing at the edge of a filbert thicket, this one in shirt sleeves with a gun in a belt holster. He muttered to Jordan, “Locking the door after the horse is stolen,” and Jordan grunted, “That wasn’t the horse, it was only one of the donkeys.”
The drive leveled with the ground immediately surrounding the house. Fox stopped the car under the roof of the porte-cochere, at the lifted hand of a bald well-fed man in a butler’s costume who stood there, and was told that Mr. Thorpe was at present engaged but would see him shortly. He drove on through, arrived at a large gravelled space and maneuvered the car into the shade of a maple tree. Five or six other cars were already parked there and among them he observed the Wethersill Special which Jeffrey Thorpe had been driving on Monday. He got out and invited Jordan to come on and find a cool spot, but the little man shook his head.
“I’d rather wait here.”
Fox insisted. “You’re an old friend of Thorpe’s, you know. He was weekending on your boat. It would look better to the company. See that state police car?”
“You understand, Mr. Fox, that I’m not entirely comfortable at this place.”