Hannibal slipped his arm about her. When she sobbed, he soothed her. I found myself wishing I were in his place. I said, “Well, I guess I might as well not muss up another guest room tonight. I came here to wait until the old man had died and make sure, meantime, he had the chance to fix himself another will if he wanted to. He’s done both, and I guess I...” Hannibal was leading the girl back toward the library.
I got my hat from the antique hall tree and went out the front door. My car wasn’t where I’d left it. I called out Jed Sloan’s name, got no answer, and walked around the side of the house. The car was in the garage, where I guessed Jeddrath had put it.
I backed out of the garage. In the night the house looked white and spectral; a faint fog was rising, shredding across the lawn. I thought about the girl in there; then I kicked the clutch and started down the driveway.
The Mace house was a few miles from Maceton proper. I first noticed the thumping in the back end of the coupé when I hit a rut in the road. It sounded as if the spare tire had come loose from its moorings and was slogging around in the luggage compartment. Finally, I pulled the coupé over to the side of the road, thinking it would be better to take a few minutes putting the spare hack in place than driving all the way to New Orleans with that annoying thumping behind me.
I was about a mile out of Maceton. The road lay like a fat, sluggish snake in the moonlight. I raised the lid of the luggage compartment and the night suddenly turned very cold.
I was hauling a dead man around with me.
III.
It was Jeddrath Sloan, twisted there in the trunk compartment. His leathery face wore a frightened grimace; his eyes were like two pieces of ice in the moonlight. He had been stabbed in the throat, and the blood, caked with dust from the compartment made his neck a mess. I touched the thing he’d been slabbed with, using my handkerchief. The weapon that had taken his life was a long fingernail file with a fancy, curlicue mother-of-pearl handle.
Far off in the night, I heard the hum of a car motor — coming this way. It jerked me out of the paralysis. I slammed the compartment down, got in the coupé, and swung it around in the road. In another two and a half or three hours Ansel Mace should arrive from New Orleans.
It seemed to me there were a few things Mr. Mace hadn’t told me about the set-up at Mace Manor...
Back at the Mace house, I ran the coupé in the garage, opened the compartment once again. Carefully, I pulled the leathery-faced corpse out. I carried Jeddrath over to the corner, around the pair of long, sleek cars that filled the rest of the garage. I dumped him there, got a piece of tarpaulin from a narrow workbench, covered him with it. It might not have been so good, but it was a lot better than having Jed Sloan in the luggage compartment of my car.
When I went around the house. Hannibal Constan was standing on the corner of the veranda, looking out in the night, smoking. I must have still been shuddering from the shock of finding Jeddrath Sloan’s body. Constan looked at me in the glow from the wan, overhead veranda light, said, “Anything wrong?”
“Nothing time and effort won’t fix, I guess.”
“I thought you’d gone, Martin.”
I shrugged. “I decided the drive back to New Orleans was too long and uncomfortable to make tonight.” I ran the back of my hand over my lips and decided I might as well get started, in a round-about way, on this business of Jeddrath right now. I asked Constan: “Have you seen Jed Sloan around?”
“Not in the last hour or so. Just a little while before old Theron passed on, Jeannie sent Jed up to her room for some trifle.”
“How long before he came back down?”
Hannibal shook his beet-top thatch.
“Why — I don’t know. Come to think of it, he might not have done the errand. An independent old cuss. The way he resents Jean being here, I hope he shoots himself with that shotgun of his.”
“He won’t,” I assured him.
I went on in the house, tossed my hat back on the hall tree, and walked upstairs without being too noisy about it. I tapped on Jean Dupree’s door. There was no answer, no sound in the room.
I tried the knob; the door swung open, and I slipped inside. I clicked on the light. The room had a nice feminine smell, but when I walked over to the dressing table it seemed a chill wind off distant swampland surged into the room.
A tan leather case was open on the dressing table. The case contained a manicuring outfit, a comb, brush, hand mirror — all done in mother-of-pearl. But one leather loop was empty. It was just the right size. You didn’t have to be a soothsayer to know that a long, keen nail file with a curlicue, mother-of-pearl handle was missing from the outfit...
I glanced about the room. There were no signs of a struggle, but any signs could have been erased; Jeddrath’s body could have been pushed out the window, to lie at the side of the house unnoticed until the opportunity had occurred to put him in my car, in an effort to get the corpse away from here and divert suspicion the wrong way.
But could a woman have handled a heavy, limp body in that manner? What if Jean had stayed downstairs after sending Jeddrath up here, and hadn’t followed him? How about Cole Delanard? Ansel Mace had said that Doctor Delanard had been his chum in New Orleans, which didn’t raise Delanard’s reputation in my opinion. Had Delanard, going in too strongly for wine, women and ribald song, in some sort of jam that made him hot-foot it away from the bright lights of New Orleans to this backwoods spot?
I went downstairs and found the maid. Between her sobbing laments for old Theron Mace, she told me Cole Delanard had gone home. She told me how to find his place, and I went out without seeing anyone, entered the garage, and climbed wearily in the coupé.
Cole Delanard’s house was about two miles on the other side of Mace-ton. A long box hedge fronted the highway; the house itself was a rambling, hulking structure in the darkness.
I left the coupé in the drive. The house was unlighted. There was no sign of life or movement over the whole of the flat, black landscape. The fog rolled up around the house, over the lawn, and clouds clutched and receded from the pale yellow moon.
I knocked, listened to the echo. I tried it a couple more times; then I walked off the porch, skirted shrubbery growing beneath the front windows and went around the side of Delanard’s house.
There was no light in the back of the house, either. The place was still, dead. From the back yard, where I now stood, I could see the outbuildings, the barn, the flat, perfectly naked acres that stretched for miles in every direction until they were swallowed by night.
Then I stiffened, staring hard at the barn, wondering if it were the rising night wind rustling a stall shutter, or if a man had really moved out there.
I started forward, across the back yard, the wind sobbing in the multiple gables and eaves of the house which was now behind me. I didn’t see the shadow again. I skirted the barn. Hulking in the night, it was a gigantic structure that could have used a coat of paint. Its massive double doors were closed, padlocked. If I had really seen a man, he hadn’t gone in this way.
I swept the sprawling held with my gaze. It appeared to be hard, sunbaked earth, likely not farmed since Cole Delanard had been living in the place. I took half a dozen more undecided steps. The moon swept free of clouds. It was then that I saw the dark, small splotches on the earth. At first I thought they were large drops of blood, then I bent closer, touched my finger to one; it was oil. I was chiding myself for letting my taut nerves see blood where there was only drops of oil — when the shooting started.