“But — but you asked me — told me—”
Beau glared down at her as she crouched, hugging her knees, staring up at him. He was furious with himself, and with her for having made him lose his head. The plea had slipped out under the pressure of her arms, the warmth of her breathing, the joyful yearning and hope in her eyes. He saw her hungry, tramping from studio to studio, one of the thousands of starched, frayed, and fixedly smiling Hollywood job-hunters...
So he sneered: “You dames are all alike. I thought maybe you were different. But you’re a pushover like the rest of ’em!”
Kerrie jumped up and ran away.
Just before they left the rooming house for the station the next day, Beau received two telegrams.
One was from Lloyd Goossens.
“MARGO COLE FOUND IN FRANCE”
The other was from Mr. Ellery Queen, and it said:
“MARGO FOUND STOP MORE CONVINCED THAN EVER MURDER IN THIS CASE STOP JOB JUST BEGUN FOR THE LOVE OF MIKE GET BACK ON IT WILL YOU”
Beau glanced at Kerrie Shawn, his eyes a little red, two deep lines running from his nostrils to the corners of his mouth.
But Kerrie sailed past him with Vi as if he didn’t exist.
He grinned wryly.
Part Two
V. Fists Across the Sea
The instant Kerrie gazed into her cousin Margo’s eyes, she knew they would be enemies.
In the midst of the hurly-burly of presenting her proofs of identity to Lloyd Goossens and Edmund De Carlos, whom Kerrie immediately disliked, of moving into and exploring the Tarrytown mansion and its broad acres, complete with woods and bridle-paths and hidden streams and unexpected arbors, of selecting personal servants and cars and of refurnishing her own suite of rooms, turning them from gloomy chambers into bright and chintzy places, of shopping and granting press interviews and the whole feverish process of settling down to her new life in the East... in the midst of all this, Kerrie had looked forward to her cousin’s arrival from France.
It was a peculiar anticipation, touched with sadness, for Kerrie felt as if she had lost something, and she wanted to make up her loss in another way.
But when she saw Margo Cole, she knew she had wished for the moon.
They all went down the bay in a cutter to meet the Normandie in quarantine — Kerrie, Vi, Goossens, De Carlos, and Beau. Goossens, brief-case in hand, boarded the liner to meet Margo; they appeared a short time later and descended the ladder to the motor-launch, which ferried them to the cutter.
Margo Cole stepped aboard in a swirl of furs and scent, followed by a pert French maid and a mountain of luggage. She kept chattering gaily with Goossens as her eyes flickered over Vi indifferently, paused on Kerrie, examined her briefly, tossed her aside, and traveled on to De Carlos and Beau. De Carlos’s bearded cheeks and toothy grin she greeted with a smile; but her blue eyes, slant, almost Egyptian, narrowed when they came to Beau, and then swept over him from unkempt head to disreputable toe with an astounding relish.
That was when Kerrie decided they were born foes.
“Licking her chops,” whispered Vi, pressing Kerrie’s arm. “The flashy type. Don’t let her step on you, hon. She’ll try.”
Margo Cole was a tall, strongly built woman — one of those splendid females who contrive to look vigorous even when they are lolling in a sun-chair. She was beautiful in a cold, majestic way, and she walked with a slow strutting poise that showed off her tightly draped hips.
“Either did a strip-tease or modeled,” said Vi. “I don’t like her. Do you?”
“No,” said Kerrie.
“She’s thirty, if she’s a day.”
“Thirty-two,” said Kerrie, who had been absorbing a little family history.
“Look at the so-called men goggle! You’d think they never saw a hip before. It’s disgusting!”
They murmured politely when Lloyd Goossens introduced them.
Then Margo slipped her arm through Beau’s. “So you’re the man who was supposed to find me. How nice he is, Mr. Goossens! If I had known, I should have ignored Mr. Queen’s advertisements in the French papers and waited for him to come find me.”
“I imagine,” grinned Beau, “it would have been fun at that.”
“Shall we go to my office?” asked Goossens. “Miss Cole, there are certain formalities — naturally you’ll put up at a hotel until we’ve... ah... checked your proofs of identity. Of course, if you’d rather—”
“No, no. Let’s have the dismal scene,” said Margo. “Mr. Queen, you’ll come?”
“How could I resist a smile like that?”
“Cynic! And... oh, of course, you, dear Kerrie! I should feel lost without you. After all, though I was born here, I’ve lived all my life in France—”
“That was France’s hard luck,” mumbled Vi.
Kerrie smiled. “I’d be charmed to shield you from the shocks of this rude, new world.”
“Ah, no, no,” said Edmund De Carlos. “That shall be my special province, ladies.” And he bowed first to Kerrie, and then to Margo, licking his bearded lips, meanwhile with the tip of his red tongue.
The cutter plowed up the bay.
Kerrie developed a headache on shore. She excused herself politely and drove off with Vi in her new roadster.
Margo waved gaily, watching with her cold Egyptian eyes.
Lloyd Goossens examined Margo Cole very sharply when they reached his office, but there could be no doubt of the validity of her proofs of identity.
She accepted a cigaret from the lawyer and a flame from De Carlos. “It seems odd to be called Miss Cole, or even Margo. You see, I’ve been calling myself Ann Strange ever since 1925.”
“How is that?” asked Goossens, filling his pipe.
“Mother died that year. I don’t recall my father, of course; we never ran across any one mother’d known in America; she hadn’t even a family. We used to travel about from town to town in France — Dijon, Lyon, a few years in Montpellier in the South, buckets of places — while mother taught English to French children and earned enough to keep me in the convent schools.
“I knew nothing about my family; mother never talked about them. But when she died I found letters, a diary, little mementoes, and they told me all about my Cole heritage. Especially,” she laughed, “about dear Uncle Cadmus and how helpful he’d been when mother, father, and I had been starving in a Parisian garret. You know, one letter of Uncle Cadmus’s drove my father to suicide. So I decided to change my name — wash out everything connected with the past.”
“You’ve brought those letters and things, Miss Cole?”
She produced them from an alligator shopping bag. The handwriting of the diary checked with the handwriting of Nadine Malloy Cole, a sample of which Goossens had from Mrs. Cole’s letter to Cadmus Cole in 1909, found among his effects.
There were also some faded old photographs of Huntley Cole and his wife, and one, dated Paris 1910, in which Margo was a chubby three-year-old with blonde hair and staring, frightened light eyes.
And there was Cole’s typewritten letter to his sister-in-law, dated 1909, in which he refused financial aid. Goossens and Beau compared it with the typed letter Cole had sent his sister Monica in 1918, preserved by Kerrie. The style and tenor were much the same, and Cole had initialed both in his bold, simple, block-letter script.
“Of course, we’ll have everything checked by experts, Miss Cole,” said Goossens. “You understand — such a large estate. Matter of form—”