Montague wiped his face with his handkerchief. “I’m glad to know the way it happened.”
“You wouldn’t suggest suicide?”
For a moment Archer’s eyes and Montague’s locked. Then Montague said quietly, “No, I know of no reason why Rose Tiffin would have gassed herself.”
Archer went off on a new tack. I wondered what in blazes he was eventually driving at. He said. “Luke and I had a visitor. A very nice little old lady. Marilyn Foster’s Aunt Minna.”
Montague didn’t speak for a few moments. A far-away look grew in his eyes, as if he were thinking of the past and the memories it held. “The way Marilyn always took care of the old dame,” he said, “made me think a lot of her. Brittle and tough as she was, Marilyn had her qualities.”
“You thought so much of her, you hated to see her intent on marrying Buddy VanDyke? You tried to talk her out of it?”
Montague’s eyes came back to the present with a cold, jarred look in them. “What,” he said softly, “if I did try to talk her out of it?”
The feeling in the room began to bring me toward the edge of my chair, made me conscious of the weight of the gun in my shoulder rig.
Archer splayed his palms on Montague’s desk, as if he would crawl over the desk right down Lon’s throat. The chief said, “You maybe thought so much of Marilyn Foster you’d have killed her to keep another man — Buddy VanDyke — from having her?”
Montague’s face went livid. His eyes blazed; he pounced to his feet, ripping out an oath. “I wouldn’t have touched a hair on her head!” he shouted. “Listen, you two-bit private dick, if you think I’m going to stand here in my own office and let you talk to me...”
“Sit down, Montague,” Archer said placidly. “It’s either me or the police. It’d be a lot better to have me on your team — even at two-bits. Which is practically all I’m getting out of this case.”
Montague opened his mouth to curse some more, but the chief waggled a finger and said, “Your team, remember? You’re going to tell me what I want to know, or I’ll have Brogardus breathing so hard down your neck it’ll scorch your shoulder blades!”
Montague got that glittering look in his eyes again. He sensed this was a moment for caution. “If you told Tim Brogardus a pack of lies about me, Archer,” he warned, “dark alleys might get mighty unsafe for you.”
“I don’t doubt that,” Archer conceded, “but I’m a truthful man. And the fact remains that about a year ago you blossomed into the big time with this club. It takes backing — capital — to do that; you didn’t have it on your own.”
“Meaning?”
“Let’s dig up a little past history,” the chief suggested mildly. “Buddy VanDyke, for example. Marilyn Foster was not to have been Buddy’s first venture into marriage, as I remember. Over a year ago, Buddy married Sue-Carol Loefler, the heiress to the Loefler Distilleries fortune. At that time Buddy was practically flat, the old, respected VanDyke fortune having gone the way of so many old, respected fortunes. Buddy was living mostly on his name, good looks, and credit. Then he marries Sue-Carol — and just a short time after their marriage, she leaves here one night after an argument with Buddy. He was drunk, stayed here at the club, refusing to go with her. A few hours later, Sue-Carol was found in the wreckage of her car in a ravine on Highway Sixty Six.
“It was raining that night, and cold, with a film of ice on the roads. The police marked off Sue-Carol Loefler VanDyke’s death as an accident. Angered and hurt because of her argument with Buddy, she’d been driving too fast. She’d been unable to make the curve — possibly hadn’t seen it in the darkness and rain until too late — and had plunged to her death in the ravine.
“But the fact remains that Buddy inherited her millions; that Buddy was here at the club, and you alibied him; and that a short time after that you began expanding.”
“Meaning?” Montague said again, the word like the crackle of ice in the room.
“Meaning that there is the remote chance that Sue-Carol’s death could have been murder.”
“That’s a lie! You’d never get to first base trying to stump up a thing as insane as that!”
“But what if it isn’t a lie?” Archer persisted. “If Sue-Carol were murdered, you’d have been in a prime position to make Buddy VanDyke pay off, up to his eyeteeth!”
That controlled glitter in Montague’s eyes shattered. He mouthed a curse this time, threw a looping punch at the chief. Archer sidestepped. I moved in on Montague, and he jabbed at me. I jabbed back, and Montague staggered into the desk. He damned my ancestors, and before I could get close enough to stop him, yanked a desk drawer open. I knew he was going for a gun.
I plunged into him, trying to pin him over the desk. He writhed out of my grip, and we tripped and fell with a jar that shook the floor. Sometime in his long, spotty past, Montague had learned a lot about dirty fighting. He gave me a knee in the groin, went for my eyes with his thumbs and the soft pressure point behind my ears, where the jaw hinges, with his index fingers. He’d called it. If that was the way he wanted to play, it was all right with me. I worked on his kidneys with my elbows, thrashing to get out from under him. I rolled on top, butted him in the chin. That stunned him, and I grabbed a handful of hair and slammed his head against the floor. The carpet was thick, but not that thick. Montague relaxed, groaning.
“I guess,” Archer remarked, as we went out the door, “that we insulted Lon! Let’s go someplace and get a bite of dinner.”
We did, and with the grub under our belts, Archer decided we’d drive out to the VanDyke house.
The huge old pile of stone and steel that was the VanDyke mansion looked grim and forbidding in the darkness. Lights were on here and there in the place, making the windows like eyes watching us as we rolled up the long, curving driveway.
I planted the sedan at just about the same spot I had when we’d been here earlier today. We’d just got out of the car and started up the veranda steps when headlights splashed in the driveway behind us. We turned, saw a car coming up the drive. It was moving fast for that narrow, twisting drive; it almost lost a bumper against a tree, and I stood frozen, thinking my old sedan was finally going to-be reduced to complete junk.
But the driver of the other car, a convertible with the top down, saw the sedan, slapped on the brakes. The convertible stopped with a little side skid in the drive, nudged against the sedan’s bumper.
The convertible’s horn let out a long, protracted blast. A male voice shouted thickly, “Wha’sh idea leaving that heap parked like that?”
“Sounds like Buddy VanDyke,” the chief said.
“Like Buddy VanDyke with a few too many under his belt,” I added, as we bolted down the veranda steps.
Buddy was lolling over the convertible steering wheel. He still had his palm on the horn, and it was setting up such a racket I couldn’t hear myself think. “Sho,” he mouthed looking at us, his face flushed in the light of the dash lamp, “it’sh the great detectiffs! Going to find out who killed little Marilyn, Mishter Archer?”
“Move the car, Luke,” the chief told me softly. “I’ll see if I can do anything with this guy besides pouring him back in the bottle.”
I moved up the drive, got in the sedan, started it, and pulled it over to the extreme edge of the driveway. While I was occupied with that, the big, oaken front door of the VanDyke house had opened and old Ludwig and the leathery servant, Josiah, had come out, attracted by the convertible’s horn.
“What’s the meaning of this?” old Ludwig roared.
“Don’t shout, grandpa,” Buddy held his finger up to his lips. “Lishen, she might be out there in the night shomeplace. Poor Marilyn. Dead in the night shomeplace.”