I had reached the door to my patient’s room. I opened it and turned to Nicky Senour and hissed (literally, because I didn’t want my patient to be roused), “If I stay, she stays,” and closed the door on his handsome but startled face.
There was no change in Craig Brent’s pulse or breathing. I didn’t want to rouse him, then, to take his temperature. He had an intelligent and a sensitive face and, from the nose and chin, a will of his own; his behaviour had shown anything but that. I thought of the gaps in Drue’s story. It was brief; it was necessarily elliptical. Obviously there were only two alternatives by way of explanation; either Craig had repented his hasty marriage and ended it in that way (in which case she was well rid of him, but that wouldn’t help Drue just then), or there was actually dirty work at some crossroads. In that case, a few words between Drue and the man before me would clear up a mere lovers’ misunderstanding.
But nothing in her brief and very deleted account of her almost equally brief marriage even touched upon a question that was beginning to assert itself more and more ominously in my mind. Definitely there was something fishy about the story of the shooting. So Craig Brent had been shot, intentionally, with murderous design, then why? And, furthermore, who?
Anna rose from the armchair across the room, within the curtained niche where old-fashioned bay windows made a semi-circular little room of their own. She had been crying and was wiping her eyes. I went to her and said a little sharply, “You can go. I’ll stay now.”
When she had gone, I pulled a chair up near the bed where I could watch for the faintest shadow of a change in Craig Brent’s face. The brown was sunburn; under the tan his face was a kind of gray. I was sitting like that with my fingers on his lean brown wrist when the door opened and two men walked quietly into the room and closed the door behind them. One was the doctor. I had never seen Dr. Chivery before, but a kind of antiseptic spruceness about him identified him at once. He was a short, gray man with no chin, slender, except for a little watermelon in front, and pouches under his eyes. He looked nervous.
The other man was a state trooper in beautiful brownish gray uniform with bars on his sleeve. I must say, though, that the uniform was not a welcome sight; it was like a confirmation of general fishiness.
I got to my feet. The doctor and the policeman (a lieutenant, I thought, by the bars) came straight to the bed. The doctor glanced at me once absently, and they both looked down at my patient for a long moment. Then the doctor said, whispering emphatically, “Nobody shot him. Nobody could have shot him. It was an accident, I tell you.”
And the policeman said, “I’ll have to see the bullet. And the gun.”
3
DR. CHIVERY’S HANDS STARTED toward each other and then thrust themselves in his pockets; they were pink hands, a little shiny and wrinkled and none too steady. He said, “Well, that’s what I’m afraid you can’t do.”
The state trooper turned abruptly to look down at the doctor. He didn’t ask why, and the doctor fidgeted a little and said, “You see, the bullet was thrown out-accidentally; and the gun is gone. Nobody knows what happened to it.”
Again the state trooper said nothing but simply waited, watching the doctor and looking very tall and formidable in his trim uniform. Dr. Chivery said, “In the excitement somebody must have picked up the gun without remembering. It will turn up. But it hasn’t yet.
He waited for an answer again and this time the state trooper obliged. He said, “Ah.”
It was just then, by the way, that I discovered an odd thing about Dr. Chivery, and that was his habit of looking at the edges of things. For he glanced at the left corner of my cap, at a post of the bed, at my patient’s brown hair (so inordinately neat and wetly plastered that I surmised Anna’s fine firm hand) and at the trooper’s coat buttons. He said, “You know me, Lieutenant. Or perhaps you don’t. But the fact is, if I had had reason to think it wasn’t an accident (which is simply absurd on the face of it) perhaps I wouldn’t have been quite so frank and prompt about reporting it. Ha,” said the doctor, still whispering vehemently. “Ha.”
It was intended to be a laugh and his mouth twitched upward nervously to accompany it. The trooper’s face was as grave and untouched as a stone image. He said, “Now let me be sure I have the facts straight. It happened last night at eleven?”
Dr. Chivery, eyeing the bedpost, nodded.
“The butler, Beevens, Mrs. Brent’s brother, Nicky Senour, and a guest, Peter Huber…”
“You talked to them yourself,” interrupted Dr. Chivery.
“… Yes, were in the library when it happened; the butler was locking up and looking at the window catches and Mr. Huber and Mr. Senour were reading the papers. They heard the shot and then heard his”-he nodded once toward the man in the bed-“call for help. They went to the garden, found him and-and no one else. They brought him to this room…”
“And telephoned for me,” said Chivery nodding.
“At the time of the shot, so far as you know, Craig Brent was alone in the garden?”
“He was alone,” said Dr. Chivery. “I was at home, reading in my library. My wife was upstairs, writing letters. I mention us because we are-ha, ha,” he interpolated painstakingly again, “almost members of the family here. Mr. Conrad Brent-Craig’s father had gone to bed. Mrs. Brent was likewise in her own room; she had said good night to the others and gone upstairs only a moment or two before it happened. The servants…”
“I’ll question them. Thank you. You don’t know of any family disagreements…”
Dr. Chivery interrupted indignantly. “My dear fellow-really-this is not an inquiry into murder.”
The trooper looked at Craig. “Well, no-not yet,” he said somewhat pointedly.
“But, really,” began Dr. Chivery again, rubbing his pink hands together. His voice had risen shrilly and unexpectedly, so in spite of my intense interest I felt obliged to rustle and put my hand on Craig Brent’s wrist and look hard at the doctor.
Dr. Chivery glanced at my right eyebrow. Preoccupation sat like a gray mask on his face; yet it seemed to me that behind that mask there was a kind of flicker of disapproval directed at me. The trooper had looked at me too. It was the trooper who moved quietly to the door and, incredibly laconic to the last, nodded and disappeared. The doctor hesitated, looked at the pin on my collar and said, “Miss…”
“Keate,” I said.
“You found my orders?”
“Yes, Doctor. And I wanted to ask you…”
One pink hand fluttered. “I’ll return later and we’ll go over the situation. Just now, has our patient said anything?”
“No, Doctor.”
“Oh. Umm. Well,” he said, “he may be a little delirious, rambling; pay no attention to it. But-er-Nurse…” He glanced nervously over his shoulder toward the door and lowered his voice. “I trust I don’t need to remind you that anything said in a sick room…”
I drew myself up and almost, but not quite, forced him to look into my eyes. “I am not a gossip,” I said with some energy.
Again I saw the flicker of disapproval behind that curtain of preoccupation. I could almost hear him think, I’ll get rid of this nurse as soon as I get around to it. He said suavely, “Not at all. Not at all. I’ll be back presently.” With that, and a slanting look at my Oxford ties, he went away.
It left me alone again in that big gloomy bedroom with the rain whispering against the window and a sick man, a man who’d been shot, on the bed.
I was a little shaken. Shootings, guns and bullets. Police and a doctor who wouldn’t look at me.
To complicate it, Drue with her loveliness and her honesty linked so strongly with that dreary, secretive house and everybody in it. Especially the man who had been shot.