The Almost Perfect Murder by Hulbert Footner (reading the story of the TXT) 📕

So the front curtain was pulled down. It made little difference to me,

because I had no idea where we were anyhow. But I didn’t like Mr.

Punch’s proposition a little bit. It was too smooth to come from an

honest man, and Mephisto had fallen in with it a little too quickly. I

began to feel as if they were all crooks together. My anxiety was

chiefly on Mme. Storey’s account. A woman as famous as she is has to

be wary. She has many enemies. However, as she seemed to accede to

it, there was nothing I could do.

The whole business of trying to escape from the police seemed senseless

to me, and I could not imagine how Mme. Storey had come to fall for it.

You can’t trifle with murder. But presumably she knew what she was

doing. She always does.

The red-clad devil produced a packet of cigarettes and offered them

around. Only Anne Boleyn helped herself with a cry of thankfulness.

“That’s what I wanted!” She and Mephisto lighted up.

“Well, the worst appears to be over,” said Anne.

Over? Our troubles are just starting, I thought. But I saw that her

object was to recommend herself to these people as a good pal, and I

kept my mouth shut.

“Yes,” said Mephisto. “Mr. Punch seems to be a man of resource.”

“Have you any idea who he is?” she asked offhand.

“Not the slightest. But he must work for very fine people, judging by

the car.”

Mr. Punch drove for a considerable distance, but from the number of

turns we made, I judged he was merely trying to confuse our sense of

direction.

Finally we came to a standstill. Opening the front window a crack, Mr.

Punch said: “Sit still until I give the word.”

I was greatly tempted to peep around one of the blinds, but I noticed

that Mephisto was watching us narrowly. As it was, Jackie happened to

push one aside for a moment with a movement of her shoulder, and I got

a glimpse through the glass of the door. But all I saw was a dark and

deserted street with lamp-posts at intervals. It was a fashionable

quarter of the town, that was all I could tell.

I heard the squeaking of hinges, and afterward the car moved forward

for a few yards and stopped again. A gate closed behind us, and Mr.

Punch opened the car door. He had on his mask.

“Here we are,” he said.

We were in a private garage that had once been a stable. Another

handsome car lay alongside us, and through an open door we could see

the disused stalls beyond. Opening a small door, Mr. Punch led us all

out into a narrow courtyard with the stars overhead and the dark bulk

of a great mansion looming before us.

“You will be safe here,” he said. “My employers have gone south for

the winter.”

“How about your licence plates?” asked Abdullah anxiously. “The police

in the small car certainly got the number.”

“That won’t do them any good,” answered Mr. Punch with a laugh. “I

always fasten on false plates when I go out in the evening—just to be

on the safe side, you know.”

He unlocked a door into the rear of the house, and switched on lights

in the passage. I noticed that after we had all passed in, he locked

the door with a key, and dropped it into his pocket. This did not make

me feel any easier in my mind. In fact this so-called place of safety

scared me more than the supper room at the hall, where there had been

at least a crowd outside within call. The big house was as silent as

the grave.

We crossed a spacious old-fashioned kitchen, and mounted a flight of

stairs to the main floor. It was a really palatial mansion in the

older fashion, with an immense central hall running through it, and a

suite of three superb drawing-rooms on one side.

Everything had been dismantled in the absence of the family; hangings

and rugs removed and all furniture and pictures swathed in white

dustcloths. I noticed that all the windows on the first floor were

closely boarded up outside, and I suspected that there was no way out

except by the basement door to which Mr. Punch held the key.

He led us into the middle drawing-room and turned on a single bulb in a

wall bracket, which created just a little island of light amid the

crowding shadows. Queer-shaped objects peeped out of the corners; a

shrouded harp, a statue on a pedestal with a sheet thrown over it and

tied around its middle.

On either side opened a wide archway revealing a yawning pit of

blackness beyond. To my disordered imagination the ceiling looked a

hundred feet high. Our motley crew of masqueraders were like a little

company of ghosts stealing through some long-deserted hall.

Jackie glanced around her, and fell to shivering. “What did you bring

me here for?” she whimpered. “I want to go home.”

“I reckon you’re all wondering why I brought you here,” said Mr. Punch

suavely, “and you’re certainly entitled to know. This is it. It’s up

to us to discover amongst ourselves who shot George Danforth, so that

we all won’t have to suffer for the crime of one.”

George Danforth! The name rang familiarly in my mind. Then suddenly I

recollected that George Danforth was butler at the Creighton Woodleys’

when the big jewel robbery took place. So Mme. Storey’s caprice in

attending the butlers’ ball was something more than a caprice.

We four women were shown into a dressing-room on the first floor of the

mansion to tidy up after our strenuous escape from Webster Hall.

Naturally Mme. Storey and I did not unmask in the presence of the

others. Those two, masked also, would not approach within a yard of

each other. Suspicion divided us all. My employer and I lingered in

the room until they had gone out, so that we could have a word or two

together. What a relief it was to raise our masks!

“Are you scared, Bella?” she asked, smiling.

“You know I am,” I answered tartly. “So there’s not much use in

denying it.”

There was a telephone in the room. She took down the receiver and

listened. “Dead,” she told me, hanging up again.

“Where do you suppose Crider is?” I asked nervously.

“Heaven knows!” she said. “I couldn’t foresee any such outcome as

this, and he has no instructions to cover it. The poor fellow will be

wild with anxiety…. We may solve our case through this accident,”

she went on thoughtfully, “but it’s risky—it’s risky!”

“Oh, what does a jewel robbery matter beside a murder?” I said,

shuddering.

“It’s all part of the same thing,” she said gravely.

I stared. “Do you know where we are?” I asked. She shook her head.

“I thought I knew most of the great houses in New York, but I’ve never

been in this one. There can’t be many of the type left. It’s on Fifth

Avenue, I should say, and probably it’s somewhere in the Sixties.

We’ll dope it out before we leave. Ha!” she cried, suddenly pointing

to the telephone instrument; “there’s our clue! The telephone number

is Buckingham 4-3773.”

“But you can’t go through the telephone book looking for that number!”

I objected.

“I won’t have to,” she said, tapping the directory. It had been

slipped inside an elaborately tooled leather cover which bore a big V

on the front. “Undoubtedly the family initial,” she said.

The Social Register lay beside the telephone book, and Mme. Storey

picked up the blue volume as affording a narrower field for her search.

Almost immediately she said: “I have it! A. A. Vandegrift. I was

nearly right. This house is on Madison instead of Fifth, and behind

St. Patrick’s Cathedral. We have often passed it!”

“What does Vandegrift do?” I asked.

“Do?” she said, smiling. “He’s a rich man of the third generation. He

sits in a window of the Union Club during the rare periods when he

favours New York with his visits and complains that times are not what

they were.”

“It’s too bad the Social Register doesn’t give the butlers’ names,

too,” I suggested.

“I know it now, without that!” she said. “Crider told me that the

president of the Butlers’ Association was the Vandegrifts’ butler. His

name is Alfred Denby. That identifies Mr. Punch. We are making

headway, my dear.”

“We’d better go out or they’ll be getting suspicious,” I said,

nervously.

“Just one moment! Mr. Punch, I take it, is preparing to hold a sort of

hearing. I want you to testify against Abdullah.”

“But I don’t know anything against him.”

“Then make something up. You’ll see why later. And don’t mind if I

get you all tangled up on cross-examination. I don’t want them to

suspect we’re working together.”

We adjusted our masks and left the room.

Mr. Punch had placed a little table for himself under the single light

in the middle drawing-room. He sat behind it on a sofa with six chairs

in linen covers ranged in a semi-circle before him. It was certainly

the most grotesque court ever held—if you could call it a court: Mr.

Punch and six mummers. But all the fun had gone out of this mummery.

The participants were distracted with grief, fear and suspicion.

He began in his suave and reasonable voice: “Abdullah—or whatever your

name may be—all the evidence seems to point to you as the one who shot

George Danforth. But we want to give you every chance. Have you got

anything to say for yourself?”

“I didn’t do it!” cried Abdullah. “I had no gun!”

“You knew who Danforth was?” Mr. Punch snapped.

“Sure, I knew,” he said sullenly. “Everybody connected with the

Association knew him.”

“Then you’re connected with the Association?”

No answer.

“You hated Danforth?”

“That’s no proof,” muttered Abdullah. “Plenty of others had it in for

him. He was a blackguard with women.”

Zuleika snatched off her mask, revealing her passionate gipsy face.

“That’s a lie!” she cried.

“A lie!” added Jackie with scarcely less violence.

Now that he was dead, I saw that both these women were getting ready to

sanctify him. Well, that’s the way women are!

“One minute, ladies,” said Mr. Punch smoothly. Turning to Abdullah, he

said: “If you didn’t shoot him, who did?”

“The gun was fired beside me,” said Abdullah. He leaned forward and

looked at Zuleika. “I believe she did it!”

“He’s lying, and he knows he’s lying!” cried Zuleika, jumping up.

“No doubt,” said Mr. Punch suavely, “but can you prove it?”

She glared around at us as if we were all her enemies. “Yes, I can,”

she said. “I’m a good shot with a pistol, and I don’t care who knows

it. But if it had been me I would have had to shoot on the level with

my eyes. It’s the only way I can shoot. And this gun was fired low

down. As if it was resting on the edge of the table!” The woman was

suddenly overcome by a hard dry sobbing. She covered her face with her

hands and ran into the dark room adjoining.

“Can anybody confirm that?” demanded Mr. Punch. “You, Jackie, you were

immediately across the table from the gun.”

“She’s right,” said Jackie, sniffing. “The shot came from low down.”