‘At seven-thirty.’
‘He called me at ten past ten. I wonder what he was doing for two hours and forty minutes here. Have you any idea?
‘I suppose he was looking over the house. I wish you would go after your friend and help him. Mr. Dedrick might be lying in the grounds—hurt.’
I began to get the idea that she wanted to get rid of me.
‘I’ll stick around until the police come. We don’t want you kidnapped.’
‘I—I don’t think I can face any more of this. I’ll go bock to the hotel,’ she said, her voice suddenly husky. ‘Will you tell them, please? I’ll see them at the hotel.’
‘I think it would be better to wait until they come,’ I said quietly.
‘No; I think I’ll go. He—he may be at the hotel. I think I ought to go.’
As she turned, I caught her wrist
‘I’m sorry, but until the police come, you must stay.’
She stared up at me, her eyes hard in the moonlight.
‘If you think it is necessary.’
‘That’s the idea.’
She opened her bag.
‘I think a cigarette…’
She did it very smoothly. I found myself looking down at a .25, aimed at my midriff.
‘Go in there!’
‘Now, look…’
‘Go in there!’ There was a dangerous note in her voice. ‘I’ll shoot if you don’t go in!’
‘You’re playing it wrong, but have it your own way.’
I walked into the lounge.
The moment I heard her running down the terrace I jumped to the balustrade.
‘Head her off, Jack!’ I bawled into the darkness. ‘But watch out; she has a gun!’
Then I legged it down the terrace after her.
There came a spiteful crack of the .25, and a slug buzzed past my head. I dodged behind a tub of palms. More gun-fire, and an excited yell from Kerman. Then a car engine exploded into life; the gun fired again and the car went furiously down the drive.
I raced to the end of the terrace, intent on following her in the Buick, but she had taken care of that. Her last shot had gone through the off-side rear wheel.
Kerman came out of the darkness.
‘What goes on?’ he demanded indignantly. ‘She tried to shoot me.’
V
We sat together before the empty fireplace in the library while a stony-eyed cop stood by the door and watched us without appearing to do so.
We had told our stories to Detective Sergeant MacGraw, and now we were waiting for Brandon. As soon as MacGraw learned who Dedrick was, he said the Captain of Police would want to see us. So we waited.
In the next room a squad of the Homicide boys were at work, dusting for fingerprints, photographing the body and the room, and prowling around for clues.
There was a considerable amount of telephoning and coming and going of cars. After a while I heard a barking voice and I nudged Kerman,
‘Brandon.’
‘What a thrill for him to find us here,’ Kerman said, and grinned.
The cop scowled at him and moved restlessly. Unconsciously, he straightened his jacket and looked critically at his buttons. Captain of the Police Brandon was a martinet, and every cop on the Force was terrified of him.
Silence settled over us again like a film of dust. Another half-hour crawled past. The hands of my watch showed a quarter past midnight. Kerman was dozing. I longed for a drink.
Then the door forked open and Brandon and Detective Lieutenant Mifflin of the Homicide Squad came in.
I gave Kerman a nudge and he opened his eyes as Brandon paused to survey us the way a grand duke would look at a set of muddy footprints on his bed.
Brandon was short and thickset, with a round, fat pink-and-white face, a mass of chalk-white hair and cold, inquisitive eyes. He was an ambitious cop without being a clever one. He got results because he used Mifflin’s brains and took the credit. He had been Captain of Police for ten years. He owned a Cadillac, a seven-bedroom house; his wife had a mink coat, and his son and daughter went to the University. He didn’t live in that style on his pay. There were the usual rumours that he could be bought, but no one had ever attempted to prove it as far as I knew. He had been known to fake evidence and encouraged his cops to be brutal and ruthless. A man with a lot of power; a dangerous man.
‘So you two have horned in on this, have you?’ he said in his hard, rasping voice. I’ve never known such a pair of jackals.’
Neither of us said anything. Talk out of turn to Brandon and you’re liable to find yourself behind bars.
He glanced at the cop who was as rigid as a wooden effigy.
‘Out!’
The cop went out on tiptoe and closed the door as if it were made of egg-shells.
Mifflin gave me a slow, heavy wink from behind Brandon’s head.
Brandon sat down, stretched out his short, fat legs, pushed his hard pork-pie hat to the back of his head and fumbled for the inevitable cigar.
‘Let’s have it all over again,’ he said. ‘There’re one or two points I want to check. Go ahead, Malloy. Tell it the way you told it to MacGraw. I’ll stop you when I’ve had enough.’
‘Kerman and I were spending the evening in my cabin,’ I said briskly. ‘At ten minutes past ten the telephone bell rang, and a man who identified himself as Lee Dedrick asked me to come over here right away. He explained that some man had ‘phoned him and warned him that an attempt was to be made tonight to kidnap him.’
‘You’re sure he said that?’ Brandon asked, slitting the cellophane wrapping of his cigar with a well-manicured thumbnail.
‘Why, yes.’
‘There’s been no incoming calls to this house tonight. What do you make of that?’
‘Maybe he had the call at his hotel.’
‘He didn’t. We’ve checked that too.’
‘Any out-going calls from here, besides the one he made to me?’
Brandon rolled the cigar between his fat fingers.
‘Yeah, one to a call-box number. What of it?’
Mifflin said in his slow, heavy voice, ‘He could have been told during the day to call that number tonight, and got the warning that way.’
Brandon looked over his shoulder as if he wasn’t aware until now that Mifflin was in the room. Although he relied on Mifflin’s brains, he always acted as if Mifflin had no business to be on the Force.
‘Maybe,’ he said, ‘or Malloy could be lying.’ He looked at me, showing his small even teeth. ‘Are you?’
‘No.’
Tell me, why didn’t Dedrick call the police instead of you?’
I had an answer to that one, but I didn’t think he would like it. Instead, I said, ‘He wasn’t sure someone wasn’t pulling his leg. Probably he was anxious not to make a fool of himself.’
‘Well, go on. Tell me more,’ Brandon said, setting fire to the cigar. He rolled it around between his thin lips and stared heavily at me.
‘While he was talking, there was a sudden silence on the line. I called to him, but he didn’t answer. I could hear him breathing over the line, then he hung up.’
‘And that’s when you should have called Headquarters,’ Brandon snarled. ‘You should have known something was wrong.’
‘I thought maybe his chauffeur had come in, and Dedrick didn’t want him to hear what he was saying. I’m not all that crazy to mix up a man like Dedrick with the police without his sayso.’
Brandon scowled at me and flicked ash off his cigar.
‘You’d talk yourself out of a coffin,’ he said sourly. ‘Well, go on. You came out here and found Souki, That right?’
‘Souki? Is that the chauffeur’s name?’
‘According to the letters he had in his pocket, it’s his name. Did you see anyone on your way up; any car?’
‘No. As soon as we found the body I told Kerman to ‘phone your people. Before he could do so this girl arrived.’