He sat up quickly. The heat and the sluggard reveries of the two old men in the window had made him forget... He’s being very discreet, his mother had said. Taking special precautions.
What if this stop at the club was a “special precaution”?
Dane hustled the rented Ford around the corner and — sure enough! — there, at the rear entrance of the club, outside a public garage, sat the empty Bentley — Ramon had disappeared, apparently dismissed — and just coming out was Dane’s father.
Ashton McKell was no longer wearing the light linen suit made for him by Sarcy, his London tailor, nor the shoes (fitted to his lasts) from Motherthwaite’s, also of London, nor the hat of jipijapa fibers specially woven for him in Ecuador. The rather startling clothes he was now wearing Dane had never seen before. He also carried a walking stick and a small black leather satchel, like a medical bag.
Dane’s brow wrinkled. These could hardly constitute “special precautions” — a mere change of clothing. What was he up to?
The elder McKell walked past the Bentley and without warning climbed into a black Continental limousine, took the wheel himself, and drove off.
The limousine turned north, east, south, west... Dane lost track of direction in his awkward efforts to keep the other car in sight. The Continental had old-fashioned curtained windows, like a hearse, and the curtains were now drawn. What the devil?
It poked its nose into Central Park and began describing parabolas, for what purpose Dane could not imagine. Not to throw off pursuers — it was going too slowly for that. Was he simply killing time?
Suddenly the limousine pulled up and stopped, and as Dane drove by he saw his father get out of the driver’s seat and climb into the curtained rear. Dane parked around a nearby curve and waited with his engine running. He was baffled. Why had his father got into the rear of the car? There was no one else with him, Dane was almost positive. What could he be doing there?
Suddenly the Continental drove past him, heading toward an exit. Dane followed.
The limousine drove east and pulled up at a garage on a side street between Madison Avenue and Park. Dane slammed on his brakes, double-parking. He saw a garage mechanic come out with an orange ticket and reach into the Continental with it, nodding; he saw the driver of the Continental back out from behind the wheel and immediately hail a taxicab and jump in, to be driven off. The taxi had to stop at the corner of Park Avenue for a red light, and Dane pulled up directly behind it.
He was doubly puzzled now. There was something strange-looking about the passenger in the cab, viewed from the rear. But what it was he could not at the moment put his finger on.
The light changed, and the cab turned into Park Avenue. Dane turned, too... It was a very short trip, no more than six or eight blocks. The cab darted in toward the curb, its passenger jumped out, paid the driver, the cab drove off, and the passenger began to walk down Park Avenue.
Dane, creeping along, was utterly confused. His parents lived less than a block away. And the man who had got out of the taxi was not the same man who had driven the Continental away from the Cricket Club.
At least, that was Dane’s first impression. The man had gray hair, rather long and untidy at the neck. He wore a gray mustache, a Vandyke beard, and eyeglasses. A stranger.
One hand grasped a walking stick, the other a small black leather bag. The man was dressed all in tan — tan cords, tan straw hat, tan shoes — the same costume, as far as Dan could remember, that his father had worn on emerging from the club. Had there been another man waiting in the Continental after all? — a man who had exchanged clothes with the elder McKell behind the drawn curtains when he had pulled up in Central Park?
But why? And who could he be?
And then Dane knew.
It was not a stranger. It was his father. Disregard the clothes, strip off the mustache, beard, and wig, and the pupa beneath was — had to be — Ashton McKell.
His father in a disguise! He had put on the make-up during the stop in Central Park, behind the drawn curtains.
Dane almost laughed aloud. But there was a pathetic quality about that figure walking stiffly along the street with cane and bag swinging that discouraged levity. What in the name of all that was unholy did he think he was doing? “Special precautions”! He looked like someone out of an old-time vaudeville act.
There was no place to park. Dane double-parked and took up the chase on foot. His face was grim.
It became grimmer.
For the disguised Ashton McKell turned neither right nor left. He stumped up to the entrance of a building and went in.
It was a converted old Park Avenue one-family mansion, originally owned by the haughty Huytenses. The last Huytens had left it to “my beloved pet and friend, Fluffy,” but long before old Mrs. Huytens’ cousins succeeded in having Fluffy legally disinherited, the house had begun to decline. Dane’s maternal grandfather had made a bargain purchase of it in the latter days of the depression and turned it into an apartment building. It housed three duplex apartments and a penthouse, and Dane knew it intimately.
He had been brought up in it.
It was his parents’ home.
The pattern was now clear except for one point... the most important point.
Everything about his father’s extraordinary precautions smacked of secrecy. The elder McKell on Wednesday afternoons had his chauffeur drive him in the Bentley to the Cricket Club. The Bentley was left in the garage behind the club, and Ramon, given a few hours off, discreetly vanished. Meanwhile Ashton McKell changed clothes in his room at the club. He sneaked out through the rear entrance, picked up the Continental, and drove away. In Central Park, at a secluded spot, he stopped the car, got into the rear of the tonneau, and applied his disguise. Then he drove over to a garage — he probably uses different ones, Dane thought — left the Continental, and took a taxi to the corner of the Park Avenue block where the McKell apartment building stood. And it was all so timed that he would enter the building while the doorman was at his dinner — a precaution against being recognized, in spite of the disguise, by John. He ran a lesser risk on leaving the building, when the doorman was back on duty, for John would not pay as much attention to a departing visitor as to an incoming one. The medical bag alone gave him some of the invisibility of Chesterton’s postman.
And when he left, he simply went back to the garage where he had parked the Continental, drove down to the Cricket Club after removing his make-up — probably in Central Park again — changed back into his ordinary clothes in his room at the club, and had Ramon, back on duty, drive him home in the Bentley.
The unexplained question was: Whom was he doing all this for? Whom was he visiting in his own apartment building?
Dane waited for the tall gray-uniformed figure of the doorman to reappear under the canopy.
“Oh, Mr. Dane,” the doorman said. “Mrs. McKell isn’t in.”
“Any notion where she went, John, or when she’ll be back?”
“She went to that Mr. Cohen’s gallery to see some rugs, she said.” The doorman, as usual, transformed Mir Khan from Pakistani to a more comfortable New York name. “I don’t know when she’ll be back.”
The doorman’s “I don’t know” sounded rather like I dawn’t knaw. John Leslie was a “Geordie,” or Tynesider, from the north of England; and his speech came out both Irish and Scottish, with rich overtones of South Carolina. In his teens Dane had smoked forbidden cigarets in Leslie’s basement apartment, left and received messages there which presumably would have been frowned upon by his parents.