The Crooked Lane Read online

  “You’re actually telling me that you have to spend years on end studying criminalistic photochemical optics or whatever you call the damn things before you can become even a police lieutenant?”

  Sheridan laughed again.

  “‘Even!’ Oh, my dear Mallory, that is as though you were to say ‘Even a member of Parliament.’ I have described to you only the kindergarten of our education.”

  “Well, I’d give a good pound sterling at the old rate to hear you outlining your curriculum to a London bobby,” remarked Mallory, suddenly overcome by mirth. “Or to certain members of the Washington police force, if it comes to that. Let me in on your first conference, will you?”

  Sheridan grinned back at him imperturbably. “My dear fellow, I am not to be attached to the police force I Frankly, though, I doubt whether our particular technique of education would be very useful with an ordinary police organization. On the Continent, as you undoubtedly know, the criminal is apt to be a highly trained expert, too; he uses his wits, we use ours, and machine guns are not called in to settle the argument. But in a land of amateurs and gangsters our occupation, like Othello’s, would be gone. A smattering of ballistics, a good file of fingerprints, a length of rubber hose, and a night stick—what more equipment is needed here, should you say?”

  “Not a single violet ray, if you’re asking me! But then why in—”

  “Ah, why indeed! Your Bureau of Investigation, however, is quite another matter. Like my alma mater it employs experts to fight the expert criminal. I’ll expound on the subject for hours on end, if it won’t bore you too much, but just now I think that Uncle Greg is looking our way with a very marked ‘Shall we join the ladies?’ expression in his eyes. Exactly!”

  They were all on their feet, propelled by the expert marshaling of their host, and as they passed leisurely through the crystal doors, the sound of music reached them, seductive and imperious. General Temple, with a guilty glance in its direction, quickened his pace.

  The living room, green and tranquil as a forest, was sweet with the flowering branches of young fruit trees, starring its dark peace with their fragile, tremulous beauty. There were half a dozen new faces scattered about among the companionable groups of deep chairs and small tables, and in a wide, bare room beyond, which seemed to be furnished principally with blue moonlight and silver curtains, two or three couples were drifting with the lovely, aimless ease engendered only by ample space, a perfect floor, and music that flowed with the clear cadence of water. Tess Stuart, seated with Vicki Wilde and Cara Temple in the group nearest the door, rose as they came towards her.

  “Ours, Tess?” asked Mallory, and she answered, smiling, her hand already on his arm:

  “Ours, of course.… I waited. Yours next, isn’t it, K?”

  Incredible how long one waltz could last; simply incredible. K circled the shining room three times with Cara Temple, light and graceful as a girl in her trailing laces and high silvered heels, all radiant interest in darling Hannele’s little boy.

  “Staying with Dion Mallory? Oh, but K, how perfect—and how clever of you! You’ll adore Dion, and he can be really useful to you; you simply couldn’t find anyone who knows the ropes better.… Oh, dearie dear, look what a horrid, purposeful expression Raoul Chevalier has—and he can’t even touch you when it comes to waltzing.… Aren’t you good to an old lady, Raoul! Of course, I will. K, have you met everyone? Mrs. Lindsay? This is Karl Sheridan, Joan; please be especially nice to my favorite godchild!”

  Four times round with the small, soft-voiced enchantress known as Joan, who danced like a highly intelligent fairy, and whose eyelashes and dimples were even more extravagant than they had seemed across the table. Before he turned her over to the all too handsome Dr. Byrd, she had informed him in a dovelike murmur that Vienna was her passion, that she was in a frightful hurry to get back to Green Gardens because her daughter Midget had a new tooth and Elsie Dinsmore, the cocker spaniel, had produced three utterly peerless puppies no bigger than blond mice early that morning—and that the party Monday evening would be an utter fiasco if Karl Sheridan did not honor it with his presence.… Twice with Vicki Wilde, who confined herself to curt, ungracious monosyllables, and turned from him unsmiling in reply to Lindsay’s gay insistence. The music was rising to a final crescendo before it trailed languorously off into temporary silence, and he stood leaning against the doorway in the hall, his eyes following the progress of the white cloud dipping and swirling with airy assurance in the protecting circle of Dion Mallory’s arms.… She caught his eye, lifted her hand in greeting, and a second later had drifted half across the room to his side.

  “Dion’s going,” she mourned, her hand still on Dion’s arm. “Will you dance with me, K? Will you stay me with flagons and comfort me with apples? He’s taking a girl with him, too. A girl with green eyes and a bad headache and a lot of fine, tall talk about equal rights for men and women to make fools of themselves—”

  “I’ll drop the poor girl on her doorstep soft and easy as a kitten, darling,” laughed Mallory. “And she’s got more than a headache, let me tell you! Bill’s informed her that he may be bringing home a gang of those press lads from the dinner, and she has to be there to cut the sandwiches and pour the beer. She’s straight on the road to my diggings, anyway, where I have to change these clothes and pick up those confounded papers. Ah, now, don’t stand there looking at me so lovely and so sad, or I’ll never be able to leave at all, and Geneva’ll go wondering all the days of its life what kind of papers the eminent Mr. Harrington collected in America.”

  “Oh, how I loathe—how I detest foggy-minded old gentlemen who go around leaving packages behind them!” murmured Miss Stuart with soft vehemence. “Dion, don’t drive too fast—no, and don’t drive too slow, either. And hurry back, darling; I’m going to miss you so frightfully.”

  “If you aren’t a bit careful, you’ll have me setting a speed record for future generations to shoot at! Sheridan, I’ll be seeing you tomorrow surely; I’m counting it grand good luck that you’re willing to take a chance on me as a housemate.… Yes, coming, Abby.… Good-bye—good-bye, darling.”

  Darling.… Well, everyone in America apparently addressed every one he or she spoke six words to as “darling,” the young man from Vienna decided with a certain amount of bitterness. Probably they saluted the footman and dismissed the butler with those two well-chosen syllables.… Darling indeed! He stood for a moment watching his future host bending just low enough over Cara Temple’s extended hands, saluting Cara’s husband with just the right touch of affectionate respect, turning to the green-eyed Abby with precisely the right degree of amused and sympathetic solicitude.… Undoubtedly—oh, undoubtedly—the very nicest fellow that he had met in twenty years.… He suppressed a really dismal sigh, grinned companionably at his juvenile idiocy, and turned to the lady who was Dion Mallory’s darling.

  “Do we dance?”

  “K, would you mind awfully if we didn’t? Not just now, I mean. Unlike Peter Pan’s fairies, I don’t feel particularly dancy. What time is it?”

  “Eleven—no, five minutes past. Good Lord, where has the time gone to?”

  “Isn’t it dreadful? But you see dinner was frightfully late—and frightfully long, thanks to your train and your charms! Listen, K, I’m a little worried about Fay. She hasn’t been well lately, and I want to make sure that she got home all right from Warrenton. Just wait one minute till I telephone, and then I’ll devote the rest of the evening to showing you the prettiest thing in Washington. The telephone’s in the library. Sure you don’t mind being kidnaped?”

  “Quite sure.”

  She pushed the door open—and collided on the threshold with Vicki Wilde, her mouth a little tenser than usual, her eyes feverishly bright.

  “Look out, darling—where’s the fire?”

  “Oh, Tess, the damnedest nuisance, honestly. Freddy was going to give me a lift to Sally Hitchcock’s—they’re playing off the backgammon semifinals there, you
know—and just because I was out in the garden for about two minutes, she dashed off and left me flat. She just telephoned; I do think it was hateful of her. Now if I can’t find someone in there to cadge or lift off of, it means a taxi—and God knows how I loathe taxis!”

  “Cadge one off me,” suggested a voice from the hall, lightly and amiably. “I’m bound Sallywards myself. Tie on your bonnet and come along.”

  Karl Sheridan stood watching every drop of blood drain back out of the hard little face before he let his eyes travel past it to the hall, where the doctor whose hair was a trifle too curly stood elaborately at ease, hat in hand, overcoat on arm.

  The pale child, her eyes riveted, moistened her lips and murmured in a voice barely above a whisper, “Yes. All right.… All right. Let’s go,” and brushed by them as though they were not there. Miss Stuart, looking suddenly remote and delicately scornful, dismissed the two of them with a fastidious flicker of her lashes.

  “The human race,” she informed her companion, “is simply more than I can cope with. Remind me to have nothing whatever to do with it, will you?”

  She seated herself on the edge of the table, drawing the telephone towards her, and tapping out the number in a series of impatient little clicks.

  “I did—I did think that wretched child had more pride,” she murmured forlornly. “After everything I’ve said to her—”

  Her voice trailed off into silence as she bent her head, listening intently. Sheridan could hear it, too; a faint buzzing far off and insistent.

  After a moment she put back the receiver carefully; lifted it again, and once more turned the dial, this time with meticulous deliberation. Then he could hear a tiny voice, infinitely remote and impersonal. It ceased, and Tess Stuart replaced the little black horn with a gesture of curious finality.

  “It’s the operator; she says that the line is out of order. Someone else has been trying to get the number for the last hour. Or she may have left the receiver off.”

  She put her hand to her head, as though she were suddenly and mortally tired.

  “No, but see here,” said Sheridan impulsively. “If you are worried, why do you not let me get your car, and—”

  “No, no. She’d be furious.… It’s stupid of me to give it a thought, I know, and I wouldn’t if I were sure that Kippy was with her when she left, and that she wasn’t—oh, what an abject idiot I am! I’ll call the Tappans, of course. They can tell me in a minute.”

  She leaned towards the dial impatiently, and Sheridan, noticing how suddenly and strangely dark the eyes were under the fine, straight brows, said with the grave courtesy that he had brought from another and a distant land:

  “Shall I not wait outside, Tess? I myself detest to hold telephone conversations with three corners.”

  “No, don’t go. It won’t take a minute, truly.… Hello? Is Mrs. Tappan there? Nell? … Nell, it’s Tess Stuart. Did Fay get off all right? … What time? … Before nine? Oh, then she must have been home for ages.… She was all right, wasn’t she? … No, it’s just that the telephone didn’t answer, and like a lunatic, I began to worry. She’s been having those ghastly headaches again, you know.… Kippy Todd was with her, wasn’t he? … Oh, then he undoubtedly came in to amuse her, and the little demon’s probably left the receiver off on purpose.… Was it a grand party? … I’ll wager you did! Thanks, darling—good-night.… No, I’m not bothered now, honestly. No, honestly.… Good-night.”

  She hung up the receiver slowly, a flicker of annoyed amusement in her eyes.

  “You know she really is an imp of the first water! Any time that romance strikes her as more agreeable than reality, she simply turns down the lights, lifts off the receiver, and lets the rest of the world go mad. Shall we try the winter garden?”

  “By all means. These gloves here on the chair, are they yours?”

  Tess ran them critically through her fingers.

  “No, I never wear gloves—they’re like veils and stiff collars and high boots—they all make me feel as though I were strangling to death in jail. Ridiculous, isn’t it? … These must be Vicki’s. I’ll see she gets them.… It’s right through these doors. Look out for the step.”

  “Thanks. And this—this Kippy Todd—he represents romance to Fay for the time being, you think?”

  Tess Stuart, a white dream in the dark doorway, lifted bare shoulders in a small, amused shrug, disdainful and indulgent.

  “Oh, anyone a foot or so away is Fay’s idea of romance, if the lights have the right kind of shades! The current of her emotions flows from the fingertips to the heart, not from the heart to the fingertips.” She ran lightly down the steps, turning towards him with a proud wave of the hand, her lifted face starry with delight, the gown billowing about her, light as foam. “There, didn’t I tell you that it was perfect? Look at the little brick wall with the wicket gate in it, that makes you think that it’s going on and on forever—look at the flagged path winding along with moss in its cracks—look at those lilies that come to my shoulder, and this larkspur that comes to my eyebrows, and pansies that come just to the tips of my toes. And oh, oh, look at these chairs on the terrace! Shades of the Arabian nights, did you ever see such luxury?”

  But the disobedient Mr. Sheridan was looking at something else. Something more shining than the far-off stars—something that gleamed with a more radiant and mysterious pallor than the flowers themselves, turned by the night to white moths and silver butterflies.

  “Never. Never in all my life have I seen anything one half so lovely,” he assured her with profound conviction.

  Tess, already deep in the lacquer-red cushions of the basket chair, linked her hands behind the honey-colored head and smiled up contentedly at the stars.

  “Oh, but you should see it in winter! That’s when it seems an absolute miracle, with drifts of snow against the glass roof and drifts of night-blooming jasmine reaching up to them. Making spring and summer bloom together in the snow—isn’t that the prettiest miracle you ever heard of?”

  Karl Sheridan, his eyes on the drifted white against the scarlet cushions, shook a noncommittal head.

  “You must not make me the judge of miracles!” he said. “Tonight they have come so thick and fast that I have touched my eyes with my fingers more than once to make sure they are not betraying me. But do you know, I think that a snowdrift in May is perhaps even a prettier miracle than flowers in January.… I have not yet thanked you for the kind thought that you put into Mallory’s kind head.”

  “He’s delighted that you’re coming. It wasn’t kindness on my part—nor on his. He really wants you.… Is installing this laboratory going to keep you fairly tied down, or are you going to have some time to play with us?”

  “Plenty of time, I dare prophesy. I do not believe that the Division of Investigation is going to clamor for eight hours a day of laboratory instruction; in fact, I doubt whether just now they would trust me a block out of sight with my little bag.”

  “Oh, the bag!” The gray eyes traveled swift and clear as light, from the far-off stars to the brown, amused face, barely a hand’s breadth away. “You were going to tell me what was in it—you promised. Tell now.”

  “Now? But what is in that little bag does not go, believe me, with stars and flowers. Nor with a lady who is made of both! Let us leave the bag safe in its drawer and listen to what that poor fellow in there is trying to tell us on the violin.”

  “I’m tired through to my bones of flowers and stars and music,” she told him amiably. “And of polite young gentlemen telling polite little lies. Unpack the bag for me, K.”

  “You have no heart,” said Karl Sheridan in a voice that he hoped was dispassionate. “And probably no soul, either. It is distinctly unscrupulous to wear eyes and mouth like that if you have no heart and no soul.… There are twenty-eight articles in the bag.”

  “Twenty-eight? It must be a fine, fat little bag.”

  “On the contrary, it is quite flat and neat; you can wear it over your shou
lder, like a knapsack, or around your waist on a belt. I brought it over to check up with the one used by the field agents of your Division of Investigation. It is what is known as the Thorndyke equipment, somewhat modified by the famous Herr Doktor Gross and your humble servant. Each thing has its own pocket or its own strap, so that you can check them quickly before you start.”

  “Start where?”

  “For X, naturally; where else?”

  “X, of course,” repeated Tess, in the small, far-away voice of a dreaming child. “X marks the spot where the body fell.… Begin, please. Begin counting the things in the bag.”

  “A steel tape measure,” said Karl Sheridan; and she checked off the steel tape measure on the little finger of the slim white hand. “A flashlight. A strong magnifying glass. A fountain pen. A box of metal-bound tags to mark exhibits. A packet of envelopes to contain them. A notebook. A compass. A small mirror—”

  The finger with the ruby on it, which had been reached in the orderly process of checking, was raised in peremptory protest.

  “A mirror? What is this? The Thorndyke equipment or a vanity case?”

  “Perhaps you are right,” said the young man gravely. “Perhaps, as you suggest, it is a vanity case. ‘Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher… all is vanity.’ Life—and death, too, perhaps.… You must hold the little mirror quite close to lips that will not tell you their secret; if no cloud rises on its surface, then you can be very sure that you have reached X. It is a better guide than even the compass.”

  “Yes. I see.” The deep young voice sounded farther away than ever, but it was as steady as his. “What is ten?”

  “A ball of twine. A tin of what chemists call gray powder, used to develop fingerprints. A small spray, known as an insufflator, and a camel’s-hair brush for the same purpose. A rubber roller, a tube of printer’s ink, a glass slab—all to take prints. Rubber gloves. A bottle of iodine. A cake of soap. A towel.”