“In this business you don’t lie, Connie—especially not to the cops. If they ask you a direct question, you give ’em a direct answer. If you don’t know, you say so. If you know and can’t tell, you say that. You don’t do one thing and say the other. If you do, first thing you know you’re out in the snow right Bat on your royal white palfrey—and try to find some news from them that’s fit to print or anything else. Good night, Connie. Hear?”
“Sorry.”
She opened the door. Ed Noonan’s grating voice stopped her halfway through it. “Maybe there’s one more thing I could say before you go, Connie.” He teetered forward and back again, still holding on to his foot. “When Swede Carlson says he wants Gus before somebody cracks him on the head, he ain’t kiddin’. Swede don’t have time for the funny papers.”
Connie’s lips tightened. She shut the door quietly behind her. Gus Blake could take care of himself without any help. If Gus wouldn’t stick his neck out far enough to offend people by keeping their obituaries off the front page, he was hardly likely to stick it out so far he’d get his skull crushed in. Gus was smarter than most people thought. How psychic did Ed Noonan think he was?
She got in her car, switched on the motor, and let off the brake.
“Home, Connie,” she said deliberately. “Home. You’ve been kicked around enough today.”
She left her car in the drive in front of the house and hurried up across the wide white-pillared porch to the door. She hoped John Maynard was at home. She needed somebody to re-establish her battered ego. And he was there. She could see him through the narrow slit where the green-gold curtain had been carelessly drawn at the library window. He was pacing slowly back and forth in front of the fire, his hands in his pockets, his head bent down, lips moving, heavy brows pulled together in concentrated furrows. Connie frowned. That meant his frazzle-haired, giraffe-lipped old-maid secretary was there. The only time John Maynard ever paced, eyes on the floor, was when he was dictating.
Connie stopped a moment in the hall, listening for the low, rich, mellow rumble of his voice. She cocked her ear more intently. He must be almost through. She waited for Miss Delabear’s high-pitched nasal voice to come clacking through the door.
That’s funny,
she thought. She heard the phone ring in the pantry and cocked her ear the other way. It might be Gus calling her. Her pulse quickened at the thought, and slowed again as she heard the buzzer in the library, heard the chair knock against the desk and her father’s friendly drawl as he answered. Her face brightened. He was alone, then. She took the paper out of her pocket, took her coat off and laid it over the mahogany newel post, and gave herself a cursory glance in the mirror behind the banked chrysanthemums, waiting a moment for him to finish before she went over and opened the library door, the paper in her hand. She hoped he hadn’t seen it yet. He usually waited for her to bring it home.
“Hi,” she said, smiling gaily. He was just putting down the phone, and not smiling till he saw her. Then his handsome face composed itself into its customary bland and amiable lines.
“Hello, Connie honey,” he drawled. “How’s my girl?”
There was something missing. She felt it in the atmosphere more than she saw it in her father’s face or heard it in his voice. Her own warm anticipatory pleasure chilled.
“What’s the matter, Daddy?”
Her eyes fell on the
Gazette
spread out on the desk in front of him. His hand was still on the phone. He reached out, pressed the bell under the edge of his desk, and took the phone up again.
“Lawrence,” he said, “I’ve gone out if anyone else calls the next couple of hours or so.” He put the phone down and smiled at his daughter. His facial muscles smiled, she realized. The youthful brown eyes fixed on her had failed to get the word.
“Nothin’s the matter, Connie,” he drawled pleasantly. “Just a mite wore out tellin’ people to call Gus, not me, and havin’ them tell me they already called Gus. Where is Gus, by the way, Con?”
She felt an unaccountable relief. “Golly, Daddy.” She came across the room and flopped down in the deep leather chair by the desk. “I was afraid for a minute it was me you were mad at. I don’t know where Gus is. He came in looking like a cross between Mussolini and a rattlesnake and barged out, leaving me to get the paper out. I thought I’d be panicky about it, but I really wasn’t. That’s what I dashed home to tell you. I thought you’d be pleased with me.”
A mildly humorous light twitched in her father’s eyes for an instant and disappeared. He glanced down at the front page of the paper.
“I’m mighty pleased, honey,” he drawled. “Where was old Ed, all the time? He barge off, too?”
“No, Ed was there.” The warm tingle in Connie’s cheeks sharpened her voice. “But I was responsible. Even if he did write the leaders. I’m not pretending I ran the presses and made all the deliveries, either.”
“Keep your shirt on, Con,” John Maynard said mildly. He tapped the box in the center of the front page. “Where’d Gus get all this about Wernitz, honey? You any idea? It’s mighty interestin’ to me,”
“None at all. You’re the second person who’s asked me that.” The flush in her cheeks deepened. “Chief Carlson was fit to be tied.”
“He was? Well, that’s interestin’, too. So at least Gus didn’t get it from him, did he, Connie?” He folded the pages. “I expect Gus don’t want to tell anybody just where he did get it. Ever thought of that, honey? That maybe that’s why he didn’t stick around very long today?”
“Oh,” Connie said. “Oh.” She hadn’t thought of it. And maybe that did explain it. With what old Ed had told her about direct answers to direct questions, and legal methods making people talk who didn’t want to talk, that could very well be it.
“But maybe not,” her father added as he saw her eyes brighten. “Gus is an unpredictable sort of bastard, in my experience with him. I wouldn’t draw any conclusions, myself.”
He put his chin down on his shirt collar and folded his hands across his stomach, his elbows resting on the arms of his chair. After a moment he looked up.
“Carlson’s trying to find Gus?”
Connie nodded. “He’s got the whole force out after him. He was trying to scare me and Ed into telling him where Gus had got to. He said somebody might try to cave Gus’s skull in, too.”
“That so?” John Maynard said. “Well, Carlson’s supposed to be a pretty level-headed sort of fellow. I expect he knows what he’s doing.”
“Oh, rot!” Connie snapped. “Carlson’s a—a half-wit, if you want to know my personal opinion of him. He came in the office—”
Her father nodded. “I know. He told me he was in talkin’ to you.”
“He did?” She let the cigarette she’d reached for drop back into the box. “Did he tell you what he said to me? Practically accusing
you
of murdering Wernitz? Swindling him out of his property and then killing him to save your own reputation? Did he tell you that’s what he said to me?” She straightened her body up in the leather chair and got to her feet. “He didn’t have the guts to tell you that, I’ll bet.”
“Sit down, Constance,” John Maynard said.
She dropped abruptly back in the chair. Her mouth dropped open a little. Neither his voice nor the smiling lines on his face had changed, but everything else had. She tried stupidly to remember when he’d called her Constance before. Not for years. Not since she was fifteen and had called her mother a liar at the dining-room table.
“Sit down and listen to me, honey.”
His voice reached her across a dazed stretch of intense and breathless silence. A stranger was speaking to her. Under the outward guise of familiarity and friendliness, a stranger was sitting at her father’s desk, as impenetrable as bedrock, a whiplash concealed in his slow, mellow drawl.
“When I said
you had brains, maybe it wasn’t brains but imagination I was talkin’ about,” she heard the stranger say. “Imagination’s all right, except when it gets too powerful and goes off the track unless there’s brains behind it to keep it where it belongs. The trouble with you, honey, is you’re like a hound bitch in the springtime. You ain’t usin’ the brains you got, daughter. You’re figurin’ you’re Constance Maynard, so let everybody else go to hell and stay there. You ain’t thinkin’ about nobody else but Constance Maynard. When people start doin’ that, Connie, they’re licked before they leave the post. That’s a mistake. You’re makin’ a goddam fool of yourself, Connie, and I just hate to see it, honey. Swede Carlson knew you was doin’ it. So does everybody else.”
“Swede Carlson!” She sat up again, her eyes blazing. “What did he come to the office for? What was he trying to pump me about your deal with Gus about the paper for? What—”
“Just for the pleasure of seein’ you get in a swivet of some kind or other, honey, I expect,” John Maynard said gently. “Just to see what you did and didn’t know.”
“He saw all right, then. Because I don’t know. I don’t know anything. I don’t even know why he should come straight to you the minute Doc Wernitz gets killed. Or why—”
“Because I happen to know more about Doc Wernitz’s affairs than most anybody else in Smith County, Connie.” John Maynard pushed his chair back from the desk. “Anybody but one man. And Swede Carlson.” He got up to his feet. “I didn’t realize Doc Wernitz was the sort of fella to take the chief of police into his confidence when he was gettin’ up ready to pull out of Smithville. It might ’a made a considerable difference if he’d been a little more communicative, in fact, Connie. It ain’t always a good plan to keep too many things to yourself. For instance—”
He hesitated an instant. “I don’t much like to jump to any conclusions, but it’s my guess that if Wernitz had told everybody he wasn’t really pullin’ out of Smith County, all he was doin’ was pullin’ out of the gamblin’ end of it, because he’d made all the money he could ever use, and no family or relatives left any place for him to leave it to— and time runnin’ out fast before the big boys decided Smithville was fat enough territory for them to move in— if he’d told people that, I expect he might still be alive and enjoyin’ the sunshine down in Florida this winter, instead of bein’ down there in the dark like he is. He was always funny about the dark. Didn’t like it much. Hated it like sin and Satan, you might say if you wanted to tell the truth. So that’s why Carlson came to see me, honey.”
But why not?
Connie thought. After all, why not? Why shouldn’t her father know all about Doc Wernitz’s business. Her father was a lawyer. Lawyers didn’t pick their clients because they liked their table manners, or refuse them when they didn’t. He probably had a lot of people he did business for that he let in the back way. She was suddenly aware of her father’s eyes studying her face, and the amusement in them. Transparent again, no doubt. Just as Swede Carlson had said.
“Not that it’s any of your business, honey,” John Maynard said. “Don’t start gettin’ your little back up again, because it don’t do anybody any good. Tomorrow I’m goin’ out to Wernitz’s with Carlson and Hugo Vanaman to look through his papers. Most people think Vanaman ain’t as savory a character as he might be, but he’s a smart lawyer. Wernitz used him where a savory character mightn’t ’a done the trick. Then maybe we’ll know more’n we know right now.”
“You mean you don’t really know too much yourself?”
“That’s right,” John Maynard agreed amiably. “Might say I don’t know nary a single blessed thing, in fact. So you just run along now. Jim Ferguson’s comin’ in a few minutes to talk about some business.”
“Dad.” She’d forgotten about the bank and Janey’s checks, and what her cousin Dorsey had told her. It flashed back now. “Why did you do it? Why did you have to go and cover Janey’s checks? Why didn’t you find out who stole them and make them—”
She put her hand up to her mouth and involuntarily took a step backward. “I—I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Dad.” She should never have let him know she knew about the checks—not because of her promise to Dorsey, which was unimportant, but because of himself—because of the way he was looking at her again. She shivered a little and moved back another step.
“Who told you I covered Janey’s checks, honey?” His voice, still unchanged, stopped her before she could take the step that would get her to the door. She shivered again. “But don’t tell me.” He went on before she could speak. “You probably weren’t supposed to tell me anybody told you, were you, Connie?”
She shook her head.
“You talk too much, honey,” John Maynard said equably. “You got too much gab. Maybe someday you’ll learn. But you listen to me now—listen and keep your mouth shut. I know who took Janey’s checks. I know who took them, and where they are.”
He stopped a moment to let it sink into her bewildered brain.
“Now that’s enough, Connie. Enough and plenty. You go get yourself dressed. Decently dressed, I mean. Not that green rig you had on last night. It didn’t do you any good then and tonight you won’t need it. I don’t expect Gus is going to show up at the Sailing Club tonight. And the others’ll be coming—”
“Others? What others? I’m not going to the Sailing Club tonight. I’m not going anywhere.”
John Maynard looked at the clock again.
“You’re going to the Sailing Club tonight, Connie. You wouldn’t want anybody to think you were all up in the air about what Swede Carlson told you, would you? Or tell people you’d got yourself so all worked up you forgot—”
“Oh,” Connie said. She had forgotten.
“You forgot you invited Jim and Martha Ferguson, and Dorsey and Gus, to dinner tonight, while Janey was saying goodbye to your mother, didn’t you? I expect you remember it now. You remember Gus said he had to go to the town meeting—so you invited Orvie to come and take Janey to the Sailing Club. So you could cut and go with Gus—or drop in at the town meeting after he got there. Well, you did it. And your mother invited your Aunt Mamie and your Uncle Nelly. Your mother’s a kind woman, Connie. She don’t like to see people be rude to anybody right in front of their faces, like you were to Aunt Mamie. Askin’ Dorsey right after Mamie had asked him to go to the town meetin’ with her when Gus mentioned it.”
“I’m sorry. I guess I didn’t hear her ask him.” Connie moved over to the door.