Rex Stout_Tecumseh Fox 03 Read online

  The young man who spoke—handsome, dark-eyed and dark-haired, fully as elegant in evening attire as Adolph Koch, and considerably more slender and athletic—had a hand on the back of Dora Mowbray’s chair. His tone, while not exactly supercilious, conveyed the impression that if he had the time and felt like it he might do his grandmother the favor of teaching her to suck eggs. The captain’s eyes took him in, as did others. The captain inquired:

  “Your name, please?”

  “My name’s Perry Dunham. There’s no need to question Miss Mowbray. She’s already passed out once. She and I both saw Jan shoot himself.”

  “Oh. You did?”

  “We did, as most of the people present can tell you. When I got back here Miss Mowbray and Mr. Koch were already here, and a lot of others came soon after. Everybody buzzed around, wondering what was wrong with Jan. Two or three of them started to go in the dressing room, but he yelled at them to stay out. Finally, when the intermission time was about up, Beck and Koch decided Miss Mowbray should go in, but I thought he might even throw something at her, so I went along. He was standing in front of the mirror with the pistol in his hand. I kept my head and told Miss Mowbray to shut the door and she did. I started talking to Jan, and getting closer to him, but when I was still ten feet away he stuck the gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger.”

  “Well.” The captain took a breath. “As I said, Mr. Dunham, I had already concluded that Tusar committed suicide. I never heard of a man holding his mouth open for someone to stick a gun in it pointing straight up. Of course this settles it, but as a matter of form I’ll ask Miss Mowbray a question. Did this thing occur as Mr. Dunham describes it, Miss Mowbray?”

  Without looking at him, without lifting her head or eyes to look at anyone, she nodded.

  “I’m sorry,” the captain persisted, “but if we get it clear now that ends it. You were present, with Mr. Dunham, when Tusar shot himself?”

  “Yes.” She whispered it. Then her head came up and her eyes met the captain’s, and her voice was suddenly and surprisingly strong. “While we stood there—as Perry said. I was farther away than he was, keeping myself—trying not to scream at him. When he lifted the gun Perry jumped for him, but it was—he couldn’t—”

  “He was too fast,” said Dunham curtly. “Or I was too slow. He went down and I stumbled and went down too. When I got up Miss Mowbray had backed up against the door and didn’t realize her weight was holding it against someone’s effort to open it. I didn’t think there ought to be a mob rushing in there, but I didn’t know what else to do, so I went and got her away from the door and opened it, and in they came.”

  The captain grunted. He rubbed his chin, looked slowly around at the faces, and grunted again. “Well,” he said, “I don’t see any point in bothering you people. We have your names if we need them, but I don’t suppose we will. I understand that one of the officers phoned Tusar’s sister. Has she come?”

  Shaken heads gave him a negative. He went on, “It would be a good idea if a couple of you who are friends of hers would wait here for her. The rest of you might as well go. Unless anyone has something to add to what has been said.”

  His eyes made the round again. Silence seemed to be all he was to get, until a voice rumbled:

  “There’s one little thing.”

  It was Adolph Koch, who had left his chair and was standing in the middle of the room. The captain’s eyes settled on him.

  “Yes, sir?”

  “Where the other note went to.”

  “The other?…”

  “You say Tusar left a note addressed to his friends who believed in him. But soon after the shot was heard several of us entered the dressing room, and though there was a good deal of confusion I heard Mr. Gill say, ‘Here’s a note he left,’ and Miss Mowbray said, ‘There are two notes,’ and Mr. Gill said, ‘No, there’s only one,’ and Miss Mowbray said, “There are two, I saw them there together,’ ” Koch sighed. “I suppose it’s of no importance, but in case you think it desirable to search for the other note before we leave …”

  The captain was scowling distastefully; this intrusion of a nasty little complication like a missing note in a perfectly straightforward suicide was most unwelcome. He addressed Dora Mowbray with a tone more aggressive than he had previously used:

  “Is that right? Did you say there were two notes?”

  She nodded with a heavy head. “I guess I did. I thought I saw two—but of course I was wrong. I saw them when I was standing there and Jan had the gun and Perry was getting closer to him. It was just an impression—it must have been wrong, because Perry says he only saw one. Oh, does it matter?”

  The captain bore down. “Then you are not prepared to state positively that you saw two notes?”

  “Oh, no—there must have been only one—”

  “You saw only one, Mr. Dunham?”

  “Of course.” The youth darted an unfriendly glance at Adolph Koch. The older man ignored it and said in a skeptical tone to the girl:

  “You have very good eyes, Dora.” He looked at the captain: “It really does seem probable that there were two notes and that someone took one of them.”

  The captain demanded testily, “What’s your name?”

  “Adolph Koch. Manufacturer of dresses and suits. Admirer of the arts.”

  “Do you make a point of this? Do you think I’m going to ask these ladies and gentlemen to permit me to search their persons?”

  “By no means.” Koch was unperturbed. “I wouldn’t even permit you to search me. I mentioned the matter only because you asked if anyone had anything to add.”

  “Well, have you anything else?”

  “No.”

  “Has anyone?”

  The expression on the captain’s face did not invite further contributions, but one came. A baritone inquired politely, “May I make a suggestion?”

  Another voice spoke from the rear, “That’s Tecumseh Fox, Captain.”

  “Here as a spectator only,” Fox got in hastily. “I was just going to suggest, before you send us off, do you think it would be a good plan to have Mr. Beck take a look at that violin? In view of his doubt of its identity?”

  “Certainly, I wasn’t forgetting that, of course—”

  “Before we leave? If you don’t mind?”

  The captain addressed Felix Beck: “Can you identify Tusar’s violin?”

  “Naturally,” Beck replied, as though he had been asked if he could identify his own face in a mirror.

  “All of you please remain a moment,” said the captain, and went to the dressing room and entered, closing the door behind him. There was a cessation of the other muffled sounds from within; voices could be heard, but not words; and then the captain reappeared. He closed the door and turned to confront them, and the scowl on his face was considerably more pronounced than it had been when Koch had raised the question of the notes. He surveyed the audience for a long moment in silence, and when he spoke his tone was one of dry disgust.

  “There’s no violin in there.”

  Ejaculations, gasps, startled movements were the response to that. Felix Beck darted for the dressing-room door, but one of the census takers grabbed him by the arm and held him. Half a dozen people were declaring that it was impossible, they had seen it there, and the captain was lifting a hand to restore the meeting to order when the confusion gained a new recruit from without. The door at the far end burst open and a woman entered—her mink coat flying open, her dark agitated eyes in her pale face seeing none of them, her red lips parted for panting. She rushed across through the lane they made, toward the dressing room, until she was stopped by the captain, who blocked her way.

  Adolph Koch marched toward her, calling sharply, “Garda! You shouldn’t have—”

  She was clawing at the captain. “My brother! Jan! Where is he—”

  Tecumseh Fox quietly retreated to the corner he had pre-empted before.

  Chapter 3

  I don’t agree,” Diego Zo
rilla said with conviction. “I don’t agree at all. It was a sensible thing for Jan to do. I should have done it myself when I lost my fingers. As for the violin, I don’t believe it. If any substitution had been made, Jan couldn’t possibly have failed to know it.” He drank, put the glass down, and shook his head. “No, it was simply stolen, that’s all. Though how and by whom …”

  “Yes, you might let me in on that,” Fox suggested.

  They were sitting in Rusterman’s Bar, having finally left Carnegie Hall around midnight. The last two hours there had been productive of no result whatever, except the negative one that Jan Tusar’s violin could not be found. There seemed to be no question that it had been in the dressing room immediately after Tusar had shot himself. Everyone denied having removed it or even touched it, but it was generally admitted that in the confusion and excitement it could easily have been taken without observation. A careful check had established with a fair amount of certainty that only three people had left the scene before the arrival of the captain: a Mrs. Briscoe, a Mr. Tillingsley, and Miss Hebe Heath. Men had been sent to interview them, and they had all denied any knowledge of the violin. It was true that there had been overcoats and women’s wraps around, under one of which the instrument could easily have been carried unseen, and any of those present might have been away for a few minutes without its being remarked, but a search of the entire building was fruitless.

  In the comfortable little booth at Rusterman’s, Diego had told Fox that of the three persons who had left the scene before the arrival of the police, Mrs. Briscoe was the lady whom Fox had characterized as a skeleton in sable and could be dismissed from consideration as a fiddle thief; Mr. Tillingsley was the concert master of the Manhattan Symphony Orchestra, equally above suspicion; and, though Hebe Heath was a movie star and therefore not subject to the normal processes of reason or logic, it seemed unlikely that she would steal a violin to the purchase of which she had contributed the substantial sum of two thousand, five hundred dollars.

  Fox inquired, “Is she also an admirer of the arts?”

  “She was an admirer of Jan Tusar,” said Diego in a certain tone. “Jan was a very romantic figure. He was, in fact, truly romantic—as he proved tonight. And as I am not. I am a realist. When my fingers were smashed in an accident and they had to go, taking the best of me with them, did I finish the job? Not me. I accepted your hospitality—your charity—and for months stayed at your place in the country, because a realist has to eat. Shall we have another drink? And now I arrange music for the Metropolitan Broadcasting Company.”

  “A lot of people listen to it. Anyhow, you’re all right. Tell me about some of those other people.”

  Diego told him. It was understood, he said, that Tusar had entertained the idea of marrying Dora Mowbray, but it had not been encouraged by Dora and had been unrelentingly opposed by her father. When, a few months ago, Lawton Mowbray had tumbled from his office window to his death, there had even been murmurs about the possibility that Jan Tusar had sent him on that last journey in order to remove an obstacle from the path of true love; but, Diego said, that had been merely a drop of acid from rumor’s unclean tongue, for Jan hadn’t been so romantic as all that. After an interval Dora had consented to act again as Jan’s accompanist; firstly, because Jan insisted that otherwise he could not play, and secondly, because she needed the money; for, though Lawton Mowbray had been an extremely successful manager of artists, he had spent more than he had made and had left nothing but debts, pleasant memories, and a penniless daughter.

  Fox remarked that young Mr. Dunham seemed to be on terms with Miss Mowbray.

  Diego snorted and said he hoped not. Perry Dunham was an arrogant young ape, incapable of appreciating one of so true a loveliness as little Dora. He called her “little Dora” because when he had first met her, six years ago, she had been only fourteen and had legs like a calf. Even now, he admitted, she lacked somewhat in roundness for a Spaniard’s taste, but she was undeniably lovely, and she could even make pretty good music. As for Perry, he thought swing was music, which—judging from Diego’s tone—settled him. The only reason he ever set foot inside Carnegie Hall was to keep on the good side of his rich mother, Irene Dunham Pomfret, who was the financial godmother of enough musicians to make up a Bethlehem Festival. Garda Tusar, Jan’s sister, was more his type than Dora Mowbray.

  Were they?…

  No, not that Diego knew of. The dark and tempestuous Garda, as Fox had himself had opportunity to observe, exhibited in her face and figure and movements the authentic ingredients of a seductress, but if she was using them to that end she was being extremely discreet about it. She was in fact somewhat of a mystery. She was supposed to be working at some vague sort of job connected with the fashion world, but if her salary paid for the clothes she wore and the apartment she maintained and her car and chauffeur, it must be a super-job.

  She had been fond of her brother, Fox said.

  Undoubtedly, Diego agreed; but recently there had been a coolness. Only yesterday Jan had told him that Garda was so angry with him that she was not coming to the Carnegie Hall recital, but he had not said what she was angry about. Diego added remorsefully that for the past few months he had not maintained his former close relations with Jan, and that had been wrong because it had been his, Diego’s, fault; he had been envious. In his remorse, and after six or seven drinks, he admitted it. Jan had been preparing for the most important event of his career; it would assuredly be a glorious triumph; and it was a little more than Diego could bear. He had neglected his young friend at the moment of his greatest need, and he would never forgive himself. Now he would do what he could to atone for it. He would avenge the contemptible treachery that had plunged Jan into a false but fatal despair and caused him to take his life. He would, with his friend Fox’s help, discover who it was that had substituted a cracker box with a handle for Jan’s violin and had taken it away after it had fulfilled its base purpose. He would …

  Ten minutes later he was saying that if any substitution had been made, Jan couldn’t possibly have failed to know it.

  Fox smiled at him. “You can’t have it both ways, Diego. A little while ago you said—”

  “What if I did?” Diego met the smile with sour gloom. “Anyway, I was right. It’s all well enough to say Jan couldn’t have been fooled about that violin, but he was. And I’m going to find out who did it. I’m drunk now, but I won’t be tomorrow, and that’s exactly what I’m going to do.”

  “Well, good luck.” Fox looked at his watch. “I’m sorry I can’t be here to help, but I’m catching a sleeper to Louisville. Two days should be all I need there, so I’ll probably be giving you a ring Thursday morning to ask how you’re making out.”

  But at Louisville a problem regarding a sudden and unaccountable epidemic of stomach-aches in a stable of racehorses, among them a Derby entry, took a day longer than Fox had expected, so it was Friday instead of Thursday when he returned to New York, at two in the afternoon instead of eight in the morning, and at LaGuardia Airport instead of the Pennsylvania Station. He did not, however, need to phone Diego Zorilla to learn how he was making out with his project of atonement and vengeance, because he had talked with him over long distance Thursday evening and already knew. Furthermore, he had received information and a request which now resulted in his eating a hasty lunch in the airport lunchroom, taking a subway to Manhattan, and a taxi to an address on Park Avenue.

  His fatigue after three strenuous days and nights, his pockets bulging with packages—gifts for the Trimbles and others at the Zoo, as his home in the country was popularly called—and the battered suitcase he was carrying, should naturally, he thought, have caused some degree of aloofness on the part of the impeccable butler who admitted him to a spacious reception hall after an elevator had lifted him to the twentieth floor. But the butler seemed utterly unimpressed, and Fox surmised that the household staff of Irene Dunham Pomfret was hardened to apparitions from other worlds. The butler was standi
ng by courteously while a second man in uniform, also courteously, was disposing of Fox’s bag and outdoor coverings, when a woman appeared from within through a vaulted archway and approached, talking as she came.

  “How do you do? I don’t have any maids. I don’t like them. I have only men. I had maids once, and they were always sick. You’re Fox? Tecumseh Fox? I’ve heard a great deal about you from Diego. You were very sweet to him at the time of his misfortune. Let’s go in here …”

  Fox was valiantly concealing a series of shocks. The large and richly furnished reception hall had furnished one. He happened to know something about Chinese vases, through their involvement in a case he had worked on, and two rare and beautiful specimens were displayed there on a table; and on the wall back of them was an ordinary colored print of Greuze’s “The Broken Pitcher”! He did not know, of course, that that had been the favorite picture of James Garfield Dunham, Mrs. Pomfret’s rather sentimental first husband, nor that Mrs. Pomfret was capable of complete disregard of canons of convention and taste when her personal feelings were involved—though after one look at her the latter would have been an easy surmise.

  Her appearance was the second shock. It displayed none of the bloodless and brittle insolence her reputation as a female Maecenas had led him to expect. Her figure was generous, her eyes shrewd and merry, her mouth with full lips well-disposed and satisfied with life, and her surprisingly youthful skin—considering, in view of her son Perry, that she must have been at least halfway between forty and fifty—was a flesh covering that Rubens would have enjoyed looking at. Fox himself did.

  The vast chamber into which she conducted him, in which two concert grands were merely minor incidents, was overpowering but not irritating. She stopped at the edge of a priceless Zendjan rug and called in a voice that succeeded in blending tender affection with a note of command which invited instant response:

  “Henry!”