The Indigo Necklace Read online

  “Basil?” Aunt Rita said. Then she said again, “Oh, the poor thing!” The poor creature’s passion for the herbs made her live again to Aunt Rita.

  The household gathered in the carriageway, each behaving in his fashion, all kept from entering the hall by Uncle George, who, dam-like in his tent-sized dressing-gown, completely occupied the doorway. Aunt Dollie asked a lot of questions in her stylish voice, without waiting in between them for answers. Ava lighted a cigarette. Old grizzled Hugo trembled and looked mute. Paulette grumbled and scolded. Toby Wick arrived and made Uncle George let him come in. He looked at the nurse, moved his shoulders, and went out again. Then Captain Jonas came in and ordered everyone to leave the hall.

  “Don’t leave the house. You’ll be questioned in your turn,” he said.

  The police soon overflowed the hall and spilled outside into the courtyard. I waited in Helen Clary’s room. Captain Jonas was dressed in a clean white suit, but this time he wore no flower in his lapel. Through the open door I could see a photographer taking pictures. A fingerprint man dusted for prints. The dry little medical examiner announced a swelling at the base of the skull but deemed offhand that death was due to suffocation. Jonas asked if a dose of that curare extract—that Indian arrow poison à la mode, he called it with derision—would make her look like that and the doctor said he couldn’t exactly say. The trouble was, you hadn’t had any experience with curare. Arsenic, cyanide, carbolic acid—but curare, no, that was something else.

  Patrick was wanted by Captain Jonas on the scene. I was allowed to stay on in Helen Clary’s room because Patrick wouldn’t permit me to go upstairs, thus reminding me that he had let me stick around more than usual because he was afraid I would be attacked.

  The shutters had been thrown wide open and the white-hot light poured into the great lofty room. Stripped of all superfluous adornments except the crystal chandelier, furnished only with the dull and pitiful appurtenances deemed safe and suitable for the mentally ill, the big white room nevertheless had the noble dignity of every room in this house. There was grandeur, poetry on an epic scale, in its proportions.

  But it gave you a queer feeling, this room, as though it had been inhabited by no one, and therefore, though empty and lonely, was not bereft of an occupant. It even had a queer empty sort of smell. It was like a tomb, or an asylum. Puzzling over this, I discovered that tombs and asylums always seem uninhabited.

  I was glad when Patrick and Captain Jonas came in.

  “This place gives me the creeps,” I said.

  “Me too,” Jonas said. “And why not? Two murders instead of one supposed murder. The murder of the nurse removes any doubt about Helen Clary’s death being murder. No pictures here yet!” he snapped over one shoulder, as a man showed up with a camera. “And no publicity yet.” The man grumbled under his breath. “You heard what I said!” Jonas snapped. We three were alone then for a few minutes, and he said, lowering his voice, “She was hidden in one of these two rooms. I thought so all along, but old Sears stuck to his story that she left the house, and I didn’t want to rush in and tear up floors and so on and get myself called on the carpet by the Chief if she happened to walk in alive. Sears was covering up because he expects to collect off Clary, of course.” Uncle George’s high-pitched whisper came back to me. “What’s five hundred to you now, boy?” he had asked, with a terrible joviality which meant he had made a successful touch. “When this house was built there weren’t any vaults and such for valuables, except what each man fixed up for himself,” Jonas said, as he walked ahead of us into Roger Clary’s bedroom. “We’ll find where he put her without much trouble now—but there was nothing to be done, except go easy, till we found out what happened to the nurse. She wasn’t in that chest this morning, by the way.”

  Patrick said, “She wasn’t in the chest at ten past two.”

  I said, “Patrick looked when we came back from lunch.”

  Instantly Jonas was alertly suspicious. “You expected to find her, Lieutenant Abbott?”

  Patrick’s grin slid up one flat brown cheek.

  “Not at all. But the chest had been pulled out and stood wide open when we came in earlier—which was shortly before we met you at lunch. Just plain curiosity made me look in the chest when we came home again. Nobody there then.”

  “Well, she didn’t get there under her own power,” Jonas said.

  “Nope.”

  “Ten minutes past two. You said you found her when you came back down on a tour of the house, along with the girl, Major Clary, and Miss Marguerite?”

  “Right. It was then five past three.”

  “So she was put in the chest during that fifty-five minutes. Where were you, all the time?”

  “In our apartment,” I said.

  “In the living room?”

  “All over,” Patrick said. “We changed, because of the weather. We had the shower going. Then we sat in the kitchenette.”

  “Would you have heard any disturbance in the lower hall?”

  “I think not and, obviously, we didn’t.”

  “He might have had some help, somebody watching, when he moved the body,” Jonas said. “Didn’t you notice anything suspicious?”

  “Nothing,” Patrick said. He wasn’t being truthful altogether. Carol had come up through that hall, a breathless, panicked Carol.

  “Who put the house in order?” Jonas asked. “Understand our fellows left it in a mess?”

  “Hugo and Paulette straightened things up,” I said. “Paulette was pretty mad. I think you should be glad none of your policemen was around when she was having that job to do, Captain Jonas.”

  Jonas looked at me unsmilingly. “She’s a husky wench,” he said thoughtfully. “She had a feud on with the nurse. There’s nothing on earth like the relationship between these Orleanians and their Negroes. They’ve got a funny sort of loyalty to each other. They bicker and fuss with each other and all the time they stand by their own through thick and thin, regardless of color. I know exactly what happened. Paulette and Hugo grumbled every move they made and meanwhile did a first-class job but kept on grumbling and would have died in their tracks before they refused.” Jonas was looking at us, but lost in speculation. “Paulette,” he mused. “I wonder how far she might go? Miss Clary mentioned that she would have liked to have Victorine in her employ. I wonder what Paulette’s reaction might be to that? Paulette didn’t like Victorine. There is much more to this business than meets the eye. That nurse had one of those herbs they quarreled about clutched in one hand....”

  Jonas suddenly pulled himself together. “Clary did it,” he snapped, as though he were two people and one did not agree with the other.

  Patrick asked to see the herb, and Jonas produced an envelope from his pocket. Patrick handed it over and asked me to sniff. “Remind you of anything?” he asked. It smelled weedy and faintly like sage. I shook my head. Patrick handed it back and Jonas replaced the envelope in his pocket.

  The detective looked around Roger’s bedroom.

  The shutters here were also wide open, the brash light poured in, robbing the heavy satin-brocade curtains and the rose-satin underlining of the giant tester of color, but enhancing their superb quality. Age could not fade them, but here and there the silk was beginning to fray.

  “Clary did it,” Jonas reiterated. “He could save our time and the public’s money and his own neck by confessing.” He set his jaw. “He’ll never do that. I know these Creoles. He’ll fight till the last gasp. The others will stick by him. But a chain, you know, is only as strong as its weakest link—Uncle George.”

  Patrick’s nod was preoccupied. He was glancing at the curtain pole which had supposedly hit me on the head. It was back in place, its draperies painstakingly arranged to frame the tall French window. Now he was eyeing the marble-topped bureau to the left of the window. Now, a bookcase.

  My gaze followed his. My heart began to pound.

  Tice’s Practice of Medicine, Volume X, was back beside Vo
lume IX!

  I could not help shooting a glance straight at Captain Jonas. Those pale round eyes were fixed on nothing at all. The detective was wrapped in his own thoughts. He seemed brusque and dogged. This was not our genial and inspired host at luncheon. This man no longer cared whether we knew a little more than we were telling, or not. He was sure of himself without us. His intuition had been right. He knew his man, and he would get him.

  I felt a wave of sorrow not only for Roger Clary, but also for my Patrick, whose friendship for Roger had clouded his judgment.

  The young policeman who was Jonas’s stenographer appeared at a gallery window.

  “They say the dining room is the coolest room in the house,” he said.

  “Okay,” Jonas said. “I’ll talk to Sears first. Have Callahan take Roger Clary off by himself, see that he can’t communicate with anybody. That parlor would be a good place.”

  “Yes, sir.” The stenographer went out.

  “The dining room then,” Jonas said, to us.

  Outside the heat had not lessened, but the light had changed slightly and there was an ominous, threatening note in the air.

  Patrick asked, “May I ask Major Clary a couple of questions?”

  Jonas didn’t pause in his march across the courtyard.

  “Ask as many as you like,” he said.

  “In private.”

  Jonas slowed down, and slanted him an inquisitive look. He was evidently reassured by Patrick’s casualness.

  “Sure. I’ll expect you to tell me what you ask and what he answers.”

  “Naturally,” Patrick said.

  “I’ll get word to Callahan,” Jonas said.

  We arrived on the second floor ahead of Roger. There was no one in the drawing room. Its satinwood and mahogany, its gilt, its overabundance of fragile Clary treasures, seemed all at once theatrical and unreal.

  Sergeant Callahan opened the door and admitted Roger Clary. He closed the door and Roger was alone with us.

  He seemed gloomy and depressed. He hardly noticed our presence. He shook his head only after a short, poignant interval when Patrick offered cigarettes.

  The question was brief.

  “Did you take the book from our kitchenette?” Patrick asked.

  “I did.” Roger’s eyes were bright and hot and scornful. “Run quick and tell Captain Jonas,” he said.

  Patrick said, “Did anyone in the house have reason to believe you wouldn’t come home last night?”

  “You go to hell!” said Roger Clary.

  XIV

  ON This main wing a door opened directly from the hall onto the gallery. We left the drawing room at once, went downstairs and directly out on the gallery. Immediately we heard Aunt Dollie’s fashionable voice going it in the morning room, which was the sitting room next door to the dining room. As we passed I saw Aunt Dollie standing by one of the tall windows, and Aunt Rita and Ava Graham sat listening to her talk. Perhaps they were not really listening. Aunt Dollie talked so much and said so little that it would be difficult for her to hold their attention at a time like this. But Aunt Rita had the polite habit of attention, and Ava like as not pretended it, though far away in the complacent world of cocktail parties, pretty dresses and Toby Wick.

  When she saw us Aunt Dollie stopped talking.

  She eyed us angrily, tossed her head, and looked the other way.

  It was over immediately because we walked on. Oh, dear! Even Aunt Dollie hated us now.

  They all would, certainly, before this awfulness was over with. Roger’s hatred was terrible. Carol had been briefly won over, but it wouldn’t last. Aunt Rita would hate us most of all, even though she did not let it show.

  To my surprise, Patrick marched me past the dining room, where Uncle George’s voice was protesting excitedly above the whirring noise of a large fan. We went down the five steps to the garden.

  A brick walk turned right past the outside kitchen, turned left again and skirted the herb garden in front of the storehouse which had once been stables. The light-green spikes of the bush basil stood out against the dark-leafed camellias in front of the servants’ house. Without pausing, Patrick dipped down and absent-mindedly plucked a small branch. By the time we had circled the garden he had snatched a couple of roses and some oleander flowers.

  We had climbed our steps and were in our apartment before this flower-snatching meant anything. He dropped everything in a wastebasket except the basil, which he proffered me.

  “Crush it slightly in one hand, Jean.” I did so. “Now sniff, and mention the first thing you think of.”

  “Absinthe!” I said, so excited I forgot the heat, even.

  “Or anise?”

  “Well—maybe. Licorice, also.”

  Patrick was looking at me steadily. “It might be anisette you’re thinking of. The liqueur anisette is made and used a lot in New Orleans homes. Now which will you have? Does it smell like absinthe, or anise, or anisette, or licorice, or basil?”

  “Now I’m mixed up,” I said. I put down the basil and washed off the scent at the sink. “That was a dirty trick, Pat.”

  Patrick went to the icebox, took out Coca Cola and limes, fished a bottle of Bacardi from the top shelf of the cabinet, and, as I sat at the kitchen table with a cigarette, made us Cuba Libres.

  “I guess I’m pretty dumb, Pat.”

  “Why?”

  “You know why. I was sure at first that it was Toby Wick who killed Helen Clary. Positive. And all I could think of was how Roger would ever get cleared of all suspicion and Toby get caught. But, honestly, Jonas has been right all the time. And Roger is being such a fiend along with it. I mean he won’t even bother to be decent. When you are trying to help him so much, too. He ran up here and tried to stop us looking through the house with Aunt Rita because he knew the body was then in that chest. Of course! Because he himself just moved it there! I guess he sent Carol up here to keep us busy while he moved the nurse from wherever he had hidden her to the chest. Remember how sort of breathless Carol seemed when you went to let her in? I thought it was because she had overheard something we said. But it was because she was worried about what she knew Roger was all set to do while she was here keeping us occupied. Carol knows. That makes her an accessory after the fact, and we might just as well face it and—and start looking for some place to move to, if there is any.”

  Patrick was gently swirling his glass. The ice clinked and now the smell of the limes in the drink was stronger in the room than the scent of the basil.

  “It was wishful thinking made me want it to be Toby Wick,” I admitted. “That was silly. Because, no matter how much he wanted Carol, or any other woman, he would never go to a lot of trouble to get her. He certainly wouldn’t go as far as to do murder. If he would, he would have murdered Ava when she did whatever she did to get him eating out of her hand.”

  I started thinking about that for a change. “Now, what’s Ava got on Toby that makes her suddenly so sure of herself?”

  “Why don’t we find out?” Patrick asked.

  “Do you think,” I asked, excited again, “that there’s still a chance that Toby Wick did it?”

  Patrick said, “A sober Wick certainly wouldn’t do murder for any woman, Jeanie. You’re right. But absinthe is a peculiar drink. It affects the reason, and it makes its habitués—I almost said addicts—do very peculiar things.” The ice clinked. “I offered the basil as something—well, something for you to keep in mind. The basil doesn’t mean that you did or did not smell basil, or absinthe, or what have you, last night. Still Wick might be mixed up in it—I’ll grant you that.”

  “There was grass on his shoes.”

  “I’ve got ideas about that grass.”

  I said, “Victorine herself wouldn’t’ve done it, would she, dear? She was peculiar. I wouldn’t put it past her to hit somebody barging into that room with that book...”

  “And afterwards fracturing her own skull and crawling into the secret archives and smothering and twelv
e hours or so later moving on to the chest? That would be real voodoo, and Victorine would be the only honest-to-God zombie...”

  “Hey?”

  “I’m trying to impress on you that Victorine herself is not a suspect. Let’s concentrate on Ava. I’d like to know more how she ticks,” His face darkened. “And—we haven’t much time.”

  “You mean...”

  “I’m afraid that Captain Jonas may want to get this over with before it’s so late he has to stand in line for his dinner.”

  It was not a joke. Patrick looked very grim as he said it.

  All at once I realized that Patrick was discouraged. He got up and paced slowly around the living room, taking long steps, his jaw hard, the up-and-down lines in his tanned cheeks deep and the color of his blue-green eyes deep.

  The intense heat had not lessened, I reached from where I sat and opened the slats of a shutter on the one window in the kitchenette. I could see the sky, darkly gray now, and lowering. The leaves on the vines drooped, dead still.

  I slanted the slats down and saw Ava Graham standing on the lower gallery opposite talking, or rather listening, to Captain Jonas.

  Patrick, when I reported this, stepped over to one of our windows to reconnoiter. He put his ear to a crack between slats, and said, “I don’t think Aunt Dollie’s in circulation at the moment. At least, I hear no one talking. I’ll ask Jonas and Ava up for a drink.”

  My goodness, I thought, as he suited the action to the idea. Jonas actually hesitated before he sadly shook his head.

  “But there’s no reason why Miss Graham can’t join you,” he gallantly added.

  “My God, you saved my life!” Ava was saying, with actual appreciation, two minutes later. She held her drink in one exquisite hand. Her long red nails—the very, very long ones never cease to astonish me because people really must do nothing at all to keep them so—made a smart contrast for her simple white dress. She wore garnet earrings, definitely heirloomish, two matching garnet bracelets, and the same red flashed from the open toes of her high-heeled white sandals. “I’m jittery, kids. No fooling!” she said. “Uncle George is in a spot. I could help him, but I’m afraid to. He’s right, as it happens, and while I’d hate to go on record as maudlin and sentimental I—well, I simply adore Uncle George!”