Cold Steal Read online

  Phoebe Atwood Taylor once again embroils her scholarly sleuth Leonidas’ Witherall in enough foul play to challenge his wits to their limit. Returning to the Cape after a trip around the world, Witherall investigates some odd doings on the train: he is knocked unconscious and kidnapped. When he finally manages to get home, he discovers the body of Miss Medora Winthrop in his garage. Even the amazing Witherall is hard put to solve this one.

  © Copyright 1939, by Phoebe Atwood Taylor

  All rights reserved

  This edition published in 1980 by Foul Play Press, a division of The Countryman Press, Woodstock, Vermont 05091, distributed by The Independent Publishers Group, 14 Vanderventer Avenue, Port Washington, New York 11050.

  ISBN 0-914378-54-6

  Printed in the United States of America

  For

  K. B.

  COLD STEAL

  CHAPTER 1

  A TIDAL WAVE of gray flannel dressing gown streamed out behind Miss Chard as she bolted like a bewildered mouse across the vestibule platforms from Car Ten into Car Nine.

  Once inside, she huddled against the cold metal of the parlor car wall, her eyes glued to the door, and her ears strained for the sound of footsteps that never came. While mile after mile of snow-spotted fields, drab and leaden in the chill New England dawn, rushed past the corridor windows, she stood there watching and listening and trembling, and clutching at the brown paper package in her dressing gown pocket.

  In the face of her apparently overpowering fear, the fact that she could still remember her immediate objective stood out as a tribute to her tenacity. That she could actually force her felt-slippered feet to start moving on down the narrow corridor was an achievement, a positive triumph of will power and strength of mind.

  Only her strong will, Miss Chard thought as she stopped in front of the water cooler, accounted for her being alive and on the train. Her “body was simply an innocent and panic-stricken bystander that since seven o’clock the previous evening had been shoved hither and yon through a suddenly tumultuous and chaotic world.

  Her dangling gray braid bobbed from side to side at the recollection of the last twelve hours, of those Dalton policemen and their guns, the sirens screeching, and then the airplane trip to New York. Then, practically before she got the cotton out of her ears and the gum taste out of her mouth, she was on this train and going back home again. And throughout it all there hadn’t been a single moment when Miss Chard was not terrified to the core.

  She still was.

  But now she had only this final gesture to make before turning Leslie Horn over to her aunt. Once Leslie Horn was placed, figuratively speaking, in the arms of Medora Winthrop, Miss Chard’s nightmare would be over.

  Resolutely, she drew from her pocket the brown paper package of whose contents she stood in such mortal fear. Before Leslie Horn waked up, that package had to be thrown away, a task made unbelievably formidable by the tightly fitting Pullman windows that remained unmoved in response to her tuggings. She had considered disposing of the package by way of an open vestibule door, but to open one seemed to her dangerous, and besides, the sign said that passengers mustn’t.

  Miss Chard peered beyond into Car Nine and its still slumbering occupants, and then over her shoulder in the direction of Car Ten.

  Then, hastily, she buried the brown paper package deep down out of sight in the bottom of the receptacle for used drinking cups, at the base of the water cooler. For good measure, she yanked a handful of clean cups from the wall container and strewed them on the top layer, above the package.

  “There!” Miss Chard whispered. “There!”

  Her feeling of relief at completing her little mission, as she turned from the water cooler, gave way to a gasp of acute dismay.

  Framed in the doorway of Drawing Room A, and observing her interestedly, stood an elderly man with a small pointed beard.

  He looked like Shakespeare. He looked so much like Shakespeare that it seemed as if some library bust or engraved frontispiece had come suddenly to life.

  “I hope,” Leonidas Witherall began courteously, “that I didn’t frighten—”

  But Miss Chard was already in flight.

  Leonidas Witherall sighed in annoyance as the gray dressing gown streamed past him up the narrow corridor and out of the car.

  He didn’t mind the woman’s gasp. A,gasp was not at all an unusual reaction from someone beholding him for the first time. He was thoroughly accustomed to being gasped at and gaped at and stared at. Dozens of people did so daily, and fully half of them asked excitedly if anyone had ever told him that he looked like Shakespeare. Occasionally some ardent Shakespeare lover went so far as to prod him to see if he was real.

  All that was routine, and Leonidas accepted it. But a flight was different. He resented having mousy women stampede at the sight of him, as if he were a monster. This was the third fugitive within a month, and every last one had been a grayish, mousy woman who scuttled.

  Leonidas stepped across the corridor to survey the dreary, snow-heaped landscape flashing by.

  He was amazed and a little discouraged at the number of mousy women who seemed constantly traveling. On the trip arbund the world which he was just concluding, he had been haunted from the start by throngs of mousy women. Wherever he went, he was confronted by mousy women taking snapshots, or buying wicker baskets and never-ending strings of beads, or writing the dates and dimensions of things in little black notebooks.

  They worried about fleas, and crawling insects, and where the lettuce came from. They lost trunks, and that worried them. They lost pocketbooks, and that worried them more. And only those things they worried about were allowed to creep into their conversation. But he could forgive their dullness, Leonidas thought. He could even forgive this new habit of stampeding at the sight of him, if they weren’t all so uncompromisingly plain and mousy.

  Leonidas swung his pince-nez from their broad black ribbon.

  Perhaps it was all his fault for not outgrowing the E. Phillips Oppenheim tradition, but he had never entirely been able to banish a conviction that on every train or every ship there should be at least one intensely beautiful woman, who, furthermore, should be guarding a pouch stuffed with stolen emeralds. Lacking emeralds, the beautiful woman should have crammed beneath her girdle a handful of secret treaties, or pilfered designs for superdreadnoughts, or anyway a plan for Der Tag.

  But if such exciting creatures existed, they always avoided the conveyances on which Leonidas traveled. Very likely the throngs of mousy women scared them off, which he considered a great pity.

  Swinging his pince-nez, he watched more fields rush past. The snow became increasingly deeper as they neared Boston, and the sky was gloomy and overcast.

  “Not an inspiring sight.”

  Leonidas turned around. Busy with his bitter thoughts concerning mousy women, he hadn’t noticed the young man in the blue suit who had emerged from Car Nine, and was standing almost at his elbow.

  “Not— My God, you do look like Shakespeare, don’t you?”

  “So,” Leonidas said, “I have been told.”

  He started to move along up the corridor, but the young man, apparently entranced by his discovery, continued to block the way and stare at him raptly.

  “I say, when I was a youngster, I went to Meredith’s Academy, and there was a professor in the upper school they used to call Bill Shakespeare. I’ve forgotten his real name. No one ever called him by it, anyway. Aren’t you him?”

  “Were you graduated from Meredith’s?” Leonidas asked gently.

  “No, I went on to Dumbert,” the young man said.

  Leonidas nodded. “I felt sure that if you had come under my jurisdiction in the English Department, you would not ask me if I wasn’t
him. Actually, I am he.”

  A more sensitive ear would have caught the faint implication of a snub, but the young man only laughed.

  “Well, you know Dumbert. Just a bunch of illiterates. We went in more for football and stuff. I can’t spell, either— Say, will you look out at those drifts? The porter said Boston got two feet of snow yesterday, and there’s supposed to be a cold wave coming, too. New England in March! Honestly, did you ever see anything drearier than those fields in this light? Doesn’t it depress you?”

  There was something infectious about the young man’s buoyant vigor, and Leonidas took off his pince-nez and gave up trying to remain aloof.

  “Ordinarily,” he said, “I should avert my eyes. But this morning, I find the landscape rather stimulating.”

  “What? Now you don’t mean,” the young man waved a hand toward the window, “that—that Godforsaken vista gives you any lift?”

  “It does. You see, I’m going home. And it’s the first time in years I’ve had a home to go to.” Leonidas, who had no intention of doing anything of the kind, suddenly found to his surprise that he was unburdening himself to this chatty young fellow. “A brand new house, built just for me. A small white house with green blinds. And I’ve never seen it.”

  “How come?” the young man asked interestedly as he lighted a cigarette. “If I ever built me a house, I’d sit and watch every nail get driven, and stick my fingers in the concrete, and play with the shavings—why, that’s half the fun of building a house!”

  “I suppose so,” Leonidas said. “But I was in a hurry to see the world once more while there was still some world left to see, and the tangle of my uncle’s estate wasn’t settled enough for me to spend more money before I went. Then when I heard the estate was settled, I cabled my friends to get busy—”

  “You let your friends build you a house while you were away? It’s fantastic!” the young man said. “It’s incredible!”

  Leonidas shook his head. “Not really. I had the land, and the plans. In fact, I had the plans long before I had the land, or the money to build a house with.”

  “Sort of a dream house, huh?”

  “In a way,” Leonidas said. “I’ve never seen it, but I know just how it’s going to look, and how the staircase curves, and where each book will go. And— What did you say?”

  “I choked. Just a stray New Haven cinder. Well, sir, I think you had courage to let other people build your dream house— My God, it’s six-thirty, and I promised to wake Mike at six! I’ve got to rush. Good luck to you in your new house!”

  Leonidas watched his departure with amusement. He didn’t for a moment believe that there was anyone named Mike who had to be awakened. The young man had invented him as an excuse to escape hearing further details about the new house. It served him right, Leonidas thought, for being so chatty with strangers.

  Putting on his pince-nez, he turned back to the window. In an hour he would be in the South Station, and in another hour he would be home. Once settled, he would start the new Lieutenant Haseltine book, for which his publishers clamored. He never intended to continue the Haseltine series now that he had an income again, but the Haseltine habit proved too strong to break. He had written three Haseltine books a year for so many years that he automatically wrote about the daring lieutenant whether he meant to or not.

  He wondered what his friends would say if they knew he was the author of the Haseltine books. He wondered what the mousy women would make of that intrepid officer.

  Chuckling at the thought, he started up the corridor. A cup of coffee in the club car would help while away the time.

  He stopped suddenly in front of the water cooler, and stared reflectively at the “Out of Order” sign dangling from the faucet lever.

  That, he reflected, was odd. It hadn’t been out of order when the mousy woman was getting her drink a few minutes before.

  Then it occurred to him that he had not actually seen her either getting the drink or in the act of drinking. He had taken that for granted. As a matter of fact, the woman had just been sort of fumbling around.

  And the top layer of discarded cups was curiously dry and unsullied.

  Why, Leonidas wondered, would the mousy woman wastefully strew dry cups around? Pique, possibly. Perhaps the mousy woman was wasting the Pullman Company’s cups in a spirit of revenge.

  “A mouse,” Leonidas murmured. “A mouse, gnawing at a mountain. M yes.”

  But if the woman was being vindictive, why hadn’t she made a clean sweep? There were still plenty of cups left up in the wall container.

  The pince-nez described a series of small circles while Leonidas swung them and pondered.

  Now that he considered the situation, that gasp had been more in the nature of a guilty start than an exclamation of amazement at his appearance. Perhaps his looking and not his looks had prompted that gasp and that flight.

  Leonidas fixed his attention on the top layer of paper cups. When you took the trouble to camouflage the top of anything, you usually wished to hide what was at the bottom. At Meredith’s, he had learned to be suspicious of unduly neat top layers in his weekly inspection of dormitory bureau drawers. A brisk fishing invariably brought to light any number of strange and illicit objects, like those famous stink bombs of Hartley Minor’s.

  Leaning forward, Leonidas fished.

  With a gleam in his blue eyes, he extricated Miss Chard’s brown paper package.

  Obviously, by the feel of it, the package contained neither stolen emeralds nor a handful of secret treaties. But if the contents included what Leonidas guessed they did, then he had erred in his judgments concerning the activities of mousy women who traveled. He had underestimated them, definitely.

  Back inside his drawing room, Leonidas discovered that he had guessed correctly. Under the brown paper wrapping there was a gun, a small but sinister-looking revolver. And, in addition to the gun, there was also a pair of sleek and shining handcuffs.

  After gazing at them for a critical moment, Leonidas replaced the wrapping, tied up the package, and returned it to its former hiding place at the base of the water cooler. Guns and handcuffs played no part in his life. He had no use for them, nor any desire to become involved in difficult explanations, should anyone in authority demand them and start asking questions.

  Besides, he felt there was more chance of his curiosity being satisfied by replacing the package, and waiting to see what would happen next.

  For he was positive that the mousy woman would return. From his infinite experience with them, he knew that mousy women made a fetish of Making Sure. He had seen them open pocketbooks twenty times in five minutes to make sure that their tickets were safe. On train platforms, in customs sheds, on wharves, he had watched mousy women constantly unlocking suitcases and pawing through trunks to make sure that their possessions were where they had been put.

  Because she had been observed, this mousy woman with the braid would certainly come back and check up on her brown paper package, the minute the coast was clear. She would employ the interval by telling herself reassuringly that the man who looked like Shakespeare had not seen a thing, and that he would have made some other comment if he had. But she would never be able to restrain herself from coming back and making sure. Sooner or later, she would return.

  Leonidas wedged his drawing room door open to a thin crack, and sat down to await developments. It exasperated him somewhat to think that at the end of his journey, with only three-quarters of an hour to go, something mildly akin to adventure should at last turn up.

  The chatty young man walked rather hurriedly past the door. He was followed by a porter, and a querulous man in magenta pajamas, who was complaining bitterly that he hadn’t slept a wink.

  They, however, all came from Car Nine, and the mousy woman ought to be coming the other way, from Car Ten.

  The rush and roar of a passing train drowned out all other sounds, and in the flickering slits of light as the cars slatted past, Leonidas nearly mis
sed the flash of gray past his door. For a puzzled moment, he wondered if he had imagined it.

  A series of clinks as something metallic dropped on the corridor floor brought him to his feet.

  He had known, Leonidas told himself with satisfaction, that she would come back. She was the type.

  But in the doorway, he stopped short.

  It was not the mousy woman who knelt on her hands and knees on the floor. It was a strikingly beautiful girl in a gray suit who peered up at him, and smiled disarmingly.

  “You’ve dropped something?” Leonidas inquired.

  “Practically everything,” the girl said. “A cigarette case, and a lighter, and a lipstick, and— Oh, here’s the case. Is that the lipstick in that crack by you?”

  Obligingly, Leonidas got down on all fours and hunted in the crack.

  “Here’s the lighter,” the girl said. “I’ve found the lighter. Oh, damn, I hate losing that lipstick! It’s my pet lipstick. I suppose it’s rolled around and got stuck under— Oh, porter! Do you see my lipstick anywhere?”

  The porter joined their crablike scramble around the narrow corridor, a sight which enchanted the chatty young man when he returned once again to Car Nine.

  “Playing leapfrog?” he asked genially. “Can anyone join? Oh, you’ve lost something. I see. Well, if the lady in gray will rise and give me her place, old Hawk-eye will find it. Move over, Shakespeare.”

  Another porter co-operated, and so did the train conductor and the Pullman conductor. But it was Leonidas who eventually found the lipstick at the far end of the corridor, imbedded under the linoleum by the entrance door.

  “You’re wonderful!” the girl said. “You’ve all been simply marvelous, and I can’t begin to tell you all how grateful I am! Really, you—”

  Long before she finished her speech of thanks, the group was glowing with pleasure and good fellowship, and the feeling that they had all been of tremendous service in an undertaking of major importance.

  All, that is, except Leonidas.