Mignon Eberhart - Wolf in Man’s Clothing

“Certainly not,” I said. “If I had, I’d have told you so. This is nothing to me, any of it. I’m a nurse here. I arrived today-that is, yesterday afternoon. I…”

“Yes, I know,” he said. “You and Miss Drue Cable, who was formerly married to Craig Brent.”

I caught my breath so hard that I nearly choked myself trying to conceal it. “Yes. Some time ago. That has naturally nothing to do with…”

“They were divorced last year. You were the first to find Mr. Brent, is that right?”

Dr. Chivery passed his hand over his forehead and thin hair and I said cautiously, “It’s as I told you. He was dead when I reached him.”

“Yes, I know,” said the Lieutenant. “But how did you happen to find him? You were upstairs in your patient’s room, weren’t you?”

I had seen it coming but was still unprepared and it put me on what I believe is called the spot. If Peter Huber hadn’t seen Drue with me, leaning over Conrad Brent-but he had. I said very carefully, “I thought I heard a kind of call of help. Miss Cable must have heard something, too. But we could do nothing for him. Then-then Peter Huber came running down the stairs, too. He had heard the same thing, I imagine. I sent him to telephone for the doctor…”

“Why?”

“For the death certificate, naturally. Miss Cable went back upstairs to our patient” (I was rather pleased with the implication of that) “and I stayed here. But there was nothing I could do. And then all at once there was a loud noise.” Suddenly, I remembered that no one had inquired about that, yet almost certainly it was the thing that had roused Maud and Nicky and Alexia.

“Noise? What was it?”

“I don’t know. It sounded as if the house was coming down.” I was anxiously making a clean breast of everything I could and hoping desperately to divert his inquiry from Drue. “Peter Huber ran upstairs to see what it was. I ran after him, but when I got upstairs he had disappeared and I was afraid that-that something had happened to my patient…”

“Something had happened to him? What do you mean?”

“N-nothing. Naturally he was on my mind. And I was right, because when I got to his room he wasn’t there. Miss Cable had found him, though; he had apparently got up and put on a dressing gown and started downstairs and fallen. We got him back to bed.”

“Where was he when you found him?”

I told him briefly.

“But I thought he was drugged.”

“He was,” said Dr. Chivery suddenly. “He is. But nothing is so variable as a drug plus a bit of temperature with a man like Craig. He probably got some fuzzy notion of something going on and fainted on the way downstairs.”

The Lieutenant (Nugent his name was, I learned later; just Nugent; if he had a Christian name he kept it a secret) looked at Claud Chivery. “He had had a quarrel with his father, hadn’t he, Doctor?”

Dr. Chivery looked up quickly and uneasily; he looked terribly tired, his eyes swollen and the nervous lines deep and gray in his troubled face with its receding chin. “Why-why, no,” he said. “That is, in the past perhaps, yes. But not…”

“You’d better know, Dr. Chivery, just where we stand,” said Nugent, suddenly. “You-and everyone here told me a story about that shooting business the other night that frankly, Doctor, was phony.”

“Lieutenant Nugent…” began Claud Chivery, rising indignantly.

“Well, it seemed so to me. But, as things were, my hands were tied. If Craig Brent died I intended to start an investigation into murder…”

“Murder…” said Dr. Chivery in a high protesting voice, his little hands tremulous.

“… if he didn’t die I intended to insist upon his preferring charges. But yesterday, while he was so heavily drugged as to be entirely unconscious, there was nothing I could do. I couldn’t even question him. Now, you see, I’m going to.”

“But-but it wasn’t Craig that died. It’s Conrad…”

“Exactly,” said Lieutenant Nugent, cutting off Chivery’s fluttering expostulation. “Could Craig Brent have walked down here to the library, poisoned his father and walked back upstairs and collapsed there in the storeroom…”

“Linen room,” I said.

“… where he was found?”

“ Poisoned !” cried Chivery shrilly, his uneasy face turning gray. “That’s horrible! I tell you Conrad died a perfectly natural death. I’ll do an autopsy. And your medical examiner can help me. But mark my words we’ll find he died of a heart attack-and anyway…” his nervous eyes darted about the library, toward the desk, toward the sofa, anywhere but at the Lieutenant. “Anyway, Craig shot himself! Accidentally. Why-even you cannot believe that there are two murderers here in this house…”

“Unless Craig shot himself for that very reason,” said Lieutenant Nugent watching Chivery’s frightened, uneasy face.

“Shot himself-oh, I see! To make it look as if somebody else tried to kill him and then succeeded in killing his father? To establish a kind of alibi before the deed? Why, that’s preposterous, Lieutenant! That’s absurd! Ha, ha, ha,” again it was meant to be a laugh and sounded like anything else in the world.

And I said, “But he does have an alibi. Craig, I mean. I am it.” Both men looked at me. “I was in the room. I would have known if he had moved. He didn’t.”

There was a moment of silence. Chivery hadn’t looked quite at me, just at my left ear. Nugent jerked his head toward one of the two waiting-and intently listening-policemen. “Telephone Dr. Marrow,” he said. “Get him over here at once.” One of the troopers vanished.

Claud Chivery said slowly, “Conrad must have just got back from his walk. He went for a walk every night. About eleven. Said it made him sleep. Walked very slowly…”

Nugent said abruptly, “That’s all now, Nurse.” He was bending over Conrad again when I left-trying not to run.

No one was in the hall. Claud Chivery, I think, closed the door behind me. At the stair landing I stopped, looked quickly around, saw no one and plunged my hand under the ferns. The syringe was not there.

I looked and looked and still it wasn’t there. The only possible conclusion was that someone had seen me hide it and had taken it away.

There’s no use in trying to describe my feelings. Naturally, it wasn’t myself I cared about; it was Drue, whom I had delivered into the hands of her enemies-if, that is, Alexia or Nicky had taken the syringe. Or even Maud; there was a look in her dark eyes that suggested depths and no way to tell what kind of depths-true or false, as the radio programs put it.

All three of them-Alexia, Nicky and Maud-had passed that fern on their way upstairs; Peter Huber also could have taken it. Or Beevens, presupposing eyes in the back of his head, for he certainly had not turned while I hid it.

The library door was visible from the landing, and it had been open when I came downstairs; but I had seen no one, for I had looked.

Eventually, hearing steps coming from the end of the hall beyond the stairs (where there proved to be a tiny telephone room, and a hall going to the back stairs and kitchen regions) and guessing correctly that it was a trooper, I had to give up. I trudged up the remaining stairs with a heavy and a troubled heart. Murder is no pleasant thing, and I kept seeing Drue’s face-so young and so lovely, with the childish, honest curve of her young mouth, and the look in her eyes when she’d lifted them to mine and said, “I’ve only tonight.”

And I had to tell her what I had done.

She was sitting by the bed when I entered Craig’s room; her eyes leaped to mine. Craig was unconscious, asleep, I thought; his pulse was all right; the wound hadn’t opened and she had sterilized and dressed the bloody bruise on his temple so a neat patch of surgical dressing and adhesive adorned it. I beckoned Drue into the dressing room and told her everything, except that the syringe was gone-quickly whispering, hating to see the color drain out of her lips when I told her the police were there.