Rex Stout - Cordially Invited to Meet Death

I asked Janet, “What’s eating him?”

“Well,” she said, “after all, you are a detective. And his aunt has died — terrible, it was terrible—”

“Sure. If you want to call that grief. What was the crack about three per cent?”

“Oh...” She hesitated. “But there’s nothing secret about it, goodness knows. Miss Huddleston’s affairs are tangled up. Everybody thought she was rich, but apparently she spent it as fast as she made it.”

“Faster, if the creditors are going to get three percent.” I got started towards the terrace, and she came beside me. “In that case, the brother and the nephew are out of luck. I apologize to Larry. He’s probably overcome by grief, after all.”

“That’s a mean thing to say,” Janet protested.

“Then I take it back.” I waved it away. “Let’s talk about something else.”

I was thinking the best plan was to sit with her on the terrace, with the idea of getting her to leave me alone there for a few minutes, which was all I needed, but the hot noon sun was coming straight down, and she went on into the house with me behind her. She invited me to sit on a couch with her, but with the tools in my hip pockets I thought it was safer to take a chair facing her. We had a conversation.

Of course the simplest thing would have been to tell her what I wanted to do and then go ahead and do it, and I deny that it was any suspicion of her, either as a letter writer or as a murderess, that kept me from doing that. It was the natural desire I had not to hurt her feelings by letting her know that my real purpose in coming was not just to see her. If things should develop it was good policy to have her friendly. So I played it for a solo. I was thinking it was about time to get on with it, and was figuring out an errand for her, preferably upstairs, that would be sure to keep her five minutes, when suddenly I saw something through the window that made me stare.

It was Daniel Huddleston on the terrace with a newspaper bundle under his arm and a long-bladed knife in one hand and a garden trowel in the other!

I stood up to see better.

“What is it?” Janet asked, and stood up too. I shushed her and whispered in her ear, “First lesson for a detective. Don’t make any noise.”

Brother Daniel stopped near the center of the terrace, in front of the swing, knelt down on a flagstone, deposited the newspaper bundle and some folded newspapers beside him, and the trowel, and plunged the knife into the strip of turf at the edge of the flagstone. There was nothing furtive about it; he didn’t do any glancing over his shoulder, but he worked fast. With the trowel he scooped out a hunk of the turf, the width of the strip, about six inches long and three inches deep, and rolled it in a piece of newspaper. Then a second one, to the right of the first hole, and then a third one, to the left, wrapping each separately.

“What on earth does he think he’s doing?” Janet whispered. I squeezed her arm.

He was about done. Opening the package he had brought with him, he produced three strips of turf the size and shape of those he had just dug out, fitted them into the trench he had made, pressed them with his foot until they were level with the flagstone, remade the package with the three hunks he had removed, and the knife and trowel, and went off as if he were bound somewhere.

I took Janet’s hand and gave her an earnest eye. “Listen, girlie,” I said, “my one fault is curiosity. Otherwise I am perfect. Don’t forget that. It’s time for your lunch anyway.”

She said something to my back as I made for the door. I emerged onto the terrace cautiously, slid across and into the hedge of shrubbery, made a hole and looked through. Daniel was forty paces away, going across the lawn not in the direction of the drive where my car was but the other way, off to the right. I decided to give him another twenty paces before emerging, and it was well that I did, for suddenly a voice sounded above me:

“Hey, Uncle Dan! Where you going?”

Daniel stopped in his tracks and whirled. I twisted my neck, and through the leaves got a glimpse of Larry’s head sticking out of an upper window, and Maryella’s beside it.

Larry shouted, “We need you!”

“See you later!” Daniel yelled.

“But it’s time for lunch!” Maryella called.

“See you later!” Daniel turned and was off.

“Now that’s a performance,” Maryella said to Larry.

“Cuckoo,” Larry declared.

Their heads went in. But they might still have been looking out, so I scooted along the side of the house to the corner, and from there circled wide around evergreens and similar obstructions before swinging into the direction Daniel had taken. He wasn’t in sight. This part of the premises was new to me, and the first thing I knew I ran smack into the fence in the middle of a thicket. I couldn’t fight my way through on account of noise, so I doubled around, dashed along the edge of the thicket, and pretty soon hit a path. No sight of Daniel. The path took me to a series of stone steps up a steep bank, and up I went. Getting to the top, I saw him. A hundred feet ahead was a gate in the fence, and he was shutting the gate and starting down a lane between rows of little trees. The package was under his arm. In a way I was more interested in the package than I was in him. What if he threw it down a sewer? So I closed up more than I would have for an ordinary tailing job, and proceeding through the gate, followed him down the lane. At the end of the lane, not far ahead, he stopped, and I dived into the trees.

He had stopped at a curb, a paved street. The way cars were rolling by, apparently it was a main traffic street; and that point was settled when a double-decker bus jerked to a stop right square in front of Daniel, and he climbed on and off the bus went.

I hotfooted it to the corner. It was Marble Avenue. Riverdale is like that. The bus was too far away to read its number, and no taxi was in sight in either direction. I stepped into the street, into the path of the first car coming, and held up a commanding palm. By bad luck it was occupied by the two women that Helen Hokinson used for models, but there was no time to pick and choose. I hopped into the back seat, gave the driver a fleeting glimpse of my detective license, and said briskly:

“Police business. Step on it and catch up with a bus that’s ahead.”

The one driving emitted a baby scream. The other one said, “You don’t look like a policeman. You get out. If you don’t we’ll drive to a police station.”

“Suit yourself, madam. While we sit and talk the most dangerous gangster in New York is escaping. He’s on the bus.”

“Oh! He’ll shoot at us.”

“No. He isn’t armed.”

“Then why is he dangerous?”

“For God’s sake,” I reached for the door latch, “I’ll take a car with a man in it!”

But the car started forward. “You will not,” the driver said fiercely. “I’m as good a driver as any man. My husband says so.”

She was okay at that. Within a block she had it up to fifty, and she was good at passing, and it wasn’t long before we caught up with the bus. At least, a bus. When it stopped at a corner I told her to get alongside, which she did neatly, and with my hand over my face I looked for him and there he was.

“I’m shadowing him,” I told the ladies. “I think he’s on his way to meet a crooked politician. The first empty taxi we see you can let me out if you want to, but of course he might suspect a taxi, whereas he never would suspect a car like this with two good-looking well-dressed women in it.”

The driver looked grim. “In that case,” she declared, “it is our duty.”

And by gum she crawled along behind that bus for a good three-quarters of an hour, to Riverside Drive, the whole length of the Drive, over to Broadway, and on downtown. I thought the least I could do was furnish diversion, which I did with tales of my experiences with gangsters and kidnappers and so forth. When Daniel was still on the bus after crossing 42nd Street I decided in disgust that he was probably bound for Headquarters, and I was so deeply considering the feasibility of intercepting him before he got there that I nearly missed it when he hopped to the sidewalk at 34th Street. Paying the ladies with thanks and a cordial smile, I jumped out and dodged through the midday shopping mob, and almost lost him. I picked him up going west on 34th.