Rex Stout - Double for Death

“Didn’t you go ashore?”

“No. On that boat I can forget the world and give my nerves a rest. We didn’t leave the boat until this afternoon, after the thunderstorm. We were anchored in a little cove on Long Island. When the storm was over we chugged down to Port Jefferson and went ashore — I was intending to get back to business — and the first thing I saw was big headlines about the investigation of my murder. I would have had to wait an hour for a train, so I got the police and told them I wanted a fast car. They didn’t want to believe me and I suppose I can’t blame them. Here I am.”

He looked at his children. “I’m sorry you had this shock, Miranda. You too, Jeffrey. But you’ve had the advantage of reading my will. It treats you fairly, doesn’t it?”

“Perfectly.” Miranda’s gaze hadn’t left him once. “But I knew it would. More than one shock, though. Two. The first one was — shocking. This is shattering.”

“Of course it is. You were a multimillionaire in your own right. Now you have to go back to pestering Vaughn to watch for a good moment to get my consent to an extra twenty thous—”

“I didn’t mean that, Father. I only meant it’s a shattering surprise.”

“It is. Yes,” Jeffrey muttered.

“Yes, my boy, you too. Shattering. Well, I’m not dead. By the way, where in the name of heaven is Vaughn? I read a paper on the way here. And you’re District Attorney Derwin, investigating my murder. Good gracious, it’s a fantastic mess! Have the meddling stopped at once. I don’t want an army of people — Here, give me that phone.”

“Just a minute.” Derwin dropped into his chair and got his hand on the phone. He turned: “Is your name Henry Jordan?”

“Yes, sir.” Jordan’s deep-set grey eyes were level and his tone quiet and composed.

“What’s your occupation?”

“I’m a retired ship’s officer.”

“Where do you live?”

“914 Island Street, City Island.”

“How long have you lived there?”

“Five years. Ever since I retired.”

“Do you corroborate what this man has said?”

“I do.”

“Is he Ridley Thorpe, the financier and corporation executive?”

“He is.”

“How long have you known him?”

“Seven years. I first met him when I was purser on the Cedric and he was a passenger.”

Derwin snapped at Ben Cook, “Send a man to City Island to check it. Got the address?” Cook nodded and tramped out. Derwin turned to Miranda:

“How sure are you that this man is your father?”

“Completely. Of course he is.”

He shifted to Jeffrey. “Are you sure too?”

Jeffrey nodded without taking his eyes from the ghost.

“You are?” Derwin insisted.

“Certainly I am. Wouldn’t I be?”

“I’m asking. You were sure that the body you saw was your father’s.”

“I wasn’t asked if I was sure. I didn’t — there was no reason to doubt it. It looked like him — only — it was a body. This is my father, alive.”

The district attorney regarded him glumly, then slowly transferred the regard, first to his sister, then to Henry Jordan and last to his ghost.

“I would say,” he growled, “that fantastic mess is a damn mild term for it. I’ll want a signed statement from you, Mr. Thorpe, and copies of it will be furnished to the press. From you also, Mr. Jordan. God, what an uproar—” He looked at the phone, his hand still clutching it, in sour distaste, lifted it and clapped it to his ear, and told the transmitter:

“Get Colonel Brissenden. He’s somewhere in New York, probably at the Thorpe residence. Find him. Send in a couple of men, whoever’s out there. As soon as I’m through with Colonel Brissenden I want Joe Bradley...”

Nine minutes later the radio had it. Long waves, short waves, old-fashioned sound waves, undulated and quivering with it. City editors shouted it and telephone wires let it pass, and swift rumor distorted it. From different spots in New York, three newsreel trucks headed north almost simultaneously. At a water-front dock at Port Jefferson a policeman on guard arrested a man for swiping a cushion from the cockpit of the Armada for a souvenir...

In the district attorney’s office at White Plains, Derwin was desperately mopping his face with a wet handkerchief and trying to handle with official calm an utterly preposterous situation, Ridley Thorpe, with his friend Henry Jordan at his elbow, was carefully dictating a statement to a stenographer whose hand was trembling with excitement, Miranda was deliberately and effectively using a compact, and Jeffrey was sunk in his chair, scowling with compressed lips, when the door opened for a state trooper to usher in three men. Vaughn Kester, in front, looked pale, exhausted and tense; Luke Wheer’s eyes were threatening to pop entirely out; Tecumseh Fox’s apparel was untidy and his face exasperated, but his step was still quick and light and might even have been called jaunty.

Derwin jumped up and started to bark at the trooper, “Didn’t I tell — take them outside and—”

But that was beyond his handling too. Bedlam intervened, everyone joining in. Luke and Kester saw their employer and made for him. Miranda exclaimed something at Kester. Jeffrey leaped for Luke and got him by the arm and shouted at him. Fox stood aside, taking it in. Derwin abandoned official calm completely and barked helplessly.

Ridley Thorpe’s voice finally emerged from the confusion: “I tell you we were on the Long Island shore all the time! You should have found us Monday! Inexcusable incompetence—”

Miranda: “But Vaughn, why didn’t you—”

Jeffrey: “What happened, Luke, damn it?

What—”

Kester: “I did my very best, sir—”

Luke: “I told Mr. Kester we ought—”

Derwin: “I tell you I want—”

A baritone claimed the air and got it: “Everybody, please!” Tecumseh Fox, among them, got Kester’s arm and turned him. “Is this Mr. Thorpe?”

“Yes, I’m trying to tell him—”

“Quiet, Vaughn. Who are you?”

“I’m Tecumseh Fox. Kester hired me to help him find you. The district attorney—”

“I want—”

“I know you do, Mr. Derwin. You’ll have to take what you get. From me would be the quickest. Did you take my tip and buy Thorpe Control on the drop?”

“What the devil—”

“All right, I’ll rub it in some other time. Andrew Grant’s statement that he saw Ridley Thorpe listening to band music on the radio at the Dick Barry hour suggested to you that Grant was lying. To me it suggested that it wasn’t Ridley Thorpe he saw, neither then alive nor later dead. I got an item relayed to Dick Barry for his broadcast last night, as bait. I got a nibble from Vaughn Kester. Has Mr. Thorpe explained to you where he was and about his stand-in?”

“I have,” Thorpe cut in, “and you’re not—”

“I’m at bat, Mr. Thorpe — Kester phoned me at three o’clock this morning and I met him, and Luke Wheer was with him. Luke, entrusted with guarding the secret that the man at the bungalow was not really Thorpe, got panicky when the man was murdered and ran. He didn’t even know where Thorpe was. He got in touch with Kester and they hid out to get time to consider the situation. Kester did know that Thorpe was supposed to be somewhere, probably on Long Island Sound, with Henry Jordan in his boat. But he didn’t know precisely where. He didn’t even know positively that it wasn’t Thorpe who had been killed, in spite of Luke’s assurance that it was the stand-in; Kester wasn’t absolutely sure of what had happened and couldn’t be sure until he found Thorpe. He and Luke tried it; they were afraid to hire a boat, so they worked along the shore. Late last night they were on a pier at Huntington when they heard, on a radio on a boat anchored nearby, Dick Barry broadcasting the item I had got to him. That scared them and Kester phoned me, and I met them.”