The Case of the Crumpled Knave Read online

  The Case of the Crumpled Knave

  A Fergus O’Breen Mystery

  Anthony Boucher

  For

  PHYLLIS WHITE

  AT LAST

  The characters, events, and institutions (with the exceptions of the United States Army and the Los Angeles Police Department) of this novel are completely fictional and have no reference to actual people or occurrences.

  Characters

  HUMPHREY GARNETT

  retired research chemist

  KAY GARNETT

  his daughter

  ARTHUR WILLOWE

  his brother-in-law

  WILL HARDING

  his laboratory assistant

  CAMILLA SALLICE

  his protégée

  COLONEL THEODORE RAND (U. S. A., retired)

  his friend

  RICHARD VINTON

  film actor, engaged to Kay Garnett

  MAX FARRINGTON

  lawyer

  MAURICE WARRINER

  museum curator

  DETECTIVE LIEUTENANT A. JACKSON

  of the Los Angeles Police

  FERGUS O’BREEN

  private investigator

  Contents

  PROLOGUE

  I

  LE PENDU

  II

  ARTHUR WILLOWE PLAYS SOLITAIRE

  III

  HUMPHREY GARNETT EXPOUNDS A PARABLE

  IV

  COLONEL RAND REREADS A TELEGRAM

  THE CASE

  I

  COLONEL RAND TAKES A TAXI

  II

  LIEUTENANT JACKSON TELLS OF A MURDER

  III

  THE KNAVE OF DIAMONDS IS TAKEN PRISONER

  IV

  FERGUS IS SUMMONED

  V

  FERGUS TAKES OVER

  VI

  FERGUS HEARS THE FACTS

  VII

  WILL HARDING TALKS OF PEACE

  VIII

  ARTHUR WILLOWE IS NOT HELPFUL

  IX

  CAMILLA SALLICE REMEMBERS A MOTIVE

  X

  COLONEL RAND EXAMINES A TAROT

  XI

  PEOPLE TALK AT DINNER

  XII

  COLONEL RAND IS NOT A GENTLEMAN

  XIII

  COLONEL RAND HEARS THINGS GO BUMP IN THE NIGHT

  XIV

  FERGUS APOLOGIZES

  XV

  COLONEL RAND READS IN A MIRROR

  XVI

  FERGUS GOES ROWING

  XVII

  CAMILLA SALLICE TELLS TWO SECRETS

  XVIII

  MAURICE WARRINER RUNS

  XIX

  LIEUTENANT JACKSON ACCEPTS AN ALLY

  XX

  WILL HARDING IS SPECTACULAR

  XXI

  A ROOM IS SEALED

  XXII

  LIEUTENANT JACKSON CONSIDERS THE CASE CLOSED

  XXIII

  FERGUS GATHERS THE THREADS

  XXIV

  FERGUS TIES THE KNOT

  XXV

  COLONEL RAND DOES HIS DUTY

  XXVI

  THE CASE IS CLOSED

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  PROLOGUE

  I

  Le Pendu

  It was quite literally a matter of life and death; and his own death was not a pleasant thing to contemplate. Clearly the next step was to send the telegram. The affair might not come to a head for several days yet, but the telegram must be sent now.

  He broke off his incompleted game of patience (the knave of diamonds was hopelessly locked anyhow—a fact which pleased him ironically in view of what was to follow) and walked slowly around the room while he pondered the exact phrasing.

  He was alone now in the study. Outside the window he could glimpse the Verdugo hills, calmly beautiful in the winter sunlight. But in here he was alone with the oddly assorted library, the cryptic chemical notes, the table for four-handed chess, the superb collection of playing cards. It was, he mused characteristically, a good setting.

  He paused before a picture on the wall—an exquisite reproduction of one of the silver-gold tarot cards painted for Charles VI. They had always fascinated him, these tarots—dark symbols of an ancient mysticism, now lightly shuffled in a game of chance, but still strong with their old stark meaning. That was fitting for his plan—a daring, fantastic gamble with a core of desperate significance.

  He had it now. Swiftly he crossed to the telephone while the perfect formula was still sharp in his mind. He dialed operator and asked for Western Union.

  “I want to send a telegram,” he said, “to Colonel Theodore Rand.” He spelled out the name and added an address in a New York suburb.

  “And what is the message?” the flat voice asked.

  “COME TO LOS ANGELES AT ONCE STOP.” He spoke slowly and clearly. “FLY IF NECESSARY STOP.”

  The voice interrupted mechanically. “You do not need to send the word STOP. Punctuation is now transmitted free of charge.”

  “Send it anyway.” He smiled. “I like the effect.”

  “Very well, if you wish. It will count as a word. Is that all of the message?”

  “No.” His enunciation grew even sharper. “Add this. YOU MAY BE INVALUABLE WITNESS AT INQUEST ON MY BODY STOP.” The voice emitted a noise of quite unprofessional surprise. “WATCH HECTOR-H, E, C, T, O, R-CAREFULLY.” He added the signature and hung up without bothering to hear the message read back.

  He returned to the picture on the wall and allowed himself a moment of smiling pleasure. It was a curious omen to bless his telegram—the tarot known as Le Pendu … the Hanged Man.

  II

  Arthur Willowe Plays Solitaire

  Arthur Willowe was the least clever person in the Garnett household. Everyone admitted that, including Willowe himself. Some of them were nice about it—Kay, for example, who loved him because he was her mother’s brother, and never paused to remember that his lack of cleverness had killed her mother. Others were not so nice about it—for instance, the dominant ruler of the household, Humphrey Garnett himself, to whom forgiving and forgetting were as in-alterably alien as an error in a chess game.

  Thus loved or hated, Willowe always felt self-consciously unclever. He was out of place in this room, with its monuments to ingenuity—the cabinet of rare playing cards, the desk crammed with chemical formulae, the table especially designed for that arcane mystery known as four-handed chess. So he sat unobtrusively in a corner and played solitaire.

  The Garnett household went in for solitaire extensively. In any of the rooms you were apt to come across a low table and a worn pack or two for the use of anyone who wished to think out a problem to pasteboard accompaniment. But Arthur Willowe was unclever even in his choice of solitaires. Where the other men played the Zodiac or the Salic Law or La Nivernaise (elaborate involutions demanding two or more packs and a planned campaign as complex as a chess problem), Willowe contented himself with one pack and Klondike or Canfield, and lost even those with a persistence which would have cruelly disheartened anyone who laid a serious claim to an ingenious mind.

  It was probably those two interrelated factors—devotion to solitaire and lack of cleverness—which made Arthur Willowe acutely aware of the impending murder.

  He would not have put it so sharply as that himself. It was simply that there was a tension in the household, a tension so strong that it must inevitably be loosed by one hard moment of violence.

  He noticed it first in the afternoon. He had tired of Canfield and was deciding to try Klondike for a change. He had just laid out the stock and the starter when his brother-in-law came in to telephone. Humphrey Garnett didn’t look in the corner. People had a way of not looking at him, Willowe thought;
he could commit a neat murder in a crowded room and afterwards twenty people would swear they hadn’t seen him there. For a moment he sat wondering at himself for thinking of such a strange thing as murder; then he shrugged, and his weary old hands laid out the four cards across.

  There was something of strength and efficiency in even the way Humphrey Garnett approached a telephone. There was not a waste movement of his compact muscles. The clicks of the dial were as sharp and regular as rifle practice. “Dr. White’s office,” Willowe heard him say.

  There was a pause, and Willowe moved a card or two fitfully. Then his brother-in-law’s vigorous voice cut across his thoughts. “White? Garnett speaking. Called to give you the weekly report. I’m still alive, and by God I love it.” His laughter was free and rough. “I’ll see you at your funeral, my fine threatening charlatan.”

  He hung up abruptly and dialed another number. “O’Breen?” There was a pause. “That you, O’Breen? Got that report for me?” A question at the other end seemed to interrupt him. “Damn it, man, what kind of a detective are you if you can’t recognize a voice on the phone? This is Garnett speaking. Go ahead.”

  He was silent for a while. Silent, that is, verbally; Willowe could hear an occasional grunt of restrained joy and once an outburst of triumphant laughter. “Fine,” Garnett said at last. “Good lad. Glad I took a chance on you. Call and see us sometime—as Kay’s friend, of course. Not a word about this. Meanwhile send me a copy of that and your bill. And you needn’t be too modest in your demands. God knows I couldn’t overpay you for this.”

  He set down the receiver and stretched his wiry arms in a broad gesture of malicious glee. Then he saw Willowe. The quiet old man cringed a little. He felt what was coming.

  Garnett walked slowly over to the table, contentedly rubbing a hairy wrist with an even hairier hand. “Don’t be afraid, Arthur,” he said with a curious harsh gentleness. “I’m not going to torment you. I’m not going to laugh at your piddling inefficiency. I’m not going to twit you for putting an eight on a ten. I’m not even going to mention automobiles or water hydrants.”

  Willowe’s armor was thin. He winced at the last words (blood and water … they mixed then, and the blood was as thin as the water … Alicia’s blood, thinly coursing …). He tried hopelessly to recover himself by moving the offending eight.

  “Of course,” Garnett meditated with tense humor, “we’ll have to wait until Rand has come. We couldn’t get rid of the bastard before then; the Colonel and I must have our four-handed chess, and small help you’d be, my dear Arthur, with your—But forgive me. I had intended not to waste my abuse on you. It’s bigger game I’m after now.”

  He said the words lightly, but Willowe felt a menace hid in their careless tone.

  “What do you think of Richard Vinton?” Garnett asked abruptly, with ironic stress on each syllable of the name.

  Willowe saw the young Englishman in his mind; but he was not alone. There was a bright, redheaded girl with him, and their eyes were alive at each other’s presence. “Kay loves him,” he answered simply.

  “Does she, Arthur? Does she now indeed? How I have underestimated you, Arthur! You’re really a most entertaining conversationalist.”

  The old man looked after Garnett in confusion. It had been a true and an obvious remark; he failed to understand its hidden humor. Why should a father find his daughter’s love so magnificently comic?

  Garnett was gone; but the room was still a sounding box for his vibrant laughter. And as Willowe listened to it, he began to understand. It was not the laughter of comedy.

  This odd episode, so meaningless and yet (to Willowe at least) so unnerving, forced the old man to observe Richard Vinton more carefully. He had never particularly noticed the young British actor before. In past years he had been alert to watch people and their oddities, and then talk them over with Alicia, to whom all things human were fascinating; but now …

  He knew that Vinton was engaged to Kay Garnett, that he stayed at the house a great deal (there was even a room set aside for him), and that Humphrey Garnett, heretofore at least, had always seemed to relish his company as that of an equal in ingenuity. He thought he remembered vaguely that the young man’s father, who bore some sort of British title, had been a crony of Garnett’s during war days in Washington. Aside from that, Vinton was nothing to him but a pleasant young man who was building himself quite a reputation as a screen juvenile.

  Now the young Briton seemed somehow more important. It was worth while distracting yourself from the cards to hear what he might say or what people might say to him.

  Arthur Willowe was thinking these random thoughts on the sun porch. The study, for him, still rang with Garnett’s throaty laughter; and the open air was a happier place. And so, because of these thoughts, he listened unseen when Kay and Vinton passed by him on their way from the garage to the front of the house.

  “I’ve been thinking, Richard, about what you told me the other night,” Kay was saying in her clear young voice.

  “Yes?” There was a painful hesitancy in that one clipped syllable.

  “I—You know, darling, it would be foolish to say it doesn’t matter to me. It does, of course. Everything about you has to matter, and matter terribly.” Her voice paused, and her footsteps too.

  “I understand,” Vinton murmured, so low that Willowe could scarcely hear him.

  “But it would be just as foolish to say that it made any real difference between us. I love you; and if you want to tell me things like that—why, it just proves how much you love me too. So thank you, dear—and that’s all.”

  They went on in silence, and Willowe resumed his patience and his thoughts. More and more Vinton seemed focal; there was even a Secret now. Willowe capitalized the word in his thoughts. That made things more melodramatic and added fresh zest to this new game he had found to entertain him.

  The next move in the game was on the part of Will Harding—the pale, sandy, earnest young man who was Garnett’s laboratory assistant. He came out on the porch shortly after the voices ceased. He might even have seen the couple pass by; certainly his thoughts were fixed upon them.

  He spoke jerkily, as though forced despite himself. “Mr. Willowe …”

  Black seven on red eight. “Yes?” Fill the space from the stock.

  “What do you know about Richard Vinton?”

  That, Willowe thought to himself, is what people call a guilty start. But he looked unconcerned and said, “No more than you do, I suppose.” And he outlined what little he did know.

  “You think he’s—you know what I mean—all right?”

  “I think so.”

  The young man’s dull voice sounded troubled. “We don’t really know much about him, do we? And you hear so much about actors and the things that happen in the colony—”

  “If Kay trusts him, I imagine that we can. But why should it concern you so, Will?”

  “Why, I just mean—After all, he’s here so much, and he’s going to—I just couldn’t help wondering.”

  The words were so suspiciously indefinite that Willowe looked up from his game. For a moment he saw the young technician, whom he had always so envied for his unemotional efficiency, staring along the path by which the lovers had passed with something very close to fury in his gray eyes. It was only for a moment. Then he turned and regarded Willowe with so pacific and ordinary a gaze that the older man could scarcely trust that instant of memory.

  But the memory lingered nonetheless; and when the last member of the Garnett household came onto the porch some minutes later, he could not refrain from probing there, too. This careworn but still darkly beautiful girl was Camilla Sallice; and with her nothing was associated in Willowe’s mind—no facts, no feelings, only a dull resentment of her very presence. Who she was, where she came from, why she lived with them and called Garnett “Uncle Humphrey” (though Willowe knew the man had, apart from his daughter Kay, no living relatives)—none of these things was clear.

&n
bsp; She smiled at him—that curious smile so characteristic of her in its blend of tragedy and gaiety. “Would you like a cushion from the swing, Mr. Willowe? That chair looks frightfully hard.”

  “No, thank you,” he muttered ungraciously. That was one of the infuriating things about this girl. She wanted to be so much nicer to him than he had any intention of allowing her to be.

  “You don’t mind if I share the sun with you?”

  “No.” He waited a minute or two, while she settled herself on the chaise longue with a feline stretch of her supple body. Then he sprang his question, just as she seemed on the point of dozing. “And how well, Miss Sallice, do you know Richard Vinton?”

  She sat up sharply, flushed and almost a little frightened. For the moment she was too taken aback to say anything. He regretted that; for when she did speak, she had regained control of herself.

  “Quite as well as I care to,” she said calmly. “After all, Mr. Willowe, he is Kay’s.”

  Disgruntled, Willowe returned to the cards. But he had hardly dealt a fresh stock when Camilla Sallice added, with a quiet amusement which he failed to comprehend, “And what would you think of me as a blonde?”

  As Willowe shaved for dinner, with the cherished straight razor which Alicia had given him for his birthday the very week before—before the accident—he thought all these little items through. He had long felt terror in this house; that was nothing new. But he had always thought its menace directed at himself. He was mortally (even—he toyed with the word—immortally) afraid of Humphrey Garnett. He knew how Garnett hated him for Alicia’s accidental death (was it an accident? if he had not boastfully tried to drive when he knew he needed new glasses …) and he had gone in dread of impending revenge. It was a relief now to know that Garnett’s enmity, for the moment at least, was directed at another object.