The Classic Mystery Novel MEGAPACK®. Hay James
Читать онлайн книгу.
I wish you’d remember I’m in a hurry. I don’t propose to sit here the rest of the night.”
“By God…”
Harkway stepped hastily between the two angry men, but fortunately didn’t need to interfere. The emotional storm blew up and over. I caught Jack’s coat, and he got back into the car. He slammed the door himself. However much a nasty brawl might have lightened his spirits, he perceived it wouldn’t really clear the air, and also, on second thought, he disliked letting me in for it. He heaved a long, relinquishing sigh. Harkway flashed me a friendly grin, remounted his motorcycle, waved us on. Jack gripped the wheel, stamped on the starter and, until we reached Crockford, said nothing.
Every inch of space before our favorite grocery store was jammed. Jack pulled up abruptly on the other, darker side of Main Street beneath an enormous elm which shaded the Episcopal Church. He turned to me.
“Give me tomorrow’s grocery list, Lola.”
“What are you going to do?”
“A little shopping, and something else that badly needs doing. Give me the list, Lola.”
“What else?”
“You needn’t worry. Nothing is going to happen. Nothing serious. My passions have cooled somewhat.” Jack grinned. “However, I’m going to get rid of that oaf. In about five minutes I’m coming back with a double-armload of groceries; at which time I will tell Elmer Lewis that I can use the rumble seat for onions. He has arrived at the end of the line.”
Jack strode across the street. I, also, immediately departed. I wasn’t frightened any more, just relieved at the knowledge that soon we would see the last of Lewis. As I scrambled over his bag and under the wheel. I turned and hurriedly announced that I would wait in the drug store. I allowed him no chance for protest or questioning. My idea was that a scene was brewing and I desired no part in it.
The drug store was at the end of the block. Seated at a marble-topped table I consumed a chocolate sundae and watched the door, anxious to receive the welcome news that the incubus had been lifted. Five minutes dragged by. Like a tediously turning wheel my mind retraced the events of the evening. I recalled my earlier conviction that the voice which demanded our appearance in New Haven had been disguised.
Something about the voice troubled me—something elusive as a shadow. What was it? Suddenly I grasped the shadow. Lewis’s voice and the voice of the telephone were not the same!
It was not Lewis who had telephoned Jack, but someone else, someone who had said that he was Lewis.
Check unpaid, gloves left behind, in flying haste I quit the drug store. Nearly a block distant on the opposite side of the street was Hahneman’s Fancy Grocery, an old-fashioned emporium with a wide porch elevated from the sidewalk. Laden with packages Jack was descending the steps, trailed by a grocery boy with additional packages. Risking traffic, I darted into the middle of the street. Jack spied me and paused at the curb until, gasping, I reached him. “Lola, for heaven’s sake…”
“Lewis didn’t phone you! I know he didn’t. It was someone else—a different voice.”
Jack shook his head in a pitying way. “Your imagination may bring in an occasional check, but it’s hell on a husband’s nervous system. Suppose Lewis didn’t phone. Couldn’t he have a secretary and couldn’t he ask his secretary to make the call?”
I was flattened. The natural explanation had quite escaped me; it had remained for Jack to point it out. The three of us. Jack, Dennis Cark, the grocery boy, and I, crossed to the parked car. Lewis sat stiffly in the rumble seat—stiffly, motionlessly, in the gloom of the great elm—and then the beams of passing headlights illuminated seat and passenger. There was a dark wet patch on the upholstery; there was a dark wet patch on Lewis’s coat.
“That’s blood,” said Dennis Cark, and stopped beside me.
Jack sprang forward and leaped to the running board. The groceries spilled from his arms to the street. He bent over. His voice seemed queer and high.
“Stay back, Lola. This man is dead.”
“Dead.”
“He’s been shot.” Jack straightened. “I—I can’t find a gun. It looks like murder.”
CHAPTER THREE
Discovered in the Rumble Seat
I don’t remember a great deal about the next few minutes. There was a roaring in my ears, and I had a hazy impression that if I didn’t snap out of it, I was going to disgrace myself and faint. A crowd—one of those crowds which seems to materialize from nowhere—instantly collected, and Jack, to be counted on always in emergency, clung to the running board and shouted at them to stand back from the car.
To me he said, “Get the police.”
Something—his tone perhaps, the knowledge of what he expected of me—carried me down the block to the house where the village police chief lived. John Standish was sitting down to his evening meal when I burst in on him. He was a bulky, middle-aged man, and though he rose at once from the table, he seemed, in my excited state, intolerably slow. I know he made me wait while he went upstairs for his hat and coat.
Not until we were on the street did I appreciate how his calmness had steadied me. His manner, as I was to discover, was all a trick. But I was prepared to like John Standish. Curiously, it did not occur to me to consider him as a possible source of danger to me and mine.
The crowd had thickened around the car, and traffic was snarled in the street beyond. Two constables—whom Standish had phoned from the house—were attempting to rope off the place. The police chief pushed through. He explored the car, the rumble seat, the adjacent pavement and studied the body before he turned to Jack.
“It’s murder, all right,” he said. “Suppose you tell me all about it.”
“I hardly know where to begin.”
“Begin,” suggested Standish, “by telling me who shot this man.”
“I wish,” said Jack in a thin, tired voice, “I could. Unfortunately I wasn’t present when the murder occurred.”
Standish frowned. “Where were you?”
“In the grocery store across the street, shopping. My wife was at the drug store. Lewis was alone in the car.”
“How long was he alone?”
“Ten minutes at the most. Immediately I got back and discovered what had happened, my wife went for you.”
“Lewis? You say his name was Lewis?”
“Elmer Lewis. He was a friend of my landlady’s—Mrs. Luella Coatesnash. I picked him up in the New Haven station this afternoon.”
“Where did he come from? What’s his home address? Who’s his nearest relative?”
For the first time and with a certain inward shock, I realized the paucity of our knowledge concerning Elmer Lewis. I saw Jack hesitate. Then he plunged into a lengthy account of the phone-call episode. As if suddenly aware of the many eager listeners, Standish broke into the story and looked around. Umbrellas filled the sidewalk and the street, overflowed into the Episcopal churchyard and bobbed on the church steps like tiny tents in a mushroom city.
Turning from Jack, the police chief put a few general questions. Had anyone noticed the car during the interval when Jack and I were gone? No one had. Had anyone heard a shot? Again no one had. This was not surprising. The physical conditions, the weather, even the deserted spot where we had parked the car, presented an almost perfect set of circumstances for tragedy. The din of Friday-night traffic, the honking and the backfiring, would screen the sound of a shot, and stragglers hurrying through the rain would be too intent on keeping dry to observe with any interest a little gray car lost in the broad, thick shadows of the great elm.
It next occurred to Standish that someone in the crowd might be acquainted with the victim. A