The Classic Mystery Novel MEGAPACK®. Hay James
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to on the phone said he was Lewis, but later on when I met Lewis I decided he wasn’t the person who phoned. Lewis’s voice was different, higher, more nasal, much thinner.”
“Why do you say you spoke to Lewis’s secretary?”
“Simply because I imagined…”
“Let me provide the imagination; you stick to facts.” The officer brusquely moved his chair toward mine. “Now, Mrs. Storm, please be exact. When you spoke to the New York operator this afternoon did you hear any mention of an exchange? Did you hear coins dropping—we might learn in that way whether a public phone was used—did you hear any scrap of conversation which might help us fix the locality where the call originated?”
“No,” I said.
“Will you tell exactly what you did hear?”
I started bravely, came to an awful pause. At that unpropitious moment an appalling thought occurred to me. I realized that at no time had I heard a woman’s voice. Yet telephone operators—and an operator would necessarily put through a long-distance call—are invariably feminine.
In the growing silence I re-checked my findings; the results remained the same; the phone call stood forth in sickening detail. The words, the accents, the voice, particularly the voice. The male voice which informed me that New York was calling, the male voice which requested Jack.
“Have you remembered something, Mrs. Storm?”
“I’m afraid I have.” My heart knocked painfully. “Aren’t telephone operators always women?”
“I suppose so…of course…I never knew of a male operator at a central exchange. Why do you ask?”
Standish’s face grew cold. Jack’s bewildered. Both stared. Except tor the crackle of the fire, the room was still.
“The phone call,” I said, “might not have come from New York. I didn’t hear a phone operator, so there’s no proof it did. None at all.”
“But. Lola, you told me…”
“Be quiet, please. I was mistaken—tricked. I believe now. I was meant to think it was a New York call; I did think it. Quit staring, you two. This is no fun for me.”
I was on the point of hysterics, and both men perceived it. Standish harrumphed Jack moved closer to me; his eyes said, Steady girl, steady. He put his hand on my arm. Then I had to behave With a definite effort of will I gave a full account of the phone call, straightforward, coherent—and, at any rate to Standish, unconvincing He soon made that clear.
“Am I to understand that you didn’t hear a long-distance operator?”
“That’s right.”
“Weren’t you suspicious when a male voice said New York was calling? Didn’t it occur to you that someone might be faking a long-distance call?”
“Not at the time. I had no reason to be suspicious. Can’t you see I hadn’t?”
The little try at extenuation fell flat. “Did you hear two voices, Mrs. Storm, or only one?”
“I can’t be sure. At the time I supposed there were two. But now I’m inclined to think there was only one.”
“Could you identify the voice you did hear?”
“I might identify it; I didn’t recognize it.” My next words were carefully chosen. “In fact, I had a definite impression that the voice was disguised.”
I had expected a reaction. I got none. From the amount of interest Standish exhibited, he might have believed the latter part of my statement to be a deliberate embellishment. I had got off to a wrong start. I did not know whether he thought my story of the telephone message was untrue or whether he thought it was colored and confused by what had happened afterward.
Standish wound up that part of the inquiry. “Well, this is the matter in a nutshell. We don’t know what time the call was made, who made it, whether it originated in New York or was only made to appear so. My guess is we will have difficulties tracing the telephone message.”
His manner, courteous but cool, indicated that he considered the young Storms unsatisfactory witnesses. Gladly disposing of me, he resumed his interrogation of Jack.
“Pretty tough driving this afternoon, wasn’t it, what with the rain?”
“Terrible.”
The officer gloomily drew a lungful of smoke. “I’m not for a minute doubting your veracity, but I don’t quite understand your making that long drive as a favor to a man you’d never seen or heard of. It looks curious.”
“Curious or not,” Jack said shortly, “I’ve explained how it came about. I was taken by surprise, and I had been called upon so often to do various unpleasant little jobs for Mrs. Coatesnash that I automatically agreed.”
“What time did you leave your home?”
“At four o’clock.”
“Can anyone corroborate you? Did you meet anyone who knows you on the road?”
“Not on the way over. On the way back, about five miles outside Crockford, we were stopped for speeding.”
The officer’s eyes brightened. “Who stopped you?”
Before Jack answered, Minnie Gray crept in. A small timid woman with enormous teeth and a perpetually worried air, she took an interminable time snapping a rubber on her notebook locating a soft lead pencil, adjusting her skirts.
“And please speak slowly, Mr. Storm. Sixty words a minute is my speed.”
Neither Jack nor I understood that we could not be compelled to submit to a formal questioning. The scratch of the stenographer’s pencil, the frequent admonitions to slow down, the consciousness that every spoken word went promptly into a neat little notebook, threw Jack off his stride, made him choose his phrases. An artist, not a business man, he was ignorant of his own legal rights and the police chief took advantage of this ignorance. He asked questions which no lawyer would have allowed, and Jack obliged with replies which in cold print conveyed a quite different impression than he meant to convey.
Standish returned to the examination with his customary thoroughness. “Let’s start with your being stopped on the road.”
Jack carefully told of Harkway’s pursuit and of Lewis’s interference in the subsequent colloquy. In reproducing the dead man’s language and his own, it was impossible to avoid a revelation of the disagreeable scene. Jack didn’t dodge the point but with Minnie’s notebook staring him in the face, naturally didn’t stress it.
Standish listened closely. “You were angry?”
Jack hesitated. “Angry isn’t just the word. I would prefer to say that I was irritated. Lewis had an—an unfortunate manner. I’ve described how he behaved in the station. Then, later on, by butting in he got me loaded down with a ticket. Of course I didn’t like it. Who would?”
“Did you and Lewis quarrel?”
“He said a few things; I said a few. It was more an argument than a quarrel.”
“Why did you put up with him? As I picture it, Lewis acted badly from the first. It was your car. Why didn’t you ask him to get out?”
“We were five miles from town; it was raining; I decided to wait till we got to Crockford. I meant to get rid of him then. I believe I told you so.”
“Yet when you reached Crockford you went into the grocery store and still he was in your car. Still you hadn’t spoken? Or had you?”
Jack grinned wryly. “My curse is a stupid sense of humor. I intended to come back from the grocery store and tell Lewis I needed the rumble seat for onions. It sounds absurd, but it’s the truth.”
Standish made no comment. Lifting his telephone, he put through