Untidy Murder Page 11

  But I can sit on it she thought—if I go to sleep, I can lie on it. At least I’ll have warning. Then she realized there was a better way, because—dimly—there was an object nearby which was large and square and probably a trunk. If she could move that over the trapdoor it could not—not easily, at any rate—be opened from below. Particularly, she thought, not by Piper. She crawled to the object and found it was a trunk, and after a moment she found a handle. She backed away from the trunk, trying to tug it after her. It was too heavy to move. She tugged and it moved perhaps an inch, and even with that inch it screeched on the rough wood floor.

  “Hey, what you doing up there?” the man below called. He was immediately under her; he was Piper. “Moving the furniture?” he said, and then snickered. It was a great joke, apparently. “Want some help?” he said then.

  She did not answer for a moment, and then thought that not answering would be wrong. He would come up to investigate.

  “I bumped into something,” she said. She put her face down close to the floor when she spoke.

  “Tough,” Piper said. “Sure is tough.”

  But apparently he was satisfied.

  There was no other trunk near enough and this one was too heavy. But now, more than ever, she wanted something—something more than the door itself—between her and the snickering little man. If she could unpack the trunk, even partly, that might do it. If it wasn’t locked—

  She pushed up on the lid and nothing happened. She felt around and discovered she was pushing up on the hinged side. She crept around to the other and pushed and the lid went up. There was an old comforter of some sort on top, and under it, when she lifted it off, were books. Two and three at a time, she took the books off and piled them at the side, out of the way. She had to gauge this; the trunk should be as heavy as she could leave it, and still move it—move it quickly, so that it was over the door before Piper could move.

  She stopped taking out the books while the trunk was still about a third full, put down the lid and crawled around to the end of the trunk. She got a firm hold, set herself as well as she could—it was hard, because she could not stand up straight enough to give real purchase—and pulled. The trunk moved—it was still too heavy, but it moved. It screeched on the floor and Piper yelled again, but she did not stop. The strap of the trunk bruised her hands, her knees ground against the floor and pain shot through them, but the trunk moved. She backed across the trapdoor, pulling the trunk. She stopped with the trunk over the door. Now let little Piper yell. Let him snicker.

  “What the hell?” Piper said. “What the hell?”

  She didn’t answer this time. It didn’t matter so much now. Let him try.

  He did try, she thought; there were sounds of his trying. But the trunk did not move, and it held the door fast. Piper desisted.

  “Smart as hell, ain’t you?” he said. “Smart as they come!” He was derisive. “Afraid I’ll—” She did not—she tried not to—listen to the rest of what he said. But he was still derisive.

  But he couldn’t get at her. It was not certain, she thought now that it was not even probable, he had planned to get at her. But it was reassuring that he could not. It was a stalemate. And, having done this much, she no longer felt helpless; was no longer something to be moved this way and that way, as the two men chose. Perhaps now she could even stand them off, if that seemed—later—to be worth trying. Perhaps in the end she could even think of some way to get free.

  She spread the comforter from the trunk out on the floor and lay down on it and thought, the best thing is to sleep. But she lay awake for a long time trying to figure things out, and not making it. Finally the light from the two ventilators was changing and she was utterly weary and felt herself beginning to doze. “Good night, Bill,” she said, in a whisper, but so that she could hear her own voice. “Come and get me, darling.” And then, fitfully, she slept.…

  When she awoke, the garret was almost light and she was, inappropriately she thought, very hungry. It was not, she realized, inappropriate to be hungry. She had not eaten since her lunch with Pam North the day before. But it was odd that her situation did not banish such lesser problems as the desire for food. She had never believed the stories of men who ate heartily just before they were hanged or strapped into an electric chair, and she did not now. But it was apparent that hunger was unexpectedly impervious even to fear.

  She looked at her watch and discovered that it was, amazingly, after ten o’clock. She listened to her watch and heard the steady whisper of its ticking, and then had to believe that she had really, in spite of everything, slept more than five hours—certainly more than five hours. She listened for sounds from the rooms below and heard nothing. She moved, deliberately making sounds on the wooden floor. But this apparently disturbed nobody below, and then she began to think that there was nobody below.

  The thought was not comforting, although she would have expected it to be if she had thought about it abstractly, earlier. Certainly being rid, and finally rid, of both Farno and Piper, being entirely out of their hands, would be a comfort. But it was not reassuring to think that she had been left alone in the house, not knowing where it was, or how deserted, how far from other houses—and left, specifically, in the cramped prison of this elongated doghouse. Thinking of that, she did suddenly cease to be hungry.

  It might, she realized, very well suit the convenience of Farno and Piper to go away and leave her where she was, indefinitely. If the house were isolated, if there was little chance that, scream as much as she might through the little ventilators, she would be heard, it might be fine for Farno and Piper. They would have a long run of it before the chase—the specific chase—really started. They might get almost anywhere in the time it would take for her to be found. Then she thought—no, this is Saturday; this house is almost certainly a place where someone spends weekends; that someone will be here by this evening. Because it was clearly not Farno’s house, or Piper’s. They had not had keys, for one thing. It was a house they knew about, presumably it was the house of a friend of theirs. This was not consoling; she had no desire to meet a friend of Farno’s, and still less a friend of Piper’s. But even that would be better than to meet no one for—well, for however long it took a healthy young woman to die of hunger and thirst. This last thought made her hungrier than she had been before and, at the same time, very thirsty.

  Well, Dorian thought, I can’t just sit here. She took off one shoe and beat with the heel on the floor. The sound was sharp and satisfactory, but there was no answer. They were gone, apparently. They had locked her up and gone.

  And then she had another thought. Nobody who expected to use such a storage place as this—to climb up into it to put things away, to get them out again—would arrange matters so that, merely by closing the trapdoor, he would lock himself permanently in a hot, cramped jail. There was some sort of a catch to hold the door down. She remembered that. That was presumably because the door was counter-balanced to open easily. Otherwise there would be no need of latching it down. She did not remember, when they had put her there, that Farno and Piper had afterward made the sounds they would make if they put some kind of lock—a padlock, presumably—through the catch. Was it possible they had not thought of the chance of opening the trapdoor from above? Or had they planned to stay on guard below?

  The simplest thing would be to find out. She moved over to the trunk she had pulled onto the trapdoor and, with a good deal of effort, moved it off the door. In doing so she knocked over one of the piles of books she had made in the darkness as she lightened the trunk. They were old school books and one of them fell partly open, so that the leaves were doubled a little within the covers. So doubled, the edges of the pages were spread out, making, from the angle she saw them, a slope—a plane slanting away from her. And so slanted, they showed clearly the letters which, long ago, some school-child had penciled on them—penciled with the leaves spread out, so that when the book was in its normal condition they were unreadable.
She remembered suddenly the little tingle of secrecy that gives a child.

  The letters on this old book—a history, it was—were P.W. They were obscurely familiar. Prisoners of war? No, that was POW. Somebody she had heard of with those ink—of course! Paul Wilming!

  Quickly she examined several of the books. Paul Wilming—how long ago?—had written his name on the flyleaf of the history. The writing was firm and round. On the page of another book there was an elaborate monogram—again with difficulty this time, PW, intertwined. Paul Wilming—Paul Wilming—Paul Osborne Wilming (that form had been infrequent even then; evidently discarded later.) The initials in great variety of tangled monograms. “To Paul from Mother,”—in a copy of “David Copperfield.” The dust was thick on the books. Her hands were black with it.

  And she knew where she was—where almost certainly she was. Farno and Piper had brought her to the weekend cottage of the man who, almost twenty-four hours ago, had splashed horribly on the pavement so far beneath an open window. The knowledge explained nothing. And, obscurely, it was frightening.

  So Dorian Weigand’s hands moved abruptly, almost violently, as she tugged at the handhold on the trapdoor. It resisted for a moment. Then, with such disconcerting ease that she stumbled back and almost fell, the door opened.

  There was no chair under the trapdoor, no box atop a chair to stand on. But she could hang by her hands from the edge and drop. She did, moving quickly. Her knees bent to cushion the impact, straightened, and for a moment she stood almost in the center of the little living room. There was no one in it; from the other rooms she heard no sound. She moved then, moved very swiftly toward the door. She reached it, had her hand on the knob to pull it toward her—and it opened toward her, the knob striking against her fingers, breaking a nail.

  “Where you think you’re going, lady?” Piper said, and came on in. He slammed the door closed behind him, kicking it with a heel. He reached back and turned the key, and put the key in his pocket. “You ain’t going nowhere, see?” Then he snickered. “Going to take a little walk, huh?” he said. “A little stroll?” He advanced toward her and she retreated, facing him.

  She backed into a chair and sat in it. He nodded and took his right hand out of his coat pocket. There was a gun in it, and he shook it in his hand, calling her attention to it.

  “You wouldn’t walk out on your old friends, would you?” he said. “You wouldn’t do that.”

  She merely looked at him. She tried not to show in her face what she felt.

  “You and me,” he said, “we’re going to wait right here for Farno, see? Farno’s gone to see—to fix things up. Maybe we’ll get things fixed up so you can go, see? Maybe we won’t. We gotta wait for Farno.”

  “It’s a mistake, you know,” Dorian said. “You and Farno are making a bad mistake, Mr. Piper.”

  “Think of that,” Piper said. “Just think of that!” He intended to be derisive. But his large brown eyes looked for a moment unhappy. Derision was not as clear in his voice as he intended.

  “If you let me go,” she said, “it would help you. I’d see that it helped you.” She spoke slowly and carefully. “More than Farno can help you,” she said. “Much more.”

  “Forget it,” Piper said. “Don’t try it, lady.” He stood in front of her, waving the gun. “Farno and me’ll take care of it, lady,” he said. “Don’t bother trying anything.”

  He was more convincing now. Now, evidently, wasn’t the time.

  “All right,” Dorian said. “Where—”

  He waved his gun toward one of the bedrooms.

  “In there,” he said.

  He went with her to the bedroom door and waved the gun again at a door opening off the bedroom. He stood in the doorway while she crossed the room and went into the tiny bath. There was no window in the bath; only a ventilator. There was a stall shower, but the waiting presence of Piper just across the little bedroom made its use impossible. She slapped water on her face; she realized that her purse, with her compact and lipstick, was in the living room—somewhere in the living room. Well, she did not want to be attractive for Piper. She went out again.

  “Now,” Piper said, “hows to cook us some breakfast, lady?”

  “All right,” she said. “Is there something?”

  “Coffee,” Piper said. “Half a loaf of bread. Maybe there’s something in the icebox, but that ain’t on.”

  He stood back and let her go ahead of him toward the kitchen.

  “You’d think a guy like—” he said, and broke off. “You’d think a guy would have things fixed better. Electric gadgets and things. You know what he’s got?”

  “No,” Dorian said.

  “Damn fool setup,” Piper said. “A kinda gas stove, except it ain’t real gas, see? It comes in tanks and you gotta turn it on outside first. See? That’s where I was when you thought you was going to take a walk.”

  She knew the tank gas arrangement; the Norths had it at Lone Lake; the cabin she lived in during that strange, terrifying time—the time which ended, after everything, with the quite beautiful discovery of Bill—had had tank gas. But nobody had ever turned it off outside when they left between weekends. Paul Wilming, if he had habitually gone to that trouble, was an excessively cautious man.

  Perhaps, she thought a moment later, it was because he had a gas refrigerator. Perhaps that made a difference, somehow; perhaps it was necessary, if you did not want the refrigerator going for days when you were away, to turn off the whole gas supply. There was a bread box on the refrigerator and she looked at it first. There was half a loaf of bread, looking very stale.

  She crouched down in front of the refrigerator. Piper was still standing watching her, the gun in his right hand. Suddenly she was very much annoyed.

  “Oh,” she said, “do something! Light the stove—put some water on to heat!”

  Her tone was peremptory and Piper apparently was conditioned. He moved toward the stove as she opened the refrigerator door and, leaning forward, peered in. She heard a match striking.

  What happened then was sudden and terrifying. Thinking afterward, she thought it had been not so much an explosion as a sudden, not really explosive flame. For an instant it seemed to fill the whole tiny kitchen. And in that instant she realized that, miraculously, the heavy refrigerator door, standing out between her and the stove, was protecting her. The door moved toward her, hit her sharply, knocked her forward so that her head was bruised by one of the refrigerator shelves. But it protected her from the full force of the flame. She realized that even as she heard Piper scream.

  She threw herself on the floor and, as she did so, realized that the first flash—the flash that filled the room—had gone. A long stream of flame was shooting out from under the stove. Curtains at the single window were burning and the flames were licking against the roof. But there was little smoke as yet and the greatest peril seemed to be that searching shaft of flame coming from beneath the stove. It licked at the floor and the floor was already burning.

  And Piper, his hands over his face, was lying just beyond the reach of the questing flame. His clothing was smouldering and he seemed either unconscious or dead, there was no way of telling which. It would not make much difference, for long, unless he was moved.

  Dorian did not hesitate. She crawled a little way until she could reach his feet, seized them, and backed out of the kitchen, dragging him very much as she had before dragged the trunk. Piper was lighter.

  The kitchen was burning in half a dozen places as she pulled Piper out of it. She slammed the door to on the fire and dragged the little man on into the center of the living room. She turned him over and found that his face was blackened and then she saw that the backs of his hands were not only blackened but burned. The front of his coat was smouldering and she managed to drag the coat off of him. She had completed that and was about to search for his pulse when he opened his eyes. Then, almost at once, he sat up on the floor.

  “What the hell,” he said. “What the he
ll?”

  He seemed dazed, she thought.

  “We’ve got to get out,” she said. “Listen—we’ve got to get out. Give me the key!”

  “You tried to burn me up,” Piper said. He swore with a kind of dull anger. “You tried to burn me up, you—!”

  “No,” she said. “There was something wrong with the stove. We’ve got to get out.” She put her hands on his shoulders and shook him. “The key!” she said. “Give me the key!”

  She was leaning toward him, trying to get through to him, and so did not see what he was doing until it was too late. Then she tried to dodge the swinging gun. She was partly successful, and the butt of the gun hit her only a glancing blow on the temple. But everything went red and then began to go black, and she could hear Piper swearing furiously, calling her names she had before only known about, but never heard.

  She fought not to lose consciousness and when Piper began to stand up she reached out toward him and said: “No! No! You can’t!”

  But he did not pay any attention. When she realized that she was losing her fight for consciousness the last thing she saw was a little, exploring tongue of flame which had found its way under the kitchen door and was licking up along the door with a kind of hunger.

  Pam North said she knew it was early. She said that if Jerry insisted, they could call it brunch.

  “God forbid!” Jerry North said, with vigor.

  “I think so,” Pam said. “Some people don’t mind, I suppose.”

  The headwaiter at the Algonquin seemed surprised to see them at a few minutes after noon, but he was on the whole pleased. The room was almost empty and they could pick and choose, and did.