American Sherlocks Nick Rennison (best big ereader txt) 📖

the Senator repeated vaguely. The next instant, as though grasping the situation anew, he sprang down the hall with the skirts of his frock coat flapping against his knees. At the door of the veranda, he whirled.

‘Get the doctor on the ’phone, Dorrence – Redfield, if Scott is out. Let him know it’s a matter of minutes! And, Dorrence –’

‘Yes, sir!’

‘Tell the telephone girl that, if this leaks to the newspapers, I will have the whole office discharged!’

A shifting group on the edge of the lawn, with that strange sense of awkwardness which sudden death brings, showed the scene of the tragedy.

The circle fell back as the Senator’s figure appeared. On the grass, Rennick’s body still lay where it had fallen – suggesting a skater who has ignominiously collapsed on the ice rather than a man stabbed to the heart. The group had been wondering at the fact in whispered monosyllables.

A kneeling girl was bending over the secretary’s body. It was not until Senator Duffield had spoken her name twice that she glanced up. In her eyes was a grief so wild that for a moment he was held dumb.

‘Come, Beth,’ he said, gently, ‘this is no place for you.’

At once the white-faced girl became the central figure of the situation. If she heard him, she gave no sign. The Senator caught her shoulder and pushed her slowly away. One of the women-servants took her arm. Curiously enough, the two were the only members of the family that had been called to the scene.

The Senator swung on the group with a return of his aggressiveness.

‘Someone, who can talk fast and to the point, tell me the story. Burke, you have a ready tongue. How did it happen?’

The groom – a much-tanned young fellow in his early twenties – touched his cap.

‘I don’t know, sir. No one knows. Mr Rennick was lying here, stabbed, when we found him. He was already dead.’

‘But surely there was some cry, some sound of a scuffle?’

The groom shook his head. ‘If there was, sir, none of us heard it. We all liked Mr Rennick, sir. I would have gone through fire and water if he needed my help. If there had been an outcry loud enough to reach the stable, I would have been there on the jump!’

‘Do you mean to tell me that Rennick could have been struck down in the midst of fifteen or twenty people with no one the wiser? It’s ridiculous, impossible!’

Burke squared his shoulders, with an almost unconscious suggestion of dignity. ‘I am telling you the truth, sir!’

The Senator’s glance dropped to his secretary’s body and he looked up with a shudder. Then, as though with an effort, his eyes returned to the huddled form, and he stood staring down at the dead man, with a frown knitting his brow. Once he jerked his head toward the gardener with the curt question, ‘Who found him?’ Jenkins shambled forward uneasily. ‘I did, sir. I hope you don’t think I disturbed the body?’

The Senator shrugged his shoulders impatiently. He did not raise his head again until the sound of a motor in the driveway broke the tension. The surgeon had arrived. Almost at the same moment there was a cry from Jenkins.

The gardener stood perhaps a half a dozen yards from the body, staring at an object hidden in the grass at his feet. He stooped and raised it. It was a woman’s slipper!

As a turn of his head showed him the eyes of the group turned in his direction, he walked across to Senator Duffield, holding his find at arm’s length, as though its dainty outlines might conceal an adder’s nest.

The slipper was of black suede, high-heeled and slender, tied with a broad, black ribbon. One end of the ribbon was broken and stained as though it had tripped its owner. On the thin sole were cakes of the peculiar red clay of the driveway.

It might have been unconscious magnetism that caused the Senator suddenly to turn his eyes in the direction of his daughter. She was swaying on the arm of the servant.

Throwing off the support of the woman, she took two quick steps forward, with her hand flung out as though to tear the slipper from him. And then, without a word, she fell prone on the grass.

II

The telephone in my room must have been jangling a full moment before I struggled out of my sleep and raised myself to my elbow. It was with a feeling of distinct rebellion that I slipped into my kimono and slippers and shuffled across to the sputtering instrument in the corner. From eight in the morning until eight in the evening, I had been on racking duty in the Farragut poison trial, and the belated report of the wrangling jury, at an hour which made any sort of a meal impossible until after ten, had left me worn out physically and mentally. I glanced at my watch as I snapped the receiver to my ear. It lacked barely fifteen minutes of midnight. An unearthly hour to call a woman out of bed, even if she is past the age of sentimental dreams! ‘Well?’ I growled.

A laugh answered me at the other end of the wire. I would have flung the receiver back to the hook and myself back to bed had I not recognized the tones. There is only one person in the world, except the tyrant at our city editor’s desk, who would arouse me at midnight. But I had thought this person separated from me by twelve hundred miles of ocean.

‘Madelyn Mack!’ I gasped.

The laughter ceased. ‘Madelyn Mack it is!’ came back the answer, now reduced to a tone of decorous gravity. ‘Pardon my merriment, Nora. The mental picture of your huddled form –’

‘But I thought you in Jamaica!’ I broke in, now thoroughly awake.

‘I was – until Saturday. Our steamer came out of quarantine at four o’clock this afternoon. As it develops, I reached here at the psychological moment.’

I