The facts concerning Mrs. Carpenter were as meager and uninformative as those embracing the three previous victims. Mrs. Carpenter had come to New York on the morning of the day she was stricken to do some Christmas shopping. Her course had been easy to trace, from the packages she carried and those sent to her home: a succession of stores, luncheon at Schraftt’s, more shopping and resultant fatigue. She hadn’t been feeling well when she entered the women’s room. One of the attendants did remember that.
Alice Camber hadn’t been well, either, nor had Mrs. Fenway. Mr. Jackson, according to his wife, had also confessed to a slight headache on returning from the office. The Scotsman had already formulated a theory. It was only that. There wasn’t an iota of testimony with which to back it up. The other victims, Alice Camber, Mrs. Fenway and Mr. Jackson, had been dead when the police arrived on the scene and could tell no tales. It was a tale that had to be told; the necessity was commanding. Through the long night, pacing up and down the hospital corridor, McKee had waited for word that Mrs. Carpenter could be interviewed. His stenographer, Kent, was with him. McKee said, “I’ll be as brief as I can, Doctor,” and the doctor opened the door and the two officials entered the white-walled room.
The Scotsman was shocked at what he saw. Cyanide isn’t kind to its takers. He stood on one side of the high white bed, Kent on the other. The doctor was beside Kent, a nurse flanked McKee.
“Mrs. Carpenter,” the Inspector spoke softly to the woman lying on pillows, her wasted face a sharp skeleton mask. “Will you tell us what happened to you?” He repeated the question half a dozen times. It was a horrible thing to have to do; it had to be done.
At first there was no response. Then a change came over the suffering mask. It was very slight. The blue lips moved. No sound came through but the hand on the coverlet, cyanosis tinging it, was lifted. Mrs. Carpenter tried to touch her forehead with fumbling blue fingers.
He had been right. McKee said to Kent, “Headache,” and, as Kent wrote, he said more loudly to Mrs. Carpenter, “You were in the waiting-room at Grand Central and you were tired from shopping. You had a headache, and someone gave you something for your head.”
The slightest sketch of a nod rewarded that.
“The person who gave you the medicine was a friend, someone you knew?”
No response.
“It was a stranger who gave you the medicine. The stranger was a woman. You met this woman in the ladies’ room while you were waiting for your train.”
Nod again.
“Mrs. Carpenter…” McKee paused. To ask a dying patient to describe a perfect stranger with the wealth of detail that would be necessary, if a successful search and identification were to be made, was an almost hopeless task. The Scotsman took it in sections, relying on trial and error and on Mrs. Carpenter’s constantly weaker response or lack of it to keep him on the right track. At the end of three quarters of an hour he had established that the medicine given to the woman in the bed wasn’t a liquid and that the poisoner was neither young nor old, had black hair and was tall. Just before coma set in Mrs. Carpenter unexpectedly spoke. The blue lips parted. The eyes fastened on the ceiling were almost sightless but the sick woman struggled. A single syllable finally issued from her wrenching throat. It was “pod” or “perd.”
They had done all they could there in that room. McKee returned to the office. He studied Kent’s notes. He forgot the others, Alice Camber and Mrs. Fenway and Mr. Jackson, and concentrated on Mrs. Carpenter, fiercely. Pod…Perd…Pardon? She wasn’t a woman who would have had to ask forgiveness; she had neither the make-up nor the temperament for it. He put prefixes in front of the broken syllable she had uttered. He put suffixes after it. Late, very late that night, it came to him, sailing into memory like a kite out of the blue. He had been questioning Mrs. Carpenter about the poisoner’s clothing, and Mrs. Carpenter hadn’t answered at all. And then from the depths of her immobility she had brought up that single syllable. That was what it was, a syllable, part of a word, he was sure of it.
Busy transcribing his notes at the far end of the long, narrow room Kent started and jumped when the Scotsman sent a line of Keats drifting though the smoke-laden air. What McKee said was, “Striped like the leopard, spotted like the pard…‘Lamia,’ I think.” He reached for the phone.
Long before the latest victim had joined the others who had traveled the same path, McKee and the entire police department of New York City had begun looking for a tall dark woman in her thirties who had been in Grand Central between a quarter of five and a quarter past on the afternoon of December the fourth and who had worn a leopard coat.
Chapter Three
RETURN OF THE TIGRESS
Meanwhile the people who were finally to become the other participants in that tragedy of errors and of deliberate, premeditated, cold-blooded murder, with two exceptions, had all assembled at Hoydens Hill in Connecticut.
Hoydens Hill was in the high country back from and above the Sound in one of the few unexploited spots of the Nutmeg State still within reach of the metropolis. Its inaccessibility—the station was five miles to the east—and the nest of factories, quiet places ringing the Hill’s base, were responsible for the colony’s isolation. The people who had settled on the Hill’s rolling, wooded slopes were fond of their fastness. There weren’t many of them; they all valued privacy and the freedom it gave.
At that time, Julie Bishop and Julie alone was without previous knowledge of any kind on any single facet of the peculiar set of crimes which already had engaged inspector McKee’s attention in New York and whose fine flowering had reached neither its ultimate objective nor its peak.
On the afternoon of December the fourth, shortly before McKee was summoned to Grand Central, Julie was dressing for dinner in her cottage in the little settlement sixty-odd miles to the northeast. The shadow that had fallen over her on the day of Mouse Tilden’s wedding had never completely retreated. She had tried to make herself believe that it had and she had succeeded to a certain extent. She hadn’t spoken to anyone of Bill Conroy’s appearance at the Biltmore on the afternoon of Mouse’s wedding. When she examined her fear in the light of normal surroundings, it had seemed more than a little absurd. And her anger at Brian, at his abrupt change of plan without consulting her, had dissipated. He had said to her, coming up on the train, “Julie, don’t mind me, I’m jittery these days,” and had kissed her quickly and satisfactorily in the darkness of the platform to which they had repaired for a cigarette.
Under other circumstances she might have lingered over certain irrelevancies and discrepancies that remained unsolved, but on the ninth of December, as soon as Brian got his divorce, they were going to be married and she had hordes of things to do. The marriage was to take place at a little church at Westhaven under the auspices of Brian’s aunt, Eleanor Yates, a shrewd, forthright woman who was very fond of her only nephew and who had relievingly taken a fancy to Julie.
The only other guests were to have been Sam and Frances Ashe and Mouse and Joe Westing, who had reached the Hill two days earlier. The Prendergasts, friends of the Ashes who were spending the winter in Florida, had loaned their house at Hoydens Hill to the newlywedded Westings for their brief honeymoon. They were only just settled when Joe’s sister, Rosetta, arrived unexpectedly and plunked herself down bag and baggage on the bride and groom.
“Why,” Brian had demanded, “do we have to have little pussy whose claws are so long?” Julie had laughed, but Rosetta was rather a problem. The people on the hill were older, all busy about their own concerns, and there was nothing for Rosetta to do. Mouse and Joe had arrived sooner than they were expected. A short sojourn in Atlantic City—“Wouldn’t you know?”