Wings of the Black Death/Chapter 16

SPIDER ARRESTED FOR PLAGUE. KILLS SELF IN BRIDGE LEAP

Those black headlines screamed at Nita van Sloan when, with the morning sun warm in her face, she walked briskly along the drive with Apollo, joying in the fresh breezes that swept in from over the Hudson.

“Spider Arrested!” A boy shouted. “Extra! Paper!”

With hands that trembled despite her every effort at control, Nita bought one of the smeary papers, gasped at the headlines, skimmed through the story. Her eyes caught on two sentences and she breathed hope deeply through her nostrils.

Everyone else in the car was saved by the men on the tug, but the Spider was drowned. The body has not been recovered.

The body has not been recovered. Hope. Hope. But why in the name of heaven had Stanley Kirkpatrick ordered the arrest of his friend? Knowing Wentworth innocent as she did, knowing Kirkpatrick's friendship for him, she could not understand how he could have been driven to such a step.

She saw that Kirkpatrick had been plunged into the river with Wentworth. Surely from him then, she could learn the truth. She flagged a taxi, sat with whitely clasped hands while it twisted into the express highway, which, elevated on stilts, shot motor traffic down the bank of the Hudson. Once she threw back her head and laughed. But it was as if hands closed on her throat and the laughter stopped. Dead? Dick could not be dead. He could not be! He must not be...

Her name won her instant admittance to the office of the Commissioner, and Kirkpatrick, gray-faced and sleepless, rose to greet her. As the door clicked shut behind her, Nita van Sloan stopped in her tracks, staring at this apparition of the man she had known as gay, debonair, perpetually smiling.

Then she hurried forward, and suddenly her lips were tremulous.

“Tell me! Tell me!” she commanded.

The wintry smile that was Kirkpatrick's only mirth these days stirred his lips. But his deep-sunken eyes remained dull, without life.

“I hope,” he said slowly, “and it's for your sake as well as his, that he is dead.”

The girl fell back a little staggering half pace, her wrist against her mouth smothering the cry that rose there. But suddenly in those words, too, she found hope.

“You don't know!” she cried at him. “You don't know!”

He drooped into his chair. “No. I don't know.” And a gag seemed taken from his mouth. He began to talk as he had not spoken for days, pouring out words. “You don't know the evidence against him, Nita. It was overwhelming.” And he recited the long list of circumstances that pointed to Wentworth as the Spider, and to the Spider as the perpetrator of the Black Death. He seemed suddenly obsessed with the necessity for convincing this girl, perhaps of proving to himself, that he had acted rightly.

“And there in the base of his lighter was a secret compartment,” he finished. He spread his hands, palms upward. “I ordered his arrest.”

“And you—you,” the girl's scorn rang in the room, “—you called yourself his friend.”

“But, Nita—”

The girl leaned across the desk and her eyes were burning in a dead white face.

“You know that Dick Wentworth could not do the things you accused him of.”

Kirkpatrick eyed her shrewdly. “Yet you yourself quarreled with him, and I do not believe it was for the reason that the gossip columns of the newspapers reported. I believe it was because he could not explain...”

Nita laughed wildly.

“We quarreled. Dear Lord, we quarreled! Dick said that if we pretended to, over his leaving town, it would help convince his enemies that he had left. In which case he would be able to help you better to track down the Black Death... That was what he said!”

The girl paused, her breasts rising and falling, straining against her dress with the quickness of her breath. She went on more slowly. “Yes, that was what he told me, but I see now that his real reason was to protect me. He knew that he was going into terrible danger. Yes, Dick Wentworth did that, and you think that such a man could—”

Kirkpatrick jerked to his feet. His voice rose and cracked.

“Don't you suppose I know what kind of man Dick Wentworth is? Why do you suppose—”

He stretched out both his hands and they were trembling. “It was the pigeons that clinched the case against him. Whether I believed or not did not matter. I was forced to act.”

“The pigeons?”

“Dick offered to take us to the place where the plague master was hidden, where he had concealed the pigeons that, Dick says, bring the plague of the Black Death to the city.”

Nita straightened slowly. Pigeons. She shook her head slowly, and all at once she was weary. Her head throbbed. She pressed the back of her hand to her forehead, and the Great Dane pressed against her legs to comfort her.

“Nita—” Kirkpatrick began, moving about the desk.

But the girl shook her head. “No! No!” she cried, and turned and left the office in a stumbling run. And Kirkpatrick watched her go with haunted eyes. The Great Dane turned its head and looked back at him and its lips lifted in a soundless snarl that showed gleaming white fangs.

Nita fled to Wentworth's home, hoping against hope that she might find reassurance there. But Jenkyns' old eyes were swollen with weeping, and Ram Singh had already left for Dick's Long Island estate, there to gather his belongings and leave for India.

Nita, still refusing to believe, went to her home, with Apollo pressing ever close to her side. In her apartment, the girl threw herself down on her knees, caught the dog's great head between her hands and looked with brimming eyes into his face.

“But we don't believe it, do we, Apollo? Do we, boy?”

The dog whined low in its throat, licked out its pink tongue. Nita got slowly to her feet. She would not believe. She began feverishly to pack a small overnight bag, stopped a moment to repair the damage emotion had wrought on her face, and hurried out. She took a taxi to a garage and wheeled out the compact but powerful Renault that Dick had helped her select.

She sent it skimming over the roads, Apollo on the seat beside her, thrusting his head out from behind the windshield into the push of the wind. The swift drive over Queensborough bridge and out onto Long Island roads cleared her head.

Wasn't it possible that Wentworth had escaped? He was a superb swimmer and, unless he had been stunned in the plunge, unless he had wanted to die—Dick want to die? She laughed, and actual gayety crept into her voice. He would risk his life gladly in any just cause, but it was because he loved so to live that he got pleasure in thus defying death.

It was an hour and a half later that she swung into the drive that twined, through trees, up to the home Dick had built on the hill, for the day, he had explained to Nita with a twisted smile, when some other man, stronger than himself and with an equal oneness of purpose, could take up his battle against the forces of evil. The day when Dick and Nita...

She choked on the thought, saw the old caretaker running toward her, a man with a face the weather and sun had thickened like leather and seamed with good nature.

“Is Dick here?” she called gaily.

The man came smiling up to her, a battered straw hat in his hands, his overall knees smudged with dirt from his labors among the flowers.

“Ain't seen him this month, Miss Nita,” he said. “And I've been wantin' to show him his peonies. They're gorgeous, ma'am. And that cross he worked out that I says wouldn't do a thing—Miss Nita, it's the loveliest flower you ever saw.”

Nita's hope died. She had hoped that Ram Singh's coming here meant Dick had set up a secret domicile in this place.

“Then Ram Singh isn't here either?”

The man frowned a little in bewilderment. “If the master ain't here, ma'am, why would—”

Nita nodded jerkily, her throat too choked for words. She moved a hand in farewell, spun the wheel and shot the Renault down the drive again with gravel-spurting tires. This place was too full of memories.

She turned back toward town. Perhaps she might run into Ram Singh on the road. Evidently, he had not yet had time to reach the estate. She forced herself to drive slowly and, passing brick columns beside the road, saw the name of MacDonald Pugh on a mail box. On an impulse, she spun the wheel and drove in. This was where Dick had mentioned coming for the week-end. Perhaps in this part of the country he expected to find some clue to the Black Death. Perhaps she—

Grimly Nita van Sloan decided that if Dick had died, then she would devote the rest of her life, if necessary, to clearing his name of the smirching charge that he was the Master of the Black Death. For his identification as the Spider she had no apologies.

Nita had been nearer collapse than she had realized. But the determination strengthened her. She drew up before the house, and MacDonald Pugh, seeing her from the porch, hurried out to greet her. He was dressed in tennis flannels. His face and great bald head were redly sunburned. Even his big hands, clasping hers, were red.

“I'm damned glad you came, Nita. Of course this whole business about Dick is preposterous.”

The girl smiled bravely with lips that quivered a little in spite of her. It was good to find someone who believed.

“Dick told me the other day you had asked us out for the week-end,” she said. “I know he'd want me to carry on.”

“Exactly,” Pugh agreed. He caught up her grip himself and carried it into the house, walking beside her with his heavy, forward-thrust head bent attentively. “If you give way to grief, people might think you gave some credence to those ridiculous charges. The late papers practically refute them anyway. Have you seen them?”

Nita stopped, whirled toward him. Her lips dared not frame the question. Pugh's wide mouth turned down wryly.

“The newspapers got another letter signed the Black Death. Even if the Spider is dead, the letter said, the plague will go on unless the money is delivered. Good Lord,” Pugh growled, striding on into the house. “As if the banks could shell out a billion dollars like so many rolls of pennies and not feel it. But they'll do it.” His face went grim. “They'll have to, or else...”

Nita's shoulders sagged slightly. She had been hoping against hope that there might be some new information about Dick.

“But they haven't—” she hesitated, walking into the cool dimness of the hall, “they haven't—”

“They've found no trace of Dick's body, no,” Pugh said kindly.

A maid came then and took over Nita's case and showed her up winding stairs to a coolly bright room. She dismissed the servant instantly and stood in the middle of the floor staring about her while the Great Dane prowled around, sniffing at everything and finally standing before Nita, peering up with lolling tongue.

Nita forced herself from the lethargy that kept dropping back upon her, opened her case and swiftly dressed in riding clothes. The clue she believed Dick sought might lie in the country about here, or it might lie among the weekend guests. But the guests could wait until night. She would have to do any exploring she was to accomplish at once.

A short while later, she went alertly down the stairs, wearing khaki jodhpurs, a silk blouse that, open at the neck, showed the sweet curve of her throat and, drawn down over her rebellious curls, a soft brown felt. Pugh sprang to his feet as she came to the porch. He was alone there.

“The others took a spin down to the town for drinks,” he said. “Katherine said she was damned sick of rye all the time and longed to taste some real bathtub gin again.” He made a face, and Nita saw gratefully that he was religiously avoiding the subject of Dick, deliberately treating her as though tragedy had not a few hours before sought to tear her heart in two.

“Your wife has small cause to complain of your rye, Mac.” She smiled up at him, then glanced down at her riding clothes. “I know it's the wrong time of day, but I wanted to take a ramble through the woods on one of those excellent riding horses of yours.”

Pugh nodded instantly.

“I'm only sorry I can't accompany you,” he said, “but I'm expecting someone from town. Business,” he wrinkled his reddened face wryly. “Otherwise Dick and I would be trolling for tuna off Montauk.

“I'll go have a horse saddled for you,” he broke off, turned and strode long-legged off toward the stable.

He was gone a considerable while, and Nita began to stroll down toward the red-painted barn herself before he came out of its dimness frowning.

“Something seems to have happened to all my good horses,” he said angrily. “It looks as if that new groom has gotten poisoned weeds in with their hay. I've only got one to offer you, Nita, and he won't be very spirited. It's an old one I got for Katherine. She doesn't like them lively.”

Nita nodded carelessly. “I'm sorry about your horses,” she said. “If it wasn't that I'd set my heart on a ride—”

“Quite all right,” said Pugh, and the stable boy led out a dappled gray horse to whose back he assisted Nita. Apollo threw up his head and frisked about like a puppy.

Suddenly the horse reared on its hind legs, pawing the air, whinnied shrilly and flopped flat on its back. Only Nita's long experience and her swift leap saved her. She sprawled as her feet hit the ground, but she was up instantly.

The horse jerked up its head from the ground, tried to maneuver its legs, flopped back and, breathing hoarsely a few times, died. Nita stared at it with startled eyes, then walked about its head, cried out and pointed at the gray forehead.

“A bullet hole!” she gasped. “Someone shot the horse!”