"Charlie Chan - 7402 - The SIlent Corpse" - читать интересную книгу автора (Chan Charlie)

For a moment, the detective was almost paralyzed. Then the instincts of long training and experience in rescue work came alive and he went out the window to kneel on the ledge in his pajamas. Holding firmly to the silt with his left hand, he extended his right arm to its fullest and gripped the nearer of the two wrists.
From below him, a feminine voice said, "Who is it?"
"It's all right, Harriet," he said, "it's me - Charlie Chan."
Thus reassured, Harriet did her part in the life-saving act with surprising efficiency and dispatch, revealing unexpected strength and balance. Within a minute, Chan had her safely in the room, a dripping, sodden ruin with deep-set eyes that blazed fury.
She said, even before she thanked him, "Some son of a bitch pushed me through the window as I was putting the shutter in place. Somebody tried to kill me!"


V

WITH HER pate brown hair darkened by the rain and plastered across her forehead, Harriet MacLean looked like some fury of the storm. To Charlie Chan, she resembled Mad Meg, the horrendous witch in the Pieter Brueghel painting. Her black flowered print still clung to her lean but unexpectedly feminine body. Her shoes were gone and her stockings, like her hair, darkened by water.
But Harriet was very much alive. The rage that burned in her dark blue eyes seemed to light up the predawn dimness of the room. The detective sat her down in an armchair and moved toward the bathroom in search of some sort of restorative.
"No time for that now, Charlie," Harriet stopped him with a gesture. "I want you to find out who pushed me." Her voice was grim.
"You don't know?"
"I haven't the slightest idea. Thanks to the carpet and the noise of the storm, I didn't hear a thing. All I felt were two hands on my back - pushing. Then I was over and out."
"How did you manage to survive?"
"Sheer unadulterated luck," she replied, "plus the fact I was captain of the gym team at Vassar. Oh - and you can add knowledge of the way this house is built. Lionel may have ordered the reconstruction, but you can lay odds I was the one who supervised the work."
She paused, cold fury blazing in her dark blue eyes, added, "You can give the porch roof credit, too. It broke my fall. I was unconscious for awhile, and when I woke, all the windows were locked. I didn't think I'd ever get back in."
"You've been there all night?" Chan found it hard to believe.
"It wasn't too bad. It was wet and it was cold, but I've had worse experiences."
"Why didn't you call out - hammer on the shutters?"
She regarded Charlie Chan sardonically, said, "Even if anyone heard me - which is unlikely - they'd have thought the storm was making the noise. So I stuck it out. By the time the eye of the hurricane got here, I'd had ample opportunity to think things through. It occurred to me that, since somebody wanted me dead and probably believed I was dead, it might be smarter to remain that way. I had to get off the balcony though, to accomplish anything. Then I saw you open the shutter. You gave me an assist, and here I am."
Chan said, "But you need dry things, a hot bath - and you must be hungry."
Her look was steel hard as she replied, "I'm too damn mad to catch pneumonia, and I'm in no danger of starving, thank you." She regarded him evenly, said, her voice under complete restraint so as not to be overhead, "Charlie, what do you think of it?"
"Something stink like long dead carp in fiftieth state," said Chan. "But first, you've got to get dry clothes and food."
Harriet thought that over. Bedraggled and weather-worn she might be, but she looked as indestructible as a sturdy oak tree from the family's native New England. Then she said, "Charlie, you're right. We must talk. By the way, I was responsible for getting you here. You were the only person I really wanted to see after Lionel's - suicide."
Chan nodded, no longer surprised at anything involved in the Lionel Burdon afterdeath. Harriet's story, the attempt on her life, and the subsequent attack on Chan himself, had converted slowly mounting suspicion over the clan chief's tragic fate into certainty that something was very wrong with it.
He said, "Where can we go?"
"Put something on" she said, "And don't worry. I won't peek. I've seen better male bodies than yours naked in my time. Right now, our problem is just that - time."
Chan, essentially a modest man, slipped out of his pajamas and into his clothes in the bathroom. When he emerged, he found Harriet waiting impatiently. She led him to the rear of the big house, down two flights of rear stairs to the basement. Once again, the complexity of the catacomb muddled Chan's sense of direction. All he could feel reasonably certain of was that their general direction was south. Finally they entered a long passageway that, after some two hundred feet, ended at a steel door.
"Open barley," said Harriet, and the door slid silently back in the wall revealed a flight of rising stairs beyond.
They climbed it after the door closed automatically behind them, to emerge in a trimly but not opulently furnished living room in a small cottage. Off this central chamber lay bedroom and bath, kitchen and pantry.
"It's a good thing I closed the storm shutters here before I went to the house," said Harriet, surveying the "retreat" to make certain nothing had been disturbed. Then, "Why are you smiling?"
" 'Open barley,' " said the detective.
Harriet sighed. "That was one of Lionel's little jokes. Just when he got so stuffy nobody could stand him, he'd come up with something like that. I can't say I'm not going to miss him, even..."
Chan was amused at the audio-key to the cellar door lock. "Open barley" was what Ali Baba's bad brother cried when he forgot the "Open Sesame" key in the old Arabian Nights fairy tale. If it was a joke, it was an effective one. Very few potential intruders would think to use it.
He said, "Who knows about the passage, Harriet?"
"Lionel does - or did. And Willis, the butler. If any of the others ever heard of it, they think it was filled in during the reconstruction. This used to be old Gideon Burdon's counting house in the early days. He had the tunnel dug to get to and from his office during storms like this."
As she spoke, Harriet busied herself with the job of changing her clothes, talking to the detective through the half open bedroom door. While she showered, Chan looked around at the furniture and decor with interest. Save that the wood was of Island origin, it could, once again, have been made long ago in the granite laced hills of northern New England from which the Burdon tribe sprung.
Chan was studying with interest a mezzotint over the rolltop desk when Harriet reappeared. It was a picture of the brig Gideon, out of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, entering Gloucester harbor. The fine script of the second line proclaimed Capt. Gideon Burdon, Master. The date was 1817.
"Our Gideon's grandfather," said Harriet matter of factly. "He was tougher than buzzards if family tradition is right. Made the children work out their Christmas presents in chores around the house - when he was home for Christmas, which was seldom."
Chan regarded her with amazement. In just under twelve minutes, she had showered and changed. Save that her hair was covered by a paisley kerchief, there was no visible evidence that this quietly smart, still attractive, sun-bronzed lady had spent the night shivering through the front end of a hurricane after surviving an attempt on her life that had missed by a hair's breadth.
She read his expression correctly, said with a trace of mockery, "I think you're wonderful, too, Charlie." Then, seating herself in a cane backed chair and motioning him to the sofa, she reached for a cigarette and said, "What do you know to date?"
"I know nothing," he replied, "but there is much I would like to know. What reason did Lionel Burdon have to commit suicide? That's the central, basic question that sticks in my Cantonese craw."
"People commit suicide for all sorts of reasons - some from sheer boredom. And if ever a man was bored with himself, it was Lionel. He may have been my brother, but he was basically dull as dishwater - duller."
Chan considered this unexpected appraisal of a man whose public image was virtually all he had known of him, a modern business and family chief executive whose abilities and kindnesses were both legion and legend. Surely such a man... Then he noted the narrow appraisal in Harriet's eyes and decided to go along with it. There was something else there - a wary appraisal of himself.
He said, "But you don't believe he killed himself."
"Not for a moment - once I had recovered from the shock of his death. But it was clever, damned clever. When I had the coroner give him a paraffin test and learned there were powder burns..." She let it hang.
Chan considered this apparent stumbling block in the path of all suspicion of murder, shelved it as already at least plausibly explicable thanks to the shooting gallery. He said, "I have yet to hear the details surrounding his death. You were there?"
"I was in the living room for the entire two-hour period during which Lionel's death must have occurred," said Harriet. "I was watching a television special I'd been looking forward to seeing, a rerun of the movie version of James Michener's Hawaii. Frankly, it was a disappointing lot of crud. It was just after it finished that I knocked on the study door. When Lionel didn't answer, I went in and found him lying there."
"Painful shock for you," said the detective.