The Cat Wears a Mask

  The Cat Wears a Mask

  A Rachel Murdock Mystery

  Dolores Hitchens

  Chapter 1

  The crowd at the roulette table was about as usual, with one exception—and even the exception could be explained away by the fact that you’re apt to see almost anything in Reno.

  Squeezed in between a large blonde in burgundy satin and a blank-faced man whose hands constantly trembled was a little old lady. She looked fresh and chipper in her sprigged muslin gown, straw bonnet with yellow daisies, and yellow lace mitts. The effect was that of a Dresden figurine, demure and delicate; an angel who had wafted unknowing into the bogs of sin. This impression vanished when she lifted her eyes. The eyes betrayed the mischief that went on under the bonnet. She studiously played numbers seventeen, double-O, and the red. She wasn’t winning, but the losses didn’t seem to worry her. There is a lot of play in a dollar’s worth of nickel chips.

  The blonde clucked in her throat as the little ball rattled into a niche on the wheel and the croupier raked away the chips. “I knew I shouldn’t have stuck to eleven. Cursed luck. I’ve a notion to move to another table.” She glanced down at the little Old lady curiously. “How are you doing?”

  “Not very well,” Miss Rachel Murdock admitted.

  “You’ve got a system, I suppose.”

  “Well—I thought I had. It looked logical on paper.”

  “They always do.” The blonde patted her temples with a lilac-scented kerchief. The club was warm and stuffy. Outside, late afternoon sunlight made a blaze that reflected into the big room from the street. The air-conditioning system was not quite adequate for the combination of cigarette smoke, overcharged nerves, and summer heat. “I think I’ll move,” the blonde threatened again loudly.

  The croupier raised his eyebrows, went on stacking chips.

  He said montonously, “Place your bets, please. Get your bets down.”

  From the rear of the club, where the crap tables stood, a shout rose as someone made his point the hard way. The whirr and clank of slot machines was a steady rhythm from the front. The wheel of fortune made a shadow on the wall as of a giant wagon wheel rolling nowhere.

  All at once the blonde opened her purse. “Oh well. Harry!”

  The croupier, evidently familiar with the blonde’s moods and methods, cynically dealt her a new stack of chips. Twenty chips, and the blonde handed him a twenty-dollar bill which he stuffed into the slot without offering any change. Not everyone, Miss Rachel realized, played for nickels. She glanced at the blonde with respect for her nerve.

  Others were covertly staring too. Perhaps the flattery implied by their silent regard rattled the blonde. She picked the chips up with a brusque, overconfident gesture and began to scatter them on the board. As she bent to reach the double-O she went off balance. A spike heel stabbed the air, then stabbed a fat man who cried, “Ouch!” The blonde’s free hand scrabbled on the lettered felt while the croupier watched with glassy disapproval. She was making a mess of the board.

  A ripple of complaint went through the crowd. At about that time the blonde’s other hand opened and the fresh stack of dollar chips rolled briskly in all directions. They hit the floor, and in the sudden hush they were loud, a sound effect for the shadowy wagon wheel up on the wall.

  The blonde shrieked. “Harry! Jeez, look what happened!”

  Harry’s mouth twitched. He made a careful and suspicious check of the board, then deigned to glance under the table. “Down there. I can see most of them. Ask the folks to help you.”

  The crowd about the table was sympathetic, good-natured. They began retrieving chips underfoot, tossing them to the blonde. The fat man made a crack about the probability that she would get back more than she had lost, and everyone laughed. The blonde’s anxiety began to change to an arch petulance.

  Harry tidied up the board, poised the little white ball inside the rim of the wheel. The crowd tightened, drew closer.

  “Wait a minute,” cried the blonde. “I’ve—I haven’t got all of them.”

  “Can it, sister,” muttered the man whose hands trembled. “What’s a buck? Let’s have a roll on what we got down.”

  Harry gave the ball a twist, a snap, and it was rolling in the rim of the wheel. But the blonde’s anger was louder than the sound of the little ball. Even though everyone’s eyes were on the wheel, their cars were assaulted by the indignant grief, threats to call the manager, and accusations of thievery the blonde flung forth.

  The ball dropped into a slot. Harry cleared the board of losing bets, paid a couple of winners, then regarded the blonde with a stare which had daggers in it.

  “I did too lose one!” she snapped. “Somebody’s holding out on me.” She glanced vindictively from one to another.

  “But we all have different colors,” Miss Rachel offered. “How could we use, or collect on, a chip belonging to you?”

  The blonde’s eyes had turned to slits. “Whoever has it thinks he’ll wait till I’m gone, then buy a few dollar chips and slip it in. Then he’ll cash my buck, or play it. I ought to call the manager.”

  The fact that the chip would probably by now have been back on Harry’s side of the table was not the point, Miss Rachel gathered. The blonde was incensed about a matter of principle.

  “Somebody here’s a damned thief—” the blonde began.

  “Shut up, baby,” said the croupier almost inaudibly.

  She shut up, quickly though unwillingly. Then, as if afraid Miss Rachel might have wondered at such meek obedience, she muttered, “Harry’s my husband.”

  “Oh,” said Miss Rachel. She thought it over. “Then he’ll watch for that missing chip.”

  The blonde pushed all of her remaining chips towards Harry. “Cash me in, darling.” Her tone bit. To Miss Rachel: “I hope he catches it. Harry’s absent-minded, though. If you’re going to be here awhile, keep your eyes open. I’m getting out so the son of—uh”—she was obviously trying to find a word suitable for the ears of a gentle little old spinster—“sea cook—whoever it is—will try his trick sooner.”

  “I’ll see what I can see,” Miss Rachel promised.

  The blonde left. Some of the excitement and color seemed to leave with her. The table settled down to a series of monotonous plays; a few people drifted off so that the crowd was thinner. Perhaps it was just getting along into the shank of the afternoon, almost dinnertime, when things were normally quieter anyway. No one tried to buy the deep purple chips which the blonde had turned in. Harry yawned once or twice behind his hand.

  Miss Rachel glanced at the little watch which hung from a fleur-de-lis pin on the bosom of the sprigged muslin. She wondered how long her sister Jennifer might think was reasonable to spend in the public library, looking up Indian dances—without becoming suspicious.

  Miss Jennifer was chronically suspicious these last few years. Recently Miss Rachel had dared complain of it.

  “I’ll bear with you,” Jennifer had replied darkly, and with a throat-slitting gesture, unexpectedly vivid, which had startled Miss Rachel. “You can endure a bit of watching in return.”

  To escape the watching she had made up the story about going to the library, leaving Miss Jennifer in their hotel room to study the tour map. From Reno they were to head southward by chartered air-conditioned bus, taking in an assortment of ghost towns, the Grand Canyon, a plush resort (thriftily reserved by the tour management during the off season) where Jennifer would no doubt be properly horrified by the nakedness of the play clothes, then the Hopi Indian reservation, Boulder Dam, and home. It was a nice, wholesome tour. “Nobody will kill anybody,” Miss Jennifer prophesied; and, taking in the fresh touristy happiness of their traveling companions, Miss Rachel agreed. This trip
was going to be without any excitement whatever, except what she might dig up on her own initiative in which Jennifer called “sin holes.” So here she was in a sin hole, and someone had stolen the blonde’s dollar chip and the puzzle of the theft was at least something to think about during dinner.

  There was a soft touch on her sleeve.

  She turned. At her elbow was someone young and slender in a green linen dress, flop-brimmed green hat, white gloves, white scarf tied high under the chin. For an instant there was the impact of the girl’s appearance, as of a stranger’s. Miss Rachel had known Gail Dickson from a child—a godchild—and yet she was seeing all over again the sensitive face, deep gray eyes, wren-colored hair, mouth with its hint of stubborn pride.

  “Oh,” said Miss Rachel. “Of all people.”

  Gail’s smile seemed uncertain. “I’ve been standing and watching you for a while. I wasn’t sure I ought to speak.” She took her hand away, stepped back.

  Miss Rachel followed so that they were free of the tight group around the roulette table. She looked at Gail closely, meanwhile. The girl was thinner, there was a new edginess to her chin, and the gray eyes had a guard up. “What a funny idea—to go off without speaking. Why?”

  Gail fumbled at the knot in her scarf. “I’m—sort of full of funny ideas these days.” There was something under the words which Miss Rachel couldn’t place—irony, self-amusement, scorn; one of these, she thought. “Mostly, though, because I wanted to talk to you so badly and I felt Miss Jennifer wouldn’t approve.”

  “Does Jennifer know something I don’t know?” Miss Rachel asked interestedly. “You haven’t become a—shill, I think, is what they call them. Or taken up running a crap table?”

  “Oh no,” said Gail, amused. “I’m still engrossed with my desert daubs. Much the same as those I exhibited in Los Angeles last year.” She seemed indifferent, and this was new in Gail when she talked of painting. “No, it’s Miss Jennifer’s attitude when anyone asks your advice about what she calls—horrors.”

  Even the yellow daisies on the bonnet seemed to grow alert. Miss Rachel made a deprecatory gesture. “Jennifer’s just jealous of the excitement I find in life. What is your particular—horror, Gail?”

  The afternoon light had faded; some of the big globes had been turned on in the ceiling. By their light Miss Rachel saw the fine sweat that came out on Gail’s upper lip. Gail seemed to find trouble in getting the right words. Finally she said, “Do you know what a Kachina is?”

  The yellow daisies were quite still now. “A spirit?”

  “A returned ghost of the dead,” Gail corrected.

  Miss Rachel blinked. “You’ve seen one?”

  “I had a message.” Again there seemed the note of self-scorn that was so elusive. “For myself—it wasn’t important. Though I was a bit surprised that a ghost could be so knowing … Of course, I’m not fooling you with my nonsense.”

  “You had a poison-pen letter,” Miss Rachel said slowly.

  From a dear, old friend. Shall we go somewhere and have a drink while I tell you about it?”

  “Jennifer is getting a nose like a fox these days.”

  “Order a vodka collins. She won’t smell that. There’s a bar in the rear here, but it’s always crowded. We’ll go across the street.”

  “Whoever told you about vodka?”

  “In college, in our literary-society meetings, we served vodka highballs to everyone except the two advisers—the old dears—and they thought everyone was having lemonade like themselves. But that’s part of what I want to tell you—”

  They went out into the street, to the high clear twilight of the desert. The street was beginning to bloom with neon. One gambling-club sign overlapped another, and the effect was gay and a little naughty. In the cocktail lounge of the hotel across the street Gail and Miss Rachel found a quiet table, settled themselves in purplish gloom.

  “How did you happen to be in Reno?” Gail asked after they had given their order.

  “We’re making an educational tour. And you?”

  Gail took hold of the table edge. Her fingers were slender and waxy in dimness. “I bolted. I ran out. Reno was the nearest place where I could stay up all night with something to do.” Her voice shook and she cut it off impatiently.

  “Don’t be ashamed of being scared,” Miss Rachel told her. “Are you going to let me see your letter?”

  “No.”

  “Then how do you want me to help you?”

  “Tell me how to catch the one who sent it.”

  The drinks came then. Above the vodka collins Miss Rachel took a long look at Gail. There was more, she thought, than simple nervous fright over a letter. Something deeper, more galling, shaming, hurtful. “Can you tell me what the letter was about?”

  “It referred to—to a silly affair I’d had long ago. A love affair. The sort of moronic love a simpleton offers a superegoist.”

  “Oh,” said Miss Rachel. “And how was the thing signed?” “Kachina.”

  Miss Rachel thought about it. “As I understand the Hopi tribal legends, the Kachinas are beneficent spirits who return to do good among the living.”

  “How they treat you depends on how you’ve behaved.”

  “This has, you said, something to do with your college literary society.”

  “The letters are made up of cut-out words and phrases from our club yearbook—the year we graduated. That narrows the field, you see. We had very few copies made, and we were a small group …”

  Miss Rachel was looking at her curiously. “Letters? More than one?”

  “This Kachina is a most impartial spirit.”

  “Who else, then?”

  Gail hesitated. “Three, that I know of. I saw two of them—Bob Ryker’s, Ilene Taggart’s. Christine, Bob’s wife, got one. Bob caught a glimpse of it, but she wouldn’t let him read it.”

  “What were they like, those you saw? As cruel as yours seems to have been?”

  Gail flinched and her eyes asked mutely if she was showing it that much. She said, “In a way, they were. It’s hard to judge how much another person is hurt … Bob’s letter referred rather nastily to his drinking, and Bob had had a weird idea that the drinking had been a secret. Ilene’s letter took a dig at her being an old maid.”

  Miss Rachel’s white eyebrows went up. “An old maid—at what must be about your age?”

  “She is, though. You’d have to see her to believe it.” Gail bent nervously over her drink. “What I had thought of doing was to invite the members of that little society out to my place on the desert. A house party. The Hopi snake dances aren’t far off—I could use them as an excuse and a drawing card. I’m almost at the edge of the reservation, you know. I’d have time to study everybody, I’d have them right in my house where I could test them out.”

  Miss Rachel was frowning over a point she had let slip by “You seem so sure that the words were cut from this yearbook. Why?”

  Gail’s bright mouth twitched. “We were very arty, as well as literary. We dug up some terrifically long-legged strange type and the book was set in it. I’ve never seen anything like it before or since. There couldn’t be a mistake on that point—nor the fact that the only copies available for such whacking-up would be those owned by the members.”

  “It seems such an oddly deliberate lead back to that literary club,” Miss Rachel said slowly. “Just who are these people you’re thinking of inviting?”

  Gail seemed to be looking down a long channel of the years. Sudden misery flooded her eyes. Then she glanced down at her folded hands. “There are the Rykers whom I mentioned—Bob and Christine. They married after we graduated. Several years afterward. And Ilene—I told you about her. There is Zia, a Hopi girl, one of the few Indian women ever to leave a reservation and go to college. There’s Dave Grubler—we used to call him the Grub in a horrid attempt at humor. He’s pale and slick and there is something sort of dreadfully grublike about him. And then there—there’s another.” Her throat seemed
to close over the words.

  “Another?”

  Gail said quickly, “A—a man named Hal Emerson. I’m not going to ask him to come.”

  “Oh? Why not?” Miss Rachel seemed not to see the tight agony in Gail’s face. “You didn’t like him?”

  “He—didn’t keep in touch with the rest of us. It——it has to be someone, you see, who knows that Bob drinks now rather more than he ought to. And who knows the way Ilene has changed.”

  In the dining room on the other side of the lounge door a string orchestra began playing softly for the dinner patrons. They played “Liebestraum” with a pathetic loneliness. Gail didn’t lift her eyes. She seemed lost in some bitter reflection.

  At last she asked, “What do you suggest for catching this creature who sends us letters?”

  Miss Rachel drew a big breath—big for her who is so small. “Do you really want my advice on this matter?”

  Gail looked up now. Something in Miss Rachel’s tone had caught her attention. “Yes. Very much. That’s why I asked.”

  “Don’t touch it,” said Miss Rachel. “Let it alone.”

  Gail’s eyes withdrew; the stubborn mouth set itself.

  Miss Rachel sighed. “You’re going to do it anyway.”

  Gail nodded slowly.

  Chapter 2

  Miss Jennifer Murdock was sitting bolt upright in a straight chair just inside the lobby door. She wore a prim dark blue taffeta dress and a tight little black hat, under which her hair had the plainness of a peeled onion. There was no nonsense and no fripperies about Miss Jennifer. She was the battle-ax type, accepted the fact and made the most of it.

  When Miss Rachel sidled in from the dark street, trying to be unobtrusive, Miss Jennifer poked her with an indignant finger.

  “Oh!” said Miss Rachel.

  “Yes, Oh!” Miss Jennifer mimicked. “Where have you been all this time?”

  Some intuition told Miss Rachel that it had better not be the library. “I ran into Gail Dickson on the street—you can imagine how surprised I was—and we went into a hotel lounge to talk.”