THE SILENT CORPSE
                             by Robert Hart Davis

                 CHARLIE CHAN MYSTERY MAGAZINE, February 1974.

     The hurricane struck the island suddenly, trapping the guests and Charlie Chan on Burdon Point - but greater than the fury of the storm was the terror when it was learned Lionel Burdon had been murdered!


     I

     THE HANDSOME, white haired man had fallen asleep at his handsome mahogany desk in the book lined study of his handsome home. His right elbow rested on the wide arm of his chair and his torso slanted that way. Although his killer entered silently, the slight click of the door closing half-roused the man from his after-dinner slumber.
     His killer smiled down into the sleep-ridded eyes and said, "Let me make you more comfortable, Lionel."
     "Thanks," Lionel Burdon mumbled. "Can't imagine why I'm so sleepy."
     "You're tired," the killer told him. "You're not a young man any more. Here - let me..."
     As a left hand straightened the slumberer's torso, the right put a Smith and Wesson revolver against his right temple and pulled the trigger.
     The sound of the discharge was shockingly loud in the room, but the killer remained untroubled by the possibility of discovery, knowing there was no one within earshot beyond the room's thick, book-sheathed walls with its massive wooden door securely closed.
     Lionel Burdon's head was a sickening sight. A torrent of blood poured from the hole in his right temple, blood mixed with bits of flesh, bone and greyish white brain matter. The ugliness of this achievement failed to disturb the killer who was troubled by a quite different concern. This was the credibility of Lionel Burdon's suicide among those who had known him well. It was not a large worry, however - for everyone would have to accept the fact of Burdon's self destruction.
     The killer had planned everything to perfection.
     The pistol placed carefully on the rich red carpet, the fact that the pistol belonged to the corpse, the matching of bullet and barrel, even the recent indications of powder marks on the victim's right hand should the authorities choose to apply a paraffin test - all added up to evidence impossible to controvert.
     The killer left the room silently, conscious of a difficult job well done...


     II

     ALTHOUGH the white spired brick chapel was less than five hundred yards from the main house, the small funeral party covered the distance in chauffeur driven limousines. Charlie Chan ordinarily would have preferred to walk but the mounting fury of the hurricane made footing it out of the question.
     The services had been brief and simple, after the Unitarian fashion, and the coffin had been mercifully covered. Even with a mortician's napkin draped over the wound, a man who has blown out his brains with a thirty-eight calibre pistol is not a reassuring sight.
     Dr. Smith, the Burdon family physician, shared the soft upholstery of the Continental with the Honolulu Chief of Detectives. He said, "The chapel always makes me feel that I am in New England instead of on the island of Hawaii."
     Chan said, "Either in New England or Hollywood. It reminds me very much of Forest Lawn."
     Dr. Smith, watching the windswept and rain-lashed cypresses that lined the winding drive bend low before the rising storm, said nervously, "I have four cases waiting in Hilo."
     Chan, who had known the eminent Chinese-American physician for many years, wondered a little at the nervousness. Dr. Li Mok Smith had always impressed him as a man of almost preternatural calm. Perhaps, he thought, it was the hurricane. Low atmospheric pressures, which invariably accompany such a storm, affect most people one way or another.
     He said, "Li, if we're to be marooned on Burdon Point, we could be in quarters much less comfortable."
     Chan, himself, had a full docket awaiting him on the island of Oahu. As the big car pulled slowly under the porte cochere of the main house, he wished that he, too, were back in his own bailiwick, but Chan was quite willing to accept the inevitable.
     Curiosity gnawed at him, curiosity both personal and professional, and he was inclined to welcome a prolongation of his visit to Burdon Point as an opportunity to seek and perhaps find answers to the questions plaguing him.
     Ordinarily, when a man like Lionel Burdon died, the acknowledged leader of one of the half dozen great families in any state, a man of great distinction and even greater power and reputation, his funeral would have been that of at least a petty prince, with the governor himself in attendance. It was because Burdon had committed suicide that Chan was there instead.
     There had been much inter-island telephoning once the date of the funeral was set. While the Burdon family, or its surviving clan-chiefs, felt that a representative of the executive should be present, it also felt that the presence of too high-level an official would bring the inevitable and unwanted newspaper and television reporters and camera crews in his wake.
     Ultimately, Honolulu Detective Inspector Charlie Chan had been tapped for the chore. He was not only sufficiently distinguished but was noted for his discretion and his ability to render himself invisible to the media representatives when such invisibility was desired. He had been known long and favorably to the deceased, having attained the status of valued friend after managing to restore safely to her home the kidnapped Lenore Burdon not merely unharmed but without payment of ransom.
     The hurricane, watched by trackers for two weeks as it approached the islands, was also a factor. While the funeral had been timed well ahead of the predicted arrival of the tropical storm on Hawaii's west coast, there was always the possibility that it would get there ahead of schedule - which had, in fact, happened.
     Charlie Chan had thus flown from Oahu early that morning, arriving barely in time to attend the services. Now, with both wind and water rising at a furious pitch, it appeared that his stay on Burdon Point, along with that of other guests, would be prolonged.
     "...without a toothbrush," he remarked in an aside to Dr. Smith as they were ushered into the entry hall of the main house by an immense and solemn faced Negro butler resplendent in gold-frogged blue broadcloth livery.
     Although, at the time of Lenore Burdon's kidnapping, Chan had been in two of the Burdon mansions on Oahu, he was unprepared for the truly baronial scale on which Burdon Point was conceived and maintained.
     As with the chapel, New England was very much present in the mahogany topped double railing of the gracefully curved banisters, in the white wall paneling and in the dour primitive ancestral portraits of earlier Burdons who glowered tight lipped and probably toothless out of their plain gilt oval frames.
     In a deceptively simple living room off the entrance hall, where biscuits and a superb claret punch were being served, Chan stuck close to Dr. Smith, which was not difficult since they were the only non-family persons present. There had been no chance for private conversation between the two quasi-officials before the ceremony at the chapel.
     In the course of his long career as a police detective in Honolulu, Chan had viewed and investigated at least a thousand suicides, most of them easily understandable. As a rule, he had learned, men and women destroyed themselves violently when facing incurable diseases, when driven insane, when confronted with unendurable prospects of failure in business or even in love, or when hopelessly hooked on narcotics habits they could no longer manage to support.
     There were other, more obscure causes for suicide, and these, too, were comprehensible. However, there were a few whose motivation for self murder had remained stubbornly beyond the bounds of any applicable logic. To Chan, Lionel Burdon's suicide was among these. In his quietly unassertive way, Lionel Burdon was, to all outward evidence, one of the most vitally alive human beings, one of the most interested and interesting men, Chan had ever met.
     Yet, Burdon had pressed a revolver muzzle against his right temple and blown out his brains. Chan had talked to his opposite number at Hilo by telephone about it before leaving his Honolulu office to drive to the airport.
     According to that official, the evidence of suicide was incontrovertible. The position of the body, the angle of bullet entry, the powder burns in the skin surrounding the wound - all spelled self destruction. Paraffin tests had even detected the presence of powder markings on the gun hand itself.
     Still, Chan found it hard to accept. Hence, his cornering of Dr. Smith, who had been Lionel Burdon's personal physician on Hawaii.
     "Li," he said, "have you any idea why?"
     The physician shrugged and shook his head, then said, "Charlie, it beats me. Of all the men I've ever known..." he let it hang.
     "How about his health?"
     "I checked him every six months for the past eight years, the last time six weeks ago. For a man sixty-one years old, he had the body and mind of a man twenty years younger. His muscle tone was perfect, his reaction timing above normal in quickness, his blood pressure one-twenty over eighty. You and I should have it so good."
     "Mental health to match?"
     Dr. Smith spread his hands wide, said, "Charlie, you know I'm no psychiatrist, so I'm hardly qualified to give you an answer. But, off the record, he was probably the sanest son of a bitch I ever knew in my life. He never saw a shrink unless it was social."
     "Come on, you two," said a sweetly low-pitched feminine voice. "Don't try to spoil the wake with shop talk. You won't succeed."
     Dr. Smith murmured something about its being the quietest wake he had ever attended and wandered away. Looking after him briefly, Chan received a definite impression that the physician had seized the opportunity to get away from his questioning. He wondered why, since the evidence of suicide was incontrovertible and the questions had been elemental.
     "Inspector Chan," said the low-pitched feminine voice, "aren't you going to say hello to your victim?"
     "Pardon, Mrs. Wilmot," Chan said, lapsing into the pidgin English that had once been his trademark. "Most rude." Then, regarding Lenore Burdon Wilmot for the first time, "Victim bloom like beautiful bronze chrysanthemum."
     The girl he had rescued from kidnappers nine years before had indeed bloomed into a most attractive woman - nor was the bronze chrysanthemum simile inapt, since the curling cap of her hair bore close resemblance to the flower.
     Her wide-set eyes were grey green, her slightly uptilted nose dusted with freckles against the healthy tan of her complexion. Her basic black dress, with its inevitable single strand of perfectly matched pearls, suggested that the coltish teenager whose rescue he had achieved had become a stunningly contoured young matron.
     "How perfectly charming," she said. Then, mimicking him gently, "But come as no surprise from captivating detective chief."
     Dropping the pidgin, Chan said, "Seriously, Lenore, it's nice to see you thriving - even on such an occasion."
     Trouble flickered over the attractive face, then vanished as quickly as it had appeared. "That's one thing about us Burdons," she said, "we thrive and thrive and thrive."
     The troubled look flickered again. Lenore Burdon Wilmot opened her mouth to speak, but, before she could say whatever was in her mind, an intruder shattered the brief tete a fete.
     Red-haired, hound-dog lean and lined of countenance, even in mourning Zachariah Burdon seemed to wear his medals. His light blue eyes lit up the room, the sardonic twist of his oblique mouth suggested verbal devastation to come. The fact that he was sopping wet added to his charisma of drama.
     He said, "Hello, Charlie. Glad you made it - though it looks as if you're going to be stuck here for a bit." His voice carried with it a grainy resonance that cut through other conversations like a laser beam.
     "Uncle Zach," said Lenore, "you're all wet!"
     Zachariah Burdon grimaced, then brushed his condition away with a decisive gesture. "I've been closing the west storm shutters upstairs," he said. "Half of them were wide open. It's lucky we aren't flooded right now."
     Lenore Burdon Wilmot said, "But Harriet said she was going to see to that. She stayed home from the services to make the house watertight."
     Rudely, Zachariah Burdon said, "I'd like to get my hands on that old bat right now." With his free hand - the other carried a cup of punch - he indicated the soaked condition of his chest and shoulders.
     "Uncle Zach!" said his niece. "I didn't know you cared for Harriet that way."
     "You're making my flesh creep," said Uncle Zach with a visible shudder. Then, worried, "Where in hell could she have gone?"
     "Not far in this weather," said Lenore.
     As the wet and disgruntled Zachariah Burdon wandered away, presumably in search of the missing Harriet, Chan became aware of the intensity of the raging tropical storm. A moment of silence had fallen over the assemblage in the living room. Even through the heavily insulated walls of the house, the roar of angry surf and wind, the unbroken lash of driving rain, made themselves felt as well as heard in the snug haven of shelter.
     A native Hawaiian, Chan had lived through his share of early autumnal hurricanes. They were a part of the Island way of life. But this was the first time he had been exposed to such a storm on the wide open west coast of Hawaii itself. Even within the stolidly built mansion of concrete and brick, there was a sense of standing stark naked in the teeth of the gale.
     "I'd better take you up to your room," Lenore said, "if it isn't under water. I can't imagine why Harriet didn't get the windows closed in time. It's so unlike her."
     Moving gracefully, she led Chan back into the majestic hall and up the winding double staircase, which divided itself at a landing midway in its rise to curve north and south into a balcony that squared the circle of the hall itself.
     As they proceeded upward, taking the left turn, to a hallway lined with doors, tables and other ancestral portraits, Lenore said over her shoulder, "I'm afraid the family has long since appropriated the rooms on the lee side of the house."
     Midway along the corridor, she turned right through a half-open door and stopped dead just inside it with a cry of dismay. Over her shoulder, Chan saw that the opposite side of the large bedroom was indeed partially under water. Evidently, the stout wooden storm windows had been put in place too late to prevent a minor flood. A padded window seat that ran almost the width of the room was sopping, the whole far breadth of the burgundy carpet was dark with a wide water stain and the rim of fine hardwood floor visible between rug and window seat looked as if it had been freshly hosed.
     A young man and young woman, looking intensely mod despite the suitable somberness of their attire, were engaged in attempting to soak up the worst of the water with an apparently endless supply of costly looking bath towels. While Chan and Lenore stood watching them, the girl looked up at them and grimaced.
     "I'd like to wring Harriet's neck," she said.
     Beneath a vast amount of long, almost coal black hair, an arrestingly piquant young face, from which blazed light beryl blue eyes, gazed up at them. As she tossed a hopelessly wet towel onto a pile of a ready discarded towels in a corner, bracelets and neck chains jingled rather like the wind chimes that dangled from Chan's own porch roof back on Oahu.
     "Carol!" said Lenore. "Where are the servants?"
     The young man rose and replied, "Those that aren't busy downstairs are doing the rest of the west bedrooms. What a mess!"
     He was a lithe leopard of a youth clad in charcoal flare trousers and a frilled white shirt with black trim. His face, framed by neatly styled middle-brown hair and sideburns, was not handsome but attractive. His eyes, which were darkly topaz in hue, gazed from Lenore to Chan with an intensity that was just short of a hypnotic glare.
     Lenore introduced them. "Charlie, this is my cousin Carol and this is Armand Kent."
     "A hell of a way to greet a guest," said the youth, "especially such a distinguished one as Inspector Chan. Why couldn't we move him across the hall?"
     While the other three discussed and discarded the possibilities of a transfer - the house was simply too full for any such move to be practicable - Chan turned his thoughts toward the missing Harriet. Though he had met that unique member of the Burdon clan but once, her impact had been unforgettable.
     It had occurred when Chan restored Lenore to her parents, Lowell and Ellen Burdon, following his successful rescue of the girl from her kidnappers. Actually, Chan had been considerably embarrassed at the time by the fact that the Burdon family made, or tried to make, more of a hero of him than he felt his actions merited.
     Since deep collusion had been involved between "victim" and her supposed "kidnapper" - something far more frequent in such crimes than is generally believed - the Chief of Detectives had always felt that his main achievement had been to keep the story out of the press. A very young and very headstrong Lenore Burdon had fallen head over heels in love with a handsome Kanaka filling station attendant, who had cooked up the scheme of getting their non-marriage off to a prosperous start by milking Lenore's family via the fake kidnap route.
     That the boy had died when his car smashed while he was fleeing the scene was, Chan supposed, regrettable, though he was not even sure of that.
     It was then that the Burdon clan, and Lionel Burdon in particular, had won Charlie Chan's undying respect. Instead of fostering the bewildered girl's resentments by punishing her, they had rewarded Lenore with increased family responsibilities.
     But it was Harriet Burdon MacLean who stood most sharply etched in Chan's memory. When he brought the stunned and grief stricken girl home to a fine old mansion on a palm covered hilltop overlooking the city of Honolulu, Harriet had opened the door before he could pull the bell.
     Looking like the archetype of all traditional New England spinster schoolmarm types, rugged and rawboned and cutting sharp of eye and jaw, she had taken the girl from the circle of the detective's supporting arm and said to her, "I suppose I ought to whale the daylights out of you, but I'm too damned glad to see you for that."
     Just the right mixture of iron reproof and love for her wayward niece. Lenore had dissolved in a flood of tears in Harriet's arms and Harriet, looking at Chan over her niece's shoulder, her own eyes suspiciously wet, had said, "I suppose I ought to thank you, Lieutenant, for merely doing your job. Few enough people do that nowadays."
     Chan had been a detective lieutenant at the time. Although it was a good many years since, he and Harriet still faithfully exchanged Christmas cards with brief handwritten notes. Here and there, in that time, he had picked up bits of lore about Harriet Burdon MacLean, of which there was a good deal.
     Although she was a sister of Lionel, Lowell and Zachariah Burdon, none of their offspring ever called her Aunt Harriet. To do so was to invite crisp and crushing retort. To any who dared call her Aunt Hattie, punishment was more severe, usually involving a deduction from her sizable Christmas checks for those in the family, and permanent coventry for non-relatives with the ill judgment or ill luck to call her by this detested nickname.
     Her brothers might be the active heads of the clan, with Lionel chairman of the holding committee that made the conglomerate's decisions - but Harriet had both voice and vote when polling time came, and her voice was listened to and her vote counted. She had a knack of smelling out impending economic setbacks in ample time for preventive action and her cynicism protected all around her from falling for promotional figures and figureheads alike.
     It was Harriet who ran the large and complex domestic side of the establishment and who ran it superbly as well. In more ways than one, she was the Burdon family conscience, usually wrapped in a flowered print dress as befitted her age and station in her own estimation. Harriet's failure to insulate the Burdon Point main house fully against the hurricane was the first failure Chan had ever heard attributed to her.
     Somewhere, deep inside the detective, a little alarm light went on, a silent but insistent buzzer sounded. He looked at the youth called Armand Kent and said, "Were the windows open when you came in?"
     "You'd better believe it!" the youth replied. "It was as if someone had turned a fire hose on it."
     "It was scary," said Carol. "It was all the two of us could do to get the storm shutters closed."
     Chan nodded, then asked, "Who gave the alarm?"
     "Daddy," said Carol. "He was first one back from the chapel. He came running downstairs when we came in the house, calling for Harriet. When he saw us, he told us to get cracking while he called the servants."
     Lenore said, "I wonder where Harriet is." For a moment, worry clouded her grey green eyes. Then, shaking herself out of it, she said to Chan. "I'll have one of the maids see to you. Come downstairs whenever you wish. Dinner at seven-thirty. Drinks first, should you wish."
     "Thank you, Lenore," said Chan.
     As they departed, Armand Kent regarded the detective briefly from the doorway. A half-smile curled his lips as he said, "We leave you all the wet towels you want."
     Two servants, also well dampened by the invading storm just repulsed from inside the house, soon appeared and put things to rights. Wet towels were removed, dry ones substituted, toothbrush, toothpaste, shaving gear, lotion and a pair of silver-mounted ebony backed military brushes supplied.
     Since he had not had an opportunity to wash since leaving Honolulu, Charlie Chan decided to take a bath. It was too early to go downstairs, and there was much to think over. He shaved, then luxuriated in a scented tub and let the air dry him when the water had run out. When he emerged, wearing a Happi coat provided by his hostess, his eye was caught and held by the clean linen laid out on the bed.
     He paused momentarily.
     This was unfortunate, for the unseen and thus far unheard intruder took the detective's moment of other-directed attention to slip out from behind the bathroom door and come at him from behind. The detective became aware of the fact that he was not alone a mere instant before two hands struck him just under the shoulder blades and, with a vigorous shove, sent him sprawling face downward across the big double bed, ploughing right through the clothing some invisible Burdon servant had so carefully laid out.
     The door was slammed shut behind his unseen attacker before he had a chance to lift his head and look around, and when he reached the door himself and peered cautiously through it, there was nothing of the intruder to be seen in either direction of the long hallway.
     Although he knew such a feeling was ridiculous, Chan felt a sense of guilt as he donned the rumpled but still relatively neat garments his hostess had provided for him. It was as if he were responsible for the rear attack that had sent him sprawling over them on the bed.
     What, he wondered as he dressed hastily, had the unidentified visitor been after? A good question, a very good question. But a good question was of little use without a good answer.
     In an effort to provide such an answer, the detective searched the room thoroughly before going downstairs. He found nothing untoward until, while searching the still soggy windowseat, he spotted a fragment of cloth sticking out ever so slightly from the casement crack just below the bottom hinge.
     Chan tried to pull it out without opening the window but the bit of fabric remained stubbornly in its crack. When he did open the window, the pounding of the storm against the heavy wooden hurricane shutters was almost frightening even to a lifelong Islands resident like Chan. After removing the small piece of cloth, he was glad to close the casement again.
     It was wet. It looked like a fragment torn from a dress. It was black and had a tiny flowered print pattern in subdued colors. It looked as if it might have been ripped from the sort of dress Harriet would have chosen to wear on her brother's burial day.
     Had the intruder brought it into the room while Chan bathed? Or had he been looking for it to remove it? Or had his appearance had nothing to do with the scrap of cloth at all?
     Good questions, he thought wryly, in this case brought more good questions - not answers. As he went on downstairs, he decided to keep mum about the incident. But it continued to puzzle him throughout the meal.


     III

     BOTH DRINKS and dinner were of superlative quality, yet the conversation languished. The combination of the tragic death of the clan chief and the oppressive tropical storm from whose fury only the walls and roof insulated them kept the mood of the group restively depressed. A mildly bawdy joke, offered by young Armand Kent, fell flatter than flat even though the Reverend Jack Verdery, who had officiated at the simple service that afternoon, greeted it with a tolerant smile.
     There were seventeen at table, all but Charlie Chan, Dr. Smith and the Unitarian minister members of the Burdon family. Chan spent most of the meal in silence, enjoying the sharkfin soup, the exquisitely truffled half-wild pig, bred on the extensive grounds of Burdon Point, the garden fresh vegetables and salad and the papaya mousse that was served for dessert.
     During the meal, Chan amused himself by seeking to identify the relationships between those members of the Clan Burdon who seemed to him important, not merely rich - for all were wealthy beyond the dreams of less favored mortals. Of these, seven were present.
     Lowell Burdon sat at the head of the table. Beads of perspiration lined his round face and receding hairline, and his green eyes shifted from one face to another as though he expected his new role as clan chief to be challenged. Occasionally, he shifted his heavy bulk. He hardly touched his food.
     The chair at the south end of the table, facing that of Lowell Burdon was gapingly empty.
     It was usually occupied by Harriet MacLean, who had assumed the role of family hostess when Lionel Burdon's wife left him years before, via the divorce route, for remarriage to a French title and residence in Fontainbleau. Even tonight, although Lowell's plum pudding of a wife, Ellen should by rights have assumed this chair, she preferred to sit more modestly close to her husband.
     As Lenore remarked, sotto wee, when Chan mentioned its emptiness, "After all, Harriet may turn up at any moment, and Ellen could never face that." He noted that Lenore called her parents by their first names rather than by the more usual parental titles.
     Of the young folk present, Carol was Zachariah Burdon's vivid daughter, while Armand's relationship the detective was unable to figure out. Following the death of his joke, the youth ate in sullen silence.
     Zachariah himself said little, for the most part bending his vivid red head to his food. Now and again his bright blue eyes would regard one of the other diners; seeming to skewer the object of his gaze as effectively as stiletto.
     Lowell Burdon looked preoccupied, even a trifle harried, and barely touched his food. Lenore's husband, Davis Wilmot, ate, but more than once seemed to be suppressing audible symptoms of nervous indigestion.
     Chan sensed the presence of fear at the feast as he had sensed it earlier, both in chapel and in this same room while he conversed with Dr. Smith. He was speculating on its roots over a glass of Bisquit when he became aware that Armand Kent had asked him a direct question.
     It took him a moment to gather the lightly heeded tatters of what had been asked - "Inspector Chan, have you ever encountered a perfect crime?"
     There was a sudden silence in the room.
     Chan smiled and said, "Too, often, I fear - but too seldom with awareness. The perfect crime, by its very nature, is one which seems no crime at all. The moment the existence of crime is detected, it ceases to be perfect, whether the perpetrator pays for it or not."
     Zachariah Burdon, draped by one elbow from the mantel with a huge inhaler of fine champagne, uttered an unexpected, "Bravo, Inspector! The best definition I have yet heard. But, since perfect crime remains undetected as crime, can we be sure that it exists?"
     "A point of casuistry," said Chan. "It exists all around us to a frightening degree, if only indicated by the iceberg tip of detected crime."
     "Satan lurks on every hand," intoned the Reverend Verdery. Then, with a shudder, "I sound like a hellfire, old fashioned Congregationalist of the Cotton Mather genus rather than a presumably enlightened present-day Unitarian minister. But your reply stirred some atavistic ashes, I fear."
     "I was speaking," said Armand, "of the crime of murder."
     The silence was so deep that Chan felt impelled to break it in a hurry. He said, "Murder, too, of course - no pun intended. How many physicians have signed certificates of death by natural causes in cases where they at least felt the seeds of suspicion?"
     "Hey, Charlie, leave me out of this!" said Dr. Smith, laughing. But his laughter came from the throat, not the diaphragm.
     "Cholly so solly," Chan said. "Nothing personal, Li. Poisoning - either through the infliction of lethal substances into a victim's body or the withholding of needed medicine - is such an easy way to dispose of an unwanted person. And, in all probability, the most common."
     "We can't cry wolf over every death certificate," Dr. Smith protested.
     "Exactly," said Chan.
     Lenore, on whom the duties of hostess seemed to have devolved in the continued absence of Harriet and the apparent inability of her mother to fill the breach, had had enough of the subject.
     She altered it abruptly, regarding her Uncle Zachariah, and said, "Zach, I'm worried about Harriet. If she were in the house, the servants, or one of us, would have found her. If she's out, in this..." Lenore let it hang.
     As if to punctuate her concern, the hurricane outdid itself with a sudden rush and roar of even greater velocity and power of wind and water than it had yet manifested. The great solid house shuddered as if a gigantic cat had walked up its spine, then groaned rheumatically upon its firm concrete and steel foundations.
     Zachariah Burdon waited, his head cocked slightly to one side, his bright blue eyes hard and sharp in the soft light, until the great gust subsided. Then he said, "If she's out in this, we shan't find her tonight. If she is, she may have made it to her retreat."
     He moved to a wall phone just inside the hall door, punched a series of buttons set in the panel while he held the handset to his ear. After waiting a moment, he hung up, dialed again, listened again in vain. He tried a third time, pushing different buttons, talked briefly with Willie, the butler who had met Chan in the hall on his return with Dr. Smith from the funeral services.
     "To the waiting room?" he said, "If she's there, we can't reach her. Service outside the house proper is malfunctioning."
     Dr. Smith blinked behind his glasses, said, "I've been expecting a call from Hilo for over an hour. Do you suppose...?"
     "Not in Burdon Point ground," said Zachariah, "When we had the phones reinstalled five years ago, they were set just there - in the ground, in cable casings of insulation fibre and zinc. But beyond our fences, I'd say the odds were ninety-nine to one they're down and out somewhere."
     Dr. Smith uttered a four-letter word which shocked no one. Under existing conditions, it seemed a quite suitable expression. Then Lenore spoke again.
     "Dave," she said to her husband, "I think we should search the entire house, including the basements."
     Davis Wilmot, a quietly handsome rust-colored man who had spoken little during the evening, said mildly, "But why would Harriet go to the basements?"
     "There could be any number of reasons," Lenore insisted, her handsome gray-green eyes narrow. "Because of the storm, something for the household, anything."
     Ellen Burdon, another quiet one, said, "Harriet was very fond of Lionel. I think she probably slipped off to be by herself for a while."
     Lowell Burdon disagreed with his wife. "I think Lenore's right, dear," he said. "Of course Harriet is full of grief, but she's not the type to hole up in a corner in a time of crisis. And this, what with Lionel's death and the storm, is a time of double crisis."
     "But searching the basements..." said Ellen Burdon in dismay. "That's like searching the Catacombs in Rome."
     "There's another possibility nobody seems to want to consider," said young Kent. "Something may have happened to her."
     The room floated in shock at this expression of the eventuality nobody seemed to wish to consider. Then Zachariah Burdon drained his inhaler of brandy and put it down on the mantelpiece. He said, "Come on, Chan. If we're going to do it, let's get at it. You and I are the only trained investigators in the group."
     "Very well." Chan got to his feet. Such reluctance as he showed was feigned for reasons of tact rather than genuine. He wanted very much to look for Harriet, had been considering making the suggestion himself when Armand spoke up.
     "There's no sense any of us going," said Lenore, as Carol indicated her wish to go with the men by rising.
     "But I want to go," Carol protested, her face losing much of its prettiness as her expression became a sullen pout. "What's wrong with going?"
     "Oh, very well," said Lenore, looking cross in turn.
     "Coming, Dr. Smith?" Zachariah asked.
     Dr. Smith, who had been across the room trying to make a trans-island phone call, put the instrument down. "All right, Burdon" he said. You were right about the lines. They're down."
     Zachariah gave an I-told-you-so shrug and led the way toward the rear of the huge house via hall, dining room and butler's pantry beyond. Chan was next, then Lowell Burdon, then Dr. Smith, followed by the young couple and some of the other males present. Zachariah, pausing at a swinging pantry door, looked back at his troup, seemed to shudder, then looked down at the shorter detective inspector with an expression that said clearly, "We can't expect much from this bunch."
     Yes, Chan thought, Zachariah Burdon was a trained investigator. He was also a trained executive officer both in combat and business, a rakehell adventurer with an instant computer brain, a man who had earned more millions for the Burdon clan than any other member. Yet he had never in his life won a Good Conduct Medal, nor had he been awarded a voting seat on the family board of directors and trustees. Zachariah had enlisted in the army the day after Pearl Harbor - in direct defiance of the clan. They had never forgiven him, or so it seemed.
     Following the rangy redhead as he led them down a narrow staircase, the detective wondered how deeply this last rare lack of recognition rankled - or if it rankled at all...
     The basements and sub-basements of the big house at Burdon Point were indeed an extensive catacomb, extending underground over an area greater than that of the house they served. They comprised a catacomb of steel and concrete, air conditioned and moisture controlled, power-fed by its own huge generators, a subterranean fortress built to resist the most destructive efforts of nature - or of man
     After moving slowly and carefully through what seemed like hundreds of yards of passages and looking into a score of storerooms and fuel storage banks, various engine rooms and living quarters, Chan said to Zachariah, "Very impressive, but who keeps it running?"
     "A very small staff," said the former Marine colonel. "The machinery that runs Burdon Point is almost entirely automated. Frankly, I was against it when Lionel decided to install it. The plan seemed ruinously and needlessly expensive, even for us. But for once in his life, Lionel had the better vision."
     Chan pondered the implications of this remark, then said, "I suppose it's weatherproof."
     "Charlie," said Zachariah, "below ground, this house is proof against anything but a ten-point Richter scale earthquake and a direct hit by a megaton H-bomb."
     They had become separated from the others, some of whom had followed the two young people, others the massive liveried back of Willie, the butler. Zachariah led the way into a silent control room which, to the detective, looked more like the control room of some as-yet undreamt of space ship. Banks of gauges and indicators lined three of the otherwise faceless steel walls. In front of the fourth was a massive control table or desk with banks of buttons and indicators.
     Zachariah Burden turned to the slender young man with owlish granny glasses who had risen at their entrance. He said, "Everything in order, Johanssen?"
     "Everything shipshape so far, Colonel," said Johanssen. "I have Henderson and Yashimuru checking the cliffside passages just in case of leaks."
     "Fat chance of that," said Zachariah. He introduced Chan, adding, "Johanssen graduated from both Cal Tech and M.I.T. He helped install the machinery and stayed on to keep it running."
     Pleasantries concluded, Zachariah pushed on out of the control room via another door with Charlie Chan following. The detective said, "When you speak of leaks, you make the house sound like a ship."
     "It is," said the former Marine. "The ventilation is entirely artificial. Naturally, there is a back-up system if it should break down - two of them, in fact. But in the unlikely event of this Maginot Line fortress springing a leak, a lot of circuits might short. Nothing serious, understand, but a damned nuisance to fix."
     Chan forced himself to breathe deeply. He had once taken a trial trip on an atomic submarine and had been sensitive to sealed air ever since. Until then, he had not been aware of it but now he felt vaguely uncomfortable.
     Zachariah, regarding him out of the corner of one eye, said sardonically, "Don't go claustrophobic on us, Charlie. It's out of character for you."
     The detective became aware that there was sweat on his forehead and in the curves of his nostrils. He did not enjoy having his companion discover this rupture of his poise. Ignoring it, Chan said, "Do you really think Harriet is down here?"
     "I doubt it very much," said Zachariah. "Harriet's a fresh-air fiend. If she hadn't opened the windows to air out the guest rooms we wouldn't have been flooded upstairs." A pause, then, "Unless somebody hung her up on a hook in the meat locker."
     "Better look," said Chan.
     Zachariah's right eyebrow rose. Then he shrugged and led the way along another corridor. Following him, the detective's thoughts were upstairs. If Harriet's presence in the basement were so unlikely, why had Lenore Burdon Wilmot been so insistent upon the search? Nerves and worry? Possibly, he decided. Chan recalled that the seemingly unflappable Lenore was an adult version of the unstable and neurotic teenager who had connived with a declasse lover to exact ransom from her own family.
     Further speculation on these lines was cut off when Zachariah Burden opened a massive, perfectly balanced grey painted steel door whose thick glass window was frosted inside. Again, the detective followed him through. He found himself in a deep freezer large enough to serve a big hotel.
     "We'd better go through this quickly, Charlie," said the colonel. "It doesn't take long to turn a man into an icicle without a cold suit."
     Sides of beef dangled in ghostly array from ceiling hooks of gleaming metal - as did the carcasses of whole sheep, hogs and a long battery of immense turkeys. Lesser fowl and fish were stored in orthodox freeze lockers along the walls.
     Zachariah said, "You take the left aisle, I'll take the right."
     It was sensible advice, but Chan began to feel oddly uneasy as Zachariah passed out of sight behind the double rows of flayed and frozen animal corpses. After all, he was alone with a man of violent action, a man he did not really know, in a room that could quickly become a deathtrap once the door was closed. The recent attack in his room was also in Chan's mind. By the time he reached the room's far end, he could feel the chill to the very marrow of his bones.
     During the return trip, Chan forced himself to walk slowly, even to inspect the smaller wall lockers through their glass lids. Each was easily large enough to hold a human body. But they contained only small fowl and fish of a vast variety of shapes and sizes. By the time he reached the entrance, he was fighting to keep his teeth from chattering.
     Chan felt a moment of real panic when he discovered the door was shut - panic hardly abated by the fact that it was designed, like most such freezer doors, to be opened only from the outside.
     The door was opened at that moment and Zachariah stood aside to permit Chan to pass. He said, "Sorry, Charlie, but you took your time. Me, I can't stand that kind of cold very long. I guess my blood's too thin after my years in the tropics."
     The detective felt himself warm to the man about whom he had so recently been entertaining the most sinister suspicions. Thanks to his frankness, they were now all even - Zachariah one up on the air conditioning bit, Chan one up on his greater tolerance for cold.
     What fools we mortals be, he thought...
     "Harriet on your side?" Zachariah asked, and, at Chan's headshake, "Not on mine, either." He turned right into a passage they had not explored, adding, "Let's cut through the back way. It will save us about fifty yards."
     "Okay," said Chan, warming to his companion even more. Like him, the detective had no desire to retrace the seeming miles of dreary passageways they had already traversed. He wanted to learn what the others had found.
     Another left turn, and their corridor dead-ended at the inevitable steel door, this one without an inset window and with an orthodox knob. Zachariah paused there briefly, said, "This should bring us back to the others." A pause, then, "Charlie, you've had a good look at the kids. What do you think of Armand?"
     "Jury still out, judge on long weekend," said Chan, lapsing into the pidgin he used when he preferred to avoid giving an answer.
     Zachariah Burden sighed and shook his head, then grinned and said, "I guess I deserved that. But a father these days needs all the reassurance he can get."
     "It's all right," said Chan. "The apologies should be mine. Now, if I may, I have a question that's been bothering me ever since I heard Lionel Burdon committed suicide."
     "Charlie -" Zachariah spoke before the detective could ask it "- if you want to know if I know why he did it, the answer is negative. I'm as much in the dark about it as everybody else. And to do it at this time..."
     "Why 'this time' - is that significant?"
     "Maybe, Charlie, it should have been. Today, he was supposed to invest Dave Wilmot with full voting powers on the family board of directors." Another hesitation, then, "You ought to see the ceremony. It's rather like the investiture of a bishop or a coronation on a very private scale."
     With that, again he pushed opened a door and led the way inside with the detective following - into a chamber so brightly lit that it temporarily blinded Chan. There a smell of long-cooled hot metal in the atmosphere, the sharper smell of gunpowder.
     From beyond the blur of light, the detective heard somebody cry. "Don't!"
     Zachariah let out a cry of alarm and, spinning about, gripped Charlie Chan tightly and flung both of them to a floor that was unexpectedly soft beneath their bodies.
     With a shattering series of thunderlike reports, the ten shot clip of a semi-automatic rifle was discharged earsplittingly close and the bullet whined over their heads by less than a foot to thud into a spongy wall.


     IV

     IN THE CONFUSION, Charlie Chan was quickly aware of only one thing - Zachariah Burdon had led the two of them into the target end of a private shooting gallery at the precise moment that Armand Kent emptied the clip of a semi-automatic rifle at an already well perforated silhouette simulating the upper half of a man's body.
     Zachariah sprang to his feet, cursing like the proverbial camel driver of the Sahara caravan routes. What, he wanted to know, was the blankety-blank idea of firing when the rear door through which he and Chan had entered was unlocked? It was, Chan decided, a sound and relevant question under the circumstances.
     Armand stood in his firing post, still holding the rifle, looking stunned. It was the vivid dark-haired Carol Burdon, Zachariah's daughter, who volunteered the explanation.
     "Zach," she said, "he wasn't shooting at you. We came through the rear door a few minutes ago and somebody must have forgotten to set the lock."
     Three of the less conspicuous members of the family search party, all Burdons or Burdon in-laws, stood there and embarrassed. Zachariah, like Chan still dusting himself off, regarded them mordantly.
     "This is a helluva time for target practice," Zachariah barked. "We just buried a Burdon, and we're searching for a missing Burdon. Who was the last one inside?" he cried.
     A plump, middle-aged man in conventional mourning attire, shuffled his feet and said, "I guess I'm the guilty party, Zach. My God! It never occurred to me that..."
     The former Marine colonel spoke to him gently. "Elwood," he said, "in this household, where there's a rule, there's a damned good reason." Then, to Chan, "You all right, Charlie?" His look was anxious.
     "Thanks to you," said the detective. He wondered for a moment how his guide had been able to see the bombardment was imminent in the blinding glare of the battery of spotlights beamed from the firing end on the targets. Then he recalled hearing a faint click, just before Zachariah Burdon dumped him, recalled his Marine Corps combat experience and decided his guide had recognized the sound as prelude to the firing of a gun.
     Armand handed the weapon sheepishly over to Zachariah, who examined it quickly, then passed it to the detective for inspection, saying, "If that thing had killed us, Charlie, at least we'd have been done in by a Rolls Royce of weapons."
     It was a fantastic gun, not new but by no means an antique. It was gas operated, beautiful burnished and balanced, with a telescopic sight by Zeiss. The stock, of magnificently grained walnut wood, was chased with silver. In an oval plaque midway along its right elevation was inscribed in Gothic script the name Reich Marshal Hermann Goering.
     Chan said, "It looks like a Mannlicher. But I never saw a gun exactly like this."
     "It's unlikely you ever will again," said Zachariah. "Mannlicher made a half dozen for top Nazis in nineteen forty. As far as is known, this is the only one that survived the end of the war."
     Chan returned it, remarking, "Bullet kill same dead no matter lineage of gun that fires it."
     "Touche," said Zachariah. Then, to Armand, "Just what was the idea of taking target practice now? You were supposed to be looking for Harriet."
     The youth's bright brow eyes fell under the former Marine colonel's direct gaze. He shrugged elegantly clad shoulders, replied, "We covered everything except the zone you took with Mr. Chan. When we got here, it seemed like a good idea to let off some steam."
     Kent turned to Chan and said in flawless Mandarin Chinese, "Most humble apologies from misdirected self to great detective from Honolulu. No harm intended."
     Chan, whose knowledge of the supreme Chinese tongue was slight, was barely able to understand and to reply in far from flawless accents, "Honorable apology most gratefully received and accepted."
     Did he detect mockery in the too bright eyes of the elegant young man? Charlie Chan wondered!
     When they resumed upstairs, the others had already learned of the near disaster. Lowell Burdon, grave and dignified, expressed formal apology to the detective, who brushed it off politely despite the continuing fluid weakness in the backs of his knees. Chan took advantage of the moment to ask the successor to the chieftainship of the Clan Burdon for a look at the site of Lionel's suicide.
     He had expected hesitation, if only on personal grounds, but Lowell Burdon quickly agreed, adding, "You know, Charlie, I still find it hard to believe."
     Grave and dignified, he ushered the detective from the living room across a hall into another wing of the huge house, into a large, quietly luxurious library whose walls were lined with books from floor to ceiling and whose center was occupied by a huge desk, a brass and mahogany replica of the George Washington desk in New York's city hall.
     Lowell indicated an area of the rich grey carpeting that still bore the faint chalk outlines of the position in which a human figure had lain, markings inevitable to the early investigation of any violent death. "That was where Willis found him."
     "Willis?" said Chan. Then, recalling, "Oh, yes, the butler." He was unable entirely to repress an inevitable "the-butler-dunnit" thought but managed not to utter it, mildly cursing his sense of humor.
     "It still seems incredible," said Lowell Burton, leaning against the desk. "My first thought was of some incurable illness concealed from the rest of us. But Dr. Smith assured me my brother was probably healthier than I, and I am remarkably healthy for a man of fifty-nine."
     Chan could think of nothing to add along those lines, except, "Who heard the shot?"
     "No one," Lowell Burdon replied. "But that is not too surprising. This is a huge house and the walls are thick. For instance, nobody up here heard Armand's discharge in the gallery downstairs."
     "May I ask what's in there?" Chan nodded toward a door midway in the far wall.
     "Of course." Lowell Burdon led them there, opened it to reveal a rectangular chamber with a long ebony table occupying much of its area surrounded by ebony armchairs with red morocco seats and arm covers.
     "If this looks like a board of directors' meeting room, that's exactly what it is," Lowell Burdon said. "This is where the formal family conferences are held. And this room is soundproof. It's immediately over the shooting gallery where you and Zachariah had your close call."
     "Why the juxtaposition?" asked Chan. "Accident of design?"
     "Hardly. My brother did little by accident. It was a matter of practical economics." A thin smile lit his face and he added in an aside, "I know that word sounds odd in connection with this family. But Lionel wanted these two rooms completely proofed for obvious reasons and it made sense to put one on top of another.
     "Then, too, when the weather or time did not permit him to play golf, my brother liked to let off steam at the end of a working day by going downstairs and firing a few rounds at target practice." A pause, then, "Running a family empire like ours is not an easy job, a fact that I am increasingly beginning to realize since Lionel - well, since Lionel is gone and left it on my shoulders. At any rate, he found target shooting a release."
     "Understandable," said Chan as they moved back toward the living room. "I've done it myself more than once. It steadies taut nerves."
     When they returned to the others, Lenore Burdon Wilmot took Charlie Chan in charge again, offering him a highball which was gladly accepted. When they were seated, away from the others, she said, "Well, dear Charles, what do you think?"
     "Too early for think," he replied. "Still seeking cause of uncle's suicide."
     Lenore wrinkled her charming nose, shrugged equally charming shoulders. Her grey green eyes flashed fire and she said, "Who knows why he did it? Who knows why anyone does away with himself? I'm worried about Harriet. Disappearing this way simply isn't like her."
     Chan agreed but had no desire to get off on that angle again just then. For the moment, his attention and interest were focused on Armand Kent.
     "Passing curiosity, Lenore" he said, "but where did young Armand pick up Mandarin Chinese?"
     Lenore spread her hands and her eyes lit up with a glow of pride. She said, "Armand picks up languages the way other boys his age pick up girls - not that he doesn't get his share of those, too. You must have noticed that Carol is - what do they call it? - simply bananas over him."
     "I'm not quite sure who he is," said Chan, "or how he fits into the family pattern."
     Lenore's lovely brow furrowed as she thought it over, sighed, then said, "Oh, dear! It's all so complicated."
     "Try to unravel, please," said the detective.
     "Well... You see, Charlie, in a family like this, sometimes things get awfully complex. Thanks to all the money, every Burdon is a target. And sometimes - no, that makes it sound worse than it is - or was."
     She paused. Chan waited. Then she said, "When Ellen Burdon, that's Lowell's wife, was a girl, she went to school in Versailles, a very select boarding school for wealthy American girls and a few English. There, she met a handsome young Air Force major and eloped with him. There was hell to pay. He was half-French and wild as a hawk, nobody is really sure whether they were married or not. The result was Armand. Major Kent died in a crash just before he was born.
     "So, when Lowell married Ellen, Armand sort of came with her. Not right away, of course. He visited here as a boy, and everyone liked him, even if he inherited his father's wild streak. Then, about five years ago, he seemed to get serious. Charlie, he's an absolute genius. He excels everybody else at everything he tackles - languages, finances, mathematics, sports. He has a tremendous drive to succeed."
     Chan nodded. This was entirely in line with his own observations and deductions where Armand Kent was concerned. He said, "But he's not really a Burdon then, except in a second hand way."
     "But he will be one." Lenore spoke with absolute conviction. "He won't be the first the clan has adopted. Like all big families, to survive there must be a constant inflow of fresh blood and talent. After he marries Carol..."
     She shrugged, let it hang. Chan decided to change the subject. "Is there some sort of guide to this house available?" he asked. "If I'm to remain here a day or two, I'd very much like to avoid repeating the shooting gallery duck experience."
     "Poor Charlie!" Lenore put down her empty highball glass on the coffee table between them, rose, said, "Uncle Lionel had an album made up when he rebuilt the Point. I'll see if I can find it."
     While she was away, Chan considered what Lenore had told him. Most curious of all was Lenore's attitude toward her mother. She referred to Ellen Burdon amiably enough, but he sensed no normal filial attachmeet. Then, the chronology was cockeyed. If Ellen had had a schoolgirl romance in Versailles, of which Armand was the result, it would mean the boy had to be older than Lenore - which he obviously was not by quite a few years.
     He thought back to the kidnapping-ransom problem he had solved nine years before, to the girl's return to the collective bosom of her family. In this instance, the welcome had come from Harriet. It was she who had played the parental role rather than the girl's real mother.
     It failed to make sense - save under one set of conditions. When Lenore came back in triumph, the album pressed to her attractive bosom, the detective said, "Lenore, unless you've been putting me on, Ellen is not your mother."
     "I thought you knew about that," Lenore sounded astonished. "I simply took it for granted. My real mother was drowned in a sailing accident right off the Point when I was still using a pacifier. Lowell married Ellen years later. I love Ellen even if - well, never mind. Anyway, I was too old to need a mother little girl-wise."
     A pause - Chan was growing used to them - and then, offering him the album, "Here it is, dear Inspector Chan. It's the only one left. The others were given as family Christmas presents and things. Oh, dear, you'll have to excuse me. With Harriet gone and all these people here, there are a million things to do. Willis will get you another drink."
     "Thanks, but I'll do without," said Chan, rising. "I think I'll go to my room now if nobody minds. It has been a tiring day."
     "Sleep well," Lenore replied. "If you get lost, the album will show you the way."
     A pair of crimson and white striped silk pajamas lay neatly folded on the opened bed, whose snowy white linen sheets and big pillows looked deliciously inviting. There was another robe, this one of brocaded silk with a plaited and tasseled cord beside the pajamas and red morocco slippers on the carpet beside the bed. Save for a dark belt of dampness along the window seat side of the carpet there was little evidence inside the room of the raging storm without.
     Not that it had abated. The wind continued its howling, the surf its pounding rhythmic roar - while the rain struck the storm shutters like some giant devil's drummer. But within the room's shelter, all was warm and dry and softly lit and comfortable. Although the clock was still shy of midnight by half an hour, Charlie Chan decided to retire. His eyes felt heavily sanded and his muscles relaxed without trace of any of his earlier tensions.
     When he removed his suit and hung it up neatly in the huge wardrobe closet it so scantily occupied, Chan saw that his own linen had been laundered, dried, pressed and returned on hangers. He paused to admire the perfect domestic organization of Burdon Point, far exceeding that of any of Honolulu's costly resort hotels.
     This reminded him of the missing Harriet MacLean once more. He wondered where she was, and why. Then he went to the bathroom, eschewed a second tub lest he fall asleep in the warm water and emerge wrinkled like a prune. He reviewed the events of the day as he brushed his teeth, and came to with a jerk so violently that a trickle of toothpaste ran from the corner of his mouth down his chin.
     Wiping himself hastily, he returned to the bedroom closet, re-examined the returned shirt on its hanger. It had been beautifully pressed save for one thing - the pocket over the left breast hung forward a full half inch. Chan considered this minuscular discrepancy in the perfection of Burdon Point domestic service.
     He decided it unlikely that the wielder of the iron had neglected such an obvious portion of the garment. Also unlikely, he thought, was that whoever returned it from the laundry to the closet had allowed it to slide off its hanger.
     Eyes narrowed, he considered the only other implication possible - that someone had searched his room since the laundry was returned...
     On the face of it, this, too, seemed implausible. For one thing, he had brought virtually nothing with him save the clothes he was wearing. Along with keys, wallet, small change, handkerchief and the usual impediments of the male animal on a supposed one-day trip, Furthermore, all these save the handkerchief, which had been laundered, had been on his person all evening.
     He found it difficult to concentrate long on the problem - or on any problem - as the sleepiness returned to embrace him. He felt as if someone had slipped him a barbiturate.
     With heavy lids, Chan examined the hall door. It had a knob button lock, but one which could be opened by a key from the outside. He forced himself to remain awake while he pondered the suddenly titanic problem of whether to lock it or not. Since it appeared ineffective for keeping out any determined night visitors who might pass that way, he decided to leave it unlocked.
     There were reasons, two of them, both valid. One - such a gesture would indicate his confidence that his hosts and fellow guests would leave his room undisturbed white he slept. Two - if any of them violated his privacy, even if their presence failed to rouse him from his slumber, he felt certain they must leave traces he could detect in the morning.
     Chan made a last effort to rally, in order to study the album Lenore had loaned him, but found it impossible. The hitherto alarming sounds of the tropical storm raging just beyond the thin barrier of the shutters was suddenly as soothing as a mother's lullaby to a small child. Before he could turn off the lamp, he was fast asleep...
     He awakened quickly, evidently spurred by his subconscious. At first, he thought it was morning, complete with unlikely sunlight. But then he discovered that the "sunlight" was the glow of the bedside lamp in its parchment shade. He lifted his wristwatch from the table and saw that it was twelve minutes past twelve. He had been asleep less than twenty-five minutes.
     What had awakened him? For a moment it danced just out of reach, and then he remembered. Evidently his brain had not been switched off with the rest of him, because he knew with almost psychic intensity what his unseen visitor had been seeking.
     He opened the drawer of the night table and drew out his wallet, which had not been tampered with. Then, from one of its lesser folds, behind a small cluster of bank deposit receipts, he found and drew forth the small scrap of cloth he had taken from the window crack the afternoon before. It was no longer wet, of course, but Chan did not think that would matter
     Rising silently, the detective padded across the big bedroom, flinching as his bare feet came in contact with the still wet and clammy edge of the carpet. Being very careful, he unfastened the lock with difficulty, causing a sudden amplification of the hurricane thunder without. After placing the bit of flowered black fabric in the edge on the same side that he had first noticed it, he brought the window down, shutting out the fury beyond the shutters or at least cutting its volume in half.
     If something drastic had happened to Harriet Burdon MacLean, its removal now would indicate the fact to Chan. If not, he had been rearing a house of cards. In any event, if something had happened to Harriet, the cloth would hardly offer evidence that would stand up in any court. What was truly important was that he find out whether anyone were after the seemingly innocent scrap.
     Again he dozed off, this time with a sense of having accompanied something at least potentially worth while.
     When Chan awoke again, the lamp was still on and the hands of his wristwatch pointed to five forty-five. If he had been given a barbiturate, and he was by no means sure of this, its effects had totally worn off. He felt both fully awake and refreshed.
     What had awakened him, he decided, was the silence. It lay all about, like cotton batting that filled the world. The storm sounds had not merely subsided to a whisper, they had subsided altogether.
     Chan knew what this meant via long experience. The tranquil eye of the hurricane was overhead, lulling all unsuspecting souls into belief that the big storm was over. In fact, of course, the worst was yet to come, as the rear edge of such a rotating storm is invariably fiercer than its vanguard assault.
     Chan then got out of bed and went back to the window and opened it.
     The bit of tom fabric with the floral pattern was gone!
     Having already considered the possible significance of such an occurrence, Chan wasted little time over it now. Instead, he opened the storm shutters, which responded easily and silently to his touch in the absence of heavy wind pressure. The pale ashes of night still lingered in the bowl of the western sky and the dawn was cut off from the east by the massive lump of Mauna Lao.
     Although the moon had long gone about its business, a thin scattering of stars remained faintly visible in the deceptively dark blue heavens. Chan found himself seemingly overlooking a glossy, slowly turbulent sea as if from the top of a cliff. Looking straight down, beyond a narrow ledge that apparently served as a rain gutter, he could see only the lazy lift of the slow seas that broke in frothing foam beneath the range of his vision.
     Ordinarily, he knew, the sky would be dancing with gulls seeking prey on the water beneath and uttering their raucous cries. This morning, not a bird was in sight or sound. Countless generations of precarious existence had rendered them wiser than many humans to the ways of a tropical storm. They would not venture forth until its last angry shreds had passed onward to the northeast.
     A stir of sound close at hand, immediately to his left, caught his attention. A bony hand clutched from beneath at the outer lip of the ledge just under the window, and as he watched another hand appeared.
     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.
     Harriet dismissed his remark with a brusque gesture, saying, "Life is full of painful shocks. At first, I couldn't believe it. I even thought it might be some sort of practical joke, but I realized Lionel was simply not the practical joking type. And then I leaned over him and saw the other side of his head."
     "Were any of the others with you?"
     "When I found the body? No - I was alone. During the movie, I can't say, I was watching the film. It was right after dinner and Lionel went directly to his study. The others came and went, I suppose. Damn; Charlie, I wish I'd paid closer attention."
     "Hindsight lovely thing," said Chan. "Trouble is, it come too late."
     "Spare me the aphorisms, Charlie." Harriet visibly shuddered. She rose, went to the pantry, mixed herself a large glass of milk, sugar, raw egg and rum, a libation Charlie Chan declined.
     "I don't know whether it was the wetting I got or your sick sagacity, but I feel people walking over my grave."
     Charlie Chan said, "What about the award of a voting membership in the family affairs to Davis Wilmot?"
     "Oh, Jesus!" said Harriet "Tedious business, but ritual. Do you have any idea how much time and energy a family like ours wastes on tradition?" When Chan shook his head, she grimaced. "Too damned much, to my way of thinking."
     "Why does Zachariah have no vote?" the detective asked.
     "Because he bloody well doesn't want one," was the reply. Harriet paused to take a healthy swig, then said, "Zach's a rebel from the word go. He's also got the second smartest financial brain in the family. He never wanted to be tied to committee decisions. He preferred to make his own. Oh, Lionel and Lowell liked to say he lacked the necessary stability, but that was bushwah. They wanted him, even if they wouldn't admit it. He's made more than any of them, and thrown enough bones to the family to keep everybody uncomfortable about it."
     Chan said, "You say he's the second smartest - then who is smartest? Is it you?"
     Harriet put her head back and laughed. The drink had replaced some of the leathery look of her complexion with a healthier underpink. She said, "A generation ago, I might have qualified, Charlie. I've got more plain horse sense that any of the others. But horse sense isn't enough in today's computer run financial jungle. I'm still back in holding company finance. International exchange rates and rediscount duties need more mathematical brains than I've ever had. Lionel was good at that sort of things - so is Lowell, but not that good. He'll make out, though."
     "Who is the smartest?" the detective asked again.
     Harriet regarded him sardonically. "Haven't you guessed?" she said.
     Chan nodded, replied, "The boy - Armand Kent?"
     She nodded. "Armand's a genius. I've never met anyone like him. That boy has a brain that belongs in two thousand one A.D. No school could ever keep up with him. He could have graduated from Harvard, summa cum laude, at fourteen, if the college had allowed him to."
     "How about his stability factor?" Chan inquired.
     "You put your finger on it again, Charlie," said Harriet. "He's always on the ragged edge of a blowup. If he and Carol ever have children, I'd hate to be their baby sitter. I'd never have a chance. Carol doesn't say much, but she's got Zach's brains and then some."
     Chan said, "All right, Harriet, but here's the big one - who in this family or in the house would have motive to kill Lionel Burdon?"
     "Do you think that hasn't been bothering me ever since he died and I found the suicide idea hard to accept? It's a real bitch. In some ways, I think it might be better to write it off as suicide and forget it. Frankly, Charlie, I'm afraid of what disproving suicide might stir up."
     "You're forgetting two things, I'm afraid," Chan told her. "One, if you really believed that, you'd never have pulled strings to get me here. You can't let it lie."
     "True, damn it. What's the other?"
     "Your own survival - or have you forgotten last night already?"
     Harriet took a deep breath, finishing her nutritive drink, put down the glass so hard the coaster beneath it jumped. She said, "But, Charlie, why kill me? I don't know a God damned thing. Hell, I don't even suspect anybody."
     "You must know something, or whoever did it thinks you know something."
     "Charlie, what should I do?"
     At that moment, the house telephone rang.
     Chan and Harriet exchanged a look. The detective said, when the ring was repeated, "If you want to stay dead, don't answer that phone."
     "My thought exactly," said Harriet. "And you'd better be getting back if you wish to solve this problem."
     Chan glanced at his wristwatch. "It's six-thirty-three," he said. "When does the family get up?"
     "Anytime - some early, some late. Breakfast is from eighty-thirty on."
     "Thanks," said the detective. He moved toward the door, turned and said, "If I want to reach you by phone, I'll give two rings, then hang up and give three. Don't answer anything else."
     "Two and then three - fair enough." Harriet got to her feet to see him to the basement door. "Good luck, Charlie, though I'm almost afraid of what you may find out."
     "What does that mean?"
     "It means," said Harriet, "continued in our next."
     "You must have been awfully interested in the Hawaii rerun not to have heard the shot," he said.
     "I wasn't, particularly. But I heard nothing. I thought Lionel had probably fallen asleep at his desk. He used to do that quite often. I went in to wake him up when the show ended."
     "And he was beyond waking," said Chan.
     He took off down the steps and somehow made it back to the other house and his bedroom without running into anyone. There, he settled down to await breakfast, studying the album of the house Lenore had given him
     After looking at both the photographs and plans of the west elevation, he understood how Harriet had saved herself and ridden out the storm. Below the bedroom floor on which his room was, there was a sort of gallery with a row of Roman arches whose supporting columns were based on a sturdy two and a half foot wall of brick faced concrete - a wall obviously designed to keep some of the ocean out in the stormiest weather.
     Chan's admiration for Harriet and for her seafaring Yankee ancestry rose a further few notches. He wondered if she were resting to recover from what must have been an exhausting experience for anyone of any age. He was willing to lay long odds she was doing no such thing. Harriet was not a woman to give way to any such symptoms of weakness.
     Chan spent the rest of the time before breakfast going over the plans of the complex mansion as Lionel Burdon, with an assist from Harriet, had had it reconstructed. He paid special attention to the ground floor and basement plans, since it was on these floors that such action as there was had occurred. Also, he had no wish to get lost in the labyrinth carved out of the solid rock cliff as he almost had while returning from Harriet's retreat.


     BREAKFAST WAS laid out on a long teak sideboard in a smaller room opening off the main dining room. Presided over by the towering, resplendently liveried black Willis, it was in the traditionally English country house style with Yankee and Island overtones - fresh pineapple along with grilled kidneys, hot oatmeal as well as kippers. Accepting a modest serving, Chan sat down at the table, which was occupied by Lowell and Ellen Burdon.
     After the expected polite exchange of greetings, Ellen Burdon said, looking worried, "The period of grace is almost over - listen to the wind rising."
     Lowell Burdon looked up from his plate, said, "The second half of one of these storms is always worse than the first. Do you think I should postpone the meeting today, dear?"
     "I don't see how you can," said Ellen. "We can't hold the others here after the storm passes, and there's the Los Angeles project to settle at once. And the Island Air Transport corporate meeting is the day after tomorrow."
     "I know, I know," Lowell Burdon muttered through a mouthful of eggs and bacon.
     That Ellen Burdon should show such close knowledge of the family business affairs mildly surprised Charlie Chan. But then, he reflected, her brilliant son must have inherited some of his alarming intellect from her as well as from his long dead father, and an eye for detail.
     As if on cue, Armand Kent appeared, elegantly mod as ever in brilliant flowered body shirt and immensely wide cuffed slacks, the ensemble held together by a belts of braided leather thongs with silver mountings.
     Carol Burdon was with him, apparently as always, equally vivid in a turquoise open throat shirt of raw Shantung silk and chrome yellow hip huggers slung so low that they looked ready to drop from her well formed young body at the soft stomp of a kitten's paw.
     Together, together, Chan mused, pondering the open intimacy of the youths and maidens of recent years. If, indeed, any maidens, at least in a technical sense, remained at large. He wondered if they had spent the night together, decided they almost certainly had as he noted the casual intimacy with which Carol caressed Armand's hip as she directed them to seats across the table from Chan. Some of the other, more peripheral, Burdons had appeared and were serving and seating themselves under Willis's aegis. But the detective studied the young people covertly.
     Not covertly enough, apparently. Armand Kent suddenly speared him with his glowing, over-intelligent eyes and a sardonic smile twisted the too loose mouth ever so slightly. He said, "Where's Harriet, Inspector?"
     Chan knew perfectly well that the question was intended to catch him off guard, to cause him to make some revelatory involuntary gesture of reaction. Not for the first time, he thanked his Chinese ancestry, plus his long experience at self concealment, for his ability to remain phlegmatically impassive under virtually any provocation of the sort.
     But the question had caught him off guard. Until that moment, psychologically at any rate, Chan had not fully believed the accounts of Armand Kent's genius rating. From now on, even while he wondered what the young man knew or suspected, he resolved never to repeat the error of underestimating this brilliant and, he suspected, dangerous young man.
     He managed a non-committal shrug, said, "Search still continue."
     Carol said, pushing back a strand of ink-black hair that had fallen over her left eye, "I'll lay odds, if she isn't dead, she's in hiding."
     Ellen Burdon laid down her fork, looking either bewildered or frightened. Chan could not be sure which. She said, "Hiding - from what?"
     At that moment, Lenore entered the room and Chan watched her out of the corner of his eye. She looked, he thought, an inexplicable five years younger than the somewhat harried lady playing the hostess role the evening before.
     Had sleep done so much in such a few hours? The detective was mystified. And then, as Lenore moved to a place at the foot of the table, she passed behind the two young people directly opposite his own place. For an instant, he saw the look she gave Armand. It was brief, but there was no mistaking her expression.
     It was that of a woman not only hopelessly in love but of a woman happily in love, a woman whose every desire has been lavishly fulfilled.
     He wondered if Carol had not slept alone that night just past in view of this development - or had Armand sufficient stamina to make two females happy in a single night?
     "Oh, to be forty again...!" Chan thought, and not entirely humorously.


     VI

     THE REST OF the conversation, while Charlie Chan remained at table, was irrelevant as far as he was concerned, but the detective found it, all in all, a disturbing session. More than once he caught Armand's gaze on him, noted its covert mockery. On another occasion, he caught Carol regarding him covertly with amusement in her eyes.
     While the talk was of personalities, mostly absent, Chan sensed undercurrents beneath the rather too civilized facade, undercurrents of which he had no knowledge whatsoever. Clearly, the coming clan meeting was to be more than a mere formal investiture of Davis Wilmot with voting rights in the family's corporate decisions. But of what was at stake he had not the slightest idea.
     He watched Lenore with interest, but not once did she give herself away again. She was properly attentive to her husband and her guests and relatives, remarked ruefully on the weather outside, whose fury continued to mount.
     "It's like living inside a pressure cooker," she told the detective. "Air conditioning notwithstanding."
     His meal concluded, Chan rose from the table, and Armand Kent said, "Going to look for Harriet again?"
     "As soon as the weather permits." It was not, he realized, exactly an equivocal reply, but it was the best he could manage under the circumstances.
     He returned to his room and picked up the house telephone and, after punching Harriet's numbers, let it ring three times, then two after a brief hang-up. He wanted very much to talk to her, to discover, if possible, what the undercurrents he had sensed around the breakfast table were about.
     Harriet didn't answer, though he waited a full two minutes. With mounting unease, he hung up and returned downstairs to the living room to discover that the meeting had already been called. Lowell Burdon, Zachariah, Lenore, Ellen and a half dozen of the nameless relatives present had disappeared into the boardroom.
     Chan, after wandering about the room, settled in with a group that included Ellen Burdon, Doctor Smith and Davis Wilmot. Chan was surprised to see the last of these still outside the boardroom, and said as much.
     Wilmot, sighed and said, "For this occasion, I have to wait to be summoned."
     Chan said, "I don't fully understand how it works, Mr. Wilmot. Just what does a voting membership mean?"
     "It means just what it sounds like, Inspector. There are never more than seven voting members of the board of Burdon Enterprises - sometimes, like today, less, with poor Lionel gone and Harriet missing. The chairman - in this case Lowell - never casts a vote unless the other members are evenly divided on any issue."
     "What about the non-voting members, do they have any say?"
     "Each has a proxy," said Wilmot, "but it must be given to a voting member they select, and that member is not bound by a proxy's wishes."
     "Isn't that rather autocratic?" said Chan.
     Wilmot smiled beneath his mustache. "The Burdon enterprises never pretended to be democratic," he said. "Its founders may have supported the American Republic in theory, but they wanted control of their own affairs. The idea is to avoid stalemates, in the name of efficiency and progress."
     "Are there ever campaigns to collect proxies?" the detective inquired.
     "Of course there are from time to time. In fact, there's a dandy going on right now. The problem is..." He dropped the subject abruptly as if he had already gone too far.
     Chan pushed the point no further and, after a few moments, the candidate for investiture excused himself and wandered away. The detective regarded Dr. Smith, whose expression indicated that he, too, wished he were elsewhere.
     Chan said, "Li, why don't you tell me what's bothering you? You act as if there's a flea under your collar every time I come near you."
     The family physician said nothing, doing his best to remain inscrutable behind the lenses of his spectacles. But his face reddened as he failed to return Chan's steady regard.
     The detective said, "Li, let's stop clowning around. If I were to tell you I have reason to believe Lionel Burdon's suicide might have been arranged - what would your reaction be?"
     "My reaction would be that it's out of the question." The physician's voice was firm enough, but his expression grew troubled.
     "The coroner's paraffin test?" Chan suggested.
     Dr. Smith nodded, said. "There's no getting around it, and you're not going to, Charlie. No way. It's four-ten and out, and that's it."
     "Have you forgotten the target range in the basement - plus the deceased's long habit of letting off steam by firing a few rounds?"
     Dr. Smith's eyes narrowed behind his spectacles. He said, "I'm a medico, not a trained investigator. If that were so, if Lionel Burdon went down there the afternoon of the day he was killed..." A pause, a slow shake of the head, then, "But no - there's no way of proving it, Charlie. If there was, somebody would have come forward to say so."
     "Perhaps," said Chan, "Perhaps not. That's up to me to discover. I wonder why the sheriff's men didn't think of it?"
     "Probably," said Dr. Smith, "because they didn't know about it. There was no real reason, on the face of the evidence, to suggest anything but suicide."
     "You suspected something, though, Li."
     "Only," replied the physician, "because suicide seemed so out of key for the man I knew. What proof have you that it might have been caused by - by something else?"
     "Not conclusive yet," said Chan, thinking of Harriet's possible second disappearance. "But interesting."
     "God damn it!" said Smith softly, "I'd give a lot to know. The target range... Charlie, you've given me something to think about. I wonder..."
     He rose and, forgetting his manners in this new absorption, left Chan sitting there without a by-your-leave.
     The detective stared after Smith, then rose and resumed to his room on the second floor. He had forgotten to reclose the storm shutter through which Harriet had scrambled early that morning. And the servants who had tidied it up had neglected to do so, having come by during the deceptive calm of the hurricane's eye. The result was not as bad as the catastrophe of the previous afternoon, but it took Chan some fevered exertion and some minor wetting to set things to rights.
     This chore completed, he called Harriet again, using the code he had given her. Again her phone failed to answer. There was nothing for it but to return to her retreat via the tunnel and see what had become of her.
     Again, Chan used the back stairway to reach the complexities of the basement. This time, he made a wrong turn and stumbled again upon Johanssen in his control room. He apologized, found the shooting gallery and, from there, was able to get his bearings and rediscover the unobtrusive tunnel entrance. He was not aware that anyone else saw him, but his sense of unease rose with each step he took.
     So acute was his hair-stiffening sense of being in unseen danger that, when he reached the door at its end, he uttered, "Open barley," in such a low pitch that the door failed to respond. He felt trapped, tried again, louder, and his knees went watery with relief as the door obeyed the password.
     Everything appeared to be in order in Harriet's "retreat." Everything save for the fact that its proper occupant seemed to have vanished.
     Harriet's eggnog glass stood upside down in a sink rack in the kitchen, neatly rinsed and dried. Her closets were shipshape, the ashtrays were scrubbed and shining. Yet Chan felt a sense of intrusion recently past, a hackle lifting, all-but-subconscious certainty that someone else had been there before him.
     He finally connected this reaction with his sense of smell. As befitted her somewhat austere personality, the scent Harriet used, unless her dresser and bathroom lied, was old fashioned, aromatic, 7411 Eau de Cologne plus a near odorless deodorant. Yet, in her wardrobe closets and close to the front door, Chan detected another odor, one whose heavier base and distinctive scent were familiar, but which he could not quite identify. It was tantalizingly like trying to remember a word that eludes the searching memory line an eel in shallow water.
     Its olfactory remains were fading, but Chan took enough sniffs to be sure he could identify it again.
     In the less fortress-like retreat, the fury of the hurricane was far more evident than in the main residence, As he stood briefly in front of the tunnel entrance, debating his next move, a giant palm crashed somewhere outside somewhere close at hand - and the lights went out. Chan had to grope his way down the narrow staircase like a blind man.
     Fortunately, only the wiring in the retreat was put out of order and, once he was through the "open barley" door, his way along the passage was illuminated.
     As he padded along the two hundred-foot passage, Chan liked the situation less and less. His presentiment of trouble ahead continued to rise and he moved with the wariness of a commando in alien territory. When he reached the door at the north end, he hesitated, wondering what awaited him on the other side.
     Chan was not a man given to yielding to such fancies. He believed in building his cases upon facts, as a good police detective must if he is to obtain convictions in court once he has brought a criminal to face a jury of his peers.
     But there had been a handful of occasions in the course of his long and distinguished career as an investigator, when such presentiments of danger had been so overwhelming that Chan obeyed them. There was the time when, in dark of night, a multiple murderer of frail Honolulu dancehall girls had waited for him to turn a corner with the intention of decapitating him with a machete honed to razor sharpness. There was the time when he had hesitated to enter his own car and, feeling foolish, had lifted the hood - to find four sticks of dynamite wired to the starter, enough to have blown him to kingdom come. There was the time...
     But enough, Chan thought, taking a deep breath. This was another such occasion, foolish or otherwise, when he felt violent death a mere whisper away. Instead of walking through the door directly, he flattened himself against one of the tunnel walls and, after silently unlatching it, pushed the door open with a toe...
     ...to be greeted for the second time within twenty-four hours by the savage detonations of an automatic rifle fired at close range. Ricocheting bullets whined and pinged viciously about him as he dropped to the concrete floor.
     The silence that followed this deadly thunderburst was deafening, broken only by the whisper of rapidly receding footfalls. Chan took his time about rising, well aware that any pursuit would be as futile as it might prove dangerous, even fatal. He found two of the slugs lying nearby - much too near-by for comfort - and put them away in the fob-pocket of his trousers.
     Then, without hearing sounds indicating the presence of another human being, he made his way to the shooting gallery with its thick soundproof walls. This time, he made sure that he entered by the proper door at the proper end of the firing range.
     The glass front of one of the two weapons racks on either side of the door had been broken. Willis was standing in front of it, frowning at the special Mannlicher semi-automatic that had come close to eliminating both Chan and Zachariah Burdon the day before. He was holding the heavy weapon as easily as a small boy holds a cap pistol.
     Willis looked up as the detective entered and said, a frown on his handsome face, "These wall cases are kept locked except when in use. Somebody broke in and took this gun out."
     "How can you be sure that's the one?"
     For answer, Willis held it toward Chan, who took it and immediately caught the burned powder and metal smell that is unmistakable evidence of a gun that has recently been fired. He nodded, handed it back, said, "What brought you on the scene, Willis?"
     Willis said, "I was on my way to the wine cellar to select the bottles for dinner when I heard firing. I came here to see if anything was wrong, but I was too late. The weapon had already been returned to its place in the rack."
     He shook his head at the broken glass, added, "Miss Harriet is going to raise cain about this broken glass and Mr. Zach will bite nails when he finds the weapon was returned without being cleaned."
     Chan said, "Have you seen Miss Harriet?"
     The butler regarded Chan impassively. For a long moment, the detective knew he was being weighed very much in the balance, Then, slowly, Willis nodded and said, "Follow me, Inspector."
     Chan's feelings were mixed as he obeyed the gigantic man. He could not discard the possibility that Willis might quite plausibly have been the would-be assassin who had so nearly perforated him in the tunnel entrance. He had been holding the weapon. He had, by Harriet's admission, been the only person, outside of the late Lionel Burdon and herself who knew the secret of the underground passage between the two dwellings.
     Willis could have been the one who had "staged" Lionel Burdon's suicide and pushed Harriet through the bedroom window. But Chan couldn't buy that either, obvious solution though it seemed. If Willis were the murderer, if it were he who had fired at the detective, why had he not finished the job?
     It occurred to Chan then that, for reasons of his own, the big butler might not wish to dispose of him in the shooting gallery; might be leading him to some location less frequented for his impending demise. But the detective couldn't buy that, either.
     For one thing, Willis seemed to take it for granted Charlie Chan would follow him. For another, he was leading him toward the servants' wing of the big house and up a staircase the detective recognized, from his perusal of the architectural plans in the album, that led directly to the staff's quarters.
     So Chan followed obediently... up another flight of stairs, along a narrow hallway, to a door at its end which Willis opened after a discreet knock. There, in the small but neatly and comfortably furnished living room of what was evidently the butler's private suite, Harriet sat in an armchair-rocker, watching a small color television set whose picture was remarkably clear considering the near Armageddon of the elements outside.
     "I knew you'd be worried about me," Harriet said, "so I sent Willis to bring you here." Then, to the butler, "Thank you, Willis."
     It was dismissal, and the butler in his resplendent livery discreetly disappeared. Harriet flipped off the TV and said, "If you want to know why I came here, it's because somebody tried to break into the retreat. I decided discretion was the better part of cowardice and took off. This was the safest place I could think of - Willis and I are old friends. After all, we've been running this household for years now."
     Chan told her briefly about the attempted assassination in the basement. "I don't think the bullets were meant for me," he said. "I think they were meant for you."
     "Idiots!" said Harriet with scorn. Then, "Evidently, my secret passage is no longer secret."
     Chan said, "Whoever is behind this may have found the passage, but he hasn't worked out the 'open barley' bit."
     Harriet opened her mouth to ask a question, then nodded and said, "I see - if they had, they'd never have tried to get to my retreat by the front door."
     "Hardly - in this weather."
     "So now, Charlie, all you have to do is look for wet clothes. Am I right?"
     "Unlikely solution." Chan shook his head. "Wet clothes probably disposed of by now - murderer too smart."
     "Oh, talk English, will you, Charlie?" said Harriet. Then, "If he's so smart, why the gunfire after making the previous crimes so carefully accidental?"
     "Because somebody wants one of us out of the way too badly. And, as long as the gunfire was unheard - Willis's being in the cellar was coincidental from the killer's point of view - the body could still be disposed of in a house like this and in weather like this. Somebody disappears in a hurricane? Who asks questions?"
     "You could be right, Charlie." Harriet shuddered visibly, "Ugh!" she said. Then, "Were you looking for me merely to see that I'm okay, or was there something else?"
     "Something else, Harriet. Apart from making Wilmot a voting member of the board, can you tell me what the meeting is all about?"
     Harriet's eyes narrowed and she thought a good thirty seconds before replying. Then she said, "All Gaul in this instance is divided into two parts instead of Julius Caesar's three. For almost a hundred years, the family business has been a private corporation - today among the biggest in the world.
     "During the last year or so, there has been an effort by some of us to go public - to issue and sell stock across the big board. On the positive side, this would add hundreds of millions, perhaps even a billion, to the combined family exchequers. It's a very tempting prospect."
     "Wouldn't the family run the risk of losing control?"
     Harriet shrugged. "There's always that risk, of course, though a supposedly safe percentage of common and preferred stock would remain in family hands. And going public would certainly reduce the tax load.
     "On the negative side, it would change the entire picture. Inevitably, outsiders would have to be let in - and ultimately, control might be lost to some outside syndicate with enough clout to force the stock down, so that enough could be purchased to outvote the family in a proxy war. It may sound like a purely technical matter, but there are great emotional values involved, and feeling has been running high."
     Chan nodded, said, "I take it Lionel Burdon was against going public?"
     "Dead against it," Harriet winced at her own unfortunate choice of words.
     "And you?"
     Again hesitation, then, "I can see both sides and I flatter my self I'm not too old to fear change that may be inevitable. But after what has happened, I'm not going to cast my vote in favor of anyone who is willing to kill to put it through."
     "How can you cast your vote if you're not at the meeting?" the detective asked.
     "Don't worry about that, Charlie," said Harriet. "The meeting is hopelessly deadlocked. I'll sit tight until I can make my vote count the most."
     "But how can you know?"
     Harriet's smile was almost smug. She said, "I ought to keep you on the hook for the sheer satisfaction of baffling the great Charlie Chan. But it's simple enough if you think about it. Who has been managing the household and staff all these years?"
     Chan understood, said, "The servants."
     "Of course. The footman assigned to the boardroom reports to Willis. And Willis reports to me."
     As she spoke, the house phone buzzed. Three rings, then two. Harriet rose briskly to answer it, listened, nodded, then hung up. "Still deadlocked," she said, "and about to adjourn until evening. You notice we're using your code."
     "Glad to have modest role in espionage project," said Chan. Then, letting the pidgin lapse, "Now, Harriet, can you tell me who are the leaders of the go-public faction?"
     "I can try," she said, resuming her seat in the rocker with a wince, adding, "My body feels as if a troop of cavalry had just ridden over it. I guess I'm not as rugged as I used to be."
     "Who is?" said the detective.


     VII

     "ZACHARIAH is probably the leader of the go-public faction," said Harriet Burdon MacLean. "And Lenore's for it, which means Davis Wilmot, too, in all probability. Lowell's against it and so far I've held out."
     "Since Zachariah has no vote, with Lowell and Ellen and you on the stay-private side, I should think you'd be able to swing it either way with your vote alone," said Chan.
     "It's not that simple, Charlie." Harriet shifted the pillow behind her to ease her discomfort. "I didn't say Ellen was against the go-public move."
     Chan's eyebrows rose. "You mean, she's going against her husband?"
     "It's not uncommon in this situation," said Harriet. "Actually, I don't know. Ellen was strong for staying private until about six weeks ago. Since then, she has simply clammed up."
     "How is she voting in today's meeting?"
     "Thus far, she has not cast a vote," Harriet told him. "If she goes for the change when she does vote, then I'll have to go in and vote against her."
     "What about Wilmot?"
     "Poor Davis! He won't be given his seat until the issue is decided without him. That's in the new member bylaws." She shook her kerchiefed head, added, "It looks now as if he'll have to wait another day or two - perhaps till another meeting."
     "Has there ever been violence in the family before?" Chan inquired.
     "Not in my lifetime," said Harriet. "If there was any earlier, it was carefully concealed."
     Chan said, "What made you suspect foul play in your brother's death? Surely, it was not merely a hunch based on knowledge of his character that caused you to have me sent here."
     "Hunch and knowing Lionel were strong factors," said Harriet. "But there was something else. A purely negative factor, Charlie, one that took a day or two to seep out of my subconscious. You'll probably laugh at me..."
     She paused. Charlie Chan waited patiently.
     Finally, she said, "Well, I told you I was in the living room watching the old movie on TV. Lionel was with me when I turned it on. He said he'd seen it before and that it bored him. Then he went to his study to work. When I went in to wake him up after the picture was over, he was beyond waking."
     "So...?" said Chan.
     "So, I may have been interested in the film, but, Charlie, I would have heard the sound of a shot. Think it over."
     The house phone gave its coded rings. Painfully, Harriet got up to answer it, brushing off the detective's offer of help. When she hung up, she said, "Meeting adjourned until after dinner." Then she hobbled back to her chair.
     Chan said, "I thought the room was soundproofed."
     "Not the study. The boardroom beyond it is. It's directly over the shooting gallery and the control room in the basement. They're contained in a soundproofed shaft two stories high."
     "Inner citadel," said the detective.
     "Exactly," said Harriet. She reached for the purely medicinal highball at her elbow and the detective knew that it was time to depart. What Harriet had told him was vital and there was much he had to know before he took any final action.
     The first person he wanted to see was Willis. He found the big butler quietly polishing a magnificent sterling silver punchbowl in a special room off the pantry. In his shirtsleeves, Willis was even more imposing than in full livery, since the impressive width and depth of his shoulders was revealed without benefit of padding.
     Gravely, Willis laid down his chamois cloth, donned his blue and gold coat and took the detective on another tour of the basement - a briefer one than Zachariah had conducted the previous evening.
     Chan wanted to check out the environment of the "suicide" and did so. He was particularly interested in a circular, in-a-closet staircase that connected a corner of the shooting gallery with the boardroom overhead. It offered access by which anyone could have entered the boardroom from the basement, gone into the study next door, shot Lionel Burdon and returned as he - or she - had come.
     But this failed to solve the problem of the shot unheard by Harriet Burdon MacLean... unless the victim had been killed, not in his study but either in the soundproofed boardroom next door or the gallery below. Chan was certain by now that it was murder, but he was a long way from being able to prove it, even to his own personal satisfaction, much less that of a court of law.
     He decided it was time to beard Dr. Smith again to mine out of him whatever factor of doubt he was witholding.
     Instead, Chan was collared by Zachariah Burdon just as he reached the living room door.
     "Charlie," said the former Marine Corps Colonel, "I want to talk to you. Let's go to my room."
     It was more command than request, but the detective decided to play along. He was still notably unclear about several aspects of Zachariah's role in the recent tragic events that had plagued and were continuing to plague the mighty Burdon family.
     Zachariah's suite was on the lee or landward side of the big house, opposite that where Chan and the other visitors and lesser family members were billeted for the duration of the still howling hurricane. It consisted of a sizable living room, separated from a bedroom beyond by a dressing room and bathroom that faced one another on opposites sides of a brief corridor.
     A quarter-circular bar had been built into a corner of the living room and Zachariah led the way there, put the detective on a red leather stool and said, "Name your poison."
     Chan settled for a mild aperitif, a vermouth cassis, while the rawboned, redheaded former colonel poured himself a stout five ounces of bourbon only slightly softened with ice water. He drained half of it at a single swallow, then made the ice tinkle before setting it down and resting his forearms on the bartop.
     "Charlie," he said, "what in hell is going on? I feel like Moses when the light went out."
     Charlie Chan sipped slowly before replying. He countered with, "Something happen at meeting?"
     "Everything happen at meeting - and nothing happen," said Zachariah, scowling into his half finished drink. "Black is white and white is black. It's hopelessly deadlocked, and without Harriet..." He paused, then, "Do you know what happened to her? Carol thinks you do."
     Chan recalled the brief breakfast table confrontation, in which the boy wonder had surprised him with his, "Where's Harriet, Inspector?" He recalled Armand's snide amusement and the barely suppressed mirth of the dark haired girl.
     Chan said, "Miss Burdon is entitled to her opinion."
     Zachariah brought his glass down hard on the ebony bartop, causing it to splash. "Damn it, Charlie," he said, "If Harriet's okay, I have a right to know. Ditto, if she isn't."
     Chan said, "She survived - no thanks to whoever pushed her through the window."
     Zachariah's mouth fell half open. He said, "Whoever did what?"
     "Let me ask you a question, Colonel," said the detective, looking up coolly into Zachariah's angry blue eyes. "Who was first upstairs when you got back from the funeral services yesterday afternoon? Was it you?"
     "Lord..." Zachariah's brow corrugated. "It was either the kids or Lenore and me. We were in the first two cars. It got pretty confused when we found the storm shutters were open on the west elevation."
     "Who made that discovery?" said Chan.
     "I'm trying to remember. I think it was Lenore. I came directly here and she must have looked into your room - the door was open, I believe - and seen the rain coming in. She called me and then went for the servants. I got busy with the towels till the kids arrived and then put them to work while I checked the other bedrooms. Why is it so damned important? If Harriet is okay, why can't she tell you what happened?"
     "Harriet says she was reaching for the shutters in my room when somebody pushed her through. She didn't see who it was. That's why it's important."
     "I've got to talk to her..." Zachariah began, then halted. He said, "I can check it out with the kids if you like."
     "I wish you would," said Chan. "I'll go with you, if you don't mind." He was careful not to suggest command, having no desire to get the former colonel's back up.
     "Come on," Zachariah said. "The kids aren't downstairs - which means they're either in his bedroom or hers."
     They were in Armand's room and responded, utterly unembarrassed, to Carol's father's summons. Nor did the presence of the detective appear to fluster them, though Armand had troubled only to don a pair of shorts, while Carol had slipped into a brief, bright blue shift and obviously wore nothing beneath. Watching Zachariah, Chan saw his neck and jaw muscles go rigid, then relax as the former colonel took a deep breath. His face reddened only briefly.
     "What is it, Zach?" Carol's eyes were wide and innocent as those of a pre-teenager girl.
     "Hello, Inspector," Kent's tone was respectful, although there was familiar mockery in his over-intense regard.
     Zachariah looked at Charlie Chan, who put the question to them as to what had happened after the return from the services and in what order. The young folk looked at one another briefly, then Armand Kent spoke.
     "Well you and Lenore came upstairs just ahead of us. I remember hearing her call out in alarm to you as we were halfway up the stairs."
     "So do I," said Carol, frowning prettily. "We never saw Harriet, that's for sure."
     "And I certainly didn't," Zachariah spoke emphatically.
     "May we go now?" Carol asked. "You interrupted us in something."
     "My God!" growled Zachariah. "What are you, a couple of rabbits?"
     Armand's eyes flashed fire. The fury that clouded his almost too-handsome young face was frightening. But, like the former colonel, he quickly achieved self control. He turned away to follow Carol back to the bedroom. He paused at the door to say over his shoulder, "If Harriet is alive, Colonel Burdon, I'd get busy collecting every proxy I could beg, steal or borrow."
     When the door closed behind them, Zachariah exhaled and shook his head and said, "Damned kid genius - he knows more about what's happening than I do."
     He led the way back to his own quarters, poured himself a second drink, downed it neat, then said, "What makes me maddest of all, Charlie, is that I let them get me uptight. Damn it, you can't blame the kids. When we were young, there were three factors controlling our sex drives - fear of God, fear of pregnancy, fear of venereal disease. Now the kids believe God is dead, they've got the Pill and antibiotics. So why blame them? Everybody says it's good exercise. Still..."
     The outburst interested Charlie Chan as a measure of Zachariah Burdon's intelligence and feeling, both of which, he could sense, ran deep. He said, "What about Lenore?"
     Zachariah blinked at this apparent change of subject. He said, "I suppose you'd like to check her out, too, on the storm-shutter bit."
     "I shall do so," said Chan. "I was thinking of her in more general terms - or, perhaps more specific. What sort of a life do you think she and her husband enjoy?"
     "None of my business," Zachariah shrugged rawboned shoulders, then added, "My guess is Dullsville. Davis Wilmot is a fine, sober young man, but he's no ball of fire. Funny how Lenore settled down. She used to be unstable as hell. But you remember, Charlie."
     "I remember." Chan finished his vermouth cassis, thanked Zachariah and left his host leaning on the bar, staring at the rainwater pouring down the window on the lee side of the room.
     He was mildly surprised that the former colonel, otherwise an astute man, should have missed the revealing by-play between Lenore and Armand Kent at the breakfast table. He decided to shelve his wished-for chat with Doctor Smith and see Lenore first.
     The first person he met when he got downstairs was the physician. For once Li Smith did not look as if he wished to take immediate evasive action. He actually seemed anxious to talk to the detective and they adjourned to a small sitting room off the main hall of the big house, a room exquisitely furnished in Louis Seize antiques.
     Looking at the rococo arabesques of the gilded chairs, tables and loveseat, Smith said, "This room always reminds me of a whorehouse parlor in Honolulu."
     Chan smiled and agreed, then said, "All right, Li, what is it you want to get off your mind?"
     "First, I wish to clarify my position, Charlie. I've been avoiding you, and I'm sorry, but perhaps you'll understand why when I explain. I was summoned here by Lowell Burdon, as both a family physician and a friend of the deceased. So I flew across the island from Hilo, happy to be of service in any way I could at such a tragic time. I am not the coroner and have not examined the body and therefore am singularly ill equipped to answer any questions you may wish to out on that subject."
     "I understand," said the detective. "Now that you've got that out of the way, what's really bugging you about it?"
     The physician sighed, then said, "It seemed such a little thing until you began acting as if somebody had murdered Lionel Burdon and Harriet disappeared in an atmosphere of foul play. But I did have a telephone conversation with Dr. Yashimoto - he's the district coroner here - before the storm cut us off."
     "Yes, Li." Chan prodded him gently.
     "He mentioned, merely in passing, that the deceased had traces of a barbiturate in his stomach. Now, with the powder marks on his hand to indicate self destruction, that meant little or nothing. A man under pressure heavy enough even to consider suicide might well take a tranquilizer in the hope that it would lighten the load he was bearing.
     "I didn't even consider the possibility of death inflicted by an external agency until you told me about the shooting gallery and the deceased's habit of firing a number of rounds there daily. In view of this factor, plus the strength of your reputation as an investigator, Charlie, the presence of such a drug - it was a product called Valium - took on a more sinister aspect."
     "I know the product," said Chan, "although I have never had to take it, for which I am grateful."
     "Well, Charlie," Dr. Smith continued. "Valium is sold only by doctor's prescription, and as the deceased's personal physician, I have never prescribed it for him. Of course, he might have obtained it from another physician - in Honolulu, the mainland, almost anywhere - or been given it by a friend. The fact remains that I never knew him to take a tranquilizer in any form."
     Chan nodded, said, "Thanks, Li."
     "I don't know how important it is," said the physician, "or if it's important at all. But that's what's been bugging me, as you put it - apart from normal grief at losing a valued friend and client so tragically."
     They left the ornate little sitting room and Chan continued his search for Lenore, finally running her to earth in an even smaller room just off the butler's pantry, where she and Willis were discussing some problem concerning the dinner immediately impending. Lenore looked distraught.
     As the detective entered, she said, "Oh, damn, Willis, I wish Harriet were here. I'm simply not used to making that sort of decision. So I'll have to leave it up to you." Then, "Hello, Charlie, you wish to see me?"
     "Preferably in private," the detective replied, marveling anew at the magnificence of her grey-green eyes.
     "Well, if you must, you must, I suppose." She rose, shook down her grey linen dress, said, "Come along then. I'm about to change for dinner so we might as well go to my rooms." Then, with a dart of mischief, "Did you have something interesting in mind, Charlie?"
     It was shameless flirtation - hardly, Chan thought, suitable under the circumstances. He merely smiled and said nothing. Before he left the room, his eyes met those of the towering butler, and they exchanged a mutually inscrutable stare.
     The suite occupied by Lenore and Davis Wilmot was larger than that Zachariah used and it was immediately evident from its design that Lenore and her husband occupied separate bed and dressing rooms. Lenore dismissed a hovering maid and led Chan into the first honest to goodness boudoir he had seen in many years, then placed herself gracefully on a lavender chaise lounge.
     "Okay, Charlie," she said, "fire away."
     Chan decided upon an abrupt assault. He said, "Lenore, isn't the boy a bit young for you?"
     She sat upright, like a marionette operated by strings. Her eyes narrowed and then widened and she said, "Charlie, I don't know what you mean."
     But he had caught her off guard and her defenses crumbled at his second shaft. "I just finished talking to Armand and Carol."
     It was unfair, but it worked. Lenore gasped and pressed a hand to her diaphragm and then the words came pouring out of her thin, sensual lips as if the proverbial floodgate had been opened.
     "Charlie," she said. "have you any idea what it's like to live a dull, endless lie of a life? Do you know what it's like to have every genuine physical impulse locked up tight for nine years? Do you know what it's like for a woman like me to live without love?"
     Chan said, more for the record than out of curiosity, "What about Davis, Lenore?"
     "What about him - what about him?" She leaned forward in the intensity of her feelings. "Davis is a good man, a good, stupid man if you will. But he's not a good man, and there's one hell of a difference between the two of them!"
     She eyed Chan warily and, when he did not reply, said, "Oh, I know what you're thinking. You're remembering my one wild fling nine years ago, the time you think I betrayed the family. You're thinking I'm unstable, that I'm doing it again, and maybe you're partly right. But I'm not betraying the family this time. I'm trying to make us all richer than we ever were."
     Chan said, "What about Carol? Isn't Armand her boyfriend?"
     Lenore snorted her derision. "Armand belongs to nobody but Armand," she said. "Sure, he and Carol have been sleeping together. They enjoy each other and why not? But they're just kids, thrown together here, doing what comes naturally. Charlie, things have changed since you were a boy. They've changed since I was a teenager, and that wasn't exactly a century ago.
     "Sex, as such, means nothing to kids any more. It's like shaking hands to them, but a lot more fun."
     "You enjoy handshakes with Armand?" Chan interjected, and drew another withering look of contempt.
     "Why not?" Lenore repeated. "Why should I live the life of a married Vestal virgin? I've tried, Lord knows, I've tried. But since Armand came here..."
     "And you're not jealous of Carol - or she of you?"
     "Of course, I'm jealous of Carol. I wasn't exactly raised to be a liberated woman, Charlie. But there's not much point in it - and as long as I get my share of him, I'm satisfied."
     "Don't you find him - a trifle immature?"
     The grey green eyes blazed again. "Immature? Listen, Armand may be a boy in years, but he's got the mind of a mature genius. He's the one who cooked up the entire scheme for going public. He's got everything figured out. You should see how his mind works. It's like a computer, a perfectly programmed computer. And he's got the body of a young Apollo."
     Her eyes filled as she paused, indicating to the detective the depth of her emotional involvement. Chan said, "It doesn't seem to be going over too well with some of the rest of the family."
     "What do you expect?" Lenore said, obviously agitated. "We had it all set up. Uncle Lionel was finally coming around to our point of view. And Armand got to his mother. If only Lionel hadn't done what he did, we'd have scored a clean, quick victory just the way Armand planned it. We'd be in control, not the old maids with their prissy ideas of propriety."
     "What about Davis?" Chan inquired.
     Lenore dismissed her husband with a flick of the wrist, said, "Oh, Dave will ride with the herd once he's a voting member. He always has. That's how he got where he is. 'Don't make waves - don't rock the boat' - that's my husband. He courted me for two years before he went to bed with me, and then acted shocked. And me - I was dumb enough to mistake a low sex drive for true love. How dumb can you get?"
     "What about Harriet?" Chan asked. "Have you any idea how she would have voted?"
     "Are you kidding? Harriet is the status quo personified - or was. I don't know. Armand thinks she's okay and you've got her stashed away somewhere. But you wouldn't lie to me, would you Charlie? If Harriet were okay, you'd tell me."
     "Of course," Chan lied manfully. "But I still would like to know why Lionel shot himself."
     "Maybe being the rope in this family tug of war was more than he could stand. Lionel was awfully brittle underneath, you know. He could be very cool and reserved, but I've seen him close to tears over a broken pipestem. He felt his responsibilities keenly. And he hated to make even small decisions. So here he was, confronted with the biggest decision of his life and all of us trying to influence him, one way or the other. I guess it was just too much for him."
     Lenore paused, got hold of herself, seemingly for the first time aware of the extent to which she had blown her top There was a glint of fear in the grey green eyes as she said, "My God, Charlie! I must be boring you to death."
     "On the contrary," said Chan. "It has been most interesting. The Burdons are not the most talkative family I have met."
     "And then you get Big Mouth Lenny," Lenore mocked herself. She said, rallying, "But we'll win this battle, if only..." A pause, then, "Maybe not this year, but next year or the year after. But it took almost two years to win Lionel around to Armand's way of thinking. Charlie, if we went public, our estate would multiply tenfold. Look what happened to the Fords since they went public. And they have as much control as ever."
     Chan nodded. Then he put the question that was his real reason for cornering Lenore. He said, "When you and Zachariah and the kids got back here in the first two cars from the chapel yesterday, who was the first upstairs - you, or your uncle, or the kids?"
     "Lordy!" she frowned. "Everything happened so fast, and I was still upset by the funeral. And then the storm..."
     "Try to remember, Lenore," Chan urged gently.
     "I think I was first," she said. "Then Zachariah, then the kids, as you call them. Yes, I'm sure that was it."
     "Did you say anything to Harriet?" he asked.
     " '...say anything to Harriet?' " she countered. "How could I? I didn't even see her."
     As he returned to his own room, Chan was well aware that somebody was lying. He was beginning to get a glimmer of who it was - but there was one thing he had to find out first. And that promised to take a bit of doing if he were to pin down a ruthless and cunning killer before another crime was committed.


     VIII

     CHAN STILL had considerable checking out to do before he decided upon a course of action. First, he locked the door of his room, stripped to his shorts and, looking regretfully at the just dried section of rug beneath the window, went to it and opened it.
     Just beyond, the heavy wooden shutter trembled under the impact of the still howling gale outside. It took him every bit of strength he possessed to get the shutter open. The wind and rain poured into the room with such vehemence that he was pushed back a foot, almost off the window seat on which he was kneeling.
     It was enough to tell him what he had to know. Again with great effort, he got the shutter back in place and the window closed. He was sopping wet from head to thighs and cushion and carpet were wet again. He shook his head as he looked at the damp shambles, then reached for the towel he had laid on the long cushion within arm's length to dry himself off.
     Dressed once more, Chan went downstairs, arriving barely in time for dinner. The meal was superb, having been constructed around a huge baron of beef that stood proudly upright in an immense silver platter swimming in its own juices enriched with lavish lacings of soy sauce and claret, charcoal crisp and scarlet of tender center next to the bone.
     Chan ate sparingly, however, having too much on his mind to enjoy overloading his stomach. Nor did anyone else at table, save Armand and Carol, whose enjoyably athletic afternoon had rendered their appetites impervious to the tensions affecting the others at table.
     These tensions seemed, to the detective, to swirl and eddy about the diners like an invisible indoor hurricane whose forces were hardly diminished by the titanic forces of nature unleashed beyond the stout walls of the house.
     Evidently, the deadlock in the afternoon's meeting had divided the usually united Clan Burdon deeply. They were abetted by gnawing concern about Harriet's prolonged absence and uncertainty of her fate - uncertainty Chan felt it unwise to relieve at this time. More than one piece of flatware was dropped, and conversation was reduced to fits and starts.
     At the meal's conclusion, the detective spoke privately with Lowell Burdon in the study between the living room and the boardroom. The new clan chief looked a full five years older than he had the day before. His eyes were sunk deep in his head and the lines about his mouth had become visibly deeper.
     "We're hopelessly deadlocked," he revealed, "even with my vote. Without Harriet's..." He shrugged his weariness.
     "Might I ask which side you incline toward?"
     "I probably oughtn't to tell you, but why not?" said Burdon. "I was against going public from the first. I'm still against it; and Zach has come over to my side. But Ellen..." He shook his white head, added, "She's completely under her son's spell. So it's still even Stephen without Harriet."
     He regarded the detective somberly, said, "Chan, is my sister still alive?"
     Chan nodded. "She's alive and well. She's hiding because she believes Lionel was murdered and the killer is trying to get her."
     "My God!" Burdon was appalled. "Has she gone mad, Charlie?"
     "Not completely," said Chan. "I, too, believe your brother was murdered."
     Lowell Burdon said nothing for a long moment. Then, "But the evidence. It all points to suicide."
     "Not all," said the detective. "Did your brother discuss any change in his attitude toward the new corporate plans?"
     Burdon nodded slowly. "Of course. To my surprise, he seemed to have changed his mind and fumed in favor of it. I was doing my best to persuade him to use caution, to delay doing anything drastic at this time."
     "What was his response?" Chan asked.
     Burdon opened his hands, replied, "He said - I remember his exact words - 'Lowell, the time is now.'"
     "How shortly was this before his death?"
     "The evening before. We were sitting in this room, in these very chairs." The thought seemed to make Lowell uncomfortable and he shifted position restlessly. "He wanted me to change my position on it; but I refused. I had to. With Ellen already under the boy's spell, somebody had to stand up for the old values. Charlie, have you any idea what it's like for a man like me to have a genius like Armand for a stepson? He thinks rings around me - he could do that when he was twelve."
     "You think maybe he's right?" Chan said.
     "Oh, very probably - but with Armand, there's a stability factor involved. He has a surfeit of adrenalin in his system. I've been told this is not uncommon among persons of above-normal capacities. He's on a prolonged manic surge now, but even with all the miracles of modern medicine it can't be maintained forever. And when it fades, which it could overnight, there is danger not merely of deep depression but a tendency toward psychosis."
     "You seem to have looked into it thoroughly," said the detective.
     "Lord knows I have that!" said Burdon. "I've consulted the best of them about him. And why not? I love the boy even if he's way out of reach most of the time."
     Chan had two more loose ends to tie up before he moved in on the killer of Lionel Burdon. He cornered Dr. Smith once more and said, "Li, did you ever prescribe Valium for a member of this household?"
     The physician nodded. When Chan asked him who it was, he said, "Lenore."
     Chan caught up with her just before she entered the boardroom for the meeting, "I hate to bother you now," he said, "but I have one question - did you do any shooting the day before your uncle was found dead."
     "Why, yes, Charlie," Lenore said. "I had a match with Harriet - and beat her rather easily, which is unusual. Do you think she'll be back soon?"
     "My guess is very soon," Chan said. "I suggest you be on your guard."
     "Why, Charlie? She's been more like my mother than an aunt ever since I was a little girl."
     Chan let her go and she filed into the boardroom after the others. It was time he closed in on the killer. As he crossed the living room, however, he caught sight of Carol trotting up the stairs. When he called her name, she stopped and turned and waited for him on the landing.
     "I hope you can spare me a moment," Chan said as he caught up with her.
     Her large eyes danced as she replied, "Not much more, I'm afraid, Inspector. Armand is so much in demand I have to take advantage of every opportunity to be alone with him."
     This, thought Chan, was beautiful. Intentionally or otherwise, the girl had thrown him a lead. Looking as naive as he could, he said, "You mean other women?"
     She laughed at him, not mocking but amused, said, "Inspector, they say some men are like catnip to women. If so, Armand is catnip in spades. And don't go cute on me and try to tell me you don't know about Lenore, for one."
     "For one?" Chan asked.
     "Nobody else has succeeded - as far as I know, which may not be as much as I hope in Armand's case. I'm not even counting the servants. You see, we're friends as well as lovers. He tells me everything - almost."
     "From your account, it surprises me you don't spend all your time together in conversation."
     "Ah, but then we'd have nothing to talk about," she capped him neatly, laughed, and was gone.
     Chan went the rest of the way to the second floor and down the rear staircase Harriet had shown him earlier. The girl had told him all he needed to know and what he wanted most now was another talk with Harriet.
     Willis was tending to the boardroom and Chan went directly to his small apartment on the second story of the servants' wing. Although no one answered his gentle knock, the door was unlocked and, after a few moments, he went on inside. There was nobody in the apartment...
     Hoping against hope that he was still in time to wrap up the case with a minimum of further damage, Chan moved quickly down the backstairs two flights to the basement.
     For a moment, Chan paused to get his bearings, feeling as before in that underground labyrinth of steel and cement a sense of oppression and ill-ease. Then, properly oriented, he trotted toward the entrance to the underground passage to Harriet's retreat
     Just before he started he heard the click of a door closing to his left, however, and halted, seeking to locate the source of the sound. To the best of his calculations, it came from the area of the shooting gallery, and Chan turned apprehensively in that direction.
     The door at the gallery's rear, opposite that through which Zachariah Burdon had led him into a burst of semiautomatic rifle fire from the custom built Mannlicher in Armand's hands, responded to his turn of the knob.
     Entering, Chan was in time to see Harriet about to open the door at the firing end that led to the circular stairway which would bring her into the boardroom. It was evident that she had received a call via Willis that had determined her to reappear to the family and cast her decisive vote in the meeting.
     "Just one moment, Harriet," Chan said.
     She either didn't hear him or chose to pretend she hadn't. He repeated the call, louder. This time she stopped, turned slowly and descended the single step she had climbed.
     "What is it, Charlie?" she said. "Can't you see I'm busy?"
     "Harriet," he said, "you shouldn't have done it - any of it."
     She made no pretense of not understanding him, but slowly walked the length of the gallery until she was facing him against the target wall of the gallery. Her expression was quizzical rather than disturbed.
     She said, "You're smarter than I gave you credit for, Charlie. Where did I go wrong?"
     Chan sighed and shook his head. He said, "Your first mistake was suggesting your brother was murdered because you did not hear the shot that killed him, the shot that you alone must have heard if he killed himself."
     "So what?"
     "You meant to suggest that he was killed somewhere in this soundproofed citadel and his body moved to the library and there arranged to look like suicide - which, in part, at least, was done."
     "That's exactly what happened," she said.
     "Lionel was murdered," Chan said slowly, "and the body was arranged to look like suicide. But he was shot right there in his study."
     "Poppycock!" said Harriet with scorn.
     Chan smiled, then continued:
     "He was shot by the only person who could have killed him where he was killed without being seen or heard by you. In short, he was killed by you yourself."
     "Now why in hell would I shoot my own brother?" Harriet demanded.
     Chan told her. He cited Lionel's change of front of the going-public issue and again she snorted and said, "So I killed him to avoid being richer? Try and prove that in court."
     "No," Chan said, "you killed him because the change would have put you out in the cold. You've really run this family for two decades or so, Harriet. You were the one who decided the major issues even though Lionel was nominal head of the Clan Burdon. If Armand's plan went through, he would be in actual control - he and his mother and Lenore. And you couldn't bear that. Not since she made out with Armand after he put you down for trying."
     The color had drained from Harriet's sunbrowned face, but her eyes were ice cool and her voice perfectly controlled as she said, "I suppose I pushed myself through the window." She watched Chan closely.
     "Nobody pushed you through the window, Harriet. Nobody could survive all night outside my room in this storm. I tested it myself a little while ago. You made it look good, from the bit of tom cloth in the frame to your acrobatic reappearance the next morning. My guess is you slept in Willis's apartment under some pretext or other that convinced him your life was in danger. I feel certain he is not so much your accomplice that he won't bear me out."
     "Nobody's going to believe you, Charlie," she said, her voice still firm, her cool regard still steady.
     "I think they will," Chan replied. "But one thing still puzzles me, if you don't mind."
     "By all means..."
     "Was the bit of torn fabric in the window an afterthought?"
     "Unfortunately, yes. I put it there to give you the idea I'd been waiting for you in your room when I was pushed. That was essential to my plan, and I didn't have it sewed up tight. So I sneaked back while everyone was bathing for dinner - that's one time there's nobody in the halls - and put it there. You almost caught me then, Charlie."
     "Did you put Valium in my toothpaste?" he asked.
     "Not guilty," Harriet said and Chan believed her.
     "Then, did you visit my room a third time that night and remove the fabric?"
     She nodded, said, "I wanted to make it look as if one of the others had really tried to kill me."
     "Preferably Lenore?" he asked.
     She shrugged, said, "It didn't really matter."
     "I think it did," Chan replied. "You gave Lionel some of Lenore's Valium before he went into the library, to make sure he'd fall asleep at his desk and make killing him easy. And you set up a lovely frame for Lenore in case murder was discovered. Incidentally, I know now it wasn't you who wanted me here, but Lowell."
     Harriet ignored the last. "Why shouldn't I make Lenore pay?" she said. "She's the prodigal, the one who got the fatted calf. And for what? Betraying the family with a hoodlum kidnapper. Now she's betraying Dave Wilmot with Armand - and thinks she's going to share control of the estate. Well, I'm not going to let her."
     Harriet was wearing a full skirted dress and, from its folds, she produced a small flat automatic, pointing it directly at the detective's stomach. They were standing inside the waist-high wall at the target end, and she had Charlie Chan as dead to rights as if he were trapped inside a large pipe.
     "How do you plan to explain my murder away, Harriet?" Charlie Chan said.
     "I don't plan to explain anything. Let them find you lying here. Nobody knows I have this gun, I took it out of the racks yesterday. I shall simply return to my retreat and wait until somebody finds me. Nobody will be able to prove I ever left it."
     Chan regarded Harriet MacLean with grudging admiration. But he had to do something and do it fast, before the muzzle of her nasty little pistol started spouting steel jacketed slugs at him. He said, "Better shut the staircase door fist, Harriet, or your alibi will be blown sky-high."
     It was hardly watertight logic. For one thing, Chan had not the slightest idea whether, with the bottom door open and the top one closed, those in the boardroom would hear the shots or not. Nor, if they did, if anyone could get down the stairs in time to catch her red-handed. But it did the job Chan intended.
     For an instant Harriet's attention wandered. Chan seized the moment to vault over the bar and put it between them. From there on in, he intended to play it by ear, trusting to his quickness and long experience in dealing with armed killers and would-be killers.
     As it was, he did not quite make it. Harriet's gun cracked loud and hard and a bullet tugged at his right sleeve. Chan landed hard, on his hands and knees, behind the brief shelter the gallery bar offered. If he could manage to make the other end of the room in one piece and arm himself, he might be able to turn the tables - though exactly how he were, to do that and remain alive he had yet to work out.
     A clear voice called, "Stay down, Inspector!"
     Chan heard the click of a rifle magazine being slapped into place, looked up to see Armand Kent holding the Mannlicher semi-automatic at the ready, aimed above him and to his right. Glancing over his shoulder, he saw Harriet standing perfectly still, apparently taking in the sudden dramatic turnover the situation had taken.
     She said, "Excuse me, gentlemen," lifted the pistol to her right temple and blew out her brains before either Chan or Armand Kent could make a move to stop her.
     Until her face became a mask of blood and disappeared from the detective's perspective, her expression was as cool and collected as if her decision to take her own life had been one that involved a change in tomorrow's menu.
     Later, when he had a moment alone with the younger man, Chan said, "Two questions, Armand. When you almost nailed me at the tunnel door this morning, were you trying for me or for Harriet."
     "Harriet," said Armand. "It was an irrational act, of course. But I knew she'd killed Lionel - it simply couldn't have been anyone else. You may not believe me capable of love, but I owed everything to him and I didn't think you'd get onto her, what with helping her hide and everything."
     Armand Kent paused. A look of bright curiosity appeared, and he said, "How did you know it was me?"
     "For a moment this evening, when I was talking with Carol, I thought it was her."
     Comprehension showed and Armand smiled sheepishly and said, "Oh, Carol's perfume."
     "Exactly. I noticed it in the retreat just before I came back via the tunnel. But I have one more question, please."
     "Go ahead, Inspector."
     "What brought you down here in time to save my life?"
     "It was a long shot but I felt it was worth taking," said Armand. "Carol told me about her little talk with you. She was quite proud of herself for hinting at Harriet's pitiful ploy for sex with me without revealing a thing. It all came together in my head, and I felt sure you'd be hunting her and might need help. As it turned out, I was on the nose."
     The boy was a wonder, beyond question. Charlie Chan considered what it would be like to have Armand for an enemy. Recalling the lack of emotion with which he had watched Harriet's act of self destruction, he wondered what it would be like to have this loaded human computer for a friend.
     Charlie Chan shuddered slightly as he moved toward the door...


     THE END







     Read: in the next issue:

     CITY OF BROTHERLY DEATH

     A Thrilling New CHARLIE CHAN Short Novel By ROBERT HART DAVIS:

     Amiable, genial, and dynamic ran the description of Mark Bruce, talk show host, in the official press releases. Chan would have added yet another term after he saw the host in action explosive. Tension ran high beyond the camera's range, and there was a definite aura of crime in the air. Not the simple kind of clean crime, but the dirty kind that preyed on people's lives - and surely led inevitably to murder...