Evidence of Things Seen (24 page)

“I think Mrs. Star would be strongly tempted to kill anybody who showed signs of wishing to investigate her or her fellow refugees too closely; and she'd be strongly tempted to kill even Craye, fond as she is of him, if he showed signs of giving her or them away. That he wasn't killed does, as you imply, seem to let her out.”

“Fond of him? How exactly do you mean that?” Hunter looked surprised.

“She loves him.”

“No!”

“Under the frightful stress and uncertainty of an hour ago she couldn't conceal it.”

“I shouldn't have thought—good Heavens!” Hunter was perplexed. “Two people more mutually indifferent I should have said I had never seen!”

“Craye doesn't reciprocate.”

“Perhaps—no, it can't be a crime of jealousy; because one must somehow work in those wretched lost securities.”

“And Miss Radford's sudden passion for paying her way in cash, and those remarkable improvements at the farm.”

“At least we needn't follow Mrs. Star's kind advice and consider Mrs. Groby. Mrs. Groby wasn't on the Ladder trail this afternoon, I think you'll agree!”

“No.” Gamadge returned his smile. “I can't see the genteel Mrs. Groby lying in wait for two men with a pistol, or having that inspiration and shooting Craye through the shoulder.”

“Then we must consider the women in the case out of it.” Hunter took a drink of whiskey, set his glass down, and suddenly looked up at Gamadge with an expression of such fierce anger that his face was the face of an unknown. “Out of it,” he repeated.

Steps sounded on the enclosed stairway, and Fanny's voice, raised in laughter, came down to them. Hunter got up and swung open the door, “Fanny,” he said.

“Yes, Phin?”

“Don't come down yet. Gamadge and I have business.”

“All right. When you want us we'll be up here in the sitting room.”

Hunter closed the door. Then he turned, came back to the table, and said coldly: “I'd like your conclusions, if you've come to any.”

“You're welcome to them; have another drink, and make yourself comfortable.”

Hunter stood for another ten seconds looking at his host; then, still frowning a little, he resumed his seat. Gamadge mixed him a highball.

“I don't know where I got the insane idea that you were to make a fool of yourself,” he said. “I apologize for it.”

“You got it by an unconscious exercise in elimination; and you must have had your own reasons, Hunter, for thinking that I would think such a thing. Later I may tell you what they were; but first I should like to put my conclusions, as you call them, into the form of a story. I shall welcome suggestions or criticism.”

Hunter said tranquilly: “I dare say I shan't interrupt you at all.” He had regained his usual calm of manner, but he had had a shock. At a sound from above his head turned, his dark eyes were raised to the ceiling. But the sound ceased, and he relaxed in his chair.

“I begin my story,” said Gamadge, after lighting a fresh cigarette, “in the summer of 1941. Mrs. Hickson is dead, Miss Radford has inherited her property, Miss Radford has discovered to her annoyance and dismay that instead of more than a hundred thousand dollars she will have a mere seventy thousand, in bonds that pay only two or three per cent a year. To Miss Radford's type all taxation seems robbery, and we may I think be certain that she is in a state of righteous indignation.

“But one day, on some shady road, as she drives along in her car or her buggy, she meets someone whom all her life she has admired and respected from afar; someone whose family has always represented distinction to Miss Radford, honor, wealth, and the highest form of civilization. Someone whom she would not hesitate to trust. This person flatters her by showing an interest in her affairs, by congratulating her on her inheritance, by sympathizing deeply with her at the loss of thirty thousand dollars to a ravening government. She listens to this person as she would not listen to her nearest relative, to the bank, to her best friend. She is delighted to hear that she can easily make up the lost thirty thousand by reinvestment in something just as safe and twice as good.

“And she is glad to leave the transaction in the hands of this kind friend, who knows all about money. She is only too quick to believe that if a word of the reinvestment gets out, the tax collectors will be down on her again. She is maliciously pleased to keep her affairs a secret.

“And she is tempted in another way; her adviser reminds her that now she will no longer be an obscure farm woman, and that she ought to take her place in the social world—not the little world of Avebury and the Grobys, but the larger one of fine houses and country estates into which her friend will introduce her when she is ready to entertain largely. I suppose that the months during which Miss Radford, guided by her friend, carried out the decorations at the farm were the happiest of her life.

“For they both enjoyed it; they were on the pleasantest terms; no doubt her kind adviser felt grateful to the woman who was saving him from ruin, and whom he fully intended to repay. That he never could repay her, that he found himself suddenly, overnight perhaps, unable to repay her, brings us to his own story and to a consideration of his own character.”

“Let us say that he—like the rest of us—had been reduced to a narrower scale of living than he had known in the past, and that he had recently gone into some scheme—quite legitimate, entirely commendable, I have no doubt—and backed it with all his capital and all his credit; some scheme, perhaps an invention as tremendous as rayon or cellophane, which needed by the summer of 1941 some not very great extra supply of capital; say that he had been called upon for a hundred thousand dollars.

“And say that he hadn't a hundred thousand, had only half of that; say that he couldn't raise a penny more, and was certain, for the lack of more, to lose all. He heard of Miss Radford's legacy, and he saw an opportunity to save himself at nobody's expense; for when he made his own fortune, within a short time now, he would not only return her seventy thousand dollars, but return it in the better-paying investments that he promised her. Meanwhile he would pay her her doubled income in cash.

“Miss Radford withdrew her securities from the Stratfield bank, and he gave her a receipt for them. He immediately turned them into cash, and turned the cash into his enterprise. And then, on the seventh of December, came the war.”

Gamadge drank some of his highball, and went on:

“In a single day the legitimate enterprise was as if it had never been. Whatever material was required for it—rubber, tin, chemicals—had ceased overnight to exist for private use. And although our friend was by no means reduced to beggary, although he might by liquidating his assets have repaid Miss Radford her seventy thousand, and still had enough to live on comfortably enough, he couldn't face the prospect. Nor could he kill himself, nor could he run away; he preferred murder; because he had a wife.”

Hunter looked up from his clasped hands to Gamadge's face. “Let's drop this ridiculous pretense,” he said. “We're not children. Admit that you actually think you're talking about me.”

I
N THE MILD
light of the candles the two men seemed to confront each other almost placidly; each had a dark open doorway behind him, though Hunter's back was to the mystery of the outer world, Gamadge's to that of the little green room where Alvira Radford had died. The low boom of the waterfall went ceaselessly on as they talked in subdued voices.

“I prefer the direct method myself,” said Gamadge, “but I was afraid that if I began with an accusation you would take Fanny and leave the house. I wanted you to hear me through, and I had no way of keeping you except by exciting your interest. I had to leave the gun you gave me in Stratfield; your other one, the one with the numbers filed away, is of course an exhibit too. Perhaps you have a third?”

Hunter said: “I have no pistol; but I warn you, Gamadge, that if in desperation at losing your suspect you attempt to drag my private life and Fanny's into this, I shall find other means of punishing you. Not that your wild conjectures won't be laughed at—and by Ledwell first of all.”

Gamadge replied: “We may as well waive the preliminaries. We both know that if you have not been suspected it is because you are considered above and beyond suspicion; the moment I tell Duckett or Ledwell that you killed Alvira Radford they'll see it for themselves; they'll investigate you, and though they may never connect you with the Radford securities, they'll discover your financial standing and activities, and they'll discover your motive.”

Hunter said: “They may still require some details—the method of the murder, you know.”

Few persons ever heard contempt in Gamadge's voice; Hunter heard it now, acid and unrepressed: “Method! The moment Clara told me her story on Wednesday morning I knew that you were the murderer, and all the details of that despicable crime. I left your house; and I was only sorry that the amenities had to be preserved while I tried to find immediate evidence for these local authorities who respect you so blindly. I needed none for myself—there was only one way for the murder to have been committed, and that's the way it therefore was committed.”

“Perhaps you'll condescend to enlighten me, though, since I persist in declaring myself in the dark?”

“Certainly, if you prefer to waste time. At a little before twenty minutes to one last Sunday morning you took the screen out of your bedroom window, climbed through it, put on the Hickson disguise—I don't wonder that the memory of it made you shudder a few minutes ago—and walked along the back of the house and around to the condemned door in that room behind me. You had had plenty of opportunity during the remodeling of the cottage to find out that it was not sealed, but only locked; you had loosened the plug so that it would fall into the room at a touch, and you had borrowed one of the house keys. You pushed the door open, and stood there only long enough for Clara to get a good look at you; then you were around the corner and back in your room—before she had even managed to get to the doorway and to call for help.

“You answered the call. You told her that Alvira Radford was dead. But she wasn't dead, she was quietly sleeping under morphia; you never allowed Clara to approach the bed again, you didn't allow anyone else to come into the room. You got the women upstairs, you telephoned, and then you came back”—Gamadge half turned, and glanced at the black rectangle of doorway behind him—“and committed your murder at leisure and in your own way.”

“That's the story you have prepared for Ledwell?” Hunter looked no more than mildly interested.

“There's a little more of it.”

“Oh—yes. I had forgotten. My burglarious entry into the farm in search of mysterious papers.”

“It wasn't burglary and it took place, of course, on your way back from Avebury with Knapp's filled prescriptions. It wasn't burglary, because—since the farm wasn't broken into—you must have had a key. Little has been said about Miss Radford's purse or bag, but she had one, and it must have been somewhere about the cottage, retrieved after her accident.”

“As a matter of fact, if you need facts—you don't seem to—I retrieved it myself from among the debris of the funeral flowers.”

“I have no doubt there was a house key in it.”

“And what mysterious papers did I abstract?”

“The receipt for the securities.”

“And it was I who made those special trips up from New York last fall, to help Alvira with the decorations here and at the farm?”

“And to persuade her that she was going to enjoy a fuller and a richer life. It was safe enough for you to make promises; you fully intended to reinvest her capital, and return the new securities to her; if you failed to improve her social standing, how could she protest effectively to you, or protest at all to others? She would have been laughed at for a fool.”

“And I got the Hickson clothes out of the attic while Clara and Maggie were otherwhere, and built up the ghost story to keep suspicion from floating out of this neighborhood and up the mountain?”

“And came down the mountain last night to try for a potshot at me through a bedroom window. I had talked as if I were likely to investigate too widely and too deeply for your safety. You gave me a gun to cover yourself; you thought Craye and I would be together on the trail, and that I would be watching him, not for a woman in a sunbonnet. The Hickson clothes, which were to be planted on Craye, you wore once again as a disguise, if disguise were needed; and your sudden later inspiration, after I fired, was as brilliant a piece of hair-trigger judgment as I ever heard of.”

“And with Craye eliminated by me, who was left to take his place as a suspect?”

“There remained four available suspects; Clara, the Grobys, Mrs. Star. You still banked on the insanity verdict against Clara, but high as your hopes in that direction were, you had at all costs to conceal them from me. You talk of leaving Fanny out of it?” Gamadge's smile was less a smile than a twisting of the lips. “You didn't leave Clara out of it, did you? It's not your fault that she's in her right senses, or that I'm alive to fight for her. But I am kinder to you than you have been to me; Fanny can't be left out of the argument, since she's the innocent cause of it all; but she can be left out of the case. Why, if not to keep her out of it, have I delayed justice and allowed Craye to remain under suspicion for even these few hours? Not, I assure you, to give you a friendly warning, Hunter; but to give you time to remove all traces of that tapped telephone wire.”

As Hunter said nothing, but continued to look at him with a kind of rigid impassivity, he went on:

“You must have tapped your telephone, or how should you have known that Craye and I were meeting this afternoon on the Ladder? Fanny cannot have told you; if she had known that you were aware of our proposed conference there, you would never have dared to go there yourself for purposes of murder.”