Jack and Susan in 1933 (19 page)

Harmon seemed unmoved by Jack's defense of his wife. “Where are the photographs now?”

“I destroyed them,” said Susan.

“Did you think they were real?”

“Of course not!” cried Barbara. “She's the one who paid MacIsaac to fake them! She sold a fur coat to a Jew on Hester Street and paid MacIsaac with the proceeds.”

Susan stared at Barbara in amazement.

“I made that part up for effect,” Barbara admitted. “But everything else is true.”

“Did you believe the photographs were real?” Harmon asked Susan as if this were a matter of no consequence. At the same time, he pulled at Scotty's ear till the dog whimpered in pain.

“Whether I did or didn't doesn't matter,” returned Susan in quiet dignity. “I tore them up because I didn't want you to be embarrassed. I didn't want a divorce from you. I certainly didn't want to marry Marcellus.”

“She didn't need to anymore,” Barbara cried, flinging her arms wide. One of her diamonds scraped across the top of her father's coffin, gouging out a little ditch in the ebony.

“I didn't need to?” Susan echoed.

“Because you'd already got what you wanted,” said Barbara, slowly advancing toward the sofa.

“What was that?” Susan asked curiously.

Barbara reached deep into her bosom and pulled out several sheets of paper folded in thirds. She dropped it into Harmon's lap.

“Father changed his will. He left everything he had to you.”

“Oh no…” said Susan, clapping a hand to her mouth. She looked at Jack in wide-eyed astonishment. Jack was perfectly certain that his own eyes were wide in astonishment, and he had a pretty good idea that he was Harmon was quickly reading through the pages. Susan reached for them. He turned smoothly out of her way.

“Well, Barbara,” Harmon remarked, “it's a good thing you have a trust fund, because you certainly won't get anything out of this little document.”

He turned over to the last page. “Oh, what an extraordinary coincidence. It's dated the day before yesterday. The day before yesterday Marcellus made his will, leaving everything to Susan, my wife. Yesterday he made a proposal of marriage to Susan, my wife. Today he's in his coffin, being decorously mourned by Susan, my wife. Who would have thought the world could move along so quickly?”

Harmon handed the will out for Jack to take, but Susan was quicker. She reached across the sofa and grabbed the papers out of her husband's hands.

“Everything you wanted,” sighed Barbara, leaning over the back of the sofa and idly trying to poke out Zelda's eye with the stem of a chrysanthemum. “I suppose it's what you'd call a happy ending.”

Susan looked up into Barbara's face. She was silent a moment. Jack wondered what she'd say. Something nasty, and then to spit in Barbara's eye seemed an appropriate response.

“Say thank you” is all she said, however.

“‘Thank you'? For what, pray tell?”

“For this,” said Susan, and with that she ripped the will in half.

Then in quarters.

Then Jack recovered from the surprise of the thing and leapt up from his chair to grab at the document.

Susan ripped the will up into eighths and flung the bits into Barbara's face.

“Thank you,” said Barbara, brushing the foolscap fragments from her dress. “Well, Jack, it appears that I'm an heiress again.”

“You shouldn't have done that,” Jack said miserably to Susan.

“No,” said Harmon, “you certainly shouldn't have, Susan. Because when
I
file for divorce on grounds of adultery, you may end up with nothing at all.”

Yes, definitely Jack had fallen into a very deep pit. Now, there at the bottom, he thought he heard the hiss of snakes.

B
ARBARA FLUNG DIRT
onto the top of her father's coffin with a silver trowel.

“It really is the most unfortunate thing,” grumbled Harmon Dodge as they turned away from the grave leaving five burly men to finish what Barbara had only begun.

“What?” Barbara asked. “Death?”

“No. This bank moratorium. The papers say the banks will be closed for two weeks at the least—which means a month—which means that I've got to live on what I've got in my pocket, which is about twenty dollars, I think.”

“There are more important things to think about just now,” said Jack quietly, nodding to the clergymen who had performed the burial service for his father-in-law.

“There certainly are,” said Barbara vehemently, “such as the fact that Harmon's soon-to-be-ex wife and murderer of my father is standing right there in plain sight of everybody here, in the company of a Communist chauffeur and an incompetent cook, holding two extremely ugly dogs with crudely clever names.” Barbara pointed vehemently off to the side, where Susan and the Graces were standing in the shade of an overgrown yew. “The
audacity
!”

“She hasn't been convicted of the murder,” said Jack, glancing uneasily in Susan's direction and noting that all three of that small party were quietly weeping. Barbara seemingly hadn't wept since learning of Marcellus's death. And she certainly wasn't quiet.

“The
gall
! I'm certain it's only a matter of time before she's arrested, and if I were she, I wouldn't be flaunting myself at the graveside of my victim waiting for a pair of handcuffs to be slapped on my wrists. Harmon, it was bad enough for you to fall for a gold digger, but I don't think I can ever forgive you for making me go out to dinner continually with the woman who has made me a homeless orphan.”

“Oh, you've forgiven me worse,” shrugged Harmon, and climbed into the back of the limousine. Then he remembered his manners, got out, and let Barbara precede him in. “Besides,” he pointed out, “you're hardly homeless, with the Cliffs, the apartment in New York, and that fourteen-room cabin in Maine.”

“I hate that place in Maine,” said Barbara as she climbed in. “You know how I feel about trees.”

While this little bit of business was being transacted, Jack looked over to Susan and wondered.

She returned his gaze steadily, and he knew she knew what he was wondering, and he blushed and got into the limousine.

He was wondering whether she had in fact murdered his father-in-law for his money.

“If she did murder him for his money,” Jack remarked in the back of the limousine, “then why did she tear up the will?”

“Once it was established that Father had been murdered, the will became the evidence of her motive,” said Barbara, sounding more and more like Mr. Chan of the Honolulu police. “You simpleton,” she added just to mar the resemblance, “she
had
to tear the damned thing up.”

“You'll handle the divorce for me, won't you, Jackie my boy?” said Harmon easily. “I don't think I have the heart for it, funerals and bank holidays and all.”

Jack didn't answer Harmon. He didn't want to handle the case. On the other hand, he didn't want to let this one get into the hands of anyone else. Anyone else would doubtless make it more sensational than it already was if such an increment were possible. With a tiny jolt of surprise Jack realized he was more concerned here with Susan than with Harmon.

“Of course Jack will handle everything. Harmon will take me back to the city,” said Barbara. “You stay on and deal with the viper.”

“Give her enough money to keep her quiet and send her to Nevada to get Reno-vated,” said Harmon. “Get rid of Louise. I can't stand servants with guns, never could. Then close up the Quarry and kill the dogs.”

“Don't you think you might wait just a little while?” asked Jack. “Just till there's some sort of proof—”

“
Proof!
” shrieked Barbara. “Why are you defending her? She murdered my father, for God's sake. The only reason she took all those driving lessons was so she could learn how to tamper with the brakes. That seems perfectly obvious to me. And the
will
, Jack, you saw the will. She got half his fortune, and she didn't even have to marry him. Let the damn dogs live, kill
her
!”

Jack was silent under this barrage. Barbara leaned forward over the seat and peered into the rearview mirror to rearrange her hat, which had come askew in her tirade.

“Besides,” she added quietly, “the people we know don't get divorces because one or another of them is a murderer. You divorce them because their hair is the wrong color, or they pack their luggage improperly, or something. Better to divorce the reptile now than wait till they're strapping on the electrodes.”

Jack still said nothing.

Harmon's eyes were closed and he looked asleep, slumped in the corner against the door. But he wasn't asleep. “You'll take care of everything then?” he asked quietly.

“Yes,” said Jack. “Of course.”

Jack dreaded the meeting with Susan. She would think that he suspected her of murder. He didn't at all. He knew that Susan Dodge would no more have set out to kill Marcellus Rhinelander for his money than Jack himself would have followed Harmon's instructions to do away with Scotty and Zelda. But circumstances pointed toward Susan's at least having a motive, and the issue was confused.

He put the meeting off a night.

He learned from Richard Grace that Susan had returned to the Quarry. The chauffeur turned away, halted, came back, stammered, and finally said he hoped that Jack did not believe that
he
had murdered his employer “on account of any little difference we might have had on certain political questions, none of them of any real importance, of course.”

“No,” said Jack gently. “Neither I, nor the police, nor anyone else I venture to say, could believe that you would destroy the brakes of the automobile that
you
drove every day.”

“Have you ever thought,” said Grace Grace, sidling up out of the darkness of the dining room, “that Richard might be the object of a plot on the part of the new administration to do away with Socialist domestics?”

“Mr. Roosevelt's been in office for only a few weeks,” Jack pointed out, “and there's hardly been time to set such a plot into motion.”

“He closed the banks quick enough,” Grace pointed out. “And where am I to get my fowl, I want to know!”

Jack had often wondered where Grace got her fowl. A medical research facility providing small animals for classes in dissection seemed more likely a source than a poulterer's.

“And who are you to serve your fowl to?” sighed Richard Grace mournfully, and trudged away into the darkness of the masterless house.

Jack put it off the next morning, too.

He visited the police in Albany instead, and inquired into the progress of the investigation.

There was no progress. The wires on the brakes had been cut. That was all that was known, and all that was likely to be known.

Jack shifted uncomfortably in an uncomfortable straight chair and tried to look the detective in the eye. He couldn't, and looked instead into the eyes of Franklin Roosevelt, whose patrician smiling likeness now hung on the wall.