Puzzle for Fiends (21 page)

Selena nodded. “I guess you are, baby, although the whole thing’s utterly out of this world.”

“I’m sure, dear,” murmured Mrs. Friend, “that you will handle it admirably. Men always do these things so much better than women.” She looked up, the faintest trace of amusement in her eyes. “All right, dear. What do you want us to begin with?”

“You can begin by telling me exactly what happened the day Mr. Friend died.”

“Why, nothing happened, dear.”

“At least one thing happened, I know. He fired Jan. Why?”

Mrs. Friend blinked. “I haven’t the slightest idea. My husband was rather like the Queen of Hearts. He often had his Off-With-His-Head moods. Probably Jan didn’t look jolly enough that morning.”

I glanced at the girls. “Either of you know?”

Marny was watching Selena. Selena shrugged.

“No, baby. I’d even forgotten that he was fired.” Her glance met Marny’s. “But it’s easy enough to find out. Ask him.”

“Yes,” said Mrs. Friend, “if you really want to know—ask him. Marny, dear, run and find him.”

Marny pushed herself off the couch and went out of the room. I had already asked Jan why he was fired and had got nowhere. I wasn’t very hopeful, unless the Friends had a better system of communication than I. Soon Marny came back with the Dutchman. He was still in his respectable seersucker suit with his blond hair plastered down.

“You ask him,” I said to Mrs. Friend.

She put the question very slowly. Jan seemed to understand it as he had with me. And, as he had done with me, he broke into a gale of laughter. The three women continued to ply him with questions. He reacted with a succession of gestures which were meaningless to me. But Mrs. Friend seemed to grasp their significance. She nodded him away. After he’d left, she turned to me.

“Well, that’s that.”

“You understood him?”

“Of course, dear. But it doesn’t help much. Jan doesn’t know why he was fired.”

“He doesn’t know?”

“That was what he was trying to convey. And it’s reasonable enough. My husband called him in, bawled him out and fired him. Jan didn’t understand what it was all about. He just accepted the situation. Jan’s always accepting situations and laughing. Really, he is tiresome. You’d think he could bother to learn just a few words of English, wouldn’t you?” She blinked again with faint decision. “Where does the investigation go from here?”

“When Mr. Friend died, did he have a nurse?”

Mrs. Friend shook her head. “He’d had one, of course, when he was seriously sick. But he had improved so much that we’d sent her away several days before.”

“Then who took care of him?”

“All of us, dear. Jan fixed him up. The girls and I saw that he got his medicine. None of us sat with him very much, I’m afraid.” She sighed. “You’d understand that better if you knew Father. He wasn’t a very amiable patient.”

“And his medicine was—digitalis?”

Mrs. Friend shrugged. “I really don’t know, dear. It was something in drops. So many drops. You mixed it with water.”

“It was digitalis,” said Marny. “You know perfectly well it was, Mimsey.”

“I forget the difficult names, dear.” Mrs. Friend gazed at me. “Anything else?”

“Who gave Mr. Friend his medicine that day?”

“I believe I gave it to him in the morning. He had it twice a day.”

“Who gave it to him in the evening?”

Mrs. Friend glanced at Selena. “Wasn’t it you, dear?”

“No,” said Marny, “it was me. At least I was going to give it to him.”

I echoed: “Going to give it to him?”

Marny nodded. She looked pale, uneasy—far more aware of the potential danger than Selena and Mrs. Friend.

“I went into his room just after dinner. That was when he always took his second lot of medicine. Since he’d fired Jan, one of the maids had brought him his dinner and taken it away. He was in a frightful temper, I supposed the maid had spilt tomato juice on the sheet or something. I offered to give him his medicine but he shouted at me to go away and send Gordy to him.”

“Gordy?”

She nodded. “I went up to his room. He was pretty tight. I got him some Lavoris, tried to make him as presentable as I could and sent him down to Father.”

“Did your Father say what he wanted Gordy for?”

“No. But whenever he was in a bad temper he always wanted Gordy. He always hoped he’d catch Gordy drunk and have a legitimate excuse for a speech about Satan. I didn’t think anything about it.”

“And it was after he’d seen his father that you met him in the hall and he said he was fed up and going to Los Angeles?”

“Matter of fact it was.”

“Did you ask him what had happened?”

“No. I just said: ‘Is he acting up as usual?’ and Gordy tossed out a string of obscenities and went off to the garage.”

“And you?”

“I went back to father to give him his medicine.”

“Did you give it to him?”

“No, Selena was there.”

I turned to Selena. “That’s right?”

“Yes, baby. I was there when Marny came in.”

“And you’d given Mr. Friend the medicine?”

She stretched for a cigarette and lit it. “No, darling, I asked if he wanted it and he said he’d had it.”

I felt a shiver of uneasiness. “So Gordy’d given it to him?”

“I suppose so.”

I turned back to Marny. “When was all this?”

“About eight-thirty. It began at eight-thirty and ended somewhere around nine.”

“And your father seemed all right when you and Selena were with him after Gordy’d left?”

“Yes. We didn’t stay more than a couple of minutes though.” I turned to Mrs. Friend. “And when did you discover he was having an attack and send for Dr. Leland?”

“Let me see. It must have been around ten-thirty, I’d say. Yes. He usually went to sleep around eleven. I just looked in to see if he wanted anything and—found him.”

It all fitted, of course. I didn’t quite know what I was feeling.

“Mr. Petherbridge said your father called him and told him he was going to change his will a couple of hours before you called Dr. Leland. That means he must have called while Gordy was in the room with him.”

I looked down at my hands and then up quickly. “See what I mean? Mr. Friend was in a bad temper. He called for Gordy. Gordy was drunk. Mr. Friend obviously bawled him out. Then Mr. Friend called Mr. Petherbridge and said he was going to change his will.”

My gaze settled on Mrs. Friend. “Try and laugh that off. Mr. Friend threatens to cut Gordy out of his will once and for all. Mr. Friend then asks for his medicine. Everyone knows that an overdose of digitalis would be fatal to a man with a bad heart. Gordy leaves the house right away. He says he’s going to Los Angeles. He’s never seen again.”

I paused, still fixing Mrs. Friend with my gaze.

“What’s the betting that Gordy never went off on a bat? What’s the betting he murdered his father, got cold feet and made a getaway to Mexico?”

I felt dejected and terribly tired.

“If the autopsy shows poisoning, there isn’t a policeman in the world who couldn’t pin the crime on Gordy Friend in twenty minutes.”

I laughed hollowly. “And to Inspector Sargent, I’m Gordy Friend. I signed the abstinence pledge. I signed the exhumation order. Even if you didn’t plan it that way, it amounts to the same thing.”

I paused. “I suppose I should be calm about that. After all, one is better off if one does not become excited, is not one?”

Mrs. Friend’s
swift fits of anger always took me by surprise. One came upon her then. She stared at me, her handsome face flushed.

“Really, to accuse my own son of murder—under my own roof. And you—you who haven’t even met him.”

“It’s not my fault I’m under your own roof,” I said. “And I’d be delighted if I’d never heard of your own son. But since I happen to be understudying for him at the moment, thanks to you, I at least have the right to speculate as to what he may or may not have done.”

Marny gave a short, humorless laugh. Selena crossed and sat down on the sofa next to Mrs. Friend, patting her shoulder. “Mimsey, darling, don’t be stuffy. He’s right. We’ve got to be ready. I don’t think Father was murdered any more than you do. But if he was, they’re bound to say it was one of us. I certainly didn’t murder him. Did you?”

Mrs. Friend freed her shoulder with a pettish shrug. “Don’t be silly, Selena.”

Selena glanced at Marny. “Did you?”

“Sure,” drawled Marny, “if it makes Mimsey feel any better.”

“You see, Mimsey?” Selena shook back her hair and watched Mrs. Friend serenely. “Who else could it have been but Gordy? After all, he’s the one who had the opportunity. And the motive, probably. Of course, I think Gordy’s a lamb just the way you do. But, if he’d been off on an ordinary bat, he’d surely have been back by now. And—well, I mean you never can tell what people may do when they’re… What’s the polite word for stinking? I never can remember.”

Mrs. Friend had become all mother. “I know,” she said, “that my Gordy would never deliberately…”

“Maybe it wasn’t deliberate,” suggested Selena. “Maybe Father asked for his medicine. Gordy was drunk. He didn’t count the drops properly. He gave him an overdose by mistake. Then he realized it and got scared and ran away. Gordy always runs away from things.” She turned to me hopefully.

“Maybe,” I said. It was just possible.

Selena laughed almost gaily as if everything had been solved and there was nothing more to worry about.

“There,” she said.

“So we all live happily ever after.” Marny was watching Selena through cigarette smoke, her eyes dark and derisive. “Since you’re so bright, what are we going to do with this poor guy here? We’ve stuck him with being Gordy. What do we do next? Do what he accused us of doing? Stick him with a murder he didn’t commit?”

Selena smiled back sweetly. “But, of course, dear.”

I stared.

Selena left the couch and, crossing to me, dropped on the carpet at my feet and put her hands on my lap. She smiled up at me radiantly.

“Darling, it’s perfectly obvious what we have to do. If you let the policeman know you’re not really Gordy Friend now, we’ll lose whatever chance we have of getting the money from that repulsive Mr. Moffat and we’ll all get into the most terrible trouble. I mean, the things we’ve done, they’re frightfully illegal, aren’t they? So you’ll simply have to go on being Gordy. And then, if the autopsy results are sinister, we’ll have to tell the truth and the policeman’s bound to suspect you. So you just come out frankly and say that you were drunk and maybe you did give Father an overdose by mistake and…” she shrugged vaguely “... And, well, that isn’t something so awful to have done, is it? I mean, they’ll understand it was just a mistake.”

“And forgive me with kisses and little crooning sounds of sympathy?”

“Well, won’t they, darling? Besides, we’ll be frightfully rich. We can give them all big fat checks and new automobiles and things if need be.”

I could never tell with Selena whether her incredible naïveté was a pose or not.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m afraid I don’t love the Friends quite enough to serve a ten-year manslaughter sentence for them.”

Selena’s eyes clouded. “Is that what they’d do to you?”

“I’d be lucky to get away with ten years.”

She caressed my knee meditatively. “I’d hate that, I’d simply hate that.” She sighed. “Then we’ll have to think of something else. What shall we think of, baby?”

Dimly, in spite of the grimness of the situation, I realized that the touch of her fingers on my knee was still as exciting as ever. Not that it mattered. Things were far too bad for me to let her make a sucker out of me any more. I knew exactly what I was going to make them “think of” anyway.

“If the autopsy report’s okay,” I said, “I’ll stay on and see this through. If it isn’t okay, there’s only one thing you can do.”

Selena looked interested. “What’s that?”

“Get me out of here—fast.”

“Get you out?”

“If you know what’s good for you.” There was a certain pleasure in being tough with the Friends at last. “I may not know who I am but I know I’m no sacrificial lamb. If Inspector Sargent thinks Gordy killed your father and starts arresting me as Gordy, I’ll come clean with the whole story. Of course it’ll put me in a spot but at least I won’t be a candidate for the electric chair.”

Selena’s eyes widened. “But what about us? I mean, if you tell, we’d be charged with conspiracy and heaven knows what.”

“That’s why I said you’d better get me out of here fast.”

“It’s not an ideal solution but there isn’t an ideal solution for the sort of jams the Friends think up. You’ll have to hide me somewhere where the police won’t find me. Then you’ll have to put them onto the trail of the real Gordy. Let them find him. And when they have—the rest is up to you.”

Selena said: “But Inspector Sargent’s seen you. If he found Gordy, he’d know he was someone different from the Gordy who’d signed the abstinence pledge.”

“He’s only seen me wrapped in bandages. Gordy and I look reasonably alike.” I grinned. “You and your mother-in-law could convince Einstein the world’s flat. Between you, you could certainly persuade the Inspector he had a little eye trouble.”

Selena pouted. “Really, baby, I think you’re being rather selfish.”

“Selfish. For God’s sake, haven’t I done enough for the Friend family already?”

Marny had been watching us for some time. Suddenly she laughed. “So you’re getting rugged with her at last. I didn’t think you had it in you.”

Selena said: “Shut up, Marny.”

“He’s the one you’ve got to shut up now.” Marny crossed and perched herself affectionately on the arm of my wheel chair. “I adore this. The worm’s finally turned. Keep it up. You’re the boss now. Tell them what to do. They’ll have to do it.”

I grinned up at her. When I needed her, Marny was always there. “Know any place you could hide me—till the casts come off?”

“Sure.” Marny glanced down at Selena. “Selena’s passionate doctor has a cabin way up on the mountains. Once we got you there, no one’d find you for weeks.”

“Once you got me there—exactly,” I said. “A cripple with a couple of broken limbs can’t travel under his own steam.”