Puzzle for Fiends (25 page)

She smiled a sudden, vivid smile. Then she hurried to the door, unlocked it and slipped away.

The pattern had fallen into place so quickly that I was still a little dazed by my own deductions. If Gordy was hiding there, he had probably been elected as executioner. How were they planning it, I wondered. Was Gordy to sneak into our bedroom and stage my suicide in the bed next to Selena’s? It would be much easier for Selena to do it herself. I thought of her sitting on my lap, twining her honey-brown arms around me, telling me she loved me. Had she shied off killing me herself? Was there at least that much squeamishness in her?

I glanced round the room for some makeshift weapon of defense! Lying on a desk by the window, I saw a paper knife. I crossed and picked it up. It was more than a paper knife, really. It was a dagger in a leather sheath—a souvenir probably from the Pacific war. I drew the knife out of the sheath and tested its blade on my thumb. It was lethally sharp.

I slipped it into my pocket, feeling a lot easier in my mind.

Marny came back soon. She was wearing a black suit and a white shirt. She carried a flashlight and a single crutch.

I tried it out. After a few minutes I got the hang of it. With the crutch under my left arm and my left leg dragging, I could move forward very slowly. It took a lot of strength but it worked.

Marny watched in dubious silence. Then when I signaled, she helped me back into the wheel chair and took the crutch.

“Okay, baby,” I said. “Let’s get going.”

Marny went ahead. As I followed her into the living-room, she picked up a whisky bottle from the table and pushed it down beside me in the chair.

“Something tells me we may need it.”

She led the way through the library, out onto the terrace and around onto a gravel drive which led to the garages.

In the moonlight it was easy enough to see what we were doing, and, as the garages were at the opposite end from Selena’s and Mimsey’s rooms, there was little risk of waking them.

Marny backed a car out of the garage. With her help and the crutch I managed to swing myself into the front seat. Marny handed me the whisky, put the crutch in the back, and pushed the wheel chair into the shadows where it wouldn’t be noticed if anyone should come to the garage while we were away.

She scrambled into the driver’s seat and glanced at me questioningly.

“Okay,” I said.

Marny nosed the car out of the gravel parking circle and down the drive. Neither of us talked as we swerved off the drive onto an old track which led away from the house towards the vast, desolate range of mountains. I was thinking more clearly now. I saw that the danger from Gordy was less real than we had imagined. After all, the whole plan rested upon killing me by stealth in a manner that could be faked to convince Inspector Sargent of suicide tomorrow. That meant he couldn’t just shoot me—particularly with Marny there as a witness.

I felt better about having involved her in this enterprise. To begin with, at least, the battle with Gordy would be a battle of wits rather than of weapons.

The track seemed endless. It was one of those sections of Southern California where the moment you’ve left habitation you might be on another planet. Bare scrub lands stretched on either side of us, and the desert mountains, like the skeletal remains of prehistoric monsters, pressed close around us.

“There’s a little canyon tucked away,” said Marny. “He had an avocado orchard there.”

“We getting near?”

“Yes.”

“Then turn off the headlights.”

She obeyed. For a couple of minutes we drove on by the light of the moon. Then the track swerved to the left.

“It’s down here,” she said.

We had reached the mouth of a little canyon. Ahead, gleaming faintly white, I could make out the shape of a building.

“Park here. We don’t want him hearing the car.”

“Can you manage that distance on the crutch?”

“I’ll have to.”

There was a dense clump of bushes. Marny drove off the road so that the car was concealed behind them. She got out, handed me the crutch and, pulling the keys in their black leather container out of the ignition, clutched them in her hand with the flashlight. I propped the crutch under my arm-pit and she helped me out. In the moonlight her face was white and tense.

“You’re crazy,” she said, “walking with that crutch. You’ll kill yourself.”

I patted her hand. “Don’t worry. Just follow my lead. This is going to be a cinch.”

Together we started laboriously down the track to the house. She supported me on my right side. That helped a lot.

As the white blur got nearer, I could distinguish an old bungalow and another building attached to it.

“A garage,” whispered Marny. “The back part of the house is a garage.”

No light showed from any of the windows. It was a dead house. It looked as if no human foot had trodden near it for years. We came up to it. A rotting picket fence divided off what had been the yard from the surrounding wilderness. There was a little gate sagging on its hinges and a large area cut in the fence for the driveway to the garage.

“The garage first,” I whispered.

We skirted the gravel of the drive. My crutch made no noise on the rough grass. We reached the garage. The double doors were drawn shut. Cautiously Marny slid them back, marking a space large enough for her to squeeze through. She turned back and eased me in after her.

It was dark inside and the air smelt stale and dusty.

“The flashlight,” I said.

Marny turned on a beam of light. A car was standing in front of us—a new, dark blue sedan, not at all the sort of car to be discarded in an abandoned house. Marny gave a smothered exclamation.

“It’s the car he went away in. Gordy’s car.”

She ran to the front window and threw the light inside. I followed. The keys were still dangling from the ignition. The car was empty. Marny turned.

“You’re right. He must be here—in the house.” Her voice broke. “What are we going to do?”

“There’s no light. He’s probably either asleep or drunk. How many doors are there?”

“One in the front. One in the back.”

“How many rooms?”

“Just a kitchen, a sitting-room, and a bedroom. There’s an old cot in the bedroom.”

“Know the window?”

She nodded.

“Okay.”

“What are we going to do?”

“Make sure he’s there. If he’s asleep and we don’t wake him—so much the better.”

“And then what?”

“Then,” I said grimly, “you’ll know for certain you’ve got a murderer for a brother and a murderess for a sister-in-law. Scared?”

Her hand found my arm and pressed it. She turned out the flashlight and started silently out of the garage. I hobbled after her.

She led the way around the garage to the back of the house. In the moonlight I could make out three blind windows and a shadowy door. Marny crept up to the window at the extreme left. Together we peered through it. The moonlight, splashing in, showed me a small, bare room. An old cot with a mattress tossed on it stretched along one wall. No one was sleeping on it. There were no bedclothes. It looked as if no one had gone near it since the house was vacated.

We moved to the kitchen window and then to the last window which gave us a glimpse of the unfurnished living-room. Between them the three windows gave a complete view of the interior. One thing was certain. Neither Gordy Friend nor anyone else was there.

“With the car in the garage he can’t have gone anywhere.” Marny shivered. “Do you suppose he heard us and is out here somewhere hiding?”

“Let’s take a look inside.”

She slipped ahead of me. The door groaned as she tugged it open. There was a single step. She had quite a time maneuvering me up it. Then we were in the kitchen. The air was foul and sour—as if a rat had died.

Marny shone the flashlight around. There was no empty cans, no refuse, no indication that anyone had been living there. The bedroom told the same story. There was a vast spider web that stretched from the ceiling to the leg of the bed where it was anchored.

“No one could have been in this room for a month,” I said.

“Then why the car?” Marny’s question was shaky. “If Gordy hasn’t been living here—why the car?”

She twisted away towards the door which led to the living-room, her car keys still clutched in her hand. As I lumbered after her, a new thought was coming—a thought which threw our whole theory out of gear and sent a cold tingle up my spine.

We stood together in the doorway of the living-room staring along the beam from Marny’s flashlight into that moldering, empty shell. The fetid smell was even stronger in here.

The floorboards were sagging and broken. The wood had warped too, making the surface billow.

“Let’s get out of here.”

Marny gave a little grunt of disgust and turned, swinging the beam from the torch in an arc.

For one second before it passed back into the bedroom, it illuminated the corner to our right.

“Marny!”

“What?”

“Shine the light back in that corner.”

She obeyed. As the light settled there, I saw my first glance had not deceived me. Two of the loose floor boards were splintered. The light patches where fragments of wood had been broken off showed that the damage was recent. I could even see the splintered-off pieces themselves, scattered over the dusty floor.

“See?” My voice sounded harsh and strange.

“But…”

“It’s got to be you,” I said. “I’d never make it, goddam it. It’s got to be you.”

It was one of those strange moments where we understood each other without saying what we meant. Marny pushed the flashlight into my left hand which was clutched around the handle of the crutch. I kept the beam steady. She ran to the corner. She wrenched at one board. It gave immediately. She tossed it aside. She tugged up another board, and then another. She was working wildly, as if, in some way, violence helped.

I took a few steps towards her. Four floorboards had been wrenched up now. I looked down into the shallow pit she had exposed. She had come back to my side. She was clutching my arm savagely. And she was whimpering.

I had been almost sure of what I would see, but that didn’t make it any easier. I didn’t look long—only long enough to see that the body of a man was lying there, a man who had been shot through the chest.

Marny’s fingers dug into my flesh. The whimper coarsened into a harsh, wracking sob.

“Gordy!’ She said, “Gordy! Gordy!”

I had known that too, of course.

We’d found what we’d come for, all right.

Marny
was sagging against me. My instinct was to get her out of that charnel room. But I couldn’t. She was the one who had to get me out. I hated my own disabilities. After a second or two she was in control again. She slipped her small arm around my waist and together we managed to reach the fresh air and the moonlight. The crutch had worked a sore place under my arm. I leaned back against the wall of the house, propping the crutch at my side.

“Cigarette?” I asked.

Having a specific task to do seemed to make it better for her. She pulled a pack of cigarettes out of the pocket of her jacket, lit two and put one between my lips. The tangy smell of smoke was wonderful after that other smell. But I was still half sick with shock, not because we had found the murdered body of a man I had never met but because the discovery implied something I could hardly bring myself to think about.

In the moonlight Marny’s face was deathly white.

I said: “All right, baby?”

“Yes. I’m all right.”

“I’m terribly sorry—getting you into this.”

“Don’t be silly. As if it’s anything to do with you. “She paused, making me very conscious of the silence of the dead world around us. Softly she said; ‘We were wrong, weren’t we? We had it figured all wrong.”

“Not wrong, baby,” I said bitterly. “Just not enough.”

“Enough?”

“Haven’t you got it?” I should have grown used to the idea that Selena’s wickedness was without limit; but now that the full truth was obvious, I felt an absurd sense of desolation, as if I had loved her very much. “First we thought Gordy murdered the old man and Selena broke in on him. Then we thought they both murdered him together. We just didn’t go far enough. Selena gave him the overdose and, as she was doing it, Gordy came in. He realized what she had done. You can’t trust a drunk with a secret like that—not even if he wants to stick by you. You can never tell what he’ll come out with when he’s stinking. So…” I shrugged “... she lured him down here and shot him. One murder, two murders.”

“Selena!’ Marny’s voice was pinched. “But why would Selena murder Father by herself? He was murdered because he was going to cut someone out of his will. Was he going to cut her out of the will?”

“Don’t you see? Mr. Friend fired Jan that day. Why? Because he must have seen Jan and Selena together, the way you did. His saintly daughter-in-law carrying on with his model clean-living houseboy, sponsored by Mr. Moffat himself. What could have made him madder?”

“And Jan—that’s why Jan made the cross? Jan helped her?”

“You said yourself he’d help you bury a body and forget it a couple of hours later. He probably didn’t help in the murders. She probably just used him to clean up—to tear up the floor boards, maybe, or to get the car in the garage.”

“But Gordy—without Gordy alive, she couldn’t have collected a cent under the will.”

“She didn’t know about the clause in the will then. None of you did.” I laughed harshly. “When Mr. Petherbridge read the will the next day, Gordy and her chance for a fortune were both buried down here under the floor. She must have had a bad couple of moments until Nate produced me and saved the day for her.”

“Then—then you don’t think Nate and Mimsey knew?”

“I’m sure they didn’t. Nate’s far too lily-livered to get mixed up with murder, even for Selena. And your mother? She’d never have stood for Gordy being killed, would she?”

“No.” Marny’s voice was emphatic. “Never in a million years.” The tip of her cigarette glowed in the darkness. She said suddenly: “She did have to kill you, didn’t she? Selena. She couldn’t pin the blame on the real Gordy, because, even if she could make him look like a suicide, the police doctor would know he’d been killed long before the abstinence pledge was signed and that would expose the whole conspiracy.”