Deadly Nightshade (25 page)

“Yes.”

“Glad to hear it. Hello, Hoskins. Mr. Schenck, is it? And this is the young man who sold an order of note paper to Serena Turnbull. I saw him drive away.”

“If you had seen the sample she ordered from, and the price she was paying for it, you might not be here at the moment. I have just come from the cemetery, Doctor Loring. A grave has been opened in the Bartram lot.”

Loring continued to look at Gamadge, while he put out his hand, picked up the glass of whisky, and drained it. Then he said: “Really?”

“Sarah Beasley's father has identified her.”

“Is poor Beasley capable of identifying anybody—under the conditions you suggest?”

“It's no use, Loring; the whole family is at home at the farm, and if necessary they will identify her too. Don't let us waste time discussing that.”

“No. Where, if you don't mind enlightening me, is the body of Julia Bartram, then?”

“Nowhere, as you already know so well. There is no Julia Bartram; there never was a Julia Bartram.”

“If you pretend that Carroll Bartram had no child—”

“I pretend no such thing. He had a son, who is now safely upstairs again in his own nursery, after a sojourn with the gypsies. Adelaide Gibbons and Mrs. Turnbull came in by the back way some time ago, and they are taking care of him. George Bartram has assumed full responsibility for his welfare, and will take him to New York tomorrow.”

A choking sound made them look around. Miss Ridgeman, livid and trembling, stood in the doorway, holding to one side of it. She whirled, rushed out into the hall, grasped one of the stair posts to steady herself, and screamed, her head thrown back: “Mr. Bartram! They've opened the grave. Do you hear me? They've opened the grave!”

There was a very long silence; no one answered her from upstairs, and at last Loring said coolly: “Not so much noise, Ridgeman. Keep calm, come in here, and sit down. Have a drop of whisky.”

She collapsed upon a chair just within the doorway, her shoulders bent, her clasped hands between her knees. Loring poured some whisky into the glass, and took it over to her; but she ignored it and him.

“Oh, all right.” He came back to the davenport, and sat down. “Take it like that, if you must; I can't blame you for feeling the shock. It's all up, and we've wasted seven good years on it; but you needn't behave as though somebody could chop your head off for it. Upon my word, I think we'll get off pretty easily. You're a man of the world, Gamadge; sit down, and tell your cohorts to sit down, and let me tell you all about it.”

Gamadge sat on a corner of the square table that stood on the left of the fireplace, and Schenck allowed his legs to bend, and his body to sink upon the seat of a convenient chair. Hoskins remained alertly poised near the door, and Harold Bantz, trying to maintain a detached and casual air, leaned beside him, pad and pen in hand.

“The truth is,” said Loring, sipping Miss Ridgeman's drink of whisky, “we put ourselves into a spot to oblige a friend, and once in it, we had to stay there. That's all there is to it. We can be had up for conniving at a fraud, but George Bartram won't prosecute—I can bet on that—and I shouldn't be surprised if they let us off with a warning. Bartram's popular, and I'm good in the witness box, and Miss Ridgeman is only a devoted employee, and a woman.”

Hoskins, representing the law, suddenly and surprisingly intervened: “You're talkin' before witnesses, Doc, and this young feller here is takin' notes. You want this to be a voluntary confession?”

Loring smiled at him, frankly amused. “Certainly, Willard. Do go and sit down, somewhere, and forget all that legal twaddle you've learned. Neither I nor Miss Ridgeman has anything to conceal—now. Mr. Gamadge seems to have blown us up, somehow, and I want him to hear our side of it. Damn it all, Gamadge, I gave you a good lunch. It ought to have choked you.”

“Unscrupulous of me to accept; but I really couldn't refuse. That might have given you food for reflection.”

“No holds barred, eh? Well, I'm in no position to complain; but I want you to hear our side of the story—Miss Ridgeman's and mine.”

“There's only one side to this story, Loring; you know perfectly well that you will both be held responsible for Sarah Beasley's death.”

“It was an accident; a most unfortunate accident. She ought to be alive and well this moment, as the Ormiston child is. Cogswell will tell you himself that she only died because she had an allergy for atropine—my God, he ought to know! He did the post-mortem himself, and ordered the analysis.”

“Doctor Cogswell thinks you ought to be lynched, all three of you.”

“Because his vanity is hurt by the way we took him in.”

“Your imagination has its limits, hasn't it? You actually can't realize the horror and disgust that everybody is going to feel when they hear about your inhuman tampering with these children's lives.”

“Now, don't take that tone, Gamadge; I should have thought that you, at least, were no sentimentalist. We didn't use atropine from choice; we used it because it's the drug in nightshade, and we wanted nightshade—for several reasons.”

“I know very well why you wanted nightshade; Mitchell and I listed some of your reasons for wanting it, early yesterday morning. We hadn't enough information then to list one of the most important ones, from your point of view; that people don't think of a doctor in connection with poison, if the poison is administered in berry form. But I submit that you did use atropine from choice, and for its own sake; you needed a quick-acting drug, and one that confuses the wits. You could always administer a minute extra dose of it, if the berries hadn't the effect you hoped for. As a matter of fact,
didn't
you administer that minute extra dose, Doctor? And isn't that why Sarah Beasley died?”

“Nonsense. The analysis—”

“No analyst could tell exactly how much atropine may have been present in the berries Sarah Beasley had, and no analyst could gauge the exact amount absorbed by her. Wasn't it that extra hundredth of a grain, say, that probably killed her? It's ghastly stuff to play with. I wonder that you didn't kill the Ormiston boy, too; and I'll be hanged if I think you cared, either of you.”

“You exaggerate.”

“I don't exaggerate the reaction you are likely to experience from your activities.”

“Manslaughter—I'm prepared for a charge of manslaughter; but the verdict won't even be that, I'd be willing to bet on it! Not when people understand that Miss Ridgeman and I went through the whole thing, at great cost to our own feelings, to get Bartram out of a jam.”

“That's the defense, is it?” Gamadge smiled crookedly at him.

“Why shouldn't it be the defense? It's true.” Loring returned the smile. “Miss Ridgeman is absolutely devoted to Bartram, as you can see for yourself, with half an eye; and he's my best friend.”

“And you had nothing to gain by the transaction.”

“Nothing. If we seem to have gained by it, I can only protest that money can't pay for such a service as we've rendered. Seven years out of our lives! It's fabulous. As for that poor unfortunate Beasley child, we only meant to borrow her for an hour or two, while the Georges were here. It was all because they came down on us at short notice—we couldn't plan anything better in the time.”

“One thing leads to another, though, doesn't it? That affair last night with the dummy, for instance.”

Loring's eyes twinkled. “Oh, come now, Gamadge, I thought better of your intelligence. You can't connect the elusive Miss Humphrey with us. Make an attempt on the life of a sympathetic person like yourself? Absurd.”

“You'd have had another try at it if we hadn't thrown poor Miss Walworth at you.”

“Seriously, Gamadge, why should Bartram and I go for you in that melodramatic fashion? We hadn't the vaguest notion that you had a line on us.”

“We had a line on that lost four hundred thousand, though, thanks to George Bartram. And Carroll Bartram knew nothing about your attempt at murder. He was bewildered, when we told him about it last night.”

“We were all bewildered. If we had had the faintest inkling of what you were up to, this interview wouldn't be taking place.”

“You decided to get rid of Mitchell and myself the moment George Bartram gave us the tip about the four hundred thousand. That tip led us straight to the motive for the whole conspiracy; and, incidentally, it exonerated George himself, since he handed it to us.”

“And we thought you were beginning to suspect dear old George!”

“Not after I realized that the fraud must have been directed against him.”

“To the deuce with all that. My point is that you can't connect Miss Humphrey with us. A lunatic of a woman, going around taking pictures of children for some nonexistent magazine!”

“Miss Humphrey wasn't taking pictures of children.”

For the first time, Loring appeared to be nonplused. He swallowed the dregs of his whisky, lighted a cigarette, and then asked sourly: “What was she doing?”

“She was trying to find out if there were any recognizable photographs of Sarah Beasley available. If there had been, she would have got hold of them all. Her visit to the Ormistons' was camouflage, and she naturally did not visit Miss Ridgeman, since Miss Ridgeman and Miss Humphrey were one.”

“Your Mr. Schenck informed me that she also visited the gypsies. Was that camouflage, too?” Loring's smile was a grimace.

“That was a fearful mistake. Miss Humphrey's interview with William Stanley ended abruptly when she realized that he was a gypsy; the last thing any of you wanted was to focus attention on them, since Bartram's boy was in their camp.”

“And why should Humphrey want pictures of Sarah Beasley, pray?”

“To destroy them. Atropine is deadly stuff; and if anything went wrong you wanted no pictures of Sarah Beasley in the papers. The George Bartrams might see them; Cogswell might see them, or one of his jury, if you couldn't persuade him out of an inquest; even the Boston funeral people might see them. Of course you
had
to persuade Cogswell out of an inquest, which was the reason why you called him in and let him have his autopsy and his analysis and all the rest of it.”

“I don't deny that your exposition is admirable,” said Loring, “but I do deny that it is based on fact. You haven't given me one iota of evidence to connect Miss Ridgeman with Miss Humphrey.” He added, glancing at the bent figure by the door, “I do wish she'd have a drink; I don't like to see her so disheartened.”

“I can do better than that,” said Gamadge. “I can connect Miss Humphrey with Miss Ridgeman, and I can connect her with you.”

“Me!”

“Yes. You adopted her personality for that very ill-advised attempt in the short cut.”

“How, if you please, did you reach that conclusion?”

“Quite simply. After I had conveyed certain information to Mitchell, which I did late this morning, he got a cleaner down from Bailtown; he was introduced into the Bartram garage while you were having Sunday dinner with them, and he thoroughly cleaned your car.”

Loring, who now sat back in his corner of the davenport, his bright inquiring eyes turned up to Gamadge's face, said gently, “Did he, indeed?”

“Late this afternoon he performed the same operation on Miss Humphrey's outfit, which was found, together with the dummy outfit, in the woods. From the car and the tweed coat and skirt he collected certain almost invisible objects, hard to remove from rough materials, and extremely hard to see. They were curiously marked cat hairs, Doctor; they had come from the body and tail of a tortoise-shell cat. As I know to my sorrow, it requires special and expert labor to extract them from one's clothes.”

After a pause Loring said in a faraway voice: “There are cats and cats.”

“tortoise-shells are not the commonest variety. For the life of them, the police haven't been able to find another within a radius of ten miles from the Beasley farm. I suppose Sarah's cat followed the car, when Sarah was borrowed on Tuesday; and, since it mustn't be found on the lower roads, when its mistress was presumably in the marsh, it was taken aboard. I don't know when it was killed, or where it is now.”

Loring said: “I think our battery of lawyers will be able to deal with all that.”

“Bartram's and Miss Ridgeman's may; yours won't.”

“Mine won't?” Loring sat up, slowly.

“No.
You're
facing a charge of murder—in the first degree.”

“Why? I only—”

“They may be accessories after the fact, but perhaps they're not.”

The whites of Loring's eyes showed, as he said: “I don't know what you're talking about.”

“I'm talking about young Trainor. He rode into the short cut with you on Tuesday evening, after he saw you leave Bartram's boy in the gypsy camp. You thought you knew his hours; but he had the gypsies on his mind, and he had altered them. I don't know what story you told him; perhaps the same one that you told them; but you couldn't swear
him
to secrecy. Completely at your mercy, wasn't he, that big young man? Stopped at your request, I suppose, and bent down to look at your lamps or your tire. He was so off his guard that you had plenty of time to bring that piece of iron, or whatever it was, down on his skull. You had to get him and his machine over to the rock, but you smoothed the traces away as well as you could. They left too wide a path across the ruts, and you didn't like to disturb the dead leaves too much.”

Loring pulled himself together. “Conjecture won't do here,” he said, “and you don't seem to have even circumstantial evidence.”

“We have better evidence than that. The gypsies saw Trainor ride into the cut with you at a little after eight; two people saw you come out of it alone; and one of them was a state policeman, leaving headquarters.”