Fair Warning (24 page)

Marcia did not believe her ears.

“The goldfish. Dead. You told me about them this morning.”

“Madam is mistaken. Is that all, sir?”

He spoke to Dr. Blakie, who, watching Marcia’s stunned face, nodded impatiently. Ancill slid to the door, and Marcia cried, as he reached it, “Wait,” but he did not—or pretended he did not—hear her.

“What on earth?” cried Rob. “What about the damn goldfish?”

“Arsenic,” said Marcia. “I know now. It was arsenic in the cupboard. That little package.” She was barely conscious of their regard as she sprang to her feet and across the room to the cupboard. That little package of thick paper, soft and heavy-looking as if it contained sugar! She flung open the door and it wasn’t there and she had known it would not be. When had it been removed? When had the police first searched that cupboard? She had seen the package the very night of Ivan’s murder. When she had stood there at that small cupboard searching for the thing she’d hidded there. Was that—she stood stock-still as one flash of queer prescience led irresistibly to another—was that why the murderer had returned? To take the arsenic—to pour it in the pool? To get rid of it then? And the goldfish had died. She stopped there. How much arsenic in how much water would suffice to kill how many goldfish? It was a nightmarish problem in algebra.

“What’s the matter?” cried Rob, again at her side.

“The arsenic,” said Marcia numbly, as if she were talking in her sleep, “was in this cupboard. It must have been that. And the—murderer—or somebody came back and took it. I don’t know why. I can’t prove it. Yes, I can. The clerk at the hardware store can give a description of the package. The water in the pool can be tested.” She turned to face them, and tuned to her own excitement, they understood in spite of the gaps.

“But why?” said Dr. Blakie. “Why?”

His question was not then answered. For the door opened and Gally came in.

“What’s happened?” he said at once. “What’s doing?” For an instant no one replied, and he came closer to them, surveying them inquisitively.

“You all look,” he said, “like the cat that swallowed the canary. Especially you, Rob. What goes on?”

It was curious, thought Marcia later, that a quick, unspoken decision seized all three of them. Nobody spoke and nobody exchanged looks, but there was immediately an agreement among them. A secret.

Dr. Blakie said dryly, “We’ve been talking of the man Ancill claims he heard talking to Ivan here in the library the night he was murdered.”

He closed the cupboard door, and Rob took out cigarettes, and Marcia walked back to the desk.

Gally looked suddenly very queer.

“Oh,” he said. “Well—” He didn’t move or say any more than that, but all at once they were looking at him, Dr. Blakie with his hand outstretched above the globe as if about to spin it, Rob with a match poised and burning.

“Well,” said Gally, moistening his lips, “I was that man. Hell, isn’t it?”

I
T WAS EXACTLY LIKE
Gally, thought Marcia incoherently. He had no sense of caution; never had had. Did not recognize the gravity of a risk. The possibility of its turning out wrong.

If he had murdered Ivan Godden, it would be like him to think, in his feckless way, that he could defy the police; it was audacity turned the wrong way. Then Gally sat down suddenly, looking very thin in Ivan’s big leather chair, and took out his handkerchief and wiped his glistening forehead, and Marcia saw that he wasn’t daring and audacious at all. He was afraid.

“And,” said Gally through the handkerchief, “I’m going to tell the police about that, too.”

It was a kind of rueful tribute to Gally’s passion for truth-telling that they accepted it, even in the first stunned moment of his revelation.

Marcia went to his side and cried, “Gally, you mustn’t do that,” and Rob said hurriedly, “For God’s sake, don’t do that. You’ve got an alibi for the time of Ivan’s murder,” and as Gally continued to wipe his forehead wretchedly Dr. Blakie sighed wearily and sat down facing him and said, “Suppose you tell us all about it.”

Gally tried to answer all three in the same breath and in a measure succeeded: “I think they’re onto me. Wait’s been asking me about the cocktail glass.”

Marcia saw it then as clearly as if she had seen it when it happened. The only mystery was that she hadn’t seen it before.

“Oh, Gally, Gally!”

He did look at her then over the handkerchief.

“Hell,” he said again miserably, “isn’t it?”

It was.

“I don’t know what you’re going to do. Are you sure they know?”

He nodded.

“They’ve been after my alibi. It wasn’t much, you know. I said the car had broken down away out about 59th and Harlem. It’s sort of deserted out there, not many filling stations and not many people along. But I’m damned—” he removed the handkerchief and looked at them petulantly and as if he’d been injured—“I’m damned if they haven’t unearthed somebody that actually was broken down out there that night, right at the time I said I was, and he says there wasn’t anybody along there for an hour except some trucks.” He sighed and added, “They’ve been getting pretty close to home with their questions—lots of repetitions, as if they expected to catch me up. But it wasn’t till this morning that Wait actually came out with this no-alibi business. I stalled,” sighed Gally. “But he knows I was stalling. The only thing for me to do is tell the truth.”

“What is the truth?” asked Dr. Blakie in a tone of faint exasperation. They were getting too much for him, thought Marcia fleetingly. Gally was putting away the handkerchief and getting cigarettes out of some pocket, which demanded struggling, and did not answer, and Marcia said:

“He was here to see Ivan about—something. Just before Ivan was killed. And he went into the dining room for something and—and the liquor cabinet was open. And—” She stopped and looked at Gally. “But why did you leave the nutmeg in the hall? And the glass in the street?”

“I was upset,” said Gally, still injured. “And who wouldn’t be? Talking to a man one minute and the next minute finding him dead. I didn’t know what I was doing.”

“Good God!” burst out Rob. “Can’t you tell anything so it’s intelligible!”

Gally drew himself up.

“I don’t like your tone, Copley,” he said with formality. “I didn’t kill Ivan.”

They couldn’t exactly believe him and they couldn’t refuse to believe him. They looked at him, reasoning one way and the other, and Gally said, “It’s like this: I was ’way early to your dinner party. I came round in the garden, and there was a light behind the french doors over there and Ivan was sitting here, with the table drawn up, eating. So I thought, ‘Here’s a chance to see him.’ I—I wanted to see him—”

“You wanted to ask him for some money,” said Marcia, too worried to say it less bluntly.

“Well—yes. If you must know.” He looked uncomfortable and continued, “He wasn’t any too pleasant. But Ivan never was. After a few minutes, he took up his dessert, and it was some sort of custardy stuff—”

“And he liked nutmeg on it and sent you for it,” said Marcia.

“How did you know?”

“Never mind. Go on.”

“He said there was some in the dining room; in the liquor cabinet,” said Gally rather sulkily. “So I was being as—well, I wanted—anyway, I said not to ring, I’d do and get it for him.” He stopped there and groaned.

“What time was all this?” said Rob tautly.

Gally brightened.

“It was just about exactly seven o’clock,” he said. “I was watching the time because I didn’t want to be late again for a dinner at your house, Rob. And, believe it or not, I didn’t get out of this house till after seven-thirty!” He gave a long squirm. “It was awful. … I don’t suppose there’s any chance of getting a drink?”

“None,” said Marcia with asperity. “Do go on, Gally. What happened? What did you see?”

“Don’t hurry me. A highball would help a lot. It’s not a pleasant story,” retorted Gally. He gave symptoms of resorting to the handkerchief again, and Rob said, “Oh, for God’s sake!” savagely.

“Well, off I trotted to the dining room, doing my good deed for the day. I opened the liquor cabinet and could hear the servants away off in the kitchen, so I knew pussyfoot Ancill wasn’t around, and right there before my eyes—And I needed a drink,” said Gally with a reminiscent look.

“How many did you have?” said Dr. Blakie.

“I don’t know exactly. There was a glass there, too. As if it was waiting for me. I kept thinking I ought to be getting back to the library, but something told me that this was the first and the last time I’d ever get anything out of Ivan Godden, so I kept taking another. Marvelous whisky,” he said, still with that reminiscent look. “Soda right there handy. After the first three I thought I’d better prolong it a bit. Well,” he sighed. “Finally I got myself together and got to thinking Ivan wasn’t such a bad fellow after all and I had better take him a drink. So I mixed one for him and put everything carefully away, feeling it was just as well for Ancill not to know what I’d been doing. I was a little mixed myself.” He grinned feebly, caught Marcia’s eye, and sobered. “Anyway, in I started to the library; but just as I opened the dining-room door I heard somebody on the stairs, and it sounded like Beatrice. I was mixed,” said Gally, “but not about Beatrice. So I went back into the dining room and shut the door and waited. I could hear her sail down the hall and close the front door as nobody but Beatrice could close it. But I waited quite a long time after that to be sure she was gone: ten minutes at least. She didn’t see me, because if she had she would have had something to say.”

“That,” said Rob, “according to Beatrice’s story, was exactly fifteen minutes after seven.”

“Probably,” said Gally. “Well, it was a sort of shock seeing Beatrice like that. But nothing—” he went rather green around the mouth suddenly and wriggled again— “nothing to the shock I got when I walked into the library with the nutmeg in one hand and the glass in the other and there was Ivan. Dead as a doornail. Right there on the rug.” He pointed and stopped and gulped. And quite suddenly the shadows in the room seemed to pick it up and whisper it! “Dead as a doornail … dead as a doornail …” And the heavy brown curtains hung thickly, and the white, blind head of Caesar looked down as if it were not blind, and the glasses along the bookshelves were busy reflecting their faces eerily, reflecting other things, reflecting what they’d seen and what they knew.

Rob moved uneasily and passed a hand across his own forehead and said in a harsh, strained way, “Well, what did you see? Who killed him?”

Gally was staring fixedly at the rug, his eyes wide and glassy-looking.

“I didn’t—” he began huskily, cleared his throat and said again, still staring at the rug, “I didn’t see anything. Except that he was dead. The french windows were open and I closed ’em. Don’t know why. There was a scrap of something white on the rug, and I remember leaning over and picking that up, but I don’t know what it was or what I did with it. I was—I’m not too clear in my head about any of it. Except that I was perfectly sure he was dead.”

“Did you approach him?” asked Dr. Blakie. “Did you take his pulse or do anything like that?”

“God, no!” said Gally. “I was sensible enough to know I’d better not touch anything. All at once I realized it was murder and I was there and I hadn’t done it. I left. Went by the front way because of a fuzzy notion the murderer had escaped by way of the french doors and I’d better go the other way. I was scared,” said Gally candidly, “and I was sort of drunk. The only thing I was sure of was that I wanted to get far, far away. So I did.”

Rob groaned and rose and flung back over his shoulder, “Well, this is a nice mess. What are we going to do about it?”

And Dr. Blakie said to Gally soberly, “What did you do exactly?”

“Well, at the door I put the nutmeg, down on the table so as to open the door. Later I remembered it and was scared to death about fingerprints on it, but somebody must’ve put it behind the Indian vase without the police seeing it. I shut the door, and it made an awful jar behind me. I thought everybody in the house would hear it.”

“I heard it,” said Marcia. “It was the second time it closed.” It was horrible, the way his story fit: it was true, then.

“Then I legged it for my car; it was parked down the street under that big catalpa—top leaks, and it was about to rain. As I got to the cross street—Larch—I realized I was still clutching that damn glass and threw it toward the sewer intake. Then I got in the car and drove and drove and drove. My head began to cool finally, and I knew I had to get back or they’d wonder why I didn’t show up for dinner. So I came back. Fixed up my story on the way. And it was a good story,” he added plaintively. “Up to now.”

It was like Gally, too, to throw himself on their mercy, thought Marcia sadly.

For a moment no one spoke. Rob lighted a cigarette and threw down the match with a jerk, and Gally stared at the carpet, and Dr. Blakie rose and stood again beside the globe, spinning it absently so the small clear sound of spinning seemed to fill the waiting silence.

Finally he said gravely, “You realize the position this places you in, Gally?”

“Oh, my God, yes,” said Gally.

“And you still think it best to tell the police about it?”

“It’s not a question of what’s best. I think they already know. Or are getting warm. Only possible thing for me to do is to tell the truth.”

“Very commendable, I’m sure,” said Dr. Blakie neatly. “But do you think they’ll believe you?”

“Why not?” said Gally.

Rob whirled around at that.

“Look here,” he said harshly. “Answer a straight question. Are you sure you didn’t kill him yourself?”

“
Kill him
! I never even thought of it. Which is more,” said Gally unexpectedly, “than you can say.”

Rob’s eyes blazed.

“What do you mean by that? I didn’t kill Ivan Godden.”

Dr. Blakie poured oil hurriedly: “Gally doesn’t think you did. Look here, Gally, don’t you have some clue to the murder? Something you saw, I mean. Some very small thing, perhaps. God knows,” he said, with an apologetic glance toward Marcia, “I had little liking for Ivan Godden. Too little to want to see one of you convicted of murdering him. And it looks—it very much looks—as if the only way to prevent—that—is to find out who actually murdered him.”