“I knew he was going to meet with the boy. He’d asked me to help him get the money together, you see.”
“That’s right, you already told me that part. Did he also ask you to be with him when he met with Calvin?”
“No, I went there on my own, knowing he’d be alone. I tried to convince him once more not to allow himself to be blackmailed, but he wouldn’t listen to me. We quarreled bitterly, but I still couldn’t persuade him. I could see reasoning with him was hopeless, so I reached into the drawer where I knew he kept his pistol.”
“How did you know that?”
“He’d shown it to me on several occasions. Having a gun for protection is only effective if people know you have it, Mr. Malloy.”
“Did Blackwell think he needed protection from you?” Frank asked with interest.
“I don’t believe he did,” Potter replied stiffly.
“So you pulled out the gun. Wasn’t Blackwell sitting right there at the desk? Didn’t he try to stop you?”
“I don’t suppose he thought I was any danger to him. In any case, he didn’t do anything to stop me. He just sat there and ... and stared at me. I knew what I had to do, so I pointed the gun at his head and fired.” He looked at Frank expectantly, although Frank didn’t know what he was expecting.
“Then what happened?” Frank asked.
“He ... he slumped over the desk, just like you found him. And I left the house. No one saw me.”
“What did you do with the gun?”
“The gun?”
“Yes, did you take it with you?”
“I ... no, of course not, I ... I must have dropped it. I really don’t remember.”
“Did you touch anything on the desk or in the room?” Frank prodded.
“I ... I don’t remember. It was so horrible. I think I just ran out.”
“Didn’t you take the money Blackwell had gotten to give Calvin?”
“Certainly not! I’m not a thief,” Potter insisted, offended. Apparently, he felt he could commit murder but still maintain some integrity by not stealing from the dead man.
“Then what happened to the money?”
Potter looked genuinely baffled. “I have no idea. Probably one of your policemen took it. Or one of the servants. How should I know?”
Frank sighed. “All right, so you ran out. Where did you go?”
“Back to my flat. I ... I waited awhile. Then I was going to go back to discover the body. I didn’t want ... Well, I certainly didn’t want Letitia to find it.”
“Of course not,” Frank said. He’d proven he’d do almost anything to protect Letitia Blackwell from unpleasantness. Unfortunately, he’d also just proven he hadn’t killed Edmund Blackwell.
S
ARAH HAD MANAGED a few catnaps during the night but nothing approaching real rest. Since the room was warm, she’d appropriated Dudley’s blanket and made herself a crude pallet on the floor. She could have slept even in such uncomfortable conditions, but Dudley kept waking up from pain or thirst all night. She’d changed his bandages once when he’d opened one of his sutures, and just when she’d finally dozed off the last time, the landlady had come pounding on the door, demanding to know if Sarah wanted some breakfast brought up.
The next time Malloy needed a nurse, he could just hire one.
Dudley woke up moaning as the landlady delivered the breakfast tray.
“He ain’t going to die, is he?” she asked Sarah. “I don’t need nobody dying here. It’s bad for business.”
“I’ll do my best to see that he doesn’st,” Sarah assured her. “I wouldn’t want to inconvenience you in any way.”
The sarcasm was wasted on the landlady, who just nodded her approval and left.
Sarah checked Dudley for fever. He seemed warm, but not too bad. No signs of serious infection yet, but it was still early. “You need to eat something,” she told him when she’d examined his bandages. “Do you think you could manage it if I help you?”
“I don’t ... I’ll try,” he said. “It hurts, though.”
“I don’t want to give you any more medicine until you’ve tried to eat,” she explained. “The medicine always makes you fall asleep too quickly.”
He nodded and closed his eyes against the pain while she pulled the chair closer so she could feed him. Sarah had asked for soft foods, and that’s what she’d gotten. Milk toast and something that might have been porridge.
He managed to swallow a few bites, and then he said, “Was I dreaming, or did you tell me that it was Mr. Potter who tried to kill me?”
“You weren’t dreaming. He’d lost his watch fob in the struggle with you, and I found it last night, under your bed. Mr. Potter realized he’d lost it and came back looking for it. Since he thought you were dead—that’s what Mr. Malloy told him—he thought it would be safe. Instead, he got caught.”
She didn’t see any point in telling him how she’d fought and overpowered Potter. She wasn’t interested in impressing him, in any case.
“He was here?”
“Yes, you slept through the whole thing. Mr. Malloy took him away.”
“And did you say that Potter had killed Dr. Blackwell and that poor boy, too?”
“I’m afraid so.”
Dudley closed his eyes and shuddered slightly.
“If the pain is that bad, I can go ahead and—”
“No, no, I’m fine,” he assured her, opening his eyes and managing a strained smile. He swallowed a few more bites before he said, “Don’t let Letitia come here. I don’t want her in this place.”
Sarah couldn’t tell him that Letitia still thought he was dead, so she was unlikely to try to visit him at all, but of course, Malloy would soon be informing her that her husband’s killer had been caught and Dudley was, in fact, alive. Sarah couldn’t help wondering if Letitia would then even
want
to visit Dudley. Sarah knew that if the man she loved had been lying grievously wounded, nothing could have kept her away, but she couldn’t imagine that sort of devotion from Letitia Blackwell. But maybe she was doing the woman an injustice.
“I’m sure she’ll want to arrange for a better place for you to stay when it’s safe to move you,” she said, hoping that, at least, was true.
“She will, but she probably won’t think of it herself. She’s really quite naive about things. That’s why she needs someone to look after her. Blackwell never took proper care of her.”
Which was, of course, why you felt obligated to commit adultery with her, Sarah thought, but of course she didn’t say that. “Oh, yes,” she said instead, not above a little shameless gossiping, even if it involved a dead man. “You started to say something last night about her being afraid of Dr. Blackwell. Was he abusive to her? Did he hurt her, I mean?”
“Not that I know of,” Dudley said, taking another bite. When he’d swallowed, he added, “But there are other ways to hurt someone besides hitting them. He had forced her to give up the morphine. You can’t imagine how horrible that was for her.”
Sarah could well imagine it, having seen others going through the same agonizing process.
He swallowed another bite. “And then he made her speak at the lectures, even knowing how terrified she was. She did it for him, because she was so grateful to him, but he never appreciated it. No wonder she turned to the morphine again.”
“I suppose she was also concerned about her husband finding out about you and the baby,” Sarah suggested.
Dudley frowned as he swallowed the next bite. “I don’t think she was afraid of that so much. Blackwell paid hardly any attention to her at all, except that he ...”
“That he what?” Sarah asked, trying to appear only mildly interested.
“Well, he disapproved of the morphine use. Actually, I don’t think he cared about Letitia’s health as much as he was worried that if she was taking the morphine again, it would reflect badly on his cure of her. He suspected that she was using it again, but of course he never found any proof because she was careful not to keep it in the house.”
“Is that what she was so afraid of?” Sarah asked. “That he would find out and make her stop again?”
“It would have killed her,” Dudley said, growing agitated. “You must understand, she just couldn’t go through that again.”
“I understand completely,” Sarah assured him. Few people could endure such an ordeal even once.
“She tried to describe the pain to me, but I don’t think I can even imagine what it was like. She was simply terrified he’d put her through that again. She was so terrified that I even thought ...”
“What did you think?” Sarah prodded when he hesitated.
He smiled sheepishly. “You’ll think I’m a cad.”
Sarah already thought so, but she said, “You can’t shock me, Mr. Dudley.”
“I hate to admit it now, since I know it wasn’t true, but I was actually afraid that Letitia might’ve killed Dr. Blackwell herself. That’s how frightened she was that he would discover she was still using morphine.”
“Oh, my, that is unchivalrous of you,” she agreed, even as a chill stole up her spine at the very thought.
“If you could have seen her that day when she came to Mr. Fong’s, you’d forgive me for believing it, though,” he defended himself. “She was on the verge of hysteria. She’d quarreled with Blackwell, you see. He’d accused her of using morphine again. She’d denied it, of course, but it was an ugly scene. And she knew that when the baby came, she wouldn’t be able to get out for several weeks. She’d have to keep the morphine in the house then, and if Blackwell found it ...”
“I can certainly see why you were worried,” Sarah agreed sympathetically. She couldn’t help wondering how sympathetic Letitia would be if she were to learn of her lover’s suspicions, however.
“I can’t tell you how relieved I am to hear it was Mr. Potter all along,” he was saying.
“I guess you forgot that Letitia was with you when Dr. Blackwell was killed, so she couldn’t have done it.”
“She was, of course, after their quarrel. But I couldn’t help thinking ... Well, no matter. None of it matters now, does it?”
Sarah supposed it didn’t.
F
RANK HAD BEEN looking forward to going to the Blackwell home to tell the widow her husband’s murder had been solved so he could be finished with this case. Of course, he’d get no reward now. Potter was hardly likely to make good on his original offer, and Symington had only wanted to reward him if he proved Dudley was the killer. On top of all that, he’d have to tell Symington and Letitia that Dudley wasn’t even dead. Not only would Symington be disappointed, they’d both be angry because he’d deceived them. Still, having the case over would be something to savor. He never wanted to see any of these people again.
Unfortunately, the case wasn’t over.
No matter how much Frank wanted it to be true, Amos Potter hadn’t killed Edmund Blackwell, and his confession had proved it. First there was the problem of how Potter got the gun in the first place. Hard as he tried, he couldn’t imagine anyone allowing another man, a man with whom he was supposedly quarreling, no less, to reach into the desk drawer at his very elbow to pull out a gun without trying to stop him. To make matters worse, Blackwell would hardly have just calmly kept on writing his letter while Potter raised the gun and pointed it to his head.
Potter had made no mention of trying to make the death look like a suicide afterward, either. He hadn’t known Blackwell was writing a letter when he was shot, and he hadn’t mentioned laying the pistol down beside him to make it appear Blackwell himself had used it. Most of all, he hadn’t mentioned replacing the pen Blackwell had been writing with in its stand.
Probably he hadn’t mentioned these things because he knew nothing about them, and he knew nothing about them because he wasn’t even there when Edmund Blackwell was killed.
Which left Frank with the task of explaining why a man would confess to a murder he hadn’t committed. And why he’d commit a murder to cover that one up if he wasn’t guilty of it in the first place, because he’d apparently killed Calvin Brown. But most importantly, Frank would have to figure out who had really killed Edmund Blackwell in the first place.
That probably wouldn’t be too difficult, though. Potter had only confessed to protect someone, and Frank knew there was only one person he’d die to protect: Letitia Blackwell.
Frank figured he shouldn’t be surprised to realize he’d once again underestimated a female. Sarah Brandt was always accusing him of doing just that. But even she had been fooled this time. As difficult as it was to imagine, Letitia Blackwell had blown her husband’s brains out and then calmly kept an assignation with her lover.
Now all he had to do was convince the chief of detectives, the police commission, and Maurice Symington that sweet Letitia Blackwell should be charged with murder.
S
ARAH WAS READY to commit murder herself by the time she heard Malloy’s familiar footstep in the hall. Dudley had been sleeping soundly for quite a while now, and she was tired and stiff and hungry and very annoyed with having to tuck and retuck her torn skirt back into its waistband.
She threw open the door before Malloy even had a chance to knock and said, “Thank heaven you’re here! You’ve got to find someone else to look after Dudley for a while so I can ... What on earth is wrong?”
He blinked in confusion. “I thought you were going to tell me,” he said.
“No, I mean what’s wrong with you? You look like someone died.”
“It’s worse than that. Is Dudley awake?”
She glanced over. He hadn’t batted an eye at Malloy’s arrival. “He’s in the arms of Morpheus.”
“Who?”
Malloy leaned around the doorway to look himself, probably expecting to see someone sharing the bed with Dudley.
“Morphine-induced slumber,” she explained. “Come in and tell me what’s happened. Didn’t Potter confess?”
“Oh, he confessed all right,” Malloy said as he came in and allowed her to close the door behind him. “The problem is, he isn’t guilty.”
“I know he’s the one who tried to kill Dudley,” she insisted. “I found the key, remember?”