“Sure,” I said. “My suicide tonight’s the only possible way it can end happily ever after for her. You see, she’s banking on the fact that you and Mimsey are in this too deep to squawk when Sargent identifies my body as Gordy.” I laughed again. “Too bad I’m not going to oblige her, isn’t it?”
Marny was watching me brightly in the moonlight. “Does it hurt?”
“Does what hurt?”
“Knowing about Selena.”
“Does it hurt knowing your father and brother are murdered?”
“I’m sorry. It was a terribly stupid question.” She moved closer and slipped her hand into mine. “Well, boss, what do we do now?”
“We don’t have much choice. Tomorrow Inspector Sargent’s going to come and tell us that your father was murdered. We might as well save him the expense of waiting for the autopsy report and call him up right now. Let him know there’s another corpus delicti for his collection.”
“And tell him about Selena?”
“What do you expect me to do? Commit hari-kari to save her skin? You’ve certainly got me tabbed as stuck on Selena, haven’t you?”
“Weren’t you?” She drew her hand quickly out of mine. “Oh, what difference does it make, anyway?” She dropped the stub of her cigarette and crushed it with her heel. “It’ll come out about the conspiracy against the League, of course. You, me, Mimsey, Nate—we’ll all get into trouble.”
“Sure. But maybe with a couple of murders on his hands Sargent won’t feel too ornery with us. After all, it isn’t as if we got away with anything.” I glanced at her. “But I guess your glamour days are over. No money now. You’ll have to take that job in a hashhouse after all.”
“I don’t care,” she said vehemently. “I’ll be so glad to be rid of the whole bunch of them forever. Working in a hashhouse suits me fine.”
“You’ve got guts, haven’t you?”
“Me?” She twisted round, staring up at me. “You’re the one with guts. You’re the one who’s taken the beating.”
She put her hands on my arms and, reaching up, kissed me on the mouth. She gave a little laugh that was almost a sob. “What a place you picked to lose your memory in.”
Her lips were sweet; her body was young and firm against mine. For a moment she made me forget what a horrible night it was.
“We’d better get started.” She slid away from me. “You wait. I’ll drive the car up.”
“No.”
“Why not? You don’t want to walk all that way.”
“I don’t have to be nursemaided. I’ll walk and like it.”
I slid the crutch under my arm. I knew she thought I was being unreasonably stubborn. I probably was. But hobbling back to the car helped me feel independent. I was tired when we reached it and the skin under my arm was burning. She helped me in, put the crutch in the back and scrambled into the driver’s seat.
Her hand felt for the ignition and then dropped back to her lap. She fumbled in the pocket of her suit and glanced uncertainly at me.
“The keys,” She said. “Did I give them to you?”
“No. You had them in your hand when we went to the house. I saw them.”
“Then I must…”
“You’ve lost them?”
“When—when we found it, I must have dropped them. I… I’ll have to go back.”
“Into that room?”
“I don’t mind. Really I don’t.” She gave me a fleeting smile. “It won’t take a minute. Here.” She handed me the whisky bottle. “Have a drink. You’ll need it. I’ll be back in a second.” She slid out of the car and then, turning back, took the bottle from me. “I’d better have some too.”
She drank, handed me the bottle and hurried away towards the house. I watched her slim, straight figure until it blurred into the featureless moonlight.
She had guts all right, I thought.
Alone I started to think of what was ahead of us. Back at that old house with Gordy’s body lying beyond the thin walls, what we had to do had seemed so simple. It didn’t seem simple now. I’d have to hand Selena over to Sargent, of course. But the moment I’d done it, that would mean the end of Nate as a doctor, the pauperization of Mimsey and Marny and the probable arrest of all of us. The entire Friend household would crumble like the walls of Jericho.
I tried to think if there was any way of saving something, at least, from the impending wreck. As my thoughts strayed barrenly, I heard a sound that started my pulses tingling. It came behind me from the trail which led from the Friends’ house and it was the drone of an approaching car.
The drone grew louder. Since our car was hidden behind the bushes, I had no view of the trail. But soon the car was up to me and the beam from its headlights, filtering between the leafy branches, fanned through the car and passed on. The automobile was headed for the old farmhouse.
In a moment I heard it stop. I heard the click of a door opening and then another click as it closed. I thought I could even hear footsteps on the gravel.
Uneasy thoughts jostled each other. It couldn’t conceivably be the police. There was no way in which Inspector Sargent could have guessed about Gordy at this stage of the game. Then, if it wasn’t the police, it was… who? Selena, recovered from the sleeping tablets? Or, much more likely, Jan. I realized then with goading anxiety just what must be happening.
If my body was to be palmed off as Gordy’s for the police tomorrow, Selena could never risk a possibility of Sargent’s finding a second body so inadequately concealed, in the old farmhouse. And yet, she wouldn’t have dared destroy Gordy’s body before now because, if the plan with me failed, an attempt to build the real Gordy up as a parricide and suicide would be safer for her than nothing, even though it would expose the conspiracy. But now she was so sure of me that she could afford to destroy Gordy.
But, if she had awakened from her doped sleep, and found me gone, she would have known she couldn’t be sure of me. This must have been planned earlier. Probably she had divided the job in two. Her job had been to kill me. Jan’s job had been to dispose of Gordy. Not knowing Selena had failed in her task, he was going ahead with his.
As the truth straightened itself out, anxiety for Marny started to crawl through me. I tried to steady myself by reflecting that she must have heard the car too. Even if she had been in the house, she would have had plenty of time to slip out by the back door and hide from any danger. But the minutes passed and she did not return. The anxiety mounted, urged on by wild speculations.
What if she hadn’t been able to find the keys and had stayed on searching until it was too late? Or what if she had tried to be smart, to set some trap which had failed?
I told myself that, if I was right and it was Jan, Marny could handle Jan. But could she? Jan as an assistant in double murder was a very different proposition from the grinning, friendly Jan she had known about the house.
My own helplessness galled me, like the skin raw under my arm. I knew it would be folly to hobble after her on the crutch. Instead of helping her, I would be an added burden. But as minutes succeeded minutes, the suspense became unendurable. At length, I twisted around to glance over my shoulder. The crutch was lying there on the back seat. By throwing my arm behind me and leaning back, I was just able to touch it. With a great effort I managed to lean back further. My fingers closed around the crutch. But as I pulled it forward, it slipped out of my grasp and fell on the floor. I struggled to reach it but the back of my seat was too high. With a feeling of frustrated despair, I slumped back against the seat.
Grunting with exasperation and exhaustion, I sat there, gathering my strength for a second attempt. The bottle of whisky lay on the seat at my side. I picked it up and took a large gulp of liquor. It was sheer chance that I did not swallow it immediately. But I didn’t. As a small amount of liquid trickled down my throat, my sense of taste was suddenly alerted. I let a little more seep down, testing it. It tasted wrong, thick and bitter. I spat what was left out of the window.
The whisky had been doctored.
In a wave of desperation, I realized what had happened. We had picked the bottle up from a table in the living-room before we left. The whisky had been planted there by Selena. The living-room had been the place she had selected for my “suicide”. If our scene in the bedroom had worked according to schedule, she would have made no excuse for us to move to the living-room. She would have given me a drink. Once I had passed out, she would have brought the suicide note out from its strategic hiding place behind Mr. Friend’s picture, put Gordy’s gun in my left hand, lifted it to my temple and shot. When the shot attracted the household, she too would probably be found rushing in, aghast, with the others.
That’s what might have happened. But, in a fever of anxiety, I realized that what had happened was almost as bad. Marny had taken a drink from the bottle. In the urgency of her return to the farmhouse, she wouldn’t have noticed the taste. Marny had not come back because she had been drugged. She would be lying defenseless out there in the darkness somewhere—between the car and that room in which Gordy’s body lay in its sordid grave beneath the floor boards.
The extreme emergency must have sharpened my faculties. As I stretched back once again vainly groping for the crutch, an image slid uninvited into my mind. It was an image of Mrs. Friend saying, as she had said the day before, how lucky it was for their plan that my right arm was in a cast, so that I could legitimately make a left-handed signature on the abstinence pledge. Lucky! If it hadn’t been for that luck, their whole plan would have been doomed to failure. If I’d signed the pledge with my right hand, comparison of my signature with any of Gordy’s would have immediately exposed the fraud.
They had been lucky enough to find me. God knows. Wasn’t the additional fact that my right arm happened to be in a cast a little too lucky for coincidence? And then suddenly another image came—an image of Nate Croft, white-faced and desperate that afternoon when he had entered the living-room and found Selena kissing me. He had said:
“Does it have to be every man that comes along? This time I thought I’d be safe, I put on the casts…”
I put on the casts…
Nate had told me at the beginning that neither my arm nor my leg would hurt. I had accepted his word as a doctor’s word. But wasn’t it possible that the casts had been as much of a lie as everything else connected with that family? What if Nate had pretended my right arm was broken to assure a left-handed signature? And the cast on the leg?
This time I thought I’d be safe.
I thought of his bitter way of loving Selena, his knowledge of her promiscuity and his passionate desire to keep her faithful. What if he had, unknown to the family, put an unnecessary cast on my leg too to keep me ‘safe’ from Selena? A chastity belt in reverse.
In the first rush of excitement before I had time to weigh the deduction soberly, I pulled the paper-knife dagger out of my pocket. I tugged up my baggy trouser leg. I started to hack at the plaster. As it began to flake off, I knew I was risking a serious fracture if my hunch was wrong, but I didn’t care. The chance of being able to get to Marny overrode everything else.
It didn’t take long to crack the cast off completely. Time was too precious for me to work on the arm. All I needed at the moment were two legs and one arm.
I slid out of the car and eased my weight on to my left leg. It felt stiff and weak, but there was no pain. I flexed the knee at the joint. There was still no pain. I took a few steps from the car. I walked shakily, but I could walk.
The excitement welled up, mingled with exasperation. I had held my own against the Friends, but I had let Nate, the jealous lover, outwit me almost to the last minute. If I had been smart enough to have thought of this before, I could have been out of the Friends’ danger-infested house days ago.
Fear for Marny blotted out everything else. I picked up the knife and slipped it in my pocket. Warily I moved around the bushes and out on to the trail.
In the moonlight I could see the other car ahead of me, parked immediately in front of the farmhouse. From the square bulkiness of its silhouette, I could tell it was a station wagon. As I moved toward it cautiously, my eyes, accustomed now to the dim light, made out a figure emerging from the front door of the farmhouse. I slipped into the shadow of a bush. I could see no detail, but as the figure moved nearer, approaching the station wagon, I could tell from its height and huskiness that I had been right. It was Jan.
As I watched, the fear for Marny stinging like iodine on a cut, Jan reached the wagon. He moved around to its back. He stopped and seemed to feel inside. Then he turned and I saw that he was carrying a square, dark object in either hand. Without pausing, he started back again to the house.
As quickly and noiselessly as I could with my stiff knee, I moved after him. Marny would almost certainly have taken the same route as we had taken. I kept my eyes skinned but there was no sign of her lying by the track. I reached the picket fence. I tiptoed along the grass which bordered the drive to the garage. Marny wouldn’t have gone to the garage. Her only object had been to retrieve the keys from the living-room. Cold sweat breaking out on my forehead, I skirted around the far side of the garage to the back of the house.
There were no trees in what had once been the yard. The moonlight, cruelly bright, shone down, illuminating the whole area. There was no trace of Marny. I ran across the exposed patch to the shadow of the house itself. I inched my way along the wall until I reached the living-room window. Cautiously I moved my head until I could see inside.
The rays of the moon cast a dim light into the room. My eyes rested instinctively on the corner where we had left Gordy’s body with the pile of floor boards at its side. To my astonishment, I saw that the boards had been put back into place. There was no sign of Gordy. Then, as my gaze moved to the other side of the room, I made out the huge figure of Jan. He stood by the door from the kitchen. He was bending to place two square objects down on the floor next to a group of four or five similar objects.
In the first second I could not make out what they were. Then, with a flash of recognition, I saw they were cans of gasoline.