The Book of the Dead (20 page)

“I'll take you on with four,” said Gamadge, “if McBride has a brassie.”

Miss Crabbe was delighted. “But I'm not going to play a foursome with three men,” she said. “Not any more. Just register, will you, and I'll call Arthur.”

She gave them cards, and rang. Gamadge, signing, asked: “I wonder if Mr. Schenck and Mr. Boucher could have a breakfast lunch and a good long quiet afternoon? They've been on the go, and they won't want to play till tomorrow. I might have a tray of lunch in my room; I'm tired myself.”

“Good idea. I'll have your friends' trays taken up.”

A houseman appeared. Boucher followed him upstairs, looking as though he might not be able to reach the top landing.

“You have a fine house here, Miss Crabbe,” continued Gamadge, his elbows on the counter. Schenck lingered beside him.”

Mine.” Miss Crabbe put the cards away. “I wanted to go on living in it, so a lot of my friends helped me to turn it into an inn, and had the golf course laid out.”

“Lovely place. Do you get many residents?”

“Not now. At present we have one young woman, who's been here before; golfer. Nobody to play with. And we have a couple for the week end.”

“We're rather disappointed—I mean my friend Boucher was—not to find a friend of ours here.”

“Oh; yes. I thought when you all came in that you were the friends he'd been inquiring for. I couldn't understand how you'd lost one another.”

“We had business in Springfield, and Boucher decided not to wait for us in case we were detained. He came out in a cab, and then took a preliminary survey of the golf course. We
were
detained—very much so.”

“Oh, I see. Poor Mr. Maxwell came by bus; dragged his bag through the woods! Couldn't get a cab for love or money.”

“If Mr. Maxwell,” said Gamadge, smiling, “is a tall, blond gentleman with a fair complexion, he's our Mr. Maxwell.”

“For Heaven's sake,” exclaimed Miss Crabbe, “how stupid I am! I might have known. The fact is that he came right in by the side door, though, and I didn't know he was here until Mr. Boucher had inquired and left. Mr. Maxwell went straight up to join Mrs. Maxwell. It's her first visit to the Crab Apple, but he was here before, you know—with that invalid friend of his, that nice Mr. Crenshaw.”

Schenck's elbows slid along the counter, but he recovered himself.

“Poor Crenshaw, yes,” said Gamadge.

“I was so sorry to hear from Mr. Maxwell that he died. They were here two weeks, June first to fifteenth…If Mr. Boucher had only mentioned Mrs. Maxwell—”

“We didn't know she was going to be here.”

“Spoil your foursome, will she?” Miss Crabbe was amused. “She came up from New York last night; luckily
she
got a cab, arrived at nine.”

“Don't tell them we're here; give her a day,” laughed Gamadge. “We'll surprise them at dinner. We'll be more or less in eclipse till evening, and I assure you, Miss Crabbe, that the last thing we want to do is to talk to Mrs. Maxwell.”

Miss Crabbe was indulgent to masculine preferences. “I won't say a word to either of them.”

Gamadge took Schenck's arm and piloted him through the archway, out of the Inn, and along the flagged path to the caddie house. Schenck, walking as in a gentle stupor, said nothing until they had entered a large, woodsmelling room that combined the functions of office, lounge and caddie-master's domain. Behind it was a dressing-room, and to the right a workshop.

Schenck sat down on a bench. He asked dully: “Maxwell is Pike?”

“Of course. I was in great agony while we talked to Miss Crabbe—delightful woman, isn't she? But I counted on the theory that Mr. Maxwell would be tired and hot after carrying his bag through the woods, and would remain in conference with Mrs. Maxwell for some time. We must be very careful not to let him see us yet; that can't happen until I've made a telephone call and had a reply to a telegram.”

“You didn't seem much surprised when we discovered that Pike had turned into a light-haired, light-complexioned golfer. Why did you describe him that way?”

“You really need to be told?”

“Yes,” said Schenck, his eyes snapping angrily. “I do.”

Gamadge came and sat down beside him. “Pike has been here before, as we learned from Miss Crabbe. He knew all about this caddie house. By the time Boucher came out of the woods, he was in there.” He nodded towards the dressing room. “Washing off his sunburn and washing the brown rinse off his hair.”

“You can't wash dye off under a water tap.”

“Not dye—rinse. Mrs. Howard Crenshaw uses it; Lucette Daker told me so.”

Schenck's eyes had an inward look. Presently he said: “When you described Pike as a blond you hadn't heard from Miss Crabbe that he'd been here before—under the name of Maxwell, and with Crenshaw.”

“No, but I'd heard a lot about that ragged brown hair of Pike's, and that sunburn. Why ragged hair? Because he couldn't go to a barber's and have it cut? You yourself suggested ‘home' cutting. Why sunburn? Sunburn is a disguise in itself; and sunburned skin has a shiny look about it; like grease paint, you know. And Pike had been described by Crenshaw as having a gallows complexion.”

“By Crenshaw?”

“I'll explain later. The point is that Crenshaw probably used the phrase literally—as descriptive of the color a man is likely to be if he's on his way to be hanged. Shakespeare, from whom the phrase was quoted, or rather in whose play the phrase was marked, probably meant by ‘complexion' the man's nature; the nature of the criminal—I'm convinced that when Crenshaw saw that phrase in
The Tempest
he thought of Pike—Pike as he really was under his disguise. A pale-skinned, light-haired man; but that's only my private notion.”

“I might agree with you,” said Schenck dryly, “if I knew what you were talking about.”

“The immediate thing is to find evidence that Maxwell is Pike.”

“We get that through Boucher and Miss Crabbe.”

“We only know through them that Pike went into the woods with a suitcase and that Maxwell came into the inn with a suitcase.”

“Pike was on the bus; Maxwell wasn't.”

“You know how those things go. The theory might be that Boucher didn't see Maxwell. We want something definite. It won't help for Boucher to say that he thought Pike was louche, that's too theoretical. But we know why he thought Pike was louche; because the color of his hair didn't go with the color of his eyes—Boucher knows all about average types—and because Pike's manner wasn't right. It wasn't right for Boucher because it had that inner force; and Pike didn't seem to be a man whose inner force could spring from spiritual grandeur. Let's look at the workshop and the washroom.”

In the washroom they found no more than a large collection of grubby paper towels; but in the workshop they found rags in a tin waste basket. Most of the rags were polishing rags of McBride's; some of them, unnoticeable among the others, were covered with reddish-brown grease and chestnut-brown stain.

“We'll leave them,” said Gamadge. “Evidently they're not put in the incinerator every day.”

“Smart of him not to put them down the drain,” said Schenck. “If they stopped up the plumbing they'd be fished out and noticed. He rubbed the grease off on them, and finished the job with soap and water in the lavatory. But where did he get the time?”

“Boucher gives him ten minutes; let's say three to get into the caddie house, and seven to do the cleaning up. More; Boucher went to the back door of the Inn, to the garage, and around to the front to ask questions of Miss Crabbe. Five minutes more at least.”

“He could wash in twelve or thirteen minutes, but he didn't have time to change into the other clothes he had in his bag. Shoes, too. No wonder that suitcase was heavy; he must have had a complete wardrobe of decent clothes in it.”

“He didn't need to change his clothes. He couldn't risk not getting rid of the grease paint and the hair rinse—it wouldn't take much of that to color very light hair, by the way—but he was only going to dash from the caddie house across to the Inn and up to his room.”

“To his wife. Maxwell has a wife; did you know
that
?” Schenck eyed Gamadge piercingly.

“Well, I thought he had something of the sort.”

“Why?”

“We'd better go back to the Inn; you want your breakfast. I'll tell you in your room.”

They found Boucher—whose room communicated with Schenck's by way of a bath—devouring his melon, bacon and eggs, toast and coffee. Schenck's tray arrived. While they ate, Gamadge sat on the deep ledge of the window, which overlooked the front lawn, and gave them a précis of the case. He began with Idelia's visit to him on the evening of the twenty-eighth, and omitted no detail except the contents of the letter which he had mailed the day before.

“There's just one thing,” he confessed, “that I'm leaving to your imagination; and all it amounts to is an idea of mine. I shan't tell you about it until I've had a reply to a telegram that I must send today; because if it doesn't come off, then you won't be disappointed.”

“You mean we won't find out where you went wrong,” said Schenck.

Boucher poured his third cup of coffee. He listened and said nothing; but he was smiling.

“Perhaps I have gone wrong.” Gamadge was quietly smoking, his eyes on the ancient turf and the ancient trees that had been Miss Crabbe's family's for a hundred years.

Schenck said: “Mrs. Maxwell is Mrs. Crenshaw. She never took the Century to Chicago at all; she came up here. She told Pike—Maxwell—about that brown rinse. It's a conspiracy, and you guessed it when you saw that note that Crenshaw made in the margin—
Cherchez la femme
. He knew that his wife and this fellow were up to something.

“You suspected her, so you never said a word to her about the underlined passages and the rubbed-out notes in the family Shakespeare.

“Billig was the third member of the gang. He got two thousand dollars for the job, but they may not know that he killed the Fisher girl; killed her as soon as he heard from you that she was making inquiries and stirring things up. And he went after you because he was afraid she'd told you something, and that
you
might upset the conspiracy.

“But what in the name of Pike
is
the conspiracy? Mrs. Howard Crenshaw and Pike and Billig didn't conspire to get rid of Crenshaw, because he died of leukemia. Didn't he?”

“He did.”

“It wasn't for the purpose of preventing Crenshaw from changing his will; he could have managed that at Stonehill, or when he first got to the hospital. You made up that story at the Jeremiah H. Wood Home to scare Mrs. Lubic into letting you see the patient. Why did you want to see the patient—that Mrs. Dodson—though? I don't get that point at all. Who did you think she might be? You couldn't simply have had a hunch that Billig was hiding two thousand dollars in her handbag? There are no such hunches.”

“None.”

“And there doesn't seem to have been any insurance swindle. If there was insurance it'll come out later, but I don't see how there can be anything in that.”

“Neither do I.”

“As for that book, the busted Shakespeare, none of the parties concerned seems to care anything about it. They don't seem to have known that the Fisher girl had it, and if they did they haven't tried to get it away from her.” He looked at Gamadge. “Why should they get it away from her? Because Crenshaw may or may not have been thinking of Pike when he underlined that part about the gallows complexion?”

“No.”

“And
cherchez la femme
didn't mean anything to you until subsequent events made it mean Mrs. Crenshaw…I suppose she did come from California by plane when she says she did?”

“Yes.”

“That's so, the girl was with her. The girl can testify that she didn't give a hang about her husband, but what of it? Are you going to invoke the Mann Act because Pike's week-ending with somebody else's widow? Count me out. At her age and in the circumstances that would be a little too tough,” said Schenck, “even in Massachusetts.”

“I shouldn't think of doing anything so vulgar as to invoke the Mann Act against the Maxwells,” said Gamadge solemnly.

“Well then, what are you going to invoke? And how are you going to tie me in?”

“Just wait till I get a reply to one of my telegrams.”

Boucher was smiling. “Prodigious,” he murmured.

“You think so?” Gamadge looked gratified.

“And formidable.”

Gamadge left his friends to their repose and went to his own room. It was on the northwest corner of the Inn, and it had a nice little balcony overlooking formal gardens; the houseman, caught as he was departing with the breakfast trays, explained that the Maxwells' suite was at the back of the house. Gamadge was pleased to know that he could take the air in the course of the afternoon. He unpacked his bag, and then furtively descended to the telephone booth under the front stairs.

He called Western Union and dictated three telegrams; none of them contained any more than the address and the telephone number of the Crab Apple Inn. One of them went to Geegan, one to Theodore.

G
AMADGE WAS LOOKING
forward to a shower before lunch. He had got so far as to remove his coat and tie when the fancy took him to step out on his little balcony and have a cigarette there. He was leaning on the rail, enjoying a prospect of flowerbeds in bloom, when he was startled by a voice that sounded almost in his ear. It said in friendly but unmusical accents: “Marvelous.”

Gamadge turned his head. A youngish woman had come out on
her
balcony, and was also leaning on the rail. She smiled at him. She had a goodnatured, plain face with prominent features, prominent gray eyes, and brown hair fashionably done up in rolls and curls. She wore navy-blue slacks, blue-and-red sandals, a white silk shirt, and large gold earrings. On her muscular forearms were many bangles.