The Complete Simon Iff (20 page)

"We can do that," said Wimble laughingly, "on our way to the cottage."

Once in the automobile and well away from the house, Iff sat up and began to take notice. "Do me a favour, Wimble," he said. "Let me dine in the city. I want to spend half an hour there first of all with a new and unexpected but I trust much-to-be-valued friend."

"Why, what's the big idea?"

"I want to chat with the Commissioner of Police."

"Wha-a-at?"

"About this murder, you know."

"Murder?"

"Mrs. Burns."

"Good-night!"

"Didn't you expect this? I had an idea that my fame had crossed the Atlantic."

"Yes, but I thought you were the real thing, not a Sunday Magazine Detective!"

"Come! you've seen all the people, and you know all the facts. Can't you put two and two together?"

"They only make four."

"Oh, this case has some very mysterious sides to it. For example, there are two things of unknown origin in it."

"As?"

"One: Bichloride of Mercury. The doctor couldn't suggest how that got into the house."

"It might have come in fifty ways; it doesn't implicate anybody."

"Yes, but there's a thing that only came in one way, and implicates somebody very much."

"That's?"

"Claudine."

"She's the child of her parents, isn't she?"

"The name, I mean."

"Americans are always giving odd names to children. Why, we discussed that already."

"We did. Didn't it mean anything to you? 'Ima Hogg" and 'Ura Hogg': does that tell you nothing about the father?"

"Peculiar sense of humour."

"Precisely. Now then, what about Claudine? Any 'free association' about Claudine?"

"Why, Willy, of course. Claudine en ménage, Claudine s'en va - that's all, though, I think."

"Right. Willy, naughty French novels. Now then, that's a curious name for a stern Puritan father to give to his daughter, isn't it?"

"Possibly a relative of that name."

"Possibly. But how does that connect with an unexplained supply of Mercury? In your imagination, I mean."

"All this is the most far-fetched, fantastic stuff. Better argue frankly that Funny Ass sounds fishy!" Iff bore up under that foul blow.

"Consider Claudine herself. I say it's Wednesday, and she takes thought before admitting it. What does that mean?"

"Mannerism."

"Suppression resulting from years of brutal tyranny."

"Oh nonsense, she's a happy, care-free, charming child."

"It's as much as her life's worth to be anything else. Look at her eyes!"

"Rats!"

"Next, that shad."

"Well? Badly cooked - I suppose the cook - oh bunk!"

"On the contrary, bed, I hope, for me to-night. But did you observe that our philanthropic friend excused the cook on account of her desolation at 'poor Mary's' death - and that he was inwardly boiling?"

"I did. He was sensitive, no doubt, about the quality of his hospitality; but his good heart forbade him to blame any one."

"Wimble, you are a very young and very innocent child. I like you. Here is a harsh tyrannical type, a terrible fellow both in his business and in his home; but he daren't blame his cook when he had every right to do so. I can only explain that attitude by guilt and fear. You, on the contrary, are mother's darling."

"You are yourself a loveable character - especially if asleep."

"That however rarely occurs."

"Well, here's Headquarters."

The Commissioner was delighted to meet the famous Simon Iff. And what could he do for him?

Mr. Iff would like a photograph of Phineas Burns shown to every doctor of high reputation in New York, Boston, and Philadelphia, with a query as to whether he had come for treatment; and if so, for what?

The Commissioner was amazed. "I shall have to ask for something more than that," he said slowly. "Very good," said Simon Iff. "I prefer a charge of murder in the first degree."

"On what grounds?" asked the Chief.

"Well, he called his daughter Claudine," said Simple Simon.

"English Law?" queried the Commissioner.

"There's more than that. He hides his feelings in the matter of planked shad, and Claudine hides her feelings in every matter, and the cook doesn't hide her feelings at all."

"You can't tell that to the Grand Jury."

"I know it. That's why I want the evidence of the doctor. Once I get that, I'll show you a little of our Thirty-Third Degree."

"Damn it, I'll do it for the fun of the thing!"

"That's all I do it for, don't you know?" Simon Iff remembered his manners just in time, and clinched the Commissioner's opinion that he had to do with a crazy Englishman.

A week later Simon Iff received the information that Phineas Burns was undoubtedly the Godfrey Smith who had been under the treatment of Dr. James Gregg Tardie of Philadelphia for ten years past. Dr. Tardie had prescribed the Bichloride of Mercury in small doses for months at a time. And would Mr. Iff favour the Commissioner with a visit?

Mr. Iff conferred the favour requested. "We found out some more while we were on the job," said the big man. "Burns has been leading Some Double Life all these years. 'Black' seems to be the bug in his dome. You've given me confidence, I'll admit; but it's still a long way to that Grand Jury and the little arm-chair with the pep."

"Oh, no!" said Simon. "It's as easy as falling off a log. Leave it," he added with an embarrassed blush, "leave it to your Uncle Dudley." And then he added "don't you know?" in a spasm of modest confusion.

"Surely."

Iff decided that he had passed the test.

"But what exactly do you propose to do?"

"Just put it to him nicely and simply, don't you know?"

"I do not. But, 'don't you know,' he's liable to throw you out."

"Yes, I would like to have you come down with me. I think if you were there he'd listen quietly because he wouldn't quite know what your presence implied. My knowing the name of Tardie will be another little scare. But all I need is that he should listen; and he'll listen - if only just to call my bluff!"

"And you're only nine high!"

"The number nine, according to the Pythagoreans, is sacred, and attains the summits of philosophy."

"Very good. I certainly want to sit in to the game."

They went down to Burns' house, and found him alone. He greeted the Commissioner with just the proper feeling. Iff asked for a special interview 'on important business', and came straight to the point.

"I want to say my say," he began, "before my friend here says his. I have only one remark to make, which is this: The wages of sin is death."

Burns smiled, and lighted a cigar. This fanatic amused him. But he restrained an early impulse to answer anything.

"Whatsoever a man soweth," went on the mystic, "that shall he also reap. He that soweth to the flesh, shall of the flesh reap corruption. Doctor Tardie tells me..."

Simon Iff broke off as he saw that Burns had let his cigar go out. He waited for him to relight it. The Commissioner noticed how great an effort it cost him.

Iff did not have to lie; he switched off from an indicative to an apodeictic proposition. "A man of your nervous tension is particularly liable to end with locomotor ataxia, general paralysis of the insane, or softening of the brain."

Burns took no second chance with his cigar, he puffed vigorously.

"It is hard for thee to kick against the pricks. You indulge in secret your desire toward an inferior race, as you deem it - and you end by finding yourself in the power of your own cook."

Burns smoked more easily. A slight smile touched his lips. But Simon Iff was watching his eyes; there was no smile in them.

"He that, being often reproved, hardeneth his neck, shall suddenly be destroyed, and that without remedy."

Simon Iff shut his mouth like the snapping of a trap.

Burns, unmoved, smoked his cigar steadily to the end. Then he crushed the fire of the butt upon a silver ashtray. Then he went to the door of the strongroom and opened it. From a drawer he took a heavy revolver, and deliberately blew away the top of his skull.

The Commissioner was on his feet, gasping. A second glance assured him that the man was dead. He turned upon Iff with a mixture of awe and horror.

The mystic, in his turn, had drawn a long black cigar from his case, and was lighting it with a hand that did not tremble in the least.

"My dear man!" was all the Commissioner could say.

"You want to know, of course? Come here!"

The magician stepped across the body, and opened one of the drawers in the strongroom at random. It was full of photographs. "Pah!" cried Teake in disgust. "Observe!" said Simon, returning to his easy chair. "When I came here I had no idea at all that the death of Mrs. Burns was anything beyond the accident it appeared. But the moment Claudine stepped into the room I understood from her manner that she had been bullied secretly and subtly until she was afraid to express herself in the simplest matter without thought, earnest thought, as to whether it might not get her into trouble. Yet a mask was always put upon the truth; she and her mother were always obliged to exhibit a 'happy home', an 'ideal American family life'. I began to understand the hard brutality of the man from that as well as from his success in business. I know also that he had expressed his own vices in the naming of his daughter after an immoral woman. Of course he would not have dared to use any name which the general public would have connected with lasciviousness, such as Cleopatra. He chose a name to which not one American in a million would attach any significance whatever. Returning to the mother, then what must her life have been with such a man? I began to suspect suicide rather than accident. So I asked the family doctor whence the Mercury had come. He could not tell me. 'Claudine' gave me a clue.

"Before I could go further, lunch arrived. I found this hard brutal cynical sensual man, annoyed at his cook's blunders, making excuses for her. Fear, I thought! What else could explain the situation? So I contrived to see the cook, and found an ambitious and intriguing woman, a woman of almost a male quality of lust, grasping at power like Browning's John the Pannonian. Then I perceived what influence might have forced him, with the Mercury ready to his hand, to murder. Oh, a safe murder! Who would suspect him of having such a drug? Who would guess, when he had been so careful as to go to Philadelphia to consult a physician under an assumed name? Even were the Mercury traced to him, still an accident! 'Poor woman, she took my tablets in mistake for hers!'"

"Yes,yes!" said the Commissioner, "I follow. I understood your train of reason before we came here. But how in God's name" - he crossed himself - "did you come to suppose that the hardest-headed man in America would fall for all that stuff from the Bible? Man, it isn't common sense!"

Simple Simon smiled with wide-open, childish eyes. "But, my dear Commissioner, think of his name! Phineas Calvin Zebedee! Don't you know who Phineas was? He 'stood for the Lord' when all Israel 'went an-whoring after Moab' or something. And Zebedee, the father of James and John, the 'Sons of Thunder.' There's your religious atmosphere! And Calvin! Why, the boy sucked in Calvin with his mother's milk. He was born and bred to that one great idea of inexorable fate. Though the mills of God grind slowly, yet they grind exceeding small, and all that, don't you know? On the top of that, too, what do we know of the father who named him? A narrow bigot, who repressed his son's normal instincts, and named him after a tyrant like himself, but with a passionate revolt against enforced chastity seeping at the very base of his nervous sytem! Well, the lust side of him was the art side too; he naturally dramatized the fate that his other side assured him must one day fall upon him, and he saw that fate in my person when I quietly reminded him of what penalties he had incurred."

The commissioner sat awhile in silence. Suddenly he shook himself like a dog. "I suppose I'd better get after that cook," he said, mechanically.

"Spare yourself the pains and the humiliation," said Simon. "He will have left her every penny - you don't have one chance in a million."

"True; but can't we do something for Claudine?"

"We can get back to New York, and dine at the Club. Claudine will be either a courtesan or a nun, and we can't help in either case."

"We can get back to new York; in fact I must; but somehow I don't feel like dinner."

And so it came about that Simon Iff dined that night with Wimble; but the only explanation that he would give was most unsatisfactory.

"It's my idiotic vanity, child!" he said, with his eighth creme de cacao; "I said to you jokingly that a man with a name like that was bound to have poisoned his wife, and so of course I had to prove it. I think I will have another Corona Corona."

Wimble, who always pretended to be excessively mean, pretended to writhe; but the waiter brought the cigar.

I

"This is the sort of puzzle we get every day," said Commissioner Teake to Simon Iff. The Head of the New York Police was doing the honours of the organization to the distinguished stranger. "Here's a shabby individual - speaks Hungarian, not a word of anything else - can't give any account of himself. Has lost his memory absolute."

"Oh!" said Simon Iff. "And where did you pick him up?"

"In a raid last night on a dive on Tenth Avenue. Possibly the shock of arrest - there was a little shooting practice, too - has destroyed his memory. He's a pretty tough guy, as you see; but I feel - well, traces of intelligence and refinement. We're holding him for observation, and to try to get in touch with some relatives."

They passed on. In the next room Simon Iff stopped the Commissioner. He put a hand on his shoulder, and said slowly: "If you get a puzzle of that sort every day, you must be a fairly busy man."

Teake was struck by the extreme significance of the mystic's tone. "Some funny business, eh?"

"Well," said Simon, "I perceive a certain Incongruity. Will you do me the favour to answer me just one question? What well-known man of high position in a foreign government did you find in that - dive, I think you called it?"