“Nothing there?” inquired the tired voice from the sofa. “I rather imagined there wouldn’t be; I fear the gods aren’t very kindly disposed to us to-night…. Well, Ross, what kind of a lock is it?”
“It’s a padlock,” said Tom Ross, coming slowly into the room. “Rather a large padlock, on a pair of good solid iron staples.”
“Rather a large padlock,” repeated Gavin Dart thoughtfully. “I suppose you had the key for it, Sheridan?”
“Oh, you know damn well I didn’t have the key for it.” Sherry’s voice, violent and despairing, rose from the corner by the door, where he sat huddled wretchedly at the deserted card table, his forehead resting on his linked hands, the untouched whiskey and soda pushed far from him, as though even drink had lost its savour.
“You’re right—I know damn well that you haven’t got it,” agreed Gavin Dart grimly. “And if it comes to that, I know damn well that you were never anywhere near the attic. Furthermore, I strongly suspect that you were right here in this room, in spite of your many and vehement protestations to the contrary. Well, are you ready now to take us into your confidence?”
Sherry, not lifting his head, said tonelessly:
“All right; you win. I wasn’t in the attic and I was in the room, and I am a liar. Does that make me a murderer?… It didn’t make Hanna one.”
“Nor you, Sheridan. If that were all in the balance against you, you’d still be as safe as most of us here. It was you who brushed by Chatty in the north corridor, too, wasn’t it?”
“You know it was—what are you asking me for?”
“I’d like to keep the record straight if possible. And just so that everything will be perfectly clear, suppose you tell us why you’ve been telling us lies as fast as you could talk for the last two or three hours?”
“Because I’m a coward,” said Sherry, with curious distinctness. He rose, swaying a little, and came toward the group near the fire, catching uncertainly at the backs of chairs, a sorry travesty of his erstwhile dapper self. Even the wings of his immaculate collar drooped forlornly, and against the sleek black of his lapel the white carnation hung limp and sodden. “Because I’m a coward and a liar and a fool. Ask Trudi—she’ll tell you. She tells me about once a fortnight.”
Trudi asked: “Sherry, haven’t you any sense of decency at all?”
“No. I forgot that; I haven’t any sense of decency either. The only things I’ve got in the world are a good heart and a thick head. Trudi’ll back me up on that, too, won’t you, Trudi?”
Trudi said sombrely: “I’ll back you up on anything, if you’ll keep quiet.”
“Sorry, old girl—I can’t very well keep quiet until I’ve proved to the Grand Inquisitor here that good-hearted, thick-headed jackasses don’t go around murdering their best pals. You still rather think that I did it, don’t you, Dart?”
“Rather,” concurred Dart laconically.
“Gavin, you can’t be such a lunatic,” said Trudi dispassionately. “Entirely aside from the fact that Sherry is congenitally incapable of hurting a kitten, there’s the other fact that he was mad about Doug—really mad about him. You’re wasting what may be invaluable time trying to fit Sherry into this simply because he’s a coward. He’s told you so himself. He can’t bear pain or trouble or danger—when he saw himself headed for all three of them he lost his head and lied. The attic was the farthest place away from all of them that he could think of, and so he put himself in the attic. That’s the truth, isn’t it, Sherry?”
“That’s the truth. I was in the north corridor when Jill screamed. I passed through this room on my way there from the kitchen.”
“Well, there you are, Gavin. It’s as simple as that. You can’t hang a man for losing his head—and the only scrap of evidence that you have against him is that he’s lied to you.”
“No, no, Trudi—that’s where you’re wrong. I have two other scraps of evidence against him.” He opened his hand, and two oblongs of white paper fluttered down to the dark surface of the table. “These two. Want to see them?”
They crowded forward, silent and intent, scrutinizing the bits of paper with eyes stupefied with strain and fatigue.
The oblong at the right was a check for fifty thousand dollars, dated October thirty-first, and signed with Neil Sheridan’s sprawling schoolboy signature. And the envelope at the left bore the same amorphous and juvenile scrawl. It read:
Doug, you may call this a loan, but you damn well know what I call it. And I swear to God that I’ll make you see it my way before we’re through. S.
“Well, Sheridan?”
Sherry turned blurred eyes in the direction of the dead level of that voice.
“Well what?”
“Have you any explanation of these things?”
“Naturally I’ve got an explanation. But before we get at it you might give me one as to how you got hold of them.”
“I’ll be delighted to. The check was in a wallet that slipped off the sofa onto the chapel floor while we were moving it in. I found the note pinned on the pillow in King’s room while Ray and I were patrolling the house. Now let’s hear yours.”
“All right; get it straight.” He pushed the nearest oblong toward Dart with an impatient thumb. “I gave Doug that check this evening, before dinner. He was flat broke … not that any of you give a damn about that! He lost close to every nickel he had when the boom crashed in Miami and Palm Beach—had to sell out everything in the world but the shirt off his back and the links in his cuffs: he’s been up against it ever since. Well, yesterday he got wind of something that’s going to recoup the whole damn thing. They’ve struck oil on one of the old Panama plantations, and they agreed to let him in again on the ground floor if he could raise a hundred and fifty thousand by the end of the week. I’ve been flourishing around a bit on the Exchange lately, and fifty thousand was the best I could manage.… I wish to God I could have made it the whole thing.”
“I see. What plantation was it that had struck oil?”
“He didn’t say; he’d sworn not to tell a soul. If it ever got out, the stock would go up like a skyrocket, naturally.”
“Naturally.… So you handed him over fifty thousand, in spite of the fact that you were rather pinched yourself. Now the note, Sheridan.”
“Well, I wanted Doug to take the damned fifty thousand as a present.” He drew the back of his hand across the reddened eyes, and glared defiance into the grim skepticism of the face across the table. “Oh, sure, I know it sounds fishy, but it’s God’s truth.… You know a whole lot, Dart, but you don’t know the only things that matter. You don’t know that I owe every last penny I have in the world to Doug King, and that, thanks to him, I own enough stock in some of those plantations down there to make a dollar for every cent I’ve got if we ever strike oil. If Doug hadn’t tipped me off ten years ago to put every nickel I could get into the Bonita and Ventura plantations, I wouldn’t have been in any position to give him fifty thousand dollars tonight, or to lend them to him either. He insisted on giving me his personal note for the check and he said he had some mortgages to turn over to me for security. I tore up the note and wrote that thing there to let him know again that I wanted the money to be a gift, free and clear—I knew he was worried sick about the whole thing, and I thought that if I couldn’t get hold of him for another talk this evening, it might buck him up to find the note on his pillow when he turned in. That’s what I was doing in the north corridor. And that’s all there is to that … except that he didn’t turn in. Too simple for you, by a long shot, isn’t it?”
“I had something even simpler,” said Gavin Dart, his eyes on the white slips. “Blackmail.”
“Blackmail? What in hell are you talking about?”
“You and King were mixed up in some fairly shady deals at the outset of this highly successful career of yours, weren’t you, Sheridan?”
“You—”
“Easy does it, my dear fellow. I don’t know much about your affairs, I confess,
but I’ve made a point of learning all that I could about Doug King this last year … and I’ve learned quite a bit. He’s been slipping from one disreputable proposition to another for a good ten years, and it’s your wife who assures me that both of you were as thick as—thieves. Not let’s see how my theory works out. Suppose that at some past period you had been—well—indiscreet enough to have gone in with Doug in one of his less savoury enterprises. Suppose that he, desperate as he was for money, decided to remind you of that fact and of the damage that publicity as to it might do to you—suppose he pointed out that for fifty thousand dollars there wouldn’t be any publicity.… Now, then, this note of yours. ‘Doug, you may call this a loan but you damn well know what I call it. And I swear to God that I’ll make you see it my way before we’re through.’ Read from my point of view it might turn from a generous reassurance to a rather ugly threat, mightn’t it? Let’s go a little further. Let’s suppose that you overheard Jill making her rendezvous with Doug on the sofa, and came down here to see whether you couldn’t persuade him that you needed that fifty thousand as much as he did, and that blackmail wasn’t a safe game to play with you for what might well be the rest of your life. Suppose that in groping your way into the room your hand came in contact with that table by the door—the card table that had the knife on it. Suppose that under that hand you felt the knife that—”
Sherry, his clay-coloured countenance suddenly and violently congested, pounded the table before him until the papers danced.
“Shut up, will you? Shut up before I—”
“I shouldn’t go in for threats much just now, if I were you, Sheridan! I think that under the circumstances they make a bad impression. Suppose you tell us something about this old Panama proposition instead.… It was your law firm that approved the legal aspects of, the stock issues of the Bonita and the Ventura plantations, wasn’t it?”
Sherry twisted in his chair, his frantic eyes seeking for someone. They came to rest just short of the shadows near the door, where Tom Ross stood, slim and pale and shabby, his arm about his Chatty, his blue eyes chilled to gray.
“Oh, there you are! I was wondering why you weren’t in on this—you’re the guy I have to thank for it all, aren’t you? Well, come on over here now and tell ’em all about how once upon a time you lifted up your hand and swore never to break a professional confidence. We’re all due for a good long laugh about this time! Come on and give it to us.”
Tom Ross removed his arm very gently from the small figure beside him, and came forward toward the fire, Chatty pattering docilely at his heels, her woebegone countenance too heavily saturated in misery for this last indignity even to stir it.
“Wrong again, Sherry. I’m precisely as much of an ass to-day as I was ten years ago; Dart went elsewhere for his information.”
Gavin Dart said smoothly:
“I’m afraid your nerves aren’t at all what they ought to be, Sheridan. You’re confoundedly jumpy—especially jumpy when it comes to conclusions! As a matter of fact, my investigations of Doug King’s career took me straight back to Panama itself, and I found out all I wanted to know right there—and a bit over for luck. I’m right about the firm of Maury, Kountz, Sheridan, and Ross vouching for the legal aspects of the issue, am I not, Ross?”
“Entirely right,” said Tom Ross, in a voice as colourless as his face.
“You were fully aware at the time that you approved these facts of the boundary dispute that was taking place between the governments of Costa Rica and Panama?”
“Fully aware.”
“And you knew that if the Costa Rican government could prove its claims, not a share of that stock was worth the paper that it was printed on?”
“We knew that, too.”
“Listen to me for a moment, will you?” demanded Sherry frantically. “We weren’t passing on their damned title. It was up to those fellows down there to search that, and they did search it, and it was good, wasn’t it? It was good as gold; better! Doug wasn’t hiring a bunch of detectives; he was hiring a law firm.”
“Still, if you’d gone to the trouble to investigate, you’d have found that the chances were about ten to one on Costa Rica?”
“About twenty to one,” corrected Ross quietly.
“Not a very pretty business, Ross?”
“Not so very pretty,” agreed Tom Ross. He glanced up swiftly, met Chatty’s tragic and bewildered eyes, and gave her a strange little smile, tender and consoling, at which her lips curved a tremulous and obedient reply.
Trudi leaned forward abruptly.
“Wait a minute, Gavin. Tom, just when did you say this plantation thing came up?”
“I didn’t say.”
“Just when was it, then?”
“Some time in 1919, I believe.”
“In the spring?”
“In the spring.”
“Just before you left the firm?”
“Why, yes, Trudi; just before I left the firm.”
“I see …” said Trudi Sheridan. “That was it, of course. Why didn’t you tell Gavin why you left the firm, Tom?”
“I didn’t think that it would interest him particularly.”
Sherry said, his voice suddenly shaken by an immense, an appalling bitterness:
“Oh, I think it would interest him, all right. And I think you know why.”
Tom Ross asked:
“Are you trying to pick a quarrel with me, old boy? I wouldn’t.”
“Go ahead—tell him!” commanded Sherry fiercely, far beyond the control of that quiet voice. “Trudi thinks you’re keeping your mouth shut because you’re a little tin god on wheels, that wouldn’t let me down by telling Dart that you got out of the firm because you thought that the plantation stuff was crooked. Well, I think you aren’t telling him because you don’t want him to know that you had a bloody row with Doug in 1919, and that you’ve hated him like rat poison ever since because you believe that he ruined your career.”
“I know that he ruined my career,” said Tom Ross, and once more the line of sweat edged the fine, sensitive lips. “I know that he has ruined Chatty’s life, and my children’s lives, too. I know that I can’t give my children proper medical attention when they’re ill, or proper education when they’re well, and that the only evening dress my wife has had since I can remember was made to-night with nail scissors out of a three-year-old street frock. I know all of these things, and I think that Doug King was a little bit cheaper and rottener and viler than rat poison.… Is that what you wanted me to tell Gavin Dart?”
“You’re crazy; what did Doug have to do with your career after you cut loose from me?”
“He had this to do with it. Since the day I forced you into choosing between Doug and me, and you chose Doug, there’s not been one opportunity that he’s let go by to spread and intensify the rumour that I was forced out of that firm because of unprofessional and discreditable conduct on my part.”
“You’re out of your head. Doug never—”
“Sherry, I know that I’m a failure, but you know that I’m not a fool. These rumours have been getting back to me for a good many years now; they’ve reached my own firm—they’ve reached half a dozen other firms that were disposed to be friendly to me—in at least four cases I learned that Doug knew the fellows that were putting me on my guard as to those rumours. He knew that if I were ever in a strong position I might be able to do him some damage; and he took excellent care that I should never get in one—such excellent care that to-day I’m barely more than an underpaid law clerk while you’re able to give Trudi seventy pair of shoes a year.”
“Trudi!” Sherry turned his livid face to the still figure in the corner of the love-seat with a dreadful sound of laughter. “Trudi—that’s good! So you haven’t got anything, haven’t you? You poor lucky stiff, you’ve got everything in the world! You’ve got kids instead of parrakeets and fan-tailed goldfish—you’ve got a home instead of a travelling circus—you’ve got a wife who thinks you’re a gen
ius and a hero and a martyr instead of a total loss, and if you want Trudi, you’ve got her, too—you’ve had her ever since the first day you laid eyes on her!”
“Oh, Sherry, you fool!” Trudi’s voice, barely above a whisper, stayed the frantic torrent for a moment. She sat rigid, her eyes fixed unflinchingly on the desperate face, her hands wrung together until the knuckles gleamed white, while over the level eyes, the steady lips, wave after wave of dreadful and engulfing crimson broke and ebbed.
“You’re right, I’m a fool! But Tom isn’t—didn’t you hear him tell you so? Tom knows that all he has to do any time he wants you is to whistle and you’ll come running. Whistle now, why don’t—”
The crack of a hand against his cheek echoed through the appalled silence like a pistol shot, and Chatty the meek, Chatty the gentle, Chatty the soft and yielding, stood glaring down at him like a miniature of the avenging angel.
“How dare you talk about her that way? How dare you?” She flashed by him, without so much as a glance at the red bars of her fingers against the livid cheek, dropping on her knees beside the love-seat. “Trudi, darling, don’t listen. Trudi, don’t mind … we know it’s not true—we know it’s just that Sherry’s gone mad.”
Trudi, from whose face and throat the scarlet waves had ebbed, said quietly through white lips:
“I don’t mind.… And you mustn’t mind that Sherry’s not really mad. He’s quite sure, you see, that Tom won’t whistle.” She lifted the small, sturdy hand, with its dimpled knuckles and reddened palm, and held it for a moment against her cheek, as though in that brief contact she found healing. “Chatty, you love me, don’t you?”
“So much, Trudi.”
“And I love you—so much. Let’s forget everything else and remember that—that and one other thing. Remember that there’s never been one day since you found each other that I haven’t been glad that you had Tom and that he had you. Don’t forget that, will you, Chatty?”
“No, dear.”
“Then suppose we all forget the rest and try to get back to civilization again. Let’s start Sherry on his way.” She rose, a little stiffly, moving forward on steady feet, and stood staring down in silence at the scarlet grill on the cheek nearest her, at the tortured eyes, humble, imploring, terrified as a whipped dog’s.
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