The Smiling Tiger

by Lenore Glen Offord

  It was almost down when without warning she was overtaken by laughter. “Catch it, quick,” said Georgine in a muffled voice, and ducked behind the window-sill. After a minute she looked down again. Her demoralization was completed by the sight of Mr. Shere solemnly rooting in the depths of the bag like an out-sized child with a Christmas stocking.

  She did not dare to come up again until she heard the involuntary whoosh given out by someone who has just taken a healthy slug of straight whisky. Shere was setting down the empty jar. “I’ll feel better in a minute,” he called up to her. “Thank you. And would you mind telling me why you asked that question?”

  “About the Johnsons?” Georgine was luckily able to speak with fair composure. “Why, it might make things clearer if we were sure for whose sake you’ve been keeping still so long, and probably telling a lot of lies into the bargain.” He opened his mouth. “No, don’t bother to tell another. You know there’s some kind of conspiracy, and you’re in it up to the ears. It isn’t Mrs. Majendie you’re protecting, I’d be willing to bet. Come on, now.”

  There was more color in his face now. It looked bewildered and somehow penitent. “I’ll tell you what I told the police,” he said. “I have no definite knowledge whatsoever about any crime that’s been committed. I’m not protecting anyone in the way you mean.”

  “And I’ll bet you are,” said Georgine firmly. “I’d simply like to know if it’s Ryn or Cass.” —Or, she thought—yourself, my boy; but I’m not going to put that in. —“Didn’t anyone ever tell you that the police have a right to your suspicions as well as your direct knowledge?”

  “No, they haven’t. I don’t know what my suspicions are, myself. I don’t even know who I’m in love with, or which of ’em I ought to be in love with! That’d make it easier, y’see? I don’t know whish—”

  His voice had grown louder and louder, and Georgine was struck with a new suspicion. “Did you have any lunch?” she called down in the middle of his sentence.

  “Lunch?” He considered gravely. “No, I guess so, but that musta been yesterday. Coupla drinks this noon. Maybe three. Now, about love.”

  “Be quiet, for goodness’ sake!”

  “About love,” David Shere repeated in a cheerful bellow. The Bourbon was evidently having a field day with its brothers in his foodless stomach. “If it was you, now, I’d be sure right away. No wonnerin’ if you’re bad and don’ look it or act it, or if you’re good and somebody else makin’ you lookbad, see what I mean? I wish it was you, honest, Georgie. Be sim—simpler.”

  “No, it wouldn’t,” said Todd’s voice from around the bend of the path. He came into sight, his face completely wooden and his step purposeful.

  David Shere cast a wild look upward at Georgine, another downward at Georgine’s husband. “Oh, gosh, I gotta fin’ Cass, haven’ I?” he blurted out, and plunged past Todd and down the stairs.

  Todd looked at the shopping bag and the empty jar. Then he, too, gazed upward at Georgine. “What did I tell you,” he remarked, “about not speaking to any strange men?”

  ***

  Half an hour later, in the living-room, she was still suffering from recurrent giggles which made it hard to attend to what Todd was saying. His arguments were all sensible and seriously conceived, too: David Shere could not have had anything to do with Joan Godfrey’s death, because she had certainly died on Tuesday night, and he had been with friends until very late that night; motive, also, was lacking—anything that the poor Godfrey had dredged up, or thought she’d discovered, about previous crimes would have been discounted by investigators; “Who’d believe her, especially a year or so after the event?” Todd demanded. “And besides, according to the police there haven’t been any previous crimes.”

  “Couldn’t he just have disliked her for herself?” Georgine inquired.

  “She’s been like that for years. Why should he pick this time?”

  “I don’t know. That would be up to him. But he talked too much, Todd.” Georgine gave another little spurt of laughter. “No, not just at that glorious moment; before. He gave me a play-by-play description of how he hadn’t seen Cass. If we find that he boiled her up in his laboratory, leaving only a few fragments of bone here and there, I shan’t be surprised.”

  “As a fiction writer,” said Todd regretfully, “I couldn’t use that. It’s been done too often—and too well… What I have to do is somehow to fit in Joan’s death with the rest of the business, and I can’t. It’s all wrong,” he complained for at least the third time. “She shouldn’t have been murdered, she ought to have committed suicide.”

  “Todd, you kill me. Here you work like a dog to make a lot of natural-seeming deaths into murders, and here’s an undoubted murder and you want it to be accident or suicide! Couldn’t you just relax and look at it the other way ’round?”

  “You mean that Joan’s was the first murder? Then why did she have to be killed? If none of the others was a crime, she couldn’t have known anything to reveal. She sure as hell wasn’t murdered for her money, it—what there is of it—goes to the Colony; and she wasn’t struck down by the Beyond-Truth because she was the one who kept on believing in it after the old lady proved to be a renegade. She won’t fit into any pattern.”

  “There has to be one, I suppose?”

  “There always is, after a crime,” said Todd.

  “Well, pooh on it. I’ve got to find us something to eat.” Georgine got up and moved toward the kitchen, pausing at the archway to remark, “Why don’t you just drop the whole thing and tell yourself that nothing’s happened? You know, like the news item about old Mr. and Mrs. Borden, thirteen years afterward.”

  “What? Oh, yes; a fine sardonic one saying that they’d both died of excessive heat.”

  “There you are. Just convince yourself that nobody’s been murdered yet, sell the stories you’ve already written and call it a day. —It’ll have to be scrambled eggs, I can’t keep my mind on anything fancier. —Todd, what is it now? What are you kissing me for? I know I’m almost irresistible at any time, but—”

  “Georgine, do you know what you just said? ‘There haven’t been any murders yet!’ ”

  “Oh, did I? What did I mean?”

  “The real murder, the planned one, hasn’t come off. We haven’t seen anything after the crime, because Joan got in its way, and had to be killed before the original victim was. By God, everything fits with that. Everything!”

  “But who’s the original victim?”

  Todd let her go, slowly, and slowly thrust his hands into his pockets.

  “That,” he said, “I don’t know.”

  ***

  Todd finished his cake and handed over his cup for a refill of coffee. “The only flaw is,” he said, “that it won’t make more than one story. I have to decide some time which way it’s going to end!”

  Georgine sat across the table from him, smoking a cigarette and gazing at him thoughtfully. “You had me scared for a while there,” she remarked. “I thought you were being the brilliant amateur after all. May I say that I much prefer the fiction writer? Not,” she added, “that you haven’t come to the same conclusion as the police, more than once.”

  “About a week after they reached it, and in company with half a million other citizens. No,” Todd said. “All for Art and the hell with evidence, that’s me as a usual thing. And life’s so annoyingly unlike art, I suppose you’ve noticed? But this shapes up. It’s good for a novelette at least.”

  “Go over it again. I can see you’re planning to, but it looks well for me to ask, don’t you think?”

  “All right. It begins with Hartlein, handily enough, because that’s where we came in. He’s at the Johnsons’ cottage half the time, pestering Cass to recognize their marriage, and he’s in a position to see what goes on there. Last May he must have suspected that Ryn’s attack of mild arsenic poisoning was more severe than could be accounted for by her licking her brush. Somebody’s slipping a li’le extra arsenic into her
food, he tells himself; and he thinks at once of the old lady, because his own mother is a matriarchal type too, and he’s willing to believe the worst of anybody who resembles her.

  “So, feeling no need for discretion, he kindly warns the girls that Aunt Chloe is putting the finger on Ryn for accepting David Shere’s attentions. They both threaten him with excommunication if he ever mentions such a thing to the police, it’s nonsense, there’s nothing in it. Hartlein waits, he broods, he sees Ryn getting sicker and sicker; and then Shere transfers his attention to Cass, and Ryn begins to get better. Cass won’t say yes or no to Shere; she’s afraid of the vengeance of the Beyond-Truth, and Ryn’s already had her lesson. But what’s that going to do to Hartlein’s prospects? As long as that finger’s hanging over the Johnsons, he can’t hope to get Cass back.

  “And after a couple of months he can’t stand it any longer. He comes around to us with the story, complying with the letter of the girls’ law but doing his best to save them from the old lady. How does he work it? By giving me a lot of cases that he himself doesn’t believe were murders, mixed in with those fiction names because they weren’t true either; and at the last he slips in the real reason for telling the tale—the suspicion that Mrs. Majendie is poisoning her niece.

  “It scared the hell out of somebody, because somebody had been putting that arsenic into Ryn’s food, and that person didn’t want to be detected. That person was still planning a murder. Maybe that slip-up scared her out of using arsenic anymore, but she’d have to make some other plan. And perhaps one necessary preliminary would be to get Hartlein—too suspicious and alert—out of the way so he wouldn’t spot that one too. No, not murder him; just make sure that he won’t come around any more. So one of the Johnsons goes down to his rooms and tells him that Cass is really through with him, she can’t stand him, they never want to see his face again—something like that. And Hartlein, really broken up over the thing, decides to commit suicide. But he’s not going out peacefully, not he; he’ll pull the temple down with him if he goes. And, working it both ways, he tries to frame the old lady for his murder so that she’ll be apprehended for that if for nothing else; and that if the police have to investigate, they’ll uncover the other shenanigans; and that he’ll have fulfilled his duty to his mother in the same gesture, leaving her his insurance. He fixes up that inhaler so that his death will look like a murder, and goes out on a blaze of glory, self-sacrifice and revenge all wrapped into one. D’you know,” Todd ended, draining his coffee cup, “if the old lady had been the murderer, I think he’d have been successful. But he made the mistake of lots of, uh, brilliant amateurs; he picked the wrong suspect.”

  “Give me another cigarette, please,” said Georgine weakly. She passed a hand across her brow. “I hope you’ll simplify this in your story?”

  “It will be as clear,” said Todd with a spacious gesture, “as a bo’le of the best gin… Hartlein hasn’t died entirely in vain, though, because his death sets off all sorts of things. It makes everybody nervous, the whole lot of ’em begin to act oddly when they’re questioned. It sends Nelse and me snooping out to the Colony on a wild goose chase. We happen to catch a wild owl instead and it flies in our faces and goes flapping off to catch more trouble.”

  “That’s a sweet metaphor, but I advise you to drop it now. Joan decides to forget personal loyalties and tell the truth, is that it?”

  “I think she’d been telling it all along,” said Todd. “She was the Marvelous Female Witness, all right, but now and then those miraculously observant women turn out to have been accurate in every detail. I heard about a case—no, never mind, you don’t have to take that too. Very well, Joan decides to tell the truth about something she saw in the past, which probably wouldn’t be believed. It isn’t enough to motivate her murder, probably. But remember—she wasn’t supposed to be at home that evening. Every Tuesday she drove the old lady out to the Colony and both of them stayed there till after ten o’clock. I think someone counted on that, someone from the cottage who couldn’t see that Joan was at home on top of the cliff. What if that person were laying the groundwork for the real, the planned, the main murder— and Joan caught her at it?”

  Georgine shivered. “In the greenhouse?”

  “It’s not impossible. The Hand of God may have been reaching out for one of those cyanide eggs—no, that sounds blasphemous. The hand of the murderer, trying to fix up something that would look natural.”

  “I never heard of anything that sounded less natural than cyanide poisoning.”

  “Now, I don’t know. A li’le more luck, and Joan’s death might have been made to look like accident. Suppose one were starting to fumigate a greenhouse, and had dropped the cyanide eggs into the jars of acid, and started to skip out? Suppose one tripped and fell and hit one’s head—and the door slammed shut in the wind?”

  “Oh, dear me!” said Georgine prayerfully. “You think your murderer planned that for the real victim, and had to—use it up on Joan?”

  “Draw a distinction there, dear heart. That’s what I’m going to use in my story. McKinnon, no matter what you may think, is not omniscient.”

  “Honest?” Georgine said.

  “But I can guess, can’t I? It’s going to work like a charm,” said Todd dreamily. “Joan points the accusing finger at the murderer. ‘Up to your tricks again,’ says she. ‘I saw you once before, and today I told Mrs. McKinnon all about it.’ She neglects to mention, of course, that the tale was so wrapped up in cosmic revelations that she didn’t identify the murderer. Murderer thinks, ‘I can keep Joan from telling about this episode,’ and lets fly with the flowerpot. And then—having hastily fixed up the gas chamber and hung the sign on the door to delay discovery—she gets to thinking about Mrs. McKinnon. She may not know anything definite, but suppose she does? Better fix it so she can be silenced— not murdered, because that would really cause too much trouble—”

  “That’s the one cheerful remark you’ve made for five minutes.”

  “—But put in line for blackmail, or her word discredited in advance somehow. Joan died Tuesday night. The lodging-house business came off as soon as the murderer had had time to think it out, the next morning. She’s the Nervous Murderer—before the fact.”

  “Todd, is this your story plan or what you really think? You mix me up, using people’s real names, and I start getting scared.”

  “I don’t know, Georgine,” said Todd soberly. “I’d like to think of it as pure fiction. It’s easy enough—except when it touches us; and then I start trying to figure out who.”

  “Oh, dear. I suppose it has to be one of the girls?”

  “For my purposes it does. I don’t believe in these willing tools; I think if Mrs. Majendie or David Shere had fixed up the business with the Trumbull woman, he or she would have done it himself, not asked one of the girls to arrange it. And the arsenic racket was worked from the cottage, there isn’t much doubt of that.”

  “And Cass Johnson slept at home the night after Joan died—and hasn’t been seen since.”

  “There,” said Todd, “we get to our li’le problem. Ryn Johnson got the arsenic in the soup, but in non-fatal doses. Did Cass give it to her—or did she give it to herself?”

  “Oh, Todd. Don’t tell me about the Styrians who used to eat the stuff, or Mr. Maybrick, or Mithridates.”

  “No, the Styrians can stay out of this. Suppose Cass had died suddenly? Ryn could come up with the tale of the long-term poisoning, and say that Cass had got by mistake the fatal dose she’d meant for Ryn. There’d be witnesses to prove she was being mysteriously poisoned. You could be one.”

  Georgine, about to rise and clear the table, sat down again. “How on earth—oh, you mean the day I saw her pouring out the milk shake for the cat?”

  “Yes. She looked up at the path, where you were, before she disposed of it.”

  “That doesn’t mean she saw me.”

  “So it doesn’t. In that case, Ryn really suspected that Cass was mak
ing food with the arsenic. She probably ate as li’le as she could of anything that dear sister had cooked.”

  “Oh, yes. That would explain the long fasts that Cass told me about—and Ryn’s having such a good appetite when she went out for lunch. But Todd, what motive? For heaven’s sake, did you ever see sisters who seemed more genuinely close to each other? They even explain what’s in the other’s mind, it’s like twins. Why on earth should one want to kill the other?”

  “I can explain that,” said Todd grandly, “on paper, in about three different ways. Money: sister Bell died and left ’em a pile, and one of ’em got the idea that that was easier than working for it. Then, there’s this highly charged young man who can’t make up his mind between them—maybe one sister would like the other out of the way.”

  “Or maybe he would,” Georgine put in. “If t’other dear charmer won’t go away of her own accord, poison her.”

  Todd was struck with this idea. “I wonder if I could do anything with that? He’d have to out-vacillate Hamlet, of course, but—” He broke off and cocked his head. “That’s the telephone.”

  Georgine opened her mouth to beg him not to answer, and then shut it again. No mother whose child isn’t right under her eye can ever ignore the thing.

  It was Nelsing, she inferred. She hustled the dishes into the pan and began to run the water on them, irritated again at the constant invasions of murder and its by-products. Why couldn’t Todd start writing love stories instead? —Well, no, perhaps that would be worse yet, young lovers all over the place and calling up even more frequently to weep on someone’s shoulder—

  The door to the hall opened a crack, and Todd’s eye appeared, gazing warily through. “Are you in a good temper?” he inquired.

  “Pretty good. What gives?”

  “Nelse wants to know if we’ll have Ryn here for the night.”