The Smiling Tiger
Page 23
Throughout those interminable sixty minutes no one spoke but Chloe Majendie. “I shall not go out to the Colony again,” she said once. “I mustn’t—help the pretence any longer.” And, after another pause, “Let them finish their lives in peace.”
The shadows wheeled, and Georgine found herself falling into a kind of stupor. Along the street outside the children were coming home from school, their voices twittering in the cold air; then again the silence, and again Mrs. Majendie’s words abruptly breaking it.
“It’s my burden,” she said in a tired echo of her beautiful voice, “and nobody else’s. I didn’t believe in the rules myself, but I let the child learn them and counted on her finding out from ordinary people that it was all nonsense. When she grew up she began to laugh at it, and then—I thought she was safe.”
She raised her eyes for a moment. They looked different, somehow, as if they might never be young again.
For the only time during the hour, Todd stirred and glanced at her. Then he went back into his motionless contemplation. The electric clock on Barby’s bureau hummed faintly, and Georgine watched its thin second hand sweep round the dial. Another minute, and another; forty of them had gone past now. She laughed at it, Georgine thought, and it swallowed her. The smile on the face of the tiger…
Mrs. Majendie spoke only once more; not to her companions, not to herself, but to someone far off. “Nicholas,” she murmured, as if she were saying good-by.
But she’s old, thought Georgine, and was stabbed by an unbearable pang of compassion.
The hand swept around, and the hour was over. Mrs. Majendie laid the gun on the dresser and got slowly to her feet. As Todd raised a window to call the officer who waited innocently below, there were faint sounds from the next room.
The old lady waited with dignity while the officer unlocked the door. “I am going to my niece,” she said with a level look at him, and walked steadily to the bedroom where Ryn Johnson was beginning to wake—while somewhere her sister was falling deeper and deeper into sleep.
She couldn’t have gone far, the police said. She couldn’t have got off the property on which the McKinnons’ and Manfreds’ houses stood, every side of it had been under observation. There was not a corner of either house which was not searched, when at last the alarm had been given.
The search took nearly half an hour. When one of the officers had finished beating the shrubbery and turned his attention to the high-piled basket of laundry, so domestically waiting under the whirligig, Cass Johnson was not yet dead; but she had death in her blood, and the hour and a half had indeed been enough.
“So it was the Maniac-Sane-on-the-Surface after all?” said Georgine wearily. She stood in the upstairs hall, unable to shake off the fatalistic lethargy of the past two hours.
“No, dear Georgine,” said her husband from the door of his workroom. “Cass wasn’t insane. She was just as illogical as any criminal who thinks he can’t get caught, she was obsessed by the desire to have as much money and power as the aunt she admired, she had a deep-rooted aversion to normal marriage—but in the end, after she’d given way to violence, she followed a different pattern. She was the Damn Fool. And,” he ended on a sigh, “she very nearly fooled me.” He glanced down at the story outline in his hand, with the penciled confession which Cass Johnson had scrawled across one blank surface: “I killed Joan Godfrey, signed, Casilda Johnson,” he read, and shook his head. “The Damn Fool, running away, panicking, making clumsy efforts to deny her guilt—and nearly getting away with it because from the fiction-writer’s standpoint nobody could be as silly as that unless she were innocent.”
“How do you suppose she looked from the police’s standpoint?”
“I’ve no doubt,” said Todd with resignation, “that Nelse knew she was guilty. He probably had a nice li’le collection of fingerprints or something to pin her down with; but nobody tells me these things. Well—he’ll want this confession, I suppose. I can remember the outline without copying it.”
“You’re going to finish the story?”
“Sure; or one something like it. A story’s—nothing but a job of work.”
***
David Shere stood in the arched entrance of the McKinnons’ living-room, directing an unfriendly gaze at the big chair in which Ryn Johnson was reclining, pale and drawn and yet still lovely, like a ghost of the Princess Nefertiti.
“Well,” he said gruffly, “I didn’t help much—pretending to drop you and run after Cass so we could see if the poisoning would stop. How was I to know I’d halfway fall for her? She was so damned plausible!”
Ryn, looking back at him out of shadowed eyes, murmured some inaudible word.
“I’m sorry,” said Shere, as if it had been forced from him. “I shouldn’t have stopped believing in you. I wouldn’t have,” he added, his vitality blazing up in a crackle of anger, “if I’d ever been sure of you! —I suppose you thought the only way to bring things to a head was to let her kill you?” He took a step into the room, scowling, his hands in his pockets. “For God’s sakes, what possessed you, letting her alone here long enough to put all the powders out of those capsules into the sugar bowl?”
Ryn stirred. She said, on a tone that was scarcely more than an exhalation, “I knew it was all right. I’d seen Todd change them.”
Todd McKinnon, sitting across the room, emitted a faint groan and put his head in his hands.
“Well, it was a fool trick,” said Mr. Shere, scarcely mollified. “Now that it’s all over, do I try to get back into your good graces? I shouldn’t think you’d want to see me again.”
“Let’s not talk about it yet, David. Not about anything.”
David Shere removed his hands from his pockets, clenched them and raised them in the air. “Not yet, let’s not talk about it yet!” he said savagely. “My God, that’s all I’ve heard from you, from any of you, as long as I can remember. Can’t I ever get anything settled? Seems to me I’ve spent my whole life dangling after Johnsons, one or another of ’em.” He lowered his fists, and a look of surprise spread over his ruddy face. “I’m sick of it,” he told her. “So help me, I am. Why don’t I just quit, and get some of my own work done for a change?”
“Just as you like, David,” Ryn murmured. A faint smile had appeared on her lips.
“Then good-bye,” said the impassioned lover. “I won’t be around for a good long time.” He straightened, inflated his broad chest with a full breath of relief, and whizzed out the front door.
Ryn Johnson turned her head a little to watch him go past the window. The smile was still very faint, but it had spread to her eyes.
***
It was almost evening, and the McKinnons were alone in their house. The police had finished and gone. Ryn and Mrs. Majendie had gone away, too. Every time Georgine glanced at the window near the front steps she seemed to see, framed in its lower half, a craggy profile crowned with a bush of white hair, held stiffly erect as if braced against a burden.
Presently peace would begin to flow back into the household, but it was not yet there. In spite of her overwhelming fatigue she could not relax. “I keep asking myself,” she said restlessly, “just how we got into this. It wasn’t curiosity, it wasn’t all our own need. From the very first it’s seemed as if it had been laid on us.”
“There was a li’le free will involved,” said Todd mildly. He stood looking out at the cold sky.
“I suppose so; but I wish I needn’t believe it. We set off so much trouble and tragedy…”
“It was happening in spite of us, Georgine; and we didn’t get off scot-free ourselves. That was quite a reaming Nelse gave me,” he said reminiscently.
Georgine’s spirit began to revive. “I know, and how dared he? What else could we have done, with a gun pointed at us?”
“Well,” said Todd, turning slowly to face her, “some time during that hour I could have jumped Mrs. Majendie. Nelse’s man would have heard the shot and come running.”
“Oh. Is
n’t that hindsight?”
“No. I thought of it then. But I thought, too, that if I handed Cass over to the police I could never be sure—”
He broke off. Georgine said, “Sure of what?”
He waited for a long minute before he answered, “—That I hadn’t done it to se’le a personal grudge.” His agate-hard eyes lifted, and he moved to stand close to her. “We aren’t made to administer strict justice, people like you and me. Could you have handed her over deliberately?”
She tipped her head against the back of the chair to look at him. “I couldn’t have, and I didn’t,” she said. “I—I knew how much laundry there was in the basket.”
Todd laughed softly and sat down on the arm of the chair to hold her close. “We’re well enough matched, dear Georgine,” he said, resting his cheek on her hair. “Take it easy now,” his casual voice went on. “We’ll se’le down soon into our old ways. I can get on with my job now—”
“We’ve got that much out of it anyway.”
“Bread as well as circuses,” he said lightly; but after a moment, when she looked up at him, his eyes were still somber and far away.
“It’s getting late,” said Georgine after a moment. “Close the blinds, will you? I’d better start supper.”
She went toward the kitchen, glancing over her shoulder at the empty lower half of the window. “Close them tight, Todd.”
For more titles by Lenore Glen Offord, as well as other “Vintage” mysteries from Felony & Mayhem Press, including the “Inspector Alleyn” series by Ngaio Marsh, please visit our website: FelonyAndMayhem.com
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All the characters and events portrayed in this work are fictitious.
THE SMILING TIGER
A Felony & Mayhem mystery
PUBLISHING HISTORY
First print edition (Duell, Sloan and Pearce): 1949
Felony & Mayhem print and digital editions: 2016
Copyright © 1949 by Lenore Glen Offord
All rights reserved
E-book ISBN: 978-1-63194-099-6