“With a bonus,” said Fergus quietly. “You hadn’t counted on Quincy, had you?”
“What’s that got to do with me? I wanted Lukey alive. I still do. I’m the last person would have—”
“I know you didn’t kill Quincy. I’m even pretty sure you didn’t attack Corcoran. If you had, you’d have been gloating over him in his cabin, not mooning over a few drops of blood on the sand. Those attacks were the McCoy, and it’s the McCoy that you let loose, Pandora.”
Her face was troubled now. “How? What did I do?”
“You let loose a devil … Twenty-five years ago, something snapped in somebody’s mind. Somewhere, somehow, the idea of throat-slitting had been planted there, and it broke loose. A couple of cats paid for that, and Martha Stanhope. But the brainstorm passed. Somebody went back to a normal life. Maybe he wasn’t even sure himself of what had happened. Until now. Because now it all happened over again. The same set-up. The wedding party, the war … and the cat.
“You killed that cat. It was clear none of the original party could have done that. It had to be a new figure, playing god-out-of-the-machine-age. You killed that cat. And that cat killed Lucas Quincy.”
“I think I’ll sit down now,” said Alys faintly. Her sullen defiance was gone; she looked worn and spent. “God! I did plenty, didn’t I?”
“But Mr. O’Breen,” Dr. Arnold protested vigorously. “Confession and all, I remain unconvinced. The girl is manifestly psychotic. Your suggestions were so strongly couched that they might easily make her confess to an untruth.”
“Why so skeptical?”
“Because we went over all this. She had no opportunity that night. No one had.”
“Sorry, doctor. But this confession’s a true bill of goods. I know. And for two reasons: Because Lucas Quincy changed his mind and because I sneezed.”
“This is no time, O’Breen, for cryptic jests.”
“Sorry, but it’s true. My subconscious pieced it together first. I dreamed this morning of Alys slitting a cat’s throat.”
“Dreams!”
“That was only my starting point, my cue. It checked when I remembered my sneezes. And then I understood this: Quincy came to me Thursday morning. He wanted me to investigate the old Stanhope killing, obviously because he thought the killer was on the rampage again and had to be stopped before he went beyond cats. I turned the job down because one condition was that I should keep my findings from the D. A., which could land me behind the eight-ball as accessory after the fact. Then when I’d met Janet and Miss Paris, I went all quixotic and took the case anyway. I thought I might as well get a fee out of it; so I put the bee on Quincy. He wasn’t interested any more.
“Now why? On Thursday, he thought that he was in peril of his life. On Friday, he didn’t give a damn. Some time in between he had realized that Valentino’s killer could not possibly have been the original madman. He had reconstructed that evening exactly as you and the others did, and seen that no one of the Hotel de la Playa group had opportunity. But he and Alys left together, and Alys was tight. Supposing she made the excuse of a walk around the block to clear her head. He remembered that, saw that she alone had had the chance, knew how the act fitted into her character, thought that he could handle her by himself, and lost his interest in reopening the Stanhope case. But it was the sneezes that clinched it for me.”
“Mr. O’Breen—”
“Don’t say ‘cryptic’ again. I’m getting there. Now I have, doctor, the goddamnedest freak allergy you’ve ever run into. So did my father. Nothing sets us off but a long-haired cat, and it’s always exactly seven sneezes, no more, no less. It happened to me at Miss Paris’ home. Valentino, of course, was dead then, but his hairs must have been still around on furniture and rugs. And it happened to me again on the beach last night.
“Alys was wearing nothing but a cloth coat. There was no fur about her that could have accounted for it. Therefore there must have been cat hairs on that coat. She couldn’t have picked them up off the Paris furniture because you don’t wear a coat at a dinner party. She hasn’t owned a cat herself since her kitten was killed in 1915; and according to Stella she even refused to play with Valentino. Long cat hairs on her coat could mean only one thing: holding that poor damned beast while she slit its throat.”
“And you figured out all that while…?” Alys sounded insulted.
“I was a little distracted at the time, my sweet, if that comforts you any. It took the dream to make me see what it meant. And now the whole shape of things begins to jell.”
Alys stared at Fergus with haggard eyes. “Tell me,” she entreated. “Who was it? Oh, I did it. I can see that. But what did I do? Who did I let loose on us? Who killed Lukey before I married him—before he could even make a will?”
“That’s true, isn’t it?” Fergus mused. “A passion for excitement means a constant need for money.”
“But I don’t even care about that now. Not just yet anyway. Right now I’ve got to know who. Don’t you see?”
“Go on back to the others, Alys,” Fergus said abruptly.
She rose, but looked at him in pleading silence.
“Go on.”
“I’m trusting you,” she said slowly. “You bastard.” And she walked to the door.
Dr. Arnold accompanied her, his steadying hand resting on her shoulder, but paused in the doorway at Fergus’ voice. “No, Dr. Arnold. Stay here another minute, if you will.”
There was authority in the order.
The doctor looked after Alys a moment, then turned back to face the detective. “Well, sir?”
“So you were in love with Martha Stanhope too.”
“Nonsense.”
“Fact. And Alys’ resemblance is sometimes too much for you. It attracted Quincy and it repels Herndon. To you it does both at once, and it’s hell.”
“What concern is this of yours? Even if it were true,” he added hastily.
“Every emotion, every feeling that anyone experienced in connection with Martha Stanhope is my concern. Even if her murderer was mad, some underlying element in his mind drove him to choose Martha as his victim. I have to know everything.”
Dr. Arnold’s sardonic smile was only half-convincing this time. “You seem to know enough without being told. More than I knew myself …” He seated himself and paused over a cigarette. “You’re right, of course, O’Breen. You should know everything … But it was only after Martha’s death that I realized what I had felt—what I might have felt. I’ve told you how priggish and self-absorbed I was. I took Martha for granted. And then, years after her death, when I wearied of being a bachelor and cast about to find a wife, only then did I realize that the only woman I could ever have married had died at the Hotel de la Playa.”
“And Alys?”
“Damn the girl. She was in New York three years ago, you know. I saw her a good deal. I … Do you realize, O’Breen, that that girl is as fascinating as she is horrible? I loathed her, and yet I felt the most intense desire for her. I … I have even made love to her when she was so drunk that thank God she remembers nothing. I despised myself. I tortured myself with thoughts of how Jay and Martha would despise me. And yet that girl’s face and body were in my mind day and night.
“I hadn’t seen her in those three years. I had thought that I was cured, that I could see her again and laugh at myself. And instead the same … Damn it, O’Breen, she is not lost. Even after the confession you forced from her just now, I cannot believe that she is lost. Surely a psychiatrist and a treatment for her dypsomania …”
“You want to build up Martha again out of her image? I think you’d find it tough sledding.”
“I must do something for her to redeem myself. Don’t you see? Only if I can make her whole can I prove to myself and to Jay that I am not a middle-aged lecher sniffing at a bitch. I—”
Fergus snapped “Come in!” in answer to a knock, and Tom Quincy entered the room. “Herndon’s walked out on us,” he announced.
> “Walked out?”
“When Alys came back it was more than he could stand. He calmly told me that he was not staying in the room with her and that I could not stop him, and went on up to his room.”
Fergus paced frowning. “All right … Leave Janet to keep an eye on the others. Then you make the rounds. Take a look at Corcoran and at Ramirez. Make sure they’re O. K., and see that Herndon is in his room.”
Tom made a mock salute of obedience. “It is done, sire. Oh, and look—forgot to ask you this before—did Herndon see anything?”
“When?”
“When we both got slugged.”
“Not a thing.”
“He looked out into the hall?”
“Yes.”
“And didn’t see anything? I know I’m just the dumb stooge, Fergus, but if I were the master mind, I’d brood about that.” With which Tom Quincy left them.
Fergus was all eagerness and rapidity as he turned back to the doctor. “There’s just one point left now, and I think you’re the man to help me. Will you?”
“Indeed I will.”
“This throat-slitting fixation must have started from something. You knew all this group in 1915. What could have induced such an outgoddamnedrageous form of mania?”
Arnold thought a moment and then let out a sudden “Ah!”
“Yes?”
“I think perhaps I have it, Mr. O’Breen. I have been pondering that problem for days with no results, but when you said ‘throat-slitting,’ something clicked.”
“That being?”
“You know how attached we all were to Jay?”
“Yes.”
“I can still remember Jay brooding, as what man of good will has not, over the perverse ingenuity of the race of man in finding ever new and more terrible means for its own destruction. I can still hear his high voice inveighing, with that slight nervous lisp, against long range guns and poison gas and submarine warfare, and concluding, with a sort of wry despair, ‘Throat-slitting is the only clean way.’ I think that that impressed all of us deeply.”
“Thank you. Thank you, doctor. And look,” Fergus went on rapidly: “Out of this whole devoted group, who would you say was most broken up by Jay’s death on the Lusitania?”
“It’s hard to say. It affected us all, naturally. But probably … yes, I’d say certainly it was the two Herndons who felt his loss the most.”
Fergus snapped his fingers impatiently and began to whistle under his breath. He crossed over to the table and made one slight revision in his chart.
“There!” he said confidently. “You’ve driven the last nail, Dr. Arnold. The case is wound up. When Andy arrives, I’ll have a nice neat bundle for him.”
Dr. Arnold leaned forward tautly. “Who?”
“So eager, doctor? Losing your impersonality?”
“Who?” Arnold insisted.
“Wait. We’re going back to the livingroom now, and there—”
Then he stopped dead. The detective and the doctor were alike frozen silent, listening to the echoes of the shot upstairs.
ii
The last nail had been driven too late, Fergus thought ruefully.
James Herndon’s tall old body slumped over the table in his bedroom. Blood trickled from his open head onto the sheets of manuscript before him. The automatic lay on the floor beneath his dangling hand.
“I couldn’t help it, God damn me,” Tom was saying. “I’d been the rounds as you told me, checking on Corcoran and Ramirez. And as I came out of the room down there where Ramirez is, I heard the shot. I should have checked up on him first. I should have realized …”
“Look, Tom,” said Fergus. “You go herd all these people downstairs again. Leave the doctor and me here. We’ll be with you as soon as we can.”
Tom cast one reluctant look at the table, shuddered, and left the room.
“No remotest chance, doctor?”
Dr. Arnold straightened up from the body. “Not the slightest. He died instantly.” He looked at the manuscript, read its first words, and said, “I think this is what you want.”
Fergus took the bloodstained sheets from him. “Throat-slitting is the only clean way …” he read. “Pity you didn’t recall that phrase earlier.”
“I never dreamed … Poor Jim!”
“The wound—it’s consistent with suicide?”
“Perfectly. But why? You can’t have any doubts?“
“After this?” Fergus was leafing hastily through the manuscript. “Hardly. But I just like everything tied up neat-like.”
“The gun.”
“What about it?”
“I thought that Jim gave you the only firearm on this island.”
“So did I.”
“Then where did he get this one?”
“It’s mine. Lifted from my stolen suitcase.” Fergus dropped to one knee and peered at the automatic without touching it. “Check. That’s Baby.” He rose slowly. His tension seemed if anything to have increased rather than relaxed at this sudden denouement. His lean face was taut and worn. “Nothing you can do for him?”
“There’s nothing any man can do for him now.”
“Excepting these unlucky deeds relate … All right. Go on downstairs, will you? I want to read this over alone before I talk. We’ve got to get things straight.”
Dr. Arnold hesitated in the doorway. “One thing …”
“Yes?”
“Getting off this island.”
“Andy’ll show up soon.”
“It can’t be too soon. I’ve got to get both Ramirez and Corcoran to a hospital. And I’d hate to predict what might happen to the rest of us if we sit around here all day brooding on death.”
“We may get results from the bonfire yet. And if Andy’s late, we can even try your heliograph gag. We may not know Morse, but we can at least send SOS.”
Which is?”
“There you have me. But it’s either three dashes, three dots, three dashes, or the other way round. And even if we send OSO, some bright soul should get the notion.”
“Some bright soul,” said Dr. Arnold earnestly, “had better.”
Alone, Fergus went back to the table. To the left of the bloody head lay the light blue volume of T. S. Eliot’s Collected Poems 1909–1935. At the right was an empty morocco-leather pipecase, its white interior spattered with red. On a pipe-rest near it stood a chaste and virginal briar of unbelievably straight grain. There was a little gray ash in the bottom of its bowl.
Fergus gently touched the still warm pipe. “Poor guy,” he said aloud.
There was the sound of movement in the kitchen when Fergus came downstairs twenty minutes later. He peered in and found Stella Paris glaring at the stove.
“They want more coffee,” she said. “And they say they can’t eat a thing, but they’re going to get coffee-cake with it if this oven’ll ever heat up. I’m not used to wood stoves any more; civilization spoils us.”
Fergus looked at the confession in his hand. “Shall I hold off my reading? It may not leave them with much appetite.”
Stella Paris wiped her overheated face with a kitchen towel. “To be frank, Fergus, I don’t care a rap whether they’ve an appetite for this coffeecake or not. Making it is enough. So long as I can worry about ovens, I don’t have to worry about Jim. You go ahead and hold your reading; I’m better off out here.”
“If you were cooking dinner,” said Fergus, “you could blame those tears on the onions. At breakfast it’s not so plausible.”
The livingroom was silent. Not even a burbling pipe disturbed it now. Dr. Arnold was playing a complex two pack solitaire at a side table. Alys stood beside him, watching, but too listless to kibitz. The Brainards sat together on the sofa, but carefully refrained from looking at each other. Horace’s cheek bore a neat decoration of gauze and adhesive plaster. Janet and Tom, hands clasped, stared out unseeing at the beach.
This was the great climactic moment. The terror was over. The throat-slitter’s confession l
ay in Fergus’ hand. But there was no glitter of triumph in this moment, no aureole of glory. There was nothing in this room but weariness and apathy and a longing to get off the island.
Horace Brainard roused himself as Fergus came in. “Weil!” he snapped. “So it’s over now. And no thanks to you.” His pallor was gone; he was bristly again, and aggressively dominant.
“He beat me to it,” said Fergus wryly.
“Indeed! Suppose you’ll claim you’d solved the whole case and were about to nab him!”
“That happens to be true, but I’m not expecting you to believe it.” Fergus found this damnable apathy infecting even him. “And I certainly don’t expect you to remember your fear-stricken babblings about blank checks.”
“Blank checks? What about blank checks? Nonsense! Never said a word of such a thing!”
“You knew, Fergus?” said Tom. “Even before the poor old man
Fergus nodded. “I knew. The main point was that parting hint of yours.” He paused. That parting hint, the unsprung trap, a few gray ashes … Suddenly the cloud of listlessness had raised. He had his professional reputation to maintain, and it was going to be a goob job. “You see,” he went on, picking his words with great care, “it all comes out of my nice little chart. After I broke down Alys, that canceled out the Valentino column.”
“Alys?” Janet gasped. “You mean that she
“Shut up!” Alys shouted. “You … You …” She groped for a sufficiently contemptuous word and found it. “You virgin!”
“Uh huh,” said Fergus. “So with that column canceled out, plus one belated correction, we were left with three candidates who had straight YES’s all the way across: Stella Paris, Dr. Arnold, and James Herndon. But if either Stella or Arnold was the thro— … the one we wanted, then he or she must have slugged Herndon after disposing of the guard, so that Herndon, when he looked out into the hall, would have seen Tom’s unconscious body. There was no place of concealment in the hall itself, and our friend couldn’t have opened one of the other doors without starting trouble.
“But Herndon said that he looked out into an empty hall. Therefore Herndon was lying and therefore his own slugging was faked. A sandbag doesn’t leave visible bruises; if you rub sand into your back hair and fake a plausible pain, you’ll have a reasonable facsimile. Herndon’s slugging was a puzzle anyway. There was no possible reason for it excepting this one: to clear himself by seeming to be another victim.”
The Case of the Seven Sneezes Page 21
