Stella Paris appeared in the kitchen doorway. The fresh clean smell of baking entered with her. “Coffee and cake,” she announced, almost cheerfully.
The verbal suggestion of food would have been set aside with sensitive scorn. Even the sight of that golden-crisp coffeecake might not have sufficed. It was the rich spicy scent from the kitchen that overcame the company. Even Fergus’ startling announcement became abruptly less important than the sudden realization that they were every one famishing.
This was all to the good, Fergus thought. It meant that much more distraction, that much more time snatched from nervous contemplation and self-torture. It was not until the fresh coffee had been totally swilled and the magnificent cake entirely devoured (drunk and eaten would be far too mild words for the eagerness of that group), that he returned to his theme, and then only at a prompting from Dr. Arnold.
“Mr. O’Breen,” the doctor began, neatly wiping cinnamon-flecked crumbs from his mouth, “our sudden distraction implies no contempt for your announcement. It is startling and unbelievable. It has implications which one’s mind refuses to grant. But you must forgive us if our appetites took unexpected precedence.”
“I understand all right,” Fergus nodded. “Maybe I’m a genius as a detective, though God knows that’s a debatable point; but even if so, Miss Paris represents genius of a damned sight higher order, and I bow to her.”
“Thank you, sir,” said Stella Paris. “But what is all this about an announcement? What have I been missing in the kitchen?”
“This young fool,” Horace Brainard burbled with a sort of muffled echo of his old bluster, “has just proclaimed that poor James is after all innocent of the 1915 crimes.”
Stella Paris all but dropped her coffeecup. “But then … If that’s true, it must—”
“Hold it,” said Fergus warningly. “Before you go to work on the implications, look at the facts.” He crossed the room in deliberate silence and took up his fireplace stance again.
“Fact A: James Herndon did write that confession. The internal evidence of style and thinking is enough in itself; and I’m morally certain a handwriting expert would uphold it on the external as well. But as Dr. Arnold was pointing out to me a while back, a suggestible and unstable mind can easily be persuaded of a false guilt.
“Fact B: James Herndon did attack Corcoran. A throat-slitter in search of a knife would never have picked out Herndon’s dull tool when the kitchen was full of far more serviceable weapons. That knife could, have been used only by the man who happened by chance to have it on him when the cutting impulse came.
“Fact C: James Herndon, after botching the Corcoran attack, did not remain and finish off the job neatly, nor even leave his victim to bleed to death. He ran instantly for a doctor.
“Fact D: James Herndon, last night, had something he tremendously wanted to say to me, and yet he was afraid to go through with it. I can remember one of the things he said: ‘I thought for many years that I knew who had killed Martha. Then Corcoran taught me otherwise. Yet you have to know this false knowledge because it may lead you to the truth.’
“Fact E: James Herndon scribbled a cryptic quote from Eliot at the top of his confession.”
Fergus gave up his dignified and dominating pose and began to pace as he talked. In all his experience, he had rarely held an audience in such tense silence as this. He could see their eyes darting to each other. He could hear the one mass-thought of the group: If not James Herndon, who?
“Someone else killed Martha, for a damned sane and comprehensible reason, and the first cats. That someone, knowing of Aunt Margaret, knowing of Jay’s dictum on throat-slitting, knowing of Herndon’s almost abnormal devotion to Jay, taking advantage of his finding Martha, of his being drunk when the cats were killed, worked on poor Herndon until he was convinced of his guilt, or at least so pitifully uncertain of his innocence that he would be sure to crack under an official investigation.
“It was a perfect out for the murderer. If things got dangerous, he had only to direct official suspicion ever so gently in Herndon’s direction, and he’d have a confession on a silver platter. But he never needed that out. The police handling of the case was incredibly stupid, and they accepted the prowler theory, which was even safer. The murderer gladly accepted this gift from the gods, but never quite let Herndon forget how fortunate he had been in escaping punishment for ‘his crime.’ There would be a certain sadistic pleasure, a bitter humor in holding Herndon on a string, in keeping him under obligation for the considerate silence of the real murderer.
“And then comes 1940, and the external duplication of the emotional setup of war and wedding. And Alys decides to have some fun.
“Valentino’s death must have meant terrible doubts to Herndon. Was this half-forgotten past nightmare the truth? Had this throat-slitting beast reawakened in him? And imagine the terror it must have caused to the real murderer. Had Herndon finally broken down under the quarter century of strain and become in truth what the murderer had convinced him he must be? If so, he might not stop at cats. The whole cycle might repeat. That would mean investigation, a revival of the old Hotel de la Playa case, and God knows what danger to the murderer. If Herndon could be talked into writing out a confession as protection to a hypothetical innocent suspect, everything might be all right.
“So the murderer went to work on Herndon, and the result is what I just read you. The old man believed it when he wrote it. He brooded on it. He lived in dread of what he might do next. He remembered nothing of what he had done before; how could he prevent what he might do in the future? And brooding in this fashion, he went out on the sands for a pipe before dinner yesterday.
“This is the one time he cracked, the single moment when Aunt Margaret’s strain was strong in his blood. It’s little wonder. Even a man with no mental taint might well have broken down under what he had gone through. There he stood on the sands, loathing himself, dreading the future crimes he might commit. There also stood a lone defenseless man, and in Herndon’s pocket was a knife.
“But the instant that dull knife bit into the flesh of Corcoran’s throat, Herndon knew that it was all wrong. He felt none of the vicious elation of the madman he by now believed himself to be. He felt only disgust and pity. He flung away the knife, ran for the doctor to save his victim, and knew, finally and irrevocably, that he was not the murderer.”
“But why,” Tom protested in bewilderment, “why didn’t he destroy the confession?”
“Because he knew now that this kind friend who had so nobly withheld his knowledge of the Stanhope case, who had sympathized with him so for twenty-five years, who had so considerately talked him into writing the confession—that this inestimable friend must be the murderer himself. This friend knew where the manuscript was hidden, and would be most zealously sure that it stayed where he could find if it ever became necessary for him to use it. To destroy the confession would be to expose yourself to the hatred of the murderer of Martha Stanhope. James Herndon was not a brave man. The most he dared do was to add an apparently harmless notation on Eliot, which read:
If one, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl
And turning toward the window, should say:
311. ff.
“These lines are, as Tom recognized, from The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock—fortunately the first poem in the collected volume, or I might have been a great while longer in deciphering this clincher. The three lines following are:
‘That is not it at all,
That is not what I meant at all.
No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be …’
Or to translate: ‘This manuscript is not the truth I meant it to be, and I am not a madman.’”
There was silence in the room. Eyes darted restlessly, distrustfully. Stella Paris started to speak, caught a curious calculating look from Alys, and subsided. Horace Brainard plucked nervously at his mustache. Catherine twisted a handkerchief in her fingers and shifted her chair
away from her husband.
“Damn you, O’Breen!” Arnold burst out at last. “I ask you to help us, to relieve our tension, and what have you done? You’ve given us a new terror ten times worse than the old.”
“Because,” said Miss Paris, “it was awful enough to think it was Jim. But if it wasn’t Jim, then—” She looked around the group and was silent.
“I’m sorry,” said Fergus sincerely. “I thought it was clear enough from the ‘confession’ itself. There’s no need for you to fear each other now. The real murderer, of course, was Lucas Quincy.”
ii
“There is,” Fergus went on, “one key paragraph in that confession.” He thumbed through the manuscript and read:
I did not believe it. I would not believe it now if it were not for Aunt Margaret and what followed and above all for what Lucas told me but why should he keep silence? Then perhaps out of pity and hope but now when he fears what I fear and why is this enough?
“There are other references to Lucas in the manuscript, but this paragraph alone is plenty. All by itself it’s a fifty-word summary of the whole situation of false guilt which I’ve just outlined to you. This, in the last sentence, obviously means the confession. Why should Lucas, knowing my guilt, be content simply with my writing it out? Such contentment is possible only to the murderer, who does not want a possibly dangerous reopening of the old case, but finds the manuscript invaluable as a reserve weapon of self-defense.
“Lucas Quincy came to me when he thought that Herndon had broken under the strain and killed Valentino. He doubtless planned to lead me subtly into finding the manuscript and putting unofficial pressure on Herndon to get him put quietly away, voluntarily if possible, where he could no longer revive the Stanhope case. When Quincy realized what Alys had been up to, he felt safe again; but the Corcoran and Ramirez episodes brought back his fear and he rehired me. His cryptic ‘The solution lies in Eliot’ referred, not to Herndon’s devotion to that poet, but to a topographical fact: the hiding place of the manuscript, which had been concealed in the Collected Poems 1909–1935—a wise choice, since no one else in the party was too apt to investigate that book.”
“But why?” Arnold demanded. “Was Quincy a madman? And do madmen cover their tracks with such elaborate plots?”
“No, Lucas was no madman. Unless you feel, as doubtless Jay Stanhope would have, that anyone who willingly takes human life is not humanly sane.”
“But why? He was going to marry Martha. I think he loved her in his own harsh way. Why should he kill her?”
“Are you so sure he was going to marry Martha? Look again at a couple of phrases in the confession: Herndon tells how he drank to celebrate Horace’s coming happiness but not Lucas’ though the rounds pledged him as well and how vainly. And again he says: But Martha would have married. Not Lucas of course as things fell out, but she would have married. And yet again: … even though as they believed Martha was to marry Lucas …
“That was what you all believed, but James Herndon obviously knew something more. He knew that the second wedding would never have taken place.”
“But Lucas,” Stella Paris objected. “Lucas was so dreadfully hardheaded. You can’t imagine him risking his own life simply because he had been jilted.”
“I agree. But though the jilting is not the source of the murder, the two facts might have the same cause. Here we have to guess, but I think it makes a pretty clear picture:
“Lucas foresaw our entry into the war. He foresaw the profits that could be made in what we then called Preparedness. He was already, Dr. Arnold has said, laying the foundation for the fortune he was to make in uniforms. And we know from our history books that some pretty rank corruption went on in that line. We also know that Jay Stanhope was a man of fanatically insistent honesty.
“Jay had found out something—what, we will never know. Lucas was wise enough in his generation to realize that there was no appeal, no bribe that could silence him. I have no doubt that only the sinking of the Lusitania kept Jay from being the first victim of the throat-slitter. But Jay’s death did not remove the menace. Martha also knew, and she was her brother’s sister.
“This information, whatever it was, must have been in that famous last letter of Jay’s. It was something that shocked Martha deeply, something that she could not read aloud to her friends, something that she had to think about. And she took James Herndon as her confidant.
“That was natural enough. He was Jay’s closest friend. She could speak to him almost as to her brother. And besides … Martha doubtless knew that Herndon loved her. In his quiet ineffectuality, he had probably never bothered to mention the fact; but she must have been aware. And now, in the shock of this disillusion about Quincy, the first time that she saw him as all of us knew him in recent years, she would realize how wrongly she had chosen and what the breaking off her engagement would mean to Herndon. You remember, Stella, that you described Herndon after that walk as disturbed and yet somehow exultant?
“He did not know the true facts, or he would never have been allowed to live with that knowledge. Probably all that Martha told him was that she had learned something terrible about Lucas and did he think that she should fulfill her obligations and go through with the marriage anyway? I hope he took up his cue. I hope for once he rose to the occasion and persuaded her to marry him. I should like to think of one highspot of triumph in that poor drab life.
“Martha was a Stanhope. So of course she was scrupulously honest with Lucas. She told him what she knew and why she could not marry him. She also told him, quite without realizing it, why he could no longer let her live. She let the others go on thinking she would marry Lucas; why should her problems cast a shadow over the wedding festivities of the Brainards? And Lucas was more than willing that everyone should go on thinking so, while he matured his plans.
“They were, you have to admit, excellent plans. With one plot, he avenged the insult of the jilting, poisoned the life of the man who had supplanted him with Martha, and—the essential point—protected the secret of his dishonesty. It remained, for twenty-five years, an admirable marvel of planning.”
“For twenty-five years …” Dr. Arnold repeated reflectively.
Suddenly Horace Brainard was on his feet. “But it caught up with him, didn’t it? Twenty-five years, and now Lucas dead. And if Lucas was the original murderer, for God’s sake, O’Breen, tell us who killed Lucas?”
It was Tom who answered. “Who? Who else but the man whose life he’d destroyed?”
Catherine Brainard’s voice trembled. “James?”
“Of course. All Fergus’ chain of reasoning on the slugging still holds good. When Herndon realized that he’d been duped and tricked all his life, he hated Quincy as he had never hated him before. And he took the perfect revenge: killing Quincy by the very act of throat-slitting which he’d been falsely trapped into confessing.”
“Smart stooge,” said Fergus approvingly.
“But when it came to his suicide,” Tom went on, “he couldn’t bear even then to confess the real truth, the sane murder. That was too close, too terrible. He left the old confession, knowing its falseness, but hoping that it would be taken as explaining the situation.”
“And Ramirez?” said Dr. Arnold.
“Herndon again. A desperate attempt at a cover-up before he finally gave up and cracked. He must have—”
Janet was staring out the window. “Hi!” she called. “Either I’m seeing mirages, or there’s a motor launch headed straight for here.”
Fergus looked as relieved as Hercules after transferring the burden of the heavens back to the shoulders of Atlas. “Thank God!” he said. “Andy.”
From the wharf you could see three men in the launch, two in uniform and a heavy-set blue-jowled individual in mufti.
“Which one’s your friend?” Tom Quincy asked.
Fergus narrowed his eyes. “None of ’em. But God knows they’re the United States Marines.”
With Tom he
helped secure the launch to the wharf and gave a hand to the landing officers. Blue Jowls rumbled and took charge. “I’m Donovan. Chief of Police at Santa Eulalia. Where’s a guy named O’Breen?”
“I’m O’Breen,” said Fergus. “This is Tom Quincy, my official stooge. Brainard and the rest are up at the house. Did you hear from Jackson or come to investigate the bonfire?”
“We heard from Jackson. I thought it was a gag, but Koppo here insisted on checking back. I’m having me a friendly game with the boys and I say Nuts, but we check and it’s official all right. This L. A. bull of yours thinks there’s all hell popping on Blackman’s Island and we should investigate. Then we prowl around and we hear as how old Hokay Ramirez is missing and his launch too and people’ve been seeing a fire on this island like the whole place was burning up.”
“So we decided to check,” said the taller of the officers. “I’m Koplinski, O’Breen, and this is Sanchez. I met your Jackson at a convention once; he told me about you.”
“Which is all very fine,” said Chief Donovan, “but did we come out here for social introductions? What’s your story, O’Breen? And it had better be good.”
“It is,” said Fergus modestly. “We have on this island, in addition to assorted extras, one man recovering from a slit throat, one man with a stab where his heart ought to be, two corpses, and a murderer.”
“That’s a start,” said Officer Koplinski.
“Fergus is building it,” Tom explained. “To be exact, we’ve got two murderers, but they’re likewise the two corpses.”
“Kilkenny cats, like?” Donovan rumbled.
“Oh no,” said Fergus quietly. “I play fair. Chief Donovan wouldn’t like to break up his game for a mere pair of corpses, would he? I’ve got a nice live fresh murderer. And you better grab him quick, Chief. He’s a joker wild. He steals boats.”
Tom frowned. “I don’t get it. Something still up your sleeve? But in that case we’d better hurry back to the house. We can’t leave Janet on a spot like that.”
The Case of the Seven Sneezes Page 23
