Ghost snapped his fingers against a paragraph in the paper he was holding. “The cork was replaced!” He made a little gesture of disapproval, as if the murderer’s error had pained him. “I suppose you’ve read the accounts?”
“Well, I thought I had.” Mollock laughed. “What cork?”
Ghost was surprised. “It’s really quite an interesting puzzle, Duns. Probably you read only the headlines and the first paragraphs. In a nutshell, this is it: The young woman’s body was found this morning, but rather obviously she had been dead for some time. The body was in an advanced state of decomposition. From what remained of her clothing, it was assumed that she had been neatly although not expensively dressed. There was one piece of jewelry—a breast pin—also inexpensive and a bit old-fashioned, I believe. Underneath the body was found her bag, a small leather affair. It was in rather bad shape, but the contents were intact—a three-ounce bottle of chloral hydrate, a coin purse containing $3.84, and a compact. And, of course, the blatant suicide note.”
He ticked the items off on his long, sensitive fingers.
“No handkerchief—something a woman rarely goes without. Of course, it may have been removed from the bag and have disintegrated during the winter. But my point is—my first point—a small quantity of the chloral had been removed from the bottle and the cork tightly replaced! A singular business! Why in the world should a young woman contemplating suicide bother to replace the cork and shut the bottle up in her bag?”
Mollock’s eyes had begun to sparkle. It was a neat point—the sort of thing his fictional detectives were always springing on somebody.
“Of course,” continued Ghost, “there are other indications. Most young women bent on destroying themselves would do it, I think, wherever they happened to be, instead of hunting up a remote thicket or ravine; but I will grant you that circumstances might have dictated concealment. If so, however, why the note? Wasn’t it intended to be seen? Wasn’t it left to be discovered? 'I am tired of living. Only the dead are really happy.' A very able summary of her emotions. Literate and admirable, although the final assertion perhaps is of dubious accuracy. Yet the poor creature is discovered months after the event—”
Mollock again interrupted. “And why chloral hydrate, if it comes to that! It’s easy enough nowadays to get a quicker poison.”
“It isn’t even certain death,” agreed Ghost. “It depends on the amount, at any rate, and how it’s taken. Half an ounce would kill. Thirty drops is the adult dosage as an anodyne. The toxic action, after a fatal dose, would include coma, loss of reflexes, slow respiration, fall of blood pressure and temperature due to cardiovascular depression, dilated pupils, perhaps nausea and vomiting, perhaps an exanthem, anæmia and insanity. But of course she didn’t take any of it. The bottle was just part of the plan of the man who murdered her. He probably knew little or nothing of poisons and took the first dangerous thing that came handy. Chloral hydrate has a sinister sound. Then he enticed her to the spot selected, and no doubt killed her with a wrench or something equally horrible. It was sometime during the winter, I think, and he depended on the ravine to hide her until spring. Possibly until summer. By which time …”
He shrugged, and the furrows on his brow were more sharply outlined. Deep in his heart Ghost was a humane and sensitive spirit. The horrors and injustices of an imperfect world wore more heavily upon him than his friends imagined.
“I see one thing clearly enough,” said Mollock, after a moment of silence. “You’ll be in this case up to your ears before it’s over. You needn’t smile. I know it! Get back to Stephen Garment, Walter. You said you didn’t think that Spessifer killed him. Why not?”
Ghost flung his newspaper into a vacant chair. He leaned back in his own.
“Because,” he replied, “whether he did it on his own or as an agent, he would not drive the body up to the Kimbark door. That would be too much like inviting disaster. A really clever man might have done it, but not Spessifer. He hasn’t the imagination. And he would refuse to risk it, as an agent, even while he might consent to commit the murder.”
Mollock played his trump. “Anger,” he remarked casually, “thinks Spessifer may have done it on orders from Kimbark.”
But Ghost was not excited. “No doubt he does,” he retorted calmly, “if he didn’t somehow manage it himself. He is, himself, of course, highly suspect by the nature of his employment. So is Charlesworth. I mean, they are the obvious police suspects, along with Spessifer. I suppose Anger has something upon which to base his suspicion?”
“Plenty, I imagine. He didn’t open up the whole tale with me. Too much the English gentleman for that. But there’s small doubt that there was an affaire of some sort between Garment and Mrs. Kimbark. It happened when they were both in New York; that is, during the winter, some months before Garment’s visit to Chicago.”
The story writer chuckled. “We did a bit of detective work of our own—Anger and I. If Anger hadn’t weakened, we might have got somewhere.”
He told his friend with great gusto of the visit to the Kimbark establishment on the morning after the murder.
Ghost laughed. “Very Dupinesque. A variation of the trick in ‘The Purloined Letter.’ Later borrowed by Doyle for his ‘Scandal in Bohemia.’ I suppose Anger knows there were letters exchanged?”
“Oh, I suppose so.”
“Need it have been letters she was hiding?”
Mollock was surprised. “What else could it have been?” he asked.
“I can think of several other things. Well, well, perhaps it was letters! Did the lady seem disturbed by your appearance?”
“She did at first, I believe. So Anger said. Later, when she had visited the writing room, she was quite herself again.”
For some moments Ghost was thoughtful. “It’s all very sordid,” he said, at length, a bit disgustedly. “But it has its points,” he admitted. “The time element is almost brilliantly involved. It would require a mathematician to straighten it out. In a houseful of guests, such as Kimbark had that night, the number of suspects is limited only by the number of the guests. And the Lord knows who was loitering outside the house. But any one of the guests might have slipped away and not have been missed. Can you describe the house to me, Duns?”
He listened with attention to the longer story that Mollock now spun in detail.
“You have no personal knowledge, then, of much that went forward in the living room,” he commented, when the novelist had finished. “I gather that you were doing some important drinking in the library. Well, who was left alone in the library when the word came that Garment’s cab was coming up the drive?”
Mollock creased his brows for greater accuracy. “Only Miss Bland,” he said, at last. “She was finishing a bottle of Bourbon. I found the empty flask on the lawn, next morning—just outside the window. She was ashamed of her capacity, I suppose—and I don’t wonder. The way that woman put away neat Bourbon was—Well, well, let’s see! Dromgoole and Miss Waterloo had left the library a few seconds earlier. Pope and I, and Key, accompanied Kimbark from the room. Yep, Miss Bland was the only one left.”
Ghost was reflective. “A matter of a very few minutes, at most,” he mused. “And people coming and going more or less all the time, I suppose, whether you realized it or not. It does seem a bit like looking for the needle in the haystack. Which, by the way, as a figure of speech connoting impossibility is now slightly discredited. The ‘Believe It or Not’ man has turned up a fellow who found a needle in a haystack after forty minutes of search. Of course,” he added, “there’s that curious performance at the other end of the ride. What about that?”
“What about it?”
“There were a number of guests left at Van Peters’ when Garment was sped upon his way. Enough of them to be confusing. One of them might have slipped out in advance of Anger and Van Peter and have ensconced himself advantageously?”
“I doubt it. No, that’s crazy, Walter! Even if one of them had, how did he bring
it off? Anger and Van Peter tumbled Garment into the cab, the cab drove off, and—there you are!”
“I suppose so,” admitted Ghost reluctantly. “Yes, if the murderer was in the cab when it drove up, Spessifer knew about it, and had wrecked the lighting system of his car. But you tell me the lights worked perfectly when the body was delivered.”
“Not exactly. I think they did. I feel sure they must have. Spessifer, of course, says they did.” Mollock gestured impatiently. “But Anger or Van Peter would have seen anybody in the cab.”
“Of course, if somebody at Van Peters’, knowing that Garment was determined to go on to the Kimbarks’, had decided to precede him—to wait for him on the Kimbark lawn—eh?—it would have been an easy matter to escape detection.”
“I know,” said Mollock. “Cicotte said the same thing.”
“The deuce he did!” Ghost was mildly dismayed. Then he laughed. “Well, I can’t help that. Were the cab windows closed, by the way?”
“I—Hang it, I don’t think I remember! No-body asked that before.”
“Did Mrs. Kimbark leave the house, as far as you know, at any time during the waiting period?”
“Mrs. Kimbark?”
“M-m-m.”
“I didn’t see her, if she did.” Mollock was a trifle startled. “She may have. Listen, Walter! Why not ask Stella Birdflight? She was in the living room while I was in the library, and you can gamble she saw all there was to be seen. She’s that kind. And having reached Stella Birdflight, I’ll finish my story. She's got something to explain, too.”
He told of his meeting with the actress on the train and of his adventures of the morning.
Ghost was laughing his silent amusement. “You do tell your stories a chapter at a time, don’t you, Duns?” he commented. “And a minor climax at the end of every installment, eh? What else are you holding out on me?”
“That’s all. Honour bright! Except an idea of my own. Ask me about a pair of shoelaces, when we get around to it. I wanted you to get the whole picture before I complicated it with ideas of my own.”
His friend glanced at him whimsically. “Shoelaces, eh?” Then he rose to his feet and strolled about the room, his hands in his pockets. He was now smoking a long, thin cigar that looked like a stogie and wasn’t. The room on two sides was lined with open bookshelves, and a third wall would have been similarly crowded had it not been for the interruption of a fine old white wood mantel and fireplace. It was an old-fashioned room in an old-fashioned house, but mellow age and strident modernity rubbed elbows on its walls and bookshelves—a harmonious whole when one knew its owner and his wayward, eclectic interests.
“You realize, of course,” continued Ghost, after a few moments, “that Miss Birdflight may have been doing exactly what you were planning to do? Playing detective, that is. You wondered if Charlesworth had returned to New York and you contemplated a casual visit that would have been, in effect, a fishing expedition. Being of a constabulary turn of mind, you vaguely suspect Charlesworth of guilty knowledge. Miss Birdflight may have had the same idea.”
“Why should she want to play detective?”
“It’s a disease,” said Ghost. “However, I don’t insist. Her action was certainly curious and, perhaps, significant. If there’s anything between her and Charlesworth that bears upon the case, it ought to be looked into.”
He smiled. “What about your shoelaces?”
“They aren’t mine,” said Mollock. “But I want you to admire my idea. Frankly, I don’t think I believe it for an instant; but it’s a lallapaloosa.”
Alternately serious and grinning, he narrated the fantastic episode of the footpad and the clubman, and drew again his astounding inferences.
“You see the possibilities?” he concluded. “But isn’t it wild!”
Ghost was enormously amused. “It’s delicious, Duns,” he congratulated. “The quality of your thinking is, if I may say so, one of the most distinctive and outstanding phenomena of our time. Seriously, you are probably quite mad, as you suggest—and yet, it’s a mad incident. And something odd is behind it. Your shoelace deduction is a masterpiece. At the moment, I confess, I can’t see where any of it fits the Garment tangle.”
Mollock was pleased by his friend’s praise. On the whole, however, he was dissatisfied with the evening. He had expected something different. Some flaming revelation. Perhaps a brilliant monologue in the course of which motives would be examined, precedents adduced, hidden clues brought sorcerously to light, and in the end a murderer isolated from his crowding fellows and made to drop his eyes in theoretical, tacit confession. Something like that. He expected great things always of Walter Ghost. He fell from immense heights to abysmal depths when Ghost failed, as he thought, to deliver.
Seeing and understanding which, Ghost laughed and said: “I’m sorry, Duns! If I were as good as you believe me to be, I’d be quite a fellow!”
“But you have some idea of what really happened that night?”
“Hardly enough to go on, just yet, is there, old chap? It’s all ‘if’ and speculation. Too many people had the chance, and the deed itself was too commonplace. Really, you know, you should be closer to the solution of a case like this than I. You recall what Taine said of Balzac!”
He stretched out a long arm and unerringly plucked a volume from its place upon the shelves.
“‘Both nature and profession oblige him to imagine and to believe; for the observation of a novelist must often be a power of divination. He does not examine sentiments as an anatomist examines tissues. From physiognomy and gesture he conjectures and concludes… . His instrument is intuition—a dangerous faculty, yet a high one— by which a man discovers from an isolated incident the procession of incidents which have produced it, or which it is about to produce.’”
“It’s grand,” admitted Mollock; “but I’m no Balzac. Wish I were!”
“We all fall a bit short of the giants,” laughed Ghost. “More’s the pity, eh? The Garment mystery interests me, Duns, and again it doesn’t. It’s sordid, as I say; but for that matter so are most murder mysteries. My feelings are a bit mixed, but the thing somehow doesn’t allure—if you know what I mean. If it were never solved, I should probably feel that no great injustice had gone unrectified.”
“Oh, that!” Mollock gestured floridly. “I’ve no sympathy with the victim myself. His books are unethical and lousy, and so—I gather—was the man. He should have been murdered years ago, as a matter of fact, if for nothing else than his horrible bungling of pronouns.”
Ghost smiled. “It wasn’t precisely what I meant,” he demurred. “As a problem per se, I find it a bit lacking; at least, less entertaining, less alluring, than the Amersham puzzle. That lonely body in the ravine! The suicide note that probably she didn’t write! The exquisite attention given by the murderer to detail—although he overdid it, by Jove! One more attempt at the perfect crime, Duns. He even counted upon the weather to come to his assistance, and it did.”
“And there we are, back where we started,” said Mollock. “A perfect circle! The practice is known as the ‘cyclical mode of discoursing,’ I believe. By the Lord Harry, I’m going in for it—professionally! At so much a word, it would be a gold mine. Good-night, Walter! I’m off.”
“Good-night,” said Ghost. “I’ll go to the door with you, for a breath of air.”
There was a small thump upon the door, low down, against the baseboard.
“There,” he continued, “that means that it’s one o’clock. The newsboy down the street throws me a morning paper, at this time, on his way home. The early, or ‘Bulldog’ edition, I believe it’s called.”
“There’s never anything in it,” said Mollock.
Ghost opened the door and lifted the folded and rolled newspaper from the step. “Good-night, Duns,” he said again.
Under the hall light, as he turned back toward his library, he opened the paper and moved his eyes across its headlines. Then with almost a single bound he was b
ack at the door and tugging at the fastenings.
“Duns!” he called.
But Mollock had turned the corner and was already out of hearing.
1 See Murder on “B” Deck and Dead Man Inside.
Chapter Seven
The steam yacht Jezebel loitered pleasantly in summer seas. There is something healing always about the water, not least in the sound of it within the soul; in the long slap of waves against a vessel’s sides. It is a therapeutic melody.
With the Bermudas a day behind them the guests of Curly Pope were in no haste to see the next island excrescence upon the horizon. The sharp prow clove a sea of glass, and overhead the sun was a white blot of heat in a sky of blue and madreperl. Differences in a large degree had been forgotten.
The murder of Stephen Garment, while still a topic of conversation, had become a legend of another civilization. It was discussed as books are discussed, with an appreciation of their points and of their failings. Only Anger of the group on board seemed puzzled by the remoteness of the incident to those who had been a part of its excitement.
Something of his bewilderment he communicated to Betty Waterloo, seated on the afterdeck, watching the Jezebel's frothy trail in the Atlantic. He liked Betty Waterloo, in whom as yet little of offensive sex-consciousness had developed to spoil her charm. Indeed he liked her better than he had dared to tell her.
She smiled and accepted his cigarette.
“They are that way,” she admitted. “That’s all that can be said about it. While it was on the boards, so to speak, it was good fun—you know? Now it is dead as yesterday’s newspaper. You are closer to it, of course.” She added a bit sententiously: “They are self-centred and selfish, I suppose—but isn’t everybody?”
“I hope not,” answered Anger quickly.
“Besides,” she continued, with a shrewd twinkle in her grey eyes, “you suspect us all, and so for you the case has just begun.”
“Good heavens, child!” cried Anger, in astonishment. “What put that into your pretty head?”
The End of Mr. Garment Page 7
