The End of Mr. Garment

by Vincent Starrett

  And now another name was to be substituted for that of Dromgoole. Another man, for reasons still a mystery, and yet as strong—he must believe—as those he had himself concealed, that night had waited Garment’s coming, with murder in his heart. For surely it could have been no sudden whim to take a famous life and offer the sated world a new sensation. The murderer, a guest, had come from within the house. Betty had seen his whipping coat tails on the balcony. There could now be no sudden, surprising revelation of a murderer from off the streets. If the murderer had not been Allan Dromgoole, he had been—Who?

  Ghost rustled the sheaf of papers he held in his hands. At length he laid them aside.

  “There is a point of delicacy involved here,” he began, “which made it seem wise that our conference should be held in private. Mollock’s opinion, as coming from a writing man, may be invaluable. In any case he is my confidant, and I prefer that he shall know all that I know. You, Mr. Kimbark, have been all but accused of Garment’s murder; your name and your wife’s name have been bandied about in outrageous fashion, and you are entitled to know the truth. As for the rest—including the police—it may be that the less they are told about the truth the better. That is to be decided.”

  A little twinkle shone for a moment in his eye, and he puffed earnestly and with enjoyment on his long cigar. He turned to Kimbark.

  “It was really rather extraordinary the way we failed to guess each other’s minds. All the time we were so courteously refraining from embarrassing each other, the other morning in Chicago, you were diligently protecting Allan Dromgoole—while I was thinking of quite another person. But Dromgoole’s statement (and Miss Bland’s) about your niece, together with her own amazing revelation, should make everything quite clear. The order of events now stands forth as if they were numbered scenes.

  “You saw Dromgoole on the balcony, of course. The time, as you later figured it, was just before the murder. Actually, I think, he was there a moment or two after the murder had been committed. Miss Waterloo had just gone over. Dromgoole had seen her go. You had drifted back into the hallway, for a moment, for some reason or other—”

  “Frankly,” interpolated Kimbark, “it was to stir up Miss Bland, in the library. I knew she hadn’t left the room, and I didn’t like the idea of her sitting there—getting tight—just when our guest was arriving.”

  Ghost nodded understandingly. “In Dromgoole’s case, he had turned back because he missed your niece, with whom he had left the library. But you didn’t reach the library, I believe, to urge your temperance lecture upon Miss Bland?”

  “I did not. As I crossed the passage leading to the balcony, I noticed Dromgoole stepping out. Somehow I got the notion, then—I lost it later—that Miss Bland was with him; that is, had just preceded him. I accepted the idea with some gratitude, and returned at once to the living room. Allison was just answering the bell, which seemed to me to have been ringing more or less forever.”

  “Precisely,” agreed Ghost. “You turned back to interview Miss Bland, and were stopped by the sight of Dromgoole on the balcony. What you didn’t know, and couldn’t know, of course, was that another person had leaped across the railing only a moment before. That person was Betty Waterloo. And what you didn’t dream, and Dromgoole didn’t dream, was that still another person had preceded Betty. That person was the murderer. And Betty followed him, believing him to be you.”

  He laughed an amused little laugh as the picture again unfolded in his mind. “One would think, now, that your hallway, that night, Kimbark, had been a veritable parade ground—all within the space of a few minutes. Yet, actually, considering the number of persons in your house, there were relatively few who, during those minutes, used the hall at all. Come now, both of you! Between the moment Mrs. Kimbark sent Ronald Key to announce that Garment’s cab was coming up the drive—she had been peeking from the window, at intervals, for some hours—and the instant that you and Mollock, Kimbark, went down the steps to find the body, how many minutes would you say elapsed?”

  Kimbark considered. “Five?”

  “Even less,” was Mollock’s idea.

  “That is the impression one gets. Actually, it was closer to eight, unless I am greatly mistaken. The word was brought to you, let us say, as Garment’s taxi entered the grounds. The driver had to reach the steps, stop his car, get down and climb the steps—after first taking a shrewd look at his drunken fare, to wonder if the fellow was capable of moving by himself; possibly after nudging him a bit and receiving a remunerative curse—ring your doorbell, and after a decent wait conduct his preliminary conversation with your butler. In everything he did, we may safely assume that Spessifer was slow—as slow as Allison in answering the bell. I venture to suppose his meter was still ticking when he returned to find his drunkard dead. There was a further discussion when you joined Allison at the door. Then Mollock appeared, and explanations were again in order. Finally you all went down the steps and reached the cab—but, believe me, there had been ample time for a swift and nerveless murderer to finish off your novelist, hide himself among the shrubs, and wait for the excitement to begin. When it began, and nobody was thinking very clearly, he quietly went back into the house exactly as he had left it—and that time, it is clear, Miss Bland was not looking from her window.”

  Mollock stirred in his chair. “You think,” he asked, “that the fellow was hiding among the bushes when Betty came around the side of the house?”

  “I am certain of it.”

  “Good Lord!” said Howland Kimbark.

  “However, she was not herself in any danger. Well,” continued Ghost, “that is the order of events as I have reconstructed them. With reference to motive, it occurred to me, some time ago, that the clue to Garment’s murder might very well be hidden in a book. In one of his own books. It seemed a plausible idea and I acted on it. Without any notable excess of pleasure, I have in recent weeks read all of Stephen Garment’s published works.”

  He smiled a bit mischievously. “Hiding them behind my geography, as it were! But not one of them,” he added seriously, “seemed quite to fit the crime. You see, I was looking for something rather special, without being quite aware of what it was. Something nasty, perhaps, in the way of revelation—cast in the guise of fiction—which, correctly read by those familiar with the circumstances, might smirch a reputation. There was plenty that was nasty, but nothing that seemed immediate. Nothing, for the matter of that, which seemed sufficiently out of the beaten path of literary sexnastiness to indicate a particular individual or group. Old stuff for the reason that life and literature, borrowing from each other, repeat themselves down the ages, although the actual incidents described may be of freshly horrible occurrence.

  “And so,” continued Ghost, after a pause, “I felt obliged, at last, to consider two other alternatives. The motive, if it were indeed hidden in the pages of a story, either was antecedent to immediate gossip or was to be found in a book as yet unpublished. There was much to be said in favour of the latter notion, since an excellent reason for murder might be the preventing of a scurrility about to be made public. I had little doubt, at any time, that when the motive was revealed a woman would be implicated. It appears that I was right.”

  He picked up the sheaf of papers he had laid aside, the nature of which already had been recognized by Mollock.

  “These are the galley proofs of Garment’s latest novel—his last novel, as far as I am aware, and as far as Anger is aware. I talked with Anger about it this morning—privately—before we parted. It is curious, but I believe it to be true, that although he actually worked a bit with Garment on this book, shortly after becoming his secretary, he had no suspicion of its significance either before or after the murder. If the novel was in any sense autobiographical, he told me, it concerned an earlier episode in Garment’s career than any he was aware of. In short, although reasonably familiar with the tale, Anger read nothing into it that bore in any way upon a member of the group associated in our m
inds with Garment’s murder. He was at first surprised and puzzled by my inquiry. Later, in view of his suspicions of you, Mr. Kimbark, and his wife’s suspicions, I thought it advisable to look them up again and let them know the truth. Besides ourselves, they are the only ones who will know it, unless we agree that it should be made public. They are at present sworn to secrecy.”

  With a little gesture, unconsciously dramatic, Ghost spread the papers on his knee, tapping them with accusing forefinger.

  “The tale is loosely one of distant scenes and queerish customs. Islands and lordly palms—seascapes and strange inhabitants—diplomatic entanglements and the paradoxically undiplomatic entanglements of diplomats. Romantic sex-stuff for the stay-at-homes; a bit innocuous, a bit vicious, always a trifle leering. Peeping Tom and Godivas with bobbed hair. All of it pitched on the unwholesome, feverish note that we have come to associate with its author. A lot of it false, a lot of it true. Realism for weary romanticists. Romance for bored and sated realists. A fine talent for observation and analysis prostituted by the American dollar. Melville adapted for the screen by Hollywood directors. A fundamental honesty of purpose twisted by exigency or malice into something hysterical and distorted. Salaam! I have spoken! My first and I trust my last appearance as a literary critic, gentlemen, on any stage.” And Walter Ghost, realizing that he had rather let himself go, smiled a deprecating smile and returned more seriously to his muttons.

  “In the tale we have the inevitable British novelist on holiday—in search of local colour. And at one point—the single point that actually concerns us here, to-day—we have the inevitable girl. The background, at the moment, is a city in China, looted by Chinese bandits and blasted by Chinese artillery. One of the periodical rebellions of that ingenious people. But the immediate scene is a German hotel in the war-torn Chinese city. A strange place in which to find, the author tells us, an American girl of gentle birth and breeding, all alone and lonely, like a castaway on a desert reef!

  “Dear, dear,” smiled Walter Ghost. “She appealed, it seems, to one’s sympathy, this girl of twenty, with her troubled eyes and brave yet tremulous smile; and, of course, she inspired one’s curiosity. That curiosity of the roving novelist—it is insatiable! Around her on the long hotel piazza, not yet demolished, swaggered officers in brilliant uniforms, clicking their heels and talking many languages. Yes, you have guessed it, Kimbark! She was a bride; her husband—a civilian who had helped to defend the American legation—had been wounded in the first day’s fighting and now was convalescing in the hotel hospital.”

  Howland Kimbark had risen upright with automatic suddenness and with knotted fists. “Good God!” he said, his face a curious mask of understanding and disbelief.

  “That’s how the story runs,” continued Ghost, “and I fancy that up to a point it is strictly true. It is known that Garment took his plots from life. His working method was not unique. It was, simply stated, the petty pilfering of the human emotions around him, and the unscrupulous recounting of those emotions in tales that deviated little from the truth—but which did deviate from the truth whenever the truth was insufficiently salacious for his need. Naturally, I had looked quietly into the past lives of the several persons who might, by reason of proximity, have murdered Garment, and I knew something of their movements about the world. The files of the Chicago newspapers were useful in this connection.”

  He shrugged. “Shall I finish the story? How the novelist helped to nurse the wounded husband and ultimately seduced the bride? The details are fairly indecent and, since I believe them to be untrue in toto, unnecessary to your understanding of what occurred that night in Spessifer’s taxicab.

  “You see,” said Walter Ghost, “the essential falsity of fiction, which even at its best seldom enough exactly reproduces life. For in fiction the artistic conscience—a greatly overrated intelligence—is constantly at work making the story pattern-perfect. And since the artistic conscience is actuated in large part by the artist’s conception of himself as hero of the piece, it is likely to express his wish-fulfillments rather than the unflattering truth. Perfection, in a tale, represents for him the thing he would have liked to have had happen. There are no doubt exceptions, but the rule is safe. And just now we are talking about Stephen Garment, at best a minor artist.”

  “The story was a lie?” asked Kimbark, after a thoughtful moment. He had resumed his seat and listened to the lecture upon conscience with respectful inattention.

  “The dénouement was a lie,” amended Ghost. “To quote a vulgar dictum, it is a caddish thing to ‘kiss and tell.’ But even more ignoble and degraded an action—and in law, I think, more libellous—is to tell without having kissed. It was this, in effect, that Garment did. The utmost baseness, the utmost abysmal depth of poor sportsmanship—to fail in an ungenerous attempt upon a woman’s virtue and then boast that one has triumphed.”

  Mollock reached over and seized a sheet of the proofs. “What’s it called, Walter?” he asked, with professional curiosity.

  He read the title at the top: When the Cat's Away. Immediately there was an outcry. “Why the infernal scoundrel! He’s stolen one of my titles. I was going to use that myself one of these days! You remember, Walter, my jolly little idea? When the cat’s away, not the mice but the cat will play!”

  Ghost smiled. “I remember that, Duns. The same idea to a hair. His roving novelist is, of course, the cat. But don’t worry—he’ll never use it now.” He added: “This book isn’t going to appear.”

  Kimbark was annoyed by the interruption. “And Pope knew the story to be a lie?” he asked. The murderer’s name dropped into the conversation as quietly and casually as a fly lighting upon the water, but upon Mollock it had the impact of a fist between the eyes. “But, of course, he would,” continued Kimbark thoughtfully, “knowing his wife. Knowing Myra, myself, I ought not to have asked the question. I knew, of course, that it was Pope you meant, when you mentioned the American legation and the hotel.”

  “Pope!” said Mollock. “Curly Pope!”

  “But how,” asked Kimbark, “could he have known the book was to be published? I mean, with all that dreadful stuff about himself and Myra?”

  “Myra was in England. We had Pope’s own word for that, after the supposed discovery of her body. She and Garment met—again. And Garment told her what he was going to do. He did not say, I believe, that he had actually done it. It was a sort of genial, mocking threat. They had met again on terms of amity—the past apparently forgotten. She did not know whether to believe him, and in the end decided it was just a bluff. In the poorest taste, of course; but bad taste was to be expected of Stephen Garment. However, she wrote to Pope about it, telling him what had been said. Quite naturally, he was furious. He had never liked Garment. And after the episode in China— when Garment’s plan of seduction had failed and Pope was well and whole again—he had invited Garment to his yacht and thrashed him within an inch of his life. That affair, of course, did not get into the papers. I believe Garment told some yarn about falling off a horse. But the incentive for his own brutal story is very clear.”

  “You have known all this from the beginning?” asked Mollock incredulously.

  “Good heavens, no!” said Ghost. “I have suspected some of it for a time; but the sequence of events just fell into place this morning—after I had left you at Anger’s hotel. After Kimbark’s story about Dromgoole on the balcony, and Dromgoole’s story of Betty on the lawn, and Betty’s story of the coat tails that had whipped across the railing, there was nothing left but to question Pope. But first I went to see a member of Pope’s crew. An elderly fellow and a shrewd one—the engineer. He had been with the yacht for many years, a fact which I had learned from Harry Blonde, the young man who was also once a member of the crew and is now awaiting conviction as the murderer of Madeline Darrow. I had asked Blonde merely for the name of the oldest member of the crew.

  “Carlyle, the engineer, a Scotsman, remembered the thrashing. I had some diffic
ulty in getting him to talk about it; but when I had made it clear that it was imperative, he told me what he knew. He would not tell me the circumstances, although I have no doubt he suspected them; but he did admit that Garment had once been thrashed by Curly Pope. In the beginning I had simply asked him for information about an earlier association between the two.

  “I had, of course, read the proofs hurriedly before looking up Carlyle. They were waiting for me when I reached New York, and I read them immediately after leaving you all at the Angers’ hotel. After the story told me by the engineer, everything seemed reasonably clear. Things were falling into shape, and I hurried off to Pope. I had no difficulty there. When he realized how much I knew, he told me the rest. He confirmed my guesses and added details. He had not known, and hadn’t particularly cared, whether Garment intended to publish the book as threatened. It was sufficient that the subject had been revived and that the boastful threat had been made. He determined, at the first opportunity, to remove Stephen Garment from the world. He simply waited, and the opportunity arrived with Kimbark’s party. He used Kimbark’s knife because it was more convenient than a small revolver, which was in his pocket all the time, and without quite realizing the mess that it might precipitate for Kimbark. Had any innocent victim been arrested and put in actual peril of his life, he would have given him self up. Until such an eventuality occurred he had sensibly determined to do nothing.”

  “He intended to shoot Garment?”

  “He thought it likely that it would occur that way; but he was not courting the publicity the affair would give his wife. He later decided that if it could all be done quietly—without shooting— it would be better. He acquired the knife without being seen and waited for the proper moment. It seemed to have arrived when word came that Garment was coming up the drive. When he ran out, he did not know that Garment was alone, but thought it possible. Had Anger been with Garment, there would have been no murder—at that time. But everything was fortuitously arranged for him, even to Garment’s drunkenness; even to the delay before you and Mollock reached the cab. And he had preferred to kill Garment outside the house, for that way there would be less suspicion of anybody in the house. He was protecting himself and also protecting all the others at the party, particularly Kimbark. He swears he had no notion that Kimbark’s initial was on the dagger, and I believe him. Had he been himself arrested at once, as was quite within the bounds of possibility, he had determined to tell his story simply and throw himself upon the mercy of a jury. But the central idea, throughout, was to murder Garment—and he did it, one must admit, as neatly as any well-intentioned assassin in the history of crime.”