“Hurray for good old Curly!” ejaculated Mollock, with enthusiasm. He caught Ghost’s eye and coughed a deprecating little cough. “And hurray for you, too, Walter,” he added; “although it seems to me you’ve got our friend into a hell of a mess by all this clever detecting of yours.”
Ghost shrugged and smiled, a little dryly. “Perhaps,” he said; “but I’m inclined to doubt it. Mr. Curly Pope, fortunately for himself, is not troubled by moral convictions and so is likely to escape a legal conviction—unless we tell on him! He will suffer no remorse as a result of his first and final murder, and so will not be moved to give himself up to the police. If miraculously they find the truth out for themselves—I am in favour, personally, of telling them nothing whatsoever—an American jury will free him without leaving the jury box.”
“Quite,” asserted Kimbark, with rigid jaw. “Not a word do they get from any of us. Let everybody think I did it to the end of time, if it comes to that. It can’t be proved.”
He remembered that, after all, he had wanted to do it.
Mollock agreed. “But, look here, Walter,” he cried eagerly, “tell us how you really did it! Why did you pick on Pope and let the others out? There’s something lacking somewhere. I can understand it all after you’d heard this group of stories, and after you’d read the book. But there must have been something earlier than that—some little thing that pointed the way, eh? Some little—”
“The first thing that turned my attention to Curly Pope,” said Walter Ghost, “was the supposed discovery of his wife’s body, up at Amersham. Then it developed that the body was not that of Mrs. Pope at all. You remember how I reached that conclusion, even before it was a certainty. To make it a fact beyond dispute, Mrs. Pope returned from England in the flesh. Obviously the murder of Garment in Chicago and the murder of a strange young woman in the East—so many months before—could not be related. That is, the connecting link between them had been severed. And they were not related. But the incident had served to stamp the image of Pope upon my mind. Although he had not murdered his wife, he might have murdered Garment. I mean, he was one of a group of individuals, at Kimbark’s party, any one of whom might have had the opportunity and, conceivably, the motive.
“To the public mind, the return of Mrs. Pope from England was a complete acquittal of her husband of any murder whatsoever. To my mind the coincidence involved in the mistaken identity of Madeline Darrow’s body was a singular one; yet with the connection gone I could only be puzzled that such a freak should have occurred. The return of Mrs. Pope from England was a matter of another colour. It had been sudden and it had been, apparently, unpremeditated. Pope himself did not know that his wife was coming back! She had returned at the very instant her presence was most useful in supporting my idea that the body at Amersham was not hers; yet when she sailed from England she could not have known that a body had been found at Amersham! Another very singular coincidence. By a careful checking of the time element involved in the case, however, it was quite certain that she had sailed from England almost immediately after she must have heard, through the London journals, of the murder of Stephen Garment. In other words it occurred to me—forcibly—that Mrs. Pope had returned to America in great haste because she feared—and had reason to fear—that it was her husband who had murdered Garment.
“With that idea in mind I attacked the problem in Chicago. I was willing enough to see where others might have committed the crime—Kimbark, Dromgoole, Key, Miss Bland, even Charles worth or your actress friend (for Charlesworth might have been outside the house waiting for Garment to appear); but the name of Pope was in my subconscious and it stuck there like a burr. Quite naturally, I believe. The suspicion against Kimbark was wide and the evidence strong; it was indeed almost too strong, in my opinion. I did not believe he would use a weapon so conveniently engraved with his initial, nor did I believe, in his rôle of host, he would rush out of the house and murder his tardy guest before that guest had made his projected visit. Ronald Key was a mild possibility, but the only evidence against him was his nationality, and the fact that—like many others— he might have been in a position to do it; neither a very strong reason for mentally indicting a man for murder.
“Dromgoole’s time, as I had understood the preliminary report given me by Mollock,” continued Ghost, looking at Kimbark, “was rather fully occupied during the moments under scrutiny. Presumably he had been in the company of Miss Waterloo at the very moment—if he were to be regarded as the murderer—he should have been engaged upon his murder. His activities on the yacht were puzzling, no doubt, but could be laid to curiosity or to a suspicion of his own that he was anxious to verify. Actually he was keeping a friendly eye on the supposed case against Miss Waterloo—that is, trying to find out whether she was suspected by the police.
“But in the case of Pope, while certainly nothing had been proven, there was a very definite and suspicious circumstance in hand, to make him the most likely candidate of the ‘library group.’ At any rate he would do as a starter. Only in Kimbark’s case, at the outset, was there any apparent motive; but, then, motives are seldom apparent until they have been unearthed, and apparent motives are frequently untrustworthy.
“Everything had to be checked, of course—not least, the certainty almost that Mrs. Kimbark suspected her husband. I was certain she had hidden the weapon; that it was the weapon she was so concerned about when Mollock and Anger called upon her. She might even have known that Kimbark had killed Garment, for all I actually knew to the contrary. But I didn’t believe that; Kimbark simply was not my choice as the murderer. I wouldn’t accept him unless I was forced to. My finding of the knife where I did find it, and its certain identification with Kimbark, helped me to absolve him rather than the contrary. I am stubborn about such matters.
“But my finding of the knife was responsible for even more positive eliminations. It made it seem reasonably sure that the murderer had come from the house—although he was not Kimbark—and therefore would not turn out to be somebody from Van Peter’s place, or elsewhere. My timing of the distances between various points in the house had helped already to eliminate such prosaic murderers as servants, and made it seem likely that the guilty man was one of the group that gossiped in the library, of which group, as I have pointed out, Pope was a leading member. Miss Bland was frankly a bit intoxicated, and nothing in the whole episode suggested that the murderer had been drunk. Quite the contrary, in fact. There was plenty of mild drunkenness in your home that night, Kimbark; but you may be certain that Curly Pope, at least, was sober. If he drank, it was very little.
“Well, that’s about the whole story, Duns. In Kimbark’s home, with Cicotte, I had the extraordinary adventure with the impostor, Harry Blonde; and after that matters moved more rapidly. Blonde had come to steal a picture of a party on Pope’s yacht! Pope again, you see, although that immediate twist of the investigation bore only on the murder at Amersham—which had no possible connection with the murder of Garment. Again it was the name Pope pursuing me—forcing me to wonder—forcing me to look for a connection where I was certain there could be none. To the last, almost, it might have been another man who murdered Garment; but it wasn’t. When I had heard the stories of Dromgoole and Miss Bland, the stories told by Kimbark and Betty Waterloo, and ultimately, of course, the story of the engineer, Carlyle, there could be no further doubt. Although there had been no connection ever between the Amersham murder and the Chicago opuscule, it was the Amersham murder which first directed my suspicions to the murderer; and it was the capture of Harry Blonde that clinched matters because it was Blonde who directed me to Carlyle and furnished me with the elusive motive. The book and Pope came later.”
“Of course there was Miss Bland’s empty pint,” suggested Mollock. “Don’t forget that I found that. Although my shoelace idea didn’t seem to come to much, did it?” he asked pensively.
“Those shoelaces!” smiled Ghost. “Well, you can put them in a story, Duns. Yes, th
e flask was a help. It helped me to one of the longest shots I have ever made—when I taxed her with having seen somebody on the lawn. It pointed the way, too, for my reading of Dromgoole’s performance on the yacht—the idea that he and the reckless playwriter were sharing a secret that had been communicated by Miss Bland. I had no notion that Dromgoole had seen something, too, until he told me.”
“And Mrs. Duane?” asked Kimbark. “She has been absolved in the other case?”
“Almost reluctantly on my part,” admitted Ghost. “It was a lovely idea; but there was simply no room left for her, when everything came out about Blonde.”
“Anyway,” said Dunstan Mollock, “it was all grand, Walter. Simply swell! There’s nobody like you under the sun, moon, and stars.”
“I’m rather glad of that,” said Ghost, pleased and embarrassed by his friend’s extravagance.
He pushed aside the galley proofs of Garment’s novel and lighted one of his long cigars. “And that, I take it, is that,” he observed. “Or is it? At any rate there’s nothing left to worry about, Kimbark. Cicotte may take it into his head to risk a case against Van Peter, but if he does he’s beaten before he begins. Van Peter will admit the deed with which he is charged—to wit, of leaning on the left-hand window frame of Spessifer’s purple cab and talking with a drunken novelist inside. But Anger tells me that Van Peter is not left-handed; and in any case, with Anger’s testimony, a charge of murder could not be substantiated. I shall advise Cicotte against it. But I am inclined to believe that nothing whatever will develop.”
“The book?”
“Will not appear,” said Ghost. “There can be little doubt of that, since publishers are better sometimes than their authors. When the circumstances are explained—without, of course, the use of names—the volume will be withdrawn. I shall attend to that myself.
“No, Duns, the case of Stephen Garment already is at an end, and the long hand of Time already is at work upon his fame. No doubt he will be denounced and apotheosized for years to come, and in time he may become the thing he could not be in life—a great and memorable figure in the world of letters. That is the happy fate, sometimes, of rakes and scoundrels who have come to tragic ends. The glamorous drama of their fates provokes a kinder and less critical estimate of their performances. In any case the murder of Stephen Garment is destined to become one of the great and unsolved mysteries of our time.”
It was very late. The room was very comfortable. Howland Kimbark hated to go away. An inhuman sort of pair, the Kimbarks. according to the Kimbark legend. But in Walter Ghost, Kimbark had found a human being to whom at last he could respond. A human being who was—damn it!—human. In Mollock he had found an inhuman sort of creature who was also, curiously, human in a way that he was beginning, oddly enough, to like. He wished there were something he could say to tell them this; but all his training was against it.
He started to reach out a hand. …
In a corner of the room, the telephone rang sharply.
Ghost rose and answered the call. “Long distance,” he said, after a moment. “Chicago’s calling.” And after another moment, into the rubber mouthpiece he said: “Yes, speaking!…Who? … Oh, it’s you, McDaniel!”
And then his voice fairly crackled. “What!…It’s impossible!…I beg your pardon! Of course, it isn’t impossible, since you are telling me it happened. But I will not go to Chicago, McDaniel.”
He listened again. “I’m sorry—very sorry indeed; but I have no terms for such services, and I am not a detective. Thank you very much for calling.”
He swung from the instrument to his bewildered guests. “Miss Celia Maynard has been murdered in Chicago.”
They stared at him as if he had gone mad.
“Her body was found, a few hours ago, in a public telephone booth, with a gunshot wound behind the ear. I suppose McDaniel meant a pistol. The door was closed. There was no sign of the weapon and no trace of the murderer.”
Suddenly Mollock found his voice. “Crazy!” he said. “The girl who was on the yacht! It’s perfectly crazy. There can be no possible connection.”
“None whatever,” agreed Ghost. “I have just refused to go to Chicago and conduct an investigation.”
They stared at one another for a number of terrible moments.
“Life—” said Walter Ghost; and after a time he completed his tremendous thought—“and Death.” In the miniature interval his mind had bridged incredible distances and he had found no other words to say. “Good-night, Kimbark!”
He reached out his hand.
In the streets the newsboys were just beginning to shout their extras.
THE END
About the Author
Vincent Starrett (1886–1974) was a Chicago journalist who become one of the world’s foremost experts on Sherlock Holmes. A books columnist for the Chicago Tribune, he also wrote biographies of authors such as Robert Louis Stevenson and Ambrose Bierce. A founding member of the Baker Street Irregulars, Starrett is best known for writing The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1933), an imaginative biography of the famous sleuth.
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Copyright © 1932 by Vincent Starrett
Cover design by Andy Ross
ISBN: 978-1-5040-6597-9
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The End of Mr. Garment Page 20
