As I reeled off each item of description, he converted it to code on a couple of machine file index cards. When both cards were completed, he took them into the room where the Bertillon files were kept. In five minutes he was back with two stacks of photographs, more than a hundred photos in each stack.
I tackled the pile denoting men of the English lord’s general description, while Mouldy skimmed through pictures of short, squat and dark criminals. Greene found his man a quarter way through.
“Jeeze!” he said. “This baby is quite a character!”
I took the card from his hand. It was my friend Harry, all right, both front and profile, and had been taken at San Quentin five years before. His full name was Harry Sommerfield, but he was more commonly known as Harry the Horse for reasons not explained in the file. He was wanted in New York for prison break, in Michigan for arson and homicide, and in Illinois for just homicide. The FBI also wanted him for income-tax evasion.
Ten minutes later I found my man. His name was Thomas “Dude” Garrity, and his record made Harry look like a Sunday school teacher. Apparently he had never made a graven image, but aside from that he had managed to break all of the ten commandments at least once, and to have invented a couple of new crimes Moses must have neglected to copy down.
While we pored over the pictures, the blond cop had again become absorbed in his magazine. I jerked him back from the world of romance to the dull routine of real life by tossing the two cards in his lap.
“Those are the lads,” I told him.
“Fine,” he said, then glanced at the typed notations on the backs of the cards and pursed his lips in a silent whistle.
“You really picked a couple of tough ones,” he said. “We’ll get it out on the air tonight, and by morning we’ll have pictures for the whole force.”
“Good,” I said. “Leave a note for Inspector Day that I’ll see him or phone him sometime tomorrow.”
XII
WHEN GREENE DROPPED ME in front of my flat, I borrowed his army automatic and holster, since my P-38 was still in the possession of the two gunmen. Standing on the sidewalk, I checked the load by pulling back the slide. It locked open, indicating emptiness.
“You knuckle-head!” I yelled at him. “What am I supposed to do with an empty gun?”
“Guess I forgot to reload it,” he said mildly.
Fishing in his coat pocket, he produced a full clip. I traded him for the empty and went in without even saying thanks.
Possibly I was still jittery, for I opened my apartment door with the gun in my hand and the safety off. My dramatics proved unnecessary, however, for the place was empty.
I locked the door, opened all the windows, and in a few moments the place cooled off from boiling to a mere ninety-nine. After cleaning Mouldy’s pistol, taking a cool shower and a warm shampoo, I went to bed.
My mental alarm clock was off in the opposite direction the next morning. I set it for eight and woke at eleven. By the time I had shaved, dressed, and fixed myself eggs and coffee, it was noon.
I wore my green gabardine, which was the next lightest suit I owned after the tan one ruined by dust, and it was tailored snug through the chest. The bulge left by the .45 under my arm left little doubt about what I carried there.
The first thing I saw as I stepped out the main entrance of the apartment house was the yellow convertible parked across the street in the shade of an elm. When Mouldy saw me, he grinned like a dog wagging its tail. Resignedly I crossed the street, opened the car door, and climbed in.
“If I can’t get rid of you, you may as well chauffeur me,” I said. “How long you been waiting?”
“Since eight. Figured you wouldn’t be up before then.” “Had lunch?”
“Three sandwiches.” He pointed to the drugstore on the corner.
“Drive me out to Willow Dale.”
We drove in silence for ten minutes before I asked, “Didn’t you tell Fausta I wanted you to let me alone?” “Couldn’t. She wasn’t there.”
I lapsed into moody silence for the rest of the trip.
As I was showing Mouldy which drive to turn into, he said suddenly, “Joe, the bartender, said Fausta and that girl went off somewheres in a taxi.”
“What?” I yelled so loudly, he jammed on the brakes, nearly putting me on the hood.
“Don’t do that,” he said reproachfully, moving the car forward again.
As I started to open my mouth the second time, the Lawson swimming-pool came into sight, and I shut off what I had meant to say when I saw the two bathing-suited figures at the water’s edge.
“Stop by the pool,” I told Mouldy.
When he stopped, I got out and waved him on toward the parking-area behind the house. Then I crossed the short strip of lawn to stand with hands on my hips looking down at Fausta and Grace Lawson.
“She refused to stay at El Patio, Manny,” Fausta said quickly. “I could not keep her by force, so I did the next best thing. I went along.” I shifted my gaze to Grace.
“I couldn’t do it, Mr. Moon,” Grace said just as quickly. “I got to thinking if I had to suspect my own family and my closest friends, there’s not much point in living anyway. Then Don’s funeral was this morning, and everyone would have wondered where I was when all the rest of the family was there. It’s not Fausta’s fault. I made her let me go to the funeral and come home afterward.”
I didn’t say anything, because there wasn’t anything to say.
The Negro houseboy appeared around the edge of the weeping willows which screened us from the house. On a tray he carried two bottles of Coke and two glasses containing ice. As he neared, I noticed the tray also contained a shot glass of dark liquor, which I surmised to be rum, since rum and Coke is Fausta’s pet drink.
“Afternoon, sir,” he said to mèi
“How are you, Edmund?”
Mixing Fausta’s drink first, Edmund handed it to her, then poured Grace’s plain Coke over the ice in her glass.
I asked Grace, “Is that boy of yours coming in tonight?”
“Arnold? He’s here now. We’re both so upset about this, we’re going to cut for a day or two. And we couldn’t go to class today anyway, on account of the funeral. Arnold’s up changing into swim trunks.”
I accompanied Edmund back to the house. Arnold Tate, wearing swim trunks and carrying a towel, was coming down the stairs as I started up.
“Let’s go up to your room for a minute,” I suggested.
His eyebrows rose, then he shrugged his lean shoulders and turned to lead me upstairs. Closing the door of his room behind us, I put my back against it.
“Sit down, Arnold,” I invited. “I have a question for
Almost as though he knew what was coming, he perched himself on the side of the bed.
“There are five servants and six relatives and friends who might be responsible for the attempts on Grace’s life, Arnold. But of all of them, you’re the only one with an alibi for the time of Don’s death—presuming he was murdered, of course.”
He waited without saying anything.
“Isn’t that right?” I asked.
“You’re doing the talking,” he said without inflection. “I assume that’s a rhetorical question.”
I shook my head. “No. I want you to tell me your alibi.”
The fine bead of sweat on his brow could have been from the heat, but a light breeze moved the curtains, and I was not particularly uncomfortable in a coat. However, his voice was perfectly controlled.
“You lay excellent traps, Mr. Moon,” he said, “but I happened to phone my roommate that I was cutting today and tomorrow.”
I conceded the first hole.
“Then I’ll change my question. Where were you last Sunday night and early Monday morning?”
“No one asked me about it before, you know,” he said. “I never said I went back to school that night. Everyone else said I did, and I simply failed to correct the misapprehension. That’s hardly the same as lying, you
know.”
I waved aside the distinction. “According to Grace she dropped you at the bus depot in time to catch the seven-fifteen, but you took the two a.m. That leaves nearly seven hours to explain.”
“Explain why?” he asked. “Since the police say Don was a suicide, no crime was committed during that seven hours.”
I regarded him steadily for a moment. “Maybe the police will ask the coroner to reconsider his verdict when they hear about your manufactured alibi.” I put my hand on the doorknob. “I’ll let you explain to Inspector Warren Day.”
“Hey, wait a minute,” he said. “I didn’t manufacture any alibi.”
“Tell the inspector that. Maybe he’ll believe you. I don’t.”
For a long time he regarded me broodingly. “All right,” he said finally. “It isn’t important enough to be stubborn about. I only kept quiet to save Grace and Ann any more grief than they already had. You see, I had an appointment with Don that night, and I know he committed suicide.”
I took my hand from the doorknob and blinked my eyes rapidly. “You mean you saw him?”
“Of course not!” he said impatiently. “That I would have told the police. And if I saw him, you think I’d have let his body lie down there in the sun for a week?”
“Take it in your own words,” I told him. “I’m temporarily out of questions.”
His face flushed almost imperceptibly, and he looked the slightest bit embarrassed. “It’s kind of silly, really. That Sunday Don got me aside right after dinner, and shortly before I was scheduled to leave with Grace, and asked me to meet him that night. He said he was in trouble and had to talk to me, but didn’t want Grace or anyone else to know. He wanted me to go in to the depot with Grace as planned, but instead of taking the bus I was to meet him at midnight at a tavern he named. They open at midnight Sundays, you know.”
I nodded to indicate I knew.
“I didn’t really want to talk to him, for to be frank, I never particularly liked Don. But after all he was Grace’s brother, and I felt some obligation to help him if I could. He seemed so deadly serious about it, I was impressed despite the sophomoric intrigue involving our clandestine meeting. So to make a long story short, I met him as he proposed. I presume he waited until eleven, when everyone in the house would be asleep normally, then sneaked out and caught the eleven-ten local bus that goes right past the house.
“We had a few beers apiece in a back booth and just sat there talking until the tavern closed again at one-thirty. They only stay open for an hour and a half after midnight Sunday, you know.”
I nodded again, though he was not improving my education, for probably no one in town was more familiar with the opening- and closing-hours of taverns than I.
“Then he walked with me to the bus depot, and we talked until I got on the bus about ten of two. That’s the last I saw of him.”
“Where was this tavern?”
“Fourth and Market. I don’t remember the name, but it has a neon sign saying, ‘Bar and Grill.’ “
“All right,” I said. “What was the trouble Don was in?”
“It was all mixed up. He seemed to think everything was wrong. Partly he was bitter about his father having his marriage annulled, and said he hated the memory of his father and was still in love with the girl he married, and always would be. Then he began to talk rather wildly about marrying another girl, a domestic of some sort, I gathered, but it seemed she didn’t love him, or did love him and wouldn’t admit it—I couldn’t quite make out which. He got awfully excited about it, but when I asked how he could be in love with both his former wife and another girl, he called me a stupid ass, then immediately apologized and dropped the subject. His whole discourse was so close to incoherent, I’m making it sound much more lucid than it was, because most of the time I hadn’t the faintest notion of what he was talking about.
“Then he switched to castigating himself. He let me know that if he’d had an ounce of spunk, he would never have let his father break up his marriage, and if he weren’t a useless heel who couldn’t make his own way and had to depend on inherited money, he wouldn’t have let the old man’s will prevent him from marrying six months ago, instead of waiting till he was twenty-one, whatever he meant by that. He said he wasn’t even a man physically, and then he asked a peculiar question. He asked me what I’d do if I discovered I had leukemia.”
Arnold paused for a moment, as though organizing his thoughts. “I asked him what leukemia was, and he said an incurable blood disease. Then he said he didn’t necessarily mean leukemia, but any incurable disease. What would I do if I knew I had only six months to live? I said I’d wait six months and die, which apparently was the wrong answer, for he became angry and called me a stupid ass again.
“But immediately he apologized the second time and began to give me what I assume he thought was an explanation for the whole performance. He had to talk to someone, he said, and he wasn’t close enough to Grace to make her understand, and the only two persons he loved he didn’t want to hurt. I gathered these were either his former wife and the domestic he wanted to marry, or the domestic and Ann. I never quite decided which, except that the domestic was one.
“It was at this point he began to hint at suicide. Not that he actually threatened it, but he went off on a tirade about what little he had to live for and how much better off all concerned would be if he were dead. Somewhere I’ve read that people who talk about suicide are not likely to commit it, so instead of trying to dissuade him, as I suspected he wanted, I got flippant and quoted poetry at him.”
Arnold flushed slightly, as though ashamed to confess he could quote poetry. “It was a particularly inappropriate thing to do, now that I look back. Rather like daring him to carry out his threat. I did it without thinking, for I was growing bored with him. The poem I quoted just popped into my head, but I couldn’t have picked one better calculated to infuriate him had I sat up all night thinking about it.”
Arnold’s face grew even redder, and when I made no comment, he went on reluctantly. “It was from G. K. Chesterton’s A Ballade of Suicide. Maybe you know it.”
He looked at me inquiringly, and when I shook my head he recited in a low voice:
“The gallows in my garden, people say,
Is new and neat and adequately tall.
I tie the noose on in a knowing way
As one that knots his necktie for a ball;
But just as all the neighbors … on the wall …
Are drawing a long breath to shout ‘Hurray!’
The strangest whim has seized me … After all
I think I will not hang myself today.”
After a moment of silence I said, “And that made him mad?”
“Absolutely furious. And this time when he finished calling me names, he didn’t apologize. When he ran down, he assumed a politely frigid air and maintained it clear up to the time my bus pulled out. Ever since we discovered the body I’ve been blaming myself for not talking him out of it, or at least refraining from quoting Chesterton. I keep telling myself I could have prevented his death by doing so.”
Arnold drew a deep breath and rubbed the towel across his sweating forehead. “That’s the whole story, Mr. Moon. And in deference to the feelings of Grace and Ann, I think you can see why I failed to mention it after the coroner decided it was suicide. Of course if the verdict had been homicide, I would have had to tell what I knew. Obviously Don came back home, wrote his farewell note, and jumped off the bluff sometime between two and daybreak.”
I asked slowly, “Is this what you were about to tell yesterday when Grace sidetracked you and you slammed into the house?”
As soon as I asked the question, I knew it couldn’t be. A moment later I knew I should not have asked it, for his expression changed from surprise to thoughtfulness and then to a kind of eager wariness.
“That’s right,” he said.
I tried to undo the harm. “But you said you hadn’t mentioned any of this to Grace
,” I shot at him.
“Did I say that?” he asked in a surprised voice. “You must have misunderstood me. I meant to say I didn’t mention it to the police in order to prevent Grace and Ann from becoming upset over the publicity. But of course I tell Grace everything.” He grinned at me blandly.
At that moment there carried through the open window from the direction of the swimming-pool the excited voice of Dr. Douglas Lawson.
“Ahoy, the house!” he shouted. “Help! Help!”
Then faintly we heard a splash, as though someone had dived into the pool.
XIII
HANDICAPPED BY A FALSE LEG and nearly ten years on Arnold, I was trailing him fifteen yards when we rounded the weeping willows which hid the pool from the house. Coming behind us Ann Lawson and Edmund ran show position and out-of-the-money respectively.
Pantingly we all gathered around the tableau at the edge of the pool. Grace Lawson, dripping water, lay on her stomach unconscious, while Dr. Lawson, in swim trunks and also dripping, kneeled astride her back administering artificial respiration. Fausta Moreni stretched on her back with her small feet dangling in the water and her empty glass, overturned, lying by her side. Near her head lay the glass used by Grace.
My first impression was that both women had started to drown and had been pulled out by Dr. Lawson. I rushed to Fausta with the intention of rolling her over and administering artificial respiration, but when I touched her body, I discovered her suit was dry. She was breathing heavily but evenly.
Without touching Fausta’s glass, I sniffed at it. Then, with a thumb, I pushed up one eyelid, let it close again, and stood up from my kneeling position. I returned to the group around Grace just as the doctor stopped his rhythmic movements and rose with a puzzled frown.
“There doesn’t seem to have been enough water in her to worry about,” he said. “But she’s out like a light.”
“Knockout drops,” I explained. “In both their drinks.”
The entire group stared at me stupidly. Dr. Lawson was the first to recover. Dropping to one knee, he rolled Grace over and thumbed up an eyelid. Then he listened to her heart, felt her pulse, and rose again.
Gallows in My Garden Page 10
