The Viola Brothers Shore Mystery

by Viola Brothers Shore

  Well, a $60,000 pendant can’t just disappear. At least I made up my mind it couldn’t. It was in that room. None of us had gone out. And none of us were going out until that pendant turned up. The old lady kept saying, “It can’t be gone—” as though I had invented the whole thing. I guess it was like Dr. Marcus’ vine theory. I’d start defending myself and we’d get in an argument and lose sight of the one important fact—that the pendant was not there.

  The tip of Willette’s nose always twitched when she was scared. Uncle Digby was turning over the same three coffee cups, as though he felt it would look funny not to be doing something. And Alice kept repeating in a worried little voice, “It’ll turn up—”

  “Be too bad, wouldn’t it,” sneered Teddy who was lounging against the window with his hands in his pockets, “if poor old Joel had to pay for it without having anything to show for his money?”

  “You’re damn right!” I said and closing the door on Abraham, I turned the key. Then I went over and locked the second door and put the key in my pocket. They were all watching me—resentful, afraid, curious or contemptuous—but I took my time coming back to the mantel. Alice had a hunch of what I was going to do, but I avoided her eyes and stood facing the others, measuring them. Uncle Digby looked a little less sleepy than usual, Willette a little more scared. The old lady, exactly as usual, was ready with her gloves up. Teddy, I noticed, was not looking bored. He seemed to be waiting with a sort of mocking interest for what his brother-in-law, that dull, lowbred real estate fellow was going to do.

  I lit a cigarette and then I let them have it, weighing each word. “That pendant is in this room. And I want it back.”

  Nobody said anything. I didn’t expect them to. I didn’t expect anybody to hold it up and get his hand slapped. So I went on—“It is ten minutes to nine—and before the clock strikes, that pendant is going to be back on that coffee table. If it isn’t, I’m phoning for the police.”

  The old lady blazed first—she always did. “You’ll do no such thing, Joel Quinn! We’ll have no police and no newspapermen in this house!” She was furious at my mentioning police on the sacred Barroway preserves—not at the fact that there was a thief in the sacred Barroway family!

  [“Why do you say that?” For the first time the dentist broke in. “If you’ll hold on a while,” I informed him, “you’ll see why—” and I went on with the story.]

  Even Alice was against me. She took off the ruby and handed it to me without a word. But I knew what she meant—‘Consider that you gave me the pendant, and stop making all this fuss.’ Alice took a different view later, when she began to see the truth about her family. But at the time she was ashamed of me—ashamed that I could behave without taste—and not that they could behave without morals. “Please, Joel,” she said, “I’m sure the pendant will turn up somewhere.” They were all sure it would, but I stood my ground. And by that time there were just about five minutes left to the hour. I turned off the main lights.

  “There are just five minutes left,” I said. “At two minutes of nine I snap off this lamp and whoever has that pendant will have time and darkness to put it back on the coffee table. I’m not interested in knowing who took it, but I advise whoever did, to put it back. Because at the first stroke of the clock I turn on the light and if it isn’t there, I call the police.

  “Another thing—” I held up my hand to cut off discussion. “Instead of spending money to keep the Barroway name looking clean, I’ll spend more than the pendant is worth to publicize this thing, so that it won’t be possible to unload that opal. It will be hot in every city on both sides of the Atlantic. And I’ll spend another Sixty Thousand to put whoever took it behind bars.

  “And let me tell you one thing more—in case you think I won’t go through with it—that Alice will be able to twist me around her finger. I know exactly how much you all hate me. Mrs. Barroway can never forgive me for being the son of a common cop. Teddy hates me because I’ve just refused to part with enough money to keep him out of the country, in the style to which he’s accustomed, for as long as it will take his current mess to cool off. Digby knows that I paid back $400 to Abraham and threatened to fire him if he ever lent Mr. Digby another nickel. Even Willette blames me because her mother is trying to marry her off to Hodgett’s Forty Millions, and I happened to be the one who introduced my old boss.

  “So it gives me great pleasure to let you know that I think you’re a lot of leeches and cowards and bullies and it will give me even greater pleasure to turn any one of you over to the police. I’m sorry for Alice, but she’s got to wake up and realize that a name is only as good as the people that carry it—and the people are only as good as their principles. Since she took the name of Quinn, that’s her responsibility, and the hell with Barroway if its owners can’t keep it shipshape.

  “So now you know. You haven’t a chance to get away with it. And you’ve got just 120 seconds to put it back—”

  And I switched out the light.

  It was so still in the room that every tick of the big French clock took a nick out of stretched nerves. I began to count along with the clock.

  While I told off the first thirty seconds there was literally not another sound in the room. But as I kept on I could begin to hear things—the wheezy breathing of Uncle Digby who always got more asthmatic under pressure—and someone walking around on the rug—I imagined it was Teddy since I hadn’t heard anyone else get up.

  Before I got to eighty, the Gobelin chair squeaked twice. And right after that there was a little jingle of metal. Somebody gasped but I recognized the tinkle of one thin bracelet against another. About three counts later somebody swallowed audibly—as though a gulp of air had come up against a rigid windpipe.

  It was exactly when I said One Hundred that the sound came—the one we were waiting for. It was no more than a tiny muffled clink of metal on china. But after that the silence in the room was so tense you could feel it throb. I kept on counting until the clock gave the warning gasp it always sends out before it strikes. From somewhere in the darkness it called forth an echo. And as the first stroke of nine screamed through the silence, I switched on the light.

  Before I bent toward the coffee table, I knew what I would see. Alice’s eyes, wide and fixed on her empty cup, forewarned me. There in the saucer lay the opal pendant…

  * * * *

  “And there,” I said to my dinner guests, “you have the story.”

  “Is that all—?” Zoe turned her disappointed face to the dentist.

  He laughed. “You insist on having somebody killed? It seems to me Mr. Quinn has told us a fine yarn and told it very well. You must admit he’s given us a very complex situation.”

  “Well, of course, there’s that—” admitted Zoe reluctantly. “You never found out who took it?” Alice shook her head. “Well, I suppose it would be fun to try and figure it out. Unless—?” Again she looked at Alice.

  “I’d like to know,” Alice said slowly, and repeated, “I’d like to know. It made me quite miserable for a long time. Especially because of Willette. She was so unhappy anyway—and just about that time the boy was dismissed from his teaching job—it was a civil rights case and the papers were full of it. Poor Willette had nobody to turn to. Nobody. Not even me. It was all bottled up in her and one day it just exploded and she went off and married him. Without a cent. Without even taking her clothes. And to this day there’s a wall between us—because she always thought I thought she took the pendant. But of course I didn’t…”

  “Who, did you think, took it?” inquired the dentist, but she shrugged, avoiding his eyes. “I don’t know—”

  “Well, if you want to know what I think—” began Zoe.

  “I’d like to hear what Doc thinks,” I said. “I’d like to see how this analysis is done. How we get the vines out of the way and dig down to the roots.”

  “Not knowing the people
—” the dentist had his alibi ready—“or all their circumstances, it’s hard to judge what is irrelevant.”

  “Well, let’s take them.” Zoe was a pretty practical young woman. “Willette you think is out? But Mr. Quinn said nobody ever paid any attention to Willette—wouldn’t that give her the best opportunity? And she looked more scared than usual. If her mother was putting on pressure about Hodgett’s Forty Millions, maybe she saw the pendant as the way out—?”

  The dentist thought that reasoning was pretty superficial. “I believe you said, Mr. Quinn, you were leaning against the mantel, watching them all? It must have taken steady nerves to try anything under your shrewd and observing eyes. And if Willette was so timid she was afraid to speak up for the man she loved—”

  “One minute—” I interrupted. “I’m not accusing Willette, but just for the record—for the ‘scientific analysis’—any psychologist will tell you that very timid people, if they’re driven too far, will turn into lions—”

  “And she was attracted to the pendant—” Zoe had a real sleuth-story nose. “And Mr. Quinn heard her bracelets jangling in the dark—”

  The doctor shook his head. “Willette was in love with a poor school teacher and only dread of her family kept her from marrying him. When she did finally run off, she didn’t even take the clothes that belonged to her. So I don’t think money meant a great deal to her. The pendant wouldn’t have solved her problem anyway. Even if she knew how to cash it in, that wouldn’t have removed the family pressure, when the other man had Forty Millions. I don’t believe those were the circumstances under which the haunted little white rabbit would have turned into the lion. However, don’t let’s argue about psychological shadings—”

  “I don’t see how we can get rid of irrelevancies—” Zoe insisted, “any better than by eliminating them. What about Mrs. Barroway. She needed money, didn’t she?”

  “Always.” Alice smiled. “I never knew my mother when she didn’t need money—and didn’t manage to get it somehow. I know my father used to say there was only one thing equal to mother’s capacity for wanting things, and that was her capacity for taking them.”

  “Without having to steal them,” suggested the doctor. “Mr. and Mrs. Quinn probably denied her very little. I take it you paid for the Gobelins? And she had no idea you were contemplating leaving the family roof?”

  “We never spoke of it until after that anniversary,” Alice remembered. Poor Alice, she found out the hard way that I was right—that they did hate me—and her too—and that the house wasn’t big enough for us all. When her mother had her stroke, she was still so bitter at Alice that she didn’t want them to send for us…

  “Just the same,” Zoe brought out, “Teddy was in trouble you said—he needed money. And Mr. Quinn had refused to fork over. The Gobelin chair squeaked twice—maybe when she leaned forward to drop something on the coffee table—and when she leaned back. Maybe she didn’t realize it would be a hard thing to cash in—”

  “A shrewd business woman?” inquired the doctor. “Wouldn’t she have taken the diamonds?”

  “When do we begin to look for that underlying cause—those roots?”

  I reminded them.

  “Well,” said the doctor, “you gave us a pretty good picture of the way the family would look to the Man from Mars. And I think under that picture are roots and motive.”

  “The Profit Motive?” I couldn’t resist needling him.

  He ignored it. “It shouldn’t be hard to figure who had the most to gain from the theft—and also possessed the character to attempt it.”

  “Well, not Uncle Digby!” Zoe began positively. “Although he was a chronic roulette player and always short of money—”

  “But so lazy—” the doctor pointed out. “Too lazy to move when they wanted to search under the cushions.”

  “Oh, but wait! Maybe he had another reason for not moving and maybe he was only pretending to be asleep! And if Mr. Quinn had just cut off his last source of supply—”

  “Uncle Digby seemed to think in very modest terms of a ten or a twenty.” The doctor accepted his third cup of black coffee. “And he never showed any desire to change his habits or enlarge his orbit. Besides, he was a habitual gambler and women aren’t the only ones who consider opals unlucky.”

  “Well, the root was money, surely,” announced Zoe. “The only trouble is, they all needed money. So the question is, who needed it most and who had the intestinal stamina to grab it.”

  “I always thought it was Uncle Digby,” Alice confessed a little wistfully.

  “You mean you always hoped it was because he meant so much less to you than—your brother perhaps?”

  The doctor had her there. “You know you really thought it was Ted,” I accused her and she did not deny it.

  Zoe jumped to her feet, demitasse in hand. “Well, of course he’s fairly obvious. That’s why we saved him for the last. Even if the rest didn’t realize how bad a jam he was in, he must have. You admit that, Alice.”

  “That was just after Bing Bailey had found out about Ted and Frieda Bailey,” Alice admitted unhappily. “So Ted already knew that Bing was determined to divorce her and make him marry her. But I don’t believe he realized just how determined Bing was. Even with the gun pressed against his ribs, I don’t think he really believed that Bing would shoot. In fact he laughed—” Funny thing, family ties. He had never brought any pleasure into his sister’s life and yet she could still suffer over his pain.

  Zoe set down her empty cup conclusively. “Teddy is certainly the most likely one to have taken it.”

  “But the least likely one to have put it back,” the doctor pointed out. “He knew that room and there must have been a hundred places where he could have dropped a pendant on the chance that the police would not really be called—or if they were that they wouldn’t find it. Even if they did, they couldn’t have pinned it on him. He had taken chances all his life. Consider him, walking up and down that room in the dark, reckless, defiant, stubborn, hating everybody and particularly his brother-in-law. He died because he laughed into a gun. I wonder whether Mr. Quinn’s bluff—or even his threat—would have made him meekly replace the jewel. It’s not impossible, of course, but I just wonder…”

  For a moment Zoe looked stumped. Then she banged her hand on the table excitedly. “Good lord! What about Abraham? Didn’t you say he had just served the brandy? And he looked under the cushions, didn’t he? Suppose it had dropped there and he found it and—” She looked around hopefully.

  “I’ve known Abraham all my life,” said Alice. “He always managed to save money and there was one time when we were living on Abraham’s savings. We used to tease him about being thrifty, but he always said somebody ought to have a dollar put by, and obviously the Barroways never would. I’d stake my life on Abraham—” she finished solemnly.

  “I guess he’s not a very likely suspect,” Zoe admitted a little shamefacedly. “In fact none of them are. That’s the whole trouble. They’re all possible, but not one is probable.” She looked around ruefully. “I guess we haven’t been much help.”

  “Oh, but you have!” insisted Alice, who is always gracious. “About Willette, I mean. Maybe the reason I never could break through to her was that I wasn’t convinced enough. Now I am. And I’m very grateful—truly. The rest really doesn’t matter. Ted and Mother are gone and Uncle Digby—” Her shrug dismissed him, together with the whole puzzle. But her eyes gave the gesture the lie. Poor Alice, her vines aren’t easily uprooted—

  “I hate to give up—” sighed Zoe.

  “Why should you?” the doctor demanded. “It’s a great story. You should write it.”

  “Without an answer? Or a villain? What could I write?”

  “What Mr. Quinn understood so well and told so graphically. Six people celebrating together, presenting the appearance of a happy family circle, rich,
wellborn, well-favored—in fact, the darlings of fortune. Almost casually a bauble disappears. And suddenly all the rot and corruption come to the surface—envy—sycophancy—greed—one iron will trying to break or absorb all the others—mutual mistrust—contempt—resentment—hate. But through this very eruption, the ones who are worth saving escape. And their escape contributes to the final dissolution of the others—by death—by violence—by slow decay. Why, it’s an absorbing social document!”

  “And Society is the villain. I see what you mean—” said Zoe. But as she went with Alice to get their wraps, it was evident she was not satisfied.

  I wasn’t either. “Very clever. Dr. Marcus, but I don’t think that analytical searchlight brought up anything new. I like concrete results. However, I admire the way you sidestepped it. Another brandy?”

  “Thank you, Mr. Quinn. You understand, I didn’t like to be too explicit before Mrs. Quinn. She is a very sensitive, very sentimental woman. Besides, I couldn’t help feeling a certain sympathy for the person who took the pendant.”

  “Come on—don’t be cryptic with me. I want to know who did it and how you figured it out. That is, if you have figured it out. And don’t forget that Profit Motive.”

  The doctor looked into his glass of brandy. “The profit motive, of course, is all over the yarn—and it provides a lot of mixed threads which haven’t anything to do with the real purpose of the theft.” He held up his glass and squinted through it at the light.

  “The basic problem, Mr. Quinn, was the one which the theft did solve—the problem of saving what was best from the inevitable corruption of that atmosphere. I’m glad you got her away before that house destroyed her utterly. It was clever psychology you used, to break their hold on her. And it was cleverly told too. But obviously you were the only person in the room who had a really impelling motive and the necessary character. No wonder you are a successful business man. Of course, there are people who might cavil at a certain dishonesty in your method—a certain callous disregard as to where the chips might fall. But then, that’s what business is, isn’t it Mr. Quinn?”