by Otto Penzler
And again.
And seven times more. And I sat thinking myself quite mad and quite a silly fool to be sending those rings echoing through a house in which there was no one to answer. The eighth ring.
What kind of little play are you acting out inside yourself, dear Ellen Lathrop? I heard a voice murmur—not unkindly—inside my head.
And then the distant receiver was picked up.
O, I could hear the aching silence of that fogbound bedroom in the receiver at my ear.
I could hear a breathing in the phone, too. But whose? In God’s name whose? Tell me quickly before I am struck mad forever!
When the voice spoke I fell back in the chair in a half faint.
It was he. Yes, it was his voice. Charlie Gribble. The Brown Recluse.
And, to my even greater horror and dismay, he seemed, for the first time in years, quite affable and even talkative.
Ellen, he said. How nice it is to hear you. How are you. For some curious reason I was thinking about you a quarter hour or so ago. I meant to call you.
Are you—are you all right?
Not really, he said then, in fateful, unmistakable words of doom, though unawares of that. I’m concerned. Jim Smitherman, a colleague of mine from Wheeling, has been here for supper and we’ve been working since then on those old Bow Chemical mineral right suits you may have read about in the Glory Argus. Well, it was warm this afternoon when we came home from the bank (Why had I not seen them!) and Jim left his coat in my office. Around ten I asked for a file of documents Jim had brought down with him. It wasn’t here. Obviously, Jim had left it at the bank. Jim knew exactly where the file was and offered to go back for it. By then this plagued river weather had changed and the fog was up and it was chilly. Damned chilly. I loaned Jim something to wear and he took it and left, and it’s been an hour and he’s not back yet.
I began to laugh then. O, I caught it in time, but I am sure he distinctly heard my laugh. And then I said some things I can’t quite remember and hung up. Somehow I made it to bed and took some Veronal and slept—astonishingly untormented by the dream of having killed the wrong person.
At daybreak the chain reaction of certain incredible and astonishing events began. I settled down in father’s cool library—like a forest cover of ancient oaks—with a bottle of Yardley’s Smelling Salts and a box of Kleenex for my tears until sunrise.
Soon the fog would burn off—roll away and wisp away like the departing ghosts of some long white night. Morning sun would filter through the high canopy of maples and sycamores and elms and spin gold coins on the glowing green lawn. Sun motes and dandelions would intermingle there. I stared out through the front window, beyond the tiny statue of Michelangelo’s “David” which father always kept there on the deep, white sill. Every morning I sat and stared there at a certain inevitable, unvarying matutinal event that would take place. It would happen almost simultaneously with the striking of father’s old Dutch clock. I watched. I waited. Yes, here he came—weaving and stumbling along the uneven brick path: even on this fatal, fateful morning here he came—Ort Holliday, the town drunk, making his way home at sunrise with a skinful of cheap corncob wine or some foul, resinous bootleg distillation.
He was rounding Twelfth Street now and making his way unsteadily to the left and up Water Street toward my house, toward—yes, toward the gigantic old elm beneath which lay, on the wet, glittering bricks—
I watched, enthralled, rapt in suspense as he came closer. He stumbled once where the sidewalk tilted up suddenly and then steadied himself against Mart Brown’s big willow and came on, past the street lamp now competing dismally with the misty, yet powerful sun. On and on. Stumbled, staggered, and leaned. And on.
I thought foolishly for a moment he was going to stumble on the body or that he would somehow stagger around it, seeing it but fancying it was merely a sample of the delirium that was waiting for him in his little shack down below the zinc smelter where Water Street dwindles out and is lost amid mesamerican memories. Surely, he had seen it by now! Good God, he has passed it. No. No, he hasn’t. He has seen it. He rubs his eyes, his swollen, sweating face. He stares again. He stoops unsteadily to have a better look. A cunning look replaces the fear on his face. He smiles tipsily, looks around to see if anyone may be watching at this strange prebreakfast hour when only coal miners and drunks are up and about. He pauses, his right hand poised unsteadily like the bill of a robin about to pounce on a worm. Now he makes his move. Swiftly the dirty hand darts down and under the dirty tweed cape, the inner jacket pocket, the inside pocket. The purse is in his hands now as he greedily snaps it open, plucks out a rather thick wad of bills, and without counting them stuffs them into his own coat pocket from which peeps the stained corner of a dirty bandanna. He rises, smiling, his raddled, smeary face working in slow emotion as he tries to persuade himself that his fortune is real. He seems curious as to how his obliging victim died. He leans again—almost as if suddenly sober, almost as though arranging things not as they are but as they should be.
Yes, yes, he nods to himself. Yes, yes.
His gray lips working wetly.
He stoops then and picks up a loose, mossy brick at the edge of the stacked, ornamental pavement. He sees blood on it—blood which has coiled oily across the walk from the wound somewhere up under the huddled, staring head.
He is standing there, the victim’s purse already in his pocket, a brick smeared with gouts of the victim’s own blood in his right hand, a memoryless vacant smile on his dissipated face—yes, standing there so when Sheriff Voitle and his deputy, on a last tour before shift change, came round the corner of Twelfth and Water Street in their Plymouth cruiser.
He was, of course, arrested, advised of his rights, arraigned and locked up in the Apple County jail.
I did something that morning and afternoon I have never done in my life. I went to father’s little wine cabinet with its little brass key which chirps like a golden bird in the lock when you turn it. I saw that only one bottle of father’s wine was left—the Bordeaux. So I selected one I had purchased and put there five years before—a perfectly delectable 1971 Château Calon-Ségur, Saint-Estèphe.
I drank all that morning. I drank past lunch while all around me Glory buzzed and whispered over the murder within its sacrosanct city limits. I drank until—at four that afternoon—I suddenly realized that the phone was ringing and had been ringing for, perhaps, two or three minutes. I did not stagger. I think, perhaps, that it is, moreover, quite impossible to stagger on one leg. I made my way quite steadily to the phone and picked it up.
It was he—the unspeakable—the dark, the dreary, the intended dead—the Brown Recluse.
I suppose you’ve heard, he said.
About the murder? Yes.
I was pleased and delighted at how carefully and distinctly my voice sounded. I was really quite drunk, you see, and I somehow believe that the adrenaline already in me from the excitement of the night had counteracted the wine. I had never spoken more distinctly.
I don’t suppose you saw anything, Ellen, he said then. You’re generally up and about at the time the murder took place. Sitting in the ladder-back chair in your father’s library. At the window.
How well, I said, you remember all my night habits, Charlie.
Don’t be unpleasant, Ellen, he said. Besides I didn’t call you about that.
What then?
There’s to be a special meeting of the Irregulars tonight at sundown. I think you might like to attend.
I was silent a moment.
What is the occasion? No meeting was scheduled until the fall meeting in October.
The occasion, he said, is the awarding of the Persian Slipper. This time in perpetuity.
To whom? Gene Voitle, I suppose. He solved the crime, I am told.
That’s the plan, he said.
Well, what a windfall for Gene, I said. I mean he didn’t really have to do any real detection. Not in the manner of the Master. He just happened
round the corner and his two eyes saw Ort Holliday standing there, the brick in his hand, the purse in his pocket.
That is why he is not going to be awarded the Persian Slipper.
Oh?
Well, wait, Ellen. Be at the meeting tonight. I don’t want to spoil my denouement to this strange series of events. Be at the meeting. At sundown.
I shall be at the hotel at six at the latest, I said.
O, no, said the Brown Recluse. Not at the hotel.
What do you mean?
I mean this session of the Baker Street Irregulars isn’t going to be held at 221B.
Where then?
Why, in front of your house, Ellen, as a matter of fact. At the scene of the murder.
Why there? I whispered.
Because it is there, said the Brown Recluse, that I am going to demonstrate that Ort Holliday did not—and could not possibly—have murdered Jim Smitherman.
Oh? How? Who then—?
You always were impatient, Ellen. A probing, curious mind, you have.
You know then?
Of course, I know.
I mean, you know who really murdered your friend?
I do, he said. And I shall prove it. At the big elm which grows in front of your house, Ellen. At tonight’s emergency meeting of our dedicated little group.
My mouth opened but the words wouldn’t work. I suddenly felt a severe headache. From the wine. From the pressure which seemed to be tightening, like a silver band, around my perspiring brow. From I knew not what.
Are you there, Ellen?
Yes. Yes. Yes, I’ll be there. At six, I cried out and slammed down the receiver.
So he knew. How could he know? Had he anticipated such a crime and followed Smitherman’s progress through the thick white night? Nonsense. Had he set the whole thing up to trap me?—knowing I would mistake the brown cloaked figure and—O, I must pull myself together. These are chimeras, unbelievable and impossible conjectures.
I drank coffee. Mother’s old blue-speckled coffee pot steamed and puffed all the remainder of that afternoon. As I drank the coffee and smoked cigarette after cigarette (I seldom smoke) a curious and aery self-assurance seemed to overcome me.
By five-thirty I was ready for whatever came. I think I was even quite sensibly resigned to this ultimate victory of the Brown Recluse—his winning of the coveted Persian Slipper in perpetuity. O, it stung. It hurt. I shall not deny that. But I tell you I felt in absolute possession of myself as the sun sank lower over the river, over the stained Ohio Hills, and six o’clock approached. Even the realization that my crime would be exposed and that he and not I would come into eternal possession of that yearned for possession—well, my mind seemed to stop at the threshold of that realization and to refuse to accept it. Somehow, this detestable Brown Recluse should not be so smiled on by Goddess Fortune.
The sun was low on the mine tipple across the great river when we began to gather. There was a chill in the air, as there had been the night before. I had bathed and massaged my foot in its special emollient cream for half an hour. I wore my black silk dress, black stocking, black shoe. I wore my grandmother’s black onyx pendant on its tiny platinum chain. I wore my mother’s good quarter-length beaver jacket—as soft and fresh as the day she put it in the cedar chest the afternoon of her death. I put a dab of mother’s favorite perfume (and mine—Christmas Night by Houbigant) behind each ear and on the instep of my pretty, pretty foot. I gave my shoe a little shine. Then I came out—rather regally, I think—and made my way down the tanbark path toward the brick sidewalk, under the enormous and venerable tree, where the rest of the Irregulars were awaiting me.
Gene Voitle, his big gun clinging to his hip, looked vainglorious and a little defiant. He looked as determined as the Brown Recluse to win that precious award. I smiled. I knew that my expression betrayed nothing. And I was thankful for that, because the Brown Recluse never once took his beady, spidery eyes off my face, as the meeting began.
I don’t know what this is all about, grumbled the sheriff. I don’t know how there could be any more incriminating evidence than to find a man at the scene of a cold-blooded murder with the fatal weapon in his hand.
But the brick did not kill Jim Smitherman, said the Brown Recluse. Ort Holliday merely discovered the body and being the cut of man that he is and being, moreover, blind drunk, stole the dead man’s wallet. Corpse robbing is, of course, a felony. But it is not the felony of first-degree murder, gentlemen.
And Ms. Lathrop. May I remind you I am here. And that I am not a gentleman, Charlie.
Forgive me, Ellen, he said with ungracious politeness. I had not forgotten your presence here. Oh, far from it.
The wind stirred the long, lovely willow fronds down by the landing where the river lapped on the old stones of the now deserted wharf. For a moment I dreamed one of the old steamboats—lovely as a white-clad bride—was feeling her way in for a landing. Sun motes danced like spinning gold pieces in the high grass and clinging, thick green moss on the brick pavement. The wind blew—that cold September wind. Soon the fog would be up—soon it would claim all, everything, the town, the world, in its white embrace—like a lover taking all from a lover, owning the clasped white earth. Soon it would be London out here where we stood and footpads and cut-purses would dart amid the moonstruck and radiant woolly world. Down yonder where the dark water lapped would not be the Glory wharf—it would be Shadwell Stair and the stair named Wapping Old. And the white queen sleeps more soundly in her Windsor bed because of the Master. And because of me.
Now, said the Brown Recluse. Let us stop this child’s play, gentlemen. And—and dear Ellen. Let us show who really murdered James Arthur Smitherman quite early this morning.
I spoke recklessly then.
Charlie Gribble, I said, in a level voice devoid of all the bitterness I might well have been justified in showing. Charlie, I guess this is the happiest moment of your life.
He pondered this.
Oddly enough, he said, it is one of the most uncomfortable. Even though I shall gladly accept and treasure forever the result of it. No, Ellen, it is quite a sad occasion, really.
In what way, sir?
Because it involves my proving that the real murderer was not Ort Holliday as Gene proposes, he said, but that it was someone much closer to us.
Closer? How?
One of us, he said, almost in a whisper, his little glass eyes fixed on mine, a faint smile whispering round his thin, gray lips. One of the Baker Street Irregulars is the murderer.
Oh, really, now, blurted two or three of the group at once. Come on now, Charlie. That’s a little thick to cut. Who? Which one?
I’ll get to that, said the Brown Recluse, strutting back and forth across the blood-stained bricks like some barnyard tyrant, crowing as he went. First though we must establish motive.
Well, the motive was plain enough, said the sheriff then. Robbery. The defendant already had the victim’s wallet in his pocket when he was apprehended. With the murder weapon in his hand.
Again I say that was not the murder weapon, said the Brown Recluse.
I stared at him. He was not wearing the bilious brown tweed cape. That, I supposed, had gone to Empire Cleaners, with an admonition to return it to him in pristine, unstained state. Now he shivered in a shabby little Aquascutum trench coat, quite a few sizes too small. He strutted some more, picked his gold tooth, and inspected a particle of food on the end of it. He flicked it into the gold-dappled grass beside the bricks.
The blood on that brick was dry, he said. Already several hours old. For reasons known only to Holliday he picked the brick up—already clotted with the considerable flow from the deceased’s wounds a few feet away. The blood was dry, I say. Clearly Holliday arrived at the scene of the crime a full two hours after it took place. Now are you asking us to suppose that he committed the crime say around four in the morning and then stood there till six with the bloody brick in his hand and the victim’s purse in his coat—waiting unt
il Gene yonder could chance upon him? I say that is sheer nonsense, gentlemen—Ellen.
O, he was so patronizing when he said my name. And yet I felt that wine of assurance warm in my veins. Somehow I should win. You see the key to the murder—to any murder—is the establishment of the strongest motive.
What was the motive, Charlie? asked Ory then. If it wasn’t greed.
Oh, it was greed all right, said the Brown Recluse. But it wasn’t the greed of a simple-minded drunkard for a purse containing forty—maybe fifty dollars and a few coins. It was a much greater greed.
Everyone waited. No one spoke.
The evidence of how great that greed is, he went on, is provided by the absence here this evening of one of our charter members.
I cocked my brow. What was happening here? My mind ransacked all possibilities. What was the repulsive creature getting at? O, I was more determined than ever that he should not possess my treasure. Yes, it had always been mine, I thought in that instant.
And everyone was looking around to see who was missing. Gene Voitle was there. I was there. Gribble was there. Jake Bardall, the carpenter, was there. Ory looked uncomfortable.
He cleared his throat.
Harry Hornbrook, he said. I know he’d be sorry to miss this meeting. I mean, a special meeting like this.
Where is Harry? Where is your real estate partner, Ory?
He went to Wheeling early this morning, Ory said. Took a plane to Pittsburgh. Planed out of there for Washington.
Tell us, Ory, said the Brown Recluse, strutting all the more, his pale, hairy wrists jutting out of the undersized trenchcoat like naked chicken bones. Tell us, he said, like some popinjay of a small-town prosecuting attorney, why Harry said he was going to Washington.
Why to fight Bow Chemical’s mineral rights contract—they bought up hundreds of them last year—to take over his coal lands.
Tell me, Sheriff Voitle, said the Brown Recluse then, would you have any idea where the original deeds for those mineral rights might be?
No, Charlie, I don’t.
Perhaps I can inform you, said the Brown Recluse, like some shyster in a thirties movie, that until the murder in the early hours in this September morning, those original contracts—the sole arbitrating fulcrum for any claims in this case—these were in Jim Smitherman’s briefcase.
