Trant was still moving toward Brian. “You cleared up most of the things I was still doubtful about, Mr. Mullen. But, thanks to your wife’s interruption, you didn’t carry your story quite far enough, did you? You described your morning session with Nanny Ordway in Mr. Duluth’s apartment. You admitted she had told you to go down again at three o’clock with your final decision. But that’s where you stopped. You should have finished the story. You should have told Mr. Duluth how you went down at three, how she threatened once again to make your life impossible if you didn’t fall in with her plans. You should have told him how you murdered her—as the only way to save your marriage.”
I was listening with an extraordinary mixture of bewilderment and relief. So, for some improbable reason, Trant wasn’t hounding me any more. He had the solution. There had been no need for my acrobatic attempts to save myself.
Iris had been standing beside me. Now, quickly, she crossed to Lottie. That made me, too, remember Lottie with a prick of alarm. I looked across at her. Her face was terrifying because it had become suddenly sagging and old. Ironically, I realized it would have been better for her if I’d told her before Trant arrived. This way she was having to swallow the bitter, bitter pill without any sugar coating at all.
But Iris had her arm around her. I turned toward Brian. He was terribly shaken, too. His face wore the dazed, almost beatific expression of a prizefighter teetering on his heels just after a knock-out blow.
“Of course, Mr. Mullen,” Trant’s quiet, penetrating voice was sounding again, “if you’d told Mr. Duluth all that, it would have been embarrassing to explain why you left the body in his apartment where it would certainly implicate him. But, after all, Mr. Duluth’s an understanding man. He would have appreciated your problem. The body was there. You could hardly lug it away. At least you did your best to make it look like suicide—with the chandelier, the faked suicide note—”
“But,” gasped Brian, “but that wasn’t it. That—that isn’t true.”
“It isn’t?” snapped Trant. “You didn’t go down to Mr. Duluth’s apartment again at three o’clock?”
“No.”
“Why not? She’d told you to go down, hadn’t she?”
“Y-Yes.”
“But you didn’t go?”
“I didn’t go.”
“Then at least she called you. When you didn’t show up, she’d certainly have called you.”
“Oh, yes.” Brian seemed to be regaining a little control. “She called—around three-fifteen.”
“And what did she say?”
“She asked why I hadn’t come down. She—she said she hoped I was more sensible by then, that—” Brian’s eyes shifted miserably to Lottie and then back again to Trant, “that I’d realized my place was with her and my baby and—”
“And—what?”
Brian crossed to Lottie. He took her hands in his, while she gazed up at him dully. “Lottie, if only I’d told you earlier, I could have explained. I could have made you understand. Now, please, don’t get mad, not till I’ve had a chance to explain.”
“Mr. Mullen,” cut in Trant, “I’m waiting to hear what happened next. She called you; she threatened you again and—and what?”
Brian turned back from Lottie. His face was crimson now. “I wanted to tell her to go to hell. I’d have liked to do that more than anything in the world. But, all afternoon, I’d been sitting here, figuring, and I’d decided what was the point of going against her? If I did, she’d tell Lottie.” He gestured helplessly toward his wife. “Once Lottie knew, she’d throw me out. I knew, if I went against her, I’d lose everything. I guess I’m pretty much of a coward. If I’d had any guts, I’d have done something, but—I didn’t. I didn’t fight her. I didn’t even try. I thought if—if I strung along with her, at least it would give me a couple of months. Something might always turn up, I thought. So that’s what I told her on the phone. I said I’d let her go ahead and sue Peter; I’d stand by her; and when the time came I’d get a divorce. I gave in all along the line. And it satisfied her. She said I wouldn’t ever regret it, that—that she loved me. And she hung up.”
He was looking down at the carpet. “That was all, Lieutenant. You’re crazy to say I killed her. She hung up and I never saw her again. If you don’t believe me, ask Lottie. She came in just after that—just about ten minutes later. I was here. She can prove that.”
Trant had been listening with his own peculiar brand of silence which managed to question each statement and somehow make it seem improbable and false. His voice was implacable now.
“So that’s how you claim it happened?”
“That’s how it did happen.”
“It isn’t very plausible, is it? A girl was downstairs in that apartment, threatening to ruin you. You were up here. A few minutes later she was dead.” He took a sudden step forward. “If you didn’t kill her, who did?”
It was then that Brian looked straight at me. He didn’t say anything, but his face, both puzzled and reproachful, was infinitely expressive.
“Tell me,” Trant was repeating, “if you didn’t kill her, Mr. Mullen, who did?”
It was then that Lottie moved. It was the slightest of movements, but I knew the trick so well from her acting. It was the first, deliberately small movement after complete stillness—and it always worked. It worked now. All of us, almost before we realized it, had turned to look at her.
She had her face back under control. She still looked too elaborate and overglamorized in the terrible hat, but, behind the veil, her eyes were as clear, as gimlet-sharp as ever. There was even the smile on her mouth which I knew so well. Around the theater, they called it her watch-out smile.
For a moment the gimlet gaze was settled on me. Then, very slowly, she turned it to Trant.
“All this is really true, Lieutenant? You’re sure this—this little girl was murdered?”
Trant seemed as much under her spell as the rest of us.
“There isn’t any doubt about it, Miss Marin.”
“And you are honestly idiotic enough to accuse my husband?”
“There’s plenty of evidence.”
“Evidence! What sort of evidence? What sort—indeed?”
Suddenly she swung around to me. Her hand came out, pointing. It wasn’t just a woman pointing. It was the mother in Terese Raquin pointing at her son’s destroyer; it was Electra pointing Orestes up the steps toward Cassandra.
“There he is!” she exclaimed. “There is the murderer of Nanny Ordway.”
The finger was still pointing as she turned to Trant. “From the start I’ve known it, but, fool that I was, I tried to protect him because he was my friend. That day, around three-fifteen, I came back from the photographer’s. My new pictures were ready. I wanted them put up outside the theater that night. I stopped off at Peter’s floor to tell him. I went to the door. I was going to knock. Then I heard voices—Peter’s voice—a girl’s voice—”
She paused for the fraction of a second, then the beautiful voice in all its rich sonority boomed on.
“I heard the girl say, ‘No—no—no—please!’ I stood there, with my hand up to the door. What is this? I thought. What’s the matter? Then I heard Peter’s voice. It was loud, fierce. ‘I’ll fix you,’ he said. That’s what he said. ‘I’ll fix you.’ That’s when I thought: This is not for me. I came up the stairs to the apartment. Brian was here. I found him right here in this room, reading the paper.”
She moved to Brian and put her hand protectively on his arm.
“There, Lieutenant. There it is. That’s all I have to say.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
“PETER!”
Iris ran to my side. I was staring with shocked incredulity at Lottie. The bitch! I thought. She was perfectly serene now, standing there with her hand on her exonerated husband’s arm, slightly lofty as if she had said her piece and was above any tiresome details that might still have to be settled.
There was the faintest trace of a
smile on Trant’s lips as he watched her. He was happy. Of course he was. His ruse had worked. Peter Duluth, the seducer, the liar, the cowardly murderer, was finally in the trap.
He said, “Miss Marin, you’re prepared to come around to the station house and make a sworn statement of what you’ve just said?”
“Naturally.” Lottie, the grande dame, shrugged. “If it’s necessary.”
Very quietly Trant said, “I don’t recommend it, Miss Marin.”
“You don’t recommend it? Why not? Why ever not?”
Trant’s smile was a real smile now, not just the suggestion of one. “Because I never recommend perjury.”
“Perjury!” exclaimed Lottie.
“Yes, Miss Marin. Your story was very convincing, but there’s one unfortunate hitch. You couldn’t have heard Mr. Duluth in his apartment at three—because at three Mr. Duluth was at a movie.”
“Pooh.” Lottie waved an arm. “That’s just what he says.”
“That’s what I thought, too, Miss Marin. But I’m afraid I made as much of a fool of myself as you. A couple of hours ago, one of my men brought in the boy who’d been collecting the tickets at the theater that afternoon. He’d been sick and we’d had difficulty locating him. But finally they brought him in.”
Trant flashed me a glance out of the corner of his eye. That was the first time, since his arrival, that he’d paid me any attention at all.
“As it happens, Miss Marin, the ticket collector is a would-be actor. He’s been around to all the producers’ offices many times. The moment Mr. Duluth turned in his ticket at two-thirty, he recognized him. He recognized him again when he came out at four-thirty. There’s no doubt about the day, either. Mr. Duluth has an alibi which nothing on earth can break.”
It was only then that Lottie’s godlike poise collapsed. Even though half of me was absorbed with the miracle of Trant, against all expectations, becoming my champion, I noticed it with grim satisfaction.
She had broken away from Brian, throwing out her hand in a feeble little gesture that meant nothing at all. For a moment, the silence was extreme. It was Iris who broke it. Her face was clouded with astonishment and shock.
“Lieutenant,” she exclaimed, “did she make all that up about Peter?”
“I’m afraid she did.”
“Of all the low-down, stinking—”
My wife lunged forward toward Lottie. Trant caught her arm.
“Now, Mrs. Duluth—please.”
His voice was soft, almost paternal. Iris glanced back at me.
I said, “Let it go, baby.”
“But, Peter—”
“Let it go.”
She came back to my side, still seething with indignation. Trant turned to Brian.
“Okay, Mr. Mullen, you’re under arrest.”
“No!” cried Lottie.
Trant ignored her. There was a new harshness, a melodramatic quality to him which was quite unfamiliar to me. He was being the theatrical cop, something out of the movies, not at all the Lieutenant Trant I had known.
“You’ll come with me, Mr. Mullen. And I don’t advise you to make difficulties. I have men outside. They’re armed. And—”
He felt in his pocket and tugged out a pair of handcuffs. Once again I was conscious of a false exaggeration of gesture. He grabbed at Brian’s unresisting wrist. The handcuffs flashed as he brought them forward.
Lottie flew at him. “Don’t! Don’t do it!”
“Why not?”
“You can’t.”
“He’s under arrest. You’ve interfered enough already.”
“No.”
Astonishingly Trant whipped around and grabbed her arms.
“Why not? Why shouldn’t I arrest him?”
“Because—”
“Because he didn’t do it?”
“No, no. He didn’t do it.”
I’d never seen Lottie like that before. She had no dignity, no presence. She was just struggling blindly—like Miss Amberley quivering with terror in my grip.
Trant’s voice was dominating, metallic. “Why didn’t he do it, Miss Marin? How do you know?”
“I know.”
“Because you killed her yourself! That’s it—isn’t it? You came home around three-fifteen. You let yourself into the hall. You heard your husband in here on the phone. You heard enough of what he was saying to make you curious. You tiptoed out to the kitchen. You picked up the extension. And you heard her—you heard Nanny Ordway downstairs. You heard her say, ‘Your place is with me and my baby.’ And you heard your husband say, ‘Yes, I admit it. I’ll get a divorce.’”
Lottie, still held by the arms, had stopped struggling. But her passivity was almost worse than the hysterical violence that had gone before it. Her face was tilted up to Trant’s. Her lips were half parted. She seemed hypnotized, unable to move, to think, to do anything but listen.
“Yes,” Trant was saying, “that’s how it happened. You listened. You put down the receiver. You went down by the back stairs. Your husband! you thought. The man that belonged to you! Your husband! That girl was trying to take him away from you. That girl was having a baby by him. You knocked on the door. She let you in. You said, ‘I know all about you. I know it all. You’re going to leave my husband alone.’ That’s what you said. And she looked at you, didn’t she? She looked at you and laughed. ‘What do you think you can do about it?’ she said. ‘He’s mine. I’m having his baby. You think you can compete with me—an old bag like you?’”
He threw the words straight at her white, stricken face. It was horrible but horribly vivid as if, by some uncanny trick, he had taken us all back into that room.
“Her scarf was there, wasn’t it, Miss Marin? It was lying there, maybe over the back of a chair. Maybe she turned away from you, showing her contempt for you. You saw the scarf. You were furious—furious, bewildered, frightened, hurt. You picked up the scarf, you—”
“No!” shouted Lottie suddenly. “No, no.”
Trant’s hands were still on her arms. “You deny it? You deny that’s what happened? Then your husband will go to jail; he’ll be tried; he’ll be convicted. He’ll be killed, Miss Marin. The man you committed murder for will be killed!”
“Stop.” The word came from Lottie in a wrenching gasp. “Stop it, I say.”
She twisted out of his grasp and ran to Brian, throwing herself against him.
“I’d known it,” she cried. “For weeks I’d known there was someone. But I never realized it was she—that little slut, that scheming, sly, pale little slut. She wasn’t going to take you away from me.”
The words choked into a sob. I saw with a kind of instinctive professional detachment that it was exactly like her stage sobbing—ugly, harrowing.
Trant’s face was almost gray now. He moved across after her.
“All right, Miss Marin? You’ll come with me?”
“You’re mine,” Lottie was babbling. “You’re mine, Brian. You’re all I’ve got.”
“Miss Marin, you’ll come with me to the station house?”
She turned her head so that she could glance up at Trant. She gave an almost invisible nod.
Trant said to Brian, “You’d better take her in the bedroom. See she gets some things packed.”
“But—”
“Do it.”
Brian put his arm around his wife’s waist and guided her into the next room. Trant watched them and then dropped down onto the arm of a chair. I saw that his hands were shaking.
It had happened so quickly, so unexpectedly that my thoughts were skittering around. But already I could see the inevitability of the motive. Lottie owns Brian. Miss Mills had said that. And it was the key to it all. You couldn’t take anything from Lottie. No one could. Not even Nanny Ordway.
I looked at Trant. I saw now what his ruse had been and I felt a kind of awed admiration.
“You accused Brian from the beginning to try to force her to confess?”
He glanced up and nodded vaguely.<
br />
“And I thought—”
The corners of his mouth twisted in a slight smile. “That I was going to arrest you. I’m sorry, Mr. Duluth. I’ve got a lot of apologies to make to you.”
“But how did you figure it out?”
“Once your alibi was confirmed, once I’d talked to Gordon Ling, it was easy enough to get on to Mr. Mullen’s part of it. And then I thought—well, on the character side, I couldn’t see Mr. Mullen as a killer, but—”
“You could see Lottie?”
“Yes. I could see Miss Marin.”
And now that he had completed the puzzle, I could see it, too. There had been an almost terrifying consistency in the pattern. Male spiders don’t kill female spiders. Flies don’t kill spiders, either. It had needed a worthy antagonist to kill Nanny Ordway. What are the spiders’ mortal enemies? The wasps.
Lottie, the wasp, had destroyed the Nanny-spider.
I was still looking at Trant, thinking that I owed him as many apologies as he owed me. Nanny Ordway’s dupe—that was what I’d thought of him. How wrong I had been!
“And that’s all you had?” I asked. “Just that hunch?”
He threw out a hand. “I’m afraid I’m not that much of a wizard, Mr. Duluth. No, I had evidence, but it wasn’t really enough to stand on its own without a confession.” He paused. “When I was first up here, I noticed a lot of doodles on the telephone pad. Even though I had you picked out as the murderer then, I don’t like to let anything pass. I knew there’d be a question of drawing with the suicide note. So I picked them up and shipped them over to the expert. His report came back this evening. He’s ready to go on the stand and testify that the doodles and the drawing of the hanged girl were made by the same person.”
I thought back to the day when Lottie had picked up Nanny’s drawing. The gimlet glance.
Whatever is this?
And all that was still muddled fell into place. Lottie Marin had killed Nanny Ordway as a passionately possessive woman fighting to keep what was hers. But to have killed is terrible and to go on living after you’ve killed is unendurable unless there is some support. Lottie had had the perfect support. She was an actress.
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