Crime is Murder

by Nielsen, Helen

  “Be quiet!” Marta ordered.

  “I don’t have to be quiet. She knows all right, Professor, and I know, too. I was working up at the big house the day it happened. I heard them fussin’ and fightin’ upstairs.”

  “Be quiet!” Marta cried again.

  “And she knows what happened to old Mr. Hubbard’s medicine, and why old Claude Humphrey got put away! She’s a bad one, I tell you. She’s got a curse on her. She’s a bad—”

  Carrie didn’t get any further. She didn’t finish her tirade or even explain those two new accusations. Lisa saw it happen right before her eyes—saw Marta’s hand reach down for the paperweight on the desk, saw her arm and body draw back in preparation, and then it was done too quickly for anyone to stop.

  “You witch! You terrible, lying old witch!”

  The words and the paperweight were hurled simultaneously. And then everything was quiet—especially Carrie.

  CHAPTER 10

  It was a direct hit. The paperweight struck Carrie on the forehead. She fell to the floor with no more protest than a barely audible groan, and didn’t move again. All was very still in the room until Professor Dawes, the first of a horror-stricken group to return to mobility, crossed quickly to the doorway and knelt beside her. At that instant, Johnny regained speech long enough for one accusing word.

  “You—!” she gasped.

  Marta’s face was chalk-white. She shrank back toward the windows.

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to! I didn’t meant to hurt her!”

  It was the cry of a child. She might have been all of five years old. The professor didn’t even look at her.

  “Miss Johnson, I think you had better call a doctor. Ask the operator for Dr. Hazlitt’s residence. He’ll surely be home at this hour.”

  “Is it bad?” Johnny asked.

  “I don’t know. I think it’s a concussion. Please call.”

  Lisa knew that what the professor was saying was important. Carrie was hurt—that was important. But she still couldn’t pry her eyes away from Marta’s face. She saw the mouth form a silent, stricken “Oh!” at his words. She saw one long-fingered hand fly to the mouth to hold back the sound. And then, before Lisa could do anything to stop her, she turned and ran out through the windows and was lost in the darkness of the path. Like a child. Like a terrified child.

  “It’s all right,” Dr. Hazlitt said. “Carrie’s a tough old bird. She’ll live. But if that paperweight had struck the temple—”

  The storm had broken. It was dark out now, totally black except for an occasional flash of lightning that brightened the kitchen windows. It was a large, old-fashioned kitchen with a long center table—far more practical for serving a hastily improvised dinner than the dining room. Carrie had come to the study—this was known now that she could speak again—for the purpose of learning whether or not the professor was staying for dinner. Now there were two guests and no cook. But as long as the can opener held out Johnny could get by. Lisa made the coffee. Lots of hot coffee. Everybody needed it tonight.

  “I gave her a sedative and she’s sleeping now,” the doctor added, “but you’re going to have trouble when she awakens. Maybe you can talk to her, Miss Bancroft. She insists on calling Sheriff Elliot and preferring charges against Marta Cornish. That might cause a great deal of trouble.”

  “And why shouldn’t she prefer charges?” Johnny demanded. “Does Bellville have special laws for a Cornish? Is that girl some sort of sacred calf?”

  The professor didn’t speak, but Lisa felt that his silence could be construed as consent. And Johnny was right, of course. An assault had been made, a felonious assault that might easily have been fatal; but still she was in sympathy with the doctor, whose perpetually haggard face displayed all his disapproval of what was being said. He had refused food. “Had an early dinner,” he explained. But he sat with them at the table lingering over a large cup of coffee while one restless hand played with the watch chain on his vest.

  “Marta’s a nervous girl, high strung,” he said. “I’m sure she didn’t meant to hurt Carrie.”

  “She said that she didn’t,” Lisa remarked.

  “And then ran off without even bothering to see if Carrie was going to live or die! Damn it, Lisa, you know I’m not the vindictive type, but I think that girl’s dangerous!”

  Johnny punctuated her statement by returning to the stove for more coffee. There was a little silence, broken only by the sound of the rain lashing against the windows and the faraway growl of receding thunder. The pyrotechnics of the storm were almost over. It would rain steadily all night.

  “You must know Marta Cornish as well as anyone in this village, Doctor Hazlitt,” the professor said, breaking a thoughtful silence. “Has she always been, to use your own term, high strung?”

  Unbalanced is what you really mean, isn’t it, Professor? Lisa smiled knowingly but the professor didn’t see. She sat at the far end of the table where the light was dim. Her face was but a shadow to the others.

  The doctor frowned at his cup. It was obvious he didn’t like the direction the conversation was taking, but it would be worse not to answer than to answer.

  “I’ve known Marta all her life,” he said. “In fact, I delivered her. She’s a perfectly normal, healthy—”

  “We’re discussing her emotional traits,” the professor interrupted, “not physical.”

  “—and beautiful child,” the doctor finished, ignoring the interruption with masterful contempt, “but she’s been a life-long center of interest because of her famous father and, if I judge correctly, has a deep sense of insecurity not uncommon to fatherless children.”

  “With a father’s reputation to uphold,” Lisa suggested.

  The doctor seemed both surprised and pleased at unexpected succor. He looked up from his cup and stared at the shadow of her face. He stared so long, she began to regret her words. It was almost as if he had forgotten the topic of conversation. But Professor Dawes hadn’t forgotten, and he wasn’t going to let anyone else forget.

  “But surely, if you’ve known Marta all of her life, you must also know of these tales being told about her,” he persisted. “And you must know what brought on this outbreak this evening if you’ve been talking to Carrie.”

  “Carrie Hokum is an old fool!” the doctor exclaimed. “Harmless but not quite all there. It’s a wonder she hasn’t been put away long ago.”

  “Like Claude Humphrey?” the professor asked.

  A last, distant rumble of thunder came like a muted drum roll behind the professor’s words. Then quiet. A very cautious quiet. Dr. Hazlitt’s tired eyes found the professor’s face and rested there as if exhausted after the journey.

  “You have heard the old tales,” he murmured.

  “I’ve gone hunting for them,” the professor said. “Exhumed them, so to speak. I have a reason.”

  “Your nephew?”

  The professor nodded. “My nephew is in love with Marta. He wants to marry her. In view of Howard Gleason’s suicide and certain other events, I feel that I have the right to make inquiries. Even if doing so—” he raised his head and glanced toward Lisa’s shadowed face—”does make me seem a meddling Mephistopheles.”

  “Pay no attention to Lisa,” Johnny remarked, returning to her table with a refilled cup. “She’s written too many books. I say exhume until the dirt flies! Who the devil is Claude Humphrey? Or should I say ‘was’? Most of the people associated with Marta Cornish seem to be in the past tense now.”

  “Perhaps Dr. Hazlitt would prefer to tell the story,” Dawes suggested.

  “Nothing to tell,” the doctor said. “Nothing, really. It certainly doesn’t concern Marta. She was a mere child.”

  “She was only eleven when Alistair Hubbard lost his heart medicine,” Johnny recalled. “At least, that’s what Tod Graham told us.”

  “Tod? Tod told you that?”

  The doctor looked shocked. It was the most expression Lisa had seen on his weary face. />
  “Well, Mrs. Graham, to be exact.”

  “That woman! She’s almost as bad as Carrie Hokum. I didn’t think Tod Graham would go about telling tales like that.”

  You didn’t think he’d dare, Lisa thought. She said nothing. The conversation was progressing nicely without her.

  “I’m still waiting to hear about Claude What’s-his-name,” Johnny persisted.

  “Very well.” The old doctor sighed and stared at his cup again. He took up a spoon and stirred the contents in a completely disinterested manner. “Claude Humphrey was the Cornish gardener many, many years ago. He was slow-witted and clumsy, but I think Martin Cornish was fond of him. I never knew Martin very well. Nobody did, I guess, except Nydia. I’m not too sure that she knew him either. But that’s neither here nor there. You asked about Claude.”

  Just when the stirring operation was about to set Lisa’s nerves on edge, he laid down the spoon. The coffee, however, remained untouched.

  “It’s been—oh, fifteen or sixteen years since Claude was committed. There was no mystery about it. He wasn’t dangerous, merely—” The doctor groped for a word. Now that the spoon was quiet, he’d taken to fingering the watch chain again. “Merely incapable of taking care of himself. Mrs. Cornish didn’t want any harm to come to him. She had him placed in a private sanitarium at her own expense. He’s there yet, well provided for and happy. Now, what’s your version of the story, Professor?”

  “I have no version,” the professor said. “I’d merely heard—”

  “—that Marta Cornish didn’t like the gardener and taunted him into fits of anger until he had to be locked up?”

  Dr. Hazlitt had lived in Bellville much longer than Curran Dawes. Lisa could see by the reaction on the professor’s face that the accusation had sunk home.

  “The child wasn’t more than four or five years old when the commitment took place. What’s more, the whole village knew Claude was a little off. He’d always been that way.”

  The doctor seemed relieved to have the story told. He glanced toward the windows where the rain, no longer lashed by wind, poured down relentlessly from the gutted clouds. He started to shove back his chair in a movement of departure, but he wasn’t going to get off so easily.

  “And Alistair Hubbard,” the professor said quickly, “I suppose he was a patient of yours?”

  Reluctantly, Dr. Hazlitt retained his seat. “He was,” he admitted. “He’d been under my care for some twenty-odd years before his death.”

  “Did you attend him the day of his death?”

  The doctor hesitated. He was annoyed—that was obvious; but an abrupt departure would only leave the situation more unsettled.

  “I was called up to the mansion,” he said. “It was too late to do anything for him. He was dead before I arrived.”

  “But what about his medicine? Had he lost it? Was it later found in Marta’s room?”

  The professor seemed to have taken Lisa’s advice to heart. Backstairs gossip did interest him now. He leaned forward a bit in his chair and waited for the answer. He didn’t wait alone.

  “It’s been a long time,” the doctor said.

  “Ten years,” Johnny reminded. “Ten years isn’t such a long time.”

  For the first time, Lisa saw a faint smile touch the lips of Dr. Hazlitt. “At your age, Miss Johnson, ten years is nothing. When you reach the other end of life, it will seem much more.” Then the smile passed as quickly as it had come, as if embarrassed to have been seen at all. “As for the medicine, I believe there was some talk about it being found somewhere in the mansion. It may have been Marta’s room, or some such nonsense.”

  “Nonsense?” Lisa echoed.

  She regretted the interruption at once. It brought the doctor’s eyes back to her face again. They could be most uncomfortable when fixed in that enigmatic stare. “Nonsense,” he repeated. “Alistair Hubbard was over eighty years old. He was very forgetful. I’d cautioned him more than once about going off without his medicine, but you can be sure the gossips would try to make something sinister out of his death. Anything connected with the Cornish family—”

  “And what about Pierre Duval, the music teacher?”

  Professor Dawes was insistent. The doctor looked at him with tired eyes. His fingers were playing with the watch chain again.

  “Were you called to the mansion when he died?” the professor persisted.

  “I was,” Dr. Hazlitt answered. “But I was too late. Duval was dead when I arrived.”

  “It was quite a shock, I suppose,” Lisa ventured.

  The tired eyes were for her now. “For Marta and Mrs. Cornish—yes,” he said. “They were both very fond of the young man.”

  “But it wasn’t a shock for you?” Lisa asked.

  She’d caught a certain connotation in the words. The doctor made no attempt at denial.

  “Not when I heard over the telephone what had occurred. Death was almost instantaneous—Nydia, of course, didn’t know that when she called. It was only to be expected in view of Duval’s old head injury. I’d found out about that some months before. He fell off a stepladder while replacing a burned-out bulb in a light fixture up at the mansion. Had a bad time of it then. I warned him to be careful, just as I’d warned old Alistair Hubbard. But Duval was a hotheaded Frenchman. He wouldn’t listen. He wouldn’t stop taking chances.”

  “But Carrie intimated that Marta and Duval had been quarreling just before he fell,” the professor interrupted.

  “Carrie—!”

  Dr. Hazlitt shoved back his chair and came to his feet. The annoyance in his voice would have blossomed into outright anger if anger didn’t require so much energy.

  “I can imagine what Carrie said; I’ve heard the tale before. The truth of the matter is that one of the top steps on the staircase up at the mansion had a loose tread. Nydia had warned the household to be careful—even called a carpenter to get it fixed, but he hadn’t been able to get around to the job right away. I’m surprised, Professor, that a man of your intelligence would be taken in by such talk. Why don’t you try to think of Marta’s emotions? She’s had to hear these wild tales all her life. She’s had to grow up under a cloud of gossip and innuendo that would unnerve any child, let alone one of her sensitivity!”

  “But isn’t it true,” Lisa asked, “that Duval was insured with Marta as his beneficiary?”

  Dr. Hazlitt scowled at the back of the chair, his white, blue-veined hands still clamped on the ladder-back. For a few seconds Lisa thought he wasn’t going to answer at all.

  “I wouldn’t know about that,” he said at last. “I don’t handle such matters.”

  “But you must have heard—”

  “I suppose I have. And it’s possible. Duval had great faith in Marta’s talent. He would have wanted to help her if he could.”

  And then Dr. Hazlitt stopped answering questions, not gracefully but abruptly. He let go of the ladder-back and left the kitchen, barely muttering his good-byes. It was Lisa who followed him out. Someone must see the old man down that long hall, and someone must know how to care for Carrie.

  But it wasn’t Carrie’s physical condition that disturbed Dr. Hazlitt.

  “Speak to her, Miss Bancroft,” he urged. “Talk her out of this nonsense of preferring charges. She could cause a great deal of trouble.”

  For whom, Lisa wondered. For Marta or for the family doctor who didn’t like remembering things? A snatch of a conversation she’d once had with a girl reporter mingled with the thought. “Nydia Cornish just about runs this town. She wouldn’t let anybody tell you anything about her darling daughter.”

  The doctor had a few thoughts on Bellville, too.

  “Small towns are all alike,” he said, “small in every sense of the word. You’ve lived in many places, Miss Bancroft?”

  “Many places,” Lisa replied.

  “I envy you. When I was a young fellow, I used to dream of practicing in a big city. If I had my life to live over—”

&n
bsp; With his raincoat on, Dr. Hazlitt couldn’t finger the time on his watch chain. He could only hold it in his eyes. And then he looked at Lisa sharply, his head cocked slightly on one side.

  “Poliomyelitis?” he asked.

  The diagnostician. She’d dreaded this that day in the museum. It had to come sooner or later.

  “Yes,” she answered. “But it was a long time ago. I’ve almost forgotten.”

  Lie to the man, Lisa. Pretend it doesn’t matter. Lie to the man and he’ll go away.

  Dr. Hazlitt nodded. “Used to have a lot of polio in this country. Quite a lot.”

  And then, without looking at her again, he picked up his bag and walked out into the rain that had come to spend the night—a tired old man who didn’t like to remember.

  CHAPTER 11

  Silencing Carrie wasn’t the easiest assignment Lisa had ever undertaken. Dr. Hazlitt was right insofar as the woman’s recuperative powers were concerned. Being an invalid wasn’t in keeping with Carrie’s Spartan way of life.

  “Coddlin’ never made nobody well,” she insisted, “and honest work never made nobody sick. It’s that funny kind of work—piano playin’ and such—that causes trouble.”

  “Or writing books,” Johnny suggested dryly.

  “Any funny kind of work like that. A body needs fresh air an’ exercise an’ natural foods.”

  And so Carrie, like Lazarus, came forth on the morning following her unpremeditated collision with the paperweight, and resumed her household duties with no apparent signs of discomfort beyond a hideous bruise she seemed to enjoy immensely. But restraining her from legal action was quite another matter. It was her own lack of faith in man’s justice that finally prevailed.

  “You can’t do nothin’ to a Cornish anyhow,” she conceded at last. “That girl would just lie out of it like she’s always lied out of ever’thing else. She’s been brought up wrong—that’s the trouble. Fancy foods, too much piano playin’. Spoiled, that’s the trouble. Spoiled rotten. And cursed, too.”