She stood stiffly, chin up but trembling, her face deadwhite and pinched at the mouth. The neat pile of dirt beside the flower can bore testimony to her activity, and when Barry looked back at her his jaw was hard and his dark-blue eyes were grim and hostile.
“So you’re the one that killed him,” he said harshly. “But for a bit of luck you’d have framed me for it, too.”
For a moment then she simply stared at him, lips slowly parting, the luminous dark eyes shocked and unbelieving.
“Oh, no!” she whispered huskily. “No, Barry.”
He did not believe her. He said so. “Sit down!” he said, and waited until she had done so before he perched on the edge of the window seat. “Go ahead,” he said, still shaken. “Talk. Unless you’d rather tell it to the police.”
“I didn’t kill him,” she said simply, and now her eyes moved beyond him, a mistiness growing in them in this contemplation of something that she alone could see. “I was going to marry him,” she said, her voice dull and lifeless. “We were going to England. Why should I want to kill him?”
“How do I know? Maybe because you’d had an affair with McBride and Lambert found out about it. Maybe he kicked you out.”
“Yes,” she said. “We had an affair. But that was over. That stopped when I knew how Colin felt about me.”
“So what did you come here for tonight?”
He watched her glance stray to the pile of dirt and fasten there. He stood up and worked on the dirt with a newspaper until he had transferred it to the can where it belonged.
“Well?” he said when he had finished.
“I came for the diamonds,” she said with no further hesitation. “I knew the police didn’t have them. I thought they were still here.”
“You planted them.”
“Yes.”
“To frame me,” he said as anger stirred anew inside him. “You figured the police would come here, and they did. If I hadn’t had a bit of luck and got rid of them, I’d be waiting trial right now.”
“No.”
“What do you mean, no?”
“If I had wanted to frame you, Barry, I would have told the truth last night.”
“The truth?” he said in slow astonishment. “About what?”
“About you.”
He had risen to get his cigarettes, and now he stopped, wheeling, peering at her, understanding somehow that she meant what she said. For she was looking right back at him, chin up now and her dark gaze unflinching.
He got the cigarettes, but by now he was so upset by what she had said that he forgot to offer her one. She asked if she might have one too. He said he was sorry and gave her a light. Then, because he had to know, he said:
“What’s the rest of it?”
“Colin telephoned me last night about a half-hour after I’d left him. He didn’t say what he wanted, but he sounded upset about something. He said he had to see me. I told him I couldn’t come then. I was all undressed and I’d washed my hair and was putting it up. He said to come as soon as I could.”
She reached for an ashtray and balanced it on her lap. “By the time I was ready the shower had started and I had to wait, but I started as soon as I could. I was nearly there, on the other side of the street, when I saw someone come out of the house and hurry down the stairs. By the time you turned toward the hotel I knew it was you. When—when I went in I found him on the floor.”
Barry let his breath out, an odd coldness beginning to work on him as the night breeze swirled gently about his bare ankles. There could be no argument to this and he knew it; he knew that he was indeed lucky that she had not told the truth the night before, but it was still not enough.
“You took the diamonds.”
“Yes.”
“How? Did you know the combination? Since when?”
“Since Monday night. Colin was in Trinidad over the week-end. He brought me a bracelet. We had dinner at his place, just like last night. He didn’t drink much, but that time he had two brandies after dinner and he was in a wonderful mood. He was considerate and affectionate, and finally he said he’d brought me a present. He teased me about it and I teased to make him give it to me. Finally he laughed and said if I could open the safe I could have it, and then—well, he gave me a number for each kiss. There were three, and that’s how I got the bracelet.”
“Were the diamonds there then?”
“No. I never actually saw them. I wouldn’t have known the pouch was in the safe if he hadn’t told me about the deal he was going to make after you had left yesterday afternoon.”
She put her cigarette out and took a breath, the fabric of the blouse tightening against the fullness of her bosom. “I can tell you why I took them if you want to know,” she said quietly. “But to make you understand I’ll have to start a long way back…. Would you have anything to drink here, Barry?”
He said all he had was rum. She said that would be fine, and so he got the bottle from the bureau, holding it up to the light to be sure it was nearly full. He brought two glasses from the bathroom, one of which he filled with water. He watched her pour an inch of rum, swallow half of it, and then take a sip of water. She put the water glass aside, but held the other one.
“I don’t think there’s much point to tell you about my childhood except to say that it was a pretty sordid and unhappy one,” she said. “We lived in Pennsylvania—there were two brothers, but I was the oldest—and my father couldn’t hold a job because he drank too much. So did my mother finally—in self-defense, I guess. I waited until I was seventeen before I decided I’d had enough of it. I’d saved a little money, and a girl friend of mine who was just as fed up as I was ran away with me. We rode the bus to Florida.
“It was easy enough to find a job,” she said. “It was during the last months of the war and gas rationing was off and Miami and the Beach were crawling with soldiers and the papers were full of ads for waitresses and hostesses and car hops. The only problem was to get a place where you didn’t have to fight off the customers. But I knew by then that I had something men wanted, and the tips were good and everything was all right until my friend found herself a nice sergeant and got married…. I got married after a while too,” she said and now a note of irony colored her voice.
She discovered she still had some rum in the glass and tossed it off. “He was only a kid and I didn’t know any better. He said he had a job as an assistant manager at one of the Beach hotels. Actually he was no such thing. He hung around that hotel and some others, and wore good clothes because he was hustling bets for the gamblers and taking a flyer himself when he could. All I knew was that he had the clothes, and money in his pocket. We got a little apartment and I kept house and took dancing lessons. Considering my background and lack of talent for dancing,” she said frankly, “I suppose it wasn’t too bad until he got too cute for the gamblers and they bounced him. The next thing I knew, he and another guy were grabbed sticking up a liquor store.”
She paused again and there was distance in her dark gaze as her mind went back. It was as though she were reliving that period in her life, and even her words took on the connotation of her background now that the veneer she had acquired sloughed off.
“They had him over a barrel,” she said, “and they let him have it. The last I heard—and that was a long time ago—he was working with the road gang. I got a divorce. I found out I couldn’t dance enough to do much good, so I worked here and there, mostly as a cigarette girl and mostly in traps. I was drifting,” she said. “I was a tramp and didn’t know it. When a fellow came along and said I could do better in Havana I believed him, and it was the same act, shilling for drinks, listening to the propositions that came along and sometimes taking one.
“I never told anyone about this part before,” she said. “I’ve been trying for years to forget it; I thought I had. I’m only telling you now so you’ll understand how it was, and I guess the details aren’t important. Havana back to Miami, sometimes doing good, sometimes not. Fou
r of us went to Panama with a night-club act we’d rehearsed. I guess we were pretty pitiful, but I was always glad I went because that’s where I met Bill Ransom.”
She glanced down at the empty glass she still held, and Barry reached out with the bottle to add another couple of ounces. She tasted the rum and sipped some water, and when she continued nothing had changed in her voice.
“He was an Englishman, an engineer, and he’d been on a job in Costa Rica. He was in town for a couple of weeks before he took a new assignment in Belize. He had enough money and he was a quiet guy with nice manners and a way of treating you that made you think you were important. I was working in one of those Central Avenue traps—have you ever been to Panama City?—and I knew he was interested when he kept coming back. About the third night he got up enough courage to buy me a drink. He’d had quite a lot himself, but he was still polite and when he asked if I’d have lunch with him I said yes. We did a lot of talking in the next few days. He was staying at the El Panama and we swam in the pool there and went for a picnic out at the beach at Amador. Then, about three days before his leave was up, he asked me to marry him.… Have you ever been to Belize?”
“No,” Barry said. “It’s in British Honduras, isn’t it?”
“And like this in a way, only worse. Hot and humid and swampy, at least where I was. But Bill was a wonderful guy. He helped make up for the country and he helped me forget I’d been a tramp. I met his friends and I paid attention. I watched my language. I must have done all right because he never gave me any trouble. When he was transferred here a year and a half ago I was practically a lady. If only that God-damned jeep hadn’t tipped over and killed him!” she said with sudden vehemence.
Barry knew about the accident. Although he had not been here at the time, he knew that Ransom had been in charge of constructing a small power station at Tumatumari Falls, but the accident had happened on the road from Atkinson Field when a blowout flipped the jeep over and broke Bill Ransom’s neck.
He said he had heard about the accident and watched her finish the rest of her rum. When she put the glass aside he poured a slug for himself and washed it down with water.
“Bill had a daughter in England,” she said. “Did I tell you he’d lost his wife in an air raid?… Well, he had one goodsized insurance policy and it was payable to her. I got his personal things and the money he had in the bank here. It wasn’t much. The English don’t overpay their engineers. I moved into the hotel here because I couldn’t stay in the bungalow we’d had…. I didn’t know what I was going to do,” she said. “I didn’t want to do anything. And then I met Boyd McBride. I found this flat where I am now and he helped me move and get straightened out. I saw a lot of him. I fell in love with him, even though I knew he’d never be the steady sort that Bill had been. I said we had an affair; we did. If you want to know the truth, I’m still a little in love with him.”
“But you were going to marry Lambert.”
“And I’ve been trying to tell you why. I’ll be thirty on my next birthday. I know what it’s like to be a tramp. I know what it’s like to be in love and have fun and chase around. If I could have that and what Colin could offer all in one man I’d take it, but I’m not kidding myself I’ll get that sort of break. I know enough to make a halfway decent wife for almost any man when I put my mind to it, and I was ready to do just that. Romance I’d like, but I can do without it. With Colin I’d have all the money I’d need, and position, and an estate in England, the sort of life I’ve never known.
“I know all about his past,” she said. “But he was older when I knew him. I think he’d changed. I think it would have been all right,” she added with some defiance. “Maybe I was cold-blooded about it, but that was what I wanted. I—I only wish it could have happened,” she said, her eyes suddenly bright with unwanted tears.
Watching her now, seeing the way the lamplight molded the curves and angles of her face, he knew that much of what she said was true. Here, he knew, was a woman who could be deeply stirred by passion, but there could be coldness, and calculation too, when her happiness was threatened. The facts of life as she knew them had left their mark, and he sensed that her needs would govern her actions. She had wanted the things Lambert could offer and she had been willing to pay for them; her very frankness indicated that she had been ready to accept Lambert’s terms.
“You know about the will he was going to make,” she said. “That shows how he felt about me. He wanted me to have everything I needed. I had bought all my clothes, my trousseau. He was going to pay for that too. And then”—her voice faltered and her chin sagged—“I never had the chance. Maybe what I did was wrong; I suppose it was. All I could think of when I saw him there on the floor was that I’d been cheated. There would be no England or money or anything else.
“Maybe it’s a horrible thing to say,” she continued, “but after that first shock, knowing he was dead and that no one would help him now, I thought about myself and what I’d lost and how unfair it all was. I don’t know how I happened to remember the diamonds, but when I did it seemed to me that at least I should have that much. I didn’t stop to think of the consequences or what I would do with them. Maybe I didn’t think at all. All I know is that I took them and ran. I don’t believe I was in that room more than a minute or two.”
“Yeah,” Barry said grimly, the spell of her words shattered by this new pressure of reality. “And when you got scared you planted them here so that if the police found them I’d be the one—”
“No,” she cut in hoarsely. “That’s not-true. I didn’t tell the police the truth about you, did I? I thought you’d be the last to be suspected.”
“What made you think of me at all?”
“It was only partly that,” she said. “You see, I had this room for several weeks after Bill died. I’m the one who asked the manager to get me these big cans. I planted those shrubs. They’re tuberoses. They’re almost too big now, but—”
“Ohh—” Barry said, for the first time beginning to understand the part coincidence had played in her plan.
“After we’d been questioned I began to get scared,” she said. “I was afraid the police might come and search my place—and they did, you know? Just after midnight—and I thought if they found the pouch they’d think I was the one who killed Colin. I had to hide them,” she said.
“Sure.”
“And I didn’t know where, and then I thought about you and I remembered the plants and it seemed a perfect place. I never dreamed the police would come. I didn’t want them to; if I had, I would have told the truth. I don’t even know why I didn’t, but I didn’t. I didn’t care about you then; I wanted the diamonds. Can’t you understand that?”
Barry nodded. He said he was beginning to understand. “Did you come in here the same way you did tonight?”
“Yes,” she said, her tone wooden now, her shoulder slumping as though the effort to make him understand had tired her. She started to reach for the rum bottle and then checked herself. “Have you another cigarette?”
He gave her one and a light, and she said: “I came through the archway under the lounge. There’s hardly ever anyone around this place after eleven o’clock and I didn’t see a soul. I hadn’t been home more than five minutes when the police came.”
“They came here too,” he said and watched her lean slowly forward, her dark gaze intent.
“Who came?”
“Kerby and the Inspector.”
“When?”
He told. her. “They had a warrant,” he said. “They took a good look. They said I was the last stop.”
“Did they—” She broke off, her glance darting to the flower can, a note of awe in her voice.
“Yes, they looked there. Kerby poked all over the place with that swagger stick of his.”
She drew the proper conclusion an instant later. “You’d already found them,” she breathed. “How? Why should you—”
“Lucky, I guess,” Barry said. “Or mayb
e it was because you weren’t very neat. I’d just had a session with Louis Amanti I didn’t understand too well and my nerves were jumpy.” He rose to tighten his robe and moved over to the window seat. “I saw the specks of dirt you’d spilled, and when I saw those two cans I got scared. I took a look.”
“Then you know where they are now?”
He came back to his chair, poured out a little rum, and took a swallow of water.
“Where?” she said.
He looked back at her, deliberately silent now and seeing the narrowness working in her eyes.
“They’re not yours, you know,” she said.
“That’s right. And they’re not mine to give…. How was Lambert going to get those dollars out of the country?” he added in swift digression. “Or was he going to deposit them here and have pounds transferred to London?”
“He didn’t want pounds,” she said. “He wanted something hard—that was the way he put it—dollars or bolivars or Swiss francs. That’s why he wanted to sell the stones to Mr. Hudson for cash.”
“Amanti said Lambert had chartered McBride’s plane for Monday.”
“We were going to Trinidad and Caracas and stay overnight. We both had passports and visas because we’d made the trip before. We couldn’t go by way of Atkinson because of the customs, but with Boyd’s amphibian it would be easy…. What about the diamonds, Barry? What are you going to do?”
He thought a moment longer about Lambert’s plan to convert the dollars through a Caracas bank and knew that it could probably be managed. It explained the ten-per-cent bonus he was offering, since it would be worth it to a man who preferred dollars to pounds.
“I don’t know,” he said, answering her question.
“You don’t dare turn them in to the police, do you?”
“Not until I find out who killed Lambert. The way Kerby’s got it figured, I not only could have murdered Lambert but Thaxter as well …By rights,” he said, “they should go to the estate.”
Man on a Rope Page 12
