Bill looked highly gratified. He took the gun and pushed down the safety catch, then shoved it in his pocket.
“One if by land and two if by sea,” he said, and considering it a good exit line cheerfully took himself off.
O’Brien shut the door behind him and turned to me.
“Now,” he said “what’s all this?”
He listened carefully while I told him what the police probably knew: Gert’s beauty shop where I learned where the Benjamin woman lived, the fingerprints in the house, both Gert and Mrs. Hunnewell to identify me—the works, as Bill would say. When I finished he shook his head.
“They can’t arrest you,” he said. “Where’s your motive? But this plays hell with my own plans. There’s only one answer, of course. You found the return-trip ticket and kept it. So you thought you’d play detective and find out who she was.”
“And kept my mouth shut after I did!” I said furiously. “You have a lot of nerve, Terry O’Brien. I do your dirty work and you go calmly about your business and let me go to jail. I have no intention of doing any such thing. You and your Flaherty, who’s been dead for years!”
I saw him really angry then for the first time.
“I suppose you think I like what I’m doing,” he said with cold fury. “I like watching these grounds of yours instead of getting a decent night’s sleep. I like trying to save your sister’s life when maybe it isn’t worth saving. And I suppose I like hiding behind a girl’s skirts, or pants, or whatever she’s wearing! A few days in jail wouldn’t hurt you. At least you’d be safe and I could stop worrying my fool head off about you.”
“Nobody asked you to do any of those things,” I said. “And don’t bother to deny you came here under false pretenses. As if you really wanted to raise chickens! If you ask me you hate them.”
Then unexpectedly he laughed.
“As a matter of fact,” he said, “they grow on you. They’re pretty good girls, you know. They’ve been contributing quite a bit to your breakfast.”
“Are you still going to insist on that ticket thing?” I demanded.
“I’ll change the story, if you like. There was a slip in the bag, but the wind blew it away. A day or two later you found it. How’s that?”
He got it out of the desk and held it out to me. After its immersion in the pool it looked crumpled enough to have been out in the weather. I took it reluctantly.
“Just where does Judith come in in all of this?” I asked. “Don’t tell me she killed Flaherty, or the Preston girl.”
He closed the desk drawer with a snap.
“No,” he said. “Someday before long I’ll tell you her story. It goes back a long time, and it isn’t pretty, Lois. But I don’t want her killed. I want her kept alive and well. It’s important. In fact it’s vital.”
“Don’t tell me it has anything to do with Flaherty!”
“Not necessarily, no,” he said.
He clammed up then, got his car and drove me to the house. Evidently he was taking no chances without his gun. The key was under the porch matting as he had ordered, and I got his gun from the hall table and held it out to him.
He didn’t take it. Not immediately, that is. He simply wrapped me in a pair of arms that could have squeezed a bear to death and kissed me hard. Then he released me.
“Sorry,” he said. “Just an impulse. Don’t think anything of it.”
He was off the porch before I could slam the door.
Chapter 19
WHEN I REACHED MY room I was astonished to find it was only two o’clock. I had thought it was almost morning. I was not sleepy, naturally. Too much had happened, or was going to happen, including O’Brien himself.
Not the kiss. A girl these days who lays any emphasis on a thing like that must have been raised on a desert island. But what he had said about Judith puzzled as well as alarmed me. All those years of marriage, when the press always referred to her as the beautiful Mrs. Chandler. Her music. Her parties. Her big apartment, done by a good decorator as a setting for her. And all this time something hanging over her; perhaps something dangerous.
I found myself going back to the early days when Judith had been my big sister, to whom I looked up with a mixture of jealousy and admiration. Even then she had been popular. And now and then she had gone to subdeb parties, with Mother or my governess to chaperon her, much to her disgust.
I was allowed to stay up and see her off when that happened. She would stand in the lower hall, in white chiffon, or rose taffeta, and turn around for my benefit.
“Like it, Lois?”
“It’s wonderful. You’re wonderful, Judith.”
And Mother standing by, her pride in her eyes, as though she could not believe she had given birth to so much beauty.
Compared with Judith I had been allowed to run wild in those early days, to ride my bicycle, to play even with the East Side kids whenever I got a chance, to roller-skate and ice-skate while nurse or governess talked scandal with others of her kind on the park benches. And at The Birches I learned to swim like an otter. I had an idea that Anne had had the same upbringing as mine. Judith was different, however. Looking back I think Mother was hardly normal about her. She watched her like a hawk, but Judith could have walked all over her had she wanted to do so.
The one time Judith had a certain amount of freedom had been in the summers at The Birches. Then a crowd of girls and college boys would motor out or gather from the vicinity, especially over weekends. The drive would be filled with cars, some sporty and expensive, others rather like Bill’s, and to my childish mind fascinating with the chalked designs and words on them. One of them said Charleston Charlie, because those were the days of the Charleston.
Rolled stockings, very short skirts, girdles surreptitiously removed for dances, and the Charleston! I remembered trying to do it with my knock-kneed little-girl legs, and Father catching me up and laughing.
“Stop it, skinny!” he said. “You’re still my baby. Let the big girls make fools of themselves. Not you.”
But outside of Judith it was the pool that was the center of attraction, and an alfresco lunch was always set out there on Saturdays. There was Prohibition then and no drinks were served, but most of the boys carried flasks, and many a Coke or ginger ale was needled in the shrubbery. I used to watch them, and they would yell at me, “Get out of here, Lois, you little snoop.”
I never told on them, of course.
As I have said, it was the day of big expensive summer places, plenty of servants, plenty of everything. Now most of the houses were gone, either torn down for taxes or abandoned, and try as I would I could not remember the names of any of the young crowd I tried so hard to join, and which so completely ignored me.
O’Brien said Judith’s story went back a long time, and was not a pretty one. Whatever it was I felt certain it dated back to those weekends at the pool, and to one of the boys who surrounded her there. Whether she had eloped with him or not he had some sort of hold on her, which her curious egocentrism had built into a deadly menace.
I did not believe he was a menace. I did not believe he had killed Selina Benjamin thinking she was Judith. The note through the window, what he had said when he picked me up and on discovering his mistake dropped me into the pool, were not the acts of a man with murder in his heart. Something else occurred to me, too.
He had not waited to get me out of the water. He seemed to know I could swim. Perhaps, after all, he remembered the little Lois Maynard who had been practically amphibious in those days.
With all that, and my approaching interview with the district attorney the next day, it was early summer dawn when I finally went to sleep, and in no time at all Jennie was pounding on my door.
“You better come down,” she called. “The chief’s here for you.”
It had come, then. I was about to be arrested, and to be arrested, of all things, on an empty stomach! I dressed as carefully as I could, although my morning mood before coffee is distinctly sinister.
But the plain fact is that with apprehension and lack of sleep my hands scarcely obeyed me. I dropped my hairbrush, put on too much makeup and had to wipe it off and start again. And, of course, I pulled a button off the white sports dress I was wearing—as a symbol of innocence—and had to stop to sew it on again.
Chief Fowler was scowling over a cup of coffee when I entered the dining-room. There was no sign of Judith, but Bill was there, looking horrible and explaining that he had chased a strange man on the grounds and fallen, a fact which Fowler obviously did not believe. And, of course, Phil decided to cheer me by being facetious.
“Very nice,” he said, inspecting me. “Not that it will save you from the chair, but a good try.”
I could not eat. Not with Jennie ogling me with suspicion, and Helga peeping from the pantry door. Not with the story O’Brien had given me to tell, and my own feeling of guilt about it. I did get down a cup of black coffee, however. It steadied me somewhat, as did the announcement that both Phil and Bill intended to go with me to the district attorney’s office. Not with me, exactly. I went in the chief’s car. But there was a certain amount of comfort in knowing they were behind me.
The cottage was closed as we passed it. But O’Brien’s car was standing outside, and I felt a wave of fury which actually shook me. He could sleep, I thought, while I lied myself black in the face with a tale no one was going to believe. And for what? So he could solve the murder years ago of a man I had never heard of and cared nothing about. Why hadn’t I come out with the truth? That the ticket had been in the bag, that he had taken it, and that at his behest I had looked up the Benjamin woman.
I still do not know why I had not done it. There had been something in his face when he talked about Flaherty that moved me deeply. He had been like a son speaking of a beloved father. But at least he could have been around, I thought furiously. He could at least say he had suggested I locate Mrs. Benjamin, and that I had given him her bankbooks. Although why they thought I had taken them was beyond me. I certainly could not cash in on them.
Yet my first impression of the district attorney was rather favorable. A smallish man, thin and with gray hair and a pair of keen blue eyes, when I was ushered in to him, he smiled and got up from behind a desk. His name he said as he shook hands was Tarbell.
“I’m afraid this is rather early for you,” he said politely. “Sit down, please. That chair isn’t bad. Would you like a cigarette?”
He came around the desk to light it, and I found myself relaxing. Somewhere outside were my menfolk, Phil and Bill. And Fowler, who had merely admitted me to the presence, had disappeared. I stiffened, however, when I saw a golf club lying on the desk.
But the district attorney did not mention it. He went back to his seat and surveyed me benignly.
“You know,” he said, “you look like a nice girl. A very pretty one, too, if I may say so. I’m wondering just how you got involved in this mess.”
“I didn’t kill that woman,” I said, “if that’s what you mean.”
“Possibly not, but someone did. And certainly you have done some odd things since, Miss Maynard. Let me tell you what I know. In the first place, you have maintained you did not know her. I accept part of that, for certainly you did not know exactly where she lived. Also your behavior shows it. You described her to certain people in that town of hers, and you located her house.
“You know what happened after that. You broke in and you searched her desk. Your prints are all over it. You took her bankbooks, for some unknown reason, but so far as I know nothing else. Why? She was dead. The bankbooks were of no use to you. I would say she had been blackmailing you, but for one reason.”
“I suppose because you can’t get blood out of a turnip,” I said, attempting to be facetious but inwardly shaking.
He did not smile.
“No,” he said. “Because Mrs. Benjamin did not need money. Blackmail is a risky business, so why would she try it? She knew about the money, and it was hers by the will he left. That in itself is curious. Why wouldn’t she touch it?”
I didn’t know and said so. He went on: “You say you have no money. What about your sister? Ridgely Chandler is a very wealthy man.”
“She has her alimony. That’s all. He was smart about that. He made a trust fund for her. The interest is all she gets. On her death it goes to charity. As for my brother and myself, Phil worked his way through college, and I imagine he got Ridgely Chandler to send me.”
“I see,” he said thoughtfully. “Mr. Chandler has been trying to hush this thing up, Miss Maynard. He has even been in touch with the governor. But the governor is a pretty stout fellow. He won’t interfere. In fact he can’t. Only I don’t like that sort of thing.”
“Then you don’t know the Chandlers!”
He let that pass.
“This is the picture as I see it, Miss Maynard,” he went on. “Here’s a woman who is well provided for. Her husband had left her some insurance. She had sold the business, and she owned her home. She had adequate means to live as she did which was very simply. Besides she was a quiet retiring sort of woman, and a churchgoer; not, I think, the blackmailing type.
“Yet she had some reason for being on your grounds the night she was killed. Do you know what that was?”
“I think she was meeting someone there,” I told him. “There had been a strange man on the grounds two or three times at night. Once he frightened one of the maids. Another time he threw a rock through my sister’s window, and only two nights ago he caught me in the drive, picked me up, and threw me into our swimming pool.”
He looked completely incredulous.
“Into the pool? Why? Do you mean he tried to drown you?”
“I don’t know what he meant. He didn’t stop to explain.”
“Still, it seems an extraordinary thing to do. Did you recognize him?”
“No. It was dark, of course. I didn’t know his voice.”
“Oh, he spoke, did he?”
“He told me I was going to talk, or he’d kill me.”
The district attorney was staring at me with what amounted to fascination.
“I don’t suppose,” he said slowly, “that anyone could invent a story like that. It’s too preposterous.”
“All right,” I said. “If you don’t believe it, call in my nephew, Bill Harrison, and look at his face.”
“I presume it is a nice honest face, but why should I look at it? Especially when I can look at yours.”
He was smiling, but I wasn’t having any humor at that moment, or any compliments, either.
“Because he chased the same man last night,” I told him. “He caught him, too. He’s young and he’s fast. Only the other man was stronger. I gather he won the round. At least he knocked Bill out and escaped. If you’ll call him in—”
He looked a trifle uncertain, which I imagine was unusual. Also he said nothing when I lit a cigarette which, so far as I knew, might be my last one.
“I’ll see your Bill later,” he said. “Just now I want to talk to you. There are certain other curious angles about this case. For one thing, the Benjamin woman sent the taxi away. Why? Did she expect someone to motor her back to the railroad station? Or—did she mean to stay all night?”
“How could she expect that? None of us even knew her.”
“You knew where she lived. The town, anyhow. You went there like a homing pigeon. Don’t you think that needs some explanation?”
It was a bad moment. Inwardly I was cursing O’Brien and all his works, but I had to go through with it.
“It wasn’t hard to do,” I said. “You see, I had this.” And reaching into my bag brought out the crumpled water-soaked return ticket. He took it and examined it.
“This was in her purse?” he inquired.
“It must have been. I emptied it, you know. I told them so at the inquest.”
“You denied it at first.”
“I hated to admit I’d been snooping.”
“An inquest is a
serious matter,” he said, eyeing me. “So is murder. Now why did you keep this ticket? What possible reason could you have?”
“I didn’t keep it,” I said with complete truth. “It just turned up later. As a matter of fact, the tenant in our cottage found it and gave it to me. If you don’t believe me, ask him. His name’s O’Brien.”
He looked at me.
“So O’Brien found it,” he said. “The queer thing about this case is the way Terry O’Brien turns up in it. He’s a smart cop, but this isn’t a New York case, Miss Maynard. Why is a detective lieutenant of the City Homicide Department involved in it?”
“He’s retired, isn’t he?”
“No,” he said grimly. “Apparently he’s on a protracted leave of absence, or something of the sort. I wish to God he’d let us attend to our own business in this county, and keep his nose out of it. What kind of game is he playing, anyhow? He’s inherited a lot of money, but he doesn’t retire. Instead he rents a small cottage from you, pretends to be something he isn’t, and for God’s sake raises chickens!”
“Maybe he likes them.”
He had lost his urbanity by that time. He drew a long exasperated breath.
“All right,” he said. “Let’s forget O’Brien. I’ll keep this ticket, of course. Whether you took it out of the bag or got it some other way, it should have been given to the local police at once. As it is, we’ve wasted a lot of time. What interests me just now is why you broke into the Benjamin house.”
“It was the cat,” I said, with more assurance. “I couldn’t leave it there to die.”
“There were neighbors. There was this Mrs. Hunnewell, for instance, the woman who identified her. Why not have called her? Why break a window to get in?”
“I didn’t want to be seen there. After all, she had been killed in our pool. But I wanted to know why it had been our pool. There must be plenty of others nearer where she lived.”
“I suppose your brother and sister did not know of this excursion of yours to the Benjamin house?”
The Swimming Pool Page 18
