Marty was interested now. Maybe because I was making it convincing, maybe because you could read things in the face of Robert Bayless.
“What was wrong with that deal?” he asked.
“The thimble,” I answered promptly, glad to be on firmer ground. “We were all dumb not to see that.”
Iris Kent frowned, then nodded. She said, “I think I begin to see what you’re driving at, Danny.”
“According to Bayless,” I said, “Dorothy was turning over to him everything of value she had with her in advance of keeping this engagement. Bayless knew that we’d eventually tumble to the fact that someone was blackmailing Dorothy, and that we’d then assume—correctly—that her date on the night of her death was with the blackmailer. He wanted to give us the impression that she had entrusted her valuable jewelry to him in the fear that the blackmailer would make a pitch for it.
“So far, fine. Sound as a dollar. But figure this: If Bayless’ story were true, would Dorothy have given him an eight-dollar thimble that had a great sentimental value to her, but was of absolutely no value to anyone other than herself? Would she?”
A voice said, “I’ll be damned!”
I picked it up. “Don’t you see the picture? The murderer killed her in the car. Took her to the motel. If it had been her husband or Montero, he’d have carried her from the car to the bed. But we know from the marks of her heels on the rug that she was dragged. That could have meant Iris or Dolores, though I doubt whether either of them would have had sufficient strength even for that. Bayless would have had that much strength, but not sufficient muscle to have carried her.
“Whoever registered imitated Iris’ handwriting. Dolores and Montero probably didn’t know what her handwriting looked like. If Iris herself had done the registering, she wouldn’t have written backhand at all. Whatever way she wrote, she’d have avoided the one most distinctive thing about her handwriting.”
I heard Marty say, “That figures. Keep going, kid,” so I kept going.
“Bayless has killed her in the car. The motel is an out. The payment of forty-eight hours in advance gives him plenty of time to cover any tracks he might have left. He decides on the stunt of making it look like robbery. He takes the engagement and dinner rings from her fingers and the watch from her wrist. He goes into her bag and grabs the valuable clip and earrings. He also sees a little velvet case, a jeweler’s case. He doesn’t stop then to find out what’s in it. What would usually be in a jeweler’s case? Jewelry. Something else of value. And when he gives it back to us, he gives that, too. He’s too shrewd to hold out anything that might be checked.
“Here’s what it means. The murderer, stealing from his victim, either for gain or to make it look like something it wasn’t, would have taken that thimble. Mrs. Dorothy Halliday, afraid that the blackmailer might persuade her to hand over her jewelry, and entrusting it to a friend so that she couldn’t give in to the blackmailer’s demands, wouldn’t have included the thimble in the stuff she gave him to keep. Why? Because it had no value.”
Bert Lane said, “Well, I’ll be goddamned! The kid’s got something, Captain. It was sitting right there for us all the time and we were too blind to see it.”
I turned to Iris. I told her I wasn’t asking her to accuse Robert Bayless of anything. I was checking with her merely as to whether I was on the beam figuring how Dorothy would have thought. She took a long time about answering, and then she nodded, slowly, reluctantly.
“Dorothy would probably have figured that way, Danny. She wouldn’t have thought of the thimble as intrinsically valuable. But that doesn’t necessarily point to Robert.”
“He had the jewelry, including the thimble. By his own story, Dorothy gave the stuff to him.”
I saw Bert Lane move a step or two closer to Bayless. Robert was seated near a window, and he was beginning to sweat. Bert was just making sure that there wouldn’t be any sudden move; any impulsive leap through that window.
Bayless saw the move and cringed. He felt the silence that hung in the room. He was trying to act naturally, just the way he’d be acting if he were innocent.
“Your idea doesn’t hold water, O’Leary,” he said quietly. “If I were this archfiend who was blackmailing Dorothy, if I could get what I wanted from her just by asking for it, why would I kill her?”
“You wouldn’t,” I said. “You had no such idea. It wasn’t until after you got in the car with her that you discovered that that was to be the pay-off night. No, you hadn’t planned to kill her, Bayless, and you were probably astounded when you learned that she had planned to kill you.”
He really gave off sparks then. You could almost feel his fear. I turned to Marty.
“Remember discussing that theory, Marty—that we could place Dorothy in the car easily if she happened to be the one who was seeking the engagement? Well, that’s the way I’m sure it was. Bayless had a terrific hold over her, the sort of hold she’d kill for. She wouldn’t have made her move until they were in a deserted spot. So when he wrestled the gun away from her and killed her, there was no one to hear the shot.
“Why Mrs. Halliday had the jewelry with her is probably one of those things we’ll never know. She might have refused a demand from Bayless for more money, and then been afraid that he might take the jewelry from her room. That would have been before she decided to kill him, of course. She might have put the jewelry in her handbag, intending to take it to her bank, and then become so panicked by the whole situation that she decided that Bayless’ death was the only solution. In her excitement she probably wouldn’t have thought to put the jewelry back in her dresser, where Iris said she usually kept it. Or she might have been afraid that her husband would sell it to get the money that she refused to give him. But I think it was probably Bayless she was afraid of. That would explain the presence of the thimble. If Bayless was going to take the jewelry from her dresser, he’d take everything there was, including the thimble, which was valuable to her even if it wasn’t worth much in dollars and cents. Her husband, being more familiar with what she owned, would take only what he could sell for a good price.”
I had been looking steadily at Bayless while I was talking. His face assumed an expression of weary scorn. He said disgustedly, “I am not a jewel thief, O’Leary. What on earth would I do with the stuff if I had it? You can’t sell important pieces of insured jewelry to reputable jewelers without all sorts of red tape. And I assure you that I have no connections with the underworld.”
“I believe you,” I said. “We’re not concerned with what you were or weren’t planning to do with the jewels. It’s what Mrs. Halliday thought you might be planning that interests us.” I turned to Iris. “Iris, do you know if Bayless had any specific knowledge of where your sister kept her jewels?”
She frowned. “Why, no, I—Yes! Yes, he did. Because one day he and I went to Dorothy’s room to ask her something, and just as we entered she was taking the clip and earrings out of the drawer where she kept them. She was going to wear them to a party that night. But Robert would never have taken them, Danny.”
“Probably not, but that’s not the point,” I reminded her gently. “She knew he knew where she kept them. That would be enough to scare her.”
I turned back to Marty. “The other two murders are logical. Bayless watched us line up our suspects. He figured he had cleared himself by turning the jewelry over to us. He O.K.‘d Iris’ trip to Las Vegas to see Dolores and Montero, knowing it would look bad. He was willing for me to go along with his girl—the girl he was supposed to be in love with—realizing what would logically happen between us. He checked in with all of that because he wanted me to be interested in anyone, he didn’t care who, as long as it wasn’t him.
“Just before that trip, he had killed Dean Halliday. I’ll come to the reason for that in a moment. The answer was up there in the attic of the Halliday house, where Bayless kept his model railroad. That was where he had stumbled across the thing that gave him his hold over Dorothv.
“You’ll remember, Marty, that Iris told us Halliday sometimes went up to the attic. She shrugged that off, but I didn’t, except maybe at first. And Bayless wouldn’t fail to notice it, either. I believe that Halliday learned the secret the attic held and that Bayless knew he had discovered it. That meant that Halliday had to go. Not only would he be in on the deal, but he’d be able to prove that Bayless was the bad boy of this picture.
“It just happened that a perfect setup presented itself: the party Halliday was throwing to celebrate his unexpected fifty-thousand-dollar inheritance. Bayless had brought Iris home. She had been indignant. Let’s go stronger than that. She was mad enough to kill, provided the idea of killing ever entered her mind.
“Bayless stuck around. He said he was doing it to protect Iris. But he knew she’d go to her room and stay there. He followed Halliday upstairs, got the rifle out of the gun case, and shot him. He took a chance, of course, but when nobody heard the shot, he must have felt safe.
“The affair tonight was also simple. Bayless knew Marty and I had prowled the attic. He knew I was sticking close to Iris. He probably figured she had talked a lot on our Las Vegas trip. He knew that he was still in danger and would remain in danger until someone was formally charged with the two murders that already had been committed.
“He was in the house when Iris made the date to meet me. He was listening on the extension downstairs. There’s no proof of that, but it could be. If Dolores or Montero had gone to that downstairs telephone, Bayless would have been quick enough to notice, and to tell us. But if he had gone to the telephone—which was in the hall— they probably wouldn’t even have noticed. After all, they had probably never even met Bayless before, and they were just visiting. If he left the room for a moment, they wouldn’t have any idea what he was doing or why. They wouldn’t even care.
“Iris was to meet me in a secluded spot. Bayless knew that she was our number one suspect. He took a rifle from the gun case and got there first. It’s a dead-end street with plenty of trees and shrubbery. My car showed up. I was in it—or rather he took it for granted it was I. If Iris had been there, he’d have killed me anyway, and tossed the gun into the bushes. She’d have had a tough time explaining that. So he shot and killed, but he didn’t kill me—the person who perhaps had uncovered something he was afraid of. He didn’t know I’d gone out on an emergency call and had sent a friend to notify Iris. He thought he’d done a neat job, the last one he’d be called upon to do. That was calculated to hook Iris tight. We’d be compelled to book her.
“His play tonight was cute. The noble hero, laying down his life for the girl. Sure, he was surprised to see me, but not so surprised that he neglected to put the clincher on it. He said, ‘She told me …’ He carried it just far enough to make it effective.
“He planned that if we tried to rush the place, he’d kill her and then himself. Me, I don’t think it would have worked that way. He would have killed her—a man will do a lot of things when he’s afraid for his own life. But my hunch is that we’d have captured him before he could take his own life, for the simple reason that he had no intention of committing suicide. A sentimental jury would probably have turned him loose, too—juries in this area being what they are.
“And then there’s also this thought: There’s the strong possibility that Bayless anticipated the tear gas. That would suit him fine. He had rigged up the case against Iris to perfection. He had starred in the role of heroic-friend.”
I stopped talking. The atmosphere of the room was tense. It was Marty Walsh who spoke.
“It’s a nice story, kid,” he said. “I believe it. But there’s one thing lacking. You’ve talked about Bayless having a hold over Dorothy—a hold so strong, a secret so great, that she’d be willing to kill. That has to mean that she was protecting someone-herself or someone else. Who was she protecting?”
“Iris,” I said.
“Protecting her from what?”
“Knowledge. Something that Dorothy never wanted Iris to know.”
“What was it?” That was still Marty feeding me the right questions. “What was the secret?”
I got a lungful of air, and then let them have the answer.
“Dorothy Halliday was not Iris Kent’s sister. She was Iris’ mother.”
Chapter Twenty-six
There was a little strangled cry from Iris. She said, “Oh, no!” Then there was more silence.
You could almost hear the brains working in that room. I had been lucky enough to get the idea first, but the others were getting it now. Especially Marty Walsh. He slammed his fist on the desk and said something that was profane but not out of place. He said, “Iris” mother! Sure, kid. Sure! I see it now.”
“When we were going over all that dope from the lawyer and the bank, Marty, it was yelling at us to be seen. Get what I mean?”
“Yeah.” Walsh was concentrating, reassembling the setup, piecing things together.
“Is this how you tab it, Danny?” he inquired as though for confirmation. “Under the will of Mr. and Mrs. Kent, Dorothy was merely the beneficiary of the trust until she was twenty-five years of age, when she was to get the whole thing. We know that the trust was wound up in 1940, which would make her date of birth 1915 and her age at death thirty-six instead of thirty-two.”
“Right,” I said, feeling surer of myself now that I had another guy riding with me. “Presuming I’m right, Dorothy naturally wanted to take all precautions against anyone’s ever suspecting their true relationship. The way she arranged it, she was apparently only eleven years older than Iris. But that wasn’t the way it was. She was fifteen or sixteen years older, and she could easily have been the mother.”
Bayless said, “That doesn’t mean she was. Lots of women try to make themselves out younger than they are.”
“Agreed. I’ve wrestled with that one. I figure the answer isn’t as simple as a woman’s vanity. It doesn’t check with a lot of things, including Dorothy’s general attitude toward Iris.”
Iris had been staring at the desk top, then at me, then at Bayless. She said, “I think you’re right, Danny. It’s a new idea to me, too, but it makes me understand a lot of things. If she was my mother—if she’d never been married before—well, she’d blame my wildness on herself. She’d think it was my heritage. You could be right, Danny. What gave you the idea?”
“Something that I didn’t understand when I first saw it.” I turned to Marty. “Remember the day we browsed through the attic? Remember the old trunk we dug into, and all the junk we unearthed?”
Marty said yes, he remembered.
“My understanding is that that trunk was packed by Mrs. Klinger, the governess, when the three of them moved to California. She kept things of sentimental value, but you may have noticed that there was nothing left like a baby book or a bride’s book—not any of the things that were popular in the days when Mr. and Mrs. Kent were young. Mrs. Klinger must have been pretty careful about what she kept and what she destroyed. She only slipped once.”
“Where?”
“There was a picture—a casual snapshot. It showed three people: Mr. Elsworth Kent in the uniform of a World War I lieutenant, Mrs. Kent, and a little girl. It had three names marked under it in white ink, and the third name was Dorothy. It established the fact that the picture had been taken in 1917 just prior to Mr. Kent’s departure for France.
“That’s where the age hunch came from, because if Dorothy Kent had been the age she claimed to be, she’d have been born in 1919. She couldn’t have been in any picture taken in 1917.”
“It still doesn’t prove anything,” snapped Bayless.
Marty Walsh and I looked at each other. We knew better than anybody else that I hadn’t proved anything, but we also knew that if I happened to be right, proof would be easy enough. I deliberately built up my case before starting on Bayless direct.
“This lad probably got his first hint of the truth from the same picture,” I said, “or from something
similar that Mrs. Klinger may have overlooked. He had all the opportunity in the world to browse through that attic.
“There was a secret big enough to carry its possessor anywhere. Bayless figured that Iris wasn’t going to marry him. He figured that if he was going to be left out in the cold, he might as well cash in on what he knew. He started blackmailing Dorothy. At first, she paid. Then she realized that there would be no end to it. There was nothing she wouldn’t do to keep this secret from Iris.
“When Dorothy realized that Bayless had no intention of letting up, she decided to do something about it. She certainly was no longer in favor of Bayless and Iris getting married. So she made an engagement to meet him. In her car. She took the .38 from the gun case. She intended to kill Bayless if she didn’t succeed in scaring him off. He turned the tables and killed her.”
“That,” said Bayless sharply, “makes it self-defense.”
“Like hell it does!” I stepped close to him, shoved my face into his, and talked tough. “Who the hell do you think you’re kidding? A man wrestles with a woman in a car over a gun. All you had to do was get it away from her. You didn’t have to shoot her with it. That’s not self-defense, it’s murder.”
“But that’s not how it happened. She pulled the gun and tried to shoot me. She was still holding it when it went—”
He stopped. Stopped suddenly. He knew—too late— that he had defended himself too vehemently, and that in doing so he had put the noose around his own neck. His face turned an unpleasant pasty color, and he closed his eyes for a moment.
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