The Book of the Lion

by Elizabeth Daly

  The door swung wide.

  “And loose hinges,” added the superintendent.

  They stood looking into the dim room. Mrs. Wakes had not put her papers away or covered her typewriter. A breeze from the west fluttered an edge of a curtain. The superintendent said: “Well, you can write the note while I—” He started for the lobby, and stopped.

  Gamadge had not moved from the doorway; now he went across the room and bent over the figure on the couch.

  “Out like a light,” said the superintendent. “Early for her, and I’m surprised she started in before I came. They always think nobody knows about it.”

  Mrs. Wakes looked as though she had barely made the trip to the day bed. She had sat down, leaned back against the pillow, and gone to sleep with her feet on the floor. Gamadge lifted her hand.

  “What’s the use distoib her?” asked the superintendent irascibly. “Take an expoit to wake her out of that.”

  Gamadge straightened. “You have a telephone downstairs, haven’t you?”

  “Listen, what’s the use calling a doctor? She don’t need one. Didn’t you ever see a blot-out before?”

  “The police will bring their own doctor.”

  “Police?” The superintendent’s voice rose in a croak.

  “She’s dead.”

  “What are you…” The superintendent moved forward and stared. “I tell you she’s…”

  “Will you go down and ring the precinct? Or do you want to stay here while I do it?”

  The superintendent leaned forward, and studied the grey face. Then he stood upright. He said: “For a fact, I’ll go.”

  “Ask for Lieutenant Durfee, will you?”

  “Thank God you got a friend there.” The superintendent hurried away. Gamadge shut the door, and then went back to look at the leaden profile against the red cushion. His face was blank, his hands hung loosely at his sides. Presently he turned and surveyed the room, frowning. He walked into the little dark lobby, which contained nothing but a wardrobe trunk, and then turned left and went into a big tiled bathroom.

  There was an old tub raised on claw feet, a washstand and medicine cabinet, an electric plate and a gas ring on a small zinc-covered table. There was a little tin ice-box, under which water dripped into a pan. A closet door, half open, disclosed part of Mrs. Wakes’s wardrobe, and shelves crowded with dishes and containers.

  On the ledge of the washbasin lay a half-pint brandy flask, with a little brandy in it; against it had rolled a glass tube, thin as a straw, with white dust and a fragment of white pellet at the bottom of it. It had no label. A tumbler stood back where the ledge was wider; it contained dregs of brandy.

  Gamadge went back into the sitting-room, sat in the wicker chair, and looked at Mrs. Wakes. She had had a quiet death, and Gamadge did not think that she would have blamed him too much; she had been a ghost in more ways than one for so long.

  The radio men came in a very few minutes, and after them the usual crowd, the usual routine. After the first turmoil was over, Gamadge was able to get down to the superintendent’s basement and telephone Clara that he would be very late for dinner; but that was after Durfee had come. An hour later the room was cleared, and he and Durfee sat facing each other across the desk. They were both smoking.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Half a Pint

  DURFEE SAID: “I ALWAYS like your rigmaroles. I’ve heard a lot of ’em, and I’ve enjoyed ’em.” He fluttered the fingers of both hands, then picked up his cigarette again. “This one, no. Not this time.”

  Gamadge said nothing; his eyes were on a framed photograph of a bridge over the Seine, which hung just above Durfee’s head.

  “It’s the plainest case of suicide I ever saw,” continued Durfee, “it can’t be anything but suicide, and you supplied the motive yourself.” He leaned forward and tapped the desk. “Don’t you admit you’re responsible for this woman’s death?”

  “In a way, yes, I am.”

  “In a way? In a way? What happens? You come here—bust in on her this afternoon and give her the shock of her life; tell her we know Paul Bradlock called here the evening he was killed. And you even let her think we know who he called on. And let me tell you, Gamadge, you overstepped there.”

  Gamadge looked sideways at Durfee, and then back at the picture. Durfee put up both hands, palm outwards, and shoved them towards Gamadge as though he were pushing him off.

  “I know, I know, I give you that,” he said angrily. “You found out who she was, and you connected her up with Paul Bradlock.”

  “They were connected before. She was connected with him twenty years ago in Paris.”

  “She was, and who else? Anyway, I’ll give you that. It’s pretty plain, from what you say, that she saw him that evening.”

  “Since he was here such a short time, it almost looks as if she were all ready for him,” remarked Gamadge.

  “Even if she didn’t have a telephone. Wait a minute, did she have one then, two years ago?” Durfee thought. “No, I guess not. Well, he came here to tell her something or to hear something, or to give her something.”

  “Or to get something,” said Gamadge dreamily.

  “Which he dragged all over town with him. For all I know,” said Durfee, “she followed him up and down to all the saloons, and then took him walking in the park and killed him. With”—Durfee glanced around the room sourly—“with something she had with her, slid down in her umbrella. In spite of the fact that there’s no evidence he wasn’t murdered by a hold-up man.” Durfee looked up at Gamadge from under lowered lids, scowling. “Another motive for her to commit suicide, if she thought you were on to that. Truth is, Gamadge, you have murder on the brain. You came in this morning and asked about Paul Bradlock’s death, with no better reason than some funny business about those letters, which Iverson and Mrs. Paul explained to you to-day.”

  Gamadge lifted his head and gazed at the ceiling as if in prayer. He said: “I’ve just told you that I wondered whether she hadn’t sold something of value, which Paul Bradlock had been murdered for.”

  This time Durfee put his hands up as before, but motioned with them violently to the left, the gesture of one who tries to disencumber himself of something soft and smothering. He said: “You have murder on the brain. What happens? You come here and explode this bomb under the woman. She gets up and goes into her bathroom and she pours a shot of brandy into a tumbler and empties a tube of quarter-grain morphia tablets into the shot. That’s black market morphia, or it would have had the label with the serial number on it; but it’s a twenty-tablet tube, five grains. There must have been eight to twelve tablets in there, perhaps more—I bet they find all of three grains in her. I wouldn’t be surprised if they got most of the five. Doc says she’d be dead in half an hour, and she was dead in half an hour, or just about. When you left, she was dying. Wasn’t she?”

  “Yes, she was dying.”

  “The times are right. You left at four. Doc was here by seven. He says she died more than two hours before he got here, and so far as he could tell it might have been near three. Feller, you were lucky I came.”

  “Well,” said Gamadge, looking at him mildly, “I sent for you.”

  “Yes,” replied Durfee, almost at the top of his voice, “and what do you tell me when I get here? That the woman didn’t commit suicide, oh no, she was murdered. She was murdered! With morphia in the glass she drank out of, none in the half-pint flask, and the container there with morphia in it, and she comes back here with brandy on her breath and goes right to sleep. Or wait, no, she comes to when you leave, hears the door shut I suppose, and just manages to get across to the couch, and hasn’t time even to put her feet up. And you want it to be a murder.”

  “Yes.”

  Durfee’s voice dropped to a low, persuasive note; he gripped the edge of the desk with both hands, using self-control, and bent forward:

  “Gamadge, does anybody dope a tumbler? And if so, how? Ten grains in that half pint would fix her,
she’d get enough to kill her out of one good drink—she did! But that brandy in the flask had no poison in it. They got me definite word of that a quarter hour ago.”

  Gamadge did not seem to be paying much attention to this. He said: “I knew she hadn’t had anything to drink before. I couldn’t understand.”

  “Well, you understand now, don’t you? But if you don’t—if you still don’t—” Durfee sat back. “This Iverson was calling you since one o’clock, you tell me.”

  “He was.”

  “Calling you up to explain about those papers, which were none of your business anyway. He was calling you up before you ever heard of Mrs. Wakes. Get that? Before you ever heard of her.”

  “I’d heard of her.”

  “Before you knew where she was or anything about her and you only found her this afternoon by chance.”

  “Well, not exactly chance.”

  “Inspiration, then, when you saw that name Weekes.”

  “Call it that,” said Gamadge.

  “Whatever it was, she couldn’t have let them know you were coming to see her, even if she’d had a telephone. And by the time you left, she was dying.”

  “That’s so.”

  “And what’s more, Iverson and Mrs. Paul Bradlock didn’t know you’d ever heard of her, didn’t know you were looking for her, and didn’t know you’d find her. So why murder her, even if she knows they killed Paul Bradlock? They never murdered her before. Why do it now, when the picture hasn’t changed, so far as they know, at all? Besides…” Durfee bent forward again, this time with his forefinger pointing at Gamadge’s face: “This afternoon, to hear you tell it, they give you a motive! They get you up there and give you their motive for killing Bradlock! They tell you that something valuable was found—after he died, of course—and that they sold it for a hundred thousand dollars. You think they’re crazy?”

  “I don’t, no. What they told me doesn’t constitute a motive for killing Bradlock.”

  “It doesn’t?”

  “No. It wasn’t true. That manuscript they talked about was never found by Paul Bradlock or anybody else.”

  “You mean there was never any such thing?”

  “There was such a thing, but it’s lost. It wasn’t picked up by Paul Bradlock in a rummage sale, if it’s escaped the attention of all the professional hunters since rare documents have been hunted for. If it has been found,” said Gamadge, “then I’m the wife of Bath.”

  Durfee asked after a pause: “You know it hasn’t?”

  “Of course I don’t know. The story can’t be disproved—that’s why they told it. That’s why they told the other one, that thin one about the letters. Nobody can disprove any of it. They told the truth twice this afternoon,” said Gamadge. “Mrs. Paul Bradlock told the truth when she said she wanted to stay on at the Bradlock studio—and Iverson told it when he said that they were confessing to that hundred thousand dollar deal because I might find out about it anyway. Mrs. Bradlock’s truth was obvious—it’s plain that she did want to stay on; Iverson’s truth was necessary—for all they knew I had ways of discovering that Mrs. Bradlock had a private income of noble proportions, instead of being penniless.”

  Durfee said: “That damn rigmarole. All right, they’re a couple of crooks, though I can’t say they seem to have broken any laws. But now go on and tell me how they got in here and put morphia in a tumbler when Mrs. Wakes wasn’t looking, and then persuaded her to pour brandy in on top of the morphia later on and drink it. How could anybody count on her doing such a thing, even if she was blind and couldn’t see the stuff? As for pouring out a shot of brandy and leaving it for her to drink some time or other, she just might notice that tube of morphia laying there. A perfect suicide picture, and you want to make it a murder because you don’t like this Iverson. I tell you if it was murder the morphia would have been in the bottle.”

  “But then everybody would have known it was murder, Durfee.”

  Durfee opened his mouth, looked at Gamadge, and closed his mouth again.

  Gamadge smiled for the first time. “You get it.”

  “No, I don’t get it.”

  “Of course you get it. The poison was in the flask.”

  “It wasn’t.”

  Gamadge sat up and lighted a cigarette. He said: “There was plenty of time after I left at four o’clock, before I got back at six, to come and remove the doped flask and substitute another.”

  “They didn’t know you’d ever been here,” said Durfee in a low voice.

  “That’s so. But I knew where they were between four and six—at the studio. They couldn’t have got here after that before I did.”

  Durfee said slowly: “You mean they wanted you there for an alibi.”

  “Their alibi was good from four o’clock on; I had notice to come and find them there. They must think they have some other effective alibi up to four o’clock; after four they have a corker—me.”

  “And as soon as you actually came they sent somebody over to change the brandy flasks? Why not before?”

  “They must have known she wouldn’t start drinking till she quit work. They’d give her at least an hour to die in.”

  Durfee put up his hands again, this time to wave them in the air. “Gamadge, it’s a pipe dream. You think they sent this little cousin over to change those flasks—the girl that beat it as soon as you got there. Or that fellow Welsh?”

  “If it was Welsh he must have been hanging around outside watching for me to come, because I don’t think there’s a back way out of that annex. No reason why there should be.”

  “It’s a pipe dream. The party would have had to have a key to get in. They’d have had to know all about the dead woman’s habits, the fact that she took her brandy neat and drank alone, the fact that there wasn’t another bottle of liquor in the place. And I ask you, does that sound like a heavy drinker—one half pint of brandy on the premises? In spite of what that super says! Take one drink and let him smell it, and that character would say anything. And there wasn’t a sign she took drugs.” Durfee drummed on the desk with all ten fingers. “They’ll find out later, but there wasn’t a sign. She had that morphia ready for the day she decided to quit.”

  “I’m glad you know where it came from.”

  “You came here, got talking about old times, and she couldn’t stand it—woman who’d lost money, come down in the world. The papers are going to put it down as a plain honest-to-God suicide.”

  “The papers will have enough in them to suit me.” Gamadge smiled.

  “You mean you’re satisfied to leave it that way?” Durfee looked relieved. “You’re wise. All it would do would be to make a lot of trouble for those poor unfortunate Avery Bradlocks. It isn’t as if there was one atom of evidence.” He scowled at Gamadge again. “It’s all conjecture.”

  Gamadge laughed. “That’s what I say when you rebuke me for keeping things to myself. Don’t blame me this time.”

  “You’re going on with it?”

  “Well, of course I am. I’m rather involved.”

  “Personally, I wouldn’t know where to start.” Durfee got up. “Tell you what I’ll do, I’ll find out if any of the neighbours saw any of these people going in here or coming out between four and six to-day.”

  “Thanks very much.” Gamadge slowly pushed himself to his feet.

  “Just try not to drive anybody else to killing themselves, that’s all.” Durfee walked to the door and opened it.

  “I’ll try.” Gamadge went through into the hall. Durfee locked the door after them. “Like to bet you we don’t find out anything more about this suicide,” he said. “Like to bet nobody saw anybody interesting around here this afternoon?”

  “No use losing my money.”

  “Well,” said Durfee as they went downstairs, “you might keep me posted. I’m interested.”

  “That’s good.”

  They went down the echoing stairs, and out into waning afternoon sunlight. Eyeing each other with friendly cynic
ism, they shook hands. Durfee went on down to the subway; Gamadge crossed the street and entered a drugstore. In the telephone booth he got out his notebook and looked up a number. He dialled.

  A well-remembered voice came over the wire, a voice with a squeak in it: “Indus speaking.”

  “Thank goodness I caught you. This is—”

  “Don’t have to tell me that. It’s Mr. Gamadge, and how are you?”

  “Indus, you know everything. I’m fine, Indus. Listen, I know you retired. How do you like it, by the way?”

  “Mr. Gamadge, the days ain’t long enough.”

  “That’s good hearing. You wouldn’t do a little job for me, would you? It’s so confidential I couldn’t ask another soul.”

  “Mr. Gamadge, the truth is I’m past it. I couldn’t foller a baby carriage, if the nurse had any kind of a stride. It’s my jernts.”

  “I know, Indus, but you’re not laid up, are you?”

  “I’m brisk; it’s just that I don’t get around fast. Not fast enough to get out of sight in a hurry, or run for cabs.”

  “You could almost do this sitting down.”

  “What is it?”

  “I want a private word or two with a young lady. She lives with a cousin in a private house, no servants, and if I could catch her when the other woman was out… There’s a boarder, too.”

  “I could hang around.”

  “There’s a drugstore around the corner from the place, on Madison. You could call me when the coast seemed to be clear.”

  “Is it urgent?”

  “It’s urgent, but we can’t exactly hurry it, can we?”

  “I don’t know.” Indus paused, then went on: “It’s eight o’clock. I could start tonight—don’t mind late hours. In fact, I was going to the movies.”

  “Well, that’s so, the other woman might go out. If you got up there in a hurry—take a cab.” Gamadge described the studio, and gave Indus a carefully detailed picture of the little pink-nosed girl, of Mrs. Paul Bradlock, of young Welsh and of Iverson.

  “Leave it to me,” said Indus. “I’ll knock off at ten, call you tomorrow morning if there’s nothing going on tonight.”