by Zenith Brown
She turned to Bestoso. “I didn’t know my son was dead till you came this morning. Nor did Nikki. He was sick, waiting for Dodo to remember the clock striking four. Finlay’s light was on at three. He’d remember a noise in the garage when he was reminded later. And Dodo came through. You believed her, Bestoso. You are old fishing friends, she told us. Nikki had won again. That’s when I decided to kill him. But Durban came. He said no, there were other ways. I was going away with him then . . . until Jennifer came.
“—The girl Peter was to marry. Alive when Peter was dead . . . in the door, rain on her hair, cool lovely rain, with Peter burned . . . no lovely rain to cool the hair my hands—”
Her voice broke for an instant.
“She spoke to Durban, the hunchback. It was Finlay she loved . . . lame, ugly Finlay, not Peter, my beautiful Peter. She never saw Durban’s terrible body. Only his kindness and his wisdom. And there handsome Nikki was, sweating in the door, afraid to open it, afraid to close it, because he was afraid Durban was there to tell Dodo that Nikki owed him money. And I was leaving Jennifer, knowing there was nothing would stop him from killing her. So I stayed. I went upstairs and called Finlay. I told him I had a debt of honor. Last night I promised him Peter and I would see that nothing happened to Jennifer. Peter had done his part without knowing it. I still had mine to do. If Nikki heard I was down at the Rock, he’d come. He had to kill me. Both he and I knew that. He’d tried to kill Finlay there, before dinner last night. That would have been an accident. Poor lame Finlay lost his footing. Today it would have been poor disconsolate Alla, bereft of her only son, a suicide. Nikki would never resist so easy a way out for me. I got my gun and called Finlay. I wanted him as an eyewitness, to see I killed Nikki in self-defence, close to the Rock. I was just going down the back stairs to ask Moulton to tell Nikki I’d gone there. . . . But Jennifer came. Dodo had made a deal, ten thousand a year and safety. Jennifer was calling you, Bestoso. Nikki came up the stairs. I shot him. I’m ready to go now.”
She turned to take her cape from Jenny and stopped, her eyes fixed past her. In Dodo’s hands was the half-burned fragment of the portrait print Fish Finlay had taken from the fireplace at the stable.
“What’s that?”
“I thought you’d tell me,” Dodo said. “I put it in my pocket to show Nikki on the plane.”
Alla Emlyn looked down at it for an instant. She shrugged. “This is from a painting of her? Her hands, and the carnations . . . she drove Nikki mad always filling everything in the house with them, even his bedroom.” Her eyes rested on it again. “So this is how Blum and Polly Randolph knew about the rubies. Nikki thought they saw them first on Dodo at the Randolphs’.”
She spoke slowly, as if trying to absorb something she hadn’t known before. “I see, now. This explains a lot we didn’t know. How they were traced to us in the first place.”
“They were stolen, Alla?”
“Stolen? Not if the Axis had won the war. There was an old man in Vienna who collected star rubies. He and his wife were in a concentration camp. He offered a friend of mine, a power in the land, three star rubies he’d hidden to get him and his wife out of the Nazi hell to New York where his son lived. They didn’t reach the border and my friend got all the rubies, not three. He didn’t know that star rubies aren’t meant for a necklace. They were red, my neck is white. And I had to hide them after the war. The stones are known. I couldn’t sell them except under the counter. The son has a claim in for them with the Occupation authorities. We heard last month they had been traced to us, we didn’t know how. We had to get them out of France. Dodo kindly smuggled them in for us.”
“At Nikki’s suggestion,” Dodo said, with sudden bitterness. “I can hear him now. And the other night he persuaded me it was all right for me to wear them to the Randolphs’ . . . so he could go to the stable phone, to call the Customs. Very neatly done, Alla.”
“Well, it was a gambler’s chance for fifty thousand dollars, darling,” Alla Emlyn said coolly. “The local Customs wouldn’t know about the Austrian claim, you’d rush down and redeem them to save your own face if nothing else. That was another reason Nikki had to kill Blum and Polly, so they couldn’t tell. Until Durban insisted on seeing Dodo, and Nikki knew he couldn’t afford to wait to see if the gamble worked.”
She put her cape around her shoulders. “A nest of vipers your lamppost brought you. But I was only cheating you. I never planned to kill you, dear. Shall we go, Bestoso?”
She walked to the door, waited for him to open it, and went out across the hall without turning her head again.
Dodo sat staring in front of her for an instant, and put her hands to her face.
“Don’t, Mother . . . please,” Jenny said.
Dodo shook her head. “It’s nothing. Just what a ghastly fool I’ve been. Go away, Caxey. I can’t bear to look at you. Go away, Fish.”
Fish Finlay had not even heard Alla Emlyn, except in a dazed fog, since she’d said ‘lame, ugly Finlay. . . .’
“Let’s us go, Mother,” Jenny said. “You and I. We’ll go away some—”
She broke off as Bestoso came back into the room. “Well, she’s gone,” he said grimly. “Did I leave my hat?” He started out, and stopped. “There’s this thing,” he said. He put his hand in his pocket and brought out a paper. “I had a tough time getting it. It’s going to be a hell of a lot tougher, explaining why—”
“Let me see it, Art.” Caxson Reeves took it, took his half spectacles out of his breast pocket, polished them, put them on and read the paper, carefully and for a long time. Jenny’s cheeks went pale at first and colored, miserably, hotly red.
“Let’s go, Mother,” she said quickly.
“Wait, darling. What is it, Caxey, for heaven’s sake?”
Reeves looked over the straight bar of his spectacles gravely, at Fish Finlay first, and at Jenny Linton, the color seeping still more unhappily up into her face.
“It is a document,” he said cautiously. “A document that purports to be a special license, valid for one marriage between James Fisher Finlay and Jennifer Louise—”
“Jenny!”
“No, Mother . . . please!” Jenny said desperately. “It’s nothing . . . it was just a crazy idea—”
“No, Jenny.” Fish Finlay moved then. “It’s a beautiful idea, Jenny.”
He went over to her. She shook her head, her lashes down, her cheeks burning. “Please, Fish. You don’t have to—”
“Jenny.” He turned to Caxson Reeves, Bestoso and B. Meggs. “Look, you carrion crows. Give a guy a break, will you? How can I tell a girl I love her with you three standing on the sidelines? How can I tell her I fell in love with her before I knew she was Jennifer Linton, on a back road in Virginia, when her face was dirty and her shirt torn, and I gave her my azaleas because they were all I had left . . . she’d already taken my heart. I can’t tell her I love her with you people here. Or can I, Jenny? I love you, Jenny. Will you marry me?”
“I got a preacher out in the car too,” Lieutenant Bestoso said. “I just got a Protestant, though. I didn’t want to pull a fast one in the Church.”
“The Maloneys of Enniskerry are all Protestants, Art,” Dodo said tartly.
“Well, you find good people in all faiths,” Lieutenant Bestoso said. “—I guess.”
“Stinkers too,” said B. Meggs.
“I love you, Jenny. Will you marry me?”
“Polly’s beat, not mine,” said B. Meggs. “Do my best, though. On Sunday, at Enniskerry in Newport, a motley crew assembled. . . .”
“Will you marry me, Jenny? Here? Now?”
Jenny Linton raised her face then, glowing, silver-bright as the new young moon.
“For protective custody only?”
“For protective custody,” Fish Finlay said, “but . . . to take the intolerable burden of the Maloney Trust from Mr. Reeves’s unwilling shoulders, it’s our duty to produce a foal. Or two.”
“Or more, Rusty Red,” said Caxso
n Reeves. “None of them for sale at any price.” He looked at Dodo. “Just the influence of Finlay’s living quarters here at Enniskerry,” he said blandly. “Symbolic. But effective, I trust.”
He took off his spectacles, folded them and put them back in his pocket. “Ask our Protestant friend to come in, please, Art,” he said.