“But you’re one yourself.”
“I know,” she said, and left it at that.
“How nice!” Fran Owen said as she came in. “Company!”
“Uh-huh,” said Fergus. “Nice place you’ve got here, once a guy gets past the sentry.”
“This is Lucille,” Fran explained. “She’s the guiding spirit of the place. Would you like a drink?”
“We’re hospitable, we are,” said the redhead.
“If you would …?”
“No,” said Fran, with a certain quiet pride. “I’m on the wagon.”
“Yoicks!” yelled Lucille. “Lordy, but have I got to spread this news! See you later, boys.” And she vanished, shouting in a childlike chant, “Fran is on the wagon! Fran is on the waaaaagon!”
“Quiet life you lead here,” Fergus observed. To punctuate his remark, a near-by piano began beating out something excessively percussive and probably by Béla Bartók.
“We have fun. Everybody’s doing something. And when we all chip in together on work and expenses, it adds up to a pretty reasonable life.”
“All same like Mark Andrews’ ideas on the theater?”
“Yes. And isn’t that swell? That’s why I’ve gone on the wagon; or did you guess? Now I’ve got something really to work for, something honest and clean and good.”
“None of which words,” Fergus commented, “would exactly fit the late Rupert Carruthers.”
“No.” Fran’s voice sank. “They wouldn’t, would they?”
“Andrews was right. You were one of those smart enough to see through Carruthers. But in that case, why the hell did you stay on with him?”
“Why? Must there be reasons for everything?”
“Little reasons, yes. It’s the big questions that stand magnificently unanswered; the little reasons always work out.”
“And why should this be a little reason?” evaded Fran.
“Come on, Fran. The Carruthers period is over; tell us why you put up with it.”
“I put up with it … No, I invited it, because—”
From the hall a girl burst in—a tall and slim young Jewess in shorts and a halter. “Look!” she cried. “Look, Fran!” From a graceful poise in the center of the floor, she sprang into the air, twittered her feet together seven times, and sank lightly to the floor again. “Entrechat sept!” she exclaimed ecstatically. “And the best I could ever do before was cinq!”
“This is Bella,” said Fran. “She—”
“Don’t tell me,” Fergus stopped her. “Let me guess. She’s a strip-teaser?”
“No,” said Bella. “But I used to be. Want to see?” Her hips swung into a low slow grind, and her hands stole up to the back clasp of her halter.
“Honey lamb,” Fergus protested, “I’m used to it from the balcony. Close up I couldn’t stand it, not in my condition.”
Bella grinned, broke from the grind into an entrechat trois for an encore, stuck out her tongue, and disappeared.
Fran made a helpless gesture of her hands. “You see?”
“You were saying …?” Fergus prompted.
“Was I? But how silly of me. Tell me, Mr. Harker: this play of yours—what is its name?”
“It hasn’t any. I think one of our first cooperative ventures will have to be christening it. And nothing about Souls and Garments.”
“We’ll ’tend to that. But what I was going to ask—does it have a part in it for me?”
“I haven’t seen you act, of course; but from what Fergus and Sarah have told me about your work, I think yes.”
“Fine. What sort?”
“A woman with the highest ideals and an active life all planned for herself, who marries into Oklahoma oil and slowly watches herself decay. The only one in the group conscious of what’s happening to her, but morally impotent to arrest the process.”
“Sounds good. Like a part you could get your teeth into. I’m looking forward to that reading next week, if Fennworth doesn’t throw a monkey wrench into the plans.”
“Then you hadn’t heard?”
“Heard what?”
Fergus answered her. “Fennworth was killed last night.”
The pianist had shifted to Falla’s Fire Dance. She seemingly liked them loud. The rhythmic and ritual banging all but drowned out Fran’s quiet “Killed …?”
“He crossed the street without looking both ways. Moral for pedestrians.”
“Oh.” There was relief in her voice.
“Yes. Murder’s so common, isn’t it? Refreshing to run onto a death that’s pure accident.”
“Is murder so common as all that?” she smiled. “Are you fed up with it, Fergus? And you, Mr. Harker? Carrying around nice clippings on murder?” She said it deliberately, as she might have pressed the tip of her tongue against an aching tooth.
Fergus tapped his cane on the floor. “I really came here for a purpose, Fran.”
“Yes?”
“I wanted to tell you something. Something that might be useful for you to know.”
“You’re not going back to my acting? I maintain I’ll underplay if I want to underplay. It is not essentially untheatrical, as you once insisted. In fact, it’s the New Hamming.”
“All right, Macushla. Underplay this: Willard Beemis is still alive.”
The door burst open again. This intruder was a straight-haired and somewhat wild-eyed blonde in a slack suit. “Good,” she said. “Company. Look, boys—anybody here know anything about vampires?”
Fran tried to clear the frown from her face. “This is Cathy,” she said. “She writes pulps.”
“What I want to know,” the blonde went on, “is what happens when you drive the stake into them. Do they spurt a geyser of blood or explode with a loud bang?”
“It’s like with Boojums,” said Norman. “They softly and suddenly vanish away and never are met with again.”
“Thanks. That’s all I wanted to know. But I think a geyser’d be more fun.” And she was gone.
Fran turned her gaze slowly on Fergus. “Did I underplay it all right?”
“As beautiful a job as I could ask.”
“But he isn’t, you know. He’s dead, with a burned face. I thought you’d guessed that.”
“I had. That’s why I say: he’s still alive.”
Fran sat very still. “I don’t believe you.”
“I just thought you might want to know.”
“Do you think I can stay on the wagon now?”
“He’ll pay soon. I promise you that. Not for your mother, but for plenty else.”
“I could bluff you,” Fran said half to herself. “But why? I gave myself away that night at Joe’s. And then again when you told me about … the case, I said Janet’s name and you hadn’t mentioned it. I caught that too late. But I didn’t care who knew after that. It was over. I didn’t have to try to forget it in drinking or in men that walked off with the first buxom wench that showed. It was over, and now …”
The piano had stopped. The room was horribly still.
“Tell me three things,” said Fergus.
“Why? And again, why not?”
“How did you know him?”
“I didn’t. Not to prove.”
“But what made you think …?”
“I spent the last of the little money I had on private detectives to trace Beemis. When I finally got a typing job I lived on crackers and milk and went on paying them. They learned that he’d gone into the theater, but they couldn’t find out what he’d changed his name to. Maybe that’s why I turned to acting—the subconscious hope that some day I’d catch up with him. I don’t know.
“Then when I met this man … He didn’t look the same, but I felt something jump inside me. The way I suppose it must be when your child first kicks you. I kept watching. Little things. An intonation, a turn of phrase, a word he never pronounced correctly.
“I tried to find out what I could about him. Nothing went farther back than 1927. There was a dead end there. And m
ore and more I was certain; I knew … What are your other things?”
“Why did you write to the Cincinnati police?”
“I was tight,” she said simply. “One of those good-ideas-at-the-time. I saw the next morning how futile it was; but I’d been desperate. It seemed like doing something—anything to keep my mother’s murderer from strutting about as the god of his dirty little theatrical puddle.”
“The other question,” Fergus cut in. “Did he have those eyebrows in Cincinnati?”
“No.”
Fergus rose. “Thanks, Fran.” There was warmth and gratitude and sympathy under those simple words. “I’ll let you know what breaks. And … promise me you’ll try the wagon till tomorrow.”
Fran nodded wordlessly and attempted a smile. The pianist began the Prokofieff March fortissimo.
Chapter 15
Lewis Jordan’s quiet hermitage basked peacefully in the sun. Here, Norman thought, was refuge and surcease; and yet here might well lie the very core of this complex and deadly problem.
The cat Nansen was reveling in the warmth, playing with something bright from which glaring rays blinded the eye. Fergus thrust out his cane and pulled the glimmering object nearer. It was an empty whisky bottle, of the same execrable cheap brand which had figured in Hilary’s narrative and which Norman had found in Carruthers’ desk. Fergus gave his Watson a wordless glance and limped on to the door.
Jordan did not seem happy to welcome them. There was a slightly grudging quality to his “Come in, gentlemen.” He made the inevitable polite inquiries as to Fergus’ ankle, but then let the conversation drop and only as a forced afterthought remembered to offer his guests chairs.
“I’d expected to see you at the theater before this,” Fergus said.
“I know.” Jordan plucked restlessly at his beard. “I should have come. But the news that you brought me on Thursday was such a shock that … I could not adjust myself to the thought of death in the theater. I have stayed here and sought to—to think things through. Not an easy task, I assure you.”
“Things have been happening in your absence.”
Jordan was silent. “Have they?” he forced himself to ask at last. “And what sort of things, Mr. O’Breen? A man in his isolation must not lose touch with the world.”
Fergus told him briefly of Fennworth’s death, relating it simply as an accident, and of Mark Andrews’ plans for the theater.
“Death again,” Jordan murmured. “Death …”
“And I’m afraid,” Fergus continued, “that if this plan of Andrews’ goes through, your opus is headed for the wastebasket. He doesn’t show any gnawing desire to go on with that production.”
“It does not matter,” said Jordan surprisingly. “He is probably right. The play is bad. A man must hold to what he knows, to what he can do. To venture into the fields of others is to destroy oneself. Let him scrap the play. It can make no difference to me.”
Fergus looked at him oddly. “I thought The Soul meant so much to you?”
“It did. Many things have meant much to me. Perhaps the wrong things. Values are not so certain, not so simple as a man may sometimes think. To dream is noble. To hope is splendid. But to believe in dreams and hopes is … idiocy.” His voice was harsh and bitter.
“You’ve changed, sir.” It was a simple and obvious enough statement, but Fergus’ voice shook a little as he made it.
Jordan fixed him with sharp old eyes. “You think that I have changed, Mr. O’Breen?”
“You seem to have lost—what shall I say?—your better self?”
“Some changes are necessary … But why have you come here? Is it for more unexplained questions?”
“No. Chiefly because I thought this was a house of quiet and contentment. I may have been wrong.”
“Does a man with a game leg come so far for quiet and contentment?”
“All right. I will ask a question. When we left here Thursday, we saw Adam Fennworth driving up in his incredible old jaloppy. What did he want with you?”
Lewis Jordan’s face was blank. “I have not seen Fennworth since I was last at the theater.”
There was a little silence, a curiously tense silence covering unspoken, almost unframed hostilities. Norman looked about the room. Disorder had spread, starting from the writing table as focus, like a malignant growth eating its way through healthy cells.
Before Thursday Norman had sensed trouble in the theater; but among all the smoldering emotions there had been two pure sources of relief, Sarah and Lewis Jordan. Now the smoldering had burst into flame, and even those two slaking sources were dried up. Her own whims if nothing worse (and how much worse it might be, he still refused to think) had cut him off from Sarah; and now the blessed quietude of Jordan’s retreat was also somehow destroyed. Where he had found serenity, now there were only the overtones of some hidden bitterness. It was as though Carruthers’ destructive power were even stronger after death, if indeed …
“Gentlemen,” said Lewis Jordan, with an only passable attempt at the manner of genial hospitality, “I was about to put on the kettle when you arrived. Should you care to join me in a pot of tea?”
Norman began a polite murmur of acceptance, but Fergus cut him short with a rapped-out “No thanks.”
Jordan frowned and seemed not even to notice that Nansen had sprung into his lap. “Such weak drinks do not appeal to you, Mr. O’Breen?”
“I confess,” said Fergus, “it wasn’t the weakness that worried me.”
Jordan’s right hand stroked the purring Nansen. “I do not understand you.”
“I might take a spot of whisky if you had any.”
“You know that I do not care for hard liquor. A glass of sherry, perhaps?”
“No thanks.”
Jordan leaned forward in his chair. “Mr. O’Breen,” he said slowly, “who are you?”
“Me? I’m the dope that asks foolish questions. Remember?”
“And why?”
“Asks, not answers. And I’m going to ask two more, Mr. Jordan. One, have you got a telephone?”
The apparently total irrelevance of this seemed to throw Jordan off his stride. “Yes,” he nodded.
“And the other is just an echo: who are you?”
Fergus’ voice was no longer bright and chipper. It was a cool hard voice that cut the warm air with its chill incision. His green stare fixed the eyes of Jordan. For a long minute there was silence. Then Nansen let out a yowl of pain and sprang away from the strong hand which had clenched him.
The tension snapped. “Sorry to’ve bothered you,” said Fergus lightly. “Let’s get going, Norm.”
“Good-by, Mr. Jordan,” said Norman, in courteous confusion.
Lewis Jordan said nothing. They felt his eyes on their backs as they left the house. That gaze burned hotter than the sun.
“How’s the dynamite holding out?” Norman asked. They were sitting in the O’Breen kitchen, devouring a much needed snack of ham sandwiches and beer. It was their first food since breakfast, though not until he smelled the ham had Norman realized how enormously hungry he really was.
“The dynamite? It’s due to go off tonight, Norm. And I tell you I’m scared. Partly scared of making a fool of myself, and partly—well, just plain old scared. I wish to God all my problems were as easy as Paul Jackson’s.”
Norman started. “Don’t tell me that in the midst of everything else you’ve figured that one out?”
“Afraid I have. Subconsciouslike. Kept hammering at it in the back of my mind until at last … I may round that off tonight too; that’d please what Andy calls my taste for esthetic symmetry.”
“But how—” Norman broke off as the phone rang.
“Take that, will you?” Fergus requested from the depths of his stein. “I’m not so spry as I used to be.”
When Norman returned to the kitchen, he could not repress a malicious grin. “That,” he said, “was Paul Jackson. He said not to bother you—just tell you that he’s seen R
ita, she’s safely back from Honolulu, and it was all a mistake. I was sure he’d want to hear your solution, but somehow he didn’t seem to care.”
Fergus thumped his stein on the table. “Mr. Jackson,” he said cryptically, “may have a surprise coming to him yet. Almost as great as yours, my irreverent Watson. And now to work. Help me into the other room.”
Norman’s grin vanished as he listened to Fergus at the telephone. First came the long conversation with Mr. Ivers of the Southwest National Insurance Company, who seemed markedly averse to transacting business on a Saturday night, but who was finally persuaded that irregularities may be justified when a hundred thousand dollars is at stake.
Then came the even longer and more detailed conversation with Lieutenant Jackson. Norman saw the evening’s plans take shape, he heard the logical points click into place.
And still he could not believe.
It was real now. No more abstract theorizing, no more light badinage; this was the real thing. And it was impossible, and it must be true.
Fergus hung up the phone and leaned back. “You understand it now, don’t you? You see why Fennworth was killed and why Jordan hadn’t been to the theater and why Nansen has a bottle to play with? You see how the insurance fraud worked and how Carruthers gets the hundred grand? And above all you know now whose body wound up wearing a burned face and Carruthers’ false teeth?”
“I see it,” said Norman reluctantly. “I don’t understand it yet, not fully. It’s too much. It’s too complete a reversal.”
“Mr. Beemis has gone a long way.”
“Can you prove that—the Beemis part of it?”
“Probably. He was held for questioning in Cincinnati; they must have his prints on file.”
“But prove the murder, I mean?”
“I doubt it. But you don’t expect a man to be executed more than once. And then of course in Ohio he wouldn’t have the civilized comforts of our lethal-gas chamber.”
It was on this cheerful note that Maureen entered. “Hello, boys,” she groaned wearily. “I suppose you’ve cleaned out the icebox again?”
“There remains, my beautiful sororal sot, as much beer as is good for little girls. You could bring us some too. Have a hard day?”
The Case of the Solid Key Page 18