“Did I?” Maureen kicked off her shoes and tossed her hat onto a lamp standard, where it looked quite as plausible as it had on her head. “I’ve been running a reception, and you know Polly’s receptions.” She padded in stocking feet to the kitchen, and returned with three nobly foaming steins.
“Who was the function for this time?”
“Our Rita. Just got back from Honolulu on the Clipper.”
Norman suppressed several comments.
“Paul there?” Fergus asked idly.
“Oh,” Maureen grinned reminiscently, “that was pretty, that was. Remember when I told Paul we were calling off the romance build-up? Well, so we had to stage a break-up scene and explain to the press that they had, as Mr. Winchell would say, pfft, or perhaps pfuit. Best acting I ever saw Rita do—all noble and renunciatory and she must not hamper Paul’s career and down to Gehenna or up to the throne and stuff. Oh, is that ever good …!” she sighed luxuriantly as she half-drained the stein.
“Fun and games,” said Fergus.
Norman raised an eyebrow. “Rita actually acting?”
“She can, you know. That’s the hell of it. She’s been built up as the World’s Desire and the Lay of the Land, but she isn’t like that at all. She’s just a quiet girl that wants to act, and much chance they give her. When she’s a good actress, she can rouse the critic in you, but not the beast; and when she is bad, she is torrid. And it’s the beast that shells out at the b.o.”
“B.o.?” Norman wondered.
“I know. What right did Lifebuoy have to spoil a perfectly good piece of show-business cant? B.o. means box office.” She turned to her brother. “What did the doctor say?”
“He didn’t come,” said Fergus calmly.
“He didn’t? Good lord, these professional men. Probably had to play golf with some big-shot specialist who could toss a case his way. Did you phone him?”
“He said he’d be out tomorrow,” Fergus continued to improvise.
“And what I won’t have to say to him! Leaving you here with that ankle swelling by the minute. Look. I’m going to scrape up a hasty supper now—you’ll stay, won’t you, Norm?—and then we’ll put you to bed out of harm’s way.”
“Hm,” said Fergus. “Hm. Well you see, my sweetest sweet, the fact is that I … As a matter of fact, we …”
Norman took over. “We have to be at the offices of the Southwest National at eight o’clock—if a phone call comes through all right.”
Maureen looked them both over and snorted. “‘The doctor didn’t come,’” she quoted. “I get it. When you should be in bed, you’ve been gallivanting all over Hollywood poking your nose into—”
“Look,” said Fergus sharply. “What I’ve been poking my nose into is maybe five thousand dollars. I shan’t speak about justice or straightening out people’s lives, or even what this break can do for my career. I appeal to your Hollywood mind with that solid sum, and even attuned as you are to movie figures, you can’t sneeze at it. I’ve got to be down at that office by eight-thirty tonight, ankle or no ankle. So, my beloved sister, to your tender care I proffer my fondest nuts. I’m going.”
“Then so am I.”
“But you can’t. This is confidential.”
“Is Norm going?”
“He has to drive me.”
“If he can go, I can.”
“But I need him to corroborate my evidence.”
“You don’t think I’m going to let you two screwballs wander off alone together? I’m going.” Fergus shrugged and turned to Norman. “You see how a conflict between O’Breens turns out? She says I can’t go. I say she can’t go. Upshot: we’re both going. But on one condition.”
“Condition?” Maureen asked suspiciously.
“Norm, do you think you could take about ten minutes to refill these steins?”
Norman left for the kitchen with the firmest intentions of not eavesdropping. These intentions did not last long, but he might as well have retained them. He could make nothing out of this secret O’Breen dialogue beyond the fact that at one point one of them used the telephone.
The rest of the time he could hear nothing but his own thoughts reminding him that Fergus had sketched in every angle of the case but one. He had not said a word of where Sarah fitted into the picture.
Norman remembered the beach, remembered Sarah pleading with him to trust her whatever happened, to believe in her love. It was not easy.
He lifted his stein and pledged the empty air. “Whatever,” he said.
Chapter 16
Maureen did not crash the meeting after all. Fergus and Lieutenant Jackson did their best to vouch for her, but Mr. Ivers (a neat and precise little man with rimless pince-nez and a wing collar) sniffed and asked, “Is this young woman essential to the presentation of your case, O’Breen?” And when Fergus reluctantly admitted that she was not, Mr. Ivers curtly consigned her to the outer darkness of the reception room.
Mr. Ivers’ office was as quietly prim as the man himself. Fergus, insisting on the rights of an invalid, had a padded chair brought in from the reception room; but Norman and Jackson had to be content with what comfort they could find in Mr. Ivers’ anchoritic straight-backed chairs.
“I still fail to see, O’Breen,” the executive expostulated with a certain petulance, “why it is necessary to have the police represented at this session. The Company” (his reverent speech capitalized the word) “does not always choose to prosecute in cases of fraud. In fact, we prefer to retain our own prerogative of choice.”
“If it were only fraud, Mr. Ivers,” said Jackson, “I might sympathize with you. But I’m sure the Southwest National would never try to cover up evidence in a case of murder.”
“To be sure,” said Mr. Ivers. “To be sure. But until murder has been proved—”
A rap came on the hall door of the office. Mr. Ivers himself opened the door.
“Mr. Ivers?” Lewis Jordan asked quietly.
“Mr. Jordan? Won’t you come in? I realize that it was most irregular of me to ask you to come here at this hour, but circumstances beyond my control have regrettably forced me to—”
“Yes,” said Jordan. There was no telling how long Mr. Ivers’ sentence might have run on without that monosyllabic interruption.
“It is kind of you to be so tolerant. If you will step in here …”
Jordan started into the room, then stopped dead and seemed on the point of turning back. But he mastered the momentary shock and went on in. “Good evening, Mr. O’Breen. I had not expected to see you here. And Mr. Harker. And …?”
“Jackson’s the name,” said the Lieutenant.
“Glad to meet you, sir.” Jordan extended his right hand. “But why such a social gathering, Mr. Ivers?”
Mr. Ivers frowned, glared at Fergus, and hemmed. “Again, Mr. Jordan, I can only say that circumstances—”
“—beyond your control. Yes, I understand. But I thought you called me here to discuss the payment of the policy on Rupert Carruthers. Surely that is not such a public matter?”
Mr. Ivers seated himself behind his desk and began dissecting his pen-and-pencil set with intense mechanical concentration. “I fear you do not fully appreciate the situation. Mr. O’Breen is … ah … one of our confidential investigators.”
Jordan’s face hardened. “I see. And Harker, I imagine, is his assistant?”
“In a way.”
“And Mr. Jackson?”
“Is a detective lieutenant of the police force.”
Jordan sat silent. His hand moved almost imperceptibly, as though stroking an invisible Nansen. “Very well,” he said at last. “I do not understand their presence, but I see no reason why we should not conclude our business promptly even before them. I have come here simply to—”
“One moment, Mr. Jordan.” (Fergus was to say later that a tragedy might have been averted if Mr. Ivers had not chosen that exact instant to speak.) “Before we take up our business, we must first see if we have any busi
ness to take up. Mr. O’Breen, if you please?”
Fergus tapped his cane. In the moment of silence that followed, Norman looked at the bearded old man and felt one sudden instant of pure panicky desire to be anywhere, even back in Oklahoma, so long as it was out of this office. But Fergus was speaking now. The die was cast.
“If I could pace,” the detective began, “I might go into all this in great detail. I even might if Mr. Ivers’ office ran to draught beer. But since I’m both seated and dry, I’m going to be relatively succinct. I’m just giving the highlights. But Harker and the Lieutenant both know that each of these statements I’m about to make has ample corroboration; and if you want footnotes and authorities, you can have them later. All right. Now this is the case of Carruthers :
“To start from the beginning, what kind of a man was Rupert Carruthers? He was venal, unscrupulous, and self-seeking. My own investigations into the way he ran his theater show that he would do anything to anybody if he could make money out of it. Even human life meant nothing to him. We have Hilary Vane’s evidence of how calmly he shifted all responsibility for the death of an old woman onto her son; and we have something stronger than mere suspicion that he had committed a deliberate and cold-blooded murder for cash thirteen years ago, followed up by an equally calm murder of an accomplice to conceal evidence. In short, if we were to divide the human race as simply as Mr. Jordan does in his play into Black and White, Rupert Carruthers was just about as Black as they come.
“But the shady pickings of the Carruthers Little Theater were hay to a man of Rupert’s caliber. Nevertheless he seemed content to get along with what picayune chiseling he could finagle through this setup until he met Lewis Jordan, a man as White as Carruthers himself was Black.” (Jordan shifted uncomfortably.) “Then a series of strange things began to happen. First of all Carruthers accepted Jordan’s play for production. Now he was a shrewd enough theater man to know that the opus stood no commercial chance whatsoever. He asked no money from Jordan to finance its production. And its thesis was hardly one which he would support altruistically. In short, from what we know of Carruthers, there was no legitimate or even reasonably shady reason why he should produce The Soul Has Two Garments.
“Following this acceptance, he performed two other peculiar acts. One was to induce Jordan to join him in this partnership-insurance policy which has brought us here tonight. The other was to take a lively interest in the details of production and staging, which he normally slurred over. And this production depended largely on the fire effects in the prologue.
“Now a man like Carruthers does not act out of character without a purpose. We don’t even need Hilary Vane’s testimony of overhearing a plot to deduce from these few actions that there was a plot afoot, a plot that would somehow secure a hundred thousand dollars for Rupert Carruthers.
“What happens next? A corpse is found with its head crushed and its face burned. The corpse purports to be that of Rupert Carruthers. You all know the supposedly accepted reconstruction of events according to the accident theory; but a clot of blood on one of the powder bottles plays hell with that. So do all the advance actions of Rupert Carruthers, which point to only one thing: that he was framing an insurance fraud.
“And every physical fact is equally consistent with my own theory of murder: that Carruthers met one N that night in his laboratory, stunned N lightly, cracked his skull against the lathe, exchanged clothes and teeth with him, and then carefully burned off his face. Yes, Mr. Jordan?”
“I did not speak. I am sorry—it was an exclamation that escaped me, of horror perhaps. Sudden death is terrible enough in itself, but murder …”
Mr. Ivers frowned. “Every physical fact, you say, O’ Breen? But I understood that the workshop was found locked on the inside. How could Carruthers have left the room?”
“Take it, Andy,” said Fergus.
Jackson stretched his long legs. “This is too easy, when you come to think of it. I don’t even have to draw a diagram. Tell us again, Harker, just what happened.”
Norman thought back. “We tried the door, and it was locked. Then Fennworth looked in and saw that the key was in the lock. He tried to get it out with a pencil but shoved it only part way. I finished the job with my pipe tool and drew the key under the door with a piece of cardboard.”
“There you are,” said Jackson. “It’s as simple as that. All you can testify to directly is that you saw that key hanging by its wards on the inside of the keyhole; the rest is just what Fennworth made you think he saw. I tried it this afternoon on a door at home and it works fine. Hang the key on the inside by its wards; go out; lock the door from the outside with another key; and there you are—door apparently locked on inside. If you catch the key right, it won’t fall out even if you shake the door and pound on it; it has to be poked out with something like your pipe tool.”
“But what did you mean about the advantage?” Norman asked.
“Just to bedazzle O’Breen,” Jackson explained to Mr. Ivers, “I said that the only advantage this key had over an ordinary one is a disadvantage. That’s paradoxical, but true; and it’s a further proof of a plot. Why should Carruthers have had that key made with a solid handle? No locksmith ordinarily carries such a die. He must have had it specially made, though we haven’t tracked down the particular smith yet.
“Now the one conceivable advantage of that key is that you can’t possibly pull string tricks to lock it from the outside. In other words, what would be a disadvantage if you were trying an old-style, locked-room fake is an advantage if you’ve thought of a new slant. If the lock contains not merely a key, but a key that you can’t pass any leverage through, then—thinks Mr. Carruthers—the police will indeed be hopelessly baffled.”
“Thanks,” said Fergus. “And so that key itself turns into one more indication of fraud. So we reach this point: the only evidence that would break down a murder case is given by Adam Fennworth. Also the only conclusive identification of the body is provided by Adam Fennworth. Also a nasty little attempt to get a private detective out of the way is made by Adam Fennworth. And Fennworth is Carruthers’ confidential aide. And two nights later Fennworth dies very suddenly—a fate peculiarly apt to befall the confidential aides of murderers.
“I think by this time there’s no longer any resisting this conclusion: that Rupert Carruthers planned and consummated a neat little murder-cum-fraud, that the unidentified body of one N is now in the morgue, and that Mr. Carruthers is still at large. But now comes the real question:
“The sole motive for this plot must be the Southwest National’s hundred thousand dollars. And if he is anonymously at large and supposedly dead, how in hell is Mr. Carruthers going to collect that hundred gees?
“There’s been suggestions: that he had a scheme for blackmailing Jordan out of the money—weak, because it’s too uncertain a return on the investment of all that risk. That Jordan was his accomplice in the scheme—worse than weak, because it means an unbelievable reversal of the whole character of Lewis Jordan. I’ll say frankly here and now that I don’t believe any evidence can ever be produced linking Lewis Jordan to this Carruthers plot.”
Jordan frowned, seemed about to speak, then abruptly resumed his pose of quietly interested listener.
Up to this point Fergus had seemed blithe and speculative, mustering his facts with the same carefree precision which one might apply to a chess problem or to one of the more intricate solitaires. But now this gamesome freedom left his voice. His phrasing was still casual and easy, but his tone was low and intent. Each word fell into the silent room with forceful and deadly earnest.
“I said a while back that a simple and consistent character like Mr. Carruthers doesn’t perform inconsistent actions without a damned good reason. The same goes for other characters, too. Let’s take an example. A man is openhearted, kindly, truthful, almost overneat, abstemious, and left-handed.”
“If this is a parable, O’Breen,” snapped Mr. Ivers, “I must remind you th
at we have business in hand.”
Fergus disregarded him. “And in the space of a few days that man becomes suspicious and cynical. He tells seemingly unnecessary lies. His tidy room becomes a messy maelstrom. There are whisky bottles in his yard. He cares nothing for the ambitions on which he had centered his life so shortly before. And most curious of all, he uses his right hand in preference to his left. Wouldn’t you say, Mr. Ivers, that there must be a damned good reason for such a collection of inconsistencies?”
“I am fascinated,” said the executive tartly, “to hear ambidexterity included in a collection of character traits. Nevertheless, O’Breen, I wish you would return to the point in hand.”
“But this is the point,” Fergus protested. “The point of everything. The magnigoddamnedficently simple point that our friend N, the guy that used to have a face, is Lewis Jordan.”
Lieutenant Jackson leaned forward alertly, as though poised for instant action. But the man with the white beard simply sank deeper into his chair and stared at Fergus with silent horror.
“What do you mean, O’Breen?” Mr. Ivers squeaked. “This is Lewis Jordan … isn’t it?” he added feebly.
Fergus went on quietly, staring directly at the man whose existence he denied. “From what Hilary Vane overheard, Carruthers’ plot was directed against the life of someone connected with the theater. Obviously N, if his body was to be taken for Carruthers’, must be a man, and equally obviously he must have false teeth. All the men around the theater are young, too young at least to have lost their teeth, except two: Lewis Jordan and Adam Fennworth. Fennworth, however, had another and equally important role in the plot; moreover, his game leg would identify him in an autopsy. He could not possibly be N.
“And then I hit on the simplest possible answer to the question of how Rupert Carruthers could collect that hundred thousand dollars. How indeed but by being himself the beneficiary? The characters of the two men dictated his plot. If Jordan died in an accident and Carruthers collected, everyone who knew Carruthers would be suspicious; but if ‘Carruthers’ died and ‘Jordan’ collected …”
The Case of the Solid Key Page 19