The End of Mr. Garment

by Vincent Starrett

  “Don’t you?”

  He laughed, hesitated, and turned it into a game. “Not all, certainly. I don’t suspect you!”

  She twisted comfortably in her wicker chair so that her smiling eyes looked directly into his. “Honest to Pete, Mr. Anger, who do you suspect?”

  “Whom,” corrected Anger.

  “All right, whom! But tell me.”

  “What makes you think I suspect anybody?”

  “Your presence on the yacht, for one thing. Come now, isn’t it significant that the secretary of the murdered man should accept the first invitation offered him to go upon a voyage? It’s either significant or heartless.”

  “I was invited by the Van Peters to accompany them,” said Anger. “I like Van Peter very much. However, my presence on the yacht might be accounted for much more significantly.”

  Under the high significance of his smile she blushed and turned her eyes to the sea.

  “That’s clever and flattering—and equivocal,” she retorted, after a moment.

  “Not any of them,” he assured her eagerly. Then he frowned a little. “Nevertheless your accusation alarms me. Do you suppose the same idea has occurred to the others? If so, I shall find myself a very unpopular fellow.”

  She shrugged lightly. “Probably not. Probably they don’t think of it at all. If they did, they would assume that you were like themselves—glad of a chance to get away. Aren’t you going to tell me?”

  “You are a persistent little wretch, aren’t you? Are redheads always so persistent? If you were right, wouldn’t I be an idiot to tell you?”

  She turned back to him eagerly. “Because I might tell others? Surely you don’t think I would do that! And since you don’t suspect me—and as we are the only two on board who seem to care any more—”

  “We ought to pool our interests?” finished Anger. “But I don’t know what your interest is.”

  “Ask me,” said Miss Waterloo.

  “You don’t mean to say you have suspicions of your own?” cried Anger, amazed.

  “Of course I have! Now ask me who—whom— I suspect.”

  In the presence of such candour Anger was uncomfortable and dismayed. “I’m almost afraid to,” he confessed. “Whom?”

  “Lillian Van Peter!”

  “Good God!” said Anger. “What are you thinking of, I wonder!”

  “Oh, I don’t mean that she stuck the knife into Mr. Garment. She wouldn’t do that. She merely saw to it that it was done.”

  “Betty,” he said, still stupefied, “I think you are as crazy as a lark. What under the sun put that into your head?”

  “You think,” she accused, “that Uncle Howland —Mr. Kimbark—did it. He didn’t. Lillian Van Peter and Aunt Nidia were in New York together when they met Mr. Garment. The things she said about Aunt Nidia were not true. She’s a scheming, cold-blooded woman—”

  “But why,” asked Anger, “should she have wished Mr. Garment dead?”

  “To cover up some misdemeanours of her own, I suppose. That’s why she lied about Aunt Nidia.”

  “And you think Van Peter knows of this? That he helped to—”

  “Oh, no,” she interrupted quickly. “I haven’t forgotten that you and Anthony Van Peter put Mr. Garment into the cab—and you have said that he was then alive. Tony doesn’t know, and she doesn’t want him to.”

  Anger turned it all over in his mind. What the relationship between Garment and Mrs. Kimbark had been even he did not know; but he did know that peculiar letters had been exchanged. And he greatly doubted that between Garment and Mrs. Van Peter there had been any relationship at all. It was true that they had met in New York. That the Van Peter woman might have been jealous of attentions paid by Garment to Mrs. Kimbark was, of course, quite possible, as he thought it over; but that this murder should have resulted from such a cause seemed incredible.

  He was about to say: “But, my dear child, you are simply being loyal to your aunt, who has no doubt been kind to you. As Garment’s secretary, I know that something must have gone forward between them.”

  Instead he said merely: “That’s an extraordinary idea. I’m glad you mentioned it to me, for I should like to caution you against giving it too much credence.” After a moment he continued: “But you’ve been frank with me—astonishingly so!—and I am bound to repay your confidence. I’ve suspected everybody in any way touched by the case, at one time and another; and I’ve perhaps leaned a little more toward Kimbark than anyone else. But the principal reason I came upon this cruise was—”

  He paused.

  “Are you going to tell the real truth?” she asked swiftly.

  “On my honour.”

  “Was what?”

  He bent his head and with his lips touched the back of her hand where it lay upon her chair-arm.

  “You,” he said.

  After what seemed a long time she spoke in a low voice, but with her usual candour. “Well, I hoped it was—and once or twice I really thought it was. I’m glad you told the truth.”

  She was barely eighteen, and he was close to thirty; but there seemed no further reason for him respectfully to kiss her hand. And after this development the murder of Stephen Garment seemed more remote than ever.

  The others, for the most part, preferred to play bridge. Sometimes this went forward in the cabin, and sometimes—with sun glasses—it went forward on the decks. Dromgoole, the Chicago writer, sat massively in his favourite chair almost from dewy morn to midnight prayers, although the morns were hot rather than dewy and certainly no prayers were raised. Between them, he and Miss Bland ran up some notable scores.

  There had been nothing benignly Machiavellian in Pope’s selection of his guests. If he knew that Nidia Kimbark and Lillian Van Peter did not like each other, it was not to heal their differences that they were cast together upon a yacht. The invitations, in point of fact, save in the case of Anger and a hurried tenth, had been of long standing. All were friends of Pope’s, which was sufficient for the burly sportsman. But the fact remained that Mesdames Kimbark and Van Peter had adjusted themselves admirably to the situation. They quarrelled less over the games than Dromgoole and Miss Bland.

  The tenth member of the party was Miss Celia Maynard, also a friend of the Van Peters, who had been invited, in effect, to furnish forth an ostensible partner for Harold Anger. In the circumstances, however, with Anger very much the heavy lover, she was seen most often with the commander of the expedition, with whom she played shuffleboard strenuously, under a sun that would have stricken others to the deck. For all her make-up and her outspoken costumes, she struck Anger as being a bit spinsterish—even a bit epicene. Lacking Mollock, however, she was perhaps the most literary member of the party. Dromgoole, on vacation, was very much the bridge player.

  Miss Maynard knew precisely what she wanted from life, which was possibly the reason she did not get it. She wanted children, a villa on the Riviera, a town house in London or New York, and just the right number of right persons for friends. One gathered that money and a man were involved somewhere in the minor items of her desiderata, although she delicately refrained from mentioning either.

  Around the oval dinner table, in the long cabin, when this catalogue had been several times repeated, Miss Bland took wistful issue with its precision.

  “I really envy you, you know, darling,” she said, and poured herself a thoughtful drink. “It is so refreshing to find someone who knows exactly what she wants. So few people do. I never seem to, at any rate. Sometimes it is one thing, sometimes another; and neither is ever absolute or final. There’s always something else. And those are the concrete things, after all, which it is possible to name. Beyond them are so many other things that are vague and nebulous and have no name—or perhaps so many names that one never finds the right one.”

  “That’s very metaphysical, I’m sure,” smiled Anger. “What does it mean?”

  Dromgoole grinned satirically. “Abracadabra,” he said. “Miss Bland postulates
that no one ever knows exactly what he wants; he only knows that he doesn’t get it. Miss Maynard, to the contrary, knows precisely what she wants, and doesn’t get it either.”

  “Of course,” said Anger innocently, “there’s the third horn of the dilemma—getting what you want, then finding you don’t want it at all.”

  Van Peter laughed loudly. “That from you, Anger! The most ungallant speech of the voyage!”

  Anger was confused. His own romance had not been in his mind; nor, apparently, was it as deep a secret as he had fondly imagined.

  “I wasn’t thinking of myself,” he confessed, making the best of it. “I’m afraid I was quoting a favourite theme of Mr. Garment’s. That piece of cynical philosophy was almost his literary raison d'être.”

  “His what?” cried Pope boisterously, from the head of the table. “What sort of language is that, Anger, on a respectable ship?”

  “It’s just the way stupid people get a reputation for cleverness, Mr. Pope,” smiled the secretary. “By saying stupid things in a foreign language.”

  “Speaking of Garment,” said Dromgoole—“as we do occasionally,” he added—“what was his particular grouch, Anger? If it isn’t a secret! An unfortunate marriage?”

  “Possibly,” answered Anger, guarding his speech. There were several around the table, he realized, for whom his reply would be of more than casual interest. “Certainly there was once a Mrs. Garment and there is so no longer. It was the fashion for a time to read his own life into each new novel, I believe. If he realized it—and I suppose he did—he managed in his fourteen books to confuse the issue rather successfully.”

  “Wrote about the same women, probably, and gave them different names,” suggested Van Peter. “One woman ought to be good for seven novels, all different. What’s that about ‘her infinite propriety’?”

  “‘Variety,’” corrected Miss Bland.

  “Kiss and tell,” growled Dromgoole, “has been the slogan of better novelists than Garment. I don’t say anything against the morality of the practice. Might do it myself if I could get away with it. The kissing’s pleasant and the telling’s profitable. Artistically, it’s in a class with photography.”

  Lillian Van Peter laughed her brilliant, tinkling laugh, which seemed to draw an antiphon from the glasses on the sideboard. “Let your employer’s life be a warning to you, young man,” she said to Anger, with mock severity. “Women are dangerous predilections, and married women are the devil.”

  The conversation was alarming. “I’m not to get married, then?” queried Anger meekly.

  Van Peter came gallantly to his rescue. “Marry her, by all means, my boy. Her age is in your favour. You can raise her as if she were your daughter, and thrash her if she doesn’t stand around.”

  He was secretly annoyed with his wife for her persistent innuendo.

  The stentorian “Ho ho!” of Curly Pope came down the table in a gust of appreciation. “So that’s why your wife stands around the way she does,” he bellowed.

  Van Peter smiled at the lady in question. “I’m thinking of poisoning her, one of these days,” he said; “but don’t tell her—I want it to be a surprise.”

  The Kimbarks said nothing, although they smiled with icy courtesy and simulated amusement. Miss Waterloo’s dislike of Lillian Van Peter increased by leaps and bounds.

  It was Dromgoole, however, who swung the conversation to safer channels. “What are you going to do, yourself, Anger—now that it’s all over?” he asked good-humouredly. “Not turn writer on your own, I hope.”

  “I am not,” replied Anger fervently. “I’ve seen enough of the literary life to last me all my days —with all respect to yourself.”

  “Oh, don’t mind me,” said Dromgoole. “I’m with you, whatever it is—medicine, horseshoeing, vaudeville, or piracy.”

  “I once thought I wanted to be a writer,” confessed the young Englishman. “The thought was responsible for my position with Mr. Garment. Now I know I’m through with it. I’m also through with the independent notion of making my own way in life, when it isn’t necessary. I’m going to join my uncle in Ceylon, become an overseer or something on his plantation, and live in comfort and white drill the rest of my life.”

  “And a white helmet,” added Betty Waterloo suddenly, opportunity having been given her for the revelation. And she added triumphantly: “His uncle is Sir James Fortescue-Anger, F.R.G.S., K.C.M.G.!”

  That, she hoped, would hold Lillian Van Peter for a minute.

  “Ceylon, darling,” murmured Miss Bland, pouring herself a thoughtful drink, “is where you wade around in the rice fields in your bare feet and have trouble with your Chinese servants. I don’t believe I should like it.”

  It occurred to Anger, later in the evening, that nothing had been contributed to the hilarious evening by the Kimbarks. Were they annoyed, he wondered, by his apparent intentions with reference to their niece? No doubt they thought of her as a child and of himself as an English fortune hunter. Secretary to a murdered and notorious English novelist! He rather liked Kimbark, on the whole, in spite of his suspicions; at any rate, he didn’t dislike him. And he had nothing in particular against Nidia. And surely where the novelist had wooed the wife, not unsuccessfully, the humble secretary might wed the niece!

  It further occurred to him to wonder if Mrs. Kimbark was carrying her precious package with her. Distrusting detectives, as he supposed she did, she was unlikely to have left her letters behind for the plump and disconcerting Cicotte. For that Cicotte would get wind of the liaison sooner or later, and draw his own conclusions, Anger had no doubt at all. But he no longer greatly cared what became of Mrs. Kimbark or her precious letters. She had had her opportunity to see the last of them, and she had failed to seize it.

  As he strolled toward the wireless room of the yacht, under a sky of gleaming stars, intending to circle back and join Miss Waterloo upon the afterdeck, through the window of the room he was approaching he suddenly saw the steward who had waited upon them at the table. The man was handing a message to the operator. Surely an innocent enough action.

  Yet something halted the secretary’s feet. Curious! A bit incongruous perhaps? A dining-room steward?

  More than likely the fellow was delivering a message written by one of the guests—by the owner of the vessel, no doubt What harm was there in that?

  Then he became aware of a presence at his own side, and an arm fell across his shoulders. In the tropical semidarkness he recognized the face of Curly Pope.

  “Damn that fellow!” muttered the commander of the Jezebel. “I wondered which of you would be the first to spot him. What do you say, Anger— shall we chuck him overboard and say the sharks got him?”

  So humorously troubled was the yachtsman’s voice that Anger suppressed a desire to laugh. “Why in the world should we toss him overboard?” he asked.

  “I thought you’d guessed,” said Pope. “He’s a detective—one of Cicotte’s men. By God, I’m ashamed of myself every time I face my guests! A detective on the Jezebel to watch them—to listen in on their conversations!”

  “So that’s his job!”

  “I’m a traitor to everybody on board,” said Pope. “But what could I do? I’ve known Barney Cicotte for twenty years, and when he asked me if he could stick a steward among the crew, I had to say yes.”

  Anger laughed shortly. “By Jove!” he observed. “Cicotte is after somebody, isn’t he!”

  “He’s after Kimbark, I suppose. He was vague enough about it; but whom else could he be after? Unless it’s one of the women—which is crazy!”

  “Or me,” said Anger.

  Pope stared back at him in the scented gloom. Then he laughed. “Not Cicotte,” he said. “You’ve got an alibi. Van Peter’s your alibi, and you are Van Peter’s, if I understand the story correctly.”

  “I’ve wanted to kill him, once or twice,” admitted Anger. “He had it coming to him. No, I didn’t do it.”

  “None of you did,” said P
ope irritably. “It’s just one of Barney Cicotte’s damn’-fool ideas.”

  Anger glanced at the steward, now preparing to take his departure. “What’s this fellow sending?” he asked. “I suppose you’ve taken a look at his ‘copy’?”

  The yachtsman grinned. “Haven’t I! No use— it’s code. Ought I to make a clean breast of it, and tell the others?”

  Anger cupped his hand away from the light breeze and touched a match to his cigarette. “No,” he answered reflectively, after a moment, “I suppose not. If Cicotte really has an idea, we oughtn’t to stand in the way of it.”

  “That’s what I thought at first,” agreed Pope; “but this damned steward begins to give me a pain.”

  They turned and strolled away as the detective moved to leave the wireless room. “Not that I think it’s you he’s watching,” said Curly Pope, “but if he saw us looking at him he’d be sure to think I’d spilled the works to everybody. Well, so long! I wouldn’t keep you for the world.” He finished with a broad and friendly smile.

  “She’ll wait,” said Anger, blushing in spite of himself. He wished that people would let him and Betty alone. But it was impossible to be annoyed with Pope, a hearty fellow who looked as if his moustache had grown upon the face of a merry child.

  He stood for a moment in the doorway, when the yachtsman had gone within, thinking over what had passed. Then, on impulse, he turned swiftly and retraced his steps to the wireless cabin. The detective that is in every man again had taken possession of him. A single word had done it.

  “Code,” he murmured, with a happy smile. And then: “By Jove, Harold, you used to be pretty good at that yourself!”

  As for Cicotte, he reflected, God alone knew what the fellow had in mind. Even he, Anger, might be under suspicion, as he had suggested.

  In convenient shadow he halted his advance as abruptly as he had begun it. Someone else was now in the cabin with the operator. Another message was going out into the Atlantic night! On the very heels, perhaps, of the steward’s. Were they upon the same subject?

  Since the newcomer was Allan Dromgoole, he supposed not. But, all in all, it seemed a busy evening on the good ship Jezebel.