by Rufus King
“No; in fact, rarely any way.”
“I wish you could see Henri fix them. He cuts the breasts and turns the two ends so as to look like a frog and then flattens the result with a blow of the cleaver. It makes him very happy, and I have to send down a little note of appreciation.”
She did not know. Estelle could not, Ann thought, know and still be pleasured with such warmly gustatory anticipations. Ann was swamped with sympathy for this agreeable woman who was trying so hard to be friendly and over whose head, impregnant in the very atmosphere which surrounded her, hung death in its most brutal form.
They went down to lunch.
Ludwig Appleby put himself out to be pleasant. He indulged in no thoughtful glances or in any of the complex innuendoes with which he had bespattered Ann last night and during the morning. Estelle seemed grateful for this change of Ludwig’s, and the babas arrived during a swelter of chitchat of the most innocuously social nature.
Dr. Johnson came in while they were having coffee.
His face was pouted with worry, and his skin had the quality of damp suede. He apologized briefly for intruding. He refused Estelle’s immediate invitation to join them.
He said to Ann, “Mr. Marlow wishes to see you. Will you come with me, please? Now?”
He said to Ann as they walked toward the elevator: “Mr. Marlow recovered consciousness and started talking about you. Inadvertently I mentioned your decision to leave here today. I would not have done so if I could possibly have foreseen the effect on him. He became frantic. He insisted upon my giving him something which would bring him momentary strength, enough strength so that he could talk with you.”
CHAPTER X
The nurse and Dr. Johnson left, walking softly on the carpet’s deep pile: two stolid rears, the one in dark tweed and the other planed in starched white.
Ann sat in a chair drawn close to the Empire bed, its metal stars golden in murky light, its smooth veneers deep pools of dark shadow.
Marlow’s skin was waxen, and his eyes were abnormally alive from the stimulant which Dr. Johnson had given him. They searched for Ann’s eyes, held them compellingly.
“My life has been like this storm,” he said. “Thunder and lightning crashing close and then receding to a murmur. But never going, always coming back again. Do smoke if you want to.”
Wasted fingers gestured toward a marquisette box on the bed table. Ann took a cigarette and lighted it.
“I know very little of your life, Mr. Marlow. I’ve been told the general rumors, that’s all.”
“Do you believe them?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because I’ve met you.”
This pleased Marlow enormously, and he said nothing for a while but lay quietly regarding her, and then he said: “I had nothing to do with the deaths of Jerry Abbott and Frank Lawrence. I am reputed to have killed them both. You have heard about them?”
“Yes.”
“Also, there was that business of the two men whom I managed to drown in Crystal Lake. So it was said, and so it still is said. Such rumors never die. They have the longevity of burdocks. I grew tired of people tightening up when they came near me.”
“I’m sure the deaths were accidental, Mr. Marlow.”
“You say that because you have decided to like me. As for myself, I am sure that they were not. They were murder. I except the two men who were drowned. But Abbott and Lawrence, a common thread united them, one which bound each of them to Alice, and I am incredulous at so great a stretching of coincidence. What do you know about Alice?”
“She was your son’s wife.”
“I shall say it for you: and Fred was executed on the charge of having murdered her. I shall tell you about Alice.”
“I have been told she was beautiful.”
“Very beautiful. Can you understand that her beauty was not just a thing of the day? So many handsome young women receive the cachet through a resemblance to some reigning fad. Because they looked like the Gibson girl or some timely belle of the hourglass age or the statuesque. We find their pictures in old albums and realize that their beauty died with their brief moment, leaving tolerant laughter. Alice was not like that. She had a timeless beauty, both of face and of character. It killed her. Much as the ownership of some celebrated jewel is potentially linked with violence and death.”
“I would like to have known her.”
“You would have loved her, as Fred loved her, and I. She was a simple woman, natural and sweet and utterly incapable of governing this devastating power which her beauty gave her. It constantly bewildered her, and I think there were moments when it frightened her too. I want you to understand this because I want you to understand Fred.”
“I think I do. Covet is such a bad word, but I can see how she would be, as men would covet a stone like the Koh-I-Noor.”
“Yes, that is it. Covet, kill, and cheat, and die as men have always done for such a thing. It has never been the stone’s fault any more than the fault was Alice’s. She was as inanimate in her helplessness as that. Mr. Richardson, who prosecuted for the state, claimed that Fred killed her during a fit of homicidal jealousy.”
“I know.”
“Clarence Harlan was our lawyer. He still is. I told him then, as I still tell him today, that Fred’s sole chance of proving his innocence lay in our turning up the man who killed Alice. My intention to do this has never died.” Marlow raised himself on one elbow while the scarlet silk of the spread rippled in dull valleys of fire. He forced himself to speak, in the manner of a man who has reached the brink of an abyss and is, at last, compelled to jump. “Your intention to do this must never die. There was a child. You are that child.”
Shreds came back of her civilian-defense Red Cross work, and Ann thought: I’m getting shock. Clammy skin, feeble pulse, lassitude; all were evident because her admirably cultured power of intuition assured her that Marlow would never have made such a confounding claim unless it were the truth.
“I have shocked you,” Marlow was saying, “but I am a believer in clean strokes rather than in a niggling approach. Clarence Harlan is one of the best lawyers in the country. He has all of the documentary evidence of this, Ann. You were not given over into adoption. So far as you and the world were to know, you were simply brought up by Florence and Walter Ledrick as their own child.”
“I loved them, and they loved me. They were everything to me.”
“If I had not been sure of that you would never have been left in their care. You are no longer a child but a woman. You now have the moral stamina to accept this situation which would have shattered you during your formative years, warped you, driven you deeply into some neurosis from which you never could have recovered. Instead of being the healthy girl you are now you would have been an embittered, furtive creature, wincing before every finger that pointed you out as the daughter of a murderer, of a husband who had killed his wife who was with child. Could you have stood that, Ann?”
“I think no child could have.”
“There was also the brutal misfortune that you were heiress to a great fortune. You were news. You would have continued to be news at every break you might have attempted from any seclusion. School, social contacts, a normal girl’s existence would have been plain hell for you.”
Marlow waited until his breathing had calmed down and then continued: “You were three months old when I arranged with the Ledricks that they take you. They and Clarence Harlan guarded the secret. No one else has known it until recently I told Estelle. Naturally the press made great efforts to discover what had happened to the Marlow Murder Baby.” Marlow smiled bitterly. “They gave up the search in time as a bad job.”
“And now, of course…”
“Yes, you will go through your moments of anger and torture at their hands, but you will have the courage and strength to face them.” Marlow leaned toward her and said with dreadful earnestness: “And you will have the courage to carry on my fight after I am
gone. Your fight, Ann. You shall prove your father’s innocence, never pausing, never letting up until the job is done. No—do not interrupt—I am growing weak.”
Marlow fought for breath for a moment.
He said, “I have sent for Clarence Harlan. Everything that I know, he knows. Give me your hand, Ann.”
Her own fingers were as chill as Marlow’s. He pressed them gently.
He said, “You will need your courage. All of it. Not alone from the publicity you will be forced to face, but from physical dangers. When you leave this room it will be known that I have told you every guiding point I have been able to discover leading toward the murderer of your mother. There are not enough, but you and Harlan will add to them. Complete them. I have guarded myself well.” (You have not, Ann thought. Your guard has failed. You have been murdered.) “I am going to arrange plans whereby you shall be guarded too. Trust no one. Trust no one but Clarence Harlan.”
A spasm of such strength gripped Marlow that he twisted sideways across the bed. He fought desperately for breath, but the power to breathe eluded him, and his eyes grew weary of the strain. Briefly the struggle ceased. He died.
CHAPTER XI
Ann felt no sense of grief over Marlow’s death because of the short moment for which she had known him. Certainly there was none of the wrenching sorrow which had shaken her after the deaths of Florence and Walter Ledrick, whom she continued in her heart to consider as her true mother and father.
She was sorry for Marlow, enormously, and thoroughly shocked. Her skin remained clammy and chill while she waited in Marlow’s living room after Dr. Johnson and the nurse had gone in to him.
Dr. Johnson returned alone.
He said, “Mr. Marlow is dead, Miss Ledrick.”
He observed her speculatively. He shook a pill from a vial in his pocket and got a glass of water. He made her take the pill.
He said, “A fearful experience for you. You are shaken, but your sense of shock will be over shortly. Mercifully his passing was quick, and at last we can come out in the open.”
“About the radium, Doctor?”
“About everything. I shall get in touch again with the state police and let them know that death itself has solved our impasse. I see no reason for locking these rooms until they reach here. There is no ‘scene of the crime.’ Simply a bed in which a murdered old man died.” He smiled oddly. “Of course it’s more than that. There’s an end-of-a-dynasty touch about it. He was a great figure in his way. One of the last of those men who were so rich that their lives touched the feudal. You are looking better, Miss Ledrick. Some color is returning to your cheeks. Miss Marlow must be told. Would you care to come with me?”
“Yes.”
Dr. Johnson hesitated.
“Do you mind my being curious? I am puzzled by what he wanted to see you about. In a sense whatever he said to you would fall under the heading of being last words.”
“He told me, Doctor, that I am Ann Marlow.”
Dr. Johnson’s once-handsome face became deathly pale, and small mottle marks grew prominent on his skin.
“I brought you into the world. I did that operation which made it possible for you to live.” He studied Ann for a moment with eyes that were newly critical. “How wise he was. How right. Tell me—Alice and Fred Marlow are nothing more than names to you?”
“Nothing more, Doctor.”
“So completely wise.” He contemplated her for a further moment as a visual justification of Marlow’s apt foresight. He seemed to regiment some disturbing train of thought. He said, “Does Estelle Marlow know this?”
“Mr. Marlow said he had told her.”
“And Ludwig Appleby, does he know?”
“No, Doctor.”
“I am being stupid. It doesn’t matter now whether Ludwig knows or not. The country will read of it in tomorrow’s newspapers. You will be the most talked-of woman in America.”
They took the lift to the ground floor. An utterly irrelevant and untimely realization came to Ann as they were descending. She thought: This is my elevator.
It symbolized with deadly accuracy the fabulous change in her fortunes. Her work had taken her into many great houses, and more than anything else their private lifts had stood out as the hallmark of large wealth. She had been touched with a normal envy.
She felt badly about thinking of such things with Marlow so newly, so brutally dead, but the notion had come and had burst like a small star of white fire in her brain. She admitted the truth that subconsciously she would have liked unlimited wealth. That any woman would have. The Cinderella dream so deathless in each of them. Aladdin’s lamp.
Her father (she would always, she thought, continue to regard Walter Ledrick as such) had once tried to shield her against future disillusionment when she was a child. He had said to her: “The gods, to avenge themselves, grant us our desires,” and had explained what the quotation meant. It recurred to Ann now.
Estelle and Ludwig were playing backgammon near the fireplace in the lounge. The rattle of dice seemed impudently futile on the heels of a crash of thunder. Both of them, when they observed the look on Dr. Johnson’s face, stood up.
“Justin,” Estelle said, “is dead.”
“Yes.”
Tears brimmed her eyes.
“Justin. I think of him as sleeping. A good sleep at last with no horror in his dreams.” She held out her dimpled hands to Ann. Ann took them. A delicate scent of Parma violets sifted from Estelle. She said, “He told you, Ann?”
“Yes.”
Ludwig’s bold dark eyes were no longer alive with speculation but were flat disks of knowledge.
“You are Alice’s child,” he said. “I knew it last night when I met you. I thought of her at once on seeing you. I thought of her while talking with you this morning. You have her look.”
“Who is with Justin, Doctor?” Estelle asked.
“Miss Ashton.”
“I must go to him. Death is so unbelievable when it comes, no matter how much one has been prepared for it. This is hard on you, Ann. I’ll carry on until you get adjusted. There are any number of people to be notified and things to be done.”
“I have already,” Dr. Johnson said flatly, “notified the state police. I phoned them before lunch. Before, even, Mr. Marlow’s death.”
Ann could see Estelle shrink. Literally Estelle seemed to get smaller, and her face looked as if someone had struck her. She regarded Dr. Johnson as though he had suddenly gone stark mad.
She said, “Why?”
“Mr. Marlow was murdered.”
Ludwig gripped the edge of the backgammon table so abruptly that green and white counters rolled slamming onto the floor.
“How was it done?” he asked.
“I shall make my report to the police.”
“I see. It’s going to be that way.”
“Ludwig!” Estelle said sharply. “Poor Justin. Even to the end.” She sat down as tears once more clouded her eyes. She said to Dr. Johnson, “What do we do?”
“We wait.” Thunder growled endlessly. “Possibly they will get through on horseback. I’ll telephone now.”
“Is there anything to be done here?”
“Nothing. The coroner must get through, too, before Mr. Marlow’s body—before any arrangements can be made.”
Dr. Johnson left the room. They sat with their several thoughts. A log shot sparks up the chimney. Death seeped down upon them, through wood and steel and plaster, from Marlow’s room. It descended unchecked by any physical barrier and joined them.
“Ludwig, would you mind leaving me with Ann?” Estelle said.
Ludwig was not pleased. His handsome face clouded sullenly, and for a moment he seemed on the point of refusing.
“Very well,” he said. “I’ll be in the library if you want me.
Estelle waited until Ludwig had gone. Then she said to Ann, “Do you know the fable about the man who protested too much? It isn’t a fable, of course. It’s one of those things ou
t of Shakespeare. Anyhow, it’s Ludwig. He was here when Alice was killed. He has always claimed that he knew something which might prove Fred’s innocence, something which lay just on the fringe of memory but which Ludwig was unable to recall. Justin has been giving him sums of money at different times for years to jog this peculiar quirk in Ludwig’s memory. Ludwig is not a pleasant man.”
“No, he is not a pleasant man.”
“Of course Justin never believed in him for a minute and neither have I. Justin paid to tempt him into coming here. He hoped that at some moment during their talks Ludwig would make a slip.” Estelle glanced briefly toward the distant doorway. “Justin and I have always thought it was Ludwig who murdered Alice.”
CHAPTER XII
Washburn apologized for the interruption.
He spoke briefly of Marlow: a formal expression of sincere regret at his death, offered both to Estelle and to Ann. His manner toward her, Ann thought, had subtly altered. She was, it implied, now one of the family.
The press associations, Washburn said, and a great many specific newspapers were putting through telephone calls with requests for interviews and information. The story had been phoned to the New York Review by its local correspondent in the village of Bypass, from where the troopers were leaving on horseback. The Review was already on the street with it, and the other papers were insistent for further facts.
Washburn looked at a point impartially spaced between Estelle and Ann.
“What would you advise, Estelle?” Ann said.