“Oh,” said Michela. “Writing a story?”
“No,” said Susan. “It’s not a story. Here’s the alcohol.”
Under Susan’s straight look Michela had the grace to depart rather hastily, yanking up her stockings and twisting them hurriedly, and clutching at the bottle of alcohol. Her red bracelets clanked, and her scarlet fingernails looked as if they’d been dipped in blood. Of the few people who might have killed Joe Bromfel, Susan reflected coolly, she would prefer it to be Michela.
It was just then that a curious vagrant memory began to tease Susan. Rather it was not so much a memory as a memory of a memory—something that sometime she had known and now could not remember. It was tantalizing. It was maddeningly elusive. It floated teasingly on the very edge of her consciousness.
Deliberately, at last, Susan pushed it away and went back to work. Christabel and the amethyst. Christabel and the wisteria. Christabel.
It was dark and still drizzly when Susan took her way down toward the big house.
At the laurel hedge she met Tryon Welles.
“Oh, hello,” he said. “Where’ve you been?”
“At the cottage,” said Susan. “There was nothing I could do. How’s Christabel?”
“Liz says she is still asleep—thank heaven for that. God, what a day! You oughtn’t to be prowling around alone at this time of night. I’ll walk to the house with you.”
“Have the sheriff and other men gone?”
“For the time being. They’ll be back, I suppose.”
“Do they know any more about—who killed him?”
“I don’t know. You can’t tell much. I don’t know of any evidence they have unearthed. They asked me to stay on.” He took a quick puff or two of his cigarette and then said irritably: “It puts me in a bad place. It’s a business deal where time matters. I’m a broker—I ought to be going back to New York tonight——” He broke off abruptly and said: “Oh, Randy—” as young Randy’s pale, thin face above a shining mackintosh emerged from the dusk—“let’s just escort Miss Susan to the steps.”
“Is she afraid of the famous tramp?” asked Randy and laughed unpleasantly. He’d been drinking, thought Susan, with a flicker of anxiety. Sober, Randy was incalculable enough; drinking, he might be dangerous. Could she do anything with him? No, better leave it to Tryon Welles. “The tramp,” Randy was repeating loudly. “Don’t be afraid of a tramp. It wasn’t any tramp killed Joe. And everybody knows it. You’re safe enough, Susan, unless you’ve got some evidence. Have you got any evidence, Susan?”
He took her elbow and joggled it urgently.
“She’s the quiet kind, Tryon, that sees everything and says nothing. Bet she’s got evidence enough to hang us all. Evidence. That’s what we need. Evidence.”
“Randy, you’re drunk,” said Susan crisply. She shook off his clutch upon her arm and then, looking at his thin face, which was so white and tight-drawn in the dusk, was suddenly sorry for him. “Go on and take your walk,” she said more kindly. “Things will be all right.”
“Things will never be the same again,” said Randy. “Never the same—do you know why, Susan?” He’s very drunk, thought Susan; worse than I thought. “It’s because Michela shot him. Yes, sir.”
“Randy, shut up!”
“Don’t bother me, Tryon, I know what I’m saying. And Michela,” asserted Randy with simplicity, “makes me sick.”
“Come on, Randy.” This time Tryon Welles took Randy’s arm. “I’ll take care of him, Miss Susan.”
The house was deserted and seemed cold. Christabel was still asleep, Michela nowhere to be seen, and Susan finally told Mars to send her dinner on a tray to the cottage and returned quietly like a small brown wraith through the moist twilight.
But she was an oddly frightened wraith.
She was alone on the silent terrace, she was alone on the dark path—strange that she felt as if someone else were there, too. Was the bare fact of murder like a presence hovering, beating dark wings, waiting to sweep downward again?
“Nonsense,” said Susan aloud. “Nonsense——” and ran the rest of the way.
She was not, however, to be alone in the cottage, for Michela sat there, composedly awaiting her.
“Do you mind,” said Michela, “if I spend the night here? There’s two beds in there. You see—” she hesitated, her flat dark eyes were furtive—“I’m—afraid.”
“Of what?” said Susan, after a moment. “Of whom?”
“I don’t know who,” said Michela, “or what.”
After a long, singularly still moment Susan forced herself to say evenly:
“Stay if you are nervous. It’s safe here.” Was it? Susan continued hurriedly: “Mars will send up dinner.”
Michela’s thick white hand made an impatient movement.
“Call it nerves—although I’ve not a nerve in my body. But when Mars comes with dinner—just be sure it is Mars before you open the door, will you? Although as to that—I don’t know. But I brought my revolver—loaded.” She reached into her pocket, and Susan sat upright, abruptly. Susan, whose knowledge of revolvers had such a wide and peculiar range that any policeman, learning of it, would arrest her on suspicion alone, was nevertheless somewhat uneasy in their immediate vicinity.
“Afraid?” said Michela.
“Not at all,” said Susan. “But I don’t think a revolver will be necessary.”
“I hope not, I’m sure,” said Michela somberly and stared at the fire.
After that, as Susan later reflected, there was not much to be said. The only interruption during the whole queer evening was the arrival of Mars and dinner.
Later in the evening Michela spoke again, abruptly. “I didn’t kill Joe,” she said. And after another long silence she said unexpectedly: “Did Christabel ask you how to kill him and get by with it?”
“No!”
“Oh.” Michela looked at her queerly. “I thought maybe she’d got you to plan it for her. You—knowing so much about murders and all.”
“She didn’t,” said Susan forcefully. “And I don’t plan murders for my friends, I assure you. I’m going to bed.”
Michela, following her, put the revolver on the small table between the two beds.
If the night before had been heavy with apprehension, this night was an active nightmare. Susan tossed and turned and was uneasily conscious that Michela was awake and restless, too.
Susan must have slept at last, though, for she waked up with a start and sat upright, instantly aware of some movement in the room. Then she saw a figure dimly outlined against the window. It was Michela.
Susan joined her. “What are you doing?”
“Hush,” whispered Michela. Her face was pressed against the glass. Susan looked, too, but could see only blackness.
“There’s someone out there,” whispered Michela. “And if he moves again I’m going to shoot.”
Susan was suddenly aware that the ice-cold thing against her arm was the revolver.
“You are not,” said Susan and wrenched the thing out of Michela’s hand. Michela gasped and whirled, and Susan said grimly: “Go back to bed. Nobody’s out there.”
“How do you know?” said Michela, her voice sulky.
“I don’t,” said Susan, very much astonished at herself, but clutching the revolver firmly. “But I do know that you aren’t going to start shooting. If there’s any shooting to be done,” said Susan with aplomb, “I’ll do it myself. Go to bed.”
But long after Michela was quiet Susan still sat bolt upright, clutching the revolver and listening.
Along toward dawn, out of the mêlée of confused, unhappy thoughts, the vagrant little recollection of a recollection came back to tantalize her. Something she’d known and now did not know. This time she returned as completely as she could over the track her thoughts had taken in
the hope of capturing it by association. She’d been thinking of the murder and of the possible suspects; that if Michela had not murdered Joe, then there were left Randy and Christabel and Tryon Welles. And she didn’t want it to be Christabel; it must not be Christabel. And that left Randy and Tryon Welles. Randy had a motive, but Tryon Welles had not. Tryon Welles wore a ring habitually, and Randy did not. But the ring was an emerald. And Christabel’s ring was what Mars called red. Red—then what would he have called Michela’s scarlet bracelet? Pink? But that was a bracelet. She wrenched herself back to dig at the troublesome phantom of a memory. It was something trivial—but something she could not project into her conscious memory. And it was something that somehow she needed. Needed now.
She awoke and was horrified to discover her cheek pillowed cosily upon the revolver. She thrust it away. And realized with a sinking of her heart that day had come and, with it, urgent problems. Christabel, first.
Michela was still silent and sulky. Crossing the terrace, Susan looked at the wisteria winding upward over its trellis. It was heavy with purple blossoms—purple like dark amethysts.
Christabel was in her own room, holding a breakfast tray on her lap and looking out the window with a blank, unseeing gaze. She was years older; shrunken somehow inside. She was pathetically willing to answer the few questions that Susan asked, but added nothing to Susan’s small store of knowledge. She left her finally, feeling that Christabel wanted only solitude. But she went away reluctantly. It would not be long before Jim Byrne returned, and she had nothing to tell him—nothing, that is, except surmise.
Randy was not at breakfast, and it was a dark and uncomfortable meal. Dark because Tryon Welles said something about a headache and turned out the electric light, and uncomfortable because it could not be otherwise. Michela had changed to a thin suit—red again. The teasing ghost of a memory drifted over Susan’s mind and away again before she could grasp it.
As the meal ended Susan was called to the telephone. It was Jim Byrne saying that he would be there in an hour.
On the terrace Tryon Welles overtook her again and said: “How’s Christabel?”
“I don’t know,” said Susan slowly. “She looks—stunned.”
“I wish I could make it easier for her,” he said. “But—I’m caught, too. There’s nothing I can do, really. I mean about the house, of course. Didn’t she tell you?”
“No.”
He looked at her, considered, and went on slowly.
“She wouldn’t mind your knowing. You see—oh, it’s tragically simple. But I can’t help myself. It’s like this: Randy borrowed money of me—kept on borrowing it, spent it like water. Without Christabel knowing it, he put up the house and grounds as collateral. She knows now, of course. Now I’m in a pinch in business and have got to take the house over legally in order to borrow enough money on it myself to keep things going for a few months. Do you see?”
Susan nodded. Was it this knowledge, then, that had so stricken Christabel?
“I hate it,” said Tryon Welles. “But what can I do? And now Joe’s—death—on top of it—” He paused, reached absently for a cigarette case, extracted a cigarette, and the small flame from his lighter flared suddenly clear and bright. “It’s—hell,” he said, puffing, “for her. But what can I do? I’ve got my own business to save.”
“I see,” said Susan slowly.
And quite suddenly, looking at the lighter, she did see. It was as simple, as miraculously simple as that. She said, her voice to her own ears marvelously unshaken and calm: “May I have a cigarette?”
He was embarrassed at not having offered it to her: he fumbled for his cigarette case and then held the flame of the lighter for her. Susan was very deliberate about getting her cigarette lighted. Finally she did so, said, “Thank you,” and added, quite as if she had the whole thing planned: “Will you wake Randy, Mr. Welles, and send him to me? Now?”
“Why, of course,” he said. “You’ll be in the cottage?”
“Yes,” said Susan and fled.
She was bent over the yellow paper when Jim Byrne arrived.
He was fresh and alert and, Susan could see, prepared to be kind. He expected her, then, to fail.
“Well,” he said gently, “have you discovered the murderer?”
“Yes,” said Susan Dare.
Jim Byrne sat down quite suddenly.
“I know who killed him,” she said simply, “but I don’t know why.”
Jim Byrne reached into his pocket for a handkerchief and dabbed it lightly to his forehead. “Suppose,” he suggested in a hushed way, “you tell all.”
“Randy will be here in a moment,” said Susan. “But it’s all very simple. You see, the final clue was only the proof. I knew Christabel couldn’t have killed him, for two reasons: one is, she’s inherently incapable of killing anything; the other is—she loved him still. And I knew it wasn’t Michela, because she is, actually, cowardly; and then, too, Michela had an alibi.”
“Alibi?”
“She really was in the pine woods for a long time that morning. Waiting, I think, for Randy, who slept late. I know she was there, because she was simply chewed by jiggers, and they are only in the pine woods.”
“Maybe she was there the day before.”
Susan shook her head decidedly.
“No, I know jiggers. If it had been during the previous day they’d have stopped itching by the time she came to me. And it wasn’t during the afternoon, for no one went in the pine woods then except the sheriff’s men.”
“That would leave, then, Randy and Tryon Welles.”
“Yes,” said Susan. Now that it had come to doing it, she felt ill and weak; would it be her evidence, her words, that would send a fellow creature over that long and ignominious road that ends so tragically?
Jim Byrne knew what she was thinking.
“Remember Christabel,” he said quietly.
“Oh, I know,” said Susan sadly. She locked her fingers together, and there were quick footsteps on the porch.
“You want me, Susan?” said Randy.
“Yes, Randy,” said Susan. “I want you to tell me if you owed Joe Bromfel anything. Money—or—or anything.”
“How did you know?” said Randy.
“Did you give him a note—anything?”
“Yes.”
“What was your collateral?”
“The house—it’s all mine——”
“When was it dated? Answer me, Randy.”
He flung up his head.
“I suppose you’ve been talking to Tryon,” he said defiantly. “Well, it was dated before Tryon got his note. I couldn’t help it. I’d got some stocks on margin. I had to have——”
“So the house actually belonged to Joe Bromfel?” Susan was curiously cold. Christabel’s house. Christabel’s brother.
“Well, yes—if you want to put it like that.”
Jim Byrne had risen quietly.
“And after Joe Bromfel, to Michela, if she knows of this and claims it?” pressed Susan.
“I don’t know,” said Randy. “I never thought of that.”
Jim Byrne started to speak, but Susan silenced him.
“No, he really didn’t think of it,” she said wearily. “And I knew it wasn’t Randy who killed him because he didn’t, really, care enough for Michela to do that. It was—Tryon Welles who killed Joe Bromfel. He had to. For he had to silence Joe and then secure the note and, probably, destroy it, in order to have a clear title to the house, himself. Randy—did Joe have the note here with him?”
“Yes.”
“It was not found upon his body?”
It was Jim Byrne who answered: “Nothing of the kind was found anywhere.”
“Then,” said Susan, “after the murder was discovered and before the sheriff arrived and the search began, only
you and Tryon Welles were upstairs and had the opportunity to search Joe’s room and find the note and destroy it. Was it you who did that, Randy?”
“No—no!” The color rose in his face.
“Then it must have been then that Tryon Welles found and destroyed it.” She frowned. “Somehow, he must have known it was there. I don’t know how—perhaps he had had words with Joe about it before he shot him and Joe inadvertently told him where it was. There was no time for him to search the body. But he knew——”
“Maybe,” said Randy reluctantly, “I told him. You see—I knew Joe had it in his letter case. He—he told me. But I never thought of taking it.”
“It was not on record?” asked Jim Byrne.
“No,” said Randy, flushing. “I—asked him to keep it quiet.”
“I wonder,” said Susan, looking away from Randy’s miserable young face, “just how Tryon Welles expected to silence you.”
“Well,” said Randy dully, after a moment, “it was not exactly to my credit. But you needn’t rub it in. I never thought of this—I was thinking of—Michela. That she did it. I’ve had my lesson. And if he destroyed the note, how are you going to prove all this?”
“By your testimony,” said Susan. “And besides—there’s the ring.”
“Ring,” said Randy. Jim Byrne leaned forward intently.
“Yes,” said Susan. “I’d forgotten. But I remembered that Joe had been reading the newspaper when he was killed. The curtains were pulled together back of him, so, in order to see the paper, he must have had the light turned on above his chair. It wasn’t burning when I entered the library, or I should have noted it. So the murderer had pulled the cord of the lamp before he escaped. And ever since then he has been very careful to avoid any artificial light.”
“What are you talking about?” cried Randy.
“Yet he had to keep on wearing the ring,” said Susan. “Fortunately for him he didn’t have it on the first night—I suppose the color at night would have been wrong with his green tie. But this morning he lit a cigarette and I saw.”
“Saw what, in God’s name,” said Randy burstingly.
“That the stone isn’t an emerald at all,” replied Susan. “It’s an Alexandrite. It changed color under the flare of the lighter.”
The Big Book of Female Detectives Page 107