“She followed orders exactly. And, what was more, she was devoted to my wife. That’s rare when the patient is a mental case,” Roger said.
Dr. Postgate agreed that such devotion was rare, but he wasn’t so sure that the nurse followed his orders meticulously. He conceded that she had taken excellent physical care of the patient and, so far as he knew, had not abandoned her on any occasion previously. Roger finished by saying that Victorine had no relatives in this country, so far as he knew, and that she was not a woman who made close friends. The young policeman wrote down everything. The Roger Clarys’ home address was St. Martinville.
“What exactly makes you think that Mrs. Clary was given that stuff?” Jonas asked Dr. Postgate.
Dr. Postgate sighed.
“The general symptoms, particularly the strikingly relaxed condition of the neck muscles. We covered that. Remember?”
“How do you give the stuff?”
“Intravenously. I told you that.”
“Any mark on her body from a recent hypo?”
“None. But one arm had been scratched by a splinter when she fell down the steps.”
“Spoiling any evidence of a hypo, huh? Very coincidental. How long had you been using the stuff on Mrs. Clary?”
Dr. Postgate pressed his red lips together in the nest of brown-and-gray beard.
“I use it only in my clinic. I told you that. I told you that I had not yet used the extract on this case. It is given, you understand, along with the shock therapy for...”
The detective flapped his arms and said, “No, I don’t understand. You can save that fancy stuff for the medical examiner, Doc. Could anybody walk into a drugstore and buy the stuff?”
“I daresay it could be done,” Dr. Postgate said.
“Would the nurse know that?”
“I don’t know what she knew.” Dr. Postgate was getting irritable. “I do know that she overheard me discussing the curare one day with Dr.—Major—Clary....”
“I thought she spoke only French?”
“I speak French!”
“Did you and Major Clary talk in French that time in front of the nurse?”
“Of course not!” The brain specialist was getting very snappish. “But the word curare is curarine in French and sounds much like curare. Look here, curare is said to be used in that voodoo business they have so much of in the West Indies, and if this nurse really fooled around with black magic, as some people think, she may have taken my curare with the idea of fixing up some sort of ignorant native cure for Mrs. Clary—but I told you that the first thing, if you recall.”
“Write down everything,” the detective said to the young policeman. He had the ampules described. Small bottles of clear glass filled with a transparent fluid and having a rubber cap. You stuck the needle of a hypo through the rubber cap and drew out the amount required. “Okay,” he said finally. “That’s enough of that. Now we’ll get down to the real business. Who wanted Mrs. Helen Clary dead?”
There was a hush, which ended when a small titter sounded outside the closed shutters of one French door.
The detective marched to the door. As he did so Patrick dipped down and then pocketed something which he had concealed under one foot.
Detective Jonas yanked a shutter open. Outside, globular in a clean white-pongee suit, stood Uncle George Sears.
The detective fixed his peculiar stare on Mr. Sears for a moment and then invited him in. “You come in too,” he said, to somebody farther away. Toby Wick answered with his ready insolence from somewhere along the veranda, “I’m perfectly satisfied where I am, thanks.”
“What are you doing here, Wick?”
“I happen to live here,” Toby drawled.
“Some people don’t seem too particular,” Jonas retorted. He closed the shutter and returned to the side of the bed. Since there was no chair ample enough for Uncle George, he remained standing near the door. His little eyes darted and darted.
Roger Clary asked abruptly, “Would you mind covering her face?”
“Not at all,” Jonas said. He picked up the turned-back portion of the sheet and laid it gently over the dead face. “Now, let’s see. We were talking about motive. Who would profit by this woman’s death?” His eyes swung round the room. They settled on Roger Clary. “I happen to have a brother in St. Martin Parish,” he said. “I sometimes go out there to fish. I happen to have heard that your wife is a very rich woman in her own right, Major Clary.” He curved the palm of one of his small hands and bounced the knuckles of the other in the palm and kept it up. “Would the nurse benefit by her death?”
“Benefit?” Roger asked.
“Was she mentioned in Mrs. Clary’s will?”
“She had no will,” Roger said.
“I see,” Jonas said. His clear round eyes remained on Roger longer than need be. “Lots of relations, I reckon?”
“She hadn’t a relation in the world.”
“Then you alone benefit by her death?”
“Why, what an awful thing to say!” Carol Graham burst out. She took a step nearer the detective.
The round eyes wheeled on Carol. They studied her. “Murder is an awful business, Miss. But maybe you’re too young to know?”
Once again, and with ghastly coincidence, Uncle George giggled.
Dr. Postgate buzzed back into the conversation. “Now, see here, Officer. I don’t want you to make any trouble for this family. It’s a fine family, one of New Orleans’ oldest and best French families, as you possibly know. I asked the police to come here tonight only because I’m suspicious of that nurse. I don’t mind saying, now, that I’ve been against her from the start. Major Clary insisted that she was trustworthy, but I myself was never convinced. Ignorance is a really dangerous thing.” He paused to let this sink in. I resolved to look up metrazol, hydrolyzable and prostigmine in the dictionary my very first chance. “Well, Officer, she’s gone. Where? Why? She went off, abandoned the patient in what appears to have been a helpless condition. The real truth is, the woman was hardly better than a savage....”
“Oh, now, Doctor!” Roger Clary protested.
“A better sort of savage,” Dr. Postgate granted. “But she had the superstition of a savage. The practice of witchcraft—or voodoo, if you prefer to call it that—is common in the West Indian Islands. Some say there is plenty of it here in New Orleans. But I say let’s find the nurse and go on from there.”
“Well, it all sounds nuts to me,” Jonas said, cheerfully. “The medical examiner will be here in a minute, though, and you can thrash it out with him, Doc. How come your wife went crazy, Major Clary?”
Roger struggled to control his horrified anger. He spoke evenly.
“It began with an attack of encephalitis....”
“What’s that?”
“A brain inflammation of some kind. It may sound pretty vague to you, but I think Dr. Postgate will agree that we don’t yet know as much about brain infections as we hope to some day. She was ill several weeks. She was left without—well, without any memory, or any purpose. She was like a child. She was never violent and never unhappy.”
“Very interesting case,” proclaimed Dr. Postgate.
“You never thought of putting her in an institution?” Jonas asked.
Roger winced. “We lived in a large house....”
“Yes, I know,” Jonas said. “Everybody knows the big Winwood place out in your parish, Major. Your wife was a Miss Winwood, wasn’t she?”
“In that case,” Roger said, in growing rage, “you know that there was ample room for my wife to have a wing of the house to herself, strictly for herself and her nurses. After all, it was her house and her money, you know.”
“I’m glad you realized that, Major,” Jonas said. “You said nurses? You call a black woman who believes in voodoo a nurse?”
“God damn you!” Roger Clary shouted, suddenly.
The policeman entered it in his notebook.
I glanced at Carol. She was looking at
Roger with a beseeching expression in her eyes—cautioning him, believing him, loving him.
Uncle George’s eyes were darting here and there.
Patrick was standing at his ease, and diffident as could be.
“Do we have to stay in this room?” Roger Clary demanded loudly.
The detective paid him no attention.
He started asking me questions. I told about hearing the dragging noise, the bumping down the steps, about thinking she was dead. I said there was some blood. Jonas asked again about the blood. Dr. Postgate corroborated Roger’s statement that it was all from the scratch on her forearm. I then told about coming into the house for help and being bashed on the head by the curtain pole and about waking and smelling iodoform. I was able to mention the time exactly—two o’clock. Major Clary had found me a while before the clock struck a quarter past two, so I’d been blacked out a very short time, three to six minutes at the most.
“You were coming home from your hospital, Major Clary?” Jonas asked.
“Yes.”
“What time did you leave the hospital?”
“I don’t know exactly,” Roger said.
“They keep a record?”
“Why, yes. Of course. It’s a military hospital.”
“You came into town on a bus....”
“I had my car,” Roger interrupted him impatiently. “I left it in the garage....”
“Which garage?”
“The Monteleone. On Iberville Street. What possible difference...?”
“That is a good place to leave your car, under the circumstances, Major Clary. They check you in with a time-clock. Now, if they kept a record of when you left the hospital and when you checked in your car and then we allow you a reasonable time to arrive here at the house, you’ll have a fine alibi, Major.”
Carol Graham stamped her foot. “You act as though he’s a criminal!”
Captain Jonas gave her a long look.
There was a slight disturbance outside and a small hatchet-faced man in a rumpled Palm Beach suit appeared. He was Dr. Ambrose Durand, medical examiner for the police.
VI
IT WAS AT this time that Police Detective Captain William Henry Jonas started behaving as though Patrick were his own consulting expert on the Clary murder case. The police detective indeed had a good memory. He recognized Patrick from the coincidence of his name with photographs he had seen in a California murder case some years back which Patrick had solved with what Captain Jonas called smart work.
He asked—later when we were away from the others—if Patrick was Patrick Abbott, the San Francisco private detective. He commented that the military was behaving with its usual dumbness in stationing a man like Patrick in New Orleans. Then, with a shrewdness we soon knew never failed him, he added that Germany knew what she was doing when just before the war she had sent one of her smartest Nazi diplomats as Consul to New Orleans, considering the complicated network of waterways which open up Louisiana from the Gulf. Patrick merely agreed.
Captain Jonas’s chumming up to us made me immediately uncomfortable. “Look,” I whispered to Patrick, while we were still in Helen Clary’s room, shortly after the medical examiner had come in, “we’re the only outsiders living in this house, except Toby Wick. We ought to be careful.”
Patrick quietly agreed. Presently, he left the room briefly and went up to our apartment and came back.
Captain Jonas finished what he had to say to the police doctor and then came over to us and proposed a cup of coffee at the Morning Call coffee stand in the French Market. Patrick said he thought I shouldn’t walk even that far just now, having so recently been banged up by that curtain pole. The detective, slightly baffled because he had not invited me to go anyhow, compromised by saying we could all go in his car. Uncle George had meanwhile skimmed over to a spot where he could more comfortably listen to what we were saying. I insisted that we shouldn’t go at all. But we went.
We left with Captain Jonas under the lifted eyebrows of Major Roger Clary.
No policeman was left at the house. A plainclothes one was posted farther along Dumaine Street, but Jonas at first didn’t risk telling us that—because I was present. I went feeling generally put upon, but I had to go because Patrick had made up his mind that it was murder, and he wanted to hear what the detective had to say, and he refused to leave me alone in our apartment.
Near the Market, the French Quarter is down-at-the-heel and looks a natural lurking place for rogues and rascals. Tonight the yellow moon did shadowy tricks with the elaborate balcony ironwork of the dilapidated old houses. Streetlamps, spaced farthest apart in an area which needed them the most, burned with feeble light. Grilled gates sagged in front of dark, evil-smelling courts. Over it all hung the depressing odor of the fishmarket.
Patrick always said that this part of New Orleans made him think of Marseilles, because it stank, and because it was frequented by the homeless and footloose and even, just then, by so many French sailors with those red pompoms.
Directly around the Market the shuddery character of the streets gave way to a businesslike stir of motors and pedestrians, even at three-thirty in the morning, and the coffee stand itself was crowded with market-workers, fishermen, late revelers in evening clothes, scrubwomen, and more French and American sailors. It smelled pleasantly of its own famous doughnuts and coffee.
Captain Jonas managed to get a table at once. I took a moment to admire as always the old polished marble coffee bars with their great mirrors, and the immense old silver sugarbowls.
Jonas said, “I was certainly in no mood to work tonight, Lieutenant Abbott.” A waiter splashed down three mugs of coffee and banged after them a plate containing six of the pillow-shaped doughnuts. Captain Jonas powdered all the doughnuts with sugar, gulped down two, and said, “When I got the call I was at a banquet at the Roosevelt for one of the boys who’s been overseas and is home on leave.” He said no more about the guest of honor but narrated with gusto what they had to eat. One of his small hands stole up once or twice to the carnation in his blue pinstripe lapel. “We had just settled down to a little serious drinking when Headquarters phoned. I didn’t arrive on the scene of the murder in a very good humor.” He added, “It is, of course, murder.”
I said—to put off the talk of murder—that we had dined at Arnaud’s and had a reservation for dinner at Antoine’s tonight.
“Lucky you!” Captain Jonas said, with real envy.
Thoughtfully, he consumed two of our share of the doughnuts, and shouted at the waiter to keep them coming.
“Lieutenant Abbott, how much do you know about Creoles?” he asked then.
“I know they’re white, and usually of French descent,” Patrick said.
“You can’t help knowing that, the way people keep informing you about it all the time,” I said. “People here seem to think that Northerners think Creoles are Negroes.”
“That’s not what I mean,” Jonas said. “I’m talking about the way they clique together. They never squeal on each other if there’s a blood tie. There’s two things every Creole is crazy about—his family and money. Also, they love to keep up appearances. They’ll make a little girl’s underwear out of sugar sacks to save money for a splashy wedding years and years in the future. The idea is to save money when she’s little so she can wear silk and satin on her honeymoon.”
“That would take character, though,” I said.
Jonas looked at me quizzically. I sensed that character was not a quality he thought a girl ought to be too interested in.
He went on.
“If there’s anything tough to break it’s a case where the suspects are Creoles. Now, that woman was murdered, Lieutenant. No doubt about that. The reason is plain as your nose. She was rolling in dough. She was nuts. The thrifty Creole mind would figure that there’s no sense keeping her in an expensive asylum and wasting all the good dough it would cost when it’s just so easy to bump her off. Let’s get down to the facts. Just how much do y
ou know?”
The cold vigilant eyes moved between us.
I looked into my coffee cup. Patrick offered cigarettes and then gave us a light.
“I’m afraid I can’t help you very much, Captain Jonas,” he said. “We’ve been living in the house a very short time. We didn’t even know what was wrong with Mrs. Clary, till tonight.”
The detective’s lips flattened across his big jowls.
“I’ll bet you didn’t! How much rent do you pay?” Patrick told him, and Jonas said, “Too much. They wouldn’t’ve hooked you at that figure if you had known there was a crazy woman downstairs. Or would they?”
“Naturally not,” Patrick said. “But not because of the rent. That’s okay. The apartment is exceptionally nice and very cool and very convenient, but I shouldn’t’ve wanted my wife alone in that wing with a mental case downstairs. I told Clary so tonight.”
“Does he know you’re a detective in private life?”
Patrick’s smile flattered Captain Jonas. “You are the first to spot me in New Orleans.”
“I thought maybe he got you to move there on purpose, with the murder already planned. Meaning to use your services when the time came. You like him?”
“Very much. I admire him, too. He’s doing fine work at his hospital.”
Jonas waded into a fresh plate of doughnuts.
“The smarter he is the tougher he’ll be to catch. Only maybe he’s not so smart.”
“You think Roger Clary did it, Captain Jonas?”
“Why not? She was crazy. Handier to have her dead than alive. He’s a doctor. He knows all the ways. Curare...Just like a book!” Jonas flapped the hands. “His big mistake was letting that nurse go. She didn’t run out on that job for the first time in years just before her patient happened to die. Oh, no. Somebody told her to go. Chances are she went with a large slice of dough in her pocket. That wasn’t smart, Lieutenant. Clary ought to have figured up some way to do it with her around, but not being wise to what was up, so that she could give evidence in his favor.”
The Indigo Necklace Page 5