“But it’s different with you. You’ve got Vickie. You …”
“Don’t talk about Vickie.”
“But how can I help it when you’re married to her?”
“Linda, please. I’ve told you the deal on Vickie.”
“Oh, I know I’m silly, but tell me again. Darling, it helps so much when you tell me; it’s the one thing that gives me strength. What you said was really true? You don’t love her?”
“Love her! Do you of all people have to be told that? I never loved her. From the first it was nothing—nothing at all. I told you. It was Dad. The mill was in a desperate way, debts, God knows what. Dad had done everything, straight and crooked, I guess. And then Vickie came along with all that money. Dad said she was a gift from heaven. If I married her, we could save the mill. If I didn’t, maybe we’d both end up in jail. Linda, you must believe me. I didn’t mind her. She was perfectly harmless and when it meant so much to …”
With a sudden violent movement Vickie had sprung across the room and snapped off the recorder switch. She spun around. Her eyes, bright in a dead white face, settled for a moment on Brad, then they moved to Steve Ritter.
“You heard. And now you know. John set a trap with another tape and he fell into the trap. I saw him. John saw him. He went to the box and took out the tape.”
She ran across the room, plunged her hand into Brad’s jacket pocket and brought out the decoy tape.
“There.” She threw it to Steve Ritter. “Now you know.”
As he watched, Linda was still obsessively in John’s mind; Linda, the cannibal, eating up the wretched Brad as she had tried to eat him up, never faltering in her devious plan, turning on the recorder, wheedling out of Brad an admission which would keep him tied to her for ever—the admission of a crooked company and an even more crooked marriage.
The men were all standing in transfixed silence, looking from Vickie to Brad. Finally Steve Ritter moistened his lips.
“So you say it’s that way, Vickie. Brad got kind of tangled up with Linda, out of his depth, and when it all got too much …”
It was then that Mr. Carey moved. He had been standing perfectly still. Now, his face thunderous, he turned to Steve.
“You heard the accusation she’s trying to make and you know it’s nonsense. How could my son possibly have killed Mrs. Hamilton and buried her under that cement floor. In the morning? When Hamilton was still there in the house. Preposterous. And after that he was in New York. I sent him there myself on business. He was there all the time and Hamilton here is a witness.” He glanced at John. “Isn’t that true? Wasn’t Brad with you all the time?’1
John was looking at Brad who stood by the window, his shoulders stooped, his eyes on the ground. So …
“Yes, Mr. Carey, he was in New York with me.”
“But he took the tape!” The words came explosively from Vickie.
“And you can tell them why.” Mr. Carey swung around, glaring at her with a malignity which was terrifying. “Can’t you, Vickie? You can tell them. Or do you want me to?”
The two of them stood watching each other, the antagonism crackling between them.
Then, in a very quiet voice, Vickie said, “I haven’t the slightest idea what you’re talking about.”
“No, you haven’t, because you didn’t realize I was listening at the Morelands’. You didn’t know that I heard when you drew Brad aside and said, ‘Go to the Fishers’ and get that box.’” Mr. Carey flung out an accusing finger at her. “You must have enjoyed that. It must have given you a very satisfactory sensation—not only to have killed the woman who came between you and your husband, but also, in the end when your first plan failed, to be able to incriminate my son in the murder …”
In the uproar that ensued, John felt excitement pulsing. So—it was all right. It was going to be all right.
Steve Ritter was staring at Vickie. She was standing very stiffly, her face scrawled with astonishment and anger.
“Steve.” When Steve Ritter turned to him, John said, “We might as well get this over.”
“Over? With Vickie … ?”
“Whoever called the hardware store to order cement, using my name, must be the murderer, mustn’t it?”
“Sure, sure, I guess so.”
“He called at nine in the morning. The man in the store remembers that clearly. Even if you imagine Vickie could fake a man’s voice, she couldn’t possibly have made that call. That day she’d been on the lake with Leroy fishing since dawn. They didn’t get back until after ten.” He looked around for Leroy and saw him hovering with Buck behind the thin, alert figure of Gordon Moreland. “That’s right, isn’t it, Leroy?”
“Yes,” he said. “We were out fishing, yes.”
“So much then for that fantastic accusation of Vickie. But you know now, don’t you? Everyone knows. There’s no doubt about it now.”
Slowly, savoring this moment which, against all expectations, had finally come, John turned to Brad.
“Are you that much under his thumb? Are you going to stand there and let him accuse Vickie without doing a thing about it? Linda decided to marry you, didn’t she? That’s why she made the tape. She threatened you with it and you were scared, far too scared to get out of your own mess yourself. But there was always Daddy. There’d been Daddy to fix your rich marriage for you and for himself, and now there was Daddy to rescue you from the clutches of Linda. You went to him, didn’t you? After Linda had given her final threat at the birthday party, you had that long ‘business’ conference with him. You confessed the whole miserable foul-up. I’m in a terrible jam. It’s not only my marriage. It’s the company. I let her know the company had been crooked and that you used Vickie’s money to get you out of the hole … You were terrified, weren’t you? But Daddy wasn’t. Just leave this to me, Brad. You get down to New York, out of the way, and when you come back …”
Anger and contempt were merged now with his excitement.
“After that, you didn’t know, did you? After you came back, you couldn’t be sure. Maybe I’d done your job for you. Maybe miraculously I’d done what you wanted to be done, just when you needed it being done. That’s what Daddy told you, wasn’t it? Oh, he hadn’t done a thing. He hadn’t any idea what had become of Linda. But you couldn’t have been sure. Could Daddy really have liquidated her—ruthlessly wiped out the menace to the family and the family firm? Couldn’t Daddy have done that? Wasn’t he perfectly capable of it? How about calling me and persuading me to go to vote? Couldn’t he have been hoping that I’d be lynched at the town meeting and it would all be over before any investigation began? And then, tonight, at the Morelands’, you knew, didn’t you? You had to know.”
He crossed the room and grabbed Brad by the arm. “Tell them. Go on. If you don’t, God knows what will happen to you. But you’re innocent. You can put up a good fight in court to prove you had nothing to do with it at all. So. Go on. Tell them. Who sent you from the Morelands’ to get the tape out of the box?”
Brad looked up. The disintegration of his face was pitiful. His tongue came out flickering over his lower lip.
“I didn’t know, John. Honestly, I didn’t …”
“Brad!” Mr. Carey’s voice rang out in a harsh travesty of authority. “Brad, don’t let him …”
“Who sent you to get that box?”
For a moment Brad’s eyes shifted between his father and John. Then he hung his head and whispered, “It was Dad. He sent me. He had to wait for Steve Ritter. He said I must go. But I didn’t know. He didn’t say why. Go get that box, he said. I…”
Steve Ritter and the farmers had closed in around Mr. Carey. Brad turned to his wife and put out a hand tentatively.
“Vickie…”
But she swung away from him and ran to the window, turning her back on them all.
It was over, thought John. With the demoralized Brad in the witness stand against him, Mr. Carey was as doomed as if he’d made a confession.
All t
he men were milling excitedly around, but John felt completely removed from them. He went over to Vickie. She was still at the window, gazing out past the lounging men and over the Fishers’ unmowed lawn to the woods. He put his hand gently on her shoulder and, as she turned her head slightly toward him, he felt the pity and affection in him growing and expanding into a sensation of kinship. Linda … Mr. Carey … He’d been a monster’s victim; so had Vickie. It had been the same for them both, and now …
“John.”
A hand was tugging at his sleeve. He looked around and there was Emily gazing up at him from black anguished eyes.
“Angel told. I tried but I couldn’t stop her. When they came, Angel told. Oh, John, is it all right?”
His hand was still on Vickie’s shoulder. With his other arm, he drew Emily toward him.
“Yes, Emily,” he said. “It’s all right.”
FIN
PATRICK QUENTIN
Patrick Quentin, Q. Patrick and Jonathan Stagge were pen names under which Hugh Callingham Wheeler (19 March 1912 – 26 July 1987), Richard Wilson Webb (August 1901 – December 1966), Martha Mott Kelley (30 April 1906 – 2005) and Mary Louise White Aswell (3 June 1902 – 24 December 1984) wrote detective fiction. In some foreign countries their books have been published under the variant Quentin Patrick. Most of the stories were written by Webb and Wheeler in collaboration, or by Wheeler alone. Their most famous creation is the amateur sleuth Peter Duluth. In 1963, the story collection The Ordeal of Mrs. Snow was given a Special Edgar Award by the Mystery Writers of America.
In 1931 Richard Wilson Webb (born in 1901 in Burnham-on-Sea, Somerset, an Englishman working for a pharmaceutical company in Philadelphia) and Martha Mott Kelley collaborated on the detective novel Cottage Sinister. Kelley was known as Patsy (Patsy Kelly was a well-known character actress of that era) and Webb as Rick, so they created the pseudonym Q. Patrick by combining their nicknames—adding the Q "because it was unusual".
Webb's and Kelley's literary partnership ended with Kelley's marriage to Stephen Wilson. Webb continued to write under the Q. Patrick name, while looking for a new writing partner. Although he wrote two novels with the journalist and Harper's Bazaar editor Mary Louise Aswell, he would find his permanent collaborator in Hugh Wheeler, a Londoner who had moved to the US in 1934.
Wheeler's and Webb's first collaboration was published in 1936. That same year, they introduced two new pseudonyms: Murder Gone to Earth, the first novel featuring Dr. Westlake, was credited to Jonathan Stagge, a name they would continue to use for the rest of the Westlake series. A Puzzle for Fools introduced Peter Duluth and was signed Patrick Quentin. This would become their primary and most famous pen name, even though they also continued to use Q. Patrick until the end of their collaboration (particularly for Inspector Trant stories).
In the late 1940s, Webb's contributions gradually decreased due to health problems. From the 1950s and on, Wheeler continued writing as Patrick Quentin on his own, and also had one book published under his own name. In the 1960s and '70s, Wheeler achieved success as a playwright and librettist, and his output as Quentin Patrick slowed and then ceased altogether after 1965. However, Wheeler did write the book for the 1979 musical Sweeney Todd about a fictional London mass murderer, showing he had not altogether abandoned the genre.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
As Patrick Quentin
A Puzzle For Fools (1936)
Puzzle For Players (1938)
Puzzle For Puppets (1944)
Puzzle For Wantons (1945) aka Slay the Loose Ladies
Puzzle For Fiends (1946) aka Love Is a Deadly Weapon
Puzzle For Pilgrims (1947) aka The Fate of the Immodest Blonde
Run To Death (1948)
The Follower (1950)
Black Widow (1952) aka Fatal Woman
My Son, the Murderer (1954) aka the Wife of Ronald Sheldon
The Man With Two Wives (1955)
The Man in the Net (1956)
Suspicious Circumstances (1957)
Shadow of Guilt (1959)
The Green-Eyed Monster (1960)
The Ordeal of Mrs Snow (1961), short stories
Family Skeletons (1965)
As Q Patrick
Cottage Sinister (1931)
Murder at the Women's City Club (1932) aka Death in the Dovecote
SS Murder (1933)
Murder at the 'Varsity (1933) aka Murder at Cambridge
The Grindle Nightmare (1935) aka Darker Grows the Valley
Death Goes To School (1936)
Death For Dear Clara (1937)
The File on Fenton and Farr (1938)
The File on Claudia Cragge (1938)
Death and the Maiden (1939)
Return To the Scene (1941) aka Death in Bermuda
Danger Next Door (1952)
As Jonathan Stagge
The Dogs Do Bark (1936) aka Murder Gone To Earth
Murder by Prescription (1938) aka Murder or Mercy?
The Stars Spell Death (1939) aka Murder in the Stars
Turn of the Table (1940) aka Funeral For Five
The Yellow Taxi (1942) aka Call a Hearse
The Scarlet Circle (1943) aka Light From a Lantern
Death, My Darling Daughters (1945) aka Death and the Dear Girls
Death's Old Sweet Song (1946)
The Three Fears (1949)
As Hugh Wheeler
The Crippled Muse (1951)
Table of Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
About Patrick Quentin
Bibliography
The Man in the Net Page 20