Staircase 4

by Helen Reilly

  An infinitesimal fraction of time too small for the brain to measure held horror like a great suspended bubble. In that freezing instant of silence between lap and lap of water the bubble burst. The silence was smashed to pieces by the shrill clamor of a bell.

  Gabrielle heard just the beginning of it. As the edge of the wave of sound touched her ears the gun in John Muir’s hand jerked upward. Fire spat at the muzzle. A gigantic fist hit Gabrielle between the shoulders. Before her body struck the first few downward steps consciousness was gone.

  Chapter Twenty-Two: Confessions by two

  “YES, TODHUNTER?”

  McKee looked up from the desk in William Glouster’s study, in the room in which John Muir had left Gabrielle Conant when she first entered the house more than nine hours earlier. It was almost three o’clock in the morning. The house wasn’t, as it had been then, in darkness. It blazed with lights, and the halls and corridors were full of men, state troopers soldierly in uniform and the detectives McKee had brought with him on that final assault.

  The ringing of the bell that had clanged in Gabrielle’s ears before her body went pitching down the cement steps in the boathouse had been set off by the opening of the boathouse doors before the nose of a police launch. The doors were still open. The indicator in the bell box in the kitchen stood frozen at Staircase 4.

  Todhunter said to McKee, “We’ve got them all here, the Van Nesses and the Amorys and Miss Holmes, and the Middletons and Bond. Do you want to talk to them now, Inspector?”

  McKee nodded. “I think so. I’d like to finish up tonight. How is Miss Conant?”

  “Not too bad,” Todhunter said, with the first vestige of cheerfulness. “No bones broken, no concussion—the doctor says that what she needs is rest.”

  “Saving the medical gentleman’s favor,” McKee said dryly, expelling smoke from the bottom of his lungs, “rest is precisely what she doesn’t need, right now. What she’s got to have is the truth. I know she’s pretty well knocked out—but she’ll be better for it later on.”

  Gabrielle had talked to him when she was first revived. Eyes blank and fixed, the shining pupils, enormously enlarged by the sedative she had been given, she had told him, in a monotonous voice that neither rose nor fell but continued on one dead level, everything that had happened, as she knew it, from the beginning.

  The only thing that might have helped, if they had known it earlier, was Florence Nelson’s coat and the letter inside the lining pointing to the whereabouts of the round man. And even that—he doubted whether it would have made any real difference in the end. The round man, Bertrand Oliver, was doomed from the moment Mark Middleton’s death was called murder.

  “Have them bring Miss Conant, Todhunter, and then bring the others.”

  “Yes, Inspector.” The little detective went mournfully on his errand. The windup of a case always distressed him.

  Chairs from other rooms were carried in. Presently William Glouster’s study was full. The Inspector behind the desk, a stenographer at a table, detectives at the door; Gabrielle sat in the wing chair to the left of the fireplace, the chair from which she had risen when she read the slip of paper concealed in the jewel box, risen like a sleepwalker, and gone to what was, for her, very nearly the end of time.

  A bandaged temple and wrist, a strapped shoulder, strapped ribs; the drug she had been given dulled physical pain. She sat almost as though she were still asleep, except that she was too erect, her face as empty as a slate that had been wiped clean; her exhausted eyes, concealed by fringes of dark lash, fastened on hands clasped in her lap, as though she had been posed that way for a portrait and instructed not to move.

  No one spoke to her, nor did she speak herself. There was no talking whatever; that had been done when they were first brought to the house, with sound and fury. Indignation, anger, expostulations—they had been told, coldly, that Bertrand Oliver was dead and that the case was nearing an end, and that was all.

  Facing Gabrielle and the Scotsman were Joanna and Claire Middleton, Claire very young and frightened, the Amorys, Susan and Tony, and Philip Bond. It was amazing, Gabrielle thought apathetically, how like their usual selves they were, in spite of the hour and the circumstances. What mysteries men and women were, even those you knew best. There was no closeness, no truth, no real contact between one human being and another. She, for instance, saw Joanna out of her own eyes, and everything that she herself was, that she had been from the moment she entered the world—no, further back than that; everything her ancestors had been, had seen, and thought and felt—shaped her vision.

  Where was John Muir? Not in custody; the Inspector was talking. He startled her distantly when he said that no arrest had yet been made, that before the perpetrator was taken into custody and charged with the deaths, by violence, of Mark Middleton, Edward Glass, Florence Nelson, and Bertrand Oliver, it would be necessary to get certain details clear, for the record.

  He began talking about Mark, put Mark in his study in the apartment on Central Park West shortly before he died. “Seated,” McKee said, “much as I am now, with this”—the tip of a delicately blunted forefinger touched the green-leather box holding the pearls—“on his desk in front of him.”

  The frost-bound stillness was broken by a tiny gasp. Gabrielle raised her lashes. It came from Susan. McKee didn’t look at her; he was looking at Tony. “I believe you told Miss Conant, Mr. Van Ness, that Mark Middleton gave you these pearls in front of the Hotel Devon at around three o’clock on the afternoon of the day he was killed. Would you care to change your statement?”

  Tony had collapsed in his chair. The air seemed to have gone out of him. His body looked flat, one-dimensional. His throat working convulsively, he moistened his lips and finally spoke. “I didn’t kill him—Mark. No matter what you say—I didn’t! You can’t fasten it on me! He was dead when I went in. I swear it…”

  He continued to pour out words. They gushed from him like water from a faucet. He had been in the Devon, near the cloakroom, within a few yards of Gabrielle and Mark, when Mark showed Gabrielle the pearls. He had heard Mark say that the clasp had to be fixed. He had gone to the Devon to ask Mark for a loan, knew Gabrielle wouldn’t like it, and didn’t want to approach Mark while she was with him. They left the hotel together. Mark put Gabrielle into a cab alone, but before he could get to him, Mark had climbed into another cab and driven off. Tony said he had to have money. That evening he had gone to Mark’s apartment. As he rounded the turn from the elevator and stepped into the transverse corridor he had had a fleeting impression that someone had just moved from Mark’s door. He didn’t think anything of it, then. Mark’s door wasn’t quite closed. He tapped, didn’t get any answer, walked in, and found Mark dead, as he thought, on the study floor.

  The pearls were on the desk. The lid of the box was up. He was horrified. He was also desperate, and he had had a lot to drink. He had snatched up the pearls and gone. The next thing he knew he was in the street. He proceeded with the tale he had already told Gabrielle. He had been mad, it was a mad thing to have done. He knew it… His voice dribbled off incoherently.

  McKee made absolutely no comment on his story, except: “You say you had an impression of movement in the corridor outside Mr. Middleton’s door when you first entered it. Can you elaborate on that, Mr. Van Ness?”

  Tony couldn’t. He shrugged heavily. “I don’t know, it was just an idea. Maybe I imagined it. But the door was open and I—when I thought about it afterward, I thought that maybe whoever killed Mark heard me coming and dashed in the other direction, toward the stairs, without stopping to pull the door closed properly.”

  The silence throbbed. Mr. McKee let it go on for a moment. Then he settled back in his chair. “I think you all know that whoever borrowed, or instigated the borrowing, of eighty thousand dollars, in cash, from Mark Middleton, killed him.”

  “Whoever borrowed eighty thousand dollars in cash”—Gabrielle examined a fingernail broken to the quick. … The Inspec
tor knew to whom the money had gone. Why was he beating about the bush? It was stupid of him. His voice went on and on, tiresomely. He said that once the missing money had come to light, the police had turned their attention to who, among Mark’s friends, needed money at the time Mark had converted his securities into cash. Mr. Muir and Mr. Muir’s firm, Tritex, Incorporated, leaped to the eye. Mr. Muir and Tritex, Incorporated, were being sued for five million dollars by Crosby and Sons on charges that the defendants had conspired to copy the Crosby system of production and design and other knowledge, and to compel certain manufacturers to sever their connection with the Crosby company and to destroy the Crosby company’s source of supply. With this suit pending, McKee said, the stock of Tritex had fallen sharply.

  A pause; McKee was looking at Alice.

  “I believe you had large holdings in Mr. Muir’s company back in June, when this happened, Mrs. Amory?” Alice stared at him stonily. “No.”

  “No?” McKee’s brows rose. “Then how do you account for the fact that your broker sold a large block of Tritex shares in July, a transaction on which you received a handsome profit, as the shares had risen sharply after the suit was decided in favor of Tritex?” Alice looked steadily at the Inspector, looked away. Her lips opened, and closed. They were blue around the edges of blurred lipstick. She wasn’t going to answer. She stared at space.

  McKee didn’t attempt to force an answer from her. His attention was already directed elsewhere. “And you, Mrs. Middleton,” he said, “I believe you held and still hold stock in Tritex?” Joanna said calmly, “That’s correct, Inspector,” and nothing more. She was encased in a shell of composure it would have taken a sledge hammer to smash.

  The Inspector didn’t use one. He abandoned both women, went on musingly: “The break in this case came when we found out what Mark Middleton did on the afternoon of the day he died. Before that, we knew simply this, that the man Miss Conant called the round man, and whose name was Bertrand Oliver, called at Mark Middleton’s apartment on June the twenty-fifth and in all probability took the eighty thousand dollars in cash away with him in his briefcase, and that a little more than some eight weeks later, Mr. Middleton caught sight of Oliver in the lobby of the Devon and showed strong anger. We didn’t know why. We didn’t know where Mr. Middleton went that afternoon, or what he did in the hours immediately preceding his death. Then we found out. After taking leave of Miss Conant in front of the Devon, he drove to the house of Judge Silverbridge on East Sixty-Fourth Street.”

  A stir ran through the room.

  “Yes,” McKee said, interpreting it, “Judge Silverbridge was the judge who gave the verdict in John Muir’s and Tritex’s favor in the suit against them. If the verdict had gone the other way, if it had been adverse, Tritex couldn’t have weathered the blow. John Muir’s personal fortune would have been wiped out and the investors in Tritex would have lost heavily.”

  The Scotsman looked thoughtfully over the faces turned on him. “Our next discovery was that on that afternoon, the afternoon Mark Middleton saw him, Judge Silverbridge had a stroke. Returning home a few minutes after Mark Middleton left the house, the Judge’s wife found Judge Silverbridge in a state of collapse on the library floor.”

  McKee made some sort of signal to a detective near the door. The door opened and John Muir came in. Gabrielle dragged herself up from seas of weariness that threatened to engulf her. Why did she have to be there, to see, to listen?

  “Mr. Muir, I have here this receipt.” The Inspector read the note to Mark from John aloud, explained where it had been found. “Undoubtedly,” he said, “Mark Middleton meant the eighty thousand dollars he expected to receive from you, Mr. Muir, as a wed ding present for Miss Conant. He put this note into the box with the pearls, beneath the cushion on which the pearls lay, probably meaning to surprise her. He intended to give her this wedding gift when they lunched that day in the Devon. What he learned while he was waiting for Miss Conant there made it impossible, which was why he invented an excuse for keeping the box containing the pearls, and the receipt, in his possession—until he had done what he intended to do, and which he carried out, in part.”

  Cold, cold as ice, John’s voice. “Inspector, I did not write that receipt. I did not receive eighty thousand dollars from Mark Middleton. That is not my signature.”

  “You’re claiming that somebody else borrowed the eighty thousand from Mark Middleton, in your name, and forged your signature?”

  “Yes.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Muir.” McKee turned back to the others.

  “Late this afternoon I drove up to see Judge Silverbridge at his home in Dutchess County. The Judge is an invalid, has never recovered from the shock of what happened when Mark Middleton went to see him last August. I saw the Judge, talked to him. The Judge talked to me.

  “Bertrand Oliver, Miss Conant’s ‘round man,’ the man who was killed here tonight, was a protégé, a sort of henchman, of the Judge’s. Becoming interested in Oliver as a boy, the Judge put him through school and later found him jobs, using him often himself in a confidential capacity. When Mark Middleton was waiting for Miss Conant in the lobby of the Devon, he saw Bertrand Oliver there. Oliver wasn’t alone. Judge Silverbridge was with him, was just parting from him.

  “Mark Middleton didn’t know who Oliver’s companion was then, and, as far as Oliver went, he simply knew he was the messenger who had carried away the eighty thousand dollars destined for Mr. Muir. No, Mark Middleton had no idea who Oliver’s companion was. Two men standing near Middleton enlightened him. Speaking in a confidential voice, one man said to the other, ‘There’s Judge Silverbridge—and his bag-man, Oliver. You’d never think, would you, that Silverbridge was on the take? But I guess there’s no doubt of it.’

  “Mark Middleton was thunderstruck. He realized instantly that he had been made the butt, the victim, of a conspiracy to defraud, that the eighty thousand dollars in cash John Muir had borrowed was the Judge’s pourboire, his payment, for the decision against Crosby and Sons and in favor of John Muir and Tritex. When he went to see the Judge, Mark Middleton accused him of having taken a bribe of eighty thousand dollars in return for favors received, told him he was going to expose him and everyone who had been a party to the transaction.”

  The distant sea boomed, wind beat at the walls; inside the crowded room, except for the Inspector’s voice, there wasn’t the slightest sound.

  He said, “Had Mark Middleton been able to carry out his intention, the decision in favor of Tritex would have been reversed, and the Judge and anyone and everyone involved brought to trial and sentenced to long prison terms.” McKee shrugged. “Mark Middleton wasn’t able to carry out what he intended to do. Back in his apartment, he called, not Mr. Muir, who he thought was in South America, but the man who had asked for the eighty thousand dollars on Mr. Muir’s behalf, in Mr. Muir’s name. That man is Tyrell Amory.”

  Gabrielle sat very still. The house was rocking like a ship. Someone was talking. It was Tyrell. Tyrell was saying in a loud empty voice, “Yes, I did it. Yes…”

  Gabrielle didn’t look at him. The Inspector was finishing up. He said that Judge Silverbridge was entirely innocent. The Judge had reached the decision in favor of John Muir and Tritex on the merits of the case. Unfortunately, there was a leak, and his decision had become known in advance. Tyrell Amory was in trouble. Without Mrs. Amory’s knowledge he had invested a large sum of his wife’s money, more than half of what she had, in Tritex. When the Crosby company had filed suit, the stock had fallen heavily. A favorable verdict could send it soaring. Tyrell Amory was approached and offered a favorable verdict—price, eighty thousand dollars, in cash.

  Tyrell had no money, but Mark Middleton had. Mark was generous, open-handed, had come to the assistance of his friends on other occasions. Tyrell had gone to Mark, representing that John Muir, with whom he was in constant touch, was temporarily short of cash with which to bolster his own stock by quiet buying, a perfectly legal procedure. This was
the easier to do because John was in South America and not expected to return for some time. The receipt, purportedly forwarded via Tyrell by John to Mark, was a forgery.

  All had gone well. Tyrell had managed to unload his wife’s shares at a profit and reinvest them as she had originally directed. In addition, by selling shares of his own that he had bought when Tritex was low, he was ready to pay Mark back, when Mark saw Judge Silverbridge and Oliver in the Devon, heard the comment of the man near him, and put two and two together. The truth had a way of leaking out. It wasn’t the first transaction of that sort that had been negotiated. It had happened twice before.

  As he talked, McKee had been scribbling absently on a piece of paper in front of him. He laid the pencil aside. Everything he had said, done, throwing suspicion now here, now there, laboring certain points, dwelling on them, had been for one purpose. He didn’t know whether or not he was going to be successful in what he was attempting. No use waiting any longer—put it to the test. He raised his eyes, and looked, not at Tyrell Amory, but at the woman on Tyrell’s left.

  “Miss Holmes,” he said, “you were the one who went to Tyrell Amory with a legal verdict for sale. I charge you with the murders of Mark Middleton, Edward Glass, Florence Nelson, and Bertrand Oliver.”

  The silence was complete. It was like the intense stillness after a tremendous flash of lightning and before the advent of thunder, Gabrielle thought dazedly. A sound broke it. Brenda Holmes laughed.

  It was a quiet laugh, a little ripple of amusement. There was something blood-chilling in its composure, in the way her beautiful face didn’t change, the way her skin held its bloom, her blue eyes their light. She said in a languid voice, “Some of your deductions are correct, Inspector. Not all. You’ve been arguing with insufficient knowledge. Your conclusion is wrong. I didn’t kill anyone. The man you want, the man who killed Mark, and that private detective, and the Nelson woman, is Blake Evans.”