by Helen Reilly
Gabrielle wrestled with stupefaction. Brenda’s voice stopped. There was another sound then; it was the opening of the door. Blake Evans stood in the opening, between two big men. His clothes were in disorder, disarray, as though he had been in some sort of melee, but his handsome face was just as it always was, attractive, debonair, faintly smiling. It was a white smile. There was a glittering quality to it. Blake didn’t glance at Brenda, who had turned sharply. He was looking at McKee. He said, slowly, in what would have been an indifferent tone except for the whip of savagery in it, “You were right, inspector. I was wrong. You thought Miss Holmes would talk. I didn’t. I acknowledge my mistake. I’m quite willing to talk now.”
“John!” Brenda Holmes’s cry was almost a scream. She was up and out of her chair, was across to where John stood, an elbow propped on one of the bookcases, had flung herself against him, her arms wound tightly around his neck. “John,” she cried frantically, “don’t listen. It isn’t true that I…”
She must have known it was futile, useless, that she was already lost. The ensuing five minutes were frightful. Claire Middleton sobbing wildly, Joanna trying to quiet her, Tyrell speaking, and then the Inspector. Brenda Holmes and Blake Evans were both charged with murder, repeated four times, and removed.
Tyrell was taken away, too. Alice went with him, a new, a different Alice, subdued, stern, but with the veil of despair gone from her. Tyrell wasn’t in love with Brenda Holmes. He never had been. The bond between them had been hateful to him. When Alice, and Gabrielle, had seen them together in the little room beyond the dining-room the night before, Brenda was pleading with Tyrell to remain silent, for all their sakes. Tyrell had had no hand in murder. The others had managed to persuade him that Bertrand Oliver was the real culprit.
Tyrell had wanted to go to the police. That was why Oliver had been killed that night; they were afraid of Tyrell, of what he might do. It was Blake Evans who had sent Gabrielle crashing down Staircase 4 in the boathouse, Blake Evans at whom John had fired. Evans had killed Oliver earlier, when he first entered the house. He had gone upstairs to collect Oliver’s clothing so that there should be no trace of him left.
The Glousters had gone abroad the previous May. Oliver was there without their knowledge. They had never heard of him. Brenda knew the Glousters, knew the house would be empty and an admirable hiding-place. Oliver had lived there quietly from August oh, pretending to be cataloguing the Glousters’ library to the few local people he encountered.
While Blake Evans was upstairs, John had found Oliver dead in a boat ready on the black water in the boathouse. The plan had been to take Oliver out into the Sound in the rowboat, dump him overboard in deep water so well weighted down that it would be a long while before his body broke the surface, by which time he would have become unrecognizable.
Some of this Gabrielle learned then, some of it later on. Other things were made plain, too, but not there. The house gradually emptied. Gabrielle, McKee, and John were among the last to go, in John’s car. They drove through the first tinges of gray light to an all-night coffee shop near the shore, over John’s objections. “She ought to be in bed.” The Inspector didn’t agree. “Miss Conant’s too keyed up to sleep and I imagine there are things she wants to know. No, Muir, I think she’d better have it all cleared up now.”
Over coffee at a white table at the back of the clean little shop bright with chromium and enamel and blazing lights, while the dawn struggled into being beyond the curtained windows, the Scotsman talked.
The affair between Brenda Holmes and Blake Evans had been going on for years. They couldn’t afford to marry. It was one of those poisonous relationships that had ruined them both, breaking down moral fibers that were never strong.
Blake Evans was Judge Silverbridge’s stepson. The Judge disliked and distrusted him; he couldn’t, for his wife’s sake, forbid him the house. Evans had taken advantage of his position twice before, selling secretly, in advance, decisions the Judge had already made and that needn’t have been bought at all.
Evans had made a full confession, determined that Brenda, who at the last would have betrayed him to save herself, should be equally implicated—the affair between them had by that time worn thin.
Bertrand Oliver had been a tool, snatching at a chance to make a little gravy on the side; he got five thousand for his work, which had consisted of delivering Mark’s money to Evans and changing the large bills into smaller ones. Tyrell had been a dupe throughout. After that interview with Judge Silverbridge, in whose protestations of noncomplicity he didn’t believe, Mark had phoned to Tyrell, Tyrell had phoned to Blake Evans, and Evans had gone to the apartment on Central Park West and had killed Mark with Mark’s own gun.
“I imagine,” McKee said, “that Mark had it in readiness in case of trouble. He wasn’t quick enough…” At any rate, Mark was dead and his death was pronounced suicide—a verdict which Tyrell accepted—and for a while it must have seemed to Brenda Holmes and Evans that they were sitting pretty. McKee stirred his coffee. “Miss Conant was the only threat. I wasn’t in the city, and her protestations that his death was murder got nowhere. But there was one fly in the ointment—a very large fly. The receipt for the eighty thousand dollars, signed with John Muir’s name, had vanished. It was not among Mark’s papers, which Tyrell Amory, as a close friend and under the pretense of helping Philip Bond, went through very carefully indeed.”
John interrupted there. “If nothing had happened, Inspector, if Mark had lived, weren’t they afraid Mark and I would have gotten together and the truth about the loan would have come out?”
McKee said, “They argued, correctly, I think, that Mark was not the sort of man to remind you of benefits received; not knowing it, you couldn’t mention it to him. In addition, Mark was going to be in the West for a long while… Incidentally, Miss Conant,” the Inspector remarked to Gabrielle, “it was Tyrell Amory who shoved you into the closet in Mark’s apartment when you surprised him making a last desperate search for the forged receipt.”
With it missing, John had come home from South America. They were afraid of him, of what he might do if his suspicions were aroused. His suspicions would be aroused if he met Gabrielle, and heard her story—which was why the attempt had been made on her life on the subway platform on the afternoon of the day of John’s return, by Evans.
The attempt was unsuccessful. John and Gabrielle met at Tyrell’s birthday party that evening. It was Brenda who had opened the door while they were together in Tyrell’s study. John had seen her hand on the knob and, although she had slipped away by the time he got to the door, he recognized her perfume when he joined her in the living-room. Brenda had heard John planning to meet Gabrielle later on, hence the second attempt at murder that same night.
It was Evans who had called Gabrielle in a disguised voice, directing her to go Jordon’s on the lower West Side. As McKee had surmised, there was to have been a pretended pursuit of the round man and at the end of it death for Gabrielle, in an obscure spot in New Jersey. When and if her body was eventually discovered her death would have been called self-destruction, brought on by despondency over Mark’s suicide. John’s presence, outside the restaurant—he had been seen by Evans—had stymied the second attempt.
McKee said that it was Alice Gabrielle had seen in a cab on Sixth Avenue that night. While Evans was busy about his abortive adventure in crime, Brenda had summoned Tyrell to a conference in her cousin’s flat on Washington Square. Alice had followed Tyrell, had watched him go in, and had returned home convinced that he was Brenda’s lover.
The attempts on Gabrielle’s reason, planned by Brenda Holmes and carried out by Evans—he had had keys made for her apartment from the one in Susan’s possession—had been made in an effort to convince John that she wasn’t sane, that her allegations concerning Mark’s death were fancies of a sick mind. Everything that had been done to her had been done by them together or separately, as opportunity offered.
Again the pair
met failure. Then had come the planting of three of Mark’s bills, still unchanged and in Brenda’s hands but too hot to handle, in order to throw active suspicion on Gabrielle. There, however, McKee said, Evans had run into heavy weather.
Glass was in Gabrielle’s apartment, doing his little job of examining her desk for Joanna, who was becoming restive and wanted results, when Evans came in, planted the bills in the lamp base, and set the fire that brought about their discovery. From that moment on Glass abandoned Gabrielle and devoted his entire attention to Blake Evans.
Gabrielle’s call to John Muir asking him to meet her at Miss Nelson’s had been overheard by Brenda when she arrived at his door earlier that evening for cocktails. At that point McKee digressed.
“You, too, misfired that evening, didn’t you, Mr. Muir?”
John nodded. “Yes. I suppose you searched my rooms and found the dictaphone? I was convinced all along, as Alice was convinced, that Brenda and Tyrell were lovers as well as companions in crime. I asked the Amorys and Brenda for cocktails, meant to get Alice into another room and leave Brenda and Tyrell alone. I thought they would seize the opportunity to talk things over and I would have final proof. It didn’t come off. Tyrell didn’t turn up, and I had to go out.”
At any rate, McKee said, Florence Nelson, Bertrand Oliver’s girlfriend, of whose existence neither Brenda Holmes nor Evans had had the slightest suspicion until she was tracked down by Gabrielle, was a pistol pointed at their heads. Gabrielle and John were going to see her. It was nip and tuck there. The meeting couldn’t be permitted to take place. Evans went over to Miss Nelson’s apartment. She was out. Time was growing short. When she came back he rang her bell, was admitted, represented himself as a friend of Oliver’s and told her Oliver was in danger, that the police were on his trail and that they were coming to the apartment to question her. Instant flight was the only thing that would save her and the man she loved.
Miss Nelson had no real idea of what was going on. Oliver hadn’t confided in her. She simply knew that he had been engaged in an undertaking that, if not criminal, was on the shady side of the law. Evans impressed on her Oliver’s danger should his whereabouts become known, and sent her out of the apartment by way of the fire stairs. He gave her the names of several hotels to try, instructing her not to attempt to contact either him or Oliver, that he would get in touch with her later. Meanwhile she was to remain hidden. Terrified, she did as she was told, wearing a coat she had bought at a thrift shop on her way home that afternoon, a detail which had hampered them in their search for her.
She was safely gone and Evans himself was about to leave—he hadn’t many minutes to spare—when Glass, who had followed him to the apartment, admitted himself with the aid of a skeleton key, a handy little tool of his trade he kept by him, and walked into the living-room. “Glass demanded money for his knowledge of the planting of the bills, Evans pretended to agree, diverted his attention and”—McKee shrugged—“just as later, when the chase got too hot, he went to the Hotel Rothingham and eliminated Miss Nelson.”
The Scotsman lit a cigarette. “When you saw him with his mother in the coffeeroom the other morning, Miss Conant, Evans was persuading her to give him an alibi covering the time of Florence Nelson’s death. You recall his saying earlier that he was in his office, when he wasn’t?” Gabrielle nodded stiffly. McKee gave her a veiled glance with worry in it, and continued. “It was in Mrs. Middleton’s room in the Waldorf that I first became definitely suspicious of Evans. It was obvious that Claire Middleton was jealous of him, thought he was in love with another woman—you, Miss Conant. Joanna Middleton shared her daughter’s suspicions. Joanna was actually following Blake Evans, whom she had tracked from his office, when he entered the Rothingham on the afternoon Miss Nelson was killed. Mrs. Middleton lost Evans but saw you.”
McKee said that to kill Florence Nelson was a mistake. Oliver was a poor weak creature, and a perfect tool, but there were limits, and he had a genuine affection for the woman. He was living in isolation in the Glousters’ house on the shore but sooner or later he would find out… Another obstacle reared itself menacingly. Tyrell Amory was getting restive. They had managed to convince him, because he wanted to be convinced, that Oliver had killed both Glass and Miss Nelson. Amory wanted to make a clean breast of things, and turn Oliver over to the police. “So”—the Scotsman shrugged—“you know what happened tonight.” Gabrielle nodded. It was all clear, and terrible. Widening light, iron-gray beyond the curtains; in the bright little shop it was still night. The counter, the tables and chairs, the salt and pepper shakers, the sugar bowl, John, the Inspector, were all curiously insubstantial. The real world was the permanent twilight of those scenes the Inspector had unrolled. Gabrielle was back in them, must live there always, she thought; she, and she alone, was responsible for three of the lives that had been taken. She said so in a low voice, her eyes on the paper napkin she was fingering. “If I hadn’t gone on insisting that Mark’s death was murder, if I had let it go—those others wouldn’t have died.”
John had been sitting back, following the Inspector closely and asking an occasional question, as engrossed as though she weren’t there. When she spoke he leaned forward and took her hands. “No, Gabrielle,” he said, “you had nothing to do with it. I was the one they were afraid of. If it hadn’t been for me, none of it would have happened.”
He was right, in part, Gabrielle thought drearily, but a shared responsibility was no help, no panacea. She knew at last that John had never loved Brenda Holmes, that he had simply pretended to do so in order to be able to be with her continuously, watch her closely. She also knew that he had warned her against marrying Mark because he was convinced that Mark was still in thrall to Brenda, in spite of disillusionment. He had probably stumbled on some hint of her relationship with Blake Evans. Now Brenda was no longer a barrier. But what might have been between John and herself, in another existence, had become impossible with the weight of those three lives that had been taken dragging them down. There had been only one albatross. She, at least, could never endure those three gray ghosts who would always be with her, in every room, in every chair, at every table, in corners and in passageways, under the sun and under the stars, mournful and implacable and eternally persistent.
The Inspector spoke then. He said crisply, smiling a little, “I don’t like to disabuse your minds, but I must. If you, Miss Conant, had never raised your voice, and if you, Mr. Muir, had never come home, if you had remained in South America indefinitely, the result would have been the same in the end.”
They stared at him, startled, while he told them of Mark’s call to him, over his own private wire, made within seconds of Mark’s death. He wasn’t in New York. Detective Todhunter had taken the call. He told them of Todhunter’s conviction that Mark had been killed. He said, “Once we started to investigate, Miss Nelson and Bertrand Oliver were as doomed as though they were already dead and in their graves. They had to be eliminated. As for Glass, he brought his death on himself. You two retarded us more than you helped; you had nothing to do with what actually transpired. That was foreordained from the moment that the shot that killed Mark was fired. However—credit where credit is due. You did help us tonight, Mr. Muir. We had lost sight of Miss Conant, we didn’t lose sight of you. When you followed Tyrell Amory to the Glousters’ in his vain attempt to see Oliver tonight, vain because he got no answer and couldn’t get into the house, we followed you.”
Gabrielle continued to stare at McKee, but without any longer seeing him. The relief was so tremendous that it was almost like pain. A heavy stone rolled away from her heart, unsealing it. She was not responsible. John was not responsible. They were free, unchained, relieved of the frightful burden of guilt.
A horn sounded outside. The Scotsman was on his feet. “I’ll leave you now. Later…”
Gabrielle didn’t hear the rest of what he said. The counterman was in some hidden recess. China rattled and water gushed. She and John were alone. His ha
nds tightened on hers. His grip was firm, gentle, healing. They looked at each other. There was no need of words. The night was gone and it was morning, a gray November morning with an icy wind out of the north. It was a wind such as had almost blown Gabrielle down when she had thought that it was Brenda Holmes John loved. Let it cry now as it would, it was powerless against that inner warmth that was like wine. Nothing divided John and her now. Nothing…
Coming in, the counterman was astonished at the order he received. The tall man—athletic type, with plenty of dough, you could see that—said to him affably, “Let’s have another cup of coffee.” And the pretty girl, who had looked so down and who was now on the up and up, said over her shoulder, although she had had no chow, “… and let’s have another piece of pie,” and her eyes promptly filled with tears.
Half a minute later the two of them were going through the door, the guy’s arm around the girl. The counterman looked at the twenty-dollar bill in front of him, then after them. They were getting into the Cadillac convertible out front. He put the bill in his pocket, reached under the shelf, opened a bottle of beer, and toasted them. “Here’s luck.” Drinking heartily, he watched the car recede around the turn.
FIN
Bibliography
Helen Reilly [nee Kieran]. Married to artist Paul Reilly, mother of four daughters, including mystery writers Ursula Curtiss and Mary McMullen. Her brother, James Kieran, also wrote mystery fiction. President of MWA, 1953.
US Editions Only
* = Inspector Christopher McKee
The Diamond Feather*. Doubleday Crime Club, 1930; hardcover reprint: Grosset & Dunlap, n.d. Magazine appearance: Triple Detective, Summer, 1950.
The Thirty-First Bullfinch. Doubleday Crime Club; 1930. Magazine appearance: Thrilling Mystery Novel Magazine, March 1946.