No one else but St. Erme could have brought that paper here. No one else has come from Danbury.
Everything—everything should have told me.
I’ll write his name here:
A. M. DEXTER WAS THE MURDERER. HE IS INIS ST. ERME AND HAS ALSO TAKEN ON THE ROLE OF HIS LATE UNCLE, ADAM MACCOMEROU, WHOSE BODY LIES IN THE SAWDUST, DON’T LET HIM GET AWAY WITH IT. RIDDLE.
I’ll put it here, beneath the blotter. There was some paper underneath already, with some writing on it in a spidery hand:
My nephew Adam M. Dexter is coming behind me now to kill me.
A. MacComerou.
He knew. He knew, with all that he knew of murder. But he couldn’t help himself.
So he sat here, and wrote that, and slipped it beneath the blotter to be found. But no one ever found it.
Now I must not let him hurt her—he’s behind me—I see him in the secretary glass, pretending not to look—batears, mushy mouth, he has knife, thank God he is goingfor me first, not girl—name underneath blotter, please find—Dexter—Adam Dexter—killed all—
He had been in the dark bedroom for a long time, I think. He had been in there—he must have been—when I had gone in, looking for Trooper Stone, after waiting twenty minutes. He must have been in there then already, because I closed the window then and locked it, before I came out again.
Behind the curtain in the draped-off corner where clothes were hung, I think, or perhaps just behind the door as I went in. I had smelt him. Yes, I had smelt him. Turning this way and that, to let no shadow get behind me. But I couldn’t go in behind the drape and push the hangers full of heavy clothes apart, searching for him, with his knife. I couldn’t even look behind the door.
Why he hadn’t come at me then I don t know. Except that he must have been wanting me to come in to him. And I was on my toes, I had stance. I kept clear space about me. And so he had thought he had better wait. And I had closed the window and locked it, and gone out and closed the door.
I had figured on the door hinges creaking, if he was in there and came out. But he was a mechanic, and he had an oil can in the bedroom. The hinges had not squeaked.
I felt the shadow on my page, and from the edges of my eyes I saw him in the glass of the secretary bookshelf, with his pale eyes, his brown bat ears, and mushy mouth.
I didn’t want him to do it in here. If the girl waked. with the start of a scream, he would silence her with one slice of that sharp serrated blade.
And I knew that he would rather not do it in here, himself, either, with blood upon the desk and carpet. He would rather do it outside, in the garden, among the yellow roses, with the deep black garden earth in which to hide me, with Corkscrew, so that I should be just vanished.
And so he wanted it, and I wanted it, to be outside in the darkness. On that we were agreed.
I laid down my pencil, yawned, and stretched my arms a little. I had to be very careful. He knew every gesture that I made by nature. He had been watching me all night, trying to read from the least expression or gesture the thought back in my head.
I put my hand back and rubbed the back of my head, and down across the nape. I thought of being hungry. I pushed back my chair and got up, letting the chair leg on my knees roll off onto the carpet. I went out through the kitchen door beside the desk, pausing on the threshold just an instant, to look about me, in front of me, out in the kitchen, as if to make sure that he was not there. I went to the screen door, and removed the pots and pans that were balanced on the chair against the screen, laying them carefully to the side upon the floor. I moved the chair aside, and pulled the screen door open. I stepped out on the latticed porch and got me a banana from the box. I stepped to the porch steps’ edge, peeling it.
“Here. I am!” he whispered. “Behind you!”
And laughed mushily. Remembering when I had come on him in the garden, maybe, as he had been pounding down the earth above poor old Corkscrew, and the sound of my voice had terrified him, my voice like poor old Corkscrew’s, so that he hadn’t known whether he had heard it or had only imagined it. Or whether it had come from the twilight air around him, or from the ground. And I had had to use those same words to him, to tell him where I was.
I turned slowly and incredulously, pausing in peeling the banana. As if I could not believe him. Could not believe my own ears. And I felt easier, just a little easier, as I turned slowly to face him. It is better to get it in the breast than in the back. Though about the throat, I don’t know.
Don’t move, Riddle. Face it.
“You meant to nail me,” he said mushily. “You knew from the beginning, from the moment when you came! You knew when you saw the frightened phoebe in the twilight at the drive entrance, because she would not have been frightened if anyone lived here and she was used to seeing men. It was the damned bird that told you!”
“I’m not an ornithologist,” I said.
“You knew!” he said. “You knew from the beginning, and you meant to nail me! You knew when you saw that damned wailing cat of Uncle Adam’s, that there had been no one to feed, and that hasn’t been able to stalk its own game with the bell around its throat. You knew when the damned cat went wailing from you. It was the damned cat that told you!”
“I’m not a zoologist,” I said.
“You knew!” he said. “You came to nail me! I read it in your eyes. You know that I’d not be planting tulip bulbs in August, and pounding them down with a spade. It was that that told you!”
“I’m not a botanist,” I said.
“You with your damned quiet soft voice!” he said mushily. “Like that damned red-eyed little bum spouting his Latin. You knew why you had frightened me in the garden! You knew that only St. Erme, besides her, had ever heard his voice, or could recognize it, and so I must be he! Saying to me, ‘I am behind you!’ When I thought you were in the ground. Hell will not pay for that moment that you gave me. You knew. You knew from the beginning. It was I myself who told you, a dozen times when your damned prodding drove me to. It was I myself who told you. Don’t lie to me!”
“Perhaps,” I said. “Perhaps I knew from the beginning. Yes, you told me. Everything about you told me. A dozen times, and still a dozen times. Yes, I knew that I had nailed you. My blind throw had hit you. You could slide down beneath grass and lie quietly, but you couldn’t get away. You had got it in the head, and you were a dead snake. Yes, I knew, Adam. I knew.”
“But you won’t ever tell anybody!” he said. “I have been too smart, and I am too strong for you.”
He had the knife against my throat. He backed me down the steps, with my arms spread out wide on each side of me from the shoulders, as he wanted them—in his sight, but not overhead, where I might have whipped them down and caught that knife. Step by step backward, down the steps. With, the smell of yellow roses and the deep black earth of the garden in the night around me, I stepped back down onto the ground. The ground from which we all come, and to which we all go back someday.
But not for me tonight. I like to think it was the banana peel that finished him—the banana peel that I had thrown away as I went out with him at twilight, starting back up toward my car.
Or perhaps it wasn’t. Perhaps I would have got him, anyway. I had nailed him at the Swamp Road, when he had stood behind me with that rock. There had been three times more, at least, tonight, when he had had the chance to give it to me, but there had been fear in him, and he had failed. He knew that I had nailed him. He knew that he was through. So doubtless I should have got him, anyway. But if it hadn’t been for that banana peel beneath my right shoe’s crepe sole, as I made my third step back upon the ground, before him, I might have been badly cut by that knife.
I felt the sliding peel beneath my foot as I backed, and I smeared my foot with a twist in it, shooting my foot up and throwing my arms back. I caught him in the groin as I went back.
I caught the ground with both hands back of me, and rolled on one hand, half getting my feet beneath me, three f
eet from his slashing knife. I might have got away from the knife. But he had me on the ground, or half on it, he thought, where he wanted me. He thrust his knife into the waistband of his trousers, quick. He picked up his spade—his spade that he had tossed there, close beside the porch, as we went in at dusk.
The spade had a longer sweep, a more battering stroke, with which to catch me and to smash me. That was his mistake. He sliced the edge of it down at me. It caught me across the instep of my right foot with a smashing blow as I leaped back; and so I had to stand.
The thing was very painful. I shall be lame for a long time. If he had not picked up the spade, I should have got away from him, perhaps. It was what I had counted on doing—my one chance. Dodging the knife thrust and outrunning him, through the tangled rose briers of the garden, and up across the stony pasture in the back, getting him away from the house and the girl in it as Corkscrew had got him away from her down at Dead Bridegroom’s Pond, and shouting as I ran. As poor Corkscrew had not had anyone to shout to.
But he had broken the bones of my foot, and I could not get away from him. I was caught there. He had made me stand. He had pinned me with that hellish blow, and I could not move a step from him. And that was his mistake.
The thing was very painful. Yes, extremely. I had no breath to groan about it. I had none at all to shout. I caught the spade shaft as he lifted it to swing it at me again. I got my other hand on it as he tried to slice it down. We gripped it with both our hands upon it, breast to breast.
It was for life. My life, or his, and all that he had counted on. Let him but smash me, and there was no one else who knew him. No one in this world. Not the girl, if she should see him, or hear his mushy voice without his teeth. He could appear again, and say that I had reported falsely that he had been with Unistaire and me down in the sawdust heaps, and that Unistaire had found a dead man there. There would be no need to search the cascaded sawdust heaps further. Let him but bury me beside dead Corkscrew, and I and Corkscrew were one man. Within one hidden grave. Within the black earth at the roots of the yellow roses, vanished. It was my life, or his.
He had strong hands, but I have strong hands, too, as a surgeon must. He had strong shoulders, he had heavy and terribly strong shoulders, muscled like ropes, with a strength that could lift a motor out of its hood housing, or lift up a car by its rear end. But I am supple and wiry, though lightly built. He outweighed me, he outtowered me, by five inches and fifty pounds, but I had twenty-seven years to his forty-five, and I had more years to live for, and better years. We wrestled for that spade.
We wrestled for it, and he was very strong. I shall always remember the knotted sweat of him, and the clenching of his toothless jaws together, and his terrible pale eyes. The sweat and the breath of him, and the ironness of his muscles and his bones. My eyes swam, and the pain of my smashed foot was a red fire. Oh, he was strong, he was very strong. But I was younger than he was by eighteen years, and I knew how his muscles and his bones were made. Slowly I bent him aside, breaking his hold, taking it from him.
He released his grip, as he felt it breaking, and snatched out his saw-tooth knife from his waistband again, with a gasp. He thrust the knife at me, with a quick whipping motion, while from his mouth there came a scream. But I had the spade lifted above his head, and it was coming. I did it with the spade.
Yes, I did it, and I finished it. Right there. My foot was hurting, and I slammed that spade. I felt sick and dizzy. The third blow was unnecessary, I grant it; but I was sick and dizzy. My foot will always hurt whenever I smell black garden earth or yellow roses, so long as I live, I think.
Lieutenant Rosenblatt has given me a cigar. A Havana Corona, soft and green, as I am particularly fond of them. I don’t allow myself to smoke frequently, since a surgeon must keep his nerves and eyes at the keenest, and his mind always on the sharpest edge. Still, as Rosenblatt said in presenting it, it is something of an occasion.
And I think so, too. To be given a cigar by a policeman. I know something else that I’d rather be given, by that sweet youngster Darrie still sleeping in the living room. But that can wait.
“Da mi mille basia, diende centum,” said old Catullus, in his next line following that melancholy one about us humans having one long night for sleeping, after our suns go down. I have no confidence in my Latin any more, and I’ll have to ask her to translate it for me. “Give me a thousand kisses, then a hundred”—I think that’s the way it should be. But we shall see.
Rosenblatt has a brother who is a police sergeant in Tampa, is why he has such good green cigars, he says.
Orange blossoms and cigars are the loveliest products of Florida.
Rosenblatt has given Stone a cigar, too. I had to take care of Stone before I could take care of my own foot. A rather nasty mess back of Stone’s right car, at the posterior junction of the parietal and temporal, just forward of the lambdoidal suture. Enough to kill any two ordinary men. But before we had got him in through the window, from the deep grass outside where he was lying, and onto a bed, Stone was awake and swearing. There are some bone splinters that will have to be taken out, and he’ll probably need a plate, but he is actually smoking that cigar. Rosenblatt thinks it is funny that Stone was knocked out by a stone. Two stones and one bird, he says. A buzzard. But everyone has his own sense of humor.
That buzzard got Stone by scratching his fingernail on the window screen beside Stone’s head and showing his face. Stone had been asleep, and didn’t know that Unistaire had found Professor MacComerou dead and buried in the sawdust heaps, and that men were digging for his body. This was Professor MacComerou at the window, and he lived here. He had been helping to direct the search. He had been helping all night.
Dexter whispered through the screen to Stone that Lieutenant Rosenblatt wanted Stone to go down to Unistaire’s house and phone the Hotel President from there to check up on St. Erme, particularly to see if they could get any fingerprints of St. Erme from the room he had occupied, to compare with the fingerprints of that mutilated body, without letting Miss Darrie know. And to Stone, still half asleep—or even wide awake, as he claims he was—that seemed an intelligent order. He had unhooked the screen and taken it out quietly, and had slid quietly forth to join Professor MacComerou.
Dexter had got him just as his toes reached the ground, with his hands behind him on the window ledge, as I had figured it. A blinding flash is all that Stone remembers.
Dexter had run like hell, after getting him, back up to the woods behind the house, and up along the path which led to John Flail’s, letting out that awful scream from there which had pulled Rosenblatt raging forth: “This is Ouelch! Help! Help! I’ve got him!” He had waited till Rosenblatt had passed him, and had then returned, slipping in through the screenless window into the bedroom, and had waited there for his chance when I should not be watching.
Rosenblatt hadn’t believed in the least that that scream came from Quelch, of course, he says. Even if Quelch had been dying, he had felt quite sure that Ouelch would not refer to himself as anything but Mr. Quelch. He had known it was the killer—Corkscrew or St. Erme, or whoever it was, not having made up his mind between the two of them—and he was mad enough to try to find out. He hadn’t figured that the call was to lure him away from the house, but that it was directed toward the men down in the swamp, with the dogs to lure them back from there. And so he had stayed out looking, feeling sure that Stone had come out of the bedroom immediately to take over the guard on the girl, or else I would have shouted to him to return before he had got out of earshot.
It was his fault, he says, for taking Stone for granted. But it was my fault, too.
So it was a rock that he had used to get Stone, and the spade that he had used to try to finish me. He had used the car to kill Two-finger Pete Flail, and a rock, as with Stone, to crush in the head of John Flail. And he had strangled poor old Corkscrew with his hands. He had used the knife on Corkscrew only after he was dead, to have some blood on the car and the
road. Actually, he had used the knife only once to kill—on Unistaire in the sawdust pits, when there had been no other weapon handy, and Unistaire had to be silenced at once about the body he had found.
But the fear of that knife had been plenty.
“Taking it all in all,” Rosenblatt has just remarked, “it was a pretty good play, as criminal plays go. He had established him as Professor MacComerou from the time of his first arrival with his uncle, and his alibi-that he had been living here continuously for the past ten or twelve weeks was plausible, except for what John Flail could have told. No one would have thought of looking in the barn here for that car. It had passed here and killed John Flail. And so, by an assumable sequence of actions, it had gone on and on. He had got Miss Darrie’s money, and even though he had failed to kill her, all that could be said about St. Erme, when she should eventually discover her emptied bank account, was that he must have been a crook. But that was no blight on himself as Dexter, who didn’t know St. Erme very well. He might very likely have got St. Erme’s insurance eventually, even without a body. Still, he must have felt that Pete Flail’s body was rather providential. It’s always better when you’re dead to have a body.”
“It’s better when you’re alive, too,” I told him. “There were some moments when I wasn’t sure that I hadn’t traveled out of mine, without knowing it, I’ll admit now, Lieutenant. But I just had to stand on it that I had been there at the Swamp Road entrance all the time, and that he had not gone by. I’m sorry if I drove you wild with keeping at it.”
The Red Right Hand Page 18