by Craig Rice
“The first Tuesday didn’t want to lose any time getting negotiations under way, so he decided to look me up himself and start the ball rolling. He found out what bars I usually frequent, and went out hunting for me. Venning ran into him in the midst of it. That’s why Venning knew he had to act fast, that very night, in fact.”
Von Flanagan thought that over for a few minutes before he said, “Oh.”
After he had gone, the room was quiet for a little while. At last Malone shook his head. “I think of everything. I don’t know how I do it.” Suddenly he grinned at Lou White. “I liked you better with the wig on. Where the hell did you ever learn to knit?”
The stocky, bald-headed man glared at him. “I never liked a job less in my life. Believe me, I was glad when the maid brought your note up to me, saying the game was up and I’d better switch back to my regular clothes.”
Helene reached for Jake’s hand and held it tight.
Editha Venning rose to her feet unexpectedly. “But he believed all that! He believed every word of it!”
“Sure,” Malone said. “It’ll go down in the records that way. Officially, justice has been done, and the case is closed.” He paused, and added admiringly, “I can twist my little finger around von Flanagan, just like that.”
She stared at him. “What made you do it?” She drew a long, almost sobbing breath. “Why didn’t you tell him the truth?”
Malone laid down his cigar very slowly and deliberately. “And do you out of five million bucks?” His voice was halfway between indignation and incredulity. “That would be unethical! What the hell kind of a lawyer do you think you’ve got?”
Chapter Thirty-Four
The big room was deathly still. Darkness had fallen outside, but only the fireplace and the one soft lamp lighted the faces of the little group around the fireplace.
Editha Venning was very calm now. There was no trace of tears in either her eyes or her voice.
“How much of the truth do you know?” she asked softly.
“All of it,” Malone said. “Beginning with the murder of Michael Venning by Gerald Tuesday.”
“Listen, damn you,” Jake said indignantly. “You’re losing your mind. It was Venning who murdered Tuesday.”
The lawyer shook his head. “Michael Venning was murdered years ago. The man in the room tonight was Gerald Tuesday.”
The red-haired man stirred uneasily. “I’ll believe in one Gerald Tuesday,” he said. “I’ll stretch a point and believe in two. But I’m triple-damned if I’ll believe in three.”
“There were three Tuesdays,” Malone told him, “only one Gerald. The other two were Gordon and George.” He turned to Editha Venning. “Correct me if I make any mistakes. I had to dig up a lot of facts in a hurry.”
He lit a cigar and sat watching the smoke curl toward the lamp. “The three Tuesdays came from Elkhart, Indiana. They were daring, enterprising men, all of them great opportunists. About 1919 they went to the Orient and engaged in various commercial enterprises there, not all strictly honest. That I learned from a News reporter who was out in the Orient in those years. Michael Venning was there, with his young wife, planning to stay a year or so. As far as the world knew, he stayed twenty years.”
“He was murdered?” Helene asked in a whisper.
“They told me it wasn’t murder,” Editha Venning said. Her voice was very low. “They told me it was an accident. It must have been.” She drew a long, sighing breath. “Michael and the Tuesdays became acquainted in Singapore, and Michael consented to back them in an importing business. It was a matter of a hundred thousand dollars. At the time I rather suspected Michael was being taken in, but it was his affair.”
“He came back here with Gerald Tuesday in 1921, didn’t he?” Malone said. It was more of a statement than a question.
She nodded. “You know how Michael’s money was tied up by the will. He had to come all the way back here to deal with the trustees. Gerald came with him. I stayed in Singapore. It was a flying trip—not half a dozen people knew about it. Then I got a cable saying Michael was returning. Just that, no more. Later there was another cable, asking me to meet him in Tokyo. I went there and when his boat docked—it was Gerald Tuesday who came down the gangplank. He told me Michael was dead.”
Helene gasped, started to speak, and was silent. Jake squeezed her arm gently.
“Gerald said—it had been an accident—the day of their arrival. It was summer—they went out to the Venning estate in Maple Park. No one was there but the caretaker. Going up the stairs Michael tripped, fell—and broke his neck. Gerald buried him out there, secretly. Then he took Michael’s passport—they looked just enough alike so he could get away with it—practiced writing Michael’s signature, and started back to the Orient.”
Lotus Allen, nee Angelo, gasped. “You mean—he decided to become Michael Venning?”
It was Malone who answered. “I said he was a great opportunist. If it really was an accident, not murder, probably that day at the house, with Venning lying dead at the foot of the stairs, he thought it all over. Not only was it true that with Venning dead his chance of the hundred grand to put into his business was gone. But this was a God-given chance to be a millionaire for the rest of his days. No one knew Venning had been in this country, save a very few and unimportant people. He could bury Venning secretly, impersonate him, and collect the monthly checks from the trustees of the estate without any trouble. All he had to do was stay away from people who knew him or knew Venning.”
He looked at Editha Venning. “Of course he had Venning’s widow to reckon with. But old Venning’s will was a powerful argument in his favor.”
She stared at the fire. “If I’d had any money of my own—but I didn’t. That will allowed two thousand a year to Michael’s widow as long as she lived. If I had it to do all over again now—”
She paused, passed one hand over her eyes, looked up, and said, “I don’t know, I might do the same thing. Who is to say? I honestly don’t know.”
“It was a hard decision,” Helene said gently, looking away.
Editha Venning sighed faintly. “It was really very simple. For a few years we’d go to places where we were strangers—Australia, Java, Indo-China. In time, Gerald figured, enough people would forget how Michael looked so that when Gerald turned up in his place it would be thought that a few years in the Orient had changed him a little, nothing more. They were about the same height and build and coloring, and not so unlike in appearance.” She paused, frowning. “Once I’d agreed, I’d let myself in for it. After that, I couldn’t give him away without giving myself away.”
Mona McClane reached out and laid a hand on her shoulder.
“It was horrible,” the woman said suddenly. Her voice broke only a little. “Not only being an outcast—living in all the faraway places of the world, but he—” She paused again, and Jake could see the muscles tightening in her throat. “He was pretty bad.”
“I rather imagined so,” Malone said quietly, and his eyes looked hard.
She went on, “There was always the business of dodging people who’d known Michael. When people like that came to wherever we were, he would be away on a hunting trip, or ill. But we were beginning to be afraid that people would start to wonder, if no one ever saw him.” The color began to recede from her cheeks. “Then the war came. We took a chance on coming back here. He felt sure that no one would remember Michael after so long. Mona had seen us in India the year before, and accepted him as Michael Venning, so when Mona’s invitation came, we decided to accept it. He felt sure that if Mona introduced him as Michael Venning, and believed he was Michael Venning, everyone else would.” Her face was colorless now. “I hated it so over there. I was so lonely, always lonely. I couldn’t stand him any longer—” That was when her voice did break.
“All right,” Malone said gently. “You don’t need to talk any more. Let Mona tell it.” He knocked the ashes off his cigar. “Or shall I?”
Mona McClane
lighted a cigarette with white, nervous fingers and sat looking at the end of it. In the dim light her face was pointed, shadowy, a little pale triangle in the darkness.
“I planned to kill him,” she said simply. “There was no other way. He was the man I meant to murder.”
Jake and Helene turned their heads to look at each other at exactly the same moment.
She said, “I had always been so fond of Editha.” That was all.
Malone rose and stood leaning one elbow on the corner of the mantel. “She told you the whole story after she came here,” he said to Mona McClane. “Michael Venning—the real Michael Venning—would soon have been fifty. If on, or after, that birthdate the man believed to be Michael Venning died, and the truth never came up, not only would Editha Venning’s part in the deception never be known, but she would inherit the estate. He had treated her abominably all these years, and he deserved to die.” He flicked his ashes into the fireplace. “Besides, he had murdered the real Michael Venning. It wasn’t an accident.”
Jake leaned forward suddenly. “But that bet—when you made that bet with me—”
“I had planned it then,” Mona McClane said. “I learned the whole story from Editha very soon after her arrival—Michael wasn’t afraid to let Editha talk alone with me. He didn’t think she would dare tell the truth to anyone. After all—she couldn’t expose him without incriminating herself. After she’d told me the story, I could think of only one thing to do.”
She smiled at Jake and Helene. “I’d made up my mind the day we got into that insane conversation and the bet came up. The idea amused me. I’d gambled on almost everything else in my life, so why not murder? I didn’t really mean to interfere with your honeymoon, either. You were expected back in Chicago by Michael Venning’s birthday, and his impersonator had to remain alive until then.”
She lifted her shoulders delicately. “It would all have gone off according to schedule, if only the other two Tuesdays hadn’t complicated everything.”
Helene looked up suddenly. “That’s right. Where were they, all this time their brother was impersonating Michael Venning?”
“Traveling around the world, living on the fat of the land,” Malone said. “Gerald split with them, because they knew the truth. But when he came back here he decided to cut them out. There already was a grave in Rosedale cemetery with a stone marked ‘Gerald Tuesday’ and the dates. The grave was empty—probably because he didn’t have a chance to put Michael Venning’s body in it. The body stayed in that grave out in Maple Park all those years. But his first act when he came back was to transfer it.”
“But.” Helene said, and paused. “What was the idea of the gravestone in the first place?”
“There had to be some way to account for the fact that two men came here from the Orient and only one went back,” Malone said. “When Gerald Tuesday decided to become Michael Venning, he put up a stone marking the death of Gerald Tuesday.”
He paused to relight his cigar. “He figured that once he’d gotten Chicagoans who’d known the real Michael Venning to accept him, and reburied the real Michael’s bones in the Rosedale grave, his brothers wouldn’t dare yelp. But he didn’t know their persistence.” He looked at Mona. “How much did you help them?”
“I sent them to you,” Mona said, “with the proof.” She stopped suddenly. “Where is it now?”
“I’m sitting on it,” Jake said unexpectedly. He pulled the big manila envelope out from under him and handed it to Malone. “Baggage locker 114, in the State Street bus depot.”
Malone drew out a small handful of letters, faded and yellowed around the edges, and glanced through them hurriedly.
“This would have done it,” he said quietly. He handed them to Jake and Helene. “Letters to George Tuesday who was in Singapore at the time the real Michael Venning and Gerald came over here. Some are from Venning discussing arrangements of the business they were to go into and referring to the fact that Gerald was with him. One—I didn’t read it closely but I gathered enough—is from Gerald, hinting that a more satisfactory arrangement would be made and asking George to stay in Singapore to handle things there. The final clincher is a letter written after Venning’s death in which Gerald asked George to pave the way for his return to the Orient in his new character of Michael Venning.”
Mona McClane said, “The man we knew as Gerald Tuesday came here asking for Mr. Venning. He was out. When the man said his name was Gerald Tuesday, I called him in and told him that I knew the truth. I advised him to put his proof in a safe place and go to you to act as intermediary. I knew that if Venning—the false Venning—discovered that his brother were here, there would be murder done. Then the police would be called in, everything would come out—you see? But I thought that if you had been drawn into the affair, you could handle anything that came up.”
“Thanks,” Malone said. The tips of his ears were pink.
“The other Tuesday—the one who was killed first—went out looking for you. By the way, I was telling the truth when I said I never saw him before. I only saw the one we knew as Gerald. New Year’s Eve, Venning—I can’t think to call him anything else—saw his brother and trailed him.”
“Yes, it must have been that way,” Malone said. “He trailed the first Tuesday to some lonely spot in an alley and stabbed him. Then Tuesday lived just long enough to find me and give me that key. The second Tuesday’s dying act was to try to telephone me. They wanted me to find that locker and its contents, and avenge their deaths. They were a hardy bunch, those boys.”
“After New Year’s Eve,” Mona McClane went on, “the man I knew as Gerald Tuesday came to me, to blackmail his way into my house. He knew, then, that I was trying to protect Editha, and he threatened to tell the whole story to the police. I warned him that the false Venning had done one murder and wouldn’t hesitate at a second—but he said he’d take his chance on that. Well, he took it.”
Malone said, “You had some other reason, too. You can’t tell me you can be blackmailed that easy.”
She smiled faintly. “I thought that if Tuesday carried out his plan and came here, his brother would murder him. That might give me the opportunity to carry out my plans that it did give me—today.”
“It turned out all right in the end, anyway,” Malone said gently. “Well, that does it up. The murders of the first and second Tuesdays—the attempted murder of young McLaurin because the murderer feared he knew the truth—the open grave.” He relit his cigar. “The false Venning’s first move when he arrived here was probably to dig up the remains of the real Michael Venning and dispose of them.” He smiled at Editha Venning. “You gave Jake a bad moment when you turned up looking for the grave.”
“Somebody else gave me a much worse moment,” said Jake. “That must have been Michael Venning the Second shooting at me out in the woods. Or was he just having a little quiet target practice?”
Editha smiled wanly. “I was so relieved to see you out there. I was sure Michael had followed me. You were protection. I hadn’t realized how desperate he was. He must have thought the open grave would be a dead giveaway.”
Jake sighed. “I guess I’ve lost my most appreciative audience, the only person who ever thought I was a mastermind.”
Mona McClane said, “Let’s all have a drink.”
Malone looked at the letters in his hand. “I don’t think we need these any longer,” he said. He laid them in the fire. A brilliant blaze lighted the room and died down again. The little lawyer looked up at Pendley Tidewell. “You’d better give me that picture, too—the one you took in Venning’s room last night. Where were you, anyway?”
“Under the bed,” the young man said meekly. “I’d been trying to get a picture of him ever since he got here. Yesterday I got one of those lamps and rigged it up in his room and hid there. I figured I could get a picture of him without his knowing it. Then Aunt Editha came in and began prowling around. I took one of her, and just then he came out of the wardrobe and bopped her o
ne and ducked out the door and down that side stairway. But I got a couple of pictures of him.”
“If we’d needed any proof—” Malone said. He sighed. “Toss them in the fireplace, son.”
Pendley Tidewell seemed on the verge of tears. “But gosh. They’re the first good pictures I ever took.”
Jake said, “Never mind. I’ll fix it so you can get a candid-camera shot of Mayor Kelly. You never had a chance to photograph a mayor before.”
A second blaze sprang up in the fireplace.
“What were you looking for in that room?” Malone asked Editha Venning. “Not that it matters now.”
“I knew Michael—Gerald—had murdered his brothers. I figured he must have gotten back the proof they had of the deception. So when I thought he was going to be away last night, I doped Miss White—Mr. White—and went to search the room. But he suspected something was up, and got there ahead of me.”
“A good thing you did,” Jake said. “He evidently planned to go out to Maple Park and fill in the grave where he’d so conveniently placed Ross McLaurin. If you hadn’t delayed him, we might have had to shoot it out with him right then and there, and the only weapon we had was a bottle of rye.”
“That reminds me,” Malone said. “Lou White—am I right that Venning engaged him when you got to this country, to keep an eye on you, just in case, without telling him what it was all about?”
Editha Venning nodded. “I don’t know what he told White—but it wasn’t the truth.”
“O.K.,” the lawyer said. “I warned White to tell the police exactly what I told him, and he’s doing it now. I threatened that if he didn’t, I’d tell every private dick in New York that Lou White knew how to knit.”
There was a brief and pleasant confusion around the cocktail table. In the midst of it the maid suddenly appeared and announced, “The hospital just called. Mr. McLaurin is conscious and asking for Miss Allen.”