“Hey!” he called impolitely.
Barbara had flopped over on her back and now she came up on both elbows.
“Is that Mike Fabyan’s schooner?”
She followed his pointing arm. She bobbed her head. “It looks like it,” she said. “Yes, I think it is.”
Ward set off down the beach at an easy lope, keeping to the strip where the receding water had left the sand hard. Alternately watching for sea eggs and scanning the edge of the trees, he saw presently the skiff which lay bottom up just beyond the Highpoint path. He went up on the dry sand until he saw there were no marks to indicate it had been used recently, and then continued on towards the jetty.
He passed the Dunham bungalow standing stiltlike on its concrete pilings, and the jetty was now about an eighth of a mile distant when, from up ahead, the slow throbbing of a motor drifted across the water. At the same time the schooner’s main and stay sails fluttered upward and the bow began to swing.
Ward put on speed. Over the tops of the trees he could see two squat, round oil-storage tanks that had heretofore been screened from sight, and now he noticed the fuel pipe that had been laid along the jetty, the land end of which terminated on a bluff. To reach it he would have had to climb inshore so he kept on close to the water until the timbers rose above him. Here he cupped his hands and yelled:
“Ahoy schooner!”
Open water now showed between the hull and the jetty. The man at the wheel, naked to the waist and the tallest one aboard, straightened and shielded his eyes. A Negro took his place as the bow continued to swing.
“Ahoy yourself!” Mike Fabyan called.
“Can I come aboard?”
“If you can swim fast enough.”
“I want to talk to you,” Ward yelled.
“I’ve got a berth at the Careenage.” Fabyan pointed off to the left. “If you want to talk come down to dockside.”…
12
KATE ROYCE was sitting on her porch when Ward came down from his room. Her gray eyes inspected him openly as he approached and when he stopped in front of her she crushed out her cigarette and said:
“Would you like a drink? You look as if you could use one.”
Ward shook his head. He said he could use one all right but he didn’t want one now. He sat down on the railing and launched at once into his story, giving the details of the telephone call as well as he could remember them and watching the change come over the woman’s face as the facts unfolded. When he ran out of breath she was not looking at him but at the distant sky, her brows bunched and mouth tight and turned down at the corners.
“In other words,” she said finally. “You haven’t any corroboration for your story at all?”
“None.”
“You could have been lying from the beginning.”
“I could have.”
Her head came about slowly and she gave him a moment of steady regard. “What do you propose to do about it?”
“Tell the Major. Right now I think he considers me an A-1 suspect and I’ve had enough of it.”
She leaned back in the canvas chair and folded her brown arms. “Tell me about Alma and what happened last night,” she said. “This morning was the first I’d heard of it.”
Ward told her as best he could. When she asked him if he thought there was some connection between that incident and the murder he said he did not know.
“Probably,” he said, “but I don’t know why because I don’t know what the man wanted. Was he after something, or was it part of his plan to kill her too? And why should anyone want to do that?”
“Do you think the Dunhams told you the truth?”
“I don’t know about him. I don’t think she did.” Then, as his mind went on he said: “Who is she, anyway? Where’s she from?”
“She’s an English girl.” Kate watched a lizard stick its head out from a corner of the railing. “Her father was in the Colonial Service—a schoolmaster—and they were stationed here at one time. Judith had a chance to marry Gordon and she took it. I don’t know whether it was because she loved him or because she liked it here and decided it would be better to settle for Gordon than to take her chances elsewhere.… What makes you think she was lying?”
“She had sand on her sneakers,” Ward said and related the circumstances. “I don’t think she sat in the front room reading all that time. She was on the beach some time that night and—” He stopped as a new thought came to him. “Johnny said Gordon might try to divorce Judith so he could marry Barbara Connant. I mean, once Gordon came into his inheritance and could swing it. What about Judith?”
“What do you mean?”
“Would she care, or is there someone—”
“If you’re wondering if she might meet someone on the beach, she might. If she did it would be Mike Fabyan.”
Ward said: “Ohh,” and it was a soft, drawn-out sound. So, he thought, maybe that’s who Mike was kissing under the trees that first night. Judith could have met him. It didn’t have to be Alma. The thought brought a temporary brightening to his spirits until Kate’s voice clouded them.
“But to get back to you,” she said. “You think if you tell Freddie you’re Duncan Ward it will eliminate you as a suspect.”
“Certainly. Because I haven’t any motive.”
“It’s not good enough.”
He had been watching the lizard hanging head down as it waited for a choice insect to come within range; now he glanced up.
“I beg your pardon?”
“It’s too late. Freddie’s smart. I think he might take the attitude that an innocent man would have confessed the first thing this morning.”
“But”—Ward looked at her incredulously and tried to keep his voice down—“you told me not to.”
She seemed not to hear him. Her tone was gravely thoughtful and her gaze was remote.
“I think Freddie might reconstruct things this way: The real Jim MacQuade died at nine o’clock on Monday and you have only your word to say you did not know this. You could have found out. You were close enough to him to know all about Johnny.…”
He tried to interrupt her but she motioned him silent.
“You knew Jim would inherit part of the estate if he came down here. You had access to his papers and you could forge the check and get your plane ticket. Remember, that plane did not leave until twelve thirty. Plenty of time for you to make your plans. When did you send the cable?”
“A little after eleven, after I came out of the movies,” Ward said, a little stunned now by the things she was saying.
“You see? Why not earlier? Why not at five or six if you’re telling the truth.”
“Because I wasn’t sure I’d send one at all. I didn’t make up my mind until I was in the movies.” He stood up, continued morosely. “It’s silly. I still have no motive. I can’t inherit a nickel.”
“Ahh.” She shook her head. “But Gilette has to consider that you may have thought you would when you smothered Johnny. That is the important thing to remember. What happened between you and him nobody knows. Suppose he discovered you were an impostor last night? If you confess now, Freddie must at least consider the assumption. He has to consider the possibility that you did kill Johnny, never suspecting that Oliver was going to see you with the pillow, with no idea you would be under suspicion because you couldn’t know an autopsy would be performed or that the button would be found in Johnny’s mouth. The whole idea of the pillow would be to make it appear that Johnny died of a last fatal stroke; that’s what you could reasonably expect the verdict to be.”
“Wait a minute,” he said harshly.
She paid no attention. She said: “But this morning it became a murder case with you what you call an A-1 suspect. That frightens you. They may hang you. But still you think it over. So now you confess. It was all in good faith, you say. And you say it because you’d rather be a live poor man than a dead man with an inheritance. Freddie—if he suspects you at all, and he most certainly does—has to assume that if the
murder had gone undiscovered you would not have confessed at all.… Are you listening to me?”
Ward had started to pace the veranda. Now he stopped, his gaze smoldering and his jaw hard. He looked at her in open amazement, unable to understand the change that had come over the woman.
At first he had felt that she considered him with some suspicion, but since she had learned that he was not Jim MacQuade he had thought her attitude sympathetic. He thought she liked him. But now—
He walked away and came back. What was this, anyway? Her voice had become direct, aggressive, and quietly convincing. She was reasoning like a man and, what was worse, what she said made sense.
This thing he had just heard was disturbingly logical and he could understand Major Gilette pursuing an identical course of reasoning. It took him a few seconds to force his thoughts beyond the hypothesis and arrive finally at the weak point in the argument, the one factor that would help him.
“But look,” he said, no longer polite. “Your idea is all right up to a point. But there’s a hole in it this big. You knew I was an impostor the first night I was here.” He sat on the rail again. He leaned forward and now he had her attention.
“You knew it and I knew you knew,” he said. “That was the end of the impersonation. From then on I had absolutely no motive whatever. Why should I kill John MacQuade when you knew I could not possibly benefit by his death? When, by your own theory, I knew Jim was dead and could not collect either.”
Kate pulled herself out of her chair and the lizard scampered. She walked to the end of the veranda and stood looking out. He followed her.
“I’m the only one who knows that,” she said finally.
“What about it?”
“I could deny I knew anything about you.”
“You could what?” His voice rose and he wanted to swear at her. He wanted to grab her by the arm and spin her about and shout at her. “Why?” he said. “Why should you?”
She turned, her arms folded and things happening to her eyes as she considered his outburst.
“There could be reasons.”
He started to say: “Name one,” and then checked himself as he got his thoughts in hand. He was greatly disturbed by her attitude and could not tell whether she trusted him or not, or even if he trusted her. But it came to him presently that it was time to tell her something that, until now, had been his secret.
“There’s something else Freddie might like to know,” he said, and then he was telling her the story of the poisoned cat, just as MacQuade had told it to him, keeping his voice down but speaking directly and forcefully, as he would to a man.
“That happened the night before I arrived,” he said in conclusion. “How is Freddie going to fit that in with his suspicions of me?”
He saw the change in her as he spoke. For the first time there was an uncertainty in her manner and her glance kept straying. She moved her chair three inches to one side and brushed a hair from the seat. Finally she looked up.
“Who knows this besides you?”
“No one—but the one who used the poison.”
She took a breath and her shoulders came back. “Then there’s still nothing but your word.”
“There’s a dead cat somewhere,” he said flatly. “But in any case you either believe me or you don’t. What I’d really like to know is this: Am I going to be able to count on you or not?”
She seemed to consider this but the answer never came, for suddenly her expression changed as her glance slid beyond him. She smiled and only then did Ward hear the light footsteps behind him.
“Come along. Alma!”
The girl had stopped as she came round the corner from the breezeway. She looked from one to the other, smiling faintly in her hesitation, and right then Ward knew he was going to do as Kate asked, but not for the reasons she had proposed.
That his own position might become more serious the longer he continued his impersonation was something he well understood. His legal training and his lawyer’s mind supported the logic of the woman’s reasoning; Gilette could give him a tough time, a very tough time indeed unless Kate supported his story, but even as he rationalized such thoughts he knew that to him the safety of this girl was the most important thing of all and he wondered how he could have considered any other course.
To confess now, to tell the truth, meant that he must leave the house and live apart, not knowing what was going on here or where she was or what she was doing. The attack on her the night before remained frighteningly vivid; that it had failed in its purpose—whatever that purpose was—suggested that there might be some other attempt. Now, even as he smiled back at her, the thought scared him strangely and he knew that, whatever happened to him, he had to play out his hand as long as he could, to stay close until the murder was finally solved and the danger to her past.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to—”
“You’re not,” Kate interrupted. “Sit down. It’s almost time for tea.”
“Please,” Ward added. “I was just leaving. That is, if I can borrow your car again.”
The girl came on. She said of course he could and Kate asked where he would be. “In case anyone” —she hesitated, her inference being that the anyone might be Gilette—“wants to reach you?”
Ward said he’d be somewhere along the Careenage talking to Mike Fabyan. He said he had an idea that Fabyan’s schooner had been tied up at the oil company’s jetty the night before.
13
DUNCAN WARD had to do considerable jockeying with the Vauxhall before he got it parked alongside the wall of a warehouse which faced the north side of the Careenage. The hazards were other cars, trucks, manpowered two-wheel carts, wheelbarrows, bicycles, and donkeys. Everyone was busy, no one was hurrying, and over all of this hung the shouts and laughter and the chattering of the natives.
He had no trouble locating Fabyan’s schooner. Black-hulled like most of the others, it was one of the larger boats and by all odds the smartest looking. The paint looked a little fresher, the spars were brighter in their coats of varnish and the running gear looked more shipshape. Across the stem and lettered in gold were the words: Carib Lady. Underneath this it said: St. Vincent.
The cover was off the main hatch and a husky Negro was wrestling bulging burlap bags, tossing them on deck where a second man passed them to the shore side and the waiting cart. In the shade of the canvas awning aft Fabyan watched proceedings, a tall, half-naked, muscular figure in faded denims, his cap on the back of his head. When he saw Ward he saluted.
“Come aboard, mate,” he said and indicated a discolored canvas chair of the variety which, Ward was convinced, was indigenous to the island. “Sit and cool off. Sorry I had to leave you stranded there by the jetty but I wanted to get in here while there was a berth for me.”
Ward shrugged out of his jacket and sat down. “Taking on oil up there?” he asked.
“Topped my tanks.” Fabyan hesitated, rubbed the back of his neck. “Too bad about your uncle. Quite a guy, Johnny.”
Ward offered cigarettes and hazarded a guess. “You didn’t tie up at the jetty this morning, did you?”
“About sundown yesterday.”
“I thought so.”
Fabyan made no comment to this. His eyes were busy with the activity about him and presently he shouted a command to one of his crew. This gave Ward time to consider the objectives he had in mind and speculate on his procedure. There were two or three things he wanted to know but he hoped to get his answers as casually as possible.
“Where do you go with this?”
“The Lady? You could take her anywhere but mostly I use her between here and St. Vincent and Grenada. I’ve got a big sloop and she’s more of a tramp—Grenadines, Trinidad, St. Lucia, anywhere there’s a buck to be had.”
“What have you got, a small diesel? I didn’t think these native boats had auxiliaries.”
“Not one in a hundred does. A diesel’ll pay for itself though if you use
it properly. Take this St. Vincent run. Going over you can leave here in late afternoon and be there in the morning because of the prevailing winds. You can count on it. Coming back you take two, three, four days under sail. It’s no good for fresh vegetables or fruit, or passengers.”
“Passengers?”
“Sure.” Fabyan grinned. “How do you think most of islanders travel? By Lady Boats or Alcoa? Practically all the blacks travel this way except the rich ones. The whites—well, it’s like this.” He sat on the rail and crossed his legs.
“Take the vacationers. They’re here a couple weeks or a month and they want to see something. They can go to St. Vincent or Grenada on a steamer but they may have to wait a week to get back. They can go overnight on a schooner but they won’t spend three days coming back because there are no conveniences, and I mean none. Can’t take your wife.” He grinned again. “Only now you can if you ride with Mike Fabyan. Come on, I’ll show you.”
He led the way down a companionway ladder to a stateroom immediately forward. “I put this in last year. Put in a head.” He threw open a door and Ward stepped into a clean, tidy-looking room that had two comfortable bunks with built-in drawers and lockers, transom berths above, enough space between them to stand and dress.
“With this I can take a couple. Two couples,” he said, “and if they’re modest the wives can have this and the men can sleep topside under the canvas. It isn’t the Queen Mary but it’s one-day service. Under sail on the way over and use the diesel part of the way back.”
He picked at his Errol Flynn mustache and his dark eyes had a gleam of pride as he glanced about. Ward said it was neat. He said he’d like to take the trip himself and Fabyan said why not.
“What do you have for cargo?” he said as the big man preceded him up the ladder.
“Anything and everything. Coming this way, wood, lumber, fruit, vegetables, livestock, arrowroot. You name it and we’ll carry it. Going west, pottery, oil and gas, furniture, passengers.”
Ward studied the other a moment and he was still wondering what sort of man he was underneath the handsome bluff exterior, what made him tick. He asked him where he came from in the States and how he happened to come here. The story he heard was brief and matter-of-fact.
The Man Who Died Twice Page 10