Yet the detective had become, of late, queerly preoccupied,—nay, quite troubled—by the passage of Time, and Time’s grave authority. For it seemed to him, he knew not why, that he must get his man before the turn of the year, or he would lose him forever: a notion, somewhat superstitious, that might have derived from the increasing darkness of winter; or from the fact that his fortieth birthday was approaching, several months hither. On some days he was provoked to near-frenzy, by a contemplation of Time, that he must work more quickly, to assemble a great mass of data, a veritable miniature galaxy, it seemed, proving Poindexter’s guilt; on other days, alas, he felt near-paralyzed by the terrifying thought that, even as his pulses beat, Time beat, and though he labor at his task ten, or twelve, or fifteen, or eighteen,—or, indeed, twenty-four—hours a day, he could never hope to catch the phantom Poindexter; or even, for a scant minute, to still that dread passage of time.
So apprehensive was Xavier of repeating certain of the blunders that had led to the acquittal of Valentine Westergaard, he conspired to erect an “airtight” case against Poindexter, where, by degrees, he might wear his man down from within, as it were; for, painful as it is to admit, in this most definitive of histories, by this time in his turbulent career Xavier Kilgarvan had seriously lost faith in the judicial system of our great nation,—and had, in truth, lost faith in the integrity of the average law enforcement officer, long before Jabez Dovekie’s “natural” death. (So preposterous a matter came to light, in the last week of October, it was some days before Xavier could bring himself to tell his friend Murre: evidently, the murder weapon itself, a fifty-four-inch ax with a powerful five-pound head, had been in some wise lost down at the police station!—and was never to be found again; nor to turn up anywhere, in any Crime Collection that I know of. “But how on earth can it be that an object of that size has been lost—?” Xavier asked the blushing Orrin Wick, with no attempt to conceal his outrage; whereupon the chief of police replied, in a sullen and defensive voice: “I did not say that the ax has been lost, Mr. Kilgarvan, but that it has been misplaced.”)
So absorbed in his work was Xavier, he oft-times did not speak with his sole friend for days at a time; and was to be observed leaving the house, and returning, frequently disguised, at any hour of the day or night. His mealtimes were erratic; frequently he failed to dine at all, or, discovering himself ravenous, ate a hasty meal in a tavern close at hand; or bought food from a street vendor, to devour as he walked along. With the approach of the winter solstice, the daylight hours were lamentably truncated; with the inevitable result that, following his old custom, Xavier allowed himself to partake of alcoholic spirits earlier and earlier each day: there being some days when, it seemed, the sun neglected to appear at all, and “dusk” and “dawn” were most weirdly conjoined.
When his thrumming nerves were calmed by drink, and the piercing pain behind his eyes tempered, Xavier drew breath, as it were, and saw that his task was by no means an impossible one; for, over the past ten or twelve years, he had solved far more knotty cases, and aided in the restoration of Justice. Poindexter was clever,—devilishly clever,—and behaved much more circumspectly now than he had done in the past: but if Xavier applied himself unstintingly, he was confident that he would, one day soon, get his man,—and avenge Perdita’s despoiled honor, and the pain and humiliation she had suffered, in the cuckold Poindexter’s villainy. To that end, Xavier was amassing a prodigious quantity of evidence; and made it a point to trail the master of St. Bride’s about, in disguise if he wished not to be detected, undisguised if he wished, for reasons of his own, to be recognized; and envisioned himself as a sort of memento mori, very like the human skull kept in a monk’s cell, to remind him of his mortality. One evening when, by chance, both he and Poindexter appeared together on the doorstep of a Berwick Square townhouse, Xavier said, in a lowered voice: “I know you for what you are, and for what you have done; and am content to wait a very long time, until you make a mistake and reveal yourself to the world.” With a show of bravado, Poindexter replied, “Why, then, you detective, you shall wait a very long time; and I hope you are not an impatient man.”
BEFORE THE INVALIDED PERDITA was removed to Contracoeur, against her will, to what were deemed more hospitable surroundings, the lovers were able to meet several times, by stealth, in Perdita’s very bed-chamber; with the servant-girl Nell constrained to keep watch at the head of the stairs, to warn them against the approach of Mrs. Harwich, or Thérèse, or the busybody Hatch, who kept a jealous watch, as it were, over his patient. “I hope that Nell is as unfailingly loyal as you seem to believe her,” Xavier said; whereupon Perdita said gaily: “Why, she knows her mistress’s caprices so thoroughly, she should be frightened not to be loyal!”
During these idyllic, and oft-times somewhat giddy, interludes, such grave matters as revenge, and justice, and Poindexter’s villainy were never directly addressed: for Perdita naturally shrank from speaking of them, or of her own condition: and Xavier, a gentleman to his fingertips, could not bring himself to broach the subject,—or to hint to Perdita the smoldering rage he felt that Poindexter, who had so brutally abused her, walked about Winterthurn a free man, his chin uplifted and his gaze, for the most part, unwavering. (“He is no less a monster than Valentine Westergaard,” Xavier thought, with a shudder, “but this time I shall not fail.”)
The reader will be gratified to learn that all was soon healed betwixt Xavier and Perdita: the one “forgiving” the other, for the hurt she had inflicted upon them both: and the other several times breaking into tempestuous tears of self-recrimination that she should have been so blind,—nay, so demented—as to have imagined that being the wife of a man of God might have had a whit to do with God!—or, indeed, as she so sadly phrased it, with earthly happiness.
“Albeit,” she said in haste, while pressing herself agitatedly into Xavier’s arms, “—albeit I did love Mr. Bunting, according to my bond; and have every reason to believe that he loved me. And my regard for poor Mrs. Bunting,—by which is meant, Mother Bunting—was no less high: for it is no exaggeration to say, as all of Winterthurn says, that that remarkable woman was a saint.”
(Of Amanda Poindexter’s death Perdita never spoke at all; so that Xavier came to wonder whether the full extent of the carnage below-stairs had been explained to her. It had been Thérèse’s grim duty to break the news,—the which, following precisely Dr. Hatch’s instructions, she had broken by degrees: informing Perdita that her husband was “gravely afflicted,” and then “critically ill,” and then “not expected to live,” etc. This most staggering of blows being dealt, and the widow forced to comprehend that she was a widow, Thérèse had then told her of Mrs. Bunting’s death,—and then of Mrs. Poindexter’s. But, as Xavier reasoned, it was altogether possible that Perdita had failed to absorb this additional news,—or that she had not “heard” it at all. For such vagaries of the human spirit had become commonplace to him, during the course of his career; he could recall a half-dozen cases, for instance, in which persons who knew very well that loved ones were dead, continued to speak of them as living, in the present tense,—there being an actual deafness operant. “Well, Perdita shall be steeped in these grisly details soon enough, when she rises from her sickbed,” Xavier thought.)
Yet, ah!—how warmly suffused with love, and kittenish affection, Perdita now was!—so delighted to be reconciled with Xavier (“whom I feared I had irrevocably offended”), she brought a crimson flush to his face by kissing him full on the lips, as often, and as deeply, as impulse moved her; and of hugging him, and “clambering” (as she playfully called it) into his lap, from out her very sickbed—! Doubtless a certain measure of this exhilaration derived from a powerful reaction against the horrors that had transpired: yet it is certainly the case that Perdita was possessed of a wild and repentant sort of love for her cousin,—with whom she essayed to speak, very often, of the past: of what she called their “shared past,” as if they had been children together, in any s
ignificant sense, in and about Glen Mawr Manor. (“Do you remember, Xavier,” she would begin, thereby to chatter lightly of an event in which Xavier had not participated, so far as he could recall: “Ah, do you remember—! And Father was still living, then; and poor Georgina; and dear old Uncle Simon; and Jupiter,—do you remember Jupiter?”)
Betwixt them, however, the opprobrious name Poindexter was never uttered; though Perdita must have understood Xavier’s passion,—that he would be incapable of repose, or of ordinary contentment, until the “balance of Justice” was restored.
At their last stolen meeting, the tearful Perdita had seized his hands in hers, and again covered them in kisses, and rubbed them against her cheeks and bosom, that she might be warmed; and murmured the wish,—nay, it was very nearly a plea—that Xavier leave the business of Justice to others, or even to God. For, once the period of mourning was accomplished,—once she regained her health,—and the complications of the Bunting estate were settled (Perdita having inherited, it seemed, a tidy little fortune in properties and investments),—why, might they not be wed; was it not toward this long-awaited end that Fate at last directed them—?
“We will be wed, assuredly,” Xavier declared, kissing his mistress’s inflamed cheeks, and allowing his tears to mingle freely with hers, “but that cannot exclude the restoration of Justice, as any Kilgarvan must know.”
The Poisoned Benison
Though much of Xavier Kilgarvan’s laboriously assembled evidence against Ellery Poindexter was to be destroyed by his own despairing hand, in late December, it is believed that the punctilious investigator had assembled an unprecedented quantity of “hard” data (but a single item, for instance, being a few grains of sandstone-and-oyster-shell gravel, identical to that used on the main drive at St. Bride’s, which he had discovered betwixt the floorboards of Harmon Bunting’s study); and that, in an exercise of great patience and ingenuity, rivaling that of any criminal investigator on this continent, or in Europe, he had essayed to construct a minute-by-minute time chart, recording the actual, hypothetical, probable, and “claimed” activities of some two dozen persons, through the daylight hours of September 11. (As unburnt sections of this chart were retrieved by Murre Pitt-Davies from the fireplace of Xavier’s room, it is possible for us to reconstruct it in outline, if not in particulars, and to marvel at its ambition. It consisted of several sheets of stiff, plain shelving paper, taped together to form a whole, measuring some six feet by eight, onto which was transcribed, in the detective’s clear angular hand, a staggering cornucopia of facts!—the Hours of the Day noted in a horizontal band, at the top of the sheet, and the Principal Actors noted vertically, in a band at the far left. [For, to his credit, it must be said that while Xavier knew that Poindexter was his man, he knew also that several other persons might have committed the crimes,—amongst them, for instance, McPhearson Jones, John Hathorne, and Henry Harder.] Doubtless Xavier had affixed this masterpiece of detective work to the wall of his bedroom that, even while lying abed, he might allow his restless eye to travel over it, seeking out here and there a clue, or a miscalculation, or a contradiction, or a remarkable new possibility, otherwise overlooked,—the euphoric nature of the enterprise being, Xavier could not predict what might next spring to mind. Needless to say, the elaborate chart concerned itself most obsessively with Ellery Poindexter,—in his actual, hypothetical, and probable emanations; but it contained fascinating, albeit mildly scandalous, details regarding numerous other principals as well; and odd, near-illegible scribbles here and there,—doubtless penned by the detective very late at night, or while sunk in an uncharacteristic mood, one of these being, in black ink, Circumstance is all.)
LIKE MANY ANOTHER criminal investigator before him, Xavier Kilgarvan exulted in busyness, and movement,—indeed, a kind of perpetual motion: the which saw him in all parts of Winterthurn City, and even in the village of Rivière-du-Loup: at Poindexter’s clubs, at Poindexter’s favored racetrack, at St. Bride’s itself (in disguise,—once as an itinerant peddler; another time as a cousin of Amanda Poindexter’s from Missouri, who had not yet learned of her death; yet another time, by night and stealth, in a state of quasi-invisibility). Though oft-times revulsed by his fellow man, and harboring a very low opinion of Mankind’s capacity for telling the truth, Xavier gloried in his interrogations, whether they yielded fruit, or no: for it gratified him to speak with persons otherwise unknown to him, of no connection with his solitary life. Thus a lengthy session with Mrs. Bessie Hyde, which threw light, as it were, on Harmon Bunting’s inordinate dependence upon Letitia Bunting; thus a yet more lengthy session with Henry Harder, whose dislike of Reverend Bunting, and sympathy for his young wife, soon came to the fore; a conversation with the embittered McPhearson Jones, whose story shifted even while he repeated it,—the main constant being Mr. Poindexter’s cruelty to Mrs. Poindexter, whom he had several times threatened to divorce. And, too, unsettling conversations with the rectory servants, who disagreed vehemently on the frequency with which Mrs. Poindexter had visited Harmon Bunting; and with the pale-faced John Hathorne, who betrayed a comical sort of apprehension that Xavier Kilgarvan, with his magical detective’s prowess, should somehow prove him the murderer.
“A curious notion of the way in which a criminal investigation is directed—!” Xavier thought, in irritation.
He managed to obtain an interview, after some difficulty, with his elder brother Bradford: who insisted that, the case being closed, it only remained for Xavier to withdraw his services, and betake himself back to Manhattan,—“where, I have no doubt,” Bradford said, “you are rather more at home than you are here.” Showing a broad, sleek, ruddy face of perplexed innocence, Bradford Kilgarvan professed not to know anything pertaining to the mystery,—not to have been aware of anything, whether minor tensions betwixt Bunting and his parishioners, or rumors having to do with the adulterous affair, or Ellery Poindexter’s clouded reputation. As the minutes passed, Bradford fell to interrupting his younger brother,—with such remarks as “Non-sense!” and “Not at all, my boy, there you are mistaken!”—and it soon became evident to the dismayed Xavier that Bradford lied for the sheer pleasure of lying. “This disagreeable person is my brother,” Xavier bethought himself, sickened to the very marrow of his bones, “and yet I feel no more brotherly sentiment for him than I do for Poindexter himself.”
Thus it was, the purposeless interview was concluded; and the two remaining Kilgarvan sons solemnly shook hands, with such finality, it seemed they had no wish ever to meet again.
It was Xavier’s strategy, as I have noted, to follow Ellery Poindexter closely about Winterthurn: either in so overt a manner as to make it impossible for the vexed gentleman not to see him, or so cleverly disguised, even Poindexter’s anxious eye could not detect him. To wear his man down from within seemed to Xavier the only hope, for no other strategy, under these peculiar circumstances, was likely to succeed.
To this end, Xavier often kept a vigil close by St. Bride’s, that he might follow his prey downtown, where Poindexter made a pretense of keeping to professional hours. When Poindexter escorted a trio of elderly female relatives to Mrs. Poindexter’s gravesite, Xavier observed him through a pair of binoculars, noting how the widower carelessly yawned behind his glove, and, when none of the ladies was turned toward him, essayed to dislodge mud from his shoes by scraping them against his wife’s very marker. (“A monster!—pray God he is not conscienceless,” Xavier thought, staring in revulsion.) Upon those occasions when Poindexter dined at the Rose Tree Club, or the Corinthian Club, or the Athletic Club, Xavier, alerted by his paid informers, hurried to keep the gentleman company, as it were: timing his cocktail hour, and his dinner hour, to coincide smoothly with Poindexter’s. He observed him at billiards, and at cards, with a neutral expression; silent as a ghost, he stole up behind him in the cloakroom, to murmur a quiet greeting. When Poindexter journeyed to New York City at the end of November, allegedly for business purposes, Xavier slipped into the club ca
r just behind him, and sat but two or three seats away, so that both gentlemen were facing a mirror, and the agitated Poindexter had no choice but to stare in fascinated loathing at the detective’s reflection. “You! Why do you persecute me! Why cannot you let me go?” the guilty man at last exclaimed.
But Xavier Kilgarvan, unyielding, implacable as Fate, did no more than keep his stony gray gaze affixed to Poindexter’s, by way of the polished surface of the mirror. You know why I cannot, his heart intoned.
NOT MANY DAYS AFTERWARD an uncanny episode transpired, which Xavier found puzzling in the extreme.
In one of his favored disguises, he had been making his way, at dusk, through the lively pubs and taverns of lower Union Avenue when, quite by happenstance, he found himself standing at a crowded bar beside his very prey, Ellery Poindexter!—the flush-faced gentleman being already in a state of mild drunkenness, and altogether ignorant of Xavier’s identity. (As much for the pleasure of the sport as for pragmatic reasons, Xavier had, that evening, cast himself into the mold of an itinerant salesman of “cultural” pretensions: with gray-powdered hair, and thick quizzical eyebrows, and muttonchop whiskers; and gold-rimmed glasses that fitted his face tightly; and upper eyelids so cunningly built up with flesh-colored putty, his eyes appeared smaller than they were, with a decided Slavic or Oriental cast. Studying himself in a mirror beforehand, Xavier had felt a grim thrill of euphoria, that he could not be recognized by anyone on earth,—that he had, indeed, slipped out of his nettlesome skin and was possessed of nearly as much power as if he were invisible. “Why, it is to be wondered whether Perdita herself would know me now,” he thought, examining his countenance closely.)
Mysteries of Winterthurn Page 57