This was all very well, and on the highest possible plane, but it did not answer the question of what they were to do about Mr. Galli and the cabana rendezvous. Herschel resolved this quite simply: Lucille would go, meet Mr. Galli and find out what cards he held, while he, Herschel, would be concealed outside the cabana in readiness to play his own hand accordingly.
* * * *
“I have been made aware through Madame Alcott’s reports, Miss Bellington, that you are seriously disturbed. That you are contemplating the folly of even withdrawing from the Foundation. I felt I must prove to you that any such stupid move shall not occur.”
“Shall not, Mr. Galli?”
The confines of the cabana held a nightmarish pressure, a captive intimacy with a power for evil, exemplified in the sveltely tailored person of Mr. Galli.
“Not,” he went on, “unless you wish to be exposed in every newspaper in the country as secretly conducting an illicit affair with Herschel Pompey, even while posing as a paragon of virtue and the fiancé of Mr. Dasher. Furthermore, you would be branded as a Communist Party traveler and a traitor to the United States.”
Naturally Lucille was stunned. That her senses reeled would not be putting it too strongly, while Mr. Galli gave her a verbal resumé (as compiled in a cleverly pieced together photostat) of her written notes with what the press would label her secret lover, Herschel. This was hot stuff, picked out from the Swinburne quotes.
The traitor angle with red overtones was similarly taken care of by her indignant reactions to the news items selected by Herschel for her comment—the rackets, the Cuban situation—the South American ex-dictator’s legal battle against extradition. The net result, all in her own handwriting, if handed over for publication in the press would crucify her on all counts. It was iron tight.
Did, Mr. Galli wanted to know, Miss Bellington see the light? Would she be a good girl and follow instructions from here on, in regard to the sub rosa use to which the Foundation was to be put?
Admittedly, weaker vessels might have cracked. Not Lucille. Unconditionally she refused. She even went a suicidal step further by vowing that she would expose Mr. Galli’s cooked-up evidence of moral turpitude and fellow-traveling if it took a lifetime and her entire papaya fortune. Her indomitable intention was to expose Mr. Galli to Stuff Driscoll and, via him, to the proper Federal authorities. What’s more, she would attend to the matter at once.
“Miss Bellington,” Mr. Galli said almost sympathetically, “you leave me no alternative. The Foundation will be just as suitable to our purposes with you dead. It will stand, inviolate from the law and from suspicion, as a memorial to your honored name.”
Even a child could recognize this high-flown verbiage as a sentence of death. It was a sentence that Mr. Galli proceeded immediately to put into effect. He clutched Lucille about her throat and was adroitly strangling her when he noticed that Herschel had stepped into the cabana.
Although annoyed at having an eyewitness to his already activated disposal of Lucille, Mr. Galli still regarded Herschel as an ally—a fact that simplified Herschel’s wresting of Lucille from his throttling grasp. Now if there was one thing certain about Mr. Galli it was his ability to sum up a situation in a flash. He realized (a) that his fanfaron had ratted, and (b) that his fanfaron was about to take him physically apart. So he left the cabana at a rapid glide.
This did not reassure Herschel for one minute. Nor Lucille. Both were certain that Mr. Galli was outside in the darkness and would make every effort to eliminate them before they could get in touch with Stuff Driscoll. They decided not to go back to the Bellington house with Mr. Galli spidering in ambush along the way, armed perhaps with a revolver obtained from the usual convenient glove compartment of his car.
They settled on the clever strategy of going to Griptread Tires. There they would acquaint Lyle with all the perfidy including Madame Alcott’s status as a conspirator (she being still presumably in conference with the helpless convalescent over the Revels Humane) and they would telephone Stuff Driscoll from the sanctuary of Lyle’s home.
With cautious steps they made their way through the tropical shrubbery. They found Lyle limp on a chaise-longue in the Florida Room with Madame Alcott seated fulsomely in a chair by his side. Then safe at last from Mr. Galli and his murderous impulses, even though he was still on the prowl outside under the night’s dark cloak, Lucille exposed the entire evil mess to Lyle. Also, for Madame Alcott’s outraged and shocked information, she revealed Herschel’s admirable act of self-sacrifice in ratting on Mr. Galli’s racket and coming over to the side of the angels.
With this bundle off her chest, Lucille headed for a telephone. If stage directions were called for at this instant they might seem a trifle involved. We have Lucille stepping toward a telephone that rested on a corner stand. We have Madame Alcott lunging at her in a towering rage to prevent the call, and we have Herschel professionally tackling Madame Alcott around her generous middle and bringing her to a halt. It was not this, however, that checked Lucille from reaching the telephone. She was stopped, held spellbound by a torrent of invective that streamed with bullet force from Madame Alcott’s unhampered lips.
The essence of the tirade was that Lucille was a fool. Herschel was not alone a fool but a rat fool. Even should Lucille telephone that species of a Gestapo named Stuff Driscoll either Mr. Galli or Mr. Galli’s client, whose power was illimitable, would see that matters were properly attended to before Mr. Driscoll could reach them.
Madame Alcott diverged momentarily to spew out some data on said client. He was, of course, the ex-dictator from South America and his vicious plot was to get behind-the-scenes control of the Foundation, to use it as a base for the storage and shipment of arms to his country. To stage a counterrevolution—the only manner in which he could return without having his brains blasted out.
At this point Madame Alcott was forced to forage for breath, and Lucille, pretty well hitting the nail on the head, took the opportunity of telling Madame Alcott that she was insane. Herschel, Lucille declared with a glowing conviction, would protect them. Lyle, even though convalescing, would also exert whatever strength he could muster in their defense.
Madame Alcott, her pump working again, laughed. It was a nasty laugh, very typical of just such a situation, with a ring of triumph in it.
“Herschel?” she asked, the laugh over. “Herschel protect you? While Lyle Dasher is covering him with that gun in his hand?”
Lucille received her final blow: Lyle indeed was covering Herschel with a deadly Luger. Lyle was the murderer! Her thoroughly shattered system brought her voice down to a whisper. “Lyle—oh no!”
Oh yes, Madame Alcott exulted in a fiendish bravura of victory. Mr. Dasher was more important even than the ex-dictator. He was the Leader. He was Moscow’s secret head for stirring up sabotage, unrest, and revolution throughout South America. He had appreciated instantly the value of the Foundation as an underground headquarters for the Cause.
Just what else Lyle was, or had appreciated, or why, was cut off short by Lyle who, sternly lugered, took over. He announced in a cold, convincingly commanding voice that the four of them with no further nonsense or delay would take a ride out to the shark-infested Gulf Stream in his cruiser.
At this dramatic moment, with death staring one half of the quartet in their chalk white faces, a diversion occurred in the form of a jalousie door being opened behind Lyle and a voice saying, “I will take it from here, Mr. Dasher.”
But Lyle was in no mood to play second fiddle. He said with icy, Leader tones, “I am quite in control of the situation, Mr. Galli.”
“The name,” Stuff said, pressing the muzzle of a .38 against Lyle’s stiff spine, “is Driscoll.”
* * * *
A good bit earlier in this chronicle it was hinted that murder, heartbreak, brilliant detective work, and Spartan retribution were to precede the gala opening of the Revels Humane.
Obviously the first two happenstances on the list
have been covered, whereas the brilliant detective work on the part of Stuff Driscoll, et al, has been parked on the sidelines. In mysteryland this is usually attended to at the denouement by an uninterrupted, and uninhibited, harangue by the private eye or the official detective who solved the case, and that is pretty nearly just what is going to be done right now.
During the hour or two between the moment when Stuff pricked Lyle Dasher’s megalomaniac balloon and the later meeting that took place among himself and Lucille and Herschel in the Granada Room, a few official incidentals call for notation.
Mr. Galli had been scooped up from amid the subtropical shrubbery. Madame Alcott and Lyle Dasher were equally in custody. The three of them, incidentally, would shortly be transferred to Washington where the FBI and the State Department would arrange that their cases be handled as completely in camera as possible—this because of the Russian overtones and particularly in view of an impending social call by Premier Khrushchev at the White House.
Companionably, General Mendoza Conti had been lifted from his Miami mansion and was being held incommunicado prior to his now certain deportation to South America and his presumed bullet-spiced desserts.
It was after these routine matters were concluded that Stuff joined Lucille and Herschel in the Granada Room to relieve them of the puzzling details of the case. Supplied by Hopper with a selection of open-face Danish sandwiches and a tall papaya punch, he started from scratch. As the only conceivable interest to us in the harangue lay in its highlights, here is a list of them.
The Rev—penciled by Jones on the match folder did not stand for the start of Revels Humane. It was the start of the word Revolution.
Lyle Dasher confessed in his signed statement the reasons for his having cast his lot with the Commies. Stuff amplified this with psychiatric footnotes on the Warped Brain, and with several references to known similar cases in the past where important people, industrialists, and so forth, had been hornswoggled and swept up by the red tide.
The poison that had upset Lyle (plus, because of its comparative obscurity, the M.E. and the lab boys) had come from the Mexican flame vine that draped the palm tree trunks encircling the gazebo.
At this point Stuff presented Lucille and Herschel with a leisurely quote on said poison, lifted from “Principal Toxic Plants,” an article prepared by Dr. Edward Larson of the Medical Research Unit, and Julia F. Morton of the Morton Collectanea, University of Miami.
The quote: Senecio confusus (Britten), Mexican flame vine. Climbing woody vine with flowers like daisies but orange in color. Popular ornamental. Listed in Florida handbook as especially popular for growing on [trunks of palm trees]. Toxic portion: All parts of plant. Effect: Irritates skin of sensitive persons. Internally, severely poisonous.
The weapon of the crime had been a section of this vine.
Lyle, who was of course the Voice, had been in a complete state of nature but for his plum-toned Jansen swim trunks when he had realized that a stranger, Jones, was also hidden in the hibiscus and had been an eavesdropping party to his talk with the supposedly deaf-mute Herschel. Quite obviously the man had to be killed, and on the spot.
Being in swim trunks, and hence having no knife or other weapon with which silently to dispose of this wirily muscular-looking character, Lyle attempted to rip off a length of the Mexican flame vine for use as a garrote. Unable to tear the tough stuff with his hands, Lyle chewed it apart with his teeth. Being definitely sensitive to the poison, this later resulted in the “pimples on his lips” and the stomach convulsions so falsely attributed to the Friggoni stone crabs.
Naturally, when earlier in the evening the M.E. at last identified the poison for Stuff as the noxious vine, the traces of which had been in the groove of strangulation and among the scrapings from Jones’s fingernails where he had clawed at the garrote, these, added to the effects induced in Lyle by his chewings, sent Stuff hightailing it for Griptread Tires where he had arrived on the scene in, yes, the nick of time.
Stuff touched as gently as possible on Estelle’s brutal murder. Lyle, on being told by Herschel at the gazebo about her having voiced her doubts on the legitimacy of the Foundation to Lucille, and his then having observed Herschel talking with her on the sands (thus exposing his mute-deaf chicanery and surely all else), Lyle arrived at a typical Leader decision that Estelle was a potential menace and had better be put away. He did so with his skin diving equipment while the girls were taking their swim.
* * * *
Happily, there was a pleasing ending to this otherwise grim and dour tale. In view of his reformation, of his endangering his life by ratting on Mr. Galli, and his saving of Lucille, the potential charges against Herschel Pompey were, with the Governor’s influence, squashed—to press them would, of course, have meant a public exposé of the whole shebang, including His Excellency’s whole hog publicity endorsements.
The Foundation (minus Lyle’s fortunately silent partnership), the Governor’s political reputation, Lucille’s layman’s reputation all emerged unscathed by any taint of public scandal. In regard to the true villains—Lyle Dasher, Mr. Galli, Madame Alcott, and General Mendoza Conti—justice would be done.
It is especially gratifying to be able to report that the Revels Humane took place on schedule with éclat, in a swelter of handsomely gowned women, penguined men, and with His Excellency the Governor dispensing his customary intimate charm in an opening speech. Lucille, by this time entirely pulled together again, was on the dais at his side.
And as for herself and Herschel—surely no one could doubt it—they were to pass the rest of their lives dissolved in that blessed state once so fashionably known as togetherness.
Which brings us to the end.
THE KNIGHT’S CROSS SIGNAL PROBLEM, by Ernest Bramah
Taken from Four Max Carrados Detective Stories (1914).
“Louis,” exclaimed Mr. Carrados, with the air of genial gaiety that Carlyle had found so incongruous to his conception of a blind man, “you have a mystery somewhere about you! I know it by your step.”
Nearly a month had passed since the incident of the false Dionysius had led to the two men meeting. It was now December. Whatever Mr. Carlyle’s step might indicate to the inner eye it betokened to the casual observer the manner of a crisp, alert, self-possessed man of business. Carlyle, in truth, betrayed nothing of the pessimism and despondency that had marked him on the earlier occasion.
“You have only yourself to thank that it is a very poor one,” he retorted. “If you hadn’t held me to a hasty promise—”
“To give me an option on the next case that baffled you, no matter what it was—”
“Just so. The consequence is that you get a very unsatisfactory affair that has no special interest to an amateur and is only baffling because it is—well—”
“Well, baffling?”
“Exactly, Max. Your would-be jest has discovered the proverbial truth. I need hardly tell you that it is only the insoluble that is finally baffling and this is very probably insoluble. You remember the awful smash on the Central and Suburban at Knight’s Cross Station a few weeks ago?”
“Yes,” replied Carrados, with interest. “I read the whole ghastly details at the time.”
“You read?” exclaimed his friend suspiciously.
“I still use the familiar phrases,” explained Carrados, with a smile. “As a matter of fact, my secretary reads to me. I mark what I want to hear and when he comes at ten o’clock we clear off the morning papers in no time.”
“And how do you know what to mark?” demanded Mr. Carlyle cunningly.
Carrados’s right hand, lying idly on the table, moved to a newspaper near. He ran his finger along a column heading, his eyes still turned towards his visitor.
“‘The Money Market. Continued from page 2. British Railways,’” he announced.
“Extraordinary,” murmured Carlyle.
“Not very,” said Carrados. “If someone dipped a stick in treacle and wrote ‘Rats’ across a
marble slab you would probably be able to distinguish what was there, blindfold.”
“Probably,” admitted Mr. Carlyle. “At all events we will not test the experiment.”
“The difference to you of treacle on a marble background is scarcely greater than that of printers’ ink on newspaper to me. But anything smaller than pica I do not read with comfort, and below long primer I cannot read at all. Hence the secretary. Now the accident, Louis.”
“The accident: well, you remember all about that. An ordinary Central and Suburban passenger train, non-stop at Knight’s Cross, ran past the signal and crashed into a crowded electric train that was just beginning to move out. It was like sending a garden roller down a row of handlights. Two carriages of the electric train were flattened out of existence; the next two were broken up. For the first time on an English railway there was a good stand-up smash between a heavy steam-engine and a train of light cars, and it was ‘bad for the coo.’”
“Twenty-seven killed, forty something injured, eight died since,” commented Carrados.
“That was bad for the Co.,” said Carlyle. “Well, the main fact was plain enough. The heavy train was in the wrong. But was the engine-driver responsible? He claimed, and he claimed vehemently from the first, and he never varied one iota, that he had a ‘clear’ signal—that is to say, the green light, it being dark. The signalman concerned was equally dogged that he never pulled off the signal—that it was at ‘danger’ when the accident happened and that it had been for five minutes before. Obviously, they could not both be right.”
“Why, Louis?” asked Mr. Carrados smoothly.
“The signal must either have been up or down—red or green.”
“Did you ever notice the signals on the Great Northern Railway, Louis?”
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