“Well, he was broke. Maybe she had some not-too-honest idea for getting money, like robbing a bank! But you didn’t live through those times,” he added patronizingly. “Plenty of men were doing the same thing.”
It was not until we were having coffee on the porch that I told him of my experience of the night before. It startled him out of his usual equanimity.
“For God’s sake!” he said. “Why didn’t you call the police?”
“He was gone by the time I got out of the pool. I heard his car start.”
“What’s this about his mistaking you for Judith?”
“She says so. She says he means to kill her.”
He took a minute or so to think about that, placing his empty cup in its saucer, and then putting them both on the table.
“Then you don’t think she’s inventing it?” he asked.
“She didn’t invent the man. He was real enough. And Doctor Townsend thinks her trouble is real, too. I’ve seen him.”
“This is the hell of a place for her in that case,” he said. “Anyone can break in. See here, Lois, I’m going to the police. We need protection, or she does. I’ll get Fowler out here, or some of the state police. You might even get that good-looking big guy of yours in the cottage, too. Unless he’s the fellow himself.” He looked at me with sudden suspicion. “Maybe he is, at that!”
“No,” I told him. “It wasn’t O’Brien. And don’t call him my guy. I wish he were.”
I don’t think he even heard me, for as if Phil’s mention of him had summoned him we saw Fowler’s car coming up the drive. He climbed the steps, wiping his face with a large white handkerchief, and greeting us politely.
“Glad you’ve had your dinner,” he said, seeing our coffee cups. “Always hate to disturb people at their meals. But I have some news for you. We have identified the woman in your pool.”
Phil asked him to sit down and offered him coffee, which he refused. He sat down, however, seeming, I thought, rather pleased with himself. He did not glance at me, which was fortunate. I must have looked shaken.
“Yes,” he said. “Her name’s Benjamin. Selina Benjamin. Any of you know her?”
Phil said no, and I chimed in thinly.
“She’s a widow,” Fowler went on. “Comes from a small town up the river. Well off, too, or at least comfortably fixed; Funny thing, her coming here. She didn’t expect to be gone long. Left her cat in the house. No reason for suicide apparently. Anyhow if she wanted to drown herself she had the whole Hudson River almost within spitting distance.”
Phil was smoking calmly, but my hands were shaking too much to light a cigarette. Curiously, too, Fowler was still not looking at me.
“I’m glad you identified her,” Phil said. “But I’d like to know myself what she was doing here.”
“That’s the question,” Fowler said and settled himself in his chair. “You see, we’ve got a funny story about her. Seems she’d been missing for some days. Nobody noticed it. Apparently she lived pretty much to herself. But a neighbor of hers got suspicious when she didn’t come home, and she called up the local police. That was only yesterday, but she tells a sort of queer tale.”
He looked at me then for the first time.
“Seems like the house had been broken into. She thought it was all right at first. The girl—it was a girl—said she’d seen the woman’s cat tearing the curtains of the front room, so she broke in a kitchen window to see what was wrong.
“This neighbor—her name’s Hunnewell—said it seemed all right to her at first. Then she told her husband, and he didn’t like it. Said the girl had no business breaking in. She ought to have talked to the neighbors first, or even called the police. Anyhow, he took her to the local authorities last night, and they went to the place.
“The woman was gone all right, and they knew what we had here in town. They brought the two of them down here today, and they identified the body at the mortuary. Full name was Katherine Selina Benjamin. She used the Selina. This afternoon they got some fingerprints in the house. Hers were all over the place, but there were some others, too. I guess, Miss Maynard, you know whose they are.”
Phil’s jaw had dropped. He stared at me incredulously.
“What’s all this, Lois?” he said. “What’s it got to do with you?”
I think if at that moment I had had O’Brien nearby I would have strangled him with my bare hands. Him and his Flaherty, I thought bitterly. The case that was never closed? And here I was, on the verge of arrest.
“It’s not very difficult to understand,” I said, as calmly as I could “I saw the cat in the window. It looked desperate, so I tried to save it. It was almost dying of thirst. I fed it some salmon, too, if that’s suspicious.”
“You didn’t feed it at the desk in the parlor, did you?”
“I don’t know what you mean. Anyone who would leave a cat like that to die—”
“Look, Lois,” Phil said. “Of course, you’re not mixed up in any real trouble. That’s preposterous. But what the hell were you doing there at all? That’s the dickens of a way from here.”
“Can’t I take a drive?” I demanded. “I haven’t been able to work for days. When I get a spell like that I often drive around. You know it, Phil.”
Fowler was having none of that, however.
“You knew her,” he said. “You knew where she lived. And she died in your pool. She didn’t commit suicide. She was struck with something before she fell in, which makes it murder, Miss Maynard. Now her bankbooks are missing. Mrs. Hunnewell says she often saw them in the desk, but the Benjamin woman didn’t have them with her the night she died. They weren’t in her bag.”
Phil got up. His usual bland cheerful face was set and hard.
“Are you trying to arrest my sister?” he said. “If you do, I warn you that I’ll have you turned out of office if it’s the last thing I do. It’s absurd. She didn’t even know the woman. None of us did.”
“I haven’t said I’m arresting her,” Fowler said with dignity. “I am saying she was in the Benjamin house that day. And I’ll go this far. The district attorney wants to see her tomorrow. Maybe he’ll believe in black cats. I don’t.”
He went away, jamming his hat on his head as he went down the steps and slamming the door of his car as he gave me a last suspicious glance: Phil watched him out of sight. Then he turned to me.
“All right,” he said. “Let’s have it. Of all the lame-brain stories I ever heard, yours was the worst.”
“I’m sorry, Phil,” I said feebly. “I just can’t tell you. But I didn’t kill her.”
He gave me a long hard look.
“I’ll accept that,” he said. “You didn’t kill her. I merely wondered why Chief Fowler came here and took away my golf clubs.”
I regret to say I laughed.
“I’ll write often, Phil,” I said. “And if I send you a cake look out for a file in it.”
Chapter 18
I DON’T KNOW WHAT he would have done, outside of throttling me, had Judith not chosen to come out at that moment. She looked really ill, and she had not bothered to use any makeup. She dropped into a chair, and when she took the cigarette Phil gave her, I saw her hands were trembling. Which made two of us.
“Wasn’t that the chief’s car?” she asked.
“It was,” Phil said gruffly.
“What on earth did he want?”
“Don’t ask me. Ask Lois. It seems she’s been saving black cats, or something of the sort.”
She looked relieved. What I did or did not do evidently did not interest her just then. She only looked somewhat blank.
“Did you tell him about the man on the grounds last night?” she asked.
“No. I clean forgot.” Phil looked uncomfortable. “What’s a man to do with a pair of lunatics gumming up the works? Suppose you come clean, Judith. What do you know about this man? First Lois tells me he dumped her into the pool. Then the chief of police comes and threatens to arrest her because a wom
an named Benjamin left a black cat when she died in our pool. Now it’s a strange man on the grounds who wants to kill you, Judith. I must have missed part of this movie. It doesn’t make sense.”
Judith said nothing. She sat very still, as though she had not heard him, but she was still shaking. It seemed a good time to attack her.
“What Phil hasn’t said,” I told her, “is that I’m likely to be arrested for murder tomorrow.”
“Murder!” She looked appalled. “What murder?”
“The woman in the pool. I’m supposed to have killed her with one of Phil’s golf clubs.”
“But you didn’t do it. Why on earth would you?”
“That’s the sixty-four-dollar question, Jude, and I have an idea you know the answer.”
When she didn’t speak I turned to Phil.
“I’m not in Judith’s confidence,” I said stiffly, “but if she won’t talk I will. As I’ve told you before, she’s been afraid for her life for months. I don’t know when it started, but I believe it was before she left Ridgely. If she would tell us about it, we could protect her. As it is, one man is trying to do it for us. His name’s O’Brien, and I think that’s why he rented our cottage.”
Judith stared at me.
“O’Brien?” she said. “What does he know? Or what has he told you, Lois?”
“So far the shoe’s been on the other foot,” I said curtly. “What I know is his. What he knows is his, too. But it may interest you both to know he didn’t go to bed at all last night after Judith’s friend attacked me and then ran. He stayed up and watched this house until daylight. I saw him.”
“What the hell does he say it’s about?” This was Phil, looking completely confused.
“He doesn’t say. Perhaps he doesn’t know. Only he does believe Judith’s in danger.”
“Why?” Phil said sharply. “Don’t tell me you don’t know, Judith. And don’t sit there like a damned fool and let an ex-cop look after you. You have a family, even if you chose to forget it for a good many years. It’s up to us to protect you and I wouldn’t say The Birches is the place to do it in.”
“It wouldn’t matter where I went,” Judith said dully. “I know that now. Unless I get out of the country.”
I suppose it was idiotic to feel sorry for a woman who seemed bent on her own destruction. I did, however. I didn’t think she was merely stubborn, either. She was concealing something because she felt she had to do so.
She got up before I could speak, said a brief good night, and went into the house, leaving Phil cursing under his breath and me in a state of pretty complete helplessness. It began to look as though I was going to be held for the murder of a woman I had probably never seen until she was dead. And also as though Judith would let me go to the chair before she revealed what she was hiding.
All in all, it wasn’t the end of a perfect day, and I noticed that Phil locked up with extreme care before he went up to bed that night. When I told him Bill was still out, he merely grunted.
“He’s got a car,” he said. “He’s got a home, too. It wouldn’t hurt him to go there once in a while. I’ll let him in. You look as though you could stand some sleep.”
In spite of that I slept very badly. Quite obviously the police were not accepting my explanation of why I had been in the Benjamin house. And equally obviously Judith would die or be killed before she explained her own terror.
The strangeness of that attitude kept me turning restlessly in my bed. It was certainly abnormal. Or was it? Was she afraid to tell the truth, and if so why? She was a grown woman, not an adolescent pushed into a marriage she loathed. She knew the man she said meant to kill her. It was she he had expected at the pool. Hadn’t he said she had the note he had thrown through the window? And she was to talk. Only talk.
It didn’t sound like any prelude to murder to me. Or to Sara Winters, either.
I thought of Phil’s story about Father, about the incredible note he had left for Mother. It was brutal, as only a man in a brutal situation could be. But what was the situation? Why had Mother made her frenzied escape to Arizona, taking a sulky Judith with her? There had been no pregnancy, Anne said. There might have been something else, however. There was the time in the summer of 1929 when Father had a ruptured appendix and had to leave the three of us at The Birches.
Suppose Judith had slipped over the Connecticut border and married one of the boys who always surrounded her? There might have been a divorce or an annulment, or—knowing Mother—there might have been neither. She was quite capable of ignoring such a complication and marrying Judith to Ridgely Chandler without benefit of the law.
The fact that Judith might possibly have an unknown husband throwing notes attached to rocks through her window was intriguing, to say the least.
But I had my own problem to face that night. The next morning I was going to be interrogated by the district attorney, and I had no real answers. Mrs. Hunnewell would be there to identify me. Gertrude of the beauty shop could say I had asked where the Benjamin woman lived and my story to her about a lost purse would blow up with a bang. Also—unless O’Brien told about the return-trip ticket—they would believe I had known all along what town she came from. He would have to talk now, I thought sourly; have to admit he had sent me to locate her, and why.
And he was going to do it, or else!
All evening his cottage had been dark, but now there was a light in it, and at last I put on a pair of slacks and a shirt and went carefully down the stairs. As I opened the front door, however, I had to choke back a scream. Someone was standing on the porch with a handkerchief to his face, and it was a moment or so before I realized it was Bill.
He staggered into the hall and dropped into a big Italian chair there which was a part of Mother’s loot.
“Sorry, Lois,” he gasped. “Suppose I could have a drink? I’ve had the hell of a time.”
I got him some brandy from Phil’s decanter in the dining-room, and while I have never considered brandy the miracle worker most writers do, he did begin to look a little better. Evidently he had been in a fight of some sort. His black dinner tie was somewhere under his collar and hanging loose, his coat was torn, there was a large welt over his right eye, and his lip was cut and bleeding. He managed to grin at me, however, as he handed back the glass.
“Chased a fellow and caught up with him,” he said. “Only he was stronger than I was. He got me down and banged me with a flashlight. Or maybe it was a gun,” he added. “I didn’t have time to examine it.”
I felt weak and shaky.
“Where was all this?” I asked sharply.
“Down the drive near the pool. I saw him skulking there, and I didn’t like the idea. When I asked him what he was doing there, he tried to get away. Only like a damn fool I could run faster than he could. He—I guess he knocked me out. When I came to I was flat, anyhow, and he was gone.”
He seemed apologetic rather than worried. He would have done better in the scrimmage, he said, only he was tired. His car had run out of gas a mile or two from The Birches, and he’d had to walk home.
“That’s how I came to see him. My feet were sore, so I came up on the grass. He almost jumped out of his skin when he saw me.”
“Did he drive off in a car?”
“He may have gone up in a balloon for all I know. I was having a nice little nap. I don’t think he’s still around, if that’s what you mean. I imagine he wasn’t feeling any too good himself.”
“Did you get a good look at him, Bill?” I managed to ask. “Was he big or small?”
“Quite a hunk of man,” he said. “All muscle, too. The minute I grabbed him I knew it was an error and the side was out.”
So Mr. X was still around, or had been. Whoever he was he was certainly tenacious, and something had to be done.
“Look, Bill,” I said, “can you walk?”
“Walk where?” he asked suspiciously. “If you mean up to bed I guess I can make it.”
“Down to the co
ttage,” I said. “It’s important, Bill. I’m—I think I’m to be arrested in the morning, and I’m not going along that drive alone.”
His young jaw dropped.
“Arrested? You?”
“They think I killed the woman in the pool. Don’t ask me why. Just get me to the cottage. Then you can leave. O’Brien will bring me back.”
“So that’s the way it is!” he said yawning. “Well, I can only try. If I drop I trust you to carry me back to ole Virginny.”
He staggered to his feet, still rather glassy eyed and certainly no protection. But I was too weary to explain anything to him as we more or less weaved down the drive, and although he asked innumerable questions he was not in too good shape himself. Luckily O’Brien was still up and dressed. I suspected he was about to look around the grounds, for he had a gun in his hand when he opened the door. He slid it in a pocket when he recognized us, but I am sure Bill saw it.
“What’s this?” he said. “A late call?”
Then he saw Bill’s battered face and pulled him inside and into a chair.
“What happened?” he asked. “Been in a fight?”
“It turned into that.” Bill grinned. “I chased a fellow, only I’m too good. I caught up with him.”
“Where?”
“Here. On the other side of the pool.”
O’Brien examined the bruise and the cut lip while Bill explained about his car. The injuries were not serious, O’Brien said but Bill would look a trifle odd for a day or two. Then at last he looked at me.
“Was Fowler at the house tonight?” he asked.
“He was,” I said. “It is now known that I murdered the Benjamin woman and stole her bankbooks. I’ve been identified and my fingerprints are all over the house. I did it with one of Phil’s golf clubs, and I’m to be interrogated tomorrow—this morning, rather. The district attorney expects to have quite a day.”
He straightened. For the first time since I knew him he Looked uncertain. Then apparently he made up his mind.
“Afraid you’ll have to go back to the house and put yourself to bed,” he told Bill. “I’ll see Lois gets in all right. And”—he hesitated, then he pulled the gun out of his pocket—“if you see this fellow again, take a shot or two at him. I won’t cry if you get him.”
The Swimming Pool Page 17