I shook my head. The mention of Judith, however, reminded me of something.
“My sister is convinced someone has been trying to kill her,” I told him. “She’s psychotic, of course, if that’s the word for it. Or is it psychosomatic? But she really means it.”
“And she thinks it was this woman?”
“No, of course not. She didn’t even know her. I’m sure of that. She thinks whoever did it mistook the Benjamin woman for her. Anyhow she’s dead, and Judith’s still afraid. More than ever, as a matter of fact.”
“Why? Doesn’t she say?”
“No. She won’t talk about it, but she thinks it’s the man who has been haunting our grounds.”
“Why for God’s sake haven’t you notified the police?”
“We did. O’Brien knows all about it.”
He looked practically apoplectic, but he managed to control himself.
“What does this fellow look like?” he asked.
“I don’t know. Nobody does, unless it’s my sister. He’s strong. I think he’s about medium height. And he has a car, or gets one somehow. I heard him drive off while I was in the pool.”
“Your sister refuses to identify him?”
“She says he means to kill her. That’s all.”
“Have you any idea why? Or why she won’t talk?”
I daresay I was pretty well wrought up by that time. I realized, too, that much I had said sounded like complete nonsense without some sort of background. So almost before I knew it I was telling him of Judith’s sudden intention to get a divorce, after twenty years of marriage; of our trip to Reno and her fright at the railroad station; of the locks and nailed windows at The Birches; and of Doctor Townsend’s conviction that her terror had a real basis. He listened carefully, making no notes, and part of the time with his eyes closed, until I finished.
“Do you think she’s afraid of her husband?”
“No,” I said positively. “I don’t think she ever was in love with him, as I look back, but they got on well enough. Anyhow, he’s not that sort of person.”
“How can we say what sort of person any individual is? Even children commit murder, and pious women with innocence written all over them. But it wasn’t Chandler on the grounds? You are sure of that?”
“Absolutely. Ridge is short. This man is bigger and with a deeper voice. I couldn’t be mistaken.”
“Do you think she would talk to me?”
“I think she’d faint if she so much as saw you.”
He smiled at that. Not much of a smile, but a good try. It was a moment or two before he spoke.
“Had you any reason to associate this Benjamin woman with your sister?” he asked finally. “Or with her divorce? After all, that’s a curious story of yours. A woman suddenly decides to leave her husband. She goes to Reno and seems contented there. Then at the railroad station something happens. She faints, and she has been terrified ever since. She won’t use taxis, for one thing. That mean anything to you?”
It did not. I said so.
“Any taxi drivers around when this happened? At Reno?”
“One or two, maybe more. I didn’t notice.”
“Yet a taxi figures in this,” he said. “Let’s take a purely hypothetical situation. Suppose one night last winter your sister is in a cab with a man and something happens. She’s a good-looking woman, I understand. So he makes a pass at her and she—let’s say she opens the door and pushes him out. He’s killed, and the driver gets out and accuses her of murder. So she’s at his mercy. There’s blackmail right off, and I’ve been smelling blackmail in this case right along.”
“I don’t believe it.”
He smiled again.
“I’m only guessing,” he said. “She has to be afraid of something or somebody, and according to you it happened suddenly. She wasn’t prepared for it, so all she could do was cut and run. She chose Reno, and she was followed there.”
“What about this Benjamin woman?” I asked. “Where does she come in?”
“I’m supposed to be asking you that. What about her? Why did O’Brien put you on her tail? Because I think he did.”
I didn’t deny it. How could I?
“I haven’t the remotest idea,” I said honestly, and rather to my surprise he seemed to agree with me. He said he thought that was about all, and shook hands with me.
“But,” he added, “the next time you find a piece of paper the police are breaking their necks to locate, I suggest you give it to them. You’d be surprised how well they know their business.”
Phil and Bill were in the anteroom, waiting anxiously, and when he saw Bill’s face the district attorney grinned.
“Quite a shiner you’ve got there, son. Want to come in and tell me about it?”
He kept Bill only five minutes or so. And he was not smiling when he let him go. He looked very sober.
“I’d better have a man or two around your place for a while,” he said. “Looks as though this fellow has a gun. No fist ever made a bruise like that.” He looked at Phil. “And now, Mr. Maynard, I think it’s time you and I had a talk.”
I shall never forget Phil’s face as he went into that room and the district attorney closed the door behind him.
Chapter 20
IT WAS AN HOUR before he appeared again. He looked as though he had been run through a wringer, and this time the district attorney did not see him out. But he said nothing, merely nodding when Bill insisted that we have lunch in town to celebrate what he called my escape from the chair. Bill’s face called for lively interest in the restaurant, but as usual he ate stolidly from soup to nuts, only to stop now and then with what the newspapers would say that night:
“‘Socialites Quizzed in Murder Case,’” he offered. Or: “‘Woman Novelist Involved in Crime She Writes About.’”
As a result we were still there when the Hunnewell woman came in.
She was accompanied by what I learned later was a local detective, a youngish good-looking man who appeared slightly bored, and I knew what was coming the moment I saw her. I would have to pass her table going out, and I hadn’t a hope she would not recognize me.
She did, at the top of her voice.
“That’s her!” she yelled. “That’s the girl who broke into the house.”
I stopped beside her. There was nothing else to do.
“I’ve just been telling the district attorney about it,” I said with a forced smile. The whole restaurant was listening, and one or two people stood up to see me better. “How’s the cat? And I hope your husband fixed the window.”
Apparently it took most of the wind out of her sails. But not all. She stared at me.
“The cat’s all right. I wouldn’t say the same for you.”
“No?”
“Not with Selina Benjamin gone to her grave, and dead in your pool.”
Here the detective handed her a menu and said something in a low voice. She flushed angrily.
“All right,” she said. “I’ll shut up, but if that girl thinks she’s putting something over on me she can think again.”
It was three o’clock when we reached our drive, and as Phil turned in I saw that the O’Brien cottage was still closed. A window was open, however, and his car was there. As he had been up most of the night I supposed he was sleeping. But his girls were still in the chicken house, announcing feverishly that they wanted to be let out and fed.
That was when I saw Henrietta.
The little hen was strutting about alone in the front yard, and I knew O’Brien never allowed her there. It was a small thing, of course, but Henrietta where she did not belong, plus the indignation in the henhouse, made me uneasy.
As a result I made Phil stop the car and got out, with Bill at my heels. The front door of the cottage was locked, but a window was open, and when no one answered my knocks and calls I made Bill crawl through the window. It was some time before he opened the door. When he did he stood blocking it with his solid young body.
; “Get out of the way, Lois,” he said. “Phil, come here, will you?”
I didn’t get out of the way, of course. I ducked under Bill’s arm and got inside, to see O’Brien in his big chair, unconscious and with blood all over the place. He was in pajamas and a dressing-gown, but evidently he had been shot somewhere outside, for there was a trail of blood across the floor from a wound in his right leg. Equally evident was the fact that he had made an attempt to telephone, for the instrument had fallen beside him on the floor.
Not that I noticed any of this at the time. I was screaming for a doctor, Bill says, and that I jerked off his—Bill’s—necktie to use as a ligature.
“My best tie, too,” he said. “You simply yanked it. It didn’t help, either. The leg had stopped bleeding hours before, but there you were, blubbering at the top of your lungs and wrecking a three-dollar tie, all at the same time.”
The real wound, of course, was in his chest, but the fact is I do not remember much what followed. I recall the ambulance coming, the care with which they carried O’Brien’s big body out to it, and Phil going with it when it left. But I do not remember stripping the chair of its bloody chintz cover and carrying it carefully to the house.
Bill said I was making no sense whatever, that I wailed over it all the way, because I had made it and it had been damned hard to make, and now it was stained and would not wash! And Jennie maintains I handed it to her in the hall and told her to take it out to the incinerator and burn it, which the idiot proceeded to do.
I must have been making quite a fuss, for Judith heard me and came down the stairs.
“What on earth!” she said. “Jennie said Fowler had arrested you.”
I glared at her.
“Your friend out on the grounds has killed O’Brien,” I said frantically. “Now maybe you’ll tell us about him. If you don’t, I warn you I’ll choke it out of you. I mean it.”
She did not faint. I was still standing with that bloody cover in my hands, and I knew the sight of blood upset her. All she did, however, was to sit down on the stairs and look blank. She didn’t even speak. If ever I saw a human being appear sick and frightened, it was Judith that day.
“What do you mean, my friend?” she gasped. “I don’t understand, Lois.”
“The taxi driver,” I said. “That’s what he is, isn’t it? That’s why you won’t take taxis. The district attorney knows all about you, the blackmail and everything.”
“Blackmail?” she said strangely. “Who on earth is being blackmailed?”
Bill had been standing by, puzzled. He came over and put an arm around me.
“I don’t know what all this is about,” he said. “But O’Brien isn’t dead, Lois. Not yet, anyhow. What’s this about Judith’s friend on the grounds? The fellow I had the fight with?”
“Ask her,” I said. “Maybe she’ll talk to you. She knows a lot she’s not telling.”
Then my knees gave way suddenly, and Bill caught me and eased me into a chair. I suppose it was the sudden understanding of what he had said, that O’Brien was not dead. In any event I shut my eyes. When I opened them Judith had disappeared, and Bill was standing by me with a glass of whisky. Later he helped to get me up to bed, where Helga undressed me, her old face grim.
“Now you go to sleep, child,” she said, tucking the covers around me. “That O’Brien will be all right. Phil promised to telephone from the hospital. But he’s strong. Don’t you worry about him.”
“You know him, don’t you, Helga?”
“We’ve had one or two talks,” she said evasively. “When he brought me some eggs. That’s all.”
“What about?”
“Just about the old days. Nothing important. Now you go to sleep and stop worrying. It takes a lot to kill an Irish cop.”
So Helga knew who and what he was. I wondered just why he had talked to her, or what he had hoped to learn. But in one way she had reassured me. O’Brien was strong. I remembered the night when he dived into the pool for my bag, and his big muscular body in his trunks. And—because I was trying to forget that scene in the cottage—I thought over what Helga had said. The old days! What about the old days, when Father had killed himself and a police officer named Flaherty had been murdered because he had apparently located a Selina Benjamin, wife of a respected tobacconist! But she might not have been Selina Benjamin twenty years ago. She might have been Kate Henry. Katherine Selina Henry, whose testimony before a grand jury had indicted a boy for murder, and who had disappeared before his trial.
It was nine o’clock that night before we had any word from the hospital. Helga, who would not let Jennie into my room, had brought me a cup of soup and some crackers at seven, but I could not touch them. When the phone rang, I was out of bed in a second. Bill, however, was answering it in the lower hall. He listened for some time. Then: “Good. I’ll tell Lois. But listen, Phil, what about Aunt Judith? She’s locked in and won’t speak to anybody. I’m kind of worried. Think Christy ought to see her?” And after a pause: “No, I suppose not. Well, I’ll try it.”
He came up to my room. I had put on a dressing-gown over my pajamas by that time, and as my door was open he came in. He still showed the marks of battle. In fact the lurid purple was even deeper, but his mouth looked better.
“They think O’Brien will be all right,” he said cheerfully. “Take time, of course. They got one bullet. According to Phil, it was in the apex of a lung, and believe it or not it missed the subclavian artery, whatever that might be. The other wound isn’t serious. It went through his leg. But he lost a lot of blood, so they’re giving him transfusions. Phil says the hospital is lousy with New York cops. Seems the guy is popular.”
I sat down, because my knees had given way with relief.
“Does he know who did it?” I asked.
“Didn’t see anybody. Of course, he isn’t talking much. Too weak. He was by the pool when he got it. That’s all he knows.”
I must have looked better, for he lit a cigarette and offered me one.
“What makes with him, anyhow?” he said. “Phil says those city cops look fighting mad; that they all insisted on being tapped for blood and it was flowing by the quart, so far as he could tell.”
“He’s one of them,” I said weakly. “Homicide.”
He whistled.
“Homicide? For God’s sake what’s he been doing here?”
“I don’t know. It’s something about an old murder. An officer named Flaherty was killed, and lately something came up that revived it. I don’t know what it is, Bill.”
“What’s it got to do with The Birches?”
“A woman was killed here. Don’t forget.”
“He was here before that happened,” he said looking mystified. Then he apparently abandoned the puzzle. “I suppose you know there are cops all over the grounds.”
All over the cottage, too, I realized. It meant they already had seen the bankbooks and photograph, as well as the clippings. What would they make of the one about Judith? Would they connect her with Selina Benjamin’s death? And would they be right? If the golf club on the district attorney’s desk was one of Phil’s, and they could prove it had been the murder weapon—
Bill’s next words penetrated the haze that was my mind at that moment.
“Those guys make it damned inconvenient when a fellow wants to try a job of breaking and entering,” he said. “What’s the penalty for that, anyhow?”
“Breaking and entering?”
“Look,” he said, his bantering tone gone. “I’d better tell you. I’m anxious about Judith. There hasn’t been a sound out of her since she learned about the shooting. I’ve called to her off and on ever since. I’ve even thrown pebbles at her windows. She won’t speak and I can’t hear a sound in the place.”
I rallied as best I could.
“She’s upset, that’s all, Bill. And you can’t break into her room. That door’s too solid. Anyhow it’s silly. She has spells like this sometimes. Phil says she did the same th
ing after Father died. I wouldn’t worry.”
“You didn’t see her face when she heard about O’Brien,” he said grimly. “She looked like death. Either she’s scared into a fit or she knows a lot she’s not telling. I think she’s scared.”
“She’s been scared for weeks.”
“This was different,” he insisted. “How about a window? I’m not fooling, Lois. She may be unconscious or even worse.”
“Don’t be a young idiot,” I said. “She’s frightened about something, but she likes to dramatize herself, too. You know how she is.”
“I know she’s as nutty as a fruitcake,” he said, with the brutality of youth. “Just the same, I think someone needs to look after her. Where can I get hold of a ladder?”
“I thought you said there were police all over the place.”
“They’re mostly around the cottage and the pool. Anyhow, what can they do? I’m locked out and trying to get into my room. Apologies and all that. Come on. What are we waiting for?”
“Helga may come in, Bill. If she finds me gone—”
“The hell with Helga. Turn out your lights and lock your door. She’ll think you’re asleep.”
If it were not so horrible I could laugh over that excursion of ours. With Phil away, the lower floor was empty and dark. I did not think Helga was asleep, so we avoided the service wing. We groped our way out the rear-hall door, to find it was raining, a hard summer shower which almost sent me back into the house. But Bill took my arm, and we crept around the back of the old conservatory and toward the stables.
“I used to see a ladder there,” he said. “Climbed trees with it when I was a kid. Suppose it’s still there?”
I was not sure. I seldom visited the stables. Also I was already soaked and considerably irritated.
“Of all the fool things!” I said. “If you think I’m going to climb a ladder and scare Judith to death, you can think again.”
“Who asked you to climb? You’re the lookout, that’s all.”
There was a brilliant flash of lightning just then, followed by a clap of thunder. We stuck out like a pair of sore thumbs but, as Bill observed the glory boys—his name for the state police—didn’t like to get their pretty uniforms wet.
The Swimming Pool Page 19