The Swimming Pool

by Mary Roberts Rinehart

  “I had my traveling-iron, of course,” she said, as though it mattered.

  The curious thing was that until much later she did not even know the woman’s identity. I realized she still did not know who she really was.

  “Her name was Kate Henry, but she married Dawson. He’d changed his name to Benjamin, so she called herself Selina Benjamin. I imagine he told her the whole story, including the murder of a Homicide man named Flaherty. Inspector Flaherty.”

  That was when I realized I had lost her. The new frankness, even the friendliness, was gone. It was as though a hand had been drawn over her face, wiping out all expression.

  “If he told her Mother was mixed up in the death of Flaherty he was lying,” she said sharply. “He probably had plenty of enemies. I guess I’ve talked too much, Lois, but I wanted you to know. I had nothing to do with the Benjamin woman’s death. Do you mind ringing for the nurse?”

  It was the first time Flaherty’s name had entered the case, and I told O’Brien about it that night.

  “She’s right, of course, except it’s odd the way she reacted. Someday she’ll come clean all the way, and she’ll feel better when she does. It’s the gun that bothers me now. Who had it all this time? Sure it wasn’t in the attic?”

  “I’m not sure about anything.”

  I went out to the porch with him, but he did not go back to the cottage. He kissed me lightly—he was definitely a man who did his own courting—and said he wanted a few words with Helga.

  “She’s probably in bed,” I protested but he only grinned.

  “It won’t be the first time I’ve disturbed her virgin slumbers,” he said. “And ‘tis a sorry spectacle she’ll be, mavourneen.”

  I always suspected him when he lapsed into his Irish vernacular. It meant he was getting away with something I was not to know about. But he gave me no chance to question him.

  He kissed me again and disappeared toward the service wing. I never doubted he had a key to it. And he had.

  Chapter 33

  I NEVER HAVE KNOWN whether Fowler served his warrant or not. I did not see Judith the next day, for the offer for the property became definite that September morning, and the prospective owners arrived en masse to inspect it.

  The children loved it. There was a little girl of seven or so with a front tooth out who reminded me of myself at the same age. But, of course, one of the boys promptly fell into the pool and I had to dive in after him while the mother screamed her head off. I think the husband liked the pool, nevertheless. He gave me rather a tired smile as I got my orders.

  “I’m afraid it will have to go, my dear,” he said as I stood dripping beside him. “At once, if you can manage it. I want the kids out of town as soon as possible.”

  I changed my clothes after they departed, and went out onto the grounds again. A man had already arrived at the pool. He was struggling to open the sluice gate, and I stood there watching him. Just so I must have stood years ago, with Father holding my hand as it began to fill. Looking worried, too.

  “You’ll have to learn to swim, baby,” he said. “We can’t have you falling into the thing unless you know how to get out.”

  I went over to his garden. It looked dreary at the end of the summer, but the birches still stood tall and proud over the little cemetery. They seemed to be whispering to each other, and I sat down under them and wept. My eyes were still red when Anne arrived later in the afternoon. She looked hot and tired, but. exultant about her share of the money involved as she sat fanning herself on the porch.

  “Of course, the price includes the furniture, such as it is,” I told her.

  “But not Mother’s portrait!” she protested. “You wouldn’t sell that, Lois.”

  “No. You can have it if you like. Phil doesn’t want it. Nor do I.”

  My voice probably sounded bleak, for she stared at me.

  “I rather thought you’d want it.”

  “I’ll probably have no place for it, Anne.”

  “Then you are going to marry that policeman.”

  “I’m not sure. He hasn’t really asked me yet.”

  She had a glass of iced tea in her hand, but she did not drink it. She was flushed with indignation.

  “I think Mother would turn in her grave if she thought you were serious about him,” she said. “A policeman, and an Irish one at that! Good Lord Lois, have you lost your mind?”

  I wanted to say Mother was probably whirling if she knew all about us. I did not, of course.

  “I didn’t know there was anything wrong with being Irish.”

  “Maybe not, but a policeman! A cop! What do they call them? A flatfoot!”

  “He’s hardly that, Anne. He’s a lieutenant in the Homicide Department. Also he’s a college man. He can even read and write. And before I forget it, Janey has another name. It’s Jones.”

  I don’t think she even heard me.

  “Even Judith made a good marriage,” she said scornfully. “You’ll go far before you find a finer man than Ridge Chandler, even if she did divorce him. And my Martin may not be a millionaire, but he’s a gentleman. That policeman, with his chickens! You’re not really serious about this, Lois, are you?”

  “I’m as serious as all hell,” I said. “He’s a man, and a real one. I’m terribly in love with him. And I’ll tell you something else you don’t know. Ridge Chandler may be a gentleman, but he bought Judith just the same. The exact price was fifty thousand dollars. Or so he says.”

  She dropped her fan and did not bother to pick it up.

  “I don’t believe it,” she said flatly. “Why would he do a thing like that?”

  “To save her reputation, and incidentally to send a man to prison for murder.”

  Sitting there, with Anne clutching a glass of iced tea she never drank, I told her the story of Judith’s early days, as I had it from both Ridge and Judith herself. Her rather long face grew longer as I went on, her nice eyes bigger. I rather think her greatest shock was Ridge’s part in it, for it was the only comment she made.

  “He must have been crazy,” she said. “After all, a Chandler—”

  “He meant to marry her. He paid the fifty thousand dollars to save his family name. Not ours.”

  She did not even know of Judith’s arrest! It surprises me now to think how little she really had known all along. But when I came to Father’s gun she was stunned.

  “What became of it, Anne?” I asked. “You know, after he died. Did the police send it back to us?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t remember seeing it. Of course, with all the confusion at the time—Does it matter?”

  “Matter? It may send Judith to the chair, or to life imprisonment. It was Father’s gun that killed the cabdriver, Anne. He had a license for it, and the police have traced it. Ridge says it was returned. To Mother. He was there when she got it.”

  She was too stunned even to put her glass down properly. She put it on the edge of the table, where it toppled to the floor and smashed. It belonged to a set Mother had brought from Venice on her wedding trip, but she ignored it.

  “Why?” she said. “Why would she kill such a person? She wouldn’t even know him. How could she?”

  “Because he was the man she sent to prison, the Johnny Shannon I told you about.”

  Thinking now of that talk I realize I had the whole case before me. The clues, as Sara Winters would say, were all there. But it was like not seeing the forest for the trees. I was too close, too tired perhaps too stupid.

  Sitting there on the porch, the house quiet behind us, I told her as much as I knew, beginning with Father’s suicide and the note he left, and ending with the warrant for Judith’s arrest. I told her about Flaherty and Mollie Preston. I told her about Dawson and the bribe, and about Selina his wife, who had sworn away Johnny Shannon’s liberty and then married Dawson under the name of Benjamin. I even told her of my excursion to their town, and the tobacco shop there. And finally I repeated Judith’s story about
Phil’s golf club and how near we had come, Phil and I, to arrest because of it.

  She tried to smile. After all, if Ridge was a Chandler she was a Maynard and the Maynards have their own standards of behavior.

  “Bill says I’m a lame-brain,” she said, “but I’ve got at least part of it. Only I thought Judith was claiming it was a holdup.”

  “She does, only they don’t believe her. How would a thug like that get Father’s gun? It was his gun. The slugs matched.”

  None of us except Bill ate much dinner that night, although Helga was celebrating the sale of the house with fried chicken and an angel-food cake, undoubtedly the largess from O’Brien’s girls. All Phil had to say was the warrant had been served and Judith was under arrest.

  He pushed away his dessert, which was the ice cream he usually liked, and excusing himself went out onto the grounds. Even Bill seemed subdued. He and Janey had had a fight, he said, but there were plenty of other fish in his particular ocean.

  “The more I think of it, the more I understand Joseph Smith,” he said.

  “Joseph Smith?” Anne said, looking puzzled. “Who on earth was he?”

  She took Bill with her while she went over the house, so I was alone on the porch when Doctor Townsend drove up. He had been dining somewhere in the neighborhood but as the others were about to play canasta, which he detested, he had made an excuse and left.

  “I understand Mrs. Chandler is getting better,” he said. “Terrific shock she’d had. It would have killed a lot of women.”

  “She’s a worse one today,” I said. “She’s been arrested for murder, Doctor.”

  I think he already knew it, but he drew a long breath.

  “I suppose it was inevitable, but still—”

  “You don’t think she did it, do you?”

  “Almost anyone will kill, if sufficiently desperate,” he said. “In fact”—he smiled faintly—“there is a school of thought which says we are all killers, only restrained by the laws we ourselves have made. The point is, why? Why would Mrs. Chandler kill this man? She doesn’t even claim he attacked her. It’s easier to believe in her highwayman.”

  The district attorney, he said, had been at the dinner party that night and admitted the case was puzzling. For instance, if she had used the gun, why carry it back here with her? She was in shock, of course. He asked me if I knew Ballistics showed it was the murder weapon, and I nodded.

  “Even semiconscious as she was,” he said, “wouldn’t she have thrown it away somewhere? Down a bank. Into a creek. Even into your own swimming pool? She was not completely in shock. That came later. She knew her way here. She even knew where the stable was.”

  He left soon after, leaving me somewhat cheered but still bewildered.

  It was almost nine o’clock when O’Brien arrived. We must have looked like a normal family party, with Anne serving coffee from Mother’s big silver service on the table before her in the living-room and Phil passing benedictine in one of Father’s handsome decanters. There was a small fire going, too, and I tried to forget how soon we were leaving it. Or, for that matter, what was to come.

  Because I knew O’Brien had something to say. His voice over the telephone was his policeman’s voice.

  “That you, Lois?”

  “Yes. Is anything wrong?”

  “No more than usual,” he said. “I’ll be at The Birches as soon as I can make it. Don’t let Helga go to bed. I’ll want her.”

  He hung up, without so much as a good-by, and I went upstairs in a fury and put on my blue silk dress, which had withstood the water in the pool after all, and remade my face.

  When he did come he had evidently stopped at the cottage, for he was freshly shaved and he wore a fine pair of gabardine slacks and a tweed sport jacket. He had had a haircut, too, and not since the case began had I seen him so resplendent or with such an air of tired dignity.

  He took the highball Phil gave him, but he did not sit down. He stood by the mantel, glass in hand, and surveyed the three of us.

  “I’ll try to make this short,” he said. “Some of it’s damned unpleasant, and much of it Lois knows, but it has to be told. First of all, try to imagine Judith Chandler’s state of mind last winter when she read in the papers that Johnny Shannon was free. She never doubted he would try to kill her. She has never doubted it since. But I didn’t believe it. I met him when he came out, and eventually I gave him enough money to go west. What he really wanted was to be exonerated and I told him I would try to do it. There was no revenge in him. He had had a long time to get over that, but it’s hard for an ex-con to get anywhere, and he had studied law in prison. Once cleared he could practice somewhere.

  “He wrote me from Reno that he was driving a taxi and even saving some money. He hadn’t changed a great deal. He had been a good-looking boy, and except that his hair was white he was still much the same.

  “I had a leave coming, and so I went out to Reno to see him. He was doing all right. He had a small room there. He even had a sweetheart. But he had an obsession, an idée fixe. He wouldn’t marry her until his name was cleared.

  “Then he saw Judith at the train in Reno. He was driving a taxi, and she was beautiful and smiling and—well, reeking of prosperity. She wore a mass of orchids, I remember. It made him pretty bitter, I imagine. All I know is what his girl wrote me. He’d left Reno after that and come east, and I began to worry. In Reno he’d changed his name to Alec Morrison. I knew that. But if he’d changed it again, or dyed his hair—There are twelve million people in and around New York. There are several thousand taxi drivers, too. His Reno license would help him there.

  “I spent days going over the list of cabdrivers in the city. Also I put other men on it. I even advertised for him. But the plain fact is I had lost him. He knew where to find me, but he never showed up. And the first time I saw him after Reno was after he had been killed.

  “All this is merely to tell you why I took the cottage here. I began to realize he might not be entirely normal, and I stayed up a good many nights when he began to haunt the grounds. As you all know, I never caught him.”

  He stopped then, and I thought he was listening for something. All he did, however, was to ask me if Helga was still up, and to bring her in if she was. She looked startled when I told her. She waited, too, to put on a clean apron, and I saw her old hands were shaking.

  “What does he want?” she asked. “If it’s about the eggs, why let them go rotten? I’ve fed his chickens enough to pay for them.”

  It was not about the eggs, of course. He stepped forward when she followed me into the room and gave her a chair. True to her training she sat only on the edge of it, but his voice was pleasant as he spoke to her.

  “I want you to tell me something,” he said. “It won’t do any harm now. It may even help. I think you have known all along more than you have ever told.”

  “This is my family,” she said bleakly. “It’s all I have.”

  “That’s understandable,” he agreed. “But go back twenty years, Helga. You knew Miss Judith was out the night the Preston girl was murdered, didn’t you?”

  She swallowed hard.

  “Yes, I knew it,” she said defiantly “Those children were like my own, Lieutenant. And there was trouble enough, with the money all gone and Mr. Maynard shooting himself. Anyhow, who would believe me, with both Judith and her mother against me? I didn’t even see Dawson let her in that night. I only heard it.”

  “What time was that?”

  “It was after four in the morning. My legs were bad and I’d gone down to the kitchen for some aspirin. When I think of that murdering devil blackmailing the madam, after what he’d done himself that night!”

  “What had he done, Helga?”

  “What? He’d strangled the Preston girl. That’s what. Crazy about her, he was, and at his age! Jealous, too. I heard him often, over the pantry phone, begging to get her to see him. He was out that night, too. I heard him go and come back. He had big ugly hands.
They were strong, too. That’s what he did it with.”

  I think all of us were shocked. I know I was. But O’Brien was not interested in Dawson or his possible guilt.

  “So you let this Shannon boy take the rap for something he didn’t do,” he said. “You knew Miss Judith was his alibi for that night. Why did you do it, Helga?”

  “I didn’t know him,” she said defensively. “And I couldn’t prove anything, could I? That’s what Mrs. Maynard said, too.”

  “Oh, so you told her?”

  “Sure I told her.”

  Phil got up. He was very pale.

  “Are you saying my mother knew all this and did nothing about it?”

  “She knew, Mr. Phil, but I swore on the Bible I wouldn’t talk. And I didn’t. Until now, if it will help Judith any. That’s why I took the things from the desk in the cottage, and you nearly caught me. I hid in the chicken house that night. The photograph was Dawson all right, no matter what he called himself.”

  She looked at O’Brien.

  “You said you were only going to ask me about the gun,” she said.

  But Phil had not finished. He went across the room and stood over her.

  “How much of this did my father know?” he demanded, his face frozen.

  “Don’t you go blaming your father, Phil,” she said. “He was the best man I ever knew. I think he knew Judith had been out that night, and why Dawson was blackmailing your mother. But he didn’t know she’d been with the Shannon boy. If he had he’d have gone right before a jury and told them. That’s what he was like.”

  Phil turned. He gave a despairing glance at the Laszlo over the fireplace. Then he sat down and put his head in his hands. Anne had not moved. She was staring straight ahead of her, but seeing nothing. As for me, I felt dizzy and sick. Mother, carrying that guilt all those years, dying with an innocent boy spending the best years of his life behind stone walls, and still not talking. Father’s suicide, too, that gentle kindly man driven to desperation and unable to raise the money to save Judith’s reputation.