Murder Comes to Eden

by Zenith Brown

  He broke off and reached for the phone. “Yerby speaking.” Spig saw him draw in his breath and half close his eyes. He leaned back, listening patiently.

  “All right,” he said at last. “We’ll certainly check. We sure will. Thanks for calling.”

  He put the phone down and sat there staring at it, swearing softly under his breath. “That . . . that dame’s going to drive me psycho. I swear to God she is.” The muscles of his jaw worked savagely.

  O’Leary looked his question.

  “Mrs. Twohey—Dunning’s missing. She’s been trying to phone him. She can’t get him. Nobody out at the Ashtons’ has seen him for two days.”

  “Why didn’t you tell her——”

  “Look.” Yerby glared at him his face flushed. “The guy’s a s.o.b. So what? He doesn’t show up to paint that old she-cougar’s picture. That’s no g.d. business of mine. If he was a polecat I wouldn’t tell her where to find him.”

  “Someday you’ll break a blood vessel,” Spig said.

  “If it gets that old witch out of my craw it’ll be first-rate with me. If one of her neighbours is three minutes late getting in the milk bottle, she’s smelling gas and yelling for a deputy. And she’d have sent Nat out to hunt for Dunning, but Nat’s home with his heart to-day. Look . . . if Nat Twohey had the guts to move out and leave that old hellion, he wouldn’t have a heart.”

  He relaxed suddenly, grinning. “Ah, well, the poor old girl. That’s all she’s got to do, I guess. But the less she sees of Dunning, the better I like it. Or vice versa, is what I mean.”

  “Unless he’s seen her all he needs to.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  Spig shook his head. “Just an idea.” He remembered suddenly what Dunning had said to Lucy the night before There’s one more visit I want to make—and the look on his face as he’d said it.

  “He hasn’t been digging around your place, has he?” Yerby asked abruptly.

  “I didn’t know there was anything to dig. Do you mean physically dig?”

  Yerby shook his head. “No, no. It’s just that that was the place. The duck blind was about where the bridge is now. You’ve still got the table, haven’t you?” He was silent for a moment. “The position of that stain, he said then slowly. “It’s funny—nobody ever got rid of that table. Of course the place was locked up. Shutters nailed, my father said. David did that. But it’s a funny thing.”

  He was silent again, frowning. “I was thinking about it the other night. They say all kinds of people get away with murder. I doubt it. Most murderers convict themselves. Or another thing. Say you killed somebody, in the heat of passion. Maybe you’d want it known some time. To explain. Or to justify yourself, maybe. Or just to get it off your conscience. Or maybe there’s something else, out of your control. Like this fellow Dunning coming along, for instance. Something you’d never expect. George Sudley’s been dead and dust for forty years, and he comes along . . . You take my father. He was plenty tough. But he couldn’t go to his grave without telling somebody. You wouldn’t like to set fire to that table, would you?”

  He said it so without changing tempo that it took Spig O’Leary a moment to understand what he was saying. If that was what he was saying.

  “It’s Miss Fairlie’s table,” he said then. “I guess I’m not suspicious, Buck. We’ve lived with that stain for seven years . . .”

  “Well,” Yerby examined the back of his hand carefully. “George Sudley knew guns. Gone gunning all his life. But suppose he hadn’t. If he was sitting there at the table with a blanket around him, his clothes drying in front of the fire . . . if he was sitting there, cleaning his gun—a loaded gun with the muzzle towards him—and the gun went off and blasted his heart out, he’d have slumped right down in his chair, wouldn’t he? Hard to see how he’d get up and fall out in the middle of the table. But let’s forget it—if we can.”

  He leaned forward, straightening the blotter on his desk. “I was going to have a talk with Dunning. But when he sat there last night backing up Lucy and Charlie’s story, word for word—well, I figured a liar’s a liar.”

  He shrugged, but the angry glint was back in his eye. “Just the way Mrs. Sudley and her sister backed up Charlie’s end of it, tooth and nail. That’s five of ’em against you—you and one regular deputy used to be a farmer before Sudley’s bank foreclosed.”

  “And Miss Fairlie.”

  “That’s right. Everybody knows she’s crazy.”

  “There’s a cheque in Nick’s pants pocket,” O’Leary said evenly. “Anita took it to him this morning, at seven-thirty.”

  “For the new Greek church, I bet it says,” Yerby remarked dryly. “But I’ll get ’em, don’t you forget it. Every man I’ve got’s out——”

  “Monkey-wrenching the Strip. That’s the beef Nick’s getting.”

  “That’s right. I’ll monkey-wrench ’em right out of . . .”

  He reached a long arm for the phone. “Yerby speaking.”

  It was not the second Mrs. Twohey again. He straightened up and brought his chair forward abruptly. “Where?” He listened soberly. “I’ll be right over.”

  He put the phone down and sat there a moment. “Ramey,” he said. “The old teller over at the bank. Blew his brains out.”

  He pushed his chair back and reached for his hat. “Come on. Back way—just across the street. Nice old fellow . . . just one of the nicest old fellows I ever knew.”

  They went out and across the parking square. A small crowd was already gathered, gaping around the door set in the wall next to a grocery store. They went on through. Yerby turned at the door. “Why don’t you move off a-way’s, folks? He’s dead. Let him have a little peace. What do you say?”

  They moved back soberly, a little ashamed. The two went on through a long narrow hall, up sagging stairs to the second floor. At the end of the upstairs hall a deputy and half a dozen people were outside an open door. A dark-haired girl was sitting in the window, her eyes red. Spig had seen her in the bank. Beside her was a coloured girl with a blue checked apron over her cotton dress, her face putty-grey.

  The deputy came towards them. “You’ll want to see them two,” he said. “And this is the landlady.” He nodded at the middle-aged woman there.

  “He lost his job, was why he did it.” The landlady had been crying too. “Been here fourteen years, and never a speck of trouble. I’d never have thought——”

  “All right, Mrs. Rogers,” Yerby said. “You go downstairs. Take the rest of these people. I’ll be down.”

  They went on into the room. Dr. Parker was already there. It was bare, with a white iron bed neatly made, an oak dresser, mirror and morris chair. Between the two windows was an oak table thickly covered with newspapers. Seated in a straight chair in front of it, his coat hung on the back of the chair, was the old teller from the Sudley bank, his body forward, his grey head lying on the papers, a small revolver still in his hand. Except for his eyes staring blindly he looked alive, his face tired and sad.

  “Didn’t want to make a mess for anybody,” the doctor said, pointing down at the newspapers.

  Yerby nodded. “He leave any note?”

  “Maybe under the papers. We haven’t moved anything.”

  There were heavy steps outside.

  “The boys are here, if you’re ready, Buck,” the deputy said.

  “Put the two girls in the next room or some place till he’s out.”

  Yerby came over to Spig, looking at the framed enlargements of the bank’s outings on the wall. There were two dark rectangles in the faded paper where pictures had been. When he heard the slow laborious steps going down the stairs, Yerby turned back to the table. There were still very little blood on the papers covering it, but there was some. Yerby folded the papers carefully and put them in the metal waste basket. He stood with Spig and Dr. Parker looking down at what they had covered. There were two picture frames, face down. Yerby picked the first one up. It was a photograph inscribed across
the bottom corner, “With warm personal regards to James Ramey, from Harland Sudley.” The second was a framed memorial with an engraving of the bank at the top. “To James Ramey in appreciation of twenty-five years of faithful service to the Farmers’ National Bank of Devonport.” It was signed by the officers and board of the bank, dated in 1948.

  Beneath one was a note, written in ink on a sheet of ruled tablet paper. Yerby read it and handed it to Spig. It said, “I swear before Almighty God I did not know the money was stolen. I never made a dollar or kept a dollar of it. My account in the Drovers’ Bank in Baltimore is from stock market transactions from my savings. I leave it to my sister Mrs. Ethel R. Allen, 9 Elm Street, Barber’s Point, Pa. Every penny of it was honestly earned. I am entirely innocent. I did not know the money was stolen. The balance of it is in the bottom bureau drawer.—James V. Ramey.”

  Yerby went over to the bureau and opened the drawer. In it was a tin box with the key in the lock. He took the box out and put it on the table to open it. There were six fifty-cent pieces loose on top of a small pile of paper used to roll silver coins in. Beside it were ten rolls, made up, marked: “10——50c.”

  Yerby stood looking down at them for an instant. “Get those girls in,” he said quietly. He stood at the window looking down into the yard until the two of them came in. “You found him, Alice?”

  The girl nodded. “It’s my fault he lost his job. You know how Mr. Sudley is about slot machines. Nobody in the bank’s allowed to play them. Three or four times I noticed Mr. Ramey with more silver than he’s supposed to have. I asked him. He said it was slot machine money he was changing, a friend had won a couple of jackpots. I told my boy friend and he told Mr. Sudley. I didn’t even know it. Or that they were watching him. Yesterday they caught him, and Mr. Sudley fired him. I was sick about it. I came by to tell him it was my fault and I was sorry. He didn’t answer when I knocked, but there was a sort of funny smell, and I opened the door. It’s all my fault. And I just don’t believe what Marie says.” She nodded at the coloured girl. “I mean, I don’t believe he was a thief.”

  “I never said he was.” The girl shook her head quickly. “I just told her he was all right when I came. I brought him up his coffee and the papers. I didn’t know he wasn’t at the bank any more. I told him—Brother works for the Acme, and last night they had another slot machine broken open. Nobody knows who did it and the mechanics don’t want to get blamed, so Brother told me to ask Mr. Ramey to watch and see if anybody brought a lot of half-dollars to the bank, just on a chance. I asked him this morning. He asked me when was the last one and I told him at the Three D night before last. He looked like he was going to faint but didn’t pay any attention.”

  “All right—thanks,” Yerby said. “You can go on. Don’t talk about it any more than you can help.”

  He waited until they had gone and looked at Spig, his face expressionless. As if O’Leary were somebody he’d never seen before.

  Then he said, “Just get the hell out, will you?”

  “Sure.”

  “Anything I can do, Buck?” the deputy asked.

  Yerby was silent a moment. “Yeah,” he said. “Phone Sudley. Tell him I want him. Here. Right now.”

  CHAPTER XIX

  OUTSIDE IN the street Spig saw the long lanky figure of Pete Greenway headed over from the Times-Gazette building, and turned into a side street to avoid him and get to the Twoheys’. Actually there was no real reason for him to go there except the off-chance that the old judge was right about his son’s not being totally devoid of imagination and legal resources, and that, slow but sure, Nat Twohey might come up with something that would keep another honky-tonk version of Devon Death Strip off the Ashton place and the bridge approach. And it was hardly that so much as some inner feeling that he’d better check with Nat even if he was laid up with his heart and the second Mrs. Twohey was a necessary hazard. She could be marketing . . . or hunting Dunning.

  O’Leary grinned without conviction as he came up the walk to the porch and rang the bell, his heart sinking only slightly when he heard the brisk efficient scurry of high heels coming to answer it. But prepared as he was, his preparation was wholly inadequate.

  The second Mrs. Twohey, beaming with welcome, was in panoply. She had on a pink satin evening gown with rhinestone shoulder straps, her full bosom and vigorous bare shoulders swathed in a cloud of misty pink tulle, a pink velvet rose in her hair that was dyed a handsome chestnut, and upswept into a coronet of curls, with earrings and bracelets, eyebrows pencilled, rouge, powder, lipstick, the works, including a wide open pink feather fan.

  O’Leary took a backward step as Mrs. Twohey’s bright expectancy, the toothy smile, bursting cordiality and delighted voice passed into instant rigor mortis in mid-air.

  “Oh . . . I . . . I thought you were Arthur . . .’

  The speed of her recovery alone would have showed how stout the stuff she was made of, without any decolletage to aid it. She managed a brisk and efficient smile. “I’m expecting him. He’s coming to paint. I didn’t want to waste a minute of his precious time. It’s such a privilege. But do come in.”

  “You found him, then.” O’Leary recovered more slowly.

  “Oh, no, but that sweet child Lucy called me.” She closed the fan. “He’s got me down in his book for nine-thirty,” she said. “But he’s always a little late.”

  A pixie diversion, no doubt, O’Leary thought. It was striking ten when he crossed the square.

  “But I expect it’s Nat you’ve come to see,” she said cheerfully. “He had a little attack yesterday morning. The doctor said for him to rest in bed.”

  “Then I’d better get along.”

  Mrs. Twohey tapped his arm playfully with the fan. “Before you go, I’m going to let you have just a little peek. Arthur says I mustn’t show it before he’s finished, but there are a few people I just can’t resist. Now, you wait. It’s right in here”

  She went over to the living-room door. It was closed, as was the library door directly across the hall from it . . . fortunately, Spig thought, if any conscious part of the old judge were still lingering in its shabby precincts.

  “Now, close your eyes! Don’t open them till I tell you. And I want you to be honest. Brutally honest.”

  She’s pleased with it. But Ashton was pleased with that thing of him.

  “Now!”

  Spig opened his eyes, and opened them wider. The lady in pink smiling at him from the unfinished canvas was Mrs. Twohey as Mrs. Twohey might, in her fondest dreams, have longed to look somewhere back in her middle thirties—wistful, ethereally lovely, graceful and gentle as a summer cloud. He stared at it, keeping his eyes resolutely away from the robust figure of its original, posing with pride and happiness beside it.

  “I tell him he’s idealised me.” She paused for him to contradict her if he could.

  The poor damned woman . . . she believes it. It was the first twinge of sympathy he’d ever felt for the late judge’s second wife. He looked at her then. Beside the clear and lovely rose-petal pink on the canvas there she looked as if she and all her finery had been steeped in stale coffee, old, brazen and of the earth earthy, without any of the earth’s kindliness to save her. The switchblade twist. In itself this was one—the woman who made the picture a caricature, more cruel than if it had been the other way round.

  He remembered suddenly what its purpose had really been.

  “It’s . . . beautiful,” he said. “Did you talk much while he was painting you?”

  “Oh, yes. Arthur says painting a portrait is just like going to a psychiatrist. Of course, you don’t discuss sex. I don’t mean that. You talk about your hopes and fears . . . the things that have meant the most to you. Arthur says it’s that way the artist sees the true image, the psyche behind the stultifying mask of environment. It’s the soul the artist paints. Arthur is a deeply spiritual man, you know.”

  “I’m afraid I didn’t.”

  She moved the portrait back to t
he map stand by the window and closed the door, almost reverently. “And he’s been such a joy to me. He’s the only sympathetic person I’ve met in all my years in Devon County. Bitter years, many of them, Mr. O’Leary.”

  “Oh, come, Mrs. Twohey.” It was the touch of drama that made it suddenly too much for O’Leary. “You’ve had a pretty good life, here in Devon.”

  “That’s what you think, Mr. O’Leary.”

  There was no drama in this. Her lips tightened. “It took Arthur to see the truth. He’s heard the stories. He knows what it means to a woman to be told her husband only married her because he needed a housekeeper. He understands what I’ve suffered, being constantly told it’s that crazy woman out at Eden my husband was in love with . . . the humiliation I’ve gone through.”

  “Nuts,” O’Leary said. “I’ll bet you never thought about it until——”

  “He’s certainly the one who made me see it in true perspective, Mr. O’Leary,” she retorted. “And opened my eye to people who’ve pretended to be my friends when all the time it was their own precious hides they were saving. Instead of slaving, second fiddle, in this house all these years, I should have demanded my husband put that crazy woman where she belonged. But you wait!”

  She snapped her jaws together, her eyes gleaming. “Just you wait! This town’s put up with her crazy didos long enough. And with Harlan Sudley’s. The time has come for a real accounting.”

  “Accounting?” Spig asked quietly.

  “An accounting, Mr. O’Leary. Why do you think Harlan Sudley slaves for a mad woman, ploughing her fields, selling her tobacco for her, taking care of her farm machinery, giving her discounts she doesn’t need? What hold has she got over him, Mr. O’Leary? Ask yourself that, if you haven’t already done so. What hold does a crazy woman have over——”