by Joan Sanger
Cautioning her to secrecy, I gave her the address of the new hotel at which I was to meet Alcott.
“There’s a good reason for my asking.” But I needed no reassurance from Lynn. “Remember—oh ages ago—my speaking of Uncle Fred?”
I wrinkled up my forehead, thinking hard. “Vaguely. He was the great big howling success down in New York!”
Lynn nodded. “Exactly. The one I simply adored back in my salad days!”
“So what?” I said indifferently. I never went in for genealogies. Lynn knew it.
“Don’t you remember his last name?”
I shook my head, thinking of all the water, fresh and brackish, that had spilled over the dam since those days. Lynn was looking at me humorously.
“It’s Lamar. Sanfred Lamar!” It was my turn to sit bolt upright.
“Good Lord! Not Judge Sanfred Lamar? The one who knew Wyndham?”
She nodded triumphantly. “Now, what do you say?”
Say? Just then I said nothing. Instead I broke out whistling. Yes sir! To the Havana Gulf waters, to the blue sky, but best of all to my old girl Lynn, I sat there whistling my little pet tune.
“I’ve taken my fun where I’ve found it;
I’ve rogued an’ I’ve ranged in my time.”
Somewhere out of the furtive wind, I could hear Alcott’s dry comment. “Think we’re getting along, don’t you old man?”
Well, doggone it! Maybe at last we were!
Chapter XVII AN IMPORTANT BIT OF EVIDENCE
ILOCATED our new hotel with a maximum of effort and a minimum of speed. It turned out to be a quiet little place in the heart of a secluded residential district, certainly the last place in the world anyone would expect to stumble upon a couple of newspapermen. A sleepy doorman, surprised at his late afternoon nap, led me past a rusty iron fountain, across a trim Spanish garden and thus directly to the door of my room, which pleasantly fronted thereon.
To my surprise, I found Alcott inside, propped on the bed, a welter of books around him.
“What’s the big idea?”
Instead of greeting he raised his eyebrow a fraction of an inch and continued reading in silence. At the end of his chapter he abruptly slammed the book to.
“Ever hear of Gross or Lacassagne or Locardi?” he asked with a quizzical smile.
“Not some more guys in on Wyndham’s poker party, were they?”
Alcott shook his head and laughed. “Nope! Not they!” Then, with an inclusive gesture toward the heap of books around him, “Make your bow to a bunch of pioneers, Johnny. Yep! Pioneers, my lad, of the vast unchartered realm of criminology.” Then he finished in disgust. “But they’ll get us all of nowheres!”
I looked at Alcott closely.
“Say! How many daiquiris did you have this afternoon?”
Alcott laughed. “Not one. It so happens I spent an hour and a half at Police Headquarters, thirty minutes at the Havana Post, and the rest of my time at a second hand book store at the end of Obispo Street.”
“Hence this?” I indicated the mass of books scattered pell mell about the place.
“Exactly!”
“But why?”
Alcott looked away, a frown on his face. “We’re in deep water. Terribly deep, old man. Frankly, this was sort of a call for help.” He lit a cigarette absently.
“H’m! You seem to have gotten the damned stuff by the carload,” I remarked sarcastically, picking up first a worn French edition of “Manuel de Police Scientifique” by Reiss, and then two ponderous volumes entitled “Handbuch fur Untersuchungs Richter,” by Gross.
Alcott shook his head glumly. “You’re right. Those guys are swell. They can tell you exactly how to look at a footprint and know whether the man that made it was carrying a bundle or not, how fast he was walking. All that stuff! Even our old friend Bertillon here. . . .” He stopped to reach for a book that had somehow (and I had my own suspicions how) landed five feet across the floor. “He tells about an ‘effraction dynamometer’ that can measure the exact amount of strength required to break down a door. He can settle once for all whether a forcible entry was effected by one or two men.” Alcott gave a dry laugh. “Our big trouble seems to be that we haven’t any footprints, we haven’t any broken down doors, and our crime is nearly a year old!”
There was a tinge of weariness to Alcott’s tone, a note of profound discouragement altogether unusual in him. I thought the news about Judge Lamar would buck him up, so I sprang it. But even that failed. Instead, he sat on the side of the bed flicking ashes over the floor, staring moodily at the welter of books around him. “It’s as though we sat here trying to make bricks without straw!”
Out of the heap of books I picked up an English treatise, and commenced glancing through it. Its theme was that the detection of crime rests more with the chemist, the physicist and bacteriologist than ever with the police or other agents. It hammered so steadily away at this point, that I was just beginning to understand Alcott’s discouragement, when suddenly he sprang up and reached for his hat.
“Good God! I’ve got a hunch, Johnny. A good one! We’ll get our ‘footprints,’ we’ll get our ‘straw!’ Wait here. I’ll be back in an hour.”
In three strides he was out the door. Nothing else to do, I sat down and resigned myself to a cheery little study of subtle poisons that kill in an hour, of the strange powers of psychological suggestion, of delusions that can obsess the criminally defective and such like, until a rap on the door called me back to actuality. Outside, against the sunny silence of the garden, I found my old friend the doorman standing irresolutely, a note outstretched in his hand. Hardly pausing to reflect on the singularity of any letter finding its way to us so soon after our change in quarters, I took it from him and tore it open.
My dear Mr. Ellis—
Lynn Dawson has just informed us of your presence in Havana. together with a hint as to the reason. It is imperative that we get together as soon as possible so you’ll find me close on the heels of this note. Judge Lamar is with me.
Calvin Watts.
“Where’s the man who gave you this?” I burst out to the doorman with such excitement that, though the fellow spoke no English, he gathered my meaning and nodded back to the entrance.
“Send him and his companion here.”
Two minutes later, crossing the garden toward me, I saw a fine looking, squarely knit man of middle age whom, now in the bright afternoon sunlight, I easily recognized from the newspaper pictures as Judge Sanfred Lamar. I wondered how I had ever missed his identity the first night when I saw him with Lynn at the Chateau Madrid. Hair greying at the temples, strong, clear features, deep-set blue eyes, there was about Lamar the unmistakable air of distinction and stamp of leadership that generally makes men of his type stand out from the crowd. But just now it was the young man at the judge’s side who managed to engage my interest. Why, I could hardly have said. He was a tall, rangy fellow in his early thirties, with unruly dark hair, a broad generous mouth, crooked nose and haggard eyes.
As Lamar came up he gripped my hand in greeting. “Forgive our intruding this way. My niece Lynn assured us you wouldn’t mind. And there was no controlling my young friend here!” He nodded toward his companion. Then, on second thought he added pleasantly, “By the way, I’m Sanfred Lamar, and this is Mr. Calvin Watts, of Baltimore.”
Watts looked at me directly. “You don’t mind our busting in like this, do you?”
I smiled. “If you hadn’t come along today, by tomorrow I would have busted in on you at the Almandares Hotel and the Judge at his villa in tha Vedado section. Yes, and Mr. Barton Dunlap at the Presidente.”
Calvin Watts ignored the fact that I had run down all their addresses. He ignored the wild disorder of our book-strewn room. He ignored the chairs I proffered. All the while his tired eyes bored through me searching, questing for something he didn’t seem to find. Then, without waiting for Judge Lamar to speak, he came directly to the point.
“Damn it all!
What do you make of it?”
“That was what I was going to ask you,” I said quietly.
The young man waved aside my question brusquely. “For God’s sake, let’s can the formality! I’ll lay out my cards first because the Judge’s niece has told us you’re straight shooting and O.K. All right. Get this. I was Stephen Wyndham’s best friend. We knew each other since we were youngsters. Yale together—all that!”
Watts broke off abruptly and turned aside. “Oh, what’s the use!” Then, on second thought he decided there was some use, for he proceeded. “The whole point is I cared about Steve Wyndham as though he were a brother. And yet, good God! Well, you know the facts. Some one did Steve in. I was there, present on the very occasion. What did I do? I allowed myself to get stuffed with a lot of banana oil. I spent six months playing around with airplanes and polo ponies. Man! you won’t believe it, even my friend Judge Lamar, I guess, can hardly do so, but until the papers broke with the story of Steve’s disappearance, never once did I question but that Steve dashed off on one of his usual impulsive jaunts.” Watts ran his hand through his hair distractedly and looked me straight in the eye. “Good God! Can you imagine the way I feel?”
I could. I could also imagine it was no very satisfactory dilemma for a friend. I felt oddly sorry for the chap. There was something so forthright about him, you couldn’t help feeling that way.
Even the Judge warmly came to his rescue, putting his arm over Watts’ shoulder with an impulsive generosity that dissipated, once and for all, any preconceived notion I might have had that here stood the usual sanctified executor of the law. “I’ve tried to make this boy realize that the responsibility falls alike on everyone of us who was present that night.”
Watts ran his hand nervously through his hair. “Oh, let’s get this all up to date and done with! The week this story broke I dashed back here to Havana. I saw Judge Lamar, who, as you seem to know, usually vacations down here. Together we’ve hunted high and low for evidence. We’ve dredged for Steve’s body. We’ve searched the records of crematories, hospitals and asylums. Not a trace has been found. We’re at our wits ends, honestly. There! Those are all our facts to date. The whole meager array of them. Now what have you to offer?”
I must have looked my indecision. Anyhow, Judge Lamar shrewdly guessed it, for his eyes twinkled exactly like Lynn’s.
“Look here, young fellow. Don’t you let us inveigle you into talking unless you so wish. That’s spoken as a counsel; and, er—as the relative of an old friend!”
The laugh that followed cracked the ice. I told them as much as I thought safe, which is another way of saying that I told them nothing very important. Not that I entertained the slightest doubt of either, but at the crucial moment I remembered my pledge to Alcott, and that effectively tied my tongue.
When I had finished, Lamar and Watts shook their heads. “It doesn’t get us much further!”
“Not exactly a burst of light, I’ll admit.”
Just the same I got them to reconstruct for me, bit by bit, their story of the fatal night. All tallied neatly with what I had already heard. I questioned them about the Wyndham will and Parson Stone. To no avail. Judge Lamar knew less than I did, and although Watts was vaguely aware of some mystery about the will, just what it was he had never heard. I got them to check my hotel plans and the diagram of the men at the table. Lamar was helpful, in his precise, clear way, but Watts was impatient of all such detail. One half hour of it he managed to stand; then, with sudden impulsiveness, he turned away from us and commenced walking up and down the room.
“What’s the use? Good Lord! To you newspapermen all this is just another murder feature! Nothing else!”
I realized a new line of approach was necessary. “Look here. Our very detachment and coolness are the best qualities that could be brought to bear just now. After all, where’s your righteous wrath getting you?”
Watts stopped short in his pacing, wrapping himself around my idea like an amoeba about some particle of food. “I guess that’s true,” he said slowly. “Only to us who knew Steve it all seems such a rank outrage. He was the whitest guy that ever lived. Really!”
“I believe all that. Still . . . when you’re close to a person you lose your perspective.”
Watts was unconvinced. “You didn’t know Steve as I did. He wasn’t the sort of fellow to whom anything like this should have happened. He didn’t go around acquiring enemies.”
I jumped at the opening Watts offered. “Nonetheless, you admitted awhile ago that on that very night you had to stop a fight between him and Sanchez.”
For a minute Watts looked taken back. Then I heard him echo precisely what Barton Dunlap had said back in New York. “Oh, that didn’t mean much. Steve’s affair with that Caros girl was over and done with. We all knew that. Why the very morning before his murder, Steve had warned me that I’d better quit making bets on the chances of his remaining single. I got the notion that he might be settling down any time within the year.”
“How do you know he didn’t have this Lolita person in mind?”
Watts looked at me intently. “Steve didn’t say. Just the same I had a damned good idea it wasn’t she.”
I wanted to whistle or whoop. Something lay ahead. I could feel it. Very quietly I aimed my bolt. “Right here you have one of those simple little elementary facts which is getting you nowhere. Whereas,” I smiled, with Metternichean cunning, “if laid out before a cooler, more unbiased eye . . .”
Calvin Watts looked genuinely uncomfortable. “What you ask is impossible,” he said. “It brings in the name of a particularly nice person who’s had trouble enough of her own lately without being bothered with this mess. Furthermore, she was miles away from Havana on the night of February 13th.”
“Omit the name,” I said persuasively. “All I want is a new slant.”
Obstinately Watts shook his head and it was only after an infinite amount of digging and probing that I gathered the fact that the girl in the case was married, and very unhappily so, at the time that she and Wyndham had first met. Furthermore that the attraction between her and Stephen had been instantaneous, mutual, and the honest-to-God thing.
I let Watts finish, and then very quietly I faced him. “By the way, did you happen to know that on the morning of February 14th, Wyndham had an appointment with this very same woman in Pinar del Rio?”
My question must have exploded Watts’ consciousness like a shot.
He wheeled around on me. “How did you know that?”
“Simply enough. I got it from your friend, Barton Dunlap.”
Calvin Watts’ open face turned scarlet and his jaw dropped. “The dog!” he said in a low tone. “The dirty low down bastard!”
“You’re a little rough on the chap,” I ventured, but Watts only stared at me.
It was Judge Lamar who quietly explained. “He should be. That girl at Pinar del Rio was Dunlap’s wife.”
Chapter XVIII THEORY, PLUS A FEW STRANGE FACTS
“NOW listen, Pete Alcott!” I burst out that evening. “I’m warning you. If we turn up one more suspect in this case, I’ll go just plain bughouse from the strain. Anyhow, why did you ever come busting into this mess? Before you happened along, I seem to recall great stretches of peace and quiet and the marvelous blessedness of not one single clue.”
By the light of the street lamp which we were passing, I saw Pete smile faintly at the extravagance of my jest; but he didn’t trouble to answer. It happened just then he was indulging in a fit of temperament, the only genuine one I had ever observed in him. I remember the occasion with peculiar vividness. We were tramping along the Maleçon. He had suggested the walk shortly after I’d finished telling him my story of the afternoon. Along our path the sea waves with wild, impetuous force were hurling themselves against the grey embankment, shattering to silver spray, washing the pavement around us, sprinkling our faces, suggesting somehow by their unceasing boom and obstinacy a little of our own plight and the equally
impenetrable wall of mystery against which we were matching our strength.
When Pete spoke it was as though he were echoing my thoughts. “Well, if that sea doesn’t shatter the wall it gets over it somehow, by God!”
I remember noticing his face when he said this. Thin, fine features set in determination and silhouetted clearly against the luminous sky. It did more for my morale than a shot of whiskey.
“Think hard. You’re sure they didn’t give you a clue as to where Dunlap’s ex-wife could be located?”
“Nope. We could wire Billy Farrel, though. That little ferret would dig it up.”
“I wouldn’t bother him just yet.”
Again we tramped in silence. Absently I noticed the moon had a ring around it. I noticed the huddled masts of the fishing boats, dozens of them, tossing at their moorings near the foot of the Prada. There was an inexpressible magnificence to the night.
Abruptly Alcott spoke up. “I guess it would be too much to hope that you remembered to ask Lamar and Watts whether they were smoking in Wyndham’s rooms on the fatal night?”
“Oh, nothing’s too much to hope,” I said lightly. “Take my own case. I’m hoping old Gerraghty won’t part with our invaluable assistance just because of this little spree. I’m hoping to see Lynn Dawson once more before this confounded case drives me completely nuts. I’m even hoping you’ll quit acting so almighty patronizing before I knock your damned block off.”
Alcott laughed. “And what of that little matter of smoking?”
“As to that: Judge Lamar and Watts were smoking early in the evening. The Judge recalled that Watts had smoked him out of his last Havana cigar. But by the time the lights went out both had stopped. The way Watts remembered was that he’d looked for his lighter and had not been able to find it at the time.”
“I see.”