“Where’s everyone else?” Kay asked.
“Marshal used whiskey to handle the crisis, too much even for him. They’re in the can.”
Kay looked at the sobbing Joanna and said, “Hank! Sid and I have to talk to you alone, right away.”
“No reason why not. I’m sure not doing any good here. Let’s step out into the hall.”
Kay’s first words were, “Hank. You have to believe us. David Rouse didn’t commit suicide. He was killed, by the same person who killed Bart Cain.”
“You’d better have some pretty convincing evidence. As far as I’m concerned, the case is closed. Who’s your suspect?”
“Francis Forbes, and you’d better go into the can right now and cuff him. He’s not only the murderer, but he could be dangerous to other people as well. “
“I can’t.”
“Why not?”
“He isn’t in there. It’s just Dolph and Marshal and the chauffeur. Francis stayed back at Cliffhouse.”
“What!!” Kay shouted. “We’ve got to get out there right away. You may have a real suicide on your hands if we don’t.”
Corky stuck her head out the door of Hank’s office. “Thing’s have quieted down in here, except that something of an emergency call just came through. It was Craig. He’s all upset. He says Qual didn’t answer the phone when Laura called him from the office, so he went home to check. He says Qual’s gone, and so is his car. I couldn’t make out what all the fuss was about.”
“Oh my God!” Kay was almost screaming.
Sid was heading for the door. “C’mon Hank,” he yelled. “Take our word for it. We have to get out to Cliffhouse as fast as we can. It may not be a suicide we have to worry about, it could be another homicide.”
***
The words were still ringing in Qual’s ear. “I have to see you. Please come out, right away. Please!” There was more than pain in the voice, more than a plea. It was the closest to utter despair Qual had ever encountered.
The moment he had heard about David Rouse’s death, he knew what he had to do, knew what he should have done, knew he had been under a spell for the last several days, and knew the spell was still hovering over him. Only the two-mile gravel road leading from the highway to Cliffhouse slowed him down to fifty. Even so, he had difficulty controlling the wheel on the curves and inclines.
No one answered his ring. After a second attempt, Qual opened the door and entered the house. He called. Still no answer. Exploring the first floor, he found no one and started up the stairs to the second floor. He had never been in the house before, but Kay’s description of it told him where Francis would be. Opening the large door into Mark’s studio, he could see the top of Francis’s head where he was sitting in a leather chair pulled up close to an open window. The sound of the waves crashing against the base of the cliff reverberated through the room.
Qual tried to control his voice, and knew he was not succeeding. “I came as soon as I could.” He walked over slowly and put a hand on Francis’s shoulder. Francis shook it off and said nothing, staring off to the horizon across the blue water flecked with a few stray whitecaps from the trades. The winds had just started to blow.
“It isn’t too late, Francis,” Qual said in a low voice. “I can get you help.”
“No one will ever know.”
“Know what?”
“No one will ever know.”
“What are you trying to say?”
Francis turned his head slowly toward Qual, but Qual could not be certain Francis had heard him. Certainly he was not seeing him. His eyes were still focused on the far distance.
“She’s a cannibal. She eats my heart. She killed her.” In spite of the bright daylight streaming through the window, Francis’s pupils were fully dilated.
Like a mother trying to soothe a child in pain, but knowing her voice had no effect, Qual kept talking. So did Francis.
“Mark told me. He comes to me, you know. He told me. I didn’t believe him at first. She’s clever. She couldn’t hide the smell. Mark said she couldn’t. He was right.”
For a moment, Qual thought Francis was seeing him. Grasping the arms of the chair, Francis heaved himself jerkily upwards and started walking toward Qual, backing him toward the open window.
***
Even though Hank was not convinced, he insisted on taking a patrol car and opened up with the siren and the flashing blue light. “If you want to get there in a hurry, this is the way to do it.”
Kay was sitting in the passenger seat. Sid, anticipating the nature of the ride, had strapped himself in securely in the rear. From where he was sitting, he could see the speedometer needle crawling past the ninety mark.
“OK,” said Hank while crouching over the wheel, “why do you suspect Francis?”
“Because he had motive and opportunity,” Kay said, “and because we’ve caught him in a whole series of lies.”
“Motive?”
“Jealousy, I guess, is the closest we can come to what he felt. He was jealous of his mother’s boy friends. So he hatched out a scheme to kill one of them and to frame the other one for the murder. In that warped mind of his, he figured that would do it. David Rouse would go to prison for killing Bart Cain.”
Bunched-up cars ahead straggled off onto the shoulder.
“Hell! If you’re right, I signed Rouse’s death warrant when I got you to spread the story he was no longer a suspect.”
“I hate to say it, but I think you did. Sid and I were both taken in. But even when we became sure Francis was the killer, we never in the world thought he was doing anything more than trying to take suspicion away from himself by framing David. That’s the reason I was really stumped. I couldn’t figure out his motive for killing Bart.”
An old pickup stayed in the middle of its lane as Hank swerved out and back in just in time to avoid an oncoming van. Sid caught a glimpse of a startled old Japanese man driving the pickup as they roared by.
“I’m still not convinced.”
“His lying was what finally convinced me. Once I told myself both Dolph and David were telling the truth about the scuba bottle in David’s stateroom, then I knew someone else had planted it there for Dolph to see and then had taken it away. By his own admission, Francis was in his cabin most of the morning, and so he was by far the most likely one to have done it. As soon as I started pressing him on that, he began to hedge. Even so, he couldn’t have been gone during the whole time Dolph was in the staterooms, because the cleaning took from ten thirty until noon. Yet he lied about it, and he lied when he said he didn’t hear Dolph cleaning the rooms, because the sound of the flushing toilets can be clearly heard by anyone in those rooms.”
A semi came around a curve and over a low hill. Struggling to get off the road, the trailer weaved toward the screaming police car, straightening just enough to let it by.
“How did he get the bottle aboard?”
“That was no problem. He had a large suitcase loaded, according to him, with books.”
Sid closed his eyes as they approached a narrow, shoulderless bridge. Hank passed two cars while crossing the span.
“Where did he get the nitrous oxide in the first place.”
“David’s office was the obvious place. I’d be willing to bet he had a key to David’s house, which was what I wanted to check on with David last night, but I couldn’t find him. We must have passed him right on this road when we were coming back from Cliffhouse.” Turning on to the gravel road, Hank tripped off the siren, barely caught the car as it begin to skid on the loose rocks, and dropped the speed to sixty. The three of them were out of the car almost before it stopped with its bumper inches from the front porch. Hank was the first one through the door and headed immediately for the second floor studio. Sid and Kay followed close behind.
Throwing open the studio doors, the three of them burst in simultaneously. At first the room seemed to be empty, and then they saw the two of them by the open window. Francis was in the lea
ther chair, his knees pulled up to his chin. Qual was crouched beside it, smoothing Francis’s hair and talking soothingly to him. What Kay was to remember most vividly was the whiteness of Qual’s lips, his drawn face, and the look of hopeless anguish sketched across the familiar features.
Chapter 25
It was a full week before Qual came back to work, and yet another week before he spoke about what had happened. It was Sid whom he confided in one morning, when the two of them were working up a contract for a client.
Qual pushed the papers to the back of his desk, and said, “Have you heard anything about Francis?”
Sid chose his words carefully. “Joanna has him in a private hospital in Honolulu. He’s been definitely diagnosed as being schizophrenic. It’s a severe kind the doctor called catatonic, and he said it may be related to the encephalitis he had when he was ten.”
Watching Qual carefully, Sid could detect no emotion. He continued. “The prognosis is poor. Even without the brain damage, the recovery rate is pretty rare.”
Qual nodded. “I still feel responsible for David’s death, and I’m sure that’s what tipped the balance.”
“That’s ridiculous, Qual, and you know it. Francis was deteriorating rapidly.”
“Yes, but if I hadn’t been so…so crazy myself, I could have saved David’s life. You see, I knew—almost from the moment I saw him at the prep school—I knew Francis killed Bart.”
“How could you have?”
“Because he said he didn’t know Rouse very well. Five years ago I was in David’s office having my teeth worked on when a young teenager wearing braces came in. I didn’t catch the name then, but at the time David mentioned he was the son of some friends of his, and he liked coming around the office even when he didn’t have to have his teeth worked on. When I saw Francis at the school, I recognized him immediately. After I’d talked to him, and before I left, I’m almost certain he knew I knew. If only I’d gotten help for him then.”
“You had no proof. In fact, Hank didn’t give up on his pet theory until he found a key to David Rouse’s office in Francis’s bedroom. The real clincher was the other item he found there–a piece of flex hose with fittings to attach the nitrous oxide bottle to the scuba bottle.”
***
Kay, Sid, Laura, Corky and Hank had decided to try the new Indonesian restaurant which had opened up two blocks from the courthouse. It was the first time the five of them had sat down together since the wild trip to Cliffhouse.
“I’m glad I missed it,” said Corky. “The only thing more frightening than an airplane ride is Hank’s driving when he’s in a hurry.”
“There’s no question but that it was pretty exciting,” Sid said, “especially when we first hit the gravel road leading up to the house. I felt like I was riding the tail end of a dragon on a mudslide.”
“I hate to admit it,” Hank said, ignoring the conversation going on around him, “but I was so completely sold on the idea David Rouse was the murderer, I stopped even thinking about any other possibilities.”
“You weren’t the only one sold on the idea,” Kay said. “Joanna was absolutely sure he was the one who did it, but where you were trying to convict him, she was trying to cover for him. She even talked Jeff into passing on the information about the huge amount she was leaving to David in her will. We already knew that was false since David Rouse told us he’d been a witness to the will and witnesses can’t be named in the document.”
“I don’t get it,” Corky said. “How could that have anything to do with anything?”
“It was just an additional weight she wanted to add on David’s side of the scale. She figured anything indicating he had nothing to gain by killing Bart would be all to the good. I’ve talked to Jeff since. He was also convinced David was the murderer and was doing his best to get us off the scent. That’s why he was throwing out wild comments about everyone in the family. Sam was in there pitching, sprinkling false leads pointing to others like Captain Silva, for example. Everybody was protecting David. Hank’s story that David was off the hook came as a relief to everyone…everyone but Francis.”
Sid broke in, “I have to admit I was fooled. When Kay told me why she suspected Francis, in the back of my mind I was still holding out for David. Even after she convinced me, I still couldn’t understand what Francis’s motive was, though looking back at it, it should have been obvious.”
Kay spoke up. “I’ve thought about it ever since the horrible scene at Cliffhouse. Now, I’m not really sure I know what the motive was.”
Hank shrugged. “Seems clear enough. He was jealous as hell of his mother’s lovers.”
“I don’t think it’s so simple, Hank,” Kay said, furrowing her brows as she spoke. “The last words he said to Qual before he slipped into psychosis don’t seem to indicate jealousy. I think he was trying to get back at Joanna. God knows, in her own twisted fashion, she’d been hurting him, though she’ll never be able to admit it to anyone, least of all to herself. Francis felt it. He knew in some strange way how overprotection is a warped form of rejection.”
“So you think he killed Bart and David as a way of getting even with Joanna?” Corky asked.
“I know it sounds bizarre, but remember, his mind was becoming increasingly bizarre,” Kay said.
Corky picked up on the theme. “I guess that’s the mistake we make sometimes. Just because someone can plan and execute a murder with meticulous care, it doesn’t mean their motives aren’t twisted or their mind isn’t slipping. Just the little things Francis did—like covering the oxygen bottle with a towel, knowing Dolph would pick it up and uncover the bottle—had me completely fooled. Imagine hiding something where you know it’s going to be found. Has anyone figured out how David got air into the bottle?”
“That part was simple,” Kay said. “Mark had an air compressor in the garage. After Francis filled the bottle part way with nitrous oxide at the dentist’s office, he came home and used the pump to fill it the rest of the way with air.”
“What I never figured out was how he knew what mixture to use.” Hank said.
“You can thank his school for that, Hank.” Sid explained. “I called his chem teacher, and he did some research. Francis had checked out a book which had a whole chapter on nitrous oxide. It even pointed out the levels of intoxication with every percentage of nitrous-oxide-air mixture.”
“I guess that solves most of the mysteries,” Corky said. “The biggest one, as far as I’m concerned, is how he could have killed David without anyone else in the house knowing about it. Since it seems pretty clear Francis pushed him out of the studio window, how did he get him up there in the first place? Why didn’t anyone hear David scream when he fell? I know I’d have screamed the whole way down.”
Kay answered her questions. “He probably used some pretext. Maybe he called David and told him he wanted to show him something, something he didn’t want the others to know about. So David came out, visited for a while and excused himself. Once up in the studio, it wouldn’t have been hard to get David to look out the window. Come to think of it, I did it at Sam’s suggestion and never thought anything about it, except it made me dizzy. There was no way anyone could have heard the screams. Out at the swimming pool, the noise of the breakers would have muffled any other sound. We found out the house is insulated. So much so it would have prevented anyone inside from hearing screams.”
Hank broke in. “I didn’t believe Kay when she said Qual was in danger of being killed. Now I can’t figure out why Francis didn’t kill Qual.”
“Maybe Laura can answer that,” Sid said. “She was a psychology major as an undergraduate.”
Laura laughed. “I escaped comparatively unscathed, Sid. But I do remember something one of the few professors who seemed to know anything about human beings said. The funny part of it is she was an animal psychologist. Anyway, it’s something that might apply here. She made it all pretty dramatic by telling the story about a rabid dog being patted by his youn
g master. The kid hollers into the house and says, ‘Come and see Shep. I’m brushing his teeth and he’s all foamy.’”
The other four at the table all looked puzzled.
“The point she was making is you can’t ever do any harm to someone who trusts you and really loves you.”
END
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