by Zenith Brown
If Elizabeth Darrell said any more or if Tom said anything, Jonas did not hear it. He was holding the phone, conscious eventually of the dial tone singing in his ear. When it started, how long it had been going on, he could not have told. The whole thing was a coup de foudre of another sort that left him utterly dazed.
Suddenly he came back to his senses, jammed the phone down on the cradle and got to his feet. He strode across the room, threw the door open and came to a halt. Her chair was empty. As he started for the hall door Martha, the maid, came around the stair landing.
“You looking for Miss Elizabeth?” she asked. “She gone. She flew outa here. Maybe her grandpa’s took worse again.”
“Thanks,” Jonas said. He reached the front door, pulled it open and stopped again.
Sergeant Digges was on the bottom step.
“Going some place, doctor?” he inquired pleasantly. “I’m afraid it’ll have to wait. It’s time you and me had a little talk.—it wasn’t anybody sick you were rushing off to see, was it, doctor?”
“No,” Jonas said.
Sergeant Digges followed him into his consulting room, pulled a chair up to the corner of the desk, sat down and put his hat on the floor.
“I didn’t think so. You don’t see doctors breaking their necks for sick people, these days, especially the young ones. Funny attitude they’ve—”
“Could we discuss the medical profession some other time, Sergeant?”
“We could, I expect.” Sergeant Digges crossed his legs and examined his shoe string with deliberation. “I’d like to do it now.—What I wanted to ask you was, how long would it take me to learn to take out somebody’s appendix?”
Jonas had picked up the newspaper to drop it in the waste-basket. He let it fall back on the desk.
“—Take out somebody’s… you… I don’t get it, Sergeant.” He did not try to keep the sharp edge of irritation out of his voice. “What’s the—”
“Me,” replied Sergeant Digges imperturbably. “Take out somebody’s appendix. Sort of shocks you, doesn’t it? Well, it sort of shocks me when some young squirt prances in and starts doing my job instead of leaving it to me. I sort of figure my job takes training too, and experience, and a certain amount of knowledge. And what you’d call technique, and equipment—like you’ve got in there.”
He nodded toward Jonas’s small laboratory and storage cupboard.
“Just for instance, now. That gun somebody stuck in Grymes’s hand. I guess whoever did it didn’t stop to figure the difference in the fingerprints a live and a dead man’s hand makes. Or remembered that nobody ever handled a gun and left it all shined up except for one set of post-mortem prints. Even my kid knows you can’t put a gun in a dead hand the way a live one would take hold of it.”
Sergeant Digges regarded Jonas tranquilly a moment.
“Before you start cutting a person open, you find out what his history is, and try to get some kind of a background picture to go on, don’t you, doctor?”
“Of course.”
“Okay. How much did you find out about this fellow that was killed out there?”
Jonas smiled patiently. “I’ve told you, Sergeant. I never—”
“Okay. You never saw him before. Did you know he was thirty-four years old, a physical 4-F so the draft never got him? Or that he worked for a publicity firm, public relations specialist, they call themselves?”
Jonas shook his head.
“Not that that’s important, except you’re apt to wonder why a fellow that lived out in California had to come here to get somebody to kill him, in a place not many people know him. Now, take that gun again. When you got started figuring things out, doctor, what did you find out about it?”
“I… nothing,” Jonas said curtly.
“Maybe we ought to pool our information, then, doctor.” Sergeant Digges could not have been more dead-pan. He reached in his pocket and brought out a telegram. “When you don’t have facilities to do your job, you go to a hospital. We go to the FBI or some other place that maybe has what we need and don’t have. This is from the Los Angeles County Police. The Grymes boys were born and raised out there, and out there they register guns and issue permits to carry them. This one was registered in 1938 and a permit issued. It’s the one that killed this fellow, all right.”
Sergeant Digges looked steadily at Jonas.
“And would you know who registered it, and who the permit was issued to?”
“Gordon Darcy, I presume,” Jonas said.
Sergeant Digges shook his head. “No, doctor. Not Gordon. It was Franklin, doctor. Franklin C. Grymes. Gordon Darcy Grymes’s brother. In 1938.”
Jonas thought quickly. He had a vision of Agatha Reed’s pleading tear-stained face and her sudden passion in defense of the man she was engaged to marry.
“That doesn’t necessarily mean Franklin Grymes still had it. He could have given it to his brother, or something. That’s a long time ago.”
Sergeant Digges nodded. “He could have, I expect. Only, he got into a little trouble, and spent one night as the guest of the Los Angeles County Police and his permit was revoked. That was in January, 1940. Franklin Grymes came to Baltimore to work for his uncle in the Old Foundry in August, 1940. Gordon Grymes stayed out there and got a job with these publicity people. According to Franklin’s story, he hasn’t seen his brother since then—not until Saturday night.”
Jonas shook his head. “I give up, Sergeant. I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m all balled up.”
“No reason for being balled up, doctor. All I’m saying is that the gun we found out there on the floor of the Milnors’ cottage was registered and owned by Franklin Grymes.”
His eyes still rested steadily on Jonas’s.
“And there’s another little item of information I might as well give you, doctor. Except I was sort of thinking of keeping it to surprise you with some time.”
“What’s that?”
Jonas did not mean to speak as quickly as he did. A sudden alert gleam shone in the sergeant’s eyes for an instant. He relaxed into his complacent amiability again.
“Well, if you’re real anxious to hear, and in case you don’t know already, I’ll tell you.”
He fished in his pocket for a second telegram.
“This is from the FBI in Washington, I expect you know they get fingerprints from police departments all over the country and keep ’em on file. Well, the night Franklin Grymes spent in the L. A. County Jail they took his—routine stuff if you get in trouble and go to jail. So, the FBI’s got ’em. We sent ’em this gun Gordon Grymes was killed with, and the liquor glass on the table, and the silver flask out of his pocket. And just to do the job right, we sent ’em the dead man’s fingerprints too. They’re all the same, all identical. And the funny part of it is, they don’t belong to Gordon Grymes. They belong to his brother Franklin.”
Sergeant Digges paused a moment, regarding Jonas intently.
“If that gets you all balled up, doctor, I’ll put it the other way. The fellow that was shot and killed out there at the Milnors’ wasn’t Gordon Darcy Grymes. He’s Franklin Grymes—the guy that got arrested and got his permit to carry the gun revoked in 1940. And the fellow up at the Old Foundry in Baltimore is not Franklin Grymes… he’s Gordon Darcy Grymes.—Surprises you, doctor. Leaves you all of a heap, doesn’t it, doctor?”
CHAPTER 16
“—That surprises you, doctor?”
For a long two minutes, Jonas Smith M.D. said nothing at all. He sat in a virtual state of suspended animation, staring stupidly across his desk, trying mechanically to make up his mind whether what he thought he had heard Sergeant Digges say was what Sergeant Digges had in fact said.
What he thought he had heard him say was that the body he had seen in the Milnors’ cottage out at Ardundel Creek was the body of Franklin Grymes. That w
as so completely cockeyed he must have made some mistake. But Sergeant Digges was sitting there, looking at him with a kind of triumphant glaze over his alert hard-bitten countenance. There seemed to be no doubt he had said it, and moreover that he meant it.
“I thought maybe it would surprise you,” Sergeant Digges said quietly.
“Surprise me?”
The word was understatement to a comic degree. Jonas laughed mirthlessly.
“It really does, Sergeant. In fact it surprises the hell out of me—so much I don’t believe a word of it. It… it can’t be true, that’s all. Are you… sure about it?”
Sergeant Digges nodded.
“Fingerprints don’t lie, doctor. They’re the one witness we ever get that doesn’t—consciously or unconsciously, it doesn’t matter. They’re the only one I’d ever trust absolutely.”
He sat there, looking steadily at Jonas across the desk. “Well, doctor?”
“Don’t say well to me, for God’s sake.”
Jonas tried again to stagger out of the bewildered daze it had left him in.
“Don’t ask me—tell me. It just doesn’t make any sense that I can see. You really mean it wasn’t Gordon Darcy Grymes that was out at the Milnors’? It was his brother Franklin. And it’s Gordon, not Franklin, who’s up in Baltimore right now?”
If he stated it himself, he was thinking, perhaps he could get it straightened out.
“That’s it, doctor. That’s exactly what I’m telling you. I thought maybe you’d be able to help me figure it out, you seem to be on such good terms with the widow and the fiancée, or the fiancée and the widow… one or the other. I thought maybe you might know which is which, and what various people are up to, and why.”
Jonas shook his head, silently, and kept on shaking it.
“You’re sure, doctor?”
“Absolutely.”
Jonas took a deep breath. “Look, Sergeant. I tell you again I don’t know any of these people. This just doesn’t make any sense that I can see.”
“It doesn’t to me either—not right now. But it will.”
Sergeant Digges reached for his hat and got to his feet.
“I’m going to take your word for it—for the time being, that is.”
He put his hat on the back of his head and moved toward the door.
“I don’t know where you fit in, in all this, doctor. Up until I got these telegrams, I figured it was plain sailing. I was going to come here and put all the cards down. You could take it or leave it—quit all this stalling around or go to jail. I’m not say-saying that isn’t where you’ll wind up tomorrow morning. But right now I’ve got this on my mind, and until I get it off I’m not bothering with you any more.”
Jonas nodded. “I know. All you’re going to do is dog my tracks. Don’t try to fool me, Sergeant. But be a little more careful, will you? I get nervous at night. I don’t like people prowling around my back yard listening to my conversations. Next time come in and join us, will you? Miss Van Holt was here as a friend, not a patient. Nothing private or confidential. See what I mean?”
Sergeant Digges looked at him for a moment. He smiled faintly.
“Okay, doc. I’ll remember that. I guess I must be slipping.”
He put his hand on the door knob.
“One other thing,” he said deliberately. “I’m not joking, doctor.”
Jonas got to his feet. He had no doubt of it.
“What is it, Sergeant?” he asked soberly.
“What I’ve just told you about the Grymes brothers is strictly in the lodge. I want you to understand that. I thought I wasn’t going to tell you. Then I decided I’d like to give you a break, if it happened you were getting tangled up with the wrong people… just to let you know there’s no hard feelings as far as I’m personally concerned. If I don’t hang you I might need you myself if I got real sick some night. Right now, I’m telling you to keep your trap shut. You understand?”
“I understand. You needn’t worry.”
“Okay. And that goes for all your lady friends whatsoever. Get it?”
“I get it,” Jonas said.
“All right. Now get along wherever it was you were going. But stick around Annapolis, doc. I might want to see you later. So long.”
“So long, Sergeant.”
Jonas stood where he was for several minutes. He heard the Sergeant speak to Martha and Roddy in the front hall. The door closed as he left the house, Martha and Roddy went back to the kitchen. He registered it all automatically in the periphery of his mind, absorbed in trying mentally to arrange everything. He felt a little the way the atomic experts must have felt when they set up their first chain reaction and saw where it had landed them. The shot Jenny Darrell had fired had certainly set one up. Who else the final blast was going to sear was a question that Jonas Smith could ask but not conceivably answer. There were other questions… so many that it was as if all the rats in Christendom had gathered and his mind was precisely where they were staging the big race.
—What were the sweepstakes in the grand switcheroo, Jonas Smith thought… when was it made, and how, and why? Did Jenny think she was out with Gordon Grymes when she was really with Franklin? And above all, where did this leave Miss Philippa Van Holt? It was fantastic. The whole thing was so utterly fantastic that every question he asked himself instead of clearing anything up made it more of a jungle growth of entanglement and utter confusion. He was tangled up, he was confused, he was dizzy in the head. Whatever any of it was, whatever it could possibly mean, the only point of contact he had out of which he felt he ought to be able, somehow, to make a reasonable judgment of some sort was the unhappy scene he’d been present at in Miss Olive’s Papa’s sanctum in the little yellow brick house on St. John’s Street the day before. It was more bewildering now than it had been then. He recalled Philippa’s outburst of venomous animosity before she ran out of the room and up the stairs, and Franklin Grymes’s—or was it Gordon’s—collapse into frenzied despair. But it still didn’t make sense. On the other hand . . .
Jonas straightened his shoulders and shook his head to clear the snarled-up cobwebs out of it. He was getting the blast end of the chain reaction mixed up with the initial step that set it into being. The solid inexorable and irrevocable fact was that a man was dead and Jennifer Darrell had killed him. It didn’t make any difference—except to him—whether his name was Gordon, Franklin or George B. Patapsco. Whatever his name, he was still dead. If the tangent Sergeant Digges was off on led straight into the hornet’s nest it seemed to be leading into, it was only a question of time when it would lead back again. Nothing had changed. Nothing except his own moral position. And that, it was not easy to justify.
He thought about Agatha Reed. It wasn’t right to let anyone who was innocent of murder get caught in the meshes of the kind of publicity net Agatha was already being tripped up with. He looked at his watch. It was thirteen minutes to twelve. Elizabeth would be on her way to see Tom in Bancroft Hall before noon meal formation. He didn’t want to stop her from seeing him, because after all if she could make him tell the Superintendent the truth when he saw him that afternoon, they might take back the book he’d said they had to throw at him. They wouldn’t kick a boy out of the United States Naval Academy for putting his sister’s honor and safety above the rules and regulations. The rules and regulations had not been broken by Midshipman Tom Darrell for the first and only time in the history of the Academy. Plenty of flag officers, if not actually the one Tom would see that afternoon, had frenched out over the wall in their midshipman days without destroying either themselves or the United States Navy.
And now they—Elizabeth, Tom, Jenny, himself—were faced with a serious problem in moral values. No matter which Grymes brother was which or what they had done that the one remaining alive in Baltimore was so frantically anxious to conceal, the unalterable fact was that he had not k
illed the other one at the Milnors’ cottage. If, in order to prove that, he had to face the ruin he and Agatha so desperately maintained he did, it seemed to Jonas that maybe he’d been right in the beginning, and Jenny had been right in wanting to make a clean breast of the whole thing. The chain reaction Jenny had set up so far killed one man, given another a stroke that miraculously hadn’t killed him or paralyzed him for life. It was on the point of ruining her brother’s career, getting him kicked out of the Service in disgrace two weeks before he graduated. It was ruining the other Grymes, wrecking Agatha Reed’s life; it had made a widow out of Philippa Van Holt. It was a sobering thought to realize how a seventeen-year-old’s inexperience and lack of emotional security could affect so many adult lives.
Including, Jonas reflected, his own. Which brought him back to Elizabeth Darrell. She could tell Tom anything she liked, and he could make his own decision, but there was one thing she had to know. She had to know that he was not in love with Philippa Van Holt. It was the one important thing in Jonas Smith’s life just then, a driving impulse he had to fulfill.
“If I don’t tell her, I’ll go nuts,” he thought. It was stupid, it could wait. Yet he knew very well it could not wait. He had to tell her before she saw Tom. He had to save all of them from that one error at any event—and because he was in love it seemed an error of the most overwhelming magnitude. And if he hurried, he could intercept her.
He did hurry, but he would have hurried more effectively if he had left his car at home.
“Are you from in town, sir?” The guard at the Main Gate stopped him politely but firmly. “You’ll have to park outside the Yard.”