“I’ve some hot coffee here, sir,” said Richards.
“Murder!” Cain said. “Why don’t you go away, my good man?”
“I’m sorry to have disturbed you, sir, but Mrs. Stoddard is most anxious to see you.”
“Mrs. Stoddard!” Vaguely Cain began to remember things. “Where’s Carol?”
“Miss Carol went out, sir, shortly after Miss Reed left.” Richards cleared his throat. “She said to tell you, sir, she thought you had chosen an inopportune moment to … uh … become inebriated, sir.”
Cain opened one eye. “What the hell!” he said. “Full of warmth and sympathy, that gal. Where did she go, Richards?”
“I can’t say, sir.”
“How long have I been here?” Cain asked.
“Exactly two hours and-thirteen minutes, sir.”
“Oh, my God!”
“Miss Carol and, I carried you up here, sir. Miss Carol managed your feet.”
“And big they are, too,” said Cain. He sat up again and swung those feet over the side of the bed, reckless of whether his head came off or not. “As I recollect it, Richards, I am a very smart guy. I went to ask certain questions of some people and I thought it was a subtle idea to let them get high before I turned on the screws. The objective was not reached. It seems you have to know vodka intimately or not at all.”
“It is treacherous stuff, sir,” said Richards. “If you would try some of this coffee?”
Cain looked at the electric percolator which was bubbling on the night table. He drew a deep breath. “Start pouring,” he said.
It was all clear in his head now. He remembered Margo’s bitter accusation; Carol’s protest; add Emily standing white and silent by the center table. He remembered his own Minsky entrance and winced.
He got down two cups of Richards’ coffee, and then retired to the bathroom where he stood under the cold shower until his teeth were chattering. After a rubdown he put on bathrobe and slippers and went back into the bedroom.
“Light a cigarette for me, will you, Richards? My good hand is doing the shaking for two.”
“Yes, sir.”
Cain sat down on the edge of the bed and inhaled cigarette smoke. “Were you here when Miss Reed came this afternoon.
“Yes, sir. I let her in,” Richards said.
“How did she act?”
“I thought she seemed upset, sir. It wasn’t surprising considering all things, sir.”
“Did you hear what went on between her and Mrs. Stoddard?”
Richards’ face went blanker than usual. “Naturally not, sir.”
“Just between pals,” said Cain. “Not any of it?”
“Not any of it, sir.”
“Did any of the rest of the servants?”
“Positively not, sir.”
“You’re not very helpful, Richards.”
“I’m sorry; sir. If you’ll pardon me for reminding you, sir, Mrs, Stoddard is waiting in the library.”
Cain sighed. “Okay,” he said.
2
Emily Stoddard was alone in the library when Cain went down a few minutes later. She was sitting at the desk in the corner and she had already covered several sheets of notepaper with her precise handwriting. The scratching of her pen stopped as he came in.
“I trust you’re feeling better, Mr. Cain,” she said.
For the first time Cain saw something in her he admired. It was pride. Cain was a sucker for the old head-held-high-in-the-face-of-adversity stuff. He saw her with a new interest, too. There had been nothing visible between her and Edgar to make Cain think that once they had been in love, that once they might have held hands together under the moon. Edgar had money and Emily had married him and taken over the running of the show. Cain had wondered if even Carol wasn’t Emily’s concession to Edgar’s wish for a ‘home.’
Now there was something else. Here was a woman, apparently bound by convention, who had had a love affair of such proportions that she had run the risk of putting down what she felt in letters. And yet she faced Cain squarely, without flinching. He liked her for it.
“I’m sorry about taking a dive,” said Cain.
“I don’t suppose you did it intentionally,” Emily said, “and under other circumstances I shouldn’t have disturbed you now. But I am worried about Carol.”
Cain frowned. “I don’t get it.”
“Do you remember anything of what happened when you first got home, Mr. Cain?”
“Too much,” said Cain. “By the way, was there any truth in what Margo said?”
“That I murdered Bill and Arthur?” There was no hesitation as she mentioned Summers’ name. “Not any. But she’s gone to Bradley with it.”
“And the other?”
“There were letters,” she said, deliberately avoiding a direct answer. “That is what concerns me. You see, Mr. Cain, Margo found three of those letters. I wrote several dozen.”
“Oh, boy!” said Cain.
“Carol is convinced that if Arthur kept any of them he must have kept them all. She insists on making an effort to get them back.”
“Where did she go?” Cain asked.
“I have no idea. But I am unwilling that she should involve herself. I thought perhaps if you would talk to her … ”
“Look here,” Cain said, “what about you and Summers?”
She didn’t waver. “Arthur and I have been very close for a number of years.”
“Before Margo?” Cain asked.
‘Before Margo,” said Emily coolly, “and since.”
“You were in love with him?”
“If I told you that I wasn’t you wouldn’t believe it,” she said.
Cain blinked. “All I can suggest, Mrs. Stoddard, is that this isn’t the best time in the world to split hairs.”
“I’m not attempting to,” Emily said. She looked down at her clasped hands. “I have never been in love with any man but Edgar. And I lost him.”
“But the letters,” Cain said.
“I doubt if you’d understand what happens to a woman when she finds the man she loves has shut a door between her and him. I blame myself for Edgar’s attitude. I was a fool with stupid, small ambitions. When I discovered they were stupid and small it was too late.”
“Maybe not,” said Cain. “But we have to deal with facts, Mrs. Stoddard. Facts which Margo has told the police.”
“I know,” Emily said. “I have been writing a letter to Edgar to explain because I expert Bradley to arrest me. The whole story will be in the newspapers.”
“Which is?”
She gave him a look which suggested she doubted the use of telling him. But she went ahead. “I drove Edgar into making a life for himself without me,” she said. “I thought I wanted social position and power more than anything else. When I met Arthur through the Beethoven Society here so New York, he saw what I lacked and offered it to me. I helped him with his work and had a hand in building his career. What it was too late for me to do for Edgar. I was flattered and I grew fond of him. But I was never in love with him.” She lifted her chin a little higher. “There was never any more than that, Mr. Cain.”
“Well, I’ll be damned!” Cain said.
“Arthur filled a desperate need in my life,” Emily continued. “Other women flattered him, catered to him. There were plenty of them. What he wanted was affection and companionship on his own intellectual level. We were in the habit of writing each other when we could not meet. That was all there was to it.”
“It sounds loopy,” Cain said, “but I’m damned if I don’t believe you.”
“But would Margo believe me if I told her? Even Carol has gone off quite convinced that I have lied. My only concern now is that Edgar must understand.”
“If he doesn’t already,” Cain said.
“What do you mean?” Emily’s voice was sharp.
“I’m just guessing,” Cain said. “But at the moment we’ve got to look at it from other angles, Mrs. Stoddard. Margo’s story will s
how Bradley you had a motive. He’s going to be on your neck. We’ve got to build up your defenses if we can. Isn’t there any way we can make your alibi for the time of Summers’ murder stick?”
“I’ve racked my brains,” Emily said, “to remember seeing someone who knew me while I was in the writing room at the Biltmore. But I can’t. I was trying to avoid people.”
“You haven’t bought any prussic acid or vitriol at any time?”
“Good heavens, no!”
“Has anyone ever brought either of those acids into the house?”
“Why should they?”
“Then there’s nothing very concrete Bradley can pin on you. But I don’t know if we can stop him from hounding you unless we can produce proof against the guilty person.” He took a cigarette from his pocket and lit it. “I’m going hunting again, Mrs. Stoddard. And this time no vodka.”
Cain went out into the hall. In the telephone closet he called police headquarters. After considerable argument he got himself connected with Bradley.
“How’s the detective business?” Cain said.
“I was about to ask the same thing,” Bradley said.
“You got visitors?”
“Miss Reed? Yes.”
“It’s the bunk,” Cain said. “Mrs. Stoddard turns out to be the reincarnation of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. It was all in the mind.”
“I can read,” said Bradley.
“But what does it get you?” Cain asked. “Look at Willkie! But I called to ask you if Carol is there.”
“Miss Stoddard? No.”
“Has she asked for you or Miss Reed?”
“No.”
“Well, she’s running around loose with ideas about playing detective herself. If any of your boys come across her, have them wrap her up and send her home.”
“You can count on it!” Bradley sounded grim. “And when she gets there, sit on her, will you?”
Cain got his hat from the hall table. He went out. He didn’t call a cab. Instead he walked part way down the block and turned up the alley to the garage. From the stove pipe in the side windowpane came a little ooze of smoke.
Cain dropped his cigarette on the stone flagging, stepped on it, and then knocked on the door. The lines at the corners of his mouth and eyes seemed to have grown deeper.
Chapter Seventeen
1
Edgar opened the door. He was holding a can of saddle soap in one hand and a fragment of sponge in the other. The musty, leathery smell, made into a hot blast by the heat from the pot-bellied stove, enveloped Cain.
“Oh, it’s you, Pat,” Edgar said. “Come in.”
A double-bitted bridle was hanging from the center bale hook. On the stool beside it was Edgar’s corncob pipe. The old man picked it up and began to puff.
“Drink?”
“No, thanks,” said Cain, with a slight shudder.
“I was hoping you might drop in,” Edgar said. “Had a hankering to talk to someone. Here, sit down on this stool.”
“Thanks.”
Edgar rubbed away on the bridle with a chamois. “Wondered what you’d been up to,” he said. “Knew you slept all morning. Thought maybe you’d come out here when you got stirring. Just up?”
“For the second time,” said Cain dryly. “I paid a call on the Rosokovs and managed to get stinking on vodka.”
“It creeps up on you,” Edgar said.
Cain said: “Creeps, hell! You haven’t been back to the house for the last two or three hours?”
“Nope,” said Edgar. “Been right here.”
“And nobody called on you?”
“Not a soul,” said Edgar. He smiled at Cain. “It isn’t everybody I encourage to visit me out here, Pat.”
“Margo paid a call on your wife,” Cain said, watching Edgar.
“Poor kid. Things are pretty tough for her. I hope the rumor that Summers left her fixed is on the level.”
Cain shifted his attack. “Edgar, you didn’t like Summers very much, did you?”
Edgar polished for a moment in silence. “He wasn’t my type, Pat. Knew his business; hard worker; but … how shall I put it? … his code of living was different from mine.”
“I remember you said that once before. Something about ‘No Trespassing’ signs,” Cain said.
“That’s right.”
“And I said if a guy couldn’t hold on to his own woman he had no one to blame but himself.”
Edgar looked across at Cain, his pale blue eyes narrowing. “What are you getting at, Pat?”
“How long have you known,” Cain asked, “that your wife and Summers … ”
“That will be enough!” Edgar said sternly.
Cain sat still, perched on the stool, smoking his cigarette. Edgar took the bridle off the bale hook and hung it on a wall bracket. Slowly he dried his hands on a piece of cloth.
“Where did you get hold of this?” he asked. His face had a bleak, tired look and the warmth had gone out of his voice.
“Margo,” said Cain. “There are letters.”
“Who has them?”
“Bradley, now.”
A long sigh escaped Edgar. “I didn’t know about the letters,” he said. “That makes it bad, doesn’t it?”
“I don’t know,” Cain said, “does it?”
Edgar’s eyebrows rose. “It means the whole thing becomes public.”
“Worse things could happen,” Cain said. “How long had you known?”
“From the beginning. Six … seven years.”
“And you just took it?”
“I just took it.”
“Why?”
“Emily and I had lost touch with each other, Pat. As long as it stayed in the poetic stage …” Edgar shrugged. “I might have done the same thing.”
“And if it hadn’t been poetic?”
Edgar knocked out his pipe in the old coffee tin. “I’d have put a stop to it,” he said.
“Did you?”
“Did I what?”
“Put a stop to it?”
“Oh, I see,” Edgar said. “Rather a nasty slant on things, haven’t you, Pat?”
“I’m just asking,” said Cain. “I’m trying to forget that I like you; that you’ve been swell to me. I’m trying to look at it like a cop.”
“And you think … ”
“That you protested your affection for Bill Brackett almost too earnestly. I think maybe Bill, in digging into the Egan business, found out about Summers and your wife. He was amused, he said. It would be amusing, wouldn’t it, to find that Mrs. Stoddard, who objected to him, was out on a limb herself? Perhaps he told you that it wouldn’t be smart to stand in the way of his marriage to Carol any longer.”
“You think Bill was a blackmailer?” Edgar asked.
“He might have been readly to use the weapon that came to hand to block Mrs. Stoddard’s opposition.”
“What has that got to do with me?’
“You knew about your wife and Summers. If there was danger of publicity you were ready to take action. No one would believe the story of a platonic love affair. Bill represented a threat and you got rid of him.”
“I see,” said Edgar.
“Summers got wise and realized he was in danger himself so he decided to spill the beans to Bradley.”
“So he let me talk with him alone; let me lead him out to the elevator shaft after he’d been blinded? Not too bright of him, do you think?”
Cain said: “That’s a nice point. Don’t forget to remind your lawyer of it.”
“Just where do you stand, Pat? Are you working to pin this on me?”
“No, I’m trying to make the facts fit.”
“And do they?”
“They might,” Cain said.
Edgar sighed again, and turned away toward an old corner cupboard. “I’m sorry you feel that way, Pat. Somehow I hoped that you would think things out without getting cluttered up with sensationalism.” He opened the cupboard door. “Ballast. That’s how I looked on y
ou. Everyone else hysterical. But I thought you’d use your head. I’m sorry I was wrong.”
He turned away from the cupboard. On the stool Cain held his breath. In Edgars hand was an automatic. It was pointed carelessly at Cain’s stomach.
2
“It won’t work,” Cain said. He scarcely recognized the sound of his own voice.
“What won’t work, Pat?”
“Guns tell stories, Edgar.”
Edgar looked at the automatic and then back at Cain. His eyes widened, “For God’s sake, Pat!” he said. The gun dropped on the work bench.
Cain raised his hand to his forehead. There were beads of cold perspiration there. Edgar hurried to him. “My dear boy!” he said. “I was only going to make a point. I only wanted to show you that I had a way of dealing with the situation. I cut my teeth on a gun in the west. For God’s sake, boy, I wouldn’t have messed around with poison or blinding people.”
Cain started to laugh. “And I thought you were going to blow my guts out!”
Edgar seemed more disturbed than Cain. The hand he rested on Cain’s arm was shaking. “I’m sorry, Pat. God almighty, you must have gone a long way toward convincing yourself about me.”
“I’ll tell you this, chum,” said Cain, still laughing, “when you pointed that gun at me I knew the answer!”
“I guess we’d better have a drink after all,” Edgar said.
He went to the window sill and brought back the pint of alleged Old Hickory.
“I never thought liquor would touch these lips again,” Cain said, “but here goes. I need it.” He raised the bottle and then handed it to Edgar, who wiped off the neck with his handkerchief, and also drank.
“God,” said Edgar, “the look on your face!”
“What you didn’t see,” said Cain, “was the look on my stomach! It was upside down!”
“Pat,” Edgar said, “to get back to the main show. This thing has always been marked a woman’s crime. You say Margo found letters from Emily to Summers. That she confronted Emily with them. How do you know she didn’t find them days ago?”
“I don’t.”
“Suppose she discovered that Summers was Lydia’s man. For her own pride she wouldn’t want Bill dishing that out. And then she learns that there were others besides Lydia and does for Summers, too. Now she wants to pin it on someone else. The letters give a lead to Emily. So she plays the part of righteous indignation. Doesn’t it fit?”
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