“Picturesque interlude,” Fergus observed. “Now just what do you think that means?”
“Simple enough,” Rand said. “He’s jealous of Vinton. Seeing him and Kay together again got on his nerves. So he got stinking drunk and made a damned fool of himself. It needn’t mean any more than that.”
But Jackson had picked up the newspaper and was studying it. “It’s this morning’s paper,” he said, “and folded to the theatrical section. What that could—Just a minute. Here’s a paragraph marked.” He read slowly.
The creditors of what screen juvenile are rejoicing at his arrest on suspicion of murder, because the publicity will mean the formerly very doubtful renewal of his contract.
Fergus whistled. “I thought our little Richard was big time.”
“You never can tell. Once you start slipping, you slip fast. This is a shrewd point; if he’s cleared of all blame and scandal, the publicity should make him an invaluable property to his studio. A while ago this extra motive, if you can call it that, might have helped us; now it’s just a nuisance. The fingerprints clear him on Garnett, and he couldn’t possibly have killed Willowe.”
“But it does show,” Rand put in, “that Harding is exceedingly anxious to incriminate him.”
“Yes …”
“But to get back to the facts of death,” Fergus broke in. “Look, Andy. You were going to tell us about the will.”
“Yes. As I was starting to say, there were two codicils. One was made two years ago—just after Alicia Garnett’s death in the accident. It canceled the legacy to Arthur Willowe, and turned that ten thousand dollars over to Will Harding for purposes of research.”
“And the other?”
“That was made about a year ago. It leaves twenty thousand dollars in a trust fund to Camilla Sallice, on the condition that she goes on with her singing studies.”
“Anything else to tell us?”
“Minor routine items. There isn’t any doubt, for instance, that the poison was administered to Garnett in that highball. We analyzed the few drops left in the glass. And about that glass—there are smudges, probably glove marks, over Vinton’s fingerprints, which was to be expected. And those fingerprints—which is another thing that made us suspicious of a frame—are exceptionally clear—much more so than you’d expect from a casual handling—even show a portion of the palm which we can identify by the pore markings.”
“Anything more on Willowe’s death?”
“We’ve identified the needle roughly. It’s the same as several that are stuck in a pincushion on Miss Garnett’s dressing table. I suppose anybody could have slipped into her room and taken it. One needle out of six or eight wouldn’t be missed.”
“Of course. All pretty inconclusive, isn’t it?”
Jackson shrugged. “So far, I admit. But remember we’re still working. I won’t say the Los Angeles police always Get Their Man, but we don’t do so badly. Now let’s hear what you’ve found out.”
Rand leaned back and watched the smoke of his cigar while Fergus told the results of their endeavors—Garnett’s secret researches, Harding’s violent pacifism, Willowe’s false premonition, Warriner’s theories and eccentricities, the secret of Camilla Sallice, and the possible double meaning of Hector.
Lieutenant Jackson listened with sharp interest. “So,” he observed as Fergus paused. “You’ve done good work. Is that all?”
Fergus nodded. “That’s all. Now have you any questions to ask—of me or anybody else—before I go on to explain who was the murderer?”
Jackson frowned. “Aren’t you going a little fast, Fergus? Or is this one of the famous O’Breen ribs?”
“I know. You think I’m bluffing. Well, I’m not. I’m perfectly ready to explain the whole thing right here and now. But look. You know me, and you know I’m young and Irish. That means I’m theatrical. So how’s about helping me out?”
“How so—helping you out?”
“Call this gang together and let me expound my solution—with all the trimmings and cranberry sauce. You know: Tent ‘em to the quick; if they but blench, I’ll know my cause. Not that I need that, but it does make things picturesque.”
The Lieutenant looked at him for a puzzled moment. Then he grinned. “All right, Fergus. It’s a tomfool idea, and I’ve got a terrible fear that you might make an idiot of yourself. But go ahead, so long as it’s understood that this is strictly unofficial.”
“Thanks, Andy. For a minute I was afraid that you were going to go all stern and hardboiled on me.”
But the Lieutenant looked stern enough as it was. “Wait a minute; let me get this off my chest first. Don’t go getting any ideas in your cracked Irish pot that I’m one of these obliging police detectives out of stories that are only too too happy to sit back and stooge for the brilliant young investigator. I want to crack this case. I know your record and I think maybe you can help me, even if you do pick a damned queer way of going about it. But any funny business out of you, and you’re going to wind up in the can, basketball or no basketball. And you might find some trouble in getting your license renewed. Understand me?”
“I get it.”
“That’s OK then. Now who do you want for this grand finale?”
“The whole kit and kaboodle.” Fergus ticked them off on his lean fingers. “The three of us, of course. Kay. The Sallice chick. Harding, if we can sober him up. Vinton. Might as well drag in Farrington if we can get hold of him.”
“He’s here now. Came out with Vinton. Anybody else?”
“Warriner. And I think that about washes up the list. Complete cast of characters.”
Complete minus two, Rand reflected. He wished intensely that those two might also be present; he would give a great deal to see how Humphrey Garnett’s brilliantly intricate mind would cope with the macabre problem of his own death.
“Warriner?” Jackson repeated questioningly.
“The curator,” Fergus added.
“Oh yes. He was here earlier on the night of Garnett’s death, I remember. But he can’t have had anything—”
“Just the same, I want him.”
“What am I supposed to do? Send out a dragnet for him?”
Fergus looked as though he had stepped through a curtain which suddenly turned into a brick wall. “You mean he’s not here?”
“Why should he be? He’s out of the question in this investigation. We haven’t—”
“I know your Cerberus at the door didn’t see him, but I thought after all—I mean, my car—” He stopped abruptly. That story, he seemed to be thinking, mightn’t help much to bolster his reputation with the Lieutenant. “I guess it’s not really necessary,” he said slowly. “Can you round up the others for me?”
“That’s simple enough. They’re all right here in the house.”
“Fine.”
“And where were you planning on holding your séance?”
“The sun porch. Light and freedom. Clear thinking. Daylight and champaign discovers not more.’ And when an O’Breen quotes Shakespeare, Andy, that means, in classical language, that all hell is about to bust loose.” His natural exuberance was recovering from the shock of Warriner’s absence; but the frown was not quite gone from his forehead.
Rand puffed his cigar in quiet confusion. Like the Lieutenant, he feared that Fergus was being overconfident—that his impetuous Irish brilliance was leading him to a rash promise which he might find it difficult to fulfill. Surely on this contradictorily insufficient and oversufficient evidence, and immediately on top of the still unsolved Warriner fiasco …
“There’s just one thing,” Fergus was saying, “that bothers me. It isn’t vital, I’m certain. It can’t be; everything else hangs together too neatly. But I don’t like loose ends.”
“Neither do I,” Jackson commented drily. “Neither does a jury.”
“It isn’t anything as important as that. It’s just my endless curiosity. What I want to know is—who was in Garnett’s laboratory last night. You’ve
heard about that?”
“I have. And that’s one of the things I was waiting to hear you explain.”
Fergus paced softly. “At first I had it figured this way: Everything else in the case points to somebody inside this household; and here’s one bit of evidence that says: Aha, an intruder from without! What does that suggest to you?”
“One of the people here trying to throw suspicion onto an outsider.”
“And that’s what I thought too. But there were only two men in this house at that time, and both of them are perfectly alibied—Willowe by Kay Garnett and Harding by me. And the Colonel swears it must have been a man. If I could solve that little point …”
Colonel Rand roused himself. “If that is all that is holding you back, O’Breen, I think that I might help you. Our unknown intruder was a gentleman named Roger Dalrymple.”
“It’s against all the rules,” Fergus groaned in desperation. “A new character at this hour!”
Jackson was less esthetic and more practical. “But according to what I was told, sir, you claimed after the scuffle that you were unable to identify him?”
The Colonel went “harrumph” and made rather a show of lighting his cigar; he didn’t care to receive the spotlight of attention like this. “I have had occasion,” he announced, “to meet up with Mr. Dalrymple once or twice before in my military career, and I recall especially his individual manner of fighting, which was learned anywhere save on the playing fields of Eton. But despite the foul blow which I received in last night’s struggle, I was not certain until today. Then it came to me in an instantaneous flash.”
“But why?”
With a complete lack of theatrical affectation, Rand paused to knock the overlong ash from his cigar. “You see,” he said, “you gentlemen know this individual as Maurice Warriner.”
XXI
A Room Is Sealed
Colonel rand disliked strained metaphors, but this one suggested itself to him with irresistible force: Fergus snatched the bit out of the Colonel’s very mouth and ran full tilt away with it.
“Of course!” he cried. “You and I, Andy, are damned downright idiots, and our staunch military friend here is a sturdy Gibraltar of perspicacity.” He paused for a moment, as though to contemplate the audacity of his own idiom, then plunged ahead. “It was all so damned obvious. The man was overplaying every minute. He was just too wildly eccentric to be credible. The snuff and the erudition and the quotations from the lesser Elizabethans—it all had to be a gag, a performance played just a couple of inches beyond the hilt. You can see him saying to himself, ‘Now how can I create a vivid and eccentric character?’ And then, by God, he went ahead and did it, and we swallowed it whole.”
Jackson made an authoritative bid for quiet. “Speak for yourself, Fergus. You’re entitled to call yourself an idiot as much as you please; but remember I never saw this man. I didn’t have any chance to draw these startling deductions you feel that ‘we’ should have made. And now if you please, Colonel, I’d like to know just who this Dalrymple is, and how you finally recognized him.”
“Roger Dalrymple,” Rand said quietly, “is what a reader of sensational fiction might call an international spy—a free-lance secret agent. I have no means of knowing which foreign power commands his invaluable services at the moment; his loyalty has always belonged to the highest bidder. But I am certain that it was the secret of Humphrey Garnett’s two gases, and that of the poison gas in particular, which he was seeking.”
“Then all that rumpus in the laboratory,” Fergus interrupted, “must have been just a ruse to draw Harding and me out of the study so he could get at the desk. What a break for us that Harding had those notes in his pocket all the time!”
“But I still don’t see how you can be certain,” Jackson objected. “If you failed to recognize him at the time—”
“When I think of his hands,” Fergus groaned, “I could tear up my license. They were lithe and strong—far and away too young for the rest of his body. And how he would forget his stoop sometimes, and the way he insisted on Harding’s guilt—you can see how it would have suited his plans to get the assistant out of the way.”
“All those things bothered me,” the Colonel said. “And then this afternoon I saw him in a good light from the rear. He was walking erect; and no matter how effective the rest of your getup is, you can’t disguise a back short of a hump. Involuntarily I called out, ‘Dalrymplel’”
“So that’s what started it all,” Fergus muttered.
“All what?”
Briefly the Colonel told of the pursuit of Dalrymple-Warriner, while Fergus looked duly abashed.
“But it was ingenious,” the young Irishman said as the Colonel concluded the story. “That alibi about dope, I mean. Admitting to one vice to hide another—”
Wordlessly Colonel Rand drew the enameled snuffbox from his pocket and laid it on the desk, where the reaping skeleton grinned up at the Lieutenant.
“This his?” Jackson asked.
“I picked it up after this morning’s scuffle.”
Jackson opened the box and looked at its powdered contents. Gingerly he sniffed, then with infinite caution touched a minute pinch of the dust to his tongue. “This,” he pronounced carefully, “is, as far as I can make out, the purest Copenhagen snuff.”
Fergus swore with quiet fervor. “And all of us being so nice to the dear old man and respectfully asking his advice on technical card problems. … Though come to think of it, we can rely on what he said about such things. He must have boned up on that subject and damned well, too; his act worked with Garnett, and God knows he would have tripped him up if anything had sounded phony.”
“This alters the whole case,” Jackson said decisively. “With a known professional criminal at large, we can’t he too careful. He may not realize as yet that he’s been spotted, despite his recent scare; we might still catch him as Warriner. And if not, can you give me, Colonel, a description of Roger Dalrymple that I can send out?”
“One moment, Lieutenant.” Rand hesitated. “If you do find him, what charges can you hold him on?”
Jackson paused. “That’s right. You know his past record, but we don’t have any direct evidence of his present subversive activities. It isn’t as though he’s succeeded in nabbing the plans he was after. We might have him on breaking and entering, though I don’t know how well your identification would hold up under good cross-examination. At least we can detain him as a material witness; that’ll cut off his activities for a while, and in the meantime something may turn up that will pin the murders on him—though God knows why he should want to get rid of Willowe.”
The Colonel shook his head. “I know his nature from the past, Lieutenant. Roger Dalrymple never kills. His is the fouler treason which butchers our country’s men by the thousand—never the simpler, cleaner crime which destroys but one.”
“That’s as may be, sir; but even professional criminals change their habits occasionally. There’s no telling what circumstances may force them to do. Now if you’ll give me that description—”
Fergus and Rand exerted their best efforts, but the task seemed hopeless. If the man was so ingenious at impersonation, it seemed in the highest degree unlikely that he could be found under any description which they might give. What bothered Rand most was the presence of the yellow roadster in front of the Garnett house. Dalrymple, on escaping from them, had driven directly here. And after that—?
Had he, Rand pondered, intended one last desperate attempt to secure the plans, only to abandon it when he noticed that the police had once more taken over the house? If so, why had he left the car? Was it a nose-thumbing gesture toward Fergus or simply a logical desire to get rid of an encumbrance that might be too easily traced? And where had he gone from here? The forgotten song of the World War began to course through Rand’s attempts at reasoning: Oh boy, oh joy, where do we go …
“One more thing.” Jackson set down the telephone, through which he had been issu
ing his orders for the search for Warriner-Dalrymple. “With a man like that on the loose, I’m going to do what should have been done two days ago. I’m going to seal up that laboratory. I locked it this morning with Garnett’s key, but locks don’t mean very much to a professional. This is going to be a thorough job, and if there’s any tampering going on, we’ll know about it in time to head off the consequences.”
Fergus muttered something about stable doors; it was fortunate, Rand reflected, that Jackson seemed not to hear it.
Number One was dispatched to seal the windows from the outside, while the Lieutenant and his two new allies went down the long hall to the dead man’s laboratory, which grew like a parasite around the rear of the house. As from a parasite, too, there issued from, this room an evil power which was slowly draining the life of this household. To Rand, there was something foully wrong about poison. You couldn’t fight it; there was no sense of combat. It was worse than a bullet in the back. He would be profoundly glad to see this laboratory of death sealed away for ever.
“I’ll be damned,” Jackson exclaimed.
The laboratory door, which he had carefully locked so recently, now stood wide open. Inside they could see Will Harding, puttering aimlessly about among rows of glass objects.
“Of course,” the Lieutenant went on. “He must have his own key; I should have allowed for that. And in the state he’s in, he might do anything. Hardingl”
The assistant turned, a beaker in his hand and a nebulous smile on his face. Cautiously he wobbled toward the door. “Sh!” he said. “They’re playing games. Nice games. Mating games. Mustn’t peek!”
The Case of the Crumpled Knave Page 14