“Well, Mr. Duluth, I’ve made a thorough mess of the whole thing, but it’s good to see you at last.”
I had anticipated danger and Halliday. I had anticipated uneventfulness and Mr. Brand. But I had never expected surprise.
And that is what I felt—sheer, undiluted surprise.
Because the man in front of me was Mr. Johnson, the bridegroom from Yucatan.
XXII
The smile, although apologetic, had its old familiar sweetness. “I’m certainly relieved to see you. If I’d had any sense, this could have happened days ago. Come in.”
I hesitated on the threshold. In this affair, where everything sooner or later became something that it hadn’t been, it was reasonable enough that even the Yucatan bridegroom should fit into the pattern. But it seemed almost beyond belief that he, of all people, could be the uncle to whom Deborah had been so perilously fleeing.
He obviously read my thoughts. “I can see you don’t trust me. I suppose it must seem crazy that I’m Deborah’s uncle.” He jerked his head towards the apartment behind him. “You probably think I’ve got some sort of trap here for you. Why don’t we go out and get this thing straightened out in a bar or a café?”
His frankness, of course, could have been an act, but I didn’t think so. Besides, I had my gun. I said: “It’s all right here.”
“Good.” He turned and lumbered with his heavy athlete’s grace through a little hallway into a long, untidy room. I followed. A large desk, strewn with papers and little bottles, presumably containing metals or ores, stood by the window. A half-open door gave a glimpse into a room beyond.
“My workshop,” he said. “All the serious stuff’s done at the office. But I play around a bit here. I have a house out in the suburbs where my wife holds sway. This is just a hole-in-the-wall—my old bachelor hangout. Sit down.”
He indicated a worn blue-leather chair. I sat down and put the gabardine bag on the carpet at my feet. He moved around the desk and took the chair behind it.
“Of course, Mr. Duluth, looking back, I can see now exactly what poor Deborah must have done. But at the time I hadn’t the faintest idea that you were anything more than an innocent tourist.” He glanced at me almost suspiciously. “You do know what I’m talking about?”
“That Deborah was murdered,” I said, “for something she’d been bringing from Peru?”
He looked relieved. “Exactly.”
“Something to do with a mine, wasn’t it?”
He put his big hands on the surface of the desk and studied them. “I can see that Deborah confided in you.”
“She didn’t. I’ve just been picking it up as I went along—in between attempts on my life. Maybe you’d tell me the whole story. Oddly enough, by now I’m curious.”
His quick smile came again. “I don’t blame you.” He paused. “But first, you said on the phone you were bringing me something. You are, aren’t you? You have the book and the—sample.”
So I had been right about the jar of sunburn cream. “No. I haven’t got the book. Halliday’s got that. I haven’t the sample, if that’s what it is, either. But I can get it. It’s perfectly safe.”
He looked directly at me from his straight blue eyes. I couldn’t tell whether the news that the book was in Halliday’s possession was a blow or not. “And you are prepared to give it to me if I can satisfy you of my honesty?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Then I’d better tell you the story from the beginning. When you’ve heard it, I imagine you’ll be satisfied with my honesty.” His lips moved wryly. “I doubt whether you’ll be satisfied with my handling of the situation. I made a mess of it; but, then, I am an amateur in conspiracy. I’m afraid that fact had very tragic results.”
He offered me a cigarette from a box on the desk. I refused.
“It starts with my brother,” he said. “Joseph used to be a mining engineer, too. Then he got interested in archæology and gave everything else up. For the last fifteen years he’s lived down in South and Central America, Guatemala, Ecuador, Peru. Three or four months ago, Joseph and another man….”
“Frank Liddon,” I broke in, remembering the newspaper paragraph. “By the way, I read about your brother’s disappearance.”
He looked up, gravely. “You did? Yes, Joseph and Liddon took this expedition into the interior of Peru. It’s very wild country, miles from civilization. Joseph had a lead on an old Inca city. They never found it. But for quite a while they’ve been excavating around there. And then, about three weeks ago, I guess, Joseph, quite by chance, dug into this vein of ore. He was enough of a mineralogist to get excited, because he had a hunch that it might contain something of terrific value.” He watched me portentously across the desk. “He thought it might contain a high percentage of thorium.”
“Thorium,” I echoed, not registering.
“You don’t know what thorium is? It’s a sort of second cousin to uranium, but much rarer. Its value and political implications at the present time in our would-be atomic age can hardly be measured. Right away, Joseph realized the immense potential importance of the thing, and took every precaution to keep his discovery a secret. Although he’d worked with Liddon before and trusted him as an old friend, even to him he only hinted at what he might have found. Immediately, of course, he thought of me. During the war my firm worked very closely with the United States Government. We are still co-operating. He knew, if he could get all the information to me and if his guess was right, that through me the ultimte control of the area would get into the proper hands, because through me the United States Government and the Peruvian Government could work together.”
He lit a cigarette. “It might have been fairly plain sailing, but it wasn’t. Because just a short time before, another archæological expedition had arrived at the scene. It was organized by a group of which politically Joseph had a right to be dubious and, from little incidents, he began to suspect that the news, or at least enough of it to arouse curiosity, had leaked out. He couldn’t think how, but he was certain of it when a couple of days later there was a kidnap attempt on him.
I was listening intently now. “Another one?”
“Yes. It was clumsy. It didn’t come off. But it was enough to make him sure the other expedition was only a front for an intensive mining survey. And then Deborah, who’d been in college in Buenos Aires, showed up unexpectedly. She’d come on her vacation to visit her father. Joseph saw that it was terribly dangerous there for a girl, particularly his daughter, and decided to take care of the two problems at once. I don’t think he told Deborah much—just enough to make her appreciate the importance of the situation. He drew a rough sketch of the exact area of the vein in the back of a pocket novel. He gave it to her. He also gave her a sample of ore, and told her to come straight to me in New Orleans.”
There it was, fairly simple, much as I had figured it out on my walk through the quaintness of the Vieux Carré.
I had been right about stumbling into a war.
“But before Deborah left,” continued Mr. Brand, “a cable came in for Lidden from the nearest town to say that his brother was dying in the Argentine. He had to leave at once. It was only after both he and Deborah had gone that Joseph discovered, once again quite by accident, apparently, how the information had leaked out. He came across some paper—I don’t know what it was—but it proved that Liddon, in whom he had complete trust, had sold out to the other side. Liddon didn’t know everything, of course. He didn’t know the actual situation of the vein or exactly what it might contain, but he’d known enough. And, what was worse, he’d also known of Deborah’s mission to me.”
He leaned across the desk. “Joseph realized that they would do everything to keep her from getting the information to me. It was too late to warn her. So he drove in to the nearest telephone, called me and told me as much as I’m telling you. He was half crazy with worry for Deborah. I suggested the only thing I could think of. If they were after her, they’d probably try to pi
ck her up in New Orleans. I said I’d take the next flight to Merida, where she had to change planes, and escort her on from there.”
He shrugged ruefully. “That’s where I took over. And that’s where things started going seriously wrong.”
He stubbed his cigarette. “There was one bad difficulty. Deborah hadn’t been in the States since she was a child, and didn’t know what I looked like. The only thing she knew about me was that recently I’ve married a young Mexican girl. I decided, uselessly as it turned out, that I would take Lupe with me, partly to help Deborah to identify me, partly to make the whole expedition seem like an innocent vacation. I reached Merida in time. My wife and I were at the airport when Deborah’s plane from Balboa was due to arrive. That’s when the first thing went wrong. You see, I’d never seen Liddon. Didn’t have an idea what he looked like. The story of his dying brother in Argentina had, of course, been a fake. He was the man they had decided to send after Deborah. He was there at the airport in Merida to stop her.”
I saw it then. I had been suspecting it almost from the beginning of his story.
“Liddon,” I said, “is Halliday.”
William C. Brand nodded. “From there on I can only deduce what happened, but it’s pretty clear. Liddon must somehow have found out what I looked like. At any rate, he spotted me at the airport, and realized Joseph had discovered about him and got in touch with me. The moment Deborah left the plane, before I had even time to identify her, he had met her. Since she had complete trust in him as her father’s old friend, it was easy for him to fake some story. He must have told her that her father had sent him after her to warn her that an impostor posing as her uncle was waiting at the airport to kidnap her. Probably he told her the safest thing to do was to sneak out to Chichén-Itzá and wait for him while he took care of the impostor. His plan, of course, was to get her out there where she was trapped and kill her.”
I watched his worried, boyish blue eyes. It was all pitifully clear now. Deborah tricked into flying from the man who had come to save her, Deborah getting a ride from me, frightened of every car that followed, clinging to me for protection from an imaginary danger while the real danger was relentlessly catching up with her.
“You can guess the rest, Mr. Duluth. I missed her at the airport, but I managed to trace her to Chichén. By that time, however, she was hopelessly afraid of me. She never gave me or my wife a chance to be alone with her that first night.” He threw out his hands. “Almost before I realized there was any danger for her, Liddon had pushed her into the cenote.”
From then on I knew more about it than he. The figure outside Deborah’s window had been Liddon-Halliday. Obviously he had been making the date to meet her at the cenote, probably convincing her that her father wanted her to turn the book and the ore over to him, since the danger had become too great for a young girl. But he couldn’t have convinced her—not quite. Because she had left the jar of sunburn cream with me and, at the last minute, had given me the book, too. That had been it, of course. Deborah was shrewder than Liddon had thought, and began to suspect him. She had been smart not to hand over the mine information to him until she was surer of him—but not smart enough to have saved her own life.
Brand’s quiet voice was running on. “You’ll think I’m a prize sucker, but at first in Chichén I didn’t suspect murder. It was only later that I began to realize the man who called himself Halliday was probably Liddon. You I thought nothing of. I never dreamed Deborah had given you the book and the ore. I was sure Halliday had them. I realized the situation was too dangerous for my wife. I sent her home. When Mrs. Snood discovered me at the Reforma, I invented that hospital story. Since we’d posed as a bride and groom on honeymoon, I couldn’t very well tell the truth. From then on in Mexico”—he shrugged again—“I kept tracks on Halliday, hoping for a chance to get the stuff back from him. Needless to say, I was outsmarted on every side. And then yesterday I read in the newspaper that they had finally got Joseph in Peru. I knew they’d be doing everything to force the information out of him. It was no use chasing after Halliday any more. Things had become far too serious for that. I came back here and told the whole story to the proper authorities.”
“Then the Government knows everything now?”
Brand smiled his quick, disarming smile. “Yes, Mr. Duluth. At last this is in more competent hands than mine. They have already communicated with the Peruvian Embassy. The whole ring should be cleaned up pretty soon.” The smile went. “I only hope they will be in time to save Joseph.”
“But there’s still Halliday,” I said. I almost mentioned Vera, too, but I didn’t.
William C. Brand shook his head. “You don’t have to worry about him. He was picked up by the Federal Authorities when he landed here last night.”
So that was the end of Halliday. The danger which I had felt to be so imminent ever since we arrived in New Orleans had been imaginary. I thought of Vera trussed up in my bathtub and felt almost sorry for her. If she had tried to telephone Halliday, she had not been able to reach him. In those last moments, when she must have felt so near success, she had indeed been on her own.
The story was over now. It gave me a slight sensation of awe to realize the enormous issues behind all the “sluggings and burglings and strippings” in Mexico. I began to feel a faint and purely selfish excitement, too. Perhaps they wouldn’t be needing me any more. Perhaps I could catch that ten o’clock plane to Iris, after all.
Brand was saying: “Well, that’s that. You must have had a couple of most bewildering days, Mr. Duluth. I’d like to hear exactly what happened to you. But first do you feel confident enough in me to tell me now where that ore sample is?”
I was only too glad at the prospect of disencumbering myself of it. The sooner it got to the Government laboratories the better I was pleased. I told him about the switched bags and called the airport. To my great satisfaction, the clerk informed me that my suitcase had not yet been sent to the Lost Property Office. The owner of the bag I had taken had raised a terrific fuss. They had opened my bag, found my name in it and, knowing me to be a passenger to New Orleans, had sent it to the downtown office while they had been feverishly calling the hotels to locate me. When I told them I had the other bag with me, they said they would send a messenger right round with mine.
While we waited, I gave Mr. Brand an exhaustive account of everything that had happened to me in Mexico City. I was still regaling him with my story when the buzzer rang. We both hurried to the door. A uniformed boy appeared up the stairs carrying my gabardine bag. I gave him the other. Together Brand and I went back to the living-room. I put the bag on the desk. I opened it, found the jar of sunburn cream and, scooping down through the cream, pulled out a small, sticky lump.
Brand’s hand was unsteady with excitement as he took it from me and, hurrying into the little workshop, washed it off at a faucet. When he held it up for my inspection, it was to me just a piece of faintly gleaming ore—something supremely unworthy of all the slaughter and heartache it had created. But Mr. Brand was in a kind of mining engineer’s trance. I could tell his fingers were itching to hammer at it or crush it or put it in test-tubes or do with it whatever a mining engineer does.
I, too, was itching for something—to get away. I had fulfilled my unspoken obligation to Deborah. There was nothing to keep me longer in this small private war, which now had far more efficient protagonists than I. Oddly enough, although the excitement at the prospect of my reunion with Iris should have been uppermost, it was the image of Vera that dominated my thoughts.
She had tricked me and double-crossed me in every possible way. She was as much of a menace to my idea of how the world should be as Halliday. And she was completely in my power. All I had to do was to mention her to Brand, and she would be taken care of as Halliday had been. But, absurdly, I didn’t want to mention her to Brand. I don’t really know what I wanted to do. All I knew was that I wanted to get back to the hotel room.
Mr. Brand was st
ill lost in a specialist’s examination of the ore sample. I said:
“Well, this seems to be this. Are you going to need me any more?”
He glanced up abstractedly. “You have something else you want to do?”
“I’ve a date with my wife in New York,” I said. “A plane to catch.”
He put the ore down on a table. “Well, I don’t really see any need for you to stay around. Later there will almost certainly be a private hearing in Washington. You will have to attend that, of course.”
“Of course.”
“Then if you leave your address with me…”
I scribbled it down. He came with me to the door. When we reached it, he held out his big hand and smiled.
“When the authorities hear what you did, Mr. Duluth, they will be very grateful.”
I took the hand. “Oh, think nothing of it. Things always happen to me that shouldn’t happen to dogs.”
His sweet smile broadened to a grin. “Next time you take a vacation I suggest something a little less colourful. Good-bye, Mr. Duluth.”
“Good-bye.”
XXIII
I hurried down the stairs and let myself out into the street. Evening was beginning to come and, with it, the evening crowds. The little sidewalks, arched here and there by the poles supporting the iron filigree balconies, were gay with people. Across the street, victrola music came from a balcony bright with pink geraniums and white begonias. Two large policemen were carrying on a solemn conversation at the street corner. The Vieux Carré was almost as picturesque as a stage setting of it in a Broadway musical.
I passed the policemen and started up the next block towards the Montedoro. A girl was coming towards me. She was wearing a red suit which reminded me of Vera. Because I was thinking of Vera, I noticed her particularly. She wasn’t a bit like Vera. She was smaller and dark-skinned—Latin looking. But something about the movements, the rather thick legs, the demureness of her was familiar. She was almost up to me. When she was a few feet away, I recognized her as Mr. Brand’s wife, the “Bride” of Chichén-Itzá.
Run to Death Page 17