“Why?” he asked, scarcely able to speak the word.
His head bowed and he wept again; for the sister he had loved so deeply, yet had made no effort to save.
At last he raised his head and looked at me, eyes glistening.
“You never knew about us, did you, Padre?” he said. “You only knew what Max told you and what little you saw.”
Slowly and gently, he stroked his sister’s hand as he spoke.
“Our father was an alcoholic,” he said. “A failed vaudevillian who didn’t mellow with inebriation but turned vicious instead. Abused our mother and us.” He bared his teeth momentarily. “And, in Cassandra’s case …”
He didn’t finish, but he didn’t have to; I understood.
“When I was ten, my mother hanged herself,” he went on. “Cassandra took her place in my life, the only person in the world I could trust.
“She took me away from our father when she was sixteen and I was thirteen. By then, she’d made up her mind to follow no rules but to do anything she could to get ahead.
“I didn’t blame her; I don’t blame her now. We were two of a kind—angry, vengeful, pitted against a world which had given us nothing but pain.
“So we became what you saw and heard about from Max—a pair of icy opportunists. Not that he knew it at first. Cassandra was too good at pretending to allow him to see what she—and I—really were.”
He stopped speaking and lowered his head again; I thought he was finished.
He wasn’t. Rising, he retrieved the skirt he’d removed and lay it across Cassandra’s still features.
Then he moved to the picture window and stared out at the lake, a faint smile on his lips. Is he thinking, I wondered, that the view he sees is only a reflection? I had no way of knowing.
Finally, he turned and walked to the desk, sitting on its edge.
“We have a little wait, don’t we?” he said.
“Where was I?”
He stared at me bleakly; then, after several moments, he spoke again.
“She had an affair with a stage magician when she was seventeen. She used him to learn his trade and she taught me what she’d learned.
“Then she dropped him, and it was the two of us again, together in … every way,” he murmured.
His smile was bitter.
“Several other ‘status-enhancing’—as she called them—relationships followed before she met Max and set her cap for him. Moving in after Adelaide’s death. With me, as always, trailing behind, her faithful lapdog … slavish to her every demand.”
He sighed heavily.
“Things changed after they were married,” he said. “My closeness to her gradually deteriorated. She was—without my knowing it—scheming toward a future which did not include me.
“I tried not to notice it. I’d been trained to trust her totally, believe her every word. I loved her, Padre—” His voice broke, and he had to pause to regain himself.
“But in spite of that,” he said, “I had to recognize, eventually, that I was living—in her life, at least—on borrowed time.”
“It all came to a head when Max demanded that I help him eliminate her because of what she was doing to him.”
The bitter smile again.
“How clever she was,” he said. “Until that moment, I’d had no idea that she was plotting either Max’s dissolution as a performer or—if that didn’t work—his death.
“Discovering that was a traumatic blow to me, Padre,” he went on. “Putting aside everything we’d meant to one another, she was planning to betray me.
“I saw the cabal; Cassandra and Harry versus Max, with me completely out of the picture.
“It was then that the lapdog planned his revenge.”
“I pretended to agree with Max. Even signed that stupid murder contract with him; of course, I planned to destroy it later.
“Then I told Cassandra what he was planning to do: drug her with the blowgun dart and have me hang her in the freezer to die slowly—as she planned to let him die slowly from arsenic poisoning.”
Once more, that bitter smile.
“She pretended, of course, that she’d always intended to tell me what she’d been doing,” he said.
He turned his head and looked at Cassandra’s body, his expression once again unreadable. He stared at her for more than a minute.
Then he murmured, “Right,” and moved behind the desk. Sitting, he took a sheet of paper from the drawer and began to write on it.
“They all misread me, Padre,” he said. “Brian the pathetic gofer. Nothing but a pawn to be moved around their murderous chessboard.”
His expression was hard now, his voice angry.
“They should have given me more credit,” he said.
“I made fools of them both.
“Pretending to help each one separately, I played my game and stood by while they contrived to murder one another.”
He shuddered.
“Not that I intended for her to die,” he said. “Max surprised me there. And my own anger at what I heard her say while I was behind the wall panel—that she might let me drown at sea—so enraged me that …”
His breath faltered.
“I might have saved her,” he said. “Then again, maybe there wasn’t time; I’ll never know.
“So—in my total rage—I let her know what I’d done. Then I let her die.”
Another faltering breath. He had to stop writing, his hand shook so badly.
A minute later, he put the pen back into its holder.
“Why have I told you all this?” he inquired.
He made a sound of dark amusement.
“Probably because you’re the only audience I’ll ever have.
“The perfect audience in one respect; you can’t fidget in your seat or walk out. You have to listen to every word.
“At the same time, the worst audience I could ever have because you can’t react, you can’t respond in any way. Applause? Forget it. A cheer? No way. The audience participation of a cabbage is limited. Forgive me for saying so, Padre. I always liked you, and respected you for what you’d done with your life. But as an audience …” He shook his head.
Little did he know.
There was complete reaction. And response, if only inwardly.
No gofer he. Instead, a diabolically clever mari who’d played a two-sided game against Cassandra and my son.
Neither of them conceived, you see, that he was capable of such an ingeniously sinister plot against them. Blinded by their confident assumptions, they never noticed that, while each of them was involved in his (and her) intricate scheme, Brian was outmaneuvering them both.
He had even dared to call attention to himself by portraying the Sheriff as a slow-witted rustic!
Did he experience some sense of dreadful glee at that deception?
Brian stood and walked to the bar.
Removing the champagne bottle from its ice bucket, he poured a glassful and drank it in a swallow.
I wondered if my face betrayed the utter shock I felt.
“Don’t worry, Padre,” he said. “I’ve left a written confession on the desk.”
He chuckled.
“Not that it’s likely they’ll think you did it all. Still …”
He winced as the poison began to take effect.
Face set, he poured himself another glassful, raised it toward me in a final toast.
“Prosit, Padre,” he said. “And farewell.”
He drained the glass and put it back on the bar.
Moving to where Cassandra’s body lay, he stretched himself out beside her and took her hand in his. He made a sound of pain. Then, chillingly, he laughed.
“The real Sheriff Plum has got a lot to deal with here,” he said.
He closed his eyes.
“Good luck, Padre,” he murmured.
Then he, too, was gone.
I complete the tale as expeditiously as possible.
Sheriff Plum arrived soon a
fter—looking more like an unbearded Abraham Lincoln than the portly figure Brian had presented—and took over. Unlike Brian’s characterization of him, he was a man of sharp perception.
The case was closed in due time. Later on, I caught up with the months of newspaper, magazine, tabloid, and television coverage of the case.
The court allowed me to retain the full estate, the servants remaining to take care of me.
Then an odd—and wholly unexpected—thing occurred.
The vegetable made a comeback.
Medical opinion varied, but the consensus was that the shock of witnessing the horrors of that afternoon—while being totally unable to stop them in any way—had traumatized my system.
Whether this is true or not, I’ll never know.
All I do know is that for some fortuitous reason, my arterial blood flow discovered an alternate route to the damaged area of my brain, effecting a gradual but definite recovery.
Not complete, of course. I won’t be vying in future Olympic Games.
Still, I’m well enough, at eighty-seven, to get about a little, feed myself, manage bathroom matters unassisted (there’s a pleasure, let me tell you!), and write about what happened that day.
A minor coda to the story.
My son’s estate was not extensive, most of it being invested in the house.
Accordingly, in order to acquire living funds, I had to sell the house.
I did so with little reluctance; it was filled with too many painful memories. I sold it furnished. And to whom?
How utterly ironic—
Harry.
He had always coveted the place, you see. No doubt he thought it grimly satisfying to be able to possess it after the way Max had tormented him there.
His offer was the highest among a scarce few bidders.
So I had to sell it to him.
Before I left, however, I called in a local handyman and had the entire place rewired so that every time Harry turned on a lamp or pushed up a light switch or tried to use an electric appliance, breaker switches were thrown. My one regret was that the house didn’t still use screw-in fuses.
Better still (I had to pay the handyman a tidy sum to keep his mouth shut on this), I had every screw in every door and cabinet hinge in the house removed, the screw holes injected with hydrochloric acid, then the screws tightened back in place.
I will carry to my grave the heartwarming vision of that amoral sleazeball having every door and cabinet face fall off, one by one, in his hands as the acid did its work!
Me?
I live in St. John. Always loved the place since my wife and I had stayed there on numerous vacations.
A jolly Irish woman named Endira Muldoon (thrice widowed, with nine children and seventeen grandchildren scattered about the globe) comes every day to my cottage to cook and provide for me.
Each day she drives me to the beach—unless there is a hurricane, of course, in which case I remain at home.
I’ve collected a group of young children who gather around me on the sand while I perform minor hand manipulations for them. Colored balls and handkerchiefs, disappearances and replications, mostly.
They seem to enjoy it.
Now You See It . . . Page 17