Widow's Web
Page 16
Torrant stayed still with an effort. There was no point in charging out into the night to look for Simeon; the police were already in motion. He listened instead to what Louise Mallow was saying: that Simeon had called her up one afternoon to inquire about who a Mrs. Partridge was, that, taken off guard, she had told him. He hadn’t seemed to attach any importance to it, but he had told Louise that he wanted to talk to her and would she please be in at about six-thirty.
An alibi for her for afterwards, of course, although she hadn’t known that then. She couldn’t stay in, she couldn’t bear the thought of a visit from Simeon. She had library books out and that was an excuse; she called a taxi, wandered blankly around among the stacks for a time and then came home. It was after seven o’clock when Paulette Kirby telephoned her.
Louise Mallow’s voice went on; Torrant’s mind began to assemble details he had had all along. Mrs. Kirby’s penchant for liquor, and her somewhat haggard air in the upper hall of this house on the evening after Mrs. Partridge’s death. Her edginess when he had inquired about Simeon’s visit the night before, her new-leaf severity of a few hours ago—and the telephone call which Simeon had returned while Torrant listened from the landing above. ‘Ten minutes, fifteen at the outside,’ he had said, and ‘Not at all, it happens to—’ It happens to everybody, now and then?
“—alanol,” Louise Mallow was saying tiredly. “I know he had it because he offered it to me once. Alanol and liquor make a complete blank, don’t they? So that he could have taken Mrs. Kirby’s car and gone to the station to watch for Mrs. Partridge and then come back after he’d—done it, and she’d never have known he was gone. I remember that she sounded quite groggy, and she went on apologizing for having kept Simeon—I suppose he made her call when he got back, so that I couldn’t connect him with Mrs. Partridge. I suppose she enjoyed calling, too. She’s always been curious about me, X think she sensed something wrong because she attached herself to me right after the accident and wouldn’t be shaken off. I couldn’t afford to be rude to her although,” said Louise wearily, “Mrs. Kirby is really a dreadful woman.”
Torrant said into the silence, “If she was suspicious, was there anything for her to find in the attic? Photographs, things like that?”
Louise Mallow shook her head. “Mrs. Kirby was after her husband’s family silver and some heirloom things—to pawn, I suppose. When he went to prison he stored it with the people who used to own this house, and when he came out he either forgot about it or didn’t care. Mrs. Kirby explained to me that it was hers, but it obviously wouldn’t be here if it were.”
Torrant reflected that he ought to have known that; it wasn’t likely that the owner of one of the oldest houses in Chauncy would have harbored the personal belongings of a newcomer who, Mrs. Judd had told him, the town distrusted. Her husband’s, yes, but not hers.”
Between silence and soreness, Maria’s voice sounded difficult and not her own. “Then everything you told me last night—”
‘”—happened,” Louise said, “but not quite that way.” She went to the window and came back again. “Simeon was afraid you’d recognize me if you stayed here, and he told me to get rid of you or he would. So I offered you money and you refused it, and even though I was worried I was—pleased, I guess, and I wanted you to stay for tea. I forgot who I was supposed to be for the moment, and I was appalled when Mr. Torrant snatched your hand away like that. So nothing was accomplished at all, and the next time I had to do it.”
Briefly, she broke frightening fancy down into fact; the germ of truth was there but that was all. With a hunting lodge rented every year Gerald had taught her to shoot, riding over her fear of guns and her reluctance to kill anything, because with clients to entertain she might be useful to help make up a hunting party. In spite of all his instruction she was afraid of the woods and terrified of getting lost, and in a moment of panic her rifle had gone off, narrowly missing Gerald.
As for the sleeping pills, Gerald had come in late one night, fumblingly drunk, and started to take them by mistake—from a different bottle on a different shelf. The same was true of his seizure after the lobster; he had been drinking a great deal i and his stomach had finally revolted, with the severity of the j spasm affecting his heart.
“I tried to run away once, even before I knew exactly j what Annabelle and Simeon had done between them,” said Louise, and her eyes met Torrant’s and she smiled wryly. . “When I faced the fact that your Martin had been murdered, I and that Simeon had killed Mrs. Partridge so that she couldn’t expose me, the money didn’t matter any more. Nothing did, except to get away and inform on Simeon from some safe I anonymous distance. If,” said Louise, and glanced at the black ] windows and shivered again, “there is such a thing.”
“There is,” Torrant told her grimly, and looked at his watch, j He wondered in what crevice of the night Simeon would be caught up with, to answer first a charge of assault—because j he would be caught up with: Chauncy was not a town in „ which a man could board a train on the spur of the moment |] or, failing that, melt unnoticed. He wondered too what Simeon . had told Mrs. Watts to produce that stoniness, what threat the inventive mind had produced for this particular emergency. I Whatever it was, it would dissolve with Simeon safely in custody.
Louise said, still with that small wry smile, “I couldn’t leave without telling you, Maria. I didn’t know I’d nearly get you killed. I was careful, and I don’t know how Simeon knew—”
“I do,” said Torrant briefly, and explained, cursing himself i all over again. He had left Mrs. Judd to find a safe temporary 1 shelter for Maria, and who knew what dire phrases she might have used on the telephone? ‘Life or death’, ‘Mrs. Mallow’s young cousin’—enough, anyway, to make Simeon, overhearing, decide that the evacuation of Maria from the garage apartment called for action. He might have intended to warn Anna-belle, perhaps, or threaten Maria into silence with her cousin’s safety held over her head—but he hadn’t taken his car, he had left that for a badge of occupancy at Mrs. Judd’s while he ran up the side roads and across the fields.
To hear Maria say to Louise Mallow that she knew; to see this effortless money going up in smoke.
Not a parrot after all, Torrant thought, holding the beaked and thrusting face in his mind; a bird of prey. Simeon had bargained with Louise over the Mallow estate; how much of the proceeds from Martin’s murder had Annabelle Blair turned over to him? Annabelle, who had been dead for three weeks when he knocked at the door of the house on Bolton Road . . .
Maria left the loveseat with a held-in suddenness and crossed the room and took her cousin’s hands. Louise looked up at her, the gray gaze quiet and clear. “I’m sorry about everything, Maria.”
“Sorry!” Maria said, and it was plainly not the soreness from Simeon’s hands at her throat that made her voice blurred and shaken. “If I’d come when you wrote me—”
But Louise had steeled herself beyond that point. She was holding herself very still, and her glance slipped past Maria’s and met Torrant’s, acknowledging a sound over the sleet, a faint hum that was coming closer. She took her hands gently from Maria s and stood up.
“Shock,” Torrant told her rapidly; he had already begun to think about this. “The doctor will certainly go along with that under the circumstances. All you have to tell the police—”
“But I don’t care,” Louise said. Her mouth twisted a little in a smile. Relaxed, free of fear, it was a pleasant mouth. ‘1 thought once that I couldn’t bear to have people know the truth, even strangers—but I didn’t know then what Annabelle Blair was really like. It’s so nice, not being Annabelle any more.”
The hum grew louder and then slowed; headlights slid along the windows as a car stopped before the Mallow house, a black car with a bubble of red on top. Louise said steadily to Torrant, “Would you let them in? I think I’d better go upstairs and get a few things.”
So that there were only speeding seconds alone with Maria, whose glance and voice a
nd walk had seemed to belong in his personal history from the first; Maria whom he had found and almost lost. Now wasn’t the time to tell her; she looked white and ruffled and bemused. She looked at Torrant as though she didn’t see him, and said in a wondering voice, “She called Gerald by his first name once, and that proved she thought of him that way. And then, tonight, she called me Maria, and I didn’t understand it, but I wasn’t afraid of her any more.”
Torrant watched her. He said gravely, “And what do I have to call you?”
The knocker fell then with a crisp official sound, and after a long moment he went to answer it.