Puzzle for Fiends (28 page)

But, even with my embarrassing presence eliminated, what would happen to Selena and Mimsey? Confronted with the disappearance of Marny and the man they thought was Gordy, the police would start a search. Soon they would find the remains of a male body in the burned farmhouse and Marny’s body in the second car. Without the information that only I could give, Inspector Sargent would almost certainly arrest Mimsey and Selena not only for Mr. Friend’s murder but for my murder and Marny’s too.

Now that I knew they had been almost as fiendishly victimized as I, my old affection for Mimsey and Selena returned. I couldn’t walk out and leave them to face the rap for three murders they hadn’t committed.

As I leaned forward to toss my cigarette out of the window, the suicide note made a crinkling noise in my pocket. That little sound gave me an idea. I pulled the letter out and, taking the note from the envelope, read it through in the pulsing light from the burning building.

Yes. After all, there was still a way.

My mind was working very clearly now. I ran back to the other car. Roughly, so I wouldn’t have to think about it, I pushed Marny’s body to one side. I backed the car onto the trail and drove it past Gordy’s car straight into the garage. The house itself was blazing now, and flames were already licking at the garage roof.

I picked the revolver up from the floor of the front seat. I made sure no fragments of plaster had caught in the matting. I pulled the crutch out of the back window.

As I left the garage cones of flame were skittering all over the roof. In a few minutes the garage would be burning as furiously as the house.

I carried the crutch and the revolver around to the back of the house. I could still make out the gaping hole which had been the window of the room where Gordy’s body lay. I inched as near to it as I could. The heat was terrific. I tossed the crutch and revolver through the window into the flames.

There were the casts to think of too. I didn’t know what happened to plaster of Paris in fire but I was taking no chances. I was sure the cast on my arm was as phony as the cast on my leg. With the dagger, I split the plaster off. I flexed my arm. Like my leg it was stiff but there was no pain. It was obviously sound. I threw the flakes of plaster and the sling through the window. I went back to the spot behind the bushes where Marny had parked the car. I gathered up all the fragments of my leg cast and, bringing them back, threw them into the building too.

I stood a moment, making sure I had taken care of everything. Satisfied, I went to Gordy’s car and started driving back to the house. There was only one more thing left to do.

When I reached the house, I parked the car outside the garages and walked to the terrace and through the french windows into the dark library. Jan was the only member of the household at all likely to be awake, and his room was in the other wing. There wasn’t much risk of attracting his attention. I groped for the writing lamp on the desk and turned it on. The typewriter stood where it had always stood—by the telephone. There was paper, too.

I slid a piece of paper into the typewriter. I had composed the note on the drive back. I knew exactly what I was going to say. The typewriter had rubber keys. I didn’t know whether the police would be able to get fingerprints. I suspected that each finger as it tapped a key would hopelessly blur its print with the print left there before. But once again I was taking no chances. In the note I was going to write, I was posing as a man with his right arm in a cast. So I typed with my left hand only.

And I typed:

Dear Mimsey:

This is terribly important. Tell Sargent. Marny killed Father. I knew it all along. I walked into the room when she was giving him the overdose. I knew with Father dead I’d be rich. Marny made me promise not to tell so I agreed. That’s why I went off on a bat. I was scared of being around, of giving it away. I wasn’t going to tell but now Sargent suspects, it’s different. Marny realized that too. She made me promise to meet her tonight in the library after you’d all gone to sleep. I had to dope Selena with sleeping pills. That was the only way I could get away. Marny was waiting here. She said Sargent would find poison in the body at the autopsy, and it would all come out. She said if I told she’d done it, she’d accuse me of helping her. I said it was hopeless. Sargent would find out the truth anyway. She said maybe I was right and that the only thing to do was to escape while there was a chance. But she wasn’t going to leave me behind, knowing what I knew about her. She’d stolen my gun. She brought it out then. She said I had to go with her in the car or she’d shoot me. I pretended to agree. I’m helpless in the casts. But I said I couldn’t get into the car without a crutch. I said she must get me a crutch. I pretended they were in the attic instead of the closet so that I’d have more time to write this while she’s away. She locked me in here. She’ll be back any minute. She says she’s going to escape to Mexico and take me with her. I don’t believe she’s going to take me with her. She mentioned the old farmhouse and looked funny. She has the gun. I think she’s going to stop at the old farmhouse and try to kill me. No one would think of looking there. I’m going to stop her. But if I don’t, if I’m not back, here tomorrow or if I don’t call, go to the farmhouse. Please, Mimsey, please. She’ll be here in a second, I must stop. I…

I picked up a pencil in my left hand and signed a clumsy, scrawling
Gordy
at the foot of the page. I slipped the note under the typewriter with one corner sticking out so that they would be bound to find it in the morning.

That story, compounded of truths, half-truths, and lies, was the best I could do. At least it pinned the crimes on the right person and drew Sargent’s attention to the farmhouse. When he searched the ruins and found the remains of Marny in the garage and the remains of Gordy in the house, the note was sufficiently vague to enable him to form his own theory as to whether Marny or Gordy started the fire and whether Marny killed Gordy first or Gordy killed Marny. After the flames had done their work he couldn’t possibly tell that Gordy had been dead for a week, and I had arranged my props so that, even if some quirk of the fire left something undestroyed, the right things were in the right places—the crutch and the casts in the room with Gordy’s body.

It had been a toss-up whether to leave the revolver with Marny or Gordy. I had chosen Gordy because I thought that made a plausible story. Marny had fatally wounded Gordy. Gordy had managed to get the gun, kill her, and then stumble into the house to die.

Between the lines there was a message for the Friends in the note too. They would realize that I was telling them obliquely that Marny had killed Gordy the day she killed her father and hid his body in the farmhouse. I was letting them know the truth and hinting broadly at the attitude they should take with the police. Unless luck was dead against them, they should be able to clear themselves.

They might even get the money, I thought with a faint twitch of amusement. The police would never know a false Gordy had existed or that the signature on the abstinence pledge was a forgery. Once they believed that Marny had killed her father, there was no legal hitch to Mimsey’s and Selena’s inheritance. They would have trouble with Mr. Moffat, of course. But, between them, Mimsey and Selena were expert trouble girls.

An image of Selena came into my mind. Not one image but a dozen images merged together. I thought of my first staggering glimpse of her. I thought of her bending over me in the moonlight. I thought of her as she had been tonight, her honey-brown arms twined around me, her dark blue eyes looking deep into mine with those unlikely tears smudging her lashes.

“I love you. I really think I do. This is different. This time it hurts. It must he love when it hurts, mustn't it, baby?”

I had thought of her as a murderess then, a black-hearted, lying murderess. Now, with a queer pang, I thought:

Maybe she meant it. Maybe for the first time she was on the level.

I wanted to run up the stairs, to see her once more, to slip my arms around her and feel the velvet warmth of her skin against mine.

But I knew that it wasn’t to be. If I saw her again, how could I leave her?

And I had to go.

I crossed back to the desk and opened the drawer where Mrs. Friend kept her cache of money. I couldn’t go out into the world penniless. I took fifty dollars. When Mrs. Friend realized what I was doing for her, she would think it cheap at the price.

I turned out the light. There was a bathroom across the hall. I was grimy and disheveled and there was blood—only a little, luckily—on my sleeve. I washed up. I stuffed the towel in my pocket to be destroyed along with Marny’s fake suicide-note. I hurried back to the garage. I got into Gordy’s car. I drove away.

I didn’t know where I was going. I didn’t care.

Just so long as it was—away…

I was
in the drab lobby of a cheap little Los Angeles hotel when I read the newspaper. I had been there a week because a cheap hotel in a big city was a good place to hide.

Not that I had much reason to hide any longer. I had read the papers avidly since the sensational murder case at Lona Beach had broken, and things were turning out exactly as I had hoped. Sargent was satisfied that Marny had murdered her father and, although the farmhouse had been so completely destroyed that it was almost impossible to reconstruct what had happened there, fragments of the cast had been found which convinced Sargent that Gordy’s body was mine. Mimsey and Selena, who had put on a magnificent show, were almost completely free from suspicion. Even Mr. Moffat, in a press interview seething with frustrated fury, had indicated his intention of waiving all claims to the Friend fortune.

My link with Mimsey and Selena through the papers was the only thing that made me feel alive. As my fifty dollars dwindled almost to the vanishing point, my mind remained as blank as ever as to my own identity.

A thousand times a day, I said to myself:
Peter. Iris. A plane. Seeing someone off on a plane.

But those words that had at once seemed so full of meaning now had association only with the Friends. Selena carrying the black spaniel out of the grey and gold room. Selena bending over the vase of irises, her fair hair shimmering, her red lips parted in a smile.

The future was blank and featureless as a drowned man’s face.

It was evening when I bought that particular newspaper. I sat down gloomily in one of the lobby’s worn red leather chairs and glanced at the front page for any new Friend story. The photograph of a man at the head of a column of print caught my eye. Wasn’t there something dimly familiar about that young, narrow face with the close-set eyes and the flopping mane of black hair? Under the photograph was the caption:

ADMITS TO ASSAULT AND ROBBERY OF MOVIE STAR’S MATE

Halfheartedly at first, I started to read that the boy, whose name was Louis Crivelli, had been arrested in San Diego for a car hold-up and, under police questioning, had admitted to having bummed a ride from a certain Peter Duluth, slugged him and stolen his car one month before. This, the paper said, only deepened the mystery surrounding the disappearance of Peter Duluth, recently discharged from the Navy and married to the famous movie actress, Iris Duluth. A month ago, having said good-bye to his wife, who had flown with the USO morale unit to entertain the American Army of Occupation in Tokyo, Mr. Duluth had left Burbank Airfield and had never been seen again. The police were going to take Crivelli to the spot where he claimed to have abandoned Mr. Duluth and were going to start a new search from there. It was believed now that Duluth was probably suffering from amnesia caused by a blow on the head stuck by Crivelli.

At that point I was told to see Column 7, page 3. Halfhearted no longer, I leafed through the paper to page three. Above the continuation of the story on Crivelli, was a photograph, captioned:

LAST PHOTOGRAPH TAKEN OF PETER DULUTH

An army bomber, its propellers whirring, stood on a huge airfield. In front of it, staring at each other rather foolishly, were a beautiful dark girl and a man.

To me, of course, they weren’t just a beautiful girl and a man. Nor was the plane just a plane.

I remembered the plane. I knew the girl. And the man’s face was as familiar as my own—for a very good reason.

It was my own.

The sense of relief that rushed through me was indescribable. It wasn’t that memory of my whole life came tumbling back in one instant. It wasn’t as wholesale as that. It was just that every detail of that moment, caught in the photograph, sprang into life for me.
Seeing someone off on a plane… Peter… Iris…
The way the wind from the propellers tugged at Iris’s skirt. The feel of the sunshine. Iris’s voice:
Peter, darling, miss me.

I remembered it all as if I had left the airport only ten minutes ago.

“Iris. “I said her name out loud. It was wonderful.

There was more in the paper. At the end of the column I read:

Iris Duluth, who only learned of her husband’s disappearance last week, flew back from Japan immediately and arrived at her Beverly Hills home yesterday morning.

That’s all I waited for. A phone booth stood in a dreary corner of the lobby. I ran to it. My hands had quite a time getting a nickel into the right slot. The operator looked up Iris Duluth’s number and got it. A girl’s voice said:

“Hello.”

I was going to ask:
Is this Iris Duluth?
But there was no need. That voice was as much part of me as my own fingers.

“Hiyah, baby,” I said. “Thought I’d let you know I’ll be home in the hour.”

“Peter. “There was a catch in her voice that made my heart turn over. “Peter, I can’t believe it.”

“Neither can I.”

“Darling, I’ve been half out of my mind. Where are you?”

“Downtown L.A. A cheesy hotel.”

“But what happened?”

“I got conked on the head, I guess.”

“I know that. Of course I know that. And I told you to be careful. I might have known. But none of that matters now. Peter, darling, half of California’s been after you. Where on earth have you been?”