Shadow of Guilt (20 page)

Authors: Patrick Quentin

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BOOK: Shadow of Guilt

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He leaned a little forward, resting his hand on the knee of his elegantly pressed gray pants. “But Saxby wasn’t one to throw in the towel. He’d lost out with the Hadleys but there was still his old girlfriend. What if Ruth Kramer had cut him into the deal in the first place? Saxby was a firm believer in dog-eat-dog. Okay, he had to get out of town, but there was nothing to stop his leaving with a nice big check from Ruth Kramer. She wasn’t sitting as pretty as that. The moment it came out who she really was, she would have been back in the gutter too. So!”

He gave a slight, quizzical shrug. “There’s the murder set-up. Saxby called Ruth Kramer. He told her to bring him a check for a going-away present. Once he got the check, he said, he’d burn whatever papers he’d been keeping to remind her just who she was. Ruth Kramer must have been a very angry girl, but she knew when she was licked. On Sunday afternoon she went around with the check. She handed it over. He burned the papers in the fireplace. That could have been the end of the episode, but it wasn’t, because of Chuck’s gun.”

He paused. “I imagine it wasn’t just having to give him the money, although that must have been annoying enough. Ruth Kramer knew her Saxby. She knew, whether he’d burnt the papers or not, this was only a beginning. From now on, what was to stop him coming back and back again for a touch whenever he felt in the mood? And what use was he to her any more anyway? She’d got her place in the sun and she’d got it through her own unaided efforts. Saxby was as obsolete in her life now as a dinosaur and yet as dangerous as a saber-toothed tiger.”

He was grinning at me. “I don’t blame her for shooting him—particularly with someone else’s gun. No, if I’d been Ruth Kramer, I’d have shot Donald Saxby myself.”

I knew, of course. I’d known almost from the first moment he’d mentioned Ruth Kramer. Vivien, who had come from California, who must have actually seen Chuck taking the gun!

Trant was just sitting there, watching me, perched on the chair arm, bringing once again the incongruous image of a cocktail party guest. Someone should have been offering him a little circle of toast spread with caviar.

“Then,” I said, “then Ruth Kramer when she changed her name—”

“She changed it through marriage, Mr. Hadley. You see, when her brother was shot resisting arrest and Saxby was given five years, she was left with no one to take care of her. Not being taken care of was something Ruth Kramer didn’t like at all, so she did what any sensible girl in her place would have done. She looked around for a stopgap until Saxby was out of jail. She found an ideal one—a pathetic invalid who’d already been condemned to death by his doctors, an invalid, incidentally, who was very adequately insured. She found him in Bakersfield, California.”

“No!” I heard the word. I knew I’d said it. I knew that choking cry was the sound of my own voice.

“Yes.” I could hear Lieutenant Trant’s voice but it, like my own, seemed merely a grotesque hallucination in my mind. “Yes, Mr. Hadley, his name, I’m afraid, was Oliver Lord.”

My arm was still around Eve. It seemed to have no life of its own at all as if, in some nightmare, it had grown onto her, was grafted onto her—and nothing could separate us but a tearing of skin.

“When Oliver Lord died, Mr. Hadley, Ruth Kramer came to New York. She was looking for work, their kind of work, which would pay off for herself and Saxby too. She found it at Consolidated Carbide, didn’t she? The husband of a rich woman with a nineteen-year-old daughter? The mother and daughter for Saxby, the husband for her—a husband who had been married for twelve years, a husband at the exact psychological moment when he could be eased into having a little fling. To begin with, I imagine, the husband was rather incidental, the big money seemed to lie with the mother and daughter. But—I’m only guessing, of course—suddenly Ruth Kramer found the husband was even riper for romance than she’d suspected: What do you know? This wasn’t just a guy with an itch, this was a decent guy, a guy in love who might even divorce his wife and whisk Ruth Kramer right up out of the gutter once and for all. What had she got on to? And why had she ever cut Saxby in?”

We were still—Eve and I—locked together by the awful paralysis of my arm. I stood listening, just listening, not interpreting at all, not feeling anything but the pressure of my arm against her side. Trant’s voice pounded on like a hammer.

“But Saxby was there, wasn’t he—the Frankenstein’s monster she’d brought in as an ally but who, when his own part of the scheme collapsed, had turned into the enemy. He wasn’t going to scuttle out of New York and leave Ruth Kramer to live happily ever after as Mrs. Hadley. Not Saxby. The telephone call. Come over, bring the check. What time was it, Mrs. Lord? Sometime after three, I guess. Just time enough for you to give him the check while he burned the papers, and then to pick up the gun, shoot—and run. You were lucky you did it when you did, weren’t you, because Mr. Hadley showed up at your apartment at five minutes to four. You must just about have made it before he arrived.”

Eve had been wearing a coat. Suddenly that little fact dug into me splintering the ice with which I had been immobilized. When I’d come to my “sanctuary” in desperate need for Eve’s help with my problem, she’d opened the door with her coat on.
I was just going out to mail a letter. Thank God I didn’t miss you.
Behind the humiliation, the anguish, the stultifying exhaustion, there now was a hard, cruel little voice spelling everything out. I could see it all. That was almost the most terrible part of it. I was as positive of it all as if, all along without admitting it, I’d been conscious of the extreme and ludicrous folly of my bid for a new life.

It had never been Eve, it had been Eve and Donald Saxby. All through my shabby idyl, Saxby had been hovering in the background, pulling the strings. The French restaurant! Of course. That
chance
meeting when for the very first time in our relationship it had been Eve who had suggested we go out to eat. That had been part of it—part of their infinitely intricate plot.
A little pressure on the husband now. I’ve got Ala where I want her. This would be a good moment for me to surprise the husband kissing his secretary. It’ll get him into the right mood for sanctioning the Stockbridge weekend.

Saxby, always Saxby. The most frustrating sensation in the world, I discovered, was the longing to kill a man who was already dead.

Somehow I had moved away from Eve. I was standing on my own, watching the two of them. Trant’s face, stripped of its gentleness, was hard as a rock. Eve’s face didn’t seem to be her face at all. It was the small, shrunken face of a little old woman.

“Well, Mrs. Lord, there isn’t much point in going on with this, is there? You let Chuck get arrested. Just now you were hoping to pin it on Mrs. Hadley. And, of course, there was always Ala, if need be, wasn’t there? Anyone, in fact, except Mr. Hadley. You needed Mr. Hadley as a far more desirable successor to Mr. Lord.”

Eve stood looking at him from her shrunken little old woman’s face, and when the words came out they were tight and dry.

“There isn’t any proof.”

“Proof? But I’m afraid there is, Mrs. Lord.” Trant’s hand had gone to his pocket. “I sent a man over to Saxby’s apartment tonight and he found it caught in the flu of the chimney. You shouldn’t have thrown it on the fire, Mrs. Lord—not at a time when you were so emotionally disturbed. It was after the shooting, wasn’t it? Hot air above a fire is buoyant, you know. If you don’t watch out, a piece of paper can very easily float up a chimney. It would have been much safer to have destroyed it at home, but I suppose you were very eager to get rid of it and never have to see it again—ever.”

His hand came out of his pocket. He was holding an envelope. He opened it and carefully slid a piece of charred paper onto his palm.

“Your check, Mrs. Lord. And, as you will see, your signature is intact. Twenty-five thousand dollars. As I understand from the California police, that was the exact amount of your insurance on Mr. Lord. The name of the payee or most of it is burnt away. But the last three letters of it are there… XBY.”

He was putting the check back in the envelope and the envelope back in his pocket.

“Well,” he said, “I guess this is it.”

There was, I knew, no short cut for me away from humiliation. But already, very dimly, I could see the way ahead.
Once you get kicked out of a fool’s paradise, at least it’s a comfort to understand why you had the kick coming to you.

Connie had said that. I’d got the kick all right—George Hadley who had turned out to be the fool of the family.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Hadley.” Trant’s voice, quiet with sympathy—a doctor’s voice—came through to me. “I’ll be taking her away now. There won’t be any need for you. In fact, I imagine it’s about time you had a little talk with your wife, isn’t it?”

My wife! At that moment when it seemed impossible that there could be any grain of comfort anywhere, I could hear Connie’s voice as if she were speaking in my ear.

I was stupid, I know, but I thought things like that happened in all marriages, even good ones. I thought it was just a middle phase. You see, I was sure I had what I wanted, not quite the way I wanted it, of course, but I was always sure that would come back, too.

I watched Lieutenant Trant leading Ruth Kramer to the door.

FIN

PATRICK QUENTIN

Patrick Quentin, Q. Patrick and Jonathan Stagge were pen names under which Hugh Callingham Wheeler (19 March 1912 – 26 July 1987), Richard Wilson Webb (August 1901 – December 1966), Martha Mott Kelley (30 April 1906 – 2005) and Mary Louise White Aswell (3 June 1902 – 24 December 1984) wrote detective fiction. In some foreign countries their books have been published under the variant Quentin Patrick. Most of the stories were written by Webb and Wheeler in collaboration, or by Wheeler alone. Their most famous creation is the amateur sleuth Peter Duluth. In 1963, the story collection The Ordeal of Mrs. Snow was given a Special Edgar Award by the Mystery Writers of America.

In 1931 Richard Wilson Webb (born in 1901 in Burnham-on-Sea, Somerset, an Englishman working for a pharmaceutical company in Philadelphia) and Martha Mott Kelley collaborated on the detective novel
Cottage Sinister.
Kelley was known as Patsy (Patsy Kelly was a well-known character actress of that era) and Webb as Rick, so they created the pseudonym Q. Patrick by combining their nicknames—adding the Q “because it was unusual”.

Webb’s and Kelley’s literary partnership ended with Kelley’s marriage to Stephen Wilson. Webb continued to write under the Q. Patrick name, while looking for a new writing partner. Although he wrote two novels with the journalist and
Harper’s Bazaar
editor Mary Louise Aswell, he would find his permanent collaborator in Hugh Wheeler, a Londoner who had moved to the US in 1934.

Wheeler’s and Webb’s first collaboration was published in 1936. That same year, they introduced two new pseudonyms:
Murder Gone to Earth
, the first novel featuring Dr. Westlake, was credited to Jonathan Stagge, a name they would continue to use for the rest of the Westlake series.
A Puzzle for Fools
introduced Peter Duluth and was signed Patrick Quentin. This would become their primary and most famous pen name, even though they also continued to use Q. Patrick until the end of their collaboration (particularly for Inspector Trant stories).

In the late 1940s, Webb’s contributions gradually decreased due to health problems. From the 1950s and on, Wheeler continued writing as Patrick Quentin on his own, and also had one book published under his own name. In the 1960s and ’70s, Wheeler achieved success as a playwright and librettist, and his output as Quentin Patrick slowed and then ceased altogether after 1965. However, Wheeler did write the book for the 1979 musical
Sweeney Todd
about a fictional London mass murderer, showing he had not altogether abandoned the genre.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

As Patrick Quentin