The Big Book of Sherlock Holmes Stories (18 page)

If you ponder a moment, you will realize that I was on the wrong side of the tree for him not to glimpse me before I struck. He was far, far stronger than I—stronger than some men, I should wager—and I knew if he saw me with my heavy crutch raised he would fend away my blow easily and successfully ward it off. I could not permit that to happen.

With an effort so great that it tore at my very breath I scrambled around the half circumference of the huge tree trunk and stationed myself on the other side—and not a moment too soon.

He was almost opposite me now. I must wait until that split moment when he is past, yet not too far past, out of eyeshot, at least, but within striking distance. The moment arrived and I harvested it well.

I have not yet mentioned the strength in my right shoulder and arm with which almost forty-nine years of crutching myself about have endowed me. On that side I am quite powerful.

I shall never forget that moment. The street lamp like a blinding, baleful moon above us both. He—in that split instant with his back to me—that hated back, the dirty glow of the bilious brown-tweed cape below the scraggled hair and not very clean collar and raddled, fat neck. It was at this target that now, with all my mortal power, I aimed and swung the crutch.

The Circle of Willis, the poets call it. And the doctors. That area of cranial excellence and all living movement—the base of the skull above the nape. I felt the metal of the crutch standard strike and I felt something crunch and I heard an almost mindless gasp—a sound that seemed to have been an afterthought to dying. Without
another noise the hideous victim slumped heavily to the glistening brick pavement.

And fitting the armpiece of the crutch back under my arm I hobbled slowly, remorselessly, and feeling wholly at peace with myself, toward the light in the pantry window.

I had a slender stemmed glass of Muscadet Bordeaux from a bottle my father had left in his small liquor cabinet in the library. I sat a long while in the dark of the parlor. My thoughts were as slow and grave as the procession of numerals on a clock face. My mind was entirely in order. Except for one thought—a fancy, at first, and then presently an obsession.

I thought I should now never possess the Persian Slipper. I thought the ghost of the Brown Recluse—the avenging shade named Charlie Gribble—would come back from the dead and announce (after much showy pretense of deduction) his own murderer. And in perpetuity—even if in Death—possess the adorable award. The more I thought of it the more I trembled. Even at this moment, it seemed, the ghost of the man I had murdered was pacing the sterile linoleum of his bedroom, pondering the solution to this latest and most intriguing of crimes—and then pointing his phosphorescent finger of accusations—quite accurately—at me!

Damn him!

I hobbled to the phone and sank onto the Ottoman beside it. I laid down my crutch (quite unstained by its recent fatal contact) and picked up the phone and dialed his number. O, yes I knew it. I would never forget it—a memory of the nights when—full of his child—I had frantically called and called to a phone which was off the hook or not answered at all.

I listened to the distant drone of the ring—somehow seeming a little fainter because of the fog against the windows.

Again it rang.

And again.

And seven times more. And I sat thinking myself quite mad and quite a silly fool to be sending those rings echoing through a house in which there was no one to answer. The eighth ring.

What kind of little play are you acting out inside yourself, dear Ellen Lathrop? I heard a voice murmur—not unkindly—inside my head.

And then the distant receiver was picked up.

O, I could hear the aching silence of that fogbound bedroom in the receiver at my ear.

I could hear a breathing in the phone, too. But whose? In God's name whose? Tell me quickly before I am struck mad forever!

When the voice spoke I fell back in the chair in a half faint.

It was he. Yes, it was his voice. Charlie Gribble. The Brown Recluse.

And, to my even greater horror and dismay, he seemed, for the first time in years, quite affable and even talkative.

Ellen, he said. How nice it is to hear you. How are you. For some curious reason I was thinking about you a quarter hour or so ago. I meant to call you.

Are you—are you all right?

Not really, he said then, in fateful, unmistakable words of doom, though unawares of that. I'm concerned. Jim Smitherman, a colleague of mine from Wheeling, has been here for supper and we've been working since then on those old Bow Chemical mineral right suits you may have read about in the Glory
Argus
. Well, it was warm this afternoon when we came home from the bank (Why had I not seen them!) and Jim left his coat in my office. Around ten I asked for a file of documents Jim had brought down with him. It wasn't here. Obviously, Jim had left it at the bank. Jim knew exactly where the file was and offered to go back for it. By then this plagued river weather had changed and the fog was up and it was chilly. Damned chilly. I loaned Jim something to wear and he took it and left, and it's been an hour and he's not back yet.

I began to laugh then. O, I caught it in time, but I am sure he distinctly heard my laugh. And then I said some things I can't quite remember and hung up. Somehow I made it to bed and took some Veronal and slept—astonishingly untormented by the dream of having killed the wrong person.

At daybreak the chain reaction of certain incredible and astonishing events began. I settled down in father's cool library—like a forest cover of ancient oaks—with a bottle of Yardley's Smelling Salts and a box of Kleenex for my tears until sunrise.

Soon the fog would burn off—roll away and wisp away like the departing ghosts of some long white night. Morning sun would filter through the high canopy of maples and sycamores and elms and spin gold coins on the glowing green lawn. Sun motes and dandelions would intermingle there. I stared out through the front window, beyond the tiny statue of Michelangelo's “David” which father always kept there on the deep, white sill. Every morning I sat and stared there at a certain inevitable, unvarying matutinal event that would take place. It would happen almost simultaneously with the striking of father's old Dutch clock. I watched. I waited. Yes, here he came—weaving and stumbling along the uneven brick path: even on this fatal, fateful morning here he came—Ort Holliday, the town drunk, making his way home at sunrise with a skinful of cheap corncob wine or some foul, resinous bootleg distillation.

He was rounding Twelfth Street now and making his way unsteadily to the left and up Water Street toward my house, toward—yes, toward the gigantic old elm beneath which lay, on the wet, glittering bricks—

I watched, enthralled, rapt in suspense as he came closer. He stumbled once where the sidewalk tilted up suddenly and then steadied himself against Mart Brown's big willow and came on, past the street lamp now competing dismally with the misty, yet powerful sun. On and on. Stumbled, staggered, and leaned. And on.

I thought foolishly for a moment he was going to stumble on the body or that he would somehow stagger around it, seeing it but fancying it was merely a sample of the delirium that was waiting for him in his little shack down below the zinc smelter where Water Street dwindles out and is lost amid mesamerican memories. Surely, he had seen it by now! Good God, he has passed it. No. No, he hasn't. He has seen it. He rubs his eyes, his swollen, sweating face. He stares again. He stoops unsteadily to have a better look. A cunning look replaces the fear on his face. He smiles tipsily, looks around to see if anyone may be watching at this strange prebreakfast hour when only coal miners and drunks are up and about. He pauses, his right hand poised unsteadily like the bill of a robin about to pounce on a worm. Now he makes his move. Swiftly the dirty hand darts down and under the dirty tweed cape, the inner jacket pocket, the inside pocket. The purse is in his hands now as he greedily snaps it open, plucks out a rather thick wad of bills, and without counting them stuffs them into his own coat pocket from which peeps the stained corner of a dirty bandanna. He rises, smiling, his raddled, smeary face working in slow emotion as he tries to persuade himself that his fortune is real. He seems curious as to how his obliging victim died. He leans again—almost as if suddenly sober, almost as though arranging things not as they are but as they should be.

Yes, yes, he nods to himself. Yes, yes.

His gray lips working wetly.

He stoops then and picks up a loose, mossy brick at the edge of the stacked, ornamental pavement. He sees blood on it—blood which has coiled oily across the walk from the wound somewhere up under the huddled, staring head.

He is standing there, the victim's purse already in his pocket, a brick smeared with gouts of the victim's own blood in his right hand, a memoryless vacant smile on his dissipated face—yes, standing there so when Sheriff Voitle and his deputy, on a last tour before shift change, came round the corner of Twelfth and Water Street in their Plymouth cruiser.

He was, of course, arrested, advised of his rights, arraigned and locked up in the Apple County jail.

I did something that morning and afternoon I have never done in my life. I went to father's little wine cabinet with its little brass key which chirps like a golden bird in the lock when you turn it. I saw that only one bottle of father's wine
was left—the Bordeaux. So I selected one I had purchased and put there five years before—a perfectly delectable 1971 Château Calon-Ségur, Saint-Estèphe.

I drank all that morning. I drank past lunch while all around me Glory buzzed and whispered over the murder within its sacrosanct city limits. I drank until—at four that afternoon—I suddenly realized that the phone was ringing and had been ringing for, perhaps, two or three minutes. I did not stagger. I think, perhaps, that it is, moreover, quite impossible to stagger on one leg. I made my way quite steadily to the phone and picked it up.

It was he—the unspeakable—the dark, the dreary, the intended dead—the Brown Recluse.

I suppose you've heard, he said.

About the murder? Yes.

I was pleased and delighted at how carefully and distinctly my voice sounded. I was really quite drunk, you see, and I somehow believe that the adrenaline already in me from the excitement of the night had counteracted the wine. I had never spoken more distinctly.

I don't suppose you saw anything, Ellen, he said then. You're generally up and about at the time the murder took place. Sitting in the ladder-back chair in your father's library. At the window.

How well, I said, you remember all my night habits, Charlie.

Don't be unpleasant, Ellen, he said. Besides I didn't call you about that.

What then?

There's to be a special meeting of the Irregulars tonight at sundown. I think you might like to attend.

I was silent a moment.

What is the occasion? No meeting was scheduled until the fall meeting in October.

The occasion, he said, is the awarding of the Persian Slipper. This time in perpetuity.

To whom? Gene Voitle, I suppose. He solved the crime, I am told.

That's the plan, he said.

Well, what a windfall for Gene, I said. I mean he didn't really have to do any real detection. Not in the manner of the Master. He just happened round the corner and his two eyes saw Ort Holliday standing there, the brick in his hand, the purse in his pocket.

That is why he is not going to be awarded the Persian Slipper.

Oh?

Well, wait, Ellen. Be at the meeting tonight. I don't want to spoil my denouement to this strange series of events. Be at the meeting. At sundown.

I shall be at the hotel at six at the latest, I said.

O, no, said the Brown Recluse. Not at the hotel.

What do you mean?

I mean this session of the Baker Street Irregulars isn't going to be held at 221
B
.

Where then?

Why, in front of your house, Ellen, as a matter of fact. At the scene of the murder.

Why there? I whispered.

Because it is there, said the Brown Recluse, that I am going to demonstrate that Ort Holliday did not—and could not possibly—have murdered Jim Smitherman.

Oh? How? Who then—?

You always were impatient, Ellen. A probing, curious mind, you have.

You
know
then?

Of course, I know.

I mean, you know who really murdered your friend?

I do, he said. And I shall prove it. At the big elm which grows in front of your house, Ellen. At tonight's emergency meeting of our dedicated little group.

My mouth opened but the words wouldn't work. I suddenly felt a severe headache. From the wine. From the pressure which seemed to be tightening, like a silver band, around my perspiring brow. From I knew not what.

Are you there, Ellen?

Yes. Yes. Yes, I'll be there. At six, I cried out and slammed down the receiver.

So he knew. How could he know? Had he anticipated such a crime and followed Smitherman's progress through the thick white night?
Nonsense. Had he set the whole thing up to trap me?—knowing I would mistake the brown cloaked figure and—O, I must pull myself together. These are chimeras, unbelievable and impossible conjectures.

I drank coffee. Mother's old blue-speckled coffee pot steamed and puffed all the remainder of that afternoon. As I drank the coffee and smoked cigarette after cigarette (I seldom smoke) a curious and aery self-assurance seemed to overcome me.

By five-thirty I was ready for whatever came. I think I was even quite sensibly resigned to this ultimate victory of the Brown Recluse—his winning of the coveted Persian Slipper in perpetuity. O, it stung. It hurt. I shall not deny that. But I tell you I felt in absolute possession of myself as the sun sank lower over the river, over the stained Ohio Hills, and six o'clock approached. Even the realization that my crime would be exposed and that he and not I would come into eternal possession of that yearned for possession—well, my mind seemed to stop at the threshold of that realization and to refuse to accept it. Somehow, this detestable Brown Recluse should not be so smiled on by Goddess Fortune.