The Book of the Dead (23 page)

D
R. FLORIAN BILLIG
was profoundly sunk in Gamadge's deepest and widest chair, with a frosted tumbler on the table beside him and a cigar in his thick fingers; but he looked very much cast down. So did Gamadge, who sat on the chesterfield facing him.

“It was abominable, Doctor,” he said. “I hated doing it. But if I hadn't, you never would have screwed yourself up to telling me, and we had to have your evidence.”

“I tried to tell you often enough.”

“Don't worry about Geegan and his operatives, by the way; they fully understand that it was all an unfortunate mistake.”

Billig said: “Geegan and his operatives will know all about me soon enough.” He sighed, rolled sideways, and extracted a letter from his pocket. He opened it, and after a glance at Gamadge through the upper half of his bifocals, read it aloud in a booming voice:

My dear Dr. Billig,

I am in possession of Charge Coin Number 152593, property of the lady now going under the name of Dodson. Stengel's department store will have her real name and her former address. Stengel's will not give it to me, but they will if required to do so give it to the police
.

I have no wish to apply to the police. I do not believe that your part in the Pike-Crenshaw affair was criminal, and I should like if possible to keep you out of the case. I cannot even attempt to do so unless I know your motives and have your story
.

Please take a night to think it over. Tomorrow at noon I shall telegraph you where to reach me by telephone, and I shall hope to hear from you soon afterwards
.

I must advise you that I have operatives working on the matter, and that you will not be able to remove yourself—or anyone else—from the city without my knowledge
.

Very truly yours,
HENRY GAMADGE.

Billig folded the letter, leaned forward, handed it to Gamadge, and sank back in his chair.

“Blackmail,” he said, “is a serious crime. You had better burn that communication, Mr. Gamadge.”

“Thanks. I will.” Gamadge snapped on his lighter, and watched the typed sheet curl to ashes.

“Of course I had no choice,” said Billig. “I had been expecting something of the sort ever since Mrs. Lubic informed me of your visit to the Wood Home. Was the—er—incident of the handbag that same afternoon part of your campaign?”

“I'm afraid so.”

“That poor girl—my wife; I always think of her as my wife, I always shall; and to this day, Gamadge, whether you can believe it or whether you can't, I'd rather be in the same room with her than with any other living creature—there's still a charge out against her for shoplifting. She's dying. Her brain's going, but it's not too far gone to register what an arrest is. I want her to go out in peace, and I don't want a scandal. She comes from—comes from a very good family.”

“Anybody can see that.”

“But you should have seen her when she was young. You should—” he looked up at Gamadge from under heavy brows—“you should have seen me. No beauty, you know, and what a background. Memory shies from it. A brilliant young fellow, though, well thought of in his profession. Her people would never have allowed her to marry me, naturally; and she had no money of her own. She had the spirit and the heart to run away with me.

“Of course it didn't last—for her. It was hard going, and I wasn't her sort; and when the novelty wore off she swung back to what she had been brought up to.

“I gave her a divorce, naturally, but the fellow was no good. They weren't together long. She'd gone down a little by that time, and soon she was in bad trouble. I was able to get her out of it, but I'm still paying that bill and there were others. I never could seem to get ahead.

“This shoplifting—I was at my wits' end. I had to hide her. The Wood Home—even the little place in Queens—were more than I could afford, and when Pike came along on the afternoon of the sixth of July I was wondering what to do.

“I knew there was something wrong, of course; a man in Crenshaw's circumstances wouldn't have sent out and got
me
if there hadn't been something wrong; and when I told him what was the matter with him I knew he'd been diagnosed before, and that the incurable nature of the disease was no news to him. You can't fool a man who's been in practice as long as I have, and doomed as many people. When he pretended that my news was news, I asked myself what I was being hired to do.”

“Barton Crenshaw,” said Gamadge, “had been diagnosed in May—immediately before he went to San Francisco from Omaha and appealed to his rich cousin Howard—whom he had never liked, and whom he hadn't seen for at least twenty-five years. We have details from Lucette Daker.”

“Barton Crenshaw,” said Billig, “couldn't face a charity ward in a hospital and a pauper's grave. I don't much blame him.”

“I'm not inclined to be too hard on his memory myself. He was the last of his branch of the family, a fastidious, easy-living man who'd earned a good income by research, but who hadn't saved a penny. When that ghastly illness developed, Howard Crenshaw was his last resort. Howard offered him all the luxuries; but when they were offered as the price of compounding a fraud, Barton wasn't as grateful as he would otherwise have been. He succumbed to the temptation, but he didn't live up to the bargain as Howard did. He cheated; and he blamed himself for cheating.”

“I can see why he succumbed to the temptation,” said Billig. “He foresaw—what? An indefinite sojourn in some hospital; no luxuries and precious few comforts; there's a shortage of nurses now. Sick, alone, and poor—I can see the temptation to escape that.”

“And I can see why he broke his promise and made a friend. In Idelia Fisher he found his last chance to be admired; the last build-up for his self-esteem. He could tell himself, poor devil, that if Idelia admired him there must be something in him after all. There was, of course: literary taste,” said Gamadge, smiling.

“The fraud,” said Billig, “wasn't financial. Mrs. Howard Crenshaw lost no money by it; or none that she could possibly have expected to get.”

“And Howard told the sick man that he was merely escaping from life with a mean and selfish woman—an intolerable life. Of course he
had
asked for a divorce—many times. Mrs. Crenshaw didn't permit that humiliating fact to be known in Sundown, California!”

“They value their position in the community,” said Billig, rotating his thumbs while he pondered the Mrs. Crenshaws. “They don't like the status of divorced wife.”

“And if Crenshaw had simply left her she wouldn't have given him a moment's peace; she would have had him hounded to the ends of the earth—which are not as far away now as they would be if there were no war. Howard Crenshaw couldn't have set up with Lucette Daker as Mr. Maxwell, or rather as Mr. Strong. He had more money, of course, than his wife imagined—ten times more. He'd sold the business more profitably than she knew, he'd saved and speculated. His separate account is in Georgia, under the name of Strong. Quite a catch, was Mr. Crenshaw; but he wasn't getting younger, and Lucette Daker wasn't the kind to wait for him or any man, and she would only live with him if she could be accepted as his wife.”

“He had been in love with her from the time she came into the house?”

“There are ways of being in love. You haven't seen her, Doctor; it's a type that can do fearful damage to a man unless he's allergic to it.”

“I gather that you are allergic to it?”

“Yes. I don't like them
quite
so oldfashioned, you know; I like them not quite so primitive. It's the oldest fashion in the world, Lucette Daker's.”

“We are cynical?”

“You should have seen her turn on him the moment the plot went wrong; it wasn't human. I'll never forget it; never forget his face. He thought she loved him. He had had illusions about her, and yet—how keenly he had judged his wife! He knew perfectly what her reaction would be to the news of his illness and death. They were normal; she was aware, if we were not, that her husband had had no reason to consider her feelings; she thought he'd been spiting her. She was angry when I saw her, but she didn't show great surprise. And he knew she wouldn't waste time on anything but the money end of it—he knew very well that she wouldn't ask to see his body, or even go to the funeral.”

“Why did he leave her so much in his will?”

“It was an old will, made when they were first married; he really had nobody else to leave money to, until Lucette Daker came; and by that time he had plenty more. The unchanged will would allay suspicion; Mrs. Crenshaw wouldn't inquire beyond it.”

“I suppose Barton Crenshaw presented himself at the bank here, but Howard was on hand to sign checks.”

“And documents. No checks were signed at the bank, and when Ferris came up on the afternoon of the twenty-first with the cash balance, Barton had a check for the exact amount—made out and signed by Howard—in his writing pad. He wrote a check himself, and switched them. That cash balance satisfied everybody here; no questions asked.”

Billig glanced at him. Then he said: “Miss Daker has done a lot of talking.”

“She'll say anything to get out of standing trial as an accomplice to the fraud. Mrs. Crenshaw would probably have her boiled in oil if she could, but she won't be; she'll be State's witness.”

“Barton Crenshaw didn't know of her existence?”

“He only suspected it later, when he had time to study his cousin Howard and his motives.
Cherchez la femme
. Lucette Daker must have come into the conversation—how could a man obsessed as Crenshaw was keep her entirely out of it?”

“It's odd that a woman of Mrs. Crenshaw's type didn't suspect.”

“Lucette Daker had many admirers, and you ought to have heard her talk about her poor dear Uncle Howard! But he wasn't even a step-uncle, and I was looking for the woman, and she seemed to be cutting herself off rather suddenly and at a crucial moment from her past. Nor did she behave as though her happiness depended on poor Binney. The enthusiasm was all on his side, I do assure you.”

Billig said: “Your powers of observation are greater than mine. I thought that Pike and Crenshaw were hiding from the law, of course; embezzlement, some form of thievery or fraud, I didn't know. The sick man didn't look like a swindler, but then I didn't think I was a swindler until I took the two thousand dollars for helping them keep out of contact with the world—and asking no questions. When Pike came to me on the evening of the twenty-eighth—with the rest of my pay, you know—I felt in duty bound to tell him that inquiries were being made; I gave him Idelia Fisher's name, and your name, and her address, and the information that you were going to Buckley's. I had been called up by the hospital. Mr. Thompson, the night supervisor, was interested. I should have seen that the man I knew as Pike was staggered by my news; it was the first he'd heard of Idelia Fisher; he must have been thunderstruck. But he seemed no more than mildly interested. The truth is that the thought of my own venality—and the thought that this man knew it—was so hideous to me that I wasn't paying much attention to him. I sent him directly to her; I condemned her to death. And I kept silence afterwards. I spent many unprofitable hours, I assure you, telling myself that the papers were right—that it was a hold-up.”

“You could only guess that it wasn't. As a matter of fact he had plenty of time to catch us when we left Buckley's, identify us to his own satisfaction—he had seen Idelia at Stonehill—and follow us to the drugstore. He saw me head uptown, but of course stuck to her; what mightn't Barton Crenshaw have told her, what mightn't she have told me? They must have travelled across town on the same bus; it didn't matter if she saw him—she would have been very glad of a message from Howard Crenshaw! But I don't think she ever did see him. She was unlocking the door, and she was struck down from behind.

“As for me—he had to make the attempt on me, but he didn't really worry about me much. He didn't really worry much about her; but he killed her. That's the ugly thing about him—he'd kill rather than run the faintest risk.”

After a silence Billig said: “The ugly thing about me is that I wanted that poor soul at the Wood Home to have two thousand dollars more than I wanted the truth about the Fisher girl's death. I drove straight down after you left me and put it in her handbag. You know why she hung on to it like that? Because that was where she used to put the stuff she lifted from the shops. She had nothing to hide any more, but sometimes she thought she had. They're very decent down there; I've known Mrs. Lubic a long time. She'd have spent the two thousand on her if anything happened to me.

“Well.” Billig heaved himself out of his chair. “I always knew no good would come of the Pike-Crenshaw business. When you walked in on me that night I knew it was all up with me—don't ask me why. Guilty conscience? I simply felt it in my bones. I'm a doctor, and I diagnosed Barton Crenshaw correctly and treated him properly, and it wasn't my business to inquire into his private life; but I took twenty times my reasonable fee for keeping my mouth shut and protecting him from questions and outside contacts; and I didn't go to the police after the Fisher girl was killed. When they get me into court I won't get the benefit of any doubt on the witness stand; Crenshaw's counsel will say I was in on the racket, and why shouldn't he think so? I'm done for, and I deserve to be.”

Gamadge had not risen. He said, looking up at the other earnestly: “Don't give up yet, Doctor.”

“No? You won't save me,” said Billig, smiling down at him, “and you won't send Howard Crenshaw to the electric chair. But perhaps you'll be satisfied with the penitentiary for him? Perhaps Idelia Fisher would be?”