The Devil To Pay (11 page)

“No,” said Val.

Rhys sat down in his soggy coat, puffing at the cigar. “Don’t go off half-cocked, puss. I watched him. He’s concealing something, it’s true, but I have the feeling it isn’t what you think. Walter’s always been close-mouthed—after all, he never had the benefits of a normal upbringing—he’ll always depend on himself, keep things to himself. I’ve studied him, and I’m sure he’s incapable of viciousness. I couldn’t be wrong in him, darling—”

“I wonder,” said Val tonelessly, “if I could be wrong in
you.
”

“Val.” He examined her with surprise. “Pink, what’s the matter? Something’s happened.”

“Don’t you know?” muttered Pink.

“I know,” he said a trifle sharply, “that you’re both being childishly mysterious.”

Val pushed the bankbook an inch toward her father with the very tip of one fingernail. He did not pick it up at once. He continued to look at Val and Pink. As he looked, a curious pallor spread under the brown of his flat cheeks. He took the bankbook slowly, stared at his name on the cover, opened the book, stared at the figures, stared at the date, the cashier’s initials. … “What is this?” he asked in a flat voice. “Well, don’t look at me like sticks! Pink, you know something about this. Where did it come from?”

“It’s none of my business,” shrugged Pink.

“I said where did it come from?”

Pink flung the ladle down. “Damn it, what do you want from me, Rhys? Don’t put on an act for my benefit! It’s a bankbook with a five-million-dollar deposit, and I found it this morning in your morocco golf-bag!”

Rhys rose, holding the bankbook in one hand and the fuming cigar in the other, and began to walk up and down the narrow kitchen. The brown wrinkles on his forehead deepened with each step. The paleness was gone now; the brownness had an angry red tinge.

“I never thought,” said Pink bitterly, “you’d be that kind of a heel, Rhys.”

Rhys stopped pacing. “I can’t help being angry,” he said quietly, “although I don’t blame either of you. It looks damned bad. But I’m not going to deny this more than once.” Pink paled. “I know nothing about this deposit. I’ve never had an account at Spaeth’s bank. This five million dollars isn’t mine. Do you understand, both of you?”

Val felt a great shame. She was so tired she could have cried for sheer exhaustion. As for Pink, his pallor, too, vanished in a blush that reached to the roots of his red hair; and he leaned against the gas range biting his fingernails.

Rhys opened the book and glanced again at the stamped date of deposit. “Pink, where was I last Wednesday?” he asked in the same quiet tone.

Pink mumbled: “We ran the yacht down to Long Beach to see that guy who decided not to buy.”

“We left at six in the morning and didn’t get back to town until after dark—isn’t that so?”

“Yeah.”

Rhys tossed the bankbook on the table. “Look at the date of that deposit. It was made last Wednesday.”

Pink snatched the book. He said nothing at all. But the blush turned burning scarlet. He kept looking at the date as if he could not believe his eyes. Or perhaps because it was the only way he could cover his embarrassment.

“Pop,” said Val, resting her head on her arms, “I’m sorry.” There was a long silence.

“It could only have been Spaeth,” said Rhys at last. “He visited me in the gym this morning, as I told Glücke. He must have slipped it into the golf-bag when my back was turned.”

“But why, for the love of Mike?” cried Pink. “My God, who gives away five million bucks? I
had
to think—”

“I see it now.” Rhys flung his cigar into the drip-pan. “I’ve never told you before, but when things began to go wrong with Ohippi I came to my senses and had a confidential accountant and investigator look into things.”

“I
had
to think—” said Pink again, miserably.

Rhys began to pace again, nibbling at his lips. “I found that friend Solly, who up to a certain point had been perfectly coached by Ruhig, had gone on his own in one connection—and slipped very badly. He issued a prospectus for the further sale of stock in which he falsified the cash position of the companies. He had to make the stocks look sound, and he did—with false figures.”

Val raised her head. “He was always a thief,” she said wearily.

“Suppose he did?” demanded Pink.

“Using the mails to defraud is a serious offense, Pink,” said Rhys. “It was the penitentiary for Spaeth if the government ever found him out.”

“Why didn’t you hold him up?” asked Pink hoarsely.

“At the time there was still a chance to recoup. But later, when the floods ruined the plants completely, I threatened to send him to prison if he didn’t rehabilitate them.” Rhys shrugged. “He made a counter-threat. He said he had something on me which would so blacken my reputation and so completely destroy public confidence that nothing would ever save the plants. This deposit must have been the answer, making it look as if I’d cleaned up, too, and was a hypocrite besides.”

“But five million dollars!”

“If paying out ten percent of fifty millions in profits would keep him out of jail,” said Rhys dryly, “he was a good enough business man to pay it out.”

“The dirty rat,” said Pink passionately. “Mixin’ people up! Why the hell do they have to look for people who bump off rats like that? It ain’t fair!”

“It puts me on a spot,” sighed Rhys. “I can’t keep the money, of course—it isn’t mine. Yet if I used it to start a fund to salvage Ohippi, nobody’d believe the story. The auction, my being broke. … I can’t keep it, and I can’t give it away. I’ll have to think about it.”

“Yeah,” muttered Pink, “we’ll have to think about it.”

Rhys went heavily out of the kitchen into the foyer, taking off his coat. Pink turned blindly to the range as something began to burn. Val pulled herself to her feet and said: “I don’t think I’m hungry any more, Pink. I’m going to—”

Rhys said, strangling: “Good God.”

Val was paralysed by the horror in her father’s voice. “Pop!” She found her voice and her strength at the same instant. She almost capsized Pink trying to get to the foyer first.

Rhys had turned on the overhead light. The door of the foyer closet was open. He was squatting on his heels and staring into the closet. On the floor of the closet lay two objects. One was a long cup-handled rapier with a red-brown stain on its point. The other, crushed into a ball, was a tan camel’s-hair topcoat.

“Y
OUR
coat,” said Val. “Your
coat
. The—the sword!”

Rhys grasped the rapier by the hilt and brought it out of the closet, turning it this way and that in his two shaking hands, as if he were too stupefied to do more than simply look at it. It was the Italian rapier which had hung on Solly Spaeth’s wall; there was no question about that. And if there had been a question, the stained point would have answered it.

“Don’t handle it. Don’t touch it,” whispered Val. “It’s—it’s poisoned. You might get a scratch!”

“Put it away,” mumbled Pink. “No. Here. Gimme that. We’ve got to get rid of it. Rhys, for God’s sake!”

But Rhys kept holding the rapier and examining it as a child might examine a strange toy. Pink, reached in and snared the coat. He shook it out; it was Rhys’s coat; there was no question about that, either. For from the right pocket to the hem a narrow strip of camel’s-hair cloth was missing, leaving a long gap.

“Oh, look,” said Val faintly, pointing.

The breast of the coat was smeared with a dirty brown liquid which had dried and crusted. Fresh red blood turns dirty brown under the corrupting touch of the outer world. Rhys got to his feet, still clutching the sword; his red-streaked eyeballs were bulging slightly. “How in the name of red devils did these things get here?” he croaked.

Before Val’s eyes rose the unlovely vision of Mr. Walter Spaeth, grimy, slack with drink, and pugnacious, sitting on the edge of the armchair in their living-room when they had reached the apartment after Glücke’s inquisition. He had stolen the house-key from the desk downstairs; he had confessed that. He had let himself in. He had—he had—“Walter,” said Val in a still small voice. “Walter!”

Rhys rubbed his left eye with his left hand and said painfully: “Don’t jump to conclusions. Don’t jump, Val. It’s—We’ll have to sit down and think this out, too.” He stood there holding the rapier, holding it because he did not seem to know what to do with it.

Pink said in an agonized treble: “Well, don’t be a dope, Rhys, for God’s sake. You can’t just stand here with that thing. It’s too risky. It’s too—”

Just then some one pounded on the foyer door.

It was all so unreasonable, so theatrical, so ridiculous, that Val could only laugh. She began to laugh softly—more a titter than a laugh, and the laugh swelled until it was no longer soft and until tears rolled down her cheeks. The buzzer rang. It rang again. Then some one leaned on it and forgot to remove his elbow.

Pink gripped Val’s jaws in his iron fingers and shook her head furiously, as he might have shaken a recalcitrant puppy. “Shut up!” he growled. “Rhys, if you don’t put those things away—hide ’em. … In a minute!” he yelled at the door.

“Come on, open it,” said a clipped voice from the other side. It was Inspector Glücke’s voice.

Inspector Glücke!

“Pop, p-pop,” stammered Val, looking around wildly. “Throw it out the window. Anywhere. They can’t find it here. They’ll—They mustn’t—”

Sanity came back to her father’s face. “Here,” he said slowly. “This won’t do.”

“Open up, Jardin, or I’ll have the door broken down.”

“Oh, for God’s sake, pop,” whispered Valerie.

“No.” Rhys shook his head with maddening slowness. “There’s something inevitable about this. He’s been tipped off. He’s bound to find it. No, Val. Pink, open that door.”

“Rhys, don’t be a cluck!”

“Let them in, Pink.”

Val shrank back. With a scowl of baffled fury Pink stepped over to the door. Rhys picked up the coat and carried it and the rapier into the living-room and laid them down on the sofa. Men boiled in, headed by Glücke. “Search warrant,” he said curtly, waving a paper. He pushed past Val and stopped in the living-room archway.

“Is this what you want?” asked Rhys tiredly, and he sat down in the armchair and clasped his hands.

The Inspector pounced on the objects on the sofa. His three companions blocked the corridor door. “Ah,” said Glücke; he said nothing more.

“I suppose,” murmured Rhys, “it won’t do any good to assure you we just found those things on the floor of our foyer closet?”

The Inspector did not reply. He raised the coat and examined it curiously. Then he turned and made a sign to his men, and two of them came forward with cotton bags and wrapping paper and began to stow away the coat and rapier, handling them as if they had been made of Ming porcelain.

“He’s telling it to you straight,” said Pink desperately. “Listen, Inspector, don’t be a jackass. Listen to him, to me. We just found it—the three of us. He’s being framed, Rhys is! You can’t—”

“Well,” said Glücke lightly, “there may be something in that, Mr. Pincus.”

“Pink,” muttered Pink.

“Western Union in downtown L.A. ’phoned a wire to Headquarters—anonymous—telling us to search this apartment right away. The telegram was ’phoned in to the Western Union office and we haven’t been able to trace the call. So maybe all this is phony at that.” But he did not sound as if he meant what he said. He sounded as if he were merely trying to make agreeable conversation. He nodded at his men, and two of them followed him out of the apartment. The third man set his back against the open door and just stood there, shifting from one foot to another from time to time, as if he were tired. Val cowered against her supporting wall in the foyer, unable to move, to think. Rhys got up from the chair in the living-room and turned to go into his bathroom.

“Hold it,” said the detective at the door. Rhys looked at him. Then he sat down again.

“Hullo,” said a voice from the corridor. Pink went to the door and dug his elbow into the detective’s abdomen, and the detective shoved his arm angrily away. Pink saw the two other detectives leaning against the balustrade of the emergency stairway which led down to the lobby. They were no more than five feet from the door, and they returned his glance without expression. “Hullo,” said the same voice. Pink looked through him. It was Fitzgerald, of the
Independent
.

The detective at the door said: “Nobody in.”

Fitz’s eyes under their bird’s-nest brows roved, took in Val before him, Rhys sitting motionless in the living-room. “I see they’re keeping the death-watch here. Come on, Mac, this is the press.”

“You heard him,” said Pink, stepping up to him.

“I got a tip from some one I know at Headquarters,” said Fitz. “It seems—Come on, mugg, out of the way.”

The detective at the door closed his eyes. Pink said: “Get the hell out of here.”

“Rhys,” called Fitz. “I want to talk to you. This is serious, Rhys. Maybe I can give you a right steer—”

Pink put his broad palm on Fitz’s chest and pushed, stepping through the doorway. The man at the door did not open his eyes, and the two detectives across the hall did not move. “Do you want a sock in the teeth,” said Pink, “or will you go nice and quiet, like a good little man?”

Fitz laughed. He lashed out with his fist. Pink sidestepped and brought his left up in a short arc. Fitz grunted. He had been drinking, and droplets of alcoholic saliva sprayed Pink’s face.

“Here, stop that,” said one of the men leaning against the balustrade. “Do your brawlin’ outside.” Pink grabbed Fitz by the seat of his pants and ran him down the stairs.

Val trudged into the living-room and sat down on the floor by Rhys’s knee. She rested her cheek on it.

“I don’t think we have much time,” said Rhys in a very low voice. “Val, listen to me.”

“Yes, pop.”

“Glücke will be back soon.” He glanced cautiously at the detective in the doorway. “Maybe in five minutes, maybe in an hour. But whenever he comes back it will be with a warrant for my arrest.”

Val shivered. “But he can’t do that. You didn’t do it. You couldn’t have done it. You were right here—”