The Golden Goose (18 page)

“Where do you want to go?”

“I don't want to go. I must go.”

“Why?”

“Will you come with me, Coley?”

“Of course, but why so mysterious?”

“It's just that I'll have to talk about it when we get there, and I'd rather not have to say this particular piece twice.”

“All right, Mystery Girl,” said Coley lightly; but his eyes were serious and puzzled and just a bit wary.

They rose together, his arm still around her.

Outside, they turned toward town, walking along under the tall old trees, drifting through sunshine and shade. It was one of those timeless afternoons filled with the lazy scents and sounds of summer. The kind of afternoon that always made Prin feel like a little girl fresh from her bath, wearing a newly ironed organdy dress and a big bright satin ribbon in her hair. It was strange that she should feel that way, for Prin could not remember ever having owned an organdy dress or a big bright satin ribbon during the childhood Royal O'Shea had made for her—could not really remember ever having been a little girl, for that matter.

She and Coley walked in silence, since they had agreed that nothing was to be said until they got to where they were going. But he took her hand and gripped it, and that was the way they walked to town, and through town to Cibola City Hall.

When Coley saw that they were going into Cibola City Hall, he let go of Prin's hand. And when they were inside, at the door marked
Cibola City Police Department
, Coley stopped altogether.

“Why are we coming here?” he demanded.

“To see Lieutenant Grundy.”

“What for?”

“I told you, Coley. There's something I have to say.”

“This is about your uncle, I take it?”

“Yes.”

“I don't understand women at all! Why the sudden switch, Prin? Haven't I protected your interests to your satisfaction? After all, I was the one who turned the tables on your aunt and that shyster and got back what they tried to steal from you.”

“I know you did, Coley,” said Prin softly, “and I'm grateful, I really am.”

“Then what's this all about? Don't you trust me any more?”

“It's not a question of trust. It's just that this is something I have to do all by myself, Coley. I've thought and thought about it, and my mind is made up. Won't you please come on?”

“All right,” grumbled Coley. “But I warn you, you're not going to find Grundy in a very understanding mood. Selwyn Fish just made a monkey out of him, and he knows it.”

“Lieutenant Grundy,” said Prin grimly, “will understand this.”

The desk sergeant showed them into Grundy's office. The lieutenant, as Coley had predicted, did not seem in an understanding mood. In fact, he was sitting behind his desk wearing the blackest of scowls. For two days, after the district attorney had laughed in his face, he had tried to think of a way to nail Selwyn Fish for the crime Grundy knew he had committed; and he had failed. The district attorney was right. There was no evidence of crime to present to a grand jury. Slater O'Shea had told Coley Collins that he had made a will leaving everything to Princess O'Shea; and Selwyn Fish had produced a genuine will signed by Slater O'Shea, leaving everything to Princess O'Shea. For the existence of the fraudulent will leaving everything to Miss Lallie O'Shea there was only Grundy's word that Selwyn Fish had told him about it, to which Fish had merely to enter a denial. And that the fraudulent will was now smoke and ashes flushed down a drain even Grundy had had to concede.

When the sergeant announced Princess O'Shea and Coley Collins, Grundy was turning his thoughts to another line of attack. He was convinced that Slater O'Shea had been murdered by the team of Lallie O'Shea and Selwyn Fish; if he could get to Fish through Aunt Lallie … murder was a better rap than fraud and forgery … At that moment Prin and Coley came in, and the lieutenant looked up impatiently.

“Yes?” he said.

“Miss Princess O'Shea,” said Mr. Coley Collins, “has something to tell you, Lieutenant, and since she refused to tell me beforehand what it was, I sincerely wish you would listen to her so that I may satisfy my curiosity.”

Grundy shot a look from Coley to Prin. What he saw on Prin's pretty face sent all thoughts of Selwyn Fish
et al
. from his head.

“In that case,” he said, “you two may as well sit down.”

Prin did, folding her hands and holding them rather high, so that for a startled moment Grundy thought she was praying. Coley remained on his feet in an attitude that said he was ready for anything.

“Start talking,” Grundy said to Prin.

“With discretion,” Coley said to Prin.

“No, it's courage that's necessary,” said Prin, “and I have only enough to last a little while, so hear me out. What has been occupying my thoughts, of course, is Uncle Slater's murder and who might be accused of it. Aunt Lallie and that lawyer Fish might be, if it could be proved that they dreamed up the fraudulent will; and I might be, if it could be proved that I knew before Uncle Slater's murder that I was his sole heir; and Twig might be, because he's the one I'd
like
it to be, if it has to be anyone; and Brady might be, on the basis of general lack of character; and even Peet might be, if this were a detective story and you had to have it the least likely person. And that was all there seemed to be in the way of suspects. Until suddenly,” said Prin, “I thought of another one.”

“Who's that?” asked Coley.

“You,” said Prin.

“Me?” said Coley.

“Him?”
said Lieutenant Grundy, staring at Coley as if he had just contrived to crawl out of the woodwork.

“Yes, Lieutenant,” said Prin steadily. “Coley knew I was sole heir even before he met me, because Uncle Slater had told him; and then a couple of weeks later I happened to stop into the taproom and right away he wanted to marry me and after a while I said yes—and that gave Coley a motive … through
me
.

“When you think about the
why,”
Prin continued in the deathly stillness, “you can't help going on to think about the
how
. The day Uncle Slater died he came home loaded, which meant he had been at a bar; and his favorite bar was the Coronado taproom. And, of course, that synthetic substitute for insulin having a delayed effect of about an hour, as somebody or other said, Uncle Slater
could
have been given the overdose in a drink at the taproom just before he left for home, instead of in his bedside bourbon bottle. And then I remembered how Coley had insisted on our slipping upstairs for a look at Uncle Slater's room after I'd found him dead, and the bedroom was dim and I was distracted and Coley
could
have dropped some of the drug into the bourbon bottle at that time to make it seem as if the murder was an in-the-house crime.

“And then just this afternoon,” Prin went on in the same steady voice, not looking at Coley, who was looking at her with the same sort of horror with which Grundy was looking at
him
, “I walked over to where Coley lives, and I met his friend Winnie Whitfield, with whom he shares the apartment, and all of a sudden it came out that Winnie was on his way to a drug store to refill a prescription for an insulin substitute, because Winnie says he is a diabetic. And that would seem to give Coley a simple, direct way of getting hold of the drug, because all he had to do was steal some from Winnie's supply. Now do you see the lines along which I have been thinking?”

“What I see,” said Coley bitterly, “is that you will sure as hell get me electrocuted if you don't quit talking right now.”

“What I see,” said Lieutenant Grundy in an iron voice, “is a great—white—light.”

“Then, Lieutenant,” said Prin, “you are quite blind. What you think you now see through my eyes you would sooner or later have seen through your own; it is only a question of time; but through my eyes or your own, what you think you see is a big fat coincidence. No, Lieutenant, I can't let Coley go through the ordeal of arrest and conviction, and maybe the agony of execution, just because of a remarkable accident of circumstances. Coley didn't murder Uncle Slater.

“I did.”

16

And in this swift transshipment of horrors—Grundy to Coley to Princess O'Shea, Coley to Princess O'Shea from one cast of horror to another—Prin went inexorably on.

“Because, you see,” said Prin, “I've known about the will all along. Uncle Slater told me about it in confidence just after he had Selwyn Fish draw it up secretly. That was Uncle Slater's mistake. He forgot that for all the sweetness and light I'm supposed to radiate, I am nevertheless an O'Shea born and bred, however much I've always wished I weren't; and that an O'Shea will do anything, for any reason—even, sometimes, for no reason.

“But this time there was reason enough. Uncle Slater was an old dear, but the way he was going he might have lived on and on and on. And I knew he had left everything to me, and I was sick of pretending to be someone I never really was, and going through the motions of working for my keep—what a joke that job is, and how I loathe it!—and being dependent on handouts,
et cetera, ad infinitum
. So I stole some of the drug from Mr. Free's pharmaceutical cubby, and I dropped a lethal dose into Uncle Slater's bedside bottle of bourbon just before he came home for his nap. If he had to die at my hand, I wanted his death to be as painless and even pleasurable as possible. And it was—oh, I hope it was.

“So now, Coley, go away,” said Prin in a strange half cry. “Go away and let Lieutenant Grundy do whatever he has to do. And don't look at me that way, I can't bear it.
Go away!”

And Princess O'Shea clutched her pretty face with her two little palms and began to weep, not as if her heart were breaking, but rather as if it had broken long, long before and she had forgotten how to weep properly.

And Lieutenant Grundy, who had been glaring at her in profound horror, now glared at her with profound bitterness; and finally he looked away, as if he were unable to take the sight of her at all any longer, because she had betrayed him into human feeling against the dictates of his policeman's training and his policeman's sense, which had told him all along that she had plotted the murder of her uncle.

As for Coley Collins, he had turned his back on her. And there he stood, a sad figure with a droop to his shoulders, in an attitude of hopelessness and helplessness, as if she had reduced him in a stroke to something far less than a man. But then he turned around, and Lieutenant Grundy saw that this had all been illusion, a trick of posture and atmosphere. For Coley Collins' eyes held something hard and abstracted, and there was a twisted smile on his lips, a smile at once sorrowful and cynical—the grist of a mill that had ground an unexpected portion for the miller. And Coley sighed, and he spoke. And although he addressed Princess O'Shea principally, and Lieutenant Grundy incidentally, he actually seemed to be talking to himself.

“All right, you win,” Coley said. “You win, Princess; and you lose, Coley; and you don't know what we're talking about, Lieutenant, which isn't to be marveled at, because murder isn't your dish of chop suey, is it?—which is a nice-nelly way of saying you wouldn't last two weeks on a big-city police force.

“The lady declines to accuse me,” Coley went on as Prin raised her quite tearless face and Lieutenant Grundy parted his quite dry lips, “and I thank the lady for that; but by accusing herself she has cleverly placed me in a position in which I must accuse
myself
; and that is cleverness indeed. Because it calls on me to act in a manner unnatural and painful and downright stupid, when you come to think of it; and only a master psychologist or an outraged female
would
think of it.”

Coley Collins turned to Grundy. “Miss O'Shea was right the first time, Lieutenant. I killed Slater O'Shea. He was a nice old bird, and I hated to do it, but I did. Maybe the idea,” he continued, turning to Prin squarely, “sneaked into my head in a sort of suppositional way when your uncle blabbed to me about the will, I don't know. I do know there was an heiress around, and I've never had any luck with heiresses, because either they were ugly and I didn't want them, or they were pretty and they didn't want me. But then you came into the taproom one evening, and everything felt just right. You were an heiress, you were a doll, and you were interested. So it became more than a hypothesis—much more. It became a plan—well, all right, a plot. I should like to assure you, if you need assurance, Princess, that Uncle Slater's money became immensely more attractive because you came with it. But I don't suppose you care about that now. Anyhow, we both know there was something between us. I knew we'd be married if things worked out, so I put the stuff in your uncle's bourbon Manhattan-for-the-road that afternoon at my bar just before he left for home. Because of its delayed action I was pretty certain he wouldn't die till he got there; and I figured his death would pass as from natural causes—heart failure; and I'll bet it would have, too, if not for that old maniac Appleton.

“The reason I dropped in later that day was to look over the field of action and see if there were any holes in the line that needed plugging. And the first thing I ran into was Appleton's fool talk about calling the police and having an autopsy and all. And I realized right off that I had to change my strategy. If the thing was going to be handled as a murder instead of a natural death, I had to protect myself. And I saw that the best way to do it was to make it appear that the murder had taken place in Slater O'Shea's house—if I didn't do that, the police would surely trace the crime back to my bar. That's why I conned you into taking me upstairs to your uncle's room, Princess. And while we were up there I managed to slip some more of the drug into the bourbon bottle on his bedside table, as you figured. I'd taken the stuff from old Winnie's supply to dose Uncle Slater's last drink at my bar; I still had some with me—luckily, I thought—so I was sitting pretty.