Saturday, December 6, 1941
IT WAS a Saturday night a month later, the last Saturday night of a nation nominally at peace. Lieutenant Marshall was hospitably mixing drinks for a company replete with one of Leona’s noble dinners. There were present the Duncans and the Carters and Joe Henderson and Jenny Green.
“One thing,” Marshall observed as he poured. “You’ve affected my taste in reading matter. You boys have got something here in this fantasy field.” He gestured toward a bookshelf where two pulps stood beside the Greek Anthology. “At its best, it’s fresh, vigorous, creative imagination, and the perfect escape literature. I never could find much escape myself in a mystery novel. Too close to home or too exasperatingly far from it. But in a space ship . . . God can I escape! Some of it, of course, can be pretty flat; but for instance in the two magazines that your friend Don Stuart edits, it’s the McCoy.”
The three writers bowed gratefully. “We’ll prove that there’s a market for fantasy yet,” said Austin Carter. “Maybe even between book covers, though my novels so far haven’t caused any particular worry for the fire wardens along the Thames. And wait till you see Matt’s latest novelet. I kicked around that time machine alibi I sprang on you, but it wouldn’t jell. So I generously turned it over to Matt and he did a sweet job. Don’s always maintained that a science fiction detective story was by definition impossible, but wait till you read that one.”
“Thanks for the plug,” said Matt. “I’ll return it: How’s your anthology coming?”
Carter made a face. “I’m doing an anthology of science fiction for Pocket Books,” he explained. “And I’ve got the strictest instructions never to pay over fifty dollars for reprint rights on a story.”
“So?” Marshall asked as he paused.
“So it doesn’t contain any Fowler Foulkes. Vance wants a hundred or no dice.”
Joe Henderson gaped. “Vance did that to you?”
“But,” Matt objected, “I thought Metropolis reconsidered and bought your novel. Vance played ball on that.”
“Sure. After I promised him a cut on the sale, or he’d repeat Hilary’s trick of withholding the Derringer stories.”
“Good God!” Marshall ejaculated. “All that trouble and what have we got in the end? Another Hilary.”
“Please!” Jenny Green protested. “Oh, I know the things Cousin Hilary did. I know there’s no excusing him. But he was good to me. Even in his will after he died. And I can’t stand the way you all always talk about him . . .” There were the first wellings of tears in her eyes. Joe Henderson unobtrusively took her hand.
“Hilary’s dead,” said Austin Carter, “and the evil that he did lives after him very actively.”
“A man is dead,” said Marshall, “and the arrangement that allowed and all but compelled him to do wrong—in this case, the arbitrary administration of literary rights by a capricious individual—”
“Oxford,” said Leona in a loud aside.
“All right. Anyway this arrangement allows and compels his successor to do likewise. A man dies, but nothing is changed unless the system dies too. You could work out some pretty metaphorical applications . . .”
“I don’t know,” Carter frowned. “I agree the system has worked badly on this estate; but what is one to do? When we eventually get into this war and the Navy calls me up for active duty, supposing I get killed? I certainly want Berni to enjoy whatever small income my stuff may still bring in.”
“Thanks, sweet,” Bernice smiled. “But don’t be in a hurry to leave me holding the royalties.”
“The income,” Marshall said. “Of course a writer’s heirs should enjoy his income, unless one wishes to attack the whole problem of hereditary fortunes. But should they have willful and unchecked control of his work? I can imagine something like a committee of the Authors’ League of America which would pass on all applications for the use of material and fix a reasonable fee, which would of course be received by the estate. I—”
“You’re getting out of your depth, dear, aren’t you?” Leona suggested. “Tell these charming people your latest professional discovery.”
“Oh.” Marshall laughed. “Yes, this was one of my main reasons for having you over. Thought you’d all want to know. For my own satisfaction, you see, I’ve been checking up on loose ends on the Foulkes case. My report is in and done with, but there were things I wanted to know. Maybe they weren’t my professional concern any longer, but I needed to know them.
“I went wrong from the start on this case. I’ll admit that. I was too preoccupied with detail to see pattern. To Sister Ursula, it was clear from the start that the attacks originated with Hilary. Me, the bright industrious professional, I go snooping around on little trails of detail, and end up damned near arresting you, Mr. Carter.”
Austin Carter grinned. “Some imp kept prompting me to try to goad you into that, Lieutenant.”
“I know. And I kept trying to figure if that was a sign of malicious innocence or brilliant guilt.”
“What was it put you on to Austin, Lieutenant?” Bernice Carter asked. “The Derringer costume?”
“But if you’d only asked me about that,” said Jenny Green. “Or if I’d only thought to tell you . . . Hilary always had a Derringer costume, even long before I knew him. He used to wear it for family masquerades and such.”
“Mr. MacLeish was right,” Marshall sighed and quoted: “ ‘It is the questions that we do not know.’ So I got beautifully lost on detail in those first attempts, and I got lost again toward the end. I got enough detailed facts to figure out two beautiful theories about Wimpole and Runcible, put them together, and thought I had everything. And all the time I kept worrying my eyes over these details, there was the grand pattern if I’d only step back a couple of feet and take it in.
“But even after we saw the big pattern, some of these details still bothered me until I realized that they were parts of incomplete sub-patterns. And I needed to fill in the rest.”
“Skip the mea culpa, Terence,” said Matt, “and tell us these sub-patterns.”
“Well now, for instance, about Vance Wimpole. Most of my guess was right on that. He had been in Los Angeles from time to time during his supposed wanderings, and Phyn had seen him and was blackmailing him. But the whole set-up, including letters mailed by friends from distant points, was intended to circumvent detectives, not from homicide, but from a divorce-evidence agency. I managed to find out enough to set up in blackmail for myself; but I’ll hold out the juicier details.
“And the other business is too bitterly good to be true. William Runcible Foulkes, I discovered by painstaking checking through records, was orphaned at an early age and brought up in an asylum. He learned a trade and grew up into a first-rate turret-lathe operator. He died in Chicago of natural causes in 1938.”
The audience was duly and gogglingly petrified. “Then our Runcible . . . ?” Austin Carter ventured at last.
“Something we’ll never know about this case is who did what and with which and to whom, or in less famous words, who was defrauding whom in what manner. Did a false Runcible put himself over on Tarbell, that specialist in lost claimants? Were Runcible and Tarbell collaborators in fraud? Or did Tarbell convince a young innocent that he was the missing Foulkes heir and use him as a lever on Hilary?”
“Tune in to this station tomorrow and find out,” Leona murmured.
“I wish this station knew. But it can make a guess that the last of those assumptions is correct. Tarbell was in Chicago building up his Weyringhausen case at the time the real Runcible died. And he did have the rosary, and God knows what else that was destroyed either at the Elite Hotel or at the rooming house on Adams. Say that he knew the young man and was planning to press his claims when he up and dies. So Tarbell filches and preserves the evidence for future use. Finally fate is kind, and he runs on to a man with a marked physical resemblance to the Foulkes’, even down to the arm trick. If this young man’s own family background were hazy, it shouldn’t be hard to persuade him that he was the descendant of the Fowler Foulkes whom he so idolizes.”
“Then all Hilary’s . . .” Jenny Green began. “It was all for nothing?”
“For nothing?” said Joe Henderson quietly.
“You and Bernice should be happy,” Matt Duncan observed to his wife as they walked home from the streetcar. “It looks like you’ve finally got a nice girl for Joe.”
“I like her.”
“So do I. But she does seem mild for Joe’s tastes. I’d have thought that bitch of a Foulkes woman was more his type.”
“I think I know what happened there. Jenny says she and Joe were there when Mrs. Foulkes and her brother talked about Hilary’s death, just before we came in. She says it was awful . . . like something inhuman. I think then Joe realized just how evil a woman can really be; and evil women sort of lost their fascination.” Concha paused and removed a pebble from her shoe. “If we had a car . . .” she muttered.
“We’re not going into that again!” Matt snapped.
“But I used my own money when . . . you know . . .”
“I know. Sorry, darling. I shouldn’t have barked at you like that. You used your money, and it meant more than I ever thought money could mean. It meant that you loved me and needed me and wanted me free even when I was charged with killing a man. But still I . . . Damn it, my love, life is so confusedly much a matter of prides. Hilary had his own peculiar kind of pride. Sister Ursula has hers. Well, I have mine.”
“I think,” said Concha in a very little voice, “I’ve got a solution.”
“Yes, dear?”
“I could spend the money on anything that was my own, couldn’t I? I mean let’s say I wanted to raise pedigreed chows. I could spend it on them, couldn’t I?”
“I guess so. I wouldn’t stop you. But I don’t know as how chows—”
“Silly. That was just for example like. I don’t mean chows. But I could . . . oh I know I wouldn’t be very good at it and not nearly so capable and admirable as Leona but then who is? And every time we go to the Marshalls’ I get to thinking about it and . . . I could spend it raising my own baby, couldn’t I?”
Matt Duncan did a very slow take. Then, though they were at that moment right under a bright street lamp, he took his wife in his arms. “Darling,” he said a little later, “let’s get home and make sure of that.”
Thirty hours later, in the white-and-gold chapel of the Sisters of Martha of Bethany, the chaplain had just finished saying the requested month’s mind Mass for the repose of the soul of Hilary Foulkes. A nun moved slowly about the chapel. As she paused in devotion before each station of the Cross, she fingered a curious rosary which should by rights have reposed in the Black Museum of the Los Angeles Police Department.