We were sitting down to a real breakfast which we had had sent up and I was about to pour the coffee when Alexis Murray arrived. She didn’t ring up from downstairs but came directly to our room. So she knew the number, too.
In the early morning light which filled our hotel bedroom she looked as wan as a girl with a stylish cap haircut and aged nineteen could look. Which is not very wan. She was wearing a white-cotton blouse and a skirt of faded-blue denim, and black sandals with bobby socks. Her tailored sports jacket was navy flannel. Over her heart her monogram was embroidered on the jacket in red.
How fresh and sweet she looked! And how worried! Poor child, to get mixed up, at her age, in such a mess.
“Look,” she said, before she would sit down, “I shot Guy Adriance.”
“We heard you the first time,” Patrick said. “Sit down, Alex, and have some coffee. I’ll get room service and order more of everything.”
“No, no. I don’t want anything.”
“Oh, yes, you do, dear,” Patrick said. He seldom called other girls dear and darling and I shot him a look. I saw that he was really concerned and worried about young Alexis Murray.
He helped her off with her jacket and seated her in his place. He asked what she’d like to eat. She said nothing at all and Pat went to the phone, and ordered more orange juice and cereal with cream and bacon and eggs and toast and another big pot of coffee. Alex picked up Pat’s cup and drank it black.
Patrick came back and stood smiling down at her.
“Pull yourself together, Alex. You’ll be all right.”
“But I just have to talk.”
“All right, honey. Talk. Get it off your chest.”
“I just couldn’t go to the sheriff. Or my father.”
“Of course not.”
“The deputy sheriff, I mean. The real one is away. I know him and I could have talked to him all right but he would have gone straight to Rob, and then what? My father takes things in his own hands. I am frightened for him to know I did it. He would say right away he did it himself and everybody would believe him because he hates them so.”
“The Adriances?” Patrick asked, as if there was any doubt.
“Oh, he would never say he hated Aunt Kitty. She’s a woman and she’s practically kin. Not really, but you know how it is when you call a person Aunt. It’s almost as if they were. But he does, all the same. And he’s violent. Rob is really violent, Pat. Oh, never with us, but he hates liars and cheaters, and he hates pretense, and he specially hates Aunt Kitty because he thinks she did Faye wrong. Ruined her whole life.”
“Faye’s life is not ruined,” I said.
“Of course not. She has a grand time and more proposals than you can imagine. All the time. She always has. When she was engaged to Guy’s father she was only seventeen, and not even quite that, and then all at once Aunt Kitty moved in on her and got him. Aunt Kitty was twenty-four. That ring the other night—that was the ring he gave Aunt Kitty and Faye had had it first, and when I found that out I took it back.”
“When did you find out, Alex?”
“Rob told me. After you were gone.”
“And what did you do then?”
“What I’ve told you all along. First I slipped out of the house. I went out to the stallion barn. One of the men was there but he wasn’t in the office just then so I called to him it was me and I took the pistol from Rob’s desk. I walked over to Adriances’ taking the ring. I used the bridle path. It’s the short-cut and it’s private. Guy was sitting on the sofa with a champagne bottle in an ice bucket and chain-smoking as usual.”
“What was he doing with his ashes, Alex?”
“Ashes? Using an ash tray, I suppose. The window was open and the shade was up because he is sort of afraid of Aunt Kitty. Or I should say was. She hates the smell of cigarette smoke in her parlor. I handed out the ring and said my say. He wouldn’t take the ring. He laughed and—well, I threw the ring into the room and then I let him have it. He dropped down and I dropped the gun and ran.”
“Did you hear the report?”
“I didn’t hear anything. My heart was pounding so. I was in a terrible rage. I don’t know what happened to the gun. I ran to the fence and climbed over into the bridle path and ran all the way home.”
“You saw no one?”,
“Not a soul. It was at least one o’clock. You don’t see anybody much at that hour in the country, unless on the main pikes. And I stuck to the bridle path. Nobody saw me, but the man at the barn knows I came there and he will remember it and speak about it to Rob. I want you to tell my father. I can’t bear to.”
“All right,” Patrick said. “If you’ll promise me something.”
“Oh, I will. What?”
“First to eat your breakfast and then to keep mum about this affair. You didn’t kill Sam Casey too?”
“Casey? Are you crazy?”
Patrick smiled. “I don’t think so, Alex. Are you going to do what I asked?”
“Yes. But don’t put it off too long. I just can’t stand knowing it and hearing people think Guy did it himself. He never would. He hadn’t the—the decency. I know that now. You can fall out of love with a person just as fast as you fell in.”
“You can at your age, darling,” I said.
She began to eat with a healthy appetite and Patrick lit a cigarette, helped himself to my cup of coffee, and said, “Who was the woman in Casey’s life, Alex?”
Alex grinned. “There wasn’t any. None that anybody knows of.”
“I felt, in his house, that there was.”
“You mean because it looked so prissy? Nope, that’s the way he wanted it. Faye had it done for him just the way he wanted it and she groaned and carried on because she thought it was so dull. Just like everybody else’s house, she said, except for the photographs and the pictures of horses. The place itself had possibilities of originality, but he would have it just like it is. Poor Casey. His death had nothing to do with Guy’s, Pat. I shot Guy. And both my father and Steve Banning will swear up and down they did it themselves. You’ll see.”
“That will be nice,” I said. “Nobody will believe either of them and that will be the end of it. Nobody will believe you did it either, Alex. Dr. Gusdorf calls it suicide, and Mrs. Adriance will let it go at that, I think, rather than have a public scandal. So we’ll all go out to Keeneland to the races and everything will be fine.”
“Oh, Jean, you can’t know how awful I feel …”
“Hey, remember your promise, Alex,” Patrick said. “Are you a good shot?”
“Not awfully. I aimed at his head. I missed it, I guess. Faye’s the one who can shoot in our family. She’s tops.”
“When did Faye join your father in Texas, Alex?”
“Right after she got jilted. Don’t hate me for my saying that, kids. She says it herself. Honestly, she got right over it. She was so young, you see. It was the next one she didn’t get over. When she was about twenty-five she was engaged and all ready to be married to a wonderful man in Texas. The whole family loved him. He was burned to death in an accident in the oil fields a week or so before they were to be married. But here Aunt Kitty is always reminding people that she got Guy’s father away from Faye. He couldn’t have been very much. He walked out on Aunt Kitty later. And he was soon nothing to Faye any more. Absolutely nothing.”
There was a tap and the waiter came in with lots more food and coffee, which we now needed badly. The waiter arranged things and went out.
“In a place like this,” said Alex, buttering another piece of toast, “nobody ever lets anything die. Gossip lives forever. Nobody will ever forget that Aunt Kitty got that Guy’s father away from Faye.”
“Then what do they hold against Guy Adriance?” I asked.
Alex frowned. “Oh, that’s not much, really. He had a sort of crush on an older woman. We kids understand stuff like that now. I guess she was a nymphomaniac. Everybody knows that. Faye and Rob have delicately refrained from telling me that spot of dirt, but everybody knows it. Absolutely everybody.”
“The terms you kids use nowadays!” I said. “Any woman is a nymphomaniac to you psychiatry-tainted brats if she steps off the straight and narrow even once. But go on.”
“Well I just want you to know that that old scandal had nothing to do with me. You should have heard what he said to me there at the window. He also said he didn’t blame me for not liking that old sparkler, and he had given it to me just to please his mother. Since by then Rob had told me about the ring I saw red. What a stinking thing for Aunt Kitty to do! I mean, trying to hurt Faye all over again. Well, then Guy started piling on the goo, and then he changed his line and said some nasty things about Steve, and then he got nasty and asked if I was meeting my corn-fed lover some place tonight—that was what he called Steve—and then I said all he wanted of me was my father’s money, and then he said, why not. I think he was drunk, because of the way he gave himself away. I realized then that I had been behaving like a perfect goon. And finally on top of all the rest he said he hated his mother.”
“He told the truth that time,” Patrick said.
“Look, you don’t say things like that about your own mother in Kentucky, Pat,” Alex said earnestly.
“You don’t anywhere,” I said. “If you’re the right kind.”
Alex ate more bacon, eggs, toast and drank more coffee.
“I said he wasn’t honest. He laughed and said, who was? Said how did my father get rich? Oil and horses, the two most dishonest businesses in the world, he said. He was absolutely awful.”
“He was very indiscreet, at least,” I said. “If he really wanted you, I mean.”
“He didn’t want me. Some time or other between the time he left my house and my seeing him there at his house something happened which changed his mind. What? Maybe he realized that my father would make him support me. Not give me a penny if I married Guy. Rob wouldn’t’ve, either.”
“Or maybe he just got drunk,” I remarked.
“Adriance would not concede to himself that Rob would cut you off,” Patrick said. “He would figure that some way or other once he married you he could put the squeeze on Rob, Alex.”
“How do you know that?” Alex asked.
“It’s an assumption. He was a type. What sort of shoes did you wear last night when you went over to Adriance’s, Alex?”
“My riding boots. I know it’s silly, but I’m afraid of snakes, even though they are not supposed to be out at night at this time of year. We don’t have many poisonous snakes here, of course. But I’m wary. The feeling is a hangover from south Texas.”
Patrick said, “After you went back home, then, you decided to go to Steve’s.”
“Yes, I did. I knew it was his gun. I knew after thinking it over that he had to be told. I used the bridle path and I walked again. And I wore saddle oxfords because it is a good mile to Steve’s house and I couldn’t walk that in those riding boots, snakes or no snakes. Anyhow, by that time I was too worried to think of anything but what I had done.”
“You thought you had killed him?”
“I knew it when I walked by the second time and saw your car and the doctor’s and heard the patrol car coming and saw its special lights. Nobody saw me. It was too late to get the gun. I crouched down a little so my head wouldn’t show above the fence and hurried on past the house.”
She had managed a good breakfast and two cups of coffee and she was much settled down, either from the talk or the food or both, but I was surprised when Patrick said, “Now, tell me all about what happened, when you got to the Adriance house the first time, Alex. Which window was it?”
She said which window, and it was the right window.
“The shade was up how far?”
“Halfway up, I think. The bottom sash was wide open.”
“You walked right into the flower bed under that window?”
“I guess so. I didn’t give it a thought.”
“You spoke to Guy at once about why you had come?”
“Oh, yes. I was furious. I told him what I thought about his giving me that particular ring. He sort of swayed when he stood up and then he asked me to have some champagne and there wasn’t any left in the bottle, so he splashed it down in the bucket and said, and his voice was thick. ‘Good thing you don’t drink, honey. Is no more champagne.’”
“Then he had already finished off a bottle by himself?”
“Why, I don’t know. What difference?”
“Champagne makes people cocky. That might have been why Guy had the nerve to talk to you as he did. Up till then he had been playing his cards pretty carefully, hadn’t he?”
“Why, yes, I suppose he had. I thought he was in love with me. He behaved so well, didn’t paw or anything, didn’t even kiss me till last night. I guess I knew the truth then. His kiss hadn’t any zoom.”
“That proves it, dear,” I said.
“Go on, Alex,” Patrick said, with a small wink my way she couldn’t have seen, a special wink, for me. “What happened then?”
“Well, he said it was too bad about there being no more champagne because he was drinking it to celebrate our engagement. So I tossed the ring in and said there wasn’t any more engagement now so it made no difference. Then he said what I will never repeat. And he grabbed at me through the window with a terrible look on his face and I fired the gun. I was scared.”
“We can call it self-defense, Alex darling,” I said.
“Didn’t he say anything?” Patrick asked, kicking me hard under the table.
“Yes, he did. He said after all he proposed giving up for me he’d see about that. Then—well, it was then that I shot him.”
“How long had you been with Steve when we got there?”
“About two minutes.”
“Did you tell him what you told me?”
“He wouldn’t give me a chance. First he said to scram. Then he said he’d get his car and get me home, and then you arrived.”
Patrick went back to the Adriances.
“Do you think Mrs. Adriance saw you at the window? Or heard you talking with Guy?”
“Oh, dear. Oh, no, I don’t think so. I think she would have flocked right out. To chaperone me, of course.”
“Or to keep sonny-boy Guy from saying the wrong thing when he was plastered,” I said.
“You’re sure you didn’t tell Steve anything?” Pat said.
“Positive. Except what you heard. Naturally he was surprised when I turned up at that hour and the first thing he thought of was getting me back home. We kissed each other and I was surprised at his having a drink. Steve hardly ever has a drink. He’s like me. Enough zoom without drinking.”
“Alex, the police will have no trouble identifying the gun.”
“I know that. That’s why I came to you first. I want to know what to do.”
“Nothing just now. Just wait.”
“If you think I’ll stand by and let other people take the blame for something I did …”
“I know you won’t, Alex. I just don’t want you to say anything about this for—for just a few hours.”
“Why?”
“Well, the minute you tell this story, Alex, your father and Steve Banning will each declare they shot Adriance. Keep it quiet just now for their sake.”
The telephone rang. Patrick answered, and Alex’s eyes met mine as she recognized her father’s deep, voice.
“We’re worried about Alex,” Rob said.
“She’s here with us, Rob.”
We could hear his relieved sigh.
“Well, thank God. Faye said she heard her car go out half an hour ago, but I haven’t been able to locate her till now.”
“Like us to bring her home?”
“I guess she can fetch herself, Pat. She has her car. Thanks anyway.”
Patrick cradled the phone.
“Get ready,” he said. “We’re following you back to Murray Farm, Alex. That is, if you think you can keep your promise.”
“You don’t believe I did it!” Alex said. “You’re kidding.”
“Sure, I believe it,” Patrick said. “You’re also afraid your father or Steve or both will try to take the rap for you. They will, too. But we won’t let them because we know the truth. Is that how you want it, Alex?”
Tears filled her eyes.
“Yes, it is.”
“Good girl,” Patrick said. “You’re all right.”