THE STORY
Derek Wingblade leaned forward in surprise. “Isn’t—isn’t McCorniss?” he exclaimed. “Why, hellfire, girl—that is a story! That’s—but what’s—what’s your basis for such a statement as you made?”
“I’ll tell you,” she said, expertly twirling her cocktail glass so that not a drop of it was spilled. “Up to some time ago, I had a sweetheart in this burg here. Fellow named Nick Verdigris. Yes, a Greek. A craps-artist who could shake the 7’s right off a pair of bones. Anyway, Nick had some kind of arthritis in one leg. And the toxins from it had affected his heart. And he went to Shelby’s Bluff, the town there on Big River, where McCorniss lived—and off of which, of course, ’way out in Big River, is—or was!—McCorniss’ island—or should I call it by its right name?—Bleeker’s Island?—well, anyway, Nick went to Shelby’s Bluff to take a crack at some magic waters they have there.”
“Yes,” Wingblade acknowledged. “The story I read even told of McCorniss having left a substantial bequest to investigate and develop the spring from which that water flows.”
“The man, you mean,” she corrected him, “who is—rather was—posing as McCorniss. But get this! Nick had met Philaster McCorniss once. Not a Philaster McCorniss, please understand, but the Philaster McCorniss who was the only son of the guy that invented the Helical Plow. This is important. He’d met Philaster McCorniss, as I started to say, in Cape Town, South Africa. Nick, in the money at the time, was living at a hotel where McCorniss, on a sort of round-the-world trip, checked in for a week. Nick played chess with McCorniss half a dozen times—for the galloping cubes weren’t always Nick’s meat, you see! Nick also took McCorniss over the burg—which Nick knew well—a couple of times. Nick even nearly interested McCorniss in a fly-by-night proposition laid here in N’Yawk, but McCorniss went cold on it after considering it all sides. Anyway, the point is that Nick met McCorniss personally—so personally and intimately as to see McCorniss’ ‘fambly scrapbook’ with pictures of the latter’s old man, and the Helical Plow Factory the old man founded, and so forth and so on—and to see letters to McCorniss from the Harvester Trust, making offers—and to see business cables received by McCorniss right there in the hotel in Cape Town—and so may be said to have known McCorniss better, by a thousand times, than I knew you tonight when I sized you up here under the light. And, when Nick got to Shelby’s Bluff, what did he find but that the rich man of the burg was ‘Philaster McCorniss’—son of the guy who invented the Helical Plow, and all that!—but not the real McCorniss at all!”
“Good God!” Derek Wingbladc exclaimed, twirling his own as-yet-untouched cocktail gently by its stem, as expertly as even she did, “that would be a wow of a story—if it could be confirmed. Where could one get in touch with Nick now?”
“In hell,” the girl said calmly. “For he’s dead. He died there in Shelby’s Bluff a few days back. And was shipped home—no, not to New York here, no—but to Chicago, where his papers showed he had an old man running a Greek grocery on Halsted Street. Which I knew myself—though I didn’t know the old boy’s name.” She paused. “Anyway all the facts I’ve just give you he told me—in the last letter he wrote me. After he commenced to feel a bit better from that water. I got the letter yesterday. And rang Nick by long distance. And that’s how I found he had croaked—and had been shipped home to Chi. The letter I had, I—”
“Might I see the letter?” Derek Wingblade asked quickly. “You mightn’t not,” she said, with a moue. “For the reason that I burned it. Since it referred to a little matter in which Nick and I once—anyway,” she broke off curtly, “I burned it. But the facts I’m giving you from it are plenty fresh in my mind. Since—”
“Wait! What was Nick’s theory? About this interchange of identities? And what did he intend to do about it?”
“Nick was too sick a man to do anything about anybody or anything. His theory was that—well, it seems that this guy McCorniss had been taken away from that town when he was an infant, and returned to it only a half-century or so later to spend his final days there. And Nick’s theory was that somebody bumped McCorniss off at some time—and then sidled gently into Shelby’s Bluff where nobody had ever-known McCorniss—or at least no more than as a bawling infant—to spend the rest of his days and McCorniss’ coin.”
“Zowie!” commented Wingblade. “I’d—but how about the two old servants—mentioned in bequests?”
“A couple of shills, Nick was certain. Simple-minded rubes picked up somewhere by the phony—and drug in as old family servants. Instructed always, if they wanted to keep their jobs, to say about town that they’d been with him all his life. They, in turn—so Nick figured—believed they were faithfully covering up some werry sinful part of their dear master’s career for him!”
“Logical enough,” mused Wingblade. “For—but see here—this is a grave charge. Now you say Nick was a very sick man. Is there any chance that the years that had passed over McCorniss’ head had changed him sufficiently that he seemed like someone else?”
“Does sickness change a man’s nose?—and his chin? And his—but Nick said positively no. As to McCorniss’ being just an ‘older’ McCorniss, I mean. The man who was there in Shelby’s Bluff was no outgrowth, Nick said, by 20 years, or anything else, of the man Nick had known in Cape Town.”
“Well—did Nick, by any chance, talk with this Shelby’s Bluff McCorniss—and try to see whether McCorniss recognized him?”
“Of course! And—Nick said—‘McCorniss’ plainly didn’t know him from Adam. Still more, when Nick, learning from the gink that introduced ’em that ‘McCorniss’ had been all over the globe, asked him a question about Cape Town, the son-of-a-bitch lost no time in saying he’d never been there—so’s, you see, not to get tangled up in any statements?”
“Hm? Well maybe, having forgotten all about Nick over the years, he thought Nick was a phony of some sort—and was asking him, McCorniss, whether he’d ever been in Cape Town only preparatory to spilling some fakealoo of his—Nick’s—own about the town; and so thought to trap Nick into spilling something that would be all screwy as to Cape Town’s geography—or topography—or what-have-you?”
“Yeah?” The girl was frankly amused. “Well, it’s plain to be seen that you don’t take as much stock in Nick’s dope as I do! But that’s because you never knew him. He had more brains and observation as a sick man than 20 well men. I’ve seen Nick, in a hospital, and only halfway out of some ether, tip me off to insignificant facts about the room and nurses that I—there 3 full hours—never even noticed. So if Nick said that that Shelby’s Bluff McCorniss was a phony, then—why, listen, Nick—Nick was so all there, I tell you—when it came to brains and—and observation, that he discovered, full six months ago, something scientific which even Sci’nce hadn’t discovered—and which only now, in the last month or so, they’ve doped out. Doped out what Nick had as good as knew—all along.”
“Discovered something—which Science even hadn’t?” echoed Wingblade. “We-ell—if you can illuminate that, I think I can accept right off the bat that your Nick’s discovery, there in Shelby’s Bluff, may be—well—99 per cent correct! Leaving 1 per cent yet for that ever possible ‘error,’ don’t you know? So spill it! What in the devil did your Nick discover—that it took the professorial Greybeards six months to overtake him?”