There were men in nightshirts and overalls pouring water and dirt on the flames behind him. There was Hercules licking his face, there was Jake and Helene, and Florence Peveley, and a mob of men standing in the glare of the flames.
John J. Malone struggled to his feet. For just an instant there was a whirligig of starred sky, black trees, white faces, and blazing timbers. His hands and face stung sharply, the breaths that he drew came painfully.
He looked at Jake’s face, it was black and singed, and he realized that they must have leaped through the flames.
“That’s the guy,” a voice screamed. “The red-haired one.”
Malone roared, “Just—a—minute!” The crowd of men suddenly hushed.
It was a hair’s breadth, Malone thought, like the last sixty seconds before the jury went out. The mob inspired by the Citizens’ Committee had been momentarily taken aback, but, he knew, only momentarily. Until Jerry Luckstone and the sheriff came, there was only himself to stand between Jake and the mob. And his throat hurt.
The fire was dying down a little. Malone struck a pose and instinctively reached for a cigar. He had none. He addressed the mob.
“Has anybody out there got a cigar?”
There was an instant’s pause, then a faint ripple of laughter. Someone in the middle of the crowd pushed forward and tossed something at Malone.
“Here y’are!”
“Thanks,” Malone said, catching it neatly. He paused for a deliberate length of time, biting off the end of the cigar, lighting it, and throwing the match away, always acutely conscious of Helene’s dead-white face and of Jake holding tight to her arm. It was a two-for-a-nickel cigar, and it tasted terrible.
He puffed at it, re-posed himself, looked out over the crowd, and spoke in a low-pitched, passionate voice.
“Listen, all you guys out there, who’ve got wives and kids. Do you want to go home and pat those little kids on the head with hands”—his voice dropped a good half octave—“stained with the blood”—he paused—“of an innocent man!”
There was silence, and a faint, subdued crackling of flames.
That’s the stuff, he told himself, pour it out to them as if they were a Cook County jury. That’s what they are, they’re a jury. Pour it out. He felt a strange, uncomfortable tingling all over, the stinging burns on his face and hands seemed to have eased a little, and he wondered if he were dying. The mob had begun to murmur again, a few of its leaders had stepped up a few feet closer. Malone tried to stand so that he would be between the men and Helene.
He spoke quietly and persuasively. “There must be a hundred of you out there. A thousand dollars divided up between you would come to about ten bucks apiece.” He gathered in all the breath he could stand and let it out in a last, frantic appeal to the jury. “Do you want to go to your grave with the blood of an innocent man on your hands, for a lousy ten bucks apiece?”
In the same instant Hercules, somewhere in the bushes beyond, sent up a heart-rending howl.
An uneasy, frightened movement began in the crowd, slowly men began pulling away in little groups and starting for their cars. A piece of loose tinder in the burning building behind Malone suddenly blazed up and sent an unearthly light over the scene, in the same instant Hercules let loose with another dreadful howl, and the movement toward the parked cars became a panicked rout.
Malone spun around and threw the cigar into the smoldering flames. There wasn’t much difference, after all, between a lynch mob and a jury in the criminal court. You could convince ’em, or you could reason with ’em, or you could pray with ’em, but the simplest thing of all to do was to scare ’em. He wished he could take Hercules into a courtroom with him sometime.
Helene said, “Malone, how did you get out here?”
He looked at her. Her lovely silver-gilt hair was loose and flying in all directions, her face was smudged with smoke. Jake, beside her, had lost most of his eyebrows and a little of his skin. And Florence Peveley’s red hair, in the immediate background, looked like a Fourth of July sparkler just about to expire.
“For that matter,” he said to Helene crossly, “how did you get here?” A fire came into his eyes that wasn’t a reflection of the half-burned building. “I thought I put you to sleep.”
“Malone, forgive me. I poured that drink on the carpet when you weren’t looking. I had to know what was going on. Then Flo—Florence Peveley—came. She’d heard about the mob. Her gardener was part of it and he’d been tipped off as to where it was going. So we got in her car and came out here—”
Malone said in a cracked, terrible voice, “I just need to know one thing. Who tipped off Flo Peveley’s gardener? Who told this mob to come out here?” He gasped for breath. “And Jake. Jake, who warned you? Because—”
He was interrupted again. Another car screamed into the driveway, this one was blazing with official-looking lights, and its siren sounded a low whine as it came to a stop. From somewhere out of sight Hercules answered the whine, as Jerry Luckstone, Sheriff Kling, and the deputy sheriff climbed out of the front seat. Ed Skindingsrude, Mr. Goudge, and Phil Smith, the latter still holding his head very straight above the bandages, came out of the back seat and followed the sheriff up to where Malone was standing.
“They were in Marv’s office,” Jerry explained “and they came along with us.” His face was pale. “My God, Jake Justus! Are you all right?”
“Obviously, no,” Jake said between scorched lips.
“We’ve had a little trouble here,” Malone said acidly.
There were questions to be asked, and answers to be given. But before anyone could say a word, an ominous roar and crackling sounded from the building behind them. A sheet of flame shot from one window, darted to the next, and then burst out on the floor above.
“Look out below!” Malone yelled, “it’s breaking out on the other story!”
There were shouts, there was confusion, a great rushing back and forth of men with buckets, and a smothering outpouring of smoke. Someone took Malone by the arm and dragged him backwards; he saw the flames receding from his sight, shut his eyes, and let himself be propelled over the lawn. A door was opened and strong hands helped him through it and into a chair.
“It’s under control,” a voice said from somewhere, “and the fire department is on the way out.”
“Give him a drink,” another voice said.
Malone opened his eyes and saw a glass being filled from a bottle of Dollar Gin. He wondered if the fire wouldn’t have been easier to survive.
“Take this,” Helene said firmly. He took it, blinked a few times, and looked around the room.
Everyone was there, Jake and Helene, holding tight to each other’s hands, Flo Peveley, her red hair flying in all directions, Jerry Luckstone, pale and worried, the sheriff and Joe Ryan, his deputy, Doc Goudge, who wasn’t a madman but was head of the county asylum, Philomen Ma. Smith, Mr. Goudge, and Ed Skindingsrude. A cold, wet nose pushed its way into his hand. It was Hercules.
“Malone, listen,” Helene’s voice begged. “Remember. The other story. Do you know now what you meant?”
Malone closed his eyes and nodded. He thought he knew what he meant, but he wasn’t sure.
“The other story,” Jake repeated urgently. “Pay attention, damn you. Where another person might have said ‘the other floor,’ you said ‘the other story.’ You said it once before, and you said it was important.”
“It was important,” Malone said, nodding. The effort hurt his head. “Because I meant the other story of the courthouse.” He opened his eyes. All he could see was a circle of white faces around him. In a minute he would have to point to one of those faces. And he knew, now, which one it was. “I meant”—it was painful, forming the words through those blistered lips—“the man who shot Senator Peveley, and blew up the bank, and strangled Cora Belle, was not on the second story of the courthouse.” He gasped at the air. “He was on the other story. The first story.”
A voice said, “He’s out of his head. He’s delirious.”
“I am not,” Malone said. “None of the people we listed as being on the second story of the courthouse shot Senator Peveley. The man who did shoot him was supposedly downstairs.” He gasped again. Someone poured another drink of Dollar Gin down his throat. “He knew the Senator was coming to the courthouse at that hour, he went upstairs and concealed himself in the broom closet, he waited until the Senator started down the little staircase and shot him in the back, he closed the door of the closet and waited until everyone else had gone down the stairs, and then,” he tried to draw a breath; it stuck in his throat.
“Malone, go on,” Helene said.
“Then,” the little lawyer whispered, “he went through the courtroom and down the big, main staircase and joined the crowd in the hall, as though he’d just come from his own office. I know it. The murderer could never have come out of that closet and down the little staircase without being observed by the people standing in the hall around the Senator’s body. It had to be like that. There was no other way.”
He realized dimly that Helene was shaking him. “Malone. Who was it? What was his name?”
Somehow he managed to form the words. “Don’t you Know? It’s a matter of simple arithmetic. There’s only one person it could be.”
He knew, as he said them, that those were the last words he would speak above a whisper for a long time, maybe hours.
But at the same time, he knew that he didn’t need to speak. The faces around him weren’t looking at him now.
“That’s right,” Jerry Luckstone was saying, in a curiously strained voice. “There’s just one person who was in the bank that day who was on the first floor of the courthouse, not the second, when Senator Peveley was shot.”
Malone grabbed at the young district attorney’s arm, shook it to attract attention, and went through a series of complicated gestures. Jerry Luckstone nodded in agreement.
“He put the bomb in that package of school-fund records Ellen McGowan brought to the bank. Because he wanted to make sure they were destroyed.” He looked back at Malone, who made more gestures. “He strangled Cora Belle because she knew where Harold McGowan was buried. He cut Ellen McGowan’s throat because she was about to tell—” he stopped and pointed.
Alvin Goudge had decided to make a break for it. He didn’t get far.
It wasn’t the sheriff or his deputy who stopped him. It was Hercules who leaped on his chest, at exactly the same moment that Doc Goudge stepped in front of the door, yanked a blackjack from his pocket, and brought it down neatly over his skull.
There was a moment of complete, deathlike silence in the room. Malone looked around at Jake and Helene holding hands, at Florence Peveley, her friendly, homely face smudged with smoke, at Jerry Luckstone, Ed Skindingsrude, and Philomen Ma. Smith, all three of them pale and shocked, at the red-necked sheriff and his open-mouthed deputy, and at the white-haired old Doc Goudge, standing with a blackjack in his hand, over the unconscious form of his brother. Then he closed his eyes for a minute.
“I always thought he’d turn out this way,” Doc Goudge said very quietly. “There’s always been a bad streak in the family, and it came out in Alvin. But I never knew anything about what he was doing.” Malone’s ears caught the soft sighing of a long, indrawn breath. “When he asked me to have a car pick up Mr. Justus, here, at Grove’s Culvert, and to hide him out here, I thought he was telling me the truth, that Mr. Justus was the victim of unfortunate circumstantial evidence and that the vigilantes were after him. I didn’t know what he intended to do.”
“But what did he intend to do?” Sheriff Kling cried. “What was the idea?” He paused, scowled. “I see he was the murderer but I don’t know why he was, I see he got Mr. Justus out here but I don’t know why he did it. I see he was back of organizing the Citizens’ Committee, but—”
Suddenly there was a chorus of questions, not only from the sheriff but from all the corners of the room. Why did he do it? What was the reason? How about Ellen McGowan? How did Malone know? What was the idea, what was the idea, what was the —
Helene pulled her hand out of Jake’s and sprang in front of the little lawyer just as Hercules moved in from the other side.
“Leave him alone, can’t you? Damn it, he’s been blown up in a bombing, he’s been pulled out of a river, he’s helped open up a grave, he’s been in a fire and jumped out of a window. He’ll explain everything, but for the love of mud, give him time.” She wheeled to face Doc Goudge. Her voice broke a little. “Look at him. Half the skin is off his face and he can hardly talk. Do something about it, can’t you, don’t let him just sit here and be bothered by a lot of”—she looked around the room—“damn-fool incompetents!”
Hercules put his front paws up on Malone’s shoulder and licked gently at his left ear.
“We’ve got to tell something to the people still hanging around outside,” Sheriff Kling said anxiously.
“Tell them we’ve got the murderer and we’re taking him to jail,” Jerry Luckstone said.
There was a little commotion in the room. Philomen Ma. Smith was standing before Malone, his face very grave.
“They made me secretary treasurer of the Citizens’ Committee,” he said slowly. “I thought it was a respectable civic organization. Instead I find I have been the front man for a lynch mob.”
Malone’s eyes popped open. He wondered where the classical scholar had picked up the term “front man.”
“I made a terrible mistake,” the white-haired man went on.
Jake cleared his throat. “We lament the mistakes of a good man, and do not begin to detest him until he affects to renounce his principles,” he quoted. “Bartlett’s.” He added, “I guess we both got the same book.”
Philomen Ma. Smith smiled at him gratefully.
“Mistake or no mistake,” Malone whispered, “you’ve still got that reward money, haven’t you?” He saw Philomen Ma. Smith nod and managed a last breath. “You can deliver it to me at the General Andrew Jackson House.” He closed his eyes.
“I’ll deliver it in person,” the white-haired man said. He paused. “But the reward of a thing well done is to have done it. Emerson.”