DOWN IN THE TOWN OF Shoreham the crowd was pushing out of the funeral home into the sunshine. One or another of the photographers darted out to get a shot of Helen Abbott Cairns, a handkerchief to her face, as her father hurried her towards the car.
The reporters yapped like a kennel of hounds: “May we quote you as saying …” “Is it true that …” “Does this verdict …” But their cries were terminated by the slamming of the limousine door and the roar of its motor.
Beneath the great evergreen which shaded the doorway Jed Nicolet stood idly tapping a cigarette against the back of his hand. Commander Bennington came up beside him. “Well!” said the Navy man.
Nicolet nodded. “Deceased came to his death at the hands of person or persons unknown. Only we know, don’t we, Sam?”
“Stop talking like that, you young fool!”
“Well, don’t we?”
“They’re still holding that soldier,” said the commander huffily. “He certainly had a motive, being crazy in love with Helen. And the opportunity too.”
Nicolet shook his head. “Not Montague. That’s why I mixed into it Saturday night. He isn’t going to take the rap.”
“Bilge!” Bennington stuck his lower lip out far enough so that he could have gazed down upon it. “They have no real case against him, not now, anyway. They’ll have to let him go for lack of evidence; you’re a lawyer and you know that. I don’t see anything to be gained by talking, do you?”
“It depends on where you’re sitting,” Jed Nicolet pointed out. “Not from the standpoint of Mrs. Boad, or the doctor, or you. Or me, for that matter. I was an accessory before the fact; I suppose I might as well be one after. All the same, it’s not too nice to know that one of your friends, one of the people you play bridge and tennis with and meet at the Marine Room for dinner every Saturday, is a murderer.”
“But as long as we don’t know which one—” Bennington suggested. “Besides, Cairns had it coming to him.”
“You’d feel differently,” Nicolet told him, “if Pat Montague were on trial for his life, which he very likely will be. Are you for keeping silent even then?”
Bennington didn’t say anything. Mrs. Boad and Trudy were coming towards them. He looked off, saw his wife, and bowed out. “Ava’s waiting,” he called out over his shoulder. “We’ll talk about it later, won’t we, Jed?”
“Such a fuss!” Mame Boad remarked after a moment. “And all over practically nothing! It’s such a shame that Huntley Cairns has all that money. If he were poor this would have been written off as an accidental death.”
“If he’d been poor he wouldn’t have had a swimming pool to get drowned in,” Jed reminded her.
Mrs. Boad snorted. “I must be running along—Trudy has to get to the hairdresser’s. Do come up for dinner one night this week and we’ll talk about it then. But I still insist that the whole thing is crystal-clear. That Abbott girl’s testimony clinched it. Cairns died an accidental death by getting caught on that metal hook, or whatever it was, down underwater in the pool.”
“In spite of the fact that the man could barely swim on the surface?”
Mame Boad said there was no telling what some people would do, and flounced off. Jed threw away his cigarette and started after them and then was halted by a jovial hail from Dr. Radebaugh. “Drop you anywhere, Jed?”
Nicolet shook his head. “I’m walking back. I want to think. This setup is all wrong.”
“You’re doing too much thinking,” the doctor advised him. “It isn’t good for you—makes for ulcers and things. Better come up to my office and have a checkup.”
He climbed into his roadster, and Jed started off along the sidewalk. There was still plenty wrong with the setup. Wrong because of many things, but chiefly because of Huntley Cairns, who now lay back inside that funeral parlor in an expensive casket with real silver handles, unwept, unhonored, and unsung. Most definitely unwept.
Jed walked slowly back down town, pausing at the Elite Florists to order a suitable floral tribute for the funeral. He wondered if it was in good taste to send a corsage of orchids to the widow. Probably not, he decided, and chose two dozen waxy-white Frau Karl Druschki roses. On second thought he ordered the orchids sent to Lawn.
Up at the salmon-pink house on the hill, Miss Hildegarde Withers was just being aided into the police sedan by the inspector when a taxi pulled up and deposited Lawn Abbott. She stopped short, staring, and then came forward, looking stranger and paler than ever in the navy-blue suit which she had worn as suitable for inquests and funerals. “Just exactly what is going on here?” she demanded bluntly.
“Er—you see—” began Miss Withers.
“I get it!” Lawn said. “Miss Withers, you’re being arrested, aren’t you?” She whirled on the inspector. “What’s it for? I demand to know!”
He stared at her, straight-faced. “Now, if you’re really demanding you may as well know that this lady’s been laying herself open to a charge of breaking and entering. Or illegal entry, anyway.”
“Is that it?” Lawn Abbott drew herself up to her full height, which was slightly over five feet, including her heels. “Then let me tell you something, mister policeman. You can’t hold Miss Withers on any such charge as that. She had every right to be in the house!”
“Just why?” asked the inspector very gravely.
“Because I asked her to! Only yesterday morning I called her into the case because I could see what a botch the regular police were making of it. If she came inside she was only there at my request, trying to straighten out this muddle! Now, let’s see you arrest her and make it stick!”
The inspector, containing himself with difficulty, bowed. “Under the circumstances I haven’t any choice,” he admitted. “Miss Withers, you have been sprung, and how!” He winked at her behind Lawn’s back.
“I certainly have, haven’t I?” murmured the schoolteacher, a little taken aback at the girl’s intense partisanship.
Lawn grasped her hand. “Please come on back in. I want to talk to you.”
“I think maybe I’ll come too,” suggested Inspector Piper wickedly.
“You’ll come with a search warrant tucked in your hot little hand, and not without it!” Lawn drew Miss Withers towards the front door, pausing to glare at Officer Lunney sprawled in the deck chair.
Once inside, Miss Withers shook her head. “Very kind of you—but, child, aren’t you afraid of making enemies sometimes? You were rather short with the inspector, and in front of one of his subordinates too.”
“Oh, dear. That’s a knack I seem to have,” Lawn admitted ruefully. “For making un-friends. I’m always getting into trouble because I say what I mean and what I think—in a world full of people who live by double talk.” She led the way into the living room and threw herself down on a big divan, relaxing immediately as a cat on a cushion.
“I suppose,” she said, “you think I’m an odd person. Maybe I am. Maybe you’re a bit odd too. I guess I shouldn’t have rushed out of your place yesterday—I had no business to have hurt feelings. But please tell me what’s going on and what’s going to happen. I left the inquest early when I saw the way it was going, but Helen and Father will be along shortly. We haven’t much time.”
“It is later than you think,” the schoolteacher agreed. “They used to inscribe that on sundials, so it must be true.”
“I’m truly sorry that I blew up yesterday,” Lawn repeated. She bit thoughtfully at the tip of her right forefinger. “I guess I’m just the moody type. But I’d just had a scene with Helen and Father. I can’t stand my family, you see, and they can’t stand me. Never mind that—I hear that you are doing your level best to get Pat out of jail, and I want to know all about it, and how I can help. By the way, if it’s a question of money—”
“Dear me, no,” Miss Withers assured her. “Snooping is for me a labor of love, and I don’t want to lose my amateur standing at this late date. As for the progress I’m making, all I can say is that I’ve tripped over a number of threads. I don’t know just where they lead, except that they do not lead towards Pat Montague. If he had had murder in his heart he wouldn’t have come along the highway in broad daylight to crash a party he hadn’t been invited to. He’d have sneaked in after dark, with an Army pistol or a hand grenade or something—”
“You mentioned threads,” Lawn reminded her.
“I did. One thread seems to lead to a group of outstanding local citizens who made a mysterious proposition to me some weeks ago. Another indicates your gardener, who may not be a murderer but who takes it upon himself to water lawns and flowerbeds in the heat of the day, which, according to the best horticultural authorities, is simply not done. A third is tangled up with the personality and background of Cairns himself—how he managed to make a million dollars or so in three years, and just what sort of public relations he was mixed up in. He doesn’t seem the type, somehow—”
“To make money, you mean? But everybody’s been making money the last three years.”
“Every one fortunate enough not to wear a uniform, you mean. However, I was referring to Cairns’s personality. He isn’t like any public-relations man I ever knew. They are usually ex-reporters or disappointed writers. Cairns was in his late thirties, which means that he came to maturity in the between-war era. I would expect any publicity or public-relations man to have some manuscript poetry in the back of his desk, or the first draft of the great American novel. At the very least there should be some worn volumes of James Branch Cabell and Floyd Dell and Ronald Firbank somewhere in his library.”
Lawn nodded. “Huntley was different.” She pointed. “You know, I wouldn’t like to admit it to everybody, but every book in the library in there was bought in bulk from a dealer in town. He got what they call publishers’ remainders. Those are the ones that they can’t sell in the ordinary way. He didn’t care, as long as they filled up the shelves. Neither did Helen; she’s no reader. If there isn’t any dancing or bridge or anything, she just goes to sleep.”
“Very sensible of her, in a way. But to return to my threads—the last one has to do with a book in a red jacket, a book that seems to have mysteriously disappeared from the library and which somebody must have been searching for at the time I dropped in.”
Miss Withers was watching Lawn’s face very closely, but the girl only looked blank at the mention of the book. “I don’t understand,” she said. “Who’d want to take one of the books? I told you they were all remainders, at ten or twenty cents apiece. So there isn’t much chance of a first-folio Shakespeare or a Gutenberg Bible or anything. I mean, there couldn’t be anything of the slightest value.”
“I doubt very much,” observed Miss Hildegarde Withers, “if this murder was committed for money. After all, nobody benefits financially but your sister, and she had everything already.”
“Everything,” Lawn agreed softly “Except Pat Montague.”
“But, child, didn’t you indicate yesterday that your sister had never loved anything except herself?”
The girl smiled wryly. “There’s love—and then there’s wanting somebody because he’s all the things your husband isn’t. Because he’s tall and good looking and dances well and is a sort of war hero and represents the things you’ve lost. As I told you, Helen is emotionally immature.”
“In your opinion, would Helen have run away with Pat Montague if he’d asked her to?”
Lawn thought about that for some time. Then she shook her head. “She’s too conventional. Besides, Pat wouldn’t have asked her to—not after he’d actually seen for himself that she was really and truly married to somebody else. Pat’s a poet, really, but he’s the soul of honor.”
“Too honorable to hold a successful rival under water until he drowned, at any rate?” Miss Withers nodded. “By the way, I almost forgot to ask. Just what was the final autopsy report?”
“What everyone expected. The autopsy surgeon backed up everything that Harry Radebaugh had diagnosed Saturday night, just after it happened. Huntley died from something called ‘syncope,’ which means he strangled all at once, from shock.”
“Did you testify?”
“Just about the snag at the bottom of the pool. I don’t know how much stock they put in what I said. I tried to point out some other things to them, but they cut me off short. I guess they thought I was just trying to protect my sister and her guilty lover, which is a laugh. The whole police theory in this case is ridiculous. Come on, I’ll prove it to you—”
Lawn leaped suddenly to her feet and drew Miss Withers out through the rear of the house, down the steps, across the patio, and down the path which led around the bathhouse. Before them lay the big concrete-lined hole in the ground which had once been the swimming pool, with only a few puddles of murky water at the bottom.
“It was here that they found him,” Lawn said, pointing towards a corner of the pool at the deep end, the widest part of the oval. Peering down, Miss Withers could see the exit of the drainpipe, and by squinting a little she fancied that she could make out the jagged bit of metal which had caught and held the body of Huntley Cairns.
“Dear, dear!” she said.
“Now, look, Miss Withers,” Lawn said abruptly. “Do you know how long a garden rake is?”
“When I was a girl,” the schoolteacher said, “there used to be a riddle about how long is a piece of string, but I forget the answer.”
“This is no riddle. Because garden rakes are all approximately the same length. Wait a minute.” The girl disappeared around the corner of the building and in a moment was back with an ordinary rake. She held it erect on the tiles so that the teeth came almost but not quite to her forehead. “You see? They don’t make rakes any longer than this. The one the police took away as Exhibit A was just like this. And yet Pat is supposed to have murdered Huntley by holding him under with a rake, like this.”
Lawn took the tool to the edge of the swimming pool, reached down with it as far as she could. “You see? The pool was just ten feet deep here, and the rake handle is barely five. If you allow a couple of feet for the width of the body, then the murderer must still have reached down a good three feet into the water in order to hook Huntley’s shorts on to that projecting bit of metal.”
The schoolteacher inclined her head gravely. “Your mathematics seem correct,” she admitted.
“Well, then! Pat’s sleeves were only wet a little at the wrist when I let him out of that dressing room Saturday night. Jed Nicolet can testify to the same thing because he saw Pat in the bar only a little while later.”
“And how about Searles’s sleeves?”
“I didn’t see him. But it wouldn’t matter, even if he was dripping to the shoulder, because he did most of the work hauling the body out, remember. He must have had to reach down as far as he could to hook the rake—” She stopped, biting her lip. “What a grisly business this is!”
Miss Withers was inclined to agree with her. They headed back for the house by way of the toolshed so Lawn could replace the rake. The flagged path led them almost to the kitchen door, and then the schoolteacher stopped short, pointing a lean finger. “What’s that?”
Lawn hesitated. “It looks like Helen’s white bathing suit. I guess Beulah hung it out.”
“A little odd, isn’t it? I mean, the pool has been dry since yesterday morning, so she can’t have been swimming.” The schoolteacher looked at the brief lastex garment, made so form-fitting that it had to be laced like a football at either side, and noticed that the laces had been tied tight and then torn instead of being untied.
“Helen never takes any care of her things,” Lawn informed her. “I used to have to mend them for her, and now Beulah has to do it.”
They came into the kitchen, where Beulah, her face darker than usual, was cleaning up the table on which Searles had left the makings of his sandwich. She was mumbling something about “trash” but looked up blankly at Miss Withers’s opening question.
“Yassum,” she said. “I hanged out Miss’ Cairns’s suit. It sho’ woulda mildewed fast, tucked down into her laundry bag all wet like she left it.”
“When,” asked Miss Withers softly, turning to Lawn, “just when was the last time your sister wore that suit that you know of?”
Lawn shrugged. “I don’t know. She may have tried the pool out Friday, the day before the party. They’d filled it then.”
“I see. I thought for a moment…” Miss Withers shook her head. “By the way, I wonder how long it would take a man to remove his coat and shirt and then whisk them on again after he had done—well, whatever it was.”
Lawn’s eyes narrowed. “Still aiming at Pat? A man, I know, has lots of buttons on his shirt, and then there’s a necktie and all that. Of course Searles doesn’t wear a tie, but he wears a sweater under that foul old jacket, and probably long underwear under that. But—but a woman! It would be easy enough for a woman, because women usually wear loose sleeves that could roll to the shoulder in a jiffy”
“You mean, darling, sleeves like the ones on the dress I wore at the party?” They both looked up with a start to see Helen, a symphony in black, standing in the door of the dining room. Behind her was Thurlow Abbott, looking older and tireder.
The two sisters faced each other, and for a moment Miss Withers could see a resemblance between them, which flickered and was gone. “Why, yes,” Lawn said slowly. “Helen, I want to talk to you.”
“Surely not now!” Helen said. “It wouldn’t be any use. You see, I know what you’re up to. You’ve failed to pin this mess on to Pat, and so you’ve decided on me.”
There was a long silence. “You’re so beautiful,” Lawn told her. “And so good. It’s a shame that you couldn’t have been just a little brighter!” The girl turned towards Miss Withers. “Please excuse me, it’s getting very, very stuffy in here. I’m going to change my clothes and then go down and have a long talk with the horses in Mame Boad’s stable.” She ran out of the room.
“My daughter Lawn,” said Thurlow Abbott in his croaking voice, “gets more difficult every day. By the way, Miss Withers, may I ask just what it was you wanted?”
“To find out how and why your son-in-law was murdered, and who did it!”
“But it wasn’t murder!” Helen cut in. “Didn’t you know? The police are being awfully slow and stupid about it all, but I thought you would see. When they drained the pool yesterday they found Huntley’s wristwatch at the bottom. He must have missed it when he was dressing after his swim and rushed out just as he was. In trying to reach it, he fell in and was drowned.”
“Huntley was, I’m afraid, a very week swimmer,” Thurlow Abbott chimed in. “Not the athletic type at all, you know.”
“And that watch was his pride and joy,” Helen added. “Huntley loved gadgety things like that. He’d have gone almost out of his mind if he’d looked at his wrist and seen that it was missing.”
“Was he so proud of it,” Miss Withers probed gently, “that he’d have gone swimming without noticing that he’d left it on?”
Helen thought he might. “You see, except in the tub, he never took it off, not even when he slept. It was waterproof and shockproof and everything proof.”
The schoolteacher stilled an impulse to ask if the watch had been equipped with an outboard motor too—so that it could travel from the shallow end of the pool, where a poor swimmer like Cairns would presumably have been disporting himself, down to the deep end, fifty feet or more away. But for the moment that could wait. She smiled at Helen Cairns and then asked, “There is just one other thing I must ask you now. Where did your late husband hide things?”
The beautiful face went blank. “Hide things? But he didn’t. He wasn’t the hiding type. Why, he even told me what I was getting for my birthdays and Christmases weeks before the day.”
“I wasn’t thinking of presents,” Miss Withers went on. “I was wondering whatever became of the book—the book with the red jacket. Oriental Moments was the title, I believe.”
She had great hopes of that shot in the dark, but it fizzled out like a wet firecracker. Either Helen and her father had never heard of the book, or else they were far better actors than she had given them credit for. And long experience with the little hellions of her third-grade classes back at Jefferson School had taught her a number of ways to tell when any one is lying. She shrugged. “Well, perhaps it will turn up when we least expect it. Like your white bathing suit.”
Helen froze. “My what?”
“Your white bathing suit that your maid found in your laundry bag in grave danger of mildew.”
“I don’t understand.” Helen was frowning, but she looked a little pale. “I used the suit Friday, but—I’m sure I left it in the dressing room.”
“Did you really? Well, thank you very much, anyway. I’m on my way down to the jail now, in hopes of seeing the proper authorities and getting young Montague released. He couldn’t have drowned your husband, Mrs. Cairns. The rake wasn’t long enough. Would you have any message for Pat, in case I get in to see him?”
Helen looked quickly at her father, who still hovered nervously in the background. “Why, no. Of course not.” But she walked with Miss Withers through the house, almost to the front door. Making sure that they were alone, she produced from her breast a thin packet of letters tied neatly with red string. “Just give these back to him, will you, before the police find them. Tell him—oh, there’s nothing I can say to Pat now!” Helen turned and went back towards the stairs, half-running, and with a handkerchief pressed to her mouth.
Miss Withers stood stock-still, looking after her. Then she saw Thurlow Abbott coming towards her, his face strained and drawn. “I hope you’ll make allowances for my daughter Helen,” he said. “She is very distrait. An old, forgotten love popping up suddenly out of the past, reviving old memories—”
“Forgotten?” Miss Withers echoed doubtfully.
“Helen fancied herself in love with young Montague many years ago,” Abbott told her. “It was nothing but a boy-and-girl affair, really. They were not suited to each other in any way. I tried of course to advise her, but it is difficult for a father to be a mother.”
“I can imagine,” agreed the schoolteacher.
“Er—yes. It was very lucky for everyone concerned that the draft took the young man away.”
“For everyone except the young man, at any rate.”
Abbott didn’t smile. “It was unfortunate that he returned. You see, Helen is the sentimental feminine type. Not at all like Lawn.”
Miss Withers could agree with him there, at any rate. “Your daughters do seem rather unlike, for sisters,” she angled hopefully.
“Half-sisters,” he confessed in his sepulchral voice. “A minor poet who once visited our house said that Helen and Lawn typified the women of Eden. Eve and Lilith, you know. The wife and the mistress type.”
“Very poetic,” agreed Miss Withers. “But after all, it was Eve who got into trouble with the snake, wasn’t it? I never heard anything scandalous about Lilith, outside of her being an Assyrian demon, of course.”
Thurlow Abbott wasn’t listening; he was merely waiting for her to stop talking so that he could start again. “I do wish, Miss Withers,” he said, coming closer, “that you would take anything Lawn says to you with a big grain of salt. You see, Helen’s mother was a choir singer, a very sweet and gentle person. After her tragic death—she was the first woman to be killed in a motor car accident on Long Island—I traveled for a few seasons, and there in vaude—I mean, in concert, I fell in with a very fascinating wildcat of a woman. The Princess Zoraida, Egyptian mystic, she called herself. Her powers were, to tell the truth, unusual. She was Lawn’s mother.”
“Really! And she abandoned you with the babe in your arms? It sounds a little like Way Down East in reverse.”
“It was on Pan-time, in Seattle,” Abbott corrected her. “Of course the Princess and I had gone through a ceremony, but I had reason after she walked out on me to think that she already had a husband or two scattered throughout the theatrical profession.”
“How very unfortunate. It cannot be easy for a man to try to bring up two children.”
He bowed. “I had hoped, of course, that they would carry on the Abbott name in the theater, but it was not to be. Helen has the beauty but not the temperament. And Lawn—I’m afraid that the consciousness of her dark heritage has embittered her. She has never felt that she belonged, in spite of everything that I could do.” Thurlow Abbott sighed heavily. “You understand, of course.”
“I think I’m beginning to,” admitted Miss Withers, and took her departure.