FOR A MAN with a charge of murder hanging over his head, Harold Benson seemed surprisingly cheerful. When Henry had dismissed the escorting prison officer, and had assured Benson that they were quite alone and that their conversation was not being overheard or recorded, Benson sat down, smiled broadly, and said, “Thank you, Chief Superintendent.”
“What for?”
“For heading Sally off. I don’t know how you did it, but I sure am grateful. It’s a weight off my mind.”
Henry said, “I haven’t got time for this sort of nonsense, Benson. Why didn’t you tell me your wife was Simon Warwick?”
Benson’s jaw dropped in utter astonishment. At last, he said, “Now, that’s the most absurd—”
“It’s not absurd, and you know it. Simon Warwick—or rather, Simon Finch—had a sex-change operation and became Sally Finch. You married her. There’s no point in denying it, because I can easily enough check the record of your marriage in the States.”
This time, Benson said, “How in heaven’s name did you find out?”
“That doesn’t matter. What color are your wife’s eyes?”
“Oh,” said Benson. “Yes, I see. That’s the only thing we were afraid of—that somebody might know about the eyes.”
“I think,” said Henry, “that you’d better tell me about it from the beginning.”
“Okay.” Benson seemed more at ease. “Since you know, there can’t be any harm in it. Of course, I can only tell you what Sally told me. It seems that as far back as she can remember, she somehow knew that nature had made an awful mistake—had put a girl into a boy’s body. You may find that hard to believe, but I didn’t, when she told me, because Sally is just the most feminine person you can imagine. That’s one of the reasons I fell in love with her.”
“So Simon Finch had a pretty unhappy childhood,” Henry said.
“Miserable. She…or he, I suppose, but I just can’t think of Sally as anything but a girl…he was a bright child, but couldn’t get on with the other kids at school. Things weren’t made any easier by his father, who was a super-masculine thug with an artificial leg acquired in the war. Naturally, he wanted his son to be super-masculine, too, and do all the things he couldn’t. Finally, when he was fifteen, Simon had a complete breakdown. The father dismissed it as hysterical tantrums, but fortunately the mother decided to consult an analyst—a very advanced and perceptive man. He diagnosed the trouble—that is, he got Simon to trust him to the point where he could talk about his problem. The doctor spoke to Mrs. Finch, and advised two things. First, that Simon should be told that Finch was not his real father. That’s when Mrs. Finch showed Simon the Warwick passport, and told him who he really was. I don’t think she ever knew that Sally took it with her when she left home. It meant so much, you see. Secondly, the doctor advised the sex-change operation. It was rarer then than it is now, of course, but the doctor felt that this was a case in which the poor kid would never be able to lead any sort of a happy life as a boy. He said the sooner the change process was started, the better.”
“The change process? I thought it was an operation?”
“That’s only the final stage. It’s a long job. You can’t just walk into the hospital as a man and come out ten days later as a woman. There have to be years of hormone treatment, and gradual changeover, before surgery can be done. Sally was overjoyed at the idea. Mrs. Finch agreed. You can imagine the reaction of Captain Finch. He always called himself Captain, even though it was only a wartime rank. That was the sort of man he was.”
Henry nodded. “So what happened?”
“Well,” said Benson, “Sally’s mother told her the story of the adoption—including the fact that her real mother had had different-colored eyes. Apparently she got that information from some English attorney who had known the Warwicks, and had visited the Finches when Sally was a small child. Mrs. Finch did point out to Sally that she had a very rich bachelor uncle in England who might one day want to trace his nephew, and might be very put out to find a niece instead. Sal said she didn’t care. She wanted the operation anyway.
“If Finch had been a different sort of man, it would all have been easy. The whole family could have moved to a new neighborhood, and Sally could have started life there as a girl. But the captain wasn’t having any of that. If the boy wished to disgrace the family and drag his father’s name in the mud, he said, so much the worse for Simon. He could get out—leave home—never show his face again…you can imagine how it was. Finally it was decided that Simon should go and live in Washington—it’s only a few miles from McLean, over the river. There, he’d be close to home, and also within easy reach of the Baltimore hospital and the doctor who would eventually do the operation. Mrs. Finch kept in touch all the time, of course. But Captain Finch insisted on putting out the story that his rapscallion son had run away from home—and Mrs. Finch had to go along with it in front of anybody who had known Simon as a boy. The whole emphasis was on making a fresh start, you see.”
Henry said, “I had a feeling all along that Simon Finch wasn’t a runaway, but I must admit that nothing as bizarre as the real explanation ever occurred to me. Go on.”
“Well, Sally lived in an apartment in D.C. and took the hormone treatment and dressed as a girl. She was tremendously happy for the first time in her life. She got excellent grades in school, and after she graduated she had the operation. When she had fully recovered, she entered George Washington University—as a girl, of course, with a fresh set of papers showing that she was, and always had been, Sally Finch. Simon Finch had ceased to exist.”
Henry said, “You met at university, did you? You’re almost exactly the same age.”
“That’s right. And both our mothers were English—not that that was any rarity, for people of our generation. My mother used to call it reverse lend-lease—the stream of GI brides coming over from England at the end of the war. Anyhow, it made a sort of bond between us. We started dating, and finally I asked her to marry me. That was when she told me the truth. Nobody else in the world knew it, except her mother and her doctor. Captain Finch had died the year before.”
“Were you upset…shocked…?” Henry had forgotten that he was a policeman interviewing a murder suspect. He was quite simply fascinated by the story.
Harold Benson smiled, remembering. “I sure as hell was surprised,” he said. “As for being upset—well, that was only about myself, not about Sally.”
“How do you mean?”
“Well, my first reaction was to suspect I must be a latent homosexual. I’d never felt any interest sexually in other guys—but now it seemed I was asking one to marry me. But Sally made me go and talk to her doctor, and he explained. A homosexual doesn’t want to be a woman, see? He enjoys being male, and making love to other men. A transsexual, like Sally, is quite different. He hates his male body. He—or rather she—is a complete, heterosexual woman after the operation. Even before it, a transsexual feels like a woman—but a woman trapped in a male body. That’s why it always leads to misery if a transsexual experiments with homosexuality. The two are completely different, just as transvestites are something else again.”
Henry said, “You’re quite an authority on the subject.”
Benson grinned. “I had to become one,” he said, “before we could get married. I had to be sure I knew what I was doing and felt easy about it. Of course, we can never have children of our own, so we decided from the beginning to adopt at least one. We waited to get married until I was offered this job in Charlottesville. We reckoned it was far enough away from anybody who might possibly have known Sally as Simon. Sally’s mother was marvelous to us. It broke Sal’s heart that she didn’t live to see us married.”
“She was killed in an air crash, wasn’t she?” said Henry.
“Yes. And Sally has always felt that it was her fault.”
“Her fault?”
“Not really, of course, but if it hadn’t been for Sally and our engagement, Mrs. Finch would never have been on that airplane. You see, with the wedding coming up, she began to think again about the legal position of Simon Warwick, and she decided to go over to England and consult with the lawyer who arranged the adoption in the first place.”
“Humberton?”
“I never knew his name, nor did Sally. However, Mrs. Finch said she was going to tell the attorney the whole story, and get his opinion on the legal situation, should Lord Charlton ever start looking for his nephew. I know she saw him, because she wrote us a very guarded letter from England, saying she would explain the position when she got back home. And then the plane crashed, and we never did find out what the attorney said.”
“But Ronald Goodman probably did,” said Henry. And then, “What did you think when you heard that your rival claimant was Simon Finch?”
“I didn’t,” Benson protested. “Quince never told me there was another claimant until that last letter he wrote, and then he didn’t give his name. The first time I heard it was from that dumb girl in the outer office. ‘Mr. Finch has already arrived,’ she said. It gave me almost as big a shock as when I found his body a few moments later. I just couldn’t figure it out, until you told me he was the attorney’s clerk.”
Henry said, “You knew he wasn’t Simon Warwick, and he knew that you weren’t. Quite an intriguing situation—but somebody made sure it didn’t develop.”
“Not me, Chief Superintendent. Not me.”
“We’ll see about that,” Henry said. “Meanwhile, how did you come to be making your own fraudulent claim?”
Benson said, “I don’t think you can call it fraudulent. Sally saw the advertisement as soon as it appeared, and we talked the whole thing over. We presumed that Lord Charlton knew about his nephew’s eyes, so he would have had to acknowledge Sally—but of course then the whole story would have come out, and can you imagine the publicity it would have gotten? Our lives would have been wrecked. But then Lord Charlton died. We talked it all over again. After all, Sally was the rightful heir, absolutely entitled to the money. We felt for our son’s sake we ought to try to claim it. I decided to have a shot at it.
“I had to gamble on the fact that nobody but Charlton knew about the eyes—if he’d told the attorney, then I’d have been thrown out at once. It was obvious from the advertisements that Quince didn’t know the name of the adoptive parents, so I guessed the other old attorney must be dead and the papers destroyed. I couldn’t call myself Finch, of course—I had to sort of graft Sal’s story onto my own childhood, which I knew could be checked. The birth date wasn’t quite right, but we thought up a story to cover that. It didn’t seem to us that it was really a deception. After all, Simon Warwick would have inherited Warwick Industries, which was what Lord Charlton wanted.”
“I don’t think this is the moment to go into the ethics of the matter,” Henry said. “The fact is that you came over to England impersonating your own wife, and Goodman turned up claiming to be Simon Finch. Ambrose Quince went over to the States and did a neat little piece of detective work which proved conclusively that Simon Finch was Simon Warwick, and Harold Benson was not.”
“That’s right. He came nosing around Charlottesville, trying to see Sally. Of course, she couldn’t risk meeting him. She made some excuse, and he never followed it up.”
“Quince’s father knew about Simon’s eyes,” said Henry. “He was the English lawyer who visited the Finches. He died some time ago. As far as I know, nobody else except Lord Charlton himself…” He stopped.
Benson said, “I wasn’t really worried—not by that very clumsy attempt to push me under a bus. What scared me was the note I found in my pocket.”
“Why?”
“Because it seemed to me that somebody had found out about Sally, and that it was a threat to her, not to me. I knew somebody had killed Goodman because they believed him to be Simon Warwick, and that person, I thought, was prepared to kill Sally. Anybody who had found out the truth would know that Hank must be adopted, and so couldn’t inherit if Sally was dead. That’s why I decided to drop the claim—like I said, no amount of money could be worth Sally’s life. That’s why I’m so grateful to you for preventing her from coming over here.” Benson leaned forward and spoke very seriously. “Chief Superintendent, the person who murdered Ronald Goodman knows now that my wife was born Simon Warwick. I’m convinced of it. If Sally came to this country, she’d be in very great danger. You must believe me.”
Henry sighed. “I do believe you,” he said, “and I’m afraid I’ve got bad news for you.”
“What bad news?”
“That cable was faked. Your wife is in England. She arrived this morning, as arranged.”
Benson jumped to his feet. “Then where is she?”
“Then you bloody well ought to know! What’s a police force for? I told you, if you didn’t stop her, then you’d have to protect her—”
Henry said, “Mr. Benson, if you’d told us sooner what you’ve told me this morning, things would have been very different.”
“You knew already! You knew that Sally was Simon Warwick, and you didn’t do a damn thing about it! It’s all very well for you. If it was your wife…”
Henry said, “It is, Mr. Benson.”
“What?”
“My wife,” Henry said, “is an exceptionally nice person. When I told her there was no way we could meet Mrs. Benson officially, she decided to go out to the airport herself. I found out just yesterday that Simon Warwick had one blue eye and one green, and my wife knew this—so when she saw your wife, she realized the truth. She telephoned me from the airport.”
“And then…? Where is she now?”
“I wish I knew.” Henry stood up. “Both our wives, Mr. Benson, seem to have disappeared.”