Any Shape or Form (18 page)

“I'm not mad,” Gamadge assured him benignly. “And a murderess did hire me once.”

“You knew she was one?”

“By the time I took the job I knew it, yes. But I had to take the job; she was cooking up evidence against somebody. I had to keep her under my eye. But I didn't,” said Gamadge, morosely.

“And you didn't get paid, I suppose.”

“No, I didn't.”

“Well, you try and get me a nice piece of evidence in this case, something that can be passed around to the jury in a box. Exhibit A, that's all I want; never mind the rest of the alphabet.”

Gamadge rose. “I won't get you anything you can hand to the jury in a box. But I'll get you something.”

“You will?” Griggs stared.

“If you'll indulge me in my whims.”

“What whims?”

“I'll tell you later.”

“Why not now?”

“My brain isn't working tonight.”

“Just so long as it starts working before the inquests tomorrow afternoon.”

“It will.”

Griggs was beginning to get a look on his face that Gamadge was used to seeing on the faces of policemen; so Gamadge left him sitting beside the ashes, and went out into the hall and upstairs.

G
AMADGE FOUND
Officer Stromer strategically planted in the upper hall; he commanded a view of the main corridor, and could look down the south wing by turning his head; but his eyes were relentlessly fixed on the north wing and Malcolm's doorway.

David Malcolm stood there, leaning against the jamb. Color had returned to his lips, and he was smiling. “Come in, Mr. Gamadge,” he said. “We'll sit over there by the windows; then the gendarmerie won't overhear us. I shouldn't like them to.”

Cora Malcolm was sitting at a round table there, her elbows on the rosewood surface, her chin on her hands. When Gamadge crossed the room towards her only her eyes moved.

“Have this chair.” Malcolm touched the back of one as he passed it, and moved on to another. They sat down.

“Smoke?” Malcolm offered his case.

“I have mine, thanks.”

“Cora?”

She took one, and Malcolm lighted hers, Gamadge's, and his own. “I always use one match for three,” he said. “A ban always challenges me. Kind of Mr. Gamadge to come in and see us, isn't it, Cora?”

“Kind,” she said.

“The truth is, Mr. Gamadge, we read a book of yours in Paris; it was called
Guilty But Insane.
It dealt with problems of the past which have never been officially solved, and why should I tell you that? But perhaps you don't know what a vogue it had with the literary vanguard before the war.”

“I heard there were copies sold there. Very gratifying.”

“One of our most brilliant friends—you wouldn't have heard of him, before he realized his talents he came to a bad end—called it the Grand Guignol of Elfland.”

“I didn't intend to be elfin,” said Gamadge, looking somewhat taken aback.

“Elfland can be very macabre. Our friend said that you were the only American he could imagine wanting to know. They didn't think of Cora and me as Americans, you understand; we didn't think of ourselves as belonging to any country. But we found ourselves stirred by some sort of atavistic pride when our doomed friend praised your book. This may sound irrelevant, but it isn't; I have been wondering whether you couldn't help us with our problem; these two murders.”

Gamadge said: “Theory doesn't help much, Mr. Malcolm.”

“But may I present a theory to you? It's only a theory; we have no evidence that you could offer the police, and I am hoping that you will agree to regard what I say as confidential.”

“If it's pure theory, certainly.”

“I know of course that I shall be arrested tomorrow; that's certain,” continued Malcolm. “I am consulting you on Cora's behalf. I should like to feel that you are watching her interests when I'm not here. But I should tell you first that the situation is slightly complicated—she thinks I committed the murders.”

“No, Davy,” she said, “I don't.”

“Yes, my child, you do.” He turned to Gamadge. “She wouldn't have thought so once, no matter what the evidence against me. But she's lost confidence in my moral integrity. There were Covenanters among our forebears, Mr. Gamadge, and she has inherited something from them; while I seem to have inherited something from remoter ancestors—the ones that crawled out of caves, you know, carrying stone implements to assault the Roman wall.”

“David,” she said quietly.

“But although I have done foolish, and worse than foolish things,” he went on, ignoring her, “her conviction that I'm a double murderer springs from something more than that. I was operated on”—he put his hand to his head in that automatic gesture—“in the disintegrating French hospital I told you about. And though you can't make a French surgeon of the first class—any surgeon, perhaps—quit his job in the middle by dropping bombs on the roof and breaking the windows of the operating room, you can make him nervous. And afterwards even my wife couldn't get me quite the care—but that's past. The thing is that I still have trouble off and on, and when life at some given moment strikes me as intolerable, I go into what you might call tantrums. I break things.”

“No, Davy,” said Cora in the same dragging voice, “you don't.”

“I broke that alarm clock.”

“You knocked it off the table with your elbow. It was an accident.”

“I recall a red flash and a tremor of the brain, and then the alarm clock was on the floor. My sister knows all that, Mr. Gamadge, and she also knows how I have always felt about my father's second marriage, and his second wife, and the will.”

“I felt as strongly,” said Cora.

“No, Cora, you didn't. You never feel as strongly as I do about anything. You never act impulsively. You have had plenty of chances to commit follies, but you haven't taken them.

“And Cora knows, Mr. Gamadge, what it would have meant to me to be able to get rid of my late wife.”

He broke off to put out the stub of his cigarette and light another.

“I don't of course wish you,” he went on, “to get a worse impression of me than necessary. Freddy was never in love with me, and she wouldn't have objected to a divorce if I had had my father's money to share with her. And I wasn't in love with her, although as a patient I succumbed to her spell. Perhaps you won't believe me, but it was a potent one. And she liked the idea of the marriage, and after all it was the least I could do—to repay her for what she'd done for us. Cora couldn't stand it, though—went on home.

“But Freddy soon got tired of me, and off she went. But she kept an eye on us—couldn't imagine anybody not cheating in money matters if they could. And she was quite justified in thinking that Cora and I might spoil our chance at the extra income that Mrs. Malcolm was offering us; in fact, we had decided—independently—to refuse it. The toadying we might have had to do for ten or twenty years! We preferred to wait until the whole principal came to us in the course of nature; but now Cora thinks I didn't wait.

“And if you deny it, my dear child,” he added, looking at her affectionately, “I shall probably go into a tantrum and smash Redfield's nice clock; which”—he glanced up at the mantel—“looks like an antique, and may be of great value.”

Cora, her eyes on the cigarette from which she flicked the ash, was silent.

Gamadge said: “You have explained why Miss Malcolm thinks you murdered your stepmother. Why does she think you murdered your wife?”

“I suppose she imagines that Freddy saw me fire that rifle in the rose garden. Or perhaps she thinks I didn't want to pay so much alimony—I can assure you that it would have to be a good deal! Mind you, Cora hasn't said a word of all this; but we are sympathetic mentally, if not morally, and I know what she is thinking.

“Well, that's enough preamble. Now for my theory. You will have to assume for purposes of argument that I didn't commit the murders. My idea is that the person who did commit them has no intention of letting me suffer. Cora was always meant to be the victim. She's to take the blame for the first crime, and then it will be assumed that she committed the second crime to protect herself from blackmail.”

“But you are taking the blame for the crimes. What went wrong?”

“Nothing. The evidence against Cora will emerge as if naturally—unless you do something about it.”

“Catch the real murderer?” Gamadge regarded him with mild interest.

“Oh, no you can't catch the party. There'll be no evidence. But I hoped you might scare the party off. Prevent that plot against Cora from ever coming to anything.”

“How should I do that?”

“Well, you know these people. I thought you might find some way of putting the fear of God into that particular person.”

“But even if I do, your position will remain as it is?”

“Oh, yes. Nothing can be done about my position. I don't want Cora in it, with just the extra bit of evidence that will be fatal for her. I suppose I have some faint chance of getting off?”

“In such cases it usually depends on the judge's summing up and charge to the jury.”

“And judges don't like old ladies being killed for money, and they don't like deserted wives being killed by husbands who get tired of them. I suppose that's the way the court would see it. And the story about her saving my life would come out, and the fact that I'm—or was—a man of independent if small income, and she was a working woman. Bad, very bad.”

“Something else would come out, Mr. Malcolm; your injury, and it's aftereffects as you describe them. Your lawyer might change the plea. You might get a life sentence, but not of the kind that is shortened by parole.”

“Oh yes,” said Malcolm.
“Guilty but insane.”

Cora got suddenly to her feet. “I can't stand this,” she gasped, and put her hands to her head.

Malcolm sprang up and held her. “I told you not to sit in on it,” he said gently. “You'd better go in and lie down. I'll get you some aspirin.”

He led her through the bath into her room. After a while he came back, closing the bathroom door after him. He was lighting a cigarette.

“I knew it would be too much for her,” he said. “But she has lots of pluck. The unbearable thing for her now, of course, is that she thinks I'm going to try to shove the guilt on somebody else.”

“And aren't you?” asked Gamadge.

“Yes; but as I said before, there's no question of turning the party over to the police. That complication doesn't exist to disturb me.” He sat down again. “I want to say that if you do pull the thing off, Cora will see that you're paid for your trouble; though no payment could be adequate from my point of view. But I thought ten thousand dollars—”

“Very handsome. But as you remarked before, these people are old friends of mine. I couldn't take money for the job.”

“I had to offer it.”

“Of course.” Gamadge sat up in his chair, pulled the ash tray towards him, stubbed out his cigarette, and went on briskly: “Let's see if we can clarify this idea of yours, which remains obscure to me. You say you know the guilty party. But the field narrows; we have only four suspects left, if we eliminate you and your sister and my cousin Abigail Ryder.”

“Miss Ryder? I never dreamed of including her. A charming lady.”

“Redfield?”

“I don't know why he should kill his golden goose—my stepmother; but apart from that, he doesn't meet my requirements.”

“Drummond?”

“Out. This involves Cora, and he wouldn't hurt a hair of her head. They think the world of each other—great friends. Though what she sees in him—but that's her business. Perhaps my poor sister has had enough of the mercurial temperament.”

“We arrive at Blanche Drummond.”

“Unfortunately, we do.”

“And why should Blanche Drummond have murdered Mrs. Archibald Malcolm?”

The young man crossed his legs, uncrossed them, put out his cigarette, lighted another, and looked at the ceiling. He said: “I knew this was going to be awkward, and sound like the devil. Perhaps you'll accept my assurance that I wouldn't say a word if it weren't for Cora?”

“Don't apologize, Mr. Malcolm. This is a purely business conversation now.”

“Well, the fact is that last summer and the summer before I had a silly affair with Mrs. Drummond. Nothing that really deserves the name of an affair, you know; but it's one of the reasons why Cora has ceased to regard me as a high soul. She likes Drummond, as I said. Well, Mrs. Drummond took the thing seriously. I didn't expect her to. No European of her age would have regarded it as anything but the mildest kind of romantic time-passing. How could I know?”

“We ask that question,” murmured Gamadge, “still.”

“Cora made me break off this summer. I was for withdrawing gracefully, but she made me speed it up. And Mrs. Drummond knew that Cora was working on it.”

“But you are not asking me to think that the murder was a devious attempt at revenge upon your sister?”

“I'm not a fool. I'm afraid Mrs. Drummond did it for the money.”

“Let me get this clear. She thought if you had your inheritance, and Cora should afterwards be eliminated from the scene, you would be able to buy your wife off, and make it possible for Blanche to buy Walter off, and marry Blanche?”

“Yes.”

“You think that Blanche Drummond staked everything on two divorces and your sister's elimination?”

“She hasn't a realistic point of view.”

Gamadge sat back. “I won't comment on that. But during your season of dalliance with Blanche Drummond you must have developed a low opinion of her, Mr. Malcolm. Low indeed.”