Rex Stout (27 page)

Sherwood, having departed at dawn, was now back again, as was Brissenden; they were in the card room with Len Chisholm, who had informed the trooper stationed outside his door that he had awakened, by a series of deep and lugubrious groans. Inspector Cramer was gone.

Dol had not slept. She knew her head was not clear; the sunny lawn outside was like a landscape in a dream, in appearance fair and cheerful, but with a sinister and threatening quality that could not be defined. And her brain was muddled. She knew it but couldn’t help it. She could not lie down and sleep. She must first leap that crevasse; she knew that she must, all the hours that she had been shrinking from it. Those hours had begun when she had heard de Roode’s story in the card room; she had been convinced then of what had before been only incredulous conjecture. With that conviction in her head it was not strange that she could not sleep. For one thing among others, she was tormented by the practical certainty that if
she had gone to Zimmerman at ten o’clock, with what she had known then, instead of waiting until two, he would be alive now and it would all be over.

Now there was no Zimmerman to go to, and that made the situation desperate.

She had considered presenting Sherwood with her facts and surmises and leaving it to him, but from what she had seen of his methods she doubted if he would be equal to the job—and now the job
must
be done. The murderer of Storrs and Zimmerman
must
be unmasked. She had considered a direct attack on de Roode with whatever weapons she might command, but dismissed that as hopeless. She had considered, again, the possibility of coercing Janet into disclosure, and had dismissed that too. One false step might be ruin, for when she once betrayed her knowledge all the defenses of cunning and despair would be erected against her, unless she demolished them in advance.

So, finally, she was led to her decision. Her head still was not clear, but her determination was. She would take the jump. There was nothing else for it.

She swallowed the last of her cup of tea, got up and went to the mirror and peered at her reflection and muttered at it, “You look like something left on the bank when a river goes down. Also you feel like it.” She brushed at her hair a little, patted with a powder puff, scraped her lips with her teeth and renounced lipstick; and went to the pigskin case where it rested on the table, opened it and unstrapped the Holcomb pistol from the lid, looked to make sure the pistol was loaded, and put it in her handbag. With the handbag under her arm, she left the room, descended the stairs, and told the trooper in the hall that she wished to speak with Sherwood. The trooper went to the card room and in a moment returned and told her to go in.

She ignored Len Chisholm, who sat with his elbow on the arm of his chair and his head supported by his hand; likewise Brissenden, who stood, by now permanently truculent. She spoke to the attorney:

“I want to go for a little walk with Martin Foltz. I’m telling you in case your men have been instructed not to let any of us out of their sight; I don’t want that; I need a
těte-à-těte
with him. I’ll tell you about it after I see how it comes out.”

“What’s the idea?” Sherwood regarded her without enthusiasm. “You’d better tell me about it now.”

“No, I can’t do that. Maybe there’s nothing to tell. I’m not going to elope with him; we won’t leave Birchhaven. You can trust me. I’m not going to strangle him, either.”

Sherwood appraised her. Finally he shrugged. “Go ahead, if you don’t leave these grounds.”

“Tell your men, please.”

Sherwood turned. “You hear, Quill? Tell the men Foltz and Miss Bonner are going for a walk and don’t want to be disturbed.”

The sergeant went, and Dol followed him.

Another inquiry of the trooper in the hall got her a direction to the sun room. There she found Martin and Sylvia. Martin was stretched out on the couch in the recess, with his eyes closed, and Sylvia sat on the edge, leaning over his head, smoothing his brow with the tips of her fingers, passing them back and forth gently, soothingly. The motion was suspended as she looked up at Dol with tired and cheerless eyes; and Martin stirred and sat up.

“Anything … anything new?”

“No, Raffray.” Dol was crisp. “What would a man be without a ministering angel? But I’m going to supplant you. Something has occurred to me that I want to discuss with Martin.”

“I’m not discussing with him. He won’t discuss.”

“He will with me. Won’t you, Martin?”

“Sure.” He wasn’t eager. “Shoot.”

Dol shook her head. “Not here. I’m going to cart you off. I’m proposing a
těte-à-těte
. Come along.”

Sylvia, her lips compressed, stood up. “I knew … it was something. It always is when you walk like that. Dol … I can’t stand any more of this! I don’t see how anybody can! And you … you’re so damned mysterious.…”

“I’m not mysterious. I just want Martin to come with me somewhere outdoors. I want to consult him about something. That will do his nerves more good than having you baby him. You ought to do something too, anything, it
would do you good. Go to the kitchen and bake a pie. Come along, Martin.”

She finally got away with him, leaving Sylvia standing there gazing after them. Instead of leaving the house directly from the sun room, she led the way the length of the side hall, emerging onto the east terrace—flooded with sunshine, as was the whole expansive slope, stretching away from their feet. Dol said, “Let’s go this way,” and started on a bee-line across the grass, ignoring the path. Martin, beside her, observed querulously, “I don’t like to go more than twenty yards from the house, because one of those damned cops comes snooping around.”

Dol grunted something. But in another fifty paces Martin suddenly stopped short and demanded, “Where are you headed for? I don’t want to go down there.”

Dol faced him. “It’s the best place. The nook. The cops won’t follow us—you know I am supposed to be helping them—and I don’t want to be overheard.”

Martin shook his head stubbornly. “Nobody can hear you right here. What do you want to discuss?”

“Now, Martin,” Dol chided him. “And you usually so gallant? I want to talk with you in that nook. I’m not capricious, am I? Lord, if I wanted to I could have a squad of troopers conduct you there—I stand high with them since I found the gloves. I’d much rather it was just you and me.”

She thought she was smiling at him, she wasn’t sure, but she was sure that her heart was thumping. She must not give herself away ahead of time, she must do it right or it wouldn’t work; and she knew that he was perfectly capable of turning on his heel and returning to the house. If her smile looked the say she hoped it did, he probably wouldn’t.… She turned, with assurance, and started down the slope again.

He was with her. She wished now her heart would stop thumping; cool composure would be better. They passed the fish pool, circled the end of it … and were at the dogwoods. They stooped under the low branches … and were in the nook.

Dol said, “You haven’t been here since it happened, have you?” She pointed. “That’s the tree the wire was fastened to—that’s
the limb. That’s the bench that was overturned; they’ve set it up again. What’s that? Oh, I guess they drove those pegs there to show the position the bench was in.” She sat down on the bench, and a shiver ran over her. “I suppose it isn’t really cool in here, but it seems so coming out of the warm sun, and as dark as the devil. Sit down, Martin. Don’t stand there as if you were ready to run, I really do have something to say to you.”

He lowered himself to the bench, towards the other end, four feet from her. He told her petulantly, in what Sylvia called his off-key tone, “All right, say it.”

Dol did not look at him. She had a feeling that it would be better, at that point, not to. She looked at the grass at his feet, and made her voice as casual as she could: “What I want to talk to you about is confession. The different ways people have of confessing things. All sorts of things. They confess sins to priests, and injuries, big ones and little ones, to their wives and husbands and mothers and friends, and of course they confess mistakes all the time, either because they have to or because they want to. It seems to be an instinct, and often it gets so powerful that it’s irresistible. Don’t you think so?”

She looked at him; but she saw that he wasn’t going to answer, because he wasn’t breathing; he was rigid, with his eyes fixed on her. She went on: “Of course, whether it’s an instinct or not, I don’t suppose anyone ever confesses to anything serious unless there’s some good reason for it. You confess to a priest because you want absolution. Sometimes a man confesses to the police to make them stop hurting him. And so on. But I suppose the commonest reason for confession is to distribute the burden of guilt. It becomes intolerable, and you have to share it. This may all sound elementary to you, I don’t know; if Steve Zimmerman were here he could phrase it in technical psychological terms, but I can’t do that; anyway, that’s what I want to talk to you about, the different reasons for confession. Of course, I’m not silly enough to think that you’re going to break down and confess just because I talk about it, and that’s why I’m saying there must be a reason for it.”

She heard him breathe, and looked at him, and saw that he was trying to smile. He said, “I’d just as soon confess to
you as not. You confess to me and I’ll confess to you. I’ll bet it will take you longer than it will me.” Suddenly he was petulant again. “Why the devil did you bring me down here to talk about confession? I’m no priest.”

“I brought you here to tell you the reasons why you must confess.” Dol got his eye and held it, and her fingers tightened on the leather of the handbag under her arm. “There’s nothing else for you to do. There are various reasons, but the main one is the one piece of bad luck you had. That was what gave you away. I mean, of course, that it was Janet who found the gloves.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” Martin’s voice was doubtless meant to be harsh with resentful bewilderment, but it was not a proper harshness; the tin was in it. His expression was better than his voice. “Is this supposed to be funny? Janet didn’t find the gloves; you found them yourself.”

Dol shook her head. “Janet found them. Haven’t you been wondering who the dickens put them in that watermelon? Of course you have; but you might have known it was Janet, because no one else would have done it.” The handbag slid to her lap; she opened it and put her hand in as if to take out something, but instead let the hand stay there. She did that without taking her eyes from Martin’s face. “But I must explain why that gave you away. After I found the gloves I tested the melon for fingerprints, and it was covered with Janet’s. She had hid the gloves. I went to her, and she said that she had found them under the peat moss in the rose garden, and recognized them as yours and took them to her room. Then, when her father was found murdered, and hands were examined and gloves were discussed, she looked at the pair she had found and saw that they were marked with the wire. She didn’t think you had killed her father, but she didn’t want you dragged into it by having them recognized as your gloves—so she told me—and besides, it would have been embarrassing for her to explain why she had concealed them in her room.” Inside the bag, the pistol grip was now snug in her hand. “But yesterday afternoon it came out that the gloves had been bought on Saturday. The only time that Janet could possibly have seen them was in the pocket of your jacket in the
reception hall Saturday afternoon, and even that was not possible, because she had not been there. She had been in the rose garden, and she had not seen you or anyone else. Her statement that she had recognized them as your gloves was a lie. But her action in taking them to her room and later hiding them in the watermelon could only be explained on the theory that she
did
know they were yours. She could not very well have recognized them as belonging to anyone else, and even if she had, who besides you would she seek to protect? So she must have known they were yours, and there was only one way she could have known it: she must have seen you hide them in the rose garden. While you were doing that, you didn’t know that Janet was in the filbert thicket looking for a bird, did you? She was. And she saw you stooping over, doing something in the peat moss under a rose bush, and after you had left she went to take a look, and she found the gloves.”

Dol suddenly withdrew her hand from the bag, with the pistol in it. She spoke to his face: “Look here, Martin. I can shoot this thing, I’ve practised with it. Don’t think I won’t. I show it to you so you won’t get any notion about treating me the way you did Storrs and Zimmerman. I wouldn’t kill you if I could help it, but I would hurt you, and I know you can’t stand the idea of being hurt. So don’t make any sudden movements.”

Martin’s eyes lifted from the pistol to her face. She had, on various occasions, seen his eyes petulant, or plaintive, or contumelious, but she had never seen them ugly before—little round hard pebbles of fear and hate, so painful to see, so odious as human eyes which she thought she knew, that an uncontrollable shudder ran over her. He said, in a voice that was also new to her, “Put that … thing away. Put it away, I tell you!”

“Don’t you move.” Dol’s hand with the pistol rested on the bench. “You look as if you might jump and run. Don’t try that either, or I’ll shoot.” She forced herself to keep her gaze at his intolerable eyes. “I’ll finish about Janet and the gloves. I don’t know whether you knew they had been taken from the rose garden or not; maybe you didn’t go near there, thinking that if they were found you could explain that they had disappeared from your jacket, and
that that was safer than getting them and trying to dispose of them. You must have been astounded and pretty flustered when you learned that they had been found in a watermelon. I was sitting looking at you when you learned that, and I’m remembering how you handled yourself; that’s why I’m taking no chances now, I’ll pull this trigger if you make a move. As for Janet, of course she knew Saturday night that you had killed her father, since she actually saw you hide the gloves. I don’t pretend to understand her; of course I’m aware that she’s infatuated with you, God knows why. Maybe she doesn’t believe in vengeance, or maybe she offered her filial love as a sacrifice to another kind of love, or she may even have counted on impressing you some time with the tale of what she had done to protect you. It doesn’t matter.