City of Brass (10 page)

I parked in the familiar space behind the black Ford, which I decided must belong to the woman named Gerta. The Baines were right behind us and there was another car coming over the rise. I guessed it would be Father Fox, whom Baine had called before leaving.

“This is the place?” Simon asked, studying the towering reaches of the old house.

“This is the place.” I went over to meet Baine and his wife. He was still looking unhappy at the prospect, and I could see it was only Betty that kept him from changing his mind about the whole business.

“That would be Father Fox,” Betty said, and the black figure detached itself from the last car in line. It was indeed a priest, a short, squat man with a kindly yet firm face. He spoke not a word about the lateness of the hour, but shook hands all around like a pastor greeting his flock on a Sunday morning.

“Ark, Simon Ark,” he repeated, when I’d introduced them. “I have read that name somewhere.”

Simon I knew would be smiling slightly, though I did not turn to look at him. “I have traveled,” he told the priest. “You may have seen my name in the papers, or perhaps even read a brief little book I wrote on witchcraft.”

“Yes,” the priest nodded vigorously. “That was it.”

We entered the house in a group, and the woman named Gerta appeared from somewhere to greet us. “You come late at night,” she mumbled sleepily.

“We come to see my mother,” Baine said. “Tell her we’re here.”

Simon and I had fallen back with the little priest and now I spoke to him. “Father, do you believe this business about the stigmata?”

The priest shrugged. “I believe what my eyes tell me, with some reservations.”

“Have you reported the case to your bishop?”

“Of course. But that is all. I certainly have not recommended any official church action. As long as the woman remains here, in seclusion, what harm is done?”

Simon’s eyebrows raised a trifle. “You are implying …?

“I imply nothing,” the little priest said. “Let us go in.”

We entered the room, and to me it was much as I’d left it that afternoon. There was even still the wisp of a fire in the grate, and the old woman sat upright in the same stone-like position. “Why do you all come here by night?” she asked with a little gasp. Then she saw Father Fox and said, “Is it time already, Father? Is it morning?”

Simon Ark knelt in silence by the woman and carefully examined the palms of her hands. For a long time there was no word spoken in the room. We simply stood and watched, and I think even the priest was wondering about this man who was still sometimes a stranger even to me. And as we watched, Simon spoke to her.

“Mrs. Baine, Mrs. Baine, can you hear me? My name is Simon Ark. I have come a long way to speak with you.”

“Yes,” she answered.

The flickering glow of fireplace embers danced on their faces, and they might have been in a world apart. “When did you last eat, Mrs. Baine?”

“It has been many years now. I need only the Communion of Father Fox now. I am very close to my God.”

Foster Baine sighed and would have stepped forward to end it, but the little priest held him back with a touch on the shoulder. We stood and listened as these two before us continued their strange conversation.

“Is your God a good God, Mrs. Baine?” Simon asked quietly.

“He is all good, all powerful.”

“Then why do you use such trickery to gain the glory of Heaven? Why do you live this great lie, Mrs. Baine?”

She turned on him with old eyes flashing. “How dare you question the wisdom of the Lord!”

But Simon would not retreat. “You do not eat, yet even now there are cracker crumbs on your lap.”

The eyes closed, the body shuddered, and we waited. “Go,” she said. “Go.”

Simon stood up and looked around the room. “Professor Wilber said he’d searched this place. But perhaps … Get me water—a pitcher of water. Quickly!”

“Simon, what are you looking for?”

It was Betty Baine who produced the requested water from the kitchen, while the rest of us just stood there transfixed. Simon pulled open the fireplace screen and hurled the water onto the glowing embers. There was a sizzling puff of smoke as fire and water met.

Then Simon was clawing the soggy logs out of the way with a poker, feeling around till the metal tip caught on something else of metal beneath the ashes. “A new fireplace,” Simon said, half to himself. “I thought it would have a trap door for ash disposal. And … here’s a little bundle wired to the inside of the trap.”

The woman in the chair gave a sobbing scream and sprang forward. She was almost upon Simon when suddenly she gasped and clutched at her breast. “Catch her someone,” I shouted, and they all made a grab for her at once. It was Father Fox who stood up finally, gave a little shake of his head and began to pray over her.

And as they covered her old face with a sheet from the bed I thought the look on Foster Baine’s face might have even been one of relief …

“She was injecting turpentine under the skin of her hands and feet with a syringe,” Simon told us later. “It causes the appearance of stigmata, and of course with the look of a saint about her it was easy to persuade old Gerta to slip her occasional food. She kept the turpentine and syringe in a small bag in the ash chute at the rear of the fireplace, where even Wilber never thought to look.”

We were back in Quinn’s office now, with the Sergeant sitting in unofficially on the conversation. Baine and his wife were gone now, off somewhere with the body of the old lady at last free from her room in the old house. “But how did you know, Simon?” I asked him.

“The turpentine trick has been used before. I came across it in France some years ago. And the fireplace just struck me as the most likely hiding place.”

“But why? Why would she do it?”

“Why do any of them do it? Sometimes, especially in older women, religion can be a driving force that becomes too much for the mind to bear. I think Father Fox suspected something, but of course he had no real evidence.”

“And now she’s dead,” Quinn said.

“She’s released,” Simon corrected. “I’m certain there will be a degree of forgiveness for her actions.”

“Was she implicated in the death of Cathy Clark?”

Simon sighed. “No, my friend, she was not. But the chain of circumstances that seems to link everyone in Baine City reached to her as well. Perhaps it would be best if I told you a little about it.”

Quinn rolled a pencil between his fingers. “I’m just interested in who killed the girl, that’s all.”

“Well,” Simon began, “you see, I am not the only one to discover the murder’s identity. Professor Wilber knows, and has known all along.”

“He knows and wouldn’t tell?”

“He couldn’t tell, for two reasons. Foster Baine feared that the involvement of Wilber would lead to the discovery of his mother’s supposed condition. So he was bringing pressure to bear. And the real murderer was blackmailing Wilber with the threat to reveal still another activity of the Professor—a series of experiments that even Baine knew nothing about.”

“The ones Henry Mahon mentioned!” I said, beginning to see the pattern.

“Exactly,” Simon nodded. “But now that Baine’s problem has been removed I think we can get Wilber to talk.”

Quinn glanced at his watch. “There isn’t much time for anything any more. The funeral’s in four hours, you know.”

Simon Ark stood up. “That will be all the time I need. I will be there, with Wilber and with our murderer …”

Funerals are always sadder on a sunny day. Somehow you expect it when the skies open up to pour down rain, but the restless beating of the sun on the covered casket is more than a sensitive soul can sometimes stand.

This day, as I followed the six men with their burden down the steps of the funeral parlor and to the edge of the waiting hearse, I had the distinct feeling that a climax was near. It was the end of a life, but it was also the end of something more. Perhaps it was even the end of a city.

I was watching the curiously tense Henry Mahon leading Jean into the third car, just behind the hearse, and for that reason I didn’t really notice the car with Simon Ark and Professor Wilber fall into line at the end of the procession. My eyes were busy counting out the detectives in the crowd, seeing how many I could spot.

Quinn was there, of course, because this was his day. But there was no evidence of Betty Baine and her husband. They would have a death of their own to contend with this day. I wondered vaguely what those people would say at the news of Mrs. Baine’s final death—those people who’d thought she’d been dead for years.

The graveyard was small and detached when we reached it, nestled in a niche between two groves of trees, behind an old country church that had somehow made its way into the city’s outskirts. We’d weaved our way around, past Baine Brass, past Baine University, finally pausing here at the final resting place of Cathy Clark.

I knelt with the others for a moment by the grave, as a minister spoke the usual saddening words. Then we crowded nearer the casket as it was placed over the open grave, the noonday sun reflecting off the brass nameplate. Yes, there would be Baine Brass even at the end of it all.

And then Simon Ark spoke up, stepping through the crowd with Professor Wilber at his side. “Wait!” he spoke commandingly. “Don’t lower that coffin yet!”

They turned, men and women, to stare at this fantastic interruption. And with the sun still beating down upon us Simon turned to Wilber. “Tell them, Professor.”

Professor Kane Wilber cleared his throat. “I’m sorry about this all, but I feel I must speak now. The …”

The sentence was never finished. From across the grave I saw a brief streak of light, the sun reflecting off a sudden gun barrel. It was a gun in the hand of Henry Mahon, as I’d somehow known it would be, and even as I watched it spat a single simple shot.

Wilber grabbed at his side and went down, and somewhere in the crowd a woman screamed. I never knew what madness Mahon planned next. They were on him, of course, in an instant, battering him to the ground while they wrestled the gun away from him. I saw that Wilber was only nicked, and Simon was helping him to his feet.

“Mahon killed his sister-in-law?” Quinn asked, somehow not wanting to believe it until Simon himself spoke the words.

I looked to Simon for the familiar slight nod, but it wasn’t coming. Instead he slowly shook his head. “Henry Mahon never killed anyone. He’s just someone who never grew up.”

“What?” Quinn released his grip on Mahon’s shoulder. “Hell, if he didn’t do it then who did kill Cathy Clark?”

And Simon in his moment of glory pulled himself up tall in the sunlight, like an ancient figure of an avenging angel. “That is just the point, my friend. No one killed Cathy Clark.”

“
No
one …?”

“The girl in the coffin is Jean Clark Mahon, and Cathy Clark is standing right over there.
Stop her, Quinn!
”

And that was the end of it …

I suppose, in some fantastic manner, I should have known. I should certainly have known as quickly as Simon Ark knew—Simon who had never even met Cathy Clark before the murder. I should have known when Jean (or Cathy) came to the hotel that night to have the drink with me and then quickly depart. Of course she’d wanted only to make certain I hadn’t penetrated her disguise.

And there were a thousand other things, too. Even I had commented on the similarity between the girls. Even I had noticed that the color of their hair was the major difference between them. But their parents were dead, and the dead girl’s two closest kin—her sister and Mahon—were ready to swear she was Cathy Clark. Zenny never noticed the difference, nor did I. But Professor Wilber did, of course, and returned to the funeral parlor to run his fingers through the dead girl’s hair, searching for evidence that the hair had been bleached to its blonde color. He found the evidence, and then he was sure. Jean’s hair had been bleached after death, just as the real Cathy had dyed hers black to assume her sister’s role.

Motive? Cathy’s motive was the small fortune her parents had left to Jean instead of her. And Henry Mahon’s motive in going along with it was resentment at being trapped into marriage with a girl he’d never really loved. For someone like him, Cathy would probably have seemed a great improvement over Jean. So he’d stood aside while Cathy killed his wife and stole her identity. He’d stood aside then, and later at the end had even tried to shoot his way out of it for her. When he’d heard about Wilber examining the dead girl’s head and hair, he’d known Wilber knew—but he’d counted on the blackmail to keep the professor shut up.

But even after it was all over I still had a few questions for Simon. “Why did they try to get you and me up here last month, anyway? Was that part of it?”

“At the time it must have been,” Simon replied. “They must have had some other plan for killing Jean and possibly framing Wilber. But then they failed to hook us and changed to his plan—which certainly didn’t call for our presence. We almost spoiled things right from the beginning by arriving so suddenly.”

“And that was why Mahon wouldn’t come to the funeral parlor? Because he couldn’t face seeing his wife there, in her sister’s coffin?”

“Exactly. It was a twisted crime, one with very little chance of success, and yet they really did almost get away with it.”

And so we left them all behind. Baine City and Baine Brass and the so many twisted lives. And I really didn’t think I would ever go back there again.

“Simon?”

“Yes, my friend?”

“What was Wilber’s secret experiment?”

“I fear that must remain a secret. He tells me it was a failure anyway, and certainly I cannot help but feel that too was for the best.”

“Do I have to paw through reference books till I find out who Mirza Ali Akbar was?”

And Simon smiled a bit. “You remembered the name.”

“I remembered. Who was he?”

And he looked away, far away, as if peering into another world. “Can’t you ask me something else? Like whether or not Cathy and Wilber were once lovers? Because they were, you know.”

“I guessed that,” I lied. “Otherwise how would he have spotted Jean in the coffin when everyone else missed it. But to get back to the subject …?”