Nothing Can Rescue Me (25 page)

“I wasn't even in the house!”

“You undoubtedly had keys to it, after all the years you had worked here; and you have a car. You know books, you are familiar with the typewriter; and with what pleasure, what rapture, you must have studied Percy's choice of reading matter, and settled upon those quotations!”

She slowly turned her head and looked over her shoulder. “Mr. Macloud.”

He responded instantly. “Right here, Corinne.”

“This isn't evidence?”

“Not a word of it.”

“Then must I listen to it?”

“Hear him out. Perhaps he'll do better.”

“I'll do better,” said Gamadge. “Having accepted as true Miss Wing's story that she had seen Percy, or thought she had seen him, in the garden, I asked myself whom she could have seen; since I also accepted as true his denial of having been there. Not Mason, who is blond; not Mrs. Deedes, whose hair is grey; not the auburn Miss Burt, whose hair could probably not have been seen over the hedge at all. If she saw dark hair under a hat, I could only suppose that she had seen yours.

“Well; there I was, and there I remained. I was forced to tempt you into betraying yourself by a trick that failed; but even while it failed—and here we arrive at the third paradox in the case—it gave me the evidence I needed; and even as I saw that evidence, and acted on it to save Evelyn Wing's life, I remembered in a flash the single abnormality in your conduct, in anybody's conduct since the case opened. Why I asked myself, as I fled down the hall, should you have brought your sewing kit to Underhill?”

Her eyes rested on his unwaveringly; but her attitude had changed. Her back, straight as ever, looked rigid.

“Why on earth,” continued Gamadge, “should you have arranged to do sewing here, on your holiday, when all you said you had planned was to walk and sleep? And why should a curtain in Underhill have a rent in it? I have not asked those super-parlourmaids whether that curtain—in a guest room, you know, even though it is a small guest room—had a rent in it; but I don't think it had. Louise would have brought it to their attention, if their trained eyes had missed it.”

She leaned back in her chair, hands deep in her pockets, legs outstretched in front of her, feet crossed; never had Gamadge seen her make herself comfortable before, and he at least knew that she had relaxed because the battle, for her, was over.

“But conclusive as that evidence must be,” he said, “I have evidence as good, evidence of which you know nothing. You have not looked, Miss Hutter, at the soles of your shoes.”

With a movement indescribably furtive she placed one foot on the other knee, and looked at it. Then she looked up at him. “You no doubt observe,” said Gamadge, “the silvery film that is ground into the leather, and that won't come off without intensive scrubbing. It's powder, the sticky kind that won't come out of carpet unless you go at it hard. The griffons spilled Macloud's talcum on the tiles of that bathroom; and when I went to unfasten the door you had bolted I saw your footprints on my rug. They are fainter in the hall, still fainter in Miss Wing's room; but they are there. And nobody has been in my room or bath since, and two officers are now guarding the hall.”

In obedience to Windorp's shouted order, Morse had fled; Gamadge heard him talking to Beaver, and then heard him telephoning in the library. But Windorp was demanding an answer to another question:

“What's that about sewing up a tear in a curtain?”

“Oh; you'll want witnesses when you look in her sewing kit. I should say there's an extra capsule—one of the red capsules, you know—in the middle of a spool of cotton. White cotton. It would just fit. But I think—look out; look out for that thimble.”

She had withdrawn a hand from her sweater pocket; her brass thimble was on her finger, and Windorp, snatching it off, removed from inside it a spiral of tissue paper. He sniffed it, and his face was a study as he gazed at her.

“That thimble is too big for me,” she told him. “Your policewoman didn't bother with it; she didn't hardly interrupt my sewing.”

“I don't think you'll see a policewoman again, Miss Hutter,” said Gamadge. “You'll see a nurse and doctors. You are a mad-woman.”

“Am I?” She returned his grave look with one as profound.

“You are, and I only hope that that agreement—whatever it is—won't make it look like premeditated murder for money. If it weren't for that agreement, you know, people would think of you sitting there in Erasmus, day after day, and your rich relations up here at Underhill. They'd remember what Nahum Hutter was like, and they'd remember the old family feud, and they'd say no wonder you lost your wits. I don't think you'd ever see the inside of a court-house, and you'd end your days comfortably enough in an asylum; criminally insane. But an agreement looks like conspiracy; and madness doesn't conspire—not your kind of madness. It plays a lone hand.”

She was watching him intently. After a pause she said: “I guess you're right. I didn't have any agreement with Evelyn Wing; just a verbal understanding that she'd let me have part of her income because I got her the job. I knew she'd let me have Underhill.”

Mrs. Deedes, as if bewitched, sat looking dumbly at her. Macloud looked at Gamadge as if he had just seen him produce a globe of goldfish from a top hat. Windorp asked: “You think Evelyn Wing would have given you this place—without any signed agreement—just because you got her the job with Mrs. Mason?”

“I know she would have.”

“Then you
are
crazy.”

“Yes; didn't Mr Gamadge say I am?”

Early dusk was falling when Gamadge walked into Mrs. Deedes's room. It was littered with tissue paper, bags and cases, and she sat among her possessions with her grey dress across her knees.

“Well, Sally.” He shook his head at her. “You've been very wicked.”

The grey dress slid to the floor. “Oh, Henry,” she wailed, “how did you know?”

“You were in such a confounded dither from the first; and Corinne Hutter was protecting you, too, though I didn't see fit to mention it.”

“I nearly fainted when you began to talk about her protecting Evelyn. I sat there and wondered whether you were really going to keep me out of it; I didn't see how you could.”

“Let's hope Windorp didn't see you nearly faint.”

“Won't Corinne tell?”

“Certainly not. The last thing she wants is to have the conspiracy element brought forward.”

“I never dreamed of conspiracy!”

“It looks like conspiracy; in fact, it was conspiracy.”

“Bill would never forgive me! He'd never marry me over again!” Mrs. Deedes hunted about among the litter on the bed, and snatched up a handkerchief. She wiped streaming tears from her cheeks. Gamadge, propped against a carved bedpost, hands in pockets and head lowered, watched her with a kind of grudging sympathy.

“I must confess,” he said, “that I was thinking of Bill when I reprehensibly saved you at the expense of your cousin Miss Evelyn Wing. Bill has his faults, but they're out in the open. He wouldn't have cared for this.”

“Oh, Henry, are you sure about Corinne?”

“My dear child, Corinne took my broad hint and will act upon it. She will be declared insane before the case ever gets before the grand jury. And unless I'm very much mistaken she will
be
insane within a few years. Schizophrenia, paranoia, dementia praecox—I don't know what they call it; but she's well on the way to it now.”

Mrs. Deedes, her tears wiped away, gazed plaintively up at him. “She always seemed so sensible!”

“She has a ratlike cunning. I dare say she began life as the most intelligent of all the Hutters; but there was something wrong. I knew there was something wrong when I was confronted with the greatest of all the paradoxes in the case—the paradox of her having refused a Hutter legacy, while yet remaining on good terms with the Hutters. That called for an abnormality of cleverness, or else a kind of otherworldliness that I was quite sure she didn't have. Percy saw that she didn't have it, and vaguely diagnosed madness to come; but of course he wasn't interested in Corinne Hutter.”

“She must be absolutely mad now, to have run those risks.”

“Except for that last flurry when she risked getting out of Evelyn Wing's room and around the corner into the back passage before anybody appeared in the hall, she had too much opportunity for watching chances to run much risk of any kind. And even then, even in those seconds after Evelyn Wing had been shut into the closet, she knew where the patrol was and knew that I must be on my way to unbolt the bathroom door.”

“Oh dear, I thought she had so much character!”

“She had. You'd better tell me all about the conspiracy, Sally. I don't think you can be quite out of the woods yet.”

“It all happened so naturally, it was just like the simplest business transaction. Florence met Evelyn at my apartment, and liked her looks and her game of bridge and everything, and was so much interested in her story and the hard time she'd been having. She told Corinne about her, and one day Corinne arrived in New York and asked to meet Evelyn herself. She said she'd just come to town to see the exhibition of Italian old masters at the Museum of Modern Art.”

“I wonder whether she saw and admired Parmigiano's ‘Portrait of a Lady'—subject unknown. It suddenly occurs to me as an excellent portrait of Corinne Hutter.”

“Henry you must be out of your senses. Corinne like that? It's a portrait of somebody of the Renaissance nobility!”

“Put Corinne in robes and jewels, do up her hair—why, even the pose is the same! That characteristic leaning a little forward, looking straight at you. Some think Parmigiano's lady is beautiful, some think she looks like a rat; both schools are right, and I only wish I had thought of it when I first saw her looking down at me from the back stairs. ‘Now that,' I said to myself, ‘is a personality.'”

“Well, I never thought of her as a personality, but I knew she always had lots of influence with Florence.”

“Oh, Sally, Sally.”

“I know, Henry, but how could I dream she was capable of murder? I thought it was Tim Mason and that horrid little Susie Burt. Well, Corinne met Evelyn, and was sure she'd do beautifully as Florence's secretary and I told her about lending Evelyn a thousand dollars to take a business course, and live on while she was taking it. I couldn't afford to lend it to her, but she was penniless, and had been ill, and jobs aren't easy to get. Bill made me.”

“And Miss Hutter suggested that you ought to protect the loan?”

“Yes, because I had no security I thought her idea about the agreement was so clever; it was with Evelyn, you know. Corinne told me how to draw it up; it gave me half Evelyn's income for five years.”

Gamadge closed his eyes. “Income, not salary,” he murmured. Then, looking at Mrs. Deedes with a certain incredulity he asked: “Were you expecting about a hundred and fifty percent on your money?”

“No, of course not. Just the regular thing, six percent, like any loan. And when I had got the thousand dollars and the interest back, I simply banked the rest; saved it for her, you know, and sent her an accounting. In case she was out of work again, you know, or ill, or something. One really couldn't count on poor Florrie.”

“Five years—just enough time to get Florence well pinned down. Miss Wing came here four years ago. You've been had, Sally.”

“How could I know? At the time it seemed only fair, and Evelyn was glad to sign. She hates being under an obligation.”

“She was created, in fact, to serve the purposes of Miss Corinne Hutter.”

“Well, I didn't intend to cheat her! We had a notary witness our signatures, and of course I never dreamed that Evelyn would ever have anything but a few years of salary. Then Corinne came in one day, about six months later, and said that Florence liked her so much that she might actually adopt her, and was sure to leave her something in her will; unless something happened, of course. Corinne explained that Tim Mason was getting nervous about Florence's interest in Evelyn, and that Florence, being fickle and easily swayed, needed a lot of handling. Corinne said perhaps I'd like to make another agreement this time with her; to go half and half with her on my share of Evelyn's income from then on while Evelyn kept the job.

“I knew very well that Evelyn wouldn't keep the job if Corinne made trouble for her. So I—”

“Submitted to extortion.”

“Well, it was value received; Corinne took a good deal of trouble with it. But she said she'd like to have something else in our agreement, too; she said that if Florence should die, leaving Evelyn something considerable in her will, something equivalent to the value of Underhill plus Underhill itself, say, Corinne would waive all other claims on my share of Evelyn's income in favour of Underhill and enough cash to pay the taxes.”

“Great heavens.”

“Well, Henry, what could I do? I didn't expect Florence to die in five years, or to leave Underhill to Evelyn Wing! I thought it was just pride on Corinne's part, a sort of forlorn hope. Because as she explained to me, she couldn't take anything directly from the Hutters on account of a dying promise she made her father.”

“She took something directly from the Hutters, all right. I only hope this never gets before a judge and a jury—you'd have to plead insanity yourself.”

“It didn't sound insane, the way she put it; she said she'd like to run Underhill as a boarding-house or summer resort, and of course the taxes aren't much up here. And she could have done it, too.”

“When Sylvanus and Florence were killed, and you found out that Underhill had been left to Miss Wing, all as per schedule, weren't you sharply reminded of that agreement?”