Voyage into Violence (24 page)

The lights which circled upward with the staircase were dim. They plunged into dimness and began to climb. The stairs were steep and narrow, and turned sharply in the cylinder of the tower. They clutched rails on either side and pulled themselves up. But their climbing seemed unbearably slow.

The heavy walls of this mimic Morro Castle shut out sound, as they shut out all light save that provided by the dim bulbs. It was like climbing, laboriously, inside a dark pipe. And if one of the two struggling above fell—fell fifty feet to unrelenting flagstones—or if both fell, the climbing men would hear nothing of the falling.

They were gasping for breath when they reached the platform—climbed into the merciless white light—reached out for the swaying two, now again against the rail. Olivia Macklin's red hair streamed about her face, and she had her hands at Hilda Macklin's throat. The girl's white dress was torn from one shoulder, and on the shoulder and upper breast there were long welts of red, from one of which blood seeped.

Jerry had Hilda, pulled her back against him, and she did not resist, although her body trembled against his. Mrs. Macklin's struggles did not end so quickly; for a moment she writhed in Bill Weigand's hands, seemed not to know that he was not still the adversary with whom she struggled. But then, very suddenly, her body quieted. But she spoke, wildly—still almost in a scream.

“
Tried to kill me!
” she said, and momentarily swayed toward the younger woman. “
You tried to kill me!
” Hilda merely looked at her.

“She followed me,” Mrs. Macklin said, and spoke somewhat less violently, but still violently enough, venomously enough. “To push me—off!” She pointed at the rail. “You murdering—” She had turned again on Hilda. She went on. She used a good many words in telling Hilda Macklin what she was. But Hilda merely listened. As she listened, she pulled her torn dress over her shoulder. She put a hand up and smoothed her disordered hair.

“I found out what she was,” Mrs. Macklin said, again twisting in Weigand's grasp so that she could look up at him. “So she tried to kill me—too. The way she—”

Hilda spoke, then.

“She's crazy,” she said, and her voice was not raised. “No wonder they wanted to—she's crazy as they come. She's—”

It was all Weigand could do, then, to hold the struggling red-haired woman. She wrenched herself toward the girl, and for a moment almost pulled Bill with her. Then, whirling, she seemed to try to drag both of them to the low railing. But Bill had recovered his balance then, and held her.

“Be quiet,” Bill said. “Do you hear me? Be quiet.”

Unexpectedly, she obeyed. She became a heavy weight in Bill Weigand's supporting hands.

Then she began to say, over and over, in a kind of babble—“Not crazy, not crazy, not crazy.”

“She meant me to follow her,” Hilda said, and spoke evenly, her voice without inflection. “She—when I got up here, she was waiting. To push me off—to kill me. The way she tried before. We were fools not to have—” She stopped, then. She stopped abruptly.

“Yes,” Bill said. “More than you bargained for, wasn't it? And I suppose it looked so easy.”

Hilda looked at him. She looked at him steadily.

“I don't know what you're talking about,” she said. “I don't know what the hell you're talking about, captain.”

“—say I'm crazy,” Mrs. Macklin said. “Can't say I'm crazy. My mind's as good as—” She stopped. She looked at Bill.

“You see how it is, don't you?” she said. “With everybody against me—my own children trying to prove—” She was shaking, now. And the worst thing, or almost the worst thing, was that her rigidly drawn face was unchanged—remained smoothly impervious to the anguish in her voice, the anguish which burned in her eyes. “Do you think I'm crazy?” she said, and now her voice had an odd, strange note of hope in it.

“No,” Bill said. “No. But, now, it might be better if you were, you know.”

She stared at him. Then her eyes went blank.

“She was the one,” Mrs. Macklin said. “She tried to kill
me
. That's the way it was.”

But Bill shook his head.

“No,” Bill said. “You'd be no good to Mrs. Barron dead, would you? You realized that. That's how you knew she'd follow you up here. To see that you didn't—harm yourself. I suppose you hinted you—”

But he stopped. Mrs. Macklin was not listening. She was looking again at Hilda, who held her torn dress up to the shoulder nails had clawed.

“You won't get away with it,” she said. “You. Or that husband of yours.”

She turned to Weigand.

“You know who she is?” Mrs. Macklin said.

“Oh yes,” Bill said. “We know she's Mrs. Barron. And what they were up to. And—that they weren't up to murder. Not tonight, or any time. Why did you use the sword, Mrs. Ferris?”

Winifred Ferris did not answer. She did not even seem to hear.

13

The sun sank behind the
Carib Queen
, and she sailed for Nassau. Cuba was no longer a dark outline on the water; as far as one could see, the western water sparkled empty in the sunlight. But they were not looking at the sea; they were sitting in the coolness of the smoke room, and three of them were looking, not without resentment, at the other. It had not, they told Bill Weigand, by expressions on their faces, and also in words, been fair. He had known something they did not know; he had deliberately kept from them what he knew.

Bill was tired, and looked it, but he did not seem perturbed. He said that, as for the last, he had felt entitled to some pleasure during what was, by intention, a pleasure cruise. As for what he knew that they did not—he had asked questions and been answered. At least one of these questions, he thought, stood out. After he knew, from Stein (who knew from the police in Cambridge, Massachusetts), he would have been glad to tell any of them who asked. None of them had asked. They had, he said, as much reason as he had to see the question sticking out. The question was a simple one: Where was the motive for murder?

“Not,” Bill said, “the motives for snooping in other people's staterooms. Not for trying to peddle jewelry, which was not yours, for your own profit. Not for, as Folsom admits, having a showdown with Marsh.”

That, he said, was what he had stuck on, not realizing he was stuck on that. That Marsh was looking into a possible—but not admitted—shortage in Folsom's accounts was, certainly, inconvenient for Folsom. But Folsom did not appear to be a man to jump out of the slow simmer of embezzlement, even supposing it could be proved, into the hot fire of murder. And, one had to take into account the appearance of people.

As for Hilda Barron, who had posed as Hilda Macklin, and been paid to, and for her husband—admit they were crooks, mulcting an elderly woman and, toward the end, advancing to blackmail. But they were crooks, not thugs—they were not small-time robbers, losing their nerve at a crucial moment and losing it enough to kill.

“Admit?” Pam said. “Do
they?
”

They did not. Emphatically they did not. They were, ostensibly, shocked at the very suggestion, which Bill had made. But they were not indignant; if they were anything, they were amused—or as amused as a couple on the make is likely to be after the bottom has fallen out of a plan which seemed to be progressing far better than anyone could have hoped.

“Because how,” Bill said, “could they hope that their victim would put herself on the spot by killing someone else? Someone they had never heard of?”

“I wish,” Dorian said, “that you would start over. Mrs. Macklin—I mean Mrs. Ferris—killed Mr. Marsh because she was afraid he would manage to take her back—back to her son and daughter, and the house in Cambridge. She was afraid because she thought they were going to have her committed to a mental institution. You thought of that, and radioed Stein to find out, and he did and they were. You didn't tell us about it because you thought it would be fun and games not to. Or—because you didn't want to go out on a limb?”

“Well—” Bill Weigand said, and sipped from his glass.

“I,” Jerry said, “opt for the limb. You were looking for a motive—I'll give you the weakness of the others—and you thought: Wouldn't it work out fine if Mrs. Macklin was Mrs. Ferris, scared out of her wits, assuming she wasn't out of them already, by the threat of the booby hatch. Terrified at the thought—”

“The poor thing,” Pam said. “We're—we're all bright and gay about it and she—there was that blackness—that awful—And I thought she just drank too much.” Pam looked at the others.

“She killed a man,” Bill said. “Let's keep it simple as we can, Pam. She ran a sword into him. She tried, twice, to kill a woman—not a very likeable woman, I'll admit. But a woman who was young and alive, and wanted to stay alive. Let's keep it simple as we can. Incidentally, she says she didn't mean to kill Marsh—just to threaten him. She says the ship moved and she lost her balance.”

“You believe her?”

Bill shrugged. He said it didn't matter a great deal, except perhaps to Mrs. Ferris herself. If she wanted the consolation—

“Is she insane?” Dorian asked, and immediately added that she knew it was a silly question, although pertinent.

Bill shrugged again. He said that that would have to be decided by a jury—a British jury, presumably in Nassau. He was, himself, inclined to doubt that she was legally insane—or, indeed, anything more than a little “queer.” Her motive, in either case, was not “insane”—or no more so than any motive which leads to the hideous disproportion of murder always is.

“To get back to the point,” Dorian said. “If we conceivably can. Where did you get the idea? If not out of thin air?”

Bill managed to look surprised. He thought it was obvious. Pamela North sighed a stage sigh.

“Because,” Bill said, “she went to such an unreasonable amount of trouble—if she was really Mrs. Ferris. She wasn't merely leaving a place which bored her. She was running. And, she expected to be pursued. Why else the trouble?”

He amplified. A person who merely “wants to get lost,” on whom there is no other pressure, simply goes away some place else and stays there. He may change his name, but perhaps not even that. If found he has merely to say he likes it where he is and, if he is polite, listen politely to expostulations. But if he flees from a threat—to life, to liberty, or to sanity—

From the start, the most likely thing had been that Mrs. Macklin was Mrs. Ferris. But each effort to verify that supposition had been balked. The face-lifting and the dyed hair—those were obvious enough disguises. But they indicated a good deal of trouble, and not a little discomfort, had been gone to. But they were only the start. Mrs. Macklin was traveling with her daughter. Mrs. Ferris's only daughter was in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Mrs. Ferris had been in a hotel in Los Angeles when Mrs. Macklin was aboard the
Carib Queen
. And, Mrs. Ferris had been in California when Mrs. Macklin was staying at a New York hotel. Granted a carefully, and troublesome, arranged plan, any of these discrepancies, or all of them, could be resolved. But one had to grant the plan—a carefully worked out change of identity. The working out was disproportionate to the occasion—if Mrs. Ferris was merely trying to avoid a loving family. The incentive for the masquerade needed to be more powerful. Mrs. Ferris had been described as eccentric. A euphemism for drunken? Or, for something more? Bill had wondered. He had been answered. The family had admitted they had considered steps to have Mrs. Ferris committed as mentally incompetent; they admitted she probably had got wind of it. So, when Mrs. Ferris found out that J. Orville Marsh was on the ship, presumably planning to take her back to a mental institution, she killed him.

“Wait,” Pam said. “How did she know he was?”

“She knew her stateroom had been searched,” Bill said. “Marsh had, I suppose, been looking for something to prove what he suspected. She knew that Marsh was a private detective who specialized in finding the missing. She put two and two together and got Mr. Folsom's little sword and went to ask. That was, of course, precisely what Marsh wanted. But he hadn't counted on the sword. She says, incidentally, that when a woman goes to a strange man's room at night she ought to have some protection and the sword was handy. She saw the rifle box was open.

“She is,” Dorian said, “queer enough.”

“Hilda?” Pam said. “How did she get into it—she and Barron?”

That—and about it Hilda talked freely enough—was quite simple. She had answered an advertisement. That had been, some months before, in Los Angeles, where the Barrons were somewhat on their uppers. The advertisement was for a young woman who would act as a companion, and who would be willing to travel. The Barrons, who were briskly trying to turn something up, thought the advertisement worth answering.

Mrs. Ferris made the mistake of approving Hilda. Hilda took what seemed to be the heaven-sent opportunity of posing as the daughter of a woman of apparent wealth and—apparent credulity. “She doesn't admit that, naturally,” Bill said. “She insists she was just sorry for ‘the poor old thing, running away from those awful children of hers.'”

The idea had been to get what could be got of Mrs. Ferris's money, and, at the start, Bill thought—although he admitted he was guessing, on the basis of character—Hilda had been satisfied with fairly small peculations—ten dollars here and twenty there. (Which she denied.) She had given value received, or thereabouts. She had employed an elderly woman to pose as Mrs. Ferris in the Los Angeles hotel. She had mailed the letter from Los Angeles. (And neither of these things, as she pointed out, violated the law.) But then she found out that Mrs. Ferris had killed Marsh.

“How?” Jerry said.