“Leaving town, Mr. Bland?”
Bland nearly jumped out of his skin. “Oh no. Just stepping down to the bus station.”
“With your suitcase? Why don’t we go back to the house and see what’s in it?”
Bland offered no resistance as Auburn took charge of the suitcase. Gardner and Drebbel barely looked up from their chess game as Auburn led Bland through the parlor and back to the kitchen. He put the suitcase on the kitchen table and called up the back stairs for Kestrel to come down.
“This seems to be locked, Mr. Bland,” he said. “Got the key handy?”
Bland, cowering in the corner, passed a tremulous hand over a tremulous jowl. “That’s not my suitcase,” he said “Mrs. Helm asked me to put it in a pay locker down at the bus station for her.”
“Do you know what’s in it?”
The door to Mrs. Helm’s room flew open as if on cue, and she bowled into the kitchen. “Those are some things of my sister’s she asked me to put away safe,” she said.
“Would you please open the case, ma’am?”
“I don’t have the key.”
Kestrel inspected the catches briefly, then wrenched them open one after the other with the can opener blade of his pocket knife. He turned back the lid of the suitcase. Inside was a tattered green quilt, redolent of stale cigarette smoke like everything in Strode’s room. Rolled up in it were several thousand dollars in bundles of bills done up with red rubber bands. Kestrel pulled out the long-sought quilt and spread it on the kitchen table.
Auburn made a formal arrest, charged Mrs. Helm with murder and robbery, and read her her rights, vaguely aware that Gardner and Drebbel were lurking in the dark dining room. “He was such an aggravating person,” she fumed. “Always whining about something not being right. And lately he was just unbearable, bragging about how important he was over to the factory. Plus he wouldn’t never pay his rent till I threatened to put him in the street.”
Sometimes Auburn got a little cheeky when things were falling into place at the conclusion of a case. “And on top of that,” he suggested, “he blabbed once too often about this collection of miniature portraits of the presidents he had in his dresser drawer, didn’t he?”
It took her a moment to catch on. “Oh, he never made no secret of that money. He was always talking about how much he saved by never getting married, and how he wouldn’t put it in the bank because his folks was ruined in the Depression. He kept it locked in that top dresser drawer, and he wore the key on a chain around his neck. The key’s in there with the money somewhere.”
“Was that why you killed him? For the money? And because he was talking about moving out?”
Mrs. Helm glowered. “I never said I killed him. You said that. I took the money after I found him dead, mostly to pay for his back rent and his funeral.”
“You found him dead? When was that?”
“Right after midnight. I went up to see how he was feeling before I went to bed, and I found him dead.”
Auburn’s stomach was churning, and his mouth was dry. He got a drink of water at the kitchen sink before proceeding.
“Not quite dead, Mrs. Helm. Pretty close to it, maybe, but not quite. I found some old medicine bottles up in the bathroom. The marks in the dust show that those bottles have been handled and opened recently. The medicine in them is ammonium chloride, a nonprescription diuretic. An overdose causes dehydration, acid buildup, and extreme weakness. How many of those pills did you put in Frank Strode’s soup and juice every day?” He didn’t credit Mrs. Helm with enough toxicologic savvy to know that even a large overdose of ammonium chloride probably wouldn’t be detected by the pending laboratory tests.
She swept Auburn and Kestrel with a scowl of defiance. “Those pills was my husband’s, which he’s been dead for seventeen years from blood pressure. I take them myself sometimes when my feet is swollen. But I never gave none of that medicine to Mr. Strode.”
“You gave it to him, all right. Maybe it didn’t work as fast on him as it did on Mr. Ambrose—”
“Mr. Ambrose!”
“—or on your husband.”
Her complexion turned the color of slate. Auburn took another drink of water.
“When you went up there last night and saw that he was too weak to put up a fight, you burked him — sat or knelt on his chest and held the covers over his face until he stopped trying to breathe. He put up just enough of a struggle to knock the alarm clock off the night stand and break it.”
“I never done that.”
“Yes, you did, and I’ll tell you how we can prove it. Mr. Schell, the undertaker, found Mr. Strode’s mouth and throat full of green polyester fibers, and there were fresh cuts inside his mouth from his teeth. After Mr. Schell called us, Mr. Strode’s body was removed from the funeral parlor to the coroner’s morgue, and this afternoon an autopsy showed three fresh rib fractures.”
“That don’t mean I had anything to do with it.”
“Look at this quilt. What are those black marks all over it?”
“I don’t know,” she sulked, looking everywhere but at the quilt. “Probably some dirt Mr. Strode got into.”
“That’s black shoe polish, Mrs. Helm. And I don’t think Officer Kestrel and the people at the forensic lab will have any trouble proving it’s chemically identical to the polish on the shoes you’re wearing right now.”
He was far too polite to point out that, in addition, probably she alone in that house had sufficient avoirdupois to have burked Strode.
“After Mr. Stamaty was here, you took another look in Mr. Strode’s room and noticed those marks your shoes had made on the quilt. So you hid it, and you sent Mr. Bland to get it out of the house along with the loot.”
They took Mrs. Helm downtown to be booked, leaving her surviving boarders (two of whom had learned to play chess while serving stretches in prison) to fend for themselves and thank their stars they kept their meagre financial resources in the bank and had always been punctual with the rent.
At the Sign of Mercury
by Maurice Leblanc
To Madame Danie Paris 30 November
La Roncière
NEAR BASSICOURT
My dearest friend—
There has been no letter from you for a fortnight, so I don’t expect now to receive one for that troublesome date of the fifth of December which we fixed as the last day of our partnership. I rather wish it would come because you will then be released from a contract which no longer seems to give you pleasure. To me the seven battles which we fought and won together were a time of endless delight and enthusiasm. I was living beside you. I was conscious of all the good which that more active and stirring existence was doing you. My happiness was so great that I dared not speak of it to you or let you see anything of my secret feelings except my desire to please you and my passionate devotion. Today you have had enough of your brother in arms. Your will shall be law.
But, though I bow to your decree, may I remind you what it was that I always believed our final adventure would be? May I repeat your words, not one of which I have forgotten?
“I demand,” you said, “that you shall restore to me a small, antique clasp made of a cornelian set in a filigree mount. It came to me from my mother; and everyone knew that it used to bring her happiness and me too. Since the day when it vanished from my jewel case, I have had nothing but unhappiness. Restore it to me, my good genius.”
And when I asked you when the clasp had disappeared, you answered with a laugh, “Seven years ago... or eight... or nine: I don’t know exactly... I don’t know when... I don’t know how... I know nothing about it...”