Nicki began to sob, but I couldn’t see it; the sobs were too deep inside her. “Will you help us, Jeff?”
“If I knew the score.”
“Will you swear to keep a secret, even if you can’t help us?”
“I swear it,” I said.
She dropped her eyes, her voice almost a whisper. “I think my uncle killed his wife. Last night they had a terrific argument in our summer cottage sixty miles from here. He was a little drunk. They were in the kitchen and he struck her with a heavy iron skillet. I... I was scared, and brought him here last night. He’s a murderer, Jeff!”
Well, I thought, they even called Nelson Baby-Face; maybe Uncle Theron is quite an old gadabout.
“And the others?”
“Anna, my uncle’s stepsister, and Horace came early this morning. Sam Everette arrived not long after. Uncle called Sam here to make a new will.”
“Yes?”
“A will favoring me.”
“Has he made it?”
“No.”
“Whom does the present will favor?”
“All of us. I get about three million, but the new will would possibly give me much more.”
This was a helluva note. A fine silver and gold romance fading into the black night of impossibility. How could a guy like me marry — and keep — a dame with three million berries? A tough problem, one that I’d have to chew on later.
“I’m going out and talk to the others,” I said.
They were on the veranda, deep shadows against the lowering curtain of night. Sam Everette and Horace were sitting on the veranda steps. Anna Rawlins had the only available chair, a creaking wicker affair Cy had found someplace. I sat down on the top step between the lawyer and Horace. I didn’t see the monster-dog Bimbo nearby and my blood pressure went down a little.
“I remember when I was working on the Houston Chronicle, we had a murder sort of like this.”
No one said anything.
I pulled the gold compact out of my pocket, handed it up to Anna. She almost snatched it. “Where did you find it?”
“Where did you lose it?”
She didn’t answer.
“In Theron’s summer cottage?”
“How did you...” Then her teeth snapped together. “I’ll talk to the sheriff — and no one else! Come Horace!”
“Don’t let Nicki tell you things, palsy,” Horace said. “We love her like a saint loves Lucifer. I’ll break her damn neck if she starts telling things on Anna and me.”
I bit back a retort, and Horace took Anna’s arm, escorting her regally into the house. He had her wrapped around his little finger. And he was money mad.
I said, “Sam, can you tell me anything about this new will?”
“Nope,” Sam said. “I just had a call from Nicki to come up here. She said Theron wanted to see me and make a will favoring her completely. But none of us been able to see Theron today. Nicki said he’d been through some kind of shock and had to rest.”
“I’m getting no place fast,” I said.
He grunted, got up. “Think I’ll heist a little of Cy’s moonshine.”
I sat there, mulling it over and listening to the crickets for maybe ten minutes. I wondered how long it would take Cy to get back. I wanted to get out of here, but country sheriffs are funny. He might get the wrong impression if a material witness didn’t stick close around to the body he’d found. Then like ice water, Nicki’s scream poured on my thoughts. She kept screaming over and over, was in the middle of a scream, her clenched hands pressed against the sides of her face, when all of us, gathering from different parts of the house, ran in the bedroom of Theron.
I jerked her hands from her face. My reflexes were all mixed up. She was screaming and Theron Rawlins lying on the bed dead and her right hand felt hot and moist and her left hand was cool, dry; her eyes swam in my vision.
I slapped her once across each cheek, and she stopped screaming quite suddenly. “He’s dead,” she said woodenly, nodding toward the bed. “He committed suicide.”
I released her, and we all fanned out about the foot of the bed. Theron was bleeding profusely from the throat and the bed was gory. In his one agonized convulsion, he had twisted himself up awkwardly. The knife was lying beside the bed. I picked it up gingerly, guarding against smearing prints. The knife was clean as a new wife’s fresh kitchen.
“Not dead,” I said, “murdered. Someone killed him, wiped the knife...”
“...And,” Nicki choked, “the someone was scared away when I came down the hall. The someone dropped the knife, went out that door, doubled back and came in the room with the rest of you. I heard my uncle cry out, chokingly, and came running. Somebody here killed him — and Gaspard.”
“Let’s go in the living room,” I said. Stumbling, Anna turned and went out, Horace, white-faced, helping her. Sam Everette’s jaw muscles were twitching. I took Nicki’s arm and followed them.
“Let’s get a drink,” she shuddered. “I can even drink Cy’s brew — now.”
Anna, Horace, and Sam went in the living room. We turned down the hall to the kitchen. It was a large room, its plaster cracked, one side filled with a huge, closet-like cupboard. The old range, which burned lump coal or hickory logs, I couldn’t decide which, filled one side of the room.
On a rickety table stood the omnipresent fruitjar, Cy’s hillbilly token of good cheer.
“Want one?”
I shook my head. I watched her pour a tiny one, looked at her fingers as she picked the glass up. She was very much a right-handed person, and I didn’t like that, for it gave me all the answers.
I took the glass from her fingers. She looked at my face and her hand stayed suspended where it had been holding the glass.
“I feel very sorry for you, Nicki. It was beautiful — except for one tiny slip.”
“Beautiful?”
“Want me to tell you? You were fishing for money, and you covered every angle. When your uncle struck his wife, you convinced him that he had killed her. You got him to run away — to this house, where you were going to politely blackmail him into making a new will. As soon as the will was made you wore going to murder him.”
“Jeff, you’re joking!”
“I wish I were,” I said heavily. “But it isn’t funny. Your plan in the beginning was that simple — kill your uncle as soon as the new will was made. You’d claim it was suicide, that he’d taken his life in remorse, thinking he’d killed his wife. But two complications developed. Somewhere on the drive here, your uncle had access to a phone. He called his right-hand — Gaspard. Gaspard in his thorough way went to the summer cottage, found Theron’s wife alive. He came here and you had to kill him. The other complication was Anna and Horace. They arrived at the summer cottage. They followed you up here. Perhaps Horace had persuaded Anna to try a little blackmail on their own, not knowing your scheme. You told them all a tale of Theron suffering an illness to keep them out of the room. You drove back to the summer cottage, found Anna’s compact and knew they’d been there. You had to work fast then. You took the rotor out of the car, in order to delay the arrival of the sheriff — for you knew you had to clean the business up definitely before the police arrived. You planned to clean it up by pulling a smooth murder — Theron — and pointing the guilt at Anna and Horace. You wiped the knife, knowing we’d notice it and believe you innocent because you apparently thought it suicide. It was a very subtle business, with so many tiny things of that nature that you mixed in. You weren’t attempting to make an out and out frame-up of the affair. You knew that if you showed your own innocence well enough, the law, learning of Horace and Anna’s affair, their hate of you, their love of money, would eventually get around to pinning the crime on them. They had the obvious motive: they didn’t want the will changed; Gaspard learned of their plans, had to be killed to keep him quiet; Theron had to be killed in order to stop him from making the will.”