Sara would have none of it. “Where I go my husband goes,” she said from behind her heavy draperies.
“You cannot impose him on your grandfather, not even now.”
“As you like.” Sara shrugged. “Then I’ll follow my grandfather in the second car.”
“Your place is with us.”
“My place is with my husband.”
She turned away to join her Franklin. He had stepped back from this fracas. He had taken a whisky flask from his pocket and unscrewed the cap. Now quickly he raised the flask to his lips, snatching this moment of lull. Sara hurried toward him, expostulating as she went.
“Really, Frank,” she said. “Couldn’t that watt? After all, he was my grandfather.”
Frail never answered. A cramping spasm twisted his face and the flask dropped from his hand. It hit the pavement only a moment before he toppled and crashed down beside it. The glass shattered and the whisky spread over the sidewalk. The unmistakable odor hit my nostrils just as that unmistakable mottling of cherry red began to come into Franklin Frail’s face.
Both Gibby and George Bardon, M.D., jumped for the fallen man; but, of course, it was no good. When it’s cyanide, nobody can be quick enough; and it was cyanide.
Sara faltered. I saw her sag and I was standing close enough to catch her. George came away from the dead to minister to the living. We laid her flat on the pavement and I threw back her veil while he loosened the collar of her black suit. The crowd closed in around us until Gibby got the police to move them back. It was just as well he did, because much of that crowd was made up of Uncle Hep’s blondes and just then Sara needed air, not perfume.
5.
We didn’t go out to the cemetery. It was obvious that Sara wouldn’t be up to going and it was even more obvious that we would now be having business with the rest of the Bardon family. They were ushered back inside and nobody was pretending that they weren’t under police surveillance even though we did work at making it as discreet and polite as we could. That first car, into which some of the Bardons had already climbed, was driven away for examination. Gibby ordered that. He was taking no chances on the possibility that further supplies of cyanide might have been concealed somewhere in that automobile.
Aunt Agatha and Uncle Hep were indignant at the delay. Emory Kent sought to soothe them down. Cousin George was busy ministering to the newly widowed Sara; and Everett came to us to volunteer information.
“That was cyanide in his whisky,” he said.
“How do you know?” Gibby snapped.
“Because I know cyanide,” Everett answered, “and because there isn’t a chance that it isn’t my cyanide.”
“Just like that?”
“I do silversmithing for a hobby,” he explained. “I use cyanide for cleaning the stuff. There is always a supply of it on the workbench in my room at home.”
“I seem to remember you have another hobby,” Gibby told him. “Letting people go to hell in hand baskets of their own choosing. You’re the only one of the family who didn’t want detectives around. You didn’t want anybody watching.”
“Does that make me smart or an idiot?”
“An idiot, perhaps, with flashes of sense. I’m going to have to search you”
“You don’t think I have cyanide on me now, do you?”
“I don’t know. I remember Hermann Goring. He had it on him for when the going would get tough. You have tough going ahead, boy.”
“I don’t mind being searched,” Everett said.
We got him off in a room by himself and he stripped for us while we went over him inch by inch. We got no cyanide out of that but we did get talk. Everett had a theory and he was snatching at the opportunity to toss it at us. He explained that he’d always made it a point that everyone in the house should know that he had the cyanide, just how dangerous it was, and where he kept it. The idea was that everyone would be forewarned. Nobody could have an ignorant accident with the poison. Servants, family, house guests always were informed.
“Your Cousin Sara and her husband?” Gibby asked.
“That’s it,” Everett answered. “That’s where I slipped. I was too much impressed by Sara’s in-the-house-but-not-of-it routine — the hat and the gloves and the attitudes and the way she kept Frail hanging aloof, too. It never occurred to me that I had to warn them. They were keeping to themselves. They weren’t making themselves at home at all. How could I imagine that he would go up to my room and make himself at home there?”
“You want us to believe that the poor man found himself not loved enough in the Bardon house and that he stole your cyanide to commit suicide with it?” Gibby snarled.
“I’d like you to see that he had an accident with it.”
“Like how?”
“Like boredom. It’s easy to see he was having a dull time of it. Sara kept sitting like a frozen image and she wanted him to sit with her and match her freeze for freeze. He got bored and he started idly wandering the house. I know our house. I can figure he didn’t find much to amuse him till he came to my room.”
“A delightful bottle of cyanide,” Gibby said. “Such fun.”
Everett shook it off. “You’d have to know what I’m working on,” he said. “Uncle Hep has a birthday coming up and I’m making him a surprise. It’s a set of silver buttons, embossed, a different bare-butt babe on each button. He’ll wear them on one of those red waistcoats of his. I’m guessing Frail came on those and got a kick out of them.”
He went on with it. The glass pocket flask had been the man’s most constant companion all the time Frail had been in the house. Left to himself, he would probably have been glad enough to drink the Bardons’ whisky but Sara wouldn’t allow that. She’d taken a position. They were in the house to be available just in case her grandfather should change his mind about her husband, but she was accepting no hospitality. She had their meals sent in from a restaurant and they ate the meals in their room. She also ordered in their own whisky and he drank only that. Therefore, the pocket flask. It was for times when he was out of the room, even briefly.
As Everett’s theory went, Frail wanders and comes on the workbench and the amusing buttons. From them, he idly turns to the rest of the workbench. He sees the bottle with all that “Poison” and “Don’t touch” on it and he’s curious about it. About this time, it hits him that he’s been more than long enough between snorts. He has the cyanide bottle open and he pulls his flask out to slug himself a little with his whisky. Somehow, in handling the cyanide bottle, he gets a little of the cyanide on his hands. He drinks his whisky and somehow in recapping the flask, he gets a little cyanide from his hands on the mouth of the flask or on the stopper.
“It doesn’t take much, you know,” Everett said. “And if it was all on the mouth of the flask or on the stopper, that would mean he got all of it when he next put the flask to his lips and started sucking on the whisky.”
“Possible,” Gibby said. “Awfully elaborate. Highly improbable.”
“The probable accidents are usually avoided,” Everett argued. “It’s mostly the elaborate and highly improbable kind that get to happen.”
“But not opportune, as well,” Gibby objected. “Your aunt, your uncle, and you all want Frail removed. He’s stupid and careless with your cyanide and his whisky and he is removed. It’s too convenient.”
Everett found it necessary to correct Gibby. Everett had never wanted Frail removed and he was also asking us to understand the feelings of his aunt and uncle.