Everett thought carefully before he answered. It had been the night of his grandfather’s death. He had been at his workbench when he had been called away from it to go to his grandfather’s room for the last time. He hadn’t been near the workbench since. When asked if he remembered how much cyanide the bottle had contained, he remembered clearly that it had been almost full. Gibby held the bottle up so the boy could see the level of its contents. Everett went white.
“That,” he said, “is a lot more than any bit of the stuff be could have got smeared on his hands.”
“How much more?” Gibby asked.
“Almost half a bottle, enough left over from killing Frail to kill all the people in this house.”
“And you have no idea where it is?”
“Wherever it is, you’ve got to find it,” Everett stormed. “Don’t you see? I was all wrong. It wasn’t an accident, so that means it has to be Aunt Ag or Uncle Hep. Why would they take so much? I can tell you why. They’re not killers, so for either one, it would come to a little for Frail so that Sara would be saved and then a lot for themselves. I don’t know which of them it is, but one of them is going to kill himself and you’ve got to stop it Don’t you see?”
He was storming along that way when his uncle came upstairs. Hepburn Bardon took over. He’d heard what Everett said and the boy had it all wrong. It never had been an accident and it wasn’t murder, either. It was attempted murder and it had gone wrong.
So then we had another theory and this one seemed to be the joint enterprise of Hepburn Bardon and his sister, Agatha. They had been right about Franklin Frail all along. Their only mistake had been in underestimating the man’s greed and the vicious scope of his evil plans. Frail had recognized that come what may, Bardons leave money to Bardons. Where else would one leave it? His wife would be coming into a one-fourth share of her grandfather’s estate. Frail had seen a way to make it a larger share.
“He had that flask,” Hep explained. “He thought he’d be in the car with us, riding to the cemetery. He thought we’d all be needing picking up. He would bring out his flask. He would pass it around. It’s no more than manners for a man to offer a drink before he drinks himself. Agatha and myself, possibly even Everett. You know, an occasion of special strains in spite of this probation nonsense. He would get the lot of us and safely because he would have used this poison of Everett’s. See how clever he was? Agatha and me poisoned. Everett in the electric chair for it. That would leave Sara to inherit the whole lot and only then he would have come around to killing Sara. In all our worries about the girl, it never occurred to us that she would be safe until he’d finished with his preliminaries and that we ourselves were to be those preliminaries. Really horribly clever.”
“Horribly,” Gibby said dryly. “What made him change his mind?”
“But he didn’t. He just misjudged himself. You have to have known Frail. With him, taking a nip out of that flask was automatic. He’d have done it without even thinking, the way another man might have blinked an eye. He’d sat through the services. For him that was a long time between drinks. He was drinking out of that flask before he even knew what he was doing.”
The more Hep talked about it, the more he warmed to the idea. He was thinking up elaborations and we couldn’t get rid of him. Suddenly I remembered something that would do it. I told him that Dolly and her mama were in the sitting room waiting for him. It worked. He went off to join them, but we weren’t rid of him for long. As soon as he got into the room and before I even had time to wonder how it was that the door Dorinda had set ajar could have been closed, Hepburn Bardon was screaming. Mama and daughter were in there, but they had given up waiting. They were dead of cyanide poisoning. We found the glasses from which they had taken their fatal highballs. On the bar we found the bottle of sour-mash whisky, Franklin Frail’s brand, and enough cyanide in it to account for every last bit of the stuff that was missing from Everett’s supply.
7.
That was when the impossible happened. I’d never expected to see that Bardon family pulled together, but the death of those Gibbs babes made the difference. It brought Sara Frail back into the bosom of her family. Sara embraced her Uncle Hepburn’s theory. Now, that was a touching scene. Sara blamed herself and she blamed the blind selfishness of her pride. She had known her Frank. She had loved him and she had feared him. She had known just how right her family was in their judgment of him, but she had been too proud to acknowledge it.
Then her Frank had died and she’d known immediately how it had happened. This was the mixture as before, just as we’d already had it from Uncle Hep. Reaching for a drink was automatic with Frank. Frank would already have taken if down before he would even have known he was reaching. It had happened just as Hep believed except that Frank had been more thorough in his planning, horribly more thorough. He had anticipated the possibility that they wouldn’t all be in the same car or the possibility that they wouldn’t want to drink in the car. He had included that in his planning. When they would be home again, they would be the stricken family and he, relatively an outsider, would be less stricken. He would be ready to let bygones be bygones. He would minister to them in their grief, mix them drinks, buck them up. He would mix the drinks from his own bottle, just as a gesture of friendship. That would have done it.
“I didn’t know there was any more,” Sara wailed. “I thought he’d made his mistake and be was dead of it In my pride I thought I could leave it without telling you. I knew my aunt and uncle were innocent and I was confident that nothing could ever be proved against either one of them. The thing would remain a mystery. I wouldn’t have to humiliate myself. So now I’ve been punished for it, bitterly punished. Those two innocent women, strangers, people we didn’t even know. It’s horrible.”
It might even have remained that way, even though Gibby wasn’t at all satisfied. But then he was suddenly much happier when the routine work on the cadavers of the Gibbs women brought in something that he could fasten upon. He fastened. It was the intelligence that Mama Gibbs had had a criminal record. She had served time. She had served it in California. She had served it in the same jail that had housed Franklin Frail’s first wife and she had served it at the same time. The crime had been blackmail and extortion.
Grabbing that up, Gibby took off for the Bardon house. I followed along. I could see that here was a new dimension. Buying off a blonde obviously could not have been a new item in Uncle Hep’s career. He’d had too many of the babes in his time and it would be inevitable that he would have paid off to no few of them. This, however, would have been different This one had behind her a professional, her mother; and with them was allied another professional, his niece’s husband. It was easy to see that simple old Hep could never before have been that much surrounded; and when this man they had been fearing so much came into it, that would have been the last straw. Surrounded by tormentors, Uncle Hep had turned on all of them.
We arrived at the Bardon house in time to come in on a business session. Kent was reading the will. The legatees were signing the necessary releases. Everything was being hurried along for Sara Frail’s sake. Everybody understood how that young woman couldn’t remain in the house with the associations of grief and horror it must hold for her. She was leaving that very night, going back to Chicago and from there she didn’t know where, but it would be someplace where she could work at wiping from her memory that monster she’d had the ill fortune to love.
“He was no lily,” Gibby said, while we stood by and watched the signing. “He was no lily, but he wasn’t as bad as you think. He didn’t kill anybody.”