There was a possibility, of course, that he had stopped on his way home at a bar or restaurant. Detectives questioned bartenders and waiters in the Third and Lexington Avenue places between Sixty-fifth and Seventy-ninth Street, but none of them remembered having served him. And if he had been accidentally poisoned in any of these places, there would certainly have been other victims.
There was one other possibility, suicide. This was not likely. He was not of a morbid nature, and since he had been married to Nancy he had no financial problems. His play had failed, but if actors committed suicide after every flop, there’d be none left to keep the theater going. And the day before he had been interviewed about a good part by an important manager. There was no reason for Gilbert Jones to have been suicidally unhappy. Two women had loved him, but that was more or less what he expected. In his way he had probably cared for both, which is to say that he loved neither, since he had room in his heart only for love of himself.
It must have been one of the women. They had both played emotional scenes with him, had both given him drinks. Their stories were in direct conflict. Each said that he had promised her to give up the other, and had gone so far as to play a farewell scene with the unhappy one. Although neither of them accused the other, each implied that the other was guilty. No poison was discovered in either apartment. But when a murderer washes the dishes, she might easily get rid of deadlier evidence. If there had been poison left in either apartment, the guilty woman could easily get rid of it. Modern plumbing provides a quick and easy way to dispose of such evidence...
While Mike was summing up the points on both sides and adding to my suspense, the telephone rang. We were silent for a moment. All the color had left Mike’s face. Into the phone he said, “This is Jordan... All right; I’ll hold on.”
Although I was crazy to hear the conversation, I had been brought up to believe that there is no sin more despicable than eavesdropping. Virtuously I walked on tiptoe toward the patio.
“You heard the rest, you might as well hear this,” Mike said, and I flew into the living-room.
It was on the west side of the house, and although the curtains had been drawn, the sun filtered light through the patterned green cloth. I sat on the couch as I used to sit in the dentist’s waiting-room, my hands at my sides pressed hard against the seat.
After a seemingly endless interval I heard Mike say, “Hello, dear.” He was silent for a few minutes, and then he turned to me and said, “She’s crying.”
“Who?”
He spoke into the telephone: “I know you wouldn’t do such a thing, my dear. I know who did it... Yes! If you do as I say, she’ll have to confess.” After another interval he said to her, “Because I know. Of course it’s hard for you, but not half so hard as being accused, yourself.”
Apparently she asked Mike to come to New York, for he told her that he was not free to leave, since he was in the Army. “I can’t get away, you know, unless they subpoena me, which isn’t probable, since I was three thousand miles away when the murder was committed. But I do know positively.” His voice became gentler: “You’ll have to handle this yourself. Tell her that you must talk to her privately, and get her to come to your apartment. She’ll come if you tell her you’ve talked to Mike Jordan. I’m sure that she knows I know. You must let her think you’re alone; but have someone there. If you’re constantly under surveillance by the Homicide Squad, so much the better. Have your lawyer there, too, but concealed.”
Again there was argument. Mike almost lost his temper. “Of course it’s a horrid thing to do, but, my dear girl, you are suspected of murder.”
She must finally have agreed, because Mike turned to me and nodded. Then he spoke again into the telephone: “Tell her that you know about her first murder.”
I gasped. Probably there was as much astonishment at the other end of the wire, for Mike hastened to reassure her by saying, “Yes, indeed. I do know it. Tell her you know what caused Fred Miller’s death.”
Silence must have followed this revelation. Mike turned to see the effect upon me.
“Then it was Phyllis?” I muttered.
Mike said it into the telephone, “It wasn’t jealousy that caused her to poison Gil. She was jealous, no doubt, and afraid of losing him. This made her hysterical, and you know how completely she’d abandon herself once she unlocked that shell of restraint. She probably pleaded with Gil, told him that he dared not desert her after what she’d done for him. I can’t tell you exactly what her words were, but I’m sure she disclosed theatrically that she’d been driven to murder for Gil’s sake.
“Knowing Gil, I feel that he was shocked at the thought before he quite believed her. Instead of exciting him and increasing his passion, it turned him against her. You knew Gil better than I. He was vain enough to enjoy the spectacle of the two of you weeping and fighting over him, but he didn’t want corpses as tribute on the altar of love. I know Gil’s faults, too. He was vain and opportunistic, but there wasn’t a malicious bone in his body. Think of his naïveté over that suicide business. As soon as she had confessed, whether he fully believed it or not, he began to loathe her. This cooled her considerably, I’m sure. When the hysteria died, she saw that he was dangerous to her, and put poison in his highball.”
“She had the poison, you know,” Mike continued. “It was the same stuff she’d put into the sleeping pills. After she discovered that Gil had married you and she’d killed poor Fred in vain, she tried to kill herself. She probably thought she was sincere about it, but the sincerity wasn’t deep enough to make her go through with it. If she had died, Nancy, you would have been punished and your marriage with Gil haunted by her ghost. And since she recovered, she found it less embarrassing to appear the victim of a murder attempt than a frustrated suicide.
“That looked bad for you, too, you know. She probably tried to make believe that you’d poisoned her sleeping pills. Yes, she inferred it when she told me the story. Naturally, I never believed it, Nancy; I knew you too well, and I also knew how Fred Miller died.”
I did not hear the rest of the conversation, for there came into my mind then the image of a psychology professor, a pompous little man he was, who once said to our class that suicide and murder are not far removed from each other; both, he told us, were born of the desire for revenge upon an individual or upon society. Suddenly, as Mike finished the long-distance call, I saw the pattern of the story. There was only one point which I did not understand.
“How did you know, Mike, that Phyllis had killed Fred Miller? I thought you said he’d died of pneumonia.”
We were on the patio when I asked that question. The pepper tree’s shadow had shifted and Mike sat upright in a metal chair under the striped umbrella. Sunlight and the brilliant hues of the geraniums hinted mockingly at the pleasure of being alive. The blossoms of the mimosa were fat yellow balls.
“There’s no doubt that Fred died of pneumonia. In a hospital with a physician in attendance.”
“But you said that Phyllis killed him.”
“It’s easy, Lissa, when a person has a bad cold, to give him pneumonia, particularly if you’re his loving wife.” In the hot light Mike shivered. “Don’t ask me how she did it. That, Lissa, is something I’ll never tell anyone again.”
“You told her how to do it, Mike? Why? Why did you tell her how to kill her husband?”
Mike rose and walked to the edge of the patio, stood at the wall looking down on the valley and the highway. His fists were clenched so tightly that the bones shone through the skin.