We found a taxi at once. Neither of us spoke all the way uptown. When we got to my house I got out my latch key. “My manservant is on his vacation,” I said, and let her into the hall. “I’m going to have a whiskey and soda. Will you join me?”
She refused but thanked me with a lift of her shadowed, lovely blue eyes. Then I said, “You might know. Did Miss Dune have a... well, I suppose one would say a boy friend? Some man—”
She gave me a quiet but intelligent look. “That occurred to me, too. You mean, someone might have planned this and might have influenced her to take the pearls. Yes, I think so. Once or twice I’ve seen her with a man. I’m not sure that I could identify him. I might be able to. But I feel sure that she wouldn’t have done that unless she was urged to do it. Some man, someone younger perhaps— But it seems cruel to say or think it.”
My study is at the right of the hall, and I took her there and told her to sit down. A tray with decanter and glasses stood on my desk. I mixed myself a rather strong whiskey and soda, then I opened a drawer of the desk and took out my revolver.
“What—” Miss Evans began, sitting upright.
I took out the box of shells and loaded the gun. “I don’t like the idea of a man. By now he knows what has happened. He might be dangerous.” I put the loaded gun down on the table and went into the hall to the street door. I opened it. The street was deserted. I went back to the study and closed the door. The house was extraordinarily quiet.
I picked up my glass and went to the window. The curtains had not been closed; the room behind me was reflected in the glittering, black windowpanes. I took rather a long drink. Then I said, “Where are the pearls?”
The figure in the cherry red dress stiffened.
I said, “You’ve worn the pearls twice — once six months ago, once a year and a half ago. One of those times you changed them for false pearls. No one saw the difference until today. Miss Dune saw that they were not the Wagstaff pearls; probably she looked up the record herself. She sent for you tonight to tell you to give them up and you—”
Her head lifted. “I reported the suicide. I wouldn’t have done that if—”
“You had to report it. The boy at the switchboard knew that you were there.”
The red dress flashed. I am not a brave man but I had to go on, “You killed her.”
I heard then a kind of metallic click behind me. I turned. She was standing beside the table, facing me. Her beauty leaped out like a flame. But she had my gun in her hand, and it was pointed at me.
I am not a brave man and I swiftly decided that I wasn’t very smart either. “You can’t do that!”
“I have to,” she said. Her voice was low and melodious, her face as lovely as the stars and as fateful. “The pearls are in my apartment. I intended to hide them, but I’ll not have time for that. You’d tell the police. But the pearls were your responsibility and everyone knows how you feel about the bank and — they’ll say this is suicide, too.” She put her finger on the trigger.
I hadn’t heard anyone enter the hall through the street door which I had been at some pains to open. But the study door smashed open and the room was flooded with policemen and the gun went off but the bullet went straight through the ceiling.
“Of course she’d snatch at the idea of some man who might have the pearls. And you had to have an excuse for the gun. That was pretty smart, sir,” the lieutenant said later.
I said wearily, “I had no facts, nothing I could tell you. I could not make so serious a charge without facts. But I thought that if she were guilty, if I accused her and I gave her a chance to get hold of the gun, she’d try to get rid of me. Thanks for getting here as I asked you to do, Lieutenant.”
He eyed me over his glass with a certain respect. “You are a real detective.”
“No, the detective in this case was — well, never mind.” He wouldn’t have understood. The detective was a lady who had smiled at me and said, “Beauty calls for beauty — that is why, sometimes, a beautiful woman will do anything for jewels.”
Yet perhaps he would have understood, for he said, a trifle wistfully, “That girl really stacked up. A beauty, wouldn’t you say? You didn’t exactly see it at first. But gradually — yes, sir, I guess that Helen of Troy dame might have looked something like that.”
He seemed to fumble deep down in his consciousness, for an idea. “I guess that’s why she wanted the pearls—” he said, gave me an abashed glance, murmured, “So long as I’m off duty,” and lifted his glass toward me.
I lifted my glass, too; but I drank my toast to another beautiful woman.
Tabloid News
by Louis Bromfield
Louis Bromfield’s EARLY AUTUMN won the Pulitzer Prize in 1927. The author of THE GREEN BAY TREE, THE STRANGE CASE OF MISS ANNIE SPRAGG, and THE FARM has seen his later novels — like THE RAINS CAME and MRS. PARKINGTON — transformed into super-budget Class-A films which have spread the name of Louis Bromfield to the four corners of the world. Once upon a time, however, Mr. Bromfield promised his readers that in his writing he would devote himself exclusively to the American scene; alas, he did not keep that promise, but you will find in “Tabloid News” a tale of passion and murder that only an American could have written — an authentic American story, native to its deepest roots.
Homer Dilworth was born in 1881 and they hanged him by the neck until dead only last Tuesday, so he was only 50 when he died in the prime of life. He was younger than most men of 50. He was solider, rosier, clearer-eyed. His voice was alive, and his skin was soft and young. And the funny thing is that he was younger at 50 than he was at 40.
He was even younger when he died than he was at 30. He’d always been rather sour-faced and dry and bony, like a handsome tree withered by blight. And then, all at once, when he was 48 he suddenly turned young.
In a way, to have hanged him was worse than killing most young fellows, because Homer had his youth so late in life. He turned young all of a sudden, like an old apple tree blossoming carelessly in October.
His parents were respectable folk and very religious. The old woman was a little queer, and they lived in a little town called Hanover, and Homer was an only child. ’Way back when he was a boy, little towns like that didn’t have theaters or movies or automobiles or radios, and everything centered about the church. There was going to church on Sunday, and church sociables and strawberry festivals, and then, about once a year, a big revival meeting, when everything broke loose.
It was like that in Hanover. They were awful strict but just as much love-making went on there as anywhere else, only they made it nasty in Hanover.
His mother and father wanted Homer, their only son, to be a preacher, and Homer thought he wanted to be one. He took it all seriously and talked a lot about purity and the devil. He used to harangue me a good deal. We had a kind of Damon and Pythias friendship.
The other night I was thinking back over his story and I remembered a few things, mostly in pictures, the way you remember things when you’re beginning to grow old. There was a swimming hole about three miles from town where we used to go swimming together. It was a clear stream and in the middle of a wide pasture it spread out into a kind of pond.
A couple of hundred feet away there was a low hill with a house on it, but nobody lived in the house and it was falling into ruin. It was partly log cabin and partly clapboard and all the windows were broken and the bushes had grown up high around it.