“His own game had boomeranged on him. The woman whom he had spent all night and hundreds of dollars in trying to turn into a ghost as far as you, Henderson, were concerned, had turned into a ghost — but as far as he himself was concerned now. Which wasn’t what he’d wanted at all. It left things too dangerously indefinite. She might pop back into the picture at any moment.
“He went through hell in those few short hours that were all he could spare before he had to plane out, if he was still to overtake his ship. He knew how hopeless it was. He knew, as you and I know, what a place New York is to find someone in, on short order.
“He hunted for her high and low, with the remorselessness of a maniac, and he couldn’t find her again. The day went, and the second night went, and his time was up, he couldn’t stay behind any longer. So he had to let it go under the heading of unfinished business. An ax hanging over him from then on, threatening to fall at any moment.
“He planed out of New York the second day after the murder, made the short overwater hop from Miami to Havana that same day, and was just in time to board his own ship when it touched there on the third day out. His excuse to the shipboard officials was that he’d got drunk the night of sailing and missed it.
“That was why he was so ripe for that come-on message I sent in your name; that was all he needed to drop everything and come back. He’d been panicky all along, and that gave him the finishing touch. They talk about murderers being drawn back to the scene of their crime. This pulled him back like a magnet. Your asking for help gave him just the excuse he needed. He could come back openly now and help you ‘look’ for her. Finish the death hunt he hadn’t had time to complete the first time. Make sure that if she was ever found, she’d be found dead.”
“Then you already suspected him when you came to my cell that day and drafted that cable in my name. When did you first begin to suspect him?”
“I can’t put my finger on it and give you the exact day or hour. It was a very gradual thing, that came on in the wake of my change of mind about your own guilt. There was no conclusive evidence against him from first to last, that’s why I had to go at it in the roundabout way I did. He left no fingerprints at the apartment; must have wiped the few surfaces he touched off clean. I remember we found several doorknobs without any marks on them at all.
“To start with, he was just a name you’d dropped, in the course of being questioned yourself. An old-time friend, whose invitation to join him in a farewell tour of the town you’d conscientiously passed up, much to your regret, on her account. I had a routine inquiry made for him, more to have him help us fill in a little of your background for our record than anything else. I learned he’d sailed, as you’d mentioned he intended to. But I also found out, quite unintentionally, from the steamship line, that he’d missed the sailing here and caught up with his ship at Havana three days later. And one other thing. That he’d originally booked passage for two, himself and a wife, but that when he’d overtaken the ship he was alone, and had finished out the rest of the trip unaccompanied. Incidentally, there was no record of his ever having been married or having had a wife up here, when I checked a little further.
“Now there was not necessarily an>thing glaringly suspicious in all that, you understand. People do miss ships, especially when they celebrate too copiously just before sailing time. And people’s brides-to-be do change their minds at the last minute, back out, or the contemplated marriage is postponed by mutual consent.
“So I didn’t think any more about it. And yet on the other hand I did. That little detail of his missing the ship and then overtaking it alone, lodged in the back of my mind and stayed with me from then on. He had, a little bit unluckily for himself, managed to attract my attention. Which seldom turns out to be beneficial, with cops. Then later, when my belief in your own guilt began to evaporate, there was a vacuum left behind. And a vacuum is something that has to be filled, or it will fill by itself. These facts about him began to trickle out, and before I knew it, the empty space had begun to fill up again.”
“You sure kept me in the dark,” Henderson admitted.
“I had to. There wasn’t anything definite enough, until just recently. In fact until that night he drove Miss Richman into the woods with him. Confiding in you would have been a bad risk. Most likely you wouldn’t have shared my feelings about him, and for all I knew might have warned him off in some burst of misguided loyalty. Or even if you had strung along with me, had shared my belief, knowledge of what was up might have made you a poor actor. He might have detected something in your manner toward him, and our hands would have been tipped. You were under a terrific strain, you know. I felt the safest thing to do was to work through you, using you as a sort of unconscious medium, without letting you realize the purpose of what you were doing yourself. And it wasn’t easy. Take that stunt with the theater programs, for instance—”
“I thought you were crazy — or I would have if I was normal myself — the way you rehearsed me and rehearsed me and rehearsed me, every little act, every little word, that was to lead up to it. You know what I thought you were doing it for? As a pain-killer, to keep my mind off the approaching deadline. So I fell in with it, and did as you told me, but with my tongue in my cheek.”
“Your tongue in your cheek, and my heart in my mouth,” Burgess chuckled grimly.
“Did he have anything to do with those peculiar accidents that kept dogging you all along the way, as far as you were able to find out?”
“Everything. The strange part of that is, the one that seemed most like a murder, the Cliff Millburn affair, proved to be a bona fide suicide when we got through investigating it; and of course the barman was killed accidentally. But the two that seemed most like accidents turned out to be murders. Murders that he committed. I’m speaking of the deaths of the blind man and Pierrette Douglas. Both were murders without weapons, in the usual sense. The death of the blind man was a particularly horrible piece of business.
“He left him there in the room for a moment or two, ostensibly to chase down to the street and call me. He knew the man had an aversion to the police, typical of his kind of fraudulent panhandling. He knew the first thing he’d do would be to tn.’ to escape from there. He counted on his doing that. As soon as he was on the other side of the door he attached a strong black thread, the kind tailors use, across the top step, at about ankle height. Knotted it around the banister leg on one side, a projecting nail head on the other. Then he turned out the light, knowing now the blind man had the use of his eyes, made a receding drum-beat of his footsteps, you know that old stunt, and crouched there waiting on the lower flight, just out of sight below the landing.
“The blind man came out fast and incautiously, in a hurry to put himself out of reach before Lombard returned with his police friend, and the thing worked just as he’d intended it to. The thread caught him short and sent him toppling down the whole flight, and into the foreshortened landing wall head-first. The thread had snapped, of course, but that didn’t save him. The fall didn’t kill him, he simply got a nasty crack on the skull and lay there stunned. And so Lombard hurriedly came back up to the landing again, stepped over him, went on to the head of the stairs, removed the telltale ends of loose thread from both sides.
“Then he went back to the senseless man, explored with his hands, found he was still breathing. His head was forced back at an unnatural angle by the wall against which it rested, and there was a strain on his neck. It was like a suspension bridge, you understand, between his shoulders flat on the floor and his head semi-upright against the wall. He located the position of the neck, and then he straightened up, raised one leg so that his heavy shoe was poised just over it, and—”