“Well, there we were. I was married to her. She had a couple of million coming when her uncle’s affairs were straightened out. She couldn’t possibly, it seemed, escape arrest and conviction. Even if no one had seen her entering or leaving her uncle’s flat, everything still pointed to her guilt, and the foolish course I had persuaded her to follow would simply ruin her chance of pleading self-defense. If they hanged her, the two million would come to me. If she got a long term in prison, I’d have the handling of the money at least.”
Landow dropped and crushed his second cigarette and stared for a moment straight ahead into distance.
“Do you believe in God, or Providence, or Fate, or any of that, Rush?” he asked. “Well, some believe in one thing and some in another, but listen. Sara was never arrested, never even really suspected. It seems there was some sort of Finn or Swede who had had a run-in with Jerome and threatened him. I suppose he couldn’t account for his whereabouts the night of the killing, so he went into hiding when he heard of Jerome’s murder. The police suspicion settled on him. They looked Sara up, of course, but not very thoroughly. No one seems to have seen her in the street, and the people in her apartment house, having seen her come in at six o’clock with me, and not having seen her — or not remembering if they did — go out or in again, told the police she had been in all evening. The police were too much interested in the missing Finn, or whatever he was, to look any further into Sara’s affairs.
“So there we were again. I was married into the money, but I wasn’t fixed so I could hand Madeline her cut. Madeline said we’d let things run along as they were until the estate was settled up, and then we could tip Sara off to the police. But by the time the money was settled up there was another hitch. This one was my doing. I... I... well, I wanted to go on just as we were. Conscience had nothing to do with it, you understand? It was simply that — well — that living on with Sara was the only thing I wanted. I wasn’t even sorry for what I’d done, because if it hadn’t been for that I would never have had her.
“I don’t know whether I can make this clear to you, Rush, but even now I don’t regret any of it. If it could have been different — but it couldn’t. It had to be this way or none. And I’ve had those six months. I can see that I’ve been a chump. Sara was never for me. I got her by a crime and a trick, and while I held on to a silly hope that some day she’d — she’d look at me as I did at her, I knew in my heart all the time it was no use. There had been a man — your Millar. She’s free now that it’s out about my being married to Polly, and I hope she — I hope— Well, Madeline began to howl for action. I told Sara that Madeline had had a child by Jerome, and Sara agreed to settle some money on her. But that didn’t satisfy Madeline. It wasn’t sentiment with her. I mean, it wasn’t any feeling for me, it was just the money. She wanted every cent she could get, and she couldn’t get enough to satisfy her in a settlement of the kind Sara wanted to make.
“With Polly, it was that too, but maybe a little more. She’s fond of me, I think. I don’t know how she traced me here after she got out of the Wisconsin big house, but I can see how she figured things. I was married to a wealthy woman. If the woman died — shot by a bandit in a hold-up attempt — then I’d have money, and Polly would have both me and money. I haven’t seen her, wouldn’t know she was in Baltimore if you hadn’t told me, but that’s the way it would work out in her mind. The killing idea would have occurred just as easily to Madeline. I had told her I wouldn’t stand for pushing the game through on Sara. Madeline knew that if she went ahead on her own hook and hung the Falsoner murder on Sara I’d blow up the whole racket. But if Sara died, then I’d have the money and Madeline would draw her cut. So that was it.
“I didn’t know that until you told me, Rush. I don’t give a damn for your opinion of me, but it’s God’s truth that I didn’t know that either Polly or Madeline was trying to have Sara killed. Well, that’s about all. Were you shadowing me when I went to the hotel?”
“Yeah.”
“I thought so. That letter I wrote and sent home told just about what I’ve told you, spilled the whole story. I was going to run for it, leaving Sara in the clear. She’s clear, all right, but now I’ll have to face it. But I don’t want to see her again, Rush.”
“I wouldn’t think you would,” the detective agreed. “Not after making a killer of her.”
“But I didn’t,” Landow protested. “She isn’t. I forgot to tell you that, but I put it in the letter. Jerome Falsoner was not dead, not even dying, when I went past her into the flat. The knife was too high in his chest. I killed him, driving the knife into the same wound again, but downward. That’s what I went in for, to make sure he was finished!”
Alec Rush screwed up his savage bloodshot eyes, looked long into the confessed murderer’s face.
“That’s a lie,” he croaked at last, “but a decent one. Are you sure you want to stick to it? The truth will be enough to clear the girl, and maybe won’t swing you.”
“What difference does it make?” the younger man asked. “I’m a gone baby anyhow. And I might as well put Sara in the clear with herself as well as with the law. I’m caught to rights and another rap won’t hurt. I told you Madeline had brains. I was afraid of them. She’d have had something up her sleeve to spring on us — to ruin Sara with. She could out-smart me without trying. I couldn’t take any chances.”
He laughed into Alec Rush’s ugly face and, with a somewhat theatrical gesture, jerked one cuff an inch or two out of his coat-sleeve. The cuff was still damp with a maroon stain.
“I killed Madeline an hour ago,” said Henry Bangs, alias Hubert Landow.
The Figure of Incongruity
(written ~ 1926/27); aka: A Man Named Thin (Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, February 1, 1961)
Papa was, though I may be deemed an undutiful son for saying it, in an abominable mood. His chin protruded across the desk at me in a fashion that almost justified the epithet of brutal which had once been applied to it by an unfriendly journalist; and his mustache seemed to bristle with choler of its own, though this was merely the impression I received. It would be preposterous to assume actual change in the mustache which, whatever Papa’s humor, was always somewhat irregularly salient.
“So you’re still fooling with this damned nonsense of yours?”
On Papa’s desk, under one of his hands, lay a letter which, its odd shape and color informed me immediately, was from the editor of The Jongleur to whom, a few days before, I had sent a sonnet.
“If you mean my writing,” I replied respectfully, but none the less staunchly; for my thirtieth birthday being some months past, I considered myself entitled to some liberty of purpose, even though that purpose might be distasteful to Papa. “If you mean my writing, Papa, I assure you I am not fooling, but am completely in earnest.”
“But why in” — if now and then I garble Papa’s remarks in reporting them, it is not, I beg you to believe, because he is addicted to incoherencies, but simply because he frequently saw fit to sacrifice the amenities of speech to what he considered a vigor of expression — “do you have to pick on poetry? Aren’t there plenty of other things to write about? Why, Robin, you could write some good serious articles about our work, articles that would tell the public the truth about it and at the same time give us some advertising.”