“Leave out the drama, Sable. You didn’t go into this conspiracy on the spur of the moment. You’ve been working on it for months.”
“I’m not denying that. There was a lot of work to be done. Culligan’s idea didn’t look too promising at first. He’d been carrying it around ever since he ran into the Fredericks boy in Canada five or six years ago. He’d known Anthony Galton in Luna Bay, and was struck by the boy’s resemblance to him. He even brought Fredericks into the States in the hope of cashing in on the resemblance in some way. But he ran into trouble with the law, and lost track of the boy. He believed that if I’d stake him, he could find him again.
“Culligan did find him, as you know, going to school in Ann Arbor. I went east myself in February, and saw him in one of the student plays. He was a fairly good actor, with a nice air of sincerity about him. I decided when I talked to him that he could carry the thing off if anyone could. I introduced myself as a Hollywood producer interested in his talent. Once he was hooked on that, and had taken money from me, he wasn’t too hard to talk around to the other.
“I prepared his story for him, of course. It required considerable thought. The most difficult problem was how to lead investigation of his actual Canadian background into a blind alley. The Crystal Springs orphanage was my inspiration. But I realized that the success of the imposture depended primarily on him. If he did succeed in bringing it off, he would be entitled to the lion’s share. I was modest in my own demands. He simply gave me an option to buy, at a nominal price, a certain amount of producing oil property.”
I watched him, trying to understand how a man with so much foresight could have ended where Sable was. Something had cut off the use of his mind from constructive purposes. Perhaps it was the shallow pride which he seemed to take in his schemes, even at this late date.
“They talk about the crime of the century,” he said. “This would have been the greatest of all – a multi-million-dollar enterprise with no actual harm done to anyone. The boy was simply to let himself be discovered, and let the facts speak for themselves.”
“The facts?” I said sharply.
“The apparent facts, if you like. I’m not a philosopher. We lawyers don’t deal in ultimate realities. Who knows what they are? We deal in appearances. There was very little manipulation of the facts in this case, no actual falsification of documents. True, the boy had to tell one or two little lies about his childhood and his parents. What did a few little lies matter? They made Mrs. Galton just as happy as if he was her real grandson. And if she chose to leave him her money, that was her affair.”
“Has she made a new will?”
“I believe so. I had no part in it. I advised her to get another lawyer.”
“Wasn’t that taking a chance?”
“Not if you know Maria Galton as I know her. Her reactions are so consistently contrary that you can depend on them. I got her to make a new will by urging her not to. I got her interested in looking for Tony by telling her it was hopeless. I persuaded her to hire you by opposing the whole idea of a detective.”
“Why me?”
“Schwartz was prodding me, and I had to get the ball rolling. I couldn’t take the chance of finding the boy for myself. I had to have someone to do it for me, someone I could trust. I thought, too, if we could get past you, we could get past anyone. And if we failed to get past you, I thought you’d be – more flexible, shall we say?”
“Crooked, shall we say?”
Sable winced at the word. Words meant more to him than the facts they stood for.
A door opened at the end of the corridor, and Alice Sable and Dr. Howell came toward us. She hung on the doctor’s arm, dressed and freshly groomed and empty-faced under her makeup. He was carrying a white leather suitcase in his free hand.
“Sable has made a full confession,” I said to Howell. “Phone the Sheriff’s office, will you?”
“I already have. They ought to be here shortly. I’m taking Mrs. Sable back where she’ll be properly attended to.” He added in an undertone: “I hope this will be a turning-point for her.”
“I hope so, too,” Sable said. “Honestly I do.”
Howell made no response. Sable tried again:
“Good-by, Alice. I really do wish you well, you know.”
Her neck stiffened, but she didn’t look at him. She went out leaning on Howell. Her brushed hair shone like gold in the sunlight. Fool’s gold. I felt a twinge of sympathy for Sable. He hadn’t been able to carry her weight. In the stretching gap between his weakness and her need, Culligan had driven a wedge, and the whole structure had fallen.
Sable was a subtle man, and he must have noticed some change in my expression:
“You surprise me, Lew. I didn’t expect you to bear down so hard. You have a reputation for tempering the wind to the shorn lamb.”
“Stabbing Culligan to death wasn’t exactly a lamblike gesture.”
“I had to kill him. You don’t seem to understand.”
“On account of your wife?”
“My wife was only the beginning. He kept moving in on me. He wasn’t content to share my wife and my house. He was very hungry, always wanting more. I finally saw that he wanted it all to himself. Everything.” His voice trembled with indignation. “After all my contributions, all my risks, he was planning to shut me out.”
“How could he?”
“Through the boy. He had something on Theo Fredericks. I never learned what it was, I couldn’t get it out of either of them. But Culligan said that it was enough to ruin my whole plan. It was his plan, too, of course, but he was irresponsible enough to wreck it unless he got his way.”
“So you killed him.”
“The chance offered itself, and I took it. It wasn’t premeditated.”
“No jury will believe that, after what you did to your wife. It looks as premeditated as hell. You waited for your chance to knock off a defenseless man, and then tried to push the guilt onto a sick woman.”
“She asked for it,” he said coldly. “She wanted to believe that she killed him. She was half-convinced before I talked to her, she felt so guilty about her affair with him. I only did what any man would do under the circumstances. She’d seen me stab him. I had to do something to purge her mind of the memory.”
“Is that what you’ve been doing on your long visits, pounding guilt into her mind?”
He struck the wall with the flat of his hand. “She was the cause of the trouble. She brought him into our life. She deserved to suffer for it. Why should I do all the suffering?”
“You don’t have to. Spread it around a little. Tell me how to get to the Fredericks boy.”
He glanced at me from the corners of his eyes. “I’d want a quid pro quo.” The legal phrase seemed to encourage him. He went on in quickening tempo until he was almost chattering: “As a matter of fact, he should take the blame for most of this frightful mess. If it will help to clear up the matter, I’m willing to turn state’s evidence. Alice can’t be made to testify against me. You don’t even know that what she said was true. How do you know her story is true? I may be simply covering up for her.” His voice was rising like a manic hope.
“How do you know you’re alive, Sable? I want your partner. He was in San Mateo this morning. Where is he headed for?”
“I haven’t the faintest idea.”
“When did you see him last?”
“I don’t know why I should co-operate with you if you won’t co-operate with me.”
I still had his empty rifle in my hands. I reversed it and raised it like a club. I was angry enough to use it if I had to.