When the sergeant announced Princess O’Shea and Coley Collins, Grundy was turning his thoughts to another line of attack. He was convinced that Slater O’Shea had been murdered by the team of Lallie O’Shea and Selwyn Fish; if he could get to Fish through Aunt Lallie... murder was a better rap than fraud and forgery... At that moment Prin and Coley came in, and the lieutenant looked up impatiently.
“Yes?” he said.
“Miss Princess O’Shea,” said Mr. Coley Collins, “has something to tell you, Lieutenant, and since she refused to tell me beforehand what it was, I sincerely wish you would listen to her so that I may satisfy my curiosity.”
Grundy shot a look from Coley to Prin. What he saw on Prin’s pretty face sent all thoughts of Selwyn Fish et al. from his head.
“In that case,” he said, “you two may as well sit down.”
Prin did, folding her hands and holding them rather high, so that for a startled moment Grundy thought she was praying. Coley remained on his feet in an attitude that said he was ready for anything.
“Start talking,” Grundy said to Prin.
“With discretion,” Coley said to Prin.
“No, it’s courage that’s necessary,” said Prin, “and I have only enough to last a little while, so hear me out. What has been occupying my thoughts, of course, is Uncle Slater’s murder and who might be accused of it. Aunt Lallie and that lawyer Fish might be, if it could be proved that they dreamed up the fraudulent will; and I might be, if it could be proved that I knew before Uncle Slater’s murder that I was his sole heir; and Twig might be, because he’s the one I’d like it to be, if it has to be anyone; and Brady might be, on the basis of general lack of character; and even Peet might be, if this were a detective story and you had to have it the least likely person. And that was all there seemed to be in the way of suspects. Until suddenly,” said Prin, “I thought of another one.”
“Who’s that?” asked Coley.
“You,” said Prin.
“Me?” said Coley.
“Him?” said Lieutenant Grundy, staring at Coley as if he had just contrived to crawl out of the woodwork.
“Yes, Lieutenant,” said Prin steadily. “Coley knew I was sole heir even before he met me, because Uncle Slater had told him; and then a couple of weeks later I happened to stop into the taproom and right away he wanted to marry me and after a while I said yes — and that gave Coley a motive... through me.
“When you think about the why,” Prin continued in the deathly stillness, “you can’t help going on to think about the how. The day Uncle Slater died he came home loaded, which meant he had been at a bar; and his favorite bar was the Coronado taproom. And, of course, that synthetic substitute for insulin having a delayed effect of about an hour, as somebody or other said, Uncle Slater could have been given the overdose in a drink at the taproom just before he left for home, instead of in his bedside bourbon bottle. And then I remembered how Coley had insisted on our slipping upstairs for a look at Uncle Slater’s room after I’d found him dead, and the bedroom was dim and I was distracted and Coley could have dropped some of the drug into the bourbon bottle at that time to make it seem as if the murder was an in-the-house crime.
“And then just this afternoon,” Prin went on in the same steady voice, not looking at Coley, who was looking at her with the same sort of horror with which Grundy was looking at him, “I walked over to where Coley lives, and I met his friend Winnie Whitfield, with whom he shares the apartment, and all of a sudden it came out that Winnie was on his way to a drug store to refill a prescription for an insulin substitute, because Winnie says he is a diabetic. And that would seem to give Coley a simple, direct way of getting hold of the drug, because all he had to do was steal some from Winnie’s supply. Now do you see the lines along which I have been thinking?”
“What I see,” said Coley bitterly, “is that you will sure as hell get me electrocuted if you don’t quit talking right now.”
“What I see,” said Lieutenant Grundy in an iron voice, “is a great — white — light.”
“Then, Lieutenant,” said Prin, “you are quite blind. What you think you now see through my eyes you would sooner or later have seen through your own; it is only a question of time; but through my eyes or your own, what you think you see is a big fat coincidence. No, Lieutenant, I can’t let Coley go through the ordeal of arrest and conviction, and maybe the agony of execution, just because of a remarkable accident of circumstances. Coley didn’t murder Uncle Slater.
“I did.”
16
And in this swift transshipment of horrors — Grundy to Coley to Princess O’Shea, Coley to Princess O’Shea from one cast of horror to another — Prin went inexorably on.
“Because, you see,” said Prin, “I’ve known about the will all along. Uncle Slater told me about it in confidence just after he had Selwyn Fish draw it up secretly. That was Uncle Slater’s mistake. He forgot that for all the sweetness and light I’m supposed to radiate, I am nevertheless an O’Shea born and bred, however much I’ve always wished I weren’t; and that an O’Shea will do anything, for any reason — even, sometimes, for no reason.
“But this time there was reason enough. Uncle Slater was an old dear, but the way he was going he might have lived on and on and on. And I knew he had left everything to me, and I was sick of pretending to be someone I never really was, and going through the motions of working for my keep — what a joke that job is, and how I loathe it! — and being dependent on handouts, et cetera, ad infinitum. So I stole some of the drug from Mr. Free’s pharmaceutical cubby, and I dropped a lethal dose into Uncle Slater’s bedside bottle of bourbon just before he came home for his nap. If he had to die at my hand, I wanted his death to be as painless and even pleasurable as possible. And it was — oh, I hope it was.
“So now, Coley, go away,” said Prin in a strange half cry. “Go away and let Lieutenant Grundy do whatever he has to do. And don’t look at me that way, I can’t bear it. Go away!”
And Princess O’Shea clutched her pretty face with her two little palms and began to weep, not as if her heart were breaking, but rather as if it had broken long, long before and she had forgotten how to weep properly.
And Lieutenant Grundy, who had been glaring at her in profound horror, now glared at her with profound bitterness; and finally he looked away, as if he were unable to take the sight of her at all any longer, because she had betrayed him into human feeling against the dictates of his policeman’s training and his policeman’s sense, which had told him all along that she had plotted the murder of her uncle.
As for Coley Collins, he had turned his back on her. And there he stood, a sad figure with a droop to his shoulders, in an attitude of hopelessness and helplessness, as if she had reduced him in a stroke to something far less than a man. But then he turned around, and Lieutenant Grundy saw that this had all been illusion, a trick of posture and atmosphere. For Coley Collins’ eyes held something hard and abstracted, and there was a twisted smile on his lips, a smile at once sorrowful and cynical — the grist of a mill that had ground an unexpected portion for the miller. And Coley sighed, and he spoke. And although he addressed Princess O’Shea principally, and Lieutenant Grundy incidentally, he actually seemed to be talking to himself.
“All right, you win,” Coley said. “You win, Princess; and you lose, Coley; and you don’t know what we’re talking about, Lieutenant, which isn’t to be marveled at, because murder isn’t your dish of chop suey, is it? — which is a nice-nelly way of saying you wouldn’t last two weeks on a big-city police force.