“The scarf was not in the cedar closet where Lucille said it was. I looked in my own room and then in hers. The diary was in one of her bureau drawers. It wasn’t even hidden properly, it was just there. As if she took it out now and then to read...” He stopped, sucking in his breath. “Think of it! She murdered my wife. And all these years she’s kept the evidence to convict her, casually, in a bureau drawer.”
“It may not have been there all the time,” Sands said. “Perhaps she’d hidden it well, and came across it and wanted to read it again.” Why? To re-live it, and by reliving it to lay the ghost that haunted her mind?
“I think you’re right. She’d been thinking of Mildred that day, Sunday. Martin and I found the sketches she made of Mildred. She had burned out the eyes with a cigarette.” He paused again, shaking his head half in sorrow, half in bewildered rage. “The systematic illogic of women. A man cannot believe it. When they are angry they are cold and merciless. When they have a grievance they tuck it up their sleeve and it comes out at some inexplicable and unconnected moment as tears. They can live, almost happily, with a man they hate, and harry a man they love to death.”
“Like yourself?”
“Like myself, yes. All my life I’ve been fair prey for any woman, because I value peace. I gave up my independence for the sake of peace. I’ve hired myself out to a series of managers — my mother, Edith, Lucille. A man has no redress against the soft lilting command, no refuge at all from the voices of the women who love him and are doing everything ‘for his own good.’ ”
He was no longer angry. He even seemed bored with his own words, as if he had said them to himself a great many times and was now reciting a piece of memory work.
“I killed Edith,” he said.
Sands did not reply.
“I killed her because she started to nag at me. She wanted a sleeping prescription, so I gave her one. I hadn’t planned anything, hadn’t thought of it. But suddenly there she was, wanting to be put to sleep. You understand? It was so simple, so predestined. She asked for it.”
“Yes.”
“I went in after she was dead, to find the diary and destroy it. But it wasn’t there. I didn’t worry about it, however.”
“You should. It might help to hang you.”
“No, it won’t. This talk is confidential between the two of us. And the evidence against Edith is top strong. Your friends will find morphine in Edith’s glass, and I will supply the letter she wrote to Lucille at Penwood.”
“Edith was the only one who couldn’t possibly have sent the amputated finger to Lucille.”
“You can’t fool me like that,” Andrew said. “You will have to bring me to trial one case at a time. You can’t try to prove that perhaps I killed Greeley, and perhaps I killed Edith, and have the two perhaps make a certainty.”
“That’s right.”
“Why do you want to hang me, anyway? Revenge? Punishment? To teach me a lesson or teach other people a lesson?”
“It’s my job,” Sands said wryly.
“Purely impersonal?”
“No, not quite.”
“Why, then?”
“I think you might do it again.”
“That’s ridiculous,” Andrew said. “I have no reason to kill anyone else.”
“Perhaps you had no reason to kill Greeley?”
“He was interfering, getting in my way. I hadn’t planned on killing him or anyone else. I hadn’t really planned anything. I was pretty dazed after reading the diary, I hardly remember driving out to meet Giles. All I could think of was Lucille’s two faces — the one she showed to me and the one I saw in Mildred’s diary. I thought I would keep quiet until after Polly was married and then I would confront Lucille with the diary. But what then? Would she confess? Would she lie? Would she even try to kill me perhaps, to save herself? Then we came upon the train wreck and the situation solved itself. I knew how I could test Lucille. I saw the finger in a slop pail and I picked it up and wrapped it in my handkerchief.”
The grotesque picture formed in Sands’ mind. The man bending furtively over a slop pail, wrapping the finger carefully in his handkerchief, like a jewel.
“You know how it makes you feel when you do something like that?” Andrew said. “It makes you feel a little crazy.”
“It would.”
“It was only a test for her, you understand. I had to know whether she was guilty. I didn’t foresee the actual results — it wasn’t even her own guilt that drove her crazy, it was the knowledge that someone else knew of her guilt, and was pointing it out, that someone had tracked her down. She, who had lived a placid, happy life for sixteen years now found herself a criminal.” He paused. “I keep thinking of what she did when she opened the box. She screamed, we know that, and then she must have run to the bureau drawer to find the diary. When she saw it was gone, she knew one of us must have taken it.”
“A pretty symbol, that finger.”
Andrew shrugged away the implications.
“I carried it in my pocket for the rest of the night. In the morning I bought a box in the dime store on my way to the office, and wrapped it. I thought of sending it through the mail, but then I saw this shabby-looking little man standing beside the newsstand. I asked him if he’d deliver a parcel for two dollars and he said he would.”
“You could have saved yourself trouble by lowering it to fifty cents. A parcel worth a two-dollar delivery is worth opening. Childish of you.”
“I... it just didn’t occur to me not to trust him. I’ve had no experience with such things.”
“The first thing he did, of course, was take it to a washroom and open it. Maybe he was a little surprised by it, but I don’t think so. Greeley had seen a lot of things in his life. What interested him was the smell of money, and he got a big whiff when he opened that parcel. He delivered it, all right. Then he waited around to see what would happen. He followed Lucille down to Sunnyside and waited outside while she was in the beauty parlor. When she came out he confronted her. She gave him a fifty-dollar bill to keep him quiet. She took a room at the Lakeside Hotel, and when he was pretty sure she was going to stay there for a while he went out and had what for Greeley was a big evening. Life was all right for Greeley that night. He had champagne, even if it was in a third-rate joint; he had a girl, no matter how many other people had had her; he danced, though his legs must have hurt him; he had a shot of morphine for a cheap dream, but most of all he had a future.
“Lucille must have promised him more money, for he told the girl he was with that he had a date, and then he returned to the Lakeside. He got there about the same time as Inspector Bascombe and I did. Men like Greeley have a sharp nose for two things — money and cops, and he probably recognized us right away. He didn’t know what we were there for. Maybe it was Lucille, maybe not. He hung around the alley for a while, and then you came along. He recognized you immediately.”
“It was a shock,” Andrew said, “it was a terrible shock to me to meet him again. I’d almost forgotten about him. Then I saw what I should have seen the preceding afternoon if I. hadn’t been intent on my plan — he was a morphine addict. I could see his eyes clearly in the light of the hotel sign, they were pupil-less, blind-looking. The tragedy of it was that I was carrying my instrument bag in case I’d have to give Lucille a sedative.”
“Tragedy?”
“He saw I was a doctor.”
“I see.”
“Yes, a doctor means only one thing to an addict — a chance for more dope. We’re all pestered by them at one time or another. The first thing the man said was, “A sawbones, eh?” I told him I wasn’t, but he didn’t believe me. He seemed to be burning up with triumph. I could see then what I had let myself in for. I had committed no crime, but I had done what most people would consider a revolting thing — and I wanted it kept secret. But Greeley, you understand, thought I had committed a crime.”