She was at the casement. He was behind her. She could feel the rigid strength of his body, the sharp pressure of his hip. His breath panted hoarsely in her hair. His left arm was clamped like a bar across her neck, both her wrists pinioned beneath it.
Outside were faces. They were picked out vivid against the green lawn, the brilliant sunshine. Captain Corrigan, his bullet head forward, his eyes like two slits of a knife, his hard jaw working. The policemen, the sun flashing from their shields, their guns half extended. The hawklike face of De Saules, his black spear point of beard jabbing up and down with irregular motions. All were staring at the face behind her, their faces etched alike with stunned, stark blankness.
They were looking into the face of the murderer – the face she could not see!
Then his coat sleeve brushed by her body as he raised his arm to fire. She couldn’t do anything. She couldn’t move her wrists. All she could do was turn over the compact in her hand. She couldn’t aim it. But her hand was jammed almost against his jaw. She got the hole in the metal cover around just as his arm swung down to shoot.
She squeezed the compact for all she was worth. The jet of ammonia shot like a cascade into his face. The contraction of his body threw her headfirst against the wall. But before she spun into blackness, before the rush through the window reached that floundering, gagging form, she caught one glimpse of his face – the too florid, too blue-eyed, too handsome face of Gawdy!
Captain Corrigan was beside her. She was sitting on the sofa. The rush, tumult and furor had all gone out, now, out of the room and out of the house, taking the gold-coated bulk of Gawdy with it. Out of her mind, too – she was once more clear and collected, her shako hat straight on her head, her face freshened, and except for the ache in her head, could even look back on things with a certain perspective.
Captain Corrigan’s head was lowered. He was leafing through a telephone book. He jabbed his thumb at a name.
“You’re right! There it is! A dentist! Dr Gawdy! Now why the devil didn’t I look the guy up? Is that all you did to find it?”
“That’s all.” Sandra put her slim forefinger beside his thumb. “There it was in the book – George Gawdy, D.D.S., Suite 405-406, Mohican Building. He was Mr Delaunay’s dentist – for how long I don’t know, but probably after he married Marceline.”
Corrigan had dropped the book and was staring at a bright object on the sofa flanked by two circular gold prongs. “An old-fashioned denture – a one-tooth removable bridge!” He turned it over. “And there, there’s the hole in it where it was filled with the pulverized crystals of oxalic acid!”
“Yes, and through the same hole the acid got out.” Sandra could not look at it without repulsion. “It’s a duplicate, made by the dental laboratory man Dow, to be slipped into Mr Delaunay’s mouth in place of the one he had. Under the guise of having it repaired, Gawdy got hold of it and had the hollow duplicate made.”
Corrigan began a curse, checked himself. “All Gawdy did was fill it with the pulverized crystals, and plug it with a little soluble cement, so the poison would come out when the cement did!”
“Of course. And that moment happened to be when Mr Delaunay got so angry over reading Dow’s warning note. He ground his teeth and dislodged the plug – and the acid poured into his mouth.”
Corrigan stared at her. His eyes went over her trim head, her vivid young cheeks, her wide brown eyes, in a kind of mystified stupefaction.
“How the devil did you ever happen to pick out Gawdy?”
“You helped me, Captain Corrigan.” Sandra’s brown eyes flashed a smile. “It was yesterday morning, in your office, when you said of Dow: ‘Why help his confederate on one hand, harm him on the other?’ Only because he had to. Women’s minds make strange quirks, Captain Corrigan, and that made mine flash back to when Dow, in the welfare office, had given me the note. It made me see what I had entirely overlooked – that Dow palmed the note he gave me. He hid it in his hand. Why? Why not hand me the note openly? It could only have been because of the presence of someone he didn’t want to see it – and the only other person there was Gawdy. That made it” – she gestured – “oh, so plain, it was just like a bombshell! So then I went and looked Gawdy up in the phone book, and there he was – a dentist. That almost proved it, at least to me. Of course the poison had to be something to do with his teeth! It was the only way it could get into his mouth! So you see, at the bottom of the crazy way a woman’s mind works, you really supplied the answer.”
Corrigan took his hat off. He almost blushed.
“There’s precious little credit in this for me. Go on. I’m listening. My hat’s off to you. I’ve got my mouth open.”
Sandra said with a gesture of both hands: “There wasn’t anything else. I had a wild idea there might be a dental chart of Mr Delaunay’s in Gawdy’s office. I went up to the Mohican Building – and found Dow selling the bridge to Marceline. Of course I didn’t know it was a bridge, but I knew it was something that looked like a tooth.”
A shadow crossed her face. “Maybe what kept me from thinking of Gawdy so long was the fact that he brought the baby up to my office. That was pure coincidence. He was coming up to see that Dow delivered the bamboo tube to me without any hitch, and finding the baby gave him a good excuse to come in.” She shook her head. “I can see what Dow’s whole aim was all through, to make the affair plainly a murder, so he could blackmail Gawdy’s secret bride. But I still don’t know why, Captain Corrigan, they sent the acid to the Chinese maid.”
Corrigan grunted. “You were still unconscious when Dow gasped that part out to us with what must have been his last gallon of breath. The maid was the one that overheard Gawdy talking to the old man, examining his bridge, and suggesting that he come up to the office and have it repaired.”
“So that’s it!” Sandra gave a breath of relief. “I’m so glad she’s cleared; I had a feeling she was honest all through.”
Corrigan gave his knee a vicious cut with his hat. “No wonder the M.E. or the autopsy didn’t find anything wrong with the old man’s mouth! When the M.E. first looked into it, the duplicate bridge was there; when the autopsy was conducted, his honest old original bridge was there!”
“Of course. And all Dow cut the tongue out for was to get at the poisoned bridge, remove it, and replace the original harmless one; and of course then there was not the slightest thing wrong with the old man’s mouth.”
Corrigan’s hard eyes flicked over the broken remnants of the goldfish bowl. “The young lady Marceline can consider herself damned lucky she only got a flesh wound. Gawdy was in here to clean up. He was going to get her and Dow and everyone he figured knew a solitary thing about it.”
Sandra’s eyes blazed. “And after what Marceline went through for him, did for him, out of pure, unadulterated love for him! She begged De Saules to reverse his testimony – probably at the cost of saying she herself was implicated – and De Saules, out of family loyalty and because he really was gone on her, agreed.” She broke off suddenly. She didn’t tell how De Saules had come up, tried to stop her with cycloprophane. Let bygones be bygones. She had a feeling the whole answer to Marceline’s shattered life lay in De Saules.
“By George! I wish I was ten years younger!” Captain Corrigan was staring at her with his widest-open look. He got up and stood with his blunt hands on his hips. “Think of it, a girl like you, smart as they make ’em, pretty as a little dream, running around loose!” His thundering voice broke off with a grin. “How come no man has appropriated you?”