I felt I couldn’t live another minute without a shot of whisky. The tension and the acute anxiety of the past four hours had left me exhausted. I walked into the lounge and began to head towards the bar when I stopped short, my nerves jangling, my heart skipping a beat.
Lolling in one of the lounging chairs was a tall, dark man of about my own age who was nursing a glass of whisky, a cigarette hanging from his lips.
He looked up at me and gave me a slow, lazy grin. His darkly tanned, humorously ugly face lit up as he smiled and he waved the glass of whisky at me.
‘Rotten habit to drink at this hour,’ he said. ‘My wife would have a fit if she could see me, but I’ve been up all night and I can’t take it unless I have twelve hours sleep.’
I remained motionless, looking at him.
‘Are you from the Press?’ I managed to get out.
‘Me? Do I look like a pressman?’ His grin widened. ‘No. I’m Steve Harmas, special investigator for the National Fidelity Insurance Company. I’m waiting for old man Maddux. He’s due here any moment.’
I felt a cold chill creep over me. ‘Maddux?’
‘That’s right. No one could keep the old wolfs snout out of a setup like this for long.’ Again he grinned at me. ‘Have a drink. You look as if you need one.’
A few minutes to seven-fifteen, Maddux walked into the lounge. By then I had shaved, showered and dressed, moving like an automaton, my heart cold with fear. I kept telling myself that if the police were satisfied, there was no reason why Maddux shouldn’t be. I reminded myself again and again that it was in his company’s interest to accept the theory that Dester had killed his wife and then had shot himself. If the coroner found that Dester had committed suicide then Maddux’s company would not be liable for three-quarters of a million dollars. Surely he wouldn’t be such a fool as to try to prove Dester had been murdered? He would jump at the chance not to pay out the money.
For the past hour, Harmas had been talking in his slow, drawling voice about the political situation as he saw it. He seemed to take a great interest in the Russian attitude and America’s policy in Europe. I scarcely listened to what he was saying, but that didn’t stop him talking.
As soon as Maddux walked into the lounge, I noticed a sharp change come over Harmas. He no longer looked lazy. His face became alert, his eyes hardened and he uncoiled his tall frame from the chair and stood up as if he had released a spring inside him.
Maddux looked at us and walked over to the empty fireplace. He set his back to it, took out his pipe and began to fill it.
‘I guess I’m in the way,’ I said. ‘I’ll go up to my room.’
‘Stay right here, Mr. Nash,’ Maddux said. ‘There may be points where you can help us. Sit down. Sit down, Steve.’ He waited until we had sat down, then he lit his pipe and went on, ‘Well? What’s it look like?’
Harmas lit a cigarette.
‘You remember the business we had over that striptease dancer last year? When she tried to gyp us out of a million and a half bucks by a neat trick that we nearly fell for?’ he said. ‘Well, this setup seems to me to be along those lines.’
Something as cold as a dead man’s hand clutched my heart when he said that. Neither he nor Maddux was looking at me, and they didn’t see my convulsive start.
Maddux said: ‘What makes you think that?’
‘The things that have appeared to happen that couldn’t possibly have happened,’ Harmas returned, sinking further into his chair. ‘It’s so obviously a clever trick, but it beats me how it was worked. For instance, Dester was supposed to have entered the house by the cloakroom window. All the other windows in the house and all the doors were locked. The cloakroom window was open: so that was the way he was supposed to enter the house, but he didn’t because I was right outside the cloakroom window watching the house all the evening. Dester didn’t enter the house that way, so how did he get in?’
‘He could have been hiding in the house during the afternoon,’ Maddux suggested.
‘He wasn’t. Lewis told me he went over the house from top to bottom at six o’clock in the evening when I took up my position in the garden. Dester wasn’t in the house then, and he didn’t get into the house after that time, but for all that he was found dead in the study.’
Maddux moved to a chair and sat down.
‘Yes: that’s quite a point. What else?’
‘I’ve seen ten suicides from shots in the head during my career,’ Harmas went on. ‘The mess was considerable, and yet Dester bled very little. If it wasn’t absolutely impossible, I would have said he had shot himself some other place and then moved himself to his study to finish his bleeding there.’
Maddux shifted impatiently.
‘What did the medical examiner say?’
Harmas lifted his shoulders.
‘He was surprised, but he didn’t seem to be put off his conviction that Dester shot himself. After all, here was a guy, a gun at his side, shot through the head, causing instantaneous death, who hadn’t been dead for more than fifteen minutes, who couldn’t have been brought into the house since I was watching outside and all the doors and windows, except for the small cloakroom window through which it would be difficult, not to say impossible, to push a dead body, were locked. So the doc just shrugged his shoulders and said odd things happen and he had no idea why Dester hadn’t bled more than he had. He accepted the situation because there was no other theory that would fit.’
Maddux showed his white teeth in a grin.
‘But we know better, huh?’ He looked over at me. ‘I think I mentioned to you that I have had some experience in fraud, Mr. Nash. It is unbelievable the tricks some guys get up to to earn themselves an easy buck. I’ve got to the point now when I don’t rely on my eyes and ears; I rely on hunches. You’d be surprised how my hunches pay off.’
‘You’ll have to have a pretty hot hunch to explain why Dester didn’t bleed as much as he should for all that,’ Harmas said.
Maddux waved this aside. ‘What else have you got?’
‘There were no fingerprints,’ Harmas said. ‘Not one. Dester left a confession note; no prints on the paper nor the typewriter. Apparently he took a drink and dropped a bottle of whisky, but there were no prints on either the glass nor on the broken bottle. There were no prints on the gun. It had been wiped clean. There were no prints on the cloakroom window, and yet he was supposed to have opened it.’
‘Maybe he wore gloves.’
‘Then where are they? I’ve looked for them and I can’t find them. Why should a guy write a confession note in gloves?’
I took out my handkerchief and wiped the sweat from my face. I was feeling so bad I was past caring if they saw me do it, but neither of them looked at me.
‘Then there’s another thing,’ Harmas went on. ‘When Dester left the house to go to the sanatorium with Mrs. Dester, he was wearing a dark brown hat, a camel-haired coat, dark grey trousers and reverse calf shoes. When he was found in his study, he had no top coat or hat, his trousers were blue and he was wearing black leather shoes.’
‘What did Bromwich think of that?’
‘He thought maybe Dester had soiled his clothes while he was at the forestry station and had changed into the clothes he had with him in the suitcase. He’s having a search made for the camel-haired coat. He’s checking all the left-luggage depots as a start. It may take time, but he’s working first on those near where the Rolls was ditched.’
Maddux scratched the side of his jaw with his pipe stem. He looked relaxed and there was a contented expression in his eyes.
‘It looks as if we have a nice little puzzle dropped in our laps,’ he said. ‘I knew this was an attempt at fraud. I smelt it. Someone has thought up a smart idea to get himself a packet of dough. I told Bromwich to look for the other man. Well, if he won’t we will.’