The bartender ambled toward us and set our glasses on the table. Peter cupped his hand around his own with a welcoming sigh. “Alexia wanted me to go and hear what was said, so I went. She didn’t want to go herself.” He took a long drink, put down his glass and said unexpectedly, “He had really a lot of money. Conrad, I mean. And it won’t come to Drue, so that ought to help out your little friend. I mean, she hadn’t money for a motive.”
He looked very gloomy. I said, a little gloomily myself, “Unless they think she hoped to remarry Craig and thus get money. That is, if Craig does inherit.”
“Oh, yes, he inherits. Conrad wouldn’t have cut him off; Conrad was strong on family, you know. A little cracked really on the subject. Had all kinds of grandiose ideas.”
“Yes, I know,” I said dryly, remembering what Conrad had said of Drue. “Anybody’s wife, yes,” said Conrad, “but not my son’s.” I added, “He seems to have felt that Alexia fitted into his family particularly well.”
Peter glanced quickly at me, and I felt the way you do when you’ve said something that sounds more disagreeable than you meant it, and a man gives you that look of “So-it’s-true-about-women-and-cats.” He said slowly, “Perhaps he married her because Craig had as good as jilted her. The honor of the family-all that.”
“Nonsense,” I said. “He was in love with her; he…” I hesitated and then went rashly on, “Perhaps he’d been in love with her, really, without knowing it, for a long time. But that doesn’t matter, anyway, and it’s nothing to me.”
“Nor to me,” said Peter, and added thoughtfully, “But there’s Mrs. Chivery. An extremely handsome and brilliant woman. I should have thought somebody like-well, like Mrs. Chivery, would have attracted Conrad.”
“Mrs. Chivery!”
“Oh, I didn’t mean anything,” he said hurriedly. “It’s only that she’s very-well, attractive, you know.”
I stared at him. He had a pleasant face; his calm blue eyes were well spaced above high, rather sharp cheekbones; his blunt chin and his wide mouth and thick blond eyebrows suggested a certain uncompromising strength. He was no Adonis, certainly, but he was not bad-looking, either. And I was visited by a more or less fantastic idea. Perhaps it was Maud he’d fallen in love with and not Alexia, so Craig was right in guessing his emotional temperature, so to speak, but wrong in his diagnosis of its cause. True, Maud was at least twenty to twenty-five years older than he, but what with all the liberties playwrights and scientists are taking with time these days, that might not make so much difference. Time might be actually a sheer question of relativity; and I might be skipping rope again at any moment. Which was a fairly blood-curdling thought and shocked me back into a semblance of common sense.
Peter said, “Chivery knew about Conrad’s will; we sat together and before the inquest began he told me about it. Dr. Chivery himself inherits fifty thousand dollars.”
“Fifty… Good gracious!”
“They were old friends. And Mrs. Chivery managed the house for Conrad for years. Until he married Alexia. Then there were a few bequests to servants, something like five thousand to the butler, small sums to the others. The library rug was willed to a museum. A blessing, that; it ought never to have been put on the floor. There were smallish sums to one or two charities. The rest was divided between Craig and Alexia.”
So Alexia had that for a motive. But if money were a motive for murder then it was widespread, for it included everyone. Everyone except-suddenly I remembered Nicky.
“Nothing to Nicky Senour?”
“No. But Nicky’d already had his share.”
“Nicky! But he’s only Alexia’s brother. He…”
Peter said, in a matter-of-fact way, “The police have already got to that. For two years or so Conrad has been paying Nicky Senour fairly substantial sums. At irregular intervals. By check.”
If that was true then Nicky Senour had every motive to keep Conrad alive. Peter went on calmly, “But I don’t think that it was blackmail. “It…” His head jerked around and his eyes fastened on something behind me. I hadn’t heard a sound or a rustle, but Peter got quickly to his feet. And I turned around just as Maud Chivery emerged from the high-backed settle in the corner.
She wore a long black cloak and no hat on that neat, high, black pompadour. She floated toward us, noiselessly, her small white face suspended above that black cloak, her bright, peering eyes upon us.
The bartender materialized too, beside us, but more noisily. “That’ll be for three brandies, Mrs. Chivery,” he said, and Peter began to dig quickly into his pocket. Maud said to Peter, “I thought Claud would come in here after the inquest. I wanted to know what happened.” (I thought, parenthetically, that she had heard that, and some other things too.) She went on quickly, “Have you seen him?”
“He left the inquest a few minutes before it was adjourned,” said Peter. “Ten or fifteen minutes before, I imagine. I don’t know where he went.”
“Oh,” said Maud. “Well, then I’ll go home with you, if you don’t mind.” She folded her cloak around her, fixed her bright dark eyes upon Peter and said, “Are you sure about the money? Conrad’s money, I mean. Doesn’t any of it come direct to me?”
“Dr. Chivery told me the money comes to him,” said Peter. “But Conrad must have meant it for both of you.”
Maud’s lips set tightly. “Yes. Yes,” she said with an odd effect of resolution, as if she were casting a vote or making a vow. She pulled her cloak closer around her and let Peter pay for her drinks and I got up and prepared to go. I didn’t leap to the conclusion that Maud Chivery was a dipsomaniac because she chose to retire to the depths of Balifold’s bar for a little private drinking.
I did think that in spite of her clear speech, her eyes were a little glassy. And I thought too that it was time for me to go back to the Brent house.
On the way out I stopped at the slot machine.
Peter and Maud had gone on ahead when rather unexpectedly I found that my fingers had explored the pocket of my cape and found a nickel. So I put it in a slit in the machine and then, as directions said to do, turned a kind of crank. I can see why these instruments have a certain attraction, for instantly a veritable shower of nickels shot out of the machine. Being unprepared, I didn’t catch all the nickels and they went everywhere, rolling merrily on the floor. Peter and Maud came back quickly in a startled manner, and helped me gather up nickels. At least Peter did. Although I’m not sure that Maud didn’t pick up one or two in spite of her aloof attitude, but, if she did, she didn’t give them to me.
But it was owing to the nickels (and perhaps a little to the brandy she’d drunk while waiting for Claud Chivery) that Maud said just what she said.
Peter had pursued several spinning little disks behind the bar and he and the bartender were talking. And Maud leaned over toward me, touched the nickels in my cupped hands with positively loving fingers and said suddenly and low, her face all at once aglow, “Money-gold, silver, jewels. I’m going to have lots of money, soon. As soon as they can get the jewels. Heaps of jewels. All behind the church.”
“Ch-church!” I said in a kind of gasp, clutching nickels.
And Maud nodded briskly and brightly, with a shimmering hard glaze over her eyes.
“Truckloads of jewels. Spanish. Castles in Spain-my castles in Spain…” she said in a dry whisper. And then Peter came back with the last of the nickels.
I didn’t have time then to count them; we went directly out to the car, Peter laughing a little and Maud suddenly as silent and uncommunicative as a little black shadow. As well she might be, I thought a little tersely, if brandy affected her like that. Castles in Spain and truckloads of jewels! Truckloads. Well, really! In the car the odors of brandy and Maud’s violet sachet were quite marked.