Arrow Pointing Nowhere, page 19
Presently two persons came in, walking side by side and close together; two persons who at first glance seemed to Gamadge to be strangers; but only one of them—the plain-clothes man—was a stranger; the other, a tall, broad-shouldered, good-looking fellow with an air of competence and alertness about him, was Mrs. Cort Fenway’s eldest son without his mask.
“Thanks very much for seeing me, sir,” he rapped out in a staccato and businesslike way; and his voice was a stranger’s voice too. “I can imagine what an effort it must be for you, but I know you’ll appreciate my position. I simply want to do my mother justice.”
Fenway slowly turned in his chair to face him, and sat regarding him with a kind of shocked incredulity; as if he were a fabulous monster turned real. Gamadge, studying the blond giant with interest, had the curious impression that in regaining his own personality the impostor had lost half his breeding. He had been far more like a Fenway before; now, having dropped the disguise, he exposed himself as a type that used to be seen swaggering in the casinos and at the race-meetings of Europe—coarse-grained, arrogant and knowing.
He glanced from Fenway’s bleak face to Gamadge’s, and favored the latter with a half-smile. “How did she get the S.O.S. to you?” he asked curiously.
The plain-clothes man slightly jerked his wrist, which—as could now be seen—was riveted to the impostor’s with steel. The prisoner looked down at his gyved hand, and put it in his pocket. “All right,” he said. “I suppose I won’t be allowed even to ask you where that damned picture was.”
Gamadge moved his head to the right; the other followed the motion like a flash, and Gamadge said: “Pasted under the coffer.”
“Well, I’ll be—I’ve been looking for it every night since a week ago Thursday, when that woman came and told us—but that’s over. Still, when you think how much depended on it, you’d suppose I ought to have turned the trick. Too nervous, perhaps, with a houseful of people above and below. Well.”
He paused, took countenance, and faced Blake Fenway again.
“I’d like to say first,” he went on briskly, “that you mustn’t be shocked at my attitude; it isn’t frivolous. My mother brought me up to regard it all as a gamble, and I knew what she’d do if we lost. I was prepared, and I’m glad she’s out of it. Mind you, the only reason we did lose was because the war came, and she got hurt on that cursed boat, and had to have somebody to take care of her. And of course I had to impersonate Alden Fenway in this house, or be had up before a draft board and all kinds of intelligence tests.
“The impersonation wasn’t as hard as you’d think. I was coached young. I mean we had a look round at cases in the big institutions in Europe, and my mother asked plenty of questions. Then we’d practice at pensions and hotels, and really there wasn’t much to it. Here in this house I only had to keep it up from late breakfast to early bedtime, and after that I could lead my own life and have some fun.”
Gamadge, leaning rather wearily against the side of the mantelpiece, looked up from the still wearier figure of his host to interrupt the speaker: “You found yourself under the sad necessity of killing Miss Fenway’s dog, I think.”
The alert blue eyes clouded. “Now I rather wish you hadn’t brought that up. I was awfully sorry about that. Dangerous, too; but I managed somehow.”
“Mr. Mott Fenway thought Craddock had done it.”
“Mr. Mott Fenway had too many bright thoughts. Anyhow, I was able to lead almost as good a life as my mother and I led in Europe; we travelled, we let each other alone and had our own amusements. What a sport she was! It was hard on her here, being cooped up; but she didn’t mind, except for worrying about me. She didn’t dare move away from the family, of course, because we were afraid I’d be put through some of these modern tests for I.Q.—as I said. Neither of us knew what the scientific methods are now, and I don’t have to tell you that we didn’t consult specialists in Europe.”
Gamadge said: “Not even Fagon in Paris.”
At the other’s laugh Fenway glanced up, then closed his eyes and let his head sink back against the cushions of his chair. “Fagon? Poor soul. We hoped his casebooks and his records were lost. We had to take a gamble on that. We were getting along all right, except for Caroline and Mott getting sick of us, and Mott watching me. And then along came that confounded book, and Mrs. Grove rushed up on Thursday afternoon to throw her bomb; that there was a signed letter traced through on a page—on the picture of old Fenbrook. She said it was from Cort Fenway to Mother, and that it proved I wasn’t Alden. She said the Fenways had been done out of half their money, and that unless Mother confessed, she’d tell. Fuss about nothing; what harm had we done? The Fenways didn’t want or need the money, and Cort Fenway would have liked me to have it. He liked me—he was going to adopt me. But that obstinate fool of a woman, who never acquired any knowledge of the world or any kind of broad views after she left boarding school—we couldn’t make her see it.” He glanced about him with a frown. “She was always burrowing in this room; I might have known she’d hide the picture here. I thought I’d pretty well covered the ground here, though. I was wasting time on the stair carpets.”
Fenway opened his eyes to say tonelessly: “Belle ought to have known that I wouldn’t prosecute.”
“My dear, kind man, that wasn’t the point; my mother was thinking of my interests—my income. Mrs. Grove didn’t realize what she was up against; she never had a chance. But after Mott died she knew what she could expect if she persisted in trying to ruin us, and we didn’t understand at the time why she kept going. I’m sorry about Mott, Mr. Fenway.”
Fenway continued to stare at him.
“The thing is, I overheard Mott confiding in Gamadge yesterday. We couldn’t have Gamadge looking for the picture; we were afraid that by some fluke he might find it—and damned if he didn’t! So I acted on the spur of the moment and got rid of Mott, who seemed dangerous; but I oughtn’t to have been so impulsive. He was a lot more dangerous to us dead than alive.” The alert blue eyes turned to Gamadge. “You see why, don’t you?”
Gamadge nodded, and the other went on, somewhat shamefacedly: “I was a fool. Hilda and the Dobsons would be invited to Mott’s funeral; Mrs. Grove would know all about it, know they’d left Fenbrook, and burst out with her story as soon as she was sure they had left. You know about the trap; I fixed it up myself that same Thursday night, and a hell of a cold trip it was. We needed it to keep Mrs. Grove quiet, and we needed it for evidence against her if we finally had to put on the act we put on this afternoon. You know something, Gamadge? We never could have convinced her that the trap was there unless it really had been there. I realized that, when I was describing it to her. After that she couldn’t keep her eyes off the telephone, and she never said another word about telling Fenway. Sly, wasn’t she? I wish you’d tell me how she got the message through to you.”
Gamadge said: “I rather hope you never will know that.”
“Annoyed at losing your client after all, are you? Well, your client wasn’t taking any chances with that telephone. She knew that I could have reached it, or one of the others, before anybody could prevent me. I could tackle the whole crowd of them singlehanded, including Craddock.”
He spoke with satisfaction. Gamadge murmured gently: “It is folie de grandeur,” and was answered in a flash:
“No, it’s not! There’s nothing the matter with my brain.”
Gamadge looked doubtful. “Such a life—it couldn’t help but warp any human soul.”
“Jargon! It was a wonderful life.”
“I’m only trying to find some way of explaining you,” said Gamadge, continuing to look at him as if in wonder.
“If you’ll listen, you’ll soon understand all about me and about my mother, too. Where was I? Oh yes; the shock we got this afternoon when we realized that Mrs. Grove was going to talk to Mr. Fenway after all; why, we couldn’t imagine. We—hadn’t the faintest idea, of course, that Hilda had left Fenbrook—that you were on the job. Well, we went ahead with the scene we’d rehearsed in case of just such an emergency; and if Mother was upset afterwards you can’t blame her—it’s no joke to get a bullet in your arm, even if you’re expecting it. Besides, we were a little flustered by your turning up outside the door, when we thought I had plenty of time to shut and lock it; time while Mr. Fenway came upstairs. But I did get it locked against you, and everything went off perfectly—our strategy of retreat. At least our part of it went off perfectly, and that’s enough of that.” He turned again to Blake Fenway. “What you’re interested in, sir, is the substitution scheme, all those years ago. It’s a very simple story.
“My mother and Alden were at the villa back of Cannes; peasant nursemaid with them, and a couple of servants that slept out. Cort Fenway had left for America. Alden had a turn for the worse, mentally and physically. Mother arranged for a specialist to come down from Paris, a visiting big shot from Russia; I may as well say now that he went to Sweden soon afterwards, and died there.
“He doomed Alden; growth on the brain, nothing to be done, matter of a few weeks. It had always been a possibility, it was part of the original diagnosis of Alden’s case. Mother didn’t say a word about it to her servants—she wasn’t that sort; and it’s lucky she wasn’t, because she got word from America that Cort was seriously ill. You know what that meant to her—everything. If Alden died first, and Cort followed him, the Fenway money went back to the estate. She took no chances.”
Blake Fenway’s muffled voice interrupted him: “I would have taken care of her.”
“But my mother wasn’t sold on that idea, Mr. Fenway; an allowance from you might have kept her going, but she wanted more than that for me; she wanted what Alden would have come in for after his father died. For I was always in the offing; at that time I was boarded out with country people in the vicinity—she came to see me regularly, under an assumed name. And let me tell you that your brother sometimes came too!
“I don’t believe anybody could honestly blame her for what she did. She was a general. She told the nursemaid that Alden needed trained care, had been ordered it by the specialist, and that he must be taken to Switzerland; she sent the girl home to her family in the north of France. When Alden died the other servants didn’t know it; my mother buried him herself—in the grounds. Beautiful spot, she told me, under big trees. Anything so terrible about that?
“Then she left money for the servants and a letter and money for the agent; and a poste-restante address in Geneva. She said she was taking Alden to Switzerland, orders from the doctor. The villa was to be closed. Then she simply bundled herself and her traps into a car and came to me. She took me direct to a little place near Geneva, and drove in to the post office every day.
“When the cable arrived saying that Cort was dead, we went to Austria. There we stayed, travelling about, until I was old enough to pass as Alden. I was only three years and a little over, you know, and we both looked like her. You and Caroline met me for the first time in Paris when I was fifteen, Mr. Fenway; you may have thought me a little overgrown for my age, but you weren’t unprepared to find me out of the ordinary, physically as well as mentally. No: we were perfectly safe. We didn’t suppose that that Russian would ever hear of us or check up on us again, and he didn’t; and by the time we were ready to go to Paris he was dead.”
Gamadge asked mildly: “She had no trouble at all, even at first, with a child of your age—no trouble at all? You could keep such a secret even then, and learn to play such a part?”
“All I had to do for a long time was keep my mouth shut; and I was quite capable of doing that! It didn’t take me long to realize the difference between a small income and a large one, I can tell you. Children are the greatest snobs in the world—next to dogs.”
“If they’re trained to be.”
“Not much training required, my dear Mr. Gamadge. And now, I really think that’s all.” Mrs. Fenway’s son, master of himself and—so proudly did he bear himself—apparently master of the situation, seemed about to turn away; but Gamadge, hands in pockets and eyes fixed on him in a kind of dark amusement, said: “Well, no; not quite all. We don’t even now know who you are.”
“Who I am?”
“Who you are. Or don’t you care to say?”
“Of course I care to say. My father was a thorough-going sport; I come by my adventurous disposition from both sides of my family. He was a charming person and a sport, and the only human being except me that my mother ever cared a hang about. His name was Bargrave, Clyde Bargrave, and that’s my name too. They met at a dude ranch. Her mother was going to break it up, so they ran off to Mexico; he was in the money at the time, I don’t know why, but his luck changed and he cleared out. She never did know what became of him.
“Her mother was wild, of course; got her to Europe, and got right in touch with the faithful swain Cort Fenway. He behaved like the gentleman he was, and I’ll say this—it seems to be a family of gentlemen. He knew all about me, of course, and he helped with money and visas, and I was smuggled into the world without anybody being the wiser from that day to this—anybody who mattered, I mean. You can imagine that Mrs. Kane was only too glad to have my mother marry him in those circumstances—marry anybody!”
Gamadge asked: “What if Cort Fenway hadn’t died, Mr. Bargrave?”
“Hadn’t died?”
“What if he had survived his illness, and come back to France to find his child dead and illegally buried?”
“Oh—that wasn’t more than a remote possibility; but my mother said he wouldn’t have done anything. You don’t know how he felt about her, but perhaps Mr. Blake Fenway will tell you. He wouldn’t have allowed her to pass me off as Alden, naturally; but he’d have helped her conceal the circumstances of Alden’s death. She would have told him that she hadn’t been responsible at the time; out of her head with grief for Alden and worry about him. She wouldn’t have told him that she had designs on the Fenway property. He’d have brought her home, and told people that Alden had died in France and was buried there. He’d have said that he knew all about it. Perfectly safe. In those post-war times nobody would have bothered to ask questions. He’d have adopted me, and I’d have been a member of the family. Please try to remember, sir, that what she did was only a technical misdemeanor. As for Mott’s death, I’m really sorry; but he was an old man and useless, and he’d been a drag on you for years.”
Fenway said: “You are not competent to judge the value I placed on my cousin; such values are not in your power of reckoning. I can’t meet you on the common ground of ordinary human feeling. I can only ask you—since you will be able to understand that question, at least what advantage it would have been to you to be confined in some institution for life? As you would have been, if Mr. Gamadge had not found the picture of Fenbrook.”
“I had no choice, sir; from the moment Mrs. Grove decided to talk it was confinement in an institution or—well, what I face now. But my mother and I had plans for the future. I wasn’t going to wait in an observation ward for an overhaul by specialists, you know; I would have escaped tonight. It wouldn’t have been much of a job; Craddock and Thurley had convinced the police that I was an amiable child, and they were all awfully sorry for me and handling me with gloves. I had a place all ready to go to, and I wasn’t afraid of being recognized. Would you recognize me?”
Receiving no answer, he went on: “Mother would have followed me as soon as she could walk, and settled near me. She had what money she’d saved, and she would have had more from you; a dam’ sight better than nothing. I should have put in time with the armed forces, but that was all right; I had papers—I got them right here in New York. We should have been all right.”
He paused, and his eye met Gamadge’s. He said with a kind of malignant humor: “You were the one that ought to have been eliminated, but I thought that after Mott was dead you’d consult Mr. Fenway, and that he’d send you about your business. I didn’t know you had another client in the house. But I had a queer sort of a hunch last night when I met you at the head of the stairs that you were ready for me, and so you were.”
Gamadge said: “I’d like to ask you one more question, Mr. Bargrave.”
“As many as you like.”
“Only one: why have you obliged us with all this detail instead of putting up a fight?”
Bargrave looked very much taken aback. “Putting up a fight? What kind of a fight could I put up? If you mean Mott Fenway’s death, what difference would that make in the outcome, since nobody could deny that I’d killed Mrs. Grove? And they told me upstairs that you’d found the picture, which contained proof that I wasn’t Alden Fenway, wasn’t therefore a half-wit, and was responsible. And how could I plead extenuating circumstances, or lack of premeditation, when you’d had Mrs. Grove’s message and could check up on the trap at Fenbrook? She wouldn’t tell you where the picture was; we knew well enough that she was saving the family scandal for Mr. Fenway alone; but she certainly told you her life had been threatened, and that there was a conspiracy. You must have the message, though how in the name of all that’s wonderful she managed to write one and send it out—”
Gamadge said: “Nothing in any message I received from Mrs. Grove could be used against you in any court of law.”
“No?”
“No.”
Bargrave stood for a moment staring, too angry to speak. Then he pulled himself together. “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “I’d have had a long jail sentence, and I don’t want that; I prefer to quit, as my mother did, or at least as soon as I can.”
He swung away, but unfortunately for his poise he had at last forgotten the steel on his wrist. It brought him up short, and he was forced to stand tethered while the plain-clothes man exchanged some words with Nordhall. Gamadge wondered whether those few minutes were not the bitterest that Mr. Bargrave would ever know, since while they passed he could not even pretend to be doing as he chose.
