Rex Stout - Double for Death

Jordan wet his lips. “No,” he said huskily. He wet his lips again. “No, she can’t. Not the gun that killed Arnold. I had no motive.”

“I’ll take that last.” Fox’s gaze was relentless. “You see, you’re springing leaks. Another one is that letter you wrote. It was obvious it had been written by a Briton or someone with a British education and background. It said, ‘You will meet me on the pavement.’ An American would say, ‘You will meet me on the sidewalk,’ or ‘You will meet me on the street.’ But in England they never say sidewalk, they say pavement. No American ever does, in that sense. Also you mentioned your word of honor and you spelled honor with a u. No American does that; all Britons do. That was all there was to that sentence downstairs; it had the word honor in it. You were the only one who spelled it with a u.”

Luke Wheer was whispering to himself, “H, O, N, O...”

Kester, his colorless eyes leaving Jordan for Fox, muttered, “I’ll be damned.”

Fox nodded. “That’s all there was to that. It ought to be a pretty fair piece of evidence.”

Apparently Jordan’s lips were dry; he kept wetting them. The muscles of his hands, still cupped over his knees, were slowly and rhythmically tensing and relaxing; he said nothing.

“But I have an idea,” Fox resumed, “that the evidence that will clinch it is your motive for murdering Arnold. That’s another thing I’m not very proud of. Since traditional morality left its cradle thousands of years ago, so many outraged fathers have killed the men who were weekending with their daughters without benefit of clergy! That was the outstanding ostentatious fact of your connection with Thorpe: you were the father of his weekend companion. Such fathers have immemorially fallen into one of two categories: one is the enraged defender of the family honor who kills the man if he can; the other is the complacent sharer in the proceeds of his daughter’s degradation. Obviously you were not in the second category, since you refused even to accept any gift either from Thorpe or your daughter. Apparently you were not in the first category either, since your expressed attitude was that it was her life she was living; and even if you had been, that would have supplied no motive for your killing the man in the bungalow, since you knew it wasn’t Thorpe. Those considerations seemed to put you out of the running, but they shouldn’t have, since there was one other point to consider. Particularly I should have considered it, but like a fool I didn’t. Thorpe himself had told me that you were a comparatively poor man, that you lived on a little income from your savings and that the one thing in the world you wanted was a new boat of a certain design that would cost twenty thousand dollars.”

Jordan blurted, as if involuntarily, “He wanted to give me the money himself and I wouldn’t take it!”

Fox nodded. “I know. He told me about that. Your pride wouldn’t let you. You wouldn’t have been able to look yourself in the face if you had accepted money from Thorpe, but you wanted that boat and there wasn’t the remotest chance that you would ever be able to acquire it. So you made a plan and you carried it out. It’s a dismal commentary on the limitations of the human mind, at least of my mind, that I considered the likelihood that Arnold had been murdered by someone who wanted to buy Thorpe Control at 40 and sell it at 80 — I considered that possibility in connection with Kester and Thorpe himself and any number of unknown financiers, but not in connection with you. I was too grandiose. I thought of someone doing it to clean up a couple of million profit, but not of you doing it to get a boat. Of course I have no evidence of that, but it will be easy to get if it exists. If it is found that you recently turned your savings into cash, and that Thorpe Control was bought for you Monday on the drop, that will be conclusive.”

“I didn’t—” Jordan’s tongue was struggling heroically against the dizzy and horrible panic of his brain. His hands, still on his knees, no longer had a firm grip; they were flaccid, quivering, useless to hold anything down. His eyes, withdrawn under the jutting brows, were dark little slits of terror.

“Pull yourself together,” Fox told him in a hard, metallic voice. “You had a boat, didn’t you? If you were tough enough to kill a man to get a new boat, you can be tough enough to take what’s coming to you. You haven’t even got the excuse—”

Fox stopped because the door of the room was opening. As he frowned at it, it swung wide enough to admit the breadth of Dan Pavey; then it was closed again, softly. Dan approached, glanced at the little man in the chair, no longer wiry, and announced to Fox:

“Not just a boat.”

“Why not?” Fox demanded. “I’ll handle this, Dan, if you’ll—”

“You can’t handle what I’ve got in my pocket unless you get it out. With this bum arm I can’t get at it — here in my jacket — no, the other side—”

Fox’s fingers, inserted into the inner pocket of Dan’s jacket, came out again clutching a folded sheaf of papers. He unfolded them, fingered through them with a glance at each, screwed up his lips and looked at Dan.

“Where the devil did you get these?”

“On Jordan’s boat.”

“This morning?”

“Sure.” Dan ignored an inarticulate cry of rage from Jordan, behind him. “I thought I might as well look around. They were in a metal box I had to pry open. There’s a box of cartridges there too, a kind I never saw before, in a drawer in the galley. I left them there—”

“It might interest you to know,” Fox said dryly, “that if you had given these to me this morning it would have saved a life.”

“You mean Ridley Thorpe.”

“Yes.”

“You mean there in the rose trellis.”

“Yes.”

“Right. I should have. After you finished laughing. You sent me home before I had a chance—”

“It can’t be helped now.” Fox glanced at the papers again, then returned his gaze to Henry Jordan. “So,” he observed quietly, “it wasn’t just a boat. Thorpe told me he doubted if you profited by the market tips he gave you, but you must have, to get enough capital to swing fifteen thousand shares of Thorpe Control. What in the name of God were you going to do with a million dollars when you got it, at your age? But that’s none of my business. My only purpose in bringing you up here to talk it over was to let you know that Luke and Kester and I will say nothing about Thorpe and your daughter if you don’t. It’s up to you. Your motive for murder is valid without that. Stand up!”

Jordan came up from his chair. Technically, he was standing, but he could scarcely have been called erect. He was shaking all over and his mouth was hanging open. “I d-d-didn’t—” he stammered. “I... I didn’t... you c-c-can’t—”

“He’s going to have hysterics,” Vaughn Kester said icily.

Fox moved until he was directly in front of Jordan, facing him, and stood there frowning down intently at the suddenly grey and flabby face. Abruptly and swiftly his hand swooped up and its palm flattened against Jordan’s cheek-bone with a sharp and staggering smack. Jordan nearly fell, but recovered his balance; and then, slowly and painfully, he straightened. He was erect. A last quiver ran over his body and it was composed. He looked up at Tecumseh Fox and said clearly and firmly:

“Thank you. I’m all right now. What do you want me to do?”

“Go on.” Fox inclined his head to the door. “I’ll follow. To the library to see Derwin.”

As they went out, Jordan with a steady unfaltering step and Fox close behind him, Kester’s pale cold eyes followed them. Luke’s did not. His head was bent and his eyes closed, like a preacher leading his congregation in prayer.