Эллери Куин - The Devil To Pay

Val raised her head. “He was always a thief,” she said wearily.

“Suppose he did?” demanded Pink.

“Using the mails to defraud is a serious offense, Pink,” said Rhys. “It was the penitentiary for Spaeth if the government ever found him out.”

“Why didn’t you hold him up?” asked Pink hoarsely.

“At the time there was still a chance to recoup. But later, when the floods ruined the plants completely, I threatened to send him to prison if he didn’t rehabilitate them.” Rhys shrugged. “He made a counter-threat. He said he had something on me which would so blacken my reputation and so completely destroy public confidence that nothing would ever save the plants. This deposit must have been the answer, making it look as if I’d cleaned up, too, and was a hypocrite besides.”

“But five million dollars!”

“If paying out ten percent of fifty millions in profits would keep him out of jail,” said Rhys dryly, “he was a good enough business man to pay it out.”

“The dirty rat,” said Pink passionately. “Mixin’ people up! Why the hell do they have to look for people who bump off rats like that? It ain’t fair!”

“It puts me on a spot,” sighed Rhys. “I can’t keep the money, of course — it isn’t mine. Yet if I used it to start a fund to salvage Ohippi, nobody’d believe the story. The auction, my being broke... I can’t keep it, and I can’t give it away. I’ll have to think about it.”

“Yeah,” muttered Pink, “we’ll have to think about it.”

Rhys went heavily out of the kitchen into the foyer, taking off his coat. Pink turned blindly to the range as something began to burn. Val pulled herself to her feet and said: “I don’t think I’m hungry any more, Pink. I’m going to—”

Rhys said, strangling: “Good God.”

Val was paralysed by the horror in her father’s voice.

“Pop!” She found her voice and her strength at the same instant. She almost capsized Pink trying to get to the foyer first.

Rhys had turned on the overhead light. The door of the foyer closet was open. He was squatting on his heels and staring into the closet.

On the floor of the closet lay two objects.

One was a long cup-handled rapier with a red-brown stain on its point.

The other, crushed into a ball, was a tan camel’s-hair topcoat.

“Your coat,” said Val. “Your coat . The... the sword!”

Rhys grasped the rapier by the hilt and brought it out of the closet, turning it this way and that in his two shaking hands, as if he were too stupefied to do more than simply look at it.

It was the Italian rapier which had hung on Solly Spaeth’s wall; there was no question about that. And if there had been a question, the stained point would have answered it.

“Don’t handle it. Don’t touch it,” whispered Val. “It’s... it’s poisoned. You might get a scratch!”

“Put it away,” mumbled Pink. “No. Here. Gimme that. We’ve got to get rid of it. Rhys, for God’s sake!”

But Rhys kept holding the rapier and examining it as a child might examine a strange toy.

Pink, reached in and snared the coat. He shook it out; it was Rhys’s coat; there was no question about that, either. For from the right pocket to the hem a narrow strip of camel’s-hair cloth was missing, leaving a long gap.

“Oh, look,” said Val faintly, pointing.

The breast of the coat was smeared with a dirty brown liquid which had dried and crusted.

Fresh red blood turns dirty brown under the corrupting touch of the outer world.

Rhys got to his feet, still clutching the sword; his red-streaked eyeballs were bulging slightly. “How in the name of red devils did these things get here?” he croaked.

Before Val’s eyes rose the unlovely vision of Mr. Walter Spaeth, grimy, slack with drink, and pugnacious, sitting on the edge of the armchair in their living-room when they had reached the apartment after Glücke’s inquisition. He had stolen the house-key from the desk downstairs; he had confessed that. He had let himself in. He had... he had—

“Walter,” said Val in a still small voice. “Walter!”

Rhys rubbed his left eye with his left hand and said painfully: “Don’t jump to conclusions. Don’t jump, Val. It’s— We’ll have to sit down and think this out, too.” He stood there holding the rapier, holding it because he did not seem to know what to do with it.

Pink said in an agonized treble: “Well, don’t be a dope, Rhys, for God’s sake. You can’t just stand here with that thing. It’s too risky. It’s too—”

Just then some one pounded on the foyer door.

It was all so unreasonable, so theatrical, so ridiculous, that Val could only laugh. She began to laugh softly — more a titter than a laugh, and the laugh swelled until it was no longer soft and until tears rolled down her cheeks.

The buzzer rang. It rang again. Then some one leaned on it and forgot to remove his elbow.

Pink gripped Val’s jaws in his iron fingers and shook her head furiously, as he might have shaken a recalcitrant puppy.

“Shut up!” he growled. “Rhys, if you don’t put those things away — hide ’em... In a minute!” he yelled at the door.

“Come on, open it,” said a clipped voice from the other side. It was Inspector Glücke’s voice.

Inspector Glücke!

“Pop, p-pop,” stammered Val, looking around wildly. “Throw it out the window. Anywhere. They can’t find it here. They’ll— They mustn’t—”

Sanity came back to her father’s face. “Here,” he said slowly. “This won’t do.”

“Open up, Jardin, or I’ll have the door broken down.”

“Oh, for God’s sake, pop,” whispered Valerie.

“No.” Rhys shook his head with maddening slowness. “There’s something inevitable about this. He’s been tipped off. He’s bound to find it. No, Val. Pink, open that door.”

“Rhys, don’t be a cluck!”

“Let them in, Pink.”

Val shrank back. With a scowl of baffled fury Pink stepped over to the door. Rhys picked up the coat and carried it and the rapier into the living-room and laid them down on the sofa.

Men boiled in, headed by Glücke.

“Search warrant,” he said curtly, waving a paper. He pushed past Val and stopped in the living-room archway.

“Is this what you want?” asked Rhys tiredly, and he sat down in the armchair and clasped his hands.

The Inspector pounced on the objects on the sofa. His three companions blocked the corridor door.

“Ah,” said Glücke; he said nothing more.

“I suppose,” murmured Rhys, “it won’t do any good to assure you we just found those things on the floor of our foyer closet?”

The Inspector did not reply. He raised the coat and examined it curiously.

Then he turned and made a sign to his men, and two of them came forward with cotton bags and wrapping paper and began to stow away the coat and rapier, handling them as if they had been made of Ming porcelain.

“He’s telling it to you straight,” said Pink desperately. “Listen, Inspector, don’t be a jackass. Listen to him, to me. We just found it — the three of us. He’s being framed, Rhys is! You can’t—”

“Well,” said Glücke lightly, “there may be something in that, Mr. Pincus.”

“Pink,” muttered Pink.

“Western Union in downtown L.A. ’phoned a wire to Headquarters — anonymous — telling us to search this apartment right away. The telegram was ’phoned in to the Western Union office and we haven’t been able to trace the call. So maybe all this is phony at that.”

But he did not sound as if he meant what he said. He sounded as if he were merely trying to make agreeable conversation.