Richard Deming - Gallows in My Garden

For the second time that day I took a taxi to Willow Dale, but this time I went alone, for I wanted to speak to Kate privately, and I had no intention of letting Grace out of my sight anywhere in the vicinity of her home. First we returned to El Patio, where I remanded my charge to Mouldy Greene’s custody.

“Don’t move two feet from her side until I get back,” I told him.

He nodded his flat head. “Sure. Suppose she wants to go to the powder room?”

“Then ask Fausta for instructions,” I said patiently.

At the Lawson home I found Ann sitting on the veranda sipping an iced lemonade.

“May I talk to Kate somewhere privately?” I asked her.

“Certainly,” she said, rising and preceding me into the house. “Go back to the den and I’ll send her in.”

She showed no surprise at the request, apparently having become adjusted to the idea that I was going to pop in and out at odd moments on strange missions while the investigation was going on.

When Kate showed up in the den a few minutes later, I asked her to sit down, then took a seat behind the desk myself.

Without preamble I asked, “Why did you conceal you were the girl who eloped with Don Lawson three years ago?”

If I had known in advance what her reaction would be, I would not have been so abrupt. She turned dead white, leaned back in her chair, and passed out cold.

Fortunately I had a little experience with fainting women, once having had a female client who fainted at regular intervals. Instead of rousing the household and getting everyone excited, I employed the same treatment my fainting client had me use. Grasping the girl’s shoulders, I bent her forward until her head hung down between her knees. In a few moments she snorted twice, wagged her head back and forth, then weakly sat up.

“Want me to get you a glass of water?” I asked.

She shook her head, closed her eyes, and leaned back. I waited until her color had returned.

“Let’s start over,” I suggested. “Why did you conceal you were Don Lawson’s ex-wife?”

“I’ll get out of town tonight,” she said in a weak, pleading voice. “Please, mister. Give me a break.”

I blinked at her and turned her words over in my mind until they made less sense than they had when I heard them.

“Let’s start over a third time,” I said finally. “Why should you leave town?”

She straightened, and a cautious expression replaced the fright in her face. “You mean you aren’t going to—” She broke off and asked crisply, “What was it you wanted, Mr. Moon?”

Her change of tone left me as confused as her fright. I studied her for a moment before replying, noting the determined jut of her jaw, which only a moment before had been slack with fear.

I said gently, “Let’s get something straight, Kate. I’m interested only in whoever is trying to bump off the Lawson family. I’m not a cop, and if whatever you’re afraid of doesn’t concern Don’s death or the attempts on Grace, I wouldn’t repeat it to a soul.”

“I’m afraid I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said haughtily. She rose, as if to leave the room.

“Yes you do. For some reason you thought you were in for lots of trouble if anyone discovered you were the girl who eloped with Don. That’s why you kept it a secret. Apparently you thought I had come to arrest you or something. Well, I didn’t. But I want to know what you’re afraid of.”

She shook her head. “You’re mistaken. I’m not afraid of anything.”

“The alternative,” I said, “is to explain to the police. Take your choice.”

Her jutting chin withdrew slightly, and her lips began to tremble. “I didn’t do anything. Why can’t you let me alone?”

“Look, Kate,” I said reasonably. “If you aren’t tied up in this affair concerning Don and Grace, I don’t care what you did that makes you afraid. Tell me and it stops right there.”

“I didn’t do anything.” A tear slid down one cheek. “It was a frame-up.”

“What was?”

“The shoplifting charge.”

“What shoplifting charge?”

Now the tears were falling freely, and along with them the story spilled out in a supplicating tone, her eyes begging for belief. “It was right after I married Don. When we phoned his father, he came right down to the hotel. We had registered at the Jefferson, you see. We’d both been kind of scared of what Don’s father would say, but figured he had to know it sometime, and once we were married there wouldn’t be anything he could do.”

She stopped long enough to sop her tears with a handkerchief. “That’s where we were wrong. He jerked Don out of the room just like he was a kid, and left me there waiting with my mouth open. There wasn’t a thing I could think of to do, so I finally just went to bed and cried all night.”

She stopped again, staring off into space while she relived the embarrassment and frustration.

“And then?” I prodded.

“Mr. Lawson came back in the morning with three men. One was a policeman in plain clothes — he showed me his badge. The other two were the manager and the store detective of Mercer’s Department Store. The store detective said, ‘That’s the woman,’ and pointed at me, and the manager nodded his head and said, ‘Yes. She’s the one, all right.’ Then the cop said, ‘Come along, sister. You’re under arrest.’

“I said I didn’t know what they were talking about. Then Mr. Lawson explained that the store manager and the detective claimed they had caught me shoplifting at Mercer’s, and wanted to swear out a warrant. He said their testimony could get me ten years in jail, but he was interceding because he wanted to avoid the publicity of his son’s wife being in jail. He said he was having our marriage annulled on the grounds that Don was underage, and told me very frankly he intended to arrange things so there was no chance of us ever getting together again. I could take my choice of getting out of the state and staying out, or going to prison.”

“Did you swallow that hogwash?” I asked in astonishment.

“It wasn’t hogwash,” she said. “I don’t know about the store detective, but the man who said he managed Mercer’s really did, because I had turned back a dress there once, and he was called to okay the exchange slip. The plain-clothes man was really a policeman, too. They took me down to police headquarters and entered a formal complaint and took my fingerprints. Then Mr. Lawson gave me five hundred dollars and told me to get out of the state. He said I wouldn’t be hunted, but if I ever came back here, the charge would still be against me even if it was ten years later.”

I shook my head in wonderment. “The things you can do with twenty million dollars! So when did you decide to take a chance and come back?”

“When Don found me. After his father died, he hired a private detective to trace me. I was working for some people in Chicago at the time. He said when he reached twenty-one, we could be married and he’d have enough money to quash the shoplifting charge, and he talked me into coming back. Just in case, I decided to go by my middle name instead of Mary, which was the name the charge was filed under.”

“I still don’t see why you concealed your identity,” I said thoughtfully. “Now that both the old man and Don are dead, it isn’t likely the store manager and detective would press charges — if the thing was trumped up originally.”

“Don’t you think so?” she asked hopefully, either missing or ignoring the innuendo tacked on the end of my last statement.

I smiled at her reassuringly. “Don’t worry about it another minute. I know the police chief personally, and I’ll explain the whole frame-up to him.”