Richard Deming - Gallows in My Garden

“I cut,” he said. “I can’t study or sit in class or anything when I don’t know whether or not Grace is in danger.”

Fausta went out to the hall in answer to a knock on the door and returned with the morning paper. She scanned the headlines, glanced up at me sharply, then continued to read, frowning deeper the farther she read.

“Manny Moon!” she said when she had finished the item. “Why did you try to get shot before you came to take me out?”

“I needed the reward money before I could afford you,” I said.

“Playing hero!” she said scornfully, and tossed the paper to Grace.

It went from hand to hand, with me getting it last. The write-up was page one and was by-lined by Carl Saunders, the Globe’s top feature writer. It referred to my “daring, singlehanded assault on two of the nation’s most desperate criminals” and made me sound either like a movie-style hero or a suicidal idiot, I couldn’t decide which.

Neither could the other persons present, apparently, for reactions were mixed. Grace turned starry-eyed with admiration, even shifting her attention temporarily from Arnold to me. Arnold examined me with a peculiar expression which indicated he thought I was mad, and Mouldy Greene inquired, “Those the same characters I almost got before you chased them away?”

“Yes,” I said. “Want half the reward?”

“No, no,” he said magnanimously. “After all, you was on the spot.”

At nine-thirty I left with Fausta and Grace again in tow, after firmly telling Arnold to get back to school and stop worrying about his bride’s safety. He reluctantly agreed only after Grace backed me up by appealing to the scholastic side of his nature.

“Suppose you failed a course, Arnold,” she said. “You’d never get to be a university president, and I’d be so ashamed.”

This would have left me cold, but apparently it touched an inner chord in Arnold, for he gave up without further struggle.

My two female companions were dressed more conservatively today, Fausta wearing the same dirndl and peasant blouse she had discarded in favor of a sunsuit yesterday, and Grace wearing a backless sun dress which exposed a good deal of her top, but at least covered her thighs. I still felt a bit like the manager of a burlesque house, but I lost the feeling that I should keep looking over my shoulder to see if the cops were raiding the joint.

At the state teachers’ college we caught Professor Quisby during a ten-minute break between classes. He handed me a typewritten paper without comment. It was a transcript of the complete note written by Don Lawson, and it read:

Dear Ann:

I hate to leave this way, because undoubtedly the publicity will be unpleasant for you, but I think it the wisest course. Explain things to Grace. Uncle Doug may be able to make you understand better, for he knows my condition. I can’t stand to just sit and wait for death, so I’m going forward to meet it. I’m writing to you instead of (Here the word Kate was scratched out) Grace because you’ve been the only person aside from Uncle Doug and Maggie who ever made any attempt to understand me.

I read it over twice, then handed it to Grace and let her read it.

“Why it was suicide after all, then!” Grace said when she had finished. “Why do you suppose someone cut off the bottom part?”

Professor Quisby cleared his throat. “Perhaps,” he intoned, “someone deliberately wanted it to look like murder.”

Fausta read the transcript, screwed up her nose, and said, “I think you made a lot of trouble for nothing. This is no more than you had before.”

“Let’s see what Warren Day has to say about it,” I suggested.

We found the chief of Homicide in his office poring over teletypes for the last part of June and early July.

“I think I got it,” he greeted me when I opened his door in response to a shouted “Come in!” Then his eyes bugged out as he saw Fausta’s bare shoulders, shifted to Grace’s scanty sun dress, and he blinked rapidly twice.

“Hello, hello,” he said in a faintly strangled voice. “Come in and sit down.”

“What do you think you’ve got?” I inquired when we had all found chairs.

“Eh?” He glanced surreptitiously at Fausta’s shoulders for a second time, hurriedly dropped his eyes, and studied a sheet of teletype he was holding upside down.

“You said you thought you had something,” I reminded him patiently.

“Oh, yeah, yeah,” he said, coming back to earth. He inverted the teletype sheet and scanned it quickly.

“This is for June twenty-eighth,” he said. He paused, started to hunt in his ash tray for a used butt, then changed his mind and produced a fresh cigar from his breast pocket, apparently in honor of his female guests. “June twenty-eighth two masked bandits tried to stick up the Central Trust Bank at Peoria, Illinois. A teller managed to sound the alarm, and they were beaten off without getting anything. One was believed to be wounded. They headed southwest, switched cars with a traveling salesman after knocking him out with a gun butt, and their trail was lost at the Illinois border.”

He paused long enough to shift his cigar from one corner of his mouth to the other. “No one was able to give a very good description of the bandits, even as to size. You know how those things go; everybody sees something different. But at least two of the witnesses agreed that one was tall and the other short. And they all agreed that both were dressed either in white gabardine or Palm Beach.”

The inspector stopped and peered at me over his glasses.

“Could be our boys,” I said. “And the date is only two and a half weeks back.” I tossed him the transcript of Don Lawson’s suicide note.

When he had read it, he frowned at me and asked, “What do you make of this?”

“What do you make of it?” I countered.

He reread the note, then looked up puzzledly. “Can’t see a reason in the world why anyone would cut off the lower part. As far as the reference to Doctor Lawson is concerned, he himself told us young Don fancied he had every disease in the book, and called at his office regularly with fatal symptoms. We also knew Don didn’t get on too well with his sister here, but was fond of Maggie and Ann — Mrs. Lawson. Think the maid could have cut it off because her name appeared and then was scratched through?”

“Not likely,” I said. “She wouldn’t have been able to tell what the scratched-out word was without a microscope.”

“Then I don’t get it at all,” the inspector decided. “Just offhand I’d say this pretty definitely establishes the boy’s death as suicide, and knocks our last theory right in the head.” He glanced quickly at Grace, as though afraid she might know what the last theory was.

I shook my head. “You can’t get around Vance Logan’s income and a certain other person’s small bank account.”

Day frowned at me. “You mean you still go for the theory you had yesterday?” Again he glanced at Grace self-consciously.

I nodded. “I not only go for it. This clinches it. I’m sure who the murderer is.”

My remark drew a moment of dead silence from everyone. Grace was the first to speak.

“It isn’t anyone we know, is it?” she asked inanely.

When I glanced at her, her face was suddenly white, and I felt a twinge of pity.

“I mean,” she said in a small voice, “it isn’t any of the people—” Her voice trailed off and disappeared.

“I’m afraid it is,” I said gently.

Warren Day scratched his head uncertainly, glanced at Grace, and then averted his eyes. “Since you’ve gone this far, you might as well tell her who it is.”