Beware the Young Stranger

18

They were waiting for him on the porch of the Ferguson cottage.

“You didn’t nail him,” Howard Conway said with disappointment.

“Aren’t you glad?” Vallancourt smiled.

“What do you mean?” Ralph Hibbs asked.

“Go inside, Nancy,” her father said.

A glance at her father’s face was enough. Nancy went into the lodge.

“I mean that the case is still open. A fugitive is still at large. There’s still the chance that he’ll stop a police bullet and close the book on the Dorcas Ferguson murder.” Vallancourt smiled. “Except for one thing. I know who the murderer is — and his name isn’t Keith.”

Conway and Hibbs exchanged puzzled glances.

“I suspected Keith was innocent quite early,” Vallancourt said. “In fact, when the cashbox from Dorcas’s study turned up in Keith’s car. He was not carrying the box when he broke out of the house. That means it had been put in his car beforehand. It simply wasn’t reasonable that Keith would kill her, lug the cashbox out, then return to her lifeless body.

“So it looked very much as if the cashbox was a plant, and Keith the victim of a frame-up — the sacrificial goat being offered up by the real killer to save his own skin. At the time, of course, my principal concern was not Keith’s innocence or guilt, but getting Nancy back before she came to harm.

“The morning of her death, Dorcas phoned Keith to come to her home. I’m convinced she was going to tell him the truth about their relationship — that she was his mother.

“When he got there, he found her dead. She had been dead only a short time. Someone had preceded him there. Obviously the murderer. And the murderer, having been informed by Dorcas that she had summoned Keith, and why, had used those few minutes to set his stage. He was desperate. He had nothing to lose at that point, and his neck to save.”

“Ralph,” Conway said, “you went by Dorcas’s house early that morning.”

“Even if Ralph did,” Vallancourt said, “it was too early, some time before she was killed. At the time of her death Ralph was selling a car to a customer.”

“That’s true,” Ralph Hibbs exclaimed. “I remember mentioning it to you, John.”

“And it would have been a silly attempt at an alibi if it weren’t true,” Vallancourt said. “Too easily checked.”

Howard Conway moved to the edge of the porch and leaned against the railing. “So where do we go from here?”

“Police headquarters, Howard. We’ll have a matron sober Ivy up.”

“Damned poor joke,” Conway said.

“Yes, it was. But it’s not on Keith any longer, Howard,” Vallancourt said. “I don’t think you intended to kill Dorcas, but she’s no less dead. And to have framed Keith... Did you think your own hide worth the lives of a boy and girl, Howard?”

“Afraid you’ve lost me on the curve, John.” But Conway was beginning to sweat.

“Then let’s take it from the beginning,” Vallancourt said. “You tried to talk Dorcas out of revealing the truth about Keith. Your motive was obvious. If the whole world knew she was his mother, she might then leave everything she had to him. And that would freeze out Ivy, her sister — your wife. You’d counted on that inheritance. So you argued, and she wouldn’t listen, and you lost your head and shoved her, and the edge of the table got in the way — and there you were, with a dead woman on your hands.

“You were on a very hot spot, Howard. Keith was due to arrive momentarily. But... the boy was already under suspicion of the nastiest kind of murder — that Florida business. Why not let Keith pay for the crime? Make it appear that Dorcas, the doting aunt, had become suspicious of his part in the Florida rape-murder, disillusioned. That he’d knocked her down when confronted, killed her, stolen money from her study, and fled.

“Sam Rollins was the only other person, aside from you and Ivy, who knew the truth about Keith. You figured that, if it ever came to that, you could buy Sam’s silence.

“Your more immediate problem was your wife. You had to tell her Dorcas was dead, and you had to force her to pretend to be Dorcas — to make the call summoning me, the needed witness whose additional testimony would wrap it up tight for you.

“Dorcas was dead. Nothing Ivy might do could change that. And you had a prime weapon. You could threaten Ivy with the exposure of Keith as Dorcas’s son and heir, if you went to jail. Ivy wanted that inheritance, too. She made the call.”

Ralph Hibbs was gaping at Howard Conway as if he had never seen him before.

“You were cutting it thin, but you had luck,” Vallancourt said. “But not quite enough, Howard. There never seems to be enough luck for that kind of thing.

“First detail to go haywire for you was the cashbox. I imagine you wanted it to look as if Keith had gone from the living room back to the study, grabbed the box, and opened it on his way out.

“You snatched the box, opening it outside while you waited for Keith’s arrival. I’m sure you intended to return the box to any point in the house where it would look as if Keith had dropped it. From your hiding place you saw Keith arrive. A mere matter of minutes for it fall in place for you now. If I got there late, it wouldn’t matter. You could pretend you’d just arrived, too; you’d seen Keith drive away hurriedly; we’d both go inside and discover the murder.

“Instead, I arrived a few seconds early and you had to leave the cashbox in Keith’s car. Still, no harm done, you thought. The police would catch Keith and close the whole thing out in a matter of a few hours. The presence of the cashbox in his car would be taken to be plain stupidity on Keith’s part. Anyway, so long as Keith’s true relationship to Dorcas remained unknown, no one could pin a motive on you for the murder.

“Second detail to blow up in your face was your certainty that Keith would be caught. But he wasn’t. He kept fighting, dodging, stayed out of the hands of the police. He strung it out, and the more he strung it out the deeper I got into it. And I got to the truth, Howard. About Keith’s parentage, the reason for the fight that led to Dorcas’s death, the identity of the man who wanted Keith’s true parentage to remain unknown, the only woman who could have posed as Dorcas on a telephone.

“Everything building like a wall around you, Howard. Until the final detail that nails the lid on — with implications that nauseate me!”

Vallancourt’s face was iron.

“When we started checking lake cottages earlier today, it was you, Howard, who went to the rear of the cottage where Nancy and Keith were hiding. Nancy later came out that back door, the door through which they’d entered after Keith broke the lock. You couldn’t have missed that broken lock, Howard. You knew they were in there, and said nothing. You wanted them to stay.”

“Why would I want that, John?” Conway asked blindly.

“I think you meant to go back there later — alone,” Vallancourt said. “I think you were so deeply corrupted by what you’d already done that you intended for the police eventually to find a young murder suspect in that cottage who, in despair, had apparently killed himself. And — God help you! — if Nancy was still with him when you went back, I believe you could have nerved yourself to making it appear a murder-suicide pact. Right, Howard?”

Conway wiped his forehead.

“It’s a nice tale, John. But you spent too much of your life in countries where intrigue is a way of life. This isn’t a foreign country. Here, you have to have proof.”

“I don’t have to prove a thing, Howard. That’s the job for the police. I don’t think they’ll have much trouble. How long do you think Sam Rollins will hold out? And Ivy — you can’t delude yourself into thinking she’ll last very long when the questions start coming — and she has no scotch to fall back on.”

Howard Conway rolled over the porch railing. He struck the ground and was off and running toward the road, the hills, anywhere.

And then Conway stopped dead. Keith was coming along the road, toward the lodge.

“Keith!” Vallancourt shouted. “Howard Conway killed her. Do you understand? Howard is the guilty man, Keith. Take him!”

Keith stood with face raised toward the cottage for an instant, intently. Then he looked at Conway.

Conway scrambled about and started running in the opposite direction.

Vallancourt watched a young tiger gather himself and spring. He nodded soberly as Conway crashed to the road. No more mental block, Keith, to bar the final act of winning, Vallancourt thought.

Nancy was back at her father’s side. From below came the sounds of turmoil.

Nancy touched her father’s arm. “Dad...”

“Going rather well, isn’t it?” Vallancourt said. “Do you have a cigarette, dear?”

“Dad, there’s still that Florida thing...”

“Keith’s claim of innocence down there was the truth, Nancy, or he was acting drastically out of character. I’m not speaking of the first uncertainties and fears I sensed in him. I’m speaking of the basic stuff I’ve discovered in him, the material that survived the slings and arrows. Do I make sense?”

Her eyes were misty. “You make sense, dad.”

“But no more of this elopement nonsense. I want to give you away in style.”

“Oh, yes, daddy!”

“And Sam Rollins — don’t you think we ought to suggest to him a less hostile environment?”

“Whatever you say, daddy.”

Three months later, on a day in late summer, Vallancourt happened upon a wire-story squib with a Port Palmetto, Florida dateline.

A known degenerate, with a long history of sex offenses, had been picked up on a molesting charge and, to the surprise of Port Palmetto police officials, had confessed to the sex murder of Cheryl Pemberton.

Vallancourt cut out the squib, sealed it in an envelope, and addressed the envelope to Mrs. Keith Rollins at Niagara Falls.