The Broken Vase

Chapter 18

Pomfret showed his teeth. White was on his cheeks.

His wife extended a hand and said harshly, “Let me see it.”

Fox shook his head. “I’m going on a little,” he said grimly. “I’m going to have the satisfaction of cleaning it up in front of him.” He twisted in his seat to face Pomfret, but kept one arm across the violin. “I said a while ago that I learned something yesterday afternoon that made me sure it was you. What I learned was what I already suspected, that you broke your Ming five-color vase yourself. You did it purposely—”

“No,” a voice declared. It was Adolph Koch. “I don’t believe that. If you have proof that he’s a murderer, you have, but he never broke that Ming deliberately. He simply couldn’t.”

“He did.” Fox didn’t look away from Pomfret. “You broke it because you had to have a good and convincing excuse to stop collecting pottery. Your wife knew too much about pottery — not as much as you, I suppose, but too much. You wanted to start collecting coins. Because you could safely pretend that you had paid a couple of thousand for a Fatimid dinar, whereas it had cost only three or four hundred. And your wife furnished the money for your coin collecting, as she had for your pottery. In that way you could clear — I don’t know — say twenty thousand a year, anyway enough to serve your purpose. So you broke the Ming.”

“That’s a lie.” Pomfret wet his lips. He was steadily meeting Fox’s gaze, which must have been easier, at least, than meeting his wife’s. “It’s a damned lie.” He showed his teeth. “By God, you’ll pay for this! That transparent trick — proof—” He pointed at the violin, his finger nearly touching it. “Pretending there’s proof — when there can’t be—”

“I’ll come to that.” Fox fastened to his eyes. “First a few other things. You broke the Ming. You were seen standing in the yellow room with a piece of it in your hand more than half an hour before Perry Dunham discovered it.”

“Who saw me?”

“Lawrence Mowbray.”

“He is dead.”

“Yes, he’s dead. I suppose the vase episode made him suspicious. He may even have been clever enough to have guessed at the motive. Somehow, I don’t know how, he confirmed the suspicion and learned of your relations with Miss Tusar. Your wife was his dear and old friend. He warned you to give her a square deal and threatened to tell her if you didn’t. You went unobserved to his office and hit him on the head and pushed him out of a window.”

“You can prove that too.”

“No, I can’t. That’s mostly conjecture, but I wanted to say it to you and let Miss Mowbray hear it—”

“Dora!” Pomfret stretched a hand across the table. “You don’t believe?...”

She didn’t look at him. Her lips compressed, her fingers twisted tight, she was gazing at Fox.

“That,” Fox said, “was last winter. You felt safe. But in fact you’re an extraordinary combination of cleverness and stupidity. It is possible for a man to conceal, and keep forever concealed, some isolated action, but any activity continued indefinitely will sooner or later be discovered. Mowbray discovered your relations with Miss Tusar, and not long ago Jan Tusar did also. I don’t know just when or how; Miss Tusar will no doubt eventually fill that gap; before the day comes for you to face a judge and jury she will probably tell much more than that, to save herself from being tried as an accessory. It may even be that he saw the Wan Li vase in his sister’s apartment, as Diego did later — your vase that you had taken there yourself. Anyway, he learned about it; and he didn’t like you, and he was under great obligation to your wife. He confronted you with his knowledge and gave you an ultimatum: Break off your relations with his sister or he would inform your wife. You met the threat with the calculation of a devil and the cunning of a snake; a few hours before his big concert you poured varnish into his violin. You knew his character and temperament; you knew that, engulfed in despair, he might even kill himself; and he did.”

“No,” Henry Pomfret said. His voice was thick. “No!” Then he made an irremediable blunder. His head turned, and not toward his wife, but away from her. “Garda!” he entreated. “Garda, I didn’t!”

Mrs. Pomfret stood up, and stood straight. There was a metallic ring in her voice:

“You say you have proof?”

Fox nodded at her. “In a moment.” He took Pomfret again: “So once more, as with Lawrence Mowbray, you thought you were safe, only this time there were complications. The disappearance of the violin must have worried you badly, and though I cleared that up to your satisfaction, at the same time I brought you fresh dread by my discovery of the varnish. Your fear was not that the crime might be traced to you, but that you might be suspected by Miss Tusar, and you tried to prevent that by sending her that note and directing her suspicion elsewhere — Miss Tusar! Please! Diego, hold her!”

Diego did.

Fox went on. “But the fuse had been lit and could not be extinguished. With other apprehensions already gnawing at you, you must have been close to desperation when Perry Dunham told you that Jan had in fact left a second note, that it had been addressed to your wife and had revealed the secret of your relations with Garda, and that he had it in his possession. What else did he say? The same, I imagine, as Mowbray and Jan: He demanded that you break with Garda. He knew his mother was fairly happy with you, and he cared enough for her not to want to shatter her happiness, so instead of showing the note to her he gave you a chance. He didn’t know, of course, that you were a murderer. You promised him you would break with Garda, and he foolishly believed you. As I say, he didn’t know you were a murderer, but even so, it was stupid of him to take a drink from a whisky bottle to which you had access at any time, and which you knew was the brand he always took.”

“You know damned well,” Adolph Koch said resentfully, staring at Pomfret, “that I drink bourbon sometimes!”

Hebe Heath giggled hysterically.

“So with Perry gone,” Fox resumed, “you were safe again. But things were piling up and your nerves began to squeak. There was the matter of the Wan Li vase. Garda had of course told you of Diego’s taking it, and you were no longer as cool and cunning as you had been. You became Mrs. Harriet Piscus again long enough to buy some nitrobenzene. Your breaking into Diego’s apartment to get the vase, and to set that trap for him, was worse than risky, it was idiotic; I won’t demonstrate that; think it over. For one thing, it didn’t work. There was also the matter of the second note left by Jan. That was vital. You got hold of a key to Perry’s apartment — when Mrs. Pomfret gave me one I noticed that there was a duplicate — got upstairs by a subterfuge, as Mrs. Piscus, and made a frantic search, but didn’t find the note.”

Mrs. Pomfret spoke. “My son told me that there was none. That there was only one. That Dora had been mistaken. My son never lied to me.”

“He did that once, Mrs. Pomfret. A fairly white lie, as lies go.” Fox maintained his gaze at Pomfret. “That note must have had you worried. I know it did me. After Perry made a grab for the violin when I left him alone with it that day, I had an idea the note might be inside it. If a glance at the note’s contents that evening in the dressing room had made him want to conceal it, and not on his person, he might easily have dropped it through one of the f-holes, and been unable to retrieve it later because the violin had disappeared. I shook the violin around, and there was nothing loose inside. I even looked inside with a pencil flash, and that was when I discovered the varnish, but no note was visible. It was dumb of me not to guess what had happened. The layer of varnish was so thick that it was still sticky after being in there six or seven hours, and the note had fluttered down to the end and adhered there. So it didn’t move when I shook the violin, and it couldn’t be seen through the f-hole. It’s still in there.”

“It— it—” A spasm ran over Pomfret’s face. “It—” That was all he could get out.

Fox nodded. “It’s there flat against the varnish.” His tone hardened. “It’s Jan’s vengeance, and his sister Garda disclosed it to us. It says, “To I.D.P. Goodbye. My death like this is an ugliness you do not deserve. Another is your husband and my sister. Stop them. I owe you this. Good-bye. Jan.’ ”

Garda’s head fell to the table and she shook with sobs.

“Give that to me,” Pomfret said in a constrained and horrible voice.

Fox made the mistake of turning his head toward her, and as he did so Pomfret sprang. He hurled himself against Fox, knocked him back in his chair, and clawed at the violin. But someone else moved too, from Pomfret’s other side, and came through the air at him like a big cat for prey. Pomfret missed his grab for the violin and went down, to the floor, at Fox’s feet, with Hebe Heath on top of him. Then Fox was there... and Felix Beck... and Adolph Koch...

Fox bobbed up to find Wells, the secretary, hugging the violin to his breast. Wells spoke for the first time, in a trembling voice:

“That telephone is connected, sir.”

“Thanks,” Fox said. “Get Spring 7-3100.”