The Broken Vase

Chapter 8

Hebe Heath clutched her breasts and tilted her chin to stare blue-eyed defiance up at the inspector. Adolph Koch half rose from his chair, muttering something, and sank back again. Ted Gill stepped across, put his hand on the back of Hebe’s chair, stood there as a protector, and sighed heavily. Damon’s gaze slanted down to the brave glory of Hebe’s matchless eyes, and then he took a step toward her and inquired:

“Well?”

“Well,” she whispered.

“Did you throw that bottle out of the window?”

She nodded.

“You did?”

She nodded.

“Why?”

Her hands abandoned their clutch on her breasts and flew straight for the inspector in appeal, to the length of her outstretched arms. “Oh,” she cried softly, “it was an ungovernment impulse!”

Tecumseh Fox stirred in his seat and looked away from her. The others stared at her in soundless fascination, then transferred to Henry Pomfret when a noise came from him — a spasmodic tremoloso titter. He looked around abashed, and said pugnaciously to no one, “I’m sorry,” and caught his lip with his teeth. Ted Gill spoke at Damon in a patient and determined voice:

“She means ungovernable. Miss Heath is sensitive and high-strung. She is emotionally unstable. She is impetuous, mercurial, galvanic. She is an artist—”

“I’m not asking her for a character analysis,” said Damon. “Or you either, Mr. Gill. I’m asking her why she threw that bottle out of the window.”

“And I’m telling you. You are dealing with an extraordinary person. She becomes seized with an irresistible desire to do something, and she does it. It’s a kind of trance. Then it goes out of her mind. She does not now actually remember picking up that bottle and throwing it—”

Damon snorted. “She just admitted it!”

“She admitted it because three of us saw her do it and have — mentioned it to her. Miss Mowbray, Mr. Beck, and myself. At the moment she did it, Mrs. Pomfret was kneeling beside her son, Koch and Miss Tusar were bending over her, and Zorilla had gone after Fox. I was standing with Miss Mowbray and I said the bottle he drank out of ought to be corked but I didn’t know which one, and she said he always drank bourbon. I reached for it, but Miss Heath grabbed it and made one of her — made a gesture, a dramatic gesture, and hurled it out of the window. When Fox came I told him, and I also told the first policeman who appeared. But I knew by the look on her face, a kind of, uh, exaltation, that she didn’t know what she was doing—”

“Bah!” Felix Beck was out of his chair, trembling with indignation. “Her an artist! Not know what she was doing? Hah! She’s a Circe! An evil witch! First Jan, I warned him about her, and now this—”

“Oh, can it!” Ted snapped at him. “It’s bad enough without a lot of yapping—”

“Both of you can it,” Damon commanded sharply. He confronted Hebe. “I’ll talk with you later, Miss Heath, but I’ll ask you now, is Mr. Gill correct? Do you do things and forget about them?”

“Oh,” she breathed.

“Well, do you?”

“I don’t know.” Her lovely hands were clasped tight and pulled against her shape. “Oh, I don’t know!”

“Do you become seized with an irresistible desire to do something, and do it? Did you become seized with such a desire to put something into that bottle of bourbon?”

“To put...” She goggled at him. Her hands unclasped, and tension left the muscles of her face. “Put something in the bottle?” she demanded incredulously, in an entirely new tone. “Don’t be a damn fool!”

Damon grunted, and regarded her in silence. He raised a hand to scratch the back of his neck, and still gazed at her.

“May I suggest—” Tecumseh Fox began.

“No,” Damon said shortly. His eyes swept an arc around the faces, around to the left, slowly, and back to the right. “It is my duty to inform you,” he said in a tone of displeasure, “that there is a presumption that Perry Dunham was murdered. I’ll have to talk with each of you separately before you’re allowed to leave here, and that will take a long time. May I have a room to use, Mr. Pomfret?”

“Certainly. My wife...” Pomfret hesitated. “But of course. Or we’ll go somewhere else and you can use this.”

“That will do fine. You and your wife will go where you please. In your house. But the rest of you will stay together in one room, with law officers present. I have the right to enforce that under the circumstances, but I would appreciate it if you will co-operate. I ask you to consider the possibility that the murderer of Perry Dunham is among you. If you don’t like that idea, neither do I. Now one thing. If there was poison in that bourbon, it could have been put there at any time since somebody last drank from it. It wasn’t necessarily put there in that room this afternoon. But it might have been. If it was, the container that held the poison is probably somewhere around, unless it was thrown out of the window the way the bottle was. That room is being searched, and the whole house will be. Each of you will be questioned about your movements. But there is a chance that the container is concealed on the person of someone. I think it would be a good plan if you would all allow yourselves to be searched. I think you should agree to that. For the ladies, I can have a policewoman here in five minutes.”

They shrank. They glanced at each other, and back at the inspector, and away. If the murderer was there, he had no reason to fear exposing himself by a unique reluctance, for reluctance and distaste were on all faces except that of Tecumseh Fox. He nodded at Damon:

“Good here. That’s sensible. Though probably futile.”

“It is an indignity,” Felix Beck growled.

Hebe said, “It’s horribly revolting.”

The door opened, and eyes went to it. A man entered and spoke across the room to Damon: “Craig wants you, Inspector,” and Damon nodded and tramped out. Everybody decided all at once that their muscles were cramped and shifted to new positions in their chairs or on their feet. Low-voiced mutterings started. Adolph Koch asked Fox if they could be legally compelled to submit to a search, and Fox said no, and Ted Gill said they might as well submit anyway. Beck folded his arms and paced up and down, and a policeman yawned. Schaeffer, who had served the bar, expounded something lengthily to his colleague in an undertone. Tecumseh Fox leaned far backwards and stared at the ceiling, and was still in that position five minutes later when the door opened again and the inspector entered. He walked across to the end of the big table, which was about the geographical center of the assemblage, and held up an object in his hand for all to see.

“Do any of you recognize this?”

“Certainly.” Henry Pomfret spoke up. “It’s my Ju Chou incense bowl. Please don’t drop it!”

“I won’t.” Damon’s big hand had an adequate grip on the beautiful little bowl of red and misty pearly green. “How long has it been kept on that stand in that room?”

“A long time. A couple of years.”

“Is it used to drop things into? Like an ash tray?”

“Not if I know it, it isn’t. Sometimes some ass drops a cigarette in it.”

“Well, this time it wasn’t a cigarette.” There was a note of grim satisfaction in the inspector’s voice. He put the bowl down on the table, and took from it, with his thumb and forefinger, a ball of crumpled paper; and displayed it as a prestidigitator displays a coin he has plucked from the air. “It was this. I’m not going to open it out. One of my men did, part way. It’s a piece of ordinary bond paper, and clinging to it are particles of white powder. He dampened a little of it, and it smells like cyanide. So I withdraw my request that you permit yourselves to be searched.”

There was a stir, a rustle, and dead silence. It was broken by Henry Pomfret.

“Christ,” he muttered incredulously. “In the incense bowl. Then...”

“Then what, Mr. Pomfret?”

“Nothing.” Pomfret shook his head as in disbelief. “Nothing.”

“Did the fact that this was found in the bowl suggest something to you?”

“No! Nothing!”

Damon gazed at him and persisted. “Did it perhaps remind you that you saw someone go to that bowl and drop something in it?”

“No! It didn’t remind me of anything! I was merely going to say that this makes it — that someone here did it. If I had seen anyone drop something in that bowl I’d have fished it out; I always do. Anyway, I wasn’t there, I was in here with Fox.”

“But you might,” Fox put it, “have seen it earlier in the afternoon.” He looked at the inspector. “I was going to suggest before that you may have got a wrong impression from what Schaeffer said. He told you that he served the bar when Mrs. Pomfret rang and told him to. When these people — most of them, he said — were already there. But that wasn’t when they left Pomfret and me here and went to the yellow room, it was before we came to this room at all. I arrived at a quarter past two and the bar was in there then, and everyone else was present.” He returned to Pomfret. “So you could have seen someone drop something into the bowl then, couldn’t you?”

“I suppose I could,” Pomfret admitted gruffly. “But I didn’t.”

“I did,” said a voice.

Swift glances darted to Garda Tusar.

“Who?” Damon barked.

Garda, ignoring him, left her chair over by the big screen, near Adolph Koch, and came around the end of the table. She intended, apparently, to face someone, and she did. It was Dora Mowbray. Garda’s black eyes blazed down, and Dora’s came up to meet them.

“You did it,” Garda said. “I saw you. You went over to the stand—”

There was simultaneous and universal movement; it was as if the nervous systems of those well-behaved people had been adjusted to absorb so much strain and no more. Felix Beck snarled, Hebe gasped, Diego arose so precipitately that he overturned his chair... but the chief performers were Ted Gill and Henry Pomfret. Ted sprang through space, seized Garda’s arm and violently whirled her around; she lost her balance, toppled against the table, and knocked the incense bowl off onto the floor; Pomfret yelled and leaped, grabbed for the bowl and missed, spun around, doubled his fist and crashed it against Ted’s jaw; the detective and policemen, rushing up, got their hands on Pomfret, on Ted, on Garda—

“Back off!” Damon commanded sharply. He glared at Pomfret. “What the hell was that for?”

“I’m sorry,” Pomfret said, but didn’t sound sorry. He was panting. He stooped to get the bowl, which was intact.

Ted’s eyes were glittering at Garda. “I would like,” he said through his teeth, “to pass that tap on to you with interest. I don’t know why you’ve got it in for Miss Mowbray, but you try any more of that raving—”

“Ted!” Dora was there, with a hand on his arm. “Please! She wasn’t raving. I did drop that paper into the bowl.”

Ted gawked at her. The inspector whirled:

“You did?”

“Yes.”

There was a stunned silence.

“By God,” Diego growled. “My little Dora—”

“No, Diego.” Dora shook her head at him. “Your little Dora didn’t put poison in Perry’s whisky.” Her lip trembled, then it curled in sudden anger and her face flared. “Look at you! All of you! Your faces! You believe — just because I— Oh, if my father was here! Everything has been hateful — ever since he died—”

“I’m here!” Ted sang at her.

Damon gazing at her, said dryly, “About dropping that paper in the bowl.”

“I did.” Dora’s eyes met his. “I said I did. It was in my bag.”

“Who put it there?”

“I don’t know. I found it there when we were leaving the yellow room to come in here.” She picked up a brown cloth handbag from her chair, held it up, and indicated an outside compartment made with an extra fold of the cloth. “It was in here. I saw the bulge and stuck my fingers in to see what it was. I had no idea where it came from. It looked like nothing but a crumpled piece of paper, and I dropped it in the bowl as I went by.”

“You are saying that someone put it in there while the bag was in your possession.”

“I am not. I didn’t say that. I left the bag lying on a sofa in the yellow room when Perry — when I went to the other end of the room with Mr. Dunham.”

“And it was when you got it again that you noticed the bulge in it?”

“Yes.”

“How long was the bag lying on the sofa?”

“Well, it was — fifteen or twenty minutes.”

“Why did you go to the other end of the room with Dunham?”

“Because he said he wanted to speak to me.”

“What about?”

“About — something — a personal matter.”

“Were you engaged to marry Dunham?”

“That’s none of your business. But I wasn’t.”

The inspector grunted. “You’ll probably be surprised,” he said crustily, “at what the police regard as their business in a murder investigation. And what we don’t get one way we get another. If we can. Were you in love with Dunham?”

“Good heavens, no!”

“Did you hate him?”

“No.”

“Were you an intimate friend of his?”

“No.” Dora frowned. “I have known him all my life. His mother and my father were friends.”

“I’d like to know what it was he wanted to speak to you about this afternoon. If you refuse to tell me, you can’t blame me if I—”

“I don’t refuse to tell you. He wanted to know about the other note Jan left. Whether I had seen it — whether I had read any of it.”

“Note? Who is Jan?”

“Jan Tusar,” Tecumseh Fox broke in. “He committed suicide — shot himself — last Monday evening at Carnegie Hall. I think you’re going to have to shuffle that into your deck, and I can save you a lot of time on it.” His eyes took in the others. “You folks understand, of course, that there is no longer any question of going to the police with the violin business. The police are here. I suggest, Inspector, if you want to cut some corners, that you get together with me and a man with a notebook... By the way, Miss Tusar, since the police are here, how about that thing you were saving for them? You might as well hand it over now. You can’t do any better than the chief of the Homicide Squad.”

Garda, who had dropped into a chair beside Diego, opened her handbag and took out the envelope and held it out to Damon. He glanced at the address and then removed the enclosure and looked at it:

“My God,” he muttered in disgust, “one of those things.” He regarded Garda in bewilderment. “Then you were married to Tusar? And Dunham was your brother?”

Garda stared at him.

“No,” Fox said impatiently, “the violinist was her brother. That’s one small item of the background, which I’m offering you at a bargain. Unless you prefer to slash your way through the brush—”

“Thanks, I’ll take it. I like bargains.” Damon addressed the group: “A while ago I asked you folks to co-operate by staying together in one room. Now, in view of finding that paper in that bowl, as well as other things, I instruct you to do so. I’m going to start with Fox, and you’ll be notified when I’m ready for you. Ryder, take a man and stay with them. Mr. Pomfret, will you kindly lead the way to a room where they can sit down? And Ryder, send Kossoy in with a notebook, and tell Craig I want to see him.”