The Case of the Turning Tide

Chapter 26

An aura of death surrounded the house, an in-tangible, mystic miasma of violent demise. Other houses in the neighborhood were either brilliantly lighted or completely dark, giving the impression of life and gaiety on the one band, or dignified slumber on the other. But in the house of C. Arthur Right two or three windows glowing with the sickly emanations of subdued light managed to convey an impression of death.

Duryea, who had stopped at police headquarters to pick up a police escort, pulled his car to a stop in front of the house. A few feet behind him, the police car glided in close to the curb. Officers debouched to the pavement, formed with Frank Duryea and his wife into a compact group.

Duryea said, “I don’t want her to commit suicide. If she asks to be excused, you’ll have to go with her, Milred, and if she should make any attempt to...”

“Go right ahead, Frank. I’ll back your play by doing whatever’s expected.”

Duryea said, “All right, here we go, boys,” and rang the bell.

A maid answered the bell.

“Mrs. Right,” Duryea said. “This is the district attorney of Santa Delbarra County.”

“I’m sorry. Mrs. Right simply can’t see anyone. She...”

“She’ll have to see me,” Duryea said, pushing his way on through the door.

The maid started to protest, but gave ground as the deter-mined little group pushed past her.

“Where is she?” Duryea asked.

“Upstairs lying down in her bedroom — the one in front.”

“Is she dressed?”

“Yes.”

“You come with us,” Duryea said.

They made noise as they ascended the steps, the boards creaking in protest as heavy bodies, keeping in the closely compact companionship of a group which is called upon to discharge a disagreeable duty, climbed the carpeted treads.

The maid indicated the room.

Mrs. Right looked up as Duryea opened the door. The expression on her face ran through a rapid series of changes from surprise to indignation, indignation to dismay.

Duryea said, “I’m sorry to have to bother you, Mrs. Right, and sorry to take this unconventional method of calling, but there are some questions in connection with your husband’s death which you’ll have to answer in person, and immediately.”

“Why... why, I...”

Duryea whipped out the rubber bathing suit. “For instance, Mrs. Right, I’m going to ask you to make a frank statement concerning the circumstances which caused you to borrow Miss Harpler’s bathing suit.”

“Why, I... I can’t understand...”

Duryea said, “Remember that anything you say may be used against you, that I have means of checking up. Miss Harpler telephoned you, didn’t she?”

“Well, yes, she... I...”

“Miss Harpler walked into a trap,” Duryea said with the assurance of a man who is bluffing and knows that he must make his bluff carry weight, “I’m afraid her attempt to rush out and buy a duplicate bathing suit, in place of putting you in the clear, has put both of you in a very bad light.”

Mrs. Right faced the circle of accusing faces, said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Miss Harpler telephoned me upon an entirely different matter, and, as for that bathing suit, I...”

“Wore it,” Duryea said, “when you jumped overboard from Miss Harpler’s yacht when Warren Hilbers picked you up in his speedboat and took you back to Catalina so you could manufacture an alibi. I’m afraid, Mrs. Right, it’s going to be necessary for me to ask you to accompany me to police headquarters.”

She studied his face for a moment, then made a little gesture of surrender. “All right,” she said wearily, “I was afraid it wouldn’t work. That’s right. I was on Joan’s yacht. She was keeping me concealed. Then Nita Moline wanted to use the yacht. We were afraid that if we withheld permission it might make her suspicious. She was nosing around too much anyway. I guess you know just about what happened.”

Duryea said, with dignity, “Perhaps you’ll tell us exactly why you killed your husband, Mrs. Right.”

“But I didn’t kill him. That’s just the point. I...”

“You want us to believe that you went to all this trouble to manufacture an alibi and yet knew nothing of your husband’s death?”

She said, “I was suspicious of my husband. I thought that he and Addison Stearne were planning to do something that would jeopardize my interests. I felt he was going to fix it so Nita Moline would consent to marry Arthur after he’d secured a divorce. I wanted to follow them and see what happened. Well, I fixed it up with Warren. He has a speedboat. As soon as my husband had sailed, Warren and I followed along. Joan had consented to put her yacht at my disposal. So when we found they were headed for Santa Delbarra, Warren put me aboard the Albatross and we went to Santa Delbarra. I kept out of sight, of course.

“Joan moored her yacht where it was possible to watch the Gypsy Queen. We wanted to see who went aboard.”

“Who did?” Duryea asked.

“That’s exactly the point. No one. Mr. Duryea, that crime couldn’t have been what you think it was. Addison shot my husband, and then committed suicide, and someone who didn’t want it to appear that he had committed suicide, picked up the gun and tossed it overboard.”

“Which accounts for the reason you went to all this trouble to build an alibi?” Duryea asked sarcastically.

“I admit that was a mistake, but Miss Moline must have been suspicious. She kept prowling around the Albatross. And, after all, as Joan pointed out, I could have swum across to the other yacht at almost any time during the night, killed Arthur and Addison Stearne, and returned. Joan said the officers would probably think of that if they knew I was hiding on her yacht. So she got Warren on the telephone, told him to come out with his speedboat and stand by. I guess you know the rest.”

“What time did you first get to Santa Delbarra?” Duryea asked.

“Right around six o’clock Saturday. Saturday morning we tagged along in the speedboat long enough to find out that Stearne was taking his yacht to Santa Delbarra. Then Warren took me over to Catalina so he could pick up Joan. She was waiting there in the Albatross. We couldn’t find her right at first, because she was out fishing. When we finally located her, she had to go in to Catalina to take aboard some gasoline and do some telephoning. It was shortly before six o’clock when we got to Santa Delbarra. And no one went aboard the Gypsy Queen after that.”

“And I suppose your alibi for that is Miss Harpler?”

“Yes.”

“Then you must have killed your husband almost immediately after the yacht was moored,” Duryea said.

“I tell you I didn’t. I...”

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Right, but, according to your own admission, you were within a hundred feet of the place where your husband was killed. You had every opportunity to kill him. You had every incentive to kill him. You concocted a fake alibi. According to your own admission, you knew about his death, yet proceeded to deliberately fabricate a lot of evidence to throw the officers off the trail. Under the circumstances, Mrs. Right, I’m going to have to take you into custody. If you’ll get your things together...”

Duryea broke off as the house echoed to the sound of struggle. The impact of jarring thuds shook pictures on the walls. A revolver shot crashed punctuation to the sounds of struggle. For a moment following that shot, the noises ceased, then they started again.

“Watch this woman,” Duryea said to one of the officers. “This may very easily be a trick. Come on, men.”

The rest of them ran across the corridor, down the stairs toward the back of the house from which the sounds were proceeding.

Duryea jerked open a door. A chair, thrown with great force, crashed against the door just as he had it partially opened, jerked the door out of his hand.

Duryea jumped into the room, the officers behind him.

Gramps Wiggins, attired in his rubber bathing suit, a broomstick in his hand, was dancing nimbly around, striking out with quick, sharp blows. Warren Hilbers, his face distorted with rage, one arm dangling at his side, was picking up everything movable which seemed to offer possibilities of a lethal nature with his other hand.

“Hold it!” one of the officers said, raising a revolver. “Hold it or I’ll shoot!”

The men stopped. It was as though a motion picture had suddenly frozen on the screen. Gramps shrilled to Duryea, “Take him, Frank! Take him! Don’t you get it now?”

“Get what?” Duryea asked.

“He’s the one who killed Right and Stearne. Nab him. Those were his spectacles. An oculist can...”

Hilbers turned and made a wild dash for freedom.

One of the officers made a flying tackle, and grabbed his legs.

Gramps ran his fingers through his graying hair. “Yep,” he said, “I got to thinkin’ it over, drivin’ down. Shucks, son, that other yacht didn’t get in there until about six o’clock. The murder might have been committed before then. S’pose it was? Well, I got to thinkin’ that if Mrs. Right left the house with Hilbers an’ showed up in Santa Delbarra aboard Joan Harpler’s yacht, then Hilbers must have put her aboard the Albatross. His speedboat would do thirty-five or forty miles an hour. What was to prevent him from puttin’ Mrs. Right on the Albatross, then pretendin’ to go back, but instead circlin’ around, an’ goin’ up to Santa Delbarra?

“Hilbers had been gettin’ money from his sister. She had paid for part of the cost of his last speedboat. You get it? If Mrs. Right an’ her old man split up, Hilbers was goin’ to get pinched. But if Right an’ Stearne should get bumped off, Mrs. Right was goin’ to inherit a whole flock of iron men.

“Then Mrs. Right told him about how she’d made that crack about Nita Moline to Arthur Right — an’ that was Hilbers’ chance. He’d already got Right’s gun. Right might have gone to the bureau drawer for it, but it was gone when he got there.

“But when Hilbers got aboard the yacht, Right smelled a rat. P’raps he saw the gun in Hilbers’ pocket. He an’ Hilbers had a fight. Hilbers’ glasses went overboard. Then they fell down the cabin stairs an’ Hilbers shot. He had to do his shootin’ inside so the noise wouldn’t attract attention.

“When Stearne came back from mailin’ that letter, Hilbers was waitin’ for him. It was that simple, just a murder an’ suicide frame-up, an’ then a lot o’ dough. He didn’t know the law wouldn’t have let Right inherit from Stearne — that would have been a laugh — if his scheme had gone through.

“Then Hilbers sneaked back an’ went over to Catalina an’ was the devoted, loyal brother when the murder came out. You see he knew his sister would be hidin’ on the yacht, an’ he knew darn well that havin’ done that, she couldn’t afford ever to let the authorities know she’d been there. He just co-operated in manufacturin’ her alibi, an’ he was laughin’ up his sleeve all the time, because if everythin’ went right, he was goin’ to get his hands on a fortune, an’ if anythin’ went wrong, he had it fixed so she’d take the rap for the murder.

“I came down here as fast as I could. I couldn’t make such good time with my old jalopy, what with the trailer on behind. But I got here in time. He’d been in with his sister. When he heard the cops come up, he tried sneakin’ out. He was goin’ to leave sis to take the rap.”

Gramps ceased talking, looked at Duryea, then at his granddaughter. “How’m I doin’, Milred?” he asked.

“Swell,” she said. “Right according to the best Wiggins traditions.”

Hilbers said angrily to Gramps, “You’re cockeyed. Don’t think I’m so dumb I left myself that wide open. I staged that whole thing to look like a murder and suicide. I left a type-written statement with a darn good forgery of Arthur Right’s signature. You poor hicks never would have had anything on me if something hadn’t happened to that evidence.”

Gramps grinned at the district attorney. “That is where we shoulda got wise sooner, son. We had it all doped out, but we didn’t have guts enough to follow our convictions. About the only one who coulda ditched that confession and tossed the gun overboard was the Moline woman, but after she did that, she went to a lot o’ trouble to try an’ watch the yacht. Get the sketch? She knew the confession was a fake, an’ that it was a double murder. How did she know it? Because she knew Addison Stearne an’ Right could never have quarreled over her, because the minute Right made a crack Stearne would have I told him the true facts, that he looked on Nita Moline as his daughter. So when that Moline gal found the confession an’ the gun, an’ found her name was mentioned the way it was, she knew it was a murder. But even so, she didn’t want her name to get smeared, so she tossed the gun overboard, pocketed the confession, an’ then tried to keep watch to see who went back aboard the yacht.”

Gramps swung back to Hilbers. “But don’t think we wouldn’t have got you now. We was checkin’ up on everybody in the case. By tomorrow at the latest we’d have had a report on your eyes. When you dropped those glasses overboard, you as good as left your callin’ card.”

Duryea said, “I remember now, Hilbers, how much trouble you had finding the end of your cigarette with a match. You had to move the match back and forth.”

Gramps grinned triumphantly. “What’d I tell you?” he said to Hilbers.

One of the officers turned to Duryea. “Listen,” he said, glowering suspiciously at the weazened old man in the woman’s bathing suit, “who the hell is this guy?”

“That,” Duryea said, “is a relative by marriage who aspires to become a detective.”

“Aspires, hell!” Gramps Wiggins wheezed. “I’ve graduated.”