The Devil Loves Me

11

At eleven forty-five on Monday morning Inspector Sands was in Boston, Dr. Prye was studying handwriting, and Sammy Twist was knocking off work to have lunch.

Later, Prye and Sands were to know Sammy quite well, but Sammy never became aware of them.

He shut the door of his elevator, hung up his “Use the Next Elevator Please” sign, reported to Mr. Jones at the desk, and went downstairs to have his lunch.

He was twenty, but he was small, thin, and quick, and he looked younger than his age. His youth and his ready grin earned him more than his share of tips, but a great deal of his money was spent on horses. He knew a lot about horses, so much that he was too subtle in picking his winners and most of them didn’t win.

The members of the hotel staff who saw Sammy on Monday swore to a man that he was exactly the same as he always was, friendly and a little sly. He carried his racing form down to lunch in the basement and read it while he ate.

What the staff didn’t know was that Sammy was not reading very carefully. He was troubled. He had a problem which required advice from someone older and wiser, but he couldn’t ask anyone to help him. He’d already used the fifty dollars.

Besides, Sammy thought, the whole thing sounded make believe. He didn’t want to make a fool of himself and there’d been nothing in the papers about a Miss Stevens dying. Sammy had been very careful on that point.

The whole thing was a joke, Sammy decided. The letter had said it was a joke. When he got back to his elevator he took the letter from his pocket and stared at it without opening it. The very way it had been delivered to him showed it was a joke, Sammy thought.

It had come last Friday. He had been busy all afternoon and at six he went down to his locker to change into his suit. When he took off his uniform he saw that an envelope had fallen part way out of his coat pocket. There was nothing written on the outside and it was sealed.

He knew it wasn’t his; but if it was put in his coat pocket maybe someone meant it for him. How had it gotten there?

Someone must have slipped it into his pocket that afternoon, one of his passengers, any one of them.

Sammy was cautious. He felt the envelope and pressed it and thought of foreign spies and secret plans and designs for bomb sights. What he didn’t think of was that someone was giving him a fifty-dollar bill for making one telephone call.

The bill fluttered to the floor. Sammy made a grab for it and put it in his pocket before anyone could come downstairs and see it. He hadn’t decided to keep it yet, of course, but it sure felt swell in his pocket.

And all he had to do was to call Toronto General Hospital on Saturday at twelve o’clock and tell them that Miss Stevens was an atropine case. It was, the letter said, a joke on Miss Stevens, and if Sammy did his part and kept quiet about it there was more money in it for him. The writer would communicate with him again.

Sammy did his part because Iron Man was bound to come in tomorrow and fifty split across the board meant big money.

At twelve on Saturday Sammy called the hospital, at four Iron Man reached the finishing line some seconds later than usual, and at midnight Duncan Stevens was dead.

When Sammy reached his boarding house at seven o’clock on Monday night he received a telephone call which worried him a great deal. While he was wondering what to do about it, Inspector Sands was flying back from Boston and Dr. Prye was putting mint jelly on a slice of roast lamb.

Tempers had mellowed somewhat in the Shane house. True, there were still two policemen in the place, and considerable noise was issuing from the cellar where boxes and coal and musty trunks were being hauled around. But at least the searching was over on the upper floors.

“It’s a pity,” Mrs. Shane observed, “that they don’t houseclean while they’re at it. We shall have to be upset all over again.”

“I’m afraid that won’t worry the law,” Prye said from the end of the table. “I believe Mr. Revel here could have helped a bit if he’d chosen to do so.”

Revel looked up from his plate and blinked. “What’s that?”

“I was telling Mrs. Shane that you might have helped with the searching.”

“How so?” Revel said lightly.

Dinah said, “If you’re thinking of making George admit something, give it up, Paul. George has perfect control and his tongue is so smooth it’s going to slip down his throat and choke him one of these days.”

Revel grinned at her across the table. “If it does it won’t cut my throat the way yours would, Dinah.”

“What dreadful ideas you young people get!” Aspasia cried. “If Jennifer or I had said such a thing at home we should have been dismissed from the table immediately, shouldn’t we, Jennifer?”

“I shouldn’t have been,” Mrs. Shane said, smiling. “Father was an old fraud and he knew I knew.”

“Your whole generation was a fraud,” Dinah said. “Perfect angels outside and God-knows-what inside. Like children. Children learn hypocrisy easily and early. I remember when I was ten Duncan and I were great pals, but I used to lie awake at nights and plan to murder him.”

“Be frank,” Prye said, “but try not to be foolish, Dinah.”

“Well, I did,” Dinah went on coolly. “He used to tease me about my hair. Once I decided to leave him in the jungle so the ants would eat him, but the jungle was so far away I never got around to it.”

“You always were a little fiend,” Mrs. Shane said mildly. “Of course Duncan was too. I used to think the two of you would be a bad influence on Jane.”

Jane smiled forgivingly, as if admitting that Dinah and Duncan had been a bad influence but that her own nature was too sweet to be affected.

“Duncan,” she said silkily, “turned out very well.”

Dinah raised an eyebrow. “He didn’t hang, if that’s what you mean.”

Jane opened her mouth to reply but Prye got there first. “The three of you went to the same school?” he asked casually.

Dinah nodded. “Touching, isn’t it? I used to live in Boston until romance snatched me away and set me down in Montreal. I don’t have a warm spot in my heart for either place at the moment.”

She’s talking too much today, Prye thought. It isn’t like Dinah. She’s too shrewd to let her tongue run away with her.

He looked at her carefully. Her eyes were unnaturally bright and her hands kept moving nervously, tracing the pattern in the tablecloth and smoothing the collar of her yellow dress. Her eyes caught his in a long stare, then she looked away and he saw the pulse beating in her temple. He counted the beats almost automatically.

Over a hundred, Prye thought. She’s excited about something.

“I feel safer with a policeman in the house,” he said aloud. “It makes a third murder a little more improbable.”

“A third murder!” Aspasia repeated. “Oh, please don’t talk about it.”

“More fraud, you see,” Dinah said. “We’ve had two murders, but we’re not supposed to talk about a third.”

“That isn’t the point at all,” Aspasia replied stiffly. “If we think and talk of evil, the evil is that much closer to us.”

“Bosh,” Dinah said.

Mrs. Shane interrupted tactfully. “It’s odd, but evil is something I always associate with modern things. I never remember that there was any when I was a girl. It’s rather a comforting thought at my age. Yet there were Jack the Ripper and Landru, and of course others. And then there was my grandfather who was caught stealing sheep.”

“I wish,” Nora said gloomily, “that we didn’t have to go into that again. To hear you talk you’d think he won the Nobel prize for stealing sheep.”

Mrs. Shane was aggrieved. “Really, Nora, I’m only trying to make conversation. When I leave the conversation to the rest of you, you merely exchange insults.”

She rang the little bell in front of her plate and Jack son came in.

“Jackson, we’ll have coffee in here tonight. Haven’t those policemen finished yet?”

“No, madam. They are still in the cellar.”

“The cellar! Why should they be in the cellar?” Dinah leaned toward Mrs. Shane and said, “Have you forgotten about Dennis, Aunt Jennifer? Dennis was murdered in your cellar.”

If Sammy Twist had heard this he would have stopped pondering over his telephone call and gone to bed behind a locked door. Instead, he sat in the dining room of his boardinghouse with the evening paper spread on the table in front of him.

There was no mention of anything unusual happening at 197 River Road. A Mr. Duncan Stevens of Boston had met an accidental death while visiting in the city, but Stevens was a common name.

One ninety-seven River Road. Sammy knew that was a residential section. Classy, Sammy called it. He knew, too, that classy people often did crazy things just for a laugh, but they didn’t commit crimes. Because if you were classy you didn’t have to—

“Going out, Mr. Twist?” his landlady asked with an indifference that didn’t fool Sammy.

“Maybe,” he said. “Maybe not.”

“I just wondered,” the landlady said. “Because if you aren’t going out I thought I’d slip over to the Adelphi and see Myrna Loy and you could watch Roscoe.”

Roscoe was six years old and Sammy did not find him amusing.

“I think I will go out,” Sammy said. “On business.”

“Oh, that telephone call, eh?” she said brightly. “Peculiar voice, wasn’t it? Sort of muffled.”

Muffled, Sammy thought. Sure it was, but it was classy just the same.

“He had a cold,” he said rather stiffly.

“Your boss?”

Sammy rattled the paper and pretended he hadn’t heard her. Until that minute he hadn’t thought how the person had learned his name and his telephone number.

Through Mr. Jones at the desk, Sammy decided. That was simple. You walked up and asked Jones who was the guy operating the second elevator from the left.

At eleven o’clock. Why so late? Sammy wondered.

Well, maybe the guy was going some place before that.

“Will you be late?” the landlady asked.

“Twelve, I guess.”

“I’ll leave the hall light on then,” she said.

He folded the paper. He had a sudden desire to tell her everything, to ask her what he should do, just in case. In case of what? Sammy shook his head angrily.

“Something bothering you, Mr. Twist?”

“Business worries,” Sammy said, scowling.

“Anything I can do?”

Just in case, Sammy thought. “Yes,” he said. “I’m going to tell you an address I want you to remember for me. It’s 197 River Road.”

She wrote it down on the pad beside the telephone.

Inspector Sands had both hands clasped to his stomach. Not that he felt any better that way but he was afraid that if he took them away he would feel worse. He held his stomach and cursed softly and sadly every time the plane hit an air pocket.

He wanted to read over the notes he had taken during the day but his head felt as if it were caught in a revolving door. He leaned back and thought of the three interviews he had had in Boston.

Mr. Pipe, Duncan Stevens’ lawyer, had been cautious. It was not, Sands felt, the caution of a lawyer protecting his client but rather the caution of a man protecting himself.

“Stevens,” Mr. Pipe said, rolling the word on his tongue like a piece of alum, “Stevens. Dead, you say? What a sad thing! It grieves me when I see the young meet an untimely end. It doesn’t seem to matter so much for old codgers like you and me.”

Sands, who was fifty-one, took an instant dislike to Mr. Pipe. “You made his will?”

“He made it,” Mr. Pipe said precisely. “I merely assisted. The will is perfectly simple.”

“In that case you’ll have no difficulty remembering it?” Sands said.

Mr. Pipe smiled sourly. “He leaves everything to his sister Jane. What ‘everything’ means I have no idea.”

“Didn’t you handle his affairs?”

“I did, up to a point,” Mr. Pipe said. “I handled his father’s affairs completely, but young Stevens was a secretive fellow. I know that he keeps an account in the First National.”

“Much money?”

“He had a private fortune to begin with,” Mr. Pipe went on. “A considerable one. But he was extravagant. How much is left I don’t know.”

“Any real estate?”

“Not to my knowledge.”

“Safe-deposit box?”

“Probably,” Mr. Pipe agreed.

“This brokerage business he started,” Sands said. “As far as you know it was on the level?”

Mr. Pipe pursed his lips and said, “So far as I know, yes. I suspect, however, that he conducted the business merely to amuse himself, as a kind of hobby, you understand. Stevens was like that. He tried a number of things, including a racing stable. He thought he could do anything.”

Mr. Pipe had not been very helpful, but the manager of the First National branch where Stevens banked was almost too helpful.

“Stevens’ account,” he told Sands flatly, “is exactly one dollar.”

A month previously Stevens had begun to withdraw large sums of money, ranging from five thousand dollars to a final withdrawal of twenty thousand a week and a half ago.

He gave no explanation and the bank manager bad asked for none. He had left one dollar in his account to keep it open.

“Had he ever done this before?” Sands asked.

“Not so mysteriously,” the manager said with a smile. “Usually he confided to me the details of some new scheme he had. His account has been going downhill steadily, but these last withdrawals have been preposterous. One dollar left of his father’s fortune.”

“Perhaps he meant to bring it back doubled.”

“He usually meant to,” the bank manager said grimly. “I thought of blackmail this time, but a man wouldn’t allow himself to be blackmailed out of his whole bank account.”

“Which was?”

“Last month it had dwindled to forty-two thousand. What is in his safe-deposit box I don’t feel at liberty to tell you.”

“I’ve brought the key,” Sands said. “It was found on him.”

“The property is his sister’s now.”

“I’m sorry,” Sands said, “but I’d like to look at his deposit box.”

He did, but it was a disappointment. There were some shares of stock and a letter to Jane. It lay in his pocket as he flew back to Toronto, a mute reminder of the time and effort a policeman wastes on blind alleys. Because the letter destroyed the slim possibility that anyone had killed Stevens to inherit his money.

The letter was dated August the first, before Stevens had begun his final withdrawals. It contained one sentence to the effect that the enclosed shares would be sufficient to support Jane, if she was careful, and if Duncan died possessed of nothing else.

It didn’t make sense, Sands thought bitterly. Nothing made sense.

When he left the bank he called at Duncan Stevens’ office. He was surprised to find that it consisted of only two rooms, one of them containing a large and beautiful blonde with an exquisitely blank expression.

The blonde’s name was Miss Evans. She was Mr. Stevens’ private secretary, she informed him loftily. She didn’t know when Mr. Stevens would be back. He had gone to Toronto to attend a wedding.

Sands looked around and gathered that Stevens’ business was not very pressing. There was no sign of the feverish activity associated with brokers’ offices. A ticker tape machine was languidly coughing in one corner of the room. Miss Evans ignored it. She also ignored Sands until he told her that Mr. Stevens was never coming back.

There was an easy flow of mascara and rouge down Miss Evans’ classic cheeks. It developed that she had just bought a fox cape on the installment plan and now she was out of a job and couldn’t pay for it. What was a poor girl to do?

Sands told her to take it back. Then he waited while Miss Evans reconstructed her face.

She was new to the job, she told him. She had come only two weeks ago and didn’t know who had been there before her. She just took letters. No, she simply couldn’t remember what letters and Mr. Stevens said carbon copies weren’t necessary.

No, she hadn’t ever worked in a broker’s office before. She thought it was funny. There didn’t seem to be much doing.

Her salary? Forty a week in advance. She had been suspicious of that at first, but Mr. Stevens hadn’t made any passes at her at all. Sands left Miss Evans pondering her twin sorrows, no fox cape and no passes.

The plane hit another air pocket and Sands clutched his stomach and stopped thinking for the rest of the trip. He was conscious only of being conscious and of finding it unpleasant.

At the Shane residence the family and guests were starting to retire for the night although it was only half-past ten. Aspasia’s bones had worn themselves out sending her premonitions of evil and were now frankly aching. She retired to her room with a hot-water bottle and a nembutal capsule prescribed by Prye. Mrs. Shane followed her sister upstairs.

The others were still sitting around the drawing room. Dinah was telling Jane, in a voice which reached Revel very clearly, that she was a damned fool if she ever got married.

Jane yawned, apologized, and promptly yawned again.

“Of course if you’re bored, Jane,” Dinah said coldly.

“Oh no, I’m not bored,” Jane said with some truth.

“I am,” Revel said dryly. “I find bad taste boring.”

Nora and Prye looked up from their game of double Canfield and started talking simultaneously to preserve peace.

“Why don’t we—?”

“Couldn’t you—?”

They stopped.

Dinah was scowling at them. “Back to your game, turtledoves. Revel and I are going to bat some home truths around the room.”

Revel shrugged. “Anything to oblige. Let’s get rid of the women and children first.” He glanced significantly at Jane.

“Oh, I’m not a bit sleepy,” she said brightly. “Really I’m not.”

Dinah switched her scowl to Jane. “Darling, if your ears get any bigger you’ll take off. Beat it.”

“You’d better,” Nora said. “I’ll go with you.”

Jane repeated obstinately that she wasn’t a bit sleepy, but Nora led her out of the room.

Prye remained at the card table, shuffling cards absently and watching Dinah out of the comer of his eye. She was standing in front of the fireplace, her hands clenched at her sides.

Revel sat down, sighing audibly. Neither of them spoke for some time. Then Revel said, “I don’t want to quarrel with you, Dinah.”

His voice was very gentle. Dinah’s hands unclenched and she looked as if she wanted to cry. She clutched the mantel to steady herself.

“Your voice,” she said. “When I’m ninety I’ll remember your voice and the way you’ve deliberately used it to soften me, to make a fool of me—”

“No,” Revel said.

“—and God knows it was easy enough, wasn’t it? Me! You could even fool me. How did you talk to your tarts, Revel? Same way?”

“There weren’t any tarts,” Revel said. “There were girls, nice girls some of them. I used to talk to them about you.”

“Just quiet, cozy evenings between the sheets. God, you are a rat, Revel.”

“I am an ordinary man,” Revel said, “who had a wife who didn’t love him.”

“How could I possibly hate you so much if I hadn’t loved you? I’ve got so much hate for you I’m almost happy.”

“You cried every night on our honeymoon, remember? I left you alone; I thought you’d get over it. Instead you got worse—”

“You’ve made me hate all men, George.”

“You always did,” Revel said.

“The best of them is still a louse to me because you’re a louse. Dennis was no better than the rest of you. I knew what he was but I was going to marry him anyway. I was going to get back at all men by marrying him.”

Revel said, “Stop talking. You’re only feeding your hate. I’m sorry for you, Dinah.”

Her whole body was shaking. “Don’t be sorry for me. All I want now is revenge, and I’m going to have it. I’ve got enough strength in me to fight you all.”

Revel said nothing. There was nothing to say. He watched her in silence as she walked out of the room.

Sammy Twist had started out early. He took a streetcar along Bloor West and got off at River Road.

He felt better walking up the street. The wind was fresh and free and whipped his coat and sent the blood coursing through his body. He walked with the wind, feeling full of courage and very adventurous.

At a quarter to eleven he stood on the street outside 197 and looked up at the house. He was early. He wasn’t to knock at the back door until eleven o’clock.

The first floor was dark, but lights were showing in two rooms on the second floor and one on the third.

“Knock on the back door at eleven o’clock,” the wind whistled.

Sammy stepped into the driveway and walked toward the back of the house. As he watched the lights went off on the second floor. He stood beside the garage and lit a cigarette, shielding the match with his hands.

“Ask for Mr. Williams,” the leaves whispered.

He began to wonder about Mr. Williams. Did he five here? And what did he want?

“I want to give you some more money. You did fine.”

I did fine, Sammy thought; he said I did fine.

Sammy’s hands were beginning to get cold. He threw away his cigarette and rubbed his hands together. He was a little afraid now, because he realized for the first time that if Mr. Williams had just wanted to give him some more money he could have sent it by mail or messenger.

“Have you still got my letter? Bring it along with you.”

Sammy started to walk away, slowly, a little ashamed of this sudden fear. Why, it wasn’t even really dark on account of the street lights.

“I’ll be waiting for you!”

But still his heart kept pounding in his ears, deafening him, and the fear had crept down into his legs and made them cold and heavy...

At one o’clock his landlady got up out of bed and turned off the hall light. She knew Mr. Twist wasn’t in yet and she was quite sad when she climbed back in bed. Mr. Twist was so young to get mixed up with a woman. Horses were bad enough.