The Devil Loves Me

13

Even before she opened her eyes Dinah started to cry. She cried quietly, without moving. From his chair Prye could see the tears streaming from her closed eyelids. He was still angry about Sammy. He watched Dinah, detached, critical, without sympathy.

He said finally, “What are you crying about? Are you sorry for Sammy or sorry for yourself? In either case there’s nothing I can do. Do you mind if I go now?”

She opened her eyes and blew her nose. Prye went over and sat down beside the bed. “While you’re crying, you might toss in a gallon or so for Revel too. He’s still in love with you. He’s practically pushed himself into the penitentiary to prove it.”

She blew her nose again and said, “How?”

“He told me what Duncan brought to this house, what he was killed for. He wants to get the mystery cleared up so that you can go away from this house and be happy. I told him it was a lost cause, that you’d never be happy.”

“You think that’s true?”

“Certainly.”

“Why can’t I be? Why won’t I be?”

“Because you don’t know what happiness is. You think it’s living on an exalted plane all the time, a constant ecstasy. You want to swoon with bliss twenty-four hours a day.”

“I don’t!” she cried shrilly.

“You want to sink up to your eyes in an oozy mixture of sweetness and light, a sluggish syrup that will paralyze you. You’re a nihilist. You believe in nothing really, because you believe that happiness is unconsciousness, unawareness of unhappiness. You’re in love with death. There are thousands of neurotics like you, many of them alcoholics, drinking themselves into a stupor, groping always toward extinction, the bliss of unconsciousness.”

“But why? If I am like this there is a reason. I want to know.”

“I am hampered by my lack of knowledge of you and your family. But I would guess that you experienced a great deal of illness, perhaps a death, when you were a child.”

“Yes.”

“Freud would trace it back to some unpleasant sex experience which has been repressed. I don’t always agree with Freud but I think such a repression, added to your painful memories of illness and death, has made you what you are. I think you’re a passionate woman who has never known fulfillment.”

She was very white. She said, “No, no, I haven’t.”

“I believe your marriage was a constant struggle not between you and Revel as you thought, but between you and you, between the instinctive sex-hungry Dinah and the Dinah who hates her own body and takes off her clothes in the dark. To you the natural functions of the body are depraved. But that’s a stiff dose for your mind to take, so your mind didn’t take it. It indulged in some dexterous hocus-pocus, with the result that the depravity applies to everything male. Your hate for your own body has been directed into a hate for all men. Me, even.”

“You,” she said grimly. “I’d hate you anyway for knowing so much about me.”

“That’s often the case,” he said in a mild voice. “Neurotics seldom want to be understood. Hospitals are full of them — little whining cats that rub up against you for sympathy, showing their wounds but not letting you touch them. They’ve got to keep their wounds open, you see; they’re what make them different from other people. Their wounds are their excuse in the eyes of the world, their justification.”

She sat up straight in the bed. “I’m not like that! I’m not asking for sympathy.”

“I’m just telling you what I think. You don’t have to believe me. I’ll also tell you what I’d do if I were you.”

“All right.” Her voice was tired.

“It won’t be easy. In your case I don’t recommend psychoanalysis. It has cured some neurotics, but in others it has merely intensified their egocentricity and magnified their ills. I’d advise you to try switching the emphasis of your life and quit moping over the inadequacy of your sex life.”

“I don’t—”

“Then I’d take some of my money, if I were you, and spend it. Very few people are civilized enough to enjoy a lot of money by spending it on themselves. You might try some social-service work. Go to a baby clinic and change a few diapers. There’s something very earthy about changing diapers. After that you might try having a few babies of your own, say three or four, for instance.”

“Four!” She looked horrified. “Whose babies?”

“George will do,” Prye said easily. “Providing he’s not in jail. And if I know George he won’t be. Yes, a few babies by all means. Instead of worrying about yourself you’ll be worrying about Junior refusing his spinach and whether little Mary’s hair will be curly.”

“But... heredity?”

“George isn’t a born crook,” Prye said. “Besides, that type of heredity is important only when it’s aided by environment.”

“What did George do exactly?”

Prye looked down at her thoughtfully. “Really want to know? George didn’t tell me. He merely gave me the clues. My subconscious did the rest by making me whistle ‘Yankee Doodle.’ ”

“Oh, don’t be mysterious,” she said impatiently.

He got up and went to the door. “Dennis and Duncan were killed because they had fifty thousand dollars and somebody else wanted it.”

“Money?” Dinah said. “Just money?”

“Money is enough,” Prye said.

He closed the door behind him, stood for a minute in the hall, and went downstairs. Sands was just coming in the front door. He looked calm, almost indifferent, though his face was a shade grayer.

“I’ve figured something out for you,” Prye said.

Sands leaned against the wall, as if he were too tired to stand alone. “Have you?”

“Yes. I know what a brunette is.”

Sands said, faintly ironic, “You know?”

“It’s a thousand dollars. I’m pretty sure of it.”

“Oh.” Sands shot him a quick glance. “Revel break down and confess?”

“I did some drinking,” Prye said smoothly. “How much did Stevens withdraw from his account this past month?”

“Forty-two thousand dollars.”

“In American money. And how much would that be worth in Canadian money?”

“At the present exchange rate, 10 per cent, about forty-six thousand dollars.”

“That’s the official exchange rate,” Prye said. “But if you know where to go, and as a broker Duncan would know, you can buy a Canadian dollar in the United States for eighty American cents. So with his forty-two thousand dollars Duncan could buy more than fifty thousand dollars in Canadian money. If that could be smuggled across the border into Canada, as in fact it was, it could be used to buy forty-six thousand American dollars, at the regular exchange rate. That would make a clear profit of four thousand dollars.

“Stevens would get half for his part, buying up Canadian money cheaply in the United States and bringing it across the border. Revel would get the other half for buying up American securities in Canada and then turning them over to Stevens.”

“A conspiracy to evade the regulations of the Foreign Exchange Control Board,” Sands said. “It’s been done before. I didn’t think of it in connection with this case. The profit seems so disproportionately small compared to the risk. Two thousand dollars for each of them.”

Prye said dryly, “But fifty thousand dollars for someone else.”

“Or for Revel,” Sands said. “If the deal went through he would have received two thousand. But if he didn’t have to return American securities to Stevens, his profit is fifty thousand, the same as a hijacker’s would be.”

“Revel doesn’t need the money.”

Sands smiled cynically. “Everybody needs fifty thousand dollars, even as you and I. How is the money done up?”

“I’m not that psychic,” Prye said. “I suppose it’s wrapped and that the parcel is fairly bulky and that it’s hidden somewhere in the house.”

“My men were over the house thoroughly yesterday. Nothing was found.”

“Stevens was pretty subtle.”

“Perhaps he was subtle but he was no Houdini. If the money were here it would have been found.”

“Williams found it, I think. Did he put it back? He must have. He—”

“How do you know Williams found it?”

“He’s dead, isn’t he?” Prye said.

“Get Revel for me,” Sands said. “There are two possible reasons for Williams’ death: either he found the money or he knew who murdered Stevens.”

Prye went out and came back to the library in five minutes with Revel. Sands asked Revel politely to sit down, and Revel, puzzled but still indifferent, sat down in the leather chair beside the desk.

“I am not,” Sands said, “asking you to say anything which may be used in evidence. I think personally that you’re involved in some crooked deal which would annoy the Foreign Exchange Control Board, but I can’t prove it and you know I can’t. We’ll leave that then. I want you to tell me if, when you talked to Williams at the hotel shortly before he was murdered, he hinted that he knew who murdered Stevens.”

Revel smiled. “Did he act as though he had guilty knowledge? No. I think he was bewildered and a little scared.”

“Why?”

“Scared you might arrest him, I fancy. I’ve had the same feeling myself now and then.”

“Why did he come back to this house when I’d given him permission to return to Montreal?”

“Why?” Revel said. “Why do people do anything? For love or money. Perhaps both.”

“Did you send him back here?”

Revels smile broadened into a grin. “What a nasty question, Inspector. If I admit sending him back, it would mean that I admit knowledge of those elusive fifty brunettes, wouldn’t it? It would also mean that since I wanted to find out where they were I couldn’t be the murderer. So you are tempting me to clear myself of a murder charge by getting myself embroiled in a lesser charge.”

“Nothing of the sort,” Sands said brusquely. “You don’t think Williams had knowledge of the murderer?”

“Quite sure of it. I believe he even suspected me!”

“Horrible thought,” the inspector said. “All right. You may go.”

Revel looked surprised but willing to go. When he had left Prye said, “And what about Sammy?”

“Nothing much beyond the essential fact that he is dead. Struck from behind with something heavy and sharp. Sutton suggests an ax, but the weapon hasn’t been found. Apparently Sammy was struck down on the driveway some time before midnight. You must have forgotten to lock your nimble seat. The garage is never locked, I’m told.” He smiled sourly. “Precautions like that are considered unnecessary in this section of the city. Someone rang up Sammy, told him to come here at a certain time, waited for him to come, and killed him.”

“And where in hell was the policeman we’ve been billeting?”

“That’s the interesting part of it,” Sands said softly. “He was in the hall downstairs with a clear view of both halls. The lights were on and he swears he was awake.”

“And that means?”

“Fairies,” Sands said. “The fairies killed Sammy, because nobody went through those halls after eleven o’clock last night except Revel, who went into your room around one and went straight back to his own room half an hour later.”

“Windows?”

“The first-floor windows are out. The policeman says that everyone was upstairs from a quarter to eleven.”

“Second-floor windows then,” Prye said. “I’d rather believe in an agile murderer than in fairies. There is ivy growing on the walls, trees surrounding the house, and there’s the old boarding-school dodge of knotted sheets.”

Sands said, “The ivy’s too young to support a cat. The trees are too far away. And the sheets— Perhaps I’d better see Hilda.” He rang the bell for Jackson.

When Jackson came in he was looking shocked and a little frightened and his voice trembled.

“Where is Hilda?” Sands asked.

“Upstairs,” Jackson said. “I— She is making up the rooms.”

“Will you get her, please?”

Jackson hesitated. “I don’t think she’ll come.”

“She’ll come.”

Jackson’s face got red. “She’s scared. You’re a policeman. You’re used to seeing people murdered. What does it matter to you? If people weren’t murdered you wouldn’t have a job—”

He had to stop because he couldn’t control his voice. He was afraid he might cry, so he turned and went out, very stiffly.

Sands watched him go, his eyes rather sad. “He’s a very young man,” he said gently.

Prye said, “Find anything out about him?”

“Just that he went to Harvard as he says he did. He waited on table in one of the residences.”

Prye said, “So that’s it,” and Sands nodded. They were both a little embarrassed at their own softness.

When Hilda came in her eyes were red with weeping. She refused to sit down but stood just inside the door, defiant and sullen.

“I don’t know anything,” she said.

“You look after the upstairs, Hilda?”

“That’s part of my job. I make the beds, change the linen twice a week, and tidy—”

“When do you change the linen, Hilda?”

Her gaze said plainly, I might have expected stupid questions like this. She said finally, “Mondays and Thursdays. You’re wasting my time. There’s been three murders done and you—”

“Yesterday morning, then, you changed the linen on all the beds?”

“Most of them.”

“What do you do with the soiled linen?”

“Put it down the laundry chute. It goes into a basket in the cellar.”

“Have you made the beds this morning?”

The scorn of the righteous was in her voice. “Naturally I have. It’s nearly lunch time. I’m just tidying up the bathrooms.”

“Notice anything unusual about any of the beds this morning?” Sands asked.

She looked faintly contemptuous. “Sure I did. I found Mrs. Revel in bed crying, and I found a hole in one of the blankets where Mr. Revel had burned it with a cigarette, if that’s what you mean by unusual.”

Sands regarded her coldly. “I’d like to go down to the cellar and see the laundry basket. I want you to come too.”

“Why?” she cried. “Why? I don’t want to go down there where... where Mr. Williams was— I want to go home!”

“You want your mother,” Sands said.

She began to cry. “I w-want my m-mother!”

Sands said, “You come down into the cellar with me and I’ll send you home to your mother.”

He took her by the arm and led her out. Prye followed them to the cellar. The laundry basket was beside the steps. Sands paused in front of it and said, “I want you to count the sheets, Hilda, and as you count, hand them to me.”

She started to pull out the sheets, still crying, but softly and happily.

“Sixteen,” Sands said, five minutes later. “Is that all?”

Hilda straightened up. “N-no, I don’t think so. Let me see. I didn’t change Mr. Revel’s bed, as he hasn’t been here very long, and I didn’t go into Mr. Stevens’ or Mr. Williams’ room. But all the other beds would make eighteen sheets. That means there are two missing.”

“So it does,” Sands said.

“What could that mean? Who’d want two dirty sheets?”

Sands told her she’d better go up to her room and pack if she still wanted to go home. She exhibited her first sign of willing co-operation by running up the steps two at a time. Sands and Prye faced each other across the laundry basket.

“The old boarding-school dodge,” Sands said, “seems to have worked. How it was worked is another question. If any of the guests came through the first- and second-floor halls carrying two soiled sheets Constable Clovis would remember. Sitting at the front door, he had a view of both halls. However, we’ll examine the rooms on the second floor.”

They were lucky. The second room they looked at was the bathroom beside Duncan’s room. There were unmistakable signs that someone had crawled through the window: the soot on the outside ledge was disturbed and several strands of lint were caught in the roughened wood.

“Nerve,” Sands said. “Or desperation. Or both. Where could the sheets have been tied to?”

Prye pointed. “The toilet. That would give the whole thing a nice homey touch.”

“Ridiculous, isn’t it? A grim and desperate murderer tying a sheet round a toilet, all done in perfect seriousness.” He looked out of the window again. “The tree there would prevent anyone from accidentally seeing the operation. The bathroom door would be locked — perfectly legitimate. And the sheets? Brought in under a bathrobe, I suppose, taken out the same way, thrown down the laundry chute, recovered later, and put in the furnace. Neat. Nothing incriminating. Baths are being taken all the time. Question is, did the policeman notice who went into this bathroom?”

The policeman, roused out of bed by the telephone, did not know. Everyone, he said, was going into bathrooms at that time. They were all retiring. Naturally he paid no attention.

“Naturally,” Sands repeated to Prye with a grimace. “Probably closed his eyes to avoid embarrassing the ladies.”

He left Prye standing in the hall and went outside by the back door. Two men were putting Sammy Twist on a stretcher and covering him. When the cover was over him Sammy didn’t look human at all. He was still curled up like a baby.

Sands said, “Wait!” and went over and lifted the cover from Sammy’s face.

“Can’t you — straighten him out a little?” he asked the men who were carrying the stretcher.

The men looked at him in surprise. One of them opened his mouth to speak hut Sands said coldly, “What I mean is, he looks a bit — messy. Oh well. Never mind. Go ahead.”

He walked off, shrugging his shoulders.

“Well, I’ll be goddamned,” one of the men said. “Looks messy, does he? It ain’t enough that the poor guy is murdered, he’s got to look cute. That Sands has no heart.”

“He ain’t human,” the other man agreed.

They had a profound discussion on Sands’ inhumanity all the way to the morgue.

Sands walked back to the house, thinking, I’ll have to be more careful. I’m getting soft. When he went into the hall he saw Dinah coming down the steps toward him. She was moving slowly and carefully, like a woman who has been ill for a long time. Sands noticed for the first time how thin she was, with the thinness and awkwardness of a schoolgirl.

He said, “I’m sorry you had such an unpleasant experience, Mrs. Revel.”

Her eyes looked at him blankly for a moment. “Yes, it was unpleasant. I don’t want to think about it.” She shivered. “He was cold... cold. Was that your Sammy Twist?”

Sands nodded.

“He was awfully young,” Dinah said, stroking the banister with her hand. Little whining cats, she thought, that rub up against your leg for sympathy. “I was never young. When I was born I looked like a little old man, I’m told, all wrinkled and gray.”

“Most babies are red,” Sands said.

“Yes, I know. I was gray. A little old man.” She came down the rest of the steps, stroking the banister as she moved, her face strange and dreamy like a cat’s. “Of course I should never have been born at all.”

“No,” Sands said, fascinated by the movement of her hand, soft and quick on the banister.

“My mother was shocked when she saw me. She thought she was going to have a baby and then she saw me, a little gray old man. Obscene, isn’t it?”

He wanted to escape from her. He wanted to tell her to keep her chin up or to go to hell, he didn’t care which.

Jackson came out of the kitchen, ringing the bell for lunch. Dinah walked away, without speaking, toward the dining room.

“Will you be having lunch, sir?” Jackson asked.

“No, thanks,” Sands said.

He shut himself up in the library before anyone else appeared.

Dinah stood by the buffet looking at herself in the mirror. I look crazy, she thought, like a crazy, white-faced witch. Nobody would be in love with me, certainly not George. Witch—

She knew it was George coming in by the sound of his step, but she didn’t turn around.

“Hello, Dinah,” Revel said. “I’ve been talking to Prye.”

“He has no right to talk about me to anyone,” she said without turning around.

“He wasn’t talking about you but about me. He thinks I’m a heel. I’m inclined to agree. I must be getting senile.”

“You’ll be thirty-three in two weeks.”

“Will I?” He seemed surprised. “You must remember to send me a pint of cyanide for my birthday.”

“Where are you going after... after all this?”

“Home,” he said. “Unless the police choose a new address for me.”

“Home,” she repeated. “Where do you live, George?”

He shrugged his shoulders. “Same place.”

“Is it exactly the same?”

“I think so.”

It seemed strange to her that it should be exactly the same. She said, “Except my room, of course.”

He looked at her gravely. “Your room is exactly the same too. I like yellow curtains.”

“So do I. Like the sun.”

“Yes, like the sun,” he said.

Their breathing was quick and uneven. She turned her head away.

“You’ll come back,” he said.

“No.” She lifted her hand slowly to her head. “No, it’s too late.”

Prye came in with Nora and her mother, and then Jane and Aspasia clinging to each other, two gloomy wraiths. Jane’s eyes were swollen and the lids were pink and transparent.

“What’s the matter with Jane?” Prye asked Nora in a whisper.

“What’s the matter with all of us?” Nora said. “Murders. Our emotions don’t operate on the sub-zero level that yours do. Besides, she’s just found out that Duncan left her almost nothing.”

“Who told her?”

“Dinah,” Nora said grimly. “Who else?”

Jackson came in with the soup. When he had gone out again, Mrs. Shane said, “Do let us have a pleasant meal for once. I’m sure everything will turn out all right and that all of us will come out unscathed.”

Aspasia was in the grip of the tragic muse again. “I might have saved these young men,” she said sonorously. “But no, no one would listen to me. I was scorned, even as Christ and Cassandra—”

“And President Roosevelt,” Dinah said.

“I might have saved them.”

“How?” Mrs. Shane inquired acidly.

“By concentrating on Good,” Aspasia replied.

“Nobody was stopping you.”

“It requires more than one.”

“Aunt Aspasia is right!” Jane cried defiantly. “If you hadn’t all been so unpleasant, so offensive even— But you have been and you are and you always will be! And now I’m going to s-s-starve to death.”

“The argument is a little hard to follow,” Prye said. “Are you going to starve because we’re offensive or—”

Jane turned to him. “And you! You’re supposed to be a detective and you haven’t detected anything, not a single thing. If I were Nora I’d think twice before marrying you, I’d think twice!”

Prye said to Nora, “You did, didn’t you, darling?”

Nora grinned and said that if all her thoughts on the subject were laid end to end they’d reach from the level of the present conversation to that of the Einstein theory.

“I don’t want any lunch,” Jane said stiffly.

“That’s fine,” Dinah said. “Good common sense. If you’re going to starve anyway you might as well train for it. Eventually, why not now?”

“Oh, do sit down, Jane!” Mrs. Shane exclaimed. “Don’t be so childish. Really, you’d think I was running a boardinghouse the way people jump up and down and dash in and out at mealtime. Jane!”

Jane sat down and finished her meal in a cold and disapproving silence. After lunch she went up to her room and locked her door.

“Sulking,” Nora told Prye in the drawing room. “Duncan used to do the same thing. She’s copying him. It’s not Jane’s real nature to sulk. She’d prefer to weep prettily to an audience of six or more males.”

“God grant I be not one,” Prye said fervently. “I’m a bit weary of weeping ladies.”

“I’m sorry for that. I’m due to break down any minute.”

“You’re different,” Prye said. He kissed her thoroughly to prove how different she was.

“I don’t feel much better,” Nora said gloomily. “Is it true that you haven’t tried to help Inspector Sands?”

“No.”

“But you just can’t do anything, is that it?”

He did not reply. She looked at him sharply.

“Paul, you know who did it? Tell me.”

“Do you want to know?”

She turned away. “No. I don’t know. It’s all such a muddle. That young boy—”

“Sammy,” Prye said. “Without Sammy we couldn’t have found out—”

“We?”

“Sands and I.”

“Is he — going to arrest anyone?”

Prye said, “It’s Sands’ problem. I’m keeping out of it.”

“Because of me?”

Prye took her hand. “Don’t think or talk of it. We don’t know what’s going to happen or when. But there’s nothing we can do, except go on as we have been.”

“Until somebody else is murdered?”

“There won’t be any more murders,” he said quietly. “The only person who is in danger realizes her danger — and locks her door.”