The Devil Loves Me

15

“But why?” Nora said. “Why did she kill Duncan? She was very fond of him. She talked about him all the time.”

“Fond?” Prye repeated. “I don’t think either Duncan or Jane was fond of anyone. But she had a sincere respect for him and she was afraid of him. If she hadn’t been they might both be alive today. As long as Duncan lived Jane hadn’t the courage to disobey or disregard him. She was under his thumb almost completely. He chose her friends, prevented her from marrying, was squandering the money some of which should have been hers. How she found out that Duncan had withdrawn his last cent to go into this deal with Revel, I don’t know. But she had the best opportunity to find out. She was living with Duncan and had access to his mail and his check book. She probably knew about the deal right away. If she didn’t she might have suspected something was up when Duncan went all the way to Detroit to come into Canada.”

“Why did he?”

“The commuters between Windsor and Detroit keep the border officials pretty busy at certain hours and Duncan wanted to get through with a minimum of inspection. Jane probably didn’t understand what the deal was between Duncan and Revel but she grasped the essential fact: that Duncan had withdrawn all his money and was bringing it across the border. Rightfully the money was hers. Duncan had wasted many times his share. So she began to plan.

“The very planning of the murder was indicative of the type of mind behind it. She was not intelligent or quick-witted and she realized it. Her knowledge of her own mind motivated the studied, cautious planning of Duncan’s murder: the letter written to me with Duncan’s fountain pen, containing whole sentences from one of Duncan’s own letters to her; the destruction of the pen afterward; her own poisoning in circumstances that would force us to believe Duncan was the intended victim; the perfectly calculated amount of atropine she took—”

“How could she have known?” Nora asked.

Prye smiled. “Lots of pleasant books on the subject in every library. Jane’s own role in the drama was easy enough to play. There was very little acting required. She had a great respect for Duncan, she was dumb, she did resent Duncan’s being found by a lowly milkman, and so on. Her chief asset was the lack of imagination that attended her stupidity. She had only to wipe her mind clear of the fact that she had committed the murders and then act natural.”

“But Dennis?”

“My guess is that Dennis was sent back to the house by Revel to find the money and that he found it. It’s fairly likely that Dennis had been searching for it from the time that Duncan refused to hand it over. He’d searched in the ordinary places. There remained the basement.

“At any rate, Dennis told Jackson in the second-floor hall that he was going down to the basement to practice some billiard shots. Jane overheard the conversation and was instantly suspicious. She had read the letter written by Duncan to Revel and she knew Dennis was Revel’s agent. She knew too that the police had let him go and that he had come back. Dennis went to the basement and Jane made her preparations. She had taken Duncan’s gun from his clothes when she’d killed him. She started to go down after Dennis. At this point I arrived with Revel and we delayed her for some time. She didn’t have to force those tears she shed on Revel. She was pretty frantic at the delay. I made it worse by practically forcing her to come into the drawing room with me. She stayed with me until she thought of an excuse for getting out. She told me she had an idea, that she was going up to her room to verify it. Instead she went down to the basement, shot Dennis, and then went upstairs. The whole thing could have been done in three minutes.

“Hilda saw her going into her room immediately after she’d killed Dennis. Jane was bright enough to admit this to Sands. Of course she was going into her room, she confessed; she had just come from the drawing room, where she had thought of something important, a letter that Duncan had written her from Detroit. The letter had already been destroyed, of course, after she’d copied from it when she wrote the note to me.

“The police graphologist was positive that she had written the note to me after I’d given him a sample of her handwriting. But he could never have proved it. Graphologists today are in much the same position as fingerprint experts were thirty years ago; they are not regarded as scientists. Besides, the handwriting of relatives tends to be similar, and Duncan and Jane and Dinah were not only related, they went to the same school. A defense lawyer would have made much of this. So Sands’ problem was to get a witness who had seen Jane at the Royal York where Sammy Twist worked. The evidence of Sammy’s betting book made it likely that Jane had contacted Sammy at the hotel some time on Friday.”

“We were downtown shopping on Friday afternoon,” Nora said. “I had my hair done.”

“And while you were having your hair done Jane was getting in touch with Sammy. Probably she’d picked him out earlier in the week. I feel sure she wouldn’t have taken the risk of speaking to him personally, so she may have written a note and sent it to him in some way.”

“Why did she drag him into it at all?” Nora asked.

“Again part of the too-cautious planning. It was the stupidest and cleverest move she made. I can think of three good reasons for it. The first, her own safety: she had to be sure the poison was identified so she would have the proper treatment. The second, while her poisoning gave her some sort of alibi, the phone call would make her alibi more valid. That is, she could have poisoned herself but she could not have put in that telephone call. The third reason: she wanted the call to come from a man so the police would think a man had killed Duncan.

“Well, Sammy made the phone call and lost the money on the races. This was Sammy’s mistake. It made him ripe for the proposal Jane made over the telephone on Monday night. She had already gotten his name and address from one of the desk clerks on Friday in case it would prove necessary. The desk clerk has since remembered her. At any rate, some time on Monday Jane realized the terrible mistake she had made, and that realization meant the end of Sammy.”

“Mistake?” Nora said. “I can’t think of any.”

“I told you Sammy’s death made everything plain. Jane contacted Sammy on Friday. What was Sammy’s message to the hospital on Saturday?”

“ ‘Miss Stevens is an atropine case.’ ”

“Exactly,” Prye said. “How could anyone but Jane herself have known that she would drink out of Duncan’s pitcher of water? It was an incredible blunder. She rectified it as well as she could: she killed Sammy so that he couldn’t give evidence against her. Sammy had to die because at any moment he might go to the police and tell them that he made the phone call as instructed on Friday afternoon. But dead or alive Sammy could tell tales. Sands found his betting book in his locker.

“Jane kept her head well at this time. The murder of Sammy was risky and she didn’t know whether he had confided in anyone. In addition to that uncertainty she had Dinah to deal with. How Dinah found out that Jane was guilty I don’t know, but she did. She kept baiting Jane, trying to break her down without success, until Tuesday night. On Tuesday I told Dinah that what Duncan had brought with him was a parcel of money. Before that Dinah had been looking around, and on Tuesday night she was fairly sure where the money was. After the rest of us had retired Dinah went to Jane and passed out several strong hints. She coerced Revel into helping her.”

“Why?” Nora asked.

“It was to Revel’s advantage to have the money destroyed, since the money and the letter Duncan wrote to him added up to pretty strong evidence against him. This was Dinah’s chief motive. Trapping Jane into giving herself away was the secondary one. Jane couldn’t afford to ignore any hints. She had killed three times for that money and she went into the basement prepared to kill again if it was necessary.”

“She hadn’t any weapon,” Nora said.

“She didn’t need one when she was dealing with a woman. She was remarkably strong. She did admit to Sands that she’d been in some tennis finals. And it required considerable strength to climb down those sheets and up again. That trick automatically eliminated your mother and Aspasia. It also eliminated Jackson, but for a different reason. Jackson’s room is on the third floor and his using a bathroom on the second floor would have been too foolhardy.

“When Dinah threw the money into the fireplace she performed the one act that could have saved her life. Jane was lost to everything but the necessity of rescuing the money. The sight of it burning drove her insane.”

“Are you feeling better, Mrs. Revel?” Sands asked.

“Much better, thanks. Where is George?”

“He’s waiting in the hall. I’m leaving town tomorrow. I decided to see you first.”

“Why?”

Sands smiled. “I thought I’d give you hell.”

“I don’t care,” Dinah said. “I don’t care about anything now that my hair’s growing in.”

“Did you think I wasn’t aware that it was Miss Stevens?”

“She’s fooled a lot of people. When did you become aware?”

“After Sammy Twists death,” Sands said. “Before that I had only a list of suspicious questions: why didn’t she taste the eyedrops in the water she drank? I’ve experimented and found the taste very strong. Why was atropine used at all? Dr. Prye supplied the answer to this — atropine has a perfect antidote. Why was the poison administered so that its effects began at the church in a crowd of people with a hospital just around the comer? Why was she so completely ignorant of her brother’s affairs though they lived together? After Sammy’s death a number of other things cropped up in addition to the conclusive fact of the telephone call.”

“Prye told me of that,” Dinah said.

“There were the sheets, a typically female inspiration. There was her attitude toward you: she took too much from you, it wasn’t the natural reaction.”

“She required some wearing down,” Dinah said.

“And how did you know she did it?”

Dinah smiled. “I knew what I’d have done to Duncan if I’d been in her shoes, and I judged accordingly.”

“There’s her husband going in again,” Miss Tomson said. “Look.”

“It’s not her husband,” Miss Hearst replied. “They’re divorced. Isn’t that romantic?”

“Divorced? Well, I never! A disgrace, I call it, him hanging around all the time.”

“That’s love for you.”

“I don’t care what you call it, it’s a disgrace!”

“You wouldn’t know,” Miss Hearst said dreamily.

“Nora.”

“Yes, Mother.”

“Nora, I bought a copy of Emily Post’s Etiquette today. I’m afraid you can’t be married decently for some time.”

“Can’t I?”

“She says not,” Mrs. Shane sighed. “A small wedding, perhaps. A large one, no. I don’t want to hurry you, of course—”

“Mother, you’re an old fraud. You’re dying to get rid of me.”

“I should like to get settled. And those fifteen coffee—”

“Send them back, darling. Paul and I were married yesterday at the City Hall.”

“Dear heaven,” Mrs. Shane said piously.

There was fog again, a wall of fog built around the city, breaking the wind, muffling the gloomy wail of the foghorn from the lake.

As Sands walked a damp leaf fluttered against his coat sleeve and clung to it. As if I were Us last hope for life, Sands thought.

He jerked his arm, and the leaf fell drunkenly to the pavement and lay stained red with the blood of autumn and smudged with soot.

Indignity, Sands thought, the death of anything is an indignity.

He walked on, swinging his arms savagely through the fog.