The Devil's Cook

25

Later that day, which was a Wednesday, the story of Terry Miles was issued by Captain Bartholdi to the press. Too late for the morning edition of the Journal, it was lavishly treated in the evening edition — illustrated with garish photographs of the old Skully house and the bleak little room where the body was found, and of Terry and Jay, which were dug up from somewhere. And it was annotated with comment from the authorities in high places, and from young Vernon and Charles, who gave free rein to imaginations loosened at last from the threat of police displeasure. Vernon in particular revealed a talent for narrative embroidery.

Bartholdi, peppered by snipers from all sides, remained committed to his task. Early in the day he telephoned Jay to warn him of coming events; Jay, on the captain’s advice, arranged for the removal of Terry’s remains to a private mortuary from which, as soon as arrangements could be completed, they would be transferred to the west coast. Thereafter, still following Bartholdi’s advice, he locked his door and took his telephone out of its cradle. Even Fanny, who made two attempts, was unable to rouse him.

After dark, when he was at last on his way home, Bartholdi — having greater authority — was admitted. He remained with Jay behind a locked door for half an hour.

It was the following afternoon when Jay, expecting Bartholdi again, opened to find Brian O’Hara on his threshold. The gambler was meticulously dressed, from burnished black shoes to gray homburg, which he held at his side in a black-gloved hand. His face gave the impression of having been as carefully selected and donned for the occasion as his attire. Jay had the feeling that O’Hara, in rage and grief, had deliberately applied himself to the minutiae of his appearance as a sort of emotional camouflage.

“Oh,” said Jay. “I was expecting someone else.”

O’Hara voice had come out of the closet with his face and tie. “I tried your phone, but it was dead. May I come in?”

“If you must.”

Jay stepped aside, and O’Hara walked three steps into the room and stopped. He stripped off his gloves and held them with his homburg in his right hand.

“What I have to say will only take a minute,” he said. “It won’t be an expression of sympathy, I assure you.”

“Good. I’m relieved that you’re so sensitive to the situation.”

“There’s nothing to be gained by our being cute with each other. We know what the situation was last week. But now it’s changed, and what it is is something to be settled between us. Terry’s dead. I’ve been telling myself that — it’s hard to accept, but it’s true. She’s dead, and someone knocked her off. If it was you, I’ll find out. And if I find out before the police do, I’ll settle with you. I’m not making a threat. It’s a promise.”

“Is that all you came to say, O’Hara?”

“That’s all.”

“You might be surprised to know how little difference it makes to me. To me, Terry’s been dead for a long time. She was killed piecemeal, by you and others like you; and whoever killed her in the end, for whatever reason, was only finishing what the rest of you started. Now, if you have nothing more to say, I must ask to be excused. I’m expecting someone.”

O’Hara drew on his gloves and moved to the door, where he stopped. “Let’s hope — for your sake — I never have to see you or speak to you again.”

He opened the door and stood face to face with Bartholdi.

“How are you, O’Hara?” Bartholdi said. “I was about to knock.”

“And I was about to leave.”

“Don’t hurry because of me. My business isn’t private.”

“Mine was. And it’s finished, so I’ll be off.”

“I’d rather you wouldn’t, if you don’t mind. The business of all of us is substantially the same right now. We may as well settle it together.”

Bartholdi walked past O’Hara, followed by a short thin man with a golfer’s tan and gray hair so tightly curled on his head that it looked like raw wool. Jay, seeing Bartholdi’s companion, stepped forward and extended a hand.

“Hello, Mr. Feldman,” he said. “I’m glad to see you.”

The Los Angeles attorney took the hand and let it go. “I’m dreadfully sorry about all this, Jay. If there’s anything I can do—”

“There’s nothing.”

“You’re wrong,” Bartholdi said. “There’s a killer to talk about, and now is the time to do it. Did you invite the other tenants, Mr. Miles, as I asked?”

“The whole lot. Otis and Ardis Bowers. Farley and Fanny Moran. Ben Green. Even Orville Reasnor.”

“Good.” Bartholdi glanced at his watch. “O’Hara here is a bonus... We’re a few minutes early. I suggest you make yourselves comfortable while we’re waiting.”

They had just sat down when Fanny appeared, with Ben in tow. Fanny’s eyes were dime-bright with curiosity. It was apparent that, early as she was, she would have preferred being earlier, while Ben, for his part, would have preferred being later, or even absent.

“Well, here we are,” Fanny said. “Ben kept dragging his heels, but I saw to it that he didn’t sneak off and hide. Jay, why have you been avoiding everyone just when we wanted to help?”

“Come in and sit down, Miss Moran,” Bartholdi said, stepping between Jay and the question.

“Yes,” said Ben, “and, for God’s sake, shut up.”

“Don’t pay any attention to Ben,” Fanny said. “Did you know that we’re going to be married?”

“Like hell!” said Ben.

“Congratulations,” said Bartholdi. “Is your brother Farley coming?”

“He’s coming, but he had to go somewhere first. Ben, where did Farley have to go, and when will he be back?”

“I don’t know. He didn’t say.”

“Never mind,” Bartholdi said. “I know what he’s doing.”

“I don’t see why Farley always has to be the one who’s asked to do things,” Fanny said.

Bartholdi said, “Here are the others now.”

And so they were: Ardis and Otis Bowers and Orville Reasnor. They came into the room, Reasnor trailing a couple of paces as became a man who knew his place.

“I want to know what this is all about,” announced Ardis. “I don’t like being ordered around with no reason given.”

“You’ll see, Mrs, Bowers,” Bartholdi said. “Please sit down and be patient.”

“Be patient and be quiet,” Otis snapped to his wife with rare asperity. “Jay, I won’t even try to tell you how terrible I feel about all this.”

“Thanks,” said Jay. “I’d rather you didn’t.”

“Perhaps you all know Mr. O’Hara by reputation if not by sight,” Bartholdi said. “This other gentleman is Attorney Maurice Feldman, who has come on from Los Angeles. His time is limited — he’s got to return on the five o’clock jet. I specifically asked that you all be informed of that. Were you informed, Miss Moran?”

“Oh, yes,” said Fanny in a puzzled way. “So was Ben.”

“I told them all, as you instructed,” Jay said.

“Good. Then we’d better start.”

Bartholdi, pausing, divided a long look six ways, beginning with Fanny, as brightly inquisitive as a bird, and ending with O’Hara, as still as a stone. “What I’m going to do is to tell you who killed Terry Miles and take her murderer into custody.”

Even Fanny’s impetuosity was for the moment stilled.

“Practically from the beginning,” Bartholdi said, “I was convinced that Terry Miles was murdered by someone who knew her well — someone who saw her regularly. Three pieces of evidence — three clues, if you want — all pointed to this.

“First, there was the companion-newspaper carrying the Personal that was assumed, as was intended, to be addressed to the victim. I found it, you may remember, in the Miles’s kitchen, where it had been left with other newspapers, and where it went unnoticed by the murderer. The other paper had been planted in the living room, where it could easily be found, or pointed out if necessary.

“The only reasonable purpose of the Personal ad, I figured, was to draw attention away from this building, and to be attributed later to a kidnapper who was still to show his hand.

“Secondly, there was the casual remark of a certain young lady. After coming back to this building late last Friday night she had a nightcap, not prepared by her; and then, in spite of all the excitement, she got suddenly very sleepy and went to bed and slept like a log. This in itself would not be remarkable except that she was impressed enough by it to mention it afterward. The incident became significant when I considered the locations of the four apartments in the building in relation to one another. Was the sound sleep artificially induced — by sleeping pills in her drink, say — to insure non-interference with something that had to be done secretly and quickly nearby?

“Finally,” continued Bartholdi, “and of first importance, there was the ragout left simmering in the skillet. It’s common practice for a wife to prepare her husband’s dinner, even if she doesn’t intend to be there to eat it with him — yes, and even though she’s invited a guest to share it. But why, if Terry Miles did prepare her husband’s dinner, should she have prepared it in such a manner as to make her husband find it disagreeable, if not inedible? The ragout contained far too much onion for Mr. Miles’s well-advertised tastes — such an excess, in fact, that he was moved to complain about it openly and repeatedly during and after the meal. Did his wife put too many onions into the ragout out of malice? Hardly — not when she thought she was bound for an assignation; under such circumstances a woman would want, not to arouse her husband’s anger, but to keep conditions as normal as possible.

“The way it looked to me,” said Bartholdi, “Terry Miles did not prepare that ragout. Someone else did.” He paused, and in the pause he could see that he had them fast in his grip. “That ragout, if it had not been made by Terry Miles, must therefore have been prepared, cooked, and left simmering in the skillet by her murderer — only her murderer would want it thought that she was still alive; and the ragout, being an extension of her, so to speak, had to be left on the stove as if she had prepared it and left it there. She had announced her intention of making a ragout for dinner in the presence of a third party, who would certainly remember it later and mention it to the police. The murderer had no difficulty preparing it, because Mrs. Miles had recited the recipe. What he didn’t know, of course, was that when she made Student’s Ragout for her husband she modified the recipe and used far less onions than it called for.

“And that, together with all the other facts in this case, told me who the murderer was.”

Bartholdi fell silent, staring about him. The face of the murderer seemed to be hanging in midair before some of them; to others, apparently, it was a mere outline, still to be filled in with flesh and blood.

“The motive for Terry Miles’s murder was certainly the ransom to be collected after her supposed kidnapping,” Captain Bartholdi went on, “although the murderer had no intention of letting her live — she knew him and could identify him. What I needed was confirmation that the murderer could have had the one piece of information vital to his crime — that Terry Miles was an heiress; in other words, that there would be plenty of money available to ransom her. (Of course, his ransom plot never got off the ground; those two boys accidentally running across the dead woman in that empty house put a crimp in everything.)

“Who knew that Mrs. Miles had a fortune in her name? Her husband here knew — but Mr. Miles is eliminated as the kidnapper-murderer because he is the only suspect in this case who would have no reason to put too many onions in the ragout; in fact, every reason not to. Mrs. Miles knew. Attorney Feldman knew. But Mr. Feldman was in Los Angeles when all this was taking place, and there was all kinds of testimony to the effect that neither of the Mileses mentioned a word to anyone of Terry’s inheritance.

“Mr. Feldman has given me the link to the murderer’s knowledge about that inheritance.

“Some years ago a young pre-law student worked part time in Mr. Feldman’s law office in Los Angeles for experience and pocket money, Mr. Feldman tells me. Being in the office, the student had access to the information that Terry Miles was coming into her father’s considerable estate by the terms of his will. What’s more, this student left Los Angeles soon after Terry and Jay Miles got married, and moved east to Handclasp to enroll in the university here.

“So there was the last link. Terry Miles was murdered because she would have been able to name her kidnapper. She was murdered by the same man who planted the Personal ad as a red herring. By the same man who gave that sleeping dose to Fanny Moran — who lived directly over his apartment and might have been disturbed by what he had to do that night. Which was — after he was left alone with her early Friday afternoon and killed her — to keep her body hidden in his apartment until the night came and he could push the body out his rear window and transport it in his car to the old Skully house. Which he had rented beforehand, in disguise and under a phony name, so that he would have a place to hide the body while he tried to collect the ransom. By the same man who, Friday afternoon, prepared the ragout from the recipe Terry Miles had recited in his presence. By the same man who, made desperate by the ruin of his plans to collect ransom, because of the premature discovery of the body, had to go through the farce of playing the contactman for the ransom payment. By the only man who fits the entire picture.”

Bartholdi broke off and stood still, head cocked, diverted by the sound of a familiar action in the hall outside. He took out his old-fashioned pocket watch and carefully checked the time.

“In short,” Bartholdi concluded, “by the same man who has just slipped into his apartment across the hall under the illusion that his present danger is gone with the one man who can identify him as the former part-time officer clerk — the only suspect in this case who found it expedient not to be present with Mr. Feldman here. I’m afraid, you see, that I had Jay deliberately misinform you about Mr. Feldman’s commitment. He has no plane to catch this afternoon.”

No one moved or spoke until Jay Miles, his carefully disciplined tone broken by a kind of wonder, said, “But it’s incredible! How could he have lived here among us without ever arousing the least suspicion that he’s capable of such a thing?”

“There’s no questioning the facts, Mr. Miles. I learned a long time ago that you can’t always tell a killer from a psalm-singer.”

“But why didn’t he wait? In another year, Terry would have controlled her own money. All the complications with the estate could have been avoided.”

“We can hold Mr. O’Hara responsible for that. It must have been clear to the killer that Mrs. Miles’s marriage was about to end, and that O’Hara here would be next on her hitparade. Once she left here for good, the execution of the plan would have become much harder and more dangerous. Maybe impossible.”

“You had better go and get him,” O’Hara said suddenly, “if you don’t want me to save you the trouble.”

“There’s no hurry.” Bartholdi’s eyes engaged O’Hara’s, and for the first time there was in them a flicker of something like contempt. “I have men stationed outside, of course. And they can, if necessary, take you as easily as they’ll take Farley Moran.”

At that point, as though cued by the name, spoken at last, Fanny Moran rose.

“I believe,” she said, in a small, sick voice, “that I shall go upstairs.”

Ben Green climbed the stairs and entered Fanny’s apartment without knocking. She was seated in a chair by a window, staring out into the thickening darkness of the coming November night. He went over and placed a hand on her shoulder and stood beside her.

“Are they gone?” she asked.

“Yes, Fan.”

“I guess I’ve always known there was something wrong with him,” Fanny said. “I never liked him much, to tell the truth. It’s a hard thing to say. It was a feeling I had. A kind of — I don’t know — uneasiness, when I was with him.”

“Is that why you followed him to Handclasp? To try to look after him?”

“I’m not sure. I never asked myself. Maybe I didn’t really want to know. But I never dreamed he would come to as bad an end as this.”

“It’s the end, all right, and it’s bad, all right.”

“Yes.” She turned toward Ben Green and clutched his hand, and her voice was at once fiercely possessive and a plea for comfort. “Now, darn you, maybe you’ll stop being so sensitive about your family! The shoe’s on the other foot. Do you want to marry the half-sister of a murderer?”

“No,” said Ben Green. Fanny’s lower lip trembled; she began to blubber. “Fan... Fan, sweet bunch, don’t. Damn it all, that ‘no’ slipped out out of habit. I meant... yes!”