The Paradise Affair

21 Sabina

The subconscious mind was a problem-solving marvel. It kept right on functioning independently while the conscious mind was asleep, sorting through memory and supplying elusive answers to troubling questions. When Sabina awakened on Thursday morning, she knew what it was she had overlooked, or rather failed to recognize, in Gordon Pettibone’s study, and therefore the probable meaning of his dying words and the significance of RL462618359. Combined, they explained why the shooting had taken place in the study in the dead of night, and part of the motive for the crime.

But she needed to verify her suppositions before she acted on them, which meant another visit to the Pettibone house. She consulted the cameo watch she wore pinned at her bosom when dressed; it was not yet eight o’clock, early enough that Philip Oakes should not have left for Great Orient Import-Export, if in fact that was his intention today.

She dressed hurriedly, pocketed the two pieces of driftwood and the envelope containing the sliver of wood and line of letters and numbers, and left the guesthouse. Once again she took the shortcut across the Pettibone property, went around to the front of the house and rang the bell. She had to ring it twice more before Cheng opened the door.

“It’s urgent that I speak to Mr. Oakes,” she told him. “Is he here?”

Yes, he was. Apparently he hadn’t arisen yet. When she repeated the urgent need to speak with him, Cheng allowed her to enter the foyer and climbed the staircase to deliver the message.

She had to wait several minutes before Philip Oakes appeared, clad in a wine-red robe, his usually slicked-down sandy hair hastily combed. Eye bags and other sleep marks made him look even more dissipated. “What is it, Mrs. Quincannon? What is so urgent?”

“It’s imperative that I have another look inside the study.”

“Imperative? Imperative? Why?” His expression brightened. “Have you thought of something to prove my uncle’s death was accidental?”

Sabina said evasively, “We’ll discuss that at a later time. May I have that look?”

“Yes. Of course.”

He led her down the hallway to the study door. “Alone again, please,” she said then. “I won’t be more than a few minutes.”

“Very well. As you wish. I’ll be in the parlor.”

She spent no more than fifteen minutes inside the study. Suppositions verified.

In the parlor she said to Philip Oakes, “Now the police need to be summoned.”

“The police? The police?”

“Yes. Captain Jacobsen, if he is available.”

“... Ah! Then you do have proof!”

“I believe I do, but not of an accident. Your uncle, Mr. Oakes, was murdered.”

Captain Jacobsen was available, fortunately, and soon arrived in a police van with two uniformed officers, who waited for him outside. He wore the same clothing as the day before, the only difference being that his bow tie today was magenta, but his manner was more brusque than it had been in the Pritchards’ living room.

“I must say I am surprised that you involved yourself in this matter, Mrs. Quincannon.”

“I did so at Mr. Oakes’s request. And not because I expected to reach a conclusion other than yours.”

“But you did reach a different conclusion. According to the telephone call from Mr. Oakes, you contend his uncle’s death was neither suicide nor accident but a case of homicide.”

“With just cause.”

“Do you suspect who committed the crime and how it was done?”

“I do, and I believe I can prove it to your satisfaction.”

“If so,” he said, “I will bow to your superior detective skills.” There was no irony in the words. He seemed not at all resentful of the possibility of having made an incorrect diagnosis, or of being proven wrong by a woman. A rare breed of police officer, Captain Emil Jacobsen.

Philip Oakes and Earlene Thurmond were called for and the four of them gathered in the study. Oakes, dressed now in one of his dapper suits, was excited and eager, if still somewhat skeptical; he had tried unsuccessfully to talk Sabina into explaining while they waited. Miss Thurmond had not been told why the police were summoned — she had remained in her room until Captain Jacobsen’s arrival — but she had to have some idea. Though her demeanor was as phlegmatic as it had been the previous afternoon, there was tension in her movements, her rigid stance.

“You have the floor, Mrs. Quincannon,” the captain said. “Tell us why you believe Gordon Pettibone was murdered.”

“Murdered? Is that what this is all about?” Miss Thurmond’s exclamation was scornful. “The notion is preposterous. He was alone in here with the door and windows bolted.”

“One of the windows was not bolted,” Sabina said.

“That isn’t so, they both were. I told you yesterday that Mr. Oakes and I both checked them.”

Sabina went to the shutter-free window, the others at her heels. “Checked them how? By turning this bolt knob” — she put her fingers on it — “or simply giving the handles a tug? That was Mr. Pettibone’s method of checking the windows in the evenings, wasn’t it?”

“I never paid any attention. But I tell you the bolt on that window was in place when I tested it.”

“It was not in place when he was shot. The two halves were unbolted then, and had been for some time before and after the shooting.”

“That is impossible—”

“No, it isn’t. Unbolted, but held tightly shut by another means from outside.”

“What means?” Philip Oakes demanded. “What means?”

John, in Sabina’s place, would have seized the opportunity to indulge his flair for the dramatic and drawn out the explanation, but she had not been born with a theatrical “ham bone.” She believed in being direct and concise. She released the bolt, opened the two halves, and pointed out the mark on the sill. Then she told of the sliver of wood caught atop the one frame, took from her pocket the two wedge-shaped pieces of driftwood, held them up in the palm of her hand.

“The sliver came from this one,” she said, indicating the mark in the larger, blackened piece, “when it was inserted at the top joining of the two halves. The other piece was inserted at the bottom joining, and both were hidden from view in here by the width of the frames. Together they provided a tight temporary seal, one that passed the handle-tugging test.”

The explanation had the desired impression on Captain Jacobsen. “Where did you find them?” he asked.

“In the grass outside,” Sabina said. “Cast away after they were no longer needed.”

“And when was that?”

“That I found them? After you left yesterday morning, Captain.”

“Why were they used in the first place?”

“To permit surreptitious access in the middle of the night.”

“By whom? And for what purpose?”

“By Miss Earlene Thurmond.”

The secretary said with feigned outrage, “Poppycock! How dare you accuse me!”

“It couldn’t be anyone else but you,” Sabina said. “I saw you on the beach Sunday, searching among the driftwood cast up by Saturday night’s storm. You picked up something small and dark — this black wedge-shaped piece.”

“No. I picked up a shell, not a piece of driftwood.”

Sabina ignored the denial. “It was the storm damage to the shutter that gave you the idea, wasn’t it? That is why you acted when you did. You spent much of your time in this room each day, surely not every minute in the company of Mr. Pettibone. It was easy enough for you to unbolt the window when left alone that day, then to go outside and wedge these pieces into the frames.

“Late that night you slipped out, removed the wedges, and climbed in here. Mr. Pettibone caught you and locked the door after entering, then opened the drapes to confirm your method of access. In some fashion during the confrontation you managed to gain possession of his pistol and shot him. Afterward you climbed back out through the window, reinserted the driftwood pieces, rushed to the back stairs and up to your room, and threw on a robe to hide the fact that you were fully dressed — a process that took several minutes. That is why you didn’t appear until after Mr. Oakes broke down the door.”

“You have no proof of any of that.”

Captain Jacobsen fixed the woman with a stern eye. “You deny these accusations, Miss Thurmond?”

“Of course I deny them. What possible purpose could I have for such... such chicanery?”

Sabina said, “The rifling of Mr. Pettibone’s safe.”

Oakes, who had been staring at Miss Thurmond with an admixture of loathing and awe, emitted a bleat of surprise. “What’s that? Safe? There is no safe in here.”

“Yes there is, a well hidden one. Your uncle must have had it installed when the house was built, long before you and Miss Thurmond came to live here. Either she discovered it by accident, or he made the mistake of revealing its presence for reasons of his own. In any event she knew about it and was desperate for something locked inside.”

His eyes roamed the room. “Where the devil is this safe?”

“Pick up sticks,” Sabina said.

“What? What?”

“The safe’s existence and location was what your uncle was trying to convey with his dying words; that is the reason he crawled to where he was found and thrust out his arm — an effort to point, not to rise. He must have spoken as he did, instead of simply naming Miss Thurmond, because whatever she was after in the safe will prove her guilt beyond any doubt. I believe we’ll find that it is still there. She hadn’t enough time to remove it that night, and while she could have done so sometime during the past two days, with all the activity and the fact that the library door can no longer be locked, it would have been an unnecessarily risky undertaking. Neither you nor Cheng knew of the safe, and she didn’t expect that I had discovered it; she could afford to wait until things settled down and she was alone in the house.”

Earlene Thurmond had nothing more to say, but if her eyes had had claws, they would have torn Sabina’s throat out.

Oakes said to Sabina, “I still don’t understand the meaning of ‘pick up sticks.’”

“You told me that your uncle spoke those words with a pause between the last two. If he had lived long enough, there would have been a fourth word. ‘Pick up... sticks... wood.’”

“Wood? What wood?”

Sabina went to the fireplace hearth. “The half-dozen sticks of firewood stacked here — stacked loosely, not placed in a container of any kind, and never used because no fire was ever laid on this pristine hearth. I noticed them yesterday but it was not until this morning that I realized that their purpose was not decoration but concealment.”

As she had done earlier, Oakes and Captain Jacobsen moved the sticks of firewood to the center of the hearth. Access to the safe was a two-foot-square opening camouflaged by a cover snugly fitted into the surrounding bricks; a layer of matching brick-and-mortar had been skillfully affixed to a thin metal plate, thus rendering it undetectable except on close inspection. A finger hole on one end allowed the cover to be lifted and then removed. The safe imbedded beneath was a small Mosler with a combination dial.

Oakes said, “It can’t be opened without the combination.”

“I have the combination,” Sabina said. “I found it in the same place Miss Thurmond must have, on a card in the Bible shelved with the Oriental history books.” She produced the envelope on which she’d copied the line of letters and numbers. “RL462618359. That is the combination, coded by the letters RL for right and left rotations and the numbers run together in order: right to 46, left to 26, right to 18, left to 35, right to 9. I unlocked the safe earlier to make sure that was the correct rotation, then locked it again. I did not feel I had the right to look inside without a witness present.”

She handed the envelope to Oakes, who proceeded to rotate the dial accordingly. The safe opened easily to his upward lift. Inside, along with Gordon Pettibone’s will and a small amount of cash, was what Earlene Thurmond had been after — an envelope containing documented proof that she had embezzled the sum of two thousand dollars during her employment at the Honolulu branch of the Great Orient Import-Export Company, proof that could have sent her to prison if revealed.

“He was a blackmailer and a sadist!” she cried when confronted with it. Her outrage now was genuine, all pretense at innocence gone. “He forced me to move in here with him, made me work for a pittance, shared my bed at night whenever he felt like it. That’s how he caught me Tuesday night — snuck into my room and found me gone. He once told me where the documents were, to torment me because he believed I’d never be able to open the safe. I would have destroyed the evidence if I’d had time to get it, then left here and gone back to San Francisco. But I’m not sorry he caught me, not sorry he was careless with the pistol and it went off when I snatched it out of his hand. I’m glad he’s dead. Glad!”

Not one villain but two, Sabina thought as Captain Jacobsen placed Earlene Thurmond under arrest. Or two and a half, counting Philip Oakes. As John was fond of saying, a pox on criminals of every stripe.