Crime is Murder (8 page)

The only practical way to answer Johnny’s question was to get back to the house and ask the professor. And she was right—he was in a state of nerves. He was perched on the edge of one of the lounge chairs when Lisa and Johnny came through the French windows. He came to his feet at the sight of them and stood with his back to the cold fireplace. The hat in his hands was well on its way to acquiring a shredded brim.

“Forgive me,” he said, “for barging in this way without an invitation. I simply had to talk to you.”

“I’m glad you’ve come,” Lisa said. “I’ve been wanting to talk to you, too. We did part company under rather provocative circumstances.”

The professor stared morosely at the hat in his hands. “That was very foolish of me,” he said. “I shouldn’t have said what I did.” And then he looked up and his eyes met Lisa’s. “You talked to Joel after I left. I must ask you, Miss Bancroft, how did he act? What did he say?”

“Very little,” Lisa answered, “about you.”

The wind from the open windows was getting a bit stronger. Lisa placed a paperweight over some of the material on her desk and then sat down behind it. The floor was the professor’s now. No quick exists, no unfinished tales now. He looked terribly uncomfortable, but this call was his idea and he had to go on.

“I merely asked because I’m worried about the boy,” he said. “I can’t reach him lately. He tolerates me, that’s all. He merely tolerates me.”

“He’s a very busy young man,” Lisa suggested.

That wasn’t the right answer. The professor fixed her with a penetrating gaze.

“Does he intend to marry that girl?”

“That girl.”
Another slip, as bad as the one on the athletic field.

“He does,” Lisa said. “And apparently she intends to marry him.”

The news didn’t surprise the professor; it merely confirmed the scowl of dismay on his forehead. He waited a bit, trying to think out his words. Johnny was getting impatient. Lisa had learned to wait.

“I know what you’re thinking,” he said at last. “You’re thinking that I’m a meddling old bachelor trying to break up a young romance. You’re wrong, Miss Bancroft. I love my nephew and have always felt a great sense of responsibility for him, but I’m not reluctant to let him grow up. I want him to be happy—much happier than I’ve ever been.”

The professor fell silent again. He seemed embarrassed to have brought himself into his story. Schoolteachers weren’t supposed to have lives. They lived behind textbooks or the little pitch pipes dangling over their flat chests. The thought was there, all the stronger because it was unspoken, and then the professor continued.

“As you now know, I deliberately tried to arouse your interest in Marta Cornish from the day of our meeting in the tearoom. I wanted to get to the truth of this matter. I needed assistance, and no one in Bellville, I’m sure, could be considered to have a truly unprejudiced mind. I knew that I wouldn’t have to say very much: a suggestion here and there and you would learn the rest in your own way. Gossip is easy to find.”

“Too easy,” Lisa said. “Truth doesn’t come that easy.”

“Exactly, Miss Bancroft. And yet, where there’s smoke—”

“Somebody’s liable to get burned,” Johnny said.

“Yes.” The professor nursed that thought for a moment. The scowl had never left his face. “Oh, I know how you must have felt about all this in the beginning—perhaps still do. I went through that phase myself. I came to Bellville shortly after Duval’s death. I heard the tongues wagging and shrugged it off as malicious gossip. When the Hubbard death was brought to my attention I reacted just as I did when you mentioned it this afternoon. I still think that’s nonsense.”

“But not the Duval rumors?” Lisa asked.

“That depends on which rumors you mean,” the professor answered, “but I’m getting ahead of my story. At that time
—
when Duval’s death still had the town buzzing—I was quite unconcerned. I’d seen Marta Cornish a few times—she couldn’t very well be missed in this town—but I felt very much the same as you did that day in the tearoom. I knew a girl of her position would be a natural target for gossip, and thought the stories about her hideously cruel. It never occurred to me to question her sanity or her morals.

“But I
knew
Howard Gleason. Duval was just a name to me, the name of a man who met an unfortunate death. Howard Gleason was a living thing—a fine, talented young man of great promise. I saw him first before he won the award. I saw him last the day before he killed himself.”

The professor’s pause was pregnant with implication. No one had to be prepared for his next words.

“He didn’t die suddenly, Miss Bancroft. Death was instantaneous when the bullet entered his head, but he’d been dying very slowly for a year. Kill the spirit and you kill life.”

“And you think that Marta Cornish killed his spirit?” Lisa asked.

“Someone did,” the professor answered. “All I know is that Howard Gleason fell in love, so much in love that he gave up his scholarship to study abroad and remained on in Bellville as a simple instructor. He took a modest apartment here in town, but every week end was spent at Bell Mansion. Apparently he was well received by Mrs. Cornish. There’s no reason to think that anything or anyone came between him and Marta.”

“Except Marta,” Johnny suggested.

“A girl doesn’t have to marry a man just because he’s in love with her.”

The words were Joel’s, but they were such good words Lisa couldn’t help borrowing them. They stopped the professor only momentarily.

“That’s very true,” he said quietly, “and it’s also very true that Howard Gleason was emotionally unstable. But that’s all the more reason to be suspicious about the five thousand dollars.”

The questions fairly leaped into Johnny’s eyes; but Lisa waved her to silence. Professor Dawes was leaving no tales untold this time.

“The award money,” he explained. “The Cornish Award is a year of study in Europe
or
five thousand dollars. Gleason took the money, a certified check signed by Nydia Bell Cornish and cosigned by Stanley Watts, treasurer of the Cornish Award committee. And yet Gleason died penniless. Think of that, if you please. One year in Bellville, one year in which his living expenses could have been no more than his salary, small as it was, and yet no trace of that money could be found after his death. His funeral expenses were paid out of a small insurance policy, the residue of which went to his beneficiary—Marta Cornish.”

The wind from the windows was cooler now. Fact number four. Lisa’s mind went wandering back to that unfinished meditation down at the old ruins. She’d been on the verge of a discovery then. She was much closer now.

“This isn’t just hearsay,” the professor added. “I’ve checked my facts. I was upset at the time of Gleason’s suicide. This time the gossip penetrated deeper. When my nephew began keeping company with Marta I set out to verify some of the rumors.”

“You mentioned on the athletic field that both Marta’s suitors were insured,” Lisa reminded.

“I shouldn’t have blurted it out that way, not in front of Joel. Our relationship is strained enough already.”

“But is it true?”

The professor looked miserable now. He seemed to hate himself for what he was saying.

“I have a friend in the insurance business in the East,” he answered finally. “At my request he verified the fact that Pierre Duval, who, like Gleason, had no next of kin, had named Marta as beneficiary in a five-thousand-dollar policy which carried a double indemnity clause for accidental death. Within six months after Duval’s death, ten thousand dollars was paid into the Cornish estate to be held in trust for Marta.”

It was all out in the open now. Lisa had been right in her accusation at the foot of the high school steps: the professor had been holding out on her. But it was Johnny who was the explosive type, who dared put into words what no one else did.

“Do you realize what you’re saying, Professor?” she demanded. “Do you realize that we now have what’s known in homicidal circles as the motive for the crime?”

The professor smiled wanly.

“What crime, Miss Johnson?”

Even Johnny didn’t dare go far enough to answer his question. It was left hanging like a suspended sentence—what crime? Lisa’s mind was busy. As Joel had told her, there would have been an investigation at Duval’s death. If there had been any evidence, if there had ever been any evidence of foul play, it was all lost and forgotten now.

But Curran Dawes loved his nephew, and Curran Dawes was afraid. Lisa saw that clearly for the first time. Undecided, tormented by a mind that had been trained to logic and fair play; but underneath the surface that oldest of primitive emotions—fear. Was it justified? What crime?

Lisa couldn’t answer the question, but someone could. Someone did.

“It’s a lie! It’s all a horrible lie! Don’t listen to him, Miss Bancroft. He’s just trying to break us up!”

The cry was from the French windows. More than the wind had stormed in. Three silent people turned to meet the cry and found themselves facing a slender pillar of defiance—Marta Cornish.

There was no telling how long Marta had been standing there. The wind was strong enough now to drown out the sound of footsteps, and what the professor had been saying was much too absorbing to allow any straying of interest on the part of listeners or speaker. Apparently it had been interesting to Marta, too. She came forward into the study, her small fists clenched in anger and her eyes fired with contempt.

“You’ll never rest, will you?” she challenged. “You’ll never let us alone!”

The words, the eyes, the anger were all for a stunned Professor Dawes. She didn’t even seem aware of Lisa or Johnny now.

“I knew you were here,” she added. “I heard someone calling Miss Bancroft when she was out by the ruins. I could see from the house—”

“Then you
were
playing—”

Lisa’s question was ignored. Marta hadn’t come to discuss music.

“I knew you’d come around trying to get her to start trouble for us. I told you that day—” Now Marta looked at Lisa. The anger was still there. “I told you in the tearoom to leave me out of your book about my father!”

“We haven’t been discussing a book,” Lisa said.

“I’ll bet you haven’t! You’ve been discussing Joel and me! You’ve been digging up those old, horrible lies! And they are lies, all of them. I never got a penny of that money. I never saw those checks, and I don’t know where the money went!”

Lisa started to rise from the desk. There was far too much anger in Marta to go unleashed. She looked at Johnny, hoping for some matter-of-fact statement that would bring reason back to the room; but Johnny was too enthralled with the scene to respond. Instead of reason, something more disturbing than Marta came into the room. With the ultimate of ill-timing, Carrie Hokum appeared in the doorway, and her statement wasn’t at all what was needed.

“Don’t you believe her!” Carrie snapped. “Don’t you believe anything that spoiled hellcat says! She knows all right!”

“Carrie!”

But Carrie didn’t respond to cues. Lisa might as well have saved her breath.

“She knows plenty, that one,” she cried. “She knows why that poor Mr. Gleason shot himself, and she knows why the other one fell down the stairs.”

“Be quiet!” Marta ordered.

“I don’t have to be quiet. She knows all right, Professor, and I know, too. I was working up at the big house the day it happened. I heard them fussin’ and fightin’ upstairs.”

“Be quiet!” Marta cried again.

“And she knows what happened to old Mr. Hubbard’s medicine, and why old Claude Humphrey got put away! She’s a bad one, I tell you. She’s got a curse on her. She’s a bad—”

Carrie didn’t get any further. She didn’t finish her tirade or even explain those two new accusations. Lisa saw it happen right before her eyes—saw Marta’s hand reach down for the paperweight on the desk, saw her arm and body draw back in preparation, and then it was done too quickly for anyone to stop.

“You witch! You terrible, lying old witch!”

The words and the paperweight were hurled simultaneously. And then everything was quiet—especially Carrie.

It was a direct hit. The paperweight struck Carrie on the forehead. She fell to the floor with no more protest than a barely audible groan, and didn’t move again. All was very still in the room until Professor Dawes, the first of a horror-stricken group to return to mobility, crossed quickly to the doorway and knelt beside her. At that instant, Johnny regained speech long enough for one accusing word.

“You—!” she gasped.

Marta’s face was chalk-white. She shrank back toward the windows.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to! I didn’t meant to hurt her!”

It was the cry of a child. She might have been all of five years old. The professor didn’t even look at her.

“Miss Johnson, I think you had better call a doctor. Ask the operator for Dr. Hazlitt’s residence. He’ll surely be home at this hour.”

“Is it bad?” Johnny asked.

“I don’t know. I think it’s a concussion. Please call.”

Lisa knew that what the professor was saying was important. Carrie was hurt—that was important. But she still couldn’t pry her eyes away from Marta’s face. She saw the mouth form a silent, stricken “Oh!” at his words. She saw one long-fingered hand fly to the mouth to hold back the sound. And then, before Lisa could do anything to stop her, she turned and ran out through the windows and was lost in the darkness of the path. Like a child. Like a terrified child.

“It’s all right,” Dr. Hazlitt said. “Carrie’s a tough old bird. She’ll live. But if that paperweight had struck the temple—”

The storm had broken. It was dark out now, totally black except for an occasional flash of lightning that brightened the kitchen windows. It was a large, old-fashioned kitchen with a long center table—far more practical for serving a hastily improvised dinner than the dining room. Carrie had come to the study—this was known now that she could speak again—for the purpose of learning whether or not the professor was staying for dinner. Now there were two guests and no cook. But as long as the can opener held out Johnny could get by. Lisa made the coffee. Lots of hot coffee. Everybody needed it tonight.

“I gave her a sedative and she’s sleeping now,” the doctor added, “but you’re going to have trouble when she awakens. Maybe you can talk to her, Miss Bancroft. She insists on calling Sheriff Elliot and preferring charges against Marta Cornish. That might cause a great deal of trouble.”

“And why shouldn’t she prefer charges?” Johnny demanded. “Does Bellville have special laws for a Cornish? Is that girl some sort of sacred calf?”

The professor didn’t speak, but Lisa felt that his silence could be construed as consent. And Johnny was right, of course. An assault had been made, a felonious assault that might easily have been fatal; but still she was in sympathy with the doctor, whose perpetually haggard face displayed all his disapproval of what was being said. He had refused food. “Had an early dinner,” he explained. But he sat with them at the table lingering over a large cup of coffee while one restless hand played with the watch chain on his vest.

“Marta’s a nervous girl, high strung,” he said. “I’m sure she didn’t meant to hurt Carrie.”

“She said that she didn’t,” Lisa remarked.

“And then ran off without even bothering to see if Carrie was going to live or die! Damn it, Lisa, you know I’m not the vindictive type, but I think that girl’s dangerous!”

Johnny punctuated her statement by returning to the stove for more coffee. There was a little silence, broken only by the sound of the rain lashing against the windows and the faraway growl of receding thunder. The pyrotechnics of the storm were almost over. It would rain steadily all night.

“You must know Marta Cornish as well as anyone in this village, Doctor Hazlitt,” the professor said, breaking a thoughtful silence. “Has she always been, to use your own term, high strung?”

Unbalanced is what you really mean, isn’t it, Professor? Lisa smiled knowingly but the professor didn’t see. She sat at the far end of the table where the light was dim. Her face was but a shadow to the others.

The doctor frowned at his cup. It was obvious he didn’t like the direction the conversation was taking, but it would be worse not to answer than to answer.

“I’ve known Marta all her life,” he said. “In fact, I delivered her. She’s a perfectly normal, healthy—”

“We’re discussing her emotional traits,” the professor interrupted, “not physical.”

“—and beautiful child,” the doctor finished, ignoring the interruption with masterful contempt, “but she’s been a life-long center of interest because of her famous father and, if I judge correctly, has a deep sense of insecurity not uncommon to fatherless children.”

“With a father’s reputation to uphold,” Lisa suggested.

The doctor seemed both surprised and pleased at unexpected succor. He looked up from his cup and stared at the shadow of her face. He stared so long, she began to regret her words. It was almost as if he had forgotten the topic of conversation. But Professor Dawes hadn’t forgotten, and he wasn’t going to let anyone else forget.

“But surely, if you’ve known Marta all of her life, you must also know of these tales being told about her,” he persisted. “And you must know what brought on this outbreak this evening if you’ve been talking to Carrie.”

“Carrie Hokum is an old fool!” the doctor exclaimed. “Harmless but not quite all there. It’s a wonder she hasn’t been put away long ago.”

“Like Claude Humphrey?” the professor asked.

A last, distant rumble of thunder came like a muted drum roll behind the professor’s words. Then quiet. A very cautious quiet. Dr. Hazlitt’s tired eyes found the professor’s face and rested there as if exhausted after the journey.

“You
have
heard the old tales,” he murmured.

“I’ve gone hunting for them,” the professor said. “Exhumed them, so to speak. I have a reason.”

“Your nephew?”

The professor nodded. “My nephew is in love with Marta. He wants to marry her. In view of Howard Gleason’s suicide and certain other events, I feel that I have the right to make inquiries. Even if doing so—” he raised his head and glanced toward Lisa’s shadowed face—”does make me seem a meddling Mephistopheles.”

“Pay no attention to Lisa,” Johnny remarked, returning to her table with a refilled cup. “She’s written too many books. I say exhume until the dirt flies! Who the devil is Claude Humphrey? Or should I say ‘was’? Most of the people associated with Marta Cornish seem to be in the past tense now.”

“Perhaps Dr. Hazlitt would prefer to tell the story,” Dawes suggested.

“Nothing to tell,” the doctor said. “Nothing, really. It certainly doesn’t concern Marta. She was a mere child.”

“She was only eleven when Alistair Hubbard lost his heart medicine,” Johnny recalled. “At least, that’s what Tod Graham told us.”

“Tod? Tod told you that?”

The doctor looked shocked. It was the most expression Lisa had seen on his weary face.

“Well, Mrs. Graham, to be exact.”

“That woman! She’s almost as bad as Carrie Hokum. I didn’t think Tod Graham would go about telling tales like that.”

You didn’t think he’d dare, Lisa thought. She said nothing. The conversation was progressing nicely without her.

“I’m still waiting to hear about Claude What’s-his-name,” Johnny persisted.

“Very well.” The old doctor sighed and stared at his cup again. He took up a spoon and stirred the contents in a completely disinterested manner. “Claude Humphrey was the Cornish gardener many, many years ago. He was slow-witted and clumsy, but I think Martin Cornish was fond of him. I never knew Martin very well. Nobody did, I guess, except Nydia. I’m not too sure that she knew him either. But that’s neither here nor there. You asked about Claude.”

Just when the stirring operation was about to set Lisa’s nerves on edge, he laid down the spoon. The coffee, however, remained untouched.

“It’s been—oh, fifteen or sixteen years since Claude was committed. There was no mystery about it. He wasn’t dangerous, merely—” The doctor groped for a word. Now that the spoon was quiet, he’d taken to fingering the watch chain again. “Merely incapable of taking care of himself. Mrs. Cornish didn’t want any harm to come to him. She had him placed in a private sanitarium at her own expense. He’s there yet, well provided for and happy. Now, what’s your version of the story, Professor?”

“I have no version,” the professor said. “I’d merely heard—”

“—that Marta Cornish didn’t like the gardener and taunted him into fits of anger until he had to be locked up?”

Dr. Hazlitt had lived in Bellville much longer than Curran Dawes. Lisa could see by the reaction on the professor’s face that the accusation had sunk home.

“The child wasn’t more than four or five years old when the commitment took place. What’s more, the whole village knew Claude was a little off. He’d always been that way.”

The doctor seemed relieved to have the story told. He glanced toward the windows where the rain, no longer lashed by wind, poured down relentlessly from the gutted clouds. He started to shove back his chair in a movement of departure, but he wasn’t going to get off so easily.

“And Alistair Hubbard,” the professor said quickly, “I suppose he was a patient of yours?”

Reluctantly, Dr. Hazlitt retained his seat. “He was,” he admitted. “He’d been under my care for some twenty-odd years before his death.”

“Did you attend him the day of his death?”

The doctor hesitated. He was annoyed—that was obvious; but an abrupt departure would only leave the situation more unsettled.

“I was called up to the mansion,” he said. “It was too late to do anything for him. He was dead before I arrived.”

“But what about his medicine? Had he lost it? Was it later found in Marta’s room?”

The professor seemed to have taken Lisa’s advice to heart. Backstairs gossip did interest him now. He leaned forward a bit in his chair and waited for the answer. He didn’t wait alone.

“It’s been a long time,” the doctor said.

“Ten years,” Johnny reminded. “Ten years isn’t such a long time.”

For the first time, Lisa saw a faint smile touch the lips of Dr. Hazlitt. “At your age, Miss Johnson, ten years is nothing. When you reach the other end of life, it will seem much more.” Then the smile passed as quickly as it had come, as if embarrassed to have been seen at all. “As for the medicine, I believe there was some talk about it being found somewhere in the mansion. It may have been Marta’s room, or some such nonsense.”

“Nonsense?” Lisa echoed.

She regretted the interruption at once. It brought the doctor’s eyes back to her face again. They could be most uncomfortable when fixed in that enigmatic stare. “Nonsense,” he repeated. “Alistair Hubbard was over eighty years old. He was very forgetful. I’d cautioned him more than once about going off without his medicine, but you can be sure the gossips would try to make something sinister out of his death. Anything connected with the Cornish family—”

“And what about Pierre Duval, the music teacher?”

Professor Dawes was insistent. The doctor looked at him with tired eyes. His fingers were playing with the watch chain again.

“Were you called to the mansion when he died?” the professor persisted.

“I was,” Dr. Hazlitt answered. “But I was too late. Duval was dead when I arrived.”

“It was quite a shock, I suppose,” Lisa ventured.

The tired eyes were for her now. “For Marta and Mrs. Cornish—yes,” he said. “They were both very fond of the young man.”

“But it wasn’t a shock for you?” Lisa asked.

She’d caught a certain connotation in the words. The doctor made no attempt at denial.

“Not when I heard over the telephone what had occurred. Death was almost instantaneous—Nydia, of course, didn’t know that when she called. It was only to be expected in view of Duval’s old head injury. I’d found out about that some months before. He fell off a stepladder while replacing a burned-out bulb in a light fixture up at the mansion. Had a bad time of it then. I warned him to be careful, just as I’d warned old Alistair Hubbard. But Duval was a hotheaded Frenchman. He wouldn’t listen. He wouldn’t stop taking chances.”

“But Carrie intimated that Marta and Duval had been quarreling just before he fell,” the professor interrupted.

“Carrie—!”

Dr. Hazlitt shoved back his chair and came to his feet. The annoyance in his voice would have blossomed into outright anger if anger didn’t require so much energy.

“I can imagine what Carrie said; I’ve heard the tale before. The truth of the matter is that one of the top steps on the staircase up at the mansion had a loose tread. Nydia had warned the household to be careful—even called a carpenter to get it fixed, but he hadn’t been able to get around to the job right away. I’m surprised, Professor, that a man of your intelligence would be taken in by such talk. Why don’t you try to think of Marta’s emotions? She’s had to hear these wild tales all her life. She’s had to grow up under a cloud of gossip and innuendo that would unnerve any child, let alone one of her sensitivity!”

“But isn’t it true,” Lisa asked, “that Duval was insured with Marta as his beneficiary?”

Dr. Hazlitt scowled at the back of the chair, his white, blue-veined hands still clamped on the ladder-back. For a few seconds Lisa thought he wasn’t going to answer at all.