The Dain Curse Page 11

  “Then what,” he asked, looking puzzled, “did happen?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t think anybody knows. I’m telling you what I saw plus the part of what Aaronia Haldorn told me which fits in with what I saw. To fit in with what I saw, most of it must have happened very nearly as I’ve told you. If you want to believe that it did, all right. I don’t. I’d rather believe I saw things that weren’t there.”

  “Not now,” he pleaded. “Later, after you’ve finished the story, you can attach your ifs and buts to it, distorting and twisting it, making it as cloudy and confusing and generally hopeless as you like. But first please finish it, so I’ll see it at least once in its original state before you start improving it.”

  “You actually believe what I’ve told you so far?” I asked.

  He nodded, grinning, and said that he not only believed it but liked it.

  “What a childish mind you’ve got,” I said. “Let me tell you the story about the wolf that went to the little girl’s grandmother’s house and—”

  “I always liked that one, too; but finish this one now. Joseph had decided to kill his wife.”

  “All right. There’s not much more. While Minnie was being worked on, I popped into her room, intending to rouse her and send her for help. Before I did any rousing, I was needing some myself: I had a couple of lungfuls of the gas. The Finks must have turned the ghost loose on me, because Joseph was probably on his way downstairs with his wife at that time. He had faith enough in his divinity-shield, or he was nutty enough, to take her down and tie her on the altar before he carved her. Or maybe he had a way of fitting that stunt into his scheme, or maybe he simply had a liking for bloody theatricals. Anyway, he probably took her down there while I was up in Minnie’s room going around and around with the ghost.

  “The ghost had me sweating ink, and when I finally left him and tottered out into the corridor, the Finks jumped me. I say they did, and know it; but it was too dark for me to see them. I beat them off, got a gun, and went downstairs. Collinson and Gabrielle were gone from where I had left them. I found Collinson: Gabrielle had put him outside and shut the door on him. The Haldorns’ son—a kid of thirteen or so—came to us with the news that Papa was about to kill Mama, and that Gabrielle was with them. I killed Haldorn, but I almost didn’t. I put seven bullets in him. Hard-coated .32’s go in clean, without much of a thump, true enough; but I put seven of them in him—in his face and body—standing close and firing pointblank—and he didn’t even know it. That’s how completely he had himself hypnotized. I finally got him down by driving the dagger through his neck.”

  I stopped. Fitzstephan asked: “Well?”

  “Well what?”

  “What happened after that?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “That’s the kind of a story it is. I warned you there was no sense to it.”

  “But what was Gabrielle doing there?”

  “Crouching beside the altar, looking up at the pretty spotlight.”

  “But why was she there? What was her reason for being there? Had she been called there again? Or was she there of her own free will? How did she come to be there? What was she there for?”

  “I don’t know. She didn’t know. I asked her. She didn’t know she was there.”

  “But surely you could learn something from the others?”

  “Yeah,” I said; “what I’ve told you, chiefly from Aaronia Haldorn. She and her husband ran a cult, and he went crazy and began murdering people, and how could she help it? Fink won’t talk. He’s a mechanic, yes; and he put in his trick-machinery for the Haldorns and operated it; but he doesn’t know what happened last night. He heard a lot of noises, but it was none of his business to go poking his nose out to see what it was: the first he knew anything was wrong was when some police came and started giving him hell. Mrs. Fink’s gone. The other employees probably don’t really know anything, though it’s a gut they could make some good guesses. Manuel, the little boy, is too frightened to talk—and will be sure to know nothing when he gets over his fright. What we’re up against is this: if Joseph went crazy and committed some murders on his own hook, the others, even though they unknowingly helped him, are in the clear. The worst any of them can draw is a light sentence for taking part in the cult swindle. But if any of them admits knowing anything, then he lets himself in for trouble as an accomplice in the murder. Nobody’s likely to do that.”

  “I see,” Fitzstephan said slowly. “Joseph is dead, so Joseph did everything. How will you get around that?”

  “I won’t,” I said; “though the police will at least try to. My end’s done, so Madison Andrews told me a couple of hours ago.”

  “But if, as you say, you aren’t satisfied that you’ve learned the whole truth of the affair, I should think you—”

  “It’s not me,” I said. “There’s a lot I’d like to do yet, but I was hired, this time, by Andrews, to guard her while she was in the Temple. She isn’t there now, and Andrews doesn’t think there’s anything further to be learned about what happened there. And, as far as guarding her is necessary, her husband ought to be able to do that.”

  “Her what?”

  “Husband.”

  Fitzstephan thumped his stein down on the table so that beer sloshed over the sides.

  “Now there you are,” he said accusingly. “You didn’t tell me anything about that. God only knows how much else there is that you’ve not told me.”

  “Collinson took advantage of the confusion to carry her off to Reno, where they won’t have to wait the Californian three days for their license. I didn’t know they’d gone till Andrews jumped on my neck three or four hours later. He was kind of unpleasant about it, which is one of the ways we came to stop being client and operative.”

  “I didn’t know he was opposed to Collinson as a husband for her.”

  “I don’t know that he is, but he didn’t think this the time, nor that the way, for their wedding.”

  “I can understand that,” he said as we got up from the table. “Andrews likes to have his way in most things.”

  PART

  3

  QUESADA

  13

  THE CLIFF ROAD

  Eric Collinson wired me from Quesada:

  COME IMMEDIATELY STOP NEED YOU STOP TROUBLE DANGER STOP MEET ME AT SUNSET HOTEL STOP DO NOT COMMUNICATE STOP GABRIELLE MUST NOT KNOW STOP HURRY

  ERIC CARTER

  The telegram came to the agency on Friday morning.

  I wasn’t in San Francisco that morning. I was up in Martinez dickering with a divorced wife of Phil Leach, alias a lot of names. We wanted him for spreading reams of orphan paper through the Northwest, and we wanted him badly. This ex-wife—a sweet-looking little blonde telephone operator—had a fairly recent photograph of Phil, and was willing to sell it.

  “He never thought enough of me to risk passing any bum checks so I could have things,” she complained. “I had to bring in my own share of the nut. So why shouldn’t I make something out of him now, when I guess some tramp’s getting plenty? Now how much will you give for it?”

  She had an exaggerated idea of how much the photograph was worth to us, of course, but I finally made the deal with her. But it was after six when I returned to the city, too late for a train that would put me in Quesada that night. I packed a bag, got my car from the garage, and drove down.

  Quesada was a one-hotel town pasted on the rocky side of a young mountain that sloped into the Pacific Ocean some eighty miles from San Francisco. Quesada’s beach was too abrupt and hard and jagged for bathing, so Quesada had never got much summer-resort money. For a while it had been a hustling rum-running port, but that racket was dead now: bootleggers had learned there was more profit and less worry in handling domestic hooch than imported. Quesada had gone back to sleep.

  I got there at eleven-something that night, garaged my car, and crossed the street to the Sunset Hotel. It was a low, sprawled-out, yellow building. The night clerk was alone in the lobby, a s
mall effeminate man well past sixty who went to a lot of trouble to show me that his fingernails were rosy and shiny.

  When he had read my name on the register he gave me a sealed envelope—hotel stationery—addressed to me in Eric Collinson’s handwriting. I tore it open and read:

  Do not leave the hotel

  until I have seen you.

  E.C.

  “How long has this been here?” I asked.

  “Since about eight o’clock. Mr. Carter waited for you for more than an hour, until after the last stage came in from the railroad.”

  “He isn’t staying here?”

  “Oh, dear, no. He and his bride have got the Tooker place, down in the cove.”

  Collinson wasn’t the sort of person to whose instructions I’d pay a whole lot of attention. I asked:

  “How do you get there?”

  “You’d never be able to find it at night,” the clerk assured me, “unless you went all the way around by the East road, and not then, I’m sure, unless you knew the country.”

  “Yeah? How do you get there in the daytime?”

  “You go down this street to the end, take the fork of the road on the ocean side, and follow that up along the cliff. It isn’t really a road, more a a path. It’s about three miles to the house, a brown house, shingled all over, on a little hill. It’s easily enough found in the daytime if you remember to keep to the right, to the ocean side, all the way down. But you’d never, never in the world, be able to find—”

  “Thanks,” I said, not wanting to hear the story all over again.

  He led me up to a room, promised to call me at five, and I was asleep by midnight.

  The morning was dull, ugly, foggy, and cold when I climbed out of bed to say, “All right, thanks,” into the phone. It hadn’t improved much by the time I had got dressed and gone downstairs. The clerk said there was not a chance in the world of getting anything to eat in Quesada before seven o’clock.

  I went out of the hotel, down the street until it became a dirt road, kept to the dirt road until it forked, and turned into the branch that bent toward the ocean. This branch was never really a road from its beginning, and soon was nothing but a rocky path climbing along the side of a rocky ledge that kept pushing closer to the water’s edge. The side of the ledge became steeper and steeper, until the path was simply an irregular shelf on the face of a cliff—a shelf eight or ten feet wide in places, no more than four or five in others. Above and behind the path, the cliff rose sixty or seventy feet; below and in front, it slanted down a hundred or more to ravel out in the ocean. A breeze from the general direction of China was pushing fog over the top of the cliff, making noisy lather of sea water at its bottom.

  Rounding a corner where the cliff was steepest—was, in fact, for a hundred yards or so, straight up and down—I stopped to look at a small ragged hole in the path’s outer rim. The hole was perhaps six inches across, with fresh loose earth piled in a little semicircular mound on one side, scattered on the other. It wasn’t exciting to look at, but it said plainly to even such a city man as I was: here a bush was uprooted not so long ago.

  There was no uprooted bush in sight. I checked my cigarette away and got down on hands and knees, putting my head out over the path’s rim, looking down. I saw the bush twenty feet below. It was perched on the top of a stunted tree that grew almost parallel to the cliff, fresh brown earth sticking to the bush’s roots. The next thing that caught my eye was also brown—a soft hat lying upside down between two pointed gray rocks, half-way down to the water. I looked at the bottom of the cliff and saw the feet and legs.

  They were a man’s feet and legs, in black shoes and dark trousers. The feet lay on the top of a water-smoothed boulder, lay on their sides, six inches part, both pointing to the left. From the feet, dark-trousered legs slanted down into the water, disappearing beneath the surface a few inches above the knees. That was all I could see from the cliff road.

  I went down the cliff, though not at that point. It was a lot too steep there to be tackled by a middle-aged fat man. A couple of hundred yards back, the path had crossed a crooked ravine that creased the cliff diagonally from top to bottom. I returned to the ravine and went down it, stumbling, sliding, sweating and swearing, but reaching the bottom all in one piece, with nothing more serious the matter with me than torn fingers, dirty clothes, and ruined shoes.

  The fringe of rock that lay between cliff and ocean wasn’t meant to be walked on, but I managed to travel over it most of the way, having to wade only once or twice, and then not up to my knees. But when I came to the spot where the feet and legs were I had to go waist-deep into the Pacific to lift the body, which rested on its back on the worn slanting side of a mostly submerged boulder, covered from thighs up by frothing water. I got my hands under the armpits, found solid ground for my feet, and lifted.

  It was Eric Collinson’s body. Bones showed through flesh and clothing on his shattered back. The back of his head—that half of it—was crushed. I dragged him out of the water and put him down on dry rocks. His dripping pockets contained a hundred and fifty-four dollars and eighty-two cents, a watch, a knife, a gold pen and pencil, papers, a couple of letters, and a memoranda book. I spread out the papers, letters, and book; and read them; and learned nothing except that what was written in them hadn’t anything to do with his death. I couldn’t find anything else—on him or near him—to tell me more about his death than the uprooted bush, the hat caught between rocks, and the position of his body had told me.

  I left him there and went back to the ravine, panting and heaving myself up it to the cliff path, returning to where the bush had grown. I didn’t find anything there in the way of significant marks, footprints, or the like. The path was chiefly hard rock. I went on along it. Presently the cliff began to bend away from the ocean, lowering the path along its side. After another half-mile there was no cliff at all, merely a bush-grown ridge at whose foot the path ran. There was no sun yet. My pants stuck disagreeably to my chilly legs. Water squnched in my torn shoes. I hadn’t had any breakfast. My cigarettes had got wet. My left knee ached from a twist it had got sliding down the ravine. I cursed the detective business and slopped on along the path.

  The path took me away from the sea for a while, across the neck of a wooded point that pushed the ocean back, down into a small valley, up the side of a low hill; and then I saw the house the night clerk had described.

  It was a rather large two-story building, roof and walls brown-shingled, set on a hump in the ground close to where the ocean came in to take a quarter-mile u-shaped bite out of the coast. The house faced the water. I was behind it. There was nobody in sight. The ground-floor windows were closed, with drawn blinds. The second-story windows were open. Off to one side were some smaller farm buildings.

  I went around to the front of the house. Wicker chairs and a table were on the screened front porch. The screened porch-door was hooked on the inside. I rattled it noisily. I rattled it off and on for at least five minutes, and got no response. I went around to the rear again, and knocked on the back door. My knocking knuckles pushed the door open half a foot. Inside was a dark kitchen and silence. I opened the door wider, knocking on it again, loudly. More silence.

  I called: “Mrs. Collinson.”

  When no answer came I went through the kitchen and a darker dining room, found a flight of stairs, climbed them, and began poking my head into rooms.

  There was nobody in the house.

  In one bedroom, a .38 automatic pistol lay in the center of the floor. There was an empty shell close to it, another under a chair across the room, and a faint odor of burnt gunpowder in the air. In one corner of the ceiling was a hole that a .38 bullet could have made, and, under it on the floor, a few crumbs of plaster. The bed-clothes were smooth and undisturbed. Clothes in the closet, things on and in table and bureau, told me this was Eric Collinson’s bedroom.

  Next to it, according to the same sort of evidence, was Gabrielle’s bedroom. Her bed had not
been slept in, or had been made since being slept in. On the floor of her closet I found a black satin dress, a once-white handkerchief, and a pair of black suede slippers, all wet and muddy—the handkerchief also wet with blood. In her bathroom—in the tub—were a bath-towel and a face-towel, both stained with mud and blood, and still damp. On her dressing-table was a small piece of thick white paper that had been folded. White powder clung to one crease. I touched it with the end of my tongue—morphine.

  I went back to Quesada, changed my shoes and socks, got breakfast and a supply of dry cigarettes, and asked the clerk—a dapper boy, this one—who was responsible for law and order there.

  “The marshal’s Dick Cotton,” he told me; “but he went up to the city last night. Ben Rolly’s deputy sheriff. You can likely find him over at his old man’s office.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “Next door to the garage.”

  I found it, a one-story red brick building with wide glass windows labeled J. King Rolly, Real Estate, Mortgages, Loans, Stocks and Bonds, Insurance, Notes, Employment Agency, Notary Public, Moving and Storage, and a lot more that I’ve forgotten.

  Two men were inside, sitting with their feet on a battered desk behind a battered counter. One was a man of fifty—and, with hair, eyes, and skin of indefinite, washed-out tan shades—an amiable, aimless-looking man in shabby clothes. The other was twenty years younger and in twenty years would look just like him.

  “I’m hunting,” I said, “for the deputy sheriff.”

  “Me,” the younger man said, easing his feet from desk to floor. He didn’t get up. Instead, he put a foot out, hooked a chair by its rounds, pulled it from the wall, and returned his feet to the desk-top. “Set down. This is Pa,” wiggling a thumb at the other man. “You don’t have to mind him.”