The Dain Curse Read online

  She was sitting up in bed with pillows behind her back, her face still—or again—powdered, her eyes shining happily.

  “I didn’t mean for you to go away forever,” she scolded. “It was nasty of you. I’ve got a surprise for you and I’ve nearly burst waiting.”

  “Well, here I am. What is it?”

  “Shut your eyes.”

  I shut them.

  “Open your eyes.”

  I opened them. She was holding out to me the eight bindles that Mary Nunez had picked my pocket for.

  “I’ve had them since noon,” she said proudly; “and they’ve got finger-marks and tear-marks on them, but not one of them has been opened. It—honestly—it wasn’t so hard not to.”

  “I knew it wouldn’t be, for you,” I said. “That’s why I didn’t take them away from Mary.”

  “You knew? You trusted me that much—to go away and leave me with them?”

  Nobody but an idiot would have confessed that for two days the folded papers had held powdered sugar instead of the original morphine.

  “You’re the nicest man in the world.” She caught one of my hands and rubbed her cheek into it, then dropped it quickly, frowned her face out of shape, and said: “Except! You sat there this noon and deliberately tried to make me think you were in love with me.”

  “Well?” I asked, trying to keep my face straight.

  “You hypocrite. You deceiver of young girls. It would serve you right if I made you marry me—or sued you for breach of promise. I honestly believed you all afternoon—and it did help me. I believed you until you came in just now, and then I saw—” She stopped.

  “Saw what?”

  “A monster. A nice one, an especially nice one to have around when you’re in trouble, but a monster just the same, without any human foolishness like love in him, and—What’s the matter? Have I said something I shouldn’t?”

  “I don’t think you should have,” I said. “I’m not sure I wouldn’t trade places with Fitzstephan now—if that big-eyed woman with the voice was part of the bargain.”

  “Oh, dear!” she said.

  23

  THE CIRCUS

  Owen Fitzstephan never spoke to me again. He refused to see me, and when, as a prisoner, he couldn’t help himself there, he shut his mouth and kept it shut. This sudden hatred of me—for it amounted to that—had grown, I supposed, out of his knowing I thought him insane. He wanted the rest of the world, or at least the dozen who would represent the world on his jury, to think he had been crazy—and did make them think so—but he didn’t want me to agree with them. As a sane man who, by pretending to be a lunatic, had done as he pleased and escaped punishment, he had a joke—if you wanted to call it that—on the world. But if he was a lunatic who, ignorant of his craziness, thought he was pretending to be a lunatic, then the joke—if you wanted to call it that—was on him. And my having such a joke on him was more than his egotism could stomach, even though it’s not likely he ever admitted to himself that he was, or might be, actually crazy. Whatever he thought, he never spoke to me after the hospital interview in which I had said he was legally entitled to escape hanging.

  His trial, when he was well enough to appear in court some months later, was every bit of the circus he had promised, and the newspapers had their happy convulsions. He was tried in the county court house for Mrs. Cotton’s murder. Two new witnesses had been found, who had seen him walking away from the rear of the Cotton house that morning, and a third who identified his car as the one that had been parked four blocks away all—or all the latter part of—the previous night. The city and county district attorneys agreed that this evidence made the Cotton case the strongest against him.

  Fitzstephan’s plea was Not guilty by reason of insanity, or whatever the legal wording was. Since Mrs. Cotton’s murder had been the last of his crimes, his lawyers could, and did, introduce, as proof of his insanity, all that he had done in the others. They made a high, wide, and handsome job of it, carrying out his original idea that the best way to prove him crazy was to show he had committed more crimes than any sane man could have. Well, it was plain enough that he had.

  He had known Alice Dain, his cousin, in New York when she and Gabrielle, then a child, were living there. Gabrielle couldn’t corroborate this: we had only Fitzstephan’s word for it; but it may have been so. He said they concealed his relationship from the others because they did not want the girl’s father—for whom Alice was then searching—to know that she was bringing with her any links with the dangerous past. Fitzstephan said Alice had been his mistress in New York: that could have been true, but didn’t matter.

  After Alice and Gabrielle left New York for San Francisco, Fitzstephan and the woman exchanged letters occasionally, but with no definite purpose. Fitzstephan then met the Haldorns. The cult was his idea: he organized it, financed it, and brought it to San Francisco, though he kept his connection with it a secret, since everyone who knew him knew his skepticism; and his interest in it would have advertised it as the fake it was. To him, he said, the cult was a combination of toy and meal-ticket: he liked influencing people, especially in obscure ways, and people didn’t seem to like buying his books.

  Aaronia Haldorn was his mistress. Joseph was a puppet, in the family as in the Temple.

  In San Francisco Fitzstephan and Alice arranged so that he became acquainted with her husband and Gabrielle through other friends of the family. Gabrielle was now a young woman. Her physical peculiarities, which he interpreted pretty much as she had, fascinated him; and he tried his luck with her. He didn’t have any. That made him doubly determined to land her: he was that way. Alice was his ally. She knew him and she hated the girl—so she wanted him to have her. Alice had told Fitzstephan the family history. The girl’s father did not know at this time that she had been taught to think him her mother’s murderer. He knew she had a deep aversion to him, but did not know on what it was based. He thought that what he had gone through in prison and since had marked him with a hardness naturally enough repellant to a young girl who was, in spite of their relationship, actually only a recent acquaintance.

  He learned the truth about it when, surprising Fitzstephan in further attempts to make Gabrielle—as Fitzstephan put it—listen to reason, he had got into a three-cornered row with the pair of them. Leggett now began to understand what sort of a woman he was married to. Fitzstephan was no longer invited to the Leggett house, but kept in touch with Alice and waited his time.

  His time came when Upton arrived with his demand for blackmail. Alice went to Fitzstephan for advice. He gave it to her—poisonously. He urged her to handle Upton herself, concealing his demand—his knowledge of the Leggett past—from Leggett. He told her she should above all else continue to keep her knowledge of Leggett’s Central American and Mexican history concealed from him—a valuable hold on him now that he hated her because of what she’d taught the girl. Giving Upton the diamonds, and faking the burglary evidence, were Fitzstephan’s ideas. Poor Alice didn’t mean anything to him: he didn’t care what happened to her so long as he could ruin Leggett and get Gabrielle.

  He succeeded in the first of those aims: guided by him, Alice completely demolished the Leggett household, thinking, until the very last, when he pursued her after giving her the pistol in the laboratory, that he had a clever plan by which they would be saved; that is, she and he would: her husband didn’t count with her any more than she with Fitzstephan. Fitzstephan had had to kill her, of course, to keep her from exposing him when she found that his clever plan was a trap for her.

  Fitzstephan said he killed Leggett himself. When Gabrielle left the house after seeing Ruppert’s murder, she left a note saying she had gone for good. That broke up the arrangement as far as Leggett was concerned. He told Alice he was through, was going away, and offered of his own accord to write a statement assuming responsibility for what she had done. Fitzstephan tried to persuade Alice to kill him, but she wouldn’t. He did. He wanted Gabrielle, and he didn’t th
ink a live Leggett, even though a fugitive from justice, would let him have her.

  Fitzstephan’s success in getting rid of Leggett, and in escaping detection by killing Alice, encouraged him. He went blithely on with his plan to get the girl. The Haldorns had been introduced to the Leggetts some months before, and already had her nibbling at their hook. She had gone to them when she ran away from home. Now they persuaded her to come to the Temple again. The Haldorns didn’t know what Fitzstephan was up to, what he had done to the Leggetts: they thought that the girl was only another of the likely prospects he fed them. But Doctor Riese, hunting for Joseph in Joseph’s part of the Temple the day I got there, opened a door that should have been locked, and saw Fitzstephan and the Haldorns in conference.

  That was dangerous: Riese couldn’t be kept quiet, and, once Fitzstephan’s connection with the Temple was known, as likely as not the truth about his part in the Leggett riot would come out. He had two easily handled tools—Joseph and Minnie. He had Riese killed. But that woke Aaronia up to his true interest in Gabrielle. Aaronia, jealous, could and would either make him give up the girl or ruin him. He persuaded Joseph that none of them was safe from the gallows while Aaronia lived. When I saved Aaronia by killing her husband, I also saved Fitzstephan for the time: Aaronia and Fink had to keep quiet about Riese’s death if they wanted to save themselves from being charged with complicity in it.

  By this time Fitzstephan had hit his stride. He looked on Gabrielle now as his property, bought with the deaths he had caused. Each death had increased her price, her value to him. When Eric carried her off and married her, Fitzstephan hadn’t hesitated. Eric was to be killed.

  Nearly a year before, Fitzstephan had wanted a quiet place where he could go to finish a novel. Mrs. Fink, my village-blacksmith, had recommended Quesada. She was a native of the village, and her son by a former marriage, Harvey Whidden, was living there. Fitzstephan went to Quesada for a couple of months, and became fairly well acquainted with Whidden. Now that there was another murder to be done, Fitzstephan remembered Whidden as a man who might do it, for a price.

  When Fitzstephan heard that Collinson wanted a quiet place where his wife could rest and recuperate while they were waiting for the Haldorns’ trial, he suggested Quesada. Well, it was a quiet place, probably the quietest in California. Then Fitzstephan went to Whidden with an offer of a thousand dollars for Eric’s murder. Whidden refused at first, but he wasn’t nimble-witted, and Fitzstephan could be persuasive enough, so the bargain had been made.

  Whidden bungled a try at it Thursday night, frightening Collinson into wiring me, saw the wire in the telegraph office, and thought he had to go through with it then to save himself. So he fortified himself with whiskey, followed Collinson Friday night, and shoved him off the cliff. Then he took some more whiskey and came to San Francisco, considering himself by this time a hell of a desperate guy. He phoned his employer, saying: “Well, I killed him easy enough and dead enough. Now I want my money.”

  Fitzstephan’s phone came through the house switchboard: he didn’t know who might have heard Whidden talking. He decided to play safe. He pretended he didn’t know who was talking nor what he was talking about. Thinking Fitzstephan was double-crossing him, knowing what the novelist wanted, Whidden decided to take the girl and hold her for, not his original thousand dollars, but ten thousand. He had enough drunken cunning to disguise his handwriting when he wrote his note to Fitzstephan, not to sign it, and to so word it that Fitzstephan couldn’t tell the police who had sent it without explaining how he knew who had sent it.

  Fitzstephan wasn’t sitting any too pretty. When he got Whidden’s note, he decided to play his hand boldly, pushing his thus-far-solid luck. He told me about the phone-call and gave me the letter. That entitled him to show himself in Quesada with an excellent reason for being there. But he came down ahead of time, the night before he joined me, and went to the marshal’s house to ask Mrs. Cotton—whose relation to Whidden he knew—where he could find the man. Whidden was there, hiding from the marshal. Whidden wasn’t nimble-witted, and Fitzstephan was persuasive enough when he wanted to be: Fitzstephan explained how Whidden’s recklessness had forced him to pretend to not understand the phone-call. Fitzstephan had a scheme by which Whidden could now collect his ten thousand dollars in safety, or so he made Whidden think.

  Whidden went back to his hiding-place. Fitzstephan remained with Mrs. Cotton. She, poor woman, now knew too much, and didn’t like what she knew. She was doomed: killing people was the one sure and safe way of keeping them quiet: his whole recent experience proved it. His experience with Leggett told him that if he could get her to leave behind a statement in which various mysterious points were satisfactorily—and not too truthfully—explained, his situation would be still further improved. She suspected his intentions, and didn’t want to help him carry them out. She finally wrote the statement he dictated, but not until late in the morning. His description of how he finally got it from her wasn’t pleasant; but he got it, and then strangled her, barely finishing when her husband arrived home from his all-night hunt.

  Fitzstephan escaped by the back door—the witnesses who had seen him go away from the house didn’t come forward until his photograph in the papers jogged their memories—and joined Vernon and me at the hotel. He went with us to Whidden’s hiding-place below Dull Point. He knew Whidden, knew the dull man’s probable reaction to this second betrayal. He knew that neither Cotton nor Feeney would be sorry to have to shoot Whidden. Fitzstephan believed he could trust to his luck and what gamblers call the percentage of the situation. That failing, he meant to stumble when he stepped from the boat, accidentally shooting Whidden with the gun in his hand. (He remembered how neatly he had disposed of Mrs. Leggett.) He might have been blamed for that, might even have been suspected, but he could hardly have been convicted of anything.

  Once again his luck held. Whidden, seeing Fitzstephan with us, had flared up and tried to shoot him, and we had killed Whidden.

  That was the story with which this crazy man, thinking himself sane, tried to establish his insanity, and succeeded. The other charges against him were dropped. He was sent to the state asylum at Napa. A year later he was discharged. I don’t suppose the asylum officials thought him cured: they thought he was too badly crippled ever to be dangerous again.

  Aaronia Haldorn carried him off to an island in Puget Sound, I’ve heard.

  She testified at his trial, as one of his witnesses, but was not herself tried for anything. The attempt of her husband and Fitzstephan to kill her had, for all practical purposes, removed her from among the guilty.

  We never found Mrs. Fink.

  Tom Fink drew a five-to-fifteen-years jolt in San Quentin for what he had done to Fitzstephan. Neither of them seemed to blame the other now, and each tried to cover the other up on the witness stand. Fink’s professed motive for the bombing was to avenge his step-son’s death, but nobody swallowed that. He had tried to check Fitzstephan’s activities before Fitzstephan brought the whole works down on their ears.

  Released from prison, finding himself shadowed, Fink had seen both reason for fear and a means to safety in that shadow. He had back-doored Mickey that night, slipping out to get the material for his bomb, and then in again, working all night on the bomb. The news he had brought me was supposed to account for his presence in Quesada. The bomb wasn’t large—its outer cover was an aluminum soap container wrapped in white paper—and neither he nor Fitzstephan had had any difficulty in concealing it from me when it passed between them during their handshaking. Fitzstephan had thought it something Aaronia was sending him, something important enough to justify the risk in sending it. He couldn’t have refused to take it without attracting my attention, without giving away the connection between him and Fink. He had concealed it until we had left the room, and then had opened it—to wake up in the hospital. Tom Fink had thought himself safe, with Mickey to testify that he had shadowed him from the time he had left the prison, and me to
account for his behavior on the scene of the bombing.

  Fitzstephan said that he did not think Alice Leggett’s account of the killing of her sister Lily was the truth, that he thought she—Alice—had done the killing herself and had lied to hurt Gabrielle. Everybody took it for granted that he was right—everybody, including Gabrielle—though he didn’t have any evidence to support what was after all only his guess. I was tempted to have the agency’s Paris correspondent see what he could dig up on that early affair, but decided not to. It was nobody’s business except Gabrielle’s, and she seemed happy enough with what had already been dug up.

  She was in the Collinsons’ hands now. They had come to Quesada for her as soon as the newspapers put out their first extra accusing Fitzstephan of Eric’s murder. The Collinsons hadn’t had to be crude about it—to admit that they’d ever suspected her of anything: when Andrews had surrendered his letters testamentary, and another administrator—Walter Fielding—had been appointed, the Collinsons had simply seemed to pick her up, as was their right as her closest relations, where Andrews had put her down.

  Two months in the mountains topped off her cure, and she came back to the city looking like nothing that she had been. The difference was not only in appearance.

  “I can’t really make myself believe that all that actually happened to me,” she told me one noon when she, Laurence Collinson, and I were lunching together between morning and afternoon court-sessions. “Is it, do you think, because there was so much of it that I became callous?”

  “No. Remember you were going around coked up most of the time. That saved you from the sharp edge. Lucky for you you were. Stay away from the morphine now and it’ll always be a hazy sort of dream. Any time you want to bring it back clear and vivid, take a jolt.”

  “I won’t, I won’t, ever,” she said; “not even to give you the—the fun of bullying me through a cure again. He enjoyed himself awfully,” she told Laurence Collinson. “He used to curse me, ridicule me, threaten me with the most terrible things, and then, at the last, I think he tried to seduce me. And if I’m uncouth at times, Laurence, you’ll have to blame him: he positively hadn’t a refining influence.”