The Indigo Necklace Read online

  “I thought the kid died?”

  “You’re darn right,” Jonas said. “Wick claimed self-defense and got away with it, but he had to shut up shop. Only, why did he come here? There are plenty of other towns rolling in defense-plant money, but Wick comes here, takes that place at Miss Clary’s, spends a mint fixing it up. Why? He doesn’t seem to overly want that girl. I was watching them this morning. He’s a lucky guy and he doesn’t seem to care.” Captain Jonas waved a hand. “Well, we’re playing along, keeping our mouths shut and our eyes open.”

  “Why isn’t he in the army?” I asked.

  “Busted ear-drum to start with. Now he’s over age.”

  I said he didn’t look it, and Jonas turned the talk back to food as the waiter brought trout, the filet de truite Marguery which Galatoire’s was said to do, he said, the best of anybody in the world. Had we tried their bouillabaisse? They also did a tasty gumbo here based on crabmeat and seasoned with many herbs—thyme, bay leaf, garlic, if you liked it, parsley. Herbs. Mint was an herb. That smell last night before I got bashed by the book was—all at once I remembered—anise. Absinthe smelled like anise. Anise was an herb.

  “Clary did it,” Jonas was saying. He looked about again cautiously. “We will charge him with murder as soon as we get the nurse. I wouldn’t say yet that Carol Graham knew what he was up to when they met last night in Jackson Square, but afterwards Clary went home and killed his wife. It ties up, Lieutenant.”

  I was so startled at his knowing about their meeting that I sat gaping at Jonas with my fork up in the air.

  Patrick appeared as surprised as I was. But not because Jonas knew those two had met, but because they had met! You would think he’d never heard of it before.

  He said, after a perceptible moment, “How did you find that out, Captain Jonas?”

  “Somebody phoned headquarters. One of those anonymous calls, a woman, our switchboard operator thought. He took the message, which was nothing but a flat statement that two people who looked like Major Clary and some girl had been seen along about mid’ night in Jackson Square. We made a routine check-up and a new patrolman remembered seeing them. They sat on a bench near the gate in front of the church. His description was pretty close, and he identified them this morning at the house without their knowing it. The haze had started lifting when he spotted them in the Square and he had hesitated about turning them out of the park because he was new at the job and hated to do it. Also they weren’t spooning or anything, just sitting there—talking things over, I reckon, in a cold-blooded Creole sort of way. When they left the Square the girl went first and the Major followed half a block behind her. Neither ever noticed the patrolman. He couldn’t hear what they said, and he thought they spoke French, which he doesn’t happen to understand. I talked to Carol at the house this morning and she admitted it. She’s got some temper, that girl.”

  “Did Clary admit it, too?”

  “I didn’t mention it to Clary. The girl will, which is the way I want it done, at the moment. The madder we get Clary the more mistakes he is likely to make.”

  The waiter brought tiny green limas, shoestring potatoes, and a salad as green as my emerald, and poured the dry white wine.

  “A good Bordeaux,” said Captain Jonas. “Getting very scarce.”

  The waiter left us again, and Jonas, spreading out his small hands, which looked graceful now, either because of the drinks inside me, or because, under the influence of excellent food and drink, he became really graceful, said, “We checked Major Clary’s story. He left his hospital when he said he did, drove into town, and put his car in the garage at seven minutes before midnight. From there we lose his trail till the policeman sees them in the park, but that is only a few minutes, four or five at most, after they met, according to Carol’s story, on the corner near the church, or more accurately near the Cabildo, because it was the corner of St. Peter Street and Chartres where they had a date to meet. Then they went at once and sat on the bench. Clary, of course, was under great provocation to do murder. His wife was hopelessly insane....”

  “He didn’t know she was hopeless at that time,” Patrick put in. “Chances were she was, but neither of the doctors knew positively that her case was hopeless till Postgate examined the brain during the autopsy.”

  “A detail,” Jonas said, spreading his hands. “He had made up his mind to murder her very likely long before last night. He wanted her money and he wanted Carol Graham. He planned it in detail. He would use the curare preparation, which he had previously taken from Postgate’s case, and...”

  “He wouldn’t have to,” I said. “He’s a doctor. He could buy his own curare.”

  “Would that be wise? No. It isn’t yet too easy to buy the stuff off the shelf and if you did buy it you might be remembered. It’s unusual, see. If it was taken from the hospital, where he’s attached, it would be too easy to trace. I think we can say with a fair amount of truth that somehow or other Clary got hold of the doctor’s two little bottles in a carefully worked-out plan to do murder. The hitch, of course, was the nurse, but she wasn’t a very serious obstacle, really, because lately he had several times let her go to her room on Dauphine Street when he got home at night. We found that out from Victorine’s landlady. He was planning all along to do away with his wife, and he knew that it would look pretty funny if his wife checked out the very first time he let the nurse go. Last night he got around to doing it. Only, he made some mistakes. First, he rang up the girl. The call is on record at his hospital and also at the one where she was doing nurse’s aide. Then they met by the church, and she has admitted it.

  “Clary was probably pretty worked up. He probably thought he had to see the girl, kiss her maybe, in order to bring himself to kill his wife. Clary isn’t a natural killer. Wick, now, if anybody stood in his way like that, would promptly arrange to get rid of him without a second thought. His only concern would be getting caught. Wick wouldn’t’ve made the mistake of meeting the girl. He wouldn’t risk the girl’s getting wise to what he was going to do, either. Not Wick. He wouldn’t trust anybody but himself, and specially he wouldn’t trust any woman.

  “However, Clary had gradually made up his mind to kill his wife and, having got that far, he would see it through, even though it was hard to bring himself to do it. I’ll say this for Clary: I don’t think he would have done it for the money only. He had to have the added incentive of the girl. He would have to care a lot about the girl, too. His conscience would handicap him a lot, too. Even though his wife was crazy. But that is simply because he hates to kill. Whatever feeling he had had for the woman when they were married was gone because she was not, of course, the same woman.” Jonas paused, and then said, “Well, he couldn’t bring himself to do it, even after meeting Carol, for a couple of hours more. He stayed away from the house, and he kept walking. His story is that he was worried about one thing or another and that he walked from the time he left his car in the garage till he came into the house and found Mrs. Abbott lying unconscious across his doorsill.” Jonas added, after taking breath, “He hasn’t mentioned meeting Carol, and we haven’t because we want him to have it from her first.”

  Patrick said, “So you think it was Clary who hit my wife on the head with the curtain pole?”

  Jonas’s eyes gleamed. “Not the pole. Something else. We haven’t got that yet. You ought to have told us, Mrs. Abbott. He banged Mrs. Abbott on the head and then he hopped on a chair and stepped on to the marble-topped dresser near that window and pulled down the pole and curtains to make it look like an accident. An inspiration on his part—only he didn’t allow for the windows opening inward, which spoiled an otherwise good idea. He wouldn’t’ve deliberately killed you, Mrs. Abbott. But he hit you hard enough, had the blow landed right. He was panicked, and why not? Well, you know the rest. Your coming down when you saw Mrs. Clary in the yard started a chain of disturbances and eventually roused the house, Mrs. Abbott, and then Dr. Postgate remembered his two little bottles and a
sked for an investigation. So we go looking for a nurse—and catch a doctor. A medical Major, which will mean getting mixed up with the military, I reckon.”

  “But the nurse went out before Roger came home?” I said.

  “No, Mrs. Abbott. It was the other way round.”

  “Then Uncle George lied, you mean?”

  The detective shook his large head.

  “Perhaps. Perhaps not. Uncle George, as you call him, is a shifty old customer, but we haven’t been able to shake him on his story. He may have seen the nurse leave the house, but he may have been mistaken about the time. Clary came in first. Uncle George didn’t see Clary come in because he came from Chartres Street, which would bring him past Wick’s apartment but not past the window where Uncle George sat. So Clary could easily have let himself into the house without being noticed by Uncle George, even though the old man sat by a window near the sidewalk. Or maybe George wasn’t looking out when Clary came home....Well, Clary came in, anyway, sent the nurse out, and then got right down to the dirty work before he could start thinking too hard and change his mind. He was lucky in one thing, and that was when he pushed her down the steps to make it look like an accident. Her arm was scratched and the mark of the hypo destroyed—but his luck didn’t hold because upstairs a wind is banging a shutter and this young lady gets up and hears suspicious noises and—well, you know the rest. I haven’t ordered the dessert, thinking you might like to choose it yourselves. Mrs. Abbott, what shall yours be?”

  To my horror I heard myself without a qualm, even after that horrible story, taking the waiter’s suggestion of the Baked Alaska. The New Orleans food was so good, or the drinks, that I could sit here listening to a hideous tale—which spelled the doom of poor Roger Clary and would make Carol miserable all her life—and still eat! My mind and spirit were in turmoil, my stomach indecently normal and contented.

  It remained so right through the coffee and the good cognac. “I shall spare the girl as much as I can,” Jonas said, as he lit a cigar. Patrick passed me a cigarette. “I find her very pretty. She’s got a face that grows on you, in a way.” The detective inhaled with deep pleasure, and added, tranquilly, as he slowly sipped the cognac, “I hate working on a Creole case like nobody’s business. But these Creoles certainly know how to cook.”

  When Captain Jonas dropped us at our house it was ten minutes past two—ten past one, standard time.

  The heat was bitter. The sky was white-hot. There was no true sunshine. The clouds had shaped a cap which shut down mercilessly upon the old city, and its heat was more intense and more cruel than raw sunshine. We fled into the cool security of the house.

  As I followed Patrick up the steps from the carriageway my eye was caught by a mere flick of movement on Roger Clary’s gallery, so slight it might not have happened, might have been a trick of the eye. Had a window opened slightly in Roger’s bedroom, and then closed, quickly and furtively? It was the same window I had entered in the dark, seeking help for Helen Clary.

  In our hall the mahogany chest had been moved back into its place. Patrick stepped back and lifted the lid and looked in. How macabre, I was thinking, à la Ava Graham, as I climbed the stairs. Halfway up I could see down into the chest when he opened it, and it was empty, and there was no reason why it shouldn’t be, no reason at all why there should be anything in it, or why I should think it macabre that he had peered into it. Maybe it was the heat, which gets on my nerves like nothing else, that made me jumpy.

  In our rooms Patrick went straight toward the bedroom, dropping off his hot clothes piece by piece as he walked. It was the thing to do. At home you took off as much as you could and you kept taking baths and you endured the heat. It was better to be in an office at work, Patrick always said, than to have to live through it idle. But I was burning with curiosity about that moving window. Had it happened, or hadn’t it? If it had, why, after starting to open, had it closed, when whoever was behind it discovered us? Why should Roger Clary do that to us, when Patrick was his friend, when Patrick was asked to help him? I opened a shutter stealthily and went onto the gallery, walking furtively myself. I cringed and blinked against the full glare of the white heat.

  There was no one at all in view. The garden and the courtyard were bleached of color by the pitiless light. The galleries were empty, and every shutter was closed and the slats turned so that they slanted outward and down to prevent the glare from coming into the house. I had turned to escape back into the house when Uncle George spoke up on the downstairs gallery, his falsetto pitched higher than he thought, “Five hundred’s all I need, Roger, and I promise I’ll pay it back and never ask you for another cent. What’s five hundred to you now, boy?” Rogers reply was irritable. “All right, all right,” he said.

  XII

  THE KITCHENETTE was the coolest place, or rather the least warm, because it had linoleum and a plain modern maple table and chairs, and we sat down, had a cigarette, and I told Patrick what Uncle George had been saying to Roger when I stepped out on our gallery. He didn’t seem to attach much importance to it. He said that it was inevitable that Uncle George should make such a touch, but doubted if it was in the best of taste to make it so soon. I said at least he ought to wait till tomorrow, with nothing open on Sunday.

  Then I told Patrick about Toby Wicks absinthe having the aroma I smelled last night just before I was bashed on the head. Toby, reeking of absinthe, I implied—you might say I laid it on thick—was certainly the one who did it. Patrick was doubtful that the remembered smell would be called good evidence.

  There were a good many things also that smelled like absinthe, which was scented with anise. There was anise, of course, in the herb garden. The seeds were used for cokes. Creoles liked the liqueur anisette and might grow the herb for that purpose. Maybe I smelled anisette or plain anise.

  I said then that I had seen the window move, though I hadn’t felt sure it was furtive until, from our gallery, what Uncle George had said to Roger had completed the impression.

  I asked how Patrick had known so much about Toby Wick.

  “I don’t know anything about Wick, Jeanie.”

  “But you talked to Jonas as if you knew everything! I was sure you were bluffing part of the time, but...”

  “Wick told me he came from Chicago. He’s obviously an expert barkeeper, anyone can see that, so I deduced that had been his business before he came here. Since he likes money he wouldn’t’ve come to New Orleans to set himself up in competition with the popular old places here before the defense boom made any kind of bar likely to be profitable. So I could make a fair stab at when he came here. I’m interested now in whether he plans to stay here after the war. He probably does. He attracts people of exotic taste, as you notice, and there are no doubt a large proportion of such in this town for its size, thanks to its mixed heritage. New Orleans is full of sophisticates out of all proportion to its size.

  “But you knew he’d changed his name?”

  “I did not! I merely drew Jonas out. He did it probably because of the Chicago trouble.”

  I mulled it over.

  “Villers, or something. Maybe he’s partly French?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Look, you knew about that bouncing business, in Chicago?”

  “No. Jonas jibed at him at the Good Angel, asked in a suggestive tone if he ever did his own bouncing. It stuck in my mind.”

  “Oh. Jonas doesn’t think he killed Helen Clary, does he?”

  “I wouldn’t know.”

  “Oh. You think...”

  “I think Captain Jonas is taking his own sweet time. He can’t even prove that Helen Clary was murdered—not yet, unless he has an ace up his sleeve he isn’t showing till he’s ready. He probably knows more than he’s telling.”

  “Maybe he knows where the nurse is now. He seemed awfully sort of settled in his mind at lunch. He was nice. And he didn’t try to quiz me, the way I expected. He was sweet. I thought it was the food.”

  “Let’s cal
l it the food, Jeanie.”

  “Of course, he may have planned that lunch just to make us feel good and so draw us out. He seemed positively inspired, darling. Not at all blunt and clumsy the way he was before. Then he didn’t try to draw us out.” Patrick seemed lost in thought and made no reply. I mopped my forehead, which was steaming from the exertion of talking. “And, there are always homicidal maniacs...”

  “Right. The next time Toby makes us one of his swell mint juleps remind me to ask him if he’s one.”

  “Darling, don’t joke. It’s too hot, and also there isn’t time. Captain Jonas might arrest Roger if only on suspicion. Maybe he’s only waiting till the cool of the day.” Patrick’s grin irked me. “Well, why not? Why isn’t that a good reason? And look, you’re right about his being smart. Remember how he knew about Carol and Roger meeting near the church?”

  “Elemental,” Patrick said, with a certain amount of impatience. “Roger made the date from a hospital where there was a switchboard. It was luck for Jonas that the patrolman remembered them, however.”

  “But there was an anonymous phone call—a woman, Jonas said. Who would do a dirty trick like that?” Patrick did not reply. “How about Ava Graham?”

  Ava, beautiful, supercilious Ava, slipped in and out of this thing like a knowing sort of wraith.

  “Carol and Roger both told us that no one saw them except ourselves,” Patrick said then. “They may be wrong.”

  All at once I knew why Carol was mad at me! She thought it was I who had tipped off the police!

  “I shouldn’t wonder,” Patrick said, as if he had thought of that long ago. “We’ll have to fix that with Carol, later on. I doubt if Ava made any anonymous phone call, however. I wouldn’t see how she would know that Carol and Roger met, unless Carol told her, which is possible.”

  I shook my head.