The Red Right Hand Read online

  And no man—no man living—makes a completely perfect picture. Even less the dead.

  Lack of perfect eyesight is no barrier to obtaining life insurance, anyway. The examining doctors aren’t interested in whether a man’s eyes are jellybeans or glass. They are interested in his heart and kidneys. If they concern themselves with his eyes at all, it is only to peer back of them with an ophthalmoscope at the blood vessels in the fundus, trying to guess from their appearance how long he will live. Though that is a thing which even the best can’t answer.

  I never saw St. Erme alive myself. These details about him are what Elinor Darrie told me, as I drove up the road with her from Dead Bridegroom’s Pond, and what she told in fuller detail in answer to Lieutenant Rosenblatt’s questions later.

  Q. [To Miss Darrie] If anyone—if this man that we are calling Corkscrew—had known that Mr. St. Erme was nearly blind, before he hailed you, it might have been useful to him. But you had never mentioned Mr. St. Erme’s handicap to anyone, had you, Miss Darrie?

  A. That would have been terrible. I mean Inis didn’t want even me to know anything about it, I felt. I would have thought it terrible to have told other people about it. I never discussed anything about him with anybody.

  Q. Never with anybody?

  A. Well, I told Mr. Riddle, Mr. Paul Riddle, my boss, that I thought Mr. Erme was nice. But I never discussed him with anybody.

  Q. Who was the doctor who examined Mr. St. Erme for his insurance?

  A. Dr. Burnstetter. He has been doing that work for Mr. Riddle’s company for forty years.

  Q. Did he notice that Mr. St. Erme’s eyes were so bad, himself?

  A. He didn’t mention it on his report form, I don’t think. Of course, he wouldn’t have made a special notation of it, unless it had something to do with an examinee’s general health. And Inis was quite healthy, really. Except for his eyes, he had nothing wrong.

  Q. Even though he didn’t mention it in his report, Dr. Burnstetter could have told about Mr. St. Erme’s handicap to someone else, couldn’t he?

  A. [By Dr. Riddle] That’s a ridiculous assumption, Lieutenant. Physicians don’t go around blabbing about their patient’s handicaps or defects. For one thing, they know too many different kinds to make any particular individual’s seem interesting. For another, it’s against their oath.

  Q. But they might say something to another physician, mightn’t they, Doctor?

  A. If there were anything medically unusual in the case.

  Q. Do you happen to know Dr. Burnstetter yourself, Doctor?

  A. No, I’ve never heard of him. Of course he might belong to some medical society that I belong to, and I may have met and conversed with him at some meeting. But I have no recollection of him, nor of anything we may have discussed. He never discussed his examinees’ myopia with me, to the best of my knowledge. I never heard of St. Erme.

  Q. [To Miss Darrie] Could you tell me something about the business for which Mr. St. Erme got his insurance? Who might benefit by his death?

  A. [By Miss Darrie] It was some kind of business that he was in with Mr. Dexter, who owns a garage. An inventing business. Mr. Dexter wouldn’t benefit, in any way important. Inis was going to make millions for him....

  The business for which St. Erme had wanted to insure his life was a side line in which he had become interested. He had discovered a garage owner, A. M. Dexter, owning a place on West Fourteenth, who was one of these gadgetmakers and mechanical geniuses, and had formed a grub-staking partnership with Dexter to develop and exploit some of his inventions.

  The situation of Dexter, when St. Erme found him, was this: that he was a man of considerable native ingenuity and creative imagination, but was impractical, and without any business sense. He would work on some device till he had got it toward the final stage, and then would lose interest in it; or would perhaps find himself tied up for lack of a few hundred dollars of necessary capital to make a working model, and would turn in a frenzy of fresh, enthusiasm to something else, and go through the same whole bootless process again.

  Dexter had never patented anything. He had never actually quite perfected anything. He had never thought of any of his inventions from the utilitarian and commercial point of view, in terms of money that might be made from them and the uses to which they might be put. He was just a puttering, baldheaded, grease-stained, middle-aged mechanic, essentially, who liked to tinker with odd devices for the fun of it, owning a small business that was always on the verge of bankruptcy. Yet when St. Erme had looked his shop over, he had found that Dexter had on the ways no less than half a dozen devices of great promise, including an adaptation of the radar principle for perceiving objects under water, a television walkie-talkie of light and inexpensive construction, and a method of producing a rubber substitute from coal-mine refuse culm at a cost which St. Erme estimated would be no more than a fraction of a cent a pound.

  St. Erme did not claim to be a technical man. Yet it would require no great amount of mechanical understanding to see that if even one of those inventions was perfected, and proved practicable, it would be worth almost any sum, quite apart from any patriotic consideration of the importance, to the nation at war, of some of those devices for military use. By subsidizing Dexter with the necessary money for materials and models, St. Erme would share fifty-fifty in any profits. At the worst, if all those devices should prove to be only a gadget-maker’s dreams, he would not stand to lose very much.

  He had signed partnership papers with Dexter, and had put Dexter on a regular drawing account in lieu of salary, with regulated and business methods of work. He had wanted to insure that Dexter would be able to continue, in case of his own death.

  He might have set aside twenty-five thousand dollars in a special bank account for that purpose. But it was simpler to make the provision in the form of insurance, without putting up the cash where it might be tied up in litigation, in case Dexter should prove to be only a crazy dreamer or even a chiseling fraud. The insurance, in that case, could merely be allowed to lapse.

  It was the way his lawyers had advised him to handle it.

  Dexter, the garage man, had no knowledge that St. Erme had taken out any insurance in his favor, it would seem, from his conversation when old MacComerou called him up at dusk.

  Dexter did not seem to know a great deal about St. Erme in any way. He did not even know where St. Erme lived in New York. He didn’t know Elinor Darrie’s name, and wasn’t aware that St. Erme was being married. He had even forgotten that St. Erme had borrowed his car, until reminded of it. He was working on an invention and couldn’t be bothered.

  “Young St. Erme?” he told MacComerou, in his dry rasping voice which I couldn’t help but overhear. “Certainly I know him, Professor. He’s backing me. He’s got a lot of money. A fine young fellow, straight as a die, with a smart head on his shoulders. We’re going to make ten million dollars, he says, when I get a gadget finished that I’m working on....

  “No, I haven’t seen him today, that I remember. He lives at some hotel here in New York, I’ve forgotten the name of it. He has a girl, I think, who might know. He called me up last night to borrow my sport touring job for a few days, come to think of it. He wanted to go some place with his girl.

  “Where did you say you’re calling from, Professor? Up in the Berkshires in north Connecticut? That does sound like my job you saw go by. XL 465-297’s the license number, if you happen to get a look at it. I gave him the loan of it. His girl was going to drive it. That’s all I know about it. I hope there’s nothing wrong. If anything happened to the boy, I’d be in a bad way. Excuse me, I’ve got something boiling on the stove that’s liable to blow up on me. Can you call me up some other time, Professor?”

  And click! A hundred miles away down in New York, Inis St. Erme’s gadgetmaking partner had hung up dryly.

  That was within an hour, at most, of the time of St. Erme’s murder. Before it was more than a shadowy and intangible projection that something da
rk and diabolic might have happened to him. He might not even have been dead at that moment, it was possible. Down there on the Swamp Road a mile away, still alive and still all too terribly aware, with crazy laughing little Corkscrew and his knife.

  That scene keeps coming back to me—that scene at twilight when I first came here, looking for some help in getting started, with my car stalled at the entrance to the Swamp Road.

  The voices of the locusts come back to me, and the gray bird fluttering frantically in my face, and the sound, like a great frog croaking in the weedy ditch, there had been as I came down the road, and that hat which I had found, that damned blue mutilated hat. There was something in all of it that troubled old MacComerou. There was something in the picture that he knew could not be right.

  There were only the two of us around the place here, then. No one knew yet that murder had been done. St. Erme wasn’t even a name to me. Corkscrew not even a phantom. But old MacComerou had seen that gray car rushing by, and I had not seen it. And he knew the picture wasn’t right.

  The question is, what train of thought had started in his keen old brain, which impelled him to call up Dexter? There was something about that car which he wanted answered. I can see him yet, standing at the phone out in the kitchen, still in his gardening shorts and moccasins, with dirt and sweat over him, gaunt and bent-shouldered, a gray furze on his pale chest, laying a big silver watch down deliberately on the slanting phone-box ledge beneath the mouthpiece before thumbing through his black book for Dexter’s number, then ringing the crank with a long white arm like a peeled white stick, and asking for toll operator, which is Connecticutese for long distance.

  Putting his questions to Dexter, when he had got him, with meditative deliberation, still thumbing through his black book while he listened to Dexter’s rasping answers. Perhaps looking for other numbers to call up, if the car had not been Dexter’s. With his big old brain working beneath his flat bald skull, and his shrewd faded blue eyes that knew too much of murder.

  Yet whatever the thought in old MacComerou’s mind, I missed it. He seemed satisfied with the information Dexter gave him, anyway, as he turned and looked at me. There is nothing in the picture that I can see, nothing whatever, to connect St. Erme’s doodling garage-man partner with red-eyed little Corkscrew.

  There is nothing to connect him with anyone. He appears to have come from limbo, and to have vanished the same way. The problem must be approached from the beginning. To trace back, if possible, at what moment he first appeared upon the scene—that red-eyed wedding guest.

  Q. [To Miss Darrie] When did you and Mr. St. Erme first decide on your wedding journey today, Miss Darrie? How large a sum of money was he carrying with him? Who knew where you were going?

  A. We decided to get married only yesterday at lunch. I don’t know just how much money Inis had with him, but it was at least twenty-five hundred dollars. No one knew where we were going. We didn’t know ourselves....

  It had been, it seemed, only about thirty hours before I met her there on the road that she and St. Erme had decided to get married.

  They had been having lunch together at a little place near her office. A place where people ate outdoors, in a Spanish patio beside a fountain, with caged birds singing, and it was a bright sunshiny day in August, and they had known each other nearly two months.

  St. Erme had not spoken of marriage to her before. It had been something that had not been in her own mind at all, at the moment. She might have thought of it subconsciously, at different times, as a possible eventual culmination of their acquaintance, as a girl does, but not as anything immediate or even necessarily very probable. There was the difference in their ages and their stations. It was only something which after a year or so he might propose, if he still continued to see her and find her company pleasant; and which she might consider then.

  She had never had a man in love with her before. She had not realized that he was.

  But this was New York, not Spardersburg, and St. Erme was a man of decision, not a mooning boy. They were both alone in New York and the world, and only themselves mattered. In the time that they had known each other they had dined together, and had gone to movies together, to the Central Park Zoo and Radio City, and had ridden on the ferry to Staten Island and listened to concerts at the Stadium, and done all those other things together which can be done during a summer in New York. St. Erme had learned about her all that there was to know, perhaps; and she about him all that she would ever know. And so it might as well be now.

  He had set down his demitasse and tossed his crumpled napkin on the table.

  “Let’s get married,” he had said to her, smiling at her with his diffident white smile, his black eyes crinkled. “Let’s get married right away today.”

  All that she would ever know. But as much, perhaps, as most girls know about the man they marry. A girl must take the unread pages on faith, or the whole thing is nothing.

  “Why not?” she had replied, her heart beating.

  And that’s the way it’s agreed, after luncheon on a bright summer day, in a patio with birds singing and a fountain playing, or in some other pleasant setting, by an exchange of casual words, when there are no relatives from whom to obtain permission or friends to be informed, but only the two of them in the whole world, and wanting life to be like this moment always.

  St. Erme had summoned the check; and on the way out they had stopped at a telephone booth, where she had called up her office, saying that she would not be back that afternoon. She had already had a tentative permission to take the afternoon off, if she should want to for shopping. Without any more preliminaries than that, without any plan, they had taken the near-by subway down to City Hall.

  But New York State has a three-day law, they had learned at the license bureau. St. Erme had thought then of Connecticut, as many people do. Even people who have lived in New York all their lives are apt to think of Connecticut as an elopers’ paradise, perhaps because Greenwich is the first railroad station in that state, and, its name is confused with Gretna Green. Though actually Connecticut has had a five-day law for a long time.

  St. Erme and she didn’t know about that, however. When they learned about the New York law, he had thought of Connecticut. It was too late to go there that day, though. They would have to put it off till the next. It had occurred to him that they might go by car, and they could then go on up, making a honeymoon of it, to Maine or Montreal.

  St. Erme hadn’t brought his own car East with him, with his chauffeur now in the army and the gas situation what it was. Rather than trying to rent a limousine with chauffeur, though, he would see if he could get a car from Dexter for her to drive.

  He didn’t say that his eyes were the reason he didn’t drive. He merely explained it to her, with his curious small vanity, that he had never had the time to learn. But she could drive, of course, having always driven her grandmother’s car. Even old Amish ladies, who think that modern inventions like buttons are all sinful, used to like to sit spread out on the back seat of a sedan in their black bombazines, with their hands folded on their laps, and watch the trees and houses and telephone poles and cows go past, like everyone else, in the days of rubber and gas.

  Driving a car was something that she had always enjoyed doing. She had even got a New York driver’s license, at a cost of a dollar and a half for three years, on first coming to the city, with the idea of some day perhaps sending for the old sedan. However, its tires were gone; and her grandmother’s executor back in Spardersburg had sold it for seventy-five dollars. So that part of her life was already over.

  St. Erme had called up Dexter during dinner, when they had decided on it, and had secured the use of Dexter’s gray Cadillac sport touring for as long as he might want it. A colored boy from Dexter’s garage had delivered it to her apartment the next morning, and had then driven around the block with her a few times, until she had got the feel of it.

  “Should I give you a receipt, or is Mr. St.
Erme’s name sufficient?” she asked the boy, when she had returned him to the garage to which he directed her, a few blocks distant.

  The boy shook his head.

  “Mr. Dexter just gave word to the night man to deliver it to you all this morning. He didn’t say anything about wanting a receipt.”

  “Perhaps Mr. Dexter would like to pass on me himself before I take it, if he’s not too busy,” she had said. “It’s a perfectly beautiful car, and I wouldn’t want him to worry that I might wreck it.”

  “Mr. Dexter ain’t been in this morning yet, I don’t think,” said the boy. “He ain’t always. Just remember that your gear shift’s on the steering post, and you don’t have to keep reaching down around your knees. I reckon you aren’t any crazy driver, and won’t hurt it. You aren’t going to steal it, neither, I don’t guess. Nobody wouldn’t get nowhere very far with it if they did. Might as well try to steal a fire engine. Just listen to that horn.”

  He pressed a high-pitched wailing blast from the button, as he got out.

  “That says, ‘Here I come like a big gray ball of fire! Get out of my way, all you good-for-nothing ornery little puddle jumpers!’ ” he told her with a grin. “Some day I’d sure like to have a car like her myself. Boy, I’d sure make their eyes bug out.”

  A short fat bald white man in a grease-stained monkey suit had come out of the garage doors at the blast.

  “Miss Burry?” he said, wiping his hands on waste. “Mr. Dexter just called up to ask if you had got it. He wasn’t sure if he had got the address right. But I see he did.”

  “Miss Darrie,” she said. “I thought perhaps you were Mr. Dexter. Thank him for me, anyway, and for Mr. St. Erme.”

  “Me Dexter?” he said with a laugh. “Good Lord, I’m just Gus. Dexter is twice as big, twice as homely, and twice as dumb. Thank him for who? Mr. Saturn? Never mind, I guess Mr. Dexter knows who it is, anyway. He wouldn’t let anybody use that car unless he thought a lot of them. Your gas tank’s filled up, and the coupon book’s in the glove compartment. C to H are still good. You must be planning to drive quite a ways. Are you going on a honeymoon or something?”