“Then I noticed a heavy bracelet that didn’t seem to close properly on her wrist. Its catch was defective, stuck up like a microscopic spur, needed flattening. What could it do to anyone else but graze them, inflict a tiny scratch? ‘Ouch!’ ‘Oh, I’m sorry, dear, I’ll kiss it away.’ ‘Forget it.’ But to me it would have brought death. Strange that only on the night she was wearing that particular ornament did she try to hug me tightly around the neck. The night before, and the night after, she didn’t come near me.”

  He stopped and looked at me. “More?”

  “A little more. I’ll tell you when to stop.”

  “In a hundred ways she has tried to draw the single drop of blood from me that will eventually bring death in its wake. She brought a cat into the house, a pedigreed Persian. Yet I happen to know that she hates animals herself. Why a cat, then? I soon found out.” He shrugged. “You know the feline propensity for stalking, and finally clawing at anything moving? I sat reading one night before the fire, with the cat there, and finally dozed off, as she must have hoped I would. I opened my eyes just in time to find the cat crouched at my feet, tail lashing, about to spring.

  “My arm was hanging limp over the side of the chair. The cat’s claws would have raked it in a half dozen places. A loose piece of string was traveling up my arm, drawn from behind the chair. Luckily there was a cushion behind me. I just had time enough to swing it out in front of me, use it as a buffer. The cat struck it, gashed it to ribbons.

  “When I stood up and turned, she was behind me, holding the other end of the string she had used to bait the cat. What could I say? ‘You tried to kill me just then’? All she seemed to be doing was playing with the cat. Yet I knew she had tried; I knew she must have kept flinging out that piece of string again and again until it trailed across my arm as she wanted it to.

  “Whom could I tell such a thing to—and expect to be believed? What bodyguard, what detective, can protect me against such methods?”

  He was right about that. I could have sent someone back with him to protect him against a gun, a knife, poison. Not against a woman playing with a cat or twining her arms about his neck. “Why don’t you leave her, then? Why don’t you get out while there is still time? Why stay and wait for it to happen?”

  “We Iverias don’t give up the things we prize that easily.”

  That left me kind of at a loss. Here was a man who knew he was going to be murdered, yet wouldn’t lift his little finger to prevent it. “Any more?”

  “What is the use of going ahead? I have either convinced you by the few examples I have given or there is no hope of my ever convincing you.”

  “And now just what is it you want me to do?”

  “Nothing. When it happens—maybe tomorrow, maybe next week—I will call you, while I still have the strength left, and say, ‘This is it.’ But even if I fail to, be sure that it is ‘it.’ You will read in the papers, within a day or two after that, that the Prince of Iveria died from hemophilia. Some slight mishap in the home. A pin had been left in his freshly laundered shirt.

  “There isn’t a living soul in the whole world, physician or layman, who will believe such a thing could have been murder. But you will know better, Inspector Burke, you will know better after what I have told you today.

  “Take my affidavit out of your safe, go up there, and arrest her. Force the issue through, so that she has to stand trial for it. Probably she will not be convicted. That doesn’t matter. The thing will be brought out into the open, aired before the whole world. His name will be dragged into it. Convicted or acquitted, I will have succeeded in what I set out to do. She cannot marry him or go near him, after I am gone, without branding herself a murderess in the eyes of the world.”

  “So that’s it,” I said softly.

  “That’s it. He can’t have her and she can’t have him. Unless they are willing to go through a living hell, become outcasts, end by hating each other. In which case they have lost each other anyway. I am the Prince of Iveria. What once belongs to me I give up to no other man.”

  He’d said his say and had no more to say. He stood up and stretched out his hand to me.

  “Goodbye, Inspector Burke. We shall probably not see each other again. Your job is to punish murder. See that you don’t fail. You’ll do what I’ve asked you to?”

  What could I do? Go up there and arrest her to prevent it? On what charge? Wearing a bracelet with a catch that needed repairing? Playing with a pet cat in the same room he happened to be in? True, he was almost seeking the thing instead of trying to ward it off. But I couldn’t compel him to move out of his own home if he didn’t want to. If murder was committed, even though he made no move to avoid it, even though he met it halfway, that didn’t make it any the less murder.

  He kept looking at me, waiting for my answer.

  I nodded gloomily at last, almost against my will. “I’ll do whatever the situation calls for.”

  He turned and went slowly out through the doorway with the aid of his cane, stiffly erect, just leaning a little sideways. I never saw him alive again.

  It came quicker than I’d expected. Too quickly for me to be able to do anything to prevent it. I’d intended paying a visit up there in person, trying to introduce myself into the establishment in some way, to see if I could size up the situation at first hand, form my own conclusions. He hadn’t given me any physical evidence, remember, that she was attempting to murder him. All right, granting that he couldn’t give me physical evidence—the very nature of the setup forbade it—he still hadn’t convinced me one hundred percent. My own eyes and ears would have helped.

  But before I had a chance it was already too late—the thing was over.

  The second day after his visit, at nine in the morning, just after I’d got in to Headquarters, I was hailed. “Inspector Burke, you’re wanted on the phone.”

  I picked it up and a woman’s voice, cool and crisp, said, “Inspector Burke, this is the Cedars of Lebanon Hospital at Eastport. We have a patient here, the Prince of Iveria, who would like to speak to you.”

  I waited, squeezing the life out of the thing. There were vague preparatory sounds at the other end. He must have been very weak already. I could hardly hear him at first. Just a raspy breathing sound, like dry leaves rustling in the wind. They must have been holding him up. I said, “I can’t hear you!”

  Then he got words through. Four of them. “Burke? This is it.”

  I said, “Hello! Hello!” He’d hung up.

  I called right back. I couldn’t get him again. Just got the hospital switchboard. They wouldn’t clear the call. The patient was in no condition to speak further to anyone, they told me. He was—dying.

  “You’ve got to put me through to him again! He was just on the line, so how can an extra thirty seconds hurt?”

  Another wait. The hospital operator came back again. “The patient says there is nothing further to be said.” Click.

  If ever a man embraced death willingly, you might even say exultantly, it was he.

  I grabbed my hat, grabbed a cab, and went straight to the hospital. Again the switchboard operator blocked me. She plugged in, plugged out. “Sorry, no one can go up. The Prince of Iveria is in a coma—no longer conscious. I’m afraid there’s not much hope left.”

  That cooled me off. If he couldn’t talk there wasn’t much use in my going up. I said, “I’ll wait,” and hung around in the lobby for the next two hours, having her ring up at intervals to find out. There was always a chance he might rally. What I wanted to hear from him was: had she done it or hadn’t she? True, the implication of ‘This is it’ was she had; he’d warned me that was all he was going to say when the time came, but I had to have more than that.

  Probably the only material witness there would ever be against her was slipping through my fingers. I didn’t have a nail left intact on my ten fingers, the marble flooring on my side of the reception foyer was swimming with cigarette butts, by the time the two hours were up. I must have driven the poor switchboard girl half crazy.

  Twice, while I was waiting, I saw rather husky-looking individuals step out of the elevator. They were both too hale-looking to be hospital cases themselves. One was counting over a small wad of bills, the second hitching at his sleeve, as though his arm were tender. Without knowing for sure, I had a good hunch they were donors who had been called in for blood transfusions.

  The operator tried his floor once more, but he was still unconscious, so it looked as though it hadn’t helped. Even my badge wouldn’t have got me up—this was a hospital, after all—but I didn’t want to use it, in any event.

  At ten to two that afternoon the elevator door opened and she came out—alone. I saw her for the first time. I knew it must be she. He’d said she was the most beautiful girl in Europe or America. He needn’t have left out Asia or Africa. She was the most beautiful human being I’d ever seen anywhere in my life. The sort of a face that goes with wings and a halo.

  She was all in black, but not the black of mourning—yet—the black of fashion. She wasn’t crying, just looking down at the floor as if she had a lot to think about. So at least she was no hypocrite; I gave her that much.

  As she moved through the foyer the nurse at the switchboard followed her with her eyes, a pair of question marks in them that couldn’t be ignored. She—Iveria’s wife—felt their insistence finally, looked over at her, nodded with a sort of calm sadness. About the same degree of melancholy that would go with the withering of a pet plant in one’s garden.

  So he’d died.

  I didn’t accost her, didn’t do anything about it right then. She wasn’t some fly-by-night roadhouse hostess that you grab while the grabbing’s good; she would always be where I could reach her. The patrimony of the House of Iveria, immovably fixed in the ground, in mines, farms, forests, castles, would see to that. If she’d done it, there was plenty of time. If she hadn’t there was even more time than plenty.

  She went out through the revolving door to a car waiting for her. Nobody else was in it but the driver. It skimmed away like a bolt of satin being unrolled along the asphalt.

  The switchboard operator turned to me and whispered unnecessarily, “He’s dead.”

  It was up to me now, I was on my own. All I had was the valueless memory of a conversation, and an almost equally valueless affidavit, deposed before the event itself. And my own eyes and ears and good judgment, for whatever they were worth.

  There had been a pyramidal hierarchy of medical experience in attendance on him, as was to be expected, but I didn’t bother with the lower strata. I took a short cut straight to the apex and singled out the topmost man. I did it right then and there, as soon as I’d seen her leave the hospital.

  His name was Drake, and he’d treated everyone prominent who’d ever had it, which meant he got about one patient every five years. And could live nicely on it, at that, to give you a rough idea.

  I found him in a small pleasant lounge reserved for the doctors on the hospital staff—it was a private institution—on the same floor where Iveria had just died, but well insulated from the hospital activities around it. He was having a glass of champagne-and-bitters and smoking a Turkish cigarette, to help him forget the long-drawn-out death scene he’d just attended.

  I didn’t make the mistake of thinking this was heartlessness. I could tell it wasn’t, just by looking at him. He had a sensitive face, and his hands were a little shaky. The loss of the patient had affected him, either professionally or personally, or both.

  He thought I was a reporter at first, and wasn’t having any. “Please don’t bother me right now. They’ll give you all the necessary details at the information desk.” Then when he understood I was police, he still couldn’t understand why there should be any police interest in the case. Which didn’t surprise me. Whatever the thing was, I had expected it to look natural. Iveria had warned me it would—so natural I might never be able to break it down.

  I didn’t give him an inkling of what my real purpose was. “This isn’t police interest in the usual sense,” I glibly explained. “His highness took me into his confidence shortly before this happened, asked me to have certain personal matters carried out for him in case of his death. That’s my only interest.”

  That cleared away the obstructions. “Wait a minute; is your name Burke?” He put down his champagne glass.

  “That’s right.”

  “He left a message for you. He revived for a moment or two, shortly before the end, whispered something to us. The nurse jotted it down.” He handed me a penciled scrap of paper. “I don’t know whether we got it right or not, it was very hard to hear him—”

  It said: Burke. Don’t fail me. This is a job for you.

  Which was a covert way of saying murder. “Yes, you got it right,” I assented gloomily, and put it in my pocket. “Was his wife present when he whispered this?”

  “Not in the room itself, in the outside room.”

  “Did she see it afterwards?”

  “No. He muttered something that sounded like ‘Nobody but him,’ so we took that to mean he didn’t want anyone but you to see it.”

  “That’s right, he didn’t.”

  “Sit down. Have some?” I shook my head. “Swell fellow, wasn’t he? Practically doomed from the beginning, though. They always are with that. I tried transfusions, and I even tried this new cobra-venom treatment. Minute doses, of course. Very efficacious in some cases. Couldn’t stop the flow this time, though. You see, that’s the worst part of the hellish thing. It’s progressive. Each time they’re less able to resist than the time before. He was too weak by this time to pull through—”

  He’d been under a strain, and he was going to work it off in garrulousness, if I didn’t stop him; so I stopped him. I wasn’t interested in the medical aspects of the case, anyway. There was only one thing I wanted. “What brought it on this time?”

  “The lesions were all over his forehead and scalp. An unfortunate chain of trivialities led to an accident. They occupied adjoining bedrooms, you know. The communicating door was faced with a large mirror panel. There was a reading chair in Iveria’s room with a large, bulky hassock to go with it, on which he habitually rested his feet. There was a bedside light, which should have cast enough light to avoid what happened.

  “At any rate, he said he was awakened from a sound sleep by his wife’s voice crying out a name; evidently she was being troubled by a bad dream. There was such terror in her voice, however, that he could not be sure it was just that, and not possibly an intruder. He seized a small revolver he habitually kept under his pillow, pulled the chain of the bedside light. It refused to go on; the bulb had evidently burned itself out since the last time it had been in use. The switch controlling the main overhead lights was at the opposite side of the room.

  “He therefore jumped up without any lights, made for the mirror-door by his sense of direction alone, gun in hand. The reading chair and hassock should have been offside. The chair still was; the hassock had become misplaced and was directly in his path. It tripped him. There was not enough space between it and the mirror-faced door to give the length of his body clearance. His forehead struck the mirror, shattered it.

  “It would have been a serious accident for anyone—but not a fatal accident. None of the numerous little gashes was deep enough to require stitches. But he and his wife both knew what it meant to him and they didn’t waste any time. She telephoned me in Montreal, where I was attending a medical convention, and I chartered a plane and flew right back. But I doubt that I could have saved him even if I had been right in the same room with him when it happened. I had them remove him to the hospital and summon donors before I even started down. I gave him the first transfusion ten minutes after I arrived, but he failed to rally, continued sinking steadily.”

  I wasn’t interested in the rest, only in what the original “mishap,” the starting point, had been. I thanked him and left. This was going to be a tricky thing to sift to the bottom of. Acutely perceptive? You needed to be a magnetized divining rod to know what to do!

  I opened the safe and I read over his affidavit before I went to tackle her. The affidavit didn’t bring anything new to the case, simply restated what he had said to me that day in the office, only at greater length and in more detail. The incident of the loosened windshield was there, the cat incident, and several others that he hadn’t told me at the time.

  “. . .I, therefore, in view of the above, solemnly accuse my wife, Marilyn Reid d’Iveria, of having at various times sought to cause my death, by means of the affliction known to her to be visited upon me, and of continuing to seek to do so at the time this deposition is taken, and charge the authorities and all concerned that in case of my death occurring at any time hereafter during her continued presence in my house and proximity to me, to apprehend and detain the said Marilyn Reid d’Iveria with a view to inquiring into and ascertaining her responsibility and guilt for the aforesaid death, and of bringing just punishment upon her.

  Arnoldo Amadeo

  Manfredo d’Iveria”

  With that final postscript tacked on, it was going to be damned effective. Enough to arrest her on, book her for suspicion of murder, and hold her for trial. What went on after that, in the courtroom, was none of my business.

  I put it in my pocket and left to interview the party of the second part—the murderess.

  He’d been buried in the morning—privately—and I got out there about five that same afternoon. There was no question of an arrest yet, not on this first visit anyway, so I didn’t bother looking up the locals, even though I was out of jurisdiction here. She could slam the door in my face if she wanted. She wouldn’t, if she was smart. It wouldn’t help her case any.

  It was a much smaller place than I’d expected it to be. White stucco or sandstone or something. I’m not up on those things. I turned into the driveway on foot. It was dusk by now, and a couple of the ground-floor windows on the side were lighted; the rest of the house was blacked out.

 

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38