Trial by Fury Page 24

  “They were in Marv’s office,” Jerry explained “and they came along with us.” His face was pale. “My God, Jake Justus! Are you all right?”

  “Obviously, no,” Jake said between scorched lips.

  “We’ve had a little trouble here,” Malone said acidly.

  There were questions to be asked, and answers to be given. But before anyone could say a word, an ominous roar and crackling sounded from the building behind them. A sheet of flame shot from one window, darted to the next, and then burst out on the floor above.

  “Look out below!” Malone yelled, “it’s breaking out on the other story!”

  There were shouts, there was confusion, a great rushing back and forth of men with buckets, and a smothering outpouring of smoke. Someone took Malone by the arm and dragged him backwards; he saw the flames receding from his sight, shut his eyes, and let himself be propelled over the lawn. A door was opened and strong hands helped him through it and into a chair.

  “It’s under control,” a voice said from somewhere, “and the fire department is on the way out.”

  “Give him a drink,” another voice said.

  Malone opened his eyes and saw a glass being filled from a bottle of Dollar Gin. He wondered if the fire wouldn’t have been easier to survive.

  “Take this,” Helene said firmly. He took it, blinked a few times, and looked around the room.

  Everyone was there, Jake and Helene, holding tight to each other’s hands, Flo Peveley, her red hair flying in all directions, Jerry Luckstone, pale and worried, the sheriff and Joe Ryan, his deputy, Doc Goudge, who wasn’t a madman but was head of the county asylum, Philomen Ma. Smith, Mr. Goudge, and Ed Skindingsrude. A cold, wet nose pushed its way into his hand. It was Hercules.

  “Malone, listen,” Helene’s voice begged. “Remember. The other story. Do you know now what you meant?”

  Malone closed his eyes and nodded. He thought he knew what he meant, but he wasn’t sure.

  “The other story,” Jake repeated urgently. “Pay attention, damn you. Where another person might have said ‘the other floor,’ you said ‘the other story.’ You said it once before, and you said it was important.”

  “It was important,” Malone said, nodding. The effort hurt his head. “Because I meant the other story of the courthouse.” He opened his eyes. All he could see was a circle of white faces around him. In a minute he would have to point to one of those faces. And he knew, now, which one it was. “I meant”—it was painful, forming the words through those blistered lips—“the man who shot Senator Peveley, and blew up the bank, and strangled Cora Belle, was not on the second story of the courthouse.” He gasped at the air. “He was on the other story. The first story.”

  A voice said, “He’s out of his head. He’s delirious.”

  “I am not,” Malone said. “None of the people we listed as being on the second story of the courthouse shot Senator Peveley. The man who did shoot him was supposedly downstairs.” He gasped again. Someone poured another drink of Dollar Gin down his throat. “He knew the Senator was coming to the courthouse at that hour, he went upstairs and concealed himself in the broom closet, he waited until the Senator started down the little staircase and shot him in the back, he closed the door of the closet and waited until everyone else had gone down the stairs, and then,” he tried to draw a breath; it stuck in his throat.

  “Malone, go on,” Helene said.

  “Then,” the little lawyer whispered, “he went through the courtroom and down the big, main staircase and joined the crowd in the hall, as though he’d just come from his own office. I know it. The murderer could never have come out of that closet and down the little staircase without being observed by the people standing in the hall around the Senator’s body. It had to be like that. There was no other way.”

  He realized dimly that Helene was shaking him. “Malone. Who was it? What was his name?”

  Somehow he managed to form the words. “Don’t you Know? It’s a matter of simple arithmetic. There’s only one person it could be.”

  He knew, as he said them, that those were the last words he would speak above a whisper for a long time, maybe hours.

  But at the same time, he knew that he didn’t need to speak. The faces around him weren’t looking at him now.

  “That’s right,” Jerry Luckstone was saying, in a curiously strained voice. “There’s just one person who was in the bank that day who was on the first floor of the courthouse, not the second, when Senator Peveley was shot.”

  Malone grabbed at the young district attorney’s arm, shook it to attract attention, and went through a series of complicated gestures. Jerry Luckstone nodded in agreement.

  “He put the bomb in that package of school-fund records Ellen McGowan brought to the bank. Because he wanted to make sure they were destroyed.” He looked back at Malone, who made more gestures. “He strangled Cora Belle because she knew where Harold McGowan was buried. He cut Ellen McGowan’s throat because she was about to tell—” he stopped and pointed.

  Alvin Goudge had decided to make a break for it. He didn’t get far.

  It wasn’t the sheriff or his deputy who stopped him. It was Hercules who leaped on his chest, at exactly the same moment that Doc Goudge stepped in front of the door, yanked a blackjack from his pocket, and brought it down neatly over his skull.

  There was a moment of complete, deathlike silence in the room. Malone looked around at Jake and Helene holding hands, at Florence Peveley, her friendly, homely face smudged with smoke, at Jerry Luckstone, Ed Skindingsrude, and Philomen Ma. Smith, all three of them pale and shocked, at the red-necked sheriff and his open-mouthed deputy, and at the white-haired old Doc Goudge, standing with a blackjack in his hand, over the unconscious form of his brother. Then he closed his eyes for a minute.

  “I always thought he’d turn out this way,” Doc Goudge said very quietly. “There’s always been a bad streak in the family, and it came out in Alvin. But I never knew anything about what he was doing.” Malone’s ears caught the soft sighing of a long, indrawn breath. “When he asked me to have a car pick up Mr. Justus, here, at Grove’s Culvert, and to hide him out here, I thought he was telling me the truth, that Mr. Justus was the victim of unfortunate circumstantial evidence and that the vigilantes were after him. I didn’t know what he intended to do.”

  “But what did he intend to do?” Sheriff Kling cried. “What was the idea?” He paused, scowled. “I see he was the murderer but I don’t know why he was, I see he got Mr. Justus out here but I don’t know why he did it. I see he was back of organizing the Citizens’ Committee, but—”

  Suddenly there was a chorus of questions, not only from the sheriff but from all the corners of the room. Why did he do it? What was the reason? How about Ellen McGowan? How did Malone know? What was the idea, what was the idea, what was the —

  Helene pulled her hand out of Jake’s and sprang in front of the little lawyer just as Hercules moved in from the other side.

  “Leave him alone, can’t you? Damn it, he’s been blown up in a bombing, he’s been pulled out of a river, he’s helped open up a grave, he’s been in a fire and jumped out of a window. He’ll explain everything, but for the love of mud, give him time.” She wheeled to face Doc Goudge. Her voice broke a little. “Look at him. Half the skin is off his face and he can hardly talk. Do something about it, can’t you, don’t let him just sit here and be bothered by a lot of”—she looked around the room—“damn-fool incompetents!”

  Hercules put his front paws up on Malone’s shoulder and licked gently at his left ear.

  “We’ve got to tell something to the people still hanging around outside,” Sheriff Kling said anxiously.

  “Tell them we’ve got the murderer and we’re taking him to jail,” Jerry Luckstone said.

  There was a little commotion in the room. Philomen Ma. Smith was standing before Malone, his face very grave.

  “They made me secretary treasurer of the Citizens’ Committee,” he said
slowly. “I thought it was a respectable civic organization. Instead I find I have been the front man for a lynch mob.”

  Malone’s eyes popped open. He wondered where the classical scholar had picked up the term “front man.”

  “I made a terrible mistake,” the white-haired man went on.

  Jake cleared his throat. “We lament the mistakes of a good man, and do not begin to detest him until he affects to renounce his principles,” he quoted. “Bartlett’s.” He added, “I guess we both got the same book.”

  Philomen Ma. Smith smiled at him gratefully.

  “Mistake or no mistake,” Malone whispered, “you’ve still got that reward money, haven’t you?” He saw Philomen Ma. Smith nod and managed a last breath. “You can deliver it to me at the General Andrew Jackson House.” He closed his eyes.

  “I’ll deliver it in person,” the white-haired man said. He paused. “But the reward of a thing well done is to have done it. Emerson.”

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  “Nothing wrong with him,” Doc Spain said. “Got a little skin and hair burned off, but that’s nothing.” He plastered something oily and unpleasant-tasting on Malone’s under lip. “Probably have a terrible hangover in the morning. Tell him nothing’ll cure it except time.” He began plastering Malone’s forehead. “I remember a fella once out in Jay Creek got drunk and set a hayrick afire—”

  Malone groaned. “I don’t care how bad I’m going to feel tomorrow,” he said unhappily, “I feel worse now.”

  There were only five people, beside himself and Doc Spain, in the little room, but it seemed unbearably crowded. Malone wished they would all go away and let him suffer. But Jake and Helene sat side by side on the window sill, Philomen Ma. Smith occupied the one chair, and Jerry Luckstone and Ed Skindingsrude lounged against the wall.

  The lawyer sighed. “It won’t hurt me to talk now, doc, will it?” he asked hopefully.

  “Not a bit,” Doc Spain said heartily, too heartily.

  Malone picked a cigar off the bed table and began unwrapping it. “It’s a long story,” he said, “and I’ve got to invent it as I go along. But, Jerry, you’d better take notes on it so you can check it with Goudge’s confession. Where his confession disagrees with what I guess at, you can be sure he’s not telling the truth.”

  He lighted the cigar and puffed at it for a moment.

  “It all has to do with money,” Malone said. “Seventy-six thousand dollars, to be exact. Lord only knows what he did with his share of it, but he got it.”

  Jerry Luckstone stirred uneasily. “You mean that’s where the rest of the money went?”

  “Where else could it go?” Malone asked. “Ellen McGowan never spent a penny of what she stole on herself. Not one single penny went into her stomach or on her back or for anything in the world that was any good to her.” He paused for a moment; there was a sore place in his mind, and he wished he hadn’t touched on it.

  “Her father was short twenty thousand dollars in his accounts when he died,” Malone said, “but Ellen McGowan embezzled seventy-six thousand dollars. The difference had to go somewhere. And where would it go, except to the man who had stumbled on the juggling of accounts, the county treasurer; the man who didn’t make his discovery public but checked up on Ellen McGowan’s story that her father had gone to California and found that he had never been there at all, who checked up on the state of the old man’s health”—he paused and turned to Dr. Spain—“am I right about that?”

  The doctor nodded. “He came to me once and asked just how bad Hal McGowan’s heart condition had been. Just kind, friendly anxiety. I told him.”

  “There you are,” Malone said. “I told you I was inventing this as I went along, but that much is corroborated. Well, anyway, Alvin Goudge was a damned smart guy. His whole family must have been smart, or they wouldn’t have had so much insanity in it. He added up the juggling of the school funds, the information from California, the condition of Mr. McGowan’s heart, and the story of Luke McGowan laying a concrete floor in the McGowan basement, and came to the same conclusion I did about what had happened. Only he went to Ellen McGowan and said, ‘I know the whole story, and you’re in a position to do a lot more juggling of accounts, so kick in.’” Malone paused and added quietly, “Maybe he didn’t phrase it exactly that way.”

  “You mean,” Jerry Luckstone said, “you mean that he blackmailed her?”

  “That’s the word for it,” Malone said, between parched lips, “and don’t look so shocked. It’s going on all over the world, all the time. Anyway, Ellen McGowan kicked in, over a period of four years, to the tune of the difference between twenty thousand dollars and seventy-six thousand.” He wished his cigar didn’t taste of medicine. “She didn’t want to do it, but she didn’t want the world to know her father was buried under her basement floor and had died owing the county a pile of money.”

  “Senator Peveley,” Phil Smith began, a little uneasily.

  “Don’t start with Senator Peveley, start with Cora Belle,” Malone said. “She was another wise baby who tumbled to the whole story. Luke McGowan blabbed as much as he knew to her, and she guessed the rest. With the result that she called in Senator Peveley, president of the Farmers’ Bank, and told him what to look for and where to look.”

  The little lawyer closed his eyes for a moment. “Henry Peveley said his brother went around angry for a week, and that he was angry on the day he died. That was the reason. He went to the county treasurer’s office and demanded the books and records of the school funds. Goudge probably stalled him, but the Senator got away with one book of records. Goudge could see what was coming. So he provided himself with a key to the little broom closet and a gun.”

  Ed Skindingsrude said, “But how did he know that the Senator was coming up to the courtroom just at that time?”

  “Ellen McGowan tipped him off,” Malone said dreamily. “Either in person or by phone. She told him ‘the jig’s up,’ or however a well-bred lady would put it. The Senator would come over, he’d look for Jerry Luckstone first—since he needed the district attorney to lay his case before—then he’d go downstairs to fetch Goudge and the evidence. So Goudge waltzed upstairs and parked himself in the closet and waited for the Senator to start down the stairs, and when he did,” Malone paused for dramatic effect, “Goudge shot him dead.”

  There was a faint movement in the room. The little lawyer lay back against the pillows for a moment, feeling inordinately pleased with himself. “The rest, you know. He had to destroy the school-fund records, so he made himself a little bomb and planted it in them. He waited till he got to the bank to set it off, so that there would be a number of other likely suspects for the crime. You’ll recall he was walking away from the bomb as fast as he decently could when it went off.

  “But there was still Cora Belle,” he went on. “She was always a danger, because she knew the truth. And she was especially dangerous because she hated everyone in town like poison and was looking for nothing better than to stir up new trouble. So he called on her early yesterday morning” —had it only been twenty-four hours ago?—“he must have been there before at odd hours, since she let him in without any protest, and he strangled her.

  “But,” he said, “when Ellen McGowan was confronted with the evidence at the bank, she broke down and told the whole story. She was on the point of telling more. He wasn’t prepared for that. But the luckiest thing in the world for him happened just then. His daughter jumped into the river.”

  “She did jump?” Helene wanted to know.

  Malone nodded. “And I found out why Tom Burrows didn’t jump in to save her.” He paused. “He can’t swim.”

  After a moment he continued, “Ellen McGowan had fainted across the desk. All Goudge had to do was take advantage of the excitement and the confusion, slip back into the bank, cut her throat, and slip away again, to reappear later at the door of the bank and be terribly shocked by it all. He probably used a pocketknife, you can check up on that. He was
n’t prepared for this murder; he had to use the first thing that came to hand.

  “Then,” he said, “if anyone asked embarrassing questions about why he wasn’t panting on the riverbank when his own child was being dragged up on shore, he’d covered himself by proclaiming, ‘Gentlemen, I have no daughter.’”

  Helene sniffed. “I knew a line as corny as that had something phony about it.”

  There was a little silence, before Malone spoke again. “That’s probably the way he’ll dictate it to your stenographer in the morning. If he leaves anything out, just refer to your notes. I think that’s all.” He closed his eyes and wished he could die and was glad he was alive, all at the same time.

  “No it isn’t all,” Jake said suddenly. “What was the idea of this guy coming up and dragging me out of bed, and telling me all hell-fire and damnation were after me, and hustling me down the stairs, and having me park all day out in the county insane asylum, of all the damn places in the world?” He paused and added, “Not that the food isn’t better than in the General Andrew Jackson House.”

  “And what about the Citizens’ Committee?” Ed Skindingsrude asked. “What was the idea of that?”

  Malone groaned. “You people are more trouble. Can anybody here give me a drink?” There was a pleasant, gurgling sound, and someone held a glass to his lips. He drank, closing his eyes, and sat up in bed.

  He realized suddenly that Doc Spain had put him to bed stripped to the skin, and hastily pulled a sheet over his chest. “It’s like this,” he said. “All of a sudden Mr. Goudge discovered he’d left out one important element. There had to be somebody who’d committed these murders. Town feeling was running pretty high. Any moment some smart guy like John J. Malone from Chicago might happen onto the truth. So he organized the Citizens’ Committee. Public feeling did the rest. Then he planted Jake out at the County Farm, where he knew his brother would take care of him, and went around quietly buying drinks for a lot of excited young punks and tipping them off to the fact that Jake was hidden out there.” He paused.