Gavigan grunted faintly, eyed Burt, who was busy at the liquor cabinet, and said, “I’ll have Scotch, straight.”
“Our criminal then,” Merlini continued, “committed his murders while surrounded, nearly swamped, in fact, by criminals and potential criminals, and against a background of smooth, expert; dirty work. These people, in order to avoid their own detection, found it necessary to cover up after him. It’s a device to remember. Though it does have its dangers.”
He nodded his thanks as Burt passed him his drink, held it in his hand, looked at it speculatively a moment, and went on.
“The situation was this: Floyd and Arnold both hated Linda with understandable fervor because, as Arnold said, she was hell on wheels to live with and because she had a tight hold on what they considered their rightful share of the Skelton fortune. And Linda, with a disproportionate number of left-handed kinks under her hat, rubbed that fact in. She even went so far as to wave a will in their faces which, except for the trifling technical bequest of one dollar each, made no mention of either of them. She taunted them with the fact that she had willed the Skelton millions to — Miss Sigrid Verrill.”
Sigrid’s glass dropped from her fingers, and the liquid splashed out across the carpet. Dr. Gail was motionless.
“Mix her another, Burt,” Merlini said and, without pause, went quickly on. “Arnold, as you know, with yet another, even stronger motive, planned eventually to kill her. While Floyd, unable to suffer lack of funds, planned to get some of his own back. He had invested what little patrimony he had in treasure hunts that never panned out. He decided that Linda should play angel for the next, with himself on the receiving end. I can imagine he thought about that for a long time before he stumbled on a practical method of selling her such a bill of goods. But he found it — Madame Eva Rappourt.
“He met her when they were both taken to the cleaners by the Caribbean Salvage Corporation, a concern that could stand — or perhaps might not stand investigation. You should look into it, Inspector. If it was a phony, I’m beginning to suspect that Ira Brooke might just possibly have had a finger in the pie.
“Floyd realized that, if there was one sure-fire method of swindling Linda, it was by the spirit-message route. He didn’t know whether Rappourt could be ‘had,’ but he worked on the almost-axiomatic assumption that, crossing a medium’s palm with a good-sized cut of $8,000,000 will buy just about any spirit phenomena one could desire. He didn’t tell her he was after the salvage money, you notice. He told her his Hussar story — and she fell for it, as she’d fallen for the Caribbean Salvage Corporation. Anyone can be fooled at the other man’s game. Lamb, the ex-head of a million-dollar criminal combine, was hooked on a confidence game — and is that going to burn him up when he realizes it! I knew a world-famous magician — you’d recognize the name at once — who earned a respectable fortune fooling people and promptly sank it all in a nearly nonexistent gold mine. ‘Old Smoke’ Morrisey, perhaps the most important figure in the history of American gambling, made himself $1,500,000 in 20 years of skinning-house and casino operation, and then lost most of it in Wall Street. Even the slicker can be a sucker. Rappourt had fooled a lot of learned investigating committees in dark rooms, but—”
Irritably Gavigan cut-in.
“Do you have to document your argument so damn thoroughly?”
Merlini, twisting his glass in his fingers and gazing into the liquid as into a crystal ball, continued imperturbably, “Rappourt fell for his story though she did bounce a bit. She’d just dropped $75,000 and she figured that this time she might as well hold out an ace or two. That bright and shining $8,000,000 might be there in the river as Floyd asserted, but she was going to see that the salvage money was not expended in any vain attempt to get it. Floyd was double-crossing her and, quite independently, she laid plans to double-cross him! She brought in Glass Eye George to play the part of Ira Brooke, submarine expert and inventor, suggest a lot of fancy reasons why at least $200,000 would be needed to salvage the treasure, and help her produce spirit phenomena. But Floyd didn’t know that. Floyd thought he was a bona-fide expert and congratulated himself because his Hussar changed-location theory got by so nicely. Of course, he didn’t object if the salvage ante was raised; that was okay with him, since that’s what he was really after. Floyd, the amateur swindler, placed his con-game in the hands of a couple of experts — though not the sort he thought!”
Gavigan said, “It sounds good, but how have you managed to read Floyd’s mind after death? You been getting spirit messages, too?”
“Yes, I have. I’ll produce a few shortly, genuine ones, that will corroborate everything I’ve said. But I’ll have you know that I deduced those facts, too, believe it or not. It wasn’t too difficult. Counterfeit coins and stolen relics obviously indicated a swindle and made it only too apparent that Floyd himself never really believed his Hussar theory. If he really thought he had located the genuine article, he’d never have jeopardized a possible $8,000,000 haul by introducing faked evidence. That could only mean he was after the salvage money itself. Also, if he knew that Ira was a phony expert he’d certainly never have even considered making a dangerous 110-foot dive with that gentleman as his topside assistant. Thus, since he thought Ira the real thing, it meant that he must be planning to blow with the salvage money, double-crossing Rappourt and Ira; and, conversely, his unawareness of Ira’s faked status meant that Rappourt and Brooke must be crossing him up.
“But didn’t we decide,” Gavigan objected, “that the murderer would never have thought of his fake-diving-chart murder method unless he knew Ira was not what he pretended to be? If Rappourt and Brooke kept that fact even from Floyd, who the hell else—? Was Watrous in on the con-game too?”
“No. The Colonel was no swindler. We did decide the murderer must have known Ira was a fake; the murderer did know; and once you tumble to how he knew you’ve solved the case. Think about it.”
Without having tasted it, Merlini leaned forward and placed his drink on the floor between his feet. He took a cigarette from his pocket. Burt, standing quietly beside my chair, tossed him a paper of matches. When the cigarette was glowing, Merlini went on.
“Then Mr. Charles Lamb appeared on the scene, and the plot thickened. He came out here with his two guns, looking for an island to settle on because he had a persecution complex that sprang, not like Linda’s neurosis, from an imaginary fear, but from a very real one. Lamb was a thorn in my deductions throughout. I realized that his aversion for the police, indicated by his cutting the phone, scuttling the boats, and blackjacking the Colonel, meant that he had something to hide. But until you got the goods on him I didn’t know that he was scared pink that some day Mike the Weasel or Gatling Gun Joe, or whatever their names are, would catch up with him. He wanted to have a good open view of all the approaches. A nice quiet retreat with a moat around it. I rather think, if Dr. Gail will permit me to enter the diagnostic field for a moment, that that was also the reason for those little pink pills of his. He had, for business purposes, acted the part of a stony-faced, ruthless killer and his emotions, securely bottled up for so long, simply played merry hell with his digestive system.… Do you realize that this case might well be titled The Great Pirate Murder Mystery? It began with the notorious Captain Skelton, and it ends with the just-as-notorious Captain Lamb, First Mate Rappourt, and Second Mate Brooke — pirates all, modern versions. The conspirators didn’t know about Lamb’s reputation. I thought they looked unnaturally pale around the gills tonight when you told them, Inspector. They thought he was a hard-headed business man, a retired broker. And they weren’t too sure, at first, that their spirit hocus-pocus would go down. But he wasn’t a broker and he was a not-particularly-cultivated Corsican, and superstitious. The séance phenomena impressed him — with what he had on his conscience, I’m surprised it didn’t scare the living daylights out of him! Anyway, Floyd, Rappourt, and Brooke decided that he was just another lamb ready for the shearing — sorry — that crept up on me.