“Hello, there!” Lois called as Quade approached. “How’d you happen to find us?”
Quade jerked his head toward the husky. “The dog. He howled.”
Lois looked at him in surprise. “You mean you recognized his howl? But you’ve only seen him once or twice.”
“I know, but this happens to be the only dog in this neighborhood that doesn’t bark. You’re a dog raiser; you ought to know that an Eskimo dog, being descended from the wolf, does not bark — he howls.”
“The Human Encyclopedia himself,” said Jessie.
Quade looked at her. Jessie was unsmiling. “Yes,” he said. “I got that information out of the encyclopedia. It was a good thing to know.”
“We were just about to start home,” said Lois. “Jessie wanted to explore this old house first. It’s deserted.”
“Some other time,” said Quade. “Let’s go back to Westfield now.”
“Why, has something happened?” Lois’ eyes clouded.
“I’ll tell you later,” Quade held out his hand to Jessie. “Let me have your bag.”
Her eyes widened, but he took the handbag firmly from her grasp. It was heavy and he could feel the outline of something hard in it.
Lois’ forehead was creased as they walked to the cars. Something seemed to be annoying her. Quade’s rudeness, no doubt. At the car he maneuvered to hand Jessie into the seat first, then took hold of Lois’ elbow.
“I’ll drive,” he said firmly.
He handed her into the car, then stowed the two dogs into the rumble seat, chaining each to a side, so they would not be forced together too much.
Quade walked around and slipped in under the wheel. He could feel Jessie beside him, her body tensed. She knew that he knew.
No one said a word until they reached the Lanyard house.
“Your father’s in the living-room,” he suggested, guessing that the old man would still be by the window overlooking the dog kennels. He was. By the look on Guy Lanyard’s face Quade knew that he had guessed the truth during his absence.
“Renfrew, Wesley Peters’ pal, is dead,” Quade said.
Lois gasped. “Dead!”
“The police captured this Demetros,” said Guy Lanyard. “Costello phoned just a few minutes ago. He resisted and is in a bad way. Probably won’t live. He’d come to Westfield to—”
Lois suddenly looked sharply at her sister-in-law. “Jessie,” she said slowly, “who was that dark man you talked to at the dog show this morning? I asked you about him before and you didn’t answer.”
“I’m going to my room,” Jessie said.
Guy Lanyard looked at Quade. The latter held his gaze for a moment, then looked at Jessie’s handbag in his right hand. He extended it to her. “Here’s your bag.”
Jessie’s teeth were sunk into her lower lip. She took the bag, turned and walked out of the room. Quade heard her heels as they clicked on the stairs going up.
“Thank God you got to Lois in time,” Guy Lanyard said.
Lois turned to Quade. “What does he mean? What’s the matter with her? Why wouldn’t she answer me about that man? Was he…?”
There was a sharp explosion upstairs. Quade relaxed. Guy Lanyard slumped into his chair.
“It’s best this way,” Quade said.
“That was a shot!” cried Lois. Her eyes were wide. “Jessie! Jessie!”
An hour later Quade dropped wearily onto the bed in his room at the Westfield Hotel. Charlie sat on the other bed, biting his fingernails. “The dame!” he swore. “You knew it was her all the time!”
“Not all the time, Charlie. She fooled me there at the start. That confession of hers. It was on the level and that’s what threw me off the track.
“If she’d stopped with Peters’ death she’d probably have got away with it.”
“What mistakes did she make?” asked Boston. “I didn’t get any. Hell, I never even suspected her.”
“But I knew she killed her husband the minute I read the suicide note he was supposed to have left. Remember what it said? ‘Forgive me for making this exit.’ Making an exit is an actor’s expression. Bob might conceivably have picked up such a phrase from his wife, but his speech ordinarily was scholastic and precise. In his most tragic moment he would not have used slang.
“But aside from the note, Jessie gave herself away by killing Bob in the dog kennels. Remember the layout?”
Boston considered that for a moment, then shook his head. “What’s wrong with that layout? She didn’t want to kill him in the house maybe on account of the noise.”
“It would have been far safer for her to have done so. Don’t you see, Charlie? The dogs are loose in their kennels. She could have forced Bob past the pointers, but after shooting him she could never have gone back that way. The pointer, Duke, would have torn her to pieces. Dogs smell blood quickly and sense death. And Bob probably cried out when she shot him. No, after shooting him she left by way of the husky kennels, her own dogs.
“Get it now. No one could have killed Bob and left by the pointer kennels. And only Jessie could leave by the Eskimo kennels. Those dogs are half wild and in the middle of the night would have attacked anyone but their mistress. So it had to be Jessie.”
“I’ll be damned!” exclaimed Boston. “But did she have to kill Bob?”
“Perhaps, perhaps not. But one murder leads to another and after she killed Peters she had to kill her husband. You see, Jessie made her big mistake years ago when she tried to throw over Bill Demetros. Demetros wasn’t the sort of man who liked his women to leave him, at least not until he was through with them. And he wasn’t through with Jessie. She changed her name, but Bill would have caught up with her probably, except the Government caught up with him about then and sent him on that five-year visit to Atlanta.
“Then Jessie got into that show with Wes Peters. That was a bad break for her, because he turned out to be Bill Demetros’ brother. When Jessie found out she threw him over. Or maybe she met Bob Lanyard about that time. Lanyard meant real dough to her. And safety.
“She married Bob. And then it turned out that Peters, even though he was supposedly not like his gangster brother, was even worse. He blackmailed Jessie about her former association with a gangster and threatened always to tell Bill where she was unless she paid plenty.”
“You mean she paid heavy sugar just to keep that rat Peters from writing his brother that Jessie had married a rich guy?” demanded Charlie.
“That’s about the size of it. Jessie knew Bill pretty well. She knew that he would get word to some of his pals on the outside and it would be too bad for her. So she paid off… and then Bill got out. Inasmuch as Wes had played around with his brother’s girl he figured he’d better skip. He needed money for that. So he went to his mint, Jessie, and demanded one last big roll.
“She couldn’t get enough money. So she gave Peters that thousand that was on him when he was found dead and stalled him. She got an opportunity and gave him a lead slug instead of more money. She might even have taken to carrying the gun figuring to kill herself with it. But when she got such a swell chance in the dog show she up and let him have it.
“It was her first murder and she was pretty shaky about it, so when we went after her hot and heavy there at the start, she broke down, admitted it. Then when her husband tried to take the blame and she saw that no one really wanted to believe she had done it, she began covering up.
“But Bill Demetros must’ve got to her, because all of a sudden I found Demetros on her side. Which wasn’t at all according to Hoyle. Took me a little time to figure out. Demetros had been away for five years and I imagine his lawyers and fixers had come pretty high, so the old safety deposit box was probably pretty empty. He knew Jessie was scared stiff of him. So he showed her how she could come into a big chunk of dough and by splitting with him, live to spend it.