The Million-Dollar Suitcase - Alice MacGowan (guided reading books TXT) 📗

had nothing to do with Thomas Gilbert's sudden death, could not offset in my mind the conviction of Thomas Gilbert's stiffened fingers about the pistol's butt. That I made a second thorough investigation of the study interior was not because I questioned the manner of the death.

I began taking down books from the shelves at regular intervals, sounding the thick dead-wall, in search of a secreted entrance. I came on a row of volumes whose red morocco backs carried nothing but dates.

"Account books?" I asked.

Worth turned his head to look, and the bleakest thing that could be called a smile twisted his lips a little, as he said,

"My father's diaries."

"Quite a lot of them."

"Yes. He'd kept diaries for thirty years."

"But he seems to have dropped the habit. There is no 1920 book."

"Oh, yes there is," very definitely. "He never gave up setting down the sins of his family and neighbors while his eyes had sight to see them, and his hand the cunning to write." He spoke with extraordinary bitterness, finishing, "He would have had it on the desk there. The current book was always kept convenient to his hand."

An idea occurred to me.

"Worth," I asked, "did you see that 1920 volume when you were here last night?"

He looked a little startled, and I prompted,

"Were you too excited to have noticed a detail like that?"

"I wasn't excited; not in the sense of being confused," he spoke slowly. "The book was there; he'd been writing in it. I remember looking at it and thinking that as soon as I was gone, he'd sit down in his chair and put every damn' word of our row into it. That was his way. The seamy side of Santa Ysobel life's recorded in those books. I always understood they amounted to a pack of neighborhood dynamite."

"Got to find that last book," I said.

He nodded listlessly. I went to it, giving that room such a searching as would have turned out a bent pin, had one been mislaid in it. I even took down from the shelves books of similar size to see if the lost volume had been slipped into a camouflaging cover—all to no good. It wasn't there. And when I had finished I was positive of two things; the study had no other entrance than the apparent ones, and the diary of 1920 had been removed from the room since Worth saw it there the night before. I reached for one of the other volumes. Worth spoke again in a sort of dragging voice,

"What do you want to look at them for, Jerry?"

"It's not idle curiosity," I told him, a bit pricked.

"I know it's not that." The old, affectionate tone went right to my heart. "But if you're thinking you'll find in them any explanation of my father's taking his own life, I'm here to tell you you're mistaken. Plenty there, no doubt, to have driven a tender hearted man off the earth.... He was different." Eyeing the book in my hand, the boy blurted with sudden heat, "Those damn' diaries have been wife and child and meat and drink to him. They were his reason for living—not dying!"

"Start me right in regard to your father, Worth," I urged anxiously. "It's important."

The boy gave me his shoulder and continued to stare down into the fire, as he said at last, slowly,

"I would rather leave him alone, Jerry."

I knew it would be useless to insist. Never then or thereafter did I hear him say more of his father's character. At that, he could hardly have told more in an hour's talk.

At random, I took the volume that covered the year in which, as I remembered, Thomas Gilbert's wife had secured her divorce from him. Neatly and carefully written in a script as readable as type, the books, if I am a judge, had literary style. They were much more than mere diaries. True, each entry began with a note of the day's weather, and certain small records of the writer's personal affairs; but these went oddly enough with what followed; a biting analysis of the inner life, the estimated intentions and emotions, of the beings nearest to him. It was inhuman stuff. But Worth was right; there was no soil for suicide in this matter written by a hand guided by a harsh, censorious mind; too much egotism here to willingly give over the rôle of conscience for his friends. Friends?—could a man have friends who regarded humanity through such unkindly, wide open, all-seeing eyes?

Worth, seated across from me on the other side of the fire, stared straight into the leaping blaze; but I doubted if that was what he saw. On his face was the look which I had come to know, of the dignified householder who had gone in and shut the door on whatever of dismay and confusion might be in his private affairs. I began to read his father's version of the separation from his mother, with its ironic references to her most intimate friend.

"Marion would like to see Laura Bowman ship Tony and marry Jim Edwards. I swear the modern woman has played bridge so long that her idea of the most serious obligation in life—the marriage vow—is, 'Never mind. If you don't like the hand you have got, shuffle, cut, and deal again!'"

I dropped the book to my knee and looked over at Worth, asking,

"This Mrs. Dr. Bowman that we met last night at Tait's—she was a special friend of your mother's?"

"They were like sisters—in more than one way." I knew without his telling it that he alluded to their common misfortune of being both unhappily married. His mother, a woman of more force than the other, had gained her freedom.

"Femina Priores." I came on an entry standing oddly alone. "Marion is to secure the divorce—at my suggestion. I have demanded that our son share his time between us."

Again I let the book down on my knee and looked across at the silent fellow there. And I had heard him compassionate Barbara Wallace for having painful memories of her childhood! I believe he was at that moment more at peace with his father than he had ever been in his life—and that he grieved that this was so. I knew, too, that the forgiveness and forgetting would not extend to these pitiless records. Without disturbing him, I laid the book I held down and scouted forward for things more recent.

"Laura Bowman"—through one entry after another Gilbert kicked that poor woman's name like a football. Very fine and righteous and high-minded in what he said, but writing it out in full and calling her painful difficulties—the writhing of a sensitive, high-strung woman, mismated with a tyrant—an example notably stupid and unoriginal, of the eternal matrimonial triangle. Bowman evidently kept his sympathy, so far as such a nature can be said to entertain that gentle emotion.

I ran through other volumes, merciless recitals, now and again, of the shortcomings of his associates or servants; a cold blooded misrepresentation of his son; a sneer for the affair with Ina Thornhill, with the dictum, sound enough no doubt, that the girl herself did the courting, and that she had no conscience—"The extreme society type of parasite," he put it. And then the account of his break with Edwards.

Dr. Bowman, it seems, had come to Gilbert in confidence for help, saying that his wife had left his house in the small hours the previous night, nothing but an evening wrap pulled over her night wear, and that he guessed where she could be found, since she hadn't gone to her mother's. He asked Gilbert to be his ambassador with messages of pardon. Didn't want to go himself, because that would mean a row, and he was determined, if possible, to keep the thing private, giving a generous reason: that he wasn't willing to disgrace the woman. All of which, after he'd written it down, the diarist discredited with his brief comment to the effect that Tony Bowman shunned publicity because scandal of the sort would hurt his practice, and his pride as well, and that he didn't go out to Jim Edwards's ranch because, under these circumstances, he would be afraid of Jim.

Thomas Gilbert did the doctor's errand for him. The entry concerning it occupied the next day. I read between the lines how much he enjoyed his position of god from the machine, swooping down on the two he found out there, estimating their situation and behavior in his usual hair-splitting fashion, sitting as a court of last appeal. It was of no use for Edwards to explain to him that Laura Bowman was practically crazy when she walked out of her husband's house as the culmination of a miserable scene—the sort that had been more and more frequent there of late—carrying black-and-blue marks where he had grabbed and shaken her. The statement that it was by mere chance she encountered Jim seemed to have made Gilbert smile, and Jim's taking of her out to the ranch, the assertion that it was the only thing to do, that she was sick and delirious, had inspired Gilbert to say to him, quite neatly, "You weren't delirious, I take it—not more than usual."

Then he demanded that Laura go with him, at once, back to her husband, or out to her mother's. She considered the matter and chose to go back to Bowman, saying bitterly that her mother made the match in the first place, and stood always against her daughter and with her son-in-law whatever he did. Plainly it took all of Laura's persuasions to prevent actual blows between Gilbert and Edwards. Also, she would only promise to go back and live under Bowman's roof, but not as his wife—and the whole situation was much aggravated.

I followed Mr. Thomas Gilbert's observation of this affair: his amused understanding of how much Jim Edwards and Laura hated him; his private contempt for Bowman, to whom he continued to give countenance and moral support; his setting down of the quarrels, intimate, disastrous, between Bowman and his wife, as the doctor retailed them to him, the woman dragging herself on her knees to beg for her freedom, and his callous refusals; backed by threat of the wide publicity of a scandalous divorce suit, with Thomas Gilbert as main witness. I turned to Worth and asked,

"When will Edwards be here?"

"Any minute now." Worth looked at me queerly, but I went on,

"You said he phoned from the ranch. Did he answer you in person—from out there?"

"That's what I told you, Jerry."

My searching gaze made nothing of the boy's impassive face; I plunged again into the diaries, running down a page, getting the heading of a sentence, not delaying to go further unless I struck something which seemed to me important, and each minute thinking of the strangeness of a man like this killing himself. It was in the 1916 volume, that I made a discovery which surprised an exclamation from me.

"What would you call this, Worth? Your father's way of making corrections?"

"Corrections?" Worth spoke without looking around. "My father never made corrections—in anything." It was said without animus—a simple statement of fact.

"But look here." I held toward him the book. There were three leaves gone; that meant six pages, and the entries covered May 31 and June 1. I had verified that before I spoke to him, noticing that the statement of the weather for May 31 remained at the foot of the last page left, while a run-over on the page beyond the missing ones had been marked out. It had nothing to do with the weather. As nearly as I could make out with the reading glass I held over it, the words were, "take the woman for no other than she appears."

"Worth," I urged, "give