“Then why did she keep Upton away from him? Why did she kill Ruppert? Why should she have carried the load for him there? It was his danger. Why did she make it hers if he had no value to her? Why did she risk all that to keep him from learning that the past had come to life again?”
“I think I see what you’re getting at,” Fitzstephan said slowly. “You think–”
“Wait–here’s another thing. I talked to Leggett and his wife together a couple of times. Neither of them addressed a word to the other either time, though the woman did a lot of acting to make me think she would have told me something about her daughter’s disappearance if it had not been for him.”
“Where did you find Gabrielle?”
“After seeing Ruppert murdered, she beat it to the Haldorns’ with what money she had and her jewelry, turning the jewelry over to Minnie Hershey to raise money on. Minnie bought a couple of pieces for herself–her man had picked himself up a lot of dough in a crap game a night or two before: the police checked that–and sent the man out to peddle the rest. He was picked up in a hock-shop, just on general suspicion.”
“Gabrielle was leaving home for good?” he asked.
“You can’t blame her–thinking her father a murderer, and now catching her step-mother in the act. Who’d want to live in a home like that?”
“And you think Leggett and his wife were on bad terms? That may be: I hadn’t seen much of them lately, and wasn’t intimate enough with them to have been let in on a condition of that sort if it had existed. Do you think he had perhaps learned something–some of the truth about her?”
“Maybe, but not enough to keep him from taking the fall for her on Ruppert’s murder; and what he had learned wasn’t connected with this recent affair, because the first time I saw him he really believed in the burglary. But then–”
“Aw, shut up! You’re never satisfied until you’ve got two buts and an if attached to everything. I don’t see any reason for doubting Mrs. Leggett’s story. She told us the whole thing quite gratuitously. Why should we suppose that she’d lie to implicate herself?”
“You mean in her sister’s murder? She’d been acquitted of that, and I suppose the French system’s like ours in that she couldn’t be tried again for it, no matter what she confessed. She didn’t give anything away, brother.”
“Always belittling,” he said. “You need more beer to expand your soul.”
At the Leggett-Ruppert inquests I saw Gabrielle Leggett again, but was not sure that she even recognized me. She was with Madison Andrews, who had been Leggett’s attorney and was now his estate’s executor. Eric Collinson was there, but, peculiarly, apparently not with Gabrielle. He gave me nods and nothing else.
The newspapers got hold of what Mrs. Leggett had said happened in Paris in 1913, and made a couple-day fuss over it. The recovery of Halstead and Beauchamp’s diamonds let the Continental Detective Agency out: we wrote _Discontinued_ at the bottom of the Leggett record. I went up in the mountains to snoop around for a gold-mine-owner who thought his employes were gypping him.
I expected to be in the mountains for at least a month: inside jobs of that sort take time. On the evening of my tenth day there I had a long-distance call from the Old Man, my boss.
“I’m sending Foley up to relieve you,” he said. “Don’t wait for him. Catch tonight’s train back. The Leggett matter is active again.”
Part Two: The Temple
IX. Tad’s Blind Man
Madison Andrews was a tall gaunt man of sixty with ragged white hair, eyebrows, and mustache that exaggerated the ruddiness of his bony hard-muscled face. He wore his clothes loose, chewed tobacco, and had twice in the past ten years been publicly named co-respondent in divorce suits.
“I dare say young Collinson has babbled all sorts of nonsense to you,” he said. “He seems to think I’m in my second childhood, as good as told me so.”
“I haven’t seen him,” I said. “I’ve only been back in town a couple of hours, long enough to go to the office and then come here.”