By this time Fitzstephan had hit his stride. He looked on Gabrielle now as his property, bought with the deaths he had caused. Each death had increased her price, her value to him. When Eric carried her off and married her, Fitzstephan hadn’t hesitated. Eric was to be killed.
Nearly a year before, Fitzstephan had wanted a quiet place where he could go to finish a novel. Mrs. Fink, my village-blacksmith, had recommended Quesada. She was a native of the village, and her son by a former marriage, Harvey Whidden, was living there. Fitzstephan went to Quesada for a couple of months, and became fairly well acquainted with Whidden. Now that there was another murder to be done, Fitzstephan remembered Whidden as a man who might do it, for a price.
When Fitzstephan heard that Collinson wanted a quiet place where his wife could rest and recuperate while they were waiting for the Haldorns’ trial, he suggested Quesada. Well, it was a quiet place, probably the quietest in California. Then Fitzstephan went to Whidden with an offer of a thousand dollars for Eric’s murder. Whidden refused at first, but he wasn’t nimble-witted, and Fitzstephan could be persuasive enough, so the bargain had been made.
Whidden bungled a try at it Thursday night, frightening Collinson into wiring me, saw the wire in the telegraph office, and thought he had to go through with it then to save himself. So he fortified himself with whiskey, followed Collinson Friday night, and shoved him off the cliff. Then he took some more whiskey and came to San Francisco, considering himself by this time a hell of a desperate guy. He phoned his employer, saying: “Well, I killed him easy enough and dead enough. Now I want my money.”
Fitzstephan’s phone came through the house switchboard: he didn’t know who might have heard Whidden talking. He decided to play safe. He pretended he didn’t know who was talking nor what he was talking about. Thinking Fitzstephan was double-crossing him, knowing what the novelist wanted, Whidden decided to take the girl and hold her for, not his original thousand dollars, but ten thousand. He had enough drunken cunning to disguise his handwriting when he wrote his note to Fitzstephan, not to sign it, and to so word it that Fitzstephan couldn’t tell the police who had sent it without explaining how he knew who had sent it.
Fitzstephan wasn’t sitting any too pretty. When he got Whidden’s note, he decided to play his hand boldly, pushing his thus-far-solid luck. He told me about the phone-call and gave me the letter. That entitled him to show himself in Quesada with an excellent reason for being there. But he came down ahead of time, the night before he joined me, and went to the marshal’s house to ask Mrs. Cotton–whose relation to Whidden he knew–where he could find the man. Whidden was there, hiding from the marshal. Whidden wasn’t nimble-witted, and Fitzstephan was persuasive enough when he wanted to be: Fitzstephan explained how Whidden’s recklessness had forced him to pretend to not understand the phone-call. Fitzstephan had a scheme by which Whidden could now collect his ten thousand dollars in safety, or so he made Whidden think.
Whidden went back to his hiding-place. Fitzstephan remained with Mrs. Cotton. She, poor woman, now knew too much, and didn’t like what she knew. She was doomed: killing people was the one sure and safe way of keeping them quiet: his whole recent experience proved it. His experience with Leggett told him that if he could get her to leave behind a statement in which various mysterious points were satisfactorily–and not too truthfully–explained, his situation would be still further improved. She suspected his intentions, and didn’t want to help him carry them out. She finally wrote the statement he dictated, but not until late in the morning. His description of how he finally got it from her wasn’t pleasant; but he got it, and then strangled her, barely finishing when her husband arrived home from his all-night hunt.
Fitzstephan escaped by the back door–the witnesses who had seen him go away from the house didn’t come forward until his photograph in the papers jogged their memories–and joined Vernon and me at the hotel. He went with us to Whidden’s hiding-place below Dull Point. He knew Whidden, knew the dull man’s probable reaction to this second betrayal. He knew that neither Cotton nor Feeney would be sorry to have to shoot Whidden. Fitzstephan believed he could trust to his luck and what gamblers call the percentage of the situation. That failing, he meant to stumble when he stepped from the boat, accidentally shooting Whidden with the gun in his hand. (He remembered how neatly he had disposed of Mrs. Leggett.) He might have been blamed for that, might even have been suspected, but he could hardly have been convicted of anything.