“Why ring Blake in on this?” he asked, and his voice took a deadly level. His lips also leveled to a straight line, and his teeth showed white in the slit between. “After all he’s too good a friend, isn’t he, of yours, and mine? What’s the big idea?”
“He is a friend, old man, true enough.” Whittaker quietly brushed Belknap’s hand from his sleeve, and turned away. “But what are friends, true or false, to me now? ‘Less than the dust.’ Besides, Blake is a crack shot—and a sportsman to boot. Even though you proved so brilliantly that he didn’t shoot Stanton, it was just the kind of shooting he might have done, you know that. He gives no quarter to men who run out on debts, or dishonor women. Sort of a knight errant—goes about saving situations in the nick of time. That he finds it convenient to use a gun in most cases is not his fault. I can even see him doing me what he would call ‘a good turn,’ taking me out after a whiskey and soda, and putting a hole through me against the garden wall with a Sorrell-and-Son generosity, ‘We mustn’t let the poor devil suffer.’ Yes, Belknap, you must admit he’s a splendid prospect from my point of view. I can’t help it that you have scruples against sleuthing him.”
“By all that’s holy, you are beyond me, Whittaker.”
“If you mean by that that I am beyond the pale, I am. And beyond caring. There may or may not be a life in death, but that there is death in life I’m finding out. So what the Hell!”
“Enough said, Whittaker. We’ll leave it at that. I begin to see that it is ‘what the Hell’ and then some.” Belknap was pacing the floor, his hands thrust deep in his pockets. He stopped before Whittaker to ask, “I have a question before we go further. What’s the match, that lights the fuse, that blows up the house that Bertrand built?”
“A good match, Ordway, soaked in tar, pitch, and turpentine. I publish my Diary. It’s a substantial, well-filled, truthful Diary, packed with sensations. In a period when confessions and revelations are in such demand, it seemed a pity not to keep abreast of the times. Hearst gives me a small fortune for mine, sight unseen, and it goes, in my will, with whatever else I possess, to my niece Joel—unless, of course, this week-end makes it useless to her; in which case—”
“Joel Lacey! See here, Whittaker, you’re insane! I’ve cared for Joel, and you know it, since she was too young to know the meaning of the word love. She is incapable of murder. But if she had committed a crime, and you were letting her down, you would have me to reckon with.”
“Hear, hear! The first threat, and that from my bodyguard. Check it for Berry’s benefit. It happens, my dear fellow, that your estimate of Joel’s character, like that of all true lovers, is mistaken. Joel is a murderess. Her husband wasn’t a suicide. Oh, she had incentive enough, I guess. And it was hardly a murder in one sense: she challenged him to a duel but he scoffed at the very idea. So she fired anyway, and came to me to give herself up. I silenced her. As for letting her in for all this—well, I needed her. I was short of women for the dinner table. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have bothered with her, for my hopes don’t lean very heavily on her, I can assure you.”
“I should have thought you might be short of women. Who are the others, by the way?”
“Romany Monte Video for one. The accident in The Renegade Lover, in which she killed her husband (who was not her husband in private) with a folding dagger which didn’t collapse was not an accident. The dagger that night was not intended to fold.”