Wolfe’s gaze went left. “Mr. Quest?”
Chapter 12
During the fifty-some hours that had passed since my call at the Softdown building on Collins Street, I had had plenty of spare moments for research, and one of the items I had collected was Bernard Quest’s age. He was eighty-one. Nevertheless, it was not necessary to assume, as Wolfe had in the case of Viola Duday, that if he had killed Priscilla Eads he had probably done so by contrivance and not by perpetration. In spite of his pure white hair and wrinkled old skin, I would have bet, from the way he looked and moved and held his shoulders and head, that he could still have chinned himself up to five or six times.
He told Wolfe, in a low but firm and strong voice, “In a long life I have had to swallow only two really bitter pills. This affair is one of them. I don’t mean the murder, the violent death of Priscilla Eads, though that was shocking and regrettable. I mean that it is thought possible that I, Bernard Quest, was involved in it. Not only by you, I don’t care about you, but by the official and responsible investigators of crime.”
His eyes went left, to Pitkin and Miss Duday, and right, to Brucker and Helmar, and back to Wolfe. “These others are infants compared to me. I have been with this business sixty-two years. I have been sales manager for thirty-four years and vice-president for twenty-nine. More than four billion dollars’ worth of our products have been sold by me and/or under my direction. In nineteen twenty-three, when I was made vice-president by Nathan Eads, he promised me that someday I would be given a substantial block of stock in the corporation. In the years that followed that promise was repeated several times, but it was never kept. In nineteen thirty-eight Nathan Eads told me that he had made provision in his will for redemption of the promise. I protested, and by then I was resentful enough to back up my protest with action, but it was too late. I was nearly seventy years old, and rival firms which had formerly offered me unlimited inducements would no longer do so. By then I knew, of course, that I could place no reliance at all on the word of Nathan Eads, but I had waited too long to make my demands effective by the only method that would have moved him.
“Four years later, in nineteen forty-two, he died. When the will was read I found that once more he had broken his word to me. I said I have swallowed two really bitter pills; that was the first one. It may be asked, what did it matter? I was over seventy. My children were grown and out in the world, happy and on the way to success. My wife was dead. I had an ample income, more than I needed. What good would three million dollars’ worth of corporation stock have done me? None. None at all. Probably more harm than good to me and mine. But I decided to kill a girl, Priscilla Eads, then fifteen years old, in order to get at least a portion of it.”
“Bernie!” Miss Duday gasped.
“Yes, Vi.” He looked at her, nodded, and returned to Wolfe. “I have not told this to the police, not because I thought it important to withhold it, but because those who have questioned me have not been a stimulating audience. Sitting here an hour ago, I realized that it would be — a pleasure? No, not a pleasure, but an excellent opportunity to lighten the load. After eighty, that is a major objective, to lighten the load.”
Suddenly he smiled, but it was not at or with any of us; he was smiling to himself. “My sense of justice, of fairness, was outraged. I knew that Nathan Eads, who had inherited the business, had contributed very little to its phenomenal growth during the quarter-century he had been the nominal head. That growth was mainly the work of two men, one named Arthur Gilliam, a production genius, and me. Eads had to give Gilliam ten per cent of the corporation’s stock in order to keep him, and that stock is now owned by Gilliam’s daughter, Mrs. Sarah Jaffee. Because I wasn’t as tough as Gilliam, I got nothing. And this final treachery of Nathan Eads in the provisions of his will was too much for me. I didn’t decide to kill Priscilla for the sake of gain; that would have been a rational decision, and it wasn’t rational at all; I was simply unbalanced. I suppose I was actually insane.”
He waved that aside. “I decided,” he said, “to strangle her.”