Chapter 7 Chapter 7 The Curse

For a few minutes after I finished reading, no one spoke.Mrs. Leggett had removed her handkerchief from her face to listen, and sobbed softly now and then.Gabriel's eyes swept across the audience quickly, and there was a fierce interlacing of light and shadow in her eyes.Her lips twisted as if she wanted to say something, but couldn't. I went to the table, bent over the dead man, and searched his pockets.The inside pocket of his coat bulged.I reached under his arm, unbuttoned his coat, and pulled a brown wallet from his pocket.The wallet contained a thick wad of bills—we counted the amount later, and it was fifteen thousand dollars.

I showed my wallet to everyone, and asked, "Has he left any other messages besides the letter I just read?" "We only found letters," said Olga. "What's the matter?" "As far as you know, Mrs. Leggett?" I asked. She shook her head. "Why do you ask that?" asked Olga. "He didn't commit suicide," I said, "it was homicide." Gabrielle Leggett screamed, jumped up from her chair, and pointed her white fingers with sharp nails at Mrs. Leggett. "She killed him," cried the girl sharply, "and she said, 'Come back to me!' Then she opened the kitchen door with one hand, picked up the knife on the drip-board with the other, and when he passed by her The knife went into his back. I saw it. She killed him. I was in my dressing gown, so I hid in the pantry when I heard them coming, and I saw her kill him."

Mrs. Leggett rose.She was unsteady on foot, and would have really fallen if Fitzstephan hadn't come to hold her up.Surprise flooded her swollen face, drowning the sadness. The grey-faced man in smart attire at the table—I later learned that it was Dr. Reese—said in a cold, clear voice: "There was no knife wound. He was killed by a bullet from this pistol at point-blank range to the temple. According to me Look, it's clearly a suicide." Collinson forced Gabrielle back into the chair, trying to calm her down.She twisted her hands together and moaned continuously. I disagree with the last sentence of the doctor, and while I was saying this, I was thinking about another thing in my mind.

"It was homicide. He put so much money in his pocket, and he wanted to get away. He wrote to the police to get his wife and daughter off the hook, so that they wouldn't be sentenced as accomplices. In your opinion," I asked Olga. , "Is this like a farewell letter from a dying man to his beloved wife and daughter? Not a single word to them—it's all for the police." "Perhaps you're right," said Olga, "but if he wanted to run, he'd leave them a—" "If he had lived long enough, he would have told them before he left—if he hadn't written it he would have said it. He wanted to clean up the mess and hide from the limelight. Well...maybe he was going to kill himself, but the money The information given by Qian and the tone of the letter makes me suspicious; even if he really had that intention, I think he changed his mind after all. He was killed before he could clean up the mess—perhaps because he spent It's been too long. How was he discovered?"

"I heard..." sobbed Mrs. Leggett, "I heard a gunshot, and ran upstairs, and he... that's what he was. I went downstairs to ring, and the bell—the doorbell— It rang, and it was Mr Fitzstephan. I told him. There was no one else in the house, and it must have been suicide." "You killed him," I said to her. "He was going to run away. He wrote the statement and you got the blame. You killed Rupert in the kitchen down there, that's what the girl was talking about. You The husband's letter reads enough to be a suicide note, so you kill him—because you think his confession plus death will close the whole thing and let us not pursue it any further."

I couldn't read any information from her face.The countenance was distorted, but could mean anything.I took a deep breath and continued, not exactly a growl, but very loud. "There are six lies in your husband's statement--that's all I can point out right now. He never wrote to ask you and your daughter to come here. You found it yourself. Mrs. Begg said you came from New York Here, he didn't expect it at all. He didn't give Upton the diamonds. He said he gave them to Upton and what he was going to do afterward, a whole lot of bullshit, but he did it out of desperation. Best idea I could come up with to get you out of a crime. Leggett would give cash or nothing; he wouldn't be stupid enough to give Upton someone else's diamond and get all this trouble.

"Upton followed you here. He threatened you, not your husband. You hired Upton to find Leggett earlier, so he knew you. He and Rupert helped you find Leggett The whereabouts of - not only to Mexico City, but all the way here. They would have blackmailed you out of jail long before that if you hadn't been locked up in Sing Sing Correctional Facility for other cases. Once they get out, Upton So here you go. You arranged a theft, handed the diamonds to Upton, and didn't say a word to your husband. Your husband thought the theft was real, otherwise, someone with his record How could you take the risk of reporting the crime?

"Why didn't you mention Upton to him? Don't you want him to know that you followed him from Devil's Island to San Francisco? Why? Maybe his record in South America gave you another good handle on him." —in case you need it? Maybe you don't want him to know you know about RaPaul and Howe and Edge?" I didn't give her a chance to answer any of my questions, but kept on chasing, gradually slowing down the tone: "Perhaps Rupert followed Upton here and got in touch with you. You asked him to kill Upton— He was going to do it himself. Possibly, since he did kill Upton, he did come after you, and you felt compelled to take him down in the kitchen downstairs. You It's not clear that the girl was hiding in the pantry and saw it all, but you do know that you've made a huge mistake. You know that your chances of clearing Rupert's murder are slim and your family is now in the spotlight Next. So you play the only trick you can. You go to your husband and tell everything - or at least enough to convince him to say yes - and ask him to help you with the burden. Then you give him this — on this table.

"He's for you; he's always been for you, and you—" I growled, my voice now at ease, "killed your sister Lily—his first wife—and made him suffer in your place. After that you followed him to London. If you were innocent, would you follow the enemy who killed your sister? You found someone to track him down, and you followed him, and finally married him. You also decided that he married the wrong person , and then killed his own sister." "It's her! It's her!" cried Gabrielle Leggett, trying to get up from her chair, but Collinson held her down. "she--"

Mrs. Leggett straightened up and smiled, showing her set of fine yellow teeth.She took two steps and stood in the middle of the room, with one hand resting on her hip and the other hanging loosely by her side.The housewife - what Fitzstephan called the soul of quiet reason - suddenly disappeared.The blond woman in front of her has a plump body, not the kind of roundness that is satisfied and rich after entering middle age, but like a cat hunting in a jungle or a dark alley, her whole body is wrapped in soft muscles. I gathered up the gun on the table and put it in my pocket. "Do you want to know who killed my sister?" asked Mrs. Leggett softly, facing me, her teeth chattering between the words, her lips tinted in a smile, her eyes burning. "It was she, This little devil—Gabrielle killed her mother. It was her he wanted to protect."

The girl yelled meaningless words. "Nonsense," I said, "she was a baby." "Oh, but it's not a lie," said the woman. "She was almost five years old—a five-year-old who played with a gun from a drawer while her mother was sleeping. The pistol went off and Lily died instantly. It was an accident." , of course, but Morris is too sentimental a man to bear to let the kid grow up to know that he killed his mother. Besides, Morris could have been sentenced anyway. Everyone knew his relationship with me at the time Extraordinary, and knowing that he wanted to leave Lily, and that he was at the door of Lily's bedroom at the time of the incident. But none of this mattered to him. His only hope was that the child would not remember that he had made a big mistake, and that she would not because of To know that I killed my mother—no matter how accidental—will never hold my head up.” What makes these words particularly harsh is the woman's smile when she speaks, and her almost critical attention when she weighs her words, and she strives to speak every word with style. She went on: "The fact is that Gabrielle had been—how should I put it—mentally insane before she became addicted to drugs. So, by the time the London police found us, we had successfully wiped Lost all her memories, I mean, especially about that incident. These words, I can assure you, are absolutely true. She killed her mother; and her father, to paraphrase you Said it was done on her behalf." "It kind of makes sense," I conceded, "but it doesn't quite make sense. Leggett may have believed it, but I didn't. I suspect you're trying to set your stepdaughter up because she told us she saw You stabbed Rupert downstairs." She closed her lips and took a big step towards me, her eyes were white.Then she collected her emotions and laughed shrilly. The fire disappeared from her eyes—or maybe it should be said to recede behind the eyelids, still burning secretly.She put her hands on her hips, smiled at me playfully and contemptuously, and spoke nonchalantly.Yet beneath her eyes, her smile, her voice, a maddened rage still lurks. "Really? Then I'm going to tell you something—if it wasn't true, I wouldn't be able to say such a thing. I taught her to kill her mother. Do you understand? I taught her, trained her She, wants her to practice, rehearses for her. Do you understand that? Lily and I are real sisters, inseparable, hating each other. Maurice, neither of us he wants to marry— Why should he? But he's close enough to both of us to talk about marriage. You don't want to be too platonic about that. We're poor as hell, you know, and he's not; that's why Lily wants to marry him .And I, I want to marry him because Lily wants to marry him. We are such a perfect pair of sisters, everything is the same. But Lily got him, she first - cheated him It's done. It's hard to say, but it's true. She's married to him. "Gabrielle was born six or seven months later. What a happy little family we were! I lived with them—wasn't Lily and I inseparable? And from the first, Gabriel Brielle loves me more than she loves her mother. This is the result of my careful management: Aunt Alice can do anything for her dear little niece. The reason is not that if she favors me, it will put Lily Crazy? And it's not that Lily loves the kid so much, it's just that we're sisters: whatever one wants, the other has to get it—not for sharing, but for exclusiveness. "I started the long-term project when Gabrielle was born; by the time she was almost five years old, I had done it. Maurice's pistol, a very small one, was kept in a locked chest of drawers. in the drawer. I unlocked the drawer, took out the bullets, and taught Gabrielle a nice little game. I would lie on Lily's bed and pretend to be asleep. The child would push the chair over to the chest of drawers, crawl Go up, get the pistol out of the drawer, climb into bed, put the muzzle to my head, and pull the trigger. If she does a good job, making little or no noise, and the little two-handed gun is in the right position, I'll Give her candy as a reward, and remind her not to mention the game to her mom or anyone else - because we're going to scare her mom really well one day. "We did. We really scared her to death one afternoon. Lily went to bed on an aspirin because she had a headache. I opened the locked drawer that time, but didn't unload the gun. Then I told the kid she could play the game with her mother while I visited friends on the next floor so no one would suspect I had anything to do with the death of my dear sister. I thought Morris would be all afternoon Stay outside. I'm going to run upstairs with my friends when I hear the gunshots and find out with them that the kid killed his mom by mistake playing with a gun. "I don't worry about the child leaking the secret afterward. As I said, she's mentally underdeveloped, and loves and trusts me so much, and she'll be in my hands before any official interrogation; like this, I know it's important to control her. It couldn't have been easier, and she was sure she wouldn't say anything about my part in this... well, this good show. But Maurice almost ruined it. He came home suddenly, and was Brielle was at the bedroom door when he pulled the trigger. Had he been there a fraction of a second earlier, he would have had time to save his wife's life. "Anyway, it is unfortunate that he was charged with it; but he would never suspect me; and he was so eager to erase all memory of the incident from the child's mind afterward that he also exonerated me. Worry. I did follow him to this country after he escaped from Devil's Island, and to San Francisco after Upton helped me find him. I took advantage of Gabriel's love for me, my hatred for him— This hatred was also carefully cultivated in her heart by me - and then I persuaded her to forgive Maurice for killing her mother with fake words. In order to continue to hide the truth from Gabriel, and because I With the loyalty shown by Gabrielle, Maurice decided to marry me. He felt that marrying me would somehow make up for our shattered lives. The day he married Lily, I swore to save him from snatched her around. i did. "I hope my dear sister in hell knows too." The smile disappeared.The frantic rage was no longer hidden in her eyes and voice—it was in them, manipulating the face and merging into the posture.This frantic rage consumed her as if she were the only living thing in the room.We, the eight viewers and listeners, are completely excluded, at least for the moment.We were still alive to her, but not to each other, and not to anything but her. She turned away from me and pointed one arm at the girl on the other side of the room, her voice thick and raspy, bursting out in wild triumph.And her words were also split by a short pause, which sounded like she was chanting. "You are her daughter," she cried, "so you are as bloody and dark as she and I, and all the Danes, and dark souls. This is your curse; Your hands were stained with your mother's blood when you were a child, it's your curse; thanks to me, your twisted mind, drug addiction is your curse; your life will be with your mother and me As dark as Maurice's, the lives of everyone you meet will be as dark as Morris's, and your—" "Shut up!" snapped Eric Collinson. "Shut her up!" Gabrielle Leggett put her hands to her ears, her distorted face was full of panic.She let out a scream—horribly—and fell forward out of the chair. Pat Reddy had very little experience in arresting people, but Olga and I were very experienced, and no matter how much the girl screamed or fell, we should not take our eyes off Mrs. Leggett at this time-not even for half a second. It doesn't work either.But we look at the girl anyway, maybe for less than half a second - and that's more than enough.When we looked back at Mrs. Leggett, she had an extra gun in her hand, and she had already taken a step towards the door. There was no one between her and the door—the uniformed officer had stepped forward to help Collinson hold Gabrielle Leggett; and no one was behind her—she had her back to the door, and as she turned, Fee Stephen stepped into her sight.She looked over from the black muzzle of the gun, her burning eyes flicked between us, then she took a step back and shouted: "You all must not move!" Pat Reddy shifts his weight toward his heels.I frowned at him and shook my head.The best way to catch her is in the hallway or on the stairs, where innocent people may be hurt. She stepped back over the threshold, hissing breath between her teeth, and dodged down the corridor. Owen Fitzstephan was the first to chase out the door.The police blocked my way, but I took second.The woman had already run to the stairs, at the other end of the dark corridor.Fitzstephan followed closely, and was about to catch up. As soon as I reached the landing, he caught her on the landing.He twisted one of her arms on top of her, but the one holding the gun was still dangling.He reached out to grab it, but was unsuccessful.Just as I was jumping down towards them - ducking my head so as not to hit the edge of the floor - she put the muzzle of the gun on his body. I landed on top of them just in time, slammed into them, and slammed them into the corner of the platform.The bullet that had been aimed at Fitzstephan now entered the stairs. We didn't stand up.I stretched out my hands, trying to stop the shaking pistol, but failed, but caught her waist.Not far from my chin, Fitzstephan clasped her gun-wielding wrist with bony fingers. Her body twisted and rolled around my right arm.My right arm was still sore from the impact of the car rollover earlier, and I couldn't bear it.Her strong body lifted up abruptly, turned over and pressed me down. The gunshots exploded in my ears, burning my cheeks. The woman's body softened. She didn't move as Olga and Reddy pulled us away.A second bullet passed through her throat. I went upstairs to the lab.Gabrielle Leggett lay on the floor with the doctor and Collinson kneeling beside her. I told the doctor, "Go and see Mrs. Leggett. She's on the stairs. I think she's dead, but you'd better go and see." The doctor goes out.Collinson rubbed the hands of the unconscious girl and looked at me as if he thought there should be some kind of law against people like me.Then he said: "Your work is over, you are satisfied!" "It's really over," I said.