“She had a very real interest.
She had married him last fall.”
He gave me a moment to comprehend that, and then went on more briskly.
“Now let’s go back. Let’s go back to last summer, to the end of July.
“Walter Somers was in town, and one day he got a note to go to a house on Halkett Street.
He went, and he met there this man I’m calling Norton, and a woman named Bassett.
The Bassett woman claimed to have been a maid in Margaret Somers’ employ in Biarritz, and that Margaret Somers had there given birth to a child.”
“Howard Somers’ child?” I asked sharply.
“No.
I believe that was the plot at first; it was all a plot anyhow.
There was no such child.
This girl they were passing off was the Bassett woman’s own daughter by an earlier marriage.
The Bassett woman had remarried.
The girl’s name was Mary Martin.”
“Mary!
And she believed it?”
“I think she did believe it for a time.
She wanted to believe it.
That’s natural.
But when the plot failed Mrs. Bassett told her the truth.
The immediate result, however, was that Walter sent for his father, and his father came here.
“Howard Somers denied the story in toto.
He had had no second child by Margaret, and she had borne no child in Europe.
The whole story was a lie.
But he worked himself into a heart attack over it, and that was the start of the trouble.
“Norton’s little plan had failed.
But this sickness gave him a new idea.
Queer how one criminal thought leads to another.
He went to Walter with the scheme about the will, and Walter almost kicked him out.
But Walter was in debt, and there was the idea.
It got to ‘eating him,’ as he put it.
Then, too, he was already interested in the girl.
The girl was straight.
She’d believed that story.
As a matter of fact, when her mother told her the truth she tried to see Howard Somers at the Imperial, but they would not let her in.
“And there’s this to say in Walter’s defense; he felt that he had been badly treated, that a half of the estate should have been his.
Later on, when his father was dead, he went on to New York to tell the whole story. But they alienated him there, and we have to remember that he wasn’t sure his father had been murdered.
Mary Martin suspected it, and told him so over the long distance telephone.
“And I’ll say this for him. He went to this Norton and Norton denied it.
But he laid Norton out cold on general principles, and Norton hated him from that moment.
That’s what I mean when I say Walter Somers had paid his price.
His wife was desperately in love with him, but she loathed the whole imposture.
She threatened again and again to uncover it.
“Now about this conspiracy to draw up a fake will.
It wasn’t Walter Somers’ idea, although he helped to put it through, and the cleverness with which that will was put among his father’s papers was not his idea either.
It was simple enough, at that.
Mr. Somers did not alter his mind or his will during that illness, but he did pay some notes of Walter’s.
In some ways he was a hard man, and he made Walter bring him the canceled notes.
“He meant to keep them.
But Walter was afraid Mrs. Somers would find them in case his father died, so he had him endorse the envelope to be returned to him—to Walter—in that case.