The Galton Case Read Online Free Page A

it, Gordon? No, I don’t believe I have. I’ve told no one, I’ve always been so ashamed.” She lifted her hands and dropped them in her robed lap. “But now I can forgive him for that, too.”
    “How much money was involved?” I said.
    “I don’t know exactly how much, to the penny. Several thousand dollars, anyway. Ever since the day the banks closed, Mr. Galton had had a habit of keeping a certain amount of cash for current expenses.”
    “Where did he keep it?”
    “In his private safe, in the study. The combination was on a piece of paper pasted to the inside of his desk drawer. Anthony must have found it there, and used it to open the safe. He took everything in it, all the money, and even some of my jewels which I kept there.”
    “Are you sure he took it?”
    “Unfortunately, yes. It disappeared at the same time he did. It’s why he hid himself away, and never came back to us.”
    Sable’s glum look deepened. Probably he was thinking the same thing I was: that several thousand dollars in cash, in the slums of San Francisco, in the depths of the depression, were a very likely passport to oblivion.
    But we couldn’t say it out loud. With her money, and her asthma, and her heart, Mrs. Galton was living at several removes from reality. Apparently that was how it had to be.
    “Do you have a picture of your son, taken not too long before his disappearance?”
    “I believe I have. I’ll ask Cassie to have a look. She should be coming soon.”
    “In the meantime, can you give me any other information? Particularly about where your son might have gone, who or where he might have visited.”
    “I know nothing of his life after he left the university. Hecut himself off from all decent society. He was perversely bound to sink in the social scale, to declass himself. I’m afraid my son had a
nostalgie de la boue
—a nostalgia for the gutter. He tried to cover it over with fancy talk about re-establishing contact with the earth, becoming a poet of the people, and such nonsense. His real interest was dirt for dirt’s own sake. I brought him up to be pure in thought and desire, but somehow—somehow he became fascinated with the pitch that defileth. And the pitch defiled him.”
    Her breathing was noisy. She had begun to shake, and scratch with waxy fingers at the robe that covered her knees.
    Sable leaned toward her solicitously. “You mustn’t excite yourself, Mrs. Galton. It was all over long ago.”
    “It’s not all over. I want Anthony back. I have nobody. I have nothing. He was stolen away from me.”
    “We’ll get him back if it’s humanly possible.”
    “Yes, I know you will, Gordon.” Her mood had changed like a fitful wind. Her head inclined toward Sable’s shoulder as though to rest against it. She spoke like a little girl betrayed by time and loss, by fading hair and wrinkles and the fear of death: “I’m a foolish angry old woman. You’re always so good to me. Anthony will be good to me, too, won’t he, when he comes? In spite of all I’ve said against him, he was a darling boy. He was always good to his poor mother, and he will be again.”
    She was chanting in a ritual of hope. If she said it often enough, it would have to come true.
    “I’m sure he will, Mrs. Galton.”
    Sable rose and pressed her hand. I was always a little suspicious of men who put themselves out too much for rich old ladies, or even poor ones. But then it was part of his job.
    “I’m hungry,” she said. “I want my lunch. What’s going on downstairs?”
    She lunged half out of her long chair and got hold of awired bellpush on the table beside it. She kept her finger pressed on the button until her lunch arrived. That was a tense five minutes.

chapter
4
    I T CAME on a covered platter carried by the woman I’d seen on the badminton court. She had changed her shorts for a plain linen dress which managed to conceal her figure, if not her fine brown legs. Her blue eyes were watchful.
    “You kept me