The Case of the Grinning Gorilla

Mrs. Kempton said, “Helen kept herself to herself, Mr. Mason. She had a consuming, driving ambition. She was willing to sacrifice everything to that, and, of course, somewhere in the back of her life there was an unfortunate love affair.”

“Did she tell you about that?”

“Good heavens, no. She didn’t need to. You could see as plain as day what she was doing.”

“What was she doing?”

“She’d evidently been jilted by someone who... well, sometimes I had the idea it was someone who fancied that he was a little bit above her in life, a little bit superior to her. Helen seemed to have dedicated her whole life to showing him that she could make a success, and the only thing that she had that she could make an outstanding success of was... well, something like pictures. She was really beautiful.”

“So I gather,” Mason said. “I have some photographs of her. Who took them, do you know?”

“Mr. Addicks, I suppose. He was always snapping people with a camera, and on the whole he took some pretty good pictures.”

“He had a camera on the yacht?”

“He had cameras on the yacht, he had cameras in the house, he had cameras everywhere. He had a whole bunch of cameras of different sorts.”

“All this about Helen’s love affair, how did you get this information?”

“By putting two and two together. She was a good looking, normal girl, but she didn’t seem eager to go out. She worked, she wrote in her diary, she took sunbaths. She even had a quartz light for the cloudy, rainy days.”

“That was her whole life?”

“That and her work. Of course, she had no real office hours. She was on call whenever anything turned up, and she went with Mr. Addicks, of course, whenever he went anywhere.”

“Was that frequent?”

“Oh yes. He had lots of irons in the fire. There’d be a phone call on some mining deal or other and he’d be running around, throwing things into a car, and then he’d be off — sometimes with Hershey, sometimes with Fallon, sometimes just by himself — with Helen, of course. She went on all of his trips.”

“There’s one more question before you go. Do you feel that there was anything really strange about Helen’s death?”

“Of course there was.”

“I mean, do you feel that she didn’t commit suicide?”

“That she could have been washed overboard accidentally?”

“I’m asking you,” Mason said.

She said, “Mr. Mason, I’m never going to say anything that would make it difficult for anyone. I know all too well how rumors can get started and how much they can do to ruin a person’s whole career, but... well, if I’d been the police I wouldn’t have quit that easy.”

“And why not?”

“Because... well, I know, I just absolutely know Helen didn’t commit suicide, and I know that somebody took her diary and threw it overboard.”

“How do you know that?”

“Because her diary was missing, and I know that she would have kept it with her.”

“How do you know it was missing?”

“I had the job of going through Helen’s room afterwards and tidying it up and getting the things together for the public administrator. He went in there with me and we went through everything. He put all of her clothes and personal things in one box, and all of her books in another.”

“She left no relatives?”

“No one could find out a thing in the world about her, where she came from or anything.”

“Nathan Fallon claims that he’s a distant relative,” Mason said.

“Nathan Fallon does?” she asked in incredulous surprise.

Mason nodded.

“She hated the ground he walked on. He was no more related to her than — than he was to those apes out in the cages.”

“You don’t think she had perhaps known him before she got the position and...?”

“You mean that she owed her position to him?”

“In a way, yes.”

“Good heavens, no. She hated Nathan Fallon.”

“How do you feel about him?”

“I don’t like to hate people.”

“But you don’t like him?”

“Definitely not.”

“Did Fallon try to be attentive to...?”

“Try to be attentive to her? Of course he did. He couldn’t keep his hands off of her at first — and then she slapped him into his place. He’s one of those men who go around pawing and slapping and nudging, and letting his hand rest on your arm, then on your shoulder, and then he’ll start patting you on the knee. When he has a chance he’ll slip an arm around you, but it’s never still. He’s — the man is just unclean somehow. You want to spit in his face.”

“Well, I think that gives me all the information I wanted,” Mason said. “I was primarily interested in finding out about the missing diary.”

“Well, I... I’ve done a lot of wondering about that myself. She could have taken it with her when she went overboard.”

“Anything else you’ve been wondering about?”

“Yes.”

“Such as what?”

“Well,” she said, “that important document that she was doing for Mr. Addicks. I’ve often wondered about that, and about what happened to it.”

“What do you mean?”

“It wasn’t in her stateroom, and I don’t think Addicks took it with him when he left her stateroom. Of course he could have, but I doubt it. I think she was supposed to have finished the typing the next morning. They called off work when the storm got bad.”