The Door (26 page)

“For not telling?”

“For not telling.”

“Reasons so strong that he is willing to go to the chair rather than tell them? That’s ridiculous.”

“Not if he recognized the person he saw on that hillside, or wherever it was.”

And I saw between them once more that practically wordless exchange which I found so irritating; Judy staring at Dick, and Dick making a gesture, at once protesting and protective.

“But who could that be? Not Wallie. We know that.”

Judy looked at me, and I have never seen so tragic a look in a child’s eyes.

“Dick thinks it might have been father.”

I do not blame them, poor young things. Indeed, thinking that over later, I was not so sure that they were not right. Here was Jim, asking the day after Sarah’s death about Howard, and if I was certain he had not been down recently; and burning his papers later on, as though some such inquiry might have been made by letter and answered.

And there was the whole situation; a secret will, to be kept from Howard’s family, and even embodying a further secret clause. Howard might have had reason in his own mind for desperate measures to prevent Katherine learning of that will. And then, unable to bear that weight of guilt, or confronted with Jim the night of his death, he had resorted to suicide.

I was, however, profoundly shocked at the time, so much so that Judy rang for some sherry for me.

“I know,” she said, “I feel like that too. But if Uncle Jim’s innocent he’s not going to the chair. And it will be the chair unless something is done, and done soon.”

Apparently there was something to be done, simple enough on the face of it. We were to go, the three of us, to the path into the park, and there conduct an experiment as to the possibility of recognizing each other.

“It’s the same sort of night,” Dick said. “Stars but no moon. You two can go down to where Uncle Jim said he rested”—even then I noted the Uncle Jim—“and I’ll cut across the hillside. I’ll stop when you can see me enough to recognize me.”

And this we did. That end of the park was deserted, and we saw no one. Dick left us at the Larimer lot, and cut across directly to the hillside. We could hear him working his way through the brush for some time, then we lost him. Judy and I followed the street to the path, and then down the hill.

Halfway down we stopped and Judy lighted a cigarette. She had not spoken at all until then. An unusual thing for her, and by the light of the match I thought she was crying.

“It’s a crazy idea,” she said. “We’re all crazy. And why the devil doesn’t he come?”

It did seem to be taking Dick a long time. Judy sat down finally, her hands clasped about her knees.

“There’s more light than I thought,” she said. “That street lamp up there helps. I can see you plainly, Elizabeth Jane.”

But stare as we might we could not see Dick, and at last Judy got up.

“I’d better go over,” she said. “He may have fallen.”

I had a queer feeling even then that something was not right. The silence was appalling, and I remember wishing we had brought the dogs. Judy was ahead, hard to follow in her black dress, and so we progressed for some two hundred feet along the steep hillside.

But we did not find Dick at all. Judy was frantically calling him by that time, and I remember looking up to see my own garage towering above me, and so excited was I that I hardly recognized it. And then hearing Judy’s voice Joseph came on the run, and in no time at all we had the police there.

They found Dick unconscious in a deep wash beneath the Larimer lot. Whether he had fallen or had been struck we did not know, but he had a deep wound on the back of his head.

They took him to the hospital at once, and up to the operating room. There was no fracture, however, but a bad concussion of the brain, and both Judy and I spent the night in his room.

Some time during that endless night, with Judy sitting beside the bed where Dick’s long figure never moved and nurses came and went in that silence which is as ominous as death, a thought came to me, who seemed not to be thinking at all. This thought was that here was a crime which could not be laid to Jim; which might even help him. Whether Dick lived or died—and I prayed God that he live—the unknown killer was still at large.

And, now that Dick was to live, something of that relief, and more, was in Judy’s mind.

Toward morning she got stiffly out of her chair and coming over to me put her hand on my shoulder.

“You see, we were wrong,” she said, rather childishly. “We were both wrong, Elizabeth.”

At dawn Dick became conscious and reached out for Judy’s hand. But it was not until evening of that day that he told his story.

He had reached the edge of the lot, and was climbing down the hillside. When he reached the gully he stopped, hesitating whether to cross or go around it, and at that moment he heard a sound above him.

There was at this point no direct light from the street lamp, but a faint reflected radiance. The crest of the hill, however, with the lamp behind it, stood out clearly silhouetted against the night. And against that outline something was moving; an indistinguishable mass, close to the ground.

It was perhaps eight feet above him, and he had thought at first that it was a dog. He decided to go up the hill and around the head of the wash, and then the thing came at him. That was all he remembered, and even now that is all we know.

It is probable that nothing more than surveillance of our movements was intended. But Dick altered his course, recognition was imminent, and the reaction was quick and violent.

W
ITH THE SURPRISING RECUPERATIVE
power of youth Dick was out again in a few days. But although preparations for Jim’s trial were going on rapidly, that attack had not only completely undermined the
morale
of my household, it was causing Inspector Harrison some sleepless nights also.

He had examined the hillside again but without result. The weather had been dry as well as warm, and there were no footprints. He was completely baffled, and he did not hesitate to say so.

“I don’t want any miscarriage of justice,” he said. “I’m not like the District Attorney. I do my work and my job goes on, convictions or no convictions; and I don’t give a particular damn for the press. What I want is the guilty man. And I’m not so sure we’ve got him.”

Dick had been hurt the twenty-seventh of May, Friday. On Monday morning I came downstairs to find the Inspector having a comfortable cup of coffee in the pantry. He was not at all abashed, put down the kitchen clock which he had been examining, said briefly that it needed cleaning, and followed me into the front hall.

After his habit, he stopped at the lavatory and looked inside.

“Has it ever occurred to you,” he said, “that that pencil Walter Somers produced was not what he found in that airshaft?”

“I think Judy—”

“Ha!” he said. “Trust Miss Judy. She knows. Well, it wasn’t. Now, here are the facts about that pencil, Miss Bell. In the first place, I believe that it was yours; to be truthful about it, we found your fingerprints on it. Yours and Walter Somers’. No others. In the second place, I believe it was taken from your desk that night, and deliberately placed on that skylight. I have not said that it was taken for that purpose, although it might have been. Do you recall Walter Somers using a pencil that night? Before he started the investigation?”

“I don’t think he did. He may have.”

“He didn’t look into the skylight, get down and go on some errand into the library?”

“He went in for some matches.”

“Matches, eh? Well, he’s a smoker, and the average cigarette smoker carries them. I think he got that pencil, and let’s see if I’m right. We have to remember, of course, that Walter Somers knows something he’s not telling. Now, he looks down that airshaft, and he sees something there which he recognizes; a key, maybe; or a watch charm, or a fountain pen, or a false tooth! Anyhow, something that he knows at sight, or suspects. He comes down, goes into the library for matches and picks up a pencil and slips it in his pocket. He climbs the ladder, gets this object, shows you the pencil instead, and there you are.

“Being afraid of nothing, he seals it up for the police. Clever, wasn’t it? Only it was a bit too clever.”

“He fooled us all, then.”

“Not quite all of us,” said the Inspector cheerfully. “You’re not a smoker, I take it?”

“I don’t smoke. No.”

“Don’t carry pencils around in your pockets?”

“Women have no pockets nowadays.”

“All right. And what sort of clothing did Walter Somers wear that night?”

“His dinner jacket.”

“Black. Now here’s what the microscope showed, Miss Bell. That pencil had been carried in the pocket of a black suit; in the side pocket, where a man often carries a package of cigarettes. There were bits of tobacco from cigarettes caught around the eraser, along with black filaments from the pocket. Now, I’ve watched Walter Somers. He doesn’t use a cigarette case; he carries his cigarettes in a paper packet in his right hand coat pocket. And I don’t mind telling you that I’ve had that coat, and that this pocket bears out the facts. He had that pencil there before he climbed that ladder.”

“Walter!” I gasped. “But I thought you said—”

“Not so fast,” he warned me. “No, he didn’t kill Sarah Gittings, if your alibi for him is correct. Although alibis are tricky things. Still, three alibis are good and sufficient for anybody. But look at the case against him!

“He gets his father to change his will in his favor. The news leaks out, and he’s afraid it will get to Mrs. Somers and the good work will be undone. So he kills Sarah Gittings for fear she’ll talk, and Florence Gunther because she’s trying to see you and tell you what she knows. Then, later on—”

“He would never have lifted a hand against his father.”

“No? Well, I daresay not. Anyhow, he didn’t. We have him checked for that night too. But it’s a pity. It’s a perfect case otherwise. But to get back to this pencil. We have only two guesses; either he had had it in his pocket for some time, and substituted it for what he found on the skylight. Or he already suspected or knew what was there, took the pencil from your desk, and used the ladder to remove something which was damaging.”

“To him?”

“Not necessarily; but to some one.” He sat back, thoughtfully. “I’ve already said that this is a family matter, Miss Bell. I’ve never seen a family more apparently united to frustrate justice and protect a criminal! It’s disunited every other way, but when it comes to these murders it turns a solid front to the world. Now, what was the purpose of that little drama on the hillside the other night?”

“To see if poor Jim Blake could have recognized somebody there,” I said defiantly.

“Precisely! And Jim Blake keeping his mouth shut and ready to take what comes! Who is he protecting? Who is Joseph protecting? He helps somebody out of that shaft, or at least to get out of the house. He finishes your job in the cellar and burns the carpet, and later on he gets knocked on the head for his trouble. How far can the police go, in a case like that?”

They had not found Mary Martin. That is strange, when I think back over it. She was not trying to hide; not then, at least. She was indeed, as the Inspector was to admit disgustedly later on, “under their noses.”

Nor were any of us seeing much of Wallie. Judy suggested that he was trying, like the police, to locate Mary.

“But why?”

“Because he’s crazy about her.”

“I don’t believe it.”

“Don’t you? I found her in his arms the day he came to New York, after father died. He had gone out, but he came back.”

“Judy!”

“Well, I did. She was crying, and he was smoothing her hair and whispering to her. I just backed out and let them be miserable.”

“She may have broken down, and he was trying to quiet her.”

But she only smiled, as from the depths of some secret knowledge which she knew well enough I did not possess.

I thought over that after Judy had gone. I thought back to the night of Sarah’s death, and Mary’s sudden pause in the drive when she learned that Sarah was still out. Wallie had been nervous too, I seemed to remember. At some time in the evening he had asked about Sarah.

“And where was Sarah, while all this was going on?”

“She was out.”

“And she’s still out?”

“Yes.”

It seemed to me now that he had looked slightly surprised and rather thoughtful; but how much of this impression was due to what had followed I was not certain.

But what did Mary Martin know? What possible business could she have had with Howard? A business so furtive that she must wait until Sarah was out, and so urgent that she had gone as white as a sheet when she was stopped.

She had not gone to Walter. Her errand—providing there was an errand—was one she was apparently concealing from Walter. It was a part of that same motive which had lain behind that strange procedure of hers when she had walked into Katherine’s New York apartment and by sheer audacity superseded poor Maude Palmer.

According to Katherine she had not wanted me to know that she was there.

“Why?” Katherine had asked.

“She would think I had used what I know, to my own advantage.”

Frightened, beyond a doubt; pale, as she had been pale that day at the hotel. But quietly determined. Hiding herself away in a little room downtown, going out at night to throw something into the river, and then—going to bed and “sleeping well.” As though some weight was off her mind, as though now at last all was well, and safe. Poor Mary!

I had had my talk with the Inspector on Monday morning, and on Tuesday he asked permission to go over the house once more. Never have I seen a more exhausting search, or less result from it, unless I except the bewildered indignation of the servants. But at the last I did a thing I shall regret to the end of my life. I locked the ormolu cabinet and put the key away.

Simmons was in charge, and he came to me about it. But I explained that it had been examined, and that my mother’s Chelsea figures inside were very precious and not to be handled. He was satisfied, and so it was not opened.