The Opening Door

by Helen Reilly

  McKee pushed it open and shut it a half dozen times without a word. Behind him, Cunningham said, “What is it, Inspector?”

  “Oh, nothing, nothing at all,” the Scotsman said airily. But he had received a blow. It was a hard one. The airtight case involving seven people, and seven people alone, had broken down with a crash. Now it was anybody’s game. Eve Flavells glass, the glass into which the morphine had been dropped, had been standing on the table below the sill. He touched his fingers to the green wood.

  Cunningham got it. He looked from the window to the table to McKee’s face. He said, “The morphine could have been dropped into Eve’s glass by someone standing out there...There was a lot of confusion and noise here and people moving around...

  McKee didn’t answer. He stood erect and abandoned the window, but not its implication. He wanted the man who was watching the Flavell table up there in the restaurant on 52nd Street. He reached for the phone.

  Wanting wasn’t having. In the turmoil attendant on the finding of the box of morphine tablets the man who had roused the Scotsman’s interest earlier had slipped away. It wasn’t of any real importance, or it didn’t seem to be, then. While McKee was in the middle of orders to have the man traced, the other call came through and with it, except for minor details, to all intents and purposes the case was washed up, finished and at a successful conclusion.

  The experiment with Bruce Cunningham’s Winchester, the results of which Sergeant Cutts of the Ballistics Bureau communicated to McKee at 1:15 a.m. that morning, had taken time. It wasn’t the first of its kind in the Henderson Square murder. Before the discovery of the bullet that had killed Charlotte Foy, other weapons had been collected from the various people involved.

  There was Eve Flavell’s Colt, and a museum piece, a revolutionary blunderbuss that had been removed from over the mantel in the Gerald Flavells apartment; there was an old Army revolver belonging to Jim Holland that had been his uncle’s and that had been recovered from the bottom of a trunk in his rooms, and there was a curious and interesting weapon belonging to Hugh Flavell, a walking-stick shotgun of European manufacture that Flavell had picked up in the Pyrenees in 1930. All these weapons had been duly discharged as a matter of routine. They were automatically discarded after the discovery that Charlotte Foy had been killed, not with a shotgun or a pistol or a revolver but with a bullet from a rifle.

  Bruce Cunningham’s .351 was checked in at Headquarters at half-past ten. At around eleven it was tried out. The procedure was simple in its early stages. A test bullet from the .351 was discharged into the open end of a long wooden box, packed with three feet of cotton, backed up by another six feet of cotton waste. The lid of the box was unhinged and the bullet dug from the waste at the far end, encased in a clinging cocoon of cotton in which it had wrapped itself.

  It was lifted out tenderly, tagged, and conveyed, with the .351, to the room on the floor above with the bright lights and the microscopes, where Sergeant Cutts went to work. The lethal and test bullets stood side by side under twin microscopes. The Sergeant’s all-seeing eye moved from one series of lenses to the other. He revolved the leaden slugs gently, and peered and made notes and peered again. Men wandered in and out of the room at intervals. Cutts paid no attention. He was one of the best ballistics experts in any police department in the world and his word was practically law on the witness stand—but you couldn’t hurry him.

  He made his announcement at the end of almost three hours of study. Charlotte Foy of Henderson Square West had been shot and killed with a bullet from the .351 Winchester repeating rifle that belonged to Lieutenant Bruce Cunningham.

  Cutts sewed it up so tightly that there wasn’t a hole a midget could slide through. There was no question of any fooling with the barrel, any trick. Whole and complete and entire, just as it stood, Bruce Cunningham’s .351 was the murder weapon, beyond the possibility of a doubt. Cutts talked to Inspector McKee himself.

  In the shop on East 19th Street, with the fire low and sleet tapping at the now closed casement windows with squares of mirror for panes, McKee listened and dropped the instrument slowly into its cradle. He looked past the gold eagle on the cap on the mantel at a pink china shepherdess leading a mild brown cow into infinity on top of a bookcase and then at Bruce Cunningham.

  “I’m sorry, Lieutenant,” he said, “but I’m afraid you’ll have to come with me.”

  “I congratulate you, Inspector, I do indeed. It was nice work—and for once, quick. I couldn’t ask for a prettier case, I really couldn’t. It’s just about perfect.”

  John Francis Dwyer, New York’s short chunky dynamic District Attorney, blue-eyed and with hair the color of May butter, rubbed his hands together happily in the big room at the end of the corridor in the long gray building on Centre Street. It was ten o’clock on the morning following the attack on Eve Flavell. Commissioner Carey sat behind his desk and nodded his agreement. McKee stood at one of the windows looking out.

  The facts were simple, and damning. The rifle with which Charlotte Foy had been killed not only belonged to Lieutenant Bruce Cunningham, but Cunningham, and Cunningham alone, had had access to it at the time the crime was committed.

  The flier had been taken into custody at 2:15 that morning. After a quiet denial of having given morphine to Eve Flavell and a reiteration of his innocence about Charlotte Foy, he had made no further statement.

  The Scotsman’s continued silence began to get on Commissioner Carey’s nerves. “Well, McKee?” he rapped out at last.

  The Inspector turned from the window. “It’s all been said, hasn’t it?”

  “You’re convinced Cunningham is our man?”

  “My conviction is neither here nor there, Commissioner,” McKee answered. “It’s a question, now, of proof. The ownership of the rifle isn’t the important thing—or not the most important. Guns have been stolen before and used and thrown away or replaced. As far as this case goes, there’s just one loophole. Graham, one of the two men with Thom Cunningham has been staying, says that the .351 was in the apartment on the day Charlotte Foy was killed. That’s a lot of hours to cover. The defense will undoubtedly be that the gun was removed by another person prior to the shooting and returned after it had taken place.”

  Dwyer snorted genially. “Nothing doing. No sir...Wait a minute, Graham’s outside. Would you like to talk to him, Commissioner? Good.” He pressed a buzzer and Philip Graham, Bruce Cunningham’s unlucky friend, was brought in, tired and unshaven and in a fog. A writer by profession, he had handled crime for years, in fiction; he had found fact something else again. He retold his story for the hundredth time. Boiled to its bones it was simple and damning for the Lieutenant.

  The .351 had been in the apartment for months. Graham had noticed it particularly on Wednesday morning because the dog knocked it to the floor. As McKee pointed out, there was a possibility that it might have been removed later on that day. Graham and Joe Buchanan, the man who shared the apartment with him were in and out; how it could have been returned was another matter.

  Bruce Cunningham had said in a previous statement that he left home at a few minutes after 7 p.m. on Wednesday evening in order to keep his appointment with Charlotte Foy at the north gate of Henderson Square. Apparently he had lied. He did leave the Eldon Place apartment at a few minutes after seven but he returned unexpectedly, perhaps a quarter of an hour later.

  The writer squirmed in his chair. He hadn’t exactly seen Cunningham come back, but he had called to him. After a couple of minutes Cunningham left once more. At that time, twenty to twenty-five minutes past seven, Graham and Joe Buchanan were both in the apartment. At around eight o’clock Graham went out for the evening, but Joe Buchanan remained in the apartment all evening, working on a drawing, and when Graham got back at a little before twelve, Buchanan told him that the evening had been quiet and that there had been no alarums and excursions and no callers.

  A statement from Buchanan himself was unavailable at the moment. On the morning f
ollowing the murder, before Charlotte Foy’s body was discovered, he left New York to visit his aunt. Graham didn’t know where this aunt, a Martha Denham, lived. He had said he would be back at the end of the week.

  After a few more questions Graham was dismissed and then Bruce Cunningham was brought in. The flier entered the room with a confident step, between two detectives. The Commissioner nodded at them and they withdrew. He said, “Sit down, Lieutenant,” and Cunningham dropped into the indicated chair.

  He bore the marks of what he had been through since three o’clock that morning. His lean dark face was tired, the jaw and sensitive clean-cut mouth were sternly set and eyes, straight-looking intelligent eyes under a good forehead, were narrow with strain.

  He would have been a fool if he hadn’t been worried. He wasn’t a fool. He had acted like one in not disposing of the rifle immediately after he had killed Charlotte Foy with a bullet from it, McKee reflected. This was one of the peculiar features of the case that made him uncomfortable, irresolute.

  Innocent or guilty, the flier’s composure was genuine. There was no bravado about it. He sat in an easy attitude, knees crossed, shoulders relaxed, a long tall figure in uniform, his head up. He drew a cigarette from his pocket, tapped it thoughtfully on the back of a brown hand and lit it without asking permission. He admitted his return to the Eldon Place apartment after he had, he said, failed to find Charlotte Foy at the north gate of Henderson Park.

  “Yes, I went back there.”

  Dwyer moved in on him. “We know you went back. You went back to put the rifle you killed her with in what you considered, for the moment, a safe place.”

  “No, Mr. District Attorney,” Cunningham answered with a quirk of his strongly marked dark brows, “I went back because I forgot my wallet.”

  Dwyer laughed. “Well, well, well, so you forgot your wallet? Now isn’t that nice?”

  Bruce Cunningham remained cool. “I didn’t think so at the time. It was a nuisance.”

  “But what a convenient nuisance,” Dwyer purred. “Where were you when you made this—interesting discovery about your wallet?”

  Cunningham looked at him. “At the north gate of the park. I had decided that Charlotte Foy wasn’t coming and was just about to start around the Square to pick up Miss Flavell when I found that in changing my clothes I had left my wallet behind in my other pocket.”

  The District Attorney was openly incredulous. “It was raining, then, I believe....Yes. And your coat was presumably buttoned, your overcoat and the jacket of your uniform. Yet standing there in the fog and the rain, you suddenly remembered that you didn’t have your wallet with you.”

  “That’s right.”

  Cunningham smiled. If there were women on the jury, the Scotsman decided, and he smiled like that often enough, Francis was going to need everything he could get on the ball. Bruce Cunningham’s face was introspective and a little aloof in repose; when he smiled, it changed, warmed, was gay, devil-may-care and singularly attractive.

  His smile didn’t produce a softening effect on New York’s choleric district attorney. He said harshly, “The Flavells are wealthy people, Mr. Cunningham. You were due at the house in a short time and you’re engaged to be married to Natalie Flavell. Yet you walked ten blocks through the driving rain, five there and five back, rather than borrow what money you needed from your fiancée or her father.”

  The lieutenant remained imperturbable. “I don’t borrow money from women, Mr. District Attorney, and Hugh Flavell is not a wealthy man.”

  His rocklike composure got under Francis’ skin. He waved coldly at the desk, at the two bullets and the rifle laid across it, at the report headed “Ballistics Department” beside the rifle.

  “We don’t need to listen to any more of your lies, Cunningham. Those things tell the tale. You shot Charlotte Foy with that gun. No one else could have got possession of it, and you have no alibi for the period covering the time within which the shot was fired. You’re as guilty as hell. Why don’t you come clean? Give us a confession. It will make it easier for everyone. If you won’t think of yourself, think of that poor young girl to whom you’re engaged, of her family. Think of the uniform you wear.”

  For a startled moment McKee was under the impression that Cunningham was going to break. He sat forward in his chair staring at the gun, at the bullets, with grim concentration. There was pallor under his tanned skin and his eyes, narrowed on the damning exhibit, had a helpless, almost a hopeless gleam to them. He drew a long breath and sat erect.

  “Dilly, Dally, come out and be killed,” he said in a tired voice. “You know, I’ve often wondered what sort of argument the police used to get a confession, what it was they offered a man in exchange for his life. I know now it’s nothing, just bluff and fatigue and strain and to hear you stop talking. You’re a smart man, Counselor. I’m going to put something to you. You’ve provided me with opportunity and a weapon. But what about motive? What possible reason could I have for killing Charlotte Foy? That’s what I’d like you to tell me. Just that.”

  He had placed his finger on the weak spot in the State’s case. Nevertheless the question was a mistake. He waited too eagerly for an answer. That he had a motive, even though they didn’t know what it was, was now certain. Even without motive the evidence against him was overwhelming. He was taken away. A short conference ensued. The result was a foregone conclusion. Before 11 a.m. on Friday, December the 4th, Bruce Cunningham was under arrest in connection with the murder of Charlotte Foy.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  “No, Papa, let me alone—please.”

  Natalie rose and walked swiftly to one of the front windows in the living room of the house on the Square and stood there, looking out. The sweeping sea-green draperies framed the gray light of mid-afternoon. The girls slim black wool back was as straight as a pikestaff and her soft fair hair fell in a motionless and shining wave to her stiff shoulders.

  Hugh Flavell, who had been leaning toward her supplicatingly, sank back cross-kneed into the corner of one of the deep sofas at the fire with a gesture of despair. McKee leaned on a yellow satin chair, arms folded along the top, and watched them both.

  Immediately following the scene in the Commissioner’s office, the Flavells had been informed of what had taken place. Natalie hadn’t broken down or had hysterics. After an outburst of tight-lipped fury at the stupidity of the police she had gone into action. Within half an hour she had retained Gerard Burchall, New York’s most eminent criminal lawyer, to look after Bruce Cunningham’s interests.

  Whatever else Charlotte Foy’s coddling, the swaddling clothes in which she had wrapped Natalie, had done to her, it hadn’t made her a weakling, the Scotsman reflected.

  At the window Natalie repeated icily, “I don’t care what the evidence is, I don’t care anything about the rifle. Bruce didn’t kill Charlotte. The idea is too ridiculous for words. Bruce wouldn’t kill anyone.”

  It was to her father she spoke. Hugh Flavell didn’t say anything.

  McKee said soothingly, “Don’t worry too much, Miss Flavell. The formalities of the Lieutenant’s release on bail will be concluded shortly. After all, he isn’t in custody on a charge of homicide but only as a material witness.”

  He didn’t add that it had taken all kinds of persuasion to convince the District Attorney that at this point the material-witness charge was a safer bet than a homicide rap, as a precautionary measure, until the evidence should be complete—and that Bruce Cunningham wasn’t likely to be out on bail long.

  The moment Gerard Burchall informed Natalie that Bruce Cunningham was eligible for bail she had ordered him to arrange it. The bail was stiff. Natalie had dismissed the $100,000 demanded by the court with a few strokes of a pen.

  Dwyer was furious but there was nothing he could do about it. He was convinced that in the Lieutenant they had their man and that no further search was required. McKee didn’t agree, which was why he advised going slow. He wanted the whole canvas laid bare. He wan
ted the man or woman with the blood-stained shoes who had searched Charlotte Foy’s bedroom. It wasn’t Bruce Cunningham; Cunningham was with Natalie when that search was being conducted. He also wanted the photograph with the corner torn off that had cropped up between Susan De Sange and Charlotte Foy shortly before Charlotte died.

  He looked absently at the blaze of a burnt-orange Degas above a bookcase. Above all, he wanted the missing Buchanan, the third occupant of the Eldon Place apartment, who had been at home from eight o’clock on, the night Charlotte was killed and whose testimony that there had been no visitors, unless it was changed, would put Bruce Cunningham in the electric chair.

  Buchanan had said to Graham of that evening, “No alarums and excursions and no visitors,” which would seem to indicate that no one except Bruce Cunningham could have replaced the .351. But Graham’s report was only hearsay and until they talked to Buchanan himself, they couldn’t be sure. He was out of New York, visiting an aunt who was ill. Graham didn’t have the slightest idea where the aunt lived, except that it was on a farm within a radius of a couple of hundred miles of the city. The search for Buchanan was already under way. In addition, McKee was interested in the gentleman who had been watching the Flavell table in the Cedars and who had so expeditiously vanished. Susan De Sange knew this man.

  Natalie turned from the window and began to move restlessly around the room. She didn’t look at her father; she was aware of his lack of confidence in Bruce’s innocence. She said, pausing beside a coffee table and shifting a crystal box with tight fingers, “Someone got hold of Bruce’s rifle, Papa. That’s what we’ve got to prove. It was there, in Bruce’s apartment for months. Anyone could have taken it when the apartment was empty. I had a key. Suppose other people had keys, too?”