“What are you doing here?” he asked suspiciously. “If a man works all day and can’t get his proper sleep—”
She cut him short.
“Lift this ladder, Amos. I want to look at the cupola.”
“What for?”
“That’s my business. Miss Jan was hurt here last night. I want to know why.”
“Hurt? Not bad, is it?”
“Bad enough. She’ll get over it.”
The cupola, however, revealed nothing at first. It was floored, save for the square opening for the ladder. Such light as there was was admitted by slotted openings on the four sides. Except that in one place the dust of ages seemed to have been disturbed, it appeared empty. Then she saw something; an old pair of chauffeur’s gloves. They had been shoved back into a corner, but she managed to reach them. She showed them to Amos when she climbed down again.
“Are these yours?”
He stared at them. Then he grinned.
“So that’s where they went!” he said.
“You didn’t put them up there?”
“Why would I put them up there?” he demanded truculently. “I lost them two or three months ago. I thought somebody stole them.”
He wanted them back, but Hilda to his fury took them back to the house with her. One part of the mystery, she felt, was solved. But before she left she turned to him.
“I suppose you can account for your own movements last night?”
He took a step toward her, looking ugly.
“So I hurt her, did I?” he said harshly. “Like my own daughter, and I try to kill her! Sure I can account for where I was last night, if that’s any of your business. You don’t have to come out to the stable to find your murderer, Miss Police Nurse. Look in the house.”
Jan was better that morning. Outside of a headache and some bruises she had suffered no ill effects. She even drank a cup of coffee and ate a piece of toast. But she had no idea what had happened to her, except that she thought the ladder had slipped.
She had not gone to bed. She had quarreled with Courtney and she could not sleep. She had decided to go over and see him. She had reached the stable when she heard a sound overhead. She thought it was Amos, and called to tell him that the door to the staircase was open. Amos, however, had not answered, so she had climbed the stairs.
She was not frightened. She had thought for some time that the bats in her grandmother’s room might have come from the cupola.
“There were slits in the shutters,” she said. “Pigeons couldn’t get in, but bats might.”
What she thought she heard, she said, might have been bats flying around. No, she couldn’t describe it. It was just a sound. Not very loud, either. She knew the loft well. She had played there as a child. She didn’t even light a match until she got there.
To her surprise the ladder was in place. She decided to investigate the cupola, and striking a match she climbed it. She was near the top when it gave way under her.
“I felt it going,” she said. “I couldn’t catch anything. I—well, I guess I just fell. I don’t remember.”
They let her think that. She was not told that it had probably been jerked from under her, or of the savage attack on her with the flashlight.
Hilda saw the inspector later that morning, sitting across from him, and placing on the desk between them the piece of muslin, the gloves, a small can of white paint, and the piece of charred rope. Fuller eyed them solemnly.
“You’re slipping,” he said. “No snakes? No guinea pigs?”
He looked tired. He had slept badly, and it almost annoyed him to see Hilda, bland and fresh, her hands neatly folded in her lap.
“You’re not human,” he said. “And what in God’s name does all this stuff mean?”
“Somebody tried to kill Janice Garrison last night.”
He almost leaped out of his chair.
“What?” he yelled. “And you didn’t call me? See here. I’ll be damned if I’ll have you running this case. You’ve let one murder happen, and now you tell me—”
He choked, and Hilda looked more bland than ever.
“I thought you needed your sleep,” she said calmly. “And the family didn’t want you.” She smiled faintly. “They said they had had enough of you to last a long time.”
“Who said that?”
“I think it was Carlton.”
She told her story after that, the attack on Jan, her own discovery of the girl, being locked in Amos’s rooms, and Carlton coming to the rescue.
“So he was downstairs, was he?”
“He was. Probably getting a drink.”
Fuller leaned back in his chair.
“You don’t think he is guilty, do you?”
“I think he was fond of his mother.”
Their eyes clashed, the inspector’s hard, Hilda’s blue and childlike, and stubborn.
“He had the motive and the opportunity.”
“You couldn’t get an indictment on that, could you? No grand jury—”
“All right,” he said resignedly. “Now what’s all this stuff?”
Hilda smiled.
“I don’t know about the rope. Not yet, anyhow. But suppose you wanted to scare an old lady, maybe bring on a heart attack. And suppose she’s afraid of bats. Other things, too, like rats. You might get a supply of them, put them in an old birdcage covered with a piece of muslin and hide them where nobody ever went.”
“The cupola?”
“The cupola. But bats—and other things—have teeth. At least I think so. So you use a pair of heavy gloves. You might look at those gloves. They have small holes in them.”
“Where would you get the bats—and so forth?”
“Out of the cupola itself. I didn’t see any. I probably scared them away. But there’s a butterfly net in the loft. I suppose it would be possible.”
He threw up his hands.
“All right. You win,” he said. “But how did they get into the room?”
“I imagine that’s where the paint comes in,” she said tranquilly.
She was there for some time. When she got up the inspector went to the door with her. Always she amused him, often she delighted him, but that morning there was a new look of admiration in his eyes.
“You’re a highly useful person, Miss Pinkerton,” he said, smiling down at her. “If I didn’t think you’d slap me I’d kiss you.”
“It wouldn’t be the first time.”
“Which?” he said quizzically. “Slap or kiss?”
“Both,” she said, and went out.
Ida was dusting the lower hall when she went back. She did not look up, and Hilda did not speak to her. She had no idea that it was to be the last time she was to see the girl alive.
Chapter 20
The inquest was held at two o’clock that afternoon. It was very brief. Carlton Fairbanks identified his mother’s body, and nothing new was developed. Susie came home looking sick and went to bed, but Marian stayed downtown to make arrangements for the funeral and to buy the conventional black.
She was still out when the inspector arrived at four that afternoon. Jan was better, sitting up in bed, with Courtney Brooke in and out of the room, but mostly in. They did not talk much. It seemed to content them merely to be together. And Carlton was in the library. He had had a drink or two, but he was entirely sober.
He did not seem surprised to see the inspector. He stood up stiffly.
“I rather expected you,” he said. “Jan’s accident, and all that. But I want to ask you not to judge us on what may seem unusual. If any one of us has been at fault—”
Here, however, his voice failed him. It was a moment or so before he pulled himself together.
“I know things look bad,” he said. “When I saw the paint was gone—But it has nothing to do with my mother’s death. Nothing. I am innocent, and so—God help her—is my wife.”
He followed the inspector up the stairs. Hilda, watching them come, thought he would not make the top. He ra
llied, however, when she unlocked the door of the death room, although he did not look at the bed.
The inspector was brisk and businesslike. He went at once to the closet and ignoring the safe got down on his knees and examined the baseboard. He used a flashlight, and he rapped on it and listened, his head on one side, while Carlton stood mutely by. When he got up his voice was brisk.
“All right,” he said. “Now I’d like to see your room, please.”
This time Carlton led the way. He looked shrunken, incredibly aged. Once inside he closed the door to Susie’s room, but when the inspector opened his closet door he spoke for the first time.
“I give you my word of honor,” he said bleakly, “that I knew nothing about this until yesterday morning. I would have told you before, but it involved”—he swallowed—“it involved someone very dear to me.”
He said nothing more. He stood silent while the inspector took out the row of neatly treed shoes. Even the tan ones were there, although the paint had been removed. The inspector picked up his flashlight and turned it on the baseboard.
“How does this open?”
“It slides—toward the fireplace. It’s nailed now.”
“Since yesterday?”
“Since yesterday. I nailed and painted it yesterday morning.”
The white paint was dry. The inspector produced from his pocket one of those small arrangements where a number of tools are carried inside the handle. He fitted one and went to work. Carlton said nothing. A breeze from the open windows blew the curtains into the room. Outside the traffic of a busy Monday moved along the streets, and Joe’s Market was filled with women, shopping and gossiping.
“That police car’s back. Look, you can see it.”
“Much good it will do. They don’t arrest people like the Fairbankses for murder.”
It took some time to slide the panel. The paint held it. But at last it moved and the inspector picked up his flashlight. He saw a small empty chamber, the thickness of the wall, and beyond it a flat wooden surface fastened to the floor with hooks and screw-eyes. He opened it, and saw as he had expected; that it was the baseboard of Mrs. Fairbanks’s closet. On his right was the safe. He could touch it, but he could not reach the dial. The whole aperture was only seven inches high.
He got up, dusting his hand.
“I suppose that accounts for a number of things,” he said. “Not only for the attempts to frighten your mother. It could account for something else, Mr. Fairbanks.”
“For what?”
“A cable for a remote control to the radio in your mother’s room. I suggest that your mother was killed earlier in the night, that you turned on the radio from here, that you later re-entered the room ostensibly to shut it off, but actually to disconnect the cable, and that when you went to the closet it was to place the cable there, so you could withdraw it quietly from this side.”
“Before God I never did.”
That was when Susie burst into the room. She came like fury, ready to spring at Fuller.
“You fool!” she said. “You stupid fool! He never knew about it until yesterday.”
Carlton roused at that.
“Be still,” he said. “Don’t make things worse. They’re bad enough. Go back to your room. I’ll—”
She paid no attention to him. She was panting with anger and fear.
“Don’t listen to him. I did it. I had it done. He’d never have found it if I’d had a chance to close it all the way. But if you think I put those creatures in his mother’s room, I didn’t.” Her voice was shrill. She was trembling. “Someone else in this house did that. Not me. I wouldn’t touch them with a ten-foot pole.”
She came out with her story. Nothing would have stopped her. Carlton had turned his back and was staring out the window. The inspector listened. Hilda watched.
It had started the winter before, she said. She had been in the bank, and she had seen Mrs. Fairbanks receive a large bundle of currency.
“She didn’t see me,” she said. “I saw her go down to her safe-deposit box, and I knew she was hoarding money. I told Carl, but he didn’t believe me. Anyhow, he said it was his mother’s business.”
Then came the matter of the safe. Why did she want a safe in her room? And she had changed in other ways, too. She became stingy with money. She had sent away the kitchenmaid and the second housemaid.
“I was scared,” Susie said. “I knew damned well why she wanted a safe in her room. Maybe I was raised on the wrong side of the tracks, but I had a pretty good idea what she was doing; selling her securities and turning them into cash to save taxes. And now she was going to keep it in the house!
“I got my brother-in-law the job of doing the carpentry work,” she said defiantly. “The safe was to be built into the wall, and I told him what I thought. Suppose she had two or three million dollars in cash in this house? A lot of people might know, her banks, her brokers. Things like that leak out. It wasn’t safe. We weren’t safe. Even if there was a fire—”
Her brother-in-law had suggested that she could at least keep an eye on things. “You can’t change her,” he said, “but you can watch her. Then if she’s doing it you can get that son of hers to work on her. If she’s trying to escape her taxes she ought to go to jail.”
Mrs. Fairbanks and Marian were in Florida, Jan was visiting a school friend, and she and Carl were out of town for days at a time looking for a farm. He had no difficulty in doing the work. And when the old lady came back she—Susie—learned a good bit. Mostly by listening. Mrs. Fairbanks would drive out, come back and put something in the safe. After a time, as the money apparently accumulated, she developed a new habit. She would lock her door at night, set up a card table, and apparently count over her hoard.
“I didn’t dare to open the baseboard all the way,” Susie said, “but I’d push it out an inch or so. She kept her shoes in a shoe bag on the door, so they didn’t bother me. She’d pretend to be playing solitaire, but she didn’t fool me! But when I tried to tell Carl he wouldn’t believe it. I didn’t dare to tell him how I knew.”
As to a possible cable to the radio and a remote control, she dismissed that with a gesture.
“That’s crazy,” she said. “He never knew the thing was there until after his mother was dead and he hunted out some black shoes yesterday morning to wear with his morning coat. Then he gave me hell, and yesterday he nailed it up.” She went over and put a hand on Carlton’s arm. “The one thing he suspected me of I didn’t do,” she said softly. “He thought I was keeping the bats in the stable. He found a birdcage up there wrapped in a cloth, and he was bringing it to me when the nurse saw him. He had to take it back!”
She eyed Hilda without rancor.
“You’re pretty smart,” she said, “but you missed that, didn’t you? That’s why I went out there in the rain that night. Carl had told me about it, and I wanted to see if it was still there, and what was in it.”
“But you never got there?”
“I was scared off,” said Susie, suddenly wary. “Somebody grabbed me. I don’t know who.”
Down in the kitchen Maggie was looking at the clock.
“I’d like to know what’s keeping Ida,” she observed. “She said she’d be gone only an hour, and it’s five now.” She poured William a cup of tea and took one for herself. “She’s been queer lately,” she said. “Ever since the old lady’s death, and before.”
“She’ll be all right,” said William. “Maybe she went to a movie.”
But no one upstairs was thinking of Ida. Not then, certainly. Carlton did not know the combination to his mother’s safe, and the inspector was anxious to open it.
“I think she would have written it down,” Carlton said worriedly. “Her memory wasn’t very good lately. Perhaps you have seen it, Miss Adams. It would be a combination of some sort, I suppose. Letters and numbers.”
Hilda, however, had seen nothing of the sort. She had never seen Mrs. Fairbanks open the safe, and in the search of her
room which followed nothing developed. They took the pictures from the walls, raised the rug at its edges, looked through the bed and under the paper lining the drawers of her table and bureau. They even examined the few books lying about, the vases on the mantel, the back of the clock and the radio, as well as the cards with which—according to Susie—she had merely pretended to play solitaire.
They were almost friendly, the four of them, during that interval. At least a common cause united them. When Maggie came to the door at a quarter to six, it was to see Mrs. Fairbanks’s room completely dismantled, Susie on a chair examining the top of the draperies at the window, and an inspector of police lying under the bed, with only his legs protruding.
She looked apologetic.
“I didn’t mean to disturb anybody,” she said, highly embarrassed. “It’s about Ida. She went out at one o’clock for an hour or so, and she hasn’t come back yet.”
The inspector had crawled out. He stood up and dusted his clothes.
“Does she often do that?”
“Never before, to my knowledge.”
“Did she say where she was going?”
“She said she needed some darning silk. I wanted her to eat her lunch first. She looked sick. But she wouldn’t wait.”
The inspector looked at his watch.
“It’s almost six now. Five hours. I wouldn’t worry. She’ll probably show up.”
Ida did not show up, however. Marian came home from her shopping and her interview with the mortician looking exhausted and, refusing dinner, lay on her chaise longue, her eyes closed and her face bitter.
Carlton was closeted with Susie in her room, and Jan and Courtney had a double tray on the side of her bed, achieving the impossible of balancing it, holding hands, and still doing away with a considerable amount of food.
When Hilda carried it out he followed her.
“See here,” he said. “What’s been going on? What’s this about Ida being missing?”
“I don’t know that she is, doctor.”
“Well, what’s the row about? Maggie says you’ve practically torn up the old lady’s room.”
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