“Some laboratories buy such things,” Hilda said mendaciously, and got up. “Someone had been keeping things in a birdcage in the Fairbanks stable. Never mind. I’m only sorry. If there is anything I can do—”
Courtney had not gone into the house. He was standing by the car when she came out.
“Funny thing,” he said. “There was a boy over by the barn. I started over to him but he beat it. Well, how did they take it?”
“It’s broken them,” she said wearily. “I suppose it was the boy who did it.”
“Did what?”
“Caught the bats and so on and gave them to Ida.”
He almost put the car into a ditch.
“So that’s it,” he said. “It was Ida! But why, and who killed her?”
“Are you sure you don’t know, doctor? On the night Mrs. Fairbanks died you saw someone on the third floor, didn’t you? You were holding a cup of coffee. It spilled.”
He passed a truck before he replied.
“That’s as preposterous a deduction as I’ve ever heard,” he said. “If that’s the way the police work—”
“I’m not a policewoman,” she told him patiently. “You saw someone, didn’t you?”
“I’ve already said no.”
He was lying, and he was not a good liar. She did not pursue the subject. She was very quiet the rest of the way back to town. Her face had no longer its bland cherubic expression. She looked dispirited and half sick. When young Brooke politely but coldly offered her dinner at a roadhouse she refused it.
“I’m not hungry,” she said. “Thanks just the same. I want to get back as soon as possible.”
Yet for a woman in a hurry she did nothing much when she reached the Fairbanks house again. She did not get into uniform. She merely took off her hat and sat down in her room. When Jan, on her way to bed, rapped at her door she was still there in the dark.
“Good gracious! “Jan said. “Don’t you want a light? And did you have anything to eat?”
“I didn’t want anything, Jan.”
“Just what were you and Courtney cooking up this afternoon?” Jan asked curiously. “I saw you, you know. You were gone for hours.”
“I was telling Ida’s people about her,” said Hilda. “It was rather sad. I hate to carry bad news.”
She looked at the girl. How would she bear another blow? Suppose she was right and Ida had been put out of the way because she knew what Hilda thought she knew?
It was midnight before she made any move. The household was asleep. Even Amos’s light in the stable was out, by that time. But she took the precaution of slipping off her shoes. Then, armed with her flashlight, she went up to the third floor. She did not go back to Ida’s room, however. She went into the guest rooms, taking one after the other, examining the floors and the bathrooms, and removing the dust covers from the beds.
It was in the room over Carlton’s that she found what she had been afraid to find.
She went to bed and to sleep after that, but she carried a sort of mental alarm clock in her head, and promptly at six she wakened. Nobody was stirring in the house when she went down to the library and called the inspector on the phone at his bachelor apartment. His voice was heavy with sleep when he answered.
“It’s Hilda Adams,” she said carefully. “I want you to do something. Now, if you will.”
“At this hour? Good heavens, Hilda, don’t you ever go to bed?”
“I do, but I get out of it. Will you have someone check the hotels in town for a woman who got there early Sunday morning and left that afternoon?”
“Sunday? Sure. But what’s it all about?”
“I’ll tell you later. I can’t talk here.”
She hung up and went upstairs again. She had been stupid, she thought. She should have known all this before. Yet she had also a sense of horror. It was still written all over her when she sat in the inspector’s office that Wednesday morning.
“How did you guess it?” he said.
“Then it’s correct?”
“Correct as hell. She checked in at five Sunday morning and left that afternoon. She left Atlantic City on Saturday.”
She drew a long breath.
“I should have known it before,” she said. “The figure at the top of the stairs and the chandelier shaking. I think young Brooke saw it, too, although he denies it. But the rooms looked the same. Only Ida had cleaned a bathroom, and she couldn’t put back the dust. I suppose that cost her her life. If she had only raised a window and let the dirt in—”
In spite of himself Fuller smiled.
“The world lost a great criminal in you, Hilda,” he said admiringly.
He looked over his notes. Marian had registered at one of the big Atlantic City hotels the night she had left home. She had remained most of the time in her room, having her meals served there, and she had left on a late train on Saturday.
“It checks,” he said thoughtfully. “She came home late and Ida probably admitted her and told her Eileen was there. She smuggled her up the back stairs to the third floor and settled her there. Then what? Did she come down while young Brooke was with Jan, and stab her mother? It’s—well, it’s unnatural, to say the least.”
Hilda sat very still.
“I’m not sure,” she said at last. “She was there. I don’t know where she hid while the house was searched. Maybe in the stable. Anyhow she got away, and after you let Ida go I suppose she made up the bed.”
“What put you on the track?” he asked curiously.
“I don’t know exactly.” She got up to go. “Ida’s parents said she was devoted to Marian. And then the doctor—I just wondered if Ida had seen Marian at Stern and Jones on Monday.”
He looked at her with shocked surprise.
“You don’t mean that, do you?”
“It could be,” she said rather dismally, and went out.
He read over his notes carefully after she had gone. The waitresses in the restaurant at Stern & Jones did not remember Ida, but they did remember Marian, who was well known in the store. She had come in at three o’clock and had a cup of tea. But she had been alone. As to the will, in a long-distance call to Mrs. Fairbanks’s lawyer, Charles Willis, in Canada for salmon, Willis said that the old lady had kept all three copies, but that Carlton was substantially correct. The estate was divided between Marian and Carlton, with Marian’s share in trust for Janice.
“Although there was a hundred thousand dollars for the girl,” he said.
The will had been made seven years ago. He did not think she had changed it.
After that the inspector went to Mrs. Fairbanks’s bank, and had some difficulty in getting information. In the end, however, he learned that over the past year or two she had been selling bonds and converting the results into cash. This she apparently deposited in the safe-deposit boxes in the basement, of which she rented several. If she had removed this cash the bank had no knowledge of it. It was not an unusual procedure, especially where the customer was a woman. Women resented both income and inheritance taxes, always hoping to escape them. And here the bank added a human note. “As do most people,” it said.
Back at his office he made a brief chronological chart:
In January, Susie had seen Mrs. Fairbanks remove cash from the bank and take it to her box.
In February, Mrs. Fairbanks and Marian had gone to Florida, while the safe was installed, and Susie’s brother-in-law built the peephole.
On the ninth of March Mrs. Fairbanks came home, arriving that night. The next morning she was poisoned with arsenic. The arsenic was shown to have been in the sugar.
She was suspicious afterward of her household, making her own breakfast and at other meals eating only what they ate. But the attempt had not been repeated. From that day in March until the beginning of May everything had been as usual.
After that the so-called hauntings began. It was the first of May when she found the first bat in her room. Later there were two more bats, two sparrows,
and a rat over a period of a month, and when another bat was discovered she had gone to the police.
“Someone is trying to kill me,” she had said, sitting erect in her chair. “I have a bad heart, and they know it. But I’m pretty hard to scare.”
He put his notes away and went thoughtfully out to lunch.
He saw Courtney Brooke that afternoon, and he laid all his cards on the table. He liked the boy, but he sensed a change in him when it came to the safe and the money possibly in it. He stiffened slightly.
“I don’t care a damn for the money,” he said. “As a matter of fact it bothers me. I’d rather marry a poor girl. I suppose you can open the safe, sooner or later?”
“It won’t be easy. The makers will send somebody, if we don’t find the combination. I’m putting a guard in the grounds tonight. If the money is there, it won’t leave the house.”
But Brooke still looked uneasy, and Fuller changed the subject. He asked about arsenic. It could be obtained without much trouble, the doctor said; weed killers, of course, but also it could be soaked out of fly-paper, for instance, or even out of old wallpapers and some fabrics. But on the subject of the attack on Jan he waxed bitter.
“Who would want to kill her? The old lady and Ida, well, the old lady had the money and Ida probably knew something. But to try to kill Jan—”
“I don’t think anyone tried to kill her.”
Brooke stared.
“Look at it,” said the inspector. “She could have been killed. She was unconscious, and the nurse was locked up in Amos’s rooms. But she wasn’t killed. She probably began to come to, and she was struck to put her out again. Somebody was there who didn’t want to be seen.”
Brooke said nothing. He gazed out the window, looking thoughtful, as though he was comparing all this with some private knowledge of his own. When he turned to the inspector it was with a faint smile.
“Funny,” he said. “I’ve been scared to hell and gone. You’ve relieved me a lot. I’ve been hanging around under the window every night since it happened.”
But the smile died when he was asked about the night of Mrs. Fairbanks’s death.
“I didn’t see anybody on the third floor,” he said flatly. “That’s Miss Adams’s idea. Just because I spilled some coffee—”
“I think you did,” said the inspector, his face grave.
“I think you saw Marian Fairbanks, and she saw you.”
“How could I? She wasn’t there.”
“Just whom did you see, doctor?”
“Nobody,” he asserted stubbornly. “Nobody at all.”
Chapter 23
Ida had been poisoned on Monday, and Mrs. Fairbanks was buried on Tuesday. It was Wednesday morning when Hilda made her report, and it was the same night when Frank Garrison was arrested for murder.
Late on Wednesday afternoon Fuller went back to the Fairbanks house. He intended interviewing Marian, and he dreaded doing it. To believe that she had killed her mother and a servant and attacked her own child made her an inhuman monster. Unhappy and bitter as she was, he did not believe she was guilty. Nor, he thought, did Hilda.
He did not interview her, however. Marian was in bed, under the influence of a sedative, and he found Hilda back in uniform at her old post in the hall. An absorbed Hilda, who was not knitting or reading the Practice of Nursing, but instead had set up a card table and was patiently laying out a pack of cards.
“And people pay you money for this!” he said. “I wish my job was as easy.”
She nodded absently, and he watched her as she gathered up the cards, closely inspected the edges, and then began to lay them out again. He sat down and watched her.
“What is all this?”
“I’ll tell you in a minute.” She was intensely serious. “It’s the order,” she said. “Clubs first don’t do. Maybe it’s the other way. Spades.”
“Nothing has disturbed you, has it? You feel all right? No dizzy spells? Anything like that?”
She did not even hear him. She spread the cards again, gathered them up, looked at the edges, spread them slightly, and then handed him the pack.
There was something written on one side, and she looked rather smug.
“I think it’s the combination to the safe,” she said complacently.
Fuller examined the cards. Thus arranged they showed plainly written in ink a series of letters and numbers. Shuffled in the ordinary fashion they were not detectable, but in their present order they were perfectly clear. He gave her an odd look. Then he took out an old envelope and wrote them down.
“So that’s the solitaire she played,” he said thoughtfully. “Good girl, Hilda. How did you think of it?”
“Courtney Brooke thought of it first,” she told him.
He eyed her sharply, but her face told him nothing.
He sent for Carlton before they opened the safe. He had little or nothing to say. He did not even ask how they had found the combination. Hilda unlocked the door, and he followed them in. The room was as it had been left after the search, and he carefully avoided looking at it. There was still daylight, but the closet was dark and Hilda brought a flashlight. Using it the inspector turned the dial, but he did not open the door.
“I’d rather you did this, Fairbanks,” he said.
He stepped out of the closet, and Carlton stepped in. He pulled open the door and looked speechlessly inside. The safe was packed to the top with bundles of currency.
He made a little gesture and backed out of the closet. He looked small and singularly defenseless.
“All right. It’s there,” he said dully. “Do what you like with it. I don’t want to look at it. It makes me sick.”
It required some urging to send him back again.
“Look for your mother’s will,” Fuller said. “Bring out any papers you find. We may learn something.”
The will was there, in a compartment of its own. It was in a brown envelope sealed with red wax, and it was marked Last Will and Testament in the old lady’s thin hand. Carlton almost broke down when he read it. But there was another paper in the envelope, and he opened and read it, too. He stood, against the absurd background of hanging fussy dresses and shoes in the bag on the door, holding the paper and staring at it. But neither Hilda nor the inspector was prepared for his reaction to it.
“So that’s why she was killed,” he said thickly, and collapsed on the floor before they could reach him.
Frank Garrison was arrested late that night at his club. He was evidently living there. His clothes were in the closet, his brushes on the dresser, and he was in pajamas when they found him.
He said little or nothing. The inspector had sent the detectives out, and remained himself in the room while he dressed. Once he said he better take his bag “as he might not be coming back soon.” And again he spoke of Jan.
“Tell the poor kid to take it easy, will you?” he said. “She’s had enough trouble, and she’s—fond of me.”
He puzzled the inspector. He offered no explanation of his being at the club. He offered nothing, in fact. He sat in the car, his fine profile etched against the street lights, and except once when he lit a cigarette he did not move. He seemed to be thinking profoundly. Nor was he more co-operative when they reached the inspector’s office, with two or three detectives around, and a stenographer taking down questions and answers.
He was perfectly polite. He denied absolutely having been in the Fairbanks house the night Mrs. Fairbanks was killed, although he admitted having been in the grounds.
“I came home late from Washington. The apartment was empty—we had not had a maid for some time—and my wife was not there. I knew Jan was friendly with Eileen, so I went there to ask if she knew what had happened. We had quarreled, and I was afraid she—well, she’s been pretty nervous lately. But Jan—my daughter—said she was there. I talked to Jan at her window. I did not enter the house.”
“What did you do after that?”
“I walked around for a whi
le. Then I went home.”
“What time did you talk to your daughter?”
“After one. Perhaps half past. I didn’t get back from Washington until twelve o’clock.”
“Did your daughter tell you where your wife was? In what room?”
He colored.
“Yes. In my former wife’s bedroom. I didn’t like it, but what could I do?”
“She told you your wife was sick?”
“Yes.”
“You didn’t come in, to see how she was?”
“We had quarreled before I left. I didn’t think she cared to see me. Anyhow, her light was out. I thought she was asleep.”
“You have since separated?”
“Not exactly. Call it a difference.”
“She is going to have a child.”
He showed temper for the first time.
“What the hell has that got to do with this?”
But although he was guardedly frank about his movements the night of Mrs. Fairbanks’s murder, he continued to deny having entered the house, through Eileen’s window or in any other way. He had not climbed to the roof of the porte-cochere. He doubted if it was possible. And when he was shown the knife he stated flatly that he had never to his knowledge seen it before. He admitted, however, knowing that the safe was in Mrs. Fairbanks’s room. “Jan told me about it.” But he denied any knowledge whatever of its contents.
The mention of the safe, however, obviously disturbed him. He seemed relieved when the subject was changed to the attack on Jan in the loft of the stable; but he was clearly indignant about it, as well as puzzled.
“If I could lay my hands on whoever did it I—well, I might commit a murder of my own.”
“You have no explanation of it?”
They thought he hesitated.
“None whatever. Unless she was mistaken for someone else. Or—” he added slowly—“unless someone was there who didn’t want to be seen.”
They shifted to Ida’s death. He seemed puzzled.
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