“You knew her?”
“Of course. She had been in the Fairbanks house for years.”
“She was attached to your first wife?”
“I don’t know. I don’t care to discuss my first wife.”
“You are on good terms?”
“Good God, leave her out of this, can’t you? I won’t have her dragged in. What has she got to do with it, or my—feeling for her?”
He was excited, indignant. The inspector broke the tension.
“Mr. Garrison, did you at any time in the last few weeks supply this woman, Ida Miller, with certain creatures to introduce into Mrs. Fairbanks’s room?” He picked up a memorandum and read from it. “‘Five bats, two sparrows, one or more rats, and a small garden snake.’”
The detective grinned. The stenographer dropped his pen. And Frank Garrison unexpectedly laughed. Only the inspector remained sober.
“Is that a serious question?”
“It is.”
“The answer is no. I thought the old lady imagined all that.”
“Have you at any time had in your possession a poison called arsenious acid? White arsenic?”
“Never.”
“Can you account for your movements Monday afternoon? Say, from one o’clock on.”
The quick shifts seemed to bother him, but he managed to make a fair statement. He had lunched at the club. After that he went to see a man who was taking over some housing work in Washington. When he went home his wife was still in bed. She had been “difficult.” He had told her he would send her a maid. After that he had packed a bag and left. They had not been getting on for some time. Perhaps it was his fault. He wasn’t accustomed to being idle.
“Did you at any time Monday go to Stern and Jones? The department store?”
“I stopped in and bought a black tie. I was going to Mrs. Fairbanks’s funeral the next day.”
“At what time?”
“After I saw the man I referred to. Maybe two-thirty or three o’clock.”
“Did you see the girl, Ida, at that time?”
He looked puzzled.
“Where? Where would I see her?”
“In the store.”
“No. Certainly not.”
“Have you a key to the Fairbanks house?”
“I may have, somewhere. I lived there for a good many years. I don’t carry it.”
It lasted until half past one. The questions were designed to confuse him, but on the whole he kept his head. It was not until the inspector lifted a paper from the desk and handed it to him that he apparently gave up the fight. He glanced at it and handed it back, his face set.
“I see,” he said quietly. “I was there that night. I could have got into the house, by key or through my wife’s window, and I had a motive. I suppose that’s enough.”
“You knew about this agreement?”
“Mrs. Fairbanks told me about it at the time.”
“Who else knew about it?”
“My first wife. She signed it, as you see. Mrs. Fairbanks and myself.”
“No one else knew about it?”
“Not unless Mrs. Fairbanks told about it. I don’t think she did.”
The inspector got up. He looked tired, and for once uncertain.
“I’m sorry about this, Garrison,” he said. “We’re not through, but I’ll have to hold you. We’ll see that you’re not too uncomfortable.”
Garrison forced a smile and stood.
“No rubber hose?” he said.
“No rubber hose,” said the inspector.
There was a momentary silence. Garrison glanced around the room. He seemed on the point of saying something, something important. The hush was breathless, as if all the men were waiting and watching. But he decided against it, whatever it was.
“I suppose it’s no use saying I didn’t do it?”
“No man is guilty until he has been found guilty,” said the inspector sententiously, and watched the prisoner out of the room.
Carlton broke the news to the family the next morning, a worried little man, telling Susie first, staying with Jan until she had stopped crying, and then going to Marian. He was there a long time. Hilda, shut out, could hear his voice and Marian’s loud hysterical protests.
“He never did it. Never. Never.”
When the inspector came she refused at first to see him, and he went in to find her sitting frozen in a chair and gazing ahead of her as though she was seeing something she did not want to face. She turned her head, however, at his crisp greeting.
“Good morning,” he said. “Do you mind if we have a little talk?”
“I have no option, have I?”
“I can’t force you, you know,” he said matter-of-factly. “All I would like is a little co-operation.”
“Co-operation!” she said, her face set and cold. “Why should I cooperate? You are holding Frank Garrison, aren’t you? Of all the cruel absurd things! A man who loved my mother! The kindest man on earth! What possible reason could he have had to kill my mother?”
“There was a possible reason, and you know it, Mrs. Garrison,” he said unsmilingly.
He drew up a chair and sat down, confronting her squarely.
“At what time did you reach here, the night your mother was killed?” he asked.
It was apparently the one question she had not expected. She opened her mouth to speak, but she could not. She tried to get out of her chair, and the inspector put his hand on her knee.
“Better sit still,” he said quietly. “You had every right to be here. I am not accusing you of anything. Suppose I help you a little. You came home during or after the time your husband’s present wife had arrived. Either you saw her, in the hall downstairs, or one of the servants told you she was here. However that was, you decided to stay. It was your house. Why let her drive you out? Is that right?”
“Yes,” she said, with tight lips. “It was Ida. I opened the side door with my latchkey. There was no one around, so I went back to get William to carry up my bags. I met Ida in the back hall. She told me.”
She went on. She seemed glad to talk. She had been angry and indignant. She didn’t even want to see Jan. It was Jan who had brought it about. Jan had said that Eileen was going to have a baby, and had even brought her to the house. That was why she had gone away. To have her own mother and her own child against her! And now Eileen had invented some silly story and sought sanctuary here.
“I wasn’t going to let her drive me away a second time,” she said. “She had ruined my life, and now at my mother’s orders they had put her in my room. I couldn’t believe it at first, when Ida told me.”
Ida, it appeared, had got her to the third floor by the back staircase, and made up the bed. They had to walk carefully, for fear Carlton would hear them in his room below. But she did not go to bed. How could she, with that woman below? She did manage to smoke, sitting by the open window. She was still sitting there when Susie began to scream.
“That was when Ida came to warn you?”
“She knew something was terribly wrong. Neither of us knew what. I thought at first the house was on fire. I sent her down, and listened over the stair rail. That’s how I knew what had happened.”
She sat back. Her color was better now, and the inspector, watching her, thought she looked like a woman who had passed a danger point safely.
“No one but Ida knew you were in the house?” he persisted.
“No one. Not even Jan.”
“Are you sure of that? Didn’t you come down the stairs while Doctor Brooke was in the hall?”
“Never.”
But she looked shaken. Her thin hands were trembling.
“I think you did, Mrs. Garrison,” he told her. “He was standing outside your mother’s door. You spoke to him from the stairs. You told him to get Eileen out of the house in the morning, didn’t you?”
“No! I did nothing of the sort,” said Marian frantically. There was complete despair in her face. She looked b
eaten. “I never spoke to him at all,” she said in a dead voice. “When I saw him he was coming out of Mother’s room.”
The rest of her story was not important. She told it with dead eyes and in a flat hopeless voice. Brooke had not seen her, she thought, and Ida had helped her to get out of the house before the police had taken charge. She had used the back stairs and had gone out through the break in the fence. She had taken only the one bag which she could carry, Ida hiding the other, and she had spent what was left of the night at a hotel.
“I was afraid to stay,” she told them. “After what I’d seen I didn’t want to be questioned. I had Jan to think of. I still have Jan to think of,” she added drearily. “Courtney Brooke killed my mother, and I’ve ruined Jan’s life forever and ever.”
Chapter 24
Brooke was interrogated at police headquarters that afternoon. Inspector Fuller found him in his back office, dressing a small boy’s hand.
“All right, Jimmy,” he said. “And don’t fool with knives after this.”
The boy left, and Fuller went in. Young Brooke was putting away his dressings, his face sober.
“What’s this about Mr. Garrison being held, inspector?” he said. “I was just going over to see Jan. She’s taking it badly.”
The inspector did not relax.
“You’ve been holding out on us, doctor,” he said stiffly. “That’s a dangerous thing to do in a murder case.”
Brooke flushed. He still held a roll of bandage in his hand. He put it down on the table before he answered.
“All right. What’s it all about?”
“You were in Mrs. Fairbanks’s room at or about the time she was killed.”
“Why not?” He looked defiant. “She was my patient. I had a right to look at her. She’d had a good bit of excitement that night, and I didn’t go all the way in. I opened the door and listened. She was alive then. I’ll swear to that. I could hear her breathing.”
“Why didn’t you tell about it?” said the inspector inexorably.
Brooke looked unhappy.
“Sheer funk, I suppose. I told Jan, after it all came out, and she didn’t want me to. Not that I’m putting the blame on her,” he added quickly. “I was in a cold sweat myself. In fact, I still am!”
He grinned and pulling out a handkerchief mopped his face.
“I thought I had as many guts as the other fellow,” he said. “But this thing’s got me.”
He looked incredulous, however, when the inspector asked him to go with him to headquarters.
“What for? Are you trying to arrest me?” he asked suspiciously.
“Not necessarily. We’ll want a statement from you.”
“I’ve told you everything I know.”
He went finally, calling to the slovenly girl that he would be back for dinner, and slamming the door furiously behind him as he left the house. He was still indignant when he reached the inspector’s office. A look at the room, however, with the stenographer at his desk and Captain Henderson and the detectives filing in, rather subdued him.
“Third-degree stuff, I suppose,” he said, and lit a cigarette. “All right. I’m a fool and a coward, but I’m no killer. You can put that down.”
“No third degree, doctor. Just some facts. Sit down, please. We may be some time.”
They were some time. Before they were through he was white and exhausted.
“Did Janice Garrison know of the document in the safe?”
“Yes. Why drag her in? She hasn’t done anything.”
“She was fond of her father?”
“Crazy about him.”
“You knew that she was to inherit a considerable sum of money?”
“I did.”
“What were your exact movements, the night Mrs. Fairbanks was killed? While the nurse was downstairs boiling water?”
“I cleaned the hypo with alcohol. After that I looked in at Mrs. Fairbanks. She was breathing all right, so I went back to see Jan. I was there about five minutes. I went back and poured some coffee. I was drinking it when the nurse came up with the water.”
“At what time did you see Mrs. Garrison?”
He was startled.
“Mrs. Garrison! She wasn’t there. She didn’t come until the next day. Sunday.”
“She was there, doctor. She saw you coming out of her mother’s room.”
“Oh, God,” he said wretchedly. “So she was there, too. Poor Jan!”
But his story was straightforward. He had not seen Marian when he came out of Mrs. Fairbanks’s room. Later, however, as he poured the coffee, he had felt that someone was overhead, on the third floor. The glass chandelier was shaking. He had looked up the staircase, but no one was in sight.
They showed him the knife, and he smiled thinly.
“Never saw it before,” he said. He examined it. “Somebody did a rotten job of sharpening it,” he said.
“It seems to have answered,” the inspector observed dryly. “Have you ever done any surgery, doctor?”
“Plenty.”
“You could find a heart without trouble? Even in the dark?”
“Anybody can find a heart. It’s bigger than most people think. But if you mean did I stab Mrs. Fairbanks, certainly not.”
He explained readily enough his search and Jan’s for the combination of the safe.
“She knew the agreement was there. The old lady had told her. She was afraid it would incriminate her father. When nobody could open the safe I happened to think of the cards. Mrs. Fairbanks played solitaire at night. But maybe she didn’t. Jan believed she locked herself in and then opened the safe, and we thought the cards might have the combination. I’d seen them with pictures painted on the edges. You arranged them a certain way and there was the picture.”
“The idea being to get this document?”
“Well, yes. She was worrying herself sick. But the nurse was too smart for us. She locked the door.”
It was five o’clock before he was released, with a warning not to leave town. He managed to grin at that. He got out his wallet and some silver from his pocket.
“I could travel—let’s see—exactly five dollars and eighty cents’ worth,” he said. “I’ve just paid the rent.”
The inspector looked at Henderson after he had gone.
“Well?” he said.
“Could have,” said Henderson. “But my money’s on the other fellow. Garrison was broke, too, but he wouldn’t be without the alimony.”
“Why didn’t he have it reduced? It would have been easier than murder.”
“Still in love with the first wife,” said Henderson promptly. “Sticks out all over him.”
“Oh,” said the inspector. “So you got that, too!”
Alone in his office he got out the document he had shown to Garrison the night before, and studied it. Briefly it was an agreement written in the old lady’s hand, signed by Marian and witnessed by Amos and Ida, by which Marian’s alimony from her ex-husband was to cease on her mother’s death. “Otherwise, as provided for in my will, she ceases to inherit any portion of my estate save the sum of one dollar, to be paid by my executors.”
He had a picture of Mrs. Fairbanks writing that, all the resentment at Marian and the divorce and its terms in her small resolute body and trembling old hand. He put it back in his safe, along with the knife and Hilda’s contributions—a can of white paint, a pair of worn chauffeur’s driving gloves, a bit of charred rope, a largish square of unbleached muslin, and now a pack of playing cards. To that odd assortment he added the paper on which he had recorded the numbers of the new bills in Ida’s purse, and surveyed the lot glumly.
“Looks like Bundles for Britain,” he grunted.
He saw Eileen late that afternoon. She was in bed, untidy and tearful, and she turned on him like a wildcat.
“I always knew the police were fools,” she shrieked. “What have you got on Frank Garrison? Nothing, and you know it. I didn’t let him in through my window. I didn’t let anyb
ody in. I was sick. Why don’t you ask the doctor? He knows.”
He could get nothing from her. She turned sulky and then cried hysterically. She didn’t know about Mrs. Fairbanks’s will. She had never heard of any agreement. What sort of an agreement? And they’d better release Frank if they knew what was good for them. She’d get a lawyer. She’d get a dozen lawyers. She would take it to the President. She would take it to the Supreme Court. She would—
This new conception of the Supreme Court at least got him away. He left her still talking, and when the maid let him out he suggested a doctor.
“She’s pretty nervous,” he said. Which was by way of being a masterpiece of understatement.
On the way downtown he thought he saw Hilda in one of the shopping streets, but when he stopped his car and looked back she had disappeared.
He might have been surprised, had he followed her.
Chapter 25
Hilda was at a loose end that afternoon. Courtney had recovered from his collapse and had gone out, still pale, to drive around in his car and think his own unhappy thoughts. Marian’s door had been closed and locked since the inspector’s visit. Jan wandered around the house, worried about her mother and ignorant of what was going on. And Susie, recovered from her fright about her husband, had settled down on her bed to a magazine.
“I’d better loaf while I can,” she told Hilda. “It’s me for the pigpens from now on. If you think Carl will change his mind now that he gets some money you can think again.”
Hilda was standing in the doorway, her face bland but her eyes alert.
“What do you think about the police holding Mr. Garrison?” she asked.
“Me? They’re crazy. Carl says that paper they found will convict him, but I don’t believe it. If you ask me—”
She stopped abruptly.
“If I asked you, what?”
“Nothing,” said Susie airily. “If I were you I’d take a look at the radio by Mrs. Fairbanks’s bed. Maybe you can make something out of it. I can’t.”
“What’s wrong with it?”
“I don’t know. It’s set to a blank spot on the dial. That’s all. Carl says he didn’t move the needle.”
She went back to her magazine, and Hilda went to the old lady’s room. She closed the door and going to the radio switched it on. There was a faint roaring as the tubes warmed up, but nothing else. She was puzzled rather than excited. But she had already decided to go out, and now she had a double errand.
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