Murder by an Aristocrat

by Mignon G. Eberhart

  “What else was there for me to think, Hilary? Oh, I know now that you didn’t kill him. But then I was afraid. I thought of everything. Of the boys. Of you. I knew how Bayard goaded you. Even a word or a look or a smile from Bayard could always enrage Hilary —”

  “Evelyn, for God’s sake, stop,” groaned Hilary. “Stop her, Allen. Can’t you see what she is doing —”

  “So I thought,” continued Evelyn inexorably, “that I’d better not tell that I found Bayard dead when I came here to meet Hilary. And Hilary agreed with me about it. He said there were times when a lie is —”

  Hilary was on his feet.

  “Evelyn, will you stop talking! Will you —”

  “Evelyn,” said Allen, crisply breaking through Hilary’s frenzied protest, “you say you know now that Hilary didn’t kill Bayard. How do you know it? Don’t be frightened.”

  “I’m not frightened,” said Evelyn calmly, and I’m sure she spoke the truth. “I know Hilary didn’t kill Bayard because he told me he didn’t.”

  “Because I told — Oh, my God, Evelyn, are you trying to make things worse than they are already?”

  “Why, no, Hilary,” said Evelyn. “I’m just telling the truth. I never felt right about that lie, but I told it after I’d promised you I would. I could see why it was so necessary, but now the truth is out we may as well make the best —”

  I stepped forward. My uniform rustled in the sudden silence. I suppose they saw something in my face, for no one spoke, and I was conscious of their combined gaze.

  “Did you close Bayard’s eyes?” I asked Evelyn.

  “No,” she said. “No. His eyes were closed when I found him. I was glad of that. His eyes were closed.”

  “His eyes were closed,” I repeated slowly. Dr. Bouligny started to speak and checked himself.

  “The eyes of those who die a violent death do not close voluntarily.” I turned squarely to Hilary.

  “Did you close Bayard’s eyes?”

  CHAPTER XV

  Hilary was, I believe, an excellent and levelheaded man of business. It was only owing to the fact that Bayard’s murder so nearly concerned him that he found it so difficult to keep his head. Found it, in fact, impossible to behave with the assurance and foresight with which, in all likelihood, he would have advised his bank’s client. Perhaps, too, as Evelyn had hinted, he had become supersensitive to Bayard or anything connected with Bayard; I myself had seen how easily and swiftly Bayard’s smiling, edged remarks could penetrate Hilary’s complacency.

  Besides that, his own feelings were deeply involved; everything he had worked for, everything he held dear was threatened. He had been under a protracted nervous strain, he was harassed on all sides by worries, and Dave’s death was the final blow.

  My question was patently unwelcome. But then, almost anything I might have said would be unwelcome to Hilary.

  He gave me a harassed, quick look, fumbled for a cigarette, selected one with jerky fingers, and said:

  “No. No, I didn’t close his eyes. How could I? Bayard was alive, I tell you, when I came here that afternoon. I’m going to telephone to Frank Whiting right now, Adela. It won’t do to wait.”

  He started for the study. Almost at the door he stopped suddenly, as if he couldn’t bear to see Dave’s body again, turned abruptly, and went to the hall.

  “That’s right,” said Dr. Bouligny. “Frank will have to be told sooner or later, and it’s better sooner.”

  It was so quiet in the long shadowed room that we could hear Hilary’s voice from the telephone in Adela’s morning room, and his footsteps back along the hall. He was wiping his face with his handkerchief when he entered the room again.

  “This is going to be bad,” he said. “Frank Whiting — well, he didn’t say much, but I could feel what he thought. God, it’s such a mess!” He dropped heavily into a chair and sat there, staring at the rug.

  “Is he coming right away?” asked Dr. Bouligny.

  “Soon. He couldn’t come immediately.”

  I am never one to put my hand to the plow and look back. And I did not like Hilary’s evasion.

  “Someone,” I said, “closed Bayard’s eyes. And if Bayard was alive when you left the house that afternoon, Mr. Thatcher, and dead when your wife came so soon after and no one entered the house in that interval — how did Bayard die?”

  “What do you mean by that?” cried Hilary. “Are you accusing me of murder? What business is it of yours?”

  “Hilary, I asked Miss Keate to do exactly what she is doing.” It was Adela, of course, stiff and cold and straight and marvelously composed.

  “I think you would do well to answer the nurse,” said Allen dryly. “It is a reasonable question. You see, Hilary, you don’t seem to realize that you are in a rather questionable position. You appear to be the last one known to have been with Bayard before his death. You say you didn’t kill him, and we are only too ready to believe you. But Miss Keate, quite reasonably, wants further proof.”

  There was a short silence. It was so quiet I could hear Pansy, withdrawn to a corner and forgotten, panting asthmatically. Hilary continued to stare with narrowed eyes at the rug. Finally he said sulkily:

  “I don’t know who killed Bayard. I hate to seem cowardly, but I think Dave did it. But I don’t know how it happened.”

  “Suppose we go at this in a more orderly way,” said Allen. He went to the table. There was a pad of paper there and a heavy bronze inkwell and pens. “Now then, Miss Keate, you were sitting out in the arbor all that afternoon. About what time did you go out there?”

  “About two o’clock. I left Bayard resting in his own room. It was perhaps ten minutes after you and Dave Thatcher had left the house.”

  “And you say Higby was mowing the lawn?”

  “Yes; he had already started by the time I had reached the arbor. He didn’t stop except very briefly, when he would turn a corner — so briefly as scarcely to be noted — during the whole afternoon. I could hear the lawn-mower very plainly.”

  “That ought to let Higby out, then. He couldn’t mow the lawn and crawl in the library window and shoot Bayard simultaneously. Now, then, when you took up your somewhat observatory position in the arbor, who were still in the house?”

  “Bayard, of course. And Emmeline. And Florrie.” I hesitated.

  “And I was there,” said Janice at once. “And Adela.”

  “What time did you leave the house, Janice?”

  “It must have been about twenty minutes to three.” She looked inquiringly at me.

  “Yes,” I agreed. “It was just two-thirty when Florrie left. And you came out of the house not more than ten minutes later.”

  “Janice, where was Bayard when you left the house?” His question was very gentle.

  “Bayard was there in Dave’s study. Alone,” said Janice steadily. “He must have come downstairs again as soon as Miss Keate left him.”

  “What was he doing?”

  “Nothing in particular.”

  “Did you speak to him?”

  “Yes,” said Janice slowly, her dark eyes meeting Allen’s intent look. “But only for a moment. I only talked to him for a moment, and then I left the house.”

  “Two-forty, then, Janice leaves the house. Bayard is alive then.” Allen was making notes as he talked. “What happened next, Miss Keate?”

  “I saw Bayard,” interposed Adela. “I came downstairs ready to go to the Benevolent Aid Society. Bayard was there at the door of the study, and I spoke to him a moment before I left.”

  “Was he alone then, Adela?”

  “Certainly.”

  “What time was that?”

  “I don’t know exactly,” said Adela. “I think it was close to three o’clock.”

  “But, Adela, you didn’t say you had spoken to Bayard just before you left home,” said Evelyn in a puzzled way.

  “Didn’t I?” said Adela calmly. “Well, I spoke to him. So you see, I was one of the last to see him alive.”
/>
  I caught the flicker of her set blue gaze toward Hilary.

  “It was exactly three o’clock when Miss Thatcher left the house,” I said. “I happened to glance at my watch. And it was four o’clock when Mr. Thatcher arrived. And no one came near the house in the meantime.”

  “You are sure of that?” asked Allen. “You didn’t drop into sleep during that time?”

  “No,” I replied, so decidedly that he did not pursue the matter.

  “Then at four o’clock Hilary arrives. About how long were you in the house, Hilary?”

  “Ten minutes,” I said, before I could check myself. Hilary gave me a look of rage and nodded.

  “I suppose she is right,” he said. “It was probably ten minutes or so. I didn’t realize,” he added bitterly, “that she was holding a stopwatch on us all afternoon.”

  “Hilary,” said Adela swiftly, “I asked Miss Keate to help me inquire into Bayard’s death. Please remember that.”

  Please remember, she might as well have said, that we must keep Miss Keate friendly to us. That we must convince her that no Thatcher has done murder. That we must answer every question she may wish to ask.

  Hilary mumbled something which sounded near enough to an apology, and Allen said rather hastily:

  “Four-ten, Hilary leaves.” His pen sputtered as he wrote it. “Then Evelyn arrives.” He looked questioningly at me.

  “It was only a few moments after Mr. Thatcher left,” I said. “She must have actually entered the house at close to four-fifteen and left no later than four-twenty.”

  “Then, after Evelyn left, you saw no one until Janice and Adela returned together?”

  “No one,” I said positively.

  “And Emmeline is perfectly sure that no one came near the back of the house during the time between Hilary’s departure and Evelyn’s arrival?”

  “She is perfectly sure,” said Adela stiffly. That was to protect Dave, I thought to myself; I began to wonder what she would do with her burglar theory.

  Allen was frowning at the paper.

  “You aren’t very helpful, Hilary,” he said. “According to Miss Keate you were scarcely out of the house before Evelyn arrived. There’s at best only four or five minutes between the time when you say you left Bayard alive and Evelyn says she found him dead.”

  I looked at Hilary. We all looked at Hilary. Hilary, so fatally trapped in his own words.

  His plump face was pink and glistening. His eyes were frightened, evading our gaze, looking everywhere but at Allen. He got out his handkerchief and wiped his face again. He had not lighted the cigarette he had selected and had rolled it in his nervous fingers until it was limp and crushed and shedding small shreds of tobacco on his neat gray trousers. He did not speak, and Allen finally said softly:

  “You say you found him alive. You talked to him. Are you sure of that, Hilary? Are you sure he was still alive when you left?”

  “Allen!” cried Evelyn in a shocked tone. She turned quickly to her husband. “Hilary, they are blaming you for Bayard’s death. They are making you a murderer. How can you talk like that, Allen! You know Hilary didn’t kill him.”

  “I don’t know anything about this until it is proved, Evelyn. I only know somebody certainly killed Bayard. And I think we’d better have the truth.”

  The little pause gave Hilary time to rally. I suppose with desperation courage returned; and with it a measure of ingenuity. The wary, frightened look left his face, and he looked openly at Allen and at all of us.

  “I think you’re going off half-cocked,” he said. “And I’d like to know who constituted you private inquiry agent, Allen. You make a damn poor one, if you ask me. Look here. I’m not the only one known to have been in this house with Bayard just before he was killed. Even aside from the burglar — and there must have been a burglar, for the diamonds were certainly stolen — there were two other people, either one of whom had as much reason to kill him as I had. There was Higby. And there was Emmeline.”

  There was a short silence. Somehow I had been so certain that one of the Thatchers had killed Bayard that Emmeline’s possible culpability or Higby’s had not presented itself to me as a sensible line of inquiry.

  “But Higby,” I said out of my thoughts, and not quite realizing that I was speaking aloud and rather decidedly, “Higby was mowing the lawn all afternoon. I heard him.”

  Hilary looked at me scornfully.

  “If that’s his only alibi, it’s a poor one.”

  “But Emmeline said she kept an eye on him all afternoon to be sure he worked along —”

  “Emmeline says,” said Hilary, as if that didn’t mean much. “Everybody knows that Higby is as poor as a church mouse. And lazy into the bargain. What more likely than that he’s been planning to steal the diamonds for months? Everybody knows about them, probably everyone in town knows exactly where we keep them. Higby thought everyone was out of the house, fixed up some contrivance to keep the mower moving — he’s of a mechanical turn of mind, and could amount to something in that line if he wasn’t so good-for-nothing — he got into the study, stole the diamonds. Bayard was downstairs and caught Higby in the act, and Higby snatched up Dave’s revolver and shot Bayard dead. Then Higby went back to his lawn-mowing, the diamonds in his pocket or hidden in some safe place, and nobody even searched him. And there you are.”

  There was another rather curious silence; I saw Evelyn give her husband an admiring but a rather puzzled look; Adela was staring bleakly at Hilary, and even Janice seemed to have put aside for the moment the thought of Dave’s death and was watching Hilary with wide, perplexed eyes. I could not tell what Allen or Dr. Bouligny thought of Hilary’s suddenly evolved theory.

  “How could he have got into the safe?” asked Allen.

  Hilary shrugged his plump shoulders.

  “We didn’t even keep it locked, half the time. It has always been so safe here in C —. Anyway, it is an old-fashioned safe, even an amateur thief could open it, I should think.”

  “Why is Higby waiting around here, then? Why doesn’t he get away?”

  “That’s easy,” said Hilary. “He doesn’t want to attract suspicion. Mind you,” he went on, as if to be entirely just and fair. “I’m not saying Higby did it.”

  “I hope not,” murmured Allen rather cynically. “There are too many holes in that notion.”

  “I’m not saying Higby did it. We could only prove that by finding the diamonds on him. Or hidden by him. But he could have done it. You all know that. We can’t say he did it without proof. But you can’t say I did it without much more convincing proof than you have now. It is only circumstantial evidence against me now, and mighty slim evidence at that. I’ll not speak of the rather unusual matter of a man’s own family trying to make him out a murderer —”

  “Hilary,” said Adela faintly. “We are not doing that. But Dave didn’t kill Bayard. Dave couldn’t have killed him. I won’t let Dave be thought —”

  Hilary continued. As he noted the effect of his words upon us he was becoming more natural, a bit pompous.

  “I’ll not talk of that,” he repeated, failing to reproach his family for their lack of faith in him with a noble restraint which was a little too obvious to be exactly impressive. “But I will bring some other things to your attention. Here’s another point about Higby. Higby could easily have been bribed.”

  He paused to give his suggestion its due dramatic emphasis, and then went on, and this time even Allen looked as if he might consider the matter seriously.

  “Higby has never had enough money. He’s distinctly the get-rich-quick type; he never wants to work and earn, he always hopes for some windfall. He’s not particularly devoted to us; there’s no reason why he should be. If a thief came along and offered him, say, five hundred dollars, a thousand even, to let him cross the lawn, get into the library windows, and to be silent about it afterward, don’t you think Higby would be tempted? He might hesitate, but not for long. He’s weak and lazy. And it woul
d have been such an easy way to get some money. Higby would be afraid to tell it once he found that Bayard had been killed. He would only know enough to stick to his story that nobody crossed the lawn all the afternoon.”

  He paused in barely veiled triumph. Adela looked at him with the first shade of approval I had seen her offer him.

  “I must say, Hilary,” she said, “that is quite possible.”

  Allen was drawing idle circles on the paper before him, his brown face enigmatic, and Dr. Bouligny looked mottled and uneasy.

  “I think,” said Dr. Bouligny, “the sooner we let this thing drop the better. Call it a burglar — as, of course, it was,” he interpolated swiftly as he met Adela’s cold gaze, “and forget it.”

  “Then,” said Hilary, without even looking at Dr. Bouligny, “here’s another possibility. Emmeline.”

  “Emmeline!” cried Adela. “Hilary, you are mad. I would never be convinced that Emmeline would do such a thing.”

  “Emmeline,” repeated Hilary firmly. “She was out in the summer kitchen the entire afternoon. No one was watching her. She was only a few steps from the back door of the house. It seems to me that she insists that she never left that window a bit too fervently. Why should she be so determined that we should believe that —”

  “Emmeline is always determined,” said Adela, but Hilary swept on.

  “She could have entered the house and shot Bayard as easily as not. And she could have done it during those few moments between my departure and Evelyn’s arrival.”

  “But the motive,” said Allen, still drawing circles on the paper and not looking up.

  “Motive?” Hilary made an expansive gesture with his fat pink hands. “The motive is the most convincing thing about it. Emmeline knows all the family affairs. She can hardly help knowing. She’s not so deaf as she seems to be, and besides, she has been with us for years. To all practical purposes she is one of the family. She is devoted to Adela and to Dave. She’s known, of course, what a source of trouble and anxiety Bayard has always been. She must have known of his frequent demands for money, threatening all kinds of things, making Adela’s life hell. Emmeline is direct, blunt, has no qualms about anything she considers her duty. Besides, she has a strong religious bias.”