Murder by an Aristocrat

by Mignon G. Eberhart

  “Don’t say anything, Janice,” said Allen again. “There’s no need to. They can’t make you talk.”

  “But I’m quite willing to talk,” said Janice. Her dark, troubled eyes met our combined gaze openly. “I want to tell exactly what I know of this.”

  “Then do so, my dear,” said Adela rather crisply. She sat very stiff and straight, her blunt white fingers fumbling with her eyeglasses, and the arrogant curve of her nose rather sharp.

  “Where was the gun when you picked it up, Janice?” asked Allen.

  “It was on the rug. On the small Sarouk in Dave’s study.”

  The lines about Allen’s eyes tightened a bit.

  “But Adela, Evelyn, and Hilary all say there was no gun when each of them entered the study during the afternoon. And you found the gun, remember, late in the afternoon after all three of them had visited the study.” Allen was speaking very deliberately, as if to give Janice time to word her answer carefully. I suppose, after warning her not to talk, and seeing that she meant to do so in spite of his warning, he had resolved quickly to question her himself and thus give her a measure of protection.

  A moment of utter silence followed his inquiry. We were all watching Janice, waiting a bit breathlessly for her reply. It was only then I think that she knew she was trapped. For I saw the horror flare into her eyes. She sprang out of her chair.

  “Oh, I see,” she cried with a sort of incredulous gasp. “The basket! That is what you mean, the basket! I could have taken the revolver out of the house in the basket, couldn’t I! I could have shot Bayard myself with Dave’s revolver and hidden it in the egg basket and left Bayard’s body there in the study. Left his body there for Adela to find when she came downstairs only a few moments later. I know now why you are all looking at me so strangely. How stupid I was not to see it at once. Oh, how can you! How can you think that of me!”

  A half sob caught in her throat, and Allen put out his hand, and she brushed it away and flung up her little white chin and cried, “I did not! I did not shoot Bayard. I did not kill him. When I left the house that afternoon Bayard was still alive. I spoke to him. But I did not kill him with Dave’s revolver and then hide the revolver in the basket and leave. It all happened just as I told you. I never dreamed Bayard was dead until I returned from the farm and walked into the house just ahead of Adela and found Bayard dead. And moved him. I moved him, you know. I moved him from the study into the library.”

  Hilary cried out something incoherent, but Adela did not speak. And Evelyn said directly, “But the revolver, Janice. When did you hide the revolver?”

  Janice’s eyes went slowly around the group, traveled deliberately from one intent face to another before she walked gracefully out of the trap.

  “The revolver,” she said quietly, “was under Bayard’s body.”

  It was Hilary, of course, who exploded into the silence.

  “Under Bayard’s — And you moved him, Janice? It was you who moved him?”

  “Yes, yes, Hilary. I moved him. I thought Dave had killed him. I moved him out of Dave’s study into the library, and I found the revolver and hid it in the egg basket.”

  “I hope,” said Allen with a rather grim look around his mouth, “that that satisfies all of you. And now that you’ve hounded Janice into telling ‘exactly what happened,’ no matter how painful, suppose the rest of you tell a few things. Who, for instance, put those diamonds among Janice’s things? And why?”

  “Allen!” Adela made an expostulatory gesture. “Don’t speak so. We didn’t try to make a victim of Janice. You can see for yourself how much better it is now that she has explained about the revolver. And as to the diamonds — I put them in the jar of bath salts myself. You didn’t give me time to finish my story. I had only a few moments, you see, there in the study to make it look as though no one in the family had murdered —”

  “You mean Dave?” asked Allen sharply.

  “Dave,” conceded Adela. “That Dave had not murdered Bayard. The safe caught my eyes, and I remembered the diamonds were in it, so I opened the safe and took the diamonds out and dropped them into one of the lower drawers of the table there, and left the safe open. The next morning after the murder I took them upstairs, and since I feared there might be considerable search for them, I hid them in what I thought was a safe place and one that was unlikely to be looked in, no matter what happened. I imagine the rather frenzied things I did may seem foolish and disconnected to you —” Adela adjusted her eyeglasses carefully and looked bleakly at us through them —“but I thought that with the telephone to establish a sort of alibi for Dave. and the safe open, and the diamonds actually gone, there would be little chance of anyone suspecting that any of the family had killed Bayard. I cannot tell you what a shock it was to find that everything I had planned had gone wrong. The worst thing —” she faltered a second and touched her gray-blue lips with a delicately laced handkerchief — “the worst thing was finding Bayard in the library. Not in the study.” She paused again, regained her resolute manner, and said with just a touch of her former blandness, “not that I am admitting that Dave killed Bayard. I only knew that he would be thought to have killed him. I am convinced it was a burglar, in spite of everything you say. I am trying to prove it.”

  “Adela, it is so hopeless,” said Hilary despairingly. Don’t you see that what you are actually doing is to involve every one of us in the affair? Since we all know that Dave tried once to kill Bayard, why don’t we let it —”

  “Did you know why Bayard and Dave quarreled?” I asked Adela directly, breaking in upon Hilary’s rambling reproaches, which threatened to involve us all in one of those long family discussions which told so little and so much and were consistent and so dreadfully cruel.

  A gray shadow passed over Adela’s face, but she answered with a barely perceptible evidence of the effort it must have been to force the words from her tongue.

  “Yes. I know. It is a very terrible thing, but we all know now that Dave was a drug addict. Bayard had been furnishing Dave with veronal. They quarreled somehow over that; I do not know exactly why it reached such a shocking climax that night, but I believe Bayard was trying to get more money from Dave and was keeping a new supply from him. Bayard, of course, had ways to provide the drug, and Dave depended upon him for it. I heard only a word or two of it while Janice had slipped out of the room to hide the revolver.”

  The revolver again, and Janice. Allen said quickly:

  “When you took the gun from Dave’s hand that night what did you do with it, Janice?”

  “I put it in my own room. In the drawer of my desk.”

  “Do you keep the drawer locked?”

  “No.”

  “Then anyone in the house had access to the gun by merely walking into your room and helping himself?”

  “Why, yes, I suppose so. But, Allen, I don’t think that anyone would —”

  “When did you last see the gun in your desk?”

  “I’m not sure. Wait, let me think. I didn’t look at it again at all. I didn’t see it again until I found it under Bayard’s body there in the study, when I found him dead. Why do you question me like this, Allen?”

  Allen’s grim face softened a little as he looked down at the slim girl shrunk into the corner of the chair. It seemed to me then that with Dave’s death a certain air of maturity had left Janice; she was younger, less rigidly controlled and poised now that she was released from the tragic load of care and anxiety and responsibility she had carried so resolutely.

  “For your own protection, Janice,” said Allen.

  Hilary flared immediately.

  “I don’t like your tone, Allen. I don’t like your implications. We are not trying to blame Janice. None of us has even hinted that things looked rather black for her —”

  “Hilary —” Allen had taken a step forward so quickly and suggestively that Hilary backed off a little. But Allen checked himself abruptly and said more quietly, “Look here. Janice has been ev
erything that is good and fine. She’s stayed by Dave and tried to take care of him and help him, and has been a loyal wife to him when most women would have simply walked out. And it’s because she tried to protect Dave and thought nothing of herself that she has become involved in this murder. This,” said Allen grimly, “this family murder.”

  Hilary had been swelling and empurpling with every word, and I really thought for a moment or two that we were about to witness an out-and-out fight between the two men. But Evelyn said quickly:

  “Allen, what are you saying! You must not talk like that!”

  And Adela in her stately manner said with cold reproof:

  “I think you two are forgetting yourselves. Certainly you have forgotten the rest of us.”

  Hilary cast his wife and sister an outraged glance and returned to Allen.

  “While you are defending others who don’t need your defense,” he said hotly, “why don’t you defend yourself? Or do you think you are above suspicion? Because, if you think that, I must undeceive you. Your quarrel with Bayard was overheard. Your —” Hilary paused as if to give his words more emphasis — “your threat to kill Bayard was overheard.”

  If Hilary’s knowledge was a blow to Allen, he gave no evidence of it. And if it was news to the others I could see no evidence of that either; I dare say there were family conferences at which I was not in uninvited attendance.

  “If you accept Emmeline’s statement that no one approached the house during the afternoon as exculpating Dave, you’ve got to accept it for me,” said Allen coolly. “And if you accept it as conclusive proof that Dave was not near the house that afternoon, then why all this talk of protecting Dave from suspicion? No matter how many times he tried to kill Bayard, if he wasn’t near the house at the time when Bayard was actually murdered, then he couldn’t have killed him.”

  Which was true enough, of course. That was one of their most trying inconsistencies; they accepted Emmeline’s statement, which released Dave from suspicion, and at the same time in their hearts they firmly believed that he had murdered Bayard. They wanted it proved, and they didn’t want it proved. They wanted, I thought somewhat shrewishly to myself, to establish Dave’s guilt as a belief, for that released the rest of them from that grisly suspicion; yet it was not to be established as a fact so conclusively and formally proved that it made their brother a murderer, Janice’s husband a murderer. A Thatcher can do no wrong: that was their standing ground. They would thrust the ugliness of the affair deep down into their consciousness and hide it; gradually they would begin to speak of Dave gently, with tenderness. Subtly the non-existent burglar would be reinstituted. Before many years had passed it would be an accepted family fiction that Bayard had been killed by a marauding burglar and that Dave had died of an illness. Most families maintain certain fictions: that would be one of the Thatchers’.

  “You are trying to divert our interest, Allen,” said Hilary. “Clever of you, but suppose you do some telling of the truth yourself. Didn’t you threaten to kill Bayard? The very night Dave shot him in the shoulder?”

  “So it was you walking so conveniently in the shadows of the shrubbery that night. Were you taking an after-dinner stroll?”

  “Never mind what I was doing. I heard you tell Bayard you’d kill him. You didn’t make any secret about it. You were telling the world. Emmeline in the kitchen above you could have heard it all if she wasn’t deaf.”

  I resisted an impulse to say Florrie had heard them, and Evelyn said in a stricken way:

  “Allen, you didn’t threaten to kill Bayard! You didn’t!”

  “Why, yes,” said Allen calmly. “Yes, I threatened to kill him. He had taken a — paper — that was mine. And I’m not sure I wouldn’t have kept my word if someone else hadn’t got him first.”

  I saw Adela’s bleak blue eyes go swiftly to Allen as if she were thinking, “What is this? What does this mean? Does it threaten us? How shall we meet this?”

  “Allen, Allen, you must not talk like that.” Evelyn’s brown face looked suddenly thin and sharp with anxiety, and her blue eyes were dark and full of fear. She went to her brother and put her hand on his arm. “You don’t really mean that, Allen. It’s just your hot temper. All of us disliked Bayard. It was his own fault; he was everything that is despicable. And there was scarcely one of us who did not have some reason to wish him out of the way. His very presence goaded us. But you didn’t really mean that you would kill him.”

  It seemed to me that they were launching upon another mass of conversation that might get nowhere at all. I said dryly:

  “The point is, are we to accept Emmeline’s statement that no one entered the house from the back? If we do, that excludes Dave and Mr. Carick from suspicion, no matter what either of them felt for Bayard.”

  Hilary looked petulantly at me.

  “The nurse is right,” he said grudgingly. “We can’t seem to talk of this matter without letting our own feelings and fears distract us from the logical trend of inquiry. It doesn’t matter what we feel to be the solution of this trouble or who we feel to have murdered Bayard. We must stick to the plain facts of the matter. And just now the thing is to consider who could have come into the house and shot Bayard during those few moments after Janice left him and Adela found him dead. Could a burglar or some intruder have got into the house unobserved? Could Higby have killed him during that time? Could Emmeline have done so? And I think she could and possibly did —”

  “Hilary,” murmured Adela in an expostulatory way, and Hilary continued without looking at her:

  “Or could Dave or Allen have returned to the house at that time unobserved? No, Allen, I’m not trying to blame you. But those are the facts of the matter.”

  I felt the first shade of approval for Hilary that I had yet experienced. At the same time, it seemed to me that there was a certain alacrity about his willingness to pursue the matter now that Adela’s unexpected confession had automatically removed Hilary himself from possible suspicion.

  “The farther we go the more difficult it becomes,” Evelyn said in a hopeless way that was unusual with her. “None of those questions can be answered. It all depends upon whether or not Higby and Emmeline are telling the truth, and I don’t know what infallible test we can make of that. Oh, why can’t we just drop the whole thing? There isn’t any proof. There never can be any proof. We have done everything we can do. If Dave somehow got past Emmeline into the house and killed Bayard, I, for one, don’t want to know it. Don’t want it proved.”

  “Dave didn’t kill Bayard before three o’clock,” said Allen definitely. “He was with me until then. And —” he fumbled in his pocket and drew out the paper on which he had made a sort of chart the previous afternoon. “According to Miss Keate it was exactly three o’clock when Adela left the house after having found Bayard dead and made her hurried efforts to make it look like robbery. What Adela has told us has upset all our previous calculations. We shall have to rearrange everything to discover the time of Bayard’s death. Florrie left the house at two-thirty; Janice possibly ten minutes later. Two-forty, then. Adela left at three. What time was it, Adela, when you found Bayard dead?”

  “I don’t know exactly. But it would have taken at least fifteen minutes to do what I had to do. One thinks rapidly in an emergency; still, it takes a few moments to recover from the shock and outline a sort of plan. But Janice had been out of the house and gone at least five or ten minutes before I came downstairs. And five minutes would be long enough for anyone to kill Bayard.”

  “But, Adela,” said Allen more gently, “don’t you see that while five minutes might be long enough for some member of the family who knew his way about the place to take the gun from Janice’s desk and shoot Bayard and escape, it couldn’t possibly give time enough for an intruder. And we all know it was Dave’s revolver.”

  I need have felt no sympathy for Adela. She was more than a match for Allen. She said with unruffled dignity and a sincerity that was inescapable, so that
I did not in the least doubt her story:

  “My dear Allen, I have told now the exact truth. You may make of it what you will. If anyone wishes to believe that I committed a murder he may do so. But I shall be glad that I have been the means of clearing Dave’s name. Of proving that he did not kill Bayard.”

  “You’ve proved nothing,” said Hilary rather cruelly. “Dave is dead. Don’t look at me like that, Adela. That margin of time is too small. Five minutes more or less is not enough. Our watches might not have coincided. Allen might have been mistaken about the time when he and Dave separated.”

  “Hilary, I refuse to listen. You are determined to make it appear that Dave killed Bayard and then killed himself.”

  “Now, Adela, wait. The thing I’m trying to show is that this inquiry is hopeless. We can’t prove anything conclusively. But if we don’t settle on something we’ll spend the rest of our lives wondering. Suspecting each other. Not sure. And since Dave was obviously a suicide and we know he had tried once to kill Bayard, why not —”

  “But you aren’t at all sure he was a suicide,” I said wearily, wishing I had never seen these baffling, inconsistent, illogical Thatchers with their pride and their selfishness and their undeniable courage. “You aren’t even sure he was not murdered, too. Where did he get the veronal that killed him?”

  CHAPTER XIX

  It was just at that moment that Dr. Bouligny opened the door to the long room and entered, pausing in a worried fashion, for I suppose our very attitudes gave him some warning of the suspense the moment held. Then he advanced toward Adela. His face looked old and very tired, there were pouches under his eyes, and his cheeks and heavy chin were flabby.

  “Good-morning, good-morning,” he said with an obvious and not very successful attempt at a professionally cheery greeting. “How are you this morning, Adela?”

  Almost visibly she thrust aside any hidden reference to her grief over Dave’s death; it was as if she were reserving her sorrow.