The Whistling Legs

by Roman McDougald

  “I then went back to the desk and carefully examined a writing pad which was lying there. I could see that the surface of the top sheet was faintly indented, and I realized instantly what had happened. Knowing that Darryl writes rather heavily, I surmised that he had written something on that pad and the next page had received an impression which could be made legible.

  “I brought that sheet and the empty envelope here to my room and subjected them to numerous tests. I shall not recount the steps I took except to say that I not only developed the impression on the paper but I made enlargements of it, compared it with specimens of Darryl’s handwriting, and determined beyond doubt that the script was that of Darryl Rand.

  “One other pregnant detail was the fact that there was a tiny pencil mark on the sheet and a particle of paper adhering to it. I examined it under the microscope and found that it was a fragment of the typed letter ‘e.’ From this I deduced that the message itself had been written on the back of a typed letter and that the pencil in Darryl’s heavy hand had broken through the indentation at that point.

  “It was impossible, naturally, to be sure of this, but in view of the empty envelope in the wastebasket it was reasonable to assume that the letter in question had been the one from the War Department, which had almost certainly been lying there on the desk that night. It was indicative of Darryl’s great agitation at the time that he should have seized the first piece of paper he saw——”

  Cabot broke in. “Holy smokes, man, you’re outdoing Sherlock himself! Maybe I am going to be Watson. What did the message say? ‘

  Carlo leaned forward in the dark and touched his knee. His voice came in a dramatic hiss. “It said: I have killed a fellow human being and I have gotten away with it. But I have discovered that there is no such thing as the perfect crime, after all. This is the only way out for me. Darryl Rand.”

  Cabot’s thoughts flashed back to Rand’s own words over the telephone: A suicide note which will be to all appearances a confession of the murder...He asked quickly, “Do you think he had killed someone?”

  Carlo said, “I checked back over his actions for some time previous, and the survey upheld my conjecture that it was extremely unlikely. There was, then, only one recognizable alternative. No doubt it has already occurred to you?” Cabot said, “No, it hasn’t. What?”

  Carlo touched his knee again. “He was going to kill someone, Cabot!” he said dramatically. “He intended to kill someone and then to kill himself! And he wrote the note in advance.”

  “But why?” Cabot stopped in complete bewilderment. “Say, Pugh, isn’t that fellow a vegetarian?”

  “He is,” said Carlo, “and a very weak-stomached one at that. I’d say offhand that he’d be much more likely to keel over at the sight of blood than either Gail or Jan. In his case I can think of only one emotion that would be powerful enough to overcome those qualms and make him a killer.” Carlo paused and then said emphatically, “Jealousy, Cabot! A vast, overpowering jealousy!”

  “Jealousy?” echoed Cabot, startled. “You mean of his wife?”

  “Exactly! That is his weak point. He is crazy about Gail, and Gail——“ Carlo broke off into an expressive silence.

  Cabot said, “This thing sounds nutty to me. He was going to kill someone and then he didn’t. What happened——”

  Carlo interrupted tensely, “I ask you to revert, Cabot, to the sequence of events. Let us take them up in order. Now!” Carlo paused, and Cabot knew without seeing it that he had raised a forefinger in the darkness. “Point i. Darryl obviously wrote the note after going to his apartment some time subsequent to 1:52 a.m. Point 2. He wrote this note at the desk in the bedroom. Point 3. At 2:28 some one passed my door, going toward Darryl’s apartment. This person, considering the hour, would naturally have gone to the bedroom door which opens upon the corridor. Point 4. At 2:29—or at the very time the unknown would have reached the bedroom door—the telephone rang again. Since it rang only briefly, we must assume that Darryl went into the study to answer it. Point 5. Upon opening the bedroom door, the visitor would immediately have seen both the automatic and the note lying on the table. Point 6. Shortly thereafter the visitor passed my door again, going hurriedly in the opposite direction. Point 7. Within a few minutes Darryl Rand, showing signs of extreme anxiety, appeared and began listening outside each door on this floor. His actions indicated two things quite clearly: he knew that someone had been into the bedroom, and he had no idea who this person was. In other words, he had plainly not seen the visitor and he could have learned of his presence only by some change in the room. The change which immediately suggests itself is that something was missing. Now we know, Cabot, that it was not the automatic since I saw it there. We may, therefore, safely assume that it was the note!”

  Cabot said, “Great Scott! And you think that it was someone here?”

  “It was,” said Carlo complacently, “someone who was here at the time. It was someone whom we must for the moment designate as ‘X’—someone who can be identified only as having made an unprecedentedly strange sound, a sort of whispering or whistling sound in the darkness.”

  Cabot thought for a moment. “Have you told anyone else about this?”

  “No. Not, that is, about the note and my deductions.”

  “What did you tell?”

  “I merely mentioned to Jan about hearing the telephone ringing and the person who passed my door twice and the sound of voices in the corridor. I knew that she sometimes reads late and I thought it possible that she may have heard some of this.”

  “Had she?”

  “She said that she heard Darryl come in, but she was going to bed at the time and she fell asleep at once.”

  A voice was calling in the hall. “Cabot!”

  Cabot went out hastily, almost colliding with Kroll.

  The Captain’s voice was strained. “I’ve been looking for you. Tell me, Cabot—is that woman crazy?”

  “You mean Theresa? I don’t think so. Why?”

  Kroll looked at him grimly in the narrow ray of the torch and shrugged.

  “Because,” he said, “she is telling a crazy story, a darn crazy story, Cabot, about what got hold of her in this hall!”

  Chapter Six

  They went into Greg’s room, where Theresa Church was lying back in a chair with a pillow under her head. Her face, with the blood washed off, was almost as white as the cloth.

  Boynton said, “We don’t want to disturb you too much at present. But perhaps you will tell Mr. Cabot what you started to tell us. It might have an immediate meaning for him.”

  Cabot said casually, “Theresa, by the way, is a detective.”

  Boynton uttered an eloquent exclamation of astonishment, and Kroll stood stock-still for a moment, staring at her with his mouth open. Then, his long face appearing to grow a trifle gloomier than before, he produced a tin of dyspepsia tablets, swallowed three of them, and replaced the box carefully in his pocket.

  Cabot sat down beside Theresa’s chair. He said, “Let’s go back for a second to where we left off when the bell rang. You’re a detective. You’re from Cleveland. Why are you here?”

  She said slowly, “I was employed to make an investigation. It doesn’t have anything to do with—this.”

  “We won’t be too sure about that. Who employed you?” She hesitated, glancing sidewise at Boynton. “Must I tell you? Oh—all right. It was a woman named Mrs. Martin kirk. You probably haven’t heard anything about her.” Cabot said, “Don’t bet on it.” He was taking a cigarette from his case. “Now, Mrs. Kirk had been separated from her husband for some time before his death. Very likely she had only recently heard of Magnamite. It occurred to her that there might have been a lot of money involved. She wanted to get the low-down on the whole thing. So she came to you in Cleveland—alone?”

  “Why, yes.”

  “Didn’t Kirk also have a son?”

  Theresa looked startled. “Yes. She did mention one. But he wasn’t her son. In fa
ct, I don’t think she even knew him. He lives out West somewhere.” She was staring at Cabot. “You know about all this, don’t you? She was after money. She thought there might have been some kind of trickery.”

  “How did you get the job here?”

  “I bribed the Rand maid to leave at the same time I applied. Servants are scarce, you know.”

  “Since you’ve been here, have you found anything to substantiate Mrs. Kirk’s suspicion?”

  “No. Not what she thought, anyway. If there was any trickery, it wasn’t on Rand’s part. I’m convinced of that.”

  “You’ve found that Rand is a straight-shooter?”

  She said, “He is more than that. He is a very kind man.”

  “Is he jealous of his wife?”

  She gave him a queer look. “Who told you that?”

  “It doesn’t matter. Skip it. Let’s jump to Deb. Do you know why he was killed?”

  “I can’t even guess. It seems incredible. It doesn’t appear to have a connection with anything else.” She moved her hand on the chair arm. “But, then, Deb was your job. And somebody evidently didn’t want you to do it.”

  Cabot at last put the cigarette into his mouth. He said, “All right. We’ve been running our fingers over the keys. Now let’s start playing. What happened after I left you?” She waited a moment and then began in a deliberate voice. “I stood there as you told me to do,” she said, “and I didn’t see anybody after you turned into the corridor. Mr. Pugh had already gone into his room and closed the door. All the doors were closed along the hall, and I kept watching them, expecting every moment to see one of them open and somebody start coming toward me. If somebody had come toward me, I’d have screamed.”

  “But you didn’t see anybody?”

  “Nobody at all. I kept looking both ways, up and down, and at those closed doors. The hall was absolutely empty, and it was as still as a tomb. I got to thinking about that dead boy in the room behind me, and something made me turn and look at that door, too——”

  Cabot said, “You didn’t by any chance hear something inside?”

  She gave a slight shiver. “For a second I could almost imagine that I had heard something. It was nerves, I suppose. But it fixed my whole attention for the time being on that one door, and I don’t know what went on behind me. I didn’t notice anything else until the lights went out.”

  “What did you do then?”

  “I spun around in the dark. My first impulse was to scream. I knew that you would rush to me at once out of Mr. Rand’s room. And then I thought, ‘Suppose that’s what somebody is counting on? Suppose it’s not Deb’s room he wants to get into?’ I thought that, and I didn’t scream. I just stood there, listening.”

  Cabot studied her face for a moment. “And how long was it before you heard something?”

  She said, “I don’t know. It’s so difficult to determine time in the darkness. I suppose that actually it was only two or three minutes, but it seemed longer. I may even have heard the sound for a few seconds before I really became conscious of it. For it wasn’t at all the kind of noise I was expecting. I was listening, you see, for the stairs to creak or for a foot to go off the edge of the rug and make a little tap on the floor. And this was altogether different.” Boynton cleared his throat, and Kroll remarked dourly, “It must have been—the way you described it.”

  Boynton said, “You told us that it didn’t sound human.”

  “I know. I——”

  Cabot leaned forward. The hand holding the cigarette had suddenly stiffened. He said, “Did it strike you, Theresa, as being a kind of swishing?”

  Her great gray eyes were fixed upon him intently. She said, after a long pause, “I didn’t describe it that way. But I can understand why someone else might have.”

  “How did you describe it?”

  “I called it a sort of whispering sound, like dry branches in the wind. That was why I thought at first that it wasn’t human. But after a moment I realized that it must be. There was something purposeful about it. It was approaching.”

  “You didn’t think of cloth?”

  She shook her head. “It didn’t sound like cloth, somehow.”

  “Had you ever heard that sound before?”

  She stared across the room. “I’m not sure about this,” she said. “I’m not positive. But about two weeks ago, very late one night, I heard the telephone ringing in Mr. Rand’s study. My room is on the third floor landing just above the corridor leading to his apartment. I thought I’d slip down the stairs and answer the telephone, as I was certain that everyone else was asleep.”

  “Yes?”

  “Well, just as I started down the stairway I saw that one of the doors of his apartment—the bedroom door—was open. I had a glimpse of somebody moving away from that lighted doorway into the dimness of the corridor. I took it for granted that it was Mr. Rand himself, and I stood there for some little time wondering what was wrong. And then Mr. Rand suddenly came out of the bedroom with a wild look on his face and asked me whether I had seen anyone leave the apartment. I told him that I had, but I didn’t know who it was.”

  Cabot thought of Pugh’s description of that night two weeks ago, the voices he had overheard in the corridor. Theresa’s story checked with it.

  He said, “But how does this tie in with what happened tonight?”

  She answered slowly. “As I stood there on the stairs after that first glimpse of somebody coming out of the bedroom, it was very quiet in the house. I couldn’t see the person who was leaving, but I could still hear him as he moved away down the corridor into the hall. And now that I think of it, it seems to me that it was that same sound that I heard tonight—though it was much fainter then, and I didn’t realize how strange it was.”

  Cabot said, “But you realized it tonight?”

  She nodded. “It fascinated me. I stood there trying to identify it in my own mind and to locate it in the darkness. And then the hand suddenly closed over my mouth, and I couldn’t scream.”

  Cabot said, “Go on.”

  “It all happened in a flash. I was jerked off balance, the key was snatched from my hand, and I was pulled backward into the room. Almost at once something hit me and everything turned dim. When the fog lifted a little, I found myself trying to crawl across the room, back to the door.” Another siren wailed briefly in the street outside. There was the sound of raised voices, and a door slammed.

  Boynton said, “Was that a man’s hand over your mouth?”

  “I don’t know. I——“ She stopped with a slight shiver.

  Boynton rapped, “You’re holding something back!”

  “I don’t want to seem crazy. That’s why——“ She wavered a moment longer and then went on in a desperate rush. “That thing over my mouth was not flesh, Mr. Boynton. It was rough. Like—hide. But don’t misunderstand me. It could have been a glove. That’s what I’m trying to tell myself——”

  He prompted her. “Go on.”

  “But that’s all of it. I’ve told you everything.”

  He was frowning judicially. “This is no way for a story to end,” he said. “I think we had better go over this again.” Fleming appeared at the door. “The squad is here, sir,” he reported. “I called from the nearest box, and they sent an electrician and a telephone repair man. And the Medical Examiner arrived a while ago.”

  Boynton was still scowling perplexedly at Theresa, who had closed her eyes wearily. “All right,” he said after a moment, “we’ll let you rest for the present. Perhaps you can tell us more about this tomorrow. Come on, Phil.”

  Dr. Theron Ware was just straightening up from the chair as they went into Deb’s room. He waved his hand perfunctorily to the waiting photographers and squinted around at Kroll.

  “Nothing at all complicated here,” he said. “This man was killed within the past two hours by a sharp instrument, presumably a knife, which entered his body between the fifth and sixth ribs, penetrated laterally from the apex of the heart,
and extended possibly as far as the conus arteriosus. He was dead—legally dead—within three minutes. And now I suppose you’ll want me to take his temperature.”

  Kroll said, “Well, Doc, if that’s the way you get the time——”

  Cabot said, “I can give you that more definitely than the thermometer could. It was between 10:15 and 10:45.”

  The photographers were drawing their tripods away from the chair to take shots of the room itself from various angles. On the sidelines the fingerprint men were waiting to move in.

  Boynton said, “We’d better clear out of here, go downstairs. A stenographer should be here by now.”

  Cabot accompanied him down the stairs and into the mirrored drawing-room, where the District Attorney looked around at once for the telephone and then rushed back into the hall.

  Cabot sank into a chair and stuck a cigarette into his mouth. Boynton returned and sat down at a table which looked toy-like before his great frame.

  “All right, Phil,” he said. “Let’s have it.”

  Cabot said, “Give me a match.”

  Boynton tossed a box to him and looked around at the door, where Kroll was entering. “Oh, yes, Captain!” he said. “Maybe you’d better take this down until the stenographer comes.”

  Kroll sat down beside him and opened a notebook. They looked expectantly at Cabot. He returned the matches to Boynton and settled back in his chair.

  He said carefully, “Darryl Rand telephoned me this evening and asked me to come here to take up a matter of urgent importance. I arrived shortly before ten o’clock. .

  He was watching Kroll, keeping his eyes on the nimble fingers as they drove the pencil across the narrow sheets. Boynton was already stirring restlessly, but Cabot did not glance at him. His voice flowed on, keeping pace with the swift scrawl of the pencil.

  At last he stopped, and at once the fidgeting Boynton leaned over the table. “That’s good, Phil,” he commented. “It’s very good, so far as the events are concerned. But—“ he made an eloquent gesture—“you’ve left out something!” Cabot took a last, long draw on the cigarette. “Have I?”