“No, cal’late not. They ain’t no one within three hundred miles seen any ’lectric. If they have, that is, they ain’t ’dentified it with the one we’re after, or with the time we want. In other words, no one saw him. An’ he couldn’t of been so far away, when you come to think of it, Miss Prue. Say he could make an av’rage twenty miles an hour. That’s the very best he could do. Well, give him twenty hours of drivin’ out of twenty-four, an’ he couldn’t of gone over four hundred miles. But his bat’ry wouldn’t of lasted all that distance. Either he’d had to of stopped an’ got it charged or else of changed bat’ries, an’ Tom says he didn’t. Now, all that bein’ true, he couldn’t of gone outside a radius of a hundred or seventy-five miles in any d’rection. He just couldn’t of. Tom don’t remember the mileage, but he says he don’t think Stires could of gone over two hundred, anyhows. An’ he used up over a hundred of that gettin’ down here. There you are.”
“Then you’d say he went from twenty to forty miles in one direction, came back and drove down here?”
“That’s about the size of it. I’d hoped to get some answers from around Boston way, but I didn’t. No one around Boston saw any ’lectrics on Tuesday or Wednesday ’cept a cop in Pembroke that saw him Wednesday noon. He had the number an’ all, so that’s all right. That bears out what I think, that he went some distance north or west of Boston, then come down Wednesday mornin’ after spendin’ the night wherever he did. They ain’t nothin’ about Tuesday attall, though.”
“What are you going to do now?”
“Well, somethin’ more may turn up. Only usually folks would answer a thing like that right away, an’ if any one around Boston seen Stires, they’d be sure to let us know right away on account of the broadcast bein’ on Boston stations. But they’ll ask again later over the whole dum New England network an’ maybe that’ll bring some results.”
“Has Rowena said anything to you about her newest idea?” I asked.
“Nope. She come in here before dinner an’ took a couple of big books out. Maybe,” he grinned, “maybe she’s aimin’ to settle it on to you an’ me an’ Phrone. You can’t never tell.”
He got up and went to the window. “Car cornin’,” he announced. “Shouldn’t wonder if ’t wasn’t the lawyer. I sort of expected him sooner.”
He went out into the hall and in a few minutes returned with Stephen Crump.
Stephen is not half so well-known as he might be, and I have always felt that if it were not for his firm chin and intelligent face, he might easily be taken for a tap-dancer. He is short and wiry, and he affects suits with stripes.
“I’m glad to see you, Prue,” he said as he shook hands. “I’d have been here sooner, but we lost a chain and skidded into a drift somewhere on the Eastham plains. We clogged up the something or other and while it was being unclogged, I took time out and had dinner and warmed myself. I can think of better places to be hung up in than the Eastham plains. But I’m here, anyway. How are things going, Asey?”
“Not so good,” Asey returned cheerfully. “Mr. Crump, did you find out about this stray girl we got here?”
Crump nodded as he opened a fat brief-case. “Yes. I called up the real Desire Allerton after I got that telegram from her, but she didn’t know a thing about this red-head. So I called up Lesly Crowell—he was a friend of Cass—and got the story from him. The girl’s name is Hoffman and she’s the friend of a woman named Leah Spengel, who was living with Allerton when he died. The Spengel woman was the cause of her coming as Desire Allerton, from what Crowell said. I don’t quite know what her purpose was, but it’s pretty certain that she never knew Bert or had anything to do with him.”
Asey nodded and told him what the girl had told us.
“Curious,” Crump remarked, “but it’s probably the truth. Now, what about Stires?”
Briefly Asey told him about the candles and Mary Gross, and of our suspicions regarding Denny, Blake and Hobart.
“You don’t think it’s the servants?” he asked.
“Nope. It’s got a little mite too much brainwork involved for them.”
“I think you’re right,” Crump said thoughtfully. “But do you mean, Asey, that in spite of all this planning of the murderer, you can’t get any of the threads?”
“That’s it, Mr. Crump. I’d sort of hoped myself that he’d planned too hard, as you might say. But we can’t catch up on anything he’s left hangin’. Y’see, he planned first that it wouldn’t be discovered as a murder. It was. So he planted arsenic for us to find. He tried to get me an’ Miss Prue, an’ he didn’t fail by much. If Mary Gross hadn’t made a mistake about usin’ her poisoned candles, an’ if we hadn’t connected her an’ Stires an’ that closet business, we’d never of known about the candles. But knowin’, where’s it get us? Lyddy Howes says Mary was goin’ to make some special candles for some one last fall. Only Mary didn’t keep no letters nor no records. We’re pretty much stuck, you see?”
“I see. Yet Hobart had a motive, and that billiard-cue stunt and the ink-bottle cover would seem to indicate that he was the one who slammed the door shut, and the one that planted the arsenic.”
“Uh-huh. But Blake’s a boy planner.” Crump laughed at Asey’s choice of words. “An’ this pewter-plate business is sort of silly. He could have had Kelley get candles then. He had as much chance for shuttin’ us in an’ plantin’ arsenic as Hobart had. An’ Denny James got candles from Mary, an’ accordin’ to the doc an’ Miss Fible, he did his best to keep ’em from huntin’ in the cellar.”
“What about this fight between John and June?” Crump asked. He had made notes on what Asey had told him, and now he was covering the sheets of paper with tiny rows of triangles. “I don’t understand that at all. Of course, John has been known to unleash a nasty and uncertain temper on various and sundry occasions, and I personally bailed June out of jail for being mixed up in some student fights in his college days, but why should the two of ’em brawl?”
“You know as much as we do,” I said. “Stephen, what about the will?”
“If you’re hunting motives,” Crump said, “that will is not going to do a bit of good. Bulk of the estate goes to charity, so do the two houses in Boston and this place here. Harvard and Andover get bequests. Prence, his partner, has an option on Stires’s part of the business. The servants get a few thousand apiece, and just for the fun of it, I tried to see if they were in any financial difficulties. The Boleses have a very solid bank-account and Tom saves about half his salary and puts it into postal savings.”
“What about the people here?”
“Denny and Blake get some prints and some pewter, John gets some books—most of the library goes to the Museum—and some furniture, and Hobart’s given some old guns and a Chippendale secretary. He left none of them any money. All of them have more than they need anyway.”
“Nothin’ funny about the will? No catches? Nothin’ strange?”
“Not a thing, Asey. There is this, however. About a month ago, while I was in London, Stires came into my office with a lot of ideas about a codicil. We—or at least, my son Steve—fixed it up for him. Then the next day, he came in and asked that the codicil be destroyed and that the carbons and memoranda concerning it be destroyed, too.”
“What was it about? D’you know?”
“I thought of it at once when you called me. But we had no records at all. Steve had been awfully busy the day Stires came in, and he’d more or less thrust him off on this secretary. You know her, Prue, that lady with the stiff neck and the shirt-waists. She’s been with us for thirty years and she knows more about the business than I do myself. Well, here are the notes she gave me. She won’t swear to the accuracy, but this is what she remembered.”
He cleared his throat and read. “As I recall the beneficiaries, they were Victor Blake, Junior, John Kent and Borden James.”
“See here,” I interrupted, “June and John! Wouldn’t that have some bearing on the fight?”
“It mi
ght,” Crump said, “except that she can’t remember what they were given, or anything definite at all.”
“God A’mighty,” said Asey disgustedly. “Mr. Crump, here you go gettin’ our hopes all uplifted, an’ then you say that. Didn’t she remember nothin’ else?”
“Only that Bert’s cellar, he still has some pre-war stock, was to be given to one of them. She rather thinks it was given to Denny James, but she isn’t sure. You see, Asey, Stires came in late one afternoon when Steve was up to his ears in work over the Romaine case, and Miss Wheary was just as busy. She took rough notes of what he wanted, typed out the codicil the next day, but Stires came and got it soon after. If the whole office hadn’t been pretty well disorganized, some one would have remembered something more. But that’s the way it was.”
Asey shook his head despondently. “That’s a big pity,” he said. “Well, I s’pose it can’t be helped. Got ’nything else?”
“These.” Out of the brief-case Crump took two small packages. They were sealed with many globs of sealing wax and looked very official indeed.
“What’s all that?” Asey asked.
“I don’t know. I don’t know even for whom they are intended.”
“I s’pose,” Asey suggested bitterly, “that some one was so busy that they forgot all about them too.”
Stephen laughed. “No. I found these in his safe-deposit box. They are to be opened when the will is read.”
“See here, Steve,” I said suddenly, “what about the Stires emeralds?”
“I don’t know, Prue. I’ve asked Bert about them from time to time, but he never would tell me. He said that he had made his own arrangements, and I took it for granted that he’d given them away or sold them, or something of the sort.”
“Couldn’t—don’t you think that they might be in one of those boxes?”
“Maybe, but I doubt it. That larger one is heavy as lead, and the other seems pretty heavy, too.”
“Well,” Asey said, “if you’ve got to read the will to find out what’s in ’em, can’t you do it? Now we’ve lost that codicil business, we might get somethin’ out of these.”
“I suppose,” Crump said, “that under the circumstances, it is the best thing. It might be the most important clue in the whole affair, I suppose. Asey, you go and collect every one and I’ll read the will and maybe it will make up for the codicil.”
“What do you think of it all?” I asked after Asey had gone.
“Frankly, Prue, I think it’s frightful. I don’t see why any one should kill Bert. He was a good sort, as men go. He had a lot of little eccentricities, but he was kind and decent and all that. I was appalled when I heard about it, and I’m more appalled to find that he was surrounded by a houseful of faithful friends and servants. I don’t see how you could have stood it here, Prue, after that closet experience.”
“Had to,” I said, and told him about Rowena and the tin of biscuit. “She—well, none of us really ate until Phrone came over. She wasn’t here when it happened, you know, and somehow it made us feel better. The doctor said when he first told us about Stires that one could be poisoned through clothes, and I give you my word, Stephen, I’ve kept everything in my bags so that no one could poison me that way. Rowena’s never said anything about it, but I notice that she has, too. But after we found out about the candles, I’ve felt better. I still suspect the sheets though, and Rena’s been using a silk nightgown as a bath towel.”
Crump threw back his head and laughed. “I suppose I could trust you to see the funny side of it, Prue. But it is frightful. It doesn’t seem to me that any one of those men is guilty, yet I agree with Asey that it must be one of them. It couldn’t be any one else.”
“Asey said you were his lawyer,” I remarked.
“Porter left him a tidy sum of money,” Crump said, “and I’ve looked out for things for him from time to time. He’s not rich, but he has more than most people give him credit for having. Asey is a great sort. I stopped in to see Burnett at Barnstable on the way down, and he agreed with me. He said that he was being severely criticized for letting Asey handle this, but that as far as he was concerned, if Asey couldn’t find out who killed Stires, no one could. His methods, Burnett said, might not be strictly conventional, but he thought that Asey would get results.”
Asey came back. “They’re all waitin’.”
Crump picked up his brief-case and put on a pair of heavy shell-rimmed glasses.
He stood before the fire in the living-room and read through the legal phrases of the will. I have never been able to understand the simplest legal document, and had I not been told the gist of it before, I greatly doubt whether or not I should have understood the small part that I did.
The men, however, seemed to have no difficulty in grasping the essentials from the maze of whereases and wherefores. I noticed that when Crump came to the bequests to the servants, not one of them seemed at all happy at his fortune. They cared, I decided, more about losing Stires than getting his money.
“And now,” Stephen said, putting the will back into his brief-case, “now I have two packages here which I have been commissioned to open after Stires’s death. I do not know if they are intended for any one in this room, but if such is the case, I hope that the recipient will be good enough to open them at once. I have a particular reason for making that request.”
He snapped open a pocket-knife and slowly broke the seals and cords of the two small packages. Every one leaned forward in their seats, much as if Stephen were a magician and they expected him to pull a rabbit and a bowl of goldfish out of the wrappings.
Stephen is something of an actor. But I am inclined to think that he overdid himself that night. Certainly two packages were never opened more slowly, and when he had peeled off the second layer of seals and paper, Asey gave vent to his feelings.
“Many layers as an onion,” he whispered in my ear.
I watched patiently while Stephen blew his nose, adjusted his glasses and gave a preliminary cough. He picked up the smaller of the two packages, read the name on it, and a look of utter amazement spread across his face. He opened his mouth as though to speak, closed it again, picked up the larger package, read the inscription on that, and cleared his throat again.
“Rowena,” he said gravely, “these appear to belong to you.”
“To me?” Rowena looked as though she had been struck by lightning.
“Yes. Will you be good enough to open them?”
Dazedly she got to her feet and took the packages. Stephen offered her his pocket-knife ceremoniously and she took it with a little nod of thanks.
She was as quick in opening the little white packages as Crump had been slow.
She opened the bigger box, looked at its contents and flushed a deep crimson. She looked into the smaller one and then did something which I am sure she never did before in her life.
She fainted.
While Phrone rushed to her, I followed the rest to the table to see what was in the boxes.
In the larger one lay half a brick. In the other, the Stires emeralds twinkled and shone.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
MISS FIBLE
BETWEEN US, Phrone and I got Rowena up-stairs and into bed. She seemed too dazed and bewildered to know where she was or what she was doing—and she spoke not one word. That, I think, worried me more than anything else. For I had known her long enough to be certain that when Rowena did not express herself, the situation was very bad indeed.
“I’ll look after her,” Phrone said briskly. “You go down an’ see that Asey Mayo keeps some one by that telephone. An’ here,” she passed over a sheet of paper from the pocket of her gray sweater, “here’s the rest of his calls. Ain’t nothin’ about Stires, attall.”
I took the list and went down-stairs somewhat reluctantly.
“How is she?” Hobart asked as I passed by the door of the living-room. “Don’t you suppose that a bromide pill would do her some good? I’ve got some up in my room.”
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br /> Denny James overheard his offer and snorted. He and Hobart had not exchanged two words since Walker had found the arsenic in Hobart’s cold pills.
“Pills!” Denny looked at him, went to the phone and called up the doctor.
Asey came out of the library, sensed the situation and grinned. “Tell you what, Mr. James, after you git through that call, you just stay by the phone. Take down any calls you git about where Stires was, an’ just make a note about ’em unless it’s pretty certain that it is Stires that they’re talkin’ about.”
“For how long?”
“Till I tell you to stop. Miss Prue, is that Phrone’s list? She didn’t get anything either? I didn’t think so. Come into the lib’ry.”
“How’s Rena?” Crump asked. “If any one had told me that I should see Rowena Fible faint, I’d have called him an out-and-out liar without any hesitation whatsoever. I don’t understand it. Prue, you’re a woman and presumably you understand the psychology of your sex. You explain why Rowena fainted.”
“Well,” I said hesitantly, “I might be able to give an explanation, but whether or not it is the right one, I don’t know. You remember about Rowena’s knocking out Bert’s teeth? That’s the beginning, I suppose. Then, when she told John that she’d come here Tuesday, she made him promise that he would have Blake and Bert sit next to her. You know how Bert would have felt at that. That is, she came here for the principal purpose of making Stires squirm. If you remember about the teeth, you recall that Bert said some pretty nasty things about her. She’d always resented them, and I think she came here for revenge. See here, am I being at all clear?”
“We follow,” Crump said.
“Well, when Bert came in Wednesday night, so cheerful and pitiful in his dripping clothes, and after he accepted our being here so sportingly,—he just sort of took it in his stride,—Rowena said that she certainly shouldn’t think of baiting him at all. And that night when we all came up to bed, she spoke to Stires and told him that she was sorry she’d thrown the brick. He told her that he was sorry for his part, too.”
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