“She’s getting quieter, miss,” she said. “You’ll have to speak loud. She’s deaf.”
It took me only a second, however, to realize why Miss Juliet was quieter. She had lapsed into a coma, and she was almost pulseless.
“Doctor!” I called. “Doctor!”
He hurried then, and for the next few minutes we were two pretty busy people. He ordered a hypodermic of nitroglycerin, and stood for some time holding her pulse and watching it. Not until it perceptibly improved did he speak at all.
“That’s curious,” he said at last. “She’s shown shock, of course. Been restless, and the usual flushed face and rapid pulse. There’s a bad heart condition, an arteriosclerosis of the coronary arteries. But she was quieter when I went downstairs. You don’t know of anything that could have excited her?”
“I’ve just come in, doctor.”
“How about you, Mary?”
“I don’t know. I was just talking to her.”
“You didn’t say anything to excite her?”
She shook her head. Miss Juliet had been growing calmer as she talked to her; then suddenly she had given a little cry and sat up in bed. She had even tried to get out, and asked for her slippers. Then she apparently changed her mind and lay back again.
“Did she say why she wanted her slippers?”
“I think she wanted to go upstairs again. To see him.”
“She didn’t explain that?”
“No.”
Doctor Stewart considered that, his hand still on the old lady’s wrist.
“You didn’t intimate to her that he had killed himself?”
“Killed himself! Why should I? He was yellow, through and through. He never killed himself. It was an accident.”
All this time she was looking at me with unfriendly eyes. I am used to that, the resentment of all servants, and especially of old servants, to a trained nurse in the house. But it seemed to me that she was not so much jealous of me that night as afraid of me, and that she was even more shrill than usual in her insistence of an accident.
“Why shouldn’t she get weak and faint?” she demanded. “She’s had a plenty. And not only tonight,” she added darkly.
It was some time before the old lady rallied, and still later before the doctor felt that he could safely go. He left me some amyl-nitrite ampoules and nitroglycerin for emergency, and I thought he looked worried as I followed him into the hall.
“Curious,” he said, “her collapsing like that. She’d had a shock, of course, but she was all over it; and she wasn’t fond of the boy. She had no reason to be. I’m still wondering if Mary didn’t say something that sent her off. You see, we’ve maintained to her that it was an accident. If she learned that it was suicide, or might be, that would account for it.”
“I heard Mary telling her it was an accident.”
“In that case …” He left the sentence unfinished, for one of the men who had been in the lower hall had started up the stairs. He moved slowly and weightily, and I recognized him as he approached us; a well-known attorney in town, named Glenn. He stopped on the landing.
“How is she?”
“Not so well. Better than a few minutes ago, but that’s about all.”
“Do you think I’d better stay?”
“If anybody stays, I’m the logical one,” said the doctor. “But the nurse is here.”
Mr. Glenn looked at me for the first time. As I said, I knew him by sight; one of those big-bodied men who naturally gravitate to the law and become a repository for the family secrets of the best people. He looked at me and nodded amiably.
“So I see. Well, I might as well go home; I suppose there is nothing I can do up there.” He indicated the third floor.
“They won’t let you in, Mr. Glenn,” I said. But he was not listening.
“See here, Stewart,” he said, “have you any idea why he would do such a thing? Has he been speculating?”
“What did he have to speculate with?” the doctor demanded, rather sourly.
“I suppose that’s true enough. How about a girl?”
“Don’t ask me. That’s your sort of business, not mine!”
Mr. Glenn smiled a little, and put his hand on the doctor’s shoulder. “Come, come, Dave,” he said, “you’re letting this get under your skin. It’s bad business, but it’s not yours.”
They went down the stairs together, companionably enough, and soon afterward the Inspector came up to tell me to close the door from Miss Juliet’s room into the hall. The door beside her bed opened close to the foot of the third-floor staircase, and they were about to bring the body down. Mary was still in the room, and I had no chance for a word with him.
Soon after that I heard the shuffling of the men in the hall, and Mary gave a gasp and went very pale. With a sort of morbid curiosity, however, she went out into the hall, after they had passed, and a few moments later she burst back into the room.
“Hugo!” she said. “They’ve taken him along, miss!”
“Who is Hugo?”
“My husband. What do the police want with him? He doesn’t know anything. He was asleep in the bed beside me when Miss Juliet banged on that door out there.”
I tried to quiet her. Miss Juliet was apparently asleep, and I was ready myself to get some rest. But she went on and on. Why did the police want Hugo? Mr. Herbert had killed himself. There he was, lying on the floor with his own gun beside him, in front of the bureau. Maybe he meant to, maybe he didn’t. Hugo knew nothing. He had almost dropped when he saw the body.
I gathered, here and there through this hysterical outburst, that Hugo and Mary were the only servants in the house, and that they had been there for many years. In the old days Hugo had been the butler and Mary the cook. There had been other servants, but one by one they had drifted away. Now Hugo was everything from houseman to butler, and Mary “was worked until at night she was like to drop off her feet.”
I finally got her to bed. It developed that she and Hugo occupied two rooms, a sitting room and bedroom, beyond the second-floor landing; rooms originally used by the family, so that a door on the landing connected with them. But as that door was kept locked as well as bolted, I had to take her downstairs and wait in the kitchen until she had had time to climb the rear staircase.
And it was while I was standing there that I thought I heard, somewhere outside, a soft movement in the shrubbery just beyond the kitchen door.
I put it down to nerves or maybe to a dog, but I did not like it. Standing there in the dark, it seemed to me that something was moving along the kitchen wall outside, and brushing against it.
CHAPTER III
Like all women, I feel safer with a light. Again and again, Mr. Patton has warned me against that obsession.
“Think it over,” he said dryly one day. “What is the idea anyhow? It’s what is left of your little-girl fear of ghosts, and you know it. But in this business you’re not dealing with ghosts; you’re dealing with people, and often enough people with guns. Keep dark. Don’t move. Don’t speak.”
But no advice in the world would have kept me from feeling about for the light in that kitchen, and turning it on. It was the light which gave me courage, so that I threw open the kitchen door. And sure enough there was something there. A huge black cat stalked in with dignity, and proceeded to curl up under the stove.
I closed and bolted the door again, but I was still uncertain. I could almost have located that sound I had heard, and it was high up on the frame wall, about shoulder height, I thought. Or maybe that is what some people call hindsight. I know now that it was not the cat, and so I think that I noticed it then.
However that may be, I put out the light and went upstairs, as the Inspector put it later on, as though I had been fired out of a gun! I imagine that was at half past two or thereabouts. I know that it seemed incredible, when I had taken off my uniform and put on my dressing gown, to find that it was only three o’clock. It seemed to me that I had been in that old house for h
ours.
Miss Juliet was sleeping quietly by that time, and her pulse and general condition were much better. In spite of my recent fright, I went methodically enough about my preparation for what was left of the night. But I was still puzzled. As I made my bed on the couch at the foot of Miss Juliet’s big bed, as I laid out my hypodermic tray in the front room adjoining, which had been assigned to me, I was still wondering. Both Doctor Stewart and Mr. Glenn had taken it for granted that Herbert Wynne had killed himself by accident or design. Then what did they make of the Homicide Squad? Or did they know about it? I had seen the Inspector slip in a half-dozen men from the Bureau, under the very noses of the family, and nobody suspect it at all.
And had that been the cat, outside in the shrubbery?
The house was eerie that night. There was no wind, but it creaked and groaned all about me; and after I had raised the windows, the furniture began to rap. I knew well enough what it was, that the change of temperature was doing it. But it was as though some unseen hand were beating a fine tattoo, on the old walnut bureau, on the old brass fire irons, even on the footboard of the bed at my head.
I must have dozed, in spite of all that, for it was only slowly that I became aware of a still louder rapping, and roused to discover that someone was throwing gravel from the drive against a window sash.
I recognized the signal, and went downstairs at once, to find the Inspector on the front porch. There was still no sign of dawn, but I could see him faintly by the distant light of a street lamp.
“How is she? Asleep?”
“Sound. The doctor gave her a sedative.”
He sat down on a step, pulled out his pipe and lighted it.
“Well, here’s the layout,” he said, “and I’m damned if I know what to make of it. So far as I can learn, young Wynne ate his dinner in good spirits, and spent the time until almost nine o’clock cleaning and oiling his automatic. The cook went in at eight o’clock to turn down his bed, and he was at it, and cheerful enough, she says. Shortly before nine o’clock, Hugo, the butler, heard him go out. He and Mary are man and wife; they occupy the rooms behind the landing on the second floor, and the sitting room is just behind the landing. There’s a door connecting it, but it is kept locked and bolted, and the bolt is on the landing side. It’s still locked and bolted, for that matter.
“But the point is that Hugo, reading his paper in the sitting room, heard him go down the front stairs shortly before nine o’clock, and says that he was whistling. We can’t shake that story of his, and it’s probably true. In other words, if we had nothing else to go on, it wouldn’t look like suicide.”
“But you have something else?”
“We have, Miss Pinkerton.”
He did not tell me at once, however, and from the way he pulled at his pipe I gathered that something had annoyed him. Finally it came out. Between his department and the District Attorney’s office was a long-standing feud, and now it turned out that the District Attorney was already butting in, as he put it; had put on his clothes and appeared himself.
“Afraid he won’t get into the papers,” he said disgustedly. “Ready to blab the whole story, and steal the job. He’s working on Hugo now, so I got out. He leaves all the dirty work to us, but when it comes to a prominent family like this—”
He checked himself, grinning sheepishly and went on. The local precinct station had received a call at fifteen minutes after twelve, and the police lieutenant who first arrived on the scene had merely taken in the general picture, and had decided then and there that it had been suicide.
“Fellow’s a fool,” the Inspector said. “How do you get a suicide without contact marks? And it’s the first hour that counts in these cases. The first five minutes would be better, but we don’t get those breaks very often.”
“And there were no powder marks on the body?”
“Not a mark. It took O’Brien ten minutes to notice that! And he calls himself a policeman.”
He had noticed it finally, however, and he had telephoned to Headquarters.
Luckily the Inspector had still been in his office, and he got to the house at a quarter before one. It took him just two minutes, he said with some pride, to decide that it was neither a suicide nor an accident, to send for the Squad and to telephone for me.
“Not so easy, that last,” he said. “Stewart had some pet or other he wanted to put on the case. Yes, Stewart was there. He got there before I did. But I tipped the word to the Medical Examiner, and he told Stewart he had somebody he could get at once. It worked.”
“It did,” I said grimly. “And what was it that you saw in two minutes?”
“This. That boy was drilled through the center of the forehead; and he didn’t move a foot after the bullet hit him. That’s certain. But where was he when they found him? He was in front of the bureau, on the floor. All right. O’Brien sized it up first that he’d been standing in front of the mirror, with a revolver pointed at the center of his forehead. But in that case where would the bullet go? It would go through his skull and into the wall at the head of the bed. But it did nothing of the sort. It hit the brick facing of the fireplace, at right angles to the bed, and bounced off. I found it on the floor.”
I considered that. It was a ghastly sort of picture at best. “Maybe he didn’t face the mirror,” I suggested.
“Maybe not. But it’s a cinch that he was standing up, if he did it himself. There’s no chair in front of that bureau. And that bullet went through his head in a straight line, and hit the fireplace about four feet above the floor. He was pretty close to six feet tall, so you see what I mean.”
“He might have knelt.”
“Good for you. So he might. They hate the idea of falling, and I’ve known them to put a blanket on the floor, or a bunch of pillows. I grant you, too, that that would account for the way his knees were bent. But I still want to know why he shows no contact marks. A man doesn’t drill himself through the head without leaving something more than just a hole. Of course it’s possible that he’d rigged up a device of some sort for firing the gun at a distance, and there’s the chance that the servants and the old lady did away with it. They had time enough before they called the police.”
“It isn’t an insurance case?” I asked. I had worked on one or two such cases for him.
“Well, he had some insurance. The family doctor, Stewart, says he examined him not long ago for a couple of small policies. But why would he do such a thing? Kill himself in order to leave his insurance to an old woman who hadn’t long to live, and who didn’t like him anyhow? It’s not reasonable.”
Well, it was not reasonable, and I knew it; although the trouble some people take to kill themselves so that it will look like something else is extraordinary. I believe there is a clause in most policies about suicide; if the holder kills himself within a year, the policy lapses. Something of that sort, anyhow.
“It couldn’t have been an accident?” I asked.
“Well, apparently the boy belonged to a pistol club at college; he knew how to handle a gun. And most accidents of that sort occur when the cleaning is going on; not two or three hours later. He’d cleaned that gun before he went out, and left the oil and the rags on top of his bureau. But here’s another thing. How do you get an accident with all the earmarks of suicide? Gun on the floor, bent knees as though he might have knelt in front of the mirror, and a bullet straight through his forehead? Straight, I’m telling you. Where was that gun and where was he, in that case?”
“If you’re asking me,” I said mildly, “I haven’t any idea.”
He shook out his pipe. “That’s what I like about you,” he said, smiling into the darkness. “I can talk, and you haven’t any theories. You’ve got a factual mind, and no nonsense.”
“What does the Medical Examiner think?”
“He’s guessing accident. Stewart is guessing suicide.”
“And you?”
“Just at the minute I’m guessing murder. I may change that, of
course. But this boy was weak, and it takes more than a temporary spell of depression for any man to plan a suicide so that it looks like something else. Take that gun now; it’s the one that killed him. It had been fired since he cleaned it, and there are no prints on it, except some smudged ones that look like his own. Either he’d rigged it so that he could pull a string and fire it from a distance; or somebody else held it with a handkerchief, or wore gloves.”
“Nobody heard the shot?”
“Nobody. But that doesn’t mean anything. The servants were pretty far away. And the old lady is deaf as a post. There was a shot fired, that’s certain. Stewart, who got there before our man, says Wynne hadn’t been dead for too long then; less than an hour. The Medical Examiner put the time as about a quarter past eleven. But they’re both guessing. So am I. But I’m guessing that, if it’s murder, it’s an inside job.”
He struck a match and looked at his watch. “Well, the D. A. will be wanting a little shut-eye about now. I’ll go back and take over Hugo.”
“What do you mean by an inside job?” I demanded. “That old woman, and two antiquated servants! Was there anyone else in the house?”
“Not a soul, apparently. And get this. Even if I can figure that this boy could kill himself without leaving any contact marks, I’ve got to explain one or two things to myself. Why did he go out whistling at nine o’clock, if he did, and then come back to kill himself at something after eleven? And why did he have a new suitcase in his closet, locked in and partially packed? He was going on a journey, but it wasn’t one where he needed silk pajamas!”
Miss Pinkerton Page 2