I could only shake my head. “You talk to this girl,” I told him. “I don’t believe that that boy went to the movies that night, bought a paper to look at the financial page, kissed his sweetheart goodbye, told her to be ready to run away with him in a day or two, said that they would soon be sitting pretty, as he expressed it, and then went whistling down the street to kill himself. It’s nonsense.”
He looked slightly crestfallen. “You didn’t tell me all that, before. I’ll get her here, and get the truth out of her.”
“She’ll tell you just what she told me. Maybe he did kill himself, but he didn’t expect to do it when he left her. He left her around eleven, and Miss Juliet found the body about twelve. That gave him less than an hour to get home and to have something happen which would lead him to kill himself. And where did he get that copy of the News? Don’t tell me he stopped and bought it so he could use it as you say, when he had the Eagle in his pocket. You talk to Paula Brent, and then find whoever put that copy of the Daily News on that bureau. If it’s possible to have a suicide arranged to look like a murder, why not a murder that looks like a suicide?”
“But it didn’t look like a suicide. Remember that.”
“Well, like accidental death. That’s the verdict, isn’t it? And here’s another thing, Inspector. I don’t believe he invented that story about being followed. And who shot at him, that night in the country? You’ll find that that’s true.”
“Plenty of that going on these days,” he retorted. “I still insist that if he meant to kill himself, and wanted it to be considered a murder, he would make up a story just like that, and tell it where it would be repeated.”
“Why should he want it to be considered a murder? If he set that stage, as it was set, with the things for cleaning his gun all over the place, then he meant it to be considered an accident. If he meant anything at all.”
And with that for him to think about, I went back to my patient.
I did not go directly back. I was annoyed with the Inspector and rather upset myself. For the first time in my experience I found not only my sympathy but my judgment opposed to that of Headquarters. I did not believe that Herbert Wynne had killed himself. I believed Paula Brent’s story, vague as it was, and I dreaded the ordeal of interrogation which I knew was before her.
I was undecided when I reached the street. I called a taxicab, and stood with my hand on the door, still hesitating. Then I gave the address of the Brent house in Rosedale, crawled in, and gave myself up to an emotional orgy of irresolution and remorse. I was on my way to warn Paula. I knew police methods. Who better? They would not use physical force with her, of course, but they would discover at once that she was not telling all she knew. After that, they would not stop. They would keep after her, poor little thing; firing questions at her until she was exhausted, playing tricks on her, waiting until she was utterly weary and then pouncing.
I was pretty much exhausted myself when I got to Rosedale. Once a suburb, it is now a part of the city, and I knew the Brent house by sight. It was one of those large brick Colonial houses which should be set back among trees, and instead took up almost all of the lot. At the rear was a garage, and behind that an alley. The block was almost solidly built up, and the alley on both sides lined with similar garages, brick and frame.
Paula was at home, and her mother out. This last was no surprise to me. Mrs. Brent was on the Woman’s Board of St. Luke’s, and when she was not there, running her finger around for dust and prying into the refrigerators in the diet kitchens, she was somewhere else doing the same thing. I knew the type; the sort who leaves her daughter to a governess until she is old enough to come out, and then wonders why she gets into trouble.
The butler showed me into a large living room, and I found Paula there. She had apparently been curled up in the corner of a davenport until I came in, and I had a feeling that she had not been alone there; that someone had left the room by a rear door as I entered. I thought she looked somewhat better, and she even managed a smile, although I saw that she was startled.
“Then you knew me, all along,” she said.
I had not thought of that, and it took some quick thinking. “I’ve seen a good many pictures of you, Miss Brent.”
“Funny! I never thought of that.”
But when I told her that the police would probably want to ask her some questions, she sat down suddenly, as though she had gone weak in the knees.
“What makes you think that?”
“They saw you with me this morning, and I think they followed you home,” I said shamelessly. “I thought maybe I’d better tell you. They have a way of getting the facts, you know.”
She lighted a cigarette, and I thought her hands were unsteady. But she looked at me again with that queer look of defiance that I had noticed before.
“I’ll tell them just what I told you.”
“If there is anything else—”
“There is nothing else. Herbert was killed by someone in that house, probably Hugo, and that old woman knows it. If the police are out to whitewash the Mitchell family, I’ll call in a bunch of reporters and tell them so! You can tell them that, if you like.”
But it was bravado. So was the cigarette, and her whole general attitude. She was very pale, and the next thing I knew, she was crumpled up in a heap on the davenport, crying as though her heart would break. I found myself trying to quiet her, and from that moment on, through all that was on the way for all of us, I found myself unconsciously on that child’s side, and against the police.
And that in spite of the fact that I was fully aware, as the butler showed me out, that she had already started back for that rear door, where somebody unknown had been waiting and probably listening.
Miss Juliet ate a fair supper that evening, and I must say that everybody around the place seemed more cheerful than I had yet seen them. The meal, too, was the most substantial I had seen served, and Hugo moved almost lightly around the table. After all, why not? No one there had had any affection for Herbert Wynne, and his passing and the verdict meant a clear hundred thousand dollars for them. I began to think, not that the death had been as the Inspector now believed, but that it had had its compensations. After all, comfort and security for the old age of three elderly people were not such bad things in exchange for a boy who had obviously been of little value to the world, save to one girl, who would soon forget him.
I was, however, rather surprised to learn that certain plans had been made in my absence. Hugo told me of them when he brought in my dessert.
“I beg pardon, miss, but I thought you would like to know. Doctor Stewart and Mr. Glenn are going to be in the house tonight.”
“Both of them? What for?”
“The gentlemen consider it advisable, miss. Mr. Glenn will be here until two o’clock, and Doctor Stewart will spend the remainder of the night. I understand that he has a case which will keep him until about that time.”
“They haven’t said why?”
“No, miss.”
I lost patience at that. “Now listen to me, Hugo. If you know anything, it’s your business to tell the police. What is it? Who was here last night, on that landing? And who are they afraid will get in again tonight?”
But he had no explanation beyond what I already knew. The two men had met there late that afternoon, and Hugo had told them about the night before. It was Mr. Glenn who had suggested the watch on the house.
“After all, miss,” Hugo went on, “if somebody got in on Monday night and again last night, there’s no telling when they will try again.”
“But for what purpose, Hugo? Why should somebody try to get in?”
“I haven’t any idea, miss.”
And somehow I believed him.
Nevertheless there was an element of humor in that night’s vigil as kept by the two men who had arranged it, and also a bit of drama. One or two small things, too, rather roused my curiosity.
Thus, although the general atmosphere had certai
nly improved, I thought there was some sort of trouble between Mary and Hugo that evening. She stood sullenly over her stove while Hugo prepared Miss Juliet’s tray, and once, when he spoke to her, she ignored him. Also, while she relieved me for my dinner, she must have said something to the old lady which upset her, for her pulse was faster when I went back to her.
Some of the humor lay in Mr. Glenn’s rather ponderous and meticulous examination of the house when he arrived at nine o’clock. He spent some time in the kitchen with Mary, and then proceeded to go over the entire place, including the cellars; and the only good laugh I had during that entire week was when he somehow managed to knock over a can of red paint at the top of the cellar stairs, slip on the top step, and bump all the way to the bottom.
He was not hurt, but he was outraged to the very depths of his soul. I could hear him swearing clear up in the sickroom, and I was just in time to see him emerging, apparently covered with blood, and in a vicious humor. He had to send home for other clothes, and the house smelled of paint all night!
Mary was sullenly viewing the wreckage when I went back again.
“How on earth did he do it, Mary?”
“I don’t know, miss. He’d do well to keep to his own part of the house. That’s all.”
After that we settled down. Apparently Mr. Glenn had brought some work with him, for at ten o’clock his confidential secretary arrived, and as it turned out, it was she—her name, I learned later, was Florence Lenz—who provided the only bit of drama we had that Wednesday night.
I had seen her when she came in, and I did not like her much. She had evidently made a special toilet for the occasion, and she stopped in the hall to powder her nose. I knew her sort the minute I saw her. They never forget that their employer is a man, and when he is, like Mr. Glenn, pretty much a man of the world and not married, that he may represent anything from a tidy flat to a marriage license.
But she was evidently an efficient secretary, and they worked together in the library with the door open until midnight. Now and then he would emerge, make a round of the lower floor, and then go back again. I could hear his voice, monotonously dictating something to her, and only broken by these tours of duty.
Then, at twelve o’clock, he let her go, sending her out to his car and calling to the chauffeur to take her home. And it was not more than three minutes later, when I had at last settled down for some sleep, that I heard the doorbell ringing furiously and Mr. Glenn running to the door.
I was a trifle scared myself when he opened it. There was the chauffeur with the secretary in his arms. Looking as helpless as men always do at such times.
“What’s the matter? Is she hurt?”
And with that she released herself, stumbled through the doorway and dropped gracefully on the floor at Mr. Glenn’s feet! I ran down at once, in my dressing gown and bare feet, and I had only to touch her eyeballs to know that she was no more in a faint than I was. It did not take me long to go back to the kitchen and get a bottle of household ammonia. I had seen plenty of this fake fainting, and I have never known anything quicker than a good whiff of that stuff to bring them around.
It did not take her long. She choked and coughed, and when she opened her eyes, she gave me a look of plain hatred! But she came around all right, and it turned out that she had something to tell after all. I had not believed it at first, nor, I think, had Mr. Glenn.
“Sit up, Miss Lenz, and don’t be an idiot,” he said. “What’s the matter? What happened to you?”
“A man,” she said, still coughing from the ammonia. “A man. He knocked me down and ran over me.”
“Knocked you down? He attacked you?”
“He knocked me down and ran over me.”
“You’ve said that before! Where was all this?”
“Around the corner.”
“What corner?”
“Around the corner of the house.”
And there was certainly some truth in what she claimed, as we realized when we looked at her. Her knee was cut—she wore her stockings rolled, of course!—and she had a considerable bump on her head. Mr. Glenn asked no more questions. He went out the front door in a hurry, leaving Florence glaring at me.
“That’s a dirty trick you pulled!” she said.
“It revived you.”
“It damn near killed me.”
Well, there was enough truth in that to send me rather remorsefully upstairs for some dressings and adhesive plaster. I was still working over her knee, and she was making a lot of fuss about it, when Mr. Glenn came back and she told her story.
She had started for the car, and then decided to go around the house and take what she elegantly called a look-see. All her life she had heard of the Mitchell place, and now she was inside the gates.
“I told Mac to wait,” she said—Mac was evidently Mr. Glenn’s chauffeur—“and that I was going to walk around the house. But as I rounded the corner at the back, this fellow bumped into me, and how! Well, he knocked me flat, but did he stop? He did not. He simply jumped over me and beat it. You can ask Mac. He heard him running.”
Well, it might or might not be important. I didn’t know. We got rid of her at last, loudly calling on “Mac” to bear her out, and limping so that Mr. Glenn had to help her to the car. But that was the only dramatic incident of the night. When the doctor arrived at two o’clock, his reaction to the Lenz girl’s story was characteristic.
“Somebody’s chauffeur, going home late across lots,” he said dryly. “Probably worse scared than the girl, at that.”
And I gathered, after the lawyer had left, that the doctor considered the whole idea a silly one.
“I’m ready to do my bit,” he said to me. “I’m used to losing sleep, if it comes to that. But what the hell do Glenn and Hugo think anyone wants out of this house? A lot of secondhand furniture?”
After which he proceeded to settle himself on the old sofa in the hall, and to sleep there comfortably for the rest of the night. I could hear him snoring as I lay on my extemporized bed at the foot of the big walnut one, so I finally dropped off myself. I needed sleep that night, and I got it.
CHAPTER X
That was on Wednesday night.
I wakened early the next morning, and lay on my sofa, thinking over the newspaper incident and the Inspector’s theory about it. It seemed to me, not only that if a suicide could be planned to look like a murder, a murder could also be planned to look like a suicide; but that in this latter event the newspaper became extremely important. For suppose a charge of murder was made, against Hugo, for example? What would be simpler than for Hugo to produce that paper and thus demonstrate that Herbert had killed himself, but had carefully arranged it to look like murder or accidental death?
In that case the paper would not have been destroyed. It would be carefully hidden, perhaps somewhere in the library, where I had missed it, or better still, in that back flat where Hugo and Mary lived their silent lives together.
At seven o’clock I heard Doctor Stewart moving in the hall below. There was an old-fashioned marble washstand built in under the stairs, and I could hear him washing there. Soon after that he went outside, and I could see him from a window making a round of the house. Apparently he discovered nothing suspicious there, for when he had had a cup of coffee, he came up to see Miss Juliet, and he was scornful about the whole business.
“I don’t believe there was anyone there at all,” he said. “What I think is that that girl, whatever her name is, fell over something and then cooked up a story for Glenn. Makes her interesting! And Glenn’s not married.”
He left soon after that, and I went down to get my own breakfast. But I found myself watching Hugo that morning with a sort of indignation. What manner of man was this, if I were right, putting down my coffee with a steady hand, bringing in my bacon, and placing the morning paper before me almost with a flourish: “WYNNE VERDICT—ACCIDENTAL DEATH.” I looked up and caught his eye, and I thought he looked away.
�
�So they’ve settled it, Hugo!”
“It’s all settled, miss. Apparently.”
But for all his flourish, he seemed quiet and depressed. There was no talk going on in the kitchen when I got the old lady’s tray, and Mary was still sullen and morose.
Just what was it that Mary knew, and Miss Juliet? For that they shared some guilty knowledge I felt convinced by that time. Why must Mary write her messages to the old lady and then destroy them? Why had she resented Mr. Glenn the night before?
I have lain awake at night since, wondering if poor old Miss Juliet ever felt that I suspected her of some tacit connivance in that crime, and thinking of the price she had to pay to convince me that she was innocent. Poor old Miss Juliet Mitchell, succumbing to her one moment of temptation, and so sending herself in all innocence to what the Inspector called the black-out! I was glad that she never knew that. And I am glad to remember that if, from that time on, there was little kindness in my care of her, at least I did my duty by her. And I hope a little more.
They buried Herbert that morning, Thursday, from a mortuary chapel in the town. I gathered later that there was a small attendance of old friends of the family, and an enormous crowd of morbid-minded people there. And that at least one person attended in simple grief and with utter recklessness of consequences—Paula Brent. Hugo did not go at all, but at ten o’clock Mary appeared in the doorway of Miss Juliet’s room, clad in the black raiment which certain people keep for such occasions, and shouted to the old lady.
“I’m going, Miss Juliet.”
“Thank you, Mary.”
That was all.
At noon the Inspector called me up, to say that he was going to talk to Paula Brent that afternoon, and would like me to be there.
“You’d better come down and check on her story,” he said. “Watch out for any discrepancies. She’s pretty much haywire just now, but she’ll have settled down by the time you get here.”
I looked about, but Hugo was in the kitchen, and Mary had not come back. I lowered my voice. “You might have given her a little time, after this morning!”
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