Miss Pinkerton

by Rinehart, Mary Roberts;

  “She’s had three days,” he said, rather ominously, and hung up the receiver.

  I was considerably upset when I went upstairs again. What did he mean by that three days?

  Mary came back soon afterward, and when I went upstairs after lunch, I found that she had been carrying down the dead boy’s clothes, and piling them on the stairs to the third floor. They lay outside Miss Juliet’s room, on the lower steps, piled in neat bundles; his shirts, his collars and ties, his suits of clothing. There was something dreadful to me in that haste of hers to get rid of the last vestiges of that unlucky youth, and I called Mary into the hall and said so.

  “What is the hurry?” I asked. “That could wait, couldn’t it?”

  “It was her idea,” she said sourly. “She wants to look them over. They’re to go to the Salvation Army. And what’s wrong about it? He’ll never need them again.”

  When I went in, I found Miss Juliet’s pulse fast again, and not too good. I gave her some digitalis, and I advised her to let the clothing wait for a day or two.

  “You’re in no condition to do things like that, Miss Juliet,” I told her sternly. “A day won’t matter, and I won’t be answerable to the doctor if you don’t obey orders.”

  She nodded. “Mary wanted to get them out of the house,” she said. “Certainly there is no hurry.”

  Well, I could make what I wanted of those two statements, Mary’s and hers, although I was pretty much puzzled. Had they been going over his clothing together, those two old women, searching for something? I thought of that as she nibbled without appetite at the food on the tray I had carried up. Were they afraid he had left something, a letter perhaps, which would weaken or destroy the verdict which meant so much to them? A letter was the usual thing left by suicides.

  Still, if he had killed himself, why take all that trouble to make it look like something else, and then leave such a letter? Unless it was a letter he might have received, from Paula perhaps. Almost certainly she would have written to him.

  The only thing I could work out from that was that Paula might have written him something about the danger he was in, and that those two women suspected that she had. But, of course, that implied that they knew both of this danger and about Paula. I was not sure that they knew either. Actually I was sure of only one thing, and that was that they had made a systematic search of the dead boy’s clothing.

  That theory was verified when I saw that the coat which Mary had hastily laid on the stairs as I appeared had a pocket turned inside out. Of course that really proved nothing. Everyone goes over clothing before giving it away. Or the police might have done it. It was only the haste and stealth of the performance that looked queer to me.

  I would rather have had a tooth pulled than go into the Inspector’s neat and tidy office that afternoon. Unlike the Police Commissioner’s room, which was a sort of murder museum with revolvers, dirks and even a bit of charred human bone glued to a card, the Inspector’s office was bare to the last degree. A chair or two, a big desk, and two telephones were all that it contained. But I stood for some time with my hand on the knob of the door, before I could make up my mind to go in and face Paula Brent. Nor was my discomfort lessened when she looked up at me with a dreary little smile.

  “So they’ve got you, too!” she said.

  “It looks like it.”

  “Well, I hope he believes you. He doesn’t believe me. He thinks Herbert killed himself.”

  “If he was sure of that, you wouldn’t be here,” I told her.

  And that turned out to be the case. The interrogation had barely commenced, but I saw at once that the Inspector had at least temporarily abandoned the suicide theory.

  She bore up under it very well, although watching her as she sat in her straight chair—facing the light, as did everyone called for questioning into that office—I saw what struck me as rather pathetic; that she had put on a black dress and a little black hat for the funeral.

  It had its effect on the Inspector also, for he handled her with rather unusual gentleness. And I must say that the story she told him was the story she had told me, word for word. Now and then he looked at me, and I nodded. It was not until he began to question her that she seemed less assured.

  “Now, about your being on the Mitchell place that night. You hadn’t, by any chance, been in the house with him?”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “I’m asking you, Miss Brent. Don’t get the idea that I think you killed him. I know better. But if you had quarreled, and after you left, he had decided to—you see what I mean.”

  “Never. We had never quarreled.”

  “Tell me about the two hours between the time you separated, and the time you saw the house lighted and a police car in the drive.”

  “I just drove around,” she said vaguely. “I was nervous.”

  “Drove for two hours? Where did you go?”

  “I really don’t know.”

  “You must know,” he said sharply. “You know the roads around here. You had to get back home. Come, come, Miss Brent! Don’t you want us to learn the truth about all this?”

  “What I did has nothing to do with that. I didn’t kill him.”

  “Well, where were you when you had the trouble, on what road?”

  “Trouble? What sort of trouble?”

  “Didn’t something happen to your car?”

  She remembered then, and glanced at me suspiciously. “I had a flat tire. It was outside of Norrisville. It took me a good while to change it.”

  And then, while she was still confused over that temporary lapse, he flung a bomb at her.

  “Just why did you get that ladder?”

  She stared at him, her lips slightly parted. For a moment she could not speak.

  “I don’t know what you mean by a ladder.”

  “I think you do,” he said quietly. “And I warn you against concealing anything which has a bearing on this case. You got a ladder and dragged it across two lawns and through the shrubbery of the Mitchell place; and a good trail you left. If you want to see it, I have a rough drawing here.”

  But she made no move to look at it. She sat huddled in her chair, her face white and drawn. “I don’t understand,” she said weakly. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  Nor did I, for that matter. The afternoon before, he had told me that a man had carried that ladder, and now here he was accusing this girl. He has his own methods, however, and in the next question he had apparently abandoned the ladder, and shifted to something else.

  “You told Miss Adams that Herbert’s family, or rather Miss Mitchell and her household, did not like him.”

  “They hated him.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “He always said so. Lately it had been worse. For a month or so.”

  “What do you mean by worse?”

  “He got frightened. They were following him.”

  “That’s rather absurd, isn’t it? Old Miss Juliet could follow nobody.”

  “Somebody was following him. He began to carry his revolver.”

  “He never said who it was?”

  “He didn’t know. I think now that it was Hugo.”

  “Why Hugo?”

  I need not repeat that part of her story. It was much like what she had told me. But she added something which was new. This was to the effect that, while Herbert had refused to explain his fears and suspicions to her, he had told her he had written a letter, so that if anything happened to him, she would understand. And that on Wednesday morning, when I had surprised her in the yard, she had been trying to get into the house to find it.

  “That’s the truth, is it?”

  “I’ve told you.”

  “You weren’t there to see if that ladder had left any marks, and to erase them if you found them?”

  “What ladder?”

  But the questions had evidently alarmed her, for now she began to cry. She didn’t know anything about a ladder. She
wished he would let her alone. She wanted to go home. After all, she hadn’t killed Herbert, although the Inspector acted as though she had. When she was quieter, I noticed that he had tactfully abandoned the ladder.

  “This letter you speak of, did he tell anyone else about it?”

  “He wouldn’t. I’m sure he never did.”

  He nodded, and shortly after that he got up.

  “You understand, of course, that you re not under arrest. That would be ridiculous. But I shall ask you a few more questions, and I’ll see that your family is notified of your safety. You’ll be home tonight, all right. In the meantime the matron will see that you are comfortable, and we’ll have some food sent in.”

  “Why not ask them now?” she said. “If I’m not guilty, you have no business to hold me.”

  “Maybe not.” He smiled down at her. “But I can’t ask my questions yet; and after all, you and I want the same thing, don’t we? We want to know who killed Herbert Wynne, if he was killed. And why.”

  CHAPTER XI

  She went, chin high and her bearing faintly defiant, when the matron came. The Inspector followed her out with his eyes, and waited until the door had closed.

  “How about it, Miss Adams?”

  “It’s the same story.”

  “She almost forgot the tire!”

  “That doesn’t prove anything, does it? She has had a lot to distract her. How on earth did you learn that she had dragged that ladder, Inspector?”

  “I didn’t,” he said calmly. “We found the tracks, all right. They led toward the Mitchell house. But we found none leading back. In other words, it looked as though someone without strength to carry it had taken it to the house; that might be a woman, or a girl. But it had been carried back; somebody had had strength enough to do that, and as you know, this man was seen.”

  “And that footprint was hers?”

  “That’s my guess. She wore high heels, and so she slipped off her pumps. She’s intelligent, and if she was scared that night, she was still using her brains.”

  “Then you think she got somebody off that roof? On Monday night?”

  “I do indeed, Miss Pinkerton!”

  “Who?”

  But he ignored that for the time. He got out his old briar pipe and carefully filled it.

  “It’s like this,” he said finally. “When there’s a question between murder and suicide, we have only one choice. We have to go on the murder theory until that’s disproved. That doesn’t mean that it is a murder. It only means that it may be a murder. But in this case there are a number of things that begin to confirm my first impressions. The coroner didn’t have all of them. I can’t see that boy in front of the bureau when that shot was fired, and I know he didn’t move a foot after it was fired. But I can’t see that ladder either, unless it was used to let somebody escape from that roof who had no business to be there. Any more than this fellow in the grounds had any business there last night.”

  “You know about that, do you?” I asked, surprised.

  “I know a little about a lot of things,” he said. “And not enough about any one of them. For instance, why the deuce let those two amateur sleuths take over the job of the police?”

  “It was their idea, not mine. I’d told you I had seen something on the landing the night before,” I said indignantly. “But you were too busy shooting yourself through a newspaper to pay much attention.”

  He grinned at that, but he was sober enough as he went on. “Well, we both slipped up there,” he agreed. “The point is that Hugo was scared last night, and that he didn’t want the police. So he gets the two men he trusts; and we lose something that might be important.”

  He filled his pipe and leaned back in his chair. “After talking with this girl,” he said, “I notice that there is one element which she has been mighty careful to keep out of her story. That’s her family. She’s frightened, and so she emphasizes the fact the Mitchell household disliked him.

  “But somebody else may have had more than dislike for him. He was a weakling, with the unbridled passions of his type, and here was a nice girl in love with him. Who had a reason for putting him out of the way? Maybe more of a reason than we know?”

  “I suppose you mean Mr. Brent. But I don’t think—”

  “No? Well, fathers have a way of looking after their daughters. And remember, this boy was a bad actor. He may already have—well, let’s not get carried away. She looks like a girl with character, but just the same she has a father; and it’s pretty certain that that father was afraid of him, and of what might happen. Mind you, I’m not accusing the father. He just enters the picture as a possibility, provided this turns out to be a murder.

  “Now go back to that night. Herbert Wynne may have killed himself, but he was a fellow with a weak chin and that sort are pretty careful of their skins! Also, if she is right about his whistling when he left her and all that, we have to suppose that something happened between eleven and twelve o’clock that night which changed his cheerfulness into despair. That’s a pretty short time. What had he done, or what had he learned, to effect that change? Had Paula thrown him over? She doesn’t act as though she had.”

  “She hadn’t,” I said positively. “Whether she was in love with him or simply infatuated, I don’t know. But she’s still wearing his ring, if you noticed.”

  He nodded. “I did notice. Nice ring, too. I’d like to know where he got the money for it … But let’s get on to Mr. Brent again. And by the way, that story of the broken windshield is true enough. We’ve checked it.”

  “So Mr. Brent drove past his daughter’s car, and fired at it! How did he know he wouldn’t kill her?”

  That annoyed him, although he laughed. “I’ve said that there is a good bit of indiscriminate shooting going on just now. Let’s leave that for a minute. Suppose that the girl’s father has followed them, seen them in the movies, and when the girl drove off, has followed him home. He goes in with him, there’s a quarrel, the boy’s revolver is on the table, and—because it has turned out that he deserves it—the father shoots him. Probably he didn’t mean to, but there’s the boy’s gun on the bureau. Perhaps it was that shot that aroused Miss Juliet, although she doesn’t know it. She opens her door, sees a light above, and starts up the stairs. The father is there, trapped!

  “What does he do? He only has a few minutes. He drags the body in front of the bureau, bends the knees, and—using his handkerchief, of course—he puts the revolver on the floor beside him. Then he escapes, by the only way possible.”

  “By the window?”

  “By the window. I believe a strong man could swing over to that roof of the ell, and do it safely. And now take the rest of the story. The girl watches those two go off, either together or the one following the other; and she knows there may be trouble. What does she do? She follows them and hangs around outside the house. That story about a flat tire near Norrisville is pure invention. She hangs around the Mitchell place, and she’s not deaf, or asleep. She hears a shot fired.

  “What can she do? She sees the lights going on, and knows that the household is alarmed and up. But so far as she knows, Mr. Brent is still in the building. She sees the police go in, and later on a Headquarters car. She still hangs around. She stops you, but you can’t tell her anything. And she has to know, somehow.

  “Now we get to the ladder. We’ll say that Mr. Brent is on that roof. He can’t get down, and he’s gone if he’s found there. It isn’t hard to imagine that he saw her below and signaled to her, or that she waited until we had gone and then got that ladder. Of course, this is only conjecture, but something like that happened Monday night, if there was any murder at all.”

  “And so on Wednesday morning,” I said, “when she knew that the servants were at the inquest, she went back there to—”

  “Precisely. To look for the ladder marks and to erase them. You surprised her, and so she told you that story.”

  I sat for some time, thinking this over. It fitte
d together too well to be ignored, but I was not certain of one or two things.

  “He didn’t go in with Herbert,” I said at last. “Herbert had started to undress.”

  “Then he followed him later.”

  “How did he get in? The doorbell rings in the servants’ bedroom as well as in the kitchen. It would have wakened them.”

  “He might have called, or thrown gravel. You and I know that that can be done.”

  But I was not satisfied. “Herbert wouldn’t have admitted Mr. Brent,” I said. “Not if Paula’s story is true. He’d have known that it meant trouble.”

  But he only shrugged his shoulders. “One thing will happen if I’m right,” he said. “We’ll let the family know where Paula is, and if there is anything to this idea, he’ll burst in as soon as he hears it. He’ll probably do that anyhow,” he added ruefully.

  He let me go soon after that, merely saying that he would probably come up that night, to look over the roof and the window sill of Herbert’s room.

  “If this was a murder, then somebody was on that roof all the time we were examining the body and the room,” he said. “As a matter of fact, I looked out over the roof myself. But there’s a sizeable chimney there, and whoever it was, Brent or someone unknown, may have been behind it. But this girl knows who it was. You can bank on that.

  “And don’t forget this,” he added, as I started to go. “That theory doesn’t apply only to Brent. It applies to anyone who was interested in the girl.”

  It was four o’clock when I left the office, and four thirty when I got to the Mitchell place. I bought an evening paper on the way, and I saw that the press already knew that Paula Brent had been interrogated. “SOCIETY GIRL QUERIED IN MITCHELL CASE,” was the heading. Following as it did on a coroner’s verdict of accidental death, the Eagle had certainly made the most of it.

  I was not surprised when I saw the doctor’s car in the drive, but I was startled at Hugo’s face when he let me in.

  “She’s had a bad turn, miss,” he said. “The doctor’s asking for you.”

  I went in, without changing my uniform, to find Miss Juliet lying back on her pillows, and both the doctor and Mary bending over her. The doctor was holding a towel to her nose, and the pungent odor of amyl-nitrite filled the room. When I took her wrist, her pulse was very rapid, and I noticed that her sallow face was flushed.