Miss Pinkerton

by Rinehart, Mary Roberts;

  “About eleven fifteen, I imagine. And she didn’t leave for ten minutes or so afterward.”

  “Oh! She left again?”

  “Yes. She stayed there in the garage for some time. I gathered that she was crying and was pretty well upset, and I waited because—well, I was interested, and I didn’t much like her being there alone and in trouble. As a matter of fact, I was seriously considering going over to see what I could do, when she started her car and went out again.”

  “What time was that?”

  “It may have been eleven thirty, or thereabouts. Long enough, anyhow, for my wife gave me the devil when I got back. She’s rather nervous,” he added sheepishly.

  I could believe that. He offered a complete picture of the subdued and dominated husband as he stood in the Mitchell hall that night, giving evidence that he would infinitely have preferred keeping to himself.

  He had little more to add. He had not heard Paula’s car come back, but his wife said that she had got in shortly after three thirty. They had a clock which chimed the hours. He hated the thing, but his wife liked it. She didn’t sleep very well, and it was company for her.

  Mr. Henderson left shortly before Hugo and the deputy inspector returned, and I had little or no time to discuss the new turn events had taken before I was compelled to retreat to the sickroom. I noticed that the Inspector looked unusually grave, however.

  He sent the deputy inspector away about a quarter to eleven, and then, with Hugo leading the way, he proceeded to make a minute inspection of the house from the basement to the upper floor. I saw him stop on the landing and inspect the locked and bolted door to the servants’ quarters, and he even stooped and glanced at the clothing still lying on the stairs. He saw the inverted pocket, I imagine, for he straightened and glanced at Hugo. But Hugo was imperturbable.

  It was midnight when he went away. Miss Juliet had wakened by that time, so I went down at half past twelve and heated a glass of milk for her. But I must admit I was not comfortable down there. A wind was blowing outside, and the kitchen wing seemed to be even more out of repair than the rest of the house. It creaked and groaned, and once I would have sworn that the tea-kettle moved right across the top of the stove! If it had been possible to gallop upstairs with a glass of hot milk in my hand, I would have done it! As it was, I went up with my head turned over my shoulder, until I got almost to the top of the stairs. Then I fixed my eyes on the landing, and if Miss Juliet had appeared there at that minute in her white nightgown, I dare say I would have died of heart failure.

  But I got to the room safely enough, and after the old lady drank the milk, she grew drowsy. Just before she dozed off, however, she asked me if Hugo had gone to bed, and seemed disappointed to learn that he had.

  “I want to see him,” she said. “I must see him before Arthur comes back, in the morning. He has a right to know.”

  She did not explain that, so at one o’clock I put on my kimono and fixed my couch for the night.

  Something roused me after I had been asleep an hour or so. It sounded like a door banging somewhere, and I looked at the luminous dial of my watch. It was two o’clock, and there was a real gale going outside, although the room was quiet enough. But as I lay there, a sudden gust came in over the transom, and I could dimly see, by the distant street lights, that the curtain at the window was blowing out, and flapping in the wind.

  Out, and not in! That took a moment to register in my mind, and then it meant only one thing. Someone somewhere in the house had opened either an outside door or a window.

  I sat up and stared over the foot of the bed at the door into the hall, and I admit that if the handle had so much as turned, I was prepared to let out a shriek that would have reached to the police station. But it did not, and I was drawing a real breath when something happened which set my heart to hammering again. Something fell in the hall, or rather on the stairs to the third floor. There was no crash, but a dull thud, and then a complete and utter silence. I knew at once what it was.

  Somebody had been going up those stairs to the third floor, and had stumbled over the clothes piled on them.

  CHAPTER XIV

  For just a moment I had an irresistible impulse to crawl into bed beside Miss Juliet and cover my head with the bedclothes. The next, however, I was in the center of the floor, and listening intently. There was no further sound, and I moved to the door and put my ear against it.

  There was no room for doubt. Someone was stealthily climbing the stairs to the third floor. The old stairs creaked one after the other, and one of the boards on the landing gave with a loud crack.

  The next second I was out in the dark hall and feeling my way to the locked door to the back flat. I wanted Hugo; I wanted Hugo and Mary. I wanted somebody near, and the fact that, in spite of everything, I still suspected Hugo of the murder seemed at that minute to have no importance whatever.

  In a condition approaching panic I groped my way through that awful darkness, and flung myself against the door. “Hugo!” I called. “Hugo!”

  The next second I was falling, and that is all I remember.

  When I came to, I was lying flat on my back in a room I had never seen before, and Mary, in her nightgown, was sprinkling water on my face and listening to a crashing noise overhead which sounded like the breaking down of a door. Hugo was not in sight.

  “Where am I?” I asked feebly.

  “In our sitting room, miss,” Mary said shortly. “You fainted.”

  I managed to sit up and look about me. From somewhere out in the grounds a man was calling, and from overhead came that continued battering, as though a heavy body was throwing itself against a door. Mary had left me and was standing in the doorway, listening; in the doorway, for that long-locked door onto the landing was standing wide open. But a strangely changed Mary. If ever I have seen a woman look tortured, she did that night. When I spoke again to her, she did not reply.

  “It’s a strong door,” she said, as though she was talking to herself. “It looks old and easy to break, but it’s strong.”

  “Who’s in the room?” I demanded. “Is it Hugo?”

  That seemed to register. She turned and gave me a strange look. “Hugo!” she said. “Hugo is up there helping the police.”

  And as if to prove it, there was a call above for an axe, and Hugo passed the open doorway on a run, going downstairs apparently to get one.

  I got up then, rather dizzily, and surveyed the site of my recent disaster. The door from the little sitting room onto the landing was open, as I have said, and I could see readily enough what had happened. I had thrown myself against it, and it had been partly open. In my fall I must have struck my head, perhaps on the rocker of a chair nearby, for I found a sharp bruise on my forehead later on.

  The room itself was small and dreary enough, although it was very tidy. In a corner a small staircase led down into darkness, and I knew that it ended at the side door behind the parlor window. All this I took in at a glance: the room, the staircase, the open door and Mary in it. I moved unsteadily toward the doorway, to find her planted squarely in it.

  “Better sit down and wait a minute, miss. You’ve had a bad knock.”

  “Let me out, Mary. I’m going upstairs.”

  She eyed me. “Nobody’s going up those stairs,” she said doggedly. “Let them fight it out themselves. You stay here.”

  “Don’t be idiotic, Mary. I can at least go to see Miss Juliet.”

  She moved aside, unwillingly. “I wouldn’t wonder there’ll be shooting,” she said. “He’ll be desperate.”

  “He? Who?”

  She shrugged her shoulders, under her cheap cotton nightgown. “You’ll find out soon enough now,” was all she would say, and again fell into that somber attitude of waiting and listening. For what? Even now I am uncertain as to how much Mary knew that night, or how much she merely suspected.

  I looked in at Miss Juliet. She was wide awake, and staring at the door as I entered.

  “Wh
at is it?” she asked anxiously. “Who is running up and down the stairs?”

  Well, there was no use mincing matters. I shouted to her that the police were in the house, and that they had apparently trapped a burglar on the third floor; that he had locked himself in one of the rooms, and they were breaking down the door. But if I had expected her to show excitement, she did not.

  “I hope they won’t break the door,” she said. “My father was so proud of the doors in this house. They are all solid walnut. Ask them to do as little damage as they can.”

  And that was that! I gazed at her in astonishment, but she only waved me toward the hall.

  “Tell them, please.”

  I went out obediently, and over those piles of clothing to the upper hall. It was all a part of the strangeness of that night that I should find the Inspector there outside the closed door into Herbert’s room, with Evans, the deputy inspector from Headquarters, and a lieutenant in uniform, and that none of them paid any attention to me. I can still see them, the Inspector with his gun in his hand, and the lieutenant now working with the axe. But as I arrived, the Inspector stopped them.

  “Pretty solid door,” he said. Then, raising his voice, he called, “Stand aside in there. I’m going to shoot this lock.”

  He waited a few seconds and then fired. The explosion fairly rocked the old house, but the door swung open, and the three men burst into the room. I was just behind them, and I saw standing against the wall by the head of the bed a tall, very good-looking young man, ghastly white, but with a faint smile on his face.

  He moved away from the wall and faced us all squarely, still with that faint whimsical smile. “Pretty good door!” he said. “Don’t make them like that any more.”

  “Good, but not good enough,” said the Inspector, fumbling in his pockets. “Look him over, Evans.”

  “I’m not armed.”

  “I’m not looking for a gun. I want a bunch of keys.”

  He shrugged at that, and submitted quietly while the deputy searched him, laying out on the bureau in methodical order what he found: a monogrammed handkerchief, a gold cigarette case, a wallet, some loose money, and last of all a key ring with a number of keys. The Inspector took these last, and the young man smiled again.

  “Sorry, Inspector,” he said. “I can identify them all; office key, keys to my car, keys to my home. That’s all. You can try them out if you like.”

  “I wouldn’t be feeling funny, if I were in your place,” said the Inspector grimly. “Take these down and try them, Jim.” He passed the keys to the lieutenant, who disappeared. “How did you get into this house?”

  “Maybe I found the doors open.”

  But the Inspector merely grunted, and went to the window.

  “O’Reilly,” he called, “did this bird throw anything out of the window?”

  “Didn’t hear anything, Inspector.”

  “Well, take a look around. I want a bunch of keys.”

  He turned back to the boy. “I’m arresting you, Elliott. I guess you know why.”

  “Housebreaking? ”

  “That will do until we find those keys.”

  “And then what?”

  “Then I’ll arrest you for the murder of Herbert Wynne, in this room, last Monday night.”

  He fumbled in his pockets and brought out a pair of handcuffs, and for a second or so I thought the boy was going to faint. Then he straightened himself and smiled again, faintly.

  “So I killed him,” he said quietly. “I killed him, but I couldn’t stay away from the scene of my crime! Like a dog returning to his vomit, eh?”

  “I’ve told you it isn’t funny.”

  “I’m not trying to be funny. I’m trying not to cry, or fight. You don’t need the bracelets. I’m coming all right.”

  “You bet you’re coming.”

  We stood there, waiting. The lieutenant brought back young Elliott’s keys, reporting that none of them fitted the doors in question. In the grounds, O’Reilly and Evans, the deputy inspector, were searching below the window, presumably with a flashlight. In the doorway Hugo stood like a man carved out of stone, and down in Miss Juliet’s room I could hear Mary shouting to her that they had caught the burglar.

  Suddenly the boy lost his debonair manner. He looked at the Inspector with rather desperate young eyes. “I’d like to stop and tell my mother,” he said. “She’d take it better from me. She hasn’t been well, and this will be a shock to her.”

  “It’s a little late to be thinking about a shock for her, isn’t it?” the Inspector said coldly.

  The boy—he was not much more—made an odd little gesture, throwing out both hands in a helpless fashion that went to my heart. Then he got hold of himself again, shrugged his shoulders and put his hands in his pockets.

  “Sorry!” he said. “My fault! Forgive these tears! And may I have a cigarette? No poison in them, save the natural poison of the natural leaf.”

  When no one spoke, he went to the bureau and took one from his case. In that brilliant light, with all eyes on him, he looked like a bright-haired young actor, rehearsing a bit of business. When he had lighted his cigarette, he flicked his eyes over us, and they came to rest on me. He stood looking at me thoughtfully.

  “You, there,” he said. “I don’t know your name. Will you telephone a message for me?”

  “To your mother?”

  “I’ll attend to that. To Paula Brent. You know her. In fact, I think you owe her something, don’t you? If it hadn’t been for you—but never mind that. Tell her there has been a slip-up, but she is not to worry. Will you?”

  I glanced at the Inspector. But at that instant we heard the tramp of feet below, and soon after, Evans and O’Reilly came into the room. Evans held out his hand, without speaking. On his palm lay two keys on a silver ring, and he confronted the Elliott boy with them.

  “These what you threw away?”

  “That would be telling. Think it out for yourself,” he said, with that white-lipped flippancy which fooled nobody.

  “These are Herbert Wynne’s keys, to the side door and to the door on the second-floor landing. His initials are on the key ring. How did you get them?”

  “That,” said young Elliott quietly, “I regard strictly as my own business.”

  CHAPTER XV

  It was about half past two when they took him away. He walked down the stairs jauntily enough, and he went down without the bracelets after all. I think the Inspector felt a sort of grudging admiration for the way he had carried it off, and after all there were four of them to guard him. I stood in the hall and watched that heavy-footed procession go out the front door, and something in me rebelled. That boy a killer!

  Yet I knew that the case against him was practically complete, so far as the police were concerned. He had a motive, as Mr. Henderson and a good many other people knew; he had been in love with Paula Brent, probably still was. He had left her in anger on Monday night, to go and settle the matter with someone unknown. She had been frightened and had followed him somewhat later; and that the somebody he meant to settle with was Herbert Wynne was certain, for it was to the Mitchell house that she had gone.

  It was one of those neatly fitting cases that the Inspector loved, as I knew. Every piece fell into place, now that he had the keys. Here was the Elliott boy in Herbert’s room that night, and old Miss Juliet unconsciously cutting off his retreat; and here was the open window, and his strong young arms to swing him to the roof below, and safety. But not immediate safety. There must have been a bad time when the Inspector threw his flashlight out onto that roof; the boy cowering behind the chimney, and the flash playing on both sides of him.

  Just how Paula had discovered him there I did not know. It seemed certain, however, that she had, that she had then gone in search of a ladder, dragged it to the house and so enabled him to escape. And I had not the slightest doubt that it was Charles Elliott who, as the man in the dinner jacket, had returned the ladder to the Manchester property.


  Tragic as the situation was, I had to smile at the sheer audacity with which that entire escape was carried through, and at the thought of Inspector Patton smoking quietly on the front porch, while those two youngsters calmly used that ladder and then politely returned it to where it belonged. As a matter of fact, later on we were to learn that when the Inspector left me Monday night to investigate a sound at the rear of the house, he almost fell over that ladder as it lay on the ground.

  That was one time when his theory of working in the dark failed him!

  But I only learned that later, and after much grief and further trouble had made all that relatively unimportant. What I knew that night, as they took the boy away, was that he was in line for the chair; and I felt I could not bear it.

  I knew well enough what would happen. I had seen it too often. The District Attorney’s office would make its case, using only what it required to do so, and eliminating everything which conflicted with it. That scrap of powder-stained newspaper would never be brought into evidence; nor another thing which occurred to me as I once more prepared for what was left of the night. Herbert had started to undress when he was shot. That didn’t look as though Charlie Elliott had entered the house with him; and if he had not, then how had he got in?

  It was easy enough to explain his presence this night, provided he had killed Herbert. He could have taken the keys from his pocket. They were Herbert’s own keys. But on Monday night he would not have had those keys. And again, even granting that he had killed Herbert Wynne, why had he taken the keys from him? What mystery lay behind them, and his reckless entrance tonight into the house which, above all others, he should have avoided? And was this his first visit? What about that figure I had seen on the landing, the night I had found Hugo asleep in the parlor? What about the man who had bumped into Florence Lenz? Had Charlie Elliott been that figure, that man?

  I sat down on my sofa and held my head. I had a lump the size of a goose egg on it, and my brain felt like a cheese soufflé, but I had to do my thinking then, if ever; I knew that something terrible was going to happen if I did not.