Miss Pinkerton

by Rinehart, Mary Roberts;

  Miss Juliet was awake but quiet, and in the lower hall I could hear Hugo at the telephone, reporting the night’s events to Doctor Stewart and to Mr. Glenn. Mary was nowhere in sight; I had seen her face as Charlie Elliott was taken downstairs, and it had puzzled me even in that moment of stress. She had looked at the boy, and then she had turned hard relentless eyes on Hugo, following the others. But he had not looked at her.

  It was the door on the landing, I found, which most puzzled me. That is, outside of Charlie Elliott being in the house that night at all. I gave that up. It seemed plain idiocy to me, for if he had left anything incriminating there, he must have known that the Homicide Squad would have found it, unless.it was that he was afraid he had left some prints on the window sill.

  That was possible, and after Hugo had hung up the receiver below and gone to bed, I invented an excuse and went up to look. But if Charlie Elliott had left any readable prints on that sill—and I had the Inspector’s word that he had not—there was no sign of them now. Only in one corner a bit of the print powder which the police had used on them.

  I stood there, looking around that bare little room. Like the rest of the house, Herbert Wynne might never have lived there, for any trace of occupancy he had left. But I noticed something that the police had apparently overlooked. The bed had been moved somewhat. It stood four or five inches away from the wall, and not entirely straight.

  It must have been three o’clock by that time, and three o’clock in the morning is a low hour for nurses as well as patients. But I had to look under that bed, and around it. I hated the room; I hated the whole job. Nevertheless I examined it carefully, and, finding nothing, I got down on the floor and crawled under it. I had had one case where an important paper was hidden under a bed slat, and I was not going to make another mistake.

  But as I have said, that room was filled with ghosts for me, and my head was jumping anyhow. I got underneath somehow, and on my back at that; and I had no sooner done so than something touched my ankle. I lay there, helpless and absolutely paralyzed, and the next minute it gave another soft shove against my knee.

  Then I yelped, and I imagine I hold the world’s record for the lying broad leap. I simply gathered my muscles together and shot out, and why I didn’t carry the bed with me I do not know. I was out in the hall before I dared to look back. Then I saw that it was Mary’s cat again; and if I had bitten it that night, it would have died of tetanus.

  I suppose, in order to make it interesting at this point, I should have gone back into the room and found a clue there. But it has not been my experience that criminals go about dropping cuff-links for the police to discover. And I did not go back into that room. Not that night, at least.

  A nurse has to learn to act, and so I probably looked calm enough when I went back to Miss Juliet. She was still awake. Although she had accepted the story of a burglar calmly, I was not sure that she had believed it, and I have wondered since if some inkling of the truth had come to her that night. Did she know she was in danger? How could she know?

  I cannot think so, and yet something she requested might be so construed. I had been rubbing her with alcohol, after that experience on the third floor, when unexpectedly she said, “I shall want to see my clergyman tomorrow, Miss Adams.”

  “Very well, Miss Juliet.”

  “I want to make a statement to my lawyer first, and then to speak to my clergyman. Mary knows who he is. You can tell her.”

  “A statement? Can’t that wait until you are stronger?”

  “I may never be any stronger,” she said, in her flat voice. And added, as if to reassure me, “After all, I am an old woman, my dear. I am living on borrowed time at the best.”

  I did the usual thing, of course; told her she was getting better all the time, and so on. But my mind was occupied with only the one thing. She was going to make a statement of some sort! A formal statement, signed.

  I took that to my sofa with me later, along with my bump and my headache. What sort of statement? Would it involve Charlie Elliott still further? After all, what had she seen that night when she climbed the stairs? What had she told Mr. Glenn so that he would say, or shout, “I don’t believe it. I don’t care what he told you. I don’t believe it.”

  I had thought that that had referred to Herbert, but did it? Suppose that when Miss Juliet went up the stairs Monday night, she had found Charlie Elliott in the room above? Suppose, then, that all the time she lay in her bed, and I on the couch at its foot, she had known that he was on the roof? And suppose that her later excursion to the third floor while I slept was to see if he was still there, or had escaped?

  Then all those days she had lain in her bed, knowing something which she had concealed. And now she was about to tell it, and to send that boy to the chair. To save her own soul, and send him to the chair! Her lawyer and then her clergyman, and that bright-haired boy her burnt offering.

  It made me shudder.

  I was convinced that I was right, but it was daylight before I thought of a plan, and that not a very hopeful one. Yet, in a way, it had possibilities. After all, it was her indignation that Paula Brent had been questioned by the police which had apparently crystallized her resolution. Evidently that ancient love affair of hers with Paula’s grandfather had never been entirely forgotten. And my plan was simply to get Paula there before the attorney came, and to have her plead with the old lady for silence.

  I think now that it would have worked, and I put it among the tragic failures of my career that I did not make myself clear when I finally got Paula on the telephone. She understood well enough. She agreed to come. But what with her terror and excitement over the news of Charlie Elliott’s arrest, she somehow mistook the hour. I had told her nine o’clock, and she came at ten.

  She was just an hour too late.

  CHAPTER XVI

  I hope never to live through another morning like that one of Friday, the eighteenth of last September.

  The first thing that went wrong was the arrival of Inspector Patton, slightly smug with success and, what is rare with him, inclined to be garrulous. That was at half past eight, and Paula was due at nine. He had apparently settled the case and thrown all caution to the winds, for he called me down into the library and closed the door.

  “You look half dead,” he observed, inspecting me. “You’ll need a rest after this case. But I guess it’s over.”

  “Naturally!” I said with some bitterness. “I know it. Who better? Why should you care whether he did it or not? You’ve got your case, and that’s what you want, isn’t it?”

  “You’re like all women. Because a man happens to be good-looking, you can’t believe he’s a rascal.”

  “I can’t believe he’s a fool, either. Why did he come back again, last night? And maybe a night or so ago, too? Tell me that.”

  “What does it matter, now? We’re not interested in last night, or the night before. We’re interested in Monday night, and that’s all.”

  “You would be!” I said. “Personally, I don’t think you’ve touched this story. You’ve got your case, but you have enough left over to make another. Why did Charlie Elliott fire that shot through a newspaper?”

  He smiled. “Who said he did? That scrap of paper was from a News of the week before.”

  I stared at him. “A week old?”

  “Our fellows looked it up. No mistake about it, Miss Pinkerton! And as for his coming back, you know why he did that, and so do I.”

  “I suppose you mean the prints on the window sill?”

  “I thought you’d get that. Yes.”

  He settled down in his chair and drew out his pipe, and I had a cold sensation of despair. He was going to go over the whole story. I knew what that meant. So long as he remained around the place, I could not smuggle Paula into Miss Juliet’s room. And it was no use to try to escape. When I said my patient needed me, he merely called to Hugo to tell Mary to stay with her, and calmly went on talking.

  Under any other cir
cumstances I would have been interested, to say the least; and even as it was, I followed him clearly enough, if I did spend most of the time watching the drive for Paula Brent. He explained first what, to me at least, had remained a mystery so far, just how and why he had had the house surrounded, and had caught Charlie Elliott as he had. After that semi-absurd watch of the night before, divided between Mr. Glenn and the doctor, he had put a man on the grounds “on general principles,” as he said. But also, after hearing Mr. Henderson’s story the evening before, he had had young Elliott “tailed.” He had put a good operative on the case, and then had gone back to his office.

  “You see, I held something out on you that I’d known for a day or two,” he said, eying me. “No use making you nervous, you know. That bolt on the door upstairs, the one on the landing, wasn’t much use. Not any, in fact. It had been sawed off, so that it appeared to be on the job, but wasn’t. It fooled me for a while. It fitted pretty closely, and there was no key to unlock the door and test it. It stood to reason, then, that anybody with keys to that door and to the side door below could get in and out whenever they wanted. That’s what Herbert Wynne did, anyhow. In spite of the old lady, he could come and go at night pretty much as he liked, provided, of course, the servants had gone to bed.”

  “Did Hugo know about the bolt?”

  “He says he didn’t.”

  “And you believe that?”

  “I believe this. I believe Hugo was as worried about this fellow getting into the house as anybody, and as puzzled.”

  But that door, and its sawed-off bolt, had played their part in what he called the solution of the crime.

  “Elliott had to get in somehow,” he said. “He got in Monday night and committed the murder. He got part of the way in on Tuesday night, and you spoiled it. He escaped through the door on the landing, of course; again on Wednesday night, when he knocked down Glenn’s secretary and gave her a sore knee for him to be sorry for.” He grinned. “And again last night.

  “Now it isn’t hard to know how he got in. He’d taken those keys from the body, so that was simple enough. But how did he get in the first night? That’s the question.”

  “He won’t tell you?”

  “No.”

  “You surprise me!” I said, with the sarcasm he detests.

  “Still fighting for the blond-haired boy!” he observed. “Well, that comes of letting a woman in on a thing like this. She gets carried away by her emotions.”

  “Letting me in? I was dragged in, and you know it.”

  He let that go, and went back to the story of the night before. After Mr. Henderson’s statement, he had put the operative on the case, and then gone to his office at Headquarters. He often sleeps there, and he had had a hunch that something might happen.

  It did. At half past one the operative watching the Elliott house had seen young Elliott slip out quietly, using a rear door and not taking his car, and having followed him to the Mitchell property, found the policeman hidden in the shrubbery on the other side of the house and notified him. Then he had hurried to the nearest telephone and called Headquarters.

  When the Inspector and Evans arrived, young Elliott had already entered the house by the side entrance, and they found the door there standing open. They had brought a police lieutenant along also, and he remained outside at first, to watch with O’Reilly for a possible escape.

  The Inspector and Evans had gone in by the same route, moving very quietly, and they had just reached the top of the stairs when they had what amounted to a real shock, there in the servants’ sitting room and in black darkness. Something had given a terrible shriek and then pitched into the room almost at their feet, and not moved.

  “That was you,” said the Inspector, “and the only reason I didn’t turn and bolt down those stairs was because Evans was behind me!”

  Well, they turned a flash on me, and at first they thought I had been killed.

  “It was a bad thirty seconds or so,” the Inspector said, smiling grimly. “It looked as though he’d got you. I don’t mind telling you that I thought I’d lost my most valuable assistant!”

  But the beans were spilled by that time, he said. There had been enough noise to rouse everybody in the house, and to warn Elliott.

  “He was warned all right. A dynamite explosion couldn’t have done it any better! But he couldn’t get out this time. He might have tried the roof again, but had no little lady friend to help him down, and he probably saw our fellows below anyhow. What he did was to lock the door and then wait. He hadn’t anything to gain by it, but that’s what he did. Just to make it harder!”

  “Or to gain time to look for whatever he was after,” I said. “I suppose that hadn’t occurred to you?”

  “The prints on the sill? He’d had plenty of time for that.”

  “But he didn’t touch them, did he?”

  He looked at me thoughtfully. “Well, no. Now that you speak of it, he didn’t. But he didn’t have to. As he swung off, he’d smeared them pretty well, and he’d realized that. What are you driving at?”

  “I’m intimating that he was there to get something,” I said rather sharply. “And that it was not fingerprints, unless they were under the bed.”

  “Under the bed? Nonsense!”

  “Then why was the bed moved away from the wall? Or perhaps you didn’t notice that?”

  He got up, and grinned rather sheepishly. “One up for you,” he said. “No, I didn’t notice it. I’m a rotten policeman, but you’re the only one who knows it! I’ll go up and take a look around!”

  But he did not go at once. “What are you thinking about this case?” he asked. “You’ve got an opinion. I can see that. And it’s not mine.”

  “It is not. There was a time when you were certain this case was a suicide, and I believed it was a murder. Perhaps you remember that? Now you would stake your reputation that it was a murder, and …”

  “And that I have the murderer. I certainly would. Well?”

  “I’m still trying to explain to myself why that scrap of newspaper had powder marks on it. And whether, after all, Paula Brent doesn’t believe that Herbert left a letter explaining that he had killed himself, and sent that boy to get it. How deep was he in the market?”

  “All he had. That wasn’t enough to drive him to suicide.”

  “Well then, something which might explain this danger he was always talking about.”

  “How do you know there was such a danger? Or that the girl didn’t invent that story later on, to protect this Elliott boy?”

  “He was carrying a gun. Monday night wasn’t the first night Herbert had carried that gun.”

  “How do you know he was, before that night? That’s her story, too.”

  “All right,” I said. “Then tell me where he got the money to take out all that insurance? And enough more to speculate with on a margin? That’s what you’ve got left over, isn’t it? You’ve got your case, but you have all that left over. What are you going to do about it?”

  He did not answer that, for the telephone rang, and as it was the District Attorney, he had to leave at once and go downtown.

  When I saw him again, it was too late. The second tragedy had happened.

  CHAPTER XVII

  When he had gone, I took a final despairing look outside, but Paula was still not in sight, and so I went up to Miss Juliet. To my surprise Mary was not there, and it was Hugo who stood by the bed. It was the first time I had seen him in the room, and if ever I have seen a man both alarmed and angry, he was that morning. He was standing by the bed, and Miss Juliet was talking, in her low monotonous voice. The door was open, and when he heard me on the landing, he made a gesture of caution and her voice ceased.

  He brushed past me without a word, and soon after that Mr. Glenn arrived, and I heard Hugo talking to him in the lower hall. He was still upset, apparently, and Mr. Glenn seemed to be conciliating him. However that was, Hugo came up in a few minutes to say that the lawyer wanted to see me in
the library, and so I went down again.

  Rather to my surprise, I found the secretary in the hall. She was standing in front of the mirror powdering her nose, and she grinned at me in the glass.

  “You don’t feel weak, or anything?” she sang out at me.

  “Weak? Why?”

  “I’d like to try that ammonia stunt on you, for a change!”

  “The next time you throw a fit like that, be sure there’s no trained nurse around,” I told her, and went into the library.

  Mr. Glenn was there, neat and immaculate and rather too well dressed, as usual. But he was nervous, too. He was pacing up and down the room when I entered it.

  “This is a bad business, Miss Adams,” he said.

  “Very bad indeed.”

  “Does Miss Juliet know about it?”

  “Not yet. No.”

  “That’s right. Keep it from her as long as you can. Tell Mary not to carry her a paper. I can trust Hugo, but not Mary.” He took another turn about the room, while I stood waiting. “As a matter of fact, I think the old lady knows already that this boy is guilty, Miss Adams. She intimated as much to me last night.”

  “Then why keep the arrest from her?” I asked. “After all, if she knows …”

  He hesitated. “I suppose I might as well tell you. She intends to make a statement this morning. Or perhaps you know that.”

  “I do.”

  “Well, this statement should be as unprejudiced as possible. She saw something last Monday night, and that is what she wants to tell.”

  “She saw Charlie Elliott, I suppose, Mr. Glenn?”

  “That’s for her to say,” he said shortly. “The point is that, right or wrong, she thinks she has not long to live, and she wants to tell her story before she goes. As a matter of fact, it was to be kept in my safe, and only used in case of some miscarriage of justice. But this arrest changes things. She needn’t know that, however.”

  “She needn’t make the statement at all!” I said. And then, what with Paula not getting there in time and strain and lack of sleep and all the rest, I simply made a fool of myself and burst into tears.