Miss Pinkerton

by Rinehart, Mary Roberts;

  They were quite businesslike, but apparently they had forgotten their paint! They put the ladder up against the wall not far from my window, and both climbed to the roof of the ell.

  Well, my patience was pretty much exhausted by that time, so I got a broom from the housemaid’s closet in the hall and, reaching out the window, I gave that ladder a good shove. It fell with a crash, and the last I saw of those two reporters they were peering dejectedly over the tin gutter of the roof, and muttering to themselves. Later on I learned that they had stayed on that roof for five hours, not daring to call for help! And it was a tin roof, and a hot September day.

  I never thought of them again. It appears that one or two cameramen from other papers appeared, and that they appealed for help from them. But one rude young competitor only put his thumb to his nose at them, and another took their pictures. It was the police who rescued them at last, after threatening to leave them there all night.

  Sometimes I think of them, marooned on that roof while, inside the house, a tragedy was taking place; probably seeing the Medical Examiner’s car in the drive and people coming and going, going slowly crazy while another story broke, and nothing to do about it except, like Charlie Elliott, either to fight or cry.

  But they served a very important purpose, nevertheless, in the answer to our mystery. When the dénouement came, it was as though we had been putting together one of those jigsaw puzzles, and they had found the key to the picture.

  Mr. Glenn had not left the house until after eleven o’clock, and so it was probably nearly twelve when the doctor arrived. I knew that it was after one when the Inspector, hurriedly sent for, was reached while he was eating his lunch, and he got there shortly afterward.

  Just when Paula Brent left the house I do not know.

  What happened, as accurately as I can remember, was as follows:

  The doctor had ordered a hypodermic of nitroglycerin for Miss Juliet, and he remained with her, his fingers on her thin wrist, while I went down to the kitchen for some sterile water with which to give it. Mary was alone in the kitchen, and gave it to me herself.

  I cleaned my hypodermic, and then, going back to my tray, I got the tube of tablets. There was no mistake about it. I remember looking at the label of the tube, which was not a fresh one, shaking out the tablet, dropping it into the glass barrel of the syringe, and watching it dissolve there. I remember all that, just as I remember pinching up the flesh of Miss Juliet’s withered old arm, and her wincing at the jab of the needle. I remember, too, that Doctor Stewart still held his fingers on her pulse, and that I moved about the room, straightening it after my habit; and that I then went into the bathroom, where I washed my hypodermic needle and cleaned it with alcohol.

  I was there when the doctor called to me. Miss Juliet looked rather strange. She had grown tense and was twitching somewhat. The doctor was leaning over her.

  “What is it? Pain?”

  She did not say anything, and he looked puzzled.

  “What did you give her?” he asked me.

  “Just the usual dose of nitroglycerin, doctor.”

  That apparently satisfied him, and he drew up a chair and sat beside the bed. After ten minutes or so the twitching stopped, but she still seemed rather rigid, so he ordered another hypodermic. The interval between them was perhaps a half hour. I could feel that curious rigidity when I gave the second injection, but I had seen angina before, and some people stiffen under the pain.

  I repeated my previous procedure, went to the bathroom, cleaned the syringe, put away my tray. I was in my room when I heard the doctor again, and this time he was fairly shouting for me.

  I ran back, to see Miss Juliet in a convulsion on the bed.

  Over and over again I have lived those next few minutes. I have even dreamed about them. In these dreams I am once again beside the big walnut bed, with Doctor Stewart across from me and staring down at the old lady, and she is having that convulsion, jerking and twitching; and on her unconscious face that dreadful risus sardonicus, the sardonic grin which almost at once began to fade into the mask of death.

  How long that lasted I do not know. Time means nothing in such a situation. As the grin began to fade, I remember that I glanced up at the doctor, and at that instant she gave a final convulsive shiver and then relaxed.

  The doctor stared at her, then straightened and looked across the bed at me.

  “She is dead! For God’s sake, what did you give her?”

  CHAPTER XIX

  I stood there, stupidly looking down at her. My own heart seemed to have stopped, and my mind, too. I was certainly not thinking.

  “Wake up, woman! She’s dead, I tell you. What was in the hypodermic?”

  “What you ordered. You can look at the tube. You gave it to me yourself, Monday night.”

  “Bring that syringe here.”

  “I’ve washed it, doctor.”

  “Then bring me the tube. Bring in your tray.”

  His hands were shaking as he examined it, but he went over it carefully. There was not much on it; the usual morphia, but the tube containing it still sealed; the amyl-nitrite ampoules; some cotton and alcohol; and the nitroglycerin. One of these tablets he shook out in his hand and then put to his lips. Whatever he had expected to discover, he was evidently disappointed.

  I was terribly frightened; more frightened than I had ever been in my life. I had not even time for pity. Every ounce of me was concentrated fiercely on self-protection.

  “I gave her exactly what you ordered.”

  “How do I know you did? She’s dead, and nitroglycerin didn’t cause that spasm.”

  “I’ve never made such a mistake in my life!”

  “Mistake or—something else.”

  “Good God, doctor! What do you think I gave her? Or why would I want to kill her?”

  He made no reply to that. He came close to me, and I saw that his forehead was beaded with fine drops of perspiration. He got out his handkerchief and wiped it.

  “Listen, Miss Adams,” he said. “I believe that this unfortunate woman here has been poisoned. I don’t know why, or by whom. I’m making no accusations. I’m not even certain of the fact. But I believe she was poisoned, with an alkaloidal poison of some sort.”

  “What sort?”

  “Strychnia,” he said grimly. “Strychnia. That’s my guess, and it is yours.”

  “I don’t know what you mean,” I said wildly. “There’s no strychnia on that tray.”

  “Not now.” He put his handkerchief away, turned to the bed, and then faced me again.

  “I prefer to say nothing more until I have called the police. You will remain in this room, please, until they arrive.”

  I tried to laugh, then. “And make me a prisoner! You can’t mean that, doctor.”

  “I do mean it. And”—he added more slowly—“I begin to wonder if Hugo was right after all.”

  “What has Hugo to do with it?”

  “He hasn’t trusted you, for one thing. You can tell your story to the police when they get here, but I’ll say just this. I don’t know what you are doing here. You were not my choice, if it comes to that. But Hugo has suspected all along that you were here for some purpose of your own. He has found you where you have had no business to be, and he wanted you sent off the case; he asked me to do that yesterday.”

  “I wish you had,” I said bitterly. “I’d have been glad enough to go.”

  “That’s as it may be. And I’ll take that hypodermic, if you please. You were pretty quick about washing it!”

  He slipped the case into his pocket, along with the other tube from the tray, and started out. But he hesitated at the door. His intention was clear enough; he wanted to lock me in. But he did not quite dare. I stood in the middle of the room and defied him.

  “If you do that, doctor,” I said clearly, “I shall shout for help from a window!”

  He went out then, and in spite of that quiet old figure on the bed he slammed the door behind him. The
n I could hear him running down the stairs, and shortly afterward, shouting at the telephone. He was trying to get through to the Inspector, who was evidently still closeted with the District Attorney. But he did get the Medical Examiner. I could hear that.

  My anger had left me by that time. I went over to the bed, and looked down at the quiet figure lying there. Death had smoothed that terrible grin from Miss Juliet’s face, so that now she looked younger, and very placid. I had no fear of the doctor’s accusations, but I had a real regret for the method of her passing. Perhaps she had not had much time left, as she had said the night before; but little or much, she had been entitled to it. And she had not seen her clergyman after all!

  I was still dazed, of course. I made no move when the door opened, and Mary came in. She was not crying. Her face was a sort of bluish white, and she paid no attention to me whatever. She stood on the other side of the bed, looking down at the body, and then she did a queer thing. She made the sign of the cross over it, in the air. Only after that did she speak to me at all.

  “Hugo’s feeling poorly, miss. I said I’d tell you.”

  “You’d better get the doctor, Mary. He wants me to stay here.”

  She looked at me. “What’s the use, now?” she said. “It’s all over, isn’t it? All over and done?”

  “I’m afraid it’s all over for Miss Mitchell, if that is what you mean.”

  She went out again, and I followed her to the landing. In the hall below, the doctor was pacing back and forth, his head sunk on his breast. He heard me, and told me sharply not to disturb anything; to leave the body alone, and the room. Then Mary told him about Hugo, and he went back with her toward the kitchen.

  I suppose it was a half hour before the Medical Examiner got there, and with nothing to do I had plenty of time to think. I looked at Miss Juliet, lying so peacefully on her bed, and I had a bitter moment when I felt that, since she was to go, it was a pity that she had not gone before she signed Charlie Elliott’s death warrant. For that it was, I knew. And now there would not even be the respite of a few days. Mr. Glenn would have to produce it, and at once.

  It was only then that I began to see a possible connection between Miss Juliet’s murder, if it was murder, and that confession. Suppose it had been intended that she never make that statement? Suppose someone, with access to that tray of mine, had skillfully plotted to kill her, so that it would never be signed?

  I stood at the window, twisting a curtain cord in my hand, and tried to think that out. Who had had access to my tray recently? Recently, because I had already given her more than one hypodermic from that tube, with perfectly normal reactions. Hugo and Mary, of course, and even the doctor that morning, while I was downstairs getting water. And of course there had been Florence Lenz.

  I thought about Florence. Had she been acting all the time, and was she really the blatant and rather disagreeable person she seemed to be? Or was there something else behind that frivolous manner of hers? Had she known Herbert Wynne? Would she have had any motive for putting Miss Juliet Mitchell out of the way? What lay behind her slipping into that room when she came upstairs? She had stood directly over the tray. It was covered with the powder she had been using. Wasn’t it possible that that very powder was a sort of blind? Suppose she had been working over the tray, putting something into that nitroglycerin tube, when she heard me just outside?

  We had come up the stairs very quietly. She could have had only a second or two of warning. Then what was more likely than a wild dash at my powder, spilling it in her excitement, in every direction?

  But, once again, all of this was simply one of those devices to which we all resort when we want to protect ourselves from some thought which is not bearable. I knew all along that I would have to come to Paula Brent.

  She had hated Miss Juliet, and was convinced that she had had something to do with Herbert’s death. Suppose that visit of hers that morning had been deliberately devised so that she could get into the house? The story of the letter an invention, and Paula determined that Miss Juliet, knowing something vital to Charlie Elliott’s safety, should be put out of the way before she decided to talk?

  She knew Doctor Stewart. She knew Mr. Glenn. Suppose the doctor had told her that Miss Juliet was being stimulated with nitroglycerin? Or the attorney had revealed that the old lady knew something, and was bound to tell it sooner or later? And the girl desperate, distracted.

  I went back again over that little scene when the two girls met in my bedroom. There had been some deep and secret antipathy there. I had an idea that, while they had not met before, each knew about the other; and my mind once more went back to Herbert Wynne.

  The Medical Examiner arrived while I was still standing there. I saw his gay little car come in, and he himself emerge, dapper as usual. I have sometimes thought that his bright car and his dandied dress were a sort of defense which he set up against what was often a gruesome business.

  He was followed out of the car by a tall thin individual whom I recognized as the laboratory man from Headquarters. Doctor Stewart brought them both up, and the Medical Examiner seemed rather put out that the Inspector was not there.

  “What makes you think it was poison?” he demanded.

  “How would anybody know it? She was weak, but she wasn’t dying. Then she gets these two hypodermics. She reacted very badly to the first, so I ordered a second.”

  “How far apart?”

  “A half hour. The second caused the convulsion. There was risus sardonicus, very marked; and if you’ve ever seen angina cause that, you’ve seen more than I have.”

  The chemist had said nothing, but now he asked for the hypodermic and the tubes. He got them, handling them carefully and dropping them in an envelope, and then glanced at me. He knew me, but, like the Examiner, he made no sign that he did.

  “Cleaned, I suppose?” He always spoke with a drawl, and now it seemed more marked than ever.

  “Thoroughly. With alcohol.”

  “What do you think of this case?” he asked me.

  Doctor Stewart glanced up angrily. “That’s a question for the police, isn’t it?”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” he drawled. “After all, this young woman gave the stuff. She ought to know something, if there’s anything to know.”

  “I think she was probably poisoned,” I said quietly. “I don’t know how it was done, but I venture to guess that, whatever was put into the nitroglycerin tube, whoever did it placed it there within the last twelve to fourteen hours. I had used nitroglycerin tablets before that, and they worked as they should.”

  He took out the tube, holding it in his handkerchief to do so, and, like the doctor, shook a tablet into his hand and put it to his tongue.

  “No strychnia here, anyhow,” he said. “Well, let’s get busy, doctor.”

  “What will you want?” I asked.

  “Nothing much. Some towels. We have everything else.”

  I shall not go into details of what followed. There was some talk of strychnia affecting the central nervous system, and so they took some spinal fluid as well as a specimen of blood from the jugular. I know that the laboratory man wanted the stomach, too, but he did not get it. The Medical Examiner wanted his lunch.

  “Going to be hard enough to discover anything,” said the laboratory man. “And even when these things are given by hypodermic, some of them resecrete in the stomach. Give us a chance.”

  “If you can’t find it with what you’ve got, the chances are that it isn’t there,” said the Medical Examiner briefly, and drew off his rubber gloves.

  The laboratory man lounged about the room while the other was preparing to go. He whistled softly as he moved, and Doctor Stewart eyed him without much favor. He was quite unconscious of it, however.

  “Queer case, isn’t it?” he drawled. “Here they have one murderer all safely locked away, and another one turns up!”

  “If it is murder,” said the Examiner, picking up his bag. “You get the idea of murder g
oing, and you can see it everywhere. I’m still not sure that poor devil upstairs didn’t kill himself, last Monday night. He may have worked out something. You never can tell.”

  Then they went away, quite cheerfully. I could hear them arranging to lunch together as they went down the stairs. The tall man turned back to say that there would be a tentative report that night, but that it might take longer. I thought later that it was merely an excuse, for he leaned forward and said something in a low tone.

  “Watch out for yourself, little lady,” he said to me. “When these poison bugs get started, they don’t know where to stop.”

  It was while Doctor Stewart was still below with them, and while I was cleaning the rubber sheet in the bathroom, that I heard a sound in Miss Juliet’s room. I went to the door, to see Hugo on his knees beside the bed, his shoulders shaking. He got up when he heard me, and started out of the room, but he seemed unsteady as he walked. He had suddenly become an old man, a tired and feeble old man.

  CHAPTER XX

  It was after they had gone that the Inspector arrived. He said later that his car did not have to be steered any more; that it just naturally took the route to the Mitchell place and turned in there. And he took hold at once, hardly listening to the doctor’s excited story.

  “Examiner’s been here already?” he asked. “Well, that’s quick work. All right, Hugo. Go and sit down somewhere. And Miss Adams, I’ll put you in charge of that room up there. Don’t let anybody in. Now, doctor, if you’ll come into the library, we’ll talk this over.”

  “I protest against leaving Miss Adams in charge upstairs,” said the doctor truculently.

  Hugo had gone by that time, and the Inspector smiled at me and then patted me on the shoulder. “I know this young woman, doctor,” he said. “It’s perfectly safe to leave her here. Safe for us, anyhow. I’m not so sure about the lady!”