“That I cared for you, and not for him,” Paula put in bravely.
“Well, you see what that would mean. I just didn’t want her mixed up with it. That’s all. And of course I wasn’t sure that it was Paula.” He glanced at her. “Sorry, Paula, but you know it, too. Wynne always had a girl or two on the string. He was that sort.”
The Inspector flicked a glance at me. “All right,” he said. “Now we’ll go over the ladder business. I’ll need you for that, Miss Brent.”
But they never did go over the ladder business. When they had reached the front door, passing solemnly by that room where Miss Juliet lay in state, surrounded by her flowers, it was to find an officer in the lower hall, with a message for the Inspector.
He turned to me with a grave face. “Break this to Mary as gently as you can,” he said. “The old man was knocked down by a hit-and-run driver not very far from the house, and died on his way to the hospital.”
CHAPTER XXVI
That night remains to me one of the most horrible in my experience.
It was necessary to break the news to Mary, and she went into utter and complete collapse. Hugo’s body was still in the hospital mortuary, and it was useless to ask her what her wishes were with regard to it. By ten o’clock I had got the doctor, and he gave her something to keep her quiet; but when he had gone, I found myself virtually alone.
A dim light burned in Miss Juliet’s room, and the entire house was redolent with the sickly odor of funeral flowers. I had opened the door on the landing, so that I could go back now and then to see Mary, and I sat in the room which had been mine, and which adjoined the large front room where Miss Juliet lay in state.
I was very tired. It was Friday night, and the amount of real sleep I had had since the Monday before was negligible. But as usual in such cases, I was too weary to sleep. I threw myself, still in my uniform, on my bed; but once down, my mind began to fill with clues, conjectures, what not.
Once more I tried to reconstruct what had happened in that upper room on Monday night, but with the same lack of success. I could see Herbert, entering by the front door, and cheerfully enough. He would still have the Eagle in his pocket, at least probably. And I could see him in his room later on, preparing to undress, taking out his revolver first, and laying it and then the newspaper on the bureau. I could even see someone entering that room, but it would not have been Charlie Elliott, or Herbert would not have remained in that chair. He would have leaped to his feet, surely; have sensed trouble, even reached for his revolver.
But he had not gotten up. He had looked up, perhaps, from untying his shoe. He had almost certainly not been alarmed at all, although he may have been surprised. But he had stayed in his chair, perhaps for some time. There had been conversation of some sort, with the killer getting out his handkerchief under some pretense or other, or keeping on his gloves, and edging toward that revolver on the dresser. But Herbert had not expected to be killed. He had looked up, and had got a bullet in his forehead, perhaps even before he sensed that there was any danger.
I could go as far as that, but no further. I believed Paula’s story, and Charlie Elliott’s. I believe that Herbert had been dead when Charlie Elliott entered that room. But nothing in all of this explained how the Eagle had become the News, or why that scrap of paper had had powder marks on it, or had been a week old. Nor did any of it bear any relationship to a plot about life insurance.
I went over Miss Juliet’s statement in my mind. Perhaps young Elliott had moved to the bed; he was excited. Perhaps she had seen him coming forward as she said, and then stooping over the body. But she had said that he had moved it, dragged it across the floor! Had she seen that, or had she imagined it later?”
I was roused at eleven by the doorbell, and I went wearily down the stairs. It seemed to me that I had made a million excursions up and down those stairs; that I had worn hollows in them with my feet. I had expected a reporter, but it was the Inspector himself, looking even more grave than the circumstances seemed to warrant.
He stepped into the hall, and closed the door behind him. “Look here,” he said, “have you your automatic?”
“You told me not to bring it.”
“Well, I’ve brought you one,” he said, and laid it on the table beside me. “Just remember to take off the safety before you snap it at anybody.”
“I don’t want it,” I said. “I don’t want it. I want to go home and go to sleep forever.”
“You’ll take a good chance of going to sleep forever if you don’t keep a gun handy in this house,” he retorted grimly. “I’m not trying to scare you, but I put you on this job and I’m responsible for you. I’m not sending you after Hugo.”
“After Hugo?”
“I think Hugo was murdered, deliberately run down and killed as he crossed the street by the Manchester place. Our man saw it done, but he had only a glimpse of the car.”
“He was murdered!”
“He’s dead, anyhow.”
He looked at me, and I must have been pale, for he put a hand on my shoulder. “You’re a brave young woman, Miss Pinkerton,” he said, “and you’re not going to quit on us now. Nor are we going to quit on you. Just remember that. And now I’m going up and talk to Mary.”
He was closeted with her for some time, and after that I heard him moving about the rear of the house. He stopped at the washstand in the hall to wash his hands, and he was drying them when he came back to me, in the library.
He put me into a comfortable chair before he said anything.
“Just lean back and listen,” he said. “I think I’ve got this thing doped out, and I’ve made some plans to close it up. But I can tell you a certain amount. Here was what at first looked like a suicide, but with no contact marks. There were two possibilities. This boy had a fortune in insurance, and he knew that the old lady was desperate for money. It might, of course, have been accidental death, but Herbert wasn’t cleaning his gun when it happened. He’d done it earlier that evening, between eight and nine. And if the bullet mark on the fireplace and other signs meant anything, he had been in a chair when it happened, taking off his shoes.
“Still, there are ways of committing suicide so that it looks like something else, and that newspaper would probably have thrown us off the scent entirely, if I had happened to open it. As a matter of fact, I picked it up and looked at it, but as you know, the front and back pages were whole; no bullet marks on them. It wasn’t until you found that scrap here in the library and gave it to me that I began to veer toward the suicide idea. But even there I was puzzled. The scrap was from a paper a week old, and by all the evidence it should have been from the Eagle. It wasn’t. I put our fellows on it, and it was from the News.
“That might mean a lot, or it might not. I can tell you now that I got that newspaper from Mary just now. She’d had it hidden from Hugo all week, but she told me a little while ago where to find it.”
He took it from his pocket and gave it to me. It was much as he had described such a paper, that day in the office. Closed, it was whole; opened, it showed part of a bullet hole, and certain powder marks and scorchings. One corner was missing and the Inspector took out the scrap from his wallet and fitted it into place.
“Now we have to think of this,” he went on. “Miss Juliet confessed to a certain amount, but not all she knew. She had seen that newspaper, and Mary admits that she knew from Herbert how such a trick could be pulled. She got that newspaper that night and gave it to Mary to hide. Hugo was not to know about it, or anybody.
“What I figure is that she lay in her bed that night, and she suddenly remembered that newspaper on the bureau, and had her moment of temptation. Mary may have told her that night that there was considerable insurance. Mary had a way of learning things she was not supposed to know. You can see Miss Juliet’s argument. After all, she was poor and insurance companies are rich. And she couldn’t bring that boy back to life.”
“I don’t believe it. I don’t believe she wou
ld lend herself to a thing like that. To profit by her own nephew’s death … !”
“Nevertheless, that is what she did. And that’s our scrap of paper.”
“And he killed himself after all!”
“Who said he killed himself? All I’m saying is that whatever opinion she formed later, that night she believed that he had killed himself. It wasn’t until we began working on the case that she began to doubt it. She had seen young Elliott escaping, but she knew him. It wouldn’t occur to her that a boy she knew would kill. You know the idea; she’d known his people. He’d been engaged to Paula. An accident, or a suicide, but not murder. Not then, anyhow.”
“She came to murder, just the same,” I said with some bitterness.
“Surely she did. So did you. So did I. But let’s get on with this. I have to go.” He looked at his watch.
“Now take the other side. Here’s a clear case of murder against Charlie Elliott; so clear that the District Attorney is going to have to be restrained if anything happens to it. Young Elliott was jealous. More than that, he was frantic. He had followed the girl, and he knew she was coming to this house at night. Pretty hard to swallow, all that, for Herbert Wynne was no good and he knew it.
“Now, it’s at least conceivable that, leaving out the matter of the insurance, young Elliott might kill Wynne. Here’s the girl’s story about Wynne being followed, and having to carry a revolver. It all fits. But there are one or two things left over; this newspaper, for one thing. It’s hardly conceivable that Elliott fired at Wynne through that paper. But if he did, for any reason, why was the paper a week old?”
“You mean, it had been prepared in advance?”
“Good for you. That’s just what I do mean. You said something that day in the office, when you said that a murder could be made to look like a suicide. The only answer to this newspaper is that this murder was to look like an accident, and that if trouble came there was the alibi—the paper. Only one thing slipped up. Mary got that paper and hid it. She hid it, if you want to know, in a mason jar and set it into a crock of apple butter in the cellar!”
I gazed at him with eyes that must have been sunk deep in my head. “Then it was Hugo, after all?”
“It was not Hugo. I only know this; that if some plans I’ve laid work out as I expect them to, I ought to be able to tell you in the morning. Or sooner!”
And with that he went away. Even now, looking back, I find it hard to forgive him for that. He might have told me something, have given me some hint. He could trust me; I had worked hard for him. But he did not even tell me how he had planned to protect me.
I think he had his own moment of doubt as he went away, for he stood in the hall and looked at me, and then at the stairs behind me.
“Good night,” he said. “Don’t do too much running about; and take the gun upstairs with you.” Then he went away, and as I locked and bolted the door behind him, I again had that curious little shiver of fear.
The house was certainly eerie that night. It creaked and rapped incessantly, and over it all hung the heavy funereal odor of those flowers in the front room. The hall was filled with it, and it had even penetrated back to Mary’s room.
I had taken the gun upstairs with me, but I don’t mind saying that after a time I began to feel that no revolver would be of any use against the phantoms with which my mind insisted on filling those old rooms; with Miss Juliet and Herbert, and now with Hugo. Only Mary left, out of that family of ghosts, and she sleeping the sleep of drugs and exhaustion in that back room.
At half past twelve I went back to look at her, but she was quiet. Even seeing her, at least alive and substantial, calmed me somewhat; and I was quiet and somewhat comforted when I left her. Somewhat comforted! That is even funny now. For it was that visit to Mary which precipitated my own catastrophe.
Her cat was lying on her bed, and I picked the animal up to carry it into the front hall. Perhaps it is a superstition, but I do not like cats around where there are dead, and it was my intention to put it out.
On the landing, however, it escaped and ran up the third-floor stairs. I disliked intensely the idea of following it, but at last I decided to, turning on the hall light first, and then going on up, calling it as I went.
“Here, Tom!” I called. “Come here! Tom! Tom!”
The sound of my own voice in that quiet house sounded cavernous, and I was not happy to catch a glimpse of the animal, and going into Herbert’s room at that. But I had started, and I meant to see the thing through. So I followed him in.
There was a faint light in the room from the hall below, and by it I worked my way toward the dresser and the bracket light beside it. I could see it, faintly gleaming; and then suddenly I could not see at all. Very quietly the door had closed behind me!
I was paralyzed with terror. I stood perfectly still, my arm upraised toward the bracket, and now I was certain that there was someone in the room. Yet nothing moved. There were only the usual creaks and groans of the old house, swaying in the September breeze. Then, I was certain that the creaks were approaching me. I had my back to the room, but I could hear them, coming closer; and just as I opened my mouth to scream, I felt hands close on my throat. I was being slowly strangled from behind.
CHAPTER XXVII
Whoever it was, those hands were prodigiously strong. I was utterly helpless. Sometimes, even now, I waken at night, dripping with a hot sweat, again feeling that terrible struggle for breath, and once more trying to loosen those deadly fingers.
I was incredulous at first, I know. This thing could not be happening to me. It was not possible that someone was trying to kill me. Then I knew that it was possible, and that I was about to die. I can remember that, and I can remember when I began to lose consciousness. My knees went first; I could not stand. I was sagging, falling. Then I must have gone entirely, although I have no memory of that.
I came to myself very slowly. It was difficult to breathe. My throat was swollen and I could not turn my head. And the air, when I did get it, seemed to do me no good. My lungs labored; I could hear myself gasping.
I tried to move, although my head was bursting. But I could not move. I seemed to be in a half-sitting position, in a narrow space, and as I became more conscious, I put out my hand. I touched a wall, and in another direction, only a couple of feet away, I touched another wall. It was some time, in my dazed condition, before I realized that one of these walls was a door, and a still longer time before the facts began to dawn on me; that I was locked in the closet of Herbert’s room, and that the air supply was very bad.
So completely was I engrossed with my own position and with that struggle for air, which was partially due to the œdema of my throat, that it must have been several minutes before I so much as attempted to orient myself. It was even longer before I became aware of the complete and utter silence in the house. Then I tried to call out, but I could only make a hoarse and guttural noise which could not have been heard beyond the door of the room, so I gave that up. It took air which, apparently, I could not spare.
The closet was stiflingly hot, and my legs began to cramp. I tried to stand up, but I was too weak to rise. My mind was clearer, however.
I tried hammering on the door, but the really dreadful silence continued. And then, far away, I heard a sound. It might have been anything, but it began to sound like someone climbing the stairs. And that, I realized very soon, was what it was. Whoever it was came very slowly, and seemed now and then to stop; but that inevitable progress continued. The stairs creaked, the railing groaned, as if someone was holding on to it. Suddenly it occurred to me that it was the murderer coming back, and I had an attack of panic so terrible that, even as I write this, I find myself in a hot sweat of fear.
The footsteps reached the third floor at last, still with that curious wavering advance, and the unknown seemed to stand in the doorway for some time, like a runner who has finished a race. Then they came into the room and stopped there. I could hear a sort of gasping fo
r breath, and then there followed another stealthy movement; a movement toward the closet door and, after what seemed like a moment of listening, the turning of the key in that door.
Even now I wonder about that. Was there a sort of late repentance for it? A final decision to give me a chance for life before I smothered? I cannot believe it. But I do know that with the turning of the key I tried to scream, and that my vocal cords would not respond.
Something else did, however. Just what strength I received at the instant I do not know. I have a vague sort of recollection of suddenly being able to stand, and of being stronger that I had ever been before. I recall that, and that as the key turned I pushed against the door with a frenzy born of desperation. It flew open, and it evidently struck whoever stood outside, and struck hard; for I heard a grunt in the darkness and then a heavy fall and silence. I actually fell over that inert figure as I rushed out, and the next instant I was flying down the stairs, and almost straight into the barrel of a revolver held by Inspector Patton.
“In Herbert’s room,” I croaked. “Quick! In Herbert’s room.”
Then, almost on the spot where poor Hugo had collapsed that very day, I fainted again.
When I came to, I was lying on my bed in my own small room adjoining Miss Juliet’s. The Inspector was standing beside the bed, and there was a sound of shuffling feet outside. The Inspector frowned and hastily closed the door into the hall, but I knew only too well what that shuffling meant: the careful carrying of a stretcher, where men do not keep step, but walk with a broken rhythm to avoid the swinging which might jar whoever lies on it. When the Inspector came back to the bed, I was looking at him, he has said since, and making strange noises in my throat.
“Don’t try to talk. How do you feel? All right?”
I nodded. “Ice,” I croaked. “Ice on my throat. Swollen.”
I realized then that there was a policeman just outside the door, for the Inspector sent him for some cracked ice in a towel, and then looked at me gravely.
Miss Pinkerton Page 18