“I’ll have to be running along,” he said. “But I can’t go without saying that I owe you a number of things, including one of the profoundest apologies of my life; and a policeman’s life is full of them! I told you once that down at Headquarters we had a lot of wall-eyed pikes who called themselves detectives. Well, I’m the king piker of the lot. All I can do is to thank God it’s no worse, little Miss Pinkerton.”
“Who was it?” I croaked. My lips were still swollen, and my tongue felt thick in my mouth. When he said later that I was hissing like a teakettle with excitement, he was pretty nearly right.
And, of course, the policeman chose that moment to come running with a piece of ice as big as his head, and on top of that I heard the telephone ringing wildly downstairs. Somebody below answered it and called up.
“You’re wanted, Inspector. Fellow seems to be in a hurry.”
“Who is it?”
“Name’s Henderson, he says.”
The Inspector flung out of the room, and I could hear him running down the stairs. I got off the bed, and went as far as the landing, feeling weak, my knees shaking. When I had got a firm grip on the stair rail and looked over, it was to see the Inspector at the telephone, a tall lank figure in a gray suit; the front doors wide open and men standing on the porch, and beyond them again, something shining and black; the police ambulance.
The Inspector was barking into the telephone.
“What’s the matter, Henderson?”
He listened for a minute.
“How long ago?” he shouted. … “An hour or more? Good God, man! Get over there and break a window. I’ll be right along.”
He gave a few orders, and then, seeing me on the stairs, he called to me.
“How are you now? Strong enough to take a ride? You won’t have to talk!”
I nodded, and was about to turn back for a coat when he called again.
“If you’re coming, come now. We’ve got no time to spare.”
With that he shot out of the front door and down the steps. I followed him as best I could, and I was barely in the car, and had not managed to close the door, before he had let in the clutch and we were on our way. Never before have I traveled at such a rate, and I hope never to do so again. A motorcycle policeman had materialized from nowhere, and he preceded us, keeping his siren going, and clearing the way. We dashed through traffic lights and past pedestrians, having only a glimpse of their astonished faces, and in all that time he spoke only once.
“It’s Paula Brent,” he said, not looking at me. “She’s in the garage; locked in, according to Henderson. And he can’t make her hear him.”
To my surprise I found that I could speak, although huskily.
“Locked in! She hasn’t tried to kill herself?”
“I rather think,” he said slowly, “that someone has tried to do that for her. And we can thank little Henderson if it wasn’t successful. I don’t even know that yet.”
“How?”
“Carbon-monoxide gas, apparently. But it is a large garage. There’s just a chance …”
His voice trailed off, and at that moment we turned into the alley behind the Brent house.
There was no trouble in finding what we were looking for. Halfway along the block was a private garage, brightly lighted, and inside of it a small group of people bending over something on the floor which I could not see. Even before we had got out of the car, a figure detached itself from the group, and I saw that it was Mr. Henderson.
“We’ve sent for the ambulance, Inspector. It ought to be here any minute.”
“Then she’s living?”
“Yes.”
“Thank God! Who is in there?”
“Her father and mother, and my wife. Our roundsman, too, but he has just come. It was my wife who sent for the ambulance.“
And I seemed to feel his pride in that, even as I climbed out of the car and went into the garage.
Paula Brent was lying on the cement floor, very still and barely breathing.
CHAPTER XXVIII
She lay at the rear of her own small coupé, and as the group about her moved back, I examined her, but I had had little experience of carbon-monoxide cases, and I was rather at a loss. I suggested artificial respiration until the ambulance arrived; and it was the motorcycle man who gave it. I myself was still too weak.
I found the Inspector bending over me as I stooped.
“Any marks on her? Has she been hurt?”
“I’m not sure. There is a lump on the back of her head, but she may have fallen.”
He left the group and I saw him prowling about the garage, but apparently he found nothing, and I think he expected to find nothing. There was glass on the floor under the window, where Mr. Henderson had broken his way in, but that was all. I saw him talking to Mr. Henderson, and soon after that he took a pocket flashlight and went out into the alley. When he came back, with little Henderson trotting at his heels, he was carrying a small key in his handkerchief, and he wrapped it carefully and put it in his pocket.
If I had had any doubt that an attempt had been made that night to murder Paula Brent, it died then. She had been locked in that garage, and left to die.
The ambulance arrived very soon after that, and we followed it to the hospital. A queer-looking object I must have been, at that. I had worked at St. Luke’s, and the night porter knew me well.
“Looks as though you’d been in some sort of mixup, Miss Adams,” he said.
“Mix-up is the word, John,” I said, “and if there is anyone still in the kitchen, I’d like to have some strong black coffee.”
He promised to send it to me, and I followed the Inspector to the Emergency Ward. There were five or six people around the table there, and they had sent for the pulmotor. What with a couple of internes, the night supervisor and what not, I could get only a glimpse of Paula, lying there still and rather childish. Then the group closed in, and somebody brought me my coffee.
They worked over her most of what was left of the night, and it was gray dawn before she was out of danger. The Inspector had disappeared as soon as she began to improve, but he returned again shortly after daylight, to pace the hospital corridor until he was allowed to see her. When that time came, he cleared the room, except for me, and then drawing up a chair beside the bed proceeded to question her; rather gently, as one might interrogate a child.
But she knew very little. After that experiment at the Mitchell house she had meant to go home, as the Inspector had ordered. She was happy and excited, however, for she felt certain that the police meant to release Charlie Elliott. She had told the Inspector, too, about Florence and the keys, and all in all she was very hopeful.
So she did not got home. She drove about until half past eleven or so. Then she went home and put her car in the garage. She had cut off her engine when she heard someone walking in the alley. That did not disturb her, and she was on her way to close the garage doors when she saw a man entering. There was a light in the alley, and her first alarm came when she saw that he had something dark tied over the lower part of his face.
That frightened her, and she turned to escape by the small door leading to the house. It must have been then that he struck her down, for she remembered no more until she awakened in the hospital.
That was all she knew, and it was Mr. Henderson, still waiting below, who supplied some of the gaps in her story.
Apparently it was as Inspector Patton had said the day before, that the arrest of Charlie Elliott, and his own part in it, was the nearest to drama that his life had ever touched. However that may be, apparently from the time on Monday night when he had heard Paula and Charlie quarreling in the alley, he had taken an avid interest in their affairs.
On that Friday night, then, he had heard Paula taking out her car about eight, and when she was not back by ten or thereabouts, he grew a little anxious.
“I’ve got no children,” he explained, “so I’ve always been fond of Paula. And of Charlie Elliott,
too,” he hastened to add.
By eleven, when she still had not returned, he spoke to his wife. She, however, was not as fond of Paula as he was, and she told him to go to bed and quit worrying about a girl young enough to be his daughter. He said nothing more to her and he did go to bed; but he lay awake and listened, and around eleven thirty or maybe a quarter to twelve, she drove in and cut off her engine, and soon after, he heard the garage doors close.
He turned over then to go to sleep, but after five minutes or so he heard the engine going again. He got up and looked out. The garage across the alley was dark, but there was no question about the motor. It was going, and going hard. He would have gone over then, but his wife was indignant by that time, and so he had crawled back into bed.
“You’d think that child didn’t know anything about a car,” she told him. “If she wants to try out her engine, let her do it.”
“But there’s no light in the place.”
“How do you know that? She’s probably using a hand flash. Now go to sleep.”
He did not go to sleep, however, and it was perhaps a quarter to one when his wife at last seemed settled for the night. All that time he had heard the motor running, but at that time or thereabouts he heard the engine stop, and he went to the window again. He was worried, for some reason or other. He went to the window, he said, so that when Paula left the garage by the small door, he could see her and then settle down. There was a light on at the Brent place, and he could always see anyone who left the garage at night and went toward the house.
But she did not leave the garage. He waited for perhaps fifteen minutes, and then he resolutely put on his clothes and went carefully down the stairs and out of the house. He felt, I gathered, rather foolish, and he did not want his wife to waken and find him gone.
“You know how women are,” he said to the Inspector, as if that explained it.
He found the Brent garage doors locked, both the double ones on the alley and the small one toward the house, and the garage itself dark and quiet. He began to feel foolish, but that odd sense of something wrong still persisted and at last he went back to the house and got his flashlight.
His wife wakened as he fumbled for it, and he made an excuse of hearing a noise downstairs, and said something about burglars. It was the wrong thing, evidently, for she tried to keep him from going down at all; and at last he simply went, asserting himself in a fashion that still evidently startled him. He mopped his face as he told it.
But he took the flash and went across the alley and around to a side window, and he was sure that he could see Paula lying on the cement floor, behind the car. It was then that he went back and telephoned, first to Headquarters and then to the Mitchell house.
As to the stopping of the engine at a quarter before one, he believed what later proved to be the fact—that it had stopped because the gas tank was empty.
Most of all that I only learned later, of course. I was still with Paula when the Inspector came back and again began to question her. She was much better by that time, although she was still very white.
“Can you tell me what you did yesterday, Paula?” he asked. “Go through the day, as briefly as you can.”
Well, her day had been fairly full, all things considered.
It began with my telephone message, and her mistake in the hour. She had reached the house at ten, had been too late to see Miss Juliet, and had asked me to take her into the house.
“I know all that. I found that certificate, Paula. It’s safe.”
She colored faintly, but went on. She had met Florence Lenz in my room, and learned who she was. Florence had been rude to her. She had had trouble in getting out of the house, but had managed it, and gone home to lunch. Early in the afternoon a woman named Henderson, a terrible person apparently, who browbeat her nice little husband, had telephoned that Miss Juliet was dead. She was the sort who could not wait to pass on bad news, and Paula resented her tone. She had simply hung up the receiver.
But she was frightened just the same. If Miss Juliet’s statement was damaging to Charlie Elliott, there would be no way of disproving it now. It was not until later in the afternoon, when Doctor Stewart came in to see her mother, that she learned the possibility of poison.
“But if it was poison, doctor,” she had said, “wouldn’t that exonerate Charlie? They couldn’t blame him for that.”
The two of them were alone in the library by that time, and she made up her mind to tell the doctor at least a part of the story. She had done that, and while she did so, something had occurred to her for the first time. If she was married to Herbert, she was entitled to that insurance money. And if she had that money, she could afford to employ a lawyer.
When the doctor left, she had telephoned to Arthur Glenn, but he was still in court. She went to his office, however, and waited for him until he came in at something after four. She had thought of him, because he had been Miss Juliet’s lawyer, and his father had represented the Mitchell family before him. If he worked with Charlie’s attorneys, it would show that he really believed him innocent.
But sitting there waiting, with Florence busily typing in another room, she had had time to look at her. And it was then that she had remembered where she had seen Florence before; coming out of that moving-picture theater on Monday night, and giving her a cold stare as she passed.
CHAPTER XXIX
Strange as it seems now, in all the strain of that night and the frenzied endeavors to save Paula Brent, I had given little or no thought to my own experience. And now, in that hospital room, all I craved was sleep. Curiosity was dead in me. I found my head drooping while she talked, and when, later on, the Inspector bundled me in his car and drove me home, he tells me that I slept all the way.
But we did not leave immediately when Paula had finished. Instead the Inspector got up and, opening the door to the hall, beckoned to someone. The next moment Charlie Elliott was in the room and bending over Paula’s bed.
“Darling!” he said thickly. “You poor darling.”
“Somebody gave me the rap, Charlie!”
“I know about that.”
But if I had expected any emotional scene between them that morning, I did not get it. True, they had a tight grip on each other, as though they meant never to let go. But these modern youngsters camouflage what they feel, so what she said was, “You need a shave, you know. What did you do? Break out with dynamite?”
He glanced at the Inspector, benignly watching them.
“Those bozos down at the jail said that after almost a week they’d be glad to pay me to get out.”
“I don’t blame them! I suppose you tried to be funny.”
“Be funny!” he protested. “I was funny. Ask the Inspector; he knows. Tell her that joke of mine about the Marines and the cow, Inspector.
But it was camouflage, and the next minute he grinned at us, and waved toward the door.
“We’re about six months behind in our necking,” he observed, “and I’m old-fashioned about necking. I don’t like an audience.”
When I glanced back through the open door a minute later, he was on his knees beside Paula’s bed, with an arm thrown over her. And she was crying.
I was almost beyond noticing, however. Somehow the Inspector got me down to his car, and as I have said, I slept all the way home. I remember getting out of the car and climbing the stairs to my sitting room. I have a faint recollection of Dick hopping about wildly, and then I was on my couch and I did not waken until the stealthy clatter of dishes roused me. I looked up, and Mrs. Merwin was carrying in a tray for two.
“Here’s some breakfast, dearie,” she said cheerfully. “And some for the gentleman. … You look a wreck. It must have been a bad case,” she added, appraising me carefully. Then she left.
I began to laugh. I laughed until I found the Inspector holding a cup of coffee under my nose and sternly telling me to drink it and quit it.
“Quit it!” I said hysterically. “I have quit. I�
�m through. Washed up.”
He paid absolutely no attention to that, and while I sipped my coffee, he went over and talked to the canary.
“Well, Dick,” he said, “your mistress is in a bad humor, and there will be no sugar for either of us for a while. I don’t know that I blame her, either. And we have to remember that. But outside of the temper, she’s rather a dear person, and I’m fond of her. In fact, I’m very fond of her.”
“Stop talking nonsense,” I said sharply. “And tell me about last night.”
“It’s a long story. I need food first.”
“If that gun you gave me wasn’t in the jardinière …”
“In the jardinière!” he said. “My God!”
And then, between mouthfuls of a hearty breakfast, he began his story.
“As a matter of record,” he said, “I owe a part of the solution of these two crimes—or maybe three—to you. You did a good piece of work without knowing it, when you marooned those two poor devils on the roof yesterday. And I repaid you by getting you damned near choked to death! You can consider last night’s apology repeated, and then some. But I have an excuse, such as it is. We were there all right, outside the house. But we were watching the doors. We knew that this person we were after had keys to that side door and, by all the laws of probability, would use them.
“What we did not know was that a window would be unlocked and subsequently used.
“When we found that open window, it was too late.
“But let’s get at this in orderly fashion. I’ll say this. Up to between four o’clock and five yesterday afternoon you knew almost as much as I did. You knew about the insurance, and that Herbert Wynne hadn’t carried out the plan as he was supposed to. You’d seen Miss Juliet’s confession, and you knew that it definitely implicated Charlie Elliott. And you knew, too, that she had been murdered in her turn.
“Charlie Elliott couldn’t have done that. And as you said yesterday after you read that statement of hers—or did I say it?—that statement left out certain facts which were important. What about that newspaper? Why had she left that out of her statement? That set me to thinking.
Miss Pinkerton Page 19