Murder by the Clock

by Rufus King

  “Did.”

  “Yes?”

  “I told you,” she blazed, “that he was half animal. You can hardly expect me to become more explicit.”

  Lieutenant Valcour was genuinely upset. “I do beg your pardon, Mrs. Endicott,” he said. “About this afternoon, were you in the house?”

  “Partly. I had tea at the Ritz, early, about four-thirty—with,” she added defiantly, “a man.”

  “Ah.”

  “Exactly so. That will permit you to reverse another tradition and go cherchez l’homme.”

  Lieutenant Valcour found instant good humour. “So you decided to fight fire with fire,” he said.

  “If you care to call it that.”

  “Just who is Marge Myles, and what?” Lieutenant Valcour said suddenly.

  “There are several terms one might apply to her. They all mean the same thing. I believe that recently, however,” Mrs. Endicott said very distinctly, “she has lost her amateur standing.”

  “Recently?”

  “The past year or so.”

  “Mr. Endicott had known her as long as that?”

  “Until the past month or two my husband had not known her at all. He’d heard of her, of course, and so had I.”

  “Then she is a woman who once had position?”

  “She was the wife of one of Herbert’s friends, a man who died two years ago and left her penniless. They say, incidentally, that she killed him.”

  “Killed him?”

  “It was just gossip, of course. They had a camp near some obscure lake up in Maine. The canoe they were in one evening upset. Harry Myles couldn’t swim.”

  “And Marge Myles?”

  “Marge Myles was famous for her swimming.”

  “Then the inference is that she, well, neglected to save her husband?”

  “That—and that she deliberately upset the canoe. I repeat it’s all gossip. People dropped him, you see, after he married her. That’s a commentary for you.”

  “You mean they still accepted him while he was—that is, before the ceremony.”

  “Yes, while he was living with her. It’s thoroughly natural, of course. People didn’t have to recognize her then; they could ignore her. But you can’t ignore a man’s wife; you either have to recognize her or not. The nots had it. If she had been a genuinely nice person, or an amusing one, I doubt whether the fact of their having lived together really would have mattered. But she wasn’t.”

  “What was she before her marriage?”

  “A member of that much-maligned group known as the chorus.”

  “And recently she had got in touch with your husband?”

  “She looked up all of Harry’s old friends. Don’t you see? As a widow she again had a standing—a shade higher, but similar to the one she held before Harry married her. I don’t know how many others she landed, but she certainly landed Herbert.”

  “And you were afraid she would do something to him?”

  “Well, she killed Harry.”

  “Then you personally believe the gossip?”

  Mrs. Endicott did not bother to give a direct reply.

  She shrugged, and twisted a little on the chaise longue.

  “And do you associate her in any way, Mrs. Endicott, with what has happened here tonight?”

  She continued to evade further direct responsibility for an opinion. “Who else?” she said.

  “But the actual mechanics of it, Mrs. Endicott—how could she have got into the house?”

  “It could be done. Herbert himself might have let her in.”

  “That’s going a little far, isn’t it?”

  “Yes. It was rotten of me to suggest it. I never really thought it, Lieutenant. I just said it.”

  “And after all, Mrs. Endicott, why should she want to kill your husband? You weren’t trying to keep him from her.”

  “He might have been trying to keep himself from her.”

  “He might. It’s stretching it a little, though, to think she’d deliberately kill him for that.”

  “She wouldn’t do it deliberately.”

  “I don’t know. When a woman starts out to kill she invariably chooses some weapon, or a poison. Every case has proved it again and again. But we’re only speculating, aren’t we? Who was it who took you to tea?”

  “I haven’t any intention of telling you.”

  “Because it might involve him?”

  “He couldn’t possibly be involved. If I thought he were I’d tell you in a minute.”

  Someone knocked on the door.

  “Just the same, Mrs. Endicott, I wish you would tell me who he was.”

  “No.”

  Lieutenant Valcour was able not only to recognize finality, he could accept it. He considered Mrs. Endicott’s very definite refusal to answer his question as of small consequence; there were so many more ways than one for frying an eel. He stood up and crossed to the door. He opened it and stepped into the corridor, closing the door behind him. Even in the dimmish light young Cassidy’s normally ruddy face was the color of chalk.

  “What’s happened, Cassidy?”

  “Honest to God, Lieutenant, I’m scared stiff. They’re getting things ready in there to bring that corpse back to life.”

  CHAPTER VI

  10:32 P.M.—Pictures in Dust

  Lieutenant Valcour stared for a puzzled instant at the white face.

  “What do you mean, Cassidy?” he said.

  “Honest to God, Lieutenant, I mean just what I say.”

  “But that’s impossible.”

  Cassidy went even further. “It’s sacrilege,” he said.

  “Nonsense,” Lieutenant Valcour said sharply. “You have simply misunderstood Dr. Worth. It is possible that Mr. Endicott was not dead at all but in some state of catalepsy. No one, Cassidy, can bring back the dead.”

  “I’m glad to hear you say so, sir.”

  “Then let us go in.”

  “Must I go back in there, too?”

  “You must. Forget the fact that you’re a superstitious Irishman, Cassidy, and remember that you’re a cop. Cops, as you’ve been told more times than one, should be noble, firm, and perpetually cool, calm, and collected.”

  “Sure now, you’re kidding.”

  “Tut, tut.”

  “Well, and I’ll try, Lieutenant—but cripes!”

  “But nothing,” advised Lieutenant Valcour as he opened the door to Endicott’s room.

  The effect was shockingly garish. All shades had been removed from their lamps, and the various details of the furnishing stood out in the painful white light brightly clear.

  Andrews was alone. He stood near the bed upon which Endicott had been placed, looking in rather shocked bewilderment at the body. Lieutenant Valcour joined him. A blanket had been drawn up to Endicott’s chin, and the face which remained exposed looked very waxlike—very still—very much like a dead man’s indeed.

  “This is the damnedest thing, Valcour.”

  “What is, Chief?”

  “They say there’s a chance that this man isn’t dead. Worth is going to operate.”

  “Operate? But Dr. Worth himself admitted that the heart had stopped beating after testing with a stethoscope. What sort of an operation?”

  “Worth’s going to inject adrenaline into the cardiac muscles.”

  “I wonder just how much value there is in that stuff.”

  “Well, unless Endicott’s been poisoned, the medical examiner and Worth both seem to think there’s a chance. They feel there’s no harm in trying, anyway. It sounds silly to me, but they reminded me of that recent case in Queens—you probably read about it—where a man had been pronounced dead for six hours and was revived. Of course, they said he wasn’t really dead, just as they now think that Endicott may not be really dead. No one can bring back the dead.”

  Lieutenant Valcour threw a bland look to Cassidy, who was standing in as convenient a position to the hall door as he could possibly get.

  “They say,�
�� Andrews went on, “that adrenaline’s been used off and on for years. Worth says they try it quite often when a baby is born ‘dead.’ Sometimes it starts the heart pumping and the baby lives.”

  Lieutenant Valcour shrugged. “It will make things pretty simple for us if it works with Endicott,” he said. “He can make a statement and prefer charges himself. Where is everybody?”

  “The medical examiner and Worth are downstairs telephoning and making arrangements for the operation. My men have finished and have gone back to headquarters. There wasn’t any sign of forcing an entry, so it looks like an inside job, if there was any job. I tell you, Valcour, if it wasn’t for your suggestion that robbery was a motive, or for that note that might have been a threat, I’d drop the whole thing. It’s a different matter if the adrenaline doesn’t work and an autopsy proves poison or something. Find out much from Mrs. Endicott?”

  “Enough to be interested in learning more. Want the details?”

  “Later, if I have to get to work on the case. You want to keep on handling it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Go ahead. Call for any outside stuff you want us to check up on for you. I’ll send you a report on the brushes and comb as soon as they finish with them downtown.”

  “You going, Chief?”

  “No use in my sticking around, Valcour. We haven’t a case yet, really, that calls for any Central Office work. Hell, according to those two six-syllable specialists downstairs, we haven’t even got a corpse. Robbery there may have been, and it’s your precinct—so go to it. I’ll find out from the medical examiner when he gets back how the operation turned out, and if there’s going to be an autopsy. If poisoning is proved and you haven’t pinned it on anyone by then, I’ll get on the job again. I suppose you’ll see that the people in the house are given the once over?”

  “Certainly, Chief.”

  “I’ll run along then. Good luck, Valcour.”

  “Thank you, Chief.”

  Andrews left the room and closed the door.

  “I bet he’s got a date,” said Cassidy.

  “He’d stay here if he had twenty dates, if he thought it was necessary,” said Lieutenant Valcour.

  “Well, I wish I had a date.”

  “You’ll have a whole vacation if you don’t brace up. I’m going to take a look in that cupboard, now that Endicott’s no longer in it.”

  Even a cupboard seemed preferable to Cassidy to being in the room. “Can’t I help you, sir?” he said with almost fervent politeness.

  “No, Cassidy, you can’t. You can stay just where you are.”

  “Oh, very well, sir.”

  Lieutenant Valcour picked up a straight-backed chair and took it into the cupboard with him. He held a sincere respect for the Central Office men, but at the same time felt that their work was too methodically routine to permit their darting along interesting tangents or wasting their time in strolls along bypaths that might lead to fertile fields. There was no criticism in his mind at all. He admired the system that had been established, and the expert functioning of its units and departments. He knew very well that its average of successes was greater than its average of failures. But it was deficient in that elusive, time-taking, and sometimes expensive thing known as the “personal equation.” It remained, at its best, a machine.

  A certain amount of carelessness, too, ran in the general plan. In many cases some things were slurred over, some missed entirely. This again was not surprising when one considered that the personnel was recruited largely from the more intelligent men in the ranks. Intelligent, yes, but hardly specialists, nor could one in all fairness expect them to be.

  When working on a case they functioned along two distinctly separate but parallel lines. One department of specialists handled the technical and chemical investigation of material things and clues found on the scene of the crime—just as the brushes and comb were shortly to be examined by the proper men down at Central Office. A second department dealt with the human aspect—examining witnesses, looking up all friends or connections of the victim; a large, competent organization that would stretch feelers, no matter how many were necessary, to every contact point of the victim’s life within the city, and from whose findings some possible motive could be established and some possible suspect or group of suspects be evolved.

  The two branches would then compare notes, and if a satisfactory amount of evidence had been obtained by the technical department to establish a case against one or several of the suspects, arrests would be made or the suspects brought in for questioning. According to the temperament and station of the suspects, one of the various forms that go to make up the properly dreaded third degree would be employed and a confession obtained. The work of the Central Office would then be finished, and the case up to the prosecutor.

  Lieutenant Valcour was glad that in the present instance the homicide chief had felt it useless to set in motion the machinery of the second branch until more definite developments should occur. The case interested him. Mrs. Endicott interested him—her astonishing beauty, her mind, her contradictions—Roberts—Marge Myles—three women who offered an assurance of satisfying an almost blatant curiosity he possessed for discovering the source springs of human behavior. This talk about reviving Endicott and Endicott himself making a statement—well, perhaps. But until it was accomplished he preferred to think of Endicott as a corpse, the case a definite homicide, and of possible suspects right in the house.

  Lieutenant Valcour concentrated his attention upon the cupboard. There were shelves along the back of it, the lowest one being at the height of a man’s head. Numerous suits of clothes were hanging from beneath this lowest shelf. He stood on the chair and played his flashlight along the top of it. There was nothing there but an accumulation of dust. He felt a distinct and highly satisfactory thrill when he noted that streaks showed where the dust had very recently been rubbed away, as if somebody had deliberately wiped both his hands in it. It linked with the dirty cake of soap. Andrews had said nothing about the streaks. It was pretty obvious that the Central Office men had overlooked them—had casually observed that the shelves were empty and had let the matter go at that.

  Lieutenant Valcour began to feel quite pleasant and informed himself gravely that a deduction was in order. For a happy moment he considered the possibility of that curious and sinister Oriental influence that crops up so perennially in the very finest of murder cases—of Cassidy’s murder cases: that elusive figure swathed in gray, whitely turbaned above coffee-colored skin, who has a penchant toward religious fanaticism the esoteric rites of which involve dust. This breath-shocking villain would ultimately be trapped by the bright detective through the wretch’s occult passion for this dust. Had one, Lieutenant Valcour wanted to know, such an enigma to deal with here? No, he informed himself sternly, one knew damned well one had not. But in the place of such a handy and beautiful deduction—what?

  He stared at the dust and began to see pictures in it: a crouching person tormented by hate or fear, or both, who knows that Endicott is going to open the cupboard door. What, in the name of the lighter humorists, to do? The person dreads recognition. Is there no disguise? No, curse it—but yes—the dust! The person’s hands are smeared, and by means of the hands, the face…

  “Ain’t there nothing I can do for you, Lieutenant?”

  Lieutenant Valcour sighed and got down from the chair.

  “Yes, Cassidy,” he said. “You can take this chair and put it over by the hall door. Then you can sit down.”

  “Very well, Lieutenant,” said Cassidy bitterly. “But when you’re in that cupboard there ain’t nobody in the room with me but that live corpse.”

  “Then sit where you can’t see it.”

  “Cripes, Lieutenant, I don’t have to see it. I get the chills just thinking about it.”

  “You’ll get the gate, Cassidy, if you don’t snap out of it.”

  “All right, sir, but if you come out and find me keeled over, don’t blame me.
”

  “I wouldn’t dream of it, Cassidy.”

  Lieutenant Valcour reentered the cupboard. He examined the corner in which Endicott had been slumped. The suits on the hangers had fallen back a little into shape. He carefully went through their various pockets. They were empty, and from the rumpled condition of their linings he knew that they had been hastily gone through before. Perhaps the Central Office men had done so, but he doubted it. They would concern themselves pretty exclusively with the effects taken from the clothes Endicott had been wearing at the time of the attack.

  It interested him to note that the suits against which Endicott’s body had been slumped showed evidence of having been searched with the rest. It confirmed his theory that that was what the attacker had been doing when caught in the cupboard by Endicott’s sudden appearance in the bedroom, and it also strengthened his theory of the ingenious use of dust from the shelf top as a disguise.

  Shoes lined a low shelf along the bottom of one side, and hat boxes occupied a corresponding shelf on the other. Lieutenant Valcour dismissed the possibility that the particular hat he was searching for—the one that Endicott was wearing or intended to get at the moment of the attack—would be in a box. Perhaps it was in the cupboard Mrs. Endicott spoke about downstairs in the entrance hall. The point kept nagging at him irritatingly, and he considered it important enough to go down and find out.

  Cassidy barely restrained himself from clutching Lieutenant Valcour’s arm by the hall door.

  “Honest to God, you ain’t going to leave me in here alone, Lieutenant?”

  “Honest to God, Cassidy, I am.”

  Lieutenant Valcour went out. Cassidy took one bleak look at his charge, the living corpse, carefully crossed the fingers of both his hands, and sat down.

  “I just knew,” he muttered truculently, “that this case was going to be one of them printed damn things.”

  CHAPTER VII

  11:01 P.M.—Banked Fires

  The corridor was deserted.

  Lieutenant Valcour walked along it to the top of the stair well and looked down into the entrance hall. He could see the broad athletic back of Officer O’Brian on guard at the door. O’Brian’s snub nose was pressed against the plate glass, and his eyes, one presumed, were staring out through the door’s bronze grille upon the street.