by Rufus King
“I want you to tell me,” he said, “just where about this house you have hidden Marge Myles.”
CHAPTER XXIX
6:30 A.M.—As Is Mirage
Mrs. Endicott stared sharply at Lieutenant Valcour. She was suddenly tensely alert.
“I think,” she said, “that you have gone mad.”
“Do you still maintain the pretense that when you were on the sill of your window and looking toward your husband’s room you saw nobody on the balcony?”
“There is no reason why I should alter the truth.”
“I shall be as patient with you, Mrs. Endicott, as you have just been with me. Listen carefully to me, please, and I will tell you why it is I believe Marge Myles killed your husband, and why I think you have given her sanctuary after the crime by concealing her some place within this house.”
“I’ve no alternative but to listen, Lieutenant. But you are wrong—absurdly wrong.”
“We will start with the initial premise, Mrs. Endicott, that Marge did murder Harry Myles in that canoe episode on the lake. I know that she has been paying blackmail to her stepmother, Madame Velasquez, for a long while, probably since the time of the crime itself. Well, a woman of her type doesn’t pay hush money easily; she makes very certain, first, that the blackmailer really has the goods on her. Which made it simple for your husband.”
“Herbert? Are you suggesting the fantastic idea that Herbert was trying to blackmail her?”
“People are blackmailed into giving up more things than money, Mrs. Endicott. I’m not suggesting that your husband was after money, but I do suggest that to further some abortive purpose Mr. Endicott held the postscript forgery that you made over Marge Myles’s head as a threat. I have just found that letter in his trunk, and it is now in my pocket.”
“Abortive purpose—Don’t go on just for a moment, please—I’m trying to make it fit.”
“It’s something along the lines of cruelty that I’m suggesting—some special cruelty.”
“Perhaps. Herbert liked to see things squirm. He was subconsciously sadistic.”
“He probably drove her pretty far, because she made up her mind to get that letter—he undoubtedly greatly magnified its importance as evidence to her—no matter at what risk to herself. I don’t really believe that when she came here last night she had any intention at all of actually killing your husband. What she wanted was that letter. Did you let her into the house, Mrs. Endicott?”
Mrs. Endicott smiled a bit acidly and kept her lips tightly compressed.
“Because if you didn’t,” Lieutenant Valcour went on, “she must have stolen a key from your husband. At any rate, she was in the house here and searching for the letter in Mr. Endicott’s room sometime around seven last night. Mr. Endicott should have been miles away up at her apartment, according to appointment, and leaving her a clear field. She had planned the whole thing out pretty carefully, because she left a note for Madame Velasquez, who was due to arrive at the apartment for a visit last night. Marge implied in the note that it had been written after seven when, as a matter of fact, it must have been written considerably earlier and planted in the apartment either as an alibi or as an explanation to Mr. Endicott of her absence. It would certainly have sent him hurrying off to the Colonial in search of her. It wasn’t successful, of course, as he was undoubtedly delayed because of the quarrel he had with you, and was here in the house instead of up at her apartment as she had expected he would be. Don’t you see that it rather all fits in?”
“Quite. But I still fail to understand what possible connection it can have with me.”
“It has every connection with you, Mrs. Endicott, because unless we can prove that Marge Myles fired the shot this morning that killed your husband it will be unpleasantly necessary to establish the charge against yourself.”
“I am probably very stupid, Lieutenant, but it is incomprehensible to me why I should shoot my husband around two or three o’clock this morning because Marge Myles was searching for a letter in his room at seven last night.”
“Consider the problem, please, as two separate crimes and follow it through on that basis. At seven o’clock last night we have Marge Myles searching the pockets of your husband’s clothes in his cupboard. He comes into the room, and she finds herself trapped in the cupboard. He opens the door, and the sudden terrifying sight of her gives him a heart attack. She believes him dead and drags him into the cupboard so that his body will not be found until she has had a chance to escape. She hasn’t returned to her apartment, you know, all night, so it’s quite possible she has either taken flight or is in hiding some place in the city.”
“Then I can’t, as you have suggested, be hiding her in the house.”
It was Lieutenant Valcour who now assumed the role of teacher, with Mrs. Endicott as his young pupil.
“Not under that supposition. But if she did escape from the house at that time, what have we left? You found the scrap of paper on which she herself wrote a hinted threat in an effort to divert suspicion, and the writing of which was inspired by the distraught mental condition she must have been in. You called the police, and we found Mr. Endicott. Your suspicions jumped unerringly to the man who was uppermost in your thoughts: Mr. Hollander. He, you said to yourself, had done this thing to save you. Consequently, when you learned that Mr. Endicott had been revived and was expected to make a statement, you shot him to prevent his accusing Mr. Hollander, and you arranged your alibi with considerable ingenuity by only pretending to have taken the narcotic.”
“It makes quite a case, doesn’t it?”
“Yes, Mrs. Endicott, quite a case.”
“And the alternative? You did suggest that there was an alternative.”
“That Marge Myles has never left the house at all. That she is still here. And this is what the prosecuting attorney will offer to the jury: that with your knowledge she got onto the balcony through one of the windows in your room, shot Mr. Endicott, returned to your room, and was hidden by you some place around this house.”
“All of which is unfortunately negated, Lieutenant, by the fact that it was my slipper you found outside the window, and not hers.”
“The prosecuting attorney can alter the action of the scene to suit that, Mrs. Endicott. After Marge Myles got onto the balcony you were terrified at the thought of what you had become a party to. You made an effort to recall her, when the shots were fired and threw you into a panic. You dropped your slipper and got back into the room.” Lieutenant Valcour became quietly persuasive. “Which of my two theories shall I believe? I can make you no promises, Mrs. Endicott, because any confession that has been given under an understanding that there will be an amelioration of punishment loses value in court. But I can suggest to you that if you choose to make things easier for justice the act may prove beneficial for yourself. There are more unwritten laws than the common one so generally known.”
Mrs. Endicott looked at him queerly.
“You don’t worry me,” she said, “at all. Any course that I might take can have but a common, a desired ending. The method of achievement is utterly inconsequential to me, as long as the ultimate result remains the same.”
She was mounted again, Lieutenant Valcour decided, upon her hobby which carried her along indifferent trails to death. The apparent strength of her obsession rendered any further efforts on his part futile. In the attic there was, for him, no longer anything of mystery or the beauty of shrouded things. It was an ugly, littered room peopled by a smartly turned out beauty who, like a petulant and spoiled child reaching for the moon, sought further mysteries in that life which beckons from beyond life, and by a tired, oldish fellow standing stupidly in his stockinged feet away from his shoes.
“Come downstairs with me, Mrs. Endicott,” he said. “As soon as my men have thoroughly searched this house you will be formally charged.”
CHAPTER XXX
7:11 A.M.—The Criminal and Weapon of the Crime
Lieutenant Valcour was
once more in his shoes. Even in their laceless condition they restored his confidence in the relative fitness of things.
Mrs. Endicott preceded him down two flights of stairs and to the door of her husband’s room, which Lieutenant Valcour opened. He looked inside and saw Cassidy sound asleep, seated on the large mahogany chest by the window. And he did not blame Cassidy so much as he envied him.
“Cassidy.”
Cassidy’s sharp return to consciousness would have reflected credit upon the hero of any Western drama. “Sir?”
“Put your gun back, Cassidy.”
“Yes, Lieutenant. I must have dropped off for a cat nap.”
“We can discuss that later. I want you to take Mrs. Endicott down to the entrance hall with you and leave her there in charge of O’Brian. She is under arrest.”
“Yes, sir.”
“After that, warn the men on the servants’ entrance and garden door to keep on their toes. If anyone tries to get past them on any pretext whatever they are to stop him. Look up Hansen—he may still be in the backyard—and then both of you come back here. We will then search the house.”
“Yes, sir.”
Lieutenant Valcour went into Endicott’s room and closed the door. It was getting to be a mechanical action with him that caused him to go to the desk and sit down. The perfumed sheet of notepaper, which he had twice been prevented through interruptions from reading, caught his attention at once. He read the letter through.
I don’t believe you [it began, without any preliminaries], and right from the start I tell you I think you are a liar and a louse. Harry never wrote your wife no such thing, and even if he did it proves nothing anyway. Nobody can prove a thing. You think it is funny to scare me and if you do it any more I am going to show you just how damn funny it is. I am through with you just the same way that your wife is through with you and you are a nasty rat.
MARGE.
Not really, Lieutenant Valcour decided, an essentially nice person. He folded the letter and put it in his pocket to keep company with the postscript forged by Mrs. Endicott. It would serve ably in establishing a motive and help the prosecuting attorney to clinch the case. Just as soon, he added unhappily, as he had unearthed the criminal and the weapon of the crime. That criminal, he repeated softly to himself, who with her weapon was still at large about the house, unless his theory of the case was basically wrong.
And therein lay the danger, the source of that curious presentiment of impending menace which had gripped him at odd intervals throughout the night. Strange that it should possess him most strongly in this silent room. But wasn’t that just the association of ideas? Endicott, dead on the bed over there, and the path of that death-dealing bullet cutting through that corner over by the other window. He sought relief from a return of it by a mental mopping up. It didn’t do to linger on presentiments…
There were those few little side issues to think about; issues that had puzzled him, but which did not bear any direct reference to the main theme. He felt that they were explainable without any further personal investigation.
It seemed obvious to him, for example, that the reason why Mrs. Siddons had gone downstairs with her bonnet on, when the sight of O’Brian by the front door had turned her back, was a desire on her part to get in touch with Maizie’s sailor husband and warn him that the crime she thought he had committed had been discovered and that the police were in the house. She had told Mrs. Endicott that she believed that she had seen him loitering about the street during the afternoon. And Mrs. Siddons would never have questioned her own ability to walk right out and find him because, if it so desired, Providence would have prearranged a suitable rendezvous.
…They came from that corner, really: those definitely significant waves of warning, as insistent as the scent that had led him to find the letter from Marge Myles in the desk. But they weren’t a scent, nor were they anything so definite as a letter. They were (the astonishing thought thrilled him disagreeably) Marge Myles—her personality—herself—inimical… Nonsense, nonsense—the room was empty…
He forced himself to think of the two little bewilderments that had troubled him in connection with the thoroughly bewildering Roberts. That pregnant look she had given him—what had it really meant, more or less, than an intense urge on her part to erase any spell of fascination which Mrs. Endicott might have cast upon him, and to plant in its place the seeds of suspicion of Roberts’s own sowing. It had been nothing more, really, than that.
Now of greater inconsistency had been Roberts’s suggestion of Hollander as the proper friend to stay with Endicott; for Roberts assuredly had held a fantastic passion for Endicott—fantastic in that there was this abnormal interrelationship of his personality with that of her war-killed brother—and she had just as assuredly been convinced that a liaison existed between Hollander and Endicott’s wife. There was but one solution: Roberts had never observed Hollander and Mrs. Endicott together, and she had hoped, should morning bring a meeting, that under the natural dramatic effect of the setting there might be some betrayal. A look, perhaps, was all she wanted to confirm her suspicions. And there could have been in her mind no thought of any real danger to Endicott from Hollander, for had there not been a nurse and two policemen close by on guard? Then later, when Endicott was well again, Roberts could have told him the thing which she had seen.
…Mental fingers, that’s what they were, plucking at his nerves and forming dissonances that chilled him queerly. He wasn’t alone—but he must be—the room was empty…
He would think of that Mr. “Smith” who lived with Hollander. Did he fit in—beyond one solid thump on the head? Only as one of the myriad side issues that cling like parasites to the trunk of each major crime. One could suppose (with reasonable assurance that the supposition would later prove to be fact) that Hollander was in some genteelly illicit profession such as bootlegging, and that Mr. Smith drummed up Hollander’s customers for him among the night clubs—incidentally relieving some of the more foolish of them of their jewels. Mr. Smith might well have believed, at that moment when Lieutenant Valcour went to the telephone in their apartment, that if Hollander’s goose was cooked his own might be cooked, too, and a blackjack had then seemed the simplest expedient that would insure his fading swiftly out of the picture—the room was empty—the room was empty…
As for the emotional jungle of warped and sunless growths through which Endicott, his wife, Marge Myles, and Hollander had all groped their illusion-drugged way to this unhappy end—that lay beyond the punishment or acquittal of earthbound law. The proper tribunal for that must be found seated within their separate souls. Lies—evasions—fetid depths…
But had she lied?
Had there truly been no one on the balcony, as Mrs. Endicott had said?
The shot had assuredly been fired from the direction of that window above the large mahogany chest.
Above?
Presentiments were banished before the lash of fact. The lid of that chest was not quite closed. And the object that was holding it open, for the space of perhaps a half of an inch, was the small black muzzle of a gun.
Lieutenant Valcour’s hand moved indolently toward the upper left pocket of his vest, in which there rested a flat, efficient little automatic of small caliber. He knew what had happened—that owing to his stillness for the last five minutes the murderer had thought the room was empty and was attempting to escape. His hand moved more quickly, but not quickly enough. The lid opened wider—eyes—a face—a little shock of alarm, of terror—all ever so much more quickly accomplished than told. The lid slammed up.
“Quit it, Lieutenant, and put your hands down flat on the top of that desk.”
“You’re Marge Myles, of course,” he said.
He flattened his hands on the desk’s mahogany surface and stared curiously at her sultry beauty as she sat on the rim of the open chest. Flamboyant, that’s what she was, and terribly bizarre from the effect of a shingled ripple of bleached blonde hair above h
er Spanish night-filled eyes.
“You have put yourself in my way, Lieutenant”—her voice was as disagreeable as the clash of dishes in a cheap restaurant—“and I am going to kill you and escape.”
“I see,” Lieutenant Valcour said politely, “that you believe in threes.”
“How?”
“Your husband, Mrs. Endicott’s husband, and now myself. One—two—three. For the sake of symmetry it is a pity that I am a bachelor.”
She enjoyed for a full moment of silence—luxuriated in it, really—the sense of power which she held over this man. She had always enjoyed the power exerted by her body, and it was refreshing to drink quietly for a while of this different sort of power, which, through the medium of the pistol held unwaveringly in her hand, controlled the services of life and death. She would shoot him soon…
Lieutenant Valcour hoped that Hansen would not blunder.
He could see Hansen quite clearly now, all but pressed against the outside of the window just behind Marge Myles. So Hansen, he reflected, had found that there was a way to climb up onto the balcony from the garden down below. What a handy thing it was, at times, to have been a sailor. Lieutenant Valcour fervently hoped that—the usefulness of the rule having been accomplished—Hansen would promptly stop being a sailor and become a policeman. He couldn’t, and didn’t, expect that Hansen would shoot a woman down in cold blood, nor would Hansen dare to startle her by throwing open the window or crashing through its glass. Could Hansen shoot through the glass and knock the pistol from her hand? Maybe once, Lieutenant Valcour thought unhappily, out of every twenty times. And she certainly wouldn’t refrain from pulling the trigger while Hansen practiced twenty times.