The Big Book of Female Detectives

by The Big Book of Female Detectives (retail) (epub)

  “ ‘William Tell’ is nearing the end, I fancy. Listen!”

  The speaker was right. It was the end—but not the end that either the musician or his audience were expecting.

  Above the crash of the music rang out the sudden, muffled report of a revolver!

  From the piano came a long, echoing discord, as though the player’s arm had fallen heavily to the keys.

  And then silence—a silence so intense that the low breathing of the group in the library, stricken suddenly motionless, sounded with strange distinctness!

  For a moment the quartet stood staring at one another, helpless, dumb, under the spell of an overwhelming bewilderment.

  Miss Morrison fell back against the wall, panting like a frightened deer, her eyes staring up the winding stairway as though they would pierce the closed door above and see—what?

  Of the two men, Weston was the prompter to act.

  Jerking his companion by the elbow as though to arouse him to the necessity of the situation, he sprang out of the doorway, taking the steps to the second floor two at a bound.

  John Wilkins, glancing hesitatingly at the women, followed more slowly at his shoulder.

  From the end of the upper hall came the sound of running steps as the men reached it. A tall, slight, fair-haired girl, in a green satin evening gown, clutched Weston’s arm with a wild, questioning stare.

  For the first time Wilkins sensed the spell of tragedy. In the girl’s eyes was a gleam of undisguised terror.

  “The shot?” she burst out. “It came from——”

  Weston nodded shortly, even curtly, as he jerked his head toward the door of the music-room, still closed, and followed the motion with a quick step. Wilkins reached forward and touched the girl’s shoulder awkwardly.

  “Don’t you think I had better escort you below, Miss Wentworth?”

  The girl shook off his fingers impatiently.

  Weston’s hand was on the knob of the music-room door. He turned it abruptly. A puzzled frown swept his face, and he turned it again more violently. The door was locked.

  Hilda Wentworth darted to his side, tearing his hand away almost fiercely and beating the panels sharply with her knuckles.

  “Uncle! Uncle! It is I, Hilda!”

  The silence was unbroken.

  The girl redoubled her efforts, tearing at the wood with her fingers and raising her voice almost to a shriek.

  Then of a sudden she stepped back, turned with a low, gasping wail, and sank into the arms of a tall, broad-shouldered young man with the build of an athlete, who sprang up the stairs past Wilkins’s hesitating figure just in time to catch her.

  Weston glanced at the newcomer with a swift hardening of his lips. “Lend a hand here, Grayson!” he jerked out. “We’ve got to break in this door!”

  “In Heaven’s name, why?”

  “No time for questions, man!” Weston’s tones were curt. “Hendricks is in there. We heard a shot. We don’t——”

  “A shot?”

  The words might have been a spur. The speaker lowered the body of the fainting girl to the floor, and sprang to the door with a vigor that made the others stare in spite of the tension of the moment.

  Poising himself for an instant, he launched his body toward the oaken panels. There was a sharp splintering of wood.

  Weston muttered a low cry of satisfaction and joined him in a second assault. The door shivered on its hinges.

  The girl on the floor raised herself on her elbow and watched the two with a white, strained face.

  The men drew back with muscles taut and hurled themselves a third time toward the barrier.

  II

  This time the attack was successful. The door fell inward so abruptly that they were thrown to their knees.

  Before they could rise, a satin-clad figure sprang past them from the hall and threw itself with a cry on the body of a man in evening clothes, huddled on the floor.

  Just above his left ear showed a gaping bullet-hole, from which a thin stream of blood was already trickling down on to the rug beneath him.

  His eyes were fixed in a ghastly stare which permitted no second question as to his condition. Homer Hendricks was dead!

  Weston raised the girl to her feet with the commanding gesture of a strong-minded man in a sudden emergency.

  “Hilda—Miss Wentworth—you must let us take you down-stairs. This is no place for you.”

  “Oh, Uncle! Poor Uncle!” sobbed the girl unheeding.

  Weston darted a swift glance around the room and toward the stairs. The women below were evidently not yet aware of the situation.

  Wilkins from the hall was surveying the scene like a man in a nightmare, with a face from which every vestige of color had fled.

  Grayson was still standing by the shattered door, with his hands clenched as though in a quick, nervous spasm.

  At Weston’s words he approached the girl with an added sentence of entreaty.

  She nodded dully, flashed a last, despairing glance at the body on the floor, and suffered him to take her arm without resistance.

  There was a certain suggestion of intimacy in the action, which brought a sudden scowl to Weston’s features, as he said crisply:

  “Of course, Grayson, you will explain to the ladies. As for the rest of it, you had better have them remain until——”

  “The police?” Grayson finished inquiringly. “Shall I telephone?”

  Weston hesitated, with a glance at Wilkins. The latter was still maintaining his position in the doorway as though fearing to enter.

  “The police?” he repeated huskily. His eyes were riveted on the body of Hendricks as though held by a magnet. “I—I suppose so. This is awful, gentlemen!”

  The attitude of the three men in the face of the sudden tragedy was curiously suggestive of their characters—Weston, with the crisply directing demeanor of the man accustomed to leadership; Grayson, frankly bewildered, with his attention centered on the girl’s distress rather than the harsher features of the situation; Wilkins, passively content to allow another to direct his actions.

  Hilda Wentworth gathered up her skirts and gently released herself from Grayson’s hand.

  In her face was a forced calmness, to a close observer more expressive of inward suffering than even her first outburst of grief.

  As Grayson made a move to follow her, she turned with a low sentence. “I would prefer that you stay here, Bob!”

  Her inflection, and the glance which accompanied it, brought another swiftly veiled scowl to Weston’s face. He strode to the end of the room and did not turn until Wilkins had led Miss Wentworth to the stairs.

  Grayson, in the center of the apartment, had dug his hands into his trousers-pockets and was watching him curiously.

  “A beastly bad business, Bob!” Weston spoke nervously, in odd contrast to his former curt tones.

  Grayson jerked his head almost imperceptibly toward the motionless body on the carpet.

  “What on earth made him do it?”

  “Him do it?” There was an obvious note of surprise in Weston’s voice. “Heavens, Bob, can’t you see it’s not—not that?”

  Grayson recoiled as from a blow.

  “Not suicide?” His tone raised itself with a shrill suddenness. “Why, man, it must be! You don’t mean, you can’t mean——”

  Weston lifted his eyebrows questioningly. “Do men shoot themselves without a weapon, Bob?”

  Grayson sprang abruptly past the other, stooped swiftly over the silent form of Homer Hendricks, and turned his eyes, fiercely across the adjacent stretch of carpet.

  Weston watched him somberly.

  “Are you convinced?” he queried at length.

  Grayson pushed back the only chair in that e
nd of the room, saw that it concealed nothing, and then, seizing an end of the elaborately carved piano, in front of which the body of the dead man rested, tugged until he forced it an inch from the wall.

  His eyes swept the crack thus exposed, and he stepped back with a gesture of bewilderment.

  “Have you found it?” Weston ventured. There was the barest trace of a sneer in his voice.

  Grayson sprang across at him and clutched his shoulder.

  “The weapon, man! Where is it? I say it must be here!”

  Weston glanced at the other’s flushed features calmly.

  “I told you, Bob, there was none. Or, perhaps, you think that a dead man can rise to his feet and toss the gun that has ended his life out of the window?”

  “The window?” Grayson muttered. Weston’s sneer escaped him.

  Darting to the three windows of the music-room, he flung back the drawn curtains of each in turn. They were all locked, and neither the glass nor the curtains showed a mark of disturbance.

  Weston followed his movements with folded arms.

  “There is still the door, Bob. And remember that is the only other possible exit.” He hesitated. “If you will take the trouble to raise it from the floor, you will discover a fact which I learned some minutes ago. The key was turned from the inside and not from the outside!”

  Grayson glanced at the other for a long moment in silence; then, stepping across the carpet with the resolution of a man determined to accept only the evidence of his own eyes, he raised the shattered panels until the lock was exposed.

  The key, bent by the force of the fall, was still firmly fixed on the inward side of the door!

  Grayson rose from his knees like a man groping in a brain-whirling maze.

  “Sit down, Bob!” Weston pushed across a chair and forced the other into it. “We’ve got to face this thing coolly.”

  “Coolly!” Grayson’s voice rose almost to a hysterical laugh. “Good Heavens! Are you a man or a machine? You tell me that Hendricks did not kill himself——”

  “Could not!” Weston corrected in a level tone.

  “And now,” Grayson burst on unheeding, “you show me that he was not——”

  “Murdered?” Weston completed calmly. “That is where you are wrong. I have shown you no such inference!”

  Grayson passed his hand wearily over his brow.

  “We are not dealing with spirits, man! You forget that the windows are fastened, the door locked——”

  “I forget nothing!” said Weston coldly.

  Grayson kicked back his chair impatiently. “Then, if Hendricks’s murderer has not vanished into thin air, how——”

  “That, my dear boy,” said Weston softly, “is a question which these gentlemen may be able to answer for us!”

  As he spoke, he motioned toward the hall.

  Wilkins had appeared at the head of the stairs with two newcomers, both of whom were obviously policemen, although only one was in uniform.

  Wilkins paused awkwardly at the door, with his hand on the shoulder of the man in civilian clothes.

  “Lieutenant Perry, of headquarters,” he announced formally, “Mr. Weston and Mr. Grayson!”

  Weston extended his hand with a subtle suggestion of deference which brought a gratified flush to the officer’s face.

  He was a short, stocky, round-headed man with all of the evidences of the stubborn police bulldog, although the suggestion of any pronounced mental ability was lacking.

  His eyes swept the body of the dead man and the details of the room with professional stoicism. Motioning to his companion, he knelt over Hendricks’s stiffening form.

  “Bullet entered at the left ear,” he muttered. “Death probably instantaneous!” He straightened with the conventional police frown. “Where’s the weapon, gentlemen?”

  Grayson was silent, content that Weston should act as spokesman. The latter flung out his hands.

  “We thought you could find it for us!” he answered shortly.

  “Then you have not found it?” There was a flash of suspicion in the lieutenant’s voice.

  “We have not!”

  The lieutenant jotted down a scrawling line in his note-book.

  “Are we to believe this murder, then?” he rasped.

  “I should prefer that you draw your own conclusions, Lieutenant!”

  For an instant the officer’s pencil was poised in the air, then he closed his note-book with a jerk, thrust his pencil into his pocket, and walked quickly to the closed windows, and then to the door. A growing coldness was apparent in every movement.

  “Help me here, Burke!” he snapped to his subordinate. “Stand back, gentlemen!” he continued with almost a growl as Weston made a motion as though to assist.

  The next moment the broken door was raised slowly back against the wall. The lieutenant’s eyes fell on the lock with the twisted key. With a grimness he did not attempt to conceal, he whirled on the two men behind him.

  “What kind of a yarn are you trying to give me?” His hand pointed first to the locked door and then to the fastened windows. “Do you think I was born yesterday? Come, gents, out with the truth!”

  “The truth?” said Weston curtly.

  The lieutenant bristled. “Just so—and the sooner you let me have it the better for all parties concerned! First you tell me there is no weapon, and would have me infer that Mr. Hendricks did not kill himself. Then I find that the room is locked as tight as a drum and there is no possible way for anyone else to have fired the shot—and escape. Do you think I am blind? You are either covering up the fact of suicide, or trying to shield the murderer!”

  Lieutenant Perry paused, quite out of breath, with his face very red and his right hand clenched with the violence of his emotions.

  The turn of affairs was so abrupt and unexpected that Grayson stood speechless. Weston had made an angry step forward, with his eyes flashing, when a low exclamation from the policeman, Burke, broke the tension.

  In his right hand he was holding out a woman’s white kid glove, with its thumb stained with a ragged splotch of still fresh blood.

  “Found it down by the wall, sir! It was covered up by the door!”

  Lieutenant Perry snatched the glove from the other’s hand and held it toward the light. On the wrist was a delicately embroidered monogram in white silk.

  Grayson with difficulty smothered a sharp cry. Then his eyes sought Weston’s face, grown suddenly cold and hard. Both men had recognized the object on the instant. The glove was the property of Hilda Wentworth!

  “H. W.” The lieutenant deciphered the letters slowly. “And pray, gentlemen,” he said mockingly, nodding toward Weston with a grin of exultation, “what person do these interesting initials fit?”

  “I think I can answer that question, sir!”

  The words came in a clear, cold tone from the doorway, and Hilda Wentworth, pressing her way past Wilkins’s resisting arm, stepped into the room.

  “The glove is mine, officer!”

  She held out her hand, but the lieutenant, with a low laugh that brought the blood flaming to the girl’s face, thrust the glove into his pocket.

  His eyes flashed from Weston to Grayson significantly.

  “I fancy, gentlemen, I have found the explanation of your cock and bull story!” he said slowly.

  Grayson sprang forward with a growl.

  “You will take those words back or—or——”

  Weston caught his shoulder sternly. “Gently, Bob! You are only making a bad matter worse!”

  The lieutenant turned to his man, Burke, ignoring Grayson’s threatening attitude. “Clear the room and telephone the coroner! As for you, Miss Wentworth, I am sorry, but——”

  “What?” asked the girl steadily. Reve
rsing the situation of a few moments before, she seemed the calmest member of the group.

  “I am compelled to ask you not to leave the house until I give you permission!” the officer finished brusquely.

  A sudden pallor swept Hilda Wentworth’s face and for an instant her eyes closed; but she fought back the weakness resolutely. With a curt nod she stepped to the door.

  “I am at your service!” she said simply.

  Wilkins offered her his arm, and Weston followed the two without a backward glance. Grayson hesitated, still scowling at the lieutenant’s stocky figure. The officer was glaring from the face of the dead man to the polished surface of the piano, with his nerves plainly on a feather edge.

  Grayson shrugged, and had made a step toward the hall when his gaze was arrested almost mechanically by a glitter of green on the red carpet, near the wall at his right. He had taken a second step when a curious impulse—was it the factor of chance?—caused him to turn swiftly. Lieutenant Perry was bending over the body of Homer Hendricks with his face for the moment averted. Grayson’s hand felt hurriedly over the carpet and closed about a small greenish object at his feet. Straightening, he walked rapidly through the doorway.

  In the hall, he glanced at the object in his hand. It was a green jade ball, whose diameter was perhaps that of a quarter. Dropping it into his pocket, the young man ran down the stairs.

  III

  “I have earned a vacation, Nora, and I intend to take it.”

  Madelyn Mack elevated her arms in a luxurious yawn, as she pushed aside the traveling-bag at her feet. The eight o’clock train had just brought her back from Denver, and six weeks in the tortuous windings of the Ramsen bullion case. I had received her telegram from Buffalo just in time to meet her at the Grand Central station, and we had driven at once to her Fifth Avenue office. As I noted the tired lines under her eyes, and the droop of her shoulders, I could appreciate something of the strain under which she had been laboring. I nodded slowly.

  “Yes, you need a vacation,” I agreed.

  Madelyn impatiently pushed aside a stack of unopened letters. “And I intend to take it!” she repeated almost belligerently. “Business or no business!”