Miss Mack hung up the receiver abruptly. It was obvious that she was in a hurry. But there was an inflection in her tones that brought a new color to Hilda Wentworth’s face, and she was surprised to find herself return to her breakfast with almost a relish.
For a moment, after she had finished the call, Madelyn sat with a pen poised thoughtfully over a pad of writing paper. Then, tossing the pen aside, she turned to the telephone again.
“Hello! Bugle office?” she snapped, as a belated click answered her call. “Oh, is that you, Nora? Can you give me a few moments? Good! I wish you would call at the office of Ambrose Murray, the president of the Third National Bank, and tell him that you were sent by Miss Mack. He may, or may not, have certain information to give you. You will deliver his message to me at the Hendricks home at a quarter after ten. Wait for me outside. Do you understand—outside?”
* * *
—
As the tall, old-fashioned clock in the library of the late Homer Hendricks rang out the stroke of half past ten, it gazed down on a group of six persons, whose attitudes presented an interesting study in contrasting emotions.
In the corner nearest the door stood Lieutenant Perry and Coroner Smedley. The lieutenant had refused the offer of a chair, and the coroner, who worshipped at the Perry shrine for political reasons, essayed to copy the other’s majesty of demeanor, his smile of supreme boredom, and even his very attitude.
Grayson had drawn Hilda Wentworth’s chair thoughtfully into the shadow of a huge palm, and was bending over her in an effort to buoy her spirits, which was apparently so successful that Weston, seated with Wilkins on the opposite side of the room, scowled savagely.
“Ten thirty!” snapped Mr. Perry, ostentatiously consulting the gold repeater, which the members of the detective department had presented to him on the occasion of his silver wedding anniversary. “I will give Miss Mack just five minutes more. I have work to do!”
“The five minutes will not be necessary, Lieutenant,” said a quiet voice from the hall, as Madelyn and I paused in the doorway.
“Quite dramatic!” came from Mr. Perry.
Madelyn’s eyes swept the room. Her graceful serenity had disappeared in a sudden tenseness. “You will please follow me up-stairs,” she said, moving back.
“Up-stairs?” growled Mr. Perry.
Madelyn turned to the stairway without answer.
Miss Wentworth and Grayson were the first to comply, and the lieutenant, observing that the others were joining them, brought up a sullen rear, with the coroner endeavoring to copy his appearance of contempt.
Madelyn paused at the door of the music-room, and waited silently for us to enter. The shattered door had been temporarily repaired, and placed on a new set of hinges. Madelyn closed it, and stepped to the center of the room. She stood for a moment, staring abstractedly up at a brightly colored Turner landscape. A silence crept through the apartment, so pregnant that even Lieutenant Perry squared his shoulders.
“I am going to tell you the story of a tragedy,” began Madelyn, with her eyes still fixed on the landscape as though studying its bold coloring.
“In all of my peculiar experience I have never met with a crime so artistically conceived and so diabolically carried out. From a personal standpoint, I may even say that I owe the author my thanks for one of the most interesting problems which it has been my fortune to confront. In these days of bungled crime, it is a relief to cross wits with one who has really raised murder to a fine art!”
Her left hand mechanically, almost unconsciously, dropped a small round object into the palm of her right hand. It was a green jade ball. From somewhere in the room came a sudden low sound like the hiss of a trampled snake.
Madelyn’s eyes dropped to the ball almost caressingly. “I am now about to re-enact the drama of Mr. Homer Hendricks’s murder. I hardly think it will be necessary to caution silence until I am quite through!”
She stepped to the piano at the other end of the room, twirled the music stool a moment, and, carefully inspecting its height like a musician critical of trifles, took her seat at the keyboard.
Her hands ran lightly over the keys with the touch of the born music-lover. Then, without preamble, she broke into the storm scene from “William Tell.”
Miss Wentworth was gazing at Grayson with a sort of dumb wonder. The young man pressed her arm gently.
The expression of superior boredom had entirely left Lieutenant Perry’s ruddy features.
Madelyn’s fingers seemed fairly to race over the keys. The thundering music of Rossini rolled through the apartment. Madelyn was reaching the climax in that superb musical painting of the war of the elements.
Again that low sibilant sound like a serpent’s hiss sounded from somewhere in the taut-nerved audience, to be drowned by the sharp, clear-cut report of a revolver!
Madelyn’s fingers wavered, her elbow fell with a sharp discord on the keys, and she staggered back from the stool. In the front of the piano, at a point almost directly opposite her left temple, a small hole, perhaps the diameter of a quarter, had opened in the elaborate carving, and from it curled a thin spiral of blue smoke!
With a jagged splotch of powder extending from her temple to her cheek, Madelyn sprang to her feet. From the rear of the room, a man, crouching forward in his chair, darted toward the door. Lieutenant Perry’s hand flashed from his pocket with the instinct of the veteran policeman. At the end of his outflung arm frowned the blue muzzle of a revolver.
“You may arrest Mr. Montague Weston for the murder of Homer Hendricks!” came the quiet voice of Madelyn.
The words, instead of a spur, acted with much the effect of a sledge-hammer on the agitated figure of Weston. For an instant he gazed wildly about the room like a man confronted with a ghastly specter. The steady coolness of purpose that had marked his brilliant rise at the bar had shriveled in the heart-stabbing moments of Madelyn’s demonstration. As Lieutenant Perry stretched a hand toward him, he fell in a sobbing heap at the officer’s feet.
Madelyn jerked her head significantly from the white, drawn face of Hilda Wentworth to Weston’s moaning form. The lieutenant fastened his hand on the man’s collar and dragged him to his feet as the coroner flung open the door.
The suddenness of it all had gripped us as by a magnet. The creaking of a chair sounded in the tension with a sharpness that was almost painful. The denouement had occurred with the swiftness of a film from a moving picture machine—and was blotted out as swiftly as the lieutenant closed the door behind his cowering prisoner.
Grayson breathed a long, deep sigh.
“How, how in thunder, Miss Mack, did——”
Madelyn had resumed her toying with the green jade ball. With a gesture almost like that of a schoolmistress addressing a dense student, she stepped across to the piano, and inserted the ball in the small, round hole in the heavy carving, through which had floated the blue curl of smoke. It exactly matched six other balls of green jade, set into the panels in a fantastic ornamentation.
“Before this instrument is used again,” said Madelyn, as she turned, “I would recommend a thorough overhauling. Just behind the opening which I have filled is the muzzle of a revolver—loaded with a blank cartridge for this morning’s purpose, but which has not always been so harmless.
“From its trigger, you will find—as I assured myself last night—a wire spring connecting with one of the treble D flats on the keyboard. When Mr. Hendricks struck it in the overture of ‘William Tell,’ and again when I repeated his action just now, the pressure of the key released the trigger of the weapon, and it was automatically exploded.
“When Weston attached the apparatus—your ten days’ absence from the house, Miss Wentworth, giving him ample time—he used a paper substitute for the jade ball he had removed, and probably took occasion, when he entered the room la
st night, to cover over the exposed opening in the panels.
“Unfortunately for him, the imp of chance was dogging his trail. He dropped the jade ball—and the same perverse imp directed the hand of Nemesis to it.
“The psychological effect of my repetition of the crime, after the shock of the discovery of his apparatus, would have taxed a far stronger set of nerves than those of Mr. Weston!”
She paused, and then added in a musing afterthought, “Perhaps, you can tell me, Mr. Grayson, what cynical philosopher has said that all women are fickle? Mr. Weston happens to be an assiduous devotee of My Lady Nicotine. I fancy that he was so completely under her spell that he sought relief from the task of arranging his murder-spring in his favorite pipe. But she of Nicotine, perhaps in horror at his meditated crime, jilted her slave. As he bent over his work his pipe bowl was tilted ever so slightly—and the ashes, which fell with her favor, again aided the imp of chance to lead me to his trail!”
Madelyn shrugged her shoulders as though she were quite through, and then, with a sudden suggestion, continued, “The motive? What are the two greatest factors that sway men to evil?
“The first, of course, is greed. Weston, himself, will have to supply the details of his betrayal of the trust of Homer Hendricks. It was not until Miss Noraker brought me, just before I entered the house this morning, certain confidential information as to the financial condition of Weston, that I was absolutely certain of this link in my chain of evidence.
“Under an assumed name, he has been engineering certain questionable mining companies, and had even persuaded the man who was his life-long friend to invest a considerable share of his fortune in one of his projects. Faced by the imminence of exposure, and ruin, and unable to conceal longer the truth from Homer Hendricks, Weston’s devilish ingenuity suggested the death of the man who had trusted him—and the means of carrying it out.”
Madelyn walked slowly to the door, and then turned.
“I have forgotten the second of the two motives that I referred to. Of course, it is the factor of jealousy, or perhaps love. May I mention your name, Miss Wentworth?
“Goaded by the fear of losing you, he pilfered one of your gloves, and dropped it where a schoolboy was bound to see its connection with the crime. I daresay that he would have offered to establish your innocence on your promise to marry him. He could have done it in any one of a dozen ways, of course, without implicating himself.”
Madelyn gave a sudden glance toward Wilkins and myself.
“I think that Mr. Grayson wishes to discuss that factor of love somewhat further with Miss Wentworth!”
As we stepped into the hall after her, she softly closed the door of the music-room.
DETECTIVE: VIOLET STRANGE
AN INTANGIBLE CLEW
Anna Katharine Green
ANNA KATHARINE GREEN ROHLFS (1846–1935), known variously as the mother, grandmother, and godmother of the American detective story, has popularly and famously been credited with writing the first American detective novel by a woman, The Leavenworth Case (1878). The fact that her novel was preceded by The Dead Letter in 1867, by Seeley Regester (the nom de plume of Metta Victoria Fuller Victor), is significant mainly to historians and pedants, as The Dead Letter sank without notice while The Leavenworth Case became one of the bestselling detective novels of the nineteenth century.
That landmark novel introduced Ebenezer Gryce, a stolid, competent, and colorless policeman who bears many of the characteristics of Charles Dickens’s Inspector Bucket (from Bleak House, 1852–1853) and Wilkie Collins’s Sergeant Cuff (from The Moonstone, 1868). Gryce, dignified and gentle, inspires confidence even in those he interrogates. The enormous success of The Leavenworth Case induced Green to invent many more mysteries for Gryce to solve, including A Strange Disappearance (1880) and Hand and Ring (1883); the last, The Mystery of the Hasty Arrow (1917), was published forty years after the first.
Green also was one of the first authors to produce female detective protagonists, notably Amelia Butterworth, who often worked with Gryce and was of a higher social standing than the policeman, thereby allowing him access to a level of society that otherwise might have presented difficulties, and Violet Strange, a beautiful and wealthy young woman employed by a private detective agency who accepted cases only if they interested her.
“An Intangible Clew” was originally published in The Golden Slipper and Other Problems for Violet Strange (New York, G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1915).
An Intangible Clew
ANNA KATHARINE GREEN
“HAVE YOU STUDIED THE CASE?”
“Not I.”
“Not studied the case which for the last few days has provided the papers with such conspicuous headlines?”
“I do not read the papers. I have not looked at one in a whole week.”
“Miss Strange, your social engagements must be of a very pressing nature just now?”
“They are.”
“And your business sense in abeyance?”
“How so?”
“You would not ask if you had read the papers.”
To this she made no reply save by a slight toss of her pretty head. If her employer felt nettled by this show of indifference, he did not betray it save by the rapidity of his tones as, without further preamble and possibly without real excuse, he proceeded to lay before her the case in question.
“Last Tuesday night a woman was murdered in this city; an old woman, in a lonely house where she has lived for years. Perhaps you remember this house? It occupies a not inconspicuous site in Seventeenth Street—a house of the olden time?”
“No, I do not remember.”
The extreme carelessness of Miss Strange’s tone would have been fatal to her socially; but then, she would never have used it socially. This they both knew, yet he smiled with his customary indulgence.
“Then I will describe it.”
She looked around for a chair and sank into it. He did the same.
“It has a fanlight over the front door.”
She remained impassive.
“And two old-fashioned strips of parti-coloured glass on either side.”
“And a knocker between its panels which may bring money someday.”
“Oh, you do remember! I thought you would, Miss Strange.”
“Yes. Fanlights over doors are becoming very rare in New York.”
“Very well, then. That house was the scene of Tuesday’s tragedy. The woman who has lived there in solitude for years was foully murdered. I have since heard that the people who knew her best have always anticipated some such violent end for her. She never allowed maid or friend to remain with her after five in the afternoon; yet she had money—some think a great deal—always in the house.”
“I am interested in the house, not in her.”
“Yet, she was a character—as full of whims and crotchets as a nut is of meat. Her death was horrible. She fought—her dress was torn from her body in rags. This happened, you see, before her hour for retiring; some think as early as six in the afternoon. And”—here he made a rapid gesture to catch Violet’s wandering attention—“in spite of this struggle; in spite of the fact that she was dragged from room to room—that her person was searched—and everything in the house searched—that drawers were pulled out of bureaus—doors wrenched off of cupboards—china smashed upon the floor—whole shelves denuded and not a spot from cellar to garret left unransacked, no direct clew to the perpetrator has been found—nothing that gives any idea of his personality save his display of strength and great cupidity. The police have even deigned to consult me—an unusual procedure—but I could find nothing, either. Evidences of fiendish purpose abound—of relentless search—but no clew to the man himself. It’s uncommon, isn’t it, not to have any clew?”
“I suppose so.” Miss Strange hated murders and it was with difficul
ty she could be brought to discuss them. But she was not going to be let off; not this time.
“You see,” he proceeded insistently, “it’s not only mortifying to the police but disappointing to the press, especially as few reporters believe in the No-thoroughfare business. They say, and we cannot but agree with them, that no such struggle could take place and no such repeated goings to and fro through the house without some vestige being left by which to connect this crime with its daring perpetrator.”
Still she stared down at her hands—those little hands so white and fluttering, so seemingly helpless under the weight of their many rings, and yet so slyly capable.
“She must have queer neighbours,” came at last, from Miss Strange’s reluctant lips. “Didn’t they hear or see anything of all this?”
“She has no neighbours—that is, after half-past five o’clock. There’s a printing establishment on one side of her, a deserted mansion on the other side, and nothing but warehouses back and front. There was no one to notice what took place in her small dwelling after the printing house was closed. She was the most courageous or the most foolish of women to remain there as she did. But nothing except death could budge her. She was born in the room where she died; was married in the one where she worked; saw husband, father, mother, and five sisters carried out in turn to their graves through the door with the fanlight over the top—and these memories held her.”
“You are trying to interest me in the woman. Don’t.”
“No, I’m not trying to interest you in her, only trying to explain her. There was another reason for her remaining where she did so long after all residents had left the block. She had a business.”
“Oh!”
“She embroidered monograms for fine ladies.”
“She did? But you needn’t look at me like that. She never embroidered any for me.”
“No? She did first-class work. I saw some of it. Miss Strange, if I could get you into that house for ten minutes—not to see her but to pick up the loose intangible thread which I am sure is floating around in it somewhere—wouldn’t you go?”
The Big Book of Female Detectives Page 26