Wall

by Mary Roberts Rinehart

  “How did she act that night?” I asked. “Did she seem excited? Or worried about anything?”

  “She didn’t seem the excitable kind. No. She looked kind of determined. I guess she was that sort, though.”

  I left the house, still puzzled. Jordan had decided that night on some course of action. She had gone to a telephone and then walked along the bay path on Long Point. She had carried the handbag, and left the key to her room with Eliza. And locked in that room had been only one thing of any possible importance; what the sheriff called the Jennifer letter.

  Was it important, after all? Had she kept it merely for her own purposes, perhaps in the hope of securing a situation with “Jennifer”? I could not tell, of course. Yet it is curious that on that very morning the Jennifer of the letter was going through a difficult time of her own, in the cabin of an incoming ocean liner.

  I knew that Russell Shand had always considered that the letter had some bearing on the case; but I did not know he had enlisted the New York police to help him. They had traced her name through the telephone number in that book of Juliette’s, and it must have been a shock to her when two detectives from Centre Street met her ship at Quarantine.

  It was a long time before I heard that story, and then it was from Russell Shand himself.

  “They didn’t think much of me or of that letter either,” he said cheerfully. “It stood out all over them; a country sheriff with two murders on his hands and maybe three, and messing them up to beat the band! The lady was Fifth Avenue and Southampton, and that griped them.”

  Her name, it had turned out, was Dennison, Mrs. Walter Dennison; and she traveled with a maid and a dog. What is more, she had the best suite on the ship. The detectives were uncomfortable when they realized what they were up against.

  At first she thought they were ship reporters, and she received them with the proper air of resignation plus straightening her hat in case of photographs. The disillusionment must have been a shock.

  “Sorry to bother you, madam. We’d like to ask a question or two.”

  “For the press?”

  They grinned and said no. She stared at them.

  “Then who are you?” she demanded.

  One of them flashed a badge, and she went pale.

  “If you are from the customs—”

  “Nothing to do with customs, Mrs. Dennison. Did you know a Mrs. Juliette Ransom?”

  Her color came back, but she still looked wary.

  “I did. She is dead, isn’t she?”

  “Yes. You probably know the circumstances. Mrs. Dennison, we have here a copy of a letter which seems to be yours. It was found among Mrs. Ransom’s effects. Will you glance over it and identify it?”

  She did so, with the two men watching her. When she came to the postscript they thought she stiffened, but she handed it back calmly enough.

  “It is mine,” she said. “What about it?”

  “Do you care to identify the man whose initial you used in that letter?”

  “Certainly not. It was a purely personal matter.”

  “‘Have just heard about L—. Do please be careful, Julie. You know what I mean.’ That sounds like a warning, Mrs. Dennison. Was this L—liable to do her bodily harm?”

  “Of course not. Mrs. Ransom was reckless sometimes. She did a good many foolish things. I was merely telling her to behave herself.”

  They did not believe her.

  “This L—was a man, wasn’t he?”

  “Yes. That doesn’t mean anything. She knew a lot of men. And now,” she added haughtily, “if you’ll give me a chance to get ready to leave this ship, I’d appreciate it.”

  They got nothing more from her as the liner moved up the river to its dock. In fact, she ordered them out of her room. Once landed she left her maid to see her trunks through the customs, and still ignoring them marched to her waiting car and got in. But she did not go to her apartment on Fifth Avenue. Some time during that ride uptown she had her bags transferred to a taxicab and quietly disappeared.

  “That’s what set me on the trail,” said the sheriff, long after. “All along I’d thought that letter was important. Now I knew it.”

  It was August by that time, and August is the gay time on the island. Usually my calendar then is filled from morning until night, from club pool to lunch, from lunch to golf or a sail on the bay, and after that cocktails here and dinner there. But during the early part of that month I did little or nothing.

  When it was clear I sat on this upper porch where I am today, and listlessly watched the activity in the bay. Now and then a speedboat would pass, trailing a surfboard with some youngster erect on it. Yachts came and departed, brilliant with paint, their brasswork gleaming in the sun, and once in a while I saw Lucy Hutchinson, usually the head and front of the August season, sitting lethargically on the bench by the sea wall where Bob and I had talked.

  Sometimes she saw me and waved, but mostly she ignored me. She looked thin, I thought, and Bob was said to be drinking heavily.

  Then one day a British battleship came in, and Tony Rutherford asked me to go to the club to help make it gay for the officers at tea. He seemed to hold no resentment for what had happened on the golf course.

  “It’s only tea. Put on your prettiest dress and come along,” he coaxed. “We can’t have all dowagers, Marcia. No use letting the English think the average age of America is over fifty. Be good, won’t you?”

  I went and felt better for it. Death and danger seemed far away. The uniforms were dignified, the men charming; and behind them in the harbor—as a background—was their great gray ship. I did my best, and apparently made a conquest of one of the junior officers, for I could not lose him. But as I was leaving I saw Lucy, and she drew me aside into the cardroom and closed the door.

  I was shocked when I saw her, close at hand. Her smartness was gone, her face looked ravaged; and after lighting a cigarette she dropped into a chair and stared out at the crowd on the lawn.

  “What do you do,” she said finally, “when you think you are losing your mind?”

  “You’d have plenty of company just now,” I said, feeling suddenly tired and lost.

  She glanced at me quickly.

  “I’ll change that question,” she said. “What do you do when you suspect your husband of everything from unfaithfulness to murder? He denies both, of course,” she added.

  “I don’t think he killed Juliette, Lucy,” I said. “If that’s what you mean.”

  “Why not?” She shrugged her shoulders. “He used to be in love with her, years ago. He’s big enough and strong enough to do anything. And he’s not been the same since she was killed. He’s been like a crazy man. Of course, if he was still in love with her—”

  “You don’t believe that, do you? Not seriously.”

  “I don’t know what I believe,” she said. “He took her to lunch last winter, That’s all he admits, but how do I know it’s true?”

  “A good many men take women to lunch without killing them later,” I said impatiently. “Be yourself, Lucy. What if he did? You lunch with men day after day, don’t you? I expect a good many of them make love to you too. It’s customary. You’d be disappointed if they didn’t. But you are still alive, even if you do look shot to pieces.”

  She did not resent that. She lit another cigarette and fitted it neatly into her holder before she spoke again. Then:

  “I’m fond of Bob,” she said slowly. “I’m—Well, it’s more than that, of course. I’d have fought and killed to hold him, if it would have done any good. And after I thought the affair with her was over we were happier than we had ever been. I thought I’d got him back. He wasn’t even drinking. Then it started again, last winter. He came home one night—well, plastered is as good a word as any, isn’t it?—and it’s been going on ever since.” She turned and gave me a direct look. “Just why was Juliette murdered, Marcia? Have you any idea?”

  “The general public seems to think that Arthur did it, for o
bvious reasons,” I said bitterly.

  “That’s nonsense, of course. You must have some theory. Who wanted her out of the way? Was she dangerous to someone? Was she blackmailing anyone?”

  “The police have been over her bank account. It’s all right. If she was getting money she got it in cash.”

  “But you think she was spending more than she got from Arthur?”

  “She always did that.”

  She thought that over.

  “It’s not like the old days,” she said. “Credit’s not as easy as it used to be. She had to pay some of her bills, and that crowd of hers had no use for people who couldn’t spend pretty freely. Sometimes I wonder if she was blackmailing Bob.”

  She got up. She looked as though she had not slept for a long time; and it was typical of Juliette, I thought, to leave behind her a trail of devastated women: Mary Lou, fighting her own suspicion; Lucy, haggard and uncertain; Marjorie Pendexter, and myself. Even Jordan certainly gone to her death because of some secret knowledge she had possessed of Juliette’s affairs.

  Lucy was preparing to go, powdering her nose, reddening her lips; but doing it abstractedly. She looked up at me.

  “These men!” she said, with a sort of sullen anger. “You love them. You do all you can for them. And then they run out on you, and you find there’s another woman. He walked out with her after that time he lunched with her, and bought her a diamond bracelet!”

  “Juliette! How do you know?”

  “I know all right. His secretary paid the bill, and she wrote me the other day, to ask if I didn’t want to insure it!”

  There was nothing I could say. She stood still, holding her vanity case.

  “What about this Allen Pell?” she said. “He’s in this too, Marcia. Somewhere. Have the police any idea who the man was who went to that trailer of his just after he disappeared?”

  “Nobody knows. They haven’t traced him.”

  She drew a long breath.

  “Sometimes I think I am going crazy,” she said. “Bob was out in the car that evening. I don’t even know where he went.”

  I found my junior officer still on duty when I went out, and I had some difficulty in getting away. Also, as a result of anxiety and the long rainy spell, I went down with a feverish cold the next day. Maggie sent for Doctor Jamieson, and it was Doctor Jamieson who added a new angle to the case of Allen Pell.

  He tapped me, announced that I would live, wrote a prescription and then sat back to talk. It seemed that Agnes Dean was down again, and that Mansfield Dean was taking it very hard.

  “Funny thing,” he said. “These big men who marry fragile women like that and worship them! Of course she has come through a lot. Still, what’s the use of nursing old griefs? Dean rates something.”

  It was not until he got up to go that he mentioned Allen. I remember that he looked tired that day. As I look back over this record I find that at some time or other I have said the same thing about most of us. But he looked worried too, and what he had to say put a new light on the situation.

  “There’s one thing the police have overlooked,” he said. “Here’s a strong man and a young man. I’ve met him now and then along the roads, and liked him. But you can count on this. Whoever hit him that afternoon was somebody he knew and trusted. He didn’t expect what he got.”

  “But no one really knew him, doctor. Not well anyhow.”

  “Someone knew him too well for his own good,” he said dryly, and left me to lie wretchedly in bed, thinking that over.

  CHAPTER XXV

  AS IT HAPPENED, THAT night ended the bad weather. When I wakened late the next morning it was to sunshine and the wailing cries of the gulls. My cold was better too, and if there had been any real cheer in the world for me just then I would have felt it over Lizzie’s strong clear coffee, her crisp bacon, and a rose fresh from the garden which is Mike’s occasional contribution to my breakfast tray.

  After I had dressed and been bundled into the sweaters Maggie forced on me I went downstairs and out into the garden. I was still there, dutifully inspecting the Canterbury bells, when the sheriff drove in.

  He took one look at my nose and shoved me back into the house.

  “Looks as though you needed somebody to look after you,” he said, apparently forgetting the terms on which we had last parted. “I can’t even go away for a week without something happening to you.”

  “I didn’t know you’d been away.”

  He tried to appear reproachful, but he only barely missed looking triumphant.

  “Sure I have,” he said. “Been doing some traveling too. Thought maybe you’d like the law out of your pocket for a while.”

  “Did you learn anything?” I asked eagerly. “About Allen Pell?”

  He shook his head.

  “No, but I learned a lot about something else.”

  He had put me into a chair in the library, and now he sat down and looked me over.

  “It’s a funny world, Marcia,” he said. “I don’t get you people at all. I’ve got a farm outside Clinton, and when I breed my cattle you can bet I know all about who’s who, or what’s what.” He looked uncomfortable then, as if he had been indelicate. He went on rather hurriedly. “Yet here’s your own brother, born and brought up like royalty, and what does he do? He marries a girl he doesn’t know a thing about; her folks, if any, or where she came from. All he knows is that she has a pretty face and he wants her.”

  “And look where it’s brought him,” I said bitterly.

  “Well, look where it’s brought her too,” he said, not unreasonably. “Anyhow, once it’s done it’s done. Nobody looks her up. Nobody knows anything about her.”

  “What was the use?” I asked. “She was Arthur’s wife.”

  “Sure she was. But did any of you know her real name was Julia, and that she’d been married before? No? I told you, I handle my cattle better than that.”

  I could only stare at him incredulously.

  “Married before?” I gasped. “Are you trying to tell me she had a husband when she married Arthur?”

  “Not necessarily. He may have died, or she may have divorced him. But let’s get back to this. First of all I had to trace her, and that took time.”

  Nevertheless, he had done it. It still seems incredible to me, but what with the police radio and a good picture of her, added to the nation-wide publicity, he had done it. “Not alone,” he said. “I had a lot of help, both in New York and elsewhere. But I’ve had an idea all along that this trouble didn’t begin here. You Lloyds may kill—I’ve seen a look in your face once or twice I didn’t like much—but I don’t think you kill for money or money reasons. That set me off. Or up, if you like. I went part of the way by plane.”

  He seemed rather proud of that, although he gave me a detailed description of himself in the air, with a paper bag for certain emergencies and a feeling that he was being pretty much of a damned fool for the risk he was taking. “Never drew a full breath till I was down,” he said. But he came back to Juliette after that.

  “First thing,” he explained, “she came from Kansas, and when she left there her name was not Juliette Ransom. It was Julia Ransom Bates. Her folks were dead and she lived with the old aunt she told you about. That part was true enough. She’s dead too, but plenty of people remember both of them. According to them, Juliette was the usual small-town pretty girl. Decent, I guess, but shaking her curls and making eyes at the traveling men in the hotel, and driving the local boys crazy. She wasn’t popular with the women, but the men fell for her like ripe apples.

  “Anyhow she was eighteen when she lit out one day with a salesman for something or other, one of the hotel crowd, and she married him the next day in Kansas City. I saw the record.”

  I said nothing. I was seeing her that day when Arthur brought her into this very house, looking young and innocent and appealing.

  “Well, that’s the story,” he went on. “She never came back, the aunt died, and the next line-up we get sh
e’s in New York studying music; or pretending to. She’s smart and she’s good-looking, and Arthur meets her and marries her. Then when she gets her divorce from him, she doesn’t go back to Bates as a name. Not stylish enough, most likely. She’s not Julia Bates. She’s Juliette Ransom, which is the name she used when Arthur married her.”

  It was amazing, all of it. What a long way she had gone, this Julia Ransom Bates Something-or-other Lloyd; from the main street of a small town, ogled by the boys on the corner and eyed appreciatively by men in hotel windows, to our house on Park Avenue and this one on the island; and later on to that gay and exotic crowd which lived so fast and precariously in the night clubs and bars of wherever it happened to be.

  One thing was certain. When Arthur brought her to us as his shy young bride, she had been already an experienced woman. “Try to forgive me,” she had said to Mother. “I love him so terribly.” She had been no mean actress, Juliette.

  But the sheriff was not through. He reached into his pocketbook and drew out a letter.

  “There’s something else, Marcia,” he said. “Helen Jordan came from that town too. If Juliette was the pretty girl of the place, Helen was the ugly duckling. Worked in a grocery store, had no family and no prospects. Then two or three years ago she sold what furniture she had and went east. She wrote one or two letters back to a woman she knew, and I got hold of this one. Maybe it means something, maybe not.”

  He gave it to me. It was written in a surprisingly good hand, and was undated.

  Dear Mabel: Well here I am, and I don’t mind saying it is a new world and no mistake. Day is night and night is day, with my lady sleeping until all hours, and the place looking like hell upset no matter what I do.

  There followed a long description of Juliette’s apartment, her clothes and so on. But the last two paragraphs seemed pertinent:

  You would hardly know Julia. She’s looking prettier than ever, and that’s going some! But she has something on her mind. She acts scared, and you know that isn’t like her. Some trouble about a man, I suppose. There are plenty of them.