Wall

by Mary Roberts Rinehart

  That was his good-bye to her. He turned around and waved to her from the car. She did not wave back; she stood gazing after him, as though she would never see him again.

  They took him to Clinton, and to the courthouse there. They were all silent on the way over. Once Fred asked to stop and buy some cigarettes, and the deputy went into the store with him. At the courthouse he was taken to the sheriff’s office. Bullard and a couple of detectives were waiting, but so far as I can learn it was Russell Shand who asked that first amazing question.

  “Just answer this straight, Fred,” he said. “When and where did you marry Julia Bates?”

  He must have known all along that it was coming; that long-dead past of his, rising now to confront him. Nevertheless, it was some time before he answered.

  “In nineteen-twenty-three,” he said thickly. “We ran away.”

  “How long did you stay together?”

  “Less than a year. I was traveling then, selling sporting goods, and playing some golf on the side. I didn’t like the way she carried on while I was on the road.”

  “So you left her?”

  “It was about an even split. We were both satisfied.”

  “Was there a divorce?”

  “She wrote me she’d got one. In Reno.”

  “But that’s all. You got no papers?”

  “Well, I was on the road a good bit. Things get lost. No. I never got any.”

  “When and why did you change your name?”

  He looked surprised at that.

  “I didn’t change it. It was Theodore, but everybody called me Fred. I don’t know why. Guess my mother started it. She didn’t—” he gulped—“she didn’t like the other.”

  Then they pulled their trump card. Bullard did it, leaning forward, his plump face vindictive.

  “Isn’t it a fact,” he said, “that you afterwards learned there had been no divorce? And that you learned it from Mrs. Ransom herself?”

  He was silent for a long time. The room was still, except for the ticking of a wall clock. Then he shrugged his shoulders.

  “That’s right,” he said. “I didn’t know it until she came here this summer.”

  “You were married by that time. Your wife was going to have a child. Then Mrs. Ransom saw you, and told you. Your wife was not your wife. Your child would be illegitimate. And so you killed her.”

  He jumped to his feet.

  “It’s a lie,” he shouted. “I wanted to kill her. God knows she deserved it. I could hardly keep my hands off her. But as God is my witness, I never touched her.”

  That was Bullard. When the sheriff took up the interrogation he was less brutal.

  “Why did she tell you, Fred?” he inquired. “She was sitting pretty, the way I see it. As the divorced wife of Arthur Lloyd she was drawing a fat alimony. If it came out that the marriage to Arthur Lloyd wasn’t legal she stood to lose it, didn’t she?”

  “She knew I wouldn’t talk. How could I?”

  “That wasn’t the question. Why did she tell you?”

  “She wanted money,” he said sullenly.

  “Did she come to the island for that purpose?”

  “No. She didn’t know I was here. I just happened to meet her. I’d been walking. She was riding, and I nearly dropped dead when I saw her.”

  Bullard leaned forward again.

  “Where was that? That meeting?”

  “Up in the hills,” said Fred defiantly. “I’d hiked up there, and we met. I think she was scared at first. She looked that way. She didn’t have much to say either. Just ‘Hello, Fred. What are you doing here?’ But she must have thought it over. She called me at the club the next day, and I met her later on. That was when she told me about the divorce.”

  “And asked for money?”

  “She’d talked to somebody. Mr. Rutherford, maybe. He knew I’d saved a bit. I’d asked him what to do with it. I didn’t know about her alimony then. I didn’t even know she’d married Mr. Lloyd. I didn’t know anything about her at all. What I wanted was to keep her quiet, until—”

  “And you did keep her quiet,” said Bullard roughly.

  They went over and over that part of the story. Juliette had not followed him to the island. She hadn’t known he was there. The idea of getting money from him must have been a secondary one. After all, the little he had wouldn’t amount to much. But he had thought she looked worried. She had said something about getting all she could lay her hands on and then leaving the country. He hadn’t paid much attention to that. She had always threatened to go somewhere else when things did not suit her.

  It was then that they switched to Helen Jordan.

  “Did you know her?”

  “No. That is, there was a girl in Julia’s town by that name, or something like it. I never knew her.”

  “Did you know she was here with Mrs. Ransom?”

  “No. Not until she disappeared.”

  “Ever see her?”

  “Never.”

  “But it would be natural, if Mrs. Ransom saw you, that she would mention it to this Jordan woman?”

  “How do I know? I tell you I hadn’t seen her for years.” His voice rose. “She’d changed her name to Juliette Ransom, and that didn’t mean a thing to me.”

  They switched again. Had he a telephone? On the night Helen Jordan disappeared had she called him up? Did he meet her that same night on the bay path? Could he run a motor launch?

  He must have grown dizzy with that interrogation, going on as it did for hours. They let him smoke, but he had had no lunch. When they brought in two or three other men and lined him up with them he was unsteady on his feet. And he was apparently utterly bewildered when they brought in a man from the camp on Pine Hill and asked him to look them over.

  “Size and build,” said the sheriff. “We’re not asking for a positive identification.”

  The man was cautious. He eyed them all, even asked them to turn around. In the end he nodded and was taken out of the room. Not until long after did Fred know that he had selected him as having the general proportions of the mysterious visitor to Allen Pell’s trailer, the day he disappeared.

  They held him. Even the sheriff knew the motive was there. They put him in a cell that night, and at least they saw that he had a decent meal. But he did not eat it. He sat with his head in his hands, wondering about Dorothy, wondering how to get out of the trouble he was in. It had hit him suddenly, whereas the authorities had had several days to prepare; ever since the sheriff’s return, in fact. For in one of Jordan’s letters which he had not shown me was the name of Fred Martin.

  “Things have certainly changed,” Jordan had written, “since the time when she ran away with Fred Martin. You’d think, to see her, that she had never heard of him! Or of Reno.”

  They had had time to look up the records too; time enough to have the records at Reno checked, and to discover that no such divorce was recorded there; time to check over Fred’s activities also. He told them that on the night of Jordan’s murder he was at home with Dorothy, and that on the morning Juliette disappeared he gave a golf lesson at nine-thirty.

  But it was not far from the club to the bridle path. He would have had time to do what was done, and be back for the lesson. And so far as Allen Pell was concerned, he admitted that he had been in the hills that afternoon.

  He maintained, however, that he had not gone near the camp, nor had he even seen the trailer. And as far as going there that night, he denied it absolutely.

  “Why would I go there?” he asked. “I’d seen the Pell fellow around, but I’d never talked to him. I didn’t even know his name until there was all this fuss about him.”

  It was some weeks before I saw that record, taken down in shorthand by a clerk from Bullard’s office and later transcribed. It seemed rather pitiful to me. Bullard was exultant. After Fred had been taken away he leaned back in his chair and grinned at the sheriff.

  “There’s the case!” he said. “Sewed up in a bag.”

>   The sheriff lit his pipe before he answered.

  “Maybe,” he said. “Fellow looks guilty as hell. But it seems to me the bag isn’t big enough, Bullard.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “Doesn’t hold it all. Too many odds and ends left over. What about that letter Helen Jordan carried away and locked up in her suitcase? You can’t get an ‘L’ out of either Theodore or Fred Martin. And what’s the idea of wiping the fingerprints off that trailer? Who got away with Pell anyhow? Martin didn’t even know him. And to go way back, who tried to get into the Lloyd house, and did get in? Got in more than once, maybe; once to tear up the place, and the second time to throw Marcia Lloyd’s maid down the stairs—or whatever happened to her. Who broke into that apartment in New York and went over the Ransom woman’s effects?”

  That last was a mistake. Bullard laughed.

  “I thought you said Fred Martin was in New York that week. Sure he would go there. He’d killed her. He had to be sure there were no other letters out of that past of his, no marriage certificate. He’d done the job. Now he had to mop up after it.”

  CHAPTER XXVII

  ALL THAT TOOK PLACE, of course, in Clinton. But I have said that this was a case of human reactions and motivations, rather than of clues; of the effect of crime on a group of normal people, neither better nor worse than their fellows. And the immediate effect of all this on Arthur was shattering.

  Save that Fred was under arrest in connection with the murders nothing else was generally known. Sometime that evening the sheriff drove to Millbank and saw Arthur. He stopped his car outside on the road and went up to the cottage; and through the window he saw Junior in his night clothes, hanging onto his father and shouting for him to play, with Mary Lou standing by.

  The sheriff is a sentimental man, so he went back to his car again and sat there for a while, smoking his pipe. Then, when the lights went on upstairs he went back to the cottage. Arthur was alone, and he stepped inside and spoke to him.

  “Mind if I see you for a minute, Arthur? It’s not official.”

  He smiled, and Arthur grinned back, rather wryly.

  “Sit down,” he said. “And since it’s not official, how about a drink?”

  The sheriff shook his head.

  “I’d as soon see you outside. I have an idea you won’t like what I’ve got to say.”

  “I thought it wasn’t official.”

  “Well, it’s not, at that. But it’s damned unpleasant if it’s true.”

  They went out together; and on the lawn, sitting side by side on a bench, Arthur heard that story. What passed through his mind I do not know. Perhaps he was seeing Juliette, in that festive hat and frock she had worn at their wedding; looking out with bland childlike eyes and solemnly taking him for her husband, when she already had one. Certainly that incredible duplicity of hers was the first thing he mentioned.

  “Married!” he said. “To Fred Martin! I can’t believe it. I don’t believe it.”

  Then he sensed something further.

  “But look here,” he said. “You don’t mean—” He steadied himself. “She had divorced him, of course.”

  The sheriff knocked his pipe against the arm of his chair.

  “Well, that’s it, Lloyd,” he said. “We don’t know for sure. She wrote to Fred that she’d been to Reno, but there’s no record there. And when she saw him here she said there hadn’t been any divorce at all.”

  Arthur sat still, in a stunned silence.

  “Good God!” he said. “And I lived with her for years!”

  That was his first thought. It was later that he remembered the alimony, the constant nagging worry about money for her, his continuous anxieties, even the deprivations. It must have been a bitter pill to swallow. He had paid her a small fortune, and if the sheriff was right she had not been entitled to it.

  I believe he did not go to bed at all that night. Toward morning Mary Lou wakened, and found him in the cottage living room.

  “What in the world is the matter?” she asked. “It’s four o’clock.”

  But he could not tell her. Not the truth anyhow.

  He reached up and pulled her down on his knee.

  “My darling,” he said. “I have just learned something that—well, that bothers me.”

  “What?”

  “Apparently Juliette had been married before I met her.”

  She stared at him.

  “So that’s the woman you couldn’t forget!” she said. “A liar and a cheat! A cheap woman, hiding her past and carrying on with anybody who attracted her! What fools men are!”

  She was sorry afterwards. She cried and he tried to comfort her. At last he carried her up to their room and put her into her bed; but when she moved over and made room for him he kissed her and went away again.

  Juliette had made a fool and then a tool out of him. But it was not only that. Jonas Tripp was still away, his alibi for the murder still uncorroborated; and sitting alone that night, with Mary Lou and Junior asleep upstairs, he wondered if Juliette had not provided a new and convincing motive for his having killed her.

  There was plenty of activity now. One night Tate did not appear, and I gathered that with Fred under lock and key in the jail at Clinton we were supposed to be safe again. Then suddenly there came real news of Allen Pell. On the third day after Fred Martin’s arrest a hospital a hundred miles down the coast reported a case which might or might not have been the missing man. At least both the date and the appearance of the man in question coincided. A detective, sent there at once, brought back the details.

  It was a curious story. On the night of Allen’s disappearance, or rather about two o’clock in the morning, the night porter on duty had heard the bell ringing frantically, and ran to the front door. There was a car in the driveway, and two men were on the steps, one lying still and the other bending over him. The one on the steps was unconscious and bleeding from a wound on the head.

  The stooping man did not straighten. He was holding a handkerchief to the wound, and he spoke in a husky voice.

  “I struck this fellow with my car,” he said. “Better get some help and carry him in.”

  The porter went to get an orderly, and when the two came back with a stretcher the injured man was alone. Both car and driver had gone.

  That was the story, belated as it was. The porter could describe neither the automobile nor the man who had driven it. The incident itself was not unusual. Motorists were not infrequently moved to pity but anxious to escape recognition; and the injury was not a fatal one. Pell—if it was Pell—had had a bad concussion and a deep surface cut at the back of his head.

  They had put him in a semipublic ward, where he had lain in a stupor for several days. When he came out of it he did not know where he was.

  “How did I get here?” he asked the nurse. “What happened to me?”

  “A car hit you,” she told him.

  “And where is this? Where am I?”

  He seemed bewildered when she explained, but he asked no more questions. He gave the name of Henry Lewis, and said he had no fixed residence. As to his injury, he said that the last he remembered he had been on a road some miles from a hospital, and that he knew nothing more. The intern who dressed the wound the night he was brought in said, however, that it appeared to be several hours old. The blood was clotted and had changed in color.

  He was impatient to get up and leave, but it was two weeks or so before he was up and about. He insisted on going, and as he had still some money in his pocket they let him go.

  “Some money?” asked the detective. “How much?”

  “He had two hundred dollars when he came in. I thought later maybe the fellow who brought him put it there. Lewis seemed surprised to find it. He had about a hundred left, I think, after he paid his bill. The rate is low here in the wards.”

  There was apparently no doubt that it had been Allen. He answered the description, even to the slacks and sweater I remembered so well. But the
re was no further trace of him. Once more radio and teletype sent out their description, without result, of his weight, height, coloring, and even of his clothing. The press played up the story, and he was generally believed to have been the third victim of the unknown killer.

  I was entirely certain myself that it had been Allen. It tied up with the tramp, who had been in a hospital himself; but though relieved, I was still anxious. And the story, as the sheriff pointed out, was not consistent.

  “Why the Henry Lewis stuff?” he demanded. “If he is straight, why not come back here and tell what happened to him? The papers are full of it. And what about this tale of his, of being on a road some miles from that hospital? How did he get there? His car and trailer are still here.”

  “He is alive anyhow,” I said inadequately.

  “Alive where? See here, Marcia,” he said. “You were a friend of his—if that’s the word, after seeing the way you took his disappearance! Did he ever tell you anything about himself?”

  “Nothing—except that he didn’t like the police.”

  He grinned wryly at this.

  “May have his reasons for that,” he said. “May have had his reasons for the trailer too. It’s a pretty anonymous way to live. No permanent location. No neighbors to watch. Just trundling along from place to place. A fellow could hide out that way pretty much as he pleased; especially if he knew somebody was after him.” He smiled. “When I take this to Bullard he’ll say Fred Martin was after him!”

  Fred was not without friends during those days. I was looking after Dorothy. The baby was adorable, but she herself still lay in bed, her face white against the pillows, and the nurse reported that she could not eat. But the golf club had taken up a subscription for Fred’s defense, and retained a lawyer for him. His name was Standish, and on learning the Pell story he gave it to the press.

  “Nothing,” he was quoted as saying, “will be explained until we know why this man Pell was injured and then spirited away. Martin did not know him, and he has a clear alibi for that night. He and his wife were at the late movies, and had ice-cream sodas at the drugstore afterwards. I demand that this man be produced and made to tell his story.”