by Mabel Seeley
What of it? I caught my streetcar and knew I was having a perfectly glorious time. I hadn’t had so much fun and excitement in years.
* * *
—
MRS. HALLORAN, IT SEEMED, had asked Mrs. Tewman to leave her house, too. When I got back the two women were sitting, each at one end of the davenport, and figuratively—and I’m not sure not literally—spitting at each other.
I told Mrs. Halloran of my project for searching Mrs. Garr’s house for anything that might shed light on the death, and saw excitement come into her eyes.
“Oh, my goodness, here I been wasting all this time! I got a right to look into everything there is now, don’t I?”
“Of course. And Lieutenant Strom wants me to work with you.” I carried on cheerfully my bent for lying.
Craftiness crept back of her eyes.
“I don’t need no help.”
“Oh, I’m sure Lieutenant Strom would object to your doing it alone,” I said. I showed her the lieutenant’s note, which read
Jack, let Mrs. Dacres make a further search of Mrs. Garr’s rooms. But keep an eye on her.
Mrs. Halloran struggled; I saw her vast dismay. She might have discovered money! But she had to give up.
“The police have already searched everything thoroughly.”
I was impatient. “All I’m interested in is clues.”
With Mrs. Tewman dismissed to the basement, and the lumpy policeman regarding us solemnly, we started on the parlor, Mrs. Halloran jumping to snatch first anything that I moved to pick up.
“Let’s start on the drawer of this table,” I said. It was the drawer in which I thought Mr. Grant had been hunting, on that afternoon long ago.
The drawer was full of a litter of papers. Trembling with feverish energy and suspicion, Mrs. Halloran pushed me aside to paw through the papers. She found nothing save paper.
“There ain’t nothing here!”
“Mind if I look?”
I sorted the papers carefully. Meager grocery lists: bread, 8¢; 1/2 lb. hamburger, 9¢; 1/2 lb. butter, 20¢; cornflakes, 10¢. Added columns of figures: taxes, $138.72; water, $6.48; fire insurance, $19.64; doorbell batteries, $1.00. Laundry bills. Gas and electric bills, stamped paid. A receipt book.
I picked that up, thumbed through it from the back. Stubs of receipts: to me, for $4.00; to Mr. Kistler, $6.00; to Mr. Grant, $2.00; to Miss Sands, $5.00; to Mr. Buffingham, $9.00.
My eyes were halted, incredulous, by those last two figures. Miss Sands paid more for her one tiny room with a two-burner gas plate than I did! And Mr. Buffingham paid more than twice what I did!
Rapidly, then, I went through the book. It went back for months. One receipt to each person for each week. Each week a receipt to Miss Sands, $5.00. Each week a receipt to Mr. Buffingham, $9.00.
Carefully, I checked. The sums never varied. Mr. Grant’s room was small and its comforts probably provided by himself; $2.00 was about right for that. Mr. Kistler had two nice front rooms and shared a private lavatory. Six dollars was about right for that. But Miss Sands, $5.00 for a room scarcely larger than Mr. Grant’s! And Mr. Buffingham, $9.00 a week for a room with one window!
I couldn’t make it out. If it were the Wallers’ apartment, now . . .
The Wallers! Again I went through the receipt book, every last single stub.
There wasn’t one to indicate the Wallers had ever paid anything!
13
I SAT DOWN, THE better to think.
Mrs. Halloran grabbed the receipt book, hunted through it, looked from me to it and back again.
“There ain’t nothing you can get anything out of here,” she said. “They’re all paid up. My aunt Hattie wouldn’t never have let anybody stay if they weren’t paid up.”
What would I gain by keeping my discovery about the Wallers secret? It would be a lot easier and more natural for Mrs. Halloran to tackle the Wallers about their rent than for me to do so. And anything Mrs. Halloran found out I could soon know.
I took the book back from her nervous hands; she gave it to me bottom side up. The cardboard back had been scribbled over with spidery figures, some of them almost erased with handling, the others fresher. The freshest of all was a row of figures added up in a straggling column:
$ 5
$ 9
$ 2
$ 6
$ 4
$26
And underneath, in Mrs. Garr’s old-fashioned script, were two words:
Not enough.
That decided me. There they were, all the weekly rents for which she had given receipts. And here, too, there was no sum included for rent from the Wallers!
Mrs. Garr was scarcely the person to give people free houseroom—not for nothing. And the Wallers themselves said they had been here for years.
But before seeking an explanation I moved to verify the facts.
“Look,” I said to the twittering Mrs. Halloran. “Doesn’t this seem queer to you? Not a single receipt for rent to the Wallers!”
She grabbed the book from me again.
“No, there ain’t! That’s right, there ain’t! Well, they’re going to pay rent to me, I can tell you that much!”
As I had expected, she didn’t wait for more; she hurried out and upstairs.
I went on with the search. In turn, I took each piece of furniture, going over it carefully. When I was halfway through the room Mrs. Halloran was back, half subdued, one quarter suspicious, and one quarter belligerent.
“They says she owed ’em money. They said my aunt Harriet owed ’em two thousand dollars, and they had a note for it. They says she let ’em live here instead of payin’ ’em interest. Well, I ain’t goin’ to do it. They can’t live here on me! And I ain’t going to pay that money, either. They can just go to law for it. They’ll see! Before they can get any money out of me I’ll spend it. I’ll spend every penny!”
“Mmmmmmm . . .” I said. “If they can prove Mrs. Garr owed them money, that’ll probably be paid before you get yours at all.”
She immediately screamed and fell back on the davenport, kicking her heels like an overgrown four-year-old. I gathered, from her comments, that the Wallers were thieves and robbers, I was a thief and a robber, and the sooner I got out of there the better, the police were all thieves and robbers, and she’d get the G-men, that’s who she’d get, they’d “pertect” her, they’d shoot us all down!
There wasn’t anything to do but let her scream; the lumpy fat policeman, who had wandered out into the hall in boredom at my unsuccessful hunting, returned to the doorway, where he stood contemplating her histrionics with calm round eyes.
I went on searching. Nothing.
Until I got to the overstuffed armchair. That contributed nothing above, but when I upended it I noticed that three tacks, holding one corner of the bottom lining, looked loose. They worked out easily; I poked among the springs with my fingers.
Mrs. Halloran, smelling money, stopped screaming, dashed forward, jerked my hands away, and scrambled inside with her own.
Bills came out in her hands. Ones and fives.
She tore madly at the upholstery with one hand, clutching the money to her bosom with the other, uttering beastly little noises to warn me off. Excelsior, horsehair, wisps of cloth scattered over the floor, but there was only the one cache.
She arose from her couch, glaring at me, breathless, at bay.
The policeman placidly advanced.
“I’ll have to take that in charge, ma’am.”
“No, you ain’t going to take it! You thief! You robber!”
As the officer advanced upon her, she thrust the money into the front of her dress; he caught her two hands easily behind her back in one fat fist, reached down with the other, drew the money forth.
“You wouldn’t rob them poor animals, would you?”
She kicked and clawed at him; he fended her off, holding out the money to me.
“Count it, lady.”
I did.
One hundred and twenty dollars, even.
He took it back.
“I call you both to witness the amount.” With that he stowed the bills away in a big wallet, strolled back to the door, Mrs. Halloran shrieking after him in helpless fury.
After that the searching was out of my hands. Mrs. Halloran sped ruthlessly from one article to another, grabbing picture frames from the walls, ripping them apart, casting the shattered remnants on the floor. Between the back and the photograph in one frame, she found two five-dollar bills. Sewed into an old quilted robe she found in the room under the stairs were seven twenties. From deep down in a mess of buttons, hooks, eyes, nails, and hairpins in a two-pound coffee tin, she drew a neat roll of ones—twenty-eight of them.
The search was on her like a fever; the policeman claimed each new find; she quarreled and sought bitterly on.
The cellar produced nothing. The furnace room had little to search; the storage-room junk was just junk.
It was after six o’clock when, dusty, disheveled, and cross, she gave up. The parts of the house Mrs. Garr had lived in were a rubbish-strewn wreck. And my only satisfaction, as I looked on, was in thinking of the moment when Lieutenant Strom would have to eat, as he had promised, the uncovered money.
Of what I had wanted to find, of one clue that would point to why Mrs. Garr had died, and how, there wasn’t a trace. Not one thing to link Mrs. Garr to her past life. I hadn’t seen anything anyone would possibly commit murder to get—certainly the trifling sums of money would hardly be cause for murder. Hold it, though. What Mrs. Halloran had found, added to what Lieutenant Strom had found, made over a thousand dollars. Would that be enough to be tempting?
Tired of watching Mrs. Halloran mess around with the contents of the storage room, I lit the heater for a bath and went upstairs to my own apartment. From the floor just inside my door I picked up an envelope. The notice inside instructed me to be present at an inquest into the death of Harriet Luella Garr, to be held Monday afternoon, two thirty o’clock.
An inquest! Of course there’d be an inquest. There, at least, I should find out if Mrs. Garr had been murdered or not.
I bathed, dressed, went out to eat, came home again, thinking solidly all the while. The more I thought on it, the more certain I was that the Hallorans must be at the bottom of the mystery. It was a certainty that struck snags, swung aside, and swam easily on.
The Hallorans were the only ones that really benefited by the death. They were the greedy kind; they couldn’t wait to get their hands on money if they knew there was any to be had.
The Hallorans were frightfully stupid.
Yes, but it was a stupid crime, wasn’t it? A sneak thief, caught. He’d struck at her, choked her. Then rushed out, locking the door behind him. Run, trembling and afraid, home to his seven dear little children.
But the cats! The dog! The kitchen door opened, they’d have run out, too. And would Mr. Halloran, that sniveling little coward, have dared to run about in that house, in which he ran such risks of being seen, dared to run about catching those animals one by one, thrusting them back into the kitchen? Had he still been in the house when I came home that Friday night, lurking somewhere, hiding in the bathroom, perhaps? Had he stayed there until late, then sneaked down, gone to the back of the house to see the results of his work in the basement kitchen if he could, attacked me when I’d heard him?
If so, wouldn’t someone have seen him in the house?
Mr. Buffingham!
Mr. Buffingham had been on his way downstairs when one of the cats was still loose in the house; I had talked to him. If anyone had seen Mr. Halloran lurking, he would be the one.
Rapidly I considered. Mr. Buffingham hadn’t been about while I had been in Mr. Kistler’s rooms the night before, I was sure; his room had been quiet.
The fat lump had been replaced by the lantern-jawed policeman of the night before. For the second time I approached him with news of a call.
“I’d like to run up and see if Mr. Buffingham’s in. That all right?”
“Have your own way!” He waved a cordial hand. “Remember I’m here if you turn up anything on him.”
Thus encouraged, I went up to knock at Mr. Buffingham’s door.
There was a stir in the room, then silence. I knocked again. The door opened slowly; as it did so a subdued whir sounded in the room somewhere. I looked my surprise up at Mr. Buffingham’s usual dark, intent gaze.
“Why, what’s that?”
“Burglar alarm,” he replied laconically, without smiling. As a burglar alarm, it was effective; I sensed before I saw Mr. Grant’s door open and his head appear momentarily around the edge of it.
Well, Mr. Buffingham wasn’t having anyone search his room! Then I thought of my own doors and laughed with sympathy.
“Good idea! You should see the way I barricade my own doors!”
“That so?”
Potatoes and hamburgers were frying in a pan on the gas plate standing on the table against his left wall; a coffeepot covered the second flame.
“I don’t want to keep you from your dinner,” I said hastily. “I just wanted to ask you a question. That night, that Friday night, you know, I came in around ten, and one of the cats ran under the bookcase. Then you came downstairs. You didn’t happen to have seen a strange man around the house about that time, did you?”
He stared at me in silence awhile.
“No, I didn’t.”
“I’ve identified that prowler I saw in the house once—it was Mr. Halloran. The husband of Mrs. Garr’s niece. I thought he might have come around again that Friday.”
“I know Halloran—seen him around.”
“But not that Friday?”
“Ain’t seen him for months. Used to be around a lot.”
“You didn’t hear anything strange? Going down cellar, for instance? After all, that cat must have been put back in the cellar sometime between ten o’clock, when I saw her, and two o’clock, when the house was searched. She wasn’t around then.”
“How would I know? I don’t spend all my time listening around—I got my own business to tend to. And if I had seen anything I’d of said so to the police, wouldn’t I?”
“Yes, of course,” I said. “Thanks. Sorry if I’ve bothered you.”
He slammed his door; the buzzing stopped.
That hadn’t been very fruitful. I’d had my nose so close to my idea that I’d forgotten that he, as well as everyone else in the house, had been asked just those questions by the police, not only after the discovery of Mrs. Garr’s body, but on the very night, after the attack on me.
And on that throttling business—it must surely have been the murderer. It would be stretching coincidence too far to have two criminals attacking in the same house on the same night. No, the murderer must have hung around. In that case, he must have waited somewhere. Outside or inside?
As long as I was upstairs I might as well ask the other lodgers my questions, useless or not. It would serve to find out how they felt about the crime, too. I might be able to tell something from attitudes.
No answer to my knock on Mr. Kistler’s door.
Mr. Grant answered so quickly, I suspected him of listening.
“No, no one,” he answered me. “Nothing unusual.”
Miss Sands, in curlers and kimono over a cheap rayon slip, was pressing a black dress; her room was full of the ethery scent of dry-cleaning fluid.
“No, I’d of remembered it after you got choked, wouldn’t I, dearie?” she contributed wearily, turning the iron back on its rest and rubbing at the neck of the dress with a reeking rag. “Did you get a notice to go to that inquest? So did I, and I’ll have to go, too, I suppose, t
hough what Mr. Tully’s going to say when I ask to get off at two o’clock, right in the busiest time, I hate to think.”
“Poor Mrs. Garr,” I said. “She didn’t make it pleasant for anyone, dying. Except maybe the Hallorans.”
“That old leech! I’m glad she’s dead!” There was hate in the words. “Now maybe I’ll—” She stopped there, stamped sullenly down with the iron. She wouldn’t say more; I got no bites on my casts.
The Wallers, too, were uncommunicative. I got the effect, when they opened their door, that they had retired to their apartment as to a fort, to hide there until forays were past. Mrs. Waller opened the door only a crack, didn’t ask me in.
“No, we didn’t see anyone. No, we didn’t hear anything,” she answered, and shut her door. I heard it lock.
What did they do? What did they talk about, all day behind that locked door? Going downstairs, I thought about them; they seemed normal people in so many respects, yet what a life they lived. Mr. Waller did odd jobs; I’d pieced that out. Yet he was a retired policeman. Appearance and apparent character would place him above an odd-job man. Was it all to be blamed on the depression, that sausage machine for turning out economic alibis?
What possible reason could Mrs. Garr have had for borrowing two thousand dollars from them? Especially when she had ten thousand to invest in a trust fund for the Hallorans? Or why was she paying them two thousand dollars, if that was the way of it? For the first time, it struck me that this might be a link to her past, the first one I’d found. Two thousand dollars. The interest on two thousand dollars, even at six percent, would be only a hundred and twenty dollars a year. That would mean she let the Wallers have one of the best apartments in the house—their rooms were small, but there were three of them—for only ten dollars a month, less than two-fifty a week!
It didn’t seem like Mrs. Garr at all.
The policeman with the Wilsonian jaw said he was surprised to see me come down with empty hands, but I ignored that. I retired to a pencil and paper in my rooms. I think better with a pencil in my hands, and I needed support.