by Mabel Seeley
“That’s the way Kistler says they fell in when he and Waller broke in here Tuesday morning,” said the lieutenant.
“No one could go out through those doors, lock them, leave the key inside, and hook the chairs under the knobs after himself,” I said. “That’s flat.”
“We’d sort of figured that, too,” the lieutenant replied dryly.
“Are you sure he—it—wasn’t still in here when the door was broken in yesterday morning?”
“Well, the first thing Waller says he did was to look around, and Kistler saw him do it. I guess he even took some time off from you to look around himself, being a little mad. They both swear there couldn’t a soul have escaped ’em. After we got here we looked again, and there wasn’t a trace. This place isn’t so big anyone could have hid out on Waller or Kistler, either.”
After that he went on to the windows. I’d had the windows open, of course. From the top. But they were screened. Well screened, being on the ground floor. One screen was new—the one the policemen had gone through to capture Buffingham’s son. Every screen was held on the outside by those little gadgets that turn, and on the inside by hooks. They went over those screens with magnifying glasses, for the least fresh sign of a screwdriver or hammer. But even if they had found any, it would have been impossible for anyone to come and go by any of those windows, leaving the screens fastened both inside and out.
The kitchen window and the kitchen door were given thorough attention next. The kitchen door had once fitted loosely, but it had been weatherstripped; the men figured for an hour before they gave up, to admit the bolt couldn’t possibly have been pulled by any contrivance from the outside, however ingenious.
“Besides,” I said from my watchtower on the kitchen table, “I’ve decided that whoever’s doing this is someone stupid. You have to look for something easy.”
I’ll skip the answers I got.
They passed on to the unused door to the unused staircase. Its bolt was rusted as stiffly as ever; the lieutenant worked at it until the veins bulged on his forehead; couldn’t budge it.
They tapped the walls, took the rugs up off the floors, and examined the ceilings. Not a chance.
They stood in the living room, then, looking at each other in gloomy defeat. Lieutenant Strom rallied.
“Now, men, I don’t believe in ghosts. Not ghosts wielding hammers and anything as modern as Kleenfine. This was a human being, and maybe even a dumb one at that, if we’re going to go by Mrs. Dacres. Just dumb enough to wear gloves. What I wouldn’t give for a fingerprint on that Kleenfine can! We’ve gone over all this stuff, and there’s isn’t a clue in it. All you can say for the methods used on Mrs. Dacres is that they were thorough, except for a lucky chance, but not expert. Our best bet is tracking him down by how he got in or out. That’s what we’ve got to do, concentrate on those two questions. How’d he get in? How’d he get out?”
“He might of been in here, hiding, when Mrs. Dacres came in that night,” offered Van hopefully.
“Oh no!” That was me, appalled. “He couldn’t have been! I was all through the rooms.”
“Sure of that?”
“Oh yes!”
“In the kitchen?”
“Yes.”
“Lavatory?”
“Yes.”
“Closet?”
“Yes. I hung my dress away. I don’t have so much in my closet anyone could hide in there.”
“How about that closet of Mrs. Garr’s?”
“Before all its contents got thrown out it was so full I don’t think anyone could have squeezed in. Besides, look how the lock on it was broken. I’d certainly have noticed that.”
Again the three men walked through the two rooms, looking for hiding places. My studio couch came low to the floor. My steamer trunk was tightly against the wall. There just wasn’t any hiding place.
“Now let’s snap out of this.” The lieutenant was exasperated. “What if he did hide here? That wouldn’t tell us how he got out. There’s just one more place I can think of to give the works, and that’s those cellar stairs. We’ll get at ’em from below. Come on.”
The order was to his two men, but I came, too.
“Why, the door’s open!” I cried at the foot of the cellar stairs.
The lieutenant turned his hooded eyes on me.
“Sure, it was opened Monday afternoon, by the last cop before he left. Why not? We were through with it.”
He went on into the room in which all that was left of Mrs. Garr had been found.
I swallowed hard, but pattered right after.
It was the first time, really, that I had been in that kitchen. Before, I’d just seen it from the furnace room; sometimes the door had stood open, but usually it had been closed. Now I saw it closely. All trace of the nightmare once dwelling there had been removed. The floor was empty, clean. But it was an unappetizing kitchen, for all that. Lavatory to the right, under mine. A door, which Van opened on a flight of stairs going up toward my kitchen. At the left, a grimy, hooded gas stove. A dust-gray cupboard. Against the wall ahead, a table.
My blood quickened.
A kitchen table. One table. The only table. It stood against the back wall, midway between the two basement windows at the back, just about under where my back porch was. It stood four feet under and about three feet to the left of the basement window that was open an inch.
The lieutenant had halted at the foot of the stairs.
“Wait!” I called.
He turned around. “What?”
“The table. Is that the table where the key was found?”
“Sure.”
“Then Mrs. Garr was murdered,” a loud, clear voice was saying. Mine. “And I know how the murderer got out of this room after he killed her.”
The two policemen, already halfway up the stairs, came tumbling back. The three men advanced on me, almost like an army; there was something threatening in the way they stood over me.
“Okay, talk.”
“It’s awfully simple. The murderer walked out the door and locked it behind him. He probably caught the animals one by one, shoved them in, and locked the door behind them.”
“Yeah, he shoved the key in and locked the door behind that, I suppose.”
“Oh no. He waited until the house was quiet. Then he walked around to the back of the house, outside, and threw the key in through that partially opened window. It landed on the table. That was the sound I had heard down here. Plink, it said.”
“By God, Lieutenant, I believe she’s right!” Van was excited, staring up at the slit the window was open. “I bet it would make it! Wait. I’ll go up and throw my keys in.”
He dashed out.
The lieutenant was viewing me sourly.
“Don’t mind me,” he said bitterly. “Don’t tell me anything. I’m the last person to tell things to. Did you ever tell me one word about things falling into the cellar?”
I was mournful about it myself. “I can’t help it. I forget things. Then I see something, like the relation between that table and the window, and some remembrance flashes back.”
“I wish to God they’d flash sooner. If they had, you might have spent a more comfortable day yesterday.” He was definitely cross. But he was abashed, too; I knew he thought he should have thought that out about the window himself. But knowing how he felt about Mrs. Garr’s death, I could imagine how perfunctorily he had gone over the room, after his squad of fingerprinters and photographers had finished that night.
By that time, Van was evidently outside, because a key sailed through the window. It hit the edge of the table, then fell to the floor.
“Throw more to the right,” the lieutenant called.
The second key came in with a nice curve and landed on the table with a little metallic clink; the lieutenant flourished a handkerchief ove
r his face.
“Not three inches from where that other damn key was. That’s enough, Van.”
He sat down on the edge of the table to think, juggling the keys in his hands, until Van came back.
“Okay.” The lieutenant’s eyes were now bright beneath their hoods. “Someone has guilty knowledge of Mrs. Garr’s death. Guilty, because why, if it wasn’t, would he throw in the key? And now, Mrs. Dacres, you know another little reason why you’ve had your two little experiences. You are suspected of having heard that key land, and the murderer’s suspicions on that point are only too well confirmed. When I think how he grieves now over not having done a complete job on you, I could almost feel sorry for him. By heaven, if I’d ever lapsed from virtue anywhere near you, I’d want you murdered, too!”
He turned to the staircase from which I’d recalled him.
“Now I’m going back to where I was before you jerked me off it. And boy, was I in a whale of a place.”
He took me by the shoulders, pulled me to the first step, played his flashlight ahead up the stairs.
“See those steps?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Notice anything about ’em?”
“They look like ordinary steps to me.”
“That all?”
“The paint’s almost worn off.”
“Not that. Notice anything about ’em that should be remarked, taking in mind something that was brought out at the inquest?”
He gave me time to think; I thought hard, too. The two detectives were staring over my head. I gave up.
“Okay.” There was soothed satisfaction in the word. “Well, I didn’t put two and two together, either, when I looked at ’em yesterday. But the minute I stepped foot to ’em this morning it hit me. One of those flashes you talk about. Remember now?”
I couldn’t. The other two men were as unknowing as I was.
Greater satisfaction lit the lieutenant’s voice.
“Well, I’ll just repeat a few words we brought out in Jerry Foster’s evidence. This is what those words were: ‘The dust of those stairs was undisturbed.’”
We got it then.
“And now what?” the lieutenant went on triumphantly, over our exclamations. “Those stairs have been swept! Swept! Who swept ’em? Not Tewman. She beat it out of here right after the inquest. Swears she wouldn’t stay in the house. Not Halloran. Says she hasn’t been near the place except when we dragged her over for questioning yesterday afternoon. We got her out of bed at three in the afternoon, Tuesday. Not my squad when I told ’em to clean up here. I was in here after they’d finished and I remember thinking how like the lazy bums it was not to sweep the stairs. No, there’s only one person who would have had an interest in sweeping those stairs. And that’s the guy who wanted to chloroform Mrs. Dacres. He needed those stairs. He didn’t want footsteps to show. He knew fresh footsteps on dust couldn’t get by. But there was a chance we wouldn’t notice swept stairs. He got through that door up there somehow!”
He charged up.
We followed as far as the landing. He was working at the door, playing his light on the four screws in the door casing, with their heads tight against the door.
“We tested the knob for fingerprints last night. Clean. That’s suspicious, too. Clean, after all the time this door hasn’t been used. But I can’t budge it.”
Again his flash played up and down the door by the screwheads. He gave an exclamation of delight. I could see it, too.
In the old gray paint of the door, a tiny, fresh scratch!
“A scratch! See that? A scratch! Bolt or no bolt, I’m taking these screws out of here and seeing what happens.”
He took a knife from his pocket, worked at one screw with a flat-end blade that worked like a screwdriver. The screw turned tightly for the first four or five turns, then came with surprising ease the rest of the way. It wasn’t five minutes before he had all four screws out.
“Golly, that was easy!”
He took the doorknob in his hand, turned it, pulled back hard.
I reached out a hand to keep him from falling backward on us.
The door had come open!
It sprang open at his first touch! As easily, as freely as any door, it flew open to reveal my everyday kitchen beyond.
It was so sudden, I couldn’t think what it meant for a while.
Then I looked at the bolt.
The bolt had parted neatly, right at the edge of the door.
We all stepped through to the kitchen but stood clustering around the door, the men swearing excitedly under their breath. Both ends of the bolt were rusted solidly in their sockets; when the door was closed again both ends met; it was impossible to see the break with the door closed.
“Sawed!” Lieutenant Strom repeated for the tenth time, admiringly.
I was considering, startled, what I could sleep through.
“Wouldn’t you think I’d wake up? It must have made some noise.”
“You didn’t get home until three a.m., did you?” The lieutenant decried my lack of imagination. “Plenty of time between midnight and three a.m. for anyone to saw a dozen bolts.”
“You mean when I came home, he—it—was waiting down here, maybe listening just on the other side of that door—”
“That’s it, all right.”
“I don’t think I’ll ever sleep again!”
He laughed. “Sure you will.”
“How can I? Thinking of that, that something down there, waiting for me to sleep so he could come and kill me in the dark!”
“It won’t happen again,” the lieutenant gave reassurance. “I’ll post a man down there every night until we get this cleared up. And I’m having a locksmith in to put good new locks on all three of your doors. That satisfy you?”
“I’ll never feel safe again! When I think how I trusted those chairs under my doorknobs . . .”
Lieutenant Strom winked at the other two men.
“The only advice I can give you is, get married. Nothing’s as safe as a husband.” He laughed and turned his attention back to the door.
“What a saw that took! Who’s an old jailbird in this house?”
“No one that I know of. But of course you know Buffingham’s son—”
“I’ve got that in mind.”
Another thought had crossed my mind. “Would it be all right if you told me how much the Buffingham boy’s bail is set for?”
“You can’t get bail if you’re a murderer.”
“Any amount goes toward paying a lawyer, though. In a spot like that they’d have to pay cash in advance, I suppose. I wonder, do lawyers ever get a man out on the chance he can rob another bank afterward, and pay them?”
“We aren’t getting anywhere talking.” The lieutenant was impatient. “I’ve found out how this friend of yours got out and in, that’s something. Right after we’ve had lunch, Mrs. Dacres, I’m going to begin getting those people together, and you listen to what they told me.”
They went out to eat; I had orange juice, a half hour’s rest, and dressed. The Hallorans must have been ordered to put in an appearance, because I heard Mrs. Halloran’s voice in the front of the house while I was dressing.
Lieutenant Strom, returning, set up an impromptu court in my living room: he in my armchair with the gateleg table before him, I on the couch as both audience and jury.
The Hallorans were called. Nine of them trooped in. Mr. and Mrs. Halloran first, completely detached from their following. Seven children; I counted them. Six sly, snickering children as wild as rabbits, and one girl of perhaps eleven, the oldest, small, pinched, overworked, efficient, who pushed and slapped them into what semblance of order there was.
Mrs. Halloran did the answering to the lieutenant’s questions.
“Sure, I know where we was Monday night. We was celebrat
ing, that’s where we was. Celebrating our money we come into. I’d like to know who’s got a better right—”
“No one’s questioning your rights. Will you repeat where you went, and when, please.”
“Right home we went from that inquest and got all our dear little chillern.” She waved a vague hand at the pack. “So then we went on down to El Lago restaurant like I said yesterday, my, that’s a swell restaurant, and we all ordered exactly what we had a mind to, too, on account we got an advance from our lawyers.” She preened herself importantly, not loath, I could see, to tell the tale of the evening’s pleasures. So they had “got an advance from our lawyers”! I could see Mrs. Garr’s house evaporating, dirty bricks and all.
“So then we ate. My, that El Lago certainly has got swell food. After that, the next place we went to was the Red Bubble.”
A nightclub! Those children! I gasped and, taking the comment for admiration, Mrs. Halloran went blithely on.
“The best, I always say, is what chillern should get acquainted with. Some of the chillern never saw it before. My, they thought it was swell. We had tables right up to the dance floor, and me and Halloran danced; a couple of the kids went to sleep but we woke ’em up because we had met a couple and we were going on. We went to a beer parlor on Main Street, and then we went and had some hamburgers in a White House, and then we went to another beer parlor on Hampstead Street, and we all got in with a party of folks there, and my, we sure had a swell time.”
“Was Mr. Halloran in the party all along?” I asked.
She tossed a coquettish head back at Mr. Halloran, who hovered on her outskirts. “Sure he was with us all the time. You don’t think he’d run out on me, I hope.”
Mr. Halloran replied to this sally with a silly grin. I could well imagine he wouldn’t—not as long as she was an heiress. There was admiration as well as amazement in my look at the small hellions now. Whatever else they weren’t, you had to say they could take it.
“Yeah.” The lieutenant put a period to Mrs. Halloran. “And what’s worse, we’ve checked it all along the line, and it works. They got home at sunup. At three a.m. they were reported far too far gone to do any delicate chloroforming. I can’t see anything more in them, can you?”