by Mabel Seeley
Governor Promises Aid
Governor Lamson was deeply moved by the evidence presented to him. “If this evidence is true, and you may quote me,” he said, “I promise Gilling City a political shake-up such as no city has seen before. It is a blot on the fair escutcheon of this state, that a lovely young visitor from a sister state should be here inducted, whether willingly or unwillingly, into a house of vice. It is a crime that such conditions should exist.”
Hartigan to Go Before Investigating Committee
The governor immediately set in motion an investigation into the conduct of the police department under Chief Hartigan. First witness before the committee, the governor indicated, would be Police Chief Hartigan himself. Mrs. Garr, proprietress of the house at 417 St. Simon Street, would also come under scrutiny, he indicated.
My eyes flew over the other headlines on the page. They were blazingly sensational. One:
I FOUND HER DEAD
She Speaks—The Girl Who Found Rose Liberry!
This is the story of the girl, the woman, who found Rose Liberry dead. She prefers to be unnamed except for her first name, Leah.
“It was eight o’clock in the morning.” Leah’s tear-wet brown eyes closed with pain as she haltingly told her story to a Comet reporter. “I woke up. There was a girl in the room next to mine. A funny kid. She didn’t seem very chummy. But I just thought I’d slip in for a minute and talk while I waited for the bathroom. So I knocked at her door but she didn’t answer. I opened her door. None of our doors have keys. Mrs. Garr doesn’t care at all if we visit. Only the outside doors are locked because she doesn’t like girls slipping out on her without her knowing it. You can’t blame her, because where would she be if she had a lot of business and all the girls gone to a movie? So, as I said, I opened the door and walked in.”
Walks in on Death Scene
“I walked in, and there was that poor kid hanging to a hook on the inside of the closet door. With a torn-up bedsheet. I run out of there and downstairs because the first thing I thought was that we ought to have a cop, and I screamed at Fancy—that’s the housemaid—that there was a girl killed herself and we had to have a cop. The cops were always awful nice whenever we had anything go wrong at our place. So she unlocked the doors. She has keys, too. I pushed right past her and out into the street in my sleeping clothes, if you can imagine how excited I was, and there I ran into a cop, a young fella.
“He came right back with me into the room. I stood in the door, and I guess the racket of us running upstairs must of woke Mrs. Garr because she came out into the hall yelling.
“‘What’s going on here?’ And she went into the room with the cop and slammed the door. That’s all I know.”
Another account was headed:
MRS. GARR WON’T TALK
Vice Palace Keeper Refuses to Comment
Another was headed:
CHIEF HARTIGAN CLOSETED WITH PARTY LEADERS
Another:
AUNT WAS FIRST TO SUSPECT HUMAN TRAFFICKING IN CASE
Another:
VICE LORDS OF CITY TREMBLE AS NET CLOSES
Another:
WILL PROMINENT MEN BE NAMED AS FREQUENTERS OF PALACE OF VICE?
A two-line streamer at the bottom of the page ran:
THE LIFE STORY OF ROSE LIBERRY FROM BABYHOOD TO HER APPALLING END IN A DEN OF VICE; STORY ON PAGE 2
My fingers ached. I’d thought of Lieutenant Strom’s request for headlines and first paragraphs as modest, but I’d discovered otherwise. My handwriting began to look as if I’d never decipher it. But I got everything on the page. I ran through the rest of the paper, too, gathering all the angles the Comet hadn’t found room for on page one. Then I turned back to page one to check for anything I’d missed.
The pictures.
I studied them.
Mr. Liberry and the governor, snapped together, the governor smiling genially, the father’s face deeply furrowed with tragedy. Another picture of Rose Liberry. A studio photograph of the mother, serene and happy; grim irony now. A snapshot of the aunt behind a flowering rosebush, another grim reminder of unharrowed days. A smiling picture of Chief Hartigan, “Chief Called to Questioning.” A picture of a young policeman, Patrolman Walters, “Called by Screaming Girl to Discover Scene of Tragedy in Vice Palace.”
My eyes slid over that last picture, and then, as if recalled by intuition, returned. Intent, now, I bent over the pictured face. Young. But add eighteen years to it. Add creases in the forehead, blur the clean chin line with fat. Noses don’t change much. Add a lost look to the eyes. Patrolman Walters.
No! Mr. Waller!
21
I WAS QUIVERING WITH excitement.
Mr. Waller! Mr. Waller! How sure could I be? No, I couldn’t be sure. If only Mr. Kistler were here! If only Lieutenant Strom were here!
I whirled on the librarian.
“Where can I find a phone? Don’t let anyone touch that book. It’s important. It’s important in a case of murder! Don’t let anyone come near it! Where’s the nearest phone?”
The librarian, who had backed into the nearest corner, pointed down the other side of the room, to a laden desk. I dashed at it.
“Police headquarters, please.” To the girl at the switchboard. “Lieutenant Strom, please . . . Yes, it’s important. The Garr case . . . Mrs. Dacres . . . Oh, Lieutenant Strom, I think I’ve found something!”
“What?”
“I’m not sure. I’m not even sure I’ve found anything. But I think so. And if it is so, it may be frightfully important. Can you come over?”
“Where?”
“The Comet library.”
“Five minutes.”
He hung up.
The librarian stayed in his corner; he was still there when Lieutenant Strom stalked in, the omnipresent Van in tow.
“Hello, Mrs. Dacres, let’s see what you’ve got.”
My shaking finger pointed out the picture. I didn’t say anything; if he didn’t get it by himself I was just all wet.
Lieutenant Strom bent over the picture. Then he straightened to stare at me.
“Waller, by God!”
I felt almost faint.
* * *
—
WHILE I WAS DRIVING to the station with Lieutenant Strom there wasn’t a doubt in my mind that the case was settled.
Together we’d run quickly through the multitudinous publicity the Liberry case had had in the Comet through the rest of July, through August and September of 1919. The investigation of the police department. The volcanic cleaning out. The lurid details of daily life in Mrs. Garr’s Palace of Vice, at least forty percent of which was certainly fiction. The revulsion of the ministry. The shrieks to heaven of the women’s clubs. The beginnings of Mrs. Garr’s trial. The continuous attempts by Rose Liberry’s father to uncover evidence that his daughter had been forcibly held in Mrs. Garr’s house, that she was forced to suicide as her only escape. The success of Mrs. Garr’s attorneys in upholding Mrs. Garr’s contention that Rose Liberry had come to the house with a young man for a party, and that she had stayed because she enjoyed the excitement and did not want to go back to her parents.
Not even a suicide note had been found. Again and again, the Liberry attorneys had grilled the girl named Leah, Patrolman Walters, and Mrs. Garr. No suicide note.
Then the Comet headlines carried the news that Mrs. Garr had been sentenced to five years at Waterford.
From Vice Palace to Penitentiary—
Mrs. Garr’s Life at Waterford
The Liberry case, as far as the Comet was concerned, had been drained to its last drop.
It had been drained to its last drop for Lieutenant Strom, too. We left the library to the librarian. Van was dispatched to bring the Wallers in for questioning. The lieutenant let me wander restlessly around his of
fice while he waited for them to come.
“Can you prove it—can you prove from this that they murdered Mrs. Garr?” I asked, with variations.
The lieutenant merely grunted. He was sitting quietly at his desk, gazing thoughtfully down at the pencil in his hands. He stayed that way until Van brought the Wallers in.
They had been frightened yesterday; they were twice as frightened now. They looked as if they had long seen catastrophe coming, and now it had come.
“Sit down,” the lieutenant ordered. He looked at the two, then, with level eyes, let silence frighten them still further.
“Waller,” he said, even and low, “Mrs. Dacres has been helping me today by looking over the Comet files of the Liberry case. On July 10, 1919, the Comet ran the picture of a young patrolman. On the morning of July eighth that patrolman had been called into a house at 417 St. Simon Street by a woman who came out in her nightclothes screaming that a girl had hung herself in a bedroom upstairs. The name of that patrolman was Walters.”
Silence.
“Mrs. Dacres has a quick eye. But she didn’t trust it. She called me. I looked, too.”
Silence.
“Waller, why didn’t you tell me you were once on the force?”
Mr. Waller wasn’t looking at him. He was looking at me. With tired eyes. Mrs. Waller was looking at me, too. With hating eyes.
“I knew she’d bring it up sooner or later.” He talked as if he spoke in a vacuum. “Ever since she said Mrs. Garr told her.”
“Yes, you knew!” Strom exploded into a shattering bellow. “You knew, all right! And you tried to kill her to quiet her!”
Mr. Waller, still leaden, shook his head.
“No.”
“Your wife got you the Kleenfine!”
“No.”
“She used it!”
“For cleaning. Only for cleaning.”
“You went home from the inquest. You waited until the house was quiet. You went into the basement. You swept the back cellar stairs. You took out the screws and sawed the bolt of the door going into Mrs. Dacres’ kitchen. You lurked there in the dark stairway, waiting until Mrs. Dacres came home, waited while she undressed and went to bed and slept, waited like the coward you are until it was safe for you to do your beastly work. Until you could come out in the dark—in the dark—and kill her!”
The Wallers were trembling. I was shaking, myself.
The lieutenant’s voice dropped then, and he spoke in cold little tones like ice.
“What were you looking for in that closet?”
“I wasn’t, I swear to God I wasn’t.”
“Then what were you doing there?”
“Nothing. I wasn’t there.”
Silence.
The lieutenant whispered.
“Waller, I’m going to have your rooms searched.”
Silence.
“No objection?”
Silence.
“So it isn’t there, eh? Well, Waller, maybe there’s more than one road to town. Waller, I have a note in my safe. That note is dated July 8, 1919. On July eight Patrolman Walters—that was you, Waller—went into a house at 417 St. Simon Street. You found something there. Something Mrs. Garr paid you two thousand dollars for!
“Walters, there’s only one thing you could have found in that room that Mrs. Garr would have paid you that much money for. No amount of money could have saved her from getting into some trouble, and she knew it. But one thing could have made her trouble a lot worse.
“Walters, all during the Liberry trial, the Liberry attorneys tried to get evidence of a suicide note. They tried to get it from Mrs. Garr. They tried to get it from the girl who found the body. They tried to get it from you, Walters, from the policeman who was really the first person to examine the room.
“But they didn’t get it. Because you were lying, Walters. You were lying your soul to hell, and they couldn’t prove it.
“But I know something those attorneys didn’t know. Something that girl’s father would have paid—God, I wonder how much—to know.
“I know about that note you hold, dated July 8, 1919.”
Nothing in the room, except the vibration of two people trembling in the silence.
A simple question, simply asked.
Dully Mr. Waller looked at him. And then, as simply as if this were not an answer withheld through eighteen years, he spoke: “Mrs. Garr burned it.”
Softly, on an expended breath: “She burned it.”
Mr. Waller nodded silently.
Mrs. Waller’s head moved, the faint echo of a nod.
I felt like crying. The lieutenant’s voice was so still and small it sounded in the small room as if he spoke in a great hall.
“You found the suicide note.”
“Yes, I found it.”
“Mrs. Garr paid you two thousand dollars to keep silent about it.”
“Yes.”
“Only the two of you knew.”
“Yes.”
“Walters, did you read that note?”
The man he was questioning made a sound like a sigh. He didn’t answer directly; he said, whispering:
“Paper.”
Lieutenant Strom pushed paper and pencil across the desk.
Mr. Waller stared at the pencil and the paper at the edge of the desk for a long moment; then he got to his feet, staggering as if he were drunk. He walked to the desk, bent above it, picked up the pencil.
His fingers were shaking, I saw, but the shaking fingers began writing almost automatically, as if this were an exercise performed many times before. Then he pushed the paper across the desk toward the lieutenant and stood, staring at the floor.
Hardness swept into Lieutenant Strom’s face. I moved to read over his shoulder.
Odd handwriting to be a man’s. It wasn’t a man’s writing; it was almost a woman’s writing; a writing remembered so exactly in a man’s mind that he could almost reproduce it.
Father, Mother, I’ve tried and tried to get out. I can’t, the house is locked. The things they make me do are horrible, horrible. Oh, Father and Mother, forgive me. I love you, and I know you would so much rather your Rose were dead.
I kept my eyes on that paper. I would not, I could not, look at the Wallers. But my ears heard Mr. Waller saying woodenly:
“Now maybe I can forget it. I was new on the force. I owed a lot. We were going to have a baby. It died. That note’s eaten the heart out of me ever since.”
The lieutenant said, still quietly, “Two thousand dollars was your entire payment for surrendering this note?”
Mr. Waller answered as if now his shame were full, there could be no more.
“She gave me all the money she had in the house, too. That was about three thousand dollars.”
“God, Waller!”
Suddenly Mr. Waller stumbled backward to his chair; his head dropped to his hands and he began sobbing, the broken, wrenching way a man sobs. I didn’t look, but I could feel Mrs. Waller patting his shoulder.
“Did you kill Mrs. Garr, Waller?” The lieutenant’s voice was as even as if he’d been asking about the weather.
“Before God, no.”
“Did you make the attack on Mrs. Dacres Monday night?”
“No.”
The lieutenant shrugged weary shoulders, turned to me.
“Why don’t you go on along home, Mrs. Dacres? The rest of this is just going to be the same reel, over and over until he breaks the rest of the way. I think I might get along better without you. I’ll let you know when I get where I’m going. Thanks for what you did.”
I went out, down the corridor, past the desk, out into June sunshine. I was tense with excitement. But I was glad to go. I’d had enough of seeing the Wallers bludgeoned. Questions were worse than knives. Worse than clubs. Questions care
fully hunt out the vital spot. Then strike! Strike! Strike!
Odd that I should feel any pity at all for the Wallers. Incomprehensible that I should pity Mr. Waller, who had let Rose Liberry’s father and mother suffer more terribly because the world was made to think their daughter vicious. Vicious at sixteen. Girls were vicious, sometimes, at sixteen. But not their daughter. Not Rose. Not Rose with the grave eyes.
I called Hodge Kistler from a corner drugstore; over dinner, I told him what the afternoon had brought out.
“It is awful,” Hodge agreed soberly when I had finished. “The whole thing’s awful. That nice kid, getting into that sort of thing. And then letting her parents think she was rotten. Letting that God-awful oldish-bitch off with five years. Waller ought to be shot.”
“That’s the trouble,” I said. “I think he wishes he was. He looks as if he wouldn’t mind if he were shot. I can’t hate him as I should.”
“Hate him? Why should you? Hate’s personal.”
“Is it? Then what about Mr. Grant? He hated Mrs. Garr. His reasons were impersonal.”
“The reasons he gave were impersonal. You don’t know what his real reasons were—or are.”
“No, that’s true. Well, whatever they were, it doesn’t look now as if they had anything to do with what we’re interested in. The lieutenant is sure Waller is the one. They have personal enough reasons for wanting to bump Mrs. Garr off, goodness knows. I’d hate anyone who’d led me into doing anything that nasty.”
“Mean to say you’d let yourself be led?”
“How do I know? I’m feeling very humble tonight. I only know I was there in the room when Mr. Waller told. And I could feel what he was feeling. I can’t get away from it. He was feeling exactly as I would have if it had been me.”
“Honest. Now, if it was me, I’m certain I should have run from the house, waving the note on high. Heck, think how I could have rocked the world with that suicide note in 1919! Even 1920! The only thing that could have made that story bigger than it was, and that was big enough. Well, Rose Liberry died to give Gilling City a clean government; she accomplished that much. Lots of men have lived longer and done less.”