The Listening House

by Mabel Seeley

  He was so triumphant, it hurt your eyes to look at him.

  “What a bunch of ‘I told you so’ I bet you’re spreading,” I told him.

  “Sure, why not? It isn’t often I’m as right as I was this time.”

  He’s good at taking the curse off himself.

  “Tell me everything. Do you realize how long I’ve waited?”

  “Ah, but you know the denouement. Some nice points, though. Guess who got the second-best bit of clinching evidence?”

  “I give up right away. Who?”

  “Waller.”

  “You mean he suspected Mr. Buffingham, too?”

  “He got around to it. You see, after Grant died, and Waller got let out by Strom, he came around to the Guide office to see me. Said now that he’d quit being afraid of being found out, he’d got to thinking. He asked me who I thought the murderer probably was, before it had been pinned on Grant, and I said Buffingham. So he said, ‘Funny, I’ve come around to Buffingham, too.’

  “We talked it over, and Waller decided he’d trail Buffingham as much as he could without being seen, because there wasn’t much he could do working back over what had happened; that’d all been covered by the police. He trailed Buffingham now and again from then on, and he also hung around the Elite Drugstore on the nights Buffingham was off.

  “It wasn’t long before he began to get on to something. He noticed an awful lot of men dropped into that drugstore late at night and paid a visit to a back counter. It wasn’t hard to get in on. Buffingham and the owner of the store were running a little numbers racket of their own, taking bets on the total livestock receipts at the South Gilling stockyards; the figure’s printed in the Comet every night.

  “He got to know the regulars: shoe salesmen, collectors, carpenters, grocery clerks, punks—it’s a low-pay neighborhood. He didn’t get anything out of them until one night, he was talking to a guy he’d seen there almost every night. When he asked him what his business was, the guy said ‘bank guard.’ Get that? Bank guard.”

  “I don’t see what connection that would have.”

  “Neither did Waller, at first. But he went on chatting, eventually mentioning that he lived in the same house as Buffingham, where an old lady had died, Mrs. Garr, to see if he’d get any reaction. And for the first time, he got one. The bank guard said, ‘She died, did she? Who got all her dough?’ Waller said, ‘Oh, she didn’t leave so much.’

  “The bank guard said, ‘Didn’t leave much? I’ll never forget the time she come in the bank when we went off the gold standard, carrying an old black reticule my great-grandmother wouldn’t of been seen out with. She lugged that reticule up to a cashier’s window, took a good swing on it to lift it, and splashed gold all over the counter. That was the biggest lot of gold we ever had turned in by a private individual. “Give me new paper money for it,” she says. Forty thousand dollars even, the cashier said it was. She stuck those stacks of bills back in the reticule and walked out like it was forty cents.’

  “‘I guess she’d been giving a lot to her niece,’ Waller said quickly. ‘Man, that’s a good story. What’d Buffingham say when he heard it?’ ‘Said he never knew the old bitch had so much dough,’ the bank guard said to Waller.”

  Hodge stopped to let it sink in.

  “F’heaven’s sake,” I said, “and I thought I was a detective.”

  “Yeah. Waller’s got a gift for it. He’d have got along all right as a cop if he hadn’t been ruined by what he did for Mrs. Garr.”

  “Go on, go on.”

  “So Waller was so excited, he almost bit his pipe in two. But he asked one more question. He got such a shock on that one, he did bite it—right smack through! Showed me the pieces.”

  “Go on!”

  “Want to know what that question was? Well, this is it. Waller says to this bank guard, ‘What’d the other guys around here think about that?’ And the bank guard said, ‘Why, I wouldn’t tell a story like that to a bunch of folks. Some of ’em might not be good characters. As a matter of fact,’ the bank guard says, looking sort of nervous, ‘I wished afterward I hadn’t told Buffingham that story. There was one other man heard it. He died, that other man did. But it sure taught me a lesson to look folks over before I talk shop like that. Made me pretty nervous when it came out in the papers.’

  “Waller says, ‘What story was that?’ And the bank guard said, ‘About that other man getting killed. Zeitman, his name was. He used to hang around here some before he got killed.’”

  “Zeitman!”

  “Yep, Zeitman.”

  “Hodge, you mean that gangster? That man I found in back of the house?”

  “I mean the same.”

  “But why didn’t that bank guard tell the police when he read about the killing? Why didn’t he say he—?”

  “Where do you suppose his job would have been if he had?”

  “Oh, my goodness! Zeitman knew about the money in Mrs. Garr’s house, too, then! And Mr. Buffingham knew Zeitman!”

  “Guess what day this was Waller talked to the bank guard.”

  “Friday evening, I suppose.”

  “Not that close. Thursday night, though. We were still arguing about whether to turn in this discovery to Lieutenant Strom or wait until we had something more.”

  “You didn’t have to wait long,” I contributed grimly.

  “You’re a wonderful bean spiller, my sweet.”

  “Wait. I’ve got more questions. Why had he ever written that confession, the one you brought in here?”

  “Strom got that out of him. Mrs. Garr’s lawyers made him write it, back when she was having her trial. The lawyer threatened to have Mrs. Garr testify Buffingham brought the girl to the house and seduced her, left her there with Mrs. Garr. In that case, as the lawyer pointed out, our state would probably have had a lynching to its credit. This town was stirred up about Rose Liberry. Buffingham signed quick. Then the lawyers used the confession to make sure Buffingham wouldn’t testify against Mrs. Garr. And when Mrs. Garr got out of jail, she used it for her private pleasure—blackmail. Buffingham never got over being afraid of it.”

  “That Liberry case is undoubtedly the world’s nastiest.”

  “It’s done now.”

  “Yes, it’s done now. Does Buffingham say—does he admit he killed Mrs. Garr?”

  “You should have seen your friend the lieutenant making up for lost time when he got hold of Buffingham Friday night. He confessed, all right. We had that part down pat. He was in the kitchen hunting for the forty thousand in new bills when she came in and caught him. He strangled her.”

  “But that part about that gangster, Zeitman. Where did he—?”

  “Strom got that out of him, too, once he had the bank guard’s statement and Buffingham knew it was all up, anyway. Buffingham bumped him off, too. And why, do you think?”

  “Why?”

  “Because of you, baby, because of you.”

  “You’re insane.”

  “No, I’m not, my sweetling. You may look harmless, but because of you, a man died. Zeitman.”

  “How—?”

  “I like this. The day you first came to Mrs. Garr’s house to look it over, Buffingham stood on the stairs and heard Mrs. Garr say she kept a closet in that kitchen. He’d only just begun his hunt then. Mrs. Garr stuck so close, Buffingham couldn’t search your rooms before you moved in. Then you stuck around too much. Zeitman was getting hard up and wanted to rush things; it was his idea to burgle the joint, tie you up or bump you off so they could look your rooms over. Buffingham objected; he said he never intended any violence, up until he got caught. Probably he wanted to find the dough by himself and double-cross the other guy, too. Zeitman thought so, anyway. They had a fight, sitting in Buffingham’s car. Zeitman pulled his gun just for a little threatening, and the next thing he knew he had a pitchfork i
n his tail. All over you!”

  “But how did he get where I found him?”

  “Zeitman was killed in the car, out by Lake Maris somewhere, where they’d driven to talk things over. When Zeitman was dead, Buffingham just drove back to town with the body—he said it just looked drunk—calmly drove up in back of 593 Trent, dumped the body over the guardrail, drove back to the side of the house, wiped out the car for fingerprints—all the blood had soaked into Zeitman’s own clothes—and went to bed.”

  “He didn’t seem to mind killing when he got started. What about me?”

  “He even confessed that.”

  “But why did he pick on me?”

  Hodge’s triangular grin came on again. “So thick-witted,” he said.

  “WHY?”

  “It seems that after a certain run-in, he was always afraid you would put two and two together. After all, you caught him hunting for that cat on the night Mrs. Garr was murdered.”

  If I could have lain back any harder, I’d have lain back harder.

  There it was, staring me in the face.

  That was what Mr. Buffingham had been doing, that Friday night before Memorial Day, when I’d come into the hall at ten. He had been chasing the cat!

  I felt so low, I couldn’t even climb up close enough to the bottom to ask any more questions.

  It’s bad enough having another amateur find a murderer you’ve been hunting yourself, without having it pointed out to you that you should have jolly well known it all along.

  * * *

  —

  THAT’S THE STORY OF the murder of Mrs. Garr.

  The rest of this is about what happened since then, in case you’d like to know.

  I wasn’t lonesome in the hospital after that day. Girls I’d known in offices came to hear all about it, every one agog. Hodge saved the papers for me; I read them all. About how I’d found Mrs. Garr’s hidden savings, how Mr. Buffingham had been listening to me because I’d stayed so long in the basement, how he’d crept down to see if I was hunting, too, and seen me make the find.

  So I knew who the listener in the house was, after Mrs. Garr was dead.

  Mr. Waller and Mr. Kistler got a big hand for their capture of Buffingham, and Mr. Waller was given an extra play for his discovery of the talkative bank guard. There were all sorts of pictures: the house, the one remaining picture of Mrs. Garr—the one I’d seen at the railroad station—Charles Buffingham, Reginald Buffingham, even the black scarf Buffingham had tied over his face.

  The papers finally had the story they’d been cheated out of at first.

  But reading, you could see the accounts were incomplete. That was when the rumors began to spread. People began wondering about why the police hadn’t known Mrs. Garr was murdered. Interest was whipped up as promises were made of sensational disclosures at the trial.

  On my ninth day in the hospital, the trial and the newspaper accounts all ended with a bang and a whimper.

  Mr. Buffingham hanged himself in his cell.

  * * *

  —

  MISS SANDS CAME IN to see me one evening. I was glad; you can gossip with a woman so much more thoroughly than with a man, and she knew the facts. I’d had to be careful with the girls from the offices.

  She seemed pathetically glad because I enjoyed her coming; after the first time, she came every night. She told me Lieutenant Strom had called Mr. Waller in to see him, and after hemming and hawing around said they were taking on a new group of substitutes, and he had been agreeably impressed with Mr. Waller’s work on the bank guard. Then he gave him back his two-thousand-dollar note, and Waller tore it into bits and threw it into Strom’s wastebasket and walked home with a job. Miss Sands said he went home and cried.

  Lieutenant Strom sent flowers but didn’t come himself. I wondered what that meant.

  The Wallers didn’t come, but Mrs. Halloran did. She’d bought herself a forty-dollar black satin dress, the very first of the fall preshowings; she sweated in it proudly all the hot afternoon she visited me.

  “My, you’ll hardly know the place when you get back,” she said. “We got men stuccoing the outside now. Pale green, we decided on. My, it’s going to look swell. We’re going to raise all the rents.”

  “You’ll want richer people than me, then. This hospital is cleaning me out.”

  I was willing to move now.

  “Why, I wouldn’t think of asking you to move, Mrs. Dacres, in your condition and all, but if you could see your way around to, it would be lovely, just lovely.” She paused, hinted. “Wasn’t it around this time of week you used to pay?”

  Hodge had brought my handbag down, with necessities.

  I paid her eight dollars for two weeks.

  “I’ll be very sorry to lose you, Mrs. Dacres, such prompt pay and all, but that’s the way it is, some go up in the world, and some go down.”

  “You’re still going up nicely?”

  “Oh my, yes.” She leaned forward confidentially. “You know that money? All that money you found? We got in touch with some swell lawyers; they come around to see us when the story come out in the papers. They said it was a shame, the way we were the only relatives and all, we shouldn’t get the money. They said we had a swell case, in view. In view, you know. They don’t think the people who are supposed to start that dog and cat house will fight very hard. And then we’ll get all that money! My! Forty thousand dollars! I cer’n’y never knew my aunt Hattie had that much money, the way she lived and all.”

  “That’ll be lovely,” I said. “So nice for the children.”

  “Oh my, yes. For me, too.”

  “For the lawyers, too?”

  “Oh no, they’re very reasonable, they said. Dirt cheap, they said. If we win they get half, but if we don’t win they only get two thousand dollars. We wouldn’t hardly notice two thousand dollars, not out of forty thousand.”

  I didn’t point out the flaw in the logic.

  So that was what was to become of the forty thousand dollars, the money Mrs. Garr had watched, rocking below in her chair by day, sleeping on the couch in that room at the head of the stairs by night. That was what was to become of the money Mr. Buffingham had killed for twice, and would have killed for again, and for which he had hanged himself in his cell, and for whose lack, his son would take the punishments his crimes had earned.

  The lawyers would get half, Mrs. Halloran would get half, and there would probably be stucco on the inside as well as on the outside of Mrs. Garr’s old house.

  Just before she left, Mrs. Halloran’s face brightened with the brightness of one who remembers something important.

  “Oh, Mrs. Dacres, you remember that five-dollar bill, the tore one, the one you was asking about? The minute I took in the paper Sat’d’y and read about the money and how he confessed and all, I remembered it just like it was happening right then. He give me a bill, and it was tore. It was Mr. Buffingham give me that bill, that’s who it was.”

  * * *

  —

  TWO WEEKS FROM THE day I entered the hospital the doctors said I could leave. That, you’ll notice, was a Friday, too.

  I still wore the cast, of course. And the left side of my face, where I’d landed, was still a lively purple, with burgundy borders.

  Hodge came around in midmorning, to take me home in his car. We drove through residence streets.

  “Nice of you to get out of hospitals on Friday, when I have lots of time,” he said.

  “Nice of you to allow me a Friday. I thought you were being awfully stingy with ’em for a while.”

  “Suppose I had let you in on what we were doing. You’d have run around to Buffingham’s room, asking, ‘Now, just tell me everything you’ve done that’s suspicious.’”

  “Don’t forget I found out about that ticket.”

  “We’ll celebrate that today.
In fact I’m thinking of spending the whole day celebrating. I have to stop in here to see a guy first, though. Want to come along?”

  “I wouldn’t mind,” I said. “I haven’t been many places lately.”

  The house was white with a wide porch. Hodge punched the bell.

  A mild, white-whiskered old man answered the door.

  “You’re the young man for eleven o’clock?” he asked. “Come right in.”

  We went into a horsehair and mahogany parlor; I didn’t think any had survived.

  The white-whiskered man looked at me doubtfully, but didn’t ask me to sit down.

  “You have the license?” he asked.

  “Right here,” Hodge answered and handed him a paper from his pocket. A clean one, folded.

  “Has—ah—the young lady been in an accident?” asked the old man.

  “Oh no, not at all,” Hodge said. “I take ’em by capture. She put up a fight. The methods of my forefathers are good enough for me.”

  You have to remember I was on my way home from a hospital, and I’d been in bed steadily until two days ago.

  “What do you mean, capture?” I asked dizzily.

  “Oh, haven’t you heard?” Hodge asked me airily. “You’re marrying me today.”

  The old man laughed politely.

  “Young people are so lighthearted nowadays,” he said.

  He scuttled away and came back with two women.

  He married us then, with his wife and his maidservant for witnesses.

  “I’m doing this as a life-saving measure,” Hodge explained kindly, back in the car. “It isn’t safe to leave you alone at night. You have too many accidents. And I always did wonder if it was fun to be a philandering husband, too.”

  “I wonder what Lieutenant Strom will say,” I said, which was a silly thing to bring up.

  “Strom? Oh, he’s already said it. This last time you cracked up, I told him we were engaged. Had been for two months. Sort of surprised him, but he’s a philosopher. Swore a little.”