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“Looks like blood here,” he said.
He straightened up and looked about him, then he creaked his way across the tin roof. There, lying wilted but fairly fresh in the hot sun he picked up two or three bits of newly cut grass. Just such grass indeed as I had watched cascading from the blades of Eben’s lawn mower.
“What’s that?” said the Inspector.
“Grass. How’d it get here? There’s no wind.”
“Birds, maybe.”
None of them were satisfied, however. They went across into Emily’s room, where her bird was still singing in the sunlight by a front window, and tried her screens. They too were locked, but they opened fairly easily.
“Anyhow that’s out,” said the Inspector. “She was in here herself, dressing, when it happened.”
“So she says,” said Sullivan drily, and the two men exchanged glances and went back across the hall.
Up to that time, oddly enough, they had not found the weapon. The medical examiner had suggested a hatchet, but there was none in sight. Then one of the fingerprint men happened to glance up, and he saw a stain on the tester top of the bed. Somebody got a chair, and being tall he was able to reach up with a clean towel and bring down the axe.
“It made me kind of sick,” said the Inspector later. “I’m used to blood and all that, but an axe! And that little old woman not weighing a hundred pounds! It—well, it just about got me.”
The discovery of the axe, while gratifying, was not particularly productive, however. It was a moderately heavy wood axe, with the usual long handle, but it bore only what looked like old and badly smeared fingerprints. At the extreme end there were no prints whatever,
“Either wore gloves or wiped it pretty carefully,” was the comment of the fingerprint man, after a look at it.
None of them knew then, of course, that it belonged in the Lancaster woodshed, and practically all of them except Sullivan had veered to the idea of a homicidal maniac. The brutality of the crime, its apparent lack of motive, and as the Inspector said later, the utter recklessness of the entire business looked like that.
“You’ve got to get your lunatic into the house,” was Sullivan’s comment. “He hadn’t wings, that’s sure.”
They began to study the room once more. The chest under the bed had at that time no significance for them, and the room was not particularly disturbed. Mrs. Lancaster’s bed stood with its head against the wall toward her husband’s room, and she had been found lying on the side toward the door into the hall. On one side of the bed was the entrance to the bathroom, which the police had found shut, and on the other a closet door, also closed. Beyond the closet door in the corner was a small chest of drawers, and one of these drawers was partly open, although its contents, mainly the dead woman’s nightdress and bed jackets, were undisturbed.
There had apparently been no struggle, but that part of the room was a shambles. Not content with the first blow, probably fatal, five or six had been struck. In other words, as the Inspector said later, either some furious anger or pure mania lay behind the attack; or possibly fear, he added as an afterthought.
And, to quote him again:
“Well, there we were,” he said. “We had some clues, as you might call them. We’d sliced that sliver with the blood off the window screen, and Sullivan was taking care of those bits of grass. But there was nothing on the axe or anywhere else. Also the house was shut, and shut tight. We didn’t know about the hoarding then, but those lower floor windows and screens had new catches on them, and everybody in the house swore—and they were right at that—that every door had been locked and kept locked!
“Take the outside of the house, too. Here was the gardener. Nobody got past him, as we know, and I had my doubts about anybody except a professional strong man being able to climb one of those porch pillars with that axe, as you may say, in his teeth. Even the ground outside didn’t help us any. Of course the earth was baked hard, but take a house like that with grass right up to the building itself, and there’s mighty little chance of a print anyhow.
“Then there’s another thing. I can understand that nobody heard anything. It’s likely they couldn’t, with that canary wound up tight and going hard. But it’s not credible that whoever did that thing wasn’t covered with blood from head to foot, and yet beyond a mark or two we spotted on that red hall carpet, probably from the gardener’s shoes, there wasn’t a sign of blood outside that room.
“For those wounds had bled! Especially the one in the neck. They bled and bled fast. Our medical examiner said that it would be practically impossible to strike those five blows and then cover the poor woman as she was covered, without the killer showing something. And maybe a good bit. You see she’d been arranged. In a way, that is; the body was straight in the bed and a sheet drawn up part way. And the mere matter of getting that key meant stains, and plenty of them.”
The key had puzzled them, and Miss Emily’s frantic search for it. No one explained it to them, and still of course they knew nothing of the gold.
“We were pretty much at sea about that time,” he acknowledged. “Either it was an inside or an outside job, and there were arguments against either or both! It looked like one of those motiveless crazy crimes which drive the Department wild,” he added. “The least to go on and the most showy from the press point of view! You could guess a crazy man with a pair of wings, and you could say that a bird went crazy with the heat and carried three blades of grass up onto that tin roof. But short of that where were we? And nobody, axe or no axe, had climbed those porch pillars. We caught a camera man shinning up a porch column that night to get a picture, and the marks he left were nobody’s business!
“That’s the outside end of it. Then take the inside. Take the matter of time as we figured it out that day,” he said. “It was four o’clock when Miss Emily Lancaster ran out that side door and fainted on the grass. It was three-thirty when Mrs. Talbot left and the old lady turned over to take her nap. How much time had anybody in that house had to clean up a mess and get rid of a lot of bloody clothes? Whoever it was hadn’t burned them and they couldn’t hide them. We didn’t merely examine that furnace; one of our operatives crawled inside it, and we had the devil of a time getting him out!”
And this, so far as the police were concerned, was the situation up to six o’clock that night when, Margaret being the calmest of the lot, they showed her the axe. She went white and sick, but she identified it at once as belonging to the household.
Normally it hung, from May until November, on two nails in the woodshed at the back of the lot; a woodshed which was purely a shed, having a door which usually stood wide open from one year’s end to the other, but which Eben had noticed that day was closed. Investigation inside the shed, however, revealed nothing to show when it had been entered. The nails were there, the axe gone. Nothing else had been disturbed. The narrow shelf where Miss Margaret potted her plants for the porch roof and for the house in winter showed nothing save the usual crocks and a heap of loose leaf mold.
There was no sign of blood, nor of any stained clothing, anywhere in the shed.
It was the discovery of the ownership of the axe that finally convinced the police that the crime had been an inside one. But nobody mentioned the gold, or intimated that it was in the house until approximately ten o’clock that night. Then Emily Lancaster suddenly broke down under their questions and admitted that Jim Wellington had been near her when she recovered from her fainting attack in the garden.
With that Peggy was recalled and broke down, and, as the Inspector would have said, the fat was in the fire.
Chapter VII
OUT OF THAT INTERROGATION, of family and servants, certain statements were finally collected by the police and put into shape. Copies of these I now have, and as they illuminate the events of that day far better than I can repeat them here. I have stripped them, of course, of inessentials and repetitions, but they are correct in every other respect.
That of Emily Lancas
ter, as being the one who found the body, I give first.
“Mother had been restless all day. She felt the heat terribly, but an electric fan gave her neuritis, so I fanned her a good bit of the time. Except that I slipped over to the library in the morning to change that book I was reading aloud to her, I hardly left her at all. Indeed, I had not even a chance to clean my bird until Lydia Talbot arrived after lunch.
“Mrs. Talbot came in at half past two, and she relieved me of the fanning for a while. We sat and talked, but I thought that something Mrs. Talbot had said had annoyed Mother, and I was relieved when she went away. I went downstairs with her, and we met Father in the hall and they left the house together.
“I closed and locked the front door, and then went back to the kitchen porch for a glass of ice water. Jennie was there, cleaning the silver, and Ellen was beating up a cake.
“As I went up the back stairs I thought I heard the housemaid in one of the guest rooms. It was a sound of some sort. I called ‘Peggy, is that you?’ No one answered, so I looked into the guest rooms, but they were empty.
“All that took about five minutes. I then went to Margaret’s door. I knew she meant to go out and was afraid she had fallen asleep. I asked her if she would listen for Mother while I changed for the afternoon, but she said she was going to take a long shower to get cool before she dressed, and that she had just seen Mother, and she was asleep.
“I went on forward to my room and took off my dress, but just then I thought I heard Mother pounding on the floor with her stick, which is the way she often calls if she thinks I am downstairs. There is a bell over her bed, but it rings in the kitchen. I put on a dressing gown and went across, but she seemed to be asleep. I know that she—that nothing had happened then. I left the door partially open, and went back to my room.
“I know the exact time, for I looked at my clock. I like to be dressed for the afternoon by four, and it was not quite fifteen minutes before four.
“I dressed as fast as possible. My bird is a great singer, and he was making so much noise that once I opened my door and listened, for fear Mother was awake. She did not like birds much. I heard nothing, and so I finished dressing. It was almost four when I was ready.
“I went across to Mother’s room, but I did not go all the way in. I saw her and I think I screamed. Then I ran back to Margaret’s room, but I had to go all the way into the bathroom, for the water was running and she did not hear me. After that I ran down the stairs and out into the yard. I don’t know why, except that I had to get away somewhere.”
That was Emily’s story, told in fragments between attacks of hysteria, and in some ways the most fully detailed of the lot. Neither in it nor in the others, until the situation was forced, did any of the family mention the dead woman’s hoard. Partly I dare say it was pride, the fear that the newspapers would exploit the fact; partly it must have been because of their unwillingness to involve Jim Wellington. And it must be remembered that at that time the police still attached no significance whatever to the wooden chest under the bed.
Margaret’s statement, which followed Emily’s, is less exact as to time.
“This was my afternoon off. By that I mean that my sister and I take—took—alternate afternoons with Mother. Usually I go out on my free days, but today was very hot.
“I rested and read in my room until I heard Mrs. Talbot and Father leaving at half-past three. Then I remembered that Peggy, the housemaid, was having her afternoon off and that Mother had scolded her severely that morning. She was a good maid, and I did not want her leave.
“I went upstairs and spoke to her. She was crying, but at last she agreed to stay. I was there only a few minutes, but as I used the back staircase my sister may have heard me as she came up from the kitchen porch. I did not hear her call, however.
“I was running the water when she—Emily—came into my room with the news. She could hardly speak, and at first I did not hear her. Then I threw on something, took a glance into Mother’s room and after calling to the servants I ran downstairs. In the lower hall I met Eben, and the two of us ran upstairs the front way while the servants hurried up the back.
“Eben then closed the door into Mother’s room and started out to get a policeman. He was running. I have no real idea how long all this took, but at last I remembered Emily and went out to look for her. She was lying on the ground, and Lou Hall was stooping over her.
“Lou and I brought her in. Father had met Eben on the street and been told. We found him collapsed in the library, and soon after that the police came.
“The axe is one belonging to us. It was never brought into the house, and I have no idea how it got there. I know of no reason why my mother was attacked, and I trust our servants absolutely. Two of the women and Eben have been with us for many years. Peggy has been with us only a short time, but she had neither reason nor opportunity to do this thing.”
All of which sounds rather like Margaret, clear and unemotional and—even in the police notes—told without Emily’s hesitation and indirection.
Mr. Lancaster’s story to the police was much more vague. He was still profoundly shocked, but in his account he was quite clear as to the essential facts.
He had not been well for several days, and had not slept at night. He and Mrs. Lancaster had for several weeks disagreed on what he called a matter of policy, by which undoubtedly he referred to her hoarding of gold currency; but which he didn’t explain that night. In her condition he did not like to argue with her, but he had been considerably upset.
That day he had read all morning in the library. Before going in to lunch he had made his usual noon visit to his wife. Emily was out, and he found Mrs. Lancaster silent and rather fretful, and had laid it to the heat. But here he added, after a certain hesitation, that he had been under the impression when he entered the bedroom that she had hidden something from him.
Asked what it might have been, he said that he had no idea, and might even have been mistaken. He was merely trying to remember all that he could. She had not said anything to suggest that it might be true, nor had he questioned her.
At noon he had eaten a light meal, largely fruit and tea, and had then slept for some time. He had not gone upstairs at all, but being roused by Mrs. Talbot’s voice as she started down, had got his hat and left the house when she did. He had taken his usual walk, and had heard the news on the street as he returned from Eben, who was running for a policeman.
Asked as to his usual walk, he stated what we all knew, that it was his habit to go out through the Crescent gates, and to go past the hospital and toward the shopping district a half mile away. For the city had grown and apartments had appeared on our horizon, so had sprung up six or eight blocks of small shops to supply their needs. Even the Crescent, which for a long time ignored them and did its buying downtown, had at last recognized and patronized them.
His walk that day, he said, had merely taken him to the tobacconist’s shop on Liberty Avenue and back to the gates, where Eben met him. Unfortunately, and this is when the police determined to make a second and intensive search of the house, there were two things about Mr. Lancaster’s statement which set Inspector Briggs to thinking, and thinking hard.
One was that he had stopped at a small and unimportant drug store, and had there had a glass of coca-cola.
“As we happened to know,” the Inspector said later, “the drug store he mentioned had been padlocked that day for an infringement of the Volstead Act on the premises. Wherever he’d been, the old gentleman hadn’t been there. And then came this girl Peggy with her story and—well, we began to wonder. That’s all!”
For Peggy, seated uneasily on the edge of a chair in the dining room, her eyes swollen with crying, had finally admitted that she had been standing at her window overlooking the front street, had seen Mr. Lancaster go out with Mrs. Talbot; and return five minutes later.
“I don’t want them to know I said so,” she had whispered, “but that’s the truth.”
“No, sir. I didn’t stand there more than five minutes at the most. Miss Margaret will tell you that she came up to speak to me, and that I was standing at my window then. Maybe she’ll know the time.”
“Did you tell Miss Margaret that Mr. Lancaster had come back?”
“I didn’t think of it. You see the old—Mrs. Lancaster had acted very mean to me that morning, and I was thinking about leaving. I couldn’t make up my mind. Miss Margaret came up to ask me to stay on, and I said I would.”
The Inspector had heard Emily’s story by that time, and so he asked her if she couldn’t be mistaken.
“Looking down from a third story window,” he said, “people look different, you know, Peggy.”
“I’d know that old panama of his anywhere,” she said stubbornly.
“Lots of men wear old panamas. Was there nothing else?”
“He was getting out his keys. I saw him as plain as I see you. Besides,” she added triumphantly, “anybody else but Mr. Wellington would have had to ring the doorbell, and it didn’t ring. It rings on the third floor as well as in the kitchen.”
But there is to Peggy’s credit the fact that she then set her small and pretty chin, and that she said nothing more about Jim until she was recalled later that night. That was after Emily had remembered that Jim had spoken to me in the garden; and they brought the girl in, anxious and with reddened eyes, and inquired if the man she had seen on the walk could not have been Jim Wellington.
She shook her head obstinately, but they kept at her, and at last she admitted that she had seen Jim that afternoon.
“Where? On the walk?”
“No. In the house. On the second floor.” And then seeing the Inspector’s expression, she burst into a flood of tears.
But of course she had to go on, and at last they had a fairly coherent story from her.