“And you’ve come here for help?”
He shook his head cheerfully.
“No,” he said. “I hadn’t meant to come here at all, but I saw the lights, and you’re an intelligent young woman and as near to a witness as we’ve got. I’d like to know, of course, what you dropped on the pavement last night and went back for, but I suppose you won’t tell me, eh?”
“My handkerchief.”
“You would swear to that, on the witness stand. Under oath?”
I was silent, and he nodded.
“You see what we’re up against,” he said. “I’ll not try to bully you. Whatever it was, you’ve probably destroyed it anyhow. But it’s just possible that that sort of silence can send the wrong person to the chair. You might think it over. Our man thinks it was an envelope of some sort.”
And when I still said nothing, he went on:
“We’ve followed up Daniels, the street cleaner you spoke of. Nothing doing there, no blood, no indications whatever, no police record. He’s a quiet man, rather eccentric, living alone on a street behind the hospital. Has lived where he is for the last ten years with no interruptions. Got a bit of shrapnel in his leg in the war. Seems to have volunteered early in spite of his age, and not to have asked for any compensation since. Rather likeable chap, but reticent. Better than his job, I imagine, although he doesn’t say so. In these times a man takes what he can get.”
“So, because you like him, you would rather suspect Jim Wellington! Is that it?”
He grinned.
“Well,” he said, “you see this shrapnel lamed him. He might have climbed a pillar of that porch, but he’d need two arms and two legs. And I don’t see him carrying the axe in his teeth.”
I had to confess that I had not noticed that the man was lame.
“I suppose nobody ever really sees a street cleaner,” I said. “You just take them for granted.”
He nodded absently; he had already eliminated Daniels from his mind.
“These two women over there, the daughters. They are Mr. Lancaster’s stepdaughters, I understand.”
“Yes. I suppose they really should be called Talbot; but they were quite small when their mother married again. They have always used Mr. Lancaster’s name. The Talbots didn’t like it much at first, I’ve heard.”
After that he asked me once more to go over what I had seen the afternoon before, both inside and outside the Lancaster house. He was particularly interested in my entrance when Margaret and I helped Emily inside.
“Mr. Lancaster was in the library?”
“Yes. Lying back in a leather chair with his eyes closed.”
“Can you remember what he said?”
“Margaret asked him who had told him, and he said Eben. Then she asked him if he had been upstairs, and he said no. She went out to get him a glass of wine, and then he asked Emily if it was she who had found Mrs. Lancaster, and if she had heard anything.”
“What did she say to that?”
“She said that she was dressing with her door closed, and that when she ran to tell Margaret, she was running a shower. That about all, Inspector. It was not until after he got the wine that he asked about the money.”
“Oh, he asked about the money?”
“Not in so many words. He asked if anybody had looked under the bed. Then Miss Emily remembered the gold, and she sat up and asked him if that was what he thought. He said: ‘What else am I to think?’”
The Inspector considered this for some little time.
“Then, in your opinion, all these people acted as people would normally act, under the circumstances?”
“I don’t know what is normal in such circumstances, but I should think so.”
“Shocked, rather than grieved, eh?”
“Perhaps. I really don’t know.”
“You didn’t think Miss Margaret rather cool?”
“She is always like that, Inspector.”
“And you yourself, you have no suspicions whatever? Now listen, Miss Hall. A particularly brutal murder has been committed. This is no time for scruples. People are not sent to the chair on suspicion anyhow. It takes a water-tight case before any jury imposes a death sentence, and they don’t do it easily even then. It’s a pretty serious matter for any group of men to send another one to the chair.”
I shivered, there in that warm room.
“I’ve thought of nothing else since it happened, Inspector. I am being as honest as I know how when I tell you that I simply cannot conceive of anyone I know killing that poor old woman.”
“Not even for money?”
“Not even for money. And as to that, you know as well as I do that money went before the murder. Unless you are willing to believe that somebody had time to break into that house, kill Mrs. Lancaster, open the chest, put the bags on the roof, drop them to the ground and carry them to a car which nobody saw—even Eben or myself—all in about fifteen minutes.”
He smiled again, and resumed his thoughtful pinching of his lip.
“And also carried into the house those bags of lead weights. Don’t forget them! And, now we’re on them, what about those weights, Miss Hall? They’re used for other purposes, of course, but in the main I believe they’re used in women’s clothes. Now, you’re a woman. Suppose you wanted a lot of them. How would you go about it?”
“I haven’t an idea. Try a wholesale house, maybe.”
He nodded.
“Or several wholesale houses,” he added. He looked at his watch and got up. “Well, it’s a queer case. Generally speaking, an axe is a man’s weapon. Women run to pistols if they have them and are in a hurry; and to poison when they have time and opportunity. If anyone in that house had wanted to do away with the old lady, why not poison? Nobody would have been surprised at her death, I gather; or suspicious, either.”
I remember all that, although I was listening with only half my mind. What he had said about scruples had aroused something in me. All the Crescent, I knew, regarded the police with distaste and resentment. It would tell as little as it could, and yet expect them to solve the crime. It was not fair. And people were not sent to the chair on suspicion.
I had to make my decision quickly, for the Inspector was ready to go. The gold piece, found not far from the rear of Jim’s house, I decided to keep to myself. The glove also, although I was soon to realize that in that I had committed an error so grievous that even now I wake up at night to think about it. But the Daltons were different.
Then and there I told him about the night before.
He listened with fascinated interest, and I saw that he lifted his head suddenly when I repeated Mr. Dalton’s speech on the path: “It’s sheer madness, Laura. With all these policemen about.” And her reply, that she did not care, and the more the better. He seemed irritated too that they had reached the woodshed without the officer on guard at the back discovering them; although I pointed out that the Lancaster planting had been expressly devised to conceal the shed. But it was over the last words that he pondered for some time.
“Well, what have you found?”
“I know what I’m after. That’s something.”
And over Mr. Dalton’s odd and angry explanation: “If you’d been any sort of wife to me.” And her statement that the police couldn’t hold her, not for a minute.
“Intimating of course that we could hold him,” he said pinching his lip again. “Well, that’s interesting to say the least. You’re sure she said them?” ‘I’ll find them’?”
“Absolutely certain.”
“And young Talbot suspects Peggy of knowing something! Well, she could have got an impression of the lock to the chest, that’s sure. When was it that Talbot saw Mr. Dalton around the shed?”
“Early yesterday morning. The morning of the crime.”
“And what was Talbot doing there himself?”
“He was looking for a lost golf ball. Both he and Mr. Dalton often practice short shots back there.”
The Inspector
got up and held out a large capable hand.
“Thank you,” he said. “I know this hasn’t been easy. But if Dalton is mixed up in this it’s time we knew it. I’ll keep you out of it, of course. They needn’t know who overheard them. We’ve got to remember too that it may be only a jealous woman, hot on a trail of nothing more than a letter or two! I suppose you don’t know why they live the way they do? Not speaking and all that?”
“There may have been somebody else. But that’s years ago, of course.”
“It takes a jealous woman to hold a grudge, Miss Hall. They seem to get some sort of a kick out of it. But one thing’s sure: she wasn’t jealous of old Mrs. Lancaster!”
He said only one more thing that night that I recall, and that was partly to himself.
“What I don’t understand,” he said, “is about the key to that chest. The only object in doing away with it would seem to be to gain time; for an escape, maybe, or to get rid of the gold. But nobody connected with the case so far has apparently made a move to do either!”
From which I gathered that perhaps we were all being more closely watched than we suspected.
Chapter XV
THE INSPECTOR HAD GIVEN me plenty to think about after he had gone. Once more I went over in my mind the Lancaster household and what I knew of it: over Mr. Lancaster taking his daily walk, and Emily living her vicarious life out of a loan library, and Margaret holding desperately to her youth. Over Peggy too, cheerful and pretty, and maybe carried away by Mr. Dalton and the attentions of a gentleman. But it was only the same vicious circle. Who among them all would have done so terrible a thing, or could have done it? And how was it possible for any criminal literally smeared with blood to have escaped out of a locked and bolted house into a brilliant summer day, without being discovered at once?
Mary came in at half past eleven, an hour which would have shocked Mother, and I waited until both she and Annie had gone safely up to bed. Then I went out to the kitchen porch on my rather grisly errand.
I found myself oddly nervous and apprehensive. The excitement of the day before had vanished, and with it much of my courage. The fact that the night was bright, with a clear cold moon, only seemed to make matters worse. It exaggerated the shadows, and the wind turned every tree and bush into a moving thing, alive and menacing. There was not even the comfort of Holmes in his room over the garage, for he was once again sleeping in the house at Mother’s order. Rather sulkily, I had thought.
I intended to burn the glove in the furnace, and even while I was fishing in the can for it the thought of the dark basement rather daunted me. And then, with the glove in my hand, I looked up and saw a man standing on the path just below! That settled it. Police or not, that glove had to go into the furnace before it was found; and in a perfect hysteria of terror and anxiety I shot into the house and down the cellar stairs.
I remember pausing only long enough to press the switch at the top of the basement steps which lights the cellar, and then of running on down. At the foot of the stairs, however, I stopped abruptly. I had not even closed the kitchen door, an act so foolhardy that my first impulse was to rush back again and do it. But there was the glove, damaging and maybe damning, and ahead of me the long passage forward to the furnace cellar, with the darkened doors which opened off it.
I had my choice and I took it. I went forward toward the furnace, and it was when I had almost reached the small room where we store our fire wood that I heard somebody coming down the cellar stairs.
I managed to turn and look behind me, but I could not have moved if the house had been on fire. And still those awful steps came on, heavy steps that were trying to be light. With their approach I made a final superhuman effort, rushed into the wood cellar, fell over a piece of wood that had slipped from the pile and simply lay there, half-conscious.
I was aroused by the light of an electric flash on my face, and a strange male voice that was not entirely strange, saying:
“Oh, I say! I am sorry!”
“Who is it?” I managed at last. I could see nothing; and the voice laughed a little.
“Well, I’m a friend,” it said, “although I don’t blame you for doubting it. Are you hurt?”
I sat up, and between me and the door I could make out the figure of a tall man, now bent forward.
“I’m mostly shocked and scared,” I said. “If you’ll get out into the light so I can see who you are—”
He did so at once, and I saw that it was the man who had blown up the Wellington range. But I saw something else; he had a flashlight in his left hand, but his right held a blue automatic. He realized that too at that moment, for he slipped it into his pocket.
“Sorry again!” he said lightly. “You see, I thought you were a burglar when I heard you on the porch. And these being unhealthy days around this neighborhood, I simply followed you in. Why in the world did you leave the door unlocked? You ought to know better.”
“I forgot it,” I said lamely.
“Now that’s interesting.” He looked at me cheerfully. “That’s very interesting. With everyone around here locked in against a possible lunatic or against poor Jim, you forget to fasten the kitchen door!”
And then suddenly I remembered him.
“I know you now. You are a friend of his, aren’t you? I saw you there one night, when Helen was giving a party.”
“Great party giver, Helen,” he commented briefly. “Well, every man to his taste; every woman too,” he added. “And now, shall I go up and see what you put into that can? Or will you tell me?”
“You are not a policeman?”
“Are you insulting me, young woman?”
But his eyes were sober enough.
“Look here,” he said, “can’t we go into the laundry and sit on the tubs or something? You and I have some matters to discuss, and I’ve got a stiff leg from that fall.” And when I hesitated: “Jim is counting on you, Miss Lou; on you and me. He’s in a pretty tight place.”
Then and there I made up my mind, and I went back into the wood cellar and got the glove. I simply handed it to him.
“I didn’t put anything into the trash can. I got this out of it,” I said shakily, “and it can send Jim Wellington to the chair.”
He took it and examined it. Then without another word he led the way back into the laundry, and while I sat on a box and he used the ironing table (all the Crescent irons its table linens on a table) I told him the whole story. When I had finished he did as Mother had done. He put the glove to his nose and sniffed.
“Boot polish, of course,” he said. “And something else too,” he added with delicacy. “Well, it’s hard to believe, isn’t it? Yet there it is.”
“There what is?”
“Our case. I wonder—” he checked himself, and smiled at me. “You’ve given Jim a break tonight,” he said. “The first he’s had, and he certainly needed it. Now go over it again, and let me listen.”
So I did, and he sat awkwardly on the laundry table and took it all in without a word. When I had finished he nodded, put the glove into his pocket and then slid to his feet.
“Good work, Miss Lou. It would be interesting to know just how Margaret Lancaster found it, and whether she’s getting rid of it out of pure altruism or not. But that can wait. The main thing is that we’ve got it. We have a long way to go, little lady; it’s going to be darned hard to prove Jim’s innocence. But that’s what I’m here for, and you too, I gather.”
“I’d do anything I can,” I said shakily, and suddenly burst into tears. He came over then and patted me on the shoulder, and I was conscious that there still hung about him a faint odor of scorched hair. In spite of myself that made me smile, and he touched his eyebrows ruefully.
“I admit I’ve lost something in looks,” he said. “You may not believe it possible, but it’s true. Just now I’m glad it’s a cool night, for lacking my eyebrows I’m like a house that has lost its eaves!”
His nonsense gave me back my control, which is no
doubt what he intended.
But he was noncommittal about himself and his presence there. It seemed that his home was somewhere else.
“I’m here because Jim is in trouble,” he said lightly. “Frat brother, you know; the good old grip and the magic word. Which, by the way, in this case is silence.”
That was my second encounter with Mr. Herbert Ranchester Dean, usually referred to by Helen as Bertie Dean; the criminologist who, working with our own police, finally solved our crimes. Not for some days was I to know his profession, nor for weeks of that laboratory of his which, when I finally saw it, looked not unlike the one where Mother goes annually for her various tests.
But of the man himself and his work he gave me the best description when, after almost two weeks of death and absolute horror, the answer was spread across the newspapers of every city in the country, and our reign of terror was over.
“I am not a lone wolf,” he said. “I hunt with the pack. The actual fact is that I’d be helpless without the police, while they need me only now and then. They have the machinery, for one thing. What I have is a line of specialized knowledge, odds and ends. Actually, I look after the little things, while they do the big ones.
“They’ve got their machinery, men, radio, teletype, files—the whole business of law and order. I’ve got mine. Mostly it’s a microscope! But in this case I played in luck. Ordinarily the gloves, for instance, would be their job; they’d find them and I’d tell them there was boot polish on them, if their noses didn’t!
“To get back to the gloves. There had to be gloves. Two gloves. The police knew that well enough; it takes two hands to use an axe. But you turned up both of them for me, one after the other, and the story of the crime was right there. All,” he added, with his quizzical smile, “but the identity of the criminal.”
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