by Rufus King
Valcour ran with incredible swiftness for the curving stairs.
CHAPTER XIX
The black, quiet stairs, the dim and silent hall mocked his stumbling haste emptily. Valcour twisted the knob of Vera’s door and the door opened readily. Light flooded the room. A chill draft hit him from an open window. Crumpled on the floor before the cupboard was Vera. He touched her. Her flesh was warm, but she did not breathe. He lifted her. Her body was surprisingly heavy. He placed it on the bed. Blood speckled his hand brightly. He slammed down the opened window, ran the length of the hall, and knocked sharply on the door of the maid’s room.
“Dr. Harlan!”
“Yes?”
“Come at once—quickly!”
A bolt was drawn sharply. The door swung open.
“Valcour, you’re pale—trembling!”
“A shock, Doctor. Quick, take your bag and come with me to Mrs. Sturm’s room.”
“It’s happened?” Dr. Harlan, in shirt sleeves, was snatching up his bag.
“Yes—most damnable. I should have insisted. You see, I knew—”
They were in Vera’s room and Valcour had closed its door. Dr. Harlan was bending over Vera, snipping swiftly with scissors—a stethoscope. He turned a curiously pale and ashen face to Valcour, saying, “She’s dead.”
They stood still, recovering themselves. They looked their fill of Vera. Her mouth was distorted from that unuttered scream. Her eyes were like glass eyes set in over-widened lids.
“Could you arrange things a little, Doctor?” Valcour said.
He turned away while Dr. Harlan busied himself with the body. He felt slightly nauseated. He knew perfectly well what, under ordinary circumstances, he ought to do: post guards at every exit, search the house immediately from top to bottom, question at once Will Sturm and his father, phone headquarters for his corps of assistants. But the circumstances were not ordinary. Headquarters were practically four hundred miles away, and he did not believe that any inmate would attempt to pass the unguarded doors, and he did not believe the most immediate of searches (an almost impossible task at best) would uncover an intruder, and as for any instantaneous questioning of the Sturms…he preferred very definitely to delay, for a moment, the questioning of the Sturms…
“Get a sheet or something, Valcour, will you? Try one of the beds in the guest room.”
Valcour went out into the hall. He had not been able to control his eyes from one snatched glance: a folded handkerchief beneath Vera’s chin, being knotted above the cup of her burnished hair—lashes shielding the dead glass eyes—a swollen lip protruding sullenly. He smiled a little grimly at Mr. Sturm’s closed door, at Will’s closed door. Neither, apparently, had been disturbed from their sound and placid slumbers, and yet the past five minutes had not been particularly silent ones. Some noise, some impression of electric excitement must have carried behind the panels of those tight-shut doors.
He went to one of the beds in the guest room and yanked off a sheet. He carried it back to Vera’s room, shut the door, and handed the sheet to Dr. Harlan.
“It’s an awful mess, Valcour.”
“Quite a mess, Doctor.”
The white sheet was drawn over Vera like a final curtain.
“Shall I notify Will and Mr. Sturm?”
Valcour’s smile was a little twisted. “I wonder whether it’s necessary,” he said.
“Certainly. Why not?”
Valcour realized that Dr. Harlan was using what he labeled as “surface” words—the automatic functioning of talk unlinked with directive thought. He explained patiently: “I doubt whether either of them can have fallen asleep. It hasn’t been much more than twenty minutes since we left them with Vera in Will’s room. They weren’t even undressed.”
“Well?”
Valcour shrugged. “A pane of glass has been broken, a window has been slammed shut, my knocking at your door was pretty sharp, our voices were scarcely whispers…It is possible that they heard none of those things, but does it seem natural?”
Dr. Harlan seemed still to be terribly shaken from shock. He was incapable of grasping accurately or quickly the significance of details. “Natural? I’m sure I don’t follow you, Valcour.”
Valcour became quite simple and direct. “It is unnatural that either Will or his father should not have been brought from their rooms. Neither one of them strikes me as being a physical coward, and each must be aware that something has happened. Sound travels with peculiar ease in this house.” His tone became businesslike and stern. “Our position here has altered. It is no longer what we might term as semi-social. We are not investigating an indefinite shooting of minor consequences. We are in charge, Doctor, of a case of murder.”
“Murder. I do not like the word, Valcour.”
“We will go through with what I believe is the farce of notifying Mr. Sturm and his son in good time. In your opinion what caused Mrs. Sturm’s death? You have been able to determine, haven’t you?”
Dr. Harlan made an obvious effort to pull himself together. “A knife of some sort,” he said. “It pierced the heart and she died instantly. She never felt it at all!”
“What type of knife would you say?”
“Very sharp and slender—a thin knife, Valcour.”
“That’s an unusual shape for ordinary usage. It sounds like a stiletto, or one of those sharp-pointed paper-file steels that are weighted at the bottom.”
Dr. Harlan was wiping perspiration from his face with a handkerchief. “That was probably it,” he said.
“There wasn’t anything near her; nothing in the nature of a weapon. Of course I really haven’t had time to look carefully. We can figure out pretty well what happened.”
“You can?”
“Why, yes, it should be simple, Doctor. Someone came in here while Mrs. Sturm and I were down in the kitchen getting coffee. We were there for quite a while, you know. You’ve noticed the drawers and things, haven’t you?”
“Drawers?”
“Yes. That bureau there—take a look at it. Mrs. Sturm was undoubtedly a sloppy woman, but I don’t think even she would have made such a mess. This dresser, here, was just gone through and nothing put back at all. Whoever was in here was looking for something that he wanted very badly.”
“You said yourself Vera was sloppy.”
“This is beyond sloppiness, Doctor. It couldn’t have been done, either, while Mrs. Sturm and I were downstairs. If it had been, Mrs. Sturm would have noticed it when she came back. He was probably looking through things during that time, but doing so carefully and not disarranging anything. I think he was probably at it when he heard Mrs. Sturm and me coming upstairs. We talked a little on the way up. I remember her saying something about getting a pillow and blanket for me in the guest room. I think the man in here heard us and knew he couldn’t get out without being seen.” Valcour stared around the room. His eyes came to rest on the cupboard. He nodded toward it. “I imagine that’s where he hid himself. She must have gone to it to get something—that wrapper she has on, perhaps—and he killed her. It is extraordinarily confusing.”
“What is?”
“Just why he killed her. I mean the question as to whether it was an impulsive murder, or premeditated. The fact that he was looking for something would tend to make it impulsive, the possible reaction of a person who has been trapped and kills in order to escape; to escape, in this case, either from denunciation or betrayal. I also doubt whether anyone who had deliberately set out to kill her would select either this room or this time. On the other hand, the weapon argues premeditation.”
“How?”
“People rarely carry lethal knives about with them, Doctor, unless they expect to use them. They’re offensive weapons nowadays, rather than defensive. Then there’s another important consideration, and that’s the temperature of the crime.”
�
��Temperature?”
“Yes; I don’t know how else to express it. The emotional heat of the criminal, perhaps, makes it clearer. If a person’s mentally blind with emotion—the emotion of fear, or rage, or hate, or even love—he ceases temporarily to be a reasoning person and reverts to basic elements. He becomes an animal. That happens, at its extreme point, when a man kills another man in the presence of known witnesses. Then there is a perverted exhibitionism—but there’s no use in drifting too far into the abstract. I think this mess was made after he had killed her. He was very silent about it, because I heard nothing. But he must have been rather excited and in a desperate hurry. Maybe he found what he wanted, and maybe he didn’t, I wonder,” Valcour ended softly, and his eyes were rather startled, “just what he wanted.”
They stood away from the bed, but their eyes were absently drawn toward it, staring at the smooth white sheet, seeing Vera beneath it, strangely compelling even in death and curiously vital in spite of her body’s utter immobility. The wind was throbbing through the locust trees, and singing like sand against the blackened panes were streaming flakes of baffled snow.
Dr. Harlan shivered and drew a deep, unsatisfactory breath. “Let’s hope this is all over soon,” he said.
“There are several hours of this dreadful night left us, Doctor, before morning.”
“Well, at any rate—” Dr. Harlan tried to coordinate confused impressions into a lucid sentence. “At any rate, any danger is over. What I mean is, no one is any longer in danger.”
Valcour felt singularly queer. “Do you believe in abstruse forces?” he said.
“You mean things that are beyond the knowledge of science?”
“Yes; forces that we know nothing about, but which we have the power to release.” Valcour’s tone was low but intensely compelling. “Murder, I think, is such a force. There is something of the juggernaut about it. The body of the victim and the act itself are nothing but results of it that we can touch and comprehend. But we cannot touch or comprehend the element itself of murder, and once it is loosed it broods for a long time in the air. I feel it tonight, Doctor, still lingering in the air.”
Dr. Harlan was thoroughly unnerved.
“We must stop it,” he said. “We must stop talking like this…must do something…”
Valcour smiled without humor. “I’m going,” he said, “to the fountainhead of all knowledge.”
“To what?”
“To Mr. Sturm.”
Mr. Sturm did not rise. He sat, slender and severe in black silk, between the wings of a deep armchair. A book of poems rested on his lap, a tapered dead-white finger marking the place. “Sit down, please, Mr. Valcour,” he said.
“Thank you.” Valcour sat down and stared full into Mr. Sturm’s face. It was undeniably patrician; a cameo done in cipher, the key to which had been thrown away many years ago.
“There was something you wished to see me about, sir?”
“It is rather unpleasant.”
“This whole night has been thoroughly unpleasant, Mr. Valcour.”
“It concerns your daughter-in-law, Mr. Sturm. She is dead.”
Mr. Sturm was out of his chair. It was like a trick of levitation; there had been no perceptible use of any muscles, of any effort. There was no change in color, perhaps because his face was normally without color. The book of poems had fallen to the floor, and Valcour stood up to retrieve it.
“Thank you.” Mr. Sturm took the book and then sat down again. “Permit me to rest for a moment,” he said. “We must do everything as quietly as we can.”
Valcour sat down again, too. He wondered whether Mr. Sturm’s little exhibition in registering shock had been natural or simply Mr. Sturm’s contribution to what seemed essential to the scene. He absorbed in silence the austere and immaculate quality of the room. It wasn’t a well-dusted room; it was a room that never had any dust in it at all. He preferred to wait for Mr. Sturm to speak, to strike the keynote. He felt that any direct questioning of Mr. Sturm would be as bewildering, to the questioner, as a visit to the Delphic Oracle. Two minutes passed heavily. It began to seem as if they were engaged in some strange duel of stillness. And then Mr. Sturm spoke.
“Do you believe in prayer, Mr. Valcour?” he said.
“Concretely?”
“Oh, most concretely. One prays for rain; it rains. One prays for drought; the heavens dry up. Do you believe in such prayer, sir?”
“No, I’m afraid I can’t believe sincerely that Providence works in that way.”
“I thought not, too.” Mr. Sturm’s smile was very fleeting, and vanished instantly as he added, “Until tonight.”
Valcour knew perfectly well what he meant: Mr. Sturm had bluntly been praying for Vera’s death, and Vera was dead. Of course Vera, in that game, had had her innings, too. It was simply that, metaphysically speaking, Mr. Sturm had got the jump on her. Had he also apportioned to himself the role of earthly agent to execute the behests of his own prayer? Mr. Sturm was speaking again.
“It is curious that in this house, of all houses, there should have been two women attacked. First Alice, and now Vera. I take it, sir, that her death was the result of an attack. Her health—her vitality—were astonishing. Disease or organic trouble would be out of the question. Her nature would preclude suicide.”
“Suicide is quite out of the question, Mr. Sturm.”
Mr. Sturm’s stare fell lightly upon Lieutenant Valcour like two delicate probing fingers. “Murder,” he said, “is a grave charge and a very much graver offense. It places us and our house entirely in your hands. Might I ask what arrangements have been made?”
“There are none immediately essential, Mr. Sturm. Dr. Harlan is a deputy coroner and can cover that angle of the case. He has made a perfunctory examination. In the morning, or as soon as the road has been plowed through to the village, he will have Mrs. Sturm taken to the local undertaker’s and perform the necessary autopsy. I have been deputized, as I believe you know, by the district attorney’s office. There is nothing the district attorney could personally do tonight. It would be impossible for him to get here before the first train comes through from the county seat in the morning. I shall telephone him then.”
Valcour lighted a cigarette before adding, “During the balance of the night I shall try to collect such evidence as may exist on which to base an indictment for murder.”
Mr. Sturm’s stare continued its probing. “You are an intelligent man, Mr. Valcour,” he said. “I, sir, am an intelligent man, too. I shall not suggest absurdities. There is no stranger in this house. You know it; I know it. That leaves us with certain unpleasant facts to face.”
“Very unpleasant, Mr. Sturm.”
“You are not a married man, sir?”
“No.”
“Then you are unacquainted with the demoralizing effects of having children—in my case, an only child. I am normally, Mr. Valcour, a moral and a law-abiding man. But there are no limits to which I would not go, either illegal or unmoral, to protect my son.”
“I have not accused him, Mr. Sturm.”
“Nor do I, sir, believe him guilty, but I am not a fool. Nor—to carry the matter to its banal limits—would I ever do anything so hackneyed as to confess my own possible guilt in an effort to shield him. I realize, of course, that he and I are the rational suspects.”
“Possibly.”
“There is no need of mincing matters with me. We are. Unless either the probability or the actual proof of guilt can be thrown upon someone else.”
“I hope that it can be, Mr. Sturm.”
“I will see that it shall be.”
“Such a course would be difficult and decidedly unwise.”
“I shall not take up the wisdom of it, but I can promise you it would not be difficult. Our discussion has no witness, Mr. Valcour, and until it is proved otherwise my primary and publ
ic contention shall be that there was an intruder in this house.”
Valcour did not smile. “You will, of course, do as you think best.”
“You doubt my ability? Let me show you. This is a large house and connected with its kitchen, as you may have observed, is a shed. To discover the ultimate hiding places in this house would take several days. It would be almost impossible for one man, and a difficult task for two. An intruder could keep on the move, could hide from place to place. So I am afraid, Mr. Valcour,” Mr. Sturm concluded softly, “that the district attorney will have a peculiarly difficult task in convincing a jury that there was no intruder in this house.”
Valcour’s smile was perfunctory. “There are other points of attack,” he said.
“Oh, undoubtedly. I am simply trying to point out that it could be offered that an intruder who had entered the house for purposes of theft had been caught by Vera in her room, and that he had killed her and then escaped.” Mr. Sturm, with a faint gesture, indicated falling snow. “His tracks would immediately be obliterated.”
“He would himself be, Mr. Sturm.”
“Not necessarily, sir. There are numerous methods of traveling over deep snow.”
Valcour held a brief mental picture of the two sets of snowshoes hanging from the blackened beams of the kitchen. The thing was possible, of course. He wondered…
“We forget our prelude,” he said.
“Prelude?” Mr. Sturm’s eyebrows raised slightly.
“Yes. The shooting of Alice Tribeau. She was wearing a dress of Mrs. Sturm’s. She would be similar in appearance, in poor light, to Mrs. Sturm. The two crimes, I believe, are linked.” Mr. Sturm’s face looked the slightest bit tired. His erect body drooped almost imperceptibly, and the edge of his dominance was dulled a little.
“That is true, sir. We have neglected to take into consideration the shooting of Alice Tribeau. It offers you an extremely satisfactory premise.”