The Lady Sleuths MEGAPACK ™: 20 Modern and Classic Tales of Female Detectives

by Catherine Louisa Pirkis

  “Where is Tom? Oh, where is Tom? Why does he leave me? I’m afraid of what he may be tempted to do or say down on those great piazzas alone.”

  “Mr. Poindexter is with him,” answered a voice, measured, but kind. “Mr. Adams was getting very tired, and your father persuaded him to go down and have a smoke.”

  “I must get up; indeed I must get up. Oh! the camphor—the—”

  There was a bustle; this poor young wife had evidently fainted again.

  Miss Butterworth cast very miserable glances at the door.

  Meanwhile in that small and retired smoking-room a terrible scene was in progress. The two gentlemen had lit their cigars and were sitting in certain forced attitudes that evinced their non-enjoyment of the weed each had taken out of complaisance to the other, when an old man, strangely serious, strangely at home, yet as strangely a guest of the house like themselves, came in, and shut the door behind him.

  “Gentlemen,” he at once announced, “I am Detective Gryce of the New York police, and I am here—but I see that one of you at least knows why I am here.”

  One? Both of them! This was evident in a moment. No denial, no subterfuge was possible. At the first word uttered in the strange, authoritative tone which old detectives acquire after years of such experiences, the young man sank down in sudden collapse, while his companion, without yielding so entirely to his emotions, showed that he was not insensible to the blow which, in one moment, had brought destruction to all their hopes.

  When Mr. Gryce saw himself so completely understood, he no longer hesitated over his duty. Directing his full attention to Mr. Adams, he said, this time with some feeling, for the misery of this young man had impressed him:

  “You are wanted in New York by Coroner D——, whose business it is to hold an inquest over the remains of Mr. Felix Adams, of whose astonishing death you are undoubtedly informed. As you and your wife were seen leaving that gentleman’s house a few minutes before he expired, you are naturally regarded as valuable witnesses in determining whether his death was one of suicide or murder.”

  It was an accusation, or so nearly one, that Mr. Gryce was not at all surprised to behold the dark flush of shame displace the livid terror which but an instant before had made the man before him look like one of those lost spirits we sometimes imagine as flitting across the open mouth of hell. But he said nothing, seemingly had no power to do so, and his father-in-law was about to make some effort to turn aside this blow when a voice in the hall outside was heard inquiring for Mr. Adams, saying that his wife had fainted again and required his help.

  The young husband started, cast a look full of despair at Mr. Poindexter, and thrusting his hand against the door as if to hold it shut, sank on his knees before Mr. Gryce, saying:

  “She knows! She suspects! Her nature is so sensitive.”

  This he managed to utter in gasps as the detective bent compassionately over him. “Don’t, don’t disturb her! She is an angel, a saint from heaven. Let me bear the blame—he was my brother—let me go with you, but leave her in ignorance—”

  Mr. Gryce, with a vivid sense of justice, laid his hand on the young man’s arm.

  “Say nothing,” he enjoined. “My memory is good, and I would rather hear nothing from your lips. As for your wife, my warrant does in no way include her; and if you promise to come with me quietly, I will even let you bid her adieu, so that you do it in my presence.”

  The change which passed over the young man’s face at these significant words was of a nature to surprise Mr. Gryce. Rising slowly, he took his stand by Mr. Poindexter, who, true to his inflexible nature, had scarcely moved in limb and feature since Mr. Gryce came in.

  “What have you against me?” he demanded. And there was a surprising ring to his voice, as if courage had come with the necessity of the moment. “Of what am I accused? I want you to tell me. I had rather you would tell me in so many words. I cannot leave in peace until you do.”

  Mr. Poindexter made a movement at this, and cast a half-suspicious, half-warning glance at his son-in-law. But the young man took no notice of his interference. He kept his eye on the detective, who quietly took out his warrant.

  At this instant the door shook.

  “Lock it!” was the hoarse command of the accused man. “Don’t let any one pass that door, even if it is to bring the tidings of my wife’s death.”

  Mr. Gryce reached out his hand, and turned the key in the lock. Young Adams opened the paper which he had taken from the detective’s hand, and while his blood-shot eyes vainly sought to master the few lines there written, Mr. Poindexter attracted the attention of Mr. Gryce, and, fixing him with his eye, formed his lips with three soundless words:

  “For murder? Him?”

  The detective’s bow and a very long-drawn sigh from his son-in-law answered him simultaneously. With a curious lift of his upper lip, which showed his teeth somewhat unpleasantly for a moment, he drew back a step, and sank into his previous immobility.

  “I am indebted to you,” declared the young man. “Now I know where I stand. I am quite ready to go with you and stand trial, if such be deemed necessary by the officials in New York. You,” he cried, turning with almost an air of command to the old gentleman beside him, “will watch over Eva. Not like a father, sir, but like a mother. You will be at her side when she wakes, and, if possible, leave her only when she sleeps. Do not let her suffer—not too much. No newspapers, no gossiping women. Watch! watch! as I would watch, and when I come back—for I will come back, will I not?” he appealed to Mr. Gryce, “my prayers will bless you and—” A sob stuck in his throat, and he turned for a minute aside; then he took the detective’s arm quite calmly and remarked:

  “I do not want to say good-by to my wife. I cannot bear it. I had rather go straight from here without another glance at her unconscious face. When I have told my story, for I shall tell it to the first man who asks me, I may find courage to write her. Meanwhile, get me away as quickly as you can. Time enough for the world to know my shame tomorrow.”

  Mr. Gryce tapped on the window overlooking the piazza. A young man stepped in.

  “Here is a gentleman,” he cried, “who finds himself forced to return in great haste to New York. See that he gets to the train in time, without fuss and without raising the least comment. I will follow with his portmanteau. Mr. Poindexter, you are now at liberty to attend your suffering daughter.” And with a turn of the key, he unlocked the door, and one of the most painful scenes of his long life was over.

  CHAPTER XII

  THOMAS EXPLAINS

  Mr. Gryce was not above employing a little finesse. He had expressed his intention of following Mr. Adams, and he did follow him, but so immediately that he not only took the same train, but sat in the same car. He wished to note at his leisure the bearing of this young man, who interested him in quite a different way from what he had anticipated, a way that vaguely touched his own conscience and made him feel his years as he had no right to feel them when he had just brought to an end an intricate and difficult pursuit.

  Seated at a distance, he watched with increasing interest the changes which passed over his prisoner’s handsome countenance. He noted the calmness which now marked the features he had so lately seen writhing in deepest agony, and wondered from what source the strength came which enabled this young man to sit so stoically under the eyes of people from whose regard, an hour before, he had shrunk with such apparent suffering. Was it that courage comes with despair? Or was he too absorbed in his own misery to note the shadow it cast about him? His brooding brow and vacant eye spoke of a mind withdrawn from present surroundings. Into what depths of remorse, who could say? Certainly not this old detective, seasoned though he was by lifelong contact with criminals, some of them of the same social standing and cultured aspect as this young man.

  At the station in Brooklyn he
rejoined his prisoner, who scarcely looked up as he approached. In another hour they were at Police Headquarters and the serious questioning of Mr. Adams had begun.

  He did not attempt to shirk it. Indeed, he seemed anxious to talk. He had a burden on his mind, and longed to throw it off. But the burden was not of the exact nature anticipated by the police. He did not acknowledge having killed his brother, but confessed to having been the incidental cause of that brother’s death. The story he told was this:

  “My name is Cadwalader, not Adams. My father, a Scotchman by birth, was a naturalized citizen of Pennsylvania, having settled in a place called Montgomery when a young married man. He had two children then, one of whom died in early life; the other was my brother Felix, whose violent death under the name of Adams you have called me here to explain. I am the fruit of a later marriage, entered into by my father some years after leaving Montgomery. When I was born he was living in Harrisburg, but, as he left there shortly after I had reached my third year, I have no remembrances connected with that city. Indeed, my recollections are all of very different scenes than this country affords. My mother having died while I was still an infant, I was sent very early in life to the Old World, from which my father had originally come. When I returned, which was not till this very year, I found my father dying, and my brother a grown man with money—a great deal of money—which I had been led to think he was ready to share with me. But after my father was laid away, Felix” (with what effort he uttered that name!) “Felix came to New York, and I was left to wander about without settled hopes or any definite promise of means upon which to base a future or start a career. While wandering, I came upon the town where my father had lived in early youth, and, hunting up his old friends, I met in the house of one who had come over from Scotland with my father a young lady” (how his voice shook, and with what a poignant accent he uttered that beloved name) “in whom I speedily became interested to the point of wishing to marry her. But I had no money, no business, no home to give her, and, as I was fain to acknowledge, no prospects. Still I could not give up the hope of making her my wife. So I wrote to my brother, Felix Cadwalader, or, rather, Felix Adams, as he preferred to be called in later years for family reasons entirely disconnected with the matter of his sudden demise, and, telling him I had become interested in a young girl of good family and some wealth, asked him to settle upon me a certain sum which would enable me to marry her with some feeling of self-respect. My only answer was a repetition of the vague promise he had thrown out before. But youth is hopeful, even to daring, and I decided to make her mine without further parley, in the hope that her beauty and endearing qualities would win from him, at first view, the definite concession he had so persistently denied me.

  “This I did, and the fault with which I have most to reproach myself is that I entered into this alliance without taking her or her father into my confidence. They thought me well off, possibly rich, and while Mr. Poindexter is a man of means, I am sure, if he had known I had nothing but the clothes I wore and the merest trifle in the way of pocket money, he would have cried halt to the marriage, for he is a very ambitious man and considers his daughter well worth a millionaire’s devotion—as she is.

  “Felix (you must pardon me if I show no affection for my brother—he was a very strange man) was notified of my marriage, but did not choose to witness it, neither did he choose to prohibit it; so it was conducted quietly, with strangers for witnesses, in a hotel parlor. Then, with vague hopes, as well as certain vague fears, I prepared to take my young bride into the presence of my brother, who, hardened as he was by years of bachelorhood, could not be so entirely impervious to feminine charms as not to recognize my wife as a woman deserving of every consideration.

  “But I had counted without my host. When, two days after the ceremony which had made us one, I took her to the house which has since become so unhappily notorious, I found that my brother had but shown me one facet, and that the least obdurate, of his many-sided nature.

  “Brilliant as steel, he was as hard, and not only professed himself unmoved by my wife’s many charms, but also as totally out of sympathy with such follies as love and marriage, which were, he said, the fruit of unoccupied minds and a pastime wholly unworthy of men boasting of such talents and attainments as ourselves. Then he turned his back upon us, and I, moved by an anger little short of frenzy, began an abuse for which he was so little prepared that he crouched like a man under blows, and, losing minute by minute his self-control, finally caught up a dagger lying close at hand, and crying, ‘You want my money? Well, then, take it!’ stabbed himself to the heart with one desperate blow.

  “I fear I shall not be believed, but that is the story of this crime, gentlemen.”

  CHAPTER XIII

  DESPAIR

  Was it? Tragedies as unpremeditated as this had doubtless occurred, and inconsistencies in character shown themselves in similar impetuosities, from the beginning of time up till now. Yet there was not a man present, with or without the memory of Bartow’s pantomime, which, as you will recall, did not tally at all with this account of Mr. Adams’s violent end, who did not show in a greater or less degree his distrust and evident disbelief in this tale, poured out with such volubility before them.

  The young man, gifted as he was with the keenest susceptibilities, perceived this, and his head drooped.

  “I shall add nothing to and take nothing from what I have said,” was his dogged remark. “Make of it what you will.”

  The inspector who was conducting the inquiry glanced dubiously at Mr. Gryce as these words left Thomas Adams’s lips; whereupon the detective said:

  “We are sorry you have taken such a resolution. There are many things yet left to be explained, Mr. Adams; for instance, why, if your brother slew himself in this unforeseen manner, you left the house so precipitately, without giving an alarm or even proclaiming your relationship to him?”

  “You need not answer, you know,” the inspector’s voice broke in. “No man is called upon to incriminate himself in this free and independent country.”

  A smile, the saddest ever seen, wandered for a minute over the prisoner’s pallid lips. Then he lifted his head and replied with a certain air of desperation:

  “Incrimination is not what I fear now. From the way you all look at me I perceive that I am lost, for I have no means of proving my story.”

  This acknowledgment, which might pass for the despairing cry of an innocent man, made his interrogator stare.

  “You forget,” suggested that gentleman, “that you had your wife with you. She can corroborate your words, and will prove herself, no doubt, an invaluable witness in your favor.”

  “My wife!” he repeated, choking so that his words could be barely understood. “Must she be dragged into this—so sick, so weak a woman? It would kill her, sir. She loves me—she—”

  “Was she with you in Mr. Adams’s study? Did she see him lift the dagger against his own breast?”

  “No.” And with this denial the young man seemed to take new courage. “She had fainted several moments previously, while the altercation between my brother and myself was at its height. She did not see the final act, and—gentlemen, I might as well speak the truth (I have nothing to gain by silence), she finds it as difficult as you do to believe that Mr. Adams struck himself. I—I have tried with all my arts to impress the truth upon her, but oh, what can I hope from the world when the wife of my bosom—an angel, too, who loves me—oh, sirs, she can never be a witness for me; she is too conscientious, too true to her own convictions. I should lose—she would die—”

  Mr. Gryce tried to stop him; he would not be stopped.

  “Spare me, sirs! Spare my wife! Write me down guilty, anything you please, rather than force that young creature to speak—”

  Here the inspector cut short these appeals which were rending every heart present. “Have you read the
newspapers for the last few days?” he asked.

  “I? Yes, yes, sir. How could I help it? Blood is blood; the man was my brother; I had left him dying—I was naturally anxious, naturally saw my own danger, and I read them, of course.”

  “Then you know he was found with a large cross on his breast, a cross which was once on the wall. How came it to be torn down? Who put it on his bosom?”

  “I, sir. I am not a Catholic but Felix was, and seeing him dying without absolution, without extreme unction, I thought of the holy cross, and tore down the only one I saw, and placed it in his arms.”

  “A pious act. Did he recognize it?”

  “I cannot say. I had my fainting wife to look after. She occupied all my thoughts.”

  “I see, and you carried her out and were so absorbed in caring for her you did not observe Mr. Adams’s valet—”

  “He’s innocent, sir. Whatever people may think, he had nothing to do with this crime—”

  “You did not observe him, I say, standing in the doorway and watching you?”

  Now the inspector knew that Bartow had not been standing there, but at the loophole above; but the opportunity for entrapping the witness was too good to lose.

  Mr. Adams was caught in the trap, or so one might judge from the beads of perspiration which at that moment showed themselves on his pale forehead. But he struggled to maintain the stand he had taken, crying hotly: