It seems incredible now that I had not told him about the shot the night before. At breakfast he had been in a hurry, and I had not seen him since. Now I told him, and Anne, having returned from the mailbox, heard me and gave a small shriek.
“Shot!” she said. “Who in the world would want to shoot you?”
“I don’t know, Anne. O’Brien thinks it was for him. It was dark, you know.”
Phil turned a pair of cold eyes on me.
“Where was all this?” he demanded. “And when?”
“I suppose an hour or more after Judith left,” I said guiltily. “I had some things to tell Lieutenant O’Brien, and I saw his light was on. I was at the door of the cottage when it happened.”
He was still angry, furiously angry.
“For God’s sake, why didn’t you tell me you’d been shot at, when I brought you home from O’Brien’s last night? What is he up to, anyhow? It occurs to me that this was a quiet spot until he hit it. Since then we’ve had two murders and two shootings. And maybe a third death. Your own sister.”
I never answered that. The helicopter appeared, flying low and some distance away, and we watched it with fascinated eyes. None of us, I think, noticed the car which had driven up until the man got out of it and climbed the steps.
It was Doctor Townsend.
“I’m sorry to intrude just now,” he said, “but I gather from that machine in the air that you haven’t located Mrs. Chandler.”
“No,” I said. “They’re trying everything, of course. This is my sister Anne, Mrs. Harrison, Doctor, and you may know my brother, Phil. Won’t you sit down?”
He did, but he declined Phil’s offer of a drink.
“I have a radio in my car,” he said. “I gather there is a rumor to the effect that Mrs. Chandler herself shot this driver and then escaped into the woods.”
“That’s idiotic,” I told him. “I saw her off last night. I helped her pack, too. She didn’t have a gun. I don’t think she ever had one. And she was happy when she left, happier than she had been for months.”
“I see.” It was a hot day, and he got out a handkerchief and mopped his face. “Of course, I agree with you. She didn’t do it. She was quite incapable of such a thing. The reason I came was this: If she could walk at all—and it seems she could—where would she be likely to go? As I drove past the place where the car went over, I realized how wild it was. Knowing her, I don’t think she would strike into those hills. She was a sensitive woman and a highly civilized one. It was a dark night, too.”
“All right,” Phil said, annoyed. “Tell us where she would go. That’s your business, isn’t it? Knowing what people will or will not do?”
The doctor eyed him calmly.
“Quite definitely,” he said. “Wearing the heels she always did she would stay on the road. Provided of course, she could get there. She must have been in profound shock.”
I suppose Phil was worried half sick, as we all were. Certainly he was exasperated.
“We may discover she took the Queen Mary after all!” he said. “Look, Doctor, I’m sorry to be rude, but this is a hell of a situation. Judith hasn’t been normal for months. We’ve put up with her locked doors, her shutting herself away. She tries to kill herself, and Lois here nurses her until she’s exhausted. Now we’ve got this. If the sensational press thinks she killed this Morrison, we can’t help it. But if you think we’re hiding her here you’re mistaken.”
Doctor Townsend looked stubborn. He set his jaw.
“I didn’t say that, Mr. Maynard. I do suggest a search of the grounds, even possibly of the pool down there. Where else could she go? In trouble most people strike for home. It means shelter, safety. Remember, even if she didn’t kill this man she has been through a terrifying experience.”
“The pool! Good God,” Phil gasped. “Do you think she’s there?”
The doctor shook his head.
“I have no idea where she is,” he said. “I can only suggest that if she was able to move at all she would try to come here. Where else could she go?”
Chapter 30
BILL RETURNED AS PHIL went inside for his bathing trunks. He had no news. He was badly scratched, and one leg of his gabardine slacks was torn from the knee down. Anne looked after him as he followed Phil into the house.
“You would think clothes grew on trees,” she said acidly. “Did you ever learn who this Janey is? What’s her last name?”
I hadn’t an idea, and said so. Anne grunted.
“They never have any,” she said fretfully. “They’re Nell and Betty and God knows what. I often wonder what Mother would think.”
I didn’t say anything. Down the drive by the pool I could see a girl in a pair of dirty white shorts who was trying to escape our attention. She had obviously been on the search with Bill and she was tying a handkerchief over what I imagined was a scratch on one of a pair of long and very bare legs. Anne was too short-sighted to see her, but so far as I could tell she was merely any seventeen-year-old, and probably Janey.
The men came out then and headed for the pool. Neither Anne nor I accompanied them. I was too shaken to move, and Anne was weeping into her drink, whether about Judith or Bill’s slacks, I did not know. Janey did not move as the procession neared her, but when Bill stopped to explain to her she nodded, turned and took a quick dive into the water, with a flash of slim legs and in what I imagine was a highly expensive sweater.
Then for fifteen minutes we waited. O’Brien’s car drove in and stopped by the pool. When he came up to the house I saw by his face they had found nothing. Anne stopped crying to glare at him when he came up the steps.
“Sorry, old girl,” he said. “It’s pretty bad. But she’s not dead. We’d have found her by now if she were. She’s not in the pool, either. I was in it myself around noon, looking for her.” He glanced at Anne, or more specifically at her drink. “Hate to cadge your liquor,” he said, “but I could do with one of those myself.”
He sat down. If Bill had looked exhausted, O’Brien looked even worse. His shirt was torn and his slacks were stained and dirty. Anne gave him a frigid nod when I introduced him, but it didn’t bother him. He sat back with his eyes closed until I gave him the whisky. He gulped it down and sat up, as if he had a new idea.
“Ever hear the story about the village idiot and the jackass?” He looked at Anne. “He just thought where he’d go if he was a jackass and—”
“I was raised on it,” Anne said, her voice chilly. He ignored it, however.
“It’s like this,” he said. “I’m a woman, and I’ve been through something of an experience like—let’s say—the driver of my car being shot and the car rolling down a hill. Perhaps I got out before that. Maybe I spilled out. I’ve got a bump or so or maybe the glass has cut me. But I can still walk. I know there’s a killer around somewhere, and I wait awhile. Then it’s all quiet. So what? Where do I head for? The woods? They’re dark, and I don’t know them, anyhow. I do the only thing I can. I head for home.”
“We’ve already heard that from Doctor Townsend,” Anne said, still stiffly. “Only she isn’t here, Lieutenant.”
“How do you know she isn’t?” he demanded. “She gets back here, and only God knows what that mile or so cost her. She makes it, but just barely. And the house is dark, locked and dark. So she—” He got up abruptly. “Don’t bother about another drink, Lois. It can wait. Has anybody looked in the stable?”
They had not, I thought, and followed him at a dogtrot as he raced down the steps and around the corner of the house. I caught up to him in the birch grove. He had gone rather pale, and he stopped and leaned against one of the trees.
“Excuse it, please,” he said, trying to smile. “It’s the old wound plus a couple of late ones. I keep forgetting the damned things.”
He took a couple of deep breaths and started again. But at first the stable was a disappointment. There was nothing in what we called the carriage house but a rusty old sleigh. O’Brien did not s
top there, however. He went through a door at the back and stopped dead in the doorway of the tack room.
Judith was there, on the floor.
She was unconscious, and even when he picked her up and she opened her eyes it was clear they saw nothing. She was a pitiable sight. There was a hideous bruise on her forehead, and one of her hands was badly cut. Her clothes were torn, too, and one of her ankles was swollen, as though she had sprained it.
O’Brien handled her like a baby.
“Get somebody to turn down her bed,” he said. “Fill some hot-water bottles, too. And maybe she can swallow a little brandy. It won’t hurt to try.”
They were all on the porch when our small procession arrived, Phil and Bill still in bathing trunks, Doctor Townsend immaculate and calm. I shall never forget their shocked faces as we turned the corner of the old conservatory and reached the steps. There were cries of where had we found her, and both Phil and Bill rushed down to help O’Brien. He warded them off, however.
“She’s not heavy,” he said. “Get out of the way, all of you. She’s unconscious.”
“Is she hurt?” This was Phil. Anne seemed for once beyond speech.
“She’s got a bad knock on the head,” O’Brien said. “No fracture, I think. Better notify the police, Mr. Maynard. They’ll want to know this. And get a doctor.”
“The police?” Phil looked mutinous. “She needs a hospital and medical care.”
“She’ll get them,” O’Brien said grimly. “Only they have to know. At the moment she may be wanted for murder.”
There was a shocked silence as we went into the house, and O’Brien did not elaborate. We got her into bed while Phil telephoned Fowler and Doctor Christy, and then followed us upstairs.
“Just what did you mean by that remark, O’Brien?” he demanded angrily. “She’s been attacked herself. Look at her!”
“I’m not accusing her,” O’Brien said mildly. “The driver of her car was shot in the back of the head. To the chief of police here that means only one thing at the moment. She wasn’t attacked herself. She went down the hill in the car, and only God knows why she’s alive.”
“That in itself ought to prove her innocence to any man with sense.”
O’Brien only smiled.
“Not necessarily,” he said. “The driver’s foot may have been on the gas and started it. It was an old model. Fowler’s idea, not mine.”
“Then where’s the gun?”
“If you’ll get out of the way I’ll look for it.”
“In the stable, I suppose,” Phil jeered.
But O’Brien was too late. There had been police on the grounds, and when he got downstairs one of them had already found it. She had dropped it in the grass near the stable door, and one of the local detectives was on the drive with it, wrapped in his handkerchief. Fowler came up on the porch and surveyed the crowd. I was not there, but I was told about it.
“Sorry about all this,” he said. “I guess I’ll have to talk to Mrs. Chandler.”
“She’s hurt,” someone said. “She needs a hospital.”
“Sure,” he said. “We’re taking her there as soon as the ambulance comes. But I hope you folks understand. That gun Jim has down there has been fired recently. Two or three times if it was fully loaded, and the cabdriver was shot, if you don’t happen to know it.”
“But why?” Anne wailed. “Why would she shoot a man like that?”
The answer, so far as the others were concerned came late that afternoon. They had taken the dead man’s fingerprints, and as I already knew they proved to be those of Johnny Shannon, ex-convict and only a few months ago released from twenty years in prison for manslaughter. I was in the hospital with Judith, so I missed the army of reporters and cameramen that besieged the house.
I stayed in the hospital all night. Judith was still unconscious, and in the morning Phil came in with one of the New York papers and the news that her fingerprints—and only hers—were on the gun. I went out into the hall to talk to him, and to see a policeman sitting there, outside Judith’s room.
He handed me the paper.
“Maybe you can make some sense out of this,” he said. “I can’t. It’s tabloid stuff, of course. The news is on another page.”
I took it to a window and read it. It had been written by a well-known columnist.
Did Judith Chandler, famous beauty and society woman, kill Johnny Shannon? And if so, why? It was well known, at the time of his trial, twenty years ago, that Inspector Flaherty before his own murder believed him innocent of the Mollie Preston slaying, and that he made at least one visit to the Maynard house, where the then Judith Maynard was queried.
The case was further complicated by the disappearance before the trial of one Kate Henry, one of the chief witnesses for the prosecution. Other witnesses appeared, however, testifying to Shannon’s presence in the building at or about the time of the murder, and the noisy quarrel which followed. It was believed that the defense hoped the then Judith Maynard could substantiate Shannon’s alibi, but this failed to stand up, and Johnny Shannon was convicted. Not the least curious part of the present case is the participation in it of Flaherty’s sergeant at the time, now Inspector Terrence O’Brien.
It was largely due to O’Brien’s efforts that Johnny Shannon was released some months ago. It is an odd coincidence that three people concerned in the long-ago murder of an unimportant East Side girl should again be involved in a crime: one of them the victim, another the woman possibly responsible for his life sentence, and the third a police officer who worked with Flaherty on the Mollie Preston case and who had never believed Shannon guilty.
As for Judith Chandler—née Maynard—herself, it is difficult to believe she would shoot and kill the driver of the car while it was still in motion. Such a course would be purely suicidal. Had Johnny Shannon stopped the car and revealed his identity? In that case she might have killed him in self-defense. But the car was apparently in motion, thus providing the authorities with a highly perplexing problem.
So far there has been no arrest. The police move slowly when any member of a highly respected family is involved. And both the Chandlers and the Maynards have always stood for the best in the city. It is indicative of this that her ex-husband, Ridgely Chandler, is standing by Judith in this trying time.
Phil looked as though he had not slept. He took the tabloid from me and stuck it in his pocket.
“Fowler read it,” he said. “That’s why the cop’s outside her door. She’s under arrest whether she knows it or not. Maybe they call it protective custody, but they’re holding her for first-degree murder.”
That was when I took him into the drab reception room and told him O’Brien’s story. He listened stoically.
“So she had to kill him,” he said. “She wasn’t going to admit she’d sent an innocent man to prison for twenty years. But how did she know the driver was Shannon?”
“I think he told her himself that night, Phil. Only how did he know she was going to need a cab?”
“He must have known she was waiting for a ship. Maybe he did the telephoning himself. O’Brien says all he wanted was vindication, poor devil. What he got was a cold-blooded murder.”
It shows how we both felt that day. Neither of us really doubted Judith’s guilt. Phil merely wondered how and when she had got the gun. He said she might have recognized Shannon’s voice over the telephone and staged the whole thing as a holdup for her jewel case.
“Because the damned thing’s still missing,” he said. “Anne and I have searched the stable, as well as the whole house, attic and all. If she had it with her, she must have hidden it somewhere along the road.”
He was right, of course, but within limits. When the time came it was practically her sole defense.
It was a long time before that happened, however. It was a full week before she began to recover. She would lie in her high hospital bed, not awake and not asleep, in a partial coma which was pitiful to see. It seemed absu
rd to have a policeman sitting outside her door. Not only because she could not walk—one ankle was badly twisted—but because she made no effort whatever to move.
After a day or two they could rouse her to swallow liquid food and water. That is, she could get them down. Her eyes, however, remained blank, until one day she reached out a bandaged hand and touched me.
“Lois,” she said.
It was the first sign of consciousness she had given.
Her skull was not fractured, but she had a bad concussion. Also she had walked on the sprained ankle, and even now I shiver at what that mile or so along the road at night must have meant.
I saw very little of O’Brien that week. He was seldom at the cottage, and I spent my days at the hospital. Once, however, he called me up there.
“Just to keep you from forgetting me, my darling,” he said. “And also to let you know I’m still on the case.”
“Always the policeman!” I said bitterly. “Are you going to send her to the chair?”
“Not necessarily,” he said. “I may be able to surprise you before very long.”
“I don’t like your surprises. I’ve had all of them I can take.”
He told me not to be like that and then hung up abruptly. Hours and days for his job, I thought dourly, and two minutes for dalliance, as he probably regarded it. I missed him sickeningly
I am quite sure Judith had no idea she was under arrest at that time. She could not see the policeman from her bed and under the doctor’s orders Fowler and his minions left her strictly alone. I did feel, however, as time went on that her semicomatose condition was partly protective. Once in a while when the nurse was out I would find her watching me, and now and then she spoke. As the missing jewel case was on all our minds, I asked her about it one day.
She seemed to come back from a far distance.
“Jewel case?” she said slowly.
“Yes. The one you had with you when you were hurt, Jude.”
The Swimming Pool Page 28