The Classic Mystery Novel

by Dorothy Cameron Disney

  His hostility to the caller was obvious. The evident and grateful interest with which the night before he had heard the detective’s stories of crimes and criminals had changed now to annoyance at the very sight of him. As a raconteur, Mr. Hastings was quite the thing; as protector of the Sloane family’s privacy and seclusion, he was a nuisance. Such was the impression Mr. Hastings received.

  At a loss to understand his host’s frame of mind, he took a chair near the bed.

  Mr. Sloane stirred jerkily under his thin summer coverings.

  “A little light, Jarvis,” he said peevishly. “Now, Mr. Hastings, what can I do for—tell you?”

  Jarvis put back a curtain.

  “Quivering and crucified martyrs!” the prostrate man burst forth. “I said a little, Jarvis! You drown my optic nerves in ink and, without a moment’s warning, flood them with the glaring brilliancy of the noonday sun!” Jarvis half-drew the curtain. “Ah, that’s better. Never more than an inch at a time, Jarvis. How many times have I told you that? Never give me a shock like that again; never more than an inch of light at a time. Frantic fiends! From cimmerian, abysmal darkness to Sahara-desert glare!”

  “Yes, sir,” said Jarvis, as if on the point of digging a grave—for himself. “Beg pardon, sir.”

  He effaced himself, in shadows, somewhere behind Hastings, who seized the opportunity to speak.

  “Miss Sloane suggested that you wanted certain information. In fact, she asked me to see you.”

  “My daughter? Oh, yes!” The prone body became semi-upright, leaned on an elbow. “Yes! What I want to know is, why—why, in the name of all the jumping angels, everybody seems to think there’s a lot of mystery connected with this brutal, vulgar, dastardly crime! It passes my comprehension, utterly!—Jarvis, stop clicking your finger-nails together!” This with a note of exaggerated pleading. “You know I’m a nervous wreck, a total loss physically, and yet you stand there in the corner and indulge yourself wickedly, wickedly, in that infernal habit of yours of clicking your finger-nails! Mute and mutilated Christian martyrs!”

  He fell back among the pillows, breathing heavily, the perfect picture of exhaustion. Jarvis came near on soundless feet and applied a wet cloth to his master’s temples.

  The old man regarded them both with unconcealed amazement.

  “You’ll have to excuse me, Mr. Hastings, really, I can’t be annoyed!” the wreck, somewhat revived, announced feebly. “All I said to my daughter, Miss Sloane, is what I say to you now: I see no reason why we should employ you, or indeed why you should be connected with this affair. You were my guest, here, at Sloanehurst. Unfortunately, some ruffian of whom we never heard, whose existence we never suspected—Jarvis, take off this counterpane; you’re boiling me, parboiling me; my nerves are seething, simmering, stewing! Athletic devils! Have you no discrimination, Jarvis?—as I was saying, Mr. Hastings, somebody stabbed somebody else to death on my lawn, unfortunately marring your visit. But that’s all. I can’t see that we need you—thank you, nevertheless.”

  The dismissal was unequivocal. Hastings got to his feet, his indignation all the greater through realization that he had been sent for merely to be flouted. And yet, this man’s daughter had come to him literally with tears in her eyes, had begged him to help her, had said that money was the smallest of considerations. Moreover, he had accepted her employment, had made the definite agreement and promise. Apparently, Sloane was in no condition to act independently, and his daughter had known it, had hoped that he, Hastings, might soothe his silly mind, do away with his objections to assistance which she knew he needed.

  There was, also, the fact that Lucille believed her father unaccountably interested, if not implicated, in the crime. He could not get away from that impression. He was sure he had interpreted correctly the girl’s anxiety the night before. She was working to save her father—from something. And she believed Berne Webster innocent.

  These were some of the considerations which, flashing through his mind, prevented his giving way to righteous wrath. He most certainly would not allow Arthur Sloane to eliminate him from the situation. He sat down again.

  The nervous wreck made himself more understandable.

  “Perhaps, Jarvis,” he said, shrinking to one side like a man in sudden pain, “the gentleman can’t see how to reach that large door. A little more light, half an inch-not a fraction more!”

  “Don’t bother,” Hastings told Jarvis. “I’m not going quite yet.”

  “Leaping crime!” moaned Mr. Sloane, digging deeper into the pillows, “Frantic imps!”

  “I hope I won’t distress you too much,” the detective apologized grimly, “if I ask you a few questions. Fact is, I must. I’m investigating the circumstances surrounding what may turn out to be a baffling crime, and, irrespective of your personal wishes, Mr. Sloane, I can’t let go of it. This is a serious business—”

  The sick man sat up in bed with surprising abruptness.

  “Serious business! Serious saints!—Jarvis, the eau de cologne!—You think I don’t know it? They make a slaughter-house of my lawn. They make a morgue of my house. They hold a coroner’s inquest in my parlour. They’re in there now—live people like ravens, and one dead one. They cheat the undertaker to plague me. They wreck me all over again. They give me a new exhaustion of the nerves. They frighten my daughter to death.—Jarvis, the smelling salts. Shattered saints, Jarvis! Hurry! Thanks.—They rig up lies which, Tom Wilton, my old and trusted friend, tells me, will incriminate Berne Webster. They sit around a corpse in my house and chatter by the hour. You come in here and make Jarvis nearly blind me.

  “And, then, then, by the holy, agile angels! you think you have to persuade me it’s a serious business! Never fear! I know it!—Jarvis, the bromide, quick! Before I know it, they’ll drive me to opiates.—Serious business! Shrivelled and shrinking saints!”

  Arms clasped around his legs, knees pressed against his chin, Mr. Sloane trembled and shook until Jarvis, more agile than the angels of whom his employer had spoken, gave him the dose of bromides.

  Still, Mr. Hastings did not retire.

  “I was going to say,” he resumed, in a tone devoid of compassion, “I couldn’t drop this thing now. I may be able to find the murderer; and you may be able to help me.”

  “I?”

  “Yes.”

  “Isn’t it Russell? He’s among the ravens now, in my parlour. Wilton told me the sheriff was certain Russell was the man. Murdered martyrs! Sacrificed saints! Can’t you let a guilty man hang when he comes forward and puts the rope around his own worthless neck?”

  “If Russell’s guilty,” Hastings said, glad of the information that the accused man was then at Sloanehurst, “I hope we can develop the necessary evidence against him. But—”

  “The necessary—”

  “Let me finish, Mr. Sloane, if you please!” The old man was determined to disregard the other’s signs of suffering. He did not believe that they were anything but assumed, the exaggerated camouflage which he usually employed as an excuse for idleness. “But, if Russell isn’t guilty, there are facts which may help me to find the murderer. And you may have valuable information concerning them.”

  “Sobbing, sorrowing saints!” lamented Mr. Sloane, but his trembling ceased; he was closely attentive. “A cigarette, Jarvis, a cigarette! Nerves will be served.—I suppose the easiest way is to submit. Go on.”

  “I shall ask you only two or three questions,” Hastings said.

  The jackknife-like figure in the bed shuddered its repugnance.

  “I’ve been told, Mr. Sloane, that Mr. Webster has been in great need of money, as much as sixty-five thousand dollars. In fact, according to my information, he needs it now.”

  “Well, did he kill the woman, expecting to find it in her stocking?”

  “The significance of his being hard-pressed, for so large an amount,” the o
ld man went on, ignoring the sarcasm, “is in the further charge that Miss Brace was trying to make him marry her, that he should have married her, that he killed her in order to be free to marry your daughter—for money.”

  “My daughter! For money!” shrilled Sloane, neck elongated, head thrust forward, eyes bulging. “Leaping and whistling cherubim!” For all his outward agitation, he seemed to Hastings in thorough command of his logical faculties; it was more than possible, the detective thought, that the expletives were time-killers, until he could decide what to say. “It’s ridiculous, absurd! Why, sir, you reason as loosely as you dress! Are you trying to prostrate me further with impossible theories? Webster marry my daughter for money, for sixty-five thousand dollars? He knows I’d let him have any amount he wanted. I’d give him the money if it meant his peace of mind and Lucille’s happiness.—Dumb and dancing devils! Jarvis, a little whiskey! I’m worn out, worn out!”

  “Did you ever tell Mr. Webster of the extent of your generous feeling toward him, Mr. Sloane—in dollars and cents?”

  “No; it wasn’t necessary. He knows how fond of him I am.”

  “And you would let him have sixty-five thousand dollars—if he had to have it?”

  “I would, sir!—today, this morning.”

  “Now, one other thing, Mr. Sloane, and I’m through. It’s barely possible that there was some connection between this murder and a letter which came to Sloanehurst yesterday afternoon, a letter in an oblong grey envelope. Did—”

  The nervous man went to pieces again, beat with his open palms on the bed covering.

  “Starved and stoned evangels, Jarvis! Quit balling your feet! You stand there and see me harassed to the point of extinction by a lot of crazy queries, and you indulge yourself in that infernal weakness of yours of balling your feet! Leaping angels! You know how acute my hearing is; you know the noise of your sock against the sole of your shoe when you ball your feet is the most exquisite torture to me! A little whiskey, Jarvis! Quick!” He spoke now in a weak, almost inaudible voice to Hastings: “No; I got no such letter. I saw no such letter.” He sank slowly back to a prone posture.

  “I was going to remind you,” the detective continued, “that I brought the five o’clock mail in. Getting off the car, I met the rural carrier; he asked me to bring in the mail, saving him the few steps to your box. All there was consisted of a newspaper and one letter. I recall the shape and colour of the envelope—oblong, grey. I did not, of course, look at the address. I handed the mail to you when you met me on the porch.”

  Mr. Sloane, raising himself on one elbow to take the restoring drink from Jarvis, looked across the glass at his cross-examiner.

  “I put the mail in the basket on the hall table,” he said in high-keyed endeavour to express withering contempt. “If it had been for me, Jarvis would have brought it to me later. I seldom carry my reading glasses about the house with me.”

  Hastings, subjecting the pallid Jarvis to severe scrutiny, asked him:

  “Was that grey letter addressed to—whom?”

  “I didn’t see it,” replied Jarvis, scarcely polite.

  “And yet, it’s your business to inspect and deliver the household’s mail?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “What became of it, then—the grey envelope?”

  “I’m sure I can’t say, sir, unless some one got it before I reached the mail basket.”

  Hastings stood up. Interrogation of both master and man had given him nothing save the inescapable conviction that both of them resented his questioning and would do nothing to help him. The reason for this opposition he could not grasp, but it was a fact, challenging his analysis. Arthur Sloane rejected his proffered help in the pursuit of the man who had brought murder to the doors of Sloanehurst. Why? Was this his method of hiding facts in his possession?

  Hastings questioned him again:

  “Your waking up at that unusual hour last night—was it because of a noise outside?”

  The neurasthenic, once more recumbent, succeeded in voicing faint denial of having heard any noises, outside or inside. Nor had he been aware of the murder until called by Judge Wilton. He had turned on his light to find the smelling-salts which, for the first time in six years, Jarvis had failed to leave on his bed-table,—terrible and ill-trained apes! Couldn’t he be left in peace?

  The hall door opened, admitting Judge Wilton. The newcomer, with a word of greeting to Hastings, sat down on the bedside and put a hand on Sloane’s shoulder.

  Hastings turned to leave the room.

  “Any news?” the judge asked him.

  “I’ve just been asking Mr. Sloane that,” Hastings said, in a tone that made Wilton look swiftly at his friend’s face.

  “I told Arthur this morning,” he said, “how lucky he was that you’d promised Lucille to go into this thing.”

  “Apparently,” Hastings retorted drily, “he’s unconvinced of the extent of his good fortune.”

  Mr. Sloane, quivering from head to foot, mourned softly: “Unfathomable fate!”

  Wilton, his rugged features softening to frank amusement, stared a moment in silence at Sloane’s thin face, at the deeply lined forehead topped by stringy grey hair.

  “See here, Arthur,” he protested, nodding Hastings an invitation to remain; “you know as much about crime as Hastings and I. If you’ve thought about this murder at all, you must see what it is. If Russell isn’t guilty—if he’s not the man, that crime was committed shrewdly, with forethought. And it was a devilish thing—devilish!”

  “Well, what of it?” Sloane protested shrilly, not opening his eyes.

  “Take my advice. Quit antagonizing Mr. Hastings. Be thankful that he’s here, that he’s promised to run down the guilty man.”

  Mr. Sloane turned his face to the wall.

  “A little whiskey, Jarvis,” he said softly. “I’m exhausted, Tom. Leave me alone.”

  Wilton waved his hand, indicative of the futility of further argument.

  “Judge,” announced Hastings, at the door, “I’ll ask you a question I put to Mr. Sloane. Did you receive, or see, a letter in an oblong, grey envelope in yesterday afternoon’s mail?”

  “No. I never get any mail while I’m here for a week-end.”

  Wilton followed the detective into the hall.

  “I hope you’re not going to give up the case, Hastings. You won’t pay any attention to Arthur’s unreasonable attitude, will you?”

  “I don’t know,” Hastings said, still indignant. “I made my bargain with his daughter. I’ll see her.”

  “If you can’t manage any other way, I—or she—will get any information you want from Arthur.”

  “I hope to keep on. It’s a big thing, I think.” The old man was again intent on solving the problem. “Tell me, judge; do you think Berne Webster’s guilty?” Seeing the judge’s hesitance, he supplemented: “I mean, did you notice anything last night, in his conduct, that would indicate guilt—or fear?”

  Later, when other developments gave this scene immense importance, Hastings, in reviewing it, remembered the curious little flicker of the judge’s eyelids preceding his reply.

  “Absolutely not,” he declared, with emphasis. “Are you working on that”—he hesitated hardly perceptibly—“idea?”

  VIII

  THE MAN WHO RAN AWAY

  Ancestors of the old family from whom Arthur Sloane had purchased this colonial mansion eight years ago still looked out of their gilded frames on the parlour walls, their high-bred calm undisturbed, their aristocratic eyes unwidened, by the chatter and clatter of the strangers within their gates. Hastings noticed that even the mob and mouthing of a coroner’s inquest failed to destroy the ancient atmosphere and charm of the great room. He smiled. The pictured grandeur of a bygone age, the brocaded mahogany chairs, the tall French mirrors—all these made an incongruous setting for t
he harsh machinery of crime-inquiry.

  The detective had completed his second and more detailed search of the guest-rooms in time to hear the words and study the face of the last witness on Dr. Garnet’s list. That was Eugene Russell.

  “One of life’s persimmons—long before frost!” Hastings thought, making swift appraisal. “A boneless spine—chin like a sheep—brave as a lamb.”

  Russell could not conceal his agitation. In fact, he referred to it. Fear, he explained in a low, husky voice to the coroner and the jury, was not a part of his emotions. His only feeling was sorrow, varied now and then by the embarrassment he felt as a result of the purely personal and very intimate facts which he had to reveal.

  His one desire was to be frank, he declared, his pale blue eyes roving from place to place, his nervous fingers incessantly playing with his thin, uncertain lips. This mania for truthfulness, he asserted, was natural, in that it offered him the one sure path to freedom and the establishment of his innocence of all connection with the murder of the woman he had loved.

  He was, he testified, thirty-one years old, a clerk in a real-estate dealer’s office and a native of Washington. Mildred Brace had been employed for a few weeks by the same firm for which he worked, and it was there that he had met her. Although she had refused to marry him on the ground that his salary was inadequate for the needs of two people, she had encouraged his attentions. Sometimes, they had quarrelled.

  “Speak up, Mr. Russell!” Dr. Garnet directed. “And take your time. Let the jury hear every word you utter.”

  After that, the witness abandoned his attempt to exclude the family portraits from his confidence, but his voice shook.

  “Conductor Barton is right,” he said, responding to the coroner’s interrogation. “I did come out on his car, the car that gets to the Sloanehurst stop at ten-thirty, and I did leave the car at the Ridgecrest stop, a quarter of a mile from here. I was following Mil—Miss Brace. I saw her leave her apartment house, the Walman. I followed her to the transfer station at the bridge, and I saw her take the car there. I followed on the next car. I knew where she was going, knew she was going to Sloanehurst.”