The Classic Mystery Novel

by Dorothy Cameron Disney

  “How did you know that, Mr. Russell?”

  “I mean I was certain of it. She’d told me Mr. Berne Webster, the lawyer she’d been working for, was out here spending the week-end; and I knew she was coming out to meet him.”

  “Why did she do that?”

  Mr. Russell displayed pathetic embarrassment and confusion before he answered that. He plucked at his lower lip with spasmodic fingers. His eyes were downcast. He attempted a self-deprecatory smile which ended in an unpleasant grimace.

  “She wouldn’t say. But it was because she was in love with him.”

  “And you were jealous of Mr. Webster?”

  “We-ell—yes, sir; that’s about it, I guess.”

  “Did Miss Brace tell you she was coming to Sloanehurst?”

  “No, sir. I suspected it.”

  “And watched her movements?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And followed her?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why did you think she was in love with Mr. Webster, Mr. Russell? And please give us a direct answer. You can understand the importance of what you’re about to say.”

  “I do. I thought so because she had told me that he was in love with her, and because of her grief and anger when he dismissed her from his office. And she did everything to make me think so, except declaring it outright. She did that because she knew I hated to think she was in love with him.”

  “All right, Mr. Russell. Now, tell us what happened during your—ah—shadowing Miss Brace the night she was killed.”

  “I got off the car at Ridgecrest and walked toward Sloanehurst. It was raining then, pretty hard. I thought she had made an appointment to meet Mr. Webster somewhere in the grounds here. It was a quarter to eleven when I got to the little side-gate that opens on the lawn out there on the north side of the house.”

  “How did you know that?”

  “I looked at my watch then. It’s got a luminous dial.”

  “You were then at the gate near where she was found, dead?”

  “Yes. And she was at the gate.”

  “Oh! So you saw her?”

  “I saw her. When I lifted the latch of the gate, she came toward me. There was a heavy drizzle then. I thought she had been leaning on the fence a few feet away. She whispered, sharp and quick, ‘Who’s that?’ I knew who she was, right off. I said, ‘Gene.’

  “She caught hold of my arm and shook it. She told me, still whispering, if I didn’t get away from there, if I didn’t go back to town, she’d raise an alarm, accuse me of trying to kill her—or she’d kill me. She pressed something against my cheek. It felt like a knife, although I couldn’t see, for the darkness.”

  The witness paused and licked his dry lips. He was breathing fast, and his restless eyes had a hunted look. The people in the room leaned farther toward him, some believing, some doubting him.

  Hastings thought: “He’s scared stiff, but telling the truth—so far.”

  “All right; what next?” asked Dr. Garnet, involuntarily lowering his voice to Russell’s tone.

  “I accused her of having an appointment to meet Webster there. I got mad. I hate to have to tell all this, gentlemen; but I want to tell the truth. I told her she was a fool to run after a man who’d thrown her over.

  “‘It’s none of your look-out what I do!’ she told me. ‘You get away from here, now—this minute! You’ll be sorry if you don’t!’ There was something about her that frightened me, mad as I was. I’d never seen her like that before.”

  “What do you mean?” Garnet urged him.

  “I thought she would kill me, or somebody else would, and she knew it. I got the idea that she was like a crazy woman, out of her head about Webster, ready to do anything desperate, anything wild. I can’t explain it any better than that.”

  “And did you leave her?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “At once?”

  “Practically. A sort of panic got hold of me. I can’t explain it, really.”

  Russell, seeking an illuminative phrase, gave vent to a long-drawn, anxious sigh. He appeared to feel no shame for his flight. His fear was that he would not be believed.

  “Just as she told me a second time to leave her, I thought I heard somebody coming toward us, a slushy, dull sound, like heavy footsteps on the wet grass. Mildred’s manner, her voice, had already scared me.

  “When I heard those footsteps, I turned and ran. My heart was in my mouth. I ran out to the road and back toward Washington. I ran as fast as I could. Twice I fell on my hands and knees. I can’t tell you exactly how it was, why it was. I just knew something terrible would happen if I stayed there. I never had a feeling like that before. I was more afraid of her than I was of the man coming toward us.”

  Members of the jury pushed back their chairs, were audible with subdued exclamations and long breaths, relieved of the nervous tension to which Russell’s story of the encounter at the gate had lifted them. They were, however, prejudiced against him, a fact which he grasped.

  One of them asked him:

  “Can you tell us why you followed her out here?”

  “Why?” Russell echoed, like a man seeking time for deliberation.

  “Yes. What did you think you’d do after you’d overtaken her?”

  “Persuade her to go back home with me. I wanted to save her from doing anything foolish—anything like that, you know.”

  “But, from what you’ve told us here this morning, it seems you never had much influence on her behaviour. Isn’t that true?”

  “I suppose it is.—But,” Russell added eagerly, “I can prove I had no idea of hurting her, if that’s what you’re hinting at. I can prove I never struck her. At twenty minutes past eleven last night I was four miles from here. Mr. Otis, a Washington commission merchant, picked me up in his automobile, six miles outside of Washington and took me into town. I couldn’t have made that four miles on foot, no matter how I ran, in approximately fifteen or twenty minutes.

  “It’s been proved that she was struck down after eleven anyway.—You said the condition of the body showed that, doctor.—You see, I would have had to make the four miles in less than twenty minutes—an impossibility. You see?”

  His eagerness to win their confidence put a disagreeable note, almost a whimper, into his voice. It grated on Dr. Garnet.

  It affected Hastings more definitely.

  “Now,” he decided, “he’s lying—about something. But what?” He noted a change in Russell’s face, a suggestion of craftiness, the merest shadow of slyness over his general attitude of anxiety. And yet, this part of his story seemed straight enough.

  Dr. Garnet’s next question brought out the fact that it would be corroborated.

  “This Mr. Otis, Mr. Russell; where is he?”

  “Right there, by the window,” the witness answered, with a smug smile which gave him a still more unprepossessing look.

  Jury and spectators turned toward the man at the window. They saw a clean-shaven, alert-looking person of middle age, who nodded slightly in Russell’s direction as if endorsing his testimony. There seemed no possible grounds for doubting whatever Otis might say. Hastings at once accepted him as genuine, an opinion which, it was obvious, was shared by the rest of the assemblage.

  Russell sensed the change of sentiment toward himself. Until now, it had been a certainty that he would be held for the murder. But his producing an outsider, incontestably a trustworthy man, to establish the truth of his statement that he had been four miles away from the scene of the crime a quarter of an hour after it had been committed—that was something in his favour which could not be gainsaid.

  Granting even that he had had an automobile at his disposal—a supposition for which there was no foundation—his alibi would still have been good, in view of the rain and the fact that one of the four miles in quest
ion was “dirt road.”

  With the realization of this, the jury swung back to the animus it had felt against Webster, the incredulity with which it had received his statement that there had been between him and the dead woman no closer relationship than that of employer and employe.

  Webster, seated near the wall furthest from the jury, felt the inquiry of many eyes upon him, but he was unmoved, kept his gaze on Russell.

  Dr. Garnet, announcing that he would ask Mr. Otis to testify a little later, handed Russell the weapon with which Mildred Brace had been murdered.

  “Have you ever seen that dagger before?” he asked.

  Russell said he had not. Reminded that Sheriff Crown had testified to searching the witness’s room and had discovered that a nail file was missing from his dressing case, a file which, judging by other articles in the case, must have been the same size as the one used in making the amateur dagger, Russell declared that his file had been lost for three years. He had left it in a hotel room on the only trip he had ever taken to New York.

  He gave way to Mr. Otis, who described himself as a commission merchant of Washington. Returning from a tour to Lynchburg, Virginia, he said, he had been hailed last night by a man in the road and had agreed to take him into town, a ride of six miles. Reaching Washington shortly before midnight, he had dropped his passenger at Eleventh and F streets.

  “Who was this passenger?” inquired Garnet.

  “He told me,” said Otis, “his name was Eugene Russell. I gave him my name. That explains how he was able to find me this morning. When he told me how he was situated, I agreed to come over here and give you gentlemen the facts.”

  “Notice anything peculiar about Mr. Russell last night?”

  “No; I think not.”

  “Was he agitated, disturbed?”

  “He was out of breath. And he commented on that himself, said he’d been walking fast. Oh, yes! He was bareheaded; and he explained that—said the rain had ruined a cheap straw hat he had been wearing; the glue had run out of the straw and down his neck, he had thrown the hat away.”

  “And the time? When did you pick him up?”

  “It was twenty minutes past eleven o’clock. When I stopped, I glanced at my machine clock; I carry a clock just above my speedometer.”

  Mr. Otis was positive in his statements. He realized, he said, that his words might relieve one man of suspicion and bring it upon another. Unless he had been absolutely certain of his facts, he would not have stated them. He was sure, beyond the possibility of doubt, that he had made no mistake when he looked at his automobile clock; it was running when he stopped and when he reached Washington; yes, it was an accurate timepiece.

  Russell’s alibi was established. His defence appealed to the jurymen as unassailable. When, after a conference of less than half an hour, they brought in a verdict that Mildred Brace had been murdered by a thrust of the “nail-file dagger” in the hands of a person unknown, nobody in the room was surprised.

  And nobody was blind to the fact that the freeing of Eugene Russell seriously questioned the innocence of Berne Webster.

  IX

  THE BREAKING DOWN OF WEBSTER

  Hastings, sprawling comfortably in a low chair by the south window in the music room, stopped his whittling when Berne Webster came in with Judge Wilton. “Meddlesome Mike!” thought the detective. “I sent for Webster.”

  “Berne asked me to come with him,” the judge explained his presence at once. “We’ve talked things over; he thought I might help him bring out every detail—jog his memory, if necessary.”

  Hastings did not protest the arrangement. He saw, almost immediately, that Webster had come with no intention of giving him hearty cooperation. The motive for this lack of frankness he could not determine. It was enough that he felt the younger man’s veiled antagonism and appreciated the fact that Wilton accompanied him in the rôle of protector.

  “If I’m to get anything worth while out of this talk,” he decided, “I’ve got to mix up my delivery, shuffle the cards, spring first one thing and then another at him—bewilder him.”

  He proceeded with that definite design: at an opportune time, he would guide the narrative, take it out of Webster’s hands, and find out what he wanted to know, not merely what the young lawyer wanted to tell. He recognized the necessity of breaking down the shell of self-control that overlaid the suspected man’s uneasiness.

  That it was only a shell, he felt sure. Webster, leaning an elbow lightly on the piano, looked down at him out of anxious eyes, and continually passed his right hand over his smooth, dark-brown hair from forehead to crown, a mechanical gesture of his when perplexed.

  His smile, too, was forced, hardly more than a slight, fixed twist of the lips, as if he strove to advertise his ability to laugh at danger. His customary dash, a pleasing levity of manner, was gone, giving place to a suggestion of strain, so that he seemed always on the alert against himself, determined to edit in advance his answer to every question.

  Wilton had chosen a chair which placed him directly opposite Hastings and at the same time enabled him to watch Webster. He was smoking a cigar, and, through the haze that floated up just then from his lips, he gave the detective a long, searching look, to which Hastings paid no attention.

  Webster talked nearly twenty minutes, explaining his eagerness to be “thoroughly frank as to every detail,” reviewing the evidence brought out by the inquest, and criticising the action of the jury, but producing nothing new. Occasionally he left the piano and paced the floor, smoking interminably, lighting the fresh cigarette from the stub of the old, obviously strung to the limit of his nervous strength. Hastings detected a little twitching of the muscles at the corners of his mouth, and the too frequent winking of his eyes.

  Judge Wilton had told him, Webster continued, of Mrs. Brace’s charge that he wanted to marry Miss Sloane because of financial pressure; there was not a word of truth in it; he had already arranged for a loan to make that payment when it fell due. He was, however, aware of his unenviable position, and he wanted to give the detective every assistance possible, in that way assuring his own prompt relief from embarrassment.

  By this time, Hastings had mapped out his line of questioning, his assault on Webster’s reticence.

  “That’s the right idea!” he said, getting to his feet. “Let’s go to work.”

  They saw the change in him. Instead of the genial, drawling, slow-moving old fellow who had seemed thankful for anything he might chance to hear, they were confronted now by an aroused, quick-thinking man whose words came from him with a sharp, clipped-off effect, and whose questions scouted the whole field of their possible and probable information. He stood leaning his elbows on the other end of the piano, facing Webster across the polished length of its broad top. His dominance of the night before, in the library, had returned.

  “Now, Mr. Webster,” he began, innocent of threat, “as things stack up at present, only two people had the semblance of a motive for killing Mildred Brace—either Eugene Russell killed her out of jealousy of you; or you killed her to silence her demands. Do you see that?”

  He had put back his head a little and was peering at Webster under his spectacle-rims, down the line of his nose. He saw how the other fought down the impulse to deny, hesitating before answering, with a laugh on a high note, like derision:

  “I suppose that’s what a lot of people will say.”

  “Precisely. Now, I’ve just had a talk with this Russell—caught him after the inquest. I believe there’s something rotten about that alibi of his; but I couldn’t shake him; and the Otis testimony’s sound. So we’ll have to quit counting on Russell’s proving his own guilt. We’ve got that little job on our hands, and the best way to handle it is to prove your innocence. See that?”

  The bow with which Webster acknowledged this statement was a curious mingling of grace and mockery. The d
etective ignored it.

  “And,” he continued, “there’s only one way for you to come whole out of this muddle—frankness. I’m working for you; you know that. Tell me everything you know, and we’ve got a chance to win. The innocent man who tries to twist black into white is an innocent fool.” He looked swiftly to Wilton, who was leaning far back in his chair, head lolling slowly from side to side, the picture of indifference. “Isn’t that so, judge?”

  “Quite,” Wilton agreed, pausing to remove his cigar from his mouth.

  “Of course, it’s so,” Webster said curtly. “I’ve just told you so. That’s why I’ve decided—the judge and I have talked it over—to give you something in confidence.”

  “One moment!” Hastings warned him. “Maybe, I won’t take it in confidence—if it’s something incriminating you.”

  “Yes; you’ve phrased that unfortunately, Berne,” the judge put in, tilting his head on the chair-back to meet the detective’s look.

  Webster was nonplussed. Apparently, his surprise came from the judge’s remark rather than from the detective’s refusal to assume the rôle of confidant. Hastings inferred that Wilton, agreeing beforehand to the proposal being advanced, had changed his mind after entering the room.

  “Hastings is right,” the judge concluded; “even if he’s on your side, you can’t expect him to be tied up blind that way by a suspected man—and you’re just that, Berne.”

  Seeing Webster’s uncertainty, Hastings took another course.

  “I think I know what you’re talking about, Mr. Webster,” he said, matter-of-fact. “Your nail-file’s missing from your dressing case—disappeared since yesterday morning.”

  “You know that!” Berne flashed, suddenly angry. “And you’re holding it over me!”

  Open hostility was in every feature of his face; his lips twitched to the sharp intake of his breath.

  “Why don’t you look at it another way?” the old man countered quickly. “If I’d told the coroner about it—if I’d told him also that the size of that nail-file, judging from the rest of the dressing case, matched that of the one used for the blade of the dagger, matched it as well as Russell’s—what then?”