The Classic Mystery Novel

by Dorothy Cameron Disney

  “That all?”

  “That’s all, right now. But I’ve got a suspicion she knows more than we think. When she makes up her mind to talk, she’ll say something!—Mr. Hastings,” Crown added, as if he imparted a tremendous fact, “that woman’s smart! I tell you, she’s got brains, a head full of ’em!”

  “So I judged,” the detective agreed, drily. “By the way, have you seen Russell again?”

  “Yes. There’s another thing. I don’t see where you get that stuff about his weak alibi. It’s copper-riveted!”

  “He says so, you mean.”

  “Yes; and the way he says it. But I followed your advice. I’ve advertised, through the police here and up and down the Atlantic coast, for any automobile party or parties who went along that Sloanehurst road last night between ten-thirty and eleven-thirty.”

  “Fine!” Hastings congratulated. “But get me straight on that: I don’t say any of them saw him; I say there’s a chance that he was seen.”

  The old man went back, not to examination of Hendricks’ parcel, but to further consideration of the possible contents of the letter that had been in the grey envelope. Russell, he reflected, had been present when Mildred Brace mailed it, and, what was more important, when Mildred started out of the apartment with it.

  He made sudden decision: he would question Russell again. Carefully placing Hendricks’ package of dust and lint in a drawer of the table, he set out for the Eleventh street boarding house.

  It was, however, not Russell who figured most prominently in the accounts of the murder published by the Monday morning newspapers. The reporters, resenting the reticence they had encountered at Sloanehurst, and making much of Mrs. Brace’s threats, put in the forefront of their stories an appealing picture of a bereaved mother’s one-sided fight for justice against the baffling combination of the Sloanehurst secretiveness and indifference and the mysterious circumstances of the daughter’s death. Not one of them questioned the validity of Russell’s alibi.

  “With the innocence of the dead girl’s fiancé established,” said one account, “Sheriff Crown last night made no secret of his chagrin that Berne Webster had collapsed at the very moment when the sheriff was on the point of putting him through a rigid cross-examination. The young lawyer’s retirement from the scene, coupled with the Sloane family’s retaining the celebrated detective, Jefferson Hastings, as a buffer against any questioning of the Sloanehurst people, has given Society, here and in Virginia, a topic for discussion of more than ordinary interest.”

  Another paragraph that caught Hastings’ attention, as he read between mouthfuls of his breakfast, was this:

  “Mrs. Brace, discussing the tragedy with a reporter last night, showed a surprising knowledge of all its incidents. Although she had not left her apartment in the Walman all day, she had been questioned by both Sheriff Crown and Mr. Hastings, not to mention the unusually large number of newspaper writers who besieged her for interviews.

  “And it seemed that, in addition to answering the queries put to her by the investigators, she had accomplished a vast amount of keen inquiry on her own account. When talking to her, it is impossible for one to escape the impression that this extraordinarily intelligent woman believes she can prove the guilt of the man who struck down her daughter.”

  “Just what I was afraid of,” thought the detective. “Nearly every paper siding with her!”

  His face brightened.

  “All the better,” he consoled himself. “More chance of her overreaching herself—as long as she don’t know what I suspect. I’ll get the meaning of that grey letter yet!”

  But he was worried. Berne Webster’s collapse, he knew, was too convenient for Webster—it looked like pretence. Ninety-nine out of every hundred newspaper readers would consider his illness a fake, the obvious trick to escape the work of explaining what seemed to be inexplicable circumstances.

  To Hastings the situation was particularly annoying because he had brought it about; his own questioning had turned out to be the straw that broke the suspected man’s endurance.

  “Always blundering!” he upbraided himself. “Trying to be so all-shot smart, I overplayed my hand.”

  He got Dr. Garnet on the wire.

  “Doctor,” he said, in a tone that implored, “I’m obliged to see Webster today.”

  “Sorry, Mr. Hastings,” came the instant refusal; “but it can’t be done.”

  “For one question,” qualified Hastings; “less than a minute’s talk—one word, ‘yes’ or ‘no’? It’s almost a matter of life and death.”

  “If that man’s excited about anything,” Garnet retorted, “it will be entirely a matter of death. Frankly, I couldn’t see my way clear to letting you question him if his escaping arrest depended on it. I called in Dr. Welles last night; and I’m giving you his opinion as well as my own.”

  “When can I see him, then?”

  “I can’t answer that. It may be a week; it may be a month. All I can tell you today is that you can’t question him now.”

  With that information, Hastings decided to interview Judge Wilton.

  “He’s the next best,” he thought. “That whispering across the woman’s body—it’s got to be explained, and explained right!”

  As a matter of fact, he had refrained from this inquiry the day before, so that his mind might not be clouded by anger. His deception by the judge had greatly provoked him.

  XIII

  MRS. BRACE BEGINS

  Court had recessed for lunch when Hastings, going down a second-story corridor of the Alexandria county courthouse, entered Judge Wilton’s anteroom. His hand was raised to knock on the door of the inner office when he heard the murmur of voices on the other side. He took off his hat and sat down, welcoming the breeze that swept through the room, a refreshing contrast to the forenoon’s heat and smother downstairs.

  He reached for his knife and piece of pine, checked the motion and glanced swiftly toward the closed door. A high note of a woman’s voice touched his memory, for a moment confusing him. But it was for a moment only. While the sound was still in his ears, he remembered where he had heard it before—from Mrs. Brace when, toward the close of his interview with her, she had shrilly denounced Berne Webster.

  Mrs. Brace, her daughter’s funeral barely three hours old, had started to make her threats good.

  While he was considering that, the door of the private office swung inward, Judge Wilton’s hand on the knob. It opened on the middle of a sentence spoken by Mrs. Brace:

  “—tell you, you’re a fool if you think you can put me off with that!”

  Her gleaming eyes were so furtive and so quick that they traversed the whole of Wilton’s countenance many times, a fiery probe of each separate feature. The inflections of her voice invested her words with ugliness; but she did not shriek.

  “You bully everybody else, but not me! They don’t call you ‘Hard Tom Wilton’ for nothing, do they? I know you! I know you, I tell you! I was down there in the courtroom when you sentenced that man! You had cruelty in your mind, cruelty on your face. Ugh! And you’re cruel to me—and taking an ungodly pleasure in it! Well, let me tell you, I won’t be broken by it. I want fair dealing, and I’ll have it!”

  At that moment, facing full toward Hastings, she caught sight of him. But his presence seemed a matter of no importance to her; it did not break the stream of her fierce invective. She did not even pause.

  He saw at once that her anger of yesterday was as nothing to the storming rage which shook her now. Every line of her face revealed malignity. The eyebrows were drawn higher on her forehead, nearer to the wave of white hair that showed under her black hat. The nostrils dilated and contracted with indescribable rapidity. The lips, thickened and rolling back at intervals from her teeth, revealed more distinctly that animal, exaggerated wetness which had so repelled him.

  “You wer
e out there on that lawn!” she pursued, her glance flashing back to the judge. “You were out there when she was killed! If you try to tell me you—”

  “Stop it! Stop it!” Wilton commanded, and, as he did so, turned his head to an angle that put Hastings within his field of vision.

  The judge, with one hand on the doorknob, had been pressing with the other against the woman’s shoulders, trying to thrust her out of the room—a move which she resisted by a hanging-back posture that threw her weight on his arm. He put more strength now into his effort and succeeded in forcing her clear of the threshold. His eyes were blazing under the shadow of his heavy, overhanging brows; but there was about him no suggestion of a loss of self-control.

  “I’m glad to see you!” he told Hastings, speaking over Mrs. Brace’s head, and smiling a deprecatory recognition of the hopelessness of contending with an infuriated woman.

  She addressed them both.

  “Smile all you please, now!” she threatened. “But the accounts aren’t balanced yet! Wait for what I choose to tell—what I intend to do!”

  Suddenly she got herself in hand. It was as unexpected and thorough a transformation as the one Hastings had seen twenty-four hours before during her declaration of Webster’s guilt. She had the same appearance now as then, the same tautness of body, the same flat, constrained tone.

  She turned to Wilton:

  “I ask you again, will you help me as I asked you? Are you going to deny me fair play?”

  He looked at her in amazement, scowling.

  “What fair play?” he exclaimed, and, without waiting for her reply, said to Hastings: “She insists that I know young Webster killed her daughter, that I can produce the evidence to prove it. Can you disabuse her mind?”

  She surprised them by going, slowly and with apparent composure, toward the corridor door. There she paused, looking at first one and then the other with an evil smile so openly contemptuous that it affected them strongly. There was something in it that made it flagrantly insulting. Hastings turned away from her. Judge Wilton gave her look for look, but his already flushed face coloured more darkly.

  “Very well, Judge Wilton!” she gave him insolent good-bye, in which there was also unmistakable threat. “You’ll do the right thing sooner or later—and as I tell you. You’re—get this straight—you’re not through with me yet!”

  She laughed, one low note, and, impossible as it seemed, proclaimed with the harsh sound an absolute confidence in what she said.

  “Nor you, Mr. Hastings!” she continued, taking her time with her words, and waiting until the detective faced her again, before she concluded: “You’ll sing a different tune when you find I’ve got this affair in my hands—tight!”

  Still smiling her contempt, as if she enjoyed a feeling of superiority, she left the room. When her footsteps died down the corridor, the two men drew long breaths of relief.

  Wilton broke the ensuing silence.

  “Is she sane?”

  “Yes,” Hastings said, “so far as sanity can be said to exist in a mind consecrated to evil.”

  The judge was surprised by the solemnity of the other’s manner. “Why do you say that?” he asked. “Do you know that much about her?”

  “Who wouldn’t?” Hastings retorted. “It’s written all over her.”

  Wilton led the way into his private office and closed the door.

  “I’m glad it happened at just this time,” he said, “when everybody’s out of the building.” He struck the desk with his fist. “By God!” he ground out through gritted teeth. “How I hate these wild, unbridled women!”

  “Yes,” agreed Hastings, taking the chair Wilton rolled forward for him. “She worries me. Wonder if she’s going to Sloanehurst.”

  “That would be the logical sequel to this visit,” Wilton said. “But pardon my show of temper. You came to see me?”

  “Yes; and, like her, for information. But,” the detective said, smiling, “not for rough-house purposes.”

  The judge had not entirely regained his equanimity; his face still wore a heightened colour; his whole bearing was that of a man mentally reviewing the results of an unpleasant incident. Instead of replying promptly to Hastings, he sat looking out of the window, obviously troubled.

  “Her game is blackmail,” he declared at last.

  “On whom?” the detective queried.

  “Arthur Sloane, of course. She calculates that he’ll play to have her cease annoying his daughter’s fiancé. And she’ll impress Arthur, if Jarvis ever lets her get to him. Somehow, she strangely compels credence.”

  “Not for me,” Hastings objected, and did not point out that Wilton’s words might be taken as an admission of Webster’s guilt.

  The judge himself might have seen that.

  “I mean,” he qualified, “she seems too smart a woman to put herself in a position where ridicule will be sure to overtake her. And yet, that’s what she’s doing—isn’t she?”

  The detective was whittling, dropping the chips into the waste-basket. He spoke with a deliberateness unusual even in him, framing each sentence in his mind before giving it utterance.

  “I reckon, judge, you and I have had some four or five talks—that is, not counting Saturday evening and yesterday at Sloanehurst. That’s about the extent of our acquaintance. That right?”

  “Why, yes,” Wilton said, surprised by the change of topic.

  “I mention it,” Hastings explained, “to show how I’ve felt toward you—you interested me. Excuse me if I speak plainly—you’ll see why later on—but you struck me as worth studying, deep. And I thought you must have sized me up, catalogued me one way or the other. You’re like me: waste no time with men who bore you. I felt certain, if you’d been asked, you’d have checked me off as reliable. Would you?”

  “Unquestionably.”

  “And, if I was reliable then, I’m reliable now. That’s a fair assumption, ain’t it?”

  “Certainly.” The judge laughed shortly, a little embarrassed.

  “That brings me to my point. You’ll believe me when I tell you my only interest in this murder is to find the murderer, and, while I’m doing it, to save the Sloanes as much as possible from annoyance. You’ll believe me, also, when I say I’ve got to have all the facts if I’m to work surely and fast. You recognize the force of that, don’t you?”

  “Why, yes, Hastings.” Wilton spoke impatiently this time.

  “Fine!” The old man shot him a genial glance over the steel-rimmed spectacles. “That’s the introduction. Here’s the real thing: I’ve an idea you could tell me more about what happened on the lawn Saturday night.”

  After his involuntary, immediate start of surprise, Wilton tilted his head, slowly blowing the cigar smoke from his pursed lips. He had a fine air of reflection, careful thought.

  “I can elaborate what I’ve already told you,” he said, finally, “if that’s what you mean—go into greater detail.”

  He watched closely the edge of the detective’s face unhidden by his bending over the wood he was cutting.

  “I don’t think elaboration could do much good,” Hastings objected. “I referred to new stuff—some fact or facts you might have omitted, unconsciously.”

  “Unconsciously?” Wilton echoed the word, as a man does when his mind is overtaxed.

  Hastings took it up.

  “Or consciously, even,” he said quickly, meeting the other’s eyes.

  The judge moved sharply, bracing himself against the back of the chair.

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “Skilled in the law yourself, thoroughly familiar, with the rules of evidence, it’s more than possible that you might have reviewed matters and decided that there were things which, if they were known, would do harm instead of good—obscure the truth, perhaps; or hinder the hunt for the guilty man instead of hel
ping it on. That’s clear enough, isn’t it? You might have thought that?”

  The look of sullen resentment in the judge’s face was unmistakable.

  “Oh, say what you mean!” he retorted warmly. “What you’re insinuating is that I’ve lied!”

  “It don’t have to be called that.”

  “Well, then, that I, a judge, sworn to uphold the law and punish crime, have elected to thwart the law and to cheat its officials of the facts they should have. Is that what you mean?”

  “I’ll be honest with you,” Hastings admitted, unmoved by the other’s grand manner. “I’ve wondered about that—whether you thought a judge had a right to do a thing of that sort.”

  Wilton’s hand, clenched on the edge of the desk, shook perceptibly.

  “Did you think that, judge?” the detective persisted.

  The judge hesitated.

  “It’s a point I’ve never gone into,” he said finally, with intentional sarcasm.

  Hastings snapped his knife-blade shut and thrust the piece of wood into his pocket.

  “Let’s get away from this beating about the bush,” he suggested, voice on a sterner note. “I don’t want to irritate you unnecessarily, judge. I came here for information—stuff I’m more than anxious to get. And I go back to that now: won’t you tell me anything more about the discovery of the woman’s body by the two of you—you and Webster?”

  “No; I won’t! I’ve covered the whole thing—several times.”

  “Is there anything that you haven’t told—anything you’ve decided to suppress?”

  Wilton got up from his chair and struck the desk with his fist.

  “See here, Hastings! You’re getting beside yourself. Representing Miss Sloane doesn’t warrant your insulting her friends. Suppose we consider this interview at an end. Some other time, perhaps—”

  Hastings also had risen.

  “Just a minute, judge!” he interrupted, all at once assuming the authoritative air that had so amazed Wilton the night of the murder. “You’re suppressing something—and I know it!”

  “That’s a lie!” Wilton retorted, the flush deepening to crimson on his face.