The Classic Mystery Novel

by Dorothy Cameron Disney

  Although his voice was shrill, there was no sound of weakness in it. The trembling that attacked him was the result of anger, not of nervousness.

  Hastings rose, astounded by the outbreak.

  “I’m afraid you don’t realize the seriousness of—”

  “Oh, get out of here!” Sloane interrupted again. “You’ve imposed on my daughter with your talk of being helpful, and all that rot, but you can’t hoodwink me. What the devil do you mean by letting that sheriff come in here and subject me to all this annoyance and shock? You’d save us from unpleasantness!”

  He spoke more slowly now, as if he cudgelled his brain for the most biting sarcasm, the most unbearable insolence.

  “Don’t realize the seriousness!—Flat-headed fiends!—Are you any nearer the truth now than you were at the start?—Try to understand this, Mr. Hastings: you’re discharged, fired! From now on, I’m in charge of what goes on in this house. If there’s any trouble to be avoided, I’ll attend to it. Get that!—and get out!”

  Hastings, opening his mouth for angry retort, checked himself. He stood a moment silent, shaken by the effort it cost him to maintain his self-control.

  “Humph!” Sloane’s nasal, twangy exclamation was clearly intended to provoke him further.

  But, without a word, he turned and left the room. Passing the screen near the door, he heard Jarvis snicker, a discreet echo of Sloane’s goading ridicule.

  On his way back to the parlour, the old man made up his mind to discount Sloane’s behaviour.

  “I’ve got to take a chance,” he counselled himself, “but I know I’m right in doing it. A big responsibility—but I’m right!”

  Then he submitted this report:

  “He says nothing new, Crown. Far as I can make out, nothing unusual waked him up that night—except chronic nervousness; he turned on that light to find some medicine; he knew nothing of the murder until Judge Wilton called him.”

  “Humph!” growled Crown. “And you fall for that!”

  Hastings eyed him sternly. “It’s the statement I’m going to give to the reporters.”

  The sheriff was silent, irresolute. Hastings congratulated himself on his earlier deduction: that Crown, unable to frighten Sloane into communicativeness, was thankful for an excuse to withdraw.

  Hendricks had reported the two-hour conference between Crown and Mrs. Brace late that afternoon. Hastings decided now: “The man’s in cahoots with her. His ally! And he won’t act until he’s had another session with her.—And she won’t advise an arrest for a day or two anyway. Her game is to make him play on Sloane’s nerves for a while. She advises threats, not arrests—which suits me, to a T!”

  He fought down a chuckle, thinking of that alliance.

  Crown corroborated his reasoning.

  “All right, Hastings,” he said doggedly. “I’m not going back to his room. I gave him his chance. He can take the consequences.”

  “What consequences?”

  “I’d hardly describe ’em to his personal representative, would I? But you can take this from me: they’ll come soon enough—and rough enough!”

  Hastings made no reference to having been dismissed by Sloane. He was glad when Crown changed the subject.

  “Hastings, you saw the reporters this afternoon—I’ve been wondering—they asked me—did they ask you whether you suspected the valet—Jarvis?”

  “Of what?”

  “Killing her.”

  “No; they didn’t ask me.”

  “Funny,” said Crown, ill at ease. “They asked me.”

  “So you said,” Hastings reminded, looking hard at him.

  “Well!” Crown blurted it out. “Do you suspect him? Are you working on that line—at all?”

  Hastings paused. He had no desire to mislead him. And yet, there was no reason for confiding in him—and delay was at present the Hastings plan.

  “I’ll tell you, Crown,” he said, finally; “I’ll work on any line that can lead to the guilty man.—What do you know?”

  “Who? Me?” Crown’s tone indicated the absurdity of suspecting Jarvis. “Not a thing.”

  But it gave Hastings food for thought. Was Mrs. Brace in communication with Jarvis? And did Crown know that? Was it possible that Crown wanted to find out whether Hastings was having Jarvis shadowed? How much of a fool was the woman making of the sheriff, anyway?

  Another thing puzzled him: why did Mrs. Brace suspect Arthur Sloane of withholding the true story of what he had seen the night of the murder? Hastings’ suspicion, amounting to certainty, came from his knowledge that the man’s own daughter thought him deeply involved in the crime. But Mrs. Brace—was she clever enough to make that deduction from the known facts? Or did she have more direct information from Sloanehurst than he had thought possible?

  He decided not to leave the sheriff entirely subject to her schemes and suggestions. He would give Mr. Crown something along another line—a brake, as it were, on impulsive action.

  “You talk about arresting Webster right away—or Sloane,” he began, suddenly confiding. “You wouldn’t want to make a mistake—would you?”

  Crown rose to that. “Why? What do you know—specially?”

  “Well, not so much, maybe. But it’s worth thinking about. I’ll give you the facts—confidentially, of course.—Hub Hill’s about a hundred yards from this house, on the road to Washington. When automobiles sink into it hub-deep, they come out with a lot of mud on their wheels—black, loamy mud. Ain’t any other mud like that Hub Hill mud anywhere near here. It’s just special and peculiar to Hub Hill. That so?”

  “Yes,” agreed Crown, absorbed.

  “All right. How, then, did Eugene Russell keep black, Hub Hill mud on his shoes that night if he went the four miles on foot to where Otis picked him up?”

  “Eh?” said Crown, chin fallen.

  “By the time he’d run four miles, his shoes would have been covered with the red mud of that mile of ‘dirt road’ or the thin, grey mud of the three miles of pike—wouldn’t they? They’d have thrown off that Hub Hill mud pretty quick, wouldn’t they?”

  “Thunder!” marvelled Crown. “That’s right! And those shoes were in his room; I saw ’em.” He gurgled, far back in his throat. “Say! How did he get from Hub Hill to where Otis picked him up?”

  “That’s what I say,” declared Hastings, very bland. “How?”

  To Lucille, after Crown’s departure, the detective declared his intention to “stand by” her, to stay on the case. He repeated his statement of yesterday: he suspected too much, and knew too little, to give it up.

  He told her of the responsibility he had assumed in giving the sheriff the fictitious Sloane statement. “That is, it’s not fictitious, in itself; it’s what your father has been saying. But I told Crown, and I’m going to tell the newspaper men, that he says it’s all he knows, really. And I hate to do it—because, honestly, Miss Sloane, I don’t think it is all. I’m afraid he’s deceiving us.”

  She did not contradict that; it was her own opinion.

  “However,” the old man made excuse, “I had to do it—in view of things as they are. And he’s got to stick to it, now that I’ve made it ‘official,’ so to speak. Do you think he will?”

  She did not see why not. She would explain to him the importance, the necessity, of that course.

  “He’s so mistaken in what he’s doing!” she said. “I don’t understand him—really. You know how devoted to me he is. He called me into his room again an hour or two ago and tried to comfort me. He said he had reason to know everything would come out as it should. But he looked so—so uncertain!—Oh, Mr. Hastings, who did kill that woman?”

  “I think I’ll be able to prove who did it—let’s see,” he spoke with a light cheerfulness, and at the same time with sincerity; “I’ll be able to prove it in less than a week after Mrs. Brac
e takes that money from you.”

  She said nothing to that, and he leaned forward sharply, peering at her face, illegible to him in the darkness of the verandah.

  “So much depends on that, on you,” he added. “You won’t fail me—tomorrow?”

  “I’ll do my best,” she said, earnestly, struggling against depression.

  “She must take that money,” he declared with great emphasis. “She must!”

  “And you think she will?”

  “Miss Sloane, I know she will,” he said, a fatherly encouragement in his voice. “I’m seldom mistaken in people; and I know I’ve judged this woman correctly. Money’s her weakness. Love of it has destroyed her already. Offering this bribe to anybody else situated as she is would be ridiculous—but she—she’ll take it.”

  Lucille sat a long time on the verandah after Hastings had gone. She was far more depressed than he had suspected; she had to endure so much, she thought—the suspense, which grew heavier as time went by; the notoriety; Berne Webster still in danger of his life; her father’s inexplicable pose of indifference toward everything; the suspicions of the newspapers and the public of both her father and Berne; and the waiting, waiting, waiting—for what?

  A little moan escaped her.

  What if Mrs. Brace did take the marked money? What would that show? That she was acting with criminal intent, Hastings had said. But he had another and more definite object in urging her to this undertaking; he expected from it a vital development which he had not explained—she was sure. She worried with that idea.

  Her confidence in Hastings had been without qualification. But what was he doing? Anything? Judge Wilton was forever saying, “Trust Hastings; he’s the man for this case.” And that was his reputation; people declared that, if anybody could get to the bottom of all this mystery, he could. Yet, two whole days had passed since the murder, and he had just said another week might be required to work out his plan of detection—whatever that plan was.

  Another week of this! She put her hot palms to her hotter temples, striving for clarity of thought. But she was dazed by her terror—her isolated terror, for some of her thoughts were such that she could share them with nobody—not even Hastings.

  “If the sheriff makes no arrest within the next few days, I’ll be out of the woods,” he had told her. “Delay is what I want.”

  There, again, was discouragement, for here was the sheriff threatening to serve a warrant on Berne within the next twenty-four hours! She had heard Crown make the threat, and to her it had seemed absolutely final: unless her father revealed something which Crown wanted, whether her father knew it or not, Berne was to be subjected to this humiliation, this added blow to his chance for recovery!

  She sprang up, throwing her hands wide and staring blindly at the stars.

  The woman whom she was to bribe cast a deep shadow on her imagination. Sharing the feeling of many others, she had reached the reluctant conclusion that Mrs. Brace in some way knew more than anybody else about the murder and its motives. It was, she told herself, a horrid feeling, and without reason. But she could not shake it off. To her, Mrs. Brace was a figure of sinister power, an agent of ugliness, waiting to do evil—waiting for what?

  By a great effort, she steadied her jangled nerves. Hastings was counting on her. And work—even work in the dark—was preferable to this idleness, this everlasting summing-up of frightful possibilities without a ray of hope. She would do her best to make that woman take the money!

  Tomorrow she would be of real service to Berne Webster—she would atone, in some small measure, for the sorrow she had brought upon him, discarding him because of empty gossip!—Would he continue to love her?—Perhaps, if she had not discarded him, Mildred Brace would not have been murdered.

  A groan escaped her. She fled into the house, away from her thoughts.

  XVI

  THE BRIBE

  It was nine o’clock the following evening when Lucille Sloane, sure that she had entered the Walman unobserved, rang the bell of Mrs. Brace’s apartment. Her body felt remarkably light and facile, as if she moved in a tenuous, half-real atmosphere. There were moments when she had the sensation of floating. Her brain worked with extraordinary rapidity. She was conscious of an unusually resourceful intelligence, and performed a series of mental gymnastics, framing in advance the sentences she would use in the interview confronting her.

  The constant thought at the back of her brain was that she would succeed; she would speak and act in such a way that Mrs. Brace would take the money. She was buoyed by a fierce determination to be repaid for all the suspense, all the agony of heart, that had weighed her down throughout this long, leaden-footed day—the past twenty-four hours unproductive of a single enlightening incident.

  Mrs. Brace opened the door and, with a scarcely perceptible nod of the head, motioned her into the living room. Neither of them spoke until they had seated themselves on the chairs by the window. Even then, the silence was prolonged, until Lucille realized that her tongue was dry and uncomfortably large for her mouth. An access of trembling shook her. She tried to smile and knew that her lips were twisting in a ghastly grin.

  Mrs. Brace moved slowly to and fro on the armless rocker, her swift, appraising eyes taking in her visitor’s distress. The smooth face wore its customary, inexpressive calm. Lucille, striving desperately to arrive at some opinion of what the woman thought, saw that she might as well try to find emotion in a statue.

  “I—I,” the girl finally attained a quick, flurried utterance, “want to thank you for—for having this—this talk with me.”

  “What do you want to talk about, Miss Sloane?”

  The low, metallic voice was neither friendly nor hostile. It expressed, more than anything else, a sardonic, bullying self-sufficiency.

  It both angered and encouraged Lucille. She perceived the futility of polite, introductory phrases here; she could go straight to her purpose, be brutally frank. She gave Mrs. Brace a brilliant, disarming smile, a proclamation of fellowship. Her confidence was restored.

  “I’m sure we can talk sensibly together, Mrs. Brace,” she explained, dissembling her indignation. “We can get down to business, at once.”

  “What business?” inquired the older woman, with some of the manner Hastings had seen, an air of lying in wait.

  “I said, on the phone, it was something of advantage to you—didn’t I?”

  “Yes; you said that.”

  “And, of course, I want something from you.”

  “Naturally.”

  “I’ll tell you what it is.” Lucille spoke now with cool precision, as yet untouched by the horror she had expected to feel. “It’s a matter of money.”

  Mrs. Brace’s tongue came out to the edge of the thin line of her lips. Her nostrils quivered, once, to the sharply indrawn breath. Her eyes were more furtive.

  “Money?” she echoed. “For what?”

  “There’s no good of my making long explanations, Mrs. Brace,” Lucille said. “I’ve read the newspapers, every line of them, about—our trouble. And I saw the references to your finances, your lack of money.”

  “Yes?” Mrs. Brace’s right hand lay on her lap; the thumb of it began to move against the forefinger rapidly, the motion a woman makes in feeling the texture of cloth—or the trick of a bank clerk separating paper money.

  “Yes. I read, also, what you said about the tragedy. Today I noticed that the only note of newness in the articles in the papers came from you—from your saying that ‘in a few days, three or four at the outside’—that was your language, I’m quite sure—you’d produce evidence on which an arrest would be made. I’ve intelligence enough to see that the public’s interest in you is so great, the sympathy for you is so great, that your threats—I mean, predictions, or opinions—colour everything that’s written by the reporters. You see?”

  “Do I see what?”<
br />
  Despite her excellent pose of waiting with nothing more than a polite interest, Lucille saw in her a pronounced alteration. That was not so much in her face as in her body. Her limbs had a look of rigidity.

  “Don’t you see what I mean?” Lucille insisted. “I see that you can make endless trouble for us—for all of us at Sloanehurst. You can make people believe Mr. Webster guilty, and that father and I are shielding him. People listen to what you say. They seem to be on your side.”

  “Well?”

  “I wondered if you wouldn’t stop your interviews—your accusations?”

  The younger woman’s eagerness, evident now in the variety of her gestures and the rapid procession of pallour and flush across her cheeks, persuaded Mrs. Brace that Lucille was acting on an impulse of her own, not as an agent to carry out another’s well designed scheme. The older woman, at that idea, felt safe. She asked:

  “And you want—what?”

  “I’ve come here to ask you to tell me all you know, or to be quiet altogether.”

  “I’m afraid I don’t understand—fully,” returned Mrs. Brace, with an exaggerated bewilderment. “Tell all I know?”

  “That is, if you do know anything you haven’t told!” Lucille urged her. “Oh, don’t you see? I’m saying to you that I want to put an end to this dreadful suspense!”

  Mrs. Brace laughed disagreeably; her face was harder, less human. “You mean I’m amusing myself, exerting myself needlessly, as a matter of spite? Do you mean to tell me that?”

  “No! No!” Lucille denied, impatient with herself for lack of clearness. “I mean I’m sure you’re attacking an innocent man. And I’m willing, I’m anxious—oh, I hope so much, Mrs. Brace—to make an agreement with you—a financial arrangement—” She paused the fractional part of a second on that; and, seeing that the other did not resent the term, she added: “to pay you to stop it. Isn’t that clear?”

  “Yes; that’s clear.”

  “Understand me, please. What I ask is that you say nothing more to the reporters, the sheriff or the Washington police, that will have the effect of hounding them on against Mr. Webster. I want to eliminate from the situation all the influence you’ve exerted to make Mr. Crown believe Mr. Webster’s guilty and my father’s protecting him.”