“He revelled in judicial murders. He gloated over the helpless people who, looking to him for justice, were merely the victims of his abhorrent cruelty. He loved the look of sick surprise in their starting eyes. He got a filthy joy out of seeing a man turn pale. He rubbed his hands in glee when a woman swooned. He—”
“I can’t stand that—can’t stand it!” Sloane protested, hands over his eyes.
“What more do you want, to prove his guilt, his abominable guilt?” Hastings swept on. “You have the motive, hatred of this woman here and her daughter—you have the proof of the letter sent to him making the compulsory appointment—you have his own crazy explanation of his homicidal impulse, from which, by the way, he never sought relief, a queer ‘impulse’ since it gave him time, hours, to plan the crime and manufacture the weapon with which he killed!”
“I said at the start,” Wilton put in hoarsely, “this man Hastings was only theorizing. If he had anything to connect me with—”
“I have!” Hastings told him, and came to a standstill in front of the sheriff, bending over him, as if to drive each statement into Crown’s reluctant mind.
“He got that letter a little after five in the afternoon. He left me here, in this room, with Sloane and Webster, and was gone three-quarters of an hour. That was just before dinner. He had the second floor, on that side of the house, entirely to himself. He took a nail-file from Webster’s dressing case, and in Webster’s room put a sharper point on it by filing it roughly with the file-blade of his own pen knife.
“That’s doubly proved: first, my magnet, with which I went over the floor in Webster’s room, picked up small particles of steel. Here they are.”
He produced a small packet and, without unwrapping it, handed it to Crown.
“Again: you’ll find that the file-blade of his knife retained particles of the steel in the little furrows of its corrugated surface. I know, because last Sunday, as your car came up the driveway, I borrowed his knife, on the pretext of tightening a screw in the blade of mine. And I examined it.”
He put up a silencing hand as Wilton forced a jeering laugh.
“But there’s more to prove his manufacture and ownership of the weapon that killed the woman. He made the handle from the end of a slat on the bed in the room which I occupied that night. The inference is obvious: he didn’t care to risk going outside the house to hunt for the wood he needed; he wouldn’t take it from an easily visible place; and, having stolen something from one room, he paid his attention to mine. All this is the supercaution of the so-called ‘smart criminal.’ It matches the risk he took in returning to the body to hunt for the weapon. That was why he was there when Webster found the body.
“The handle of the dagger matches the wood of the slat I’ve just mentioned. You won’t find that particular slat upstairs now. It was taken out of the house the next day, broken into sections and packed in his bag of golf-sticks. But there is proof in this room of the fact that he and he only made the dagger.
“You’ll find in the edge of the large blade of his penknife a nick, triangular in shape, which left an unmistakable groove in the wood every time he cut into it. That little groove shows, to the naked eye, on the end of the shortened slat and on the handle of the dagger. If you doubt it—”
“Thunder!” Crown interrupted, in an awed tone. “You’re right!”
He had taken the dagger from his pocket and given it minute scrutiny. He handed it now to Sloane.
Wilton, watching the scene with flaming eyes, sat motionless, his chin thrust down hard upon his collar, his face shining as if it had been polished with a cloth.
Sloane gave the dagger back to Crown before he spoke, in a wheezy, shrill key: “They’re there, the marks, the grooves!”
He did not look at Wilton.
Hastings straightened to his full stature, and looked toward Wilton.
“Now, Judge Wilton,” he challenged, “you said you preferred to answer the accusation here and now. Do you, still?”
Wilton, slowly raising the heavy lids of his eyes, like a man coming out of a trance, presented to him and to the others a face which, in spite of its flushed and swollen aspect, looked singularly bleak.
“It’s not an accusation,” he said in his roughened, grating voice. “It’s a network of suppositions, of theories, of impossibilities—a crazy structure, all built on the rotten foundation of a previous misfortune.”
“Arrest him, Crown!” Hastings commanded sharply.
Wilton tried to laugh, but his heavy lips merely worked in a crazy barrenness of sound. With a vague, clumsy idea of covering up his confusion, he started to light a cigar.
He stopped, hands in mid-air, when Crown, shambling to his feet, said:
“Judge, I’ve got to act. He’s proved his case.”
“Proved it!” Wilton made weak protest.
“If he hasn’t, let’s see your penknife.”
Wilton put his hand into his trousers pocket, began the motion that would have drawn out the knife, checked it, and withdrew his hand empty. He managed a mirthless, dreary laugh, a rattling sound that fell, dead of any feeling, from his grimacing lips.
“No, by God!” he refused. “I’ll give it to neither of you. I don’t have to!”
In that moment, he fell to pieces. With his thick shoulders dropping forward, he became an inert mass bundled against the table edge. The blood went out of his face, so that his cheeks hollowed, and shadows formed under his eyes. He was like the victim of a quick consumption.
Crown’s eyes were on Hastings.
“That’s enough,” the old man said shortly.
“Too much,” agreed Crown. “Judge, there’s no bail—on a murder charge.”
“I’m very glad,” Mrs. Brace commented, a terrible satisfaction in her voice. “He pays me—at last.”
In the music room Dr. Garnet had just given Lucille and Hastings a favourable report on Berne Webster’s condition.
“I should so like to tell him,” she said, her glance entreating; “if you’ll let me! Wouldn’t he get well much faster if he knew it—knew the suspense was all over—that neither he nor father’s suspected any more?”
“I think,” the doctor gave his opinion with exaggerated deliberation, “it might—in fact, it really will be his best medicine.”
She thanked him, stars swimming in her eyes.
THE WINNING CLUE, by James Hay, Jr.
A note from the publisher: This novel was originally published in 1919 and contains elements which modern readers may find insensitive or racist. They representat attitudes of the era and should be viewed with their historical perspective in mind.
CHAPTER I
STRANGLED
When a woman’s voice, pitched to the high note of utter terror, rang out on the late morning quiet of Manniston Road, Lawrence Bristow looked up from his newspaper quickly but vaguely, as if he doubted his own ears. He was reading an account of a murder committed in Waukesha, Wisconsin, and the shrieks he had just heard fitted in so well with the paragraph then before his eyes that his imagination might have been playing him tricks. He was allowed, however, little time for speculation or doubt.
“Murder! Help!” cried the woman in a staccato sharpness that carried the length of many blocks.
Bristow sprang to his feet and started down the short flight of stairs leading from his porch to the street. Before he had taken three steps, he saw the frightened girl standing on the porch of No. 5, two doors to his left. Although he was lame, he displayed surprising agility. His left leg, two inches shorter than the right and supported by a steel brace from foot to thigh, did not prevent his being the first to reach the young woman’s side.
Late as it was, half-past ten, she was not fully dressed. She wore a kimono of light, sheer material which, clutched spasmodically about her, revealed the slightness and grace of her figure. Her fa
ir hair hung down her back in a long, thick braid.
Neighbours across the street and further up Manniston Road were out on their porches now or starting toward No. 5. All of them were women.
The girl—she was barely past twenty, he thought—stopped screaming, and, her hands pressed to her throat and cheeks, stared wildly from him toward the front door, which was standing open. He entered the living room of the one-story bungalow. A foot within the doorway, he stood stock still. On the sofa against the opposite wall he saw another woman. He knew at first glance that she was dead.
The body was in a curious position. Apparently, before death had come, the victim had been sitting on the sofa, and, in dying, her body had crumpled over from the waist toward the right, so that now the lower part of her occupied the attitude of sitting while the upper half reclined as if in the posture of natural sleep. One thing which, perhaps, added to the gruesomeness of the sight was that she had on evening dress, a gown of pale blue satin embellished in unerring taste with real old Irish lace.
Although the face had been beautiful under its crown of luxuriant black hair, it now was distorted. While the eyes were closed, the mouth was open, very wide—an ugly, repulsive gape.
He was aware that the woman in the kimono was just behind him—he could feel her hot breath against the back of his neck—and that behind her pressed the neighbours, their number augmented by the arrival of two men. He turned and faced them.
“Call a doctor—and the police, somebody, will you?” he said sharply.
“They have a telephone back there in the dining room,” volunteered one of the women on the porch.
Another, a Mrs. Allen who lived in No. 6, had put her arms around the terrified girl and was forcing her into an armchair on the porch.
The others started into the living room.
“Wait a moment,” cautioned Bristow. “Don’t come in here yet. The police will want to find things undisturbed. It looks like murder.”
They obeyed him without question. He was about forty years old, of medium height and with good shoulders, but his chest was too flat, and his face showed an unnatural flush. His mere physique was not one to force obedience from others. It was in his eyes, dark-brown and lit with a peculiar flaming intensity, that they read his right to command.
“Please go through this room to the telephone and call a doctor,” he said, singling out the woman who had spoken.
His voice, a deep barytone with a pleasant note, was perfectly steady. He seemed to hold their excitement easily within bounds.
The woman he had addressed complied with his suggestion. While she was doing so, he crossed over to the sofa and put his hand to the wrist of the murdered woman. In order to do that, he had to move a fold of the gown which partially concealed it. The flesh was cold, and he shivered slightly, readjusting the satin to exactly the fold in which he had found it.
“Too late for a doctor to help now,” he threw back over his shoulder.
They watched him silently. Low moans were coming constantly from the woman in the chair on the porch.
Bristow took the telephone in his turn and called up police headquarters.
The chief of police, whom he knew, answered the call.
“Hello! Captain Greenleaf?” asked the lame man.
“Yes.”
“There’s been a murder at Number Five, Manniston Road. This is Lawrence Bristow, of Number Nine.”
“Aw, quit your kiddin’,” laughed Greenleaf. “What do you want to do, get me up there to hear another of your theories about—”
“This is no joke,” snapped Bristow. “I tell you one of the women in Number Five has been murdered. Come—”
But the chief, recognizing the urgency in the summons, had left the telephone and was on his way.
As Bristow turned toward the living room, Mrs. Allen and another woman were carrying the hysterical, moaning girl from the front porch to one of the two bedrooms in the bungalow. Some of the others again started into the living room.
“Let’s wait,” he cautioned once more. “If we get to moving around in here we may destroy any clues that could be used later.”
When they fell back a little, he joined them on the porch, standing always so that he could watch the body and see that no one changed its attitude or even approached it. His eyes studied keenly all the furniture in the room. Save for one overturned stiff-backed chair, it apparently had not been disturbed.
The doctor arrived and, waiting for no information, approached the murdered woman. As Bristow had done, he touched her wrist, and then slipped his hand beneath her corsage so that it rested above her heart. He straightened up almost immediately.
“Dead,” he said to Bristow; “dead for hours.”
The physician became conscious of the hysterical girl’s moans, took a step toward the bedrooms and paused.
“That’s right, doctor,” Bristow told him. “They need you back there.”
The doctor hurried out.
“That is—that was Mrs. Withers, wasn’t it?” Bristow, looking at the dead body, asked of the group.
“Yes; and the other is her sister, Miss Fulton,” one of them answered.
Bristow had seemed to all of them a peculiar man—too quiet and reserved—ever since he had come to No. 9 four months before. They remembered this now, when he seemed scarcely conscious of the identity of the two girls who had lived almost next door to him during all that time.
Different members of the crowd gave him information: Miss Maria Fulton, like nearly everybody else on Manniston Road, had tuberculosis, and Mrs. Withers had been living with her. They had plenty of money—not rich, perhaps, but able to have all the comforts and most of the luxuries of life. They were here in the hope that Furmville’s climate would restore Miss Fulton’s health.
Their coloured cook-and-maid had not come to work that morning, it seemed, and Miss Fulton, who was the younger of the two sisters, was on the “rest” cure, ordered by the doctor to stay in bed day and night. Perhaps that was why she had not discovered Mrs. Withers’ body earlier in the day.
They gossiped on.
It was like a lesson in immortality—the dead body, with distorted face and twisted limbs, just inside the room; and outside, in the low-toned phrases of the awed women, swift and vivid pictures of what she; when alive, had said and done and seemed.
“Everybody liked her. If somebody had come and told me a woman living on Manniston Road had been killed, she would have been the last one I’d have thought of as the victim.” “All the other beautiful women I ever knew were stupid; she wasn’t.” “Her husband couldn’t come to Furmville very often.” “Loveliest black hair I ever saw.” “She used to be—”
Then followed quick glimpses of her life as they had seen or heard it: a dance at Maplewood Inn where she had been the undisputed belle; a novel she had liked; a big reception at the White House in Washington when, during the year of her début, the French ambassador had called her “the most beautiful American,” and the newspapers had made much of it; an emerald ring she had worn; the unfailing good humour she had always shown in the tedious routine of nursing her sister—and so on, a mass of facts and impressions which were, simultaneously, a little biography of her and an unaffected appreciation of the way she had touched and coloured their lives.
Captain Greenleaf, with one of the plain-clothes men of his force, came hurrying up the steps. The crowd fell back, gave them passage, and closed in again.
“Nothing’s been disturbed, captain,” said Bristow.
“Where is she?” asked Greenleaf anxiously. He was not accustomed to murder cases.
He caught sight of the body on the sofa.
“God!” he said in a low tone, and turned toward the plain-clothes man:
“Come on in, Jenkins—you, too, Mr. Bristow.”
The three entered the living room, and
Greenleaf, with a muttered word of apology to the on-lookers, closed the door in their faces.
He, too, did what Bristow had done—put his fingers on the dead woman’s wrist. He was breathing rapidly, and his hand shook. Jenkins stood motionless. He also was overwhelmed by the tragedy. Besides, he was not cut out for work of this kind. In looking for illicit distillers and boot-leggers, or negroes charged with theft, he was in his element, but this sort of thing was new to him. He had no idea of where to turn or what to do.
“She’s dead,” Bristow said to the captain. “The doctor says she has been dead a long time—hours.”
“Where’s the doctor?”
“Back there. Miss Fulton, the sister, is hysterical with fright.”
“Who sent for the doctor?”
“I did. I asked one of the women here to telephone.”
“Then I’ll call the coroner.”
He stepped through the open folding doors into the dining room and took down the receiver, looking, as he did so, at the body and its surroundings.
Bristow stooped down, picked up something from the floor near the sofa and dropped it into his vest pocket.
The doctor—Dr. Braley—returned as the captain hung up the telephone receiver.
“Miss Fulton is quieter now,” he announced.
“Doctor,” requested Greenleaf, “look at this body, will you? What caused death?”
Braley, a thin, quick-moving little man of thirty-five, bent over the dead woman, lifted one of her eyelids, and examined her throat as far as was possible without moving the head.
“She was choked to death,” he gave his opinion. “Although the eyes are closed, you see the effect they produce of almost starting from their sockets. And the tongue protrudes. Besides, there are the marks on her throat. You can see them there on the left side.”
“How long has she been dead?”
“I can’t say definitely. I should guess about eight or ten hours anyway.”
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