He snapped his fingers under Bristow’s nose.
“Why, dammit!” he shrilled. “Haven’t you any idea yet where to look for the murderer? Are you groping around here helplessly after all this time? Dammit! I want a real detective on this job, and I’m going to get one.”
He clapped his felt hat to his head and started toward the door.
“You can bet your last dollar on that! I’m going to get one, and he’ll be here tomorrow if telegrams can bring him. I’ll have Sam Braceway, the cleverest fellow in this business in the South, here tomorrow! I intend to have punishment for the devil who killed my wife. Punishment!—the worst kind!”
His lips were trembling, and he dashed the back of his hand across his face, as if he feared the formation of tears in his eyes.
“You two boneheads can put that in your pipes and smoke it! I mean business!”
He slammed the door, and was gone, taking the steps to the street in two bounds.
“By cracky!” said Greenleaf. “What do you make of that?”
“Nothing,” Bristow answered contemptuously; “nothing except that it may be well for us to find out a whole lot more about Mr. Withers and his peculiarities of temper and temperament.”
“I should say so,” the chief chimed agreement.
“Of course,” Bristow added, “that was the easiest way for him to break off our inquiry. I don’t think he was on the level with all that storming and raging. It might have been just a great big bluff—that’s all. And yet, that Braceway he talked about is good, a wonder. He’s done some wonderful work.”
“Here’s one point,” Greenleaf advanced: “why didn’t he ask for help from the police yesterday afternoon when he lost track of that fellow with the gold tooth?”
“Yes,” the other returned absent-mindedly; “why didn’t he?”
CHAPTER VI
MORLEY IS IN A HURRY
Bristow looked at his watch. It was nearly half-past two o’clock.
“Hear anything about Perry?” he asked.
“Yes,” Greenleaf informed him. “My man found him. They’ve got him down at headquarters. I phoned from Number Five and got this. He’d been drinking. I gather that he’s about half-drunk now.”
“Good! If he’ll talk at all, it will be easier for you to get the truth out of him that way than if he were cold sober. Suppose you see him and Douglas Campbell; and later on this afternoon you and I can talk to Miss Fulton and her father.”
“Her father won’t be here today. He wired that a little while ago. He’ll get here early in the morning.”
“Very well. It’s of no consequence just now. Come back here for me at four, will you?”
When the chief had gone, Bristow sat down to his delayed dinner. As he ate, he went over the facts so far discovered, and catalogued them:
Perry, the negro—incriminated, probably, by the buttons from his overalls jacket; by the ease with which he could have obtained from Lucy Thomas the kitchen key to No. 5; by the possible motive of robbery; and by the brutal means, choking, employed to inflict death.
Morley—incriminated by his unknown whereabouts during the two hours following his missing the midnight train, and by the discovery of the ring (possibly Mrs. Withers’) in his room at the Brevord.
Withers—involved by the probable motive of jealousy and rage, and by his secret trip to Furmville.
Maria Fulton—well, he would see.
“Just now,” he concluded in his own mind, “it looks worse for the negro than anybody else. There’s one thing certain: the man against whom the most evidence rests by the time they have the inquest tomorrow will be the one held for the action of the grand jury. That’s the thing to do—get the one who seems most probably guilty.”
He thought of Douglas Campbell and immediately dismissed him as a possibility in the list of probable murderers. The young real estate dealer had been completely exonerated by the statement of the dead woman’s husband; that, upon bringing her back to the bungalow, he had at once said good night to her and gone home.
Nor did he puzzle his mind about the unknown individual with the gold tooth, he who had appeared in Abrahamson’s pawnshop and a few minutes later miraculously disappeared. If the ring pawned had belonged to Mrs. Withers, why should this man return to No. 5 and murder her? If he had obtained nothing from her beforehand, he might have had a real motive for the crime. But, since he had already got the ring, it seemed folly to assume that he would later kill her.
In spite of his growing belief that the onus of proof must fall upon the negro, Bristow could not keep his thoughts away from young Morley. He, more than any of the other suspects, had told an unsatisfactory story. Besides, he had a bad face.
The latest addition to the Furmville plain-clothes squad remembered how carefully Morley’s hands had been manicured. He—
With a quick motion, he went to the telephone and called for Greenleaf.
“Chief, are you still holding Perry?”
“Sure, I’m holding him. I’ll continue to hold him for some time, I’m thinking. His story don’t suit me. He says—”
“All right. Ill get that from you when I see you this afternoon. In the meantime, I wish you’d have his finger nails carefully cleaned. I want—”
But the request had instantly overwhelmed Greenleaf.
“What!” he yelled. “Clean his finger nails!”
“Yes,” Bristow continued smoothly, disregarding the other’s evident distaste and surprise. “If I were down there, I’d do it myself. In fact, it would be better for you to do it. Don’t leave it to some careless subordinate.”
The chief laughed his sarcasm.
“You know,” this still with laughter, “we Southerners are none too strong on acting as manicures to these coloured folks.”
“It’s absolutely necessary,” was the insistent answer. “And, when you do clean them, save every bit of dirt thus obtained. Now, will you do it?”
“Why, yes,” Greenleaf assented with reluctance. “If you say it’s absolutely necessary, I’ll do it—I’ll do it myself.”
“Good. I’ll depend on you for it. By the way, can’t you have somebody, your man Jenkins or some one as good as he is, go out on a real hunt for the fellow with the gold tooth? You remember Withers’ description of him?”
“Yes. I’d thought of that.”
“That’s good. If he can’t spot him at any of the hotels, have him make the rounds of the boarding houses. I think you’d like to get your hands on a customer as slippery as Withers says that man is.”
“I’ll send Jenkins at once,” the chief took his directions in good part.
“Good again. By the way, you’ll be up here at four?”
“No; five. Dr. Braley told me we’d have to wait until then; said we’d better. He wants her to get that extra hour’s sleep.”
Bristow started to say something further, hesitated and then hung up the receiver with a word of assent.
Mattie had come in to clear off the table.
“Go down to Number Six,” he told her, “and ask Mrs. Allen if she will be so kind as to come up here at her earliest convenience. Explain to her that it’s against the doctor’s orders for me to leave this house, and that the excitement of this morning has tired me out.”
Mrs. Allen appeared in less than a quarter of an hour. He received her in the living room and introduced himself, apologizing for not having been able to call on her. She understood perfectly, she said.
She was a woman about forty years of age, her face a little thin and worn, a good deal of gray in her dark hair. She had been nursing her husband for two years, and the strain had begun to tell. Nevertheless, he soon saw that she was a woman of refinement, possessed of a keen intelligence.
“I wish,” he requested, after he had explained his connection with the murder, “you’d tell me
all you know about these sisters. I gathered this morning that you were well acquainted with them.”
He had always found it easy to gain the confidence of women. They liked his manners, his air of deference, his manifest interest in everything they said.
“I can’t say that I’ve been intimate with them,” Mrs. Allen explained in her soft, pleasing voice; “but Mrs. Withers and I knew each other pretty well. She came over to my house quite frequently, and I was in the habit of running in to see her.”
“Don’t you know the other, Miss Fulton, equally well?”
“No. You see, she was always in, or on, the bed, and she never seemed to want to talk. Besides, she was different from Mrs. Withers—not so bright and attractive, and not so neighbourly.”
“Mrs. Withers was always a laughing, sparkling sort of a person, wasn’t she?”
“She gave that impression to some people,” Mrs. Allen answered thoughtfully, “but not to me. It was her nature to be free and happy. Most of the time she seemed that way. But there were other times when I could see that she had something weighing on her mind, something depressing her.”
“Ah!” Bristow said with deeper interest. “That’s just what we want to find out about.”
Mrs. Allen sat silent for a moment pursing her lips.
Bristow let her reflect.
“I don’t think,” she said at last, “Mrs. Withers ever was in fear of anybody or any thing. She wasn’t that kind.”
“Did she ever tell you anything to make you think that she wasn’t happy?”
“I was trying to recall just what it was. Once, I remember, when she was sitting out on the sleeping porch—she sometimes came out there to talk to my husband, who is always in bed—we had been discussing the care with which every woman had to live her life.
“‘Women are like politicians,’ Mr. Allen said. ‘They can’t afford to have a dark spot in their past. If they do, somebody will drag it out.’
“At that Mrs. Withers cried out:
“‘Oh! how awfully true that is! And how unfair! It never seems to matter with men, but with women it means heaven, or the other thing. I wish I knew—’ She broke off with a gasp, and I saw her lip tremble.
“It was funny, but at the time I thought she was referring to her sister, not to herself.”
“What made you think that?”
“I don’t know. I had no real reason for it. Perhaps it was just because unhappiness seemed so foreign to Mrs. Withers herself.”
“Was there anything else?”
“Once, when I ran into Number Five, I found her crying. She was in the living room, all doubled up in a rocking chair, crying silently.”
“Did she say why?”
“No; but, while I was trying to soothe her, she said, ‘Life’s so hard—it’s so hard to straighten out a tangle when once you’ve made it. If one could just go back and do things over again!’ When I asked her if I could help her, she said I couldn’t. ‘Nobody can,’ she sobbed out on my shoulder. ‘It doesn’t concern me alone. I’ll have to fight it out the best way I can.’”
Bristow was greatly interested.
“What did you conclude from all that, Mrs. Allen?” he asked.
“My impression was very vague,” Mrs. Allen returned frankly. “I don’t think it is of much value now. I got, somehow, the idea that there was in her life something which she had to conceal, something which might at any moment be discovered. I thought she was worrying about its effect on her husband. Of course, though, that was just my idea.”
“I see. Now, just one other thing: what did you think, what do you think, of Miss Fulton?”
“Oh, merely that she’s bad-tempered and impatient, always complaining. She was totally without any appreciation of all that Mrs. Withers did for her. Nobody likes Miss Fulton particularly. I think all of us, as we came to know the two, were amazed that Mrs. Withers could have such a disagreeable sister.”
Mrs. Allen’s recital, while interesting and valuable as to Mrs. Withers’ acknowledgment that she felt compelled to keep secret some part of her life, threw no practical light on the situation.
Bristow was silent, thoughtful, for a few moments.
“I’ve never seen Miss Fulton, except for the glance I had at her this morning,” he said. “Was it possible for anybody to mistake one for the other? I mean this: if a man had known that last night Miss Fulton was up and dressed, could it have been possible for him, in a dim light and under the stress of terrific agitation, to have attacked Mrs. Withers under the impression that he was attacking Miss Fulton?”
“Oh, no!” Mrs. Allen said emphatically, and then added: “Oh, I see what you mean. Well, they were of about the same build, although Mrs. Withers wasn’t so thin as Miss Fulton is. Then, their hair is different, Mrs. Withers’ black, Miss Fulton’s blond. I don’t know. I should say it all depended on how dark it was.”
When Mrs. Allen had gone, Bristow took from a bookcase one of his scrapbooks and went to work pasting into place the clippings he had been reading that morning when interrupted by the cry of murder.
For nine years he had been studying murder cases and the methods of murderers. People had laughed at his fad, but now he was more pleased with himself as a result of it than ever before. He was still pleasantly aware of the prominence he would enjoy in Furmville because of Greenleaf’s having called on him for assistance.
“Every murderer,” he had said many times, “makes some mistake, big or little, which will lead to his destruction if the authorities have brains enough to find it.”
He thought the rule might apply too widely to this case. In fact, his own trouble now was that too many mistakes had been made, too many clues had been left lying around. In order to determine the guilty person, much chaff would have to be sifted from the wheat of truth.
He was closing his scrapbook when the chief of police arrived a few minutes before five o’clock.
“Henry Morley,” Greenleaf announced at once, “is a receiving teller in a bank in Washington—the Anderson National Bank.”
“And receiving tellers,” put in Bristow quickly, “sometimes need money—need it to make good other money they have ‘borrowed’ from the bank. How did you find this out?”
“He told me when I met him at Number Five after leaving you this afternoon.”
“Was he still there then?”
“Yes. It seems that Miss Fulton refused at first to see him. When she did see him, it was for only a minute or two. He was very much agitated when he came from her room.”
“There’s another thing,” added Bristow. “Morley has two hours of last night to account for. He told us he missed the midnight train and went to the Brevord to spend the night. As a matter of fact, he registered at the Brevord a little after two o’clock this morning.”
The chief’s jaw dropped.
“How do you know that?”
“I called up the Brevord and got the information from the clerk.”
“That settles it, then,” Greenleaf said, his jaw set. “That young man will have to remain with us for a while.”
“Yes; quite properly.”
“I guess it’s time for us to move.” The chief turned toward the door.
“One moment,” said the other. “Somehow, I have the impression that we may get important stuff from Maria Fulton. She may not give it to us directly and willingly, but we may get it all the same. And I was thinking this: you and I have got to keep our heads. We don’t want to get rattled with the idea that we’re up against an unsolvable mystery.
“As you know, I’ve lived in New York and Chicago and Cincinnati. For the past eight or nine years I’ve gotten a lot of fun out of watching and studying these cases. And the thing I’ve learned above all others is that the best way for a criminal to escape is for the authorities to lose their heads and think they are up against someth
ing that’s really much bigger than it is.
“You see what I mean? What we want to do is to go ahead with our eyes open, knowing that at any moment we may stumble against the one act that will make everything clear and definite.”
“That’s good talk, and I’ll try to act on it,” replied the chief, “but, gee whiz! I’m not used to stuff of this sort. It kinder makes me sick.”
They went out to the porch.
“By the way,” Bristow asked, “what about the two buttons we found?”
“They belonged to Perry,” Greenleaf answered. “There’s no getting around that. He had the two middle buttons of his overalls jacket missing. What’s more, one of the buttons, the one that had a little piece of the cloth clinging to it, fitted exactly into the hole made in the jacket when the button was pulled out.”
“Which button was that?”
“The first one—the one you found in Number Five.”
They started down the steps.
“You saw the scratches on Mrs. Withers’ hand, didn’t you?” said Bristow.
“Yes.”
“Well, if Perry did the scratching, we can prove it. Any good laboratory man can tell us whether the stuff that was under his nails contains particles of the human skin, the epidermis. If those particles are found, the case is settled, it seems to me.”
“By cracky!” exclaimed Greenleaf, his admiration of his assistant growing. “You’ve solved the problem—gone to the very bottom of it.”
“What did Perry have to say? What was his story?”
“Oh, it amounted to nothing. Said he wasn’t near Number Five; said he was drunk last night and thought he was at the house of this Lucy Thomas all the time.”
“Then, the proof rests upon what the laboratory analysis of the finger nail stuff shows. When can we get that report?”
Bristow was a little surprised by the embarrassment Greenleaf showed before answering:
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