It was at one of these dinners when a conversation freighted with warning began. We were nearly through a singularly quiet repast, when Charles looked up suddenly.
“I say, the police fellow, Lyttle, was around again. He is in charge of the case officially and seems to want our permission to do a little high-class shooting.”
“I am glad Sergeant Lyttle is in charge,” I interrupted. “He is an awfully nice chap and unusually thoughtful for one of his profession.”.
“Quite the gentleman, in fact,” laughed Edwin. “Well, what is on his mind now?”
Charles bowed in Tom’s direction. “He is coming to ask the Grand Seigneur for permission to snoop among the ancestral weapons. Our enemies, having slipped up once, are about to test-fire every gun on the place. Then, I suppose, the owner of the gun whose rifling corresponds to the marks on the fatal bullet will be promptly incarcerated. Simple, isn’t it?”
Tom frowned. “It’s an extraordinary idea. Why should the police expect to find the weapon in this house? I should think they would concentrate on picking up the tramp.”
“Oh, the good old principle, of locking the stable,” Edwin put in, his eyes never leaving Tom’s face. “After all, while I’m not fool enough to believe the old saw of the criminal returning to the scene of his crime, I rather fancy that the police will never get on the trail of the mysterious stranger unless they can pick it up right here. My advice to you, Tom, is to stop talking about your little shooting party altogether, unless you change your mind and decide to divulge the identity of your dueling opponent.”
A pregnant silence reigned. Strangely enough, this was a new idea for me. Edwin believed that Tom actually knew the identity of the tramp and was concealing his knowledge. I shivered with fear and excitement. There were very few persons for whom Tom would have risked trial, rather than betray, even though he was confident of the outcome. There was only one motive strong enough to actuate him, the motive John Patrick had mentioned.
Edwin, evidently pleased with the effect of his remarks, continued after a moment, “The police are evidently toying with the idea of a hired killer. They must figure that he has come to return the gun he borrowed. How about it, Charles, any of your pals do murder as a side-line?”
“If they did,” growled his brother, “you wouldn’t be any too safe right now. Lay off me and my affairs. I don’t continually remind you of your brilliant career in banking circles.”
The air grew tense and angry. The plates were changed for the dessert course, and then Tom remarked in the curiously quiet and subdued manner habitual with him since his return home, “We should all endeavor to give the police as much help as possible, and I don’t know but that Edwin is right in suggesting we discuss the affair among ourselves as little as possible.”
Charles spoke up at once. “That’s fine for you to say, but do you realize how the rest of us must feel until the actual killer is apprehended? Hasn’t it occurred to you that there is going to be more trouble right here at Bay-side?”
“Meaning what?” asked Tom quietly.
“Meaning that the hired killer idea is Edwin’s, and unless he’s told it to the police, they don’t know it yet. They must have some bright ideas of their own, though, and you ought to know they are going to stir up more trouble.”
“Oh, rot!” Tom broke in in disgust. “Charles, you know you are just talking to hear the noise.”
“All right,” the other rejoined, “if you’d rather have my conversation plainer, I can accommodate you. How’s this?—there is one thing in the whole tangle not making any sense right now. Eliminate it, and you get a perfect candidate for suspicion. And I don’t see why we have to harbor that person in our midst—and refrain from talking about it, as you so charmingly suggest.”
I missed the last few phrases of Charles’ conversation.
It seemed silly enough to me, what I had heard, nor did I exactly understand him, but the words about one piece of evidence not making sense stuck in my mind. There was one such piece, but just then I could not think what it was. Some little thing had struck me on the afternoon of the murder and still worried me. It was like the story of Alice in Wonderland, when she followed the White Rabbit to the door through which he disappeared—when I held the key I could not get through the door, and when the door was accessible I could not reach the key. I shook my head impatiently. I must ask John Patrick to go through the notes I had made for him. Perhaps I had unconsciously set this thing, whatever it was, down in black and white, and he could find it and decipher it for me.
The next morning Sergeant Lyttle appeared to collect the guns in the house; although it seemed to me a very foolish procedure, I could well understand how the police would not dare leave any stone unturned in their search now.
“Are these all the forty-fives?” I heard Lyttle ask. I could not hear Tom’s rejoinder, but was surprised to see the Sergeant walk into the dining-room where I was breakfasting.
“Good morning, Mr. Williams,” he said, coming around the table to shake hands with me” cordially. “How are you feeling these days?”
I answered him pleasantly enough, for I liked the lad and could not forget the courtesy and restraint with which he had acted on the occasion of his first investigation. “By the way, Mr. Williams, did you bring your gun back this time?”
“Why, yes,” I replied, somewhat taken back, “I hope to get some duck-shooting while I’m here.”
“No. I didn’t mean your shotgun,” he spoke in the same suave tone. “Your forty-five.”
I was surprised. “I don’t own a forty-five.”
Lyttle seemed much chagrined. “Why, I must have been mistaken, but I thought I remembered your telling me, when you were showing me the guns here at Bayside—you are very interested in guns, are you not?”
“Yes,” I replied, somewhat mollified by his obvious discomfiture, “But I surely never told you I owned a forty-five. As a matter of fact, although fire-arms are a hobby of mine, I haven’t money enough to indulge to any extent. I own three guns; a Winchester pump gun, a gift from Mr. Cyrus Evans years ago when I first came down here to shoot; a single specimen of what was once a pair of French dueling pistols—it being of the flintlock type, I doubt if it could be of any interest to you; and, lastly, my new shotgun which I bought a year ago. It is in my room.”
“You saw service in the World War, didn’t you, Mr. Williams?” persisted Lyttle. “What about the forty-five you had in the Service?”
“Good Lord, man! I was an enlisted man in the Eighth Engineers. If you think I got away with any Army equipment when we were demobbed, you never served under a top-kick like ours.”
Lyttle laughed a shade too politely. “Just for the purposes of keeping our record straight, Mr. Williams, would you mind my sending a man up to your rooms in Baltimore to see if, by chance, you have forgotten about any pistol?”
I exploded. “Of course, I would mind. I don’t want the State Police overturning my possessions. You can take my word for it that I haven’t forgotten, as you so euphemistically phrase it, any weapon in my ownership.”
Lyttle apologized profusely and left me to finish my breakfast in a somewhat wrathy frame of mind. After I was done, I went upstairs to our suite; it comprised two bedrooms, a bath and small dressing room, which Mr. Vaile and I were using as a study. My chief, I knew, had driven up to town some time before I had risen since I, to my shame be it said, am a confirmed sleeper in the mornings. Before settling down to work, I walked over to the bureau for a handkerchief. Something about the pile of linen looked strange. I pulled out the lower drawers containing my shirts and underwear, and they, too, while not in obvious disarray, were not in the precise piles it is my custom to leave. No doubt existed in my mind: while Lyttle had held me in conversation in the dining-room, some one had been searching my room upstairs.
The first reaction to my discovery was a feeling of angry disgust. Never again would I trust that smooth-speaking young policeman, whom I had believed
so thoughtful and well-disposed. Plausible and soft-spoken, Sergeant Lyttle was capable of such double-dealing as I had not suspected. I had no doubt that by now he had sent some one to search my flat in town—probably while he was being refused permission, he was well aware that one of his men was on his way to gain an entrance and go through all my private belongings.
Then sober second thought cooled me down somewhat. Did this activity of the police mean that I was actually under suspicion? Then I thought of Charles’ half-heard words of the evening before, and their probable meaning came to me all of a sudden. It was my evidence which would have gone a long way toward convicting Tom, save for the silent witness of the bullet marking; conversely, Tom’s acquittal did much to discredit my story. Furthermore, for some reason the police must believe that the gun, with which the murder was committed, had not been done away with. It either belonged to some one who could not dispose of it without rousing comment, or it reposed in some place from which its absence would be noted.
As this became clearer to me and as I began to draw some startling inferences from my conclusions, I decided that there was only one thing for me to do—I must seize the bull by the horns and attempt to clear myself at once. Taking a deep breath, I nerved myself to go in search of the Sergeant and carry the war into the open. It took nerve to do it, but I felt I must rid myself of this under-cover suspicion; a little courage now, or I feared my morale would be entirely broken down by finding myself subjected to these covert searches and distrust.
James told me that the Sergeant had gone down to the pistol range. This range occupied part of the waste land down along the beach at the eastern end of the property, the target butts being perhaps five hundred yards from the boat-house as you proceeded along the water’s edge. Cyrus Evans himself had had this range constructed years ago, and it was here that the whole family had practiced shooting.
As I neared the ground I heard spasmodic firing, and I wondered how many guns of the proper caliber had been collected. Bales of waste replaced the usual targets, and I came up in time to see a curious by-play, the significance of which entirely escaped me. Sergeant Lyttle was firing a forty-five, from whose side the sun rays glinted strangely bright. Charles was standing dangerously close, occasionally stooping down to pick up some object from the ground. Then he walked over to the Sergeant and put something in the latter’s outstretched hand.
“I could only find two,” I heard him say.
“One is enough,” Lyttle responded, and then Tom reached out his hand for the gun.
“Sorry, sir, the District Attorney told me to bring it back.”
Tom looked puzzled. “But I certainly can’t let him have my trophy gun for a souvenir.”
The Sergeant’s face expressed sympathetic comprehension. “I’m sure they will be glad to return it to you in person, sir, if you will go over to see them about it. As soon as this exhibit is complete, there will be no more use for it.” Then he turned to Charles, “Now, if you please, your gun.”
Charles withdrew his weapon with a flourish. He was wearing it in a holster under his arm.
I drew Edwin aside and asked him what was going on. He shrugged his shoulders. “They sent over Tom’s gun to have it test-fired with the rest, in order to get a complete series of bullets and empty cartridges for exhibit in the D. A.’s office. Typical police work—dull and stupid and much too late to do any good. Charles has been making a scene like a stubborn child. He seems to think Tom could identify the tramp, but if any one should ask me, I’d not be surprised if Charles could put a name to him far easier.”
The testing was over quickly after that, and I signified my desire for an interview with the Sergeant. We walked down to the shore and seated ourselves on a rock, where, even though it was damp and chilly, we were at least out of the range of possible eavesdroppers. It was hard enough to say what I had to, to one person, and I had no desire to broadcast my plight. In a way, I suppose this was silly, as doubtless others had followed my line of reasoning and knew that I was suspected in the eyes of the police. I can’t describe my feelings as I plunged into that interview; innocent though I knew myself to be, I was caught in a tangle of fear and embarrassment. Tom had been suspected and tried, the same might happen to me, and already the horror of such a disaster was invading my consciousness and paralyzing my powers of thought. Tom had been acquitted, but all the time my mind ran along to the moment when I, standing in his place, might not be so fortunate.
“Sergeant Lyttle,” I began, “when I returned from breakfast this morning to my room, I discovered that some one had been there while I was gone, evidently searching through my belongings.” I waited a moment to give him a chance to speak, but, wisely enough, he kept silent, so I forged ahead. “Taken in conjunction with your remarks this morning, am I to judge that I also am under suspicion?”
This time Lyttle bestirred himself. “Shucks, Mr. Williams, you must realize how any one who was present at the time the murder took place is bound to come in for a bit of investigating. It’s all a matter of keeping the records straight.”
I blew up completely at the repetition of the phrase now so opprobrious to me. “Damn you, don’t tell me that again! I’m not a fool, nor am I entirely unacquainted with police procedure by this time. I know, I’d be the ideal culprit for you. If you can’t reconcile my statement of what I heard with what you now believe to be the facts of the case, you’d rather discard my story altogether than to try to see where it fits in. All right, but it still doesn’t prove me a murderer, you know.”
The Sergeant was perturbed by my unexpected outburst. “Mr. Williams, no one has accused you of being a murderer. You are getting too excited; take it easier. Now here is the situation—you tell us a tale of the events which happened on the afternoon Mr. Cyrus Evans was shot, and it is largely on this evidence that we proceed against Mr. Thomas Evans in such haste without making sufficiently sure investigations of the matter—”
“Your statement is not true,” I cut in. “The main piece of evidence against Tom was the gun, and you, yourself, Sergeant, told me that you felt you had taken the murderer red-handed.”
I had caught him there. “Well, let’s put it this way. Your story fitted in with what we believed to be the truth, but now, when the facts prove entirely different than they seemed at first, it becomes necessary to look on your evidence in another light. But I assure you we are not discarding your story—not at all.”
“And I tell you my evidence is true, so far as I know, as true now as it was then.”
Sergeant Lyttle began to pick up pebbles and cast them aimlessly into the water. “Look here, Mr. Williams, if you were in the house you must have heard all three shots. You didn’t and, therefore, you weren’t in the house. Where were you standing when you heard, at four-fifty exactly, the shot that killed Cyrus, but were unable to hear the shooting at the other side of the estate?”
I remained stubborn. “I was in the bath-tub. There was no reason for the curious trick of hearing, but every word I’ve told you was true.”
Lyttle did not so much as glance at me, but remained intent on his pebble throwing. “So you now think it was all a curious trick of hearing, an auditory hallucination, in fact?”
“I don’t know what to think—I never did—but, until now, you all thought it was true hearing.”
Another pebble skipped across the waves. “Why do you persist in your story, when it was clearly impossible?” he asked softly. “If you’ll tell me where you were, what you saw that made you determine to keep silent on the whole truth, I think I can help you a lot. Nobody wants to make things disagreeable for you. It would be a lot better to tell me now than wait until I find out, as I’m bound to do.”
I wondered helplessly if this was Lyttle’s own particular method of a third degree; whatever it was, it was grimly reminiscent of the words we had all spoken about Tom’s adhering to a piece of evidence that seemed false on the surface of it. I didn’t like this at all, it too closely parallele
d Tom’s experience, and I was no cool, clever, criminal lawyer.
“I can’t tell you any more than I have,” I said desperately, “and if you don’t believe me, I don’t see what I can do about it.”
The Sergeant looked at me queerly as I rose to go. He spoke quietly, “The best advice I can give you, Mr. Williams, is to go and talk it over with Mr. Vaile.”
I returned to the house in a sober frame of mind. The last remark of Lyttle’s did nothing to disguise the gravity of the situation, which had so unexpectedly engulfed me, but his bit of parting advice was good, all right, and I determined to act on it as soon as my chief returned from Baltimore.
It was not until late in the evening, however, that the opportunity for a confidential talk arose. I knocked at John Patrick’s door after he had retired and requested him to join me in the study for a few minutes. He complied with my request with an alacrity which made me suspect it was not wholly unexpected.
My chief was never a difficult person to talk to, and I told my tale unhurriedly and without heat, for, as the day had passed, the anger which had at first gripped me had disappeared entirely, leaving in its stead a sense of lively disquietude.
He heard me to the end without comment and then said, “Well, Bob, I tried to warn you that this might happen. It’s so logical from the police point of view. You see, they banked so much on your evidence during Tom’s trial that in the reaction following they are bound to think there is something wrong with your story, now. The next step is to consider you as a possible suspect—you have no alibi, you know.”
This was an uncomfortable thought; I, myself, had sent James to the lodge, and the only other indoor servant, the cook, we already knew had not been in the house at the early hour. The idea had an awful fascination for me and I found myself saying, as if discussing a third party, “Yes, I had plenty of time, since I did not at once join the troopers in Tom’s study. The police believed ten minutes was enough for Tom to commit the murder, and I had as much time as he did. But why should I want to kill Cyrus Evans? I liked the old man.”
Murder at Bayside Page 10