Brown seemed to feel that this was a good time to shift the conversation. “Mr. Thomas came back to the house just before I left,” he volunteered. “He was awful cut up about it. We had trouble in getting him to leave the gun-room where the body lies, but we had to lock it up until the Sergeant got here.”
“The gun-room?” I exclaimed stupidly.
“Suppose you begin at the beginning and tell us who found the body and all you know about it,” suggested John Patrick, but Sergeant Lyttle demurred. We were already up to the house now.
“There’s the medico’s car now,” he said. “I’ve got to get in right away. If you want to come in with me, you’ll have to wait for further details until I get more time.”
Unable to resist the opportunity afforded to gain immediate entrance to the scene of the crime, John Patrick and I followed the troopers in silence. Inside all was confusion. The doctor protested angrily against his enforced wait, but, as Trooper Brown had had the foresight to take the key to the gun-room with him when he went down to the lodge, there was nothing for any one to do. Apropos of this maneuver on Brown’s part, we later learned that he had telephoned to Baltimore to get Lyttle, only to find out that we were on our way back. Unwilling to risk any more responsibility than had already been forced upon him, he locked everything up and carefully absented himself to await his superior’s arrival. Meanwhile, Tom had appeared to keep the doctor company, the servants hovered fearfully on the outskirts of the group, and a number of the police awaited in the lower hall. Our advent was the match to set this scene of suspended animation into feverish activity. Edwin did not join us, although I saw his white face peering out of the library as we passed the door.
We gathered the story the best we could, while the doctor and police made their respective examinations. At two o’clock, when the message came from the D. A.’s office, the place had been practically deserted. John Patrick, Lyttle and I had been gone long since, and Edwin had disappeared immediately after lunch, although there seemed to be some mystery about what time he had actually left the house. When the long-distance call had come, Tom had intercepted James as he was going up to the third floor to deliver the message to Charles. The Master, unwilling though he appeared to admit it now, must certainly, in view of his own suspicions, have realized the terrible import of the message.
At least, he went himself to deliver it. James, without waiting for anything more, having finished his own work at the house, retired to his quarters. About a half an hour later, Tom called him to get his duck-shooting equipment ready, and soon after the Master left aboard his cruiser, hoping to get out to the near-by blind for some shooting. He sent the two troopers, who were guarding the boat, to the lodge where Brown was stationed. The men patrolling Bayside were well out of sight of the house, engaged in watching the boundaries to see that no one got on or off the property without due authority. At any rate, Charles was left alone in the house, and no one observed anything untoward until about six o’clock.
As I have mentioned, it was snowing lightly and was very dark from five o’clock on. There were four men in all sitting in the lodge, Trooper Starr having joined the others sometime before, to wait until it was his relief at the boundary patrol. Suddenly a car drove up, Edwin at the wheel. He went into the house and the police waited, expecting to see the plain-clothes man who had followed him out earlier in the day. When I said there was a slight mystery about the time Edwin left the estate, I did not mean that the police were at all in the dark. Lyttle had detailed a man to follow each person who left the house, and it came out later that, so literally had his instructions been adhered to, a man had actually camped outside my office all day lest I should sally forth. But it was unfortunate in several ways that Mr. Vaile and I had not been taken into the Sergeant’s confidence in respect to this order, for we could have saved him some trouble. It seemed to indicate that neither side was being as frank as their associates thought they were.
At any rate, it was quite an interval after Edwin’s appearance before his shadower arrived. He stopped at the gate and related a queer story. About three o’clock he had followed Edwin into the Crystal Palace theater. He had lost him at the doorway, in order to keep from being noticed himself, but he sat way back waiting for his quarry to come out. After several hours, the show was over and the lights flashed on, and the crowd left—but no Edwin. The mystified trooper had hastened back to Bayside, only to find out, when he got there, that his man had preceded him.
“Yeh,” sneered Brown, “but you don’t know where he has been for two and a half hours. He might have parked his car, gotten on the grounds some way we don’t know nothing about, and raided the whole house again.” Edwin was evidently Brown’s favorite suspect.
“Not without the patrol seeing him,” said the other man uncertainly.
“Well, he got away from you, didn’t he? But I guess the rest of us are a lot smarter than you and he didn’t get by.”
The upshot of the interchange was that Brown himself decided to go up to the house after Edwin. As he put it, he had a feeling that something was definitely wrong and he hoped to get a chance to talk with Edwin to see what that young man had to say for himself. As he came along the drive, just abreast of the gun-room windows, he saw the light flash on inside. Looking in, he watched Edwin go into the room and then stop suddenly in his tracks.
The trooper left the path and came closer to the window, noticing, as he did so, that it was open slightly from the bottom. Standing withdrawn a bit, to be out of sight of any one within the room, he saw directly in his own line of vision Charles’ body sprawled over in his easy-chair. Certain he was looking at a dead man, he wasted no time but dashed in the house and into the gun-room. Edwin was by then standing in front of his dead brother, gazing at him without any trace of expression on his face. Brown noted at once the powder marks, characteristic of a shot at close range, and the gun on the floor where it might have slipped out of hands relaxing in death. Making up his mind that it was suicide, he locked the room, sent for the medical examiner, and tried to get hold of Lyttle.
Meanwhile the plain-clothes man, who had lost Edwin’s trail in Belton, on receiving the latest news bestirred himself to try to find footprints which would show how Edwin had gotten on the estate, provided he had made a subsequent trip ere he came back past the gates. The snow was melting too fast to retain good prints, but he did find evidence to prove the truth of Tom’s story of his trip on the cruiser and his return, so he felt that a negative report on Edwin’s activities was fairly safe to rely upon. Nevertheless he was much relieved when Lyttle’s return brought corroboration of Brown’s first hasty verdict of suicide.
The examination of the body brought out some curious facts. The wound was large, showing that the bullet was at least of the caliber fired by the gun lying on the floor. And that gun, oddly enough, was the very weapon we had all of us been looking at the night before—the remodeled frontier pistol. In my surprise I stooped to pick it up but, with a sharp exclamation Lyttle caught my wrist in a vise-like hold.
“Leave things as they are,” he hissed. “I’ve sent for a photographer to take a picture of the body.”
“All right,” I answered in astonishment. “I should hardly think it necessary in a case of suicide, though.”
“Probably not,” replied Lyttle, “but Pm going to have the picture and then I am going to have the gun looked over for finger-prints. I’m not overlooking any bets this time.”
“I admire your efficiency and thoroughness, Sergeant,” put in Tom quietly; “but it appears to me a plain case of suicide. Look at the powder marks on the face, the position of the gun, and well—I suppose there is no use beating around the bush. If you have just come from Baltimore, you must know the reason for the suicide as well as the rest of us. It is hard on the surviving members of the family; nevertheless we do not wish to hinder the police in their work. Only, Sergeant, can’t you take this suicide as tantamount to confession and close up the police records
and get it over with the least possible publicity?” Tom’s tone was dignified, but there was an undercurrent of pleading in it.
“You may be sure, Mr. Evans,” replied the Sergeant gravely, “that every consideration possible will be made out of respect to the surviving members of the family. But my personal conviction that it is suicide, done for good and sufficient reason, is not reason enough for me to leave this house now and hush the whole thing up. I have a duty to the State and it must be performed.” This was pretty stiff, I thought. I felt, I should take a hand and I looked at my chief for guidance. He was standing near the body, apparently so absorbed in the investigation that he had not heard the discussion. Tom, sensing the futility of any more words with the Sergeant, looked at him soberly for a few seconds and then, shrugging his shoulders, turned away.
“After all,” Lyttle went on stubbornly, “there are one or two things to be cleared up. Why, for instance, did he use this gun to kill himself with, when his own forty-five is in his shoulder holster?”
“I think I can answer your question,” I said. I had been thinking over that point myself, although I had been ignorant of the presence of the other gun. “The frontier pistol is an old favorite of his, he had it remodeled himself out of sentiment. He believed it belonged to either the sheriff of Tombstone or one of its famous men. Isn’t it just like Charles,” I appealed to Tom, “to go out with a gesture of that kind? After all, we who knew him thought of him as spiritual kin to the outlaws of the West, and perhaps he felt the same. An ironical twist to death itself would be just the thing he would like.”
Lyttle was staring at me with his mouth open. “That gun has been modified to carry modern ammunition?” he finally managed to ask. “You all knew it and never thought to mention it to me. Why, it is the only gun in the house that hasn’t been test-fired! It may be the gun used to kill Cyrus Evans and, if it was, I see why he used it to kill himself, all right. It is his confession. Gentlemen, I’ll have a gun-expert here in a short while and, if we find what I think we will, I can promise you no further annoyance. The case is closed.”
My chief looked up from an examination of the gun which Lyttle had withdrawn from the holster, Charles’ own forty-five. It seemed to interest him more than the other gun interested Lyttle, as he had even withdrawn the ammunition.
“Full chamber this,” he observed. “And the safety catch was on; makes it difficult to believe this could be anything but suicide, for I can’t quite fancy Charles permitting any one to approach him closely enough to fire and leave powder burns while he had this weapon resting against his shoulder.”
Lyttle had been instructing one of his men to arrange for the test-firing, but now he whirled around and saw what John Patrick had in his hand. “You ought not to have touched that,” he cried. The Sergeant was rapidly becoming exasperated with all of us.
Fortunately, the entrance of the photographer made an interruption. We were all asked to leave except John Patrick, who had been requested to conduct the test to be made on the frontier gun. I left and went to my room to think things over, for I had not gotten the events of the day in the order which I have presented them. They had come to me piecemeal and some, such as the connected story of Edwin’s day, I had not yet ascertained.
It grew very late, perhaps close on midnight, but I could not go to sleep until I should hear the results of the conference in the gun-room, whither I knew the investigators were to repair after all the tests, photographs and finger-prints were taken, compared and discussed. Yet I dared not intrude, for the Sergeant had demonstrated a certain stubbornness and irascibility, which I thought best not to offend. So I was delighted when a knock came on my door and Tom thrust his head in.
“Thought you might like to come up to my study for a hot toddy and await the reports. Bring Edwin along if you find him awake.”
So it came about that Edwin and I took ourselves to the Master’s suite and made ourselves as comfortable as possible, considering the restraint Charles’ death had laid upon us.
It flashed through my mind, as I sat there, that there was a certain grotesque familiarity about the present scene. I was conscious of an uncanny sense of having lived through this very moment sometime in the past. The locale and the personnel were nearly the same as on the night of Cyrus’ death; the room was a different one, but Tom’s furnishings were the same and, while Sergeant Lyttle was not with us tonight, Edwin was. This still did not account for my odd sensation. I watched Tom set up his alcohol stove. What had he done next? Oh, yes, cleaned his gun. I glanced sidewise at Edwin; of course, he had not been here before, not coming in until later. And now a curious drama began to unfold before my eyes. I thought of the gruesome device of the police called reenacting the crime. The crime, so to speak, had been reenacted and my brain, stubborn so long, had at last yielded up the key to the mystery. I longed to rush out of the study, seek John Patrick, and lay my discovery before him. But I dared not; craven fear pinned me in my seat. I saw now the danger for the man who knew too much. And I knew that here, in the room with me, was a man who had killed before and would kill again.
I do not know how long a time we spent in the study. I never realized what we talked about or how we kept the conversation going on at all, without fear betraying me in my words or in my face. But talk we did, and I managed to carry on in my role until the long wait was over.
Footsteps coming up the stairs again as on the night of Cyrus’ death—thank God this nightmare was coming to an end! Just as my subconscious mind had known on that other occasion, so I was only too well aware what news was coming now. The difference now was, that whereas before I had been groping in the dark, not knowing what evil I sensed, this time the whole horrible pattern was unfolded before me and I understood in full the diabolical astuteness of the killer.
Sergeant Lyttle paused in the doorway. The room was absolutely still. His first remark was addressed to all of us.
“The remodeled forty-five did not fire the shot that killed Cyrus Evans. I compared the markings myself with those of the photograph in my file and there is no similarity.”
A subdued murmur broke out. I let my breath escape quietly. I was right then. Lyttle waited until we were silent again. Then he turned to Tom and his voice rang out, “‘Mr. Evans, your cousin did not commit suicide; he was murdered.”
Tom was on his feet in an instant. For a fraction of a second his eyes held mine—he did not look at the brother of the man who had just been murdered.
“It can’t be,” he exclaimed in a shaky tone. “You must be mistaken.”
The Sergeant shook his head deliberately. “The gun found at Mr. Charles’ feet fired the shot that killed him, but it did not have his finger-prints on it.”
“I see,” Tom steadied himself, his fingers against the edge of the desk. “Well—have a drink.” He finished abruptly, as if he had intended to say something entirely different but thought better of it. As the Sergeant took the extended glass, Tom continued, “There must be an error somewhere. It seemed so plainly to be suicide, I can’t believe it anything else.”
Then his voice took on a slightly legal tinge; I could see that Tom intended to fight the idea that it might be murder for, bad as suicide was, it was worse to have another murder at Bayside. “The absence of fingerprints alone,” he said, “is not conclusive evidence. A dozen explanations may be found. Perhaps Charles had a handkerchief in his hand, perhaps he lived long enough to wipe off the finger-marks himself. Heaven knows, he did enough odd things.”
The Sergeant took a long sip from his glass. Then he answered, “I did not say anything about the absence of finger-prints. I said that Mr. Charles’ prints are not on the gun. Another person’s are.”
My brain was in a whirl. I could not believe that there were any prints on that pistol. Had the killer slipped at last? Lyttle went on talking.
“Mr. Thomas, who was in the house besides yourself when the telephone message came from the District Attorney’s office?”
&nbs
p; For the first time since Lyttle entered the room, Tom looked at Edwin, who sat silent, tense.
“I cannot say, I’m sure.”
“James answered the telephone, and you took the message from him and said you’d deliver it yourself. You certainly know that the butler was here at least,” snapped Lyttle.
“Certainly. And I am likewise sure that one State trooper was in the house,” replied Tom impassively.
“And you dismissed him after going up to Charles’ room, telling him you were going duck-shooting.”
“I did. I went duck-shooting. You don’t doubt that fact, do you?’
“No.” Lyttle modified his tone somewhat. “What I am getting at is this—what did Mr. Charles say to you when you saw him, and did you understand the importance of the message you delivered?”
Tom answered the first part of the question promptly. “I didn’t see Charles at all. I knocked on his door, delivered the message, and he replied with some monosyllable, so I came away.”
Lyttle had to prompt him to get a reply to the second part of the double interrogative. After a short hesitation, Tom said, “In view of everything that has happened, I think I did not fully realize the significance of the message.”
Then the Sergeant turned on Edwin and shot a rapid question at him.
“Mr. Edwin, will you tell me what you can about this afternoon’s tragedy?”
Edwin answered very coolly. “There is nothing I can say. I left just after lunch. I think it must have been before the message came in—at least, I knew nothing about it. I went to the movies in Belton and remained there until nearly six o’clock.”
Oh, God, I understood now. The Sergeant’s tone was cold as ice. “No, Mr. Edwin, you went to the movies, but you didn’t stay there. You had better tell me exactly what you did do this afternoon, and I warn you that whatever you may say may be used as evidence against you.”
Murder at Bayside Page 24