Danger in the Dark

by Mignon Good Eberhart

  He paused, and no one spoke.

  “What did he know?” repeated the detective impatiently. “There was something. Something that made him, when he knew of the murder from the papers—or if he knew of it by other means—certain that he himself would not be accused of murder. Something that safeguarded him, something that, if he were arrested by any chance and charged with murder, he could produce as evidence to free him. He would not have run the risk of returning otherwise. Thus it must be evidence leading to the murderer. And it must be evidence for which you—all of you—one of you—were willing to pay. Otherwise you would not have permitted him to remain. Otherwise you would not have offered him money.” He did look then directly at Amelia. And Johnny made a helpless motion and cried, “There, Amelia. I told you all not to talk so loudly. They heard—there were policemen every where—”

  The detective glanced at him, too, impatiently. “Certainly,” he said. “Why do you suppose they were here? To play games? Now then, what did he know? You may as well tell me, you know. Did he see the murder? Did he investigate after he’d heard the shot? Did he go up the little path to the springhouse and—”

  “Springhouse?” cried Amelia violently.

  “Certainly, springhouse,” said the detective, looking at her as if he hated her. “Brewer was actually murdered in the springhouse. We’ve known that for some time. That,” said the detective, “and some other things.—Oh, there you are. Put the coffee on the table. And bring enough cups for all of us.”

  Chapter 16

  “I HAVE THEM, SIR,” said Laing. Looking pale and frightened, and clad hastily in trousers and sweater, evidently pulled on over pajamas, with a woolen scarf tied around his throat, he came into the room, hesitated while Johnny cleared a space on the table, and then set the tray down. His hands shook as he began pouring coffee, and he darted quick, worried glances about the room—at Amelia, at the detective, at the fire. At the fire tongs on the floor, which he avoided carefully as he began to pass the coffee.

  Jacob Wait looked at one of the policemen.

  “Did you question him?” he asked, nodding toward the old man.

  “Yes, sir. No go. But the housemaid—Maggie—the one with the cold—”

  Wait nodded impatiently.

  “Well, we got something sort of queer out of her.”

  “What?”

  The policeman—the one they called Braley—was over-conscientious.

  “Do you—shall I—” He indicated with a dubious gesture the circle of listeners.

  “Go on.”

  “Well, this housemaid, this Maggie, didn’t want to talk, but we—we got it out of her, sir, we got it out of her.”

  “What?”

  “About the hammer, sir.”

  “The—” Jacob Wait stopped short, gave the policeman a long look and said, “What hammer?”

  But he was killed, thought Daphne, with the fire tongs.

  “The hammer in the linen closet, sir,” said Braley with ingratiating eagerness. “She found it. She found it yesterday morning. It belonged in the tool chest in the basement. She found it in the linen closet yesterday morning, and she took it to the basement and put it away.”

  “Oh,” said the detective. “Well. If she put it away—”

  “Oh, that isn’t all,” said Braley. “She put it away, and during the afternoon she went to the linen closet again for something, and there was the hammer again. Right where she had found it before.”

  “Did she know who put it there?”

  “She said she didn’t know anything about it, sir. Not anything at all.” He looked a little rueful, as if the force of Maggie’s disclaimer had made a deep and not very pleasant impression. “I’m bound to say I believed her, sir.”

  “Did she leave it there in the linen closet?”

  “No. Oh no, she put it away again.”

  “Are you sure she’s telling the truth?”

  “Yes, sir. At least she was very reluctant. If I do say it myself, we had to handle her adroitly.”

  “Huh,” said Jacob Wait shortly. “That’ll do, Braley. I’ll see her myself.”

  Jacob Wait jerked his head toward the door. Braley choked and vanished.

  The cup which Laing was passing to Amelia rattled thinly on the saucer and stopped as Amelia’s beautiful hand took it. The fragrance of the hot, black coffee filled the little room. The detective said, addressing a plain-clothes man, “See that the tongs are taken care of. Get me an analysis as soon as possible.”

  The plain-clothes man, wrapping the tongs as carefully as if they were thin glass, instead of bronze so hard that it had killed a man, went away. Jacob Wait said, “I’ll take some coffee. Thank you. Know anything about this hammer, Laing?”

  “No, sir,” said Laing, his voice trembling a little. He went on, passing coffee, without adding to his denial.

  But Archie Shore had been killed with fire tongs, thought Daphne again. And the hammer …

  “Premeditation,” said Jacob Wait and drank some coffee, leaving the word hanging in the air with all its grisly connotations.

  They were all inexpressibly grateful for the coffee.

  Johnny stirred sugar and said suddenly to the detective, his blue eyes harassed, “Mr Wait, what about the springhouse—did you really mean that Ben was murdered there and not in the house?”

  “Yes,” said Jacob Wait and finished the steaming coffee he held and took more.

  “But how—are you certain, Mr Wait? He—it seems so strange—”

  Amelia thought so, too, apparently, for she looked more witchlike than ever and said abruptly, “If Rowley and Archie heard the shot and were standing in the door at the time, they must have known the sound came from the springhouse.”

  “We asked that,” observed Jacob Wait. “How about it, Mr Shore? Do you want to change your testimony?”

  Rowley looked into his coffee cup and said “No” sullenly.

  “You did hear the shot, though?”

  “Yes. I told you that.”

  “But you didn’t think of it coming from the springhouse?”

  “No.”

  “You didn’t go up to the springhouse and look?”

  Rowley looked up suddenly and angrily. He said, “What are you trying to make me do? Confess? Well, I won’t. I didn’t kill him. I have an alibi. I mean, I—I had an alibi. For the time when the shot was fired.”

  “But,” said the detective in a businesslike way, “it took two people to move the body of Ben Brewer—dead, then, or dying—from the springhouse to the house. I’m not sure of the motive for that, but I think I know. One person could not have done it; thus the murderer had an accomplice. An accessory after, and in all likelihood before, the fact. Now get this: I know how and why you—all of you, as a family—hated Brewer. I know that you had fought him for a year. I know the things you were doing to oust him from the company.”

  “We didn’t murder him,” cried Gertrude shrilly. “We didn’t murder him. And our hatred was justified, for he was ruining us. Another year of his management and the Haviland Bridge Company would have been bankrupt. Ask anyone. He was taking the very bread out of our mouths. The thing my father worked his whole life to build up was being steadily torn down by this—this interloper. He was not responsible—he—”

  “Can you prove all this, Mrs Shore?”

  She stopped in full flight; her eyes glittered and she said, “Certainly. It is not my opinion alone. We have often thought that he—”

  “Gertrude!” said Amelia softly and tenderly. Gertrude gulped and gave her a startled look, and Amelia said gently, “My sister was extravagantly fond of our father, Mr Wait. She felt, as you seem to know, that Mr Brewer was a danger to the welfare and progress, the continued existence indeed, of the Haviland Bridge Company. Her feelings, however, were not so violent as to—Well, dear me, I assure you we wouldn’t have been obliged to resort to murder. There would have been—if the need arose—other means of removing Mr Brewer.”

&n
bsp; “Such as,” said Jacob Wait, “having him committed to an asylum for the insane?”

  Two points of light gleamed suddenly in Amelia’s deep-set eyes. She put a slim, beautiful hand to the net cap she wore and pulled it a little looser about her throat. Gertrude’s eyes were bulging like blue marbles.

  Amelia did not, however, betray herself in words. He waited for her to do so, and as she didn’t, and as Gertrude was mesmerized into silence, he said, “You have been trying to do that for months, Miss Haviland. Don’t trouble to deny it, for we know it. Even after he became engaged to your niece you kept on—we found a list of things which you thought ought to be called eccentricities and which you had prepared to present to the stockholders in the hope of their making a petition to the medical commission.”

  “How did you know?” said Amelia, not troubling to deny.

  Jacob Wait looked annoyed.

  “It seems,” he said, “that you don’t know much of what we’ve been doing. What we always do. We know all this from the family doctor, from the doctor you went to for advice, from Mr Brewer’s own lawyer—Mr Brewer was perfectly aware of what you were doing. From the stockholders who have been getting letters signed with your name and your sister’s—violently abusive letters, casting doubts upon Mr Brewer’s sanity. We know that you did everything possible to have him removed and were told that the only possible way you could accomplish his removal was to prove his mental inability to carry on business. We know that—”

  “Letters?” said Amelia wonderingly and turned to Gertrude. “I wrote no letters. I suppose you did that.”

  Gertrude’s face was purple; she looked at Amelia and looked quickly away and shrank back against the couch so she seemed to cower before that ever-gentle little voice.

  “I—” said Gertrude and mustered up defense. “I had to do something. Certainly I had to do something. You were talking to every stockholder—insinuating—seeing doctors. I told you all along that Ben knew. I told you he was only waiting till you had everything done you could do and he was going to turn around and—and make you sorry,” finished Gertrude childishly. “He—”

  Amelia’s eyes flashed away back in the shadow of her deep eye sockets.

  “Listen, Gertrude,” she said. “If you are trying to make it look as if I feared Ben Brewer, you are not succeeding. I was afraid of what he would do as manager of the company. Everybody knows that. But I was not afraid of him physically.”

  “I didn’t mean—I never thought—I didn’t mean that, Amelia—I never thought you murdered him. Really I—”

  “Be still,” said Amelia and put her hand on Gertrude’s knee. “Don’t babble.” Gertrude’s silence assured so long as that small, beautiful hand touched her knee, Amelia turned to the detective. “Certainly I tried in every way I knew to get Ben Brewer out of the company. It made no difference to me whether or not he married my niece.”

  “Did you or did you not press this marriage?”

  “I did neither,” said Amelia. “You asked me that before. It was going to take place. Daphne was of age and my niece. I know my duty. But I brought no pressure to bear upon her. Did I, Daphne?”

  If it was an attempt to shift the burden of questioning, it failed. Daphne caught her breath and started to speak, and the detective said, “Did you think that you could influence him through your niece?”

  “Certainly not,” said Amelia.

  “If everything else failed, still you had him in the family. You had a tighter hold than you would have had otherwise. And he would be the husband of a niece whom you had cared for—who was under heavy obligation to you. It looks very much as if that was your plan, Miss Haviland. Otherwise why would this girl have been about to marry a man whom she was not in love with? Why, unless she had been urged to do so?”

  “She was not urged to marry Ben Brewer,” said Amelia flatly. “Ask her. Ask her father. Ask anyone.”

  “But on the night before the wedding something happened,” said the detective. He paused. He hated talking so much. But they had to be beaten down—they had to be frightened—they had to realize that murder was nothing you could pass over, seal up, pretend hadn’t happened, escape from. “I told you,” he said rapidly, “that you didn’t know what the usual routine of our work consisted of; it’s this—masses of information from everybody. Look here—we know, for instance, the color of the gown you wore at dinner the night Ben Brewer was murdered. We know what time he left his apartment and how long he was in his office and who came to see him. We know when he arrived here. We know when Dennis Haviland returned home. We know how long you all talked before you went to dress for dinner. We know—good God, we know what you ate. We know what time the florists came. We know what flowers they used for decorations and what you paid for them. We know who suggested the decoration. We know—well, we know that Ben Brewer quarreled with the woman he was to marry and told her she could never influence him and there was no use trying to do that.”

  “I told you that,” said Daphne. “You made me.”

  He did not look at her.

  “So you see, Miss Haviland, there’s no use in lying. We—”

  “I see,” said Amelia gently. “Do you know who murdered Ben?”

  For just an instant Jacob Wait did not reply. Not because Amelia’s pretty sarcasm had touched him. But because he saw, suddenly, that he was using a completely futile method. Futile, at least, with the two elder women. The men understood the inexorability of evidence, of law, of police methods. The girl, too, was sensible. But the two women had been for too long padded against the rebuffs and struggles of the world; for too many years they had been secure. For too long they had immersed themselves in the tight little world of the Haviland Bridge Company and the Haviland family.

  “No,” he said simply. “I still lack proof.”

  He let them wait for a completely still, shocked moment to understand—rather, to repeat to themselves—what he had said.

  Daphne thought, He thinks it’s Dennis. This tilt with Amelia means nothing: he only wants her—wants us all—to talk. He knows about the springhouse; he knows there were two. He knows they were people who had access to the house; he knows—and has known from the beginning—that there were no burglars. He knows what we did—but he can’t yet prove it is Dennis. He can never prove it, really, because Dennis didn’t kill him. He didn’t kill Archie—Dennis couldn’t kill anyone.

  But there was Dennis’ revolver—linked to the springhouse by that dark juxtaposition. There was that burden of evidence against Dennis, that inexorable heaping of one thing upon another. And there was the wedding ring.

  A crime of passion—that was what they would call it. She was, too, appalled at the vistas of exploration—of inquiry and information—which the detective’s swift words had opened before her. It was as if curtains around them had parted here and there and revealed unknown dangers pressing upon them.

  Masses of information, he had said. All the day before and the day before that the police had worked, gathering information—any and all information—and out of it, quite evidently, they were going to construct motives, evidence.

  And Amelia. Daphne had known, of course, that Amelia never gave up; that her seeming acquiescence and acceptance of Ben Brewer as president of the Haviland Bridge Company was merely her way of biding her time. Of carrying on that unremitting program to oust him secretly. Under cover.

  She glanced at her father, wondering if he had known to what vicious lengths Amelia’s desires had carried her. He caught her look and tried to smile reassuringly and put his hand over her own for a moment. But he looked shocked; he hadn’t known, she decided swiftly, and hadn’t been a party to it. He had gone on trying to keep peace, hoping for the best.

  The detective was going to say something. More questioning or more direct accusation. She braced herself for it.

  But it was neither. The detective turned and said to one of the policemen, as if it were a forgotten chore, “Get the hammer the woman talked abo
ut and have it examined for fingerprints. Question her more. Don’t bring her up here yet.” The policeman vanished. Wait turned abruptly to Amelia again. “Why were you paying Shore? What did he know?”

  Amelia looked at Johnny. “He’ll not believe us,” she said to him, and Johnny looked up at the detective. “She doesn’t know,” he said. “We didn’t know.”

  “Why did you pay him, then?”

  “We hadn’t paid him yet,” said Johnny truthfully. “But we were going to. The thing was, he was out to make trouble for us. He threatened us. But he refused to tell us what he knew, except that it was a motive for the murder of Ben. Amelia and I decided it was best to give him what he asked; we are not in a position at the moment to bargain. But we—well, we don’t know what information he held. I mean,” said Johnny, “said he held. It was all one so far as our feelings and situation are concerned.”

  “But you don’t know exactly what. Well,” said the detective shortly, “we’ll have to see if we can find out. Who found his body tonight? One at a time, please. We’ll begin with you, Miss Haviland. When did you first know of Shore’s death?”

  It was then about two, and the detective did not release them until five, but kept them there, questioning them.

  And in the end it summed up to exactly nothing.

  They had all heard the sound of the blow. Nobody, it developed, had been asleep. There was confusion about voices and about lights and about who saw what in the hall.

  “But Dennis found the body,” said Gertrude. “I remember that. And we were all there in the doorway when he turned him over and said ‘He’s dead.’”

  Everyone agreed.

  Daphne had told her own story wearily. She could not tell of Archie Shore’s visit to her room, and that because of it she had been curiously, directly certain that Archie Shore had murdered Ben. But she had been wrong: she had to be wrong, for Archie himself was murdered.