Alibi for Isabel: And Other Stories

by Mary Roberts Rinehart

  “Not in our house. They’re supposed to have legs.”

  “Good girl,” he said approvingly. “That’s what I need. So the servants didn’t use it. Then who did? Mr. and Mrs. Jennings were in their rooms on the third floor, the girls were on the fourth. Maybe Wilkinson himself used it.”

  “And then got out through a locked door!”

  “Oh, damn the door,” he said resignedly. “Well, we still have the kid sister and Gussie. After that, you can let down your hair and go home.” He grinned. “What are you going to tell father when you get there?”

  “So far as he’s concerned, I’m in a ten-cent dance hall, asking the girls if their feet hurt. I think the sister was in the next room a while ago, Johnny. Probably listening.”

  “Probably,” said Johnny indulgently. “Skinny blonde girl?”

  “That’s the one.”

  He rang for Carlos, and the butler came to the door. He was an old man, practically doddering and obviously shaken. He said he had not used the elevator that night, or ever. Also that the front door was always locked. No, he had not admitted anyone but Lieutenant Wilkinson. I made a few squizzles, but he paid no attention to me whatever. He went up the stairs to send the girls down, and Johnny lit a cigarette and lapsed into silence.

  It was some time before the girls appeared. They had been in bed, and they came in together, in their nightgowns under dressing gowns, and with their feet in bedroom slippers. Camilla was the girl I had seen on the stairs, and I gathered that the quiet little redhead behind her was Gussie. They looked about sixteen, and Camilla was shrilly furious.

  “What’s the idea?” she said. “I don’t know a damned thing, and neither does Gussie. If Caroline wanted to shoot herself that was her business, wasn’t it?”

  But she was not as tough as she pretended. Her eyes were red with crying. She came over to the desk for a cigarette, eying me coldly as she did so, and her hands were shaking.

  “As for Gussie, why bring her in? She hardly knew Caroline. What business is it of hers? And why the police anyhow? You’d think we could have some peace here tonight.”

  “Just a few questions,” said Johnny smoothly. “Why don’t you sit down? I’m not dangerous.”

  He gave her his best smile, and Johnny’s best smile is something. She looked rather sheepish, but she did sit down. Only Gussie remained standing.

  “I think I’ll go back to bed,” she said. “You don’t need me, do you?”

  I took my first good look at Gussie then, and surprised myself. For if she was not on the verge of the screaming meemies no girl ever was. She was not shaking. She was rigid. And she had gone to bed with her lipstick on. Even Camilla had cleared her face, but not Gussie.

  “It won’t take a minute,” said Johnny soothingly. “Just where were you and so on. I understand you heard the shot, Miss Gussie?”

  “I never said that. I said I heard a noise. I thought it was a backfire.”

  “That was while Miss Camilla here was in the shower?”

  “Yes. I’d had mine.”

  They were less scared now. Even Gussie had relaxed a little. But something puzzled me. I made a note of it and called to Johnny.

  “Just a moment, Lieutenant,” I said. “I’ve written in these times as you suggested. Will you look at them?”

  He came over and glanced down, his face impassive. “O.K. as far as I know,” he said, and turned back to Gussie.

  “I’ve just remembered,” he said. “You were not in the hall when the door was broken down, were you?”

  “Why should I be?”

  “I see. Just where were you?”

  “In the library, reading.”

  She was doing it well, I thought, but she knew something. She was scared stiff again.

  “Remember what you were reading?”

  “Just something I picked up. I was waiting for Cammy.”

  “You heard all the noise. Mr. Jennings banging on the door, people running about, and you went on reading?”

  “I didn’t say that either,” she said, goaded. “I just didn’t think it was any of my business.”

  “And it’s none of your business either, Mr. Policeman,” Camilla broke in. “Just because you wear a uniform isn’t any reason for your acting like this. Why shouldn’t she stay where she was?”

  “Look,” said Johnny, losing patience at last, “if you two kids are trying to put something over on me, forget it. I’m not that easy. What are you both scared about? What’s the story? Come on, speak up. What do you know?”

  They didn’t know from nothing, or so they said in just that language. Or Camilla did. Gussie had lapsed into a dazed silence. She looked pretty sick, and I began to be sorry for her. Johnny let them go at last, and Camilla’s parting shot was typical.

  “You’re going to get into trouble if you don’t take that policeman away from upstairs,” she said from the door. “If you find him knocked out you’ll know who did it.”

  Which was the first intimation I had had that Caroline’s room was under guard. Camilla banged out of the room, and Johnny eyed me.

  “How did you get on to Gussie?”

  “She’s scared to death. And why wasn’t she around when the door was broken down? Camilla was there, but nobody mentioned Gussie.”

  “But good Lord, a kid like that!”

  “She isn’t a baby. She’s a good sixteen. Maybe more. And she can read, you know.”

  He looked puzzled.

  “Listen, Johnny,” I said patiently, “if Caroline didn’t kill herself somebody wiped the gun and put her prints on it. These children as you call them read detective stories. They’d know about that. Probably the doorknobs were wiped too. How about them?”

  “Read detective stories yourself, don’t you?” He grinned wryly. “No prints at all on the inside knob. Not even Caroline’s. That’s when I began to get ideas.”

  But he refused to bring Gussie into the picture. Sure she was scared. So was Camilla. So would any teen-age girl be scared. He wasn’t sure I wasn’t scared myself. I didn’t say anything. I got up, feeling tired and confused.

  “Can I see the room, Johnny?”

  He shrugged.

  “Sure, if you like. Nothing there.” He picked up my notebook and looked at it. “Squizzles is right,” he observed. “Who’s the guy with the jaw?”

  “You,” I told him. “Imagine having to look at that jaw every day at breakfast.”

  “It’s a libel,” he said. “I have a bright and shining morning face. I’ll show you some time.”

  He didn’t follow that up, however. He put the book in his pocket, and we went out to the elevator. It moved slowly, making a definite humming sound. Johnny listened to it.

  “How far away do you think you could hear this thing?”

  “Two or three floors, I imagine.”

  He shook his head.

  “Funny,” he said. “So the servants are supposed to have legs! Then who the hell did Wilkinson hear using it?”

  The door opened quietly on the fourth floor. The light was still on in the girls’ room at the back of the house, and the officer on a chair outside Caroline’s door was half asleep. He was a middle-aged man, and in spite of Camilla’s threat he appeared undamaged.

  “Everything all right, Jenkins?” Johnny asked.

  “All right, Lieutenant. The skinny blonde girl wanted to get into the room. Said her sister had borrowed something of hers she needed. I didn’t let her in.”

  “Right,” said Johnny.

  He was thoughtful, however. Evidently he did not like the idea of Camilla’s trying to get into Caroline’s room. “What do you suppose that’s about?” he inquired. But he didn’t expect an answer, and he got none.

  Caroline’s room looked much as I had expected, as if she had merely used it when there was no place else to go. But except for the stain on the carpet and the bed torn up when the doctor had taken a sheet from it, it was fairly neat. Certainly it looked as though she had meant to go out
that night. A silver evening dress hung over the back of a chair, the slippers to match were near it, and her evening bag was on the dressing table, open.

  “That’s where she carried the gun, according to Wilkinson,” Johnny said.

  I nodded. I was looking at the dressing table. It was covered with cream jars and perfume bottles, but it was very orderly. The gold-backed brushes lay in a row, the jars and bottles were grouped. There was only one incongruous thing. A large powder puff, the sort I myself used for bath powder, lay beside the evening bag. Johnny was watching me.

  “Well?”

  “It’s the puff,” I said. “It looks as though she put it there herself.”

  “Why not?”

  “It doesn’t belong there. A woman powders herself in the bathroom. The stuff flies, you know. She doesn’t want it on the carpet.”

  “So what?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe she wouldn’t care, if she was going to kill herself. Or maybe she was using it in the bathroom when someone knocked at the door. Someone she knew. Someone she didn’t mind seeing without her clothes.”

  He whistled.

  “So that’s what you think!” he said. “Back to the kid sister, I suppose.”

  “Or someone who said she was the kid sister. It might have been Gussie.”

  He shook his head.

  “Damned if I believe it,” he said. “They put on all the airs of grownups, but they’re children just the game. All the tough talk doesn’t make them adults, or killers. Not girls raised like these, anyhow.”

  “All right,” I said shortly. “Find out if anybody saw the Garrison girl in the library when she said she was there. Ask the butler. He passed the door at least three times.”

  He was still skeptical, but he went out to locate Carlos, and left me alone. I didn’t like it much. I felt ineffectual, and the intimate belongings of another girl—so like my own—made me rather sick. But I knew I would have to look around. What had Camilla wanted from the room? If I knew that, and why both girls were half hysterical, I might learn something.

  I forced myself to move around. There was nothing much to see, however. Only in the bathroom the water was still in the tub, and the air reeked of bath-salts. Her towel was on the floor, too. Certainly if Caroline had set the stage for a suicide she would have done better than that. There is nothing dramatic about dead bath-water.

  I looked around the room. Whatever Camilla had wanted I could not identify it. I looked into the clothes closet, but except that a dress near the front had fallen from its hanger it was orderly. It housed Caroline’s huge and dazzling wardrobe: the furs, the dresses, the evening coats, the negligees. Especially the negligees, so easy to slip on, to cover a thin not too attractive body when it was found. Only Caroline had not expected to be found. She had not killed herself. I knew that as soon I saw the dress on the floor and the hanger from which it had fallen.

  When Johnny came in I was sitting on a chair because my knees felt weak. He didn’t notice.

  “He didn’t see her,” he said. “Says he used the stairs. Didn’t look into the library at all. That doesn’t mean she wasn’t there.”

  I could see that he was annoyed with me. The girls didn’t fit into any pattern of crime that he knew, and he was even more annoyed when I managed to speak.

  “I hope you don’t mind, Johnny. I’d. like to speak to Gussie.”

  “Gussie! You’ve got it in for that kid, haven’t you?”

  “I just want to talk to her.”

  He was furious. He stalked out, and I could hear shrill protests from the girls’ room. When he came back they were both behind him, looking more like children than ever. Camilla put up a bluff, however.

  “I’d like to know who you people think you are,” she screeched. “Just as we were trying to sleep—”

  “With all the lights on?” I asked.

  She gave me a hard look.

  “Why are you mixing in this?” she demanded. “I thought you were a stenographer. Who are you?”

  “Never mind about that. I want to talk to Gussie.”

  “Gussie’s not talking.”

  I was sorry for her. She reached around and took Gussie’s arm, and I felt like the Gestapo. Johnny was looking bewildered.

  “I’m afraid you’ll have to talk, Gussie,” I said. “You see, I know you were in that closet.”

  Gussie went white to the lips.

  “I didn’t kill her,” she said. “I didn’t. I wouldn’t kill anybody. I’ve never even shot a gun. I don’t know how.”

  “But you were in the closet when it happened.”

  She nodded dumbly. I opened my hand and produced a hair-net. Not the usual one, a heavier one, reddish brown in color, to match Gussie’s hair. Just such a net I had used at school for basketball, or to set my hair after I had washed it. She gave it an agonized look.

  “So what?” said Camilla stormily. “She got out that dress for Caroline. Caroline asked her to, and her net caught on a hanger. You can’t pin a murder on her for that.”

  Johnny was staring at me as if he had never seen me before. Not too agreeably, either. I tried to ignore him.

  “I haven’t said she murdered anybody,” I told Camilla. “Now shut up and keep out of this. It’s all right, Gussie. All we want is the truth. You were in the closet when someone shot Caroline. Did you see who it was?”

  She shook her head. “The door was closed,” she said.

  “And you were still in the closet when the door was broken down, weren’t you? You got out when Mr. Jennings took Mrs. Jennings away and while Lieutenant Wilkinson helped the butler downstairs.”

  She nodded again, her poor young face agonized.

  “I’d fainted,” she said with stiff lips. “I heard the shot, and I fainted. I often faint. I’d gone into the closet to get Caroline something to put around her before she opened the door.”

  “Who came in, Gussie? Who opened the door?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know. I don’t know, I tell you.”

  And at that she proceeded to go into as fine a bit of screaming hysteria as I had heard in a long time. There was no quieting her. Johnny at last picked her up and carried her back to bed, and Camilla, after a murderous look at me, followed. When he came back Johnny looked bewildered.

  “Now let’s get this, Anne,” he said. “Don’t tell me you think the girl shot Caroline Jennings. I don’t believe it.”

  “She knows who did it. Maybe she fainted. I think she did. She grabbed at a dress as it fell. It’s still on the floor. That’s probably when her hairnet caught on the hanger, too. But she didn’t faint right away. She did a first-class job of cleaning up for somebody before she did.”

  “That child! Don’t be an idiot, Anne.”

  “Listen, Johnny,” I said patiently. “I didn’t want to come here tonight. I wish I was at home in bed this minute with cold cream on my face and a good book to read. But I’m here and I’m going through with it. Who wiped the prints off that gun and put Caroline’s on it? Who wiped the doorknobs? If Gussie didn’t do it, who did?”

  “She fainted.”

  “All right, have it your own way. I don’t think it was the shot that made her faint. That’s all.”

  “Then what did?”

  “Suppose she knows who killed Caroline. Suppose she cleans up as well as she can in a hurry. Then she has to get out. But what happens? With Caroline dead on the floor the butler comes up a second time. He bangs on the door and calls, and Gussie is trapped. She makes for the closet and faints. She’s still there when they break the door in. Nobody looks, so she stays there.”

  “Are you telling me Camilla killed her own sister?”

  “No,” I said wearily. “Maybe she did. I wouldn’t know. All I say is that Gussie knows who did it.” I got up. “I’m tired, Johnny,” I told him. “I’m tired and sick. I want to go home.”

  He nodded absently.

  “I’ll take you,” he said. “Then I’ll come back
. Those girls are going to talk.”

  I wasn’t so sure. Girls are stubborn and loyal, and I had an idea that Gussie wouldn’t have talked if she was faced with torture. But in the elevator Johnny seemed to realize that I was still around.

  “You look like the wrath of heaven,” he said. “I hope to God your father’s gone to bed.”

  There was a mirror in the elevator, and I fixed my face as well as I could. I still looked dreadful, but I didn’t care. Johnny didn’t care either. He put his arms around me and kissed me.

  “Just to make you feel better,” he said, and grinned.

  I think we had both forgotten Wilkinson until we saw him sitting forlornly in the hall. He got up and tried to smile.

  “This is a poor way to spend my bit of leave,” he said. “What’s the idea of keeping me?”

  Johnny stopped in front of him. He was all policeman again.

  “I’ve got a murder on my hands, Lieutenant,” he said. “I don’t think you’re going anywhere tonight. Do you happen to know a girl named Gussie Garrison? I suppose her name’s Augusta.”

  “Never heard of her,” he replied promptly.

  “Sure of that, are you?”

  “I’ve said so, haven’t I?”

  He was angry. He stared at Johnny and Johnny stared back. They were about of a height, only Johnny was heavier. The officer at the door took a step toward them, but there as no quarrel. Johnny shrugged.

  “Just thought you might know her,” he said. “I’ll be back soon, then maybe we can let you go.”

  I think I dozed between the two big men on the way back. But I remember Johnny saying that if the elevator was on the fourth floor when they found Caroline, then whoever killed her must have used the back stairs to get away. He was still exonerating the girls, of course. But I was too exhausted to talk. And father was awake when he took me in. Johnny hadn’t wanted to come in. He said he had plenty to do that night without fathers glaring at him and thinking the worst. But he did come in, and father gave me one look and turned on him.

  “Is this the way you return my child to me?” he demanded. “Has she been in a riot, or fighting a fire?”

  Johnny looked sheepish.

  “I’m sorry, sir. She did a bit of police work tonight.”