“Joseph,” said Judy impulsively, “why don’t you tell what you know? You know something.”
“What little I know is Mr. Walter’s secret, Miss.” And that was all he would say.
Chapter Twenty-eight
THAT NIGHT JOSEPH WAS shot. Not killed, but painfully injured. The bullet struck his collar bone and broke it, near the shoulder. But fired from only five or six feet the impact was terrific, and at first I thought that he was dead.
The two children had come in about eight-thirty, and Judy was very low. The appeal was still pending, and unless we secured a new trial Jim would go to the chair early in September. There was strong pressure being brought against a re-trial.
“James Blake has had every opportunity to prove his innocence, and has failed. A jury of thoughtful men and women found him guilty and sentenced him to death as the penalty of at least one crime. There is no question but that an acquittal would have found him at once accused of at least one other murder, and possibly two.
“There is however more at issue than this. In the past the murderer with wealth at his command has found it possible to evade punishment for almost indefinite periods, with the result that the sacredness of human life—”
It is not surprising then that our group of three was silent that night.
Judy I remember had gone back to the night of Sarah’s death, as though she was desperately attempting to prove something to herself.
“Why wasn’t it Wallie after all?” she said. “He was in dinner clothes that night. Suppose he broke into the house here at night? Why hadn’t he stunned Sarah with that piece of wood, and then come here to get whatever it was, the records or the will? She may have lain unconscious for those three hours. Then later on he could have gone back to her.”
Well, that too was possible, although Dick thought the question of time entered into it.
“He’d have had to work pretty fast,” he said. “It takes time to get old putty out of a window. When I was a housebreaker—”
“He didn’t finish. He broke the pane.”
I recall that they wrangled about it, and that finally they decided to go out and experiment a bit. Dick’s idea I think was to get Judy’s mind away from Jim’s tragic situation, and as I needed the same thing myself rather badly, I trailed along. It was a steaming July night, for it had rained during the day. Somewhere in the grounds next door the ex-bootlegger’s children were exploding a few premature firecrackers, and on the street a steady procession of cars was passing, the riders not so much seeking a breeze as producing one.
We went out by the pantry and kitchen. Joseph was reading the paper in the pantry, and I remember that as we passed through the pantry Judy asked him the time.
“Ten o’clock, Miss.”
“Aren’t you hot in here, Joseph?” I asked. All the windows were down and the shades drawn.
“It’s safer like this, madam.”
I remember too that when we went outside, Dick carrying a flashlight, the dogs went with us; and that Jock saw a rabbit or something of the sort in the shrubbery by the garage and made a dash for it. I whistled him back, and he came reluctantly.
We made our way slowly about. Dick turning the flash alternately on the trees, one or two of which grow close to the house, and onto windows and doors. At last we reached the back drawing room door and Dick turned the light full on it.
“Now for the knife,” he said. “Durn you, I’ll learn you, Miss Judy.”
“Knife? What knife?”
“I gave you a pocket knife, oh love of my life. What the hell did you do with it? I put it on the desk for you.”
Judy maintained that he had done nothing of the sort, and after a momentary squabble Dick went back by the kitchen to get it. As I have said somewhere, it is exactly fifty feet around the corner from this door to the kitchen porch, and as he was running he made it very quickly. It could not have been more than three minutes from the time he left us until he rejoined us.
Jock, I recall, was restless, and Judy was obliged, to hold him. She was slightly querulous. In his excitement Dick had carried the flashlight with him, and she grumbled.
“He might have left us the light, anyhow. I feel creepy.”
And indeed she did, for when Dick unexpectedly turned the corner, having left the house by the front door and emerging from behind us, she jumped and screamed.
As I sit here, recalling that night, I am again obsessed with that peculiar fatality which seemed to attend all our actions during those months of terror. Here again was an instance of it. Dick goes into the house by the kitchen door and departs by the front door, leaving both wide open, and as a result we have not only another crime, but no clue whatever to the identity of its perpetrator. And in that night’s tragedy lay the whole story. A matter of deadly reasoning; deadly inevitable, and as coldly and recklessly carried out.
Dick came back, as I say, and began working with the knife on the hard putty around one of the panes.
“It’s hard,” he said. “Look at this. Like cement. No, lady love, Wallie hadn’t time to meet Sarah and knock her senseless, get here, dig out as much of this as he did dig, and then be seen on the stairs apparently on his way out, when he was seen. All those little things took time.”
They wrangled about it, Judy sticking to her point. Wallie had taken the pencil up the ladder with him, because he had dropped something of his own down the shaft. Later on having to dispose of the body, he used the same ladder to reach the top of the sewer. That was why she had wanted to look at it. There was red clay around the sewer.
But we were not there more than fifteen minutes in all, perhaps less. And next door the firecrackers were popping, and the cars on the street were backfiring after coasting down the hill. What was one report more or less to us, as we stood there? When we started back toward the kitchen Judy and Dick lagged behind me, like the lovers they were, and as I was leading Jock by the collar, it so happened that I was still in this stooped position when I reached the pantry door.
Joseph was still there, in his chair. But he did not rise when I entered, and I released the dog and straightened up, rather surprised. I saw then that a thin stream of blood was slowly spreading over his shirt front, and as I stared at him his body relaxed and he slid out of the chair and onto the floor.
His eyes were open, and he seemed to be looking at me. It was as though we gazed at each other, Joseph and I, and as though he said: “You see what has happened to me. It is incredible, but here I am.”
He was not conscious. Just when that look of shocked surprise left him I do not know. One moment it was there, the next it was as though a hand had been passed over his face and left it smooth. I dropped down on my knees beside him, stricken with grief. I caught his hand, which had served me for so many years. Strange, in all that time, how seldom I had touched his hand.
I felt a deep remorse, an overwhelming pity. There, under the light, still shone beneath his thin iron-gray hair the scar from that mysterious attack which might have killed him. I put my hand up and touched it, and with that I remember that I began to cry.
I realize now that some time in those shocked first seconds I heard the front door slam, but it no more than registered on my dazed brain. On the kitchen porch Dick and Judy were still talking, and the red spot on Joseph’s shirt front spread a little, but very little.
I got up and went into the kitchen.
“Judy,” I said, “will you go around by the front door? Joseph is—not well.”
“Not well? You don’t mean that he’s been drinking?”
“No. Please do what I tell you.”
I left them and went back to the pantry. There was no indication there of any visitor. The evening paper lay on the table, and Joseph’s reading glasses beside it. Apparently he had stopped reading, and perhaps had dozed.
I had noticed lately that he dozed rather often; a sort of half-sleep, like that of a very old man. Although Joseph was not that. He was perhaps in his late fifties.
Of a weapon there was no sign whatever.
I was apparently calm enough by that time. I knew that we had probably heard the shot, but that we had laid it to the customary explosions in the street. I knew that Jock had not seen a rabbit, but something infinitely more sinister, and even to an extent I was able to reconstruct the crime; Dick had left open the door to the kitchen, and Joseph had not closed it, or certainly not locked it.
There had been ten minutes after Dick had passed through the pantry, and a shot required but a second of time. I think it was then that I remembered the slamming door, and I realized that while I stared at Joseph the murderer was still in the house, working his way forward.
The sharp ringing of the door bell over my head at that moment sent a chill over me. But it was only Dick and Judy, to report that the front door had been closed, although Dick had recklessly left it standing open, and to stare at me with curious eyes.
“Look here,” Judy said. “Something’s happened to Joseph, hasn’t it?”
“He’s hurt.”
“Who hurt him?”
“I don’t know,” I said, and then I broke down and began to cry again. That shocked them profoundly. I remember Judy pushing me into the library and Dick running back. Then I believe I fainted, for I recall very little until the police were in the house, and Doctor Simonds was bending over me.
They took Joseph to the hospital that night, and they extracted the bullet. He was not badly hurt, but was suffering considerable pain.
“He’s strong,” Doctor Simonds told me, “and he has kept himself in good condition. He’s not flabby like most butlers. But he’s had a shock, more of a shock than he cares to tell about.”
“He won’t say who did it?”
“No. He says he doesn’t know. But as he was shot from in front at pretty close range, that’s unlikely. Unless he was asleep.”
In spite of myself I could not get Wallie out of my mind after I had learned that. Wallie with his revolver, and that odd statement of Joseph’s that he did not know who shot him.
Inspector Harrison was very noncommittal. One curious thing he had found that night, ranging over that first floor while Doctor Simonds worked over Joseph in the pantry. This was that the criminal, whoever it was, had paused long enough in the library to take a glass of sherry!
A decanter had been brought in earlier in the evening with some biscuits, but none of us had touched it. Yet sherry had been poured and apparently drunk. A little had even been spilled on the top of my old desk, and as it lay for some time the desk bears the stains to this day.
“But it’s incredible,” I said.
“Not incredible probably if we know the answer, but it certainly argues a degree of recklessness that’s unusual, to say the least. If Jock saw this person with the gun near the garage, and you heard the front door slam, it looks as though he simply walked in the back and out the front of the house.”
“Stopping in the library for a little wine.”
“Precisely. Stopping in the library for a little wine.”
There was no weapon anywhere. True, Joseph’s own revolver was in the pantry drawer where he kept it, but it had not been fired and the chambers were clean and new.
Dick had gone with the ambulance, and as Robert was not about I sent Judy home in a taxicab soon after. It was not until she had gone that the Inspector ceased his ranging over the lower floor and coming into the library planted himself in front of me.
“I’m going to ask you a few plain questions, Miss Bell, and I want plain answers. First, tell me again about young Carter going back into the house.”
“He ran back for a knife. I’ve told you—”
“Yes. Whose idea was this ‘experiment,’ as you call it?”
“I think it was his. I really don’t think it was Judy’s. He and Judy had both been talking about it.”
“But Miss Judy left the knife in the house? Are you sure of that?”
“He accused her of it. Half jokingly, of course.”
“That’s different. Now let’s go over this. He ran in by the kitchen, through the house and into the library, and then out by the front door?”
“Yes.”
“Why the front door?”
“I daresay it was nearer.”
He paced the floor for a moment, and the toothpick between his strong white teeth had an aggressive tilt. I began to feel uneasy, without knowing quite why.
“How well do you know young Carter? What do you know about him?” he fired at me suddenly.
“Nothing at all, really; except that he is rather a dear boy and—Judy thinks so.”
“Where does he come from? Who are his people?”
“I haven’t the remotest idea. I imagine he is practically alone. I know he is an orphan.”
“He’s poor, I take it?”
“Poor and very proud, Inspector.”
“Humph,” he grunted. “Doesn’t it beat the devil the way a good looking boy with nice manners can get everywhere, and no questions asked? Now understand me, Miss Bell, I’m not saying Dick Carter fired that shot tonight; but I am saying that he had an excellent chance to fire that shot. And I’m going to tell you something else. He had a revolver in that Ford of his, parked in the front drive.”
I was angry and outraged, but he lifted a hand against my protest.
“Now wait a minute. I’m thinking out loud, that’s all; and I have a good bit of respect for your discretion. I’ve got that gun here, and we have a man in the department who’ll be able to tell us if it’s been fired lately. Magazine’s full, of course. He’d have had time to do that, and to slip it into the pocket of his car on the way back to you and Miss Judy.”
“But why on earth would he shoot Joseph?” I demanded angrily. “Just because he has an automatic, and I happen to know that he has carried one in his car ever since this trouble began, it is ridiculous to suspect him.”
“I told you I was only thinking out loud,” he said blandly, and soon after that he went away.
It was the next day that Dick was sent for and interrogated, and Judy came around to see me with black shadows under her eyes and a look of despair in them.
“They suspect him,” she said. “They’ve got something against him now, and they may get more. Listen. What became of that knife Dick had last night?”
“I haven’t seen it since. It may be on my desk downstairs.”
“It isn’t,” she wailed. “They’ve got it, and it was Wallie’s. Dick found it in his room the night he and Joseph searched it, and brought it away. It had the point missing from one blade.”
“Do be rational, Judy. What has that got to do with it?”
“I’m as rational as you are. That knife had the point broken off a blade, and if that point fits the piece the Inspector has, the piece he found on the step after Sarah was killed, what will they think?”
“Did Joseph see him take the knife?”
“No. He just slid it into his pocket. You see we have always been sure that it was Wallie on the stairs that night, and Dick thought the knife might prove it. He showed it to me, and I thought so too.”
“You can tell them that, Judy.”
“And would they believe me? They would not. How do they know I’m not mixed up in the whole rotten mess? How do they know Sarah didn’t write me about the will? I came down that day, didn’t I? And I telephoned Dick that night. How do they know I didn’t tell him Sarah was out with that copy of the will in her pocketbook? I stood to lose a lot by that will, and so did Dick if he married me.”
“You’re crazy, Judy!”
“Am I? Uncle Jim saw that man on the hillside, didn’t he? Saw him and recognized him. Who’s he protecting? Can’t they easily think he’s being noble and protecting Dick for me?”
“And—Joseph?”
“They’d find a reason for Joseph, if they wanted one.”
“Still I daresay that even in their wildest moments, Judy, they would not accuse Dick of knocking himsel
f unconscious on the hill, or of trying to brain you in the garage.”
She laughed a little, in spite of herself, and she went away somewhat comforted. But I myself was not so sure.
They released Dick, however, after that interrogation, and things seemed to go on much as before. But I have reason to think that he was more or less under observation from that time on.
Chapter Twenty-nine
YET THINGS WERE MOVING rapidly to the dénouement, although none of us suspected it. It was the next day that Inspector Harrison found, on the hillside below the garage and leading up to it, those footprints of which he was to say nothing until his case was complete. I saw him from a rear upper window, tramping about with Simmons at his heels, and every now and then he would stoop and plant a stick in the ground. Toothpicks, maybe, although they would be a trifle small.
But this was the next day. That night he left a policeman on guard in the house, and the next morning one appeared to patrol the grounds. That continued to the end.
I think it was the next day, or the day following, that Lily Sanderson called up to say that Mrs. Bassett was dead.
“She simply slept away,” she said. “One of the boarders here thinks she got hold of the morphia and took an overdose, but if she did who can blame her?”
She seemed very sad and desolate. I told her to come in some time, and then what with one thing and another I am afraid I forgot them both; Lily getting her sleep now, in that meretricious bedroom of hers, and Mrs. Bassett resting at last after more trouble than most human beings are called upon to bear.
I was not well during that day or two following the shooting of Joseph. I had been profoundly shocked, and what with worry about Wallie and the long strain I almost collapsed. Doctor Simonds ordered me to bed on, I think, the second day, and Judy stayed with me as much as possible.
She was still anxious about Dick, still fearful for him. She seemed to think that because everything was quiet that that very quiet was ominous, and in her desperation she was casting about for some one, any one, on whom to throw the guilt.
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