“Howard Somers’ child?” I asked sharply.
“No. I believe that was the plot at first; it was all a plot anyhow. There was no such child. This girl they were passing off was the Bassett woman’s own daughter by an earlier marriage. The Bassett woman had remarried. The girl’s name was Mary Martin.”
“Mary! And she believed it?”
“I think she did believe it for a time. She wanted to believe it. That’s natural. But when the plot failed Mrs. Bassett told her the truth. The immediate result, however, was that Walter sent for his father, and his father came here.
“Howard Somers denied the story in toto. He had had no second child by Margaret, and she had borne no child in Europe. The whole story was a lie. But he worked himself into a heart attack over it, and that was the start of the trouble.
“Norton’s little plan had failed. But this sickness gave him a new idea. Queer how one criminal thought leads to another. He went to Walter with the scheme about the will, and Walter almost kicked him out. But Walter was in debt, and there was the idea. It got to ‘eating him,’ as he put it. Then, too, he was already interested in the girl. The girl was straight. She’d believed that story. As a matter of fact, when her mother told her the truth she tried to see Howard Somers at the Imperial, but they would not let her in.
“And there’s this to say in Walter’s defense; he felt that he had been badly treated, that a half of the estate should have been his. Later on, when his father was dead, he went on to New York to tell the whole story. But they alienated him there, and we have to remember that he wasn’t sure his father had been murdered. Mary Martin suspected it, and told him so over the long distance telephone.
“And I’ll say this for him. He went to this Norton and Norton denied it. But he laid Norton out cold on general principles, and Norton hated him from that moment. That’s what I mean when I say Walter Somers had paid his price. His wife was desperately in love with him, but she loathed the whole imposture. She threatened again and again to uncover it.
“Now about this conspiracy to draw up a fake will. It wasn’t Walter Somers’ idea, although he helped to put it through, and the cleverness with which that will was put among his father’s papers was not his idea either. It was simple enough, at that. Mr. Somers did not alter his mind or his will during that illness, but he did pay some notes of Walter’s. In some ways he was a hard man, and he made Walter bring him the canceled notes.
“He meant to keep them. But Walter was afraid Mrs. Somers would find them in case his father died, so he had him endorse the envelope to be returned to him—to Walter—in that case.
“He told all this to Norton, and that was the start of the whole business. Norton suggested that a spurious will could be placed in that envelope and substituted for the notes, and that’s what happened. Howard Somers himself carried back to New York and placed among his private papers that bogus will, endorsed in his own hand ‘to be given to my son Walter in the event of my death.’ It was neat, when you think of it.”
“Neat, but wicked, Inspector!”
“Wrong, yes. Still, you must remember that no murder was contemplated. Fraud, yes, although Walter felt justifiable fraud, in a way. But murder, never.
“So the comedy was staged, with the fifty thousand dollars to be this Norton’s share, his pay for that imposture, for the study he had made of Howard Somers’ signature, and for that bit of comedy where he lay in a bed in a low light, on a day selected because it was dark and gray, and feebly signed that spurious document.
“I haven’t been able to learn everything from Walter yet, but in that bit of comedy—and God knows it’s the only comedy there is—the Bassett woman in a nurse’s uniform played Sarah Gittings. Walter had prepared for that by having her give massage treatments to his father. And Norton was Mr. Somers. I imagine that Norton was the man with the box of flowers the floor clerk remembered. He had long gray hair, she said, and so Norton probably wore into the hotel that day the wig made to resemble Howard Somers’ hair.
“That flower box had flowers in it. But it had some other things, make-up and silk pyjamas, a dressing gown, a few bottles and toilet articles to dress the room. That’s a guess, but it’s pretty accurate.
“It was Walter’s room, anyhow. But they locked off the door to the sitting room, and Walter told Sarah Gittings he was having some friends there for cocktails, and to ‘stay out.’
“Yes, it looked like a water-proof scheme. The hotel manager himself brings Waite up, and Walter meets him in the hall. Nobody thinks about that door. The notary comes up on the second day and witnesses the signatures. Florence Gunther is brought in from the hall. When it is over the players go away, one at a time, by the service staircase.
“Only one thing slipped. It was Sarah Gittings’ custom to go out for a breath of air, and Walter took her place. But the two gray days with rain that were the best for their purpose, the twelfth and thirteenth of August, were bad days for her. She did not go out. She read a novel aloud to Mr. Somers instead, and put that on her record.
“Now let’s go on to this last spring, when Sarah met Florence Gunther. She may have remembered seeing her at the Imperial, sitting in the hall, or it may have been pure accident. It’s enough for us that they met, that Sarah told her she was with you, and as your connection with the Somers family is well known, that Florence finally mentioned the will.
“Sarah Gittings was incredulous, and after learning the date of the will, she went home and examined her records. She saw then that no such will could have been drawn on those days, and she began to try to reach Mr. Blake. She also finally induced Florence to abstract that copy from the safe, and on Monday the eighteenth of April she arranged to meet Mr. Blake at the Halkett Street house.
“She had already secreted the records in the wood cellar, but that evening she moved them to the cabinet. She had learned the terms of the will that day, and she knew well enough that there had been fraud. Also she knew about that secret compartment in the cabinet. When she took the will from Florence that afternoon she gave her the clock dial directions.
“But she felt safe enough. She had no thought of danger that night, when she left the house.
“Now, I’m going to reconstruct that night of the eighteenth of April. And you must remember that Walter Somers is still very weak, and that he himself can only guess at a part of it.
Chapter Thirty-two
“AT FIVE MINUTES PAST seven Sarah Gittings left this house, taking the dogs with her. She had the will for safekeeping probably inside her shoe—there had been some purse-snatching in this neighborhood—and she carried in her bag the key to her room and the key to her front door; but she was excited that night, and she forgot to lock her bedroom door.
“She went out the door, and in the drive she found Walter Somers waiting for her. He knew that she frequently took the dogs out at that hour, and this night he knew something else. He knew through Norton, who had his own way of learning things, that she had met Florence that afternoon and received a longish legal envelope from her.
“It looked as though the fat was in the fire.
“After he had talked to her, Walter saw that the game was all up. He threw up his hands and told her he’d go to his father the next day and tell him the whole story. But he begged her not to tell Jim Blake. If his stepmother ever heard this story he was through. She agreed to this.
“But she would not give him the copy of the will. Said she’d left it in the house. And he didn’t trust her. She had never liked him. He didn’t even believe her.
“But she showed him her hand bag, and the will was not in it.
“‘I’ll give it back to you after you’ve seen your father,’ she told him, and she left him standing there in the drive.
“He says, and I believe him, that he never saw her alive again.
“I’m not defending Walter for trying to get into the house and to get the will. He did get in, although he broke the point of his knife in doing so. While he wa
s working at the putty of the door back there he says he heard her whistling and calling for Jock, who appeared to have wandered off. She was, he thought, in or near the Larimer lot, and later on, when his errand had been fruitless and Joseph had helped him to escape from the house, he thinks he still heard her.
“I imagine he is right about that. The dog had run off, and she hunted him. Then, instead of going on to the house on Halkett Street, she may have been coming back here to telephone and call off that meeting. In any event, perhaps because she was tired with the climbing she had done, on the way back she seems to have sat down on that log to rest.
“And that was where Norton found her, at or about the very time the officer had arrived and the house was being searched. He probably heard the dogs, and so located her. He struck her down from behind, so that she never saw him, and he thought she was dead. Later on, at ten o’clock, he went back to look and she was still living, although unconscious. Then he finished the job. With a knife this time, a knife with a blade approximately four and a half inches long.
“Something scared him about that time, and he ran. He didn’t see Blake on the hill, coming back after waiting at the Halkett Street house for her until twenty minutes to ten. He didn’t see Blake, but Blake saw him. And now remember this. He—Norton—still had that wig like Howard Somers’ own hair, and he was going back to see if that job needed finishing. Also very likely he hadn’t got the will that first time. I believe he put that wig on his head before he went back to the lot.
“He didn’t know what had happened in the interval. She might have been found, there might be a policeman there. So he put on that disguise of his, and he fooled Jim Blake; evening clothes, longish white hair and so on. It isn’t hard, when the story began to come out, to see who Jim Blake thought he saw that night.
“It put him to bed, and it damned near sent him to the chair.”
“Then this Norton, or whoever he is, killed her for the will?”
“Partly. Partly, too, because, although Walter Somers was sick of the whole thing, Norton was determined that it go on. It was that determination, that the will stand, that was behind all the other murders.
“If Florence had kept quiet, she might have lived. He may have thought she would. She’d taken that will from the safe, and she might keep quiet about it. But she tried to see you, and that was fatal. Also, there was something else which marked her for death. Sarah had told Walter about her records for those two days, and when repeated searchings of this house didn’t turn them up, this Norton concluded that Florence had them.
“Under the pretext of bringing her here to you, he lured her into a car.
“He killed her and searched her, and then he went to the Halkett Street house that night and examined her room. He made the Bassett woman help him. It was Mrs. Bassett the Sanderson woman heard crying.
“But I want to go back to Walter. Joseph helped him out of the house that night, and he got away down the hill behind the garage, dressed and came back here. You were expecting him, but he had to come back anyhow. He had dropped his fountain pen into the airshaft, and it bore his initials.
“He got it, as we know. He was uneasy when Sarah didn’t come back, but that’s all. He was afraid she’d left the dogs somewhere and gone on to New York. That scared him; he wanted to do his own confessing, and when he went out and heard the dogs in the lot next door he thought she had tied them there. He was pretty well upset, but he went back to the club and played bridge.
“That is Walter’s story, and I know that it is true in all the salient points. When Sarah was still missing the next day he was worried, especially when you found she was not in New York.
“But he still didn’t believe she was dead, and he never thought of Norton.
“When her body was found, however, he went almost crazy. He went to Norton and Norton was shocked and grieved. Walter just didn’t understand it, that’s all. And when the sword-stick disappeared he began to suspect Jim Blake.
“Only why would Blake kill her? Had she shown him that will and let him believe it was genuine? And had Blake done it, in a passion of anger or to secure the will? It was the only answer he had, and we have to admit that a good many people thought the same way.
“The only person who didn’t was Mary Martin, and she suspected Norton from the start. She’d loathed the scheme from the moment she learned about it, the will and all of it.
“But Florence Gunther’s death showed Walter where he stood. I’m not defending him for keeping silent, but it’s easy to see how he argued. He could not bring the two women back, and how could he prove that Norton had killed them? Norton was still protesting his innocence, calling on high heaven to show that his hands were clean.
“Then you burned the carpet from the car, and Walter was all at sea. He didn’t know where he was.
“But Mary knew, and Norton knew she knew, or suspected. She wasn’t safe after that, so we have her taking Joseph’s revolver and keeping it by her, and later on we have her going to New York to the Somers’ apartment.
“She went out on the Brooklyn Bridge that night and threw the gun into the river. She felt safe, after some pretty awful weeks.”
“But why go to the Somers’ apartment?” I asked, bewildered.
“Because she saw this. She is quicker than Walter, and she believed what he still didn’t want to accept; that Norton was the killer. She saw Norton still holding on, searching Florence’s room after her death for the records, searching this house over and over. And by the way, there’s your ghost! It may be helpful with your servants!
“She saw too that Mr. Somers would have to go next, before the story of that bogus will was uncovered, and that with Mr. Somers dead Jim Blake would go to the chair. Either that or Wallie would have to tell his story, and even then that mightn’t save Blake. Blake mightn’t have known that the will was not genuine.”
“Inspector,” I said gravely, “I want to know who Norton is. I must know. This is—well, it’s cruel.”
“I think it’s kindness,” he said. “I want you to realize this man first, as he is. The craft of him, using Jim Blake’s name to get to Howard Somers, and even dressing like him; telling Mr. Somers the proofs of Jim’s guilt, and promising for a thousand dollars to keep certain things to himself; getting Mr. Somers into his study to write that check, and putting poison into the highball while he is in that study.”
“And that is what he did?”
“That is what he did. And I don’t mind saying that it was that check, which we found in his box, which completed the case against him. He couldn’t bring himself to destroy that check.”
He looked at his watch.
“Now—I’ll hurry over this—I’m going to Walter Somers again. His father’s death drove him frantic. Again he had no proof, but Mary Martin was certain. She had broken the glass and raised the windows—there’s an odor to cyanide—and she felt pretty sure it was murder. And if murder came out, the whole story came out. You can see why she tried to prevent that.
“She called Walter on the long distance phone and told him, and he about went crazy. But a confession then was a very grave matter; here were three deaths as a result of that conspiracy, and one of them his own father.
“He compromised with himself. He would see that Jim Blake got off; but if he was acquitted he would let things ride.
“But the verdict was a foregone conclusion. He had to come clean to save Jim, and Norton had to confess. For he knew now that Norton had got the records. He had been over this house and he knew the cabinet. When the clock dial cipher was read in court all Norton had to do was to come here and get them.
“When Walter left the club, that night before the day when he was to go on the stand, he had in his pocket a full confession of the murders. He had taken it with him to force the murderer to sign it. He had determined to get that signature, at the point of a gun if necessary. But he hoped to get it, by letting Norton have a chance to escape. It looked reasonable to him; if W
alter went on the stand the next day it was all over anyhow. As to the will, I mean.
“But I ought to say this. He and Norton were definitely out. There had been furious trouble between them, and of course there was the time when Walter had knocked Norton cold. Walter hated the very sight of the other man, and he knew it.
“Walter picked him up in his car; and they drove out of town, Walter talking, the other man listening. Walter was going on the stand the next day, to tell all he knew. He was wary enough; he had his revolver. But Norton, too, was prepared for trouble that night. He was too quick for Walter.
“He knocked him out and nearly killed him, and then he took him to an abandoned farmhouse out on the Warrenville road and left him there, tied. But it wasn’t to his advantage that Walter die. He drove the car over the hill where we found it, and he carried off Walter’s revolver and locked him up. But he went back now and then, although Walter was in pretty poor shape when I found him.
“With Walter dead, Mary would tell the story, and he was through. He went back now and then, looked after him a bit. Not much. Just enough to keep him alive. But he had not been there for three days when we found him, and he was mighty close to death.
“Of course it’s easy to say this now, but the case against Blake never had satisfied me. You know that. I gave you my reasons before. All along there have been some things that didn’t quite fit. Why would Jim Blake invent a man in evening dress? Well, the answer to that is easy. He was not inventing it. He saw a man in evening dress. But he said this man’s face was turned down the hill. Now that’s not possible. A man doesn’t run rapidly along a bushy hillside in the dark without looking where he is going.
“So I decided that this man, conceding that Mr. Blake saw a man, was some one he knew and wouldn’t mention. And after Howard Somers’ death, I began to wonder if it wasn’t Somers.
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