Yates had been gazing as if hypnotized at his companion. Now he said: “I always heard you were a hustler, but—”
“Hustler? A couple of telephone calls.”
“Gamadge, I don’t know what to say.”
“Don’t say a thing. You go back to the Inn now, and I’ll turn up at Edgewood later. We don’t know each other if we meet. We’d better not meet privately again, but if you feel you must see me call me up as discreetly as you can, and we’ll come here.”
Yates rose. “I feel as if you could get yourself in anywhere; but I don’t know how you’re to meet any of the Carringtons, if you want to meet them. I wish to heaven you could meet Rose. But it’s a house of mourning.”
“Let me worry about that.”
“I hoped you might say I was a fool to worry about Rose. Because, even if they did try to make a case against her for Carrington’s murder, how could they account for her trying to wipe out the whole village first?”
“You’d be surprised what paranoiacs do for good reasons of their own.”
“I thought you didn’t know anything about paranoiacs.”
“Smattering of general information.”
Yates stood looking down at him. At last he said: “Well, I can’t tell you how grateful…” His voice died. He went to his car, got into it, and bumped across the bridge and down the road. Gamadge watched him go. He finished his cigarette, walked to his car, turned it, and drove back as he had come; all the way back, to the crossroads where the filling station was. There he turned right for Westbury.
CHAPTER SIX The Facts
SHERIFF RIDLEY GOT up to shake hands with Gamadge across his desk. “Glad to meet you, Mr. Gamadge. Sit down; have a cigar.”
“Thanks very much, Sheriff. I have my cigarettes.” Gamadge settled himself in the hard chair indicated, crossed his legs, and tried to look comfortable. He said: “You evidently heard from my friend Durfee.”
“I did; glad to make his acquaintance over the telephone.” Sheriff Ridley was a stocky, middle-aged man who looked like a small-town storekeeper. He went on, studying Gamadge with some interest: “Told me about some of your cases. I’m glad the two of you took an interest in this one. Well, of course, the Carringtons are New York people; naturally New York police are interested.”
“Who isn’t? It relieves me to find that you don’t think I’m butting in too much.”
The sheriff rolled a cigar between his fingers, and his eyes were on the green eyes of his guest. He was thinking what that hard-bitten character, Detective Lieutenant Durfee of the New York Police Department (Homicide), had said over the telephone:
“I don’t know why he’s mixing in up there, Ridley; he probably got interested in something about the case he read in the papers. Don’t ask me why he’s interested—I wouldn’t have said he knew much about homicidal maniacs. Read about ’em, of course, he’s read damn near everything. But in your place, if I was stuck the way you are, I’d be glad to have him… No, he isn’t in it for publicity; hates being in the papers. If he does find out anything up there he’ll dump it right in your lap. If he gets axed himself he’ll say he fell downstairs—if he’s alive and able to say anything.”
The sheriff wanted to know what qualifications Gamadge had.
“Don’t ask me,” Durfee begged him. “I never found out yet. He’ll open a book and find a gun in it. He’ll look at a picture and find a letter written in it. He’ll study a piece of writing and make out it isn’t a laundry list, it’s the missing will. I know there’s no evidence up there, but he don’t like fingerprints.
“He might drive you crazy, he acts so simple. But I wouldn’t let that fool me if I was you. Just give him his head and try to forget about him.”
The sheriff didn’t think that Gamadge acted simple; he seemed on the contrary a businesslike person who mightn’t have read a book or looked at a picture in his life. Sheriff Ridley wondered what Durfee could have meant. He said: “Mr. Gamadge, if you can think up anything useful in connection with the case I’ll be obliged to you. Moreover, I’m delighted to have another man there—if I could refer to you in that way.”
“You can,” said Gamadge laughing.
“I wish I had fifteen men to put in that little hell-hole; I’ve got one deputy there. State police are helping out, but we can’t go on like that forever.”
“Hell-hole?” Gamadge raised his eyebrows. “I more or less gathered from the papers that Frazer’s Mills was a most inoffensive place.”
“It is if there was a prowler, and I don’t say there wasn’t a prowler. He could have cut through the woods to the southeast from Carringtons’ and got to the route, east or west of the millpond; thumbed a ride there, or walked home. Matter of twenty minutes if he had a torch, when he certainly did have; plenty of trails through those woods. And these maniacs—their folks take care of them, rather have them kill twenty people in their fits than be shut up where they ought to be.”
“But you think it may not have been a prowler after all?”
The sheriff lighted his cigar. When it was drawing properly he went on, more slowly than before:
“This is confidential.”
“Of course.”
“I wonder if the whole village over there isn’t in a conspiracy to cover the feller up.”
“You mean they all know somebody’s given to seizures, and won’t give him away?”
“By village I mean the little houses; all old stock, you know. I don’t mean Edgewood or Wakefield’s or the Carringtons. I’m not forgetting them, naturally; can’t do that. Quite the contrary. Edgewood—the Studley woman swears those doctors don’t send up mental cases to her, but people don’t go to rest cures because they’re well.” He looked at Gamadge sideways.
“They certainly don’t.”
“Wakefield’s seems to be out, though that Silver boy only has his family’s word for it that he was on his sleeping porch. The Carringtons and that Jenner girl don’t seem to have any motive. We’ll go back to them later. All I’m saying is that those old-timers in the cottages wouldn’t give each other away. I suppose you know something about this Frazer’s Mills?”
“I never even heard of it until Friday morning, when it got into the New York papers.”
“Peculiar little place. Some bloods settled it a hundred years ago, and built houses for their ex-butlers and grooms and governesses and so forth. The Tavern was run by a retired head groom and his wife; Mrs. Broadbent is the widow of one of their grandchildren.” Ridley laughed. “They had to have a tavern, but they never felt the need of a church.”
“Godless, were they?”
“Drove in to Westbury, I suppose. It’s only five miles around either way. That Miss Bluett that escaped with her life on Thursday night—the librarian—she’s descended from one of the original governesses. The point is that these originals never went away. Stuck there and brought their husbands and wives back there. It’s only in the last couple of generations that the young people went and didn’t come back. Place is thinning out.”
“And really homogeneous,” remarked Gamadge.
“That’s right, it is. The Tavern quit as a tavern fifty years ago; Mrs. Broadbent runs the upper part as a boardinghouse—rooming house—but doesn’t get roomers often. Once a year there’s a crowd of ’em, when we have our fair here. Last Thursday night the roomers were all together playing cards, so we let ’em go. Wish we could let all the other outsiders go, but it isn’t possible till after the inquest on Tuesday.
“There’s a general store and post office occupying half the ground floor of the Tavern, drugstore in the other half; that’s all the business done in Frazer’s Mills. Westbury takes care of the village, you know, collects taxes and mends the road.
“Here’s the layout: on the east side of the street we have all the big houses but one: Carringtons’ first as you drive in, then Wakefield’s, then down on the road the Tavern, then the Rigby Library, then Edgewood. Opposite are the little houses, ten of ’em; S
taplers’, where Miss Bluett boards, and the nine other families or remains of families. Mostly one or more old people to a house, no young people except the Stapler boys. Mighty few livings earned any more, they’re all fading out on little pensions or their savings or what their relations send ’em. Scotch, English, old American stock. Not a foreigner, not a stranger.
“Out to the west, way out, are the farms. Same story—old stock from way back. They don’t come to The Mills much, now that there are no mills; they deal in Westbury.”
The sheriff sat back. “Wouldn’t you say homicidal mania might develop in a place like that, or in those farms?”
“Well,” said Gamadge, smiling, “it sounds rather a paradise to me. But I see what you mean.”
“I won’t go over the list, we’ve combed the place again and again. They all act as if they were afraid of the prowler—I’ll say that much. All barricaded up day and night, it’s a dead town. I don’t know it well myself, they’ve never had to have any law there before in my time, but they say you wouldn’t know it.”
Gamadge said that no situation could be more difficult to handle.
“No. And it was the easiest thing in the world for anybody who knew the place at all to make that trip Thursday night. Oh—one more big house, used to be the Compson residence; it’s at the end on the west, just about opposite the Carringtons’. A school.
“You understand the whole place is grown up with old trees, and the woods come right down to the back of the properties on the east. Along the edge of the woods, running from behind the Studley place to beyond the Carrington place, there’s this walk they call the wood path; just somewheres to take a stroll on a nice day. It’s all covered half the time with pine needles and dead leaves, nobody pays to keep it clear now, and you couldn’t find a footprint on it to save your life.”
“Is that the route the murderer took on Thursday night?”
“We think he must have. He wasn’t seen on the street—not that that means much in Frazer’s Mills at that hour—and the grounds behind those houses are a network of gardens and grape arbors and waste land. No sign of him there. You can cut up or down from this wood path to the houses, and you can keep to turf all the way.” The sheriff took his cigar out of his mouth and looked at it. “I’m not saying a stranger couldn’t find it and use it—with a torch.
“This feller, stranger or not, seems to have started at Edgewood, come in by the side door, had a look into old Mrs. Norbury’s room at twenty-five past ten. He left and went on to the Library, going up to this wood path, you understand, and along it, and down. He finds the Library door fastened—and wasn’t that luck? He goes back up to the wood path and on to the Wakefield Inn. Same thing happens there—a locked door. He leaves the fire axe behind him and goes to Carringtons’.”
The sheriff paused, but Gamadge did not interrupt him. He went on:
“It was about ten thirty when he showed up at the Library, about ten forty when Yates got after him at the Inn, about eleven fifteen when the Carringtons locked their front door. The times fit—it doesn’t take anywhere near so long to make the trip, detours and all; we’ve timed it to a possible twenty minutes, going slow, and not counting time out for the Carrington murder. And if he did belong in the Studley place, he had time to get back there—Miss Pepper didn’t lock up until half past eleven.
“Our medical examiner got over to Carringtons’ with the rest of us half an hour after the Jenner girl found the body; about that, anyway. The Carringtons think she got home and found it around twenty-five after eleven, perhaps a minute or so later. The medical examiner places death not more than an hour earlier, probably not much later than a quarter to eleven.”
The sheriff relighted his cigar. Gamadge said: “All very clear.”
“Yes. Now let’s go back and look at these various stops he made. The first one didn’t make any impression on anybody but Mrs. Norbury—in fact nobody heard of it but Miss Pepper, who brushed it off as the old lady’s imagination. She’s eighty and crippled up with arthritis, which explains why she wasn’t more spry about getting out into the hall.”
“Where were Miss Studley and Miss Pepper when the prowler came?” asked Gamadge.
“Miss Studley was up on the top floor in her suite, Miss Pepper was in the pantry fixing the old lady’s cocoa.”
“This side door is to the north, away from the village and protected by trees and shrubbery?”
“Yes. Nothing above Edgewood to the north but road and forest, till you get to the next village—Green Tree.”
“And Edgewood—except the top floor—seemed to be in darkness?”
“The ground floor was in darkness, and so was the second-floor hall.”
“A visitor might not have noticed, with all the trees and so on, which second-floor rooms were lighted?”
“Probably didn’t notice.”
“He wandered into a dark hall, up dark stairs into darkness, and tried the first door on the left?”
“That’s right.”
“As soon as he realized that it was a lighted room, he hurried away?”
“Or just hurried out, if he’d been there all the time.”
“Any of them could have gone out and come back and nobody the wiser?”
“Except Mrs. Norbury. She’s out on all counts, Miss Pepper was with her after half past ten. So Miss Pepper’s out, and Miss Studley answered Miss Wakefield’s telephone call at just before eleven.”
Gamadge smoked for a few moments in silence. Then he asked: “These patients at Edgewood. What do you think of them?”
“You’ll see them; cute idea that, getting yourself into the place. Nothing out of the way about them so far as I could tell, they naturally don’t like the idea that they’re not free to go. I will say they didn’t make as much fuss about it as they might have. Haynes is a New York man, businessman, big hardware corporation. Mrs. Turnbull is a widow from Pittsburgh. Motley is staying in New York at the Creighton. I had to laugh—they couldn’t say they had to get home on important business, because they’re all booked for next week.”
“All mentally sound, are they?”
“Miss Studley showed me their doctors’ letters. Haynes has a heart condition—his man’s a big specialist. Quiet feller, Haynes, widower, good golf player for his age, which is about sixty.
“Motley’s thirty-one, up for neuralgia. He looks all right, but I suppose neuralgia don’t make spots come out on you, and his doctor wrote that he was in good condition otherwise. No job at present, seems well-fixed and says he’s looking around after doing war work in Washington.
“Mrs. Turnbull’s specialist—another big bug—reported her run down and in need of a change of air. She don’t look up to making that trip Thursday night.” The sheriff fumbled among papers. “Has a right to be run down; husband died in June from accidentally taking too many sleeping tablets.”
“Did he?” Gamadge looked interested.
“I inquired about that, of course, but I understand it was O.K. The husband was a drinking man, and he took the stuff with whiskey, regularly every night, last thing before he went to bed. They passed it as an accident in Pittsburgh. She had the money, by the way, and they say she was in love with him. Well, that’s the Edgewood crowd. Miss Studley’s fighting for ’em—says there isn’t a homicidal maniac in the bunch. She’s a nice woman, Miss Studley, you’ll like her. So’s Miss Pepper. She’s married, has a little boy here in town, lives with his grandmother. Miss Pepper’s husband is a petty officer second class on a battleship.”
“Why didn’t she lock up until nearly half past eleven, when they’d had Miss Wakefield’s telephone call half an hour before?”
“They feel silly about that. Miss Studley came and told Miss Pepper about the telephone call, and Miss Pepper told her that they’d already had the visit from the prowler. They didn’t expect him back, so they locked the front door and stood talking about the situation in the lobby, and gave him a chance to come back by the side door and quiet
ly go to bed. Of course it didn’t enter their heads he might belong there with them. Miss Studley still laughs that idea off; she’s just sorry she gave us the loophole.”
“And gave him the loophole. Easygoing place, Frazer’s Mills.”
“They never had any trouble before. They’re not so easygoing now.” The sheriff laughed cynically.
“Well, we have the prowler started on his way to the Library. He tried that door, although the Library was lighted.”
“That’s another reason why I think he was somebody that knew the place. He’d know Miss Bluett was there alone. He wouldn’t know who might be in that room at Edgewood—more than one person, perhaps. Miss Bluett wouldn’t raise a yell if somebody she knew walked in on her at the Library, no matter how late it was.”
“According to the papers, she thought the noise at the door was caused by a squirrel or something; that’s why she didn’t raise an alarm.”
“She’s a character. It would take more than a squirrel to scare Hattie Bluett.” The sheriff chuckled. “Know why she was working so late?”
“She’d had a consignment of books, hadn’t she?”
Ridley went on chuckling. “Typical,” he said at last. “She had the consignment because she sent for it—made the Library handyman take his cart and go and get it at seven o’clock in the evening; made Miss Carrington hustle round and collect the books and send them along, a last lot that wasn’t promised until the next week. Right at the time when the family’d be sitting down to their dinner, and a sick man in the house besides! And because why?”
Gamadge shook his head. “Give it up, unless she has delusions of grandeur and likes to make the aristocracy step around.”
“There’s that too, and it’s a kind of a town habit to humor her. But she wanted the books because she intended to take an extra day vacation, and decided to slap the labels in and get the consignment recorded before the weekend. Well, she’s still in Frazer’s Mills, fit to be tied.”
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