by S. T. Joshi
Finally, tiring of the volume, I decided to attempt more work and ascended the stairs. I heard some voices in a room I could not identify; it appeared to be the sharp but muffled voices of women arguing behind closed doors. A few moments later I knew that Alice and Judith were wrangling on some point or other—probably more trivial than not. I ought to have expected it from knowledge of their characters, but could not stifle a wince of disgust that virtually nullified the benefits gained from hours with Thackeray. I quickly retired to my room to avoid any further such experiences, nearly slamming the door behind me. Although I sat down at my desk with the thought of doing some work, a sudden sense of exhaustion overwhelmed me; I may even have dozed off for a time, perhaps from the delayed effects of traveling and subsequent exertion.
What disturbed me next was the scream.
That scream was such as could only have been uttered by a man encountering the stupefyingly horrific: it was not a normal sound, hence was doubly hideous because it was so inapposite. The walls of the entire house seemed to shake; and the echoes rang louder because of the preceding silence.
But I was more wearied than shocked: my initial shiver of fear quickly gave way to an overwhelming sense of fatigue. It was the only possible culmination, I thought, of all the previous events that had occurred in this house during the past two days: it was a knife twisted further into the wound.
Finally I got up from the desk and decided to investigate. Opening my bedroom door, I almost immediately saw something whose bizarrerie I had difficulty absorbing.
Over the threshold of a bedroom across the hall from mine lay the body of my Aunt Judith, the blade of a dagger—with a wickedly thin blade—protruding from her back, but with remarkably little blood flowing from the wound. There was no question that that dagger had come from the weapons room down the hall, although I did not specifically recognize the object from my previous examination of that room.
But this was not the worst. I saw all this so clearly because the blazing overhead light in her room cast a lurid shimmer over the room itself and poured itself out almost as a sentient entity into the otherwise darkened hallway. From the partially opened door I could see on the bed, his hands spasmodically clutching the sheets, my Uncle Edward—the obvious utterer of the scream—his eyes open in horror, mouth frozen askew. He was apparently dead of a heart attack.
Not knowing what to do first, I approached Judith in some vain hope that the injury she had suffered was not fatal. I gripped the dagger handle and was attempting to remove it from her body when several other doors opened nearly simultaneously.
Nearly all the other occupants—Uncle George, his face still ashen, whether from sleep or alarm or some other cause I could not tell; Winthrop and Alice, the latter looking apprehensively over the shoulder of the former as if his mere bulk could protect her; and Jacob, whose face registered a kind of baffled incomprehension as if he too could not mentally digest the image of his parents lying dead before him—were looking me square in the face.
For a time no one uttered a word.
Then Jacob, almost hysterically, and in a high-pitched voice that again rang through that narrow space, shrieked:
“You killed her! You killed both of them! You bastard, you murdered my parents! What did they ever do to you . . .?”
My jaw dropped; in spite of my obviously compromising position, I did not conceive that anyone could have thought me to be guilty of such an act. I looked from one to the other, speechlessly attempting to convey my innocence. But I met no one’s eyes; their expressions ranged from sorrow to horror, but none doubted that I was the culprit.
The police were not long in coming.
Chapter Six
Charles Jameson’s long and somewhat orotund narrative had tried my patience in more ways than one—but it had also presented numerous points of interest that needed to be examined. Quite frankly, the outlandish tale of how the Sarsfield clan had been summoned to the manor by way of a dead man’s will seemed the stuff of cheap pulp fiction, while the older history of the four brothers Sarsfield of the eighteenth century had more than a few touches of the sinister. I suspected that Charles was right in thinking that, at least indirectly, the probing of that centuries-old mystery would play a role in the solution of the double murder of a few days before. I was not yet prepared to accept on faith the entirety—or, indeed, any—of Charles’s narrative; in several places it seemed self-serving at best, outrightly deceptive at worst. But it was, for now, all I had to go on.
I got up heavily and looked sharply at Charles Jameson. His long narrative had apparently fatigued him, and he was leaning back against the cement wall of his cell, eyes closed. Suddenly, as if something had startled him, he opened his eyes wide and stared at me blankly, as if he didn’t know who I was. Presently a curious expression—part apprehension, part an almost hopeless plea for succor—passed over his face. His mouth opened, but he did not utter.
I spoke for him. “Charles, there are a number of things in your account that are of interest, and I’ll follow up on them as best I can. I’ll be honest with you and say that some parts of it are . . . a bit hard to swallow.”
“I recognize that,” he said, now looking down at his hands.
“I need some more information,” I said shortly. “First, where are all the other people who had come to Sarsfield Manor? Are they still there?”
“Yes,” Charles said quietly. “The police thought it best to keep them on the premises. Of course, the . . . bodies have been taken away—to the morgue, I gather.”
“How is your cousin Jacob reacting to the death of his parents?”
Charles shrugged. “It’s never been clear to me how Jacob reacts to anything. He’s a pretty unstable individual. I’m not sure he fully realizes what has happened.”
I let the matter pass.
“What about your lawyer? You’ve hired one, I take it?”
“Yes,” he said. “A local man named Samuel Parker. But quite frankly he hasn’t been of much help. I hired him only because he appears to be on good terms with the police chief and knows how things work here. You know,” he went on with the faintest tinge of irritation and petulance in his voice, “things are not done here quite as they are in Baltimore. The people on the Eastern Shore resent Baltimore—its power, its wealth, its status. Ask your friend Mencken—he’ll tell you that the country legislators all over the state routinely gang up on Baltimore and pass all kinds of laws making it a liability to live there. I’m not a Baltimorean anymore, but they know of my ties to that place, and they’d be more than happy to take me down.”
I didn’t know what to make of that tirade. “Who are you referring to? The police? Surely you’re not saying they’re trying to railroad you into jail . . . or the chair.”
That last phrase was probably a cheap shot, but I had to get Charles to realize the seriousness of his situation. He seemed to be living in some kind of fantasy world. Sure enough, those three words jerked him up out of his lethargy, so that he almost leaped in my direction, clinging to the bars of his cell.
“You’re not saying they’d . . . do that?” he breathed in a whisper.
“If you’re guilty, they will,” I said flatly.
He looked at me with incomprehension. “Joe, you can’t possibly believe . . . I just told you . . .” He stopped, almost choking on his words. “I didn’t do anything! I’m not guilty! There’s been some sort of set-up . . .”
“You mean to say,” I said blandly, “that someone else killed Judith Kellar and enticed you to clutch that dagger in her back?”
“No, no, no,” he said, shaking his head vigorously. “I didn’t mean that. But I didn’t commit this crime. I was only trying to help. Good God, Joe, when you see someone almost murdered before your eyes, you’re not exactly in full control of your faculties!”
He had a point. But something he said triggered a new query.
“Charles, did you hear anyone’s footsteps before that scream? Surely you would
at least have heard Judith herself coming down that hallway. How about anyone else?”
He gazed at me as if I had presented to him the solution of a particularly difficult problem in differential equations. “You know . . .,” he began haltingly, “come to think of it, I didn’t hear a thing! That is to say, I think I heard Judith’s footsteps—or at least someone’s footsteps—coming down that hallway...but that was it! There was no second set of footsteps—but shouldn’t there have been? How could someone have snuck up on her without making a sound? All right, maybe I wasn’t really paying attention, but I could swear there was no second set of footsteps.”
“How about a door closing?” I said. “If someone else committed the crime, they would presumably have retreated to their own bedroom after stabbing Judith. Do you remember anything like that?”
He again looked at me with a kind of awe and wonder. “I don’t remember anything like that at all. . . . But someone must have fled in a hurry after doing the deed—I was out in that hallway only a few seconds after I heard that horrible scream from Edward. Where could they have gone? What could this mean?”
What, indeed. I had to add that to the puzzle.
I said little more to him, then left. For now, I doubted that he could help me much more than he had; I had to pursue my own investigation. And my first order of business was to talk with the police chief.
This man, Frank Powers, was sitting placidly at his desk in a private room in the spacious police station. In all honesty, he didn’t seem very busy—I figured that, especially now that Prohibition was a thing of the past, there wasn’t much in this placid community that required his services. He was a heavy man and seemed to like to chomp down on cheap cigars—but there are worse vices in the world.
As I approached him, he looked up blankly. “So what’s the story with your client?” he said with an entire absence of interest.
“I wouldn’t exactly say he’s my client,” I replied. “Just an old college friend. I may want to do some investigation of this business at Sarsfield Manor, if you don’t mind.”
Powers shrugged. “Be my guest. We’re still on the case, of course,” he added a little defensively.
“So you’re not sure that Charles Jameson is the murderer?”
“I didn’t say that,” Powers said quickly. “Right now he’s the logical suspect, based on what the others have told my men.”
“How is that?” I said. “Merely because he was seen with his hand on the murder weapon? That proves nothing, and he’s given his explanation of that.”
“Well,” Powers said, looking at me with a tinge of hostility, “it doesn’t help him. He was the first at the scene of the crime, and all the others showed up very soon afterwards. They all saw him with his hand on the weapon.”
“What was his motive?”
Again Powers shrugged. “Could be any number of things. Maybe his victim had solved that ridiculous riddle that had brought them all there, and he wanted to shut her up.”
“Charles claims he wasn’t interested in solving the riddle.”
Powers almost chortled at me. “He may say any number of things, but who knows what was going on in his mind? Anyway, there could be all kinds of other factors. Maybe he just didn’t like her, and wanted to get rid of her.”
“You can’t believe that,” I said incredulously.
“I don’t know what to believe,” Powers said gruffly. “But right now, he’s the best suspect I got. And in this business, more often than not your first suspect turns out to be the culprit. Don’t think, Scintilla, that you can pull someone out of a hat like some fancy-ass detective. Things like that don’t happen. Police work is a tough, gritty business—not pretty and not glamorous. I really don’t have time for amateur sleuths . . . .”
“I’m not an amateur. I’m a professional,” I said with a glint in my eye.
He knew he’d overstepped the line, and he backed down. “Yeah, O.K., Scintilla. Sorry about that. I know something of your work—you’re good, and you play straight. But if you think you can get your friend off with some jack-in-the-box trick, you’d better think again.”
“I don’t plan to do that,” I said. “And, for your information, I’m not entirely sure he’s in the clear. I just want to investigate this case and see where it leads. If he’s the one, I’ll give him to you on a silver platter.”
Powers gave me a crooked smile. “I’m getting to like you, Scintilla.”
I wasn’t interested in buttering up Frank Powers. So I asked to look at the police report, after which I said I’d get out of his way and leave him to his work. He summoned a secretary to get me the file, and I sat down to it. It said little that I didn’t already know or assume: Judith Kellar had died of internal bleeding after being stabbed in the back, and through the heart, with an antique dagger. The photographs of the deceased showed remarkably little blood exiting from the wound. Her husband, Edward Kellar, had died of a heart attack—presumably from seeing his wife dead before him. Testimony from each of the occupants of Sarsfield Manor pretty much confirmed what Charles himself had said: he was indeed first on the scene, and the others had emerged only a few seconds later. If someone other than Charles himself really had committed the crime, that person had been awfully quick—and silent—in returning to his or her room before re-emerging into the hallway.
I went back to ask Powers if I could see the murder weapon, which I figured he must have somewhere. He glanced up at me a little suspiciously; then, with a grunt of effort, got up from his desk and went to a locked room where physical evidence was kept. It didn’t take him long to find what I wanted.
The weapon was a grim piece of work—the blade incredibly thin and sharp, and the handle almost needlessly overornamented. Running my thumb over the blade, I quickly saw that, even if this thing was more than two thousand years old, it was still fully up to the task for which it was designed.
I handed it carefully back to Powers and left.
Chapter Seven
It was early evening by the time I finished my work at the police station, so I grabbed a quick and unappetizing meal at a one-arm diner nearby and then headed out to Sarsfield Manor.
The drive was short, but it was nonetheless jarring. In a matter of moments it seemed as if I had gone from the blandness of post-Prohibition America to a kind of fantasy-world England where butlers still functioned and afternoon tea was still served. Up and down the East Coast, wealthy colonials of the eighteenth century had maintained their ties to England in spite of the political disputes that tainted the latter quarter of the century—and those who did not actually become Loyalists and flee to Canada managed to ride out the Revolution and preserve their wealth and their devotion to England even when a new flag and a new Congress had emerged. The original brothers Sarsfield had clearly been of that sort; and I suspected that any number of their descendants, right down to the present day, followed in their footsteps.
My enthusiasm for investigating this case—or, perhaps more precisely, for interviewing the parties in this case—was not high. I may have been unduly influenced by Charles Jameson’s tart words about several of them, and I had to guard against the tendency to see things through his eyes—especially since a fair amount of what he had said was likely to have been self-serving. The convenience of their all still being in the castle, as if they were all involuntary patients consigned to a mental hospital for their own good, made my life somewhat easier; but I also sensed that their continued proximity might create a hothouse atmosphere of pent-up emotions where anything could occur.
There was in fact no butler, unless the young man who greeted me—half of the couple who appeared to serve as combined cook, housekeeper, and jack-of-all-trades—could qualify. But his apprehension and nervousness were as different from the bland sobriety of the classic butler as anything could have been. He did not live on the premises, but I don’t doubt his discomfiture at having to work in a house of murder.
It did not take me long to introdu
ce myself to the assembled guests; few of them were doing much of anything, although Alice Sarsfield’s former enthusiasm for solving the riddle of the will now seemed metamorphosed into a different kind of excitement. Various policemen were still canvassing the place, and their presence did not conduce to normal behavior—assuming there was anything normal in the manner in which they had been brought here by a dead man and the subsequent killings that had taken place right under their noses.
My first point of business was to familiarize myself with the layout of the house. The ground level—foyer, drawing room, dining room, kitchen, and any number of other rooms—did not seem at the moment of any direct relevance. As I made my way upstairs, I noted the fact that the hallway was not carpeted, and that its bewildering plethora of rooms on either side of the hall must either have been bedrooms or the portrait gallery that Charles had told me about or—more significantly—the weapons room. That room was locked, but I didn’t trouble myself to have a policeman open it for me; I suspected that the case where that Hellenistic dagger reposed was unlocked, so that anyone who knew of its existence could easily have snatched it unobserved.