“It’s none of mine,” she said. “And I’d like to say that I’ve been in this house for twenty years and never before—”
“All right,” said the inspector. “Get out and send in the butler and the other woman, Ida. And make some coffee. I’ve got some men who need it, too.”
Maggie, considerably deflated, went out, and William and Ida came in. Neither of them recognized the knife, both had been in bed when Susie’s shrieks wakened them, both were—according to the inspector’s comment after they left—pure as the driven snow and innocent as unborn babes.
“But behaving according to rule,” he said dryly. “Always more emotional than the family in a crisis. Watch it sometime.”
Susie bore this out when she was sent for. She looked faintly amused as she wandered in, a cigarette in her fingers and her raincoat still covering her draggled dressing-gown.
“I suppose the dirty work begins now,” she said, sitting on the edge of the table and ignoring the knife. “I didn’t like her. I’ve had to take her charity and her insults ever since Carl’s business failed. I thought she was an old bitch and I’ve said it. So I suppose I’m the leading suspect.”
The inspector eyed her, the nightgown, the stained bedroom slippers, her hair still damp and straight.
“Not necessarily,” he said dryly. “I’d like to know why you were out in the rain tonight.”
“Your lady friend has told you, hasn’t she? I went out to get some cigarettes from the car, and that damned storm caught me.”
“There were cigarettes all over your room, Mrs. Fairbanks. I saw them there. I don’t believe that was the reason you were outside.”
Susie stared at him.
“So what?” she said defiantly. “I didn’t kill her, if that’s what you want to know.”
“But you admit you didn’t like her.”
“Good God! I don’t like you, but I don’t intend to cut your throat.”
“That’s very reassuring,” he told her gravely. “And I haven’t accused you of killing your mother-in-law. I want to know if you were in Mrs. Garrison’s room tonight?”
Susie’s surprise was apparently genuine.
“Eileen’s? I should say not. I sat in the hall while Miss Adams fastened her screen. She was asleep, thank God. That’s as near as I came to her, and nearer than I wanted to be.”
“You don’t like her, either?”
“She’s another bitch,” said Susie with feeling.
But she was evasive after that. Hilda, watching her, was certain she was frightened, that her assurance covered something close to panic. She stuck to her story, however. She had gone out for cigarettes and the storm had caught her. The garage was locked, as was the door to the stairs leading to Amos’s quarters. She had stood under the eaves of the building for a while. Then she had made a dash for the house.
“That’s all?”
“That’s all,” she said defiantly.
The inspector took a piece of paper from his pocket and unfolded it.
“‘At five minutes before two,’” he read, “‘a woman yelped under my window. I raised it and looked out. She was standing still, but someone else was going out through the break in the fence. I think it was a man. The woman was Mrs. Carlton Fairbanks. She was rubbing her arm. I watched her until she went back to the house.’”
Susie’s bravado was gone. She pushed back her heavy hair.
“Amos, the dirty skunk!” she said. “All right, I wasn’t going to say anything, but I can’t help you at that. There was a man there. I was trying the door to the stairs when he grabbed me by the arm. I yelled and he beat it. But I don’t know who it was.”
She stuck to that. He had been behind her when he caught her. He hadn’t spoken, and the rain was like a cloudburst. All she knew was that he let go of her when she screamed, and disappeared. She hadn’t said anything to Miss Adams. No use scaring a woman who had to be up all night. She had meant to tell Carl, but he was asleep and snoring. But she had had a shock. She hadn’t felt like going to bed. She had sat in the hall, and then Mrs. Fairbanks had been killed.
She pulled back the sleeve of her raincoat and showed her forearm.
“Take a look at that if you don’t believe me,” she said.
There were two or three small bruises on her arm, as if made by fingers, and they were already turning purple.
“I bruise easy,” she said.
Nothing shook her story. The sun had risen and birds were chirping outside when at last she was dismissed. With a warning, however.
“I think you know who the man was, Mrs. Fairbanks,” the inspector said soberly. “I want you to think it over. It is bad business to keep anything back in a case of this sort.”
She went out, and he looked at Hilda.
“All right, Miss Pinkerton,” he said. “What about it?”
“She’s a fine actress and a pretty fair liar,” Hilda said. “She’s protecting somebody.” She hesitated. “It may be the doctor. He lives across Huston Street, and he uses that break in the fence. But it might have been innocent enough. He’s in love with Jan Garrison. He may have meant to meet her. Or even”—she smiled faintly—“to look up at her window. I believe people in love do things like that.”
The inspector, however, had jumped to his feet.
“The doctor!” he said. “He’s in love with the girl, she inherits under the will, and he was alone outside Mrs. Fairbanks’s door for fifteen or twenty minutes. Where the hell is he?”
“He took an injured woman to the hospital. He may be home now. But he couldn’t have done it. The radio—”
“Oh, blast the radio,” he said.
He went out into the hall and sent an officer to Courtney Brooke’s house. After that he sent for Janice. She came in slowly, her eyes still red, and Hilda felt a wave of pity for her. Before going to bed she had wrapped the long ends of her hair in curlers, and they made her look childish and naïve. Even the inspector spoke gently.
“Sit down, Miss Garrison,” he said. “You know we have to ask all sorts of questions in a case like this. You needn’t be afraid. All we want is the truth.”
“I don’t know anything.”
“I don’t suppose you do. You were asleep when it happened, weren’t you?”
“I don’t know when it happened, but I wasn’t asleep when Susie yelled. I wasn’t sleepy, and Granny’s radio had been turned on full.”
“You hadn’t expected to go out? Into the grounds, I mean.”
Jan looked puzzled.
“Out? No. Why should I?”
“Let’s say, to meet someone?”
It took her by surprise. She stared at him. Then a look of horror spread over her face. She looked wildly about the room, at Hilda, at the door. She even half rose from her chair.
“I don’t know what you mean,” she managed to gasp.
The inspector’s voice was still quiet.
“Suppose you meant to meet someone by the garage. Then it rained, and you didn’t go. That would be understandable, wouldn’t it? He came, but you didn’t.”
“Nobody came. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Would you swear on oath that you had no appointment to meet Doctor Brooke by the garage tonight?”
She only looked bewildered.
“Doctor Brooke!” she said. “Certainly not. He can see me whenever he wants to, here in the house.”
He let her go, watching her out with a puzzled look on his face.
“Well, what scared her?” he demanded. “Do I look as formidable as all that, or—What about this Amos, anyhow? Think he’s reliable?”
“He’s a mischiefmaker. Stubborn and sly. He’s probably honest enough.”
“What is ‘honest enough’?” he inquired quizzically.
But Hilda was thinking. She was remembering Jan’s story that Courtney Brooke had seen her father outside the fence a night or two before. That, she was convinced, had been behind Jan’s terror just now. Yet there were
so many other things that she felt dizzy. The coldness for a day or so between Carlton and Susie, and Susie’s fainting. Her idiotic story about going to the garage for cigarettes. Carlton, earlier in the week, carrying something from the stable and being locked out. The bats and so on in Mrs. Fairbanks’s room, and the closet door which opened and closed itself.
They must make a pattern of some sort. Only what had they to do with an old woman dead of a knife thrust in a closed and guarded room?
It was just before young Brooke’s arrival that one of the detectives from upstairs came down and stood in the doorway. He looked rather sheepish.
“There’s a bat in that room where the old lady was,” he said. “It was hanging to a curtain, and it acts like it’s going crazy.”
“It hasn’t a thing on me,” said the inspector, and sighed.
It was bright daylight when Courtney Brooke arrived. He looked tired and puzzled, and like Susie he showed evidence of having been caught in the storm. His collar was crumpled and his necktie a limp string.
“What’s wrong?” he said. “I’ve just come back from the hospital. Is Mrs. Fairbanks—”
“Mrs. Fairbanks is dead,” said the inspector dryly. “She was murdered last night.”
The doctor stiffened and looked wildly at Hilda.
“Murdered! All I ordered for her was a sleeping tablet if she couldn’t sleep. If she got anything else—”
“She was stabbed. Not poisoned.”
The full impact seemed to strike him with that. He sat down, as though his legs would not hold him.
“I’d like an account of what you were doing last night, doctor,” said the inspector smoothly. “Begin, if you please, with Mrs. Garrison’s trouble, when you were sent for. You decided to give her a hypodermic. Then what?”
He made an effort to collect himself.
“I didn’t notice the time. She was having pain. She was afraid of a miscarriage. I asked the nurse here to get me some sterile water. She went downstairs. It took some time, and I—”
“You remained outside Mrs. Fairbanks’s door during all that time?”
He looked unhappy.
“Well, yes and no,” he said. “I went back and spoke to Janice Garrison. She had been uneasy about her father. Her stepmother said he had left her, but she didn’t believe it. She thought something had happened to him.”
“Did you stay in the hall? Or did you go into Miss Garrison’s room?”
“I went in. I was there only a minute or two. Long enough to reassure her.”
Hilda spoke.
“You agreed to guard the door,” she said. “Like Cerberus. You remember?”
“Well, look,” he said reasonably. “Only the family was in the house. Nobody would have had time to get in from the outside. And it was poison she was afraid of. Not—being stabbed.” He became suddenly conscious of his appearance. He put a hand to his collar. “Sorry I look like this,” he said. “The fellow who brought me was on the steps. He wouldn’t let me in the house.”
The inspector eyed him.
“Never mind how you look. This isn’t a party. It’s a murder investigation.” He cleared his throat. “That’s all, is it? You stepped into Miss Garrison’s room and out again. Right?”
“I might have been there five minutes,” he admitted. “I’d been telephoning around for her, and—”
“You saw nothing whatever that might be useful? Nobody moving about?”
For an instant he seemed to hesitate, and Hilda remembered the coffee spilled in the saucer and his strange expression as she came up the stairs. But he shook his head.
“Nothing,” he said.
He had gone home after giving Eileen the hypodermic, he said. It was raining a little, and he had taken the short cut by the stable and the break in the fence. He saw no one lurking there. And he was in bed asleep when a man from Joe’s Market rang the bell and said a woman had had an accident at the corner.
“What time was that?”
About two, he thought. It was storming hard by that time. He had telephoned for an ambulance, taken his bag, and gone to the corner. The woman was lying on the pavement, with one or two people with her. She was pretty badly hurt. He had done what he could, and then gone with the ambulance to the hospital.
“I stayed while they operated,” he said. “It’s my old hospital, Mount Hope. They all knew me.”
“At ten minutes to two you were in bed?”
“I was in bed when this fellow rang the bell. I opened a window and he called up to me.”
“You were undressed?”
Brooke grinned.
“I’ll say I was. I haven’t got much on now, under this suit.”
“You didn’t run into Mrs. Susie Fairbanks, at the garage at five minutes to two, and catch hold of her?”
He looked astounded.
“Good God, no! Why should I?”
But he lost some of his spontaneity after that. He was wary. He answered the routine questions more carefully, and at last the inspector shrugged and let him go. He was irritable, however.
“What’s the idea?” he said to Hilda grumpily. “That fellow knows something. Everybody around here knows something—except me. Even you, probably.” He looked at her keenly. “I wouldn’t put it past you, you know. You’ve held out on me before.”
“Only when I thought it was necessary,” she said, smiling up at him delicately.
But he had enough. He had had too much. He got up and banged the table.
“God damn it, Hilda,” he roared. “If I thought you have any pets around here and are protecting them, I’d—I’d turn you over my knee.”
Chapter 14
It was eight o’clock in the morning before they could rouse Eileen enough to be interviewed. Carlton, unshaven and still only partially dressed, was at the telephone trying to locate his sister. Susie had brought him a cup of coffee, but it sat untouched beside him.
“Hello. That you, Blanche? Sorry to bother you. Did Marian happen to tell you where she was going to stop while she’s away? It’s rather urgent.”
He would hang up after a minute or two, feverishly thumb the telephone book and commence all over again.
In the morning room Courtney Brooke was trying to comfort Jan, a Jan who lay face down on a long davenport and refused to be comforted. One of the curlers on the end of her long bob had come loose, and he sat turning the soft curl over a finger.
“Believe me, darling, it’s all right. You mustn’t go on like this. You break my heart, sweet.”
“Granny’s dead.” Her voice was smothered. “Nothing can change that.”
“It’s a bad business, Jan. I know that. Only try to face it as it is, not as you’re afraid it is. You’re not being fair. Even the police don’t condemn people until they have the facts.”
“I saw him. I spoke to him.” She turned over and sat up, her eyes wide with fear. “Now it will all come out, Court. She had it in the safe. She told me so. They’ll open it, and—then they’ll know.”
“Whoever did it didn’t open the safe. It’s still there, sweet.”
She got up, and as he steadied her he thought how thin she was, how badly life had treated her. His arm tightened around her.
“If it’s still there,” she said excitedly. “Do you think we could get it? Oh, Court, can’t we get it? She must have had the combination somewhere. She never trusted her memory.”
“We can make a try anyhow. Able to get upstairs?”
“I could fly, if I thought it would help.”
They were a sorry-looking pair as they went up the long staircase, Jan’s eyes still swollen, her rumpled nightgown under her bathrobe, her feet still bare. Young Brooke was not much better, a disreputable figure in a suit which had been soaked with rain, his hair standing wildly in all directions, and his collar melted around his neck. They did not notice the uniformed man in the lower hall, standing stolidly on guard, and there was hope in both of them until they reached the upper hall, to confront
a policeman parked outside Mrs. Fairbanks’s door, smoking a surreptitious cigarette.
He put it out quickly, so he did not see the dismay in their faces.
Brooke left soon after that. Eileen was still sleeping. The house was quiet. But outside in the grounds one or two men were quietly examining the pillars and roof of the porte-cochere, and a detective in plain clothes and bent double was going carefully over the ground around the stable and near the fence.
He looked up as the doctor neared him.
“Got permission to leave the place?”
“I’m the doctor,” Brooke said stiffly. “My office is across the street. Anything to say about that?”
He was in a fighting mood, but the detective only grinned.
“Not a word, brother. Not a word. Might like a look at your feet. That’s all.”
“What the hell are my feet to you?”
“Not a thing. You could lose ’em both and I wouldn’t shed a tear. Lemme look at those shoes, doc.”
Brooke was seething, but after a glance at the shoes, especially the soles, the detective only shrugged.
“Went out of here after the rain started, didn’t you?” he said. “All right. That checks. I’ll see you later. Those shoes could stand some work on them.”
Brooke was still furious as he started across the street. For the first time he realized the excitement in the neighborhood. There was a large crowd around the entrance to the driveway on Grove Avenue, and the windows on both streets were filled with men in their shirt sleeves, and women hastily or only partially dressed. To add to his rage the slovenly girl from the house where he had his offices was on the steps, surrounded by a group of laughing boys.
He caught one of them and shook him.
“Get out of here,” he said. “Get out and stay out, all of you.” He jerked the girl to her feet. “Go inside and do some work, for once,” he ordered. “If I catch you out here again—”
He knew it was useless. It was the ugly side of all tragedy, this morbid curiosity and avid interest which deprived even grief of privacy. But he could not fight it. He went upstairs and took a bath, as though to wash it away.
The Haunted Lady Page 11
