Episode of the Wandering Knife

by Rinehart, Mary Roberts;

  “I wouldn’t worry too much,” I said, as comfortingly as I could. “Nobody thinks he had anything to do with my sister-in-law’s death. But after all it is a murder.”

  “Why are they holding him, then?”

  I hesitated. She was a pathetic figure, her eyes swollen, the hands pulling at the gloves she held showing hard work. I remembered, too, the children the police captain had mentioned, and that Barnes had been what he called a decent sort.

  “It’s rather hard to tell you,” I said uncomfortably. “The fact is—well, I’m afraid they think he hasn’t told quite all he knew about last night.”

  She was indignant. She flushed.

  “He told all he knew,” she said stubbornly. “It’s easy enough for you to try to put something on him, to protect your brother. But all your money won’t save him, if he did it.”

  I suppose that made me angry. Anyhow I told her the whole story, about his denying he had seen Anna on the drive, and Anna’s insisting that he had. I even told her that he had said “to hell with the Mayor.”

  She looked shocked when I finished. Shocked and frightened. “That’s ridiculous,” she said. “No officer would say a thing like that. Not Jim, anyhow.”

  “Somebody said it,” I told her. “Why would Anna Griffin invent such a thing? I felt like saying it myself last night, but not even I …”

  She didn’t wait for me to finish. She started for the door, and she was crying again. When I got to her and touched her arm she shook me off.

  “You think it’s a sort of game, don’t you?” she said. “Well, it isn’t. It’s more than Jim’s job that’s at stake. It might be his life. I suppose you would laugh your silly head off if anything happened to him.”

  I didn’t feel funny, however. I felt pretty sick, and it was not helped by finding Mother awake when I went upstairs. She was covered with a sort of whitewash. I suppose to make the doctor realize that she was pale and needed to stay in bed. It wouldn’t have fooled anybody but a man with double cataracts, of course, but it was no use saying anything. She had fixed on the sunken garden as the place to bury the knife, which didn’t help any.

  I wandered down to the other house after that, more to see how the servants were getting along than for any other reason. The reporters had gone from the main gate on Linden Avenue, but one lone man in plain clothes was still working through the trees and shrubbery nearby, and a uniformed officer was on duty at the front door. He didn’t know me, but he let me in when Mary, the parlormaid, identified me.

  “Only don’t disturb anything, miss,” he said. “That’s orders.”

  The house felt ghostly. There was a thin film of fingerprint powder on the stair rail as I went up, and a chalk outline where Isabel’s body had lain on the landing. I shivered as I stepped over it. But her room was as she had left it: her bed turned down as she had slipped out of it, even the magazine she had been reading still on the silk blanket cover.

  I still don’t know why I lifted it. I hadn’t meant to touch anything. But lift it I did, and a small snapshot fell out. It was the side view of a woman near a palm tree. She wore a plain white dress, and her profile was rather unusual: a short aquiline nose and a slightly retreating chin. Behind her and somewhat out of focus a group of children were playing in some sand.

  It meant nothing to me. I carefully replaced it and put the magazine where I had found it.

  The servants were huddled together in the kitchen when I went downstairs. They looked lost and unhappy, as they always do when something upsets their routine. Anna was there, sulky and resentful. She insisted that she had spoken to Barnes, and that he had said what she claimed he had.

  “He was kind of laughing,” she said. “I thought maybe he’d had a drink or two. Those chauffeurs out on the avenue had a bottle.” She gave me a sly look. “That hunting knife of Mr. Shepard’s is missing, Miss Judy. Mary saw it in the closet yesterday. It’s gone.”

  “And I suppose you couldn’t wait to report that to the police?”

  “Well, what were we to do?” she said defensively. “They were out here, counting the kitchen knives. Anyhow it was Mary who told it. I didn’t.”

  I looked them over: the cook preparing a tray of tea and fresh doughnuts for the officer at the door, the others watching me with furtive curiosity. In their own way they were enjoying it, I thought bitterly: the excitement, the pictures in the newspapers, even Larry’s probable arrest. It was a change from the dull routine of their lives.

  And now the knife. I knew then that we would have to get rid of it. It was too late to go to the police with Mother’s story. I thought of the river. If I could get out that night and drop it from a bridge …

  I was still planning what to do when the plainclothesman backed out of the shrubbery. When he straightened and turned I saw that he held something in his hand. It was a man’s opera hat. I knew without looking again that it was Larry’s …

  V

  To my amazement Larry came home that night. Alma was still at the Lelands’, and I had had dinner on a tray in Mother’s room. He came in, looking exhausted, but Mother smiled like the angel she really is when she saw him. Her chin was trembling, though.

  “So they had the sense to let you go,” she said. “I thought perhaps the fools would try to hold you. Oh Larry, my own boy …”

  Like me in the morning she burst into tears then, and Larry held her poor face against his coat and got covered with whitewash.

  “Of course they didn’t hold me, old girl,” he said. “Of course not.”

  “I’ve been so scared, son.”

  “I loved her, Mother. They know that.”

  She pulled herself together after that, and looked at the smear on his coat.

  “Wipe him off, Judy,” she said. “It’s some of my night cream.” Which of course was a shameless lie.

  I waited for her to tell him about the knife, but of course it was too much to hope for. He knew about the hat, however. It puzzled him.

  “It was mine,” he said. “Only who would deliberately take it from here and hide it in a tree?” He smiled faintly. “I think that’s why they let me go. They couldn’t figure it out.”

  The tree, it appeared, was why it had not been found sooner. It was in the center of one of our big evergreens, and it hadn’t been thrown there. It had been deliberately hidden. I wondered—as I am sure Larry did—whether that was how Isabel’s killer had got up the stairs to her—in an overcoat like his, perhaps, with the hall light dim and Larry’s dark hat on his head.

  I went with him to his old sitting room where Patrick had sent him a tray. But he wasn’t hungry. He took some soup and pushed the tray away.

  “What’s the matter with Mother?” he asked. “She can’t think I had anything to do with it.”

  “She didn’t hear from you all day,” I told him. “I think it upset her.”

  It seemed to satisfy him. At least he told me what he had been doing, talking in a queer detached voice, as though he had deliberately wiped away all feeling. The autopsy, he said, showed that Isabel had been killed between nine and ten o’clock the night before. It also showed that she had been stabbed twice. The first blow had apparently knocked her down. The second had been delivered from above, while she lay there helpless.

  It was so cold-blooded that I shivered, and Larry looked sick.

  “Why didn’t she scream?” I said. “After all there must have been a second or two, Larry, when she saw whoever it was. With all those women in the house—”

  “That’s what the police are asking me,” he said thinly. “It’s the old story of why didn’t the dog bark?”

  “But that policeman, Barnes, knows you didn’t go down to your house.”

  “Barnes is missing,” he said. I nodded, and he went on. “I’ve been wondering—Judy, did Isabel know Barnes? She had been meeting somebody in the park in town. We don’t know who.”

  “His wife says he didn’t know her. Even if he did …”

  I sat stil
l, thinking of his young wife that afternoon. “The kindest man she ever knew,” she had said. And yet he had had the chance. He had been alone in the drive, and he had not seen Larry when he went out to smoke a cigarette and escape the noise.

  Larry was pacing the floor by that time. He walked and talked, as though he were thinking out loud. He was free, he said, because of two things, his hat’s being found where it was, and the man Isabel had been meeting in the park.

  It seemed that MacIntyre, Isabel’s chauffeur, had told about the man.

  When he arrived that morning—he was a family man and slept at home—he had learned of the murder for the first time. Mac is a Scot, dour and uncommunicative. He listened to the excited women, and then went out in the garage and worked on Isabel’s limousine as usual. After that he put on the soft hat he wears when off duty to show he is a man like other men, and drove his old Ford down to Police Headquarters. For a long time no one paid any attention to him. He sat on a bench outside the homicide officer for what he considered a proper length of time. Then he simply got up, opened the door and walked in.

  Larry had been taken out for a belated breakfast, but the Mayor was there, the Commissioner of Police, the District Attorney and half a dozen others. They stared at Mac.

  “I’ve got something more to say,” Mac announced bluntly. “I’m Mrs. Shepard’s chauffeur.”

  His story was pretty incredible. Isabel had been meeting a man in the park downtown, a shabby sort of man. For the past month once or twice a week she had had Mac drive to one of the entrances and had gone into the park—for a walk, she said.

  “But she was never one to walk much,” Mac said, “so one day I left the car and took a walk myself. She was. on a bench, talking to this fellow. They seemed to be arguing about something.”

  “Would you know the man again?”

  Mac shook his head.

  “I wasn’t anywhere near,” he told them. “I never did get anywhere near. But she met him often. Five or six times that I know of.”

  It was a break for Larry, of course. Mac was of the opinion that she was quarreling with the man, and once at least he thought she had been crying when she came back to the car. Larry looked crushed when he told me. “They seem to think it might be blackmail,” he said. “But who in God’s name would try to blackmail Isabel?”‘

  Some bright soul among them finally thought of Barnes. They sent for a photograph of him and showed it to Mac.

  He shook his head. “Not the same guy,” he said. “Other one was older and thinner.”

  So there they were: Isabel dead, Barnes missing, and some man meeting Isabel in the park and making her cry. An Isabel wrapped in furs on a park bench with a strange man in shabby clothes—not once, but five or six times. No wonder they thought of blackmail.

  That was Friday night. The murder had been twenty-four hours before. Barnes was still missing, Mother and I were both going to attend the inquest the next morning, there were two hats in the safe at Headquarters, somewhere Don was probably puzzling over the platinum chain he had given Isabel, and I still had the knife to hide.

  I hadn’t told Larry that it was missing, or that we had it. The police were probably keeping it as an ace in the hole, and he had enough to bear as it was. I did make an attempt to, however. He had insisted on sleeping in his own house, and I went downstairs with him. There was no one in the hall, and as he opened the door I stopped him.

  I remember trying to light a cigarette, but my hands were not so good.

  “Look, Larry,” I said, “have they told you your knife is missing?”

  “What knife?”

  “Your old hunting knife.”

  He didn’t say anything for a minute. He stood looking out into the darkness, his face stiff.

  “I suppose that settles it,” he said. “No. They didn’t tell me.” He turned suddenly and faced me. “See here, Judy, did you or Mother find it? Is that what’s wrong with her? Because if she did it’s bad business. It’s about all they need.”

  “I don’t see why.”

  “For God’s sake!” he said roughly. “If my own people think I did it and hid the weapon—”

  I had recovered, however.

  “Nonsense,” I told him lightly. “I never saw the thing. As for Mother, don’t be silly. What would she have done with it? How could she had got it out of the house? She was in a low-cut dress, and that means low.”

  He let it go at that. Probably the picture of Mother in one of her evening gowns convinced him, Mother considering there is nothing shameful about good substantial human flesh. I couldn’t tell him the truth, of course. I knew what he would do. He would take it straight to the police.

  “I didn’t kill my wife,” he would say, “but here’s the weapon. It belongs to me.”

  He didn’t go at once. He stood there, staring out at the grounds, dark and sinister in the dimout, and at the black hulk of his house.

  “Who would kill her, Judy?” he said. “Why would she put on a dressing gown and stand there while her murderer came up the stairs? Why didn’t she scream? Why didn’t she run back to her room and lock the door?”

  “She’d have let a policeman come in,” I said. “They’re not supposed to be human. Suppose Barnes came in, saying he’d found the kitchen door unlocked, and that he’d better look around to see if anyone had got in?”

  “Why on earth would Barnes kill her?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, deflated. “Only his being missing, and all that … But there are such people as homicidal maniacs. I suppose that’s rather fantastic, isn’t it? And there’s the hat, too. Patrick thinks it may have belonged to the drunken waiter he had to throw out. If you could find that waiter … After all he was inside the gates. Nobody else was.”

  “She wouldn’t have let a waiter up the stairs.”

  “He was in full dress. She mightn’t have known who he was. And Anna had left the kitchen door open. He could have put on your hat, and Isabel would have thought it was you.”

  He considered that, still gazing out.

  “Possible, but not probable,” he said. He sighed. “Look, Judy. Who was to know that Anna was to decide to see the party, and leave the kitchen door open? What outsider would know about my knife, or where I kept it? It won’t wash, my dear.”

  I let him go at last. I had a queer feeling that as he walked down the drive, somebody leaped back into the trees. So I was not going to be able to get out and drop Larry’s knife in the river. The police were still on the job.

  Mother was reading in bed when I got upstairs. She had taken off the whitewash and put on her night cream and her chin strap, and now that Larry was back she looked so darned complacent that I wanted to scream. I went over to the bed and stood looking down at her.

  “Look,” I said, “they know that knife is missing. They probably know you have it. But they aren’t going to search this house. They might as well try to search the British Museum. And if you think I’m going out in the middle of the night to dig a hole for that wretched thing …”

  She put down her book and stared at me.

  “I suppose you’d like to see Larry going to the chair,” she said. “Your own brother! I can stay here in bed for days watching it, but you won’t even lift a hand to help him.”

  Well, of course it was silly. She had had a perfectly good rest, and slept at least part of it I was just about to tell her so when she moved to get out of bed.

  “Very well,” she said. “I’m not so old that I can’t walk out in my own grounds and do it myself. Get me my dressing gown.”

  She knew she had me, of course. I couldn’t let her go wandering around in the dark. She would sprain her ankle or do some other fool thing. I didn’t trust her, either. She would probably use a flashlight, and after seeing that movement down the drive I had an idea that the police were still keeping an eye on the place. The police around, and Mother working her way through the shrubbery giving a fine imitation of a bull elephant on the loose. It made me
shudder.

  So I stalked into her bathroom, got the knife out of the tank, dried it, and was stalking out again when she spoke.

  “Do show some sense, Judy,” she said. “Wrap it in a handkerchief or something. Do you want it covered with your prints?”

  “I thought the idea was that nobody would find it.”

  Nevertheless I took a handkerchief from an upper drawer and wrapped the thing in it. I hated to touch it, and I wasn’t comforted when, as I closed the door, I heard Mother put out her reading lamp and knew she was going to sleep. I felt deserted, as though I were alone in a dark and dangerous world, and I wasn’t so far wrong at that.

  I didn’t go at once. I had to wait for Alma to settle down, for one thing. I slipped on a dark dress with a coat over it, and thank heaven I put on my tennis shoes. Then I tried a crossword puzzle and waited. I’ve seen that puzzle since. I must have been out of my mind when I did it. At one o’clock I gave it up and went downstairs.

  There is something rather dreadful in a house the size of ours at night, with all the lights off. Especially downstairs, with arches here and there instead of doors—Mother likes vistas, as she calls them—and every small sound echoing all through the place. I had always loathed the house anyhow, and I disliked it more than ever that night. Even the fountain in the hall sounded like a cataract, and when the kitchen cat—which is supposed to catch mice, but spends most of its nights trying for the goldfish in the pool—when the fool cat ran over my feet I almost dropped the knife.

  I felt a little better when I got outside. Even with the dimout there was a faint glow over the city, enough to let me see the drive after my eyes got used to the darkness. I kept an eye out for any policeman who might be about, and I am certain I made no noise whatever. But one thing was sure. If the knife was ever found it would have to be where a murderer in a hurry to escape could have hidden it.

  So I struck toward the gates on Linden Avenue and the trees and shrubbery inside them.