Death in the Back Seat

by Dorothy Cameron Disney

  “How can you know that?”

  “I found bits of rust in the wound.”

  Having alarmed me thoroughly, he advised me to go to bed and get some rest. His car roared in the yard outside and I returned to the bedroom. Propped high with pillows and still extremely white, Jack was energetically directing Silas in a search of the closet. The hired man crouched on hands and knees, staring owlishly and fruitlessly at the closet floor. Except that several garments had fallen from hangers and lay about in untidy heaps, there was no evidence that a black-faced man had hidden there within three feet of our bed. I put a stop to the search.

  Bought by the promise of an extra fifty cents, Silas agreed to spend the remainder of the night on the living-room sofa. Pie seemed decidedly uneasy, and I thought it fortunate that he knew nothing about the murder. An uncourageous man, he was sharp enough to sense that certain facts concerning the evening had been withheld. This further impaired his morale.

  “Can I keep the lights burning?”

  “Certainly.”

  “The light in the kitchen, too?”

  “As many as you like.”

  I closed the door on him. Jack retained sufficient spirit to flash a grin. “Silas isn’t much of a port for the Storms.”

  Then, as he spread his open palms upon the coverlet, his grin faded. “Look at my hands, Lola.”

  “They’re filthy!”

  “That isn’t dirt. That’s soot.”

  Uncomprehendingly, I stared. The palms of both hands were black; a smear of dense black discolored the back of the left hand.

  “But Jack, how can that be? There isn’t any soot in the woods. Where-did you get it?”

  “From the man who knocked me out. I think I must instinctively have caught at him in an effort to fight back. In fact, I’m sure I did.”

  “But, Jack…”

  “Look at the knob on the closet door. The inside knob.”

  I went to the door. The white china knob was a grimy black. I extended an experimental finger; particles of soot came away.

  “You didn’t see a Negro,” said Jack from his pillows. “You saw a man who had covered his face and hands with soot or burnt cork. You saw a man who had disguised himself.”

  I spent a restless night. At dawn, leaving Jack asleep, I rose and tiptoed through the living room. The sofa was empty. I heard Silas moving in the cellar. I established his identity by taking what would have been a silly and unthinkable precaution—twenty-four hours earlier. I shouted down.

  “Is that you, Silas?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “What are you doing?”

  “Looking for dues.”

  “I don’t suppose you’ve found any.”

  Silas’s voice, satisfied, and, now that day had dawned, chipper enough, floated upward.

  “I found out how that fellow got in.”

  Immediately I descended the unstable wooden stairs. Dusty, musty, damp, smelling of faint, strange odors, the cellar of the cottage was an untidy catch-all which we referred to privately as the Hell Hole. For generations the Coatesnash family had accumulated possessions and for generations had stubbornly-clung to them. In every available corner Mrs. Coatesnash had stored superannuated articles she considered far too good to throw away. The assemblage included a decrepit phonograph with a painted horn, three bottomless reed chairs, ancient electric fixtures, a horrible, marble-topped dresser, a camp cot, an old mattress, a three-legged table poised drunkenly against a whatnot whose seams were bursting with dampness. It included bits of broken never-to-be-mended china and bric-a-brac gleaming on shelves along with empty ginger-ale bottles and preserve jars. It included a long, unpleasant roll of carpet which had not seen the light in forty years.

  In the midst of this ruin of the past glowed a modern furnace pink with heat. Near by stood Silas, squinting at a pile of coal which mounted to a small window above. At once and certainly I knew where our intruder had got his disguise. Coal dust. In three rapid minutes, with coal dust, a white man could make himself a black man. It had been coal dust on Jack’s hands and on the doorknob. Coal dust from our own cellar!

  As I left the stairs, I had the queer feeling that Silas also, independently, had arrived at and would suggest the possibility that the intruder had smeared himself with coal dust. We had planned to impart only to the police our information regarding the disguise. For an instant I wondered if Silas were as stupid as we had thought him, or if we had considered him stupid merely because he was unlike ourselves. Had he glimpsed Jack’s hands? Had he seen the grimy door knob and drawn his own conclusions?

  “Right here, Mrs. Storm,” began the hired man in his flat, shrill tones, “is where the fellow got in. He busted that window-pane, unlocked the window and slid down the coal.”

  I picked my way to the spot. Silas pointed out the broken window-pane, the bits of shattered glass sparkling on the browned grass outside. I said nothing. Standing beside the hired man, in daylight, in the cellar of my own home, I was swept by an appalling sensation of fright and insecurity. The pane could be mended. Bars could be wedged across the window. Still I knew that never again would I feel safe in the pretty little country cottage. At length I spoke calmly, steadily.

  “You must show this to the police, Silas.”

  With which I went back upstairs. Awake now and livelier than he had any right to be, Jack was clamoring for coffee. We were breakfasting from a card table pulled up beside the bed when Silas entered with a final, disquieting piece of news. Our poker had disappeared.

  “You’re sure you saw it yesterday?”

  “I used it yesterday.”

  “Maybe you mislaid it.”

  “I don’t mislay things, Mrs. Storm. I keep that poker beside the furnace. It was there yesterday. It’s gone now.”

  After breakfast, despite Jack’s protests, Silas and I went out to search the woods. We didn’t locate the poker. As I remember, I didn’t say in words to Silas that we were hunting for the poker. He knew. He was as certain as was I that our own poker was the blunt, heavy, metal weapon which had struck Jack unconscious to the ground.

  With the sun glinting down, at eight in the morning, last night’s woods were anything but sinister or mysterious. The trees, mostly elms and oaks, grew in a sparse narrow band between two wide fields, our own, and the field which belonged to the Olmstead place. I had not previously felt the lack of neighbors. Now the brown farmhouse, shuttered, unoccupied, depressed me by its very emptiness. As we patiently wound in and out the winter trees, examining the soggy ground, I said to Silas:

  “When are the Olmsteads opening their place?”

  “Some time in May. Mrs. Olmstead asked me to start her gardens in April. She’s a nice lady, talks too much, but you will like her.”

  Empty-handed at the end of an hour’s search we plodded back toward the cottage. A car shot past on the road and pulled into our drive.

  John Standish was alighting when we arrived in the yard. He had not heard the news of the attack, and was wholly absorbed with the murder. He greeted me with tempered cordiality.

  “Good morning, Mrs. Storm. Is your husband up? I’d like to ask him some additional questions.”

  “You’ve had an answer to your cable?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Then why are you here?”

  “The second bag turned up this morning. A farmer driving along the road outside Durham found a packed bag tossed behind a signboard. We believe it to be the missing bag.”

  I looked at him blankly. “Durham! But that’s miles beyond New Haven. We weren’t there.”

  “That is what I want to establish—if I can.”

  Standish waited for my reply. I realize now that he was deliberately watching my reactions, seeking, in my first instant of surprise, to trap me into some admission that the detailed story we had told him was untrue.

  I disappointed him. “We were nowhere near Durham. Not within miles of it. If you have found the bag on a road outside Durham, som
eone put it there—not Jack, not I. Someone else.”

  “I hope that’s true.”

  “What was in the bag?”

  “A man’s pajamas, bathrobe and slippers, toilet articles, a magazine and a couple of fresh shirts.”

  “No letters? Nothing to identify Lewis?”

  Standish shook his head. “I’m afraid the identification is going to be tough. Lewis himself made it tough. A funny thing. The man’s own extraordinary behavior is hampering the investigation of his murder.”

  I had forgotten Silas. A choking sound recalled him to my attention. He was gazing pop-eyed at Standish and me, as though simultaneously we had taken leave of our senses.

  “What are you talking about? What murder? No one told me anything about a murder.”

  I said shortly, “Last night a man was murdered in the rumble seat of our car. Shot through the heart. I can’t tell you any more.”

  Silas sank to the running board of Standish’s machine. He turned a mottled gray. His first thoughts, his first words dwelt upon himself. “If I’d known about it I never in the world would have spent a night on your sofa.”

  “Then it’s as well you didn’t know!”

  While he sat huddled on the running board, I gave Standish an account of the man who had hidden in the clothes closet. The police chief listened intently, stepped over the fence and examined blurred, valueless footprints, and decided, before speaking to Jack, to go to the cellar. Silas obstinately refused to accompany him. The news of the murder had destroyed his interest in clues.

  “Let the chief look for himself. I got my work to do. I ain’t going to mix myself in murder.”

  He rose, ambled across the yard and started up the hill toward the Coatesnash mansion. In a way, I suppose Jack and I had served him a mean trick; it was natural he should resent it. Nevertheless, I was exasperated by the solid self-interest of the type he represented. Country people, suspicious of the law fearful of newcomers, anxious above all else to keep their own skirts clear of trouble—how I hated them! Jack and I had been good to Silas, yet he could see us hang without too great perturbation.

  Standish and I went to the cellar. After glancing around its gloomy confines, speculating upon the whereabouts of the missing poker and studying the broken window, the police chief suddenly climbed the steps that led to the lawn. I followed him around the house. He stared at the broken glass scattered outside the cellar window. He looked inside at the coal. Then, grunting, he stooped, picked up a fragment of glass, and dropped it in his pocket. I was curious.

  “What’s that for?”

  “One never knows,” was the evasive reply, “what might be useful.”

  How a bit of rain-washed glass could be useful was beyond my ability to conjecture. Puzzled, I escorted him into the house. He nodded to Jack, expressed jocular sympathy, crossed the bedroom and peered at the closet door knob. His face assumed a peculiar expression.

  “No fingerprints. This evidently is to be a case without them. There was none on the car, except yours and your wife’s.” Returning to the bed, he glanced at Jack’s bandaged head. “Have you had a doctor?”

  “We called Dr. Rand last night.”

  “You did!” Standish at once stepped out to telephone the physician.

  I strongly suspected that he had doubted the attack, despite the circumstantial evidence provided by Jack’s bandages, the coal dust on the knob, the broken cellar window. A few minutes later my suspicion was verified. Having spoken to the physician, Standish was now entirely convinced and—I thought—obscurely relieved. He was also friendlier.

  “The doctor is willing to swear you were murderously attacked. No question of accident. Now-it’s up to us to decide why.”

  Jack gingerly fingered his bandages. “That sounds like a large order.”

  “On the contrary, it seems to me the simplest point in the whole business. A man with a soot-blackened face hides in your closet, runs outside, with you hot on his heels. You rush into the woods; you stop to listen; perhaps you make a move as if to turn. Immediately he smacks you from behind. Why? Because he is afraid to have you turn.”

  “You mean,” said Jack slowly, “he was afraid I might recognize him?”

  “Exactly. Even with his soot-blackened face, he was afraid. Mr. Storm, you know the man who struck you down last night.”

  The solution seemed infinitely horrible to me. “If that is so, why did he run across the open field? I saw him clearly in the moonlight. So did Jack. Why didn’t he run to the road? It’s much darker there.”

  Standish frowned. “He was in a hurry to escape.”

  “The distance to the road is the same. It’s easier to run on a road than on a stubble field.”

  “Perhaps he didn’t think.”

  Jack sided with me. “It’s a queer thing to say, but I believe he did think. That man ran like a person with an objective—straight ahead. He led, you understand. I followed.”

  “He may live in one of the houses farther down the line. Who owns the next house? The Olmsteads? They winter in New Haven, don’t they?” Standish spent an interval in reflection. “Just on chance I’ll have a look at that place this afternoon.” Jack stirred restively. “The whole affair seems senseless. Meaningless. Why should anyone break into our cottage and hide in the closet?”

  “You say you have no enemies?”

  Jack smiled. “Not that sort of enemies.”

  “Then,” said Standish, “we can eliminate a design upon your personal safety as the motive.”

  Jack nodded in agreement.

  The other continued. “Next we will eliminate robbery. You drove up in a taxi. As you entered the back door it would have been easy for a thief to leave by the front door. The black-faced gentleman didn’t do that. Instead he did what no run-of-the-mine burglar ever does. He hid himself.”

  I shivered. “He was waiting for us.”

  “No, Mrs. Storm. I believe he was waiting for someone else.”

  “For Elmer Lewis!” exclaimed Jack.

  Bewildered, I interrupted. “But Lewis was dead when we drove up. Dead in Crockford, murdered.”

  “Your intruder may not have known that. You have said Lewis wanted to come to the cottage, insisted upon coming. Isn’t it possible he expected to meet someone here?”

  “Do you mean to say he expected to meet a man hidden in the closet with a poker in his hand? Am I to believe that?” Standish smiled vaguely. “Strange things happen, Mrs. Storm. After all, Lewis had one enemy. Why not two?”

  “It seems a trifle thick,” Jack said doubtfully. “Two separate plots on the same man’s life in a single evening! Lewis was an odd duck, but he wasn’t simple. He went to considerable pains before he set out on his trip—cut the labels from his clothes, shaved his mustache, wore those glasses. One would think he might have taken a few elementary precautions to protect himself.”

  “He did,” said Standish grimly. “I didn’t tell you two last night, but Lewis was armed. There was a gun in his overcoat pocket. And his right hand—you will remember—was jammed in the pocket.”

  “Under the circumstances,” said Jack, “it might have been wiser if he had carried a gun on his lap.”

  “Lewis anticipated trouble,” said Standish, “but my hunch is he didn’t anticipate what happened. He had provided for contingencies which—” The policemen looked around the bedroom. “—which might occur in this cottage.”

  An automobile—our own car, by the way—chugged into the drive, came to a noisy halt. Blair popped out of it and strode purposefully across the yard. A moment later the little deputy swept into the bedroom, clothed in the authority of the law and the neatest uniform that Crockford has ever seen.

  “Well?” said Standish.

  Blair whipped out two white envelopes, and handed them to his superior. They were the cablegrams, long awaited, one signed by Luella Coatesnash, the other by the head of the Paris Sûreté. Standish opened the envelopes, rapidly perused their contents. Jack couldn’t
conceal his eagerness. He stretched out his hand.

  In silence Standish surrendered the printed sheet. I read over Jack’s shoulder. The message was short. It follows:

  “ELMER LEWIS HANDLED NO BUSINESS FOR ME HAVE NEVER HEARD THE NAME. PLEASE CABLE EXPLANATIONS.

  LUELLA COATESNASH.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The Voice on the Telephone

  For a long interval no one in the bedroom moved or spoke. Together Jack and I stared at the printed words which had deepened materially the embarrassment and danger of our situation. I was not precisely surprised, but I was angry and discouraged. A few minutes earlier Standish had been discussing the case in quite a friendly fashion, and now it seemed to me the atmosphere had subtly altered. Jack refolded the white paper, returned it to the police chief.

  “And the other cablegram?”

  “The other is a confidential report from the French police and merely verifies what you read. Mrs. Coatesnash was interviewed at her hotel this morning, expressed her willingness to be of assistance, but was helpless. Evidently she is bewildered at being drawn into the matter, and can neither explain who Elmer Lewis is or how he happened to use her name.”

  “That,” said Jack, “is impossible for me to credit.”

  Few outsiders had the temerity or the bad taste to criticize a Coatesnash on her own home grounds. The pompous little deputy, whom Luella had never so much as spoken to, bristled like a wet cat. Standish looked cold and alienated. This was a situation we were to face throughout the coming days; whenever our interests conflicted with those of Mrs. Coatesnash, inevitably we lost.

  Said Standish, “I’ve known Luella Coatesnash since I was a boy in knickerbockers. In some ways she may be peculiar, but she is a fine old lady. I have the utmost confidence in her integrity.” Jack half rose in bed. “Isn’t it important that Lewis lured us to New Haven by using her name? Isn’t it strange? How is it to be explained?”

  Blair displayed his claws. “There’s only your word for that tale, Mr. Storm. Your word alone!”

  “There’s my wife’s word! If you were sufficiently enterprising you might discover the telephone operator who put through the call. Those girls listen in on everything. Have you done anything about tracing the call?”