Death in the Back Seat

by Dorothy Cameron Disney

  “It isn’t my place to make suggestions, but anyhow I’d like to ask a question.” I looked at Standish. “Don’t you believe it was Silas who filled in the hole in the rock garden, and changed the lock and swept out the furnace? Don’t you believe he knows exactly who was on the hill last night?”

  “I’m convinced of it.”

  “Then why,” Jack interposed, “don’t you take Silas down to jail?”

  Standish smiled. “On the theory, I suppose, that jail would loosen the Scotchman’s tongue?” Jack nodded. I must admit the theory seemed sound to me, and Lester Harkway, I believe, was of the same opinion. He listened in marked dissatisfaction as the senior officer developed his own idea.

  “Jail,” said Standish, “might make some men talk. But it would be a man of a different type from Silas. Intimidation won’t work with him. You, Mrs. Storm, saw how much he talked just now. I could trump up some charge to hold him—remember, we haven’t a particle of real evidence—but I won’t.” Standish hesitated. “If Lester feels he wants to take the responsibility for an arrest…” The sentence was ended with a shrug.

  Harkway also hesitated. “You’re in charge of the case,” he said at last, a shade ungraciously. “The final decision is up to you.

  “Then,” said Standish with vigor, “we’ll leave the situation as it is. Why, I believe Silas almost wants to go to jail. He practically suggested it himself.”

  “But…”

  “There’s no ‘but’ about it,” said Standish testily. “I’ve had enough experience to know something about human nature. I’ve known Silas for years, I can read him like a book. He’s scared now. You saw that, Mrs. Storm. Why make him mad, why bring out that stubborn streak in him? Once behind bars—mark my words—Silas would get and nurse a persecution complex, and rot before he’d speak. But out of jail,” the policeman went on soberly, “well, that hill’s a pretty lonesome place to sit, with nothing to keep you company but a guilty conscience. Let Silas’s own fears and nerves and worries work on him. They’re working now. Bringing him closer and closer to the breaking point—to that point when he must talk. When that time comes—and if I’m any judge, it’s coming soon—we’ll learn from Silas’s own lips who killed Hiram Darnley and why, and the why of everything that happened last night.”

  “But Silas himself,” I said sharply, “might have killed Hiram Darnley. In that event…”

  “No,” said Standish slowly. “No. It wasn’t Silas who shot Hiram Darnley in the back. He has an iron-clad alibi. Ordinarily I don’t put too much stock in alibis, but Silas has an alibi that can’t be cracked. He was at band practice the night that Darnley came to Crockford, Mrs. Storm. Silas was at Fred Tompkins’ barn from five o’clock until after nine. Eight members of the band swear he never left the place, and eight unimpeachable witnesses are enough for me.”

  “Who, then,” I inquired, “do you think murdered Laura Twining?”

  “When you’ve been a policeman as long as I have, Mrs. Storm, you’ll learn it isn’t wise to leap in the dark. How can I say who murdered Laura Twining? How, for that matter, can I prove she’s not alive? One small fragment of bone is a good long way from the body of a specific murdered woman.” He smiled at my disappointed face, and then said somberly, “Not that I’ve any doubt what we’ll prove. And I’ve no doubt, none at all, that Silas is a leading member of our conspiracy.”

  I thought for a moment his aggravating caution—that caution of the policeman who fears to tip his hand—would bring the conversation to a close. He surprised me by saying abruptly, “I’ll tell you one thing I do think—one thing I believe is safe to think. Do you remember that glass I picked up on the lawn after the attack on your husband? The glass from the broken cellar window?”

  “Very well indeed. I’ve always wondered why you took it.”

  “I took it to remind myself I’d found it underneath the window on the lawn. You’re a smart girl, Mrs. Storm. Doesn’t that tell you anything?”

  “I’m afraid it doesn’t.”

  “That glass told me,” said Standish, “that the window was broken from inside the cottage. Not from outside, as you imagined. Which is an important difference.”

  “Important,” Harkway now said quietly, “because the broken window was only a blind. The black-faced man in the closet didn’t need to break a window to enter the cottage. He had keys. He was Silas Elkins.”

  “That annoying alibi,” said Standish, “expired at nine o’clock. You didn’t encounter your ‘burglar’ until very late that night. So, you see, it fits.”

  The two policemen seemed equally triumphant. Out of a welter of impalpabilities, suspicion and conjecture they had arrived at something tangible. Jack and I exchanged a glance. I almost hated to speak, but I finally said:

  “The black-faced man wasn’t Silas. It isn’t possible.”

  They stared at me.

  I repeated, “It simply isn’t possible. It wasn’t more than a couple of minutes after I saw Jack run into the woods before I was talking to Silas on the phone. Silas couldn’t have got to the Lodge from the woods, in that length of time, with wings.”

  “Mrs. Storm,” said Standish with real dismay, “can’t you be mistaken in your time? You were under a strain, you…”

  I shook my head. “I thought Jack was being killed, and I moved fast. I fairly shot into the house—and when I telephoned I reached Silas very quickly. The woods must be a full mile from the Lodge.”

  “There,” said Standish, wryly, “goes an idea I’ve had for days! Everything seemed to fit so nicely. That, Mrs. Storm, is what happens when a cop who ought to know better decides to leap in the dark.”

  He pushed back his napkin and rose disgustedly from the table. After I cleared away the supper things, refusing masculine assistance, we returned to the police station, prepared to await Dr. Rand’s report. But the physician had preceded us there and was seated in the ante-room. With him was a breezy individual whom he introduced as Dr. Harvey Griggstaff, a New Haven osteologist.

  “In view of my report,” said Dr. Rand to Standish, “I thought you would like a second opinion. Dr. Griggstaff, at my request, has made an independent analysis.”

  Standish didn’t notice the curious tone. “Nonsense. Your opinion is good enough for me.” He opened the door to his private office. We all trooped in. The police chief turned around. “Well, let’s hear that report on the bone.”

  Dr. Rand was silent.

  “Go on,” said Standish irritably. “Let’s have that report. I realize the fragment was comparatively small. We don’t expect too much. But could you determine the sex?”

  “We determined,” said the doctor very slowly, “the origin of the bone.” Again he hesitated. “I’m afraid this is going to be a shock. John, that bone is not of human origin. It’s a fragment broken from the femur of a good-sized dog. There’s no question of it.”

  “None at all,” said Dr. Harvey Griggstaff.

  There was, in the room, a breathless, unbelieving silence. The events which had taken place in the rock garden, mysterious enough before, became incomprehensible.

  Why had the unknown acted with such swift and reckless violence to prevent us from digging up the body of a dead dog? Why had the dog’s body been burned in the furnace? It made no sense at all.

  Standish began to roar. “Where’s Laura Twining then? What became of her? Where’s the explanation for what went on last night?”

  “I couldn’t say,” said Dr. Rand. There was a glint of satisfaction in the glance he shot at Jack and me. “Our conversation this afternoon looks like nonsense, doesn’t it? Also it looks as though you youngsters might as well have stayed in bed.”

  The telephone on Standish’s desk started ringing. It rang on and on. Several minutes passed before the police chief snatched the receiver from its hook and spoke. The state of his emotions probably made it difficult for him to understand what was being said. We heard him shout indignant questions. And then, finally, he understood. />
  John Standish had experienced one tremendous shock, and apparently he wasn’t temperamentally equipped to experience another. He quietly hung up the receiver, and replaced the telephone on the desk.

  And in the quietest voice I’ve ever heard he said, “That was our Paris call. Apparently I won’t talk to Luella Coatesnash after all”

  “You mean she’s still asleep?”

  “She shot and killed herself fifteen minutes ago.”

  Any recital of what we thought and said, the questions we asked ourselves during the ensuing hours would be futile here. No theory which we advanced to explain the happenings on the hill or to explain the Paris suicide even touched upon the truth.

  I was most mistaken of all. For I believed that Jack and I were done with tragedy. I doubted that the mystery would ever be fully solved, but of one thing I felt sure. Mrs. Coatesnash was responsible for drawing us into the affair, and with her shocking death I was convinced that Jack and I were out of it. Even now, as an exercise in logic, that thinking of mine seems passable, but of course it was wrong.

  That very night, and for the second time, someone surreptitiously entered the cottage.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  The Short, Stout Fellow

  Jack and I left the police station at eleven o’clock. There was nothing we could do, and I was too tired to stay. During the ensuing hours New York police attempted without success to discover what had happened to Laura Twining. They traced her to the Hotel Wickmore—she and Mrs. Coatesnash had registered on the afternoon of February 17th—but no one in the hotel remembered the two women, or anything of their activities.

  And all the shipping company knew was that Mrs. Coatesnash had come aboard alone, limped to the purser’s office—a steward recalled the gold-headed cane—and canceled Laura’s passage. In Paris no further information was available. The French authorities packed Mrs. Coatesnash’s effects and prepared to ship the body back to Crockford.

  I woke up in the morning in such a physically exhausted state that I remained in bed. I remember suggesting to Jack that I was catching cold.

  “Nonsense! You always think you’re catching cold when you’re overtired. You’ll feel better after breakfast.”

  After which he gallantly served me his own idea of what the invalid might like to eat. We didn’t discuss the case, or even read the papers. We were, to tell the truth, surfeited with mystery. Two dangerous criminals—the actual murderer of Hiram Darnley, and the man who had hidden in our closet—were still unnamed and still at large. We might have thought of that. But we did not. That false sense of security, that belief that we had been eliminated from the baffling drama, imbued us both. Only because of a very trivial circumstance did we discover our mistake.

  Two weeks previously we had ordered coal and this coal was delivered at noon. Against express and often repeated orders, Mr. Brown drove his heavy truck into the yard. I was out of bed and stirring in the kitchen, and the noise took me indignantly outside.

  The culprit greeted me cheerfully. “Where do you want your coal? In the usual place?”

  I nodded sourly. “How do you expect us to grow a lawn if you persist in driving your truck across the yard? You’ve cut the ground to ribbons.”

  “It slipped my mind, ma’am. I’ll do better next time.”

  . “Let’s hope so.”

  I gave him the cellar keys, returned to my dishwashing. Sunlight poured in and I hummed as I stacked and scraped and splashed. Over this housewifely clatter rose the sound of the falling coal. A steady clunk, clunk, clunk. Not exactly pleasant perhaps, but normal, commonplace, and satisfying.

  When Mr. Brown completed his business and came for his money, he was smiling. “I shoulda brung my shotgun, Mrs. Storm. There’s good hunting downstairs. Your place is overrun with squirrels.”

  “Squirrels?”

  “I saw three. Those varmints can be awful pests. If I was you, I’d mend that window.”

  “It’s been mended.”

  “Then it’s been broke again.”

  “Where? Let me see.”

  I followed him outside. He gleefully indicated the window through which he had dumped the coal. Broken previously, it had indeed been broken once again. Coal dust blew gently through a hole which certainly had not been there yesterday. I stared in silence at Mr. Brown. I daresay my reception of his discovery pleased him. His own enthusiasm grew.

  “Funny kind of a hole, ain’t it? Round as a plate. Don’t recollect when I’ve seen a window broke like that.”

  The window catch was unfastened, and Mr. Brown volunteered that he had found it so. There was no glass on the lawn. I didn’t need John Standish to tell me that this was an outside job.

  For as I stooped to peer at the hole, I reached a conclusion which the observant Mr. Brown had missed. The window was not broken; it was cut. There was no shattering. The hole was round and neat, almost tidy. Several minute scratches rayed out from it. Such scratches as might be made by a glass-cutting instrument. Or by the diamond in a ring.

  Instantly I guessed what had occurred. Someone had stepped from the cindered driveway to the window, cut the pane, thrust through a hand, unlocked the window, opened it and dropped into the cellar. The picture of myself and Jack asleep upstairs with someone moving silently about the floor below turned me a little faint. Mr. Brown was now extremely curious. “Something wrong, Mrs. Storm?”

  “No, nothing.”

  He would have stood there talking, but I hustled him into his truck and off. Then I rushed inside and burst upon Jack who was shaving. He turned irritably at my entrance.

  “This is a bathroom, darling. Can’t you knock? And I wish you’d stop using my razor blades to sharpen pencils.”

  “Someone was in the house last night! In the cellar.”

  At first incredulous, Jack soon sobered sufficiently to wipe the lather from his face, pull on a bathrobe and accompany me into the yard. I showed him the window. There were no footprints in the vicinity—only smears and the coal truck’s heavy tread—but leading toward the road, deep in the muddy turf which bordered the drive, we discovered at least a dozen prints. Clumsy, wide and well defined.

  “A man’s prints,” Jack said. He bent over, looked mystified. “By George, the fellow wore rubbers. What extraordinary prudence in a housebreaker!”

  At the harder surface of the road the prints disappeared. We could not fix the direction from which the intruder had come, nor could we decide whether he had arrived by car or on foot.

  “I think,” said Jack, “he must have walked. Wouldn’t a stopping car have wakened you?”

  “I was tired,” I admitted.

  But, tired or not, I’m usually a light sleeper, and I couldn’t understand my not arousing. There were other things I couldn’t understand. For one, a sensible reason for the housebreaking. A stop bolt on the door which opened from the cellar into the kitchen prevented any entrance to the cottage proper. Consequently, the intruder had remained on the basement level. But what had he wanted there?

  We went to the cellar Jack turned on the light. The single electric bulb glowed dimly, and I started as a squirrel scurried past in the gloom, fled up the pile of coal and vanished through the aperture in the window. Save for the broken window there was no sign of anything unusual. The cellar presented its customary aspect—dirt and dust, ruin and decay.

  I looked over the debris with which Mrs. Coatesnash had filled every available inch of space—looked and was appalled. We had never been curious enough to investigate the dismal contents of the cellar and we had no inventory. We faced then an exasperating problem. How were we to decide what had been stolen in the night when we didn’t know accurately what had been there? Nevertheless, on the theory that a person retains a subconscious memory of any place where he has often been, Jack insisted upon a thorough, back-breaking search.

  He flatters himself on his painter’s eye, and I believe he enjoyed himself. He would arbitrarily group a collection of miscellany—a sa
gging armchair, a bird cage, a box of old light bulbs—study the group, move slowly forward and repeat the process. He touched nothing. Occasionally he would squat or step back to obtain a different perspective. With less success I imitated him. At the end of an hour my cold was getting worse, my back was breaking and I was thoroughly disgusted. Every item I specifically remembered—the painted phonograph horn, the odorous roll of carpet, the lawn mower which lacked a blade—was in its accustomed place. The disorder seemed just as bad as yesterday, no worse.

  I sat down on a barrel, discarded Jack’s method and tried out a method of my own. I let my imagination work, and attempted to decide what any sensible person could possibly have wanted that might have been concealed amid such worthless trash. Since the larger items were accounted for, it had to be something small. My ideas were more picturesque than practical. I recalled newspaper accounts of priceless paintings hidden beneath cheap lithographs, stories of incriminating papers left carelessly in trunks. I remembered reading of a will cunningly concealed in a plastered wall. And then, as I sat there, a strong impression overcame me.

  I said, “Jack, we may as well give up. We haven’t been robbed. Not a single solitary thing is missing. Nothing—I’m positive—has been disturbed.”

  Jack straightened. He looked as bewildered as I’ve ever seen him look. “Darned if that isn’t what I had decided myself. But it doesn’t make sense. If robbery wasn’t intended last night what was intended? Why was the window broken? Why are those footprints on the lawn?”

  His words were lost in the sudden roar of a motorcycle. A moment later Lester Harkway’s astonished face appeared at the open cellar door.

  “Good lord, what’s going on?”

  “An inventory,” Jack called. “We have either been robbed or else something queer has happened.”

  “Robbed?” Hark way hurriedly joined us in the cellar. I vividly recall the surprise in his face as he surveyed in turn several broken chairs, a sagging couch, a pile of rotting books. He grinned. “I shouldn’t have thought this junkman’s paradise would tempt anyone. What’s gone? What happened anyhow?” A little wryly Jack returned the smile. “That’s it—we don’t know. We know that someone broke into the cellar some time last night and that’s all we do know. But you might look at the window behind you.”