Somehow that made me shudder, and he was quick to see it.
“Better go in and get to bed, young lady,” he said kindly. “I’m going to need you on this case; I don’t want you getting sick. I’ll tell you the old lady’s story in the morning.”
But I refused to go until I had heard it. I did agree to go up and look at my patient, however, and to get my cape to throw about me. I found Miss Juliet quiet and her pulse much better, but, although she kept her eyes closed, I had an idea that she was not asleep.
When I went down again, the Inspector was sitting on the porch step in a curiously intent position, apparently listening to something I could not hear. He waved a hand at me for silence, and then, suddenly and without warning, he bolted around the side of the house. It was a full five minutes before he returned, and he appeared rather chagrined.
“Guess I need some sleep,” he said. “I’d have sworn I heard somebody moving back there among the bushes.”
It was then that I told him of my own experience earlier in the night, and he made another round of the place without discovering anything. But he did not sit down again; he stood and listened for some little time, his body and ears still evidently on the alert. There was no further sound, however.
I often think of that scene. The two of us there on the front porch, the Inspector’s two excursions to the rear, and neither one of us suspecting that a part of the answer to our mystery was perhaps not more than fifty feet away from us while we talked. Or that he almost fell over it in the darkness, without even knowing that it was there.
CHAPTER IV
It was after those interruptions that he relaxed somewhat, and began to do what I often think proves my only real value to him; to use me as an opportunity to think out loud.
“I want to go back to that room again, Miss Adams. No, don’t move. I’m not going upstairs. Let’s just think about it. Here’s this boy, Herbert. Let’s suppose something like this. He is sitting in a chair; sitting, because the bullet struck the fireplace at about that height. And he has started to undress, for we found that one shoe was unfastened. The door was closed, we’ll say. He sees it opening, but as it was Miss Juliet’s custom to discover whether or not he had come in, he does not get up. In a minute, however, he sees that it is not Miss Juliet, but someone else. Still he does not get up. Mind you, if I’m right, he was shot as he sat in that chair, and that chair was in the center of the room, between the hall door and the fireplace. Now, what do you make of that?”
“That he knew whoever it was, or that he had no time to get up.”
I felt that he was smiling once more, there in the darkness. “Who says you are not a detective?” he asked. “Someone he knew, probably, if this theory holds at all. He may have been surprised; very likely he was. But he wasn’t scared. He was young and active, and he’d have moved in a hurry if he had seen any reason to. He didn’t; and get this. Unless we learn to the contrary tomorrow, whoever shot him didn’t kill him right off. He had to get into the room and get that gun, for one thing. It was probably on the bureau, and this person picked it up. Then he walked toward the door, turned to go, wheeled and fired. Herbert never knew what hit him.”
It was a horrible picture, any way one looked at it, and I felt a little sick. I’ve seen death in a good many forms, and some of them none too pleasant; but the thought of that boy in his chair, totally unaware that he was breathing his last breath, was almost too much for me. Breathing his last breath and looking up at someone he knew.
“Then it’s your idea that, if there was a murder, whoever did it, did it on impulse?” I asked. “If he used Herbert’s gun, that looks as though he had none of his own.”
“We’ll know tomorrow, but I am betting that he used Herbert’s gun. As for doing it on impulse, well—maybe, and maybe not. Why was this unknown sneaking into the house at that hour? If we knew that, we could get somewhere. And how did he get in? There are three doors on the lower floor, and all of them were found bolted on the inside, as well as locked. That is, two of them were bolted. The third one, a side entrance, leads into the kitchen, and that is locked off at night. It also leads to the back stairs, but they go up into the servants’ sitting room. Nowhere else.”
“By a window?”
“Well, Hugo claims to have found a window open all right. But I doubt it. It looks to me as though Hugo, knowing that the house was always locked up like a jail at night, and wanting a murderer, had opened that window. He was a little too quick in discovering it and showing it off. But it happens that the ground is soft outside, and there are no footprints under that window. So I’ll stake my reputation, such as it is, that no one got in or out of that window tonight; and that Hugo himself opened it, after the body was discovered.”
“But why?” I said bewildered.
“Listen, little sister. If this boy had insurance, the last thing Hugo wants is a verdict of suicide. If Hugo killed him, he’s got to show it’s an outside job. There are two reasons for you! I could think of others if you want them.”
“Then Hugo did it?”
“Not too fast! Let’s take the other side for a minute. To do that, we have to figure how somebody unknown could have got into this house tonight and left it, through three doors, all locked, two of them bolted on the inside. And why whoever killed Herbert Wynne killed him with his own gun as he sat in a chair between the fireplace and the door, and moved the body later so that it would look like a suicide.”
“And it wasn’t Hugo?”
“Think again. Why should he move that body?”
“I’ve told you I’m no detective,” I said briefly. “You’d better tell me. It will save time. I suppose Hugo or somebody in the house could have moved it.”
“Why? To make it look like a suicide, when everybody in this house stood to lose if the coroner’s verdict at the inquest was suicide? Nonsense!”
“Then whoever killed him moved it?”
“Possibly. We only have two guesses, and that’s the other one. Right now I think that is what happened; I believe that Hugo made one attempt to indicate a murder, but that he didn’t touch the body. Miss Juliet apparently ordered them to stay out and leave everything as it stood. God knows what he’d have done otherwise, in his anxiety to prove it wasn’t suicide. He did manage, however, to get that window in the library open.”
“You’ve been over the ground around the house, of course?”
“Combed it with a fine-toothed comb,” he said, and yawned. “Found the point of a woman’s high heel just off the drive near the entrance, but too far from the house. Of course, we have to allow for that, too. He wasn’t good medicine for women.”
Strange as it seems now, for the first time during that talk of ours I remembered the girl in the drive, and told him about her. He was less impressed, however, than I had anticipated, although he stood in thoughtful silence for some time before he made any comment.
“We’ll have to watch out,” he said, “or we’ll be hearing more people in the bushes! I’ll admit that this girl looks important, but is she? It isn’t unusual these days for a girl to be out alone at one o’clock in the morning, especially if she has a car. Although the car is only a guess, isn’t it?”
“I’m convinced it was hers.”
“All right. Far be it from me to dispute any hunch of yours. Now what about her? She knows Herbert; maybe she has been playing around with him; tonight she is driving along this street, and she sees a house not notorious for light blazing from roof to cellar. She leaves her car, walks into the drive and discovers a police car near the front door and a crowd of policemen inside the open door. She wouldn’t need to be a detective to know that something had happened, would she?”
“It was more than that. She suspected what had happened. It was written all over her.”
“And she wouldn’t give her name?”
“No. She said she would telephone. But she hasn’t.”
“But that doesn’t look as though she knew when she talked t
o you, does it? As for not telephoning, perhaps she didn’t need to. We’ve had reporters here, or she may have stopped the doctor on his way out. Depend on it, she knows now or she’d be hanging on the wire.”
“Why wouldn’t she come to the house and ask?”
“I don’t know, but I’ll find out tomorrow—today, rather. She ought not to be hard to locate. She may simply have wanted to keep out of the picture, but we can’t afford to leave her out. And while this Wynne youth was a pretty bad actor, he was also pretty well known. We’ll pick her up, all right, and take her for a little ride.”
Before he left, he told me Miss Juliet’s story, and tragic enough it seemed to me. She had gone asleep at ten or thereabouts, and slept soundly until ten minutes to twelve. She wakened then, and looked at the clock beside her bed. She was certain of the time, and she sat up, prepared to go upstairs and ascertain if Herbert had come in. This was her nightly custom; to see if he was in the house, and then to go down and examine the front door, to be sure that he had closed it properly.
“Sometimes he came in a little under the weather,” the Inspector explained here. He had certain curious reserves of speech with me. “From drinking, you know.”
By which I gathered that now and then Herbert had returned to his home in no fit condition even for my experienced ears!
But while Miss Juliet sat there in her bed, looking at her clock, she was aware that someone was walking past her door, in the hall outside. She heard nothing, naturally, but like all very deaf people she was sensitive to vibrations, and her walnut bed was shaking as it always did under such conditions.
She called out. “Herbert! Is that you, Herbert?”
There was no answer, and, with the terror of burglars always in her mind, she was too frightened at first to get out of her bed. She managed that at last, and, feeling no more vibrations, she even opened her door an inch or two. There was nobody in sight, but on the landing above, Herbert’s door was open and his light going.
She called again, more sharply, and finally put on her slippers and dressing gown and climbed to the third floor. All she had expected to find was that the boy had gone to sleep with his light burning, and apparently she went up with a sense of outrage at his indifference to waste.
What she saw, from the staircase, had sent her shrieking down to hammer on the door into the servants’ rooms at the back. That door was locked, had been locked for years, and was bolted, too. To reach her, the servants had had to go down their own back staircase, through the lower hall and up to where she still stood, hysterically banging at that door.
She led the way back toward the upper room, but she did not go in. Hugo had done so, while she and Mary remained outside. She had told him not to touch anything, and she was certain that he had not done so. The body was lying as the police had found it, in front of the bureau, with the automatic beside it. Yes, the window was open, but it was three full stories above the ground.
She had fainted, or had a heart attack, at about that time, but she remembered that Hugo had said there were no powder marks, and that it must have been an accident. She had asked him then to telephone for Arthur Glenn, her attorney, and Mary had apparently sent for Doctor Stewart, for he arrived shortly after the police from the station house.
That was practically all, but the Inspector added that she had seemed anxious to believe that it was an accident and not suicide.
It was after four o’clock in the morning when he left, getting into his car and driving off at his usual furious speed. I had followed him out into the drive.
“And what am I to do?” I asked.
“Just as usual. Keep your eyes open, that’s all. By the way, I’ve told them to stay out of that room. I want to look it over in the morning.”
He put his foot on the starter, but I had thought of something.
“This boy, Herbert, he had a key, of course?”
“To the front door. Yes.”
“Could he have brought someone in with him?”
“Not if Hugo is telling the truth, and why shouldn’t he? He would give his neck to prove that Herbert Wynne had done just that. But what does Hugo say? He says that he was still in his sitting room beyond the landing at eleven or a little after, that he heard the boy going up the stairs to the third floor, and that he is certain he was alone.”
Then he roared away, and I was left standing in the drive alone.
It was still dark, although there was a hint of dawn in the sky. Dark and cold. I shivered a little as I turned back and went into the house again.
Upstairs, old Miss Juliet still lay very quietly in that great walnut bed, her head high so she could breathe more easily, but I still had that odd feeling that she was only pretending to be asleep.
I stood and looked down at her. How old she was I have no idea even now; in her late seventies, I imagine. Possibly eighty. There were stories that Miss Juliet Mitchell had been a great beauty in her day, but there were no signs of that beauty now. She looked infinitely old and very weary. It seemed to me, as I looked at her, that surely age should have certain compensations for what it has lost, and that peace and comfort should be among them. But I wondered if she had not grown hard with the years. I was remembering what the Inspector had quoted as her words when she had finished her statement.
“He is dead,” she had said, “and I will speak no evil of him. But if someone murdered him, it was for good cause. I knew him well enough to know that. And he never killed himself. He had not the courage.”
CHAPTER V
It was well after four in the morning when I finally lay down and tried to get an hour’s sleep on a couch at the foot of the old lady’s bed. It was hard to do. She was apparently asleep, but it grew still cooler toward dawn, and if before, everything about that ancient house had seemed to creak, now it appeared to me as I lay there that ghostly figures were moving up and down the stairs. Once a curtain blew out into the room and touched me on the hand, and I had all I could do not to yell my head off.
I must have dozed again, but only for a short time. I was roused by an odd sort of vibration of the footboard of the big bed; my sofa was pushed against it, so it was shaking also.
What with the Inspector’s story of some loose floor boarding or joist which connected with the hall outside, I knew what that meant, and I sat up with a jerk. Over the high footboard I could see Miss Juliet’s bed, and it was empty!
I was still sitting there, gasping, when I heard the door to the hall open cautiously, and saw her come feebly back into the room. She was ghastly white, and she stopped and stood motionless when she saw me. She was in her nightgown and her feet were bare. I dare say the fright had made me irritable, for I jumped up and confronted her.
“You know you shouldn’t have got out of bed, Miss Mitchell,” I said sternly. “That’s what I’m here for.”
Whether she heard me or not, she understood my attitude.
“I’ve been walking off a cramp in my leg,” she said in her flat, monotonous voice. “Do lie down, and go to sleep again. I’m quite all right.”
She moved toward the bed, and, dark as the room still was, I felt certain that she held something in the hand I could not see, and that, with a surprisingly quick gesture, she slid it under a pillow. Right or wrong—and I know now that I was right—she refused any help in getting back into bed, or to allow me to straighten her bedclothing, or, indeed, to work about the bed at all.
“Let me alone, please,” she said when I attempted it. “I don’t like being fussed over.”
She could not, however, prevent my putting a heater to her feet, and seeing that the soles were soiled; or taking her pulse and discovering that it was extremely fast, or watching her breathing, which was rapid and labored. Nor could she impose on me by pretending to be asleep until Mary came to relieve me for my breakfast. Neither one of us slept a wink from that time on, and I suppose there was a certain humor, hard to discover at the time, in my occasional cautious peerings over the foot of that bed,
my hair flying in all directions and my very face swollen with lack of sleep; and Miss Juliet’s equally wary watching, and the closing of her eyes the moment she saw the top of my head rising beyond that walnut footboard.
Whatever she had under her pillow, I did not get it, for Mary relieved me at eight for breakfast, a slim meal served by a morose Hugo in a shabby coat, with purple pouches of sheer exhaustion under his eyes. If there had been suppressed indignation for that night of interrogation in Mary’s manner as she relieved me, there was a curious look of humiliation in his. He looked old, tired and rather pathetically shamed.
“I’m afraid you had a hard night, Hugo.”
“I suppose it was to be expected, miss.”
He did not care to talk, I saw, and so I let him alone. But as I ate my toast and drank my weak tea, I had a chance to see more fully the impoverished gentility of that house. No wonder, if the Wynne boy had actually killed himself, Hugo had tried to make it look like a murder. The threadbare carpets, the thin and carefully darned table linen, the scanty food served with such ceremony, all pointed to a desperate struggle to keep up appearances.
And to save my life I could not see Herbert Wynne in that house. He had come and gone, apparently leaving no more impression on it than if he had never been.
Mary was still in Miss Juliet’s room when I went up again. The door was closed, so I had a moment or two in which to get my bearings by daylight. I could see that the house was only three stories in the front, and that the back wing, including the kitchen, the pantry and, as I discovered later, the laundry, was only two.
This back wing, a later addition, was of frame, while the main body of the house was brick. It was above the kitchen and so on that the servants had their rooms, carefully locked off and bolted from the landing on the front stairs. And it was evident that only the main staircase led to the third floor. The rear one, as Inspector Patton has said, led only to the two rooms and bath used by Mary and Hugo.
The house itself was a double house; that is, there was a long center hall leading back to the pantry and service quarters. On one side of the hall was a library with a dining room behind it. On the other was what was known as the long parlor. The doors into it were closed, but I knew that it was there. It had been rather a famous room locally in the old days, with its two crystal chandeliers and its two fireplaces, each with a marble mantel and a mirror over it.
Miss Pinkerton Page 3
