Murder by the Clock

by Rufus King

  “No, Mrs. Endicott. He didn’t go out at all.”

  CHAPTER II

  9:24 P.M.—Hall Marks of Murder

  Lieutenant Valcour felt that the utter stillness of the room would overwhelm him. He—Mrs. Endicott—everything seemed to be taking its cue from death. He reached past Mrs. Endicott and touched the body’s cheek. It was quite cold.

  “Where is your room, Mrs. Endicott?”

  He carefully pried her fingers from the knob of the cupboard door and then closed it.

  “But you can’t leave him in that cupboard.”

  Her voice held the toneless qualities of arrested emotion, as if the functioning of her nerve centers had stopped.

  “We must leave him in there, Mrs. Endicott, until someone from the medical examiner’s office has seen him. If you’ll tell me the name of your family physician before you lie down—”

  “Lie down—I? Lie down?”

  “Yes, and rest. I’ll call the doctor up on the possible chance that we’re mistaken, only I’m quite certain, Mrs. Endicott, that we aren’t.”

  She stumbled verbally in her rush. “Worth—Dr. Sanford Worth—Calumet 876—it’s 876 something—I know it perfectly well. I—it’s in my book—come with me.”

  She seemed mechanically vitalized, and her movements were those of a nervous, jerky toy. She flung open a door adjacent to the cupboard. It led into a bathroom, the fittings of which were of coral-colored porcelain. A door in the opposite wall led into her bedroom. She went immediately to a leather reference book beside a telephone near her bed.

  “It’s Calumet 8769,” she said.

  Her finger slipped in the dialing. Lieutenant Valcour gently took the instrument from her hands and put through the call.

  “The office of Dr. Worth?” he said, when a woman’s voice answered him. “This is the home of Mr. Herbert Endicott. I am Lieutenant Valcour of the police department. Mr. Endicott is dead. I would appreciate it if Dr. Worth would come here at once and consult with the medical examiner, and also attend to Mrs. Endicott. Thank you.” He replaced the receiver.

  “I haven’t the slightest intention of collapsing, Lieutenant.”

  “We will need Dr. Worth anyway, Mrs. Endicott.”

  Lieutenant Valcour dialed the Central Office and, in a suddenly most efficient voice, gave the requisite information. He then called his own precinct station and told the sergeant at the desk to send over a detail of five men in uniform.

  “The chief of the Homicide Bureau, the medical examiner, and some of my own men will be here presently,” he said to Mrs. Endicott.

  “And my husband has to stay in that cupboard until they come?”

  “Unless Dr. Worth arrives first and disagrees with me that Mr. Endicott is dead.”

  “It’s inhuman.”

  “Very, but there’s a set routine for these cases that we have to observe. Is this the button you ring for your maid?”

  He pressed a push button set in the wall at the head of the bed.

  “Yes, but I don’t want her.”

  “You may, and there’s no harm in her being with you. I’m going to leave you in here for a little while, until the people we’ve telephoned for come.”

  “You insist on my staying in this room?”

  “Heavens, no. Do anything you like, Mrs. Endicott, or that you feel will help you. As long,” he added gently, “as you don’t leave the house.”

  “Oh.”

  “You see we’ll have to talk such a lot of things over, just as soon as the usual formalities are finished.”

  “It’s rather terrible, isn’t it?”

  “Pretty terrible, Mrs. Endicott.”

  “So”—she mentally groped for a satisfactory word—“so conclusive.”

  It seemed a peculiar choice. Lieutenant Valcour sensed that it wasn’t just Endicott’s life alone which was concluded by death, but something else as well—such as an argument, perhaps, or a secret and bitter struggle. The precise significance was elusive, and he gave it up, or rather checked it within his memory in that compartment which already contained six barely smoked cigarette butts, a broken finger nail, bruise marks, and a note which, in view of the body, might safely be presumed to have been a threat.

  A maid knocked on the door and came in. She stared speculatively for a curious second at Lieutenant Valcour.

  “Madam rang?”

  “No, Roberts. Lieutenant Valcour rang. Lieutenant Valcour is of the police.”

  Any sudden announcing of the police is always shocking. It is a prelude to so many unpleasant possibilities even in the lives of the most blameless. They are in a class with telegrams. Lieutenant Valcour noted that Roberts accepted his identity with nothing further than an almost imperceptible catching of breath. Mrs. Endicott’s attitude puzzled him. It wasn’t resentment, certainly, or any stretching at rudeness; such emotions seemed so utterly inconsequential at this moment when she must have been wrenched by a very severe shock. It reminded him of the aimless play of lightning clowning before the purposeful fury of a storm.

  “Mrs. Endicott will explain things to you,” he said. “Stay with her, please.”

  There lingered, as he went into the bathroom, a picture of the two women, separated by the distance of the room, standing quite still and staring at each other: Mrs. Endicott, young, exquisitely lovely looking—the other, older, quite implacable. The connection was absurd, but the effect remained of two antagonists in a strange encounter who are standing in their separate corners of a ring. He closed the bathroom door and slipped the catch. He turned on all the lights.

  There was a single window. He parted muslin curtains and looked at a glazed lemon-colored shade, especially along its hemmed bottom. There were some smudges at its centre that interested him. He believed that they had been made by a dirty thumb. He raised the shade and the lower sash of the window.

  The night was clear and cold and windless. A shallow stone balcony ran the width of the rear of the house. It was for ornamentation rather than use, as to get onto it one had to straddle the window sill. Lieutenant Valcour did so, and stood looking down upon the dimly defined outlines of what, in spring, would bloom into a formal garden. He satisfied himself that there seemed no access to the balcony from the ground unless one used a ladder or were endowed with those special and fortunately rare qualities which transform an otherwise normal person into a human fly.

  The house was five windows wide; the two on the right of the bathroom belonged to Mrs. Endicott’s room, and the two on its left to her husband’s. He flashed on his electric torch and examined all five sills. None showed a trace of recent passage, and there was no very good reason, he realized, why any of them should. They were clean, windswept, and smooth.

  How pleasant it would be, he reflected, to come across the perfect imprint of a shoe, or a rubber, or—what was it that was so popular at the moment?—of course: the footprint of a gorilla. The case would then be what was technically known as an open-and-shut one. He’d simply take the train for California and arrest Lon Chaney, and—But enough.

  And the floor itself on the balcony was smugly lacking in clues. He relinquished the keen sharp air, the star-heavy night, and returned to the bathroom by way of its window, which he closed, and again drew down its lemon-colored shade.

  A cake of soap in a container set in the wall above a basin attracted his attention. It was so incredibly dirty. Someone with exceptionally dirty hands had used it and either hadn’t bothered to rinse it off or else hadn’t had the time to. The dirt had dried on it.

  He couldn’t vision such a condition of uncleanliness in connection with the hands of either Mr. or Mrs. Endicott, unless there had been some obscure reason. He preferred to think for the moment that the hands had belonged, and presumably still did, to the murderer. That, of course, eliminated the gorilla. What a pity it was, he reflected, that he was so constantly obsessed with infernal absurdities. Even though he tried to keep them under triple lock and key when working with his associates
on the force, they had a distressing habit at times of cropping out into the open where they could be seen. Nor were they of a humour especially in vogue among his contemporaries; there rarely was an and-the-drummer-said-to-Mabel or an-Irishman-and-a-Jew among them. Rarely? He shuddered. Never. As a result there were occasions when he rested under the cloud of being considered mildly lunatic. It was bad business. He had told himself so firmly again and again. Success and humour formed bedfellows as agreeable as an absent-minded dog would be en negligee in the boudoir of a surprised cat.

  With a beautiful access of gravity he lifted the lid of an enameled wicker hamper and peered in at the soiled linen it contained. There were many towels. Towels were, he reflected, one of the few genuine hall marks of the rich. The Endicott’s, hence, must be very, very rich, as it was obvious that they shed—or was it shredded?—towels as profusely as the petals fall from a white flowering tree.

  There was a badly soiled and crumpled towel on the very top of the pile. He picked it up and looked at it. It was very dirty and still faintly damp. He folded it, set it on the floor beneath the basin, and placed the cake of soap upon it. They were, he smiled faintly, Exhibits B and C. The distinction of being classified as Exhibit A was already reserved by the threatening note on the desk. As for the smudges on the lemon-colored shade, they would have to be definitely determined as finger prints before they could have their niche in the alphabet. The prosecuting attorney would be pleased. He was a man whose flair for alphabeted exhibits amounted to a passion. Lieutenant Valcour hoped that he could find a crushed rose. The prosecuting attorney was at his best with crushed roses. For example, take that knifing case in the Ghetto. Three petals were all the prosecuting attorney had had there, but they had bloomed, via the jury, into tears. Into tears, Lieutenant Valcour amended, and tripe.

  A pair of silver-backed brushes showed no finger marks upon their shining surfaces, nor were there any on the silver rim that backed a comb. One could infer, Lieutenant Valcour decided, and did, that someone later than Mr. Endicott had used them, as Mr. Endicott would never have wiped them off to remove his prints, and had he not done so there certainly would have been some signs of usage. What a careful murderer it was, he thought, to polish the evidence so very clean. And what a grip the subject of finger prints maintained upon the criminal mind, and upon the lay mind as well. It seemed to embrace their Alpha and Omega in the scientific detection of crime. Lieutenant Valcour offered to bet himself his last nickel that the murderer had overlooked entirely the possibility of what might be found left within the bristles of the brushes and between the teeth of the comb. He took a clean hand towel from the rack and wrapped the brushes and the comb up in it. He set the bundle on the floor beside the cake of soap and the dirty towel. The alphabet, he reflected, had now been depleted down to F.

  The bathroom could tell him nothing more. He reconstructed its segment of the drama before leaving it: the murderer had entered, gone at once to the window and pulled down its shade. There had been a washing of hands and a brushing and combing of hair. The murderer had wiped the silver clear of finger prints and had left. The whys and wherefores must come later. The shell would remain unchanged until the moment came to pour it full of motive and give it reason and life.

  He went into Endicott’s room and opened the cupboard door. The beam from his electric torch, added to the ceiling light, brought out sharply the waxy pallor of the face’s skin. Its good-looking, homely ruggedness was marred by a slight cast of petulance, as inappropriate as a pink bow on a lion. Cruelty showed, too, a little—and something inscrutable that baffled analysis. Endicott weighed, Lieutenant Valcour decided, close upon two hundred pounds and no fat, either; a strong, powerfully muscled man, and about thirty-five years old. He played the light upon Endicott’s right hand and exposed the wrist a little by drawing up the sleeve. The wrist and hand were normally clean, as he had expected.

  He gently inserted his fingers into such of Endicott’s pockets as he could reach without disturbing the body. From the rumpled state of their linings and their complete emptiness it was apparent that they had been hastily turned inside out and replaced.

  Lieutenant Valcour began to sniff at a motive. Not robbery, exactly, in the ordinary sense, as an expensive platinum wrist watch and a set of black pearl shirt studs were untouched, but robbery in the extraordinary sense—one that had been indulged in for a certain definite purpose. He strongly began to suspect that there would be the ubiquitous “fatal papers.” It might also develop that Endicott was the secretive owner of some fabulous jewel of a sort usually referred to as a Heart of Buddha, or perhaps some important slice of the Russian crown jewels—the number of which now almost equaled, he reflected, the thousands upon thousands of ancestors who came over to our shores on the Mayflower.

  The top button was missing from Endicott’s overcoat. It would have been torn away when the murderer had lifted his victim from the floor in order to drag him into the cupboard. Otherwise there wasn’t anything that hinted at a struggle. There wasn’t any blood, or any wound, or sign of contusion visible on the head, and no trace of blood around such parts of the cupboard that Lieutenant Valcour could see.

  He suddenly wondered where Endicott’s hat was. It wasn’t on Endicott’s head, nor in the cupboard, nor in the bedroom, which struck him as strange. He was a strong believer in the paraphrase that where the coat is, there the hat lies, too. One could look for it more carefully later. Just at present, of greater importance was Exhibit A.

  Lieutenant Valcour went to the desk, picked up the note and studied it. The pencil used had been a thick leaded one, almost a crayon. And there, right before his nose in a shallow tray that held an assortment of office things, was a pencil with a very thick lead that was almost a crayon. He copied the note with it on the back of an envelope he took from his pocket. He compared the result with the printing on the note. They were alike.

  One begins, he informed himself gently, to wonder.

  CHAPTER III

  9:45 P.M.—Guards Are Stationed at the Doors

  There are knocks, Lieutenant Valcour believed, and knocks. He ranged them from gentle careless rappings, through sly sinister taps, to imperative demands and, finally, thumps. He classified the ones at the moment being bestowed upon the hall door as official whacks. He was right. He put the scrap of paper and the crayon pencil in his pocket and turned to greet five men from the station house who flooded into the room on the heels of his “Come in.”

  They were intelligent-looking young men, well built, alert, and their uniforms were immaculate—five competent blue jays outlined sharply against gray walls. Lieutenant Valcour knew each one of them both by reputation and by name.

  He nodded to the starchiest and youngest looking of them. “Cassidy,” he said, “stay in here. O’Brian, stay by the front door, and keep Hansen with you to carry messages. There’s a servants’ entrance at the front, McGinnis. It’s yours. And you, Stump, watch the door from the back of the house into the garden. If anyone wants to leave the house send him to me first. You can let anyone in, with the exception of reporters, and find out their business. Now in regard to the reporters just be your natural genial selves and say that apart from the plain statement that Mr. Herbert Endicott, the owner of this house, is dead and that—” Lieutenant Valcour choked slightly—“foul play is suspected, you can tell them nothing. The police, as usual, are actively on the job, have the case well in hand, and there is every reason to believe that in view of our customary efficiency the guilty parties will soon be brilliantly apprehended etcetera and so forth Amen. Excuse-it-please.”

  “Cuckoo,” confided O’Brian to Hansen as, with Stump and McGinnis, they filed out.

  “Cuckoo as a fox,” agreed Hansen, who had worked under Lieutenant Valcour on a case before. “Yeh?”

  “Yeah.”

  Lieutenant Valcour and young Cassidy were alone. “Tell me, Cassidy, how are the servants taking all this, if you bumped into any of them?”

  “
Sure, I only saw the girl at the front door, Lieutenant. She’s a sorry piece, and was shivering worse than one of them new and indecent dances.”

  “Did she say anything?”

  “She did not, beyond telling us to follow her upstairs. She took us to that door across the hallway first, and some lady said you was in here.”

  “How did that lady’s voice sound to you, Cassidy?”

  “Smooth, sir.”

  “Not nervous?”

  “Devil a bit.”

  “What are you looking for, Cassidy?”

  “The corpse, sir.”

  “It’s in that cupboard.”

  “Is it now?” said Cassidy, casually removing himself as far from the cupboard door as he could. “It ain’t one of them Western hammer murders, is it?”

  “I don’t know what kind of a homicide it is, Cassidy. There are no marks on him that I can see.”

  “Will it be poison, then?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Well, let’s hope it’s one or the other. I hate them mystery cases where the deceased got his go-by from a Chinese blow gun, or some imported snake from Timbuktu, or parts adjacent.”

  “When did you ever work on such a case, Cassidy?”

  “Sure, Lieutenant, you can read about them every week in the magazines. There’s one that’s in its fourth part now where some louse of foreign extraction kills a dumb cluck of a Wall Street magnet with a package of paper matches, the tips of which was so fixed that they exploded when struck, instead of acting decent like, and shot dabs of poison into the skin of his fingers. Can you imagine it? Just say the word and I’ll bring it around to the station house and you can read it for yourself.”

  “Thanks, Cassidy.”

  “It’ll be no trouble at all, Lieutenant.”

  An important knock on the door disclosed a stranger. Lieutenant Valcour addressed him, correctly, as Dr. Worth.

  Dr. Sanforth Worth did not merely imagine that he cut a distinguished figure; he was sure of it. A certain grayness clung impressively about the temples of an intellectual brow, and he was probably one of the few physicians left in New York who had both the audacity and ability to wear a Vandyke. He was dressed in evening clothes and had not bothered to remove his overcoat or to give up his hat.