by Rufus King
“Dr. Worth? I am Lieutenant Valcour, of the police. Mr. Endicott is in here.”
Dr. Worth bowed gravely, and with a sparklingly manicured hand stroked his Vandyke once. “I have been afraid of something like this for quite a while, Lieutenant,” he said. His voice, in company with everything else about him, sounded expensive.
Lieutenant Valcour raised his eyebrows. “It begins to seem, Doctor, as if everybody except Mr. Endicott himself anticipated his murder.”
“Murder?”
It was Dr. Worth’s eyebrows’ turn. They raised. They fell. They became, in conjunction with pursed lips, judicious. He removed his overcoat and placed it, with his hat, upon a chair.
“I believe you will find, Lieutenant, that it is just his heart. His—Dear God in heaven, man, what have you left him slumped down like this for?”
“You mustn’t touch him, Doctor, unless you think he isn’t dead.”
Dr. Worth stiffened perceptibly. “Fancy that,” he said. “Well, one would infer that he is dead, all right. Just the same, Lieutenant, is there any legal objection to opening his coat and shirt bosom? I dare say I could slit them, if you preferred. You see, it might be advisable to test for any trace of heart action with the stethoscope.”
“I had no intention of offending you, Doctor. Go right ahead and do anything you think is absolutely essential to establish life or death.”
Dr. Worth melted conservatively. “You see, sir, I know his heart. He had a nervous breakdown two years ago which left its action impaired.” He loosened Endicott’s overcoat and the black pearl studs set in a semi-soft shirt bosom. He listened for a moment, and then removed the stethoscope. “No trace,” he said. “He’s dead. Shall I button up the shirt front and the coat again?”
“It isn’t necessary, Doctor.”
The hall door opened abruptly. The homicide chief and the medical examiner came in, followed by a squad of detectives. Lieutenant Valcour was well acquainted with both officials. He introduced them to Dr. Worth and placed at their disposal such information as he had gained while waiting for them to arrive.
The department’s experts automatically began to function at once. A photographer was already arranging his apparatus to make pictures of the body from as many angles as its position in the cupboard would permit. A finger-print man went about his duties along the lines laid down by established routine. The medical examiner and Dr. Worth gravitated naturally together and plunged into a discussion of Endicott’s medical history.
The homicide chief, a well-built, alert-looking man of fifty, by the name of Andrews, drew Lieutenant Valcour a little to one side.
“What do you really make of it, Valcour?” he said.
“Oh, it’s undoubtedly murder, Chief, but I doubt whether there’ll even be an indictment unless we get a lucky break, establish a definite motive, and get a confession.”
“I feel that way about it, too. Any signs of an entry having been forced?”
“I haven’t looked. I’ve been in here all the time, and my men just came.”
“Well, Stevens and Larraby are making the rounds now. They’ll let us know. If the autopsy doesn’t show poison or some wound it’ll be a nuisance. If it’s a straight heart attack, as Dr. Worth claims, we might just as well drop it. Can you imagine getting up before a jury that’s been shown a picture by the defense of a big husky like Endicott and saying, ‘This man was scared to his death?’ Suppose a woman was the defendant. They’d laugh the case out of court.”
“Maybe it won’t be as bad as all that, Chief. While you’re busy in here I’ll wander around and try to scare up something. Would you mind sending for me when the medical examiner reaches some decision as to the manner of death?”
“Sure thing, Valcour. I’ll see to it, too, that those brushes and comb are looked into.”
“I’ll probably be in Mrs. Endicott’s room. That’s the door just across the corridor.”
Andrews was aware of Lieutenant Valcour’s reputation in the department for the painless extraction of useful information from people. “Go to it,” he said. “And squeeze every drop that you can.”
CHAPTER IV
10:02 P.M.—Pale Flares the Darkness
Lieutenant Valcour wondered concerning Mrs. Endicott as he walked slowly across the corridor and knocked on the door of her room. A curious, curious woman, with youth and beauty that almost passed belief. He knew her instinctively as one of life’s misfits: complex to a note far beyond the common tune; essentially an individualist; essentially unhappy from an inevitable loneliness which is the lot of all who are banished within the narrow confines of their own complexity; a type he had seldom met, but of whose existence he was well aware.
Roberts opened the door. The woman’s face was butchered and her eyes had the quality of glass.
“Ask Mrs. Endicott, please, whether she feels strong enough to see me for a moment.”
Mrs. Endicott’s voice was definitely metallic. As it reached him in the corridor, disembodied from any visual association with herself, it seemed to hold a muted echo of brass bells.
“Certainly, come in. I wish, Lieutenant, you would give up the tiresome fiction that I am going to collapse. I’ll ring, Roberts, when I want you.”
“Yes, madam.”
As Roberts passed him on her way to the door Lieutenant Valcour felt an imperative awareness of an attempt at revelations—an attempt to impart to him some special knowledge. Her eyes, as she glanced at him, lost their cobwebs and grew sharply informative. It was entirely an unconscious reaction on his part that forced from his lips the word “Later.” The cobwebs reappeared. She left the room.
Lieutenant Valcour drew a chair close to the chaise longue upon which Mrs. Endicott was nervously lying. Flung across her knees was a robe of China silk, a black river bearing on its surface huge flowers done in silver and slashed at its fringes with the jade chiffon of her dress. He launched his campaign by first swinging, wordily, well wide of its ultimate objective. His tone, from a deliberate casual friendliness, was an anodyne to possible reservations, or fears.
“It is the tragedy of a detective’s life,” he said pleasantly, “that the sudden slender contact he has with a case affords such a useless background for human behavior. You can see what I mean, Mrs. Endicott. Were I you, or some intimate friend either of yourself or of your husband, I would already be in possession of the countless little threads that have woven the pattern of Mr. Endicott’s life for the past five or ten years. You’ll forgive me for outraging oratory? It’s a nasty habit I’ve contracted in later years whenever dealing with the abstract. I’m not making a speech, really. What I’m trying to express is that in that background, that pattern of Mr. Endicott’s life, one thread or series of interrelated threads would stand out pretty plainly as the reason why someone should wish to kill him.”
“I,” said Mrs. Endicott, “have several times wished to kill him.”
Lieutenant Valcour nodded. “There is nothing left for me but the trite things to say about marriage. And trite things, after all, are the true things, don’t you think?”
“If they’re just discovered. I mean by that, that to the person just discovering their deadly aptness they’re true. Rather terribly so sometimes.”
“But the aptness wears off with usage?”
Mrs. Endicott’s slender hand and arm were models of quietness in motion as she reached for a cigarette. “Everything wears off with usage,” she said. “Love quicker than anything else.”
“But it doesn’t wear off completely, love doesn’t, ever.”
Mrs. Endicott looked at him sharply. “Why are you a detective?” she said.
“The accident of birth—of environment. Only geniuses, you know, ever quite escape those two fatalities. My parents emigrated from France to Canada, where my father held a certain reputation in my present profession. My parents died. There was enough money to secure an education at McGill—one had contacts here in the States…” Lieutenant Valcour smiled inf
ectiously. “I reversed Caesar in that I came, was seen, was conquered.”
Mrs. Endicott was amused. “How utterly conceited.”
“Isn’t it?”
The smile vanished from her face with the peculiar suddenness of some conjuring trick. She veered abruptly. “What are they doing in my husband’s room now?” she said.
“Dr. Worth and the medical examiner are determining the cause of death.” Lieutenant Valcour transferred his attention to a Sargent water color above the mantel. “Dr. Worth has already expressed the opinion that it was heart failure,” he said.
Mrs. Endicott offered no immediate comment.
She withdrew, for a moment, into some private chamber, and her voice was rather expressionless when she spoke. “But that isn’t murder.”
“It could be—if the disease itself were used as a weapon.”
“I don’t believe that I understand.”
“Why, if some person who knew that Mr. Endicott was subject to heart attacks were deliberately to shock or scare him suddenly, or even give him a not especially forceful blow over the heart, and he were to die as a result of any one of those things, that would be murder. It would have to be proved pretty conclusively, of course, that it had been done deliberately.”
Mrs. Endicott joined him in his continued inspection of the Sargent. “It would indicate a rather circumscribed field for suspects, too, don’t you think?”
“Yes. One would confine one’s suspicions to those who were intimate enough with him to know of his physical condition. But apart from all that phase, there are those things we technically speak of as ‘attendant circumstances.’ They point to murder.” Their glances brushed for a second in passing and then parted.
“Such as?”
Lieutenant Valcour explained, with certain reservations. “The note you showed me—the position of Mr. Endicott in the cupboard—the fact that he is completely dressed for out of doors, but there is no trace of his hat—oh, several little things that speak quite plainly.” He focused her directly. “Where did Mr. Endicott usually keep his hats?”
“I’ve never noticed particularly. There’s a cupboard downstairs in the entrance hall, and of course the one—”
“Yes, I’ve looked for it up here. I wonder whether you’d care to tell me what happened—what you did, I mean, and what you remember of Mr. Endicott’s movements from the time, say, of his reaching home this afternoon.”
Mrs. Endicott’s face sought refuge in the very pith of candor. “Why, nothing much—nothing unusual.”
Lieutenant Valcour laughed pleasantly. “That is where I fail in my background,” he said. “The things done were usual to both of you and therefore of no importance. To me, however, they would prove interesting because of their unfamiliarity. Did you talk at all?”
“Elaborately.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“I said elaborately. Herbert makes a point of talking elaborately whenever he’s lying.”
“I see—he was lying, then, about Marge Myles.”
“And unoriginally. But Herbert never was original, much, in his emotions. He told me he was going to an impromptu reunion of some men in his class at the Yale Club. These reunions have occurred with astonishing regularity once a week for the past month, in spite of their impromptu character. I detest having my intelligence insulted,” she ended, not unfiercely, “more than anything else in the world.”
“You will forgive me for becoming personal, but I doubt whether Mr. Endicott understood you very well.”
“He didn’t understand me at all.”
“And you, him?”
Mrs. Endicott momentarily disarranged the perfect arch of her eyebrows. “I could see through him perfectly,” she said. “A child could see through him. But understand him? I don’t think anyone could understand Herbert. He made a fetish of reticence. He was,” she concluded, “half animal.”
“And the other half rather cloudily complex?”
“A fog.”
“And when he came home this afternoon at five?”
“Five-thirty—nearer six, even.”
“Toward six, he joined you in the living room and gave you the weekly excuse.”
“I didn’t say the living room. It was the top floor—you may have noticed that this house has a peaked roof—in what would correspond in the country to an attic—” She stopped sharply, and her defensive veneer cracked for an instant, long enough to show that she was definitely startled. “I—”
“You feel that you shouldn’t have told me that. Perhaps you shouldn’t. If the fact of your having met Mr. Endicott in the attic has nothing to do with the case at all, it will cause us to snoop around among your personal affairs unnecessarily.”
“He didn’t ‘meet’ me there, as you say. He—I don’t know why he came up there. I never will know why.”
“You didn’t ask him?”
Mrs. Endicott forced Lieutenant Valcour’s full attention by the almost startling intentness of her eyes. “There has never been a direct question put or answered between Herbert and me during the whole period of our married or unmarried life,” she said. “My hold on him was the static perfection of my features and a running, superficial smartness in attitude and mind that passed for intellect. His hold on me was that I loved him.”
“Even when you wished to kill him?”
“I suppose even then. Mind you, I never wished him dead—there’s a difference.”
“Oh, quite.” Lieutenant Valcour smiled engagingly. “You often felt like killing him, but you wanted it to stop right there.”
“You know, I wish you’d come to tea sometime—” Mrs. Endicott’s eyes contracted sharply. Her voice became a definite apology, not to Lieutenant Valcour, but as though its message were being sent along obscure and private channels to some port where it would find her husband. “There are moments,” she said, “when you make me forget.”
“Forgetting isn’t a sin. That’s natural. It’s not loving—being mentally hurtful—that’s a sin. There isn’t any word exactly for what I mean. Did you both stay in the attic and go through the trunk together, or whatever it was you were going through?”
Mrs. Endicott smiled as if at some secret knowledge. “I wasn’t going through a trunk,” she said.
“No? I just mentioned it, as nine times out of ten that’s what people do in attics.”
“And the tenth customary thing,” said Mrs. Endicott, reaching for a cigarette, “is suicide.”
CHAPTER V
10:17 P.M.—Living or Dead?
Lieutenant Valcour’s eyes narrowed slightly. He had a habit of dividing suicides into two classes—those who talked about killing themselves, and those who did so. He knew that the two rarely overlapped. He felt a shocking conviction that in Mrs. Endicott’s case she might well have been the exception which proved the rule. “I suppose an attic is the conventional place for suicide,” he said. “Or at least to think about it.”
Mrs. Endicott’s laugh was without humour. “One doesn’t need an attic in order to think about it.”
“That’s true. And so you went downstairs with him, then?”
“He followed me in here. That is,” she corrected herself with noticeable carelessness, “we went into the living room and he wondered, while he kissed me, whether I’d mind very much being alone for dinner. I doubt whether you’ve ever experienced, Lieutenant, the rather perfect torture of a, well, an abstract kiss. Men don’t.”
“We’re too self-centered, I’m afraid, or conceited or something, or else our sensibilities aren’t refined enough to be hurt by it.”
“But you could understand—if you could vision the background?”
“Everybody knows what love is, Mrs. Endicott.”
“That’s just it—it’s the comparison of what is with what has been. It’s an indescribably vulgar subject—kissing—but it’s either very wonderful or very painful. People who claim it can be a combination talk nonsense. We can eliminate, of course—”
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br /> “Of course—‘petting’ they call it, or did. You never know from one minute to the next just what a thing is being called. And then he went to his room to dress?”
“Yes.”
“Alone?”
“Certainly.”
“Has he a valet?”
“Herbert? Heavens, no.”
“And you dressed?”
“Yes.”
“Roberts helped you?”
“Of course.”
“Then when Mr. Endicott said good-bye?”
“He called it through the closed door.”
Lieutenant Valcour almost visibly showed his surprise. “He did say good-bye?”
“Herbert insists upon saying good-bye. He rapped on the door and called in. If it would interest you to know his exact words,” she said bitterly, “they were in the falsetto voice he uses when he thinks he’s being especially funny and were, ‘Don’t be angry with Herbie-werbie, sweetheart. Goodie-byskie.’”
“They’re almost a motive in themselves,” said Lieutenant Valcour, smiling. “Which door did he rap on, Mrs. Endicott?”
“The hall door.”
“I see. And you heard him going down the stairs?”
“One can’t hear footsteps with the door closed.”
“And that was at—?”
“The clock over there on my mantel was striking seven.”
“And after that there is nothing further you can tell me about Mr. Endicott?”
“Nothing.”
“You dined. You went to his room. You found the note. You began to worry, and then you called us up.”
“That is it.”
“Was it in this room here or up in the attic, Mrs. Endicott, that you told him you were going to kill him?”
“Here, after he—That wasn’t exactly fair, was it?”
“Heavens no, but awfully smart.” Lieutenant Valcour’s smile was the essence of pleasantness. “I do wish you’d continue with the ‘after he.’ After he did what? Or was it something he said?”
