by Rufus King
“You mean on the balcony?”
“Yes.”
“No.”
“That is all, Mrs. Endicott.”
“You don’t believe me.”
“Frankly, I don’t.”
Mrs. Endicott’s expression hardened perceptibly. Whether from bitterness or from some sudden private determination it was difficult to say.
“Does being detained as a material witness prohibit me from getting out of bed and dressing?” she said.
“Not at all. In fact, it is essential that you do so. You see, we detain our material witnesses in jail.”
He heard again, as he had heard it earlier in the night, the muted echo of brass bells in her voice. “If you will leave me then, please?”
“Just as soon as I have searched the room.”
“For what?”
“For a revolver, Mrs. Endicott.”
Mrs. Endicott closed her eyes. She turned on her side and faced the wall. Lieutenant Valcour conducted his search with the thoroughness and speed born of experience. In the room, in the room’s cupboard, in the various drawers, beneath the different pieces of furniture, there was no gun. He took a dressing gown and placed it on the bed.
“Put this on, please, Mrs. Endicott, I want to search the bed.”
She did so, without either comment or objection. She went to the window and stared unseeingly at the breaking day.
Lieutenant Valcour removed the spread, and with a pencil roughly outlined the damp spot where the narcotic had been spilled. Then he folded the spread and tucked it under one arm. The rest of the bedclothes, the mattress, the pillows, concealed no gun. He walked to the door.
“I will send your maid to you, Mrs. Endicott, if you wish.”
She continued to stare through the window and to present her back to him. She said nothing. He tried to catch the suggestion in her pose. It wasn’t a gesture of petty rudeness or angry spite; nor was it by any means suggestive of despair or fear. He went outside and closed the door.
And as he crossed the corridor to Endicott’s room it occurred to him with shocking clearness that, in spite of the idea’s seeming absurdity, her pose had suggested a very definite mood of positive exaltation.
CHAPTER XXIV
4:41 A.M.—As the Colors of Dawn
“Well,” Lieutenant Valcour said, as he joined Dr. Worth in Endicott’s room, “what do you think now?”
Dr. Worth was finished with bewilderments. In spite of the camel’s-hair robe swathing him, he had recaptured to an impressive extent his air of dignity.
“Lieutenant,” he said, “I think that my services are no longer required in this house. With your permission, I shall dismiss the two nurses and go home.”
“Why, certainly, Doctor, if you wish. The prosecuting attorney will probably require your testimony to secure an indictment and will want you later on at the trial, but I’m sure he will bother you just as little as possible. We realize how annoying any court work is to a doctor.”
“I shall be glad to testify whenever required.”
“Will you also let me know where to keep in touch with the two nurses? Their testimony will be needed, too.”
Dr. Worth stated the name and address of the Nurses’ Home at which Miss Vickers and Miss Murrow could always be reached, and Lieutenant Valcour wrote them down in his notebook.
“Would it bother you very much, Lieutenant, to let Mrs. Endicott know that I have gone, when you see her?”
“Not at all, Doctor.”
“I doubt whether she will require my services again.” He paused for a moment at the doorway. “That woman, sir, is of iron.”
“I shouldn’t wonder, Doctor. At any rate, she is pretty thoroughly encased in metal. I’ll send Cassidy along with you to pass you and the nurses by O’Brian down at the door. No one can leave the house, you see, without permission.”
“Thank you, Lieutenant. Good-bye.”
“Good-bye, Doctor, and thanks for all your assistance. Cassidy, come back after you’ve seen the doctor out, and stay in the corridor. I’ll call when I need you.”
“Yes, sir.”
The door closed, and Lieutenant Valcour was alone. With a persistence that was becoming annoying, the same curious feeling of lurking danger crept out at him from the room’s stillnesses. His nerves were usually as steady as the quality reputed to be enjoyed by a rock, and the strange little jumpings they were going in for were getting that fabulous animal known as his goat.
He went over to the chair before the flat-topped desk and sat down. There was that drawer filled with disordered papers to be gone through. He removed the drawer and emptied it of its contents by the simple expedient of turning it upside down onto the top of the desk.
There were, mixed up among bills and receipts, a surprising number of letters from women. He read each one of them carefully and felt a little sorrier, at the conclusion of each, for the future of the race—not so much because of any danger to its morals as to its mentality.
He made a little group of each batch of notes from the same woman. One pile topped the list with the number of ten. These were signed “Bebe” and were addressed with deplorable monotony to “My cave man.” Endicott must have been rather an ass, he decided, as well as a pretty low sort of an animal. It was all very well for Roberts to rave on about soldiers, and simple hearts, and war, and things. That’s just what it amounted to: raving. What if Endicott and, presumably, her brother had had simple hearts. So had guinea pigs.
Lieutenant Valcour wondered whether everyone else connected with the case was quite sane and he just a little mad. Roberts—Mrs. Endicott—the housekeeper—Hollander—Madame Velasquez. They all seemed a little touched, and that was a sign of madness when one considered everyone else but one’s self insane. But no one was ever truly normal under disagreeable and terrifying circumstances; at least, he had never found anyone who was so.
The letters were meaningless as possible clues to a motive; just a sticky conglomeration of lust, greed, dullness, and execrable taste. He shoved them aside.
He watched the strengthening light of day as it came through the window across the desk before him. Such sky as he saw was of rubbed emerald, and the backs of the houses across the intervening gardens were mauve and dark gray, with lines of lemon yellow running thinly along their roofs.
He thought of Boheme—dawn always made him think of Boheme—and hummed a bar or two of it softly. Then he thought of Mrs. Endicott, and his thoughts were pastelled in the colors of the dawn: a woman of half-tones and overlapping lacquer shades.
It became quite clear in his mind that she never would have killed her husband. Or Hollander. That, in fact, she never would have killed anybody at all. The belief became fixed, even in face of the sizeable amount of evidence against her.
He reviewed her case, in digest, as the prosecuting attorney might present it to a jury: from the very start there was that contrary fact of her having telephoned for the police. Why? On the slender ground of a penciled note that might or might not have been a threat, and an instinctive premonition that her husband was in danger. The prosecution would thereupon interpolate a smart crack or two on the general subject of premonitions, fortune tellings, and the Ace of Spades. They would point out that people who committed crimes which were bound to be shortly discovered occasionally got in touch with the police in order to use the gesture as a premise of their innocence.
There were her definite admissions of intent to kill her husband—her having left her bedroom immediately upon his having knocked and said goodbye—and her recent most damaging actions in regard to the narcotic and having been on the balcony.
Motive?
The prosecuting attorney could offer a thousand. The most prominent ones would include a jealous rage at her husband’s easily proved peccadilloes with other women and her own rather significant attitude toward Hollander. Yes, it would be only too possible for the prosecuting attorney to get a conviction against Mrs. Endicott, and to rope Hollander
in as an accomplice. He’d want the weapon, though, to make the case complete. Lieutenant Valcour had forgotten about the weapon. He stood up, went to the door, and opened it. Hansen was standing outside, having taken his post there until Cassidy should come back from letting out Dr. Worth and the nurses.
“Hansen,” Lieutenant Valcour said, “I want you to search the backyard for a revolver that may have been thrown there from the balcony. If you can’t find it, search the two adjoining backyards, and the three in the rear as well. Don’t wake up the people in the other houses, just get a stepladder and cross the party walls.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Report to me as soon as you’ve finished, or find anything.”
“Yes, sir.”
Lieutenant Valcour closed the door again. The revolver would clinch the case: Mrs. Endicott the principal, and Hollander the accomplice. What a sweet bunch of muck it would be, too. There were all sorts of sob angles: Hollander and Endicott as Damon and Pythias, brothers in arms during the war who were transformed through the vicious caprice of a siren into Cain and Abel. Or would Mrs. Endicott spatter the tabloids as a woman wronged who had by a reversal of the usual position of the sexes taken her just revenge beneath the legendary cloak of the unwritten law? If her lawyers were smart, she would. And they would be smart, too. She’d probably have the most impressive battery of legal guns that were procurable in the state lined up on her side.
It wasn’t the gun only that Lieutenant Valcour wanted. There was something else. Endicott’s hat: that was it. How did the person who had been caught in the cupboard fit in with Endicott’s hat? The answer came to him with the sudden clearness that will enlighten a problem that the subconscious mind has been working on for some time. The hat was the final touch to the person’s disguise. And the fact would pre-suppose a woman. A man’s hat would add immeasurably to any disguise adopted by a woman.
But which woman?
And why had his hat been in the cupboard?
And still there was no answer to the baffling question as to what had been the object of the search through Endicott’s pockets and his papers. There was, of course, a perfectly plain and logically possible solution: the object or paper, whatever it was, had been found and had been carried off by the thief along with Endicott’s hat and the top button from his overcoat. And if such were the case, just what that object or paper was might never be known.
For the fourth time since he had been sitting at the desk Lieutenant Valcour sniffed the air. There was a faint trace of scent—a curiously reminiscent odor—all but intangible, but which he was quite certain he had encountered in some different locality at some time during the night. It was only apparent when he sat at the desk, and the deduction was reached without too much mental labor that it must, hence, emanate from something connected with the desk. Perhaps that aperture from which he had pulled the drawer—
The telephone rang sharply. He drew the instrument to him across the top of the desk, and took the receiver from the hook.
The call came, he was informed, from Central Office.
CHAPTER XXV
5:01 A.M.—Lunatic Vistas
The report from Central Office which Lieutenant Valcour received over the telephone contained one definitely useful piece of information: the person who had used the comb and brushes belonging to Endicott had been a blonde and was either a man or a woman with bobbed hair.
And Mrs. Endicott, Lieutenant Valcour reflected as he hung up the receiver, had blonde shingled hair. And so, except for the shingling, did Hollander. Roberts, on the other hand, had not.
And where, he wanted to know, was his inspiring confidence in the innocence of Mrs. Endicott now? Precisely where it had been before. His mind began to gibber. What was that curious scent, that trace of an aroma? What about Hollander’s roommate: the young Southerner who preyed upon wealthy women in night clubs? Had Endicott evidence that Hollander was mixed up in similar jobs, and had Hollander come to steal it, or silence Endicott? Rats!
And what were Marge Myles’s address and telephone number doing in Mrs. Endicott’s personal directory? And why had Mrs. Endicott been such a stupid liar as to say she had seen no one on the balcony at the time when the shots were fired, when the only apparent place from which the shot that had killed Endicott could have been fired was the balcony?…A knock-knock.
“Come in,” he said.
Cassidy opened the door.
“There’s an old dame downstairs, Lieutenant, who insisted on coming in. She wants to see you.”
“Did she say who she was, Cassidy?”
“She did. And you can believe it or not, sir, but her name is Molasses.”
Lieutenant Valcour made a desperate clutch at his scattering reason.
“By all means, Cassidy,” he said, “show Mrs. Molasses right up.”
Madame Velasquez, in the penetrating light of early morning, was beyond words. The intervening hours since Lieutenant Valcour had left her, wigless and talking to herself in her stepdaughter’s apartment, had unquestionably been ones of worry. As she came into the room Lieutenant Valcour motioned to Cassidy to wait outside and close the corridor door.
Over her black sequined dress she had thrown an evening cape of blue satin edged with marabou, and on her wig rested a picture hat trimmed with plumes. Her eyes ignored the details of Endicott’s room, of Endicott’s body stretched beneath the sheet; ignored everything but Lieutenant Valcour, the man whom she had come to see.
“Marge is dead,” she said.
Her voice still retained the curious qualities that made it suggest a scream.
Lieutenant Valcour wearily closed his eyes. One other murder would truly prove to be the straw with himself in the role of the already overladen camel.
“Sit down, Madame Velasquez,” he said, “and tell me how it happened.”
Madame Velasquez spread billows of blue satin and marabou into an armchair.
“I don’t know how it happened,” she said.
“Did you find her body in the apartment?”
“There ain’t no body.” Madame Velasquez then added, as her brittle little eyes glittered with a strange sort of conviction, “He made away with it.”
“Who did, Madame Velasquez?”
“Herbert Endicott,” she said.
For a startled moment Lieutenant Valcour stared sharply down curious vistas: had Endicott killed Marge Myles, perhaps having called for her just after she had written that note to her mother? He brought himself up shortly. Utter nonsense! Endicott was in this very room at the time when Marge Myles must have been writing that note and was himself in the process of being killed.
“That isn’t possible, Madame Velasquez,” he said quietly. “Endicott was himself attacked right here at about the time your stepdaughter must have been writing that note to you. That was at seven last evening—at the very moment he was to call for her at her apartment—and it must have been a little after seven when she wrote, as she states in the note that he hadn’t come.”
“No matter”—her be-ringed fingers fluttered extravagantly—“I feel certain he did it, and I want him punished and caught.”
“But Mr. Endicott is dead, Madame Velasquez.”
“That’s what you say,” she said.
Was he really, Lieutenant Valcour wondered, going mad? There seemed such terribly disturbing possibilities of fact in every absurd aspect on the case the woman facing him opened up. Who, after all, had identified Endicott? His wife, and that only by implication; his friend Hollander, again by implication; Roberts had seen the dead man’s face, but she, in common with all the world, was mad; Dr. Worth—what proof was there that Dr. Worth was Dr. Worth, or that the telephone number given him by Mrs. Endicott had been Dr. Worth’s? It could all have been arranged by some clever mob…
“This is folly,” he said abruptly, really more to convince himself than the nutlike face peering at him from the armchair. What he needed was sleep—just a couple of hours of good sleep. “Madame Velasque
z, that body on the bed is Herbert Endicott. Now tell me as lucidly as you can, please, just why you say that Marge is dead.”
Her little eyes began to glitter with rage. “I believe she has killed herself to spite me.” The knotted paste jewels on her thin fingers quivered indignantly. “She did it to make me suffer,” she added, “to stint me.”
“Just so she wouldn’t have to give you any more money,” he suggested.
Madame Velasquez began to weep noisily. “What’ll I do, Lieutenant—oh, what will I do?”
He continued to regard her through lazy eyes. “Can’t you find somebody else to take her place?” he said. “Somebody else to blackmail?”
“I ain’t young. It’s too late.”
“Tut, tut, Madame Velasquez.”
“No, I ain’t. And unless it’s a case like Marge’s was, such rackets take looks.”
“But surely such an intelligent and charming woman as you, Madame Velasquez”—he unearthed a trowel and laid it on pretty thick—“a woman of the world, surely you can think up other cases where the evidence or proof can be faked. You know very well that you never had any real or visible proof that Marge killed her husband in that canoe disaster, now, don’t you?”
“I did, too, Lieutenant.”
“Nonsense. If you really did, you’d have it with you and would show it to me.”
She nibbled the bait slyly and refused it.
“I wouldn’t, and I haven’t. And,” she said, “I want proof of that trollop’s death. I’ll get it if I have to drag the river myself.”
Madame Velasquez jumped up and ran nervously to the door.
“Then you saw her drown herself, Madame Velasquez?”
“I saw nothing, but I know—I know—what must have been…”
She was out in the corridor and running for the stairs—a velvet virago in blue. Lieutenant Valcour ran out after her, and saw that Cassidy was blocking her way.
“Ring up the wagon, Cassidy, and have her booked as a material witness.”
Madame Velasquez began to screech. “Don’t touch me. Keep your dirty hands off me.”
