by Rufus King
“Take her downstairs, Cassidy. After you’ve arranged for the wagon leave her with O’Brian. Then go up to the housekeeper’s room and ask Mrs. Siddons if she’ll come down. I’ll see her in Endicott’s room.”
“Yes, sir.”
Lieutenant Valcour slowly retraced his steps. When he was again in Endicott’s room and the door shut, he felt a strong recurrence of that annoying sense of some hovering danger. He even shivered a little as if at some draught of cold air and glanced hastily at the windows.
But both were closed.
CHAPTER XXVI
5:25 A.M.—There Was a Sailor
Mrs. Siddons had not gone to bed at all. She remained the same amazing pencil done in flat planes of black that had left him standing with his ear pressed against the panels of her bedroom door.
Lieutenant Valcour was acutely interested in her attitude toward Endicott’s body. Her glance, the instant she entered the room, had flown to it surely and accurately. There was no sorrow, no horror or fear of the dead in that glance. It was wholly one of triumph, the satisfied gazing of some revenge that was removed from petty commonplaces. Mirrored in its satisfaction were avenging hell fires, tormenting presumably the black and wicked soul of what had been a very black and wicked Endicott. After that single initial glance she did not look toward the bed again, but came over and sat with extraordinary rigidity on the edge of a chair from where she could stare out of the window at the clear morning light of the winter’s day.
“Several hours ago, Mrs. Siddons,” Lieutenant Valcour said abruptly, “you spoke with considerable bitterness about Mr. Endicott’s attitude toward the servants. I shan’t embarrass you by asking for any information in detail. There are only one or two things that I want to know—Are you listening to me, please?”
She dragged her eyes from the daylight, from the white misty air from which she had been gathering in her thoughts the happy flowers of a seed long bedded in hate.
“I am listening,” she said.
“Then the first thing I want to know is this: was there any one particular instance in which Mr. Endicott’s actions toward one of the servants were especially brutal or resented?”
The coals began to glow faintly beneath the ash that dusted her eyes.
“There was one very particular instance, Lieutenant.”
“Recently, Mrs. Siddons?”
“It occurred about a year ago, almost to a day.”
“Did Mr. Endicott attack her?”
“Yes.”
“Here in the house?”
“No, Lieutenant. It happened on her afternoon and evening out. Mr. Endicott’s car was parked outside at the curb. He offered her a ride.”
“Where is this girl now, Mrs. Siddons?”
“She was committed last year to an institution for the insane.”
The ash was completely gone now, and her eyes blazed with avenging fires.
“But surely she brought charges, Mrs. Siddons?”
“She was insane when they found her, Lieutenant. She was trying to die by throwing herself in front of a motor in Central Park. She has never spoken lucidly since.”
Lieutenant Valcour shrugged hopelessly. There it was again: that wretched wave of hearsay showing its baffling crest above the placid sea of established fact. Rumor had had it that Marge Myles had killed her husband; rumor now would have it about all sorts of terrible implications concerning Endicott, who was dead, and a girl who was confined in an insane asylum. And neither, obviously, could give direct testimony in accusation or defense.
“What was Mr. Endicott’s story?” he said.
“That he had driven her to Macy’s, where she wanted to buy something, and had left her there.” And why not? Undoubtedly Endicott had been the blackest sort of a sheep, but the case was valueless without a thousand illuminative lights, without a whole medical history of the girl’s family, for example.
“Did you know this girl fairly well, Mrs. Siddons?”
“Yes. It is my habit to know all of the girls in my charge here very well. It is my duty, as I see it, to act not only as a housekeeper, but as their religious mentor and guide.”
“Then in the case of this girl, had she ever previously shown any symptoms of being mentally unbalanced?”
“There were times when I thought so, yes. Her family, you see, was not free from the taint. Her grandmother, on her mother’s side, had been insane. That is what made Mr. Endicott’s actions so peculiarly detestable, sir. She might have continued to live a normal, useful, happy life had he not shocked her so fatally.”
And on the other hand, Lieutenant Valcour decided, Endicott need not necessarily have done anything remotely of the sort. With such a direct strain of insanity inherent in her blood no outside agency whatever might have been needed to awaken it into activity. And then, he reminded himself, the girl had been shopping. He often wondered why more women didn’t go mad while shopping.
“Had Mr. Endicott any alibi for the period between the time he left her at Macy’s and came home?”
“No, Lieutenant. He said he had driven out a ways on Long Island along the Motor Parkway and then had come back.”
“So nothing was done about the matter officially?”
“There was nothing to do.”
“Then the only substantiated fact in the story is that she was seen getting into Mr. Endicott’s car in front of this house. I suppose someone did see her?”
“Yes.”
“Who?”
“Mrs. Endicott saw her, Lieutenant.”
There was distinct food for thought in that. No matter how far flung the tangents in the case appeared to be, they touched as a common circumference the enveloping influence of Mrs. Endicott.
“Is this girl still confined at the institution, Mrs. Siddons?”
“I don’t know. There has been nothing said—no communication.”
“What was the color of her hair, Mrs. Siddons?”
“Black—the deepest, prettiest black I ever saw. They say that opposites are attracted to one another, and it was so in her case.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“Her husband was a blond.”
Lieutenant Valcour caught his breath sharply. It fitted surprisingly well—the motive—the crime—the fact that the girl might have retained her key to the servants’ entrance and her husband have got hold of it. And her husband would readily enough have believed the talk about his wife and Endicott—husbands had a habit of doing just that. To the man’s way of thinking, it wouldn’t have been anything so ephemeral as a maternal grandmother who had driven his wife insane: it would have been Endicott.
Madame Velasquez’s innuendoes against the true identity of anybody came back to Lieutenant Valcour with annoying force. What about Hollander? Hollander was a blond, and obviously of a different level in education and position than the Endicott’s. And who had identified Hollander? Nobody. Endicott and his wife were the only two in the house who could, and Endicott was dead, and Mrs. Endicott had not seen Hollander at all, if her unbelievable statement were true: that she had not gone out onto the balcony and along it to the window from where the shot had been fired.
Suppose the man who had sat with Endicott had just been posing as Hollander but had been, in reality, the husband of this unfortunate girl. Suppose he had been waiting outside for an opportunity to reenter the house, had waylaid Hollander and forced his errand from him, had taken his driver’s license and cards from him and had shown them to O’Brian at the door to gain admittance…
No—there still arose that fundamental question: what had the attacker been searching for among Endicott’s papers? This girl’s husband surely would have nothing for which to search, unless it would be for problematic evidence of his wife’s infidelity, and that theory was pretty thin…
“What became of this girl’s husband, Mrs. Siddons?”
“He is a sailor on merchant vessels.” Her gesture vaguely encompassed the Seven Seas. “Where he is, or when, i
s as indeterminate as wind and tide.”
Lieutenant Valcour did not molest her extravagance. He refrained from pointing out that few things were determined quite so accurately, nowadays, as the tides or, for the matter of that, the winds themselves. He stood up.
“Thank you, Mrs. Siddons.”
“Shall I go?”
“If you will be so kind. Later, perhaps, we will go into greater details concerning this poor girl’s husband.”
Mrs. Siddons feasted her eyes for one parting, blinding instinct on the bed. She stopped at the door and said, “You will never get them from me, Lieutenant. And I am the only person who knows; who even knows that she was married at all. She confided in me, and if it was her husband who did this thing you will never drag his name from my lips even if my silence should mean—” Her eyes became clouded and her thoughts confused. She wanted to say something magnificent, something splendidly fitting to the occasion which she interpreted quite sincerely as a divine act on the part of God, with that poor, frail little Maizie’s husband as His instrument on earth. Even if her silence were to mean what? The words wouldn’t form. They rattled around in her tired head meaninglessly: bar of justice—herself in the dock—oh, it was cruel—life was cruel, and living was crueler still. Only death was kind, sleep and peace beneath the shelter of His sweet omnipotence. She stumbled a little as she crossed the threshold and made her way, sobbing futilely, back upstairs.
CHAPTER XXVII
5:46 A.M.—Mrs. Endicott Cannot Be Found
Lieutenant Valcour stepped across the corridor and rapped on the door of Mrs. Endicott’s room. There was no response. He rapped again, and still there was no response. He turned the knob and the door swung inward.
The room was empty.
He closed the door and called to Cassidy, who was at the other end of the corridor.
“Sir?” said Cassidy, when he had joined him.
“You’ve been out here all the while, haven’t you, Cassidy?”
“Except when I went upstairs to get the housekeeper, sir.”
“That’s right, you did. Come inside here for a minute with me. There are some questions I want to ask you.”
They went into Endicott’s room.
“Sure, it’s good to see the daylight again, Lieutenant. Will we be cleared up here soon?”
“I have a feeling that we’ll be finished pretty soon now. Tell me, Cassidy, was it you or Hansen fired first at Hollander?”
“Lieutenant, Hansen and I have been disputing that very point. We all but came to blows over it, we did.”
“Why so?”
“Because I claim it was him who fired the first shot, and he still has the audacity to say it was me who not only shot first, but shot two times before he so much as pulled the trigger.”
“That,” said Lieutenant Valcour, “is exactly what I wanted to know. You were both right and both wrong.”
“Now, how can that be, Lieutenant?”
“Neither of you fired the first shot, because it was fired by the murderer over there at the window. You heard it, and thought Hansen had fired. Hansen heard it, and then heard your following shot, and thought that you had fired twice.”
“That must have been it at that, Lieutenant.”
“It was. The second thing I wanted to ask you about is Mrs. Endicott. She isn’t in her room. Have you seen her about the corridor, or anywhere else?”
“No, sir.”
“Then go and look her up. Ask the men downstairs if they’ve seen her, and if they haven’t, look through the rooms on this floor and up above. When you do come across her, ask her if she will please come in here and see me.”
“Yes, Lieutenant.”
Cassidy went out and closed the door.
Lieutenant Valcour was beginning to feel very, very tired. He yawned elaborately, stared out of the window for a minute or two, and then sat down again at the desk. There was something that he had intended to do there when he had been interrupted by the arrival of Madame Velasquez.
What was it?
It wasn’t connected with that wretched premonition of danger which was nagging at him with increasing insistence. But it was something just as intangible…
Elusive as a shadow…
Yes, that was it—the thing that he had forgotten: he had intended to trace to its source that faint scent which was so curiously reminiscent of some place—some thing. It had come, he remembered, from the aperture from which he had taken the drawer. He shoved a hand inside and felt around. Wedged far in the back was a crumpled letter written on heavy notepaper. He pulled it out, and the scent became more penetrating.
It came back to him quite clearly now. It was the same perfume that had drenched the note left by Marge for Madame Velasquez up at the apartment. He took the letter from its envelope, smoothed it, and then turned to the signature. Yes, it was signed “Marge.”
A knock on the hall door interrupted him, and he placed the letter on the desk. Hansen came in.
“Yes, Hansen?”
“I have searched all the yards you told me to, sir.”
“Well?”
“There wasn’t any gun, Lieutenant, that I could see.”
“Did you look through all the shrubbery? There are some evergreens down there that I noticed.”
“Yes, sir, I looked through and beneath every one of them.”
“All right, Hansen.” Lieutenant Valcour studied the young man facing him for a curious moment. “You were at sea for a while, weren’t you?”
“Yes, sir. I was with the navy during the war, and after that on merchant ships for a year or two.”
“Would it be possible for a sailor to climb up onto the balcony outside this window from the garden?”
“I couldn’t say offhand, Lieutenant. I didn’t notice much about the balcony when I was down there.”
“Then go down again and see what you think. Let me know whether it would be an easy job, difficult, or impossible.”
“Yes, sir.”
Hansen went out, and Lieutenant Valcour had barely returned his attention to the letter from Marge Myles when there was another rapping on the door. This time it was Cassidy who came in. Lieutenant Valcour dropped the letter back upon the desk and turned to him.
“Did you find Mrs. Endicott all right, Cassidy?”
“No, sir, I didn’t.”
Lieutenant Valcour felt strangely disturbed. He had half expected Cassidy to answer in just that way; the denial was nothing more than a fulfillment of the curious premonitions he had been experiencing of some subtle danger.
“Did you look in all the rooms?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Question anybody?”
“Everybody, Lieutenant. There’s no one has seen hide nor hair of her.”
“How about the men at the doors?”
“Each one was at his post, sir. She didn’t go out.”
“Then in that case,” said Lieutenant Valcour, “she must still be in.”
The thought was both a bromide and a consolation. Nowadays, Lieutenant Valcour assured himself, people didn’t vanish into thin air; it just wasn’t being done. While concentrating in his mind as to the possible whereabouts of the unfindable Mrs. Endicott, his hands were mechanically placing the piles of letters he had assorted back into the empty drawer. He had shoved the letter from Marge Myles carefully to one side. Any reading of it would have to come later, after he had hit upon some logical explanation for this sudden move on the part of Mrs. Endicott.
“He must have been some stepper, Lieutenant,” Cassidy said, eyeing with interest one disappearing pack of pink envelopes.
“Quite a stepper, Cassidy.”… Where could she hide? And why should she?…
“Each one of them piles from some dame?”
“That’s right, Cassidy—each one from some dame.”… She wanted to get out of the house, one could be pretty sure of that, and go to the hospital to see Hollander. But how could she have got past the men at the doors? She couldn�
��t…
“It certainly does beat hell what some guys can get away with, Lieutenant.”
“But it never does beat hell, Cassidy.”… And Hansen had been out around the backyards, even supposing she had attempted anything so unbelievable as to scale fences. That was absurd…
“It ain’t all a matter of looks, exactly—no, nor money, either.” Cassidy’s glance toward the bed was but half complimentary. “I’ve run with lads that was one step this side of being human monkeys, but could they pick them? I’ll say. They had sex appeal. How about it, Lieutenant?”
“Undoubtedly, Cassidy.”… As for the roof, it was peaked and offered no passage to the roofs of the adjoining houses. One couldn’t picture her, in any case, scrambling over roofs any more than one could believe that she would scramble over fences…
“And the worst of it is with these bimbos that have it, they ain’t ever satisfied.”
“No one is ever satisfied, Cassidy.”… There might be a way to the roof at that, from the attic…attic…
“Not ever with anything, Lieutenant?’
“Not really ever with anything.”… Attic…and that curious look that one had had to interpret as exaltation. It couldn’t be possible, but still—
“Stay right here, Cassidy!”
Cassidy gave a nervous jump. The words were sparks from flint striking steel. Lieutenant Valcour’s sudden spurt of speed as he rushed toward the door was surprising.
A possible solution to Mrs. Endicott’s absence had just come to him with rather horrible clearness.
CHAPTER XXVIII
6:00 A.M.—Mist Drifting Through Mist
Lieutenant Valcour was out of the door in no time and racing along the corridor up the stairs to the floor above. Somewhere—somewhere was the entrance to the stairs leading farther up to the attic. Ah!—softly now, quietly, not to disturb or shock. Thank God the treads were firm and didn’t creak…
There was a window in the attic, at the garden end of its peak, not a large window, but big enough to permit the cold white light of morning to illumine the place greyly.
Mrs. Endicott’s back was toward him, her face toward that window, and the light from it blurred softly about her silhouette of darkness. She had upended the trunk she was standing on, and it had placed her hands within convenient reach of the rafter about which she had fastened one end of a short rope. Its other end was coiled in a running noose about her neck.
