Yellow Room

by Mary Roberts Rinehart

  “All I know is that he said he had some things to see to, then he was going back to the Pacific again to fly if he had to stow away to get there. He’ll do it too, silver plate and all. It’s the whale of a story, isn’t it? Be good to him—but of course you will. He’s had a rotten time. All my love to you both. Terry.

  “P.S. I’ll send you some sort of word if he comes back here, or manages to get back to his squadron. Just an okay.”

  When Dane looked up Carol was sitting with her eyes closed, as though to shut out something she could not bear. It was some time before she spoke. She was very pale.

  “Marguerite!” she said. “Are you telling me that Don killed her? That Don came here and killed her? And shot Elinor. I don’t believe it, Jerry. He wasn’t like that.”

  His voice was gentle.

  “I’ve told you this before, my darling. War changes men. They’re not quite the same after it. And there are always designing women waiting around for them.”

  “But—murder!”

  “I’ve asked you to withhold judgment, for a few hours anyhow. And don’t forget this either, Carol darling. You’ve read the story in the paper. He wasn’t only saved from that island. He got back to his squadron and has been fighting hard ever since.”

  “You think that condones what he did?” she asked. “He killed that girl because she had married Greg. And he’s allowed Greg to be indicted, to sit in a cell and wait for trial. Is that courage? It’s despicable, and you know it.”

  Dane glanced at his wrist watch. Something had to happen, and happen soon, unless he himself was crazy. Sitting on the edge of his bed—there was only one chair in the room—he began carefully to tell her Nathaniel Ward’s story as he had heard it; softening nothing, making it as clear as he could. To this he added his own visit to the Coast, the Gates family, and finally the birth certificate.

  Carol read it with only a slight rise of color.

  “That only makes it worse,” she said. “She bore him a child. She even named it for him! And then—”

  She did not finish. Someone was coming along the hall. When the door opened Dr. Harrison came in. He looked grave and unhappy when he saw Carol.

  “I’m afraid I have bad news for you, my dear.”

  She got up quickly.

  “Not Greg!”

  “No. Colonel Richardson died at his desk an hour ago. It was painless, of course. He was writing a letter at the time, and—well, it’s understandable. He had taken bad news for two years like a man and a soldier. But good news—”

  Dane drew a long breath. There were tears in Carol’s eyes.

  “He was one of the finest men I ever knew,” she said quietly. “I’d better go there. He was all alone, except for his man. Perhaps I can do something.”

  Dane got Alex on the phone the moment she was out of the room. He gave him some brief instructions and hung up. His mind was already busy with what was to be done to quash the indictment against Gregory Spencer. They would reconvene the Grand Jury, he thought, and present the new evidence, and for once he was grateful for the secrecy of such a proceeding. When Alex called all he said was a laconic “Okay,” and Dane relaxed as though a terrific burden had been lifted from his mind.

  Some time later Floyd was sitting across from him, his legs spread out and his face sulky.

  “So you’ve made a monkey out of me,” he said. “How the hell did you know?”

  “I didn’t. I worked on Terry Ward for some time. There had to be an X somewhere. Who was hiding out up at Pine Hill? Who got into the hospital, trying to talk to Lucy Norton, and scared her literally to death? Who ran into Elinor Hilliard at night and shot her in order to avoid recognition. Washington reported Terry was on the Coast and hadn’t left there.

  “Maybe I began to believe in miracles myself! But I was pretty well stymied. Washington had no record of Don’s being alive. I couldn’t discover anything on the Coast. Yet here were the Wards protecting somebody. Not Terry. He hadn’t been east. All along they’d been in it. They—”

  “Are you telling me old Nat Ward buried those clothes?” Floyd demanded.

  “You’d better ask him,” Dane said smoothly.

  “All right. You’ve dug a lot of worms to get a fish,” Floyd said resignedly. “So you pick on another hero for your fish! Don Richardson’s guilty. How are you going to prove it?”

  Dane settled back in his chair.

  “I haven’t said Don killed that girl, Floyd.”

  The chief sat forward, his face purple.

  “Stop playing games with me,” he bellowed. “First Don did it. He says he did. Then he didn’t. Who the hell did?”

  “The colonel,” said Dane, lighting a cigarette. The colonel, Floyd. And he never knew he had done it.”

  When Floyd said nothing, speech being beyond him, Dane went on.

  “Figure it out for yourself. There was always X, you know. And X didn’t behave like a guilty man. He hung around after it was over. He waited for the inquest. He tried to see Lucy Norton, to find out what she knew and hadn’t told. Wouldn’t a guilty man have escaped as soon as he could?”

  “Pretty smart, aren’t you?” Floyd said. “You got most of that from old Ward himself this morning!”

  “All right,” Dane said amiably. “I had two guesses, Don or the colonel. And if it was Don it didn’t make sense. Why didn’t he see his father? The colonel would have died to protect him. Instead of that Don took a farewell look at him through a window. The colonel didn’t like the idea, so he tried to follow him. I don’t think he even knew it was his own son. He really thought it was Terry Ward.”

  Floyd got out a bandanna handkerchief and wiped his face. He was sweating profusely.

  “Go ahead,” he said. “Go on and dream, Dane. So the colonel killed the girl and went home and had a good night’s sleep. Go on. I can take it.”

  “Well, think it out for yourself,” Dane said reasonably. “The colonel had been paying for the support of his grandson ever since he was born. He’d gone to the Coast and seen Marguerite—if that was really her name. I suspect she was born Margaret—and he knew her. Imagine his feelings when he saw her, the morning she arrived, on her way to Crestview. He was an early riser. He had to have seen her, to account for what happened. Maybe she saw him too.

  “Anyhow he went up to the house that night, after Lucy had gone to bed. She couldn’t take him into the house. She put on a negligee and went to the door to talk to him. I think she told him she had married Greg, and that she offered to bribe him. If he’d keep quiet about Don’s baby he needn’t pay any more hush money, or whatever you choose to call it.

  “He must have been in a towering rage. Not only about the trade she suggested. Here she was, a little tramp, married to Carol’s brother and capable of telling her she had been Don’s mistress. Not that he thought it out, I imagine. I think he simply lost his head and attacked her. He didn’t know he’d killed her, of course. He left at once, and from that Friday night until her body was found in the linen closet he must have thought she had got away. I saw him myself once, walking around the house, to be sure she had gone.

  “The next thing he learned was that she was dead in the linen closet.

  “He hadn’t put her there. So far as he knew he hadn’t killed her. I think all he felt was relief. She was out of the way, and someday he would locate the child and provide for him. The Wards believed Don Richardson had done it. Don had told them so. But his story didn’t hold water. He said he’d knocked her down with his fist and she’d struck her head on the stone step. You saw that wound. It hadn’t been made that way. I thought of a poker or a golf club. I didn’t think of a thin skull and a heavy walking stick.

  “After I found someone had been hiding out at Pine Hill I still had to do some guessing. I knew by that time it wasn’t Terry Ward. I had the Wards looked up. Terry was the only relative they had. Whom were they protecting, and why? Whom were they feeding? And whom were they afraid of? They were afraid of someone. O
ld Nathaniel was carrying a gun. And when you dug up the clothes on the hillside Mrs. Ward had a stroke.

  “But as I said before there was one thing I kept thinking about. Whoever shot Elinor Hilliard had been trying to escape from Colonel Richardson. That was out of the picture entirely. Why in a pouring rain did X stand outside the colonel’s window, peering in?

  “Think that over, Floyd. Don Richardson was a happy man the night of the murder. He had got rid of the girl by marrying her to Greg Spencer while Greg was drunk. He’d always hated Greg, I imagine; the big house on the hill and the small one below. Greg’s good looks, his money, even his plane. And he was on leave in Los Angeles the night of the party. I knew that from Washington.

  “Then he gets here and takes a walk to quiet down. He goes over to Crestview. Why not? He’s engaged to Carol, isn’t he. He doesn’t know the girl’s there. He goes over by the path in the dark, and what he sees is his own father slashing at someone with his cane! When his father’s gone he goes over and strikes a match. It’s Marguerite, and she’s dead.

  “Whatever his faults, he was a good son. He loved his father, and his father was a sick man. What was he to do?

  “Well, after all, he’s presumed to be dead. What does it matter? He goes back to the Wards’ with a fool tale that he’s killed her, that he’s knocked her down with his fist and she’s hit her head on the stone doorstep. She wasn’t lying on any stone doorstep when she was found. She was in the doorway of the house. That step is wood.

  “My own idea is that she had been out that night. Remember the pine needle in her slipper. She may even have gone down to the colonel’s and he took her back, probably growing angrier all the way. It must have taken a lot to make him strike her. But he never knew he had killed her. The hall was dark—no electric current. He may not even have heard her fall. Nor even that Lucy Norton, seeing Don in the hospital that night, thought she was seeing a ghost and died of it.

  “All along the colonel thought it was Terry Ward, and he was devoted to the Wards. He was sure it was Terry who had shot Elinor Hilliard. He did his best, got her out of the road and tried to call the doctor. But he wasn’t the same after that. I saw him the next day. He put up a good show, but he was in poor shape.”

  Floyd stirred.

  “Why was the Hilliard woman out that night anyhow?”

  “I found a small hole on the hillside the next day. You see, she was covering up as well as she could. Nathaniel had told her he had buried the clothes, and she’d burned the hill. But she was still frightened. She had tried to save Don to save herself, but too much was going on. She was scared of him. So were they all, for that matter.”

  “She burned the hill!”

  “Certainly. Who else? Carol Spencer knew it.”

  “Giving me the runaround again,” Floyd grunted uneasily.

  “As a matter of fact,” Dane said, “you’ve got all the Spencers suspecting each other. That threw me off for a while. I suppose I’ve got a bias in favor of our fighting men, but I never thought Greg Spencer was guilty. I got Tim Murphy on the job—”

  “Who’s Murphy?”

  “One of the best private operatives in New York. Got his own agency.” And when Floyd relapsed into speechless fury, Dane smiled.

  “So,” he said, “I began to believe in miracles myself. Don Richardson hadn’t liked Greg, and it looked too much like coincidence that Greg had married his girl. She was his girl. She’d named the boy for him. I found that out on the Coast, from his birth registration. And Terry Ward hadn’t left the coast. So what? So maybe Don was alive after all.

  “But, if it was Don, he wasn’t acting like a man with a crime on his soul. He was hiding out at Pine Hill. Why?

  “Well, I’d learned somebody else had a motive, had been paying a sort of blackmail since the boy was born. But I was still guessing until last night, when I learned that Colonel Richardson had been inquiring of the nature of the wound which killed the girl.

  “Mr. Ward had mixed things up by shooting at me, and Elinor Hilliard was keeping her mouth shut. I only learned within the last few hours, for instance, that as she turned into the drive the night of the murder she saw the colonel going into his house, and he was carrying a stick.”

  “He always carried a stick,” Floyd said belligerently. “I liked the old boy. Everybody liked him. If you’re trying to say he killed that girl in cold blood—”

  Dane’s face looked very tired.

  “Not at all,” he said. “I’m saying that for the first time in his life Colonel Richardson struck a woman, and she died of it.”

  There was a prolonged silence. Then Floyd got up.

  “I suppose you’re sure of all this,” he said heavily. “It’s going to make a stink, Dane. That’s bad for the town.”

  “Not necessarily. I want to say this. Don Richardson would never have allowed Spencer to suffer, or his father either. He went back to the Pacific to fight, but he left Mr. Ward a statement to be opened in case Spencer was convicted or he himself was killed.”

  “Saying he didn’t?”

  “Probably,” Dane said dryly.

  “Then where the hell are we?”

  “Nowhere.” He gave Floyd a grim smile. “Except that Greg Spencer will never go to trial.”

  “That’s what you say,” Floyd said, still truculent. “You’ve been doing a lot of guessing, Dane, but where’s your proof? All you’ve done is lug in a dead man who can’t defend himself. Who didn’t even know he’d done it! I gave you credit for better sense.”

  “I think he did know it, the last day or so. Remember, he thought Mr. Ward was going armed against him. He said so. Then why? Had Nathaniel found the body and tried to dispose of it, to protect him? Did they know he had done it, and think he had lost his mind? He himself told me he was considered something of a crackpot around here.

  “There’s something else too, Floyd. It’s just possible he thought he recognized Don at the window that rainy night. He wasn’t sure, of course. That might have been the reason he followed him. In that case he must have been badly worried. Why hadn’t Don come to see him? Why had he done none of the normal things? Had Don found the girl unconscious and killed her himself?”

  “I’m betting on Don this minute,” Floyd said. “Always was a wild kid. If that girl had two-timed him—”

  “Let me go on,” Dane said tiredly. “The colonel was in bad shape. He had to know. So yesterday he saw Dr. Harrison. The girl had died of one blow, by a poker or something similar. He knew then that he had killed her.

  “I don’t suppose he slept at all last night. Part of the time he spent writing out a confession. Then when he got the newspaper, with the news that Don was alive and fighting again, he collapsed.”

  Floyd’s face was ugly.

  “What’s all this about a confession?”

  “I have it here.”

  Floyd jerked it angrily from his hand and glanced at it. He looked apoplectic.

  “How did you get hold of this?” he snarled. “Damn it all, Dane, you’ve been messing in where you didn’t belong ever since this case started.”

  “As soon as I’d heard from the doctor last night I called the colonel up and suggested it,” Dane said coolly. “At its worst it was manslaughter, and he knew he hadn’t long to live. Greg Spencer had to be saved somehow. You had too good a case, Floyd, and I hadn’t any. Don’t blame the night telephone operator. I’m a friend of a friend of hers.”

  “How’d you get hold of it?”

  “Oh, that! I sent Alex there this morning. Good man, Alex.”

  “He’s a dirty snooper,” Floyd bellowed, but Dane merely smiled.

  “All right. Have it your own way. You’ll find the colonel admits an excess of rage, during which he struck her with a heavy stick he was carrying, and seeing her fall. He admits leaving her there, but not knowing she was dead. He admits he’d been paying her what amounted to blackmail. He even admits to searching the yellow room later for the child’s birth certifi
cate and some evidence of where she had hidden him with the idea of collecting on him later. He didn’t finish it, of course. His heart went back on him, or he would probably have claimed he tried to burn the body!”

  “And who did?”

  “Does that matter now?”

  The two men stared at each other, the one shrewd and angry, the other hard and inflexible. Floyd got up.

  “By God, Dane,” he said, “I’m still not sure you didn’t do it yourself!”

  He stamped out, and Dane laughed quietly as the door slammed.

  30

  HE LEFT THE HOSPITAL that afternoon. Alex had stood by while he dressed, his one eye watching every movement.

  “I’ll bet that leg’s bad again, sir,” he said. “You aren’t fooling me any.”

  “Leg! I wouldn’t know I had a leg. I’ll be going back soon, Alex. I have a little business to transact first. Then I’m off.”

  “What sort of business?” Alex inquired suspiciously. “Any more murders around?”

  “This is different,” Dane said, carefully knotting his tie. “Very, very different.”

  He was sober enough when he reached Crestview. Tim admitted him, a grinning Tim who reached for his cap with a differential air, and spoiled it by clutching him by the arm.

  “What the hell’s cooking?” he said. “You’re a tightmouthed son of a so-and-so, but if you’re letting me scrub pots while you have the time of your life running over the country and getting shot—”