He stood impatiently tapping one heel against the other, while he waited for the matter to be adjusted at the police station, then swung back to receive the name of the detective: “Yes.… You are sending Detective Siler? Because he knows the house?… Oh, there has been trouble there before?… I see.… Tell him to hurry. I will try and get there myself before eleven.”
He dashed the receiver back on to the hook, caught his coat collar close again and ran swiftly to claim a taxicab which was just bringing another member up to the club.
The streets were all but empty; and into the stiffening ice the chains on the tires of the driving wheels bit sharply; so it still lacked ten minutes of the hour, as Trant assured himself by another quick glance at his watch, when the chauffeur checked the motor short before the given number on Ashland Avenue, and the psychologist jumped out.
The vacant street, and the one dim light on the first floor of the old house, told Trant the police had not yet arrived.
The porticoed front and the battered fountain with cupids, which rose obscurely from the ice-crusted sod of the narrow lawn at its side, showed an attempt at fashion. In the rear, as well as Trant could see it in the indistinct glare of the street lamps, the building seemed to fall away into a single rambling story.
As the psychologist rang the bell and was admitted, he saw at once that he had not been mistaken in believing that the cab which had passed his motor only an instant before had come from the same house; for the mild-eyed, white-haired little man, who opened the door almost before the bell had stopped ringing, had not yet taken off his overcoat. Behind him, in the dim light of a shaded lamp, an equally placid, white-haired little woman was laying off her wraps; and their gentle faces were so completely at variance with the wild terror of the note that Trant now held between his fingers in his pocket, that he hesitated before he asked his question:
“Is W. Newberry here?”
“I am the Reverend Wesley Newberry,” the little man answered. “I am no longer in the active service of the Lord; but if it is a case of immediate necessity and I can be of use—”
“No, no!” Trant checked him. “I have not come to ask your service as a minister, Mr. Newberry. I am Luther Trant. But I see I must explain,” the psychologist continued, at first nonplused by the little man’s stare of perplexity, which showed no recognition of the name, and then flushing with the sudden suspicion that followed. “To-night when I returned to my club at half-past ten, I was informed that a woman—apparently in great anxiety—had been trying to catch me all day; and had finally referred me to this special delivery letter which was delivered for me at six o’clock.” Trant extended it to the staring little minister. “Of course, I can see now that both telephone calls and note may have been a hoax; but—in Heaven’s name! What is the matter, Mr. Newberry?”
The two old people had taken the note between them. Now the little woman, her wraps only half removed, had dropped, shaking and pale, into the nearest chair. The little man had lost his placidity and was shuddering in uncontrolled fear. He seemed to shrink away; but stiffened bravely.
“A hoax? I fear not, Mr. Trant!” The man gathered himself together. “This note is not from me; but it is, I must not deceive myself, undoubtedly from our son Walter—Walter Newberry. This writing, though broken beyond anything I have seen from him in his worst dissipations is undoubtedly his. Yet Walter is not here, Mr. Trant! I mean—I mean, he should not be here! There have been reasons—we have not seen or heard of Walter for two months. He can not be here now—surely he can not be here now, unless—unless—my wife and I went to a friend’s this evening; this is as though the writer had known we were going out! We left at half-past six and have only just returned. Oh, it is impossible that Walter could, have come here! But Martha, we have not seen Adele!” The livid terror grew stronger on his rosy, simple face as he turned to his wife. “We have not seen Adele, Martha, since we came in! And this gentleman tells us that a woman in great trouble was sending for him. If Walter had been here—be strong, Martha; be strong! But come—let us look together!”
He had turned, with no further word of explanation, and pattered excitedly to the stairs, followed by his wife and Trant.
“Adele! Adele!” the old man cried anxiously, knocking at the door nearest the head of the stairs; and when he received no answer, he flung the door open.
“Dreadful! Dreadful!” he wrung his hands, while his wife sank weakly down upon the upper step, as she saw the room was empty. “There is something very wrong here, Mr. Trant! This is the bedroom of my daughter-in-law, Walter’s wife. She should be here, at this hour! My son and his wife are separated and do not live together. My son, who has been unprincipled and uncontrollable from his childhood up, made a climax to his career of dissipation two months ago by threatening the life of his wife because she refused—because she found it impossible to live longer with him. It was a most painful affair; the police were even called in. We forbade Walter the house. So if she called to you because he was threatening her again, and he returned here to-night to carry out his threat, then Adele—Adele was indeed in danger!”
“But why should he have written me that note?” Trant returned crisply. “However—if we believe the note at all—there is surely now no time to lose, Mr. Newberry. We must search the entire house at once and make sure, at least, that Mrs. Walter Newberry is not in some other part of it!”
“You are right—quite right!” the little man pattered rapidly from door to door, throwing the rooms open to the impatient scrutiny of the psychologist; and while they were still engaged in this search upon the upper floor, a tall clock on the landing of the stairs struck eleven!
So strongly had the warning of the note impressed Trant that, at the signal of the hour, he stopped short; the others, seeing him, stopped too, and stared at him with blanched faces, while all three apprehensively strained their ears for some sound which might mark the note’s fulfillment. And scarcely had the last deep stroke of the hour ceased to resound in the hall, when suddenly, sharply, and without other warning, a revolver shot rang out, followed so swiftly by three others that the four reports rang almost as one through the silent house. The little woman screamed and seized her husband’s arm. His hand, in turn, hung upon Trant. The psychologist, turning his head to be surer of the direction of the sound, for an instant more stared indecisively; for though the shots were plainly inside the house, the echoes made it impossible to locate them exactly. But almost immediately a fifth shot, seeming louder and more distinct in its separateness, startled them again. “It is in the billiard room!” the wife shrieked, with a woman’s quicker location of indoor sounds.
The little minister ran to seize the lamp, as Trant turned toward the rear of the house. The woman started with them; but at that instant the doorbell rang furiously; and the woman stopped in trembling confusion. The psychologist pushed her husband on, however; and taking the lamp from the elder man’s shaking hand, he now led Newberry into the one-story addition which formed the back part of the house. Here he found that the L shaped passage into which they ran, opened at one end apparently on to a side porch. Newberry, now taking the lead, hurried down the other branch of the passage past a door which was plainly that of a kitchen, came to another further down the passage, tried it, and recoiled in fresh bewilderment to find it locked.
“It is never locked—never! Something dreadful must have been happening in here!” he wrung his hands again weakly.
“We must break it down then!” Trant drew the little man aside, and, bracing himself against the opposite wall, threw his shoulder against it once—twice, and even a third time, ineffectually, till a uniformed patrolman, and another man in plain clothes, coming after them with Mrs. Newberry, added their weight to Trant’s, and the door crashed open.
A blast of air from the outside storm instantly blew out both the lamp in Trant’s hand and another which had been burning in the room. The woman s
creamed and threw herself toward some object on the floor which the flare of the failing lights had momentarily revealed; but her husband caught in the darkness at her wrist and drew her to him. Siler and the patrolman, swearing softly, felt for matches and tried vainly in the draft to relight the lamp which Trant had thrust upon the table; for the psychologist had dashed to the window which was letting in the outside storm, stared out, then closed it and returned to light the lamp, which belonged in the room, as the plain-clothes man now lit the other.
This room which Mrs. Newberry had called the billiard room, he saw then, was now used only for storage purposes and was littered with the old rubbish which accumulates in every house; but the arrangement of the discarded furniture showed plainly the room had recently been fitted for occupancy as well as its means allowed. That the occupant had taken care to conceal himself, heavy sheets of brown paper pasted over the panes of all the windows—including that which Trant had found open—testified; that the occupant had been well tended, a full tray of food—practically untouched—and the stubs of at least a hundred cigarettes flung in the fireplace, made plain. These things Trant appreciated only after the first swift glance which showed him a huddled figure with its head half under a musty lounge which stood furthest from the window. It was not the body of a woman, but that of a man not yet thirty, whose rather handsome face was marred by deep lines of dissipation. The mother’s shuddering cry of recognition had showed that this was Walter Newberry.
Trant knelt beside the officers working over the body; the blood had been flowing from a bullet wound in the temple, but it had ceased to flow. A small, silver-mounted automatic revolver, such as had been recently widely advertised for the protection of women, lay on the floor close by, with the shells which had been ejected as it was fired. The psychologist straightened.
“We have come too late,” he said simply to the father. “It was necessary, as he foresaw, to get here before eleven, if we were to help him; for he is dead. And now—“he checked himself, as the little woman clutched her husband and buried her face in his sleeve, and the little man stared up at him with a chalky face—“it will be better for you to wait somewhere else till we are through here.”
“In the name of mercy, Mr. Trant!” Newberry cried miserably, as the psychologist picked up a lamp and lighted the two old people into the hall, “what is this terrible thing that has happened here? What is it—oh, what is it, Mr. Trant? And where—where is Adele?”
“I am here, father; I am here!” a new voice broke clearly and calmly through the confusion, and the light of Trant’s lamp fell on a slight but stately girl advancing down the hallway. “And you,” she said as composedly to the psychologist, though Trant could see now that her self-possession was belied by the nervous picking of her fingers at her dress and her paleness, which grew greater as she met his eyes, “are Mr. Trant—and you came too late!”
“You are—Mrs. Walter Newberry?” Trant returned. “You were the one who was calling me up this morning and this afternoon?”
“Yes,” she said. “I was his wife. So he is dead!”
She took no heed of the quick glance Trant flashed to assure himself that she spoke in this way before she could have seen the body from her place in the hall; and she turned calmly still to the old man who was clinging to her crying nervously now, “Adele! Adele! Adele!”
“Yes, dear father and dear mother!” she began compassionately. “Walter came back—“she broke off suddenly; and Trant saw her grow pale as death with staring eyes fixed over his shoulder on Siler, who had come to the doorway. “You—you brought the police, Mr. Trant! I—I thought you had nothing to do with the police!”
“Never mind that,” the plain-clothes man checked Trant’s answer. “You were saying your husband came home, Mrs. Newberry—then what?”
“Then—but that is all I know; I know nothing whatever about it.”
“Your shoes and skirt are wet, Mrs. Newberry,” the plain-clothes man pointed significantly.
“I—I heard the shots!” she caught herself up with admirable self-control. “That was all. I ran over to the neighbors’ for help; but I could get no one.”
“Then you’ll have a chance to make your statement later,” Siler answered in a business-like way. “Just now you’d better look after your father and mother.”
He took the lamp from Trant and held it to light them down the hall, then turned swiftly to the patrolman: “She is going upstairs with them; watch the front stairs and see that she does not go out. If she comes down the back stairs we can see her.”
As the patrolman went out, the plain-clothes man turned back into the room, leaving the door ajar so that the rear stairs were visible. “These husband and wife cases, Mr. Trant,” he said easily. “You think—and the man thinks, too—the woman will stand everything; and she does—till he does one more thing too much, and, all of a sudden, she lets him have it!”
“Don’t you think it’s a bit premature,” the psychologist suggested, “to assume that she killed him?”
“Didn’t you see how she shut up when she saw me?” Siler’s eyes met Trant’s with a flash of opposition. “That was because she recognized me and knew that, having been here last time there was trouble, I knew that he had been threatening her. It’s a cinch! Regular minister’s son, he was; the old man’s a missionary, you know; spent his life till two years ago trying to turn Chinese heathens into Christians. And this Walter—our station blotter’d be black with his doings; only, ever since he made China too hot to hold him and the old man brought him back here, everything’s been hushed up on the old man’s account. But I happen to have been here before; and all winter I’ve known there’d be a killing if he ever came back. Hell! I tell you it was a relief to me to see it was him on the floor when that door went down. There are no powder marks, you see,” the officer led Trant’s eyes back to the wound in the head of the form beside the lounge. “He could not have shot himself. He was shot from further off than he could reach. Besides, it’s on the left side.”
“Yes; I saw,” Trant replied.
“And that little automatic gun,” the officer stooped now and picked up the pistol that lay on the floor be side the body, “is hers. I saw it the last time I was called in here.”
“But how could he have known—if she shot him—that she was going to kill him just at eleven?” Trant objected, pulling from his pocket the note, which old Mr. Newberry had returned to him, and handing it to Siler. “He sent that to me; at least, the father says it is in his handwriting.”
“You mean,” Siler’s eyes rose slowly from the paper, “that she must have told him what she was going to do—premeditated murder?”
“I mean that the first fact which we have—and which certainly seems to me wholly incompatible with anything which you have suggested so far—is that Walter Newberry foresaw his own death and set the hour of its accomplishment; and that his wife—it is plain at least to me—when she telephoned so often for me to-day, was trying to help him to escape from it. Now what are the other facts?” Trant went on rapidly, paying no attention to the obstinate glance in the eyes of the officer. “I distinctly heard five shots—four together and then, after a second or so, one. You heard five?”
“Yes.”
“And five shots,” the psychologist’s quick glances had been taking in the finer details of the room, “are accounted for by the bullet holes—one through the lower pane of the window I found open, which shows it was down and closed during the shooting, as there is no break in the upper half; one on the plaster there to the side; one under the moulding there four feet to the right; and one more, in the plaster almost as far to the left. The one that killed him makes five.”
“Exactly!” Siler followed Trant’s indication triumphantly, “the fifth in his head! The first four went off in their struggle; and then she got away and, with the fifth, shot him.”
“But the shells,�
� Trant continued; “for that sort of revolver ejects the shells as they are fired—and I see only four. Where is the fifth?”
“You’re trying to fog this thing all up, Mr. Trant.”
“No; I’m trying to clear it. How could anyone have left the room after the firing of the last shot? No one could have gone through the door and not been seen by us in the hall; besides the door was bolted on the inside,” Trant pointed to the two bolts. “No one could have left except by the window—this window which was open when we came in, but which must have been closed when one, at least, of the shots was being fired. You remember I went at once to it and looked out, but saw nothing.”
Trant re-crossed the room swiftly and threw the window open, intently re-examining it. On the outside it was barred with a heavy grating, but he saw that the key to the grating was in the lock.
“Bring the lamp,” he said to the plain-clothes man; and as Siler screened the flame against the wind—“Ah!” he continued, “look at the ice cracked from it there—it must have been swung open. He must have gone out this way!”
“He?” Siler repeated.
The plain-clothes man had squeezed past Trant, as the grating swung back, and lamp in hand had let himself easily down to the ice-covered walk below the window, and was holding his light, shielded, just above the ground. “It was she,” he cried triumphantly—“the woman, as I told you! Look at her marks here!” He showed by the flickering light the double, sharp little semi-circles of a woman’s high heels cut into the ice; and, as Trant dropped down beside him, the police detective followed the sharp little heel marks to the side door of the house, where they turned and led into the kitchen entry.
“Premature, was I—eh?” Siler triumphed laconically. “We are used to these cases, Mr. Trant; we know what to expect in ’em.”
The Mystery & Suspense Novella Page 44
