Trant stood for an instant studying the sheet of ice. In this sheltered spot, freezing had not progressed so fast as in the open streets. Here, as an hour before on Michigan Avenue, he saw that his heels and those of the police officer at every step cut through the crust, while their toes left no mark. But except for the marks they themselves had made and the crescent stamp of the woman’s high heels leading in sharp, clear outline from the window to the side steps of the house, there were no other imprints. Then he followed the detective into the side door of the house. In the passage they met the patrolman. “She came down stairs just now,” said that officer briskly, “and went in here.”
Siler laid his hand on the door of the little sitting-room the patrolman indicated, but turned to speak a terse command to the man over his shoulder: “Go back to that room and see that things are kept as they are. Look for the fifth shell. We got four; find the other!”
Then, with a warning glance at Trant, he pushed the door open.
The girl faced the two calmly as they entered; but the whiteness of her lips showed Trant, with swift appreciation, that she could bear no more and was reaching the end of her restraint.
“You’ve had a little while to think this over, Mrs. Newberry,” the plain-clothes man said, not unkindly, “and I guess you’ve seen it’s best to make a clean breast of it. Mr. Walter Newberry has been in that room quite a while—the room shows it—though his father and mother seem not to have known about it.”
“He”—she hesitated, then answered suddenly and collectively, “he had been there six days.”
“You started to tell us about it,” Trant helped her. “You said ‘Walter came home’—but, what brought him here? Did he come to see you?”
“No;” the girl’s pale cheeks suddenly burned blood red and went white again, as she made her decision. “It was fear—deadly fear that drove him here; but I do not know of what.”
“You are going to tell us all you know, are you not, Mrs. Newberry?” the psychologist urged quietly—“how he came here; and particularly how both he and you could so foresee his death that you summoned me as you did!”
“Yes; yes—I will tell you,” the girl clenched and unclenched her hands, as she gathered herself together. “Six nights ago, Monday night, Mr. Trant, Walter came here. It was after midnight, and he did not ring the bell, but waked me by throwing pieces of ice and frozen sod against my window. I saw at once that something was the matter with him; so I went down and talked to him through the closed door—the side door here; for I was afraid at first to let him in, in spite of his promises not to hurt me. He told me his very life was in danger—and he had no other place to go; and he must hide here—hide; and I must not let anyone—even his mother or father—know he had come back; that I was the only one he could trust! So—he was my husband—and I let him in!
“I started to run from him, when I had opened the door; for I was afraid—afraid; but he ran at once into the old billiard-room—the store room there—and tried the locks of the door and the window gratings,” the sensitive voice ran on rapidly, “and then threw himself all sweating cold on the lounge there, and went to sleep in a stupor. I thought at first it was another frenzy from whiskey or—or opium. And I stayed there. But just at morning when he woke up, I saw it wasn’t that—but it was fear—fear—fear, such as I’d never seen before. He rolled off the couch and half hid under it till I’d pasted brown paper over the window panes—there were no curtains. But he wouldn’t tell me what he was afraid of.
“He got so much worse as the days went by that he couldn’t sleep at all; he walked the floor all the time and he smoked continually, so that nearly every day I had to slip out and get him cigarettes. He got more and more afraid of every noise outside and of every little sound within; and it made him so much worse when I told him I had to tell someone else—even his mother—that I didn’t dare to. He said other people were sure to find out that he was there, then, and they would kill him—kill him! He was always worst at eleven—eleven o’clock at night; and he dreaded especially eleven o’clock Sunday night—though I couldn’t find out what or why!
“I gave him my pistol—the one—the one you saw on the floor in there. It was Friday then; and he had been getting worse and worse all the time. Eleven o’clock every night I managed to be with him; and no one found us out. I was glad I gave him the pistol until this—until this morning. I never thought till then that he might use it to kill himself; but this morning—Sunday morning, when I came to him, he was talking about it—denying it; but I saw it was in his mind! ‘I shan’t shoot myself!’ I heard him saying over and over again, when I came to the door. ‘They can’t make me shoot myself! I shan’t! I shan’t!’—over and over, like that. And when he had let me in and I saw him, then I knew—I knew he meant to do it! He asked me if it wasn’t Sunday; and went whiter when I told him it was! So then I told him he had to trust someone now; this couldn’t go on; and I spoke to him about Mr. Trant; and he said he’d try him; and he wrote the letter I mailed you—special delivery—so you could come when his father and mother were out—but he never once let go my pistol; he was wild—wild with fear. Every time I could get away to the telephone, I tried to get Mr. Trant; and the last time I got back—it was awful! It was hardly ten, but he was walking up and down with my pistol in his hand, whispering strange things over and over to himself, saying most of anything, ‘No one can make me do it! No one can make me do it—even when it’s eleven—even when it’s eleven!’—and staring—staring at his watch which he’d taken out and laid on the table; staring and staring so—so that I knew I must get someone before eleven—and at last I was running next door for help—for anyone—for anything—when—when I heard the shots—I heard the shots!”
She sank forward and buried her face in her hands; rent by tearless sobs. Her fingers, white from the pressure, made long marks on her cheeks, showing livid even in the pallor of her face. But Siler pursed his lips toward Trant, and laid his hand upon her arm, sternly.
“Steady, steady, Mrs. Newberry!” the plain-clothes man warned. “You can not do that now! You say you were with your husband a moment before the shooting, but you were not in the room when he was killed?”
“Yes; yes!” the woman cried.
“You went out the door the last time?”
“The door? Yes; yes; of course the door! Why not the door?”
“Because, Mrs. Newberry,” the detective replied impressively, “just at, or a moment after, the time of the shooting, a woman left that room by the window—unlocked the grating and went out the window. We have seen her marks. And you were that woman, Mrs. Newberry!”
The girl gasped and her eyes wavered to Trant; but seeing no help there now, she recovered herself quickly.
“Of course! Why, of course!” she cried. “The last time I went out, I did go out the window! It was to get the neighbors—didn’t I tell you? So I went out the window!”
“Yes; we know you went out the window, Mrs. Newberry,” Siler responded mercilessly. “But we know, too, you did not even start for the neighbors. We have traced your tracks on the ice straight to the side door and into the house! Now, Mrs. Newberry, you’ve tried to make us believe that your husband killed himself. But that won’t do! Isn’t it a little too strange, if you left by the window while your husband was still alive, that he let the window stay open and the grating unlocked? Yes; it’s altogether too strange. You left him dead; and what we want to know—and I’m asking you straight out—is how you did it?”
“How I did it?” the girl repeated mechanically; then with sharp agony and starting eyes: “How I did it! Oh, no, no, I did not do it! I was there—I have not told all the truth! But when I saw you,” her horrified gaze resting on Siler, “and remembered you had been here before when he—he threatened me, my only thought was to hide for his sake and for theirs,” she indicated the room above, where she had taken her husband’s parents, “
that he had tried to carry out his threat. For before he killed himself, he tried to kill me! That’s how he fired those first four shots. He tried to kill me first!”
“Well, we’re getting nearer to it,” Siler approved.
“Yes; now I have told you all!” the girl cried. “Oh, I have now—I have! The last time he let me in, it was almost eleven—eleven! He had my pistol in his hand, waiting—waiting! And at last he cried out it was eleven; and he raised the pistol and shot straight at me—with the face—the face of a demon with fear. It was no use to try to speak to him, or to get away; I fell on my knees before him, just as he shot at me again and again—aiming straight, not at my eyes, but at my hair; and he shot again! But again he missed me; and his face—his face was so terrible that—that I covered my own face as he aimed at me again, staring always at my hair. And that time, when he shot, I heard him fall and saw—saw that he had shot himself and he was dead!”
Then I heard your footsteps coming to the door; and I saw for the first time that Walter had opened the window before I came in. And—all without thinking of anything except that if I was found there everybody would know he’d tried to kill me, I took up the key of the grating from the table where he had laid it, and went out!”
“I can’t force you to confess, if you will not, Mrs. Newberry,” Siler said meaningly, “though no jury, after they learned how he had threatened you, would convict you if you pleaded self-defense. We know he didn’t kill himself; for he couldn’t have fired that shot! And the case is complete, I think,” the detective shot a finally triumphant glance at Trant, “unless Mr. Trant wants to ask you something more.”
“I do!” Trant quietly spoke for the first time. “I want to ask Mrs. Newberry—since she did not actually see her husband fire the last shot that killed him—whether she was directly facing him as she knelt. It is most essential to know whether or not her head was turned to one side.”
“Why, what do you mean, Mr. Trant?” the girl looked up wonderingly; for his tone seemed to promise he was coming to her defense.
“Suppose he might have shot himself before her, as she says—what’s the difference whether she heard him with her head straight or her head turned?” the police detective demanded sneeringly.
“A fundamental difference in this case, Siler,” Trant replied, “if taken in connection with that other most important factor of all—that Walter Newberry foretold the hour of his own death. But answer me, Mrs. Newberry—if you can be certain.”
“I—certainly I can never forget how I crouched there with every muscle strained. I was directly facing him,” the girl answered.
“That is very important!” The psychologist took a rapid turn or two up and down the room. “Now you told us that your husband, during the days he was shut up in that room, talked to himself almost continuously. Toward the end, you say, he repeated over and over again such sentences as ‘No one can make me do it!’ Can you remember any others?”
“I couldn’t make much out of anything else, Mr. Trant,” the girl replied, after thinking an instant. “He seemed to have hallucinations so much of the time.”
“Hallucinations?”
“Yes; he seemed to think I was singing to him—as I used to sing to him, you know, when we were first married—and he would catch hold of me and say, ‘Don’t—don’t—don’t sing!’ Or at other times he would clutch me and tell me to sing low—sing low!”
“Anything else?”
“Nothing else even so sensible as that,” the girl responded. “Many things he said made me think he had lost his mind. He would often stare at me in an absorbed way, looking me over from head to foot, and say, ‘Look here; if anyone asks you—anyone at all—whether your mother had large or small feet, say small—never admit she had large feet, or you’ll never get in. Do you understand?’”
“What?” The psychologist stood for several moments in deep thought; then his eyes flashed suddenly with excitement. “What!” he cried again, clutching the chair-back as he leaned toward her. “He said that to you when he was absorbed?”
“A dozen times at least, Mr. Trant,” the girl replied, staring at him in startled wonder.
“Remarkable! Yes; this is extraordinary!” Trant strode up and down excitedly. “Nobody could have hoped for so fortunate a confirmation of the evidence in this remarkable case. We knew that Walter Newberry foresaw his own death; now we actually get from him himself, the key—the possibly complete explanation of his danger—”
“Explanation!” shouted the police detective. “I’ve heard no explanation! You’re throwing an impressive bluff, Mr. Trant; but I’ve heard nothing yet to make me doubt that Newberry met his death at the hands of his wife; and I’ll arrest her for his murder!”
“I can’t prevent your arresting Mrs. Newberry,” Trant swung to look the police officer between the eyes hotly. “But I can tell you—if you care to hear it—how Walter Newberry died! He was not shot by his wife; he did not die by his own hand, as she believes and has told you. The fifth shot—you have not found the fifth shell yet, Siler; and you will not find it, for it was not fired either by Walter Newberry or his wife. As she knelt, blinding her eyes as she faced her husband, Mrs. Newberry could not know whether the fifth shot sounded in front or behind her. If her head was not turned to one side, as she says it was not, then—and this is a simple psychological fact, Siler, though it seems to be unknown to you—it would be impossible for her to distinguish between sounds directly ahead and directly behind. It was not at her—at her hair—that her husband fired the four shots whose empty shells we found, but over her head at the window directly behind her. And it was through this just opened window that the fifth shot came and killed him—the shot at eleven o’clock—which he had foreseen and dreaded!”
“You must think I’m easy, Mr. Trant,” said the police officer derisively. “You can’t clear her by dragging into this business some third person who never existed. For there were no marks, and marks would have been left by anybody who came to the window!”
“Marks!” Trant echoed. “If you mean marks on the window-sill and floor, I cannot show you any. But the murderer did leave, of course, one mark which in the end will probably prove final, even to you, Siler. The shell of the fifth shot is missing because he carried it away in his revolver. But the bullet—it will be a most remarkable coincidence, Siler, if you find that the bullet which killed young Newberry was the same as the four we know were shot from his wife’s little automatic revolver!”
“But the ice—the ice under the window!” shouted the detective. “You saw for yourself how her heels and ours cut through the crust; and you saw that there were no other heel marks, as there must have been if anyone had stood outside the window to look through it, or to fire through it, as you say!”
“When you have reached the point, Siler,” said Trant, more quietly, “where you can think of some class of men who would have left no heel marks but who could have produced the effect on young Newberry’s mind which his wife has described, you will have gone far toward the discovery of the real murderer of Walter Newberry. In the meantime, I have clews enough; and I hope to find help, which cannot be given me by the city police, to enable me to bring the murderer to justice. I will ask you, Mrs. Newberry,” he glanced toward the girl, “to let me have a photograph of your husband, or”—he hesitated, unable to tell from her manner whether she had heard him—“I will stop on my way out to ask his photograph from his father.”
He glanced once more from the detective to the pale girl, who, since she received notice of her arrest, had stood as though cut from marble, with small hands tightly clenched and blind eyes fixed on vacancy; then he left them.
The next morning’s papers, which carried startling headlines of the murder of Walter Newberry, brought Police Detective Siler a feeling of satisfaction with his own work. The detective, it is true, had been made a little doubtful of his own assumptions by
Trant’s confident suggestion of a third person as the murderer. But he was reassured by the newspaper accounts, though they contained merely an elaboration of his own theory of an attack by the missionary’s dissipated son on his wife and her shooting him in self-defense, which Siler had successfully impressed not only on the police but on the reporters as well.
Even the discovery on the second morning that the bullet which had now been taken from young Newberry’s body was of .38 calibre and, as Trant had predicted, not at all similar to the steel .32 calibre bullets shot by the little automatic pistol which had belonged to young Mrs. Newberry, did not disturb the police officer’s self-confidence, though it obviously weakened the case against the wife. And when, on the day following, Siler received orders to report at an hour when he was not ordinarily on duty at the West End Police Station, where Mrs. Newberry was still held under arrest, he pushed open, with an air of importance, the door of the captain’s room, to which the sharp nod of the desk sergeant had directed him.
The detective’s first glance showed him the room’s three occupants—the huge figure of Division Inspector of Police Walker, lolling in the chair before the captain’s desk; a slight, dark man—unknown to Siler—near the window; and Luther Trant at the end of the room busy arranging a somewhat complicated apparatus.
Trant, with a short nod of greeting, at once called Siler to his aid.
With the detective’s half-suspicious, half-respectful assistance, the psychologist stretched across the end of the room a white sheet about ten feet long, three feet high, and divided into ten rectangles by nine vertical lines. Opposite this, and upon a table about ten feet away, he set up a small electrical contrivance, consisting of two magnets and wire coils supporting a small, round mirror about an inch in diameter and so delicately set upon an axis that it turned at the slightest current coming to the coils below it. In front of this little mirror Trant placed a shaded electric lamp in such a position that its light was reflected from the mirror upon the sheet at the end of the room. Then he put down a carbon plate and a zinc plate at the edge of the table; set a single cell battery under the table; connected the battery with the coils controlling the mirror, and connected them also with the zinc and carbon plates.
The Mystery & Suspense Novella Page 45
