And then at last Jim Wellington was called and sworn.
Chapter XVII
JIM SEEMED CALM ENOUGH as a witness and he made—at least at first—a good impression. But there was no getting away from the fact that he had been in the house and in the room, and that he had tried to get away without this being known. Questioned on this, however, he was firm and unshaken in his statement.
Earlier in the day, he thought between eleven and twelve o’clock, he had received word from Margaret Lancaster that her father wanted to see him at four that afternoon. She gave as a reason his anxiety about the amount of gold and currency in the house, and he had agreed to go.
He had left his car at his own house and walked to the Lancasters’. As he had a key he opened the door and went in, but Mr. Lancaster was not in his library and so, having waited a few minutes, he finally decided to go up the stairs to his aunt’s room.
That must have been, he said, at four o’clock or perhaps a couple of minutes earlier.
Mrs. Lancaster’s door was slightly ajar, and everything was quiet save for Emily Lancaster talking to her bird across the hall. He pushed open the door to his aunt’s room. The shades were drawn and at first he did not notice anything wrong. Then he reached the bed and saw her.
He saw no axe or other weapon, nor did he look for one. His first thought was that the family must not see the body as it was, and he tried to draw the sheet over it. Unfortunately it lay partly on the sheet and he did not succeed. And then he added, he had grown suddenly wildly nauseated; the sight of blood had always done that to him, and of course he was horrified as well.
He had made for the downstairs lavatory in the side hall and been violently sick.
He was still there and still sick when Emily began to scream. Then his own position began to dawn on him. There was blood on him. He decided foolishly to try to slip out the side door and to get home. When he saw through the screen door that Emily was on the grass and that I was bending over her he knew it was no good; but by that time bedlam had broken out upstairs in the house, and he did not try to go back.
“I was a fool to do what I did,” he added, “but I was still incapable of consecutive thought.”
Some of all this had been question and answer, of course, but in the main he told his story directly and frankly. It was only over a question which followed that he seemed to hesitate.
“Did you hear any suspicious sounds before you went up the stairs?”
“Not sounds exactly. I thought someone was running upstairs.”
“You heard someone running?”
“Not exactly. There’s an old crystal chandelier in the hall, and it jingled as though someone were moving very fast. The prisms swing and strike each other. They did it then.”
“That was before you went up?”
“It was while I was walking back to the stairs.”
The coroner did not pursue the subject. He asked: “Were you familiar with the key to the chest?”
“Very.”
“Where did the deceased keep it?”
“On a thin chain around her neck.”
“Did you see this key when you went to the bed?”
And then Jim’s nerves broke.
“Good God, no!” he said. “Do you suppose I was thinking about a key just then?”
Peggy was recalled after that, and her statement as to when she had seen Jim on the stair landing patiently gone into.
She had come out of a guest room in the wing and was on her way to the back stairs when she saw him. She had not seen anyone else, or heard anyone running.
“In other words,” as the coroner said later on, “if Mr. Wellington is correct and someone was actually running just before he started up the stairs, then that person’s escape was cut off from three directions; from the front stairs, from the rear hall and from the back stairs leading down to the kitchen porch where two women were at work.”
It was then that one of the jurors spoke up, much, I fancy, to the annoyance of the police.
“The jury would like to inquire about the windows, Mr. Coroner. The newspapers have stated that one of the screens in the—in Mrs. Lancaster’s bedroom was found partially raised, and a flower pot was overturned. If that is the case we would like to know it. If someone entered by the porch roof, or could have done so, we should know it.”
And much to his irritation the Inspector was recalled and obliged to tell the facts. Even then there was no mention of the bloodstain on the screen or the grass on the roof, but he admitted that the screen had been found raised some four inches and the flower pot overturned. Immediately following this, however, Mrs. Talbot insisted on being recalled, and announced in her booming voice that the flower pot had been overturned when she left her sister-in-law at three-thirty that afternoon.
“Are you positive about that?”
“Certainly I’m positive,” she boomed in her big voice. “I tried to raise the screen to set it up again. But I couldn’t move it an inch. It was stuck tight.”
It was bad luck for Jim, and I felt my hands and feet growing cold. Beside me Mr. Dalton muttered: “Damn the woman! Why couldn’t she keep her mouth shut?” And Mrs. Dalton heard him and gave him one of her sharp glances.
Nevertheless, the verdict when it came in was of murder by someone unknown. Whatever the police believed, clearly they had no case against Jim at that time, and I imagine the verdict gave them what they wanted, which was time. I know now of course that they had been tracing back his life for several months and had found nothing suspicious about it.
He was in debt, but not more so than any man with an extravagant wife and a limited income. He was well known to all the banks, and had so far as they could find no safe deposit boxes save his own. His dislike of Mrs. Lancaster’s gold hoarding was a matter of record. He had not speculated or been caught in the market, and his presence in the Lancaster house that day at that hour was acknowledged by the family to be the result of a summons by telephone.
But the press was disappointed by the whole procedure. It commented rather sharply of the fact that little or no mention of the chest and its contents had been made, although there seemed no doubt that the gold—it preferred to ignore the fact that part of it was not gold at all but currency—had provided the motive for the murder.
“The police admit that this gold is missing,” one paper said. “Then where is it? How much of it was there? Gold is bulky and heavy. Could the murderer have escaped with it, and if so, how?”
One enterprising journalist had figured that seventy-five thousand dollars in gold, an amount which he seemed to have guessed with uncanny accuracy, would weigh a total of two hundred and seventy-six pounds. But on that morning when the Crescent left the inquest and started home, all we knew was that Jim Wellington had won the first round in what might be a fight for his life, and that the Crescent itself had for a time at least been vindicated.
All of us saw Helen on the pavement outside. She was with another young woman, both very smartly dressed, and before they got into a car Helen had already lighted a cigarette. There was a man in the car, and he was grinning cheerfully. But I was fortunately the only one who heard what followed.
“Well,” he said, “which of them did it?”
Helen smiled back at him.
“Can you see them and still believe that Queen Victoria is dead? No verdict. If you ask me, they’re all capable of it. Given a reason, of course.”
“Such as?”
“Protection, pride, dignity—how can I tell?”
“What gets me is how you yourself overlooked that money, Helen!”
“I didn’t know it was there.”
Then they drove away.
Chapter XVIII
MRS. LANCASTER WAS BURIED that same afternoon from a downtown mortuary chapel. Owing to the enormous curiosity aroused by the case, admission to the services was by card only, and for these Margaret had herself made out the list.
It was the brief but beautiful serv
ice of the Episcopal church, and we were back home again by four o’clock. The funeral had tired Mother, so she went to her room, and thus at last I found time to follow George Talbot’s suggestion of a visit to the woodland where he had found the gold piece. For now at last I realized the vital importance of that money, gold or whatever it had been, from the chest.
I was too late, however. To my astonishment the woodland was already occupied by four strange men, and their procedure was so curious that I stood fascinated, watching them. They had eight wooden stakes, a spade, a hammer, several long pieces of twine and a can of water which I recognized as Miss Emily’s watering can with the sprinkler removed; and what they were doing was to drive the four stakes to form a large square, outline it with cord and then divide it in the same manner into four smaller squares.
Each man then took one square and on his hands and knees examined it carefully. Every now and then one of them got up, took the can and poured water onto the ground, while the others watched intently. How long they had been doing this I did not know, nor did I know the purpose of the water until that night, when Herbert Dean enlightened me.
“Looking to see if the ground had been disturbed,” he explained. “If it soaks in quickly and there are air-bubbles, then they can know that the earth has been dug up recently. And the woodland is obvious; it’s sheltered, while the rest is open. But of course they’ll not find the gold there.”
“Why not?” I asked.
“Because, my dear young lady, the person who committed that murder and got away with that money is too smart to have buried it there.”
That conversation took place in Jim Wellington’s house late that night. Mother, as if to make up for her inaction the day before, had stayed down until eleven, insisting on game after game of cribbage until I had gone nearly wild. Whatever she had feared after the murder, whatever had made her bring Holmes into the house and speak so mysteriously to me, she had been much more calm since she discovered that the gold was gone. But my attempt to sound her out that night met with failure.
“Mother,” I said, summoning all my courage when at last she prepared to go upstairs, “don’t you think that now you can explain what you said to me on the night of the murder?”
“What in the world are you talking about, Louisa?”
I was chilled, but I had to go on.
“You know perfectly well, mother. I was not to go out of the house, day or night. You said there was a reason.”
“Why should I explain that? It’s self-evident. And you did go out. I happen to know that! You deliberately disobeyed me. If anyone had told me that a daughter of mine—”
“Listen, mother,” I said earnestly. “It’s frightfully important. It may be vital. What was it about spoiling two lives? That’s certainly not self-evident.”
She was putting away the cribbage set, and I thought she stood for a minute with her back to me as though she were undecided, if one can imagine Mother being undecided about anything. Then very deliberately she put away the set and closed the drawer. When she turned to me her face was quite blank.
“I dare say I was merely sharing in the general hysteria,” she said blandly. “I am not certain precisely what I said, but I was certainly anxious about those two poor women next door.”
With that she admonished me as usual about locking the windows, and in her long heavy black swept out of the room and up the stairs. Mother must be well over sixty, for I was the child of her middle age, but she still sits erect in a chair and moves with the dignity which is a part of her tradition. I felt rather helpless as I watched her go, for I was as certain then as I am now that she could have helped if she had wanted to. I still marvel at her silence, at the pride or whatever it might have been that kept her suspicions to herself, or to herself and Mrs. Talbot. But here again I am up against the Crescent itself, its loathing of publicity, its distrust of the police, and its firm belief that every man’s house is his castle.
That was of course on Saturday night, and I had no intention of doing anything but follow Mother up to bed.
But I did not get to bed until hours later.
Due to that false sense of security of Mother’s, that the thing was over and done with, Holmes was no longer sleeping in the house; and as I went upstairs myself I stopped at the rear window which overlooks the garage and saw him in his room. Probably he had forgotten to draw the shade, or was indifferent, for he was still fully dressed. Mother had gone into her room. I stood by the window and gazed in surprise at what he was doing.
What he was doing, so far as I could see, was cutting the pages out of a book. He would take a knife, bend over a table, cut carefully and then take out the page and drop it, either onto the floor or into a basket. I could not see which. And he was working carefully and deliberately, so far as I could tell, doing only one page at a time. It seemed to be slow work, or perhaps he was clumsy; for he managed to take out only two or three while I watched, and the whole performance was so mysterious that when at last Mother called me I could scarcely tear myself away.
When finally I was free I was still curious. Holmes’s window was dark by that time, but it occurred to me that in all this dreadful business perhaps I had considered Holmes far too little. Certainly he knew a great deal about us. If the Lancaster servants had known about the money, for instance, he could easily have known also. I remembered that time I had seen him with Peggy on the path.
Then too he could easily have known of the axe in the woodshed, and the habits of the Lancaster house. True, he had had an alibi for the hour of the murder; Mary had said he was having a cup of tea in the kitchen at the time. But our kitchen clock is notoriously unreliable; that is Mary has a habit of turning it ahead, so that the other servants will get down in good time to breakfast.
Therefore Holmes, having his tea before taking Mother out, might actually have had it some fifteen minutes or so before four. And Holmes, like Bryan Dalton, had an eye for a pretty girl. If the Lancasters’ Peggy was involved, it seemed to me that she was far more likely to have been his tool in securing the gold than anyone else. The only stumbling block seemed to be that, having already secured the money, the murder in that case was utterly unreasonable. Unless of course he had needed more time in which to dispose of it, or unless Mrs. Lancaster herself had been suspicious.
But apparently she had not been suspicious at all. It was Mr. Lancaster who, for some reason still unknown, had insisted on the audit on that previous Thursday.
It was all too much for me, and so I determined to carry my new theory to Jim and the Dean person. I had to wait for Mother to settle down, of course, and she took a maddening time about it that night, making her usual Saturday preparation by putting her hair in kid rollers and laying out her church clothes for the morning. At last she slept, however, and once again for the third successive night I crept out of the house.
I had expected to have to rouse the Wellington house when I got there, and even to defy any officer detailed to watch the place. But neither was necessary; there was a light in the library windows, and my tap on one brought Jim himself to it.
“It’s Lou, Jim,” I said. “Can you let me in?”
“Go to the kitchen porch. I’ll open the door there.”
There was something conspiratorial in our movements; in the silence with which the door opened and I slid in. But there was nothing conspiratorial in the library, now miraculously restored to order, where Mr. Herbert Ranchester Dean was hastily putting on a coat and lamps were cheerfully burning.
“Well!” he said, “it’s the young lady of the cellar! Are you like your fellow creatures who live in the basement, and only emerge at night?”
“I was at the inquest today.”
“Were you indeed? And what did you think of our little performance?”
“I’m more interesting in one I saw an hour ago,” I told him, and took the chair he offered me.
Suddenly his light manner left him and I saw him as he was, shrewd, keen and observant
. But he finished lightning his pipe before he asked me about it.
“What was that?”
“It’s about our chauffeur, Holmes, Mr. Dean,” I said. “Why do you suppose he would be cutting the leaves out of a book tonight and then throwing them away? What is he trying to get rid of?”
He sat up suddenly and put down his pipe.
“He was doing that?”
“I watched him in his room, about an hour ago.”
“What sort of book? Could you tell? Was it large or small? And what did he do with the pages?”
“He threw them down, either onto the floor or into his wastebasket. I know there is one there. And it seemed an ordinary sized book. It might be a detective story. He reads a lot of them.”
“Has he an open fire in his room?”
“No. It is heated by a radiator, from the house.”
I thought even Jim was puzzled by his intensity and the speed of his questions. He got up, as though he were about to start out after Holmes at once. Then he reconsidered and sat down again.
“That will keep,” he said. “Either he’s burned them already, or he’ll dispose of them early tomorrow morning. If they’re gone they’re gone. If not—”
He did not finish this, but sat drawing at his pipe and thinking.
“Just what do you know about this man?” he asked at last.
“Well, very little really. What does one know of people like that. I believe he bootlegs for George Talbot and Bryan Dalton now and then, although Mother doesn’t suspect it. And he speaks sometimes of a place in the country; just a small place, but I imagine he either stores liquor there or makes it.”
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