The Black Lizard Big Book of Locked-Room Mysteries

by Otto Penzler

“I meant a master of my soul, Walter.”

  “I don’t understand you.”

  “Yes, you do. Look at me! You can’t. My soul is stronger than yours, Walter, and in your heart you know it.”

  “You’re talking nonsense.”

  “Don’t mumble your words. That’s my tragedy, if you only knew it. I have yet to meet a man bold enough to face me down. How could I surrender myself to one whose soul was secretly afraid of mine? So here I sit. You know that the madame I have hitched to my name is just to save my face. No one would believe that a woman as beautiful as I could be still unmarried—and respectable. But I am both, worse luck!”

  “It’s your own fault that you’re alone. You think too well of yourself. You make believe to scorn all men.”

  “Well, if it’s a bluff, why doesn’t some man call it?”

  “I will right now. I’m tired of this fooling. You’ve got to marry me.”

  “Look at me when you say that, Walter.”

  A silence.

  “Ah!—you can’t, you see.”

  “Ah, Rose, don’t torture me this way! Can’t you see I’m mad about you? You spoil my rest at night; you come between me and my work by day. I hunger and thirst for you like a man in a desert. Think what a team you and I would make, Rose. There’d be no stopping us short of the White House.”

  Here, to my chagrin, the dictagraph was abruptly turned off, but when, a minute or two later, Mr. Barron burst out of the inner room purple with rage I guessed that no change had occurred in the situation. He flung across the floor and out of the door without a glance in my direction.

  Madame Storey called to me to bring in my notebook. As I entered she was talking to the monkey.

  “Giannino, you are better off than you know. Better be a dumb beast than a half-thinking animal.”

  The little thing wrinkled up his forehead and chirruped as he always did when she addressed him.

  “You disagree with me? I tell you men would rather go to jail than put themselves to the trouble of thinking clearly.”

  II

  Eddie, the hall-boy, and I had become at least outwardly friendly. In his heart I think Eddie always despised me as “a jane out of the storehouse”—one of his own expressions—but as he had the keenest curiosity about all that went on in our shop, he was obliged to be affable in order to tap such sources of information as I possessed. He adored Madame Storey, of course; all youths did, as well as older males. As for me, I couldn’t help liking the amusing little wretch—he was so new.

  Like most boys of his age his ruling passion was for airplanes and aviators. At this time his particular idol was the famous Lieutenant George Grantland, who had broken so many records. Grantland had just started on a three days’ point-to-point flight from Camp Tasker, encircling the whole country east of the Mississippi, and Eddie, in order to follow him, was obliged to buy an extra every hour. Bursting with the subject and having no one else to talk to, he brought these up to my room. This was his style—of course I am only guessing at the figures.

  “Here’s the latest. Landed at New Orleans four-thirty this a.m., two hours ahead of time. Gee! If I could only get out to a bulletin-board! Slept four hours and went on. Four hundred and forty-two miles in under four hours. Wouldn’t that expand your lungs? Say, that guy is a king of the air all right. Flies by night as well as day. They have lights to guide him where to land. Hasn’t had to come down once for trouble. Here’s a picture of his plane. It’s the Bentley-Critchard type. They’re just out. Good for a hundred and forty an hour. Six hundred horse. Do you get that? Think of driving six hundred plugs through the clouds. Some team!”

  After two days of this I was almost as well acquainted with the exploits of Lieutenant Grantland as his admirer. Every hour or two Eddie would have a new picture of the dashing aviator to show me. Even after being snapshotted in the blazing sun and reproduced in a newspaper half-tone, he remained a handsome young fellow.

  Eddie was in the thick of this when they brought Philippa Dean up from the Tombs, but as she was indubitably a “class one jane,” his attention was momentarily won from his newspapers. The assistant district attorney did not accompany her. To be obliged to wait outside was, I suppose, too great a trial to his dignity. Miss Dean was under escort of two gigantic plain-clothes men, the slender little thing. I was glad, at any rate, that they had not handcuffed her.

  My first impression was a favourable one; her eyes struck you at once. They were full, limpid, blue, very wide open under fine brows, giving her an expression of proud candour in which there was something really affecting—however, I had learned ere this from Madame Storey that you cannot read a woman’s soul in her eyes; so I reserved judgment. Her hair was light-brown. She was dressed with that fine simplicity which is the despair of newly arrived women. At present she looked hard and wary, and her lips were compressed into a scarlet line—but that was small wonder in her situation.

  Madame Storey came out when she heard them. What was her first impression of the girl I cannot say, for she never gave anything away in her face at such moments. She invited the two detectives to make themselves comfortable in the outer office, and we three women passed into the big room. She waved the girl to a seat.

  “You may relax,” she said smiling; “nobody is going to put you through the third degree here.”

  But the girl sat down bolt upright, with her hands clenched in her lap. It was painful to see that tightness. Madame Storey applied herself to the task of charming it away. She said to the ape:

  “Giannino, take off your hat to Miss Dean, and tell her that we wish her well.”

  The little animal stood up on the table, jerked off his cap and gibbered in his own tongue. It was a performance that never failed to win a smile, but this girl’s lips looked as if they had forgotten how.

  “The assistant district attorney has asked me to examine you,” Madame Storey began in friendly style. “Being a public prosecutor, he’s bent on your conviction, having nobody else to accuse. But I may as well tell you that I don’t share his feelings. Indeed, he’s so cock-sure that it would give me pleasure to prove him wrong.”

  I knew that my employer was sincere in saying this, but I suppose the poor girl had learned to her cost that the devil himself can be sympathetic. At any rate, the speech had no effect on her.

  “I hope you will believe that I have no object except to discover the truth,” Madame Storey went on.

  “That’s what they all say,” muttered the girl.

  “Satisfy yourself in your own way as to whether you can trust me. Come, we have all afternoon.”

  “Am I obliged to answer your questions?” demanded the girl.

  “By no means,” was the prompt reply. “Why don’t you question me first?”

  The girl took her at her word. “Who are you?” she asked. “I have been told nothing.”

  “Madame Rosika Storey. They call me a practical psychologist. The district attorney’s office sometimes does me the honour to consult me, particularly in the cases of women.”

  “You’ll get no confession out of me.”

  “I don’t expect to. I don’t believe you did it. No sane woman would shoot a man between the shoulder-blades and expect to make out that it was a suicide. At any rate, Ashcomb Poor seems to have richly deserved his fate. Come now, frankly, did you do it?”

  The girl’s blue eyes flashed. “I did not.”

  “Good! Then tell me what happened that night.”

  The girl sullenly shook her head. “What’s the use?”

  “Why, to clear yourself, naturally.”

  “They haven’t enough evidence to convict me. They couldn’t convict me, because I didn’t do it.”

  “That’s a perilous line to take, my dear. I suspect you haven’t had much experience with juries. The gentlemen of the jury would consider silence in a woman not only unnatural, but incriminating. Of course they might let you off, anyway, if you condescended to ogle them, but as I say, it’s perilous.
Why did you confess in the first place?”

  “To get rid of them. They were driving me out of my mind with their questions.”

  “I can well understand that. Well then, what did happen, really?”

  The girl set her lips. “I have made up my mind to say nothing, and I shall stick to it,” she replied.

  Madame Storey spread out her hands. “Very well, let’s talk about something else. Dean is a good name here in New York. Are you of the New York family?”

  “My people have lived here for four generations.”

  “I have read of a great beau in the sixties and seventies—Philip Dean. Are you related to him?”

  “He was my grandfather.”

  “I might have guessed it from your first name. How interesting! All the chronicles of those days are full of references to his wit and savoir faire. But he must have been a rich man. How does it come that you have to work for your living?”

  “The usual story: the first two generations won the family fortune, and the next two lost it. I am of the fifth generation.”

  “Well, I suppose one cannot have a famous bon vivant in the family for nothing.”

  “Oh, no one could speak ill of my grandfather. He was a gallant gentleman. I knew him as a child. He spent his money in scientific experiments which only benefited others. My poor father was not to blame either. He lost the rest of the money trying to recoup his father’s losses in Wall Street.”

  “And you were thrown on your own resources.”

  “Oh, I was never a pathetic figure. I could get work. There were always women, not very sure of themselves socially, who were glad to engage Philip Dean’s granddaughter.”

  “That’s how you came to go to Mrs. Poor?”

  “No, that was different. Mrs. Poor didn’t need anybody to tell her things. Her family was as good as my own. Her husband was travelling abroad and she was lonely. She engaged me as a sort of companion.”

  “When did her husband return?”

  The girl frowned. “Now you think you’re leading me up to it, don’t you?”

  Madame Storey laughed. “I suspect you’re the kind of young lady that nobody can lead any farther than she is willing to go.”

  Miss Dean glanced suspiciously at me. “Is she taking down all I say?” she demanded.

  “Not until I tell her to,” Madame Storey replied.

  “He returned two months ago.”

  “Do you mind describing their house at Grimstead for me?” asked Madame Storey. “There’s no harm in that, is there?”

  The girl shrugged. “No. It’s a small house, considering their means, and it looks even smaller because of being built in the style of an English cottage, with low, overhanging eaves and dormer windows. You enter through a vestibule under the stairs and issue into a square hall. This hall is two stories high and has a gallery running around three sides. On your left is the library; on your right the small reception-room; the living-room, a large room, is at the back of the hall, with the dining-room adjoining it. These two rooms look out over the garden and the brook below. Between reception and dining-room there is a passage leading away to the kitchen wing. Besides pantry, kitchen, and laundry, this wing has a housekeeper’s room and a servants’ dining-room.”

  “And upstairs?”

  “Mr. and Mrs. Poor’s own suite is at the back of the house over the living-room and dining-room. My room is over the library. There is a guest room over the reception-room. All the servants’ rooms are in the kitchen wing. There is no third story.”

  Madame Storey affected to consult the notes on her desk. “Where was this burglar-alarm that there has been so much talk about?”

  “Hidden in a cranny between the telephone-booth and the hall fireplace. The telephone-booth was let into the wall just beyond the library door, and the fireplace is adjoining.”

  “Hidden, you say. Was there anything secret about it?”

  “No. Everybody in the house knew of it.”

  “What kind of switch was it?”

  “It was just a little handle that lifted up and pulled down. When it was up it was off; when it was down it was on.”

  “Describe the servants, will you?”

  “How is one to describe servants? The butler, Briggs—well, he was just a butler, smooth, deferential, fairly efficient. The maids were just typical maids. None of them had been there long. Servants don’t stick nowadays.”

  “What about Mrs. Batten?”

  In spite of herself the girl’s face softened—yet at the same time a guarded tone crept into her voice. “Oh, she’s different,” she said.

  Madame Storey did not miss the guarded tone. “How different?” she asked.

  “I didn’t look on Mrs. Batten as a servant but as a friend.”

  “Describe her for me.”

  The girl, looking down, paused before replying. Her softened face was wholly charming. “A simple kindly, motherly soul,” she said with a half-smile. “Rather absurd, because she takes everything so seriously. But while you laugh at her you get more fond of her. She doesn’t mind being laughed at.”

  “You have the knack of hitting off character,” said Madame Storey. “I see her perfectly.”

  I began to appreciate Madame Storey’s wizardry. Cautiously feeling her way with the girl, she had discovered that Philippa had a talent for description in which she took pride—perhaps the girl aspired to be a writer. At any rate, when she was asked to describe anything, her eyes became bright and abstracted, and she forgot her situation for the moment.

  It seemed to me that we were on the verge of stumbling on something, but to my surprise Madame Storey dropped Mrs. Batten. “Describe Mrs. Poor for me,” she asked.

  “That is more difficult,” the girl said unhesitatingly. “She is a complex character. We got along very well together. She was always kind, always most considerate. Indeed, she was an admirable woman, not in the least spoiled by the way people kowtowed to her. But I cannot say that I knew her very well, because she was always reserved—I mean with everybody. One felt sometimes that she would like to unbend, but had never learned how.”

  “And the master of the house?”

  The girl shuddered slightly. But still preoccupied in conveying her impressions, she did not take alarm. “He was a rich man,” she answered, “and the son of a rich man. That is to say, from babyhood he had never been denied anything. Yet he was an attractive man—when he got his own way; full of spirits and good nature. Everybody liked him—that is, nearly everybody.”

  “Didn’t you like him?” asked Madame Storey.

  “Yes, I did in a way—but——” She stopped.

  “But what?”

  She hung her head. “I’m talking too much,” she muttered.

  Madame Storey appeared to drop the whole matter with an air of relief. “Let’s have tea,” she said to me. “I can see from Giannino’s sorrowful eyes that he is famishing.”

  I hastened into the next room for the things. Madame Storey, in the way that she has, started to rattle on about cakes as if they were the most important things in the world.

  “Every afternoon at this hour Miss Brickley and Giannino and I regale ourselves. We have cakes sent in from the pastrycook’s. Don’t you love cakes with thick icing all over them? I’m childish on the subject. When I was a little girl I swore to myself that when I grew up I would stuff myself with iced cakes.”

  When I returned I saw that in spite of herself the girl had relaxed even further. Her eyes sparkled at the sight of the great silver plate of cakes. After all, she was a human girl, and I don’t suppose she’d been able to indulge her sweet tooth in jail. Giannino set up an excited chattering. Upon being given his share he retired to his favourite perch on top of a big picture to make away with it.

  While we ate and drank we talked of everything that women talk of: cakes, clothes, tenors, and what-not. One would never have guessed that the thought of murder was present in each of our minds. The girl relaxed completely. It was charming
to watch the play of her expressive eyes.

  Madame Storey, who, notwithstanding her boasted indulgence, was very abstemious, finished her cake and lighted the inevitable cigarette. Giannino stroked her cheek, begging piteously for more cake, but the plate had been put out of his way. Madame Storey, happening to lay down her cigarette, Giannino, ever on the watch for such a contingency, snatched it up and clambered with chatterings of derision up to the top of his picture. There he sat with half-closed eyes blowing clouds of smoke in the most abandoned manner. Philippa Dean laughed outright; it was strange to hear that sound from her. I was obliged to climb on a chair to recover the cigarette. I spend half my time following up that little wretch. If I don’t take the cigarette from him it makes him sick, yet he hasn’t sense enough to leave them alone—just like a man.

  “Well, shall we go on with our talk?” asked Madame Storey casually.

  The girl spread out her hands. “You have me at a disadvantage,” she said. “It is so hard to resist you.”

  “Don’t try,” suggested my employer, smiling. “You may take your notes now, Miss Brickley. You needn’t be afraid,” she added to the girl. “This is entirely between ourselves. No one else shall see them. You were saying that you liked Mr. Poor—with reservations.”

  “I meant that one could have enjoyed his company very much if he had been content to be natural. But he was one of those men who pride themselves on their—their—what shall I say——”

  “Their masculinity?”

  “Exactly. And of course with a man of that kind a girl is obliged constantly to be on her guard.”

  “The servants have stated that he pestered you with his attentions,” Madame Storey remarked.

  The girl lowered her eyes. “They misunderstood,” she said. “Mr. Poor affected a very flowery, gallant style with all women alike; it didn’t mean anything.”

  Madame Storey glanced at a paper on her desk. “The butler deposes that one evening he saw Mr. Poor seize you on the stairs and attempt to kiss you, and that you boxed his ears and fled to your room.”

  Miss Dean blushed painfully and made no reply.