“What for?”
“There’s always the chance that the murderer, in running away, dropped something, even a part of the plunder. Then, too, remember the buttons.”
“Yes; I see what you mean, but it’s getting late now. The light’s none too good—and I’m tired, chief, tired out. Suppose we let that go until tomorrow—or you do it alone.”
“No; I’ll wait for you tomorrow. We can do it together.”
“Oh,” Bristow asked, as if suddenly remembering an important item, “what kind of shoes is Perry wearing?”
“An old pair of high-topped tennis shoes—black canvas.”
“Rubber soles?”
“Yes.”
“I’m sorry,” observed Bristow. “That’s another complication. Morley wore rubbers last night. Either he or Perry might have made that footprint on the porch.”
“How about Withers?” Greenleaf advanced a new idea. “He didn’t tell us anything he did after seeing Campbell leave here last night.”
“That’s true. You’d better see him tonight. Ask him about that; and find out what time he returned to the Brevord. If you don’t get it out of him tonight, you probably never will. By tomorrow, his detective, Braceway, will be on the scene, and the chances are that Withers will talk to him and not to us—that is, if he talks at all.”
“Then I’ll see you in the morning?”
“Yes; any time. I’ll get up early. But, if you get anything out of Withers tonight, telephone me—or if your man Jenkins reports on his search for the fellow with the gold tooth.”
“O. K.,” agreed the chief, and swung off down the hill.
Bristow, whom he had left absorbed in thought, turned after a few minutes and went back to the door of No. 5. Miss Kelly answered his ring.
“I’m sorry to disturb you,” he said, his smile a compliment, “but there’s something I’m very anxious for you to do for me. Will you clean Miss Fulton’s finger nails as soon as you can? And I want you to keep everything you get as a result of that process.”
“Do her nails!” The nurse was amazed.
“Yes; please. I’ll explain later. And another thing: don’t cut the cuticle. Don’t bother with that at all. Just get what’s under the nails. You’d better use merely an orange stick, I think. Will you do that for me carefully—very carefully? It’s of the greatest importance.”
Miss Kelly finally said she would.
He went back to his own porch and sat a long time watching the last, fading rays of the sunset.
But he was not thinking about the landscape.
“This man Withers,” he was reflecting, “and his getting this detective, Braceway. Let me think. I mustn’t look at these things in the light of my theories only. Too much theorizing is confusing.
“I want to get the angle of the ordinary man in the street. How would it look to him? Why, this way: either Withers is on the level and wants to do everything possible to have the murderer caught—or he’s smart enough to employ Braceway in the knowledge that neither Braceway nor anybody else can get anything from him that he doesn’t want to tell—I wonder.”
CHAPTER VIII
THE BREATH OF SCANDAL
A telegraph messenger laboured up to the hill on his bicycle and climbed the steps to the porch of No. 5, displaying in his hand several telegrams. Two other boys had preceded him within the last hour. Friends of the Fulton family, having read of the tragedy in afternoon papers throughout the country, were wiring their messages of sympathy.
This was no little local, isolated affair, Bristow reflected. The prominence of the victim in Washington and in the South, together with the mystery surrounding the crime, made it a matter of national interest. If he could bring the thing to a successful issue, the capture and punishment of the right man, there would be fame in it for him. The thought stimulated him.
A few minutes later Withers came up Manniston Road and went into No. 5. Soon after that Miss Kelly brought Bristow a little paper packet.
“I’m not sure I ought to do this,” she said, “but, as long as the authorities have ordered it, I guess I’m safe. This is what I get as a result of ‘doing’ Miss Fulton’s nails.”
He thanked her and reassured her.
Mattie appeared at the door to tell him his supper was ready. Before he sat down at the table, he telephoned Greenleaf.
“There’s something else I want you to send to Charlotte with the Perry package.”
“Same sort of thing?” inquired the chief.
“Yes—Miss Fulton’s.”
“Wow!” barked Greenleaf over the wire. “I never thought of that.”
“That’s all right, I nearly forgot it myself. How will you send for it?”
The chief thought a moment.
“I’ll come after it myself,” he said. “I’ll be up there as soon as I see Withers. I want to talk to you about the inquest. It will be held at eleven o’clock tomorrow morning.”
“Come ahead,” Bristow invited. “You’ll have to be up here in this neighbourhood anyway if you want to see Withers. He came up to Number Five just a few minutes ago. You can catch him there.”
After supper he went back to the front porch in time to see in the dusk the white uniform and cap of a trained nurse as she came down the hill. He surmised that she was one of the six nurses who lived in No. 7, the house between his and that of the murdered woman. These nurses were employed throughout the day at the big sanitarium located just over the brow of the hill at the end of Manniston Road.
Perhaps, she could tell him what he wanted to know.
“I beg your pardon,” he called to her persuasively, “but may I trouble you to come up here for a moment?”
She obeyed the summons with slow, hesitant steps.
He pushed forward a chair for her and bowed.
“Unfortunately,” he apologized, “I don’t know your name.”
She enlightened him: “Rutgers; Miss Emily Rutgers.” In his turn, he told her briefly of his connection with the murder.
“I was wondering,” he began, “whether you had ever heard anything unusual from Number Five.”
Miss Rutgers, who was blond and too fat, had a heavy, peculiarly hoarse voice. She wanted to be certain that he had authority to “question people” about the case. He made that clear to her.
“Well, yes,” she finally said. “Mrs. Withers and Miss Fulton quarreled a good deal. We girls had remarked on it. And yesterday they had an awful row. I heard some of it because it was in the middle of the day, and I had run down here from the sanitarium to fix up the laundry we’d forgotten early in the morning.”
“What did you hear?”
“It was something about money. I didn’t really try to listen, but I couldn’t help hearing some of it, they talked so loud.”
“Yes?”
“I got the idea that Miss Fulton wanted to borrow some money from Mrs. Withers for a purpose that Mrs. Withers didn’t approve of. ‘Well,’ I heard Mrs. Withers say after Miss Fulton had almost screamed about it, ‘you can’t have any more. I haven’t got it. That’s all there is to that. I can’t let you have it when I haven’t got it!’
“Miss Fulton said something—I think it was about Mr. Withers or about asking him for the money.
“‘You’d better not do that,’ Mrs. Withers warned her. ‘I tried that once, and he flew into a perfect rage. He was so worked up that he looked like a crazy man, like a man who would do anything. He looked as if he might kill me, choke me to death, anything!’”
“Did Miss Fulton answer that?”
“If she did, I didn’t hear it. I just got the impression that they were both angry and mixed up in a terrific quarrel.”
“Have you ever heard anything else like that at any other time?”
“Oh, we often heard them fussing. Miss Fulton did the fussing. Mr
s. Withers was almost always gentle and calm. One other time I did hear Mrs. Withers say she’d lent Miss Fulton all she could afford.”
“When was that?”
“Some time ago—a month or six weeks ago; maybe two months.”
“Money, always money,” the lame man said.
He was silent, thoughtful, for several minutes.
“I’m ever so much obliged, Miss Rutgers,” he said at last. “Every bit of evidence we can get will help us—perhaps.”
Miss Rutgers had risen.
“There’s one other thing, Mr. Bristow,” she volunteered. “There was a man hanging around Number Five last night; rather, it was early this morning.”
“How do you know that?” His voice was at once urgent.
“Bessie—Miss Hardesty and I have our beds on the sleeping porch. Hers is the one nearest to Number Five. She told me about it this morning. At about one o’clock—or between one and two—she thought she heard a sloppy footstep near the sleeping porch. At that time it was raining, but not hard—just a fine drizzle.
“She went to the wiring that walls the sleeping porch on the end toward Number Five, and she made out the figure of a man coming from the front of Number Five and going toward the back fence. He had just passed the sleeping porch. She turned on the little flashlight we keep out there and saw him.”
“Who was it? Could she make him out at all?”
“She said it was a negro.”
“Did she see his face?”
“Not enough to recognize him, but enough to make her sure he was a black man.”
“She didn’t try to identify him?”
“Well, she thought it was the darky Perry who does so much work in this neighbourhood. She said she thought so because the figure of the man she saw in the rain reminded her of Perry’s general appearance.”
“Did she call out to him?”
“No; and he didn’t run. He just walked fast and was out of sight in a moment. When I heard of the murder early this afternoon, I was up at the sanitarium, and I went to the matron and told her what I’ve just told you. It was her advice that, as soon as I got off duty, I should come down here and telephone what I knew to the police. She didn’t want me to do it from the sanitarium because the patients might have heard it and become too much excited.”
“I see. Where’s Miss Hardesty now?”
“This is her night on duty at the sanitarium.”
“I see. Well, she’ll have to testify at the inquest tomorrow. You might tell her that. Never mind, though. The police will notify her.”
“I know she won’t like that much,” Miss Rutgers declared; “but, of course, she’ll tell what she knows. How about me?”
“I can’t say yet, but I don’t think we’ll need you at the inquest. We may need you later.”
“Very well,” she consented. “Let me know when the time comes. Good night, Mr. Bristow.”
He went inside and picked up a novel. He wanted to “clear his brain” for the talk with the chief of police.
Greenleaf came in, looking downcast.
“What did you get from Withers?” Bristow asked.
“Nothing but a good bawling out,” the chief said testily. “We won’t get anything more from him for some time. He told me so. He said: ‘You fellows have been carrying things with a high hand today, questioning and frightening everybody with your hidden threats and third degrees. Get out! I’ll do my talking to Sam Braceway tomorrow.’ But I did ask him one question—the thing you wanted to know. I asked him whether he had worn rubber shoes last night.”
“What did he say?” Bristow was inwardly amused by Greenleaf’s pertinacity.
“He said it was none of my business; and he flew into a rage about it—worse than he was in here this morning. He looked like a crazy man. I watched him gesticulate and get red in the face and foam and splutter. Why, he looked like a man who might commit murder any moment.”
At that, Bristow started. The chief’s words were strikingly like what Miss Rutgers had told him she had heard Mrs. Withers say: “He looked as if he might kill me, choke me to death, anything!”
“He’s going to spend the night in Number Five,” Greenleaf concluded; “he and Miss Fulton and the nurse, Miss Kelly.”
Bristow tossed his novel into a vacant chair and spread out his hands.
“Well, chief,” he said, “what do you make out of all this? What do you intend to do at the inquest tomorrow? By the way, here’s something you’ll need.”
He related what Miss Rutgers had told him.
“I’m willing to take your advice,” Greenleaf announced, “but this is my idea: we’ll present all we have against Perry, and have him held for the grand jury. We’ve got enough to do that—the buttons evidence, his failure to present anything like an alibi, the mark of the rubber sole on the front porch, the inability of the woman, Lucy Thomas, to say whether or not she gave Perry the kitchen key to Number Five.”
“She can’t remember that, can she?”
“No; not even when we’ve got her locked up in jail.”
“Chief, do you think Perry killed and robbed Mrs. Withers?”
“I think this,” he replied: “it’s an even chance he did. If he didn’t, it’s a sure thing that his being accused of it and locked up for it may make the real criminal more careless and give us a better chance to catch him.”
“Yes; you’re right. What reports have you had on the mysterious man Withers says he saw, the fellow with the long-visored cap, long raincoat, and gold tooth?”
“A little something. Jenkins has scoured the town pretty well in the time he had, A clerk at Maplewood Inn thinks—thinks—he saw such a man in the lobby there about three weeks ago. And one of our patrolmen, Ashurst, says he’s pretty certain he saw him two months ago near here, in fact down on Freeman Avenue near where Manniston Road branches off from it. It was at night, nearly midnight.”
“Did Ashurst watch him?”
“Only carelessly. Says he saw him walk on down Freeman Avenue as if he intended going into the town.”
“What did the clerk see? What did this fellow do in the Maplewood Inn lobby?”
“Nothing—came in, bought a pack of cigarettes, and went out.”
“Anybody else seen him?”
“Not so far as we’ve been able to discover.”
“Has he ever registered at any of the hotels here?”
“Not that we can find; no, never.”
“Funny,” ruminated Bristow, “very funny. Yes, I think you’re right, chief. Put up the case against Perry until we can do something better or prove it on him absolutely. Of course, if the laboratory test shows that he had human flesh—a white person’s flesh—under his finger nails, that will settle it in my mind. There couldn’t be any other answer.”
“Will the test show whether it’s a white person’s skin or a black’s?”
“Of course. There’s no pigment in a white person’s skin.”
“Is that so? That’s something I never knew before. Anyway, it certainly will nail him, won’t it? But, you don’t feel anyways sure Perry’s the guilty man, do you?”
“No, I can’t say I do. I’ll tell you what we’ve got to consider, and it’s not a very pretty theory; either that Morley killed Mrs. Withers, and Miss Fulton knows it; or that Morley and Miss Fulton together killed her; or that, although Perry killed her, we, in looking for the murderer, have come pretty near to stumbling on some sort of a nasty family scandal, something in which Maria Fulton, Enid Withers and George Withers, with perhaps another man, all have been mixed up.
“I mean a scandal ugly enough for all the rest of them to make desperate attempts to keep it hidden, even when Mrs. Withers is dead and gone. Frankly, I didn’t believe Withers was in on the murder or that he believes Maria had anything to do with it or knows how it was done.
“But Maria Fulton—that’s different. How else are we to explain her behaviour with us when we tried to interview her, the fact of her sudden abhorrence for Morley, the man to whom she was engaged only yesterday?
“And how else are we to explain Morley’s unexplained two hours of last night, and his apparent terror today, and his whole connection with the case—the matter of the ring found in his hotel room, and all that? There’s something fishy about this thing somehow, something fishy that includes Maria Fulton and Morley.
“This fellow with the brown beard and the gold tooth strengthens the theory of some rotten scandal. He must be mixed up in it some way. I’ll bet anything, though, that he had nothing to do with the murder. That’s what we want to get at—this inside scandal, this something which existed long before the murder but yet may have led indirectly to the murder.”
Greenleaf sighed and passed his hand wearily across his eyes. He had had a hard day, the hardest day of his life.
“But you think my plan for the inquest is all right?” he asked once more.
“Yes; it’s the best thing possible. By the way, don’t have me summoned to testify. Leave my evidence until the trial. I don’t want to wear myself out going down there for merely an inquest.”
“All right; I’ll fix that. We’ve enough evidence without yours—enough for the inquest, anyway.”
“Thanks.”
Bristow looked at his watch, and Greenleaf got up to go.
“I’ll be up here between eight and nine tomorrow morning,” he said, “if that suits you.”
“What for?”
“To get a good look at the grounds back of Number Five. If the murderer dropped anything, I want to be the man to pick it up.”
“Oh, I’d forgotten that,” Bristow said in a tone indicating his hopelessness of finding anything worth while. “Yes; I’ll be ready for you.”
Something else was on Greenleaf’s mind.
“This Braceway,” he said sarcastically, “the smartest detective in the South. He’ll be here in the morning. What will we do? Work with him?”
“Sure,” Bristow replied heartily, as if to fore-stall the other’s dislike of the new-comer. “Even if he were no good, the best thing we could do would be to work with him. And, as he’s something of a world-beater, we’ll get the benefit of his ideas. By all means, let’s all keep together on this thing.”
The Classic Mystery Novel Page 78
