John Patrick shook his head. “No, he would be taking a chance that way and this was absolutely safe. By the way, I found out the origin of the path you so laboriously traced; it was originally a short-cut from the outlying districts to the blacksmith shop, but since the latter has fallen into disuse, it is now traversed mainly by small boys intent on their after-school smoke.”
He paused to take breath. “When I said that Edwin went to that house, I misspoke myself a trifle. You noticed, I believe, how the path ended at a garden plot. At the right of the garden, beyond the rose arbor, is a small shed or tool-house. It was here that Edwin stopped; and, since the place, as well as being perfectly concealed for Edwin’s purposes, was likewise sheltered enough to afford me the opportunity of approaching it closely, I crept up to the window where I could see dimly and hear clearly. Edwin’s vis-a-vis was a girl, whose father was a friend of mine—Elissa Wheeler.”
“Elissa Wheeler!” I exclaimed.
“Yes, do you know her?”
“Why, yes; only she has been Elissa Stone for three years. Is that the girl you mean—Stephen Stone’s widow?”
John Patrick nodded. “If you are familiar with her story, then you begin to understand. At any rate, I occupied the thoroughly disagreeable position of eavesdropper long enough to assure myself of the girl’s identity and find out something of the part she has played in Edwin’s life.”
I couldn’t keep my attention on his words. The revelation of Elissa Stone’s whereabouts had completely nonplussed me. I remembered all about her—one of the most beautiful debutantes four seasons back, she had married one of the most brilliant young men of our group. After their marriage they had gone abroad to live; rumors drifted back that the course of the matrimonial bark did not run smooth, and finally we heard of Stone’s death on the polo field. I vaguely recalled that there had been a small son born about the time of his father’s death, but I had no idea the girl had returned from Europe; hence when my friend, the druggist, told me that the house at the end of the road was occupied by the Widow Stone and her son, I never dreamed it was Elissa of whom he spoke. In fact, I recalled how I had put a tentative inquiry to ascertain if the son were old enough to be a possible companion for Edwin but, being reassured on that score, I had dismissed the place from my thoughts.
I brought back my attention with difficulty to what my chief was saying. He was concluding what I took to be an apologetic preamble to relating the scene to which he had been an eavesdropper.
“The reason I like doing my sleuthing from an armchair,” he was saying, “is that it occasions so little of the disagreeable realities which constantly confront one on a mission such as I undertook last night. There was surely nothing dignified in the spectacle of an old man glued to the side of a tool-shed, spying on a pair of lovers.”
“Lovers!” I cried horrified. “Elissa and Edwin?”
My chief waved his hand in his favorite gesture, indicating that if the opposing side would please keep silent for a few minutes, he would explain in good time.
“Their exact relationship is unfortunately something of a mystery to me. I say unfortunately, as it is on that point exactly that our whole future action depends. But let me tell you what I gathered from their conversation.”
“I am anxious to hear,” I retorted somewhat grimly.
“Elissa was waiting for Edwin when I got there,” John Patrick resumed his narrative. “After greeting him with an affectionate embrace, she gave him a long, flat Manila envelope. From their subsequent talk, I judged that this contained a sum of around five hundred dollars, somewhat less than she usually confides to him at this time of the month.”
I took a sharp breath, but was unable to speak. This, then, was the source of Edwin’s mysterious affluence on the fifteenth of every month.
“At first I did not understand this action on the girl’s part, and I can now only surmise what is going on from scraps of conversation. I believe that on a certain date she gives him either her entire allowance, as it comes to her from her father-in-law, reserving just enough for most modest expenses, or else she waits until the fifteenth to see how much she has left over from an allowance on the first.” Later we learned that this last was the correct surmise, Elissa having arbitrarily set the date which confused us so much, in order to have ample time to pay off the month’s bills before turning the residue over to Edwin.
“Edwin has been chosen as her broker partly to demonstrate her confidence in him, and partly so that she herself need never appear in the transactions. Whether or not she is aware that he is gambling with her funds, I have no idea. She seemed to exhibit a childlike faith in his ability to make her money grow substantially larger in a minimum period of time. I also learned that the sum of money to which Edwin alluded, when speaking to his brokers, means the life insurance which her husband left. To date, she has not drawn on it heavily, although I believe the money with which he paid Jones and Courtney must have come from that source.
“There was one more point, that developed in the course of the interview, which I, in my loathsome position of listener-in, was forced to hear, and that was perhaps the most interesting of all. Elissa asked Edwin if there were any news concerning the handkerchief. He said no, in a rather sulky manner, he didn’t yet know who had put it in the car. Elissa enjoined caution on him, and said that they had better not take any more chances of being seen in the car together. Then she spoke of the vanity case and I wished I had had you along to make notes for me. I can’t recall the conversation verbatim, but the import was unmistakable. Edwin did not see her on the afternoon that he left the vanity case. Every one in her household was out; all away for the day with her father-in-law in his car. So I ask you to note in passing that apparently her own motor was in her garage. That night Edwin wrote her a letter, which she received two days later, telling her of his uncle’s murder and how he would try in every way to protect her name; but, if it all came out, she must swear she was with him. That, of course, she cannot do, for she was with her father-in-law the entire day.”
“But surely she knows whether he took her car or not,” I objected.
“Let’s put it this way; if he took the car, she doesn’t know he did. The only thing alarming her is that some one may find out he was at her house instead of at the Crystal Palace. Edwin has told her that he waited there until after five o’clock on the chance of her return. Now, he certainly has not an unassailable alibi. It takes care of every detail of his afternoon, perhaps, but could be very easily upset. He might have taken Elissa’s car, turned back the mileage and refilled the gas tank, leaving her none the wiser; or, he may have had an accomplice, but, as far as we are concerned, it leaves us at a blank end. He may have been sitting in Elissa’s garden waiting her return—I’m sure it is a plausible enough statement, but I can never lose sight of the fact that on the face of the evidence to date this murder could not have been committed anyway. Yet it was done, so somebody’s story is false.”
“By the way,” I inquired, “what is the reason for all of this secrecy about Edwin’s visits to Elissa? If she trusts him enough to give him money, why is she unwilling to be seen with him openly?”
John Patrick hesitated a moment before replying. “Scraps of their conversation led me to suspect the reason, but I wanted to make sure so I went into Baltimore today to see Ezra Wheeler. I don’t believe he was aware,” my chief broke off with a half-smile, “just how much information he did give me, but he is not hard to draw out on the subject of his only daughter.”
I imagined not indeed. Ezra Wheeler was a man of impeccable social position, but little financial acumen. Once he had brought his daughter up and sponsored her debut, he sat back thanking his stars she had married a wealthy man who would be able to give her the things she had been raised to expect. Her widowhood appalled him, nor did he have sufficient reticence to refrain from discussing it as a blow to his hopes.
“It seems, the crux of the trouble is money,” explained my chief. “El
issa has a liberal income for herself and son as long as she remains unmarried. But her father-in-law, who holds the money-bags, has made it plain that upon her remarriage she must either give the boy to his grandfather, or expect no further help from him. He likewise uses his financial power to threaten Elissa, if she does not do as he thinks is right. The girl is high-spirited and resents his interference, but is likewise devoted to her boy and will never do anything to harm him even indirectly. You know how well-to-do Stone is said to be and what his grandson’s prospects will be if Elissa does not jeopardize them. Well, Edwin, I gather, arrived on the scene when they were in Paris, although he had probably known her before her marriage. When she ran across him abroad, she assigned him the role of sympathetic friend and adviser—a familiar face, a dependable some one on whom to lean amid a strange society, whose gay personnel she blamed for the growing coolness between herself and her husband. I doubt very much if anything would ever have come of this, had it not been for Stephen Stone’s death. Elissa appears to me to be quite a thoroughbred, and I don’t believe she would ever have cheapened herself with any clandestine affairs while her husband still lived.”
“She is a very remarkable girl,” I assented warmly, perhaps too fervidly considering how little I had seen her of late. “That’s why I can’t understand her taking up with some one like Edwin.”
John Patrick regarded me steadily. “Well, I don’t know. All I can say is, when she became a widow, only ten days after the birth of her son, she determined to return to this country. She arrived at Baltimore at the time of Edwin’s trouble with the bank and all the resulting scandal, but she saw him again, sympathized with him, and would have been an open partisan of his except for her father-in-law’s ultimatum. Perhaps it was nothing more than a high-strung young girl championing a friend, but old Stone was taking no chances. There was nothing Elissa could do at the time; she couldn’t marry Edwin, and they wouldn’t let her go on seeing him. So she took the house at Belton, determined to bury herself in the country and devote herself to the care of her son.
“Just at this point Edwin came to live at Bayside. They cooked up the theater scheme to see each other occasionally, for it was as important that Cyrus be kept in ignorance of their meetings, as it was that Stone should not hear of them. Cyrus and the tyrant were great cronies and Edwin could never have won his uncle’s support of his courtship. That’s about all of the story; they have been going on seeing each other, Elissa giving Edwin her money, hoping he can make the fortune which would enable them to marry.”
“Cyrus’ fortune would let them marry,” I remarked bitterly. “Even one hundred thousand dollars would be a big help.” I hated to see this lovely, high-spirited girl waste herself on a man like Edwin.
Vaile nodded. “It gives an added motive for the crime, and there is the possible opportunity—and that is all, an impasse from any point of view. Anyhow,” he said lightly, “from their side it would have been more logical to kill Stone and leave the boy provided for.”
I objected at once. “Perhaps it was too difficult.”
“No, my boy,” John Patrick’s tone was weary. “The man who engineered Cyrus Evans’ murder would not have been stopped by difficulties in the way.”
“Well, what are we going to do about it?” I queried, impatient to be in action.
“Not a thing, son. If Edwin did come over to Bay-side and kill his uncle, we can never prove it by ourselves. Our investigation has led us temporarily to a dead end. To go any farther, we would have to enlist the aid of Elissa, in the hope that some day he might betray himself to her. But if she loves him, she would betray us to him. If he loves her, he didn’t do the murder—”
“But,” I broke in, “if he is scoundrel enough to make love to her for the money he is getting from her—”
“He is probably the man who killed Cyrus,” finished John Patrick, when emotion choked me so that I couldn’t speak. “Is he, or is he not, in love with Elissa? It resolves itself into a psychological problem and not all your textbooks on psychology can give you the answer. So far as I have observed in my sixty-five years of experience, the more unlikely it seems for a man to fall in love, the more apt he is to do it. Love is an alchemy of the spirit which defies the psychiatrist’s measuring rod.”
I was dis-spirited and admitted it. “Is there nothing for us to do now?”
“Now we eliminate,” answered John Patrick heartily. “We have other suspects. Just because you have settled it in your mind that Edwin is guilty, even though you can’t prove it, is no reason to lay down on the job. We must go on and examine the others, and then if every one else is out of the question, we will turn our information over to the police and see if they can do any more than we.”
For the first time in all my life I had a feeling akin to distrust for my chief. “Aren’t you going to do anything to break up this affair between Edwin and Elissa?” I cried. “You must admit the man is a potential murderer, yet you let it go on?”
John Patrick replied gently, “We are all potential murderers, Boy. Edwin has latent in him all the qualities of the wild Evans’ men, but he has always been a fence-straddler. Charles, with all his evil ways, is better liked because he is out and out what he is. Edwin holds back, is a hypocrite, you say; but perhaps it is the struggle within him of possibilities for good as strong as his inherent bend for outlawry. If such be the case, Elissa is the woman for him, to train and guide him.”
I made a motion of disgust. “But if you are wrong, if he is deceiving her?”
“Then he is far and away the worst of the tribe,” replied John Patrick gravely.
We were silent a moment. My feelings were mixed, my mind upset and troubled. Suddenly a faint sound came to my ears. It had come again—that strange noise I had heard last night. I held up my hand for silence and pantomimed my meaning to my chief. He heard it too. Softly, noiselessly, he moved to the desk and wrote on a slip of paper, “You have heard this sound before?”
“Yes, last night,” I wrote in answer, “just before the fury of the storm.”
“Who was in the house?”
“Only Tom and Edwin. Charles didn’t return until this afternoon.”
We stood in a tense silence. The noise kept on, invading the evening silence of the house, not loud, not strident, but insidious, pervasive. John Patrick spoke in a low whisper, “It is not a footstep. It is the noise of furniture being picked up very softly, of things being moved, very slightly. Some one is searching for something. Now I wonder if I know what they are looking for?”
EIGHTEEN
We stood listening for about three minutes, struck dumb by the eeriness of the sound. At length, John Patrick broke the spell and said in guarded tones, “I believe it came from downstairs; shall we go see?”
I was curious enough to go, but I was cautious too. As we stood there I noticed it had grown dark outside, and I was not eager to go stealing from room to room, turning on lights as I went, especially since the house did not belong to me. The responsibility properly belonged elsewhere.
“Let’s call Tom,” I suggested. “It’s his home and he is the one to be informed.”
John Patrick smiled. “I’m not going to inform any one; also I’m going to be as noisy as possible so that I shan’t surprise any one. I just want to see who is where and what explanation they have for being there.” He pulled out his watch. “It is quarter to seven—just an hour before dinner and hence every one should be in his own room dressing. What an excellent time, by the way, for a prowler to seize upon. Every one accounted for, either sleeping or starting to dress—we are dealing with a rather subtle type of housebreaker, I should say.” A moment later, he had thrown open the door of the study, saying in a conversational tone, “I should like to look in the library and see if any book on international loans is there. We might as well find it and be ready for an early start tomorrow.”
I caught my clue at once and said in a voice I strove to make steady and casual, “All right, I’ll co
me and look. I’m sure Mr. Evans had one in his library once, and I would like to consult it regarding the bond issue.”
We strode toward the stairs, speaking lightly of the case which had supposedly taken John Patrick to town. As we walked along, I glanced backward—a thin stream of light came from beneath the door of the room Edwin occupied. He had returned then; I wondered if he had seen Elissa. There was no light that I could see from Tom’s room, but he occupied a suite and, if the light were on in the bathroom or even dim in the bedroom, it would be imperceptible from where we were.
Downstairs, the hallway, which ran the length of the house from back to front, was poorly lit by candles. A fire had been laid in the library and was burning dimly behind a screen. Under cover of hunting for a book, we looked around. Nothing met my eye, no sign of disorder, nothing out of place. Then, as I crossed the room and rested my hand on the mahogany table top, a few drops of moisture met my touch. I signaled my chief; he came over and, after running his fingers over the flat surface, nodded significantly at the vase of carnations from the greenhouse.
“The flowers are arranged in the morning,” he hissed into my ear. “Somebody has had them out of the vase and sprinkled the water around without knowing it.”
We kept up our pretense of hunting for a book, turning on the top lights and getting as much illumination as possible, but only one more sign did we find. A large overstuffed davenport was in front of the fireplace; the nap of the oriental rug beneath it was pressed down in such a way as to show that the piece of furniture had recently been moved and put back slightly out of place, as if some one had lifted it by each corner to inspect one leg at a time, permitting it to pivot slightly as he did so.
“A small article was the object of the search,” I muttered cautiously, “something which could be concealed in a vase of flowers or the leg of a davenport.”
Murder at Bayside Page 19
