Legendary Women Detectives

by Jean Marie Stine

  She was still sitting there in wide-eyed misery, alternately fondling the little body and drawing back to consult its small set features for some sign of life, when the doctor came, and, after one look at the child, drew it softly from her arms and laid it quietly in the crib from which its father had evidently lifted it but a short time before. Then he turned back to her, and found her on her feet, upheld by her two friends. She had understood his action, and without a groan had accepted her fate. Indeed, she seemed incapable of any further speech or action. She was staring down at her husband’s body, which she, for the first time, seemed fully to see. Was her look one of grief or of resentment for the part he had played so unintentionally in her child’s death? It was hard to tell; and when, with slowly rising finger, she pointed to the pistol so tightly clutched in the other outstretched hand, no one there – and by this time the room was full – could foretell what her words would be when her tongue regained its usage and she could speak.

  What she did say was this: “Is there a bullet gone? Did he fire off that pistol?” A question so manifestly one of delirium that no one answered it, which seemed to surprise her, though she said nothing till her glance had passed all around the walls of the room to where a window stood open to the night, – its lower sash being entirely raised. “There! Look there!” she cried, with a commanding accent, and, throwing up her hands, sank a dead weight into the arms of those supporting her.

  No one understood; but naturally more than one rushed to the window. An open space was before them. Here lay the fields not yet parcelled out into lots and built upon; but it was not upon these they looked, but upon the strong trellis which they found there, which, if it supported no vine, formed a veritable ladder between this window and the ground.

  Could she have meant to call attention to this fact; and were her words expressive of another idea than the obvious one of suicide?

  If so, to what lengths a woman’s imagination can go! Or so their combined looks seemed to proclaim, when to their utter astonishment they saw the officer, who had presented a calm appearance up till now, shift his position and with a surprised grunt direct their eyes to a portion of the wall just visible beyond the half-drawn curtains of the bed. The mirror hanging there showed a star-shaped breakage, such as follows the sharp impact of a bullet or a fiercely projected stone.

  “He fired two shots. One went wild; the other straight home.” It was the officer delivering his opinion.

  Mr. Saunders, returning from the distant room where he had assisted in carrying Mrs. Hammond, cast a look at the shattered glass, and remarked forcibly: “I heard but one; and I was sitting up, disturbed by that poor infant. Jennie, did you hear more than one shot?” he asked, turning toward his wife.

  “No,” she answered, but not with the readiness he had evidently expected. “I heard only one, but that was not quite usual in its tone. I’m used to guns,” she explained, turning to the officer. “My father was an army man, and he taught me very early to load and fire a pistol. There was a prolonged sound to this shot; something like an echo of itself, following close upon the first ping. Didn’t you notice that, Warren?”

  “I remember something of the kind,” her husband allowed.

  “He shot twice and quickly,” interposed the policeman, sententiously. “We shall find a spent bullet back of that mirror.”

  But when, upon the arrival of the coroner, an investigation was made of the mirror and the wall behind, no bullet was found either there or any where else in the room, save in the dead man’s breast. Nor had more than one been shot from his pistol, as five full chambers testified. The case which seemed so simple had its mysteries, but the assertion made by Mrs. Saunders no longer carried weight, nor was the evidence offered by the broken mirror considered as indubitably establishing the fact that a second shot had been fired in the room.

  Yet it was equally evident that the charge which had entered the dead speculator’s breast had not been delivered at the close range of the pistol found clutched in his hand. There were no powder-marks to be discerned on his pyjama-jacket, or on the flesh beneath. Thus anomaly confronted anomaly, leaving open but one other theory: that the bullet found in Mr. Hammond’s breast came from the window and the one he shot went out of it. But this would necessitate his having shot his pistol from a point far removed from where he was found; and his wound was such as made it difficult to believe that he would stagger far, if at all, after its infliction.

  Yet, because the coroner was both conscientious and alert, he caused a most rigorous search to be made of the ground overlooked by the above mentioned window; a search in which the police joined, but which was without any result save that of rousing the attention of people in the neighbourhood and leading to a story being circulated of a man seen some time the night before crossing the fields in a great hurry. But as no further particulars were forthcoming, and not even a description of the man to be had, no emphasis would have been laid upon this story had it not transpired that the moment a report of it had come to Mrs. Hammond’s ears (why is there always some one to carry these reports?) she roused from the torpor into which she had fallen, and in wild fashion exclaimed: “I knew it! I expected it! He was shot through the window and by that wretch. He never shot himself.” Violent declarations which trailed off into the one continuous wail, “O, my baby! my poor baby!”

  Such words, even though the fruit of delirium, merited some sort of attention, or so this good coroner thought, and as soon as opportunity offered and she was sufficiently sane and quiet to respond to his questions, he asked her whom she had meant by that wretch, and what reason she had, or thought she had, of attributing her husband’s death to any other agency than his own disgust with life.

  And then it was that his sympathies, although greatly roused in her favour began to wane. She met the question with a cold stare followed by a few ambiguous words out of which he could make nothing. Had she said wretch? She did not remember. They must not be influenced by anything she might have uttered in her first grief. She was well-nigh insane at the time. But of one thing they might be sure: her husband had not shot himself; he was too much afraid of death for such an act. Besides, he was too happy. Whatever folks might say he was too fond of his family to wish to leave it.

  Nor did the coroner or any other official succeed in eliciting anything further from her. Even when she was asked, with cruel insistence, how she explained the fact that the baby was found lying on the floor instead of in its crib, her only answer was: “His father was trying to soothe it. The child was crying dreadfully, as you have heard from those who were kept awake by him that night, and my husband was carrying him about when the shot came which caused George to fall and overlay the baby in his struggles.”

  “Carrying a baby about with a loaded pistol in his hand?” came back in stern retort.

  She had no answer for this. She admitted when informed that the bullet extracted from her husband’s body had been found to correspond exactly with those remaining in the five chambers of the pistol taken from his hand, that he was not only the owner of this pistol but was in the habit of sleeping with it under his pillow; but, beyond that, nothing; and this reticence, as well as her manner which was cold and repellent, told against her.

  A verdict of suicide was rendered by the coroner’s jury, and the life-insurance company, in which Mr. Hammond had but lately insured himself for a large sum, taking advantage of the suicide clause embodied in the policy, announced its determination of not paying the same.

  Such was the situation, as known to Violet Strange and the general public, on the day she was asked to see Mrs. Hammond and learn what might alter her opinion as to the justice of this verdict and the stand taken by the Shuler Life Insurance Company.

  * * *

  The clock on the mantel in Miss Strange’s rose-colored boudoir had struck three, and Violet was gazing in some impatience at the door, when there came a gentle knock upon it, and the maid (one of the elderly, not youthful, kind) ushered in
her expected visitor.

  “You are Mrs. Hammond?” she asked, in natural awe of the too-black figure outlined so sharply against the deep pink of the sea-shell room.

  The answer was a slow lifting of the veil which shadowed the features she knew only from the cuts she had seen in newspapers.

  “You are – Miss Strange?” stammered her visitor; “the young lady who-”

  “I am,” chimed in a voice as ringing as it was sweet. “I am the person you have come here to see. And this is my home. But that does not make me less interested in the unhappy, or less desirous of serving them. Certainly you have met with the two greatest losses which can come to a woman – I know your story well enough to say that-; but what have you to tell me in proof that you should not lose your anticipated income as well? Something vital, I hope, else I cannot help you; something which you should have told the coroner’s jury – and did not.”

  The flush which was the sole answer these words called forth did not take from the refinement of the young widow’s expression, but rather added to it; Violet watched it in its ebb and flow and, seriously affected by it (why, she did not know, for Mrs. Hammond had made no other appeal either by look or gesture), pushed forward a chair and begged her visitor to be seated.

  “We can converse in perfect safety here,” she said. “When you feel quite equal to it, let me hear what you have to communicate. It will never go any further. I could not do the work I do if I felt it necessary to have a confidant.”

  “But you are so young and so – so-”

  “So inexperienced you would say and so evidently a member of what New Yorkers call ”society.“ Do not let that trouble you. My inexperience is not likely to last long and my social pleasures are more apt to add to my efficiency than to detract from it.”

  With this Violet’s face broke into a smile. It was not the brilliant one so often seen upon her lips, but there was something in its quality which carried encouragement to the widow and led her to say with obvious eagerness: “You know the facts?”

  “I have read all the papers.”

  “I was not believed on the stand.”

  “It was your manner-”

  “I could not help my manner. I was keeping something back, and, being unused to deceit, I could not act quite naturally.”

  “Why did you keep something back? When you saw the unfavourable impression made by your reticence, why did you not speak up and frankly tell your story?”

  “Because I was ashamed. Because I thought it would hurt me more to speak than to keep silent. I do not think so now; but I did then – and so made my great mistake. You must remember not only the awful shock of my double loss, but the sense of guilt accompanying it; for my husband and I had quarrelled that night, quarrelled bitterly – that was why I had run away into another room and not because I was feeling ill and impatient of the baby’s fretful cries.”

  “So people have thought.” In saying this, Miss Strange was perhaps cruelly emphatic. “You wish to explain that quarrel? You think it will be doing any good to your cause to go into that matter with me now?”

  “I cannot say; but I must first clear my conscience and then try to convince you that quarrel or no quarrel, he never took his own life. He was not that kind. He had an abnormal fear of death. I do not like to say it but he was a physical coward. I have seen him turn pale at the least hint of danger. He could no more have turned that muzzle upon his own breast than he could have turned it upon his baby. Some other hand shot him, Miss Strange. Remember the open window, the shattered mirror; and I think I know that hand.”

  Her head had fallen forward on her breast. The emotion she showed was not so eloquent of grief as of deep personal shame.

  “You think you know the man?” In saying this, Violet’s voice sank to a whisper. It was an accusation of murder she had just heard.

  “To my great distress, yes. When Mr. Hammond and I were married,” the widow now proceeded in a more determined tone, “there was another man – a very violent one – who vowed even at the church door that George and I should never live out two full years together. We have not. Our second anniversary would have been in November.”

  “But-”

  “Let me say this: the quarrel of which I speak was not serious enough to occasion any such act of despair on his part. A man would be mad to end his life on account of so slight a disagreement. It was not even on account of the person of whom I’ve just spoken, though that person had been mentioned between us earlier in the evening, Mr. Hammond having come across him face to face that very afternoon in the subway. Up to this time neither of us had seen or heard of him since our wedding-day.”

  “And you think this person whom you barely mentioned, so mindful of his old grudge that he sought out your domicile, and, with the intention of murder, climbed the trellis leading to your room and turned his pistol upon the shadowy figure which was all he could see in the semi-obscurity of a much lowered gas-jet?”

  “A man in the dark does not need a bright light to see his enemy when he is intent upon revenge.”

  Miss Strange altered her tone. “And your husband? You must acknowledge that he shot off his pistol whether the other did or not.”

  “It was in self-defence. He would shoot to save his own life – or the baby’s.”

  “Then he must have heard or seen-”

  “A man at the window.”

  “And would have shot there?”

  “Or tried to.”

  “Tried to?”

  “Yes; the other shot first – oh, I’ve thought it all out – causing my husband’s bullet to go wild. It was his which broke the mirror.”

  “And what happened then?” Violet’s eyes, bright as stars, suddenly narrowed. “Why cannot they find the bullet?”

  “Because it went out of the window – glanced off and went out of the window.” Mrs. Hammond’s tone was triumphant; her look spirited and intense.

  Violet eyed her compassionately. “Would a bullet glancing off from a mirror, however hung, be apt to reach a window so far on the opposite side?”

  “I don’t know; I only know that it did,” was the contradictory, almost absurd, reply.

  “What was the cause of the quarrel you speak of between your husband and yourself? You see, I must know the exact truth and all the truth to be of any assistance to you.”

  “It was – it was about the care I gave, or didn’t give, the baby. I feel awfully to have to say it, but George did not think I did my full duty by the child. He said there was no need of its crying so; that if I gave it the proper attention it would not keep the neighbours and himself awake half the night. And I – I got angry and insisted that I did the best I could; that the child was naturally fretful and that if he wasn’t satisfied with my way of looking after it, he might try his. All of which was very wrong and unreasonable on my part, as witness the awful punishment which followed.”

  “And what made you get up and leave him?”

  “The growl he gave me in reply. When I heard that, I bounded out of bed and said I was going to the spare room to sleep; and if the baby cried he might just try what he could do himself to stop it.”

  “And he answered?”

  “This, just this – I shall never forget his words as long as I live – ”If you go, you need not expect me to let you in again no matter what happens.“”

  “He said that?”

  “And locked the door after me. You see I could not tell all that.”

  “It might have been better if you had. It was such a natural quarrel and so unprovocative of actual tragedy.”

  Mrs. Hammond was silent. It was not difficult to see that she had no very keen regrets for her husband personally. But then he was not a very estimable man nor in any respect her equal.

  “You were not happy with him,” Violet ventured to remark.

  “I was not a fully contented woman. But for all that he had no cause to complain of me except for the reason I have mentioned. I was not a very intelligent
mother. But if the baby were living now-oh, if he were living now – with what devotion I should care for him.”

  She was on her feet, her arms were raised, her face impassioned with feeling. Violet, gazing at her, heaved a little sigh. It was perhaps in keeping with the situation, perhaps extraneous to it, but whatever its source, it marked a change in her manner. With no further check upon her sympathy, she said very softly: “It is well with the child.”

  The mother stiffened, swayed, and then burst into wild weeping. “But not with me, not with me. I am desolate and bereft. I have not even a home in which to hide my grief and no prospect of one.”

  “But,” interposed Violet, “surely your husband left you something? You cannot be quite penniless?”

  “My husband left nothing,” was the answer, uttered without bitterness, but with all the hardness of fact. “He had debts. I shall pay those debts. When these and other necessary expenses are liquidated, there will be but little left. He made no secret of the fact that he lived close up to his means. That is why he was induced to take on a life insurance. Not a friend of his but knows his improvidence. I – I have not even jewels. I have only my determination and an absolute conviction as to the real nature of my husband’s death.”

  “What is the name of the man you secretly believe to have shot your husband from the trellis?”

  Mrs. Hammond told her.

  It was a new one to Violet. She said so and then asked: “What else can you tell me about him?”

  “Nothing, but that he is a very dark man and has a club-foot.”