The Door
Page 12
“He will try to be here for the funeral.”
Judy was shut away with Katherine, who seemed to be dazed and entirely unprepared. In my room I had time to think. Mary was there, apparently at home; and as Judy had predicted, Maude Palmer was gone. She had worked fast, I reflected, had Mary Martin. She had been out of my house less than a week, and there she was.
I know now what happened, how it came about. Katherine has told me.
On the Friday before Mary had called at the apartment and asked for Katherine. Katherine was dictating letters in that small room off the great drawing room which she likes to call her study. She went out and Mary was waiting in the hall, soft voiced and assured. Within the next half hour she had told her things we had never dreamed she knew, about the sword-cane, for example, and Jim’s refusal to alibi himself the night of Sarah’s murder. She knew—or guessed—that he was not ill but hiding, and then, bending forward and speaking cautiously, she told her that the carpet was missing from Jim’s car.
Katherine was stunned.
“How do you know that?” she demanded sharply. “Amos, I suppose.”
“Partly Amos. Partly my own eyes. Miss Bell tried to burn it, but it didn’t burn. When I went down to breakfast the cook told me the poker was missing, and I found it in the cellar. So I looked about, and the carpet was there. It was in the furnace.”
“You’d swear to that?”
“Not necessarily,” said Mary, and sat waiting for Katherine to comprehend that.
Within an hour Katherine had dismissed poor Maude Palmer, who had been her secretary for five years, giving her two months’ salary in advance, and the next morning Mary Martin was threading a new ribbon into the machine in that small neat room where Katherine attended to the various duties of a woman of wealth and position.
What were her thoughts as she sat there? Was she exultant or depressed? She may have been frightened. Indeed, I think now that she was, for some time during that day she asked Katherine not to tell me she was there.
“Why?” Katherine asked. “Miss Bell would be glad to know that you are in a good position.”
“She would think I had used what I know, to my own advantage.”
Katherine gave that faint cold smile of hers, and the girl flushed. But in the end she agreed to say nothing, for a time at least.
“Of course, when Miss Judy comes back—” she said.
“It may be all right then,” Mary said quietly, and turned back to her machine.
Incomprehensible, that girl, now as I look back; hiding as definitely and more safely than Jim was hiding. She never gave even Katherine the address of her room downtown. She must have felt safe too for the first time, for on that night, as we know now, the night of the day she was engaged, she walked out on the Brooklyn Bridge and dropped something into the water. She had not tied a string around it, and as it fell the paper blew away.
Then she walked uptown to a branch post office, bought a stamped envelope and sent a note to Wallie. Not giving him her address; just a line or two. After that she went to her room and “slept very well.”
Anyhow there she was, established, settled in that handsome Park Avenue apartment where a dozen servants moved quietly about in the early hours of the day, later on to disappear and only emerge on the ringing of bells or the ritual of the table. What she felt I have no idea. She adapted herself, I fancy. She had learned a good bit while with me. But she was there for a definite purpose. That over she moved on. Vanished. A queer girl, I think now; not entirely explicable, even by the light of what we now know.
I settled down, then, to the hushed routine of a house in mourning. Katherine did not appear. People called, spoke in low voices, went away. Flowers began to arrive, and Mary entered the names of the senders, neatly in a small book. She was to stay there at night now, until after the funeral.
I thought she looked changed, not so pretty and rather worn. Once, carrying some cards into her room to be entered, I found her with her head on her desk, and I thought that she was crying. But she was not crying. Her eyes were defiant and rather hard.
I had not the faintest idea that there was any mystery about Howard’s death until I talked to Judy. Then I was fairly stunned.
And as the apartment itself figures in that story of hers, I must begin by describing it.
It is of the duplex type; on the lower floor are the large drawing room, a small living room, a library, and Katherine’s study. Behind these, along a corridor, lie the long dining room, the pantry, kitchen and servants’ rooms, and above, connecting by a front and rear staircase, are the family rooms; Katherine’s boudoir connecting with her bedroom, Howard’s study opening from his. Judy’s room, guest chambers, a room for Katherine’s maid and a small sewing and pressing room opening from it, constitute the remainder of that floor.
On that Tuesday evening, then, Judy met Mary in the lower hall preparing to go. Judy was resentful of her presence in the house and inclined to be short with her, but Mary detained her.
“I don’t think your father ought to be alone at night,” she said.
Judy eyed her.
“And why?”
“Because he’s a very sick man. If he—if he should take sick in the night, he mightn’t be able to call for help.”
“We have no intention of neglecting him,” said Judy shortly, and turned away.
But she was worried nevertheless, and she spent that evening with Howard in the study off his bedroom. He had a heavy cold and was rather uncomfortable. Mostly he read, and when at eleven o’clock Evans, his valet, brought the highball and placed it beside the bed in the bedroom, she prepared to leave him.
What followed she had not yet told her mother.
The telephone rang, and Judy herself answered it. It was for Howard, apparently a long distance call, and he appeared rather surprised when he answered it.
“Tonight?” he said. “Where are you? It’s pretty late. You’ll be a couple of hours yet.”
But in the end he agreed, and Judy said he seemed thoughtful as he hung up the receiver.
“Your Uncle Jim,” he said. “He’s motoring up. I thought he was ill.”
“He has been,” said Judy, thinking hard. “I wish you wouldn’t see him, father. He’ll upset you.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. He’s in trouble, father. Of course it’s silly, but the police are trying to connect him with Sarah, and all that.”
“Nonsense! Why should he want to do away with Sarah? It’s an outrage.”
She wanted to wait up, but he said Jim had been very urgent that his visit be kept a secret. He proposed to come in by the service entrance and up the stairs, and she was to unlock that door on the floor below. He called up the night watchman while she was still there and asked him to admit a visitor there, or better still, to open the door onto the alley and go away. He was smiling when he hung up the receiver.
“Probably thinks I’m receiving my bootlegger,” he said.
“Or a lady, father!” said Judy. “I think I’ll tell mother!”
“Your mother is not to know. He’s very insistent about that.”
She persuaded him to go to bed and see Jim there, and after he was settled she went in and herself gave him a book and fixed his light.
“Door unlocked?” he asked.
“All fixed.”
He had not touched the whisky in the glass at that time. She remembered that.
She kissed him good-night and went to her own room. But she was very uneasy. How Jim had escaped surveillance did not interest her, but she was fearful for Howard; Jim bursting in on him with that whole hideous story, perhaps begging for help to escape, perhaps—she says this entered her mind—perhaps even confessing.
She heard no footsteps by two o’clock, and she dozed off. At three she wakened suddenly, sat up and finally got up. She went along the corridor to her father’s door, and listened. She could hear voices, one low and quiet, her father’s louder and irritated.
She went to sleep after that.
At nine o’clock the next morning she was wakened by a shriek and the sound of a chair being overturned. Quick as she had been to throw on a dressing gown and run out, Mary Martin was before her. She was standing staring into Howard’s room, where Katherine lay in a faint on the floor, and Howard was quite peacefully dead across his bed.
He was in his dressing gown, a thing of heavy dark brocade, and his face according to Judy was very quiet and very peaceful. Whatever his last thoughts had been, if indeed he had any, they were wiped clean.
Some weeks afterward Inspector Harrison was to give me a little talk on just such things.
“There is no expression on a dead face,” he said. “In two minutes it’s wiped clean, like a slate. All this stuff about expressions of horror on murdered people is pure nonsense. I’ve seen a fellow beaten to death, and he looked as peaceful as though he’d died in his bed.”
Judy called for help, and the servants flocked in. Katherine’s maid, a hysterical Frenchwoman was entirely helpless, and it was Mary Martin who threw up the windows and ran into Howard’s bedroom for water.
“But she dropped the glass,” said Judy, gazing at me with reddened eyes. “She took the highball glass from beside the bed and dropped it on the bathroom floor. It broke into bits. I want to know why she did that. There were glasses in the bathroom.”
I tried to reassure her. After all, her father had been a dying man for some time. And any one might drop a glass. But she was not satisfied.
“How did she get there so quickly?” she demanded. “It’s as though she was waiting for it.”
I advised her to say nothing, especially to Katherine in her grief. But she only made a small gesture.
“She’ll know soon enough that Uncle Jim was here,” she said. “The night watchman saw him. And he told Evans this morning when he heard that father was—gone. All the servants know it, probably.”
“He recognized your Uncle Jim?”
“I don’t know. He knows somebody was here.”
“And the doctors? They think everything is all right? I mean, that it was his heart?”
“Why would they think anything else?” she said drearily. “If it was poison—”
“Hush, Judy.”
I got through the remainder of the day somehow; not for years had we faced an emergency without Sarah, and I missed her now.
Sarah would have taken hold; would have put Katherine to bed matter-of-factly and with authority, have driven out that hysterical Frenchwoman who was wringing her hands in the servants’ hall, have given us all sedatives or got the doctor to order them, and then flat-footedly and as if death were as normal as living, have read a book until we were all safely asleep.
But Sarah was gone. Florence Gunther was gone. And now Howard.
Chapter Fourteen
WALLIE ARRIVED THAT EVENING. Katherine was still shut in her room. Now and then Judy would wander in, but Katherine was absorbed in her grief, alone with it. She would kiss Judy and then forget she was there.
But she made a ghastly mistake when she refused to see Wallie. One gesture from her then, one bit of recognition of their common grief, their common loss, and things would have been different.
Whatever might be his weaknesses, Wallie had cared about his father, and he looked stricken when I went in to see him. His face was blank and expressionless, and he had little to say. He sat slumped in his chair, and for the first time I saw a hint of gray in his hair. He was only in his middle thirties, but he might have been fifty as he sat there.
“It was the heart, of course?”
“Yes. It was bound to come before long, anyhow, Wallie.”
He seemed to hesitate, to bring his next question out with an effort.
“Then there was no post-mortem?”
“No.”
“I asked for her, but I suppose she won’t see me.”
“She’s not seeing any one, Wallie. I haven’t seen her myself.”
“Does she know I’m here?” he insisted.
“I told her, yes. Through the door. She’s quite shut away, Wallie.”
But I did not tell him that I had urged her and had been refused. It had seemed to me that death ought to wipe out old angers, old jealousies. But she had been coldly stubborn, would not even unlock her door.
“I have no intention of seeing him, Elizabeth. Do go away.”
“Shall I tell him you will see him later? He seems to think it is important.”
“Nothing is important, and I never want to see him again.
Of course that was pure hysteria, but no man has ever understood a woman’s hysteria.
Mary Martin came in just then with a number of telegrams, but he did not so much as look at her. She glanced at him, waited a moment, then put down the telegrams and went quietly away.
“Give her a little time, Wallie,” I begged him.
“No,” he said. “She’s had her chance. I’m through.”
His face had hardened. It was as though he had come with some overture of peace, and the impulse had died as I looked at him. He was standing in the big drawing room, with its tapestries, its famous paintings, its well-known collection of eighteenth century French furniture, and I saw him look around as if appraising it. Then he smiled unpleasantly.
“She has good taste,” he said. “Good taste but bad judgment. I daresay I can see him? After all, he was my father.”
I asked no one’s permission for that, and he had had about five minutes alone with Howard before he left. Judy took him to the door and left him there. It must have been five minutes of pure agony, knowing what we know now, but he came out quietly enough.
When he left I thought I saw Mary waiting in the hall, but she disappeared when she saw me. She was staying for the night, working late in order to attend to all the details, and I could still hear her at her desk when at last I went up to bed.
But I did not sleep. I had taken two cups of coffee, and my mind was racing like a mill stream. The news that Jim Blake had been with Howard, that for all his pretended illness he had driven his car the night before to New York, arriving stealthily after that long distance call, had been a profound shock.
True, that might have been explicable. He was in great trouble. He might have felt the need of Howard, of some balanced judgment. But suppose that the shock of his story had destroyed Howard? Suppose he had died before Jim left?
Suppose the thud Judy had heard had been his body as it fell? Then why had Jim slipped away like a thief in the night? His own sister in a room beyond, with only her boudoir intervening, and he had not called her.
It seemed monstrous, inhuman.
Then of course Judy’s suspicions played their part. We would probably never know the truth. Unless we told Katherine the whole story she would never permit an examination of the body, and to tell her the story was to involve her own brother.
So I turned and re-turned. How long could this visit be kept under cover? Not long. The servants knew, and from the servants to Mary Martin was only a step. Then, when it was known, what? How would the police argue? That Jim had made a confession to Howard, and that the shock had killed him? Certainly they could argue that this secret visit of Jim’s was not the act of a consciously innocent man.
But what did any of them know, after all? That Howard had had a visitor, but not necessarily that visitor’s identity. Or did Mary suspect who that visitor had been? Moving in her mysterious way among us all, never of us but among us, unfathomable, shrewd, unscrupulous when she chose to be, she had her own methods, her own purposes.
Suppose then that she made inquiries, downstairs? Suppose she had talked to the night watchman, got a description of the visitor, was proposing to give that description to Wallie?
And Wallie perhaps already suspicious, asking about a post-mortem, maybe about to demand one.
Still, she had broken the glass. Why should she do that? What picture had been in her mind? Did she suspect or did she know of something—a powder perhaps—shaken into that glass beside the bed, and Howard drinking it? Sitting there, talking maybe, and drinking it.
Where was the glass now? She had broken it, but the pieces would be somewhere about. Suppose they were, and Wallie was suspicious? Suppose he had gone to the police that night, and early morning would find the trash-can examined, and Jim’s guilt proved beyond a doubt?
I thought that it would kill Katherine.
Outside it was raining, a heavy spring shower. I got out of bed and paced the floor in my bare feet, to the accompaniment of heavy thunder and the beating of the rain on neighboring roofs. Suppose I got those pieces of glass and disposed of them? Hid them and then carried them off? Dropped them in a river or out of the window of a railway carriage? Innocent or guilty, they would be gone.
Looking back, I know that I was not entirely normal that night, but I was on the verge of desperation. I was ready to pay any price for peace. It did not even seem to be important that Jim Blake might be a cold-blooded and deadly killer; what mattered was that it should not be known, that we be allowed to go back to our quiet lives once more, that no scandal break to involve us all.
So, thinking or not thinking, I put on a dressing gown and went quietly down the stairs.
As I have said, the dining room, kitchen, pantries and so on are at the rear of a long hall. One passes from the dining room through a butler’s pantry into the kitchen, and beyond the kitchen, opening from a rear hallway, is a small cement-floored room in which is the dumb-waiter by which refuse cans and so on are lowered to the basement, there to be collected. This room I knew well. During the day it was there that the boxes had been taken as the flowers were unwrapped, and when last I saw it that day it had been waist deep in paper.
To this room, therefore, I went. Save the dumb-waiter, there is no access to it other than by the one door, and I felt my way along in the darkness, fearful of rousing the servants. But outside the door I stopped, almost paralyzed with amazement. Some one was in the room. There was the stealthy movement of paper, the sound of a lid being fitted cautiously onto a can.