The Door

by Mary Roberts Rinehart

  “You can’t prove that.”

  “Perhaps not, but I can damned well try. Some one made an appointment to meet Sarah Gittings on the night she was killed; to meet her and see with his own eyes this copy of Howard Somers’ will which the Gunther girl had abstracted from the files. From that appointment Sarah Gittings never returned, and during that evening the copy of the will disappeared.”

  “Why should I destroy it? Or her? The original document was safe in New York.”

  “Did you know Florence Gunther?”

  “No.”

  “Never saw her?”

  “No.”

  “Never waited for her on Halkett Street, near a fruit stand, with a car?”

  “Absolutely no.”

  And, if the two previous denials had lacked force, this last was impressive enough.

  But the heat and the tension were telling on them both. Hours had passed, putting a fine edge on Jim’s nerves. He had exhausted his cigars, and no one offered him any. He asked for water, and after a long delay it came.

  And then, on top of his exhaustion he was told that Howard Somers had been poisoned. He very nearly collapsed, but if they had hoped to wear him into confession they were disappointed. He was still fighting. But he said a curious thing.

  “How do you know he was poisoned? How do you know he didn’t take the stuff himself?”

  “I’m not answering questions. I’m asking them.”

  Jim was angry now, however, and he braced himself for one last effort.

  “I never went to New York to see Howard Somers the night he died. Some one else used my name, that’s all. And the more I think over this case—and God knows it’s all I do think of—the more I am convinced that a definite attempt is being made to put the guilt on me.

  “Why would I have killed him? I stood to lose by his death, not to gain. He was my sister’s husband and my friend. If you are trying to show that I escaped the watch on my house, climbed the window of my garage and drove my car to New York that night, I swear before God that I never did it, or thought of it. As for this will, I had never heard of a second will until Alex Davis revealed its existence in New York.

  “I swear before God that I have never killed any one, have never thought of killing any one. And I protest against your methods. You are wearing me out. But you can’t wear me into confession. I’m innocent.”

  They had worn him out, however. His face was gray with exhaustion, and sweat was running down his face. Now and then he ran his finger under his collar, as though it choked him. The whirring of an electric fan, the tick of a clock on the wall, and the District Attorney never relaxing; watching him, firing at him his staccato questions, deliberately trying to torture him until confession would be sheer relief.

  Some time in that last half hour a memorandum was placed on the desk, and the District Attorney nodded his head.

  “Send him in when he comes.”

  Jim had listened, with an impassive face. But he felt—perhaps his exhaustion had sharpened his faculties—that something vital had happened. The questions began again, sharper, a little excitement in them.

  “You have admitted that on the night Sarah Gittings was killed, you carried with you this sword-stick, and that later on it disappeared. You had no theories about that disappearance?”

  “None whatever.”

  “You left it in the hall and it disappeared?”

  “Yes.”

  “And when did you notice that it had disappeared?”

  “It was several days later. I don’t know exactly.”

  “I think you do know exactly, Mr. Blake. It disappeared on the day Sarah Gittings’ body was found.”

  “Possibly. I’m not certain.”

  “What is your explanation of that disappearance?”

  “I’ve told you that before. I think it was stolen.”

  “As a part of the plot against you?”

  “Possibly.”

  “You did not conceal it yourself? I mean, you did not feel that its presence was a dangerous thing in your house?”

  “I thought of that, naturally. Yes.”

  “But you did not hide it.”

  Jim made an effort, moistened his dry lips.

  “Not exactly. I put it in a closet.”

  “What closet?”

  “The liquor closet, in the hall.”

  “And you locked it there?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then the story that it was missing from the hall was not true?”

  “Not entirely. But it is true that it disappeared. It was taken from there.”

  “You had the key to that closet?”

  “Yes.”

  “Was there more than one key?”

  “No. I have wondered since if Amos took it. I was in bed. He could have taken the key.”

  “And why would Amos do that?”

  He was utterly confused by that time, faint, sagged in his chair and gray of face.

  “He may have known—he may have thought—”

  “What did Amos know?”

  And then Inspector Harrison walked into the room, and laid something on the table. Jim took one look at it, and fainted dead away.

  Chapter Eighteen

  IN THE CELLAR INSPECTOR Harrison had renewed his prowling about, the Federal officers mildly interested, and Amos watching his movements with a sort of fascinated terror.

  He rapped on the cement walls again, inspected the ceiling. Now and then, furtively, he looked at the negro, and it seemed to him that the negro was increasingly alarmed each time he neared the coal cellar. But the coal cellar was full of coal. It had overflowed into the main cellar, and lay about. And suddenly Inspector Harrison remembered that it was spring.

  “Plenty of coal, for the summer?” he said to Amos. “Cook with coal?”

  “No sir. With gas,” said Amos.

  “And when did you get in all this coal?”

  “I don’t rightly remember, sir. Seems to me it was in May some time.”

  Inspector Harrison stooped down, and cleared a few lumps from the margin of the heap.

  “What’s under here? Cement?”

  “I don’t rightly know, sir.”

  But it was not cement.

  There was a shovel on the coal, and at first they put Amos to work on it. He was terrified. He made noisy protests, but there were three of them, grim and determined. They were not inhuman, however, for as the negro began to play out they took the shovel from him. One after the other, they dug into the coal, throwing it out into the clean cemented floor, scrutinizing it, and then falling to work again. It required more than two hours to clear the place, but at last they reached the end and they had found nothing.

  There was the hard-pounded black earth, glistening with black dust under their flashlights, and no sign that it had been disturbed. One of the men laughed.

  “Well, that’s that,” he said, “and now I want a bath and a bed. Let’s go.”

  But the Inspector was not listening. He was watching Amos, and Amos was smiling again.

  “If that’s all you gentlemen want,” he said, “you all can go up and I’ll put out the light.”

  The Inspector was wiping his face, which was streaming.

  “What’s the hurry, Amos?” he said gently.

  “There’s no liquor here, sir. You’ve seen for yourself.”

  “Have I? Well, maybe that’s so. Now, Amos, if you’ll go wherever you have to go to get a bucket of water, and will bring it here—”

  “There’s a lavatory on the first floor, sir.”

  “Do what you’re told,” the Inspector said sharply. “And be quick about it.”

  The Federal officers were examining their hands for blisters and swearing at the dust. Amos went cheerfully up the cellar stairs, and came back in a moment with his pail. He carried soap and a towel also, and his face was a study when the Inspector passed them back to him.

  The next procedure, however, astounded the negro. With one of the of
ficers holding a light close to the surface of the ground, the Inspector went over it carefully. He would pour a little water on the earth and watch it, then move on, repeating the performance.

  Suddenly he muttered something and asked for the shovel. Amos gave it to him, his eyes fixed on the earth, his color the peculiar gray of the terrified negro.

  And there, not more than a foot beneath the surface, Inspector Harrison came across the sword-stick.

  I can still see the rather smug complacence of his manner at the trial.

  “I then sent Amos for a pail of water.”

  “Perhaps you would better explain to the jury your purpose in sending for that water.”

  “In case of buried objects the surface of the ground may not appear to have been disturbed. In case however that it has been recently dug up, small bubbles of air will appear when water has been poured over it.”

  “And were there such bubbles?”

  “Plenty of them.”

  So there they stood in that cellar, the four of them. One of the Federal officers whistled softly. Amos was staring at the thing, pop-eyed with terror. It must have savored to him of witchcraft, that discovery; this detective, this policeman, muttering incantations to himself and then turning out that weapon into the cruel light.

  “My Gawd Amighty!” said Amos, and turning, ran up the stairs.

  They did not bother to follow him. The Inspector carefully wrapped the thing in paper, and some one telephoned to the District Attorney’s office. They had been holding poor Jim for the message.

  But they held him after the message also. Jim Blake was placed under arrest that night, and within three days he had been indicted by the Grand Jury for the murder of Sarah Gittings.

  He was to be tried only for the murder of poor Sarah, but in the opinion of the public at that time Jim Blake was guilty of two, and in the minds of the police, of a third one.

  Press comment was universally approving. That the police would not have taken this drastic step “without good and sufficient reason”; that “murder is murder, whether committed by the gangster or by the individual in high place in the community”; that “the District Attorney’s office is to be congratulated in having at last taken steps to solve these crimes,” these were some of the comments.

  Jim had been arrested after one o’clock Tuesday night, or rather early Wednesday morning, the eighteenth. Sarah had been dead for precisely a month.

  We were stunned with horror. It came as less of a surprise to me than to the others, but it was a shock for all that.

  We did little or nothing that first day. Jim was in a cell in the jail and had sent for his lawyer, Godfrey Lowell. Late in the day Godfrey came in to see me, and his face was very grave. Jim’s cell was damp and the food terrible, but these things he passed by with a gesture.

  “He’s not telling all he knows,” he said. “He says he’s innocent, and I believe he is. But he isn’t frank. He’s holding something back.”

  Nevertheless, Jim’s story as Godfrey told it to us that afternoon in the library, was sufficiently damning. Katherine hardly spoke during that recital. Dick sat holding Judy’s hand, but I doubt if Katherine noticed it.

  Briefly, Jim admitted having had an appointment to meet Sarah that night, but not in the park or by letter. She had, he maintained, telephoned him. “I have never received a letter from her, then, or at any time.” In this message, evidently sent after she had met Florence Gunther on the street and received the envelope, she had asked him to meet her that night on a very urgent matter.

  The address she gave was a house on Halkett Street, and he determined to walk, going by way of the park.

  On the way, however, he found that he had left the house number in his other clothing—he had changed to a walking suit—and he stopped at a drugstore to call her up. She had started, however; he talked to Judy for a moment and then went on, taking the short cut through the corner of the Larimer lot.

  He remembered that the house was in the seventeen hundred block on Halkett Street, and that he was to ask for a Miss Gunther. When he reached the block in question he had walked along slowly, and at one of the houses a youngish woman was waiting on the steps.

  He asked if she knew of a Miss Gunther in the vicinity, and she said that that was her name, and that Sarah had not yet arrived.

  They went together into the house and waited in the parlor. It was a boarding house, but although the door into the hall was open, he saw no one except a colored woman who passed by shortly before he left.

  The Gunther woman had been silent and very nervous. As time went on and Sarah did not arrive she seemed almost hysterical, and at twenty minutes to ten he had gone away, still in the dark as to why he had been there at all.

  “Florence Gunther apparently refused to tell him,” Godfrey said. “He came home by the same route, mystified over the whole business. He reached the path up the hill at or about ten o’clock, stopped to rest halfway up and then went on. He maintains that he knew nothing about Sarah until he got your word that she was missing, and that he never saw her that night at all.”

  “And the sword-stick?” Judy asked. “What does he say about that?”

  “That he hid it in the closet, but he did not bury it.”

  Katherine spoke, after a long silence.

  “When they found the stick, I suppose they had searched the house?”

  “I understand that they did, and that they found certain things which they believe strengthen the case.”

  “His letters? Everything?”

  “He had burned his letters. He had felt that this was coming, and yesterday he more or less got ready. Nothing important, he says, but he didn’t care to have them going through his papers.”

  I thought that Katherine looked relieved.

  I have re-read that paragraph. I know now that she was relieved. But I do not know even now what she had thought of that frantic inquiry of his, and his warning to send the reply by hand. It was burned, anyhow. She must have found some comfort in that.

  How could she know that after that scene in the District Attorney’s office Inspector Harrison had gone back to Jim’s house, armed with a small box and a delicate pair of tweezers, and had taken from the grate in that handsome room of Jim’s certain charred and blackened fragments of paper ash.

  Some time, that day or the next, he must have spent a painful hour over them. They had to be steamed and softened, and then they had to be laid out on a gummed paper and carefully pressed down. But he had his reward in the end. He had one sentence of nine words.

  It must have puzzled him, however.

  Late that evening the Inspector came in to see me, but he made no mention of his discovery in the fireplace. He seemed indeed to be rather apologetic, and he broke numberless toothpicks into fragments and strewed the floor with them.

  He had to tell me that Howard had been poisoned, and he plainly hated doing it.

  “No need of telling Mrs. Somers or Miss Judy,” he said. “After all, he may have done it himself, although that would be small comfort to them.” He looked at me. “Everything all right with them?” he asked. “Happy married life, and so on?”

  “Absolutely. He never killed himself, Inspector.”

  “Maybe not. Cyanide of potassium,” he said reflectively. “Quick and sure, but no imagination in it. No real imagination in any of these murders, for that matter. Now Walter has imagination; Blake hasn’t.”

  “Walter?” I said sharply.

  “He didn’t commit them, of course. Why should he? Leave out his affection for his father, and still he wouldn’t. The copy of the will is missing. To kill the witnesses wouldn’t get him anywhere. No, Walter Somers is out. I don’t have too much faith in alibis, but he didn’t do it.”

  Before he left he told me that the Grand Jury would have the case by Friday, and that it would undoubtedly bring in a true bill. But he did not seem particularly happy over it.

  “The more I study crime,” he said, “the less I k
now about the criminal. Take this case: these three murders were cold and audacious. They were committed by a man without fear and without scruple. They were fiendishly clever.

  “Yet we run into this situation; we find and arrest the criminal, because he has not been clever at all. He has buried his weapon in his house, although if he killed Somers he could have dropped it into a dozen streams on that trip of his. He has absolute nerve, a thing few men possess, and he faints when he is confronted with it. He is strong enough to get into that airshaft and to pull himself out later—a thing I couldn’t do, and I’m a strong man for my age—and here’s his doctor swearing he’s a sick man, has been sick for several years.

  “I’ve built this case. I’ve got evidence enough to convict Jim Blake and still have some left over. But I’m not satisfied. Not yet anyhow.”

  He broke three toothpicks in rapid succession.

  “Personally, I don’t believe we have scratched the surface of this thing. Go back to the night Miss Judy was hurt. And, by the way, has she ever told you why she went to the garage that night?”

  “She said she wanted a foot rule.”

  “But she asked Joseph where the ladder was kept, didn’t she?”

  “Yes.”

  “Now what did she want with that ladder? To look at it or to use it?”

  “I haven’t an idea, Inspector.”

  “Curious,” he said. “She had something in her mind. She’s shrewd. Now let’s go over that night.”

  “Joseph has heard the dogs barking in the shrubbery; they stop suddenly, as though they had recognized the intruder. You and Joseph start to the garage, and Joseph hears something. He calls ‘What’s that?’ There is no answer, and you both go on. Some one is in the shrubbery, or has passed through it. The next day I find footprints there; not the original ones. Planted. And by the way, those prints were made by a woman’s shoe. I’ve done some work on them! Not shoes from this house, however. Joseph and I have seen to that.

  “But here’s the point. Miss Judy was hurt at ten o’clock, and it was two when Norah saw this figure in the grounds.

  “And here is what I want to know. Where would Jim Blake go, between ten and two o’clock at night, to get a pair of shoes belonging to a heavy woman who walked on the outsides of her feet? He has no women in his house. Even his laundry goes out.