Album (43 page)

It was George Talbot.

I believe he would have killed me then and there, but at that moment the light in the hall came on, and he released me and stood staring at me.

“Sorry Lou!” he said thickly. “I thought—look here, there’s all hell loose in this house tonight. Beat it; I’m telling you! O God, there go the lights again!”

I had time to see that he held a golf club in his hand, however; and with that my shaken courage returned.

“Listen, George,” I said. “I can’t go. Herbert Dean’s here somewhere, and we’ll have to find him. If there is somebody here who is dangerous—I’d better bring in the taxi driver. He’ll help us to look, anyhow.”

And at that moment four shots in rapid succession were fired somewhere in the upper part of the house. I heard George groan in the darkness, and the next moment he had dashed out of the room and up the front stairs. Some sheer automatism took me into the front hall, and as I reached the foot of the stairs a flash of lightning showed the taxi driver in the doorway. Then everything was dark again, and out of that blackness something rushed at me from the rear of the house and knocked me flat on the floor.

Someone ran over me as I lay there, going with incredible silence and speed. Then there was a shocking scream, and by another lightning flash I saw that the taxi driver was struggling to hold a black and amorphous figure. Then there was another shot, the hall mirror fell in a crash of glass, and I fainted.

I never heard George Talbot come rushing down the stairs nor his frantic call over the telephone for the police. I never saw the inside of the library, where a grim-faced taxi driver had tied up a figure with a blackened face with the cords from the window curtains, and was now standing with a pistol pointed at it.

But the arrival of a police car finally roused me, and I was sitting dazedly in the hall when a few minutes later they carried down Herbert Dean, with a leg broken by a bullet and evidently in pain, but with a faint smile for me on a practically bloodless face.

It was midnight before I reached Aunt Caroline’s again. I had been left to recover in the hands of a strange policeman, who seemed to know as little of what had happened as I did. But I did not go until the hospital had assured me that Herbert was in pain but not gravely hurt.

I must have presented a queer sight to Aunt Caroline’s butler when at last, delivered like a warrant by the officer, he admitted me to the house and showed me up to my usual room. My hat was at a strange angle and my face dead white, save for a small cut where I had hit the edge of the hall table. I felt that I would never sleep again, but I fell into what was almost a stupor the moment I got into bed, and it was bright daylight on Wednesday morning before I wakened again.

Aunt Caroline had sent up the morning paper with my tray, and the first thing I saw was an enormous headline. “Crescent Place Murders Solved. Social Registerite Held Deranged.”

A
LL OF THAT WAS
on Wednesday, August the thirty-first. Our murders were solved, and a grateful public having read the morning papers began once more to go about its business. Editorials congratulated the police, and certain old residents of the city shook their heads and sighed.

But the police were not entirely happy. Although they now knew the answer to that baffling problem—and a surprising enough answer it was—they still did not know the whole story. There was, as Herbert says, still the question of John Talbot. How much did he know? Was he an accomplice or an innocent victim? On the one hand, they faced the stubborn silence of their prisoner; on the other, the inability to rouse Talbot out of a complete and hopeless apathy.

Herbert believed that Talbot was entirely innocent. He had formed a sort of attachment for this elderly man who for months as Daniels the street cleaner had pursued his quiet vocation among us, mildly interested but largely detached from that long-lost life of his, and returning at night to his tidy room and his books. Until at last some violent current carried him out of his eddy and into something so dreadful that his mind refused to accept it and so shut down on it; as one may draw a curtain.

The arrest had been made on Tuesday night, but the problem of John Talbot still faced the police on Wednesday. His condition was unchanged, and so it was that later on that day an interesting experiment was performed on him in his hospital room close to Herbert’s, and at Herbert’s suggestion.

The results more than justified it, and very possibly have added a new arm to crime detection, but it was not done without protest. At eight o’clock that morning Herbert Dean had called Doctor Armstrong on the telephone and had asked him to come to the hospital. There they had a long talk, Herbert pale but insistent, the doctor objecting.

“Damn it all, man, it’s still in the experimental stage. There’s a technique too. I don’t know it. If this is an actual catatonic stupor—But it may be hysteria.”

“I don’t care what it is. You can get the stuff and the technique too, can’t you? Come, doctor, this isn’t a time to hesitate. Use the long distance telephone. Use an airplane. Use anything you like, but do it.”

Finally Doctor Armstrong agreed, and by ten o’clock that morning a dictograph had been installed in John Talbot’s room, a screen ready for a police stenographer placed in a corner, and a lengthy long distance call to a great Western University had been charged, as Mother would say, against the taxpayers of the city. Shortly after that Doctor Armstrong came back, bringing with him a professor of neuropsychiatry from the local medical college and a package of a certain drug; and asking for a basin of ice, some towels, and a syringe for making intravenous injection. The drug, a preparation, I believe, of sodium amytal, was dissolved in distilled water, and with Daniels still in his stupor it was injected into his arm.

I have largely Doctor Armstrong’s description of what followed. The man on the bed relaxed almost at once, according to him. All rigidity disappeared, his breathing increased but was somewhat more shallow, his pupils on examination showed some dilation, and he himself was sunk in a deep sleep.

They allowed this sleep to last for an incredible time, according to the impatient men who by now crowded the room; the District Attorney, the Commissioner, Inspector Briggs, and Mr. Sullivan. Herbert, having fought to the last ditch for a wheeled chair and having been refused, at last bribed an orderly and got one; appearing in the doorway just as, the Inspector having pinched his lip into a permanent point and the Commissioner having called it a lot of tommyrot and threatened to leave, one of the two medical men took a cold towel from a basin beside him and placed it on the patient’s face. He repeated this twice, and then John Talbot roused, not fully but to a certain level of consciousness; enough to answer all their questions, but not enough to allow the brain censors, whatever they may be, to close down and alter the facts.

For three hours he talked, that long lean figure on the bed which bore so little resemblance to that crayon enlargement I had seen long ago in the stable loft. He told what he knew and what he suspected. He answered every question they put to him. He told them things they had never dreamed of, and without any emotion, so far as they could see, he recited the tale of that Saturday night and early Sunday morning; when he had had to cut the head off a human body, and had been actively sick in the middle of it.

The statement is too long to give here. I quote one or two lines of it, merely to give the idea of the method.

“Why did you shoot that girl in the room of the hotel at—?”

“I didn’t shoot her. I had been out, and I came back to find her dead, and the room full of people. It was my gun but I never did it.”

Then followed a long statement of his love for this woman, his unhappiness at home, the long struggle before he decided to go away with her. The police listened patiently through this flow of talk, which included his escape from the state institution.

“I was lucky to save my neck, at that. None of my relatives would put up any money, and my wife hated me. I don’t know that I blame her.”

Later on they asked him why he had come back to the city, and particularly to the Crescent.

“I came back to see my son,” he told them. “I’ve been watching him for a good many years. After the war I had a job with the iron works as a bookkeeper, but my eyes went bad, and I had to have them operated on. I drifted from one thing to another, and then I got this work for the city. I was uneasy when they put me on the Crescent, but nobody recognized me, except Emily Lancaster. She did, but I asked her to keep quiet.”

There is a good bit here in the record about George, and the tragedy of seeing him day after day. “He looked like a fine fellow. Sometimes he spoke to me. I always wanted to sit down somewhere and have a real talk with him. ‘To sow a thought and reap an act’—that’s a father’s part. But the way things were—”

They could not shake him on the Hollytree situation, although they went back to it again and again.

“What did you find when you got to the house near Hollytree?”

“It was done when I got there. All I could do was to get rid of the body. I put it in the trunk.”

“What did you do with what you took out of the trunk? The money?”

“I buried it that night. I never wanted to see it again. I buried it under some willows by the creek. Then I hid the drawers out of the trunk in the cellar. After that I walked into the town and got the expressman to take it away.”

“Where did you get the foreign labels for the trunk?”

“I’d traveled a great deal. I had some on some suitcases. All that I had to do was to soak them off.”

“Did you want this money for yourself?”

“God, no. Why should I want money?”

“What became of the head?”

“I don’t know. It was in the satchel.”

On only one point was he vague at all. He had walked ever since, all of two days and a part of two nights, until he had reached the police station. But he did not know where he had walked. The horror had closed down on him. He was not thinking. He was simply moving on and on, like a machine. He had noticed some things, for here the record speaks of “August, tarnished by the sun’s hot breath.”

It rang true, all of it. Even those cynical policemen knew that. Their attitude softened, although his revelations made them shudder. When it was all over Inspector Briggs put a hand on the thin shoulder and held it there a moment.

“Now you go to sleep,” he said, “and quit worrying. We’ll fix this up. And we’ll send your boy over to see you when you wake up.”

It was not until that long séance was over that an indignant surgeon trundled Herbert back to his bed, and growled fiercely that he was to get in and stay in. But that night I was allowed to see him, and it is from our talk then that I give Herbert’s summary of the case as well as I can.

“From the beginning it seemed clear that the money Mrs. Lancaster had hoarded was involved somehow in her death. When Emily’s part in taking it became known, then, we had two guesses. One was that she had taken it for herself, that her mother was secretly able to get about and so discovered her loss, and that Emily had killed her. Against this was Emily’s total disregard for money and her actual devotion to Mrs. Lancaster. There were other elements too; her unspotted dress that day was only one of them.

“Nevertheless, Margaret believed from the first that she had done it, and that her stepfather had killed Emily. We knew that the old gentleman had not done so, however, after Helen’s story. I never did believe it, for that matter.

“What seemed evident after the death of Holmes was that we had, outside of the murders, two definite plots to get hold of the money. The one was that of Holmes himself, possibly with Peggy to help him. The other was not so clear. I figured that more than one person was involved in it, since we were pretty certain that on the night Holmes was killed no one had left the Crescent. What occurred to me then was that somewhere near where the body was found this outsider—whoever it was—had tried to get Holmes off the truck and had perhaps run over him by accident. There was the handkerchief on his body, for one thing, so that he would be seen by any passing car.

“That was not the act of a murderer; I thought then of an inexpert driver as an explanation, and as we know now, poor old Talbot hadn’t driven a car for a good many years.

“What we now know took place is that Emily had recognized Daniels as the uncle she had been fond of. This would have been in the spring, at the time the coolness sprang up between her mother and herself. Probably Emily urged some sort of help for Talbot, and the mother refused.

“That makes it likely that Emily took the money for her uncle. Maybe not, but someone was to escape, either John Talbot or herself, and I think it was Talbot. That’s the reason for the steamer folders in her room. However, one thing is certain. She never told him what she was doing. He learned that elsewhere, and he learned it after the old lady was killed. That was when, under a threat of being sent back to the asylum, he took Peggy’s bag from her and tried to enter the MacMullen house; and the chain held him up! He says—and I believe it—that this threat was used all along to force his cooperation.

“But it was a fatal mistake that Emily made when she told her mother. The old lady could get about, as we know, when there was no one there to see her; and she took to watching this street cleaner, whenever she had a chance. He was changed, of course. She wasn’t sure he was Talbot. Then one day she asked Emily to bring down the old album, and there was a picture of him in it. Day after day she compared him with it, and she saw that Emily was right.

“That settled it, for she had a weapon now. It involved a lot of people, and especially one person. She was not a pleasant old woman, and she had hated the Talbots for a good many years.

“However that may be, this knowledge of hers gave her a weapon against them. They are a proud lot, and at any time she could spring the glad tidings that John Talbot, a fugitive from the law, was sweeping the street in front of their very house! And I’m afraid—I’m very much afraid, my darling—that she did just that, a day or two before she was killed.