The Door (17 page)

“He’s the same build. He looks like him. But that’s as far as I go.”

So Jim moved about, unsuspicious, changing the flowers, softening the lights, and Parrott watched him. He disappeared when Jim had gone upstairs again, to remain with Katherine and Judy during the services. Wallie was not asked to join them. He was left to sit alone, where he chose. A cruel thing, perhaps; a stupid thing certainly. Katherine had taken the strongest affection he had ever felt, the deepest grief, and flung them back in his face.

So he sat alone, rigid and cold during the services, and stood alone at his father’s grave. However he had wavered before, some time then he made his decision. He went that night to call on Alex Davis, sitting complacent and smug in his library, and slammed out only a half hour later, leaving Alex in a state bordering on apoplexy.

Half an hour later Alex Davis was frenziedly ringing the bell of the apartment and demanding to see Katherine. He was admitted and taken up to her, but Judy and I knew nothing of all this until later.

Judy had determined to talk to Jim, and asked me to be present in the library.

“I can’t stand it any longer,” she said. “He was here. Why doesn’t he speak up? He must know that watchman saw him. Even if father was—was alive when he left, why doesn’t he say something?”

But Jim’s reaction to her first question was a surprise to both of us. He denied, immediately, categorically, and almost violently, that he had made any visit to Howard Somers on the night of his death.

“Here?” he said. “Why, it’s madness. Why should I have come like that? You’ve lost your good common sense, Judy.”

“Some one was here and used your name. He telephoned on the way, from somewhere in the country.”

When she had told her story, however, he looked ghastly. Not only was there the implication that Howard had been murdered, but there was the terrible possibility which the situation held for himself. What was he to do, where to turn? To go to Katherine and demand that the body be exhumed? And that with the police watching him, and maybe poison to be found? All that he must have thought of, sitting there so neat and dapper in his chair.

“It’s terrible,” he said. “It’s all terrible. And this night watchman? He says he recognized me?”

“He says the man was your height and build.”

Suddenly he was savagely angry. “And so this fellow, this Parrott—he’s in the secret, is he? He’s been brought here to look me over! Good God, Judy, do you want to send me to the chair? I wasn’t here. How the hell could I get here? I’ve been sick for weeks. If somebody came here that night, using my name and impersonating me, he was a liar and an impostor, and before God I believe he was a murderer too. Why should I have come here in the night? I could come at any time.”

Then he quieted, although he was still shaking.

“Does your mother know anything of all this?”

“Nothing.”

“Then keep it from her. You can do that much. She is in great trouble.”

“So am I in great trouble,” said Judy bitterly. “But I suppose that doesn’t matter.”

He looked at her.

“You believed it, did you? Do you still believe it?”

“I don’t know. No, of course not.”

“Judy,” he said, more gently, “what motive could I have? What possible reason? Your father was my friend. To put the thing boldly, what could I possibly gain by his death? By any of these deaths?”

And as if in answer to his question a footman knocked at the door and said that Katherine wanted to see him in her room.

I have no picture of that scene, but I can see it: Katherine frozen in her chair and Alex Davis walking the floor, and after a habit of his snapping his fingers as he walked. Into that scene Jim was projected, and in the forcible language he was told what Wallie had said.

Briefly, Wallie had claimed that, during his illness the summer before, his father had made a second will. That this will was in Howard’s safe deposit box at the bank in New York, and the copy in the hands of Waite and Henderson, Mr. Waite having personally drawn it, here in my own city.

By this will, Wallie received no trust fund and no annuity, but a full half of the estate, and the previous will had been revoked. The new will made no provision whatever, either for Sarah or for Jim.

“He may be lying,” said Jim, still apparently confused.

But Alex Davis snapped his fingers with excitement, and said that if so it was fairly circumstantial lying.

“He’s even got the names of the witnesses,” he said, and drawing a slip of paper from his pocket he read them aloud. “Sarah Gittings and Florence Gunther.”

I believe it was then that Jim collapsed.

Naturally I knew nothing of this at the time, nor did Judy. Both Katherine and Jim were still shut in their rooms when I left early the next morning.

But I was sufficiently dismayed and confused. If we were to believe Jim—and I did—then the possibility of a third murder was very real. And once more, sitting in the train, I endeavored to fit together the fragments of that puzzle. I saw Howard, that night, waiting in his room, settled in his bed, the highball beside him, a book in his hand. Getting up to admit his visitor, finding it was not Jim, but making no outcry. Still calm, putting on his dressing gown and slippers, talking. Judy had heard them talking.

Some one he knew, then; knew and trusted. Was it Wallie? Wallie was not unlike Jim in build, although taller and slimmer. Might not that be the answer, and no poison, no third murder. A talk between father and son, and then Wallie going and the heart attack after he had gone.

I admit that this comforted me. I sat back and tried to read.

Shortly before the train drew in to the station Dick Carter came through the car. He looked depressed, but he forced a smile when he saw me.

“Well,” he said, “I’m back on the job! Even funerals can’t last forever.”

He sat down in the empty chair next to mine, and said that Judy had telephoned him of Jim’s denial.

“She believes him,” he said. “In that case—this Martin girl seems to be fairly vital. It begins to look as though she’s the key, doesn’t it? Take that glass, for instance. She thought fast that morning and she was still thinking that night. It’s not coincidence, all that glass stuff. Get why she did that, and we’ve got somewhere. Where does she come in in all this, anyhow?”

“I wish I knew.”

“Tell me something about her,” he said, leaning forward. “Who is she? What do you know about her?”

“Nothing, really. She answered an advertisement last fall. I tried her out, and she was efficient. Very. She had no local references.”

“And on that you took her into the house? To live?”

“Not at first. But she was really very capable, and sometimes I work at night. I rather drifted into it.”

He was silent for some time. Then he made a circle on a piece of paper and marked it around with perhaps a dozen dots. It bore a rough relation to a clock-face, but without the hands, when he held it out to me.

“This dial thing,” he said. “It may not refer to a clock, you know. It might be a safe. You haven’t a safe in the house, have you?”

“No.”

“A safe, or something resembling a clock, but not necessarily a clock. Something round. Would that mean anything to you? A picture, maybe? Have you any round pictures, with nails at the back?”

“One or two. I can examine them.”

The train was drawing in. He helped me into my wraps, and we sat down again while we were being slowly moved into the station.

“I suppose,” he said, not looking directly at me, “that you realize what all this has done to me?”

“To you!”

“About Judy. I’ll be nobody’s kept husband, and Judy’s got a couple of millions or so. I fade, that’s all.”

“Judy has a right to a vote on that, hasn’t she?”

“She’s voted. She’ll keep the money.”

“I don’t believe it.”

“Well, the equivalent of that. She says I’m a poor mean-spirited creature to refuse to let her support me in luxury. She says it takes a strong man to marry money, and I’m weak or I’d do it.”

Then the train stopped.

I was glad to get home, to find Robert at the station and Joseph at the open door. I like my servants; I have to live with them, and so when I do not like them they must go. And the house was cool and quiet, after New York. I relaxed at once under Joseph’s care; the well-laid tea table, the small hot rolls, the very smoothness and greenness of the lawns outside the windows. For the first time since Sarah’s death I felt secure. Surely now it was over; we had had our three tragedies, according to the old superstition.

I leaned back and looked at Joseph, and for the first time, I realized that he was pale, almost waxy.

“Have you been ill, Joseph?”

“No, madam. I have had an accident.”

“An accident? What sort of an accident?”

But as it turned out, Joseph had had no accident. Dragged out of him, and later corroborated by the maids, came the story of an attack in broad daylight so mysterious and so brutal that it made my blood run cold.

The story was this: on the afternoon of the day I left for New York, he had allowed the women servants to go out. He often did this in my absence, getting himself a supper of sorts, and apparently glad to have his pantry to himself.

The house was locked and Robert was washing the car in the garage. According to Robert, and this was later found to be true, the first knowledge he had of any trouble was at four o’clock that afternoon, when he heard a faint rapping on the pantry window and looking toward the house, saw a bloody head, wavering with weakness, inside.

Robert was frightened. He made no effort to get into the house alone, but summoned a white chauffeur from the garage of my bootlegger neighbor, and the two of them broke open the basement door and rushed up the stairs.

They found Joseph unconscious on the pantry floor, his head bleeding profusely from a bad cut, and as Doctor Simonds later discovered, his body a mass of bruises. It was two hours before he recovered consciousness, and then he could give no description of his assailant.

“I saw and heard nobody,” he told me. “I was on the second floor. It looked like rain and I was closing the windows. I had finished that and was about to go down the back staircase when I felt that some one was behind me. But I never saw who it was. The next thing I remember, madam, I was at the foot of the stairs, trying to crawl to the pantry.”

And this story of his was borne out by the fact that the maids later found blood on the stairs and a small pool at the bottom.

Doctor Simonds however did not place too much confidence in the story of the attack, when he came in that night to see me.

“Sure he was hurt,” he said, with that cheerful descent into the colloquial with which the medical profession soothes its fearful patients and its nervous women. “Surest thing I ever saw. It took four stitches to sew him up! But why assault? Why didn’t Joseph catch his rubber heel on something and pitch down those stairs of yours? There are twenty odd metal-edged steps there, and every one got in a bit of work.”

“He says he felt that there was some one behind him.”

“Exactly. He was stepping off as he turned to look; and why he didn’t break that stiff neck of his I don’t know. It’s a marvel to me that he’s up and about.”

But Joseph stuck to his story. He had been attacked by some one from the rear, armed either with a club or a chair. And as we know now, he was right. Joseph had indeed been murderously assaulted, and very possibly left for dead.

As it happened, it was during that call of Doctor Simonds’ that I first learned of the possibility that Howard had left a second will. He had attended Howard during his illness at the Imperial the summer before, and expressed regret over his death.

“Of course it was bound to come,” he said. “He knew it. He was not a man you could deceive, and that attack he had here was a pretty bad one. By the way, did he alter his will at that time? Or do you know?”

“Alter it? I don’t know, I’m sure.”

“He was thinking of it. Walter had been very attentive to him, and they’d patched up a peace between them. It was rather amusing, in a way. Poor Miss Gittings hated Walter, and she would have kept him out if she could.”

“I hope he did change the will,” I said, thoughtfully. “After all, his only son—”

“He may, and he may not. I talked it over with Walter, and he said there would be hell to pay if it did happen. He wasn’t sure, of course. But he got me to give him a letter, to the effect that his father was capable of drawing such a document; ‘not under drugs, or mentally enfeebled.’” He laughed a little. “Mentally enfeebled,” he said. “If Howard Somers was mentally enfeebled I wish I had arterio-sclerosis!”

But Joseph’s injury had made me most uneasy. What was the motive? What had been gained by it? I must confess that once again I considered the possibility of a killer who killed for the sheer lust of murder.

That day I bought a new revolver for Joseph, and moved him to a guest room on the second floor. Before he retired I made the round of the house with him, and even of the garage and the cellars. Then, with my own door locked, I was able to pass a quiet if not an easy night.

But again I did not sleep. I lay in bed with a pencil and a sheet of paper, and tried that night to put together what we knew about this unknown. I wrote down that he was crafty and physically strong; that he had no scruples about taking human life; that he knew my house even to the detail of the airshaft and its window; that he was—at least probably—of the same height and build as Jim Blake; that my dogs knew him; that, although since Sarah’s death the front door lock had been changed, he was still able—if Joseph’s story were accurate—to enter my house at will; and that his motive, still hidden, had somehow already involved and destroyed Sarah and Florence Gunther and possibly Howard, and might in the end affect others, God only knew who.

I was badly frightened by that time, and when just as I had finished the list I heard the stealthy padding of feet in the hall, I was in a cold sweat of terror. It was only Jock, however, moving restlessly about, with the call of the spring night in his blood and a closed and double-locked front door between him and his kind.