The Door (19 page)

It was fortunate that Joseph was taking his afternoon out, or he might not have admitted her. He had his own methods of discriminating between people making social calls and people who came for purposes of their own. Indeed, I have seen him; the swift glance at car or taxicab, the rapid appraisal, gloves, shoes, garments. And then the quick decision.

“Madam is not at home.”

Or a widening of the door, a bow; taking the cards, rather in the grand manner, and through it all a suggestion—merely a suggestion—of welcome.

But as it is Clara’s rule to admit all comers Lily Sanderson gained access without trouble, and I found her in the drawing room, rather stiff and formal.

“I hope you don’t mind my coming,” she said. “I just had a feeling I had to see you.”

“I am glad you came. Would you like a cup of tea?”

“If it isn’t too much trouble. I came from the store, and I’ve had a hard day. I didn’t take time to go home and change.”

She watched with interest while I rang for Clara and ordered tea, and the long drawing room seemed to fascinate her.

“Such a lovely place,” she said. “I was looking at your bushes, as I came in. And this room! That’s a lovely cabinet over there.”

“It is lovely,” I agreed. “It is very old.”

And as I sat there looking at this big blue-eyed woman with her faint limp, her almost childlike assumption of sophistication, her queer clothes, I felt that I liked her. Liked her and trusted her.

She did not come immediately to the reason for her visit, and I did not urge her. It was after the tea had come and Clara had gone that she finally brought up the subject.

“I don’t know whether it’s valuable or not,” she said. “But as a friend of Florence’s you ought to know. She was seen getting into a car, the night she was killed. Two people saw her.”

“What kind of a car?”

“A large one; a limousine.”

“Did they notice the color?”

“They don’t agree about that. They’re the Italians who keep the fruit stand at the corner. I don’t know their names. We call him Tony. They knew Florence well; she often bought apples there. Tony says it was black, but Mrs. Tony says it was blue.”

The story was as follows: on the night of Florence Gunther’s murder both the Italians at the fruit stand saw her coming along the street. She shook her head, to say she wanted nothing, and then waited for a street car. Both of them saw her distinctly. She seemed restless, walking a few steps each way, then back again.

Before a car arrived, however, an automobile drew up before her; a closed car with a man at the wheel. Owing to the fact that the street light was directly overhead, neither of the Italians saw him clearly, except that he wore a soft hat.

There was some conversation. The man and woman at the fruit stand were interested. They had known her for a long time, and she was always alone. She seemed to demur at something, the man appeared to insist. Finally he opened the door and she got in beside him.

But—and here was the curious part—the woman at the fruit stand maintained that this same car had been standing halfway down the block in the shadow for some time. That she had seen it there, and that the man driving it had been working at something about it; front and rear.

“She thought he was rubbing dirt over the license plates,” Miss Sanderson said. “And they had been held up a month or so before, so she watched him. She says now that he got into the car the moment he saw Florence. Then he drove up rather fast, and threw on the brakes in front of her, as though he had just seen her. But Mrs. Tony was interested in the license plates, and she went out and looked at the rear one. He had blacked it. She couldn’t read it, at all.”

But that visit of Lily Sanderson’s was disappointing in one way at least. I asked her point blank if she knew a young woman named Mary Martin, and it produced no effect whatever.

“Mary Martin?” she said thoughtfully. “No, I can’t say that I do.”

“I think she knew Florence Gunther. If not, she certainly knew some one at the house.”

“I can ask, if you like,” she said. “I’ve only been there since last fall, and most of the rest are new too. You know how it is, everything’s fine at first. Then you’re caught doing a bit of washing or having a gentleman friend more than one night a week, and there’s trouble. And that reminds me. I’ve got something to tell you about the man who called on Florence Gunther. Clarissa saw him.”

“Clarissa?”

“The colored woman at the house. And a surly creature she is, at that. I gave her a dress the other day, and she talked. He was a thin man, rather tall; she thinks about fifty. Well dressed, she says. He had a cane with him, and he wore a sport suit. Out our way that means something!”

I
T WAS THAT EVENING,
Tuesday the seventeenth, at dinner, that I received one of Katherine’s characteristic terse telegrams.

“Arriving tonight eleven o’clock train.”

The telegram was not only unexpected but ominous. That Katherine, sunk in grief as she was, should leave her house and come to me at that time seemed almost incredible. I could think of only two things; either that Jim had told her of the danger in which he stood, or that something had aroused her suspicions as to Howard’s death.

In any event her coming was certainly significant, and I am not ashamed to say that I took a small glass of sherry before I left for the station. Nor did the sight of Katherine in her widow’s weeds, with that white cold face of hers set like a mask, improve matters. She offered me her cheek, and as I offered mine at the same moment, what resulted was rather like the nose rubbing of the Africans, or whoever it is.

Not then, nor later when I showed her her room and the Frenchwoman, Elise, began to lay out her toilet things, did she offer any explanation of her visit. Judy, she said, was all right and would come with Jim the next morning. She herself had come on business. And then very politely she put me out and left me to lie awake most of the night, wondering.

It was not until ten the next morning that I got my explanation, and then it was clear enough, and worrying enough, in all conscience. At ten o’clock the door bell rang, and it was Jim, accompanied by Judy and, to my intense surprise, Alex Davis.

Judy looked odd and uncomfortable, but she was irrepressible, as always.

“It’s not a convention,” she said. “It’s merely a delegation.”

She went upstairs to Katherine and the two men waited in the library, Jim moving about restlessly, Alex Davis glancing over some notes in his hand. In five minutes or so the bell rang again, and Joseph announced Mr. Waite.

I was practically beyond speech by that time. I listened dumbly while Mr. Waite made his apologies; he had just got off the train; he had been taking the sun cure in Arizona for his arthritis and was much better, thanks. Then his eyes fell on the black band on Jim’s sleeve, and he said something polite about Howard’s death.

But it all seemed unreal to me, and when Joseph ushered in Doctor Simonds I was not surprised to see Alex Davis rise and clear his throat, as though he were about to address a meeting.

“I believe that completes us,” he said, as though he had announced that there was a quorum present. “And now, if Joseph will notify Mrs. Somers—”

Bewildered as I was, I had to admire Katherine as she came in, in her long black gown and with her fine head high in the air. There was a superb dignity about her, a refusal to make any concessions to the expected, so unlike my own fluttering as to make me self-conscious.

She shook hands with no one, smiled at no one. She simply sat down and looked at Alex Davis.

“Very well,” she said. “I believe we are all ready.”

And then Alex Davis did indeed make a speech. He referred to his late dear friend, Howard Somers, and to the grieving woman who sat there, finding herself in a position which it was difficult for her to accept.

“In all their conversations together, this husband and this wife, she was led to believe that the bulk of his fortune would come to her. Now she is confronted with a new will, a will she cannot explain and does not accept.” I saw Mr. Waite frown slightly. “A will in which a wastrel son receives one half of this large estate. It is to discuss, not the validity of this will”—he glanced at Mr. Waite—“but the circumstances under which it was drawn, that she has asked you to meet her here today.”

He sat down, and Mr. Waite took off his glasses and polished them with his handkerchief.

“Am I to speak?” he inquired. “I presume, since the integrity of the document is not in question, that it is really up to the doctor.”

Urbane as he was, I saw that he was irritated. Under Alex’s fine words he must have seen, as I did, that it was the will itself which was under fire.

“I actually know nothing,” the doctor said. “Walter Somers told me, during his father’s illness here last summer, that he was thinking of changing his will. He asked my opinion of his father’s mental condition, and I said I wished mine were as good. Later on he asked me to give him a note to that effect, and I did so.”

He sat back, smoothing a small Van Dyke beard with a hand deeply stained from cigarettes. Katherine eyed him and spoke for the first time.

“You had given him no drugs, Doctor?”

“Drugs?” he said rather testily. “I gave him drugs, of course. That’s my profession. But I gave him nothing that could by any stretch of the imagination affect his mind.”

Mr. Waite’s story was given circumstantially and directly.

On the twelfth of the previous August he had received a telephone call from Walter Somers, asking him to see his father that afternoon at the Imperial Hotel and to draw up a will for him. As he knew that Mr. Somers had been very ill and was still a sick man, he took the precaution of calling up the doctor here, who was attending him, and inquiring as to his mental condition. Doctor Simonds said that he knew Mr. Somers was contemplating a new will, and that he was entirely competent to make one. The result was that he had drawn up the draft late that afternoon, and took back the finished document at something after four o’clock the next day. It was signed in duplicate.

Katherine listened with slowly rising color.

“Do you mean to say that you would draw up a will as vital as that, as—revolutionary, without question? What about undue influence being brought to bear? A man may appear to be normal, but after a severe illness, when he is weak and broken—”

“There was certainly no influence evident at the time. The manager of the hotel took me up, and Walter Somers met me at the door and took me in. Then he went out and I did not see him again, either that day or the next.”

“Was Sarah Gittings present?”

“She left the room. She was there when I first went in, and she came in on the second day to witness the signatures. And I may add this. There was some discussion of the terms of the will. Mr. Somers himself knew that it was what you have called revolutionary, but he said that Walter had reached years of discretion, and that he felt that there was plenty for all.”

“That is not the question,” said Katherine sharply. “The money’s nothing. What does money matter? What does matter is that at the end he should have repudiated me. What brought that about, Mr. Waite? What happened here last summer to change his entire attitude toward me? Why did he put that will in his box, endorsed in his own hand ‘to be given to my son Walter in the event of my death’? That is very serious, Mr. Waite. Had he ceased to trust me? And that fund of fifty thousand dollars to be administered by Walter at his discretion! What did he say about that? What secret was he covering?”

“He said that Walter understood.”

“And that is all he said?”

“That is all.”

She leaned back in her chair, apparently exhausted, and there was a short silence broken at last by Alex Davis.

“Have you the duplicate of the will with you, Mr. Waite?”

And then some of Mr. Waite’s air of offended dignity left him. He stirred in his chair.

“I was coming to that. As a matter of fact, a very strange thing has happened to that copy, Mr. Davis. It has disappeared from our files. Mr. Henderson has been searching for several days, ever since Mr. Somers’ death, in fact. He has a theory as to its disappearance, but as it is not a pleasant one—”

I happened to glance at Jim and his mouth was twitching crazily.

“I think we must hear it, nevertheless.”

“It’s like this. On the day of Sarah Gittings’ murder—that afternoon in fact—a clerk in our office opened the safe at Florence Gunther’s request, and left her there to secure certain documents. Later on she returned these papers, and he closed and locked the safe. She was a trusted employee, and everything apparently was all right.

“When Mr. Somers died, however, in my absence Mr. Henderson, who knew about the will, went to the safe for the duplicate and found that it was gone.

“No suspicion attached itself to Florence Gunther, who had herself gone with me on both days to the hotel and who had later witnessed the will. But during the intervening time she had been murdered, and naturally everything pertaining to her had become a matter of great interest.

“Four days ago Mr. Henderson telegraphed me that the will was missing, and to come back. When he met me at the train this morning he told me that one of our clerks, a man named Lowrie, had remembered that on the afternoon of the day Sarah Gittings was killed he had seen Florence Gunther on the street; that he saw her meet a heavy-set woman whom he believes now, from the published photographs, to have been Sarah Gittings, and there on the street pass to her a long envelope of the legal type.

“If that is true, it is at least possible that the duplicate of the will was in that envelope.”

Jim spoke for the first time, trying to control his mouth.

“Why would she have done that?”

Mr. Waite considered.

“She was a reliable woman,” he said. “If she did that at all, and I am only telling you the office talk, she meant to show that will to Miss Gittings and then to put it back in the safe. But things happened and—Mr. Henderson has been to the police, and it was not found among her effects. The effects of either of the two women.”