The Door (30 page)

“Either on his return the night before, or during that day, or even following the discovery of Sarah Gittings’ body, this defendant proceeded furtively and secretly to wash the sword-cane.

“But he could not clean the interior of the sheath. That remained for the experts of our department. They have found human blood in that sheath, and also another object.

“The age of human blood, after a certain period of time, is difficult to determine. My friends of the defense may urge that this blood may be from some ancient duel long since forgotten. But of this other object discovered the age is unquestioned. Adherent to this sheath was a needle from a pine tree, and this needle was fresh, gentlemen of the jury. It came from a particular variety of evergreen to be found only on that slope of the city park down which this unfortunate woman had been dragged.

“Numbers of similar needles, from similar trees, were found clinging to her clothing on the recovery of the body. And I may add that in the opinion of the experts for the state, this blood inside the sheath was similarly fresh.”

Why go on? Bit by bit he built his case, and bit by bit Jim sagged in his chair. When he reached the question of motive, and named Florence Gunther, there was such a stir in the courtroom that it had to be called to order.

“Now, gentlemen of the jury, it is not our purpose here, directly or indirectly, to try this defendant for the murder of Florence Gunther; but here and there this girl’s name will have to enter the record.

“On the day of this murder Florence Gunther took from the safe of her employers a certain document, sealed in a brown manila envelope and duly endorsed. This document has disappeared, but its identity has been established.”

And with the description of the will which followed, the supplying of the motive, the case was indeed as Godfrey had predicted; over before it commenced.

He fought on doggedly, but what were such things as hairs and fibers to a jury which had already reached its verdict? And we had a blow or two which were unexpected, at that.

One was the proof that Sarah had indeed written the letter to Jim, as claimed by the state. A photograph had been made of her blotter and greatly enlarged, and certain words had come out clearly enough. So far as they could put the words together, allowing for certain undecipherable places, she had written somewhat as follows:

“Dear Mr. Blake: I must see you as soon as possible on a very urgent matter. When I tell you that I believe that there is a—”

The first page had ended there, or she had used less pressure, for that was all. And even in this only certain words were at all clear; “urgent” and “possible” and “believe,” for example. But the “Dear Mr. Blake” was beyond dispute.

Katherine, too, had her own particular shock to face. This was the reconstruction of that charred fragment of a letter from her to Jim, which had been found in his fireplace.

“Your message alarms—What am I not to say?”

She had no warning. She had not expected to be called, and I am sure she had not the slightest idea of what was to confront her on the stand.

“Can you identify this?”

“I don’t even know what it is.”

She put up her lorgnette, stared down at that flat board, then lifted her head slightly.

“Do you recognize it now?”

“I think it is something I have written.”

“To the defendant?”

“Yes.”

“Do you remember when you wrote that?”

“No.”

“Or how you sent it? By mail?”

She was under oath, and she would not lie.

“By hand.”

“By whose hand?”

“By my chauffeur. I was sending certain things to my brother by car, and the letter went with them.”

We know now that that was true, that she had had no idea then that Jim’s mail was being watched. But on the face of it the admission was fatal, and when later on she was asked to explain that sentence and refused, there was little more to be done.

In the eyes of the jury and of the audience that day Katherine had as much as admitted that she knew something about the crime which she was “not to say.” And the next question, ruled not competent by the court, was not only designed to show that, but had a sinister purpose not lost on the jury or the crowd.

“Did you see your brother the night he went to New York?”

“What night was that?”

“The night of your husband’s death.”

“I did not,” said Katherine haughtily. “He was not in New York that night.”

But the effect had been made. The introduction of Charles Parrott was likewise fought, but on the District Attorney’s statement that he was important to their case he was put on the stand, and he made his semi-identification.

“He’s the same height and the same build,” he said, “but he was pretty well covered. It looks like him, but that’s as far as I go.”

The purpose of the prosecution was then revealed. Judy was unwillingly obliged to say that the telephone call had been apparently from Jim, and Howard’s checkbook was introduced.

It was shown that on the day, or night, of his death he had drawn a check to cash for a thousand dollars. The book was found on his desk in the morning, with the stub so marked. This check had not been presented, but evidence was introduced to show that two days before Jim had called up a local steamship agency and inquired about sailings.

And underlying all this, brought out again and again, was the sinister reference that when Jim had left the apartment in New York that night, or just before he left, Howard was dead.

Judy made a fine witness, and she got over more than the prosecution allowed to enter the record; she deliberately talked until they stopped her, and I think the jury found her a bright spot in a long day.

“Why hasn’t Mr. Waite been murdered?” she asked once, out of a clear sky. “Why wasn’t he the first to go?”

And again, relative to the finding of the cipher, she brought a laugh.

“Why did you search that room?”

“I thought the police needed a little help.” And after the laugh, and before she could be brought to order; “Why on earth would Sarah hide whatever she did hide, if she was going to tell Uncle Jim about it? She trusted him. She wasn’t hiding it from
him.
Find who she was afraid of and—”

They stopped her then, and under pretense of getting her handkerchief I saw her looking at a card in her bag. Evidently she had made some notes on it.

When they took her back to the night of Sarah’s death, and the intruder in the house, she was ready for them.

“You didn’t see him?”

“No, nor since. He’s been breaking in ever since, while Uncle Jim has been locked up. He didn’t find what he wanted on Sarah, so he—”

She was making a valiant effort, but I heard none of her testimony after Godfrey Lowell had read aloud the cipher itself. Laura suddenly caught my arm.

“For God’s sake, Elizabeth!” she whispered. “Didn’t Sarah tell you about the cabinet?”

“What about it?”

“Let’s get out of here. We’ve got to get home.”

It took us some time, however, to escape from that crowded courtroom. The very doorways and the halls outside them were filled, and when we finally reached the street, Robert had left his car and joined the morbid throng inside the building. Laura was exasperated and almost tearful, and I was not much better.

It was Wallie who finally found him for us, and who went with us to the house.

I had my key, for all the servants were at the courthouse, and at first glance everything appeared to be as it should be.

On the way Laura made her explanation.

“I meant to write you,” she said, “but I had some buying for Sarah to do, and so I wrote her. She was to tell you. Why didn’t you tell me she had hidden something? It’s in the cabinet, of course.”

It must have been forty minutes from the reading of the cipher to the time we turned into the drive. Save for a natural urgency to get into the house and find the key to the mystery, I think none of us except Wallie realized the necessity for any haste. And he had his own reasons for not stressing that.

He said very little during the drive. I remember now that he was very white, and that he jerked his shoulder and head even more than usual. But when I had unlocked the front door and opened it everything seemed quiet and in order. The dogs came to meet us, Isabel with corpulent dignity, Jock effusively. The servants were all at the courthouse, and the house was very still.

Laura turned at once to the drawing room on the left, and as I had restored the key to the cabinet some time before, she unlocked the center door without difficulty.

The cabinet is a fine example of Louis Fourteenth, of satinwood and kingswood. It is really a small secretary; that is, a shelf draws out and forms a writing desk, and above are three doors. The two outer doors are of glass, and behind this glass are my mother’s old Chelsea figures. The center door, however, is solid, and on this is fastened a very handsome oval piece of ormolu.

It was the center door which Laura opened, and I then noticed for the first time that this ormolu was fastened to the walnut lining of the door inside by some dozen very small bronze rosettes, ostensibly covering the heads of the screws. There was one in the center also, and thus they formed what might be interpreted as a clock dial.

“Five o’clock right, seven o’clock left, press on six,” said Laura, and did so. “Give me your knife, Wallie.”

But Wallie’s knife had a broken point. I remember that now, although it meant nothing to me at the time; I remember that, and that his hands were shaking when he tried to open it. In the end I had to get my own penknife from my desk, and Laura inserted the blade along the metal binding of the door.

It sprang open, revealing between the inner lining and the front of the door a flat space, the size of the door in area but hardly more than half inch in depth.

But that space was empty.

We stared at each other. My disappointment was more than I could bear, and Laura was almost in tears. What Wallie felt I can only surmise. He bent over and examined it, and I saw then that there the lining was badly scratched. Laura saw it too.

“Those weren’t there when you got it, were they?”

“I don’t think so.”

Wallie spoke then, for the first time.

“Why should anything be there?” he said. “Somebody was quicker than we were, that’s all.”

“You mean that this has been done recently.”

“Since those directions were read out in court,” he replied grimly. “You’ll find a window broken somewhere, or a door left unlocked.”

He was right. With all of us out of the house there had been no one to put in place the chain which now supplemented the lock of the kitchen door. The key of that door lay on the floor, as though it had been pushed out from outside and a duplicate or skeleton key had been used. And the door now stood open.

It was that night that Wallie disappeared.

I was less surprised than I should have been, perhaps, when he was not in the courtroom the next morning. On the evening before, at seven o’clock, he had telephoned Judy and told her not to worry.

“I’m going on the stand tomorrow,” he said, “and everything will be all right, Judy.”

“What do you mean, all right? If everything isn’t as wrong as it can be, I don’t know what it is.”

But he said that he was going to testify, and that he had plenty to say. That she was to be ready for a shock, but not to think badly of him. He had got himself into this mess, and he would “take his medicine.”

“Go to bed and get a decent sleep,” he said. “Let me do the staying awake. And don’t worry. Jim Blake isn’t going to the chair.”

She said later that he was not drunk, she was certain, but that his voice sounded queer.

“I’ve made up my mind,” he finished, “and I feel better for it. It’s a clean slate and to hell with what happens, for me.”

But he did not appear.

I was bitterly disappointed, and Judy looked puzzled and anxious.

“He lost his nerve,” she said. “He’ll never tell now, whatever it is that he knows.”

But the trial went on, although the papers commented unpleasantly on his absence, and Godfrey Lowell was upset. Still, on the surface at least, Wallie’s testimony could neither damn Jim nor save him. Whatever the true story of that pencil in the shaft, the fact remained that Wallie was in my house at ten o’clock, and Jim was in the park.

Things went badly for Jim that day. Amos had not been located, but there was his damaging testimony before the Grand Jury; and now read into the record, over protest, that the cane had been in the hall until Sarah’s body was found and then disappeared; and that further and damning fact that he had found a bloody handkerchief of Jim’s the morning after Sarah’s murder and placed it with the soiled clothes; that on listing the laundry the following Monday he had found this handkerchief, but that in the interval it had been washed clean and dried.

The accumulated mass of testimony was overwhelming. Nothing could shake the opinion of the experts that Sarah’s letter to Jim was in her own hand, or that the drops of blood here and there on his clothing and inside the sword-stick were human blood.

“How do you know they are human blood?”

“By the shape and size of the corpuscles. Also by their numbers and groupings.”

Indeed, so badly did things go that on the day following Godfrey Lowell at last put Jim himself on the stand. Jim had asked to testify and so he did, although how he thought it would help him nobody can say.

I
HAVE BEFORE ME
now that statement of Jim’s. Given much of it in question and answer, and broken by cross-examination and objections here and there, it takes many pages of the stenographic report.

As I have also, however, that document which Jim himself prepared later as the basis of an appeal, I shall use that instead.

I give it word for word.

“I had nothing whatever to do with the death of Sarah Gittings, or of Florence Gunther. I am willing to swear that before God. If I had kept back part of what little I know, it has been partly because I saw that things looked pretty hopeless for me, and partly because of my sister, who has been and is in deep trouble.