The Door (32 page)

The thing worried me. Who was it who had telephoned? Was it Mary Martin, and if so why had she suggested the police? My entire experience with Mary convinced me that she regarded the police with fear, if not with horror. Yet who else? With all his faults Wallie had apparently steered clear of the type of underworld woman who might naturally think of the police.

In the end I called the club again and got the steward.

“This young woman who telephoned, Mr. Ellis—did she give any name?”

“No. She called from a pay station. I thought she was crying, as a matter of fact, but she hung up before I could find out anything.”

“Why do you say she was young?”

“Well, her voice was young, if you know what I mean.”

I was sure then that it was Mary, and the fact that she had been crying convinced me that something was terribly wrong. I left the telephone and went into the library and there I had as bad an attack of palpitation of the heart as I have ever had in my life.

Joseph found me there and hurried for some bicarbonate, and when I felt a little better I told him the story. It upset him greatly. The hand holding the glass shook until the spoon clattered, and he had to steady himself by a chair.

“The police, madam? Then this young person thinks he has met with real trouble?”

“She was crying, Joseph.”

In the end I called up Dick Carter, and that evening he and Joseph went to Wallie’s room at the club. They examined everything there, but without result, and the story they brought back was ominous, to say the least.

On that previous Wednesday night Wallie had eaten no dinner. Instead he had gone into the writing room and there had written for a long time, until eight or after. The boy on duty there “thought he was writing a book.” When he finished he had asked for a long manila envelope, put into it what he had written, taken his hat and a light overcoat from the man in the hall and gone out.

He stood on the outside steps for a moment, and then he came back. He seemed nervous and irritable, and he went into the telephone booth and talked to some one for a considerable time. Then he started out again, and so far as was known he had never come back.

Dick and Joseph examined his room carefully. Joseph, who occasionally went there to go over his clothing and to put things in order for him, said that he found nothing missing.

“But you must remember, madam,” he said, “that Mr. Walter has been under a great strain lately, and it is not unusual for him to start out on an evening ride in his car and then to keep on. I have known him to do that a number of times.”

“For six days, Joseph? And when he was to testify at a murder trial the next day? That’s ridiculous.”

“That is probably the reason, madam.”

“Nonsense, Joseph! Nobody believes that Mr. Walter had anything to do with it.”

From the club they went to the garage. The night man remembered clearly his coming there, and that he must have meant to return, for he had ordered the car washed that night.

“I’ll be in about eleven,” he had said. “I want it properly washed, too. The last time it looked worse than before you started.”

He had seemed to be in a bad humor. It was about a quarter after eight when he reached there, and he ordered the car filled with gas and oil. He said he was going into the country, and he stood by watching while this was done. He seemed to “be in a hurry to be off.”

But after he was in the car something happened of which the mere telling made my hands cold and sent despair into my very soul.

To quote the man at the garage:

“He had an overcoat—it’s still here—and at the last moment he threw it out to me. It was a warm night. Then he asked for it again and he took a revolver out of it. He tried to slip it out so I wouldn’t see it. But I saw it all right. He put it in the pocket of the car.”

To me that night that revolver meant only one thing. Wallie had killed himself. Somewhere he had stopped his car on a lonely road and ended a life which had ceased to be endurable.

But why? What did he know? What had he done? Was it possible after all that those three alibis of his were wrong? Had he slipped out of my house that night of the eighteenth of April and killed poor Sarah? I went over that night once more, and I was certain that he had not.

Late as it was by that time, almost midnight, I called up Inspector Harrison. I had evidently wakened him from a sound sleep, but he said he would come as soon as he could, and while I sat there waiting my mind fairly seethed.

If Wallie was innocent, then what did he know that he would rather die than tell, and for which he would let Jim suffer? And once more I harked back to Judy and that strange suspicion of hers about her father. Were we all wrong, after all? Was Howard being blackmailed, and that will with its ambiguous clause his final price for silence? Was Katherine right and was Margaret living? And were Sarah and Florence Howard’s desperate last attempt to keep that secret under cover?

Wallie and Jim both silent, the one ready to go to the chair if necessary before he would speak, and the other perhaps dead by his own hand; what did that look like?

And when the Inspector came I told him all that was in my mind, my fears for Wallie, my suspicions about Howard. He listened attentively, biting hard on the end of a toothpick and silent for some time after I had finished.

“It’s ingenious,” he said at last. “It’s even possible. Funny thing Miss Judy would think of that, isn’t it, and the rest of us would miss it? Sure he might have recognized this fellow if he was there; especially if he knew him. There’s more to recognition than features. There’s the outline and the clothes and the way a person moves. And here’s a thing that struck me at the trial. If he was inventing that man, why put him in evening clothes? It was plausible enough up to that minute. Then the jury just sat back and yawned. Now, Mr. Somers had white hair, I think, and he wore it fairly long?”

“Yes.”

“Queer case, isn’t it?” he said. “Unless Blake invented the evening coat to fit the black fibers on that log. Well, let’s get to this other matter.”

When he left it was to go to the garage and secure a description of Wallie’s car, and I believe it was almost morning before he got to his bed again. He had started the entire machinery of the city and county on the search by that time, and the only reason he did not extend that search over the country was because he felt certain, as he confessed later, that Wallie was dead by his own hand, and not too far away.

That was on Tuesday, and on Wednesday morning the papers were filled with his disappearance. “Young Millionaire Missing.” “Police Hunting Walter Somers.”

And on Thursday afternoon, the last day of June, we had some news.

Wallie’s car had been found on the Warrenville road, not far from the end of the street car line, and about two miles nearer the city than the Hawkins farm. Some boy scouts, out for a hike, had selected for lunch a gully with a small stream flowing through it, and a half dozen had wandered up this ravine for a half mile or so.

The car had been driven over the hill, and was upside down and badly demolished. A local deputy constable had notified the police and kept the boys away. They had been anxious to turn it over.

When Inspector Harrison arrived on the scene with Simmons and four or five others, the ground had not been disturbed. They found no footprints, however, save the smaller and unmistakable ones of the boys, and they were forced to the conclusion either that the car had been empty when it started on its wild journey, or that Wallie had been thrown out somewhere on the hill.

But they found no Wallie, and nothing further to help them.

The Inspector, reporting the matter, had his own opinion of it.

“He deliberately got rid of that car,” he said. “It might have lain there for a year, if those youngsters hadn’t happened on it.”

There was no sign of the revolver, and although inside it—it was a roadster, with one seat and a rumble—there were certain scratches, and a leather seat cushion torn in one place, these were probably the result of the terrific impact after it had shot down the hill.

There was however an unexpected result to the discovery and description of the car in the press. A woman named Wiggins came forward to say that she had seen such a car as she was leaving the street car at the end of the line at something before nine on the evening of Wednesday, June the twenty-second. She fixed the date absolutely, as she had gone to town to see her daughter off on a train, also she remembered the car distinctly, because it had almost run over her.

And she stated positively that there had been two men in it at the time.

The Inspector was very sober when he told me that.

“It looks now,” he said, “as though somebody knew that Walter Somers meant to go on the stand that next day and tell all he knew. And that he was—prevented.”

“Murdered is what you meant, isn’t it?”

He cleared his throat.

“It’s possible. It’s very possible. And I suppose Walter could swim and Amos couldn’t!”

Which was what he left me with, to make of it what I might.

Those few days had told terribly on Joseph. The maids reported that he walked the floor at night until they were almost crazy, and for the first time in my service he was forgetful and absent. I was startled one day to have him pour ice water into my soup, and his hands were so uncertain that he broke a piece of my mother’s Lowestoft china, a thing he had not done in all his years of dusting and washing it. On the plea that he knew Wallie’s habits I loaned him my car, and he took his afternoons and joined the search. That he went to the club I know, but I have no other knowledge of his movements save one.

Dick had taken Judy out to the road above the gully, and they were surprised to find my car there. When they got to the edge they saw Joseph below; he was sitting on a rock, his head on his breast, and when they called to him he jumped and then came toiling up the slope.

“What on earth are you doing?” Judy demanded.

He looked down sheepishly at his muddy clothes.

“I was looking for the revolver. Mr. Walter never killed himself, Miss.”

“Joseph,” said Judy impulsively, “why don’t you tell what you know? You know something.”

“What little I know is Mr. Walter’s secret, Miss.” And that was all he would say.

T
HAT NIGHT JOSEPH WAS
shot. Not killed, but painfully injured. The bullet struck his collar bone and broke it, near the shoulder. But fired from only five or six feet the impact was terrific, and at first I thought that he was dead.

The two children had come in about eight-thirty, and Judy was very low. The appeal was still pending, and unless we secured a new trial Jim would go to the chair early in September. There was strong pressure being brought against a re-trial.

“James Blake has had every opportunity to prove his innocence, and has failed. A jury of thoughtful men and women found him guilty and sentenced him to death as the penalty of at least one crime. There is no question but that an acquittal would have found him at once accused of at least one other murder, and possibly two.

“There is however more at issue than this. In the past the murderer with wealth at his command has found it possible to evade punishment for almost indefinite periods, with the result that the sacredness of human life—”

It is not surprising then that our group of three was silent that night.

Judy I remember had gone back to the night of Sarah’s death, as though she was desperately attempting to prove something to herself.

“Why wasn’t it Wallie after all?” she said. “He was in dinner clothes that night. Suppose he broke into the house here at night? Why hadn’t he stunned Sarah with that piece of wood, and then come here to get whatever it was, the records or the will? She may have lain unconscious for those three hours. Then later on he could have gone back to her.”

Well, that too was possible, although Dick thought the question of time entered into it.

“He’d have had to work pretty fast,” he said. “It takes time to get old putty out of a window. When I was a housebreaker—”

“He didn’t finish. He broke the pane.”

I recall that they wrangled about it, and that finally they decided to go out and experiment a bit. Dick’s idea I think was to get Judy’s mind away from Jim’s tragic situation, and as I needed the same thing myself rather badly, I trailed along. It was a steaming July night, for it had rained during the day. Somewhere in the grounds next door the ex-bootlegger’s children were exploding a few premature firecrackers, and on the street a steady procession of cars was passing, the riders not so much seeking a breeze as producing one.

We went out by the pantry and kitchen. Joseph was reading the paper in the pantry, and I remember that as we passed through the pantry Judy asked him the time.

“Ten o’clock, Miss.”

“Aren’t you hot in here, Joseph?” I asked. All the windows were down and the shades drawn.

“It’s safer like this, madam.”

I remember too that when we went outside, Dick carrying a flashlight, the dogs went with us; and that Jock saw a rabbit or something of the sort in the shrubbery by the garage and made a dash for it. I whistled him back, and he came reluctantly.

We made our way slowly about. Dick turning the flash alternately on the trees, one or two of which grow close to the house, and onto windows and doors. At last we reached the back drawing room door and Dick turned the light full on it.

“Now for the knife,” he said. “Durn you, I’ll learn you, Miss Judy.”

“Knife? What knife?”

“I gave you a pocket knife, oh love of my life. What the hell did you do with it? I put it on the desk for you.”

Judy maintained that he had done nothing of the sort, and after a momentary squabble Dick went back by the kitchen to get it. As I have said somewhere, it is exactly fifty feet around the corner from this door to the kitchen porch, and as he was running he made it very quickly. It could not have been more than three minutes from the time he left us until he rejoined us.

Jock, I recall, was restless, and Judy was obliged, to hold him. She was slightly querulous. In his excitement Dick had carried the flashlight with him, and she grumbled.