The Door (37 page)

“It looked as though the fat was in the fire.

“After he had talked to her, Walter saw that the game was all up. He threw up his hands and told her he’d go to his father the next day and tell him the whole story. But he begged her not to tell Jim Blake. If his stepmother ever heard this story he was through. She agreed to this.

“But she would not give him the copy of the will. Said she’d left it in the house. And he didn’t trust her. She had never liked him. He didn’t even believe her.

“But she showed him her hand bag, and the will was not in it.

“‘I’ll give it back to you after you’ve seen your father,’ she told him, and she left him standing there in the drive.

“He says, and I believe him, that he never saw her alive again.

“I’m not defending Walter for trying to get into the house and to get the will. He did get in, although he broke the point of his knife in doing so. While he was working at the putty of the door back there he says he heard her whistling and calling for Jock, who appeared to have wandered off. She was, he thought, in or near the Larimer lot, and later on, when his errand had been fruitless and Joseph had helped him to escape from the house, he thinks he still heard her.

“I imagine he is right about that. The dog had run off, and she hunted him. Then, instead of going on to the house on Halkett Street, she may have been coming back here to telephone and call off that meeting. In any event, perhaps because she was tired with the climbing she had done, on the way back she seems to have sat down on that log to rest.

“And that was where Norton found her, at or about the very time the officer had arrived and the house was being searched. He probably heard the dogs, and so located her. He struck her down from behind, so that she never saw him, and he thought she was dead. Later on, at ten o’clock, he went back to look and she was still living, although unconscious. Then he finished the job. With a knife this time, a knife with a blade approximately four and a half inches long.

“Something scared him about that time, and he ran. He didn’t see Blake on the hill, coming back after waiting at the Halkett Street house for her until twenty minutes to ten. He didn’t see Blake, but Blake saw him. And now remember this. He—Norton—still had that wig like Howard Somers’ own hair, and he was going back to see if that job needed finishing. Also very likely he hadn’t got the will that first time. I believe he put that wig on his head before he went back to the lot.

“He didn’t know what had happened in the interval. She might have been found, there might be a policeman there. So he put on that disguise of his, and he fooled Jim Blake; evening clothes, longish white hair and so on. It isn’t hard, when the story began to come out, to see who Jim Blake thought he saw that night.

“It put him to bed, and it damned near sent him to the chair.”

“Then this Norton, or whoever he is, killed her for the will?”

“Partly. Partly, too, because, although Walter Somers was sick of the whole thing, Norton was determined that it go on. It was that determination, that the will stand, that was behind all the other murders.

“If Florence had kept quiet, she might have lived. He may have thought she would. She’d taken that will from the safe, and she might keep quiet about it. But she tried to see you, and that was fatal. Also, there was something else which marked her for death. Sarah had told Walter about her records for those two days, and when repeated searchings of this house didn’t turn them up, this Norton concluded that Florence had them.

“Under the pretext of bringing her here to you, he lured her into a car.

“He killed her and searched her, and then he went to the Halkett Street house that night and examined her room. He made the Bassett woman help him. It was Mrs. Bassett the Sanderson woman heard crying.

“But I want to go back to Walter. Joseph helped him out of the house that night, and he got away down the hill behind the garage, dressed and came back here. You were expecting him, but he had to come back anyhow. He had dropped his fountain pen into the airshaft, and it bore his initials.

“He got it, as we know. He was uneasy when Sarah didn’t come back, but that’s all. He was afraid she’d left the dogs somewhere and gone on to New York. That scared him; he wanted to do his own confessing, and when he went out and heard the dogs in the lot next door he thought she had tied them there. He was pretty well upset, but he went back to the club and played bridge.

“That is Walter’s story, and I know that it is true in all the salient points. When Sarah was still missing the next day he was worried, especially when you found she was not in New York.

“But he still didn’t believe she was dead, and he never thought of Norton.

“When her body was found, however, he went almost crazy. He went to Norton and Norton was shocked and grieved. Walter just didn’t understand it, that’s all. And when the sword-stick disappeared he began to suspect Jim Blake.

“Only why would Blake kill her? Had she shown him that will and let him believe it was genuine? And had Blake done it, in a passion of anger or to secure the will? It was the only answer he had, and we have to admit that a good many people thought the same way.

“The only person who didn’t was Mary Martin, and she suspected Norton from the start. She’d loathed the scheme from the moment she learned about it, the will and all of it.

“But Florence Gunther’s death showed Walter where he stood. I’m not defending him for keeping silent, but it’s easy to see how he argued. He could not bring the two women back, and how could he prove that Norton had killed them? Norton was still protesting his innocence, calling on high heaven to show that his hands were clean.

“Then you burned the carpet from the car, and Walter was all at sea. He didn’t know where he was.

“But Mary knew, and Norton knew she knew, or suspected. She wasn’t safe after that, so we have her taking Joseph’s revolver and keeping it by her, and later on we have her going to New York to the Somers’ apartment.

“She went out on the Brooklyn Bridge that night and threw the gun into the river. She felt safe, after some pretty awful weeks.”

“But why go to the Somers’ apartment?” I asked, bewildered.

“Because she saw this. She is quicker than Walter, and she believed what he still didn’t want to accept; that Norton was the killer. She saw Norton still holding on, searching Florence’s room after her death for the records, searching this house over and over. And by the way, there’s your ghost! It may be helpful with your servants!

“She saw too that Mr. Somers would have to go next, before the story of that bogus will was uncovered, and that with Mr. Somers dead Jim Blake would go to the chair. Either that or Wallie would have to tell his story, and even then that mightn’t save Blake. Blake mightn’t have known that the will was not genuine.”

“Inspector,” I said gravely, “I want to know who Norton is. I must know. This is—well, it’s cruel.”

“I think it’s kindness,” he said. “I want you to realize this man first, as he is. The craft of him, using Jim Blake’s name to get to Howard Somers, and even dressing like him; telling Mr. Somers the proofs of Jim’s guilt, and promising for a thousand dollars to keep certain things to himself; getting Mr. Somers into his study to write that check, and putting poison into the highball while he is in that study.”

“And that is what he did?”

“That is what he did. And I don’t mind saying that it was that check, which we found in his box, which completed the case against him. He couldn’t bring himself to destroy that check.”

He looked at his watch.

“Now—I’ll hurry over this—I’m going to Walter Somers again. His father’s death drove him frantic. Again he had no proof, but Mary Martin was certain. She had broken the glass and raised the windows—there’s an odor to cyanide—and she felt pretty sure it was murder. And if murder came out, the whole story came out. You can see why she tried to prevent that.

“She called Walter on the long distance phone and told him, and he about went crazy. But a confession then was a very grave matter; here were three deaths as a result of that conspiracy, and one of them his own father.

“He compromised with himself. He would see that Jim Blake got off; but if he was acquitted he would let things ride.

“But the verdict was a foregone conclusion. He had to come clean to save Jim, and Norton had to confess. For he knew now that Norton had got the records. He had been over this house and he knew the cabinet. When the clock dial cipher was read in court all Norton had to do was to come here and get them.

“When Walter left the club, that night before the day when he was to go on the stand, he had in his pocket a full confession of the murders. He had taken it with him to force the murderer to sign it. He had determined to get that signature, at the point of a gun if necessary. But he hoped to get it, by letting Norton have a chance to escape. It looked reasonable to him; if Walter went on the stand the next day it was all over anyhow. As to the will, I mean.

“But I ought to say this. He and Norton were definitely out. There had been furious trouble between them, and of course there was the time when Walter had knocked Norton cold. Walter hated the very sight of the other man, and he knew it.

“Walter picked him up in his car; and they drove out of town, Walter talking, the other man listening. Walter was going on the stand the next day, to tell all he knew. He was wary enough; he had his revolver. But Norton, too, was prepared for trouble that night. He was too quick for Walter.

“He knocked him out and nearly killed him, and then he took him to an abandoned farmhouse out on the Warrenville road and left him there, tied. But it wasn’t to his advantage that Walter die. He drove the car over the hill where we found it, and he carried off Walter’s revolver and locked him up. But he went back now and then, although Walter was in pretty poor shape when I found him.

“With Walter dead, Mary would tell the story, and he was through. He went back now and then, looked after him a bit. Not much. Just enough to keep him alive. But he had not been there for three days when we found him, and he was mighty close to death.

“Of course it’s easy to say this now, but the case against Blake never had satisfied me. You know that. I gave you my reasons before. All along there have been some things that didn’t quite fit. Why would Jim Blake invent a man in evening dress? Well, the answer to that is easy. He was not inventing it. He
saw
a man in evening dress. But he said this man’s face was turned down the hill. Now that’s not possible. A man doesn’t run rapidly along a bushy hillside in the dark without looking where he is going.

“So I decided that this man, conceding that Mr. Blake saw a man, was some one he knew and wouldn’t mention. And after Howard Somers’ death, I began to wonder if it wasn’t Somers.

“But that didn’t get me very far, and to add to the confusion, Joseph is shot. Jim Blake is in jail, Mr. Somers is dead and Walter’s missing. And still Joseph gets shot! I’ll admit that I thought it possible at the time that Walter had done it. There was some underneath story, and Joseph either suspected or knew something. It was pretty clear to me that Joseph had had to help Walter out of the house the night he broke in.

“And I had had a theory that Walter knew a good bit about the attack on him at the top of the back stairs.

“Then there were some queer things about the shooting. Joseph was sitting in the pantry with the shades drawn, ‘because it was safer,’ but he tells some cock and bull story about dropping off to sleep, and that with the kitchen door standing wide open!

“It looked fishy to me, and as I say I thought of Walter Somers. He had had a revolver when he left, and of course at that time I didn’t know the rest of the story. So it was for Walter’s footprints that I looked the next morning, around the grounds and down the hill. But I didn’t find them. I found something that I couldn’t make out.

“It looked to me as though a woman had climbed that hill the night before, and gone back the same way. You’ll remember that it had been raining, and the ground was soft. Certainly a woman had come up that hillside, walked past the garage and through the shrubbery toward the kitchen door. And she had gone back the same way, except that she went out the front door and around back along the opposite side of the house from where the three of you were.

“But here was the queer thing. It was a heavy-ish woman, moving slowly, and she walked on the outsides of her feet. I’d seen prints like that before.

“Well, I had two choices, and I took the wrong one. Young Carter had been in the house at the time the shot was fired, or close to it; he had a revolver in his car, and he had a knife with the point gone, and that broken blade fitted the bit I’d picked up on the steps back there. And there were other things. He had an interest in that will and he was young and strong. I don’t mind saying that I gave him considerable thought.

“It was you yourself who put me on the right track. If it hadn’t been for that message of yours about the Bassett woman I believe this murderer, this cold and crafty assassin, would be free tonight, and not where he is.

“But we had to move slowly. We had no proof; we had the story and the motive, but what else? Not a fingerprint, or a track, or a weapon! Nothing to hang the case on, and he knew it. We went through his belongings with a fine tooth comb, and found nothing. We could jail him for forging that will, but we wanted him for four murders!”

“Four?”

“Amos was murdered,” he said. “He was shoved into the river and he couldn’t swim.
Because
he couldn’t swim,” he amended that. “Four murders and three murderous assaults, and we had nothing.

“Nothing that we could lay our hands on, anyhow. But it came to me one day, sitting by Walter’s bed, that if this man would do all he had done for fifty thousand dollars, he’d be likely to have kept that check for a thousand; that if he had, we had him.

“We watched him after that, day and night. And at last he slipped up. He slipped up today. He went today to the Commercial Bank to draw some money. He had an account there in the name of Norton. And he had a box there, too.