The Door (8 page)

He left the discomfited Simmons to mount guard over the prints and to keep the dogs away from them, and not unlike a terrier himself, set to work to examine the nearby ground and bushes.

“The fellow, whoever he was, stepped off the path there when Miss Judy came along. But he left footprints, and later on he remembered them. He came back, smoothed them over and planted false ones. If he’s overlooked one now—”

He was carefully turning over dead leaves with a stick he carried, and now he stooped suddenly and picked up something.

“Look at this!” he said. “The key to the tool room, isn’t it? I thought so. Threw it here as he ran.”

He was examining the key, which is the flat key of the usual Yale lock, and now he gave an exclamation of disgust.

“Clean as a whistle,” he said. “Pretty cagey, this chap. Must have been in a devil of a hurry, but he wiped it first; or he wore gloves.”

He stood there for some time, staring at the key.

“Well,” he said finally, “we have just two guesses, Miss Bell. Either he wanted to do away with Miss Judy, which is unlikely; or he did not like her going into that tool room.”

“But he let her go in, and he locked her there.”

“Not in shape to do much looking about, however,” he said grimly. “Now which was it?”

He glared at me as though he expected an answer.

“I’m sure I don’t know,” I said meekly.

Later on I stood by while his men measured the distance between the footprints and made molds of them. They sprayed the marks with something first, and then poured in plaster of Paris which the Inspector reinforced with the inevitable toothpicks. The result was a pair of rather ghastly white shoes, which he surveyed with satisfaction.

“How do I know they were planted?” he said. “Well, the stride was too long for the foot, for one thing. Here’s a small foot and a long stride. Then the ground’s soft; they weren’t deep enough. And there’s another point. When a man walks there’s a back thrust to his foot, and the weight’s likely to be more on the outside and back of the heel. Look at me; I walk in this earth. What happens? I break the earth at the rear as I lift my foot.”

“You might try that, Simmons,” he called. “Maybe the next time you won’t let somebody put something over on you.”

He left soon after that, greatly pleased with himself but considerably puzzled, and carrying the two molds carefully wrapped in a newspaper.

His examination of the garage and of the ladder had yielded nothing whatever.

J
UDY HAD BEEN HURT
on Wednesday, the twenty-seventh of April, and Florence Gunther was not killed until the first of May, which was the Sunday following.

On either Tuesday or Friday of that week, then, Wallie came in to see me.

I remember being shocked at his appearance, and still more shocked at the way he received the news that Judy had been hurt.

“Good God!” he said. “I’ll stop this thing if I have to—” He hesitated. “If I have to kill somebody with my own hands.”

But he would not explain that. He called Joseph and went out to the garage, leaving me to make what I could out of that speech of his, and of his conduct generally since Sarah had been killed.

He had searched far more assiduously than had the police, had shown more anxiety than any of us. His gaiety had gone, and he had a hollow-eyed and somber look during those days which I could not account for.

Nor did the discovery of the body afford him any apparent relief. To the rest of us, grieved as we were, it at least ended that tragic search. After all, it was over. We could not help Sarah, and the rest was for the police. But Wallie had not appeared to share this relief.

Yet Wallie had not liked Sarah. She was not a part of that early régime of which Joseph was the lone survival; of Margaret and the noisy, gay, extravagant days before she left Howard and a young son both of whom had passionately loved her, to run away with a man who abandoned her within six months.

I found myself thinking of those days. I had known Howard even then. Indeed, it was through me that he met Katherine. Margaret had had a brief unhappy year somewhere in Europe; then she died. And Wallie had needed a mother. But Katherine had not proved to be a mother to him.

He had resented her, and she had resented him. She had never liked him, and after Judy was born this dislike greatly increased.

It accentuated her jealousy of Margaret that Margaret had borne Howard a son, and that she had not; for Katherine was passionately in love with her husband. And she had kept nothing of Margaret’s that she could avoid. Even Joseph had had to go, and so I took him. Not unusual, I daresay, this jealousy of second wives for the women they have followed, even when that woman is dead. But it worked badly for Wallie.

Certainly Wallie was not blameless for his alienation from his father, but also certainly Katherine never raised a finger to restore the peace between them. Wallie was too reminiscent of his mother, fiery, passionate, undisciplined, handsome. When he had learned that Margaret was dying in Biarritz, abandoned by the man for whom she had left Howard, he had demanded permission to go to her. But he was refused on the score of his age—he was only fourteen at the time—and in desperation he had taken out of Howard’s wallet the money for a second-class passage there.

He was too late, at that, but Howard never forgave him the theft, and he had made the mistake of telling Katherine.

After her marriage, when Wallie was in the house, she kept her purse locked away. And he knew it and hated her for it. But he was not there very often. First at school and later at college, Katherine kept him away as much as possible. And after that had come the war.

Naturally then the relationship between Judy and Wallie was almost as remote as the relationship between Wallie and Sarah. To have him grow morose and exhausted when Sarah disappeared was surprising enough, but to see him grow pale and furious over the attack on Judy was actually startling.

He was quieter, however, when he came back from the garage. He planted himself in front of me, like a man who had made a resolution.

“See here,” he said. “How fond are you of Jim Blake?”

“I like him. I don’t know that it’s any more than that.”

“What time was it when he telephoned here that night?”

“About a quarter past seven.”

“And he asked for Sarah?”

“Yes.”

“Why did he do that? Was he in the habit of calling Sarah? Of course he wasn’t. How do you know that when she left the house that night it wasn’t to see Jim Blake? To meet him somewhere?”

“I don’t believe it,” I said sharply. “Why would she meet him? I don’t believe they’ve exchanged two dozen words in twenty years.”

“She went out to meet him,” he insisted. “I know that. I’ve made it my business to know it. I’ve been talking to that darky of his. You know his habits; you know he dines late and dresses for dinner. Well, that night he didn’t. He dined early and he put on a golf suit. And he left the house at seven o’clock.”

“Good heavens, Wallie! If a man may not eat when he’s hungry and dress as he likes—”

“Listen,” he said doggedly. “That’s not all. He carried with him that sword-stick you gave him.”

“Even then—”

“Let me finish, Elizabeth Jane. That cane or stick or whatever you call it, has disappeared. It’s not in the house. It stood in the hall with his other sticks until Sarah’s body was found. Then it went.”

He was looking at me with his tired sunken eyes, but there was no doubting his earnestness or his conviction.

“What does that look like?” he demanded. “He has an appointment with Sarah. He goes to meet her, armed. And then—”

“Wallie, I implore you not to give that to the police.”

“No,” he said somberly. “Not yet. But some day I may have to.”

This then was our situation, during the few days which remained before the first of May. Sarah was dead; dead of two stab wounds four and a quarter inches deep, inflicted after she had been stunned by a blow on the back of the head. Judy had been attacked by the same method, a blow on the head from the rear, but no further attempt on her life had been made. Wallie suspected Jim Blake, apparently only because the sword-cane was missing, and my household was in a state of nerves so extreme that the back-firing of automobiles as they coasted down the long hill which terminates at my drive was enough to make the women turn pale.

Of clues we had none whatever.

Because of the sensational nature of the crime the press was clamoring for an arrest, and the Inspector was annoyed and irritated.

“What do they want, anyhow?” he said. “I can’t make clues, can I? And if you’d listen to the District Attorney’s office you’d think all I had to do was to walk out and arrest the first man I met on the street. Lot of old women, getting nervous the minute the papers begin to yap at them!”

He must have broken up hundreds of toothpicks that week. We would find small scattered bits of wood all over the place.

By Sunday, the first of May, Judy was still in bed, but fully convalescent. She had ordered a number of books on crime to read, and flanked by those on one side and her cigarettes on the other, managed to put in the days comfortably enough.

The evenings were reserved for Dick. Their first meeting after Judy’s injury had defined the situation between them with entire clarity. He was on his knees beside the bed in an instant.

“My darling! My poor little darling!” he said.

She lay there, looking perfectly happy, with one hand on his head.

“Your poor little darling has made a damned fool of herself,” she said sweetly. “And you’ll give me hell when you hear about it. Go on out, Elizabeth Jane; he wants to kiss me.”

Which, Katherine or no Katherine, I promptly did.

It was then on Sunday afternoon that there occurred another of those apparently small matters on which later such grave events were to depend. Already there were a number of them: Sarah’s poor body found by the coincidence of Judy being near when a horse shied; the coolness of an April night so that Norah must go to her window to close it; Mary Martin happening to open Sarah’s door while she was writing a letter, so that Sarah had made that damning record on her white sleeve; Jim Blake’s deviation from his custom of dressing for dinner and its results; Judy’s sudden and still mysterious desire to visit the garage at night; even my own impulsive gift to Jim Blake of my grandfather’s sword-stick.

On that Sunday afternoon, at five o’clock, Florence Gunther came to see me and was turned away. I had gone upstairs to rest, and she was turned away.

Why had she not come sooner? She was frightened, of course. We know that now. Afraid for her very life. The nights must have been pure terror, locked away in there in the upper room of that shabby house on Halkett Street. But she knew she held the key to the mystery. One can figure her reading the papers, searching for some news, and all the time holding the key and wondering what she ought to do.

If she had gone to the police with her story, she might have saved her life. But if all of us behaved rationally under stress there would be no mysteries, and the dread of the police and of publicity is very strong in many people. And in addition she herself had something to hide, a small matter but vital to her. How could she tell her story and not reveal that?

She must have thought of all those things, sitting alone at night in that none too comfortable room of hers with its daybed covered with an imitation Navajo rug, its dull curtains and duller carpet, its book from the circulating library, and perhaps on the dresser when she went to bed at night, the gold bridge with its two teeth which was later to identify her.

Yet in the end she reached a decision and came to me. And Joseph, who was to identify her as my visitor later on by a photograph, answered the bell and turned her away! I was asleep, he said, and could not be disturbed. So she went off, poor creature, walking down my path to the pavement and to her doom; a thin colorless girl in a dark blue coat and a checked dress.

She had left no name, and Joseph did not tell me until I went down to dinner.

Even then it meant nothing to me.

“What was she like, Joseph? A reporter?”

“I think not, madam. A thinnish person, very quiet.”

Dick was having an early Sunday night supper with me, early so that the servants might go out. That, too, is a custom of my mother’s, the original purpose having been that they might go to church. Now, I believe, they go to the movies.

But I thought no more of the matter. Mary Martin had rather upset me. She had come in from a walk to tell me that she was leaving as soon as I could spare her, and had suddenly burst into tears.

“I just want to get away,” she said, through her handkerchief. “I’m nervous here. I’m—I guess I’m frightened.”

“That’s silly, Mary. Where would you go?”

“I may go to New York. Mrs. Somers has said she may find something for me.”

Judy’s comment on that conversation, when I stopped in her room to tell her, was characteristic.

“Mother’s idea of keeping Mary’s mouth shut,” she said. “And polite blackmail on the part of the lady!”

So Mary had not come down to dinner, and Dick and I were alone. He talked, I remember, about crime; that Scotland Yard seized on one dominant clue and followed it through, but that the expert American detective used the Continental method and followed every possible clue. And he stated as a corollary to this that the experts connected with the homicide squad had some clues in connection with Sarah’s murder that they were not giving out.

“They’ve got something, and I think it puzzles them.”

“You don’t know what it is?”

But he only shook his head, and proceeded to eat a substantial meal. I remember wondering if that clue involved Jim, and harking back again, as I had ever since, to Wallie’s suspicion of him.

Why had he telephoned to Sarah that night? Could it be that he was, in case of emergency, registering the fact that, at seven-fifteen or thereabouts, he was safely at home? But we had the word of Amos that he was not at home at that time; that, God help us, he was out somewhere, with a deadly weapon in his hand and who knew what was in his heart.