The Door (9 page)

He was still shut away, in bed. What did he think about as he lay in that bed?

“Dick,” I said. “You and Judy have something in your minds about this awful thing, haven’t you?”

“We’ve been talking about it. Who hasn’t?”

“But something concrete,” I insisted. “Why on earth did Judy want that ladder?”

He hesitated.

“I don’t know,” he said slowly. “I don’t think she wanted the ladder; I think she must have intended to look at it.

Upon this cryptic speech, which he refused to elaborate, I took him upstairs.

That evening is marked in my memory by two things. One was, about nine o’clock, a hysterical crying fit by Mary Martin. Clara came down to the library to tell me that Mary was locked in her room and crying; she could hear her through the door. As Mary was one of those self-contained young women who seem amply able to take care of themselves, the news was almost shocking.

To add to my bewilderment, when I had got the smelling salts and hurried up to her, she refused at first to let me in.

“Go away,” she said. “Please go away.”

“Let me give you the salts. I needn’t come in.”

A moment later, however, she threw the door wide open and faced me, half defiantly.

“It’s nothing,” she said. “I was low in my mind, that’s all.” She forced a smile. “I have a fit like this every so often. They’re not serious.”

“Has anything happened, Mary?”

“Nothing. I’m just silly. You know, or maybe you don’t; living around in other people’s houses, having nothing. It gets me sometimes.”

I came nearer to liking her then than I ever had, and I wondered if the sight of Dick, intent on Judy and Judy’s safety, had not precipitated the thing. After all, she was pretty and she was young. I patted her on the arm.

“Maybe I’ve done less than my duty, Mary,” I said. “I’m a selfish woman and lately, with all this tragedy—”

And then she began to cry again. Softly, however, and rather hopelessly. When I went downstairs again I wondered if she was not frightened, too; after all, her loneliness was nothing new to her.

I can look back on Mary now, as I can look back on all the other actors in our drama. But she still remains mysterious to me, a queer arrogant creature, self-conscious and sex-conscious, yet with her own hours of weakness and despair.

The other incident was when Dick received a telephone call, rather late in the evening.

That must have been around eleven o’clock. Judy and he had spent the intervening hours together, the door open out of deference to my old-fashioned ideas, but with Dick curled up comfortably on her bed in deference to their own! He came leisurely down to the telephone when I called him, but the next moment he was galvanized into action, rushed into the hall, caught up his overcoat and hat, and shouted up the stairs to Judy.

“Got to run, honey. Something’s happened, and the star reporter is required.”

“Come right up here and say good-night!”

“This is business,” he called back, grinning. “I can kiss you any time.”

And with that he was out of the house and starting the engine of his dilapidated Ford. I could hear him rattling and bumping down the drive while Judy was still calling to him from above.

I
WAS ASTONISHED THE
next morning to have Clara announce Inspector Harrison before I was dressed. I looked at the clock, and it was only half past eight. Clara plainly considered the call ill-timed.

“I can ask him to come back, ma’am.”

“Not at all. You have no idea what he wants, I suppose?”

“Joseph let him in. If you’d like some coffee first.”

But I wanted no coffee. I threw on some clothing—Judy was still asleep—and when I got down Mr. Harrison was standing in the lavatory doorway, thoughtfully gazing up at the skylight. He looked tired and untidy, and his eyes were blood-shot.

“I’ve taken the liberty of asking your butler for a cup of coffee. I’ve been up all night.”

“Why not have breakfast?”

“I’m not hungry. I don’t think I could eat anything.”

But he did eat a fair meal when it appeared, talking meanwhile of unimportant matters. Not until we were in the library with the door closed did he mention the real object of his visit.

“Miss Bell, did you ever hear of a young woman named Gunther?”

“I think not. Why?”

“Florence Gunther?”

“Florence! The Florence who telephoned to Sarah?”

“I think it’s possible. I’m not certain.”

“Well,” I said, “I’m glad you’ve found her. She must know something.”

“Yes,” he said. “Yes, I think she did know something. But she will never be able to tell it. She was shot and killed last night.”

Later on I was to wonder why he did not tell me then the details of that killing. Perhaps he was still rather sick; perhaps he had reasons of his own. But what he told me then was only that the girl had been shot and that there was some evidence that her room had been gone through, like Sarah’s. The body had been taken to the Morgue.

“There are certain points of resemblance,” he said, “although this girl was shot, not stabbed. For instance—I don’t want to harrow you—but the shoes had been removed. And although her room is not in the condition of Sarah Gittings’, it had been searched. I’ll take my oath to that. She seems to have been an orderly person, very quiet, and—”

But that phrase, very quiet, recalled something to me. Quiet. A quiet person. I remembered then; Joseph’s description of the young woman who had tried to see me the day before.

“I wonder,” I said, “if she could have been here yesterday.”

“Yesterday?”

“How was she dressed? What did she look like? Joseph turned away a young woman while I was resting. It just might have been—”

He was in the hall in a moment, calling Joseph, and what I had feared turned out to be correct. Joseph not only identified a cabinet photograph of her, but recalled that she had worn a blue coat, and “a sort of plaid dress, sir; checked, it might have been.”

When he had excused Joseph, who looked shaken over the whole business, the Inspector gave me such facts as he had.

Florence Gunther had been shot and killed; the bullet had gone into her brain and out again. But the murderer had also tried to burn her body, and had largely succeeded. A farmer named Hawkins, out on the Warrenville road, had gone out at ten o’clock the night before to look after a sick cow, and in a gully beside the road, not two hundred yards from his front gate, had seen a fire blazing.

Thinking that a passing motorist had ignited the brush with a lighted cigarette, he went back into the house and got an old blanket and a broom with which to beat out the flames. He had actually commenced this when he realized what lay before him. He smothered the fire with the blanket and called the police. But for the incident of the sick cow the body would have been destroyed, as the family had already retired.

As it was, identification would have been a slow matter, had it not been for the one thing which Mr. Harrison had said every criminal overlooks, and this was that where the body had been placed a small spring, a mere thread of water really—I saw it later—effectually soaked the ground at this point. Such garments as were in contact with the earth, then, were not destroyed, and they revealed the fact that the unfortunate woman had worn a checked dress and a dark blue coat.

There must have been footprints in that soft ground, the heavy marks of a man carrying a substantial burden; but a passing car with a group of curious and horrified motorists, Hawkins himself extinguishing the fire, the police and police reporters when they arrived, had thoroughly erased them. The three detectives from the homicide squad reached the spot to find the body, a crowd of curious onlookers, and not a discoverable clue to the murder.

At four in the morning Harrison went home and threw himself, fully clothed, on his bed. There was nothing then to connect this crime with Sarah, or with us; nor was there until seven-ten the following morning. The body had been taken to the Morgue, Mr. Harrison was peacefully asleep, and Dick Carter had written his story of the murder and gone to bed, a blue-beaded bag in his coat pocket and forgotten. At seven-ten, however, an excited telephone message was received at a local police station from a woman named Sanderson, a boarder in a house in an unfashionable part of the city, on Halkett Street.

She reported that one of the roomers, a young woman named Florence Gunther, was not in her room, and that as she never spent the night out she was certain that something was wrong.

In view of the crime the night before the call was turned over to the Inspector. Breakfastless and without changing his clothing, he got into his car—always kept at his door—and started for Halkett Street. The Sanderson woman, greatly excited, was waiting at the front door.

Her story was simple and direct.

She had not slept well, and some time in the night she had been annoyed by movements overhead, in Florence Gunther’s room.

“She seemed to be moving the furniture about,” she said, “and I made up my mind to talk to her about it in the morning. So I got up at seven and went up, but she wasn’t there. She hadn’t slept there. And when I found all her clothes except what she had on I got worried.”

He told her nothing of the crime, but he examined the room with her. The landlady, a woman named Bassett, had been ill for some time and did not appear. It was clear to both of them that the room had been searched, although there had been an attempt to conceal the fact. But the important fact was that Florence Gunther when last seen the evening before had worn a checked dress and blue coat.

He knew then what he had found. He locked the room, put Simmons on guard at the door, sent word by a colored servant to Mrs. Bassett that the room and the officer were to be undisturbed, and with a photograph of the dead woman in his pocket had come to me.

“The point seems to be this,” he said. “If this is the Florence who was in touch with Sarah, the same motive which led to the one crime has led to the other. The possession of some dangerous knowledge, possibly certain papers—it’s hard to say. The one thing apparently certain is that there was something, some physical property for which in each case a search was made. Whether it was found or not—”

He broke the end from a toothpick with great violence.

“Curious thing to think of, isn’t it?” he went on. “If you’d seen this girl yesterday she might be living today. She knew the answer to Sarah Gittings’ murder, and so she had to go. Now, if we knew how friendly they were, how they met, what brought them together, we’d have something.”

And, although we have learned many things, that association of theirs remains a mystery. By what tragic accident they were thrown together we shall never know; two lonely women in a city of over half a million, they had drifted together somehow, perhaps during their aimless evening walks, or in a moving picture theater. We have no reason to believe that there was any particular friendship between them. One thing, discovered by accident, held them together and in the end destroyed them.

The Inspector got up to go.

“I’m going down to headquarters,” he said. “Then I’m going back to that room of hers. Whether the same hand killed both women or not, I imagine the same individual searched both rooms. There’s a technique about such matters.”

“Still, I should think that a man who had just killed—”

“Not this one. He’s got no heart and he’s got no nerves. But there’s always a chance. If he goes on killing, he’ll slip up some time, and then we’ll get him.”

With which optimistic words he left me!

Later on in the day I heard from him by telephone.

“Just to cheer you up,” he said. “We have a clear slate for Walter Somers last night. He played bridge from eight until three this morning, and won two hundred dollars.”

He hung up abruptly. It was the first time I had known that the police were watching Wallie.

From the papers, ringing with another “shoe” murder, and from various sources then and later, I gained a fair idea of the unfortunate young woman.

She was about thirty years of age, a quiet but not unfriendly woman. Shy. She seldom joined the others in the parlor of the Halkett Street house; in the evenings she took a walk or went to the movies. She had apparently no family, and received no mail of any importance.

She had been an expert stenographer in the law office of Waite and Henderson, well-known attorneys, and was highly thought of there. Recently, however, she had shown signs of nervousness, and her work had suffered somewhat.

Her life had been apparently an open book.

In the morning she was called at seven. She dressed slowly, ate her breakfast, and reported at nine at the office. She had not been interested in men, or they in her; but she had had one caller, a gentleman, about two weeks before. His identity was unknown, but he seemed to have been a well-dressed man, not young. He had arrived, according to the colored woman servant, about eight o’clock and stayed until nine-thirty. She had had only a glimpse of him and could not describe him.

On the day of her death, which was Sunday, she had spent the morning doing some small washing and mending. In the afternoon, however, she had put on the blue coat and started out. She was back in less than an hour, and had seemed low-spirited.

No one had seen her leave the house that night. It was thought that she had left the house about eight, and the police believed that she had been killed at or near that ditch on the Warrenville road where the body was found.

But on Monday afternoon we were to learn where she had been shot.

My property lies at the foot of a longish hill. As a result of this, and an annoying one it is, a certain number of cars come down in gear but with the switch off, and by and large a very considerable amount of backfiring takes place directly outside of my drive. The result is that when, quite recently, a bootlegger fired a number of shots at a policeman and finally wounded him in the leg, the poor wretch lay untended for some little time.

All of which bears directly on the killing of Florence Gunther.