The House without the Door (7 page)

Clara said: "Some girls in her position wouldn't like to ask a favour."

"The impression got about that Gregson was the master of his house, and made the rules in it. As he was undoubtedly a miser too, one could see that no great confidence may have existed between him and the people he was sheltering."

"If I was in that position," said Harold, "I wouldn't ask a favour."

"You wouldn't anyway," replied Gamadge. "Is your room by any chance too hot or too cold for you, may I ask?"

"No, it ain't."

"I'm relieved to hear it."

"I wouldn't ask a favour either," said Clara, "if I were in Cecilia Warren's position. She may have been sensitive."

"She may. Well, on the night of June the fifth she had come down as usual, opened the windows, closed the lattice, and lain in the dark. She heard Benton Locke come in and go upstairs—as I said, the guest-room is at the rear of the hall, and she wasn't afraid that he'd notice anything. Pressed by the M. E., she said that she knew he wouldn't give her away if he did find she was using the guest-room. You'll remember that she was now opposite Gregson's bedroom, across the hall.

"She didn't know exactly when Gregson laughed, but she said it couldn't have been much after twelve, because she had heard Locke come in not very long before. She said that it had not been a loud laugh, just a low kind of chuckle, but that it was Gregson's. It's a fact that if you're on the bed in that guestroom, with the regular door open and the shuttered door closed, you can hear a laugh through the door of Gregson's bedroom; you can hear a laugh when you wouldn't hear low voices. An ordinary laugh would sound like a 'low kind of chuckle'; that house was built solidly and tight. Here's another fact: she couldn't have heard anything short of a stentorian guffaw from the other rooms in the house, if their doors were closed; and their doors were closed.

"She woke about six; from long habit she always woke at that hour. She heard nothing of Gregson's death until the cook told her the news that evening, and had made the statement about the laugh more to herself than to Martha Beach. She had never repeated it—and the M. E. had to drag this out of her— because she was afraid it would make trouble for Mrs. Gregson.

"Her fears were justified. Mrs. Gregson swore that she had heard no laugh, and that she could only suppose him to have laughed in his sleep, or coughed, or something; but by that time Gregson must have been in coma; and heavy breathing doesn't really sound much like laughter.

"Dr. Goff was called; a most reluctant witness, with a strong bias in favour of Mrs. Gregson. The trend of the inquiries had startled the life out of him. He deposed, however, that when he first saw the morphia tube a corner of the label was missing—had been torn or scraped off—and it happened that that corner was the one that contained the serial number of the tube. He also deposed (in agreement with Studbury) that the tube must be at least twenty years old; because such tubes held twenty-five tablets twenty years ago, but since then they have only held twenty."

"I never knew that," said Harold.

"Nor did I. Laymen aren't as a rule familiar with tubes of morphia tablets; a layman only gets possession—legitimate possession—of one through a doctor, for some special purpose; to treat a drug addict in the family, or to use in the family for the alleviation of some painful or incurable disease; cancer, gall bladder, that kind of thing. At any rate, two grains of morphia are fatal to most people, and this tube had contained six and a quarter, and nobody knew where it had come from.

"Well, imagine the state of mind of the local jury. They all knew that quiet, dowdy Mrs. Gregson, or had seen her driving herself about on mild errands in the family sedan. She was as ordinary as the clothes she got from the village tailor, and the hats she wore for three years. They announced that Gregson had died of morphia, they didn't know how or why. Studbury was disgusted, Bellfield declared that he was a most officious, disagreeable little man, and Mrs. Gregson was arrested that same night on a charge of murder in the first degree. That you, Theodore? If Mrs. Gamadge is agreeable we'll have cocktails now."

"I'm agreeable," said Clara.

"I has 'em," said Theodore, coming forward with a tray.

G
AMADGE PUT DOWN
his empty glass and rustled his notes. "The People of the State of Connecticut," he said, rejected the suicide idea—rejected it, through the mouth of the prosecutor, with irony and with contempt. Why, they wanted to know, should Gregson—whom nobody accused of having been a raving maniac—why should he laugh quietly to himself in the middle of the night (they saw fit to accept Miss Warren's story), scrape the serial number from a twenty-year-old-at-least tube of morphia tablets, and gulp a round dozen of them down; for no ascertainable reason, and without leaving a letter to his wife? They said that a suicide doesn't take pains to make the source of the poison he uses untraceable, or go out of his way to leave suspicion upon his household.

"Accident, they maintained, was out of the question. No man mistakes morphia tablets for bicarbonate of soda in powdered form, or takes three grains of morphia at once unless he's an addict; and Gregson wasn't an addict. Murder was the alternative, and who had motive, opportunity, and the necessary information but Mrs. Gregson? Information was necessary: morphia is a poison which murderers don't use—the prosecution knew of only one case in which it had been used— because it's a tricky drug; everybody doesn't react to it in the same way. It puts some people into a coma, but it excites others—makes them noisy and unmanageable. Poisoners look up the effects of their drug, and Mrs. Gregson would know Gregson's reaction to morphia; know that he wouldn't react to it by waking the house. She'd either seen him under the influence of a small dose of it or she'd asked him whether or not it put him to sleep. Cold-blooded, no doubt; the horror of poisoning is the cold-blooded premeditation which goes with it.

"Applegate defended. He cited six well-known cases of suicide for which no motive had ever been found, and he talked at some length about the mysteries of the human soul, and the solitude of human suffering. He quoted Maeterlinck— something about people smiling in the family circle and weeping in the dark. All true and all good. He then said that twenty-year-old tubes of morphia may very well lose bits of their labels; but I personally have never seen labels stick as those labels do—tighter than the bark of a tree. He said it would be shocking indeed if this poor woman sitting here in danger of her life should lose that life because a corner of an old label, which happened to contain a serial number, should happen to have been lost. He said the serial number was lost because it was
on
a corner. Perhaps he was right.

"He then laid great stress on the fact that the morphia couldn't be traced to the possession of Mrs. Gregson. Gregson had been as likely to possess it as anybody else in the house. Anybody else, he repeated sternly, in the house.

"Then he tackled the laugh in the night, and in his cross-examination of Miss Cecilia Warren he tackled it for hours. When he had finished with the laugh in the night, I can assure you that he had come within about a sixteenth of an inch of accusing Cecilia Warren of the murder."

"I wondered if he wouldn't," said Harold.

"Oh, he did."

"But
can
they?" asked Clara. "Is it allowed?"

"The defense in a murder trial is given great leeway. Applegate knows the game, and he knows how to instruct a jury by implication, innuendo, and inference. A good deal of his speech was stricken from the record, but the jury got it first. He pointed out that Miss Warren's word was uncorroborated; he took a high moral tone about poor relations, living on the bounty of their cousins, who sneak into guest-rooms and listen at doors; and he reminded the jury that if Mrs. Gregson had motive, Miss Warren also had had one—a reversionary interest in Gregson's money, since she was Mrs. Gregson's only living relative.

"He then introduced the theory that the laugh, if there was a laugh, had come from outside the house. On summer nights, he explained, people drift off pavements into the shade of trees, and those trees are often on the lawns of big houses. He said that sound carries oddly at night, especially to people who are dozing, half-asleep. And he wound up by hoping that that was where the laugh had come from, if there was a laugh, if Miss Warren had actually heard a laugh, if she was not actuated by malice, and if, in fact, she had actually spent one single night, in all her life, on that bed in the guest-room.

"He ended with a short, effective, and really touching tribute to Mrs. Gregson's blameless life and spotless reputation. Mrs. Gregson doesn't like him, perhaps he showed her that he didn't care whether she was innocent or not; but he did very well for her.

"The judge was old Bligh, a learned and a fair-minded man. He summed up without bias, but he didn't do the defense any favours. He said that if people committed suicide there was always a reason for it, whether that reason could be discovered or not, but that it was unfortunate that the morphia couldn't be traced to Gregson. He reminded the jury that Miss Warren's evidence, whatever else it did, completely cleared Locke and Mrs. Stoner and the cook, since none of them could have gone into Gregson's room without waking or disturbing a person behind a shuttered door, on the guest-room bed; and that Miss Warren had put herself voluntarily, if impulsively, in the position of a material witness. I think he was pretty well convinced that Mrs. Gregson was guilty—she had a financial motive, and her opportunity was overwhelmingly greater than that of the others. He apparently believed Miss Warren's story; the question was, would the jury decide to believe it?

"They stayed out less than two hours, and came back with a verdict of not guilty. There she sat, you know, in one of those Bellfield tailor suits, and one of those amorphous felt hats, with wisps of hair coming out from under the brim. Here's a picture of her taken during the trial; doesn't she look bludgeoned? Knocked into a daze? Colby said she made a good witness. The jury no doubt remembered how she'd taken Cecilia Warren in, years before, practically off the street.

"Colby was absolutely convinced of her innocence. Banks and Styles were furious at the verdict, and many other people thought the acquittal a farce. They were angry at the thought of her living in comfort on Gregson's money, but they needn't have worried. She hasn't had much of a time; she hid herself away, and she won't show her face. She'll never live a normal life again until she's been completely cleared."

"Is that what Mr. Colby wants?" asked Clara. "For you to clear her?"

"Well, he didn't give me such a large order as that; he's hopeful, though."

"I don't know how you could do it without knowing more about it than all this," said Clara. "We don't know anything. We don't know what the people are really like—Cecilia Warren, or Locke, or Mrs. Stoner."

"We know that unless they were all in a conspiracy, Mrs. Stoner and Locke had no motive—they lost free board and lodging by Gregson's death. Or at least Mrs. Stoner may have thought she was going to lose it; as a matter of fact, Mrs. Gregson has given her an annuity, and gives the others allowances."

"Perhaps they all loathed Mrs. Gregson," said Harold, "and deliberately put her on a spot."

"Then the motive on Cecilia Warren's part was pure loathing, seldom an adequate motive at her age; for if Mrs. Gregson had been convicted she wouldn't have inherited Gregson's money, and Miss Warren wouldn't have inherited it from her."

Clara asked: "What does Mr. Colby want you to do?"

"He called me up this morning to tell me that since August there had been four attempts on Mrs. Gregson's life."

"What!" Clara bounced on the chesterfield, and even Harold gaped at the information.

"She told me about it this afternoon. She won't consult the police; but if my investigation means publicity, she'll face it. Do you know why?"

"I should think anybody would know why!" Clara stared. "She naturally doesn't want to be murdered, and I don't wonder that she prefers publicity to losing her life."

"Not at all. Gregson's murderer is undoubtedly at the bottom of these new phenomena; and Mrs. Gregson hopes that I may discover evidence in connection with them which will clear her reputation forever."

"You'll simply have to!"

"Well, as a matter of fact I advised her to drop the whole thing and clear out."

"Drop it? Drop it? I shouldn't drop it if I were in her place, I can tell you!"

"You don't realize that she's now a woman of one idea; if I don't get the results she hopes for I believe she may actually lose her wits. She's no longer the Mrs. Curtis Gregson of those photographs, Clara; gone are the Bellfield tailored suits, the six-dollar hats, the wisps of hair. She is now Mrs. James Greer, perfectly turned out and dressed. She puts in her endless spare time striving for physical perfection."

"I never heard anything so pitiful in my life."

"Meanwhile the inner woman has been marking time; she has been doing nothing else since the trial. She lives for one thing only—to be able to convince the world that she is innocent of her husband's murder. Now she thinks there's hope of doing so, and Colby has persuaded her to enlist me. I don't like the responsibility involved; I don't feel equal to it."

"You didn't refuse to take a stab at it, though," said Harold.

"No, I didn't; it seems to me that there would be one thing worse than taking this case: not taking it. Well, you'll both have to help me. First I want to show you something." He got the anonymous warning out of his pocket. "Mrs. Gregson tells me that she got two letters after the trial from the person who sent her this last one; obviously it
is
the same person. The first letters merely said that Curtis Gregson's murderer was still at large."

"How ghastly!" breathed Clara.

"This one is more ghastly still. It says: 'Curtis Gregson's murderer must remain at large no longer.' A month later somebody put grease on her cellar stairs. Then came a dose of arsenic in her food, the strange history of an escape of gas, and a Boone fruit cake that might have killed three Mrs. Gregsons."