Album (41 page)

There was no doubt among any of the men that “the stuff” was blood. There was a serious question, of course, as to whether it was human or not. The result was that Herbert Dean cut off some of the hair and went back to town with it to make the usual test, and that he missed the search which followed.

Judging from the newspapers the next day it was an exciting one. It was a Sunday morning, and that part of the local population which had not gone to church turned out with a will. Orders were to look, not necessarily for a lake or stream, but for some small and stagnant body of water where blood would lie. They were warned also that blood changes in sunlight, or even assumes the color of its background, and were to mark and report any suspicious body of water, however small, whether it bore any indication of what they were after or not.

In the meantime Dean had telephone that the microscope showed that the specimen was undoubtedly human blood, and as soon as possible he rejoined them. He was too late, however.

On the outskirts of the town itself, and only a hundred feet or so from the main road, was an empty house which had a local reputation for being haunted. It had been for rent, furnished, for the past five years. Recently, however, it had been rented. A week or so before a man had called the owner over the telephone and taken it for the summer. He had sent two months’ rent in advance and had ordered the key left in the house on a certain day.

Strange as all this was, the owner had formed a theory. Once or twice members of the local psychic society had held sittings there, and as those people often preferred to be anonymous, he had accepted the terms without question.

He had not been asked to make any repairs, and he had made none. No tenant had moved in, although on the Wednesday night previous the neighbors had reported that a car had stopped there and that something had been moved into the building. As the nearest house was five hundred yards away, the identity of this object was not known. But on that Sunday morning while the search was going on this owner, a man named Johnson, decided to walk over to see if his new tenant had arrived.

He was uneasy, for the drain pipe which carried the waste water out of the house had broken, and if used the water would collect in a low-lying bit of ground behind it.

He saw no signs of occupancy, and walked around the house to the rear. Here he saw a largish pool, covering an area about eight by eight feet and several inches deep in the center. But he saw more than that. He saw that this pool was covered with a thin film of what looked like blood.

He did not enter the house at all. He rushed back into town and got the police, and together they broke down the door.

If they had expected to find any sign of crime, they were mistaken. The house, was bare, clean and without signs of occupancy; but a damp spot on the bathroom wall over the tub looked as though it had been washed recently. This wall was papered, and the washing had loosened the paper, which was still moist.

“How long ago, Dean?” asked the Inspector.

“Six hours, maybe. It’s hard to tell.”

The first search revealed nothing else. The cellar floor had not been disturbed, nor could they find any indication outside that anything had been buried on the property. A second and more thorough examination, however, revealed something of vital importance.

In the cellar, piled behind a stack of cut wood, they found the drawers of a new wardrobe trunk of good quality, and not one of them doubted their significance. Whether all this related to the disappearance of Lydia Talbot or not, they were on the heels of a crime, and none of them but felt confident that a body had taken the place of those drawers in a trunk.

Here they found unexpected corroboration. A dairyman in the vicinity, driving with his cans to the station early that morning, had seen a trunk being taken out of the house by the Hollytree expressman, whom he knew well by sight.

“And right there,” said the Inspector later, “we ran into the worst luck of all that unlucky business; for this fellow who does the local hauling had piled his whole family in his truck and gone for a week-end camping trip. And he never showed up until late Monday night!”

In spite of the hot trail, however, inquiry for the trunk brought no results that day. It had not been shipped from Hollytree or any station nearby, and at last they fell back on the city itself. Here they faced the usual baggage room congestion of the summer months, and they were in the position of men certain that a terrible crime had been committed and without a single clue as to where to find the body.

The frantic search included one for the camping party, but without result; and it was not until noon of a hot Monday that a trunk, waiting to be called for on the blistering platform of a way station a hundred miles from the city began to excite the interest and apprehension of the agent.

He sent for the police, and the trunk was opened, about six o’clock that night. It contained the body of a middle-aged woman, all but the head, and was at once identified by the clothing and so on as that of Lydia Talbot. The head had been removed to allow the body to be placed in the trunk, and the entire body had been wrapped in an old piece of carpet from the house at Hollytree.

I have gone as little as possible into detail. The trunk, as I have said earlier, had been disguised by a number of foreign labels, but was readily recognized as the one Miss Emily had bought and sent to the house on Liberty Avenue. There was no sign of the gold and currency it had once held, however, and an almost microscopic examination of the premises near Hollytree revealed no trace of it there.

This was the situation then on that Monday evening, the eleventh day after our first murder. Mrs. Talbot had collapsed; no sign had been found of Lizzie, although a nationwide search had been instituted and a general alarm had gone out at once; George Talbot had been violently sick after viewing the body; and Laura Dalton had crept on Monday night to her husband’s room, knocked at the door and been heard crying hysterically after he had admitted her.

The general demoralization on the Crescent was utter and complete. One by one our old servants began to give notice, the Daltons’ Joseph being the first, and on Tuesday morning our colored laundresses one by one put down their irons, walked upstairs and handed in their resignations.

Helen Wellington came in on Monday to say that John, her new butler, had vanished without pay, and that the remainder were packing their trunks.

“I’ve told them how absurd they are,” she said, “but it’s no use. Lizzie’s done her dirty work and she’s got the money. Why on earth should she come back? Jim says she is crazy, but I wish I could be crazy for the best part of a hundred thousand dollars!”

A dozen Lizzies had been found by Monday night, and every hour new ones were turning up. She was a common enough type of middle-aged spinster, and the numbers of spinsters of that age who had dyed their hair black was an embarrassment to the police.

Such information as we had in our house during those two wild days was practically entirely from the newspapers. I did not hear at all from Herbert. But the new tragedy had at least brought Mother out of her retirement, and renewed our relationship on a cool but talkative basis.

She was entirely convinced that the killer all along had been Lizzie.

“She never liked Hester Talbot,” she said, “but she was fond of Lydia and John. She never got over the fact that when Mrs. Lancaster’s first husband died she kept all the money. He left a will leaving part of his property to them, but after he died she produced a new one cutting them off. Lizzie Cromwell always said she’d forged it! Of course that wasn’t true, but I think they all believed it.

“Then when John got into trouble and shot this woman he’d run off with, Hester Talbot wouldn’t pay a good lawyer for him, and neither would the Lancasters. It was just by luck that he was found insane, although he really wasn’t—and sent somewhere. But there was no scandal here. He had assumed another name, and he was tried and convicted under it. It was a great trouble to all of us, and although Lydia got over it all I don’t think Lizzie ever did. I always thought she was a little in love with John herself!”

But she added something which I now believe to be the truth.

“I have wondered lately about poor Emily and that money she took, Louisa. She never cared anything about money, and sometimes I think—Do you suppose she had met John Talbot somewhere—he’d escaped years ago, you know—and that she took it for him? It was all so unlike her, somehow. And she was always fond of him.”

Curious, all that, when I remember that it must have been almost at that time on Monday night that an elderly man, with thick spectacles and one side of his face drooping from an old paralysis, walked into the seventeenth precinct station house and collapsed onto a bench.

H
E SAT THERE FOR
some time before anyone noticed him. Then the sergeant sent an officer over. The man had dropped asleep by that time, and the officer shook him.

“What’s wrong, old timer?” he asked not ungently. “Snap out of it!”

The man blinked at him through his spectacles.

“I don’t know,” he said, in a rather cultivated but halting voice. “I can’t seem to remember my name, or who I am.” And he added, with an apologetic smile: “Memory is like a purse, officer. ‘If it be over full all will drop out of it!’”

The officer eyed him, and then went back to the desk.

“Old boy’s lost his memory, or so he says. Better put him somewhere for the night, eh?”

The sergeant agreed, and this story might have had a different ending but for that very decision. For it was when a jailer was taking him back to a cell that he noticed some stains on the man’s white shirt. He stopped in the long stone-paved passage and looked at it.

“Ain’t hurt anywhere, are you?”

“No, I don’t think so.”

The jailer was mildly curious. In the cell he got his prisoner to take off his coat, and was shocked to find that the turned-up cuffs of the shirt were also badly stained. The unknown eyed them himself through his spectacles.

“That’s strange,” he said haltingly. “Now how did I get that?”

“You’re asking me!” said the policeman. “What you been doing? Killing a pig?”

The man shook his head, and then slowly drew something out of a trousers pocket and gravely handed it to the officer.

“This doesn’t belong to me,” he said in his halting voice. “I have no idea how I got it.”

The policeman took it and held it up. Then he grinned.

“Looks like you been playing Santa Claus!” he said, and still grinning carried the object out to the sergeant at the desk.

It was a short grayish beard of the cheapest variety, and made to hook over the ears by small wires.

When the sergeant, curious himself by then, went back to the cell, it was to find the unknown quietly asleep on his hard bed. The two men inspected the stains on him, but he did not rouse. And he was still asleep when Mr. Sullivan got there an hour later. Sullivan examined him before he roused him. He was neatly dressed, but it was evidently two days or more since he had shaved. His clothing too was incredibly dusty, and his shoes worn and scratched as with long walking over rough ground.

Sullivan, with his usual memory for faces, had known him at once for Daniels. He himself was tired and rather sick, for he had come from examining the contents of that ghastly trunk, and his next step is excusable under the circumstances. He turned to the sergeant and pointed to the stains on the shirt.

“There’s the Crescent Place killer,” he said. “And he’s shamming. I’ll give you fifteen minutes to bring his memory back while I get in touch with Headquarters.”

I do not know what followed. But I do know that when the Inspector and Herbert arrived they found Daniels stretched out on the floor of an upper room, and that there were some words between Sullivan and Herbert that, as the Inspector said later, fairly blistered the paint.

In the end they called an ambulance and took the unconscious man to the hospital on Liberty Avenue; and both Herbert and Sullivan sat with him the rest of the night. He was not hurt, it developed. He had collapsed from a combination of fright, hunger and thirst. But if they hoped that when he came to he would remember his identity, they were disappointed. He refused born food and drink, and could be induced only with difficulty to speak at all.

“Sullivan thought he was still shammering,” Herbert has said since, “but I didn’t believe it. It was either genuine amnesia or straight hysteria. I’d seen both in the war, from shock. I thought the poor devil had had a shock. That’s all.”

They tried to rouse him by questioning him.

“Listen, now. Your name is Daniels, isn’t it? Robert Daniels.”

“Daniels?” he said after an interval. “No. I’m sorry, but that’s not it.”

He did not reply at all when Herbert suggested that he was John Talbot, and shortly after that he lapsed into what Doctor Armstrong calls a definite catatonia. He would or could not reply to any questions at all, was stiff and rigid in his bed, and could not be roused for the nourishment he evidently needed. Some time in the night, however, after the two men had gone, he wakened in a condition of frenzied excitement. He was still confused, made terrible grimaces, and the policeman on guard in the room had some difficulty in keeping him in bed until he could be tied there. After that an interne gave him a hypodermic of some sort, and he became quieter.

Police swarmed in and out of his room all that day, Tuesday, but without result.

“You can get my point of view, Miss Hall,” the Inspector said a day or two later. “We knew by that time he was Talbot; Dean had wired for his prints the night before, and they came in that day. And we knew his history; knew he’d killed a woman, been sent to a state institution as insane, and had escaped from it years before. You can see how it looked, and I’ll admit the whole thing had me fooled, or Dean did, I’ve often wondered since what you told Dean to put him on the right track. He didn’t get
that
out of a microscope!”