Murder a la Richelieu (American Queens of Crime Book 2) (17 page)

“And have your blood as well on my hands,” said Mary, staring at her fingers.

“Did you take Mr Warren into your confidence, Mrs Lawson?” asked the inspector quietly.

“I took no one! No one, do you hear?”

“Yet the moment your niece saw that bloody knife from your desk set, she tried to run away with it.”

“I tell you, neither Howard nor Polly has any idea what this is all about!” cried Mary, beginning to shake from head to foot with hysteria.

“I wouldn’t be too sure about that,” murmured the inspector.

“The knife was stolen hours before the murder, Inspector!” cried Polly. “I told you that yesterday.”

The inspector shrugged his shoulders. “When did you last see the paper knife, Mrs Lawson? That is, before the police produced it, along with your niece, sometime after the crime.”

There was a dreadful silence and then a sigh as, with a face like death, Mary Lawson gasped, “I don’t remember.”

“I remember!” cried Polly Lawson passionately. “Because about five o’clock that afternoon I looked for the knife to-to open a bottle of gin, if you must know, and-and it was gone.”

The inspector eyed her thoughtfully. “You’ve gone to rather a lot of trouble during the past several months to put on a show of being a very wild young woman, haven’t you, Miss Lawson?”

Polly coloured painfully. “I-I don’t know what you mean.”

The inspector smiled. “Just why have you so ardently desired to leave the impression on numerous occasions that you were drunk, when you weren’t?”

“I don’t know what you mean,” she faltered again.

He shrugged his shoulders. “You seem to have consistently placed the cart before the horse. I mean, few young women deliberately strive to appear worse than they are.”

“Polly!” cried Howard Warren.

She refused to look at him. “I don’t know what you are getting at, Inspector,” she said sulkily. “If I’ve gone out of my way to shock the prudes in this house it’s because they make me sick!” She whirled on Howard. “That goes for you too, you old-old holier-than-thou!”

“Polly!” gasped Howard, looking as if she had struck him in the face.

The inspector appeared to have lost interest in both of them. His brows were gathered into a frown when he turned to Mary Lawson again. His voice gave me a shock. It was utterly ruthless.

“And so as early as five o’clock yesterday afternoon, Mrs Lawson, you suspected you might have to kill James Reid and had provided yourself with the paper knife off your desk,” he said.

Mary’s eyes widened and widened in her drawn ghastly face.

“I-I...” she began.

“You don’t have to answer questions which might incriminate you, Aunt Mary,” interrupted Polly, scowling ferociously at Inspector Bunyan.

The inspector ignored her remark. “That’s why you wanted to keep Adelaide Adams off the fourth floor last night, Mrs Lawson. You had a date on the fire escape with a man and you had cause to believe that James Reid was spying on you. Right?”

Her bloodless lips, after a struggle, parted. “I had an appointment on the – on the fire-escape landing, yes. That’s why I wanted Adelaide out of the way. But, as God is my keeper, I did not kill James Reid.”

“With whom did you have a clandestine appointment on the fire escape, Mrs Lawson?” pursued the inspector, while I stared at her aghast.

Of all the women in that house none I had thought was cleaner of the taint of scandal than Mary Lawson, whose heart I would have sworn still ached unbearably for her dead husband.

“I can’t tell you,” she said.

“You mean, you refuse to tell?” he demanded.

“I can’t! I can’t!” she cried wildly. “If it were only myself...” She broke off, bit her lip, and put out her hands in a little pleading gesture which wrung my heart. “If I could, God knows I’d help you, Inspector.”

“You are compelling me to take a step I regret,” said the inspector sternly. He turned to the policeman Sweeney. “Take this woman down to headquarters. Hold her there till I arrive.”

“You are going to arrest Aunt Mary?” cried Polly desperately. “You can’t, you mustn’t, Inspector! The-the disgrace will kill her!”

Mary Lawson shook her head. “It’s not so easy to die as all that,” she said bitterly. “One’s body lives on and on; only one’s heart dies.”

“Ready, Mrs Lawson?” murmured the inspector gently.

Mary’s face was like those you have seen of the martyred saints. “Yes, Inspector, I am quite ready,” she said.

She was still smiling when she walked out of the room beside Sweeney, the brawny policeman.

“It’s an outrage” protested Howard Warren. “What if Mary Lawson was-was meeting some man on the fire escape?” He swallowed painfully. “What if it was her paper knife which killed Reid? That’s a long way from being proof of murder. No jury in the world would convict on such evidence.”

With Mary’s departure in the custody of the police the conference in the parlour had more or less automatically dissolved. Those of us who had been Mary Lawson’s friends were at first too stunned by her arrest and then too distracted by it to remain static, even if Inspector Bunyan had not summarily dismissed us with the observation that he desired to follow his prisoner as quickly as possible to police headquarters.

“Of course, you realize that I’ll get in touch with Mary’s lawyer at once,” Howard told him savagely. “We’ll probably be on the scene by the time you are, Inspector. Just in case you’re planning to try something like the third degree, since you haven’t any other leg to get off on.”

“Suit yourself, Mr Warren,” murmured Inspector Bunyan with a shrug of his dapper shoulders.

Polly was having hysterics in Ella Trotter’s arms in the corridor outside the parlour doors where we were all congregated. Setting his teeth, Howard went over to them and, laying his hand on Ella’s arm, said, “Tell her – tell her there’s nothing to worry about, Mrs Trotter. It won’t take a good lawyer five minutes to tear the inspector’s case to ribbons.”

Polly did not lift her head, but her sobs diminished in violence.

Still gazing at a point slightly above her dishevelled red curls, Howard went on in a halting voice, “Tell her, Mrs Trotter, that Mary’s lawyer and I will have her out on bond before midnight.”

“Oh, thank you, Howard d-darling!” gasped Polly and then, when Howard in spite of himself reached out his hand to her, she turned away again and lifted her eyes pleadingly to Ella Trotter.

“Please – please – I don’t want to talk to anyone or see anyone – Please can’t you make everybody let me alone?”

Ella nodded vigorously. “Trust me to do that little thing.”

She then and there carried Polly off to her suite and, having put her to bed on the living room davenport, mounted guard over both doors with an ‘only over my dead body’ expression which settled that. The rest of us, unable to conceal our dejection, trailed downstairs to the lobby where we collected in small scattered groups, talking in low tones if we talked at all but for the most part listening in leaden silence to the dreary monotone of the rain.

Howard Warren, not having stopped even to get his raincoat, dashed past us on his way to meet Mary’s lawyer with whom he had made an engagement by telephone. I had known a day when Howard would not have risked spoiling the crease in his trousers, much less wet feet, in such weather. I sighed. He had no doubt been, as Polly said, a little on the holier-than-thou side at one time.

He was so no longer. Howard had gone human with a vengeance, and I had never liked him half so well.

His headlong course through the lobby, however, was checked by Stephen Lansing.

“About bailing Mrs Lawson out, Warren,” he said with a frown, “do you think that’s altogether wise?”

Howard stared at him. “Leave Mary down there at the mercy of those-those morons? Not one moment longer than is necessary!” he expostulated.

“There are worse things to be at the mercy of than the law, Warren,” said Stephen Lansing, “as we should all be prepared to testify by now.”

Howard paled. “You mean?”

“I think it’s self-evident that Mrs Lawson knows a great deal.”

“Why, you – you –”

“If you ask me,” said Stephen Lansing gravely, “most of us could be in more dangerous places than securely locked up in jail for the next few days, particularly Mary Lawson with whatever it is she has on that conscience of hers.”

“Damn it, Mary didn’t kill that swine!” protested Howard fiercely.

However, as he went slowly out the revolving door of the hotel he had lost the major portion of his aggressiveness, and I think none of us was greatly surprised to hear a little before midnight that, after an interview with her lawyer, Mary had decided for the present not to apply for release on bond.

“We did succeed in wringing one concession from the police,” said Howard when he returned, his face jaded though happier than when he left. “She has not been booked for murder. She’s being held as a material witness, or so the inspector gave out to the newspaper boys.” He smiled wryly. “At least we shan’t have her served up in headlines with our breakfast for the whole town to gape at.”

“Thank God!” I muttered.

Stephen nodded and said, “I don’t believe for a minute that the inspector thinks Mary Lawson is a murderess.” When we stared at him he added, with a gesture toward the stairs, “You notice he hasn’t called off his dogs.”

“On the contrary,” snapped Sophie Scott. “You have only to try moving about, to see them poking their square heads around corners or from behind the doors of supposedly empty rooms, like roaches coming up out of the drains.”

I did see a couple of uniformed men in my corridor, when a little after twelve our informal gathering in the lobby broke up and along with the others I trailed up to my room for a night toward which none of us, I think, looked forward with any degree of pleasure.

To tell the truth, it gave me more of a comfortable sensation than not when I opened the door to 511 to know that in the hall behind me the policeman Sweeney, evidently under special orders, was staring fixedly at the back of my head.

Even so, there was a bad minute when I stood there in the dark, fumbling for the light switch. I wondered if there would be time to scream if those two murderous hands clenched themselves about my throat or if one would be able to scream when face to face with that anonymous horror which needlessly mutilated the corpses of its victims with all the savagery of a perverted and diseased brain.

However, when my cold and trembling fingers on the second attempt succeeded in turning the switch, there was nothing in the room before me of a sinister nature except one tiny scrap of blank brown wrapping paper which I had overlooked when I flushed the others down the sewer. The mirror was innocent of lascivious notes.

The window on the fire escape was still closed and locked as I had left it. Nevertheless, my heart had a tendency to climb into my throat at the least unexpected noise, and it seemed to me I had never heard a night so full of weird creakings and stealthy footfalls and uncanny rappings.

“It’s only the wind, rattling doors and windows,” I told myself stoutly, but my blood pressure continued to mount steadily until I could feel the pulse under my ears pounding and hammering in my throat.

I remember thinking that an elderly woman whose arteries are no longer all they should be would probably prove an easy subject for strangulation, before I finally managed to pull myself together and, having removed my shoes and my outer dress, crawled into bed and, with more fortitude than one might suppose, jerked the chain which extinguished the table lamp beside me, plunging me into a blackness that took my breath away for a moment.

Under other circumstances I think I should have slept with my light on that night, but, feeling positive the policeman outside my door had received instructions to keep a close watch upon me, I was taking no chances. It was not part of my plan to be caught red handed in the undertaking to which, after having counted the probable risk to myself and made up my mind to damn the consequences, I had positively made up my mind.

It was just after the courthouse clock tolled once for a quarter of one that I stole out the side of my bed, taking care to avoid with my stocking feet the plank which I had noticed possessed a squeak. Inch by inch I eased up the window which looked out upon the fire escape.

The rain had again drizzled into a thin mist. Leaning far out, I deposited on the iron landing below me the aluminium water pitcher in which I had placed my packet of greenbacks, wrapped in an old silk handkerchief. Then, drawing my purple bathrobe about me and hunching my throat deeper into the folds of my lavender fascinator, I crouched down just below the window ledge in the mist and the dark, praying to heaven that I should not sneeze at the zero hour.

I had baited the trap; I had only to wait for a human rat to walk into it. The pocket of my bathrobe sagged under the weight of the small ugly automatic which, in a moment of aberration after a series of robberies in the city years before, I had allowed myself to buy. Not until later did it occur to me that I had no idea how to fire the thing, even if it was loaded - which to my knowledge it never had been.

I can only say for what it’s worth that it had given me a sense of protection for years to know that the revolver was in my dresser drawer, and, now that I was coming to grips with a mad and ruthless slayer, the gun still comforted me in the illogical way women have about such matters.

The clock tolled for one, and then the quarter and the half-hour. The tickling in my throat assumed the proportion of a major obstacle. To keep from coughing required a part of my self-control, but not the major portion. It was not possible to see the water pitcher from where I huddled without lifting the top of my head and one eye above the windowsill. Having no desire to alarm my prey, I yielded to this temptation only when I could no longer by main strength resist it.

However, I was not trusting to my eyes. With the police camping in the corridor, off which opened not only my door but the entrance to the fire escape, there remained but one approach to the water pitcher, and that by way of the fire escape itself. And while my knees and my eyes are not what they were, my ears are preternaturally keen. I did not believe so much as a mouse could climb to within a few feet of my nose without my hearing him, no matter how cautious his ascent.