The Door (14 page)

“I will assuredly not perjure myself, if that’s what you mean.”

“Why put a label on everything? What’s perjury anyhow? What’s the difference except the label between your pretending you have a headache and making a statement that might save a life?”

“Perjury is a lie before God.”

“Every lie is a lie before God, if you believe in God. All I want you to do is to say, if it becomes necessary to say anything, that that carpet was not in the car the other night. Wait a minute,” he said, as I started to speak, “your own position isn’t any too comfortable is it? You’ve destroyed valuable evidence. And what do you do to Jim Blake if you tell the truth? I tell you, there’s more behind this than you know. There are worse sins than lies, if you insist on talking about lies. I give you my word, if you tell about that carpet, Harrison will arrest Jim. Arrest him immediately.”

“I’m not going to volunteer anything, Wallie.”

“You’ve got to do more than that. You’ve got to stick it out. There are always thieves about, and what’s to have hindered some one crawling over Jim’s fence and getting in by the garage window? The car hadn’t been out, according to Amos, from the day Jim took sick; or went to bed, rather. He’s not sick. That carpet might have been gone for a week.”

I was in a state of greater confusion than ever when he had gone. Judy and Dick were out; on the hillside of the Larimer lot, I suspected, and after Wallie’s departure I sat down at my desk and made an outline of the possible case against Jim Blake. I still have it, and it is before me now.

(a) Sarah had tried to communicate with him by call and telephone.

(b) She had finally written him a letter, which he had probably received, but had denied receiving.

(c) On the night she was murdered he did not dress for dinner, but dined early and went out, carrying the sword-cane.

(d) From some place, not his house, he telephoned to Judy, offering her mother’s anxiety as an excuse, and asking for Sarah.

(e) He was out that night for some time. He offered no alibi for those hours, intimating that to do so would affect a woman’s reputation.

(f) When he returned he still carried the sword-cane, but on the discovery of Sarah’s body it had disappeared.

(g) Also, shortly after that discovery, he had taken to his bed, although actually not ill.

From that it was not difficult to go on to the second crime.

(h) Sarah and Florence Gunther knew each other, probably shared some secret knowledge. The paper Judy had found might or might not refer to that knowledge. Certainly one or the other of them possessed some knowledge or some physical property, or both, which had been desperately sought for in each case.

(i) According to Inspector Harrison, the two rooms had been searched by the same individual.

(j) The oil stain on the carpet of Jim’s car may not be suspicious in itself, but coupled with the above is highly evidential.

To this list I added certain queries:

(a) Would Jim, under any conceivable circumstances, have attacked Judy?

(b) Was he capable of such sustained cunning as had been shown throughout? The planted footprints, for example?

(c) Had Jim actually worn golf clothes on the night of Sarah’s murder? If not, had he had time after his telephone message to break into my house? Fifteen minutes, or at most twenty, was all he had had.

(d) Was Sarah in Jim’s house for the three hours still unaccounted for?

And under the heading “Florence Gunther”:

(a) Did Jim know her?

(b) Was Jim the visitor testified to by the colored woman at the Bassett house?

(c) Why had so cunning a murderer overlooked the oil stain in the car?

I studied this last.

Surely were Jim guilty, lying there in his bed he would have gone over inch by inch the ground he had covered; have thought of every detail, have followed his every act, searched for the possible loose thread in his fabric.

He knew he was under suspicion. He had only to raise himself in his bed to see that figure across the street. Then why would he have left that stain in the car? Why not have burned the carpet? Burned the car?

There was more than that. He was definitely under suspicion, and there had been a city-wide search for the “death car,” as the press called it. But either the police had not found that stain, or they had chosen deliberately to ignore it. Why? Jim Blake and a box of matches could at any time destroy that evidence.

It was too much for me. And to add to my anxieties Joseph told me that day that the maids were talking of leaving. Ever since Norah had found the kitchen poker in the laundry the haunting of the house had been an accepted matter, and it was finally getting on their nerves.

Yet the remainder of the day was quiet enough, on the surface. Since Wednesday night Judy and Dick had been working over the house clocks at intervals, and that Sunday was no exception. I have no doubt that the servants thought them slightly mad.

One by one the clocks were taken into the library, and there investigated. By and large, I had quite a collection of odd springs and wheels, and Dick would sit there over his wreckage, his hair rumpled, and try to reassort what Judy called “the innards.”

“Now where the devil does that go?”

“Don’t be such an ass! Right there.”

“It doesn’t fit. Try it yourself, since you know so much.”

And with this very wrangling, which was the cloak to hide their deeper feelings—after the fashion of youth today—they would be making love to each other. They would jeer at each other, their mouths hard and their eyes soft.

“Keep quiet! How can I do anything if you jerk my arm?”

“Well, you’re so damned clumsy.”

The final result, even the servants’ alarm clocks having been investigated, was that the establishment ran rather erratically. Meals were at queer hours, and I remember that on that very Sunday, with nobody the wiser, we found that we had breakfasted at eleven o’clock and lunched at half past three.

Then that Sunday night at eleven o’clock, or as near that as our ruined time system allowed me to judge, Katherine called up from New York.

Howard had had another attack. He was better, but she wanted Judy at home.

Judy left the next morning. Dick was working and so I took her to the station, and on the way there I gathered that she and Dick had reached an
impasse
in their love affair. She stated it quite flatly, after her fashion.

“He’s crazy about me,” she said, “but I’m a child of the rich! If he condescends to marry me I’m to live on his salary, and a bit he has outside! It’s absurd! It’s sublime! It’s perfectly barbaric these days for a man to insist on supporting a wife. It’s childish vanity; the great male ‘I am.’”

It was quite characteristic of her that she should be crying at the moment. But she wanted no sympathy, and I gave her none.

“If you’d rather have things than have Dick—”

“Oh, to the devil with things. It’s the principle of the thing. He’d deprive me to nurse his own vanity.”

Well, it is a problem which is confronting a good many young people today, both of them right and both of them wrong. I had no solution, and whatever their troubles it had not affected Dick’s feeling toward her, for he came in to see me that night, out of sheer habit.

“Tried to pass by,” he said, “but the old bus just naturally headed in and stuck its head over the hitching post.”

I was glad to see him. I had been very lonely; missing Judy, even missing—to tell the truth—the Inspector, with his blue eyes and his toothpicks and his general air of competence. He had deserted me almost completely for several days.

And in the expansiveness of that hour, then and there, I told Dick about the carpet. He was incredulous.

“But see here: the first car the police would examine would be that car.”

“So I think. But they may know about it, at that.”

“You’re sure Amos hasn’t been carrying oil in it?”

That had not occurred to me. I felt rather foolish, and the net result of the talk was that Dick saw Amos the next day and learned certain things.

On the night of Florence’s death, being a Sunday, he had been out and Jim was alone. But he could not have taken the car out, for Amos carried the key to the small door of the garage from the garden. The main doors to the alley were bolted on the inside.

Not that Dick asked these direct questions. He asked Amos where he was on Sunday night, and if any one could have got at the car.

But Dick was not satisfied. He watched the negro leave the house on an errand, and then climbed the rear wall into Jim’s yard. There he found two interesting facts; the side window into the garage had a broken pane, and it was possible to reach in and unlock the sash. And there were marks on one of the newly painted garden chairs.

He got into the building and examined the car. The driving seat and the one next to it were leather and could be washed, but there were no blood stains.

“Amos doesn’t watch the mileage,” he said, “so he doesn’t know whether the car was out or not. But he does suspect that the gas is lower than it ought to be.”

He did, however, discover that Amos had carried no oil in the rear of the car. He had said to him:

“What’s all this about the carpet being missing? You’ve done away with it yourself, haven’t you? Spilled something on it?”

“No, sir!” said Amos. “I never carry nothing back there. Mr. Blake’s mighty particular about that car, sir.”

All of which, important as it was, did not help us at all. Nothing was clearer than that Jim himself, locked out of the garage, might have placed a garden chair under the window, broken the pane, and taken his car out himself, on Sunday night.

That was on Tuesday, the tenth of May. Sarah had been dead for three weeks, and Florence Gunther for ten days. Apparently the police had found nothing whatever, and we ourselves had nothing but that cryptic cipher, which was not a cipher at all but a key.

I daresay I should have shown it to the police; but already I had done a reckless thing with the carpet and I was uneasy. Then too the Inspector had ceased his almost daily visits, although I saw him once on the Larimer lot, poking about with a stick and the faithful Simmons trotting at his heels. But he did not come to the house, and soon—on Wednesday morning, to be exact—I was to receive a message which made me forget it entirely for the time.

Howard Somers was dead.

S
O FAR I AM
aware that I have painted a small canvas of the family; only Judy, Wallie and myself, with a bit of Katherine. As Laura was never involved, it is unnecessary to enlarge on her. She remained in Kansas City, busy with her children, mildly regretful over Sarah but not actively grieved.

The one figure I have not touched is Howard Somers. Perhaps this is because I never understood him particularly, never greatly liked him. Katherine’s passion for him had always mystified me.

But Howard was to add his own contribution to our mystery, and that by the simple act of dying. It was not unexpected, although Katherine had sturdily refused to accept it, or to face its possibility. I fancy that there must have been times after that almost fatal attack the summer before when she was abroad, when he must have wanted to talk to her. There are many things in the heart and mind of a man facing death which must long for expression.

But I know from Judy that her mother never let him speak. It was as though, by admitting the fact, she would bring it closer.

“We really ought to paint the place at Southampton, before we go up next summer,” she would say.

And her eyes would defy him, dare him to intimate that there might be no next summer for him.

All this I was to learn from Judy later on, trying perplexedly to understand the situation among the three of them, and that strange silence of Howard’s about matters which concerned them all.

“Probably he wanted to tell her, poor darling,” she said. “But how could he? She wouldn’t let him. It was like Wallie, only worse. She wouldn’t speak about Wallie, you know.”

“Do you think he was seeing Wallie?”

She shrugged her shoulders.

“He must have been, but he never said anything. He never even told her that Wallie had been with him when he took sick last summer. I suppose he didn’t want to hurt her.”

And, without being aware of it, she had drawn a picture for me which was profoundly to affect my judgment later on; of the barrier Katherine had for years been erecting between Howard and his son, and of a relationship there perhaps closer than she imagined. The two driven to meetings practically clandestine, and Wallie with Margaret’s charm, her eyes, much of her beauty, making his definite claim on his father’s affection.

A conversation I was to have with Doctor Simonds later on was to confirm this.

“Whatever their trouble had been,” he said, “they had patched it up. Wallie was there every day. For a night or two he slept there, in the suite. Later on he relieved the nurse for a daily walk. He was Johnny on the spot all through.”

He had insisted on knowing his father’s condition, and had gone rather pale when he learned it.

“How long?”

“A year. Two years. Nobody can say. It might even be longer.”

But that was some time later.

Howard had died on Tuesday night, or rather some time early on Wednesday morning. A footman called me to the telephone, but it was, of all people in the world, Mary Martin who spoke to me.

“I am sorry to have bad news for you,” she began, and went on to tell me. Mr. Somers had seemed fairly well during the evening. Miss Judy had sat with him until after eleven. At eleven Evans, his valet, had brought a whisky and soda and placed it in his bedroom, and a short time after that Judy had gone to bed.

Katherine had found him in the morning, in his dressing gown and slippers, lying across the bed as he had fallen.

I took the eleven o’clock train and was at the apartment at something after two that afternoon. Mary was in the hall when I was admitted, her red head flaming over her decorous black frock. She was talking competently and quietly with what I gathered was an undertaker’s assistant, and she greeted me with considerable manner.