The Door (22 page)

Press comment was universally approving. That the police would not have taken this drastic step “without good and sufficient reason”; that “murder is murder, whether committed by the gangster or by the individual in high place in the community”; that “the District Attorney’s office is to be congratulated in having at last taken steps to solve these crimes,” these were some of the comments.

Jim had been arrested after one o’clock Tuesday night, or rather early Wednesday morning, the eighteenth. Sarah had been dead for precisely a month.

We were stunned with horror. It came as less of a surprise to me than to the others, but it was a shock for all that.

We did little or nothing that first day. Jim was in a cell in the jail and had sent for his lawyer, Godfrey Lowell. Late in the day Godfrey came in to see me, and his face was very grave. Jim’s cell was damp and the food terrible, but these things he passed by with a gesture.

“He’s not telling all he knows,” he said. “He says he’s innocent, and I believe he is. But he isn’t frank. He’s holding something back.”

Nevertheless, Jim’s story as Godfrey told it to us that afternoon in the library, was sufficiently damning. Katherine hardly spoke during that recital. Dick sat holding Judy’s hand, but I doubt if Katherine noticed it.

Briefly, Jim admitted having had an appointment to meet Sarah that night, but not in the park or by letter. She had, he maintained, telephoned him. “I have never received a letter from her, then, or at any time.” In this message, evidently sent after she had met Florence Gunther on the street and received the envelope, she had asked him to meet her that night on a very urgent matter.

The address she gave was a house on Halkett Street, and he determined to walk, going by way of the park.

On the way, however, he found that he had left the house number in his other clothing—he had changed to a walking suit—and he stopped at a drugstore to call her up. She had started, however; he talked to Judy for a moment and then went on, taking the short cut through the corner of the Larimer lot.

He remembered that the house was in the seventeen hundred block on Halkett Street, and that he was to ask for a Miss Gunther. When he reached the block in question he had walked along slowly, and at one of the houses a youngish woman was waiting on the steps.

He asked if she knew of a Miss Gunther in the vicinity, and she said that that was her name, and that Sarah had not yet arrived.

They went together into the house and waited in the parlor. It was a boarding house, but although the door into the hall was open, he saw no one except a colored woman who passed by shortly before he left.

The Gunther woman had been silent and very nervous. As time went on and Sarah did not arrive she seemed almost hysterical, and at twenty minutes to ten he had gone away, still in the dark as to why he had been there at all.

“Florence Gunther apparently refused to tell him,” Godfrey said. “He came home by the same route, mystified over the whole business. He reached the path up the hill at or about ten o’clock, stopped to rest halfway up and then went on. He maintains that he knew nothing about Sarah until he got your word that she was missing, and that he never saw her that night at all.”

“And the sword-stick?” Judy asked. “What does he say about that?”

“That he hid it in the closet, but he did not bury it.”

Katherine spoke, after a long silence.

“When they found the stick, I suppose they had searched the house?”

“I understand that they did, and that they found certain things which they believe strengthen the case.”

“His letters? Everything?”

“He had burned his letters. He had felt that this was coming, and yesterday he more or less got ready. Nothing important, he says, but he didn’t care to have them going through his papers.”

I thought that Katherine looked relieved.

I have re-read that paragraph. I know now that she was relieved. But I do not know even now what she had thought of that frantic inquiry of his, and his warning to send the reply by hand. It was burned, anyhow. She must have found some comfort in that.

How could she know that after that scene in the District Attorney’s office Inspector Harrison had gone back to Jim’s house, armed with a small box and a delicate pair of tweezers, and had taken from the grate in that handsome room of Jim’s certain charred and blackened fragments of paper ash.

Some time, that day or the next, he must have spent a painful hour over them. They had to be steamed and softened, and then they had to be laid out on a gummed paper and carefully pressed down. But he had his reward in the end. He had one sentence of nine words.

It must have puzzled him, however.

Late that evening the Inspector came in to see me, but he made no mention of his discovery in the fireplace. He seemed indeed to be rather apologetic, and he broke numberless toothpicks into fragments and strewed the floor with them.

He had to tell me that Howard had been poisoned, and he plainly hated doing it.

“No need of telling Mrs. Somers or Miss Judy,” he said. “After all, he may have done it himself, although that would be small comfort to them.” He looked at me. “Everything all right with them?” he asked. “Happy married life, and so on?”

“Absolutely. He never killed himself, Inspector.”

“Maybe not. Cyanide of potassium,” he said reflectively. “Quick and sure, but no imagination in it. No real imagination in any of these murders, for that matter. Now Walter has imagination; Blake hasn’t.”

“Walter?” I said sharply.

“He didn’t commit them, of course. Why should he? Leave out his affection for his father, and still he wouldn’t. The copy of the will is missing. To kill the witnesses wouldn’t get him anywhere. No, Walter Somers is out. I don’t have too much faith in alibis, but he didn’t do it.”

Before he left he told me that the Grand Jury would have the case by Friday, and that it would undoubtedly bring in a true bill. But he did not seem particularly happy over it.

“The more I study crime,” he said, “the less I know about the criminal. Take this case: these three murders were cold and audacious. They were committed by a man without fear and without scruple. They were fiendishly clever.

“Yet we run into this situation; we find and arrest the criminal, because he has not been clever at all. He has buried his weapon in his house, although if he killed Somers he could have dropped it into a dozen streams on that trip of his. He has absolute nerve, a thing few men possess, and he faints when he is confronted with it. He is strong enough to get into that airshaft and to pull himself out later—a thing I couldn’t do, and I’m a strong man for my age—and here’s his doctor swearing he’s a sick man, has been sick for several years.

“I’ve built this case. I’ve got evidence enough to convict Jim Blake and still have some left over. But I’m not satisfied. Not yet anyhow.”

He broke three toothpicks in rapid succession.

“Personally, I don’t believe we have scratched the surface of this thing. Go back to the night Miss Judy was hurt. And, by the way, has she ever told you why she went to the garage that night?”

“She said she wanted a foot rule.”

“But she asked Joseph where the ladder was kept, didn’t she?”

“Yes.”

“Now what did she want with that ladder? To look at it or to use it?”

“I haven’t an idea, Inspector.”

“Curious,” he said. “She had something in her mind. She’s shrewd. Now let’s go over that night.”

“Joseph has heard the dogs barking in the shrubbery; they stop suddenly, as though they had recognized the intruder. You and Joseph start to the garage, and Joseph hears something. He calls ‘What’s that?’ There is no answer, and you both go on. Some one is in the shrubbery, or has passed through it. The next day I find footprints there; not the original ones. Planted. And by the way, those prints were made by a woman’s shoe. I’ve done some work on them! Not shoes from this house, however. Joseph and I have seen to that.

“But here’s the point. Miss Judy was hurt at ten o’clock, and it was two when Norah saw this figure in the grounds.

“And here is what I want to know. Where would Jim Blake go, between ten and two o’clock at night, to get a pair of shoes belonging to a heavy woman who walked on the outsides of her feet? He has no women in his house. Even his laundry goes out.

“And why would Jim Blake cover those footprints as skillfully as he did, and then bury that cane in his cellar? The act of a fool or a lunatic, and the man who made those prints was neither.”

“Have you told the District Attorney all this, Inspector?”

“He wants an indictment. That’s his business.” And he added: “A man who’s been indicted by the Grand Jury has a pretty hard time of it. His trial may prove him innocent, but he’s got the stigma anyhow.”

He picked up a pencil from my desk, examined it, laid it down.

“Let’s go back still farther,” he said, “to when Blake first talked to you about Sarah Gittings’ disappearance. When was that, and where?”

“In this room, the next day. When she did not come back I sent for him. He was uneasy, but that was all.”

“You recall nothing else?”

“Nothing important. I remember now that he asked about Howard.”

“What did he ask?”

“It was something about his health, and if he was able to travel; if he had been here lately.”

The Inspector slid forward on his chair.

“That’s an interesting point. Now why would he ask such a question? The talk, I gather, had been about Sarah Gittings?”

“Entirely.”

“And he knew Mr. Somers’ condition, of course. Did you understand from that that he had reasons for thinking that Somers had been in town?”

“Yes. I remember that it surprised me. He asked me if I was certain that Howard had not been in town. I thought it unlikely, myself.”

“I suppose you have no reason to think that he had been here?” And when I shook my head, “Don’t answer that too quickly. Think it over, Miss Bell. Sometimes we think we know all about certain individuals, only to find that we know nothing at all. Why did Howard Somers secretly alter his will last summer while he was here? What is this secret fund of fifty thousand dollars? And what made Mr. Blake ask if he had been here recently?”

“I don’t believe Howard was here. He was ill, and his wife seldom left him.”

“But it would be possible? Some night when his wife had retired early? Or was out to dinner? He had a fast car, of course, and a dependable chauffeur.”

“Possibly? Yes, I daresay. But why?”

“That’s the point, exactly. If you can induce Mr. Blake to tell his attorneys why he asked you that question it might be helpful.” He moved impatiently.

“If people only told all they knew, there would be no miscarriages of justice. But out of fear or self-interest or the idea of protecting somebody they keep their mouths shut, and so we have these mysteries. Look at you yourself; you burn that carpet, and produce evidence against Jim Blake that to the average jury is enough to send him to the chair! Why did you burn it? What did you find that we’d overlooked? I’d been over that carpet with a fine tooth comb.”

“And there was no oil on it?”

“Oil! You found oil on that carpet?”

“I did indeed. A ring of oil.”

He got up and reached for his hat.

“It may interest you to know,” he said, “that there was no oil on that carpet when I examined it, the morning after Florence Gunther’s murder.”

But whatever conclusion he drew from that, his last speech that night was small comfort to me.

“Well, I don’t see how that will help with a jury,” he said, rather heavily. “On the surface it’s a water-tight case, Miss Bell. He had the weapon and the motive. The only thing he didn’t have—and you’ll have to excuse the word—was the guts. Mind you,” he added, “I’m not saying that Blake is innocent. He looks as guilty as hell. But I am saying that there are discrepancies, and I’ve got to have an explanation of some of them.”

T
HAT WAS ON WEDNESDAY
the eighteenth, a month after Sarah’s death and about six weeks before Joseph was shot.

I went upstairs that night exhausted both mentally and physically, to find Judy curled on my bed and very despondent.

“Let me stay awhile,” she pleaded. “Until mother comes in, anyhow. I want to talk.”

“I didn’t know she had gone out,” I said in surprise.

“She took Robert and the car. I think she went to Uncle Jim’s. To Pine Street.”

That surprised me, but Judy explained that it was to select some clothing to be sent to the jail.

“Only why would it take her all this time—” she added, almost pettishly.

“I didn’t hear the car.”

“You’re a little deaf, you know, Elizabeth Jane. I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot goes on that you don’t hear. Or hear about.”

“What goes on that I don’t hear about?”

“You didn’t hear Elise scream last night.”

“I had taken a sleeping tablet,” I said with dignity. “And what did Elise scream about?”

“She saw the ghost,” said Judy.

And when I came to examine that story, and to talk to Elise, I had to admit that she had seen something.

The Frenchwoman was still pale when I saw her. It appears that she had wanted to tell me the story, but that Joseph had sternly ordered her to keep quiet. Also that she was under no circumstances to tell the women servants, or she might “have the cooking and housework on her hands.” That seems to have been sufficient, but she had told Judy, talking in her rapid gesticulating French.

But her story gained credibility by the fact that she spoke no English, although she had understood Joseph well enough. She could have had no knowledge of the talk in the kitchen and servants’ hall, and indeed Joseph had told me later that he had warned both women to keep their mouths closed over the whole business.

Her story, punctuated by dramatic pauses where Judy saw that my French was inadequate, was as follows:

She was occupying Mary Martin’s room, and the night as I have said was sultry and like midsummer. She went to bed leaving her door open, but the breeze was from the opposite side of the house. She got up and opened the door across, thinking that it belonged to a room there.