The Door (28 page)

These and a dozen other instances which I was to recall later, had given me an almost superstitious attitude toward the case. Clearly it was not meant that we were to know until the deadly roster was complete, the whole sanguinary business finished. Then, when it was all over, Katherine with her deadly pertinacity was to step in, and the door was to play its part.

The next incident was a fair example of the narrow margins to which I have referred.

I have said little about reporters, but of course life had been made miserable by them for weeks; masculine and feminine, they had more or less invaded us. Dick’s injury had resulted in a fresh influx, and so I had instructed the servants to inspect all callers from the library bay window before opening the doors.

A day or two after the visit to Godfrey Lowell the bell rang and Joseph tiptoed upstairs to say that a suspicious looking woman was on the doorstep. By that I knew he meant probably a reporter, but something made me ask what she looked like.

“A big woman,” he said. “Rather flashy, madam.”

“Humph,” I said. “Big? All the ladies of the press so far have been small, Joseph. Small and young.”

The bell rang again, almost fiercely, and suddenly a curious thing happened to me. I had a vision of Florence Gunther standing there, ringing the bell and being turned away. It came and went while the bell was still ringing.

“Let her in, Joseph. I’ll see her.”

He disapproved, I knew. It was in every line of his back. But in the end he admitted her, and it developed that my caller was Lily Sanderson.

She looked tired, I thought, too tired even to be self-conscious.

“I guess you have enough bother without my adding to it,” she said. “But I had to come. I had really.”

She sat down and put her hands to her hat.

“I guess I look something dreadful. I’ve been losing a lot of sleep, and what with being on my feet all day—”

“Would you like some tea?”

“No, thanks. I feel too mussy. I want to get home and get my shoes off. My feet swell something dreadful these days. Not getting to bed properly, you know.”

“Can’t you slip them off now? Your shoes?”

But the idea seemed to outrage her sense of the proprieties. She shook her head.

“I’ll just give you my message and be getting on. It’s about Mrs. Bassett. She’s sick. She’s got—” She lowered her voice, as always will women of a certain age when mentioning cancer. “She’s got a cancer, and it’s too late to operate. She’s living on morphia. Her daughter’s there now, but I relieve her at night. That is, I sleep on a sofa, and if she gets bad she calls me.”

But the point of the matter was this: after Mrs. Bassett had had morphia she would grow talkative, “what with the pain stopping, and anyhow I guess morphia does loosen the tongue.” And Miss Sanderson would listen.

“It’s really awful,” she said. “Me working all day and trying to sleep, and her talking on and on. Sometimes she’ll say: ‘You’re not listening.’ And I’ll wake up and tell her I am. But what I’m coming to, she’s talked a lot about Florence. She’s got her on her mind. And she knows something, Miss Bell. She knows something about that murder.”

“What makes you think that?”

“She’s as much as said so. The other night she called me in the middle of the night and told me to get somebody from headquarters; she wanted to make a statement about something. So I got the telephone book, but I didn’t know what to look for, and then I heard her calling like a crazy woman. I went in, and she was running her tongue over her lips—morphia makes them dry, you know—and looking at me with a queer sly look. ‘I haven’t anything to tell the police,’ she said. ‘It’s this stuff they give me. I guess I was dreaming.’ But I didn’t believe her then and I don’t now. She meant to tell the police something, and then she got frightened.”

“It might not have been about Florence, at that.”

“Listen!” She leaned forward. “I told you I heard two people in that room the night Florence was killed, didn’t I? And that one of them was a woman and she was crying? Well, why wasn’t that Mrs. Bassett?”

She sat back, having made her effect, and gazed at me triumphantly.

“Mind you,” she said. “I’m not saying she had anything to do with the murder. She’s a decent sort of woman, and she’s had a hard time; roomers at the house, and going out to give body massage into the bargain. She knows something, that’s all I say. And I stick to it.”

“Would she talk to the police if they went there?”

“I doubt it. She’s thought it over, and she’s made up her mind. She’s afraid; afraid of somebody.”

She had, however, no more idea as to this somebody’s identity than I had. She knew no more of Mrs. Bassett than the average roomer knows of her landlady. She believed that there was a husband living, but she had never seen him. The daughter had given up a good position to take care of her, she understood. She rambled on while I thought. Only one thing struck me as being significant in all this, and that was that Mrs. Bassett had given massage.

“What does she look like?” I asked. “I mean, in build? Is she tall?”

“She’s medium height, and stocky. Very muscular. Even now she isn’t as weak as you’d expect.”

I sat up. Was it possible that Mrs. Bassett was the heavy-set woman who had given Howard Somers massage at the hotel? And if so, what would that mean? What did she know? What had she learned in those rooms, during those mysterious days of the illness, that might be valuable now? That, it seemed to me, was the important thing, and not Lily Sanderson’s guess that she had been in Florence’s room the night she was killed.

One could imagine her, her sleeves showing her strong arms as she bent over the bed, working mechanically. And then, something being said, some quarrel going on or some name being mentioned which had registered in her mind. Then, lying in her bed, the impulse to tell what she knew, and the second impulse, more profound, to be allowed to die in peace.

“Did she ever mention any of her patients?”

“I think not. She isn’t what you would call talkative.”

“I wondered. We know that a woman answering that description gave massage a few times to Mr. Howard Somers here last year. But I daresay Doctor Simonds would know.”

That, however, did not interest Miss Sanderson. What she wanted, and finally brought out, was that I should myself see Mrs. Bassett and talk to her. That night if possible.

“Her heart’s bad, and she may go any time like
that.
” She snapped her fingers. “If you could work on her she might talk. Tell her all the trouble and sorrow that’s going on. She’s kind enough. I could have yelped myself when I saw that picture of Mr. Blake with the handcuffs.”

Here the feeling that she had committed an indelicacy caused her to get up suddenly and prepare to go.

“That’s fixed, is it? You’ll come? Say about nine o’clock? I’ll be watching for you. She’ll have had her hypo at eight, and the daughter’s going out. I’ve promised to relieve her early. I can smuggle you in.” But she seemed loath to go. “I don’t know why,” she said, “but I get a funny feeling in that house at night. She thinks she hears things, and she lies and listens.”

I let her out myself, and watched her go down the drive to the street. It occurred to me then that she was frightened, that she had been frightened all along; that she knew that to meddle in this matter might be deadly; that the same fear which had turned Mrs. Bassett stubbornly silent was in her. There was pathos in that. These two women, one worn with watching, one dying, and no peace for either of them. Shut in those two upper rooms, awake in the long night, and the sick woman “hearing things.”

Doctor Simonds did not remember the Bassett woman. He had suggested massage, and either Sarah or Wallie had found some one. He himself had never seen her. He had two or three
masseuses
on his list, but they were all Danes or Swedes, there was no one named Bassett.

I
DID NOT TAKE
the car that night. I had no desire to let Robert know of that visit. But I took Joseph, out of sheer panic, to see me safely down the hill and into the lighted portion of the park. There he turned back, and I went on alone.

A week of June had passed. The trees were in full leaf, and the scent of flowering shrubbery was in the air. I remember thinking that it would soon be two months since Sarah had been murdered, and that Florence had been dead for more than a month. And what did we know now, more than we knew then? Almost nothing. That Sarah had known Florence, that they had shared the knowledge of the will, and that Sarah had hidden two pages of a record which were being diligently sought by some one unknown!

Cleared of all extraneous matter, that was our case. We might suspect that Howard had been murdered, but we did not know it. We might believe Judy had been attacked, but had the ladder possibly fallen, after all? Had Joseph tumbled down the stairs? And had Dick surprised some venial malefactor who had simply pushed him out of the way?

And was the answer of the Grand Jury the correct one? Was it, after all, as simple as that, that Jim had killed Sarah to get the duplicate will, trusting to luck—and possibly Katherine—to get hold of the other?

I daresay I walked slowly, for it was after nine o’clock when I rang the door bell.

Almost at once it was opened and Lily Sanderson slid out on the step, closing the door behind her.

“Well, wouldn’t you know it?” she said. “The husband’s come to see her! He’s up there now, and the daughter too, and there’s been all sorts of a row. She’ll be upset, and it’s bad for her. It might even kill her.”

I saw that she was crying, and I realized that her tears were not for me and my disappointment; that for a little time she had fed her starved womanhood on service, and that she had developed an affection for this unfortunate woman who had become for the time at least her child.

“You need sleep,” I said. “Let the daughter stay tonight, and go to bed.”

But she shook her head. She had stepped into the vestibule and drawn me in with her. “Look here,” she said in a low voice, “what do you suppose the fuss is about? She’s sick, and he knows it. Why is he jawing her? Is he afraid she’ll tell something?”

“Who is he? What does he look like?”

“I never saw him, and I don’t want to.”

But she caught something in my face—we were in the vestibule, and there was a little light—and she turned swiftly and went into the house. She was back again almost immediately, her finger on her lips.

“He’s coming down,” she whispered. “Don’t move.”

She had partially closed the door behind her, and we stood there waiting, while the man slowly descended to the second floor. Still as it was on that by-street, his movements were amazingly quiet. Indeed, had I not been told that some one was descending that staircase, I would not have believed it. A creak now and then, the indescribable faint sounds of a moving body, were all I could hear.

Then, part way down the second flight he stopped. Evidently he had seen the partly opened door, and was looking at it. Lily Sanderson’s face was curious in that half light. It was as though that descent, harmless enough until then, had become sinister. She stared at me, her mouth partly open, and thus we stood for an absurd time, waiting for the man on the stairs to make the first move.

Suddenly the tension became too much for her. She made an odd little sound and threw open the door. There was no man on the stairs, nobody in sight. She looked profoundly shocked, and she gave a sort of hysterical giggle.

“Can you beat that?” she whispered. “He went back!”

“Back where?”

“He went up to the second floor and down the back stairs. That is, if he’s gone.” Some rather awful thought evidently came into her mind at that moment, for she left me and ran up the stairs, her heavy legs and ridiculous heels moving with incredible rapidity. She went all the way to the third floor, and I could hear voices there; the daughter’s, I imagined, and her own. She came down more quietly.

“It just occurred to me,” she said breathlessly, “that—but she’s all right. The daughter is with her.”

“What in the world did you think?”

But she seemed rather ashamed.

“It was funny, his slipping out like that, wasn’t it?” she asked. “Maybe Clarissa saw him.”

As it turned out, however, Clarissa had already gone home. Her kitchen was dark, and I think it took some courage on Lily’s part to go in and turn on the lights. But it was empty, and she turned her attention to the door. She looked around at me with a startled face.

“I forgot! He couldn’t get out here. Clarissa takes the key with her. It’s locked now, and the key’s gone.”

It was then that we both heard a sound from the pantry, and the swinging door into it opened and closed a few inches. It was an uncanny thing, and I can still see poor Lily, leaning on the kitchen table and staring at it, and admire the courage with which she raised her quavering voice.

“Who’s there?”

In the silence which followed we both heard the front door softly close.

Evidently Mrs. Bassett’s husband, or whoever the stealthy visitor might be, had found himself locked in the kitchen, and when we went there had taken refuge in the pantry. There were two swinging doors, and the opening of the one, as we found by experiment, caused the other to move. As he escaped by the simple expedient of going forward through the dining room, this had happened.

But as Lily said, now blind to the proprieties and sitting weakly in a chair with her slippers in her hand, why escape at all?

“I don’t believe it was her husband, Miss Bell,” she said. “Anybody could come here and say that. That’s why I went upstairs.”

“To see if it was her husband?”

“To see if he had murdered her,” she said, and somehow my blood ran cold.

I took a taxicab home that night, and I did not feel safe until I was in my own house once more, with Joseph double barring the door and the dogs, as usual in my absences, settled on the best library chairs.

I told the Inspector the next day of that experience in the Halkett Street house, but he pooh-poohed the idea of its having any connection with the crimes.