The Door (36 page)

Nevertheless, we were as far from the identity of this man as ever.

It was a broiling July night. At ten o’clock Joseph, in his traveling clothes, brought in some lemonade—he was leaving at eleven that night for a short holiday—and I remember that he had hardly gone out when Judy drew up a window shade for air, and suddenly drew back from the window.

“There’s a man out there!” she said, “Just outside the window!”

Dick ran out at once. He was gone for some time, and when he came back it was to report that nobody was in sight, but that it was about to storm and that they’d better be on their way. I thought he looked rather odd, but we were all on edge that night and so I said nothing.

I was uneasy after they had gone. I wandered back to the pantry, where Robert was talking with the policeman and waiting for Joseph to come down, and while Robert stayed in the pantry the officer made a round of the house, inside and out. He found nothing, however, and as the storm broke soon after that, Joseph departed to the car by way of the kitchen porch in such a downpour as I have seldom seen.

I did not go up to bed, although it was eleven o’clock. I had a strange feeling of uneasiness, as though something was about to happen, or had happened. And at a little after eleven Jock sat up in the hall and gave tongue to a really dreadful howl.

I do not even now pretend to explain that wail, or that when I went into the hall both dogs were standing with their neck ruffs on end, staring into the dark drawing room.

I had a picture of that, of the incredulous terror in their attitudes; then they turned and bolted into the library, and I am not ashamed to admit that I followed them, and slammed and locked the door.

No, I have no explanation. When a short time later Inspector Harrison arrived and rang the door bell, he found me locked in the library; and it was all he could do to make me open the door.

He was soaking wet, and he looked very weary. He looked dejected, too, although I did not understand that until later on.

“I’m late,” he said, “but we’ve had to cut open a safe deposit box in a bank, and it took some time and some red tape. Then I had another little job—I’m not proud of that. Still, maybe it’s all for the best. It will save Walter Somers a lot of trouble.”

“Walter? He is alive?”

“He is. I’ve been doing a little nursing now and then, in odd moments! But he’s alive. He’s going to live. He’s conscious, too, since yesterday. And now that you’ve turned up the story of the will—Waite told me—I hope the family won’t prosecute. He tried to do the right thing, and it damn near cost him his life.”

He sat back and bit savagely on the end of a rather soggy toothpick.

“Yes,” he said, “I’ve bungled this thing. When I did get on the right track it was pretty late. It was the shooting of Joseph Holmes that started me straight, by the way. But I lost a lot of time, one way and another, and—well, I’ll say this, our killer will never kill again.”

“You’ve got him? The murderer?”

“Yes,” he said. “Yes—and no.”

I sat bolt upright in my excitement.

“Who was it, Inspector? Surely I have a right to know.”

“I’m coming to that.” He looked at me and smiled quizzically. “But not right off. We’ll lead up to it, and then there’ll be no shock.”

“Shock! Then I know him?”

“You do indeed,” he said gravely. “That’s why I want to tell you the story first, so you’ll understand. We’ll call it a sort of psychological preparation. And I’m going to tell the story without telling you his name. We’ll call him James C. Norton, because that’s the name he used when he rented the safe deposit box. Norton. And up to a quarter to three o’clock today we hadn’t a hope of landing him. We knew he was guilty, guilty as hell. We’ve watched him and followed him, but we hadn’t a thing. Then today he went to the Commercial Bank—he had to—and he gave the show away.

“Mind you, he knew he was being watched, or he suspected it. He didn’t know I’d found Walter, however. He had half killed Walter and tied him up in an abandoned farmhouse, and for a while he went back there now and then. It wasn’t to his interest that Walter die. But later on it
was
to his interest that Walter Somers die. He left him where I found him, left him to die. I want you to remember that.

“Things were getting pretty hot for him, and with Walter dead the story wasn’t likely to come out. And I’ll say for him, that he held on to the last minute. He knew we had nothing on him. As a matter of fact we didn’t, until about seven o’clock tonight.

“I want to give you a picture of this man, Miss Bell. We knew that he was at least moderately tall and stronger than the average. After I learned the story of that little comedy at the Imperial we knew he could act, and that he was a bit of a forger. Also we knew he was quick and catlike on his feet.

“But we knew some other things.

“This man had no heart, had no bowels of compassion. He had instead a lust for money and an infinite capacity for wickedness. Also he had cunning, a cunning so devilish that he had not only covered up his tracks; he had deliberately thrown suspicion on another man by the manufacture of false evidence.

“Such, for instance was the oil in Jim Blake’s car; the use of Jim Blake’s name in that deadly visit to New York, and the clothing, expressly arranged to give the impression to the man Parrott that it was Blake; and there was the telephone message using Blake’s name. And I say here and now that this man would have let Jim Blake go to the chair with less scruple than I break this toothpick.

“That’s the picture of this assassin. I want you to remember it.

“Now I’m going to somebody else. I don’t need to give you a picture of her. But she seemed to be in this thing up to the neck. She was, and my hat’s off to her. Her name is Mary Martin.”

“Mary! What has she done, but damage?”

He smiled again.

“She did her bit, when the truth began to drift in on her. She tried to save Howard Somers, but this—this Norton was too smart for her. She helped to find Walter. And on the night she was seen here in the drive she was running because she knew something. She knew there was going to be another murder, or an attempt at it.”

“She knew Joseph was to be killed!”

“She was afraid it would be tried. We’re coming to that. But she was in a bad way herself; she suspected what had happened to Walter. She was almost crazy, that girl. So she relaxed her vigilance and—you find Joseph shot.”

“What possible interest had Mary Martin in Walter Somers, Inspector?” I asked, bewildered.

“She had a very real interest. She had married him last fall.”

He gave me a moment to comprehend that, and then went on more briskly.

“Now let’s go back. Let’s go back to last summer, to the end of July.

“Walter Somers was in town, and one day he got a note to go to a house on Halkett Street. He went, and he met there this man I’m calling Norton, and a woman named Bassett. The Bassett woman claimed to have been a maid in Margaret Somers’ employ in Biarritz, and that Margaret Somers had there given birth to a child.”

“Howard Somers’ child?” I asked sharply.

“No. I believe that was the plot at first; it was all a plot anyhow. There was no such child. This girl they were passing off was the Bassett woman’s own daughter by an earlier marriage. The Bassett woman had remarried. The girl’s name was Mary Martin.”

“Mary! And she believed it?”

“I think she did believe it for a time. She wanted to believe it. That’s natural. But when the plot failed Mrs. Bassett told her the truth. The immediate result, however, was that Walter sent for his father, and his father came here.

“Howard Somers denied the story in toto. He had had no second child by Margaret, and she had borne no child in Europe. The whole story was a lie. But he worked himself into a heart attack over it, and that was the start of the trouble.

“Norton’s little plan had failed. But this sickness gave him a new idea. Queer how one criminal thought leads to another. He went to Walter with the scheme about the will, and Walter almost kicked him out. But Walter was in debt, and there was the idea. It got to ‘eating him,’ as he put it. Then, too, he was already interested in the girl. The girl was straight. She’d believed that story. As a matter of fact, when her mother told her the truth she tried to see Howard Somers at the Imperial, but they would not let her in.

“And there’s this to say in Walter’s defense; he felt that he had been badly treated, that a half of the estate should have been his. Later on, when his father was dead, he went on to New York to tell the whole story. But they alienated him there, and we have to remember that he wasn’t sure his father had been murdered. Mary Martin suspected it, and told him so over the long distance telephone.

“And I’ll say this for him. He went to this Norton and Norton denied it. But he laid Norton out cold on general principles, and Norton hated him from that moment. That’s what I mean when I say Walter Somers had paid his price. His wife was desperately in love with him, but she loathed the whole imposture. She threatened again and again to uncover it.

“Now about this conspiracy to draw up a fake will. It wasn’t Walter Somers’ idea, although he helped to put it through, and the cleverness with which that will was put among his father’s papers was not his idea either. It was simple enough, at that. Mr. Somers did not alter his mind or his will during that illness, but he did pay some notes of Walter’s. In some ways he was a hard man, and he made Walter bring him the canceled notes.

“He meant to keep them. But Walter was afraid Mrs. Somers would find them in case his father died, so he had him endorse the envelope to be returned to him—to Walter—in that case.

“He told all this to Norton, and that was the start of the whole business. Norton suggested that a spurious will could be placed in that envelope and substituted for the notes, and that’s what happened. Howard Somers himself carried back to New York and placed among his private papers that bogus will, endorsed in his own hand ‘to be given to my son Walter in the event of my death.’ It was neat, when you think of it.”

“Neat, but wicked, Inspector!”

“Wrong, yes. Still, you must remember that no murder was contemplated. Fraud, yes, although Walter felt justifiable fraud, in a way. But murder, never.

“So the comedy was staged, with the fifty thousand dollars to be this Norton’s share, his pay for that imposture, for the study he had made of Howard Somers’ signature, and for that bit of comedy where he lay in a bed in a low light, on a day selected because it was dark and gray, and feebly signed that spurious document.

“I haven’t been able to learn everything from Walter yet, but in that bit of comedy—and God knows it’s the only comedy there is—the Bassett woman in a nurse’s uniform played Sarah Gittings. Walter had prepared for that by having her give massage treatments to his father. And Norton was Mr. Somers. I imagine that Norton was the man with the box of flowers the floor clerk remembered. He had long gray hair, she said, and so Norton probably wore into the hotel that day the wig made to resemble Howard Somers’ hair.

“That flower box had flowers in it. But it had some other things, make-up and silk pyjamas, a dressing gown, a few bottles and toilet articles to dress the room. That’s a guess, but it’s pretty accurate.

“It was Walter’s room, anyhow. But they locked off the door to the sitting room, and Walter told Sarah Gittings he was having some friends there for cocktails, and to ‘stay out.’

“Yes, it looked like a water-proof scheme. The hotel manager himself brings Waite up, and Walter meets him in the hall. Nobody thinks about that door. The notary comes up on the second day and witnesses the signatures. Florence Gunther is brought in from the hall. When it is over the players go away, one at a time, by the service staircase.

“Only one thing slipped. It was Sarah Gittings’ custom to go out for a breath of air, and Walter took her place. But the two gray days with rain that were the best for their purpose, the twelfth and thirteenth of August, were bad days for her. She did not go out. She read a novel aloud to Mr. Somers instead, and put that on her record.

“Now let’s go on to this last spring, when Sarah met Florence Gunther. She may have remembered seeing her at the Imperial, sitting in the hall, or it may have been pure accident. It’s enough for us that they met, that Sarah told her she was with you, and as your connection with the Somers family is well known, that Florence finally mentioned the will.

“Sarah Gittings was incredulous, and after learning the date of the will, she went home and examined her records. She saw then that no such will could have been drawn on those days, and she began to try to reach Mr. Blake. She also finally induced Florence to abstract that copy from the safe, and on Monday the eighteenth of April she arranged to meet Mr. Blake at the Halkett Street house.

“She had already secreted the records in the wood cellar, but that evening she moved them to the cabinet. She had learned the terms of the will that day, and she knew well enough that there had been fraud. Also she knew about that secret compartment in the cabinet. When she took the will from Florence that afternoon she gave her the clock dial directions.

“But she felt safe enough. She had no thought of danger that night, when she left the house.

“Now, I’m going to reconstruct that night of the eighteenth of April. And you must remember that Walter Somers is still very weak, and that he himself can only guess at a part of it.

“A
T FIVE MINUTES PAST
seven Sarah Gittings left this house, taking the dogs with her. She had the will for safekeeping probably inside her shoe—there had been some purse-snatching in this neighborhood—and she carried in her bag the key to her room and the key to her front door; but she was excited that night, and she forgot to lock her bedroom door.

“She went out the door, and in the drive she found Walter Somers waiting for her. He knew that she frequently took the dogs out at that hour, and this night he knew something else. He knew through Norton, who had his own way of learning things, that she had met Florence that afternoon and received a longish legal envelope from her.