The Glass Slipper (7 page)

Brule’s eyes sharpened.

“Oh, she talked?”

“Yes. Some. In a wandering way — not very sensible.”

“Why had she come? Were you expecting her?”

“No. I think she came about — about Crystal. There was — she knew something. I think the police inquiry had alarmed her —”

Steven looked up quickly.

“Police?” he said. “Then Alicia was right —”

“Steven, if you’d only believe me,” cried Alicia. “Brule, how can you question her like that? As if you believe — with that girl dead exactly as Crystal —”

Brule swerved around with a quick compact motion to look at Alicia.

“You are talking to my wife,” he said.

In the little silence Alicia laughed a very small, faint laugh which managed to be unutterably scornful.

“Your wife,” she said and laughed. And then as Brule turned purposefully toward the table near the bed she said sharply: “What are you going to do?”

“Get the police, of course,” said Brule and took up the telephone. He knew the dial number, and they listened while the dial murmured and while he spoke; Andy moved out of the way as Gross tiptoed into the room with a sheet and spread it gingerly over the little shabby heap on the rug before the fireplace. A maid, two maids were in the hall, peering with frightened faces through the doorway. They heard Brule give the address. “I think it’s murder,” he said. “Yes… All right. We won’t touch anything.”

He hung up.

And dialed again. This time for Guy Cole.

“Guy, can you come right away? Before the police get here… Yes, it’s the thing I talked to you about but a — bad development. The nurse — the day nurse, I mean — who took care of Crystal, has been murdered. Here, in the house —”

They could hear Guy’s exclamation and the sharp click of his telephone. Brule put down the instrument and sat for a moment looking at it; his face was as always impenetrable except that there was a tight, hard look about his jaw and his eyes were very bright. He’d been operating that day, probably, thought Rue; for he looked tired, and there was about him a look of weary but satisfied accomplishment — something almost intangible, yet to Rue’s eyes obvious enough. He was planning now; sitting at the table in complete silence while his mind leaped ahead, arranged, considered. They all waited. Andy removed his overcoat quietly and put it down on a chair. Steven watched Brule. Gross hovered, his face sagged and gray, about the door. Alicia was like a fashionable statue with a face done in alabaster, and jewels for eyes.

Brule said: “Go downstairs to the library. All of you. Guy will be here in a moment. He’ll be present while the police question you. He won’t let you make any damaging admissions; but of course you’ll have to tell the truth. Exactly what happened but that’s all. Don’t volunteer any information. Stick to the simple facts as you know them. If Guy tells you not to answer, don’t answer. Do exactly what Guy says.”

“Brule, what’s this about Crystal’s having been murdered?” asked Steven abruptly. “Has there actually been an inquiry?”

“Yes. But I don’t think the police have any direct evidence. Don’t answer any questions at all about that. Now then…”

He stopped thoughtfully. Andy said slowly:

“Well, that ties it. We’re in for it now. But I don’t see Brule, why you told the police it was murder. I mean, the nurse. It seems to me it could be either accident or suicide.”

“The girl came here to see Rue; she’d probably been questioned by the police sometime yesterday about Crystal’s death. Whatever she told them, the inquiry seems to have aroused her suspicions or reminded her of something she knew and wanted to tell Rue —”

“Yes. Yes, that’s what she —” Brule’s glance stopped Rue; she didn’t know what it meant, she only felt that something in that swift look compelled her silence. Brule went on in terse sentences:

“If she really knew anything, if Crystal was murdered, if the murderer knew Julie Garder had any knowledge of it, then Julie was stopped. Before she could tell it. It’s obvious — as the police will see it.”

“But — but it isn’t conclusive, Brule. You know that. That’s assuming that Crystal was murdered,” said Andy, troubled. “That’s assuming the girl actually knew something that would lead to the murderer. That’s assuming that even if she knew it she would come here to tell Rue. Wouldn’t she have been more likely to tell the police —”

“I said, that’s as the police will certainly see the case. Call it murder then, for they will. If it proves to be accident, or if it proves to have been suicide — though God knows why she would have come here to kill herself — let the police discover it. Don’t try to dodge their own certain and obvious conclusion; tell them straight off that it’s murder.”

Steven said slowly: “Of course Brule’s right. I wouldn’t have seen it myself, but I do now.”

“If you please, sir.” It was Gross.

“Yes, Gross?”

“I think Mr Cole has arrived.”

Brule got up swiftly, with the compact elasticity of motion that characterized him.

“Go downstairs. All of you. I’ll stay here. Except — Rue, I want to talk to you.”

Alicia gave Rue a swift look, and Steven put his arm lightly about Alicia’s waist, and together they left the room. Rue moved uncertainly toward Brule. It was easier to breathe somehow since Brule and Andy had come. Was it because Brule had taken control of the situation from her own frightened, faltering hands? Or was it because Brule had looked at Julie and if there had been anything at all that could have been done to save her Brule would have done it?

“Tell me, Rue, exactly what happened. Quickly. Don’t leave out anything.” He paused and then said more kindly: “Don’t tremble like that, Rue. But tell me. Everything. What time did she arrive? Where did she sit? Where did you sit? Above all, what did she tell you? Did she —” He glanced at the door but the others had gone. His voice lowered, however, and he put his hands on Rue’s shoulders and drew her nearer him so he could look directly down into her eyes. “Did Julie know anything of Crystal’s death? For you see, if she did, if she told you, if you share her knowledge you — share her danger.”

Rue’s heart was like a bird caught in her throat. “Her… danger…” she said stiffly.

Brule’s eyes were suddenly a little less hard and bright. He said:

“Don’t be afraid. You are my wife, and I’ll try to take care of you.”

She looked up into his eyes for an instant; but in that stillness they both were aware of a sound growing out of the deepening dusk away off in the distance. A sound that swelled and diminished and swelled shrilly again and grew ever nearer and all at once became horribly eerie and paralyzing in its intent. It was the police siren swooping upon them like a bird of prey, shrieking its triumph through twilight streets.

There was no escaping it. Brule listened, and his hands on Rue’s shoulders became tighter. He said: “Hurry. Tell me what Julie told you.”

S
he told him hastily against the eerie background of that nearing siren. Brule’s bright, searching gaze seemed to draw from her every smallest phrase Julie had uttered as if she, Rue, were mesmerized. She told of the girl’s wavering entrance; of what she had said; of how Julie had seemed confused, as if she’d been drinking; of how she confused names calling Rue, Julie; of her repeated warning that memory wasn’t to be trusted, of how she had said that she knew something of Crystal’s murder and that Rue knew it too.

“What did she know?”

“I don’t know. I can’t think — it’s all so horribly sudden. I don’t know what it is. She thought I knew, too, but there’s nothing.” Rue’s voice wavered upward; there was a bewildering crescendo of sound from below the house, and then all at once complete, shattering silence as someone turned off the siren. A silence which was in its way as threatening as the siren.

“All right. You’ll have to go down. Listen, Rue, and obey me. Don’t tell the police what Julie said. It would be advertising your own danger. I’m being blunt with you because you’ve got to know. Remember Julie was almost certainly murdered because she knew too much; she was the day nurse, you were the night nurse; and she was murdered on her way to you.”

“You speak as if you know it was murder,” cried Rue.

“There’s not much doubt of it,” said Brule tersely. “We’ll make the most of what loopholes we can find — but there may be none. It’s murder; I’m afraid there’s no reasonable doubt.”

He relinquished her shoulders, strode to the window, looked down through the gathering dusk of the dark day and abruptly turned toward her again.

“They’re coming in. All of them. God… Well, Rue. Remember not to tell exactly what Julie said; say she seemed confused and didn’t say anything that made sense; insist upon it. I can’t make it too strong a warning. Do you understand?”

“I — yes. I’m to tell them nothing that she said. I’m to tell them I know nothing of Crystal’s death that suggests murder.”

“That’s right. And listen, Rue —”

Feet were on the stairs. People and voices and movement had quite suddenly flooded the house. Brule took her hand.

“Listen! We’ve stood shoulder to shoulder before this. When life was the stake as it is now. We can do it again.”

“Yes, Brule.”

He looked at her for a second or two without speaking; then quite suddenly took her in his arms. She felt briefly the pressure of his shoulder and the hard warmth of his face against her own. Then he released her.

“All right. Rue. Go downstairs with the others. Follow Guy’s lead in everything and remember what I’ve told you… I’ll stay here and see the police.”

They were in the hall when she reached it. She shrank back into the shadow beyond the stairway and watched them flood its narrow width. Gross led them into the bedroom. Her own bedroom that had been Crystal’s. Where Julie lay now and the scent of roses drifted from the silken curtains. She heard Brule’s voice; she heard other voices. Men in ordinary, everyday business suits carried strange boxes and paraphernalia up the stairs. Here and there were policemen, looming huge and bulky in their blue winter uniforms with the stars and buttons on their chests winking and catching lights.

When they had flooded into the bedroom, she crept along the hall and down the stairs. There were policemen in the hall below, too, but they didn’t question her, just looked after her, their eyes all but boring into her back, as she went down the hall, past doors into the drawing rooms and reached the library.

They were all there. Alicia and Steven and Andy and Guy Cole. And Madge was there too; still in her coat and hat as if she had just arrived from school, sobbing hysterically in Alicia’s arms, while Crystal’s painted face, detached and beautiful in its own curious pallid beauty, stared down at them mockingly from above the mantel. And ten minutes later two policemen walked into the room and remained there, so they had to talk cautiously, aware of listening, official ears.

Madge lifted her head as Rue entered, she stared at Rue with implacable, hating eyes and wiped tears from her face with the back of her hand. Alicia had removed her coat and furs and sat erect and graceful in her suave black street gown with pearls — real pearls — at her throat. She had in that moment an odd affinity with the Crystal above the mantel in that she was, as ever, like a portrait of a lady.

Andy came at once to meet Rue.

“Sit here, Rue. I’ll get you a drink. Guy’s telling us what to do.”

The police inquiry, or at least her initial experience of it as it took place then and there, that night, was like nothing Rue had ever imagined. Mainly she would not have imagined that so many men took an active part in the inquiry. Previous to that she had thought, vaguely, that police inquiry concerning any one crime was in the hands of one police officer, designated so by whatever powers there were. Now she found that instead of one officer directing and sifting and taking entire responsibility for the inquiry, there were at least a dozen. That every department and every angle of invention was to have its own special direct contact with suspects; that there was no opportunity actually for brilliant individual action to be publicized, for instead the whole aim of every bureau and every department was to pool whatever knowledge they rooted out. That a man who kept knowledge he discovered to himself in the hope of a brilliant coup and personal triumph would have been booted out of the police department in a fortnight. There was only concerted knowledge, concerted and pooled action and conclusions; concerted inquiry and effort.

That night, however, the police, the detectives, the preliminary inquiry, the casual-seeming questions was, the whole of it, like a wave that had unexpectedly submerged them; it was exactly as if they were all battling to keep their heads above an unutterably confusing and engulfing flood.

Hours, it seemed to Rue, passed while the police and Brule remained for the most part in the second floor room where Julie had died. Andy and Guy Cole during the waiting made occasional scouting trips into the hall, Andy coming back with a grave face.

After a while they removed Julie’s body; Andy pulled the old-fashioned sliding doors of the library together, but it was so quiet in the room that they could hear the heavy tread of the men carrying the girl away. There is only one occasion in the world when the tread of men sounds just like that. Rue stifled a childish impulse to cover her ears. Alicia sat like a still, pale model of fashion; Madge put up her face and listened and gave Rue a long, unchildish look.

It must have been about then that the first reporters reached the house, for next morning there were pictures of the long police ambulance and a basketlike shape, dim in the flare of lights, being carried down the steps. Guy saw the reporters.

“Tell ’em we don’t know yet whether it was suicide or — or what,” said Andy. “Don’t say any more than you can help.”

Guy looked at him rather pityingly and went away. He came back with news.

“They’re going to have an autopsy done right away. Tonight. Meantime they’ll question you. They can’t make a definite murder charge yet. But they’ll proceed as if they knew it to be murder,” said Guy rather dryly. “Remember, when they question you, everything I’ve told you.”

He had warned them and he repeated it, undeterred by the stolidly listening ears of the two policemen.

“Chances are the girl simply took an overdose of some medicine. Nurses are always prescribing for themselves. But in view of this stink they tried to raise about Crystal, you’d better be prepared. Stay on the safe side. You never know what kind of admission, no matter how innocent it is, is going to be turned around by later evidence into something — incriminating,” said Guy, pausing and looking at them with large, humid blue eyes. He was a balloon of a man, short, glistening, round, with a fringe of fluffy light hair around an expanse of pink blandness and fat red cheeks. He had the round face of a baby, and the friendliest smile in his watery-looking blue eyes, and was one of the finest criminal lawyers in the country. So far as Rue knew he had no conscience in his professional life; his side won (frequently enough to be notable) be it guilty or innocent; yet in private life he was a good and loyal friend. So Brule had told her, and so she believed, for Brule had known Guy since they were boys in school, and they had been neighbors since Brule’s marriage to Crystal, sixteen years ago.

His matter-of-fact way was subtly sustaining. Guy knew about these things; they happened all the time; their own special nightmare was a labyrinth whose twisting paths Guy could follow.

“I’ll stay with you,” he said. “Anything they ask that I think might be damaging in the event they prove the girl was murdered, I’ll object to. They can’t force you to answer anything. Unless, of course, they get enough evidence to justify an arrest; if so they are likely to take anybody arrested off to jail in the County Court Building and — keep ’em there a few days while they question.”

His eyes remained blue, humid, wide open and ingenuous. The vista his words opened was inexpressibly chilling. Andy stirred restlessly, gave Rue an anxious look and said in a voice that failed to disguise that anxiety:

“You don’t think they’re likely to do that, do you? Right now? I mean — well, do you think there’s enough evidence against — against anybody to justify an arrest?”

He meant against Rue, of course; everyone knew it.

Guy lighted a cigarette and said he didn’t think so.

“Not unless you tell them something you haven’t told me. And I wouldn’t advise that, Rue.”

It was like Guy to address Rue nonchalantly and directly. But it made still clearer her position of prime suspect.

“See here,” said Andy, glancing at the policeman uneasily but continuing. “Does she have to tell them about — well, I mean, the tea…”

“Why not? Gross knows he brought up the tea tray; the kitchen girl knows it was ordered and prepared. Besides, the fingerprints will be on the cup, and there’s no other explanation for Rue’s fingerprints being there and not the girl’s. Julie’s. But if Julie was poisoned and the poison’s been in her stomach long enough to show it was given her before she arrived here, Rue will be in the clear.”

Madge, huddled at Alicia’s feet with her arm across Alicia’s knees, looked up quickly again, her small dark face with its strong jaw looking as yellow as a candle. She’d heard them talking of Crystal’s death; there was no way to keep the barely started investigation of the previous day from her ears, so Steven had told her of it; kindly and briefly in the ten minutes before the police came into the room. And to do the child justice, thought Rue, watching her, she’d taken it well. She’d turned very pale and stopped sobbing and had clung closer to Alicia. And Alicia had given Rue a queer, brief look above the child’s head which had in it a suggestion of complacence. You see, the look had said, how Madge turns to me — not to you, who stand legally in the place of her dead mother.

A small thought flashed across Rue’s mind; sometime she must discover why Alicia so hated her, how long she had hated her and yet veiled that hatred in a semblance of kindness and friendliness. And above all, why?

But not then.

And it was then that Brule came in, his face like a mask, and said there was nothing new and that the police wanted to question Rue and would she come into the dining room.

“And Guy,” said Brule.

Guy bounced up; he had the incredible elasticity of motion some fat men have and just then it gave an effect of cheerful alacrity which was almost inhuman. Andy rose, too, as if he wanted to accompany her, seemed to realize he could not and stood there watching as Rue rose and went to the door. Queer how much willpower that slight effort of muscles took.

“Don’t be afraid,” said Brule, and Andy gave her a look of almost anguished encouragement. Alicia watched and Madge, and only Steven remained sunk miserably in his chair, his head in his hands.

“Brace up, Rue,” said Guy cheerily. “This won’t be bad. They’ve not had time yet to get the autopsy report.”

Eight or ten men were in the dining room; they were talking, and one of them was writing on a report blank, and another held shorthand tablets in his hand. They paid no attention to Rue’s entrance although all of them saw her; she stood, waiting, and Guy beside her waited also, while a tall thin man with pale blue eyes as remote as ice and deep lines like scars in his cheeks (Lieutenant Angel, he proved to be) finished what he had to say to a brother detective. The face of Oliver Miller appeared in what was to Rue a blur of faces. Then Lieutenant Angel looked directly at her and said: “All right, Mrs Hatterick. Sit down. Where’s that statement, Murphy?”

The man with the shorthand tablet flipped back a few pages and began to read rapidly and in a singsong voice while Rue sat at her own table and listened — a table that was long and stately and polished so beautifully that it gave reflections of the light from the chandelier above and, more dimly, blotches that were faces. Light poured down upon Rue — a light they never used, for it was hard and bright, and Rue preferred candles in the great silver candelabra on the buffet opposite. Guy made himself extremely comfortable in a chair near her and nodded to Lieutenant Angel and spoke to him by name, and glanced recognizingly at one or two other men sitting and standing about them. Rue realized with a start that the man Murphy was reading a statement that Brule must have made. She listened.

“ ‘… and I was reached at the hospital by the message from Mrs Hatterick. I hurried home and met Doctor Crittenden at the doorstep; he had got the message too. But the girl was dead, and we could do nothing. I called the police because it was obviously a violent death. Question: You knew it was murder? Answer —’ ”

Lieutenant Angel stirred and murmured: “Just read the answers.”

“Yes sir. ‘Answer: I didn’t know. My wife said the girl came unexpectedly and asked for her and was shown up to her room. When Miss Garder entered she seemed confused and said she’d had a cocktail. Mrs Hatterick thought the cocktail had affected her and ordered tea and gave the girl a cup of tea. She was trying to make her swallow the tea when the girl became unconscious and died. She telephoned at once for me —’ ”