She was very tired. When she looked into Eileen’s room Ida was running a carpet sweeper over the floor. Eileen’s hair had been combed and fresh linen put on her bed. She looked better, although she was still pale.
“If you’re all right I’ll go to bed for an hour or two, Mrs. Garrison,” Hilda said. “I haven’t had much sleep lately.”
“I’m perfectly all right. I told that fool of a policeman, but he wouldn’t listen.”
Hilda went back toward her room. But she did not go to bed. Maggie was carrying a tray into Jan’s room, and she followed her. Jan was standing by a window, fully dressed. She looked at the tray and shook her head.
“I’m afraid I can’t eat,” she said. “Thanks, anyhow. I’ll have the coffee.”
Maggie put down the tray firmly.
“You’ll eat,” she said. “Somebody’s got to keep going around here.” Her voice softened. “Try it anyhow, dearie,” she said. “Just remember she was old. She hadn’t long anyhow.”
Jan’s chin quivered.
“She liked living.”
“Well, so do we all,” said Maggie, philosophically. “That don’t mean we can go on forever.”
She went out. Jan looked at Hilda.
“I’ve been trying to think. How are we to get word to Mother? I don’t suppose it is in the papers, is it?”
“I hardly think so. There wasn’t time.”
“And there are no evening papers today,” Jan said desperately. “She may not hear it until tomorrow. And she ought to be here. Uncle Carl’s no good at that sort of thing, and Susie’s asleep. I went in and she was dead to the world. I wanted to talk to her. I—”
Her voice trailed off. Her hands shook as she tried to pour the coffee. Hilda took the miniature pot from her and poured it for her.
“Why not waken her?” she said quietly. “After all, if it’s important—”
“Important!” Jan’s voice was bitter. “You’ve seen her. You’ve heard her. You know she hated Granny. She hated living in the house with her. Uncle Carl wanted a farm, and she adores him. They can have it now,” she added hopelessly. “They’ll have her money. First she tried to scare Granny to death, and when that wasn’t any good—”
“What do you mean by that?” Hilda demanded sharply. “Scaring her to death.”
“Those bats and things. You don’t think they got in by themselves!” Jan was scornful. “It was just the sort of thing she would think of. Scare Granny out of the house, or into a heart attack. What did she care?”
Hilda was thoughtful. In a way Jan was right. Susie was quite capable of it. It might even appeal to her macabre sense of humor. The murder, however, was different. She could not see Susie putting arsenic in the old lady’s sugar or driving a knife into her heart.
“She had the chance last night, too,” Jan went on. “She could have heard Courtney come back to talk to me while you were downstairs. She could have slipped through Uncle Carl’s room and around the screen. Nobody would have seen her.”
She stopped, looking startled. Susie was in the doorway, cigarette in hand and her sharp blue eyes blazing.
“So I did it!” she said. “You little idiot, didn’t I lie my head off last night for you?” She threw back the sleeve of her dressing-gown and showed her arm. “You know who did that, don’t you? Suppose I’d told the police your precious father was here in the grounds last night? And his wife inside the house with the screen over the porte-cochere open? Suppose I’d said that the whole thing was a plant to get Eileen into this house, so Frank Garrison could get in, too?”
Hilda watched them, her blue eyes shrewd. Neither of them seemed aware of her presence. She saw that Jan was on the verge of collapse.
“He wouldn’t kill Granny. Never. You know it. Deep down in your heart you know it.”
Susie eyed her. Then she shrugged.
“All right, kid,” she said. “I didn’t tell the police. I won’t, either, unless you go around yelling that I did it. Or Carlton.” Suddenly she sent a shocked look at Hilda. “Good, God, I forgot. You’re police yourself, aren’t you?”
“Not all the time. I’m a human being, too.” Hilda smiled faintly.
“Well, forget it,” said Susie. “I was just talking. The kid here made me mad. Maybe he thought Eileen was here. He might have come to find out.”
She went back to her room, and Jan caught Hilda by the arm.
“That’s why he came,” she said desperately. “I swear it is. I’ll swear it by anything holy. My window was up, and he called to me. He said, ‘Jan, do you know where Eileen has gone? She’s not in the apartment.’ When I told him she was here and—and sick, he seemed worried. But he wouldn’t come in. He went away again, in the rain. In the rain,” she repeated, as though the fact hurt her. “I can’t even telephone him,” she went on. “Uncle Carl’s still using it. And if the police find it out—”
“Why worry about that? He had no reason for wishing your grandmother—out of the way, had he?”
“Of course not.” She lit a cigarette and smoked it feverishly. “He was devoted to her. But he doesn’t know what’s happened. He ought to know. He ought to be able to protect himself. Look,” she said, putting down the cigarette, “would you be willing to tell him? To go there and tell him? It wouldn’t do any harm. He can’t run away. That’s all I want, for him to know.”
It was a long time before Hilda agreed, but the girl’s sick face and passionate anxiety finally decided her. Also she was curious. There was something behind all this, something more than a distracted husband trying in the middle of the night to locate a missing wife. Why had he not come in when he learned that Eileen was sick? Surely that would have been the normal thing to do.
She knew she had very little time. The police had the cast of the footprint under the oak. They would be working on it now. They would have examined the shoes of the men in the house, measured them, perhaps photographed them. And if Amos knew more than he had told—
She hurried to her room to dress. As she opened the door she had the feeling that something had moved rapidly across the floor. Whatever it was she could not find it, and she dressed rapidly and went down the stairs. Evidently the officer there had no orders to hold her, for he smiled and opened the door.
“Out for a walk?”
“I need some air,” she said blandly.
Under the porte-cochere, however, she stopped. The crowd was still on the pavement, held back by the guard, and a photographer was holding up his camera. She turned quickly toward the stable and the broken fence. Amos was not in sight, but the soapbox lay on its side under the oak tree, some fifty feet away. She hurried to the break in the fence, and straightened, to look into the lens of a camera. A grinning young man thanked her. She made a wild snatch at the camera, but he evaded it.
“Naughty, naughty,” he said. “Papa slap. Now, what’s your name, please?”
“I have no name,” she told him furiously.
“Must be a disadvantage at times. How do they get you? Say, ‘Here, you’?”
He took another flash of her indignant face before she could stop him, and she was moving rapidly toward the corner when she became aware that the crowd was coming toward her. It moved slowly but irresistibly, as though propelled by some unseen power from behind. A half-dozen small boys ran ahead of it.
“That’s the nurse!” one of them yelled. “She’s got her cap off, but I know her.”
“Hey, nurse! What’s happened in there?”
The reporters were in the lead now. In an instant she was surrounded by eager young faces. She could see her bus a block away, and she stood haughtily silent, like a small neat Pekinese among a throng of disorderly street dogs. “Have a heart, sister.” “Come on, how was the old lady killed?” “Has anyone been arrested?”
She was driven to speech, in sheer desperation.
“I have nothing to say,” she told them. “If you care to follow me while I get some fresh uniforms and look after my canary, that’s all the good it will do you.”
They laughed but persisted until the bus came and she got on. Looking back she could see them, returning discouraged to take up their stations again, to wait and hope for a break, to be able perhaps to get a new angle on the story and maybe a raise in salary. She felt unhappy and guilty, as though she had failed them. As, of course, she had.
She reached the Garrison apartment at ten o’clock. No one answered the bell, and at last she tried the door. It was unlocked, and she stepped inside, to find herself in a long gallery, paved with black-and-white marble, and with a fine old tapestry hung at the end. It surprised her, as did the drawing-room when she saw it; a handsome room carefully furnished, but with every sign of extreme neglect. The grand piano showed dust in the morning sun, the brocaded curtains were awry, the windows filthy, the rugs askew on the floor. Old magazines and papers lay about, and a vase of flowers on a table had been dead and dried for days.
Her tidy soul revolted. No wonder men left women who surrounded themselves with dirt and disorder. But there was no sign of Frank Garrison. The place was quiet and apparently empty. Not until she had investigated most of the apartment did she locate him, in a small room at the far end of the gallery. He was in a deep chair, and he was sound asleep.
Whatever she had expected it was not this. She inspected him carefully. He was in pajamas and bathrobe, and the Sunday papers were scattered around him. A cluttered ash tray and an empty coffee cup were beside him, and he had the exhausted, unshaven look of a man who had slept little or not at all the night before.
When she touched him on the shoulder he jerked awake. Not fully, however.
“Sorry,” he mumbled. “Guess I dozed off.” He looked up at her and blinked.
“Thought you were my wife,” he said. “My apologies.” He got up slowly, his big body still clumsy with sleep. Then he recognized her. He looked alarmed.
“Miss Adams! Has anything happened? Is Jan—”
“Jan’s all right.” She sat down. “I have other news for you, Mr. Garrison, unless you already know it. Jan wanted me to tell you. Mrs. Fairbanks is dead.”
He looked surprised.
“Dead!” he said. “Just like that! Jan will take it hard. Still, I suppose it was to be expected.” He looked down at his pajamas. “I’d better dress and go over. I didn’t expect a visitor. What was it? Heart, I suppose.”
“No,” said Hilda.
“No? Then what—”
“She was murdered, Mr. Garrison.”
He stared at her. He had been in the act of picking up a cigarette. Now his hand hung frozen over the box. The incredulity in his face gave way to sick horror.
“Murdered!” he said hoarsely. “I don’t understand. Not poison again?”
“She was stabbed. With a knife.”
He seemed still unable to take it in.
“I don’t understand,” he repeated. “Who would kill her? She hadn’t very long to live. And nobody hated her. Even the servants—”
He did not finish. He got up and went to the window.
“Is Jan all right?” he asked without turning.
“She’s worried, Mr. Garrison.”
He swung around.
“Worried! What do you mean, worried?”
“You were outside the house last night, and Mrs. Carlton Fairbanks knows it.”
“Susie! So it was Susie!” he said, and gave a short laugh. “She scared the insides out of me.”
“Jan thought you ought to know,” Hilda said patiently. “There may be trouble. The police have found a footprint. I imagine it’s yours. I promised to tell you before they got here—if they come at all. Susie won’t talk, but Amos might. He looked out the window. He may have recognized you.”
He began to see the seriousness of his situation. Yet his story was coherent and straightforward. He had had what he called a difference with Eileen, on Wednesday night. He had packed a bag and gone to his club, and on Saturday morning he had taken a plane to Washington.
“Things haven’t been very good,” he said. “I needed a job, and I thought with all this government housing I might get something. I happen to be an architect. But it was a Saturday, and summer”—he smiled—“the government doesn’t work on June week-ends.”
He had got back to the apartment late the night before to find Eileen gone and her suitcase missing. They had had to let the maid go, and he didn’t know what had happened to Eileen.
“I thought Jan might know,” he said. “But I didn’t want to telephone her and rouse the house. So I went over. It was one o’clock when I left there. I’ve done that before, talked to Jan at night, I mean. Her window was up, although it was raining cats and dogs, and I called to her. She said my wife was there, so I came back here.”
“Meeting Susie on the way?”
“Meeting Susie on the way,” he said, and smiled again. “She yelled like an Indian.”
She considered that. It might be true. She had an idea, however, that it was not all the truth.
“You didn’t go back again? To the house?” He looked at her oddly.
“See here,” he said. “What’s all this about? They don’t think I killed the old lady, do they?”
“Somebody killed her,” Hilda said dryly, and got up.
He saw her out, apologizing for the dust, the evident disorder. He owned the place. He couldn’t sell it, worse luck. Nobody could sell anything nowadays, even a tapestry. But she felt that behind all this, his confident manner, the composure on his good-looking face, his mind was far away, working hard and fast.
She was on a corner waiting for a bus when she saw the inspector’s car drive up to the door of the apartment building and two or three men get out. So Amos had talked, after all.
She was not surprised, on her return to the Fairbanks house, to learn from William that the police had taken away the window screen from Eileen’s room. But she was rather astonished to find Carlton, in a morning coat and striped trousers, and wearing a black tie, wandering around upstairs and carrying a hammer and an old cigar box filled with nails.
“Thought I’d nail up the other screens,” he said vaguely. “Can’t have people getting in and out of the house. Not safe.”
He went into Eileen’s room, a dapper, incongruous figure, and Hilda followed him. Eileen was sitting up in bed. She looked better, although she was still pale; and she managed an ironical smile when Carlton told her what he was doing.
“You’re a little late with that, aren’t you?” she said.
“Some of us still want to live, Eileen.”
“You can do that now, can’t you?” she said maliciously. “Live the way you like, get your Susie safe on a farm away from other men, raise pigs, do anything you damn well please.”
He stiffened.
“That was entirely uncalled for. If you were not a sick woman—”
“If I were not a sick woman I wouldn’t be here.”
He finished his hammering, and later Hilda, remembering that day, was to hear the noise as he moved from room to room, and even to smell the putty and white paint with which he neatly covered the signs of his labors.
He finished at eleven-thirty, which was almost exactly the time Fuller and his henchmen were leaving Frank Garrison. He had told a straight story, but the inspector was not satisfied. He stood in the long marble-floored gallery and put his hat on with a jerk.
“I’ll ask you not to leave town,” he said. “Outside of that, of course, you’re free. I suppose you have no idea where your first wife is? We’d like to locate her.”
“I am not in her confidence,” he said stiffly. “I would be the last person to know.”