Ida had been poisoned on Monday, and Mrs. Fairbanks was buried on Tuesday. It was Wednesday morning when Hilda made her report, and it was the same night when Frank Garrison was arrested for murder.
Late on Wednesday afternoon Fuller went back to the Fairbanks house. He intended interviewing Marian, and he dreaded doing it. To believe that she had killed her mother and a servant and attacked her own child made her an inhuman monster. Unhappy and bitter as she was, he did not believe she was guilty. Nor, he thought, did Hilda.
He did not interview her, however. Marian was in bed, under the influence of a sedative, and he found Hilda back in uniform at her old post in the hall. An absorbed Hilda, who was not knitting or reading the Practice of Nursing, but instead had set up a card table and was patiently laying out a pack of cards.
“And people pay you money for this!” he said. “I wish my job was as easy.”
She nodded absently, and he watched her as she gathered up the cards, closely inspected the edges, and then began to lay them out again. He sat down and watched her.
“What is all this?”
“I’ll tell you in a minute.” She was intensely serious. “It’s the order,” she said. “Clubs first don’t do. Maybe it’s the other way. Spades.”
“Nothing has disturbed you, has it? You feel all right? No dizzy spells? Anything like that?”
She did not even hear him. She spread the cards again, gathered them up, looked at the edges, spread them slightly, and then handed him the pack.
There was something written on one side, and she looked rather smug.
“I think it’s the combination to the safe,” she said complacently.
Fuller examined the cards. Thus arranged they showed plainly written in ink a series of letters and numbers. Shuffled in the ordinary fashion they were not detectable, but in their present order they were perfectly clear. He gave her an odd look. Then he took out an old envelope and wrote them down.
“So that’s the solitaire she played,” he said thoughtfully. “Good girl, Hilda. How did you think of it?”
“Courtney Brooke thought of it first,” she told him.
He eyed her sharply, but her face told him nothing.
He sent for Carlton before they opened the safe. He had little or nothing to say. He did not even ask how they had found the combination. Hilda unlocked the door, and he followed them in. The room was as it had been left after the search, and he carefully avoided looking at it. There was still daylight, but the closet was dark and Hilda brought a flashlight. Using it the inspector turned the dial, but he did not open the door.
“I’d rather you did this, Fairbanks,” he said.
He stepped out of the closet, and Carlton stepped in. He pulled open the door and looked speechlessly inside. The safe was packed to the top with bundles of currency.
He made a little gesture and backed out of the closet. He looked small and singularly defenseless.
“All right. It’s there,” he said dully. “Do what you like with it. I don’t want to look at it. It makes me sick.”
It required some urging to send him back again.
“Look for your mother’s will,” Fuller said. “Bring out any papers you find. We may learn something.”
The will was there, in a compartment of its own. It was in a brown envelope sealed with red wax, and it was marked Last Will and Testament in the old lady’s thin hand. Carlton almost broke down when he read it. But there was another paper in the envelope, and he opened and read it, too. He stood, against the absurd background of hanging fussy dresses and shoes in the bag on the door, holding the paper and staring at it. But neither Hilda nor the inspector was prepared for his reaction to it.
“So that’s why she was killed,” he said thickly, and collapsed on the floor before they could reach him.
Frank Garrison was arrested late that night at his club. He was evidently living there. His clothes were in the closet, his brushes on the dresser, and he was in pajamas when they found him.
He said little or nothing. The inspector had sent the detectives out, and remained himself in the room while he dressed. Once he said he better take his bag “as he might not be coming back soon.” And again he spoke of Jan.
“Tell the poor kid to take it easy, will you?” he said. “She’s had enough trouble, and she’s—fond of me.”
He puzzled the inspector. He offered no explanation of his being at the club. He offered nothing, in fact. He sat in the car, his fine profile etched against the street lights, and except once when he lit a cigarette he did not move. He seemed to be thinking profoundly. Nor was he more co-operative when they reached the inspector’s office, with two or three detectives around, and a stenographer taking down questions and answers.
He was perfectly polite. He denied absolutely having been in the Fairbanks house the night Mrs. Fairbanks was killed, although he admitted having been in the grounds.
“I came home late from Washington. The apartment was empty—we had not had a maid for some time—and my wife was not there. I knew Jan was friendly with Eileen, so I went there to ask if she knew what had happened. We had quarreled, and I was afraid she—well, she’s been pretty nervous lately. But Jan—my daughter—said she was there. I talked to Jan at her window. I did not enter the house.”
“What did you do after that?”
“I walked around for a while. Then I went home.”
“What time did you talk to your daughter?”
“After one. Perhaps half past. I didn’t get back from Washington until twelve o’clock.”
“Did your daughter tell you where your wife was? In what room?”
He colored.
“Yes. In my former wife’s bedroom. I didn’t like it, but what could I do?”
“She told you your wife was sick?”
“Yes.”
“You didn’t come in, to see how she was?”
“We had quarreled before I left. I didn’t think she cared to see me. Anyhow, her light was out. I thought she was asleep.”
“You have since separated?”
“Not exactly. Call it a difference.”
“She is going to have a child.”
He showed temper for the first time.
“What the hell has that got to do with this?”
But although he was guardedly frank about his movements the night of Mrs. Fairbanks’s murder, he continued to deny having entered the house, through Eileen’s window or in any other way. He had not climbed to the roof of the porte-cochere. He doubted if it was possible. And when he was shown the knife he stated flatly that he had never to his knowledge seen it before. He admitted, however, knowing that the safe was in Mrs. Fairbanks’s room. “Jan told me about it.” But he denied any knowledge whatever of its contents.
The mention of the safe, however, obviously disturbed him. He seemed relieved when the subject was changed to the attack on Jan in the loft of the stable; but he was clearly indignant about it, as well as puzzled.
“If I could lay my hands on whoever did it I—well, I might commit a murder of my own.”
“You have no explanation of it?”
They thought he hesitated.
“None whatever. Unless she was mistaken for someone else. Or—” he added slowly—“unless someone was there who didn’t want to be seen.”
They shifted to Ida’s death. He seemed puzzled.
“You knew her?”
“Of course. She had been in the Fairbanks house for years.”
“She was attached to your first wife?”
“I don’t know. I don’t care to discuss my first wife.”
“You are on good terms?”
“Good God, leave her out of this, can’t you? I won’t have her dragged in. What has she got to do with it, or my—feeling for her?”
He was excited, indignant. The inspector broke the tension.
“Mr. Garrison, did you at any time in the last few weeks supply this woman, Ida Miller, with certain creatures to introduce into Mrs. Fairbanks’s room?” He picked up a memorandum and read from it. “‘Five bats, two sparrows, one or more rats, and a small garden snake.’”
The detective grinned. The stenographer dropped his pen. And Frank Garrison unexpectedly laughed. Only the inspector remained sober.
“Is that a serious question?”
“It is.”
“The answer is no. I thought the old lady imagined all that.”
“Have you at any time had in your possession a poison called arsenious acid? White arsenic?”
“Never.”
“Can you account for your movements Monday afternoon? Say, from one o’clock on.”
The quick shifts seemed to bother him, but he managed to make a fair statement. He had lunched at the club. After that he went to see a man who was taking over some housing work in Washington. When he went home his wife was still in bed. She had been “difficult.” He had told her he would send her a maid. After that he had packed a bag and left. They had not been getting on for some time. Perhaps it was his fault. He wasn’t accustomed to being idle.
“Did you at any time Monday go to Stern and Jones? The department store?”
“I stopped in and bought a black tie. I was going to Mrs. Fairbanks’s funeral the next day.”
“At what time?”
“After I saw the man I referred to. Maybe two-thirty or three o’clock.”
“Did you see the girl, Ida, at that time?”
He looked puzzled.
“Where? Where would I see her?”
“In the store.”
“No. Certainly not.”
“Have you a key to the Fairbanks house?”
“I may have, somewhere. I lived there for a good many years. I don’t carry it.”
It lasted until half past one. The questions were designed to confuse him, but on the whole he kept his head. It was not until the inspector lifted a paper from the desk and handed it to him that he apparently gave up the fight. He glanced at it and handed it back, his face set.
“I see,” he said quietly. “I was there that night. I could have got into the house, by key or through my wife’s window, and I had a motive. I suppose that’s enough.”
“You knew about this agreement?”
“Mrs. Fairbanks told me about it at the time.”
“Who else knew about it?”
“My first wife. She signed it, as you see. Mrs. Fairbanks and myself.”
“No one else knew about it?”
“Not unless Mrs. Fairbanks told about it. I don’t think she did.”
The inspector got up. He looked tired, and for once uncertain.
“I’m sorry about this, Garrison,” he said. “We’re not through, but I’ll have to hold you. We’ll see that you’re not too uncomfortable.”
Garrison forced a smile and stood.
“No rubber hose?” he said.
“No rubber hose,” said the inspector.
There was a momentary silence. Garrison glanced around the room. He seemed on the point of saying something, something important. The hush was breathless, as if all the men were waiting and watching. But he decided against it, whatever it was.
“I suppose it’s no use saying I didn’t do it?”
“No man is guilty until he has been found guilty,” said the inspector sententiously, and watched the prisoner out of the room.
Carlton broke the news to the family the next morning, a worried little man, telling Susie first, staying with Jan until she had stopped crying, and then going to Marian. He was there a long time. Hilda, shut out, could hear his voice and Marian’s loud hysterical protests.
“He never did it. Never. Never.”
When the inspector came she refused at first to see him, and he went in to find her sitting frozen in a chair and gazing ahead of her as though she was seeing something she did not want to face. She turned her head, however, at his crisp greeting.
“Good morning,” he said. “Do you mind if we have a little talk?”
“I have no option, have I?”
“I can’t force you, you know,” he said matter-of-factly. “All I would like is a little co-operation.”
“Co-operation!” she said, her face set and cold. “Why should I cooperate? You are holding Frank Garrison, aren’t you? Of all the cruel absurd things! A man who loved my mother! The kindest man on earth! What possible reason could he have had to kill my mother?”
“There was a possible reason, and you know it, Mrs. Garrison,” he said unsmilingly.
He drew up a chair and sat down, confronting her squarely.
“At what time did you reach here, the night your mother was killed?” he asked.
It was apparently the one question she had not expected. She opened her mouth to speak, but she could not. She tried to get out of her chair, and the inspector put his hand on her knee.
“Better sit still,” he said quietly. “You had every right to be here. I am not accusing you of anything. Suppose I help you a little. You came home during or after the time your husband’s present wife had arrived. Either you saw her, in the hall downstairs, or one of the servants told you she was here. However that was, you decided to stay. It was your house. Why let her drive you out? Is that right?”
“Yes,” she said, with tight lips. “It was Ida. I opened the side door with my latchkey. There was no one around, so I went back to get William to carry up my bags. I met Ida in the back hall. She told me.”
She went on. She seemed glad to talk. She had been angry and indignant. She didn’t even want to see Jan. It was Jan who had brought it about. Jan had said that Eileen was going to have a baby, and had even brought her to the house. That was why she had gone away. To have her own mother and her own child against her! And now Eileen had invented some silly story and sought sanctuary here.
“I wasn’t going to let her drive me away a second time,” she said. “She had ruined my life, and now at my mother’s orders they had put her in my room. I couldn’t believe it at first, when Ida told me.”
Ida, it appeared, had got her to the third floor by the back staircase, and made up the bed. They had to walk carefully, for fear Carlton would hear them in his room below. But she did not go to bed. How could she, with that woman below? She did manage to smoke, sitting by the open window. She was still sitting there when Susie began to scream.
“That was when Ida came to warn you?”
“She knew something was terribly wrong. Neither of us knew what. I thought at first the house was on fire. I sent her down, and listened over the stair rail. That’s how I knew what had happened.”
She sat back. Her color was better now, and the inspector, watching her, thought she looked like a woman who had passed a danger point safely.
“No one but Ida knew you were in the house?” he persisted.
“No one. Not even Jan.”
“Are you sure of that? Didn’t you come down the stairs while Doctor Brooke was in the hall?”
“Never.”
But she looked shaken. Her thin hands were trembling.
“I think you did, Mrs. Garrison,” he told her. “He was standing outside your mother’s door. You spoke to him from the stairs. You told him to get Eileen out of the house in the morning, didn’t you?”
“No! I did nothing of the sort,” said Marian frantically. There was complete despair in her face. She looked beaten. “I never spoke to him at all,” she said in a dead voice. “When I saw him he was coming out of Mother’s room.”
The rest of her story was not important. She told it with dead eyes and in a flat hopeless voice. Brooke had not seen her, she thought, and Ida had helped her to get out of the house before the police had taken charge. She had used the back stairs and had gone out through the break in the fence. She had taken only the one bag which she could carry, Ida hiding the other, and she had spent what was left of the night at a hotel.
“I was afraid to stay,” she told them. “After what I’d seen I didn’t want to be questioned. I had Jan to think of. I still have Jan to think of,” she added drearily. “Courtney Brooke killed my mother, and I’ve ruined Jan’s life forever and ever.”