IX

We knew nothing of all this that afternoon. Mother was shut in her room, waiting helplessly to be arrested, at the very least. But if the police had the knife they were not telling, and if the plumber still had it he had apparently not done anything about it.

Alma had gone back to the Lelands’. She said flowers were pouring in, and that Emily was completely helpless, poor creature. She borrowed my car again. She made plenty to keep one of her own, but as I may have said she never spent money if she could help it.

I had a bright idea after lunch, and called the plumbers who usually did our work. But of course it was Saturday afternoon. Nobody answered the telephone. Nobody rang us, either. It was a bright October day, and I knew the golf course at the country club would be crowded—at least by the people who had gas enough to get there. I wondered if Don Scott was there. After all he couldn’t be really grieving for Isabel after all this time. Or could he? Wasn’t there something about men never forgetting the women they had loved and couldn’t get?

The hours sagged along, like slow motion. Alma came back from the Lelands at four o’clock with a headache and went to bed. There was no word from Larry, or from Tony King, and I didn’t return Mother’s handkerchief. It would have involved telling her all the King man knew, and she was scared enough already.

Isabel’s funeral was to be the next morning at ten o’clock. We would have to go, of course. I looked up some black clothes and had Sarah take some flowers off a black hat. But by four I was having an acute attack of jitters. I went down to the library and tried to read. All I could think of was Larry’s knife, wandering around somewhere, and Tony King’s having the picture of me trying to bury it. He was holding out on it for a while, but when or if the knife was produced …

It was five o’clock when the totally unexpected thing happened. I was at a window when a taxi drove up and a woman got out. She was a small neat creature in a brown coat and a rather dreadful purple hat. There was something familiar about her, but I couldn’t decide what. She had a small white parcel in her hand. She kept the taxi, and I heard her ask either for Mother or me. We were not receiving casual callers, of course, and anyhow she was the sort Patrick would definitely regard as a person and turn away.

He did just that. Perhaps she had not expected anything else. When she went down the steps, I had again the feeling that I had seen her somewhere. I went into the hall. Patrick was holding the parcel and inspecting it with interest.

“A person just called, Miss Judy,” he said. “She said to give this to you or your mother.”

I don’t know why I didn’t open it there, in front of him. I usually do. He loves parcels. I grinned at him and put it to my ear.

“No bomb, Patrick,” I said. “It doesn’t tick.”

He looked abashed and turned away.

And that, if you can believe it, is the way the knife came back. I had let the woman go, I hadn’t even noticed the taxi, and when in my room upstairs I opened the box and saw it, I simply couldn’t believe it. To make things worse there was no writing on the paper and nothing whatever to indicate where the box had come from.

I stood there looking at it. Either it was incredibly good luck, or it was definitely sinister. I hadn’t an idea which. All I knew was that we had the damned thing again. It was lying in a nest of cotton, and if anything it looked more disreputable than ever. The hide on the handle was none the better for its long soaking in the tank, and some more of the hair had come off. Then I remembered that it had killed Isabel, and I went into the bathroom and lost the lunch I hadn’t eaten.

I didn’t take it back to Mother. I locked it in my jewel case and then went across the hall. Mother was sitting up in bed with a tea tray beside her. For the first time in her life she looked like a wizened old woman. She could hardly hold the teacup, and when she looked at me all the life had gone out of her eyes.

“Any word from Larry?” she asked.

“Nothing. He’s probably busy,” I said, as cheerfully as I could. But she was not to be comforted.

“He’s probably in a cell, Judy.”

“Nonsense, Mother. They have nothing on him.”

“What do you mean, nothing? They have the knife, haven’t they?”

I took the teacup from her before she could spill it. Then I sat down on the edge of the bed.

“As a matter of fact, Mother, they haven’t got the knife. They never have had it.”

“What do you mean by that?” she said thickly.

“It’s come back. It’s in my room.”

I told her the story. She isn’t a particularly religious woman, although we have a pew at St. Mark’s and she goes now and then. But when after she heard it she lay back without speaking and closed her eyes I knew she was saying a prayer. When she opened her eyes again, however, she was her old shrewd self.

“It’s just what I thought,” she said. “That plumber took it and his wife or somebody else brought it back. Probably they never read the papers. Where have you got it?”

“In my jewel case. But it’s going to the police, Mother. There are to be no more tanks. We’re just making things worse for Larry.”

I think she would have agreed. After all she is nobody’s fool, and as she said when Barnes was found he could validate Larry’s alibi that he had not gone to his house. But just then the telephone rang, and I answered it from beside her bed.

It was Tony King, speaking from a pay telephone, and his voice was grave.

“Listen, sister,” he said. “There’s a spot of trouble. Barnes has been found, out the Sunnyside Road. He’s been shot.”

“Oh, no!” I said beginning to shake. “I can’t bear it. Do you mean he’s dead?”

“Yes. Don’t take it too hard. These things happen. It hasn’t necessarily anything to do with the other affair.”

“But the police think it has, don’t they?”

He hesitated.

“Well, there’s a chance. They may hold your brother for a bit. Only as a material witness, or something of the sort. Don’t worry.”

“Listen,” I said. “Stop treating me like a child. Why are they holding Larry? They can’t think he killed Barnes.”

I heard Mother give a thin wail from the bed, but it was too late. She knew the worst by that time. And Tony King went on. It was possible that Barnes had known something about Isabel’s death and had to be put out of the way. As for details, if I wanted them, the State Police had found the body some ten miles outside the city limits. There had been a brushfire, and one of the troopers had gone along a wood road to put it out. Barnes was lying there, among the leaves. He was dressed as he had been when we all saw him last. He had been shot through the head, and he had been dead over twenty-four hours. There was no sign of the gun which killed him.

And Tony added something else which practically sent me in to a tailspin.

“You might take a look at the cars in your garage,” he said guardedly. “You may have some visitors before long. Somebody in a car took him to where he was found. I want a little time, if I can get it.”

Mother was up and trying to get her nightgown over her head before I hung up. It stuck hopelessly, of course, and I jerked it back and shoved her toward her bed.

“What on earth do you think you can do?” I demanded. “Get back there and stay there.”

“I’m going to my son,” she said defiantly. “He needs me. He hasn’t even a razor, or anything to sleep in. And bread and water to eat! As though he would kill a policeman he didn’t even know. Or his own wife.”

Which was Mother, of course, but which didn’t help any. It took some time to get her into bed again. She was threatening to go to Washington and see the President and the British Ambassador when I finally got out of the room. And of course, I was too late. When I got downstairs there were three men at the garage talking to Jim, our head chauffeur, and I didn’t need to be told that they were detectives. I watched them go inside, and the lights go on—it was getting dark by that time—and after a few minutes one of them drove Larry’s car out, another got into the car they had brought, and the third one started for the house.

That was when I panicked.

Panic is a queer thing. Either you think like blazes, or you don’t think at all. I don’t remember thinking. All I knew was that he would probably search the house, and that the knife was in my room. The rest was pure instinct, and pretty rotten instinct at that. I ran upstairs, put on a loose coat, dropped the knife in my pocket and started down again.

I was just too late. The doorbell was ringing, and one of the men was at the door opening it.

 

X

I did the only thing I could think of. I sat down on the edge of the fountain and slid the knife into the pool. I must have looked like an idiot, sitting there dabbling my hand among the water lilies, but perhaps that was the police idea of how people like us amused ourselves. Anyhow this one took it in his stride.

He came in and took off his hat.

“My name’s Anderson,” he said. “I would like to see Mrs. Shepard, or Miss Shepard.”

“I’m Judy Shepard,” I said, getting up. My voice sounded thin, but at least I could speak. “I’m sorry about Mother. She’s in bed.”

“Then I’d like to talk to you,” he said, looking around him. “Is there any place …”

I didn’t blame him. It was like trying to talk in Madison Square Garden. I took him into the library and closed the door. Then I sat down, because my knees were shaking. He produced a card and handed it to me, but I didn’t even try to read it. He was polite enough, however.

“Miss Shepard,” he said, sitting down rather close to me. “I wonder if by any chance you heard a car leaving your garage, the morning after your sister-in-law was killed. Early in the morning.”

“No, I didn’t. But the men sleep over the garage. They would know.”

“You’re sure of that? Your room faces toward the garage, doesn’t it?”

They knew a lot about us, evidently. I began to feel indignant, which was at least better than wobbling.

“If you mean did my brother take a car out at that time you’re crazy,” I said hotly. “He was in bed, in a state of collapse. It took two men to get him up the stairs.”

“I haven’t said anything about your brother,” he told me, and eyed me with sharp gray eyes. “I’m merely asking about your cars.”

“Anyhow, who could get a car out that morning?” I said. “You had men all over the place. You even had a guard at the gate.”

“There are two other gates.”

“They were padlocked. The gardeners had orders to lock them that night. The Mayor—”

“I know all about that. Are there no other keys to them?”

Well, it was no use lying to him, with extra keys hanging inside the service door at the rear and tags on them in Alma’s neat writing. I had to admit it, and he began to look quite amiable. He got up and took his hat.

“I’ll take a look at them,” he said, and went out.

I had a bad moment when he passed the fountain, but he merely gave it a glance and went on, with Patrick, who had appeared by that time, trailing behind him. He was not gone long, and when he came back he did not sit down again. He told me about Barnes, watching me like a cat as he did so: the car that had picked him up at his house, the finding of his body, the bullet wound in his head. If he wanted to break me up he certainly did so. And when he said they had taken Larry’s car for examination, and that one of Larry’s revolvers was missing from his house, I simply went berserk. I remember shouting that there was a plot to involve us all, that Larry had never killed anyone, and that the whole damned police force ought to be put away as lunatics. He waited stoically through it. Then he opened the door, and Patrick was just outside.

“Get her some ammonia or something,” he said. “And perhaps she’d better go to bed.” He looked at me. “I’m sorry, Miss Shepard. Just remember this: It’s pretty hard to send even a guilty man to the chair. If a man isn’t guilty …”

He didn’t finish. He put on his hat and went away, and I laid my head on Patrick’s shoulder and cried. He put his old arm around me.

“Never mind, Miss Judy,” he said. “Never mind. It will be all right.”

I quieted after a while, but of course it was no use trying to get the knife, with the hall brightly lighted and somebody on duty there all the time. Neither murder nor sudden death could upset that routine. I went upstairs and washed my face in cold water. Also I put away my jewel case. It was six o’clock then, and it is odd to remember that it must have been about the same time when Andrew Leland walked into Inspector Welles’s office at Headquarters. The finding of Barnes’s body had been announced over the local radio, and he had evidently heard about it. I can picture him sitting there in his big ugly house, red brick outside and red carpets and brocade hangings within. All the proper Lelandish arrangements made for Isabel’s funeral the next day, the street to be blocked off from the curious crowd, the cards to be presented at the door and then because of the silence over everything, turning on the radio.

Anyhow he walked in, still neat, still stiff, and yet somehow pathetic. He walked over to the desk and stood there.

“I have come to demand my son-in-law’s arrest for double murder,” he said.

“I see,” said the Inspector. “Won’t you sit down?”

But he did not sit. He stood there, straight and terrible.

“He killed my daughter,” he said. “And he killed your man so he couldn’t tell that he had seen him on his way to do it.”

“Have you any idea,” said the Inspector quietly, “why he would have killed your daughter?”

He must have hesitated. He knew too much, and surmised so much more. There must have been a terrific struggle going on between his pride and his certainty that Larry had murdered Isabel. In the end his pride won.

“I do not pretend to know what goes on between husband and wife,” he said. “He killed her. I know that. And if you let him escape the chair I will never believe in human justice again, or a god.”

He went out after that, as stiffly as he had gone in.

Even Alma did not know of that visit. She came downstairs to dinner, although she said her headache still bothered her.

Neither of us had changed, and she was still in the heavy black she had worn to the Leland house.

But her rooms were in the same wing as mine, and she had seen the detectives.

“What did they want?” she asked. “One of them took a car away, didn’t he?”

“Larry’s car. Yes.”

“But why?”

“Don’t ask me,” I said shortly. “They’ve found the policeman, Barnes. Somebody shot him.”

She looked shocked.

“Shot him!” she said. “Why on earth would anybody do that?”

“It’s perfectly simple,” I said. “Larry killed Isabel. Barnes saw him, so he killed him too. Now all they have to do is to find blood in his car and he’ll go to the chair.”

She looked at me sharply.

“You’d better take a sedative,” she said. “You’re on the edge of a crack-up, Judy.”

She followed me into the library. I wanted to be alone, but I saw she had something more to say, and she proceeded to say it.

“I think I’d better tell you something, Judy,” she said. “I know you’ll keep it to yourself. I’m pretty sure someone did take a car out of the garage the night Isabel was killed. Some time toward morning.”

I must have looked startled, for she smiled.

“Don’t worry. I’m not telling it,” she said. “I couldn’t sleep, and you know where my rooms are. It went toward the service gate. I didn’t think much of it at the time. The place was crawling with cars. But later I remembered. Those gates were locked that night.”

I was definitely frightened. I had never thought of Alma as a source of danger. Yet if she was questioned, she might be. There must have been times when she compared her lot with mine. And I hadn’t even told her that I was trying at last to be a useful citizen. She would only have thought I was dramatizing myself. For the first time I wondered if she really liked any of us.

For a minute I had a wild impulse to bribe her, to offer her my mink coat, to try to buy her silence with anything I had. I think she knew it too. She stiffened.

“I’ve said I’m not telling, Judy,” she said quietly. “Let it go at that.”

Her headache was better after dinner. She suggested some gin rummy, and we played for half an hour or so. I lost three dollars—she could always beat me—and feeling that I had added a trifle to the silence fund went up to see Mother. We had dined early, and it was still only eight-thirty. Mother was over her hysteria. She was playing solitaire, as she always does when she is nervous. She was sitting up in bed with a board on her knees.

“I’ve put in a call for the Governor,” she said. “Of course the wretch is out to dinner. You would think he had enough to do to run this State without going to parties.”

“Like the Mayor?”

“I had a reason for asking the Mayor,” she said coldly.

She deliberately cheated herself as usual, and when the thing came out she announced that she had won two hundred and eight dollars. But she was still worried about Larry.

“You’d better go down tonight and pack a box for him,” she said. “The poor boy hasn’t even a clean handkerchief. And if those wretches use a rubber hose on him maybe you’d better take some iodine.”

I assured her they would do nothing of the sort, and she relaxed somewhat. But I had to tell her about the knife: that it was in the pool, and why. She looked worried at first. Then she thought it over.

“Perhaps it’s not such a bad hiding place after all,” she said. “I read a story once, something about a letter. They merely turned it inside out or something, and left it where anybody could see it.”

I laughed a little, and kissed her.

“Then you did read a book once,” I said. “Well, chin up, old girl. We’re not beaten yet.”

Maybe it was the mention of a chin. Don’t ask me. I know nothing about the human mind. But all at once I remembered why the woman who had brought back the knife that afternoon had seemed familiar. Her profile had been like the one in the snapshot I had found in the magazine in Isabel’s room, chin and all. In that case …

I didn’t stop to think it out. I didn’t tell Mother. When I left her I went downstairs and got my coat from the powder room where Patrick had hung it that afternoon and started for Larry’s house.

To my relief the police guard was gone. The place was dark, except for the service wing and a light upstairs, shaded for the dimout. I went in through the kitchen. Only Anna was there. She was listening to the radio, and her eyes were bright with excitement.

“They found that policeman, Miss Judy. Somebody killed him.”

“Yes, I know, Anna. Is it all right if I go upstairs?”

“Why sure, miss. Mr. Scott’s up there. He came to get some things for Mr. Shepard. He’s not coming home tonight.”

She was enjoying it, I thought furiously. It didn’t matter to her that not far away Jim Barnes’s wife and children were in trouble, or that Isabel was dead, or Larry might never come back. I left her there and went almost blindly up the stairs. A small bag of Larry’s was standing packed in the ball, but there was no sign of Don. I suppose I had moved quietly. The carpets are very thick. For when I did locate him he was not in Larry’s room. He was in Isabel’s, bending over an open chest of drawers and fumbling in it.

He looked completely shattered when he saw me.

“Larry doesn’t keep his things there,” I said. “What’s the idea, Don?”

I think he hated me just then. He shrugged his shoulders and gave me an imitation of a smile.

“You would turn up,” he said. “Well, if you want the truth, I was looking for something. It isn’t here, so—that’s that.” He fumbled for his cigarette case. “I suppose you know they’re holding Larry?”

“Why on earth would they? They can’t think he killed Barnes.”

He didn’t answer immediately. He lit a cigarette before he spoke.

“I’m afraid it’s his car. I’m sorry, Judy, but they think Barnes was shot in it. Of course it’s ridiculous but …”

I suppose I had expected it. I wasn’t surprised. It was all part of the net closing around us. But I was angrier than I had ever been in my life.

“You believe it, don’t you, Don?” I said bitterly. “You’re standing by him, but you think he’s a monster, that he’s killed two people: the woman he loved and a man he didn’t know. Then you come here snooping, to find something to prove him guilty.”

It got under his skin.

“I wish you’d keep out of this,” he said roughly. “There are angles you don’t know. If I could only find out …”

I stood staring at him. He wasn’t really angry. He was frightened, as he had been at the inquest I took a step or two toward him.

“You didn’t happen to have done it yourself, Don, did you? What are you doing here? What are you looking for?”

“Don’t talk like a fool,” he said. “Of course I didn’t kill her. But somebody did. That policeman too. Good God, do you think I ran amok that night?

“What about the man she was meeting in the park?” he went on more quietly. “Who was he? What sort of trouble was she in? Tell me that and I’ll know why she is dead. I’ve got to know, Judy. If Larry did it he can go to the chair, and I’ll be glad of it. It just happens that I don’t think he did.”

“You were still in love with her, weren’t you, Don? What a frightful nuisance I must have been, running after you the way I did.”

“Certainly not,” he said manfully. “I’m fond of you, Judy. I always have been.”

A few days before it would have been the death knell, of course. Now I managed to laugh. All at once I saw myself running in circles after the little tin god who was not a god at all, but only tin. I laughed, and he looked embarrassed.

“Don’t give it another thought,” I said. “And now let’s find what you were looking for.”

It appeared that it was his old letters to Isabel. He said she might have kept them. She had kept the chain. I didn’t believe him for a minute, but I stood by while he made a further perfunctory search. The room had been cleaned by that time. The bed had been made up, and when I remembered the magazine I could not see it. I found it, finally, with some others in Isabel’s boudoir, but the snapshot was gone.

I called Anna. She remembered the picture. It had fallen out when she was helping to clean the room. She said she had put it on the mantel, but it was not there.

She stood eyeing us both curiously.

“It was just a snapshot,” she said. “Maybe Mr. Shepard took it, or it blew out the window while the window washer was here.”

So it was a window washer this time. Not a plumber. But then it never had been a plumber. I was fairly dizzy.

“What about it?” Don asked impatiently. “Why is it important?”

“Because I think I saw the woman in it today.”

But I couldn’t explain. I couldn’t say that the woman had brought back the knife which had killed Isabel. Also I wasn’t too sure of Don by that time. How did I know he didn’t have it himself, in a pocket or in his wallet? When Anna had gone he confronted me.

“What about this woman?” he asked. “See here, Judy, if you’re holding out anything, you’d better tell me. Where did you see her, and why do you want her picture?”

I told him half the truth, that she had called at the house, that we hadn’t talked to her, but her face had been familiar, and that she resembled the woman in Isabel’s picture. He made me describe her, which I did, palm tree and all. So far as I could see, however, it made no impression on him.

He left before I did. The last I saw of him he was carrying Larry’s bag down the stairs, and soon after I heard his car starting up. He had left it out on Linden Avenue, which made me wonder rather.

I took another look for the snapshot after he had gone, with Anna helping me. I couldn’t find it, and my heart was really not in the search. I dreaded going back and facing Mother. I dreaded the night, and still more the next day. The Sunday papers out, announcing that Larry was being held as a material witness, and Isabel to be buried somehow; the gaping crowds, a police line, masses of flowers, and nothing meaning anything to her anymore.

When I went down the stairs I saw a small neat piece of carpet had been cut out from where Mother had sat. And one of Larry’s automatics was missing from the gun room. The police were certainly building their case.

 

XI

When I left Larry’s house, I stepped into complete blackness. Remembering Tony King’s story of the man who had been in the grounds the night before I felt uneasy. But all I saw was an old-fashioned car driving out, which looked like the Lelands’, and after it two of the maids, feeling their way down the drive, probably to a late movie. I had cut across the lawn so they did not see me. They were to be important later on, those two women, to figure largely in our solution. But I did not know it then.

When I got back to the house, I found Patrick looking unhappy, and Tony King sitting beside the fountain, playing with the fish! My heart almost stopped Apparently, however, he had not discovered the knife. He looked quite cheerful, with his hat on the floor beside him and a new haircut. He pulled his sleeve up further and made another swipe at the fish and brought up a wriggling fantail.

“Why don’t you ever feed the creatures?” he said. “Throw them a little caviar now and then?” He grinned at Patrick and got up. “Any place with doors in this hovel of yours?”

“We can go back to the morning room.”

“Even a special place to mourn.”

But Patrick had stood all he could. He picked the hat from the floor and informed me that I had had several visitors. Also that if I would please inform him when I was going out …

“Who were here?” I said impatiently.

“The person who left the parcel this afternoon was back,” he said. “She waited for some time. After she had gone there was a man who I believe was an officer in plain clothes. When he found you were out he asked for your mother, but she had gone to bed. And Mr. Leland has only just driven away. He waited for some time.”

“Mr. Leland? For me?”

“He asked for Mrs. Shepard first. I told him she was resting and seeing nobody.”

“What’s all the excitement?” Tony King inquired as I closed the morning room door. “Sounds like the Pennsylvania Station. Has something new turned up here?”

“Nothing that I know of.”

He gave me a cigarette and took one himself. I wanted to ask if he knew what they had found in Larry’s car, but couldn’t quite do it. And he was busy getting something out of his pocket.

“I’m not very keen about this,” he said. “You look as though you’ve had about all you can take. But it’s got to be done. It’s the report of the autopsy on your sister-in-law. I’m afraid you’ll have to look at it.”

I drew back.

“Please,” I said. “I don’t want to. It’s dreadful.”

“I’m afraid you’ll have to. There’s a line or two in it you ought to see.”

He had pulled out a handful of envelopes. Now he extracted a paper from among them, and handed it to me. I didn’t want to take it, but there was something compelling about the way he held it out. It was a typed copy, on flimsy yellow paper, as if he had done it himself.

I turned on a lamp and read it.

I suppose it was the usual routine report. It gave Isabel’s age as twenty-seven, and her weight. Then there was a report of findings: two incised wounds and the severance of some artery or other. But it was the final paragraphs which held me. They came under what was termed inspection, and it was coldblooded enough to give me a chill.

The body, it said, was one of a white female, in apparently good health. All organs were normal. Examination revealed—and here I dropped the paper—that she had borne a child.

He was watching me.

“Didn’t know about it, did you?”

“No, I don’t believe it.”

“I’m afraid it’s true. I had to find out. She and your brother have no children, have they?”

“No.”

“None born dead? Nothing of that sort?”

I shook my head. I was beyond speech. It looked to me as though Larry was finished. If they could prove he hadn’t known she had ever borne a child and then had learned it …

He threw away his cigarette and pulled a chair close to me.

“Don’t take it too hard,” he said. “These things happen. In one way it might be dangerous. In another—well, put it this way. Suppose somebody knew this story, and was blackmailing her?”

“Why kill her?” I said bleakly. “She could have paid.”

“Any idea who could have been the child’s father?”

I shook my head.

“She wasn’t that sort. She was engaged years ago to Donald Scott, but the Lelands wouldn’t have it. He was nobody then. They made her break it off.”

He whistled.

“Scott!” he said. “He’d go a long way to kill a scandal like that.”

“He wouldn’t kill her. Never. He was still in love with her.”

He gave me his broken-toothed smile.

“Nice little motive for you, isn’t it? The beautiful sister-in-law, the man who couldn’t forget her, and the girl who couldn’t forget him. Many a crime has been committed for less.”

He got up, putting the report back in his pocket. He had succeeded in annoying me, which he probably thought was better than seeing me cry.

“What we have to do,” he said cheerfully, “is to get the story behind this story. When we do, I’m taking all bets that Larry comes marching home.”

I was surprised. “I thought you were working with the police,” I said.

He looked shocked.

“My dear child, I’m on the side of law and order. Justice will prevail, and so on.” He grinned. “Actually I’m working to get a poor little rich girl and her redheaded mother out of a jam.”

“You aren’t a police photographer?”

For some reason that seemed to amuse him. He chuckled.

“Poor little Judy!” he said. “What a sheltered life she leads! But I like sheltered women. They feed my superiority complex.”

He left after that. Patrick gave him his hat, and he set it jauntily on his head.

“Take a little advice,” he told me. “Go to bed and stay there. No use looking for trouble.”

I felt rather lost when he had gone. As for going to bed and staying there, I couldn’t of course. There was that miserable knife to be disposed of again, and I had no idea how to do it With Larry under arrest I was certain the police would search both houses, and I was afraid to go outside again.

Nevertheless it had to be taken out of the pool, and at one o’clock in the morning I went downstairs in a bathrobe and slippers. I carried a flashlight and I went directly to the pool. The kitchen cat was on the brim, trying as usual to claw out a fish.

But the knife was gone.

I couldn’t believe it at first. The pool is fairly large and I crawled around it on my hands and knees, with the fish rushing wildly about and the cat making sharp little dabs at them with her claws. What with the splash from the fountain and reaching under the water lilies, I was pretty wet when I finally gave up.

To my horror Sarah was on the gallery when I started up the stairs.

“What on earth were you doing, Miss Judy?” she said. “What were you looking for?”

“I thought I’d dropped my blue clip in the pool.”

She didn’t believe me. I could feel her stiffen in the dark. She did not persist, however. She said Mother had rung for her sleeping medicine, and she followed me into my room and made me change my pajamas before she left. Of course the blue clip was in plain sight on my dressing table. She pounced on it.

“Why, here it is, Miss Judy,” she yelped. “I don’t see how you missed it.”

But I had had enough.

“Oh, get the hell out of here, Sarah,” I said, and crawled into bed.

Some time toward daylight I dozed off. I had had the bright idea that Mother had taken it herself. She was quite capable of slipping down while the servants were having supper and the hall was empty. But I didn’t sleep long. I heard Sarah tap with Mother’s morning tea, and after she had gone I went over to her bedroom.

Mother had taken off her chin strap and was looking fairly cheerful. She said she had decided to see our senator instead of the governor, and of course they couldn’t hold Larry under any circumstances. After all we had always contributed to the Republican Party, and had I any black stockings for the funeral that day.

I broke in on her resentfully.

“If you took that thing it was a dirty trick, Mother,” I said. “You could at least have told me.”

She put down her cup and stared at me.

“Told you what?” she asked.

“About the knife.”

She looked blank and my heart sank.

“What about it? What are you talking about, Judy?”

“Didn’t you take it? Out of the pool?”

She looked as though I had struck her.

“Don’t tell me it’s gone again!” she gasped, and I caught her tray before it slipped off the bed. Her face was dead white. “I don’t believe it. You didn’t look properly.”

“I looked all right,” I said grimly. “I fished every inch of that damned pool. Me and the cat,” I added. “Somebody’s taken it.”

She looked at me pitifully.

“Don’t tell me it was somebody in the house. I couldn’t bear it, Judy.”

I was thinking hard.

“It doesn’t have to be somebody in the house. There were four people down there last night, with Patrick rushing all over the house to locate me. Maybe it was in plain view of anybody who looked at the pool. The fish may have shoved it around, or moved the lily pads. I don’t know, Mother. Somebody must have seen it. I—”

I stopped abruptly. I was remembering Tony King, his sleeve pushed up while he dipped a long arm into the pool, grinning and picking up a fish, and asking why we didn’t throw them a little caviar now and then. He had it. He had had it all the time. Lighting my cigarette, giving me that horrible report to read, and all the time the knife which would send Larry to the chair in his pocket. Picking my brains, getting the name of the man Larry might have been jealous of, pretending to be sorry for me, and fitting together the little pieces of his puzzle until he had it all.

The dirty crook, I thought furiously. Smiling at me, showing his broken tooth, and all the time the knife in his pocket. I could have killed him out of sheer fury.

 

XII

We went to Isabel’s funeral that morning. Mother was determined to do it, whether Andrew Leland suspected Larry or not.

“Why should we stay away?” she inquired tartly. “I was fond of her. If we don’t go it will look queer, too, as though we suspected Larry ourselves.”

It was pretty bad: the crowds on the street, the police and the awful funereal odor of flowers everywhere. But at least it was civilized. Nobody saw Isabel. She was somewhere upstairs. The family was there, too. Mother, shrouded in black, wept quietly all through the service. I tried not to bawl. And Larry, who came in rather late with a man who was obviously a guard, went back to some place in the rear. He looked like a man carved out of stone. Mother didn’t see him, or I knew she would have followed him.

She didn’t even notice what followed, when the service was over and people were filing quietly out. There was a space around us big enough to park a car. Nobody spoke to us except the undertaker, who asked if we were expected at the cemetery. I think Mother would have seen the whole thing through, but I had had enough.

“We are Mr. Shepard’s mother and sister,” I said. “I don’t think we are expected anywhere.”

He gave me a strange look and turned away.

I suppose that shows the state of my nerves. Mother hadn’t even heard me.

The afternoon was dreadful. Mother had gone back to bed, with Sarah in attendance, Alma had not returned, and the house was deadly quiet. When I turned on the three o’clock local news the radio said that the police had located what they called the murder car in which Barnes had been taken to his death. They had found bloodstains in it, but were giving out no further information.

Soon after that I got my car and drove to the Barnes house. I couldn’t bear to have her there alone, thinking Larry had killed her husband and that we didn’t care what happened to her. It was a pretty little place, as neat as a pin, but I got no further than the front door. A strange woman opened it and looked at me.

“I’d like to see Mrs. Barnes,” I said, rather breathlessly. “I’m so dreadfully sorry. If I can do anything …”

“What name, miss?”

“I’m Judy Shepard.”

I never saw a face change so quickly. She gave me a hard look, from head to foot, before she spoke at all. Then she said:

“You’d better go back where you come from, Miss Shepard. We don’t want you here.”

She slammed the door in my face, and I felt as though she had hit me with it.

Alma was back when I went home. She was in the hall pulling off her black gloves, and she looked tired and strained.

“Thank God that’s over,” she said. “Although the Lelands were wonderful. They always are.”

“I wonder what he wanted here last night?”

“I didn’t know he was here,” she said slowly. “Did he ask for me?”

“No. He wanted Mother or me.

It seemed to upset her. She stood there, straightening her gloves and thinking.

“He’s been rather strange the last few days,” she said. “Judy, what happened to the chain and the thing on it that they found? I suppose the police have it?”

“Yes. You knew Isabel better than I did, Alma. What in the world was that tassel arrangement on it?”

“I don’t know. I never saw it.”

She went up to her room, and I wandered into the library. The telephone was ringing, and I heard Tony King’s voice.

“Hello,” he said. “I hope you had a good sleep last night. You certainly needed it.”

I almost choked with fury.

“Listen to me,” I said. “I don’t want to talk to you. I don’t want ever to see you again. Go ahead with your dirty work. See if I care.”

I slammed down the receiver. He was shouting into the telephone as I did so, but I didn’t listen. When it rang again I simply took the receiver off the hook and left it off. After that I tried to think. It was no use, of course. When Patrick brought in the Sunday papers he replaced the telephone, but it did not ring again.

He was about to go when I called him back. He stood there blinking at me with the eyes which had needed spectacles for years—spectacles he refused to wear.

“About the detective who was here last night?” I said. “Did he say why he wanted Mother or me when you couldn’t find me?”

“No, miss.”

“What was he doing when you came down?”

“I think he was watching the fish.”

“And the woman? The one who had been here that afternoon?”

She too had stood by the pool while he looked for me again. But she had seemed uneasy, he thought. When he told her I wasn’t around she had hurried out. As for Mr. Leland, he had walked up and down the hall, refusing to go anywhere else. He had been there alone for some time. Then suddenly when Patrick reported that he could not find me he had clapped on his hat and stalked out.

So it really came back to Tony King.

I remembered sitting down and trying to follow the knife in its wanderings. Mother’s hiding it in the tank in her bathroom, the plumber’s finding it and sending it back. For that was the only explanation I could think of: that he had realized its import and sent it to us. Then my hiding it—first in my jewel case and then in the pool—and its disappearance from there. Only—why had the woman who had returned it come back again?

Out of sheer exhaustion I picked up the newspaper and glanced at it. There was no mention of Larry’s car, but it said he was being held as a material witness. There was a full page of pictures of me, surrounded by flowers when I came out; of Mother in a low-cut dress and the high diamond collar she wears to hold her throat up; of the house, called “Suspected Millionaire’s Castle”; and even one, evidently sneaked by a reporter, of the hall and fountain. The only thing missing was the tank in Mother’s bathroom. By contrast a picture of the Barnes house was set in the center of the page and entitled “Home of Murdered Policeman.”

All in all I wondered why the decent people of the town didn’t march out and burn us down. I tore it out and put it in the fire, but by that time I was in what amounted to a frenzy. I tried to read again. I saw that Barnes was to be buried the next day, with full Police Department honors: the Commissioner and his deputies, an honor guard of patrolmen and the department band. But there was another item which caught my eye and held it in frozen horror.

A woman had jumped off one of the downtown bridges late the night before. Another woman who had happened to be near her had tried to catch her, but had failed. She had not fallen into the water, however. A barge was passing below, and she fell into it. She was critically injured, but was conscious when found. She had refused to give her name.

She was about forty years of age, and she had been neatly dressed in a brown coat and a small purple hat!

I had to know. I called Police Headquarters and asked for Inspector Welles, but he was out, and when I asked for Tony King nobody seemed to know anything about him. The officer at the switchboard had apparently never heard of him.

It was impossible to settle down. At five o’clock I got my car again and drove to the hospital, only to be rebuffed. So far as the girl on duty in the office was concerned, there was no woman there who had worn a purple hat and jumped off a bridge. I was still standing, unwilling to leave, when Inspector Welles came down in the elevator. I turned my back quickly, but he saw me.

He looked surprised and came over.

“I was just inquiring for a sick friend,” I babbled. “They won’t let me see her. I do think it’s disgraceful. The money we give these places and—”

The girl behind the grill looked up.

“She was asking for the woman in Forty-Two,” she said.

There was a queer little silence. The elevator came down again and Tony King got out. He looked even more surprised than the Inspector had.

“Hello,” he said. “What are you doing here?”

Well, there I was, with all three of them staring at me. You would have thought I had pushed the woman off the bridge myself. I couldn’t even speak. It was the Inspector who broke the silence.

“Suppose we go into the reception room,” he said. “See that we aren’t disturbed, Miss Clark.”

When we were inside he closed the door and confronted me.

“Just what is your interest in this woman, Miss Shepard?” he inquired grimly.

“I saw the description of her in the paper. A woman dressed like that came to the house yesterday. She asked for Mother or me, but we weren’t at home to anybody.”

“How did you know how she was dressed?”

“I saw her get out of the taxi. I suppose it was silly. There must be a thousand women around with clothes like that I just thought …”

He made me sit down. I suppose I looked excited. He even offered me a cigarette, although he continued to watch me. As for Tony King, he had wandered to a window and stood there looking out. What his back said was that this was up to me. He was through. If I wanted to go on making a fool of myself …

“Now let’s get at this,” said the Inspector. “Why did she call on you? Did she leave any message?”

I suppose I hesitated. I could see Patrick holding the white parcel containing the knife and eyeing it curiously. He would tell them if I didn’t. But I couldn’t say it was the knife.

“She left a small parcel,” I said. “Perhaps Mother has it. I haven’t asked her. She’s not well. Besides, dozens of packages come to the house.”

I thought I had done rather well, but Tony King had turned and was looking at me, and the Inspector plainly didn’t believe me.

“So you read the paper, and saw that a woman in a brown coat and a purple hat had been hurt, and rushed here to see her. Is that it?”

“I didn’t rush. I simply came.”

Behind the Inspector Tony King was shaking his head. I stopped, and the Inspector hitched his chair closer.

“Are you sure that’s quite correct, Miss Shepard?” he said. “Suppose I suggest that it was exactly the reverse of what you say: that this woman came to your house, but instead of leaving this parcel it was given to her? What would you say to that?”

“It isn’t true,” I said wildly. “You have to believe me. Nobody gave her anything.”

His voice changed. He didn’t raise it. It simply became harsh and cold.

“What do you know about this woman?” he said. “Who was she? What was she doing there? And what are you doing here, trying to see her?”

It wasn’t any use. I saw that. I never even offered a protest when he got up and asked if I had brought my car. When I said I had, he told Tony to drive me into town. And even Tony King had little to say on the way. He had abandoned his cheerful grin entirely. He looked older and very tired.

“What was the reason for that outburst of yours this morning?” he asked.

“You ought to know.”

He frowned over that.

“I?” he said. “What had I done?”

“Gone fishing in the pool last night. Don’t deny it. I saw it myself.”

He raised his eyebrows.

“I see,” he said thoughtfully, “and what did I find? It wouldn’t by any chance have been a knife?”

“I thought you were helping us, and all the time you’ve been working against us.”

To my surprise he took a hand off the wheel and patted my knee.

“I am helping you, little Judy,” he said. “At least I’m trying to, but you make it so damned hard I’m thinking of giving it up.

That was all until we got to the Inspector’s office. There was a man in the outer room waiting, and at a gesture from the Inspector he followed us in. He was a taxi driver, and he carried his cap in his hand. He stood in front of the desk while the Inspector questioned him.

“You’re Johnson?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You’ve seen her?”

The taxi driver nodded.

“It’s the same woman. I’d know her anywhere. I saw her hat too. She’s the one.”

“You waited for her?”

“Yes, sir. The man at the door let her in. She wasn’t there very long. Only a couple of minutes.”

“Where did you take her after that?”

“I left her at Fifth Street, downtown. I think she went into the park.”

He was sent out and told to wait. The Inspector picked up some papers and glanced over them. Then he took off his glasses.

“I brought you here, Miss Shepard,” he said, “because I think it’s time you talked. You are not helping your brother by your silence. What about this woman? Did you know her? What was her name? Where did she live?”

“I’ve told you. I never saw her before. I didn’t speak to her that day. I’d told the butler to say I was out. The only thing—”

“Yes?”

“Well,” I said desperately. “I told you I saw her when she was leaving. I thought—well, after Isabel’s death I found a snapshot in the magazine she had been reading that night. There was a woman in it, standing by a palm tree. She looked like her.”

“Where is this snapshot now?”

“I don’t know. I’ve looked for it. It’s gone.”

“That was all it was? A woman and a tree?”

“There were some children in it. I didn’t notice them particularly.”

He looked at Tony King, who merely lit a cigarette.

“What did I tell you?” he said. “Curiouser and curiouser, isn’t it?”

The Inspector didn’t think that was funny. He sat still, apparently undecided about something. Finally he threw the something at me.

“What about this knife of your brother’s? Was it you or your mother who smuggled it out of the house that night?”

I didn’t answer. I couldn’t.

“All right,” he said, “let that go. How did the woman who tried to kill herself last night get hold of it? Did you give it to her?”

“Do you mean she had it?” I said wildly. “Then she did get it, after all!”

“She had it,” the Inspector said. “She had it when she fell. It was in her bag. She is dead now, so she can’t tell her story. But I think you can.” He lifted something and held it out to me. “You might look at this.”

I did. It was a greatly enlarged picture of me looking like a skinned rabbit and digging frantically at the hole under the hemlock. There was no question either of what I was digging with. It was a knife. Larry’s knife.

 

XIII

I knew then that it was over—all our struggle, the lies I had told for Larry’s sake, the fight we had put up to save him. When Tony King sauntered over to look at the picture, I was speechless.

“Not bad, is it?” he said complacently. “Not that it flatters you any. But I told you I took pretty good pictures. Someday you’ll have to let me—Here, sit down!”

I did sit down. I also, when I got control of my vocal cords again, told him what I thought of him, that under pretense of helping me he had thrown me to the wolves. I’m afraid I made it stronger than that, for I remember his saying that it was no language for a lady, and a young one at that. I must have got under his skin, for he put a not too gentle hand on my shoulder.

“Listen,” he said. “You’re a pampered brat, but for some strange reason I don’t want to see you locked up, or your mother either. The beds are bad. Now come clean, or it’s going to be bad for both of you.”

That was how I came at last to tell the story of the knife. It was dark by that time. Someone turned on the lights. A uniformed stenographer came in and sat at a table. A couple of detectives stood by. Tony King chain-smoked. And because there was nothing else for me to do I told it all, from Mother’s finding the knife under the stair carpet to my scratching her leg to account for the blood on her stocking; from my trying to bury it to Tony King’s discovering me; from my hiding it again in the bathroom tank to the plumber’s getting it out and taking it away; and from the woman’s bringing it back to my dropping it in the fish pool, and its disappearance from there.

I stopped there except to add that the dead woman had come back to see me again the night before, and that she must have seen it and taken it.

The Inspector sat back in his chair when I finished.

“Has it occurred to you,” he said drily, “that if you had told this story sooner you might have saved at least one life? Maybe more.”

“How could I? I didn’t know she had it.”

“That’s what you say,” he stated unpleasantly. “How did she know it was in the pool, Miss Shepard? Granting that it was in the pool. And I will add something else. One of our men has been killed. That makes three deaths, all apparently connected. We don’t like our men being killed.”

There was a sort of movement in the room, like a wave of anger. I could feel it. The men there were hostile, almost menacing. I think Tony King saw it, for he got up.

“If that’s all, Inspector,” he said, “I’ll take her along.”

So at least they were not holding me. I relaxed somewhat, and I managed to sign the statement. But once outside the building Tony stopped and looked at his wristwatch.

“Time to eat,” he said. “How about a hamburger? Ever try one?”

I hadn’t enough spirit left even to resent that. I nodded, and before long I was finding I was hungry. I ate four hamburgers and drank incredible amounts of coffee. I realized I had hardly eaten for three days. He watched me, looking kinder than he had before.

“You’ve been carrying quite a load, haven’t you?” he said. “You’ll feel better, now it’s off your chest. How about a little apology? Since I didn’t take the knife.”

“I feel like a heel,” I told him. “I’m sorry. But I told the truth. She got the knife herself. I never gave it to her.”

He yawned and stretched.

“I know it,” he said. “You weren’t there to do it. You were in your brother’s house with Scott.” He yawned again; then he grinned. “I hope to God you stay in bed tonight. I need some sleep.”

“You don’t mean …”

“Sure I mean it. How about the man who came looking for your brother’s hat? How about the knife? I couldn’t have you getting any more ideas about doing away with it in the dark of the moon. I’ve been practically living on your front lawn. Don’t worry. I can sleep tonight. The knife’s gone. Get someone else to find it.”

“Find it?” I said. “I thought the Inspector had it.”

“That’s just his little way. As a matter of fact, somebody got to the hospital ahead of us and took it.”

He told me what had happened. At nine o’clock that morning a man—description, tall and thin, rather shabby—said he had seen the article in the paper and asked to see the woman. She was unconscious, but he had identified her as his wife, and had looked so faint that the nurse had gone to get him some aromatic ammonia. He had given the name of Johnson and an address which turned out later to be nonexistent. He had stayed an hour or two. Then he had gone, promising to come back. He had not done so.

Beyond the usual inquiry and report the police had not been interested in the woman. Certainly no one had connected her with the case. But according to hospital routine the contents of her pocketbook had been listed at the office on arrival, before it was taken to her room. Among them was a hunting knife wrapped in a clean handkerchief. It was not until an alert young receptionist came on duty that afternoon that anyone took particular note of the knife. She thought it was odd. She went up to ask the nurse about it, and the knife was gone. She reported it at the office, but nothing was done about it.

Then the nurse, interested by that time, came down to say that she had found a slip of paper in an inner pocket of the woman’s bag. It was folded very small, and on it were the words “Strathmore House, Linden Avenue bus.” The receptionist had read the papers. She knew of the search for the knife that had killed Isabel, and so she notified the police.

“We got there too late,” Tony said gloomily. “The woman had just died. And the man hasn’t turned up. But we got a full description of the knife from the night clerk who listed it. He even said the handle was damp, as if it had been in water. Now what’s the connection between this woman and Isabel Shepard’s death? There has to be one.”

“I don’t know,” I said helplessly. “If I could find that picture—”

“The snapshot?” he asked. “Did you really make a search for it?”

So I told him about finding Don Scott in Isabel’s room and about hunting everywhere for the picture.

“It had been left on the mantel?” he asked.

“So Anna said.”

“Then, if Scott saw it there and took it, why did he want it? And what else was he looking for when you found him?”

“He said he was afraid she had kept some of his letters.”

“Nice boy, your old pal,” he observed. “Getting out from under, wasn’t he? What’s scandalous about love letters seven or eight years old?”

He paid the check and leaned back scowling and silent for some time. Then he got up abruptly.

“Why the hell didn’t you tell me this before?” he said. “Come on. We’re going to the Lelands’. I want to speak to Andrew.”

He refused to explain, although I protested. After all Isabel had been buried only that morning, and the family had a right to their decent grief.

But to my surprise we were admitted to the house, and we found Andrew in his dismal library, sitting alone. He had apparently not even been reading. There was the dank smell of funeral flowers still in the room, and only one lamp was lighted. He had aged perceptibly. He looked stricken, and even Tony King saw it. He apologized.

“I’m sorry to disturb you, Mr. Leland,” he said. “But certain things have come up. You ought to know them. My name is King. You know Miss Shepard.”

He asked us to sit down. He didn’t like me; he never had, but he was civil enough. It was to Tony King, however, that he spoke.

“What things? I’m afraid I don’t understand.”

“Your daughter’s death. The murder of a policeman. And the suicide of a woman who jumped off a bridge last night.”

“I have no knowledge of any except the first two, Mr. King.”

“Are you certain of that? Suppose I describe this woman? She was small. She had an aquiline nose and rather a receding chin. She was probably forty, maybe less. Does that mean anything to you?”

“Nothing at all,” Mr. Leland said coldly. “I know of no such woman. If this concerns my daughter’s death I still have not changed my opinion. She was killed by her husband.”

But Tony King was relentless. He bent forward, his face set and intent.

“Why would Larry Shepard kill his wife, Mr. Leland? Because he learned she had borne a child before he married her?”

The effect was more than shocking. Andrew Leland suddenly crumpled, as if without his pride he was nothing—just a little elderly man who had fought a long battle and lost it.

“For God’s sake, don’t tell her mother,” he said, with stiff lips. “It would kill her.”

“It may not be necessary,” Tony said, more gently. “Is the child alive?”

“So far as I know, yes.”

“You haven’t seen it?”

“I never saw it,” he said fiercely. “But I wish to make this statement: the boy was legitimate; my daughter had married the father and divorced him.”

“The father was Donald Scott?”

He nodded. The room was going around me in circles, but they paid no attention to me. The hardness was gone from Tony’s face. He drew a long breath.

“I’m sorry to bring this up,” he said. “I know it is painful. Do you know where the boy is now?”

“He was adopted by a family in the West. I suppose he is still there. At least I still—”

“You are still paying them for keeping him?”

“I send them a little every month,” he said carefully. “What has all this to do with my daughter’s death?”

“Just this. Unless your daughter left a will to the contrary, the boy is her heir.”

He looked startled. Then he merely shrugged his shoulders.

“He was born under another name. The people who adopted him don’t know who he is. I have never sent them checks. The money was sent indirectly.”

“Nevertheless by law he is her heir in this state,” Tony persisted. “You are a lawyer. You know that, Mr. Leland. And those people may know it too. Suppose they have discovered or always knew the child’s identity. They have adopted him. They are his legal guardians and he will have a considerable fortune on the mother’s death. That’s as good a motive as I know for murder.”

“How could they have known it? Even the father didn’t know he had a child. I took Isabel away as soon as she told me.

He went on. It had been a most unsuitable marriage. He had traced them and found them, and Isabel had come home willingly enough. It had been an impulse, which she regretted. There had been a bad time with Scott, but in the end he let her get a divorce in Reno. They managed to keep it a secret. The boy was born later in a hospital in California.

Tony King listened attentively.

“What do you know about the people who adopted the boy?” he asked. “Surely you had them investigated.”

“The doctor guaranteed them. I saw the woman myself. She”—he drew a long breath—“she impressed me very favorably. A quiet self-respecting sort. I never saw the husband.”

“And the name?”

“It was Armstrong, John P. Armstrong.”

Tony got up.

“I think we will find it was Mrs. Armstrong who jumped off a bridge here last night. If you’ll give me the address in California, I can find out tonight. She had a knife in her bag. You probably know what knife I mean.”

 

XIV

I don’t remember how we got out of the house. I know we left Mr. Leland still sunk in his chair, and that I felt I had outraged every bit of decency left in me. We had torn away his pride, laid bare the secret he had fought so long to keep, and exposed poor Isabel’s tragic story. I must have shown how I felt, for Tony took one look at me and shoved me away from the wheel of my car.

“Pretty grim story,” he said. “It hurts, doesn’t it? I sort of gather you’ve been crazy about Scott for a long time.”

I stared ahead. Had I ever really cared for Don? Or had I simply held on to an adolescent dream?

“That’s over,” I said honestly. “I suppose really it was because there was nobody else.”

“No candidates?” He raised his eyebrows.

“That’s not what I said. But Don never killed Isabel. Why should he?”

“Maybe not. But he’s in this up to his neck.”

At Police Headquarters he got out and gave me the wheel.

“I’ll discuss the matter of candidates with you later,” he said. “In the meantime, for God’s sake, relax. Big brother may be out before you know it. And another thing.” He jerked his hat down over one eye. “Go home and stay there. I may like you—and Mother, of course—but I also like my little bed. I’d like at least one night in it.”

Well, he was right on one thing. Larry was released that same evening. But Tony King did not get that night in bed. Nor did the rest of us.

I shall never forget Mother’s face when Larry came in. She put her arms around him and held on to him, without speaking. He leaned over and kissed the top of that dreadful hennaed hair of hers, his eyes tender.

“Poor old girl,” he said. “It’s going to be all right, my dear. It’s going to be all right.”

She let go of him suddenly.

“What do you mean, going to be? They’ve let you go, haven’t they?”

“They still don’t know who did it, Mother.”

“They know you didn’t,” she said valiantly.

She wouldn’t let him go, not even back to his house for the bath and extra suit he wanted. She made him sit by the bed, holding tight to his hand, and she rang for someone to go down to bring him what he needed. However, most of the men were having their Sunday out, and in the end it was Alma who volunteered to go. Larry protested, but it was no use. She went to get a coat, and I stayed to hear his story.

What with ordering a tray supper for him, and finally telling my own story of the woman in the hospital and the knife, the next hour passed without our noticing it. The knife bewildered Larry. I had to begin with Mother’s finding it under the stair carpet and go on from there. He asked again about the plumber.

“How did he know it was there?”

“All he had to do was look,” Mother said. “After all, the papers were full of it.”

“So he took it away, gave it to this woman who returned it, and she gets it out of the fountain and jumps into the river. Why?”

When Patrick came in for the tray, Larry asked him to send Sarah down. Her gloomy face lightened when she saw him, although all she said was that she was glad to see him back. It’s a queer thing but in a family of women like ours it’s the man who gets all the adoration. But when he asked Sarah about the tank, she blushed with embarrassment.

“There was something broken in it,” she said. “It—it wouldn’t flush.”

“How long had it been that way?”

“It was all right in the morning. Nellie, who does the bathrooms, told me about it.”

“And who called the plumber?”

“I think it was Miss Alma. She usually does.”

Sarah, like Patrick, hadn’t noticed the plumber much. She had stayed in Mother’s bedroom while he was there. She thought she had never seen him before, but these days, with workmen a good deal more scarce than diamonds, we took what we could get and were glad to get them. He was a tall man, about forty or more, but he hadn’t taken off his cap. No, he hadn’t mentioned finding the knife. He was there only about ten minutes.

After Sarah had gone, we began to wonder why Alma had not come back. Then one of the women servants knocked at the door.

I opened it. She was leaning against it, and she almost fell into the room. She was dressed in her street clothes, her hat awry and her face chalk white.

“It’s Miss Alma,” she gasped. “She’s lying in the driveway with a knife in her back.”

That was how Larry’s knife came back for the last time.

We couldn’t believe it. Why would anybody kill Alma? She was a part of the family, and Mother at least had loved her. We could not believe it even when we reached the drive and somebody turned on the lights. But it was true. She was lying facedown, with the things she had brought for Larry scattered all around her.

We had a dreadful time with Mother at first, while the police were on the way. She wouldn’t leave, and at last I sent for a fur coat for her, and made her put it on. Then the police arrived, and it was the same thing as Isabel’s death all over again: the same squad car, the same homicide outfit roaring up later, and the same reporters, some still trying to get over the fence after the gates were closed. Larry looked fairly haunted. The servants were huddled around the front door. Flashbulbs went off as photographs were taken, a car was driven up and its headlights turned on the body.

There was hardly time to realize what had happened. The drive was jammed with men with flashlights, men with cameras, men with pencils writing busily on yellow paper, men inside using the telephone and men trying to keep other men out. Once I thought of Tony King, but he disappeared, in the crowd.

The night was cold, and it seemed to me that they left Alma lying there for hours.

We stayed until the body had been taken away, and Inspector Welles and Larry went into the house. I didn’t like the look on the Inspector’s face. I knew no alibi Mother and I could give Larry was worth anything. For once there had been no servants to check who had left the house, and there was something diabolic about the whole thing—that Larry had been released, to have another murder within an hour or so of his homecoming.

Not that I was worrying about alibis just then. I was worrying about Mother. She had followed Larry and the Inspector into the library, and she had looked so stricken that I went into the dining room to get her some brandy.

I was pouring it when there was a tap at the window. It startled me so I nearly dropped the decanter. When I looked, I saw it was Tony. I raised the window and he crawled in.

“Quick,” he said. “Can you get me to her rooms without anybody’s seeing me?”

“Whose rooms?” I said stupidly.

“The Spencer woman’s. I want to get there before the mob gets in. Where are they?”

“Look,” I said, “do you know why she was killed? If you do, tell me. I think I’m slowly going crazy.”

“There’s usually a reason,” he said. “Do I go up or don’t I?”

He went up, of course. There was a small staircase leading almost directly to Alma’s rooms, and nobody saw us. The lights were off, and he drew the shades before he turned on the lamps in her bedroom and he looked around. The room was as neat as Alma herself had been.

“Lived pretty comfortably, didn’t she?” he said.

“The sitting room was her office,” I told him. “She had plenty to do.”

“Liked her, did you? Nice woman and all that? How about your brother? Fond of her?”

“I don’t think he really noticed whether she was around or not. Certainly he didn’t kill her. He hadn’t left Mother’s room since he got home. And I was with him, too.”

I told him all I knew, about Larry’s needing another suit and Alma’s insisting on getting it. But he hardly listened. He was going over the room, opening the closets, looking in the dresser drawers. It was her office, however, to which he paid the most careful attention. It was as orderly as the rest of the place: her typewriter covered on the table by a window, a row of steel files in a corner, and the big desk in the center of the room practically bare.

There was a fresh blotter on it, and something had been blotted on it not long before. He took her hand mirror and tried to read it. The only word that stood out clearly was “worrying.” He tore out the blotter and rolling it up put it under his arm.

“Something bothering her,” he said. “Any idea what it was?”

“Not the slightest.”

“If she wrote it where is it?”

He began going over the room again, moving quietly for so big a man, but there was no sign of what she had written. I stood it as long as I could.

“Do you have to do all this?” I said, when he started for the files. “I don’t think I can bear much more.”

He turned and looked at me. Then he came over quickly and put both hands on my shoulders.

“Look, Judy,” he said. “There’s been another murder, and we have to get after it fast. I don’t like your being here. It’s no place for you.” He leaned down unexpectedly and kissed me. “Somebody ought to come along pretty soon and marry you, to get you away.”

And tired and half-sick as I was, I tried to smile up at him.

“Is that a proposal?”

“God, no,” he said, looking shocked. “Whatever put that in your head?”

He went back to the search, and I wandered out to the hall. Behind me I could hear drawers opening and shutting, and the metallic squeak of the files as he drew them out and pushed them back. He was still busy when I heard Mother’s voice below. I went to the gallery and looked down. There was no sign of Larry, and Mother was raging at the Inspector.

“I assure you,” she was saying, “that if necessary I shall carry this case to the Supreme Court. To say that my son—”

And the Inspector, exasperated but keeping his temper: “My dear Mrs. Shepard, I have not said that your son did this thing. I am not placing him under arrest. I would like to talk to him where we are not disturbed. That’s all.”

“Talk to him? You’ve done nothing else for the last three days.”

He looked down at her, small as she was, defiant, and blazing with fury. Evidently he decided she could take it.

“Suppose I ask you what I have already asked him,” he said. “Why did you or your son give the mounted officer Barnes fifty dollars the night of your party for the Mayor?”

Mother fairly squealed.

“Fifty dollars! Don’t be ridiculous. I didn’t give him anything. And Larry hadn’t any money at all that night. He had forgotten to go to the bank. I gave him ten dollars myself that afternoon.”

Some detectives came in just then and he sent them up to Alma’s rooms. I warned Tony in time to escape, but although he looked rather smug he told me nothing. He got out as he had come in. Astride the windowsill he said he would probably be at Headquarters all night, and when he saw me again we could discuss my future. After which he simply disappeared, and as no shouts followed I gathered that no one had seen him.

I felt rather blank after he had gone. Larry and the Inspector had driven off, and Mother had gone to her room and locked the door.

I took the drink I had poured for Mother. It put some starch in my knees, and I went out into the hall. One of the uniformed men was standing by the fountain. He had a cup of coffee and a roll in his hand, and he was dropping crumbs for the fish.

“They don’t know it’s night,” he said disconsolately. “Same as me. I’ve forgotten what a good bed looks like.”

I don’t know why looking at the fish made me think of Donald Scott, unless it was because one pop-eyed little black Japanese one was fighting the others off and getting all the crumbs. Anyhow I did.

Tony King had said Don was in something or other up to the neck. I wondered if Alma had known about the child. She had an uncanny way of learning things. Suppose she was blackmailing him? She might have. She liked money, and no man would want it known that after a week or so of marriage his wife had divorced him. But it wasn’t Don who had taken the knife from the hospital that morning. It had been a thin, shabby-looking man.

I was getting excited by that time, what with the brandy and sheer nervous exhaustion. The policeman had tired of feeding the fish. He wandered off and stood looking out at the men still working in the grounds. And once again I heard Don’s voice, asking me about the tassel on the chain they had found under Isabel’s body.

I was sure I knew about that now. Isabel had given up her baby, but not entirely. She had slipped the chain around its neck, and on the chain she had hung one of the tassels from her bed jacket It had to be that way. She had even marked a cross on it with ink. She might have hoped to claim the boy someday. She might only have been protecting herself against having another child substituted for her own. But that was what she had done.

I went up to bed finally, so tired that I was staggering. Mother’s light was out, and I didn’t go in. Down the hall the police had locked and sealed Alma’s rooms for further examination. My bedside clock said three when I went in, and I sat down on the bed, too exhausted even to undress.

That was the state I was in when I saw the note on my dressing table. It was in Alma’s neat handwriting, and she had evidently left it before she had started down for Larry’s clothes. “Dear Judy,” it said, “my conscience is worrying me about the car I saw the other night. Can you come in later and discuss it?”

I sat there, turning it over in my hands. So Alma had intended trying a spot of blackmail on me after all. And the police had the blotter, with that message on it.

 

XV

I sat up in bed for hours, smoking endless cigarettes. At four in the morning I picked up the telephone and called Tony King. He was there, but the operator said he was using the long-distance phone. I tried at intervals for an hour. Then at last I gave up and went unexpectedly to sleep.

I wakened at nine, dressed in a hurry and drank a cup of coffee. The maid who brought my tray said Larry had not come home, and that Mother had dressed and gone downtown without even calling Sarah. I knew something had happened, but no one knew what it was. I was still in a state of helpless anxiety when I got my car and drove to Headquarters.

Mother was sitting in the waiting room outside the Inspector’s office. She was in what Sarah would have called a state, her hat crooked and unmatched shoes on her feet.

“Why, Mother!” I said. “What on earth—”

“I’ve come to take Larry home,” she said. “I don’t budge from this spot until those”—here she used a most impolite word—“until those —s let him go.”

The weary-looking officer at the desk looked up.

“I’ve told you, madam. He is not in there.”

“I don’t believe it.”

She got up suddenly and opened the door to the inner office. There was no sign of Larry, but Donald Scott was there—a Don I had never seen: his face unshaven, his eyes sunken in his head. He didn’t apparently notice that we were there.

“That’s the truth, so help me God,” he was saying. “I couldn’t help her, but I never killed her. Or Alma Spencer either.”

His voice broke, and Mother hastily closed the door.

“They’re crazy,” she said. “They’re all crazy. As if he would murder the mother of his own child.”

I suppose my jaw dropped, for she told me impatiently to close my mouth. But she had apparently abandoned her idea of rescuing Larry. She trotted down the stairs, her two odd shoes making clacking noises and her hat more crooked than ever. When I caught up with her, she was talking to herself. I took her arm and stopped her.

“Don’t babble,” I said. “How long have you known about Isabel’s baby?”

“Since before Larry married her, of course.”

I got the story from her on the way home. She let me take her in my car, sending her own away. As she had no confidence whatever in me as a driver I think this shows her state of mind. She was lucid enough, however.

She sat beside me in the car, that wild red hair of hers blowing in all directions, and told me the story.

You have to hand it to the Lelands of this world after all. When Larry wanted to marry Isabel, Andrew Leland had come to Strathmore House—come stiffly, I gathered, in morning coat and striped trousers, but with two small spots of color on his cheeks. He had lost no time, either. He had not even sat down. He had stood—still stiffly—in front of the fireplace and said:

“I understand your boy wants to marry my girl.”

“And why not?” said Mother.

“That’s what I came to talk about.”

He told her the whole story. Isabel was determined not to tell Larry. She had threatened to kill herself if the affair came out On the other hand, in fairness to everybody … I suppose Mother surprised him then.

“Listen to me, Andrew Leland,” she said. “It’s you who are ashamed of Isabel. I’m not.” And she had added maliciously: “There are some advantages of coming from below the tracks even a generation or two ago. Keep your mouth shut and let them alone.”

It was settled between them finally. I believe he even condescended to take a glass of sherry before he left. But he would not let Isabel have a church wedding, or even a veil. The veil, he said gravely, was symbolic, and Isabel was no longer a virgin. Which was why, it appeared, I had cried all night when I learned that Larry was going to be married, and there were to be no bridesmaids. It’s a queer conventional world the Lelands and their kind make for themselves, and others.

I got Mother home safely and persuaded her to go to bed. And that is the way things stood with us at ten o’clock on Monday morning. Isabel had been killed on Thursday night and Barnes early on Friday morning. Alma had been stabbed Sunday night. Donald Scott was probably still being interrogated, and we heard nothing whatever from Larry.

Sarah disappeared at noon that day. The police had unlocked Alma’s rooms, and I had been helping her go through Alma’s things. We had no idea what to do with them. She had a stepbrother somewhere, but I could not find his name or address anywhere.

We were still working when one of the men came to say Sarah was wanted on the telephone, and she went and didn’t come back. I waited a half hour. Then I tried to find her, but all I learned was that she had put on her hat and coat and simply walked out. In thirty years with Mother she had never done such a thing, and Mother was furious.

“She must have lost her mind,” she snapped. “Not a word to me! What does the old fool mean by such a thing?”

She was still in a bad temper when just after lunch—and still no Sarah—a message came from Headquarters. It was quite polite. Would Mother and I come to Inspector Welles’s office at three o’clock? I said with equal politeness that we would, and hung up, feeling that it had sounded like an invitation to tea. But I didn’t trust them, nor did Mother when I told her. But she agreed to go. She apparently intended to make up for her morning appearance, for warm as it was she put on her mink coat and all her pearls, and she walked into the Inspector’s office like a combination of the Queen of Sheba and a woman who has just had a severe chill.

There were a number of people in the office. Andrew Leland got up when we entered. So did Don. And Larry came over and kissed Mother. Tony King nodded from the telephone. He looked as though he had been up all night again, but he smiled at me.

I could not take my eyes from the Inspector’s desk. There was a queer collection on it: the shabby felt hat, Larry’s new opera one, none the better for its hours in the tree, a woman’s worn pocketbook, a slug from a gun and some magnified photographs of it, the platinum chain and tassel found under Isabel’s body when she was killed, and the blotter Tony had taken away from Alma’s desk.

The knife was there too, its reindeer handle looking more moth-eaten than ever. I looked away quickly, and Mother went pale under her makeup.

There was a silence in the room. Tony put down the receiver and looked at the Inspector.

“Check,” he said.

The Inspector nodded. He looked grave. He picked up the chain and looked at it, but it was a minute or two before he spoke.

“I have asked you all to come here,” he said slowly, “because you are all vitally concerned. This has been a curious case, in that one or two of the people most concerned in it have hardly appeared at all. It also involves baring certain hitherto concealed facts. I regret that this is necessary, but as you all know them …”

He put down the chain.

“From the first,” he said, “we had only one or two clues. We had this chain, we had a man’s old felt hat, and we had the curious episode of Barnes, one of our own force, denying that he had seen the woman Anna Griffin who claimed to have spoken to him.

“I am going to read you the statement made by Barnes’s wife as to that night.”

He picked up a paper and put on his glasses.

“Jim came home Thursday night after he had put up his horse at the police stable. It was about midnight. He did not act like himself. He said he had a headache and took some aspirin. Then he said he had a surprise for me. He reached in his pocket and took out fifty dollars, two twenties and a ten. ‘Go and buy yourself something pretty. That’s the way the rich do things.’ I couldn’t believe it. Now and then he gets five or ten dollars for work like that when he’s assigned to it, but never fifty.

“I was a little worried. I asked him if it was clean money. He looked funny but he said it was.

“He went to bed, but I don’t think he slept much. I wakened up when the bell rang. He leaned out the window and someone said there was trouble at the Shepard place, and to come along. He acted queer about that, too. He told me not to mention the money. Then he dressed in a hurry and went out. There was a car waiting for him.

“He came back an hour or two later. He looked terribly worried. He said young Mrs. Shepard had been killed. Someone had stabbed her. But he did not know anything about it. Only he did not go back to bed. He stayed downstairs walking the floor. I did not understand it. Then before daylight I heard another car stop, and Jim went outside.

“I heard him go out to the car and it drove off. That is all I know. Only he has not been back since, and I am almost crazy.”

He put down the paper.

“Now there are several curious things about that story,” he said. “Barnes gets fifty dollars for an ordinary routine job. That’s a lot of money for a police officer. But we know Barnes. He wouldn’t have been easy to bribe. If he had, and a murder was committed …

“Let that go. He had a headache and he asked for aspirin, and later after we had questioned him and he went home he was called out to a car and taken away. That, coupled with his confusion when we sent for him that night and his denial that the maid Anna Griffin had spoken to him, pointed to several things. Either he had not seen the Griffin woman, or he was lying for some reason of his own.

“I think we know now that he was lying, and why. When he was found he had been shot. But there was also a bruise on his head. It had been there long enough before his death to be swollen and discolored.

“That—in spite of a statement I shall read to the contrary—pointed to one thing. Barnes had been attacked and knocked unconscious before or during Mrs. Shepard’s murder. He wouldn’t admit it. No police officer likes to admit a thing like that. And he never had another chance to admit it. He was kidnapped a few hours later, probably at the point of a gun. Kidnaped and shot.

“We don’t like things of that sort happening to our men.”

He paused. There was not a stir in the room. Tony King was listening intently. Larry looked uncomfortable. Don seemed puzzled, and Andrew Leland had not moved.

“Now we have to remember the circumstances at the Shepard place that night,” the Inspector went on. “Nobody could get in who didn’t show a card, both at the gate and at the door. The rear service gates were padlocked and watched. Even the house doors, with Barnes guarding the main entrance. Then why was Barnes knocked out? We felt it was because someone had to get either in or out of the house—or both—without being seen.”

He gave a thin smile.

“That is why we held Mr. Shepard,” he said. “He has however a completely clean slate.”

I think Mother drew her first full breath in days, and he looked at her.

“We had some excuse, of course,” he said. “The issue was confused by Mrs. Shepard, who found the knife and hid it. I am sure she meant well, but—”

“You found it,” Mother said grimly. “You sent that plumber, didn’t you?”

“I’m sorry to say we didn’t find it, Mrs. Shepard. That is part of what I am going to tell. I may say before I begin that fine work on the part of Captain King has helped us greatly; he deserves great credit, especially as he is still recovering from a wound received in Africa.”

I suppose I jumped. I know I looked furiously at Tony. He didn’t give me a glance, however. He merely started ruffling through some papers in front of him, and it was the Inspector who smiled at me.

“It was Captain King,” he went on blandly, “who first drew our attention to the statement in the autopsy that Mrs. Shepard had borne a child. He learned that Mr. Shepard was not—had not been—a father, and he found a significance in the chain which we had missed. He was also aware of certain movements of the knife which for reasons of his own he kept to himself for some time.

“This case, as most of you now know, began with the elopement and marriage of Isabel Leland to Donald Scott. For reasons I need not go into, the marriage was ended by a secret divorce within a short time. It was not until after the divorce that Isabel Scott realized that she was to have a child.

“She did not tell her mother. She went to her father, and he took her to California. The boy was born in a hospital there, and ten days later was handed over to a childless couple. The baby’s mother resented this. She wanted the child, but her father opposed the idea. What she did was to put this small chain around the baby’s neck, and to make with ink an ornament from something she was wearing—possibly a bed jacket—so that in the future she might at least identify him.

“Her own identity had been carefully shielded. She was there under another name. But the unexpected happened. Someone in the hospital, a patient recovering from an appendicitis operation, had seen her door open and had recognized her. Isabel Scott, as she was at that time, did not know this; but it was not hard for the patient to learn why she was there—or that the whole affair was being kept secret.

“What was learned also was that the doctor on the case was looking for a respectable family to take the child. Such a family was brought forward. The name was Armstrong and two or three years later, with the consent of Mr. Leland and the mother, who had since married Lawrence Shepard, adoption papers were taken out. The boy took the name Armstrong, that of his foster parents, but he remained his mother’s legal heir, and there was a considerable fortune involved.

“All this time the Armstrongs remained in the West, with Mr. Leland still paying a monthly sum for the child. Then something happened. Mrs. Shepard’s second marriage had produced no children. She began to want her son. She talked to her husband about adopting a boy, and at the same time she heard from the Armstrongs. They were willing to give up the child, but for a large cash payment—fifty thousand dollars. With her estate in trust and her father completely opposed to any such action, she was pretty desperate. She had never told Donald Scott that he was a father. Now she thought of him. He had risen fast. He had made considerable money. She wrote him the facts, and she enclosed a snapshot of the Armstrong woman taken in California, with the boy one of a group of children.

“But he called her up and told her he couldn’t help—not to that extent anyhow. He had lived well. He hadn’t saved a great deal. He sent the photograph back, asking her to destroy it.

“Then the Armstrongs came East with the boy, whose first name is Scott, by the way. Mrs. Shepard had some meetings with Armstrong in the park. Her chauffeur has identified him. She also saw her son at least once. He is an attractive child and she became more anxious than ever.

“However, the Armstrongs still held out for their fifty thousand. They even threatened to raise the ante. She explained her situation to them; she had only her income, no capital, but the boy Scott would have her entire estate on her death. That was her mistake. A terrible one, for now she was more valuable dead than alive.”

I looked at Mother. Her poor chin was quivering. She could understand that pitiful story of Isabel’s, wanting her son, begging for him, seeing him and loving him, and then never getting him. Larry got out his handkerchief and blew his nose.

The Inspector went on.

“I must say here that Mrs. Armstrong was not a party to much that happened. She was willing to give up the boy if it meant a better life for him. Otherwise she refused to cooperate.”

He looked at Andrew Leland, sitting with his head bowed.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Leland. I shall have to go into some details here. If you care to leave …?”

“Go ahead,” Andrew said quietly.

“In a sense,” the Inspector resumed, “Mrs. Shepard’s death goes back to the hat here. It belongs to Armstrong, who was the drunken waiter who was ejected before the dinner that night. He has identified it himself.

“His drunkenness was an act. He was sober enough when he left. Perhaps I’d better read you his testimony. I shall read it as it was given. You will notice that he has refused to answer certain questions.”

He took up several sheets of paper fastened by a clip and put on his glasses again. “It is in the form of question and answer, but I think it is clear.” He began to read:

Question: What did you do when you were put out of the house?

Answer: I was only playing drunk. One of the policemen at the back door took me a few yards. Then he let me go.

Q. And after that?

A. Well, I was in the evening clothes I had rented, and I had somebody’s top hat from the men’s room. I went to the officer on the horse and told him I’d give him fifty dollars to let me ride his horse around the place for a while. I suppose he thought I was a guest, and tight at that. He considered it a minute. Then he got off his horse. He said fifty dollars was worth a ride in any man’s money. I didn’t get on the horse. Not then anyhow. I hit him on the head with a rock I’d picked up. Not too hard. Just enough to put him to sleep.

Q. What did you do with him?

A. I dragged him away from the drive. It was pretty dark. I put on his cap and coat. Then I heard the woman coming—Anna Griffin is her name, I think. So I got on the horse and when she spoke I answered.

Q. Why was it necessary to knock out Barnes?

A. Well, the place was full of cops, and we had business that night.

Q. What sort of business? To kill Mrs. Shepard?

A. I told you we never killed her.

Q. Then why did you attack Barnes?

The Inspector looked up.

“I shall skip the next few questions and answers. We felt he was lying. He mumbled something about Mrs. Shepard’s being prepared to pay over the money that night, in exchange for an agreement to let her adopt the boy. But there was no money in the house when she was found. Barnes was a danger, of course, if murder was contemplated. Armstrong, however, has persisted that murder was never part of the plan.” Then he read:

Q. You say “we.” Do you mean yourself and your wife?

A. My wife wasn’t. in it Leave her out. She wasn’t near the place that night.

Q. Then you did it yourself. You knocked Barnes out and then killed Mrs. Shepard.

A. I never put a foot inside the house. That’s the truth, before God.

He put down the paper.

“He collapsed at that point,” he said quietly. “We got the rest of his testimony later. I think I should explain our own situation, as it was until the death of Alma Spencer last night.

“You must remember that at this time none of us had ever heard of the Armstrongs. The autopsy had told us Mrs. Shepard had borne a child. King learned that she had not had a child by her present husband. He remembered the chauffeur’s story of her meeting a man in the park. And when Mrs. Armstrong was murdered by being thrown from a bridge, her bag was thrown with her. It contained not only Mr. Shepard’s knife; there was also a small piece of paper in it with the words ‘Strathmore House. Linden Avenue bus.’ That connected her definitely with the case.”

“I thought she committed suicide,” I said, in a thin voice. “Do you mean her husband killed her?”

“No,” he said gravely. “He did not kill her, Miss Shepard.”

 

XVI

There was a rather prolonged silence after that. The King man lit a cigarette and smiled at me. His broken tooth had not been repaired.

The Inspector picked up the knife from his desk.

“There has been a determined effort all along to pin his wife’s death on Mr. Shepard,” he said. “This knife was left where we would be sure to find it, under the stair carpet. When Jim Barnes was killed, it was with Mr. Shepard’s automatic, and in his automobile. Even the opera hat which Armstrong got rid of after he had used it to deceive Barnes belonged to Mr. Shepard.

“But to get back to the knife, which has wandered all through these tragedies. Yesterday here in this office Miss Judith Shepard told how her mother had taken it and where it had been hidden. She told us something else, however. She said that the tank in Mrs. Shepard’s bathroom had gone out of order while they were at the inquest, and that a policeman, pretending to be a plumber, had taken the knife away.

“Now we use indirect methods of that sort now and then, but we had sent no plumber to Strathmore House. It looked like another effort to produce the knife and thus close our case against Lawrence Shepard. Here’s what Armstrong says.” He read:

Question: Did you get the knife from Mrs. Shepard’s bathroom?

Answer: Yes.

Q. How did you know it was there?

No answer.

Q. Why did your wife take it back?

A. She wasn’t standing for putting the blame on Mr. Shepard. She talked and talked, so I gave it to her. She left it at Strathmore House.

Q. How did she get it back after that? She had it in her bag when she fell. You know that, don’t you?

A. (After a pause) I don’t know how she got it again. I took the boy for a walk that night. When I came back, she was gone. I never saw her again until I found her in the hospital.

He took off his glasses and looked at me.

“Where had you put it, Miss Shepard?” he said. “Have you any idea how it got back to Mrs. Armstrong’s bag?”

I shook my head.

“I don’t see how she found it,” I said. “She came back to see me that night, but I was out. She may have seen it, of course. She was in the hall alone for some time.”

“You had hidden it in the hall?”

“It was in the fish pool,” I said, and felt myself flushing.

He nodded without speaking, and picked up his papers again.

“However Mrs. Armstrong got it,” he said, “she had it in her bag Saturday night when she was killed. The bag was found in the barge when she fell. It went to the hospital with her, and the knife was still in the bag when Armstrong, after waiting for her all night, read what had happened in the morning paper.

“I don’t think he knew she had the knife. He probably opened the bag and found it there. He was in bad shape, anyhow. He either grew faint or pretended to. Certainly he got it while the nurse was out of the room getting some aromatic ammonia for him. Now let’s get back to our own side of the case.

“By that time, as late as yesterday morning, we knew only certain things. We knew through Mr. Leland that Mrs. Shepard had borne a legitimate child, which had been adopted in Los Angeles by a family named Armstrong. We knew Donald Scott was the father of the child. And we knew that a woman who had refused to give her name in the hospital had died, apparently a suicide. There was nothing to connect her with the case, or to indicate that she had not tried to kill herself.

“At the same time, Mr. Leland was convinced that Lawrence Shepard had killed his wife in a fit of jealousy after he had discovered her past. The murder of Barnes was still unsolved, and the identity of the woman who had jumped off the bridge was still unknown to us.

“Then we got a break at last. A clerk at the hospital reported finding a slip with the words ‘Strathmore House, Linden Avenue bus’ in the woman’s bag, and also discovered that the knife, which was on the list of its contents, had disappeared.

“We set out to locate Armstrong. He was using another name, but it was fairly easy, with the woman missing and a six-year-old boy around. We finally located them at a boarding-house in a respectable part of town, but Armstrong himself was missing. He never went back to the hospital.”

He stopped and drew a long breath.

“Last night Alma Spencer was stabbed,” he said. “That made four murders. It looked pretty bad. We didn’t locate Armstrong immediately, but we decided this morning to bring Mr. Scott here for questioning.” He looked at Don. “I’m sorry, Mr. Scott. I’ll have to go into this.”

Don said nothing, and he went on.

“We kept him here for some time. He admitted his marriage. He admitted that Isabel Shepard had appealed to him for money to help get their child back. But he denied everything else. And by that time we had picked up Armstrong himself. He was attempting to leave town.”

He looked at Mother.

“He had been identified as the plumber who repaired your bathroom. He knew the knife was there. Now that was a curious thing. Who knew it was in the tank in Mrs. Shepard’s bathroom? For someone did know, either an occupant of the house or someone who had free access to it. We had interrogated the servants at various times, without result.

“However, to go back to Armstrong. This is what developed at his second interrogation. I need not say, of course, that the felt hat left at Strathmore House was his.” He read again.

Question: What do you know about Alma Spencer’s death?

Answer: Nothing.

Q. Where were you last night?

A. Just walking around the streets. My wife had been murdered. What do you think I’d do? Go to a movie?

Q. You say your wife was murdered. What do you mean by that?

A. She was. She’d never kill herself. She was crazy about the boy.

Q. Who would kill her?

No answer.

Q. Why do you think she was killed?

No answer.

Q. All right. How do you think it happened?

A. She wasn’t very big. Anybody could have lifted her over that railing and thrown me bag after her. The knife was in it. Or maybe she climbed up to throw the bag into the river, and somebody gave her a shove.

Q. Who would do a thing like that?

No answer.

Q. How did she get the knife again?

A. I’m not talking.

Q. Why did you kill Barnes?

A. I never killed him. I didn’t know he was going to be killed.

Q. But you helped to dispose of the body?

No answer.

Q. Who did kill him, Armstrong? You’d better begin to talk.

A. I’ve nothing to say. I didn’t shoot him. I don’t own a gun.

Q. You were fond of your wife, weren’t you?

A. She was the best ever.

Q. Did she stab Isabel Shepard?

A. Who? My wife? Good God, no.

The Inspector looked up. “He broke down at that point,” he said. “It was some time before he was ready to talk again. And as I say we already had an idea of the truth through Captain King. I’ll ask the captain to tell you about that.”

Tony looked surprised. He threw away his cigarette and walked over to the desk.

“Well,” he said rather shyly for him. “I suppose you might say that my interest in this case started when I heard how Mr. Lawrence Shepard and his wife were married. There was no big wedding. There was no veil, no orchids, no white satin bride’s dress. I simply tucked it away in my mind and forgot it. Later on I remembered it and what it might mean: a second marriage, not a first.

“I felt all along that a woman was the murderer, the way Mrs. Shepard was dressed when she was found—or wasn’t dressed. Only two or three women were apparently involved, except for the servants, so I had to consider Mrs. Shepard and her daughter. But the Mayor was certain Mrs. Shepard had been with him until he left. That left the daughter, Judith.”

He glanced at me and looked away. I suppose my face must have been something.

“Somebody had done away with the knife, and it looked as though Mrs. Shepard had taken it from under the stair carpet. She sat there almost all night, and I had a bit of the carpet examined. I needn’t go into that. The knife had been left there.

“Then, Friday night, I found Judith Shepard trying to bury the knife. I got a flashlight picture of her. But she’s a good runner. She escaped with the knife.”

Larry half rose from his chair.

“Are you trying to say that my sister had anything to do with my wife’s death?” he demanded.

Tony shook his head.

“She and your mother were trying to protect you, Mr. Shepard,” he said. “They had a fool idea that it would send you to the chair. It might have, at that.”

He paused and looked in Mother’s direction. Mother was practically purple.

“However, I had to let Judith Shepard out. There was no motive, and I checked with the men she ate and danced with that night. She apparently hadn’t left the house.

“There was still no motive up to Saturday afternoon, when I saw Mr. Leland. The autopsy had revealed Isabel Shepard had borne a child, and Mr. Leland said the child was legitimate. That might have been a motive. She had inherited a trust fund and the boy was her legal heir, adopted or not. At least we began to work from there.

“The Los Angeles police reported that the family who had adopted the child had left the city a month ago. We began looking for them. But one thing puzzled us. According to Mr. Leland they had not known the identity of the mother.

“I got the name of the hospital where the child had been born. It was an institution for women only. It was possible that someone, either a patient or an attendant, had seen Mrs. Shepard—Mrs. Scott—there. I learned the date of the birth, and had the lists checked.

“I got it a few minutes ago.” He looked at me Inspector. “Take it away, sir,” he said. “Your turn.”

He sat down, looking rather smug, and lit a cigarette. Nobody had moved. The Inspector cleared his throat and picked up his papers again. Then he glanced at Mother.

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Shepard,” he said. “This may be a shock to you. As Captain King has said, the list of the people in the hospital came through only a short time ago. We knew the facts before, but we recognized one of the names.” He put on his glasses. “I shall skip part of the second interrogation of John Armstrong. He was in bad shape, and much was purely evasion.” He began to read.

Question: Why did you kill Alma Spencer?

Answer: Who says I killed her?

Q. I do. You took the knife from your wife’s bag at the hospital and stabbed her with it. Don’t deny it. We know it.

“There was a long silence here,” said the Inspector, looking up. “He seemed to be thinking things over.”

Question: Why did you kill her?

Answer: All right, I did. I did it because she killed my wife.

Q. What do you mean by that?

A. She threw or pushed her off the bridge. She knew too much.

Q. What did your wife know?

A. She knew that Alma stabbed Mrs. Shepard and shot the policeman. She was afraid he would remember me. But I swear to God I didn’t know she was going to kill anybody that night.

Q. How did the Spencer woman become involved in all this?

A. She knew about the boy. She’d been in the hospital as a patient when he was born. She fixed it for us to adopt him.

Q. You knew her at that time?

A. Knew her? I’ll say I did. She was my stepsister.

 

XVII

Tony King drove me home after it was over. He stopped the car once and took me into a bar for some brandy. I guess I needed it. But he didn’t talk and I couldn’t. You can’t live for years with a woman and then learn without shock that she has killed three people. I was still confused, too. I had seen the Armstrong man only once. That was when he dropped the tray of cocktails the night of the party: a thin mild-looking man giving a good imitation of having had too much to drink, but not vicious. Never vicious.

“What will they do to him?” I asked in a small voice.

“Probably only manslaughter. She killed his wife, remember. He’ll get a parole eventually.”

“I don’t seem to understand it all yet, Tony,” I said. “What about the knife? It kept moving all over the place.”

“Listen, dimwit,” he said. “What about Alma Spencer? You can bet she was moving all over the place, too. She’d left it for the police to find. Mother spoiled that, so Alma looks about and finds it in the tank. She’s too smart to take it. She sends for her stepbrother to come as a plumber, and he nabs it. All clear.”

I nodded.

“But things don’t work out so well. Stepsister-in-law isn’t having any. She brings it back, all nicely tied up in paper. And what do you do? You have the bright idea of burying it again. Only somebody catches you out. You drop it in the pool, and Alma sees you from that Romeo and Juliet balcony of yours and fishes it out.

“She’s getting pretty nervous, however. She doesn’t want the damned thing. That night she plays Juliet again and sees stepsister-in-law has come back. That looks like trouble, but you’re not there. Stepsister-in-law leaves and Alma meets her outside the house. She says: ‘Come along. You did a silly thing to bring it back, but let’s take a bus to the river and drop it in.’ Only she dumped stepsister-in-law in with it.”

“You think it’s funny, don’t you?” I said resentfully. “It isn’t, you know. I saw them that night. I thought it was two of the maids.”

He dropped his light touch immediately.

“No,” he said soberly. “No, it isn’t funny, Judy. Only this is no place for you to have the screaming meemies, and that’s what you were headed for.”

He told me a little more on the way home: that Alma had called her stepbrother toward morning after Isabel’s death and asked him to meet her near the Barnes house. She said they would have to talk to Barnes. The stepbrother didn’t want to go. He said Barnes had the fifty dollars, and he wasn’t likely to talk. Especially he wasn’t going to admit he’d been knocked out on duty by a man half his size. But she insisted, and he met her.

She had Larry’s car. She told Barnes he was wanted back at the scene of the murder, and that she had been sent to get him. He said Barnes was scared. He didn’t recognize Armstrong, in the back of the car. But the last thing Armstrong expected was to have her shoot him in the head before they reached our gates. Armstrong was frantic, but he says she was still cool. They drove on out a few miles, and he helped her to carry Barnes to where he was found. They tried to clean the car, too. There was a creek nearby. But they didn’t make much of a job of it.

“And you suspected me,” I said when he had finished.

“Well, think about it,” he said. “What did I know about you? What do I know about any of you economic royalists? I’m only a soldier. When I found you were only a pampered child of the rich, who could run like blazes, I changed my mind.”

“That was another dirty trick,” I said violently. “You hadn’t any business in civilian clothes, posing as a photographer. I don’t think it’s even allowed And if you think I’m impressed by all this playacting …”

He grinned at me, broken tooth and all.

“What was I to do? Go around in a uniform chasing down clues? I’d have been a pretty sight, wouldn’t I? Not that I’m not a pretty sight in it. You ought to see me. I’m something.”

“It might help,” I admitted.

He laughed out loud.

“I’ll show you someday,” he boasted. “Incidentally, I didn’t try to fool you. Welles is my uncle. I’m staying with him until I go back.”

“Back? To the war?”

“What do you think?”

And with that and the shock of the last few days and what not, I simply burst into tears and put my head on his shoulder. As I had on Don’s once, and on old Patrick’s. Only this didn’t go down as well. He gave a yelp and jerked away.

“Hey!” he said. “Keep off, will you? I’ve had a dirty Nazi’s bullet in there. It’s no pillow.”

Which of course didn’t help any. I sat there with the tears rolling down my face, thinking about Alma and his going back to war and what on earth had happened to Sarah and how soon I could get a war job until he finally stopped the car.

“Look here, haven’t you got a handkerchief?” he said. “And stop wailing. You’d make a hell of a soldier’s wife.”

“Who said anything about my being a soldier’s wife?” I said indignantly.

“It was just an idea. Forget it,” he said, and let it go at that. I could have slapped him.

He wouldn’t come in when we got home. He looked at the house and said it gave him the pip, as usual. And I was angry enough at last to tell him the truth.

“Why don’t you read the papers now and then?” I inquired stiffly. “Mother offered this place to the Government as a convalescent home for soldiers six months ago. They’re taking it over next month.”

He actually looked embarrassed, but he was still flippant.

“My apologies,” he said. “Give her a great big kiss from me, won’t you?”

“And I’m getting a war job,” I went on. “And Larry’s going into the Navy. We’re not such a bad lot after all, are we?”

“You break my heart,” he said, and showed that broken tooth of his again. “First you get it and then you break it. Well, that’s life.”

He drove off, leaving me standing there.

I stopped inside the front door. Mother was there, and Sarah; and chasing the fish around in the pool was a six-year-old boy. He was wet, the floor was sopping, and in the background Patrick was beaming and holding a mop.

Mother hardly noticed me. “The police sent for Sarah to look after him,” she said. “Isn’t he a pet?”

Well, he was, but as he chose that moment to fall in the pool, to be hauled out dripping, I hadn’t much chance at him. I knew he was a godsend to Mother, however. Already Alma was water over the dam, so to speak.

They bathed him and put him to bed, finally, quarreling bitterly over how many covers he needed and how high to raise the window. And that night after dinner Captain King arrived.

He was terrific. There were all sorts of insignia on his uniform, including a decoration the President had pinned on him, and Patrick looked stunned as he admitted him. The last time he had seen him he had been playing with the fish in the pool, in a suit that looked as though it had been slept in.

I blinked.

“Couldn’t you have done it a little at a time?” I said. “Say the trousers first, and so on? It’s rather overwhelming.”

“That’s the idea,” he observed complacently. “Overwhelm them. That’s my motto.”

But he was sober enough when he sat down. He looked around the library, and not through the open door to the hall, with its tapestries, its marble and fountain, and the gallery above.

“I hope the poor devils who come here to get well can take it,” he said. “It’s a grand idea and I’m for it. But has it ever occurred to you what the effect is on the people employed in a place like yours? It does something to people. It does something to me. And it did something to Alma Spencer. You’ve got to remember that, Judy.”

“Are you asking me to feel sorry for her?”

“Not exactly. But consider this: It was all right at first She saw a chance to get some support for her stepbrother and his wife, and when she learned the baby was open for adoption she had the Armstrongs apply. But I’m guessing that she wasn’t thinking of murder then. It took her a long time to come to that. Fifty thousand, divided between herself and the Armstrongs, looked like a fortune to her.

“Then—probably from Isabel herself—she learned that her fortune was in trust. Two million dollars, to go to the boy if she had no other children. And a long time before he would come of age to claim it. If Isabel died, of course.

“So she brought the Armstrongs East, and Isabel saw the boy and wanted him desperately. Alma hadn’t counted on that.

“She had to work fast. Suppose Isabel told her husband and he agreed to put up the money? What was fifty thousand compared to the control of two million until the child came of age? Remember, Alma liked money. She craved it. She’d seen it spent like water here for years. Maybe she wasn’t quite sane.

“She chose the night of the party, but the party almost defeated her. She had to get out of the house, and the doors were guarded At the last minute she got her stepbrother here as a waiter.

“She told him what to do: to play drunk and knock out Barnes. He says he didn’t want to do it. He was afraid. But even then he still believed she was only to collect the fifty thousand.

“Anyhow, with Barnes unconscious and out of sight, the rest was easy. Nobody could say she had left the party at all. She took down the chain and tassel which Isabel had insisted on as the final identification of her son, and she picked up your brother’s knife. She gave the chain to Isabel, and then—well, you know the rest. I imagine something scared her just then—perhaps Anna Griffin coming back—for she forgot the chain. If she hadn’t …”

I felt sick again. And he seemed to be blaming us as if we had driven her to it.

“We were good to her, Tony,” I protested.

“I’m sure you were, after your fashion. Like your brother Larry, who didn’t know she was around.”

I was on the sofa, and I remember leaning back and closing my eyes.

“You still don’t think much of us, do you?” I said.

He got up and came over to sit beside me, but I wasn’t leaning my head on his shoulder. I knew better.

“Let’s forget it,” he said. “What about this war job you’re taking?”

“It’s just an idea,” I said meekly.

“Any other better ideas?”

“I wouldn’t mind a good strong man helping to support me. I could work while he was away, couldn’t I?”

“What about after the war? If he’s just a common ordinary sort of guy—maybe he couldn’t even get a job.”

“I could support him, couldn’t I?”

“The hell you could,” he said, and took me in his arms. Almost immediately he let go of me, groaned, and rubbed his shoulder. “Goddamn Hitler,” he said and kissed me.

He insisted on seeing Mother before he left. We went upstairs, to find her in her nightgown and bare feet, padding out of Isabel’s boy’s room. She didn’t mind her condition—as I have said, she sees nothing shameful in good honest flesh—but she gave Tony a good long look.

“Good heavens,” she said. “Don’t tell me it’s you!”

“Just my working clothes,” he explained. “I thought I’d better tell you, Mrs. Shepard. Judy here has just made me an offer of marriage. At first I was inclined to refuse, but on thinking it over—”

You have to hand it to Mother. There she stood, looking like nothing on earth, her hair in curlers and her chin strap hanging around her neck. And did she care? She did not. She looked at Tony and gave him a heavenly smile.

“I hope you accept her,” she said. “I never could handle her myself. You look as though you might.”

“I’ll handle her all right,” he said grimly, and kissed her.

That’s the romantic way in which I was given away in marriage….