THE INSPECTOR HAD GIVEN me plenty to think about after he had gone. Once more I went over in my mind the Lancaster household and what I knew of it: over Mr. Lancaster taking his daily walk, and Emily living her vicarious life out of a loan library, and Margaret holding desperately to her youth. Over Peggy too, cheerful and pretty, and maybe carried away by Mr. Dalton and the attentions of a gentleman. But it was only the same vicious circle. Who among them all would have done so terrible a thing, or could have done it? And how was it possible for any criminal literally smeared with blood to have escaped out of a locked and bolted house into a brilliant summer day, without being discovered at once?
Mary came in at half past eleven, an hour which would have shocked Mother, and I waited until both she and Annie had gone safely up to bed. Then I went out to the kitchen porch on my rather grisly errand.
I found myself oddly nervous and apprehensive. The excitement of the day before had vanished, and with it much of my courage. The fact that the night was bright, with a clear cold moon, only seemed to make matters worse. It exaggerated the shadows, and the wind turned every tree and bush into a moving thing, alive and menacing. There was not even the comfort of Holmes in his room over the garage, for he was once again sleeping in the house at Mother’s order. Rather sulkily, I had thought.
I intended to burn the glove in the furnace, and even while I was fishing in the can for it the thought of the dark basement rather daunted me. And then, with the glove in my hand, I looked up and saw a man standing on the path just below! That settled it. Police or not, that glove had to go into the furnace before it was found; and in a perfect hysteria of terror and anxiety I shot into the house and down the cellar stairs.
I remember pausing only long enough to press the switch at the top of the basement steps which lights the cellar, and then of running on down. At the foot of the stairs, however, I stopped abruptly. I had not even closed the kitchen door, an act so foolhardy that my first impulse was to rush back again and do it. But there was the glove, damaging and maybe damning, and ahead of me the long passage forward to the furnace cellar, with the darkened doors which opened off it.
I had my choice and I took it. I went forward toward the furnace, and it was when I had almost reached the small room where we store our fire wood that I heard somebody coming down the cellar stairs.
I managed to turn and look behind me, but I could not have moved if the house had been on fire. And still those awful steps came on, heavy steps that were trying to be light. With their approach I made a final superhuman effort, rushed into the wood cellar, fell over a piece of wood that had slipped from the pile and simply lay there, half-conscious.
I was aroused by the light of an electric flash on my face, and a strange male voice that was not entirely strange, saying:
“Oh, I say! I am sorry!”
“Who is it?” I managed at last. I could see nothing; and the voice laughed a little.
“Well, I’m a friend,” it said, “although I don’t blame you for doubting it. Are you hurt?”
I sat up, and between me and the door I could make out the figure of a tall man, now bent forward.
“I’m mostly shocked and scared,” I said. “If you’ll get out into the light so I can see who you are—”
He did so at once, and I saw that it was the man who had blown up the Wellington range. But I saw something else; he had a flashlight in his left hand, but his right held a blue automatic. He realized that too at that moment, for he slipped it into his pocket.
“Sorry again!” he said lightly. “You see, I thought you were a burglar when I heard you on the porch. And these being unhealthy days around this neighborhood, I simply followed you in. Why in the world did you leave the door unlocked? You ought to know better.”
“I forgot it,” I said lamely.
“Now that’s interesting.” He looked at me cheerfully. “That’s very interesting. With everyone around here locked in against a possible lunatic or against poor Jim, you forget to fasten the kitchen door!”
And then suddenly I remembered him.
“I know you now. You are a friend of his, aren’t you? I saw you there one night, when Helen was giving a party.”
“Great party giver, Helen,” he commented briefly. “Well, every man to his taste; every woman too,” he added. “And now, shall I go up and see what you put into that can? Or will you tell me?”
“You are not a policeman?”
“Are you insulting me, young woman?”
But his eyes were sober enough.
“Look here,” he said, “can’t we go into the laundry and sit on the tubs or something? You and I have some matters to discuss, and I’ve got a stiff leg from that fall.” And when I hesitated: “Jim is counting on you, Miss Lou; on you and me. He’s in a pretty tight place.”
Then and there I made up my mind, and I went back into the wood cellar and got the glove. I simply handed it to him.
“I didn’t put anything into the trash can. I got this out of it,” I said shakily, “and it can send Jim Wellington to the chair.”
He took it and examined it. Then without another word he led the way back into the laundry, and while I sat on a box and he used the ironing table (all the Crescent irons its table linens on a table) I told him the whole story. When I had finished he did as Mother had done. He put the glove to his nose and sniffed.
“Boot polish, of course,” he said. “And something else too,” he added with delicacy. “Well, it’s hard to believe, isn’t it? Yet there it is.”
“There what is?”
“Our case. I wonder—” he checked himself, and smiled at me. “You’ve given Jim a break tonight,” he said. “The first he’s had, and he certainly needed it. Now go over it again, and let me listen.”
So I did, and he sat awkwardly on the laundry table and took it all in without a word. When I had finished he nodded, put the glove into his pocket and then slid to his feet.
“Good work, Miss Lou. It would be interesting to know just how Margaret Lancaster found it, and whether she’s getting rid of it out of pure altruism or not. But that can wait. The main thing is that we’ve got it. We have a long way to go, little lady; it’s going to be darned hard to prove Jim’s innocence. But that’s what I’m here for, and you too, I gather.”
“I’d do anything I can,” I said shakily, and suddenly burst into tears. He came over then and patted me on the shoulder, and I was conscious that there still hung about him a faint odor of scorched hair. In spite of myself that made me smile, and he touched his eyebrows ruefully.
“I admit I’ve lost something in looks,” he said. “You may not believe it possible, but it’s true. Just now I’m glad it’s a cool night, for lacking my eyebrows I’m like a house that has lost its eaves!”
His nonsense gave me back my control, which is no doubt what he intended.
But he was noncommittal about himself and his presence there. It seemed that his home was somewhere else.
“I’m here because Jim is in trouble,” he said lightly. “Frat brother, you know; the good old grip and the magic word. Which, by the way, in this case is silence.”
That was my second encounter with Mr. Herbert Ranchester Dean, usually referred to by Helen as Bertie Dean; the criminologist who, working with our own police, finally solved our crimes. Not for some days was I to know his profession, nor for weeks of that laboratory of his which, when I finally saw it, looked not unlike the one where Mother goes annually for her various tests.
But of the man himself and his work he gave me the best description when, after almost two weeks of death and absolute horror, the answer was spread across the newspapers of every city in the country, and our reign of terror was over.
“I am not a lone wolf,” he said. “I hunt with the pack. The actual fact is that I’d be helpless without the police, while they need me only now and then. They have the machinery, for one thing. What I have is a line of specialized knowledge, odds and ends. Actually, I look after the little things, while they do the big ones.
“They’ve got their machinery, men, radio, teletype, files—the whole business of law and order. I’ve got mine. Mostly it’s a microscope! But in this case I played in luck. Ordinarily the gloves, for instance, would be their job; they’d find them and I’d tell them there was boot polish on them, if their noses didn’t!
“To get back to the gloves. There had to be gloves. Two gloves. The police knew that well enough; it takes two hands to use an axe. But you turned up both of them for me, one after the other, and the story of the crime was right there. All,” he added, with his quizzical smile, “but the identity of the criminal.”
But as I say, I knew nothing of all this that Friday night, the second after Mrs. Lancaster had been killed; nor of Herbert Dean’s reputation among the police of various cities. I did not know of Jim’s wire which had brought him in a plane some five hundred miles in less than as many minutes, although the police did! As a matter of fact, Mr. Dean’s first visit on his arrival had been to the Commissioner. That had been on Friday afternoon, after he had heard Jim’s story.
“What I would like to do,” he said, “is to look over the lay of the land for a day or two, before even your own fellows know I’m on the case. If that’s all right with you—”
“Anything’s all right with me, Dean. We’re in a hole over this case and it’s falling in on us. It’s sink or swim.” And having thus neatly mixed his metaphors, he inquired as to how Herbert Dean proposed to go about it.
“I’m taking a job in the Wellington house. The story’s somewhere along that Crescent, Blake. It has to be. And maybe the servants will talk.”
Which last reveals an optimism not justified by the facts. Our servants may have talked among themselves, almost certainly they did. But never did they more than pass the time of day with Mr. Herbert Ranchester Dean, expert criminologist and for a few days what he called gentleman’s gentleman and cook-butler to Jim Wellington.
But I knew nothing of this when, the glove carefully wrapped in a bit of old newspaper, Mr. Dean slipped out the kitchen door like a shadow, and I closed and locked it behind him. It was not until I got upstairs that I became uneasy. After all, I had only this man’s word that he was working for Jim, and that vague recollection of having seen him there once on the porch at a party. It was well after twelve then, and from that time until almost two in the morning I simply walked the floor, uncertain and wretched.
It was two by my clock when I finally undressed, put out my light and went to a window to raise the shade.
I was in that state of exhaustion which makes sleep a remote thing, and so I stood by the window for a moment or two. Beneath me lay the two gardens, the Lancasters’ and our own; and that strip of lawn where Eben had been mowing the grass when Miss Emily had run shrieking out of the house. Between the two properties is a thin line of Lombardy poplars, slim and graceful, and suddenly a movement among them caught my attention.
There was a man standing there, close to the trunk of one of the trees and rather behind it. As I stared down he left his hiding place and sliding from tree to tree began to make his way silently and more rapidly than it sounds toward the rear and No Man’s Land. When he had left the poplars he abandoned all caution and commenced to move rapidly toward the rear. Who he was, whether tall or short, heavy or lean, I could not tell.
I stood by the window, stunned with astonishment. Before me was the Lancaster house, shrouded in trees save for that side entrance and for the roof which rose above them. It was dark, except for the faint light in Mr. Lancaster’s bathroom which he always kept on. Only when my eyes traveled to the roof did I see anything unusual, and then my previous astonishment turned to real alarm.
There was another man up there. A figure, anyhow. It was not erect. It was crawling on hands and knees, slowly and cautiously; and now and then it seemed to stop and to peer over the edge to where the mansard of the third floor ended in a gutter. There was something so deliberate and dreadful about the whole thing, outlined as it was against the moon, that at first I could scarcely move. Then at last I got myself under control and rushing down to the telephone, called the Lancaster house.
It was Emily who answered, her voice heavy and thick with sleep.
“What is it?” she said.
“It’s Louisa Hall, Miss Emily.”
“Good heavens, Louisa! Is anything wrong? I’ve had a sleeping powder, and I’d just got to sleep.”
“Listen, Miss Emily. Please don’t be frightened, and don’t make a noise or anything. I think there’s someone on your roof.”
“On the roof?” she said dully. “Are you sure?”
“Yes. He must have used a ladder to get there. If you’ll waken someone and take away the ladder you’ll have him trapped, and I’ll get the police.”
She made no immediate reply. She seemed to be standing there, undecided and heavy with whatever narcotic had been given her. But at last she spoke again.
“I can’t believe it; but I’ll tell Margaret.”
She did not even hang up the receiver, and I wondered what had happened. Then I heard the sound of her rather heavy footsteps in the hall, and knew that she was on her way to call Margaret.
When I went back to look at the roof the figure was gone. Perhaps through the open windows it had heard the shrill sound of the telephone bell. Indeed now I think there is no doubt of it. Anyhow that part of the roof which I could see was empty; and when I had reached the street and located the officer who was still on duty around the Lancaster house, we could find no sign of any ladder whatever.
The officer was skeptical.
“Maybe you dreamed it, miss.”
“Dreamed it? I haven’t even been to bed!”
He eyed me in the moonlight.
“Keep pretty late hours around here, don’t you? For a quiet place.”
“Perhaps you consider it quiet. Personally I don’t.”
Margaret joined us on the front porch then, and was as much at a loss as we were.
“It doesn’t seem possible, Louisa,” she said, with a worried frown. “I got Father’s revolver, and Emily and I went up to the cedar room. The ladder is where it ought to be, and nothing has been disturbed.”
I explained to the officer. Both the Lancaster house and ours have on the third floor a small cedar room, with a trap door in the ceiling; and each house keeps in the cedar room a portable ladder for the use of the men who periodically go over the roofs and paint the gutters. It was to this ladder that Margaret referred, and to this room that she took the policeman while I went back home. Only a few minutes later I saw the officer himself on the flat roof and staring about him, but apparently he discovered nothing suspicious, and soon he too disappeared.
That was, as I have said, on Friday night, or rather early Saturday morning. It was two-thirty when at last I crawled into bed, and fell into the sleep of utter exhaustion.