SO QUIETLY HAD THIS been done that even Herbert Dean had not known it when he had made that visit to me between ten and eleven o’clock of that day.
It was Jim Wellington who came bursting in to tell me at noon, fortunately finding Mother at the Lancasters’ again and myself up and in a chair. But he wasted no time on polite inquiries.
“Look here,” he said. “Where’s Dean? We’ve got to locate him.”
“Why? Is there anything new?”
“New? They’ve arrested George Talbot for killing Emily Lancaster. That’s new, isn’t it? And the devil is that they’ve got it on him. The bullet that killed Emily fits his gun. And when I say fits it, I mean fits it; scratches and all.”
He was almost inarticulate with fear for George and anger as to the whole situation, but at last I got the story pretty much as I know it now.
Early that morning there had appeared at Headquarters a rather frightened negro woman, the Talbots’ Amanda, accompanied by a pompous black man who was her husband; and prompted by him Amanda had told when and where she had found the empty shell in the Talbots’ drying yard.
The Inspector after his long night was still at home and in bed, but Mr. Sullivan was there and heard the story. He let the negroes go but kept the shell, and he apparently sat back and thought about it for some time. Before him on his desk was the report of that scuffle on the grapevine path between Herbert Dean and George the night before, and also of the incident of the stable later on. It seemed to him, and he has repeated this since, that things in general, including Emily Lancaster’s murder, had rather shifted toward the Talbot end of the Crescent, so at last he got a car and drove out there.
George had a forty-five; he knew that. Not only that. George had acknowledged being outside the night of the shooting, and having had to be admitted to the house later on. The more he thought it over the less Sullivan liked it, or the better; I suppose it depends on the point of view. But he had no intention of arresting George Talbot at that time.
He had taken a uniformed man with him and they found George, grumpy after an almost sleepless night, in the stable and ready to get out of his ancient car. Rather apologetically they asked if they might see his gun.
“What for?” he demanded. “Am I under suspicion now? You seem to have tried everyone else.”
“Not at all, but you understand that there is a routine to all this. We’re checking all the guns in the vicinity.”
That seemed to satisfy him, for he produced it at once from the pocket of the car. He was not particularly gracious about it, however.
“It’s such damned nonsense,” he complained. “I sit up all night and lose my sleep to protect the Lancaster house with that gun, and now I’m a suspect myself. I’ve got a permit, by the way. Do you want that?”
He seemed astounded when they did, but he produced it and they checked the number on it, which was correct. Certainly it was his own gun.
“I’ve cleaned it recently,” he said. “Yesterday evening, as a matter of fact. I knew I was taking it with me last night.”
“And when did you fire it last?” Sullivan asked him. But he could not remember. In the spring, he thought, or early summer, at a picnic. They had been shooting at empty bottles.
He was rather affronted than alarmed apparently when they took it away with them. After all, he had been up most of the night and was generally disgruntled anyhow. But in less than an hour he was at Police Headquarters. Examination had showed that bullets fired from his gun corresponded exactly under the microscope with the one which had killed Miss Emily.
Confronted with this fact, even shown the pictures, greatly enlarged, he either maintained a stubborn silence or reiterated his earlier story. He had slept with the gun under his pillow ever since Mrs. Lancaster was killed. He had put on the safety catch and crawled out the window with it in his hand. He had not fired it at all; had had no reason to fire it.
What was more, no one else had fired it. It had never left his possession. Since the Thursday before he had slept on it at night and carried it with him by day.
On the night before, knowing he was to spend the night as he had, he had taken it entirely apart, had taken out the barrel and the spring, had oiled and rubbed it and then reloaded it.
“Why would I keep it, if I’d killed poor old Emily?” he demanded. “Don’t you suppose I know that every gun puts its mark on a bullet? I’m not a fool.”
“Then you ought to know that these marks are identical.”
They showed him the enlargements of photographs, but he only shook his head.
“That’s your business,” he said. “Mine’s to get out of here with a whole skin. But don’t fool yourselves that anybody else has had that gun of mine. If you think that you don’t know our house. We’re not only locked up against the world. We’re locked up against each other!”
That was the best they could do. They held him all day and well into the night, and then they had to let him go home. They let him go because there were some things they could not understand about the automatic; especially about that empty shell of Amanda’s. I am no expert in ballistics, but I believe it had to do with a firing pin. There was some microscopic deviation there, but small as it was it released George.
He was not free, of course. Thereafter, and until our third mystery was solved, I was more than once to meet George walking briskly along with a detective following at a discreet distance; and to have George say:
“Just taking him around the block before I turn in. I’ve offered to put him on a leash, but he doesn’t fancy the idea.”
It must have been about the time in our reign of terror that the Commissioner of Police sent for Inspector Briggs and asked him ironically if he would like to take over the public library on Liberty Avenue as headquarters for the men on the case.
It was after luncheon on that same Tuesday that Mrs. Talbot and Lydia heard the news of George’s arrest, and they reacted in characteristic fashion. Mrs. Talbot at once called a taxi and fairly took Police Headquarters by assault.
“Where is my son?” she boomed. “Get out of my way, young man. My son is being illegally detained, and I’ll get him out of here if I have to engage every lawyer in this town.”
Lydia, indignant and frightened as well as agonized at being left behind, came in to see me.
“Of course he didn’t do it,” she said sitting as usual bolt upright on the edge of her chair. “Why should he? Anyhow I heard him getting out onto that shed roof, and there was no shot fired after that.”
“You should tell them that, Miss Lydia,” I said.
“I’ll tell them when they ask me.”
If she was alarmed for George, she was also highly curious about my own adventure. I had to sit and wait while she went back to look over the scene of it, and I can still see her after she came back, prim and late-Victorian on the edge of her chair, opening that bead bag of hers and taking out the clippings from the morning papers and giving them to me to read.
“I have kept them all,” she said. “I’m pasting them into a book, but I haven’t told Hester. It’s surprising, Louisa, how many there are.”
Strange, that casual little speech of hers, when I am writing this story largely from that very book, so neat and yet so lurid.
She did not stay long. She wandered into Mother’s room to see if a camera man who had been hidden in the bushes all morning was still there, and on discovering that he had gone she went away.
“I sent Lizzie out to drive him off,” she said, preparing to go. “But he only offered her ten dollars if she could get you to the front porch with a bandage on your head. Or he said a towel would do!”
I rather affronted her by laughing at this, and finally she went away. I remember watching her go out the door, and smiling at the butterfly hatpin in her hat. It was set on a bit of coiled wire so that the insect took on a curious activity as she walked, jerking and glittering uncannily. There was certainly nothing that morning to tell me that the time was near at hand when I was to see that same butterfly trampled into the ground; or that Lydia Talbot herself was soon to be added to our list of tragic mysteries.
I was much stronger that afternoon, and after she left Annie helped me into a dressing gown and put me into a chair. Mother, who had escaped the moment she saw Lydia, was still at the Lancaster house; for Margaret had had to go to the inquest over poor Emily, and somebody had to stay in the house.
It was still, incredible as it seems to me now, only Tuesday. The smell of hot irons on wet linen penetrated to my room, and now and then far off I could hear the thud of one as our own black Lily thumped it on the stove. All along the Crescent, though death and trouble seemed everywhere, the same process was going on. Dark hands were taking dampened rolls of this or that from our baskets, spreading them on tables and boards and ironing them. On clothes horses the finished products were hung to dry, and then folded down into their various hampers, Ruffles were fluted with fluting irons, and old damask carefully polished until it shone.
Yet the situation that Tuesday afternoon was strange enough, what with suspicion suddenly shifting from Jim to George Talbot; with reporters ringing our doorbell; with Mr. Lancaster slowly sinking in the white house across from my windows; with poor Emily still lying on a slab in the morgue, and nothing so far discovered as to the hiding place of the stolen gold.
Of actual physical clues, in the sense of something material, there were still only a half dozen. The police, so far as I can recall now, had only the series of photographs taken after each of the crimes; a number of fingerprints on cards, each card carefully marked; an automatic pistol, an empty shell and a bullet; the chest under the bed, and George Talbot! Somewhere put away they probably had those stained clothes of Jim Wellington’s, but I do not know. Also I dare say they still had those ridiculous and now withered blades of grass from the porch roof, but the sliver of wood from the screen I know had been mounted on a card and carefully kept.
I know that because after the whole thing was over the Inspector presented it to me!
They did not have the bit of stem which had been found in our hall, however. That the Commissioner of Police had gravely handed to Herbert Dean.
“Briggs here seems to think I need a salad!” he said. “He’ll be bringing me a rose geranium leaf next and asking me to smell it! Maybe you can find out what that stuff is, Dean. Not that I think it matters, but—well, take it along if you like.”
However, the police added another clue that Tuesday, and then sat around a desk at Headquarters and wondered just where it left them. That was the magnified photograph of a fingerprint from the bell which hung over Mrs. Lancaster’s bed, presumably hers, and beside it another one, of the thumbprint from the chest which had contained the money. There was no question but that they were the prints of the same thumb, and I believe the District Attorney sent for the Inspector on the strength of his discovery and told him he was the only man on the job worth a hill of beans.
“Good work, Briggs,” he said. “Now I suppose we have to guess whether the money was taken out of the chest by the old lady and hidden somewhere; or whether she found out it had been taken and was killed before she could make a fuss. No chance it’s still in the house, I suppose?”
“Not a chance, unless someone there is smarter than I think.”
Nevertheless, I believe they made another intensive search of the house that day, rapping walls and even examining the chimneys and the roof. But they found nothing whatever.
“And of course, Miss Lou,” the Inspector told me later, “it was still only a presumption that those prints were the old lady’s anyhow. The whole thing was guesswork, and how could we prove it? We didn’t like to ask for an exhumation order; the family would never have given it. And under the circumstances we hadn’t printed her before she was buried.”
Herbert Dean had one or two bits of evidence which he had not given to the police, however. Among these were the gloves, a short piece of hemp cord, and the buttons and charred paper from the fire in No Man’s Land. Also he now had the stem of the unidentified plant, over which that same day the botanical department of our local university was working. But he also had, carefully stowed away, the end of a rather expensive cigar, flattened as though it had been trampled into the ground.
These—“and an idea”—he says, were his total equipment up to four o’clock that day when, Mother still at the Lancaster house, Laura Dalton rang our doorbell, pushed Annie aside, walked deliberately up the stairs and into my bedroom, and locked the door behind her.