THE POLICE IN THE meantime were subjecting Mrs. MacMullen to a severe grilling. Herbert Dean was there also, and it is his account which I am using.
They had found her in bed in a small hot back bedroom on an upper floor. She looked ill, he said. She had deep circles under her eyes, and she had evidently been crying. So pitiful an object was she that they tried being gentle with her; but at that she grew defiant and they had finally to change their tactics.
It was after that that she admitted she had known Holmes well, but she maintained stoutly that she had never suspected the Merriam woman’s identity, or that the stolen money might have been in the trunk.
“Why should I?” she demanded. “And if it comes to that, why would I go to that Hall girl this morning and tell her all I did, if I’d any idea of it? So far as I can see, all I had to do was to keep my mouth shut, and I was all right.”
“But you knew him pretty well?”
“Oh, I knew him all right. Not so well as you may think, but one of my daughters brought him here once or twice. I don’t know that I’d ever mentioned the Merriam woman to him at all; or her trunk either.”
“How did you explain his bringing you that word about it, if you knew he was the Halls’ driver?”
“I guess I might as well tell you,” she said, looking around at that ring of determined faces. “He’d been bootlegging a bit. Not much, but now and then, and so he knew a good many people. Nice people, too. When he walked up the steps and said Miss Merriam wanted her trunk that night it didn’t surprise me. I just thought she’d seen him somewhere and asked him to bring the message. But I told him he’d have to bring the key to her door. She had a special lock on it.”
“And he brought the key?”
“He must have. He got in. I didn’t go upstairs to see.”
They got little further of any importance from her. She blamed a bootlegging gang for his death, and she insisted over and over that she had had no suspicion of what might lie in the trunk, although she admitted buying a certain number of boxes of dress weights for Miss Emily, who said her patient used them for potting flowers and weighting vases. Now and then too a heavy parcel arrived by express addressed to Miss Merriam, and was placed in the hall outside her door until she appeared.
“Once she said it was books, and I remember I said they’d be heavy reading, the way it took even to lift it. And another time she said she’d been having some old flat silver replated, and she showed me a spoon. But I wasn’t suspicious. If I watched all the queer things my roomers do I’d go crazy.”
“Yet you had read about the substitution of the dress weights for the gold, hadn’t you?”
“How on earth was I to connect this Lucy Merriam with the Lancaster family? Everybody knew they didn’t have a nurse.”
“This paper now, with the photograph. You were interested enough in these murders to put up a chain on your front door, and on the kitchen door too. But you never saw that picture until this morning. Is that your statement?”
“See here,” she said, raising herself in bed. “I’m not under arrest, am I? If I am, I’ll get a lawyer. If I’m not, you’ll take what I’m telling you I told you about that picture. Why should I have gone over to Crescent Place this morning, if I had anything to hide?”
And here I believe the Inspector smiled grimly.
“Well, you see, Mrs. MacMullen, the trunk was already gone, wasn’t it? And the money!”
It was onto this scene that without the slightest warning a new figure projected itself. The bedroom door opened and a girl rushed into the room, a pretty girl in a uniform with a thin summer coat over it, and with a face the color of chalk.
She took in the picture instantly, and with a quick gesture she wrenched the door open again. But she was not quick enough, for Herbert Dean caught it and slammed it shut. But I gather that he was gentle with her when he spoke.
“I see you’ve heard, Peggy.”
“Then it’s true?”
“I’m sorry. It is true.”
She stood there leaning against the door and looking at nobody.
“Dead!” she said. “He’s dead. My husband’s dead, mother; and I’m going to have a baby!”
They were all most uncomfortable. Peggy was hysterical and beyond questioning, and some instinct of delicacy got them out of the room. They were on the whole well impressed by the mother, and whether Peggy was or was not implicated in the theft of the trunk as unimportant just then.
“We were on a murder case,” the Inspector said later, “and Holmes hadn’t killed Mrs. Lancaster. He was a bootlegger and a thief, but he wasn’t a killer. So we let her have a little time to herself.”
They found an overworked servant somewhere, and she showed them Miss Merriam’s room. It was still unlocked, and so far as evidence went it yielded nothing whatever. It was a front room on the second floor, and its strategic value lay in its outlook, according to the police.
“She could be pretty sure no one she knew was anywhere around before she started out. And that was important.”
The public library was just across the street.
The room itself contained little of a personal character: a few simple toilet articles on the dresser, books on a table, a pathetic and half-eaten box of candy and some writing paper, pen and ink on a small desk in a corner, about completed the list. The desk blotter had been used, but nothing on it was legible, although Herbert Dean took it with him when they left.
The only thing of any value they had extracted from Peggy was the location of Holmes’s little place in the country. This, as they had expected, was out the North Road and some six miles beyond where the body had been found; and it was to this property that they went at once, Inspector Briggs, Mr. Sullivan, a plain-clothes man whose name I never heard and Herbert Dean, still carefully holding and protecting that desk blotter.
“Be careful, Smith!” the Inspector admonished the uniformed driver. “Mr. Dean back here has got the whole story of these crimes in his lap. Spill him and you lose your job!”
There was no difficulty whatever about finding the place, which they reached rather late in the afternoon. Reticent as Holmes had always been about it, there was no attempt to disguise his ownership of the property, for on the narrow dirt road leading in from the highway a mail box on a post was marked W. Holmes in plain black letters.
The car turned in there and the officers got out at the house.
It was a neat and not unattractive cottage of the bungalow type, built of wood and with a small detached garage, and surrounded by a dozen acres or so of land which had at one time apparently been a market garden. Now it lay uncared for and weed-grown in the August sun, and after a glance around the officers turned their attention to the bungalow.
It was locked; locked so securely that even Herbert Dean, who was according to the Inspector one of the best picklocks out of prison, was unable to effect a peaceable entry. They broke a window finally, and one after the other they crawled inside.
The place was untidy but comfortable. There was a living room of sorts, a bedroom, a kitchen and a dining room which had clearly been devoted to other purposes. The Inspector glanced around him and sniffed.
“Packed it here,” he said. “Where’s the cellar, Sullivan?”
“Right under the house, I imagine,” said Sullivan cheerfully. “They mostly are.”
Three of the men went down the cellar stairs finally, to find there what they had expected; a small still, or “cooker” as the Inspector called it, a vast array of bottles and so on. But Herbert Dean did not go with them. He was making a slow and painstaking inspection of the living room and the bedroom, which in the end yielded him nothing except a half-dozen books—entirely of the crime variety—a box of labels of an excellent English whisky, and a notebook containing the names of some of our best citizens.
He did better in the kitchen, however. Holmes had evidently done everything in his little country place but eat there, and the stove revealed itself as a dumping place for everything from broken glass to old newspapers. When the others emerged from the cellar they found him on the dirty kitchen floor, with a bed sheet before him and on it a miscellaneous assortment of old razor blades, defective corks, cigar ends and what looked like a book until it was opened, and then revealed itself into the type of receptacle sold in a good many stores and generally used for cigarettes.
“See you’re happy, Dean!” the Inspector said, rather grimly.
Herbert grinned and held up the box.
“Here’s the thing I told you about, anyhow,” he said. “Made it himself purely as an experiment; but rather a neat job at that. It would be interesting to know just how long he watched those library trips of Emily Lancaster’s before he began to suspect, wouldn’t it?”
The men examined the box. It was an ordinary book of fair size, with the center of each page neatly cut out but leaving an inch or less of margin. These margins had then been carefully glued together, and the interior strongly reinforced with a lining of adhesive tape. The result, which I now have, is a substantial box which looks like a rather well-worn book.
“Simple, isn’t it?” Herbert said. “She carried two or three books each time, but the duplicate of this one went back and forth pretty regularly. They’d be fastened together probably, with a strap or a piece of cord. Cord probably for I imagine it broke once, on the path to Euclid Street.”
The Inspector was less humorous about the box than he had been about the blotter. He took it and examined it carefully.
“He made it?” he said. “How d’you know this isn’t the box Emily Lancaster used, herself?”
“Because Miss Louisa Hall saw him making it. As a matter of fact, he made it last Saturday night.”
The Inspector looked annoyed.
“Look here, Dean,” he said. “I’ll admit you’re a valuable man. Maybe I don’t always see eye to eye with you on this case, but I’m glad to have you. Just the same, I’m damned if I’ll have you holding out on me, and that’s what you’re doing.”
“You’d have jailed Holmes in a minute if you’d got anything on him, Inspector. And I needed him. If he knew how that gold and currency had got out of the house, he might know where it went. I was watching him pretty closely myself.”
“Oh yeah? And you lost him, didn’t you?”
“I did. I had a man of my own on him; but he lost him Wednesday morning, at the cemetery.”
“And because you lost him, he’s going there himself!”
But Herbert shook his head.
“I’m guilty on one count, Inspector,” he said, “But not on the other. None of us can allow for accident, and I think Holmes’s death was an accident. It wasn’t in the original program, anyhow. Maybe there was a fight. Maybe he’d been put off the truck and ran in front of it to stop it. But he died because a car went over his chest, and it’s pretty hard to run down and kill an active man just because you want to do it!”