ALL OF THAT WAS on Wednesday, August the thirty-first. Our murders were solved, and a grateful public having read the morning papers began once more to go about its business. Editorials congratulated the police, and certain old residents of the city shook their heads and sighed.
But the police were not entirely happy. Although they now knew the answer to that baffling problem—and a surprising enough answer it was—they still did not know the whole story. There was, as Herbert says, still the question of John Talbot. How much did he know? Was he an accomplice or an innocent victim? On the one hand, they faced the stubborn silence of their prisoner; on the other, the inability to rouse Talbot out of a complete and hopeless apathy.
Herbert believed that Talbot was entirely innocent. He had formed a sort of attachment for this elderly man who for months as Daniels the street cleaner had pursued his quiet vocation among us, mildly interested but largely detached from that long-lost life of his, and returning at night to his tidy room and his books. Until at last some violent current carried him out of his eddy and into something so dreadful that his mind refused to accept it and so shut down on it; as one may draw a curtain.
The arrest had been made on Tuesday night, but the problem of John Talbot still faced the police on Wednesday. His condition was unchanged, and so it was that later on that day an interesting experiment was performed on him in his hospital room close to Herbert’s, and at Herbert’s suggestion.
The results more than justified it, and very possibly have added a new arm to crime detection, but it was not done without protest. At eight o’clock that morning Herbert Dean had called Doctor Armstrong on the telephone and had asked him to come to the hospital. There they had a long talk, Herbert pale but insistent, the doctor objecting.
“Damn it all, man, it’s still in the experimental stage. There’s a technique too. I don’t know it. If this is an actual catatonic stupor—But it may be hysteria.”
“I don’t care what it is. You can get the stuff and the technique too, can’t you? Come, doctor, this isn’t a time to hesitate. Use the long distance telephone. Use an airplane. Use anything you like, but do it.”
Finally Doctor Armstrong agreed, and by ten o’clock that morning a dictograph had been installed in John Talbot’s room, a screen ready for a police stenographer placed in a corner, and a lengthy long distance call to a great Western University had been charged, as Mother would say, against the taxpayers of the city. Shortly after that Doctor Armstrong came back, bringing with him a professor of neuropsychiatry from the local medical college and a package of a certain drug; and asking for a basin of ice, some towels, and a syringe for making intravenous injection. The drug, a preparation, I believe, of sodium amytal, was dissolved in distilled water, and with Daniels still in his stupor it was injected into his arm.
I have largely Doctor Armstrong’s description of what followed. The man on the bed relaxed almost at once, according to him. All rigidity disappeared, his breathing increased but was somewhat more shallow, his pupils on examination showed some dilation, and he himself was sunk in a deep sleep.
They allowed this sleep to last for an incredible time, according to the impatient men who by now crowded the room; the District Attorney, the Commissioner, Inspector Briggs, and Mr. Sullivan. Herbert, having fought to the last ditch for a wheeled chair and having been refused, at last bribed an orderly and got one; appearing in the doorway just as, the Inspector having pinched his lip into a permanent point and the Commissioner having called it a lot of tommyrot and threatened to leave, one of the two medical men took a cold towel from a basin beside him and placed it on the patient’s face. He repeated this twice, and then John Talbot roused, not fully but to a certain level of consciousness; enough to answer all their questions, but not enough to allow the brain censors, whatever they may be, to close down and alter the facts.
For three hours he talked, that long lean figure on the bed which bore so little resemblance to that crayon enlargement I had seen long ago in the stable loft. He told what he knew and what he suspected. He answered every question they put to him. He told them things they had never dreamed of, and without any emotion, so far as they could see, he recited the tale of that Saturday night and early Sunday morning; when he had had to cut the head off a human body, and had been actively sick in the middle of it.
The statement is too long to give here. I quote one or two lines of it, merely to give the idea of the method.
“Why did you shoot that girl in the room of the hotel at—?”
“I didn’t shoot her. I had been out, and I came back to find her dead, and the room full of people. It was my gun but I never did it.”
Then followed a long statement of his love for this woman, his unhappiness at home, the long struggle before he decided to go away with her. The police listened patiently through this flow of talk, which included his escape from the state institution.
“I was lucky to save my neck, at that. None of my relatives would put up any money, and my wife hated me. I don’t know that I blame her.”
Later on they asked him why he had come back to the city, and particularly to the Crescent.
“I came back to see my son,” he told them. “I’ve been watching him for a good many years. After the war I had a job with the iron works as a bookkeeper, but my eyes went bad, and I had to have them operated on. I drifted from one thing to another, and then I got this work for the city. I was uneasy when they put me on the Crescent, but nobody recognized me, except Emily Lancaster. She did, but I asked her to keep quiet.”
There is a good bit here in the record about George, and the tragedy of seeing him day after day. “He looked like a fine fellow. Sometimes he spoke to me. I always wanted to sit down somewhere and have a real talk with him. ‘To sow a thought and reap an act’—that’s a father’s part. But the way things were—”
They could not shake him on the Hollytree situation, although they went back to it again and again.
“What did you find when you got to the house near Hollytree?”
“It was done when I got there. All I could do was to get rid of the body. I put it in the trunk.”
“What did you do with what you took out of the trunk? The money?”
“I buried it that night. I never wanted to see it again. I buried it under some willows by the creek. Then I hid the drawers out of the trunk in the cellar. After that I walked into the town and got the expressman to take it away.”
“Where did you get the foreign labels for the trunk?”
“I’d traveled a great deal. I had some on some suitcases. All that I had to do was to soak them off.”
“Did you want this money for yourself?”
“God, no. Why should I want money?”
“What became of the head?”
“I don’t know. It was in the satchel.”
On only one point was he vague at all. He had walked ever since, all of two days and a part of two nights, until he had reached the police station. But he did not know where he had walked. The horror had closed down on him. He was not thinking. He was simply moving on and on, like a machine. He had noticed some things, for here the record speaks of “August, tarnished by the sun’s hot breath.”
It rang true, all of it. Even those cynical policemen knew that. Their attitude softened, although his revelations made them shudder. When it was all over Inspector Briggs put a hand on the thin shoulder and held it there a moment.
“Now you go to sleep,” he said, “and quit worrying. We’ll fix this up. And we’ll send your boy over to see you when you wake up.”
It was not until that long séance was over that an indignant surgeon trundled Herbert back to his bed, and growled fiercely that he was to get in and stay in. But that night I was allowed to see him, and it is from our talk then that I give Herbert’s summary of the case as well as I can.
“From the beginning it seemed clear that the money Mrs. Lancaster had hoarded was involved somehow in her death. When Emily’s part in taking it became known, then, we had two guesses. One was that she had taken it for herself, that her mother was secretly able to get about and so discovered her loss, and that Emily had killed her. Against this was Emily’s total disregard for money and her actual devotion to Mrs. Lancaster. There were other elements too; her unspotted dress that day was only one of them.
“Nevertheless, Margaret believed from the first that she had done it, and that her stepfather had killed Emily. We knew that the old gentleman had not done so, however, after Helen’s story. I never did believe it, for that matter.
“What seemed evident after the death of Holmes was that we had, outside of the murders, two definite plots to get hold of the money. The one was that of Holmes himself, possibly with Peggy to help him. The other was not so clear. I figured that more than one person was involved in it, since we were pretty certain that on the night Holmes was killed no one had left the Crescent. What occurred to me then was that somewhere near where the body was found this outsider—whoever it was—had tried to get Holmes off the truck and had perhaps run over him by accident. There was the handkerchief on his body, for one thing, so that he would be seen by any passing car.
“That was not the act of a murderer; I thought then of an inexpert driver as an explanation, and as we know now, poor old Talbot hadn’t driven a car for a good many years.
“What we now know took place is that Emily had recognized Daniels as the uncle she had been fond of. This would have been in the spring, at the time the coolness sprang up between her mother and herself. Probably Emily urged some sort of help for Talbot, and the mother refused.
“That makes it likely that Emily took the money for her uncle. Maybe not, but someone was to escape, either John Talbot or herself, and I think it was Talbot. That’s the reason for the steamer folders in her room. However, one thing is certain. She never told him what she was doing. He learned that elsewhere, and he learned it after the old lady was killed. That was when, under a threat of being sent back to the asylum, he took Peggy’s bag from her and tried to enter the MacMullen house; and the chain held him up! He says—and I believe it—that this threat was used all along to force his cooperation.
“But it was a fatal mistake that Emily made when she told her mother. The old lady could get about, as we know, when there was no one there to see her; and she took to watching this street cleaner, whenever she had a chance. He was changed, of course. She wasn’t sure he was Talbot. Then one day she asked Emily to bring down the old album, and there was a picture of him in it. Day after day she compared him with it, and she saw that Emily was right.
“That settled it, for she had a weapon now. It involved a lot of people, and especially one person. She was not a pleasant old woman, and she had hated the Talbots for a good many years.
“However that may be, this knowledge of hers gave her a weapon against them. They are a proud lot, and at any time she could spring the glad tidings that John Talbot, a fugitive from the law, was sweeping the street in front of their very house! And I’m afraid—I’m very much afraid, my darling—that she did just that, a day or two before she was killed.
“You see, she was killed for two reasons: to keep her quiet and to get that identifying photograph of Talbot out of the album. The money in a way was incidental, and even the second reason was not vital; it only became vital when those prints were left in the album itself.
“That killing, by the way, was as reckless and yet as cunning a piece of work as I have ever seen. There was in all that careful preparation only the one slip, and that was beyond control; that was the leaving of the album with the prints, as the result of some alarm. You see, time was vital, and she had found the old lady out of bed! That meant getting her back and covering her, to delay discovery as long as possible. She got back, but she was on the sheet! Little things, all of them; but not in the plan. Then one other thing went wrong also, for the screen would not lift. That careful method of showing an escape by the porch roof was out. No wonder she forgot the album!
“Perhaps the grass was put there then. Perhaps it was an accident. Perhaps poor old Emily, terrified of the discovery that the money was gone and trying to shout ‘wolf’ for the family to hear, put it there and overturned that pot herself. I don’t know, and it doesn’t matter now.
“What does matter is that the killer had to indicate an exit from the house while still remaining it in. Hence—and that was quick thinking—the glove thrown down into the hall. Then the slipping into the housemaid’s closet, the door locked, and the careful stealthy removal of all signs of blood.
“But there were some bad minutes in that closet or later on. They came when the album was remembered, and they must have been pretty terrible. How could this killer know that Margaret Lancaster had destroyed those prints, or had had Bryan Dalton do it for her?
“The next step was the gold itself; for there it was, with all its potentialities. I don’t suppose we’ll ever know the truth about it. For instance, how would this unknown know about it? Was Emily seen going into the MacMullen house? Was it via Peggy and the grapevine telegraph? Did someone else besides Holmes get onto the book trick? One person at least had picked up a piece of gold after that unlucky spill in No Man’s Land, and may have mentioned it. Or—and this is worth consideration—did Emily in her distress take a confidant.
“She may have. She may even have told where her keys were kept in the bird cage. I think myself that she did, or why did poor old Talbot have to climb that porch roof to try to get them? For that’s what he did, game leg and all, on that Saturday night.
“The cage was gone, however. You’d seen to that!
“Then, to come to the night of Emily’s death: it was late when she heard where the cage was, and having slept all day she was wakeful. But she was not the only person who had learned late that night that the cage was in the stable. When George Talbot came home he was told that Emily had been inquiring about it, and he told Mrs. Talbot and Lydia, in the presence of Lizzie Cromwell, just where it was.
“Nevertheless, probably no murder was intended that night, and it is a strange fact that had not one of those three women been in the laundry later that night, secretly washing those bloody undergarments which had been hidden away since Thursday, in all likelihood Emily Lancaster would still be alive. But one of them was there, and she heard a sound outside; perhaps when the gun fell.
“I have no doubt but that it was the intention to secure the keys that night anyhow, although the washing was more vital. But however it happened, one thing is sure. This woman found the automatic, shot Emily and got the keys from her. By the time George was aroused she was safely inside the house by the basement door.
“But the keys were valuable only if they could be used, and there was a period of uncertainty following that. Talbot says that although he had been relieved of his job to let a police operative take his place, no plan was made at that time. For one thing it was too dangerous. There were police and detectives all over the place, and although this killer of ours knew by that time that the money was in the trunk, she could think of no way to get at it. And I’d better say here that until Saturday night Talbot had believed what Margaret Lancaster had believed about the two murders: that Emily had killed her mother, and that the stepfather had shot Emily.
“It would be interesting to know if that theory originated with Margaret, or if someone else did not suggest it to her!
“Still acting more or less under duress, Talbot finally agreed to rent the house near Hollytree, and to take the trunk there if and when some plan could be arranged to get it. In the interval he hung around the MacMullen place. Those were Lydia’s orders, and he had to obey them. If he didn’t it meant back to the asylum for him. What hope had he of proving his case, even if it could be reopened? And to give up his job meant the bread line.
“That is why he was on the pavement the night Holmes took it away, and he rode right out into the country on the tail of the truck, with Holmes not suspecting he was there. The rest is about as I had imagined. He threw Holmes off the truck, after forcing him to stop it. But the poor little devil made a lunge toward it just as Talbot let in the clutch, and the thing went over him. Talbot went on. He had to go on. He had known from Holmes himself where his place in the country was, and after he took the trunk to the Hollytree house he simply took the trunk back there and left it. Simple, isn’t it? But he was feeling pretty sick about Holmes himself. He went back to the place where he had left him, lying there with that handkerchief on his chest, but the body was gone.
“After that it was plain hell for him. He had been in Europe, as well as a lot of other places, and with that search for the trunk going on he disguised it with those labels from his own baggage. But he was terrified by that time. Here were three deaths already connected with that money, and he began to fear that he would be involved, and perhaps too to grow suspicious. He gave up his room and left his books, going to one far downtown, and waiting there for a message.
“Then at last it came, on Saturday. That was when he went out to the house at Hollytree late in the evening; and what he found was Lizzie Cromwell shot to death in an upstairs bathroom, and his sister Lydia trying to get the body into the tub.”