as though the musician had abandoned himself to the wild spirit of his crashing climax, the pealing strains of the “storm scene” from “William Tell” rolled out from the keys of the mahogany piano, through the closed doors of Homer Hendricks’s music-room, and down the stairs to the waiting group below.
The slender, white fingers of the musician quivered with feverish energy. Into his thin, pale face, white with the pallor of midnight studies, crept two dull spots of hectic color. His eyes glistened with the gleam of the inspired artist, who behind the printed music sees the soul of the composer.
Save only for his short, pompadoured red hair, bristling above his forehead like a stiff, wiry brush, and his chin, too square and stubborn for a dreamer, Homer Hendricks, who made the law his profession and music his recreation, presented all of the characteristics of the picturesque genius.
The group in the library had crowded close to the hall door, as though fearing to miss a note in the rolling climax from the piano above. Montague Weston, tossing his neglected cigarette aside, was the first to break the spell.
“He’s a wonder!” he breathed.
The girl in white at his elbow glanced toward him with swift enthusiasm.
“Doubly so! To think that a man who can make music like that is also rated as the leading corporation lawyer in the State!”
Weston shrugged. “Yes, he calls his piano only his plaything.”
The girl lowered her voice. “Is it true—you know this is my first visit here—that he is as eccentric as we read in those sensational newspaper articles?”
A slow smile broke over Weston’s face. “That depends on your idea of eccentricity, Miss Morrison. Some persons, for instance, might deem his present performance the height of oddity. Hendricks never plays except when he is alone in his own music-room with the door closed!”
“Really!” The girl’s eyes were wide with her amazement.
“And again”—Weston was evidently enjoying the other’s naive curiosity—“the fact that Mr. Hendricks has condescended to join our theater party tonight suggests another of his peculiarities. I believe this is the first evening in ten years that he has left his piano before midnight! But then this is a special occasion.”
“Hilda Wentworth’s birthday?” the girl interjected.
Weston nodded.
“All of the affection of a lonely bachelor without a domestic circle of his own is bound up in Homer Hendricks’s love for his niece. And I happen to know, Miss Morrison, how very much alone such a man can be!”
At the wistful note in Weston’s voice, the vivacious Miss Morrison glanced away quickly.
“I should not think that would apply to your case!” she said lightly. “If all reports are true, Monty Weston has won almost as great a reputation as a heart-breaker as he has as a trust-breaker!”
“You flatter both my social and my legal ability!” Weston laughed. He glanced at his watch. “By Jove, it’s after eight! Where are Hilda and Bob Grayson?”
He turned so suddenly as he put the question that his companion gazed at him in surprise. The second of the two women in the group, Muriel Thornton, smiled shrewdly.
“Hilda went up-stairs a moment ago,” she volunteered. “As for Bob,” she paused significantly as the shadow deepened on Weston’s face. “Where is Bob?” she added artlessly.
The rivalry of Weston and Grayson, the struggling young architect, for the favors of Hilda Wentworth had too long been a matter of gossip for the point of the question to pass unnoticed.
Wilkins, the fourth member of the group, essayed an eager answer in the pause that followed.
“Bob had a business engagement in his rooms, I believe, and left directly after dinner. He was to have been back by eight, though.”
Up-stairs, the music still continued. Homer Hendricks had reached the finale of the overture, and Rossini’s majestic strains were rolling out with the sweep of a lashing surf.
Weston strolled to the door.
“ ‘William Tell’ is nearing the end, I fancy. Listen!”
The speaker was right. It was the end—but not the end that either the musician or his audience were expecting.
Above the crash of the music rang out the sudden, muffled report of a revolver!
From the piano came a long, echoing discord, as though the player’s arm had fallen heavily to the keys.
And then silence—a silence so intense that the low breathing of the group in the library, stricken suddenly motionless, sounded with strange distinctness!
For a moment the quartet stood staring at one another, helpless, dumb, under the spell of an overwhelming bewilderment.
Miss Morrison fell back against the wall, panting like a frightened deer, her eyes staring up the winding stairway as though they would pierce the closed door above and see—what?
Of the two men, Weston was the prompter to act.
Jerking his companion by the elbow as though to arouse him to the necessity of the situation, he sprang out of the doorway, taking the steps to the second floor two at a bound.
John Wilkins, glancing hesitatingly at the women, followed more slowly at his shoulder.
From the end of the upper hall came the sound of running steps as the men reached it. A tall, slight, fair-haired girl, in a green satin evening gown, clutched Weston’s arm with a wild, questioning stare.
For the first time Wilkins sensed the spell of tragedy. In the girl’s eyes was a gleam of undisguised terror.
“The shot?” she burst out. “It came from——”
Weston nodded shortly, even curtly, as he jerked his head toward the door of the music-room, still closed, and followed the motion with a quick step. Wilkins reached forward and touched the girl’s shoulder awkwardly.
“Don’t you think I had better escort you below, Miss Wentworth?”
The girl shook off his fingers impatiently.
Weston’s hand was on the knob of the music-room door. He turned it abruptly. A puzzled frown swept his face, and he turned it again more violently. The door was locked.
Hilda Wentworth darted to his side, tearing his hand away almost fiercely and beating the panels sharply with her knuckles.
“Uncle! Uncle! It is I, Hilda!”
The silence was unbroken.
The girl redoubled her efforts, tearing at the wood with her fingers and raising her voice almost to a shriek.
Then of a sudden she stepped back, turned with a low, gasping wail, and sank into the arms of a tall, broad-shouldered young man with the build of an athlete, who sprang up the stairs past Wilkins’s hesitating figure just in time to catch her.
Weston glanced at the newcomer with a swift hardening of his lips. “Lend a hand here, Grayson!” he jerked out. “We’ve got to break in this door!”
“In Heaven’s name, why?”
“No time for questions, man!” Weston’s tones were curt. “Hendricks is in there. We heard a shot. We don’t——”
“A shot?”
The words might have been a spur. The speaker lowered the body of the fainting girl to the floor, and sprang to the door with a vigor that made the others stare in spite of the tension of the moment.
Poising himself for an instant, he launched his body toward the oaken panels. There was a sharp splintering of wood.
Weston muttered a low cry of satisfaction and joined him in a second assault. The door shivered on its hinges.
The girl on the floor raised herself on her elbow and watched the two with a white, strained face.
The men drew back with muscles taut and hurled themselves a third time toward the barrier.
This time the attack was successful. The door fell inward so abruptly that they were thrown to their knees.
Before they could rise, a satin-clad figure sprang past them from the hall and threw itself with a cry on the body of a man in evening clothes, huddled on the floor.
Just above his left ear showed a gaping bullet-hole, from which a thin stream of blood was already trickling down on to the rug beneath him.
His eyes were fixed in a ghastly stare which permitted no second question as to his condition. Homer Hendricks was dead!
Weston raised the girl to her feet with the commanding gesture of a strong-minded man in a sudden emergency.
“Hilda—Miss Wentworth—you must let us take you down-stairs. This is no place for you.”
“Oh, Uncle! Poor Uncle!” sobbed the girl unheeding.
Weston darted a swift glance around the room and toward the stairs. The women below were evidently not yet aware of the situation.
Wilkins from the hall was surveying the scene like a man in a nightmare, with a face from which every vestige of color had fled.
Grayson was still standing by the shattered door, with his hands clenched as though in a quick, nervous spasm.
At Weston’s words he approached the girl with an added sentence of entreaty.
She nodded dully, flashed a last, despairing glance at the body on the floor, and suffered him to take her arm without resistance.
There was a certain suggestion of intimacy in the action, which brought a sudden scowl to Weston’s features, as he said crisply:
“Of course, Grayson, you will explain to the ladies. As for the rest of it, you had better have them remain until——”
“The police?” Grayson finished inquiringly. “Shall I telephone?”
Weston hesitated, with a glance at Wilkins. The latter was still maintaining his position in the doorway as though fearing to enter.
“The police?” he repeated huskily. His eyes were riveted on the body of Hendricks as though held by a magnet. “I—I suppose so. This is awful, gentlemen!”
The attitude of the three men in the face of the sudden tragedy was curiously suggestive of their characters—Weston, with the crisply directing demeanor of the man accustomed to leadership; Grayson, frankly bewildered, with his attention centered on the girl’s distress rather than the harsher features of the situation; Wilkins, passively content to allow another to direct his actions.
Hilda Wentworth gathered up her skirts and gently released herself from Grayson’s hand.
In her face was a forced calmness, to a close observer more expressive of inward suffering than even her first outburst of grief.
As Grayson made a move to follow her, she turned with a low sentence. “I would prefer that you stay here, Bob!”
Her inflection, and the glance which accompanied it, brought another swiftly veiled scowl to Weston’s face. He strode to the end of the room and did not turn until Wilkins had led Miss Wentworth to the stairs.
Grayson, in the center of the apartment, had dug his hands into his trousers-pockets and was watching him curiously.
“A beastly bad business, Bob!” Weston spoke nervously, in odd contrast to his former curt tones.
Grayson jerked his head almost imperceptibly toward the motionless body on the carpet.
“What on earth made him do it?”
“Him do it?” There was an obvious note of surprise in Weston’s voice. “Heavens, Bob, can’t you see it’s not—not that?”
Grayson recoiled as from a blow.
“Not suicide?” His tone raised itself with a shrill suddenness. “Why, man, it must be! You don’t mean, you can’t mean——”
Weston lifted his eyebrows questioningly. “Do men shoot themselves without a weapon, Bob?”
Grayson sprang abruptly past the other, stooped swiftly over the silent form of Homer Hendricks, and turned his eyes, fiercely across the adjacent stretch of carpet.
Weston watched him somberly.
“Are you convinced?” he queried at length.
Grayson pushed back the only chair in that end of the room, saw that it concealed nothing, and then, seizing an end of the elaborately carved piano, in front of which the body of the dead man rested, tugged until he forced it an inch from the wall.
His eyes swept the crack thus exposed, and he stepped back with a gesture of bewilderment.
“Have you found it?” Weston ventured. There was the barest trace of a sneer in his voice.
Grayson sprang across at him and clutched his shoulder.
“The weapon, man! Where is it? I say it must be here!”
Weston glanced at the other’s flushed features calmly.
“I told you, Bob, there was none. Or, perhaps, you think that a dead man can rise to his feet and toss the gun that has ended his life out of the window?”
“The window?” Grayson muttered. Weston’s sneer escaped him.
Darting to the three windows of the music-room, he flung back the drawn curtains of each in turn. They were all locked, and neither the glass nor the curtains showed a mark of disturbance.
Weston followed his movements with folded arms.
“There is still the door, Bob. And remember that is the only other possible exit.” He hesitated. “If you will take the trouble to raise it from the floor, you will discover a fact which I learned some minutes ago. The key was turned from the inside and not from the outside!”
Grayson glanced at the other for a long moment in silence; then, stepping across the carpet with the resolution of a man determined to accept only the evidence of his own eyes, he raised the shattered panels until the lock was exposed.
The key, bent by the force of the fall, was still firmly fixed on the inward side of the door!
Grayson rose from his knees like a man groping in a brain-whirling maze.
“Sit down, Bob!” Weston pushed across a chair and forced the other into it. “We’ve got to face this thing coolly.”
“Coolly!” Grayson’s voice rose almost to a hysterical laugh. “Good Heavens! Are you a man or a machine? You tell me that Hendricks did not kill himself——”
“Could not!” Weston corrected in a level tone.
“And now,” Grayson burst on unheeding, “you show me that he was not——”
“Murdered?” Weston completed calmly. “That is where you are wrong. I have shown you no such inference!”
Grayson passed his hand wearily over his brow.
“We are not dealing with spirits, man! You forget that the windows are fastened, the door locked——”
“I forget nothing!” said Weston coldly.
Grayson kicked back his chair impatiently. “Then, if Hendricks’s murderer has not vanished into thin air, how——”
“That, my dear boy,” said Weston softly, “is a question which these gentlemen may be able to answer for us!”
As he spoke, he motioned toward the hall.
Wilkins had appeared at the head of the stairs with two newcomers, both of whom were obviously policemen, although only one was in uniform.
Wilkins paused awkwardly at the door, with his hand on the shoulder of the man in civilian clothes.
“Lieutenant Perry, of headquarters,” he announced formally, “Mr. Weston and Mr. Grayson!”
Weston extended his hand with a subtle suggestion of deference which brought a gratified flush to the officer’s face.
He was a short, stocky, round-headed man with all of the evidences of the stubborn police bulldog, although the suggestion of any pronounced mental ability was lacking.
His eyes swept the body of the dead man and the details of the room with professional stoicism. Motioning to his companion, he knelt over Hendricks’s stiffening form.
“Bullet entered at the left ear,” he muttered. “Death probably instantaneous!” He straightened with the conventional police frown. “Where’s the weapon, gentlemen?”
Grayson was silent, content that Weston should act as spokesman. The latter flung out his hands.
“We thought you could find it for us!” he answered shortly.
“Then you have not found it?” There was a flash of suspicion in the lieutenant’s voice.
“We have not!”
The lieutenant jotted down a scrawling line in his note-book.
“Are we to believe this murder, then?” he rasped.
“I should prefer that you draw your own conclusions, Lieutenant!”
For an instant the officer’s pencil was poised in the air, then he closed his note-book with a jerk, thrust his pencil into his pocket, and walked quickly to the closed windows, and then to the door. A growing coldness was apparent in every movement.
“Help me here, Burke!” he snapped to his subordinate. “Stand back, gentlemen!” he continued with almost a growl as Weston made a motion as though to assist.
The next moment the broken door was raised slowly back against the wall. The lieutenant’s eyes fell on the lock with the twisted key. With a grimness he did not attempt to conceal, he whirled on the two men behind him.
“What kind of a yarn are you trying to give me?” His hand pointed first to the locked door and then to the fastened windows. “Do you think I was born yesterday? Come, gents, out with the truth!”
“The truth?” said Weston curtly.
The lieutenant bristled. “Just so—and the sooner you let me have it the better for all parties concerned! First you tell me there is no weapon, and would have me infer that Mr. Hendricks did not kill himself. Then I find that the room is locked as tight as a drum and there is no possible way for anyone else to have fired the shot—and escape. Do you think I am blind? You are either covering up the fact of suicide, or trying to shield the murderer!”
Lieutenant Perry paused, quite out of breath, with his face very red and his right hand clenched with the violence of his emotions.
The turn of affairs was so abrupt and unexpected that Grayson stood speechless. Weston had made an angry step forward, with his eyes flashing, when a low exclamation from the policeman, Burke, broke the tension.
In his right hand he was holding out a woman’s white kid glove, with its thumb stained with a ragged splotch of still fresh blood.
“Found it down by the wall, sir! It was covered up by the door!”
Lieutenant Perry snatched the glove from the other’s hand and held it toward the light. On the wrist was a delicately embroidered monogram in white silk.
Grayson with difficulty smothered a sharp cry. Then his eyes sought Weston’s face, grown suddenly cold and hard. Both men had recognized the object on the instant. The glove was the property of Hilda Wentworth!
“H. W.” The lieutenant deciphered the letters slowly. “And pray, gentlemen,” he said mockingly, nodding toward Weston with a grin of exultation, “what person do these interesting initials fit?”
“I think I can answer that question, sir!”
The words came in a clear, cold tone from the doorway, and Hilda Wentworth, pressing her way past Wilkins’s resisting arm, stepped into the room.
“The glove is mine, officer!”
She held out her hand, but the lieutenant, with a low laugh that brought the blood flaming to the girl’s face, thrust the glove into his pocket.
His eyes flashed from Weston to Grayson significantly.
“I fancy, gentlemen, I have found the explanation of your cock and bull story!” he said slowly.
Grayson sprang forward with a growl.
“You will take those words back or—or——”
Weston caught his shoulder sternly. “Gently, Bob! You are only making a bad matter worse!”
The lieutenant turned to his man, Burke, ignoring Grayson’s threatening attitude. “Clear the room and telephone the coroner! As for you, Miss Wentworth, I am sorry, but——”
“What?” asked the girl steadily. Reversing the situation of a few moments before, she seemed the calmest member of the group.
“I am compelled to ask you not to leave the house until I give you permission!” the officer finished brusquely.
A sudden pallor swept Hilda Wentworth’s face and for an instant her eyes closed; but she fought back the weakness resolutely. With a curt nod she stepped to the door.
“I am at your service!” she said simply.
Wilkins offered her his arm, and Weston followed the two without a backward glance. Grayson hesitated, still scowling at the lieutenant’s stocky figure. The officer was glaring from the face of the dead man to the polished surface of the piano, with his nerves plainly on a feather edge.
Grayson shrugged, and had made a step toward the hall when his gaze was arrested almost mechanically by a glitter of green on the red carpet, near the wall at his right. He had taken a second step when a curious impulse—was it the factor of chance?—caused him to turn swiftly. Lieutenant Perry was bending over the body of Homer Hendricks with his face for the moment averted. Grayson’s hand felt hurriedly over the carpet and closed about a small greenish object at his feet. Straightening, he walked rapidly through the doorway.
In the hall, he glanced at the object in his hand. It was a green jade ball, whose diameter was perhaps that of a quarter. Dropping it into his pocket, the young man ran down the stairs.
“I have earned a vacation, Nora, and I intend to take it.”
Madelyn Mack elevated her arms in a luxurious yawn, as she pushed aside the traveling-bag at her feet. The eight o’clock train had just brought her back from Denver, and six weeks in the tortuous windings of the Ramsen bullion case. I had received her telegram from Buffalo just in time to meet her at the Grand Central station, and we had driven at once to her Fifth Avenue office. As I noted the tired lines under her eyes, and the droop of her shoulders, I could appreciate something of the strain under which she had been laboring. I nodded slowly.
“Yes, you need a vacation,” I agreed.
Madelyn impatiently pushed aside a stack of unopened letters. “And I intend to take it!” she repeated almost belligerently. “Business or no business!”
“With a ten-thousand-dollar fee for six weeks’ work,” I laughed somewhat enviously, “you should worry!”
Madelyn tossed her accumulated correspondence recklessly into a corner of her desk, and drew down its roll-top with a bang.
“I feel like dissipating tonight, Nora. Are you up to a cabaret? A place with noise enough to drown out every echo of work!”
At her elbow the telephone shrilled suddenly. Mechanically Madelyn took down the receiver. Almost with the first sentence over the wire, I could see her features contract.
“Yes, Mr. Grayson, this is Miss Mack talking. What is that?” In a moment she clapped her hand over the transmitter, and turned a wry face to me. “Was I foolish enough to talk about a rest, Nora? Homer Hendricks has just been shot—murder or suicide!”
Her next sentence was directed at the telephone. “Never mind what Lieutenant Perry says, Mr. Grayson! I’ll be over at once. Yes, I said at once!”
She hung up the receiver, and sprang to her feet.
“Come on, Nora! I’ll give you the details on the way!” Her weariness had vanished as though it had never existed.
She slammed the door of the office, leaving her bag where she had tossed it, and jabbed the bell for the elevator. Not until we were in her car that had been waiting at the curb, and speeding up the Avenue, did she speak again.
“You know of Hendricks, the lawyer, of course, and his niece, Hilda Wentworth——”
“You don’t mean to say that he has been killed, and the girl is suspected——”
Madelyn shrugged. “The police seem to think so!”
She drew over to her end of the seat, and subsided into an abstracted silence, as we swerved across toward the Drive. I knew that it was hopeless to expect her to volunteer further information, and, indeed, doubted if she possessed it.
When the car whirled up to our destination Madelyn was out on the walk before the last revolution of the wheels had ceased.
We were not more than half-way up the steps of the Hendricks residence when the door flew open, and a young man, who had evidently been stationed in the hall awaiting our arrival, sprang forward to meet us.
Madelyn smiled as she caught his impulsively extended hand.
“Any new developments, Mr. Grayson?”
“None, except that Coroner Smedley is here. He is up-stairs now with the police.”
Madelyn led us to the farther end of the veranda.
“Before we go in, it will be just as well if you give me a brief summary of what has happened.”
Grayson walked back and forth, his hands clenched at his sides, talking rapidly. Madelyn heard him in silence, the darkness concealing her expression.
“Is that all?” she queried at length. For a moment she stood peering out over the veranda railing. “Miss Wentworth lived with her uncle, I take it?”
“Yes.”
“And inherits his property?”
Grayson growled an affirmative.
“Suppose I change my angle, and ask if you are prepared to explain your own whereabouts at the time of the crime?”
“I have done so!”
Madelyn’s eyes hardened.
“We won’t mince matters, Mr. Grayson. From the police standpoint, Miss Wentworth and yourself, as her probably favored suitor, are the two persons most likely to profit by Mr. Hendricks’s death. It may be awkward, perhaps exceedingly awkward, that you were the only two in the house not accounted for at the moment of the shot!”
“I have told you the truth!” Grayson dug his hands into his pockets sullenly.
Madelyn turned abruptly toward the door, and then paused. “Was Mr. Hendricks aware of your sentiments toward his niece?”
Grayson hesitated. “Certainly.”
“And was not enthusiastic on the subject?”
“Well, perhaps not—er—enthusiastic.” Grayson’s stammer was obvious. “To be quite frank, he preferred——”
“Yes?”
“Monty Weston; but, of course——”
“I think that is enough,” said Madelyn quietly. “Will you kindly lead the way in?”
Grayson’s hand, fumbling in his pockets, was suddenly withdrawn.
“By the way, here is something I almost forgot. I picked it up on the floor of Hendricks’s room as we were leaving.”
He extended the curious green jade ball he had found in the music-room.
Madelyn’s eyes narrowed. Then she said casually, “Quite an interesting little ornament,” and dropped it into her bag.
The hall of the Hendricks house was empty. The members of the tragically disrupted theatre party had retreated to the library, and were endeavoring nervously to maintain the semblance of a conversation. The police were still busy upstairs.
“You had better join your friends,” said Madelyn to Grayson. “We will be down presently.” And she ran lightly up the broad stairway, as I followed.
The music-room of Homer Hendricks presented a scene of confusion shattering all the precedents of its peaceful history, and almost sufficient, one was tempted to think, to call back its late master to resent the intrusion on his cherished sanctum.
The body of Mr. Hendricks was still stretched on the carpet where it had fallen. It, and the massive piano, were the only objects in the room that had been left unchanged.
Madelyn gave a shrug of disgust as we paused in the doorway and surveyed the scene of ravage.
“Are you expecting to find gold pieces concealed in the furniture, gentlemen?”
Lieutenant Perry whirled sharply. “May I inquire, Miss Mack, since when have you been in charge of this case?”
The officer essayed a wink toward his companions, who had been increased by two plain-clothes-men and the coroner since Grayson’s telephone call.
Madelyn smiled. “Your powers of humor, Lieutenant, are exceeded only by your powers of deduction!”
Her glance wandered over the torn-up room, with its chairs turned upside down, its rugs rolled up from the floor, and even its few objects of bric-a-brac removed from their places, and deposited in a corner. The search for the missing weapon that had done Homer Hendricks to death had been thorough—if nothing else.
Madelyn’s eyes rested for a second time on the piano of the dead man. The instrument seemed to exert a peculiar fascination for her. With her glance fixed on the keyboard, which no one had seen fit to close, she bowed to the grinning lieutenant.
“Will I be trespassing if I take a glance around?”
“Oh, help yourself! I reckon we have found about all there is to find!”
“Have you?” said Madelyn lightly.
The police officer righted a chair and sat down heavily on its cushioned seat, watching Madelyn’s lithe figure as she walked across to Hendricks’s body. As a matter of fact when she dropped to her knees, and held a pocket magnifying lens close to the white, rigid face of the dead man, she had the unreserved attention of every occupant of the room.
The lieutenant, realizing the fact, shrugged his shoulders. “Miss Sherlock Holmes at work!” he said in a tone loud enough to reach Madelyn’s ears.
“I beg your pardon,” said Madelyn, without shifting the position of her lens, “have you any information as to when Mr. Hendricks visited this room last, that is, previous to this evening?”
Lieutenant Perry hesitated.
“Why, er——”
“He had not been here for ten days, Miss Mack,” spoke up one of his subordinates, and then continuing, before he became aware of the scowl of his superior, “He and his niece were out of town on a visit, and only arrived home today.”
“Thank you,” said Madelyn, rising, and leaning carelessly against the piano. “May I trouble you with another question, Lieutenant?”
The lieutenant glared silently.
“Did Mr. Hendricks use tobacco?”
“He did not!”
“Thank you!” The suspicion of a smile tinged Madelyn’s face.
Lieutenant Perry crossed his left leg carelessly over his knee and thrust his thumbs into the armholes of his waistcoat. The farther plain-clothes-man nudged his companion. This attitude of the lieutenant’s was a characteristic prelude either to one of his favorite jokes or a verbal fusillade, designed to crush an opponent to the dust.
“If you are quite through with your clue-searching, Miss Mack,” he said with mock humbleness, “I would like your expert opinion on a little bit of evidence we have picked up!”
His right hand disengaged itself for a moment and produced the blood-stained glove of Hilda Wentworth. Mr. Perry held it up almost caressingly.
“Would you care to take a squint at this with that high-power lens of yours?”
“Oh, I hardly think so!” said Madelyn indifferently. “That belongs to Miss Wentworth, does it not?”
“Righto!”
“Then, if I might make a suggestion, I would return it to the young lady.”
“Oh, you would, would you?” exploded the lieutenant. “What do you think of that, men? That is the richest joke I have heard for a month!”
Madelyn sauntered to the door.
“I may have the pleasure of seeing you below, Lieutenant,” she said as she joined me.
The moment she had disappeared from the view of the men in the music-room her assumption of careless indifference vanished. Her lips closed in a tense line, as she paused at the head of the stairs.
“If those imbeciles had only left that room as it was!” Her hands were clenched as though every nerve was a-quiver. “Nora, I have got to have ten minutes alone in there! I must manage it!” She turned abruptly. “Will you kindly give Lieutenant Perry Miss Wentworth’s compliments, and tell him she desires an immediate interview with him and the coroner in the library?”
“But,” I stammered, “she doesn’t!”
Madelyn glared, and then continued as though I had not interrupted her. “They will probably take two of the policemen down-stairs with them. That will leave only one behind. If you can inveigle him outside, Nora, the obligation won’t be forgotten!”
“You speak as though I was a siren!” I snapped. “Promise him you will publish his picture in The Bugle in the morning,” said Madelyn impatiently.
She opened the nearest door, and disappeared behind it, as I returned to the music-room in my role of assumed messenger. I managed to repeat Madelyn’s instructions without so much as a quiver at Lieutenant Perry’s sudden scowl. With a nod to the coroner, he brushed past me at once.
Madelyn’s calculation proved uncannily correct. The two plain-clothes-men followed Coroner Smedley silently down the stairs in the lieutenant’s wake. Only a red-faced roundsman was left twirling his stick disconsolately in the littered room.
“Good evening!” I smiled.
He glanced up with obvious welcome at the prospect of companionship.
I plunged directly to the point. “This is a big case, Mr. Dennis,” I began, noting with relief that he was a professional acquaintance of mine. “It ought to mean something to you, eh?”
He grunted non-committally.
“I say, have you a good picture of yourself at home?”
Mr. Dennis looked interested.
“That is, one which would be good enough for publication in The Bugle?”
Mr. Dennis looked more interested.
“Because if you have,” I continued enticingly, “and will do me a favor, I will see that it is given a good position in tomorrow’s story.”
“What is the favor?”
“Oh, merely that you let me talk to you for ten minutes in the hall! A friend of mine wants a chance to look over this room without disturbance.”
“You mean Miss Mack?” asked Dennis, suspiciously.
I smiled. “That picture of yours would look mighty nice, with a quarter of a column write-up under it. I expect Mrs. Dennis would be so tickled that she would appreciate a present from me of twenty-five copies of the paper to send to her friends!”
Dennis walked abruptly into the hall. “Come on!” he snapped.
As we reached the end of the corridor, I saw Madelyn step quietly into the room we had vacated.
I wondered curiously if Hilda Wentworth would rise to the occasion sufficiently to hold the attention of the suspicious Mr. Perry, and speculated grimly what would be the result if the lieutenant should return unexpectedly to the upper floor. My fears, however, proved unfounded. Before the ten minutes were over, Madelyn reappeared, beckoned to me pleasantly, and slipped a crumpled bill into Dennis’s hand as she passed him.
“I’ll look for that picture at the office, Mr. Dennis,” I said cordially. And then I turned anxiously to Madelyn. “Did you find anything?”
“Is it fate, or Providence, or just naturally Devil’s luck that traps the transgressor?” returned Madelyn irrelevantly. She was tapping a slender blue envelope. “Exhibits A and B in the case of Homer Hendricks,” she continued. “A small jade ball, and a spoonful of tobacco ashes. They sound commonplace enough, don’t they?” And she thoughtfully descended the stairs.
At the door of the library she faced the group inside with a slight bow. The hum of conversation ceased. From an adjoining alcove, Miss Wentworth, nervously facing a battery of questions from Lieutenant Perry and the coroner, noted our arrival with an expression of hastily concealed relief. It was evident that the task of keeping the gentlemen of the law occupied had taxed the girl’s nerves to the utmost.
Grayson had taken a position as near the alcove as he could venture, and was glowering at her inquisitors, apparently not caring whether they saw his scowls or not.
“I will be obliged for a few moments’ conversation, gentlemen!” said Madelyn pleasantly. “A very few moments, I assure you. I will talk to Mr. Wilkins first, if I may.”
John Wilkins rose from his chair, as I found a vacant seat in the library, and joined Madelyn in the hall. In less than two minutes he returned, with his face wearing an expression of almost laughable bewilderment.
“Evidently the famous Miss Mack does not believe in lengthy cross-examinations,” commented Miss Morrison as he resumed his chair.
“She asked me just four questions,” said Wilkins dubiously, “and only two of them had to do with the affair up-stairs. She cut me short when I started the account of our finding the body.”
Lieutenant Perry, as though to show his disdain, deepened the rasp in his examination of Miss Wentworth as he saw Weston take Wilkins’s place in the hall.
Weston glanced at his watch as he returned. “It took me just one minute more than you to pass through the ordeal, old man,” he confided to Wilkins, with something like a grin.
Lieutenant Perry stepped out of the alcove with a gesture of finality.
“Have you a version of the case to give to The Bugle, Lieutenant?” I asked, as a ring at the doorbell and a shuffling of feet on the veranda announced the belated arrival of other members of the newspaper fraternity.
The lieutenant darted a sullen glance in the direction of Hilda Wentworth. “You may say for me,” he said acidly, “that, whether suicide or murder, a certain near relative of the dead man is holding back the truth, and, and——” his eyes traveled slowly around the room, “the police expect to find measures very shortly to make that person speak!”
A low cry broke from Hilda Wentworth. Darting across the room, she caught the lieutenant’s arm imploringly.
“Oh, please, sir, don’t—don’t——”
“I hardly think you need alarm yourself, Miss Wentworth!”
Madelyn was smiling quietly from the doorway. “I trust, Miss Noraker,” she continued, addressing me, “that The Bugle will do Miss Wentworth the justice, and myself the favor, of announcing that I am prepared to prove that no relative of Mr. Hendricks had any connection with his death, or possesses any knowledge of how it was brought about! And furthermore, for Lieutenant Perry’s peace of mind, you may add that it is a case not of suicide—but of murder!”
The lieutenant’s face went a sudden, pasty yellow. Madelyn slowly drew on her gloves.
“By the way, Lieutenant, if you and the coroner have time to meet me here at ten o’clock tomorrow morning, I will take pleasure in corroborating my statements!”
She bowed to the other occupants of the room. “I will also include in that invitation Miss Wentworth and the gentlemen who were present at the time of the murder.”
She stepped back, and, adroitly skirting the group of newly arrived newspaper men, ran lightly across the pavement to her car.
At the steps of the motor I caught her. “Madelyn, just one question, please! How in the name of Heaven could the murderer shoot, and then escape through a locked door?”
Madelyn drew down her veil wearily.
“He didn’t shoot!” she said shortly.
Hilda Wentworth, haggard-faced after a feverishly tossing night, was toying with her breakfast grapefruit and tea, which the motherly housekeeper had insisted on bringing to her room, when the bell of the telephone tinkled sharply.
Miss Wentworth took down the receiver wearily; but, at the sound of the voice at the other end of the wire, she brightened instantly.
“Good morning! This is Miss Mack. I am not going to ask you if you had a restful night.”
“Restful night!” the girl cried hysterically. “Two of those odious policemen have been patrolling the house constantly, and watching my room as though I would steal away with the family spoons if I had a ghost of a chance!”
Miss Mack’s exclamation was only partly audible, but the girl smiled wanly.
“I shall be detained perhaps a half an hour longer than I expected this morning, Miss Wentworth. If you will explain this to Lieutenant Perry, and the other gentlemen, I will appreciate it.”
Miss Mack hung up the receiver abruptly. It was obvious that she was in a hurry. But there was an inflection in her tones that brought a new color to Hilda Wentworth’s face, and she was surprised to find herself return to her breakfast with almost a relish.
For a moment, after she had finished the call, Madelyn sat with a pen poised thoughtfully over a pad of writing paper. Then, tossing the pen aside, she turned to the telephone again.
“Hello! Bugle office?” she snapped, as a belated click answered her call. “Oh, is that you, Nora? Can you give me a few moments? Good! I wish you would call at the office of Ambrose Murray, the president of the Third National Bank, and tell him that you were sent by Miss Mack. He may, or may not, have certain information to give you. You will deliver his message to me at the Hendricks home at a quarter after ten. Wait for me outside. Do you understand—outside?”
As the tall, old-fashioned clock in the library of the late Homer Hendricks rang out the stroke of half past ten, it gazed down on a group of six persons, whose attitudes presented an interesting study in contrasting emotions.
In the corner nearest the door stood Lieutenant Perry and Coroner Smedley. The lieutenant had refused the offer of a chair, and the coroner, who worshipped at the Perry shrine for political reasons, essayed to copy the other’s majesty of demeanor, his smile of supreme boredom, and even his very attitude.
Grayson had drawn Hilda Wentworth’s chair thoughtfully into the shadow of a huge palm, and was bending over her in an effort to buoy her spirits, which was apparently so successful that Weston, seated with Wilkins on the opposite side of the room, scowled savagely.
“Ten thirty!” snapped Mr. Perry, ostentatiously consulting the gold repeater, which the members of the detective department had presented to him on the occasion of his silver wedding anniversary. “I will give Miss Mack just five minutes more. I have work to do!”
“The five minutes will not be necessary, Lieutenant,” said a quiet voice from the hall, as Madelyn and I paused in the doorway.
“Quite dramatic!” came from Mr. Perry.
Madelyn’s eyes swept the room. Her graceful serenity had disappeared in a sudden tenseness. “You will please follow me up-stairs,” she said, moving back.
“Up-stairs?” growled Mr. Perry.
Madelyn turned to the stairway without answer.
Miss Wentworth and Grayson were the first to comply, and the lieutenant, observing that the others were joining them, brought up a sullen rear, with the coroner endeavoring to copy his appearance of contempt.
Madelyn paused at the door of the music-room, and waited silently for us to enter. The shattered door had been temporarily repaired, and placed on a new set of hinges. Madelyn closed it, and stepped to the center of the room. She stood for a moment, staring abstractedly up at a brightly colored Turner landscape. A silence crept through the apartment, so pregnant that even Lieutenant Perry squared his shoulders.
“I am going to tell you the story of a tragedy,” began Madelyn, with her eyes still fixed on the landscape as though studying its bold coloring.
“In all of my peculiar experience I have never met with a crime so artistically conceived and so diabolically carried out. From a personal standpoint, I may even say that I owe the author my thanks for one of the most interesting problems which it has been my fortune to confront. In these days of bungled crime, it is a relief to cross wits with one who has really raised murder to a fine art!”
Her left hand mechanically, almost unconsciously, dropped a small round object into the palm of her right hand. It was a green jade ball. From somewhere in the room came a sudden low sound like the hiss of a trampled snake.
Madelyn’s eyes dropped to the ball almost caressingly. “I am now about to re-enact the drama of Mr. Homer Hendricks’s murder. I hardly think it will be necessary to caution silence until I am quite through!”
She stepped to the piano at the other end of the room, twirled the music stool a moment, and, carefully inspecting its height like a musician critical of trifles, took her seat at the keyboard.
Her hands ran lightly over the keys with the touch of the born music-lover. Then, without preamble, she broke into the storm scene from “William Tell.”
Miss Wentworth was gazing at Grayson with a sort of dumb wonder. The young man pressed her arm gently.
The expression of superior boredom had entirely left Lieutenant Perry’s ruddy features.
Madelyn’s fingers seemed fairly to race over the keys. The thundering music of Rossini rolled through the apartment. Madelyn was reaching the climax in that superb musical painting of the war of the elements.
Again that low sibilant sound like a serpent’s hiss sounded from somewhere in the taut-nerved audience, to be drowned by the sharp, clear-cut report of a revolver!
Madelyn’s fingers wavered, her elbow fell with a sharp discord on the keys, and she staggered back from the stool. In the front of the piano, at a point almost directly opposite her left temple, a small hole, perhaps the diameter of a quarter, had opened in the elaborate carving, and from it curled a thin spiral of blue smoke!
With a jagged splotch of powder extending from her temple to her cheek, Madelyn sprang to her feet. From the rear of the room, a man, crouching forward in his chair, darted toward the door. Lieutenant Perry’s hand flashed from his pocket with the instinct of the veteran policeman. At the end of his outflung arm frowned the blue muzzle of a revolver.
“You may arrest Mr. Montague Weston for the murder of Homer Hendricks!” came the quiet voice of Madelyn.
The words, instead of a spur, acted with much the effect of a sledge-hammer on the agitated figure of Weston. For an instant he gazed wildly about the room like a man confronted with a ghastly specter. The steady coolness of purpose that had marked his brilliant rise at the bar had shriveled in the heart-stabbing moments of Madelyn’s demonstration. As Lieutenant Perry stretched a hand toward him, he fell in a sobbing heap at the officer’s feet.
Madelyn jerked her head significantly from the white, drawn face of Hilda Wentworth to Weston’s moaning form. The lieutenant fastened his hand on the man’s collar and dragged him to his feet as the coroner flung open the door.
The suddenness of it all had gripped us as by a magnet. The creaking of a chair sounded in the tension with a sharpness that was almost painful. The denouement had occurred with the swiftness of a film from a moving picture machine—and was blotted out as swiftly as the lieutenant closed the door behind his cowering prisoner.
Grayson breathed a long, deep sigh.
“How, how in thunder, Miss Mack, did——”
Madelyn had resumed her toying with the green jade ball. With a gesture almost like that of a schoolmistress addressing a dense student, she stepped across to the piano, and inserted the ball in the small, round hole in the heavy carving, through which had floated the blue curl of smoke. It exactly matched six other balls of green jade, set into the panels in a fantastic ornamentation.
“Before this instrument is used again,” said Madelyn, as she turned, “I would recommend a thorough overhauling. Just behind the opening which I have filled is the muzzle of a revolver—loaded with a blank cartridge for this morning’s purpose, but which has not always been so harmless.
“From its trigger, you will find—as I assured myself last night—a wire spring connecting with one of the treble D flats on the keyboard. When Mr. Hendricks struck it in the overture of ‘William Tell,’ and again when I repeated his action just now, the pressure of the key released the trigger of the weapon, and it was automatically exploded.
“When Weston attached the apparatus—your ten days’ absence from the house, Miss Wentworth, giving him ample time—he used a paper substitute for the jade ball he had removed, and probably took occasion, when he entered the room last night, to cover over the exposed opening in the panels.
“Unfortunately for him, the imp of chance was dogging his trail. He dropped the jade ball—and the same perverse imp directed the hand of Nemesis to it.
“The psychological effect of my repetition of the crime, after the shock of the discovery of his apparatus, would have taxed a far stronger set of nerves than those of Mr. Weston!”
She paused, and then added in a musing afterthought, “Perhaps, you can tell me, Mr. Grayson, what cynical philosopher has said that all women are fickle? Mr. Weston happens to be an assiduous devotee of My Lady Nicotine. I fancy that he was so completely under her spell that he sought relief from the task of arranging his murder-spring in his favorite pipe. But she of Nicotine, perhaps in horror at his meditated crime, jilted her slave. As he bent over his work his pipe bowl was tilted ever so slightly—and the ashes, which fell with her favor, again aided the imp of chance to lead me to his trail!”
Madelyn shrugged her shoulders as though she were quite through, and then, with a sudden suggestion, continued, “The motive? What are the two greatest factors that sway men to evil?
“The first, of course, is greed. Weston, himself, will have to supply the details of his betrayal of the trust of Homer Hendricks. It was not until Miss Noraker brought me, just before I entered the house this morning, certain confidential information as to the financial condition of Weston, that I was absolutely certain of this link in my chain of evidence.
“Under an assumed name, he has been engineering certain questionable mining companies, and had even persuaded the man who was his life-long friend to invest a considerable share of his fortune in one of his projects. Faced by the imminence of exposure, and ruin, and unable to conceal longer the truth from Homer Hendricks, Weston’s devilish ingenuity suggested the death of the man who had trusted him—and the means of carrying it out.”
Madelyn walked slowly to the door, and then turned.
“I have forgotten the second of the two motives that I referred to. Of course, it is the factor of jealousy, or perhaps love. May I mention your name, Miss Wentworth?
“Goaded by the fear of losing you, he pilfered one of your gloves, and dropped it where a schoolboy was bound to see its connection with the crime. I daresay that he would have offered to establish your innocence on your promise to marry him. He could have done it in any one of a dozen ways, of course, without implicating himself.”
Madelyn gave a sudden glance toward Wilkins and myself.
“I think that Mr. Grayson wishes to discuss that factor of love somewhat further with Miss Wentworth!”
As we stepped into the hall after her, she softly closed the door of the music-room.