MULTUM IN parvo. So much in so little. So many people poured into so confined a space. Lives all tied up in a knot because of a woman’s beauty and her greed. They were about to be untied. The assistant district attorney’s office had not about it any appearance of drama that morning. Sunlight bright outside the windows, tall towers rearing themselves against the sky. Within, gleam of mahogany, efficiency-plus in the very latest equipment, a desk like a battleship, other desks, a stenographer waiting, chairs in a row, the commissioner already there, Armstrong, a plainclothesman at the door admitting the various actors.
Mr. and Mrs. Barcley arrived first, punctual to the minute. Mrs. Barcley wore a gray suit trimmed with fur. In spite of cleverly applied make-up, her face was lined and old in the shadow of a small hat. Barcley, for all his alertness, looked tired, too. Waring was on their heels. He had recovered most of his aplomb. The Gairs were next. They bore themselves well and with no more stiffness than a rather disagreeable job warranted. There was a low murmur of casual greetings as they all sat down. The girl was last. Her eyes were very bright as she came in. Susan Gair happened to be busy with her purse as Judith Pierce dropped into a chair beside Gair, so that she didn’t turn her head. Anyhow Armstrong was on his feet explaining the formalities. Precise words had a meaningless ring to them coming from behind his thin lips. “… in order that we may have your signed statements, so that by sifting the evidence we can establish the identity of the murderer of Rita Rodriguez …” He kept glancing at the door, showed openly his relief when it opened and Inspector McKee walked into the room.
Something of the showman about McKee. Tall, lean as a rake, he nodded to the commissioner, to Armstrong, seated himself slowly behind an empty desk, fingered some withered flowers in his buttonhole absently, took them out, turned to the stenographer, said: “May I have a glass of water, Miss Stillson?” And when in the midst of a dead silence she brought it to him from the cooler, he arranged four white sweet peas with elaborate care. Armstrong was staring at him with a frown. Carey was watching, slim, interested, thoughtful behind lightly folded arms. McKee said to the district attorney: “We’ll come to these later.” And the hearing was resumed.
One by one their previous statements were read to each man and woman in the room with a windup of “Is this correct?” Just as McKee expected, Gair wished to change his testimony. He was apologetic. In the confusion following the dancer’s death he had made certain statements which he felt were not … He went on with it: “Mrs. Barcley and the colonel were talking together when Rita was shot.”
Then Waring rose and eliminated Gair from the picture with the same regret at having been mixed up in his statement to the police on that first night. Armstrong glanced at McKee. The Scotsman shook his head. The girl was last. Not a single question asked about her eventful journey across that ten feet of space between the kitchen and the mahogany barrier at the front of the garden just before Rita died. The stenographer put down the sheet of paper. McKee leaned forward, arms out across the desk, one hand playing with the glass of water, and began to speak.
“We will leave the dancer for a moment and go back to Carlos Silva who was shot on Saturday night in the middle of a thunderstorm. Our knowledge of this man is somewhat vague. But we have a few interesting mementoes.” He took in succession various objects from his pockets, spread them out on the blotter in the most leisurely manner. The first was the emerald, burning brilliantly in the sunlight, the second was the black box with its gruesome little burden, the third was the bit of jade. He went on in his unhurried voice: “This much we can say positively: Silva knew the dancer in South America. He stole a valuable collection of emeralds from the mine in Colombia, of which he was a trusted employee, was caught and imprisoned. What happened to the rest of the stones we don’t know, but this one which was in the dancer’s possession belonged to the collection. If we could establish the link between a third person, a third person who was mixed up with Silva and also with Rita Rodriguez in that exceedingly profitable little adventure … would you all be prepared to establish and swear to your whereabouts in the fall of 1925 and the spring of 1926?”
He had certainly succeeded in getting their combined attention. Every shade of astonishment, incredulity, and at last indignation was painted on various faces. Gair, Waring, and Barcley protested at almost the same moment. They had been requested to come here to verify statements made in the Sanctuary on the night of the murder. This was going a bit too far. No one of them, and the women nodded assent to this, had ever heard of Silva.
“And yet,” McKee said dreamily when the outburst had died, “the same killer disposed of both Rita and the little Colombian. Well.” He ignored the men now, sitting tense and enraged, glanced very deliberately first at Claire Barcley, then at Susan Gair, and lastly at Judith Pierce. “The gun that killed Silva has turned up. It was thrown away last night in Harlem in the alley of a tenement in which a colored cook lay dead. These flowers are from her funeral wreath. She has lived out for years, has a long record of service behind her. Some woman who employed her at one time or another went up there with a wreath of white sweet peas and took advantage of that out-of-the-way spot to get rid of an extremely damaging piece of evidence.” He paused. There wasn’t a murmur in the room.
The Scotsman sighed, leaning back in his chair. He went on in a listless voice: “Unfortunately this colored cook has no relatives, and it will take time to dig up the list of her various employers. So for the present, if no one has anything more of interest to communicate …”
They couldn’t believe that it was over, had braced themselves for an ordeal with a fortitude that was not apparently going to be required. It left them confused, up in the air. Not a single question about Gregory Archer, about the various suspicious details that had cropped up during the investigation, not even a word as to the future—that was perhaps the worst. Simply a request that the individual statements be signed, which was done stiffly. And then the room cleared and the district attorney and the commissioner and McKee were alone.
It was a long interview and not satisfactory to Armstrong. Carey, watching the Scotsman narrowly, was sure he had something up his sleeve, a card he wasn’t at the moment ready to play, perhaps because he didn’t have enough evidence. He was silent, too, in the face of the district attorney’s protest about Donaher’s useless flight to Colombia. That was being made for the purpose of gathering the truth about Silva in order to make him speak—and Silva was dead.
McKee dwelt at some length on the third visitor to Rita’s apartment on the night of her death. The girl had confessed she was there, had mentioned that sound in the living room after she entered and before the police arrived. Silva was at that time hidden in the bathroom watching her movements, so it must have been someone else. As for Archer, McKee said with a shrug that he was being taken to the yacht anchored off the Barcley estate on the New Jersey coast, where no doubt his father and mother and the colonel would join him as soon as they considered it safe.
“And what,” Armstrong demanded bitterly, “are we to do while we’re waiting for him to turn up? Sit and twiddle our thumbs until somebody breaks down and confesses?”
“Keep,” McKee answered, “those signed statements nice and safe. I have a notion we’re going to need them—when Donaher gets back. There are half a dozen things I want to check up on. I’ll be in touch.” And with that he was gone.
A lull then. Monday afternoon, Monday night, Tuesday morning. The police knew a good many things, surmised others. The river police had failed to locate Archer. No trace of the thirty-foot cruiser anywhere along the coast. It had slipped under cover and was waiting for darkness to make a run for it. The yacht was still anchored off Brielle. She couldn’t move ten feet without being instantly hailed and boarded. So that with that particular trap baited all they had to do was wait. Which the Scotsman proceeded to do with masterly decision.
Not so the people involved in Rita’s death. After having answered those subpoenas by appearing in the assistant district attorney’s office, they evidently considered themselves free to return to a normal existence. The Gairs had gone to their country place; Judith Pierce moved about the city—she went shopping, she visited friends. From hour to hour McKee received the most precise information about the girl. On Tuesday afternoon he had a long telephone call from Armstrong.
The district attorney had succeeded in tracing the man in the taxicab waiting outside the Sanctuary for Rita on the Tuesday night before her death. And at once the Barcleys and Waring were drawn sharply back into the limelight. For Claire Barcley, in the absence of her husband and worried about her son (he was spending a great deal of money), had hired the Bascomb detective agency (a rather shoddy firm but working under a state license) to trail Gregory Archer and Rita Rodriguez. Bascomb had come forward. And the substance of Bascomb’s information was that he had discovered that Archer and the dancer were on the eve of marriage and that the Barcleys and Waring had gone by appointment with Rita herself to the Sanctuary in an attempt to buy her off.
Armstrong began to argue it exactly at the other end of the wire. “If, McKee, Waring was the man who dropped the cigarette ash behind the screen in her dressing room—and there was a man there—it would indicate that the interview came off, that the dancer refused to give Archer up, and that one of the three of them, Barcley, was in the speakeasy, too, took that way of wiping Rita off the slate in order to get the fellow out of her clutches.”
McKee sighed and droned into the transmitter: “Gair was the man in her dressing room. He was on the trail of those letters of Judith Pierce’s. And if that’s the solution, why was Silva killed?” The district attorney said something forceful between his teeth and slammed the receiver back on the hook. The Scotsman brewed himself a cup of maté and returned to the perusal of a brochure on handwriting. It was getting dark now. Buckley would soon be moving out of his hideaway. From time to time the Scotsman stirred, sipped, and turned a page, his eyes on the text. “In Graphology to know how to distinguish peculiarities of character is the most difficult as it is the most important … We write not only with the hand but with the brain … writing is … an outburst of the heart, an exponent of life and character more reliable than the delineations of the countenance …”
At a few minutes after seven Telfair walked in. His countenance at least was an open book. He was elaborately calm, with bloodshot eyes and a face haggard from lack of sleep, and he had quite obviously come to find out what the police were doing about Judith Pierce, because the papers were singularly uninformative as far as the Sanctuary murder went.
The inspector murmured, “Whisky in the kitchen if you want it. Sit down,” and went on studying the list of signatures, to lean back with a yawn after a minute, push papers aside, and gaze thoughtfully at the cartoonist. “You had a visit from Susan Gair yesterday afternoon, didn’t you?” And when Telfair merely nodded, his jaw tight, “She is furious about her husband getting himself all tangled up with the dancer on account of Judith Pierce, isn’t she?”
Telfair tried to keep his voice level. He said slowly, “I can’t say I blame her, McKee. Men don’t do that sort of thing for nothing. I think—Miss Pierce might have chosen someone besides the husband of her best friend to …”
“To help her out, you mean?”
“No, I don’t,” Telfair cried, “I mean to …”and was suddenly brutal under the lash of his own pain.
“You may be jumping at conclusions that are absolutely false.”
“You know all about it, I suppose, McKee.”
“I know a good deal.” The telephone rang. He took the receiver off the hook, listened, put it back on again. “The Barcleys and Colonel Waring left the Sixty-eighth Street house in a black Lincoln limousine at a little after 5:30 this afternoon. They’ve just passed Spring Lake. They’ll reach Brielle at about eight. Sometime tonight there’ll be a loving reunion between mother and son. It will be interesting to observe. Of course——” The phone rang again. It was the man watching the Gair house out in the country. Susan Gair had taken a train for New York.
The Scotsman was not surprised at this, either. He said: “Her husband didn’t arrive home from the office, so she’s coming to New York in the hope of surprising him with Miss Pierce in her apartment. She won’t do that because——”
“Why?”
“Because Miss Pierce left it to take a ride in the subway about half an hour ago. There’s a man watching every move she makes.”
Telfair started to say something—and stopped. McKee was absolutely right. Judith had gotten herself into this mess, now let her get herself out—or she could go to Gair for help.
The inspector returned to his scrutiny of the signatures. “Claire Barcley,” he murmured aloud. “If I’d never seen her I’d know that she was the product of a select finishing school, was about fifty (notice the Spencerian slant taught in our most exclusive establishments thirty or thirty-five years ago), had a narrow emotional range (the precision with which the letters are formed), was extremely self-willed (the regularity of the stroke), and subject to an occasional attack of fury (the crossing of the t’s).”
And in the fact of Telfair’s incredulous stare, he proceeded to relate some interesting facts about Barcley and Waring, to be interrupted a third time by the ringing of the telephone bell. He picked up the instrument. It was raining now, drops spattered the windows. Telfair dropped back into bitter thoughts, roused himself as the Scotsman slammed the receiver into place and leaped to his feet with a glance at his watch. It was twenty minutes to eight.
“What is it?” the cartoonist demanded, his thoughts, as always, reverting to the girl. This time they were strictly relevant, for McKee said, his brown eyes stern in deep sockets, “The men following Judith Pierce lost her in the subway. She’s got to be found. She’s got to be found right away or it may be too late!”