At the policeman’s words Oliver whirled on his heels, presenting a ravaged face to the inspection of the two men who stood on the step below him.
He was so short that his head was only on the level of Inspector Dolan’s, and Sam, still looking down on him, thought that never had he seen such a change in a human countenance, and was correspondingly softened.
Clearly Aimée was right. Hugh Oliver had loved Consuela Thorne. It was indeed a crushed and broken-hearted man who fronted them, not defiantly as one conscious of having inflicted an injury and regardless of it, but as a humble suppliant. Even Dolan, who had no way of measuring the change in him, was silenced temporarily by his first words.
“Mr. Mellon, thank God you’re here. You are Police Commissioner now, aren’t you? You will tell this man he can’t keep me out. I have a right to be here. He must let me go in to Connie.”
Sam looked at Dolan interrogatively, who shook his head in an emphatic negative.
“I can’t give such an order without asking you a few questions first,” he then said. His tone was not unfriendly, for who could be hard on one so broken? But he was not letting his sentimental sympathy run away with him. “We have a car here. Suppose we go and sit in it while we talk? We’ll have privacy there.” Docilely Oliver followed them across the pavement, murmuring to himself the while like a broken-hearted child: “But I want to go to Connie—to Connie——”
Once established in the automobile, Dolan, who had pulled down one of the small seats and sat facing the other two, could contain himself no longer.
“After that pretty piece you sent to the papers, what rights do you think you have?” Oliver stared at him as if he had not seen him before. Then his lids drooped over his eyes with an effect of unutterable fatigue.
“I hoped it might save her life. Otherwise it was of no consequence. I told Connie that I should he obliged to do it if she persisted in sending out an announcement of our engagement. She understood the risk, but she was always willful. You know how willful she was, Mellon.”
“Yes, she was headstrong——”
“And fearless. That was her fatal trait,” Oliver supplemented, wringing his hands together desperately. “I tried my best, yet I couldn’t get her to believe me. She knew what I thought and couldn’t bring herself to credit the reality of the danger. I even suspected sometimes that she relished the thrill in the possibility that there might be something in it.”
“Danger? What danger are you talking about?” Dolan growled.
“The danger of—of death.” Oliver brought out the word with difficulty, his voice hardly raised above a whisper. “I warned her, and I sent that contradiction; but I was too late. Too late. Too late.” The repetition took of the dolour of a knell. Even Dolan was impressed, and when he spoke again it was more gently.
“Then you knew she was threatened?”
“I knew she would be if she made our engagement public. I wanted her to marry me privately. I thought, I still think, that, once we were married, I could assure her safety. Connie laughed at my reasoning.”
“Well, if you know so much, you can tell us who killed her and how it was done,” Dolan purred, his voice fairly silky in its smoothness. “It’ll help us a lot to know that.”
“Oh, I expected to have to tell you,” Oliver explained, wearily. “That’s one of the things that brought me back here. I was afraid some harmless person might be accused. It seemed to me that under the circumstances it might be easier to hang the crime on some one who was innocent than it would be afterward to prove that he didn’t do it.”
Considering the evidence that might be thought to implicate Harvey Thorne or himself, not to mention the others unknowingly involved, Sam agreed heartily, if silently, with this dictum.
“You’re quite right, Oliver,” he said. “Take your time over it. Tell us in the way least painful to you. Inspector Dolan and I are bound to see that the guilty one is punished——”
“No!” Oliver interjected, almost with violence. “There will be no punishment in this case. Not at the hands of the law.”
“Tell your story, Mr. Oliver. The C’missioner an’ me ain’t so good at solving riddles,” Dolan suggested, to add, grimly: “We’ll be responsible for the legal end o’ the matter.”
“Perhaps you won’t credit it any more than Connie did,” he murmured. “Anyhow, I’ll have to go back into my family history to try to make you understand. You’ll have patience, I hope...My mother was born in the purple, so to speak, in a state where the people could recite their pedigrees (and their horses’ pedigrees) for ten generations. My father was a remarkable man, a genius in his way, but from the day she married him her name was erased from the family records. Wiped out, as if she had never been born. I don’t suppose any of us can measure the humiliation—the disgrace—this was in her eyes. I know I can’t. After my father’s death she centered her hopes on me. I’ve tried to assume the sort of position she wanted for me because she wanted it; but the importance she attached to such things was beyond my comprehension. Understand, she asked nothing for herself. When my father died, her life was ended; but for me her ambition was boundless. Marriage, which had deprived her of her birthright, was to set me back on the throne. She watched over my social contacts, dictated what invitations I was to accept, what cliques I must cultivate, what clubs I should join. Ample money made most of this easy.”
“I wonder she did not wish you to marry a title,” Sam said.
“At one time she had that idea. She actually went to Europe and looked the possible candidates over. Her conclusion was that even in cases of international marriage based on real affection, an American gained only an anomalous position, the suspicion that such matches were entered into for revenue only being too deeply rooted to combat. No, I was to marry an American of birth and breeding. One whose family pedigree could challenge her own.”
“I see. Connie didn’t fill the bill.”
“She didn’t, and I knew she didn’t. I could make no such claim for her. And I was anxious that my mother should not hear of our connection until it was too late for her to attempt to interfere. That, perhaps, was a mistake on my part. Had I told her of our acquaintance her antagonism might not have been roused as it was. But for some time (I’m now thirty-three) she had been growing uneasy about my failure to marry. She had interfered more than once when she fancied I was paying too much attention to a girl she considered undesirable, by calling on me to escort her to some resort at a distance. Evidently she had other sources of information about me than my letters. I didn’t mind. I always told myself that when the time came that I wanted to marry, I could coax her around. After all, I was all she had in the world.”
“Was money her hold over you?” Sam asked.
“Money?” Oliver started as if he had been talking to himself and was surprised to find that he was not alone. Then he resumed his story, speaking in a flat and toneless voice: “No. We are independent of each other as far as money goes. Her hold on me consisted solely of affection. Mine for her, hers for me. But let me get on with this. My feelings don’t matter. She sent for me while I was at the Hot Springs this autumn. She had heard of my devotion to Connie and such a match would have been the wreck of all her hopes. Her son marry a divorcée without a background! She could conjure up nothing worse...Like a fool, I refused to go to her. The first rebellion of my life...This must sound to you trivial—unbelievable——”
“No,” Sam returned, “not in view of what followed. Go on.”
“Well, as I wouldn’t go to her, she came to find me. Not to the same hotel. She summoned me to meet her at her inn. She was not there, and I waited, on fire with impatience to have our scene over with and hurry back to Connie. Every minute away from her was a minute wasted. My mother had been cunning. By sending for me, she had got me out of the way and herself had driven to call on Mrs. Thorne. Their interview must have been a bit of ironic comedy, for she set the key of their conversation by immediately offering to buy Connie off! Connie, who had so far never flattered me by taking my pleadings seriously.” He turned to Sam and went on, addressing him directly: “You who knew her can imagine the imp of mischief that entered into Connie after such an offer. She undoubtedly gave a fine performance of the conscienceless little gold-digger. She flaunted that huge emerald she always wore in a way to convince my mother that it was a gift from me, from whom in reality she had consistently refused to accept more than flowers. She confessed afterwards that she had been outrageous. ‘But she was worse than I was, Hugh. I stopped short of insulting her. And now I mean to marry you, just to get even with her.’ That is the way we became engaged.”
He paused, to add pathetically.
“But do you know, I think she really liked me. Under her glitter, Consuela was a lonely soul, just as I am. And she knew that all I asked was to make her happier.”
His chin drooped and he sat silent, absorbed in his reverie. Sam had not the heart to rouse him, but Dolan’s moments of sentimentality were fleeting.
“Well, get on with it,” he urged. “Who killed her and how was the get-away managed?”
Oliver lifted one shoulder as if to shake off an unwelcome touch, then he resumed mechanically:
“When she returned to the inn, my mother was a transformed woman. There is no use of repeating the details of the scene we had. I felt as though I were facing a stranger. All tenderness toward me was submerged. She commanded me to set aside my paltry ideas of personal happiness. As much as a dethroned king, I was obligated to restore my dynasty to power. And if I was not prepared to do this voluntarily, she must make sure that I did nothing derogatory by removing my temptation. She warned me that Mrs. Thorne would never live to marry me. Gentlemen, I do not think that I am a coward, yet she frightened me. I knew I had to deal with a monomaniac. All of this, with full details which I have spared you, I told Connie on my return to her. She laughed me to scorn and her reply to the challenge was the remark I quoted. Loving her as I did, I should have refused, but that was too much to expect of flesh and blood. The most I could do, when my mother followed us to New York, was to exact a promise that Connie would not see her alone under any circumstances.”
“If your mother is a little lady who always dresses in black silk, Connie kept that promise,” Sam told him.
“How do you know? But, yes, my mother always dresses in black. She never wore colors again after my father’s death.”
Dolan slapped his knee in the way he had when enlightened on any point, and Oliver went on, although his question remained unanswered.
“I understood that she had tried to see Connie a number of times without result. I don’t know if she hoped a different effort at persuasion might be more successful; hut she evidently wanted a private interview and I’m confident that it wasn’t until Connie’s daring announcement, which she doubtless rated a defiance, that she became actually dangerous.”
“Did she do it herself or did she hire it done?” Dolan demanded, impatiently.
Oliver continued his appointed task as if he did not hear.
“The masked hall was a hell-horn opportunity for one as crafty as she. She went as a Sister of Charity——”
“My God!” Dolan shouted, “an’ slid out as sweet as you please by the fire escape. There ought to be a law against ‘em, the trouble they cause the police...I always meant to tell you, C’missioner, there was no ‘extra’ that night. The Transcript got a beat on it because Micky Flinn was at the party and managed to get to a phone before anyone else; but that wasn’t till four or nearly. Go on, Mr. Oliver. Sorry I interrupted you. So your mother did this herself? Did she show you the emerald ring she took?”
A flush crept into Oliver’s pale cheeks.
“My mother is not a thief!” he exclaimed. “If there’s a ring missing, she knows nothing about it. As to the murder, she did it alone. But she is not responsible. I can furnish indisputable medical testimony to that effect. There is a long history of insanity in that pedigree she is so proud of, poor soul. She did it, and she is now under restraint. I’ve brought you the weapon she used.”
With which words, he held out an old-fashioned, pearl-handled revolver.
“There have been several shots fired,” he ended, and sank back on the cushions as if, a tension relaxed, he was glad to rest.
Inspector Dolan and Commissioner Mellon stared at each other in open amazement.
Dolan was the first to find his voice.
“Who told you your mother killed Mrs. Thorne?” he asked, a trifle shakily.
Oliver opened his eyes, which had been closed, and regarded him with surprise.
“She did, of course,” he said. “I shouldn’t have believed it if anyone else had told me. She telephoned me. ‘There’s been a killing. Meet me at——’ Well, never mind where. I met her and she gloated over the fact that she had shot Connie and had saved me from making what she called ‘a fatal mistake.’ She had sense enough to know she must get out of the town, and I went with her to insure her safety. It was hell. She was so proud of her triumph and kept going over the details again and again. ‘Hardly any noise at all,’ she’d say ‘not so much as from an explosion in an automobile exhaust, and an obstacle to your happiness was removed.’ I had to sit and listen to that for hours and never forget that she was my mother...When I had arranged for her care, I came back to make sure no error was being made here.”
“And right here,” said Dolan, in a tone in which amazement struggled with resignation, “is another guy that doesn’t read the newspapers.”
Sam put out a hand and took Oliver’s in his soothingly, as he might a woman’s.
“You probably think there’s no good news in the world,” he said, gently. “I’ve some good news for you now. You mother didn’t kill Connie. She was stabbed, not shot.”
Oliver stared at them blindly for a moment, then from dry eyes that looked as if they would never again shed a tear, great drops welled and coursed down his face.
The two other men turned away their heads and looked out of the window of the car.