THE IMMEDIATE REQUIREMENT, MISS Withers decided, was more light on the subject. She finally found and pulled the dirty string which turned on the glaring overhead bulb, and then looked at the old-fashioned gold watch pinned to her old-fashioned bosom and noted that it was just seventeen minutes past twelve.
The important thing was to keep perfectly calm. After all, there was no real reason why her knees should be quaking or her throat too dry to swallow. This was, she reassured herself, an amateur detective’s dream come true, because here was a still-warm corpse and a murder room unsullied and untrampled by the myrmidons of the police, its clues crying to heaven to be discovered.
It was really only a matter of where to begin. Looking for clues in this cottage was going to be on the difficult side, she realized. The place was disordered, but it appeared to be a disorder of long standing. The door had been left ajar, but there was nothing to show that the murderer had entered or left that way, for both the rear windows were open, and one of them was unscreened.
True, there were a few footprints damply imprinted on the linoleum. But, she thought, it would have been simpler if there had been an exotic Turkish cigarette still burning in the ashtray. There was not, however, even an ashtray, as Searles had evidently smoked a pipe and let the refuse fall where it may. There wasn’t even an initialed gold cuff-link glistening on the floor, or a scented lace handkerchief clutched in the dead man’s hand. She thought of looking through Searles’s pockets and then backed down. It had seemed ghoulish enough to approach the pail and lift his head so that she could be sure that it was Searles and that he was beyond help.
There was a great deal of difference, Miss Withers was discovering, between standing on the sidelines and gently heckling the police as they performed their routine investigation, and trying to work all by her lonesome.
More than that, she still felt jittery, although Joe Searles was certainly past harming any one. And she knew that the murderer would be anywhere else in the world besides in the neighborhood of his deed. All the same, she tiptoed over to the antique bathroom and peered within, surprising some cockroaches and a beetle or so, and then looked into the clothes closet, which contained nothing except the dead man’s Sunday suit of shiny serge. An empty holster hung nearby on a nail.
At the other end of the room was the alcove fitted out as a kitchen, and this she found more to her liking as a spot for scientific deduction. The first notation she made was that Searles had dined that night upon hamburger patties, fried potatoes mixed with onions, rye bread: with bacon grease as a substitute for butter, and a bottle of beer.
“The condemned man ate a hearty meal,” she observed softly. Worst of all, she had a feeling that it was dollars to doughnuts that she herself had condemned him, however unwittingly. She decided, after a close study of the remains of the meal and the hardness of the grease on the dishes, that Searles had eaten early in the evening. She made a most detailed inspection of the cupboards and shelves and then looked into the garbage can, which sadly needed emptying. From that Miss Withers turned her attention to the wastepaper basket, which held several daily newspapers, metropolitan and local, with all wordage on the Cairns murder clipped out, also some onion peels, the bloodstained paper in which the hamburger had been wrapped, and an empty beer bottle. She emptied all this trash out upon the newspaper, having other uses for the basket.
Miss Withers was holding a container of pancake flour in her hand when she first heard the sound of the car turning into the alley Her first natural feminine impulse was to lock herself into the bathroom and scream, but then she noticed that the approaching automobile had a red spotlight and that as it stopped two men got out with a flash of brass buttons.
“Oh, dear!” cried the schoolteacher as she turned out the light somewhat tardily. But by the time the two officers from the police radio car were crowding into the doorway, guns out and flashlights blazing, she was calmly seated at the telephone, dialing the number of the Shoreham police station. “I’d like to speak to Inspector Oscar Piper,” she was saying. “I want to report a murder—”
That call was doomed from the start never to be completed. But as Miss Withers tried to explain to the inspector some time later, it was the officer’s own fault if he tripped over the wastebasket. “Because he needn’t have been in so much of a hurry to snatch the phone away from me when I was only trying to report the murder!”
They were standing now on the porch of Searles’s cottage, where until a moment or two ago the maiden schoolteacher had been in police custody. Inside the cottage there was now a considerable hubbub going on, with much flickering of flashlights and the rumble of official masculine voices, where Joe Searles had taken on in death an importance that could never have been his in life.
“Just relax, Hildegarde,” the inspector said patiently. “I want you to answer one or two questions. Why did you put the wastebasket in front of the door?”
She sniffed. “Because of the flour, of course.”
“I see. That makes it simple. Thanks very much. It’s just as clear as crystal to me now. And do you mind telling me why you poured all that pancake flour on the floor?”
“Your men coming so belatedly to arrest Searles startled me. I only meant to put down a little flour.”
“A little flour! But for God’s sake, why?”
“Go blow on it, and see,” she told him.
The inspector peered at her, his eyes suddenly sharp and fixed with a new worry. “Hildegarde, are you feeling all right? We’d better get you home—”
“Oh, stop it! I’m not out of my mind. I asked you to go blow on the spilled flour, just as I told you. You see, I poured the flour on the clearest footprint. The murderer must have stepped into the water that overflowed from the pail when he stuck Searles’s head in. It was evaporating very fast, and I didn’t see how else to protect it, so I poured the flour over it and then put the wastebasket on top.”
“The idea being, if I may ask?”
“A reverse-action moulage, of a sort. I thought that perhaps the flour would stick to the damp spot and give the outline of the footprint.”
The inspector suddenly left her and hurried inside. After a moment there was the sound of flapping newspaper, and then Sheriff Vinge’s voice. “There she is, damn if she ain’t. Come here, you with the camera. And who’s got the tape measure?”
After some time the inspector came back out on the porch, mopping his brow. “It’s a man’s shoe, medium-narrow toe, size 8½ B,” he admitted. “That ought to be of some help, unless, as the sheriff just suggested, you made the print yourself—”
“Does that look like an 8½ B?” demanded the schoolteacher, exposing her stout oxford and a thin if slightly bony ankle. He shook his head. “And,” she continued, “just where does Sheriff Vinge come in on this case? Isn’t it out of his jurisdiction?”
Piper shook his head. “City or country, it’s all the same. The local chief of police is a political relic, seventy years old, and Vinge operates as deputy chief. He seems inclined to take the reins back in his own hands—I guess he doesn’t like the way I’m handling things. As a matter of fact, I don’t like the way I’m handling things either.” The inspector broke off as a stubby, competent-looking little man came out of the door, jamming a straw hat down over his bald head. “Oh, Doctor!”
The inspector introduced them. “Dr. Farney, can you tell us anything about the time of death?”
“Not much. His body temperature’s 97.5, which on a night like this means he’s been dead not more than two hours and not less than half an hour. It’s just a case of simple drowning—a man can drown in a pail or an inch-deep puddle, for that matter, just as easy as in an ocean.”
“I see. Any chance of suicide or accident?”
The doctor stuck out his lower lip. “Can’t rule out the possibility. But offhand I’d say that somebody jammed the man’s head under water and held it there.”
“Which would mean, wouldn’t it,” Miss Withers excitedly put in, “that the murderer must have been an exceptionally powerful man?”
Farney was openly amused. “I think, ma’am, that you yourself could have done it if you were mad enough. You see, Searles was asleep, apparently in a drunken stupor. He was unconscious before he knew what was happening to him.”
“And you can’t narrow the time element down any?” Piper asked.
Dr. Farney shook his head. “Well, I can!” insisted Miss Withers. Both men turned to stare at her. “Because I called Searles on the phone a few minutes before twelve—it rang and rang and rang and finally he answered. And I discovered the body at twelve-seventeen.”
“You phoned Searles?” Piper demanded. “But why?”
“I was worried,” she admitted. “I felt that earlier this evening I had started something, and I didn’t know what. I was sure that Searles hadn’t told all he knew, so I phoned him. When he answered his voice was thick, and his language—”
The inspector said dryly that he could understand about Searles’s language after being awakened at midnight. “You recognized his voice?”
She shrugged. “It sounded like Searles, only his voice was all gummy and thick.”
The doctor agreed that that would be natural, with Searles in the besotted condition in which he had gone to sleep. “It’s a wonder he woke up at all,” Farney continued. “Well, if you’ll excuse me—”
“Wait, Doctor,” the inspector said. “How soon can you post him?”
“Why—won’t he keep?” Dr. Farney scowled. “I’ve got to take out kids’ tonsils all morning. How about getting another man—young Radebaugh or somebody?”
Miss Withers jabbed the inspector sharply with her elbow, and as he turned in surprised indignation the doctor settled the problem by giving in. “Oh, all right, I’ll do it as soon as you can get the body up town. Medicos aren’t supposed to need any sleep, anyway.” Mumbling quietly to himself, Dr. Farney hurried off towards his car.
“Just a minute, Hildegarde,” the inspector said. “I’ll see if Vinge has ordered the ambulance yet. Don’t go away, I want to talk to you.”
He was back in a moment. “I want to talk to you, Oscar. I want to explain why I came over here—” She broke off as she found that he had taken her arm and was leading her down the steps.
“Tell me on the way back,” he said. “I want to get you out of here before Vinge arrests you for the murder.”
“Why—” she gasped.
“You have a talent for getting into trouble,” he went on. “How’d you know Searles was going to be killed?”
“But I didn’t! I thought he was the murderer, and I was going to surprise him into a confession” She smiled. “Don’t look so glum and disgusted, Oscar. Because this second murder proves one thing, anyway. Pat Montague is innocent.”
They came out of the alleyway, away from the slow hushing sound of the breakers on the shore. The inspector laughed bitterly. “You may as well know all,” he said. “We let Montague loose a little after eleven o’clock.”
Miss Withers gasped again. “But, Oscar!”
“We had to. The confession was no good at all. As soon as he signed it we put him back under the lie detector and it all fell to pieces. Not one thing in the confession was on the level, except that he hated Cairns and wanted him dead. Of course, he may have been tricking the machine, but that’s awfully roundabout.”
“But, Oscar, isn’t it true that when the machine does give a false reading it is because the suspect has built up a false sense of guilt about unimportant things, in a way hypnotized himself into concealing things that don’t matter so he’ll confuse the issue?”
“Something like that. Anyway, we were up a tree. Then finally Loomis, the D.A., suggested that we forget the lie detector and try a truth serum, or whatever you call it.”
“Not that scopolamine stuff again?”
“No, twilight sleep is out of date. We were talking about that new drug they developed in the Army medical corps to loosen up the subconscious of bad cases of battle fatigue. When anybody’s had enough sodium betapentalin he’ll answer questions truthfully, he can’t help it. Only—”
“Only Pat Montague refused his permission?”
“Permission hell. There’s a new type of the drug you can give through the mouth, in coffee or anything. Taste’s faintly salty, like all pentothalic derivatives, that’s all. We were going to try it on Montague first and ask his permission later. By that time maybe we’d better have had a real confession instead of a fake one like he gave us earlier.”
“But even so, could you use it?”
“Not in court. But we figured we’d have enough of the real facts so we could prove our case, anyway. I even had the chief medical examiner send me out some of the stuff”—here Piper showed her a small blue glass bottle—“but we never got to use it.”
“Still insisting that Montague is guilty?” she interrupted. “Can’t you ever forget that blessed triangle of yours?”
He smiled. “There are new angles to the triangle now. And Searles’s death doesn’t make things any simpler, either. On the contrary, as a matter of fact.” They both turned to watch the ambulance as it sped along on its mission to pick up what was left of the unhappy gardener.
“But if you were so convinced of Montague’s guilt—”
“Listen a minute,” Piper said. “Look, Hildegarde. We never held Montague for murder, but just for investigation, see? But what do you think Mrs. Helen Cairns up and does yesterday? She telegraphs to Chicago for a hotshot criminal lawyer, meets him at the airport, and rushes him over to the station, stopping to see a judge on the way. So all of a sudden we had this stew-bum of a wild Irishman on our hands—”
Miss Withers began to smile. “Clarence Darrow, Fallon, or Earl Rogers?”
“None of them. Some guy named Malone or Mahoney. Before we even knew he was in town he’d got wise to the betapentalin gag, uncovered the sheriff’s private bottle of rye, dated up the D.A.’s big blonde secretary, and slapped a writ of habeas corpus in Vinge’s face.”
They walked on in silence. “A fast worker,” Miss Withers said.
“Jim the Penman crossed with Captain Kidd,” remarked the inspector bitterly. “Anyway, he sprung his client about eleven, which gave Montague plenty of time to kill Searles, who was the only real witness against him.”
“But if Montague went off in the company of his lawyer and Helen Cairns, then he has an alibi—”
“He didn’t. He went off alone, like a bat out of hell. Last I saw of Mr. Whatshisname, he was sitting in Vinge’s office, figuring up an expense account for Mrs. Cairns and singing some silly song about how he caught himself a midnight train and beat his way to Georgia.”
“But wasn’t Helen waiting outside for Pat?”
“In the hall—but he went out the side door, without a word of thanks to the hotshot lawyer or a good-bye to anybody. She hung around a while and then drove off alone, looking mad as a wet hen.”
“My, my,” said Miss Withers. “It must have been a great disappointment to Helen Cairns. After she’d gone to all that trouble—”
“For two cents I’d run the stew-bum out of town,” Piper growled. “I’ve got a hunch he isn’t entitled to practice before the New York bar, anyway.”
“I’m afraid, Oscar, that you have even worse worries than that. Or rather you will have in a minute, when I get up courage enough to make a sort of confession.” By this time they were coming up the clamshell-bordered path towards her door. “Please come inside and I’ll make you some coffee.”
“Haven’t time, thanks,” Piper said. “Now what’s this about a confession? You’re not going to tell me that you did Searles in, are you?”
The amusement went out of his face as he saw her expression. “I’m afraid,” she said, “that I did just that. You’d better change your mind and come in.”
The inspector came in and even accepted a cup of warmed-over coffee, but he was too much on edge to drink it. “Go ahead and tell me the worst,” he demanded.
“I meant it for the best. How was I to know? I mean, I was only trying to help uncover the trail by smoking out something that seemed rotten in Denmark, and—”
“Will you please stop the sansifrans double talk?”
She took a deep breath and began again. “Oscar, do you remember your promising to try to find out for me just what it was that a certain committee of local citizens had approached me about when I first came to Shoreham?”
He nodded impatiently, took a sip of his coffee, and burned his mouth. “Damn and blast! Sorry, go on.”
“I found out for myself. I also found out, through the help of the Beales’ talkativeness, that the local committee had been trying to go ahead with its own sleuthing. You see, they were trying to find out who had been poisoning dogs hereabouts, and they had come to the conclusion that it was Huntley Cairns because of something they found in his library just before he was murdered. There seemed a very good chance that one of them—or more than one—had immediately taken matters into his own hands and had drowned Cairns in his own pool.”
“If that’s all you have to say, forget it. People don’t commit murder to avenge the poisoning of a pup.” He started to rise.
“Wait, Oscar. Not normal people. But just who is normal these days? There’s always an aftermath of hysteria after a major war, and on top of that the atom bombs didn’t just blow up two Japanese cities; they blew the foundations out from under every one of us. Everybody is jittery. And you yourself know that the files are full of cases where murder was committed over a few dollars, or because a neighbor insisted on mowing his lawn too early on a Sunday morning, or because a husband misunderstood his wife’s psychic one-club bid in a hot rubber of bridge.”
He shrugged. “Go on—get to the point, will you?”
“I shall. So I decided that while one or two of the people in that group might have murdered Cairns, they couldn’t all be in on it. And the rest must be feeling worried and guilty and ready to crack. I tried to get them all together and then learned that they themselves were having a meeting to discuss the mess they were in. So I walked into the meeting and I dropped what I hoped was a bombshell. I told them I knew all, or nearly all—and that if Cairns had been killed for that reason, then they had got the wrong man, because he hadn’t been the dog poisoner at all. In proving my case I’m afraid I let them think that I had evidence enough to prove that the real dog poisoner was Joe Searles.”
Piper set the coffee down on a nearby table. “I begin to see.”
“I hope you do—and that you’ll understand. Anyway, after I’d done that I got to worrying—suppose Searles was really the murderer and had killed his employer to cover up the dog poisoning? I talked myself into believing him guilty, and finally I very rashly went down there hoping to surprise him into a confession, and I found him dead!”
“And you have a very good idea that somebody in the group, on learning they’d got the wrong man the first time, up and rushed off to get the right one!”
She nodded. “It seems logical.”
“So now it’s a question of whether Mrs. Boad, or the Benningtons, or Nicolet, or Doc Radebaugh wears a size-8½-B shoe!” Piper brightened a little at the prospect of something definite to get his teeth into. He even finished his coffee. “You’ve really made a mess of things this time, trying to work alone in the dark—but maybe I can still save something out of it, with that footprint to go on.”
“Yes, Oscar, but—”
He paused in the doorway. “Don’t worry about it too much. I’ll see you in the morning. We may even have the case all washed up—”
“Yes, perhaps. If it only wasn’t for the other clue in Searles’s cottage tonight!”
“The other—what other?”
“The whiskey bottle,” she pointed out softly.
“But there wasn’t any whiskey bottle!”
“To quote from the esteemed Mr. Holmes, ‘That was the curious incident!’ The man had been drinking—the place smelled of it—but obviously he hadn’t spent the evening in any bar. And why the killer should bother to carry away a whiskey bottle—”
The inspector thought and then shrugged. “Searles probably threw it out of the window in a drunken moment.”
She looked dubious. “Perhaps. And perhaps he brought his rotgut liquor home with him in a brown paper bag, but I doubt it. The more I think about this case, Oscar, the more I am convinced that from the beginning we have been looking for the strange and fantastic, when the actual truth is very plain and simple. As plain as—”
“As the nose on your face?” The inspector beat her to that one and then got out of the door before she could think of a reply.
“ ‘He laughs best …’ ” murmured the schoolteacher to herself. She took a small blue glass bottle from her handbag and studied it thoughtfully. It had been very easy to abstract it from the inspector’s coat pocket as they walked along. The idea of an otherwise harmless drug which would force a tongue to speak the truth was extremely attractive to her at the moment.
The question was—how to use it? For truth was, she knew, a double-edged sword.