ALL THAT TOOK PLACE, of course, in Clinton. But I have said that this was a case of human reactions and motivations, rather than of clues; of the effect of crime on a group of normal people, neither better nor worse than their fellows. And the immediate effect of all this on Arthur was shattering.
Save that Fred was under arrest in connection with the murders nothing else was generally known. Sometime that evening the sheriff drove to Millbank and saw Arthur. He stopped his car outside on the road and went up to the cottage; and through the window he saw Junior in his night clothes, hanging onto his father and shouting for him to play, with Mary Lou standing by.
The sheriff is a sentimental man, so he went back to his car again and sat there for a while, smoking his pipe. Then, when the lights went on upstairs he went back to the cottage. Arthur was alone, and he stepped inside and spoke to him.
“Mind if I see you for a minute, Arthur? It’s not official.”
He smiled, and Arthur grinned back, rather wryly.
“Sit down,” he said. “And since it’s not official, how about a drink?”
The sheriff shook his head.
“I’d as soon see you outside. I have an idea you won’t like what I’ve got to say.”
“I thought it wasn’t official.”
“Well, it’s not, at that. But it’s damned unpleasant if it’s true.”
They went out together; and on the lawn, sitting side by side on a bench, Arthur heard that story. What passed through his mind I do not know. Perhaps he was seeing Juliette, in that festive hat and frock she had worn at their wedding; looking out with bland childlike eyes and solemnly taking him for her husband, when she already had one. Certainly that incredible duplicity of hers was the first thing he mentioned.
“Married!” he said. “To Fred Martin! I can’t believe it. I don’t believe it.”
Then he sensed something further.
“But look here,” he said. “You don’t mean—” He steadied himself. “She had divorced him, of course.”
The sheriff knocked his pipe against the arm of his chair.
“Well, that’s it, Lloyd,” he said. “We don’t know for sure. She wrote to Fred that she’d been to Reno, but there’s no record there. And when she saw him here she said there hadn’t been any divorce at all.”
Arthur sat still, in a stunned silence.
“Good God!” he said. “And I lived with her for years!”
That was his first thought. It was later that he remembered the alimony, the constant nagging worry about money for her, his continuous anxieties, even the deprivations. It must have been a bitter pill to swallow. He had paid her a small fortune, and if the sheriff was right she had not been entitled to it.
I believe he did not go to bed at all that night. Toward morning Mary Lou wakened, and found him in the cottage living room.
“What in the world is the matter?” she asked. “It’s four o’clock.”
But he could not tell her. Not the truth anyhow.
He reached up and pulled her down on his knee.
“My darling,” he said. “I have just learned something that—well, that bothers me.”
“What?”
“Apparently Juliette had been married before I met her.”
She stared at him.
“So that’s the woman you couldn’t forget!” she said. “A liar and a cheat! A cheap woman, hiding her past and carrying on with anybody who attracted her! What fools men are!”
She was sorry afterwards. She cried and he tried to comfort her. At last he carried her up to their room and put her into her bed; but when she moved over and made room for him he kissed her and went away again.
Juliette had made a fool and then a tool out of him. But it was not only that. Jonas Tripp was still away, his alibi for the murder still uncorroborated; and sitting alone that night, with Mary Lou and Junior asleep upstairs, he wondered if Juliette had not provided a new and convincing motive for his having killed her.
There was plenty of activity now. One night Tate did not appear, and I gathered that with Fred under lock and key in the jail at Clinton we were supposed to be safe again. Then suddenly there came real news of Allen Pell. On the third day after Fred Martin’s arrest a hospital a hundred miles down the coast reported a case which might or might not have been the missing man. At least both the date and the appearance of the man in question coincided. A detective, sent there at once, brought back the details.
It was a curious story. On the night of Allen’s disappearance, or rather about two o’clock in the morning, the night porter on duty had heard the bell ringing frantically, and ran to the front door. There was a car in the driveway, and two men were on the steps, one lying still and the other bending over him. The one on the steps was unconscious and bleeding from a wound on the head.
The stooping man did not straighten. He was holding a handkerchief to the wound, and he spoke in a husky voice.
“I struck this fellow with my car,” he said. “Better get some help and carry him in.”
The porter went to get an orderly, and when the two came back with a stretcher the injured man was alone. Both car and driver had gone.
That was the story, belated as it was. The porter could describe neither the automobile nor the man who had driven it. The incident itself was not unusual. Motorists were not infrequently moved to pity but anxious to escape recognition; and the injury was not a fatal one. Pell—if it was Pell—had had a bad concussion and a deep surface cut at the back of his head.
They had put him in a semipublic ward, where he had lain in a stupor for several days. When he came out of it he did not know where he was.
“How did I get here?” he asked the nurse. “What happened to me?”
“A car hit you,” she told him.
“And where is this? Where am I?”
He seemed bewildered when she explained, but he asked no more questions. He gave the name of Henry Lewis, and said he had no fixed residence. As to his injury, he said that the last he remembered he had been on a road some miles from a hospital, and that he knew nothing more. The intern who dressed the wound the night he was brought in said, however, that it appeared to be several hours old. The blood was clotted and had changed in color.
He was impatient to get up and leave, but it was two weeks or so before he was up and about. He insisted on going, and as he had still some money in his pocket they let him go.
“Some money?” asked the detective. “How much?”
“He had two hundred dollars when he came in. I thought later maybe the fellow who brought him put it there. Lewis seemed surprised to find it. He had about a hundred left, I think, after he paid his bill. The rate is low here in the wards.”
There was apparently no doubt that it had been Allen. He answered the description, even to the slacks and sweater I remembered so well. But there was no further trace of him. Once more radio and teletype sent out their description, without result, of his weight, height, coloring, and even of his clothing. The press played up the story, and he was generally believed to have been the third victim of the unknown killer.
I was entirely certain myself that it had been Allen. It tied up with the tramp, who had been in a hospital himself; but though relieved, I was still anxious. And the story, as the sheriff pointed out, was not consistent.
“Why the Henry Lewis stuff?” he demanded. “If he is straight, why not come back here and tell what happened to him? The papers are full of it. And what about this tale of his, of being on a road some miles from that hospital? How did he get there? His car and trailer are still here.”
“He is alive anyhow,” I said inadequately.
“Alive where? See here, Marcia,” he said. “You were a friend of his—if that’s the word, after seeing the way you took his disappearance! Did he ever tell you anything about himself?”
“Nothing—except that he didn’t like the police.”
He grinned wryly at this.
“May have his reasons for that,” he said. “May have had his reasons for the trailer too. It’s a pretty anonymous way to live. No permanent location. No neighbors to watch. Just trundling along from place to place. A fellow could hide out that way pretty much as he pleased; especially if he knew somebody was after him.” He smiled. “When I take this to Bullard he’ll say Fred Martin was after him!”
Fred was not without friends during those days. I was looking after Dorothy. The baby was adorable, but she herself still lay in bed, her face white against the pillows, and the nurse reported that she could not eat. But the golf club had taken up a subscription for Fred’s defense, and retained a lawyer for him. His name was Standish, and on learning the Pell story he gave it to the press.
“Nothing,” he was quoted as saying, “will be explained until we know why this man Pell was injured and then spirited away. Martin did not know him, and he has a clear alibi for that night. He and his wife were at the late movies, and had ice-cream sodas at the drugstore afterwards. I demand that this man be produced and made to tell his story.”
But Standish was a voice crying in the wilderness. Demand or no demand, a special session of the grand jury indicted Fred a few days later.
I know something of what took place there. Little Bullard, pompous and pontifical: “Gentlemen of the grand jury: As prosecutor of this county it becomes my duty to present to you a most unhappy and sensational crime. In this district, known for its freedom from grave derelictions of the law, there took place, on the eleventh day of June, last, the murder of an innocent woman. That this murder was followed by a second one is not within our purview today. We are concerned only with the original crime, the motive for which crime, brutal beyond my imagination to portray, we will endeavor to show you as this session proceeds. On this day the victim, known as Juliette Ransom, went to her death, and we will show you that this death was caused by an injury to the head, inflicted by a heavy weapon.
“For fear she was not dead, however, her body was then placed in Loon Lake, where flood waters carried it later on to where it was recovered, or near by. An attempt had been made to conceal the body in a shallow grave, but this attempt failed.”
“Through the efforts of the police certain facts have been discovered which will be presented to you in due time, both by the police and by various witnesses. These facts point to a certain individual as being guilty of this crime, and after hearing the testimony it is your duty to decide whether or not to present a true bill against him.”
“Gentlemen of the grand jury, the case is now in your hands.”
The twenty-three men sat in their hard chairs and watched him. They knew him. Knew he needed a scapegoat for the case; but knew also that by that time all the country wanted a scapegoat. Known as the Rock Island murders, the crimes had been exploited from coast to coast. Nor, I dare say, were they ignorant of the reporters, gathered outside in the halls and eagerly searching the faces of the witnesses. An indictment was a story, the big story of the summer when the news was short. Wires had been leased, there was a radio sound truck in the street, and photographers crowded the pavement and halls.
I have nothing to say against the grand jury. It had been put on the stage and given its lines. Even its props had been provided: the grisly photographs of Juliette as she lay in her grave, Lucy’s golf club, which she had left at the scene of the crime, the wrist watch found on the hillside, that sodden cigarette case rescued from the lake.
There were not many witnesses: the detective who had found the body, the Boy Scout who had located the watch, the two doctors who had conducted the post-mortem; and a few others, including Ed Smith, to say that she had been in good spirits when he put her on her horse that morning of her death. But there was put into the record that damning testimony of her early marriage to Fred Martin, and her statement to him that there had been no divorce.
The verdict was settled then and there, although the session lasted two full days.
I was the one selected to carry the news to Dorothy. She lay in her bed, painfully thin, looking at me with sunken red-rimmed eyes. But she was intelligent. I did not have to tell her.
“They’ve indicted him, haven’t they?” she said. And when my face told her the truth, she still held on to her self-control.
“He didn’t do it, of course,” she went on drearily. “He might have wanted to. She had played him a dirty trick, the worst anybody could. And what about the baby?” Her voice broke. “That makes it worse for Fred, doesn’t it? But he never did it, Miss Lloyd. Never. He was too kind, too gentle. If it wasn’t for the baby I wouldn’t want to live.”
She would carry on, I knew, whatever happened. Her child might not be legitimate, but it was Fred’s and hers. I found myself quietly crying as I got into the car that day and drove back to Sunset.
Arthur went back to New York and his neglected law practice that night. I could see that he still seethed with resentment against the trick Juliette had played on him. And although he liked Fred, he thought he was probably guilty.
“I wanted to kill her myself,” he said. “If he had more guts than I had—”
It was that same night that the Sea Witch came back. I looked out at the harbor to see it at its mooring, and later in the day I had an unexpected visit from Howard Brooks.
He began without preliminary.
“What’s all this about Martin?” he asked. “All I get is fury from Mrs. Pendexter and a sort of general hysteria from the rest. Did he do it? Kill Juliette Ransom, I mean?”
“I don’t think he did. No.”
“Suppose you begin at the start, Marcia,” he said. “What have they got on him?”
I told him as best I could. He sat very still, his face expressionless, until I had finished.
“Thanks a lot,” he said. “That damned wireless of mine broke down the day after we left. I’ve been pretty much cut off.”
Then he went, getting into his car and driving off without further explanation; but I thought he looked strange when he left; uneasy and apprehensive.