Wall (36 page)

“Mike! Let me see what you put in your pocket.”

He took it out, unwillingly, but he would not let me touch it. It was Arthur’s gold key ring, and I suddenly felt weak in the knees.

Mike looked me straight in the face.

“Reckon sheriff’s got to see this, miss.”

“Mike,” I said desperately, “you can’t do this to us. Not to Mr. Arthur, or to me. You know he didn’t do any of these dreadful things.”

He shook his head.

“I’m sorry, miss. I left that roller out the night somebody broke into the shed, and I put it back the next morning. This was under it just now, when I moved it.”

There was nothing I could do. Mike simply put the ring back into his pocket, and went austerely and I thought unhappily back to work.

He took it to the police station that same evening. He had taken no one in the household into his confidence, but after his early supper I saw him dressed in his best clothes, starting for the town. He walked slowly, like a man going to an unpleasant duty, and there was something inexorable about him, like the majesty of the law.

There must be such a thing as the inertia of despair, for during the next day or two I was about as useless as a person in a cataleptic fit; that is, I was conscious of what was going on around me, but I was entirely unable to move. The police seemed to have made no further move about Arthur’s key ring. The sheriff did not come in, and there was no word whatever from Allen.

Things went on much as before. Fred Martin was still protesting his innocence in the jail at Clinton, his hard muscles growing soft and his face pale and anxious. And Dorothy, up and around now, with Mrs. Curtis to help her, was clutching her baby fiercely in her arms and looking out on an unfriendly world with wide tragic eyes. Then one day Mrs. Pendexter came to see me and roused me from my apathy.

She brought some hothouse grapes and the usual local gossip. Eliza Edwards claimed that Helen Jordan’s room in her house was haunted. Agnes Dean had taken the shock of the doctor’s death badly, and was in bed again. This family was going to Tuxedo and that one to Lenox.

Under it all she was not quite herself. She looked strained, like the rest of us; but she had aged that summer. There was no alacrity in her movements, although her tongue was as sharp as ever.

“Pack of fools, running away from trouble,” she remarked. “Even that future son-in-law of mine. If you ask me, he knows more than he’s letting on. He’s deep, but I see through him. As to that girl of mine, what’s she doing moping around? I’ve got more life in me today than she has, at whatever age she says she is.”

She finished her tea and got up.

“You ask Howard Brooks what he doing sneaking a bundle out of my house the night the doctor was killed,” she said. “Money or no money, I don’t want any killers in the family. And tell Lizzie that tea was so feeble that it ought to have been kept in bed.”

Before she left she told me that Marjorie and Howard Brooks were leaving soon, to join a house party at the races.

“Don’t know what’s happening to the young people today,” she complained. “Can’t seem to stay put for more than a minute. If you want to see Howard you’d better do it soon.”

She climbed into her high car and drove away, a stiff, indomitable little figure in an outrageous hat; and left me to make what sense I could out of what she had told me.

As a result I tried to see Marjorie that same night. She was dining out, however, and the next morning I walked to the Pendexter place, going bareheaded and surprising her on the terrace. She had a book in her lap, but she was not reading. She was sitting listlessly in a long chair, and looking out to where the
Sea Witch,
magnificent in white paint and glittering brass, swung at its anchor.

I probably startled her, but she greeted me placidly enough.

“Hello, Marcia,” she said. “Mind if I don’t move? That’s a good chair. Well, I suppose the season is over. I won’t be sorry. It’s been a hellish summer.”

I nodded and took a cigarette from the box beside her.

“Your mother says you are leaving soon.”

“Yes, thank God,” she said fervently.

She looked at me.

“You look shot to pieces,” she said with her customary candor. “Don’t lose your looks, Marcia. That’s about all we have,” she added, smiling faintly. “Looks. That’s why women like Juliette thrive. They take care of themselves. You and I—”

She shrugged and let it go at that.

But she had given me the opening I needed. I threw away my cigarette and confronted her squarely.

“That’s what I came to talk about,” I said. “Not about Juliette, but about what’s happened since. You knew Allen Pell was Langdon Page. So did Howard. I want to know why he went to the charity ball the other night.”

She tried to look surprised.

“Did he?”

“He did, and I think you know it.”

She stirred uneasily.

“I wish you wouldn’t imagine things,” she said. “If he went it was probably to see you. He’s in love with you. That’s no news to you, of course.”

“How do you know all that?” I inquired, rather grimly. “You do know he was there. And I don’t think it was to see me. He could have done that at Sunset.”

She moved restlessly in her chair.

“I wish you’d leave me alone,” she said querulously. “Yes, I knew he was there; but that’s all I do know. He and Howard were old friends. When Howard asked me for a domino and mask I found them for him. That’s all.”

That was probably Mrs. Pendexter’s bundle, although it was not much help just then.

“But why go to the ball all alone?” I persisted. “It sounds ridiculous. He was hiding from the police, or so he told me. Then he goes, badly disguised, to a thing like that! Didn’t Howard explain?”

“Howard doesn’t do much explaining,” she said, not looking at me.

“Well, I think he has some to do. He knew Langdon Page. He knew he was here on the island. When I tried to find out who Pell was Howard took the yacht out the next morning for a cruise! And I’ve wondered since about a lot of things, Marjorie. Who around here but you two knew that Langdon Page had a prison record? That his prints were on file?”

She sat bolt upright and stared at me.

“You’re not trying to connect Howard with these murders?” she demanded.

“I haven’t said that. But whoever attacked Langdon Page and then took him to a hospital knew his prints were on record. He went back to that trailer and wiped it clean.”

She lay back in her chair. The color had faded out of her face, and she seemed on the verge of collapse.

“Not Howard,” she said. “O my God, not Howard.”

That was all there was to that interview. She was plainly beyond more questioning. I tried, but she only shook her head. In the end I called the butler and got her some brandy, but as I left I could feel her eyes, enormous in her pale face, following me like those of a scared child.

I came back home, to this porch, to the monotony of high tide and low tide, dawn and sunset. It seemed as though the world had suddenly stood still; that everything had stopped and only my mind went on, feverishly active.

Nevertheless, there was tragedy in the making during that interval. No more murder, thank heaven, but real trouble; the sheriff with Arthur’s key ring locked in his office safe, and those letters of his about a dog going their slow way to the dead letter office and back to Mamie, in his office. And even before that one of the minor miracles of modern criminology: those photographs of the fingerprints from the doctor’s car on their way to Washington. A machine started, a slow quiet movement, inevitable as fate itself, and then a card dropping.

A thousand miles away at the doctor’s funeral a reverent voice intoning: “
I am the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord; he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live.”
And in Washington, in his shirt sleeves—for the day was hot—a small man with spectacles picking up that card, examining it and carrying it away.

“Here it is,” he said.

There was no excitement. The card might send a man to his death, but there it was merely routine. Less than an hour later, from another room in the building, a longish telegram went to Russell Shand, and Shand took it to the District Attorney.

Bullard read the message and looked up, angrily flushed.

“What does that prove?” he said. “That this Page—or Pell—killed some people with his car! Any drunken fool does that. We know he saw the doctor and rode in that car of his. Why wouldn’t his prints be on it? We’ll get him, but then what? If we keep on we’ll have half the people of this county in jail.”

“Who put them there?” said the sheriff belligerently. “You’ve been playing to the newspapers ever since this thing broke, Bullard. Now, by the great horn spoon, suppose you let somebody else have a chance?”

He went to New York a day or two later. This time the police there were playing ball, as he put it. He did not have to go to the library, as I had. They had the files and the records of the trial. They gave him a small room somewhere, and when he finally emerged, hot and dirty, he hauled a small newspaper clipping from his pocket and showed it to them.

“Got any idea where that would come from?” he said.

They had none. They examined it curiously.

“What about it?” they said. “His marriage was off. That wouldn’t be news. He’d gone up for eight years.”

“I was thinking,” said the sheriff, “about that ad on the other side. I’ve got a hunch that when I find who was selling those pups, I’ll have got somewhere in this case.”

They laughed. They had been polite that day, but he was still a country sheriff to them, “stepping high over plowed ground,” as he said.

He did not come back at once. He went over Juliette’s apartment again, and one day the harassed young man let him into our house, in response to a wire from me. He spent some time in the basement, which because of its barred windows had not been wired, and I believe he came up smiling. And he saw Samuel Dunne in the red brick house and even sat in at one of the meetings.

“Darndest thing I ever saw,” he told me later. “If everybody didn’t have an Aunt Mary I’d think I heard from the old lady. Least it sounded like her. She told me to go back home and mind my own business!”

The evening before he left he went to see Arthur at his apartment. Arthur and Mary Lou were dressing for dinner on some hotel roof to escape the heat, and Mary Lou absolutely refused to leave the two men together. “What concerns Arthur concerns me,” she said. “Only I wish you’d let him alone. Fred Martin did those murders, and you know it.”

There was no use in temporizing. Russell Shand got out that key ring and put it on a table.

“Thought you’d like this back Arthur,” he said.

Mary Lou was fixing her hair at a mirror, but she saw Arthur’s face and turned. She looked from one man to the other, and it was she who broke the silence.

“Where did you find it?”

“Mike found it in the toolshed.” He looked at Arthur, and then unexpectedly he put out his hand.

“Kind of awkward, losing a bunch of keys,” he said quietly. “I lost mine once, and I went around like a hen with her head off until I found them.”

He went away at once, leaving Arthur staring after him. A wise and kindly man, our sheriff. “I sort of thought I’d better leave,” he told me afterwards. “Looked like Mary Lou was getting fixed to kiss me, and I’d kept the record clean up to then.”

H
E CAME BACK THE
next day. Not alone. He had two New York detectives with him. They took a drawing room and sat up half the night, discussing the case. The alarm for Allen—he was still Allen to me—was out in earnest now. Once again radio and teletype were busy. There was an intensive search going on, this time with a grim determination and a dogged persistence that were new.

Only Russell Shand kept his head.

“Sure I want to find him,” he told Bullard. “I haven’t said yet I want to see him convicted; that’s all. And I’d hold onto Martin. A day or two more won’t hurt him.”

For as the facts became known, as such facts do become known, there was a rising demand that Fred Martin be released. The Clinton Paper had an editorial on the subject.

“We have the anomalous situation of one man being held for a murder, while an intensive search goes on for another individual suspected of the same crime; a man, moreover, who already has a conviction for manslaughter to his credit. Granting that Fred Martin had a possible motive, his past record is clean. He married a second time under a misapprehension, but there is nothing essentially criminal in such an act. On the other hand, the man Page—or Pell, as he called himself—was not only in the vicinity during all three murders. He had known Juliette Ransom well. He undoubtedly knew Helen Jordan, the second victim, and was afraid of what she might tell, and his fingerprints have been found on the murder car owned by Doctor Jamieson.

“Compared with all this, the case against Fred Martin becomes negligible.”

It was on the second day after his return that the sheriff brought one of the detectives to the house. Probably Bullard had been riding him hard, for he was grim and unsmiling.

“Sorry, Marcia,” he said. “This is Mr. Warren. He’s working with us. He wants to ask you some questions.”

I was trembling, but at least I kept my voice steady. There was a fire in the library, for the weather had turned cold, and the sheriff stood in front of it, not talking but watching me.

“Just tell him everything, Marcia,” he said. “We know most of it anyhow.”

I could not do that, but I went as far as I could.

I told of my first meeting with Allen, and of going to the trailer for tea; but when I explained the reason for going back to the camp the next night, the detective stopped me.

“What do you think he meant, that he would let no innocent man go to the chair?”

“I thought he knew something he had not told me.”

He looked significantly at the sheriff; but he was gazing serenely out a window.

“I see. And did he say why he wanted an alibi for your brother?”

“He didn’t think he was guilty.”