Wall (39 page)

“Letters. His letters to her, her letters to him.”

I stared at him.

“Her letters to him! How did she get them?”

“Well,” he said, not unreasonably, “he might have sent them back. But one or two were pretty recent. To the time he was hurt in that accident, I mean. And there were some others—not from her and not important—that had only come in the day before the trouble, Saturday, and it was Sunday when it all happened.”

“She had other letters of his?” I said, bewildered.

“She had.”

He smoked for a minute or two in silence.

“I’ve been figuring that out ever since we opened the box,” he said. “Looks to me that the minute she heard he was in trouble, she hotfooted it to his place, wherever he lived, and made a clean sweep. Maybe she hadn’t much time. As I told you, there’s stuff there of his that hadn’t anything to do with her. But she was sure raising the devil with him. He’d gone off his head about her. When that was over he wrote and told her so; but she wasn’t letting go. Not when he had the money he had. It’s all there,” he added. “Question is, would he hate her enough to wait three years and then kill her. There’s hardly any feeling on earth that lasts that long, unless—”

He changed the subject abruptly. Among other things he had found her decree of divorce from Fred Martin, obtained in Florida.

“Dorothy’s all right,” he said. “So is the youngster. That’s something anyhow. But the rest doesn’t look so good for Page, Marcia. We might as well face it.”

There were some bits of cheer, he went on. There were what he called pretty hot love letters from several men, and I gathered that some of them belonged to the summer colony on the island. “They must have been pretty darned uneasy,” he commented. He did not name them. He sat for some time contemplating the fish in the pool. Then he went back to the pearls. They puzzled him evidently. The local man thought they might be worth anywhere from thirty to fifty thousand dollars. Of course, they might have brought her back. She wanted money to get out of the country, and there they were, tucked away in a tin box behind a wall.

“What gets me,” he said, “is why she wanted to get out of the country. Who was she afraid of? Page? A man doesn’t kill a woman because he got drunk and into trouble. As to these local fellows, she may have been trying to get money out of them; their letters for cash, if you get the idea. She may even have told somebody where they were. That would be Arthur’s man on the roof, and maybe whoever hit Maggie. But I’ve looked over the field, and if there’s a killer among them I ought to be selling neckties over at Milt Anderson’s haberdashery. What about that necklace, Marcia? Would she steal a thing like that?”

I hesitated.

“I don’t really know,” I said. “I don’t think so. And after all, pearls have identity. A jeweler who has matched a really good string would always know it.”

He put down his pipe and looked at me.

“Now that’s interesting,” he said slowly. “Fellow would know them, would he?”

“I think so. Yes.”

He rose heavily. He moved like a tired man that day, as indeed he was. He picked up his hat and, still holding it, stood looking over the low hedge to the bay.

“It would be interesting to know,” he said, “if that necklace was in Page’s desk or around his place when she rifled it. A present maybe for this girl he was going to marry. If that’s what Mrs. Ransom went to get—But it doesn’t sound right to me, somehow. She didn’t go there for that. But what she did go for—” He drew a long breath. “She didn’t lose any time over getting there,” he added. “If she wasn’t after the necklace, what was it? There’s a lot in that box she wouldn’t want the police or anybody else to see. But I’ve got an idea either she didn’t find what she wanted, or she got it and destroyed it.”

He left soon after that, going back to Clinton. For reasons of his own he did not mention the box to Bullard or the detectives. Instead he took it to Langdon Page that night in his cell, and saw him go pale when he showed him the pearls.

“Belong to you?” the sheriff asked.

“No. What would I be doing with things like that?”

“Ever see them before?”

“I’ll not answer that, sheriff, if you don’t mind.”

Nevertheless, he looked shaken. He did not touch them. He did not apparently want to look at them. The only trace of interest he showed was when the sheriff said they could be traced. But it was when the sheriff handed him the clipping he had found under Helen Jordan’s bed that Page showed the first real signs of anger. He got up and crumpled the thing in his hand, his face livid.

“I wish you would stop this damned snooping,” he said, savagely. “I’m here. You’ve got me. What more do you want? What does it matter that my engagement was broken? I was in jail. I was going up for eight years. What has that got to do with this?”

“Men have killed women for things like that,” Russell Shand said gravely.

“So I killed Juliette Ransom because of a broken engagement three years ago! Emily had never heard of her then. There was no marriage because there couldn’t be a marriage. Get that through your thick head and leave it alone.”

“You hadn’t bought the necklace for Miss Forrester?”

“No. Definitely no.”

The sheriff had to let it go at that. With the letters it was different. Allen—he was still Allen to me—glanced through them, at first hastily, then more carefully. If he was looking for something he did not find it. He put them down on the bed beside him—the cell had only one chair, and the sheriff was in it—and laughed contemptuously.

“What a fool a man can be!” he said. “I suppose she went after them as soon as—as soon as the papers had the story. She seems to have beaten the police, at that. They’d have taken those pearls and put them into safekeeping somewhere.”

And that, the sheriff said later on, was where he got his first real light on the case.

He took away from that meeting what he called two hunches. One that Allen had hoped to find something among those papers which was not there; the other that he knew more about the pearls than he had admitted. But the sheriff had read that trial in New York from start to finish, and one thing had stuck out like a sore thumb. The one man on the island who had been a part of the party at the club on Long Island was Howard Brooks, and the next morning he got a boat and rowed himself out to the
Sea Witch.
The owner’s flag was up, so he knew Howard was there; and after some parley they let him aboard.

He found Howard on the deck, sipping moodily at a whisky and soda, and he looked uneasy when he saw the sheriff.

“Morning sheriff,” he said. “Anything I can do for you? Drink?”

“I’ll smoke instead,” said the sheriff. “I suppose you know what I’m after.”

“No idea,” said Howard shortly. “Except that you fellows over at Clinton are crazy.”

It was not a promising beginning. But the sheriff was not daunted. He sat there on the deck, with its chintz-covered chairs and its shining paintwork, and deliberately put all his cards on the table.

“That’s the story, Brooks,” he said when he had finished. “Bullard and these other fellows think Page is as guilty as hell. Maybe he is. I’m not so sure, myself. That’s all.”

Howard took another sip of his drink.

“I don’t get you,” he said. “What is it you want me to do?”

“Who’s in Page’s apartment in New York?”

“I haven’t an idea. It was given up, and his stuff put into storage.”

“Who did that?”

“I did,” said Howard, not too graciously. “I saw him in the hospital, before the trial. He asked me to do it.”

His suspicion of the sheriff gradually relaxed. He knew nothing of any pearls. He saw no letters from Juliette Ransom when he looked over the place. Of course the police had been there before him. He had bundled all the papers he found in a box and sent them with the furniture to the warehouse. There was nothing important among them.

“That depends on what may be important,” said the sheriff. “I suppose I could get into that place?”

“I could. I rented it. Why?”

“Because I’d like to have a look at it. You were in a hurry. There might be something more. It’s only a chance, but Godamighty, Brooks, if this fellow won’t save himself somebody’s got to do it for him.”

As a result they went to New York on the train that night. The sheriff took the pearls along, although he said nothing to Howard about it. In fact, they said little of anything. Howard evidently considered the whole proceeding useless, and was inclined to be annoyed. They ate dinner together almost in silence and separated at once, Howard to his drawing room, the sheriff to smoke his pipe on the observation platform and stare at the flying landscape without seeing it.

There was some delay in the morning. The keys were at Howard’s office, and he had to wait until his staff arrived at nine o’clock. There was still further delay at the warehouse. The room was packed to the ceiling with furniture, trunks and boxes, and only coercion and bribery finally enabled them to have some of the stuff moved outside. Howard was still glum and non-co-operative; but he handed over the keys, and as the search continued he began to show interest.

The box of papers was the first. The sheriff examined it, sitting flat on the cement floor of the hall outside and going through everything scrupulously. There was a bundle of letters from “Emily,” written in a rather unformed hand. He did not read them, but after glancing at one he stopped and wrote something in his notebook. The bills, paid and unpaid, he passed over quickly. There was no record of any necklace, but there was one for a pair of diamond earrings. They had cost twenty-five hundred dollars.

“I suppose Mrs. Ransom got them?” he observed, and Howard nodded.

Still nothing turned up. The desk was empty. So were the drawers of chests and other furniture. Howard began to look at his watch, and at last went away.

“If you’re going through the trunks,” he said, “I’ll be at the office. He had a Jap who looked after him. He packed them. You won’t be likely to find anything.”

But the sheriff did find something that morning, sitting waist-high, as he put it, in a welter of masculine clothing, ties, riding boots, and undergarments. He found it in the pocket of a dressing gown, and as he sat there it was like seeing a great white light.

“I knew a lot from that minute,” was his comment to me later. “Trouble was, it didn’t help Page any. If I’d guessed right, things looked worse for him than ever. That is, he had a real motive then for getting rid of her. Or for hating her, which might be the same thing.”

He was hot on the scent by that time.

He did not go to Howard’s office that afternoon. After some trouble he located the police officer who had seen the accident which killed Verna Dunne and her daughter, and the ambulance which had picked Page up out of the street. What he learned satisfied him, though.

“You’re sure of that?” he asked the hospital intern.

“Sure. That’s where I found him. He hadn’t been moved.”

“Didn’t seem queer to you?”

“Well, I didn’t think of it at the time. It looks funny, doesn’t it? Still, with a jolt like that—”

“No jolt in the world would send him where he was, unless the car had turned over.”

“Well, it hadn’t done that. What’s it all about anyhow? I suppose you mean he wasn’t driving the car himself?”

“That’s the idea.”

“What happened to the other fellow?”

“That’s what I’d like to know,” said the sheriff grimly, and went about his business.

He spent the rest of the afternoon visiting the jewelers in town. It was a long tedious performance, but at last he got results.

“I’m not sure, but I think—Let me call somebody, will you?”

The sheriff waited. He looked about him. “Never knew there were that many diamonds in the world,” he said, telling me about it after the case broke. At last somebody came. The pearls were identified, checked in a book, and the sheriff wrote a name in his notebook and met Howard at the train that night with an impassive face.

He said nothing of his afternoon activities. He gave him back his keys, and once more they ate together, in comparative silence. But the sheriff was profoundly anxious. So far as he could tell, he had only built up the case against Allen Langdon Page.

He was trusting nobody by that time. He slept with his wallet and notebook under his pillow in the train that night, and the next morning he sealed the little book in an envelope and locked it away in his safe, along with the necklace and the tin box. Then, with the doors closed, he got on the long-distance wire.

It is part of the irony of such matters that while he was on the telephone Mamie found at last what he called the dog letter in the mail. “Dear Sir: In response to your inquiry—”

For he already knew, by that time.

Bullard came in to see him that morning. They had not broken Allen, and he was in a vile temper. He insisted on going over the case again, over everything from the fingerprints on the doctor’s car to his ability to run a motorboat. The sheriff listened imperturbably.

“You’ve tried to block me in this case, Shand,” said Bullard belligerently. “I’ve watched you all the way through. Things have come to a pretty pass when the sheriff of this county refuses to uphold the law. Some of these days—”

“Some of these days I wish you’d park your fat fanny outside this office,” said the sheriff rudely. “I’ve got work to do.”

Bullard was still spluttering when the telephone rang. It was long distance.

“All right,” the sheriff said. “This is Shand. Get off the wire, Mamie. This is private.”

He was not smiling while he listened.

“I see,” he said. “When was that?”

He listened again, making a note on a pad before him. Then Bullard, idly watching and ready to renew the attack, saw his face change.

“Say that again,” he said slowly.

When he hung up the receiver he had forgotten that Bullard was there. He picked up his hat and shot out of the office, and a moment later his old car was rattling down the street.

I
KNEW NOTHING OF
all this at the time of course. The races were on, but the
Sea Witch
was still in the harbor. There was a rumor that Howard Brooks had been sent for, and had gone to Clinton in a towering rage. And Bob and Lucy were still next door, although they had been packed to go for a week.