WHAT LAY BEYOND THE SMASHED DOOR
Dr. Ezra Lawton had come home an hour earlier from enacting the trying
rôle of Stork’s Assistant. He had sunk to sleep wearily and embarked at
once on a delightful dream of his unanimous election as Chairman of the
Massachusetts State Medical Board.
All Aura, apparently, celebrated this dream election. For the three
church bells were ringing loudly in honor of it. There were also a
few thousand other bells which had been imported from somewhere for
the occasion. The result was a continuous loud jangle which was as
deafeningly annoying to the happy old doctor as it was gratifying.
Presently annoyance got the better of gratification and he awoke. But
even though his beautiful dream had departed the multiple bell-ringing
kept noisily on. And with a groan he realized the racket emanated from
the telephone at his bedside.
“Well,” he snarled, vicious with dead sleepiness, as he lifted the
receiver, “what the devil do you want?”
He listened for a second, then said in a far different voice:
“Oh, I beg your pardon, Miss Gregg. I didn’t guess it was you. Nothing
the matter, I hope?” he added, as though elderly spinsters were in the
habit of calling him up at three in the morning when nothing was the
matter.
Again, this time much longer, he listened. Then he ejaculated:
“Good Lord! Oh, good _Lord_!”
The genuine horror in his voice waked wide his slumbrous wife. By dint
of thirty years as a country doctor’s spouse Mrs. Lawton had schooled
herself to doze peacefully through the nocturnal telephone ringing and
three A. M. smalltalk which fringed her busy husband’s career.
Mrs. Lawton sat bolt upright in bed. Her husband was listening once
more. Through the dark his wife could hear the scratchedly buzzy tones
of Miss Gregg, desiccated and attenuated by reason of the faulty
connection. But, try as she would, she could catch no word. At last
Lawton spoke again, the hint of horror still in his voice:
“I’ll start over as soon as I can get dressed, Miss Gregg. You’ve
notified the police, of course? Huh? Well, do, at once. I’ll be right
there.”
He hung up the receiver and floundered out of bed.
“What’s the matter?” cried his wife. “What’s happened? What’s she want
you for? What’s that about the police? What’s wrong? Why is she--?”
“Young Willis Chase has been murdered,” replied the doctor, wriggling
into his scarce-cooled clothes. “Found dead in bed, with a knifeblade
sticking into his right carotid.”
“_Oh! OH!_” babbled Mrs. Lawton. “Oh, it isn’t _possible_, Ezra!
Who--who did it?”
“The murderer neglected to leave his card,” snapped the doctor. “At
least Miss Gregg didn’t mention it.... Where in hell’s hot hinges is my
other shoe?”
“But what was he doing at Miss Gregg’s? How did it happen? Who--”
“It wasn’t at Miss Gregg’s. It was at Vailholme. Houseparty, I gather.
Thax Vail’s dog woke them all up by howling and then ran to Chase’s
room. They broke the door in. Chase was lying there stone dead with
a knife in his throat. And--it was that big German army knife Thax
showed us one day. Remember it? About a million blades. One of them a
sort of three-cornered punch. That was the blade, she says. Stuck full
length in the throat. They’re all upside down there. It seems she had
presence of mind enough to send for me but not enough to send for the
police.”
“Oh, the poor, _poor_ boy! I--I never liked him.”
“Maybe he killed himself on that account,” grumbled her husband, lacing
his second shoe and rising puffingly from the task. “He--”
“Oh, it was suicide then? The--”
“Nobody seems to know what it was,” he rejoined. “I suppose later on
I’ll have to sit on that question, too, in my capacity of coroner.
Good-by. Don’t wait breakfast for me.”
He was gone. Presently through the open window his wife could hear the
throaty wheeze of his car’s engine as the self-starter awakened it.
Then there was a whirr and a rattle through the stillness, and the car
was on its fast flight to Vailholme.
Dr. Lawton found the house glaringly lighted from end to end. The front
door stood wide. So did the baize door which led back to the kitchen
quarters. Through the latter issued the gabble and strident terror of
mixed voices.
As the doctor came into the lower hall, Thaxton Vail emerged from the
living room to meet him. Vail’s face was ghastly. Behind him was Miss
Gregg.
The others of the party were grouped in unnatural postures in the
living room, their chairs huddled close together as though their
occupants felt subconscious yearning for mutual protection. Joshua Q.
Mosely--mountainous in a yellow dustcoat that swathed his purple silk
pajamas--was holding tight to the hand of his sniveling little wife.
Doris was crouched low in a corner chair. Beside her sat Clive Creede
trying awkwardly to calm the convulsive tremors which now and then
shook her.
“Take me up there,” Dr. Lawton bade Vail. “You can tell me about it
while I’m--”
He left the sentence unfinished and followed Thaxton up the stairs.
“We had a robbery at dinner time,” explained Vail as they went. “I was
afraid the thieves might make a try, later, for more things than they
could grab up at first. Foolish idea, I suppose. But anyhow I decided
to spend the night downstairs. I let poor Chase have my room. Macduff,
here, set up a most ungodly racket a few minutes ago. We followed him
to my room and broke in. Chase was lying there in bed. You remember
that big knife of mine--the one Clive Creede gave me? He had been
stabbed with that. He-- Here’s the room.”
As he stood aside for the doctor to pass in, another car rattled up to
the porte-cochère.
“Wait a second,” said Thaxton. “That may be Quimby. Miss Gregg said she
phoned him just after she notified you. He--”
The chief of police bustled into the hallway, and, at Vail’s summons,
he came lumbering importantly upstairs. Together he and Dr. Lawton
entered the deathly still room, Thaxton following.
“We left him as--as he was,” explained Vail. “Clive says the law
demands that.”
Neither of the others paid any heed to him. Both were leaning over the
bed. Thaxton stood awkwardly behind them, feeling an alien in his own
room. Presently Dr. Lawton spoke almost indignantly.
“I wondered why he should be lying as if he were asleep; with a wound
like that,” said he. “Except for the look on his face there’s no sign
of disturbance. I see now.”
As he spoke he picked from the floor beside the bed a heavy metal water
carafe which belonged on the bedside stand. Its surface was dented far
more deeply than so short a tumble warranted.
“Stabbed him,” said the doctor. “Then, as he cried out, stunned him.
See, Chief?”
The chief nodded. Then he turned from the bed and swept the room with
his beetle-browed gaze. His eyes focused on the nearest window. It
stood open, as did all the room’s other windows, on that breathless
night.
But its short muslin curtain was thrust aside so far as to be torn
slightly from its rod. On the white sill was the distinct mark of a
scrape in the paint and a blob of dried mud as from the instep of a
boot.
“Got in and out through the window,” decreed Quimby. “In a hurry going
out.”
“The door was locked,” put in Vail. “Locked from the inside.”
“H’m!” mused the chief, crossing to the splintered portal. “I see. You
folks broke it in, eh? Where’s the key?”
“What key?”
“Key of the door, of course. If Mr. Chase locked himself in he must
have done it with a key. And it isn’t likely he took the key out of
the lock afterward. Where is it? It isn’t in the keyhole.”
“The door flew open pretty hard,” said Vail. “Perhaps the key was
knocked out onto the floor. Shall I look?”
“Never mind,” refused the chief. “It isn’t immediate. My men can look
for it in the morning. I’m going to seal this room, of course, and keep
some one on guard. That knife, now--that ought to be easy to trace. It
isn’t like any other _I_ ever saw. It--”
“You’re right,” acceded Vail, nettled at his lofty air, “it’s quite
easy to trace. It’s mine.”
“Yours?”
The chief fairly spat the word at him. Again the heavy gray brows bent,
the eyes mere slits of quizzical light between the puckered lids.
“Yes,” said Vail. “I had it out, earlier in the evening. I used it to
draw a cork. I didn’t put it back in my pocket. I must have left it
lying somewhere. I looked afterward but I couldn’t find it. Some one
must have--”
“You left the knife in this room?”
“No,” denied Vail, after a moment’s thought. “I couldn’t have done
that. I didn’t come up here again. No, if I left it anywhere it was
downstairs.”
“H’m!” grunted the chief, non-committally.
Irritated afresh by the official’s manner, Thaxton turned to the
doctor, who was once more leaving the bedside.
“Dr. Lawton,” he asked, “is there any chance he killed himself?”
“Not the slightest,” replied Lawton with much emphasis. “He was lying
on his left side. The point entered the carotid from behind. He could
not possibly have struck the blow. And in any event he could not have
stunned himself with that metal water bottle afterward. No, there is
every proof it was not suicide. The man was murdered.”
“And the murderer escaped through the window,” supplemented the chief.
“Also, he entered by the same route. Now, we’ll leave everything as it
is, and I’ll take my flashlight and examine the ground just below here.”
But before he left the room he leaned far out of the window looking
downward. Vail had no need to follow the chief’s example. He knew the
veranda roof was directly outside and that any active man could climb
up or down the vine trellis which screened that end of the porch.
He also knew no man could have done so without making enough noise to
have attracted Thaxton’s notice in the night’s stillness before the
crime. Nor could any man have walked on the tin veranda roof, even
barefoot, without the crackle and bulge of the tin giving loud notice
of his presence. A tin roof cannot be traversed noiselessly, even by a
cat, to say nothing of a grown man.
As the three trooped downstairs they found the others assembled in the
hall nervously awaiting them.
“Well?” asked Miss Gregg.
“He was murdered!” pronounced the chief, portentously.
“You amaze me,” said the old lady. “But then, of course, you have the
trained police mentality. By whom?”
“That is what we intend to find out,” answered the chief, tartly.
“Where’s the phone? I want to send for a couple of my men. When I’ve
done that I want to ask a few questions.”
“We may as well go back into the living room and sit down,” suggested
Doris. “It’s chilly out here.”
But as the rest were following her suggestion she took occasion to slip
back into the hall whither Vail was returning after showing Quimby
where to find the telephone.
“Thax!” she whispered hurriedly. “I’m so sorry I was cross! I spoke
abominably to you. Won’t you _please_ forgive me? You know perfectly
well I didn’t mean a word of the nasty things I said.”
“I know,” he said soothingly. “I know. Don’t think any more about it.
It’s all right. I--”
“And, Thax,” she went on, thrilling oddly as his hand clasped hers,
“I did what you asked me to, after all. I took the pistol upstairs
with me. I hid it under the scarf I was carrying, and I smuggled it up
there. I wanted you to know--”
“They’ll be here in ten minutes now,” interrupted the chief, returning
from the telephone.
He preceded them into the living room. Briefly, at his request, Vail
told of the collie’s amazing behavior and of the finding of Chase.
“You say you hadn’t gone to bed?” asked Quimby, when the short recital
was ended. “Why not?”
“It is my own house. It had been robbed. I felt responsible. It seemed
safer for some one to stay on guard.”
“In case the thief or thieves should return?” inquired the chief. “If
you had any practical experience in such matters, you would know a
house which has just been robbed is safer than any other. Thieves don’t
rob the same house a second time the same night. Police annals show
that a house in which a crime has just been committed is immune from an
immediate second crime.”
“If robbery and murder may both be classified as crimes and not as
mere outbursts of playfulness,” said Miss Gregg, “that theory has been
proven with beautiful definiteness here to-night. So the second crime
was probably imaginary or only--”
“I was talking of thefts,” said Quimby, glowering sulkily at her.
Then stirred to professional sternness by the hint of ridicule, he
turned majestically once more to Vail.
“You were sitting up?” he prompted. “You were guarding your house--or
trying to--from a second series of thefts? Is that it?”
Thaxton nodded.
“You are sure you didn’t go to sleep all night?”
“I am.”
“Be careful, Mr. Vail! Many a man is willing to swear he hasn’t slept
a wink when really he dozed off without knowing it. That is a common
error.”
“Common or not, I don’t think it is likely I was asleep when Chase was
killed. Because I was on my feet and walking.”
“_So?_”
The chief was interested, formidably interested.
“You know then just when Mr. Chase was killed?”
“I know when the dog set up that racket. Presumably that was the time.
I know because I had looked at my watch as I left the house, just
before. It was five minutes past three when I looked.”
Dr. Lawton glanced at his own watch.
“It is seven minutes of four,” said he. “My examination proved Mr.
Chase cannot have been dead quite an hour. The two times agree.”
“You say you left the house,” pursued the chief, deaf to this
interpolation and bending forward, his eyes gripping Vail. “Why did you
leave the house?”
“To make a tour of it,” returned Thaxton. “It was the second time since
the others went to bed that I had gone out to make the rounds of the
veranda path. The time between, I was sitting in my study except for
one trip through the interior of the house at about one o’clock. That
time I went from cellar to attic.”
“But you had left the house shortly before the approximate time of Mr.
Chase’s death?” insisted the chief. “You went out through the front
door?”
“Yes. I--”
“And came back again through the front door?”
“Of course.”
“Shortly _after_ the murder?”
“The moment I heard Macduff howl. And I hadn’t been outside for more
than--”
“We’ll come back to that if necessary. At present we have established
the fact that you left the house shortly before the killing and that
you came in again shortly afterward.”
Again Vail nodded, this time a trifle sullenly. Like Miss Gregg,
he found the chief’s hectoring manner annoyed him. Nor did he care
to admit that at the instant of Macduff’s howling he had been
standing motionless under the window of Doris Lane’s room in all but
reverent--if absurd--sense of watching over her safety while she
slumbered.