of the nail file into it. Next, he sharpened the end of the file--put a
razor edge on it.--Where did you get this, Mr. Crown?"
"A servant, one of the coloured women, picked it up as I came in. You
were still in the library."
"Where was it?"
"About fifteen or twenty feet from the body. She stumbled on it, in the
grass. Ugly thing, sure!"
"Yes," Hastings said, preoccupied, and added: "Let me have it again."
He took off his spectacles and, screwing into his right eye a jeweller's
glass, studied it for several minutes. If he made an important
discovery, he did not communicate it to Crown.
"It made an ugly hole," was all he said.
"You see the blood on it?" Crown prompted.
"Oh, yes; lucky the rain stopped when it did."
"When did it stop--out here?" Crown inquired.
"About eleven; a few minutes after I'd gone up to bed."
"So she was killed between eleven and midnight?"
"No doubt about that. Her hat had fallen from her head and was bottom up
beside her. The inside of the crown and all the lower brim was dry as a
bone, while the outside, even where it did not touch the wet grass, was
wet. That showed there wasn't any rain after she was struck down."
The sheriff was impressed by the other's keenness of observation.
"That's so," he said. "I hadn't noticed it."
He sought the detective's opinion.
"Mr. Hastings, you've just heard the stories of everybody here. Do me a
favour, will you? Is it worth while for me to go into Washington? Tell
me: do you think anybody here at Sloanehurst is responsible for this
murder?"
"Mr. Crown," the old man answered, "there's no proof that anybody here
killed that woman."
"Just what I thought," Mr. Crown applauded himself. "Glad you agree with
me. It'll turn out a simple case. Wish it wouldn't. Nominating primary's
coming on in less than a month. I'd get a lot more votes if I ran down a
mysterious fellow, solved a tough problem."
He strode down the porch steps and out to his car--for the ten-mile run
into Washington. Hastings was strongly tempted to accompany him, even
without being invited; it would mean much to be present when the mother
first heard of her daughter's death.
But he had other and, he thought, more important work to do. Moving so
quietly that his footsteps made no sound, he gained the staircase in the
hall and made his way to the second floor. If anybody had seen him and
inquired what he intended to do, he would have explained that he was on
his way to get his own coat in place of the one which young Webster
had, with striking thoughtfulness, thrown over him.
As a matter of fact, his real purpose was to search Webster's room.
But experience had long since imbued him with contempt for the obvious.
Secure from interruption, since his fellow-guests were still in the
library, he did not content himself with his hawk-like scrutiny of the
one room; he explored the back stairway which had been Webster's exit to
the lawn, Judge Wilton's room, and his own.
In the last stage of the search he encountered his greatest surprise.
Looking under his own bed by the light of a pocket torch, he found that
one of the six slats had been removed from its place and laid cross-ways
upon the other five. The reason for this was apparent; it had been
shortened by between four and five inches.
"Cut off with a pocket-knife," the old man mused; "crude work, like the
shaping of the handle of that dagger--downstairs; same wood, too. And in
my room, from my bed----
"I wonder----"
With a low whistle, expressive of incredulity, he put that new theory
from him and went down to the library.
V
THE INTERVIEW WITH MRS. BRACE
Gratified, and yet puzzled, by the results of his search of the upstairs
rooms, Hastings was fully awake to the necessity of his interviewing
Mrs. Brace as soon as possible. Lally, the chauffeur, drove him back to
Washington early that Sunday morning. It was characteristic of the old
man that, as they went down the driveway, he looked back at Sloanehurst
and felt keenly the sufferings of the people under its roof.
He was particularly drawn to Lucille Sloane, with whom he had had a
second brief conference. While waiting for his coffee--nobody in the
house had felt like breakfast--he had taken a chair at the southeast end
of the front porch and, pulling a piece of soft wood and a knife from
his Gargantuan coat-pockets, had fallen to whittling and
thinking.--Whittling, he often said, enabled him to think clearly; it
was to him what tobacco was to other men.
Thus absorbed, he suddenly heard Lucille's voice, low and tense:
"We'll have to leave it as it was be----"
Berne Webster interrupted her, a grain of bitterness in his words:
"Rather an unusual request, don't you think?"
"I wanted to tell you this after the talk in the library," she
continued, "but there----"
They had approached Hastings from the south side of the house and,
hidden from him by the verandah railing, were upon him before he could
make his presence known. Now, however, he did so, warning them by
standing up with a clamorous scraping of his feet on the floor.
Instinctively, he had recoiled from overhearing their discussion of what
was, he thought, a love-affair topic.
Lucille hurried to him, not that she had additional information to give
him, but to renew her courage. Having called upon him for aid, she had
in the usual feminine way decided to make her reliance upon him
complete. And, under the influence of his reassuring kindliness, her
hesitance and misgivings disappeared.
He had judged her feelings correctly during their conference in the
parlour. At dinner, she had seen in him merely a pleasant, quiet-spoken
old man, a typical "hick" farmer, who wore baggy, absurdly large
clothing--"for the sake of his circulation," he said--and whose
appearance in no way corresponded to his reputation as a learned
psychologist and investigator of crime. Now, however, she responded
warmly to his charm, felt the sincerity of his sympathy.
Seeing that she looked up to him, he enjoyed encouraging her, was bound
more firmly to her interests.
"I think your fears are unfounded," he told her.
But he did not reveal his knowledge that she suspected her father of
some connection with the murder. In fact, he could not decide what her
suspicion was exactly, whether it was that he had been guilty of the
crime or that he had guilty knowledge of it.
A little anxious, she had asked him to promise that he would be back by
ten o'clock, for the inquest. He thought he could do that, although he
had persuaded the coroner that his evidence would not be necessary--the
judge and Webster had found the body; their stories would establish the
essential facts.
"Why do you want me here then?" he asked, not comprehending her
uneasiness.
"For one thing," she said, "I want you to talk to father--before the
inquest. I wish you could now, but he isn't up."
It was eight o'clock when Miss Davis, telephone operator in the cheap
apartment house on Fourteenth street known as The Walman, took the old
man's card and read the inscription, over the wire:
"'Mr. Jefferson Hastings.'"
After a brief pause, she told him:
"She wants to know if you are a detective."
"Tell her I am."
"You may go up," the girl reported. "It's Number Forty-three, fourth
floor--no elevator."
After ascending the three flights of stairs, he sat down on the top
step, to get his breath. Mr. Hastings was stout, not to say
sebaceous--and he proposed to begin the interview unhandicapped.
Mrs. Brace answered his ring. There was nobody else in the apartment.
The moment he looked into her restless, remarkably brilliant black eyes,
he catalogued her as cold and repellent.
"One of the swift-eyed kind," he thought; "heart as hard as her head. No
blood in her--but smart. Smart!"
He relied, without question, on his ability to "size up" people at first
glance. It was a gift with him, like the intuition of women; and to it,
he thought, he owed his best work as a detective.
Mrs. Brace, without speaking, without acknowledging his quiet "Mrs.
Brace, I believe?" led him into the living room after waiting for him
to close the entrance door. This room was unusually large, out of
proportion to the rest of the apartment which included, in addition to
the narrow entry, a bedroom, kitchen and bath--all, so far as his
observation went, sparsely and cheaply furnished.
They sat down, and still she did not speak, but studied his face. He got
the impression that she considered all men her enemies and sought some
intimation of what his hostility would be like.
"I'm sorry to trouble you at such a time," he began. "I shall be as
brief as possible."
Her black eyebrows moved upward, in curious interrogation. They were
almost mephistophelian, and unpleasantly noticeable, drawn thus nearer
to the wide wave of her white hair.
"You wanted to see me--about my daughter?"
Her voice was harsh, metallic, free of emotion. There was nothing about
her indicative of grief. She did not look as if she had been weeping. He
could learn nothing from her manner; it was extremely matter-of-fact,
and chilly. Only, in her eyes he saw suspicion--perhaps, he reflected,
suspicion was always in her eyes.
Her composure amazed him.
"Yes," he replied gently; "if I don't distress you----"
"What is it?"
She suddenly lowered her eyebrows, drew them together until they were a
straight line at the bottom of her forehead.
Her cold self-possession made it easy, in fact necessary, for him to
deal with facts directly. Apparently, she resented his intimated
condolence. He could fling any statement, however sensational, against
the wall of her indifference. She was, he decided, as free of feeling as
she was inscrutable. She would be surprised by emotion into nothing. It
was his brain against hers.
"I want to say first," he continued, "that my only concern, outside of
my natural and very real sympathy with such a loss as yours must be, is
to find the man who killed her."
She moved slowly to and fro on the armless, low-backed rocker, watching
him intently.
"Will you help me?"
"If I can."
"Thank you," he said, smiling encouragement from force of habit, not
because he expected to arouse any spirit of cooperation in her. "I may
ask you a few questions then?"
"Certainly."
Her thin nostrils dilated once, quickly, and somehow their motion
suggested the beginning of a ridiculing smile. He went seriously to
work.
"Have you any idea, Mrs. Brace, as to who killed your daughter--or could
have wanted to kill her?"
"Yes."
"Who?"
She got up, without the least change of expression, without a word, and,
as she crossed the room, paused at the little table against the farther
wall to arrange more symmetrically a pile of finger-worn periodicals.
She went through the communicating door into the bedroom, and, from
where he sat, he could see her go through another door--into the
bathroom, he guessed. In a moment, he heard a glass clink against a
faucet. She had gone for a drink of water, to moisten her throat, like
an orator preparing to deliver an address.
She came back, unhurried, imperturbable, and sat down again in the
armless rocker before she answered his question. So far as her manner
might indicate, there had been no interruption of the conversation.
He swept her with wondering eyes. She was not playing a part, not
concealing sorrow. The straight, hard lines of her lean figure were a
complement to her gleaming, unrevealing eyes. There was hardness about
her, and in her, everywhere.
A slow, warm breeze brought through the curtainless window a
disagreeable odour, sour and fetid. The apartment was at the back of the
building; the odour came from a littered courtyard, a conglomeration of
wet ashes, neglected garbage, little filthy pools, warmed into activity
by the sun, high enough now to touch them. He could see the picture
without looking--and that odour struck him as excruciatingly appropriate
to this woman's soul.
"Berne Webster killed my daughter," she said evenly, hands moveless in
her lap. "There are several reasons for my saying so. Mildred was his
stenographer for eight months, and he fell in love with her--that was
the way he described his feeling, and intention, toward her. The usual
thing happened; he discharged her two weeks ago.
"He wants to marry money. You know about that, I take it--Miss Sloane,
daughter of A. B. Sloane, Sloanehurst, where she was murdered. They're
engaged. At least, that is--was Mildred's information, although the
engagement hasn't been announced, formally. Fact is, he has to marry the
Sloane girl."
Her thin, mobile lips curled upward at the ends and looked a little
thicker, giving an exaggerated impression of wetness. Hastings thought
of some small, feline animal, creeping, anticipating prey--a sort of
calculating ferocity.
She talked like a person bent on making every statement perfectly clear
and understandable. There was no intimation that she was so
communicative because she thought she was obliged to talk. On the
contrary, she welcomed the chance to give him the story.
"Have you told all this to that sheriff, Mr. Crown?" he inquired.
"Yes; but he seemed to attach no importance to it."
She coloured her words with feeling at last--it was contempt--putting
the sheriff beyond the pale of further consideration.
"You were saying Mr. Webster had to marry Miss Sloane. What do you mean
by that, Mrs. Brace?"
"Money reasons. He had to have money. His bank balance is never more
than a thousand dollars. He's got to produce sixty-five thousand dollars
by the seventh of next September. This is the sixteenth of July. Where
is he to get all that? He's got to marry it."
Hastings put more intensity into his scrutiny of her smooth, untroubled
face. It showed no sudden access of hatred, no unreasoning venom,
except that the general cast of her features spoke generally of
vindictiveness. She was, unmistakably, sure of what she said.
"How do you know that?" he asked, hiding his surprise.
"Mildred knew it--naturally, from working in his office."
"Let me be exact, Mrs. Brace. Your charge is just what?"
He felt the need of keen thought. He reached for his knife and piece of
wood. Entirely unconsciously, he began to whittle, letting little
shavings fall on the bare floor. She made no sign of seeing his new
occupation.
"It's plain enough, Mr.--I don't recall your name."
"Hastings--Jefferson Hastings."
"It's plain and direct, Mr. Hastings. He threw her over, threw Mildred
over. She refused to be dealt with in that way. He wouldn't listen to
her side, her arguments, her protests, her pleas. She pursued him; and
last night he killed her. I understand--Mr. Crown told me--he was found
bending over the body--it seemed to me, caught in the very commission of
the crime."
A fleeting contortion, like mirthless ridicule, touched her lips as she
saw him, with head lowered, cut more savagely into the piece of wood.
She noticed, and enjoyed, his dismay.
"That isn't quite accurate," he said, without lifting his head. "He and
another man, Judge Wilton, stumbled--came upon your daughter's body at
the same moment."
"Was that it?" she retorted, unbelieving.
When he looked up, she was regarding him thoughtfully, the black brows
elevated, interrogative. The old man felt the stirrings of physical
nausea within him. But he waited for her to elaborate her story.
"Do you care to ask anything more?" she inquired, impersonal as ashes.
"If I may."
"Why, certainly."
He paused in his whittling, brought forth a huge handkerchief, passed it
across his forehead, was aware for a moment that he was working hard
against the woman's unnatural calmness, and feeling the heat intensely.
She was untouched by it. He whittled again, asking her:
"You a native of Washington?"
"No."
"How long have you been here?"
"About nine months. We came from Chicago."
"Any friends here--have you any friends here?"
"Neither here nor elsewhere." She made that bleak declaration simply,
as if he had suggested her possession of green diamonds. Her tone made
friendship a myth.
He felt again utterly free of the restraints and little hesitancies
usual in situations of this nature.
"And your means, resources. Any, Mrs. Brace?"
"None--except my daughter's."
He was unaccountably restless. Putting the knife into his pocket, he
stood up, went to the window. His guess had been correct. The courtyard
below was as he had pictured it. He stood there at least a full minute.
Turning suddenly in the hope of catching some new expression on her
face, he found her gazing steadily, as if in revery, at the opposite
wall.
"One thing more, Mrs. Brace: did you know your daughter intended to go
to Sloanehurst last night?"
"No."
"Were you uneasy when she failed to come in--last night?"
"Yes; but what could I do?"
"Had she written to Mr. Webster recently?"
"Yes; I think so."
"You think so?"
"Yes; she went out to mail a letter night before last. I recall that
she said it was important, had to be in the box for the midnight
collection, to reach its destination yesterday afternoon--late. I'm sure
it was to Webster."
"Did you see the address on it?"
"I didn't try to."
He stepped from the window, to throw the full glare of the morning sky
on her face, which was upturned, toward him.
"Was it in a grey envelope?"
"Yes; an oblong, grey envelope," she said, the impassive, unwrinkled
face unmoved to either curiosity or reticence.
With surprising swiftness he took a triangular piece of paper from his
breast pocket and held it before her.
"Might that be the flap of that grey envelope?"
She inspected it, while he kept hold of it.
"Very possibly."
Without leaving her chair, she turned and put back the lid of a rickety
little desk in the corner immediately behind her. There, she showed him,
was a bundle of grey envelopes, the corresponding paper beside it. He
compared the envelope flaps with the one he had brought. They were
identical.
Here was support of her assertion that Berne Webster had been pursued by
her daughter as late as yesterday afternoon--and, therefore, might have
been provoked into desperate action. He had found that scrap of grey
paper at Sloanehurst, in Webster's room.
VI
ACTION BY THE SHERIFF
Mrs. Brace did not ask Hastings where he had got the fragment of grey
envelope. She made no comment whatever.
He reversed the flap in his hand and showed her the inner side on which
were, at first sight, meaningless lines and little smears. He explained
that the letter must have been put into the envelope when the ink was
still undried on the part of it that came in contact with the flap, and,
the paper being of that rough-finish, spongy kind frequently affected by
women, the flap had absorbed the undried ink pressed against it.
"Have you a hand-mirror?" he asked, breaking a long pause.
She brought one from the bedroom. Holding it before the envelope flap,
he showed her the marks thus made legible. They were, on the first line:
"--edly de--," with the first loop or curve of an "n" or an "m"
following the "de"; and on the second line the one word "Pursuit!" the
whole reproduction being this:
edly de
Pursuit!
"Does that writing mean anything to you, Mrs. Brace?" Hastings asked,
keeping it in front of her.
She moved her left hand, a quiet gesture indicating her lack of further
interest in the piece of paper.
"Nothing special," she said, "except that the top line seems to bear out
what I've told you. It might be: 'repeatedly demanded'--I mean Mildred
may have written that she had repeatedly demanded justice of him,
something of that sort."
"Is it your daughter's writing?"
"Yes."
"And the word 'Pursuit,' with an exclamation point after it? That
suggest anything to you?"
"Why, no." She showed her first curiosity: "Where did you get that piece
of envelope?"
"Not from Berne Webster," he said, smiling.
"I suppose not," she agreed, and did not press him for the information.
"You said," he went to another point, "that the sheriff attached no
importance to your belief in Webster's guilt. Can you tell me why?"
Her contempt was frank enough now, and visible, her lips thickening and
assuming the abnormally humid appearance he had noticed before.
"He thinks the footsteps which Miss Sloane says she heard are the
deciding evidence. He accuses a young man named Russell, Eugene Russell,
who's been attentive to Mildred."
Hastings was relieved.
"Crown's seen him, seen Russell?" he asked, not troubling to conceal his
eagerness.
On that, he saw the beginnings of wrath in her eyes. The black eyebrows
went upward, the thin nostrils expanded, the lips set to a line no
thicker than the edge of a knife.
"You, too, will----"
She broke off, checked by the ringing of the wall telephone in the
entrance hall. She answered the call, moving without haste. It was for
Mr. Hastings, she said, going back to her seat.
He regretted the interruption; it would give her time to regain the
self-control she had been on the point of losing.
Sheriff Crown was at the other end of the wire. He was back at
Sloanehurst, he explained, and Miss Sloane had asked him to give the
detective certain information:
He had asked the Washington police to hold Eugene Russell, or to
persuade him to attend the inquest at Sloanehurst. Crown, going in to
Washington, had stopped at the car barns of the electric road which
passed Sloanehurst, and had found a conductor who had made the
ten-thirty run last night. This conductor, Barton, had slept at the
barns, waiting for the early-morning resumption of car service to take
him to his home across the city.
Barton remembered having seen a man leave his car at Ridgecrest, the
next stop before Sloanehurst, at twenty-five minutes past ten last
night. He answered Russell's description, had seemed greatly agitated,
and was unfamiliar with the stops on the line, having questioned Barton
as to the distance between Ridgecrest and Sloanehurst. That was all the
conductor had to tell.
"Mrs. Brace's description of Russell, a real estate salesman who had
been attentive to her daughter," continued Crown, "tallied with Barton's
description of the man who had been on his car. I got his address from
her. But say! She don't fall for the idea that Russell's guilty! She
gave me to understand, in that snaky, frozen way of hers, that I was a
fool for thinking so.
"Anyway, I'm going to put him over the jumps!" The sheriff was highly
elated. "What was he out here for last night if he wasn't jealous of
the girl? Wasn't he following her? And, when he came up with her on the
Sloanehurst lawn, didn't he kill her? It looks plain to me; simple. I
told you it was a simple case!"
"Have you seen him?" Hastings was looking at his watch as he spoke--it
was nine o'clock.
"No; I went to his boarding house, waked up the place at three o'clock
this morning. He wasn't there."
Hastings asked for the number of the house. It was on Eleventh street,
Crown informed him, and gave the number.
"I searched his room," the sheriff added, his voice self-congratulatory.
"Find anything?"
"I should say! The nail file was missing from his dressing case."
"What else?"
"A pair of wet shoes--muddy and wet."
"Then, he'd returned to his room, after the murder, and gone out again?"
"That's it--right."
"Anybody in the house hear him come in, or go out?"
"Not a soul.--And I don't know where he is now."
Hastings, leaving the telephone, found Mrs. Brace carefully brushing
into a newspaper the litter made by his whittling. Her performance of
that trivial task, the calm thoroughness with which she went about it,
or the littleness of it, when compared with her complete indifference to
the tragedy which should have overwhelmed her--something, he could not
tell exactly what, made her more repugnant to him than ever.
He spoke impulsively:
"Did you want--didn't you feel some impulse, some desire, to go out
there when you heard of this murder?"
She paused in her brushing, looking up to him without lifting herself
from hands and knees.
"Why should I have wanted to do any such thing?" she replied. "Mildred's
not out there. What's out there is--nothing."
"Do you know about the arrangements for the removal of the body?"
"The sheriff told me," she replied, cold, impersonal. "It will be
brought to an undertaking establishment as soon as the coroner's jury
has viewed it."