his speech with restless arms and violent motions of his head, as if to
galvanize into response the still and prostrate form before him. On the
opposite side of the bed stood the sepulchral Jarvis, flashing malign
looks at Crown, but chiefly busy, with unshaking hands, preparing a
beverage of some sort for the sick man.
Sloane lay on his back, eyes closed, face under the full glare of the
reading light. His expression indicated both boredom and physical
suffering.
"--have to make an arrest!" Crown was saying. "You're making me take
that action--ain't you? I come in here, considerate as I know how to be,
and I ask you for a few facts. Do you give 'em to me? Not by a long
shot! You lie there in that bed, and talk about leaping angels, and say
I bore you! Well, Mr. Sloane, that won't get you a thing! You're where I
said you were: it's either Webster that will be arrested--or yourself!
Now, I'm giving you another chance. I'm asking you what you saw; and you
can tell me--or take the consequences!"
Hastings thought: "He's up that gum stump of his again, and don't know
how to quit talking."
Sloane made no answer.
"Well," thundered Crown. "I'm asking you!"
"Moaning martyrs!" Sloane protested in a thin, querulous tone. "Jarvis,
the bromide."
"All right!" the sheriff delivered his ultimatum. "I'll stick to what I
said. Webster may be too sick to talk, but not too sick to have a
warrant served on him. He'll be arrested because you won't tell me----"
Hastings spoke then.
"Gentlemen!" he greeted pleasantly. "Mr. Sloane, good evening. Mr.
Sheriff--am I interrupting a private conference?"
"Fiery fiends!" wailed Sloane. "Another!"
Hastings gave his attention to Crown. He was certain that the man,
balked by Sloane's refusal to "talk," would welcome an excuse for
leaving the room.
"Let me see you a moment, will you?" He put a hand on the sheriff's
shoulder, persuading: "It's important, right now."
"But I want to know what Mr. Sloane's going to say," Crown blustered.
"If he'll tell----"
Hastings stopped him with a whisper: "That's exactly what he'll
do--soon!"
He led the sheriff into the hall. They went into the parlour.
"Now," Hastings began, in genial tone; "did you get anything from him?"
"Not a dad-blamed thing!" Crown was still blustery. "But he'll talk
before I'm through! You can put your little bets down on that!"
"All right. You've had your chance at him. Better let me see him."
Crown looked his distrust. He was thinking of Mrs. Brace's warning that
this man had made a fool of him.
"I'm not trying to put anything over on you," the detective assured
him. "Fact is, I'm out here for the newspaper men. They've had nothing
from him; they've asked me to get his story. I'll give it to you before
I see them. What do you say?"
Crown still hesitated.
"If, after you've heard it," Hastings added, "you want to question him
further, you can do it, of course. But this way we take two shots at
it."
To that, the other finally agreed.
Hastings found Sloane smoking a cigarette, his eyes still closed. Jarvis
was behind a screen near the door, now and then clinking glass against
glass as he worked.
The old man took a chair near the bed and waited for Sloane to speak. He
waited a long time. Finally, the invalid looked at him from under
lowered lids, slyly, like a child peeping. Hastings returned the look
with a pleasant smile, his shrewd eyes sparkling over the rims of his
spectacles.
"Well!" Sloane said at last, in a whiney tone. "What do you want?"
"First," Hastings apologized, "I want to say how sorry I am I didn't
make myself clearly understood night before last when I told Miss Sloane
I'd act as mouthpiece for this household. I didn't mean I could invent
a statement for each of you, or for any of you. What I did mean amounts
to this: if you, for instance, would tell me what you know--all you
know--about this murder, I could relay it to the reporters--and to the
sheriff, who's been annoying you so this evening. As----"
"Flat-headed fiends!" Sloane cut in, writhing under the light coverlet.
"Another harangue!"
Hastings kept his temper.
"No harangue about it. But it's to come to this, Mr. Sloane: you're
handicapping me, and the reporters and the sheriff don't trust you."
"Why? Why don't they trust me?" shrilled Sloane, writhing again.
"Ill tell you in a very few words: because you refused to testify at the
inquest yesterday, giving illness as an excuse. That's one reason.
The----"
"Howling helions! Wasn't I ill? Didn't I have enough to make me
ill?--Jarvis, a little whiskey!"
"Dr. Garnet hasn't told them so--the reporters. He won't tell them so.
In fact," Hastings said, with less show of cordiality, "from all he said
to me, I gather he doesn't think you an ill man--that is, dangerously
ill."
"And because of that, they say what, these reporters, this sheriff?
What?"
"They're in ugly mood, Mr. Sloane. They're saying you're trying to
protect--somebody--by keeping still about a thing which you should be
the first to haul into daylight. That's it--in a nutshell."
Sloane had stopped trembling. He sat up in the bed and stared at the
detective out of steady, hard eyes. He waved away the whiskey Jarvis
held toward him.
"And you want what, Mr. Hastings?" he inquired, a curiously effective
sarcasm in his voice.
"A statement covering every second from the time you waked up Saturday
night until you saw the body."
"A statement!--Reporters!" He was snarling on that. "What's got into
you, anyway? What are you trying to do--make people suspect me of the
murder-make 'em suspect Berne?"
He threw away the cigarette and shook his fist at Hastings. He gulped
twice before he could speak again; he seemed on the point of choking.
"In an ugly mood, are they? Well, they can stay in an ugly mood. You,
too! And that hydrophobiac sheriff! Quivering and crucified saints! I've
had enough of all of you--all of you, understand! Get out of here! Get
out!"
Although his voice was shrill, there was no sound of weakness in it.
The trembling that attacked him was the result of anger, not of
nervousness.
Hastings rose, astounded by the outbreak.
"I'm afraid you don't realize the seriousness of----"
"Oh, get out of here!" Sloane interrupted again. "You've imposed on my
daughter with your talk of being helpful, and all that rot, but you
can't hoodwink me. What the devil do you mean by letting that sheriff
come in here and subject me to all this annoyance and shock? You'd save
us from unpleasantness!"
He spoke more slowly now, as if he cudgelled his brain for the most
biting sarcasm, the most unbearable insolence.
"Don't realize the seriousness!--Flat-headed fiends!--Are you any nearer
the truth now than you were at the start?--Try to understand this, Mr.
Hastings: you're discharged, fired! From now on, I'm in charge of what
goes on in this house. If there's any trouble to be avoided, I'll attend
to it. Get that!--and get out!"
Hastings, opening his mouth for angry retort, checked himself. He stood
a moment silent, shaken by the effort it cost him to maintain his
self-control.
"Humph!" Sloane's nasal, twangy exclamation was clearly intended to
provoke him further.
But, without a word, he turned and left the room. Passing the screen
near the door, he heard Jarvis snicker, a discreet echo of Sloane's
goading ridicule.
On his way back to the parlour, the old man made up his mind to discount
Sloane's behaviour.
"I've got to take a chance," he counselled himself, "but I know I'm
right in doing it. A big responsibility--but I'm right!"
Then he submitted this report:
"He says nothing new, Crown. Far as I can make out, nothing unusual
waked him up that night--except chronic nervousness; he turned on that
light to find some medicine; he knew nothing of the murder until Judge
Wilton called him."
"Humph!" growled Crown. "And you fall for that!"
Hastings eyed him sternly. "It's the statement I'm going to give to the
reporters."
The sheriff was silent, irresolute. Hastings congratulated himself on
his earlier deduction: that Crown, unable to frighten Sloane into
communicativeness, was thankful for an excuse to withdraw.
Hendricks had reported the two-hour conference between Crown and Mrs.
Brace late that afternoon. Hastings decided now: "The man's in cahoots
with her. His ally! And he won't act until he's had another session with
her.--And she won't advise an arrest for a day or two anyway. Her game
is to make him play on Sloane's nerves for a while. She advises threats,
not arrests--which suits me, to a T!"
He fought down a chuckle, thinking of that alliance.
Crown corroborated his reasoning.
"All right, Hastings," he said doggedly. "I'm not going back to his
room. I gave him his chance. He can take the consequences."
"What consequences?"
"I'd hardly describe 'em to his personal representative, would I? But
you can take this from me: they'll come soon enough--and rough enough!"
Hastings made no reference to having been dismissed by Sloane. He was
glad when Crown changed the subject.
"Hastings, you saw the reporters this afternoon--I've been
wondering--they asked me--did they ask you whether you suspected the
valet--Jarvis?"
"Of what?"
"Killing her."
"No; they didn't ask me."
"Funny," said Crown, ill at ease. "They asked me."
"So you said," Hastings reminded, looking hard at him.
"Well!" Crown blurted it out. "Do you suspect him? Are you working on
that line--at all?"
Hastings paused. He had no desire to mislead him. And yet, there was no
reason for confiding in him--and delay was at present the Hastings plan.
"I'll tell you, Crown," he said, finally; "I'll work on any line that
can lead to the guilty man.--What do you know?"
"Who? Me?" Crown's tone indicated the absurdity of suspecting Jarvis.
"Not a thing."
But it gave Hastings food for thought. Was Mrs. Brace in communication
with Jarvis? And did Crown know that? Was it possible that Crown wanted
to find out whether Hastings was having Jarvis shadowed? How much of a
fool was the woman making of the sheriff, anyway?
Another thing puzzled him: why did Mrs. Brace suspect Arthur Sloane of
withholding the true story of what he had seen the night of the murder?
Hastings' suspicion, amounting to certainty, came from his knowledge
that the man's own daughter thought him deeply involved in the crime.
But Mrs. Brace--was she clever enough to make that deduction from the
known facts? Or did she have more direct information from Sloanehurst
than he had thought possible?
He decided not to leave the sheriff entirely subject to her schemes and
suggestions. He would give Mr. Crown something along another line--a
brake, as it were, on impulsive action.
"You talk about arresting Webster right away--or Sloane," he began,
suddenly confiding. "You wouldn't want to make a mistake--would you?"
Crown rose to that. "Why? What do you know--specially?"
"Well, not so much, maybe. But it's worth thinking about. I'll give you
the facts--confidentially, of course.--Hub Hill's about a hundred yards
from this house, on the road to Washington. When automobiles sink into
it hub-deep, they come out with a lot of mud on their wheels--black,
loamy mud. Ain't any other mud like that Hub Hill mud anywhere near
here. It's just special and peculiar to Hub Hill. That so?"
"Yes," agreed Crown, absorbed.
"All right. How, then, did Eugene Russell keep black, Hub Hill mud on
his shoes that night if he went the four miles on foot to where Otis
picked him up?"
"Eh?" said Crown, chin fallen.
"By the time he'd run four miles, his shoes would have been covered with
the red mud of that mile of 'dirt road' or the thin, grey mud of the
three miles of pike--wouldn't they? They'd have thrown off that Hub Hill
mud pretty quick, wouldn't they?"
"Thunder!" marvelled Crown. "That's right! And those shoes were in his
room; I saw 'em." He gurgled, far back in his throat. "Say! How did he
get from Hub Hill to where Otis picked him up?"
"That's what I say," declared Hastings, very bland. "How?"
To Lucille, after Crown's departure, the detective declared his
intention to "stand by" her, to stay on the case. He repeated his
statement of yesterday: he suspected too much, and knew too little, to
give it up.
He told her of the responsibility he had assumed in giving the sheriff
the fictitious Sloane statement. "That is, it's not fictitious, in
itself; it's what your father has been saying. But I told Crown, and I'm
going to tell the newspaper men, that he says it's all he knows, really.
And I hate to do it--because, honestly, Miss Sloane, I don't think it
is all. I'm afraid he's deceiving us."
She did not contradict that; it was her own opinion.
"However," the old man made excuse, "I had to do it--in view of things
as they are. And he's got to stick to it, now that I've made it
'official,' so to speak. Do you think he will?"
She did not see why not. She would explain to him the importance, the
necessity, of that course.
"He's so mistaken in what he's doing!" she said. "I don't understand
him--really. You know how devoted to me he is. He called me into his
room again an hour or two ago and tried to comfort me. He said he had
reason to know everything would come out as it should. But he looked
so--so uncertain!--Oh, Mr. Hastings, who did kill that woman?"
"I think I'll be able to prove who did it--let's see," he spoke with a
light cheerfulness, and at the same time with sincerity; "I'll be able
to prove it in less than a week after Mrs. Brace takes that money from
you."
She said nothing to that, and he leaned forward sharply, peering at her
face, illegible to him in the darkness of the verandah.
"So much depends on that, on you," he added. "You won't fail
me--tomorrow?"
"I'll do my best," she said, earnestly, struggling against depression.
"She must take that money," he declared with great emphasis. "She must!"
"And you think she will?"
"Miss Sloane, I know she will," he said, a fatherly encouragement in his
voice. "I'm seldom mistaken in people; and I know I've judged this woman
correctly. Money's her weakness. Love of it has destroyed her already.
Offering this bribe to anybody else situated as she is would be
ridiculous--but she--she'll take it."
Lucille sat a long time on the verandah after Hastings had gone. She was
far more depressed than he had suspected; she had to endure so much, she
thought--the suspense, which grew heavier as time went by; the
notoriety; Berne Webster still in danger of his life; her father's
inexplicable pose of indifference toward everything; the suspicions of
the newspapers and the public of both her father and Berne; and the
waiting, waiting, waiting--for what?
A little moan escaped her.
What if Mrs. Brace did take the marked money? What would that show? That
she was acting with criminal intent, Hastings had said. But he had
another and more definite object in urging her to this undertaking; he
expected from it a vital development which he had not explained--she was
sure. She worried with that idea.
Her confidence in Hastings had been without qualification. But what was
he doing? Anything? Judge Wilton was forever saying, "Trust Hastings;
he's the man for this case." And that was his reputation; people
declared that, if anybody could get to the bottom of all this mystery,
he could. Yet, two whole days had passed since the murder, and he had
just said another week might be required to work out his plan of
detection--whatever that plan was.
Another week of this! She put her hot palms to her hotter temples,
striving for clarity of thought. But she was dazed by her terror--her
isolated terror, for some of her thoughts were such that she could share
them with nobody--not even Hastings.
"If the sheriff makes no arrest within the next few days, I'll be out of
the woods," he had told her. "Delay is what I want."
There, again, was discouragement, for here was the sheriff threatening
to serve a warrant on Berne within the next twenty-four hours! She had
heard Crown make the threat, and to her it had seemed absolutely final:
unless her father revealed something which Crown wanted, whether her
father knew it or not, Berne was to be subjected to this humiliation,
this added blow to his chance for recovery!
She sprang up, throwing her hands wide and staring blindly at the stars.
The woman whom she was to bribe cast a deep shadow on her imagination.
Sharing the feeling of many others, she had reached the reluctant
conclusion that Mrs. Brace in some way knew more than anybody else about
the murder and its motives. It was, she told herself, a horrid feeling,
and without reason. But she could not shake it off. To her, Mrs. Brace
was a figure of sinister power, an agent of ugliness, waiting to do
evil--waiting for what?
By a great effort, she steadied her jangled nerves. Hastings was
counting on her. And work--even work in the dark--was preferable to this
idleness, this everlasting summing-up of frightful possibilities without
a ray of hope. She would do her best to make that woman take the money!
Tomorrow she would be of real service to Berne Webster--she would atone,
in some small measure, for the sorrow she had brought upon him,
discarding him because of empty gossip!--Would he continue to love
her?--Perhaps, if she had not discarded him, Mildred Brace would not
have been murdered.
A groan escaped her. She fled into the house, away from her thoughts.
XVI
THE BRIBE
It was nine o'clock the following evening when Lucille Sloane, sure that
she had entered the Walman unobserved, rang the bell of Mrs. Brace's
apartment. Her body felt remarkably light and facile, as if she moved in
a tenuous, half-real atmosphere. There were moments when she had the
sensation of floating. Her brain worked with extraordinary rapidity. She
was conscious of an unusually resourceful intelligence, and performed a
series of mental gymnastics, framing in advance the sentences she would
use in the interview confronting her.
The constant thought at the back of her brain was that she would
succeed; she would speak and act in such a way that Mrs. Brace would
take the money. She was buoyed by a fierce determination to be repaid
for all the suspense, all the agony of heart, that had weighed her down
throughout this long, leaden-footed day--the past twenty-four hours
unproductive of a single enlightening incident.
Mrs. Brace opened the door and, with a scarcely perceptible nod of the
head, motioned her into the living room. Neither of them spoke until
they had seated themselves on the chairs by the window. Even then, the
silence was prolonged, until Lucille realized that her tongue was dry
and uncomfortably large for her mouth. An access of trembling shook her.
She tried to smile and knew that her lips were twisting in a ghastly
grin.
Mrs. Brace moved slowly to and fro on the armless rocker, her swift,
appraising eyes taking in her visitor's distress. The smooth face wore
its customary, inexpressive calm. Lucille, striving desperately to
arrive at some opinion of what the woman thought, saw that she might as
well try to find emotion in a statue.
"I--I," the girl finally attained a quick, flurried utterance, "want to
thank you for--for having this--this talk with me."
"What do you want to talk about, Miss Sloane?"
The low, metallic voice was neither friendly nor hostile. It expressed,
more than anything else, a sardonic, bullying self-sufficiency.
It both angered and encouraged Lucille. She perceived the futility of
polite, introductory phrases here; she could go straight to her purpose,
be brutally frank. She gave Mrs. Brace a brilliant, disarming smile, a
proclamation of fellowship. Her confidence was restored.
"I'm sure we can talk sensibly together, Mrs. Brace," she explained,
dissembling her indignation. "We can get down to business, at once."
"What business?" inquired the older woman, with some of the manner
Hastings had seen, an air of lying in wait.
"I said, on the 'phone, it was something of advantage to you--didn't I?"
"Yes; you said that."
"And, of course, I want something from you."
"Naturally."
"I'll tell you what it is." Lucille spoke now with cool precision, as
yet untouched by the horror she had expected to feel. "It's a matter of
money."
Mrs. Brace's tongue came out to the edge of the thin line of her lips.
Her nostrils quivered, once, to the sharply indrawn breath. Her eyes
were more furtive.
"Money?" she echoed. "For what?"
"There's no good of my making long explanations, Mrs. Brace," Lucille
said. "I've read the newspapers, every line of them, about--our trouble.
And I saw the references to your finances, your lack of money."
"Yes?" Mrs. Brace's right hand lay on her lap; the thumb of it began to
move against the forefinger rapidly, the motion a woman makes in
feeling the texture of cloth--or the trick of a bank clerk separating
paper money.
"Yes. I read, also, what you said about the tragedy. Today I noticed
that the only note of newness in the articles in the papers came from
you--from your saying that 'in a few days, three or four at the
outside'--that was your language, I'm quite sure--you'd produce evidence
on which an arrest would be made. I've intelligence enough to see that
the public's interest in you is so great, the sympathy for you is so
great, that your threats--I mean, predictions, or opinions--colour
everything that's written by the reporters. You see?"
"Do I see what?"
Despite her excellent pose of waiting with nothing more than a polite
interest, Lucille saw in her a pronounced alteration. That was not so
much in her face as in her body. Her limbs had a look of rigidity.
"Don't you see what I mean?" Lucille insisted. "I see that you can make
endless trouble for us--for all of us at Sloanehurst. You can make
people believe Mr. Webster guilty, and that father and I are shielding
him. People listen to what you say. They seem to be on your side."
"Well?"
"I wondered if you wouldn't stop your interviews--your accusations?"
The younger woman's eagerness, evident now in the variety of her
gestures and the rapid procession of pallour and flush across her
cheeks, persuaded Mrs. Brace that Lucille was acting on an impulse of
her own, not as an agent to carry out another's well designed scheme.
The older woman, at that idea, felt safe. She asked:
"And you want--what?"
"I've come here to ask you to tell me all you know, or to be quiet
altogether."
"I'm afraid I don't understand--fully," returned Mrs. Brace, with an
exaggerated bewilderment. "Tell all I know?"
"That is, if you do know anything you haven't told!" Lucille urged her.
"Oh, don't you see? I'm saying to you that I want to put an end to this
dreadful suspense!"
Mrs. Brace laughed disagreeably; her face was harder, less human. "You
mean I'm amusing myself, exerting myself needlessly, as a matter of
spite? Do you mean to tell me that?"
"No! No!" Lucille denied, impatient with herself for lack of clearness.
"I mean I'm sure you're attacking an innocent man. And I'm willing, I'm
anxious--oh, I hope so much, Mrs. Brace--to make an agreement with
you--a financial arrangement----" She paused the fractional part of a
second on that; and, seeing that the other did not resent the term, she
added: "to pay you to stop it. Isn't that clear?"
"Yes; that's clear."
"Understand me, please. What I ask is that you say nothing more to the
reporters, the sheriff or the Washington police, that will have the
effect of hounding them on against Mr. Webster. I want to eliminate from
the situation all the influence you've exerted to make Mr. Crown believe
Mr. Webster's guilty and my father's protecting him."
"Let me think," Mrs. Brace said, coolly.
Lucille exulted inwardly, "She'll do it! She'll do it!" The hard eyes
dissected her eager face. The girl drew back in her chair, thinking now:
"She suspects who sent me!"
At last, the older woman spoke: