"Says the headlights were full on him as he stood on one side of the
road, there on Hub Hill, waiting to slide on the running board.--And
this Stevens is a shrewd guy, the York chief says. I guess his story
plugs Russell's lies, shoots that alibi so full of holes it makes a
sifter look like a piece of sheet-iron!
"That car went up Hub Hill at seven minutes past eleven--that means
Russell had plenty of time to kill the girl after the rain stopped and
to get out on the road and slip on to that running board. And the car
slowed up, where he rolled off the running board, at eighteen minutes
past eleven.
"Time's right, location's right, identification's right!--Pretty sweet,
ain't it, old fellow? Congratulate me, don't you? Congratulate me, even
if it does step on all those mysterious theories of yours--that right?"
Hastings bestowed the desired felicitations upon the exuberant conqueror
of crime.
Turning from the telephone, he gazed a long time at the piece of grey
envelope on the table before him. He had clung to his belief that, in
those fragments of words, was to be found a clue to the solution of the
mystery. He picked up his knife and fell to whittling.
Outside in the street a newsboy set up an abrupt, blaring din, shouting
sensational headlines:
"SLOANEHURST MYSTERY SOLVED!--RUSSELL THE MURDERER!--ALIBI A FAKE!"
The old man considered grimly, the various effects of this development
in the case--Lucille Sloane's unbounded relief mingled with censure of
him for having added to her fears, and especially for having subjected
her to the ordeal of last night's experience with Mrs. Brace--the
adverse criticism from both press and public because of his refusal to
join in the first attacks upon Russell, Arthur Sloane's complacency at
never having treated him with common courtesy.
His thoughts went to Mrs. Brace and her blackmail schemes, as he had
interpreted or suspected them.
"If I'd had a little more time," he reflected, "I might have put my hand
on----"
His eyes rested on the envelope flap. His mind flashed to another and
new idea. His muscles stiffened; he put his hands on the arms of his
chair and slowly lifted himself up, the knife dropping from his fingers
and clattering on the floor. He stood erect and held both hands aloft, a
gesture of wide and growing wonder.
"Cripes!" he said aloud.
He picked up the grey paper with a hand that trembled. His pendent
cheeks puffed out like those of a man blowing a horn. He stared at the
paper again, before restoring it to its envelope, which he put back into
one of his pockets.
"Cripes!" he said again. "It's a place! Pursuit! That's where the----"
He became a whirlwind of action, covered the floor with springy step.
Taking a book of colossal size from a shelf, he whirled the pages,
running his finger down a column while he murmured,
"Pursuit--P-u-r--P-u--P-u----"
But there was no such name in the postal directory. He went back to
older directories. He began to worry. Was there no such postoffice as
Pursuit? He went to other books, whirling the pages, running down column
after column. And at last he got the information he sought.
Consulting a railroad folder, he found a train schedule that caused him
to look at his watch.
"Twenty-five minutes," he figured. "I'm going!"
He telephoned for a cab.
Then, seating himself at the table, he tore a sheet from a scratch-pad
and wrote:
"Don't lose sight of Mrs. Brace. Disregard Russell's arrest.
"Hendricks: the Sloanehurst people are members of the Arlington Golf
Club. Get a look at golf bags there. Did one, or two, contain piece or
pieces of a bed-slat?
"Gore: check up on Mrs. B.'s use of money.
"I'll be back Sunday."
He sealed the envelope into which he put that, and, addressing it to
Hendricks, left it lying on the table.
At the station he bought the afternoon newspapers and turned to Eugene
Russell's statement, made to the reporters immediately after his arrest.
It ran:
"I repeat that I'm innocent of the murder. Of course, I made a mistake
in omitting all mention of my having ridden the first four miles from
Sloanehurst. But, being innocent and knowing the weight of the
circumstantial evidence against me, I could not resist the temptation to
make my alibi good. I neither committed that murder nor witnessed it.
The story I told at the inquest of what happened to me and what I did at
Sloanehurst stands. It is the truth."
XIX
"PURSUIT!"
Returning from his trip Sunday morning, the detective, after a brief
conference with Hendricks, had gone immediately to Mrs. Brace's
apartment. She sat now, still and watchful, on the armless rocker by the
window, waiting for him to disclose the object of his visit. Except the
lifted, faintly interrogating eyebrows, there was nothing in her face
indicative of what she thought.
He caught himself comparing her to a statue, forever seated on the
low-backed, uncomfortable chair, awaiting without emotion or alteration
of feature the outcome of her evil scheming. Her hardness gave him the
impression of something hammered on, beaten into an ugly pattern.
Having that imperturbability to overcome, he struck his first blow with
surprising directness.
"I'm just back from Pursuit," he said.
That was the first speech by either of them since the monosyllabic
greeting at the door. He saw that she had prepared herself for such an
announcement; but the way she took it reminded him of a door shaken by
the impact of a terrific blow. A little shiver, for all her force of
repression, moved her from head to foot.
"You are?" she responded, her voice controlled, the hard face untouched
by the shock to which her body had responded.
"Yes; I got back half an hour ago, and, except for one of my assistants,
you're the first person I've seen." When that drew no comment from her,
he added: "I want you to remember that--later on."
He began to whittle.
"Why?" she asked with genuine curiosity, after a pause.
"Because it may be well for you to know that I'm dealing with you alone,
and fairly.--I got all the facts concerning you."
"Concerning me?" Her tone intimated doubt.
"Now, Mrs. Brace!" he exclaimed, disapproving her apparent intention.
"You're surely not going to pretend ignorance--or innocence!"
She crossed her knees, and, putting her left forearm across her body,
rested her right elbow in that hand. She began to rock very gently, her
posture causing her to lean forward and giving her a look of continual
but polite questioning.
"If you want to talk to me," she said, her voice free of all feeling,
"you'll have to tell me what it's about."
"All right; I will," he returned. "You'll remember, I take it, my asking
you to tell me the meaning of the marks on the flap of the grey
envelope. I'll admit I was slow, criminally slow, in coming to the
conclusion that 'Pursuit!' referred to a place rather than an act. But I
got it finally--and I found Pursuit--not much left of it now; it's not
even a postoffice.
"But it's discoverable," he continued on a sterner note, and began to
shave long, slender chips from his block of wood. "I'll give you the
high lights: young Dalton was killed--his murderer made a run for
it--but you, a young widow then, in whose presence the thing was done,
smoothed matters out. You swore it was a matter of self-defence. The
result was that, after a few half-hearted attempts to locate the
fugitive, the pursuit was given up."
"Very well. But why bring that story here--now? What's its
significance?"
He stared at her in amazement. Her thin, sensitive lips were drawn back
at the corners, enough to make her mouth look a trifle wider--and enough
to suggest dimly that their motion was the start of a vindictive
grimace. Otherwise, she was unmoved, unresponsive to the open threat of
what he had said.
"Let me finish," he retorted. "An unfortunate feature, for you, was
that you seemed to have made money out of the tragedy. In straitened
circumstances previously, you began to spend freely--comparatively
speaking--a few days after the murderer's disappearance. In fact,
bribery was hinted; you had to leave the village. See any significance
in that?" he concluded, with irony.
"Suppose you explain it," she said, still cool.
"The significance is in the strengthening of the theory I've had
throughout the whole week that's passed since your daughter was killed
at Sloanehurst."
"What's that?"
She stopped rocking; her eyes played a fiery tattoo on every feature of
his face.
"Your daughter's death was the unexpected result of your attempts to
blackmail young Dalton's murderer. You, being afraid of him, and not
confessing that timidity to Mildred, persuaded her to approach him--in
person."
"I! Afraid of him!" she objected, aroused at last.
Her brows were lowered, a heavy line above her furtive, swift eyes; her
nostrils fluttered nervously.
"Granting your absurd theory," she continued, "why should I have feared
him? What had he done--except strike to save his own life?"
"You forget, Mrs. Brace," he corrected. "That body showed twenty-nine
wounds, twenty-eight of them unnecessary--if the first was inflicted in
mere self-defence. It was horrible mutilation."
"So!" she ridiculed, with obvious effort. "You picture him as a
butcher."
"Precisely. And you, having seen to what lengths his murderous fury
could take him, were afraid to face him--even after your long, long
search had located him again. Let's be sensible, Mrs. Brace. Let's give
the facts of this business a hearing.
"You had come to Washington and located him at last. But, after
receiving several demands from you, he'd stopped reading your
letters--sent them back unopened. Consequently, in order for you to make
an appointment with him, he had to be communicated with in a handwriting
he didn't know. Hence, your daughter had to write the letter making that
appointment a week ago last night. Then, however----"
"What makes you think----"
"Then, however," he concluded, overbearing her with his voice, "you
hadn't the courage to face him--out there, in the dark, alone. You
persuaded Mildred to go--in your place. And he killed her."
"Ha!" The mocking exclamation sounded as though it had been pounded out
of her by a blow upon her back. "What makes you say that? Where do you
get that? Who put that into your head?"
She volleyed those questions at him with indescribable rapidity, her
lips drawn back from her teeth, her brows straining far up toward the
line of her hair. The profound disgust with which he viewed her did not
affect her. She darted to and fro in her mind, running about in the
waste and tumult of her momentary confusion, seeking the best thing to
say, the best policy to adopt, for her own ends.
He had had time to determine that much when her gift of self-possession
reasserted itself. She forced her lips back to their thin line, and
steadied herself. He could see the vibrant tautness of her whole body,
exemplified in the rigidity with which she held her crossed knees, one
crushed upon the other.
"I know, I think, what misled you," she answered her own question.
"You've talked to Gene Russell, of course. He may have heard--I think he
did hear--Mildred and me discussing the mailing of a letter that Friday
night."
"He did," Hastings said, firmly.
"But he couldn't have heard anything to warrant your theory, Mr.
Hastings. I merely made fun of her wavering after she'd once said she'd
confront Berne Webster again with her appeal for fair play."
He inspected her with an emotion that was a mingling of incredulity and
repugnant wonder.
"It's no use, Mrs. Brace," he told her. "Russell didn't see the name of
the man to whom the letter was addressed. I saw him last Sunday
afternoon. He told me he took the name for granted, because Mildred had
taunted him, saying it went to Webster. As a matter of fact, he wanted
to see if Webster was at Sloanehurst and fastened his eyes for a
fleeting glimpse on that word--and on that alone. Besides, there are
facts to prove that the letter did not go to Webster.--Do you see how
your fancied security falls away?"
"Let me think," she said, her tone flat and impersonal.
She was silent, her restless eyes gazing at the wall over his head. He
watched her, and glanced only at intervals at the wood he was aimlessly
shaving.
"Of course," she said, after a while, looking at him with a speculative,
deliberating air, "you've deduced and pieced this together. You've a
woman's intuition--comprehension of motives, feelings."
She was silent again.
"Pieced what together?" he asked.
"It's plain enough, isn't it? You began with your suspicion that my need
of money was heavier in my mind than grief at Mildred's death. On that,
you built up--well, all you've just said."
"It was more than a suspicion," he corrected. "It was knowledge--that
everything you did, after her death, was intended to help along your
scheme to--we'll say, to get money."
"Still," she persisted shrewdly, "you felt the necessity of proving I'd
blackmail--if that's the word you want to use."
"How?" he put in quickly. "Prove it, how?"
"That's why you sent that girl here with the five hundred. I see it now;
although, at the time, I didn't." She laughed, a short, bitter note.
"Perhaps, the money, or my need of it, kept me from thinking straight."
"Well?"
"Of course," she made the admission calmly, "as soon as I took the hush
money, your theory seemed sound--the whole of it: my motives and
identity of the murderer."
She was thinking with a concentration so intense that the signs of it
resembled physical exertion. Moisture beaded the upper part of her
forehead. He could see the muscles of her face respond to the locking of
her jaws.
"But there's nothing against me," she began again, and, moved by his
expression, qualified: "nothing that I can be held for, in the courts."
"You've decided that, have you?"
"You'll admit it," she said. "There's nothing--there can be nothing--to
disprove my statement that Dalton's death was provoked. I hold the key
to that--I alone. That being true, I couldn't be prosecuted in Pursuit
as 'accessory after the fact.'"
"Yes," he agreed. "That's true."
"And here," she concluded, without a hint of triumph, even without a
special show of interest, "I can't be proceeded against for blackmail.
That money, from both of them, was a gift. I hadn't asked for it, much
less demanded it. I," she said with an assured arrogance, "hadn't got
that far.--So, you see, Mr. Hastings, I'm far from frightened."
He found nothing to say to that shameless but unassailable declaration.
Also, he was aware that she entertained, and sought solution of, a
problem, the question of how best to satisfy her implacable
determination to make the man pay. That purpose occupied all her mind,
now that her money greed was frustrated.
It was on this that he had calculated. It explained his going to her
before confronting the murderer. He had felt certain that her perverted
desire to "get even" would force her into the strange position of
helping him.
He broke the silence with a careful attempt to guide her thoughts:
"But don't fool yourself, Mrs. Brace. You've got out of this all you'll
ever get, financially--every cent. And you're in an unpleasant
situation--an outcast, perhaps. People don't stand for your line of
stuff, your behaviour."
She did not resent that. Making a desperate mental search for the best
way to serve her hard self-interest, he thought, she was impervious to
insult.
"I know," she said, to his immense relief. "I've been considering the
only remaining point."
"What's that?"
"The sure way to make him suffer as horribly as possible."
He pretended absorption in his carving.
"Why shouldn't he have provided me with money when I asked it?" she
demanded, at last.
The new quality of her speech brought his head up with a jerk. Instead
of colourless harshness, it had a warm fury. It was not that she spoke
loudly or on a high key; but it had an unbridled, self-indulgent sound.
He got the impression that she put off all censorship from either her
feeling or her expression.
"That wasn't much to ask--as long as he continued his life of ease, of
luxury, of safety--as long as I left out of consideration the debt he
couldn't pay, the debt that was impossible of payment."
Alien as the thing seemed in connection with her, he grasped it. She
thought that she had once loved the man.
"The matter of personal feeling?" he asked.
"Yes. When he left Pursuit, he destroyed the better part of me--what you
would call the good part."
She said that without sentimentalism, without making it a plea for
sympathy; she had better sense, he saw, than to imagine that she could
arouse sympathy on that ground.
"And," she continued, with intense malignity, "what was so monstrous in
my asking him for money? I asked him for no payment of what he really
owes me. That's a debt he can't pay! My beauty, destroyed, withered and
covered over with the hard mask of the features you see now; my
capacity for happiness, dead, swallowed up in my long, long devotion to
my purpose to find him again--those things, man as you are, you realize
are beyond the scope of payment or repayment!"
Without rising to a standing position, she leaned so far forward that
her weight was all on her feet, and, although her figure retained the
posture of one seated on a chair, she was in fact independent of support
from it, and held herself crouching in front of him, taut, a tremor in
her limbs because of the strain.
Her hands were held out toward him, the tips of her stiffened,
half-closed fingers less than a foot from his face. Her brows were drawn
so high that the skin of her forehead twitched, as if pulled upward by
another's hand. It was with difficulty that he compelled himself to
witness the climax of her rage. Only his need of what she knew kept him
still.
"Money!" she said, her lean arms in continual motion before him. "You're
right, there. I wanted money. I made up my mind I'd have it. It was such
a purpose of mine, so strongly grown into my whole being, that even
Mildred's death couldn't lessen or dislodge it. And there was more than
the want of money in my never letting loose of my intention to find
him. He couldn't strip me bare and get away! You've understood me pretty
well. You know it was written, on the books, that he and I should come
together again--no matter how far he went, or how cleverly!
"And I see now!" she gave him her decision, and, as she did so, rose to
an upright position, her hands at her sides going half-shut and open,
half-shut and open, as if she made mental pictures of the closing in of
her long pursuit. "I'll say what you want me to say. Confront him; put
me face to face with him, and I'll say the letter went to him. Oh, never
fear! I'll say the appropriate thing, and the convincing
thing--appropriately convincing!"
Her eyes glittered, countering his searching glance, as she stood over
him, her body flung a little forward from the waist, her arms busy with
their quick, angular gesticulation.
"When?" he asked. "When will you do that?"
"Now," she answered instantly. "Now!--Now!--Oh, don't look surprised.
I've thought of this possibility. My God!" she said with a bitterness
that startled him. "I've thought of every possibility, every possible
crook and quirk of this business."
She was struck by his slowness in responding to her offer.
"But you," she asked; "are you sure--have you the proof?"
"Thanks," he said drily. "You needn't be uneasy about that.--Now, if I
may do a little telephoning, we'll start."
He went a step from her and turned back.
"By the way," he stipulated, "that little matter of the five
hundred--you needn't refer to it. I mean it will have to be left out.
It's not necessary."
"No; it isn't," she agreed, with perfect indifference. "And it's spent."
When he had telephoned to Sloanehurst and the sheriff's office, he found
her with her hat on, ready to accompany him.
As they stepped out of the Walman, she saw the automobile waiting for
them. She stopped, a new rage darting from her eyes. He thought she
would go back. After a brief hesitation, however, she gave a short, ugly
laugh.
"You were as sure as that, were you!" she belittled herself. "Had the
car wait--to take me there!"
"By no means," he denied. "I hoped you'd go--that's all."
"That's better," she said, determined to assert her individuality of
action. "You're not forcing me into this, you know. I'm doing it, after
thinking it out to the last detail--for my own satisfaction."
XX
DENIAL OF THE CHARGE
Hastings, fully appreciating the value of surprise, had instructed Mrs.
Brace to communicate none of the new developments to anybody until he
asked for them. Reaching Sloanehurst, he went alone to the library,
leaving her in the parlour to battle as best she might with the
sheriff's anxious curiosity.
Arthur Sloane and Judge Wilton gave him cool welcome, parading for his
benefit an obvious and insolent boredom. Although uninvited to sit down,
he caught up a chair and swung it lightly into such position that, when
he seated himself, he faced them across the table. He was smiling,
enough to indicate a general satisfaction with the world.
There was in his bearing, however, that which carried them back to their
midnight session with him immediately following the discovery of Mildred
Brace's body. The smile did not lessen his look of unquestionable power;
his words were sharp, clipped-off.
"I take it," he said briskly, untouched by their demeanour of
indifference, "you gentlemen will be interested in the fact that I've
cleared up this mystery."
"Ah-h-h!" drawled Sloane. "Again?"
"What do you mean by 'again'?" he asked, good-naturedly.
"Crown, the sheriff, accomplished it four days ago, I'm credibly
informed."
"He made a mistake."
"Ah?" Sloane ridiculed.
"Yes. 'Ah!'" Hastings took him up curtly, and, with a quick turn of his
head, addressed himself to Wilton: "Judge, I've been to Pursuit."
When he said that, his head was thrown back so that he squinted at
Wilton down the line of his nose, under the rims of his spectacles.
"Pursuit!"
Wilton's echo of the word was explosive. He had been leaning back in his
chair, eying the detective from under lowered lids, and drawing deep,
prolonged puffs from his cigar. But, with the response to Hastings'
announcement, he sat up and leaned forward, putting his elbows on the
rim of the table. It was an awkward attitude, compelling him to extend
his neck and turn his face upward in order to meet the other's glance.
"Yes," Hastings said, after a measurable pause. "Interested in that?"
"Not at all," Wilton replied, plainly alarmed, and fubbed out his cigar
with forefinger and thumb, oblivious to the fact that he dropped a
little shower of fire on the table cover.
"I'll trouble you to observe, Mr. Sloane," Hastings put in, "that, being
excited, the judge's first impulse is to extinguish his cigar: it's a
habit of his.--Now, judge, in Pursuit I heard a lot about you--a lot."
"All right--what?"
He made the inquiry reluctantly, as if under compulsion of the
detective's glance.
"The Dalton case--and your part in it."
"You know about that, do you?"
"All about it," Hastings said, in a way that made doubt impossible;
Sloane, even, bewildered as he was, got the impression of his ruthless
certainty.
Wilton did not contest it.
"I struck in self-defence," he excused himself wearily, like a man
taking up a task against his will. "It would be ridiculous to call that
murder. No jury would have convicted me--none would now, if given the
truth."
"But the body showed twenty-nine wounds," Hastings pressed him, "the
marks of twenty-nine separate thrusts of that knife."
"Yes; that's true.--Yes, I'll tell you about that, you and Arthur--if
you'd care to hear?"
"That's what I'm here for," Hastings said, settling in his chair. He was
thinking: "He didn't expect this. He's unprepared!"