The Housekeeper’s Story
(Friday, June 14; 11 a.m.)
“Now,” suggested Markham, “suppose we take a look over the house. I
imagine you’ve done that pretty thoroughly already, Sergeant, but I’d
like to see the layout. Anyway, I don’t want to question the
housekeeper until the body has been removed.”
Heath rose.
“Very good, sir. I’d like another look myself.”
The four of us went into the hall and walked down the passageway to
the rear of the house. At the extreme end, on the left, was a door
leading downstairs to the basement; but it was locked and bolted.
“The basement is only used for storage now,” Heath explained; “and the
door which opens from it into the street areaway is boarded up. The
Platz woman sleeps upstairs—Benson lived here alone, and there’s
plenty of spare room in the house—; and the kitchen is on this floor.”
He opened a door on the opposite side of the passageway, and we
stepped into a small modern kitchen. Its two high windows, which gave
into the paved rear yard at a height of about eight feet from the
ground, were securely guarded with iron bars, and, in addition, the
sashes were closed and locked. Passing through a swinging door we
entered the dining-room which was directly behind the living-room. The
two windows here looked upon a small stone court—really no more than a
deep air-well between Benson’s house and the adjoining one—; and these
also were iron-barred and locked.
We now re-entered the hallway and stood for a moment at the foot of
the stairs leading above.
“You can see, Mr. Markham,” Heath pointed out, “that whoever shot
Benson must have gotten in by the front door. There’s no other way he
could have entered. Living alone, I guess Benson was a little touchy
on the subject of burglars. The only window that wasn’t barred was the
rear one in the living-room; and that was shut and locked. Anyway, it
only leads into the inside court. The front windows of the living-room
have that ironwork over them; so they couldn’t have been used even to
shoot through, for Benson was shot from the opposite direction. . . .
It’s pretty clear the gunman got in the front door.”
“Looks that way,” said Markham.
“And pardon me for saying so,” remarked Vance, “but Benson let him
in.”
“Yes?” retorted Heath unenthusiastically. “Well, we’ll find all that
out later, I hope.”
“Oh, doubtless,” Vance drily agreed.
We ascended the stairs, and entered Benson’s bed-room which was
directly over the living-room. It was severely but well furnished, and
in excellent order. The bed was made, showing it had not been slept in
that night; and the window shades were drawn. Benson’s dinner-jacket
and white piqué waistcoat were hanging over a chair. A winged collar
and a black bow-tie were on the bed, where they had evidently been
thrown when Benson had taken them off on returning home. A pair of low
evening shoes were standing by the bench at the foot of the bed. In a
glass of water on the night-table was a platinum plate of four false
teeth; and a toupee of beautiful workmanship was lying on the
chiffonier.
This last item aroused Vance’s special interest. He walked up to it
and regarded it closely.
“Most int’restin’,” he commented. “Our departed friend seems to have
worn false hair; did you know that, Markham?”
“I always suspected it,” was the indifferent answer.
Heath, who had remained standing on the threshold, seemed a little
impatient.
“There’s only one other room on this floor,” he said, leading the way
down the hall. “It’s also a bed-room—for guests, so the housekeeper
explained.”
Markham and I looked in through the door, but Vance remained lounging
against the balustrade at the head of the stairs. He was manifestly
uninterested in Alvin Benson’s domestic arrangements; and when Markham
and Heath and I went up to the third floor, he sauntered down into the
main hallway. When at length we descended from our tour of inspection
he was casually looking over the titles in Benson’s bookcase.
We had just reached the foot of the stairs when the front door opened
and two men with a stretcher entered. The ambulance from the
Department of Welfare had arrived to take the corpse to the Morgue;
and the brutal, business-like way in which Benson’s body was covered
up, lifted onto the stretcher, carried out and shoved into the wagon,
made me shudder. Vance, on the other hand; after the merest fleeting
glance at the two men, paid no attention to them. He had found a
volume with a beautiful Humphrey-Milford binding, and was absorbed in
its Roger Payne tooling and powdering.
“I think an interview with Mrs. Platz is indicated now,” said Markham;
and Heath went to the foot of the stairs and gave a loud, brisk order.
Presently a grey-haired, middle-aged woman entered the living-room
accompanied by a plain-clothes man smoking a large cigar. Mrs. Platz
was of the simple, old-fashioned, motherly type, with a calm,
benevolent countenance. She impressed me as highly capable, and as a
woman given little to hysteria—an impression strengthened by her
attitude of passive resignation. She seemed, however, to possess that
taciturn shrewdness that is so often found among the ignorant.
“Sit down, Mrs. Platz,” Markham greeted her kindly. “I’m the District
Attorney, and there are some questions I want to ask you.”
She took a straight chair by the door and waited, gazing nervously
from one to the other of us. Markham’s gentle, persuasive voice,
though, appeared to encourage her; and her answers became more and
more fluent.
The main facts that transpired from a quarter-of-an-hour’s examination
may be summed up as follows:
Mrs. Platz had been Benson’s housekeeper for four years and was the
only servant employed. She lived in the house, and her room was on
the third, or top, floor in the rear.
On the afternoon of the preceding day Benson had returned from his
office at an unusually early hour—around four o’clock—announcing to
Mrs. Platz that he would not be home for dinner that evening. He had
remained in the living-room, with the hall door closed, until half
past six, and had then gone upstairs to dress.
He had left the house about seven o’clock, but had not said where he
was going. He had remarked casually that he would return in fairly
good season, but had told Mrs. Platz she need not wait up for
him—which was her custom whenever he intended bringing guests home.
This was the last she had seen him alive. She had not heard him when
he returned that night.
She had retired about half past ten, and, because of the heat, had
left the door ajar. She had been awakened some time later by a loud
detonation. It had startled her, and she had turned on the light by
her bed, noting that it was just half past twelve by the small
alarm-clock she used for rising. It was, in fact, the early hour
which had reassured her. Benson, whenever he went out for the
evening, rarely returned home before two; and this fact, coupled
with the stillness of the house, had made her conclude that the
noise which had aroused her had been merely the backfiring of an
automobile in Forty-ninth Street. Consequently, she had dismissed
the matter from her mind, and gone back to sleep.
At seven o’clock the next morning she came downstairs as usual to
begin her day’s duties, and, on her way to the front door to bring
in the milk and cream, had discovered Benson’s body. All the shades
in the living-room were down.
At first she thought Benson had fallen asleep in his chair, but when
she saw the bullet hole and noticed that the electric lights had
been switched off, she knew he was dead. She had gone at once to the
telephone in the hall and, asking the operator for the Police
Station, had reported the murder. She had then remembered Benson’s
brother, Major Anthony Benson, and had telephoned him also. He had
arrived at the house almost simultaneously with the detectives from
the West Forty-seventh Street station. He had questioned her a
little, talked with the plain-clothes men, and gone away before the
men from Headquarters arrived.
“And now, Mrs. Platz,” said Markham, glancing at the notes he had been
making, “one or two more questions, and we won’t trouble you
further. . . . Have you noticed anything in Mr. Benson’s actions
lately that might lead you to suspect that he was worried—or, let us
say, in fear of anything happening to him?”
“No, sir,” the woman answered readily. “It looked like he was in
special good-humor for the last week or so.”
“I notice that most of the windows on this floor are barred. Was he
particularly afraid of burglars, or of people breaking in?”
“Well—not exactly,” was the hesitant reply. “But he did use to say as
how the police were no good—begging your pardon, sir—and how a man in
this city had to look out for himself if he didn’t want to get held
up.”
Markham turned to Heath with a chuckle.
“You might make a special note of that for your files, Sergeant.” Then
to Mrs. Platz: “Do you know of anyone who had a grudge against Mr.
Benson?”
“Not a soul, sir,” the housekeeper answered emphatically. “He was a
queer man in many ways, but everybody seemed to like him. He was all
the time going to parties or giving parties. I just can’t see why
anybody’d want to kill him.”
Markham looked over his notes again.
“I don’t think there’s anything else for the present. . . . How about
it, Sergeant? Anything further you want to ask?”
Heath pondered a moment.
“No, I can’t think of anything more just now. . . . But you, Mrs.
Platz,” he added, turning a cold glance on the woman, “will stay here
in this house till you’re given permission to leave. We’ll want to
question you later. But you’re not to talk to anyone else—understand?
Two of my men will be here for a while yet.”
Vance, during the interview, had been jotting down something on the
fly-leaf of a small pocket address-book, and as Heath was speaking, he
tore out the page and handed it to Markham. Markham glanced at it
frowningly and pursed his lips. Then after a few moments’ hesitation,
he addressed himself again to the housekeeper.
“You mentioned, Mrs. Platz, that Mr. Benson was liked by everyone. Did
you yourself like him?”
The woman shifted her eyes to her lap.
“Well, sir,” she replied reluctantly, “I was only working for him, and
I haven’t got any complaint about the way he treated me.”
Despite her words, she gave the impression that she either disliked
Benson extremely or greatly disapproved of him. Markham, however, did
not push the point.
“And by the way, Mrs. Platz,” he said next, “did Mr. Benson keep any
fire-arms about the house? For instance, do you know if he owned a
revolver?”
For the first time during the interview, the woman appeared agitated,
even frightened.
“Yes, sir, I—think he did,” she admitted, in an unsteady voice.
“Where did he keep it?”
The woman glanced up apprehensively, and rolled her eyes slightly as
if weighing the advisability of speaking frankly. Then she replied in
a low voice:
“In that hidden drawer there in the center-table. You—you use that
little brass button to open it with.”
Heath jumped up, and pressed the button she had indicated. A tiny,
shallow drawer shot out; and in it lay a Smith and Wesson thirty-eight
revolver with an inlaid pearl handle. He picked it up, broke the
carriage, and looked at the head of the cylinder.
“Full,” he announced laconically.
An expression of tremendous relief spread over the woman’s features,
and she sighed audibly.
Markham had risen and was looking at the revolver over Heath’s
shoulder.
“You’d better take charge of it, Sergeant,” he said; “though I don’t
see exactly how it fits in with the case.”
He resumed his seat, and glancing at the notation Vance had given him,
turned again to the housekeeper.
“One more question, Mrs. Platz. You said Mr. Benson came home early
and spent his time before dinner in this room. Did he have any callers
during that time?”
I was watching the woman closely, and it seemed to me that she quickly
compressed her lips. At any rate, she sat up a little straighter in
her chair before answering.
“There wasn’t no one, as far as I know.”
“But surely you would have known if the bell rang,” insisted Markham.
“You would have answered the door, wouldn’t you?”
“There wasn’t no one,” she repeated, with a trace of sullenness.
“And last night: did the door-bell ring at all after you had retired?”
“No, sir.”
“You would have heard it, even if you’d been asleep?”
“Yes, sir. There’s a bell just outside my door, the same as in the
kitchen. It rings in both places. Mr. Benson had it fixed that way.”
Markham thanked her and dismissed her. When she had gone, he looked at
Vance questioningly.
“What idea did you have in your mind when you handed me those
questions?”
“I might have been a bit presumptuous, y’ know,” said Vance; “but when
the lady was extolling the deceased’s popularity, I rather felt she
was overdoing it a bit. There was an unconscious implication of
antithesis in her eulogy, which suggested to me that she herself was
not ardently enamored of the gentleman.”
“And what put the notion of fire-arms into your mind?”
“That query,” explained Vance, “was a corollary of your own questions
about barred windows and Benson’s fear of burglars. If he was in a
funk about house-breakers or enemies, he’d be likely to have weapons
at hand—eh, what?”
“Well, anyway, Mr. Vance,” put in Heath, “your curiosity unearthed a
nice little revolver that’s probably never been used.”
“By the bye, Sergeant,” returned Vance, ignoring the other’s
good-humored sarcasm, “just what do you make of that nice little
revolver?”
“Well, now,” Heath replied, with ponderous facetiousness, “I deduct
that Mr. Benson kept a pearl-handled Smith and Wesson in a secret
drawer of his center-table.”
“You don’t say—really!” exclaimed Vance in mock admiration.
“Pos’tively illuminatin’!”
Markham broke up this raillery.
“Why did you want to know about visitors, Vance? There obviously
hadn’t been anyone here.”
“Oh, just a whim of mine. I was assailed by an impulsive yearning to
hear what La Platz would say.”
Heath was studying Vance curiously. His first impressions of the man
were being dispelled, and he had begun to suspect that beneath the
other’s casual and debonair exterior there was something of a more
solid nature than he had at first imagined. He was not altogether
satisfied with Vance’s explanations to Markham, and seemed to be
endeavoring to penetrate to his real reasons for supplementing the
District Attorney’s interrogation of the housekeeper. Heath was
astute, and he had the worldly man’s ability to read people; but
Vance, being different from the men with whom he usually came in
contact, was an enigma to him.
At length he relinquished his scrutiny, and drew up his chair to the
table with a spirited air.
“And now, Mr. Markham,” he said crisply, “we’d better outline our
activities so as not to duplicate our efforts. The sooner I get my men
started, the better.”
Markham assented readily.
“The investigation is entirely up to you, Sergeant. I’m here to help
wherever I’m needed.”
“That’s very kind of you, sir,” Heath returned. “But it looks to me as
though there’d be enough work for all parties. . . . Suppose I get to
work on running down the owner of the hand-bag, and send some men out
scouting among Benson’s night-life cronies,—I can pick up some names
from the housekeeper, and they’ll be a good starting point. And I’ll
get after that Cadillac, too. . . . Then we ought to look into his
lady friends—I guess he had enough of ’em.”
“I may get something out of the Major along that line,” supplied
Markham. “He’ll tell me anything I want to know. And I can also look
into Benson’s business associates through the same channel.”
“I was going to suggest that you could do that better than I could,”
Heath rejoined. “We ought to run into something pretty quick that’ll
give us a line to go on. And I’ve got an idea that when we locate the
lady he took to dinner last night and brought back here, we’ll know a
lot more than we do now.”
“Or a lot less,” murmured Vance.
Heath looked up quickly, and grunted with an air of massive petulance.
“Let me tell you something, Mr. Vance,” he said, “—since I understand
you want to learn something about these affairs: when anything goes
seriously wrong in this world, it’s pretty safe to look for a woman in
the case.”
“Ah, yes,” smiled Vance. “_Cherchez la femme_—an aged notion. Even the
Romans labored under the superstition,—they expressed it with _Dux
femina facti_.”
“However they expressed it,” retorted Heath, “they had the right idea.
And don’t let ’em tell you different.”
Again Markham diplomatically intervened.
“That point will be settled very soon, I hope. . . . And now,
Sergeant, if you’ve nothing else to suggest, I’ll be getting along. I
told Major Benson I’d see him at lunch time; and I may have some news
for you by to-night.”
“Right,” assented Heath. “I’m going to stick around here a while and
see if there’s anything I overlooked. I’ll arrange for a guard outside
and also for a man inside to keep an eye on the Platz woman. Then I’ll
see the reporters and let them in on the disappearing Cadillac and Mr.
Vance’s mysterious revolver in the secret drawer. I guess that ought
to hold ’em. If I find out anything, I’ll ’phone you.”
When he had shaken hands with the District Attorney, he turned to
Vance.
“Good-bye, sir,” he said pleasantly, much to my surprise, and to
Markham’s too, I imagine. “I hope you learned something this morning.”
“You’d be pos’tively dumbfounded, Sergeant, at all I did learn,” Vance
answered carelessly.
Again I noted the look of shrewd scrutiny in Heath’s eyes; but in a
second it was gone.
“Well, I’m glad of that,” was his perfunctory reply.
Markham, Vance and I went out, and the patrolman on duty hailed a
taxicab for us.
“So that’s the way our lofty _gendarmerie_ approaches the mysterious
wherefores of criminal enterprise—eh?” mused Vance, as we started on
our way across town. “Markham, old dear, how do those robust lads ever
succeed in running down a culprit?”
“You have witnessed only the barest preliminaries,” Markham explained.
“There are certain things that must be done as a matter of routine—_ex
abundantia cautelæ_, as we lawyers say.”
“But, my word!—such technique!” sighed Vance. “Ah, well, _quantum est
in rebus inane!_ as we laymen say.”
“You don’t think much of Heath’s capacity, I know,”—Markham’s voice
was patient—“but he’s a clever man, and one that it’s very easy to
underestimate.”
“I dare say,” murmured Vance. “Anyway, I’m deuced grateful to you, and
all that, for letting me behold the solemn proceedings. I’ve been
vastly amused, even if not uplifted. Your official Æsculapius rather
appealed to me, y’ know—such a brisk, unemotional chap, and utterly
unimpressed with the corpse. He really should have taken up crime in a
serious way, instead of studying medicine.”
Markham lapsed into gloomy silence, and sat looking out of the window
in troubled meditation until we reached Vance’s house.
“I don’t like the looks of things,” he remarked, as we drew up to the
curb. “I have a curious feeling about this case.”
Vance regarded him a moment from the corner of his eye.
“See here, Markham,” he said with unwonted seriousness; “haven’t you
any idea who shot Benson?”
Markham forced a faint smile.
“I wish I had. Crimes of wilful murder are not so easily solved. And
this case strikes me as a particularly complex one.”
“Fancy, now!” said Vance, as he stepped out of the machine. “And I
thought it extr’ordin’rily simple.”