Broderick walked slowly toward Elsinore Avenue, sounding his memory for
certain fugitive impressions, his active mind at the same time casting
about for the current which would connect them.
He looked at his watch. He was to dine with the Crumleys at seven and it
lacked but ten minutes of the hour; nevertheless he walked more slowly
still, his eyes staring at the ground, his brow channeled.
On Sunday afternoon he had spent two hours with Alys Crumley. At first
she had been reluctant to talk of any but the salient phases of the
murder, but being appealed to as a "good old pal" and reminded that real
newspaper people stood together, she finally had described the scene at
the Country Club on the afternoon preceding Balfame's death, and shown
him the drawing she had had the superior presence of mind to make.
Broderick had examined every detail of that rapid but demonstrative
sketch: the burly form at the head of the room, his condition indicated
by an angle of the shoulders and a deft exaggeration of feature which
recalled the facile art of the cartoonist; the strained forms of the men
surrounding him; Mrs. Balfame heading down the room, her face set and
terrible; the groups of women and girls in attitudes expressive of alarm
or disgust.
But when he made as if to put the sketch in his pocket she had snatched
it from him, and he merely had shrugged his shoulders, confident that
he could induce her to give it up should he really need it.
He had questioned her regarding the scene until its outlines were as
firm in his mind as in her own. But there had been something else--some
impression, not obviously linked with the case: It was for that
impression that he sounded his admirable memory; and in a moment he
found it and stopped with a smothered exclamation.
He had complimented her on the excellent likeness of Dwight Rush, whom
he knew and liked, and remarked quite naturally that he might have sat
for her a number of times. The dusky pink had mounted to her hair, but
she had replied carelessly that Rush was "a common enough type."
Possibly Broderick would have forgotten the blush had it not have been
for the swift change of expression in her eyes: a certain fear followed
by a concentrated renitence; and at the same moment he had remembered
that he had met Rush once or twice at the Crumleys' during the summer
and thought him quite the favoured guest.
Driven only by a mild personal curiosity, he had asked her how she liked
Rush and if she saw much of him; he recalled that she had answered with
an elaboration of indifference that she hadn't seen him for ages and
took no interest in him whatever.
Then Broderick had drawn her on to talk of Mrs. Balfame. Yes, in common
with all Elsinore that counted, she admired Mrs. Balfame, although she
believed that no one really knew her, that she unconsciously lived among
the surfaces of her nature. Her face as she marched down the clubroom
that day, and its curious sudden transformation on that other day at
the Friday Club when her thoughts so plainly had drifted far from the
platitudinous speakers, indicated to Miss Crumley's temperamental mind
"depths and possibly tragic possibilities."
It was patent to Mr. Broderick's own mind that her suspicions had not
lighted for a moment on the dead man's widow, but it also transpired in
the course of the conversation that the young artist who had so "loved
to sketch" the Star of Elsinore had suffered a long drop in personal
enthusiasm. Pressed astutely, she had remarked that she guessed she was
as broad-minded as anybody, especially since her year on the New York
press, but she did not approve of married women claiming a right to
share in the Great Game designed by Nature for the young of both sexes.
Then the story came out: Miss Crumley, afflicted with a headache
something over a fortnight since, and enjoying the cool night air just
behind her front gate, had seen Mrs. Balfame come out of Dr. Steuer's
garden next door and meet Dwight Rush face to face. He had begged to be
allowed to see her home.
Mrs. Balfame had lovely manners, she couldn't help being sweet unless
she disliked a person, and no woman will elect to walk up a long dark
avenue alone if a man offer to escort her.
Alys would have thought nothing of it--merely assumed that Rush, being a
comparative newcomer, had caught at the chance to make a favourable
impression on the leader of Elsinore society--(no, he was no snob, but
that idea just came to her), if they had not crawled, yes, _crawled_ all
the way up the avenue.
Both were vigorous people with long legs; they could have covered the
distance to the Balfame place in three minutes. They had been more than
ten, and as they passed under the successive lamp posts she had noted
the man's bent head, the woman's tilted back--as she gazed up into his
eyes, no doubt.
"In this town," Miss Crumley had announced, "a woman is fast or she
isn't. You know just where you are. There's a class that's sly about it,
but somehow you get 'on' in time. Mrs. Balfame has stood for the highest
and best. Mind you, I'm not saying that she ever saw Rush alone again,
or cared a snap of her finger for him--or he for her. No doubt she felt,
when the rare chance offered of taking a little flyer, that it was too
good to miss. But she shouldn't have done it; that's the point. I don't
like my idols to have feet of clay."
Broderick had felt both sympathetic and amused. He knew that Alys
Crumley was not only sweet of temper and frank, if not candid, but that
in spite of all her desperate modernism she cherished high ideals of
conduct; and here she was turning loose the cat that skulks somewhere in
every commonplace female's nature.
But the whole conversation had left his mind promptly. He had attached
no significance whatever to a ten minutes' walk between a polite man and
a woman returning alone from a friend's house on a dark night.
Now every word of the conversation came back to him. Rush, he gathered,
had gone to the Crumley house several times a week for a while, and
then, for reasons known only to himself and Alys, had ceased his visits
abruptly. Had she fallen in love with him? Or was it only her vanity
that was wounded? And if Rush had dropped a girl as pretty and bright
and winning as Alys Crumley--who improved upon acquaintance,
moreover--what was the reason? Why had he not fallen in love with her?
Had he loved some one else?
Broderick swung his mind to the morning following the murder, when he
had met Rush in the hall of the Elsinore Hotel. The lawyer professed
himself as delighted to "run up against him" and invited him to
breakfast. All this had been natural enough, and it was equally natural
that the conversation should have but one theme.
Once more Broderick sought a fugitive impression and found it. Rush, who
was a master of words when verbal exactness was imperative, had created
an impression in his companion's mind of the impeccability of the
murdered man's widow.
Broderick had wondered once or twice since whence came that mental
picture of Mrs. Balfame that rose clear-cut in his memory, in spite of
his deliberate conviction of her guilt. Other people had raved about her
and made no impression upon the young reporter's selective and somewhat
cynical mind; but Rush had almost accomplished his purpose!
Why had he sought to accomplish it?
Broderick had known Rush in and out of court for nearly two years.
Whenever he had been on an assignment in that part of Brabant County he
had made a point of seeking him out, and even of spending an evening
with him if he could afford the time. He liked the unique blend of East
and West in the man; to Broderick's keen appraising mind Rush reflected
the very best of the two great rival bisections of the nation. He liked
the mixture of frankness and subtlety, of simple unquestioning
patriotism--of assumption that no country but the United States of
America mattered in the very least--and the intense concentrated
individualism. Of hard-headed American determination to "get there" at
any honourable cost, of jealously hidden romanticism.
Broderick was almost at the Crumley gate. He halted for a moment under
the dark maples and glanced up the long shadowy avenue, his own narrower
and still more jealously guarded "romantic streak" appreciating the
possibilities on a dusky evening with a girl whose face floated for a
moment before him. But he banished her promptly, searching his memory
for some salient trait in Rush that he instinctively knew would
establish the current he desired.
He found it after a moment of intense concentration. Rush was the sort
of man that loves not woman but a woman. His very friendship for Alys
Crumley was evidence that he cared nothing for girls as girls. Only the
exceptional drew him, and mere youth left him unmoved.
Knowing Rush as he did, he felt his way rapidly toward the facts. Alys,
woman-like, had succumbed to propinquity, and betrayed herself; Rush,
finding his mere masculine loneliness misinterpreted, and being
honourable to boot, had promptly withdrawn.
But why? Alys would have made him a delightful and useful wife. She was
one of those too clever girls whom celibacy made neurotic and uncertain,
but out of whom matrimony and maternity knocked all the nonsense at once
and finally. She would make a splendid woman.
He should have thought her just the girl to allure Rush, whom he also
knew to be fastidious and to set a high value on the good old Brabant
blood. Moreover, it was time that Rush would be wanting the permanent
companionship of a woman, a bright, progressive, but feminine woman. He
had observed certain signs.
Alys, apparently, had not measured up to Rush's secret ideal of the
wholly desirable woman, nor appealed to that throbbing vein of
romanticism which he had striven to bury beneath the dusty tomes of the
law. What sort of woman, then, could satisfy all he desired? And had he
found her?
Broderick recalled a certain knightly exaltation in Rush's blue eyes
which had come and gone as they discussed Mrs. Balfame, although not a
word of the adroit concept he had built remained in the reporter's
memory. But those eyes came back to Broderick there in the dark--the
eyes of a man young and ardent like himself--he almost fancied he had
seen the woman's image in them.
He revived his impression of Mrs. Balfame, seen for the first time
to-day, and contemplated it impersonally: A beautiful, a fascinating
woman--to a man of Rush's limited experience and idealism; fastidious,
proud, gracious, supremely poised.
Nor did she look a day over thirty, although she must be a good bit
more--he recalled the obituaries of the dead man: they had alluded to
his marital accomplishment as covering a term of some twenty years.
Perhaps she was his second wife--but no--nor did it matter. Rush was
just the sort of chap to fall in love with a woman older than himself,
if she were still young in appearance and as chastely lovely, as
unapproachable, as Mrs. Balfame. He would idealise her very years,
contrast them with that vague suggestion of virginity that Broderick
recalled, of deep untroubled tides.
All romantic men believe in women's unfathomed depths when in love,
reflected the star reporter cynically, and Mrs. Balfame was just the
sort to go until forty before having the smashing love affair of her
life; and to inspire a similar passion in a hard-working idealist like
Dwight Rush.
Mrs. Balfame and Dwight Rush! Broderick, who now stood quite still, a
few paces from the Crumley gate, whistled.
Could Rush have fired that shot? Broderick recalled that the lawyer had
mentioned having spent Saturday evening in Brooklyn--on business.
Broderick shook his head vigorously. So far as he was concerned, Rush
never should be asked to produce his alibi. He did not believe that Rush
had done it, did not propose to harbour the suggestion for a moment.
Rush was not the man to commit a cowardly murder, not even for a woman.
If he had wanted to kill the man he would have involved himself in an
election row, forced the bully to draw his gun, and then got in his own
fire double quick. Standards were standards.
Broderick was more convinced than ever that Mrs. Balfame had committed
the deed, and he had established the current. His work was "cut out" for
the evening; and without further delay he presented himself at the Widow
Crumley's door.