AN INCRIMINATING LETTER
Kitty looked very pretty and quite pathetic in her smartly simple
mourning. She saw Barrison at once, and received him with a
subdued cordiality that was the perfection of good taste under the
circumstances.
“What is it?” she said, in a low voice. There was no artificiality
about her now; she was disturbed, apprehensive. “I know it’s something.
Please tell me.”
“Yes, there is something,” he said. “It’s about—your sister.”
He could hear her draw in her breath.
“My sister!” she whispered. “Marita! How did you know anything about
her?”
“I don’t think we need go into an account of that,” Jim said steadily.
“As it happens, I do know quite a good deal about her. I know, for
instance, that she was in the theater only a little while before Alan
Mortimer was murdered.”
“You know that!” she exclaimed, in unfeigned surprise. “I thought——”
Then she checked herself, but it was too late; she saw at once what she
had admitted.
“I knew it,” said Barrison, watching her. “The question is—how did you
know it, Miss Legaye?”
She dropped her eyes and was silent until he felt obliged to insist:
“I am afraid I must ask you to tell me about it, though I can easily
suppose it isn’t very pleasant for you.”
“Pleasant!” she flashed out at him then. “Think what a position I am
in! To lose him—_like that_—and then—to find my own sister mixed up in
it!”
“You think she was mixed up in it, then?”
“How on earth do I know?” she cried excitedly. “I—I—oh, Mr. Barrison,
you aren’t brutal, like most detectives; you are a gentleman! Won’t you
make it a little easier for me? My sister and I were never very fond of
each other, but I can’t be the one to implicate her now. I can’t!”
“It may seem very dreadful to you, of course, Miss Legaye. But—how can
you keep silent? She is already under suspicion. I don’t see how you
can avoid telling everything you know.”
“I thought—I never dreamed—that it would come to this!” she said
miserably. “I thought no one knew of her being there except myself
and—and my father.” She seemed to wince as she said the word; Jim
remembered that Wrenn had said she was always ashamed of him. “He did
not give you this information?”
“He only corroborated what we already knew. Now, please, Miss Legaye,
for all our sakes, even for your sister’s, tell me what you know.”
“For my sister’s?” she repeated.
“I don’t know what you have to tell; but, seriously, one of the reasons
why I have come to you is that I can’t help hoping that you can supply
some tiny link of evidence which will help to clear her. If you saw her
leave the theater, for instance——”
She shook her head, with an air of deep depression.
“I did not see her leave the theater,” she said quietly. “I did not see
her at all.”
“Did not see her! Then how——”
“Wait, Mr. Barrison, and I will tell you. I will tell you just exactly
what happened, and you must believe me, for it is the truth. I did not
see my sister, but—_I heard her voice_!”
Now that she had made up her mind to speak, the words came in a rush,
as though she could not talk fast enough, as though she were feverish
to get the ordeal over with.
“When I left you to go home, I had to pass his—Alan’s—door, as you
know. Just as I reached it, I heard voices inside—not loud, or I
suppose they would have been stopped by some one, for the whole stage
was supposed to be quiet while the act was on. But there was rather a
noisy scene going on then—the bandits quarreling among themselves over
the wine, you remember—and, anyway, the voices inside the dressing room
could only be heard by some one who was standing very close to the
door. I stopped for a moment, instinctively at first, and then—I heard
my sister’s voice, panting and excited!”
All this tallied with Wrenn’s story. “Could you hear what she said?”
asked Barrison.
“Only a word or two.”
“What words?”
She flashed him a glance of deep appeal, then went hurriedly on:
“I heard her say ‘Coward and cad,’ and—and ‘You ought to be shot, and
you know it!’ That’s all.”
All! It was quite enough. Barrison looked at her with faint pity,
though he had felt at first that she was not sincere. She had a way
of disarming him by unexpected evidence of true feeling just when he
expected her to play-act. He could see that she was finding this pretty
hard to tell.
“What did you do, Miss Legaye?”
“Do—I? Nothing. What was there for me to do? I went home.”
“Didn’t it occur to you to try to see your sister, to interfere in what
seemed to be such a very violent quarrel?”
She shook her head vehemently.
“No, it did not. Why should it? My sister and I had nothing in common.
I had not seen her for many years; I—I did not want to see her. For the
rest—I knew that she hated Alan Mortimer, and if she was talking to him
at all, it seemed quite natural that she should talk to him like that.”
“You did not feel afraid, then—did not look on those chance phrases you
heard as—well, a threat?”
She shuddered. “Oh, no; how could I? I thought she was just angry and
excited. She always had a frightful temper. How could I guess that she
had—anything else—in her mind?”
“So you went straight home, without waiting?”
“Yes.” She bent her head, and added, in a low, troubled tone: “You will
think me very selfish, very much a coward, Mr. Barrison, but—those
angry voices made me want to get away as fast as possible. I hate
scenes and quarrels and unpleasantness of all kinds. I was thankful to
get out of the theater, and to know that I had not had to meet Marita,
especially in the mood she was in then.”
“I see,” said Barrison, not without sympathy. “And is that all—really
and absolutely all—that you know about the matter?”
Kitty hesitated, and then she lifted her head and faced him bravely.
“No,” she said clearly, “it is not all. If you will wait a moment, I
have something I ought to show you.”
She rose and went to a desk, returning with an envelope. She sat down
again and took a letter from this envelope, which she first read
herself slowly and with a curious air of deliberation. Then she held it
out to Barrison.
“I am going to trust you,” she said, meeting his eyes proudly, “not to
make use of this unless you have to. Wait, before you read it! When
I knew of the horrible thing that had happened at the theater that
night, I thought of my sister. I—I am afraid it is scarcely enough to
say that I suspected her. I remembered the angry words I had heard her
say inside the dressing room. I knew her ungovernable rages and the
bitterness she had for Alan. And I knew that she was a wonderful shot,
and that she had never got out of the habit of going armed. I—well, I
felt very sure what had happened.”
She was breathing quickly, and speaking in a hoarse, strained tone.
“I knew that there was more than a chance that some one else knew
of her presence, and—I could not bear to have her arrested. I won’t
pretend that it was all sisterly affection, but I think it was that,
too, in a way. I couldn’t forget that, after all, we were of the same
blood, and had been children and young girls together. I—I sent her
money; I had seen in the paper that she and her husband were playing in
New York, and I sent it to their theater, and with it I sent a note,
begging her to lose no time in getting out of town. Was it—do you think
it was very wrong?” she asked him rather piteously.
“It was at all events very natural,” Jim answered, a little surprised
and touched by what she had told him. “And may I read this now?”
“Yes, read it. It is Marita’s answer to me. She accepted the money and
sent me this letter.”
With an odd movement of weariness and sorrow, she turned and laid her
hands upon the back of her chair, and her face upon them.
The note was in the same scrawling hand that had made all the threats
against Mortimer, that he knew to be that of Marita Blankley. And it
ran thus:
KITTY: I am glad that you have some feeling as a sister left in you.
I did not suppose that the day would ever come when it would be _you_
who would help me get out of trouble! I dare say at that it was only
your hatred of having our names linked together, or having any one
know you knew me even! Of course I was a fool to go to the theater
last night. I might have known what would happen. Now I am going to
try to forget it all. I shall live only for my husband, and we shall
get out of town as soon as possible! I can trust _you_ not to talk, I
know! There was never much love lost between us, Kitty. Your sister,
MARITA.
Barrison sat very still after reading this. At last he noticed that
Kitty had lifted her head and was watching him with an anxious face.
“Well?” she demanded.
“You told me not to use this unless it were necessary,” said Barrison
very gravely. “It is necessary now, Miss Legaye. I must take it to
headquarters at once!”
She gave a little cry.
“Oh, I was afraid—I was afraid!” she exclaimed. “You think it—it looks
bad for her?”
“I think,” said Jim Barrison, “that it is practically conclusive
evidence!”