E-text prepared by David Garcia, Mary Meehan, and the Project Gutenberg
Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net/c/)
THE WINNING CLUE
by
JAMES HAY, Jr.
Author of The Man Who Forgot, Etc.
Grosset & Dunlap
Publishers New York
Copyright, 1919
By Dodd, Mead and Company, Inc.
TO GRAHAM B. NICHOL
AS A LITTLE TOKEN OF MY ADMIRATION AND AFFECTION
CONTENTS
CHAPTER
I. Strangled
II. "Something Big in It"
III. The Ruby Ring
IV. Two Trails
V. The Husband's Story
VI. Morley Is in a Hurry
VII. Miss Fulton Is Hysterical
VIII. The Breath of Scandal
IX. Women's Nerves
X. Eyes of Accusation
XI. The $1,000 Check
XII. The Man with the Gold Tooth
XIII. Lucy Thomas Talks
XIV. The Pawn Broker Takes the Trail
XV. Braceway Sees a Light
XVI. A Message from Miss Fulton
XVII. Miss Fulton's Revelation
XVIII. What's Braceway's Game?
XIX. At the Anderson National Bank
XX. The Discovery of the Jewels
XXI. Bristow Solves a Problem
XXII. A Confession
XXIII. On the Rack
XXIV. Miss Fulton Writes a Letter
XXV. A Mystifying Telegram
XXVI. Wanted: Vengeance
XXVII. The Revelation
XXVIII. Confession Voluntary
XXIX. The Last Card
THE WINNING CLUE
CHAPTER I
STRANGLED
When a woman's voice, pitched to the high note of utter terror, rang out
on the late morning quiet of Manniston Road, Lawrence Bristow looked up
from his newspaper quickly but vaguely, as if he doubted his own ears. He
was reading an account of a murder committed in Waukesha, Wisconsin, and
the shrieks he had just heard fitted in so well with the paragraph then
before his eyes that his imagination might have been playing him tricks.
He was allowed, however, little time for speculation or doubt.
"Murder! Help!" cried the woman in a staccato sharpness that carried the
length of many blocks.
Bristow sprang to his feet and started down the short flight of stairs
leading from his porch to the street. Before he had taken three steps, he
saw the frightened girl standing on the porch of No. 5, two doors to his
left. Although he was lame, he displayed surprising agility. His left
leg, two inches shorter than the right and supported by a steel brace
from foot to thigh, did not prevent his being the first to reach the
young woman's side.
Late as it was, half-past ten, she was not fully dressed. She wore a
kimono of light, sheer material which, clutched spasmodically about her,
revealed the slightness and grace of her figure. Her fair hair hung down
her back in a long, thick braid.
Neighbours across the street and further up Manniston Road were out on
their porches now or starting toward No. 5. All of them were women.
The girl--she was barely past twenty, he thought--stopped screaming, and,
her hands pressed to her throat and cheeks, stared wildly from him toward
the front door, which was standing open. He entered the living room of
the one-story bungalow. A foot within the doorway, he stood stock still.
On the sofa against the opposite wall he saw another woman. He knew at
first glance that she was dead.
The body was in a curious position. Apparently, before death had come,
the victim had been sitting on the sofa, and, in dying, her body had
crumpled over from the waist toward the right, so that now the lower part
of her occupied the attitude of sitting while the upper half reclined as
if in the posture of natural sleep. One thing which, perhaps, added to
the gruesomeness of the sight was that she had on evening dress, a gown
of pale blue satin embellished in unerring taste with real old Irish
lace.
Although the face had been beautiful under its crown of luxuriant black
hair, it now was distorted. While the eyes were closed, the mouth was
open, very wide--an ugly, repulsive gape.
He was aware that the woman in the kimono was just behind him--he could
feel her hot breath against the back of his neck--and that behind her
pressed the neighbours, their number augmented by the arrival of two men.
He turned and faced them.
"Call a doctor--and the police, somebody, will you?" he said sharply.
"They have a telephone back there in the dining room," volunteered one of
the women on the porch.
Another, a Mrs. Allen who lived in No. 6, had put her arms around the
terrified girl and was forcing her into an armchair on the porch.
The others started into the living room.
"Wait a moment," cautioned Bristow. "Don't come in here yet. The police
will want to find things undisturbed. It looks like murder."
They obeyed him without question. He was about forty years old, of medium
height and with good shoulders, but his chest was too flat, and his face
showed an unnatural flush. His mere physique was not one to force
obedience from others. It was in his eyes, dark-brown and lit with a
peculiar flaming intensity, that they read his right to command.
"Please go through this room to the telephone and call a doctor," he
said, singling out the woman who had spoken.
His voice, a deep barytone with a pleasant note, was perfectly steady. He
seemed to hold their excitement easily within bounds.
The woman he had addressed complied with his suggestion. While she was
doing so, he crossed over to the sofa and put his hand to the wrist of
the murdered woman. In order to do that, he had to move a fold of the
gown which partially concealed it. The flesh was cold, and he shivered
slightly, readjusting the satin to exactly the fold in which he had found
it.
"Too late for a doctor to help now," he threw back over his shoulder.
They watched him silently. Low moans were coming constantly from the
woman in the chair on the porch.
Bristow took the telephone in his turn and called up police headquarters.
The chief of police, whom he knew, answered the call.
"Hello! Captain Greenleaf?" asked the lame man.
"Yes."
"There's been a murder at Number Five, Manniston Road. This is Lawrence
Bristow, of Number Nine."
"Aw, quit your kiddin'," laughed Greenleaf. "What do you want to do, get
me up there to hear another of your theories about----"
"This is no joke," snapped Bristow. "I tell you one of the women in
Number Five has been murdered. Come----"
But the chief, recognizing the urgency in the summons, had left the
telephone and was on his way.
As Bristow turned toward the living room, Mrs. Allen and another woman
were carrying the hysterical, moaning girl from the front porch to one
of the two bedrooms in the bungalow. Some of the others again started
into the living room.
"Let's wait," he cautioned once more. "If we get to moving around in here
we may destroy any clues that could be used later."
When they fell back a little, he joined them on the porch, standing
always so that he could watch the body and see that no one changed its
attitude or even approached it. His eyes studied keenly all the furniture
in the room. Save for one overturned stiff-backed chair, it apparently
had not been disturbed.
The doctor arrived and, waiting for no information, approached the
murdered woman. As Bristow had done, he touched her wrist, and then
slipped his hand beneath her corsage so that it rested above her heart.
He straightened up almost immediately.
"Dead," he said to Bristow; "dead for hours."
The physician became conscious of the hysterical girl's moans, took a
step toward the bedrooms and paused.
"That's right, doctor," Bristow told him. "They need you back there."
The doctor hurried out.
"That is--that was Mrs. Withers, wasn't it?" Bristow, looking at the dead
body, asked of the group.
"Yes; and the other is her sister, Miss Fulton," one of them answered.
Bristow had seemed to all of them a peculiar man--too quiet and
reserved--ever since he had come to No. 9 four months before. They
remembered this now, when he seemed scarcely conscious of the identity of
the two girls who had lived almost next door to him during all that time.
Different members of the crowd gave him information: Miss Maria Fulton,
like nearly everybody else on Manniston Road, had tuberculosis, and Mrs.
Withers had been living with her. They had plenty of money--not rich,
perhaps, but able to have all the comforts and most of the luxuries of
life. They were here in the hope that Furmville's climate would restore
Miss Fulton's health.
Their coloured cook-and-maid had not come to work that morning, it
seemed, and Miss Fulton, who was the younger of the two sisters, was on
the "rest" cure, ordered by the doctor to stay in bed day and night.
Perhaps that was why she had not discovered Mrs. Withers' body earlier in
the day.
They gossiped on.
It was like a lesson in immortality--the dead body, with distorted face
and twisted limbs, just inside the room; and outside, in the low-toned
phrases of the awed women, swift and vivid pictures of what she; when
alive, had said and done and seemed.
"Everybody liked her. If somebody had come and told me a woman living on
Manniston Road had been killed, she would have been the last one I'd have
thought of as the victim." "All the other beautiful women I ever knew
were stupid; she wasn't." "Her husband couldn't come to Furmville very
often." "Loveliest black hair I _ever_ saw." "She used to be----"
Then followed quick glimpses of her life as they had seen or heard it: a
dance at Maplewood Inn where she had been the undisputed belle; a novel
she had liked; a big reception at the White House in Washington when,
during the year of her debut, the French ambassador had called her "the
most beautiful American," and the newspapers had made much of it; an
emerald ring she had worn; the unfailing good humour she had always shown
in the tedious routine of nursing her sister--and so on, a mass of facts
and impressions which were, simultaneously, a little biography of her and
an unaffected appreciation of the way she had touched and coloured their
lives.
Captain Greenleaf, with one of the plain-clothes men of his force, came
hurrying up the steps. The crowd fell back, gave them passage, and closed
in again.
"Nothing's been disturbed, captain," said Bristow.
"Where is she?" asked Greenleaf anxiously. He was not accustomed to
murder cases.
He caught sight of the body on the sofa.
"God!" he said in a low tone, and turned toward the plain-clothes man:
"Come on in, Jenkins--you, too, Mr. Bristow."
The three entered the living room, and Greenleaf, with a muttered word of
apology to the on-lookers, closed the door in their faces.
He, too, did what Bristow had done--put his fingers on the dead woman's
wrist. He was breathing rapidly, and his hand shook. Jenkins stood
motionless. He also was overwhelmed by the tragedy. Besides, he was not
cut out for work of this kind. In looking for illicit distillers and
boot-leggers, or negroes charged with theft, he was in his element, but
this sort of thing was new to him. He had no idea of where to turn or
what to do.
"She's dead," Bristow said to the captain. "The doctor says she has been
dead a long time--hours."
"Where's the doctor?"
"Back there. Miss Fulton, the sister, is hysterical with fright."
"Who sent for the doctor?"
"I did. I asked one of the women here to telephone."
"Then I'll call the coroner."
He stepped through the open folding doors into the dining room and
took down the receiver, looking, as he did so, at the body and its
surroundings.
Bristow stooped down, picked up something from the floor near the sofa
and dropped it into his vest pocket.
The doctor--Dr. Braley--returned as the captain hung up the telephone
receiver.
"Miss Fulton is quieter now," he announced.
"Doctor," requested Greenleaf, "look at this body, will you? What caused
death?"
Braley, a thin, quick-moving little man of thirty-five, bent over the
dead woman, lifted one of her eyelids, and examined her throat as far as
was possible without moving the head.
"She was choked to death," he gave his opinion. "Although the eyes are
closed, you see the effect they produce of almost starting from their
sockets. And the tongue protrudes. Besides, there are the marks on her
throat. You can see them there on the left side."
"How long has she been dead?"
"I can't say definitely. I should guess about eight or ten hours anyway."
That staggered Greenleaf, the idea of this woman dead here in the front
room of a bungalow on Manniston Road for eight or ten hours--and nobody
knew anything about it! His agitation grew. He felt the need of doing
something, starting something.
"How about Miss Fulton?" he asked. "Can I get a statement from her?"
"Not just yet. Give her a little more time to get herself together.
Besides, she told me something about the--er--affair. Most remarkable
statement--most remarkable."
"What was it?"
"She says," related Braley, "that she only discovered the dead body of
her sister a few minutes before she was heard crying for help. Her
sister, Mrs. Withers, went to a dance, one of the regular Monday night
dances at the inn--Maplewood Inn. She went with Mr. Campbell, Douglas
Campbell, the real estate man here. You know him. They left the house at
nine o'clock last night. That was the last time Miss Fulton saw Mrs.
Withers alive.
"In the meantime, Miss Fulton herself, who is under my orders to stay in
bed all the time, was up and dressed so that she might spend the evening
with a friend of hers from Washington. His name is Henry Morley. He left
this house a little after eleven o'clock, and he left Furmville on the
midnight train for Washington.
"Miss Fulton, thoroughly tired out, went to bed and was asleep by
half-past eleven. As she has something which she uses when she wants a
good sleep, she took some of it last night and did not wake up until
after ten this morning. She didn't even hear her sister come in last
night.
"When she awoke this morning, she called her sister. Amazed by receiving
no answer, she got up to investigate. Mrs. Withers' bed had not been
occupied. She then came in here and found the body."
"You mean to say," put in Bristow, "that this sick girl was here all
night and heard nothing?"
"That's what she says," confirmed the physician.
"Did she give any idea who the murderer might be?" queried Greenleaf.
"No; she's not sufficiently clear in her mind to advance any theories
yet--naturally."
"Let me look around," suggested the captain.
He did so, followed by Bristow and the doctor. Save for the overturned
chair, between the sofa and the dining room door, the furniture, for the
most part the mission stuff generally found in the furnished-for-rent
cottages in Furmville, had not been knocked about in a struggle. That was
evident. The two rugs on the floor had not been disturbed. None of the
three men touched the overturned chair.
All the windows of the living room and the dining room were closed but
not locked, as there was on the outside of each the usual covering of
mosquito wiring. The shades were down. The front door did not have the
inside "catch" thrown on.
Greenleaf examined the kitchen, the unoccupied bedroom, the bathroom, and
the sleeping porch at the back of the house. This last, like the windows,
was inclosed in stout wire screens, and nowhere, on either the windows or
the sleeping porch, had this screening been broken. The kitchen door was
locked. There was no sign of a struggle anywhere. These negative facts
were gathered quickly.
Mrs. Allen, summoned from the sister's side, reported that there were no
signs of an entrance having been made through any of the three windows
in the bedroom in which Miss Fulton now lay quiet.
They made their way back to the living room. In spite of the most
painstaking examination of the floor, walls, and furniture of the entire
bungalow, they were, so far, without a clue. The murderer had left not
the slightest trace of his identity or his manner of entrance to the
death chamber.
"As I see it," said the captain when they rejoined Jenkins, "nobody broke
into this house last night. But two men had admission to it. They were
Mr. Douglas Campbell, the real estate man, and Mr. Henry Morley, who was
calling on Miss Fulton. It's up to those two to tell what they know."
"But," objected the doctor, "Miss Fulton says Morley left town last
night."
"Humph! Maybe that makes it look all the worse for Morley."
"But," suggested Bristow, "if we find that the front door was unlocked
all night, the possibilities broaden."
"How will we find that out?"
"Miss Fulton might remember about it."
"She did mention that," put in Braley; "it was unlocked."
"All the same," insisted Greenleaf, "Morley's got to come back here.
Wouldn't you say so?" This question was addressed to Bristow.
The telephone bell rang in the dining room. The chief went to answer it.
"What's that?" Those in the living room heard him. "You? I'm the chief of
police. Where are you now? Oh, I see. Come up here, will you? There's
been a murder here. Mrs. Withers. Right away? All right; I'll wait for
you."
He came back to the living room.
"That was Mr. Henry Morley," he said, "Didn't leave town last night. What
do you think of that?"