A CONFESSION
Bristow, satisfied now that he had fathomed Braceway's reluctance to
accept as final the case against Perry Carpenter, had not been the only
one mystified by the detective's course. Practically every other
detective and police official in the country was wondering what secret
motive had impelled Braceway to keep public attention focused on the
tragedy after a flawless case against the real murderer had been
established.
They knew that he was in the employ of the husband and father of the
murdered woman, and that, therefore, his acts had the endorsement of her
family. What, then, they asked, was the true situation back of the
pursuit and persecution of the bank clerk, Henry Morley?
What possible interest could they have in running him down, in ruining
his standing? What contingency was powerful enough to compel their
approval of Braceway's forcing the conclusion upon the mind of the public
that an ugly scandal had touched Mrs. Withers?
And this question, at first whispered in the gossip in Furmville, had
crept into the newspaper dispatches. The result was a morbid curiosity
generally, and, in the minds of many, a belief that Braceway would fasten
the crime on Morley. There were, however, a few who took the position
that Morley, even if he had not committed the murder, had knowledge of
some fact or facts even more terrible than the crime itself.
Major Ross awaited the two men in a large, bare-walled room on the second
floor of the station house. The night was oppressively warm, and the
tall, narrow windows were thrown open. Like Braceway, Bristow took off
his coat, the absence of it showing plainly the outline of his heavy belt
and steel brace.
Morley was ushered in and given one of the plain, straight-backed chairs
with which the room was furnished. The only other furniture was a deal
table, behind which Braceway, Bristow, and Major Ross sat in lounging
attitudes. The major, aside from his interest in the case, was there
merely as a matter of courtesy, a compliment to Braceway's reputation.
The prisoner, a few feet from them across the table, was suggestive of
neither resistance nor mental alertness. Above his limp collar and
loosened cravat, his face looked haggard and drawn. It was without a
vestige of colour save for the blue shadows under his eyes. There was a
tremor on his lips almost continuously.
Once or twice throughout the whole interview, his eyes brightened
momentarily with a hint of cunning or attempted cunning. Except for these
few flashes, he was manifestly beaten, unnerved, suffering from a
simultaneous desire and inability to weigh and ponder what he said.
Braceway began, in quick, incisive sentences:
"You're up against it, Morley. You know it as well as we do. And we don't
want to trick you or bully you. We're only after the truth. If you'll
tell the truth, it will help you and us. Will you give us a straight
story?"
"Yes," he answered dully, his hands folded, like a woman's, against his
body.
Braceway put more imperiousness into his voice.
"You know you're under arrest for embezzlement, don't you?"
"Yes."
"And you did take money from the Anderson National Bank?"
Morley squirmed and looked at each of the three in front of him before he
replied to that.
"Yes," he said finally, swallowing hard, his voice high and strained.
"Good! That's the sensible way to look at it," Braceway jogged him with
rapid speech. "We needn't bother any more about that tonight. How about
the jewelry you pawned in Baltimore today?"
The prisoner licked his lips and fixed on Braceway a look that grew into
a stare.
"You mean the rubies?"
"Well, yes."
"I didn't pawn them, and--and they were my mother's."
"How about the diamonds and emeralds?"
"I had no diamonds and emeralds."
"You didn't! Where were you all the afternoon preceding the time you
showed up at Eidstein's?"
This was his first intimation that he had been watched. He hesitated.
"Do I have to tell that?"
"Certainly. Why shouldn't you?"
A film, like tears, clouded his weak eyes. His voice was disagreeably
beseeching.
"It would bring my mother into this," he objected, twining his fingers
about each other and shuffling his feet.
"You'll have to tell us where you were and what you did," Braceway
persisted.
"Oh, very well," he said desperately; "I was in a room in the Emerson
Hotel with--with my mother. And I was--I was confessing to her that I'd
stolen from the bank. She knew I needed money. I had told her I'd been
speculating, and needed some extra money for margins. She gave me the
rubies from her earrings; and she followed me to Baltimore. If I couldn't
raise the money on the rubies, she was to borrow it on our house. She
owns that."
He paused, on the verge of tears.
"Buck up!" Braceway prodded him. "You confessed to her, did you?"
"Yes. At the last, somehow, I couldn't stand the idea of her giving up
the last thing she had, but--but she would have done it."
"Could she have mortgaged her home in Baltimore?"
"Yes. Mr. Taliaferro, A. G. Taliaferro, the lawyer, would have fixed it
for her. He's a friend of the family--used to be of father's."
"Now, about the emeralds and diamonds?" Braceway began another attack.
"I don't know what you mean."'
"They belonged to Mrs. Withers."
Morley shook his head impatiently.
"I don't know anything about them."
Bristow took a hand in the questioning, flicking him and provoking him by
tone and word. But neither he nor Braceway could get an admission, or any
appearance of admission, that he knew anything about the Withers jewelry.
Furthermore, he declared that his presence in the hotel, from the time
Delaney had "lost" him until his second appearance at Eidstein's at four
o'clock, could be established by the room clerk, two bellboys, and a maid
at the Emerson, and by the lawyer, Taliaferro, with whom he had talked on
the telephone while there with his mother.
According to him, he had unwittingly evaded Delaney by the simple act of
stepping into the elevator and going to the room where his mother, having
reached Baltimore an hour later than he, was waiting to hear how he had
fared in his interview with Eidstein.
He had hoped, he said, to cover up the $700 shortage at the bank with the
money obtained from the dealer in antiques, but, thinking of the risk of
his mother's being impoverished, he had renounced at the last moment the
plan of getting more money through the mortgage or sale of the home.
"Do you happen to know that a man, clumsily disguised and answering to
your description, pawned some of the Withers jewelry in Baltimore today?"
Braceway asked.
"Did he?" He looked blank.
"Yes. What do you know about it?"
"I've already told you: not a thing."
Braceway, recognizing the futility for the present of prolonging this
line of inquiry, paused, looking at him thoughtfully.
"If I pawned them," Morley added, without raising his eyes, "why wasn't
the money found on me?"
"Don't get too smart!" Bristow put in so roughly and suddenly that the
prisoner started violently. "What we want is facts, not arguments!"
The lame man leaned forward in his chair and made his voice sharp,
provocative.
"You're not as clever as you think you are. You lied when you made your
statement about the night Mrs. Withers was murdered. Now, come through
with that--the truth about it!"
Morley, utterly bewildered, stared and said nothing.
"What did you do that night? Where were you?"
Bristow left his chair and, going round the table, stood in front of
Morley.
"I told you that once. I wasn't anywhere near Manniston Road."
"Yes, you were! We've got proof of it. You _were_ there!"
"What proof?"
"You're curious about that, are you? I thought you would be! For one
thing, the imprint of your rubber shoe on the porch floor of Number
Five--"
"No! No! I wasn't on the porch. I----" He checked the words, realizing
that he had betrayed himself.
"Not on the porch?" Bristow caught him up. "Where, then? Where?" He
limped a step nearer to the prisoner. "Out with it now! You _were_
there! You were there!"
He stood over Morley, conquering him by the sheer weight of his
personality.
"I wasn't on the porch."
"All right--not on the porch. But where?"
Morley looked up at him and, mechanically, pushed his chair back, as if
he felt the need of more space. Bristow, in his shirt-sleeves, his right
arm held up, continued to crowd against him, threatening him, commanding
him to speak.
Braceway was amazed by the intensity of Bristow's glance, the tautness
of his body, the harsh authority in his voice. This man who had been ill
a few hours before exhibited now a strength and a vitality that would
have been remarkable in anybody. In him, under the circumstances, it was
nothing short of marvellous.
Morley could not withstand him.
"I don't know anything--anything worth while," he said weakly, trembling
from head to foot. "I would have told it at the very--at the very first;
only I thought it might keep me in Furmville too long. I wanted to get
back here and----"
"Never mind about what you wanted!" Bristow's hand fell and gripped his
shoulder painfully, shook him, brought him back to the main issue. "What
did you see? That's what we want to know, every bit of it, all of it!"
Morley flinched, trying to throw off Bristow's hand. The lame man stepped
back.
"All right," he said, "I'm not going to hurt you."
Morley, having yielded, told his story hurriedly, with little pauses here
and there, struggling for breath.
"I did miss my train, the midnight," he began. "I really tried to catch
it. But, when I found it was gone, I couldn't sleep. I was worried and
frightened. This bank business was on my mind. I wanted to think." He
forced a mirthless smile at that. "I couldn't think very straight, but
I tried to. I couldn't do anything but see myself in jail, in the
penitentiary, because of the bank.
"I wandered around without paying any attention to where I was. I'd left
my bags in the station. The first thing I knew, I was on Manniston Road,
in front of Number Nine--your house. I felt tired, and I sat down on the
bottom step. I had on a raincoat. It--it was pitch-dark there.
"The two electric lights, the street lights, on that block were out--had
burnt out, or something. The only light I could see was down at the
corner, where Manniston Road goes into Freeman Avenue--and that didn't
give any light where I was."
"That's true," Bristow said sharply, "but, from where you sat, anybody
going up or down the steps of Number Five would have been directly
between you and the avenue light. Isn't that so?"
"Yes."
"All right--go ahead. What did you see?"
Morley hitched back his chair still further. He had begun to perspire,
and he kept running his fingers round his neck between flesh and collar.
"It was raining," he went on, his voice strained and metallic, "a fine
drizzle at that time, and this made a circle of light, a kind of bright
screen around the avenue light. Things that happened on, or near, the
steps of Number Five were silhouetted against that screen of light.
"I'd been there just a little while when I noticed some kind of movement
on the steps of Number Five. It was a man coming down the steps. He was
very careful about it, and very slow; looked like a man on his tiptoes."
Bristow maintained his attitude of hanging over him, urging him on,
forcing him to talk. Braceway and Major Ross, their faces wearing
strained expressions, bent forward in their chairs, catching every
syllable that came from the prisoner.
"He went down the steps and turned down Manniston Road, toward the
avenue."
"All right!" Bristow prompted. "What then?"
"That was all there was to that. I just sat there. It looked funny to me,
but I didn't follow him. I wondered what he'd been doing. I never thought
about murder or--or anything like that. I swear I didn't!"
He licked his lips and gulped.
"I sat there, I don't know how much longer it was--pretty long, I
suppose. I didn't keep my glance always toward Number Five.
"When I did look that way again, I saw another man come down the steps
quietly, very cautiously. He turned toward me, but he came only far
enough up to cut in between Number Five and Number Seven. He disappeared
that way, between the two houses."
"Did you see the struggle?" Braceway asked sharply.
Bristow scowled at the interruption.
"What struggle?" Morley retorted, vacant eyes turned toward Braceway.
"You know! The struggle between two men at the foot of the steps of
Number Five."
"I didn't see a struggle," said Morley. "There wasn't any."
"You might as well tell it straight now as later. Give me the truth about
that struggle. Were you in it?"
"No."
"Now, see here! We know such a struggle occurred. If you were there, as
you say you were, you must have seen it. You couldn't have helped seeing
it!"
Morley denied it again, and his denial stood against all of Braceway's
skill. There had been no struggle, no encounter of any two persons. He
clung to that without qualification.
Bristow knew how great Braceway's disappointment was. He was convinced
that Braceway, in coming to Washington, had looked forward to securing
a confirmation of Withers' story. Now, instead of corroboration, he got
only a flat and unshaken contradiction.