Yes, Belknap and Berry at last had their heads together in peace and
quiet—if being cheek by jowl with a tongue in each could be said to be
having their heads together. Greek was meeting Greek, and, with
reservations (decidedly with reservations!), they put their cards on the
table.
It was a _kind_ of peace and quiet in which the two men conversed.
Nothing, thought Berry, had ever seemed to him more hollow-still than
Thorngate that Saturday evening: fog outside, and illness, depression,
and possibly guilt inside. Like the central vacuum of a cyclone it
seemed to augur as much trouble ahead as behind. He wished for a moment
that he and Belknap had let Sergeant Stebbins carry out his obstinate
desire, which had been to run the whole lot down to the Blue Acres
lockup for the night. It had really been because he relished the thought
of catching somebody red-handed that he had joined in Belknap’s quiet
but determined resistance to the idea. Belknap’s claim was that the
scandal in society was bad enough as it was without herding several
prominent and supposedly honorable ladies and gentlemen into prison as
if they were one and all guilty of murder. It was hardly likely they
_were_ all guilty, and the danger of injured innocence was not fair to
risk.
But Stebbins would undoubtedly have had his way about the arrested
Crawford, whom he had proved backwards and forwards to his own
satisfaction guilty of Whittaker’s murder, if Crawford had not chosen an
opportune moment to collapse and be put to bed. Even the hardened
Belknap had shown a gleam of sympathy for the prostrated Crawford and
asked if someone hadn’t a sleeping drug. It was Nadia Mdevani who
produced the little red bottle from her vanity bag, poured a few
half-inch capsules into her cupped hand, and re-poured them into
Belknap’s, who transferred them to Sydney Crawford’s.
“I couldn’t survive without these,” she had said. “They’re harmless
enough—allanol or luminol, or one of those things.”
So every living soul that had been dining at Thorngate the night before,
always with the exception of Dorn, was still there. It was this fact of
his absence that brought Dorn uppermost in the Belknap-Berry discussion.
“No report on Milton Dorn?” Berry asked.
“None of any exact value to us. But one of your men has unearthed a
hidden room at the back of his Eighty-fifth Street office, and in it
several human specimens in varying degrees of dissection. None of these
can hope to endure, but none have been dealt the finishing stroke of the
knife. The press is hot on _that_ scent, as you can well imagine. And of
course nothing will satisfy it but that Dorn is guilty of our three
murders and a few besides. I wish I felt as sure of the three as of the
few besides.”
Berry shivered.
“You say that’s all of no value to us? I should think as a mark of
character it might shed light on the situation. However, it’s useless to
jump to conclusions. _Our_ whole case against Dorn is summed up in his
disappearance, added to your possible glimpse of him.”
“Perfectly true. My answer referred merely to the fact that he himself
has not been traced, much less located.”
“I see.” Berry stroked his chin and glanced up at Belknap with one eye
shut. “You’re not in too good a humor, old man. Stuck for an answer?
Don’t tell me!”
“I guess I am, Berry. I’m mired.” Belknap smiled slowly, but failed to
quite meet Berry’s open eye. “The trouble being I haven’t a flare about
this business. And unless my instincts are at work I flounder. I’m not
good with a magnifying glass, I must admit.” And Belknap made a thrust
of his head at the glass on the table.
Berry laughed.
“Neither am I, really,” he said. “I bow to convention. I know you don’t.
But neither are my instincts particularly violent. A little luck, some
thinking, and an enormous amount of hard work have got the poor boy
where he is today. Don’t disparage him. A glass like this is a pretty
little tool of the trade. Boys like Prentice like to see a detective
without one as little as they like to see a naturalist without a
butterfly net. I’m a detective, you see; you’re a genius. That’s the
difference—and oh, the difference to me! Gee, that rhymes,
Belknap—internally.”
It was true that on the face of it Belknap’s reputation exceeded Berry’s
because of the ‘hunches’ that made him spectacular. Yet Berry, for just
the reason that he lacked them, perhaps averaged a greater percentage of
successes than the older man. Whereas Belknap’s failures, according to
the fortune of heroes, passed unrecorded or were forgotten overnight,
Berry’s went down in history.
Berry had recently written finis at the end of a slow, grueling,
painstaking case, begun five years before—having of course had his hand
in numberless affairs, successful and unsuccessful, in the meantime. The
Star Diamond robbery round-up, seen in a bird’s eye view from beginning
to end, was a masterpiece of intricate workmanship and cunning design,
with Berry the spider. But it had been too much to expect a fickle
public attention to remain riveted to a five-year hunt that led around
the world and back again. And what newspaper would take the time to
review it at sufficient length to bring out its pattern in bas-relief.
Belknap, on the other hand, seldom was interested in crimes at their
birth. They had to pull themselves together, assume character, even
become aged and ripened in the detective cellars, before he woke up to
them. Then suddenly with the warp and the woof before him he saw the
flaw, the weak thread, and unraveled the whole in a breath. Belknap had
a certain contempt for Berry’s methods, though a sincere respect for his
achievements.
“I’m not so sure about the luck in your case, Berry,” he said
generously. “I’m afraid there’s always been far too much of it with me.
I’m _not_ a hard worker. And as for thinking, it happens in wedges of
intuition driven in between sleeping and waking. I have damn little to
do with it. That’s why I’m up a tree now. I haven’t had a good sleep
since the returns on these murders of ours began to come in.”
“You don’t look it. And unless I miss my guess we’ve got a bad night
ahead of us. So let’s run over our lists to date and not leave the
household too long on its wild lone. Who are there to be considered? Mr.
and Mrs. Crawford; Prentice and his girl-friend; Miss Mdevani; and this
missing Dorn. And _that_ leaves out of account the quite possible
possibility that Blake killed Miss Video, or _vice versa_, or that
Whittaker killed both. Violet Mowbray’s name may be a stepping-stone and
it may prove just another stumbling-block. What really interested me in
Miss Video’s remark was the ‘revelation for revelation’ bit. Did she
mean that because Whittaker was exposing her lover Crawford she was
going to pay him off? For what she _could_ have meant was that if you
are exposing _me_ I’ll get even with a story about you and Violet
Mowbray. In which case it would bear out a little suspicion of mine
about that Diary you people seem so anxious to forget. Perhaps the Diary
had ’em _all_ in it—not merely Crawford. Whittaker may have been letting
fifty-nine cats out of the bag instead of one. He was an old scoundrel,
Whittaker, by accounts. If that was so, with most of those here having
interrelated parts, what more likely than the only way for any one of
them to come clean was to wipe out every other one, and the Diary with
’em.”
Belknap carefully regarded a thumb-nail, pausing before he spoke.
“Astute reasoning, Berry. You’re uncannily warm, you’ll be pleased to
know. I haven’t had a good opportunity to explain to you the method in
this madness, if there is any. Such as it is, it’s Whittaker’s. The poor
devil, though I swear I can’t be as sympathetic as I should be, was
dying of cancer, and witness his bright idea of a way to shorten the
sentence. He called me in at the last minute to watch it done—too late
to more than expostulate and then resign myself to what I thought was
going to be rather a gruesome lark, and has proved far too much of a
good thing. I assure you I didn’t anticipate a shambles! I’ve kept this
item for your ear alone because—well, _you_ know the police. Can’t you
picture that damned sergeant hot and bothered on the trail of a lot of
stale crimes when the time is too short for the new? What do you say
about it?”
Berry walked across and threw up a window. “Bad night,” he said, and
spit. He knocked the ashes from his pipe on the stone outer sill, closed
the window deliberately, and came a few steps back, refilling his pipe
as he came, and keeping his eyes on that.
“You’ve let me do quite a bit of feeling around in the dark, haven’t
you, boy? Oh, I don’t exactly blame you. After all, it was your case,
not mine. There’s a catch-as-catch-can element between us I guess we
can’t avoid. And aside from that I agree with you that it would be
rather low-down to allow your friend the Judge to blight the careers of
his criminal friends because of certain age-old professional secrets
between them. For I take it that’s what you’re trying to tell me.”
“I am, exactly. But now that you _are_ enlightened what good is it to
you? It’s been of little help to me to know that the Miss Laceys and Mr.
Prentices have their pasts. Can you see either one of them with any of
last night’s blood on their hands?”
“Not particularly. But we’ve both had our tragic experiences with gentle
creatures who have spread the veil of innocence over a positive welter
of sin. No, given your tale of what Whittaker had set out to do, and has
done to a T, the matter boils itself down to a neat psychological one.
We’re unable to budge with the circumstantial evidence; unless the fact
that all the circumstantial points directly at your foreign lady, Miss
Mdevani. But I, for one, feel it’s planted on her. I gather it strikes
you the same way? However, we can’t afford to eliminate her. As far as
everyone is concerned we only have their sworn word as to how they spent
last night: Miss Lacey in Mr. Prentice’s room, for the most part; Mr.
Prentice in the Judge’s, except when he wasn’t; the Judge in Miss
Video’s, you think; Mrs. Crawford in her own; Miss Mdevani very much out
and about—and yet not seen until her visit to you; Mr. Crawford further
out and about but not seen because of the assignation with his wops. The
few instances in which we can check their stories we find them quite
uncommonly truthful. You saw Miss Lacey when she says she came to the
library for a drink. Mrs. Crawford saw Mr. Prentice as he came from the
Judge’s room, when she was on her way down to find her husband and found
Blake instead. No one saw Blake. You kept moving and saw damn
little—unless you _did_ see Dorn. I wasn’t in the picture until after
two of the important episodes, and too far afield to get much out of the
third. You were actually present at the third, and a lot of good it did
you. Which reminds me. I just want to check that shooting with you
again. It bothers me. One shot, you say, from the direction of the
library wall, in other words from the holes therein. Prentice _does_
insist on two.”
“There was one shot,” Belknap said with controlled quietness. “I should
think it would be unnecessary for me to repeat myself. But there _have_
been cases of simultaneous, or all but simultaneous, shots that might
deceive one, more particularly the person nearest the scene of action.
Do you suggest it might have been something of that sort? Miss Mdevani
in the wall, and Crawford or his hired man in the pantry, shall we say?”
“My idea in a nutshell. You see this is what I found to make me such a
nuisance on the subject.”
Berry produced the bullet of a 22 calibre Colt automatic from his vest
pocket—a bullet apparently identical to the one found in the table that
morning.
“May I inquire?” Belknap asked gravely, taking the pellet on the palm of
his hand and crossing it from one to the other.
“In my meticulous, persnickety way,” Berry said with his little twisted
smile, “I made a cleaner sweep of the dining-room tonight than you and I
and the Sergeant did this morning when working in unison.” Berry had
been known to strip a freshly papered wall in his thoroughness! “And
this article is the net result. Found _in_ the sideboard—you noticed
that Chippendale thing between the windows—inside, deep in the back
board, with the doors closed and no hole in the doors. Meaning the doors
were standing open when the shot was fired, which, incidentally, means
nothing.”
“Exactly; nothing at all. And of course it may have been in hiding there
for years, the relic of some earlier shooting picnic at the Whittaker
mansion! But I congratulate you on the find, for it _is_ a find. We must
get it to the ballistician, who has Exhibit A, and let him determine
which, if either, came from our captured weapon. We know only one shot
could have come from it.”
“Certainly. I’ll take charge of it. You get in touch with Miss Mowbray.
I’ll continue with Miss Video’s room while I’m about it, and you go mix
with the gang. The more I hear about them the less I like them
unchaperoned. See you later.”
On either side the door each drew a long breath that being translated
meant “I guess I gave him my _facts_ fair enough. Conclusions? _No._”