THE BETRAYING VOICE
"Great God!" Oliver Jarvis sprang to his feet. "Where is he? Have you
got him? Take me to him, I say----"
"Easy now, Mr. Jarvis! There's more you've got to hear first," McCarty
remonstrated. "We haven't got him yet but we will soon, don't fear!
You'll only have to have a little more patience."
"Really, McCarty, your self-confidence is intended to be highly
reassuring, no doubt," drawled Terhune, "but I fear that my client will
have to exercise more than a little patience before your laudatory
ambition is achieved, and we will have to hear a few more tangible
facts before we can share your enthusiasm."
"You'll hear them!" McCarty promised grimly. "When I sat in the dark
in your consulting-room, Mr. Terhune, with a tennis ball on a wire
squeezed in my hand and your little Fourth of July illumination inside
the clock registering the sweat of me 'twas a fine little flight of
fancy I listened to, if you remember with never a complaint. I've no
phonographs here to play for you nor borrowed skeletons to rattle, nor
yet an assistant to prance up and down and work the back-stage effects,
but I'll give you plain, straight-forward facts enough before I'm
through, so sit tight, sir! You've had your little show but this is the
Inspector's and mine. I'm going to prove that 'twas Hoyos himself that
faced Mrs. Jarvis there."
"Can--can this be true?" Calvin Norwood's shaking lips could scarcely
frame the words. "But how did he get in the museum?"
"I'm coming to that," responded McCarty. "We haven't found out yet how
he got out of the river years ago nor where the body came from that was
dressed in his clothes and with his jewelry and all, but the Inspector
can prove that Hoyos found it mighty convenient to disappear just then
and start all over again; not only on account of the girl but because
his luck had gone against him in Wall Street and he'd forged some big
checks to cover his losses. We're still working on his record during
the past ten years but we know that he's traveled under different names
and been in a lot of shady transactions. It's a safe bet that he didn't
know the little convent girl he'd tricked into marriage was an heiress
or he would have stuck to her till he'd got her fortune away from her.
He must have been a surprised man when somehow, a year ago, he found
out that she had become the wealthy and prominent Mrs. Oliver Jarvis.
"He sent her the cake in order to get the word 'Noel' to her notice in
such a fashion that no one except her would guess what it meant and to
pave the way for the blackmail later."
Wade Terhune laughed sneeringly.
"He evidently did not count upon your phenomenal guessing powers, my
dear McCarty! To the merely scientific and I may add uninspired mind it
would seem a far cry from Leonidas Hoyos to a frosted Christmas cake,
but I have no doubt that you can supply the connection?"
McCarty's face reddened at the taunting tone, but he replied quietly.
"Perhaps I can, sir. You've heard, I dare say, of nicknames, and the
like. You'd hardly think, perhaps, that a man like Hoyos would be
called pet names----"
"What utter rot!" Terhune's coolness was deserting him. "It is only a
certain type of man whose personality invites nicknames and your Hoyos
is not of that breed. Are you trying to show that the man was called
'Noel'?"
"Not trying to, Mr. Terhune; I _am_ showing it." McCarty drew himself
up. "Now, if you'd been saddled with a name like 'Leonidas' it stands
to reason that your friends wouldn't be twisting their tongues over it
except on special occasions. They'd be cutting it short and calling you
'Leon,' most likely. Supposing the girl that loved you found out by
accident that those four letters turned backwards spelt 'Noel,' which
means Christmas, and decided for a reason to call you that, 'twould not
be such a far cry, after all."
"Preposterous!" Terhune exclaimed. "That is the most ridiculous,
far-fetched thing you've tried to insult our intelligence with
to-night. You surely cannot expect us to accept it!"
"'Far-fetched' is right." McCarty smiled. "For it's from New Orleans
I fetched it, sir, from the lady who was Evelyn Beaudet's best friend
when they were girls together at the convent."
"Loretta Sawtelle!" exclaimed Oliver Jarvis.
"The same, sir. She'd helped the elopement along and 'twas she told me
how the pet name of 'Noel' came about. When the girl he married found
that his name spelled a word meaning 'Christmas' she called him that
because Christmas was also her birthday; and a fine birthday present
she got in him, but no matter!
"You see, when he sent her the cake last year, the whole point was
that she must still think he was dead and that she had killed him and
somebody else who knew was threatening to squeal on her for murder. It
worked, too, only along about October he must have found bigger game
and decided to let up on blackmailing her; maybe he put a message in
macaroni paste under the bush telling her so, but that's only another
guess, Mr. Terhune. Anyway, if he learned that she was planning to go
abroad he must have been just as well pleased to get her out of the
way, for the new scheme he had in mind would have brought him in touch
with her world.
"Those macaroni-paste letters were masterpieces, at that, for they took
in the whole alphabet from 'a' to 'z'. He was thorough, that Hoyos,
I'll say that for him! Thorough, but in one thing just an hour too
late! However, I'm coming to that.
"He quit blackmailing her, and then he, too, heard about those letters
being still in existence and that Mr. Norwood had bought them for his
collection. He wanted to get them as badly as Mrs. Jarvis did, for they
would be absolute proof to hold over her head in case he ever needed in
the future to use his power over her. He managed to get possession of
a key to the Norwood house but the door to the museum itself he opened
with a spider.
"What happened when the two of them met there we don't have to guess
entirely, for unknown to either of them at the time there was a
witness, a third party who listened in on the scene long enough to
hear about the secret Mrs. Jarvis had kept all those years. He crept
away kind of stunned with the news, his only thought being to keep her
from ever suspecting that he knew. Then that night her murdered body
was discovered and he was nearly out of his head with self-reproach,
thinking how he might have prevented her death if only he hadn't gone
away and left them there in the museum together. He had one clue to the
man; the sound of his voice which was forever ringing in his ears, and
all that next week he kept thinking he heard it again and blaming his
brain for the tricks it was playing on him."
McCarty paused as his glance traveled along the semi-circle of tense,
set faces. Only the sound of a sharply drawn breath broke the stillness
until he spoke again with deep solemnity.
"Captain Marchal did not kill himself. He was murdered, shot down in
cold blood by the same hand that had strangled Mrs. Jarvis."
With his last word the tension which had held the others in leash
snapped like a tautly strung wire and instantly the room was in
confusion. Calvin Norwood, Oliver Jarvis and Wade Terhune had all three
sprung to their feet and the former cried excitedly:
"I knew it! I knew Victor was neither insane nor a coward! He'd
made too gallant a record in the war, too brave a fight afterward
to go under and take his own life just because a whippersnapper of
a detective tried to fasten the responsibility for the crime on him
rather than admit his own failure to find the real murderer!"
He turned and glared with savage exultation upon Wade Terhune, who
ignored him in cold disdain and advanced sneeringly to McCarty.
"I've listened very patiently to your ingenious though highly fanciful
tale, my dear McCarty, but this is a little too much! Marchal was a
suicide; the powder marks about the wound alone showed that, for the
position of the furniture in the room precluded the possibility of
anyone having approached him closely enough to have fired the shot."
McCarty smiled grimly.
"That's just what the murderer figured on making everyone believe, Mr.
Terhune, and he took you in as well as the rest. 'Twas a clever stunt
he pulled, but he didn't do it quite in time."
The shaft went home and the criminalist turned angrily upon Inspector
Druet, who sat apart, his face a study.
"Inspector, is McCarty speaking by your authority? Do you, too, hold to
this ridiculous assertion?"
For a moment the Inspector's eyes searched his self-constituted
spokesman's face and what he read there evidently satisfied him, for he
replied with a ring of finality in his tones:
"I do. Mac knows what he's about, Mr. Terhune; just give him the floor,
please."
The others subsided and McCarty explained:
"You see, the poor young lad betrayed himself; he showed his suspicions
too plainly before he was convinced enough to act on them and
Hoyos--we'll call him that still, though now I could put another name
to him--got to him there in the library when he was all alone. There
was a struggle and Marchal managed to get the drawer of the desk open
and pull out his pistol to defend himself with but Hoyos wrested it
out of his hand. Marchal must have broke away from his grasp then and
ran from him, for when Hoyos shot him _the first time_ 'twas from a
distance of several feet. He fell and then the bright idea came to
Hoyos.
"He knew that everyone else in the house was out and he'd have all the
time in the world to do what he wanted to. He extracted the second
cartridge shell from the pistol and picking up this pair of shears from
the table, he cut off the top of the shell with the blades of it and
took out the bullet. Then he clamped the two pieces of the cartridge
together again, using the heavy bronze handles of the shears like a
pair of pincers, and putting it back in the pistol he went up close to
where Marchal was lying and fired a second shot--a blank one--directly
into the wound, scattering the powder all over it.
"He put the empty shell of one cartridge at the feet of the corpse,
dropped the pistol by his hand, pocketed the other shell and the
second bullet, and pulled the furniture around like a barricade to make
people think exactly what they did; then he went away greatly pleased
with himself and the job, I've no doubt, but he'd forgot just three
things. There's not much blood comes from a direct heart wound and he
was too long about fixing up that blank cartridge; the sprinkling of
powder from the second shot stayed on top of the bloodstains, almost
dry, as the Inspector and I found later. We found something else,
too; the marks of lead on the blades of the shears where he'd cut the
cartridge and the grains of powder he'd let fall on the polished top of
the library table."
Amid a silence as profound as before the recent interruption, McCarty
handed the shears to the dazed Inspector and produced the envelope from
which he shook out upon his palm the particles of powder and held them
for all to see.
"He thought he'd rid himself of the last danger of discovery and
all was plain sailing ahead of him," McCarty continued, carefully
dusting the powder back into the envelope and tendering it also to the
Inspector, "but he'd come on Marchal just an hour too late.
"There's the powder and the shears to prove it, and here I've something
else that caps it all!
"They say that people who lose their eyesight get sharper in other
ways, that they can sense things quicker than them that can see.
Certain it is that Marchal not only suspected the owner of the voice
that was so like the one he had heard in the museum, but he got it
that the fellow was afraid he knew, somehow, and a warning came to him
that he'd be done to death the same as Mrs. Jarvis was. Anyhow, that
Wednesday afternoon he made up his mind to write out a statement of
what he'd heard and suspected in case anything happened to him and when
he found himself all alone in the house I think a kind of a hunch came
to him, what they call a premonition. He was in deadly fear for his
own life from that minute, not that he was afraid of death but that it
would come on him before he had a chance to denounce the murderer of
Mrs. Jarvis.
"He'd followed some of them to the door, maybe, and then made a rush
for his typewriter and in blundering around, knocked it off the table.
The crash of it was the last straw to his frazzled nerves and a kind
of a panic seized him, a frenzied determination to get that statement
written as if every minute was going to be his last. He couldn't lift
the typewriter because of an injury to his arm and shoulder which he
got in the war, but he grabbed a sheet of paper and squatted down on
the floor and wrote out his message. Then he found a pen, signed it,
and put it in the desk where 'twould be the first thing seen when the
drawer was opened. He never knew that the ribbon on the typewriter was
broken by the fall and that no writing appeared on the papers at all
but just his signature.
"There was something else in that drawer too; a photograph of Mrs.
Jarvis' fingerprint records, that she'd let Mr. Norwood take long ago,
and that Marchal had got out of the museum and hid the morning after
the murder, to shield her if she'd left any marks and anyone suspected
what had brought her there.
"I've said there was nothing on that sheet of paper except his
signature, and that's all that did show to the naked eye. Now I've
turned up my nose at microscopes and such as playthings for the amateur
and little I thought I'd ever come to one, myself, the sight that God
gave me being plenty for my needs in the past, thanks be! But when the
Inspector and I gave that paper the once-over we found little dents
in it, and put it under a magnifying glass. Then we saw that it had
been put through the typewriter and knowing the ink ribbon of it had
been broken when it crashed to the floor we put two and two together.
The dents on the paper had been made by the keys striking directly on
it instead of against the ribbon that wasn't there. I borrowed the
typewriter from Mr. Norwood and we tested it, with and without the
ribbon, till we'd doped out the message. Here it is, and I'm going to
read you the notes we made from it."
The stillness was broken now by a wordless stir which ran around the
semi-circle as McCarty took from his pocket the folded blank sheet and
another covered with laboriously scrawled writing. The first he passed
to Inspector Druet, while from the second he read:
"I know who killed Madame Jarvis. He knows that I know and he will kill
me also. I heard them there in the museum and the voice of her murderer
is the voice of him who calls himself Eric Vivaseur!"
"It's a lie!" Vivaseur's voice rose to a snarling scream as he leaped
from his chair, his once stolid, good-natured face distorted to a mask
of demoniac fury. "That poor, crazed fool never wrote those words!
You've made it up between you, damn you, to get up a case! It's a lie!
A lie!"
He checked himself suddenly as though a hand had been laid across his
writhing lips, and with eyes starting from their sockets he crumpled
back into his chair.
A tall, dark woman robed in black had appeared in the door leading to
the inner room. Her face was as white as chalk but her tones were firm
and steady as she spoke:
"I'm Kate Stricker. I was stewardess on _The Muette_ and I sold the
letters to Mr. Norwood." Slowly, inexorably she raised her arm and
pointed to the cowering, cringing figure before her. "Leon Hoyos' hair
was black then and he was younger by ten years, but that is the man!"