9:24 p. m.—Hall Marks of Murder
Lieutenant Valcour felt that the utter stillness of the room would
overwhelm him. He—Mrs. Endicott—everything seemed to be taking its cue
from death. He reached past Mrs. Endicott and touched the body’s
cheek. It was quite cold.
“Where is your room, Mrs. Endicott?”
He carefully pried her fingers from the knob of the cupboard door and
then closed it.
“But you can’t leave him in that cupboard.”
Her voice held the toneless qualities of arrested emotion, as if the
functioning of her nerve centres had stopped.
“We must leave him in there, Mrs. Endicott, until someone from the
medical examiner’s office has seen him. If you’ll tell me the name of
your family physician before you lie down——”
“Lie down—I? Lie down?”
“Yes, and rest. I’ll call the doctor up on the possible chance that
we’re mistaken, only I’m quite certain, Mrs. Endicott, that we
aren’t.”
She stumbled verbally in her rush. “Worth—Dr. Sanford Worth—Calumet
876—it’s 876 something—I know it perfectly well. I—it’s in my
book—come with me.”
She seemed mechanically vitalized, and her movements were those of a
nervous, jerky toy. She flung open a door adjacent to the cupboard. It
led into a bathroom, the fittings of which were of coral-coloured
porcelain. A door in the opposite wall led into her bedroom. She went
immediately to a leather reference book beside a telephone near her
bed.
“It’s Calumet 8769,” she said.
Her finger slipped in the dialling. Lieutenant Valcour gently took the
instrument from her hands and put through the call.
“The office of Dr. Worth?” he said, when a woman’s voice answered him.
“This is the home of Mr. Herbert Endicott. I am Lieutenant Valcour of
the police department. Mr. Endicott is dead. I would appreciate it if
Dr. Worth would come here at once and consult with the medical
examiner, and also attend to Mrs. Endicott. Thank you.” He replaced
the receiver.
“I haven’t the slightest intention of collapsing, Lieutenant.”
“We will need Dr. Worth anyway, Mrs. Endicott.”
Lieutenant Valcour dialled the Central Office and, in a suddenly most
efficient voice, gave the requisite information. He then called his
own precinct station and told the sergeant at the desk to send over a
detail of five men in uniform.
“The chief of the Homicide Bureau, the medical examiner, and some of
my own men will be here presently,” he said to Mrs. Endicott.
“And my husband has to stay in that cupboard until they come?”
“Unless Dr. Worth arrives first and disagrees with me that Mr.
Endicott is dead.”
“It’s inhuman.”
“Very, but there’s a set routine for these cases that we have to
observe. Is this the button you ring for your maid?”
He pressed a push button set in the wall at the head of the bed.
“Yes, but I don’t want her.”
“You may, and there’s no harm in her being with you. I’m going to
leave you in here for a little while, until the people we’ve
telephoned for come.”
“You insist on my staying in this room?”
“Heavens, no. Do anything you like, Mrs. Endicott, or that you feel
will help you. As long,” he added gently, “as you don’t leave the
house.”
“Oh.”
“You see we’ll have to talk such a lot of things over, just as soon as
the usual formalities are finished.”
“It’s rather terrible, isn’t it?”
“Pretty terrible, Mrs. Endicott.”
“So”—she mentally groped for a satisfactory word—“so conclusive.”
It seemed a peculiar choice. Lieutenant Valcour sensed that it wasn’t
just Endicott’s life alone which was concluded by death, but something
else as well—such as an argument, perhaps, or a secret and bitter
struggle. The precise significance was elusive, and he gave it up, or
rather checked it within his memory in that compartment which already
contained six barely smoked cigarette butts, a broken finger nail,
bruise marks, and a note which, in view of the body, might safely be
presumed to have been a threat.
A maid knocked on the door and came in. She stared speculatively for a
curious second at Lieutenant Valcour.
“Madam rang?”
“No, Roberts. Lieutenant Valcour rang. Lieutenant Valcour is of the
police.”
Any sudden announcing of the police is always shocking. It is a
prelude to so many unpleasant possibilities even in the lives of the
most blameless. They are in a class with telegrams. Lieutenant Valcour
noted that Roberts accepted his identity with nothing further than an
almost imperceptible catching of breath. Mrs. Endicott’s attitude
puzzled him. It wasn’t resentment, certainly, or any stretching at
rudeness; such emotions seemed so utterly inconsequential at this
moment when she must have been wrenched by a very severe shock. It
reminded him of the aimless play of lightning clowning before the
purposeful fury of a storm.
“Mrs. Endicott will explain things to you,” he said. “Stay with her,
please.”
There lingered, as he went into the bathroom, a picture of the two
women, separated by the distance of the room, standing quite still and
staring at each other: Mrs. Endicott, young, exquisitely lovely
looking—the other, older, quite implacable. The connection was absurd,
but the effect remained of two antagonists in a strange encounter who
are standing in their separate corners of a ring. He closed the
bathroom door and slipped the catch. He turned on all the lights.
There was a single window. He parted muslin curtains and looked at a
glazed lemon-coloured shade, especially along its hemmed bottom. There
were some smudges at its centre that interested him. He believed that
they had been made by a dirty thumb. He raised the shade and the lower
sash of the window.
The night was clear and cold and windless. A shallow stone balcony ran
the width of the rear of the house. It was for ornamentation rather
than use, as to get onto it one had to straddle the window sill.
Lieutenant Valcour did so, and stood looking down upon the dimly
defined outlines of what, in spring, would bloom into a formal garden.
He satisfied himself that there seemed no access to the balcony from
the ground unless one used a ladder or were endowed with those special
and fortunately rare qualities which transform an otherwise normal
person into a human fly.
The house was five windows wide; the two on the right of the bathroom
belonged to Mrs. Endicott’s room, and the two on its left to her
husband’s. He flashed on his electric torch and examined all five
sills. None showed a trace of recent passage, and there was no very
good reason, he realized, why any of them should. They were clean,
windswept, and smooth.
How pleasant it would be, he reflected, to come across the perfect
imprint of a shoe, or a rubber, or—what was it that was so popular at
the moment?—of course: the footprint of a gorilla. The case would then
be what was technically known as an open-and-shut one. He’d simply
take the train for California and arrest Lon Chaney, and—— But enough.
And the floor itself on the balcony was smugly lacking in clues. He
relinquished the keen sharp air, the star-heavy night, and returned to
the bathroom by way of its window, which he closed, and again drew
down its lemon-coloured shade.
A cake of soap in a container set in the wall above a basin attracted
his attention. It was so incredibly dirty. Someone with exceptionally
dirty hands had used it and either hadn’t bothered to rinse it off or
else hadn’t had the time to. The dirt had dried on it.
He couldn’t vision such a condition of uncleanliness in connection
with the hands of either Mr. or Mrs. Endicott, unless there had been
some obscure reason. He preferred to think for the moment that the
hands had belonged, and presumably still did, to the murderer. That,
of course, eliminated the gorilla. What a pity it was, he reflected,
that he was so constantly obsessed with infernal absurdities. Even
though he tried to keep them under triple lock and key when working
with his associates on the force, they had a distressing habit at
times of cropping out into the open where they could be seen. Nor were
they of a humour especially in vogue among his contemporaries; there
rarely was an and-the-drummer-said-to-Mabel or an-Irishman-and-a-Jew
among them. Rarely? He shuddered. Never. As a result there were
occasions when he rested under the cloud of being considered mildly
lunatic. It was bad business. He had told himself so firmly again and
again. Success and humour formed bedfellows as agreeable as an
absent-minded dog would be _en négligé_ in the boudoir of a surprised
cat.
With a beautiful access of gravity he lifted the lid of an enamelled
wicker hamper and peered in at the soiled linen it contained. There
were many towels. Towels were, he reflected, one of the few genuine
hall marks of the rich. The Endicotts, hence, must be very, very rich,
as it was obvious that they shed—or was it shedded?—towels as
profusely as the petals fall from a white flowering tree.
There was a badly soiled and crumpled towel on the very top of the
pile. He picked it up and looked at it. It was very dirty and still
faintly damp. He folded it, set it on the floor beneath the basin, and
placed the cake of soap upon it. They were, he smiled faintly,
Exhibits B and C. The distinction of being classified as Exhibit A was
already reserved by the threatening note on the desk. As for the
smudges on the lemon-coloured shade, they would have to be definitely
determined as finger prints before they could have their niche in the
alphabet. The prosecuting attorney would be pleased. He was a man
whose flair for alphabeted exhibits amounted to a passion. Lieutenant
Valcour hoped that he could find a crushed rose. The prosecuting
attorney was at his best with crushed roses. For example, take that
knifing case in the Ghetto. Three petals were all the prosecuting
attorney had had there, but they had bloomed, via the jury, into
tears. Into tears, Lieutenant Valcour amended, and tripe.
A pair of silver-backed brushes showed no finger marks upon their
shining surfaces, nor were there any on the silver rim that backed a
comb. One could infer, Lieutenant Valcour decided, and did, that
someone later than Mr. Endicott had used them, as Mr. Endicott would
never have wiped them off to remove his prints, and had he not done so
there certainly would have been some signs of usage. What a careful
murderer it was, he thought, to polish the evidence so very clean. And
what a grip the subject of finger prints maintained upon the criminal
mind, and upon the lay mind as well. It seemed to embrace their Alpha
and Omega in the scientific detection of crime. Lieutenant Valcour
offered to bet himself his last nickel that the murderer had
overlooked entirely the possibility of what might be found left within
the bristles of the brushes and between the teeth of the comb. He took
a clean hand towel from the rack and wrapped the brushes and the comb
up in it. He set the bundle on the floor beside the cake of soap and
the dirty towel. The alphabet, he reflected, had now been depleted
down to F.
The bathroom could tell him nothing more. He reconstructed its segment
of the drama before leaving it: the murderer had entered, gone at once
to the window and pulled down its shade. There had been a washing of
hands and a brushing and combing of hair. The murderer had wiped the
silver clear of finger prints and had left. The whys and wherefors
must come later. The shell would remain unchanged until the moment
came to pour it full of motive and give it reason and life.
He went into Endicott’s room and opened the cupboard door. The beam
from his electric torch, added to the ceiling light, brought out
sharply the waxy pallor of the face’s skin. Its good-looking, homely
ruggedness was marred by a slight cast of petulance, as inappropriate
as a pink bow on a lion. Cruelty showed, too, a little—and something
inscrutable that baffled analysis. Endicott weighed, Lieutenant
Valcour decided, close upon two hundred pounds and no fat, either; a
strong, powerfully muscled man, and about thirty-five years old. He
played the light upon Endicott’s right hand and exposed the wrist a
little by drawing up the sleeve. The wrist and hand were normally
clean, as he had expected.
He gently inserted his fingers into such of Endicott’s pockets as he
could reach without disturbing the body. From the rumpled state of
their linings and their complete emptiness it was apparent that they
had been hastily turned inside out and replaced.
Lieutenant Valcour began to sniff at a motive. Not robbery, exactly,
in the ordinary sense, as an expensive platinum wrist watch and a set
of black pearl shirt studs were untouched, but robbery in the
extraordinary sense—one that had been indulged in for a certain
definite purpose. He strongly began to suspect that there would be the
ubiquitous “fatal papers.” It might also develop that Endicott was the
secretive owner of some fabulous jewel of a sort usually referred to
as a Heart of Buddha, or perhaps some important slice of the Russian
crown jewels—the number of which now almost equalled, he reflected,
the thousands upon thousands of ancestors who came over to our shores
on the _Mayflower_.
The top button was missing from Endicott’s overcoat. It would have
been torn away when the murderer had lifted his victim from the floor
in order to drag him into the cupboard. Otherwise there wasn’t
anything that hinted at a struggle. There wasn’t any blood, or any
wound, or sign of contusion visible on the head, and no trace of blood
around such parts of the cupboard that Lieutenant Valcour could see.
He suddenly wondered where Endicott’s hat was. It wasn’t on Endicott’s
head, nor in the cupboard, nor in the bedroom, which struck him as
strange. He was a strong believer in the paraphrase that where the
coat is, there the hat lies, too. One could look for it more carefully
later. Just at present, of greater importance was Exhibit A.
Lieutenant Valcour went to the desk, picked up the note and studied
it. The pencil used had been a thick leaded one, almost a crayon. And
there, right before his nose in a shallow tray that held an assortment
of office things, was a pencil with a very thick lead that was almost
a crayon. He copied the note with it on the back of an envelope he
took from his pocket. He compared the result with the printing on the
note. They were alike.
One begins, he informed himself gently, to wonder.