9:45 p. m.—Guards Are Stationed at the Doors
There are knocks, Lieutenant Valcour believed, and knocks. He ranged
them from gentle careless rappings, through sly sinister taps, to
imperative demands and, finally, thumps. He classified the ones at the
moment being bestowed upon the hall door as official whacks. He was
right. He put the scrap of paper and the crayon pencil in his pocket
and turned to greet five men from the station house who flooded into
the room on the heels of his “Come in.”
They were intelligent-looking young men, well built, alert, and their
uniforms were immaculate—five competent blue jays outlined sharply
against gray walls. Lieutenant Valcour knew each one of them both by
reputation and by name.
He nodded to the starchiest and youngest looking of them. “Cassidy,”
he said, “stay in here. O’Brian, stay by the front door, and keep
Hansen with you to carry messages. There’s a servants’ entrance at the
front, McGinnis. It’s yours. And you, Stump, watch the door from the
back of the house into the garden. If anyone wants to leave the house
send him to me first. You can let anyone in, with the exception of
reporters, and find out their business. Now in regard to the reporters
just be your natural genial selves and say that apart from the plain
statement that Mr. Herbert Endicott, the owner of this house, is dead
and that—” Lieutenant Valcour choked slightly—“foul play is suspected,
you can tell them nothing. The police, as usual, are actively on
the job, have the case well in hand, and there is every reason to
believe that in view of our customary efficiency the guilty parties
will soon be brilliantly apprehended etcetera and so forth Amen.
Excuse-it-please.”
“Cuckoo,” confided O’Brian to Hansen as, with Stump and McGinnis, they
filed out.
“Cuckoo as a fox,” agreed Hansen, who had worked under Lieutenant
Valcour on a case before.
“Yeh?”
“Yeah.”
Lieutenant Valcour and young Cassidy were alone.
“Tell me, Cassidy, how are the servants taking all this, if you bumped
into any of them?”
“Sure, I only saw the girl at the front door, Lieutenant. She’s a
sorry piece, and was shivering worse than one of them new and indecent
dances.”
“Did she say anything?”
“She did not, beyond telling us to follow her upstairs. She took us to
that door across the hallway first, and some lady said you was in
here.”
“How did that lady’s voice sound to you, Cassidy?”
“Smooth, sir.”
“Not nervous?”
“Devil a bit.”
“What are you looking for, Cassidy?”
“The corpse, sir.”
“It’s in that cupboard.”
“Is it now?” said Cassidy, casually removing himself as far from the
cupboard door as he could. “It ain’t one of them Western hammer
murders, is it?”
“I don’t know what kind of a homicide it is, Cassidy. There are no
marks on him that I can see.”
“Will it be poison, then?”
“Maybe.”
“Well, let’s hope it’s one or the other. I hate them mystery cases
where the deceased got his go-by from a Chinese blow gun, or some
imported snake from Timbuctu, or parts adjacent.”
“When did you ever work on such a case, Cassidy?”
“Sure, Lieutenant, you can read about them every week in the
magazines. There’s one that’s in its fourth part now where some louse
of foreign extraction kills a dumb cluck of a Wall Street magnet with
a package of paper matches, the tips of which was so fixed that they
exploded when struck, instead of acting decent like, and shot dabs of
poison into the skin of his fingers. Can you imagine it? Just say the
word and I’ll bring it around to the station house and you can read it
for yourself.”
“Thanks, Cassidy.”
“It’ll be no trouble at all, Lieutenant.”
An important knock on the door disclosed a stranger. Lieutenant
Valcour addressed him, correctly, as Dr. Worth.
Dr. Sanforth Worth did not merely imagine that he cut a distinguished
figure; he was sure of it. A certain grayness clung impressively about
the temples of an intellectual brow, and he was probably one of the
few physicians left in New York who had both the audacity and ability
to wear a Vandyke. He was dressed in evening clothes and had not
bothered to remove his overcoat or to give up his hat.
“Dr. Worth? I am Lieutenant Valcour, of the police. Mr. Endicott is in
here.”
Dr. Worth bowed gravely, and with a sparklingly manicured hand stroked
his Vandyke once. “I have been afraid of something like this for quite
a while, Lieutenant,” he said. His voice, in company with everything
else about him, sounded expensive.
Lieutenant Valcour raised his eyebrows. “It begins to seem, Doctor, as
if everybody except Mr. Endicott himself anticipated his murder.”
“Murder?”
It was Dr. Worth’s eyebrows’ turn. They raised. They fell. They
became, in conjunction with pursed lips, judicious. He removed his
overcoat and placed it, with his hat, upon a chair.
“I believe you will find, Lieutenant, that it is just his heart. His——
Dear God in heaven, man, what have you left him slumped down like this
for?”
“You mustn’t touch him, Doctor, unless you think he isn’t dead.”
Dr. Worth stiffened perceptibly. “Fancy that,” he said. “Well, one
would infer that he is dead, all right. Just the same, Lieutenant, is
there any legal objection to opening his coat and shirt bosom? I dare
say I could slit them, if you preferred. You see, it might be
advisable to test for any trace of heart action with the stethoscope.”
“I had no intention of offending you, Doctor. Go right ahead and do
anything you think is absolutely essential to establish life or
death.”
Dr. Worth melted conservatively. “You see, sir, I know his heart. He
had a nervous breakdown two years ago which left its action impaired.”
He loosened Endicott’s overcoat and the black pearl studs set in a
semi-soft shirt bosom. He listened for a moment, and then removed the
stethoscope. “No trace,” he said. “He’s dead. Shall I button up the
shirt front and the coat again?”
“It isn’t necessary, Doctor.”
The hall door opened abruptly. The homicide chief and the medical
examiner came in, followed by a squad of detectives. Lieutenant
Valcour was well acquainted with both officials. He introduced them to
Dr. Worth and placed at their disposal such information as he had
gained while waiting for them to arrive.
The department’s experts automatically began to function at once. A
photographer was already arranging his apparatus to make pictures of
the body from as many angles as its position in the cupboard would
permit. A finger-print man went about his duties along the lines laid
down by established routine. The medical examiner and Dr. Worth
gravitated naturally together and plunged into a discussion of
Endicott’s medical history.
The homicide chief, a well-built, alert-looking man of fifty, by the
name of Andrews, drew Lieutenant Valcour a little to one side.
“What do you really make of it, Valcour?” he said.
“Oh, it’s undoubtedly murder, Chief, but I doubt whether there’ll even
be an indictment unless we get a lucky break, establish a definite
motive, and get a confession.”
“I feel that way about it, too. Any signs of an entry having been
forced?”
“I haven’t looked. I’ve been in here all the time, and my men just
came.”
“Well, Stevens and Larraby are making the rounds now. They’ll let us
know. If the autopsy doesn’t show poison or some wound it’ll be a
nuisance. If it’s a straight heart attack, as Dr. Worth claims, we
might just as well drop it. Can you imagine getting up before a jury
that’s been shown a picture by the defense of a big husky like
Endicott and saying, ‘This man was scared to his death?’ Suppose a
woman was the defendant. They’d laugh the case out of court.”
“Maybe it won’t be as bad as all that, Chief. While you’re busy in
here I’ll wander around and try to scare up something. Would you mind
sending for me when the medical examiner reaches some decision as to
the manner of death?”
“Sure thing, Valcour. I’ll see to it, too, that those brushes and comb
are looked into.”
“I’ll probably be in Mrs. Endicott’s room. That’s the door just across
the corridor.”
Andrews was aware of Lieutenant Valcour’s reputation in the department
for the painless extraction of useful information from people. “Go to
it,” he said. “And squeeze every drop that you can.”