10:02 p. m.—Pale Flares the Darkness
Lieutenant Valcour wondered concerning Mrs. Endicott as he walked
slowly across the corridor and knocked on the door of her room. A
curious, curious woman, with youth and beauty that almost passed
belief. He knew her instinctively as one of life’s misfits: complex to
a note far beyond the common tune; essentially an individualist;
essentially unhappy from an inevitable loneliness which is the lot of
all who are banished within the narrow confines of their own
complexity; a type he had seldom met, but of whose existence he was
well aware.
Roberts opened the door. The woman’s face was butchered and her eyes
had the quality of glass.
“Ask Mrs. Endicott, please, whether she feels strong enough to see me
for a moment.”
Mrs. Endicott’s voice was definitely metallic. As it reached him in
the corridor, disembodied from any visual association with herself, it
seemed to hold a muted echo of brass bells.
“Certainly, come in. I wish, Lieutenant, you would give up the
tiresome fiction that I am going to collapse. I’ll ring, Roberts, when
I want you.”
“Yes, madam.”
As Roberts passed him on her way to the door Lieutenant Valcour felt
an imperative awareness of an attempt at revelations—an attempt to
impart to him some special knowledge. Her eyes, as she glanced at him,
lost their cobwebs and grew sharply informative. It was entirely an
unconscious reaction on his part that forced from his lips the word
“Later.” The cobwebs reappeared. She left the room.
Lieutenant Valcour drew a chair close to the _chaise longue_ upon
which Mrs. Endicott was nervously lying. Flung across her knees was a
robe of China silk, a black river bearing on its surface huge flowers
done in silver and slashed at its fringes with the jade chiffon of her
dress. He launched his campaign by first swinging, wordily, well wide
of its ultimate objective. His tone, from a deliberate casual
friendliness, was an anodyne to possible reservations, or fears.
“It is the tragedy of a detective’s life,” he said pleasantly, “that
the sudden slender contact he has with a case affords such a useless
background for human behaviour. You can see what I mean, Mrs.
Endicott. Were I you, or some intimate friend either of yourself or of
your husband, I would already be in possession of the countless little
threads that have woven the pattern of Mr. Endicott’s life for the
past five or ten years. You’ll forgive me for outraging oratory? It’s
a nasty habit I’ve contracted in later years whenever dealing with the
abstract. I’m not making a speech, really. What I’m trying to express
is that in that background, that pattern of Mr. Endicott’s life, one
thread or series of interrelated threads would stand out pretty
plainly as the reason why someone should wish to kill him.”
“I,” said Mrs. Endicott, “have several times wished to kill him.”
Lieutenant Valcour nodded. “There is nothing left for me but the trite
things to say about marriage. And trite things, after all, are the
true things, don’t you think?”
“If they’re just discovered. I mean by that, that to the person just
discovering their deadly aptness they’re true. Rather terribly so
sometimes.”
“But the aptness wears off with usage?”
Mrs. Endicott’s slender hand and arm were models of quietness in
motion as she reached for a cigarette. “Everything wears off with
usage,” she said. “Love quicker than anything else.”
“But it doesn’t wear off completely, love doesn’t, ever.”
Mrs. Endicott looked at him sharply. “Why are you a detective?” she
said.
“The accident of birth—of environment. Only geniuses, you know, ever
quite escape those two fatalities. My parents emigrated from France to
Canada, where my father held a certain reputation in my present
profession. My parents died. There was enough money to secure an
education at McGill—one had contacts here in the States . . .”
Lieutenant Valcour smiled infectiously. “I reversed Cæsar in that I
came, was seen, was conquered.”
Mrs. Endicott was amused. “How utterly conceited.”
“Isn’t it?”
The smile vanished from her face with the peculiar suddenness of some
conjuring trick. She veered abruptly. “What are they doing in my
husband’s room now?” she said.
“Dr. Worth and the medical examiner are determining the cause of
death.” Lieutenant Valcour transferred his attention to a Sargent
water colour above the mantel. “Dr. Worth has already expressed the
opinion that it was heart failure,” he said.
Mrs. Endicott offered no immediate comment. She withdrew, for a
moment, into some private chamber, and her voice was rather
expressionless when she spoke. “But that isn’t murder.”
“It could be—if the disease itself were used as a weapon.”
“I don’t believe that I understand.”
“Why, if some person who knew that Mr. Endicott was subject to heart
attacks were deliberately to shock or scare him suddenly, or even give
him a not especially forceful blow over the heart, and he were to die
as a result of any one of those things, that would be murder. It would
have to be proved pretty conclusively, of course, that it had been
done deliberately.”
Mrs. Endicott joined him in his continued inspection of the Sargent.
“It would indicate a rather circumscribed field for suspects, too,
don’t you think?”
“Yes. One would confine one’s suspicions to those who were intimate
enough with him to know of his physical condition. But apart from all
that phase, there are those things we technically speak of as
‘attendant circumstances.’ They point to murder.”
Their glances brushed for a second in passing and then parted.
“Such as?”
Lieutenant Valcour explained, with certain reservations. “The note you
showed me—the position of Mr. Endicott in the cupboard—the fact that
he is completely dressed for out of doors, but there is no trace of
his hat—oh, several little things that speak quite plainly.” He
focussed her directly. “Where did Mr. Endicott usually keep his hats?”
“I’ve never noticed particularly. There’s a cupboard downstairs in the
entrance hall, and of course the one——”
“Yes, I’ve looked for it up here. I wonder whether you’d care to tell
me what happened—what you did, I mean, and what you remember of Mr.
Endicott’s movements from the time, say, of his reaching home this
afternoon.”
Mrs. Endicott’s face sought refuge in the very pith of candour. “Why,
nothing much—nothing unusual.”
Lieutenant Valcour laughed pleasantly. “That is where I fail in my
background,” he said. “The things done were usual to both of you and
therefore of no importance. To me, however, they would prove
interesting because of their unfamiliarity. Did you talk at all?”
“Elaborately.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“I said elaborately. Herbert makes a point of talking elaborately
whenever he’s lying.”
“I see—he was lying, then, about Marge Myles.”
“And unoriginally. But Herbert never was original, much, in his
emotions. He told me he was going to an impromptu reunion of some men
in his class at the Yale Club. These reunions have occurred with
astonishing regularity once a week for the past month, in spite of
their impromptu character. I detest having my intelligence insulted,”
she ended, not unfiercely, “more than anything else in the world.”
“You will forgive me for becoming personal, but I doubt whether Mr.
Endicott understood you very well.”
“He didn’t understand me at all.”
“And you, him?”
Mrs. Endicott momentarily disarranged the perfect arch of her
eyebrows. “I could see through him perfectly,” she said. “A child
could see through him. But understand him? I don’t think anyone could
understand Herbert. He made a fetish of reticence. He was,” she
concluded, “half animal.”
“And the other half rather cloudily complex?”
“A fog.”
“And when he came home this afternoon at five?”
“Five-thirty—nearer six, even.”
“Toward six, he joined you in the living room and gave you the weekly
excuse.”
“I didn’t say the living room. It was the top floor—you may have
noticed that this house has a peaked roof—in what would correspond in
the country to an attic——” She stopped sharply, and her defensive
veneer cracked for an instant, long enough to show that she was
definitely startled. “I——”
“You feel that you shouldn’t have told me that. Perhaps you shouldn’t.
If the fact of your having met Mr. Endicott in the attic has nothing
to do with the case at all, it will cause us to snoop around among
your personal affairs unnecessarily.”
“He didn’t ‘meet’ me there, as you say. He—I don’t know why he came up
there. I never will know why.”
“You didn’t ask him?”
Mrs. Endicott forced Lieutenant Valcour’s full attention by the almost
startling intentness of her eyes. “There has never been a direct
question put or answered between Herbert and me during the whole
period of our married or unmarried life,” she said. “My hold on him
was the static perfection of my features and a running, superficial
smartness in attitude and mind that passed for intellect. His hold on
me was that I loved him.”
“Even when you wished to kill him?”
“I suppose even then. Mind you, I never wished him _dead_—there’s a
difference.”
“Oh, quite.” Lieutenant Valcour smiled engagingly. “You often felt
like killing him, but you wanted it to stop right there.”
“You know, I wish you’d come to tea sometime——” Mrs. Endicott’s eyes
contracted sharply. Her voice became a definite apology, not to
Lieutenant Valcour, but as though its message were being sent along
obscure and private channels to some port where it would find her
husband. “There are moments,” she said, “when you make me forget.”
“Forgetting isn’t a sin. That’s natural. It’s not loving—being
mentally hurtful—that’s a sin. There isn’t any word exactly for what I
mean. Did you both stay in the attic and go through the trunk
together, or whatever it was you were going through?”
Mrs. Endicott smiled as if at some secret knowledge. “I wasn’t going
through a trunk,” she said.
“No? I just mentioned it, as nine times out of ten that’s what people
do in attics.”
“And the tenth customary thing,” said Mrs. Endicott, reaching for a
cigarette, “is suicide.”