4:41 a. m.—As the Colours of Dawn
“Well,” Lieutenant Valcour said, as he joined Dr. Worth in Endicott’s
room, “what do you think now?”
Dr. Worth was finished with bewilderments. In spite of the
camel’s-hair robe swathing him, he had recaptured to an impressive
extent his air of dignity.
“Lieutenant,” he said, “I think that my services are no longer
required in this house. With your permission, I shall dismiss the two
nurses and go home.”
“Why, certainly, Doctor, if you wish. The prosecuting attorney will
probably require your testimony to secure an indictment and will want
you later on at the trial, but I’m sure he will bother you just as
little as possible. We realize how annoying any court work is to a
doctor.”
“I shall be glad to testify whenever required.”
“Will you also let me know where to keep in touch with the two nurses?
Their testimony will be needed, too.”
Dr. Worth stated the name and address of the Nurses’ Home at which
Miss Vickers and Miss Murrow could always be reached, and Lieutenant
Valcour wrote them down in his notebook.
“Would it bother you very much, Lieutenant, to let Mrs. Endicott know
that I have gone, when you see her?”
“Not at all, Doctor.”
“I doubt whether she will require my services again.” He paused for a
moment at the doorway. “That woman, sir, is of iron.”
“I shouldn’t wonder, Doctor. At any rate, she is pretty thoroughly
encased in metal. I’ll send Cassidy along with you to pass you and the
nurses by O’Brian down at the door. No one can leave the house, you
see, without permission.”
“Thank you, Lieutenant. Good-bye.”
“Good-bye, Doctor, and thanks for all your assistance. Cassidy, come
back after you’ve seen the doctor out, and stay in the corridor. I’ll
call when I need you.”
“Yes, sir.”
The door closed, and Lieutenant Valcour was alone. With a persistence
that was becoming annoying, the same curious feeling of lurking danger
crept out at him from the room’s stillnesses. His nerves were usually
as steady as the quality reputed to be enjoyed by a rock, and the
strange little jumpings they were going in for were getting that
fabulous animal known as his goat.
He went over to the chair before the flat-topped desk and sat down.
There was that drawer filled with disordered papers to be gone
through. He removed the drawer and emptied it of its contents by the
simple expedient of turning it upside down onto the top of the desk.
There were, mixed up among bills and receipts, a surprising number of
letters from women. He read each one of them carefully and felt a
little sorrier, at the conclusion of each, for the future of the
race—not so much because of any danger to its morals as to its
mentality.
He made a little group of each batch of notes from the same woman. One
pile topped the list with the number of ten. These were signed “Bebe”
and were addressed with deplorable monotony to “My cave man.” Endicott
must have been rather an ass, he decided, as well as a pretty low sort
of an animal. It was all very well for Roberts to rave on about
soldiers, and simple hearts, and war, and things. That’s just what it
amounted to: raving. What if Endicott and, presumably, her brother had
had simple hearts. So had guinea pigs.
Lieutenant Valcour wondered whether everyone else connected with the
case was quite sane and he just a little mad. Roberts—Mrs.
Endicott—the housekeeper—Hollander—Madame Velasquez. They all seemed a
little touched, and that was a sign of madness when one considered
everyone else but one’s self insane. But no one was ever truly normal
under disagreeable and terrifying circumstances; at least, he had
never found anyone who was so.
The letters were meaningless as possible clues to a motive; just a
sticky conglomeration of lust, greed, dullness, and execrable taste.
He shoved them aside.
He watched the strengthening light of day as it came through the
window across the desk before him. Such sky as he saw was of rubbed
emerald, and the backs of the houses across the intervening gardens
were mauve and dark gray, with lines of lemon yellow running thinly
along their roofs.
He thought of _Bohême_—dawn always made him think of _Bohême_—and
hummed a bar or two of it softly. Then he thought of Mrs. Endicott,
and his thoughts were pastelled in the colours of the dawn: a woman of
half-tones and overlapping lacquer shades.
It became quite clear in his mind that she never would have killed her
husband. Or Hollander. That, in fact, she never would have killed
anybody at all. The belief became fixed, even in face of the sizeable
amount of evidence against her.
He reviewed her case, in digest, as the prosecuting attorney might
present it to a jury: from the very start there was that contrary fact
of her having telephoned for the police. Why? On the slender ground of
a pencilled note that might or might not have been a threat, and an
instinctive premonition that her husband was in danger. The
prosecution would thereupon interpolate a smart crack or two on the
general subject of premonitions, fortune tellings, and the Ace of
Spades. They would point out that people who committed crimes which
were bound to be shortly discovered occasionally got in touch with the
police in order to use the gesture as a premise of their innocence.
There were her definite admissions of intent to kill her husband—her
having left her bedroom immediately upon his having knocked and said
good-bye—and her recent most damaging actions in regard to the
narcotic and having been on the balcony.
Motive?
The prosecuting attorney could offer a thousand. The most prominent
ones would include a jealous rage at her husband’s easily proved
peccadillos with other women and her own rather significant attitude
toward Hollander. Yes, it would be only too possible for the
prosecuting attorney to get a conviction against Mrs. Endicott, and to
rope Hollander in as an accomplice. He’d want the weapon, though, to
make the case complete. Lieutenant Valcour had forgotten about the
weapon. He stood up, went to the door, and opened it. Hansen was
standing outside, having taken his post there until Cassidy should
come back from letting out Dr. Worth and the nurses.
“Hansen,” Lieutenant Valcour said, “I want you to search the backyard
for a revolver that may have been thrown there from the balcony. If
you can’t find it, search the two adjoining backyards, and the three
in the rear as well. Don’t wake up the people in the other houses,
just get a stepladder and cross the party walls.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Report to me as soon as you’ve finished, or find anything.”
“Yes, sir.”
Lieutenant Valcour closed the door again. The revolver would clinch
the case: Mrs. Endicott the principal, and Hollander the accomplice.
What a sweet bunch of muck it would be, too. There were all sorts of
sob angles: Hollander and Endicott as Damon and Pythias, brothers in
arms during the war who were transformed through the vicious caprice
of a siren into Cain and Abel. Or would Mrs. Endicott spatter the
tabloids as a woman wronged who had by a reversal of the usual
position of the sexes taken her just revenge beneath the legendary
cloak of the unwritten law? If her lawyers were smart, she would. And
they would be smart, too. She’d probably have the most impressive
battery of legal guns that were procurable in the state lined up on
her side.
It wasn’t the gun only that Lieutenant Valcour wanted. There was
something else. Endicott’s hat: that was it. How did the person who
had been caught in the cupboard fit in with Endicott’s hat? The answer
came to him with the sudden clearness that will enlighten a problem
that the subconscious mind has been working on for some time. The hat
was the final touch to the person’s disguise. And the fact would
pre-suppose a woman. A man’s hat would add immeasurably to any
disguise adopted by a woman.
But which woman?
And why had his hat been in the cupboard?
And still there was no answer to the baffling question as to what had
been the object of the search through Endicott’s pockets and his
papers. There was, of course, a perfectly plain and logically possible
solution: the object or paper, whatever it was, had been found and had
been carried off by the thief along with Endicott’s hat and the top
button from his overcoat. And if such were the case, just what that
object or paper was might never be known.
For the fourth time since he had been sitting at the desk Lieutenant
Valcour sniffed the air. There was a faint trace of scent—a curiously
reminiscent odour—all but intangible, but which he was quite certain
he had encountered in some different locality at some time during the
night. It was only apparent when he sat at the desk, and the deduction
was reached without too much mental labour that it must, hence,
emanate from something connected with the desk. Perhaps that aperture
from which he had pulled the drawer——
The telephone rang sharply. He drew the instrument to him across the
top of the desk, and took the receiver from the hook.
The call came, he was informed, from Central Office.