8:37 p. m.—Five Years Later
Mrs. Hollander thought for a moment of simply dialling the operator
and saying, “I want a policeman.”
It was what the printed notices in the telephone directory urged one
to do in case of an emergency. But it wasn’t an emergency exactly,
nor—still exactly—was it a policeman she wanted. She wanted a
detective, or an inspector, or something; a man to whom she could
explain her worry about Thomas, and who could do something about it if
he agreed with her that Thomas was in danger.
Mrs. Hollander wanted most of all a man like Lieutenant Valcour, who
had so ably handled that wretched affair five years ago when she had
been married to Herbert and Herbert had been shot. She wondered
whether Lieutenant Valcour was still on the force, and decided to find
out. She dialled Spring 3100. She grew nervous while waiting.
“This is Mrs. Thomas Hollander speaking,” she said, when the same type
of impersonal, efficient voice answered her as had been the one five
years before. “I am ’phoning to inquire whether a Lieutenant Valcour
is still connected with the police force. . . . I beg your pardon?
Oh.” She gave the address of her apartment house on Park Avenue.
“This is Mrs. Thomas Hollander speaking,” she began again upon a
second voice saying, “Hello!” “and I am trying to get in touch with a
Lieutenant Valcour who—— I beg your pardon? . . . You _are_ Lieutenant
Valcour—Inspector, is it? But how perfectly efficient! I am worried,
Inspector, about Mr. Hollander, and I wonder whether it would be
possible for you to come up and talk it over with me. . . . No, he
hasn’t disappeared. I know exactly where he has gone, but I have
reason to believe that something might happen to him. . . . Yes, I am
the Mrs. Hollander who was formerly Mrs. Herbert Endicott. . . . Yes,
that dreadful affair. . . . Oh, you will? Thank you so much.”
Inspector Valcour smiled a curiously satisfied little smile all to
himself as he sat in a department limousine, chauffeured by a
department driver, and sped smoothly north along Lafayette Street on
the way to Mrs. Hollander’s address on Park Avenue.
And he thought of many things.
He thought of Marge Myles and of Herbert Endicott, who were dead; and
of Madame Velasquez who, too, had died.
He thought of Mrs. Siddons, returned to her native New England hills,
sinking her body and her being into their granite harshnesses and
drawing amazing sustenance from them, as a flower will that grows in
the imperceptible fissure of some solid rock.
He thought of Roberts whom he had never seen again and of whom he had
never again heard, after the violation of the Sullivan Law had been
charged against her, and her sentence suspended. She had gone back to
England, probably, to lapse into a proper background for her neurotic
broodings.
And that partner of Hollander’s—the Southernistic Mr. Smith. He had
faded entirely, never to return; nor was the fact of any consequence
at all. He had been at best a side issue too unimportant for further
bother.
But most of all he thought of Mrs. Endicott, who was now Mrs.
Hollander.
The annals of history and the annals of crime were fringed with women
just like her: beautiful, astonishing women, who revolved with their
uncertainties like satellites about the world of normal beings,
trailing their baleful, striking brilliance like an impalpable
poisonous gas across the surface of every person whom they plucked and
tortured within the intricate enigma of their hearts. The law never
could touch her—nor could a person, either. She would escape. She
would always escape, with the subtlety of mercury slipping between
impotent fingers.
For she _had_ escaped.
There wasn’t any doubt in his mind about that. She had been the focal
point five years ago in that Endicott case, no matter what the law or
men might say. Her forgery of that postscript had had a deeper, a more
deliberate intention than the mere breaking up of any affair between
her husband and Marge Myles: it was to have been a breaking up of all
of his affairs. Of him.
She was the true murderer of her husband, and not Marge Myles. She had
simply spread the powder train to a suitably lethal explosive and had
then applied the match. The movements of the others had been nothing
more than gyrations performed by stringed puppets. And she had held
the strings. Some of her puppets had died, committed suicide, and been
killed. And it didn’t matter in the least. The world was ageless, she
herself was ageless, and plenty of puppets grew perennially every
spring.
Inspector Valcour wondered, as he descended to the curb and prepared
to enter the lift to her apartment, whether Thomas had become a
puppet, too.
The End
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE
This transcription is made from the text of the 1929 edition published
by Doubleday, Doran & Company, Inc. However, the following errors have
been corrected from the original text:
* “stubborness” was changed to “stubbornness” (Chapter I).
* “It’s contents” was changed to “Its contents” (Chapter I).
* “pressent” was changed to “present” (Chapter IX).
* “telehone” was changed to “telephone” (Chapter XI).
* “occasionallly” was changed to “occasionally” (Chapter XXIV).
* “Endicoott” was changed to “Endicott” (Chapter XXVI).
* “and than had” was changed to “and then had” (Chapter XXVI).
* “chauffered” was changed to “chauffeured” (Chapter XXXI).