After the inquest there was no more question about who was suspected. It
was as if every finger in Longwood was raised and pointed to Mapleshade.
The cautious people didn't say it plain--especially the shop-keepers who
were afraid of losing custom--but those who had nothing to gain by
keeping still came out with it flatfooted.
It wasn't only that nobody liked the Doctor, or believed his story, it
was because the people were wild at what had been done. They wanted to
find the murderer and put him behind bars and seeing that things pointed
more clearly to Dr. Fowler than to anybody else they pitched on him. All
the gossip about the quarreling came out blacker than ever. The papers
were full of it and the other worse stories, about Sylvia's allowance
and the will of her father. There wasn't a bit of dirty linen in the
Fowler household that wasn't washed and hung out on the line for the
public to gape at, and some of it was dirtier when they'd got through
washing than it had been before.
There were those who didn't scruple to say that the whole tragedy was a
frame-up between Virginie Dupont and the Doctor. If you talked sensible
to them and asked them how Virginie could have got word to him that
Sylvia was running away, they'd just push that to one side, saying it
could be explained some way, everything wasn't known yet--but one thing
you _could_ be sure of--the one person who knew the whereabouts of that
French woman was Dr. Daniel Fowler.
I believe there were some days after the inquest when, if there'd been
an anarchist or agitator to stand on the postoffice steps and yell that
Dr. Fowler ought to be jailed, a crowd would have gathered, gone down to
Mapleshade, and demanded him.
Fortunately there was no one of that kind around, and he stayed quiet in
his home, not even coming to the village. Two days after the inquest I
saw Anne and she said he and Mrs. Fowler hadn't been out of the
house--that they were in a state of siege what with reporters and the
police and morbid cranks who hung round the grounds looking up at the
windows.
That same evening I stayed over time in the Exchange, lending a hand.
The work was something awful, and Katie Reilly, the new girl, was most
snowed under and on the way to lose her head. I wanted to see her
through and I wanted the credit of the office kept up, but it's also
true that I wanted to be on the job myself and hear all that was
passing. Believe me, it was hard to quiet down in my bedroom at night
after eight hours at the switchboard right in the thick of the
excitement. Besides, I'd got to know the reporters pretty well and it
was fun making them think I could give them leads and then guying them.
I liked Babbitts the best, but there were three others that weren't bad
as men go. One was Jones, a tall thin chap like an actor, with long
black hair hanging down to his collar, and Freddy Jasper, who was
English and talked with an awful swell dialect, and a sallow-skinned,
consumpted-looking guy called Yerrington who belonged on a paper as
yellow as his face and always went round with a cigarette hanging from
his lip like it was stuck on with glue.
It was nearly eight and work was slacking off when I started to go home.
What with the jump I'd been on and listening to the gabbing round the
door I'd forgotten my supper. It wasn't till I saw the Gilt Edge window
with a nice pile of apples stacked up round a pumpkin, that I remembered
I was hungry and walked over. There were only three people in the place,
Florrie Stein, the waitress, and a woman with a kid in the corner.
I was just finishing my corn beef hash with a cup of coffee at my elbow
and stewed prunes on the line of promotion when Soapy and Jones and
Jasper came in and asked me if they could sit at my table. "Please
yourself," said I, "and you'll please me," for politeness is one of the
things I was bred up to, and they sat down, calling out their orders to
Florrie Stein.
They naturally began talking about "the case"--it was all anybody talked
about just then--and for all I knew so much about it, I generally picked
up some new bits from them. So I went to the extravagance of three cents
worth of jelly roll, not because I wanted it, but because I could crumb
it up and eat it slow and not give away I was sitting on to listen.
"We can talk before you, Miss Morganthau," said Babbitts, "because while
we all agree you're the belle of Longwood, we've found out by sad
experience you're a belle without a tongue."
Florrie Stein, bringing the food then, they were silent till she'd set
it out, and when she'd drawn off to the cashier's desk, they started in
again. They were, so to speak, looking over Hines as a suspect.
"No, Hines won't fit," said Babbitts. "The presence of the jewelry on
the body eliminates him. They've dug up his record and though the place
he ran wasn't to be recommended for Sunday school picnics, the man
himself seems to have been fairly decent."
"It's odd about the bag--the fitted bag and the jewelry gone from the
room," said Jasper.
"The police have an idea that Virginie Dupont could tell something of
them."
"Theft?"
"Theft on the side."
"Oh, pshaw!" said Jones, "what's the good of complicating things? If
theft was committed it was a frame-up, part of a plot."
"You believe in this idea they've got in the village that Fowler and the
French woman worked together?"
"I do--to my mind the murderer's marked as plain as Cain after he was
branded on the brow or wherever it was."
Then Jasper spoke up. He's a nice quiet chap, not as fresh as the
others. "Let's hear what you base that assertion on."
Jones forgot his supper and twisted round sideways in his chair, looking
thoughtful up at the cornice:
"As I understand it, in a murder two things are necessary--a crime and a
corpse; and in a murderer one, a motive. Now we have all three--the
motive especially strong. If Miss Hesketh married, her stepfather lost
his home and the money he had been living on, so he tried to stop her
from marrying. Saturday night he heard that his efforts had failed. I
fancy that on Sunday morning when he went for that auto drive he stopped
at some village--not as yet located--and communicated with Virginie
Dupont, who was in his pay. She, too, went out that morning, you may
remember."
"There's a good deal of surmise about this," said Babbitts.
Jones gave him a scornful look.
"If the links in the chain were perfect Dr. Fowler'd be eating his
dinner to-night in Bloomington Jail."
"How do you account for Miss Hesketh--presupposing it was she--being on
the train instead of the turnpike?" said Jasper.
"A change of plans," Jones answered calmly, "also not yet satisfactorily
cleared up. To continue: Sometime on Sunday the Doctor conceived the
plan of ridding himself of all his cares--his troublesome stepdaughter,
the disturbance of his home and his financial distress. _How_," he
turned and looked solemnly at us, fate played so well into his hands I
can't yet explain--the main point is that it did. He met Miss Hesketh at
the Junction, either by threats, persuasion or coercion made her enter
his auto and carried her up the road to the turnpike.
"And now," said Babbitts, leaning his arms on the table, "we come to her
appearance in the Wayside Arbor."
"We do," Jones replied, nodding his head. "You may remember that both
Hines and his servant said there were twigs and leaves on the edge of
her skirt and that her boots were muddy. Traces of this were still
visible in her clothes when they found her body. She _did_ get out of
the automobile, but not so far from the turnpike as he said. Either he
and she had some fierce quarrel and she ran from him in rage or terror,
or he may have told the truth and she slipped out at the turn from the
Riven Rock Road without his knowledge. Anyway she got away from him and
ran for the only light she saw. There she telephoned Reddy, withholding
the main facts from him, perhaps merely to save time, but cautioning him
against letting anyone know of the message. That, as I see it, was a
natural feminine desire to guard against gossip. When she thought Reddy
was due she started out to meet him--and instead met the Doctor."
"Who'd been hanging about for a half-hour on the roadside?"
"Precisely. He killed her, concealed the body, and went home."
"Just a minute," said Yerrington--"what did he kill her with? The weapon
used is a disputed point. Many think it was a farm implement. Did he go
across lots to Cresset's and arm himself with a convenient spade or rake
for the fatherly purpose of slaying his stepdaughter?"
But you couldn't phase Jones, he said as calm as a May morning:
"He _could_ have done that. But I don't think he did. He didn't need it.
The tool box of the car was nearer to hand. A large-sized auto wrench is
a pretty formidable weapon, and a tire wrench--did you ever see one? One
well-aimed blow of that would crush in the head of a negro."
"Gentlemen, the evidence is all in," said Babbitts.
"Your case might hold water," said Jasper, "if it wasn't as full of
holes as a sieve. Why, you can make out as good a one for almost
anybody."
"Who, for example?" Jones asked.
"Well--take Reddy."
"Jack Reddy?" I said that, sitting up suddenly and staring at them with
a piece of jelly roll halfway to my mouth.
"He's as good as another," said Jasper, and then he added sort of
dreamy: "I believe I could work up quite a convincing case against
Reddy, allowing for a hole here and there. But our illustrious friend
here admits holes at this stage."
"Fire away," said Babbitts. "Give it to us, holes and all."
"Well--off the bat here it is. You may remember that no one saw him
coming back from Maple Lane that night. There is no one, therefore, to
deny that he may have had Miss Hesketh in the car with him. Instead of
going back to Firehill, as he says he did, he followed his original plan
of taking her by the turnpike."
"Right at the start I challenge that," said Babbitts. "She appeared at
the Wayside Arbor at nine-thirty. The date in Maple Lane was for seven.
Supposing she kept it and was on time--which is a stretch of the
imagination--he would have had to travel one hundred and eighteen miles
in two hours and a half."
"He could have done it."
"On a black, dark night? nearly forty-eight miles an hour?"
"You forget he knew the road and was driving a high-powered racing car.
It's improbable but not impossible."
"I count that as a hole, but go on."
"Now in this hypothetical case we'll suppose that as that car flew over
the miles the man and the woman in it had high words?"
"Hold on," said Jones, holding out his fork--"that's too big a hole.
They were lovers eloping, not an old married couple."
"I'll explain that later. The high words inflamed and enraged the man to
the point of murder and he conceived a horrible plan. As they neared the
Wayside Arbor he told the woman something was wrong with the car and
sent her to the place ostensibly to telephone, really to establish her
presence there at a time when, had she been with him, she could hardly
have got that far."
I jumped in there. I knew it was only fooling, but even so I didn't like
hearing Mr. Reddy talked about that way.
"Who did he send her to telephone to, Mr. Jasper--himself?"
Babbitts laughed and jerked his head toward me.
"Listen to our little belle sounding the curfew on Jasper."
But Mr. Jasper was ready.
"He could have done that, knowing his house was empty. Hines, you
remember, said she wasn't five minutes in the booth. We've only Reddy's
word for that message. We don't even know if she got a connection. I
telephoned out to the Corona operator Saturday and she answered that
there was no record of the message and she herself remembered nothing
about it."
"But Sylvia," I said--"she told Hines she was expecting someone to come
for her."
"Sylvia was eloping. Mightn't she have told Hines--who was curious and
intrusive--what wasn't true?"
A sort of hush fell on us all. Babbitts's face and Jones's, from being
just amused, were intent and interested.
"Go ahead, Jasper," said Babbitts, "if this isn't buying the baby a
frock it's good yarning."
Jasper went on.
"Her story of the broken automobile _she_ believed to be true. But she
didn't want Hines to know who she was or what she was up to, so she
invented the person coming to take her home. Why she sat so long there
talking is--I'll admit--a hole, but I said in the beginning there would
be some. The end is just like the end of Jones's case. She went back to
Reddy and he killed her with, as our friend has suggested, one of the
auto tools. Very soon after it would have been as that Bohemian--what's
her name?--heard the scream at ten-ten."
"That's all very well," said Jones, "but before we go further I'd like
you to furnish us with a motive."
"Nothing easier--jealousy."
"Jealousy!" I said, sudden and sharp.
"Jealousy in its most violent form. The lady in this case was a peculiar
type--a natural born siren. She had made the man jealous, furiously
jealous. _That_ was the reason of the high words in the motor."
"Who was he jealous of?" It was I again who asked that.
Jasper turned round and looked at me with a smile.
"Why, Miss Morganthau," he said, "_you_ gave us the clue to that. He was
jealous of the man who made the date you heard on the phone. Don't you
see," he said, turning to the others, "_that_ man kept his date and
Reddy came and found him there."
I can't tell what it was that fell on us and made us sit so still for a
minute. All of us knew it was just a joke, but--for me, anyway--it was
as if a cloud had settled on the room. Babbitts sat smoking a cigarette
and staring at the rings he was making with his eyes screwed up.
Presently, when Jones spoke, his voice had a sound like his pride was
taken down.
"A great deal better than I expected, but it's simply riddled with
holes."
Before Jasper could answer the door opened and Yerrington came in. The
cigarette was hanging off his lip and as he said "Good evening" to me it
wobbled but clung on. Then he pulled out a chair, sat down and, looking
at the other three with a gleam in his eye, said:
"A little while ago Dr. Fowler's chauffeur in dusting out his car found
the gold mesh purse squeezed down between the back and the cushion."