The Door Read online

  “And why would Jim Blake cover those footprints as skillfully as he did, and then bury that cane in his cellar? The act of a fool or a lunatic, and the man who made those prints was neither.”

  “Have you told the District Attorney all this, Inspector?”

  “He wants an indictment. That’s his business.” And he added: “A man who’s been indicted by the Grand Jury has a pretty hard time of it. His trial may prove him innocent, but he’s got the stigma anyhow.”

  He picked up a pencil from my desk, examined it, laid it down.

  “Let’s go back still farther,” he said, “to when Blake first talked to you about Sarah Gittings’ disappearance. When was that, and where?”

  “In this room, the next day. When she did not come back I sent for him. He was uneasy, but that was all.”

  “You recall nothing else?”

  “Nothing important. I remember now that he asked about Howard.”

  “What did he ask?”

  “It was something about his health, and if he was able to travel; if he had been here lately.”

  The Inspector slid forward on his chair.

  “That’s an interesting point. Now why would he ask such a question? The talk, I gather, had been about Sarah Gittings?”

  “Entirely.”

  “And he knew Mr. Somers’ condition, of course. Did you understand from that that he had reasons for thinking that Somers had been in town?”

  “Yes. I remember that it surprised me. He asked me if I was certain that Howard had not been in town. I thought it unlikely, myself.”

  “I suppose you have no reason to think that he had been here?” And when I shook my head, “Don’t answer that too quickly. Think it over, Miss Bell. Sometimes we think we know all about certain individuals, only to find that we know nothing at all. Why did Howard Somers secretly alter his will last summer while he was here? What is this secret fund of fifty thousand dollars? And what made Mr. Blake ask if he had been here recently?”

  “I don’t believe Howard was here. He was ill, and his wife seldom left him.”

  “But it would be possible? Some night when his wife had retired early? Or was out to dinner? He had a fast car, of course, and a dependable chauffeur.”

  “Possibly? Yes, I daresay. But why?”

  “That’s the point, exactly. If you can induce Mr. Blake to tell his attorneys why he asked you that question it might be helpful.” He moved impatiently.

  “If people only told all they knew, there would be no miscarriages of justice. But out of fear or self-interest or the idea of protecting somebody they keep their mouths shut, and so we have these mysteries. Look at you yourself; you burn that carpet, and produce evidence against Jim Blake that to the average jury is enough to send him to the chair! Why did you burn it? What did you find that we’d overlooked? I’d been over that carpet with a fine tooth comb.”

  “And there was no oil on it?”

  “Oil! You found oil on that carpet?”

  “I did indeed. A ring of oil.”

  He got up and reached for his hat.

  “It may interest you to know,” he said, “that there was no oil on that carpet when I examined it, the morning after Florence Gunther’s murder.”

  But whatever conclusion he drew from that, his last speech that night was small comfort to me.

  “Well, I don’t see how that will help with a jury,” he said, rather heavily. “On the surface it’s a water-tight case, Miss Bell. He had the weapon and the motive. The only thing he didn’t have—and you’ll have to excuse the word—was the guts. Mind you,” he added, “I’m not saying that Blake is innocent. He looks as guilty as hell. But I am saying that there are discrepancies, and I’ve got to have an explanation of some of them.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  THAT WAS ON WEDNESDAY the eighteenth, a month after Sarah’s death and about six weeks before Joseph was shot.

  I went upstairs that night exhausted both mentally and physically, to find Judy curled on my bed and very despondent.

  “Let me stay awhile,” she pleaded. “Until mother comes in, anyhow. I want to talk.”

  “I didn’t know she had gone out,” I said in surprise.

  “She took Robert and the car. I think she went to Uncle Jim’s. To Pine Street.”

  That surprised me, but Judy explained that it was to select some clothing to be sent to the jail.

  “Only why would it take her all this time—” she added, almost pettishly.

  “I didn’t hear the car.”

  “You’re a little deaf, you know, Elizabeth Jane. I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot goes on that you don’t hear. Or hear about.”

  “What goes on that I don’t hear about?”

  “You didn’t hear Elise scream last night.”

  “I had taken a sleeping tablet,” I said with dignity. “And what did Elise scream about?”

  “She saw the ghost,” said Judy.

  And when I came to examine that story, and to talk to Elise, I had to admit that she had seen something.

  The Frenchwoman was still pale when I saw her. It appears that she had wanted to tell me the story, but that Joseph had sternly ordered her to keep quiet. Also that she was under no circumstances to tell the women servants, or she might “have the cooking and housework on her hands.” That seems to have been sufficient, but she had told Judy, talking in her rapid gesticulating French.

  But her story gained credibility by the fact that she spoke no English, although she had understood Joseph well enough. She could have had no knowledge of the talk in the kitchen and servants’ hall, and indeed Joseph had told me later that he had warned both women to keep their mouths closed over the whole business.

  Her story, punctuated by dramatic pauses where Judy saw that my French was inadequate, was as follows:

  She was occupying Mary Martin’s room, and the night as I have said was sultry and like midsummer. She went to bed leaving her door open, but the breeze was from the opposite side of the house. She got up and opened the door across, thinking that it belonged to a room there.

  It was, however, the door to the attic staircase which she had opened, and she was surprised to find not only the steps but that a faint light was going somewhere above.

  She was curious rather than alarmed. In her bare feet and night dress she went on up quietly, but not thinking of caution. However, near the top she must have made some sound. She had only an instant to see a white figure bending over something. The next moment she was stumbling down the staircase. But she was not quick enough. The thing, and she shuddered when she said it, the thing overtook her and passed her. She felt the brushing of its spectral garments, as she put it, and it was then that she screamed.

  When Joseph found her—the women would not stir out of their rooms—she was locked in her room and was still screaming. It was some time before he could induce her to open her door.

  When I talked to her, which was that night, she was still sitting in Katherine’s room and obstinately refusing to go to bed.

  “I think you dreamed it, Elise,” said Judy. “What’s the use of being a fool? There is no such thing as a ghost.”

  “I saw it. I touched it, mademoiselle.”

  “Well, you can’t touch a ghost. And mind you, nothing of this nonsense to mother. Go to bed and say your prayers. That ought to help.”

  We had to take her up ourselves finally, and wait until she was safely locked in. Then and only then did Judy look directly at me.

  “Now,” she said. “She saw something, or somebody. She may be an idiot, but I’ll say this for her. It takes a lot to keep her out of her bed.”

  Together we went up to the attic, but although it was rather ghastly at that hour of the night, I could not find that anything had been disturbed. Judy, it appeared, had been up before, and had found nothing.

  It was from Joseph, still waiting in the pantry to admit Katherine, that I secured what looked like a partial explanation.

  “The sew
ing room window on the second floor was open,” he said. “I think he got out there, madam. He could drop to the roof of the kitchen porch.”

  He had, it seems, instructed Elise to say that she had seen a mouse! Which, as Judy said, was from the sublime to the ridiculous.

  Katherine came in very late, and I thought she looked rather better.

  She had been going over Jim’s house, she said, and she had decided to move over there.

  “It looks as though I shall be here for some time, Elizabeth,” she said. “At least until they have cleared Jim of this ridiculous trumped-up charge. And there are three of us. I don’t like to crowd you. I can get the servants from New York, and be quite comfortable.”

  I made no demur. I saw that she was determined, although Judy looked rather unhappy over it.

  “What will you do with Amos?”

  “I shall let him go,” she said with decision. “I don’t like him and I don’t trust him.”

  The net result of which was that Amos gave his damaging testimony before the Grand Jury and then disappeared.

  That was on Friday, May the twentieth.

  I daresay some such system must exist, but the whole proceeding drove me almost to madness. And it was sheer farce from beginning to end. The result was a foregone conclusion, with, as Godfrey Lowell says, the indictment typed and ready to sign before it began.

  There was no chance from the first; from that sonorous opening by the District Attorney: “Gentlemen of the Grand Jury, it becomes my duty this morning to bring to your attention a most serious case. On the night of the eighteenth of April last, when most of us were peacefully asleep in our beds, a human life was ended under circumstances so brutal that they stun the normal mind. A woman named Sarah Gittings, a nurse, devoted solely to a career of service, was atrociously murdered.” There followed certain details, dramatically presented, and after that: “Through the efforts of the police department an array of facts has been discovered, which point to a certain individual as the guilty man. These facts will now be presented to you by certain witnesses, and it is for you to decide whether a true bill shall be presented against this prisoner, or not.

  “Shall we proceed, Mr. Foreman?”

  From that until the end the mounting testimony against Jim was appalling. The District Attorney grew more and more unctuous, and his secret satisfaction was evident. When all was over he made, I believe, a dramatic gesture with his hands, and standing by the table, ran his eyes along the half circle of chairs.

  “Gentlemen,” he said, in a low voice. “I have done my duty. Now must you do yours.”

  As he closed the door behind him and stepped into the hall, Dick says that he was still acting for the benefit of the press men and the crowd. He stood still, half leaning against the door like an exhausted man, and mopped his forehead with a fine handkerchief, faintly scented. Then he drew himself up, justice personified, and marched along the corridor.

  But in between those two dramatic moments were two days of sheer horror for us.

  The secrecy of the procedure, the oaths of silence, the occasional cheerful amusement of the twenty-three men who sat in that semicircle of chairs, the terrified or determined faces of the witnesses, the avid crowd of reporters outside studying these faces as they came and went, and then rushing to their typewriters: “It is reported that Miss Bell stated—”

  Building a case that might send a man to the chair, out of staircase gossip, a look, a gesture, or such information as was refused by the District Attorney but managed somehow to reach them via his office.

  Experts came and went. The heap of exhibits on the long table grew; poor Sarah’s stained and pierced clothing, the ghastly fragments of Florence Gunther’s checked dress and blue coat, for although Jim was only charged with Sarah’s murder, there were no legal limits, no laws of testimony, to be considered before the Grand Jury.

  The sword-stick was brought in, its ancient mechanism arousing a sort of childlike interest among the jurymen; and small boxes of earth, each duly ticketed and bearing the impress of the stick as Jim had touched the ground with it. And Dick telephoned once to say that there was a story among the newspaper men that something had been carried in, carefully covered with a cloth, and that the story was that a letter Jim had burned had been restored, and had been introduced as incriminating.

  We were all in the library, and I thought Katherine started when Judy repeated this. But she said nothing. She sat staring at her emerald ring, and made no comment.

  The list of exhibits grew. Sarah’s uniform, with a mirror so that the writing on the sleeve might be read; the plaster casts of the foot marks Inspector Harrison had made in my garden; the snaps from the carpet which had been rescued from my furnace; even the pencil which Wallie had found in the airshaft, the fragments of broken glass from my drawing room door, the rope which had once tied the dogs, and had later on been used to drag poor Sarah’s body down the hill; and certain pages in Sarah’s own hand of her sick-room records, designed to show that the reversed writing on Sarah’s sleeve was authentic.

  There were photographs, also. Showing the sewer structure, showing poor Sarah within it, showing the well-marked spot where the body had lain near the tree, and that room of hers as it was discovered the next day. Florence’s room was there too, and Sarah’s, in the disorder in which we had found it on the morning of the nineteenth of April.

  It must have been like sitting through a crime play to those jurymen, lifted out of their humdrum lives into that welter of crime and clues and blood.

  And against all that, what had we? My own testimony, received with evident scepticism, that the man on my stairs the night of Sarah’s murder had not worn light golf knickers, but conventional trousers! At no time was it brought out that the stains in Jim’s car had been put there later; were not there when the police examined it the following day. It was sufficient that I had burned the carpet. And when I suggested that any juryman over forty was welcome to try to hang in the light shaft by his hands, and then to try to pull himself out of it, there was general laughter.

  There was also one other development which left us in little doubt of the final outcome. This was the introduction on the second day of the colored woman, Clarissa, from the Bassett house on Halkett Street.

  It was Dick too who reported this to us. He had seen her taken in, uneasy and yet somehow deadly. A big woman, powerful and determined but frightened. When she came out her relief was manifest, and Dick took advantage of that relief. He followed her, caught her at a corner, and brought us what he had learned.

  Briefly this woman, Clarissa, having positively identified Jim at the jail, stated that on the night of Sarah’s murder he had spent some time at the Halkett Street house with Florence Gunther. He had sat in the parlor with her for an hour or more, and she remembered that he had a stick.

  That we already knew. But she had further testified that, going forward to lock the front door before leaving for the night, she had heard Jim speaking and that she remembered distinctly what he had said.

  “He said: ‘I’d better start, then. I may meet her on the way back.’”

  Some little hope however we had on the second day. The jury sent out for copies of the two wills, and they were duly produced. It looked for a time as though they might be looking for a larger picture; that the clause referring to the fifty thousand dollars might lead elsewhere.

  But to offset that the District Attorney produced those two exhibits which he had held for the psychological moment. He brought in Jim’s walking suit and his golf shoes, to prove that by laboratory test there was blood in minute quantities on both. And he re-introduced the sword-stick.

  The blade of the weapon had been carefully washed, but from inside the sheath, when it had been soaked in the laboratory, there had come a pine needle of the same variety as had been found on Sarah’s clothing; and unmistakable traces of blood. Human blood.

  It was after that that the District Attorney made his dramatic gesture.

/>   “Gentlemen, I have done my duty. Now must you do yours.”

  I daresay none of us was greatly surprised at the outcome. Certainly at least twenty-two out of the twenty-three men on the Grand Jury believed Jim guilty, and the indictment was signed, late on the second day.

  Katherine received the news better than I had expected.

  “An indictment is not a verdict,” she said, quoting Godfrey Lowell, no doubt.

  Judy, however, took it very hard and as for Wallie, the effect on him seemed devastating. Newspaper extras had announced the result, and he came in while Judy and I were at dinner. Katherine had retired to her bed, and to tea and toast on a tray.

  “The damned fools!” he said. “The—damned fools!”

  Judy looked at him out of eyes that were red and swollen.

  “Since when have you changed your mind? You were sure enough.”

  “Well, I was a damned fool myself. That’s all. He didn’t do it. And he’ll never suffer for it; I promise you that, Judy. Nothing is going to happen to him.”

  “Even if you have to tell all you know? Why don’t you do that now and save time? You might die or get run over, and then where is he?”

  He said nothing. I had had a good look at him by that time and I must confess that his appearance shocked me. His clothes were unpressed; his eyes were congested, as from sleepless nights, and he had developed a curious tic; now and again, by some involuntary contraction of the muscles, his left shoulder lifted and his head jerked to the right. I saw that he tried to control it by keeping his left hand in his coat pocket, but in spite of him up would go the shoulder. It was pitiful.

  I saw, too, that he had not wanted to come; that he had dreaded the visit, and that to reinforce his courage he had taken a drink or two before he started. Not that he showed any effect, but that the room was full of it.

  Judy eyed him.

  “You look terrible,” she said. “And stop jerking. You’ll have me doing it. Stop jerking and tell us where Mary Martin is.”