The Door Read online

  “Who’s there?”

  In the silence which followed we both heard the front door softly close.

  Evidently Mrs. Bassett’s husband, or whoever the stealthy visitor might be, had found himself locked in the kitchen, and when we went there had taken refuge in the pantry. There were two swinging doors, and the opening of the one, as we found by experiment, caused the other to move. As he escaped by the simple expedient of going forward through the dining room, this had happened.

  But as Lily said, now blind to the proprieties and sitting weakly in a chair with her slippers in her hand, why escape at all?

  “I don’t believe it was her husband, Miss Bell,” she said. “Anybody could come here and say that. That’s why I went upstairs.”

  “To see if it was her husband?”

  “To see if he had murdered her,” she said, and somehow my blood ran cold.

  I took a taxicab home that night, and I did not feel safe until I was in my own house once more, with Joseph double barring the door and the dogs, as usual in my absences, settled on the best library chairs.

  I told the Inspector the next day of that experience in the Halkett Street house, but he pooh-poohed the idea of its having any connection with the crimes.

  “Why make so much of it?” he said. “Most men tiptoe out of a sickroom. They may raise the devil inside but they tiptoe out. Watch that some time. And as for his hiding, well, maybe he did and maybe he didn’t. How do you know he hadn’t been crying? He’d rather be caught without his clothes than crying.”

  He was not so certain, however, after he had seen Mrs. Bassett that night. He had arranged with Lily Sanderson as I had, and this time the daughter was out. He stopped by on his way home.

  “Not that I got anything,” he said. “But there’s something peculiar there.”

  She had absolutely refused to talk. Asked about her request for the police some time before, she denied having made it.

  “I get queer ideas when I’ve had the dope they give me,” she said, and lay there quietly, looking at something he could not see.

  When he tried to discuss the murder of Florence Gunther she said nothing whatever. Nor was she much more communicative about her husband.

  “My daughter’s a good girl, but the least said of him the better.”

  Then she had said she was in pain and had called sharply for Lily, and he had come away.

  “But she knows something,” he told me. “Not necessarily that the husband has anything to do with it. She knows something. She had a queer look about her. I’ve seen it before.”

  “What sort of look?”

  “I saw it once before in the face of a man just before he jumped out of a tenth story window.”

  And so, like everything else which might have helped in the defense, that too had come to nothing. I believe the Inspector made at least one other attempt to see her, but either she was frightened, or more likely she had been warned, for she told him nothing. And before our mystery was cleared up she was dead.

  By the tenth of June Jim’s trial began. Public opinion and the prosecution had done everything possible to expedite the proceedings, and the defense was equally anxious. Jim was not bearing the confinement well. The jail was dark and airless, and the general feeling against him so strong and so infuriated that the authorities could do nothing to ameliorate his situation.

  There had been leaks of various sorts. It was known that Jim’s clothing had shown minute blood stains in spite of Amos, and that he had been on the hillside the night of Sarah’s death at ten o’clock. Two persons, a man and a woman, had come forward to state that they were coming up the path that night, and that they had seen a man in light golf clothing, standing beside the path and wiping something from his hands with a handkerchief.

  The man, named Francis X. Dennis, made his statement unwillingly enough.

  “I didn’t want to be mixed up in this,” he told the reporters, “but my wife thinks we’d better speak up. We’d been taking a walk, and we came along to the foot of the hill about five minutes to ten.

  “My wife’s hearing is better than mine, and she stopped and said there was somebody scrambling through the bushes overhead. We listened, and it seemed like somebody was running along the hillside. We didn’t start up until it got quiet again, and my wife was kind of nervous.

  “Well, when we’d got about halfway up there was a man. He was about ten feet off the path on our right and I saw that he had on a light golf suit and cap. He didn’t pay any attention to us. He seemed to be busy with his hands, wiping them.

  “After we’d got up the hill my wife said: ‘He’s cut himself. He’s tying up his hand.’ I said maybe he’d slipped and fallen when he was running, and—well, I guess that’s about all.”

  It was a body blow for the defense, coming when it did and with a detail the more convincing because it was unstudied. Both these people believed that it was Jim they had heard running along the hillside below the Larimer lot toward the path, and Godfrey Lowell threw up his hands in despair.

  “This case is being tried in the press,” he said. “We’ll have a verdict before we even get into court!”

  But I have thought about Godfrey since, sitting in his office and talking to the imposing array of counsel who were to help him, and going home at night to lie awake for hours, studying the darkness for some weakness to attack, some point to be made:

  “And I say to you, gentlemen of the jury—”

  What? What could he say? That Jim was a good fellow who gave good dinners and played excellent bridge? That he was a decent citizen, who had spent that evening conversing harmlessly with another woman who had since been murdered? And that he was given to nosebleed, which would account for the blood on his clothes?

  Jim still stubbornly silent, and Godfrey lying there and wondering. Was Jim innocent, after all?

  I believe that until the day before the trial he was uncertain. Then I was able to give him a little, a very little help. Small as it was it heartened him, and on it he hung his defense, but even then he was not sure.

  It was an odd conversation I had with the Inspector that second evening before Jim’s trial. He marched in like a man with a purpose, and I saw that whatever that purpose might be he had dressed for it. He was always neat enough, but that night he was resplendent.

  “This is a social call,” he said. “I’m not a policeman now; I’ll ask you to remember that.”

  And he added, not without embarrassment, that he felt very friendly toward all of us; that he had enjoyed his talks with me, and that he liked Judy. Then he sat still and stared at his well-polished boots.

  “In that case,” I suggested, “out of office hours, so to speak, and the whisky being some my father put away years ago, would you like a highball?”

  Which he would, and did.

  Perhaps it warmed him; perhaps he had come for the purpose. The upshot of it was that he said he did not want any miscarriage of justice the next few days, and that things were looking pretty black.

  “The prosecution’s going to get a conviction. It’s out for one, and it’ll get it. Mind you, the District Attorney thinks he’s right. I’ve talked it over with him, and he had God with him, as he sees it. But there are one or two little points they’re not likely to bring up, and I thought I’d talk them over with you.”

  And then and there, categorically, he outlined the defense for us. As I wrote it down for Godfrey Lowell at the time, I have it before me now.

  (a) Jim was being tried for Sarah’s murder, but the story of Florence Gunther’s would inevitably enter the case. Why was it that there was no oil in Jim’s car the morning after Florence’s death, although I found it later? “Tell Lowell to bring that out. The prosecution won’t.”

  (b) Find Amos, and get him on the stand. “He buried that sword-stick. His prints were thick on it.”

  (c) Ask the microscopist who examined Sarah Gittings’ clothing if he found anything wrapped around a button. “I may lose my job
over this, but he did. He found a longish white hair.”

  (d) Ask him—the microscopist—if that hair was living or dead? If it came from a head or a wig. “I think it came from a wig, myself. Make them produce that hair in court. They’ve got it.”

  (e) Ask the microscopist what he found on that piece of wood from the Larimer lot. “He found something besides blood and that dead woman’s hair. He found some fibers from cloth on the end of it. Black cloth, or grayish black. They’ve got those, too.”

  (f) Put a lot of emphasis on that three hours from seven to ten. Where was she? “I’m not so sure myself that the whole solution doesn’t lie there.”

  And

  (g) Why were both those stab wounds the same depth?

  He leaned back, like a man well satisfied with himself.

  “Now here’s the situation, to my mind,” he explained. “And Lowell’s welcome to use it if he likes. Here’s a man who has worked himself into a mood to kill. He’s out to kill. And he’s got a sword in his hand; a rapier, rather. It’s got a blade a foot and a half long, and it’s as sharp as a dagger. What does he do? He drives it home with all his strength, and this man who did this had strength, plenty of it. If your grandfather ever fought a duel with that weapon, he’d have run his man through, wouldn’t he? Providing he got the chance, of course!

  “But here are two stab wounds, and both of them short. That’s not accident, that’s necessity. That’s a short knife, to my mind anyhow. He might have gone short the first time, but not the second. Never the second.”

  I was re-reading my notes.

  “What do you mean by the wig?” I asked.

  “Well, that hair was peculiar. It had no root, for one thing. A hair that’s torn out usually has a root; and there was no dust on it, nothing that ought to be on hair in active service! Nothing but a lot of brilliantine. Mind you, that’s only a chance. Still, it has its points. A man old enough to have white hair and wear it long is too old to have put that body in the sewer.”

  “You mean that whoever it was was disguised?”

  “I say there’s a possibility of it. You see, men often disguise themselves to commit crimes. That and to make an escape are practically the only times any criminal uses disguise at all. In other words a murderer is seen at or near the scene of the crime, and identified by certain marks; hair, eyebrows, clothes or what not. But in his own proper person he has none of those marks.”

  “And they won’t bring that out at the trial?”

  “Well, why should they?” he said reasonably. “It wouldn’t help Blake any. How do we know he didn’t wear a wig that night?”

  “Then why bring it in?”

  He smiled.

  “For the effect on the jury,” he said. “Nobody has shown that Jim Blake wore such a wig, or even owned a wig. As a matter of fact I don’t believe he did. But get Lowell to work that three hours and the unknown in a white wig, and dress clothes, and at least he’s got a talking point.”

  Chapter Twenty-five

  I TOOK THOSE NOTES to Godfrey the next day, and by the eagerness with which he seized on them I realized his desperation.

  “Where on earth did you get all this?”

  “Never mind, Godfrey. It’s our case; that’s all.”

  And that was the situation the day before Jim’s trial opened; Laura arriving in the early morning, having left her children for once, and outraged over the whole situation. But not for a moment taking the outcome seriously; coming in from the car, smartly dressed and vocative, followed by that mass of hand luggage which she requires for a twenty-four-hour journey.

  “Don’t look at me. I’m a mess, but of course I had to come. Of all the ridiculous and pointless accusations! How are you, Joseph? How d’you do, Clara! Charles told me to see that I had an extra bolt on my door! Isn’t that like him? That cabinet looks well in there.”

  Nor did she once consider a possible unfortunate outcome for Jim until the trail began. Then the dignity of the court, the gravity of the counsel for both sides, all the panoply of a trial in which a sovereign state with all its resources is opposed to a single individual in a prisoner’s box, began to impress her.

  Our faces, too, must have told her something of our doubts; Judy pale and thin, and Katherine as if she had been chiseled out of marble.

  “Oh, the poor dears!” said Laura. “Somehow I didn’t realize it had been like this.”

  But it was Jim who struck her dumb; Jim, so carefully dressed, so drawn, so isolated. She reached out and caught my hand, and for once she was silent. Silent she remained, through that ghastly impaneling of a jury which required days, and until the opening speech of the State’s Attorney. During that speech, however, her color rose and her eyes flashed.

  “How dare they?” she muttered. “How dare they?”

  I have no space here for that trial, for its heartbreaks and its insufferable dragging hours and days. Witnesses came and went. The audience, those who had won the daily battle for admission, sat and fanned themselves with hats, handkerchiefs, newspapers. To such few points as told in Jim’s favor they were cold; they were united against him, a seething mob of hatred, waiting and furiously hoping for revenge.

  Laura said they were like the market women who knitted around the guillotine while the French aristocracy was being executed, and so I felt that they were.

  In vain Godfrey Lowell fought, cross-examined, almost wept out of his exhaustion and anxiety; in vain he made the Inspector’s points, from “a” to “g.” The jury was hot and growing weary. Sarah’s blood-stained clothing and the sword-cane were on the table. They reasoned from cause to effect.

  He had had the cane, she had threatened his easygoing life, he had been seen where she was killed, he killed her.

  Judy’s eyes were sunk in her head by the end of the third day, but she remained throughout the trial, from that sonorous opening speech of the District Attorney, of which I reproduce only a paragraph or two:

  “We will show, gentlemen of the jury, that this unfortunate woman, on the day before she was killed, wrote to this defendant and asked him to meet her, on urgent business. A reconstruction of a portion of this letter as shown on her blotter will be produced in due time. And we will show that she sent this letter. She not only wrote it but she addressed an envelope, and the imprint of this envelope, left on the cuff of that uniform of service which she wore, has been examined by experts and pronounced to be her own handwriting. It has been compared, as the law requires, with valid examples of her handwriting; samples easy to obtain, for this good and faithful friend to this family for years kept a record of all their illnesses, day by day.

  “We will show that on the night of the crime, this defendant varied from his ordinary procedure; that he dined early and without dressing, which in this case means that he did not put on a dinner jacket. That is more important than it may sound. There are certain individuals, gentlemen, to whom a dinner without a dinner jacket approaches the unthinkable. It is cataclysmic. And so revolutionary was it in the habit of this defendant that his servant made a mental note of it.

  “Following this early meal, and he ate very little, he went out. He had put on a light golf suit and a pair of heavy shoes, and this suit and these shoes will be shown to you later on, stained with blood; the blood, we fully believe of this dead woman.

  “But there was another and even more terrible, more sinister object in that house that next morning. The sword-stick stood once more in the hall, where it had stood before. But this sword-stick, or sword-cane, gentlemen, had become a matter of intense importance to this defendant.

  “Either on his return the night before, or during that day, or even following the discovery of Sarah Gittings’ body, this defendant proceeded furtively and secretly to wash the sword-cane.

  “But he could not clean the interior of the sheath. That remained for the experts of our department. They have found human blood in that sheath, and also another object.

  “The age of human blood, after
a certain period of time, is difficult to determine. My friends of the defense may urge that this blood may be from some ancient duel long since forgotten. But of this other object discovered the age is unquestioned. Adherent to this sheath was a needle from a pine tree, and this needle was fresh, gentlemen of the jury. It came from a particular variety of evergreen to be found only on that slope of the city park down which this unfortunate woman had been dragged.

  “Numbers of similar needles, from similar trees, were found clinging to her clothing on the recovery of the body. And I may add that in the opinion of the experts for the state, this blood inside the sheath was similarly fresh.”

  Why go on? Bit by bit he built his case, and bit by bit Jim sagged in his chair. When he reached the question of motive, and named Florence Gunther, there was such a stir in the courtroom that it had to be called to order.

  “Now, gentlemen of the jury, it is not our purpose here, directly or indirectly, to try this defendant for the murder of Florence Gunther; but here and there this girl’s name will have to enter the record.

  “On the day of this murder Florence Gunther took from the safe of her employers a certain document, sealed in a brown manila envelope and duly endorsed. This document has disappeared, but its identity has been established.”

  And with the description of the will which followed, the supplying of the motive, the case was indeed as Godfrey had predicted; over before it commenced.

  He fought on doggedly, but what were such things as hairs and fibers to a jury which had already reached its verdict? And we had a blow or two which were unexpected, at that.

  One was the proof that Sarah had indeed written the letter to Jim, as claimed by the state. A photograph had been made of her blotter and greatly enlarged, and certain words had come out clearly enough. So far as they could put the words together, allowing for certain undecipherable places, she had written somewhat as follows: