By the Watchman's Clock Read online

“Haven’t you seen enough for one night?”

  “Plenty,” I said.

  “Good night, Mrs. Niles.”

  He took my hand in both of his and looked gravely down at my upturned face.

  “Will you tell me all about this to-morrow?” he asked gently; and I’m rather ashamed to admit that my heart gave a perfectly shameless flutter and turned completely over.

  “If you wish. Thanks for bringing me home. Good night.”

  I went to bed, but I couldn’t go to sleep. The moment I was alone with my eyes closed, the ghastly picture of Mr. Sutton dead, his head with that gaping wound, lolled to one side against the wing smeared with blood, came back to me with horrible clarity. I drew my hand that had touched that terrible stain towards me.

  I don’t know why the idea that Mr. Sutton had been murdered in cold blood was so long in seeming horrible to me. I knew he was dead—that he’d been shot; and I must have known it wasn’t suicide. Dan recognized it as murder. I knew that. Yet the actual fact of murder by someone, someone I knew, probably, didn’t seem important until I closed my eyes and tried to go to sleep. Someone had shot Mr. Sutton. Someone who wanted him dead had deliberately killed him!

  My mind was so numb with weariness that even then it all seemed very remote. I don’t think I doubted that when I got up in the morning and went down York Road to Seaton Hall, Mr. Sutton would be at the lodge talking to Tim Healy. It was the same illusion that one has in seeing Walter Hampden die as Hamlet one night and walk the boards as Othello the next. I’m afraid I’m never quite sure what’s real and what isn’t.

  I tried to think over the steps in the swift events of that day. It was hazy then. Now it’s all very clear.

  It began when I saw Sebastien Baca sitting on my brick wall. Surely, I thought, that was longer ago than just this very morning—yesterday morning, now? It seemed years ago that I saw him catch the falling magnolia petal, and sat across from him at lunch. His account of the Ranch of the Spring of the Holy Ghost was as remote now as the actual ranch had been when he described it to us.

  Then there was Reverdy’s visit to Mr. Sutton, and my visit to Aunt Charlotte and meeting with Mr. Sutton there. Then Colonel Arbuthnot-Howe’s arrival from Washington with Wally Fenton. Next dinner, and our bathing party that so nearly ended Mr. Baca. Through all of it ran the thread of Thorn’s quarrel with her uncle, and her curious conduct that night; Wally’s face with terror on it, Mr. Sutton’s with death on it.

  I went to sleep, and I didn’t wake up until Lillie brought my breakfast and told me the devil had got Mr. Sutton and I needn’t say he hadn’t. Also Jack said some one had taken his flashlight from the hall closet and did I know where it was.

  CHAPTER XIII

  All the incredible business of the night came back. Mr. Sutton was dead. I poured a cup of coffee and stirred it slowly, thinking. My coat was lying half on a chair and half on the floor where I’d thrown it. My tennis slippers were beside it. I thought of the slip of paper in my pocket, but I found in myself a curious reluctance now to look at it.

  Ben came in, on his way to class.

  “Lillie tells me Mr. Sutton was shot last night,” he said, kissing my forehead absently.

  I nodded. “How did she know, do you think?”

  “How do they know everything that happens anywhere in town,” he replied. “Is that clock right?”

  “A little fast. It’s too bad about Mr. Sutton.”

  He sat down on the foot of my bed and regarded me with a sort of affectionate disinterest.

  “You liked him, didn’t you, Martha,” he said after a moment, as if he were stating a curious but true proposition.

  I nodded.

  “I never could understand it,” he went on. “I’ve tried to follow you, but you like such odd people. I’ve about given it up. I don’t really care, as long as you don’t stop liking me.”

  I reassured him.

  “Didn’t you ever like him at all?” I asked.

  “He was so grossly immoral. Oh, I don’t mean in the ordinary sense. I mean in his human relationships.”

  “Because he was disgustingly rich?”

  “Not at all, though I think what he did with his money is evidence of my point. He never gave it away except where it brought him the greatest prestige. I mean he never had anything but a purely selfish and egotistical motive in any of his gifts. Barton at the Polytechnic told me they rued the day he’d ever given them a dime.”

  “But he could be kind,” I protested mildly, knowing how true anything anyone wanted to say against Mr. Sutton was.

  “And often was, until somebody crossed him. That case of Dan, for instance.”

  Dan Sutton was engaged to Joan Frazier, the daughter of one of our science professors at Landover, and Mr. Sutton managed it so that the man lost his job. He sent Dan to Europe for a year and when he got back the Fraziers had disappeared. I don’t think Mr. Sutton had anything against Joan Frazier—or in the present instance—against Franklin Knox. He simply seemed bent on not having his children marry.

  “I didn’t think you’d remember that,” I remarked.

  “As I remember, it was all I heard breakfast, lunch and dinner for a year,” Ben said maliciously. “As a matter of fact, I had forgotten it until last week. I forgot to tell you I saw Frazier at the University Club in Baltimore. He said Joan had a job in New York on a magazine or something. Dan was with me.”

  This, and coming from my husband, was a greater shock than any I’d got so far. I stared at him in amazement.

  “Well, I’ve got to shove along,” he said, with a glance at his watch. “Don’t get too upset about this, will you, old girl? Just remember murder’s one of the oldest of the arts. So long.”

  He went as far as the door and stopped with a puzzled frown on his face. My gaze followed his to my tweed coat tumbled half on and half off the chair, and then to my tennis slippers.

  “You were out last night?” he said.

  I nodded.

  “By the way,” he went on; “do you happen to know who shot Sutton?”

  I shook my head. He shrugged his shoulders, got out his pipe, stepped closer to the fireplace and knocked the ashes out—which is something I’ve tried to make him stop doing, along with leaving the soap in his shaving brush, for ten years.

  “The unfortunate part of this sort of thing,” he said, “of course is that somebody has to do it. I mean if a man like Sutton could be done away with without the stigma of murder attaching to any other individual, there’d be something to be said for it. Well, I’ve got to get on. I’m lecturing on murder in primitive society this morning. Convenient, isn’t it?”

  “So that’s it,” I said. “I thought you were actually interested in Mr. Sutton. I was getting alarmed.”

  His smiling reply was drowned in the quick jangle of the telephone on my table.

  “Hello. Yes, Dan. All right. As soon as I can.”

  Mr. Sullivan was to be at Seaton Hall at 9:30 and wanted me to come over.

  Ben smiled. “Poor Martha,” he said ironically. “You’re going to have a lovely time. Don’t forget to tell Lillie about lunch.”

  “If you promise not to forget to come home and eat it.”

  “I only forget to come home when there’s chipped beef in library paste and baked apple.”

  I wish I could achieve Ben’s pleasant detachment from everyday affairs.

  The idea that someone was responsible for Mr. Sutton’s death from an academic point of view was one thing. Stated in another way, that someone, almost certainly someone I knew, had confronted Mr. Sutton in his library, with a gun in his hand and murder in his heart and had shot him dead, it was something very different. I don’t think that even then I was aware of the full meaning of what Ben had said about the stigma of murder. I began to be very shortly, however. Between the time I went into the bathroom to take a shower and the time I told Lillie what to order for lunch and got my hat, the telephone rang fourteen times.

  Mrs. Robb
ins wanted to know if I’d heard about Mr. Sutton. Professor Robbins—he teaches Browning, Fielding, Thackeray and the Manly Authors generally—thought probably it was one of the tramps they’d seen on the railroad tracks. I said possibly, knowing Mrs. Robbins thought probably it was Miss Carter herself who’d done it, and hoped I thought so too.

  Mrs. Weeks called up about the Woman’s Club concert and said by the way wasn’t it awful about Mr. Sutton. I agreed and hung up rather sharply.

  Miss Taney called up to see if Jack could come over and play with Bobbie and wasn’t it the strangest thing about Mr. Sutton. And so on, until my telephone manner, never very suave, became positively offensive.

  I got down to Seaton Hall at half-past nine. A small knot of town loafers, white of course because when there’s trouble the colored people stay as far away from it as they can, had gathered in York Road. They usually hang around the county courthouse in the Circle, but a little excitement draws them like flies. “Rich,” one of the colored gardeners, had taken Tim’s place at the gate, which he unbarred as I came up.

  I missed old Tim. This seemed the time of all others when he should have been at his post to give the blessing of God’s angels.

  “Where’s Mr. Healy, Rich?” I asked.

  He shrugged his lanky shoulders.

  “ ’Deed an’ Ah don’ know, Miss.”

  He closed the gate in the face of the village loafers with considerable pleasure, I thought.

  Jim Basil, the state policeman, was at the door when I went in, trim in his olive drab and awfully decent. His father owns the electrical shop. It was something, I thought, not to have one of Landover’s shuffling old hacks in his baggy blue, spitting tobacco juice into the laurel bushes and azaleas.

  “Good morning, Mrs. Niles,” he said. “Mr. Sullivan’s inside. I think they’re expecting you.”

  Inside there were a few people I didn’t know and a snappy young man with a broken-out face, and a horribly antiseptic smell of Lifebuoy Soap and Listerine that I did.

  “This way, Mrs. Niles. Mr. Sullivan is waiting.”

  I dislike important young men, but there didn’t seem any adequate way of indicating the fact sufficiently to make it apparent to him. So I went on into the front drawing room, where Mr. Sullivan was sitting behind a bridge table writing. He was alone.

  “Hello,” I said and sat down.

  He smiled at me. “You don’t look as though you’d been roaming around the country until four o’clock in the morning, Mrs. Niles,” he said pleasantly.

  “Was I?” I asked in surprise.

  “Weren’t you? Young Sutton says you left here at quarter to four.”

  “I suppose that’s right. I hadn’t thought of the time very much.”

  “And that’s just what you’ve got to do, Mrs. Niles,” he said very seriously, fixing me with his colorless eyes glinting under beetling eyebrows. I recognized the look. It’s the professional cross-examining look, most successful on scared country folk and trembling Negroes.

  “Don’t you try to frighten me, Mr. Sullivan,” I said. “Now that you remind me of it, I haven’t had much sleep, and there’s no use of our having a quarrel.”

  He moved his papers about in front of him with a smile.

  “Very well, Mrs. Niles; but I’m quite serious about this. Now, as far as I can make out, you were in and out of here all day, yesterday.”

  “And far into the night,” I added, with a slight attempt at irony.

  “So it would seem.”

  And then he did a strange thing. He leaned across the bridge table, tapping his papers with the rubber end of his pencil. He fixed me again with professionally narrowed eye.

  “Mrs. Niles, you have the key to this whole affair. And I’ve got to get it from you; do you understand?”

  I sat back in my chair and stared at him in open amazement. As our eyes met it occurred to me even more sharply that I was now talking to the State’s Attorney, not to the Mr. Sullivan I talked to on the street corner every afternoon.

  He got up and came around the table, and stood in front of me.

  “Look here, Mrs. Niles. Daniel Sutton has been murdered, murdered, mark you me; and it’s my duty to find out who murdered him, and send him to the gallows. Do you understand that, Mrs. Niles?”

  He turned on his heel and went back to his chair. I was left most completely dumfounded. I began to wonder if Mr. Sullivan thought I had murdered Daniel Sutton.

  “Now,” he said, smiling grimly, “what can you tell me?”

  “What do you want me to say, Mr. Sullivan?”

  “I want you to tell me what frightened you when you stood in that room, before you saw Daniel Sutton’s dead body. When I know that, Mrs. Niles, I expect to know what it was that Tim Healy saw through the library window—what it was that shocked Tim Healy to death. Literally, Mrs. Niles, mark you me, shocked him to death.”

  “Tim Healy? Dead?”

  “Dead. Tim Healy, dead!”

  The State’s Attorney repeated my horrified whisper in sharp staccato.

  CHAPTER XIV

  So I got two profound shocks within five minutes of entering Seaton Hall; and of the two, I think Mr. Sullivan’s manner was almost the more profound. I’m afraid I always assume that everybody else has the same background and plays by the same set of conventions that I do. It was a serious blow to me when I discovered that my hairdresser honestly couldn’t see why her baby shouldn’t use a teething ring. She looks more intelligent than most women I know. The fact that my butcher is head of the local Klan and has an extraordinarily deep-seated conviction that Catholics and Jews are a menace absolutely astounds me. So when Mr. Sullivan, whom I’d assumed was equipped with exactly the same prejudices that Ben has, and I have, and Thorn Carter has, and Dr. Knox has, turned out not to be at all, I was amazed.

  It seemed, in short, that Mr. Sullivan was just what a sensible person would assume he was—a small town prosecuting attorney who’d played the local political game for thirty years. He was like the other people that sit in on the game. As my husband explained patiently to me at dinner that night, he was eminently fitted to deal with the people he normally has to deal with. Most of our crime—which is very little—is committed by Negroes and low-grade whites. It shouldn’t have been surprising, then, that when Mr. Sullivan was confronted with murder at Seaton Hall, he reacted to the fact of murder and not to the fact of Seaton Hall.

  I’m convinced, in looking back on all this, that if he had used different tactics with me, things would not have ended as they did. Heaven knows I had left home and walked down York Road past the knot of village idiots and into Seaton Hall with the best will in the world. It seems to me that I just took it for granted that the person who murdered Daniel Sutton would be found and punished. I didn’t even have Ben’s attitude that whoever he was he had done a public service. I hadn’t, as far as I know, the least intention of not telling Mr. Sullivan, or somebody, everything I knew; it simply hadn’t occurred to me to do anything else.

  But when he began flashing the witness stand pyrotechnic at me, I discovered to my amazement that he was putting me in the curious position of third conspirator, and I simply went into my shell like a snail whose nose is being poked with a straw, if snails have noses. It wasn’t entirely his manner. You expect prosecuting attorneys to fix you with penetrating glances and that sort of thing. But his attitude was so exactly that I had come there with every intention of preventing him from doing his duty, and that I’d mighty soon see that the majesty of the law brooked no interference from anybody.

  For that reason, I suppose, I kept my mouth as shut as possible, when he first horrified me with his cruel announcement of poor Tim’s death, and then told me that I was the key to the whole thing.

  “Mrs. Niles,” he said, still tapping the table with his pencil, “what time did you leave this house last night?”

  “Just before one. And again just before four.”

  “What were you doing here each time?”<
br />
  “We were here to dinner and stayed late. I came back after we’d gone because Thorn Carter came after me.”

  I suppose I ought to have suspected something when he let that pass.

  “Professor Niles was with you?”

  “Mr. Niles was with me the first time.”

  “But not the second.”

  “No.”

  “Were you alone the second time, that is at four o’clock this morning?”

  “I came with Thorn Carter and Colonel Arbuthnot-Howe took me home.”

  “You say that Miss Thorn Carter came for you. When was that?”

  “About half-past two.”

  “Where were you?”

  “I was in bed.”

  “You came directly back here with her?”

  “No, we sat and talked for a while.”

  “Before you came back here.”

  “Yes.”

  “Mrs. Niles, why did Miss Carter come after you?”

  “Mr. Sullivan, she wasn’t feeling very well and she was rather troubled, I think. In fact she heard someone in the hall, and I understand that she ran out of the house and down to my place without thinking a lot about it.”

  “Mrs. Niles, when you and Miss Thorn came back, how did you get in?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Which way did you come in?”

  “Through the gate.”

  “On York Road?”

  I nodded.

  “Mrs. Niles, you know this house very well, don’t you?”

  “Pretty well.”

  “Isn’t it the custom here to keep that gate locked?”

  “Surely.”

  “What time was it when you and Miss Thorn came back here?”

  “Around three o’clock.”

  “Do you remember if the gate was locked, or not?”

  “It was locked.”

  “Mrs. Niles, who let you in?”

  I looked at him in surprise.

  “I suppose it was Tim, though we didn’t see him. He clicked the latch to let us in.”

  He looked at me strangely.

  “You’re sure of that?”

  “Yes.”