The Woman in Black, page 10
I didn’t know whether that meant all of us were going, or just Captain Lamb and I. I went out and upstairs to get my bag and the raincoat I’d worn the night before, pretty worried about the whole thing. Of course we should have warned Theodore. Even if he’d read the morning paper, which he probably hadn’t taken time to do, knowing the police were in the house, he had no way of connecting the blonde Betty Livingstone with the gray-haired woman in black he thought was annoying his white hope for a new world.
12
When I came down Dorothy was sitting over beside the fireplace, looking down into it, a little pale, I thought, but self-possessed. Theodore had Captain Lamb buttonholed in the center of the rug, telling him everything.
“I’ll count on you to clear anything that might boomerang into unfavorable publicity through my headquarters first, Captain,” he was saying as I came in. “They’re officially opened tomorrow morning at 1246 Connecticut Avenue. Or you can always contact me here.”
I looked over at Dorothy. She had her eyes closed, with a kind of infinite hopelessness that was still, I thought, steadying itself for the shock that had to come when we left and Theodore had to face the facts of life. I hoped it wasn’t too late to cancel his lease on 1246 Connecticut Avenue. So far as I could see, Mr. Stubblefield was going to have plenty of publicity without anybody having to open headquarters to dispense it.
She was still there when I went silently down the marble steps, with Captain Lamb on one side of me and Sergeant Buck on the other, both equally silent. The front door closed as I got into the back seat of the police car with Captain Lamb, the Sergeant climbing in front with the driver. We moved out of the drive and waited on the sidewalk for traffic to clear so we could cross over to the downtown side of Massachusetts Avenue. I suppose it was the sound of the front door bursting open again as we finally got across that made us all look back at once. Theodore Hallet was running out into the driveway, waving his hands and shouting at us, gesticulating frantically. It was like an old Keystone Comedy when somebody’s on the wharf but the ferry’s already in midstream.
“Keep right on going,” Captain Lamb said blandly. “We don’t see him and we don’t hear him.”
He seemed highly pleased, with himself and the whole business. He turned to me then, totally disregarding Theodore. “If Buck here thinks it would be okay with Colonel Primrose, Mrs. Latham, I’d like you to go over to this I Street place and have another look at that room. It’s just the way it was except the body’s gone. Frankly, I don’t entirely trust our friend Mrs. Hallet.”
I looked at the black square in front of me that was the back of Sergeant Phineas T. Buck. It was a clear case of instant rigor mortis.
“I’ll be glad to go, Captain Lamb,” I said.
I suspect he would have winked at me if he’d thought it would be okay with Colonel Primrose and Mrs. Lamb. The dour glint in his eye couldn’t at any rate have been from the note he’d extracted from his pocket and was now reading, because certainly there was nothing amusing in it. He read it twice before he passed it up to Buck.
“What would you say this woman had in mind, now, Mrs. Latham?” he asked, when Buck had handed it back to him.
“I wouldn’t say,” I said. “I really have no idea.”
We went the rest of the way to the house on I Street in complete silence, monumentally disapproving in front where Sergeant Buck was. The house looked very different in broad daylight with the sun shining on it. It wasn’t as big or as ominous. It was a dull gray, with the Victorian woodwork gewgaws painted cobalt blue, peeling in spots. The yard was dry now except where the puddles were, and the child’s buggy was still lying on its side, and not a blade or grass or weed, or even an ailanthus shoot, anywhere in the caked unlovely enclosure with its iron fence half fallen over.
A lot of ill-assorted people were hanging around next door and across the street, inching closer whenever the uniformed policeman on the sidewalk turned them back. The working press seemed to be all over the outside of the place, but I didn’t see anybody I knew.
Captain Lamb got out of the car and waved his hand to them. “See you later, boys. Nothing new so far.”
“Who’s the dame?” somebody asked audibly. Sergeant Buck said, “You don’t have to go in there, ma’am, if it’s going to get you all upset.”
“It isn’t at all,” I said. One thing was happily evident, and that was, it hadn’t occurred to any one out there that I was the missing socialite. I couldn’t, of course, have looked less like one.
We went in picking our way over the holes made by the missing bricks in the walk, and up the steps. It didn’t have any relation to the trek that Dorothy and I had taken ten hours earlier, or maybe it was just the solidly comforting phalanx with me that took all of the terror out of it now.
“There’s a guy in here wants to see you, Captain,” a young detective said as he came into the hall. “He thinks he’s got some dope. He’s coolin’ his heels in Mamie’s boo-dwar.”
The greasy door at the right of the stairway was partly open, and I looked in. Sitting bolt upright on a couch with half a dozen sophisticated long-legged dolls (inanimate) among the rainbow assortment of rayon cushions, was no less than the Chief Assistant Executive of Enoch B. Stubblefield Enterprises. He seemed to me to be very greenish-gray and keeping a weather eye off to one side—where was obviously the shrill presence of Mrs. Mamie Kelly herself, yelling out the window, I took it, to the woman in the next house.
“Tell him to wait,” Lamb said coolly. “And tell that woman to shut up. Come along, Mrs. Latham.”
I followed him up the dirty steps, Sergeant Buck bringing up the rear.
“You came up this way,” Lamb said.
“And to that door.”
I pointed to Number 6. A policeman moved aside for us.
“I’d like you just to look in and tell me if anything’s different.”
He opened the door.
It was all different, with the light off and the sun pouring in through the windows. It looked cheaper and more barren and even less attractive. The bed was empty, the pillows still as they’d been except that the brilliant scarlet trail had turned dirty brown and the sheet that had covered the lower part of the body was stained now too. It didn’t seem horrible, just terribly tawdry and terribly sad. I let my eyes move slowly over the rest of the room, to the dresser, the chair and the closet door.
“I thought you said the room hadn’t been changed,” I said. It seemed to me that if I didn’t smell a rat, I could at any rate smell a possible trap he was trying to catch me in.
“What’s different, Mrs. Latham?”
“The wig’s gone—it was on the dresser with the scarf,” I said. “And the black dress was on that chair, and her shoes on the floor.”
“What wig?” Captain Lamb said. “And what black dress?”
“The ones she wore yesterday afternoon to the Hallets’, when she called herself Bertha Taylor.” Whether he was trying to trap me or not, that much of the truth was so bound to come out that it didn’t make any difference. “And that dress, the blue one, was hanging on a hanger hooked over the top of the closet door.” I pointed to the print dress with white collar and cuffs in an untidy heap on the floor where it had fallen hanger and all.
“But I don’t remember those,” I went on. “I didn’t look at the floor very carefully, I’m afraid.”
I pointed again, this time to some small patches of white powder, like footsteps going to the closet door.
“We didn’t go in any farther. We just stood right here.”
Captain Lamb had his eyes fixed intently on my face, trying to decide, I suppose, how much of the truth there was in what I was telling him. I wouldn’t have dared tell him anything else just then. He looked grim and businesslike.
“Was the closet door open or shut? Think carefully, Mrs. Latham.”
“I don’t have to think,” I said. “It was closed. The hanger was hooked over it, with the dress on it. It must have fallen off when the door was opened.”
Captain Lamb glanced over my head at Sergeant Buck. They seemed to have information that I didn’t have.
“Those powder marks are where there were damp tracks from the closet to the door, Mrs. Latham. And the closet door was open when the patrol officers got here. And Mrs. Kelly was standing just where you are, screaming her head off. If that door was closed when you were here . . .”
My mouth had a funny metallic taste in it, and I swallowed once or twice to try to get rid of it.
“If you’re sure the door was closed when you and Mrs. Hallet were here, you were both playing in fool’s luck last night, Mrs. Latham. You can see for yourself.”
He went into the room and drew the closet door a little farther open. There were powder marks on the floor in the closet too, quite a patch of them.
“Man or woman, whoever shot Betty Livingstone was still here when you were,” Captain Lamb said. “Right here in this closet, not five feet from where you and Mrs. Hallet were standing in that door.”
My mouth tasted still brassier, and I swallowed again.
“There was no wig here, and no black dress, and no shoes,” he went on deliberately. “The room was exactly as you see it now. Mamie Kelly was too scared to tell anything but the truth.”
He reached down, picked the dress up and hung it back on the door. Then he got inside the closet and pulled the door shut as far as it would go with the hook over the top.
“I can see you plain as day, Mrs. Latham,” he said from inside.
He pushed the door open. The dress dropped on the floor again where it had been.
“What I’m trying to tell you is that you and Mrs. Hallet had better come through with everything you know, and quick. You were lucky, last night. This is rough stuff, Mrs. Latham.”
He paused to let that sink firmly into my torpid brain.
“I don’t think either of you saw who was in this closet last night. If you had, neither of you would have been alive to tell about it.”
He looked at me gravely.
“But murder’s a queer thing, Mrs. Latham. A guilty conscience can’t ever rest on anything for sure. If this was somebody who recognized you two women, he’ll start worrying, see? He’s going to start thinking, ‘Well, maybe those two dames did see me. Maybe they were just being cagey and pretended they didn’t see me so they’d get out whole. Maybe they looked through the keyhole before I got in the closet here.’ You don’t know how a person’s mind is going to work, Mrs. Latham, with a load like that on it.”
He let that sink in too, which it did much more quickly than he thought.
“What I’m saying to you is that you and Mrs. Hallet had better watch your step. You see?”
I nodded my head. I saw very well.
“Okay. Then what do you know about this Betty Livingstone? You don’t have to tell me now. I’m going to send you home to think it over. I want you to call up Mrs. Hallet, and tell her what I showed you here, and what I said. I want you to put the fear of God in her, like I’m trying to put it in you. And I want to know what kind of a wig, and what kind of clothes? Understand?”
“It was a gray wig,” I said. “It was dry and straggly. The dress was cheap black rayon with rain spots on it, and——”
“—Report for you, Captain.” A detective came to the door and handed a teletype message in over my shoulder. Captain Lamb took it and read it.
He looked past me to Sergeant Buck. “You were right. She was hired from her New York agency for a confidential job down here—theatrical agency. Her address was supposed to be the Preston Hotel. That’s up by the Union Station. All right. Buck. Take Mrs. Latham home, and meet me up there at the Preston Hotel in half an hour if you can make it.”
“I can go home by myself,” I said.
“I’m taking you home, ma’am,” Sergeant Buck said. I hope he didn’t mean it to sound as grim as it did, but if you have to talk out of one side of your mouth as if you had paralysis in the other, no matter what you say it sounds as if you were saying, “Scram, lady—get the hell out of here before I land you one behind the ear.” Actually, Sergeant Buck was being more than nice. He was watching his diction, I had a definite idea, and certainly being enormously articulate for him. He just can’t help sounding like a top sergeant from the old Army when the Army didn’t have to bother about everybody’s mamma writing her congressman. At least I hoped that was it, and said, “Thank you, Sergeant,” as if it was.
13
We went downstairs, Sergeant Buck two steps behind me as if I were either Colonel Primrose or an escapee from the nearest leprosarium. Captain Lamb was behind him. Mr. Ellery Seymour was in the doorway of Mrs. Kelly’s room, waiting impatiently. He didn’t look as gray-green as he had in my brief glimpse through the doorway. He merely looked like a very busy man not in the habit of being kept waiting in or outside of a bood-war.
It occurred to me that perhaps Captain Lamb did not know who it was he was keeping waiting, and I was right.
“Do you know Mr. Ellery Seymour, Captain Lamb?” I asked.
“Oh, come in, Mr. Seymour.” He edged past me and Sergeant Buck at the foot of the stairs and pushed Mrs. Kelly’s door open to indicate what he meant by “in.”
Ellery Seymour nodded to me, taking my presence there rather more for granted than seemed particularly flattering. As I’d expected to be hustled off home at once, I was surprised to find that Sergeant Buck and I were both staying, and also that we looked gray-green ourselves the minute we stepped into the orchid and chartreuse room that was Mrs. Kelly’s. It was a wonderful place, with a large picture of some tropical dive done in a mosaic of broken beer bottles, with a handsome orange moon rising through the palm trees behind it over the boarded-in fireplace. I caught only a brief view of the lady herself, her hair orange as the moon, before Captain Lamb ordered her to the rear of the house and closed the inside door to her dining room. She looked straight through me with no sign of recognition in her small bloodshot eyes.
“Sit down, Mr. Seymour; glad you came. I was going to get in touch with you. Think you can probably give us a little help.”
I’d never seen the Chief of Homicide functioning without Colonel Primrose present until this morning. If he’d been a doctor he couldn’t have had a more perfect bedside manner, deceptively grave and as smooth as sweet oil.
Ellery Seymour gave me a brief bleak smile.
“I dare say Mrs. Latham has already told you part of what I came to tell,” he said. “I’m genuinely distressed about this business.”
He looked it. He was outwardly as detached and unperturbed as ever, but he seemed to have some kind of inner disturbance, like a man who’s overworked, and still carrying on but with a definite effort to keep from throwing the whole thing up and going for a long rest. I don’t know that I would have recognized that, just seeing him then, but I’d seen him often enough before and never had that feeling about him. Subtle as the change in him was, it was still apparent.
“I tried to get in touch with you when I was here last night, or this morning, rather,” he went on. “But you’d gone and the man at the front gate was making everybody move on, so I didn’t have a chance to make myself very clear. It’s about the woman this girl was impersonating yesterday. Bertha Taylor. Her name is Bertha Elizabeth Taylor and she has a daughter whose stage name is Betty Livingstone. I suppose of course that accounts for the resemblance that fooled all of us yesterday. I suppose Mrs. Latham has told you all that.”
He glanced at me again.
“You knew about this girl, then?”
Captain Lamb spoke before I could say anything, and I suspect for that reason.
“I knew she existed, Captain,” Seymour said. “I didn’t know she was here. I thought it was her mother. The Stubble-fields and I both thought so. It isn’t the first time Bertha Taylor has come out to . . . to haunt. Mr. Stubblefield . . . though it’s the first time it would ever have been done publicly. I blame myself for not realizing that yesterday.”
“Why should she want to hunt Mr. Stubblefield, Mr. Seymour?” Captain Lamb asked patiently. “What’s all the mystery?”
Ellery Seymour shook his head, not denying knowledge, I supposed, but because what he had to say was painful, something he’d have preferred not to go into.
“It’s a pathetic business, Captain Lamb. Bertha Taylor’s husband was an employee of ours. He was brilliant but extremely erratic. I thought he was worth keeping on for the brilliant periods, but Mr. Stubblefield, like a great many un-frustrated and emotionally highly integrated people, didn’t think so. He felt Taylor had had his quota of chances and more, and he fired him. It happened that Taylor was just on the point of finishing an extraordinary piece of work on a dam we were building. He went out to it the next morning and blew his brains out. Mr. Stubblefield was very much upset about it. It took two years to finish the job instead of three months. However, he was persuaded to give Taylor’s wife an annuity. Her mind was affected by the whole thing. That’s why we’ve never called the police in when she made her previous appearances. We’ve felt very sorry for her.”
Captain Lamb was silent for a moment. “I see,” he said then. “And when did you find out that it wasn’t Mrs. Taylor but her daughter?”
“When I read this morning’s paper. I came here last night to see Bertha Taylor. Mr. Theodore Hallet phoned me around half-past two and read me a note he’d found in his wife’s pocket. It gave this address. Mr. Hallet was upset by what happened yesterday. He’s thinking of Mr. Stubblefield as Presidential timber, and there were newsmen around. He knew nothing of the background, of course—he just thought she was a crazy woman and we ought to notify the police. He’d said that earlier, but we told him we’d find her and send her home. When he came across her address he got me out of bed to tell me about it.”
“You didn’t know her address, any of you?”
“Oh, no, no. We expected she’d turn up at Mr. Stubble-field’s hotel today. I was interested in preventing that, of course, for general publicity reasons, so when Mr. Hallet called I came here at once to try to persuade her to go home quietly. I wasn’t alarmed about anything. The people next door said it was a young woman. They didn’t know her name. It wasn’t until I saw the papers this morning that I realized what must have happened.”
