The Woman in Black, page 14
“They took me back and took my fingerprints,” she said. “I wasn’t supposed to hear what they said . . . but that—they think that is the gun she was shot with?”
I nodded.
“It was right there, this morning.” She pointed out into the hall. “It was partly behind the door. I mean it was over toward the side, as if it had been on the floor and pushed back when Bill opened the door. It could have happened that way, couldn’t it?”
She sat down on the arm of the sofa under the windows looking down into the Hallets’ gardens, and smoothed her hair back from her forehead again as if the pressure of it there made her head ache and fogged her brain.
“I’ve been trying so hard to think. I can’t understand what’s happened. Somebody must have slipped it through the letter slot and onto the floor. It’s wide enough, isn’t it?”
I moved to where I could look out at the front door. The slot, about two feet from the bottom level, was at least two inches wide.
“I know it is, because the folded paper goes through.” Susan said slowly. “But what I can’t understand is why anybody would do it. I didn’t know anybody hated me that much. But somebody must, mustn’t he? I can’t figure it any other way.”
I couldn’t figure it, so far, anyway at all. “You didn’t hear anything drop?” I asked.
She shook her head. “The rug would deaden it. And Bill wouldn’t notice, pushing anything, because the rug catches sometimes and folds, so you push it when you push the door open. And anyway, I’d closed my door, and I guess I went to sleep the way I was. I didn’t get up and get undressed until after Bill came home. That was after three.”
Her voice was far away. Her eyes rested on the mess in the fireplace again, puzzled, with two small lines between her dark glossy eyebrows.
“I . . . thought he went out,” she said slowly. “I didn’t come downstairs. Maybe he didn’t go out.”
It was the cigarette stubs in the fireplace, I knew, that prompted that.
“He was here when I came about an hour ago,” I said, as gently as I could. “He told me to tell you he wouldn’t be here to dinner, but he’d come later, and wanted you to be here.”
It was like watching a slow-motion picture of a person gradually coming to life and consciousness. She didn’t seem at first to hear, and as she did, not to understand. Then as she understood, she looked up at me, her body stiffening slowly erect, her eyes moving from me to the fireplace again; and all the time she seemed to be rising from the arm of the sofa until at last she was on her feet. Her eyes were alive, the rest of her face mat-pale, blank, without any emotion or thought on it. She turned so slowly I could hardly see she was moving until she was facing the lyre-pedestaled table in front of the window at the side of the room. Then she was going over there, very slowly, almost like a bird charmed by a serpent. She put her hand out, took up the lamp and put it on the window sill, balancing it with one hand as she lifted the table top with the other. She stood there looking down into the open cavity. It seemed like a very long time that she looked into it before she lowered the top again and put the lamp back, and stood there, steadying herself with both hands on the mahogany ledge.
When she turned her eyes were strained and widely opened.
“Has he gone away, Mrs. Latham?” she asked slowly.
“He took a suitcase,” I said. “But he’s coming back tonight.”
She moved back to the sofa and let herself slowly down into it, staring straight in front of her.
“He knows, then,” she said, in a low dead voice. “There isn’t any use any more, now he knows.”
I let her sit there a while. Then I said, “There’s a lot of use, Susan. If I call his office and tell him you’re here, and need him, he’ll come. Then you talk to him as you should have done last night.”
“It was too late last night. It’s later now.”
She shook her head. “You don’t know him. I don’t think I really did, until last night, either. I . . . tried to tell him. when we came home. Something must have happened when he went upstairs to get my bag I left on the love seat. He came down again. He was wonderful. He put his arm around me and said ‘Home. baby. Let’s get out before I drive any more money changers out of the temple.’ He seemed amused about something, and more like himself than when he’s working all the time. So I . . . I thought I’d tell him.”
Neither her face nor her voice, dead blank, had changed.
“I just started. I said I had something awful to tell him, and he had to try to listen, and understand. He changed just like that.”
She moved her hand in a quick small gesture.
“We were sitting right here, his arm around me. He got up, just looking at me. I . . . couldn’t do anything or say anything. He looked so . . . so awful, as if I’d lashed him in the face when he’d thought I was going to kiss him. He went over to the door and went out. So I knew something had happened.”
“Somebody must have said something he hadn’t believed,” I said gently. “He was putting it——”
She nodded mechanically. “I thought of that. I didn’t know who it could be. It couldn’t be Ellery Seymour or the Stubblefields. And nobody else knew . . . except you.”
“It wasn’t me, Susan—or any of the ones you’ve named,” I said. “Don’t you see how it could be just somebody—anybody—who knows how much it costs to live well, and dress well, in Washington?”
She sat quietly for a long time, looking out into a blind limited space.
“What do I do now is the question,” she said at last. “I’ve quit telling myself I didn’t mean any harm. That has nothing to do with it any more—what I meant or didn’t mean. I stayed awake until I got up this morning trying to see it again the way it used to look when it looked all right. I don’t see now how I thought it ever looked that way. I should think a baby could have seen it was all wrong.”
“Maybe that’s what you were, then,” I said.
She nodded. “A dim-witted baby that thought she was smarter than anybody else around. But I really didn’t know till I tried to make it sound plausible to you yesterday that it couldn’t sound that way. It wasn’t plausible, any time. It was just plain dishonest.—And then the horrible thing.”
18
She moved a little as if trying to ease a pain gnawing somewhere inside her.
“The horrible thing was last night,” she said. “I was in a panic when we went over there to Dorothy’s. I was going to try to see Ellery Seymour and explain that I’d made a mistake, and call the whole thing off. I kept trying to catch his eye, or get near enough to him to tell him I wanted to talk to him, but he was always somewhere else with a lot of people around him. Then that woman came, the woman in black, and I heard some one repeat her name. She’d called me up in the afternoon and told me she had something she thought I’d like to know about the way the Stubblefields did business.”
“Bertha Taylor?” I asked. “She’d called you, before the cocktail party?”
She nodded. “I went down there, right away, but she wasn’t there. That’s when that child saw me. So when I saw her at Dorothy’s I thought I’d slip out after her. She went into the library and I followed her, but she’d disappeared by the time I got there.”
“Was the gun there then?”
“I didn’t see it. But I didn’t go in. Then I saw her going down the stairs. I went back. Later, after everybody cleared out, I did see Ellery Seymour. I asked him to get Mr. Stubblefield and come into the library—I had something to tell him. I went on in, and waited and waited. Then I began to realize he wasn’t coming and wasn’t bringing Mr. Stubblefield. Something seemed to happen inside me. I got in a perfect panic of terror. It just struck me all of a sudden.
“And that’s when I saw the gun. It was lying right on the floor beside a chair, just enough under it so you wouldn’t see it unless you were just staring right down at it. I picked it up. That’s when I turned around and went behind the door. That’s why I told you I didn’t know whether I meant to shoot Mr. Stubblefield or not. And I still don’t know. I guess I both did and didn’t. That sounds like what Bill calls a paradox, but it’s really true. I don’t know. If Kramer hadn’t come in and grabbed my wrist and started making such a row, I might have shot him . . . but I don’t think I was far enough out of my head really to have done it. I knew all the time it wasn’t going to help anything.”
“I don’t see that it would have,” I said.
“But now I don’t know. I don’t know whether somebody has me all figured out, like a first-grade reader, so they leave guns where I can get them, and then plant them on me after somebody’s murdered, the way they did last night, so I’ll do just what I did today. It’s a funny feeling to have.”
She shook her head slowly, staring down at the rug on the stone floor.
“I don’t know why, but it sounds like a woman, to me. I don’t know any man who’d be able to figure out just exactly how I was going to react.”
“Do you mean me, or Dorothy Hallet, dear?” I asked quietly.
She looked up at me then.
“I don’t mean you. Maybe I do mean Dorothy Hallet. Maybe I mean this Bertha Taylor woman, if she left the gun in the library. Or maybe I mean Mrs. Stubblefield. She could have put it here last night. It doesn’t have to be the same one doing both. The first could have been accidental. Maybe only the second was deliberate. But I just don’t know—I’m not thinking any clearer about this than I did about the first. I don’t really believe Dorothy Hallet did it. I don’t think she likes it that Theodore and Ellery Seymour have been as nice to me as they have, but I don’t think she’d do a . . . a wicked thing, like that.”
“I don’t think so either,” I said.
“And of course there are some men who have . . . female minds. Freddie Mollinson has one. So has that man who writes the books—Mr. Minor. I don’t know about Joe Kramer. You wouldn’t think so. I don’t think he’s got much of a mind at all, but I don’t like what he has got. He called me up here—twice. Once just after Bill left, and then around one o’clock.”
I looked at her with genuine surprise.
“Kramer?”
“He said he thought he and I could talk business. I told him I didn’t know what he meant, and he said I knew all right and he could really make it worth my while.”
“What did you say?”
“I hung up the phone. The second time I hung up as soon as I heard his voice.”
I wondered whether the blond young giant had come out to get her for Mr. Stubblefield that morning, or to talk business then. It could have been to kill two birds with one stone. I also wondered exactly what it was that Bill Kent had done to him.
“First I thought he was just being a wolf, but I don’t know, now. I don’t know anything. I just feel sort of dead all over, and it’s somebody else talking, not me myself. But I don’t think it was me he was interested in. It just struck me all of a sudden that he was doublecrossing somebody. Maybe Mr. Stubblefield. And I’d be the one to help him, because he really believed I was about to shoot.”
We sat there in silence for a moment. Then I said, “Susan, where did you leave your evening bag? In what seat?” Something that had only half registered while she was talking came up sharply in my mind just then.
“In the gold brocade love seat near the door. I left it there quite early, before I went in the library and found the gun. Why?”
“Nothing,” I said. “I just wondered.”
Which wasn’t true. It was the gold brocade love seat that Milton and I were sitting in before we left . . . the one near the door where Dorothy Hallet had hastily parked the gun when she’d heard Bill coming up the steps. I wondered about something else then.
“What happened to Dorothy when Bill was upstairs? Did she come down to you?”
Susan nodded. “She came down, and said I wasn’t to worry. She was very nice when you think what a ghastly scene I’d made—twice in the same evening.”
It was possible, then, for Bill Kent to have taken the gun when he picked up the evening bag. It was also possible for Dorothy really to have thought Milton Minor took it. I’d just wondered whether she knew Bill had taken it and was trying deliberately to shift suspicion to Milton. In any case, there were two entries at least: Milton and Bill.
I looked over at Susan. She was sitting up looking around the room, not blank and dead-faced any more. And suddenly, without any other warning than that, she crumpled into a dreadful little shaken heap on the sofa.
“Oh, he’s gone! I can’t stand it, I just can’t stand it!”
It was like somebody numbed with the agony of death waking up to its ceaseless meaning . . . some one you love gone for a moment, until the awareness breaks that it is not for a moment but forever. She was sobbing with the bitterness of irrevocable loss and utter despair.
“He’s coming back tonight, Susan,” I said.
She shook her head back and forth on the cushion. She knew, and having seen him I couldn’t tell her she wasn’t right.
“It’s too late.”
Inarticulate and hardly audible as it was, it carried a conviction of truth as hopeless as only truth can be.
Well, I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t stay there indefinitely, and I couldn’t leave her alone in the house. After a few moments I went upstairs and got her dressing gown and hairbrush and comb. I found a bag and put them in it, and went downstairs again.
“You’re going to come home with me, Susan,” I said. “We’ll try to get hold of Bill this afternoon and have him come to my house. Or you can come back here after dinner.”
I put the bag down on a chair and went out into the kitchen and down into the garage. Captain Lamb’s man was down there sitting on the steps talking to a motorcycle policeman out in the road. I don’t particularly like going around in police cars, but it seemed simpler than getting a taxi and having him trail us. And he was very co-operative. I suppose it isn’t often that people the police are supposed to tail avail themselves of the transportation facilities thereby involved. He even helped me to get Susan downstairs into the car and locked the doors and windows for us. And she didn’t make any fuss about coming. I think she was too miserably unhappy to do anything but what she was told to do.
I don’t know that fear ever can have dignity. Maybe it depends on the level of it, and the certain amount of just plain ordinary guts that keeps it from being not fear but cowardice. It’s still horribly revealing, and not fear itself as much as the things people fear. I suppose that was what was a little shocking about Milton Minor when I went out into the garden where he was, after I’d turned Susan over to Lilac to take upstairs, and make lie down quietly awhile, hoping she’d get a little sleep. The gifted-biographer outward semblance, the coat-of-mail of glittering effrontery, was gone. All that was left was a little guy scared pea-green. He was sweating profusely, but although anybody can and must do that, it being summer in Washington, D. C., neither the season nor the climate explained the tremor in Milton’s hands or his general resemblance to a nervous jellyfish afloat. The lawnmower was out there and he could just as well have pushed it as he walked up and down. It would at least have given him a useful way of putting in his time. But he just paced back and forth, up and down, his shoulders twitching, mopping his forehead.
I watched him for a moment before he knew I was there in the door at the end of the hall, though he was keeping an eye on the long windows in the sitting room. When he did see me he came hurrying over. He was a little better almost at once, as if an audience was all he needed to force him into something approximating his normal mould.
“What’s going on, Grace? For God’s sake, here I am—I don’t know a damn thing that’s happening!”
“Somebody’s chained you to the wall?” I asked. “I thought you said you were still a reporter.”
“E. B. asked me to keep out of sight. He——”
“E. B. Who? I mean which one?”
“Stubblefield, of course,” he said irritably. “He doesn’t want the trail leading to him if he can help it, and you can’t blame him. He’s really . . .”
His voice wavered to a stop. “What’s the matter?”
“Nothing at all,” I answered. I turned to go back into the sitting room, where it was about twenty degrees cooler. “I’m just surprised. Yesterday you were calling him a big baboon. Last night you were the amateur detective prancing off to find out what all the dope is. Now you act like an office boy scared he’s going to be fired. I’m just trying to readjust.”
He sat down, took out a handkerchief that had reached the saturation point so long before that the pocket of his seersucker coat was as wet as it was, mopped his forehead again, and got up again.
“Was he annoyed with you for knowing about Bertha Taylor?”
“He doesn’t know I know about her. That’s one of the points, Grace. You’ve got to keep that off the record.—You know, this is a damned serious business. I mean, above and beyond the little lady getting herself knocked off. You don’t realize how serious. I could be out on my tail, a book almost finished and no takers. I can’t afford it. I need the dough.”
“Dear me,” I said. “You’ve needed it before, haven’t you?”
“This is different. I’ve sold out, now. It’s too late to make a comeback.”
I looked away. There was something a little too abject about the, way he’d said that. Somehow, furthermore, it didn’t ring with any high resonance of truth. He was scared but not that scared—not about losing his job, anyway.
“Ellery Seymour knows you called Livingstone, Montana, and why, Milton,” I said. “Lamb had a report this morning. So Mr. Stubblefield probably knows by now.”
I looked around at him after a moment, half expecting that the silence meant he’d caved in absolutely. But not at all and quite the contrary. He seemed to have snapped together like a fresh elastic.
“What else does he know—your friend Lamb, I mean?”
