The Woman in Black, page 22
She looked anxiously out the window, her face still pale. “I wish I knew where he was. It must be terrible.”
I had the idea it was Ellery Seymour she meant now, not Theodore or Mr. Stubblefield. She broke off abruptly and glanced out into the hall. Adams was coming up the steps. We could see his gray head through the marble columns of the stair rail. She waited silently until he came to the door.
“Mr. Ellery Seymour is calling, ma’am. He’s in the parlor. I told him I thought you were engaged at this time, ma’am.”
I thought she was definitely paler now, but if she was it was so subtle a change that it only made her seem a little more remote and self-contained. Still she didn’t answer.
“Shall I tell him you’re engaged, ma’am?” Adams said.
She shook her head. “I’ll see him. Tell him I’ll be down directly.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
She waited calmly until he’d gone out and we saw him going down the stairs again. Then she looked at me. I knew she was anything but calm. It was all habit, a mannered overlay to conceal the turmoil going on inside her. Her eyes were too bright and her nostrils quivering.
“You come with me, Grace. I don’t like this. I’d rather he hadn’t come here. I haven’t anything to . . . to give him, and I don’t want to see him . . . weakened. I’d rather he’d just gone away.”
“Then don’t see him, Dorothy,” I said. “It’s perfectly simple.”
She shook her head quickly. “It isn’t simple at all. I have to see him, now he’s come. It’s just that I don’t want to see him . . . ignominious. I think it is. It isn’t that I’m afraid to see him.”
I thought it was an odd way to put it, but I went with her.
“Ignominious,” however, wasn’t the word. That was a fear totally without foundation.
He was out on the balcony, standing by the rail, his back to the long open windows, looking out over the green canyon of the Park. He turned when he heard us and stood there looking at Dorothy, very calmly, but with a strange kind of inscrutability that was hard to define, except that it had nothing in it of ignominy or failure. I thought he looked much less tense and tied up within himself, and much less the New England last Puritan sort of thing. He did look tired, depleted in a sense, like a man who’d been through a great emotional experience and needed rest. Not peace. Oddly enough, peace was the thing he seemed to have.
Dorothy, knowing him much better than I, sensed it far more immediately. She quickened her step abruptly.
“Ellery! What——”
As she reached the threshold of the balcony she stopped short, a quick and definite alteration in her manner. It was a good twenty-degree drop in the temperature.
“Hello, Susan. I didn’t know you were here.”
If Susan Kent answered I didn’t hear her, nor did she do more than indicate by the mute appeal in the glance she gave me that she was aware of my presence either. She was sitting in the reed chair that Enoch B. Stubblefield had occupied the day before, expansive over his julep and excited over Ellery Seymour’s refusal to let him make his great announcement. She was as pallid as a young ghost, and very quiet, with the kind of becalmed stillness of a painted ship upon a painted sea.
“I brought Susan with me, Dorothy,” Ellery Seymour said. “I know you won’t mind, because she has to hear this as well as you. I’d like Bill to hear it too, but I couldn’t get in touch with him.”
Dorothy inclined her head a little and went to where she’d sat the day before.
“Mr. Stubblefield called a few minutes ago,” she said. “He seemed rather cross. In fact he bellowed like an angry bull.”
Ellery Seymour was silent for an instant. Then he said, “Good. I take it he’s found out I was telling the truth—not selling out to a higher bidder.”
“Has he bought the rubber plant?”
It was Dorothy who asked it, but Susan who caught her breath quickly.
“No. He didn’t buy it. At least he hadn’t when I left. He was calling Bill Kent at Rubber Reserve. I presume he got hold of him. He must know the facts by now.”
“What are the facts, Ellery? I thought you wanted him to buy it.”
Dorothy’s face was as impassive as all the Orient. “I thought that was the way you’d . . . planned it.”
He looked at her appraisingly for a moment. If he was taken aback I saw no indication of it, except perhaps that he didn’t answer as promptly as he might have done. He seemed to be weighing every word carefully before he spoke.
“I did plan it—thoroughly and minutely—over a period of years,” he said at last. “All I had to do was wait till the chance came, and this was it. He couldn’t resist the flamboyant and spectacular. He’s always believed that two emotions are the mainsprings of human activity—vanity and cupidity, pride and greed. Because he’s ruled by them, he thought all. other men were. And because he’s ruled by them, it wasn’t very hard for me to use them. I couldn’t have got this far if he hadn’t been blinded by them, and by his own stupendous ego. It was all incredibly simple.”
“But you didn’t go through with it?” Dorothy asked, when he stopped and looked away into the leafy green distance again. “Why did you stop?”
“Why?” He repeated it without shifting his gaze. “Why did I stop? Because it didn’t make any difference to me any more. It’s a curious thing. I got up this morning with an extraordinary sense of triumph and elation, and I went to his rooms ready to finish the job. I can’t say precisely what happened, but something did. When I saw him there at his desk, when he got up and came over and slapped me on the back, on top of the world . . .”
He moved his hands in a quick gesture, and shrugged.
“Something happened to the structure I’ve built up, brick by brick, painstakingly, day after day, year after year. It crumbled to the ground. I hadn’t any desire to use it for the purpose I’d built it for. I had no emotion about it. I wasn’t sorry. I wasn’t glad. I simply didn’t care any more. His arrogance and his greed simply didn’t disturb me. I told him to tear the contracts up and put them in the wastebasket. I told him there was no magic formula for creating rubber out of skim milk for a fraction of a cent a pound. I told him it was a lie, made up out of whole cloth. I told him a great many things. I didn’t tell him the one thing that’s been behind every move I’ve made since I’ve known him. That’s neither here nor there.”
Ellery Seymour stopped for a moment. Then he said quietly, “He didn’t believe me at first. He said I’d never have risked losing my money as well as his. He . . . he didn’t understand. He accused me of having sold out to somebody else. But that didn’t matter either. I suggested he call Bill Kent. Then I left. I walked up here. It’s the first time I’ve walked in the streets a free man for many years.”
Dorothy watched him, quietly and intently. Susan had let her dark head rest back against the gray-and-yellow cushion behind her and sat with her eyes closed. There was no relief in this for her. She must have been thinking of Bill when Mr. Stubblefield called him, hunting the truth that he wouldn’t believe when Ellery Seymour told it to him.
“I’ve been rationalizing my own . . . psychosis for many years,” Ellery Seymour went on, after a moment. “What it is isn’t important, now. But I think if Stubblefield hadn’t for years reminded me, every time we were in public together, of the time I came to him, half-starved and down at the heels, and Mrs. Stubblefield hadn’t always brought up the fortune teller who saw my initials in the stars, or the teacup or whatever, I might have forgotten. It’s hard to say. I think I’m not basically vindictive. I became so through . . . something that happened in my own life.”
I thought for a moment that he’d tell us the story the engineer had told at lunch that day, about his wife and child and unborn baby. But he didn’t. He let that rest.
“I think perhaps what happened to Betty Livingstone, whose father was one of Stubblefield’s victims, as her mother and herself are because of him, and what happened to Kramer, probably affected me more than I knew,” Seymour said. “I didn’t like Kramer. I didn’t know he had a man following me. I knew he followed me himself when I left the hotel after the Stubblefields had gone to bed and went out to the Preston Hotel to find Betty. He followed me later, when Theodore called me and told me where she was, and I went over to the I Street house to find she was dead.”
I couldn’t help moving a little. A chill draft of air seemed to come through the window behind me, and creep across the back of my neck and down my spinal column. Ellery Seymour looked over at me for an instant.
“I hired Betty Livingstone of course, to haunt the Stubblefields,” he said quietly. “I never saw her. I only knew she was Bertha Taylor’s daughter and in the show business. I talked to her over the phone. She didn’t know who I was. All she knew was that we both hated Enoch B. Stubblefield. She was delighted with the idea of making him uncomfortable. Madame Tigane, Mrs. Stubblefield’s present supernatural adviser, was delighted to make an extra few hundred dollars predicting Bertha Taylor’s appearance from time to time. Cupidity and vengeance seemed to be the emotions that made that work so beautifully. Except that I didn’t plan for Betty Livingstone to come here. I talked to her over the phone at the Preston Hotel. She was to appear at the Stubblefields’ hotel, not here. I was as astonished as any one when she came. I thought later it might have been Kramer’s idea, but I suspect now it was hers. Kramer had obviously begun to put two and two together when he heard me ask for her at the Preston. I think he must have gone up there the next day, thinking he might pick up some information she’d left behind before she went to I Street.”
“It would have been very awkward for you if he’d found it, wouldn’t it?”
It was I who said that, before I realized what I was saying, and before I caught the blank horrified look in Dorothy Hallet’s eyes as she turned her head quickly away. It was tantamount, of course, to accusing him, if not actually of their murder, of a compelling motive for it, anyway. I wished I hadn’t said it. As he looked at me I felt the cold chill again. There was something terribly appraising and very still in the way his level gaze was resting on me. I moistened my lips quickly. I didn’t seem able to speak unless I did, because my throat was dry too.
“I mean . . .”
“I know what you mean, Mrs. Latham. You mean precisely what you said. And you’re right. It would have been extremely awkward at that time, when I was still carrying out my plan. It would have been infuriating to madness. And you can go on from there. You can say the reason I gave up this morning was that I’d already been through an emotional catharsis. Having murdered two people, I’d got all the tension out of my system—I could afford to let Stubblefield off and save my money. Perhaps, Mrs. Latham, I thought it was safer not to go on with the police already on my trail. Above all, Mrs. Latham, you could certainly say that with Betty Livingstone alive, recognizing me, possibly, and Kramer suspicious enough to follow me to the hotel, they were very dangerous to me indeed. I’d be the last person to deny that, since it seems to be my day to tell the truth.”
“I don’t think she meant that, Ellery,” Dorothy said quickly. “It was just an idea that popped into her head.”
“No doubt,” Ellery Seymour said coldly. “I trust it doesn’t pop into anybody else’s head—and that she doesn’t plan to produce it as a theory for Captain Lamb.”
The cold chill down my spine had turned to splinters of ice pricking sharply along it. He was looking at me, smiling a little. If there was any warmth in the smile I failed to detect it.
“It would also be hard to prove, Mrs. Latham,” he said casually. “I don’t often——”
It was then that the telephone rang, cutting him off, and Dorothy rose abruptly, Dorothy whom I’d hardly ever seen answer a phone if it was six inches from her hand. She went quickly into the drawing room and opened the Chinese cabinet. I heard her say “Mrs. Hallet speaking,” as Ellery Seymour abandoned whatever it was he was going to say he didn’t often do, and turned to Susan Kent.
“I’m sorry I ever got you involved in any of this, Susan,” he said. “That’s all the apology I’m going to make. I’m afraid I didn’t think very highly of you to begin with, and I wasn’t particularly concerned with how much you might suffer in my plan. I thought you were just another ambitious woman trying to force a good scientist into the money market. I may even have thought the sooner he caught on to you the better off he’d be.”
Susan sat forward. “You don’t have to say all that, Ellery. It was my own fault. And if I’d had any sense, I’d have known I couldn’t fool you. But you don’t have to go on. I don’t count any more. And I’ll pay you back——”
Ellery Seymour shrugged. “You earned all you were paid.”
“But Bill——”
She had just spoken his name when Dorothy’s voice, intense with some unknown shock and horror, came through the open window.
“Oh, it isn’t possible! I don’t believe it! And Bill Kent . . . it isn’t possible!”
Susan was on her feet in an instant and running into the drawing room. She must have tried to take the phone from Dorothy’s hand. I heard Dorothy’s sharp, “Stop it, Susan—don’t be a fool!” before she turned back to the phone. “I’m sorry,” she said breathlessly. “—Go on.” She listened in silence. Then I heard her say, “Oh, my God!” and she was silent again. At last she said “All right,” and the phone clicked back into place.
“Go on back, Susan, and sit down,” she said then.
“What is it?” Susan said frantically. “Tell me—what’s the matter with Bill? What is it?”
“Come and sit down and I’ll tell you. There’s nothing you can do.”
They came back out on the balcony, Dorothy holding on to her arm. Her face was absolutely colorless. I’d never seen her look the way she did.
Ellery Seymour got up. “What is it, Dorothy?”
She shook her head and pushed Susan back into her chair. She looked even more distrait than the white-faced girl she was trying to make be calm. When she turned to us I thought for a moment she wasn’t going to be able to speak.
Then she said, very quietly, “Mr. Stubblefield has been shot and killed. They have arrested Bill Kent for his murder.”
27
The sharp swish-swish, swish-swish of the stream of cars crossing the Massachusetts Avenue bridge sounded loud enough, in the silence in which we sat for a moment, unbelieving but appalled, to have been in the Hallets’ vestibule.
I don’t remember much about that exact moment, except that Susan Kent sat absolutely motionless, and that Ellery Seymour stood staring at Dorothy, completely stunned, and then sat down abruptly, his face gray as ashes. His lips were working, but if any sound came out of them I couldn’t hear it. His body twitched as if a series of electric shocks were going through it. He was totally unnerved and shattered.
“Stop it, Ellery, and Susan—both of you,” Dorothy said. “Stop it, and listen to me. It’s all crazy about Bill, it doesn’t make sense—it can’t make sense! Susan—pull yourself together! He couldn’t have killed Mr. Stubblefield. Listen to me. Let me tell you what Milton Minor said.”
“Milton Minor!” I said.
“Yes, Milton Minor. He was at the hotel. He was in the lobby when Bill came. Bill’s a hot-headed fool . . . oh, God, he’s a fool!”
She made a despairing gesture.
“He asked for Mr. Stubblefield’s room number and they wouldn’t give it to him. Then he saw Milton. Milton thought he looked sore, but not crazy, and not dangerous. He told him. The house detective tried to stop him, but Bill got into the elevator and went on up. That’s all anybody knows. The detective took the next elevator. Bill was in Mr. Stubblefield’s room, and Mr. Stubblefield was dead—shot through the heart. Bill said he was dead when he got there. They arrested him anyway. But he didn’t have a gun. There wasn’t a gun anywhere. Don’t you see how ridiculous it is? You can’t shoot people unless you’ve got a gun. So please, stop it—both of you!”
But Susan got to her feet then. “I’ve got to go, Dorothy. I’ve got to go and see him.”
“They won’t let you——”
“Yes, they will. They have to—I’ve got to see him!”
She shook off Dorothy’s hand and went quickly out. Ellery Seymour made a half-dazed move to rise, to go with her, I suppose. She heard him and turned back.
“I want to go alone. I don’t want anybody with me.”
She ran on then, through the drawing room. Dorothy put her hand on Ellery’s arm.
“Sit down. Let her go. She’ll be better off alone. I’d rather be. Please sit down.”
He sat there, still speechless. She looked at him with an expression that was an odd mixture of compassion and bewildered anxiety. Then she put her hand softly on his shoulder.
“You didn’t really hate him as much as you thought, did you?” she asked gently. “You only thought you did.”
She went over to the balcony rail and stood there with her back to us, her hand on the white painted pillar, looking out over the Park, shaking her head a little before she rested it for a moment on her hand on the pillar. No one could tell what was in her mind, of course, but I wondered. If Ellery Seymour had killed Betty Livingstone and Joe Kramer . . . But he couldn’t have killed Mr. Stubblefield. Even if he’d come in a taxi, and hadn’t walked, as he said he did, from their hotel to Dorothy’s house, Mr. Stubblefield had been alive, talking to Dorothy, when he must have been in sight of the house in either case. And there was no possible doubt that he was really shattered now. He couldn’t have feigned such utter shock if he’d been the greatest actor of all times.
“—Mr. Mollinson, ma’am.”
The contrast of Adams’ polite voice in the drawing-room window announcing the arrival of Freddie Mollinson at that point was a descent from tragic suspense to comedy on such a reduced plane that I don’t think any of us believed our ears until we saw Freddie Mollinson in person. None of us, certainly, had heard Adams come in. Dorothy turned, startled, the color rising for the first time to her cheeks that day.
