CHAPTER XI
WHAT LAY BEYOND THE SMASHED DOOR
DR. EZRA LAWTON had come home an hour earlier from enacting the trying rôle of Stork’s Assistant. He had sunk to sleep wearily and embarked at once on a delightful dream of his unanimous election as Chairman of the Massachusetts State Medical Board.
All Aura, apparently, celebrated this dream election. For the three church bells were ringing loudly in honor of it. There were also a few thousand other bells which had been imported from somewhere for the occasion. The result was a continuous loud jangle which was as deafeningly annoying to the happy old doctor as it was gratifying.
Presently annoyance got the better of gratification and he awoke. But even though his beautiful dream had departed the multiple bell-ringing kept noisily on. And with a groan he realized the racket emanated from the telephone at his bedside.
“Well,” he snarled, vicious with dead sleepiness, as he lifted the receiver, “what the devil do you want?”
He listened for a second, then said in a far different voice:
“Oh, I beg your pardon, Miss Gregg. I didn’t guess it was you. Nothing the matter, I hope?” he added, as though elderly spinsters were in the habit of calling him up at three in the morning when nothing was the matter.
Again, this time much longer, he listened. Then he ejaculated:
“Good Lord! Oh, good Lord!”
The genuine horror in his voice waked wide his slumbrous wife. By dint of thirty years as a country doctor’s spouse Mrs. Lawton had schooled herself to doze peacefully through the nocturnal telephone ringing and three A. M. smalltalk which fringed her busy husband’s career.
Mrs. Lawton sat bolt upright in bed. Her husband was listening once more. Through the dark his wife could hear the scratchedly buzzy tones of Miss Gregg, desiccated and attenuated by reason of the faulty connection. But, try as she would, she could catch no word. At last Lawton spoke again, the hint of horror still in his voice:
“I’ll start over as soon as I can get dressed, Miss Gregg. You’ve notified the police, of course? Huh? Well, do, at once. I’ll be right there.”
He hung up the receiver and floundered out of bed.
“What’s the matter?” cried his wife. “What’s happened? What’s she want you for? What’s that about the police? What’s wrong? Why is she—?”
“Young Willis Chase has been murdered,” replied the doctor, wriggling into his scarce-cooled clothes. “Found dead in bed, with a knifeblade sticking into his right carotid.”
“Oh! OH!” babbled Mrs. Lawton. “Oh, it isn’t possible, Ezra! Who—who did it?”
“The murderer neglected to leave his card,” snapped the doctor. “At least Miss Gregg didn’t mention it.... Where in hell’s hot hinges is my other shoe?”
“But what was he doing at Miss Gregg’s? How did it happen? Who—”
“It wasn’t at Miss Gregg’s. It was at Vailholme. Houseparty, I gather. Thax Vail’s dog woke them all up by howling and then ran to Chase’s room. They broke the door in. Chase was lying there stone dead with a knife in his throat. And—it was that big German army knife Thax showed us one day. Remember it? About a million blades. One of them a sort of three-cornered punch. That was the blade, she says. Stuck full length in the throat. They’re all upside down there. It seems she had presence of mind enough to send for me but not enough to send for the police.”
“Oh, the poor, poor boy! I—I never liked him.”
“Maybe he killed himself on that account,” grumbled her husband, lacing his second shoe and rising puffingly from the task. “He—”
“Oh, it was suicide then? The—”
“Nobody seems to know what it was,” he rejoined. “I suppose later on I’ll have to sit on that question, too, in my capacity of coroner. Good-by. Don’t wait breakfast for me.”
He was gone. Presently through the open window his wife could hear the throaty wheeze of his car’s engine as the self-starter awakened it. Then there was a whirr and a rattle through the stillness, and the car was on its fast flight to Vailholme.
Dr. Lawton found the house glaringly lighted from end to end. The front door stood wide. So did the baize door which led back to the kitchen quarters. Through the latter issued the gabble and strident terror of mixed voices.
As the doctor came into the lower hall, Thaxton Vail emerged from the living room to meet him. Vail’s face was ghastly. Behind him was Miss Gregg.
The others of the party were grouped in unnatural postures in the living room, their chairs huddled close together as though their occupants felt subconscious yearning for mutual protection. Joshua Q. Mosely—mountainous in a yellow dustcoat that swathed his purple silk pajamas—was holding tight to the hand of his sniveling little wife. Doris was crouched low in a corner chair. Beside her sat Clive Creede trying awkwardly to calm the convulsive tremors which now and then shook her.
“Take me up there,” Dr. Lawton bade Vail. “You can tell me about it while I’m—”
He left the sentence unfinished and followed Thaxton up the stairs.
“We had a robbery at dinner time,” explained Vail as they went. “I was afraid the thieves might make a try, later, for more things than they could grab up at first. Foolish idea, I suppose. But anyhow I decided to spend the night downstairs. I let poor Chase have my room. Macduff, here, set up a most ungodly racket a few minutes ago. We followed him to my room and broke in. Chase was lying there in bed. You remember that big knife of mine—the one Clive Creede gave me? He had been stabbed with that. He— Here’s the room.”
As he stood aside for the doctor to pass in, another car rattled up to the porte-cochère.
“Wait a second,” said Thaxton. “That may be Quimby. Miss Gregg said she phoned him just after she notified you. He—”
The chief of police bustled into the hallway, and, at Vail’s summons, he came lumbering importantly upstairs. Together he and Dr. Lawton entered the deathly still room, Thaxton following.
“We left him as—as he was,” explained Vail. “Clive says the law demands that.”
Neither of the others paid any heed to him. Both were leaning over the bed. Thaxton stood awkwardly behind them, feeling an alien in his own room. Presently Dr. Lawton spoke almost indignantly.
“I wondered why he should be lying as if he were asleep; with a wound like that,” said he. “Except for the look on his face there’s no sign of disturbance. I see now.”
As he spoke he picked from the floor beside the bed a heavy metal water carafe which belonged on the bedside stand. Its surface was dented far more deeply than so short a tumble warranted.
“Stabbed him,” said the doctor. “Then, as he cried out, stunned him. See, Chief?”
The chief nodded. Then he turned from the bed and swept the room with his beetle-browed gaze. His eyes focused on the nearest window. It stood open, as did all the room’s other windows, on that breathless night.
But its short muslin curtain was thrust aside so far as to be torn slightly from its rod. On the white sill was the distinct mark of a scrape in the paint and a blob of dried mud as from the instep of a boot.
“Got in and out through the window,” decreed Quimby. “In a hurry going out.”
“The door was locked,” put in Vail. “Locked from the inside.”
“H’m!” mused the chief, crossing to the splintered portal. “I see. You folks broke it in, eh? Where’s the key?”
“What key?”
“Key of the door, of course. If Mr. Chase locked himself in he must have done it with a key. And it isn’t likely he took the key out of the lock afterward. Where is it? It isn’t in the keyhole.”
“The door flew open pretty hard,” said Vail. “Perhaps the key was knocked out onto the floor. Shall I look?”
“Never mind,” refused the chief. “It isn’t immediate. My men can look for it in the morning. I’m going to seal this room, of course, and keep some one on guard. That knife, now—that ought to be easy to trace. It isn’t like any other I ever saw. It—”
“You’re right,” acceded Vail, nettled at his lofty air, “it’s quite easy to trace. It’s mine.”
“Yours?”
The chief fairly spat the word at him. Again the heavy gray brows bent, the eyes mere slits of quizzical light between the puckered lids.
“Yes,” said Vail. “I had it out, earlier in the evening. I used it to draw a cork. I didn’t put it back in my pocket. I must have left it lying somewhere. I looked afterward but I couldn’t find it. Some one must have—”
“You left the knife in this room?”
“No,” denied Vail, after a moment’s thought. “I couldn’t have done that. I didn’t come up here again. No, if I left it anywhere it was downstairs.”
“H’m!” grunted the chief, non-committally.
Irritated afresh by the official’s manner, Thaxton turned to the doctor, who was once more leaving the bedside.
“Dr. Lawton,” he asked, “is there any chance he killed himself?”
“Not the slightest,” replied Lawton with much emphasis. “He was lying on his left side. The point entered the carotid from behind. He could not possibly have struck the blow. And in any event he could not have stunned himself with that metal water bottle afterward. No, there is every proof it was not suicide. The man was murdered.”
“And the murderer escaped through the window,” supplemented the chief. “Also, he entered by the same route. Now, we’ll leave everything as it is, and I’ll take my flashlight and examine the ground just below here.”
But before he left the room he leaned far out of the window looking downward. Vail had no need to follow the chief’s example. He knew the veranda roof was directly outside and that any active man could climb up or down the vine trellis which screened that end of the porch.
He also knew no man could have done so without making enough noise to have attracted Thaxton’s notice in the night’s stillness before the crime. Nor could any man have walked on the tin veranda roof, even barefoot, without the crackle and bulge of the tin giving loud notice of his presence. A tin roof cannot be traversed noiselessly, even by a cat, to say nothing of a grown man.
As the three trooped downstairs they found the others assembled in the hall nervously awaiting them.
“Well?” asked Miss Gregg.
“He was murdered!” pronounced the chief, portentously.
“You amaze me,” said the old lady. “But then, of course, you have the trained police mentality. By whom?”
“That is what we intend to find out,” answered the chief, tartly. “Where’s the phone? I want to send for a couple of my men. When I’ve done that I want to ask a few questions.”
“We may as well go back into the living room and sit down,” suggested Doris. “It’s chilly out here.”
But as the rest were following her suggestion she took occasion to slip back into the hall whither Vail was returning after showing Quimby where to find the telephone.
“Thax!” she whispered hurriedly. “I’m so sorry I was cross! I spoke abominably to you. Won’t you please forgive me? You know perfectly well I didn’t mean a word of the nasty things I said.”
“I know,” he said soothingly. “I know. Don’t think any more about it. It’s all right. I—”
“And, Thax,” she went on, thrilling oddly as his hand clasped hers, “I did what you asked me to, after all. I took the pistol upstairs with me. I hid it under the scarf I was carrying, and I smuggled it up there. I wanted you to know—”
“They’ll be here in ten minutes now,” interrupted the chief, returning from the telephone.
He preceded them into the living room. Briefly, at his request, Vail told of the collie’s amazing behavior and of the finding of Chase.
“You say you hadn’t gone to bed?” asked Quimby, when the short recital was ended. “Why not?”
“It is my own house. It had been robbed. I felt responsible. It seemed safer for some one to stay on guard.”
“In case the thief or thieves should return?” inquired the chief. “If you had any practical experience in such matters, you would know a house which has just been robbed is safer than any other. Thieves don’t rob the same house a second time the same night. Police annals show that a house in which a crime has just been committed is immune from an immediate second crime.”
“If robbery and murder may both be classified as crimes and not as mere outbursts of playfulness,” said Miss Gregg, “that theory has been proven with beautiful definiteness here to-night. So the second crime was probably imaginary or only—”
“I was talking of thefts,” said Quimby, glowering sulkily at her.
Then stirred to professional sternness by the hint of ridicule, he turned majestically once more to Vail.
“You were sitting up?” he prompted. “You were guarding your house—or trying to—from a second series of thefts? Is that it?”
Thaxton nodded.
“You are sure you didn’t go to sleep all night?”
“I am.”
“Be careful, Mr. Vail! Many a man is willing to swear he hasn’t slept a wink when really he dozed off without knowing it. That is a common error.”
“Common or not, I don’t think it is likely I was asleep when Chase was killed. Because I was on my feet and walking.”
“So?”
The chief was interested, formidably interested.
“You know then just when Mr. Chase was killed?”
“I know when the dog set up that racket. Presumably that was the time. I know because I had looked at my watch as I left the house, just before. It was five minutes past three when I looked.”
Dr. Lawton glanced at his own watch.
“It is seven minutes of four,” said he. “My examination proved Mr. Chase cannot have been dead quite an hour. The two times agree.”
“You say you left the house,” pursued the chief, deaf to this interpolation and bending forward, his eyes gripping Vail. “Why did you leave the house?”
“To make a tour of it,” returned Thaxton. “It was the second time since the others went to bed that I had gone out to make the rounds of the veranda path. The time between, I was sitting in my study except for one trip through the interior of the house at about one o’clock. That time I went from cellar to attic.”
“But you had left the house shortly before the approximate time of Mr. Chase’s death?” insisted the chief. “You went out through the front door?”
“Yes. I—”
“And came back again through the front door?”
“Of course.”
“Shortly after the murder?”
“The moment I heard Macduff howl. And I hadn’t been outside for more than—”
“We’ll come back to that if necessary. At present we have established the fact that you left the house shortly before the killing and that you came in again shortly afterward.”
Again Vail nodded, this time a trifle sullenly. Like Miss Gregg, he found the chief’s hectoring manner annoyed him. Nor did he care to admit that at the instant of Macduff’s howling he had been standing motionless under the window of Doris Lane’s room in all but reverent—if absurd—sense of watching over her safety while she slumbered.