“Yes, but—”
“Let him go. That was a tall tale, Kistler. We’ll start checking on it right away, and if we can get any circumstantiating evidence, why, good for you. But it’s a lot more likely you were in a fracas with the old lady and grabbed that ticket off her. And you don’t need telling what happened to old lady Garr. If we can’t get any proof on your story you may be sitting on an awful hot seat one of these days. Think that over tonight, and see if you can’t think up a little more embroidery for your story.”
Bill came back; Mr. Kistler gave me a last brown glance and went with him.
“Now you can see what you got me into,” the glance said. “You got me into this.”
Lieutenant Strom favored me with a brooding look.
“Now I get around to you, young lady. Why’d you go into Kistler’s rooms?”
I gave him the explanation I had given Mr. Kistler.
“When curiosity was being passed around you took over a God damn big piece, Mrs. Dacres, or else.”
“I admit the first. It isn’t the ‘or else.’”
“I’m not sure about you. I suspect you of being smart.”
“I don’t. Very stupid is what I feel.” I meant it, too.
“Yes? Well, don’t forget this. We’ll find out. And remember this, too. If there’s one thing that gets a murderer caught surer and sooner than anything else, that’s what it is. Smartness. You can go on home now.”
—
AN OFFICER DID ME the honor of escorting me home in a police car. After this, I was going to find an ordinary car tame. I told my escort with elaborate politeness that it was gallant of him to take me home, but he didn’t rise. He left me with, “That’s okay, lady,” and swung away into the cool June night.
When I unlocked the front door of Mrs. Garr’s house, there were two men in the front hall, but one ducked fast into the room under the stairs. I’d quit wondering why policemen did things. The other was the same policeman from earlier that day, the voice that spoke from Mr. Kistler’s door. He had the evening Comet in his hands.
“You back?” he asked.
“No,” I said.
“Where’s Kistler?”
“I’m him.”
“Okay, lady, I’ll find out in good time.”
He buried his face in the paper again. I looked at the headline of the front page; it was about a strike. The light in the hall isn’t much for reading a paper, even your own; I had to get close to read the smaller headlines. There wasn’t one about Mrs. Garr.
“So we didn’t even make the front page.”
The policeman came promptly out of the paper’s interior. “I’ll trade fair. You get the paper, I get the news.”
After that I had to loosen up enough to tell him what had happened to Mr. Kistler. He was disappointed but still hopeful.
“If it turns out he croaked her, I oughta get a promotion,” he urged anxiously. “I bet he did. You take a yarn like that, now—he can’t prove it.”
“I should think he’d rather die than tell it,” I said.
Sitting on the black leather davenport, I looked through the paper for some account of the happenings at Mrs. Garr’s house.
“There ain’t nothing except in the obituaries,” the policeman offered helpfully from his chair.
There wasn’t, either. The article was a miracle of inadequacy, on page fourteen. But the second paragraph opened a completely new train of inquiry for me.
MRS. GARR DIES
Harriet Luella Garr, 67, resident of Gilling City since 1884, was found dead at her residence, 593 Trent Street, on Thursday evening. Alarmed by her nonappearance, lodgers called police to search the deceased woman’s rooms. She was found there.
Due to a connection with the famous Liberry case of two decades ago, Mrs. Garr was at one time a well-known figure in the city’s news. It was at her residence, then on St. Simon Street, that the unfortunate Rose Liberry was found, a suicide. After some years in retirement Mrs. Garr moved to 593 Trent Street, where she has lived quietly. The funeral will be private.
I sat there with my eyes fastened on the paper, but I was thinking, not looking. I should have known. I should have guessed. I should have known there was a story behind the evil in Mrs. Garr’s eyes. Keeping a lodging house, suffering all the mean dodges of a penurious life—that alone could not build a face and eyes such as hers. There had been something evil in her life to leave that evil behind. But what, exactly? At what did that last paragraph hint?
I spoke abruptly to the policeman.
“What business was Mrs. Garr in before she retired?”
He coughed and looked embarrassed.
“I ain’t supposed to do much talkin’.”
“But it’s right here in the paper. It’s written as if people would know to what it referred, but didn’t want to come out in plain words.”
“It’s a long time ago now. The old folks would remember; the young ones wouldn’t. Let bygones be bygones, I say.”
“You mean I shouldn’t be allowed to know something I’d know anyway if I were ten years older?”
He laughed a little. “Well, no. Put it that way, I guess there ain’t no harm tellin’. Lots of people does know. We had her on the records for years. She kept a house.”
“You mean she kept a—a house?” I gasped.
“Yep, that’s what she had, all right. Down on St. Simon Street. Had it from about 1900 to 1919, we figured. Quite a joint, too, I heard—all red plush. Them was the red-plush days. I was just a kid most of that time, but I can remember the stories the boys used to tell. Why, I wouldn’t be surprised this black leather chair I’m sittin’ in didn’t come out of that house.”
I got off the black leather davenport as if it burned me.
“Well, I certainly didn’t know what I was getting when I took an apartment in this house!”
“Oh, you don’t have to worry about that, lady. S’far’s we’ve found out,
