They had been frightened yesterday; they were twice as frightened now. They looked as if they had long seen catastrophe coming, and now it had come.
“Sit down,” the lieutenant ordered. He looked at the two, then, with level eyes, let silence frighten them still further.
“Waller,” he said, even and low, “Mrs. Dacres has been helping me today by looking over the Comet files of the Liberry case. On July 10, 1919, the Comet ran the picture of a young patrolman. On the morning of July eighth that patrolman had been called into a house at 417 St. Simon Street by a woman who came out in her nightclothes screaming that a girl had hung herself in a bedroom upstairs. The name of that patrolman was Walters.”
Silence.
“Mrs. Dacres has a quick eye. But she didn’t trust it. She called me. I looked, too.”
Silence.
“Waller, why didn’t you tell me you were once on the force?”
Mr. Waller wasn’t looking at him. He was looking at me. With tired eyes. Mrs. Waller was looking at me, too. With hating eyes.
“I knew she’d bring it up sooner or later.” He talked as if he spoke in a vacuum. “Ever since she said Mrs. Garr told her.”
“Yes, you knew!” Strom exploded into a shattering bellow. “You knew, all right! And you tried to kill her to quiet her!”
Mr. Waller, still leaden, shook his head.
“No.”
“Your wife got you the Kleenfine!”
“No.”
“She used it!”
“For cleaning. Only for cleaning.”
“You went home from the inquest. You waited until the house was quiet. You went into the basement. You swept the back cellar stairs. You took out the screws and sawed the bolt of the door going into Mrs. Dacres’ kitchen. You lurked there in the dark stairway, waiting until Mrs. Dacres came home, waited while she undressed and went to bed and slept, waited like the coward you are until it was safe for you to do your beastly work. Until you could come out in the dark—in the dark—and kill her!”
The Wallers were trembling. I was shaking, myself.
The lieutenant’s voice dropped then, and he spoke in cold little tones like ice.
“What were you looking for in that closet?”
“I wasn’t, I swear to God I wasn’t.”
“Then what were you doing there?”
“Nothing. I wasn’t there.”
Silence.
The lieutenant whispered.
“Waller, I’m going to have your rooms searched.”
Silence.
“No objection?”
Silence.
“So it isn’t there, eh? Well, Waller, maybe there’s more than one road to town. Waller, I have a note in my safe. That note is dated July 8, 1919. On July eight Patrolman Walters—that was you, Waller—went into a house at 417 St. Simon Street. You found something there. Something Mrs. Garr paid you two thousand dollars for!
“Walters, there’s only one thing you could have found in that room that Mrs. Garr would have paid you that much money for. No amount of money could have saved her from getting into some trouble, and she knew it. But one thing could have made her trouble a lot worse.
“Walters, all during the Liberry trial, the Liberry attorneys tried to get evidence of a suicide note. They tried to get it from Mrs. Garr. They tried to get it from the girl who found the body. They tried to get it from you, Walters, from the policeman who was really the first person to examine the room.
“But they didn’t get it. Because you were lying, Walters. You were lying your soul to hell, and they couldn’t prove it.
“But I know something those attorneys didn’t know. Something that girl’s father would have paid—God, I wonder how much—to know.
“I know about that note you hold, dated July 8, 1919.”
Nothing in the room, except the vibration of two people trembling in the silence.
A simple question, simply asked.
Dully Mr. Waller looked at him. And then, as simply as if this were not an answer withheld through eighteen years, he spoke: “Mrs. Garr burned it.”
Softly, on an expended breath: “She burned it.”
Mr. Waller nodded silently.
Mrs. Waller’s head moved, the faint echo of a nod.
I felt like crying. The lieutenant’s voice was so still and small it sounded in the small room as if he spoke in a great hall.
“You found the suicide note.”
“Yes, I found it.”
“Mrs. Garr paid you two thousand dollars to keep silent about it.”
“Yes.”
“Only the two of you knew.”
“Yes.”
“Walters, did you read that note?”
The man he was questioning made a sound like a sigh. He didn’t answer directly; he said, whispering:
“Paper.”
Lieutenant Strom pushed paper and pencil across the desk.
Mr. Waller stared at the pencil and the paper at the edge of the desk for a long moment; then he got to his feet, staggering as if he were drunk. He walked to the desk, bent above it, picked up the pencil.
His fingers were shaking, I saw, but the shaking fingers began writing almost automatically, as if this were an exercise performed many times before. Then he pushed the paper across the desk toward the lieutenant and stood, staring at the floor.
Hardness swept into Lieutenant Strom’s face. I moved to read over his shoulder.
Odd handwriting to be a man’s. It wasn’t a man’s writing; it was almost a woman’s writing; a writing remembered so exactly in a man’s mind that he could almost reproduce it.
Father, Mother, I’ve tried and tried to get out. I can’t, the house is locked. The things they make me do are horrible, horrible. Oh, Father and Mother, forgive me. I love you, and I know you would so much rather your Rose were dead.
I kept my eyes on that paper. I would not, I could not, look at the Wallers. But my ears heard Mr. Waller saying woodenly:
“Now maybe I can forget it. I was new on the force. I owed a lot. We were going to have a baby. It died. That note’s eaten the heart out of me ever since.”
The lieutenant said, still quietly, “Two thousand dollars was your entire payment for surrendering this note?”
Mr. Waller answered as if now his shame were full, there could be no more.
“She gave me all
