They tramped upstairs, all four. Within a few minutes, I was continually interrupted by new arrivals. I didn’t know who they were. Police officers, coroner’s men, probably. They came in officiously, asked, “Where is it?” and went upstairs.
After a while Mrs. Waller came down, her face mottled and red, her eyes anxious and frightened.
“What is it?” she asked hoarsely.
“It’s Mr. Grant. He’s dead.”
“Dead? He’s dead?”
“Yes. I found him. I went up with some coffee for him, and he was—gone.”
“What did he die from?” she whispered stiffly, terror beginning on her face.
“I don’t know. But he—he did it himself. He left a note.”
I hadn’t yet thought what the implications might be. Then I did, with a shock, as I watched hope burst into Mrs. Waller’s face. I knew immediately what she meant when she cried:
“Did he confess he’d done it?”
“Oh no. No. It doesn’t mean he had anything to do with Mrs. Garr’s death. It was something entirely different. It was—”
The realization of how directly the Wallers were concerned in both Mr. Grant’s life and his death hit me. The realization of the eighteen years of agony they had built him. I turned my eyes away.
“When Lieutenant Strom was here last night he dropped on the floor the copy of Rose Liberry’s suicide note, the one your husband wrote. Mr. Grant saw it.”
I paused. Culpable as I felt the Wallers to be, I could hardly tell her the rest. I could feel her fear growing around me, pressing against me, but there was compulsion in it, too. Compulsion to tell. I went on.
“Mr. Grant saw the note after Lieutenant Strom had left. He fainted. He—his name wasn’t Grant. It was John Grant Liberry. He was her father.”
Mrs. Waller held her breath so long I was frightened into looking at her. Then she began sobbing horribly.
She wasn’t an imaginative woman. I think that was the first time she really understood what their withholding of the note had meant.
I couldn’t be sympathetic, but you have to do what you can for another human being. I went into my kitchen, reheated the second batch of coffee, and made her drink a cup. Mr. Buffingham came down while she was drinking it.
“What’s going on now?”
I explained shortly.
“Jeez!” he exclaimed excitedly. “You mean he’s murdered?”
“No. He left a note.”
“Cripes! Suicide!”
“It looked that way.”
He began pacing up and down the hall with long, fast steps. It was curious: Mrs. Garr’s death had left him imperturbable, as had, so far as I could see, the attacks on me. But Mr. Grant’s death excited him wildly. He ran upstairs after a bit; I heard his voice now and again talking to the men upstairs.
Lieutenant Strom came down to tell Mrs. Waller and me to go into my apartment and shut the door.
We did; there was a shuffling of feet on the stairs, then comparative quiet.
Lieutenant Strom knocked on my door; came in alone. He was genially elated.
“God, what a finale! This beats anything I ever had!”
I caught at one word with blank amazement.
“Finale? What do you mean, finale?”
“Well, everything’s answered now, isn’t it?”
I just stared at him, my lower jaw hanging. He laughed at me.
“Don’t tell me your supercolossal mind hasn’t tumbled, Mrs. Dacres. Do you mean you didn’t get it? Why, it’s as plain as the nose on Kistler’s face! John Grant Liberry! Gosh, what a melodrama! Girl’s father waits until the woman who brought about his daughter’s downfall is out of jail. He never believed the willing-victim business. He knew the girl. He considers Mrs. Garr her murderer. So when she gets out, he comes here to find her. Changes his name, breaks loose from his past. That alone shows he was out for her. We don’t know when he begins his hunt, but he finds her eventually, and luck’s with him—she’s running a rooming house. He takes a room with her. He probably has that suicide note on the brain; he hunts in the house for that or some other clue to Mrs. Garr’s guilt. He can afford to take his time. Maybe he finds something, maybe he doesn’t. I think he doesn’t. But she comes back from that Chicago trip too early, catches him hunting in the kitchen. There’s some kind of a scrap, and she hits the floor. Everything fits. Why, he even said he’d seen her that night! Golly, I should have caught on, right there. That slipped out, that did. So he tries to pass it off by saying he’d seen her out the window. And who was it raised the hue and cry about Mrs. Garr being gone in the first place? Mr. Grant! The girl’s father! Boy, here’s one place this story can hit the papers, anyway.” He stopped, insufferably satisfied.
“But the attacks on me,” I objected. “Do you think he did those, too?”
“Sure, why not? Why, I almost had him last night on one of them! He actually admitted he’d been in the cellar that night. Had to cook up a story to meet Buffingham’s evidence that he’d heard him prowling around. Admitted he’d heard you hooking your chairs under the doorknobs! Just you think about that. Standing with his ear to your kitchen door, that’s where he was. Why, I must have been off my feed, not hanging it on him last night. I knew it the first thing I woke up this morning. I was just going to start for here when Jones called. Oh, he knew I had him, all right. Well, he saved the city the expense of a trial.”
I stared at his cocksure face.
If he was as sure as that, he must be right. He had experience with solving murders; I hadn’t.
“What did he—?”
“Sleeping powders. Nice quiet way. I don’t blame him. He knew he was through. I don’t blame him for much of the rest of it, either, except that he was a little hard on you. Probably didn’t realize how hard he was being. The girl’s father! Golly, what a story!”
I looked
