This last item aroused Vance’s special interest. He walked up to it and regarded it closely.
“Most int’restin’,” he commented. “Our departed friend seems to have worn false hair; did you know that, Markham?”
“I always suspected it,” was the indifferent answer.
Heath, who had remained standing on the threshold, seemed a little impatient.
“There’s only one other room on this floor,” he said, leading the way down the hall. “It’s also a bedroom—for guests, so the housekeeper explained.”
Markham and I looked in through the door, but Vance remained lounging against the balustrade at the head of the stairs. He was manifestly uninterested in Alvin Benson’s domestic arrangements; and when Markham and Heath and I went up to the third floor, he sauntered down into the main hallway. When at length we descended from our tour of inspection he was casually looking over the titles in Benson’s bookcase.
We had just reached the foot of the stairs when the front door opened and two men with a stretcher entered. The ambulance from the Department of Welfare had arrived to take the corpse to the Morgue; and the brutal, businesslike way in which Benson’s body was covered up, lifted onto the stretcher, carried out and shoved into the wagon, made me shudder. Vance, on the other hand; after the merest fleeting glance at the two men, paid no attention to them. He had found a volume with a beautiful Humphrey-Milford binding, and was absorbed in its Roger Payne tooling and powdering.
“I think an interview with Mrs. Platz is indicated now,” said Markham; and Heath went to the foot of the stairs and gave a loud, brisk order.
Presently a grey-haired, middle-aged woman entered the living-room accompanied by a plain-clothes man smoking a large cigar. Mrs. Platz was of the simple, old-fashioned, motherly type, with a calm, benevolent countenance. She impressed me as highly capable, and as a woman given little to hysteria—an impression strengthened by her attitude of passive resignation. She seemed, however, to possess that taciturn shrewdness that is so often found among the ignorant.
“Sit down, Mrs. Platz,” Markham greeted her kindly. “I’m the District Attorney, and there are some questions I want to ask you.”
She took a straight chair by the door and waited, gazing nervously from one to the other of us. Markham’s gentle, persuasive voice, though, appeared to encourage her; and her answers became more and more fluent.
The main facts that transpired from a quarter-of-an-hour’s examination may be summed up as follows:
Mrs. Platz had been Benson’s housekeeper for four years and was the only servant employed. She lived in the house, and her room was on the third, or top, floor in the rear.
On the afternoon of the preceding day Benson had returned from his office at an unusually early hour—around four o’clock—announcing to Mrs. Platz that he would not be home for dinner that evening. He had remained in the living-room, with the hall door closed, until half past six, and had then gone upstairs to dress.
He had left the house about seven o’clock, but had not said where he was going. He had remarked casually that he would return in fairly good season, but had told Mrs. Platz she need not wait up for him—which was her custom whenever he intended bringing guests home. This was the last she had seen him alive. She had not heard him when he returned that night.
She had retired about half past ten, and, because of the heat, had left the door ajar. She had been awakened some time later by a loud detonation. It had startled her, and she had turned on the light by her bed, noting that it was just half past twelve by the small alarm-clock she used for rising. It was, in fact, the early hour which had reassured her. Benson, whenever he went out for the evening, rarely returned home before two; and this fact, coupled with the stillness of the house, had made her conclude that the noise which had aroused her had been merely the backfiring of an automobile in Forty-ninth Street. Consequently, she had dismissed the matter from her mind, and gone back to sleep.
At seven o’clock the next morning she came downstairs as usual to begin her day’s duties, and, on her way to the front door to bring in the milk and cream, had discovered Benson’s body. All the shades in the living-room were down.
At first she thought Benson had fallen asleep in his chair, but when she saw the bullet hole and noticed that the electric lights had been switched off, she knew he was dead. She had gone at once to the telephone in the hall and, asking the operator for the Police Station, had reported the murder. She had then remembered Benson’s brother, Major Anthony Benson, and had telephoned him also. He had arrived at the house almost simultaneously with the detectives from the West Forty-seventh Street station. He had questioned her a little, talked with the plain-clothes men, and gone away before the men from Headquarters arrived.
“And now, Mrs. Platz,” said Markham, glancing at the notes he had been making, “one or two more questions, and we won’t trouble you further. … Have you noticed anything in Mr. Benson’s actions lately that might lead you to suspect that he was worried—or, let us say, in fear of anything happening to him?”
“No, sir,” the woman answered readily. “It looked like he was in special good-humor for the last week or so.”
“I notice that most of the windows on this floor are barred. Was he particularly afraid of burglars, or
