“There would have been plenty of time for that.”
“You’ve been with Mrs. Endicott for quite a while. Have you ever noticed whether or not she owns a pistol?”
“I don’t think I have. No, I’m sure I’ve never seen one. That doesn’t prove anything, though. There are any number of private places where she may have kept it. It is also possible”—Roberts seemed desperately earnest in her effort to strengthen each link in her accusation, for she was accusing rather than simply offering a theory—“that someone may recently have given her a revolver, isn’t it?”
“Everything is possible.”
“Mr. Hollander, for example?”
“A very good example.”
He said nothing further, and after a while the stillness became almost physically oppressive. Roberts was finished with emotions. “Is that all?” she said, and her voice was colourless.
“I believe so, Miss Roberts—except that I wish you would tell me why, in view of your recent insinuations concerning Mrs. Endicott and Hollander, you ever suggested him as the proper friend to stay with her husband tonight. It’s a little inconsistent, don’t you think?”
“Very.”
“Then why did you do it?”
“I have nothing further to say.”
Lieutenant Valcour went abruptly to the door and opened it. Cassidy and Hansen were standing near by in the corridor.
“Hansen,” he said, “go with Miss Roberts up to her room. There is a gun in her trunk. She will give it to you. Keep it for me.”
“Yes, sir.”
Roberts went outside.
“Am I to consider myself under arrest, Lieutenant?”
“No, Miss Roberts. But, as I have explained, you are not to leave the house. Cassidy, come inside here with me.”
Cassidy came in and closed the door. He watched Lieutenant Valcour draw the sheet up again over Endicott’s face.
“What’s Dr. Worth doing, Cassidy?”
“He has gone back to bed, sir. Shall I go get him?” Cassidy cast one suspicious look toward the bed.
“No, let him sleep. There’s nothing just this instant. I’ll want to see him in about a quarter of an hour, though.”
Lieutenant Valcour went into the bathroom, opened the window, and went outside onto the balcony. The gray before dawning was in the sky, and a rare clearness was vibrant in the fresh, sweet air.
The outline of the garden down below was quite distinct. There were other gardens belonging to the adjacent houses, too, and to the houses backing them from the rear. It was a street of gardens which bloomed, Lieutenant Valcour reflected, for the express benefit of caretakers in summer, while their owners spent the season at fashionable resorts either in the mountains or on the shore.
Lieutenant Valcour went and carefully examined with his flashlight the window to Endicott’s room that had been raised from the bottom when the shot was fired. He played the light upon the surface of its glass. It was quite clean. There was no trace of any pressing of noses or of foreheads against its polished surface. Nor, on the stone sill, were there any telltale threads of silk, or any of the various clues that would serve to indicate a woman’s presence.
He stared speculatively for a minute at the windows of the room above, where the curiously vindictive Mrs. Siddons was now presumably resting, or else indulging in her blank-eyed game of mental maledictions. No, he couldn’t really visualize her as descending to the balcony by a rope or any other kind of ladder. A hundred years ago, perhaps, she might have gone so far as to shape a replica of Mr. Endicott in wax and then, with appropriate incantations, proceed to stick pins in such portions of it as would cabalistically do the most good. But there was no such simple expedient left her in our modern skeptic age. It would be necessary, of course, to interview her further concerning those vague, bitter hints she had thrown out about outrageous actions on the part of Endicott toward the maids.
Even the city could not kill the fair fresh breezes of dawn. He stared at the dimming stars and wondered whether Roberts’s extraordinary statement was a lie. For after all it hinged upon nothing more significant than a damp spot at the edge of a spread, and Roberts could easily have spilled something there herself to offer as corroborative evidence to her tale. Was she, he wondered, quite so smart? And from all that he had been able to judge of her, he rather thought that she was.
He would have to consult with Dr. Worth, of course, before doing anything drastic. And the doctor would probably raise a holler, especially since he had just gone to bed and would have to be yanked summarily out of it again. Well, bed-yankings were to be expected in the lives of doctors and of the police; they were expected to be perpetually on tap, like heat or water.
He made his way slowly toward the windows of Mrs. Endicott’s room, carefully inspecting the balcony and sills with his flashlight as he went along. There were no smudges, no threads, no clues until he reached the last window in the row. And there, on the balcony floor just below its sash, something blazed in the circle of his torch a bright jade green.
It was a woman’s slipper.
XXII
4:14 a.m.—Tap—Tap—Tap
Lieutenant Valcour picked the slipper up and sighed. It was a distressingly leading and decisive clue, but it did not lead in a direction he cared to follow, nor did it decide things as he thought they ought to be decided.
On the surface of it, the case seemed blatantly plain: Hollander had come to the house at seven to save Mrs. Endicott from committing murder or suicide and had shocked Endicott almost to death—and just a short while ago Mrs. Endicott had shot her husband to prevent him from making a statement that would convict Hollander.
Rubbish!
Lieutenant Valcour flatly refused to believe it. And yet one had
