XXIV
4:41 a.m.—As the Colours of Dawn
“Well,” Lieutenant Valcour said, as he joined Dr. Worth in Endicott’s room, “what do you think now?”
Dr. Worth was finished with bewilderments. In spite of the camel’s-hair robe swathing him, he had recaptured to an impressive extent his air of dignity.
“Lieutenant,” he said, “I think that my services are no longer required in this house. With your permission, I shall dismiss the two nurses and go home.”
“Why, certainly, Doctor, if you wish. The prosecuting attorney will probably require your testimony to secure an indictment and will want you later on at the trial, but I’m sure he will bother you just as little as possible. We realize how annoying any court work is to a doctor.”
“I shall be glad to testify whenever required.”
“Will you also let me know where to keep in touch with the two nurses? Their testimony will be needed, too.”
Dr. Worth stated the name and address of the Nurses’ Home at which Miss Vickers and Miss Murrow could always be reached, and Lieutenant Valcour wrote them down in his notebook.
“Would it bother you very much, Lieutenant, to let Mrs. Endicott know that I have gone, when you see her?”
“Not at all, Doctor.”
“I doubt whether she will require my services again.” He paused for a moment at the doorway. “That woman, sir, is of iron.”
“I shouldn’t wonder, Doctor. At any rate, she is pretty thoroughly encased in metal. I’ll send Cassidy along with you to pass you and the nurses by O’Brian down at the door. No one can leave the house, you see, without permission.”
“Thank you, Lieutenant. Goodbye.”
“Goodbye, Doctor, and thanks for all your assistance. Cassidy, come back after you’ve seen the doctor out, and stay in the corridor. I’ll call when I need you.”
“Yes, sir.”
The door closed, and Lieutenant Valcour was alone. With a persistence that was becoming annoying, the same curious feeling of lurking danger crept out at him from the room’s stillnesses. His nerves were usually as steady as the quality reputed to be enjoyed by a rock, and the strange little jumpings they were going in for were getting that fabulous animal known as his goat.
He went over to the chair before the flat-topped desk and sat down. There was that drawer filled with disordered papers to be gone through. He removed the drawer and emptied it of its contents by the simple expedient of turning it upside down onto the top of the desk.
There were, mixed up among bills and receipts, a surprising number of letters from women. He read each one of them carefully and felt a little sorrier, at the conclusion of each, for the future of the race—not so much because of any danger to its morals as to its mentality.
He made a little group of each batch of notes from the same woman. One pile topped the list with the number of ten. These were signed “Bebe” and were addressed with deplorable monotony to “My cave man.” Endicott must have been rather an ass, he decided, as well as a pretty low sort of an animal. It was all very well for Roberts to rave on about soldiers, and simple hearts, and war, and things. That’s just what it amounted to: raving. What if Endicott and, presumably, her brother had had simple hearts. So had guinea pigs.
Lieutenant Valcour wondered whether everyone else connected with the case was quite sane and he just a little mad. Roberts—Mrs. Endicott—the housekeeper—Hollander—Madame Velasquez. They all seemed a little touched, and that was a sign of madness when one considered everyone else but one’s self insane. But no one was ever truly normal under disagreeable and terrifying circumstances; at least, he had never found anyone who was so.
The letters were meaningless as possible clues to a motive; just a sticky conglomeration of lust, greed, dullness, and execrable taste. He shoved them aside.
He watched the strengthening light of day as it came through the window across the desk before him. Such sky as he saw was of rubbed emerald, and the backs of the houses across the intervening gardens were mauve and dark gray, with lines of lemon yellow running thinly along their roofs.
He thought of Bohême—dawn always made him think of Bohême—and hummed a bar or two of it softly. Then he thought of Mrs. Endicott, and his thoughts were pastelled in the colours of the dawn: a woman of halftones and overlapping lacquer shades.
It became quite clear in his mind that she never would have killed her husband. Or Hollander. That, in fact, she never would have killed anybody at all. The belief became fixed, even in face of the sizeable amount of evidence against her.
He reviewed her case, in digest, as the prosecuting attorney might present it to a jury: from the very start there was that contrary fact of her having telephoned for the police. Why? On the slender ground of a pencilled note that might or might not have been a threat, and an instinctive premonition that her husband was in danger. The prosecution would thereupon interpolate a smart crack or two on the general subject of premonitions, fortune tellings, and the Ace of Spades. They would point out that people who committed crimes which were bound to be shortly discovered occasionally got in touch with the police in order to use the gesture as a premise of their innocence.
There were her definite admissions of intent to kill her husband—her having left her bedroom immediately upon his having knocked and said goodbye—and her recent most damaging actions in regard to the narcotic and having been on the balcony.
Motive?
The prosecuting attorney could offer a thousand. The most prominent ones would include a jealous rage at her husband’s easily proved peccadillos with other women and her own rather significant attitude toward Hollander. Yes, it would be only too possible for the prosecuting attorney to get a
