“I am listening,” she said.
“Then the first thing I want to know is this: was there any one particular instance in which Mr. Endicott’s actions toward one of the servants were especially brutal or resented?”
The coals began to glow faintly beneath the ash that dusted her eyes.
“There was one very particular instance, Lieutenant.”
“Recently, Mrs. Siddons?”
“It occurred about a year ago, almost to a day.”
“Did Mr. Endicott attack her?”
“Yes.”
“Here in the house?”
“No, Lieutenant. It happened on her afternoon and evening out. Mr. Endicott’s car was parked outside at the curb. He offered her a ride.”
“Where is this girl now, Mrs. Siddons?”
“She was committed last year to an institution for the insane.”
The ash was completely gone now, and her eyes blazed with avenging fires.
“But surely she brought charges, Mrs. Siddons?”
“She was insane when they found her, Lieutenant. She was trying to die by throwing herself in front of a motor in Central Park. She has never spoken lucidly since.”
Lieutenant Valcour shrugged hopelessly. There it was again: that wretched wave of hearsay showing its baffling crest above the placid sea of established fact. Rumour had had it that Marge Myles had killed her husband; rumour now would have it about all sorts of terrible implications concerning Endicott, who was dead, and a girl who was confined in an insane asylum. And neither, obviously, could give direct testimony in accusation or defense.
“What was Mr. Endicott’s story?” he said.
“That he had driven her to Macy’s, where she wanted to buy something, and had left her there.”
And why not? Undoubtedly Endicott had been the blackest sort of a sheep, but the case was valueless without a thousand illuminative lights, without a whole medical history of the girl’s family, for example.
“Did you know this girl fairly well, Mrs. Siddons?”
“Yes. It is my habit to know all of the girls in my charge here very well. It is my duty, as I see it, to act not only as a housekeeper, but as their religious mentor and guide.”
“Then in the case of this girl, had she ever previously shown any symptoms of being mentally unbalanced?”
“There were times when I thought so, yes. Her family, you see, was not free from the taint. Her grandmother, on her mother’s side, had been insane. That is what made Mr. Endicott’s actions so peculiarly detestable, sir. She might have continued to live a normal, useful, happy life had he not shocked her so fatally.”
And on the other hand, Lieutenant Valcour decided, Endicott need not necessarily have done anything remotely of the sort. With such a direct strain of insanity inherent in her blood no outside agency whatever might have been needed to awaken it into activity. And then, he reminded himself, the girl had been shopping. He often wondered why more women didn’t go mad while shopping.
“Had Mr. Endicott any alibi for the period between the time he left her at Macy’s and came home?”
“No, Lieutenant. He said he had driven out a ways on Long Island along the Motor Parkway and then had come back.”
“So nothing was done about the matter officially?”
“There was nothing to do.”
“Then the only substantiated fact in the story is that she was seen getting into Mr. Endicott’s car in front of this house. I suppose someone did see her?”
“Yes.”
“Who?”
“Mrs. Endicott saw her, Lieutenant.”
There was distinct food for thought in that. No matter how far flung the tangents in the case appeared to be, they touched as a common circumference the enveloping influence of Mrs. Endicott.
“Is this girl still confined at the institution, Mrs. Siddons?”
“I don’t know. There has been nothing said—no communication.”
“What was the colour of her hair, Mrs. Siddons?”
“Black—the deepest, prettiest black I ever saw. They say that opposites are attracted to one another, and it was so in her case.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“Her husband was a blond.”
Lieutenant Valcour caught his breath sharply. It fitted surprisingly well—the motive—the crime—the fact that the girl might have retained her key to the servants’ entrance and her husband have got hold of it. And her husband would readily enough have believed the talk about his wife and Endicott—husbands had a habit of doing just that. To the man’s way of thinking, it wouldn’t have been anything so ephemeral as a maternal grandmother who had driven his wife insane: it would have been Endicott.
Madame Velasquez’s innuendoes against the true identity of anybody came back to Lieutenant Valcour with annoying force. What about Hollander? Hollander was a blond, and obviously of a different level in education and position than the Endicotts. And who had identified Hollander? Nobody. Endicott and his wife were the only two in the house who could, and Endicott was dead, and Mrs. Endicott had not seen Hollander at all, if her unbelievable statement were true: that she had not gone out onto the balcony and along it to the window from where the shot had been fired.
Suppose the man who had sat with Endicott had just been posing as Hollander but had been, in reality, the husband of this unfortunate girl. Suppose he had been waiting outside for an opportunity to reenter the house, had waylaid Hollander and forced his errand from him, had taken his driver’s licence and cards from him and had shown them to O’Brian at the door to gain admittance. …
No—there still arose that fundamental question: what had the attacker been searching for among Endicott’s papers? This girl’s husband surely would have nothing for which to search, unless it would be for problematic evidence of his wife’s infidelity, and that theory was pretty thin. …
“What became of this girl’s husband, Mrs. Siddons?”
“He is a sailor on merchant vessels.” Her gesture vaguely encompassed the Seven Seas. “Where he is, or when, is as indeterminate as wind and tide.”
Lieutenant Valcour did not molest her extravagance. He refrained from pointing out that few things were determined quite so accurately, nowadays, as the tides or, for the matter of that, the winds themselves. He stood up.
“Thank you,
