Mrs. Endicott smiled a bit acidly and kept her lips tightly compressed.
“Because if you didn’t,” Lieutenant Valcour went on, “she must have stolen a key from your husband. At any rate, she was in the house here and searching for the letter in Mr. Endicott’s room sometime around seven last night. Mr. Endicott should have been miles away up at her apartment, according to appointment, and leaving her a clear field. She had planned the whole thing out pretty carefully, because she left a note for Madame Velasquez, who was due to arrive at the apartment for a visit last night. Marge implied in the note that it had been written after seven when, as a matter of fact, it must have been written considerably earlier and planted in the apartment either as an alibi or as an explanation to Mr. Endicott of her absence. It would certainly have sent him hurrying off to the Colonial in search of her. It wasn’t successful, of course, as he was undoubtedly delayed because of the quarrel he had with you, and was here in the house instead of up at her apartment as she had expected he would be. Don’t you see that it rather all fits in?”
“Quite. But I still fail to understand what possible connection it can have with me.”
“It has every connection with you, Mrs. Endicott, because unless we can prove that Marge Myles fired the shot this morning that killed your husband it will be unpleasantly necessary to establish the charge against yourself.”
“I am probably very stupid, Lieutenant, but it is incomprehensible to me why I should shoot my husband around two or three o’clock this morning because Marge Myles was searching for a letter in his room at seven last night.”
“Consider the problem, please, as two separate crimes and follow it through on that basis. At seven o’clock last night we have Marge Myles searching the pockets of your husband’s clothes in his cupboard. He comes into the room, and she finds herself trapped in the cupboard. He opens the door, and the sudden terrifying sight of her gives him a heart attack. She believes him dead and drags him into the cupboard so that his body will not be found until she has had a chance to escape. She hasn’t returned to her apartment, you know, all night, so it’s quite possible she has either taken flight or is in hiding some place in the city.”
“Then I can’t, as you have suggested, be hiding her in the house.”
It was Lieutenant Valcour who now assumed the role of teacher, with Mrs. Endicott as his young pupil.
“Not under that supposition. But if she did escape from the house at that time, what have we left? You found the scrap of paper on which she herself wrote a hinted threat in an effort to divert suspicion, and the writing of which was inspired by the distraught mental condition she must have been in. You called the police, and we found Mr. Endicott. Your suspicions jumped unerringly to the man who was uppermost in your thoughts: Mr. Hollander. He, you said to yourself, had done this thing to save you. Consequently, when you learned that Mr. Endicott had been revived and was expected to make a statement, you shot him to prevent his accusing Mr. Hollander, and you arranged your alibi with considerable ingenuity by only pretending to have taken the narcotic.”
“It makes quite a case, doesn’t it?”
“Yes, Mrs. Endicott, quite a case.”
“And the alternative? You did suggest that there was an alternative.”
“That Marge Myles has never left the house at all. That she is still here. And this is what the prosecuting attorney will offer to the jury: that with your knowledge she got onto the balcony through one of the windows in your room, shot Mr. Endicott, returned to your room, and was hidden by you some place around this house.”
“All of which is unfortunately negatived, Lieutenant, by the fact that it was my slipper you found outside the window, and not hers.”
“The prosecuting attorney can alter the action of the scene to suit that, Mrs. Endicott. After Marge Myles got onto the balcony you were terrified at the thought of what you had become a party to. You made an effort to recall her, when the shots were fired and threw you into a panic. You dropped your slipper and got back into the room.” Lieutenant Valcour became quietly persuasive. “Which of my two theories shall I believe? I can make you no promises, Mrs. Endicott, because any confession that has been given under an understanding that there will be an amelioration of punishment loses value in court. But I can suggest to you that if you choose to make things easier for justice the act may prove beneficial for yourself. There are more unwritten laws than the common one so generally known.”
Mrs. Endicott looked at him queerly.
“You don’t worry me,” she said, “at all. Any course that I might take can have but a common, a desired ending. The method of achievement is utterly inconsequential to me, as long as the ultimate result remains the same.”
She was mounted again, Lieutenant Valcour decided, upon her hobby which carried her along indifferent trails to death. The apparent strength of her obsession rendered any further efforts on his part futile. In the attic there was, for him, no longer anything of mystery or the beauty of shrouded things. It was an ugly, littered room peopled by a smartly turned out beauty who, like a petulant and spoiled child reaching for the moon, sought further mysteries in that life which beckons from beyond life, and by a tired, oldish fellow standing stupidly in his stockinged
