“Come downstairs with me, Mrs. Endicott,” he said. “As soon as my men have thoroughly searched this house you will be formally charged.”
XXX
7:11 a.m.—The Criminal and Weapon of the Crime
Lieutenant Valcour was once more in his shoes. Even in their laceless condition they restored his confidence in the relative fitness of things.
Mrs. Endicott preceded him down two flights of stairs and to the door of her husband’s room, which Lieutenant Valcour opened. He looked inside and saw Cassidy sound asleep, seated on the large mahogany chest by the window. And he did not blame Cassidy so much as he envied him.
“Cassidy.”
Cassidy’s sharp return to consciousness would have reflected credit upon the hero of any Western drama.
“Sir?”
“Put your gun back, Cassidy.”
“Yes, Lieutenant. I must have dropped off for a cat nap.”
“We can discuss that later. I want you to take Mrs. Endicott down to the entrance hall with you and leave her there in charge of O’Brian. She is under arrest.”
“Yes, sir.”
“After that, warn the men on the servants’ entrance and garden door to keep on their toes. If anyone tries to get past them on any pretext whatever they are to stop him. Look up Hansen—he may still be in the backyard—and then both of you come back here. We will then search the house.”
“Yes, sir.”
Lieutenant Valcour went into Endicott’s room and closed the door. It was getting to be a mechanical action with him that caused him to go to the desk and sit down. The perfumed sheet of notepaper, which he had twice been prevented through interruptions from reading, caught his attention at once. He read the letter through.
I don’t believe you [it began, without any preliminaries], and right from the start I tell you I think you are a liar and a louse. Harry never wrote your wife no such thing, and even if he did it proves nothing anyway. Nobody can prove a thing. You think it is funny to scare me and if you do it any more I am going to show you just how damn funny it is. I am through with you just the same way that your wife is through with you and you are a nasty rat.
Not really, Lieutenant Valcour decided, an essentially nice person. He folded the letter and put it in his pocket to keep company with the postscript forged by Mrs. Endicott. It would serve ably in establishing a motive and help the prosecuting attorney to clinch the case. Just as soon, he added unhappily, as he had unearthed the criminal and the weapon of the crime. That criminal, he repeated softly to himself, who with her weapon was still at large about the house, unless his theory of the case was basically wrong.
And therein lay the danger, the source of that curious presentiment of impending menace which had gripped him at odd intervals throughout the night. Strange that it should possess him most strongly in this silent room. But wasn’t that just the association of ideas? Endicott, dead on the bed over there, and the path of that death-dealing bullet cutting through that corner over by the other window. He sought relief from a return of it by a mental mopping up. It didn’t do to linger on presentiments. …
There were those few little side issues to think about; issues that had puzzled him, but which did not bear any direct reference to the main theme. He felt that they were explainable without any further personal investigation.
It seemed obvious to him, for example, that the reason why Mrs. Siddons had gone downstairs with her bonnet on, when the sight of O’Brian by the front door had turned her back, was a desire on her part to get in touch with Maizie’s sailor husband and warn him that the crime she thought he had committed had been discovered and that the police were in the house. She had told Mrs. Endicott that she believed that she had seen him loitering about the street during the afternoon. And Mrs. Siddons would never have questioned her own ability to walk right out and find him because, if it so desired, Providence would have prearranged a suitable rendezvous.
… They came from that corner, really: those definitely significant waves of warning, as insistent as the scent that had led him to find the letter from Marge Myles in the desk. But they weren’t a scent, nor were they anything so definite as a letter. They were (the astonishing thought thrilled him disagreeably) Marge Myles—her personality—herself—inimical. … Nonsense, nonsense—the room was empty. …
He forced himself to think of the two little bewilderments that had troubled him in connection with the thoroughly bewildering Roberts. That pregnant look she had given him—what had it really meant, more or less, than an intense urge on her part to erase any spell of fascination which Mrs. Endicott might have cast upon him, and to plant in its place the seeds of suspicion of Roberts’s own sowing. It had been nothing more, really, than that.
Now of greater inconsistency had been Roberts’s suggestion of Hollander as the proper friend to stay with Endicott; for Roberts assuredly had held a fantastic passion for Endicott—fantastic in that there was this abnormal interrelationship of his personality with that of her war-killed brother—and she had just as assuredly been convinced that a liaison existed between Hollander and Endicott’s wife. There was but one solution: Roberts had never observed Hollander and Mrs. Endicott together, and she had hoped, should morning bring a meeting, that under the natural dramatic effect of the setting there might be some betrayal. A look, perhaps, was all she wanted to confirm her suspicions. And there could have been in her mind no thought of any real danger to Endicott from Hollander, for had there not been a nurse and two policemen close by on guard? Then later, when Endicott was well again, Roberts could have told him
