“I’ll probably be in Mrs. Endicott’s room. That’s the door just across the corridor.”
Andrews was aware of Lieutenant Valcour’s reputation in the department for the painless extraction of useful information from people. “Go to it,” he said. “And squeeze every drop that you can.”
IV
10:02 p.m.—Pale Flares the Darkness
Lieutenant Valcour wondered concerning Mrs. Endicott as he walked slowly across the corridor and knocked on the door of her room. A curious, curious woman, with youth and beauty that almost passed belief. He knew her instinctively as one of life’s misfits: complex to a note far beyond the common tune; essentially an individualist; essentially unhappy from an inevitable loneliness which is the lot of all who are banished within the narrow confines of their own complexity; a type he had seldom met, but of whose existence he was well aware.
Roberts opened the door. The woman’s face was butchered and her eyes had the quality of glass.
“Ask Mrs. Endicott, please, whether she feels strong enough to see me for a moment.”
Mrs. Endicott’s voice was definitely metallic. As it reached him in the corridor, disembodied from any visual association with herself, it seemed to hold a muted echo of brass bells.
“Certainly, come in. I wish, Lieutenant, you would give up the tiresome fiction that I am going to collapse. I’ll ring, Roberts, when I want you.”
“Yes, madam.”
As Roberts passed him on her way to the door Lieutenant Valcour felt an imperative awareness of an attempt at revelations—an attempt to impart to him some special knowledge. Her eyes, as she glanced at him, lost their cobwebs and grew sharply informative. It was entirely an unconscious reaction on his part that forced from his lips the word “Later.” The cobwebs reappeared. She left the room.
Lieutenant Valcour drew a chair close to the chaise longue upon which Mrs. Endicott was nervously lying. Flung across her knees was a robe of China silk, a black river bearing on its surface huge flowers done in silver and slashed at its fringes with the jade chiffon of her dress. He launched his campaign by first swinging, wordily, well wide of its ultimate objective. His tone, from a deliberate casual friendliness, was an anodyne to possible reservations, or fears.
“It is the tragedy of a detective’s life,” he said pleasantly, “that the sudden slender contact he has with a case affords such a useless background for human behaviour. You can see what I mean, Mrs. Endicott. Were I you, or some intimate friend either of yourself or of your husband, I would already be in possession of the countless little threads that have woven the pattern of Mr. Endicott’s life for the past five or ten years. You’ll forgive me for outraging oratory? It’s a nasty habit I’ve contracted in later years whenever dealing with the abstract. I’m not making a speech, really. What I’m trying to express is that in that background, that pattern of Mr. Endicott’s life, one thread or series of interrelated threads would stand out pretty plainly as the reason why someone should wish to kill him.”
“I,” said Mrs. Endicott, “have several times wished to kill him.”
Lieutenant Valcour nodded. “There is nothing left for me but the trite things to say about marriage. And trite things, after all, are the true things, don’t you think?”
“If they’re just discovered. I mean by that, that to the person just discovering their deadly aptness they’re true. Rather terribly so sometimes.”
“But the aptness wears off with usage?”
Mrs. Endicott’s slender hand and arm were models of quietness in motion as she reached for a cigarette. “Everything wears off with usage,” she said. “Love quicker than anything else.”
“But it doesn’t wear off completely, love doesn’t, ever.”
Mrs. Endicott looked at him sharply. “Why are you a detective?” she said.
“The accident of birth—of environment. Only geniuses, you know, ever quite escape those two fatalities. My parents emigrated from France to Canada, where my father held a certain reputation in my present profession. My parents died. There was enough money to secure an education at McGill—one had contacts here in the States …” Lieutenant Valcour smiled infectiously. “I reversed Caesar in that I came, was seen, was conquered.”
Mrs. Endicott was amused. “How utterly conceited.”
“Isn’t it?”
The smile vanished from her face with the peculiar suddenness of some conjuring trick. She veered abruptly. “What are they doing in my husband’s room now?” she said.
“Dr. Worth and the medical examiner are determining the cause of death.” Lieutenant Valcour transferred his attention to a Sargent watercolour above the mantel. “Dr. Worth has already expressed the opinion that it was heart failure,” he said.
Mrs. Endicott offered no immediate comment. She withdrew, for a moment, into some private chamber, and her voice was rather expressionless when she spoke. “But that isn’t murder.”
“It could be—if the disease itself were used as a weapon.”
“I don’t believe that I understand.”
“Why, if some person who knew that Mr. Endicott was subject to heart attacks were deliberately to shock or scare him suddenly, or even give him a not especially forceful blow over the heart, and he were to die as a result of any one of those things, that would be murder. It would have to be proved pretty conclusively, of course, that it had been done deliberately.”
Mrs. Endicott joined him in his continued inspection of the Sargent. “It would indicate a rather circumscribed field for suspects, too, don’t you think?”
“Yes. One would confine one’s suspicions to those who were intimate enough with him to know of his physical condition. But apart from all that phase, there are those things we technically speak of as ‘attendant circumstances.’ They point to murder.”
Their glances brushed for a second in passing and then parted.
“Such as?”
Lieutenant Valcour explained, with certain reservations. “The note you showed me—the position of Mr. Endicott in the cupboard—the fact that he is completely dressed for out of doors, but there is no trace of his hat—oh, several little things that
