Back Aa

No Clue! A Mystery Story

<h2>XX</h2> <h3>DENIAL OF THE CHARGE</h3> Hastings, fully appreciating the value of surprise, had instructed Mrs. Brace to communicate none of the new developments to anybody until he asked for them. Reaching Sloanehurst, he went alone to the library, leaving her in the parlour to battle as best she might with the sheriff's anxious curiosity. Arthur Sloane and Judge Wilton gave him cool welcome, parading for his benefit an obvious and insolent boredom. Although uninvited to sit down, he caught up a chair and swung it lightly into such position that, when he seated himself, he faced them across the table. He was smiling, enough to indicate a general satisfaction with the world. There was in his bearing, however, that which carried them back to their midnight session with him immediately following the discovery of Mildred Brace's body. The smile did not lessen his look of unquestionable power; his words were sharp, clipped-off. "I take it," he said briskly, untouched by their demeanour of indifference, "you gentlemen will be interested in the fact that I've cleared up this mystery." "Ah-h-h!" drawled Sloane. "Again?" "What do you mean by 'again'?" he asked, good-naturedly. "Crown, the sheriff, accomplished it four days ago, I'm credibly informed." "He made a mistake." "Ah?" Sloane ridiculed. "Yes. 'Ah!'" Hastings took him up curtly, and, with a quick turn of his head, addressed himself to Wilton: "Judge, I've been to Pursuit." When he said that, his head was thrown back so that he squinted at Wilton down the line of his nose, under the rims of his spectacles. "Pursuit!" Wilton's echo of the word was explosive. He had been leaning back in his chair, eying the detective from under lowered lids, and drawing deep, prolonged puffs from his cigar. But, with the response to Hastings' announcement, he sat up and leaned forward, putting his elbows on the rim of the table. It was an awkward attitude, compelling him to extend his neck and turn his face upward in order to meet the other's glance. "Yes," Hastings said, after a measurable pause. "Interested in that?" "Not at all," Wilton replied, plainly alarmed, and fubbed out his cigar with forefinger and thumb, oblivious to the fact that he dropped a little shower of fire on the table cover. "I'll trouble you to observe, Mr. Sloane," Hastings put in, "that, being excited, the judge's first impulse is to extinguish his cigar: it's a habit of his.—Now, judge, in Pursuit I heard a lot about you—a lot." "All right—what?" He made the inquiry reluctantly, as if under compulsion of the detective's glance. "The Dalton case—and your part in it." "You know about that, do you?" "All about it," Hastings said, in a way that made doubt impossible; Sloane, even, bewildered as he was, got the impression of his ruthless certainty. Wilton did not contest it. "I struck in self-defence," he excused himself wearily, like a man taking up a task against his will. "It would be ridiculous to call that murder. No jury would have convicted me—none would now, if given the truth." "But the body showed twenty-nine wounds," Hastings pressed him, "the marks of twenty-nine separate thrusts of that knife." "Yes; that's true.—Yes, I'll tell you about that, you and Arthur—if you'd care to hear?" "That's what I'm here for," Hastings said, settling in his chair. He was thinking: "He didn't expect this. He's unprepared!" Sloane, who had been on the point of resenting this unbelievable attack on his friend, was struck dumb by Wilton's calm acknowledgment of the charge. From long habit, he took the cap off the smelling-salts with which he had been toying when Hastings came in, but his shaking hand could not lift the bottle to his nose. Wilton guilty of a murder, years ago! He drew a long, shuddering breath and huddled in his chair. Wilton rose clumsily and walked heavily to the door opening into the hall. He put his hand on the knob but did not turn it. He repeated the performance at the door opening into Sloane's room. In all this he was unconscionably slow, moving in the manner of a blind man, feeling his way about and fumbling both knobs. When he came back to the table, his shoulders were hunched to the front and downward, crowding his chest. His face looked larger, each separate feature of it throbbing coarsely to the pumping of his heart. Pink threads stood out on the white of his eyeballs. When the back of his neck pressed against his collar, the effect was to give the lower half of the back of his head an odd appearance of inflation or puffiness. Hastings had never seen a man struggle so to contain himself. "Suffering angels!" Sloane sympathized shrilly. "What's the matter, Tom?" "All right—it's all right," he assured, his voice still low, but so resonant and harsh that it sounded like the thrumming of a viol string. He seated himself, moving his chair several times, adjusting it to a proper angle to the table. In the end, he sat close to the table rim, hunched heavily on his elbows, and looked straight at Hastings. "But, since you've been to Pursuit, what do you imply, or say?" he asked, the words scraping, as though his throat had been roughened with a file. "That you killed Mildred Brace," Hastings answered, also leaning forward, to give the accusation weight. "I! I killed her!" Wilton's teeth went together with a sharp click; the table sagged under his weight. "I deny it. I deny it!" He ripped out an oath. "This man's crazy, Arthur! He's dragged up a mistake, a tragedy, of my youth, and now has the effrontery to use it as a reason for suspecting me of murder!" "Exactly!" chimed Sloane, in tremulous relief. "Shivering saints! Why haven't you said so long ago, Tom?" "I didn't give him credit for the wild insanity he's showing," said Wilton thickly. Whatever had been his first impulse, however near he had been to trying to explain away all blame in the Dalton murder, it was clear to Hastings now that he intended to rely on flat denial of his connection with the death of Mildred Brace. He had, perhaps, decided that explanation was too difficult. Seeing his indecision, Hastings turned on Sloane. "You've been exceedingly offensive to me on several occasions, Mr. Sloane. And I've had enough of it. Now, I've got the facts to show that you're as foolish in the selection of your friends as in making enemies. I'm about to charge this man Wilton with murder. He killed Mildred Brace, and I can prove it. If you want to hear the facts back of this mystery; if you want the stuff that will enable you to decide whether you'll stand by him or against him, you can have it!" Before Sloane could recover from his surprise at the old man's hot resentment, Wilton said, with an air of careless contempt: "Oh, we've got to deal with what he says, Arthur. I'd rather answer it here than with an audience." "The reading public, for instance?" Hastings retorted, and added: "It may interest you, Mr. Sloane, to know that you gave me my first suspicion of him. When you stepped back from the handkerchief I held out to you—remember, as I was kneeling over the body, and the servant laughed at you?—I jammed it into Wilton's right-hand coat-pocket. "Later, when I got it back from him, I saw clinging to it a few cigar ashes and two small particles of wet tobacco. He had had in that pocket a cigar stump wet from his saliva. "When he began then his story of finding the body, he said, 'I'd been smoking my good-night cigar; this is what's left of it.' As he said that, he pointed to the unlit—remember that, unlit—cigar stump between his teeth. He made it a point to emphasize the fact that so little time had elapsed between his finding the body and his giving the alarm that he hadn't smoked up the cigar, and also he hadn't taken time to put his hand to his mouth, take out the cigar and throw it away. "It was one of the over-fine little touches that a guilty man tries to pile on his scheme for appearing innocent. But what are the facts? "Just now, as soon as he got excited, he mechanically fubbed out his cigar. It's a habit of his—whenever he's in a close corner. He did it during the interview I had with him and Webster in the music room last Sunday morning—when, in fact, something dangerous to him came up. He did it again when I was talking to him in his office, following a visit from Mrs. Brace. "There you have the beginning of my suspicion. Why had he gone out of his way to put a cigar stump into his pocket that night, and to explain that he had had it in his mouth all the time? When he came into my room, to wake me up, he had no cigar in his mouth. But, when you and I rounded the corner of the porch and first saw him kneeling over the body, he had one hand in his right-hand coat-pocket. And, when we stood beside him, he had put a half-smoked, unlit cigar into his mouth. "You see my point, clearly? Instead of having had the cigar in his mouth and having kept it there while he found the body and reported the discovery to us, the truth is this: he had fubbed out the cigar when he met Mildred Brace on the lawn, and it had occurred to his calculating mind that it would be well, when he chose to give the alarm, to use the cigar stunt as evidence that he hadn't been engaged in quarrelling with and murdering a woman. "He was right in his opinion that the average man doesn't go on calmly smoking while engaged in such activities. He was wrong in letting us discover where he'd carried the stump until he needed it. "He had put it into that pocket, but, after committing the murder, he wasn't quite as calm as he'd expected to be—something had gone wrong; Webster had appeared on the scene—and the cigar wasn't restored to his mouth until you and I first reached the body. "Here's my handkerchief, showing the ashes and the pieces of cigar tobacco on it, just as it was when he handed it back to me." He took from one of his pockets a tissue-paper parcel, and, unwrapping it, handed it to Sloane. "Ah-h-h-that's what it shows," Sloane admitted, bending over the handkerchief. Wilton welcomed that with a laugh which he meant to be lightly contemptuous. "See here, Arthur!" he objected. "I'm perfectly willing to listen to any sane statement this man may make, but——" "You said you wanted to hear this!" Hasting stopped him. "I'm fair about it. I've told you why I began to watch you. I've got more." "You need it," Sloane complained. "If it's all that thin——" "Don't shout too soon," Hastings interrupted again. "Mr. Sloane, this man's been working against me from the start. Think a moment, and you'll realize it. While he was telling your daughter and a whole lot of other people that I was the only man to handle the case, he was slipping you the quiet instruction to avoid me, not to confide in me, not to tell me a single thing. Isn't that true?" "We-ell, he did say the best way for me to avoid all possibility of being involved in the thing was not to talk to anybody." "I knew it!" Hastings declared, giving his contempt full play. "And he persuaded you that you might have seen—might, mind you—and he gave you the suggestion skilfully, more by indirection than by flat statement—that you might have seen Berne Webster out there on the lawn that night, when you were uncertain, when you feared it yourself—a little. Isn't that true?" Sloane looked at him with widening eyes, his lips trembling. "Come, Mr. Sloane! Let's play fair, didn't he?" "We-ell, yes." "And," Hastings continued, thumping the table with a heavy hand to drive home the points of his statement, "he persuaded you to offer that money to Mrs. Brace—last Tuesday night.—Didn't he?—And that matches his slippery cunning in pretending he was saving Webster by hiding the fact that Webster's hand had gagged him when they found the body. He figured his willingness to help somebody else would keep suspicion away from him. I——" "Rot! All rot!" Wilton broke in. "Where do you think you are, Arthur, on the witness stand? He'll have you saying white's black in a minute." "Mr. Sloane," the detective said, getting to his feet, "he induced you to pay money to Mrs. Brace—while it's the colour of blackmail, it won't be a matter for prosecution; you gave it to her, in a sense, unsolicited—but he induced you to do that because he knew she was out for blackmail. He hoped that, if you bought her off, she wouldn't pursue him farther." "Farther!" echoed Sloane. "What do you mean by that?" "Why, man! Don't you see? Money was back of all that tragedy. He murdered the girl because she had come here to renew her mother's attempts at blackmail on him! Not content with duping you, with handling you as if you'd been a baby, he put you up to buying off the woman who was after him—and he did it by fooling you into thinking that you were saving the name, if not the very life, of your daughter's fiancé! He——" "Lies! Wild lie!" thundered Wilton, pushing back from the table. "I'm through with——" "No! No!" shrilled Sloane. "Wait! Prove that, Hastings! Prove it—if you can! Shuddering saints! Have I——?" He looked once at Wilton's contorted face, and recoiled, the movement confessing at last his lack of faith in the man. "I will," Hastings answered him, and moved toward the door; "I'll prove it—by the girl's mother." He threw open the door, and, sure now of holding Sloane's attention, went in search of Mrs. Brace and the sheriff. <hr /> <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

1 of 2

2 of 2

Update Required To play the media you will need to either update your browser to a recent version or update your Flash plugin.