Part 8

“Let’s see. How was it Miss Video mentioned her. ‘Revelation for revelation, with Violet Mowbray thrown in?’ Was that it? It might mean anything. After all, Violet Mowbray did have a past. However, we’d better look into it.”

“Yes, Miss Lacey wasn’t the only prowler last night.” Berry squinted at Julian, who stood looking bewildered but pleased at the response to at least one of his hopeful suggestions. “The remark may have meant more to another than it did to her. And it can do no harm to look up Violet, poor girl. One of your cruel cases, Belknap. Brilliantly executed, of course, and justified in consequence I suppose, but sinfully cruel. I’m surprised she’s living. Though this doesn’t prove she is.”

“It _was_ a sad affair. I regretted it myself. But Blake was a close friend, and I saw my way to be able to clear his name. Shall I give the prison a ring? One of us could see her tomorrow—or we could send a man out.”

“Do. But cast your mind’s eye over this before you go.”

Belknap took the coded message, scarcely glancing at it.

“Oh yes. I wondered when I’d see this again. Where did you find it?”

“Prentice recovered it on the stairs.”

“I must have dropped it there. I really hadn’t wanted to enter it as evidence unless it was necessary. Particularly since I am convinced it has no bearing. I received it from Miss Mdevani. She was in a trap, as you can see. She brought me this to show me in how desperate a trap. It was to her advantage under the circumstances, to prevent murder here last night. Though if it had been just between the two of them with the world well lost I’m sure she would have blown Whittaker’s brains out and considered he escaped lightly for his damned treachery. Mind, I’m holding no brief for her character. This would rise up to deny me.” He smiled ironically, lifting the paper at them. “She is no angel. But I shall have to be shown about the present case. If you think, on this account, I shall be less help than hindrance to you and Stebbins I shall gladly withdraw, with no hard feeling, I promise you.”

“Not for a minute, old man. Don’t dream of deserting me and the ship. In fact I wouldn’t, I _couldn’t_, get on without you. I’m not as cold-blooded as you; and I don’t in the least relish being left alone by night, in a fog, with the rats either dead or deserted. No, I guess I could bear up as far as that’s concerned. But I _do_ look to you to provide the missing link to what seems to me a pretty bad tangle. Which reminds me I have an important question to put to you. Run along, Prentice, will you, like a good fellow? The powers that be want to confer.”

Julian, having just congratulated himself on the fact that they seemed to have completely forgotten him, was sadly disappointed. He left them with their heads together.

XIX

Yes, Belknap and Berry at last had their heads together in peace and quiet—if being cheek by jowl with a tongue in each could be said to be having their heads together. Greek was meeting Greek, and, with reservations (decidedly with reservations!), they put their cards on the table.

It was a _kind_ of peace and quiet in which the two men conversed. Nothing, thought Berry, had ever seemed to him more hollow-still than Thorngate that Saturday evening: fog outside, and illness, depression, and possibly guilt inside. Like the central vacuum of a cyclone it seemed to augur as much trouble ahead as behind. He wished for a moment that he and Belknap had let Sergeant Stebbins carry out his obstinate desire, which had been to run the whole lot down to the Blue Acres lockup for the night. It had really been because he relished the thought of catching somebody red-handed that he had joined in Belknap’s quiet but determined resistance to the idea. Belknap’s claim was that the scandal in society was bad enough as it was without herding several prominent and supposedly honorable ladies and gentlemen into prison as if they were one and all guilty of murder. It was hardly likely they _were_ all guilty, and the danger of injured innocence was not fair to risk.

But Stebbins would undoubtedly have had his way about the arrested Crawford, whom he had proved backwards and forwards to his own satisfaction guilty of Whittaker’s murder, if Crawford had not chosen an opportune moment to collapse and be put to bed. Even the hardened Belknap had shown a gleam of sympathy for the prostrated Crawford and asked if someone hadn’t a sleeping drug. It was Nadia Mdevani who produced the little red bottle from her vanity bag, poured a few half-inch capsules into her cupped hand, and re-poured them into Belknap’s, who transferred them to Sydney Crawford’s.

“I couldn’t survive without these,” she had said. “They’re harmless enough—allanol or luminol, or one of those things.”

So every living soul that had been dining at Thorngate the night before, always with the exception of Dorn, was still there. It was this fact of his absence that brought Dorn uppermost in the Belknap-Berry discussion.

“No report on Milton Dorn?” Berry asked.

“None of any exact value to us. But one of your men has unearthed a hidden room at the back of his Eighty-fifth Street office, and in it several human specimens in varying degrees of dissection. None of these can hope to endure, but none have been dealt the finishing stroke of the knife. The press is hot on _that_ scent, as you can well imagine. And of course nothing will satisfy it but that Dorn is guilty of our three murders and a few besides. I wish I felt as sure of the three as of the few besides.”

Berry shivered.

“You say that’s all of no value to us? I should think as a mark of character it might shed light on the situation. However, it’s useless to jump to conclusions. _Our_ whole case against Dorn is summed up in his disappearance, added to your possible glimpse of him.”

“Perfectly true. My answer referred merely to the fact that he himself has not been traced, much less located.”

“I see.” Berry stroked his chin and glanced up at Belknap with one eye shut. “You’re not in too good a humor, old man. Stuck for an answer? Don’t tell me!”

“I guess I am, Berry. I’m mired.” Belknap smiled slowly, but failed to quite meet Berry’s open eye. “The trouble being I haven’t a flare about this business. And unless my instincts are at work I flounder. I’m not good with a magnifying glass, I must admit.” And Belknap made a thrust of his head at the glass on the table.

Berry laughed.

“Neither am I, really,” he said. “I bow to convention. I know you don’t. But neither are my instincts particularly violent. A little luck, some thinking, and an enormous amount of hard work have got the poor boy where he is today. Don’t disparage him. A glass like this is a pretty little tool of the trade. Boys like Prentice like to see a detective without one as little as they like to see a naturalist without a butterfly net. I’m a detective, you see; you’re a genius. That’s the difference—and oh, the difference to me! Gee, that rhymes, Belknap—internally.”

It was true that on the face of it Belknap’s reputation exceeded Berry’s because of the ‘hunches’ that made him spectacular. Yet Berry, for just the reason that he lacked them, perhaps averaged a greater percentage of successes than the older man. Whereas Belknap’s failures, according to the fortune of heroes, passed unrecorded or were forgotten overnight, Berry’s went down in history.

Berry had recently written finis at the end of a slow, grueling, painstaking case, begun five years before—having of course had his hand in numberless affairs, successful and unsuccessful, in the meantime. The Star Diamond robbery round-up, seen in a bird’s eye view from beginning to end, was a masterpiece of intricate workmanship and cunning design, with Berry the spider. But it had been too much to expect a fickle public attention to remain riveted to a five-year hunt that led around the world and back again. And what newspaper would take the time to review it at sufficient length to bring out its pattern in bas-relief.

Belknap, on the other hand, seldom was interested in crimes at their birth. They had to pull themselves together, assume character, even become aged and ripened in the detective cellars, before he woke up to them. Then suddenly with the warp and the woof before him he saw the flaw, the weak thread, and unraveled the whole in a breath. Belknap had a certain contempt for Berry’s methods, though a sincere respect for his achievements.

“I’m not so sure about the luck in your case, Berry,” he said generously. “I’m afraid there’s always been far too much of it with me. I’m _not_ a hard worker. And as for thinking, it happens in wedges of intuition driven in between sleeping and waking. I have damn little to do with it. That’s why I’m up a tree now. I haven’t had a good sleep since the returns on these murders of ours began to come in.”

“You don’t look it. And unless I miss my guess we’ve got a bad night ahead of us. So let’s run over our lists to date and not leave the household too long on its wild lone. Who are there to be considered? Mr. and Mrs. Crawford; Prentice and his girl-friend; Miss Mdevani; and this missing Dorn. And _that_ leaves out of account the quite possible possibility that Blake killed Miss Video, or _vice versa_, or that Whittaker killed both. Violet Mowbray’s name may be a stepping-stone and it may prove just another stumbling-block. What really interested me in Miss Video’s remark was the ‘revelation for revelation’ bit. Did she mean that because Whittaker was exposing her lover Crawford she was going to pay him off? For what she _could_ have meant was that if you are exposing _me_ I’ll get even with a story about you and Violet Mowbray. In which case it would bear out a little suspicion of mine about that Diary you people seem so anxious to forget. Perhaps the Diary had ’em _all_ in it—not merely Crawford. Whittaker may have been letting fifty-nine cats out of the bag instead of one. He was an old scoundrel, Whittaker, by accounts. If that was so, with most of those here having interrelated parts, what more likely than the only way for any one of them to come clean was to wipe out every other one, and the Diary with ’em.”

Belknap carefully regarded a thumb-nail, pausing before he spoke.

“Astute reasoning, Berry. You’re uncannily warm, you’ll be pleased to know. I haven’t had a good opportunity to explain to you the method in this madness, if there is any. Such as it is, it’s Whittaker’s. The poor devil, though I swear I can’t be as sympathetic as I should be, was dying of cancer, and witness his bright idea of a way to shorten the sentence. He called me in at the last minute to watch it done—too late to more than expostulate and then resign myself to what I thought was going to be rather a gruesome lark, and has proved far too much of a good thing. I assure you I didn’t anticipate a shambles! I’ve kept this item for your ear alone because—well, _you_ know the police. Can’t you picture that damned sergeant hot and bothered on the trail of a lot of stale crimes when the time is too short for the new? What do you say about it?”

Berry walked across and threw up a window. “Bad night,” he said, and spit. He knocked the ashes from his pipe on the stone outer sill, closed the window deliberately, and came a few steps back, refilling his pipe as he came, and keeping his eyes on that.

“You’ve let me do quite a bit of feeling around in the dark, haven’t you, boy? Oh, I don’t exactly blame you. After all, it was your case, not mine. There’s a catch-as-catch-can element between us I guess we can’t avoid. And aside from that I agree with you that it would be rather low-down to allow your friend the Judge to blight the careers of his criminal friends because of certain age-old professional secrets between them. For I take it that’s what you’re trying to tell me.”

“I am, exactly. But now that you _are_ enlightened what good is it to you? It’s been of little help to me to know that the Miss Laceys and Mr. Prentices have their pasts. Can you see either one of them with any of last night’s blood on their hands?”

“Not particularly. But we’ve both had our tragic experiences with gentle creatures who have spread the veil of innocence over a positive welter of sin. No, given your tale of what Whittaker had set out to do, and has done to a T, the matter boils itself down to a neat psychological one. We’re unable to budge with the circumstantial evidence; unless the fact that all the circumstantial points directly at your foreign lady, Miss Mdevani. But I, for one, feel it’s planted on her. I gather it strikes you the same way? However, we can’t afford to eliminate her. As far as everyone is concerned we only have their sworn word as to how they spent last night: Miss Lacey in Mr. Prentice’s room, for the most part; Mr. Prentice in the Judge’s, except when he wasn’t; the Judge in Miss Video’s, you think; Mrs. Crawford in her own; Miss Mdevani very much out and about—and yet not seen until her visit to you; Mr. Crawford further out and about but not seen because of the assignation with his wops. The few instances in which we can check their stories we find them quite uncommonly truthful. You saw Miss Lacey when she says she came to the library for a drink. Mrs. Crawford saw Mr. Prentice as he came from the Judge’s room, when she was on her way down to find her husband and found Blake instead. No one saw Blake. You kept moving and saw damn little—unless you _did_ see Dorn. I wasn’t in the picture until after two of the important episodes, and too far afield to get much out of the third. You were actually present at the third, and a lot of good it did you. Which reminds me. I just want to check that shooting with you again. It bothers me. One shot, you say, from the direction of the library wall, in other words from the holes therein. Prentice _does_ insist on two.”

“There was one shot,” Belknap said with controlled quietness. “I should think it would be unnecessary for me to repeat myself. But there _have_ been cases of simultaneous, or all but simultaneous, shots that might deceive one, more particularly the person nearest the scene of action. Do you suggest it might have been something of that sort? Miss Mdevani in the wall, and Crawford or his hired man in the pantry, shall we say?”

“My idea in a nutshell. You see this is what I found to make me such a nuisance on the subject.”

Berry produced the bullet of a 22 calibre Colt automatic from his vest pocket—a bullet apparently identical to the one found in the table that morning.

“May I inquire?” Belknap asked gravely, taking the pellet on the palm of his hand and crossing it from one to the other.

“In my meticulous, persnickety way,” Berry said with his little twisted smile, “I made a cleaner sweep of the dining-room tonight than you and I and the Sergeant did this morning when working in unison.” Berry had been known to strip a freshly papered wall in his thoroughness! “And this article is the net result. Found _in_ the sideboard—you noticed that Chippendale thing between the windows—inside, deep in the back board, with the doors closed and no hole in the doors. Meaning the doors were standing open when the shot was fired, which, incidentally, means nothing.”

“Exactly; nothing at all. And of course it may have been in hiding there for years, the relic of some earlier shooting picnic at the Whittaker mansion! But I congratulate you on the find, for it _is_ a find. We must get it to the ballistician, who has Exhibit A, and let him determine which, if either, came from our captured weapon. We know only one shot could have come from it.”

“Certainly. I’ll take charge of it. You get in touch with Miss Mowbray. I’ll continue with Miss Video’s room while I’m about it, and you go mix with the gang. The more I hear about them the less I like them unchaperoned. See you later.”

On either side the door each drew a long breath that being translated meant “I guess I gave him my _facts_ fair enough. Conclusions? _No._”

XX

Sydney had been wandering the house like one possessed. From her room where she stood inanimate motionless beside Neil’s bed, to the East Room where she mechanically extended her hands to the fire Nadia had herself built on the enormous hearth, to the kitchens where she blindly prepared things for Neil’s comfort, she made the rounds with frozen face and rigid body. The spirit was stricken—only the form of Sydney went on living and doing. Meeting far too many emotional crises within far too short a space of time had destroyed her receptivities; whether temporarily or permanently remained to be seen.

Nadia was in the East Room, smoking furiously, picking up and laying down bric-a-brac, books, pictures, a glass of water, with indiscriminate and hasty distraction. Seeing the ghost of Sydney pass through for the sixth time her nerves were stung to remonstrance.

“For Christ’s sake, what’s the matter, Mrs. Crawford? One would think you were the only one in trouble around here. Is it as bad as all that with your husband? Can’t he buck up?”

Sydney halted in her tracks and stood gazing straight through Nadia, through the walls, through the outer fog, for several seconds.

“He’s worse,” she said in a dragging voice. “I don’t understand it.”

“I’ll come up with you.” Nadia’s bomb of angry impatience burst in air and came softly down. “There may be something I can do.”

Again there was an appreciable interval before Sydney answered, her eyes distantly intent, as though, a creature of another world, she listened for echoes of this.

“You may come,” she murmured.

They went up together to the Crawfords’ room, passing in the lower hall a policeman sitting bolt upright in a straight-backed chair against the wall near the door. A high-low light was turned low above the mirror-table beside him. It was all the light for the hall and stairway. At the head of the stairs another policeman, equally immobile and disinterested, sat in a straight-backed chair against the wall.

“It feels like a hotel after 2 A.M., or a funeral parlor at midday,” Nadia cried at Sydney. “Let’s turn up the lights and dance on the graves—throw a celebration with horns and cymbals.”

But Sydney was deaf to her. And even Nadia’s bitter laughter died away when she had taken one look at Crawford, felt his pulse, and listened to his breathing. There was a horrid whitish edge of something, like dried foam at a tide-mark, along his upper lip. The lids of his eyes were neither up nor down, but remained fixed half across the pupils. His Adam’s apple shifted a little, spasmodically. Nadia swung on Sydney.

“You little damn fool,” she hissed. “What do you think you’re doing—playing with death? As if we hadn’t had enough of it about. Did that frightful idiot of a Dr. Giles go off duty?”

“What’s the matter?” Sydney asked stonily.

“Did you give him the sedative I gave you?”

“What?”

“I said, _did you give him the sedative I gave you_?”

“I did.”

“What else?”

“I don’t know. Some tea, I think. And bicarbonate. And—and water of course.”

“Is that all?”

“I don’t know. I tell you I don’t know. What are you driving at? Answer me! What do you mean?”

“Keep quiet.”

“Are you trying to make out I’ve—?”

“_Shut_ up, or I’ll make you.”

Sydney Crawford’s eyes seemed to return at last from the cosmic universe. They contracted and shivered to points of horror. Everything about her, from her clinched hands to her vivid chalk-white face, put itself headlong into one word:

“_Murderer!_”

And Nadia Mdevani was looking all too ready to be one when Julian, standing in the door, interrupted them.

“Don’t tell me anything’s wrong,” he said with a thin sarcasm.

Poised against each other as the two women were, it took them both several breaths to withhold their momentum and divert it to new channels. Nadia was the first to recover.

“We need a doctor, Mr. Prentice,” she said quietly. “And we need him soon.” She threw a glance in Crawford’s direction and, in a low voice, risked more: “I’ve seen a few poisons in my day, and this _is_ a poison! Arsenic. You know how rapid that is.”

Sydney sprang toward Julian.

“Don’t go, Mr. Prentice! I tell you if you go—”

But Julian had fled; down the corridor, down the dim stairs, and out into the fog. They heard the door close loudly behind him. Sydney dropped her hands loosely, resignedly, at her sides. “That’s that,” she said quietly. “Not that it really matters. I am completely at your mercy, Miss Mdevani. You may think it makes a difference. It doesn’t. There are others now who care as little as Bertrand Whittaker cared.”

Nadia looked her up and down with cold contempt and a colder pity.

“Don’t worry, Mrs. Crawford. Your time is not yet. Not _quite_ yet.” She pushed back her shining ebony hair with her two hands. “It appears I must be the one to do it at that—the chosen of the Lord. For the mortification of the flesh.” She was speaking to herself, not to Sydney.

Crawford shifted a little, and moaned.

“I am in pain,” he said. “Sydney.”

“Yes?” Sydney neither stirred, nor looked toward him.

“I am in pain.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Is something wrong?” he asked.

“Yes, something is wrong.”

Neil seemed to be considering that. Beads of perspiration stood out on his forehead, and on the backs of his hands lying weakly on the coverlid. His dry lips thinned perceptibly. Then, on a breath, he only said again:

“Sydney.”

“Yes?”

“Sydney.”

“I said, what is it?”

“It’s up to you, Mrs. Crawford,” Nadia cried softly.

“What do you mean?”

“Sydney.” Crawford’s monotonous, sad repetition of her name was the tragic undertone in the room.

“Be quick about it,” Nadia screamed in a whisper.

“I tell you I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Sydney.”

“You know as well as I do what I mean.”

“Sydney.” His voice was weaker.

The effort by which Sydney moved her limbs and went to Neil’s side was painful to watch, like the first steps of a Frankenstein conception. She bent over him a little and laid her hand across his eyes.

“It’s all right, Neil. There is nothing wrong. I didn’t mean there was. It has been so hard for you. So bad I can’t remember how bad. If I remembered I’d die. Perhaps you are remembering. Don’t let it kill you, dear. For you and I have so much to do. We are going to go on from where we laid our story down—was it a year ago? I’m sure we can find the very page, paragraph and sentence where we left off.”

Neil smiled. It was the smile of a blind person, sweet and helpless. He moved a little nearer Sydney, and lay perfectly still. How long the three in the room remained speechless and motionless it would have been hard to say. It was Belknap who disturbed two of them; the third was beyond all further disturbance.

XXI

“What have we here—a séance?” Belknap asked from the door.

Nadia quivered and shrank back against the wall as she turned to face Belknap. Her hands, with spread fingers, formed a spidery white pattern against the room’s daring modernistic wall-paper of black shot with gold. Her eyes wavered, and Belknap saw them consider the open window leading to the roof of the porte-cochère.

“Mr. Belknap!” she breathed.

“Your humble servant.” Belknap closed the door, turned its key and pocketed the key, and crossed to the bed.

“What’s ailing our friend Crawford?”

He thrust Sydney Crawford aside with an arm that would have brooked no interference had there been any. He looked down at Crawford; then bent over him; and then, quickly, felt for the heart. His face darkened.

“This man is dead,” he said, straightening and turning toward Nadia Mdevani.

“Thank God!” Sydney cried, and Belknap swung to her.

“Another Strange Death of President Harding, is that it?”