Chapter III: Murder

In which Julien De Medici collides with a tantalizing corpse—In which
a dagger, a candlestick, a crucifix, and a false beard mumble
incoherently.

Promptly at ten o’clock that night De Medici walked distractedly into the stage entrance of the Galt Theater. He had spent the day in a fever of expectancy. A memory had followed him like an offensive companion.

“She was crying when I went away. She stood looking after me and wept.”

He had watched Florence unseen by her during the few minutes she hesitated white-faced and weeping in front of the theater after his farewell.

“I’m a fool,” he argued with himself. “She was excited, overwrought. She loves me. And perhaps there’s something she’ll tell me later.”

He had offered his services to his friend Ballau after dinner.

“There’s nothing you can do except mess up things,” Ballau remonstrated. “I suggest a long, fatiguing walk.”

He had smiled kindly and De Medici, unable to dissemble his cat-like nervousness, had blurted out:

“I find it almost impossible to wait.”

“The guests will be here around eleven,” Ballau had answered. “Go walk around till then and don’t get run over or fall down any manholes.”

Entering the theater, De Medici looked around the back stage quickly for a glimpse of Florence. The wings were crowded with actors and actresses waiting the rise of the third-act curtain.

“Where’s Miss Ballau?” he inquired of Cort, the stage manager.

Cort, a sour-looking man with the disillusions and sophistications of his profession stamped on his face, turned angrily.

“Oh, hello!” he said, noticing De Medici. “We’ve had the devil of a time.”

De Medici looked at him uncomfortably.

“Miss Ballau had to leave,” went on Cort.

“Leave! What do you mean?”

Cort swore softly.

“We’ve had a time of it for the last fifteen minutes. Miss Ballau got a telephone call at the end of the second act. It knocked her out. Refused to go on with the show. Said it was impossible. And we’ve gotten Fedya Gratin, the understudy, to finish the last act.”

De Medici listened in amazement.

“A telephone call,” he repeated. “Where did she go?”

“I don’t know,” growled Cort. “All I know is she left us in the devil of a mess ... and lit out of here like a streak, make-up on and everything. Wouldn’t stop to change or listen to reason....”

“Did she say anything?” De Medici interrupted.

The news had left him unaccountably sick at heart. He made an effort to remove the fears that were clouding his thought and to conjure up a logical reason—a calm reason—for her departure. He turned desperately to the manager, who had started to move off.

“Wait a minute. What did she say on the telephone?”

“Nothing,” answered Cort. “I couldn’t get what it was about. She said, ‘Yes. Yes. Oh, God!’ hung up and was out of here before anybody knew what had happened.”

De Medici dropped the man’s arm and hurried from the theater. In the dark alley he paused and stared nervously about him. The darkness frightened him. Strange glints were in his eyes. He ran his long fingers over his forehead and shuddered. Something had happened!

He sat thinking as the cab hurried him to the Ballau apartment.... “She was crying this morning after our ride ... there was something curious about Ballau ... he wanted to get rid of me....”

A sense of relief came to him when the cab drew up before the ornate apartment building in Park Avenue. As he stepped out he noticed quickly that the scene was calm, that inside the marble lobby the stiff figure of the doorman stood—a symbol of quietude and elegance.

Entering the building, he nodded to the man at the door and walked quickly to the elevator at the rear of the vestibule. As he approached, the filigreed door of the self-operating elevator cage clicked and was thrown open.

Florence Ballau, her eyes wide with horror, staggered out. She stood looking wildly till her eyes encountered De Medici. She stumbled toward him with a shriek.

“Father ... father,” her voice filled the marble interior. “Murdered!”

De Medici held the girl in his arms. An inexplicable calm had taken possession of him. He regarded the scene aloofly—the hysterical girl, the suddenly galvanized doorman, the ornamental brass work of the marble vestibule.

“Something has happened,” he said quietly to the man as he came running forward. “Call the police. Send them up to Mr. Ballau’s apartment.”

She moaned his name as his arms held her. But a curious caution had entered his thought. Half carrying her, he entered the elevator and turned the automatic starter to Floor 5.

The white enameled door of the Ballau apartment was open. De Medici supported Florence across the threshold.

“Get a hold of yourself,” he whispered to her. She raised her eyes in amazement. His voice, cool and soft, held a tone she had never heard. Florence pointed toward the library and watched him walk to the door. He turned the iron knob and stood looking into the room he had quitted a few hours before. Before him was the famous Ballau library converted into a curious wreck. Chairs had been overturned, books scattered and ripped in half, vases smashed, pictures torn from the wall and destroyed. An air of incomprehensible and sinister disorder hovered in the dimly lighted chamber.

De Medici’s eyes traveled from detail to detail. He had sat in this room a night ago, staring at the burning logs, his thought darkened with fears—fears of an opened door, of the shadows that wavered behind his chair. But now facing the grewsome scene, his eyes lost their furtiveness. He moved with soft, quick steps to the body of Victor Ballau. Stretched on the floor in his black trousers, patent leather pumps and dress shirt lay his friend. The face was staring at the ceiling. A red stain circled the shirt front and from the center of the stain protruded the ornamental hilt of a dagger. A large, black crucifix had been placed above the wound.

De Medici knelt beside the man. He was dead, his eyes were open and filled with the same gentleness which had characterized them in life.

“Murdered,” he whispered.

He continued to kneel as if under the influence of a fascination. The dagger hilt with its medieval pattern, the black crucifix, and the inert white face with its familiar features held the glittering eyes of De Medici. Strange impulses stirred in him. He shuddered.

“I am not afraid before death,” his thought was saying. “It arouses something in me.... Murder ... murder....”

His mind repeated the word.

“I grow calm before murder,” he went on thinking swiftly. “Something grows calm inside me.”

His fingers reached slowly toward the dagger hilt.

“De Medici ... De Medici,” he murmured half aloud, and sprang to his feet. His face had become white. His eyes burned as if with fever.

Florence and Jane, the housekeeper, were standing dumbly in the doorway. De Medici stared at them.

“Who did it?” he asked.

Florence shook her head and wept. Her hands were on her cheeks and the look of horror he had noticed as she stumbled out of the elevator had returned. He moved quickly to her side and placed an arm around her shoulders.

“The police will be here in a minute,” he said. “What happened?”

She answered still in tears, her eyes centered.

“I don’t know. I came home early. I had a headache. Jane let me in.”

Her weeping overcame her.

“I opened the door,” she gasped, “and saw ... this. I screamed, and Jane came running from the kitchen. I don’t remember anything else until I saw you downstairs.”

De Medici caressed her shoulder and turned to the housekeeper.

“What happened?” he asked.

The woman regarded him with terrified eyes.

“I don’t know,” she wailed. “I was in the kitchen making sandwiches and I didn’t hear anything until Miss Ballau screamed and I came in here and saw him ... there....”

She pointed to the body and began to weep.

“Oh, he was such a good man.”

Three policemen in uniform entered. De Medici turned to them.

“Mr. Ballau has just been murdered,” he said quietly. “He’s in the library.”

The three men nodded and walked to the open door of the disordered room.

“Is there any other door to this place except here?” one of them asked.

“No,” said De Medici. “The library faces on the street.”

“There’s a fire escape.” Florence came forward. She pointed to the window. “It runs past there.”

The policeman nodded.

“We’ll take charge till the chief comes. Don’t allow anybody to leave the house and don’t touch anything.”

Jane, the housekeeper, sat motionless in a chair, weeping softly, her apron to her eyes. De Medici stood regarding the woman he loved. Her tears had stopped. A question was in his mind. Who had telephoned? And what had brought her home so precipitously from the theater? But the question remained unspoken. He stood with his arm around her asking nothing, thinking nothing, and watching the door.

It opened and a thick-set middle-aged man with reddish hair appeared.

“Lieutenant Norton,” he announced himself.

De Medici nodded and extended his hand.

“I am Julien De Medici,” he said. “Mr. Ballau has just been murdered.”

The lieutenant looked at him closely. Two detectives followed the lieutenant into the room.

“Where is the body?” Norton asked. De Medici indicated the library. The lieutenant addressed his assistants.

“Stay here, Jim,” he said. To the other he added, “And you come with me. Wait here, Mr. De Medici—with the ladies, if you please.”

“Come, we’ll sit down,” De Medici whispered. Florence shook her head.

“I feel as if I could go mad,” she muttered.

De Medici recalled the flushed, laughing face of the girl who had ridden with him through the park. Her eyes had filled him with a sense of worship. Aloof, darkly laughing eyes. Yes, it had been an overwhelming moment when the arrogant gypsy loveliness of the young woman had yielded.

“But it was I who yielded.” He stood thinking and regarding her averted face. “A desire to prostrate myself. I remember. Curious ... curious. And now she’s stopped weeping. When the lieutenant came in she changed. She’s thinking of something. She’s taking hold of herself. The telephone call—the rush from the theater. It’ll have to be explained. Her father is dead. But there’s something else more important even than her grief. Her eyes avoid me....”

De Medici’s eyes caught a glimpse of his fingers. They were reddened. His thought continued:

“Blood on my hands. Incriminating. I reached over and touched the dagger and stained my fingers. Poor Ballau. And yet I felt no grief when I kneeled there. I felt something else—as if all this had happened once before. Yes, the body, the dagger, the crucifix seemed familiar. I was calm. I knew what to do. Ah, De Medici blood. Centuries pass and it still flows unchanged in me. Yes, why not admit it? Something exulted in me at the sight of the room, the dim lights, the murdered man. There was no fear, no nervousness. But a strange feeling of familiarity. And then a revulsion. I routed the exulting De Medici phantoms. And now what? Trouble. A telephone call. She’ll tell lies. Her face is already a lie. Stern, poised, ready to fight for something.... What a woman! Yes, I’m more in love than before. Her eyes are like a shrine for something in me. They overpower me. My mind evaporates.”

De Medici reached suddenly for her hand.

“Florence,” he whispered, “remember ... regardless of anything—I adore you.”

Fifteen minutes had passed and Lieutenant Norton appeared.

“I’d like to see you,” he said, nodding at De Medici. He followed the detective into the room. For a second time the amazingly disordered room confronted him.

“I’ve made a hasty examination,” Norton began. “I’ve also sent for Dr. Greer, the physician for our squad. He’ll be here shortly. In the meantime we can talk over a few things. When did this happen? I mean exactly. Do you know?”

The eyes of the detective rested on De Medici’s stained fingers as he spoke. De Medici held his hand to the light.

“Hardly evidence,” he answered the man’s unspoken question. “I got that on my fingers when I kneeled over the body to look at the wound.”

Norton nodded. De Medici continued and repeated the scant information he had at his command—starting with the appearance of Florence Ballau in the vestibule of the apartment.

“Hm,” muttered the detective. Then after a pause, “I see. Nothing much. Did you notice what he has in his hand?”

He pointed to the dead man and De Medici bent over the body. He stared with surprise. The fingers of Victor Ballau were clutched around a short, pointed false beard—a black Vandyke.

“It was a man, then,” De Medici murmured.

“You thought it might have been a woman?” Norton asked quietly.

De Medici shrugged his shoulders. The lieutenant appeared to forget his question and continued, “There’s also this thing here.” He indicated a heavy brass candlestick whose body was ornamented with carved salamander figures twining toward its mouth. It contained an unlighted candle and stood to the left of the dead man’s head.

“Was that lighted when you came in first?” Norton asked.

“No,” said De Medici. “I would have noticed it.”

“The top is still a little warm,” the detective explained, “and you’ll notice two or three tallow drippings on the rug there. It was burning less than a half hour ago.”

“Have you any idea how the murderer escaped?” De Medici asked, raising his eyes to the detective.

“I’m not certain yet,” Norton answered. “But I don’t think he has escaped.”

De Medici nodded slowly. The man’s words had started a strange panic in his brain. He waited until his voice felt clear and then spoke.

“Hadn’t we better search the house, then? He may have gotten away down the fire escape. It leads past the window.”

Lieutenant Norton stared thoughtfully at the lean-faced, cold-spoken young man. “An odd fellow,” he repeated to himself, “nervous and high-strung as a woman. Frightened out of his wits. And yet calm—yes, calm as a dead fish.” Aloud he said:

“I don’t think a search is necessary. Of course it’s too early to say anything definite, but my first impression—and they’re usually the best—is that there’s been no murder. Mr. Ballau committed suicide.”