Chapter IX: The Second Problem

The fact that John Converse was not given to betraying either surprise or astonishment only enhanced the effect of the involuntary step he took backward in the face of the intelligence flung at him by the Chief of Police. For a minute, perhaps, he returned the gaze of the agitated official; then the indomitable tenacity of the man began to manifest itself in a setting and tightening of the solid jaw; and when he presently turned to the excited McCaleb, the stunning effect of the news had been entirely overcome--he was quite himself again, masterful, determined, and inspiring confidence. Both the Chief and the young patrolman began at once to respond to his quieting influence.

Officer Harry McCaleb was of an aptness and intelligence promising rapid advancement. It was no secret that he had aspirations looking to success in the detective service; and it was of him that the Captain demanded particulars of the crime.

"Tell me what you know," said he, his manner advising promptness and despatch.

The young patrolman delivered his account with a glibness and attention to details that betokened forethought on the subject.

"Captain Converse," he began, "this month I am on the night shift, and my beat takes in Vine Street and General Westbrook's neighborhood. Mike Clancy's my partner. You know it's a pretty big beat for two men to cover--especially as we are obliged to remain together,--and we can't pass any one point oftener than once in every two hours, or such a matter.

"Well, sir, to-night we passed the Westbrook place last at about ten-thirty. Everything was perfectly quiet at that time, and we had no occasion to be more than ordinarily vigilant. We continued on our beat, and in the natural run of events should have been back at the Westbrook corner--Tenth and Vine, sir--at about twelve-thirty. At twelve o'clock we were over in the next block--on Live Oak, to the rear of the Westbrook place, and between Tenth and Eleventh. You know it's a part of our duty after dark to watch people getting off cars to see if they belong in our territory, and we can't gauge our time very well when we meet many cars on Live Oak Street.

"It was just at twelve--the Federal Building clock had just struck, sir--when Mike stopped short. 'What's that, McCaleb?' says he. It's one of those perfectly still nights, you know, when sounds carry a long way." Converse had a fleeting memory of a madly galloping horse. 'Was that a shot?' asked Mike. I had heard something, too, but couldn't tell whether it was a shot or not; and anyhow, neither of us could locate it. We waited quite a while, listening; then, hearing nothing more, we went on. In about ten minutes--maybe fifteen--we stopped suddenly again; we heard a woman scream. There was no mistaking the direction this time; it was one of those piercing, long-drawn-out screams that makes a man's blood run cold. We had no trouble following the sounds, for the screams kept up, as fast as the woman could get her breath. 'Help! Murder!' she was yelling; and Mike and I raced down Tenth Street to the Westbrook place, as fast as we could.

"Well, sir, when we got there it was as though bedlam had broke loose; the neighbors were pouring out on all sides; some society affair was going on last night, and most of them had just got home. A woman was running up and down the Westbrook front gallery, wringing her hands in a distracted way, and every now and then stopping to scream 'Murder!'

"Stop a moment, Mac," interposed Converse..... "Chief, call a cab, please; I don't want to waste any time--I can listen to Mac as we ride..... Now, Mac, go on."

"Well, as Mike and I vaulted the front fence, I yelled out that we were officers, and Mike set his whistle going for Hartman and Corrigan in the next beat, in case we should need help; though they never heard it. The lady fell back against one of the big gallery pillars and waited till we came up. Then we saw it was Mrs. Westbrook. She looked as if she were being beaten by some one we couldn't see, and was trying to shrink away from the blows.

"The whole house was a blaze of light, every electric lamp being turned on, it seemed like; and the niggers--well, sir, they were all plum crazy. Mrs. Westbrook had evidently been to whatever was going on, because she was all dressed up in one of those shiny white dresses, and had lots of jewelry on. I could see the diamonds on her fingers sparkling with her heart-beats, for she had her hands locked tight together and pressed against her bosom. When we got close enough to her we could hear her moaning to herself, 'Oh, my God! Peyton! Peyton! Peyton! Oh, my God! Peyton!' over and over again, like a machine, and it was some time before we could get her to notice us.

"Just then two or three of the neighbors came up. One of them, a lady, grabbed Mrs. Westbrook, and asked, 'What is it, Lou?' and Mrs. Westbrook just had time to whisper, 'Peyton--in there--dead!' before slipping down the pillar in a faint.

"Of course we waited for nothing more. Leaving her with the lady, we hurried into the house through the front door, which was standing wide open.

"I never saw anything like it in my life, Captain; back under the stairs a big yellow wench was sitting on the floor, holding Miss Westbrook's head in her lap, and moaning and rocking to and fro. The young lady herself was lying out in such a way that we thought at first she was dead too. The telephone was right above her head--"

Here the recital was once more broken in upon, this time by the arrival of the cab. Mr. Converse and the patrolman hastened into it. "General Westbrook's--hurry!" said the Captain to the driver, who, having had experience in such matters, lashed the horses to a gallop in an effort to obey the injunction.

Once under way, Officer McCaleb resumed his story:

"As I was saying, the telephone was right above where Miss Westbrook was lying. She was still holding the receiver in her hand, a part of the cord attached to it, the whole thing torn loose--evidently while she was trying to use the 'phone. She must have fainted then. It took only a second or two to see that nothing worse was the matter with her; and after stirring the nigger woman up to getting water and bringing her mistress round, we went on hunting for the General. We had to search, too; for every one that hadn't fainted was wild with terror.

"Pretty soon, however, we came upon him in a downstairs room--sure enough dead, Captain Converse, with a knife sticking in him. I left Mike there to keep the crowd out, and after 'phoning to headquarters from a neighbor's, I hurried in myself to make sure."

Not until the young man had finished did Converse vouchsafe a question.

"A knife, you say?" he mused, the words being hardly so much an interrogation as an expression of the importance he seemed to attach to the circumstance. "A knife?"

"Yes, sir. But I neglected to say there was a revolver lying on the floor. I didn't have time to see much; but it was out in pretty plain view, lying close to the General."

"His, likely. But wait till we get there," said Mr. Converse; then, as an afterthought, "Who else was at the house?"

"I saw no one, sir,--that is, before the neighbors arrived."

"Doctor Westbrook?"

"No, sir."

Shortly the conveyance was grinding over the gravelled driveway which led from the street to the _porte-cochère_.

The house itself was a commodious colonial mansion, possessing the familiar, massive-pillared Greek front. Setting in the midst of a wide expanse of beautiful park, shaded by magnolia, catalpa, and numerous oak and elm trees, it was merely a variation, in details alone, of a uniform style of architecture at once simple and imposing, which lent to the neighborhood an air of distinction and aloofness, and imparted that genuine spirit of the old Southern home which is both impressive and incapable of imitation.

The few neighbors who remained had succeeded in bringing some sort of order out of the chaos that had greeted officers McCaleb and Clancy upon their arrival. The negro servants had been banished to their own quarters, where they were out of the way; all lights had been extinguished excepting the few needed, and the house was shrouded in the unbroken stillness which exists like a vacuum behind the swift turbulence following a sudden and tragic death.

The Captain was received with something of the awe that always greets a man of his profession when he first enters upon such a scene, when those who meet him are as far removed from the law's intricate machinery as were General Westbrook's friends and intimates. Old as it was, the neighborhood had never in the past sustained so rude and violent a shock to its calm respectability. Mr. Converse was now indeed the Captain, the god in the car.

An elderly gentleman, evidently a neighbor, met them at the door. He led the officers straight back through the wide and richly furnished hall, past the carved oaken stairway, which rose like an invitation to a multitude, to a lateral hall extending the width of the house. Here he turned to the left, and presently paused before a curtained door; a door so massive and solid that, together with the voluminous folds of the heavy velvet curtain which hung before it, it promised to afford an effective barrier to sounds arising within the room beyond, causing the sharpest of noises emanating therefrom to strike muffled and dead upon the ear of anybody in the hall.

Mr. Converse placed a restraining hand upon the arm outstretched to open the door.

"Just a moment, sir," said he. "Is Doctor Westbrook here?"

"No, sir; but efforts are being exerted to find him. It appears that he is in attendance upon some suburban patient."

"Who discovered the tragedy?"

"Miss Westbrook. She is completely prostrated, sir."

"Very good; now open the door."

The portal swung open and revealed, obviously, the household library. Save for the door, the windows, and the narrower spaces between the windows, its walls were entirely concealed by book-laden shelves; the apartment was otherwise scantily furnished.

By a large, old-fashioned fireplace in the southwest corner stood a heavy leathern couch; besides this the room contained nothing more in the way of large furniture except a heavy oaken table which stood in the bay of the east window. There was a swivelled desk-chair before the table; a Morris chair, a straight-backed wooden chair, and a light ladder whereby the higher shelves were made accessible. All this at a glance.

Presently, however, a number of details challenged Captain Converse's attention.

First of all, let us, as briefly as possible, dismiss the grewsome, silent figure in the centre of the floor. It lay flat upon its back beside the desk-chair; the arms were wide outstretched, and a dagger handle of ebony, or some other black wood, protruded from the left breast, into which the blade had been driven to the hilt. Surprisingly little blood had found its way through the wound, since the blade must have been reposing in the stilled heart--a well-aimed, deadly blow, signifying a cool and sinister intent. Death could not have ridden more swiftly on a thunderbolt; and plainly it had met its victim here just as he was either in the act of rising hastily from the swivel-chair, or at the moment he had gotten to his feet.

A brief inspection showed that most of the room's windows were closed and fastened, as were also the inside wooden blinds, and that lace curtains hung from the ceiling to the window-seats.

Before the table the swivel-chair was turned so that it faced two pairs of French windows in the front or north wall. These opened on a wide veranda extending across the entire front of the house. One pair of these windows now stood open, and between them stood the room's third chair,--the straight-backed one,--and upon it the Captain's attention seemed to linger.

If General Westbrook had been seated in the desk-chair, who had occupied this one so near the handily opened window? It faced the one before the desk, and their relative positions irresistibly suggested a _tête-à-tête_, the silent figure on the floor that this _tête-à-tête_ had been brought to an abrupt and violent termination. Both chairs had been forcibly pushed back a foot or more, as if the occupants of each had arisen with precipitation; for the swivel-chair had raked up one end of a magnificent tiger-skin, tearing the felt lining; and the one by the window could be traced back to where it had formerly stood, by the four deep scorings that its legs had made in the polished surface of the floor.

The occupancy of the straight-backed chair seemed to contain the crux of the matter. And here was presented another suggestion: whoever had chosen a seat so close to the open window had done so with an eye to hasty and easy retreat. This spot seemed to have attracted Mr. Converse's attention immediately after his first cursory glimpse; he still stood just inside the doorway, and his eyes, after travelling over various details of the scene before him, returned again and again to the vacant seat.

At last his regard rested upon Officer Mike Clancy, standing respectfully at attention, and he pointed to the object of his interest.

"Clancy," he asked, "who's been sitting in that chair?"

"Sure, an' there's been no wan, sorr, since Oi've been in the room."

"Not yourself?"

Clancy cast an appreciative glance at the comfortable Morris chair, and then one of contempt at the less inviting seat.

"Oi hov not," he replied, with deliberate emphasis. Such innocence of his questioner's intent was not to be doubted: the chairs had not been disturbed.

If the Captain evinced an unusual interest in the straight-backed chair, one other article must be mentioned to which his eye reverted many times,--the nickel-plated desk telephone, overturned upon the blotting-pad, its hooks free of the receiver. It was more than likely that when Miss Westbrook attempted to use the instrument in the hall, she received no response from Central, the line already, doubtless, having been put out of commission.

Close by the nerveless fingers of the General's right hand was a revolver. An inspection of this revealed a weapon of familiar make, of .38 calibre; and the pungent odor of freshly burnt powder, which still clung about it, together with two exploded shells, told its own story of recent and apparently ineffectual use.

It was only natural to turn from the revolver to a partially open drawer on the right side of the desk, and to the desk itself; and here once more the mute witnesses gave their unspoken testimony. Had General Westbrook been seated at his desk writing when some midnight caller interrupted him? Had a conference then followed which crescendoed rapidly through the various stages of a quarrel, _a verbis ad verbera_, to a sudden resort to violence? Well, here was the cover off the ink-well; a spreading spot of ink on the blotting-pad marked where a pen had been dropped; a tablet was conveniently at hand, but not one scrap of paper that had been written upon, except one or two neat piles of envelopes containing letters addressed to the dead man, and other documents of various kinds, none of which, probably, had engaged his attention during the minutes preceding the abrupt blotting out of his life.

But in these particulars could be read the fact that the unfortunate gentleman had, some time during the night, been actually writing at his desk. Then, the chair forcibly shoved backward; the right hand, overturning the telephone in its precipitancy, flying to the drawer where the revolver reposed, presented a picture to the Captain's mental vision almost as comprehensive as a photograph. The General had not been surprised: an explanation of the interval between the dropping of the pen and the hurried opening of the drawer lay in the occupancy of the two chairs; this hiatus contained the whole story of the crime.

Thoughtfully Converse set the telephone upright again. He hung the receiver upon the hooks, and after a minute or so of waiting endeavored to catch Central. But it was of no use; no response came; the line evidently had been, as he had already thought, "cut out" as being out of order--which naturally would follow upon a continuous signal with no request for a number.

Next, he picked up the writing-tablet, and upon it his scrutiny became almost instantly glued. He seemed to be as absorbed in the unsullied whiteness of its top sheet as if it had been covered with written characters. His stiff lips presently pursed; his right eyebrow lifted in a familiar quizzical manner; and he looked from the tablet in his hand to the fireplace, black and cold. After all, there was evidently a message in those blank pages: the last one used had been hastily and carelessly rent from the binding gum, as the saw-tooth particles of paper yet adhering to the tablet, in this one instance, affirmed.

The elderly gentleman who had admitted the two officers had been watching Mr. Converse with as much interest as that evinced by McCaleb himself, and the young patrolman was taking advantage of his opportunity greedily. The elderly gentleman now stepped forward.

"Pardon me," he began, "but if the question is not premature, are you able to form a theory? Have you any idea as to the identity of the assassin?"

Converse eyed the old man askance, and the latter went on immediately:

"Besides yourselves and Doctor Bane I am the only man in the house. I am a near neighbor; I reside on the opposite corner. Wilson is my name, Slayden Wilson. I was going to say, that perhaps I may be needed else--"

"By all means, don't let us detain you," urged Converse with suspicious haste.

"Thank you. And if you require anything--" his eye wandered until it rested upon the bell-button beside the door--"if you require anything, press the button there."

"Very good," Converse returned. "Try to prepare the ladies for a meeting, as I shall want to question them--the servants too."

The old gentleman withdrew, closing the door noiselessly after him.

Mr. Converse still held the writing-tablet in his hand, and now he laid it upon the table. As he did so, McCaleb--all the time close to his elbow--quietly observed.

"Do you suppose somebody's got away with it, sir?"

"It looks that way," the older man replied, abstractedly; then abruptly breaking off, he fixed a keen look upon the young man. "What do you mean, McCaleb?" he asked.

"Are you not looking for some writing?"

"Aye, aye, Mac," was the quiet reply, the speaker's glance kindling shrewdly, "aye, aye, Mac, you are correct."

He pointed to a blotter lying on the desk.

"See there, Mac; my fingers are just itching to get hold of that writing; but I fear it's gone. Mac, you haven't the first idea of its importance."

The young man slowly shook his head. "I'm afraid not, sir," said he simply.

"Well, it's just this: if we had it, we would know who is--" The speaker dropped suddenly into a reverie, leaving the thought incomplete. He picked up the blotter and stared fixedly at it for a moment; laid it back again on the table, still watching it, and concluded in a preoccupied manner, "What a game! what a game! How near--and how far--to both these deaths!"

McCaleb caught his breath.

"You don't say!" he exclaimed in a whisper. "De Sanchez--"

The Captain merely nodded once.

The blotter all at once became an object of magnetic interest for the young man, and he bent over it and began studying its cryptic markings with puckered brow.

"See what you can make of it," suggested Converse.

After a while McCaleb stood upright again, took a long breath, and shook his head.

"I can make nothing of it," said he; "the lines are too crisscrossed and mixed, the fragments of words too short and indistinct. Maybe--if I had a lens--something more to go on--"

"But is there nothing that particularly attracts your attention?"

Once more McCaleb frowned heavily and concentrated his mind upon the blotter.

"I suppose this is the one General Westbrook was using?" he asked.

"Yes."

In silence he studied it some moments longer.... "No," said he, with an air of finality; "I can make out nothing but a lot of curlicues that look like figure three's with tails to 'em. I can't imagine what they mean."

Converse chuckled in his throat. "My question was hardly fair," said he. "You hadn't the advantages in the first case I had. I'll tell you this much, though: they're letter 'z's.'"

"Oh, I begin to see. I suppose you would like me to confirm your opinion, by coming independently to the same conclusions. Well, I'll try again."

Once more the Captain nodded, and moved over to the open window.

Without touching it, he began carefully to look over the straight-backed chair, at the polished hard-wood floor about it, and at the narrow section of panelled wall behind--one of the room's wall spaces uncovered by books. Presently a barely audible exclamation escaped him--a mere breath of satisfaction, which, nevertheless, instantly brought McCaleb to his side.

"What is it?" the young man asked, breathlessly.

The Captain pointed to a small round hole in the oak panel, somewhat lower than his own shoulder as he stood, from which protruded what appeared to be half an inch of black yarn.

"You'll have to keep yourself better in hand, Mac," was his only verbal recognition of the young man's curiosity, while he extracted the particle of fabric from the tiny aperture.

"Ah, I see," McCaleb continued; "General Westbrook nearly winged him, didn't he? The man must have been standing right up against the wall to have the bullet carry away a piece of his coat like that."

Again Converse looked at the young man appreciatively.

"We'll make a detective of you yet," said he. "But the man wasn't standing so close to the wall, though. And why 'a man'? It is simply one of those rare chances where the thread of cloth clung to the bullet a bit longer than usual. If you'll notice the floor closely, you'll see--from this chair, where he sat for some time, to the desk; from the desk to the window there, and away. What that person took with"--the briefest of pauses before the pronoun--"him I'd give a good deal to have.... Those are about the actions of the General's caller. Do you notice anything peculiar about the footmarks on the floor?"

The Captain's manner was quiet and deliberate; and McCaleb, the pupil, followed the vague markings with the intentness and thoroughness of a born specialist. Slight as they were, the imprints would have been lacking entirely had it not been for the dampness of the night; but they held a meaning.

"The man came on to the desk," McCaleb began, but paused. "I suppose it was a man?" he asked.

The answer was a steady look.

In a moment the young man went on: "Well, the party came up to the desk after stabbing the General. I imagine that's where your missing paper went--what he was after. And right here--just as he got out of his chair--he seems to have slipped. Probably in a hurry; or else the bullet clipped him about that time--eh?--or her."

Converse shook his head dubiously. "I can't say," he returned, meditatively. "There's something about those footmarks that is mighty peculiar, Mac; I can't just make it out." He mused a moment longer, but presently bestirred himself again. "Two shots were fired from that gun, you know," he concluded; "have you located the other bullet?"

McCaleb looked blank for an instant, as if he had been guilty of some vital oversight. However, he turned at once to a search for the missing bullet.

The glass doors before the books simplified the matter somewhat: the radiating lines from a bullet-hole in one of the panes would be so conspicuous that the most cursory glance would scarcely overlook them. Elsewhere there was no indication of the second missile; and with a little laugh McCaleb abruptly stopped and indicated by the wave of a hand the open window.

"If you have eliminated every other possibility, all right," said Converse. "Now, Mac, you may telephone for Merkel." At which last statement McCaleb smiled: the Coroner would not be in the way now.

The young man departed on his errand, and Converse went over and knelt before the fireplace.

To Policeman Clancy, the quiet, self-contained, confident man scanning the bricks and the crevices between them with an eagle-like scrutiny was the embodiment of awful and mysterious possibilities.