The Door (23 page)

It was, however, the door to the attic staircase which she had opened, and she was surprised to find not only the steps but that a faint light was going somewhere above.

She was curious rather than alarmed. In her bare feet and night dress she went on up quietly, but not thinking of caution. However, near the top she must have made some sound. She had only an instant to see a white figure bending over something. The next moment she was stumbling down the staircase. But she was not quick enough. The thing, and she shuddered when she said it, the thing overtook her and passed her. She felt the brushing of its spectral garments, as she put it, and it was then that she screamed.

When Joseph found her—the women would not stir out of their rooms—she was locked in her room and was still screaming. It was some time before he could induce her to open her door.

When I talked to her, which was that night, she was still sitting in Katherine’s room and obstinately refusing to go to bed.

“I think you dreamed it, Elise,” said Judy. “What’s the use of being a fool? There is no such thing as a ghost.”

“I saw it. I touched it, mademoiselle.”

“Well, you can’t touch a ghost. And mind you, nothing of this nonsense to mother. Go to bed and say your prayers. That ought to help.”

We had to take her up ourselves finally, and wait until she was safely locked in. Then and only then did Judy look directly at me.

“Now,” she said. “She saw something, or somebody. She may be an idiot, but I’ll say this for her. It takes a lot to keep her out of her bed.”

Together we went up to the attic, but although it was rather ghastly at that hour of the night, I could not find that anything had been disturbed. Judy, it appeared, had been up before, and had found nothing.

It was from Joseph, still waiting in the pantry to admit Katherine, that I secured what looked like a partial explanation.

“The sewing room window on the second floor was open,” he said. “I think he got out there, madam. He could drop to the roof of the kitchen porch.”

He had, it seems, instructed Elise to say that she had seen a mouse! Which, as Judy said, was from the sublime to the ridiculous.

Katherine came in very late, and I thought she looked rather better.

She had been going over Jim’s house, she said, and she had decided to move over there.

“It looks as though I shall be here for some time, Elizabeth,” she said. “At least until they have cleared Jim of this ridiculous trumped-up charge. And there are three of us. I don’t like to crowd you. I can get the servants from New York, and be quite comfortable.”

I made no demur. I saw that she was determined, although Judy looked rather unhappy over it.

“What will you do with Amos?”

“I shall let him go,” she said with decision. “I don’t like him and I don’t trust him.”

The net result of which was that Amos gave his damaging testimony before the Grand Jury and then disappeared.

That was on Friday, May the twentieth.

I daresay some such system must exist, but the whole proceeding drove me almost to madness. And it was sheer farce from beginning to end. The result was a foregone conclusion, with, as Godfrey Lowell says, the indictment typed and ready to sign before it began.

There was no chance from the first; from that sonorous opening by the District Attorney: “Gentlemen of the Grand Jury, it becomes my duty this morning to bring to your attention a most serious case. On the night of the eighteenth of April last, when most of us were peacefully asleep in our beds, a human life was ended under circumstances so brutal that they stun the normal mind. A woman named Sarah Gittings, a nurse, devoted solely to a career of service, was atrociously murdered.” There followed certain details, dramatically presented, and after that: “Through the efforts of the police department an array of facts has been discovered, which point to a certain individual as the guilty man. These facts will now be presented to you by certain witnesses, and it is for you to decide whether a true bill shall be presented against this prisoner, or not.

“Shall we proceed, Mr. Foreman?”

From that until the end the mounting testimony against Jim was appalling. The District Attorney grew more and more unctuous, and his secret satisfaction was evident. When all was over he made, I believe, a dramatic gesture with his hands, and standing by the table, ran his eyes along the half circle of chairs.

“Gentlemen,” he said, in a low voice. “I have done my duty. Now must you do yours.”

As he closed the door behind him and stepped into the hall, Dick says that he was still acting for the benefit of the press men and the crowd. He stood still, half leaning against the door like an exhausted man, and mopped his forehead with a fine handkerchief, faintly scented. Then he drew himself up, justice personified, and marched along the corridor.

But in between those two dramatic moments were two days of sheer horror for us.

The secrecy of the procedure, the oaths of silence, the occasional cheerful amusement of the twenty-three men who sat in that semicircle of chairs, the terrified or determined faces of the witnesses, the avid crowd of reporters outside studying these faces as they came and went, and then rushing to their typewriters: “It is reported that Miss Bell stated—”

Building a case that might send a man to the chair, out of staircase gossip, a look, a gesture, or such information as was refused by the District Attorney but managed somehow to reach them
via
his office.

Experts came and went. The heap of exhibits on the long table grew; poor Sarah’s stained and pierced clothing, the ghastly fragments of Florence Gunther’s checked dress and blue coat, for although Jim was only charged with Sarah’s murder, there were no legal limits, no laws of testimony, to be considered before the Grand Jury.

The sword-stick was brought in, its ancient mechanism arousing a sort of childlike interest among the jurymen; and small boxes of earth, each duly ticketed and bearing the impress of the stick as Jim had touched the ground with it. And Dick telephoned once to say that there was a story among the newspaper men that something had been carried in, carefully covered with a cloth, and that the story was that a letter Jim had burned had been restored, and had been introduced as incriminating.

We were all in the library, and I thought Katherine started when Judy repeated this. But she said nothing. She sat staring at her emerald ring, and made no comment.

The list of exhibits grew. Sarah’s uniform, with a mirror so that the writing on the sleeve might be read; the plaster casts of the foot marks Inspector Harrison had made in my garden; the snaps from the carpet which had been rescued from my furnace; even the pencil which Wallie had found in the airshaft, the fragments of broken glass from my drawing room door, the rope which had once tied the dogs, and had later on been used to drag poor Sarah’s body down the hill; and certain pages in Sarah’s own hand of her sick-room records, designed to show that the reversed writing on Sarah’s sleeve was authentic.

There were photographs, also. Showing the sewer structure, showing poor Sarah within it, showing the well-marked spot where the body had lain near the tree, and that room of hers as it was discovered the next day. Florence’s room was there too, and Sarah’s, in the disorder in which we had found it on the morning of the nineteenth of April.

It must have been like sitting through a crime play to those jurymen, lifted out of their humdrum lives into that welter of crime and clues and blood.

And against all that, what had we? My own testimony, received with evident scepticism, that the man on my stairs the night of Sarah’s murder had not worn light golf knickers, but conventional trousers! At no time was it brought out that the stains in Jim’s car had been put there later; were not there when the police examined it the following day. It was sufficient that I had burned the carpet. And when I suggested that any juryman over forty was welcome to try to hang in the light shaft by his hands, and then to try to pull himself out of it, there was general laughter.

There was also one other development which left us in little doubt of the final outcome. This was the introduction on the second day of the colored woman, Clarissa, from the Bassett house on Halkett Street.

It was Dick too who reported this to us. He had seen her taken in, uneasy and yet somehow deadly. A big woman, powerful and determined but frightened. When she came out her relief was manifest, and Dick took advantage of that relief. He followed her, caught her at a corner, and brought us what he had learned.

Briefly this woman, Clarissa, having positively identified Jim at the jail, stated that on the night of Sarah’s murder he had spent some time at the Halkett Street house with Florence Gunther. He had sat in the parlor with her for an hour or more, and she remembered that he had a stick.

That we already knew. But she had further testified that, going forward to lock the front door before leaving for the night, she had heard Jim speaking and that she remembered distinctly what he had said.

“He said: ‘I’d better start, then. I may meet her on the way back.’”

Some little hope however we had on the second day. The jury sent out for copies of the two wills, and they were duly produced. It looked for a time as though they might be looking for a larger picture; that the clause referring to the fifty thousand dollars might lead elsewhere.

But to offset that the District Attorney produced those two exhibits which he had held for the psychological moment. He brought in Jim’s walking suit and his golf shoes, to prove that by laboratory test there was blood in minute quantities on both. And he re-introduced the sword-stick.

The blade of the weapon had been carefully washed, but from inside the sheath, when it had been soaked in the laboratory, there had come a pine needle of the same variety as had been found on Sarah’s clothing; and unmistakable traces of blood. Human blood.

It was after that that the District Attorney made his dramatic gesture.

“Gentlemen, I have done my duty. Now must you do yours.”

I daresay none of us was greatly surprised at the outcome. Certainly at least twenty-two out of the twenty-three men on the Grand Jury believed Jim guilty, and the indictment was signed, late on the second day.

Katherine received the news better than I had expected.

“An indictment is not a verdict,” she said, quoting Godfrey Lowell, no doubt.

Judy, however, took it very hard and as for Wallie, the effect on him seemed devastating. Newspaper extras had announced the result, and he came in while Judy and I were at dinner. Katherine had retired to her bed, and to tea and toast on a tray.

“The damned fools!” he said. “The—damned fools!”

Judy looked at him out of eyes that were red and swollen.

“Since when have you changed your mind? You were sure enough.”

“Well, I was a damned fool myself. That’s all. He didn’t do it. And he’ll never suffer for it; I promise you that, Judy. Nothing is going to happen to him.”

“Even if you have to tell all you know? Why don’t you do that now and save time? You might die or get run over, and then where is he?”

He said nothing. I had had a good look at him by that time and I must confess that his appearance shocked me. His clothes were unpressed; his eyes were congested, as from sleepless nights, and he had developed a curious
tic
; now and again, by some involuntary contraction of the muscles, his left shoulder lifted and his head jerked to the right. I saw that he tried to control it by keeping his left hand in his coat pocket, but in spite of him up would go the shoulder. It was pitiful.

I saw, too, that he had not wanted to come; that he had dreaded the visit, and that to reinforce his courage he had taken a drink or two before he started. Not that he showed any effect, but that the room was full of it.

Judy eyed him.

“You look terrible,” she said. “And stop jerking. You’ll have me doing it. Stop jerking and tell us where Mary Martin is.”

He said he did not know, and sat in silence until we had finished. It was not until Judy had gone up to her mother and we had moved into the library that he spoke again.

“Look here,” he said. “How soon are you going away for the summer?”

“How soon are they going to release Jim Blake?”

“That’s ridiculous,” he said sharply. “He’s well enough where he is. He’ll get some of the cocktails and food out of his system, that’s all. They’ll never send him to the chair. They can’t send him to the chair. It’s absurd.”

But it seemed to me that he was listening to his own words, trying to believe them; and that when he looked at me his bloodshot eyes were pleading with me. “You believe that too, don’t you?” they said. “They’ll never send him to the chair. They can’t send him to the chair. It’s absurd.”

“When I’m certain of that I shall go away. Not before, Wallie.”

He jerked again, rather dreadfully.

“Not if I ask you to go?” he said.

“Why should you ask me to go?”

“Because I don’t think you are safe here.”

“Who could have any design against me? I have no enemies; no actively murderous ones anyhow. I mind my own business and my conscience is as clear as the ordinary run of consciences. Why should I run away?”

“I’m telling you. That’s all. Get away, and get Judy away.”

“Then you know something I don’t know, and it is your business to tell me what it is.”

He refused to be drawn, however, and with all the questions I had in mind, managed to get away before I could ask him any of them. Save one, and that had a curious effect on him.

“Can you tell me,” I said, “why Mary Martin suggested to Judy that your father should not be left alone at night?”

“Because he was sick. That’s enough, isn’t it? Why try to read into this case something that isn’t there? And why drag her in? She has nothing to do with the case. Absolutely nothing. She’s as innocent as—as Judy.”

I made my decision then, to tell him the facts as to his father’s death. I told him as gently as I could, with my hand on his arm. But he showed no surprise and pretended none. Save that he grew a shade paler he kept himself well in hand.