The Oxford Book of American Det (61 page)

Thompson’s testimony, it looked impossible.

Fred listened to the verdict with blank eyes. His sister Margaret, sitting beside him dressed in mourning, rose. And Dr. Barclay stared straight ahead of him as though he did not hear it. Then he got up and went out, and while I put Mother in the car I saw him driving away, still with that queer fixed look on his face.

I was in a fine state of fury as I walked home. I had always liked Elinor, even when she had snatched Fred from under my nose, as Mother rather inelegantly said. As a matter of cold fact, Fred Hammond never saw me after he met her. He had worshiped her from the start, and his white stunned face at the inquest only added to the mystery.

The fools! I thought. As though Elinor would ever have jumped out of that window, even if she had been in trouble. She had never cared what people thought. I remembered almost the last time I had seen her. Somebody had given a suppressed-desire party, and Elinor had gone with a huge red A on the front of her white-satin dress.

Mother nearly had a fit when she saw it. “I trust, Elinor,” she said, “that your scarlet letter does not mean what it appears to mean.”

Elinor had laughed “What do you think, Aunt Emma? Would you swear that never in your life—“

“That will do, Elinor,” Mother said.

Elinor had been very gay that night, and she had enjoyed the little run-in with Mother.

Perhaps that was one of the reasons I had liked her. She could cope with Mother. She wasn’t an only daughter, living at home on an allowance which was threatened every now and then. And she had brought laughter and gaiety into my small world.

Mother was having tea when I got home. She sat stiffly behind the tea tray and inspected me. “I can’t see why you worry about this, Louise. What’s done is done.

After all, she led Fred a miserable life.”

“She made him happy, and now she’s dead,” I said. “Also, I don’t believe she threw herself out that window.”

“Then she fell.”

“I don’t believe that, either.”

“Nonsense! What do you believe?”

But I had had enough. I went upstairs to my room. My mind was running in circles.

Somebody had killed Elinor and had got away with it. Yet who could have hated her enough for that? A jealous wife? That was possible.

I could see the Hammond place from my window, and the thought of Fred sitting there alone was more than I could bear. Not that I had ever been in love with him, in spite of Mother’s hopes. I dressed and went down to dinner, but I couldn’t eat. Luckily it was Mother’s bridge night, and after she and her three cronies were settled at the table I slipped out through the kitchen.

Annie, the cook, was making sandwiches and cutting cake. I told her to say I had gone to bed if I was asked for, and went out.

Fred’s house was only two blocks away, set in its own grounds like ours, and as I entered the driveway I saw a man standing there looking at the place. I must have surprised him, for he turned around and looked at me. It was Dr. Barclay.

He didn’t recognise me. He touched his hat and went out to the street, and a moment later I heard his car start. But if he had been in the house Fred did not mention it. I rang, and he opened the door. He seemed relieved when he saw me. “Thought you were the damned police again,” he said. “Come in. I’ve sent the servants to bed.” We went into the library. It looked as if it hadn’t been dusted for a month. Elinor’s house had always looked that way: full of people and cigarette smoke and used highball glasses. But at least it had looked alive. Now—well, now it didn’t. So it was a surprise to see her bag lying on the table. Fred saw me looking at it. “Police returned it today,” he said.

“May I look inside it, Fred?”

“Go to it,” he said dully. “There’s no note there, if that’s what you’re thinking.” I opened the bag. It was crammed as usual: compact, rouge, coin purse, a zipper compartment with some bills in it, a memorandum book, a handkerchief smeared with lipstick, a tiny perfume vial, and some samples of dress material with a card pinned to them:
Match slippers to these.

Fred was watching me, his eyes red and sunken. “I told you. Nothing.” I searched the bag again, but I could not find the one thing which should have been there. I closed the bag and put it back on the table.

Fred was staring at a photograph of Elinor in a silver frame. “All this police stuff,” he said. “Why can’t they just let her rest? She was beautiful, wasn’t she, Lou?”

“She was indeed,” I said.

“People said things. Margaret thought she was foolish and extravagant.” He glanced at the desk, piled high with what looked like unopened bills. “Maybe she was, but what the hell did I care?”

He seemed to expect some comment, so I said, “You didn’t have to buy her, Fred.

You had her. She was devoted to you.”

He gave me a faint smile, like a frightened small boy who has been reassured. “She was, Lou,” he said. “I wasn’t only her husband. I was her father too. She told me everything. Why she had to go to that damned doctor—“

“Didn’t you know she was going, Fred?”

“Not until I found a bill from him,” he said grimly. “I told her I could prescribe a rest for her, instead of her sitting for hours with that young puppy. But she only laughed.” He talked on, as if he were glad of an audience. He had made her happy. She went her own way sometimes, but she always came back to him. He considered the coroner’s verdict an outrage. “She fell. She was always reckless about heights.” And he had made no plans, except that Margaret was coming to stay until he closed the place. And as if the mere mention of her had summoned her, at that minute Margaret walked in.

I had never liked Margaret Hammond. She was a tall angular woman, older than Fred, and she merely nodded to me.

“I decided to come tonight,” she said. “I don’t like your being alone. And tomorrow I want to inventory the house. I’d like to have Father’s portrait, Fred.” He winced at that. There had been a long quarrel about old Joe Hammond’s portrait ever since Fred’s marriage. Not that Elinor had cared about it, but because Margaret had wanted it she had held on to it. I looked at Margaret. Perhaps she was the nearest to a real enemy Elinor had ever had. She had hated the marriage; had resented Elinor’s easy-going extravagant life. Even now, she could not help looking at the desk, piled with bills.

“I’d better straighten that for you, Fred,” she said. “We’ll have to find out how you stand.”

“I know how I stand.” He got up and they confronted each other, Fred with his back to the desk, as if even then he were trying to protect Elinor from Margaret’s prying eyes.

Fred’s sister shrugged and let it go.

It was warm that night. I walked slowly home. I had gone nearly half the way when I realised I was being followed. I stopped and turned. But it was only a girl. She spoke my name. “You’re Miss Baring, aren’t you?”

“Yes. You scared me half to death.”

“I’m sorry. I saw you at the inquest today, and a reporter told me your name. Were you a friend of Mrs. Hammond’s?”

“She was my cousin. Why?”

The girl seemed to make a decision. “Because I think she was pushed out that window,” she said. “I’m in an office across the street, and I was looking out. I didn’t know who she was, of course.”

“Do you mean you saw it happen?”

“No. But I saw her at the window hardly a minute before it happened, and she was using a lipstick. When I looked out again she was—she was on the pavement.” The girl shivered. “I don’t think a woman would use a lipstick just before she did a thing like that, do you?”

“No,” I said. “You’re sure it was Mrs. Hammond you saw?”

“Yes. She had on a green dress, and I had noticed her hair. She didn’t have a hat on.

I—well, I went back tonight to see if the lipstick was on the pavement. I couldn’t find it. But I’m pretty sure she still had it when she fell.” That was what I had not told Fred—that Elinor’s gold lipstick was missing from her bag. “We might go and look again,” I said. “Do you mind?” The girl didn’t mind, but she would not tell me her name. “Just call me Smith,” she said.

I never saw her again, and unless she reads this she will probably never know that she took the first step that solved the case. Because we found the lipstick in the gutter. A dozen cars must have run over it. It was crushed flat, but Elinor’s monogram was perfectly readable.

Miss Smith saw it and gasped. “So I was right,” she said. The next minute she had hailed a bus and got on it.

It was late when I got to Dr. Barclay’s office the next morning. The reception room was empty, so I went to the window and looked down. I tried to think that I was going to jump, and whether I would use a lipstick or not if I were.

The nurse came in. I gave her my name, and after a short wait she took me to the consulting room.

The doctor got up when he saw me, and I merely put Elinor’s lipstick on the desk in front of him and sat down.

“I don’t understand,” he said.

“Mrs. Hammond was at the window in your reception room using that lipstick only a minute before she fell.”

“I suppose you mean it fell with her.”

“I mean that she never killed herself. Do you think a woman would rouge her mouth just before she meant to do—what we’re supposed to think she did?” He smiled wryly. “My dear girl, if you saw as much of human nature as I do, that wouldn’t surprise you.”

“So Elinor Hammond jumped out your window with a lipstick in her hand, and you watch the Hammond house last night and then make a bolt for it when I appear! If that makes sense—“

That shocked him. He hadn’t recognised me before. “So it was you in the driveway.

Well, I suppose I’d better tell you and trust you to keep it to yourself. I hadn’t liked the way Mr. Hammond looked at the inquest. I was afraid he might—well, put a bullet in his head.”

“You couldn’t stop it standing in the driveway,” I said sceptically.

He laughed at that. Then he sobered. “I see,” he said. “Well, Miss Baring, whatever happened to Mrs. Hammond, I assure you I didn’t do it. As for being outside the house, I’ve told you the truth. I was wondering how to get in when you came along.

His sister had called me up. She was worried.”

“I wouldn’t rely on what Margaret Hammond says. She hated Elinor.” I got up and retrieved the lipstick. He got up too and surveyed me unsmilingly.

“You’re a very young and attractive woman, Miss Baring. Why not let this drop? After all, you can’t bring her back.”

“I know she never killed herself,” I said stubbornly, and went out.

I was less surprised than I might have been to find Margaret in the reception room when I reached it. She was standing close to the open window from which Elinor had fallen, and for a minute I thought she was going to jump herself.

“Margaret!” I said sharply.

She looked terrified when she saw me. “Oh, it’s you, Louise,” she said. “You frightened me.” She sat down abruptly. “She must have slipped, Lou. It would be easy.

Try it yourself.”

But I shook my head. I had no intention of leaning out that window, not with Margaret behind me. She said she had come to pay Fred’s bill for Elinor, and I let it go at that.

Nevertheless, I felt shivery as I went down in the elevator.

I had trouble starting my car, which is how I happened to see her when she came out of the building. She looked over the pavement and in the gutter. So she either knew Elinor’s lipstick had fallen with her or she had missed it out of the bag.

She didn’t see me. She hailed a taxi and got into it. To this day, I don’t know why I followed her.

I did follow her, however. The taxi went on into the residential part of town. On a thinly settled street it stopped and Margaret got out. She did not see me or my car. She was looking at a frame house with a narrow front porch, and as I watched, she went up and rang the bell.

She was inside the house for almost an hour. I began to feel idiotic. There were so many possible reasons for her being there; reasons which had nothing to do with Elinor. But when she finally came out I sat up in amazement.

The woman seeing her off on the porch was the Mrs. Thompson of the inquest.

I stooped to fix my shoe as the taxi passed me, but I don’t believe Margaret even saw the car. Nor did Mrs. Thompson. She sat down on the porch and was still there when I went up the steps.

She looked surprised rather than apprehensive. “I hope you’re not selling anything,” she said, not unpleasantly.

“I’m not selling anything,” I said. “May I talk to you?”

“What about?” She was suspicious now.

“It’s about a murder,” I said. “There’s such a thing as being accessory after the fact, and I think you know something you didn’t tell at the Hammond inquest.” Her florid colour faded. “It wasn’t a murder,” she said. “The verdict—“

“I know all about that. Nevertheless, I think it was a murder. What was Miss Hammond doing here if it wasn’t?”

Mrs. Thompson looked startled, but she recovered quickly. “I never saw her before,” she said. “She came to thank me for my testimony, because it showed the poor thing did it herself.”

“And to pay you for it, I suppose?”

She flushed angrily. “Nobody paid me anything. And now you’d better go. If you think anybody can bribe me to lie, you’re wrong. That’s all.” She went in and slammed the door, and I drove back to town, puzzled over the whole business. Was she telling the truth, or had there been something she had not told at the inquest? Certainly I believed that the doctor had known more than he had told.

I was late for lunch that day, and Mother was indignant. “I can’t imagine why, with nothing to do, you are always late for meals,” she said.

“I’ve had plenty to do, Mother,” I said. “I’ve been working on Elinor’s murder.” She gave a ladylike squeal. “Murder? Who would do such a thing?”

“Well, Margaret for one. She always loathed her.”

“Women in Margaret’s position in life do not commit crimes,” Mother said pontifically. “Really, I don’t know what has happened to you, Louise. The idea of suspecting your friends—“

“She’s no friend of mine. Elinor was.”

“So you’ll stir up all sorts of scandal. Murder indeed! I warn you, Louise, if you keep on with this idiotic idea you’ll find yourself spread all over the newspapers. And I’ll stop your allowance.”