Yellow Room (28 page)

“It was raining hard. He may not have seen who it was. You yourself said something like that, sir.”

The colonel looked uncertain. He even looked shaken.

“I can’t help, I’m afraid,” he said thickly. “Nat won’t see me. He won’t see anybody today. He’s a broken man.”

“Have you any idea where Terry is now?”

“Gone, I suppose. They move fast these days. Hop a plane and are back on some God-forsaken island before you know it. I shouldn’t say that perhaps. My own son may be on just such an island. You know, I’m considered something of a crackpot around here.” He smiled faintly.

“Really? About what?”

“About my son. We were very close. After my wife’s death I had only the boy, and—well, let that go. Only I’ve always felt that I would know if anything had happened to him. Maybe you think that’s foolish.”

“Not at all,” Dane said gravely.

“For instance, I knew when he had pneumonia in college. I wakened out of a sound sleep, and I was so sure that I telephoned at once. He had it, you see. It’s—well, I suppose it’s psychic, although I don’t like the word.”

He got a clipping from his wallet. It was the story of a flier found after months on a Pacific island, where the natives had kept him alive. He had been badly injured, but had returned to duty. Dane read it gravely.

“Am I to understand that you think this may be your son?” he inquired.

Henry’s face fell.

“That would be too much to hope, I expect. But it shows it can happen, doesn’t it? There are so many islands,” he added, almost wistfully, “and I’ve never felt that Don was gone.”

“There’s always hope,” Dane said. “That’s what keeps most of us ticking, isn’t it?”

The colonel got out stiffly at his gate. He had aged even in the last day or so, and it seemed absurd that Nathaniel could suspect him of anything. Or was it? Dane pondered that on his way home. The story could be true, or it could be a cleverly concocted one, made up after all the evidence was in. The colonel had been a military man. He was used to firearms, and his story of having found Elinor in the lane was as incredible as Floyd had evidently regarded it.

He wanted badly to talk to Mr. Ward, but this was not the time for it, with Terry flying back to the blue inferno of the Pacific, with Mrs. Ward lying dead, and Nathaniel himself wandering around like an ancient distracted ghost. Time was growing short too. He still had no alibi for Greg in New York. Tim had had men working on it from his own agency, but with the plethora of army officers in the city and the definite percentage of them who drank to excess after prolonged battle strain, they had failed utterly.

In the end he decided to see Elinor again. He found her looking better, the room full of flowers, and a nurse reading a book by a window. Elinor looked frightened when she saw him. He went over to the bed.

“I would like to talk to you, Mrs. Hilliard,” he said. “If you want the nurse to stay it is all right with me.”

Certainly she did not want the nurse. She sent her out quickly. Dane closed the door and went back to the bed.

“I’m wondering,” he said, “if you are really willing to let your brother be found guilty of a murder you know he didn’t commit?”

She looked terrified. She cowered back among her pillows, as though she feared actual bodily violence.

“I can’t talk,” she said wildly. “I can’t say I was here that night. It would wreck my life. Howard’s too, all he has built for himself.”

“So that’s all you are thinking of?”

She had recovered somewhat by this time.

“I told you before. I don’t know who did it. I don’t know anything about it. I found her on the doorstep, and I left her there.”

“Will you swear to that in court? Because I’m going to see that you are called at the trial.”

“I won’t go to court,” she said obstinately. “I’ll leave the country first.” She was sullen now. “Maybe Greg did it. How do I know? She was already dead, I tell you.”

“Was it Greg you drove away that night, Mrs. Hilliard?”

She collapsed then. He got no more out of her. The nurse, returning, found her alone and weeping noisily, and when Dr. Harrison arrived he gave her a sedative.

“Tragic about her brother,” he said as he left. “She’s devoted to him.”

In a way Dane had played his last card. The solution, in view of Elinor’s silence, had to lie elsewhere, and he decided to fly to the Coast. He told Carol his plan that evening, sitting on the terrace in the warm darkness, with Virginia in bed and only the sleepy call of a gull now and then to break the silence.

“The story’s out there,” he said, “and my leave is over soon. There’s no time to waste.”

“But you’ll come back here?”

Something in her voice made him reach over and take her hand, now bare of Don’s ring. He touched that finger gently.

“Before I go I want to ask you something,” he said. “Are you still remembering Don Richardson? Do you still think he may come back? And if he ever does will you marry him?”

“He will never come back, Jerry,” she said positively. “I know that.”

“But if he does?”

“No,” she said simply.

He let go her hand.

“I’ve never thought of myself as a marrying man,” he said soberly. “In a way I have no right to ask any girl to marry me. My work is pretty important. Don’t get any false ideas about it. It’s not sensational, but it cuts me off from normal living. It takes all I’ve got, and sometimes more.”

She stirred in the dark.

“Are you proposing to me? Or are you giving me up?” she inquired.

“Both,” he said promptly. “I want you to wait for me, my darling. I want you to come back to. Good God, Carol, I wonder if you know what that would mean?”

“I will wait,” she said. “No matter what happens, I will always wait, Jerry.”

Then and only then he took her in his arms.

He left for the Coast the next day, Sunday, and he was still there when the Grand Jury met on Wednesday. The county seat was jammed with reporters and cameramen. Carol found herself in a small hotel room, with only a bed, a dresser and a chair or two, and with a group of newspapermen next door who banged things about, talked all night, and apparently drank when they were not talking.

Evidently Campbell and Floyd had built their case carefully. There was an air of assurance about the district attorney as he made his opening speech to the twenty-three men who sat in a semicircle around the room.

“It becomes my duty, as the representative of this sovereign state,” he began pompously, “to bring to your attention one of the most cruel crimes in our history. On the night of Friday, June sixteenth last, a summer night when our citizenry slept or worked to further a disastrous war, a young woman was done to death in the village of Bayside, in this county.

“Not only was she murdered by a heavy blow on the head, but an attempt was made to destroy her body. Her effects were taken to conceal her identity, and a quantity of inflammable liquid was poured over her and subsequently ignited.”

He went into details here, of the discovery of the body, the failure to locate the missing clothing, and the fatal identification. “A young woman, not yet thirty, and so far as we have discovered without family, except for a child which had been born some time previously.

“This woman came from Los Angeles, where she had given her child to a family with the idea of adoption soon after its birth. She had continued to see this boy, now two years old, at intervals, and we have the statement of the foster mother that on her last visit she was in a cheerful frame of mind.

“Yet she came to Bayside, in this state, to a large summer estate known as Crestview, and there she was done to death.”

He elaborated on the size of Crestview, “an establishment of so many rooms they had to be referred to by name;” that she had been assigned by the caretaker to what was known as the yellow room, and from this yellow room she had gone to meet her death.

“We know now what she told the caretaker, to obtain admission to the house. She told her that she was married, and to whom, and we will later present the certificate of this marriage discovered—along with her other effects—through the acumen of Samuel Floyd, the chief of police in Bayside.

“Unfortunately this caretaker, one Lucy Norton, is now herself dead, under circumstances which I shall not ask you to consider. But you will learn that every effort was made to conceal and destroy not only this young woman herself, but her personal effects.

“However, we now have certain facts which point to a certain individual as guilty of this heinous crime. These facts will be presented to you by various witnesses, and you will then decide whether or not to bring in a true bill against this prisoner.

“Shall we proceed, Mr. Foreman?”

Carol was the first witness. She had made her way through the curious crowd outside on her arrival with her head high, paying no attention to the cameramen as they shot her, but in the Grand Jury room she felt as though she was before a medieval inquisition. As she sat down she sensed that the men gazing at her were unfriendly; that she represented to most of them the idle rich, who lived on the bent backs of the rest of the world. Nevertheless, she told her story clearly, the finding of the house locked and Lucy gone, the discovery by Freda—now unfortunately departed into the limbo of domestic service elsewhere—and her own brief sight of the body.

She was shown the crushed white hat, the burned fur jacket, slippers, and the piece of the red negligee. But she refused to identify them. “They were brought to me later,” she said. “I did not see them on the—on the body. I only saw there was someone there.”

When they let her go she was relieved to find young Starr waiting for her outside, his old car at the curb and his grin as engaging as ever.

“How about a drink?” he inquired cheerfully. “Don’t mind those old bozos in there. It’s not a trial, you know.”

“They looked as though they hated me.”

“So what?” he said, pushing her through the crowd. “I wouldn’t trust one of them in the dark with you. That ain’t hate.”

He took her to a small bar and ordered her a brandy. He took beer himself, and when they were settled at a small table he watched her color come back. When she seemed all right again he leaned forward confidentially.

“I’m in kind of a jam myself,” he told her. “Haven’t known whether to talk or not. You see I was around your place right after they took Mrs. Hilliard to the hospital.”

“How does that put you in a jam?”

“Well, it’s like this,” he said, lowering his voice. “I’d been hanging around the town all day. Mrs. Norton had been found dead, and it looked queer as all hell. On the floor, with a broken leg and so on. Then when I started back about one o’clock that night I saw the ambulance coming out of your drive, and another car after it. That looked funny, so I left my car and walked up to your place.

“I was just looking around, you know. It was raining hard, but I kinda like rain. And there was a ladder under what you call the yellow room. I guess I hadn’t any business to do it, but I suppose you know what I found. Somebody had been there before me. Maybe I ought to tell the police about it. I don’t know. I damn near told Dane about it. I guess I funked it. He scares me, that guy.”

“I don’t see why. He’s very kind.”

He stared at her.

“Kind!” he said. “I wouldn’t like to go up against him. That’s all I can say. He was in the FBI before the war. I saw him kill a man myself.”

Carol caught her breath.

“What sort of a man?” she asked, her voice uncertain.

“Gangster, right here in this town. Don’t let that worry you. He needed killing. I guess Dane’s been doing special work since the war. Secret stuff, you know. The way those fellows are trained—!” He smiled at her again. “I kind of suspected Dane of murdering that girl. Looked like spy stuff. That’s out now.”

Seeing that this new picture of Dane had disturbed her, he reverted to the yellow room. Had the police noticed the loose baseboard in it? Had she any idea what the girl might have hidden behind it? And who did she think had torn the room apart?

When he found she knew nothing he took her back to the hotel; to the bleak room with its bed and bureau and chair, and its silence, since the press was still waiting outside the Grand Jury room. It stood there, watching the faces of witnesses, dropping endless cigarette butts on the wooden floor, and making bets on the outcome, with the odds in favor of indictment.

T
HE SESSION WAS STILL
going on, in secrecy and under oaths of silence. Impressed witnesses came and went. Floyd, Dr. Harrison, Marcia Dalton, tearful and not certain now she had seen Elinor’s car the night of the murder; making a bad impression too, as though she were shielding someone. The bus driver who had brought the girl, and Sam Thompson, with his story of her looking through his telephone directory.

The list of exhibits grew. It now included the ring, the marriage certificate with a sworn statement by a Mexican magistrate that he had married Marguerite Barbour and one Gregory Spencer a year before, the dead girl’s clothing and bags, uncovered on the hill, and the pitiful fragments of what she had worn the night of her death.

Except for the marriage certificate her handbag had contained little of importance, a hundred-odd dollars in bills and currency, the usual powder, rouge and lipstick, some cleansing tissue, a receipt from the hotel in New York, a return railroad ticket to New York, and a check for her suitcase at Grand Central. The suitcase itself was added to the list of exhibits, with the baby’s picture shown for its psychological effect on the jurors. Thereafter Campbell referred to her as “this mother,” with due effect.

The table became loaded. There was even the pitcher from the attic, with a laboratory report that it had contained gasoline, and the State’s contention that it had been used to prevent the discovery of the buried effects.

But the State also added one exhibit which explained what had been a mystery to Maggie. It produced a large oilcan which had disappeared from her kitchen, and Hank Williams to testify that he had sent Lucy Norton a gallon of the fluid on the morning of the murder. Maggie, brought over by Floyd under protest and put on oath, was obliged to state that it was almost empty when she had first seen it at Crestview on her arrival.