At One-Thirty by Isabel Ostrander (adult books to read .txt) 📕
Gaunt had approached the body, and was passing his fingers lightly and thoroughly over it.
"No doubt about robbery being the motive?" he asked, as he worked.
"Oh, no," the Inspector put in, easily. "No weapon found, window open, tracks before window in the carpet and on the curtains, and Mr. Appleton's jewelry and money gone."
"I understand." Gaunt bent and sniffed the powder-blackened shirt about the wound. "Looks as if Mr. Appleton might have recognized, or thought he recognized, the thief, doesn't it, when he let him get as near as he did to shoot him, without attempting to get on his feet, or make any outcry?"
'"Maybe he did jump to his feet, and fell back again when he was shot?" suggested the Inspector, thoughtfully.
"Hardly, seeing the way he was clutching the arms of the chair. Even death didn't release that vise-like grip. He might have clutched his breast whe
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“Really, I—I don’t remember.”
“Was it the night before his death, Miss Carhart?”
“Oh, naturally, if you call that seeing him alone. After his wife had retired, we stayed in the library, talking, where my father and Mrs. Finlay Appleton were playing cards, and then—yes, we did drift into the music-room, which opens from the library, and I played a little, I think.”
“And that was all? You did not enter the den, Miss Carhart?”
“No, Mr. Gaunt.”
The detective rose.
“Miss Carhart, you will recall what I said to you at the commencement of this interview? If you are not absolutely frank with me, I must go to your father. Will you tell me if he is at home?”
“I don’t know what you mean! I am absolutely frank with you.”
“You were in the den alone with Mr. Appleton, the night before his death. You were seen there.”
“I—was seen there?”
“I will be more frank than you have been. After Mrs. Garret Appleton had retired, Marie passed along the hall before the half-open door of the den, and saw you there with Mr. Appleton.”
There was a pause, and then the girl said, with a little break in her voice:
“I see there is no use attempting to withhold anything from you, Mr. Gaunt. I only attempted to do so because I wanted you to be sure in your own mind of the truth—that my flirtation with Mr. Appleton was only that, and nothing more. I was in the den with Mr. Appleton. He took me in there ostensibly to show me some new curios he had recently purchased, but he really wanted to talk to me alone. You see, he had taken our little flirtation more seriously than I.
“My father had planned to take me abroad next week for the winter, and he was quite broken up about it. I was really sorry that I had ever started to play this rather cruel little—joke on him when I realized now how badly he felt, and I was a little frightened, too; so I cut our conversasion short, and returned to the library, where my father was. That is all, Mr. Gaunt—really, really all! And now that this—this terrible thing has come, I feel so differently about it all—so deeply sorry that I have caused Mrs. Garret Appleton any pain—so sorry that I—I played with fire!”
“I am glad that you have been frank with me, Miss Carhart. I believe that you have been; but I must know a little more. In that interview with him in the den, did Mr. Appleton make any violent demonstration of affection toward you, any suggestions or proposals for the future?”
“No, not exactly,” the girl returned, hesitatingly. “He was very much wrought-up and excited, and didn’t seem to be quite—quite himself. He said that he could not bear the thought of my departure for Europe—of my being where he could not see me sometimes; and, when he saw how aghast I was that things had drifted so far between us in his estimation, he accused me of flirting with him, of wilfully leading him on, which was just— just what I had been doing, Mr. Gaunt, only I—it sounded so awful, put into words.
“I was very indignant, and told him so. I—I reminded him of the respect due to the woman upstairs. Oh, I said all the hypocritical things that a girl usually says when she had been playing with a man, and gets found out, and then I cut out the conversation short, and went back to the library.”
“And he came with you?”
“Yes; but he was sullen, and in an injured mood, of course, although he quelled it before my father. Nevertheless, I felt uncomfortable, and I was glad when the time came for us to go home.”
“And you heard nothing further?”
“Nothing until Marie called me up, and told me of—of his death.”
“Miss Carhart, did you know of any enemies— any active enemies—whom Mr. Appleton may have had? Did he ever tell you of any difficulty he was in, or trouble?”
“No; he only spoke, in a general way, of his unhappiness at home—the sort of thing a married man always says when he wants sympathy—that he isn’t understood.”
“That is all, Miss Carhart. I won’t trouble you any longer.”
He turned toward the door; but she laid a small, detaining hand on his arm..
“I know that you think I am horrid, Mr. Gaunt; that I don’t deserve any—respect, or anything. But it was only a petty malicious impulse—my flirting with him, I mean, and I yielded to it. If you could know how sorry I am!”
The detective smiled a little.
“We all do things which we are sorry for, at one time, or another, Miss Carhart, and it is past. You may be sure that your confidence will be respected. Good-afternoon.”
His thoughts on the way home were far from satisfied ones. If Yates Appleton was not guilty of his brother’s death, his investigation seemed to have made little or no headway. He had, to be sure, cleared up a number of false clues; but they had been fairly obvious from the start, and he seemed to be working in circles, wasting valuable time, and getting no nearer the real truth. Could it be that another line of investigation lay open to him, which he had almost wilfully overlooked for the multiplicity of clues that lay more readily within reach? Had he, because of his blindness, missed some essential detail, failed to discover some salient point, some significant finger-post, which, to his trained faculties, would have pointed unmistakably to the truth? He writhed in spirit. Why had fate endowed him with the abilities, the genius, which he possessed, and denied to him the greatest of all attributes in the life-work which he had chosen?
WHEN Gaunt reached his rooms, he found Inspector Hanrahan impatiently pacing the floor of his library.
“Thought you would never come, Mr. Gaunt,” he said. “I have been waiting for you nearly an hour. Have you come upon anything?”
“Running down a lot of false clues; clearing out the underbrush, that’s about all.” Gaunt could not quite keep the bitterness he felt from manifesting itself in his voice.
“Ah-ha! Well, I’ve come on something we’ve never even thought of looking into. We’ve taken the case up from the time of the murder, or at least the evening before. But how about the day before, Mr. Gaunt? Did it occur to you to find out how Garret Appleton spent the last day of his life?”
The detective concealed his chagrin with an effort. Could this be the line of investigation that he had overlooked, not because of his blindness, but because of a crass stupidity of reasoning which was plainly unaccountable.
“Can’t say that it did, Inspector. I have been too busy following up the clues we already had.”
“Well!” The Inspector settled back in a chair with immense satisfaction. “When Fd ran that Louis Lantelme business to earth, and found there was nothing in it, there didn’t seem a single thing left to go on; so I thought Fd cast backward a little. In the first place—I got this from Louis— for the last twp or three months Mr. Appleton has had something on his mind—something besides his family troubles, and all that, I mean. He kfept it pretty much to himself; but his man knew it—trust a valet, or a lady’s maid, to know as much about the people they work for as they know about themselves.
‘^As far as Louis could make out, it started with an article his master read in the newspaper about three months ago. He seemed very much excited, and did some mysterious telephoning; but the valet didn’t hear the numbers, and didn’t know what it was about. After Mr. Appleton had gone out, the valet looked carefully through that page of the paper which had upset his master; but he couldn’t find anything in it which, to his mind, would seem to have any bearing on Mr. Appleton’s affairs.
“He would have forgotten all about it, only from that minute his master seemed a changed man; to him, at least. More irritable than ever, and anxious—not as if he was afraid, but as if he was worried about to death. Once in the last moiith while Louis was in his employ, Mr. Appleton had gone away alone—just over night. He’s always taken Louis with him before, and that was what impressed it upon the valet’s mind as being unusual. Moreover, when he returned, he seemed more depressed and worried than ever.”
Inspector Hanrahan paused as if for commendation; but the detective merely asked quietly:
“Anything else?”
“Not from Louis Lantelme. You know he was discharged about a month ago. But when I went at the butler with this line of questioning, I got a few more facts. I told you I thought that fellow had something up his sleeve. It seems that, about three weeks ago, Mr. Appleton received a letter with a special-delivery stamp, quite late one evening.
“There was a dinner on at the house and lots of guests there; but he excused himself and went out in his car. He didn’t return until nearly six in the morning, and Dakers, whom he had told to wait up for him—and I guess from the way the fellow talked he was well paid for it—says the car was splashed from end to end with mud, as if it had had a long run, through heavy roads—although it hadn’t rained in New York that night.”
“Not so much in that,” the detective remarked.
“The morning before his death, Mr. Appleton received another special-delivery letter. This time, Mr. Appleton went out in his car, immediately, as before; but he returned about five o’clock in the afternoon, and, from then until dinner time, Dakers was pretty busy bringing him drinks. He did not seem anxious or worried then, but madder than the deuce.
“We couldn’t get a thing out of Mr. Appleton’s chauffeur, at first. He and Mr. Yates each had their own, you know, and Mr. Garret’s is a stolid German, and I suspect was paid to keep his mouth shut. But, after we had been at him for awhile, he said he had driven Mr. Appleton, on the day before his death, to a road-house away up on the Boston Post Road, where he’s had his own lunch, and waited for three hours for his employer. Then he brought him straight home.
“I got the name of the road-house from him. It’s The Rocky Point Inn, and I’m going up there for dinner tonight, and find out what Garret Appleton did during those three hours and whom he met, and then I am going to trace them, if I can.
“As to the time before, when they went on that all-night trip, they went over to Jersey, by way of Staten Island and Perth Amboy Ferry, to a farmhouse half-way between Metuchen and New Brunswick. I have got two men out there now, with the chauffeur to show them the house, and see what we get out of that.”
“What do you think, yourself. Inspector? Got a theory?”
“I think they’re the most confoundedly mysterious bunch I ever came in contact with. Mr. Garret Appleton was in some secret mix-up of his own, as sure as you are alive—nothing criminal, or anything of that sort, I think; but something he didn’t take his family into his affairs about. They were a swift couple, those two brothers, from all I have been able to gather. They’ve kept the family in hot water and themselves just out of scare-heads in the newspapers since their college days; but I think I’m on the trail
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