No Clue by James Hay (e book reader free TXT) 📕

he reflected, "I might have put my hand on——"

His eyes rested on the envelope flap. His mind flashed to another and new idea. His muscles stiffened; he put his hands on the arms of his chair and slowly lifted himself up, the knife dropping from his fingers and clattering on the floor. He stood erect and held both hands aloft, a gesture of wide and growing wonder.

"Cripes!" he said aloud.

He picked up the grey paper with a hand that trembled. His pendent cheeks puffed out like those of a man blowing a horn. He stared at the paper again, before restoring it to its envelope, which he put back into one of his pockets.

"Cripes!" he said again. "It's a place! Pursuit! That's where the——"

He became a whirlwind of action, covered the floor with springy step. Taking a book of colossal size from a shelf, he whirled the pages, running his finger down a column while he murmured, "Pursuit—P-u-r—P-u—P-u——"

But there was no such name in the postal directory. He went back to older directories. He began to worry. Was there no such postoffice as Pursuit? He went to other books, whirling the pages, running down column after column. And at last he got the information he sought.

Consulting a railroad folder, he found a train schedule that caused him to look at his watch.

"Twenty-five minutes," he figured. "I'm going!"

He telephoned for a cab.

Then, seating himself at the table, he tore a sheet from a scratch-pad and wrote:

"Don't lose sight of Mrs. Brace. Disregard Russell's arrest.

"Hendricks: the Sloanehurst people are members of the Arlington Golf Club. Get a look at golf bags there. Did one, or two, contain piece or pieces of a bed-slat?

"Gore: check up on Mrs. B.'s use of money.

"I'll be back Sunday."

He sealed the envelope into which he put that, and, addressing it to Hendricks, left it lying on the table.

At the station he bought the afternoon newspapers and turned to Eugene Russell's statement, made to the reporters immediately after his arrest. It ran:

"I repeat that I'm innocent of the murder. Of course, I made a mistake in omitting all mention of my having ridden the first four miles from Sloanehurst. But, being innocent and knowing the weight of the circumstantial evidence against me, I could not resist the temptation to make my alibi good. I neither committed that murder nor witnessed it. The story I told at the inquest of what happened to me and what I did at Sloanehurst stands. It is the truth."

XIX "PURSUIT!"

Returning from his trip Sunday morning, the detective, after a brief conference with Hendricks, had gone immediately to Mrs. Brace's apartment. She sat now, still and watchful, on the armless rocker by the window, waiting for him to disclose the object of his visit. Except the lifted, faintly interrogating eyebrows, there was nothing in her face indicative of what she thought.

He caught himself comparing her to a statue, forever seated on the low-backed, uncomfortable chair, awaiting without emotion or alteration of feature the outcome of her evil scheming. Her hardness gave him the impression of something hammered on, beaten into an ugly pattern.

Having that imperturbability to overcome, he struck his first blow with surprising directness.

"I'm just back from Pursuit," he said.

That was the first speech by either of them since the monosyllabic greeting at the door. He saw that she had prepared herself for such an announcement; but the way she took it reminded him of a door shaken by the impact of a terrific blow. A little shiver, for all her force of repression, moved her from head to foot.

"You are?" she responded, her voice controlled, the hard face untouched by the shock to which her body had responded.

"Yes; I got back half an hour ago, and, except for one of my assistants, you're the first person I've seen." When that drew no comment from her, he added: "I want you to remember that—later on."

He began to whittle.

"Why?" she asked with genuine curiosity, after a pause.

"Because it may be well for you to know that I'm dealing with you alone, and fairly.—I got all the facts concerning you."

"Concerning me?" Her tone intimated doubt.

"Now, Mrs. Brace!" he exclaimed, disapproving her apparent intention. "You're surely not going to pretend ignorance—or innocence!"

She crossed her knees, and, putting her left forearm across her body, rested her right elbow in that hand. She began to rock very gently, her posture causing her to lean forward and giving her a look of continual but polite questioning.

"If you want to talk to me," she said, her voice free of all feeling, "you'll have to tell me what it's about."

"All right; I will," he returned. "You'll remember, I take it, my asking you to tell me the meaning of the marks on the flap of the grey envelope. I'll admit I was slow, criminally slow, in coming to the conclusion that 'Pursuit!' referred to a place rather than an act. But I got it finally—and I found Pursuit—not much left of it now; it's not even a postoffice.

"But it's discoverable," he continued on a sterner note, and began to shave long, slender chips from his block of wood. "I'll give you the high lights: young Dalton was killed—his murderer made a run for it—but you, a young widow then, in whose presence the thing was done, smoothed matters out. You swore it was a matter of self-defence. The result was that, after a few half-hearted attempts to locate the fugitive, the pursuit was given up."

"Very well. But why bring that story here—now? What's its significance?"

He stared at her in amazement. Her thin, sensitive lips were drawn back at the corners, enough to make her mouth look a trifle wider—and enough to suggest dimly that their motion was the start of a vindictive grimace. Otherwise, she was unmoved, unresponsive to the open threat of what he had said.

"Let me finish," he retorted. "An unfortunate feature, for you, was that you seemed to have made money out of the tragedy. In straitened circumstances previously, you began to spend freely—comparatively speaking—a few days after the murderer's disappearance. In fact, bribery was hinted; you had to leave the village. See any significance in that?" he concluded, with irony.

"Suppose you explain it," she said, still cool.

"The significance is in the strengthening of the theory I've had throughout the whole week that's passed since your daughter was killed at Sloanehurst."

"What's that?"

She stopped rocking; her eyes played a fiery tattoo on every feature of his face.

"Your daughter's death was the unexpected result of your attempts to blackmail young Dalton's murderer. You, being afraid of him, and not confessing that timidity to Mildred, persuaded her to approach him—in person."

"I! Afraid of him!" she objected, aroused at last.

Her brows were lowered, a heavy line above her furtive, swift eyes; her nostrils fluttered nervously.

"Granting your absurd theory," she continued, "why should I have feared him? What had he done—except strike to save his own life?"

"You forget, Mrs. Brace," he corrected. "That body showed twenty-nine wounds, twenty-eight of them unnecessary—if the first was inflicted in mere self-defence. It was horrible mutilation."

"So!" she ridiculed, with obvious effort. "You picture him as a butcher."

"Precisely. And you, having seen to what lengths his murderous fury could take him, were afraid to face him—even after your long, long search had located him again. Let's be sensible, Mrs. Brace. Let's give the facts of this business a hearing.

"You had come to Washington and located him at last. But, after receiving several demands from you, he'd stopped reading your letters—sent them back unopened. Consequently, in order for you to make an appointment with him, he had to be communicated with in a handwriting he didn't know. Hence, your daughter had to write the letter making that appointment a week ago last night. Then, however——"

"What makes you think——"

"Then, however," he concluded, overbearing her with his voice, "you hadn't the courage to face him—out there, in the dark, alone. You persuaded Mildred to go—in your place. And he killed her."

"Ha!" The mocking exclamation sounded as though it had been pounded out of her by a blow upon her back. "What makes you say that? Where do you get that? Who put that into your head?"

She volleyed those questions at him with indescribable rapidity, her lips drawn back from her teeth, her brows straining far up toward the line of her hair. The profound disgust with which he viewed her did not affect her. She darted to and fro in her mind, running about in the waste and tumult of her momentary confusion, seeking the best thing to say, the best policy to adopt, for her own ends.

He had had time to determine that much when her gift of self-possession reasserted itself. She forced her lips back to their thin line, and steadied herself. He could see the vibrant tautness of her whole body, exemplified in the rigidity with which she held her crossed knees, one crushed upon the other.

"I know, I think, what misled you," she answered her own question. "You've talked to Gene Russell, of course. He may have heard—I think he did hear—Mildred and me discussing the mailing of a letter that Friday night."

"He did," Hastings said, firmly.

"But he couldn't have heard anything to warrant your theory, Mr. Hastings. I merely made fun of her wavering after she'd once said she'd confront Berne Webster again with her appeal for fair play."

He inspected her with an emotion that was a mingling of incredulity and repugnant wonder.

"It's no use, Mrs. Brace," he told her. "Russell didn't see the name of the man to whom the letter was addressed. I saw him last Sunday afternoon. He told me he took the name for granted, because Mildred had taunted him, saying it went to Webster. As a matter of fact, he wanted to see if Webster was at Sloanehurst and fastened his eyes for a fleeting glimpse on that word—and on that alone. Besides, there are facts to prove that the letter did not go to Webster.—Do you see how your fancied security falls away?"

"Let me think," she said, her tone flat and impersonal.

She was silent, her restless eyes gazing at the wall over his head. He watched her, and glanced only at intervals at the wood he was aimlessly shaving.

"Of course," she said, after a while, looking at him with a speculative, deliberating air, "you've deduced and pieced this together. You've a woman's intuition—comprehension of motives, feelings."

She was silent again.

"Pieced what together?" he asked.

"It's plain enough, isn't it? You began with your suspicion that my need of money was heavier in my mind than grief at Mildred's death. On that, you built up—well, all you've just said."

"It was more than a suspicion," he corrected. "It was knowledge—that everything you did, after her death, was intended to help along your scheme to—we'll say, to get money."

"Still," she persisted shrewdly, "you felt the necessity of proving I'd blackmail—if that's the word you want to use."

"How?" he put in quickly. "Prove it, how?"

"That's why you sent that girl here with the five hundred. I see it now; although, at the time, I didn't." She laughed, a short, bitter note. "Perhaps, the money, or my need of it, kept me from thinking straight."

"Well?"

"Of course," she made the admission calmly, "as soon as I took the hush money, your theory seemed sound—the whole of it: my motives and identity of the murderer."

She was thinking with a concentration so intense that the signs of it resembled physical exertion. Moisture beaded the upper part of her forehead. He could see the muscles of her face respond to the locking of her jaws.

"But there's nothing against me," she began again, and, moved by his expression, qualified: "nothing that I can be held for,