The amazing adventures of Letitia Carberry
“What did Briggs think he saw?” I asked nervously, holding to Tommy’s
arm. The hall was dark.
“It’s rather fantastic,” Tommy said, “but--he declared there was a bare
foot planted directly on the grill of the cage.”
“A foot!” I gasped.
“A foot,” said Tommy soberly. “And I’m going to tell you what I
wouldn’t care to tell Aunt Tish or Miss Aggie. I’ve been on top of the
cage myself, just now, with a candle. There are innumerable footprints
in the dust, distinct marks of a naked foot. But it is always the right
foot!”
I shivered. “Tommy!” I quavered. “The mark on the wall where Johnson
was found was--the print of a _naked right_ foot.”
“I know,” he replied, and fell to thinking. “Well,” he said, after a
moment, “I’d better go on. Jacobs moved the cage down, but there was
nothing on it, or in the shaft over their heads. It ends just above
that floor, and as the doors to the shaft were all locked, if anything
had been above the cage, it could hardly have got away. Briggs himself
said that he thought it was an optical illusion, and was apparently
not nervous when Jacobs went down to get Miss Lewis. He was gone some
time, Miss Lewis, as I have said, having insisted on being fortified
with food before she went up.”
Finally, as we knew, he had got Miss Lewis and they went back to the
mortuary. Briggs was sitting there quietly, with his pipe lighted and
a newspaper on his knee. But he was neither reading nor smoking and
Jacobs said he was staring overhead, with a queer expression on his
face, as if he were listening to something.
He started to say something to Jacobs, but Jacobs signaled him to be
cautious and pointed to Miss Lewis. Briggs had nodded and resumed his
pipe. Everything was quiet and peaceful, Jacobs insisted. Tommy and
Hicks had appeared sometime before and had gone up the stairs to the
roof. The man who had been sent to guard that corridor, one of the
laundry men, was dozing in a chair half way down. Jacobs, not being
needed in the mortuary, went down to him and roused him by shaking. He
and the laundry man were talking when Miss Lewis came down to the empty
ward across from them, and turning on the lights, went in search of
something she needed.
Jacobs was positive there had not been a sound from the mortuary,
except that a gust of air from its open windows had swept along the
hall, and the glass-topped doors slammed shut. There had been no
outcry, no struggle. When Miss Lewis went back briskly, and opened the
doors, she found Briggs apparently gone, and the sheeted figure on the
table as before.
It was only when she turned down the sheet that she discovered the
truth--the body of the murdered orderly on the table and the corpse not
to be seen. It was then she screamed.
“We have sent for the police,” Tommy finished. “We didn’t want any
publicity, but now it has to come. It’s beyond us. The strange thing
is,” he said, “at the time it happened, every corridor, every ward,
every possible means of access to the mortuary was guarded.”
“Yes, and with the one nearest it sound asleep!” I commented
scornfully. “And goodness knows how many of the others!”
“Jacobs was in the upper hall,” he contended, “and whoever was asleep
beforehand, none of them was asleep after Miss Lewis shrieked, Miss
Lizzie. There are only two means of access to the mortuary, one is the
fire-escape and the other the steps. Jacobs was just beyond the steps
all the time, and Hicks and I were on the roof near the fire-escape.
Nobody left by those two exits. That’s positive.”
“There is another door in the mortuary,” I said. “What is that?”
“Mortuary linen closet,” said Tommy. “Always kept locked, and still
locked.”
“You haven’t examined it?”
“The linen room woman carries the key, and she is away over night.”
“Nobody was missing in the house?”
“We made a tally immediately, with the guards all watching every door
and window. Two internes and I made the count ourselves, not a soul was
missing.”
“He was--strangled?”
“No. That’s one of the queerest things about it. He had been
_squeezed_--his chest is caved in, and I think the autopsy will show
that a point of one of the ribs entered the heart. Death was almost
instantaneous.”
“And the brown coat?” I asked. “How did it get there?”
“God knows,” said Tommy, and rapped at Miss Blake’s door.
CHAPTER XIV
BAG AND BAGGAGE
Tish stared at me the next morning when I told her the story Tommy had
told me, and laid the key of the mortuary linen closet on her breakfast
tray.
“The Blake girl is still out of her head,” I finished up, “and I found
the key, as I tell you, on her dresser, labeled as you see it. I don’t
want you to show it to Tommy, Tish.”
“Tommy!” said Tish scornfully, and pushed away her breakfast untasted.
“I tell you, Lizzie, if _I_ had had charge of things last night, that
poor wretch would have carried in this tray this morning, with the tea
slopped over everything as usual. Tommy is a nice boy, but he’s stupid.”
“But I don’t understand,” said Aggie from the bed. “If you think, Tish
Carberry, that finding the key to a linen closet is going to prove
anything against that pretty little nurse, I’ll tell Tommy about it
myself.”
“Exactly,” said Tish, coldly. “And if you do, I wash my hands of the
whole affair. As far as I’m concerned in that case, she can go under
suspicion the rest of her life.”
“Suspicion of what?” Aggie demanded tartly. “She didn’t kill Briggs,
I suppose. Even if she could have broken his ribs, as Tish says, and
she’s a perfectly respectable girl--you can see _that_ in her face--she
was right on the stairs here when it happened, wasn’t she?”
Tish got up and put the key of the linen closet in the lower bureau
drawer.
“Don’t be any more of a fool than you can help, Aggie,” she said, and
shut the drawer. “I _don’t_ think Miss Blake killed Briggs, or got
up on the wall and made a footprint a foot and a half long near the
ceiling, or hung Johnson by the neck to a chandelier. And if my nephew
chooses to be so head over ears in love with the young woman that he’s
no more capable of logical thought than a guinea-pig, _I_ shall look
into the thing myself.”
“Guinea-pig,” said Aggie. “Now then, that’s another thing, Tish. The
rabbits--”
“Lizzie,” Tish said, snubbing her completely. “Will you see if Miss
Durand is off duty yet? I want to talk to her. Lewis won’t be back from
breakfast for an hour. She can’t Fletcherize and tell that story at the
same time.”
The hall nurse promised me to find Miss Durand and send her to Tish’s
room, and started at once in the search for her. She turned to say,
over her shoulder and with bated breath, that detectives were in the
building now, that Tommy was with them, and that there was a story
that they’d found some curious prints on the wall in the room where
Johnson’s body had hung.
“A foot, and just beside it a woman’s hand,” she said. “I hear they are
going to take impressions of all the hands in the hospital to-day!”
I carried this to Tish, and she affected indifference. But she was
visibly uneasy and at different times I caught her staring fixedly at
her palm.
At eight o’clock Miss Durand came in looking tired and white, Tish
asked her to sit down and offered her a little port wine, but she
refused.
“No, thanks,” she said. “I’m off to bed soon, and if I can only
sleep--I didn’t sleep much yesterday.”
“Too noisy, I daresay,” said Tish. “Poor Briggs complained of the same
thing in this very room yesterday.”
“Oh, it wasn’t the noise. I--I got to thinking.” She tried to smile.
“There have been so many strange things happening!”
“I should think so,” said Aggie. “That poor Miss Blake! Do you think--”
Tish fixed her with a cold eye, and Aggie’s voice trailed off to
nothing. She looked frightened.
“Miss Durand,” said Tish, suddenly hitching her chair forward, “I
should like you to tell me why you left Johnson to die alone and why
you absented yourself from your ward for fifty minutes.”
Miss Durand turned even paler, and got up. “I didn’t understand that
you--”
“Sit down,” said Tish. “I guess you know I’m chairman of the Ladies’
Committee here, and you’d better tell me than tell the police. I don’t
start with the belief that half the hospital’s guilty and the other
half accessories to the crime, and that’s what the police will do,
according to my experience.”
“You may ask Bates--” she began.
“So I may,” said Tish cheerfully. “And if you are around he’ll say you
were away a scant ten minutes and if he’s alone, he’ll swear to an hour
or more.”
“It was less than an hour, I’d swear to that anywhere,” said Miss
Durand. “It couldn’t have taken so long!”
“What couldn’t have taken so long?” Tish demanded.
Miss Durand looked around at the three of us and seemed to be thinking.
“What do you mean by saying I’d better tell you than tell the police?”
she asked.
“Just this,” Tish said briskly getting out her sheet of note-paper. “I
flatter myself I can see as far through a stone wall as most people,
especially if there’s a crack to look through. I’ve been looking at
this particular stone wall off and on since four o’clock this morning,
and--well, I think I begin to see daylight.”
“Humph!” said Aggie. “Then the least I can say, Tish--”
“Now, Miss Durand,” Tish began, biting a point on her pencil, “we’ll
get at this systematically. Did Briggs have any enemies in K Ward?”
“He wasn’t popular. I guess old Johnson hated him about the most.”
“Ah!” said Tish, and put that down. “Did you know Johnson was dying
when you left the ward?”
“He’d been dying for twenty-four hours and had been unconscious for
six,” she defended herself. “Nobody can tell when that sort will make a
clean get-away.”
“Good gracious!” Aggie ejaculated, and even Tish looked shocked. Miss
Durand was clearly not in Miss Blake’s class: seen in the morning
light, her face looked hard as well as tired.
“I see,” said Tish, and put down “clean get-away.” “Now, Miss Durand,
why had Linda Smith been crying when she came to you at midnight that
night?”
“She said she had had some words with the head nurse. She had missed a
lecture that evening.”
“Why did she miss the lecture?”
“I don’t know.”
“Don’t know or won’t tell?” asked Tish, over her note-paper.
“Don’t know,” snapped Miss Durand, and for all I didn’t like her, I
thought she was telling the truth.
“Now, Miss Durand,” Tish observed, sitting back and fixing her lame leg
on its hassock, “I’d be glad to hear why Miss Linda Smith took you away
from your ward that night, and where you went.”
“She had forgotten to attend to something, and she came back to fix it.”
“What?”
Miss Durand stared at Tish and Tish leaned back, with her pencil stuck
through the knob of her hair, and stared at Miss Durand. As I have said
somewhere else, Tish is a masterful woman, and Miss Durand felt it.
“She had forgotten to turn in Johnson’s clothes,” she said. “That is
always done after a death: the clothes are held in the office for the
friends to get. We went to the basement clothes room.”
“But Johnson was not dead!”
“The chances were he would die that night. The clothes should have been
ready in case relatives had wished to remove the body at once.”
“The trip to the clothes room would take about ten minutes, I daresay,”
Tish said dryly. “Why didn’t she go alone?”
“I--I hardly know. She was nervous and upset. You see, her three years
is almost up, and she and the superintendent are on bad terms. She has
always said that he would make use of any small mistake she made, to
keep her from getting her diploma.”
“When would she get it, everything going well?”
“Next week.”
“Very good,” said Tish, and put something down. “Now then, what
happened in the clothes room?”
“I didn’t go in.”
“Where were you?”