The porcelain mask A detective story
"The room where the murder was committed?"
"Exactly, sir; that was Miss Joan's old room--the one that she had
occupied since she was quite a small girl. When she came back I didn't
have the heart to tell her about the room. 'Bates,' she says to me,
'take the bags up to my room.' And I didn't have the heart to tell
her--knowing how much store she put by it."
This information, verification of what Etta Griggs had told him, might
mean something or nothing, Wiggly knew; probably nothing. It was just
that he had that avidity of the trained newspaper reporter for all
the facts, because experience had taught him it is often the smallest
detail which, in the light of other things, achieves prime importance.
And there was the black hairpin; he was thinking of that again.
That could not be overlooked.
At this moment Doctor Bushnell appeared from the room on the first
floor, where he had placed Kirklan Gilmore, and whose bedside he was
just leaving.
"Gilmore is in a bad, nervous state," he imparted after a nod to the
reporter. "You saw him upstairs before you left for the village; he was
bad enough then, but I'm afraid of a complete collapse--one of those
high-strung, emotional chaps, you know. If his thoughts are allowed to
torture him, they might even drive him to insanity; he must be kept
quiet. Poor devil! It's much too bad that a love like that should have
to be wasted on a woman like her. Then, to make matters worse, to make
the shock double, the man whom he considered his friend----"
He paused, remembering the cigarette butt that Wiggly had taken down to
the village.
"What did you discover?"
"That it was not Victor Sarbella's cigarette that had been dropped upon
the rug. More than that, doctor, we've got another suspect now."
"Another suspect? What other suspect could there be?"
Briefly Wiggly Price told the physician of Sergeant Tish's appearance
at Borough Hall, his identification of the murder gun, and the other
matters which turned the finger of suspicion so strongly toward Don
Haskins, the crook who had already been in flight from one murder
charge. This information left Doctor Bushnell almost speechless.
"It's astounding!" he gasped. "Positively astounding! It--it does have
a plausible sound, for a fact."
"The thing that bothers us," Wiggly told him, "is why Haskins should
have been so careful to have it appear suicide. Surely no one besides
Helen Gilmore knew that he was inside the house. Obviously he came for
money--he had a hold of some kind on her; probably knew about her past
and was levying blackmail; but there's no evidence that he got any
money, and he didn't touch her jewelry."
"You can't spend jewelry without first pawning or selling it," the
doctor said shrewdly; "possibly he realized that it would be too
dangerous for him to risk appearing in a pawnshop. Perhaps he did get
money."
"He wouldn't have had to kill her for that," countered Wiggly. "If
he did know of her past, this knowledge alone was sufficient to
extort money. He wouldn't have had to kill her. But let's be getting
upstairs. Griggs and Sergeant Tish are waiting for you to let them into
the murder room. Now that we're working from a new angle, it's best to
go over the ground again, and we've daylight now."
The physician nodded and started for the stairs.
"The crook's guilt would be the most satisfactory solution," he said,
"but it did look bad for Sarbella. Is he still being detained?"
"Yes. You can't blame Griggs for holding him; the murder isn't solved
yet, and it won't be, to my notion, until a number of points are
cleared up," answered Wiggly.
As they reached the second floor, Ham Griggs and Sergeant Tish were
waiting, the former with considerable impatience. Doctor Bushnell
unlocked the door of the murder chamber and threw it wide. The body of
Helen Gilmore, as the butler had informed them, had been removed, but
the chaise longue, its creton upholstering stained with dark splotches,
bore its mute testimony of the tragedy.
"Here we are," grunted the constable, "but I dunno what you expect to
find more'n has already been found."
Sergeant Tish projected his rotund form to the center of the room,
glanced about briefly, and then went to the windows, raising the shades
to their full height so that all possible light would be admitted. At
the second window the ripped curtain dangled before him and drew his
attention.
"It would be my guess," he said, pointing to the curtain, "that this
means one of two things: Either it was done in a struggle with the
murdered woman, or when the murderer beat it through the window." He
paused a moment and added: "Still, it doesn't look as if he'd have
taken the time to shut the window behind him."
He peered through the glass to the roof of the porch, puffed out his
round cheeks, and quickly threw up the sash. There had been no rain in
weeks, and the porch shingles were covered with a coating of dust. This
film was broken where Don Haskins' body had wiggled upward from the
cornice in his careful approach to the window, and, in more places than
one, the imprint of the man's stockinged feet showed. At Tish's grunt
of elation, Constable Griggs dashed forward, with Doctor Bushnell and
Wiggly behind him.
"Somebody either entered or left this room through the window!"
exclaimed Tish. "There's his trail in the dust on the shingles."
"Entered!" said the newspaper reporter, his ears twitching. "You can
see that those footprints--and the man was in his stockings--are all
turned this way. Yes, he came in by the window, but he didn't leave by
the window. Another check in Sarbella's favor.
"The man must have torn the curtain here, as he came into the room."
Constable Griggs gulped, but said nothing. Sergeant Tish bent forward
and examined the pane of the raised sash. Clear and distinct there were
the prints of a man's fingers--on the inside of the glass. These prints
were punctuated with downward streaks, as if the fingers had slipped,
but the whorls had not been obliterated; in fact they were clear and
distinct.
Tish reached his pudgy fingers to the breast pocket of his coat and
drew forth a Bertillon card which he had borrowed from headquarters,
and which bore, in addition to rogues' gallery photographs, full-face
and profile, of Don Haskins, the crook's finger prints.
He bobbled his head back and forth, getting the light at the best
possible angle, and then he compared the finger prints on the window
glass with those upon the card. He gave a grunt of satisfaction and
nodded his head in affirmation.
"Yep, this clinches it, gents. These are Haskins' finger prints on
the window. Good thing I brought this card along, huh?" It is hard
for a man with a chubby face like Tish's to look grim, but his voice
certainly was grim, as he added, "Haskins is wanted now for two
murders. The job now is--find Haskins."
Wiggly Price leaned closer, and he, too, observed that the finger
prints were on the inside of the pane.
"That means," he said, "that Haskins came in the window and closed
it behind him. Those smudges at the top of the prints show that his
fingers slipped a little on the glass, and that his pressure was
downward. And, had he been raising the window, the finger prints would
have been at the top of the sash rather than at the bottom."
"That's true," Tish agreed absently, returning the Bertillon card to
his pocket and turning away from the window. "Haskins must have climbed
to the roof from the porch below. Guess we'll find evidence of that,
too, on the porch pillars, although it's not particularly important how
he got up; the thing that counts is that he did, that the man was in
the house, in this very room."
Ham Griggs realized that this new evidence, the incontrovertible proof
of the finger prints, completely knocked the legs out from under
his persistent theory of Sarbella's guilt, and for the moment he
surrendered to a stunned and bewildered helplessness.
Doctor Bushnell's eyes remained upon the windowpane, with an intent and
fascinated interest.
"Most remarkable!" he murmured. "How much can be proven by such a small
thing as the touch of a man's finger! The one witness, I understand,
that cannot lie. But what is the next move?"
"Find Don Haskins," Tish answered promptly.
"And that's a big order," sighed Wiggly Price. "The man's probably
miles away from Greenacres by now. However there's nothing like being
thorough, and, if Constable Griggs can get a posse together----"
"Huh!" snorted the constable. "You don't think he'd still be hangin'
anywhere around Ardmore?"
"That depends on whether he got hold of any money," replied Sergeant
Tish. "He was broke when he left New York, y'know." He took a step
across the room and bent forward, as his foot crunched down upon a
piece of the broken vase on the floor beside the table. He picked it up
and held it in his fingers.
"Haskins probably lurched against the table and knocked it off," said
Wiggly, explaining what it was. Tish glanced with slight interest at
the shattered bit of porcelain and tossed it down. It did, of course,
seem too trivial a thing for any serious consideration.
"We've put in a pretty good quarter of an hour here," grunted Tish,
"and I guess we've done about all----Good Lord! What was that?"
From out in the hallway there had come to the ears of the four men the
sound of a choking, terrified cry, a jarring, dull thud, a rending
crash of broken glass. And then--silence.
CHAPTER XXII
WHAT THE COOK SAW
There is no drama greater than the drama of life. The actors are more
than often thrust into rôles that are not of their choosing, and they
respond to cues that they do not recognize as cues, blindly obeying the
director as he plunges them into unsought situations.
Mrs. Bogart, the Gilmore cook, who came to Greenacres each morning and
returned to her home on the outskirts of Ardmore each evening, was in
the kitchen; and, although it was baking day, not so much as a cup of
flour had been sifted. She had arrived shortly after daybreak, to be
greeted with news of the murder, and immediately she gave herself over
to intermittent outbursts of weeping. Not that Mrs. Bogart, wide of
hips, ample of bosom and stolid of countenance, with straight, black
hair brushed severely back from her low and usually damp forehead,
had any great feeling of bereavement; but, for all of her phlegmatic
aspect, the cook was given to strong emotions. At the funeral of a
comparative stranger, for instance, it was the sound of her sobs which
arose above the muffled grief of the immediate family.
So Mrs. Bogart, except for brewing a bit of breakfast tea and toasting
some slices of bread--badly burned, at that--neglected her kitchen
work and gave way to her emotional nature. From Bates she had learned
that the undertaker had arrived, and that "the new Mrs. Gilmore" had
been, as she phrased it, "laid out" in one of the spare bedrooms on the
second floor.
Now, Mrs. Bogart, her attendance at funerals amounting to an obsession,
had gazed into the face of death innumerable times, but she had never
known the thrill of looking into the features of one who had been
murdered. People about Ardmore were in the habit of dying prosaically
in their beds. This was an opportunity that might never come to her
again; and well-to-do folks, she had observed, frequently had their
funerals conducted privately, turning back the pryingly curious.
For some time Mrs. Bogart, whose place was strictly the kitchen, and
who had no other household duties, had been trying to think up an
excuse to visit the second floor, considering that this might offer her
an opportunity of viewing the dead woman. Not possessing a particularly