The porcelain mask A detective story
vague even for his thoughts. Passing on up the steps to the head of the
stairs, he let himself into the murdered woman's bed-chamber.
"I don't know what I can expect to find more than I have," he told
himself discouragingly, "but the old line in the copy book used to tell
me: 'If at first you don't succeed, try, try again.' Here goes for
another try. Gilmore was startled when I mentioned tallow candles. Why?"
Obviously that question could never be answered until he found out for
himself what part the tallow had played in the tragedy, until he had
explained its mysterious presence in the room. He walked about the room
slowly several times and then dropped to hands and knees, crawling back
and forth, his eyes close to the rug, picking up all of the tallow that
he could find. Presently he had quite a little accumulation of the
stuff, gathered from a surprisingly wide radius.
The palm of his hand was pricked by a sharp surface hidden from view
in the nap of the rug--another fragment of the broken vase. The vase
hadn't impressed him greatly; for that was one thing that could be
explained. As Tish had suggested, if it hadn't been tipped from the
table, Helen Gilmore might have flung it at the murderer in a desperate
effort at self-defense.
Yet, as he was about to toss aside the fragment of porcelain, his jaw
sagged, and a startled exclamation came from his parted lips, for there
clung to what had once been the inside of the vase, a small particle of
tallow!
"Gosh!" breathed Wiggly, his ears twitching violently. "The tallow was
inside of the vase when it was broken! The two go together; I'd never
thought of that. By George, I've been missing something!"
The shattered porcelain vase had, in light of this discovery, taken
on a real importance within Wiggly's mind. Hastily he began crawling
on hands and knees about the room, retrieving every piece of it that
he could find. When he had got together all of it he could find, he
placed all the pieces on the table, with the tallow in a separate
pile and, drawing up a chair, sat down and began to study it. Still
no inspirational solution flashed through his mind; he began at
nowhere and ended at the same place. Times without number he handled
the pieces, absently sorting and resorting them, and at last, with a
hopeless sigh of defeat, he realized that an explanation was beyond his
powers of either deduction or imagination; he was simply beating his
head against a stone wall.
"Its no use!" he muttered under his breath. "Possibly I'm wrong after
all! Possibly----"
Outside the closed door in the hall he heard voices. Bates had come
upstairs to call Joan Sheridan and her mother to attend the proceedings
down in the library. Wiggly wondered if they would ask him to testify;
probably not. Doctor Bushnell and the assistant district attorney would
not want him upsetting things and confusing the accepted explanation by
flinging his unproven theories at the jury.
For a moment or so the newspaper man debated.
"I know I've no authority to do it, and I will probably get thrown out
on my ear, if I'm caught at it; but I've got a notion to have one more
try."
Leaving the piece of broken vase and the lumps of tallow on the table
where he had been studying them with so little result, he turned
toward the door, slipping quietly into the hall. The sound of voices
came up the open stairway; Doctor Bushnell, in his capacity as deputy
coroner, was swearing in the jury.
Wiggly made for the wing of the house where he knew Joan Sheridan's
room to be. He had never rid himself of the notion that she knew
something about the murder that she would never tell unless it was
forced from her unwilling lips; and the only force to which she would
respond would be evidence.
Her room was unlocked. He let himself in with the unconscious
stealthiness that overtakes a man who finds himself entering unbidden
places. Closing the door gently behind him, the reporter straightway
went about the business in hand, which was to determine whether or
not the room might not reveal something that would incriminate Joan
Sheridan.
First, he went to the girl's dressing table; the top of it, except for
some silver-backed toilet articles, was barren; but in the right-hand
drawer he did find hairpins. Quickly he compared them with the one in
his pocket; they were of the same size, color, and pattern. As alike as
the proverbial two peas in a pod; yet that in itself was slim proof,
for, as Joan herself had said, all hairpins are so much alike. He had
to have more than that--a great deal more than that.
Wiggly was closing the drawer when he noted for the first time the
black smudge on his finger--a smallish streak which flecked free from
the skin, as he rubbed at it with the ball of his thumb.
"Hello!" he exclaimed under his breath. "What's that? Where did I get
it?" With a curious and puzzled frown he stared at the dark spot on his
finger, as he continued to fleck off the black, grainy particles. He
lifted his hand to his nose and sniffed, and, as he caught the faint,
but unmistakable, odor, his ears fairly did a dance at the sides of his
head.
"Great guns," he whispered. "It's powder--burned gunpowder! Where did
I get that?" His bulging eyes swept the dressing table and the only
articles that he had touched since coming into Helen Gilmore's room.
And then he thought of the candle tallow and the black specks that had
mocked him with their enigma. Slowly, through a fog of bewilderment and
incredulity, there pierced a dawning light of understanding. He had
solved the murder!
CHAPTER XXIX
"LET THE GUILTY MAN SPEAK!"
The young assistant district attorney and Doctor Bushnell had indeed
reduced the double inquest to a cut-and-dried formality, and the
proceeding was heading swiftly toward its anticipated conclusion. Extra
chairs had been brought into the library, and it was here that the
hearing was in progress.
In his capacity as deputy coroner, Bushnell presided at a small table,
and near him, at his right, was the young attorney, blinking with
official severity from behind his rimless glasses; at the doctor's left
was the witness chair which faced the jury. The latter were an assorted
lot of village types--Mr. Judson, the ordinarily genial grocer, with
his fat, stubby fingers locked tightly in front of his ample middle;
Henry Blackburn, a local fire-insurance agent, who was tall, lean and
hatchet faced; Jim Striker, local manager of the telephone company; and
so on down the list.
There had been no move to bar any one from hearing the testimony of
the other witnesses. Behind the jury chairs Joan Sheridan murmured
soothingly in an effort to calm her mother's muffled, hysterical
sobbing; a little apart sat Kirklan Gilmore, slumped deep into a chair,
chin on his chest and his eyes half closed; but he was listening
carefully; not a syllable was escaping him. Victor Sarbella was seated
nearest the door; his dark eyes were roving restlessly about the room.
Sergeant Tish had been the first witness, identifying the gun which
had killed Helen Gilmore and recounting, for the benefit of the jury,
how it had got to Greenacres. Doctor Bushnell previously had given an
outline of the facts, as he had found them.
Bates, the butler, followed Tish and did not forget to color his
account of the happenings with a none-too-modest tribute to his own
shrewd deductions that it had been murder and not suicide. He was proud
of that little achievement. He told how he had been fast asleep when
the ringing of the doorbell had awakened him, and he had got up to
admit Gilmore, who had been out at the studio and had forgotten his
keys; he described how he had been in the butler's pantry; that he had
just finished making Gilmore a toddy, which the latter was drinking,
when both of them had heard the scream, closely followed by the shot.
Joan Sheridan suppressed a shiver, but no one noticed that.
"After that, Bates?" urged Doctor Bushnell.
"Mr. Gilmore and I hurried upstairs. When we was about halfway up we
heard a door slam shut--Haskins when he scooted back up to the attic,
I guess. The door to the younger Mrs. Gilmore's room was open, and the
light was burning. I went in first, and there she was--all covered with
blood, the gun on the floor beside the couch. It looked like suicide,
but I knew it wasn't, because she wouldn't have screamed before
shooting herself. She might have screamed after she did it, but the
shot was fired after she screamed. More than that; the door was open,
and, like I said, people don't shoot themselves with the door open."
"A very good deduction, Bates," nodded the doctor.
"Yes, sir; I rather thought so myself," agreed Bates.
Other questions and answers followed, and the entire ground was covered
swiftly, but thoroughly. The jurors were then asked if they wished to
interrogate the witness. None of them did, and Bates was excused.
"Miss Sheridan, merely as a matter of formality, will you please take
the witness chair?" murmured Doctor Bushnell, and Joan, her face
becoming a shade more pale with the ordeal, got slowly to her feet and
walked to the front of the room. Kirklan Gilmore's body tensed, and his
hand clenched, but he did not lift his eyes.
"I want you to understand," the doctor told her gently, after taking
her oath as a witness, "that this is a mere formality. You will please
tell us, in your own words, just what you know about the tragedy."
Joan Sheridan was plainly nervous; her fingers, resting in her lap,
were twisting about each other, and for a moment she did not answer.
"There is nothing--nothing that I can tell," she answered in a
strained, muffled voice.
"As I understand--in fact, from what you told me--you did not hear the
fatal shot."
Joan's voice became a little clearer, as she answered: "No, I did not
hear the fatal shot."
"I might explain to the jury," added the doctor, "that Miss Sheridan's
room is in another part of the house."
From outside the library came the sound of hurrying feet, as Wiggly
Price came down the stairs, two steps at a time. Just outside the
library he paused, screened behind the portières. Across his arm was a
woman's silk dressing gown, and in his hand was a handkerchief, caught
up at the corners and sagging with the weight of the broken vase and
the particles of candle tallow.
"Just the psychological moment!" he said under his breath. "It's made
to order."
"And there is nothing more that you can add, Miss Sheridan?" asked
Doctor Bushnell.
"There is nothing more that I can say," she answered.
"That will be all," murmured the doctor.
Wiggly Price entered the room, billowing aside the portières, as he
swept past them, and his ears were wiggling for all they were worth.
The silk dressing gown across his arm added to the dramatic effect of
his entrance.
"Just a moment, Miss Sheridan!" he exclaimed. "What you really mean is
that there is nothing more you want to say. But I am very much afraid
that you will have to say something, whether you want to or not."
Doctor Bushnell leaped angrily to his feet, his eyes snapping.
"What do you mean by this, Price?" he shouted. "I forbid----"
"I demand," broke in Wiggly, "that Miss Sheridan be forced to explain
several things, including why she tried to clean spots from the sleeve
of this dressing gown that she was wearing last night." Joan had
started to her feet, but sank limply back in her chair, a moan upon her
lips.
"Look at her face!" cried Wiggly. "Isn't that proof enough for you?
Don't look at me--look at her!"
Joan's face was chalk white, and she swayed in her chair and would
have fallen, had not the assistant district attorney leaped forward to
support her.