I tried the chauffeur's door and found it locked; called, shook it, and had set my shoulder against it to burst it in, when the rolling door on the street side moved a little, and a voice said,
"H-y-ah! What you doin' there?"
I turned and flashed my light on the six-inch crack of the sliding door. It gave me a strip of man, a long drab face at top, solid, meaty looking, yet somehow slightly cadaverous, a half shut eye, a crooked mouth – if I'd met that mug in San Francisco, I'd have labeled it "tough," and located it South of Market Street.
Slowly, it seemed rather reluctantly, Eddie Hughes worked the six-inch crack wider by working himself through it.
"What the hell do you want in my room for?" he demanded. The form of the words was truculent, but the words themselves slid in a sort of spiritless fashion from the corner of that crooked mouth of his, and he added in the next breath, "I'll open up for you, when I've lit the blinks."
There was a central lamp that made the whole place as bright as day. Eddie fumbled a key out of his pocket, threw the door of his room open, and stepped back to let me pass him.
"Capehart tells me Worth's here," he said as we went in.
"When?" I gave him a sharp look. He seemed not to notice it.
"Just now. I came straight from there."
He came straight from there? Did he supply an alibi so neatly because of that shadowy head on the door panel? For a long minute we each took measure of the other, but Eddie's nerves were less reliable than mine; he spoke first.
"Well?" he grunted, scarcely above his breath. And when I continued to stare silently at him, he writhed a shoulder with, "What's doing? What d'yuh want of me?"
Still silently, I pulled out with my thumb through the armhole of my vest the police badge pinned to the suspender. His ill-colored face went a shade nearer the yellow white of tallow.
"What for?" he asked huskily. "You haven't got nothin' on me. It was suicide – cor'ner's jury says so. Lord! It has to be, him layin' there, all hunched up on the floor, his gun so tight in his mitt that they had to pry the fingers off it!"
"So you found the body?"
He nodded and gulped.
"I told all I knowed at the inquest," he said doggedly.
"Tell it again," I commanded.
Standing there, working his hands together as though he held some small, accustomed tool that he was turning, shifting from foot to foot, with long breaks in his speech, the chauffeur finally put me into possession of what he knew – or what he wished me to know. He had been out all night. That was usual with him Saturdays. Where? Over around the canneries. Had friends that lived there. He got into this place about dawn, and went straight to bed.
"Hold on, Hughes," I stopped him there. "You never went to bed – that night, or any other night – until you'd had a jolt from the bottle inside."
He gave me a surly, half frightened glance, then said quickly,
"Not a chance. Bolts on the doors, locks everywhere; all tight as a jail. Take it from me, he wasn't the kind you want to have a run-in with – any time. Always just as cool as ice himself; try to make you believe he could tell what you were up to, clear across town. Hold it over you as if he was God almighty that stuck folks together and set 'em walkin' around and thinkin' things."
He broke off and looked over his shoulder in the direction of the study. The walls were thick – concrete; the door heavy. No sound of Worth's moving in there could be heard in this room. Apparently it was the old terror of his employer, or the new terror of the employer's death, that spoke when he said,
"I got up this morning late with a throat like the back of a chimney. Lord! I never wanted a drink so bad in my life – had to have one. The chink leaves my breakfast for me Sundays; but I knew I couldn't eat till I'd had one. So I – so I – "
It was as though some recollection fairly choked off his voice. I finished for him.
"So you went in there – " I pointed at the study door, "and found the body."
"Naw! How the hell could I? I told you – locked. I crawled up on the roof, though; huntin' a way in, and I looked through the skylight. There he was. On the floor. His eyes weren't open much, but they was watchin' me – sort of sneerin'. I come down off that roof like a bat outa hell, and scuttled over to Vandeman's where his chink was on the porch, I bellerin' at him. I telephoned from there. For the bulls; and the cor'ner; and everybody. Gawd! I was all in."
I caught one point in the tale.
"So the way into the study is through the skylight, Hughes?" and he shook his head vaguely, fumbling his lips with a trembling hand as he replied,
"Honest to God, Cap'n, I don't know. I never tried. I gave just one look through it, and – " He broke off with a shudder.
"Get a ladder," I commanded. "I want to see that skylight."
While he was gone on his errand to the shed, I investigated the outer walls of the study with the torch, hunting some break in their solidity. They were concrete; a hair-crack would have been visible in the electric glow; there was no break. Then, as he placed the ladder against the coping, I climbed to the roof and stepped across its firmness to the skylight. I looked down.
Worth, kneeling on the hearth, was laying a fire in the corner grate. As he did not glance up, I knew he had not heard me. Evidently the study had been built to resist the disturbance of sound from without. That meant that the report of the revolver inside had not been heard by any one outside the walls.
Directly below me was the library table and upon its top a blue desk blotter; a silver filagreed inkstand stood open; penholders, pencils, paper knife were on a tray beside it, one pen lying separate from the others with a ruler, upon the blotting pad; books and a magazine neatly in a pile. The walls, as I circled them with my eyes, were book-lined everywhere except for the grate and the two doors.
Then I inspected the skylight, frame and glass, feeling it over with my hands. There was no entrance here. Even should a pane of glass be removable – all seemingly solid and tight – the frame between and the sash were of steel, and the panes were too small for the passage of a man. I crept back to the ladder as Worth was striking a match to light the pitch-pine kindling.
"What about this Vandeman chink?" I asked of Hughes as I rejoined him at the foot of the ladder. "Does he hang around here much?"
"Him and Chung visit back and forth a bit. I hear 'em talkin' hy-lee hy-lo sometimes when I go by the kitchen."
"Take me over there," I said.
The fog was beginning to blow away in threads; moonlight somewhere back of it made a queer, gray, glimmering world around us. We circled the garden by the path, passing a sort of gardener's tool shed where Hughes left the ladder, and from which I judged Worth had brought the bar he pried the door planks off with, to find a gap in a hedge between this place and the next.
There was a light in the rear of the house over there, and a well-trodden path leading from the hedge gap made what I took to be a servants' highway.
Vandeman's house proved to be, as nearly as one could see it in the darkness, a sprawling bungalow, with courts, pergolas and terraces bursting out on all sides of it. I could fairly see it of a fine afternoon, with its showy master sitting on one of the showy porches, serving afternoon tea in his best manner to the best people of Santa Ysobel. Just the husband for that doll-faced girl, if she only thought so. What could she have done with a young outlaw like Worth?
When I looked at the Chinaman in charge there, I gave up my idea of questioning him. Civilly enough, with a precise and educated usage of the English language, he confirmed what Eddie Hughes had already told me about the telephoning from that place this morning; and I went no further. I know the Chinese – if anybody not Mongolian can say they know the race – and I have also a suitable respect for the value of time. A week of steady questioning of Vandeman's yellow man would have brought me nowhere. He was that kind of a chink; grave, respectful, placid and impervious.
On the way back I asked Eddie about the Thornhill servants at the house on the other side of Gilbert's, and found they kept but one, "a sort of old lady," Eddie called her, and I guessed easily at the decayed gentlewoman kind of person. It seemed that Mrs. Thornhill was a widow, and there wasn't much money now to keep up the handsome place.
I left Eddie slipping eel-like through the big doors, and went into the study to find Worth sitting before the blazing hearth. He looked up as I entered to remark quietly,
"Bobs said she'd be over later, and I told her to come on down here."
CHAPTER XI
THE MISSING DIARY
My experience as a detective has convinced me that the evident is usually true; that in a great majority of cases crime leaves a straight trail, and ambiguities are more often due to the inability of the trailer than to the cunning of the trailed. Such reputation as I have established is due to acceptance of and earnest adherence to the obvious.
In this affair of Thomas Gilbert's death, everything so far pointed one way. The body had been found in a bolted room, revolver in hand; on the wall over the mantel hung the empty holster; Worth assured me the gun was kept always loaded; and there might be motive enough for suicide in the quarrel last night between father and son.
Because of that flitting shadow I had seen, I knew this place was not impervious. Some one person, at least, could enter and leave the room easily, quickly, while its doors were locked. But that might be Hughes – or even Worth – with some reason for doing so not willingly explained, and some means not readily seen. It probably had nothing to do with Thomas Gilbert's sudden death, could not offset in my mind the conviction of Thomas Gilbert's stiffened fingers about the pistol's butt. That I made a second thorough investigation of the study interior was not because I questioned the manner of the death.
I began taking down books from the shelves at regular intervals, sounding the thick dead-wall, in search of a secreted entrance. I came on a row of volumes whose red morocco backs carried nothing but dates.
"Account books?" I asked.
Worth turned his head to look, and the bleakest thing that could be called a smile twisted his lips a little, as he said,
"My father's diaries."
"Quite a lot of them."
"Yes. He'd kept diaries for thirty years."
"But he seems to have dropped the habit. There is no 1920 book."
"Oh, yes there is," very definitely. "He never gave up setting down the sins of his family and neighbors while his eyes had sight to see them, and his hand the cunning to write." He spoke with extraordinary bitterness, finishing, "He would have had it on the desk there. The current book was always kept convenient to his hand."
An idea occurred to me.
"Worth," I asked, "did you see that 1920 volume when you were here last night?"
He looked a little startled, and I prompted,
"Were you too excited to have noticed a detail like that?"
"I wasn't excited; not in the sense of being confused," he spoke slowly. "The book was there; he'd been writing in it. I remember looking at it and thinking that as soon as I was gone, he'd sit down in his chair and put every damn' word of our row into it. That was his way. The seamy side of Santa Ysobel life's recorded in those books. I always understood they amounted to a pack of neighborhood dynamite."
"Got to find that last book," I said.
He nodded listlessly. I went to it, giving that room such a searching as would have turned out a bent pin, had one been mislaid in it. I even took down from the shelves books of similar size to see if the lost volume had been slipped into a camouflaging cover – all to no good. It wasn't there. And when I had finished I was positive of two things; the study had no other entrance than the apparent ones, and the diary of 1920 had been removed from the room since Worth saw it there the night before. I reached for one of the other volumes. Worth spoke again in a sort of dragging voice,
"What do you want to look at them for, Jerry?"
"It's not idle curiosity," I told him, a bit pricked.
"I know it's not that." The old, affectionate tone went right to my heart. "But if you're thinking you'll find in them any explanation of my father's taking his own life, I'm here to tell you you're mistaken. Plenty there, no doubt, to have driven a tender hearted man off the earth… He was different." Eyeing the book in my hand, the boy blurted with sudden heat, "Those damn' diaries have been wife and child and meat and drink to him. They were his reason for living – not dying!"
"Start me right in regard to your father, Worth," I urged anxiously. "It's important."
The boy gave me his shoulder and continued to stare down into the fire, as he said at last, slowly,
"I would rather leave him alone, Jerry."
I knew it would be useless to insist. Never then or thereafter did I hear him say more of his father's character. At that, he could hardly have told more in an hour's talk.
At random, I took the volume that covered the year in which, as I remembered, Thomas Gilbert's wife had secured her divorce from him. Neatly and carefully written in a script as readable as type, the books, if I am a judge, had literary style. They were much more than mere diaries. True, each entry began with a note of the day's weather, and certain small records of the writer's personal affairs; but these went oddly enough with what followed; a biting analysis of the inner life, the estimated intentions and emotions, of the beings nearest to him. It was inhuman stuff. But Worth was right; there was no soil for suicide in this matter written by a hand guided by a harsh, censorious mind; too much egotism here to willingly give over the rôle of conscience for his friends. Friends? – could a man have friends who regarded humanity through such unkindly, wide open, all-seeing eyes?
Worth, seated across from me on the other side of the fire, stared straight into the leaping blaze; but I doubted if that was what he saw. On his face was the look which I had come to know, of the dignified householder who had gone in and shut the door on whatever of dismay and confusion might be in his private affairs. I began to read his father's version of the separation from his mother, with its ironic references to her most intimate friend.
"Marion would like to see Laura Bowman ship Tony and marry Jim Edwards. I swear the modern woman has played bridge so long that her idea of the most serious obligation in life – the marriage vow – is, 'Never mind. If you don't like the hand you have got, shuffle, cut, and deal again!'"
I dropped the book to my knee and looked over at Worth, asking,
"This Mrs. Dr. Bowman that we met last night at Tait's – she was a special friend of your mother's?"
"They were like sisters – in more than one way." I knew without his telling it that he alluded to their common misfortune of being both unhappily married. His mother, a woman of more force than the other, had gained her freedom.
"Femina Priores." I came on an entry standing oddly alone. "Marion is to secure the divorce – at my suggestion. I have demanded that our son share his time between us."
Again I let the book down on my knee and looked across at the silent fellow there. And I had heard him compassionate Barbara Wallace for having painful memories of her childhood! I believe he was at that moment more at peace with his father than he had ever been in his life – and that he grieved that this was so. I knew, too, that the forgiveness and forgetting would not extend to these pitiless records. Without disturbing him, I laid the book I held down and scouted forward for things more recent.
"Laura Bowman" – through one entry after another Gilbert kicked that poor woman's name like a football. Very fine and righteous and high-minded in what he said, but writing it out in full and calling her painful difficulties – the writhing of a sensitive, high-strung woman, mismated with a tyrant – an example notably stupid and unoriginal, of the eternal matrimonial triangle. Bowman evidently kept his sympathy, so far as such a nature can be said to entertain that gentle emotion.
I ran through other volumes, merciless recitals, now and again, of the shortcomings of his associates or servants; a cold blooded misrepresentation of his son; a sneer for the affair with Ina Thornhill, with the dictum, sound enough no doubt, that the girl herself did the courting, and that she had no conscience – "The extreme society type of parasite," he put it. And then the account of his break with Edwards.
Dr. Bowman, it seems, had come to Gilbert in confidence for help, saying that his wife had left his house in the small hours the previous night, nothing but an evening wrap pulled over her night wear, and that he guessed where she could be found, since she hadn't gone to her mother's. He asked Gilbert to be his ambassador with messages of pardon. Didn't want to go himself, because that would mean a row, and he was determined, if possible, to keep the thing private, giving a generous reason: that he wasn't willing to disgrace the woman. All of which, after he'd written it down, the diarist discredited with his brief comment to the effect that Tony Bowman shunned publicity because scandal of the sort would hurt his practice, and his pride as well, and that he didn't go out to Jim Edwards's ranch because, under these circumstances, he would be afraid of Jim.
Thomas Gilbert did the doctor's errand for him. The entry concerning it occupied the next day. I read between the lines how much he enjoyed his position of god from the machine, swooping down on the two he found out there, estimating their situation and behavior in his usual hair-splitting fashion, sitting as a court of last appeal. It was of no use for Edwards to explain to him that Laura Bowman was practically crazy when she walked out of her husband's house as the culmination of a miserable scene – the sort that had been more and more frequent there of late – carrying black-and-blue marks where he had grabbed and shaken her. The statement that it was by mere chance she encountered Jim seemed to have made Gilbert smile, and Jim's taking of her out to the ranch, the assertion that it was the only thing to do, that she was sick and delirious, had inspired Gilbert to say to him, quite neatly, "You weren't delirious, I take it – not more than usual."
Then he demanded that Laura go with him, at once, back to her husband, or out to her mother's. She considered the matter and chose to go back to Bowman, saying bitterly that her mother made the match in the first place, and stood always against her daughter and with her son-in-law whatever he did. Plainly it took all of Laura's persuasions to prevent actual blows between Gilbert and Edwards. Also, she would only promise to go back and live under Bowman's roof, but not as his wife – and the whole situation was much aggravated.
I followed Mr. Thomas Gilbert's observation of this affair: his amused understanding of how much Jim Edwards and Laura hated him; his private contempt for Bowman, to whom he continued to give countenance and moral support; his setting down of the quarrels, intimate, disastrous, between Bowman and his wife, as the doctor retailed them to him, the woman dragging herself on her knees to beg for her freedom, and his callous refusals; backed by threat of the wide publicity of a scandalous divorce suit, with Thomas Gilbert as main witness. I turned to Worth and asked,
"When will Edwards be here?"
"Any minute now." Worth looked at me queerly, but I went on,
"You said he phoned from the ranch. Did he answer you in person – from out there?"
"That's what I told you, Jerry."
My searching gaze made nothing of the boy's impassive face; I plunged again into the diaries, running down a page, getting the heading of a sentence, not delaying to go further unless I struck something which seemed to me important, and each minute thinking of the strangeness of a man like this killing himself. It was in the 1916 volume, that I made a discovery which surprised an exclamation from me.
"What would you call this, Worth? Your father's way of making corrections?"
"Corrections?" Worth spoke without looking around. "My father never made corrections – in anything." It was said without animus – a simple statement of fact.
"But look here." I held toward him the book. There were three leaves gone; that meant six pages, and the entries covered May 31 and June 1. I had verified that before I spoke to him, noticing that the statement of the weather for May 31 remained at the foot of the last page left, while a run-over on the page beyond the missing ones had been marked out. It had nothing to do with the weather. As nearly as I could make out with the reading glass I held over it, the words were, "take the woman for no other than she appears."
"Worth," I urged, "give me your attention for a minute here. You say your father did not make corrections, but one of the diaries is cut. The records of two days are gone. Were those pages stolen?"
"How should I know?" said Worth, and added, helpfully, "Pity they didn't steal the whole lot. That would have been a relief."
There were voices and the sound of steps outside. I shoved the diary back into its place on the shelf, and turned to see Barbara at the broken door with Jim Edwards. She came in, her clear eyes a little wide, but the whole young personality of her quite composed. Edwards halted at the door, a haggard eye roving over the room, until it encountered the blood-stain on the rug, when it sheered abruptly, and fixed itself on Worth, who crossed to shake hands, with a quiet,
"Come in, won't you, Jim? Or would you rather go up to the house?"
Keenly I watched the man as he stood there struggling for words. There was color on his thin cheeks, high under the dark eyes; it made him look wild. The chill of the drive, or pure nervousness, had him shaking.
"Thank you – the house, I think," he said rather incoherently. Yet he lingered. "Barbara's been telling me," he said in that deep voice of his with the air of one who utters at random. "Worth, – had you thought that it might have been happening down here, right at the time we all sat at Tait's together?"
He was in a condition to spill anything. A moment more and we should have heard what it was that had him in such a grip of horror. But as I glanced at Worth, I saw him reply to the older man's question with a very slight but very perceptible shake of the head. It had nothing to do with what had been asked him; to any eye it said more plainly than words, "Don't talk; pull yourself together." I whirled to see how Edwards responded to this, and found our group had a new member. In the door stood a decent looking, round faced Chinaman. Edwards had drawn a little inside the threshold for him, but very little, and waited, still shaken, perturbed, hat in hand, apparently ready to leave as soon as the Oriental got out of his way.
"Hello," the yellow man saluted us.
"Hello, Chung," Worth rejoined, and added, "Looks good to see you again."
I was relieved to hear that. It showed me that the cook, anyhow, had not seen Worth last night in Santa Ysobel.
"Just now I hea' 'bout Boss." Chung's eye went straight to the stain on the rug, exactly as Edwards' had done, but it stopped there, and his Oriental impassiveness was unmoved. "Too bad," he concluded, thrust the fingers of one hand up the sleeve of the other and waited.
"Where you been all day?" I said quickly.
"My cousin' ranch."
"His cousin's got a truck farm over by Medlow – or used to have," Worth supplied, and Chung looked to him, instantly.
"You sabbee," he said hopefully. "I go iss mo'ning – all same any day – not find out 'bout Boss. Too bad. Too velly much bad." A pause, then, looking around at the four of us, "I get dinner?"
"We've all had something to eat, Chung," Worth said. "You go now fix room. Make bed. To-night, I stay; Mr. Boyne here stay; Mr. Edwards stay. Fix three rooms. Good fire."
"All 'ite," the chink would have ducked out then, Jim Edwards after him, but I stopped the proceedings with,
"Hold on a minute – while we're all together – tell us about that visitor Mr. Gilbert had last night." I was throwing a rock in the brush-pile in the chance of scaring out a rabbit. I was shooting the question at Chung, but my eye was on Edwards. He glared back at me for a moment, then couldn't stand the strain and looked away. At last the Chinaman spoke.
"Not see um. I go fix bed now."
"Hold on," again I stopped him. "Worth, tell him those beds can wait. Tell him it's all right to answer my questions."
"'S all 'ite?" Chung studied us in turn. I was keeping an inconspicuous eye on Edwards as I reassured him. "'S all 'ite," he repeated with a falling inflection this time, and finished placidly, "You want know 'bout lady?"
"What's all this?" Edwards spoke low.
"About a lady who came to see Mr. Gilbert last night," I explained shortly; then, "Who was she, Chung?"
"Not see um good." The Chinaman shook his head gravely.
"Did she come here – to the study?" I asked. He nodded. Worth moved impatiently, and the Chinaman caught it. He fixed his eyes on Worth. I stepped between them. "Chung," I said sharply. "You knew the lady. Who was she?"
"Not see um good," he repeated, plainly reluctant. "She hold hand by face – cly, I think."
"Good God!" Edwards broke out startlingly. "If we're going to hear an account of all the women that Tom lectured and made cry – leave me out of it."
"One woman will do, for this time," I said to him drily, "if it's the right one," and he subsided, turning away. But he did not go. With burning eyes, he stood and listened while I cross-examined the unwilling Chung and got apparently a straight story showing that some woman had come to the side door of his master's house shortly after dinner Saturday night, walked to the study with that master, weeping, and that her voice when he heard it, sounded like that of some one he knew. I tried every way in the world to get him to be specific about this voice; did it sound like that of a young lady? an old lady? did he think it was some one he knew well, or only a little? had he been hearing it much lately? All the usual tactics; but Chung's placid obstinacy was proof against them. He kept shaking his head and saying over and over,
"No hear um good," until Barbara, standing watchfully by, said,
"Chung, you think that lady talk like this?"
As she spoke, after the first word, a change had come into her voice; it was lighter, higher, with a something in its character faintly reminiscent to my ear. And Chung bobbed his head quickly, nodding assent. In her mimicry he had recognized the tones of the visitor. I glanced at Edwards: he looked positively relieved.
"I'll go to the house, Worth," he said with more composure in his tone than I would have thought a few moments ago he could in any way summon. "You'll find me there." And he followed the Chinaman up the moonlit path.