HERRICK IS SURE OF ONE THING
There was something at once commonplace and incredible about it—about the stupid ghastliness of the face and about the horrid, sticky smear in the muss of the finely tucked shirt. That gross, silly sprawl of the limbs!—was it those hands that had called forth angelic music? The dead man was splendidly handsome and this somehow accentuated Herrick's revulsion. McGarrigle bent over the body. After a moment he said to the superintendent, "No use for a doctor. But if you got one, get him."
"He's dead!" said the superintendent. "It's suicide!" He spoke quietly, but with a dreadfully repressed and labored breath. "Officer, can't you see it's suicide?" He called up the doctor, and then to the silent group he again insisted, "It's him shot himself. The door was bolted on the inside. He had to shoot himself!"
McGarrigle was at the 'phone, calling up the station. Turning his head he responded, "Where's the weapon?"
They had got the closet open now; no one there. No one in the bedroom closet. No one under the big brass bed, in the folds of the portières, behind the piano, under the couch. No one anywhere. Nor any weapon, either.
Herrick and Clancy began to examine the fastening of the door. It was an ordinary little brass catch—a slip-catch, the engineer called it—which shot its bolt by being turned like a Yale lock. "If this door shut behind any one with a bang, could the catch slip of itself?" The engineer shook his head.
The hall was long since full again, though the adventurers were ready to pop back at a moment's notice; pushing through them came the doctor. Herrick did not follow him into the bedroom. The room he stood in had a personality it seemed to challenge him to penetrate.
His most pervasive impression was of cool coloring. The portières were of a tapestry which struck Herrick as probably genuine Gobelin, but with their famous blue faded to a refreshing dullness and he now remembered that in handling them he had found them lined with a soft but very heavy satin of the same shade, as if to give them all possible substance. The stretched silk, figured in tapestry, which covered the walls, had been dyed a dull blue, washed with gray, to match them; and, to Herrick, this tint, sober as it was, somehow seemed a strange one for a man's room. In couch and rugs and lampshades these notes of gray and blue continued to predominate, greatly enhanced by all the woodwork, which, evidently supplied by the tenant, was of black walnut.
He had been no anchorite, that tenant. In the corner between the bedroom and the court window the surface of a seventeenth century sideboard glimmered under bright liquids, under crystal and silver. Beyond that window all sorts of rich lusters shone from the bindings of the books that thronged shelves built into the wall until they reached the great desk standing in the farthest right hand corner to catch the front window's light. A lamp stood on this desk, unlighted. At present all the illumination in the room came from three other lamps; one that squatted atop of the grand piano, between the now flameless old silver candelabra; one, almost veiled by its heavy shade, in the middle of the library table; and one, of the standing sort, that rose up tall from a sea of newspapers at the head of the couch. All these lamps, worked by the same switch, were electric, and the ordinary electric fixtures had been dispensed with; the light was abundant, but very soft and thrown low, with outlying stretches of shadow. It was not remarkable that it had failed to show them the murdered man until the electricity in the bedroom itself had been evoked.
Herrick looked again at the couch. Its cushions had lately been rumpled and lounged upon; at its head, under the tall lamp, stood a teakwood tabouret, set with smoking materials on a Benares tray. At its foot, as if for the convenience of the musician, a little ebony table bore a decanter and a bowl of ice; the ice in a tall glass, half-empty, was still melting into the whiskey; in a shallow Wedgewood saucer a half-smoked cigarette was smoldering still.
"McGarrigle!" said Herrick, in a low voice.
"Hallo!"
"He was shot in here, after all. I was sure of it." And he pointed to the foot of the piano stool. Still well above the surface of the hardwood flooring was a little puddle of blood.
McGarrigle contemplated this with a kind of sour bewilderment. "Well, the coroner's notified. You'll be wanted, y'know, to the inquest."
"What's this?" asked somebody.
It was a long chiffon scarf and it lay on the library table under the lamp. Clancy lifted it and its whiteness creamed down from his fingers in the tender lights and folds which lately it had taken around a woman's throat. Just above the long silk fringe, a sort of cloudy arabesque was embroidered in a dim wave of lucent silk. And Herrick noticed that the color of this border was blue-gray, like the blue-gray room. As they all grimly stared at it, the superintendent exclaimed, "I never saw it before!"
McGarrigle looked from him to the scarf and commanded, in deference to the coming coroner, "You leave that lay, now, Clancy!"
Clancy left it. But something in the thing's frail softness affected Herrick more painfully than the blood of the dead man. In no nightmare, then, had he imagined that shadow of a woman! She had been here; she was gone. And, on the floor in there, was that her work?
Now that the interest of rescue had failed, he wanted to get away from that place. He wanted to dress and go down to the river and think the whole thing over alone. He had now heard the doctor's verdict of instant death; and McGarrigle, again reminding him that he would be wanted at the inquest, made no objection to his withdrawal.
On his own curb stood a line of men, staring at the windows of 4-B as if they expected the tragedy to be reënacted for their benefit. They all turned their attention greedily to Herrick as he came up, and the nearest man said, "Have they got him?"
"Him?"
"Why, the murderer!"
"Oh!" Herrick said. Even in the crude excitement of the question the man's voice was so pleasant and his enunciation so agreeably clear that Herrick, constitutionally sensitive to voices and rather weary for the sound of cultivated speech, replied familiarly, "I'm afraid, strictly speaking, that there isn't any murderer. It's supposed to be a woman."
"Indeed! Well, have they caught her?"
"They've caught no one. And, after all, there seems to be some hope that it's a suicide."
"Oh!" said the other, with a smile. "Then you found him in evening dress! I've noticed that bodies found in evening dress are always supposed to be suicides!"
The note of laughter jarred. "I see nothing remarkable," Herrick rebuked him, with considerable state, "in his having on dinner clothes."
"Nothing whatever! 'Dinner clothes'—I accept the correction. Any poor fellow having them on, a night like this, might well commit suicide!—I'm obliged to you," he nodded. And, humming, went slowly down the street.
Herrick suddenly hated him; and then he saw how sore and savage he was from the whole affair. The same automobile still waited, not far from his own door, and he longed to leap into it and send it rapid as fury through the night, leaving all this doubt and horror behind him in the cramped town. His troubled apprehension did not believe in that suicide.—What sort of a woman was she? And what deviltry or what despair had driven her to a deed like that? Where and how—in God's name, how!—had she fled? He, too, looked up at that window where he had seen the lights go out. It was brightly enough lighted, now. But this time there was no blind drawn and no shadow. The bare front of the house baulked the curiosity on fire in him. "How the devil and all did she get out?" It was more than curiosity; it was interest, a kind of personal excitement. That strange, imperial, and passionate gesture! The woman who made it had killed that man. Of one thing he was sure. "If ever I see it again, I shall know her," he said, "among ten thousand!"