JOE PATRICK IS DETAINED
A thrill shook the assemblage. It was plain enough now to what goal was the coroner directing his inquiry. The covert curiosity which all along had been greedily eyeing Christina Hope stiffened instantly into a wall, dividing her from the rest of her kind. She had become something sinister, set apart under a suspended doom, like some newly caught wild animal on exhibition before them in its cage. Through the general gasp and rustle, Herrick was aware of Deutch slightly bounding and then collapsing in his seat, with a muffled croak. His wife frowned; clucking indignant sympathy, she looked with open championship at the suspected girl. Mrs. Hope started up with a little cry; Herrick judged that she was much more angry than frightened. When the coroner said, "You will have your chance to speak presently, Mrs. Hope," she dropped back with exclamations of fond resentment, and taking her daughter's hand, pressed it lovingly. Christina alone, a sedate and sober-suited lily, maintained her composure intact.
But, now, for the first time, she lifted her head and slowly fixed a long, grave look upon the coroner. There was no anger in this look. It was the expression of a very good and very serious child who regards earnestly, but without sympathy, some unseemly antic of its elders. Once she had fixed this gaze upon the coroner's face, she kept it there.
In that devout decorum of expression and in the outline of her exact profile occasioned by her change of attitude, Herrick began once more to see the youthful candor of his Evadne. Yes, there was something royally childlike in that round chin and softly rounded cheek, in that obstinate yet all too sensitive lip, and that clear brow. Yes, thus expectant and motionless, she was still strangely like a tall little girl. Where did the coroner get his certainty? By God, he was branding her!—"Mr. Bryce Herrick," the coroner called.
The young man was aware at once of being a local celebrity. His evidence was to be one of the treats of the day. Not even the attack upon Christina had created a much greater stir. He took his place; and, "At last," said the coroner, "we are, I believe, to hear from somebody who saw something."
Herrick told his story almost without interruption. He was listened to in flattering silence; the young author had never had a public which hung so intently on his words. The silence upon which he finished was still hungry.
The coroner drew a long breath. "We're greatly obliged to you, Mr. Herrick. And now let us get this thing straight. It was one o'clock or thereabouts that Mr. Ingham began to play?"
They established the time and they went over every minutest detail of changing spirit in Ingham's music.
"That crash which waked you for the second time—do you think it could have been occasioned by an attack on Mr. Ingham?—that he may have been struck and thrown against the piano?"
"Oh, not at all. It was a perfectly deliberate discord, a kind of hellish eloquence."
"Ah! I'm obliged to you for that phrase, Mr. Herrick." And again he was asked—"That gesture which so greatly impressed you—do you think you could repeat it for us?"
Herrick quelled the impulse to reply, "Not without making a damned fool of myself," and substituted, "I can describe it."
"Kindly do so."
"She threw her arm high up, as high as it would go, but at a very wide angle from her body, and at that time her hand was clenched. But while the arm was still stretched out, she slowly opened her fingers, as if they were of some stiff mechanism—and it seemed to me that it was the violence of her feeling they were stiff with—until the whole hand was open, like a stretched gauntlet."
"Well, and then, when she took down her hand?"
"She drew it in toward her quickly; I had an idea she might have covered her face."
"And then she disappeared?"
"Yes; but she seemed to dip a little forward."
"As if to pick something up?"
"Well, not as much as from the floor; no."
"From a chair, then, or the couch?"
"Possibly."
"She would, standing at the window, have been some five or six feet from the piano, where Ingham sat?"
"I should say about that."
"Mr. Herrick, are you absolutely sure that this was not until after the shooting?—this forward dip?"
"After? No, it was before!"
"Ah—And directly after the shot the lights went out?"
"Directly after. Almost as if the shot had put them out."
"Now, Mr. Herrick, you have testified that from, as you say, the vague outline of the hair and shoulders and the slope of her skirts, and from the fact that when she raised her arm there was a bit of lace, or something of the kind, hanging from her sleeve, you were perfectly sure that this shadow was the shadow of a woman. Yet you still could not in the least determine anything whatever of her appearance. That I can quite understand. But didn't you gather, nevertheless, some notion of her personality?"
Herrick avoided Deutch's eye. He said—"I don't think so."
"That extraordinary movement, then, did not leave upon you a very distinct impression?"
"In what way?"
"An impression of a lady not much concerned with social constraint or emotional control; and of a very great habitual ease and flexibility in movement."
Herrick managed to smile. "I'm afraid I'm no such observer as all that. Perhaps any lady, within sixty seconds of committing murder, is a little indifferent to social constraint."
The coroner looked at him with a slight change of expression. "Well, then, let us put it another way. You would not expect to see your mother, or your sister, or any lady of your own class, make such a gesture? No? Yet you must often have seen an actress do so?"
"That doesn't follow!" Herrick said. His flush resented for Christina the slur that his words overlooked. And suddenly words escaped him. "You answered the previous question yourself, remember! Be kind enough not to confuse my evidence with yours!"
The coroner studied him a long time without speaking, while the young man's color continued to rise, and at length came the comment, "I'm not falling asleep, Mr. Herrick. I'm only wondering what charming influence has been at work with the natural appetite, at your age, for discussing an actress."
"Ask me that later, outside your official capacity," said Herrick hotly, "and we'll see if we can't find an answer!"
"Mr. Herrick, why, on the morning after the murder, did you take down Miss Hope's photograph from over your desk?"
"Because, never having met Miss Hope, it was a photograph I had no right to. I took it down when I learned the identity of the original. I didn't want its presence to be misconstrued by cads."
"Thank you. That will do. Hermann Deutch, if you please."
Herrick retired, ruffled and angry at himself; and Deutch, in passing him, cast him a clinging glance, as of a fellow conspirator, that he found strangely indigestible. At Christina, he could not look.
It did not take the coroner two minutes to make hay of Mr. Deutch. Not, indeed, that he was able to extract any very damaging admissions. The superintendent said that he was wakened by his wife, who had herself been wakened by the 'phone. He had held the before stated conversation with Mr. Bird, and, not being able to get the elevator, had walked upstairs, being joined in the office by a policeman. The rest of his proceedings were unquestionable. But the coroner, an expert in caricature and bullying and the twisting of phrases, by making him appear ridiculous, managed to make him appear mendacious; this was the easier because every now and then there was a slip in the sense of what he said, as if he had forgotten the meaning of words; he certainly perspired more than was at all persuasive; he soon began to stumble and to contradict himself about nothing; his slight accent thickened and, in a syntax with which his German tongue was habitually glib, but not accurate, he was soon making errors laughably contemptible to a public that presumably expressed itself with equal elegance in all languages. So that presently, when he was sufficiently harrowed, the coroner drew from him an admission; not only had Ingham frequently entertained ladies at his supper-parties, but complaints had been made to Deutch by various tenants, and these complaints he had not transmitted to the owners of the apartment house. The most searching inquiry failed to connect Christina with these parties, but the inference was obvious.
"I didn't,"—Mr. Deutch burst forth—"keep 'em quiet any because she was there. She wouldn't have touched such doings, not with the sole of her foot. But I didn't want the gentleman she was engaged to should be put out of the house when I was running it, after her recommending it to him, on my account!" His eyes and his voice were full of exasperated tears. "He'd have told her one lie and yet another and another, and she'd have believed him, and he'd have wanted her to fight me. Not that she would. But he was fierce against her friends, any of 'em. And I didn't want she should have no more trouble than what she had with him already."
"Very kind of you. Nature made you for a squire of dames, Mr. Deutch. Miss Hope, now,—you are a particularly old friend of hers, I believe. And I understand you would do a great deal for her."
"I'd do anything at all for her."
"I see." All that was crouching in the coroner coiled and sprang. "Even to committing perjury for her, Mr. Deutch. Even to concealing a murder for her sake?—Silence!" he commanded Christina's friends.
In the sudden deathly stillness Deutch lifted his head. He looked at the coroner with the eyes of a lion, and in a firm voice he replied, "Say, when you speak like that about a lady, Mr. Coroner, you want to look out you don't go a little too far."
"I am about to call a witness," said the coroner, with his cold laugh, "who will go even farther. Joseph Patrick, please!"
Joe Patrick was the night-elevator boy.
People stared about them. No witness. The coroner's man came forward, saying something about "telephoned—accident—get here shortly."
"See that he does,—The day-elevator boy in court!"
Disappointment reigned. After the glorious baiting of one whose race went so long a way to make him fair game, almost anything would have been an anti-climax. There now advanced for their delectation a slim, blond, anemic, peevish youth, feeble yet cocky, almost as much like a faded flower from a somewhat degenerated stalk as if he had been nipping down Fifth Avenue under a silk hat, and whose name of Willie Clarence Dodd proclaimed him of the purest Christian blood. Yet the stare of the assembly wandered from him, passed, grinning, where Deutch sat with hanging head, and settled down to feed upon the pallor of Christina's cheek. Herrick rose suddenly, displacing, as it were, a great deal of atmosphere with his large person, and stalking across the room, pulled up a chair to Deutch's side. If he had clasped and held that plump, that trembling hand, his intention could not have been more obvious. Christina turned her head a little and, with no change of expression, looked at him for a moment. Then she turned back again to Willie Clarence Dodd. That gentleman, ogling her with a canny glance, affably tipped his hat to her, and she bowed to him with utter gravity.
Mr. Dodd was a gentleman cherishing a just grudge. By the accident of bringing him into day-service instead of night-service, when there was a murder up her sleeve, Fate had balked him of his legitimate rights in life. Notoriety had been near him, but it had escaped. Mr. Dodd's self-satisfaction, however, was not easily downed. He had still a card to play, and he played it as jauntily as if doom had not despoiled him of his due. He smiled. And he had a right to. The first important question asked him ran—"On the day after Mr. Ingham's return from Europe—the day, in fact, of his death—did Mr. Ingham have any callers?"
"Yes, sir. He had one."
Interest leaped to him. He bloomed with it.
Apart from interruptions, his story ran—"Yes, sir. A lady. Quite a good-looker. Medium height. Might make you look round for a white horse; but curls, natural. Very neat dresser and up-to-date. Cute little feet. She wouldn't give her name. But not one o' that sort, you understand. She came up to me—the telephone girl was sick and I was onto her job—and she says to me, very low, as if she'd kind of gone back on herself,—'Will you kindly tell Mr. James Ingham that the lady he expects is here?' He came down livelier than I'd ever known him, and she said it was good of him to see her and they sat down on the window-seat. That's one thing where the Van Dam's on the bum—no parlor. I was really sorry for the little lady—no, not short, but the kind a man just naturally calls little—she was so nervous and she talked about as loud as a mouse; I guess he felt the same way, for he says, 'Won't you come upstairs to tell me all this? We shall be quite undisturbed,' he says. And while they were waiting for the elevator—the hall-boy wasn't much on running it—she says to him, 'You understand; I don't want to get Christina into any trouble.' And he says, 'Of course; that is all quite understood.' In about half an hour down they came together and he had his hat. He wanted to send her off in a cab, but she wouldn't let him. The minute she was gone he says to me, ''Phone for a taxi!' They didn't answer, and he says, 'Ring like the devil!' It hadn't stopped at the door when he was in it and off."
"You couldn't, of course, hear his direction?"
"Nop! He got back about six—chewing the rag, but on the quiet. Went out in his dress suit about seven-thirty. I went off at eight."
He was dismissed, strutting.
"And now let us get down to business. If you please," said the coroner, "Miss Christina Hope."