The Tragedy of Z (5 page)

John Hume, at the door, snapped: “Hurry that man up, will you?” and father shrugged and lit a cigar. I could see that he was disgusted with the whole affair.

I felt a hard edge nudge the backs of my thighs, and turned quickly. It was Jeremy Clay, smiling, with a chair.

“Squat, Sherlocka,” he said. “If you insist on parking here, you may as well do your heavy thinking off those beautiful little feet of yours.”

“Please!” I said angrily, in a half-whisper. This was scarcely the place for levity. He grinned and forced me into the chair. No one paid the least attention to us. So with a little feeling of helplessness I resigned myself … and then I caught a glimpse of father's face.

He was holding the cigar two inches from his lips, and staring at the doorway.

3. THE BLACK BOX

A man had halted in the doorway and was looking at the desk. There was surprise on his lean face as his brain registered the emptiness of the chair. Then his gaze shifted and met the district attorney's. He smiled sadly, nodded, and advanced into the room to stand in the middle of the rug, quite motionless, at perfect ease. He was no taller than myself, compactly built, and gave the impression subtly of an animal co-ordination of muscles. There was something oddly unsecretary-like in his bearing and figure. He might have been forty, although he possessed a certain air of agelessness which was baffling.

I looked at father again. The cigar had not advanced an inch toward his lips. He was scrutinizing the newcomer with the most honest amazement.

And the dead man's secretary was looking at father, too. But intent as I was, on the alert for the slightest sign of recognition, I could detect not even the merest flicker in his bold eyes. His glance moved on and rested upon me. I thought then that he betrayed a mild astonishment, but no more than any man in his present position might betray at sight of a woman in these grim surroundings.

My eyes went back to father again. The cigar was between his teeth, he was smoking placidly, and his face was expressionless once more. No one seemed to have noticed his brief stupefaction. But that he had recognized this man Carmichael I knew; and, although Carmichael had not responded by any outward sign, I was also certain that he too had suffered a split-second shock. An individual with such consummate self-control, I reflected, would bear watching.

“Carmichael,” said John Hume abruptly, “Chief Kenyon says you have something important to tell us.”

The secretary's eyebrows went up slightly. “It depends upon what you mean by ‘important,' Mr. Hume. Of course, I found the body——”

“Yes, yes.” The district attorney's tone was cosmically impersonal. Senator Fawcett's secretary.… I fancied I grasped the nuances. “Tell us what happened tonight.”

“After dinner this evening the Senator called his three servants—the cook, the butler, and his valet—into the study here and told them to take the evening off. He——”

“How do you know this?” asked Hume sharply.

Carmichael smiled. “I was present.”

Kenyon slouched forward. “It's all right, Hume. I've had a chin-chin with the servants. They all got in about a half-hour ago. Went to a movie in town.”

“Go on, Carmichael.”

“When the Senator dismissed the servants, he told me I might take the evening off as well. After I finished some correspondence for the Senator, I left the house.”

“Wasn't this command a trifle unusual?”

The secretary shrugged. “Not at all.” His white teeth glistened in a brief smile. “He often had—ah—private business to attend to; and it wasn't at all uncommon for him to ship us out of the house. At any rate, I returned earlier than I had expected to. I found the front door wide open——”

“Time,” said father in his rumbling bass. The man's smile wavered, and returned; he waited for father's question with polite interest. His manner was perfect, I reflected; and this struck me as significant, for I could not visualize a mere secretary reacting to an examination in such circumstances with so little loss of
savoir-faire.
“When you left the house, did you close the door?”

“Oh, yes! The door, as you've probably noticed, has a spring lock, anyway. And aside from the Senator and myself, only the servants possess keys. So I take it that the Senator admitted whoever came here personally.”

“Please, no conjectures,” snapped Hume. “There is such a thing as making a wax impression, you know! You returned and found the front door open. And then?”

“The fact struck me as suspicious, and with a feeling that something was wrong I ran into the room. I found the Senator's dead body at the desk, in the chair, just as it was when Chief Kenyon arrived. Of course, the first thing I did on finding the body was to telephone the police.”

“You didn't touch the body?”

“Naturally not.”

“Hmm. What time was this, Carmichael?”

“Exactly half-past ten. When I saw that Senator Fawcett had been murdered, I consulted my watch at once. I knew such a detail might be important.”

Hume looked at father. “Interesting, eh? He found the body ten minutes after the job was pulled off.… And you didn't see anyone leave the house?”

“No, I'm afraid I was a little preoccupied when I came up the walk to the house. It was dark, too. It would have been awfully simple for the murderer to have hidden in the bushes when he heard me coming, and waited for me to go into the house before making his getaway.”

“That's right, Hume,” said father unexpectedly. “After you telephoned the police, Carmichael, what did you do?”

“I remained in the doorway there, waiting. Chief Kenyon came very quickly. Not more than ten minutes after my call.”

Father stumped over to the door and peered out into the corridor. Then he came back, nodding. “That's hunk. Then you had the front door in sight all the time. Did you see or hear anybody trying to get out of the house?”

Carmichael shook his head positively. “No one left, or attempted to leave. I'd found the door of the study open, and I didn't close it. Even while I telephoned I was facing it, and was in a position to see if anyone passed. I was alone in the house, I'm sure.”

“I'm afraid I don't quite see——” began John Hume in a nettled tone.

The piscine-eyed Kenyon interrupted in his grating baritone. “Whoever pulled this job beat it before Carmichael got here. Nobody tried a lam after we came. And we searched the dump from top to bottom, too.”

“How about other exits?” asked father.

Kenyon spat into the fireplace behind the desk before replying. “No go,” he sneered. “We found 'em all locked on the inside, except for the front door. And that means windows, too.”

“Oh, come,” said Hume. “We're wasting time.” He stepped to the desk and picked up the blood-crusted letter-knife. “Do you recognize this, Carmichael?”

“Yes, indeed. It's the Senator's. It's always been on his desk, Mr. Hume.” Carmichael regarded the weapon for an instant, then turned slightly aside. “Is there anything else? I'm a trifle upset, you know.…”

Upset! The man had no more nerves than a microbe.

The district attorney dropped the knife on the desk. “What do you know about this crime? Any suggestions?”

The man actually looked grieved. “I haven't the remotest idea, Mr. Hume. Of course, you know yourself that the Senator had made many enemies during his political career.…”

Hume said slowly: “Just what do you mean by that?”

Carmichael looked pained. “Mean? What I said, I'm sure. The Senator was a much-hated man, as you know. There are probably scores of men—and women, too, for that matter—who might be construed as potential murderers.…”

“I see,” murmured Hume. “Well, that's all for the moment. Wait outside, please.”

Carmichael, nodding, smiled and left the room.

Father drew the district attorney aside, and I heard his basso agitating Hume's ears with questions about Senator Fawcett, his intimates, the extent of his political depredations, and a series of very innocent ones about Carmichael.

Chief Kenyon continued to patrol the floor, gazing stupidly at the ceiling and walls.

The desk across the room fascinated me. I wondered—had been wondering all the while Carmichael was being questioned—if I dared get out of my chair and go to the desk. There were things there which, it seemed to me, simply wept for examination. I could not understand why father, the district attorney, Kenyon did not scrutinize with minute attention to detail the various objects on that wooden surface.

I looked around. No one was watching.

Jeremy grinned as I slipped out of my seat and quickly crossed the room. Wasting no time, dreading interruption or some stern masculine disapproval, I bent over the desk.

Directly before the chair where Senator Fawcett's dead body had sat, on top of the desk, lay a green blotter. Lying on the blotter, which covered half the desk-top, was a pad of heavy, creamy stationery. Its topmost sheet was clean, blank. Carefully I lifted the pad and discovered a curious thing.

The Senator had been seated close to the edge of the desk; he had been pressed against it. And his chest-wounds had spouted blood, not on his trousers, I recalled, not on the chair, as I now observed, but on the blotter. Now, on picking up the pad of stationery I found that a copious gush of blood had soaked into the green blotter. Yet the stain was an odd one. It followed the shape of one of the lower corners of the pad. That is, with the pad lifted from the blotter, I saw a blob of dark stain on the fresh green absorbent sheet which was irregularly spherical; but there was a rectangular chunk of clean blotter at one place where the corner of the pad had rested.

It was so clear! I looked around. Father and Hume were still conversing in undertones. Kenyon was still pacing mechanically. But Jeremy and a number of men in uniform were watching me, hard-eyed, and I hesitated. Perhaps it was unwise.… But the theory cried out for test. I made up my mind and, bending over the desk, began counting the sheets of the pad. Was it brand-new? Its appearance seemed to indicate this. And yet … There were ninety-eight sheets in the pad. On the cover, unless I were mistaken, there should be a record.…

Yes! I was right. The cover of the pad informed me that a full, unused pad should contain exactly one hundred sheets.

I replaced the pad on the blotter in the precise position in which I had found it, my heart thumping against my chest like a dog's tail on the floor. I wondered if, in testing and confirming this theory of mine, I had not stumbled upon something of overwhelming importance. At the moment, true, it seemed to lead nowhere. Yet as a clue it brought certain inescapable possibilties to mind.…

I felt father's touch on my shoulder. “Snoopin', Patty?” he asked gruffly, but his eyes shot to the pad I had just put down, and narrowed with speculation. Hume looked at me with cursory interest, smiled slightly, and turned away. I thought: “So that's it, Mr. Hume! Patronizing!” and resolved to jolt him out of his complacence at the very first opportunity.

“Now let's have a look at that bit of nonsense, Kenyon,” he said briskly. “I want to see what Inspector Thumm thinks of it.”

Kenyon grunted and dug his hand into his pocket. He brought out a very curious object.

It looked like a part of a toy. A toy box. It was made of cheap wood; soft wood, like pine. It had been stained a rusty, mottled black, and had little crude metal staples on its corners for decoration; quite as if it were meant to be a replica of a trunk, and the metal staples represented the brass pieces which protect the corners. And yet I could not feel that it was meant to represent a trunk; it was more like a box, a chest, in miniature. It stood not more than three inches high.

But the arresting feature of this object was that it was only
part
of a miniature chest. For the right side of the piece had been neatly and cleanly sawed through, and what Kenyon held in his grimy, black-nailed fingers was only two inches wide. I made a rapid calculation. Roughly, the whole chest should be, in proportion to its height, some six inches wide. This was two: it represented, therefore, one-third of the whole piece.

“Put that in your pipe and smoke it,” said Kenyon nastily to father. “What's the big-city bull got to say about
this,
huh?”

“Where'd you find it?”

“On the desk there, standin' up, large as life, when we busted in here. Behind the pad, facin' the stiff.”

“Queer, all right,” muttered father; and took it from Kenyon's fingers for a closer examination.

The lid—or rather that portion of the lid which remained lying upon the portion of chest left after the rest had been sawed away—was attached to the body of the chest by a single tiny hinge. There was nothing inside; the interior of the chest had not been stained, and its virgin woody surface was not even dirty.

And on the front of the piece that father held, carefully painted in gilt letters over the rusty black stain, were two characters: H-E.

“Now, what the devil does that mean?” Father looked at me blankly. “Who's ‘he'?”

“Cryptic, isn't it?” smiled Hume, with the air of a man who poses a merely pleasant little problem.

“Of course,” I said thoughtfully, “it probably doesn't mean ‘he' at all.”

“And what makes you say that, Miss Thumm?”

“I should think, Mr. Hume,” I said in my most sugary voice, “that a man of your perceptions would see the possibilities in the well-known flash. A mere woman, you know——”

“I can't believe this is important,” said Hume abruptly, his smile quite smothered. “Nor does Kenyon think so. At the same time, we don't want to overlook a possible clue. What do you think, Inspector?”

“My daughter,” said father, “called the turn. It may be just part of a word—the first two letters, and in that case it wouldn't mean ‘he.' Or it's the first word of a short sentence.