The Glass Slipper (16 page)

“My eyes are open. Listen, Rue, my dear, you are young. I’m — not. Let me tell you something. There’s always a time when it’s stronger than you are; I’ve had my moments of rebellion and of struggle and of — well, of hatred. Not — pleasant moments. But it’s no good. I’ve got to accept the whole of it. Do you see?”

“Y-yes.”

“No, you don’t.” He looked at her for a long moment and then unexpectedly bent and kissed her lips lightly. “What a dear child you are, Rue,” he said and turned abruptly and went to the door. He paused then.

“You’re sure you won’t go along?”

She didn’t go. Afterward she thought of it, that instant of indecision. But it would have made no difference.

She heard them leave, Alicia’s throaty, lovely voice in the hall: “We’ll stop at Field’s…”

Steven murmured something in reply. Steven, who knew about Alicia and Brule; who had known. Poor Steven.

They had barely gone when Andy telephoned. Gross came to tell her, and she took the telephone call in her own room.

But Andy didn’t say much. Even when she told him of the girl Rachel and the grisly green smudges on her hands, he said only:

“How… ?”

“She doesn’t know.” It was cheering, in that house that seemed so silent after everyone had gone, to hear Andy’s voice, even if it was at the end of a telephone wire. Even if (though there was no indication of it) police were listening to every word she said.

“Well, never mind,” he said at last. “Let the police worry about it. I only called to ask if there was anything new.”

“Only that — and the police were here when we got home. Asking about keys.”

“Keys?”

“There’s an extra key somewhere they can’t account for. I suppose someone has lost it. It’s not important.” She wanted to say: I’m alone. Please come. I’m alone and the house is big and it’s so empty and silent.

She didn’t say it. And Andy talked for a little and hung up.

After that the house was even emptier. She thought of questioning Rachel further and rang the bell, but Gross came presently and, when she inquired, said it was the maid’s day out and she had gone.

The afternoon wore on slowly after that. Gross vanished to some quiet downstairs retreat for his afternoon rest period; only the doorbell or telephone or her own bell would lure him out of it.

It grew dark early. Brule did not return; and she wondered about the emergency operation. She couldn’t read; she couldn’t write letters. She thought of Steven. She thought of Madge. She thought, wishing she wouldn’t, of Alicia.

But Steven’s whole philosophy was wrong. Rue could not accept it for herself.

She rose at last, driven by restlessness and the early dusk and her own thoughts. There was something oppressive about the silence of the darkening house. Something too poignantly reminiscent about that rose-scented room, as if the ghosts of two dead women lingered there, watching — Crystal with her mocking, secret smile, Julie helpless and trapped in a tragedy that did not concern her.

Rue went downstairs. Gross had not yet lighted the hall, and it was cavernous in the growing dusk. She went back toward the library. It, too, was not lighted, and she paused at the door to seek the electric light switch. And as she did so she glanced on down the hall.

The door to Steven’s studio was closed, and there was a thin streak of light below it.

A streak of light which, as she looked, silently disappeared.

As if someone had turned out the light.

But no one was there. The house was completely still. She walked across the hall and opened the studio door.

The first thing she realized was that the curtains must have been pulled, for the room was so dark that the ashes left in the hearth made a faint red glow. The dark cavern of the room was so still she could hear the pounding of her own heart. But someone must be there. She had just seen that light turned off.

There was a master switch there, too, by the door, and she pressed it.

The room sprang into view — long, with the big piano in the corner and the heavy curtains pulled across the bay windows.

And there was someone there. Someone that lay, oddly, across the piano bench.

Rue must have moved. For suddenly she was staring directly down at the thing on the bench, and it wasn’t quite recognizable, yet it was the maid, Rachel.

Her heart was pounding so frantically she couldn’t have heard small sounds, but she saw the piece of manuscript paper waver, slide slowly off the rack above the keyboard, flutter sluggishly across the huddled figure and fall on the floor at Rue’s feet.

It was music manuscript — printed bars filled with hurried, penciled notes. And across it suddenly a bright red smear spread itself. She stared at it stupidly, not realizing why the paper had fallen in just that way.

S
he must have seen more than she thought she saw, for later there were definite details she remembered and could tell the police. She remembered that Rachel wore a coat and was flung, twisted, on the long cushioned bench so that Rue saw the back of her coat, with a long slit cut into the dark cloth and a spreading wet patch starting all around that slit. The girl wore no hat, and her dark hair was bare, without her usual cap. She had on high-heeled pumps, and one of them had loosened somehow and dangled from one toe. There was no knife or revolver or any kind of weapon visible.

She must have seen all that.

But then she only thought with appalling slowness as in a nightmare. Rachel was dead. Rachel was murdered. But no one was in the house. And… she had seen the light turned out.

Rachel hadn’t turned out the light. Therefore… someone was there. Someone… and then she realized, still stupidly, that only a current of air from somewhere could have made that sheet of manuscript paper move and flutter from the rack, and that meant a door or a window open, and that meant…

She was afraid to look behind her, around the room. She was afraid to move, really, yet move she must and did. Perhaps she ran back to the door; she never knew. The next thing she was ever to be able to remember was ringing the bell in the library, pressing the little pearl button so hard it hurt her finger, and then meeting Gross — moments afterward it seemed, in the pantry. So she must have gone through the empty dark dining room to meet Gross. But she couldn’t remember that either.

And it must have been Gross who remembered that there usually was a policeman somewhere about the house. Later Rue had hazy memory of herself huddling against the buffet in the dining room and hearing Gross’s voice, husky and unnaturally high, shouting at someone who was apparently in the street outside the house. The front door banged, and feet came down the hall.

And it was really then that the deluge began.

It was a repetition of the night following Julie’s murder, only it was worse. And it was all unutterably confusing.

But there was another thing Rue was to remember out of the confusion, and that was Brule’s return.

For he came before the homicide squad arrived. Came just after Rue had heard them making frenzied telephone calls to the police headquarters. He came and was met in the hall and cried instantly on hearing the news:

“Where’s Mrs Hatterick?”

No one knew. Rue cried: “Brule… Brule…” and he came and met her there at the door of the dining room. Lights had been turned on by Gross and shone harshly upon Brule.

“Rue — they say you found her!”

“Yes. Oh, Brule —”

“Who did it?”

“I don’t know. Someone was in the house. The lights were turned off — Brule —” She was shivering. He put his arms around her and drew her closer to him.

“You’re sure you’re all right? I’ve got to go in there —”

“Don’t leave me.”

It was then she saw it. The infinitely small, infinitely trivial thing that was so difficult to forget. He still wore his overcoat but had tossed hat and gloves down somewhere. She had put one hand on his shoulder, and he put his own hand to cover it, and all around the square clear fingernail of the middle finger there was a faint red line. A line that was — that could be nothing else but dried blood. She had seen it too many times; there was no possible chance of her making a mistake. She must have caught her breath a little, the wet patch on Rachel’s coat too fresh in her memory, for Brule looked at her sharply, followed her gaze and released her hand abruptly to look at his own.

He frowned.

“Glove broke while I was operating,” he said quickly. “I scrubbed up afterward in a hurry. It was a long operation, and I was anxious to get home.” It was dismissed. Forever, so far as Brule was concerned.

“Stay here. Rue. I’ve got to take a look.”

He joined the men in the studio. In another moment they were searching the house.

Yes, it was the same kind of ordered, engulfing deluge that had fallen upon them, had submerged the house and all within it after Julie’s death.

Only it was worse.

This time there was no doubt that it was murder. This time there was no doubt that those other deaths had been murders. This time the savagery, the desperate cowardice behind the whole thing was partially unveiled.

At the time of Julie’s death there had been enough doubt as to the manner of her death, enough prestige belonging to the Hatterick name, to induce what the newspapers later called a kid-glove handling of the situation.

There was no more of that.

The witnesses were separated immediately, questioned alone and without a chance to make their stories agree.

Lieutenant Angel himself questioned Rue mainly, although Miller and even Funk, as well as several detectives whose faces were known to her, questioned too. Their questions were as always designedly, doggedly repetitious. But gradually, out of them all, two or three questions began to take on more and more significance through constant rewording, constant repetition.

“You were alone in the house?”

“Yes. Except for Gross and —”

“Yes, we know. Yet you saw the light turned out in the studio?”

“But no one was in the studio?”

“Only — Rachel. I saw no one else. But the manuscript fell off the piano. A door or window must have opened — closed — I don’t know.”

“There was a strong enough current of air to blow that paper off the piano. Yet you don’t know whether a door or window was open?”

“No. The curtains had been pulled.”

“Do you expect us to believe the murderer actually left that room and you didn’t see or hear anybody leave?”

“I don’t know. I’m only telling what I saw.”

Perhaps they would leave it at that, ask other questions (When had she last seen Rachel? Exactly what had Rachel told her about the streaks of green on her hands? How long had she been alone in the house?), then slyly, unexpectedly, someone would return to it: “You say you saw a light in the studio?”

Rue asked for Guy Cole, but he was not brought. Probably the others asked for him, too, and without success.

Police were all over the house. By midnight, and after hours of inquiry, there emerged certain salient facts.

Rachel had been stabbed and had been stabbed so efficiently that she had died almost at once, if not instantly. Her hat, gloves and pocketbook were in her room, in the servants’ wing at the end of the fourth floor, tossed as if hurriedly across the bed. The police deduced, after suitable inquiry of Gross and the other maid and the cook, that Rachel had taken her hours out, returned, gone straight to her room and after hurriedly removing hat and gloves and tossing down her pocketbook, had gone downstairs immediately to the library. Thus, because she was not in her uniform and had no duties in the library, she had gone there to meet someone.

And her hands were stained with those unpleasant, troublesome streaks of green.

Rue told them all she knew about that. The servants knew it too; they were terrified, superstitious. But Rachel herself hadn’t known — or had claimed she hadn’t known — where the stain came from or how it got on her hands.

“I warned her,” said Gross, quavering and eyes as blank as walls of concrete. “I warned her. It was a sign —”

“What had she gone to her room to get? Do you know?”

And Gross did know.

“The charts,” he said. “It must have been the charts. I always thought she had removed them herself. The charts for the first Mrs Hatterick… when she died…”

It was after that, probably, that they questioned Rue again, after letting her rest an hour. She was by that time in her bedroom — Crystal’s bedroom — again. Someone had hustled her there and made her stay, with a detective sitting on a chair near the door — drawing a paper bag from his pocket as time went on and eating peanuts methodically. Every time they came to question Rue he would put away his peanuts, listen thoughtfully, sigh when they went away and start eating again.

Rue huddled in the chaise longue; what was going on in the rest of the house? Steven and Madge and Alicia had returned long ago. Once when the door opened she heard Andy’s voice in the hall, speaking to one of the police, apparently, saying: “Why can’t I see her?”

“Orders.”

“All right then, what about the lawyer?”

The door closed on the words. But Guy did not come.

As to the charts, Rue only knew that she had questioned Rachel about the charts, that she’d thought in spite of Rachel’s denials that the girl knew something of them.

“Why would she take them from the room?”

“I don’t know.”

“Gross says she was crying this afternoon. Why?”

“I don’t know,” said Rue. And suddenly remembered the girl’s interview with Brule in his little study. The girl — she’d been sure it was Rachel — sobbing; Brule in a white heat of rage, which he suddenly controlled, so his voice was almost coaxing when he said: “Bring them — bring them to me at once.”

Bring what? The charts? Then Brule knew. And Brule had been furiously angry and trying, which was unusual with Brule, to conceal that anger. Brule — gone all afternoon, returning just after the murder was discovered — with blood around his fingernail.

Even if the rubber glove had broken while he worked, operating, Brule was by nature and habit immaculate and painstaking. He wouldn’t normally have walked out of the dressing room after an operation without thoroughly scrubbing and brushing his hands. Yet — if he’d been in a hurry, if the operation had been unexpectedly long!

“So you don’t know why she was crying?”

“No,” said Rue instantly.

After all, that scene between Rachel and Brule was not evidence. Why tell the police?

But she remembered it. After they’d gone again and the man beside the door had pulled up a footstool. He didn’t question her at all; didn’t seem, in fact, aware of her presence until she rose once and went to raise the window.

He was beside her instantly.

“Better not make any motions, sister,” he said. “Go on back there and take it easy.”

“I was only —”

He jerked his head once, suggestively, interrupting her explanation as finally as if he’d spoken, and Rue went back to the chaise longue.

Yet at one o’clock or thereabouts the door opened, someone outside nodded or spoke, and the man at the door got up, walked out the door, closing it behind him, and didn’t come back. At first Rue kept expecting him to return.

After a long time she got up and went cautiously to the door herself and, after listening, opened it. No one stopped her. She opened it wider — and from the shadow near the stairwell a policeman in uniform lounged forward, and she closed the door hastily.

And, lightheaded with weariness, lay without undressing on the bed and pulled a down puff over her. The police cars were still in the street below; there were reporters there too; occasionally as she heard the front door open or close there was a quick fusillade of lights — flashlights from the cameras of the newspaper photographers, which winked rapidly, like tiny flares of lightning, against her own windows.

Brule himself came finally; he knocked and as she answered spoke to someone outside and entered. She sat up, and he came and sat beside her on the bed. He was gray with fatigue; she caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror near by; a white-faced woman with bright, disheveled hair and a pale green silk puff hunched incongruously around the straight black street dress with the white lingerie touches at throat and wrists that she’d put on — how long ago? — to go on her fruitless errand to the hospital.

Brule looked at her, said: “Rue, child…” and leaned over to push her hair gently back from her forehead. “I didn’t — God knows I never meant to plunge you into anything like this. If I’d known — but how could I!”

“What are they going to do? What have they done? Have they made any arrest?”

They hadn’t. Brule explained.

“They’ve got a police guard all around the place. They’ve made a minute search. They can’t find any knife or instrument that had any bloodstains on it. There are knives in the kitchen — there’s a long paper knife in the library that’s sharp; but so far they aren’t certain. They’ve got to make an arrest soon.”

“Who?”

He looked away from her and said he didn’t know. “You see, it’s simmered down just now to a question of alibis.”

“And I — I was alone —”

“You aren’t the only one without an alibi,” said Brule quickly. “I was driving home. I could have done it. The door leading from the studio into the back lawn (that goes to the gate in the wall, the tradesmen’s entrance) — that door was open, and the gate is always unlatched. Anybody could have escaped that way.”

“But Steven and Madge and Alicia —”

“Were not together,” said Brule grimly. “Alicia and Madge went into Field’s to do some shopping. Steven sat in the car for a while, then told Kendal he was going to the drugstore for something or other and left him. Steven met all three an hour later at one of the Randolph Street doors — but he’d waited, he told them, at the wrong door. Kendal was to pick up Alicia and Madge at the door nearest Wabash; Steven said he’d waited at the Randolph Street door nearest State Street; but nevertheless, though Kendal went around the block a couple or three times, Steven says he didn’t see the car. And Alicia and Madge had separated inside Field’s; Alicia went to the seventh floor for a fitting; Madge to the fifth for dancing slippers. You see, any of them could have taken a taxi and returned to the house. There’d have been plenty of time. And Guy was in his house next door the whole time,” added Brule unexpectedly. “Alone, reading, he says. With access to the back yard and the studio door. And Andy —”

“Andy… ?”

“Certainly; why not? Andy was in his office, he says, but the office girl had a headache, and he let her go home early. He was there when I telephoned; the police had him come here. It’s pretty evident just whom the police include in their list of suspects,” said Brule a trifle wryly. “They waste no time rounding us up.”

“And no arrest,” said Rue slowly, seeking into Brule’s eyes. But if he knew — or feared — more he would not tell her. He said instead with a pretense of briskness: “So you see, it all simmers down to alibis. And since they’re pretty certain the same fellow murdered Julie and Rachel (and for the same motive in all likelihood, and that was knowledge of Crystal’s death), then the question of alibis for Julie’s murder comes into it too. Steven, now, had a perfect alibi for the time of Julie’s murder. You gave it to him yourself.”