Wall (29 page)

Suddenly I heard Tate shout, and the sound of running feet, followed by a shot and excited voices.

“Lemme go. I haven’t done anything.”

“What did you want in that house?”

“Jeez! Can’t a man ask to sleep somewhere out of this rain? Take your hands off me.”

I went to the front door, to find Tate marching along the driveway toward it, holding by the arm a disreputable-looking individual, unshaven, drenched with rain and shivering with cold and terror.

“Shooting at me,” he said resentfully. “Shooting at me for ringing a doorbell. Who are you anyhow?”

“That’s my business,” said Tate, and asked me if he might use the telephone. There was one in the hall, and still holding to his prisoner he called the police station. The man stood sullenly beside him, dripping small pools onto the carpet, and I felt sorry for him. But when I asked him if he would like some brandy he shook his head.

“And get put away for being drunk and disorderly!” he said. “No, thanks, miss. This cop’s got nothing on me and he knows it.”

The servants had been aroused, and were appearing in various states of undress. I managed to get rid of them.

“It’s nothing,” I said. “Just a man looking for shelter. There’s nothing to worry about.”

When I came back the tramp was looking at me. He had sharp little eyes, for all his evident fright.

“Any reason why I can’t stand by that fire in there?” he asked. “I’ve just come out of a hospital.”

He looked it. He was wasted and pale, and after some argument with Tate he was allowed to warm himself in the library while a car was sent to pick him up. He was still there, resigned but unhappy, when the car arrived.

The incident seemed unfortunate but unimportant, my only feeling being that at least the local jail was dry. As a matter of fact, he was kept overnight and dismissed the next morning, with a stern adjuration to leave the town and the island at once. But this was to prove a mistake, as it turned out. I know now that he had not come to ask for shelter. He had come on a definite errand. But I saw him out with some relief that night, and it was not until the next morning that I understood.

I had not gone to sleep until toward daylight, and the unfortunate result was that I slept late. When Maggie’s disapproving face appeared with my breakfast tray I thought the displeasure was for me. It was not. Propped against the coffeepot was a soiled envelope, dry but showing signs of having been wet, and with my name and address, almost obliterated, printed on it with a pencil.

“That tramp must have left it,” said Maggie stiffly. “William sent it up, dirt and all. It was behind a cushion on the library couch.”

She stood over me, filled with curiosity, and she was indignant when I sent her out before I opened it. Like all personal maids long in one position, she lived a purely vicarious life, which was mine, and normally I had no secrets from her. But I had a strange feeling about that letter, although when she had gone and I opened the envelope I found myself at first unable to grasp what it contained. There was in it a single sheet of note paper, without date or place, and on it merely seven words, also printed in pencil and with a shaky hand. They were: “Your man is Jonas Tripp, of Clinton.”

But the signature was unmistakable. It was what looked like a bus, but might have been meant for a trailer.

My first reaction was purely nervous. So great was my relief that I lay back on the pillows and found myself shaking all over. Allen was alive. Whatever happened to him, he was still alive.

It was some time before I remembered the note and looked at it again. What man? The tramp? There were plenty of Tripps around, but I had never heard of a Jonas. “Your man is Jonas Tripp, of Clinton.” Then at last I understood. Jonas Tripp was the alibi witness Allen Pell had found, and Arthur was saved. I felt a wave of relief that set me to trembling again.

All this had taken time, and when I rushed to the telephone in my sitting room it was to find that the tramp had already been reprimanded and released. I tried for Russell Shand then, but he was out somewhere; and so I spent most of the morning in my car, desperately trying to find my man on one of the roads leading to the bridge and the mainland. But after the fashion of his kind he was evidently avoiding the main highways. I did not find him, and I have never seen him since.

I shall always remember that day as one of alternate hope and anxiety. I called Arthur at Millbank and gave him the name of Jonas Tripp, but I hadn’t the heart to mention the news of Juliette’s first marriage. He seemed rather skeptical, but agreed to try to locate him. But my first relief about Allen Pell had been succeeded by fear. He was ill somewhere, or hurt. The tramp said he had just come out of a hospital, and I felt sure that that was where Allen had given him the note. But why not have said so? Why not have told me where he was? Perhaps the messenger was to have given me the details. Still, why the caution of that note, printed and unsigned?

It dawned on me then that, wherever he was, he did not want to be discovered, that he was deliberately in hiding. Why? From whom? The police?

It was a bad time, not improved by a brief call from the sheriff himself late that afternoon. He was in a hurry. He did not come in, and I talked to him in the driveway beside his rattletrap car.

“What about this tramp last night?” he inquired. “Kinda queer some ways, wasn’t it?”

“I don’t know. We have them now and then,” I said evasively.

“Light in the back of the house and so on?”

“I suppose so. I think William was still downstairs.”

He fiddled with his hat.

“Lights on and servants up,” he said. “Yet this fellow comes to the front door. What’s more, the island’s not too friendly to vagrants and they know it; but he comes right along to this house. Looks as though he might have had a reason, doesn’t it?”

I must have looked uncomfortable, for he gave me a hard look.

“I didn’t ask his reasons,” I said. “He looked cold and he was certainly wet. I suppose he saw the lights of the house from the road.”

“He passed a dozen other places before he got to this one.”

But he asked no more questions, although he made a few uncomplimentary remarks on our local police for releasing the man before he himself had heard about him. I had an uneasy feeling as he did it that he was studying me, but at last he got back into the car and settled himself.

“Don’t be surprised at anything you hear,” he said, almost airily. “At least it’s made Bullard happy, and that’s something.”

I did not know what he meant. It did not greatly concern me at the time. I was busy wondering if I had been right in not telling him about that note; and when the news came, at four o’clock the next afternoon, it was simply stupefying.

Fred Martin had been picked up at his house near the golf club and taken to Clinton for interrogation.

I
T SEEMED INCREDIBLE. EVERYBODY
knew Fred and liked him. Liked Dorothy too. It was almost time for her baby to come, and at least a dozen women I knew were knitting an afghan for it. Not Fred. There must be some mistake. He had been at the club for five years or so, and his sturdy figure and old cap were as familiar to us as the water hazard at the eighth hole, or as the very greens he watched so carefully.

Tony Rutherford brought me the news. He had been at the club when it happened, and he looked more indignant than I had ever seen him.

“It’s an outrage,” he said. “These county policemen! What do they know? Why on earth pick on Fred? I doubt if he ever saw Juliette, and as for the Jordan woman—”

He merely voiced the resentment of the entire colony. Yet it had its advantages, that arrest of Fred Martin; at least so far as we were concerned. It was obvious that if Fred was guilty Arthur was innocent, and the result was that almost the entire summer colony, by ones and twos, dropped in for tea that afternoon.

That shift in public opinion could have amused me once, but now it did not seem to matter. What started as an informal gathering turned rapidly into an indignation meeting. People continued to come, and I remember that we ran out of cake almost at once, and that William was dodging about frantically, carrying cinnamon toast and anything else Lizzie could fix in a hurry.

It was entirely futile, of course. Nobody knew precisely why Fred had been detained, except that it had to do with our murders. Even that was partly surmise, based on Dorothy’s hysterical statement that he had nothing to do with them. Mansfield Dean, driving past Fred’s house, had heard someone hysterically crying, and had stopped his car. He found Dorothy alone, face down on her bed, wailing that Fred was innocent, and that the police had come and taken him away while he was eating his lunch.

He told that story himself, standing with a teacup in his hand and looking unhappy at the recollection. Part of it we knew. Fred spent his winters at a Florida club and his summers with us. The club provided a small house, and he earned a fair amount by giving lessons. He was a natural golf player, starting as a caddy years before in some Middle Western state. Then in Florida about two years before he had met Dorothy. She had been a schoolteacher, young and a bit above him in some ways, but devoted to him.

The rest of the story came from Dorothy herself, sobbed out to Mr. Dean as she lay on her bed.

According to her, Fred had been the same as usual that summer. Maybe a little more silent—he was a cheerful man ordinarily—but she had laid that to the trouble on the island. He did not like to leave her alone at night. When he joined the searchers he had made her lock herself in.

But, still according to her, Fred was as bewildered as everybody else at the mystery. She would see him sometimes in the evening, apparently trying to puzzle the thing out. Now and then he spoke of it.

“Do you think he had ever known Mrs. Ransom?” Mansfield Dean had asked her.

She shook her head. No. How could he? She had been gone before he came to the club. Possibly he had seen her in Florida, but what could that mean? She, Juliette, wouldn’t know him. She might have met him on the golf course, but she didn’t play golf, did she?

It was pitiable, but it answered no questions. True, Fred could easily reach the bridle path from the club. True also, he liked to hike and was often seen on free afternoons up in the hills. But there it ended. It was incredible that he had murdered Juliette and disposed of her body in Loon Lake. It was equally incredible that he had killed Helen Jordan on the bay path, got a boat, tied a rope around her neck and towed her out to sea. Not Fred, giving his patient lessons, standing cheerfully with his hands in his pockets and saying:

“See what you did? Lifted that shoulder again!”

I left them there, and went to the telephone. Dorothy said he had not come back, and I knew she was still crying. I called Mrs. Curtis and asked her to go there and look after things, and when I returned it was to hear our amateur detectives still arguing back and forth, and Mrs. Pendexter’s high thin voice.

“I’m no murderer,” she said. “Not but what I’d like to be now and then. But whoever disposed of the Jordan woman was a fool.”

“Why?”

“That boat had an anchor in it, didn’t it? Why didn’t he tie it to the body? Even I would know enough to do that, if I’d killed a woman.”

“Are you sure you didn’t?” somebody asked; and in the laughter that followed the party broke up.

Mansfield Dean was the last to go. He had waited deliberately, and with his car at the door he asked me if I would go up to dinner at the house with him.

“Just as you are,” he said. “We’re not fashionable, Miss Lloyd. We dine early when we’re alone. Agnes is better, and I don’t like to think of you here by yourself. After all,” he added, “you should celebrate a little. Whatever is behind this Fred Martin affair, it doesn’t hurt your brother’s case.”

I went, waiting only to brush back my hair and wash a bit. After my old car, his big limousine was luxuriously soft, and I leaned back and shut my eyes.

“That’s right,” he said. “Try to forget it. We won’t talk about it tonight.”

He lived up to that; a fine man, I thought, Mansfield Dean, with all his money; and a comforting one. Not a very happy one though. When I opened my eyes as we swung into the driveway I saw him as I had seen him the day I met him on the path above his house; with his head bent and his face a mask of sadness.

It altered as soon as I sat up.

“Here we are,” he said. “A cocktail will make you feel better.” He put a large friendly hand over mine. “Remember, no mysteries tonight. Just a little gossip, eh?”

As a result, for three hours or so that night I listened to his big voice booming, ate delicious food at a bright table in a bright room, and tried to forget my troubles.

Agnes Dean was quiet. Now and then her husband tried to draw her into the conversation, but it was as though she had to bring herself back from a far distance. He found occasion to tell me when she left the room after dinner that Doctor Jamieson was seriously worried about her, and I sensed tragedy in his voice.

“I don’t think he is very hopeful,” he said. “A man builds a life, works and gets somewhere; and then all at once he knows it doesn’t matter. There are other things…”

His voice trailed off, and the next minute he was bellowing for hot water. “This coffee’s like ink.” And Agnes Dean was back in the room again.

He walked home with me that night. He was not sorry for himself. I could see that. But he talked about his wife. They had come to the island because of the stimulating air, he said; but her condition was partly mental. She should have been kept in bed, but inactivity depressed her. “I suppose I ought not to be telling you my troubles,” he added apologetically. “You have enough of your own.”

It was one of our rare warm summer evenings. Usually sunset sees a chill in the air, but that night was lovely. He stopped once, I remember, and looked up at the stars.

“Queer,” he said, “but a sky like that always makes me feel that there is a God after all.”

I knew what he meant. He was facing the death of his wife, and was trying to comfort himself; an unimaginative man, given to having his own way in life, and now confronting something he could not control.