Yellow Room (33 page)

“But as I said before there was one thing I kept thinking about. Whoever shot Elinor Hilliard had been trying to escape from Colonel Richardson. That was out of the picture entirely. Why in a pouring rain did X stand outside the colonel’s window, peering in?

“Think that over, Floyd. Don Richardson was a happy man the night of the murder. He had got rid of the girl by marrying her to Greg Spencer while Greg was drunk. He’d always hated Greg, I imagine; the big house on the hill and the small one below. Greg’s good looks, his money, even his plane. And he was on leave in Los Angeles the night of the party. I knew that from Washington.

“Then he gets here and takes a walk to quiet down. He goes over to Crestview. Why not? He’s engaged to Carol, isn’t he. He doesn’t know the girl’s there. He goes over by the path in the dark, and what he sees is his own father slashing at someone with his cane! When his father’s gone he goes over and strikes a match. It’s Marguerite, and she’s dead.

“Whatever his faults, he was a good son. He loved his father, and his father was a sick man. What was he to do?

“Well, after all, he’s presumed to be dead. What does it matter? He goes back to the Wards’ with a fool tale that he’s killed her, that he’s knocked her down with his fist and she’s hit her head on the stone doorstep. She wasn’t lying on any stone doorstep when she was found. She was in the doorway of the house. That step is wood.

“My own idea is that she
had
been out that night. Remember the pine needle in her slipper. She may even have gone down to the colonel’s and he took her back, probably growing angrier all the way. It must have taken a lot to make him strike her. But he never knew he had killed her. The hall was dark—no electric current. He may not even have heard her fall. Nor even that Lucy Norton, seeing Don in the hospital that night, thought she was seeing a ghost and died of it.

“All along the colonel thought it was Terry Ward, and he was devoted to the Wards. He was sure it was Terry who had shot Elinor Hilliard. He did his best, got her out of the road and tried to call the doctor. But he wasn’t the same after that. I saw him the next day. He put up a good show, but he was in poor shape.”

Floyd stirred.

“Why was the Hilliard woman out that night anyhow?”

“I found a small hole on the hillside the next day. You see, she was covering up as well as she could. Nathaniel had told her he had buried the clothes, and she’d burned the hill. But she was still frightened. She had tried to save Don to save herself, but too much was going on. She was scared of him. So were they all, for that matter.”

“She burned the hill!”

“Certainly. Who else? Carol Spencer knew it.”

“Giving me the runaround again,” Floyd grunted uneasily.

“As a matter of fact,” Dane said, “you’ve got all the Spencers suspecting each other. That threw me off for a while. I suppose I’ve got a bias in favor of our fighting men, but I never thought Greg Spencer was guilty. I got Tim Murphy on the job—”

“Who’s Murphy?”

“One of the best private operatives in New York. Got his own agency.” And when Floyd relapsed into speechless fury, Dane smiled.

“So,” he said, “I began to believe in miracles myself. Don Richardson hadn’t liked Greg, and it looked too much like coincidence that Greg had married his girl. She
was
his girl. She’d named the boy for him. I found that out on the Coast, from his birth registration. And Terry Ward hadn’t left the coast. So what? So maybe Don was alive after all.

“But, if it was Don, he wasn’t acting like a man with a crime on his soul. He was hiding out at Pine Hill. Why?

“Well, I’d learned somebody else had a motive, had been paying a sort of blackmail since the boy was born. But I was still guessing until last night, when I learned that Colonel Richardson had been inquiring of the nature of the wound which killed the girl.

“Mr. Ward had mixed things up by shooting at me, and Elinor Hilliard was keeping her mouth shut. I only learned within the last few hours, for instance, that as she turned into the drive the night of the murder she saw the colonel going into his house, and he was carrying a stick.”

“He always carried a stick,” Floyd said belligerently. “I liked the old boy. Everybody liked him. If you’re trying to say he killed that girl in cold blood—”

Dane’s face looked very tired.

“Not at all,” he said. “I’m saying that for the first time in his life Colonel Richardson struck a woman, and she died of it.”

There was a prolonged silence. Then Floyd got up.

“I suppose you’re sure of all this,” he said heavily. “It’s going to make a stink, Dane. That’s bad for the town.”

“Not necessarily. I want to say this. Don Richardson would never have allowed Spencer to suffer, or his father either. He went back to the Pacific to fight, but he left Mr. Ward a statement to be opened in case Spencer was convicted or he himself was killed.”

“Saying he didn’t?”

“Probably,” Dane said dryly.

“Then where the hell are we?”

“Nowhere.” He gave Floyd a grim smile. “Except that Greg Spencer will never go to trial.”

“That’s what you say,” Floyd said, still truculent. “You’ve been doing a lot of guessing, Dane, but where’s your proof? All you’ve done is lug in a dead man who can’t defend himself. Who didn’t even know he’d done it! I gave you credit for better sense.”

“I think he did know it, the last day or so. Remember, he thought Mr. Ward was going armed against him. He said so. Then why? Had Nathaniel found the body and tried to dispose of it, to protect him? Did they know he had done it, and think he had lost his mind? He himself told me he was considered something of a crackpot around here.

“There’s something else too, Floyd. It’s just possible he thought he recognized Don at the window that rainy night. He wasn’t sure, of course. That might have been the reason he followed him. In that case he must have been badly worried. Why hadn’t Don come to see him? Why had he done none of the normal things? Had Don found the girl unconscious and killed her himself?”

“I’m betting on Don this minute,” Floyd said. “Always was a wild kid. If that girl had two-timed him—”

“Let me go on,” Dane said tiredly. “The colonel was in bad shape. He had to know. So yesterday he saw Dr. Harrison. The girl had died of one blow, by a poker or something similar. He knew then that he had killed her.

“I don’t suppose he slept at all last night. Part of the time he spent writing out a confession. Then when he got the newspaper, with the news that Don was alive and fighting again, he collapsed.”

Floyd’s face was ugly.

“What’s all this about a confession?”

“I have it here.”

Floyd jerked it angrily from his hand and glanced at it. He looked apoplectic.

“How did you get hold of this?” he snarled. “Damn it all, Dane, you’ve been messing in where you didn’t belong ever since this case started.”

“As soon as I’d heard from the doctor last night I called the colonel up and suggested it,” Dane said coolly. “At its worst it was manslaughter, and he knew he hadn’t long to live. Greg Spencer had to be saved somehow. You had too good a case, Floyd, and I hadn’t any. Don’t blame the night telephone operator. I’m a friend of a friend of hers.”

“How’d you get hold of it?”

“Oh, that! I sent Alex there this morning. Good man, Alex.”

“He’s a dirty snooper,” Floyd bellowed, but Dane merely smiled.

“All right. Have it your own way. You’ll find the colonel admits an excess of rage, during which he struck her with a heavy stick he was carrying, and seeing her fall. He admits leaving her there, but not knowing she was dead. He admits he’d been paying her what amounted to blackmail. He even admits to searching the yellow room later for the child’s birth certificate and some evidence of where she had hidden him with the idea of collecting on him later. He didn’t finish it, of course. His heart went back on him, or he would probably have claimed he tried to burn the body!”

“And who did?”

“Does that matter now?”

The two men stared at each other, the one shrewd and angry, the other hard and inflexible. Floyd got up.

“By God, Dane,” he said, “I’m still not sure you didn’t do it yourself!”

He stamped out, and Dane laughed quietly as the door slammed.

H
E LEFT THE HOSPITAL
that afternoon. Alex had stood by while he dressed, his one eye watching every movement.

“I’ll bet that leg’s bad again, sir,” he said. “You aren’t fooling me any.”

“Leg! I wouldn’t know I had a leg. I’ll be going back soon, Alex. I have a little business to transact first. Then I’m off.”

“What sort of business?” Alex inquired suspiciously. “Any more murders around?”

“This is different,” Dane said, carefully knotting his tie. “Very, very different.”

He was sober enough when he reached Crestview. Tim admitted him, a grinning Tim who reached for his cap with a differential air, and spoiled it by clutching him by the arm.

“What the hell’s cooking?” he said. “You’re a tightmouthed son of a so-and-so, but if you’re letting me scrub pots while you have the time of your life running over the country and getting shot—”

Dane smiled.

“The pot scrubbing’s over, Tim.”

“Well, well! I suppose Floyd killed the girl. He’s the only one I haven’t suspected.”

“I’ll tell you later. Where’s Miss Spencer?”

“Locked in her room. Maggie’s been up half a dozen times with coffee. She won’t let her in.”

“I’ll go up. She may see me.”

He went up the stairs. He wasn’t limping at all. In the upper hall he stopped at the door to the yellow room and looked in. It was a pretty room, he thought. The baseboard had been nailed back in place, the mulberry curtains were in neat folds, and the fragment of candle had been replaced by a fresh one, in case a storm shut off the electric current.

He glanced back along the hall. The linen closet had been repainted. It gleamed fresh and white in the light from the patio, and in the patio itself the pool had been repainted and filled. It shone like a bit of the sky overhead, where a bomber was droning along, as if to remind him that there was still a war, and he had a place in it.

He moved along to Carol’s door and rapped.

“It’s Jerry,” he said. “I have to see you.”

He thought she hesitated. Then the key turned and she confronted him. She looked exhausted, but she was not crying. She stood aside to let him enter, but she made no movement toward him.

“I have to thank you for a great deal,” she said quietly. “You’ve saved Greg, even if you had to kill Colonel Richardson to do it.”

He looked puzzled.

“You told him about Don, didn’t you? People don’t die of joy. You called him from the hospital, and told him.”

“I couldn’t tell him anything he didn’t know, Carol,” he said gravely.”

“What does that mean? If Don came here and killed that girl—”

“Listen, my dear,” he said. “I’m feeling pretty low just now. I’ve made a mess of a lot of things, and I don’t like the way the case has turned out. But remember this. I asked you today to withhold judgment. I needed something I didn’t have at that time. Now I’m asking a question. Suppose Don is innocent, Carol?”

“You don’t mean that Greg—”

“Not Greg. No. I’m wondering how you feel about Don, now that he is alive. You cared for him once. Now he is more than alive. He is fighting like a man. You can be proud of him. And the affair with Marguerite—can’t you understand that? The hunger a man feels for a woman when he’s been cut off from them for months, or years. He was young, and he’d been in training for a long time when he met her. He didn’t know she was a—well, what she was.”

“Are you defending him?”

“I am. He is even braver than you know, my dear. You see, he confessed to a murder he didn’t commit. That takes courage. Perhaps that changes things with you—and him.”

“I’m not in love with him, if that’s what you mean. But I don’t understand,” she said steadily. She sat down, looking lost and unhappy. “Why would he do such a thing?”

He told her then, moving around the room as he did so. Sometimes stopping in front of her, again looking out the window, where the bomber was circling lazily overhead and the empty harbor with its emerald islands lay below. Once he stopped and offered her a cigarette, but she shook her head.

“Go on,” she said steadily. “I want to know it all. It’s time I did, isn’t it?”

When he had finished she sat very still. Nevertheless, except that she had lost color, she had taken it better than he had even hoped.

“It’s hard to realize,” she said, rather bleakly. “If it was anyone but the colonel. He was so kind, Jerry, so—gentle.”

“He was a man,” he reminded her. “Very much a man, my dear. When that little tramp tried to bribe him he struck at her. I’m afraid I’d have done more than that.”

She was trying to think things out, from this new angle.

“Then it was the colonel who scared Lucy, and shot Elinor. I—I don’t believe it.”

“Not the colonel, my dear. Don shot Elinor. I don’t think he meant to, any more than Mr. Ward intended to hit me. It was an accident. He was trying to get away.”

But he did not tell her, would never tell her, what he knew now was the real tragedy of that night; of Don, anxious for a last sight of his father, slipping down from Pine Hill in the rain to peer through a window and see the colonel, standing in full view in that lighted room. Or of the heartbreaking thing that had followed, the colonel starting up the lane after him and Don desperately trying to escape.

“What would happen if his father saw him? Can you imagine the Colonel keeping that news to himself. And what became of Don’s statement to the Wards that he had killed the girl? Was he to tell his father that? The man who had done it without knowing it, and who had a bad heart anyhow. What did Elinor Hilliard matter, in a situation like that?

“He probably came across her unexpectedly,” he said, “and he was pretty jumpy. Don’t ask me where he got the gun, my darling. I don’t know. It may have been Nathaniel Ward’s. Don never meant to be taken alive. Be sure of that.”

He sat down near her, watching her, wondering at the fortitude she had shown for the past month. Perhaps it was the same courage which had won Greg his decoration. Whatever it was he knew that he loved her more than he loved anything else in the world. It was not time to tell her so, however. Not so long as the bewildered look was still in her eyes.