CHAPTER XX

CHECKING UP

I KNOW that the Wrenn woman probably did it,” said Barrison, speaking to Lowry in the inspector’s office. “And I’m going to move heaven and earth to find her. But I’ve a hunch—a sort of theory—that those two women, Miss Templeton and Miss Legaye, know more than they’ve told us yet.”

He tried to keep himself from feeling guilty when he spoke of Grace Templeton; certainly his own reasons for particular interest in her had no place in a police investigation, and yet he became subtly embarrassed whenever her name came up.

“Never,” said Lowry, smoking his large, black, bad cigar, “never have theories. Find out the situation, and build your theories into that. You started off on the idea that these two women—Templeton and Legaye—were mixed up in the business somehow. You’ve been chasing ’round, worrying about them, to make that idea good. Now, I don’t believe either of ’em knows a darned thing about it! They may both have been in love with the man, but nowadays actresses, with their futures ahead, don’t often queer themselves that way. However, if there were any evidence against either of ’em, I’d go after it fast enough. But there isn’t. In fact, there’s conclusive evidence clearing them both. There’s the pistol, for instance. Not one initial among the four belonging to the two women resembles an M.”

“One moment, inspector!” broke in Barrison. “That isn’t an M, it’s a W.”

“Discovered that, eh?” remarked the inspector imperturbably. “I wondered if you would. If you’ll look at the pistol closely, though, my dear boy, you’ll find that the angle at which it is engraved is a curious one. It might be either an M or a W. It depends on how you look at it. The letter is oddly shaped; looked at from different points, it makes just as good a W as it does an M, and vice versa. Well, the ladies in question have no more W’s in their names than they have M’s. Then, Miss Templeton could not have got behind the scenes in time.”

“I imagine not,” admitted Jim. “Of course, we are dealing in what was possible, not likely; the door was unguarded just then, and——”

“The door was unguarded after the shot, not before.”

“If you believe the man Lynch. But—mind you, I suspect her no more than you, but—she was familiar with the theater.”

“Familiar—hell! No one’s familiar with any place in the pitch dark! And the other woman had gone home, hadn’t she?”

“Miss Legaye had gone home, as it was generally supposed,” said Jim, feeling obliged to register conscientiously every passing suspicion of his. “But Miss Templeton thinks she saw her near the front of the theater just after the tragedy.”

“Well, you’ve only got that woman’s word for that! Will she swear to it? No? I thought not! She’s just talking through her hat, either to queer the other, or to make herself interesting to you! Say, Barrison, you’re dippy on this thing! I always thought you were a pretty snappy detective for a young un! Now get rid of your theories, and your hunches and your intuitions and your suspicions, and check up! That’s what I’ve been doing all day, and, take it from me, while it may be old-fashioned, it’s the method that gets there nine times out of ten. Here goes!”

He took a sheet of paper and made notes, as he talked.

“Now that shot, according to the medical report, was fired at close range; very close range, indeed. The khaki of the man’s uniform was quite a bit burned by it. The bullet entered under the right arm, so he must have had his arms lifted, either to take hold of Miss Merivale, as she said, or for some other reason. It entered the body below the right armpit, and made a clean drill through the right lung at a slightly upward angle. Then it lodged in an upper rib just under the right breast. That explains the big splotch of blood on the breast. It could have been fired from either of two ways.”

He drew a rough diagram on the page before him, representing an imaginary, cylindrical man, two crosses, and a couple of dotted lines.

“So! If Miss Merivale did it,” he explained, pencil in hand, “he’d have to be standing facing toward the front of the house, with his arm slightly raised, and his right side exposed to her aim.”

“Isn’t that an unlikely attitude, under the circumstances?”

“It is unlikely, but it is perfectly possible. It’s only in songs that every little movement has a meaning all its own! Do you always have a good and logical reason for every motion you make? If you do, you’re a freak! The great difficulty with most detectives is that they try to get a reason and a sequence for everything, as though they were putting a puzzle together or writing a play. In real life, half the things we do we do for no reason at all, or from sheer natural human contrariness! However, never mind that. Now, if the other woman—the woman we believe was in the theater last night—fired the shot, she only had to stand in close at the foot of the four-step entrance, and reach up. Even if she were a small woman, she would be able to place her bullet just about where it was found. It’s a toss-up, Barrison. Either Miss Merivale fired that shot, or the unknown woman did.”

“The unknown woman I don’t consider unknown any longer. She is Wrenn’s daughter, without a doubt.”

“On Miss Templeton’s testimony? Tut, tut, my dear Barrison!”

“But, surely, the unknown woman, if you insist on continuing to think her unknown, is the more likely bet of the two?”

Inspector Lowry pulled at his cigar, and wrinkled his heavy brows.

“Likely! I’m mortally afraid of those ‘likely’ clews! When a thing looks too blamed ‘likely,’ I get scared. Nature and life and crime don’t work that way! Besides,” drawled the inspector, “we’ve not got her, and we have got the other one! There’s everything in possession!”

“But you aren’t going to hold Miss Merivale on a mere——”

“Hold your horses, boy! We aren’t holding her at all at present. She is as free as air, and will continue to be free for quite a while, anyway. But she’s being watched, Barrison, my boy, she’s being watched every minute. And she’ll go on being watched.”

Lowry relighted his defunct cigar.

“Incidentally,” he added, “we’ve got a few fresh points on this. You’d be interested in hearing them, I suppose?”

“Interested!”

“Very well. For one thing, Mrs. Parry, the dresser at the theater, has given us rather an odd piece of evidence. She says that a messenger boy called at Miss Merivale’s dressing room during the evening. She was not in the room at the time, but saw him knock, saw him admitted, and saw him go away.”

“Nothing odd in that, surely—on a first night?”

“Nothing at all odd. Mrs. Parry also recalls that, when she went in to help Miss Merivale for the last act——”

“Miss Merivale had no change for the last act.”

“No; so I understand. But she had gone back to her dressing room as usual for a few final touches. She had to alter her make-up slightly, hadn’t she?”

“Yes; she had to be rather paler in the last act.” Barrison was somewhat impressed by Lowry’s thorough, even if archaic, way of getting his facts.

“Quite so,” said the inspector equably. “Well, Mrs. Parry says that, as she entered the dressing room, she saw Miss Merivale walking up and down the room, evidently very angry. She had a note in her hand, and as she saw the woman, she tore it up in a lot of little pieces, and made an effort to become composed. Then she went hastily over to the dressing table, and caught up something that was lying there.”

“Something! What?”

“Mrs. Parry does not know. She knows that it was a small object possibly as long as her hand. She does not vouch for its shape. She just saw it in the flash of an eye.”

“And what is Miss Merivale supposed to have done with it?”

“Miss Merivale put it, very swiftly indeed, into the front of her white gown.”

Barrison felt thunderstruck. That pretty, frank-eyed girl! Why, the thing was unbelievable! Impetuously he said:

“But, as you’ve impressed on me more than once, the testimony of a single person can’t be conclusive. Suppose——”

“Suppose that testimony is borne out by that of others? Miss McAllister remembers Miss Merivale’s fingering the buttons on the front of her blouse several times, in a nervous way. And two of the minor actors in that scene say that she kept her hand at her breast when it was not part of the business, as though she could not entirely forget something she carried there.”

Lowry paused, as though to let these points sink into his hearer’s intelligence. Then he continued:

“We found the torn scraps of the note, at least enough of them to be able to get quite a fair idea of what its purport had been.” Lowry opened the drawer of his desk and took out a Manila envelope. From it he drew a sheet of paper upon which had been pasted a number of words, some of them in sequence and some of them detached and far apart. He pushed the paper across to Barrison.

“Have a look,” he said laconically. Barrison read:

“What do you make of it?” asked Lowry, after Barrison had stared at the cryptic mosaic of paper scraps for a moment or two.

The younger detective began to fill in and piece together. He evolved the logical complete letter:

Lowry read it and smiled.

“Quite good,” he pronounced. “Here’s another answer.”

And he pushed another sheet toward Jim.

This one read—with the words of the recovered scraps underlined—as follows:

Barrison read, and then, with a slight shrug, pushed it back toward the older man.

“I see very little difference,” he said.

“Really? Can’t you see that one is a love letter, and one a threat?”

“If you choose to put in phrases like ‘you beautiful fiend!’” said Barrison, raising his eyebrows.

Lowry chuckled. “Doesn’t it sound kind of natural?” he queried. “Oh, well, maybe I’m behind the times! I just tried to make it natural. But seriously, Jim, there is a difference, and you’d better get on to it quick. That letter—which was from Mortimer; I’ve had the handwriting verified—might have been a threat to a woman whom he was dead set on getting, or a billet-doux to a girl he was sweet on, and who was acting shy. Isn’t that right?”

Barrison frowned over the two epistles.

“You’ve something else up your sleeve,” he declared, watching him closely. “I’ve a good mind to go and call on Miss Merivale myself.”

“Do!” said Lowry, turning to his desk with the air of a man dismissing a lot of troublesome business, and glad of it. “You will find that she is too ill to see a soul; utterly prostrated since last night. Will that hold you for a while, you uppity young shrimp?”