"I"ll stay and see it out. If you get anything from Vandeman, I miss my guess."
CHAPTER XXI
A MATTER OF TASTE
Upon our few moments of strained waiting, Vandeman breezed in, full of apologies for his shirtsleeves. I remember noticing the monogram worked on the left silken arm, the fit and swing of immaculate trousers, as smoothly modeled to the hip as a girl"s gown; his ever smiling face; the slightly exaggerated way he wiped fingers already clean on a handkerchief pulled from a rear pocket. He was the only unconstrained person in the room; he hardly looked surprised; his glance was merely inquiring. Edwards apparently couldn"t stand it. He jumped up and began his characteristic pacing of one end of the constricted place, jerking out as he walked,
"Bronse, it"s my fault that Boyne sent for you. He"s working on this trouble of Worth"s, you know. He"s had me in here, grilling me, shaking me over h.e.l.l; and something I said--G.o.d knows why--sent him after you."
"Trouble of Worth"s!" Vandeman had been about to sit; his half bent knees straightened out again; he stood beside the chair and spoke irritably. "Told you, Boyne, if you meddled with that coroner"s verdict you"d get your employer in the devil of a tight place. n.o.body had any reason for wanting Worth"s father out of the way--except Worth, himself.
Frankly, I think you"re wrong. But everything that I can do--of course--"
"All right," I said, letting it fly at him. "Where was your wife from seven to half past nine on the evening of Gilbert"s murder?"
Back went his head; out flashed all the fine teeth; the man laughed in my face.
"Excuse me, Mr. Boyne. I understand that this is serious--nothing funny about it--but really, you know, recalling the date, what you"ve said is amusing. My dear man," he went on as I stared at him, "please remember, yourself, where Ina was on that particular evening."
"The wedding and reception were done with by seven o"clock," I objected.
This ground was familiar with me. I"d been over it in considering what opportunity Laura Bowman would have had for a call on Thomas Gilbert at the required hour. If she could slip away for it, why not Ina Vandeman?
As though he read my thoughts and answered them, Vandeman filled in,
"A bride, you know, is dead certain to have at least half a dozen persons with her every minute of the time until she leaves the house on her wedding trip. Ina did, I"m sure. We"ll just call her in, and she"ll give you their names."
He was up and starting to bring her; I stopped him.
"We"ll not bother with those names just now. I"d rather have you--or Mrs. Vandeman--tell me what you suppose would be the entry in Thomas Gilbert"s diary for May 31 and June 1, 1916. I have already identified it as the date on which the Bowmans first moved into the Wallace house.
I think Mr. Edwards knows something more, but he"s not so communicative as you promise to be."
He looked as if he wished he hadn"t been so liberal with his a.s.surances.
I saw him glance half sulkily at Edwards, as he exclaimed,
"But those diaries are burned--they"re burned. Worth told us the other night that he burned them without reading."
At the words, Edwards stopped stock-still, something almost humorous at the back of the suffering gaze he fastened on my face. I met it steadily, then answered Vandeman,
"Doesn"t make any difference to anybody that those books are burned. I"d read them; I know what was in them; and I know that three leaves--six pages--covering the entries of May 31 and June 1, 1916, were cut out."
"But what the deuce, Boyne?" Vandeman wrinkled a smooth brow. "What would some leaves gone from Mr. Gilbert"s diary four years ago have to do with us here to-day--or even with his recent death?"
"Pardon me," I said shortly. "The matter"s not as old as that. True, the stuff was written four years ago; it recorded happenings on those dates; but the ink that was used in marking out a run-over on the next following page was fresh. Anyhow, Mr. Vandeman, we know that a woman came weeping to Mr. Gilbert on the very night of his death, only a short time before his death--as nearly as medical science can determine that--and we believe that she came after those leaves out of the diary, and got them--whatever she had to do to secure them."
I was struck with the difference in the way these two men took inquiry.
Edwards had writhed, changed color, started to speak and caught himself back, showed all the agony of a clumsy criminal who dreads the probing that may give him away: temperament; the rotten spot in his affairs.
Vandeman, younger, not entangled with an unhappy married woman, sat looking me in the eye, still smiling. The blow I had to deal him would be harder. It concerned his bride; but he"d take punishment well. I proceeded to let him have it.
"I can see that Mr. Edwards has an idea what the entries on those pages covered. He has inadvertently shown me that your wife was the woman who came and got them from Thomas Gilbert on the night he was murdered."
At that he turned on Edwards, and Edwards answered the look with,
"I didn"t. On my honor, Bronse, I never mentioned your name or Ina"s.
The Chinaman told him that--about some woman coming that evening--"
"Mr. Vandeman," I broke in, "there"s no use beating about the bush.
Chung recognized your wife"s voice. She was the woman who came weeping to get those diary leaves."
He took that with astonishing quietness, and,
"Suppose you were shown that she wasn"t out of her mother"s house?"
"Wouldn"t stop me. Allow that her alibi"s perfect. Yet you men have something. There"s something here I ought to know."
"Something you"ll never find out from me," Jim Edwards" deep voice was full of defiance. "Bronse, I owe you an apology; but you can depend on me to keep my mouth shut."
After a minute"s consideration Vandeman said,
"I don"t know why we should any of us keep our mouths shut."
Jim Edwards looked utterly bewildered as the man sat there, thinking the thing over, glanced up pleasantly at me and suggested,
"Edwards has a little different slant on this from me. I don"t know why I shouldn"t state to you exactly what happened--right there in Gilbert"s study on the date you mentioned."
"Oh, there did something unusual happen; and you"ve just remembered it."
"There did something unusual happen, and I"ve just remembered it, aided thereto by your questions and Edwards" queer looks. Cheer up, old man; we haven"t all got your southern chivalry. From a plain, commonsense point of view, what I have to tell is not in the least to my wife"s discredit. In fact, I"m proud of her all the way through."
Jim Edwards came suddenly and nervously to his feet, strode to the further corner of the room and sat down at as great a distance from Vandeman as its dimensions would permit. He turned his face to the small window there, and through all that Vandeman said, kept up a steady, maddening tattoo with his fingernails on the sill.
"This has to do with what I told you the first night I ever talked with you, Boyne. You threw doubt on Thomas Gilbert"s death being suicide. I gave as a reason for my belief that it was, a knowledge and conviction that the man"s mind was unhinged."
Edwards" tattoo at the window ceased for a minute. He stared, startled, at the speaker, then went back to it, and Vandeman proceeded,
"I"m not telling Jim Edwards anything he doesn"t know, and what I say to you, Boyne, that"s discreditable to the dead, I can"t avoid. Here it is: on the evening of June first, 1916, I had dinner alone at home. You"ll find, if you look at an old calendar, that it falls on a Sunday. Jim Edwards had dined informally at the Thornhills". As he told it to me later, they were all sitting out on the side porch after dinner, and n.o.body noticed that Ina wasn"t with them until they heard cries coming from somewhere over in the direction of the Gilbert place. At my house, I"d heard it, and we both ran for the garage, where the screams were repeated again and again. We got there about the same time, found the disturbance was in the study, and Edwards who was ahead of me rushed up and hammered on its door."
Again Jim Edwards stopped the nervous drumming of his fingers on the window-sill while he stared at the younger man as at some prodigy of nature. Finally he seemed unable to hold in any longer.
"Hammered on the door!" he repeated. "If you"re going to turn out the whole d.a.m.n" thing to Boyne, tell it straight; door was open; we couldn"t have heard a yip out of Ina if it hadn"t been. Tom there in full sight, sitting in his desk chair, cool as a cuc.u.mber, letting her scream."
"I"m telling this," Vandeman snapped. "Gilbert looked to me like an insane man. Jim, you"re crazy as he was, to say anything else. Never supposed for a minute you thought otherwise--that poor girl there, dazed with fright, backed as far away from him as she could get, hair flying, eyes wild."
I looked from one to the other. What Edwards had said of the cold, contemptuous old man; what Vandeman told of the screaming girl; no answer to such a proposition of course but an attempted frame-up. To let the bridegroom get by would best serve my purpose.
"All right, gentlemen," I said. "And now could you tell me what action you took, on this state of affairs?"
"Action?" Vandeman gave me an uneasy look. "What was there to do? Told you I thought the man was crazy."