At One-Thirty, Isabel Ostrander [ebook reader with highlight function .TXT] 📗

“You have done a lot. Inspector; but I don’t quite see where it comes in connection with the murder. Do you?”

“No,” Inspector Hanrahan admitted. “I don’t quite see that yet myself; but it may come out later. Anyway, it’s worth sifting to the bottom. We’ve not got any other clue to go on.”

“Of course,” Gaunt said musingly, as if to himself, “if any outsider, who has not come into the case as yet, committed the murder, he must have had an ally in the house to let him in, in the first place, and then attempt to conceal traces of the crime afterward, and that hardly seems feasible, since no one seems to have known of this private matter except Garret Appleton, himself.”

“How about that butler, Dakers? I’ve had my eye on him from the first. I cannot help feehng, somehow, that he holds the key to the whole thing.”

The Inspector had risen, and Gaunt rose with him.

“Inspector, it’s well that you’ve no stealthy criminal to trail tonight—a criminal with trained ears and a sense of humor/’ the detective remarked jestingly. “If you had, your task would be hopeless from the start.”

“Why?” The Inspector reddened, and shifted uneasily from one foot to the other. “I don’t get you, Mr. Gaunt.”

“Your boots, man! I could hear you coming three hundred yards away. You’ve taken to wearing that soft goat’s-skin, again, machinesewn, and you creak like a windlass!” He clapped the discomfited official on the back in friendly fashion, and added: “Well, let me know if you get anything, and, if I learn anything, definitely, you’ll hear from me. Turn about is only fair play, and we seem to be working together on this thing.”

“Yes, sir. I’ve not forgotten the pointer you gave me last night—to watch that butler. To be sure,” he added hastily, “I have suspected him all along, as I’ve said, of knowing something; but it sort of confirmed it, when I found he’d impressed you the same way. You’ll hear from me in the morning, sir.”

After he had departed. Gaunt dined hastily, and then spent the intervening time before the anticipated arrival of Randolph Force at the telephone. His several short conversations seemed to bring him no satisfaction, however, and he turned from his own thoughts with a distinct feeling of relief, when his visitor was announced.

Randolph Force’s step was firm and steady, his handclasp warm and vigorous, his voice low and rich. He brought in with him a breath of the cool, clean outdoors and a faint odor of good tobacco. Gaunt felt instinctively drawn to this man, who was the affianced husband of the woman who had so deeply impressed him.

He seemed, even in the first ^few moments of their meeting, to be a fit mate for her, strong and controlled and ringing true.

“Mr. Gaunt? Miss Ellerslie told me you wished to see me. If I can be of any assistance—”

“Sit down, Mr. Force. I wanted some information, in a general way, concerning the Appleton family—the men of the family, in particular—from one who had known them well, yet who was not one of their intimate associates. I thought that you would be able to give it to me.”

The other man laughed pleasantly.

“I’ve known them always—the two boys, I mean. What makes you think I am not an associate of theirs?”

“Because Miss Ellerslie tells me that she is engaged to you. She would not be likely, I think, to choose her future husband from among the confreres of her brother-in-law.”

There was a moment’s pause, and then the young man said gravely:

“I see your point, Mr. Gaunt. As a matter-of-fact, although my family and the Appletons have been closely allied socially for three generations, I’ve never gone around very much with Garret and Yates. Our interests—let us say, our ideas of amusement—differ.”

“Can you tell me—confidentially, of course— something of the two men, Mr. Force—something of their characters and pursuits?”

“That’s rather a difficult proposition. A man doesn’t like to discuss other men, from a personal standpoint. Yates is rather an ass, I should say. No real downright harm in him; but he goes the pace, and his friends make a fool of him, generally. With Garret—hang it all! one shouldn’t speak ill of the dead—but the same tendencies Yates manifests had sunk in deeper in him, if you know what I mean—the tendency to consider vices a form of modern sport. With Yates, it is merely foolish weakness; with Garret, it had become sheer evilness. Yates drinks with his crowd; Garret alone. Yates is without moral stamina; Garret was deliberately, shrewdly vicious. You understand the distinction I am endeavoring to make?”

“Perfectly. You say that your family have been closely allied to that of the Appletons, for three generations? Can you tell me something of their antecedents?”

“Their father, Finlay Appleton, was a fine old man, and a great friend of my late father’s. Their grandfather, Appleton, started in hfe as an upstate farmer’s boy, and died a multi-millionaire and power in Wall Street. Their mother was a Yates—one of the Tuxedo Yates. Her people were rich, too, but far from being as wealthy as the Appletons. Her father was a bom miser, and would have done anything, gone to any lengths, to accumulate and hoard money. That is a trait which Garret Appleton had inherited to a marked degree. He, of course, entertained lavishly, and spent money with seeming extravagance; but it was only to keep up his position before the world, to gain the reputation of being a generous, but never spendthrift, millionaire.

“From his grandfather, Yates, he inherited an inordinate love of money for its own sake, and there have more than once been whispers in the Street that his operations were not entirely on the level; in fact, were perilously near the danger line. Of this, I think, his wife was in total ignorance; but then, as far as I can learn, he never took the trouble to make a companion or confidant of her.”

“Being engaged to Miss Ellerslie, you must know of the conditions existing in the household of her brother-in-law. “

“Yes, Mr. Gaunt; but I prefer not to speak of theni. You understand that, even to aid you in your investigation, it would be impossible for me to do so. Miss Ellerslie has told me that you are aware of the circumstances under which they lived, of the unhappiness of her sister’s home life, and the hostile attitude assumed toward them by the other members of the family. Surely, that is sufficient, without going into details, which can have no bearing on the fact of Garret’s death, and which really concern only the people involved? Really, it is a—a painful subject.”

“I am going to be very frank with you, Mr. Force. I am going to assume that you, as a prospective member of the family, are cognizant, at least, of all the intimate, personal facts, which I, as a detective, have been able to glean in two days. I know that Mr. Appleton had transferred his affections from his wife to a young society girl, a frequent guest at his house, and that, partly in consequence of that, partly because of certain traits in his character, his behavior to his wife was brutal in the extreme. But I heard a suggestion, also, that young Mrs. Appleton herself was not without an opportunity of consoling herself, whether she availed herself of it, or not.”

“What?” the young man roared, jumping to his feet. “They dared to do that! To utter a whisper against an innocent, deeply suffering woman! That was Yates, not his mother, I know. She is too jealous of the family honor, too fearful of gossip and scandal—of which she has already endured enough, through her sons— to breathe a word against anyone who bore her name. It must have been Yates—the contemptible cur! Now I will speak, Mr. Gaunt!”

Randolph Force turned, and began pacing furiously up and down before the hearth; and Gaunt rested motionless in his chair, waiting for the other’s suddenly aroused indignation to find vent in speech. At length. Force stopped abruptly, facing the detective, and his words came with a rush:

^‘Natalie Appleton is as true and loyal a little woman, as gentle a spirit, as ever existed. She would not utter a word of complaint, of disparagement even, under all the weight of her husband’s intolerable cruelties. For he was cruel; not passionately, but systematically, fiendishly. Never mind how I know. It was not, I assure you, from her own lips. A man who was as constant a visitor at the house as I, the prospective husband of her sister, could not help but inadvertently observe much that was not meant for his eyes, hear much that was not meant for his ears, and come inevitably to know the truth.

“I did not neeii the gossip of the clubs and the business world—although I heard enough of it, heaven knows!—to know the sort of life she and her siste^r were leading. I tell you, Mr. Gaunt, if those two girls had had a single male relative living. Garret Appleton would have had a bullet in his heart long ago!”

He stopped suddenly, and, in the silence that followed, Gaunt could hear the creaking of the heavy leather chair,, as the young man flung himself back in his seat. Although the detective waited, he did not speak again, and the stillness deepened and was prolonged between them, until it seemed to hang, heavy and sentient, upon the air. At last. Gaunt himself broke the spell:

“You have known Miss Ellerslie long, Mr. Force?”

“Ever since she came North, to make her home with her sister. Although not intimate with either of the brothers, as I have said, our families were old friends, and I have been a frequent visitor, with my mother and sisters, at Mrs. Finlay Appleton’s house. When Garret married, of course, I called, and admired his pretty, blonde little wife tremendously, even before I realized the strength of character that lay behind her physical frailty. Then—then I met Miss Ellerslie, and I— well, Mr. Gaunt, I imagine you know how it is with a man!”

He paused in a sudden access of boyish confusion, which was infinitely attractive after his outburst of very real indignation and the selfrepression that had followed it. But the detective did not heed the tone so much as the words themselves. He, too, had experienced the magnetism that Barbara EHerslie’s mere presence bore with it, the music in the soft, drawling pulsation of her voice, the unnamable charm in the nearness of her. The mention of her by the other man had seemed to evoke her actual being; it was as if she were there in that room^ standing before him, before his sightless eyes. He could almost hear the sound of her light footfall, feel the brush of her skirt against his knee, the touch of her cool little hand; smell the fresh, pure fragrance of her, the perfume of her breath upon his cheek, as when she had leaned toward him in the earnestness of her disclosures of the previous day…. Oh, yes, he knew how it was with a man!

“You were—to have been married soon?” He heard his own voice quietly, steadily, breaking the silence.

“This autumn, if things had grown a little brighter for Natalie. I’ve had a splendid post offered me in Russia. I don’t need the money, of course; but it is a wonderful opportunity in the diplomatic world. When it became evident that Barbara—that Miss Ellerslie could not leave her sister, I renounced it, of course, and now everything must be left to the future. I have hopes, though, that, when Natalie’s health is restored from the effects of this frightful shock,