This time the silence was complete. No one said anything. Mrs. Veering opened her mouth to speak; then shut it again, like a mackerel on dry land.
“With Mrs. Veering’s permission, I’d like to have the house searched for the bottle which contained the pills.”
Our hostess nodded, too dazed for words. Greaves poked his head into the hall and said, “O.K., boys.” The boys started their search of the house.
“Meanwhile,” continued the detective, “I’d appreciate it if everyone remained in this room while I interview you all, individually.” He accepted our silence as agreement. To my surprise, he motioned to me. “You’ll be first, Mr. Sargeant,” he said. I followed him into the alcove. Behind us a sudden buzz of talk, like a hive at swarming time, broke upon the drawing room: indignation, alarm, fear.
He asked me the routine questions and I gave him the routine answers.
Then he got down to the case in hand. At this point, I was still undecided as to what I wanted to do. My mind was working quickly. I've done a few pieces for the N.Y. Globe since I left them and I knew that I could get a nice sum for any story I might do on the death of Mildred Brexton; at the same time, there was the problem of Mrs. Veering and my business loyalty to her. This was decidedly the kind of publicity which would be bad for her. I was split down the middle trying to figure what angle to work. While answering his questions, I made an important decision: I decided to say nothing of the quarrel I’d overheard between Brexton and Claypoole. This, I decided, would be my ace-in-the-hole if I should decide to get a beat on the other newspaper people. All in all, I made a mistake.
“Now, Mr. Sargeant, you have, I gather, no real connection with any of these people, is that right?”
I nodded. “Never saw any of them until last night.”
“Your impression then should be useful, as an unprejudiced outsider . . . assuming you’re telling us the truth.” The detective smiled sadly at me.
“I understand all about perjury,” I said stuffily.
“I’m very glad,” said the officer of the law gently. “What, then was your impression of Mrs. Brexton when you first saw her?”
“A fairly good-looking, disagreeable woman, very edgy.” “Was anything said about her nervous breakdown?”
I nodded. “Yes, it was mentioned, to explain her conduct which was unsocial, to say the least.”
“Who mentioned it to you?” He was no clod; I began to have a certain respect for him. I could follow his thought; it made me think along lines that hadn’t occurred to me before.
“Mrs. Veering, for one, and Miss Claypoole for another and, I think, Miss Lung said something about it too.”
"Before or after the . . . death?”
“Before, I think. I’m not sure. Anyway I did get the impression pretty quick that she was in a bad way mentally and had to be catered to. It all came out in the open the night before she died, when there was some kind of scene between her and her husband.” I told him about the screams, about Mrs. Veering’s coming to us with soothing words. He took all this down without comment. I couldn’t tell whether it was news to him or not. I assumed it was since he hadn’t interviewed any of the others yet. I figured I’d better tell him this since he would hear it soon enough from them. I was already beginning to think of him as a competitor. In the past I’d managed, largely by accident ,to solve a couple of peculiar crimes. This one looked promising; it was certainly bewildering enough.
“No one actually saw Mrs, Brexton screaming?”
“We all heard her. I suppose her husband must’ve been with her and I think maybe Mrs. Veering was there too, though I don't know. She seemed to be coming from their bedroom, from downstairs, when she told us not to worry.”
“I see. Now tell me about this morning.
I told him exactly what had happened: how Brexton got to Mildred first and then nearly drowned himself; how Clay-poole pulled her to shore; how I rescued Brexton.
He took all this down without comment. I could see he was wondering the same thing I’d begun to wonder: had Brexton had a chance to pull his wife under just before we got there? I couldn’t be absolutely sure because the surf had been in my eyes most of the way out and I hadn’t been able to see properly. I doubted it ... if only because, when I reached them, Brexton was still several feet from his wife who was already half-dead. That Claypoole might have drowned her on the long pull back to shore was an equal possibility but I didn’t mention it to Greaves who didn’t ask me either. He was only interested in getting the eyewitness part straight.
I asked a question then: "Just what effect would four sleeping pills have . . . four of the kind she took? Are they fatal?”
He looked at me thoughtfully as though wondering whether to bother answering or not. Finally, he said: “They weren’t enough to kill her. Make her weak, though, groggy . . . they slowed down the beating of the heart.”
"Well, that explains the funny way she swam. I thought the others were just sounding off when they said she was such a fine athlete. She almost fell on her face in her first dive into the surf and her strokes were all off . . . even I could tell that and I’m no coach.”
“There’s no doubt she died as a result of weakness. She wasn't strong enough to get out of the undertow. The question of course is why, if she’d taken the pills herself, would she've gone in the water instead of to bed where she belonged?”
“To kill herself?” This was the puzzle, I knew.
“A possibility.”
“But then somebody might’ve slipped her those pills, knowing she would probably go swimming."
“Another possibility.” Greaves was enigmatic.
“But how could anybody count on that happening? She wasn’t feeling well . . . maybe she would’ve just stayed on the shore in the sun. From what I saw of her that would've been my guess. I was even surprised, now that I look back, that she went in the ocean at all.”
“The person who gave her the pills might have known her better than you. He might’ve known she would go in the water no matter what her condition.” Greaves made notes while he talked.
“And the person who knew her best was, of course, her husband.”
Greaves looked at me steadily, “I didn’t say that.”
“Who else? Even so, if I were Brexton and I wanted to kill my wife, I wouldn’t do it like that, with everybody else around.”
“Fortunately, you’re not Brexton.” The coldness in his voice gave me all the clue I needed. The police thought Brexton had killed his wife. I don’t know why but even then I didn’t think he was responsible. I suppose because my mind dislikes the obvious even though the obvious, as any detective will tell you, nine times out of ten provides the answer.
I threw one last doubt in his path. “Why, if somebody was going to give her the pills, didn’t they give her a fatal dose?”
“We must find that out.” Greaves was reasonable, polite, bored with me.
Wanting to attract his attention for future need, I said, coolly, “I’ll be writing about all this for the New York Globe."
This had the effect I intended. He winced visibly. “I thought you were in public relations, Mr. Sargeant.”
“I used to be on the Globe. In the last few years I’ve done some features for them. I guess you remember that business a couple of years back when Senator Rhodes was murdered. . .
Greaves looked at me with some interest. “You’re that fellow? I remember the case.”
“I was, if I say so myself, of some use to the police.”
“That wasn’t the way I heard it.”