“I did,” I grinned back, “but not enough.”
“Why not? You may be making a mistake,” he drawled. “You know my room is just across the hall from his, and I could have left my window, crept across the porch, fired at him, and then run back to my room, on that first night.
“And on the second night – when you were here – you ought to know that I left Knownburg in plenty of time to have come out here, parked my car down the road a bit, fired those two shots, crept around in the shadow of the house, run back to my car, and then come driving innocently up to the garage. You should know also that my reputation isn’t any too good – that I’m supposed to be a bad egg; and you do know that I don’t like the old man. And for a motive, there is the fact that my wife is Exon’s only heir. I hope” – he raised his eyebrows in burlesqued pain – “that you don’t think I have any moral scruples against a well-placed murder now and then.”
I laughed. “I don’t.”
“Well, then?”
“If Exon had been killed that first night, and I had come up here, you’d be doing your joking behind bars long before this. And if he’d been killed the second night, even, I might have grabbed you. But I don’t figure you as a man who’d bungle so easy a job – not twice, anyway. You wouldn’t have missed, and then run away, leaving him alive.”
He shook my hand gravely.
“It is comforting to have one’s few virtues appreciated.”
Before Talbert Exon died he sent for me. He wanted to die, he said, with his curiosity appeased; and so we traded information. I told him how I had come to suspect him and he told me why he had tried to kill Barbra Caywood.
Fourteen years ago he had killed his wife, not for the insurance, as he had been suspected of doing, but in a fit of jealousy. However, he had so thoroughly covered up the proofs of his guilt that he had never been brought to trial; but the murder had weighed upon him, to the extent of becoming an obsession.
He knew that he would never give himself away consciously – he was too shrewd for that – and he knew that proof of his guilt could never be found. But there was always the chance that some time, in delirium, in his sleep, or when drunk, he might tell enough to bring him to the gallows.
He thought upon this angle too often, until it became a morbid fear that always hounded him. He had given up drinking – that was easy – but there was no way of guarding against the other things.
And one of them, he said, had finally happened. He had got pneumonia, and for a week he had been out of his head, and he had talked. Coming out of that week’s delirium, he had questioned the nurse. She had given him vague answers, would not tell him what he had talked about, what he had said. And then, in unguarded moments, he had discovered that her eyes rested upon him with loathing – with intense repulsion.
He knew then that he had babbled of his wife’s murder; and he set about laying plans for removing the nurse before she repeated what she had heard.
For so long as she remained in his house, he counted himself safe. She would not tell strangers, and it might be that for a while she would not tell anyone. Professional ethics would keep her quiet, perhaps; but he could not let her leave his house with her knowledge of his secret.
Daily and in secret, he had tested his strength until he knew himself strong enough to walk about the room a little, and to hold a revolver steady. His bed was fortunately placed for his purpose – directly in line with one of the windows, the connecting door, and the girl’s bed. In an old bond box in his closet – and nobody but he had ever seen the things in that box – was a revolver; a revolver that could not possibly be traced to him.
On the first night, he had taken this gun out, stepped back from his bed a little, and fired a bullet into the doorframe. Then he had jumped back into bed, concealing the gun under the blankets – where none thought to look for it – until he could return it to its box.
That was all the preparation he had needed. He had established an attempted murder directed against himself, and he had shown that a bullet fired at him could easily go near – and therefore through – the connecting doorway.
On the second night, he had waited until the house had seemed quiet. Then he had peeped through one of the cracks in the Japanese screen at the girl, whom he could see in the reflected light from the moon. He had found, though, that when he stepped far enough back from the screen for it to escape powder marks, he could not see the girl, not while she was lying down. So he had fired first into the doorframe – near the previous night’s bullet – to awaken her.
She had sat up in bed immediately, screaming, and he had shot her. He had intended firing another shot into her body – to make sure of her death – but my approach had made that impossible, and had made concealment of the gun impossible; so, with what strength he had left, he had thrown the revolver out of the window.
He died that afternoon, and I returned to San Francisco.
But that was not quite the end of the story.
In the ordinary course of business, the Agency’s bookkeeping department sent Gallaway a bill for my services. With the check that he sent by return mail, he enclosed a letter to me, from which I quote a paragraph:
I don’t want to let you miss the cream of the whole affair. The lovely Caywood, when she recovered, denied that Exon had talked of murder or any other crime during his delirium. The cause of the distaste with which she might have looked at him afterward, and the reason she would not tell him what he had said, was that his entire conversation during that week of delirium had consisted of an uninterrupted stream of obscenities and blasphemies, which seem to have shocked the girl through and through.
ZIGZAGS OF TREACHERY
One
All know about Dr. Estep’s death,” I said, “is the stuff in the papers.” Vance Richmond’s lean gray face took on an expression of distaste.
“The newspapers aren’t always either thorough or accurate. I’ll give you the salient points as I know them; though I suppose you’ll want to go over the ground for yourself, and get your information first-hand.”
I nodded, and the attorney went on, shaping each word precisely with his thin lips before giving it sound.
“Dr. Estep came to San Francisco in 1898 or 1899 – a young man of twenty-five, just through qualifying for his license. He opened an office here, and, as you probably know, became in time a rather excellent surgeon. He married two or three years after he came here. There were no children. He and his wife seem to have been a bit happier together than the average.
“Of his life before coming to San Francisco, nothing is known. He told his wife briefly that he had been born and raised in Parkersburg, W. Va., but that his home life had been so unpleasant that he was trying to forget it, and that he did not like to talk – or even think – about it. Bear that in mind.
“Two weeks ago – on the third of the month – a woman came to his office, in the afternoon. His office was in his residence on Pine Street. Lucy Coe, who was Dr. Estep’s nurse and assistant, showed the woman into his office, and then went back to her own desk in the reception room.
“She didn’t hear anything the doctor said to the woman, but through the closed door she heard the woman’s voice now and then – a high and anguished voice, apparently pleading. Most of the words were lost upon the nurse, but she heard one coherent sentence. ‘Please! Please!’ she heard the woman cry. ‘Don’t turn me away!’ The woman was with Dr. Estep for about fifteen minutes, and left sobbing into a handkerchief. Dr. Estep said nothing about the caller either to his nurse or to his wife, who didn’t learn of it until after his death.