Mrs. Prentiss came into the room. She was wearing a housecoat of pale blue satin and lace. She looked very young; he realized again that she must have been thirty years younger than the paunchy — and dead — Mr. Prentiss.
“Stella tells me you’ve come as a friend,” she said. When she smiled, a little warm wave of pleasure ran through him. She sat down next to him, turning deliberately so that she, too, sat with her back to the kitchen. She was refreshingly lovely, now that the strain was over, and she looked at him with guileless directness.
How had he ever doubted her for a moment? And yet, on the heels of that thought came another: If Mrs. Prentiss were as fat as her husband had been, would Michael still wonder? Or would he be convinced that, with a single quick gesture, she had turned on the gas-cock in the kitchen?
He looked involuntarily at the slender, rounded arms, and so vividly did he picture it that he could almost see the fatal twist of the wrist, could almost hear the hiss of escaping gas, could almost smell it again. If what he feared were true, how could he accept a jury’s verdict of not guilty? Certainly not for the woman he hoped — yes, he almost dared hope — to make his wife.
“You’re going to stay here?” he asked, looking about him, but avoiding the kitchen door.
“No,” she said, shaking her head. “I couldn’t. I’m going away for a month or so. Then I’ll see.”
He couldn’t bear the thought of having her gone for so long. He wanted to tell her so, almost did, but his Vermont hard-headedness held him back.
The maid came in with a batch of letters.
“More of them notes, I guess,” she said proudly.
Mrs. Prentiss explained to Michaeclass="underline" “Notes of condolence. Notes of congratulation, too, that the State decided I’m not a murderess.”
Her voice caught, and a quick sympathy welled up in him. “Tell me yourself,” he said hurriedly, carried beyond caution. “Let me hear you say it. I must hear you say you didn’t do it.”
Her nostrils dilated with quick scorn. “What makes you think I care how you feel, Mr. Carriday?” She fussed with the letters in her hand. “You needn’t stop to say goodbye. Stella will show you out.”
“I said it badly,” he cried. “Naturally you don’t care how I feel — yet. I believe all the evidence. I want to believe it. Don’t you see? I just want you to tell me yourself. Just say, ‘Michael, I didn’t do it,’ and I’ll never question it or think of it again. And then I’ll make you care that I care. I swear it. I’ll make you forget every cruel moment you’ve spent in the last month.”
She looked up from the letters which she had been sorting with quick, nervous gestures. Her head lifted proudly.
“I don’t believe you,” she said. She held up the letters. “I’ve been getting letters like this every day. And not one questions my innocence. That was left for the man who says he loves me.” Her contempt stung him.
“There isn’t anyone who cares the way I do!”
“Any one of these people cares more,” she said hotly. “Perfect strangers, too.” She pulled out a letter at random. “Take this one. You’ll find no veiled accusations here.”
She tore the envelope open angrily. Instead of a letter, there fell out a printed slip of paper. Mrs. Prentiss looked up quickly. Her face twitched, and became white, and before Michael could understand, she fainted.
Stella flew to her mistress. Michael tried to slip by her, to obtain the paper which Mrs. Prentiss still held in her lax grasp. But Stella, mingling abuse of him with her endearments for the unconscious woman, made him keep his distance.
Mrs. Prentiss opened her eyes slowly, but recoiled at the sight of him.
“Get out,” she said in a whisper. Her face was set and colorless.
Stella seconded her mistress’s command. “You better go now,” she warned him.
“As you wish,” Michael said. Now was his opportunity! He moved quickly by Stella, and bent over Mrs. Prentiss to say his goodbye. The paper that had caused her to faint lay in plain sight.
Michael looked at it, and knew why Mrs. Prentiss had fainted.
It was the gas bill.
He felt a little faint himself.
The Diary of Death
by Marten Cumberland
Introducing Loreto Santos, the wealthy Argentinian who turned dilettante detective, and who was the constant wonder of his friend, Inspector Comfort of the C.I.D. in London… Here is an exploit of Santos’s, in which cold deduction solves the problem of “the locked, barred door” — one of the most fascinating themes in all detective fiction.
“Confess, my brother,” said Cleta, “that you are just a little bit of a crank. You refuse to help Inspector Comfort in most of his important cases, and yet I have known you give a whole week to some trumpery affair of a broken-down actor.”
She sat down her empty coffee-cup upon the breakfast table, and rose to get a cigarette.
“Your attitude towards life is paradoxical,” she accused him.
Loreto Santos twirled round upon the music-stool and looked at his beautiful sister with laughter in his light grey eyes.
“Paradoxical!” he repeated. “Well — perhaps. But time turns our most outlandish paradoxes into truisms. When you speak of my attitude towards life you really refer to my position with regard to crime. That is very simple. Like all the best thinkers on the subject, I am concerned only with prevention, and never, or seldom, with punishment. I don’t believe in social revenge. Anyway, chiquita, my interest in crime is purely intellectual. If I can outwit and frustrate the criminal, I am interested; if the crime is already committed, I am bored. Why should I — a man of absurd wealth — play the part of policeman? No, I leave that to friend Comfort, and I go my own sweet way. As for the ‘Death Diary’ murders, they interest me, but I want a holiday. We are due at Lady Groombridge’s next week, and Comfort must play the sleuth by himself. Voilà tout.”
He turned to the piano with a shrug of his broad shoulders, as though he dismissed the whole discussion. Soon there flowed from beneath his fingers the majestic swelling strains of a choral prelude by Bach.
Cleta Santos leant back in a deep armchair, and, whilst listening appreciatively to the music, gazed with a certain wonder at her brother’s broad back.
Loreto was continually a source of perplexity to his sister, and to most of the people who came in contact with him. Born in the Argentine of Spanish parents, Loreto had been educated in England, and on the death of his parents he had made his home in Europe.
With his sister, who was many years younger than himself, Loreto had lived in several European capitals before finally settling down in London in the big house overlooking Regent’s Park. Here his vast wealth and various gifts, intellectual and artistic, together with Cleta’s beauty, had made them welcome in certain charming circles of society.
At first Loreto had lived merely as a dilettante, a fine amateur pianist who patronized various arts; then by mere chance his attention had been drawn to a certain notorious crime, and his great gifts as a criminologist had come to light.
Subsequently he had interested himself considerably in crime — crime, that is, as a battle of wits. A kind of chess problem to be worked out — and always Santos was concerned only with the anticipation of criminal events.
The man, too, was a philanthropist of the highest order, and his vast scheme for aiding first offenders upon their liberation from prison had cost him thousands. His attitude towards the criminal was, in fact, most humane, though it never degenerated into the sentimental.