“Sutton never used that outside pantry; when he got in, found the telephone ringing, his wife played into Ellen’s hands by saying Rose had left. Later, when Sutton had gone to bed at the front of the house Ellen stole out, buried the girl, set back the radishes, and crept into bed. Her yarn of rambling through the rain couldn’t be proved, or disproved. If there isn’t a complete chain of circumstantial evidence, then I don’t know a June bug when I see one.”
Nem smoked serenely.
“Sounds real nice,” he commented. “Sure, Ellen Clarke could’ve done all that.”
His chief uttered an unclassified sound between a yelp and a snort.
“What in hell keeps you from arresting her, Nem?”
“Burlap, Tom. Sackcloth, you might say. That and a kind of hunch of mine — mebbe she’s guilty, like you say. Sound’s reasonable. But if she is, she’ll give herself away soon enough. Guilty knowledge gets ’em, every time.”
Nem’s pipe was going at full blast now. He leaned back in his chair, elevated his soft kid shoes to the top of his desk, and loosened their strings with a grunt of relief. Then he leaned back, pudgy hands linked behind his pink, bald head, and contemplated the ceiling.
O’Malley slid off his perch, and went out to his own sanctum. Nem sat where he was for a longish time — a seemingly immobile, ponderous mass of inert flesh. Then the mass took life once more.
“There ought to be something. A girl like that, sentimental, stuck on herself and her conquests—”
He lifted his feet off the desk and tied his shoes. Then he went out once more into the cold, if brilliant sun, of the April afternoon.
A short walk took him across town, into the oldest, poorest section of the city. The small, obscure street he sought, hardly more than a lane, was soon reached. Three ragged children were playing in the spring freshet that ran through the gutter of number sixty-five.
“Rose Miller live here, sonny?” he inquired of one of them.
“Yes, sir. She did, anyhow,” the urchin said, round-eyed and curious.
Nem mounted the two steps that lifted themselves almost from the sidewalk, crossed the dilapidated porch gingerly. His tug at the ancient bell brought to the door Rose Miller’s aunt.
Her face showed lines of sorrow, but no traces of tears. Life had hardened her against surrender to emotion.
“I dropped in, Mis’ Miller, sort of hopin’ that you’d let me look through Rose’s things.”
Her face softened.
“I’ll let you do anything, Mr. Parsons, that’d help you find out who killed the poor girl. What things of hers do you want to see?”
Nem stepped into the shabby hall.
“Everything, I guess. I hain’t lookin’ for anything in particular. Did she have a room to herself?”
“Oh, yes. She was dead set on that from the time she went to work.”
Nem followed her up the narrow, creaking stairs into a small room at the back of the house. The window shades were down. Mrs. Miller bustled across the floor to raise them, flood the room with light.
A little old-fashioned poster bed, neatly made up and covered with a cheap pink spread filled one corner of the room. The windows were hung with flowered challis — the same stuff that, tacked to a shelf, improvised closet space for the dead girl’s dresses.
A dressing table, vain altar to vanity, held a pathetic muddle of rouge and powder, presided over by a gaudy carnival doll, such as are given as prizes at summer beaches. Here stood empty candy boxes, ribbon tied; snapshots of Rose in swimming; Rose surrounded by youths; Rose with George Link.
And one other snapshot, that of a slender, smiling man who shielded his eyes against the sun in such a way as to render the likeness almost unrecognizable. Nem lifted it from its solitary place, scanned it for a long moment, lips puckered in a soundless movement.
Then he turned to the cheap, much carved little desk that stood between the windows. The half dozen books standing there beckoned to him.
“Give me free rein, Mis’ Miller?”
“Of course!”
Nem fingered the few volumes gently. “Pilgrim’s Progress” — unsullied, and probably a school book; “Five Little Peppers,” much thumbed; “Philosophy of Love,” read and reread; as were two novels of Laura Jean Libby’s in paper covers; and — an old copy of Swinburne’s poems.
Swinburne’s lyrics, on Rose Miller’s desk! That was worth any man’s interest. Nem pounced upon the book, and his round blue eyes roved to Mrs. Miller. She was flecking a bit of dust from a chair, evincing no interest. It was clear that she did not guess the strangeness of Rose Miller’s having that Swinburne on her shelf.
Nem looked at the yellowed flyleaf. A name had been erased carefully from the middle of the page, so carefully that the portion of paper that had borne that scrawl of ownership was worn almost transparent. But the first letter of the name was decipherable. Nem brooded over that, and over the inscription that had been made so recently at the top of the page:
There was one marker in the volume — a thin strip of paper half way through. And Nem read the scored stanza to himself, round eyes sorrowful, lips moving softly:
And in the margin was the notation: “So I too thought — until you came.”
Nem laid the book down, turned to Mrs. Miller:
“Rose was sort of popular with the boys, wasn’t she?”
She nodded grimly.
“Too popular; boy crazy, Rose was; but she was a good girl. Mr. Parsons. You... you believe that, don’t you?”
Nem’s childlike eyes circled the room again, with its pathetic notes of sentiment, of aspiration unguided. And he lied stanchly.
“ ’Course she was a good girl!” He ran through the few unimportant letters tucked in the pigeonholes of the desk. “Well, I guess that’s all for now. I’m much obliged, Mis’ Miller.”
She twisted her apron helplessly.
“Did you... did you find anything?”
Nem sighed.
“Quite a lot, Mis’ Miller; quite a lot.”
And he creaked cautiously clown the stairs, out into the April weather.
By means of a transfer at the junction point he rode out to Golden Hill without delay. And he stared out of the car window unseeingly all the way, wrapped in some inner contemplation. Just before the end of the line was reached he astonished the plump old lady across the aisle by murmuring aloud:
“Much good knowin’ does me, when I’ve got no proof. Not a mite of proof—”
After which he lapsed into seemingly somnolent silence.
There were no signs of life, other than a curling plume of smoke, about the Sutton bungalow. Nem paused in front of the house, then, treading noiselessly on the springy turf, he skirted the little porch and terrace and took the garden walk down toward the hotbed with its gruesome heap of dirt still piled by the cement wall.
The toolhouse was open. And Arthur Sutton was in there, standing with his back to the door, arms folded on the tool cabinet, dark head bowed. His attitude was expressive of despair, and, more than that, Nem thought.
“Mr. Sutton—” he said.
Sutton turned as if that gentle summons had been a pistol shot. He was gray of face, grim of jaw. And for that brief, betraying moment his eyes were those of a man doing penance, bitter penance, for past sins or future glory. Even amazement did not cloak that naked suffering of his. But amazement served to cover the transition from agony to nonchalance as he came toward Nem.