She went to the little iron stove in the corner, in which a feeble coal fire burned, and thrust the letter in. Then she remembered the envelope and consigned it to the flames, too.
Several men and an old woman — apparently a charwoman — were at the door, turning curious glances from the man on the floor to the woman beyond. They edged into the room, grew bolder, and crowded around Dudley’s body. Some of them mentioned his name as if recognizing him. A man whom Eloise knew — Marker, an illustrator and a friend of her husband’s — came in, savagely routed the group around the dead man, and knelt beside him. Marker looked up and saw
Eloise for the first time. He got to his feet, took her by the arm with gentle force, and led her to his studio, on the floor below. He made her lie on the couch, spread a blanket over her, and left her. He returned in a few minutes and sat silently in a chair across the room, sucking at a great calabash pipe, and staring at the floor. She sat up, but he would not let her talk about her husband, for which she was grateful. She sat on the edge of the couch looking with cold, inscrutable eyes at her hands clasped about a handkerchief in her lap.
Some one knocked on the door and Harker called, “Come in.”
A heavy, middle-aged man with a florid face and a bellicose black mustache came in. He did not seem to think it necessary to remove his hat, but his manner was polite enough, in a stolid way. He introduced himself as detective-sergeant Murray, and questioned Eloise.
She told him that her husband had been worrying over his lack of success with his painting; that he had seemed especially distraught that morning; that after he had gone she found his revolver was missing; that, fearing the worst, she had come to his studio, arriving just as he shot himself.
The detective asked further questions in his callous, albeit not unkindly, tone. She answered truthfully on the whole, though she told rather less than the complete truth here and there. Murray made no comment, and then turned his attention to Harker.
Harker had heard the shot, but was too engrossed with his work to pay immediate attention to it. Then the thought had intruded that the noise, which might have been made by something falling, had come from the vicinity of Morey’s studio, and he had gone up to investigate. I le said that Morey had seemed increasingly worried of late, but had never talked of himself or his affairs.
Murray left the room and returned after a few minutes accompanied by a man whom lie introduced as “Byerly of the bureau.”
“You’ll have to go down to headquarters, Mrs. Morey,” Murray said with a deprecatory gesture. “Byerly’ll show you what to do. Just red tape. Only take a few minutes.”
Eloise left the building with Byerly. As he turned toward the corner past which the street-car line ran she suggested a taxicab. He telephoned from the corner drug store; and a few minutes later they were climbing the gray steps of the City Hall. Byerly led her through a door marked “Pawn-Shop Detail” and gave her a chair.
“Just wait a couple minutes here,” he said. “I’ll see if I can hurry things up.”
Time dragged past. Half an hour. An hour. Two hours.
The door opened and Murray came in, followed by Byerly and a little fat man with a sparse handful of white hair spread over a broad pink scalp. Byerly called the fat man “Chief” when he pulled up a chair for him. The fat man and Byerly sat on chairs facing Eloise. Murray sat on a desk.
“Have you got anything to say?” Murray asked carelessly.
Her eyebrows went up. “I beg your pardon?”
“All right,” Murray said without emotion. “Eloise Morey, you’re arrested for the murder of your husband, and anything you say may be used against you.”
“Murder!” she exclaimed, startled out of her poise.
“Exactly,” Murray said.
Some measure of her assurance came back to her. She wanted to laugh, but instead she said haughtily, “Why, that’s ridiculous!”
Murray leaned forward. “Is it?” he asked imperturbably. “Now listen. You and your husband ain’t been on good terms for some time. This morning you had a peach of a battle. You said you wished he was dead, and you threatened him. Your servant girl heard you. Then after he left she saw you rush out, all worked up, and she saw you go to the drawer where the gun was kept. And she looked in the drawer after you was gone and the gun was gone, too. Two people saw you going up toward your husband’s studio looking pretty wild, and they heard a womans voice — an angry voice — just before the shot. And you admit yourself that you were in the room when your husband died. How is that? Still ridiculous?”
She had the sensation of a heavy net, sinuous, clammy, inescapable, closing about her.
“But people don’t kill each other every time they have a little family quarrel — even if all you say were true. Murder is Supposed to require a stronger urge than that, isn’t it? And I told you about finding the revolver gone, and trying to get to his studio in time to save him, didn’t I?”
Murray shook his head.
“Oh, I’ve got the ‘strong urge’ all right, Mrs. Eloise Morey. I found a batch of hot love letters, signed Joe, in your room, and some of ’em arc dated as recent as yesterday. And I find that your husband was a Catholic, the same as I am, and I guess maybe just as set against divorces. And I also find that he’s got a tidy bit of life insurance and an income of three or four thousand a year that you’d come into. I got enough motive all right.”
Eloise struggled to keep her face composed — everything appeared to hinge upon that — but the threatening net seemed closer, and now it was not so much a net as a great smothering blanket. She closed her eyes for an instant, but it was not to be escaped that way. Rage burned within her. She stood up and her eyes glared into the three alert, impassionately complacent faces before her.
“You fools!” she cried, “You—”
She remembered the letter Dudley had left behind; the letter that would have told the truth unmistakably; the letter that would have cleared her in a twinkling, the letter she had burned in the little iron stove.
She swayed, tears of despair came to the hard grey eyes. Detective-sergeant Murray left his scat and caught her as she fell.
The Vicious Circle
Black Mask, June 15, 1923, as Peter Collinson; (aka: The Man Who Stood In the Way, 1951)
I
The Senator was a massive man. The spacious leather chair in which he sat seemed scarcely adequate for its task; bulky shoulders and arms bulged over its sides with a suggestion of overflowing.
The Senator’s head under his crisp mane of iron-grey hair was massive, too, and his features were large, cragged, and graven with the lines that indicate power.
When he arose presently and crossed the library to get whiskey and cigars for his guest the immense room seemed to dwindle in an abrupt shrinking of wall and ceiling; and the polished floor threatened each instant to creak under the trend of his heavy feet, though it was far too genteel — as befit a floor in a Dupont Circle home — ever actually to creak. The vacated chair gaped wide, appeared as the great upholstered cavern it really was, to lose its dignity immediately the Senator dropped into it again.
In marked contrast with the Senator was the man who sat stiffly upright on the edge of one of the room’s least comfortable chairs and, ignoring the allure of the imported cigars his host had set at his elbow, employed a gnarled thumb to cram black nigger-wool tobacco into a yellow-grey corn-cob pipe.