She said: “Alec committed suicide. I can’t understand it but – he killed himself.” She let out her breath with the last three words.
I looked at Schneider and Haggerty across the table from me. They were practically smiling.
“I know this must be painful to you, Miss Madden,” Galloway said. “Indeed, I am deeply conscious of its painfulness, and of your fortitude. But can you tell us how you – that is, what your grounds of judgment are?”
“Yes,” she said. “I’d better tell you the whole thing. After Alec and I finished work to-night, he said he had an appointment and went off to it. I went to a movie and got out about 11:30 or so. On the way home I saw Alec’s car in front of McKinley Hall, so I – I climbed in to wait for him. I thought he probably wouldn’t be long and that he could drive me home. Anyway, I wanted to see him. He had been worried recently about the War Board and I was concerned about him.
“I sat in the car smoking until nearly midnight and it began to get quite chilly. Finally, when he didn’t come, I thought I’d go up to his office and get him – I thought he shouldn’t go on working after midnight anyway. I let myself in the side door and took the elevator up.”
“What time was this, Miss Madden?” Galloway said.
“Midnight. I heard the tower clock strike before I entered the building. Alec’s office was dark when I got there but for some reason I stood and listened at the door. I had a feeling that he was there in the dark office. I knocked on the door and called his name but he didn’t answer me, and I began to feel terribly frightened.
“I tried the door but the self-lock was on and it wouldn’t open. Then I put my ear against the glass part of the door and I could hear a sort of whispering noise. It sounded very faint and queer, like – something on a radio program.”
“Did you recognize his voice?”
“No, not then. But he spoke once before – before he jumped. I heard him speak quite loudly and clearly. His voice sounded strange and troubled but I knew that it was Alec speaking.”
“What did he say?”
“He said: ‘I don’t feel like it, but I will if I have to.’ Then I heard the window creak and his terrible cry as he fell. Just before he fell the light went on. I was quite frantic and I tried to break down the door. Then I took off my shoe and broke the pane with the heel and let myself in. There was nobody in the room.”
Her breathing was quick again and her forehead was wet. She put her hand to her forehead and then took a handkerchief out of her sleeve and wiped it.
“Thank you profoundly, Miss Madden,” Galloway said. “Certainly there is only one inference to be drawn. Did it sound as if he were talking to himself when he said – what he said?”
“Yes. It sounded rather horrible and queer, not like Alec at all, though I know it was his voice – as if he was temporarily unhinged. He sounded – sick. Why did he kill himself?” she cried on a keen rising note. “If he was sick, I wanted to take care of him.”
“Of course you did, my dear,” Galloway said. “As you say, the poor man must have been temporarily unbalanced.”
“He was not,” I said. “I’d back his brain against the brains of all of you put together.”
“Dr. Jackson,” Galloway said as if I had not spoken, “would you be good enough to take Miss Madden home?”
Jackson said, “Certainly,” and they got up and left the room.
Haggerty said, “I guess, that settles the case, doesn’t it?”
“Indubitably,” Galloway replied, and the meeting broke up. Schneider was the first to leave and Gordon left soon afterwards. Galloway was careful not to look in my direction until he left, too, with Haggerty at his heels.
Hunter came up to me and put a hand on my shoulder. “Better drop it, Bob, at least for to-night. Go home and get some sleep, man.”
I said, “Go to hell,” and left him standing by himself in the room.
I went up to my office and locked the door behind me and sat down at my desk to wear out the telephone some more.
CHAPTER VII
I PICKED UP THE telephone directory but I thought of a man whose name wasn’t in the book because he had been dead for a long time. Heraclitus was the man. He said that everything in the world flows and changes constantly like a river, so that you can’t fasten yourself permanently to anything. He was wrong.
You can fasten yourself to a man. The integrity of a man is the rock in the changing river. Suicide is a betrayal of friends, and Alec Judd was not capable of any kind of disloyalty. Therefore he had been killed. Because I was very angry, the thing seemed crystal clear to me: I could not believe that Alec killed himself without betraying him. Everybody else was wrong.
The Schneiders had an alibi for the time of Alec’s death, but if they didn’t kill him somebody else did. Perhaps Ruth Esch killed him. I was beginning to suspect her. A man will trust another man further than he’ll trust a woman, – women are a different kind of animal. I wanted to find out if she had an alibi, too.
Schneider said she had moved into a hotel, and Moran had not seen her with the Schneiders. There were two good hotels in town, the Rogers House and the Palace.
I called the Rogers and was told that no Ruth Esch was registered there. I called the Palace and she was there.
“I’d like to speak to her,” I told the operator. “Will you ring her room?”
“Certainly, sir.” She rang several times and there was no answer.
“There is no answer, sir,” the operator said melodiously as if she was singing a song. “May I take a message?”
“No, thanks. Can you tell me what time she registered at the hotel?”
“I’m sorry, sir, I cannot give you that information.” Same old song, the telephone operators’ Internationale.
“May I speak to the manager?”
“He is not here, sir,” she lilted. “But we do not give information about guests.”
Before hanging up I said, “Thanks for the musical selections,” because frustration was beginning to get me down. She switched off.
I felt a drawing tension in the roof of my mouth and a pressure on the nerves behind my eyes. I remembered it from childhood, the feeling of wanting to cry. I sat stupidly with the dead receiver to my ear, wondering if adult infantilism was getting hold of me and looking at the reproduction of the Laughing Cavalier on the wall above my desk. The Cavalier laughed and laughed, as roguishly as hell. But it wasn’t the sound of laughter I heard.
From the dead receiver, as if from a long way off, came the sound of faint, indistinguishable voices. It was the sound I had heard when I listened at the dangling receiver in Alec’s office after he fell. I pushed down the bar and got the dial tone and called the number of a taxi company. When they answered I said, “Sorry, wrong number,” and they hung up.
Then I listened and heard the voices again. It must be switchboard leakage, I thought, the sound of the calls and the operator’s voice at the university switchboard. I called another taxi company and got the same result. Apparently, you heard it whenever you put in a call on the university telephone system and the other party hung up.
So Alec had been telephoning and the other party had hung up and left the line open at Alec’s end. But who was the other party?
As I pushed the telephone to the back of the desk, I noticed the ink-stains on my fingers. Fingerprint ink. Perhaps the fingerprint man was still in the building.
I went down the hall to Alec’s office and looked in through the broken pane in the door. The fingerprint man was packing away his equipment in the black wooden case. I opened the door and he looked up.