Death Before Bedtime (15 page)

Cleared himself of what?

I decided to embark upon the chase. I stuffed my notes into my pocket. I wouldn’t have to telephone my story in to the
Globe
until dawn. By which time I might have some real news.

I went upstairs to Rufus Hollister’s room. The blanket still hung at the end of the corridor although the door behind it had been repaired and bolted shut, no longer requiring the presence of a plain-clothes man.

I knocked on Hollister’s door, very softly. There was no answer. Not wanting to disturb the other sleepers, I turned the knob and pushed the door open.

Hollister was seated at his desk, apparently hard at work.

I shut the door softly behind me; then, since he had made no move, I walked over to his desk and said, “I wonder if …” But the sight of blood stopped me.

Great quantities of blood covered his face, his shirt, the desk in front of him; only the typewriter was relatively clear of it.

He was dead, of course, shot through the right temple. The gun, a tiny pearl-handled affair, lay on the floor beside his right hand; it gleamed dully in the lamplight.

My first impulse was to run as far as I could from this room. My second impulse was to shout for the plain-clothes man out front. My third impulse, and the one which I followed, was to make a search of the room.

I was surprised at my own calm as I touched his hand to see if rigor mortis had set in: it had not. He was only recently dead. I looked at my watch to check on the time: one-nineteen. I looked at
his
watch, recalling how watches were supposed to stop magically when the wearer died … this watch was ticking merrily: about five minutes fast, too.

I don’t know why it took me so long to notice the confession which was still in the typewriter.

“I killed Senator Rhodes on Wednesday the 13th by placing
a package of explosive in his fireplace shortly after we returned from the Senate Office Building Tuesday afternoon. Rather than see an innocent man be condemned for my crime, I herewith make this confession. As to my reason for killing the Senator, I prefer not to say, since a complete confession would implicate others. I will say though that we were involved in an illegal business operation which failed. Because of the coming election, the Senator saw fit to make me the victim of that failure … which would have involved a jail sentence for me and the ruin of my reputation. Rather than suffer this, I took the occasion of Pomeroy’s visit to Washington to kill the Senator, throwing guilt on Pomeroy. Unfortunately I was not able to discover the documents pertaining to our business venture. They are either in the hands of the police or shortly will be. I have no choice but to take this way out, since I prefer dying to a jail sentence and the ruin of my career. I feel no remorse, however. I killed in self-defense. Rufus Hollister.” The name was typewritten but not signed; as though immediately after typing this confession he had shot himself, without even pulling the paper out of the typewriter.

Well, this was more than I had bargained for. The paper chase had led me to a corpse, and to the answer.

Methodically, I searched the room. As far as I could tell there was nothing else to add or subtract from what had happened. The case, it would seem, was closed. With a handkerchief I carefully wiped any prints I might have made on the watch and wrist of the corpse (I had touched nothing else); then I went downstairs and telephoned Lieutenant Winters. It was now one-thirty-six, the anniversary of the Senator’s death.

It was another all-night session.

Winters nearly had a nervous breakdown that night and the rest of us were far from being serene. We were interviewed one after the other in the dining room, just like the first night but under more distracting circumstances for police photographers and investigators were all over the place and there was talk that Winters would soon be succeeded by another, presumably more canny, official.

The Pomeroys returned, looking no worse than the rest of us that grisly dawn. The newspaper people were at every window until they were finally given a somewhat muffled and confused statement by Winters. He made no mention of the arrest of Pomeroy, an arrest which had not been legally completed, I gathered, since Mr. Pomeroy was now among us.

I sat beside Ellen in the drawing room. The others, the ones who were not being interviewed, talked quietly to one another or else dozed like Verbena Pruitt in her chair, her mouth open and snoring softly, her hair in curlers and her majestic corse damascened in an intimate garment of the night.

Ellen for once looked tired. Langdon sat some distance away, staring at the coals in the fireplace, wondering no doubt how on earth he was to get a story for
Advanceguard
out of all this confusion.

“Why,” said Ellen irritably, “do they keep us up like this
if Rufus did the murder? Why all this damned questioning? Why don’t they go home?”

“They have to find out where we all were,” I said, reasonably … but I wondered too why the confusion since the police had not only a confession but the confessor’s corpse, the ideal combination from the official point of view: no expensive investigation, no long-drawn-out trial, no angry press demanding a solution and a conviction.

Through the crack between the curtains, I saw the gray dawn and heard the noise of morning traffic in the streets. My eyes twitched with fatigue.

Ellen yawned. “In a few minutes I’m going to go to bed whether they like it or not.”

“Why don’t you? They’ve already got your testimony.” There was a commotion in the hall. We both looked and saw Rufus Hollister departing by stretcher, a sheet of canvas over him. As the front door opened, there was a roar of triumph from the waiting photographers; flash bulbs went off. The door was slammed loudly and Rufus Hollister’s earthly remains were gone to their reward: the morgue and, finally, the tomb.

“Disgusting!” said Ellen, using for the first time in my experience that censorious word. Then, without permission, she went to bed.

After the body was gone, a strange peace fell over the house. The policemen and photographers and investigators all stole quietly away, leaving the witnesses alone in the house with Winters and a guard.

At five o’clock I was admitted to the dining room.

Winters sat with bloodshot eyes and tousled hair looking at a vast pile of testimony, all in shorthand, the work of his secretary who sat a few feet down the table with a pad and pencil.

He grunted when I said hello; I sat down.

He asked me at what time I had found the body. I told him.

“Did you touch anything in the room?”

“Only the corpse’s hand, his wrist, to see how long he was dead, or
if
he was dead.”

“Was the body in the same position when we arrived that it was in when you found it?”

“Yes.”

“What were you doing in Hollister’s room at that time of night?” The voice, though tired, was sharp and impersonal.

“I wanted to ask him something.”

“What did you want to ask him?”

“About a note I received this morning.”

Winters looked at me, surprised. “A note? What note?”

I handed it to him. He read it quickly. “When did this arrive?” His voice was cold.

“This morning at breakfast … or rather yesterday morning.”

“Why didn’t you tell me about it?”

“Because I thought it was a hoax. I figured there was plenty of time to give it to you. I had no idea you were planning to arrest Pomeroy so quickly.” This was a well-directed jab at the groin. Winters scowled.

“You realize that there is a penalty for withholding vital evidence?”

“I didn’t withhold it. I just gave it to you.”

A four-letter word of exasperation and anger burst from his classic mouth. We were both silent for a moment. He studied the letter. “What,” he said in a less official voice, “do you think this means?”

“I thought it meant that Hollister was the one who broke
into the library that night and got some incriminating documents, or tried to find some.”

“Obviously he didn’t find them.”

“Did
you
find them?”

The law shook its head. “If we did we aren’t aware of their significance,” he said candidly. “We’ve checked and double-checked all the secret files and, as far as I can tell, there isn’t anything in any of them which would send Hollister to jail, or even the Senator … a lot of fast political deals but nothing illegal.”

“Do you think the Senator might have kept his business transactions somewhere else?” I recalled those mysterious safety deposit boxes belonging to pillars of the Congress which revealed, when opened posthumously, mysterious quanties of currency, received for services rendered.

“I think we’d have found it by now.”

“Maybe the Governor might be able to tell you. He was the Senator’s lawyer.”

Winters sighed and looked discouraged. “I can’t get a word out of him. All he does is harangue me about our heritage of civil liberty.”

“Maybe you can track down who wrote that note and ask them.”

Winters looked at me vindictively. “You picked a fine time to let me know, right after I almost made a false arrest. What was the big idea?”

“Remember that I didn’t see you all day. I got the note in the morning. I went to see Hollister to question him …”

“Then you
did
talk to him about the papers?”

“I certainly did.”

Winters was interested. “What did you get out of him? How did he seem?”

“I got nothing out of him and, for a man who planned to
commit suicide in the next few hours, he was remarkably calm.”

“No hint at all? What exactly happened. Word for word.”

I tried to recall as exactly as possible my conversation, making my bluffs sound, in the telling, more insidiously clever than they were. My testimony was recorded by the silent clerk.

When I finished the Lieutenant was no wiser. “Was anyone else there? Did he mention anyone else’s name?”

“Not that I remember. We were alone. Some newspaper people tried to get him on the phone and …” A light was turned on in my head, without warning. “What time did Hollister die?”

“What time …” Winters was too weary to react quickly.

“The coroner, what time did he fix his death?”

“Oh, about twelve. They’ll know exactly when the autopsy is made.”

“Hollister was murdered,” I said with a studious avoidance of melodrama, so studiously did I avoid the dramatic that Winters did not understand me. I was forced to repeat myself, my announcement losing much of its inherent grandeur with repetition.

“No,” said Lieutenant Winters, beginning to weave in his chair, “he was the murderer. We have his confession.”

“Which was typed by the murderer after he was shot.”

“Go to bed.”

“I plan to, in a few minutes. Before I go I want to make sure that you plan to keep a heavy guard in this house. I have no intention of being the next ox slaughtered.”

“Why,” said Winters with a mock-show of patience, “do you think Hollister was murdered?”

“Because when I was in his office yesterday morning he got a telephone call from an unknown party who made a
date to see him last night at midnight, at twelve o’clock, at the hour of his death. From what he said over the phone I could tell it was someone he was very anxious to please … someone he had every intention of meeting.”

“Perhaps he saw them and then killed himself.”

“Not likely. Not in the house. He was home all evening, I gather. He had made no plan to go out. Therefore his guest was coming to see him here. But no one entered or left the house, as far as we know … no
stranger
that is. Whoever he was supposed to meet was already in the house, one of the suspects … the murderer, in fact.”

While I had been talking Winters sat straighter and straighter in his chair. When I paused for breath, he said, “I don’t want you to say anything about this to anyone. Understand?”

“I do.”

“Not only because you may be right and the murderer would be warned but because if you are right and the murderer does think you’re on his trail we will have a third victim.”

I said that I had no desire to make the front pages as a corpse.

“There’s a chance you’re right,” he said thoughtfully. “I wish to hell you’d used your head and got that anonymous letter to me earlier. We could have tested it for prints, checked the handwriting and the paper … now it’ll take us several days to get a report on it. In the meantime, keep your mouth shut. Pretend the case is finished, which is what we’re going to do. We’ll keep the house party together for a few days longer, as long as we can. We’ll have to act quickly.”

“I know,” I said, feeling a little chilly and strange. “By the way whose pistol was it that did the murder?”

“Mrs. Rhodes’.”

I was most reluctant to meet the light the next morning, as the Roman poets would say, or rather the afternoon of the same day. I probably would have slept until evening if the telephone beside my bed hadn’t rung. I picked up the receiver, eyes still closed, positive that I could continue sleeping while conducting a lively conversation on the phone.

For several moments I mumbled confidently into the receiver, aware of a faraway buzz. Then I opened one eye and saw that I was talking into the wrong end. Correcting this, completely awake, I listened to Miss Flynn’s gentle reproaches.

“A Number of things have Come-up,” she said. “Which require your
personal
Supervision.”

I explained to her that a Number of things had Come-up here, too, that I couldn’t get away for several days.

“We were of the opinion that the case had been concluded in Washington and that the recent Suicidalist was,
ipso facto
, the Murderer of the Statesman.”

“Are the papers out?” I had not realized it was so late, that the afternoon papers are already on the street.

“Indeed they are. With a Prominent Display in the
Globe
bearing your Signature.”

I had pulled out all the stops in that article, just before going to bed. I had used more colors than the rainbow contains in my description of finding the body, of the case’s conclusion, for that was how Winters and I wanted it to sound. The editor had been most pleased and it took considerable strength on my part not to tell him there would be yet another story.